Translations: Energy Breaker English V1.00

[travel27]

So, what does it mean, for instance, when it says 5/7 for positive blue or 2/3 for negative green?  Especially when a spell might require, for instance, -3 green and +6 blue for example. Do I need to add more points?  Why the fractions?

[SCO]

you have a maximum per positive/negative element and a shared pool of points (that, btw, do not get allocated automatically once you 'lower' them once)
In fact, one of the things that tripped me is that for the longest time i qualified for the high level abillities and summons, but couldn't use them because of the wrong manual allocation - i was in 'auto-jrpg mode' where usually you don't configure shit at level up (not to mention i didn't notice the negative elements in the first play).

1 small suggestion:
Game is ridiculously easy with 'infinite' scrolls, especially poison, considering you always only use 1 balance point per inventory use, and can even move stuff in combat without any cost at all as long as you are in range...
Get poison and tornado scrolls, win boss fight on turn 1 or 2 with 2 npcs.

Please please, fix the game and remove the 'infinite' part on the stores of the normal game, or (more radical) remove the inventory only uses 1 balance exploit.

Btw: It's easy to miss you don't need to repeat fights if you beat them once, go into the menu where you usual 'end turn', you can run away, which in effect terminates the fight in the same screen and location.

Things i really like in the game are the movement abilities, especially the long range slash and crane abilities - tornado is godly as a scroll, but only 'nice' as a spell - that turn combat into a nice, but not very hard puzzle; as well as a few of the later encounter design; how the shinny pebbles minigame was thought out so the ultimate reward is only slightly above 1/2 of the pebbles in the game, that are hidden quite devilishly (imagine the hell of trying to find them all without a walkthrough), the ability to run away easily on already beaten battles.
The escher-like rooms are nice too.
Things i dislike is how the plot gets quite confused about midway, only straightening up near the end (was that the translator tweaking?), the *ridiculous* backtracking, the moral relativism of some things (Leon is a scumbag) and the weird stuff with that 'inside the body (womb)' sequences, especially the one with the prepubescent girl.

Spoiler question:

Spoiler

What's that drowed+water elemental stuff at the end of the credits, is it related to some of the other games or is that Leon's body at the bottom of the sea? His hair was not grey though.

[close]

[FallenAngel2387]

I'm sure Disnesquick will do what he can, but keep in mind, anything that makes a game too easy, or otherwise unenjoyable, or whatever, is on the developer(Neversoft in this case), and not the hackers/translators.

[Trixar_za]

1 small suggestion:
Game is ridiculously easy with 'infinite' scrolls, especially poison, considering you always only use 1 balance point per inventory use, and can even move stuff in combat without any cost at all as long as you are in range...
Get poison and tornado scrolls, win boss fight on turn 1 or 2 with 2 npcs.

Please please, fix the game and remove the 'infinite' part on the stores of the normal game, or (more radical) remove the inventory only uses 1 balance exploit.

That's part of original game's design and probably won't be fixed. It's not Disnesquick's responsibility to fix game mechanics.

Things i dislike is how the plot gets quite confused about midway, only straightening up near the end (was that the translator tweaking?), the *ridiculous* backtracking, the moral relativism of some things (Leon is a scumbag) and the weird stuff with that 'inside the body (womb)' sequences, especially the one with the prepubescent girl.

If you read the README file, especially the translators notes, you'd notice that this was the fault of the original game's script (Really? They talked about one of the staff member's pubes?). There is even dialog that's not even used in the final game, but left in the code. Personally, I think satsu did a great job with the mess that is Energy Breaker's original script.

[sa♥tsu]

Things i dislike is how the plot gets quite confused about midway, only straightening up near the end (was that the translator tweaking?), the *ridiculous* backtracking, the moral relativism of some things (Leon is a scumbag) and the weird stuff with that 'inside the body (womb)' sequences, especially the one with the prepubescent girl.

I did try to nail down what I could and straighten out a few things without changing it too much from what was intended.
The game was originally designed so that you could select a main character, before they threw that out the window and made Myra the main character. There's a bunch of unused text from the initial dream sequence, with conversations for each of the different characters. I think this explains why

Spoiler

large swathes of the story mostly seem to be about Lenardo, Star is kind of inconsistent as a character, Krill comes out of nowhere and so on. I think Leon's story and character were certainly a casualty of this - the original Japanese text was a lot worse about letting Leon off the hook for everything he does.

[close]

It's a shame, I think, because the basic story and setting is really good, but only the broad brushstrokes are there, and the details are clearly quite rushed in places. I'm not saying it's like the Ecce Homo restoration, or that it's bad, but I think it had much more potential. I would really love to see a modern remake of the game as it was originally intended to be.

Spoiler question:

Spoiler

What's that drowed+water elemental stuff at the end of the credits, is it related to some of the other games or is that Leon's body at the bottom of the sea? His hair was not grey though.

[close]

Nobody knows.

That's part of original game's design and probably won't be fixed. It's not Disnesquick's responsibility to fix game mechanics.
If you read the README file, especially the translators notes, you'd notice that this was the fault of the original game's script (Really? They talked about one of the staff member's pubes?). There is even dialog that's not even used in the final game, but left in the code. Personally, I think satsu did a great job with the mess that is Energy Breaker's original script.

The pubes dialogue would have only ever been visible to the debuggers. It's in a block of Irene's dialogue:

みやさかさん......って
Miyasaka...

チンげ、そった事
あるんですって！
They say he shaved
his pubes once!

There are other things like a shopkeeper mentioning a guy called Naoyuki came to buy a Lum bath towel, or other bits of cheeky dialogue - here's another one from Irene's dialogue:

わたしのヒミツ......
あそこに、ホクロがあるのよ〜〜
I've got a mole right on my...!
It's my little secret.

You can imagine what a pain in the arse this all was given the sheer volume of text. The people in Olga Town change their conversations with pretty much every event flag, it seems. You can actually miss stuff by not going counterintuitively going back to town in the middle of a quest.

[SCO]

Spoiler

large swathes of the story mostly seem to be about Lenardo, Star is kind of inconsistent as a character, Krill comes out of nowhere and so on. I think Leon's story and character were certainly a casualty of this - the original Japanese text was a lot worse about letting Leon off the hook for everything he does.

[close]

Spoiler

Yes, i had successfully blocked Krill from my mind just after playing - it makes *that* much sense
I kinda liked Star, mostly because he's a creep for most of the late game, obsessing about someone he shouldn't, seriously, the girl didn't seem to be into him anymore and probably wasn't mind controlled or anything, really seemed to enjoy her new boyfriend (in fact, she seems a lesser female Leon).
Actually the part where, don't remember the name, the female part of that scientist triangle, appears at the end makes ... very little sense considering the implications the game gave, and how Leibniz (sp) apparently has a immortality process.

In fact, how the 'worlds' connect seems really strange, because they seem not to be the *same* world, not only different periods - the angel dude dialog implies this and it nicely papers over some things - but they share characters with presumably the same experiences.
It's kinda like two or three different writers couldn't agree if they were doing alternate worlds or a time travel plot.
That there is dialog implying that the events on the early part of the game repeat over reincarnations on other realities only makes it more confusing what's what. When the time paradoxes come into play at the end of the game i gave up.

edit: they probably are the same world, continuously destroyed (as the factory shows) - which 'works' for time travel and for the reveal that Myria is a reincarnation (but why amnesia at the start? Maybe i misread and she is actually *really* a 20 something that destroyed the world 3 years ago?).

Probably overthinking a trainwreck.

Nobody knows.

Hilarious. I'm going to think of it as the corpse of Leon forever after.

[close]

[etking]

I can confirm the reincarnation flower item box bug, even when a new game is started with 1.02. When you use a reincarnation flower which is stored in an item box, the screen goes black. Outside of an item box it works normally. Also when items are moved around between characters and item boxes heavily, the menu headline text 'items' gets replaced by random garbage.

I always use zsnes since it provides by far the best overall user experience and has all the advanced functions (1080p 16:9 stretched full screen, hq4x, auto ips patching when both files are zipped, support for many satellaview games) I need. Snes9x is OK, but zsnes provides a better overall compatibility for most RPG translations. For me, bsnes is unusable crap missing many critical features and the UI is just horrible. Maybe someone should port the bsnes engine to the zsnes interface since bsnes developers are focusing on 100% accuracy with 0% left for a comfortable, feature rich, high quality and easy to use UI.

Energy Breaker is fun, music and audio style is a lot like Lufia 2 and the story feels be a bit like Chrono Trigger. I usually do not play tactical RPGs but this one could be the first interesting title for me. Difficulty seems to be very hard, in my current party only the main character can deal significant damage, all other 3 party members learn spells very slowly and are almost useless as they cannot deal any real damage, what ever I try. I did not do any grinding and gave all stat changing items to the main character, maybe this is the reason.

I got bored by Romancing Saga 3 quickly and was running through all the endless fights in 10x fast forward automatic commander mode but this game seems to be a lot more fun to play. Thanks a lot for the great and high quality work.

And I fully agree that there should be absolutely no changes made to the game balancing and mechanics. 'Infinite' scrolls is not a bug.

[SCO]

Who said it was a bug? I just said it completely breaks combat in the most ridiculous fashion i can think off, and i would appreciate if there was a diff somewhere to disable that in-game cheat. The newgame+ turns on infinite stuff for everything anyway.
Heck, you're better off buying tornado and poison scrolls than equipment, it's that broken. If it was limited like most of everything else, you'd only use them for hard or a especially hard boss (instead of every one getting 4 poison drops and being killed on 2 turns).

Search your feelings, you will *use them* when you get to the hard bosses

[Trixar_za]

Search your feelings, you will *use them* when you get to the hard bosses

Duh, without tornado scrolls some of the later bosses really overkill your party, so it's more a feature than a bug if you ask me.

Also you pretty much let out that secret for everybody that didn't know about it...

[SCO]

Secret wat? It's right there in the open. Also i don't object to using them on the bosses, or even that you can use them more than once on each enemy (debatable). Just that it being infinite removes all the elements of resource management of the stuff.

[etking]

I also think that this trick is no big deal as you do not have to use this method. There are many different styles to play an RPG and some people including myself almost never use status changing spells and still make it through most of these games. And what do you mean with infinite, the lasting time or that you can buy an infinite number? I do not see a problem with this feature at all, it actually can help a lot to progress though the game without too much grinding. And if I would not have read about it here, I would never found out that this trick even exists.

Update: Just found another small bug, this time using snes9x. In the shop menu when heavily buying items and reading descriptions after some time the item name on the upper right corner gets filled with random garbage. snes9x supports direct 3d rendering so the bilinear filter used in zsnes direct draw can be disabled, resulting in a much sharper image combined with hq4x and 1080p resolution. However, translation and hack compatibility is much better in zsnes, many games have graphical issues such as missing elements with snes9x. I did not try bzsnes so far, the zsnes UI version of bsnes that seems to exist.

Update2: Another bug: this time i was unable to reproduce it for a second time: in the hospital floor, the talk menu showed 'aggressive-normal-C C C' instead of 'aggressive-normal-friendly-give'.

[SCO]

That happens all the time, the left-most conversation menu corrupts easily. Fortunately it doesn't seem to have any consequences and it's easy to reset.
One thing i think i noticed was that some shinny pebbles rewards seemed missing (from the walkthrough). I think it was the second time you fought the 'security system' in the past, the main cannon was missing a shinny pebble reward when destroyed (and it was destroyed, unlike some boss appendages, which can be skipped, because the cannon was the 'boss').

Also i think i never got a shiny pebble for the giving the pin or the toy to the girl on the past (whose grandmother died).

[Disnesquick]

I thought I had fixed that left conversation menu thing

I am gearing up for a final 1.1 release in about a month's time (given this project and delays that probably means 2022), taking care of all the reported bugs that are still in there. After the major stuff was done I didn't want to keep overloading RHDN staff with new releases every night, and I really needed a break from EB hacking.

I am in complete agreement that the game is too easy. I would like to take a stab at a hardtype version. For the moment I can only suggest going through the game without any scrolls. I guarantee that you will not have an easy time.

[sa♥tsu]

That happens all the time, the left-most conversation menu corrupts easily. Fortunately it doesn't seem to have any consequences and it's easy to reset.
One thing i think i noticed was that some shinny pebbles rewards seemed missing (from the walkthrough). I think it was the second time you fought the 'security system' in the past, the main cannon was missing a shinny pebble reward when destroyed (and it was destroyed, unlike some boss appendages, which can be skipped, because the cannon was the 'boss').

Also i think i never got a shiny pebble for the giving the pin or the toy to the girl on the past (whose grandmother died).

For the former, it might have been because the character who delivered the finishing hit had a full inventory. If your inventory is full, you don't get enemy drops.

[etking]

The discussion on gamefaqs also mentions some bugs, like a crash before the ending so that you cannot reach new game+, don't know if this is true yet. But maybe it has been reported and fixed already.

I do not think the game is too easy, only if you do a lot of grinding this is the case. But the character balancing could be better, Myra is just so much stronger than all the other characters. All in all, Energy Breaker seems to be a comparatively short but very good game.

[sa♥tsu]

The discussion on gamefaqs also mentions some bugs, like a crash before the ending so that you cannot reach new game+, don't know if this is true yet. But maybe it has been reported and fixed already.

I do not think the game is too easy, only if you do a lot of grinding this is the case. But the character balancing could be better, Myra is just so much stronger than all the other characters. All in all, Energy Breaker seems to be a comparatively short but very good game.

If you're participating in the discussion, I'd really appreciate it if you could encourage them to post a bug report on our message board!
http://yuudachi.net/bbs/

You can easily post screenshots and save files there.

[SCO]

For the former, it might have been because the character who delivered the finishing hit had a full inventory. If your inventory is full, you don't get enemy drops.

The second might have been because it's actually possible to give the items to the girl before the topic actually comes up on the rightmost menu... a easy mistake to make in the pin case, because after all... she's obviously the girl the grandmother mentioned.

Found  your hidden text, nice retrospective.

[Disnesquick]

Found  your hidden text, nice retrospective.

I'm glad our little egg didn't go unseen!

[etking]

Just want to report a new bug:

I sold the item you get for 10 shiny pebbles by accident in Pioneer town and wanted to buy it back. But now every time I open the item shop menu and press left or right to go to another page of items, first I get blue text and then the whole screen shows garbage until I restart the emulator. Even after a reset I get a black screen after the intro. This bug might stop me from being able to continue playing the game.

srm file: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B-Yp9BvE77tibVIyRU1EaW84RVU

Update: after continuing with the storyline, the bug is now gone and I was able to buy back the item.

[travel27]

I finished this on the 8th.  As for hacking and translation, really top notch.  There were some really funny parts, as well as shocking and sad.  The game itself, outside of a few battles here and there, was easy.  Music was amazing.   I did not like the first 30 minutes or so.  The learning curve is steeper than a lot of other games of its genre in some respects.  But once you really get it, the middle 50% of the game is amazing (25-75% parts).  The last 20-25% gets a little tedious however.

Now, I do not like hacks of games where the author adds things.  But with that said, if you do a new version, I kindly ask that you just add an NPC, perhaps in the bar or in that girls house (can't remember her name) and during one of the key early parts of the game, the character can direct you to that NPC...who..will explain some basic mechanics of the game, such as magic and negative/positive as I do not recall coming across this, but would have been nice to know.