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Vanish Mantle

About Fallen/Risen Star

11 posts in this topic

Fallen Star and Risen Star originally began as an idea I had to make Golden Sun: Dark Dawn. I started researching if there were any tools to modify the game or any documentation for modding Dark Dawn. Instead I found a community dedicated to modding the original 2 Golden Suns. I then started replaying the originals only to realize that the original 2 games also had a lack of difficulty though not as much as Dark Dawn had. The majority of the difficulty in the original 2 games in their Vanilla form I felt stemmed from it being more like the older RPGs of it's time where there was very little hand holding and lack of revive items when you were deep in a dungeon. Couple that with djinni you could miss and your first run through the 1st Golden Sun could leave you frustrated. However by the time most got to The Lost Age or towards the mid point of the first game the difficulty had pretty much disappeared outside of extra bosses and even those lacked difficulty as they could be just summoned rush.

With the back story for why I started this project here is a general overview of what exactly Fallen Star and Risen Star actually are. A complete rework of Psynergy with new utility to make them more useful outside of just doing damage. This work for and against the player as enemies will now have access to a wider variety of psynergy as well. Equipment outside of weapons are no longer locked to specific characters outside of certain ones like some rings, dresses and some other pieces of equipment. What this means is that that Ivan and Mia can now make use of Shields, Helms and Armor while Isaac and Garet can now equip Circlets and the lighter gear as well. On top of this all gear including weapons come with new bonuses to stats that are not present in the original game. Some will buff your ATK while some will buff PP. This allows the player to pick what fits their specific play style the best. In addition to the changes to armor weapons have been reworked with generic, non-relic, weapons all gaining unique unleashes for their weapon class.

Each character gained a new unique psynergy to that helps flesh out parts of their tool kit in their base class. This psynergy is only available in their base class tree so if you decide to switch to a dual-element class or tri-element class you won't have access to that psynergy. In addition to these unique starting psynergy are additions of rings and stars that the characters can equip that grant them more psynergy. Unlike their new uniques these can be used outside of their mono-class. These psynergy often provide vary unique abilities that the character lacks and allows them to do better damage with those skills.

Monsters have been reworked including bosses to provide different rewards many have vastly different stats than their original counterparts. Bosses now get multiple turns so they are far more threatening than they were before. The new stats they have also mean they will hit harder and take less damage overall. Many enemies have had their skills set changed or their unique skills changed to do damage as many enemy skills did no damage at all and were of no real threat to the player. In addition to these changes monsters will reward the player with less EXP overall which means over-leveling will be harder. In addition to this there is a soft level cap in the first game at 35, however the tornado lizard that takes you to crossbone does provide the player with a lot of EXP that can get them to level 50. Risen Star however has no leveling at all meaning enemies do not reward the player with EXP instead enemies will sometimes drop stat items. These changes were made to address how open ended parts of the game are.

If you have any questions feel free to fire away. I am planning some new mods that revamp the games far more than the Fallen Star and Risen Star mods did.

 

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I've been meaning to ask, have you seen some of the changes where people have made a magic stat in Golden Sun? You might consider adding that to yours if you wanted. I'm eventually going to get around to playing this, as I like Golden Sun, it's just the first time I played it, I couldn't save!

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It's been a while since I played Fallen Star. I enjoyed it up until the endgame, where I got bored of grinding the Tornado Lizard and just stopped. I remember equipment juggling being a HUGE pain in the butt later in the game. Also remember the Psynergy gained from equipment being a LOT more important for damage output than psynergy gained from class. Never did pick up Risen Star.

One thing I found when exploring Golden Sun hacking was that someone made a hack such that Psynergy spells actually GROW in power throughout the game, instead of being locked to a certain power. That seemed HUGE, though I doubt you're at all considering re-visiting these.

Good to hear from you, Vanish Mantle.

Edited by thzfunnymzn

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13 hours ago, thzfunnymzn said:

It's been a while since I played Fallen Star. I enjoyed it up until the endgame, where I got bored of grinding the Tornado Lizard and just stopped. I remember equipment juggling being a HUGE pain in the butt later in the game. Also remember the Psynergy gained from equipment being a LOT more important for damage output than psynergy gained from class. Never did pick up Risen Star.

One thing I found when exploring Golden Sun hacking was that someone made a hack such that Psynergy spells actually GROW in power throughout the game, instead of being locked to a certain power. That seemed HUGE, though I doubt you're at all considering re-visiting these.

Good to hear from you, Vanish Mantle.

The way the games are currently balanced would require me to redo everything from the ground up for the new magic stat to work in the games. I may do a redux of FS/RS and I am planning an update to address the grind issue late game and some other minor issues. Hopefully you'll be willing to give it a go when i am able to get that out. That however is on hold as I am currently working on my first game that is going to have a demo ready in the coming weeks.

13 hours ago, Augestein said:

I've been meaning to ask, have you seen some of the changes where people have made a magic stat in Golden Sun? You might consider adding that to yours if you wanted. I'm eventually going to get around to playing this, as I like Golden Sun, it's just the first time I played it, I couldn't save!

Yeah I saw that and I was going to implement it into my mods only when I realized how badly it skewed the difficulty. I would have to rework everything from monsters, to skills, to equipment. At this point I might as well just redo the mods from the ground up with these new patches in mind however those are on hold until I am able to knock out some stuff for my game that I am working on.

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Nice to hear, both the own game you're talking about as well as a future update of RS/FS. I will most likely pick it up again if there is a new major version being released.

If your demo comes out before the weekend, I'll probably have some time to try it out then! :D

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im hype for new mods, on the other hand, if you are looking into dark dawn modding again, i'd be willing to help out. i feel like dark dawn has much more possibilities due to no 16k HP cap. additionally, characters despite 3D were made so that if you want characters to use equipment they cant normally use, it works fine. IE native supported in the code. 

as an aside, is your new golden suns mods, still going to be "insane difficulty"? (i REALLY hope so~)

Edited by dawnbomb

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On 9/16/2017 at 2:14 AM, dawnbomb said:

im hype for new mods, on the other hand, if you are looking into dark dawn modding again, i'd be willing to help out. i feel like dark dawn has much more possibilities due to no 16k HP cap. additionally, characters despite 3D were made so that if you want characters to use equipment they cant normally use, it works fine. IE native supported in the code. 

as an aside, is your new golden suns mods, still going to be "insane difficulty"? (i REALLY hope so~)

I am still be interested in working on Dark Dawn. So if you want to PM me we can discuss things for sure. As for my mods they will always be far more difficult than Vanilla Golden Sun. My new mods i would say currently are harder than my first ones.

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1 minute ago, Vanish Mantle said:

I am still be interested in working on Dark Dawn. So if you want to PM me we can discuss things for sure. As for my mods they will always be far more difficult than Vanilla Golden Sun. My new mods i would say currently are harder than my first ones.

sent you a PM

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