This is a Hack for Skies of Arcadia: Legends for the Gamecube, a lighthearted RPG that mixes your typical dungeon exploring with ship battles in a world of floating islands and full of mystery, originally released for the Dreamcast.
This Hack aims to give the gameplay a different feeling altogether, by increasing the overall challenge to make it more engaging than the low difficulty original game, while reworking many of the different elements to also provide the player more interesting equipment, Magic System, Ship Equipment options and such.
After several years, it has been updated to version 1.50. This brings a long list of improvements, tweaks, new features and just a more polished, better experience. You can read the specific changes on the readme as they're too numerous to put here.
You can easily point out if you're playing Version 1.50 as the game, once patched, has a custom banner, name, and game description new to this version.
Among the different changes made by this Hack are these:
* Character balance tweaked, in order to make all members versatile enough to work with different roles beyond the basic one they were supposed to fill.
* Significant upgrade to the Magic System and Supermoves. Spells are more powerful and versatile, Healing Magic is now essential instead of easily made obsolete by Healing Items doing the same for no cost. Status Effect Magic is a lot more reliable. Spirit Point costs have been made more reasonable to keep the rhythm of battle, but with SP management being still important.
* Crew Members tweaked. For Passive members, their effects might had some changes, and for Active members, their SP cost might have been changed to make them more useful. Merida does something now too.
* Extensive Equipment changes. Most gear now sports new special effects in order to give previously ignored items more useful traits, and to give the player more choices in how to set their characters, even more when you can swap gear during battles.
* Extensive Ship Equipment changes. Just like character gear, pieces of Ship gear have been tweaked. The different types of equipment, such as Decks or Engines, now provide more than a single Statistic. Furthermore, the previously Decorative pieces have been turned into useful ones with proper Stat bonuses that the player might want to mix and match with the other types.
* Unused pieces of equipment left in the game have been brought back too. They've been added as rewards to several battles, and other places. The readme contains a section pointing out everything (and even original items that could be missed by the player) so they don't miss anything. Of course, they received changes to mesh well with the rest of the equipment and/or to make them actually useful, in the case of unused Decorative equipment.
* As mentioned above, enemies have been made stronger, in order to make the curve of difficulty go up as you progress, instead of going down like the author feels with the original game. Almost every enemy has been reworked to be more of a fight, while still trying to make a balanced experience by giving them elemental weaknesses, Status weaknesses, and such. Changes to enemy Magic, Supermoves and other traits were made too, just like changing enemy formations to make very elusive types of enemies more common, or to make Boss battles a bit spicier.
* Ship Battles are tougher too. It was very easy to become very powerful and make opponents feel underwhelming. Not the case anymore, every ship battle should be a bigger challenge. They also reward the player with many more items, specially Ship Equipment. A couple of bosses, known by fans of the game to be a bit too long of a fight, had their HP reduced somewhat to make them less time consuming.
* Ship Magic has gotten similar improvements as "On Foot" Magic, with elemental attacks being far more useful, and Magic being more versatile in Spirit costs. Enemy Ships had their elemental resistances tweaked. New to Version 1.50, is that new Ship Magic has been included: Now players can use Sacrum, Noxi, Noxus, Eterni, Eternes and Eternum, providing a very necessary healing Spell for late game and Green and Silver elemental attacks, making the player capable of using every element on Ship Battles!
* Experience Points given by enemies have been raised moderately in certain parts of the game where they felt too low. Experience Curves for characters have been tweaked to make things flow better, specially for Fina which leaves the party several times, often leaving her behind.
* Magic Experience and Magic Experience curves have been changed, with the grinding being cut significantly. This makes for a much less "grindy" experience, letting the player learn Spells at more appropriated times according to their usefulness. This does not eliminate the need to think and choose which elements to train and putting care on it, just makes it so you're not at the end of the game with most of your spells unlearned even if you did.
* Fish are far more useful now! In the original game they mostly did nothing and had little value. Now they have a variety of effects, often being great healing items that can only be used out of battle, but sport greater effects than things you can buy. They now are more valuable and can be caught to sell, providing better Gold.
All the descriptions for altered elements have been updated to reflect these changes in-game. You can also check the readme file for a long, long detailed list.
While the increased difficulty might make it sound otherwise, this Hack could be played by first-timers, after all the raise in difficulty is made in an attempt to make it on par with RPGs of the time, not to make it a "HardType" type of Hack. Version 1.50 makes some tweaks to improve parts that the author was told through feedback, like with the first incursion to Valua.
Included in the package is an optional patch originally made by user cleartonic:
This modification makes it so by holding the B Button, no random battles can happen, either on foot or sailing. While the patch uploaded here is not compatible with this Hack, the one included here is. Just apply it after the main patch.
The Encounter Rate is often seen as higher than usual (and in the Dreamcast version was even higher) so this can be a tremendous relief for many. Just have in mind that using it too much will affect the rhythm of your Experience and Magic Experience gain, and leave you behind.
All credit goes to cleartonic for this wonderful hacked feature.
An NTSC-U version of the game is required for this. It is shared as a xDelta patch, made with the tool DeltaPatcher. The optional "Hold B" patch is a simple, IPS patch, faster to apply for such a small, size-wise, change.
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How to Install:
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Very easy, actually. This comes as a XDelta patch.
It was made with DeltaPatcher, so use that if you want.
First make a backup of Skies of Arcadia Legends NTSC-US with this checksum:
CRC32 23e347b6
MD5 3e7fa5033c4a2704434fb6ba98195ecd
SHA-1 46105320553c858f25fafc5fd357566b505a4940
If it matches, you can continue. This data confirms is a verified
good dump of the game.
Then is as easy as to patch it like any other ROM.
First, get DeltaPatcher. Select the target ISO on the first box,
my patch on the second, and click on Apply Patch.
It will take a while because this is not your typical Cartridge based game,
but that's just the only difference. After it finishes you'll have a patched
ISO! After that, just boot it the way you chose either using your Wii or Dolphin.
I personally played this through Nintendont with my Wii.
Oh, by the way. This 1.50 Release comes with its own game banner, title and
game description (which is just a reference for one of my favourite silly
little lines in this game). The Game's ID is the same as the original game.
I wanted to make a different ID so save files for the original game and my
mod were separate, but apparently this game doesn't like it at all when
trying to save or read memory cards, so I left it as it was.
I'll leave a screen capture on the 7zip file if you're curious about how it
looks on a GC.
After installing the main patch, you can choose to also install one extra
tiny patch:
Made by someone that goes by the name cleartonic, this hacker created a
modification for the game to temporarily disable random encounters while
the B Button is held. It works on foot, and sailing around too.
Here's a link:
https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/5314/
But, that patch will not be compatible with my mod. It requires a specific
patch, which you can find on the 7zip file you also found this readme and
the main hack patch.
I'ts a very light, simple IPS patch. Just apply it with LunarIPS or another
IPS tool to an ISO already patched with my main hack before.
Credits absolutely go to cleartonic for their work. I only adapted it to
be compatible with my own hack.
That's all you need to know about installation.
For the NTSC Patch, this ISO is required:
Skies of Arcadia: Legends (USA).iso
CRC32 - 23e347b6
MD5 - 3e7fa5033c4a2704434fb6ba98195ecd
SHA-1 - 46105320553c858f25fafc5fd357566b505a4940
