Those who played through the entire Illusiat JRPG series for the TI-83 Plus/84 Plus probably noticed that the difficulty in Illusiat 7 was particularly insane (although nowhere as bad as the Normal mode in Illusiat 6). Because each of the 7 character stats had to be leveled up separately, while the rate at which you gained experience in early stages was not bad, having to level up seven different parameters one by one turned the game into a major grind fest. HP had up to 30 different levels, MP 95+ and the rest 50, for a total of approximately 375 level up iterations. In addition to that, the difficulty in early game was brutal, with many enemies being able to kill you in two hits by the time you reach the 2nd forest.
14 years after the game release, it's now time to include a difficulty setting in it. Now, when you start the game, in addition of being asked to choose between four characters (which makes no difference in the game by the way, other than their startup stats), you will now be asked to choose between EASY mode and the original HARD mode. Here are the differences in EASY mode:
-Regular enemies now gives twice as much experience
-Bosses now gives 40 times more experience
-Both enemies and bosses now gives twice as much gold
-All characters start with twice as much HP, MP, attack power, defense, magic power, spirit and agility. The required next level experience, however, remains unnafected by those changes
Besides the addition of easy mode, the following minor updates were applied to the game
-VIT stat has been changed to AGI. This was a translation error that might have confused some players into thinking that VIT stood for vitality, when in fact it stood for vitesse (speed in French)
-Old Illusiat 7 saves are compatible with this version. When loading them, HARD mode is set as their difficulty mode by default.
This is not intended to be a major game update, so no optimization nor color porting has happened. As a result, this game still has its programming flaws and some clunky controls. This is simply an update to address severe difficulty problems present in the game since eons, as I did in late 2002 with Illusiat 6 (which faced the same problem, but much worse).
Note that despite the addition of an Easy mode and the fact it's much easier than its Hard counterpart, it's still difficult. However, it's much more reasonable now. One trick I recommend is: Once you are comfortable enough with your current stats, try to max out your HP as fast as possible, because there's a dungeon in Chapter 2 where you'll need it. Also buy lots of herbs during the first two dungeons and stock up on ethers later on.
Another tip: BUY THE EGG AS LATE AS POSSIBLE in chapter 2!!!!! While its cost is equal to your max HP * 10 (by the time you reach the Hell dungeon it should be maxed out to 999 or close), when you buy it it resets your next level exp requirement back to 50, which is very handy right before a boss fight.
For the time being, only the English version of the game has been updated. I'll see if there's enough demand for a French version update but for now, you can download the English update below (all archive files go to flash and RAM files to RAM)
(https://img.ourl.ca/illu7endofchapter1.gif) (https://img.ourl.ca/illu7hell.gif)
woow ^o^
this month seems to be the comeback for 84+ monochrome games :D
really glad t osee that ^^
also the speed of the gifs seems rather impresive, is it written in pure basic? :)
I'll definitely try it out once I have the time for it ^^
good job dj :) :thumbsup:
It used to be 100% BASIC from July 2002 to early 2003, but then I integrated an archive/unarchiving ASM lib in order to automate the chapter switching. The original version was like
@Hoobagee game in the way that you sometimes had to save your game and got prompted to go in the mem menu to manually archive and unarchive programs in order to continue.
As for the speed, it's fast because the screenshots run at 15 MHz, but the code is ancient and terrible per my standards >.<
Thanks though :3=
So, it's confirmed: It's actually possible to beat "Hell" with only 60 HP and 90 MP. I'm sure that doing it with 30 HP is possible too, but I didn't feel like spending 10 hours leveling up in hard mode. Basically, you need to max out your spirit and defense while hoping you won't get attacked with Flare before your turn begins :P. Oh and you must heal very often in the menu :P
You also need to raise your magic power high enough so that Flare does 9999 damage so that you can kill most bosses and enemies in one or two hits. Unfortunately, I don't think beating the final boss with such low HP is possible, unless you're ultra-lucky.
well that sounds good to me, afterall bosses arent supposed to be too easy to defeat ^^
when I'e never played any of the Illusiat games, shoud I rather begin with the first one, right...? :(
*very ashamed*
Skip the first five :P