Topic: FlyingArmor's Map Projects Present and Future

[JonLeung]

Well, I've now got listings for Final Fantasy II and Final Fantasy IV (J) instead of listing them all together as Final Fantasy IV.  I much like the proper numbering (I avoid saying "II" and "III" when I mean "IV" and "VI", unless I'm talking about the actual II and III), but it's probably best to do it this way since there are enough differences.  I suppose I'd have to do the same if anyone maps several Final Fantasy III maps that are different than Final Fantasy VI (J), if there are any.

I'll leave the minor differences between regions...Blaster Master and Shatterhand come to mind...

But I'll have to remember, when I get a chance, to split up Maniac Mansion and its Japanese counterpart since they're way too different to simply list together.  Or should I keep them together, since it is just one map?  Sure it's just one map, but it's also the whole game...

[FlyingArmor]

Just finished working on the Lunar Subterranean Valley a little bit ago, so that means I'm done mapping Final Fantasy IV (J). Those last dungeons are always a pain to map...

So with the Japanese version out of the way, I'll be able to start on the North American one fairly soon.

[FlyingArmor]

A li'l update with mapping Final Fantasy II (U). I'm a little over halfway done so far; I'm up to Agart, just before descending into the underworld. It looks like I just may have the rest ready by this weekend.

A funny thing I found when re-mapping the Sylvan Cave was a hidden passageway that I missed in the corresponding Japanese version map. With most of the other caverns in the game, the hidden passageways aren't all that obvious, but in the Sylvan Cave, they just smack you in the face! Come on Squaresoft, you could've made it at least a little challenging, hmm? On the bright side, it did highlight an error with my map, so I guess it's a good thing?


Also, one thing in regards to translations for the items in the Japanese maps. I'm not sure how many of you noticed, but there was an item that recurred a lot in many areas named 銅の砂時計 which I at first translated to "Copper Hourglass". When I was working on these maps, I would often consult what the official translations of more recent iterations of the game had named things, and for this item it ended up being "Bronze Hourglass".

I at first thought: "Bronze?! But it clearly says copper! 銅 isn't bronze! If it was bronze, it'd be 青銅!"

But later on in the game, I came across other hourglasses, these times in the Silver and Gold varieties, so I ended up recognizing the pattern being presented. "Okay I guess Bronze would make sense here..." I thought. To verify this, I ended up going to a Japanese Wikipedia page that had a list of all the countries that won medals in the Olympics, broken down in various ways, and lo and behold! they use the character 銅 for the Bronze categories. So I conceded defeat and ended up changing my translations in this case.

But one thing that's no secret is that the Japanese love abbreviating and shortening down words. So this may just be one of those instances. It certainly looks more elegant to have one character represent each medal rather than have one stand out with two characters. Heck, even the word hentai (変態), a very well known word among Japanese aficionados, is an abbreviation of the term hentai seiyoku (変態性欲) meaning "abnormal sexuality; sexual perversion". 変態 otherwise normally means "transformation; metamorphosis", but you certainly wouldn't get that impression from listening to anime with girls screaming this word left and right.

[Trop]

This is why good translations are always rewrites.  Translating the words is one thing but meaning might be something different.  Just look at the way some people switch around nouns, verbs, and adjectives in English.  A situation being described as "cool" could come out pretty strange in a direct translation.  Culture is a huge part of language.  Heck I only really understood Illusion of Gaia after playing it five times.

[YelseyKing]

You know, I never gave it much thought... are there any actual area design differences between FF4 and "FF2" other than the Beginners' Hall in Baron, the removal of the Programmers' Room in the American release, and the contents of chests changing? (And the chests themselves in high tech areas, as well as save points, being changed.) Any extra rooms, rearranged dungeons, added/removed secret passages, etc?

[FlyingArmor]

From what I've seen, there aren't any major changes like extra rooms or things like that, mainly cosmetic changes such as the things you mentioned and others. The most drastic change seems to be with the Town of Baron where the one corner is completely rearranged to accommodate the Beginner's Hall at the entrance to the town. There was also a "Beginner's Hall" or sorts in the Japanese version, but it was far smaller in scale and out of the way in the basement of the Serpent's Road (or rather, Devil's Road).

As far as the dungeons are concerned, none have been rearranged, but there are some that exhibit structural changes to make them easier to navigate around. I'm mainly referring to the tower areas that had overhead beams (for lack of a better term) that arched across pathways. These were removed from the North American version to make where you can go less ambiguous. I don't have all of them done right now, but you can check the Tower of Zot maps side by side to see what I'm talking about.

From what I can tell, all the secret passages in FF2(U) were in FF4. It's actually thanks to FF2's visible secret passageways that I was able to locate the few I missed in the Japanese maps. There are no visible cues for the one in the Antlion's Nest for example, so finding that one would've been a stroke of luck.

[FlyingArmor]

Yesterday I managed to finish off the rest of the maps for Final Fantasy II (U), so now this double project is finally done! And with that, I think I'll take a break from mapping for a while. While mapping is fun and all, I've got a lot work to do with regards to paintings and comics, so I want to devote as much time as I can to those things.

When I do get back into mapping, I'd like to take on GD Leen/Gadyurin for the Super NES. I'm in the middle of playing it right now and it's been a blast thus far. It looks like it will be pretty straightforward to map out, though without a walk-through-walls code, some of the overworld areas will be tough to map completely, but I'll worry over that when that time comes.

[YelseyKing]

You planning to do FF5 at some point? It looks like you did a couple early game maps from it, at least. And you've done FF6 and both versions of FF4, so it'd make sense. At any rate, your FF4 and FF6 maps are pretty high quality stuff. I particularly love maps that have treasures marked.

Incidentally, unrelated, but... how in the world did you manage to map out the Lete River on FF6? The layout of that place has had me completely baffled for years. Even looking at the map, I can't make sense of the place.

[FlyingArmor]

If no one else decides to work on it, I'll probably eventually find myself working on it some day. Ah, thanks so much! Your kind words are definitely appreciated.

Oh God, the Lete River was a pain in the ass to map. It was incidentally the last map I finished when I was wrapping up Final Fantasy VI, simply because it was so frustrating to work on. It basically took a ton of cheat codes to capture all the square footage that you see there. Tropicon helped me with freezing most of the water animations, and I managed to find some codes that allowed me to shift the scene the player would see when entering an area, so I could get the out-of-reach bits that you would never see when traveling down that river.

Nevertheless, the annoying thing was that I couldn't stop the raft from continuing on its course, so I was pretty much abusing the hell out of the Increase Frame function in ZSNES just so I could make sure the rapids animations matched up between screen shots. And even with all that, I still had inconsistencies in certain areas with colours changing for unknown reasons, but at that time I couldn't have cared less, I just wanted the blasted thing over and done with!

I did think about making a complimentary map that would split the river up into several parts (which would include the caverns) that would be reflective of the flow the river takes, but I never got around to doing that.

[TerraEsperZ]

I did think about making a complimentary map that would split the river up into several parts (which would include the caverns) that would be reflective of the flow the river takes, but I never got around to doing that.

Hopefully you *do* get around to doing that someday. I would love to see the river not how it exists internally in memory (which can loop around in all direction), but how it exists narratively as a place you navigate through.

[FlyingArmor]

Heeey~ I'm back.

As Jon has mentioned in another thread, I've mapped out the first area in Final Fantasy VII (PSX).

It was mainly an experiment to see if I could pull off mapping the No. 1 Reactor fully, and luckily I was able to. Don't expect to see any more FF7 maps any time soon though. I want to play through the game at least once before doing that.

Looking back on it now, there are some things I'll need to revise, such as including icons in item and materia labels. I'm not sure if I should add another instance of the elevator and have a arrow connecting them to make it clearer that the elevator travels between two places. Any and all feedback is welcome!

Having played the game for a couple of hours last night, I noticed some areas will be tricky to capture accurately, such as areas with parallax backgrounds. It's a shame you can't simply disable/enable layers with a single keystroke with PlayStation games. I'll probably need to call upon those with more experience dealing with PSX games for help whenever I run into new roadblocks, so I hope you guys can help me out when that time comes.

BumFengShui pointed me to a program (7mimic) that will make things a thousand times easier. Thanks so much! Areas with parallax backgrounds will still be a problem though, especially since the backgrounds aren't repeatable patterns. I might either forget about adding the backgrounds altogether, or resize them so they take up more space across a scene.

[FlyingArmor]

While FF7 maps may be a long way off, I've been keeping myself busy with mapping Final Fantasy V (SFC) in the meantime. This was actually the "undercover" project I made mention of back in December. I didn't want to announce it then since there were a number of obstacles to mapping this game properly, but over this past week I managed to overcome some of the really troublesome ones.

The key one was all those pesky water animations getting in the way of mapping areas properly and accurately. I managed to find codes (through much trial and error) that freeze many of the animations, making the mapping of towns and some dungeons much more feasible. It was quite the victory for me!

I also found a way of warping to normally unreachable places by activating X and Y coordinate codes when transitioning between scenes. If I warped into trees or cliffs however, I would be instantly warped back to the overworld, so finding open spots to stand on so I could capture the far corners of some scenes was quite the grueling task.

Another thing that bothered me to no end was colours being inconsistent across scenes in certain areas. It was quite stark in the mountain areas where I would check to see if a certain colour was present in all scenes, but disappointed to find palettes slightly shifting whenever transparent water or clouds were also present. This forced me to use BGMapper exclusively for capturing everything rather than rely only on screen shots. Colour counts that were 200+ before ended up around 100 or so. Quite the difference, eh?

I had this problem with Lennus II as well, but it was much more noticable in that game than it was in FF5. Has anyone else come across this problem when mapping SNES games?

[Trop]

Yes and I usually ignore it.  Either the programmers made an obvious shift, like a daylight shift, in which case I code stop it or use bgmapper.  Or there was some bad bg color change in which case I just keep mapping anyway and hope on one notices.

[FlyingArmor]

With me, if I know there is a problem with colours shifting or whatnot, I can't allow myself to simply leave it be. It'll keep bugging me until I remedy the problem.

With my paintings though, I tend not to be as uptight if there is a botch some place (paint that seeped underneath the masking tape if we're talking about my hardedge paintings for example). If I don't tell anyone it's there they tend not to notice.

[TerraEsperZ]

Things like that, especially if they're unnoticeable tend to annoy me to no end. I can spend weeks on trying to correct something really minor, after which I'll either drop the whole project or manage to convince myself that nobody will ever notice.

And in the case of the latter, a few years down the road, someone will fire an email my way about how inaccurate my map was and how it's sloppy and inexcusable, after which I'll just do a face palm and weep for humanity.