Incline Elminage Gothic (former Japan only dungeon crawler)

[aweigh]

 

[agris]

*aweigh* CASTS: wall of text

 

[aweigh]

btw, i'm right now on a roll manually inserting into hand-picked enemy inventories things like a shield for fighter-types (after much thought and after playtesting a lot i have come to the conclusion that it is much better to increase enemy Defense by giving them shields or a 2nd weapon for extra offense INSTEAD of boosting every enemy's Armor Class flatly across the board).

so yeah, i'm inserting stuff like 2nd weapons for almost all samurais in the game and giving ninjas proper ninja weapons like shurikens instead of the lackluster low-tier katanas the game usually gives them; i am adding different shields (the shield itself depends on what enemy it is and in what dungeon it is encountered; obviously i'm not giving low-level enemies uber shields); and my crowning achievement...

...i am finishing up today adding into the non-Humanoid enemy inventories (dragons, animals, beasts, etc, basically any enemy that does not utilize human-weaponry); i'm going through every single non-Humanoid enemy and making it possible to steal, yeah STEEEEL BABY, the non-humanoid enemy's natural-weapons such as their claws, beaks, jaws, teeth, nails, talons, armos, maws, etc. And no, i'm not fucking crazy or whatever: this is traditional Elminage feature! elminage: original (and 2 and 3) allow almost every single non-human enemy to have their "claws" (catch-all term) stolen and each one can be equipped on different classes. (These natural-weapons are always cursed, btw).

so i've been using the japanese wiki's 3DS spreadsheet which details every single non-human enemy's "new weapons" for stealing and they renamed every single one with a unique name for the 3DS remix version: and that part is exactly what i'm doing right now.

I already finished making the monster claw-weapons able to be stolen, and i already fixed up / matched up each and every one of those things's stats (dmg, etc) with the stats in the japanese wiki page; so i'm currently in the process of renaming each one. it is very tedious.

this was the biggest complaint about elminage: gothic from fans of elminage: original because it cut down on the absurd amount of ridiculous shit your Thief can steal and it also kind of left the Brawler class, which traditionally is the class that will utilize almost every single one of those "claw weapons" stolen from monsters, kinda got left a bit out in the cold in E: Gothic.

i also took care to make the Stealing success rate very dependant on the level of the enemy following the elminage: original stealing formula breakdown from the jap wiki because... it just wouldn't be fun if you could just steal super-duper crazy good Dragon Claws +3 from a divine dragon on the 1st turn, would it. in fact i was playtesting earlier and i can easily steal mid-game enemy monster-claws but post-game enemies require a TON of effort. just like in E: Original.

**as you can see still in process of naming each monster weapon. Mork Cricketer is the natural-weapon of one of the first Floor Master bosses in the game and in vanilla game it cannot be stolen. I made it possible, renamed it to what Starfish named the thing in the 3ds release, and fixed its stats to match the 3ds stats for the thing.

 

[aweigh]

Courtier

so, yeah, the text will sometimes go off to the right of the gui/dialog box if i don't space it correctly, and there will be TONS of instances where due to my lack of l33t reverse-engineering know-how i don't know how to implement an entirely new font into the game so... that means that if the japanese word for something was 4 hexadecimal numbers, then that's all i fucking have to squeeze in the english word.

for example you can plainly see this many times in the pictures i posted, and it's completely hit-and-miss: there is no "rule" or "pattern" to what will fit and what won't fit; for example the japanese kanji for leather armor is only four spaces, hence why i had to go with "LETH" for the name of the Leather Armor.

HOWEVER the LETHear armor's unidentified name fit the entire word "Armor", and funnily enough leather gloves and leather helms all fit completely in english because they utilized katakana + hiragana + phonetic spelling = no kanji means more space taking up by the japs which means more space to write the english words.

still, it's actually not bad at all once it's all running with the elminage: Original menu-textures. even the dialog although it suffers from the same text wrapping problems is still way easier to manipulate than Wiz Empire 3, where i still have nightmares of trying to fit "CASTLE" into two fucking letters, heh. (I ended up using... "HQ").

in any case absolutely no one else is going to do this in the entire world so might as well do it ourselves right? i'm not planning on submitting this to fan-translation of the year or whatever i just want everything possible in english.

the dialog is actually much simpler than the dialog in wizardry empire 1 and 2 but, as always, it depends on what people will be happy with: i no longer give a shit about everything being 100% accurate when it comes to dialog; the fact that this will never be in english anyway means any translation is a good translation.

i've been translating snippets of the dialog from the rival party from elminage 2 (inside the game .iso's "SCP.bin", which can be extracted with PSP disc extraction and insertion tool called UMDGen); it's not really complicated at all. yes, the actual character dialog would in the end be what ppl call a guesslation but, you know what, whatevs. this shit will be in english.

i mean... it's not like Elmi: Original's localization was very good either, amirite?

EXPART THIEF

FRIEND IS CALL

haha

yes, i am saying i can do better with software and an electronic dictionary than a professional localization did with e: original.

EDIT: obviously if any jap speaker wants to translate the character dialog by all means, contact me, do it and i will enter it into the game. wiz empire 1 is still 75% done, btw, waiting for someone to translate the npc dialog into jap.

EDIT x2: an example of me translating the tarot card text, i.e. the text that appears during battle telling you what the tarot card effect did to you:

 

[aweigh]

Courtier



So, ok, here's the sumation:

- all starfish did was insert the necessary hex numbers to "turn on" all of the E: Gothic non-Humanoid "natural weapons" such as claws, talons, etc; "turn on" = the player can steal them just like all other normal weaponry from Humanoid enemies.

- in default E: Gothic every single enemy (or thereabouts) has the same type/amount of cursed animal parts for your Thief to steal as in E: Original, the only problem is they're not flagged as normal weaponry and thus the party Thief can't remove them from the enemy.

- i went and found the necessary numbers to flag all of these natural-weapons as regular weapons and it wasn't that hard mostly i spent a few hours comparing side by side all of the data from an enemy (i used Skillving as my example) and the weapons he carries (fool's foil / bloody dagger) and then slowly but surely poring over every single number of data until i finally (via trial and error) got the enemy-weapons working in-game as normal weapons.

- i utilized the same weapon template from the Brawler-class's "fist-type weapons" as the basis for the data enabling the enemy-weapons. now your Thief can spam remove equipment to his heart's content and then eventually exit the encounter in a glow of victory as you look at the stats on the Ancient Dragon Strike +14 u just stole from him.

still to do:

- need to rename each of the enemy-weapons to the corresponding name Starfish gave them in the 3DS remix version of the game; i will do this by painstakingly matching by eye and by hand each of the enemy-weapon's Stats and then control + F'ing the japanese Wiki's list of the new 3DS enemy-weapons and match the stats to the weapon.

- after matching the thing then renaming it to whatever its name is in the 3DS ver.

EDIT: ***the reason the video seems like it's fucking impossible to steal from even low-level enemies is because i have that crab enemy rocking 3x multiplier on all of his base Attributes (fucker has an AGI score of around 49), and when stealing it's a contest mainly of AGI vs AGI***

- since this is a mod the only notification you'll receive that you can steal the enemy-weapon is waiting until it says "REMOVED EQUIPMENT: SUCCESFUL - NO ITEMS TO STEAL" (assuming the only thing the enemy has equipped is their natural-weapon).

- otherwise as long as it says "REMOVED EQUIPMENT: FAILED" that means exactly what it says.

- this, obviously, means you can disarm non-Humanoid enemies such as dragons, for example, and they'll be fighting you unarmed (of course they still have 30-40 STR)... just like in Elminage: Original

just started a new playthrough/party consisting of Ninja, Thief, Brawler, Summoner, Bishop, Alchemist in preparation of stealing claws and poke-catching summons.

 

[aweigh]

yikes, just tried stealing top-tier enemy-weapons from Ibag Tower enemies and jesus fucking christ... imposiburu. This is the formula that the game uses:


Success is determined to steal the equipment released †

• Ally judgment value
  • Equipped released: Lv × 0 ~ 2
  • Steal: Lv × 0 ~ 2
• Enemy determination value
  • Equipped released: Lv ~ + 20
  • Steal: Lv × 2 ~ 5
  • Steal (restraint abnormal): None

For the specification, such as described above, is or was quite cumbersome steal from high Lv than his opponent.
Restraint if you have to (sleep-paralysis, petrochemical) type of abnormal state, the resistance role of "stealing" will be ignored.
Equipment also released to some extent - there is also a possibility that is under modification.
Dukes Nerikin magic "Sukoreku" If equipped with release of the (about Lv90) required.
Use about six times, according to Lv is possible to put out a roll of more than 100.
However, steal determination is unreasonable (about resistance roll 180-300), so try to obediently restraint.

Range the location of the thief if the enemy front row partner is the front row, back row, it can be from either.
So steal even from the enemy back row and put a Yunihakotto of Renkin spell.
However equipment released only can only be done to the enemy front row (OK thieves position from either the front and rear column)

sooo.... yeah, it's gonna be fucking quite the FEAT if someone manages to steal dragon claws from the ibag tower dragons. high level + insane base Attributes + my thief is a dragonewt with 16 luck = nuh-uh!

 

[Haplo]

Great job as usual, aweigh. Titanic work.
I guess it would help to have a Hotlet Thief. Or maybe some monster adventurer Thief with high Agility and Luck stats - if there's one.

 

[aweigh]

Courtier

YIKES DUDE, BAD NEWS. So i'm fixing the stats (hit modifier, min dmg ~ max dmg, #atks, status-on-hit, etc) and i noticed something not fun at all...

The re-named enemy-weapons Starfish gave a lot of the enemies in the 3DS version are insanely weaker than the stats on the very same weapon, un-named, in the PC version of Gothic.

easy example: Belial's new 3DS weapon is:

Devil's claw +4
range: S
hit modifier: 0
dmg spread: 7-42
(Cursed)
SUB TYPE WEAPON
Can use: Any race and class EXCEPT faery
Special invocation: paralysis 5% BELIAL

er, ok... now take a gander at Belial's un-named "Slash" attack, unique to him only regardless of the generic name, and the stats:

Slash
range: S
hit modifier: 8
dmg spread: 8-56
(it is not cursed)
SUB TYPE WEAPON
Can use: in default Gothic only Belial!
Special attack/status affliction on hit: none

the huuuge jump in accuaracy alone tells the whole story. I'm looking and looking but ithe pattern is pretty clear-cut: Starfish powered-down all of the re-named enemy-weapons in their accuracy and their dmg spread, however, they added status-on-hit afflictions, made them Cursed, and a lot of them feature a minor boost in Armor Class like an extra -1 or -2 here or there.

So, i don't like this. I think Gothic is just perfect difficulty-wise, and in fact, i want to make it even harder in the smartest way possible. The family of demons (lesser/chaos/etc) all are now sporting weakened, re-named demon claws in the 3ds version but with minor possibility to inflict a status ailment and the like.

fuck that.

however something that is truly worth modding immediately is that Starfish changed a select few enemy's natural-weapons into M-range and L-range, such as making Insector Lord's attack L-range (but SEVERELY lowering the damage spread!) and it comes complete with 20% poison-chance and 5% paralyze chance and a -5 AC boost to the wearer; limited to Evil only alignment only. Oh, it also has a -50 resistance deficit versus Paralyze...

so, yeah, i went ahead and changed Insector Lord's Strike weapon, i re-named it to the 3ds version's name and changed all of its stats to reflect it because adding additional range to enemy attacks is much, much more interesting and dynamic than the ho-hum nerfing of all of the top-tier enemy's natural-weapons.

La Flanuse was also made M-range, so changing that as well, so on and so forth. Since this is all incredibly tedious i'm not going to edit the changes done to nerf enemies, and i'll just change the enemies that were changed to M or L range.

(Yesss, i know, i have bitched about the 3ds version before and how it "dumbed down" the difficulty, but i'm not that stubborn or hard-headed: it is simply a much more streamlined edition of E: Gothic which, let's face it, is not an easy game for newbies. Fact remains though, if you want the true hard-core experience the PSP and the PC version of E: Gothic are the undisputed champions!)

 

[aweigh]

Great job as usual, aweigh. Titanic work.
I guess it would help to have a Hotlet Thief. Or maybe some monster adventurer Thief with high Agility and Luck stats - if there's one.

100% correct man. my dragonewt thief has 16 LUCK, while a HOTTIE MC HOTLET thief can have 22 LUCK. the way Wizardry (and thus elminage) attributes work is that each point gives exponential benefit and not a linear benefit. Once certain ATTRIBUTES reach 15 and continue rising upwards each additional point is more meaningful/impactful than 5 entire points from earlier, before it reached 15.

ALL attributes work like that, and it is why the Races are sooooo well balanced. every single point makes a world of difference and Starfish really out-Wizardry'd Wizardry in every single way possible. elminage races are some of the best balanced i've ever played.

Dwarves can have 20 STR and dragonewts can have 22 STR; in end-game (i.e. level 75+ and onwards) those 2 points of STR will yield the dragonewt around 20-25% extra physical damage!

a cleric casting a Holy element spell (and revival spells are holy, btw) who only has 14 or 15 PIETY will end up turning the party member being revived into ASHES like 6 out of 10 times. Raise that PIETY to a respectable 17 and up (preferably the 20 from a GNOME race) and you'll almost never ASH your party members (although it also takes into account the dead character's PIETY attribute as well so while 20 PIE is amazing for a pure healer-type, if the dead char has like 12 VIT it's a fucking roll of the dice whether he'l turn to ASH or not)

(dead char rolls VIT versus char who is reviving's PIE, among other stuff)

This is also why E: Gothic (and Original) are pretty much one of the only RPGs if not the only one where they truly managed to get Humans right as the archetypical well-balanced Attribute race selection. In Gothic or Original using Humans is great because they reach 17-19 in every single attribute category, which is fucking amazing. Means human-race can be literally any class and do it well: AGI/LK for thief, INT or PIE for cleric/mage/bishop/alchemist, 18 STR for a martial-type char, etc, etc)

reason i always go w/ a Dragonewt Thief in my party is cos i like keeping him INNOCENT from beginning of the game all the way to the end of the game in order to maximize the thief's level gains as that compensates for the 'Newt's slow level-progression (they have higher XP reqs). Plus breathing fire is always nice since the thief won't have magic. That 16 luck means it's still rolling the dice on trap disarms especially early on, and that abominable 15 AGILITY is... lewl; still a Thief 'Newt with 22 STR can wreak havoc from back row throwing Obsidian Boomerangs, especially since most thieves are hotlets who only reach 16 STR.

EDIT: believe it or not a great race for Ninjas is the hotlet (courtier told me this tidbit) since the Ninja isn't there really to deal DPS dmg he/she is there to score at least a single hit so that their Beheading chance activates. Hotlet w/ their super high agility and insanely high luck (i'm not sure if luck is mixed in w/ beheading, but whatevs); it's really cool having the Hotlet ninja attack before the enemy most of the time and doing his thing. Plus the high luck from the hotlet will compensate for the mid-tier chest-disarming skills of the Ninja, who is worse at that than the Hunter and the Thief.

 

[aweigh]

Courtier ThisNameIsFree MrRichard999 Helly Siveon

hey man, could you do me a favor? i just got done translating a shit-ton of stuff inside the elminage 2 executable (all sorts of text but the brunt of the work was with the battle feedback; messages saying what each Tarot Card outcome was and what effect is now active as well as the dozens upon dozens of miscellaneous textual messeges that say what a Skill is and what it does and of course all of the spell names and the text description below each spell; in that specific instance i simply copied/pasted the spell text from Elminage: Original); and aaaanyway i wanted to play for a while with the menu textures from Elminage: Original but for whatever reason uMod won't "hook" into my PSP emulator anymore.

I am doing the exact same process as previously done:

1. start Ninja Ripper and use this to launch PSP emulator with a d3d9 hook so that it creates a .dll in the emulator's folder. (uMOD needs that DLL in order to hook the emulator/game).

2. close PSP emulator and then close ninja ripper (although i later tried it with NJ still running as well) and then launch uMOD and choose "Use uMOD to select a game and launch it..." and then i, of course, select the PSP emulator, and it launches without any problems whatsoever but uMOD never actually latches on to anything and it just stays stuck in its non-game "menu screen".

BTW, I already have all of the menu-textures ripped from Elminage: Original and put inside a .zip and I also already have all of the corresponding Elminage 2 menu-textures ripped and .zipped. Literally all I need to do is make uMOD hook PPSSPP so I can then "force" the textures from Elminage 1 .zip onto the running game of Elminage 2 and then have uMOD save the entire process/project so that it becomes permanent.

***NOTE*** IF ANYONE KNOWS A BETTER WAY TO DO THIS PLEASE, ALL HELP IS APPRECIATED.

 

[Dorateen]

finally reached ibag's 20th floor:

[Spoiler]

[IMG]http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y292/aweigh01/NOT-WORTHY_zpsmotsabc7.jpg[/IMG]

[/Spoiler]

@aweigh

It's because you ignored the game's [B]lore[/B]. You should not take the tests of the gods lightly.

 

[Courtier]

I had to download a modified dx9 .dll and rename it the same as the default one the game uses (d3d8 in this case) in order to get uMOD to hook WizEmp2, maybe you need to do something similar although I'm not sure how it'd work with PPSSPP

 

[aweigh]

Dorateen

EDIT: Saw the link!

EDIT x2: Link does not answer meee

elminage is the one and only game, i repeat!, the one and ONLY game where i the use of the word lore AND the discussion of said lore is not only acceptable but it is stupendously engaging!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111

sure, sure, it's all a very basic plot concerning ancient gods who created/shaped the "earth" participating (without their knowledge or will) in an eternal cycle of divine judgement upon all the races, all the magical beings and all the creatures of flesh and blood who populate elminage: gothic's world (i have no idea wtf the world is called, btw); in fact i'm proud to say i have never bothered sitting through the introductory cut-scene when you begin a new game

however the atmosphere is unparalleled, IMO, and the very brief amount of text and dialog the player can listen to from the game world's NPCs is extremely well-done. It's not that it's "well written", rather it is that in Ghostlight's attempts to skimp costs and save as much money as possible on localizing E: Gothic into English the people they hired (and I suspect it was only 1 person, btw) to localize the game opted for the tried-and-true approach when translating a symbological language like japanese into english and when you are limited in the amount of english letters that you can use (literally, as in "space" issues): the localization team went for the cryptic angle on their localization and managed to boil down what are sometimes 2x the length of text/letters in the japanese alphabet (i.e. jap version) into unbelievably concise and effective two or three sentences per conversation.

that is EXTREMELY hard to pull off, man, and that lone hero who localized E: Gothic for probably 7 bucks an hour for Ghostlight LTD did a superb job in assuring that his translated script not only "fits" the bleak parlance of the game but that it also compliments it as the player is always just shy of a complete answer to any question he or she might have.

TL:DR i have no idea what you're referring to DORATEEN and would much appreciate if u told me where to stick the giant golden key i found.

 

[aweigh]

Courtier

are you up for downloading my in-progress .ISO of elminage 2 from my firedrop account and then replacing the menu-textures (i will include a 2nd link with .zips with all of the menu-textures from elmi 1 and elmi 2) and doing that fer me? that way i can just continue translating.

you obviously/definitely know how to use those programs way betters than me because if you remember correctly i actually never managed to figure out how to get that shit working w/ Wiz Empire 2 (it was dx8). You did.

and/or if you prefer the elmi 2 jp .iso is available in all rom sites.

 

[Dorateen]

Dorateen


TL:DR i have no idea what you're referring to DORATEEN and would much appreciate if u told me where to stick the giant golden key i found.

Oh, if that's all you want to know, isn't the golden key required to return to all those "Seal of the Gods" messages scattered throughout the tower? Here are the coordinates if you need them.

Spoiler

Level 2: 8,5
Level 4: 15,10
Level 5: 17,16
Level 8: 11,19
Level 10: 4,3
Level 14: 12,2
Level 16: 12,10

But as far as being deemed unworthy on Level 20 and the three gods, I thought that might refer to three specific question encounters: a god of truth, knowledge, and power? You probably have to return to solve them. I figured you were so immersed in the wonderful gameplay mechanics of Elminage, you might have missed those spots.

 

[aweigh]

Dorateen

I AM, it's just that this is my first pass of the tower floors. i haven't actually explored the floors yet, especially 10th level and up! i've basically just been doing my best to skull-rape any enemies in my way as i climb up stair after stair in a mad rush to reach the fabled 20th floor.

so... i reached it. now what? oh, i have to do what players usually do in an RPG and go explore. ok

and, btw, if you had not told me the gold key was for the light circles i swear i would not have figured it out until i simply went over to one of the them out of boredom/frustration as i methodically mapped out every floor again from the ground up. it's very nice to know already what the circles need.

i know there's some secret lance (i think?) that is a side-quest that Courtier was talking about but since i don't know anything about that particular i'll figure out that one on my own.

as for the 3 gods? hell if know. i mean, i know the basic narrative of the game and i know the entire point of Cyclonus kidnapping and influencing and eventually possessing that young child from Igdra Village was all part of an attempt to pierce the gateway, so to speak, for Cyclonus to enter the "mortal realm" and (i then assume) go and war on the other gods; one of the gods is sleeping and his entire decayed body is the penultimate post-game dungeon (all Elminage Kamis reincarnate/resurrect and can not die, learned that from E: Original), and i know there is "Researcher", a ghost, who i assume was alive during a few cycles ago when the gods were probably a bit more active and he is now trying to either join them in a worst case scenario or in a best case scenario succeed in manipulating and controlling the magical energies of the elminage divine yoke (him being an immortal "researcher" after all, and plus he makes passing references to predecessors of both the gods and of adventurers such as your party when u steam-roll his ass); as for the third god? no clue.

[an aside I just realized] The wandering black-magic merchant from Igdra Village who you talk to throughout the entire game is a self-proclaimed wandering merchant who has been everywhere and seen everything and i think the player can 100% safely assume this guy has been around long enough to "witness a few Kamikage cycles", if you get my drift. This speculation lends further credence to the notion that Elminage is:

a) possibly a dream; a reality in flux! Not that far fetched! think about this...
b) Elminage world is simply that, a world with gods who fight every few centuries, etc, and he's just a black-magic quite-possibly half-demon moron in it for his own gain and it's as simple as that.

obviously i imagine he lives inside his bachelor pad in the penthouse of Ibag Tower with an awesome view of the Skillvings as they go about their business of making newcomers to the Tower rage-quit. Now i speculate that since this is after all basically a Wizardry derivative, and in the post-game dungeon "Cave of the Ancients" you can find two whole easter egg NPCs who talk about the good old days of (Wiz Empire "lore") and one of them insinuates that the Elminage (yes, the world itself is called "Elminage") was either a byproduct of the catatrosphic divine wars waged by the Wizardry dragon god L'kabreth (whom you skull-rape in all 3 fuckin Wiz Empire games, lewl) and/or it is simply a type of game and a type of "world" that was made simply because the project leader on Elminage series was a huge, HUGE fanatic of Wizardry/Wiz Empire and simply put he wanted to make more of the same but better. That's why those two NPCs are easter eggs and not "lore".

so, yeah, prolly a dumb dragon waiting for me to kick its teeth in and use my thief to steal his toe-nails.

 

[aweigh]

Courtier

https://firedrop.com/f7abc4db0fa6b7c12c0391312a7464e7

(that's the firedrop link to my WIP elminage 2 .ISO for PSP; if you can spare the time i'd appreciate it!)

https://firedrop.com/ea5d8cdd2bcb1a1995a4e9dfceca9d6c
(that link is a .zip of all the relevant menu-textures ripped from Elminage: Original)

https://firedrop.com/f5d3e7dd6afb6fb454f6106aa2fab4fb
(and this link is a .zip of the same menu-textures ripped from Elmi 2)

simple matter of naming the Elmi: Original textures w/ the names of the Elmi-2 ones! then when you uMOD-launch Elmi-2 you force into the game the E: Original textures that now carry the names of the menu textures from Elmi-2 and voila they will become replaced!

 

[aweigh]

Dorateen

I just thought of a reason for the King sending you into the oldest known cave in his kingdom so you can find the "truth":

- the real world will die if honey bees become extinct.

- the end-goal of the Cave of the Ancients occurs when you find the pot of honey.

- the sages and gurus inside the CotAncients repeatedly try to talk with you about such subjects as: familial love and worldly love and, of course, the only love for oneself that can realistically be attained which occurs when you void yourself of such desires that stain the grace of your spirit and occupy your thoughts and energy with things banal, mundane and self-evident; this is classic pop-culture Taoism and "zen buddhism" and probably an incalculable number of other shit (probably Indians in there before the chinks, btw) where Lao Tzu said:

"The world's most Virtuous Man is he that is Strong yet is blissfully serene and content with everyone else thinking he is weak".

ANYWAY, i was theorizing the honey you find represents you saving the "real world" and thus etc, etc, you can extrapolate from there the ramifications then concerning the possible reality-flux state / dream-world of Elminage.

 

[aweigh]

i just spent 53 straight minutes in the epic endeavor of stealing a Black Dragon's claw weapon. (he actually dual-wields! but i only got one...)

53. Fifty. And... a three. That is, once again:

- the number 5
- followed by the number 3

as a measurement of elapsed units of the concept of time.

was it worth it? i don't know. all i know is i have an absurdly OP dragon claw weapon that i can't equip on anybody because i don't have a brawler in my party and i sure did learn a valuable lesson tho!

NEVER. AGAIN. NEVER. EVER. WASTE TIME STEALING FROM ENEMIES WITH 100+ LEVELS. It is exactly as grueling as trying to contract an enemy with 90-99% summon resistance. you literally have to keep making your Thief "roll the skill dice-roll" under the hood over and over and over and over until your Thief's number surpasses the number rolled by the black dragon (who of course goes and adds his level number + 20 to his roll whereas your Thief does NOT; there are more modifiers and AGI and LK are in the mix but it all comes down to a lucky "roll".

That's another thing much, much easier in Elminage: Original - stealing shit.

 

[nomask7]

Quick question before I start this game, does the game expect the player to draw his own maps like the original Wizardries, or should I rely on mapping spells and memory?

 

[CryptRat]

You can use one-usage maps which are stackable (9) and cost almost nothing.

 

[aweigh]

nomask7

And also in the... 4th? dungeon? i think it's the 4th one (it's a dungeon set inside a giant tree) you can partake in a side-quest where you have to fight a gang of goblins who kidnapped the local village's children, and once the children are safe you have to make your way BACK to where the goblins were (depends on your party/mood how annoying that will be) and waiting for you will be a magical "Goblin Map", which has unlimited uses but every so often it'll "break", which means it requires being repaird at the City Shop (or casting the Alchemist spell "pendeku" which repairs all items).

so yeah, don't worry about maps mang.

 

[Shackleton]

aweigh, now I read this thread, something comes back to me about one of the dungeons in Gothic that I always wondered about and I would think if I was going to find out an answer, it would be in this thread.

I played it through a long time ago and my memory is a bit hazy, but I distinctly remember in one on the 'mansion' type dungeons, there were quite a lot of the glowing circles that were piles of books. Whichever chars I had in my party, I always got a message along the lines of 'you can't understand these books'. I always wondered if I went back with a high level char of a sort I didn't have at the time, I might have learnt something from them.

Were they just fluff, or was there something else about them?

 

[aweigh]

if you complete that side-quest... first:

- you have to find the dismembered "limbs" of a broken puppet girl.
- yes, they are super-duper annoyingly tedious to find... scattered throughout both floors of the mansion and i think 2 of the floors of the underground satanic bachelor pad downstairs.
- then she will fight you becase, RPGs. Er, i mean she'll fight you because she has been "asleep" for a long, long time and was confused upon being reassembled.
- then she switches into standard anime-trope of super cheery, super cute litttle girl w/ Magical Powers (TM).

...

...

congratulations! you have now unlocked the option to Create a new chracter in the training hall as a (Race) "Magic Puppet"!!! (They made their first appearance in E: Original and the quest to unlock their Race was almost exactly the same except WAAAAAAAAAAAAY less tedious)

EDIT: once that shit is done (btw, i have never ever even once bothered completing that quest. The one time i wanted to roll w/ a Puppet companion i fucking hex-edited my save game and changed someone's race like Hemingway would do, goddammit!); now there is a 2nd part to that side-quest: the mystery of the unreadable books in the Mansion.

i actually honestly have no clue how to finish that part as i have never even bothered doing it or even reading how to do it in the japanese wiki.

Courtier did both parts, tho, so he'll have something to say.

BTW, the "pay off" to being able to read the books is being able to read 2 of those alien books found in rooms in one of the floors of Cyclonus' Lair (TM). Can't remember what they say, or rather, have never went and looked cos i figure if i want to know what they tell the player i should fucking do the quest(s) myself.

 

[Shackleton]

Yeah, I remember doing that in that dungeon. But the piles of books or texts were something else. Were they connected? I never managed to find anything about them on the Japanese Wiki, but I was playing it on release so there wasn't much info out there at the time.

*Edit* Dammit lol, nice ninja edit of your post after I'd replied! Hmm, so there is more to it! I think I'm due a replay of Gothic, can't believe there's still things in it you haven't done!