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MaskedHuzzah
Mar 26, 2009

Come now! Look me in the eye and tell me - isn't this the face of a guy you can trust?
Lipstick Apathy
I was one of the testers for the Hardtype/Reborn hack, so I can offer a few bits of input on it. In retrospect, I did do the Reborn version, but running at double speed with no sound. I don't recall any major graphical differences, but it's been two years since I looked at it.

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Torrannor
Apr 27, 2013

---FAGNER---
TEAM-MATE

Vil posted:

Browsing the website reveals the guy's made other hacks, both to make games harder and easier. This includes, among other things, an EasyType hack for Mystic Quest as well:

quote:

-Increased the Hero's stats to 99 each at level 1
-Increased the Hero's starting HP to 20,000
-Increased the Hero's starting magic amounts 99 each
-Gave the Hero all spells from the begining
-Increased all ally's HP by 10 times
-Increased all weapon stats to max and to inflict all status ailments
-Gave all boss monsters 1HP
-Gave all regular monsters in the Level Forest a huge amount of EXP/GP
... I'm getting the feeling that subtle but reasonable balance changes are not this dude's strength.

If you start with 99 in each stat, 20,000 HP, 99 magic and all spells, why do you need to increase the EXP some easy monsters give you? Especially considering that all boss monsters have 1 HP! This is one of the most amazing(ly bad) rom hacks I have ever seen.

Sketchie
Nov 14, 2012

Another "Hard" mod for Mystic Quest

It only has three two changes.

quote:

-Removed ALL Experience from ALL monsters.
-Edited the Bomb, Jumbo Bomb and Mega Grenade to do half their original damage.
-Nothing else.

You'd end up with the Hero at level 1 with 40 HP, 3 charges of White, 1 Black, and 0 Wizard (if I remember correctly). That's it. Your allies will have to do all the grunt work by themselves very quickly.

I don't think it's possible at all. The description even blatantly tells you that it's impossible without cheating or being VERY lucky.

If that's not the worst Mystic Quest mod I've ever seen and there IS something worse, then I'm both impressed AND horrified. :stonk:

ultrafilter
Aug 23, 2007

It's okay if you have any questions.


cardinal direction posted:



Barring any deaths by petrification, we’re pretty much assured to never get another game over after this. Considering that we can now bring party members back to life, and they all have Life themselves, we’re good to go.

That's a bit optimistic, don't you think?

Artix
Apr 26, 2010

He's finally back,
to kick some tail!
And this time,
he's goin' to jail!
(I apologize in advance, I didn't realize the bilinear filtering was on when I recorded this. Future updates will be nice and properly pixel-y)

So, Mystic Quest Reborn. It's a hard-type hack that rebalances the game to be more of a challenge, allegedly, but to be frank, it completely misses the mark in just about every conceivable way. We'll get into the myriad of ways it fucks up making the game harder in an interesting way, but before we get started, I just wanted to say that it changes almost all of the music, including the boss theme. gently caress. That. poo poo.

Anyway, let's get this trainwreck rolling.



Art, it's been a while! How you doin', buddy? You look a little...beefier than I remember. You been working out or something?



The plot is exactly the same as vanilla Mystic Quest, unless things dramatically change later in the game. We'll be skipping it because we've all already seen this poo poo!



Right, so let's go ahead and get the basics out of the way. Yes, that hosed up HP bar is normal. For whatever reason, we start with 290 HP instead of a multiple of 40 like the UI is clearly designed for. Even if we were to get healing, that would still be our max, and as much as I love the HP bar display, that looks goddamn awful so we'll be switching over to the numerical display as soon as I can.

Anyway, nothing out of the ordinary here, right? What could possibly go wrong?



Oh, the Behemoth has Counter. Of course the Behemoth has Counter, why wouldn't it have Counter?



He also hits a lot harder, but because of our HP pool being so much higher, it's functionally like nothing has changed at all. In fact, he's actually easier. In the base game, if the Behemoth gets a crit on you, you're hosed unless you also get a crit or he misses. Under these new numbers, we can tank a crit and then some and still come out on top. Way to go, romhacker!



Anyway, Captain Exposition does his whole thing and tells us to beat it and meet him in the Level Forest.



And as before, we help the old man and get the Tree Wither so we can recruit Kaeli. On to Foresta!



:toot:



One of the goals of the hacker was apparently to make it so that we, the main character, are more powerful and less just tagging along with our amazing partners. Instead, they're supposed to complement us, by having more specialized gimmicks compared to us being a great all-rounder. He...sort of succeeded, I guess.

Kaeli only has 210 HP compared to our 290, but she's way tougher than we are. Once we get a few levels we should be reasonably caught up, but for now we have to tread lightly. She comes with 3 casts of Life Raise, just like the standard game.



Cure Potions now come in batches of 4, and the items boxes locations have been shuffled around a bit. God only knows why the hacker felt the need to move the item boxes around, but he did.



Like so. I mean, seriously. What the hell was the point of this?



What, you thought getting Cure would be that easy? Come on scrub, this is Mystic Quest Reborn. You're going to use those Potions and be grateful for it.



Right, let's hit the Level Forest.



Standard stuff, at first glance. Brownies are now Goblins, but nothing seems out of place yet.



Haha, you fool. Of course the Goblin has a counter. He has ~150 HP, so Art and Kaeli can combine to bring one down per turn, but someone's going to eat a counter in the process.



The actual layout of the forest hasn't been changed, but enemies and item boxes have been shuffled all around. Again, I have no idea why this was done, but it was.



Like so.



This, however, is a nasty surprise. We have no way of curing poison, and the fuckers have just enough HP that they won't go down to a 1-2 punch from Art and Kaeli, leaving you with both people poisoned and no way to cure it outside of running back to Foresta and hitting the bed. And if you leave the Level Forest, all the enemies respawn. You cannot reach the Minotaur without fighting at least two enemies, one of which is basically guaranteed to have a Slime. :sigh:



The other side of the forest, just for completion's sake.



Gonna take a break and go back and heal before going after Minotaur. No idea why everyone in Foresta got new sprites, apparently yellow and blue just isn't in style these days.



I got lucky, and the first Goblin fight didn't have a Slime. I tried running away a couple times to see if I could get a similar spawn here, but no dice.



Kaeli has less HP, so I made her eat the Poison counter. Life will remove poison, but only in battle, and she's going to need healing before Art will. Also, somehow she gained 9 defense since she initially joined. :psyduck:



So, a fun tidbit: enemies are no longer targetable with White magic. Aside from meaning that we can't just chump this guy with Life, that means we've lost a major source of damage against Flamerus Rex. Not looking forward to that fight.



Anyway, Minotaur has three attacks. Axe is the one you want to see, since it does ~30 damage a shot. Screech is tolerable in small doses, as it doesn't do any damage on its own, but it'll lower our defense. Roundhouse is the one we have to watch out for, because that does 90 damage a pop before we factor in any defense drops. You get one guess which attack he uses the most.



Oh, and he has Counter. Of course he has counter. Literally everything has a counter.



Anyway, he goes down really easy. Kaeli gives us her Axe and we're off to see the world on our own, right before I regret not farming a few more levels before Kaeli leaves the team.

MaskedHuzzah
Mar 26, 2009

Come now! Look me in the eye and tell me - isn't this the face of a guy you can trust?
Lipstick Apathy
The reason you can no longer target enemies with cure is because it's the only way he could prevent the end boss Cure glitch. I also went into the Bone Dungeon at level 7 and left it as level 11.

Desfore
Jun 8, 2011

Confirmed at least one furry on the Smash team

Artix posted:

Oh, and he has Counter. Of course he has counter. Literally everything has a counter.

Well, that's one way to make the game harder.

Artix
Apr 26, 2010

He's finally back,
to kick some tail!
And this time,
he's goin' to jail!
Oh man, am I going to have words when I make it through the Bone Dungeon. This poo poo is loving evil.

E: I have the Bone Dungeon like 80% written up, should have an update for that tonight.

Artix fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Jul 19, 2014

cardinal direction
Feb 20, 2011

This shit is bananas
11. This Could Have Been Worse, Just Saying



Freeing the Crystal of Fire means the earthquakes in Fireburg have stopped just in time for us to never come back here for an extended period of time. It also opens up this Battlefield



wherein you will be ambushed each and every time and all the enemies are either Iflytes or Stehnos. The reward is a measly 1000 EXP so it’s not really worth being petrified and instantly getting a game over more often than not.



But getting back to business. With another coin comes another door to open in the Focus Tower.



And another elucidating visit from this fine fellow.



“Seriously, who is Captain Mac?”



Tucked away down those stairs is a secret area of the tower and this lovely thing. Aero is the strongest and last Black magic spell. Like the others before it will come in handy for the next area.



Outside of the Focus Tower, we can see that there is apparently a huge gaping hole taking up a quarter of the world that people aren’t very concerned about.





The Rope Bridge, unfortunately, isn’t a mini-dungeon.



But it is host to talking zombies so that’s kinda unique?



What? Why?



:cripes:



See, Reuben, that’s how it’s done. Shrug slides down the vine after killing the dumb thing in one hit like he would have if you weren’t so stupid, Reuben.



Spoilers: he won’t





Not sure if Shrug is confused about the music or still perplexed by how Reuben hosed that up.



Whoa, let’s not go nuts here. “Acquaintance”, maybe. Maybe.





I have mixed feelings about this.





I know Reuben was sort of a whipping boy, but real talk, Tristam is probably the worst party member. He’s dealing about half the damage as Reuben was and is stuck with Life as his only spell. The only real difference is that we’re not stuck with him for nearly as long nor do we have to pick so many fights with him at our side. If memory serves, he’ll be around for three fights at the most, all of which are made into total jokes by Aero, if you so choose. Plus Tristam is going to do something very cool so I can forgive it. He’s also not a complete idiot, which helps.





I guess you could say Alive Forest is our first dungeon but that wouldn’t be completely right since we’re not going to really explore it at the moment. With Reuben gone, we’re switching back to the numbers for our health unless that’s really a problem.



But we’ve got some new enemies. Specters are upgraded Ghosts in that they can counter with confusion now. That’s it, as far as I know.

Mummies, similarly, are beefier Zombies. They can put you to sleep, poison, and petrify. They’re both pretty easy to kill, and Specters are weak to Tristam’s ninja stars and Shrug’s Aero.

Like most undead enemies, they can multiply so... they can be a nuisance, maybe?



The Alive Forest has trees with those teleporters on them, which allows us to access incredible goodies such as Cure Potions and Heal Potions.





These totally inconspicuous trees hide the corresponding teleporters. All that this one leads to is some Refreshers. Yahoo.



South of the Libra Crest tree is something that is totally worth it though.





Our final tier axe, the Giant’s Axe is an awesome upgrade. If Shrug were a little higher level, his attack would be comparable to Reuben’s. This is hardly bad though. As an added bonus, the Giant’s Axe won’t be obsolete within a few minutes of getting it.



The color of the axe also changes in battle. Neat!



Huh? We were looking for the king of the forest? Since when?



The results are predictable.



It’s not like Shrug was at all polite about that so I can understand.



How would you know about this?



Yeah! She must be in Aquaria by now...

The Wind section of the game sends you back and forth a lot. If this game had an actual world map it would be terrible but fortunately it’s just a little bit of a hassle. I’ve got to be honest though, this is probably my favorite section of the game in spite of that. I like the next town a lot, we’re getting the badass treasure now, and the big dungeon is pretty interesting though it has its frustrations like all the others.



I guess she’s still dealing with that whole ‘evil tree’ thing from way back when?



Well then why the hell were you digging this stupid tunnel in the first place if you could never reach him??

By the way, who’s that with you?



You don’t say. Listen, I heard a rumor about some amazing armor...


He just totally forgets about Mac, the tunnel, everything.


Let’s go!



You realize that Shrug’s also treasure hunting? No? Well, alright, whatever, I guess.

Later!



“This is bullshit!”



Rub it in, why don’t you?



I’ll give you this Dragon Claw. Don’t worry, it’s on me. Bye!



Well, I guess if a guy gives you a sick grappling hook you kind of have to forgive him.



In any case, that was it for Tristam and we’ll never see him again.



Hey, yeah, wow, that sounds like an excellent idea and nothing could go wrong.



Now an expert on explosives, Shrug would know.



Something went wrong.



Something went very wrong.





What was the point of all this then?



Yes, but did you hear about my dad?


I—uh, maybe??


Yeah, Spencer told me. He said I should see Otto in Windia, and I was hoping you’d come too.





Kaeli, who has apparently traded in her green dress and armor for something much more impractical, returns and she is a huge step up from Reuben and Tristam. She’s tough and can withstand a lot of punishment, hits like a truck, resistant to petrification and can handle more than one threat at a time. Aero is a great spell and Cure will restore a good amount of health to both characters.

I like that the Magic Ring is apparently just called “Ring” because that’s about what it amounts to in the game anyway.



And while we’re at it, let’s look at the Dragon Claw, which is super great. While it doesn’t even have the punch of the Mega Grenades on a single target, it has the benefit of an absolute status effect deluge coming behind every swing. Confusion, poison, paralysis, blind, sleep, petrification, you name it, it (probably) does it.

What’s better is that petrification is an effectively an instant death for enemies. Yeah, this is an excellent weapon.

Anyway, now that Kaeli has rejoined, we can chat up the tree again.



Being polite really was the way to go about this. We probably didn’t even need to fetch Kaeli.



Ha ha, Shrug is so sick of this.




Next time: A familiar premise?


I knuckled down and skimmed through that very bad and very loud LP of Mystic Quest Remastered and I can pretty much promise you that it's better than nearly everything in Reborn. I don't want to be a jerk or anything but the Bone Dungeon is pretty bad and the Alive Forest/this upcoming dungeon are even worse. The difficulty curve there is basically a brick wall.

E: ^^^ Oh dang, didn't see that post! I guess you'll all get to see everything wrong with the Bone Dungeon pretty soon!

cardinal direction fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Jul 19, 2014

Artix
Apr 26, 2010

He's finally back,
to kick some tail!
And this time,
he's goin' to jail!
Yeah, for everything wrong with Reuben, the guy was at least resistant to the right stuff and hit drat hard. He might only be hitting one thing, but that one thing is probably dead. Tristam's second turn doesn't even have that going for him. He can take out the Specters well enough, but he does maybe half of a Mummy's HP, and he can't even inflict anything because they resist poison/paralysis. And then as soon as he joins, he's gone again. The Dragon Claw is sweet as hell, but serious, why even bother having him come back?

E: I have the update done, but I don't want to overshadow the actual LP or anything so I'll post it in the morning or something.

Artix fucked around with this message at 03:54 on Jul 20, 2014

Rabbi Raccoon
Mar 31, 2009

I stabbed you dude!
The rope bridge just screams "unfinished" to me. No enemies, no treasure, just a small scene that could have happened in the focus Tower or the forest just as easily. And I remember when I first played my friend tried to convince me there was a secret character and I somehow convinced myself it involved the rope bridge for that very reason.

Rabbi Raccoon fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Jul 20, 2014

Krumbsthumbs
Oct 23, 2010

2nd Place.
1st Loser.
I always enjoyed seeing Kaeli after having Tristam for maybe 15 minutes. She's been sick for X amount of time and in bedrest but what does she do? Show up 8 levels higher than the treasure hunter and ready to tear through whatever gets in her way. Hell, I'm just happy to see someone with Cure and Aero compared to having just Life.

Also, seriously Reuben? You can't take out just one skeleton on your own? You just helped take out a dragon/hydra thing. What did you do, pull your back in Focus Tower? It wasn't from carrying the team, that's for sure.

Geshtal
Nov 8, 2006

So that's the post you've decided to go with, is it?
Fun fact: if you're playing this on an emulator then you can turn off the cloud layer on the world map at the beginning of the game and Windia's section is as brown and dry as Foresta's section starts as. In fact, it only turns green after you beat the Bone Dragon. Of course just a programing shortcut since normally you'd never see it otherwise, I still imagine they were doubly screwed until Shrug restored the earth crystal and they simply don't talk about it.

Geshtal fucked around with this message at 13:31 on Jul 20, 2014

Artix
Apr 26, 2010

He's finally back,
to kick some tail!
And this time,
he's goin' to jail!


So before we even attempt to tackle the Bone Dungeon, we desperately need to get some more experience under our belt. Let's see what this battlefield has to offer.



To start things off, we have the Willows. They're a decent jump in difficulty, doing ~60 damage a shot and they have somewhere around 300 HP. Our axe will make quick work of them, as it does ~200 damage a shot by hitting their weakness.



We can also find Poison Toads, which are simultaneously more and less dangerous than the Willows. Their tongue attack does about 60 damage, but they will spam the hell out of Poison Fluid (which does nothing but poison you), and they have poison-touch on top of it, so they usually end up wasting a lot of their turns. The downside is that it'll take us at least 3 turns to put one down, and poison damage adds up pretty quickly here.



Not pictured: Me running back to Foresta after every other fight because you end them looking like this.



OH COME ON THAT DOESN'T EVEN MAKE SENSE



It's worth it, though. Not only for that precious experience, but we finally got Cure. :toot:

Anyway, we only need about 500 experience for another level, so I'm going to go ahead and grind that out in the Level Forest real quick.



Now we're starting to look respectable. Let's go pick up Tristam.





Not too bad, all things considered. Guy can't cast a spell to save his life, but he's fast, pretty strong, and he's got solid defense/HP.

Now, here's the problem. Once Tristam joins, we are on a strict time limit to finish the Bone Dungeon. Those 99 ninja stars aren't going to last forever, and by the creator's own admission, running out of shuriken will make the Bone Dungeon "about 4 times harder". The Bone Dungeon is already a long, tough son of a bitch, and I'm not in the mood to make it any harder, so we'll actually have to skip the battlefield that just opened up.



Not only is it a drain on our already precious shuriken, the jackass went and increased the round count up to 15. Supposedly, higher round counts indicates better prizes, but we'll have to wait until we have Phoebe to find out.



Great. loving great. You literally can't even get in the door without being poisoned, and we still can't cure poison outside of casting Life during a fight or dying.



Right, moving on. Basilisks are right motherfuckers and I will actively go out of my way to avoid them. They're marginally stronger than the Willow/Poison Toad, typically doing ~70 damage a pop, but they have a nasty surprise in store for you. These fuckers have Para-touch, and just enough HP that following up one of Tristam's attacks isn't enough to kill them.



The last new enemy for the first room is the Sand Worm, which also confusingly has Para-touch. Quicksand will do about 40 and lower our speed, and Scrunch is good for a straight 100 or so damage. Thankfully, they go down to a 1-2 punch because of their axe weakness.



Ammo now comes in bundles of 8 instead of 10, putting our supplies under even further constraint. Note that after fighting just three enemies, we were already down to 84 shurikens.



First room done. We could have taken the quicksand directly up, but that would mean that we have to fight our way our on our own. For the love of god, do not attempt to fight your way out solo.



The next room is a breather, as we get our Bombs.



And while we're here, let's grab the Iron Shield.



Bombs have been nerfed to hell and back, doing about a quarter of the damage that they would normally do. They supposedly inflict Blindness, but I'll be damned if I ever saw that do anything for me.

Also while we're on the weapons screen, the shuriken have been changed to inflicting sleep and poison instead of paralysis and poison. After all, now that Tristam doesn't one-shot literally everything in the dungeon, we can't have him inflicting ailments that might actually be useful.



Thankfully there's really only two enemies we have to fight in this room, but I'm going to head up top in the vain hope that it's some Heal Potions or something.



Rocs Flame Beakors got a hell of an upgrade from their vanilla variant. For starters, they have way more HP, even being able to tank a hit from Tristam who hits their weakness. Aside from that, they do a ton of damage - Iron Nail lowers our defense and lands for ~40 while Blinder does ~100 and might inflict blind to add insult to injury. Fun fact: Blindness has lower priority than poison, so you'll never actually know if you're blind or not until you start missing a whole bunch!



Yeah, okay, should have seen that coming.



Then we have these fucks. Skeletons have about 600 HP and their damage is all over the place. Their sword attack does ~20 damage and their headbutt does drat near 120. :psyduck: And of course, they still have Spooky Laugh because gently caress you. And Para-Touch.



Just a brief check on supplies, we're about halfway through the dungeon and more or less fought the minimum number of enemies to get this far. We've burned through 3 of our 7 Cure casts, about a quarter of our Cure Potions, and we're still poisoned.

And that was the easy part of the dungeon.



And speaking of the easy part of the dungeon, here's someone who's glad to rid us of those silly ideas. The Gorgon is a nasty piece of work, with something like 700-800 HP, and all of its attacks do at least 100 damage a shot. Body Odor is the sole attack that won't directly do damage, and that will paralyze us. Bite and Dash are single-target attacks good for almost 200 damage, and Poison Breath will do 100 to each of us and probably re-poison you if you ever got around to curing it.



If we duck into the secret room, we can finally pick up our first Heal Potions. Yay for artificial difficulty!



Okay, that one's clever. You get points for that one, romhacker.



:sigh:



At least the box has more remedies for us.



Another status check: 1 Cure left, half our Life casts are gone, and we've burned through 3/4 of our cure potions. Not feeling particularly optimistic right now.



Finally, we have King poo poo of Bone Mountain, the Minotaur Zombie. He's packing about 1500 HP, he has Confu-touch as a counter, Stare for confusion on its own, and his damaging attacks are no less imposing. Like with the living Minotaur, you're really hoping for the Axe attack, though it does 70 damage instead of 30 this time. Roundhouse is up to a devastating ~250 damage, and if it crits, it can easily push 500, 550 damage.



Last floor, we're almost there!



Seeds! Precious, precious, seeds. This means that our healing situation more or less has solved itself, but this is all we get until Fireburg, unless I make this godawful trek again. Have to use them wisely.



:stare: Yeeeeeeeaaaaaahhhhh... No.



Okay, now that I can handle.



:toot: Not gonna lie, I was fully expecting both Quake and the seeds to have been removed because they trivialized Flamerus Rex or some bullshit.



We made it! Both of the item boxes have some greatly appreciated cure potions, since I was down to two of the things. I started this dungeon with 39 of them, for reference.



It's showtime, motherfucker. You'd be forgiven for thinking that after that absolute slog of a dungeon, Flamerus Rex was going to stomp all over your poo poo, because I sure as hell did. I mean, how the hell do you top the drat Minotaur Zombies, who can literally one-shot either of your characters if they get a lucky Roundhouse?

Well, as it turns out, the answer is "You don't". Flamerus Rex is, comparatively speaking, one of the easiest drat things in this entire dungeon. Sure, he's got a ton of HP, but his attacks are positively anemic. He only has a single attack that can hit for ~200 damage, and everything else he does ranges from 100-120 or so. Rip Earth can be nasty if he spams it, but a couple Cure spells on both characters should be enough to cover for it. He also has Poison and Sleep Powder, which are functionally free turns when he decides to use them.

Really, the whole thing is kinda insulting. I go through all of that poo poo to get here, and this is the boss that I get? That was weak, romhacker. I expected better out of you. :colbert:



Get the Sand Coin. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT FORGET THE SAND COIN, YOU LITERALLY WILL NOT MAKE IT BACK ON YOUR OWN.



And then Tristam ditches us. You did remember to leave a path where you don't have to fight anyone to get out, right? Because that isn't going to end very well either.

Anyway, with that ordeal behind us, here's the real cherry to the poo poo sundae: If at any time during the dungeon you find that you aren't well-prepared enough, or you came in at too low of a level, you more or less have to forfeit not only all the progress that you've made (because all the enemies will respawn once you leave), but you also lose all the shuriken up to that point. And god help you if you run out of those and get stuck with using Bare Hands, because not only does the axe do less damage than the shuriken do, it's going to trigger every single counter ability. With multiple sources of Confu-touch and Para-touch in the Bone Dungeon, I don't see how you can make it through without getting horrendously overlevelled or grinding out 99 cure potions, and even then you're going to die of boredom by the end.

So yeah, gently caress this hack. I'll probably keep playing it on my own, but unless something egregiously bad pops up, I think the point has been thoroughly made.

RabidWeasel
Aug 4, 2007

Cultures thrive on their myths and legends...and snuggles!
That actually seems fairly ok other than the running out of Shuriken thing. I mean yeah it looks bullshit hard but doable, which is what I expect from a hard mode hack of a Square RPG.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

RabidWeasel posted:

That actually seems fairly ok other than the running out of Shuriken thing. I mean yeah it looks bullshit hard but doable, which is what I expect from a hard mode hack of a Square RPG.

The problem is that bullshit hard isn't coming from anything clever, nor is Mystic Quest a deep enough game that you can match the bullshit with clever uses of game mechanics (hell, the most clever thing you can do is cast white magic on enemies, and that was removed!).

It's not like Final Fantasy 5 or Final Fantasy 6 where job setups or equipment setups could make your characters immune to certain attacks or trivialize certain enemies by being clever about your setup.

Torrannor
Apr 27, 2013

---FAGNER---
TEAM-MATE

Dirk the Average posted:

The problem is that bullshit hard isn't coming from anything clever, nor is Mystic Quest a deep enough game that you can match the bullshit with clever uses of game mechanics (hell, the most clever thing you can do is cast white magic on enemies, and that was removed!).

It's not like Final Fantasy 5 or Final Fantasy 6 where job setups or equipment setups could make your characters immune to certain attacks or trivialize certain enemies by being clever about your setup.

Basically this. Each new piece of equipment is a straight upgrade over the previous item. There is no customization of your character at all, all you can do is grind more levels. That's not very exciting.

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

Torrannor posted:

Basically this. Each new piece of equipment is a straight upgrade over the previous item. There is no customization of your character at all, all you can do is grind more levels. That's not very exciting.

You can also go in and out of zones to grind for consumables. I hate to think how many times Artix visited Foresta to get more Cure potions.

cardinal direction
Feb 20, 2011

This shit is bananas
I seriously wouldn't blame you if you decided to just stop there, honestly, because the egregiously/hilariously bad stuff is pretty deep in and I wouldn't wish that on you. Thanks for taking a look at it!

Anyway, here's a whole bunch of :words: on why I don't like this hack:

My biggest issue with the hack is that it completely falls short of everything it intended to do. Shrug has never felt like a "useless tool" until he got White because he still had a role to play in some way and that was usually healing at the worst. I can sort of understand the reasoning behind switching item locations around but making you work harder for a Cure spell is kind of obnoxious considering how useless Cure Potions are whether or not you get 4 or 3 of them. The creator claims that the hero is the powerhouse now and other allies are the support but I'm not seeing it. Maybe that changes in the late game but I'm not sure how masochistic you'd need to be to sit through some of the garbage later on because enemies start throwing around instant death attacks constantly. Mystic Quest already has to deal with annoying game overs by petrification and the hack has poo poo like that in spades. Since bombs are worthless and magic is sort of a tougher decision to use, you have to eat a counter or some confu-touch bullshit. Its one saving grace is being able to restart battles but then you'll eventually run out of supplies and then you're boned.

Like Dirk the Average and Torrannor said, other Square RPGs have the benefit of being designed in such a way that you have several means of exploiting battles or mechanics, whatever, but Mystic Quest doesn't have any of that and the hack offers even less because White magic can no longer be used offensively. What the hack leaves you with is a big mess of enemies that are absurdly difficult and have far too much HP for how threatening they are. Having to hit an enemy's weakness three times with the strongest weapon isn't difficult, it's just dumb. Grinding ahead seven levels isn't strategy, it's just tedious. Nerfing the bombs to like 1/5th of their potency is awful and blind is a terrible status effect for them to deal out because blind is worthless. Maybe I'm wrong on this, but I don't think Mystic Quest as is can be retooled to be more difficult as easily as the hack claims to have. Mystic Quest Remastered works around the increased difficulty by eventually giving you a full party of 4 and I think that works better, but still.

Artix didn't get a chance to show it, but you actually can only get GP from boss fights and battlefields which means you'll end up trudging through hundreds (because some battlefields actually have 99 battles before you get anything) of fights for enough to afford new equipment, and the hacker kindly pointed out that inns are a waste of money so just trek back to Foresta each and every time you run out of magic! Yeah, that's awesome and fun!

I went looking for videos of battles and the creator just flat out says "I don't think it is too hard if you strategize, that and some luck will help." Well, wait, if luck helps, then strategy is meaningless! Does this look like a victory that came from strategy or just hoping the AI wasn't going to one-shot the surviving character?

The one thing I will give it is that I like the color of the hero's armor but that's sort of damning with faint praise, isn't it?

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

cardinal direction posted:

I went looking for videos of battles and the creator just flat out says "I don't think it is too hard if you strategize, that and some luck will help." Well, wait, if luck helps, then strategy is meaningless! Does this look like a victory that came from strategy or just hoping the AI wasn't going to one-shot the surviving character?

The creator's own description of that video is "I think this was the first battle I've shown with a strategy to win."

And that "strategy" appears to be "spam White, and cast Life when someone gets killed."

Ofecks
May 4, 2009

A portly feline wizard waddles forth, muttering something about conjured food.

Artix posted:

You did remember to leave a path where you don't have to fight anyone to get out, right? Because that isn't going to end very well either.

Dunno if the hack changed it, but in the base game you can get out by jumping over the sand and holding left.

Derek Barona
Dec 8, 2009

WHO'S YOUR FRIEND?!
Any situation in a game where the actual creator just sort of throws his hands up and shrugs when asked how the gently caress you're supposed to get through it is enough cause for me to avoid that game like the plague. Seriously, just two LP posts of that hack was more than loving enough.

Sketchie
Nov 14, 2012

Artix, I can tell the hack is driving you crazy. It's kind of amusing, but that's what it's supposed to do, right? Make the viewers cackle in glee while the players bang their heads on their tables?

If you're seriously considering continuing the LP, I'd like to at least see SOME snippets of the most "OMG WHY" moments in the hack you've ran into.

If not, no biggie.

Raitzeno
Nov 24, 2007

What? It seemed like
a good idea at the time.

Sketchie posted:

Artix, I can tell the hack is driving you crazy. It's kind of amusing, but that's what it's supposed to do, right? Make the viewers cackle in glee while the players bang their heads on their tables?

If you're seriously considering continuing the LP, I'd like to at least see SOME snippets of the most "OMG WHY" moments in the hack you've ran into.

If not, no biggie.

Artix is a scarred, traumatized veteran of the terrible romhack battlefields, and here you are redeploying him after he asked for furlough.

Artix, get back in there. Remember to conserve your rations, soldier!
(See how far you can get without ever opening the same consumables box more than once. :D Because this hack totally isn't bullshit enough on its own... "merits".)

Derek Barona
Dec 8, 2009

WHO'S YOUR FRIEND?!

Raitzeno posted:

(See how far you can get without ever opening the same consumables box more than once. :D Because this hack totally isn't bullshit enough on its own... "merits".)

Good lord, that's a horrible thing to tell him to do. The vanilla game can actually be (a little) difficult if you don't abuse the respawning items, don't make him go through that shitstorm without free supplies.

Nihilarian
Oct 2, 2013


What was clever about the dragon skull?

liquidypoo
Aug 23, 2006

Chew on that... you overgrown son of a bitch.

There was an enemy encounter hidden inside of it. The skull sprite is a foreground object, so it mostly obscures the map sprite of the enemy. You can still see a tiny little sliver of the bastard on the lower right corner of the "square," though.

Here's another look so you don't have to scroll through his post to find it:

Artix posted:



Okay, that one's clever. You get points for that one, romhacker.

That's some drat fine timing, Artix. For those who haven't noticed, the game was in the middle of loading the battle when he grabbed that screen. As soon as you interact with an enemy sprite, I sorta remember the game doing a really quick fade to black square wipe, and looking at the status bar on the bottom you can see how quick he pushed the screenshot button.

liquidypoo fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Jul 22, 2014

Artix
Apr 26, 2010

He's finally back,
to kick some tail!
And this time,
he's goin' to jail!

Sketchie posted:

Artix, I can tell the hack is driving you crazy. It's kind of amusing, but that's what it's supposed to do, right? Make the viewers cackle in glee while the players bang their heads on their tables?

If you're seriously considering continuing the LP, I'd like to at least see SOME snippets of the most "OMG WHY" moments in the hack you've ran into.

If not, no biggie.

Nah, LP's done. To be frank, more than anything it commits the cardinal sin of just plain being boring. I'm going to preface this by saying that I may not play a whole lot of them, but I really enjoy dungeon crawlers. The Etrian Odyssey series is probably my favorite in recent memory, but I've played Mind Zero, Unchained Blades, and SMT IV among others in the last year or two.

Anyway, I'm going to start by saying that there definitely are some aspects of the hack that I enjoyed, although part of it comes down to the design for Mystic Quest itself. To be fair to the romhacker, there are really four ways to make it harder. You can: A) Make the enemies have more HP; B) Make the enemies do more damage; C) Increase the number of status effects that come into play; D) Take tools away from the player. As we've seen in the little that I've played so far, the hacker has made liberal use of all four, although point D won't really be that evident until much later in the game. I legitimately think you could do something really interesting with the right mix of those four elements, and the hack almost gets it in certain places. The start of the final floor of the Bone Dungeon? I'm down to one Cure cast, three quarters of my Cure Potions are gone, and four Life charges with a big "Do Not Break Unless Emergency" glass case over them. That is tense as gently caress and I love it. That's the feeling right before you fight that stratum boss and you're not quite sure if you brought enough Medicas or if the Doctor has enough MP to keep everyone standing. That is what a dungeon crawler should do, and to be frank, the fact that he didn't remove the seeds or Quake (although moreso the seeds) really deflated a lot of the tension going in there.

But really, that could have been forgiven if the boss wasn't basically unchanged from vanilla Mystic Quest. The loving Minotaur Zombies are capable of literally one-shotting either of my party members, and the absolute worst the boss can do is 120 to both or 200 to one? The only way that would be dangerous is if I don't have access to Cure, which he could have done! I know that I've railed against seeds a lot in this thread, but it cannot be emphasized enough how they break the game wide open, and I would be totally down for a hack of the game that does literally nothing but completely excise them. Especially in a hard-type hack.

Anyway, that little rant aside, the hack has a clear over-reliance on throwing status effects at you. I tried to note the most egregious ones in the write-ups, but again, he literally gave every single monster a counter. Even the goddamn Flamerus Rex had a standard counter. Again, in moderation, this would be an interesting way of adding difficulty to the game. Poison Toads and the Slimes having poison-touch makes sense. Hell, I can even see giving the Minotaur Zombie confu-touch (provided you don't make it so Tristam needs five turns to kill the thing), as long as you're not stupidly stingy with Heal Potions. That said, Para-touch is a load of bullshit and there is no excuse for including it this early in the game.

I could go on and on about the stupid poo poo like not allowing you to get any gold outside of boss fights (thus making you trek back to Foresta every single time you need to heal), or jacking up battlefield fights in the places that actually have good poo poo (up to 99 loving fights jesus christ), but that sort of poo poo doesn't need explaining as to why it's so dumb. This poo poo would be easy to fix, and it's a shame that it went so wrong because making it so that Mystic Quest doesn't just roll over for you isn't even that hard! If you increased enemy HP by about 1.5x and doubled the damage they do (with the increase tapering off as the game gets further in) with a couple flavor-appropriate counters tossed in for good measure, and you would have something that's not outright hard, but it would be way more interesting than the game is right now.

Raitzeno posted:

Artix is a scarred, traumatized veteran of the terrible romhack battlefields, and here you are redeploying him after he asked for furlough.

Artix, get back in there. Remember to conserve your rations, soldier!
(See how far you can get without ever opening the same consumables box more than once. :D Because this hack totally isn't bullshit enough on its own... "merits".)

I would be amazed if you even got out of the Level Forest. The Bone Dungeon would be flat out impossible.

liquidypoo posted:

There was an enemy encounter hidden inside of it. The skull sprite is a foreground object, so it mostly obscures the map sprite of the enemy. You can still see a tiny little sliver of the bastard on the lower right corner of the "square," though.

That's some drat fine timing, Artix. For those who haven't noticed, the game was in the middle of loading the battle when he grabbed that screen. As soon as you interact with an enemy sprite, I sorta remember the game doing a really quick fade to black square wipe, and looking at the status bar on the bottom you can see how quick he pushed the screenshot button.

It was a skeleton, no less! :D I take all of my shots from video, so it's real easy for me to get the exact frame for something like that. Helps a lot when you're dealing with any kind of quick animation.

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe
Now I'm wondering how well things would work if you started the game with 1 cast each of White, Black, and Wizard magic, and then got more casts (for different domains of magic) only when you freed different crystals. Like, Earth Crystal would give you 2 White charges, Ice would give you a White and a Black, Fire gives you Black and Wizard, Wind gives you 1 of each. And then do away with Seeds but refill your magic points to full at the beginning of each fight. That'd give you some leeway to make fights harder since you have a limited stock of Big Guns you can haul out in every single fight. And it'd make Cure/Heal Potions a lot more relevant since you'd only have a couple casts of Cure before you're out of spellpoints, assuming you don't spend them on Life or Heal.

It seems pretty clear that the guy who did this hard-mode hack was doing everything he could that just involved changing stats on things and modifying monster data structures, as opposed to adding new game logic. It can be difficult to modify game logic, but things that are just numbers or flags or whatever are pretty easy to do.

EDIT: vvv there's always Heal potions, which are exactly as good as the Heal spell. Cure Potions aren't as good as casting Cure, though, and there's no substitute for Life or Exit.

TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Jul 22, 2014

ultrafilter
Aug 23, 2007

It's okay if you have any questions.


The big problem with limiting magic in FFMQ is the frequency with which enemies throw out status effects. It gets to be some pretty serious bullshit by the end of the game, and if you couldn't spam Heal, you'd have to spend a lot of time on each fight hoping the RNG goes your way. I like the idea of increasing monster HP a bit, which is probably the most you can reasonably do given this game's simple mechanics.

Artix
Apr 26, 2010

He's finally back,
to kick some tail!
And this time,
he's goin' to jail!
Not only are Heal Potions an acceptable substitute for the spell (where Cure Potions are not), Blind and Poison are the only ailments that actually persist after battle. Petrify, Paralyze, and Confusion, while all a huge pain in the rear end, go away once you get through the battle. Poison for the most part is completely ineffectual, and Blindness can be circumvented by both Bombs and magic, depending on how you want to play it.

Rabbi Raccoon
Mar 31, 2009

I stabbed you dude!
I think it could be made more challenging and/or balanced, it just requires more thought than "throw numbers and status effects at a bestiary".

1) Keep all the weapons on the same tier competitive. Swords really aren't useful until the third tier because you get an axe so soon after getting the swords. And if memory serves, there aren't many enemies weak to swords and axe-weak enemies are coming out of the woodwork.

2) Put a limit on the amount of Seeds you can carry. Say...5. As has been stated, once you hit Fireburg, the rest of the game is basically a formality.

3) I'm not sure if it's possible with this game's engine, but let Kaeli, Tristam, Phoebe, and Reuben be able to level up. And, obviously, lower their joining level.

4) Take out respawning chests entirely, but have shops that sell shurikens and arrows (depending on who your buddy is at the time).

5) Keep all magic competitive as well. There's no real reason to use Fire, Quake, or Blizzard after getting Aero and the Wizard spells.

6) Make Refreshers actually useful. I don't think I've ever used one. Either stat-lowering attacks are so ineffectual that I don't notice them, or they're also bugged. Fix that issue.

7) And I did like the idea for battlefields that more battles means a better reward. I'd keep that too.

cardinal direction
Feb 20, 2011

This shit is bananas
12. The Tree With Two Faces







The Giant Tree is pretty cool. I mean, don’t get me wrong, this is undeniably a filler dungeon but it’s exponentially better than the Mine. Kaeli, like Reuben, is also killing a lot of enemies in one hit so life is good but now Shrug is pretty comparable himself. And as you may have noticed, it’s filled to the brim with monsters, so Shrug might gain a lot of levels here and dash my hopes of finishing the game at my lowest level yet.

The only real complaint I have about this place is that it funnels you into a lot of encounters. I fought just shy of the bare minimum and gained three levels.



Gonna get a whole slew of new enemies in here too, so let’s get on with the show.

Live Oaks are jokes—Shrug and Kaeli are going to kill them in one hit so they’re hardly threats. They picked up Electrapulse to lower your magic in case you zoned out while playing and used the grenades or something on them.

Snipions are more annoying but still easily killed in one hit. They do have Doom Powder now which is an instant death for a party member, but other than that they’re nothing special. Apparently their English name is a mistranslation of Sniper?



What is special, however, is the loving awesome Dragon Claw. We can still climb walls, obviously, but now it’s with a sick grappling hook. There are going to be a lot of those posts scattered around the tree for us to latch onto. This is good. Odds are if there’s something for you to shoot and latch on to, that’s where you should be going.



What’s a dungeon without loot?



Mad Toads can’t be killed in one hit by Kaeli, which sucks, because these guys are pretty obnoxious. They’ve got poison-touch as a counter and Body Odor for paralysis against Kaeli, and Stone Gas is as effective as usual on Shrug.



There are also a few maze-like rooms such as this one where you have to chop the mushrooms down to pass through.



God drat is that a lot of Mad Toads that we’re going to have to fight for treasure :sigh:



And then a Leech showed up. As the last of the worm enemies, they are still really weak and irrelevant. Still can’t handle axes or earth attacks, but now they’re weak to wind as well. They’ve picked up Fireball which can hurt but eh...



Uuugh just give me the dumb chest



Shrug has almost completed his spell repertoire. Meteor is awesome and does some heavy damage, but it’s sort of hamstrung by its Earth element. I’m not sure why, but I’ve always felt like White has outdamaged it.



These vines take you down a floor but doing it here just takes you backwards. I guess a shortcut if you need to get out of here for healing or something? You’ll actually want to cross the left gap to progress.



Meteor looks cool as hell and makes a great noise, just fyi



For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, you stab these faces with the sword and they’ll open up.



Well, at least everything in here is weak to axes but still. The third path to the left is the one to take to get out of this ‘maze’.



Oozes are actually pretty interesting.





To my knowledge, they’re one of very few enemies that actually have something that resembles the Reflect status of other Final Fantasy games. So don’t cast spells at them because that can ruin your day real quick. They’re weak to bombs like all of the other Jelly enemies.

e:

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

I'm a little sad that you didn't show what happens if you use the Dragon Claw on an Ooze. But again, not really worth going back for it. I don't think Oozes show up again either.



Oh?



What's happening?



If you recall that the Dragon Claw doled out status effects like candy, you might remember that petrification was amongst those. Because all of the status effect proc when they land, seeing this message means you've killed the Ooze in one hit. It's pretty satisfying! They are also correct, this is the last of the Slime line.



This is the only place where you have to drop down a level.



To an elevated part of the second floor that lets us get back to the third floor. Trees are weird.



Back on the third floor, you have to drop and catch the lower handholds. It sure is a thing, I guess!





Along with Oozes, we’ll start running into these jerks. They’ve also gotten Doom Powder because the Skeleton line needed more tools to be annoying with. They’re weak to wind, which might be worth exploiting.



By the way, if you have to go back through these rooms for any reason, all of the mushrooms come back and you have to chop all of them down again. This maze room has a bunch of Oozes and that’s unfortunate because they take awhile to kill.



Jeez, I never realized how many rooms just had a lot of one enemy. Fortunately, you can pretty much just kill one of these guys and go straight to the boss if you’d like.



e:

ultrafilter posted:

If you talk to the face before you kill Ghidra, there's a bit of dialogue. It's not worth going back for.

"If you can beat Gidrah, the monsters will disappear!" They were right, it isn't worthing going back for, but maybe someone out there was curious!





Gidrah is honestly pretty easy to deal with. I don’t even think he deserves the boss battle music but I won’t not post it because that’s a crime. The Skuldiers are the bigger issue here, in my opinion.

If it starts off with paralyzing Kaeli, though, it can be rough dealing with all of the enemies since you’re not taking them all out in one round that way.



Once you’ve taken care of the Skuldiers, this fight is pretty much won. Kaeli’s Aero hits harder than Shrug’s White, and Meteor hits harder than that. It doesn’t have a lot of health, either, so Gidrah goes down fast.



It’s got a varied pool of moves and all of them can be pretty bad. Tornado and Triple Head can hit for 450 some damage and we all know how irritating Stone Gas can be. But because Gidrah is so hilariously frail and your spells are so powerful, you'll plow through his HP way faster than he can wear you down.

Fun fact: Shrug is now at the level you'd normally finish the game at if you did a low-level run.





Hmm, you know, I’m not sure why we actually did this but it sounds like a fun reward so whatever.



“Go on kid!!” The trees sure are nice :)



Naw, I’m pretty sure we could have just walked through this.



But first, a quick stop before the next town.





Didn’t you already explain, like, the entire prophecy way back when? What more is there to say?





This doesn't seem as bad as the eternal winter, to be honest


Next time: Rainbow Road? Why not?

cardinal direction fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Jul 23, 2014

ultrafilter
Aug 23, 2007

It's okay if you have any questions.



If you talk to the face before you kill Ghidra, there's a bit of dialogue. It's not worth going back for.

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe
I'm a little sad that you didn't show what happens if you use the Dragon Claw on an Ooze. But again, not really worth going back for it. I don't think Oozes show up again either.

cardinal direction
Feb 20, 2011

This shit is bananas
I did take some screenshots of that but it looked kinda bad when I was making sure the update didn't look like garbage. I'll edit that in though, no biggie.

Blaze Dragon
Aug 28, 2013
LOWTAX'S SPINE FUND

cardinal direction posted:

Snipions are more annoying but still easily killed in one hit. They do have Doom Powder now which is an instant death for a party member, but other than that they’re nothing special. Apparently their English name is a mistranslation of Sniper?

Sniper + scorpion, I'm guessing.

Also riding a goddamn tree is the best reward and shows just how much style this game has. So stylish.

Derek Barona
Dec 8, 2009

WHO'S YOUR FRIEND?!

Blaze Dragon posted:

Also riding a goddamn tree is the best reward and shows just how much style this game has. So stylish.

On the list of poo poo I want a tree to give me for killing a bunch of monsters, it's pretty much either that or unlocking a network of teleporter trees across the map for easier travel.

TheFattestPat
Dec 28, 2012

Santa Cat Says: Good deeds are the things to always do, just make sure someone is watching you
I think the forest may have been calling Shrug a goon kid :kiddo:

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Derek Barona
Dec 8, 2009

WHO'S YOUR FRIEND?!

TheFattestPat posted:

I think the forest may have been calling Shrug a goon kid :kiddo:

The forest hears and knows all.

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