This is it. After six days, seven conferences, and 200 trailers uploaded to Giant Bomb (thanks Marino), the end of E3 is in sight. It's certainly been a harrowing week, though if past events are anything to go by tonight's live shows will probably be the most harrowing yet, to our sanity if nothing else. That's why we're (figuratively, but if you want to do this at home no-one's stopping you) putting our fingers in our ears and making loud noises until we no longer have to think about games that are months away from release, at least until February when they all come out at once. Our chief distraction? Randomizers! Take a gander at Garflink over here if you need a crash course in these chaotic little beauties.
The final randomizer is for Secret of Mana, and takes something of a detour from the randomizers we've seen so far. All the previous randomizers retained the core format of the game - the story, the sequential order of events and dungeons, and the familiar framework of the original games - but this Secret of Mana randomizer hack, dubbed Ancient Cave after a similar concept implemented in the Lufia series, tosses all that out of the window in favor of a purely roguelike experience. SoM Ancient Cave is a work-in-progress, as you'll see, but it joins a few other randomizer hacks like Final Fantasy IV's "FF4 Roguelikeifyer" in creating a whole new game from the assets of the old one. It's not like the SNES didn't have roguelikes of its own, of course (not that any came out over here, I don't think), but I wanted to check one of these out because they're further removed from their original source material than anything else we've seen so far.
Day 3: "Free Tacos, Man!"
The Game: Squaresoft's Secret of Mana, the first JRPG I ever played. I'm glad I could honor it with this weird hack that scrubs away most of what made it special.
The Rules of the Randomizer: Ancient Cave is a pure roguelike; every floor is procedurally generated from a set of visual templates, enemies are pre-determined by the relative difficulty of the floor (so no all-conquering titans on floor 1) but constantly respawn everywhere, their drops can consist from level-appropriate equipment to consumables to Mana Orbs, and even the "NPCs" are pulled from every humanoid character sprite from the game.
The randomizer can be set to be 8 floors, 16 floors, or 24 floors. The more floors there are the easier the game is, in theory: the final boss is the same (it's the final boss of the main game too), so the more floors you have to explore, the more gear and orbs and XP you can find if you're trying to make a beeline to the exit. However, you can spend as long as you want on each floor, and enemies won't stop appearing. I found it best to search around until I either found Niko (the merchant) or the exit, killing everything on the way. There's also a general difficulty slider, and you can also define the amount of bosses you'll meet - bosses take up an entire floor, so by setting their frequency higher the run will go faster but will be tougher if you're under-prepared for them. There's also options to take any or all of the three characters in with you, and whether you have a full set of starting armor or just the one chest piece.
It's a fairly rudimentary roguelike-creator, which is explicable given that it's still in an alpha state, but still impressive if you consider that it manages to transform Secret of Mana into a whole new game.
The Playthrough:
Nice for the mod to welcome me. This was followed by a Twitch link for the creator's channel, and boy let me tell you how weird it was to see one of those in Secret of Mana's window and font.The game randomizes the weapons you have to some extent. They still do their level 1 damage and be upgraded, but some start off with some gnarly abilities. Not sure about these day-glo colors though. Secret of Mana's color palette was always a bit on the gaudy side.I call them Steamed Crabs, despite the fact that they're obviously a rock.You level up really quickly in this hack. The entire game's been condensed into a small number of procgen floors, so it makes sense to accelerate the XP gain if the final boss is waiting for you at the end, but it also gives you a good indicator of when to move on - basically, if you haven't levelled for a while, you're probably strong enough to descend a floor.There's a bunch of little NPC "hovels" in each area, which change depending on the template. (For the Island template, above, they look like huts on the islands.) Most NPCs don't do anything but quote Mitch Hedberg lines though.Yet each room will also have one "special" NPC, that might be Phanna here, who restores HP and MP for a nominal fee, to Niko the merchant or Watts the blacksmith.You probably noticed the palette swaps for the main characters. You can also do this for the Rabite enemies too. This gray one didn't turn out so well; it looks like a lump of Blu Tack.Item drops appear randomly, and have random contents. This one either had a pretty strong healing item or a banging dance number.Whereas this one had an accessory that offers more defense than the default gear, but only barely.Engulf might be my favorite status effect. Enemies just stand there and cook themselves. This little guy's going to be tempura in a moment.Niko's always a welcome sight, in part because you can directly buy what enemies are dropping without relying on random chance, but also because you can off-load all the junk you've been carrying around. You could toss that stuff also, but money's valuable for higher level weapon upgrades since they increase exponentially.Naturally, you find orbs for weapon upgrades from random enemies too. No rhyme or reason to them either; they're not limited to one per floor, and you can acquire several for the same weapon before you'll ever see one for another. It can lead to unexpected favorites if you find a lot of orbs for a weapon type you don't normally use, like javelins or the axe.This is an exit. The environmental sprites used to demarcate the next floor might change depending on the template, but that cross-like pattern is always constant. I could've sworn some arrows pointed me here, but they could also be random?Of all the special NPCs, the most important might be the Mana Spirits. They'll grant you their particular element's spells, which can be useful for survival (Purim's support spells) and boss fights (Popoi's offense spells). That said, I never did find Undine, who is the one that gives you healing magic.I guess you could sit on a floor and farm these things forever, but the only true way to gauge your effectiveness is the amount of time it takes to finish the run. Most roguelike rewards aren't any more sophisticated than high scores and time trials, after all.Finally, I'm glad to be out of those repetitive islands. Of course, the forest template has its own annoyances; to wit, these green nettles need to be cut down with either the sword or the axe.You can see how long it took me to find the exit to this floor. The forest is more of a maze in the conventional sense than the islands, because there's all sorts of hard borders everywhere.Finally, we find Watts. He's the only way to make your weapons stronger, spending cash and orbs to upgrade each one. Damage output is severely limited without his help.My Javelin's my MVP in this run, since it's already level 4. I like its range, so this set-up is fine with me.I forgot to note; the game selects a random track when you start the game and never changes it, but you can always go into your item menu and change it yourself. Secret of Mana has an incredible soundtrack, so it's worth shuffling around the music.On Floor 5 we meet the first boss, Buffy (I absolutely did not get that reference the first time I played this). He's actually a super late-game boss, encountered in the final dungeon of the game, but his stats and abilities have been tweaked here to make him a moderate challenge.I'm really glad I didn't need level 8 spells and gear to take him down, because I'd be toast almost immediately.Anyway, I'll stop outside these creepy Thanatos ruins. I don't have it in me to do the whole run, especially with everything else going on today.Last though, I figured I might show off the game's alternative Chaos mode, which is similar but uses the in-game dungeons (in a random order) instead of procgen floors. It's telling me not to use the Ridiculous Color Randomization option, but how bad could it be?AHHHHHHHHAll right, maybe I'll just stick to "Reasonable" then. I'm loving Purim's new alien look. Very "Admiral Thrawn".So, Chaos Mode is similar, but it'll drop you in different parts of the world with the enemies you'd normally find there, only their stats have been tweaked to suit where that level lands in the game's progression. Levelling is as fast as always, but Chaos Mode supposedly has way more floors to account for the fact that some of these areas are fairly small - this one, for instance, is a single floor in a tower-like dungeon. Whenever you go through a transition, you end up somewhere completely new. I've also not found any NPCs yet, but at least enemies are still dropping orbs and equipment.I also set it to make bosses appear earlier, because I got bored of waiting last time. Thunder Gigas here is another fairly late-game boss, part of a gauntlet of tough bosses on the way to the Mana Tree. He's not quite as formidable now, though, thanks to the game's clever tweaking.I mean, I managed to beat him without any levelled equipment, so either I'm doing something right or the guy got nerfed to heck.
That's probably enough of that. You get the idea; most of the game's guts have been torn out and their assets repurposed for a game mode that could've easily been part of the main game as some sort of post-game bonus dungeon or optional mode on the main menu, which was pretty much the case for the Ancient Cave the mod is named after.
I'm not the biggest fan of roguelikes, and if I was really hard pressed to play one with 16-bit graphics I might try any of the Mystery Dungeon games for the system or one of the thousand Indie roguelikes homaging their aesthetic, but it's kind of cool that almost any JRPG you can name could probably be turned into one of these with a reasonable amount of effort. I hope the final version has more hooks and a bit more to break up the monotony of some of these procgen floors, but it's definitely promising for those who love Secret of Mana's look and music and wished they could fritter away a few hours trying to beat a roguelike version instead of taking on the whole enchilada.
Rating: C+ (for right now).
That's going to do it for this year's Alternative to E3 series! Hope you had fun taking a look at some chopped and screwed classics and are inspired to try playing a few of your own. If you can bothered to jump through the required hoops, I might recommend that Final Fantasy Tactics randomizer with all its surprises, and definitely the A Link to the Past chest randomizer if you haven't already. My usual blogging features (SNES Classic Mk. II and Indie Game of the Week) might be a little late this week between this series and the E3 night shows, but I'll hopefully have them up before Saturday Summaries goes live. See you all then.
