Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls: Final Fantasy I DoS Maeson

Like other hacks of this author, FF1 DoS Maeson makes an extensive number of tweaks to a game he has played more than a fair number of times, in order to get a different experience from it.

The overall changes are these:

* First of all, this Hack is based on Kea's own work: The http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3459/ Hack, which reintroduces the Spell Charge system from the NES/PS1/WS releases.

Further changes were made to the Vancian System to gel well with this Hack, such as MP Progression, MP Limits, the strength of MP-restoring Items and such. Classes that gain Spells upon promotion gain MP from the very beginning, albeit slowly, to make their new casting abilities useful right when they promote.

* The original DoS had the Experience curve of the PS1 Easy Mode, making it so you grew in Levels too fast. Thus, it slows down the curve and brought back the original Level 50 Limit. The Level progression is not as slow as the NES/PS1 versions, though.

* Original DoS had you reach much higher Levels, but Monster Stats stood the same, making an already big gap even bigger. Modified Monsters to be stronger, and some have new tricks, different resistances and such. Enemy drops also changed substantially.

* This results in an overall more challenging game, putting some focus on the use of the elemental protection Spells, a mechanic that the author finds rather important on this particular title, to deal with Bosses specially. Shields also are useful for this.

* Tweaked Weapons in an attempt to make the different types more or less equally useful. Daggers grant Evasion and hold great Accuracy, granting extra Hits at the cost of Power; while Axes have great Power and even raise HP of the wielder but their heavy nature makes them not too accurate and have an Evasion penalty.

* Tweaked Defensive Gear with the same intention. Gloves, specifically, have been altered to be less exclusive, and offer bonuses so you may want to swap between them depending on the situation.

* Rather large tweaks to Spells. A number of redundant Spells have been changed for new stuff. Status Effect Spells have been improved, damaging Spells scale in power much better than before, and some new Utility Spells have been added. Monster skills have also suffered tweaks.

* New elements are used. Earth is something more than another way of inflicting Death now. Poison and Mind are also damaging elements that you and your enemies can use. Resistances and Weaknesses were changed accordingly.

* Tweaked Stat Growths, Spell availability and Equipment availability of each Class. Class roles are more or less the same, but offer a bit more versatility.

* Shops and Treasure chests throughout the main adventure have been tweaked in order to give better things at better points of the story. Shop prices are generally higher, so there's a higher importance in how to manage your money. MP-restoring Items are no longer purchasable, for example.

* Dawn of Souls dungeons had their random chests changed. Monsters there offer no Experience, in order to not derail Level progression with the main game, but offer Gil and useful Items. Bosses have received hefty changes, and their rewards too, now being more useful and worth seeking.

* Certain other aspects have been tweaked. Random Encounter Ratio has been lowered a tad, a cap has been imposed on the extra Attack and Defense you can get from Spells and how Haste works has been changed too, in order to avoid exploits. The way Physical damage scales throughout the game has changed because of it, there's less focus on raw Defense on enemies in order to balance better Magic VS Physical damage. Intelligence is a lot more important now for damaging Spells.

Text has been edited accordingly for all the changes made to the above.

The hack has been updated to version 1.3c. Changes are as follows:

* Added an optional patch that reverts the Maximum Level from 50 to 99. Experience curve, Stat gains and such have been altered. This was added only for those that, for some reason, want to grind beyond of what would be necessary.

* Fixed a mistake in one of the floors in Earthgift Shrine, now it can be played normally.

* The Mage Staff now casts Confuse, Wizard's Staff now casts Fira. The power of Fira and Blizzara when cast through equipment has been slightly lowered.

* A couple of Treasure Chests' on Mt. Duergar had their content swapped, made minor tweaks to a handful of Monsters. Several typos fixed.

Changes made since the first release:

* Garland now always drops a Weapon as a reward.

* The Scourge Spell from the Black Robe now acts as a less powerful version of the original, like other Spell Effect equipment. Scourge no longer can be learnt by Black Mage, now it needs to promote to Black Wizard to be able to learn it.

* Turbo Ethers no longer exist. In their place, Silver Bags have been created, Items you can find from some monsters and can be sold for a moderate amount of Gil.

* Ninja had its HP slightly increased on late Levels.

* Four Fiend rematches grant higher experience.

* Crystal Equipment got a slight increase in Defense. Several Gloves got reworked, including Stats, which Classes can use it, and descriptions. And a couple of weapons were adjusted. Because of these two changes, a few Chests were changed.

* Fixed a small issue with a shop showing Phoenix Down twice.

* Equipment that Casts damaging Spells got changed. Multi-Targeting Spell effects like the Mage's Staff now have a weaker version of the real Spell, for example.

* The encounter ratio of some dungeon floors got lowered, like the Cavern of Earth L1, Mount Gulg L2, and some Soul Dungeon floors.

It was also added an optional patch with a few more Magic Charges for Levels 1 to 4, mostly intended for not very balanced or, simply put, more gimmicky party setups.

In Version 1.3b, the hack has been updated to reflect a couple of fixes for the Vancian System developed by Kea.

In version 1.3c, a number of incorrect descriptions were fixed, a few mistakes on optional patches were fixed and numerous corrections made to the readme.


This Hack is also compatible with Kea's "http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/2958/
" and "http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/5685/".


A few optional patches were added. One lowers slightly the difficulty of the Hack, in case it proves too much for some people. Another extends a bit the HP of Bosses a bit. The third is a palette edit to make the Ninja red-colored again.

Final Fantasy II got some very small changes, but it's not the focus of this project, though. With that said, attached to its readme there's a small number of Rom Hacking related information, as that portion of this collection has very little information out there.

There's the usual large Readme on the package detailing lots of stuff.


o------------o
|Installation|
o------------o

Very simple process, really. It's an IPS Patch, so you
need something like Lunar IPS and a clean US rom.

You grab the Main Patch and apply it to the Rom with
a tool such as Lunar IPS, and you're done.

This hack is compatible with two other Hacks made by
other people, these being:

Kea's "Unrunnable Battle Notifications", which will
warn you when you won't be able to run from a specific
battle (like from Piscodemons, or Bosses).

http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/2958/

And Rabite's Improved Equipment Viewer, which is also
great and offers a much, much better way of seeing
equipments specific stats (by "using" the equipment
on the Items menu).

http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/5685/

I totally recommend using them, both with an unmodded
version and with my hack.

Also, after applying my patch, and these two if you want,
you can apply one of my optional patches to.

They're very simple, really. One changes the palette of
the Ninja so it's red like in the original game as, funny
as I find it to be, some people found it to be a "betrayal"
to change it to green.

It wasn't hard to do so why the hell not add it as an extra
option.

The second optional patch lowers the difficulty slightly, for
those that I guess don't want to be challenged much. Enemies
physical and magical power will be toned down, and just that.

The third optional patch brings back the Level 99 Cap from the
original GBA version. My hack puts a Level 50 Cap as it was on
the oriignal NES game, but some people apparently like to grind
a lot.

The fourth one raises the number of Magic Points your characters
get for Levels 1 to 4, mostly made for party setups that might
not be to usual, so there's a few more casts to help them out.

The last one increases the HP of Bosses bit so boss battles take
a bit longer, as sometimes I kinda feel like I wanted them to
last a bit more, but that might be just me. Nothing else is changed.

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Database match: Final Fantasy I & II - Dawn of Souls (USA)
Database: No-Intro: Game Boy Advance (v. 20210227-023848)
File/ROM SHA-1: 6472695D69661490F78245E2982E1E676C080BE7
File/ROM CRC32: 1B39CDAB