Final Fantasy III: Final Fantasy III Maeson

Final Fantasy III Maeson is a rom hack of, obviously, Final Fantasy III for the Famicom/NES, and now has received its latest update, the 1.40 Version.

The 1.40 release is a gigantic new overhaul of the game, bigger than what 1.30 was. The main goal was to improve the progress of physical power of your characters, but to accomplish it with the level of polish the author wanted, he ended having to rework every single aspect of the hack again.

The end results aim to be the most polished and challenging version of this hack, and an attempt to make what could be considered a solid, final release; a 7th Anniversary celebration if you will.

Changes made on Version 1.41:

* Modified mechanics related to the progression of physical and magical power that provide a higher ceiling in damage and a better curve for the former and a more stable growth among Classes for the latter. This also includes making Strength as a statistic more useful.

* A few Battle engine modifications to make it a bit better, such as not needing to press a button to start every battle.

* The largest change in the Magic system, bringing back the Multi-targeting system improved through ASM hacking (thanks to Cyneprepou4uk and Everything8215) and reworking all the Spells make a more dynamic and far less broken system. Instead of most Spells being Area of Effect by default doing very large amounts of damage, the player now has to choose between strong single attacks or multi-targeted attacks that deal moderate damage, and weaknesses and resistances play a bigger role. MP has been cut down in all Classes to brig back some of the feel of FF1's MP management woes.

* Because of the points above, all Classes were thoroughly modified. Stat growths between all Classes have been redone to make their progress on similar levels instead of the more chaotic way of gaining Stats than before, and of course equipment and Spell changes have been made here and there.

* Talking about equipment, it has also been given a large cleanup. Beyond stat changes, several pieces of gear have been reworked to make new ones, like taking away the Onion Helm and Gloves to create things more Classes can use, or making the Thief Gloves something new.

* Because of the deep changes made to formulas in this game, Monsters required to be tweaked. But while it started as a tweak, ended being probably the biggest shake-up to the bestiary for this hack. Besides stat changes, the game is now balanced on Defense instead of Evasion, making damage output of the player a lot more stable. Enemy abilities have been overhauled, monster groups have been expanded and made more varied when possible. With larger number of foes, the player now has to actually pay attention to the Row System, as it also happens on the enemy side too, not only yours. More dummied enemies were brought back too!

* Shops and prices, alongside chest contents were also improved. Experience and Gil given by monsters was also touched up, now that enemy groups are larger. Enemy drops were also changed significantly, the player cannot get more Legendary weapons anymore.

* Class progression made equal for all. As long as the player doesn't run away, every action provides the same Job Experience to all Classes. This is to make them all grow at the same speed, instead of let's say, punish a Dragoon for using Magic instead of Fight. The leveling speed has been lowered a bit.

* New optional patches. For one, the Alex W. Translation got an improvement to give Item icons to consumable and key Items, putting them on the same level of equipment and magic. Another to provide Experience even if a character is petrified or dead was also included.

* Flash Reduction patches. The game has a significant amount of flashing, and there are three patches that deal with Overworld Events, Random Encounter and Battle Flashes as much as the author could.

* The Graphic Tweak patch got some updates for some of the Classes, like giving the Dragoon an overworld sprite that looks more like the real thing. A new optional window border was also added to make the window-over-window look cleaner.

* An optional patch that offers a more casual difficulty has been added. The author loves a challenge, but that doesn't mean that everyone would do too. Specifically, it lowers the physical and magical damage done to the player, while retaining the other features.

The Readme was updated, and so was the PDF Manual. With this new version, two older versions have also been included, the 1.23 and 1.37, both being the "last" release before big reworks, as both a way to look back and see the differences, and also for those that could just want to play older releases.

Because this game has several fan translations, and this hack requires text editing for a number of things, the author has made specific patches to work with:

* The Alex W. English Translation.
* The ad0220 English Translation.
* The Chaos Rush English Translation.
* The author's Spanish Translation.
* And another for the original Japanese (which will also work with any other translation that doesn't shift around game data, although it will lack the text changes, so beware).

The author would like to still show his appreciation to Kea and STARWIN for helping back in the day, and also give credit and his thanks to Everything for helping out with the Element Boost fix and finding more game data, which has been researched on a great disassembly project that can be found at GitHub; and also thank Cyneprepou4uk for the help on the multi-targeting ASM hacking.


The "good" ROM dump you need to use is this one:

Final Fantasy III (Japan).nes
CRC32: 170163F1

But if you happen to have a ROM with a CRC32 of 92189BAE
let me tell you that it will ALSO work!

If you want a TL;DR version:

1: Get your clean, Japanese Rom.
2: Patch it with your translation of choice (or original Japanese).
3: Patch it then with the patch for said translation.
4: Optional patches go in this order, if you want them:
1: Character Graphic Improvement. Always first.
2: Menu and Battle Menu color patches, and the
Text Border patch.
3: Character Alternative Palettes.
4: Optional Gameplay patches.
This includes a couple of gameplay changes,
and the Flash Reduction patches.
Read more in its section.

5: If you're playing with Alex W. translation or in Japanese, you'd
would probably want to check out A.D.R.I.A.N's B Button Dash patch.
It lets you run like in Chaos Rush's and ad0220 translations, and
it is honestly great to have.

Here's a link: http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3326/

It is compatible with my hack, so don't worry, just apply it to
a clean Japanese Rom before anything else (although if you ask
me it seems to not matter when you patch this, follow his
instructions just in case though!).

If you want to read more...

First, choose the Patch that goes along with the translation you want,
the original Alex W. Translation, ad0220 Translation with expanded ROM,
or the newish Chaos Rush Translation. Or play in Japanese if you want.

...Or if you speak my language, choose my Spanish translation based on
ad0220's Hack. If you want to patch one of the extra fonts, do it AFTER
patching this hack. So the process should be Translation > This Hack > Font.

...So, five different "packages" then. Quite annoying but it was for the best.

The reason for having different patches for each translation is simple,
there's a bit of text editing that needs to be addressed for each translation,
for things I've changed like Spells having different effects.

Another thing I did this time is trying to keep some parity where I could with
equipment's names, Classes and such whenever possible (the Alex W translation
is hard to work with though, as that translation can draw two letter tiles with
a single byte, which is something I've never seen before) to make them closer to
the official names, and a tiny bit of cleaning.

For example, the Giyaman Bell is now the Diamond Bell in the Alex W translation,
the Night Bow and Arrows are the Yoichi Bow and Arrows on the ad0220 one,
and Carrot is now Gysahl (or Gisahl, as Alex W wanted it to be) on both.

Dastar in Alex W translation is Duster, as current naming conventions says it is,
and the ad0220 translation lost the "u" at the end of many names such as Uru,
Kazusu, Deshu, and so and so for.

Classes are called the same in both, except the Conjurer/Evoker because I coduln't
come with a way of displaying "Evoker" on Alex W. translation without breaking
the formatting.

In fact, the ad0220 translation is the one with the bigger number of changes,
because I also corrected a number of formatting errors, typos and also fixing
actual glitches like when trying to draw equipment icons for items that are
stolen or dropped in battle.

Let's say that you get a Defender Sword on the normal ad0220 translation.
It would appear as "5Defender" instead of [Sword Icon]Defender.

This probably happened because in the original game almost no enemy dropped
items, and the icons are repeated twice (but the first set gets swapped
out depending on if the game needs that space for something else), ad0220
used the first set instead of the second, so whenever that happens in my hack,
it gets wrong graphics appearing. A bit tedious to fix, but hey, it's for the better.

I even added separate icons for Bows and Arrows, and a bottle for consumable Items.

So yeah, it was quite a bit of work added to what I already had to do by myself.
But I hope this works out and helps to remove the confusion of going from one
translation's names to the others, so anyone can understand when I mention a Class
or Weapon on the lists or the mini-guide and blablablah.

Now, if you're going to play on real hardware, the ad0220 translation will
give you issues, so choose another one. This also applies to my Spanish
translation. This is because it expands the game to be a full Megabyte,
instead of 513KB, but hey, maybe one day will work.

Oh, and by the way, while I made a version for Chaos Rush's translation,
I must warn you:

THIS TRANSLATION HAS PROBLEMS AND LACKS A NUMBER OF THINGS.
PLEASE READ THE TXT README INCLUDED WITH MORE DETAILS.

You must apply this *AFTER* the Translation of your choice, unless you
are playing in Japanese. Then just apply the wanted version on a clean ROM.

The "good" ROM dump you need to use is this one:

Final Fantasy III (Japan).nes
CRC32: 170163F1

But if you happen to have a ROM with a CRC32 of 92189BAE
let me tell you that it will ALSO work!

That's because the only difference between both ROMs are
two bytes on the header of the ROM, which is meaningless for the
game to work.

Once you have your translated ROM, then just grab the patch
for that specific translation, and apply it with Lunar IPS,
or any tool that can apply IPS patches.

Now, after your game is patched, you can also check the optional
patches. You can personalize a bit your experience with them,
so check the related section if you want.

Just be sure to use the correct patches, the ad0220 Translation (and thus
the Spanish one too) has its own set of patches for certain things. Be careful!

That is all.

Final Fantasy III (J) [!].nes GOODNES 3.23b
MD5 4E9BDCDD1071FF48638A3AA0FDA325FC
SHA-1 C4443FC24625E3C2BB859525EB44B6B3A80E7C35
CRC32 170163F1