Any hacks that add enemy HP displays at all?

[Mechatiger891]

My guess is probably not. You don't know how much I appreciate enemy hit point displays being added in games, beat 'em ups and role-playing games in particular are a godsend because it saves you the trouble from having to use an item, search an enemy guide online, having to guess how much HP an enemy has and is super convenient, I want it shown to me right away. Without it, I would be stuck facing the same enemy forever. I prefer that over an indication an enemy is going to die or blinks red. It's fine for other genres like simple action games or shmups but I appreciate some having enemy HP displays as additions. It would be a crime not to have that in modern RPGs! (Square Enix seriously messed that up in Octopath Traveller, hope they add that in the sequel) Am I the only one that appreciates that?

[FAST6191]

An odd request (I would consider determining HP a skill you learn to play a game with) but understandable at some level I suppose.

Two general approaches, maybe three in some cases.

1) You subvert something in the game to display the HP.
Finding enemy HP is easy enough (the same things that make infinite health cheats for players also work for enemies, https://web.archive.org/web/20080309104350/http://etk.scener.org/?op=tutorial  https://doc.kodewerx.org/index.html for those needing primers on cheats).
Find something else on screen and have that display it instead (either as a cheat or as a more conventional hack). The NES Mario speedrunners do something like this when they have a hack that replaces the score counter with a more accurate timer to facilitate their runs (helps dodge certain things if the time is controlled).

2) Same as above but you add in your own display. This is harder (modifying existing things is one0

3) In emulators it is popular to have Lua. Likewise some cheat searches work by reaching out and snatching data from emulators that don't have their own cheat search (or as nice a one as the searching program). It would be easy enough to have a program reach out and touch the emulator's memory (or have the emulator make a savestate I suppose and read that instead) to read the HP values and display that in a separate program or overlay it into the emulator itself.
Harder to get this going on in hardware outside of newer systems that have debug options though.

https://fceux.com/web/help/LuaFunctionsList.html%20https://tasvideos.org/LuaScripting
https://www.dropbox.com/s/b2kuma6zs89di8n/Metroid.lua for an example hack that overlays a map, same idea for text. There are also tools for blind people to have text grabbed from emulators at a more code level than OCR of on screen text and it would be similar.

[Zynk]

Enemy Lifebar - Hack of Mega Man 3
https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/31/

[Jorpho]

Without it, I would be stuck facing the same enemy forever.

Can you name a specific occasion when this has happened to you? If there's a game where it feels like you're stuck facing the same enemy forever, maybe it's just not a very good game and you should play something else instead?

(Breath of Fire 1 comes to mind. Very silly, Breath of Fire 1.)

[KingMike]

Are you talking about the feature where bosses (except for like one) have a hidden second lifebar?

Or is there one actually infinite boss? I'm feeling yes, but then seems like almost every RPG pulled that at least once.
I just have to think of how Final Fantasy III did that with two of the earliest bosses. I suppose it is at least a praise to the DS version (compared to the Famicom) to make it REALLY EFFIN' CLEAR that it is an unwinnable battle.

[treos]

this, combined with the lack of damage numbers on-screen, is one of the reasons i never play monster hunter games.

you need some form of visual feedback in video games to tell players if their attacks are doing any damage at all.

oh sure, you can whack a monster in monster hunter till it's low hp and starts panting and moving slowly which tells me it's low health but that doesn't tell me how low health. that just tells me i still need to keep hitting the target till it eventually stops moving.

it's like when mario screams with insanity while rapidly smacking the castle with his hammer in those old castle calamity videos.

sure, it might work eventually but how do you know? how do you know how long you need to hit it? how much damage your attacks are doing? what it's max hp/dur/etc. is before it finally falls?

so, while it may seem odd to some, this is a good request to make.

i know in a lot of genesis/snes games, devs solved this issue with bosses by making them flash red or some other color increasingly fast as their hp got lower. but there's still a lot of games where that wasn't done and all you could do (even with non-boss enemies) that all you could do is just keep attacking until the target's death animation played and hope you were doing any damage at all.

in RPG games, this doesn't always need to be done as it could take away from the tension of boss and certain event battles but it could still be a nice qol toggle maybe. but as a rom hack change, it'd be optional to begin with.

[Jorpho]

in RPG games, this doesn't always need to be done as it could take away from the tension of boss and certain event battles

Well, that's exactly it, isn't it? That's probably why Monster Hunter doesn't explicitly tell you HP numbers either. 

It's like saying it would be nice if every horror movie started out by telling you exactly who was going to still be alive at the end. Yes, some people might enjoy horror movies more that way, but maybe the director doesn't want you to know that right away?

To be quite clear, I absolutely agree there are games where you can spend ages whacking away at a boss and have no idea if you're doing damage or how long it's going to take and it gets boring and frustrating and you start wondering if you're supposed to be doing something differently.  Those are badly-designed games.

But this is all getting kind of abstract. FAST6191 already outlined the approaches.

[treos]

Well, that's exactly it, isn't it? That's probably why Monster Hunter doesn't explicitly tell you HP numbers either. 

It's like saying it would be nice if every horror movie started out by telling you exactly who was going to still be alive at the end. Yes, some people might enjoy horror movies more that way, but maybe the director doesn't want you to know that right away?

monster hunter doesn't tell you anything. the only monster hunter games do is make a monster start panting and move sluggishly after you hit it enough. beyond that, you have zero information as to how well your damage is as the player.

To be quite clear, I absolutely agree there are games where you can spend ages whacking away at a boss and have no idea if you're doing damage or how long it's going to take and it gets boring and frustrating and you start wondering if you're supposed to be doing something differently.  Those are badly-designed games.

and that's why i don't play monster hunter games. this is a problem game devs solved decades ago by showing damage numbers, hp bars, or making enemies blink red in video games. monster hunter doesn't do any of that.

---

a game that recently came out, astlibra, handles this sort of thing rather well.

normally the game gives no info of any kind about enemy stats but mastering certain weapons/shields/armor unlocks passive skills which, when equipped, display enemy hp, what color force (for the growth menu) they drop, how much damage both you and the enemy do with each hit, a "break" gauge, AND the element of the enemy (so you can switch weapons for elemental weakness damage).

and you can freely toggle any of those in the passive skill menu.