Spells are staged now. Cast Shiva and the field goes dark, the camera finds her, ice falls, and the numbers land last — the way Final Fantasy Tactics staged its magic. Almost every ability in the game has its own cinematic, every weapon and spell has its own sound, statuses announce themselves as they land, and you can read an enemy's charging spell before it goes off. Seven callings have new bodies, and the Druid is a treant.

Update required. Once this release is live the server turns away v1.6.0 and older, so download the new build before you queue.

Spell cinematics

264 of the 271 abilities are staged. The stage dims, the targets are marked, the camera is directed and the damage lands last. Attack and Defend are left alone, as FFT left them.
Hand-staged signatures: all nine Draw-Outs (Chirijiraden sweeps a full circle), all seventeen summons with their painted plates, Meteor, Wish, Stop, Ultima, and a set of sword arts and the Jade Fist's martial arts, each re-staged from its FFT counterpart.
Every element has FFT's Fire 1 to 4 grammar — the bigger the spell, the darker the stage and the harder the flash. Small spells leave your camera alone; big ones take it.
Items, weapon arts, steals, shouts, dances, jumps and traps each have a look of their own: a potion is thrown tumbling, a Break art cracks steel off, a shout appears in a speech bubble, a dance lights the floor.
A weapon art lands on the swing. The blow arrives on the frame the blade connects, and a bow art's arrow is in the air in time to meet it.
Your turn clock waits for the show. Online, your 60-second turn timer starts once the spells before your turn have finished playing (never more than 30 seconds' wait). Turns are 60 seconds again, with the 30-second extra time bank unchanged.
Damage and healing numbers roll in digit by digit, sized by how big they are: under 100, 100 to 199, and 200 or more.

Statuses you can see land

A status names itself when it lands: its painted tile and its name appear over the unit — a curse drops in, a kindness rises — then the tile settles into the unit's badge row. Two statuses on one unit play one after the other, and plates never cover each other.
IMMUNE and RESISTED show the status that was refused, on the frame of the blow (RESISTED with its odds).
Badges, body tints and the unit card change when the blow lands, not when the server's message arrives.
A cinematic only hangs a status glyph over a unit that actually took the status.

Read a charging spell

The charging spell's own icon now floats over its caster, ringed by a tracer in the caster's team colour, with the turns left before it lands. When the spell goes off its icon flies into the cast banner; if it is broken, it fizzles.
Point at that icon (or its row on the turn rail) and a window tells you what the spell is, whose it is, how many units act before it lands, where it lands, who it will hit, an estimated damage range and hit chance for each of them, and whether its caster can still pay for it. Click to pin the window.
The board shows it too: the spell's footprint brightens while every other charge fades, and a line runs from the caster to its target — flowing if the spell is locked on a unit (it follows them), still if it is anchored to the ground (step off to dodge).
The turn rail frames each spell in its caster's team colour, shows the real turns left, and says "fizzles" when the charge is going to be broken. It is now accurate about exactly when a spell lands, and updates as Haste, Slow or a silence changes that.
The death clock is a red pin that counts down and beats faster on its last tick, and a crystal glints. MP gain, MP drain, Brave and Faith loss, Echo and arcane hits each have a painted tile of their own.

Bars and windows

HP and MP bars drain on the blow, not before it: the bar holds until the hit lands, the lost part flashes pale, then drains away. Heals fill the same way.
New bars: one iron plate with HP notches every 25 (gold every 100), a cyan segment for a barrier, amber when a unit is critical, a tick on a charging caster's MP bar showing what the spell will cost (red if they can no longer pay), and a gold CT line when a unit is ready. The unit card got the same treatment.
The Living Gilt: every window — unit cards, the command menu, the Chronicle, the scoreboard, the unit sheet, and the menus — wears a gold frame with a corner jewel, and glints once when it opens.
The turn pointer and the markers over a unit sit above its own head, whatever its height, and stay on the screen at the board's far edge.

Sound

Every weapon class has its own sound — real-sounding foley instead of synthesized beeps. Bows draw and loose, crossbows and guns fire, and a basic Attack with a bow, crossbow or gun now flies a projectile you can see.
Every spell has its own voice: each calling has its own cast sound, each effect its own landing, and every Draw-Out, summon and ultimate has a signature sound. Each spell sound rotates between several takes, so a repeated spell does not sound copy-pasted.
Footsteps on every tile you walk, in the ground under you — grass, snow, cobbles, wood, water. Flyers beat their wings. Defend sounds like a guard being set.

New bodies

The Druid is a treant, and his four forms are grown from the same wood: a silver-birch wolf, a dark-oak bear, an autumn-leaf hawk, and an ember-wood dragon (the Dragon form's first body of its own).
Toad is a frog now, instead of the unit squashed and tinted green. A unit whose Brave falls below 10 becomes a chicken (Brave cannot fall that low in a match today, so this one is waiting for a reason to happen).
The Iron Fist is now the Jade Fist — a jade scarab of a monk.
The Squire — a freckled boy in a dead soldier's rust-streaked plate.
The Arcanist — a bob under the brim, a capelet and a bell skirt.
The Chronomancer — a saffron robe, a plum stole and a halo behind him.
The Cursebrand — a top-hatted showman in a crimson tailcoat.
The Apothecary — with his still carried on his chest.
The Snarewright's tail sways, and the White Seraph's wings keep their shape when she walks.
The Gallows Bat companion is now the Bramblewing Bat — a small russet bat that beats its wings and flits erratically around its unit, the first of the pals to be redrawn.
Faces: the Samurai, Ninja, Dragoon, Caller, Dancer, Orator and Arcanist wear their portraits' faces.

The battlefields

The ground is repainted: stone, paving, walls, grass, hills, sand, wood, snow and ice, with the sides of each column built to match its theme. The cemetery's stone is turf with rock breaking through.
Grass tufts are clumps of blades, and the cemetery has a new set: a mausoleum, coffins, ledger stones, a shrine, sarcophagi, a lych-gate.
The farm has crop rows, a pumpkin patch and split-rail fences; the rooftops look out over a new city of townhouses, towers and a market hall; the hedges are new.
Death crystals are a milky quartz cluster glowing in their team's colour.

Fixes

A corpse no longer stands back up a moment after sinking into the ground.
Damage numbers and statuses no longer land early after a stutter in the frame rate.
Icons were blurry at some zoom levels; they are sharp again.
Online, the turn rail could read a charge one turn high; offline battles now resolve spells in the same order as the server.
Online, damage a barrier absorbed now comes off the barrier.
Replays no longer undo a move when the game was busy as they were recorded.

Pageant