Idea 1:
A patch that applies the Variable Width Font for Secret of Mana - BUT, it keeps the original Ted Woosley script with some minor edits to fix redundant sentences like "Dwarves live in that cave. They make good weapons and know all about weapons."
That sentence should just be: "Dwarves live in that cave and they know A LOT about weapons!"
Item names would pretty much be left alone, since even in Trials of Mana Official English they didn't really alter the item names much....
In ToM, the red plant is still called "Medical Herb" and not "Presto Root." A "Chocolate" is still "Chocolate" and not "Chocochomp" and "Candy" is still "Candy" and not "Gumdrop" and "Cup of Wishes" retains its name in Trials as well, so I'd say just leave the item names alone to keep the consistency between SoM & ToM.
I'd also leave Elementals as it is, because changing it breaks the grammar ~unless~ you change the AN to just an A. - "A Spirit."
Unnecessary name changes would be avoided...
There would also be a heavy emphasis on caps lock being put on the RIGHT parts of a sentence.
Like when the Sprite remarks after acquiring Undine's magic.
The VWF and Relocalized both say: "Nobody can stop ME now!"
A possible re-write could be "Nobody can stop me NOW!"
Or "Now NO ONE can stop me!"
(I googled it, it's two words, never "noone" as that's just Noon with an E).
Also... it would try to avoid typos... Like the green haired man in Pandora Castle saying "Qui'T'ing the army" instead of "Qui'TT'ing the army."
In the original Ted Woosley script, he doesn't actually say anything about being part of the army, he just says "My life is precious and this place is dangerous, so I'm moving away."
There's also another green haired man in Pandora who says "The Empire attacked us once about 15 years ago" in the Woosley script.
In VWF and Relocalized this is turned into 6 whole screens of text.
In the Japanese script, the guy only has one screen of text.
FuYoSa definitely added that extra stuff about the Knight chasing the Emperor -- and while it's good and it expands some of the mystery / ties SoM to the other titles, it is quite a lot of text for just one NPC.
It could either be left as it was originally in Woosley's script, or edited to have more of a "flow."
Example:
1. "The Empire attacked us before, almost 15 years ago."
2. "The battle between our two forces cost many lives, Pandora's army was nearly decimated."
3. "Then the Legendary Mana Knight turned the tide by defeating the Emperor in one-on-one combat."
4. "Both were wounded in the fight, but the Mana Knight still pursued the Emperor and his forces."
5. "Then... the Mana Knight went missing, the Emperor escaped and made a full recovery."
6. "Nobody knows how the Emperor was able to dodge death, or why the Mana Knight suddenly vanished."
.....
It's presumed that the Emperor had used Dark Magic to cheat death, similar to how Belgar was trying to learn a Forbidden Spell in order to save a girl in Holy City Wendell. (When the Priest of Light exiled him and he turned against all of humanity).
It's still a mystery to me if SoM is set AFTER the events of Trials / SD3, or if it's set directly after FFA / SD1. But personally I like the idea of SD2 being set in a time ~AFTER~ SD3.
And... Despite the risk that comes with trying to insert new stuff (Spelling & Grammar problems) I'd love to see some stuff that ties those two game universes together more.
Like... having the Cannon Travel Man hanging out in Kippo Village tell the history of Cannon Travel and how the whole enterprise was first started by his great ancestor, Bon Voyage - instead of him just saying "Dis's my home. Da misses is upstairs."
Example:
Cannon Man:
1. "Hey, it's you! Welcome to my house!"
2. "Since you're here, do ya wanna hear about how all this Cannon Travel stuff got started?"
*(Box with Yes / No option)
If you choose "No" he says:
"Darn! Guess you would just be bored by it."
If you choose "Yes" he says:
3. "Well ya see, my great great grandfather, the inventor Bon Voyage, started this business."
4. "Some folks were trying to get to their destination on foot, but the bridge got blown to bits!"
5. "Luckily, Bon Voyage was working on his cannon, which let them fly there in a jiffy!"
6. "Cannon Travel was a huge success, and it became a worldwide franchise!"
(End Dialogue)
Or like... Thanatos actually ~being~ Belgar, but it's been so long and he's been so corrupted with hatred for humankind and warped by his constant pursuit of new bodies to extend his own immortality -- that he honestly just forgot his original identity... until he hears his name spoken to him again by one of the main characters who "picked it up" in another conversation with an NPC who was discussing the history of the previous large scale war between the nations.
Or maybe... his name isn't even mentioned at all. It's just sort of hinted at vaguely.
Example:
NPC:
1. "A very long time ago, a Priest from a Holy City was trying to save a sick girl."
2. "He combed through every book he could find, looking for a spell that would cheat death."
3. "In the end, he went mad and he was exiled from the city."
I think stuff like that would be great to throw in as a subtle nod to ToM and SoM having a direct relationship as well as diving into some of Belgar's history -- he was in Heroes of Mana as a playable character. He was the "Oracle of Shadows" who worked alongside the Priest of Light in Wendell.
There are similarities between the two characters which can't be ignored.
Masked Mage (Belgar) turns into a Dark Lich. Thanatos wears a mask and he also turns into a Dark Lich.
I think they're the same entity, they just forgot who they really are due to the sheer amount of time that's passed between the two games' timeframes.
ToM was medieval, they had very little technology. SoM has lots of technology - the Mana Fortress, the Sunken City with its Railway. The "Veedios" that record past events.
It's clear that a huge chunk of time passed after ToM, but Belgar is immortal and who knows how many bodies he's gone through before he settled on taking Dyluck's.
......
It's just an idea.
And I'm not trying to be a rude jerk or be ungrateful or nitpick a rom hack that was made two whole decades ago, a hack that I've played and enjoyed for a long time without saying a single negative word about it.
And I'm not picking on Relocalized either, I love that hack, it's really good... despite the introduction of some pretty strange grammar mistakes.
I'm just proposing a simplistic hack that takes the smoother and cleaner Variable Width Font and applies it to Ted Woosley's script... With minor edits to cut out some of the redundancy of the original sentences.
And ~maybe~ some small additions that help tie the history / universe of ToM & SoM together.
Also... maybe combine it with the patch that turns the "Crosshatch" window background into a solid color -- but without defaulting the border to the "Carved Wood" pirate ship type design and instead leaving it on the basic "Steel Pipe" border seen in the character naming screen.
.........................
Idea 2:
A "Magic Rebalancing Hack" for either Trials of Mana or SD3.
I know I'll probably set off alarm bells with purists, but I've always used a Save Editor to customize my Spell List so that I have exactly the type of spells I want to have for each character for their kind of Class.
In my vanilla playthroughs of ToM / SD3, spell acquisitions were pretty cumbersome and even by the end of the game I did not have a full Spell List.
What if... Getting Spells worked more like how it did in SoM? You get that spell WHEN you acquire the Elemental that it's associated with.
So if you pick up Salamando, your party gets the spells that are associated with him. Instead of you getting new spells by raising your Intellect and getting a "Learned [insert spell name]" text.
Grinding in general can be really tedious.
Why not make it so you get the Spells with each new Elemental that joins your party, but at the start they cost more MP to cast, until you start raising up your stats, and then the MP cost starts to go down significantly.
When I build my party, like... say I have Riesz, Angela & Carlie / Charlotte.
Well... when I do an SRAM edit, I will typically build Carlie as the Healer of the group.
I give Carlie the following spells.
1. Healing Light.
2. Twinkle Rain.
3. Strengthen.
4. Mental Boost.
5. Crystalline (TransShape)
6. Dispel Magic.
7. Magic Shield.
8. Lunatique.
For Angela I give her:
1. Holy Bolt.
2. Lucent Beam.
3. Evil Gate.
4. Dark Force.
5. Fireball.
6. Explode.
7. Ice Smash.
8. Spike Freeze (Mega Splash)
9. Thunderstorm.
10. Diamond Shards.
11. Ancient Curse.
12. Glitter Dust (Rainbow)
That's a full and well-rounded Spell List that covers the whole elemental spectrum. But outside of SRAM hacking, you would never encounter that kind of a list in the game on a clean playthrough.
For Riesz - I give her all the Saber Spells, I know they aren't what she's ~supposed~ to have. And if I was using Duran, I'd still be doing the same thing with him.
For Riesz / Lise:
1. Holy Saber.
2. Dark Saber.
3. Flame Saber.
4. Ice Saber.
5. Lightning Saber.
6. Stone Saber.
7. Moon Saber.
8. Leaf Saber.
I always build Riesz as being more of a Mele / Direct Combat fighter. Carlie as a Healer. And Angela as the purely Offensive Spellcaster.
I realize a build like this completely defeats the purpose of having "Class Changes" - but if a full scale hack were to be made that created a full spell list for each Character and each Class -- that was suited to their Path, it wouldn't need to be such a terrible thing...
Personally, I think the Spell Acquisition in ToM / SD3 is frustratingly slow and limited in what you get, even by the end of the game.
I loved SoM for the fact that once you add a new Elemental to your party, you get their spells, all you have to do is level them up so they are bigger and badder.
In ToM, all the spells are static: they only have one form and one strength setting throughout the entire game.
They don't Level Up the way SoM's spells do, so no fancy "different" animation at level 8.99 -- it's a disappointing aspect of ToM, but what could they do? They were already pushing the limits of the Super Famicom and the cartridge space limits didn't give them a whole lot of options.
Maybe if the SNES-CD had actually gotten to be a thing, they could have afforded to have Spell Animations that got bigger as you leveled them up.... (On that note, does ToM 3D also have plain static spells? Or do they get bigger and better with each use?)
The best I could say you might do to replicate a similar experience to SoM's spells is to just change the amount of MP a spell costs to use as you go along. Start them off costing you a lot of MP to cast, then by the time you max out your stats in the Level Up screens, they barely cost anything at all.
If possible, increase the amount of MP each character has available to them at the start, like maybe their Starting Max is 30 MP, and make it so even a basic spell like Holy Ball cost 3 times as much as it normally would because the character is fresh and new.
Holy Ball for me is currently at 2MP, so in "Rebalanced," it would be set at 6.
Something like Glitter Dust / Rainbow Dust is set at 10MP, that's a heavily abused spell because of how destructive it is, so increasing that cost to 30 would at least put a limit to how many times you could use it until you've maxed out your Magic stats.
At the end of Grinding / Enemy Farming [something I honestly hate doing because it's tedious as all heck] you have 99 MP. That would maybe get you 3 whole casts of Glitter / Rainbow. But as you build up the Spell related parts of your stats after each level up screen, the cost to cast it shrinks.
As a lower level "fresh" character, you wouldn't get to cast the higher costing spells very often and the majority of the time they'd be grey'd out for you.
When you Class Change, you still have a fully stacked Spell List, but the spells are related entirely to that Class Type.
And if you're a lower level newbie, they will basically be behind an MP pay-wall.
I think this is a lot more forgiving and less tedious than having to "Learn" the spells.
They're already there in the Spell List, you just need to be able to afford the MP it takes to cast them. And as you level up your Magic related stats, the cost it takes to cast them reduces.
............
Idea 3:
A hack for Super Mario Bros. 3 that replaces the "bland" prizes in the N Card bonus game with fancier stuff. Like the LEAF!!!
As it is normally, the N Card bonus game is kinda boring. Oh look, here's another Mushroom to add to your stack of 7 other Mushrooms. I'd be more inclined to play the N Card bonus if it didn't mean my inventory got stuffed full of Mushrooms and Fire Flowers when I would much rather have Leaf, Tanuki Suit, Hammer Bros Suit and Frog Suit as a potential prize. I wouldn't stack the board with them, just make it an occasional addition amongst all the weaker stuff...
Topic: Hack ideas: for those without the skill but with all the ideas. (Read 2266645 times)