games

Still slogging through Valheim, where I've been abandoned on my family's LAN server. I've been sailing around and trying to map out as much as I can, and just generally getting into places I really shouldn't be when I'm only in troll armor and eating Meadows-tier foods.

I did take a brief detour the other night to fire up Dragon Warrior on the NES emulator, because it was one from the bucket list. I owned it ages ago and never finished it. I remember getting up to the last dungeon, looting Erdrick's Sword, and then getting fairly close to the final boss before running completely out of MP and consumables. That failed run took something like two hours just to get there. It turns out that when I played DW1 as a tween, I was stuck in an infinite corridor where the stairs at the east end deposit you right back to the stairs at the west end. I was out of torches by this point, and couldn't see what in the hell was going on. Looking back, this is just shy of the end boss floor, but I would have had to backtrack two whole floors in the dark to find the correct staircase.

On the emulator run, I started off just lightly cheesing it with the occasional savestate (honestly, having to hike your ass all the way back to the King to save your game feels like a bit of a downgrade from being able to generate a password "save" on the fly in the Japanese version) and binding the emulation speed toggles to my controller to make the menus and slow-ass walk speed more bearable. That got me through the first hour or two before I realized just how bad the gold/XP gain tuning was. I got so bored that I finally just 100% fucking cheesed it with the FCEU hex editor, because fuck any game that has a "100+ hours of grinding and tedious menus instead of actual content" gameplay design philosophy, even if it was made in 1986 for console hardware. No amount of Akira Toriyama character design can alleviate pure tedium.

And even applying cheats was still a nuisance, because unlike several other JRPGs that came out shortly afterward, if you set your experience to a specific value that overshoots a level-up checkpoint, you don't get the level-up dialogue at the end of your next battle. It just sets your level to the new value, but doesn't bother giving you any level-up bonuses. So the only way to force-level yourself with cheats in Dragon Warrior 1 and still get stat increases is to set your experience to a value just shy of your next level-up checkpoint, fight a battle and win, get your level-up dialogue and bonuses, and repeat ad nauseam. I think I got to around level 10 or 11 the mostly-legit way (framerate speed changes, and may have save-scummed a handful of encounters with tougher enemies) before I gave up and started manipulating RAM.

So yeah. I "finished" OG Dragon Warrior as a break from Valheim. This says something about society

I'm half wondering whether I should have just waited for the DQ I & II HD-2D remake that's dropping in the fall. Oh well, back to the Valheim gulag regardless.