i have generated so many random seeds and havent completed a single one yet lol. im just enjoying tooling around in settings and treating it like a build-a-romhack
is centered around its Ancient Cave mode, inspired by a classic FFV romhack (itself inspired by Lufia 2). All the areas in the game are shuffled into a random dungeon and you progress through all of the sanctuary guardians. You can fuck with a vanilla playthrough too but it’s apparently prone to softlocking because EB is such a flag filled game. Of course there are options to put in meme characters and music from other games and such (the first floor on this seed was set to an Earthbound sound palette version of the boss theme from SMT Nocturne!! pretty rad)
there are a whole whack of Zelda randomizers and ive tooled around with all of them. the LttP one is so detailed that ive actually gotten way too distracted with the setting switches to play it much lol i need to watch my own advice and EMBRACE CHAOS which i have done with the Ocarina randomizer – i have an absurd playthrough right now where all the entrances are random and had to draw a map to keep it straight
among the QoL options are “skip cutscenes” and “make Link/Navi’s voices less grating” so tbh this would be a pretty nice way to play vanilla OoT as well. Oh yeah and i shuffled all the dialogue so everyone says stupid non sequitur bullshit
my favorite so far tho has been the Wind Waker randomizer. partly this is because i have modded Link to be a girl. but also i set it so none of the progression items are in the dungeons, so i can just enjoy the most fun part of Wind Waker eg. sailing around solving island puzzles and fighting pirate bokoblins and enjoying blue skies (comes with the swift sail from the Wii U version by default, too!). I also made it so i start without a sword and it makes the improvised/stolen weapons of WW’s combat more relevant & fun
others ive looked at: the Paper Mario one seems neat, its one of many that can be modified into an “open world” version of the game that lets you progress anywhere as long as you have keys and upgrades
The Final Fantasy 1 rando is ridiculously full featured and lets you procedurally generate an overworld (or remove it altogether and make the game a chain of towns/dungeons), create new classes/equipment/spells, turn every NPC into a zombie etc.
I’ve probably mentioned this before but one of my online buds is very into the LTTP randomizer/speedrun scene, regularly competing in the various tournaments and such (I think he once randomly finished top 4 in the big LttP/Super Metroid crossover randomizer tourney for that year). It is both amazing how in depth his knowledge about that one game is and all the random extra ramdomization stuff that gets tossed into these games in certain situations. Randomizing the actual dungeon keys is some real sicko shit.
i tried a regular story file and almost immediately got a mr baseball bat and could one-shot encounters on the field
the second one there is the replacement for titanic ant and his two antoid guards (called “passive spirits” here the procgen names are pretty tight)
Best moment so far: when Buzz-Buzz got swatted and dropped to the ground, his sprite immediately turned into a bunch of bananas
The random music is a mixed bag, but it’s great when Paula’s theme ends up in a battle, or the dungeon man theme plays in Lier X. Agerate’s shack and the kraken theme plays in his treasure cave
regarding music randomization, apparently someone is working on a randomizer for CV:HoD that randomizes notes, rather than just shuffling song assignments:
(apologies for the streamer voice over the music)
it almost sounds like what haters think HoD sounds like
(from a cursory search i don’t think this is publicly available rn)
a couple buddies of mine are working on a music randomizer for Super Metroid
It was kinda rough earlier this week, but now it produces listenable stuff (as in, it’s modifying the data they intend it to) by way of transposition to randomized scales (I think).
There’s still some work to do — there are odd groups of notes here and there not being touched — but it’s kinda surprising how much it does touch. e.g. it mangles the escape alarm in an neat way, and the opening voiceover in a funny way.
(the HoD music rando guy was in chat for the stream i was watching (it’s a small internet lol))
Wind Waker without dungeons is such a proto Breath of the Wild it strengthens my personal theory that BotW is the true sequel and Toilet Paper/Secret Service were stepping stones to the open world Zelda they really wanted to make in 2002? christ im old
I rly want them (nintendo) to make another game in this style with this specific shading. There’s nothing like it. The HD remake blowing it out with bloom lighting was fucking criminal. Like ive mentioned u get the swift sail (moves 2x speed and changes wind to match your ships heading) by default in the randomizer and it immediately makes it better than vanilla or remake Wind Waker, the worst zelda game i love
drive-by fyi to add that at least as far as zelda goes, many (all?) of the QoL enhancements can be applied through the “redux” hacks without needing to use the randomizer
i love how i made this thread last year then promptly lost interest in randomizers
well ive regained that interest!!
to take on the EarthBound randomizer ive assembled a crack team consisting of @daphaknee@siobhan & Miles “Tails” Prower from the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise
as you all know i am of course a small frog. look at how i climb ropes & ladders aren’t i cute
item distribution and difficulty are hilariously all over the place. ive found like half of Jeff’s Tails’s arsenal including his two strongest weapons, but ive also found like a half dozen stag beetles in what were originally high-value presents. Enemy sprites and names are shuffled so sometimes i get attacked by a harmless looking enemy and WHOOPS it’s actually like a Starman Deluxe. NPC and signpost sprites have the same treatment so ive had the hot springs sign from Saturn Valley run up and attack me like one of the Sharks in the arcade, and sometimes what looks like an NPC is actually a sign i have to read
Every screen and entrance in the game is in here, completely jumbled up. i might literally have to restart and create a map lol, i was doing so early on but the first “floor” was so linear… and then in the second i immediately started encountering towns, which means about a dozen new entrances which could potentially spiral off into other entrances and aaaaaa its like walking through an EarthBound memory collage dreamscape
the first floor BGM started off like the gold mine theme then abruptly became “Ievan Polkka” in the EarthBound soundfont
im having fun
edit: a tips & tricks page i should have read explains the weird treasure/enemy distribution. Theyre supposed to scale progressively but ive been completing monkey cave requests and thus skipping floors! the standard progression has you go through each of the sanctuary guardians. i think the last one i fought confirmed i was on the 6th floor whoops
also there’s a map app but i forgot to save the seed’s .json file oopsiedoodle
