[xenophile]

I woke up yesterday, looked over my todo list for this hack, and thought "maybe today is a good day to ship it?" (Well, I got it out a day later, but not too bad!?)

https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/6052/

This patch swaps Sumo's graphics with Amanda's, and vice versa. Pronouns for each character have been replaced (or eliminated). The amount of stress the game's script put on the hero being young did not read well after these changes (but really did it ever?) so the only character who refers to you as "girl" is a villain.

For the most part I have tried to avoid making changes to the translation--especially for things relating to the NPC.

I have play-tested this patch to the ending, and have pretty high confidence in my text changes, but there are three frames of animation for the main character that I have been unable to find any use of. I have not replaced these, but have drawn crude Xs over them to make them more obvious. I am really hoping someone finds them and sends me a good report/screenshot of where they are used. Of course, it is possible they may never actually get used.

I consider this to be about a version 0.9. The version 1.0 release will have quite a few optional patches included--currently I have 27 patches sitting around, but I intend to join many of them together. These will include an alternate name of "Duke" for the NPC, a fully gender neutral patch for the main character, and another round of tweaks for the "Amanda" graphics.

This is my first (released) rom hack which is one reason I decided to release before every last pixel was completely tweaked. So I could get feedback before I decide it's done. (I'm a fricken' noob here, but release early release often?)

Last but not least, thank you to Tomato for the Final Fantasy Adventure and Seiken Densetsu ROM hacking notes: https://www.romhacking.net/documents/804/
July 15, 2021, 01:33:35 am - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)Been trying to focus on getting a 1.0 done, but scope-creep is a hard battle to fight. Spent a while in the debugger today and came out with a one byte (hardly tested) QoL patch: 016-CBC-F7E Faster text display. You're welcome.

[xenophile]

First off, I did release a 1.0: FFA Gender Swap with a some fixes and improvements. With that my original todo list was complete, but todo lists only ever seem to grow over time (never shrink). It's been more than four months since then and as of today I have another patch ready (for me) to test.

Changes:
* Behind the scenes I'm now working from a (very) rough disassembly.
* Optionally change the "Girl" companion character to be gender neutral. Also optionally replace with a Moogle (literally no one asked for this).
* This time I'll be testing with my new EverDrive GB X5 on my new Game Boy Advance and my old Game Boy DMG!
* Fix the Heal bug!
* Fix the Moogle item being unusable when moogled. Internally the Heal spell and Unicorn item are both obviously meant to cure Moog so I made them both functional as well.
* Fix (bad for the player half) the Nectar bug:

Due to a bug, Nectar doesn't work until you pause (e.g. to equip Cure), and it also won't go away until you pause.

Heal curing Moog will obviously affect difficulty. I think it's obvious that the Moogle item should cure Moog (but that might not make it useful enough to keep on hand), and it seems sensible for Unicorn to cure Moog as well... but the Heal spell may now be OP--I know I'll be spamming it during my next play-through. I am considering whether to make an optional patch to re-nerf Heal. I'm curious if anyone has any opinions on this? (Yeah, I should find a Mana Series forum to ask on as well, but I haven't yet.)

Another change I made for testing is to switch the mapper from the (pretty weird) MBC2 to the more reasonable MBC1. I am assuming that all emulators and all flash boards that support MBC2 also support MBC1, and MBC5? I don't see a reason to release a patch to change the mapper until I either need to expand the rom (using MBC1?), or I want to play with Gameboy Color double-speed CPU mode (using MBC5?). I keep wondering if I'm missing any factors for or against changing mappers.