Game Talk:Vikings of Midgard/Bugs

Bob the Hamster: On the subject of the excitement of getting cool items, did anybody else obsess over the rare summons from Final Fantasy 4? The •Imp summon is not to hard to find for anyone who level-grinds a little at the beginning of the game, but when I found it, my jaw dropped. Was it possible that other monsters might be summonable? I spent crazy amounts of time fighting in diverse places, and netted •Bomb, and eventually •Mage. Then I read in Nintendo Power that •Cockatrice was available too, so I spent unholy swaths of time walking left and right and left and right and left and right and left and right on Fabul mountain. I did give up before I reached level 99, but it was a looong time. Very frustrating. I wrote a letter to nintendo power (this was before the prevalence of e-mail) asking them what I was doing wrong. They wrote me back and told me to keep trying. The also told me that I could get the •Tofu summon by fighting tofus on the moon. There, I did reach level 99, and grinded far beyond that, before again giving up in frustration. Years later, when I was playing the game with a game genie code that let me cycle the item ID number of one of my inventory slots, I learned that the cockatrice summon was now the •Dummy summon, having been present in the Japanese version, but removed from the US version at some point before the translation was done. The •Tofu summon was a bald-faced lie. Some day I will find the nintendo power employee who thought it was funny to waste 90 hours of a 13 year old kid's summer and extract my terrible revenge >:)

Item Stealing Balance

Bob the Hamster: Subjective Balance Suggestion: Acquiring good weapons and armor by stealing is a little too easy. Treasure chests are rarely exciting because "Bah, I already have three of those", and stealing cool equipment lacks some of the the "ZOMG! I 'm so lucky! I found something cool!" excitement that James is nostalgic for

Fenrir-Lunaris: Counter-suggestion - create an alchemy lab somewhere in the game that requires monster components to produce rare equipment, and have the monsters drop/possess these alchemical components. Secondary alternative - lower the success rate of stealing

Bob the Hamster: I love the alchemy idea. My top priority after the Werewaffle release is to increase the available items to > 255. The shop trading features are probably all that you need to make a decent alchemy system, although if you have any suggestions for engine improvements that would make alchemy easier to implement, let me know.

Fenrir-Lunaris: Increasing the item limit would give me a LOT of options I had been wanting to do for a long time, but couldn't due to the 255 limit. Firstly of course is the whole alchemy thing, but I'd also want to include in-game "books" that would give detailed information about each character, along with giving a list of their spells, equip-able items, and statistics (like Ends of the Earth did). I would also love to add a monster compendium that lists statistics of different monster types, including useful information like drop rates, elemental strengths and weaknesses, and some strategies (like the PSX and GBA Final Fantasy remakes). The monster compendiums would likely only list some monsters at a time, but would "upgrade" to include more encounter-able monsters as the game progresses. Of course, this'll mean the game's file size would become huge. It'd be very very impressive though.