Ys III: Ys III Rebalanced

Those who've played Ys III before would know it as the black sheep of the series, due to its side-scrolling viewpoint and notorious difficulty and grindyness. This rebalance hack aims to improve the game to be less tedious and unfair, for the port often considered to be the best overall.

Instructions: apply patch to Ys III - Wanderers from Ys (U) ROM, for Sega Genesis. Also compatible with ROMs patched with the Ys III Renewal hack, which I recommend. Unfortunately not compatible with the Japanese ROM.


Changes:

The player getting hit now grants 25 invincibility frames rather than 10; each mistake is now less likely to get you hit more than once.

Enemies now grant 6x the gold and XP in the early game; once reaching an area where you should be about halfway to the level cap, this drops to 2x. One should reach the recommended level for each area by the time one arrives, with almost no grinding required, if one slays every monster in one's path. An exploitable flying monster (with apparently-incorrect stats) had its rewards nerfed to encourage moving along.

Many enemies and bosses have had their damage output nerfed to more-reasonable levels. The final boss got particular attention and should be far less frustrating to fight.

Each enemy defeated now grants 3 ring points instead of 1, making rings more useful without frequent recharges in town.

Adol now starts the game with a sword, given the intro states he has one.



This hack may be modified or used as a base for other hacks, with attribution. Hack made by Mentil.

Database match: Ys III (USA)
Database: No-Intro: Genesis (v. 20210226-213851)
File/ROM SHA-1: B3331B41A9A5E2C3F4FB3B64C5B005037A3B6FDD
File/ROM CRC32: EA27976E