As a disclaimer, I’ve played the game using the ‘complete’ edition of the romhack (the Refined+Rebalanced patch) to better experience the changes made to the game.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, this is the ultimate way to play Super Hydlide for the Genesis for anyone remotely interested in the game. Even with just the refined part, the game is much more understandable by itself alone without having to rely on an external guide to be able to know where to go next or how to progress, as well as understanding what your stats do, and what items you have.

The Rebalanced part is where the romhack shines. Most of the changes were shifted towards making the game less tedious or grinding, things such as reducing the inn cost to $100 per night rather than $1000, or making hunger hurt 50% less, encumbrance only slow you down 50% as much as before, and higher base carry capacity. There’s more changes but I’ll not go into them specifically since they’re listed in the file bundles with the romhack. These balancing changes really help the game’s fun factor as it means you need to spend less time mindlessly grinding monsters for XP and cash due to the adjusted prices and rewards. I was also able to beat Varalys without needing to do the 100 Karma light collecting due to just being properly equipped and highly leveled.

NOTE: The biggest change from the rebalanced part is the speed fix during the dragon and Kaizack encounters, meaning you will not be able to cheese them the way most speedrunners or guides will recommend, and the only way to do them is strategy, leveling, and using proper equipment for your character. There is currently an overleveling bug that can make the fight with Kaizack close to impossible to beat. For me it was as a lv.22 Monk, but this might not occur on a different class character. My only advice is to try to beat Kaizack about the time when your healthbar is pretty much full in the UI, meaning it didn’t scale yet, so anywhere before lv.20. I want to thank the romhack developer Mentil for helping me after I’ve encountered this problem!

I recommend this hack to anyone wanting to give this someone innovative game a chance, it makes the experience that much better. Outside of that one problem I encountered with the Kaizack boss due to overleveling, this pretty much is the best way to experience this game!