Excalibur, Herald, Gigas...the blade has had many names

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Thad
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Excalibur, Herald, Gigas...the blade has had many names

Postby Thad » Fri Apr 01, 2022 4:24 pm

Decided to give the first Mana game another shot. I've tried all three versions at one time or another and never gotten very far, but maybe this'll be the time.

I looked over various comparisons and this seems to be the consensus on the three versions:

Final Fantasy Adventure: Shows its age in ways that are both appealing and not-so-appealing. The graphics and sound have a retro charm, but the mechanical limitations can be frustrating, and the localization is from era when paying for translator who know basic mechanic of English language was considered the waste of money.

Sword of Mana: Mechanically the most modern version of the game (though it's nearly 20 years old at this point) but consensus seems to be that it suffers from a ponderous script and new bolted-on systems that kind of drag the whole thing down, and while the graphics are gorgeous they suffer from some glitches and less-than-impressive animation.

Adventures of Mana: Mostly a fresh coat of paint on the original Game Boy version. Some modest mechanical improvements.

I started the Game Boy version, died about ten minutes in, saw that I hadn't saved and would have to go back through the opening again, and figured nah.

Then I decided I'd give Adventures another shot. I've got the Android version and considered maybe hooking an old phone up to my TV for playing games on. I might still do that, but I decided to go with the Vita version instead. And then I played a few minutes and had to go do something else. But the main thing I was struck by in the opening minutes was how solid the localization was -- I'd just played through the beginning of FFA and so it was clear that this was a new translation of the same old script, but, like, good. It's got that kind of faux-literary English style that Tom Slattery used in FF4DS and FFT:WotL. (I don't know who did the AoM localization as I can't find credits offhand. I'm pretty sure it's not actually Slattery's work given that he left SE like six years before it was released, but it reminds me of the style he used on those two games.)

I've owned this game for 30 years. Maybe someday I'll get more than 30 minutes into it.

Meanwhile: I also grabbed the Trials of Mana remake in the recent Steam/Humble sale and started that. Picked Hawkeye as my main and Riesz and Kevin as my other party members. Got as far as the occupied town. Runs well overall; some framerate stuttering if I set the cap at 60Hz, and tearing if I set it to 120. I should really figure out how to get VRR working on my living room setup; my receiver should do passthrough but it doesn't seem to work quite right; GNOME gives me a different set of resolution options when it's going through the receiver (max 1920x1080 60Hz or 3840x2160 30Hz) than when it's hooked directly to the TV (max 1920x1080 120Hz or 3840x2160 60Hz), and I've tested the cables and it's not them, so IDKWTF.

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Re: Excalibur, Herald, Gigas...the blade has had many names

Postby Thad » Mon Apr 04, 2022 12:50 pm

I like Adventures but man some of the oldschool design bits are annoying. It's at least increased your inventory size from the Game Boy version, but it still saddles you with a limited inventory and dungeons that require consumable items to progress. The way it handles this is sub-Zelda; the required items are never dropped (like bombs in Zelda) or placed around the dungeon (like keys in Zelda); if you run out you have to leave the dungeon, find a shop, and buy more.

Also there's a line about how breakable walls make a different sound when you strike them with your weapon and AFAICT it's a straight-up lie. I don't hear any difference between striking a breakable wall and striking a regular one (though they do look a little different). Course, it's possible I can't hear the difference because the music's too loud to hear the sound effects; there are sliders to adjust their relative volume levels but I don't think they actually do anything; I suspect whoever ported the game to Vita forgot to wire them up.

I like the sound effects overall but they're kind of a curious mix of the original Game Boy sounds, SNES sounds from the sequel, and new sounds. It's a really inconsistent soundscape. But I guess that's pretty common in SE ports and sequels; Dragon Quest 11 still uses the NES sound effects with pretty minor variations.

IDK, I kinda like Adventures but it's vexing; there are a lot of little papercuts that should have been tweaked (shit like having to equip a key item to progress when there's no damn reason why it shouldn't just activate if you have it in your inventory) and I kinda wonder if, despite its flaws, maybe I should try Sword and see if that version is more to my taste.

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Re: Excalibur, Herald, Gigas...the blade has had many names

Postby Thad » Mon Apr 04, 2022 9:45 pm

Thad wrote:I like Adventures but man some of the oldschool design bits are annoying. It's at least increased your inventory size from the Game Boy version, but it still saddles you with a limited inventory and dungeons that require consumable items to progress. The way it handles this is sub-Zelda; the required items are never dropped (like bombs in Zelda) or placed around the dungeon (like keys in Zelda); if you run out you have to leave the dungeon, find a shop, and buy more.

I was wrong! Picks and keyrings do appear as drops; I just had bad luck with the RNG on the first cave.

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Re: Excalibur, Herald, Gigas...the blade has had many names

Postby Thad » Mon Apr 04, 2022 11:29 pm

And I did find one weapon that reacts differently to destructible walls. It doesn't actually make a different sound, but the chain whip will, counterintuitively, go right through solid walls but bounce off destructible ones.

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Re: Excalibur, Herald, Gigas...the blade has had many names

Postby Thad » Thu May 05, 2022 12:14 pm

Still playing Adventures. Various stray thoughts about its rough edges:

Shit Zelda Already did right that this game should have done even in the original GB version:

There should be clear delineation on what a closed door is. You know how you can tell at a glance in Zelda whether a door is something you can walk right through, something that's shut and you have to open by satisfying some condition (kill all enemies, push a block, etc.), or locked and requires a key.

If you see a shut door in Adventures of Mana, it could be any one of those fucking things. The only way to find out is to walk right up to it. If you can walk through it without losing a key, it's just a regular passage, and fuck knows why they put a closed-door graphic on it in the first goddamn place. If you can't walk through it but there's no message, then there's something you have to do to open it. And if it's locked, if you approach it without a keyring equipped it'll give you an error, but if you approach it with a keyring equipped you'll walk right through it and lose a key.

Now, presumably in the original GB version there was a lot more "walk into the door, see an error message that it's locked, equip a key, walk through it," because there were only two buttons and you could only equip one item or spell at a time. In the mobile/Vita remake, you can equip four, so I just keep a keyring equipped, because I don't fucking want to go to a menu, equip a keyring, walk through a door, go to a menu, and equip something else every single time I encounter a locked door.

The downside is that since you lose keys automatically if you walk into a locked door, without any kind of "are you sure?" prompt, it can be easy not to notice you're losing keys. Again, this problem would be solved by having a specific "locked door" graphic, but it's exacerbated by another problem, bringing me to the next thing:

Unlocking a door, or picking open a passage, should be permanent. But it isn't! If you walk a few screens, it'll reset. That's some bullshit! If I decide I want to backtrack, I shouldn't have to use a consumable item to open something I've already fucking opened!

So those are the problems that were already solved before the game was released, and shouldn't have been in the GB version in the first place. On to...

Shit that takes its cues from Zelda, so it was understandable in the original GB version, but really should have been fixed in the remake:

Enemies spawn slightly after you enter a screen. So you pretty much have to move over a screen and pause at the entrance until they spawn, or there's a pretty good chance one will spawn right on top of you. It doesn't take long to get the rhythm down, but it's bullshit and should have been fixed.

Enemies also spawn more or less like they do in Zelda -- which is to say that there's a pre-set selection of enemies you might encounter on any given screen, and a random subset will spawn when you enter the screen. If you leave and come back without killing them all, you'll get another random subset, whereas if you kill them all and then leave and come back, the screen will be empty and enemies won't spawn again there until you've moved a certain number of screens and come back.

The problem: yesterday I hit a room where I had to turn two enemies into snowmen and then push them onto switches. Except the first time I went into the room, only one enemy spawned. I assumed I could freeze one, push him onto one switch, and then go stand on the other myself; that turned out to be wrong, you need a snowman on each switch.

But turning him into a snowman counted as a kill. I had killed all the monsters in the room. So when I left and came back, there were no monsters there and I had to fuck around for awhile until they started spawning again. And, between accidentally killing snowmen or accidentally pushing them into the bottom edge of the screen so I couldn't get them to the switches, it took me several more tries before I finally got through; I could easily have accidentally cleared the room again and had to go wander around until they were ready to respawn, but this time I was careful not to even try unless there were at least 3 monsters in the room so I could leave one of them alive. (Which of course means I get to push snowmen around the room while getting shot in the face by a third enemy I can't fight back against.)

This would be trivial to fix! Just set the rooms that require n snowmen to complete to spawn at least n monsters (who are vulnerable to Snowman status), and then exempt those rooms from the "enemies stop spawning if you kill them all" rule until the door is open.

On the whole I stand by my decision to play this version of the game over the others (I tried Sword of Mana and it was one of those fun early-2000s RPGs where you have to sit through like 15 minutes of self-serious cutscenes before you get to fucking do anything), but man, I can definitely think of some ways it could be better, and I don't just mean the mediocre graphics.

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Re: Excalibur, Herald, Gigas...the blade has had many names

Postby Thad » Sat May 07, 2022 6:00 pm

Thad wrote:it took me several more tries before I finally got through; I could easily have accidentally cleared the room again and had to go wander around until they were ready to respawn

Apparently that's what actually happened. On restoring from my save, I discovered that I hadn't actually gotten past that room, I'd just said "fuck this" and quit.

I did eventually get past it, but it took a whole lot of leaving and immediately re-entering the room until I got the correct selection of enemies to spawn, and a lot of additional leaving the room when I accidentally killed one of the ones I needed to not kill. (I did eventually figure out that the ones who weren't vulnerable to Snowman were vulnerable to Sleep, so that helped, at least.)

What a stupid fucking room. Seriously, there's no excuse for not fixing that in a remake if it's even slightly not just a straight port. Which this one isn't! It maintains most of the mechanics from the original game, but it changes some of them, and damn-well should have changed this one!

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Re: Excalibur, Herald, Gigas...the blade has had many names

Postby Thad » Wed May 18, 2022 3:21 pm

Finished up Adventures; played some of Trials.

It's a good thing I'm not trying SoM at this point because I'd have to decide whether I want to play the SAP retranslation, the Relocalized hack, SoM: Turbo...

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Re: Excalibur, Herald, Gigas...the blade has had many names

Postby Thad » Sun May 29, 2022 2:21 am

You know, I have a hunch that Kevin the beast-child and his wolf pup Karl would have probably had their names changed if this game had been localized in the '90s.

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Re: Excalibur, Herald, Gigas...the blade has had many names

Postby Friday » Thu Jun 16, 2022 8:58 am

Adventures is such a weird game, filled with so much jank but also so much charm. I can't hate it, and I even like it a bit. But man some of the design choices are like "what were you even thinking here" and that's not even counting hardware limitations.

I actually feel somewhat similar about Secret of Mana. A game with extremely janky combat mechanics and probably the most charm ever stuffed into a game, bursting with vibrant colors and equally colorful and striking music. It's a shame that the computer controlled party member AI is not much more advanced than the AI in Adventures, but then again, that's what 2p or 3p mode is for.

I've gotten about 50% of the way through SD3, and I really think it fixes a lot of the combat jank present in SoM. And it too has a lot of charm and color. But for whatever reason, I always lose steam and wander off at about the halfway mark. Dunno why.
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Re: Excalibur, Herald, Gigas...the blade has had many names

Postby Thad » Thu Jun 16, 2022 12:36 pm

Friday wrote:Secret of Mana. A game with extremely janky combat mechanics

Yeah, I'm kinda curious to try out the hack that removes the stamina bar and lets you (and enemies) just repeatedly attack at full-strength.

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