Tra$lation Compen$ation - Anearth Fantasy Stories

[EsperKnight]

Haven't checked out Anearth Fantasy just yet but hope to do it this weekend  The good thing about compression I have to admit is that it can be useful in telling if you have a legitimate script block or whatever type you may be looking for.  For another game I used it to my advantage for ripping graphics since they were all compressed that way  Course you can miss a few here or there but hey  Hopefully Anearth's compression will make it easier.  At least from what I wrote and recall it appears to just use standard LZSS I'm thinking since standard LZSS always started off the buffer at 0xFEE if I remember right... but as long as it's not as bad as Falcom's we'll be good

Regarding the PCE vs Saturn, I'd like to do both honestly  Most likely I'd say at least 95% of the script matches (say they added a few scenes here or there maybe) so it wouldn't be too bad to do both.  And the Saturn's not a bad platform to hack on as I've poked at few on there  Plus with it's file system base it may be easier to extract the scripts from there and then match them to what's extracted to the PCE version to filter out the junk (We know all about junk in scripts don't we SamIAm )  So hopefully this weekend maybe I'll have something

Edit:  Checking out Anearth for the Saturn... This is the first console game I've seen that comes with a readme on the disc 0_0

Edit Edit:  Going through google translate, words from the guys who worked on this, very cool

[ParanoiaDragon]

Having played through both versions now more times than a sane person should (would?) I'd say your points about The PCE version are pretty much spot on. The Saturn version does a couple of things different though I would say it's seems a bit easier rather than better balanced. Either way they're both fun.

I wish someone could tell me the whole story behind the demo version -



Who is TWI Soft? What were they planning on doing with this game in 1995?  It's fun to play around with as there are some very interesting screens -




Hope to hear the story on this someday. 

Wait, are you saying there's a demo of Holy Night on AFS?  Are those picks from Holy Night, as I thought it was only a digital comic from what I recall seeing.

[SamIAm]

^^"Seiya" (as in Seiya Monogatari, the Japanese title for which "Anearth Fantasy Stories" is just a subtitle) means holy night, so isn't that it? Is there another game called Holy Night on the PCE?

Anyway, maybe I shouldn't spill the beans just yet, but something is happening with AFS. It looks like the script is stored in a much simpler way than Xanadu II. We might get a clean, complete script dump very soon. Stay tuned, I guess.

By the way, has anyone seen Bonknuts? It looks like he hasn't logged on in over a month. We could really use that dude right now, both for Spriggan mk2 and for a little advice on Xanadu II.

[Necromancer]

Woot!  I'm gettin' my hopes up!

[ParanoiaDragon]

^^"Seiya" (as in Seiya Monogatari, the Japanese title for which "Anearth Fantasy Stories" is just a subtitle) means holy night, so isn't that it? Is there another game called Holy Night on the PCE?

Anyway, maybe I shouldn't spill the beans just yet, but something is happening with AFS. It looks like the script is stored in a much simpler way than Xanadu II. We might get a clean, complete script dump very soon. Stay tuned, I guess.

By the way, has anyone seen Bonknuts? It looks like he hasn't logged on in over a month. We could really use that dude right now, both for Spriggan mk2 and for a little advice on Xanadu II.

There's some prototype game that I think I have a rip of somewhere, it's called something like Holy Night, or might've been something like Holy 2 Night...I'm too tired to remember right now

Here's a listing for it on Paul's site http://www.pcengine.co.uk/HTML_Games/Angels_2-Holy_Night.htm

[ElSeven]

Anyway, maybe I shouldn't spill the beans just yet, but something is happening with AFS. It looks like the script is stored in a much simpler way than Xanadu II. We might get a clean, complete script dump very soon. Stay tuned, I guess.

gah this is so exciting!  keep us updated  

[m1savage]

Glad to hear about the progress. The pictures I posted are from the "debug" version of Anearth. The caped crusaders and the 2 guys sitting at the PC in the pics are just a couple of examples of some goofiness added to the original game for some unknown reason.

[seieienbu]

It certainly is a good time for the turbo these days.  Old games getting translated always warms my heart, especially if it's an old game that I've owned forever.

[Tatsujin]

So far, the game owned you

[seieienbu]

So far, the game owned you

well played.

[SamIAm]

I'm giving the game a play right now. I just arrived in Rostarl for the first time.

It's pretty good. I want to keep playing it, which is a good sign.

The good:
1. Decent music most of the time.
2. Graphics have good color, variety, and blending of tiles.
3. No random battles is always nice.
4. Decent pace. Each area takes about an hour, and there are 15-20 areas.
5. Many aspects of the battle system are fun.
6. The "maze full of treasures" dungeons are nice.

The bad:
1. The PSG music is bland and a little sloppy, and the redbook tracks get recycled a lot.
2. The shop menus make it a pain to figure out how much better an item is than what you currently have.
3. The battle engine spends a lot of time just scrolling left and right when no characters are even moving. They probably should have grouped everyone closer together.
4. There isn't much character development so far. This is especially true for your party members. The protagonist is basically silent, and the other members have very few lines and establish nothing in the way of relationships.
5. Few graphical flourishes. The Street Fighter II flooring in the battle engine is cool, but some water is begging for palette cycling and/or alternate tiles, and the battle engine would have looked much cooler with a little parallax.

We'll see how things evolve.

[m1savage]

Out of curiosity, what character are you playing as?

[SamIAm]

The thief.

[Tatsujin]

Are you a thief?

[SamIAm]

Are you a thief?

I once stole a bar of soap from a corner store.

Luckily, I made a clean getaway.