Shining Force II Hacking: Shining Force 2: A New Adventure!

[Dark Claw]

I'm glad to see you had fun with it. The end battles are tough and if I remember Oddeye is one of the toughest.

[Osnappar]

Yeah, the hack was a blast. It started out a little easy because of the increased stats but picked up pretty quickly around early mid.

I really like what you did with Sages, they seemed pretty overpowered at the middle of the game when the difficulty really picks up with high enemy defense but as the game progressed their rings became more utility than pure domination. I really liked the variety they offered with differing offensive spells and then the sacred ring (and the last ring was nice too) really helped pick up my healing slack since I had no heal or aura lvl 4.

I was also surprised by how many fliers I ended up with. At first I regretted making Rick a pegasus knight but he really started to shine later on. Luke was an absolute power house, Screech was a bit of a disappointment not because he was bad but by the time you get him Luke is just unstoppable. Peter after promotion was at least as beastly as in the normal game plus Katon. Kiwi was a hover tank and the scaling breath was nice although it didn't seem to trigger as much as in a the normal game (maybe it was just my luck?). I even ended up using Jaro.

The end battles were a lot of fun, I was a bit surprised by what I found in the last two especially. After SirHedge's findings, I played through the Galam battle and only lost a couple on my force, then Zeon proceeded to tear me a new one.

Spoiler

His movement range plus the range on Demon's Breath had him moving out usually before I was ready or anticipating him. The huge range on that spell and Zeon's double turns meant if I brought in too many people at once to burn down his support then he could two shot half my force before I could even react. He also had a really high counter rate and at one point double attacked 3 times in a row.

It might have been my lack of good healing, only Sarah with Aura 3 and Sheela with heal 3 plus 2 sacred rings and 2 (1 after Odd Eye) holy swords. Maybe having Frayja would have helped but I didn't keep him since boost 2 trivialized the Moun battle.

TL;DR Galam was easy, Zeon killed me 4+ times.

[SirHedge]

If anyone has a save before the Zeon battle I'd be happy to record an attempt on beating him and show why I thought he was too easy. I could also do it again with a random semi-normal save, but I know that there's always a possibility that the difference in stats between the original and this one make the difference.

EDIT: Glad to see people playing this.

[Osnappar]

Here's a link to my .srm at the start of the Zeon battle. Just rename it to whatever your rom is called.

Here

As you can see I don't have much in the way of AoE heals or even full heals for that matter. It's definitely not the best force but it was fun! The funny thing is on my successful Zeon fight I lost Sarah in the first turn due to a double attack... still not sure how I beat that one.

[SirHedge]

Thanks.

Here's the link to the movie.

SF2 A New Adventure Zeon Kill

It starts right before I begin fighting Zeon. Originally I wasn't planning on recording it at all, but when I got to that point I thought "what the heck" and went for it. The rest of the battle wasn't very exciting. I lost three characters against the first attack of enemies (the two griffins, the Arch Demon, the Demon Master, and the Horseman). After that the only other unit I lost was the sacrifice I fed to Zeon.

One thing I noticed immediately on the save was that the force I "practiced" with was actually stronger. Despite the better stat progression in this hack compared to the actual game, the save I was using had everyone level 28 or higher and clearly not everyone was promoted strictly at level 20. So this was more difficult.

Anyway, the basic premise is that Zeon activates a little like the Kraken Head does. So if you sack a unit in that death zone Zeon will come running. Then all you need to do is wait for him to reach you and beat him down.

The only problem is the Blue Shaman since he'll use the Healing Rain if Zeon falls below 250 HP. So you need to wait until the Shaman moves and then finish off Zeon (which you'll see me do in the replay).

There's also a bit of luck involved since in one attempt I made at this two of the Demon Masters attacked with Zeon. If you want to watch me humiliate myself with poor planning, playing, and bad luck, along with watching the Blue Shaman use two healing rains on Zeon before I give up and quit, this video is for you. It's with the "power save" I used previously (as in, not from this hack).
Humiliation

[Osnappar]

Cool, gonna give it a watch. I did try to lure out Zeon one time but forgot about the healing rains. First time I've ever seen something get healed for 438 hp.

[Dark Claw]

After watching that video the battle looked to easy so I fixed... now all the enemies (except for the Blue Shaman and the Prism Flowers) have the same AI as Zeon. As soon as you enter the kill zone that activates Zeon every other enemy in the battle will rush towards your party. Also I mixed up the enemy formations a little bit.

[SirHedge]

I've been gone for a week so I haven't been able to answer this sooner, but it's good to hear there won't be a cheater's way out anymore.

[kevtro]

Playing through right now, at Taros battle and about to start promoting. It's been ridiculously easy so far, but I'm not on super. But I see that everyone says the difficulty spikes right now, so I'm looking forward to that harpy battle. I despise the chess battle, one of my least favorites in the game.

Struggling with which classes to promote to now, but that's a good problem Probably go Vicar for Sarah, Wizard for Kazin; it'll be nice to actually see those classes be viable for them (Kazin WIZ in original = horrible, IMHO). Luke was always one of my favorites, and I hated how bad he always eventually became in the original, so I'm glad that so far in your hack he's kicking butt.

Like the spell icons, seemingly small but great change.

[Kcid]

Hey I forgot I was in the middle of a game of this...haha

I'll get back on it soon and give some updates

[Dark Claw]

Well after a few months this has fallen to the 2nd page. I am glad this got some attention while it lasted.

[OmegaBuster]

For some reason, I can't download the hack. This actually makes me sad. It seems so cool. And I think I might be lame, but I ignore the spoilers because I don't want to know surprises.

[SirHedge]

I think megaupload died as a service due to it's efforts to share pirated games/movies/images. I'm not 100% certain I have the latest patch for this game, but it's at least a complete version:

Download A New Adventure

[Shining Hopeful]

Not very far in but I'm enjoying the hack so far. Like the brighter costumes, Shining in Technicolour really makes the fight cut scenes stand out even more.

I've already missed the Chirrup Sandals and left Granseal (and I can't remember if there is another opportunity to get them).

Haven't built the new town yet, so the difficulty spike is a few battles away. I'm playing on Normal, so I hope it doesn't get stupid. My biggest beef with hacks is usually the over-emphasis on making it tough, when really characters looking different and items/spells doing different things or having different availability is enough to make a hack stand out, and be worth playing.

But so far, so good.

[Earl]

You should be able to get them when you go back to Galam...
Which is near the end of the game, but better than never.

[Shining Hopeful]

Okay, just rescued Elgar from the pool, which was a real struggle. Then I discovered I hadn't gone back to Hassan to pick up Rick or upgraded my weapons. So I got tanked three times and had to egress.

I haven't played SF2 in ages and the free-roaming structure really makes it easy to miss stuff.

Still enjoying the new adventure, this might be the first hack I play all the way through.

[stefanos2k10]

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