Langrisser Projects

Every wonder why Ballista units positively suck against fliers despite the troop hiring screen saying they are Bowmen?

Blame the Japanese developers.

On the road to 1.02 and during some data exploration I was doing with Niahak, we learned that there are 18 unit flags assigned to classes in the game. But it didn’t seem to make sense because the game itself only had a couple types.

It turns out the game had Infantry multiple times, Cavalry multiple times, Bowmen multiple times, and so on. We quickly deduced they must be different, but had no real point of reference as to why because the Japanese for each was the same.

Then we opened the manual: the affinity table has 18 entries.

So here is what happened. In the Japanese game, each unit type could be only two characters. The menu itself had 24 pixels to store this. We expanded it dramatically for the English game to fit in long types like “Spearmen.” However, the translation was still based on the Japanese. It was accurate — the Japanese was just wrong.

The good news is, we are able to fit the correct unit types into the list now. This means all 18 names, as they appear in the manual’s affinity table, fit perfectly. The hireable units list now demonstrates much greater variety, and the information there will actually match what the affinity table says should happen, so no more nasty surprises.

We have also reached a decision on what to do about Elementals: they will be pulled from all unit windows, since the game just cannot support hiring them. They aren’t in the table of hireable units, and we can’t get them in there. Sorry, it’s just not possible.

However, we will add Demons to the Living Armor class, which should make it a little more bearable. They are the only other demon unit, and it makes sense since it is the tier before gaining Archdemons. Currently no unit can ever hire Demons, so this should add something new to strategy.

byuu and I have decided that the 1.02 release will simply be a public beta. It will ship with the debug cheat codes. We hope everyone can help to test and report any last stray spelling and dialogue errors. Some time next year when our new patching format is ready, we will make all those final corrections and release a version 1.03 — the final release.