Skies of Arcadia: Legends Maeson

Hack description

This is a Hack for Skies of Arcadia: Legends for the Gamecube, a lighthearted RPG that mixes your typical dungeon exploring with ship battles in a world of floating islands and full of mystery, originally released for the Dreamcast.

This Hack aims to give the gameplay a different feeling altogether, by increasing the overall challenge to make it more engaging than the low difficulty original game, while reworking many of the different elements to also provide the player more interesting equipment, Magic System, Ship Equipment options and such.

After several years, it has been updated to version 1.50. This brings a long list of improvements, tweaks, new features and just a more polished, better experience. You can read the specific changes on the readme as they're too numerous to put here.

You can easily point out if you're playing Version 1.50 as the game, once patched, has a custom banner, name, and game description new to this version.

Among the different changes made by this Hack are these:

* Character balance tweaked, in order to make all members versatile enough to work with different roles beyond the basic one they were supposed to fill.

* Significant upgrade to the Magic System and Supermoves. Spells are more powerful and versatile, Healing Magic is now essential instead of easily made obsolete by Healing Items doing the same for no cost. Status Effect Magic is a lot more reliable. Spirit Point costs have been made more reasonable to keep the rhythm of battle, but with SP management being still important.

* Crew Members tweaked. For Passive members, their effects might had some changes, and for Active members, their SP cost might have been changed to make them more useful. Merida does something now too.

* Extensive Equipment changes. Most gear now sports new special effects in order to give previously ignored items more useful traits, and to give the player more choices in how to set their characters, even more when you can swap gear during battles.

* Extensive Ship Equipment changes. Just like character gear, pieces of Ship gear have been tweaked. The different types of equipment, such as Decks or Engines, now provide more than a single Statistic. Furthermore, the previously Decorative pieces have been turned into useful ones with proper Stat bonuses that the player might want to mix and match with the other types.

* Unused pieces of equipment left in the game have been brought back too. They've been added as rewards to several battles, and other places. The readme contains a section pointing out everything (and even original items that could be missed by the player) so they don't miss anything. Of course, they received changes to mesh well with the rest of the equipment and/or to make them actually useful, in the case of unused Decorative equipment.

* As mentioned above, enemies have been made stronger, in order to make the curve of difficulty go up as you progress, instead of going down like the author feels with the original game. Almost every enemy has been reworked to be more of a fight, while still trying to make a balanced experience by giving them elemental weaknesses, Status weaknesses, and such. Changes to enemy Magic, Supermoves and other traits were made too, just like changing enemy formations to make very elusive types of enemies more common, or to make Boss battles a bit spicier.

* Ship Battles are tougher too. It was very easy to become very powerful and make opponents feel underwhelming. Not the case anymore, every ship battle should be a bigger challenge. They also reward the player with many more items, specially Ship Equipment. A couple of bosses, known by fans of the game to be a bit too long of a fight, had their HP reduced somewhat to make them less time consuming.

* Ship Magic has gotten similar improvements as "On Foot" Magic, with elemental attacks being far more useful, and Magic being more versatile in Spirit costs. Enemy Ships had their elemental resistances tweaked. New to Version 1.50, is that new Ship Magic has been included: Now players can use Sacrum, Noxi, Noxus, Eterni, Eternes and Eternum, providing a very necessary healing Spell for late game and Green and Silver elemental attacks, making the player capable of using every element on Ship Battles!

* Experience Points given by enemies have been raised moderately in certain parts of the game where they felt too low. Experience Curves for characters have been tweaked to make things flow better, specially for Fina which leaves the party several times, often leaving her behind.

* Magic Experience and Magic Experience curves have been changed, with the grinding being cut significantly. This makes for a much less "grindy" experience, letting the player learn Spells at more appropriated times according to their usefulness. This does not eliminate the need to think and choose which elements to train and putting care on it, just makes it so you're not at the end of the game with most of your spells unlearned even if you did.

* Fish are far more useful now! In the original game they mostly did nothing and had little value. Now they have a variety of effects, often being great healing items that can only be used out of battle, but sport greater effects than things you can buy. They now are more valuable and can be caught to sell, providing better Gold.

All the descriptions for altered elements have been updated to reflect these changes in-game. You can also check the readme file for a long, long detailed list.

While the increased difficulty might make it sound otherwise, this Hack could be played by first-timers, after all the raise in difficulty is made in an attempt to make it on par with RPGs of the time, not to make it a "HardType" type of Hack. Version 1.50 makes some tweaks to improve parts that the author was told through feedback, like with the first incursion to Valua.

Included in the package is an optional patch originally made by user cleartonic:

https://retrohackers.net/hack-details.php?id=5314/

This modification makes it so by holding the B Button, no random battles can happen, either on foot or sailing. While the patch uploaded here is not compatible with this Hack, the one included here is. Just apply it after the main patch.

The Encounter Rate is often seen as higher than usual (and in the Dreamcast version was even higher) so this can be a tremendous relief for many. Just have in mind that using it too much will affect the rhythm of your Experience and Magic Experience gain, and leave you behind.

All credit goes to cleartonic for this wonderful hacked feature.

An NTSC-U version of the game is required for this. It is shared as a xDelta patch, made with the tool DeltaPatcher. The optional "Hold B" patch is a simple, IPS patch, faster to apply for such a small, size-wise, change.

Reviews

Great for a bit of extra challenge	rap6tor	2024-06-30	Version 1.51
Once you get a handle on the mechanics of Skies of Arcadia the game can be pretty easy, so this mod gives it an extra shot in the arm to keep you on your toes. I loved the surprise each time I encountered a boss and seeing new monsters backing them up to boost the challenge, and how buffs/debuffs are much more balanced and effective. Changes to the Silver Moon magic was very welcome, as instant death effects were never a fun element of the game, and Aika can now do something other than use Delta Shield occasionally in the harder fights. And the rebalancing of character stats to give them more versatile roles was great change, I found Fina being one of my favorite damage dealers with her super-moves, something she never was able to do before, and Vyse could do some serious crowd control with Red Magic in the early game. I highly recommend combining the mod with the mod to be able to temporarily disable random encounters (which it included the instructions on how to do). Sometimes you just want to explore or travel somewhere and not have to deal with constant trivial encounters, and it is so nice to be able to do that. I did encounter a couple bugs, only one of which soft locked the game, so overall it's quite polished. With the changes to debuffs certain enemies which were not susceptible to them before now are, and in my case the game was soft locked when I managed to apply the confusion condition to Faina in the Vyze bounty fight. She doesn't have a regular attack (only casts) so she wasn't able to attack normally locking the game. The other bug was during the last fight against Ramirez, killing both of the backup monsters stopped the music for the rest of the fight(as it triggered a death cutscene on killing the second monster). Overall, fantastic experience. And I was able to combine this with the HD Texture mod that is out there as well. A great way to experience the game again with a modern update!

Battles become a drag FAST	Allen0800	2024-05-28	Version 1.51
I decided to give this hack a try for a replay of Skies of Arcadia. I can't say I approve of the time it takes to fight random battles, let alone having bosses two-shot my characters. I guess I could grind, but that process seems generally worse due to being more drawn out than the original game. Given that there is a standalone 'avoid random battles' ROMhack, and I remember that being a particular nuisance in the late game, I think I'll just nab that one instead.

Enemies certainly hit harder!	GeneralAtrox	2022-04-03	Version 1.3
This hack is quite good but has its bad points. It adds extra enemies and makes leveling magic a bit more difficult. In the vanilla game you could farm the early levels and get insanely powerful red magic pretty quickly making the rest of the game extremely easy. I have just got to the Lost City and decided to write this review. One of the main problems I've had so far was fighting the Rokwyrm in the Pyramid. If it wasn't for save state scumming, I don't think I could of gotten past it due to it's perma stun attacks it has. The petrify chance is extremely high and its enough to stone two people for up to 5 turns meaning you'll wipe. I wouldn't recommend this for new players as you wouldn't be able to experience some of the cool special moves as you simply won't be able to afford them. Especially Drachma, he has great special moves, but if you waste them on him and he leaves, you're going to be in dire shape.

Thanks and thoughts	Exidous	2021-06-12	Version 1.49a
Some excellent ideas in this mod. Skies of Arcadia is the rare game that won me over almost entirely independent of its gameplay. This mod is a definite improvement over that vanilla gameplay, but it does create a few new balance issues. On the whole, this mod improves a wonderful game. Maybe the most prominent gameplay change is the nerf (SP cost increase) of Delta/Justice Shield. In vanilla their low cost and big benefit means their respective characters will be spamming them almost every turn. That's no longer a viable strategy if you want to finish battles in a reasonable number of turns. I'm not entirely sure the right balance was struck, the SP cost increases are probably a bit too much, but I presume Maeson really disliked the vanilla dominant strategy. Some amount of nerf was definitely appropriate here. There are a few emergent balance issues I noticed with this mod: Fish made some Seeds (stat-increasing items) obsolete. You can just farm the Max HP fish. Aika and Fina have the highest max HP in my party, and I did not abuse a fishing spot more than a few times. I would recommend removing any permanent stat increasing fish (or limiting them to the one 'special' fish in the center of a school, so people have to work for their exploits). The basic change to make fishing actually useful for out of battle healing items is great. Self destruct. Any monster that can use this move, will use it after being damaged but not dying. It may be that the across-the-board enemy HP increases simply uncovered this vanilla tactic, or this may be an AI change introduced by the mod. Either way, it's a very big party killing threat in the Catacombs and a huge disincentive to use field attacks like Red Magic or Lambda Burst that aren't guaranteed to OHKO enemies. HP Absorb. Same enemy behavior as with self destruct - if damaged they will use it on their next turn. Remember in South Ocean, all those gravers? Yeah they have HP absorb. Use a field attack to damage all of them and every. single. one. will use HP absorb on Drachma on the next turn. On one occasion they killed him from full HP in one turn. HP Absorb also seems to be a scalar rather than variable attack. It always does very close to 350 HP damage, modified only by blocking. That makes it a huge threat early on (Valuan Catacombs, South Ocean), and practically irrelevant later (Yafutoma). Again, this may be the vanilla game but you never noticed it because you first turn wiped most of the offending enemies in vanilla... A few bosses are starkly greater threats now. Antonio II - Yes, I'm kind of ashamed here, but if you get unlucky and he gets Increm from the new minions, you're going to have dead characters - I don't let anyone get KOed so I probably restarted this fight a half dozen times. You really feel DeLoco's disdain for Alfonso after repeatedly rewatching the cutscene before that battle... Grendel - post-confusion boulder throw did 12k unmitigated damage on the Little Jack - it can do two in a round, so you have to evade both of them AND heal in between, or you die. Piastol III - Her speed needs to be nerfed. She's faster than my entire party even when they have Quika. On one occasion, her regular attack Stoned Aika and then she used Eternes the next turn. Party Wipe. Because sometimes, you still have to spam Delta Shield. These are sparse nits in a largely terrific package. Many thanks to Maeson!

The Best Version Of This Game!	ultimaweapon	2020-08-18	Version 1.49a
This hack was spot on. From top to bottom, changes made to this game make it much better without changing the formula. I can truly play this over and over again. Sega needs to do a remaster for current consoles using this version!

A great way to revisit my childhood	ParkerMcFly	2020-08-17	Version 1.49a
Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. This modification of the game was near perfect. It gets a score of 99/100 from me. The detail that went into this hack is fantastic! Feels like it should have been released this way. If you are a fan of Skies of Arcadia and fear this will change it far too much: DON'T! This is how the game should be played. My only complaint is with the fight with the final boss (1st form). Because there are two other "bosses" with him, if you kill the others before him, the battle music will cut out until you finish the encounter. But man, that means nothing in the game scheme of this hack. Well done! A+ work!

Breathing life into an already lively game	evittalex	2016-12-05	Version 1.46
This is an incredibly designed rework and rebalance of Skies of Arcadia. Having played the game multiple times a year for 10 years, I knew every nuance and mechanic and enemy down to the letter. This romhack is almost like the game had it's own Hard-Mode installed, but done in what feels like a professional remake. Being an avid modder (from the Skyrim Nexusmods community), I fully appreciate the work that has been done here, and wish I had the skill to do it myself! I reach out to the author to offer personal congratulations and thanks! Alex

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