Hello. I just want to say that the effort and amount of work on this rom hack is incredibly impressive! The majority of this post is just me praising your work on the hack and pointing out how mindblown I am at the sheer ambition of it.
I read quite a bit of the thread and I didn’t see that many people point out just how mindblowing this is. It’s probably one of, if not the most ambitious rom hack I’ve ever seen, it’s ridiculously massive. From what I understand, you’ve been working on this for 20 years? If so WOW, that’s really really impressive and shows an enormous amount of dedication. The sheer amount of options and tweaks is insane, not to mention how well explained everything is in the in-game guide. There’s so many new features that had to be added from scratch and it shows that you’re VERY familiar with the game’s coding. I’m not even sure words can do justice to how impressed I am to be honest.
And on top of ALL of that, you translated the game to english AND put both languages in one single rom?!! HOW?! This is insane. The amount of work required to just translate is already enormous but here it’s just a featue of an already gigantic rom hack?!!
I love everything I’ve seen so far in terms of adding characters, so many choices that end up branching the progression of the game, expanding the lore in some ways, just WOW. This is a fan’s dream come true in all the right ways: A different take on the thracia gameplay while adding a lot of fan service in terms of characters and features. I saw someone almost critique the fact that you replaced Raydrik with Ishtore and I just can’t understand, because I think it’s a FANTASTIC idea that almost should have been in the base game! Why add a new villain when you can expand on one that had quite a bit of characterization in genealogy of the holy war yet so little screen time? It just makes perfect sense.
And then there’s all the insane customization the game gives you access to. I was a bit disappointed that I’d have to relearn the names in the patch because they were different from the official ones (and the ones used in our current english translations) and then BAM you update the game to have those names as a freaking TOGGLE. Not to mention we’re allowed to customize game mechanics and customization if we would prefer something to be a bit different which gives such an insane amount of liberty to the player.
As for the UI and quality of life features? Well it’s just as impressive as the rest! Plenty of improvements to the UI like being able to see the weapon equipped as well as the most important stats just by hovering on a unit which must have been really hard to implement. Or how the game lets you know both the actual def stat AND what their def currently is in practice when counting terrain and other things. Or how it allows you to see growth rates, AS, and how far a unit is close to reaching the next weapon level. Yes, the current translation patch that most english speakers use has these features but it’s still really cool that it’s here (not to mention I think this rom hack did it first? Not sure…). And allowing you to see the supports each unit has just by pressing the Y button?? WOW, that’s just SO useful! And then the talk command in the menu which gives you plenty of advice and hints for the current map and gives new opportunities for characters to have dialogue. And the guide is SO detailed and clear! Everything you might want to know is all there explained in a ton of detail! And the whole hack is polished everywhere to near perfection! Like how the text in the english opening scrolls faster so the intro actually ends when the music does instead of awkwardly finishing too soon and repeating. I don’t know how you did that, but I’d be great if we could fix it in the lil’ manster translation patch as well. From what I understand, in most games translated from japanese, the english text scrolls slowly because it scrolls at the same rate as in japanese, but because english requires much more characters to form words than in japanese it always ends up taking way longer for the text to scroll to express the same idea. The text in the japanese opening scrolls at a very reasonable pace while in english it’s very slow.
And these are just my thoughts after playing 3 chapters! I know this is a VERY long post that doesn’t exactly add much to the conversation or report bugs or suggest things, but I just felt like SOMEONE needed to stop and take a moment to praise you on your immense work on this patch, because it needs to be said. It just broke my heart when I was reading the posts and saw that most of the time when someone new posted, they put just a single sentence to praise the hack and then immediately jump to critcizing aspects of it or say some things need to be changed.
There’s only one thing I want to suggest here and it’s a minor nitpick: the current version everyone plays in english modified the UI to have the “wait” command at the bottom to be consistent with the majority of games in the franchise. We’re just used to it lol. It can feel odd to have something be the opposite of what you’re so used to by now. I did get used to it in mystery of the emblem but because I’ve only played thracia with “wait” at the bottom it’s super weird and can lead to misclicks lol. I imagine it’s the same for a lot of other english players. I normally wouldn’t suggest this but given how familiar you seem to be with the code of the game and how much you managed to modify/add and implement as toggles in the options already, I figured it would be realistic enough. It’s still up to you whether you want to add the option to have the “wait” command at the bottom, it’s just an idea.