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

[xenophile]

Very exciting.

Thanks!

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.

Nope! While they banked on the Final Fantasy name in both America and Japan, and borrowed heavily from it (mostly things it had already borrowed), the Mana series lore very quickly diverged. My goal is to pull in elements from that lore (especially from Secret of Mana and Seiken Densetsu 3) where appropriate and reduce ties to Final Fantasy.

Given that this is a question I get a lot (along with "why don't you remove the [religious] censorship?"), I'm happy to advise on how to hack it yourself, if you want to get into it.

[xenophile]

New version up! Behind the scenes there have been pretty major changes.

First up, credit where credit is due, Dagmor pulled off the impossible for an impressive new status bar layout. If you look close you'll see that the HP numbers don't obey the 8x8 grid. They are all being generated on the fly as your HP changes. It takes a fairly large chunk of custom assembly to make this look this good. It also means the SELECT menu doesn't anything sticking out from under it. I'm really impressed by this, but then I'm a geek.

Only a bit smaller, Dagmor also raised the Lucre (money) limit from 65535 up to 99999! In practice, you'll never need that much money, but it's likely you'll hit even that higher number before you complete your quest, and its odd to look down and see 65535 over and over.

Finally, yes, I contributed to this release as well (and not just by nitpicking Dagmor's code). In addition to my usual bug fixing (some of which I caused myself, but who's counting?), I finally broke down and expanded the ROM, doubling the amount of space available. In addition to making space for bigger assembly changes like those I already mentioned, it allowed space for a feature I've been thinking about for a while.

You see, this game has 15 "maps" (that may seem like a small number, but there are more than one thousand rooms spread between those 16), but only four distinct background tile sets, so no map get its own tile set.

For the cave and house tile set that's not so bad--in fact, they have some room to spare.

For the town tile set, things are pretty cramped (it has an airship and some large trees wedged into it).

The overworld, though? The overworld also has to share its tile set with another map, and there were definitely some compromises made, so I set out to add another tile set just for the overworld.

This allowed a lot of improvements that never would have been possible otherwise (to both maps!), starting with the swamp sections where the swamp texture no longer ends in blocky jagged hard edges before it meets the mountains. While the swamp was the most obvious (and required me to create custom tiles), after that I took advantage of this to bring grass, sand, and rubble closer to cliffs and oceans, make improvements to shadows, bring clouds to clear skies, and generally touch up lots of things.

Once again, these changes make things more vibrant and alive without it being obvious that anything has actually changed. Exactly the same game, but better.

[flamepanther]

I don't know whether this is worth any consideration at all (probably not), but my modified Super Game Boy 2 firmware automatically loads palette 4-C if a game's internal name is "SEIKEN DENSETSU". It's not the same as the official palette 4-C (all of mine are custom). And the colors aren't meant to be directly representative of anything in the game--just something I found aesthetically pleasing, and my preferred choice after trying the other custom palettes I'd made.

So it's probably of no consequence, but since these hacks likely would interact in that one minor way, I figured a heads-up was still appropriate.

https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/6449/

[xenophile]

My modified Super Game Boy 2 firmware automatically loads palette 4-C if a game's internal name is "SEIKEN DENSETSU".

https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/6449/

Thanks for reaching out! I've changed the internal name to "FFA-->LOTMS" in order to trigger a default palette in the GBC firmware, so changing it back to "SEIKEN DENSETSU" isn't something I can do without making a pretty large sacrifice.

Do you have room for more matches? Would you be willing to add a match for "FFA-->LOTMS"? Would you mind showing off a screenshot?