Glory of Heracles - Use that pokey thing of yours
 

I'm bothering to make a thread, so what I am going to talk about must be noteworthy to some degree!

Indeed

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y27...ngel/bg_01.jpg

Glory of Heracles is the fourth installment of the Heracles series in Japan, but the first to reach the west. In this installment, an amnesiac (groan is inserted here) is greeted by the nymphs as Heracles, the great hero, and he is sent on his way to Mount Olympus to ask the Gods for the return of his memory. And why everyone he meets is immortal. Standing in his way, however, is Agon, who is seemingly hellbent on preventing their arrival.

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y27...s_hands_on.jpg

Battles are standard turn-based stuff, with some stylus controls thrown in to power up spells. The game uses some sort of ether system, where elements must be present around you in order to use them-- otherwise they will consume your HP to compensate. These elements are in balance with element of darkness (light, the only element more powerful than darkness, is too rare to appear in battle). The website gives this explanation here:

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y27...ngel/bg_03.jpg

Beyond that, you have skills, abilities, lots of equipment slots, latent weapon/armor abilities, synthesizing, rusty weapon-polishing, and all the other goodies of your standard large-scale RPG. It's been criticized for not doing a whole lot of new things, but if you don't mind that, it's a great game. And for the sole English screenshot I found that was worth a damn!

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y27..._screen003.jpg

Curiously, despite the very serious tone on the website, the game's translation seems to be very relaxed and lighthearted. I suppose that's to be expected of Nintendo. Also, I'd recommend reading the interviews with the developers on the website. They're translated from the Japanese website, and they're fairly meaty.

Media

First up is the very catchy battle theme I thought I'd slap on here:

YouTube Video

I'll update this over time. Discuss!

Sounds interesting, I like games based on real-world mythology. I also like RPGs with a synthesis system, so... based on nothing much, my initial impression is good.

I presume you don't need to know anything about the previous games...?

They're all separate, with no connection to each other. Different Greece, different Heracles and all that.

I've never heard of this game 'til I got an email from Nintendo about it. It does sound interesting, but then Greek Mythology is always interesting. Don't have the funds to get it currently though.

One question. Is the hero mute or does he talk?

Oh good, well that makes this pretty much a no-brainer buy for me once the price drops a bit.

After doing a little research about the series, I found that the English translation of the third installment in the series was completely finished in the past couple months.

If you're interested in checking it out, the patch can be found here and the rom can be found here.

I'm still undecided on whether or not I'll pick this up. It looks like a solid game, but I'm pretty overloaded on DS RPGs right now. Hard to find any reviews for Heracles that don't just drone on like idiots about "Ugh, random battles and turn-based combat is so dated," too.

This is most likely a stupid question, but what does it mean by hard patching it onto a headerless ROM? The only time I've messed with patching .ips files I just had to change the name of the ROM and patch to be the same and keep them in a folder together. I'm guessing that's soft patching?

Certainly not a stupid question. As far as I know if you ever need to do hard patching (which is rare), you need a special program in order to do so. In this case it should not be necessary because I patched it the typical way that you mentioned and it worked fine.

That is soft patching, yes. Hard patching is done with a utility program, there are various ones that can apply IPS patches to a ROM.

Now about headers, when SNES roms were originally dumped by those copier machines you'd pop inbetween the cart and the console, they would put some additional data at the start of the file which the copier would then use to recognise certain things about the type of ROM. Nowadays people don't use hardware copiers to play ROMs on their SNES, but sometimes the headers remain.

The header data is of no value to an emulator, or anything other than the original copier that made the ROM, so they are often removed. The ROM data itself is unaltered, just the first chunk of information in the file is discarded.

Now... IPS patches must be applied to exactly the same ROM the were made for. If the hacker used a headerless ROM, you must do so as well. If he used one with a header, you must use one with a header too. Fortunately there are tools that will let you add or remove a header.

Romhacking.net - Utilities - NSRT 3.4 Windows

That's the best known one, NSRT. You probably won't ever need to use it, or to know what I've told you here, but it might satisfy some curiosity. If you ever apply an IPS and your game is filled with garbage text, or just won't load at all, then you probably applied it to a ROM which has a header when the patch was made using a headerless ROM. Most hackers would remove the header... like I tried to explain, it is an outdated idea of no current use.

Ah, thanks for the info. Skills explained it to me a bit last night too, but I'll just try soft patching it for now since that's working for Jinn. The patch notes said something about soft patching not working because their patch expands the game, but what do they know?

So... is anybody getting it, or has this been more successful in getting people to play Glory of Heracles III?

SD and I bought this too, he said I'd love the old school traditional fanfare about it. So I'd get into this if I wasn't heading into quite a few rpgs right now. (Popolocrois, FFV, FFVIII to name a few and especially behind on several rpg challenges too.) ;)

Just a FYI that you can get this game for ten to fifteen bucks at Gamestop depending on whether you buy it online or in the store.

I played a bit of it and enjoyed it thus far...