SirShaggy

Joachim is probably the better choice honestly since he's a better physical attacker than Karin and he can take hits like a pro, but I just enjoy Lucia and her later oils. I'm actually boosting up Karin's physical damage with seals to make her into my secondary fighter with Yuri. Not optimal, but it's more fun for me. I'll do that! I actually beat Godhand with ease due to some very lucky Slow debuffs from Yuri.

Good to know! I think my final setup will be Yuri, Karin, Lucia, and Blanca then. The difficulty spike can definitely be felt, but the last couple areas were very easy in terms of random encounters so I'm all for it. I got thrashed by the boss so now I'm grinding up some (thanks for the generous experience btw haha). I kind of like how the mod actually forces you to stealth in the Blanca section. Damn, thank you for this! I would have probably gotten myself stuck and needed to reload way back. I'm going to be staying on top of sidequests as much as possible, and cash in on those Pure Roots like you suggest. Hopefully, I won't make things too difficult for myself. Might keep going tonight if I can clear St. Marguerite. Looking forward to seeing how the difficulty affects the latter half of the game!

Wow... So I was right all those years ago. I thought I noticed a difference. The update for the Lenny fight really does help. It cuts down on the randomness when you only have to take two turns into account. The fights after Lenny/Andre have been much more strategic and interesting, especially Grail Gazer! Arc Cure and manipulating turn order has spiced up the boss fights and made them more manageable, but they're still very challenging. I'm guessing that Blanca will pretty much be necessary in the later content given how powerful Aurora is. I just started up the solo St. Marguerite section with him. This part of the game always scares me...

Not a problem! Happy to do so. To be honest, I was expecting to be incredibly tight on cash but now that I'm thinking about it, I've got plenty from the grinding so I should be upgrading as much as possible. Question: Have elemental properties always been on basic attacks? I used to think so when I was first played but somebody told me it's only when you use an elemental "edge" ability. I know it's definitely the case in the mod. Yeah, I figured I'd need Joachim and Yuri to tank as many hits as possible after seeing my first attempt fail miserably. Once one of the others go down I can't get them back up before Lenny gets his turns in. I'm overly cautious and stupidly frugal with using healing items in games, which is my downfall in the early game when I'm not sure if I'll have enough money (even though I know deep down that I'll be fine). Honestly I was thinking about Castor (and Grail Gazer) when I got Fire Dancer. Didn't even think about the Ekimmus, and I'm not used to having to strategize defensively in Shadow Hearts haha. Yeah, it wasn't a problem once I got the levels in to kill it before it could Hail Beak, but it kind of lead to a situation where I had to grind if I wanted to properly get through the dungeon (or in my case make a dash to the end before grinding, and use save states if I got surprised like a filthy pleb). Fire dress = worst first choice haha. I actually had to switch him back to the default dress. Never done that before. He's quite a bit stronger, simply because he sometimes gets 5 turns instead of Grimlock's usual 4 (5 if you count the occasional Gale) and his attacks generally do about 20% more damage on your already squishiest people. Using Joachim and Sorm and praying that they soak up hits or the damage is evenly spread is the main strategy, but the biggest problem with this boss is just the fact that he gets 5 turns as soon as the battle starts. If he kills someone within these 5 opening turns, the fight is basically over. You can't expect to heal through his damage and find time to get in hits if you're down a member. I just did a test fight after grinding and buying better accessories to see if I could kill him and I barely could, and only because he didn't kill someone on the opening turns or focus Karen/Gepetto down for whatever reason. Also, at the very end my berserk Karen was nice enough to throw a pure leaf onto Yuri (who was about to go berserk himself) and the hard hit from Yuri's combo killed him with the the extra 1 damage from hitting a wall... Yeah, haha. Granted, I'll be the first to say that I'm not playing the best and am being a "no coral accessories and all technical ring" elitist, but it is quite a difficulty/RNG spike going from Grimlock straight to Lenny. Gonna start the stream back up later today and see if I can kill him again and make some progress. It's all good! It's mostly the design of this boss being bad in the first place, coupled with the fact that it's early on and there aren't many options in terms of abilities. Things should get much better when the game starts adding in more party members, special abilities, and buffs. Again, I really appreciate all the work you put into this. You've given me an excuse to go back, relive my childhood, and replay one of my favorite games of all time. So thanks!

Hey Zed! I've been having a really fun time going back through the game with your hard-mod! It's been a really interesting change so far. Some criticism though... First, the enemy Ekimmu in the Paris underground section has too much AGI and INT for the damage it can put out with Hail Beak. It usually goes first and Hail Beak hits for 90% of everyone's health at that point (100% if you're Gepetto... RIP). If you're surprised and it uses Hail Beak on everyone as they're grouped up, it's pretty much game over. I had to grind quite a bit before Blanca would have his turn ahead of it, but up until that point I had to run away after almost every fight and heal. Honestly, I would lower both its INT and AGI by a fair amount. Second, as you stated, the bosses have a lot of turns. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the way that they get them consecutively a lot of the time does feel a little cheap. Especially for... Lenny. Holy crap, Lenny is a friggin brute. He gets 5 turns in a row and all he does is use his physical attack. I know that it's a hard mod, but this boss is terribly designed in general. All it is is face-tanking and healing his damage, so when you beef up his damage and turns the only strategy this early on in the game is to be able to face-tank more and pray. There are no good buffs or specials to use, so all I can do is grind and hope he targets the right people. And this becomes a bigger problem when there is no dungeon before Lenny. You go right from Rhonda Mines to him, and I don't think the experience in the Rhonda Mines is scaled correctly for the hard mod because I normally get about 100 exp per encounter, which was the norm in the previous dungeon, the Wine Cellar. Lastly, just a suggestion... Tankier enemies would be cool. Having different enemies act as "tanks" that you have to combo or specifically use physical/magical attacks to get down, rather than just giving them more agility/damage would be a cool way to spice things up. They did this with certain enemies like Otheon by giving them more HP than normal enemies, but there are very few enemies in the game that are resistant to physical or magical damage based on their VIT and POW stats. Having enemies be tankier in general also allows for more strategy, as it adds variety to the enemy types in battles and allows for more combos. Of course, the other offensive stats might need to be adjusted for certain "tankier" enemies but it helps lean away from the "who one-shots who first" strategy that a lot of the random battles boil down to, and that's not a problem with your mod so much as the game in general. Just something that would be nice to see. So pretty much, Ekimmu OP, Lenny OP, and balancing different enemies around taking damage instead of delivering it would be cool. Aside from that, it's been a lot of fun and I want to thank you again for putting so much work in to create this mod! I'm gonna grind for Lenny now, haha. Merry Christmas! P.S. There's a Shadow Hearts discord that was recently started up and the owner would love to find out how you change around enemy stats. He's been doing a lot of work on his own looking through game files and trying to translate the Director's Cut. Here's the link if you're interested. https://discord.gg/ez2VK2

Hey! Thank you so much for doing this! I love the Shadow Hearts series and was hoping some kind of hard mode mod would come out for Covenant. Excuse my ignorance as I'm new to emulating and mods, but the NTSC version is the NA version, right? Because when I ran the modded NA version nothing seemed to be different in Apoina Tower. All the enemies had the same stats and damage. Edit: Oh, ok... It's working now for whatever reason. Revenant just kicked Karen's ass in the air for 10 damage instead of 4. Yikes, haha. Gonna be streaming this at twitch.tv/shaggysir! Double edit: I just finished grinding for Castor and Pollux. Got everyone up to level 9. I swear I'm going to make a compilation of Gepetto getting one-shot. Poor guy can't catch a break.