Progress ~ Merry Christmas, and Apologies
# Posted on Dec. 26, 2009, 12:15 p.m. by Gideon Zhi

I'd hoped to have Megami Tensei (as in, the original) out yesterday, but due in part to being with relatives for the last 48 hours (without internet) I was unable to post this yesterday. Unfortunately this is not the biggest problem with my plan, as several extraordinarily nasty bugs (including the one pictured in the screens below, which refused to die and killed my entire party quite handily) have reared their heads and are preventing the release. The game is mostly done, I think, though I do want to get some of the more nonsensical text segments doublechecked, but the issue is largely due to the physical expansion of the ROM.

Physical expansion (i.e. making the game bigger and being able to fit more text in) is a relatively easy task when dealing with SNES games. Not so with the NES. The glitches - possibly related to timing and interrupts - were initially discovered to be causing visual corruption in the maze layouts. These are easily ameliorated by simply turning your view, but given that this is a first-person dungeon crawl, the bug was deemed serious enough to hold back a release. However when I endeavored to play further, I encountered several further problems, including the Mappa spell's output (a minimap in the left-hand pane) locking in place instead of moving with the player, Nakajima dropping to level 1 after gaining a level in battle yet retaining all of his statistics while Yumiko progressed normally, and of course, the nasty creature pictured in the attached screens, which frankly seemed to be unkillable. Given the severity of these issues, I cannot yet in good faith release the game to the public.

(I've actually just finished talking with Liana, who you may remember from Metal Max Returns. She's done some research and apparently the Bug enemy is not a bug. I hope that sounds as odd to you as it did when I wrote it! The other issues still stand, though.)

However, I *HAVE* done a lot of work on the game in the last week. I've tweaked the font to be a bit more uniform and much more readable (I've un-bolded a few of the letters and straightened out the heights), and I've redrawn the bland "DON" that appears when you bang into a wall to be a much more fancy "BAM" (pictured below.) I've re-researched all of the enemy names and brought them up to speed with proper romanizations. Several of them don't appear in any other Megami Tensei title, or certainly not in any that have been released in English - examples include Akhushtal, Viy, A Bao A Qu, Bathym and Myrrha. I've inserted most, if not all, of the miscellaneous text in the game - and Lord knows there's plenty of the stuff. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that I'd missed some.

I'll post more news when I have it. Can't say when that'll be, though, and I apologize again if I've disappointed anyone.