Serafie1999AD

I also had problems with the permanent Snowman bug when I played the Labyrinth of the Ice Walls over a month ago:
 

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I've now had to restart the Labyrinth of the Ice Walls 4 times in a row. Once because of dying just a couple of screens before the save point, and 3 times I've had to restart because of an incurable Snowman bug. Occasionally if a character is turned into a Snowman at the end of a battle, the status becomes unhealable. Tinkle Rain won't heal it, neither will moving to another screen, or even touching a Gold Statue.

If you want to reproduce the bug, try winning a battle at the moment when an enemy is using an ice breath animation (it's not a spell since it doesn't pause the game) to inflict Snowman status on your characters.

On 12.10.2017 at 9:35 PM, Nesouk said:

Items are definitly the key to survive but....

-I'm almost running out of them, and have no more money, and ennemies gives almost no money at all, and selling stuff give you nothing

So yeah I think I'm screwed and wonder if I should just restart a new game, right now the only thing I can really do is grinding, definitly not sure that would help tough.

This is what I was the most worried about trying a game on Hard, getting an unwinnable "soft game over" by running out of healing items and money to buy healing items. Try farming for gold in the previous areas, such as Maia's Golden Road and Palo's Path to Heaven. Have you tried the farming method with 6 Beastman Collars that was proposed before? If I remember correctly, the Desert of the Scorching Heat had easier fights than the Sub-Zero Snowfields, so you may want to level up there. You should be around level 32-35 for the Snowfields. If everything else fails, try reducing the game's difficulty level until you're able to advance. I'd say it's still a better choice than giving up and restarting, since this is your first playthrough and you're still not far enough to have learned all the battle strategies that this hack requires.

Praetarius: thanks for the battle tips!

Well, I did it.

I reloaded my last save with Vanadis, Rogue and Archmage, and I practiced playing on the Tough difficulty. I was able to beat

and now I'm thinking of fighting them on Hard difficulty. Before I fight the final boss again, though, I have a few questions about him, and the game mechanics:
1) Do Red Moon Horns do anything against him?
2) Are there any weapons that work well against him? If a weapon uses a different stat for attack, will it still hit against his huge physical defence stat? Or if a weapon uses a different stat for attack, is the same stat also used for tech damage (instead of STR)?
3) Are his weaknesses really weaknesses (150% damage), or are they just neutral elements (100%), while the other elements are either halved (50%) or absorbed? I ask this because I'm wondering whether Archmage's Spirit Cane can have spells do 200% damage against him or not.
4) Does the "remove weaknesses" armor remove ALL elemental weaknesses from the character, not just one of them? If it removes all weaknesses, does that mean the armor also protects you from the

EDIT: I noticed that you can skip

death animation, which results in the game becoming stuck forever (I guess you can consider it skipping the ending too :D). This also happened with FMH (2nd fight) before. Is it possible that you tweaked the spell skipping patch so that boss death animations can't be skipped, since skipping them seems to freeze the game on several occasions?

This is exactly why I posted this before:
 

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As a general tip, reading the documentation files is highly recommended for this hack.

Another piece of advice I could give, the weapons and armor in the shops are never strictly better than the previous ones. Each of them have their own specific properties. Unfortunately, there is no way to add descriptions about them into the game, especially considering some people play SD3 in Japanese, some in English. That's why, it is recommended to keep the armor_elements_stats.xls file open while playing the game, and take a look at the file when you're making decisions on what to buy or equip for your characters.

EDIT: Looks like it's also said in Praetarius' original post, as the 1st point: "Equipment offers various bonuses instead of a simple attack and defense progression"

Fortunately, there are no bosses in the double dungeon after Gorva, so if you can't deal with the fights in Bucca and Seashore Cave, you can just run from all the fights until you get out of there. After that, you'll have a chance to grind for money to buy some of the newer equipment. I recommend getting at least a Whitelight Ring for Lise and Carlie, as it upgrades most of their spells to multi-target.

4 hours ago, Nesouk said:

-Is there an efficient  way to make money cause at first I didn't have trouble with money however now the equipment start to get really expensive and ennemy really don't give much and selling item doesn't seem to give any better to plus I have to buy healing item cause honnestly healing item are for now the only viable way to heal in battle (Healing Light is one target only for now and the casttime make it not really usefull when ennemy can basically 2-3 shot any of your character with some of their attack).

I've never found a decent solution to this. However, note that new weapons and armor aren't automatically better than the previous ones. Keep the armor_elements_stats.xls file open while playing the game to know what the properties of each piece of equipment are, and plan which equipment you're really going to need. Remember, you won't be able to afford everything, so choose carefully. For example, in my last game, I wanted to make Lise (Vanadis) a level 2/3 tech user, Hawk (Rogue) a high-risk crit user and Angela (Archmage) a strong offensive mage. Therefore, I gave Lise equipment that will boost her tech gain and tech strength, I gave Hawk equipment that will increase the frequency and strength of his critical hits, as well as giving him a "thorn" armor (reflects much of the physical damage back at the enemies), and I gave Angela equipment that will boost her magic strength. After I had got all the equipment for these builds, I simply skipped most of the weapon and armor shops after that, unless I really needed something special for a boss fight.

Here's some tips LittleBigTrouble wrote before:

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i play on highest difficulty but im only lvl 55 atm , preparing for my second of the 8 GBs.
Beastman collars on all characters and i usually go to golden road and aoe jutsu everything, i ignore  treasure chest during those sessions thou, the traps are not worth candys and item seeds

For your other question, there is nothing like the Libra spell in SD3. You'll just have to experiment, although some weaknesses are obvious. You can also check the monster_bosses.xls file for the weaknesses and status vulnerabilities of normal monsters. As for bosses, I tend to try different things to see what works, and write notes about their weaknesses, strategies that worked etc.

42 minutes ago, praetarius5018 said:

I mean he is a few levels higher than the previous boss and his shifting weakness/resistance scheme makes it useless to use sabers, so maybe that's why it felt low?

None of the characters (Vanadis, Rogue, Archmage) have Sabers anyway, which is what I would consider the party's biggest weakness. If I understood correctly,

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None, same as for his uber anti magic

Does his Uber Anti-Magic only remove your buffs, or will it heal his debuffs too? I just assumed it dispels everything, so I went to reapply both buffs and debuffs.

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Also if nothing bugged up this time he should have given you a lot of time at the start of the fight.

That's right, it took him like a minute or two to do anything, and for a while, I was wondering if the AI script was broken.

Just out of curiosity, have you beat all the bosses, including the final bosses, on the hardest difficulty, to make sure that they can be beaten?

What's the difference between Ancient, Ancient 2 and Ancient 3? Do they have different animations, or are they just the same spell with a different base power?

I finally defeated

That battle felt like it took forever, probably about 40 minutes. It was mostly a battle of Archmage spamming elemental spells, Rogue spamming Silver Dart and Vanadis healing and reapplying buffs, and hoping he would die before I run out of healing items. He didn't seem to take much damage from physical attacks, even after Anti-Magic, Power Up and Cutter Missile. BTW I noticed that when he hit a character with Demon's Scream (reduces HP to 1 and MP to 0), the character started to "bleed out" HP, and if he died, Angel's Grail revived him with only 1 HP. Is there a way to dispel this "bleeding" effect?

I beat

That was an intimidating fight, especially whenever he started to cast some spells. Nice to see the enemies casting some spells which I don't think anyone else has cast before, such as

Oh yeah, the good old Genova fight, where the clunky menu system is your worst enemy. I remember being salty about the battle in the ID forums, since it's pretty much a matter of luck whether the game registers you mashing the menu button. I wouldn't remove buff/debuff messages completely, as otherwise you have no way of knowing if some spell has (de)buffed you, but I'd like it if the game kept a list of status messages it is going to show you, and if there are over 3 messages in queue, it would simply show the first 3 messages and skip the rest. Alternatively, allow menu accessing during the display of status messages.

I fought FMH in the Dark Castle. What a terrible lag! It didn't help that I had to beat him twice, since I was accidentally holding the menu button during the moment when he died, which caused his death animation to skip, and as a result, I was stuck in the room, with no way to leave or even accesss the menu.

27 minutes ago, praetarius5018 said:

If you don't have diamond saber, buy the respective claw in the black market in byzel for your main attacker.

You can't backtrack to Byzel if you've already started the battle of Rolante.

I've got a question for those who play on the hardest difficulty: how hard is the money management there? If you need to spend all your money on restocking healing items all the time, will you ever be able to afford any of the more costly weapons or armor? Even on lower difficulties, I just skip the last sets of armor, as paying over 30k for such a highly specialized armor just doesn't feel worth it.

13 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

No, no, no! Poison is the right answer! ESPECIALLY against their boss!

Was this sarcasm or seriously speaking?  Whenever I poisoned the Bloody Wolves in the Moonreading Tower with poison weapons, it felt like they went on a happy spree of Suzaku Sky Dance.

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The other, rarer kind (afaik only one very late boss) has maxed out physical defense, the same stat armors give you. Here anti-magic is useless.

I think I've found two such bosses:

9 hours ago, LittleBigTrouble said:

Here is how i dealt so far with those enemys since i have a similiar team, starlancer/ninjamaster/lord
slime princes/giga crawlers really dont like mindup fire jutsu attacks (flamecoins from zombies,if you fight at night, are also really good against the early slimes)
against carmillas i used durans in your case carlies heal light on them and for the wolfs i recommend a poison weapon at least on 1 character at all times
you have holy magic on carlie for gremlins and you can poison them
just run from boulders

These are good hints. Poison could be dangerous against the Wolves, as it will make them more eager to use Suzaku Sky Dance or Seiryu Death Fist, but you can use petrify against them. Stone Cloud should kill them, or if you can save up for one petrify-inflicting weapon from Wendel/Pedan, that would definitely be helpful. Boulders can be poisoned or petrified.

2 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

There are two basic types of physical "immunity".
One that has an immunity to physical (meaning half taken damage early game and quartered for high tier enemies) like a fire elemental is immune to fire - those can be removed with anti-magic and bypassed with weapons like Acala, Pain Tooth and Satan Flail.
The other, rarer kind (afaik only one very late boss) has maxed out physical defense, the same stat armors give you. Here anti-magic is useless.
You can theoretically increase your attack value high enough to bypass that with very specific items but any such setup leaves you a one hit wonder.

Jutsus are still physical attacks but not "physical element". Meaning they are ok against the first kind but useless against the second kind.

I hope this boss isn't a certain colored Rabite who you should never hit with spells as he always counters them.
I can't test in my current game since I don't have Sabers, but if an enemy is immune to physical attacks (the first type) and you use Sabers that hit the enemy's weakness, how well will the Sabered physical attacks damage the enemy?

Nesouk, I see you chose Valkyrie, Ninja and Priestess as your 2nd classes. A combination of Light Lise, Dark Hawk and Light Carlie is pretty solid in both the vanilla game and this hack. You'll have all stat-ups, all stat-downs, healing and sabers. Your team is physically somewhat fragile, as Lise is your only heavy-hitter and tank, and your team consists of 3 support-oriented characters rather than direct damage dealers. You should be fine most of the time, but these are the biggest threats I see for your team:

1) You won't have much elemental magic to strike against enemy weaknesses, although a combination of Mind Up + Fire Jutsu (if applicable) + Saber that exploits enemy weakness + Jutsu of that same element can somewhat make up for it.

2) You won't have Anti-Magic for your team. For bosses, you can probably farm or buy Specter's Eyes (just remember, they cost 3000+ a piece), but in regular fights, the lack of Anti-Magic may be very problematic. If an enemy absorbs some element or is immune to it, that means Hawk's Jutsus won't work against them, so you'll be unable to apply those debuffs. Especially if an enemy is immune to physical attacks, there's not much you can do against them without Anti-Magic, except spam offensive spells, which aren't exactly your strong point (see Note 1) above). Enemies like Giga Crawlers, Slime Princes, Carmillas, Blood Wolves, Wolf Devils, Gremlins and Boulders will be very tough enemies for you, since you have no good ways of taking them down. Status ailments are probably your best choice for defeating them.

What program do you use? This is what I typically do, when I'm using SnesROMUtil:

1) Patch SEIKEN3_noheader.smc with the latest patch ips.

2) (optional) Backup the newly created ROM in case I don't want to play with any of the optional patches.

3) Apply patch ghostship_savepoint.ips to SEIKEN3_noheaderSeiken Densetsu 3 (J)_sinofmana_v1032.smc (or whatever the patch is called).

4) Apply patch skippable_spell_animation.ips to this.

5) Delete old SEIKEN3_Hard.smc, rename SEIKEN3_noheaderSeiken Densetsu 3 (J)_sinofmana_v1032ghostship_savepointskippable_spell_animation.smc (whew, what a name monster! ^^;) into SEIKEN3_Hard.smc. Delete the intermediate ROMs.

6) Apply tough, normal, easy and wuss patches to SEIKEN3_Hard.smc, delete old tough, normal, easy and wuss ROM files, rename the patched files into SEIKEN3_Tough.smc, SEIKEN3_Normal.smc, SEIKEN3_Easy.smc and SEIKEN3_Wuss.smc.

Not exactly hard, but it's tedious to do after every patch, especially if there will be frequent patches.

Thanks for the patch! I've got a question about applying additional patches. I typically like using optional patches, such as the one that restores saving in Ghost Ship, and the one that skips spell animations. Will everything work correctly if I apply them to a vanilla, non-headered ROM, and only after that I apply the latest patch of Sin of Mana? It's quite troublesome first applying the latest patch, and then applying all the optional patches all over again.

1 hour ago, praetarius5018 said:

this time you're basically selling death

Does this mean the items are accidentally added to your inventory when you receive a death penalty, or maybe when you're sleeping at an inn to recover from DP?

I have a quick question about the game's internal frame rate. Weapons have a delay of 50-70 frames. Does the game process 15, 20, 30 or 60 frames per second? In other words, does a weapon with a delay of 60 take 4, 3, 2 or 1 second to recharge? If you use a stronger version of the regular attack (holding A without direction), how much does that increase the delay before the next attack?

I noticed the same bug a few days ago too. Lise had a Leather Visor in her inventory, which is a helmet belonging to Duran, even though Duran isn't even in my party. He's not in Nesouk's party, either.

1 hour ago, Nesouk said:

Well just beat Jewel Eater at this point it's clear that Random Fight aren't that much trouble however for bosses just have to throw everything I got in their face, I throw all my Attack Item (except Earth Coin as he nullifies Earth) also the item that increase Defense and multiple Holy Ball with Carlie, don't know how many HP he had but quite a lot I am LV17 (I had to grind a little I reach Jewel Eater at LV14 but couldn't beat him so I grind after that which give some nice items anyway so that's good) I don't know if I am underlevel or what but with the Defense UP item Hawk and Lise were pretty safe as long as I keep an eye on their HP I had to be more cautious with Carlie tough since she died in battle not so long before the boss so she Had less HP and was taking more damage (except for spell has she has an high PIE), by the way speaking of item what is a Demon Statue, the description say nothing.

Note that you won't be able to level up beyond level 18 until you've performed your first class change, and after Jewel Eater, you'll need to clear

before the class change. That's 5 areas, though some of them are quite short. I'd say you're heavily overleveled at the moment. The levels of regular enemies should be a good indicator to how high your levels should be. As for the Demon Statue, I'll have to ask you to check the documentation:

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===Death Penalty===

Each death that was not ended via Angel Grail increases a hidden death score (normal difficulty and higher).
Failing a trap chest from Lv36 on also increases it slightly (tough difficulty and higher).
Once death score is accumulated, max HP and defenses will be reduced.
Max HP decreases by ~10% per death, the lowest possible is 50% of the normal value.
Defenses drop by up to -90 over 7 deaths.
A death in the intro fights does count. For that purpose Kevin's "invincible" enemy has been reduced from 65k HP to 300.
Death score can be removed by using a Demon Statue or resting at an Inn.
These statues are ONLY awarded by beating certain bosses and appear unannounced in your storage; you do not get another status if you already have 5 in your storage.

2 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

Just as a hint, you'll want some VIT and PIE on everyone, especially on hard difficulty.

You'll need some LUCK too, or the enemies will just beat you up with critical hits. In the original game, the Luck stat is almost useless, while in this hack, it could be considered even too important compared to the other stats. It affects your chance to do a critical hit, your chance to avoid enemy's critical hits, your evasion (partially), your chance to cause status ailments with weapons, the amount of traps in a treasure wheel, your chance to get rare drops, the bonus damage for several mage classes and it powers up Light Hawk's traps.

I was wondering if you can create an optional patch where you can access the save menu on any screen via a hotkey, as long as there are no enemies or treasure chests left on that screen? I know you can use save states if you're playing on an emulator, but I've now had to restart the Labyrinth of the Ice Walls 4 times in a row. Once because of dying just a couple of screens before the save point, and 3 times I've had to restart because of an incurable Snowman bug. Occasionally if a character is turned into a Snowman at the end of a battle, the status becomes unhealable. Tinkle Rain won't heal it, neither will moving to another screen, or even touching a Gold Statue. I'm getting tired of playing through the same 20-30 minutes again and again because of a glitchy game, and I'd prefer to be able to save more frequently.

Great job for finally exceeding version 1.0! I've been playing the hack since version 0.102, and I'm glad to see how it's progressed steadily during these years. A few questions about the change notes:

2 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

• adjusted Xan Bie's stats
• adjusted Lightgazer's stats
• adjusted Landumber's stats and specials
• adjusted Fiegmund's stats and specials

So no changes for the Dragon Emperor?

 

2 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

• Grand Divina's final weapon "Ganvantein" now adds saber effect for elemental spells cast at allies

What does this mean? Does it mean that whenever an enemy (or you) casts an elemental spell on your characters, the characters receive additional damage, as if the caster had a Saber buff? If so, that sounds like the weapon has very limited uses.  (well, you can make all characters resistant to some element, then the saber effect will make spells of that element deal even less damage, but it's a very specialized strategy) Or did you mean this: if Angela casts an elemental spell on your own characters, they receive the damage from the spell, but they also gain the saber of that element?

The animations that have bothered me the most are Mind Up/Down and Power Up/Down, as they take the longest. I don't mind something like Ancient or Catastrophe taking long, as they're supposed to be rare, ultimate spells, but regular stat spells like Mind Up/Down taking 10 seconds usually makes me press the fast-forward button. ^^; Maybe add an optional patch that removes those 4 animations, or replaces them with shorter ones from other spells?

Hi Praetarius, nice to see this hack still going.

22 minutes ago, velsper said:

I'm restarting the game after a minute of not dabbling in it. I keep pressing the b button with a full tech bar, but I'm not firing off a tech. I hold it down and I run around just fine though. 

As a general tip, reading the documentation files is highly recommended for this hack. For example, the Readme file contains the following information:
 

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A: attack, confirm, interact
B: run (even in battle), cancel
X: open ring menu
Y: use techs (in battle), invert ally/enemy targetting for selected spell (hold while selecting the spell before starting target selection)
Y+B: open menu (out of battle)
L/R: hold to control different character
START: open inventory (out of battle), toggle control on/off (player 2&3)
SELECT: switch to different character

Another piece of advice I could give, the weapons and armor in the shops are never strictly better than the previous ones. Each of them have their own specific properties. Unfortunately, there is no way to add descriptions about them into the game, especially considering some people play SD3 in Japanese, some in English. That's why, it is recommended to keep the armor_elements_stats.xls file open while playing the game, and take a look at the file when you're making decisions on what to buy or equip for your characters.