It's like chocolate in my peanut butter. Let's Play Final Fantasy V: The Ancient Cave

Guys I'm still freaking out that this exists

OH MYYYY GOOOOOOODDDDDDDD

It is totally freaking out worthy

I love FF5... but this would just teach me that I KNOW NOTHING.

I want this translated yesterday, please.

Screw that, I'm gonna go finish learning Japanese. Finally, proper motivation.

I would play this in a heartbeat if I could read what it said.

I think that with a few weeks of studying hiragana and katakana, you can learn the most important words in this game - the items, skill names, and job names. Aerdan has a very handy translation chart here.

If someone wants to make a patch for a patched version of the game that just changes the item/job/skill names, I can't imagine it being all that difficult to throw together. I mean, if it says ポーションを手に入れました that's all Japanese but if it says Ｐｏｔｉｏｎをてに入れました that's playable.

It's probably as simple as hex-editing, given the game already has at least three Latin letters (H, M, and P); it likely has a full Latin font built-in, in fact. (And if anyone wants to make use of my translation for this, go right ahead. If you need help cramming things in, I can probably help with that, too.)

Oh ho ho, it's a little early for a second update, but it is looking like everyone isn't quite prepared to waltz through a hundred floors of aggressive monsters with no rests or shops (with the possibility that I turned off running from fights on mistake)! Let's take a closer look at what we saw last time. Eyes on the HPs please.



First we saw four freelancers waltz in with 35 or 36 HPs apiece.



Five floors later, only one character has needed to drink one of our potions. We have ten more in stock and everyone can drink one potion without a single drop going to waste. At this level, every single point counts. We can't afford to let any healing items go to waste, that's for sure.

Many people suggested we make a White Mage. However, at this level, our team wouldn't even break 50 MP, meaning that at least a portion of one of our precious ethers will go to waste. So we'd get 11 shots of Cure for one Ether, but at what tradeoff?



Not only do we lack any useful equipment for the white mage right now, there is the fact that Spoony Gundam pointed out earlier...we don't have the Freelancer job yet! Once we change classes, we can't change back! Once we switched to the White Mage, that's it. We get to keep him until his MPs run out, then we swap him to Dancer or Berserker. On top of that, we could find powerful yet hard-to-use weapons like a whip or harp on the very next floor and have no way of using them whatsoever. This also gives us a strong incentive to avoid making anyone a Berserker right now.

As for Dancers? Well, remember when I pointed this out?

The first thing you thought was, "Idiot, you mean shipwreck." And then you remembered that place is all filthy, stinking undead!

That means we are fighting a good number of skeletons and ghosts (there are monsters mixed in from other dungeons here as well). Dance might sound like a good idea at this point, but it carries the high risk that we might be handing our HPs and MPs to enemies on a (wiggling, jiving, sexy) silver platter.

And now you know the first lesson that FFV: AC teaches. Don't give up your precious Freelancers without thinking twice! Vanilla Final Fantasy V trains you to change classes and start building AP as soon as possible, and that's the first habit you're going to have to learn to break. Know when to change class.

It looks like we're just going to have to stick with Freelancers for a while. I just don't see anything here that makes a net gain for our team by switching out. "Hey jerk! If you knew this was going to happen, why the hell did you even ask?" I hear you. The answer might surprise you as much as it does me: Incompetence.

Coming up later, we'll be taking a look back at some of the pub options I missed, and we'll delve a bit deeper into the dungeon to see if we can't dig up a few more viable build options.

This is a good Let's Play.

One of the statements in TK Flash's most recent post isn't entirely accurate. Although it may as well be, given how that particular mechanic was adjusted for this ROMhack.

How hard is hex-editing to learn? Because this game kind of makes me want to learn.

Every other Let's Play of this hack has constant pining for a playable English version. I say instead of just pining Talking Time should help make that happen.

I do think it'd be better to at least start building up AP for certain characters if you know you're going to use those classes. A Dancer with the Mage Masher should still oneshot everything at this point even without Dance, and having two other characters with overpowered weapons will take the edge off of having a useless White Mage. Enemies tend to give way more AP than normal as well, so even fighting the early things helps a lot.

Is it the running thing? Because I've been pretty confused about how running works in this hack. Could you explain if you know?

Well, that's kinda buggy, but it's not what I'm referring to. If you never mess with the "alter run rate" flags at the start, you'll never be prevented from running save from fights that you cannot run from in the regular game.

Here's the real tidbit: There is a single merchant in one of the maps.

Oh, ok. I knew that. The jar in the Wind Shrine gives you a full heal every time you get the floor, so the "no resting" thing isn't completely accurate either.

That would be a real feather in this forum's cap, if it happened! Time for TT to build a legacy.

It really depends on the game. The major issue is changing the lengths of messages; if you keep the message the exact same number of characters long, hexing is trivial once you know the encoding that it's using for Japanese, but the main skill in ROM-hacking is trying to make messages longer than they were before, and you need quite some programming knowledge to work out how to do that in any given game. (Potential advantage in the case of this game: it probably works the same way as in FFV because it's based on the same engine. But I don't know what that is.) Japanese->English is thus quite different, because kanji are way shorter than the matching strings in ASCII, and kana tend to be shorter too.

You sometimes also have to hex the graphics as well as the text strings (e.g. to add characters in a particular language to a font that doesn't have them); that's easy if it's stored as a bitmap, but if it's stored in a compressed format, just finding it is awkward, and then you have to replace it with the image with the same complexity (with whatever definition the engine's compression routines have). Based on conversation so far, this game probably has a complete set of English letters in its memory already, so that might not be an issue this time.

I wholeheartedly encourage other people to work hard at something rad!

And here I thought Super Talking Time Bros (2) was TT's legacy...

That's not to say that I don't think an English patch for this bad boy would be an incredibly noble venture. Go, folks who are capable of making it happen! Let the common people enjoy this triumph of video game rejiggering!

As I said before, I'll be quite happy to translate the text in this hack (there's very little of it, truth be told; I could probably bang the whole thing out in under a week, and that includes proofreading and error checking). Find me a willing and able ROMhacker who can 1.) extract the script, 2.) modify the game to use English-language fonts, and we're in business. It'd probably cut down on our work a lot if we had access to RPGe's work on the original FF5, but even if we don't, we can manage this.

If anyone up for the job takes up the ROMhacking cause for this translation, they need only PM me to let me know.

FFV: AC: TT - Make it happen!

If TT managed to put together a dedicated translation team for FFV:AC, that would be the best thing.

After that, we'll work on 7th Dragon.

Pst, wrong Spoony.

I totally can get behind any attempt to make this English. Or, at least, English-enough.

And then we make 7th Dragon: The Ancient Cave.

This actually would have been a pretty good idea. Another possible option would be the GBA equipment. It got hacked into the game for some reason, but AFAIK it's unobtainable in the actual cave. The save you load to start the game has it all in your inventory, before everything gets removed when you talk to the frog.

And here I was, giving you a chance at tasting some of that smooth, smooth Spoony Gundam thunder! Just a little spoonful.

Lies! I added shots of the the pub options I missed to the first update, where they should've been in the first place.

The 0/255 escapes jar actually sets your total number of escapes to those numbers. It doesn't seem to limit your running any. It's just there for Brave Blade/Chicken Knife damage, since powering up the Chicken Knife would be even more of a pain in the ass than usual otherwise. You can test it before you reset your levels, since you start with both of those in your inventory.

EDIT: And I'm pretty sure the flag guy just resets the settings in the tavern to default. It spits you out to the world map after you finish the cave, and you can still go on to beat the game if you really want to for some reason. I just tried it with the save from my cleared run. But there's no getting back any items you had before entering the cave, and everything in the game has already been looted with the default saves.

Me, too! The more eyes, the better, you know.

We need to get a romhacker on this pronto then. I have no skills to contribute to the project, but I'll throw a release party at my place when it is finished!

Proofreading's about all I can do to help, but I happily volunteer.

Along with New Game +, every game should have an Ancient Cave option, this is EPIC.