For the record for the other commenters, we're going through Dragon Warrior 2 on our similarly hacked NES Classic. It's a patched version of the game from ROMhacking that makes the enemies give twice or more the experience and gold payout per battle, and it also has some small UI menu fixes (like actually providing room for your DEFENC stat to properly read as DEFENSE, etc.) All else is completely unchanged, including the original NES Thy Dungeonman localization. It's not a smarmy overhaul with an all new script and stat rebalancing and etc. It's literally just NES Dragon Warrior 2 but fixed menu/stat screen text and less stingy monster payout. And even then, as Sword put it in IM, "you'll still have to grind like a motherfucker; you just won't need to grind like two motherfuckers."
I apologize for indirectly making you think about all of this because of that. I, uh, I was just trying to tackle a game I'd long wanted to try; I didn't mean to make you play a smarmy ROMhack. *blush*
But yeah, this... there's a tendency for the complete overhauls to devolve into smugness, since 1) everyone has a grand idea for what the game balance totally should have been, and 2) the kind of people devoted enough to make a ROMhack by definition kind of have to know the game inside and out and a lot of them tend to expect you to as well. BNW sounds like it's actually a cut above your standard "nerf the obvious OP classes, give all the monsters 50x their stats, put in a masturbatory git gud speech in the readme about how you need to THINK and use STRATEGY now, that's it that's the hack." It does a lot of great quality-of-life tweaks that more games should have. But like you said, every good decision has a bad one to counterbalance. At the end of the day, this is still a stereotypical "overhaul" ROMhack. Which is unfortunate, because of all the good ideas it happened to have along the way.
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Date: 2020-01-17 03:55 pm (UTC)I apologize for indirectly making you think about all of this because of that. I, uh, I was just trying to tackle a game I'd long wanted to try; I didn't mean to make you play a smarmy ROMhack. *blush*
But yeah, this... there's a tendency for the complete overhauls to devolve into smugness, since 1) everyone has a grand idea for what the game balance totally should have been, and 2) the kind of people devoted enough to make a ROMhack by definition kind of have to know the game inside and out and a lot of them tend to expect you to as well. BNW sounds like it's actually a cut above your standard "nerf the obvious OP classes, give all the monsters 50x their stats, put in a masturbatory git gud speech in the readme about how you need to THINK and use STRATEGY now, that's it that's the hack." It does a lot of great quality-of-life tweaks that more games should have. But like you said, every good decision has a bad one to counterbalance. At the end of the day, this is still a stereotypical "overhaul" ROMhack. Which is unfortunate, because of all the good ideas it happened to have along the way.
Oh, well.