Legend of the Mana Sword (GB Final Fantasy Adventure hack)

[dagmor]

Thank you xenophile! Test results from GBC:

1) Can this sky be blue? It's blue in the Dime Tower sequence. In similar form, can you fix the Dime Tower map to match the trees and castle of the former image?




2) You've probably looked at this already, but can the waterfalls be more blue?



3) Recommend this person say something more like: "Cibba's up in the temple" or similar instead of the technically incorrect "Cibba's in here".



4) I thought these were supposed to have crosses on them? Looks fine without too, just curious.



5) As a general comment, there's a lot of green/blue in the background. It might be nice to have the player and all the NPCs be red, then have most the monsters be red too. Occasional blue monsters would be fine too.



6) Blue sky maybe?



7) First off, this is beautiful! That said, I'd love to see the HP/MP/Lucre bar be shifted to the left by 4 or 5 pixels to be centered, and the will charging bar to be red.



8 ) Dead Duke Madusa (inside joke) looks like Amanda in that sprite. Maybe a recolor of dead Duke is in order?



9) "It's You!" should be "It's you!". Also, is there a better translation of Gemma Gemma Gemma? It's cute, but awkward.




10) Is there backstory to make the new (and specifically not the same) chocobo more understandable? Why did the chocobo get hurt? How does the hero know who the chocobo is?




11) For this scene and the scene with Amanda/Duke tears, the "Can't carry" message is not easily understandable. Is there another message we can give? Like "Make room in your inventory"? It'd be better to have these be "key items", but I know FFA doesn't have that concept.


12) "The End" text in red perhaps? And maybe more blue in the light or the ring at the base?


Overall loved the playthrough! Another thing I'd love to see implemented in this mod or others would be shove-on-touch of NPCs. They could just talk if you press A next to them.

[Ok Impala!]

Thank you xenophile! Test results from GBC:

These are some great, in-depth, suggestions! I agree with the last point, though it might be hard to pull off. That would make for a huge QOL improvement. Pressing A to interact with NPCs and objects in the world would feel more natural, and you wouldn't have the accident conversation triggers while bumping into an NPC.

[xenophile]

Test results from GBC.

I know I've written about this before, but dagmor was playing with an emulator that includes functionality from the GBC bios to turn on custom palettes for certain games. This seems to be off by default even on the emulators (e.g., BGB, SameBoy) that do support this feature, it's off by default.

1) Can this sky be blue?

Not as easily as you might expect. That tile is also used for shadows and walls.

Can you fix the Dime Tower map to match the trees and castle of the former image?

These two screens actually use entirely different graphic sets--the set used by Dime Tower doesn't have the towers. I tried editing the castle screen to match the Dime Tower version, but things were pretty cramped. This might mean changes to both of them.

2) You've probably looked at this already, but can the waterfalls be more blue?

I did try this already and wasn't happy with it, but I just did another variant that I like more. Part of the issue is that this change will effect anyone playing it in B&W as well, so for changes like this I tend to try to find a solution that looks better in both B&W and color. I may have found that.

3) Recommend this person say something more like: "Cibba's up in the temple" or similar instead of the technically incorrect "Cibba's in here".

That line is mentioned by Legends of Localization, but I forgot about it. Mostly it didn't seem that important, but I'll probably change it now that you bring it up.

4) I thought these were supposed to have crosses on them? Looks fine without too, just curious.

I didn't like any of the three (or more?) official versions, so I tried designing my own and I'm pretty happy with it. They have a slimmer profile, and a darker look. The originals looked pretty corny (whether they had a cross on them or now). Glad it looks fine.

5) As a general comment, there's a lot of green/blue in the background. It might be nice to have the player and all the NPCs be red, then have most the monsters be red too. Occasional blue monsters would be fine too.

The Gameboy had two color (gray) palettes. This game uses one of them for sprites that are affected by Dark and for bosses so they can blink when they take damage (I think you commented on Red Dragon not blinking?). I need to be careful using the red palette because it disables those effects. I guess I could make all the non-enemies red, but it's a fair amount of work.

6) Blue sky maybe?

Same answer as 1. It's not that I missed these, it's that it's a different graphic set with different constraints.

7) First off, this is beautiful!

Thanks! I've actually worried over that exact screen because the sky fades into the water, but I decided it works (and I didn't have much of a choice).

That said, I'd love to see the HP/MP/Lucre bar be shifted to the left by 4 or 5 pixels to be centered, and the will charging bar to be red.

Shifting it down a pixel was possible because the font is seven pixels high in an eight pixel tile. Shifting more than that any direction would be vastly more difficult. Red is unfortunately only available for sprites, not background tiles.

Dead Duke Madusa (inside joke) looks like Amanda in that sprite. Maybe a recolor of dead Duke is in order?

Feel free to take a hack at improving that graphic. I thought the original was pretty weak, so I didn't agonize too much about the new one.

I don't know that a recolor to red would be a benefit, but maybe change Duke's color to red when the transformation starts? But that doesn't make a lot of sense because Medusa (no relation to the monster truck driving pro wrestler, at least since I fixed the typo) is blue.

9) "It's You!" should be "It's you!".

Whups! Well... looks like it's not actually my fault. I haven't edited that line at all.

Also, is there a better translation of Gemma Gemma Gemma? It's cute, but awkward.

Hopefully I left some notes on that somewhere. It's a pretty important conversation and the original English translation didn't communicate what was going on very well. Looks like the original English text was "What's that Gemma?"

10) Is there backstory to make the new (and specifically not the same) chocobo more understandable?

Why do you think it isn't the same chocobo? (I can't think of anything in the script that points either way, but my feeling has always been that it's the same chocobo.)

Why did the chocobo get hurt?

Canonically, carrying the hero through the Crystal Desert leaves the chocobo severely injured. (Crystals are sharp?) I don't think anything in the Japanese script makes this explicitly clear, but I could be wrong.

How does the hero know who the chocobo is?

Why do you think the hero does? Keep in mind at this point in the game the hero may have either never seen a chocobo, or--more likely--spent most of the game with a chocobo. The script needs to cover both cases, but if necessary there could be different dialog depending on whether you witnessed the chocobo hatch.

Some versions (the Japanese only mobile remake at least) force you to meet the chocobo before reaching Jadd, which I think decreases replayability.

11) For this scene and the scene with Amanda/Duke tears, the "Can't carry" message is not easily understandable. Is there another message we can give? Like "Make room in your inventory"?

Unfortunately, no, the "Can't carry" message is unavoidable. It could be followed with second message, but then you're taking player time when I feel most players will already know what to do.

12) "The End" text in red perhaps? And maybe more blue in the light or the ring at the base?

I like how you're thinking, but red is only available for sprites, not background. I'm hesitant to throw blue into the light unless it's also an improvement as dark gray when playing in B&W.

Overall loved the playthrough!

Awesome!

Another thing I'd love to see implemented in this mod or others would be shove-on-touch of NPCs. They could just talk if you press A next to them.

I agree with the last point, though it might be hard to pull off. That would make for a huge QOL improvement. Pressing A to interact with NPCs and objects in the world would feel more natural, and you wouldn't have the accident conversation triggers while bumping into an NPC.

This has been on my list for a long time. I'm not saying no, but it's a big project and I'm going to continue kicking that can down the road for now. Part of the reason I'm putting it off is lack of space and a plan to eventually expand the rom size for LotMS. It's pretty easy to do and would simplify a fair number of the changes I add.

So why haven't I expanded LotMS? The biggest reason is it will force expanding SRAM as well, and that will cause at least some emulators (probably most) to freak out and delete your .sav file. This is exactly the kind of sanity check I would add to an emulator if I was writing one, but it's inconvenient, and I don't want to deal with breaking save game compatibility until I actually want to change something in the saves.

[dagmor]

Folks, I found a treasure mine from the year 2000:

https://web.archive.org/web/20000616144001/http://ffmusic.vovoid.com/secret.txt

It has several more FFA warp bugs listed, plus some other FF "secrets" from the 90s. I'll be trying out these warps and reporting back!

[Ok Impala!]

Interesting stuff. It see like you can use the select/save function to mess up the screen where the game loads you. I guess this will work for every screen then. You might end up in very weird places though. 

One more reason to remove the save anywhere function in Ember and replace it with fixed savepoints. 

[Supergamerguy]

Folks, I found a treasure mine from the year 2000:

https://web.archive.org/web/20000616144001/http://ffmusic.vovoid.com/secret.txt

It has several more FFA warp bugs listed, plus some other FF "secrets" from the 90s. I'll be trying out these warps and reporting back!

The distant future? The year 2000?

[dagmor]

Interesting stuff. It see like you can use the select/save function to mess up the screen where the game loads you. I guess this will work for every screen then. You might end up in very weird places though. 

One more reason to remove the save anywhere function in Ember and replace it with fixed savepoints. 

Indeed, I've tested this out and will post some screenshots later. It only works on maps with a walkable path up (or presumably left) off screen AND that path is supposed to use a teleporter tile to get you to the next area (e.g., the path leading to the Wendel shrine). You can tell if there's a teleporter tile based on the shutter transition animation.

The bug seems simple enough. If you start to walk, but pause and save mid animation, your saved state is truncated to the upper left snap position. So if you do this by the edge of the screen and reload the game from the save, you start on the teleporter tile and don't trigger its effect. Then you can walk off the path into the great unknown.

I've found several more warps this way than what's listed, including to an unwalkable town that's seen much better days.

As for a fix to this 'telesave' bug, the most straightforward answer is for the save to use the last snap position instead of truncate up/left.

[Talien]

A bit late to the party I know, but regarding Flare vs Nuke.....anyone remember how in the English release of Final Fantasy 4 (renamed FF2) it was Nuke? And how Bahamut used Meganuke? So there's precedent for either outside of just this game.

I always thought Nuke sounded better, they should have kept that in the English localizations instead of changing it to Flare.

[Ligeia]

Interesting stuff. It see like you can use the select/save function to mess up the screen where the game loads you. I guess this will work for every screen then. You might end up in very weird places though. 

One more reason to remove the save anywhere function in Ember and replace it with fixed savepoints. 

I'd say it's quite the opposite, it's all the more reason to keep the save anywhere function. Being able to mess around with stuff is part of the fun, it's not like these tricks can be done by accident and be detrimental to the player. So there's no point in doing anything about it.

[xenophile]

As for a fix to this 'telesave' bug, the most straightforward answer is for the save to use the last snap position instead of truncate up/left.

There might be a simpler fix involving scripts: add a script for exiting the room that calls the teleporter script if you are leaving via the direction that is supposed to be blocked. This would have to be added on a per-screen basis.

I always thought Nuke sounded better, they should have kept that in the English localizations instead of changing it to Flare.

I for one still prefer Nuke to Flare for this game. I don't really have any opinions about which one Final Fantasy games use.

Being able to mess around with stuff is part of the fun, it's not like these tricks can be done by accident and be detrimental to the player. So there's no point in doing anything about it.

I sort of agree. The only reason I took a fix for the "Iron Helmet" bug is because I was convinced it could be triggered accidentally in a way that is detrimental to the player. The same is definitely true of the warp bugs triggered with weapon effects, but this new class of warp bugs seems like something no one is likely to trigger on accident.

My hope (as I mentioned above) is they could be fixed on a screen-by-screen basis as (more like "if") needed.

For example: This probably allows you to bypass a pit you are supposed to fall into in one room, but it wouldn't break anything and it would probably be faster to do that puzzle the intended way, so no reason to fix it there.

[dagmor]

I for one still prefer Nuke to Flare for this game. I don't really have any opinions about which one Final Fantasy games use.

I agree too, did you change it to better match the Japanese translation?

but this new class of warp bugs seems like something no one is likely to trigger on accident.

I'm still trying to figure out how my 8 year old self managed to go from the Wendel shrine during the "invasion" scene to the final Mana Tree shrine. I was hoping this bug was it, but nope.

My hope (as I mentioned above) is they could be fixed on a screen-by-screen basis as (more like "if") needed.

Post incoming to dive in... There are actually two new warp bug types that I'll go into.

[dagmor]

Warp test notes time!

Warp type #1, "sword-walk bug":
Sword charge attack through walls.

Go to this room, charge sword attack right while sliding up the middle part of the ice on the left, then hold left when you land. You'll go through the wall and warp out.




I don't know if this bug is due to walkable tiles to the left of this room only, or if there's really something kooky about sword charge attacks (or especially in conjunction with ice panels near walls).

In this case your buddy Amanda/Duke goes with you, which can lead to some funny/weird happenings.

For instance, going back to Damias's throne room will convert Amanda/Duke to Lester, where he can visit himself as a parrot. And then I can take him back to Medusa's cave where we started, where he then transforms back into Amanda/Duke, and now there's two of them!

[dagmor]

Warp type #2 "save-skip bug":

As mentioned above, if you save mid stride while walking up or left, when you reload the game you will be at the destination tile and skip any scripts intended to activate from stepping on the tile. If paired with teleporter tiles located at the top/left of the screen with clear paths, you can walk right into an unintended zone. Some examples:

Hydra's cave



Wendel



Lich's cave (easy way to kill lich with Lit)


And my favorite, coming up the cave of ruins


There are many many more, but none too interesting found thus far.

What is useful is to use this trick to bypass the chocobo drop off spot in the snow region. The dungeon cave wasn't scripted to force out your chocobo, so you can take him to go beat Kary.

[xenophile]

New version! Now with blue sky on two screens I missed, and bluer waterfalls when played on real hardware or emulators set up to use a proper BIOS (tested on SameBoy and bgb).





Also in geeky things almost no one will notice, one of the bosses, the flying Garuda, now explodes into a cloud of feathers when vanquished instead of a garbled mess of sprites.



This is the second time I've improved a bosses' explosion animation. It's a lot of work editing the all metasprite related tables by hand, but the final results look amazing! (For the half a second or so that they are on screen in the average playthrough.)

[Ok Impala!]

I just can't get over how amazing that feather explosion looks! 

[dagmor]

Finished a run through of the latest build. The Garuda explosion is quite nice

I noticed Kary's explosion was a bit weird. Not sure if that's original or not. So many kill scenes are looking better that perhaps the old ones stand out to me now.


Not a bad bug, but interesting: the wolf heads in the snow region will turn into blue crabs if they jump up to the next screen and you follow them.


The only other bug to report is an old one with a bit more information: empty chest and snowman switches are universally glitchy. At first I thought it was just certain rooms, but no - it's all of them. And the issue is game time random. Save states taken with a snowman a few steps from a switch will randomly work or not work, with the only difference being my walking speed. Direction of motion doesn't matter.

Two clues:
1) Snowmen and empty chest shove movement is sometimes jerky. I suspect the glitch occurs when the object jerky-moves onto the switch.
2) It seems harder to reproduce with empty chests than with snowmen, though I can still do it and same rules apply.




Finally, I'll leave you all with some Christmas cheer. My recent warp exploits landed some fun screenshots of Amanda and Duke in some iconic places.

[xenophile]

Finished a run through of the latest build. The Garuda explosion is quite nice

It is!

I noticed Kary's explosion was a bit weird.

Seems to be my fault. Worse, it's hard for me to tell if I made any similar mistakes. I may have to write a tool.

Not a bad bug, but interesting: the wolf heads in the snow region will turn into blue crabs if they jump up to the next screen and you follow them.

That is interesting. It makes sense for them to change graphics at that point, but they aren't supposed to travel between screens. Finding the misbehaving code turned out to be trivial, but fixing it without creating more bugs might be dangerous.

Empty chest and snowman switches are universally glitchy.

I continue to stare blankly at the collision management logic. It took me five minutes or less to find and understand the code that should have deleted the wolf heads, but I've put a lot of time into trying to understand how collisions work with little or nothing to show for it.

Finally, I'll leave you all with some Christmas cheer. My recent warp exploits landed some fun screenshots of Amanda and Duke in some iconic places.

That looks great! The game would be less fun without that bug!

[dagmor]

A couple more holiday miracles to report!

1) I finally found the warp glitch that hit me 30 years ago! It turns out there's another style of warping that's harder to come across. In the scene where Wendel comes under attack, on this screen the enemies can knock you north through a teleporter to the screen above.



I've brought this up before - you can end up getting told numerous times how the fallen soldier was "attacked from behind" if you're hit up near the top of the screen.



Regardless, when you recover control you'll be blinking for a little while with invincibility frames. And just like you sometimes can't go up/down stairs while blinking, you also sometimes (game time random) will be able to walk through the southern teleporter tile and warp to the scene below. Huzzah, just like I remembered! Too bad you can't get anywhere from there... You can't get down to the road below. Anyway, it's yet another collision bug to add to our list. Hopefully this will be fixed when/if we figure out the other switch collision bugs. I need to get in there and stare at that code with you xenophile!



2) I finally achieved my ultimate warp goals: I fought Julius with my chocobot and (separately) got all the end game equipment and got back to the main map with chocobot. This took three separate glitches to make work - the save glitch, the sword special on ice glitch, and the not-previously-discussed 'chocobo not triggering teleport tiles' glitch (which I don't believe can occur in normal play). I'll spare the details for anyone who wants to find the path on their own, but I may stick a guide up on gamefaqs eventually.

When fighting the final Julius form, the chocobo turned into another heroine. The heroine from the scene prior stayed fixed in place and, when interacted with, would walk straight up, tell me to be careful, then go back down. Weird stuff!






I was hoping for better sale prices of this end game gear back in Jadd! Too bad I couldn't sell the Mana sword.



=======

And finally, something LotMS specific to report; the "Warp #3" in the article I linked a while back is indeed fixed with the prior sickle warp patch. I was able to reproduce the bug in FFA original and not in LotMS. Nice work!

Here's what it looks like in FFA original. The article I linked actually had it wrong. You have to stand where I'm standing in the picture, facing down, and then swing the axe and walk left.

[dagmor]

The journey continues...

I figured out how to glitch fly through one of the map sets (the one that contains the starting area). This allowed me to access a couple unfinished areas the developers left behind. Check it out!






The cave at the bottom of the first area connects to Medusa's lair, but all the other caves/paths lead nowhere. I don't think this bug is worth trying to fix, it relies on the chocobo glitches before it, so highly unlikely to affect normal gameplay.

======

On the fixable front, here's more info for the collision bug issue. It turns out that if a snowman is on a switch against a wall, and you hold the d-pad to keep moving towards it, you will eventually slowly glitch-walk into the snowman itself. This can also be used to warp down pathways with teleporter tiles (the world record speed run uses this trick).

Edit: I've since learned that the snowman glitch requires a companion to walk into the snowman with you.

[MD_Prometh]

Very exciting.

Are there any plans to add something like "Final Fantasy Gaiden" to the title screen? This was original a FF spin off before becoming its own franchise. Chocobos are even featured.