Soul Knight

Well, as far as "grind" is concerned, you can just increase the exp/gold drop (and the starting stat).  But as you said, fairy will have to choose the main character.  So you choose the first 3 character, but the other 3 will join/part along the way -- Duran in Molebear Land, Angela in Dwarf Tunnel (where you fight Machine Golems), Kevin in Ghost Ship, Carlie in Lamplight city (forgot name), Lise in Rolante Hideout, and Hawk in Rolante Castle.  I'm sure there are numerous ways to get around that, as far as plot is concerned.

If you decide to actually attempt this, then I'll work on the detail of exactly when characters leave/join (that's the easy part).

But as you said, I guess the programing all that stuff will be near impossible.

I don't even know if this is even possible...

Can you to make the game into one giant "play as everyone" game?  In short, you don't pick who you play as in the beginning, but play as everyone.  So in the beginning, you start as Duran, and play his tutorial stage, then Kevin, then Hawk, and so on.  And somewhere in the middle, you meet other characters.  They join, then they leave after certain plot, and so on.  And after the first Mana Holyland, you can choose who you take for Mana Beasts fights (Duran in Forcena, Kevin in Moonlight City, Hawk in Oasis city, etc).  And the final dungeons would be tackled one at a time, with the first two being the "normal" characters, and the 3rd character being whomever you choose.

That would be crazy awesome, but I have a feeling that'll be near impossible since you'd have to introduce new storyline and everything.

14 hours ago, hmsong said:

Okay, this needs to be said.  Please don't ask on my behalf.  If you want to know, then you're free to ask him yourself, but what you said just now seemed like you were asking on my behalf.  That's just wrong, and I think you know that too.  Don't do that again.  If you really must say that, then please PM me directly, instead of posting that.

Now that I look back at what I said, you're right.  I can see why you read it that way.  I didn't mean to do that.  That was weird of me.  Sorry about that.  Won't happen again.

Okay, I get why you don't want critical hits.  Personally, I don't find criticals to be such a big deal, but I never played the "bug fix" version.  I only played the original and SoM.  And I'm personally very much for "make your characters OP, and you get to destroy all your enemies while laughing like a maniac, and you get to experiment different ways to rip your enemies apart" thing.  It's one of the main reasons why I loved Castlevania SotN so much.  This game is all about "trying new methods" to kill your enemies (character, class).  I don't see why you'd take away the means to destroy your enemies.

But you should still try to make agility work, because vanilla Speed Up/Down are literally useless spells, which will affect the balance of whichever class that has those spells (that technically affects the balance in some way).  I know it says that Acc/Eva changes, but we already know that acc/eva don't work.  Besides, since you want to make melee attacks less powerful, having agility work would be good, since it'll make melee attacks miss from time to time (the vanilla game makes melee attacks have 100% accuracy or something).  And it'll make shields actually do something productive, which is a part of balance of Duran's L classes.

Hmsong, I'm glad what I said didn't offend you.  And you're welcome for the suggestions.

I see praetarius is helping you a lot.  If I had the skills to make my own hack, I would have.  Okay, that's a big fat lie.  I'm too lazy to make a hack, even if I had the skills.  So I appreciate people like you.

And while at it, why not include the agility and critical fix in your patch?  It'll help with spells not working properly (ex: Energy Ball).  Well, assuming there is a "quick fix" that praetarius is willing to help you with.

Oh right.  I was playing the original game with hmsong's patch.  Whoops.

38 minutes ago, Mr. Cantaloupe said:

I'm running the 1.200 patch and tested it by casting Fireball with Angela right after learning it on the Golden Road:

Cast fireball on your favorite rabite, bring up the X ring menu, wait about ten seconds, drop the menu.  Spell comes out instantly.

I'm guessing the Golden Road you're referring to is between Maia and Byzel.  And by that time, you'd have access to only one spell -- Holy Ball (and maybe Diamond Missile if you cleared the cave).  So it's not Fireball.

Oh, I didn't mean for you to stop generating ideas.  I just thought it'd be good to give some time to let the given idea to be processed.  Sigh.  It looks like I sent out a wrong message.

Wow, this thread is turning into a huge request page.  Perhaps you people should tone it down a little.  Let the man get some rest.  Even his icon (of Duran) is stressing.

Putting aside the mechanic requests, I'll just say that I agree with the Title having the hack name.  Esp with "adding at the end" thing (so that it'd be compatible with all sorts of titles).  Your hack deserves an awesome title card.  I think Sins sound better than Sin (as hmsong said), but the better question is, what sounds better to praetarius5018?  It has to sound good to him.

You know, I checked out your patches.  They're quite decent.  Based on the compatibility (and your comment about the failed Freeze Breath), I'm guessing you specifically created them for the official Trials of Mana (and the fan translation compatibility is just a side effect).  You should probably say that in the document, just so people know why you created your patches in the first place.

I genuinely mean no offense (I'm so sorry if I offend you in what I'm about to say), but Sin of Mana is better than your patch in pretty much every single way.  In fact, I'm sure you realize it too.  The only thing your patch has over Sin of Mana is its compatibility towards Trials of Mana.  You should pitch your patch in that direction.  Don't get me wrong though.  I'm very grateful to you, because I only found about Sin of Mana from your patch document.  I'm just stating my opinion on how to sell your product.

Btw, maybe you should have Rainbow Dust also cause Trans Shape on all your allies (your v1.2 has only Life Boost).  Life Boost by itself is kinda boring and useless, since it wears itself out during the battle (I don't think Stat Ups or Saber wears off in vanilla until the battle is over).  Yes yes, Trans Shape wears out too, but it has cool effect (very useless in vanilla, due to how quickly it wears out).  Also, speaking of Trans Shape, 5 MP for that spell is just absurdly high.  It wears out so quickly, hence useless.  So unless you can change its duration time (similar to what Sin of Mana did), I suggest you to reduce its cost.

I could have PMed you on RHDN, but I felt that maybe others share my opinion.

Quote

Tbh, if I had to address cast time now with what I know of this game I'd go the opposite way,
set casttime to minimum and instead drive up MP cost and/or start you at 0 MP each screen.

Lol.  Driving up the MP is fine, but starting you at 0 MP each screen?  I advise against that.  That would probably make most skills useless.  And very frustrating.

I had no idea there were so many glitches in the original game.  No wonder it wasn't ported outside Japan.  I haven't played Trials of Mana (since that's incompatible with Sin of Mana, which has the awesome Run and none of that bullcrap enemy counter spell), but did it fix any of the glitches that existed in the original game?

Yikes.  Oh well.  Thanks for the help anyways.  Love the game btw.  I couldn't beat Dolan, so I had to come here, to find out what the heck is going on, and apparently, it's one of the most frequently asked questions.  Haha.  I'm not a fan of "in order to beat this guy, you have to do this very specific unhinted thing", but that was already brought up multiple times on this board.

I see.  I'm using the regular v1.01 (no palette rape, no bug fix -- bug fix is not necessary, since your SoM patch seems to do all that).  Do you know which hex values go with which letters?  Since Iormungand is a rare word, I assume I can just find it by searching, assuming I know which values goes with which letter.  That is, assuming it doesn't screw with your SoM patch.

Oh?  There's more than one english translation?  I only know of NCorlett+LNFT v1.01 (which is the one I'm using).  I only found out the existence of Trials of Mana official translation after I came to this board, but someone already said that that's not compatible with Sin of Mana (which makes official Trials of Mana obsolete).  What other english translations are there?  Even Romhacking.net only has NCorlett+LNFT v1.01.

Thanks for this game.  This is interesting, esp all the neat extra contents.  A request though:  Can you change the spelling for some of the spells?  Specifically, Lise's summons?  Her summon spells are all wrong.  It's not Marduke, it's Marduk.  It's not Iormungand, it's Jormungand.  Lamian Naga is right though (it should have been Lamia Naga, but the Japanese game specifically says Lamian Naga, in Katakana).  Frejya can be spelled Freya, so that's alright.  I don't know why the original creator of the patch decided this was the right spelling, but it's not.  I thought I should mention it.