Golden Sun 1: Jenna Edition

[JackitK]

Have you ever thought, "it's a shame Jenna leaves the party after the prologue in the Broken Seal, if only I could use her for the entire game...."? If so, this mod is for you.  In "Golden Sun Jenna edition", Jenna and Garret are swapped. Allowing for Jenna to be part of your main party for the entire game, also including her main default class and Psynergy, normally exclusive to the Lost Age. The currently released modern version also includes some quality of life updates previously establisehd in GS: Dawn of Djinn including prologue skip, Retreat Fast Travel, Avoid toggle and more...

   
You can find a link to download, along with more details of the project on the github page...
https://github.com/JackitK/GoldenSun-JennaEdition/releases/tag/v1.0.0


Videos featuring gameplay:

[Marin (She/Her)]

I love it~   This is definitely something I want to use next time I play. That being said, I have a couple of thoughts:

  I notice this patch doubles the game's size. And while an extra 8 MB isn't the end of the world, it did give me pause as I wasn't sure why/if it would actually need extra space. =o

  My brief test to make sure the game was working after patching it revealed that Jenna still uses Garet's deep, masculine vocal sound effects whenever she's talking. It ... paints a funny but undesirable mental image of what she sounds like. ||D

  My deepest regret, perhaps, is that I will have to choose between this hack and Reloaded or your Dawn of Djinn hack. Given that I will probably choose this hack in the end, I would've loved to combine it with one of the two if they were compatible.

I briefly tried applying both patches to a single game, knowing full well it probably wouldn't work but y'know--I was curious. Sometimes with other games it has worked in the past, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to experiment a little. With reloaded, applying Reloaded first and then Jenna resulted in the game failing to boot. I then applied Jenna first and then Reloaded and that got the game to run, but it looked like Jenna's animations were partially corrupted. For Dawn of Djinn I patched it with Jenna first and then Dawn of Djinn. This caused the game to play in (mostly) silent movie mode with no dialogue appearing during the intro cutscene, and Jenna's sprites were also completely corrupted. Patching with Dawn of Djinn first and Jenna second fixed Jenna's sprite corruption, however dialogue still did not play during the intro. So close! (Except probably not. 'Cause y'know--that was just the intro custcene)

[JackitK]

If it's any assurance Dawn of Djinn (at least the version that's currently released) doesn't have any dialogue, so it's technically intended. Not an ideal situation, but one I'm working on fixing for Version 2 aka Second Mix.

Sadly working exclusively with an editor has its limits.  Often have to resort to doing things in more wierd ways to get around the fact I don't quite have the skills just to code it sperate. Certain things like the Jenna's voice clip where sadly beyond my limits. I can't say for sure, but that probably also played into the oddly big file size for "just a sprite swap". The editor I use doesn't compress the sprites I replace and between that and using a GS Randomizer seed to implement the QOL features like fast travel Retreat, and prologue skip probably played a role in that.

Stuff I wouldn't mind looking into if I wasn't already deep into other projects, but that I will keep in mind if I ever get the chance to revisit this.

Glad you enjoy it in the end though. Wouldn't be completely opposed to messing around to see if I could make a version of Dawn of Djinn that also includes Jenna, but I'd have to do some testing to see if it would even be possible without running into sprite corruptions while modding and at the moment, most of my modding focus has been going into doing a second Mix of Dawn of Djinn.

Edit Edit:
Actually this got me thinking, since I held on to a patch with just the pallet swap; I got pondering "would this patch work on top of other mods?". Quickly tested it on an extra copy of my current Dawn of Djinn build and it seemed to work fine. Granted, it's only the sprite swap so Jenna still has Garet's default class. But the fact that worked at all got me pondering how much I can get away with before it stops working with other mods.  Let me get back to you once I've done a bit more experimenting with it.