Insane Difficulty: Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne exploratory hacking - Insane Difficulty

I've tried to crack the shell of this juicy game to get at its sweet innards a number of times in the past, but this is the first time I've gotten any real results. I present to you...

The World's Angriest Kodama:

Good shit!

So... Déjà Vu, anyone?

What actually happened is I found a byte that controls the number of times the enemy attacks you. The normal damage they deal is actually divided by the number of hits, so this is purely cosmetic... EXCEPT they always do at least 1 damage per hit... and Kodama only deals ~10 total. So when I set it to 80 to find out what it does, it actually does increase his damage.

So they created all of this "fractionated total damage" thing just for Mother Harlot's physical attack? I can't remember any other examples and those skills that hit a random number of targets are most likely calculated in a different way.
I'm actually impressed at their effort.

Looks like... Incubus, Mother Harlot, and Sakahagi. Definitely not very many enemies.

Uploaded a couple vids from the hardtype so far:

Forneus fight:

Matador fight:

Basically, bosses deal way more damage and have substantially more life. Now the bosses remain hard even if you do everything right, and can easily become impossible if you don't. The extra HP on the bosses makes it harder to just get lucky by beating them down quickly. For normal enemies: enemy demons and player demons share the same stats except HP/MP. If this were a SNES ROM, I'd just make a new table for enemies-only and recode the game to treat them separately, but I'm not so adept at PS2 hacking... and I'm not aware of anyone else who is, either. Fortunately, more HP seems to be all that Nocturne's enemies really need in a lot of places. They often do good damage, they just die in 1-2 hits, so you never see it unless they attack first. When they're able to actually live long enough to get turns, it makes normal battles a lot tougher. On the other hand, I don't want to make normal battles tediously long, so my aim is for the enemy groups to be able to survive approximately one round's worth of attacks from the player, such that they get a chance to hit back.

No script changes on bosses or enemies so far. At this point I'm not 100% sure I'd be able to do it, but hopefully I can, because I'd really like to do some re-scripting for Lucifer (he needs it). All other bosses and enemies will probably retain the same scripts.

First Nocturne script change:

The hardest battle yet x.x

Progress update in the form of the most recent boss!


I don't know why the vid isn't showing up here, but the link works.

Next up: Mother Harlot.

zombero, on 27 December 2013 - 05:35 PM, said:

https doesn't embed properly. Just throw the link up without the tags and with the s in https removed.

Advent, on 30 December 2013 - 11:40 PM, said:

Aha! Got it. Thanks.

Hnnnnggghhhh