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I like the ideas that went into weapon and magic experience consolidation over the course of the game. However, at least in the early portion of the SoE, I generally had a worse experience with this balance patch compared to the base game that I was playing alongside it for comparison. Some of the bosses' stats are just absurd compared to what I remember from years ago. I think I'd go with the boosted magic exp rate hack and/or 2 Player hack instead of this more extensive one for a replay.

So just to clarify to everyone, I only used the patch to rebalance experience gain and such. I didn't use the secondary patch that made the game harder.

Okay, so with that out of the way, I think this is a major leap forward with regards to playing SoE and without making the game too easy.

THE CHANGE: So what does the rebalancing change? Two things, actually. For your weapons, experience is given to the class of a weapon, not an individual one. For example, when using the Bone Crusher, you also gain experience for the Gladiator Sword, Crusader Sword, and Neutron Blade, although each one gains a fraction of the Bone Crusher's overall experience. When you acquire later weapons, you'll find they've already had some headway in their experience levels, requiring you to grind FAR less to use them. While this does mean you still need to grind to have good weaponry, this makes the later weapons significantly more accessible since it means you don't have to kill 200 enemies or so with each weapon to level them up to max. As a result, weapons late in the game, like the Neutron Blade, Atom Smasher, and Laser Lance especially, are more usable right out of the box so to speak if you used the previous tiers plenty beforehand.

The second change is to the alchemy system. All of the alchemy spells have been split up into various categories, similar to the weapons, and experience gained for one spell is shared by all in its category. Casting Defend, for example, will buff up the later Status Buff spells like Speed to have more experience and such as well. This was a great idea and one that should have been implemented in the base game since later spells, while visually pretty cool and all, suffered from all starting at lvl 0 while your starting spells could already be maxed out by the time you got them.

THE EFFECT: The effect this has on the game is that SoE becomes significantly less grindy. There's still plenty of it, but it feels infinitely more rewarding when you realize that strengthening your skill with one weapon or spell only increases the potency of later weapons/spells you acquire down the road, and in turn makes the player appreciate the effort to obtain some of the more hidden ones (Fire Power turned out to be one of my favorite spells by the time I got it since my Elemental Alchemy was pretty powerful by then. I normally never used it originally) To put it plainly, the game already had plenty to find and discover, especially with the alchemy system, and this patch only makes the magic significantly more user friendly when it's the hero's primary perk.

MY RATING: 8/10 I'd almost hazard to say that this is a very necessary patch to PROPERLY enjoy this game at its fullest potential. Sharing experience among weapon and spell classes is an impressively implemented idea that should have been in the game from the start. My play-through using this rebalance actually had me enjoy the game far more than I ever have, and I found myself using spells I normally shelved upon acquiring since I had no use for new lvl 0 spells. However, I have noticed other people make recommendations AGAINST the patch that changes the difficulty, so that's really the only reason I give this an 8; I didn't use the full package here, just one part of it, and it kept the game manageable and fun for me, yet in a way that kinda defeats the purpose of downloading the whole thing, doesn't it? So in my opinion? Just patch the game to rebalance how experience is allocated and leave the other patch alone unless you're curious, and considering other reviewers remarked on severe bugs, I'd hesitate to recommend it myself.

The game gets some nice additions, stronger spells but the ability to only cast when at 100%, stronger enemies and bosses, readjusted hitrates, i'd say and some other stuff. But in act III, after the queen send you into prison, the hack didn't spawn the boy anymore. You are stuck with the dog wandering around the cells in search for a way out. So i can rly recommend the hack.

This hack sounded very promising and like it was really improving the game. It's better feature is without a doubt the shared weapon and magic EXP. So if you level up a "sword" weapon, that will apply immediately to the next "sword" weapon. Magic is regrouped in categories and using any magic within a category will level up all magic of that particular category.

This is a very good idea and should have been present in the original game. Nobody wants to level up each spell independently, and do not want to use new weapons which are less powerful than old ones!

To compensate for that the author decided he would make other parts of the game harder - which I do not have an issue with. Enemies have more HP and charged attacks do less big damage, also the level ups mentionned earlier are slower and the dogs level his attack slower. I do not have any particular problem with that.

However a major problem is the bosses. They are just insane: The swamp boss (the second of the game) took me literally more than 30 minutes to beat, so much he had HP! I was very lucky because of course this implies stocking on healing items and magic as much as possible to survive in the long, very long, run. After two or three tries I could beat him with a lot of luck, after having exhausted all my healing items and magic (which were stocked up to the maximum possible before the fight).

Unfortunately the 3rd boss, the lava golem, isn't so easy. Even after fighting him for 30 minutes he still won't die, as he regenerate by swimming in lava, and you do very little damage to him. Using the non-patched ROM with the same save, I could beat the boss in one minute.

So I recommend either not using that patch, or using it only for some portions of the game, but definitely not for boss fights. Making boss fights 100 times more difficult really kills what could have been a good hack.

Much like Secret of Mana, I've always found Secret of Evermore to be way too easy. Thus, this balancing hack was something I was immediately interested in when I saw it.

There are (much like the SoM Hardtype hack) some really, really great things about this hack. All of the balancing patch tweaks are great, and I think they do a really good job of varyinhg the difficulty throughout the game. Especially endgame, where your characters tend to become gods, these stat changes were very welcome, but even earlier on things like the alchemy/weapon skill overhaul really streamlined the game systems present here, and generally got them to reach their potential, in my opinion.

The bad parts (again, much like the SoM Hardtype hack) involve a lack of attention to detail in balancing the difficulty patch. Too many times I found my fully geared and (over)leveled heroes getting mauled by minor enemies. One particular boss was even able to OHKO my main character at full health. I made it all the way through using both patches, but the difficulty patch was too much on too many occasions.

To sum up, I greatly recommend the balancing patch-great adjustments that made this game so much mroe enjoyable to play. I can only recommend the difficulty patch if you're extremely patient-you will likely be doing a lot of power leveling, and not because you wanted to.

In this patch, Ninakoru makes a number of subtle modifications to the core gameplay and leveling systems in Secret of Evermore. Although one might not notice these modifications at first, they definitely make Secret of Evermore a better game. I won't waste time listing all of the changes, but I will point out a few highlights. One of the best modifications included in this patch are systems in which experience is shared between similar weapon and magic types. For example, leveling up the bone crusher (the first "sword" type weapon you receive in the game) will also contribute experience towards leveling up the other sword type weapons you receive later on in the game. This is a much needed improvement because in the original game, many players wouldn't use a new weapon or spell because they had already spent time leveling up the less-powerful version of that weapon or spell. I should also note that the patch maintains a decent level of difficulty throughout the majority of the game. For the most part, enemies and bosses were challenging without being overly difficult. However, near the end of the game enemies tended to have a bit too much HP and took forever to kill. The final boss was also way to hard to beat in my opinion. Despite these minor shortcomings, the patch significantly improves upon the original Secret of Evermore. Overall, I highly recommend it.

PS: I played thought this game in combination with FuSoYa's 2 player hack and both work fine together.