Exile - got damn.

[bartre]

so I recently started playing the original Exile on Turbo CD.
GOT DAMN.

I think I spent a good hour trying to just get through the first boss (ant lion)
couldn't take it on legit, ended up just running to a platform and doing the dive stabs from there.

I'm generally pretty good at these games, and I think there's some good in here, but I kinda feel like there's a lot of grinding in my future.

[Black Tiger]

The PCE version is easier and un-Working Designed.

[EmperorIng]

In my experience, there are about two areas that seem to be bottlenecks of grinding.

The first is the ant-lion boss. The second comes about halfway through the game, against a bird boss. One or two levels is usually what it takes. It's kind of annoying, though on the plus side, after that stat boost, the difficulty settles down quite a bit. The game is a little wonky with how it balances things.

The sequel, Janen no Jishou (I've only played the Japanese version), doesn't seem to have any thought put into its difficulty (it's braindead easy). It's also an incredibly shitty game.

[Gypsy]

The PCE version is easier and un-Working Designed.

I breezed through the US version so the original must be extra easy. Not that it's a bad thing necessarily.

[bartre]

hmm, good to know.
at least grinding is easy, what with turbo and respawning enemies.

I guess whenever I get stuck, I'll just get the vicegrips and grab a beer.

[esteban]

The PCE version is easier and un-Working Designed.

I breezed through the US version so the original must be extra easy. Not that it's a bad thing necessarily.

Yeah, my only complaint about Exile is that it was too easy. Otherwise, it was an absolutely an enjoyable romp.

Play the Genesis version next: it’s fun to see how the game was ported for each console.

[Punch]

Exile is super easy (esp. if you decide to exploit spawn points to grind later on) so don't worry. This is one of the games that I simultaneously love and hate, I hate it because it had the potential to be an instant classic, one of the greatest RPGs ever, if they took another 6 months to 1 year polishing gameplay and making the story and locations more cohesive and large. It's quite clear that the game was rushed to completion at some point in development.

Seeing such a promising concept falling short is very frustrating.

[ginoscope]

I found Exile to not be too bad on the turbo.  The game that will really test your patience is Exile WP.  I finally ended up beating it last year but it took a lot of memorization.  Working Design messed up the difficulty before it was released in the US.  Regardless it was a fun challenge to finally beat the game.

[Arkhan]

You can grind your duder by using turbo switch, and two pieces of tape.

I forget where, but there's a spot you can just crouchstab forever and level up.

I threw the controller down and played something else for awhile.

The WD one is doofy.

[bartre]

Why is the rebalancing such a problem with the WD releases on turbo?

[Black Tiger]

Why is the rebalancing such a problem with the WD releases on turbo?

Victor Ireland.

[Arkhan]

Why is the rebalancing such a problem with the WD releases on turbo?

Victor Ireland.

It turns out he's kind of an idiot.

[Black Tiger]

WD did fix the fuzzy picture "glitch" during fade-in/outs for Exile.

Mysterious Song had the same thing in the beta, but I think that it was only minimalized in the "retail" version.

[nodtveidt]

Ja, the fuzzy picture thing (palette snow) is caused by accessing the palette stuffs at the wrong time. It was minimized by replacing the pure HuC fader routines with ones written in pure assembly. Silent Debuggers has an issue with palette snow too.

[xelement5x]

Why is the rebalancing such a problem with the WD releases on turbo?

Supposedly this is before WD had programmers in house, so when they wanted changes/text insertion and the like they would have to send it back to the devs in Japan with a list of changes to get done. 

Later on the games on the SegaCD were tweaked in difficulty too, but there is (in my opinion) a bit more finesse in it than you have on the earlier titles since they would be able to do it in Redding and test there. 

Apparently the insane difficulty in Exile: WP is due to the fact that the final change in the game was some sort of integer that completely screwed up the difficulty all over the place and they had no more submissions to the Japanese dev allowed in their contract to fix it.  Since it was "beatable" under some conditions they released it anyway.  Personally I wonder if the issues with this game are one of the reasons they decided to get a dev in house going forward. 


Oh, and if you are a fan of the balance in the originals check out this thread:
http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=23436.0

It keeps the WD translations but reverts all the difficulty modifiers.