NoIdeas4Names

Some criticism

12 posts in this topic

(Don't interpret this as me saying the hack is bad, quite the opposite, i've liked it ever since the old versions and it's easily the best ROM hack i've ever seen, taking an already good SNES game and vastly improving upon every aspect, i wouldn't be criticizing it in hopes of improvement if i didn't like it.)

The pinned post by BTB nails this, by removing status effects from an RPG like this one you take away alot of the spice that keeps it from being just healing and attacking until you either win or die, while most of the hack is very fun and satisfying due to the fair but challenging bosses that take strategy and good timing to beat, i couldn't help but notice that practically every single postgame armor shares these same effects: Making you immune to all debuffs and one hit kills, and resistant to all elements, you can still be inflicted with stat reduction; But that is much more simple and straightforward, once again, just numbers. 

Think about it, there would be much more potential for challenge, strategy and diverse equipment in more than just stats if effects weren't such a nonfactor in endgame fights, and resistance to everything wasn't so commonplace, maybe you could keep immunity to all debuffs to easy mode, while in higher difficulties, some equipment could just reduce the duration of most if not all the debuffs while some makes you immune to just one or two effects? I don't know if DK changes the source code or something else to alter the mechanics but depending on what it is, it would be relatively easy, just make it so the counter to when your debuff will end starts out at the combined number your gear detracts from durations.

Speaking of status effects, the ones you inflict on enemies are quite unbalanced now tbh: On one hand you have burn and poison which only do like 1000 set damage per turn each, amazing early game; Progressively more useless as you get stronger, meanwhile defense down is practically a requirement to succeed on high difficulties since it makes bosses take double damage for multiple turns at a very low cost of either FP or frog coins, you might argue they're balanced around it but the fact that it's such a no-brainer to use in every fight that their whole defensive stats are balanced around this one debuff is the definition of OP, it's not the higher damage taken itself that's too strong, it's the fact that in a typical fight you'll always keep the bosses taking double damage because of long duration and spammability.

So, anyways, what do you think?

Edited by NoIdeas4Names

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3 minutes ago, NoIdeas4Names said:

(Don't interpret this as me saying the hack is bad, quite the opposite, i've liked it since the old versions and it's easily the best ROM hack i've ever seen, taking an already good SNES game and vastly improving upon every aspect.)

The pinned post about design here BTB

(Accidentally sent too soon gonna edit)

If you ask me, vanilla sucks after playing through Armageddon.

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29 minutes ago, Doomsday31415 said:

It all depends on what you're looking for.

Preferences would mostly be about the difficulty and the massive amount of postgame content, but personally, few games i've played nailed satisfying, challenging bosses like most of SMRPGA did, Dark Souls is one of the only ones i can think of right now, the fairness and strategy of the fights make it hard to feel frustrated when i lose, unlike alot of games that advertise themselves for challenge but unlike this one are littered with bs and artificial difficulty.

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2 minutes ago, NoIdeas4Names said:

Preferences would mostly be about the difficulty and the massive amount of postgame content, but personally, few games i've played nailed satisfying, challenging bosses like most of SMRPGA did, Dark Souls is one of the only ones i can think of right now, the fairness and strategy of the fights make it hard to feel frustrated when i lose, unlike alot of games that advertise themselves for challenge but unlike this one are littered with bs and artificial difficulty.

Have you ever seen Ozma in FFIX?

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1 minute ago, Nitro said:

Ozma?

PTSD flashbacks to getting cursed, every, damn, turn

That one is just so luck based that it feels more like winning a gamble when you beat it lol, i find it pretty telling that SMRPGA Ozma is arguably better than the original Ozma since, while meteor can still make you lose if you get unlucky it's very rare compared to the original.

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1 hour ago, NoIdeas4Names said:

The pinned post by BTB nails this, by removing status effects from an RPG like this one you take away alot of the spice that keeps it from being just healing and attacking until you either win or die, while most of the hack is very fun and satisfying due to the fair but challenging bosses that take strategy and good timing to beat, i couldn't help but notice that practically every single postgame armor shares these same effects: Making you immune to all debuffs and one hit kills, and resistant to all elements, you can still be inflicted with stat reduction; But that is much more simple and straightforward, once again, just numbers. 

Think about it, there would be much more potential for challenge, strategy and diverse equipment in more than just stats if effects weren't such a nonfactor in endgame fights, and resistance to everything wasn't so commonplace, maybe you could keep immunity to all debuffs to easy mode, while in higher difficulties, some equipment could just reduce the duration of most if not all the debuffs while some makes you immune to just one or two effects? I don't know if DK changes the source code or something else to alter the mechanics but depending on what it is, it would be relatively easy, just make it so the counter to when your debuff will end starts out at the combined number your gear detracts from durations.

I agree, in more ways than even you might have intended.  There's basically 3~5 "status effects" in v9:

  • Poison/burn: Constant damage over time
  • Sleep/disable: Can't do anything useful
  • Full break: Lowers damage dealt and increases damage taken
    • Attack down: Lowers damage dealt
    • Fear: Increases damage taken

There's no status effects that lock just items, or just spells, or just attack.  Ironically, vanilla possessed these.

More to what you're referring to, however, towards the end you simply get status protection for everything that can be protected, resistance to all elements, and of course mortality protection.  It happens slower than it did in v8, but it's still an issue.

As far as your idea for reducing the duration, however, that is not really an option without major assembly changes.

1 hour ago, NoIdeas4Names said:

Speaking of status effects, the ones you inflict on enemies are quite unbalanced now tbh: On one hand you have burn and poison which only do like 1000 set damage per turn each, amazing early game; Progressively more useless as you get stronger, meanwhile defense down is practically a requirement to succeed on high difficulties since it makes bosses take double damage for multiple turns at a very low cost of either FP or frog coins, you might argue they're balanced around it but the fact that it's such a no-brainer to use in every fight that their whole defensive stats are balanced around this one debuff is the definition of OP, it's not the higher damage taken itself that's too strong, it's the fact that in a typical fight you'll always keep the bosses taking double damage because of long duration and spammability.

There's a number of things I'd like to see different with poison, such as it affecting normal enemies more than bosses, but we'll see what happens in doom edition.

As far as fear is concerned, it's likely not going to be usable on enemies in hard mode/doom edition for the reasons you stated.  It was an experiment in adding more uses to certain moves, but it didn't work out too well.

2 hours ago, NoIdeas4Names said:

So, anyways, what do you think?

I think there's much to improve, although what gets done in hard mode/doom edition is yet to be seen.

Thanks for the feedback! :coolguy:

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Late reply, and only putting this here cause i don't think it's big enough to warrant another post but, i just had an idea, the biggest issue you've ran into in development is the fact that the number of enemies is limited to 255, so at this point DK has to remove one to add another. However, you've already altered certain number limits to be higher bit variable types, such as damage and hp, so could you possibly remove this boundary by tinkering with the idea of making that a 16-bit variable and thus raising the limit enough that it might as well not exist? Other than Lazy Shell editor probably running into a few problems with it, what prevents this from happening? (If i had to guess it would be SNES memory issues tbh.)

Edited by NoIdeas4Names

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3 minutes ago, NoIdeas4Names said:

Late reply, and only putting this here cause i don't think it's big enough to warrant another post but, i just had an idea, the biggest issue you've ran into in development is the fact that the number of enemies is limited to 255, so DK can't add everything he wants, right? However, you've already altered certain number limits to be higher bit variable types, so could you possibly remove this boundary by tinkering with the idea of making that a 16-bit variable? Other than Lazy Shell editor probably running into a few problems with this, what prevents this from happening?

Basically everything.  Make no mistake, making something that was 8-bit suddenly be treated as 16-bit is no simple task, even for the most basic of values.

For something as complex as the number of enemies, there's likely dozens of locations in the assembly that would have to be found and updated.  Each one is a massive pain to find.

This isn't even going into the additional memory usage caused by this.

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