Timbo

Now for my other Secret of Mana hack. This one is more of an offshoot project. The goal here was to make all of the game's equipment useful when i becomes available. The original game introduces a lot of gear that is already redundant the moment it's introduced. This hack seeks to correct that in a number of ways. I fixed the Wisdom Boost Bug. So, now gear that was supposed to add a Wisdom bonus, does. I modified some of the game's equipment to bring it up to par with superior equipment sold in the same shop. I rearranged some of the game's vendor lists and added some items that were previously only dropped by monsters dummied out of the game entirely. I changed who can wear what pieces of equipment. This was done in only a couple of places with vendor gear in order to prevent redundancy. However, exclusively enemy dropped gear is another story. Each character has 3 pieces of end game gear that are unique to them. It is all at the same power level as the existing end of game items and only slightly more powerful than what Neko sells at the Grand Palace. I modified what enemies drop. This version of the hack eliminates rare drops entirely. Everything that can drop has a 1 in 16 chance of dropping. That said, a lot of the game's overpowered items were removed from enemy drop lists entirely. This change was made to prevent hours of experience loaded item farming that hurts the game's difficulty. Secret of Mana is a multiplayer game deep grinding shouldn't be a part of that. Enemy relocation. Some enemies that dropped unique or missable items were relocated to the Mana Fortress in small numbers. Weapon Orbs drop from different monsters. Turns out the game checks to make sure you're in the Mana Fortress before handing out a weapon orb from an enemy treasure box. This allows you me to have both the orbs and the end of game gear as commonly dropped gear. Download the hack here. Apply it to an Unheadered Rom (Please note that my other hack uses a headered rom). Future versions of this hack will probably see statistical revisions as I shift into balancing difficulty. One change I'm heavily considering is actually making all consumable drops rare and charging more for them at shops. Access to nearly limitless free hp, mp, status, and death healing items pretty much sucks all of the difficulty out of this game. Just off the top of my head I'm considering increasing Chocolate to 250 GP, Angel's Grails to 300 GP, and Royal Jam and Faerie Walnuts to a few thousand. Though, this will require more thought and feedback. Credits:

Secret of Mana is a great game with a poor translation by a terrific translator. I'm not here to talk about how Ted Woolsey didn't really have enough time to do it justice or how great of a job he did considering what he was up against. I'm here to talk about what I did about it and why. This project started out as me being annoyed the there was a weapon called the "Herald's Sword" that could've been called the "Kusanagi". I thought, I can fix that, it's not that big of a deal. Next thing I know, I'm relocalizing and uncensoring items, weapons, armor, monsters, spells, status messages, things in the script, I'm extracting and relocating the intro, and balancing equipment (in another hack). Early on, I decided that the only real way to do this project would be to start by getting in touch with FuSoYa and getting his permission to modify his VWF hack. Not only would I need the VWF code, but his text expansion, while a little cringy in places, is still widely considered to be a part of the best version of the game available in English. While his hack focuses on entirely on the Dialogue assets, my hack expands that to include everything else (and parts of the dialogue as well). Not only does it DE-CAPITALIZE everything, it renames things too. All of the religious references have been restored. "Palaces" and "Stages" are "Shrines" and "Altars". It fixes bugs and typos present in the original game "Weapon Skil" I'm looking at you. I've also made some aesthetic changes as well such as adding spacing between the Weapons and Mana Spirit's and their Levels. Goodbye "6:98DRAGON BUSTER". You can download the patch here. It is an addendum patch, meaning it needs to be applied on top of FuSoYa's VWF patch which you can find here. Both patches require a headered rom. There is a full list of changes in the zip folder. It is fully compatible with Zhade's Secret of Mana Gameplay Improvement Project, the Item 9 hack, my own Equipment Overhaul hack, and the next version will fully incorporate Kethinov's unreleased fanfares hack. I've played through it a couple times now At this point I think I've gotten rid of most of the typos. I'm going to give it a few weeks before I properly release it to just in case anyone finds any bugs or typos I may have missed. I really would love some feedback because this is kind of the starter hack for a much bigger Secret of Mana hack I'll be starting on very soon. Credits: