The abyss of the darkness

So, in what feels like forever ago I was playing through Doomblade 666's challenge hack for the original Shining Force but I didn't actually finish the game. I got all the way to Dark Dragon and then just stopped. Well here's a quick post about why that happened. Other than being sick and having no energy for such a game I also ran into the massive amounts of damage Dark Dragon could do with their spells.

The best I ever managed to do was killing the ice and fire heads but a whole bunch of times the team didn't even get that far. For instance...



... Earnest could be and was at times killed by a critical cast of Hail 2 from full health. This would always be an immediate reset because Earnest was my best attacker we couldn't afford to lose him early on.



Especially not when the central head, the lightning one, has the Storm spell and it hits extremely hard. All three heads have max casting and effect ranges with their respective spells too. That Storm spell that killed Max was not a critical hit. That's what the spell does in terms of damage which few team members can survive.

There's a reason the hack had to be updated and revised. I'm just too stubborn to use the updates.

So, Shining Force 2 has a semi-hidden timed bonus stage known as the Fairy Woods. Nowadays it is used primarily as a grinding spot by players wanted to get their pre-promotion characters to level 40 for maximum stats. I'm bringing this up because some time ago prototypes of the game's English translation were posted to the Hidden Palace. The Cutting Room Floor has more information on textual differences but I'm here to talk about the Fairy Woods.

Specifically the fact that the Woods received a major layout overhaul sometime between the prototype dated April 4th and the prototype dated June 30th. The June 30th layout is identical to the final English version as far as I can tell.( Read more... )

In the lull between playthroughs I've been working some more on my Shining Force 2 mod. Just cleaning up the graphics bit by bit is taking a long time although it's nice to work on my pixel art skill set. Here's a comparison of portrait edits thus far. The original ones are in the left column while my edited versions are in the right column.



Mostly this has just been removing eyebrows. It's a style to leave them (and eyes) in with transparency but the Genesis simply can't do transparent blending to make the style look nice. I also changed color 0 to something that's not the same black used for outlining. This doesn't do anything in-game (color 0 is always transparent on the Genesis) but it saves a lot of headache for me.

So on a whim I decided to run another lets-add-Prism Flowers/Zeon Guards to the bonus boss battle. The last time I tried this the game froze on the new flower's first turn. I'm not sure what's all's changed since then because when I added one last night it actually worked ... kind of.

I added some spawning monsters to the fight but doing so with Zeon's head spawned makes the game scroll down and to the right for awhile and the graphics glitch pretty hard. It clears up after a battle scene when the whole shebang is re-drawn. To prevent this I changed the win conditions to Kill Everything and made Zeon a triggerable spawn.

Long story short when added to that map Prism Flowers/Zeon Guards fire to the right horizontally but only when appended to the end of the monster list. If I try to change a monster with an ID number lower then the two default flowers the game won't freeze but the new flower just sits around doing nothing.

My best guess is there's a logic switch buried in battle scripting that needs to set a certain way to make the flowers behave as they're supposed to.

I took a break after completing my first spot check run of Shining Force 2 but have picked it back up in the last week. Here are some screenshots and discussion of changes in progress. This is only a small portion of my edits - limited as they are by what SF2Edit and the Caravan can currently do.



Enemy formations are the most obvious ways to modify the difficulty and flow of battle. The above screenshot is from Cameela's battle out on the Nazca plain. It is currently designed so that the group of 3 devils closest to the force charges out and attacks at the outset. Meanwhile the 4-person group right behind them slowly moves forward ready to pounce if the player tries to zerg rush Cameela's advance troops. They're strong enough that unless dealt with quickly Cameela's main force - the line of red dots through the center - will arrive to wreak havoc on an unprepared force. As if that wasn't enough Cameela is keeping some troops in reserve within the Nazca ship.



Peter attacks and finishes off a Devil Soldier. In this hack such soldiers are tough as nails with high defense and resistance to most elements but have lackluster attack power. This is an old screenshot. I'm no longer using ALL CAPS for unit/character names and have redrawn the game's standard font.

This screenshot does illustrate another problem inherent in system messages: differing name lengths. Devil Soldiers and Chaos Warriors have the longest names in the game. In order to prevent runovers all system text has to be written with this length in mind.



This better conveys the current state of things. My intention is to shift from passive to active voice and thus consequently shorten the needed text strings.

This screenshot also illustrates one of the many graphical errors in the original game. If you look closely at Chester's hand you can see he is holding the lance in the wrong place rather then keeping his hand behind the guard.



This shows off more of the font and how the text window could be better utilized if more attention is paid to character-by-line limits. (Sadly, as of this post all script work had to be redacted as it produced errors in the game's sound engine. I'm going to wait until everything else is at a satisfactory state before returning to this.)



Odd Eye has received an upgrade in stats (this is on Normal), a custom weapon just for him, and a Life Ring to slowly regenerate lost health.



Arch Demons are also a bit more intimidating with Bolt 4 as their primary arsenal. Unfortunately the AI cannot use the Attack, Boost, and Slow spells nor can it use inventory healing items except for Healing Rains. However the slow situation can be remedied by instead giving select devils the ability to proc slow. Arch Demons are one such devil which is part of the reason why their attack power isn't so great.



The special Healing Rain-toting Blue Shamans have become Shugenja whose job it is to defend and heal greater devils. They get two turns each rotation and have enough health and defense power to stick around for a long time.