Final Fantasy 7... on the FAMICOM!

[Kitsune Sniper]

http://cinnamonpirate.com/blog/507/

My friend Derrick Sobodash (a journalist living in China) made an excellent writeup about this odd Famicom bootleg game. Yes, it's FF7. And yes, it's pretty freakin' insane.

Just. Flippin'. Unbelievable.

Edit:
This is the ORIGINAL SOURCE of the post! Gamesniped.com STOLE THE ARTICLE.

[Superman]

I'm not a big fan or RPGs, but this game looks kind of cool, even to me.

[Jorpho]

Reminds me of those FFX Famicom mockup screen shots that showed up a few years ago - except this is evidently for real.

[Kitsune Sniper]

Oh, it IS for real. None of those shots are doctored.

[roushimsx]

Not a fan of the original game, but that is a seriously cool find and I loved the writeup on it. I'd love to take a crack at it sometime (while cheating to have an insanely high level from the get-go).

[Jimid2]

That's bizarre... fascinating, but bizarre... I'm not really sure if I want to play that, or not...

[MarioMania]

This should of been on the Super Famicom

[Daria]

Dude that blog links to another blog which links to a treasure trove of chinese bootlegs. I dunno what Dragon Quest VIII looks like for the famicom but I'm going to find out... just as soon as I can find an emulator to run it. :P

edit: Answer? Not anything like DQ8. XD

[DefaultGen]

.....

[D--]

There aren't many good games left to translate anyway. Super Famicom is scraping the bottom of the barrel with wonderful titles left like ... uh ... Bazoo? Besides, the key thing is this game is not a fan production: it was made and sold commercially by ShenZhen NanJing Technology.

I wrote that post, and thanks Kitsune for linking it here. I have a big stack of Chinese-made Famicom RPGs to go through, and most of them are actually unique titles, not like this license rip. If the post gets a positive response, I may keep going and do more for other Chinese-made FC RPGs.

http://cinnamonpirate.com/img/8bitff7.gif

Glad to see people thought it was a good read. For anyone who tries it and has trouble, I would be willing to post some useful offsets assuming you know your way around a hex editor.

[HYB]

Awesome. I never liked FFVII that much but now I could give it a try. I wish we could see a translated rom of this sometime.

[Nikademus1969]

8-bit Red XIII looks downright cuddly, like a badass My Little Pony :)

[FrakAttack]

Wow, FF7 without all the cut scenes? Might actually be worth suffering through.

[mills]

Reminds me of those FFX Famicom mockup screen shots that showed up a few years ago - except this is evidently for real.

Except that it really happened, and I played it....

[D--]

Awesome. I never liked FFVII that much but now I could give it a try. I wish we could see a translated rom of this sometime.

The entire game supports ASCII text input. Anything which does not support ASCII is a fixed graphic someone could just draw over. The script is stored in an incredibly simplistic way. The only question is how pointers are done, since this is a giant PRG ROM rather than multiple ROMs. Is there a 24-bit pointer system in place? Is there space to accommodate the English script? At 2048KB this is the largest custom NES board around, and hacking it to another mapper would be impossible.

To get stared, try searching for the "Wow" that Cid says when the Shinra guys show up to take the Tiny Bronco. @xxx adds a portrait to a text window. All the punctuation is ASCII. b0-bf are used to map full-width Chinese characters.

All it would take is someone to map out the Chinese characters, dump the script from the pointers, and insert it back in, hacking the pointers. None of the technical assembler side of things is required for this game. It would actually be a nice project for a novice. I provided tile definitions at the end of the article for anyone who wants to pull the stuff out.

And no, there is absolutely no chance of me working on this game. I don't translate games anymore.

[Snapple]

There aren't many good games left to translate anyway. Super Famicom is scraping the bottom of the barrel with wonderful titles left like ... uh ... Bazoo?

Oh come on now, most of the Japan-only Fire Emblem games still haven't been fan translated. There is tons of shit left to do on the translation scene, and it's never going to end either, because each generation brings new games that Japan doesn't want to give us.

[D--]

Sure it does.

But I can count on one hand the number of people translating games not on Super Famicom and Famicom. The Game Boy Advance comes in third, with almost no one working on PlayStation, Saturn and Megadrive.

Yes, Tales of Phantasia was translated after 9 years, and yes, one guy -- mijet -- is trickling out a stream of some fantastic Megadrive translations. Mijet is the minority. He rocks, and I love what he does.

When I was working on stuff, I always wished people would explore systems. Every document relies on the ZSNES debugger, and most of the scene masters cannot work without it. This has made a myth that modern systems are somehow more difficult. Judging by the last five years, the myth has been swallowed wholesale. The only translation communities to explore new systems are decidedly not English ones.

There will always be some new super fan calling for a re-translation of a re-translation of a commercially translated Chrono Trigger, or the person who won't rest until terrible titles like Traverse: Starlight & Praerie are all English.

That is not bringing any new or good games out in English, and action games don't really need a translation anyway. I had no trouble beating my pirate cart of Japanese Super Contra as a 7-year-old :rolleyes:

Besides, companies are more adventurous with each console. More Japanese games are coming to the US than ever before, and most of them are the best games with the broadest appeal. No one says "US gamers are too stupid for RPGs" anymore. The biggest translations were those games the magazines teased us with pictures of as children: they made dreams come true. With each generation, another hint of this magic is lost.

But this is a Retrogaming topic. Let's not get side tracked with what the translation scene is up to these days. :) Sorry for bringing them up in my earlier post. I was just making a point that the company that made this game could not have been fan translating another in its place.

[poloplayr]

Dude that blog links to another blog which links to a treasure trove of chinese bootlegs. I dunno what Dragon Quest VIII looks like for the famicom but I'm going to find out... just as soon as I can find an emulator to run it. :P

edit: Answer? Not anything like DQ8. XD

do you mind posting that link? i am too dumb to find it!

[Dreamc@sting]

Gasp!!! I want this :D ...oh no...FFVII fanboy-ism seeping out...

[Jorpho]

Except that it really happened, and I played it....

Come to think of it, I do vaguely recall that there was some sort of FFX ROM available for download, but it wasn't much - certainly nowhere near as complete as this.

[NE146]

This is funny. I was a HUGE Final Fantasy fan until FF7 came out LOL I hated that piece of crap because I didn't take the jump to polygons too well. I just hated everything about it.

Now, this makes me wonder if it came out like this would I have actually liked it instead...:?

[Daria]

Sure it does.

But I can count on one hand the number of people translating games not on Super Famicom and Famicom. The Game Boy Advance comes in third, with almost no one working on PlayStation, Saturn and Megadrive.

Yes, Tales of Phantasia was translated after 9 years, and yes, one guy -- mijet -- is trickling out a stream of some fantastic Megadrive translations. Mijet is the minority. He rocks, and I love what he does.

When I was working on stuff, I always wished people would explore systems. Every document relies on the ZSNES debugger, and most of the scene masters cannot work without it. This has made a myth that modern systems are somehow more difficult. Judging by the last five years, the myth has been swallowed wholesale. The only translation communities to explore new systems are decidedly not English ones.

There will always be some new super fan calling for a re-translation of a re-translation of a commercially translated Chrono Trigger, or the person who won't rest until terrible titles like Traverse: Starlight & Praerie are all English.

That is not bringing any new or good games out in English, and action games don't really need a translation anyway. I had no trouble beating my pirate cart of Japanese Super Contra as a 7-year-old :rolleyes:

Besides, companies are more adventurous with each console. More Japanese games are coming to the US than ever before, and most of them are the best games with the broadest appeal. No one says "US gamers are too stupid for RPGs" anymore. The biggest translations were those games the magazines teased us with pictures of as children: they made dreams come true. With each generation, another hint of this magic is lost.

But this is a Retrogaming topic. Let's not get side tracked with what the translation scene is up to these days. :) Sorry for bringing them up in my earlier post. I was just making a point that the company that made this game could not have been fan translating another in its place.

I hardly think the scene is just going to up an die as soon as all the high profile Super Famicon games are done. Action games usually quick projects compared to lengthy RPG endeavors. Which theoretically makes them good for practice and breaks between harder projects. And while I have no intention of playing "retranslations" it's hard to complain when people work on them. And not because it's their time that they're wasting or whatever. No, honestly if those people were working on a "new" game they'd chock it full of that Chrono-san bullshit with overly polite stilted dialogue.

Also I can easily imagine PSX being the next SNES is terms of translations. It has loads of great RPGs that were denied English releases. A good number of them being high profile titles such as Innocent Sin. Tales of Phantasia is still sort of paving the way, hopefully, for more groups to follow. I mean it's only recently anyone's been able to crack the compression used for Saturn games, and the emulation sucks compared to ePSXe.

[D--]

*snip*

Sent this as a PM. I do not want to derail this thread.

[James8BitStar]

No one says "US gamers are too stupid for RPGs" anymore.

Probably because today's RPGs are little more than anime with interactive battles now. Most people really WERE and ARE too dumb for games like Dragon Warrior 1 and The Bard's Tale.

Japan = the masters of dumbing things down for the masses.

[D--]

Probably because today's RPGs are little more than anime with interactive battles now. Most people really WERE and ARE too dumb for games like Dragon Warrior 1 and The Bard's Tale.

Dragon Warrior 1? Not so much. The Bard's Tale? Touché!

[Daria]

Dragon Warrior 1? Not so much.

Yeah, really doesn't take a whole lot of intelligence to figure out that you have to level up and cross the bridge.

[s1lence]

That is so cool, now if they get someone to translate it.

[Sph1nx]

Am I the only idiot who can't find a download link?

[Cryomancer]

There's plenty of SNES stuff left to translate! Nobody's even touched Love Quest! That thing is pretty funny even in moonspeak so I can only imagine being able to actually read the game...

[Daria]

Am I the only idiot who can't find a download link?


http://tszone.ys168.com/

Click "FC Roms"

[Policenaut]

That was a good reading, and I never imagined that FFVII would have appeared for the Famicom.

[Life of Brian]

Unbelievable! (How do I get a copy? :p )

[geneshifter]

Wow, FF7 without all the cut scenes? Might actually be worth suffering through.

lol. Now, if they could just take the cut scenes and linear gameplay out of all JRPGs we'd have something!

[James8BitStar]

Yeah, really doesn't take a whole lot of intelligence to figure out that you have to level up and cross the bridge.

If that were all there was to the game, you'd have a point.

Common line in any DW1 review: "I can't even figure out how to beat this game without a walkthru!" (In a game where talking to practically anyone will tell you precisely where to go and what to look for)

So yes a lot of people ARE too dumb for Dragon Warrior 1.

[Volcanon]

DW1? Is there anything that's even tricky in that game, especially the rebalanced remakes? (yay for no hours and hours of grinding).

The game basically is:

- hours of grinding
- talk to people
- get loto's crap
- do stuff in swamp
- get flute, kill big guy
- get crap from grouchy old men to make bridge
- kill dragon
- optional: save annoying princess

DQ2 is "better" as in bigger and more stuff to do. I dont like the game in it's NES form because again there's too much grinding and this time the puzzles are actually -slightly- tricky. Also in the endgame enemies spam instant-death and there's only one character who can revive and can only do it during battles, which is lame.

DQ3 - great, but still has grinding, especially before the last boss.
DQ4 - see above, but game is much longer and has a better story.

Was DQV the first DQ that didn't force you to grind endlessly?

[Blitzwing256]

I played a couple of the OMG ROMZ linked from that page and sadly only a few of them are on mappers that are used on the powerpak (dq8 being one of em)


all the dragon warriors needed some level of heavy leveling (i refuse to use the mmorpg lingo for good games). sure its time consuming but it makes you feel like you acomplished something other then the shit rpg of recent years cutscene,pussy battle cutscene cutscene pussy battle, cutscene cutscene etc etc.

[James8BitStar]

DW1? Is there anything that's even tricky in that game, especially the rebalanced remakes? (yay for no hours and hours of grinding).

While DW isn't as effort-intensive as most PC games of the time, I would say it wasn't entirely brainless nor was it without depth. If you play without a walkthru then there are many parts that require intuition and deductive reasoning to figure out. Finding Rode Fastfinger in DW2 for example--I wandered all over the world looking for that sucker, I found him by thinking carefully about what the guard outside his cell said.

It's also inarguable that, no matter what you think about DW's challenge or depth, a lot of players DO have trouble with it. "Excessive levelling" and "lack of direction" seem to be the two most oft-mentioned "flaws." Personally I don't see what the critics are talking about--I never stopped to level up in either DW1 or 2 (haven't played 3 or 4 yet--and by the way yes I'm playing the NES versions) nor did I ever have trouble figuring out where I was supposed to go or what to look for. I can only imagine that people who have these problems are being stingy with their spells, not testing their weapons and armor to see if they have magical effects, and aren't talking to the people in town for clues. All this of course would be due to learned behavior from people who spent way too much time with today's RPGs, which are designed so that you no longer NEED to do any of this stuff because there's so many paradigms in place nowadays ("Sleep never works", "if an item is special, the game will tell you", "townspeople never say anything important unless they're an important NPC").

DW was designed for people who had never played an RPG before. Today's RPGs are designed for idiots.

[FrakAttack]

http://tszone.ys168.com/

Click "FC Roms"

You also have to use Internet Explorer 5 or later. :(

[Kitsune Sniper]

Just a note, for the record - the original post was made at cinnamonpirate.com.

A lot of people are saying Gamesniped.com is the source. It's NOT. "Link" just copied and pasted the entire article. Very fucking lame of them.

[Volcanon]

How did you possibly pass DW1 or 2 on NES without levelling? When I played through DW1 ages ago I made it to the last boss at like level 13 only to find that he was impossible to beat below level 20. that's a lot of metal slimes.

DW2 same. I needed like 10 extra levels after making it to the final area. Enemies spamming instant-death was rather bad too.

It was kind of cool that MY instant-death actually worked in DW2. That's another "standard RPG thing" is that instant-death never works against anything tougher than a Slime.

[Blitzwing256]

theoreticly you CAN beat dragonwarrior 1 at level 7 (i think that was the level you get sleep) since even the dragon lord is suseptable to the spell.

its virtualy impossible but if you had the luck of the ancients you COULD do it ;-)

[Daria]

theoreticly you CAN beat dragonwarrior 1 at level 7 (i think that was the level you get sleep) since even the dragon lord is suseptable to the spell.

its virtualy impossible but if you had the luck of the ancients you COULD do it ;-)

Luck of the ancient save states maybe. :P

And I'm sorry Dragon Warrior 1 may require level grinding, which involves little more effort than walking in circles and pummeling your enemies with hurtmore. And yes, you had to talk to all the NPCs to discover the flute and make the rainbow bridge, which requires that you be literate. But not a whole lot more brain power than a seven year old can muster is required to complete the game. Then again 7 year olds today probably didn't have any more trouble playing Xenosaga with all it's pretty cut scenes, but whatever. I still say DW1 was a flawed example.

[James8BitStar]

How did you possibly pass DW1 or 2 on NES without levelling? When I played through DW1 ages ago I made it to the last boss at like level 13 only to find that he was impossible to beat below level 20. that's a lot of metal slimes.

DW2 same. I needed like 10 extra levels after making it to the final area. Enemies spamming instant-death was rather bad too.

Patience, and fearlessness.

Admittedly I probably did do a bit of levelling, just I never really took "time out" to do it. Instead I would just press through to my next objective, and make sure never to avoid a fight, especially near the end of the game when losing half my gold for dying didn't matter anymore. The point is though that doing it this way made it feel less like crunching and more like I was powering up as a side effect of what I was supposed to be doing anyway.

[Not only that, but I've noticed in any RPG with random battles that when I'm actually looking for them--or at least, if I'm not letting them irritate me--then they tend to be less common than when I'm rushing to the next objective and trying to avoid them as much as possible. That may just be a superstition on my part though. Has anyone else noticed this?]

But I still attribute my final victories in both games to patience, thought, and no fear. What I mean is, rather than taking a reactionary approach to crap I just thought about it and based decisions on it. There's an enemy that spams instant death? Kill that ****er first. If there's more than one, then pull out your big guns--if you have to use a spell, do it. Usually, I make a mental note of how much damage an enemy took before he died, so I can plan my combat rounds and predict what kind of resources I'll have to use.

I keep mentioning "no fear." What I mean by that is that, in DW2 (which I beat for the first time less than a week ago) first time I tackled Hargon's castle I kept allowing myself to get freaked out by the enemy attacks. This screwed me up against the final boss. My main plan against said boss was for Hero to keep pounding on him while the other two characters healed either him or themselves as needed. A solid plan. But then in one round the boss did an attack that brought all my characters below the triple-digit HP range. I reacted impulsively and spent a round having all my characters heal, which allowed him to gain the upper hand. One thing about RPG Bosses (and monsters in general)... EVERYTHING they do is focused on mind****ing you and making you over-react like this, causing good plans to fall apart. The second time through, I stuck to my plan even though he did the same attack again. This time I won.

Thus the glorious story of how I saved the land from darkness, twice.

By the way, Stopspell works on the Dragonlord (both forms).

[Volcanon]

I don't know much about DQ1's workings but it seems to me that the dragonlord's first forms runs the same AI script as one of the higher-tier magicians.

There is a TAS of a guy beating DQ1 on level 7 or 8 (tool-assisted speed run). He went around killing metal slimes, then killed a bunch of gold men for money, then 4/5 of the recording was him dealing 1 damage at a time to a sleeping dragonlord. It's probably the first or second Google result.

I remember nintendo power saying back in the day that one had to be level 20 or the dragon was unbeatable. I guess that was wrong but I could never beat the dragon at lower than 20.

DW2 was hard for other reasons:
- The Prince sucks until he gets mad level ups around 30. His equipment is laughable in the NES version too.
- Endless grinding
- Nobody has very good HP levels
- The AI is actually designed to gang up on your worst character, usually the Princess, who until the end of the game is the only character with decent healing.
- Enemies at the end of the game case Defeat and Sacrifice, both of which can instant-death your entire party.

On the upside, Chance can force Hargon to run away. Hilarious.

[FrakAttack]

I expect older, cart based RPGs to have lots of level grinding cuz they had to be somewhat limited in size and scope, but when newer games require it just to stretch out the gameplay that's just lazy design.

[Cryomancer]

http://www.mediafire.com/?lmqfxnh3u9k

here's the rom on a site that won't require IE