GS TLA - Enemy Rebalancing Hack

[Erik the Appreciator]

Updated versions:
Golden Sun Rebalance 2012 v1.2 (Mediafire): https://www.mediafire.com/file/24pv7rza3irhan4/Golden_Sun_Rebalance_2012_v1.2.ips/file
The Lost Age Rebalance 2013 v1.2.1 (Mediafire): https://www.mediafire.com/file/atkozyxmp8i9tjr/The_Lost_Age_Rebalance_2013_v1.2.1.ips/file
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Golden Sun: The Lost Age - Enemy Rebalancing Hack

(Alternative MediaFire link)



Over the past couple months I created a ROM hack of Golden Sun: The Lost Age using version 0.2 of the GS:TLA ROM Editor written by Atrius. My way of balancing and playtesting the hack was to play through a game of TLA as I was adjusting that ROM, and I kept a chart in a text file of all the statistics of every enemy in the game in order to painstakingly make all the adjustments with so that enemies would be balanced in relation to each other in a given area. I posted this text file here to serve as a guide.

This is purely a hack to increase the battle and reward statistics of every enemy in the game and heighten the challenge level to what would be challenging to a player that knows where and when to collect every Djinni; no other change has been made, such as with items, classes, or ability effects. Compared to some other challenge-boosting hacks on the GSHC that get more creative, this one is very traditional, and aims to show the real value of the familiar battle system and battle options Golden Sun: The Lost Age has always provided its players with.


Here are the features and points of interests of my finished product, which I guess I'll name my Enemy Rebalancing ROM Hack:

Enemies throughout each area as the game goes on scale in threat level and rewards to your party's development much more closely, and end up having much higher statistics in HP, Attack, Agility, and EXP as the game progresses. This would make the game much more "linear" in a certain sense, but the payoff is that like a lot of other contemporary RPGs, you are encouraged to spend a bit of time leveling in a dungeon or an overworld area before moving onto the next area to level there. Leveling should happen at a moderately fast rate due to the heightened and accelerating EXP rates, as well as how, in general, there are at least 2 and at most 3 monsters in every battle, and monsters in the next area always grant noticeably higher experience rates than the ones in the previous area. The drop contents and drop rates of enemies that did not drop notable items to begin with have also been fully revised, and no item ever drops at a rate lower than 1/64.

A main theme of this ROM hack is that just about every enemy in the game acts at least twice per turn, while "one-shot enemies" like Mimic and Mad Plant, as well as enemies/bosses that had 2 turns to begin with, can have up to 3 actions per turn. This gives the enemies of the game much more opportunity to attack and use their abilities and force you to rely on developing your statistics. The ability lists are also altered so that monsters will use their abilities more often.

Your level should be around between 35 and 40 by the time the Reunion takes place. It is highly recommended that you enhance the game with Password data with a GS1 party at around those levels, so that you don't have to spend a large amount of time farming Phoenixes in the upcoming Magma Rock (which give twice as much experience, by the way) to bring the original GS characters up to speed with the TLA party.

Djinn no longer have the ability to run away, and instead serve as "mini-boss" encounters similar to Mimics and Mad Plants.

In some areas, some of the enemy formations have been designed so that while most random battles are against normal monsters that appear in groups of two or three, some monsters are much tougher and only appear alone. These monsters are the visually large random enemies of TLA, and their HP ratings, EXP/Coin ratings, battle statistics, and the amount of turns they take are heightened so that one of these enemies serves about as much threat and reward as three normal enemies taken together. This provides a much needed touch of variety to the encounters of the game, so that you don't have to cast area-of-effect offensive Psynergy to win battles all the time and would need to battle with direct weapon attacks and unleashes. The large monsters adjusted to appear as "random mini-bosses", in order of toughness, are Wild Gorilla, Red Demon, Sea Dragon, Turtle Dragon, Lesser Demon, Aka Manah, Ocean Dragon, Fire Dragon, Druj, and Mad Demon.

Enemy toughness directly corresponds to their levels, and therefore there are pre-planned routes of leveling progression:

*Early Indra -> Kandorean Temple -> Shrine of the Sea God -> Dehkan Plateau -> Later Indra -> Madra Catacombs
*Early Osenia -> Yampi Desert -> Air's Rock -> Briggs boss fight -> Alhafra Cavern
*Lower Gondowan -> Kibombo Mountains -> Gabomba Statue
*After getting Cyclone Chip from Mayor of Madra: Gabomba Catacombs -> Lemurian Ship
*Great Eastern Sea ocean area -> Great Eastern Sea land areas -> Taopo Swamp -> Aqua Rock -> Gaia Rock and Serpent boss battle -> Izumo Ruins -> Islet Cave -> Ankohl Ruins -> Tundaria -> Tundaria Tower -> Avimander boss battle -> Poseidon
*Great Western Sea ocean area -> Great Western Sea land areas -> Treasure Isle Earlier Segment -> Shaman Village Cave -> Jupiter Lighthouse
*Magma Rock -> Northern Reaches sailing area -> Mars Lighthouse
*Treasure Isle -> Yampi Desert Cave -> Islet Cave -> Anemos Inner Sanctum

The nine unused items that are known to have been apparently planned Lucky Wheels prizes have been added to the game as drops from enemies. In particular, Rainbow Ring, Aroma Ring, Casual Shirt, Silver Greave, Herbed Shirt, and Ninja Sandals are what the Mimics and Mad Plants that didn't drop particularly impressive items beforehand now drop, while Knight's Greave drops from Puppet Warrior, Soul Ring drops from Raptor, and Divine Camisole drops from Devil Frog. In addition, Tear Stone drops from Merman, Star Dust drops from Sea Dragon, Sylph Feather drops from Harridan, and Dragon Scale drops from Pteranodon.

The game apparently uses the party's level ratings to influence wild encounter rates and the party's chance to run away from encounters. While all the enemies' statistics have been raised (dramatically at later stages), their levels are unchanged, whereas the party's levels will reach much higher much more quickly. This causes both wild encounter rates to be a little less frequent and for you to be allowed to safely run away from any of the later random battles. Of course, Sacred Feather and Avoid would become more reliable too.

Dullahan, like other bosses, is even more fearsome statistically, but he can no longer use Djinn Storm or Break, opting to use Formina Sage and True Collide more often.

Lastly, a tip: Remember that Nuts are available to buy once the Great Eastern Sea is opened up, Vials are buyable in Loho when the Great Western Sea is accessible, and Mist Potions are available at Prox.

[RTGreece21]

Wow! This sounds like it's going to be a lot of fun! And it seems to make more sense in a lot of areas too, like the enemies attacking more than once.

[thenightsshadow]

Wow.  Your hack is a complete version of what I wanted to accomplish.  Well done.

[leaf]

I like a lot of what you've done. Props. I'll have to try playing this sometime.

[leaf]

So I've played up to the king scorpion battle. Pretty fun. Impressions so far:

Early game difficulty seems about right (up until pre-dekkan plateau). The ruffian fights didn't seem very different from the original, so maybe make them more challenging by making them just barely capable of surviving a max damage fume, forcing you to finish them off with either a regular attack (for the first two) or to cast flare (against the group of three).

The enemies in kandorean temple actually managed to kill one of my characters once when I first got there, forcing me to reload my save. Once jenna learns beam, the battles become fairly methodical and are mainly just about knowing HP counts so as to expend the minimum PP necessary, but for the first dungeon, I think it was fine. Chestbeaters were good. I lost a character the first time to them because I misjudged one of their remaining HP counts. The second time was fairly smooth sailing, but the battle does require good allocation of resources (herbs), so I think it was a very appropriate first boss. Fog seemed an appropriate difficulty as well, but it's the only djinni I've faced that seemed appropriate. I went through this area with echo set to felix, setting it back again after each battle (mysterious card went unused). I considered setting echo to sheba for the chestbeaters fight, to have two healers, but determined it to be unnecessary, and felix using echo/venus gives better damage output. The party was lv7/7/7 for the boss fight.

The Shrine of the Sea God may have been a little on the easy side with sheba having plasma and all, but the biggest offender would have to be the djinni. For a "mini-boss," it fell to just two turns of throwing stuff at it. It was fine for fog to fall after two turns since it actually dealt some decent damage to you, and area damage at that, but breath was just too easy. I wasn't even using an optimal strategy. I went through this section with base classes.

Dekkan Plateau is too easy. Since enemies keep getting reused, you can pretty much just roll over any already-introduced enemy. The enemies are about right the moment you enter DP, but as soon as you grab themis' axe, they become too easy. The new enemies here actually do have decent HP counts for taking your attacks, but their damage output is a bit "meh." Cannon is the easiest djinni so far. It barely deals any damage and like the rest it also falls in two turns. Seriously, give that thing at least 1.5x its current HP and consider raising some of its other stats, too; it doesn't even get a chance to be a threat and it's supposed to be the strongest thing in the entire dungeon. I played through most of this area with fog set to jenna, with felix and sheba in base classes. Once I got cannon, I set it to sheba, making the rest of the area a complete breeze (yay for cannon being broken early game).

The battle with iron right outside of madra is also way too easy. Madra catacombs seemed ok. I didn't need to spend much time there, just getting the tremor bit and all, but the difficulty seemed about right. Felix: echo/iron, jenna: fog, sheba: cannon/breath.

The new world map! Good. Very good. I tried to explore some because I forgot if there was anything within reach besides the desert and got a character killed. I'd say it's perfect. I used the same setup as madra catacombs.

I can't tell if I was overleveled going into yampi desert. I might've been, since I thought the enemies could've been just a tad tougher. Not by much, but just a little bit. Same setup as madra catacombs until acquiring blitz (another djinni that was too easy... noticing a pattern here?), at which point I went with jenna with fog/cannon and felix and sheba in base classes. The king scorpion battle seemed good. I played it a few times with different strats. It was definitely hardest in any setup where felix was in his base class, since if he used iron, he kept dropping below the king scorpion's agility rating (echo is fine, just not iron), and when your primary healer only does single-target healing and is also slower than the boss, you know there's a problem. The easiest was probably zagan/atlanta spam, which is also my personal favorite (two jupiter on felix, two venus on sheba, and cannon on jenna, with fog on standby), even though the game decided to make an 80 agility character go before an 81 agility character one turn for whatever reason. The party was lv14/14/14 for the boss fight.

I used vba recording to save the battles with the djinn/bosses, so I'll be uploading the vbm files soonish. I might wait until I get the boat to upload them, though, so that there's more boss fights to see.

[Tetsuya the Azure Blade]

Hmm.... Nice hack..... Maybe I'll play it..... Some day.....

[Erik the Appreciator]

Thank you very much for taking the time to playtest and critique my ROM patch. I should notify you of some things, however: while this was a ROM patch that I had spent a lot of time and effort on, it isn't so refined as to deliver perfect challenge on every given area of the game. The overall aim was to make the overall game far less of a bore to the players that know when and where to get all the Djinn and powerful equipment, but it would still be entirely doable by those players that had mastered the original game and would take the time to level up and gather the coins for the gear like the strong stuff down in Mikasalla. It's supposed to allow for a little leeway in possible gear and Djinn the player might miss, since not everyone would know, for example, that Gabomba Catacombs can be completed before the Aqua Hydra boss battle. While many enemies like the one-shots have increased threat level, sure, part of the aim is to present what could have been an "enhanced hard mode" that might just have released to the casual public as part of the official game by Camelot themselves, rather than be an "ultimate hardmode" strictly for emulation users.

Perhaps, though, this current ROM patch could be useable as a baseline to be improved upon and lead up to the most ideal enemy-rebalance-only hack of GS:TLA in the future, and that player-testing feedback would help get to that point... *dreams*


EDIT: BTW, part of the point here *is* that enemies are "just right" when you first enter an area but become easier as you progress through the area and gain levels and gear, and that once you're empowered by that area the next area starts off as just right for that and gets easier once that is gone through, and so on.

[leaf]

Thank you very much for taking the time to playtest and critique my ROM patch.

Gladly. I'm enjoying it quite a bit.

I could tell that it wasn't designed as an "ultimate hardmode" as you put it, since even with suboptimal strats, it's certainly possible to win these battles. But it's a lot better than the original in regard to having to consider your options.

My primary criticism is really just the djinn. For foes that you're able to save and heal in front of before confronting them, they're pathetically easy to just rush down and not even think about the damage you're taking. I actually think some of the djinn here are easier than they were in the original TLA due to the higher levels, giving you more HP to take the psynergies that previously were actually somewhat dangerous. I barely lost any HP in the cannon fight and was able to kill it in just two turns, and considering that it's pretty much the dungeon's boss, that's not a good thing. If you change nothing else up until this point, change the djinn.

I also tried taking on briggs when I got to alhafra... yeah, that's definitely not something you can just go in and do right after leaving yampi desert. I was only using base classes for it, so I'm gonna try again with zagan/atlanta spam and see how far I get, but I think I'm gonna need at least either sour or spark before it becomes practical. I think I'll upload that even if it fails =p

edit: And yes, I know the foes are naturally going to become easier as you go through the areas, but in the case of dekkan plateau, the difficulty drops considerably from very early on since you acquire themis' axe in one of the first areas.