The One Thing that they could improve in the game...

[Dungeon Explorer Levender]

...better enemies in combats.

The combat in most of the game is easy - give a better AI to enemies, the same basica abilities that we can use (Lunge, Throw, etc), and the game is perfect.

Anything else you would like to see improved from the original?

[Karv3r]

There's actually a romhack for the original game called Combat Redux that greatly increases the difficulty by removing stunlocking and increasing enemy speed and damage. I wonder if we'd be able to somehow mod the remaster in a similar fashion.

[Kao the Space Cow]

The combat in the game is by far one of it's biggest short comings. Would like to see some improvements there, but this looks like a very simple remaster so I wouldn't hold your breath.

[Soulmancer]

With the game shark I did use codes to disable the stunlock and also enable hyper mode for combat.

But yah the difficulty and AI is some of the saddest I ever experienced in a mana game.

[Wolfdoggie]

someone made a difficulty mod for trials of mana I'm sure there'll be one for this too.

played the hell outa this game as a kid and it's one of my favorites but nightmare mode I always found to still be too easy.

[Elegnaim]

Originally posted by Karv3r:

There's actually a romhack for the original game called Combat Redux that greatly increases the difficulty by removing stunlocking and increasing enemy speed and damage. I wonder if we'd be able to somehow mod the remaster in a similar fashion.

Yo, that's my thing :V

So what killed my interest in developing that further on the PS1 version is that the US release of LoM had some bugs that weren't present in the Japanese version afaik, like produce not conveying the right personalities to pets. I think enemy level scaling was also changed in the US version, so enemies were always a little underleveled. I'm also under the impression some of the weapon... stats? essences? whatever don't do the right things in the US version.

And then there's that bug that let's you cancel out of the cooldown period on using a plunge if you hit one of the shoulder buttons with... either no technique equipped, or no technique charged?

Anyway, assuming those bugs get fixed in the remaster -- and I'm kind of assuming they won't be -- I'd maybe be interested in taking a look at porting my changes over, although one of the problems is that... was basically hacking the executable and I have no idea if doing that would get me DMCA'd/cause the copy protection to freak out or something :S

Also that was five or six years ago and I don't remember how exactly I reverse engineered some of that stuff.

If the enemy data's in a more screw-around-with-able format in the remaster, I could see getting the faster enemy thing in place at least.

--

Outlining what I'd want to do with it, the goal wasn't really making the game *hard* per se, just make it so enemies can actually... get attacks in on the player or force them to move around a little.

- I wouldn't remove hitstun, but instead I'd drop the player into cooldown if they stopped a quick attack combo short. Hitstun's really exploitable because you can just quickly repeat the first one or two quick attacks without really going into the full combo.

- Make enemies move farther with each step (in lieu of fixing the AI, this did seem to improve their ability to target the player).

- Greatly reduce the amount of time bosses wait while broadcasting that they're going to do a major attack.

- Speed up enemy attacks in general (not sure if this one's viable. It seemed like it was tied to the number of frames in the attack animation, so fixing it would... involve cutting out a bunch of frames of animation or something?)

- Possibly up enemy damage/increase the enemy level scaling rate (if I'm right about the US level scaling being bugged, and that gets fixed, this might not be an issue anymore?)

[Kinasin]

Originally posted by Elegnaim:

Originally posted by Karv3r:

There's actually a romhack for the original game called Combat Redux that greatly increases the difficulty by removing stunlocking and increasing enemy speed and damage. I wonder if we'd be able to somehow mod the remaster in a similar fashion.

Yo, that's my thing :V

So what killed my interest in developing that further on the PS1 version is that the US release of LoM had some bugs that weren't present in the Japanese version afaik, like produce not conveying the right personalities to pets. I think enemy level scaling was also changed in the US version, so enemies were always a little underleveled. I'm also under the impression some of the weapon... stats? essences? whatever don't do the right things in the US version.

And then there's that bug that let's you cancel out of the cooldown period on using a plunge if you hit one of the shoulder buttons with... either no technique equipped, or no technique charged?

Anyway, assuming those bugs get fixed in the remaster -- and I'm kind of assuming they won't be -- I'd maybe be interested in taking a look at porting my changes over, although one of the problems is that... was basically hacking the executable and I have no idea if doing that would get me DMCA'd/cause the copy protection to freak out or something :S

Also that was five or six years ago and I don't remember how exactly I reverse engineered some of that stuff.

If the enemy data's in a more screw-around-with-able format in the remaster, I could see getting the faster enemy thing in place at least.

--

Outlining what I'd want to do with it, the goal wasn't really making the game *hard* per se, just make it so enemies can actually... get attacks in on the player or force them to move around a little.

- I wouldn't remove hitstun, but instead I'd drop the player into cooldown if they stopped a quick attack combo short. Hitstun's really exploitable because you can just quickly repeat the first one or two quick attacks without really going into the full combo.

- Make enemies move farther with each step (in lieu of fixing the AI, this did seem to improve their ability to target the player).

- Greatly reduce the amount of time bosses wait while broadcasting that they're going to do a major attack.

- Speed up enemy attacks in general (not sure if this one's viable. It seemed like it was tied to the number of frames in the attack animation, so fixing it would... involve cutting out a bunch of frames of animation or something?)

- Possibly up enemy damage/increase the enemy level scaling rate (if I'm right about the US level scaling being bugged, and that gets fixed, this might not be an issue anymore?)

That would be amazing if you made this!!!!!!

[Chad "The King" ThunderCuck]

Originally posted by Elegnaim:

Originally posted by Karv3r:

There's actually a romhack for the original game called Combat Redux that greatly increases the difficulty by removing stunlocking and increasing enemy speed and damage. I wonder if we'd be able to somehow mod the remaster in a similar fashion.

Yo, that's my thing :V

So what killed my interest in developing that further on the PS1 version is that the US release of LoM had some bugs that weren't present in the Japanese version afaik, like produce not conveying the right personalities to pets. I think enemy level scaling was also changed in the US version, so enemies were always a little underleveled. I'm also under the impression some of the weapon... stats? essences? whatever don't do the right things in the US version.

wrong. produce gives the same personality changes in both the US and japanese version, the problem is that all the guides online use the official strategy guide for all the information on such things, and said strategy guide was wrong on many occasions due to the fact that it was machine translated from the japanese version of the strategy guide. enemy level scaling was also the same, its just so convoluted in how it works that its very difficult to get enemies to outscale your level, because you have to do certain quests early, like the tower of leires first quest, and some quests actually decrease the worlds levels. as for the cards, its unlikely that they are bugged or dummied, but rather that nobody ever found the hidden combinations you have to do to actually get effects, once again because the process of doing so is so convoluted that youd have to try out literally millions of combinations to figure it all out. there are quite a few cards which have an unknown effect and nobody knows how to even get them on equipment, and like most of the cards ONLY have their effect if you have the correct combination on the gear, so cheating in the cards dosent add the effect, just the cards. and once again, because all the guides online just copy/paste information from one another, which just so happens to be the same information from the official strategy guide, which while it was a big guide, didnt have much actual information in it because it was written by a third party not affiliated with the game in any way, and because they would have to try out millions of combinations to actually figure it out.