Mirai Shinwa Jarvas doesn’t exactly have the best of reputations. Released in 1987 for the Nintendo Famicom, the Taito-produced action RPG is notable for being one of the earliest games on the platform to feature a removable battery to allow users to save and load their games, but has also been subject to numerous complaints over the years about its disappointing design, bland graphics, and tendency to soft lock.
So, as a result, one ROM hacker named Mentil has spent roughly four months of solid work, devising a promising overhaul for the game on their own, to try and fix some of the most egregious aspects of the infamous Kusoge, which they have recently released on ROM Hack Plaza.
The hack, which is called Jarvas Redux, aims to remove all of the known soft locks from the game, as well as enhance the framerate, fix collision detection with the background, and smooth out the difficulty curve. It also removes one of the most controversial elements of the game’s design, in which players had to spend experience points to cast magic, with the solution being to add a new “MP” stat that can be refilled using drugs.
Here is a brief description taken from its project page:
“As an astronaut arriving on a future post-apocalyptic Earth, it’s up to you to recruit allies in order to storm the castles and overthrow the Evil Monarchs reigning over the seven continents. However, the greatest challenge this game offered was overcoming its ubiquitous jankiness, surprisingly-numerous softlocks, trial-and-error gameplay that tended to unexpectedly whisk one across the game world (often to the very beginning), and random difficulty spikes. Given the game is reputed as one of the Famicom’s most notorious kusoge, improvement hack author Mentil strove to rise to the challenge and attempt to make it playable and, dare one say, fun.”
As this description also goes on to outline, Mentil’s hope by tackling this particular title is that it will show that “no game with solid fundamentals is beyond redemption”, potentially inspiring other hackers to give the same treatment to similar titles that are just in need of some extra work.
You can download the patch here, if you want to give it a try. It is worth noting that it is compatible with both the original Japanese ROM and the Stardust Crusaders 1.00 English patch.
Go on.... treat yourself to a new game.
