ROM Hacks: Ys III Rebalanced Released for Genesis

[RHDNBot]

Update By: mentil

Once again, Mentil has released a balance hack for a late-80s ARPG. When will the madness end?! (Psst, at least three more games are on the docket.) This hack was made in ten days, incidentally.

As the final port (in its era) of a 1989 game, the Genesis version is oft considered the superior version... aside from its notoriously unfair difficulty and poor translation. This hack aims to rectify the former.

Primary balance changes:

• The player getting hit now grants 25 invincibility frames rather than 10; each mistake is now less likely to get you hit more than once.
  [li]Enemies now grant 6x the gold and XP in the early game; once reaching an area where you should be about halfway to the level cap, this drops to 2x. One should reach the recommended level for each area by the time one arrives, with almost no grinding required, if one slays every monster in one's path.
• Many enemies and bosses have had their damage output reduced to more-reasonable levels, with boss adjustments undergoing greater playtesting. The final boss got particular attention and should be far less frustrating to fight.
• Each enemy defeated now grants 3 ring points instead of 1, making rings more useful without frequent recharges in town.

If you have a disdain for Engrish, try this with the compatible hack Ys III Renewal by Plombo, which also includes some graphical improvements.

RHDN Project Page

Relevant Link

[kikujade]

Hello

I couldn't get the rom to work after combining it with the renewal patch, I checked the CRC first.

Kega fusion says bad checksum, how do you fix it after applying both patches?

****EDIT****

nevermind, fixed it using https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/342/

sorry for not googling first

[jabedoben]

Good stuff.

Any chance this would be possible to do with the TurboCD version?

[mentil]

Any chance this would be possible to do with the TurboCD version?

I imagine it is, but my understanding is that version is balanced differently (e.g. boss attack patterns, XP required for each level), so the effort would have to be redone from scratch, particularly since all the addresses in ROM (and likely RAM) would be different. I've never done a Turbografx hack, so I'm unsure how good the debugging tools are.

Watching a video, it doesn't seem like the voice acting or cutscenes are good enough to offset the jankier animation and less accurate/canonical translation (at least compared to the Renewal hack.) I think I'll let someone else hack that version.

[Idkbutlike2]

Ah, Ys III - the game that nearly killed Falcom as company. Glad Oath in Felghana and hacks like this help remedy its rather shitty legacy.

[vanfanel]

Are you guys sure this is compatible with Renewal? I applied Renewal and this one to the right ROM according to it's CRC, I have applied both patches in the two possibe orders, fixed the CRC with UCON64, and still I get a black screen.

[mentil]

After some experimentation, I tried the app linked by kikujade and it turns out the ROM size stated in the header isn't modified by the Renewal hack (even though the ROM is expanded). My hack, of course, doesn't fix this. Some emulators take issue with this if auto-fix-checksum is turned off. Some Genesis checksum-fixing programs (like GenRomSuite) don't check for/correct the ROM size, so if the program you used didn't seem to fix it, try the one linked by kikujade.

I actually developed this hack with a ROM already patched with Renewal; only when I was done did I make an IPS, test that it worked with an unpatched ROM, fix the header, and create a new IPS that'd give the correct header when applied to an unpatched ROM. The order the patches are applied in doesn't matter. I'll let Plombo know about fixing the ROM size in the header.