inuksuk

Chrono Trigger: Enhansa Edition

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Hello and welcome! Enhansa Edition is a mod of Chrono Trigger that aims to improve the battle system to make combat more fun. The inspiration for the mod was, "What if Hypno Wave was actually useful?" and from there it spiraled out of control to rewriting enemy AI, redesigning items and equipment, modifying Techs, and more. My goal was to give the player more choices about how to grow and gear your characters and to have those choices be felt in battle. Perhaps the biggest change is the removal of Power, Magic, and Speed Tabs; instead, an NPC at the End of Time will improve the characters' stats several times throughout the game in exchange for the Tabs you collect.

 

Spoiler

Each character has two upgrades to choose from, available up to four times throughout the game as you progress through the story. Most choices are between increasing physical damage and mitigation or increasing magical damage and mitigation, but there are exceptions.6007b8da2ace4_NuEoTCrono.thumb.PNG.a9d7c912a654087f0c437835716d19bf.PNG

 

This is not a "difficulty hack". That is to say, the game has not been made frustratingly difficult on purpose. Let me be clear that the mod is more difficult than vanilla Chrono Trigger; it was a game made for children, after all. In redesigning the battle mechanics, my interest is in increasing the options that the player has to consider. One major way this is achieved is through status effects in battle. Full functionality has been restored to many status effects that go largely ignored in vanilla Chrono Trigger.

Weapons, Armor, and Accessories have been lovingly redesigned to support the different ways you can build your characters.

 

Spoiler

What's Taban been working on?Taban.thumb.PNG.0ac23ef6032565bbb83a47cc06174873.PNG

 

Over 80 enemy AI scripts have been rewritten to make battle more engaging. Most of the new scripts are minor tweaks to existing AI to either fix bugs, remove dead time in combat from enemies wandering for several turns in a row, or align enemies to act more similarly to their palette-swapped cousins. In some cases, boss AI was reworked extensively to bring some aspect of the fight into sharper focus. Some encounters that I find tedious, like the Lavos boss rush or single Acid fights in the Factory Ruins have been removed entirely. A small number of bosses that had no redeeming features in vanilla, like the Mega/Giga/Terra Mutant fights in the Black Omen, were redesigned entirely. 

Improving on Chrono Trigger is a daunting task. The original game gets so many things right. I have endeavoured to keep the quick pace of combat from the original while still presenting challenges for the player to overcome. Thank you for playing and I hope you enjoy!

-inuksuk, October 2021

 

Edited by inuksuk

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FAQ:

1) Where do I download the mod?

It's available here through the ngplus.net website! Click here to go to the download page.

2) Isn't the city in Zeal called "Enhasa"?

Yes. The title of my mod, "Enhansa Edition", is a bad pun. Sorry.

 

Edited by inuksuk

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It's live! I've uploaded the mod in the New Game Plus discord in its #Enhansa-Edition channel. I'll get it uploaded in others places soon.

Edited by inuksuk

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I've posted a major update to bring us to a v1.0 Beta version! This update is (among many other changes) a major overhaul of status effects, making Poison, Haste, Slow, HP Down, and Blind much more relevant. It's still in the NG+ Discord server in the #Enhansa-Edition channel.

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This looks great!  I played Lavos Awakening a while back, and while I liked how it rebalanced the game and made choices in battle meaningful I thought it went too far with difficulty and some battles really dragged on.  This looks like a much better approach than that, focusing on meaningful choices in combat and character builds.

A question: are you tweaking the nature of combo attacks at all from vanilla?  In the vanilla game, for the most part there's never a mechanical reason to use most combos vs. individual techs due to combos not being much stronger than using the techs individually and requiring more setup.  One thing other mods have done is add a multiplier to combos to make them more enticing to pull off.  Are you doing something similar?

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Yes, there's been close attention paid to the damage dealt by single and combo Techs. There are some multipliers for combo Techs in vanilla, but they're not applied consistently and as you point out sometimes there's no benefit above using the individual Techs. The changes I made are documented in the Readme that comes with the download.

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On 1/16/2022 at 8:24 PM, inuksuk said:

Yes, there's been close attention paid to the damage dealt by single and combo Techs. There are some multipliers for combo Techs in vanilla, but they're not applied consistently and as you point out sometimes there's no benefit above using the individual Techs. The changes I made are documented in the Readme that comes with the download.

radical!

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I am certainly enjoying this so far, it's the first Chrono Trigger mod I played.

Just did the first upgrade for Crono (Swordsman), Marle (Princess), Lucca (Engineer) and Robo (Immovable Object).

 

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Hello there, just found out about this hack and currently giving it a try. 
Just got Lucca and Frog...everything seems okay so far. 
When, like what part of the hack, will I start running into the new stuff ? 
Also, been hitting critical hits like crazy...did the default sword get a crit buff ?

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You'll start to get some new weapons with the Jailbreak/Future portion of the game. There are some minor changes you might notice before then. The End of Time has the new NPC and character advancement.

I don't think the starting sword had its crit rate changed. You're just running hot!

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Hi, i used a ñn ips patcher with the (usa) rom. How do i know if the patch is installed? I love the game but i dont want to play up till the end of time to see if the thing installed correctly.

And i ask this because a lot of ips patchers (and i downloaded this one from romhavking.net) tell you it worked but in reality it didnt install.

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Hi deno46, if you see this dialogue box, then you know you're playing Enhansa Edition. The vanilla textbox tells you how to choose your name. On my next update that textbox will just say welcome to Enhansa Edition to help reassure people who boot the game. :)

Enhansa_message.PNG

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