Part 1: Wanna Pet That Dog

We begin with the slow walk to Narshe, the opening credits replaced with the randomizer credits, as well as new music!

Chrono Cross - Life is the track for this walk.



Our first glimpse at the party. A nice teal paintjob on the Magitek armor, some big purple hair and..dogs?



It can be hard to tell who a sprite is supposed to be, especially when they're shoved into a giant walking suit of magic. Maybe the menu screen can shed some light!



PUPPIES! And Squall from FF8. The original Gestahl sprite kinda looked like a dog to young me, and it seems also to whoever made this sprite. What are our new friends wearing?



Oh my. If anything at this point in the game posed a threat, those relics could really save my bacon. Or they could have random attributes that fuck me over, . Since we can't unequip Biggs or Wedge, let's get ????? naked and see what they bring to the table.



These are VERY nice rolls for Speed and Magic Power, generally the two most important stats. Many commands will rely on the Magic Power stat, and starting at 45 is great. Fight/Item are fine, Mimic has uses, and Dance will either be amazing or terrible.




You can see here the extra information granted by the ROM I'm using; the MithrilBlade displays all the properties it has. The game has been edited so all (or nearly all) weapons can be used with SwdTech, Runic, and the Gauntlet relic. This is to prevent you from getting a character with one of those commands but not being able to equip any weapons that enable them.

Items in the randomizer are kept to a certain range of power, comparable to the item you would normally get at that point. There is a code that can disable this, meaning you would get any item available in the game at any time. This includes things like getting an Illumina on your starting character, or a boss in the final dungeon dropping a Leather Hat.

The only real stand out here is the Buckler. It gives the wearer poison immunity, decent defense, and a real cool +10 to Evade. If you're familiar with the base game, you would know that the Evade stat does nothing due to a bug. All evasion is instead calculated based on your Magic Block stat. The randomizer fixes this bug, so that +10 Evade is great to have.



A quick glance at the Dances on the Skill page; I can check the generated text file to see what the dances are but it's more fun to find out as we learn them.



Normally, there would be NPCs walking on screen to yell at me. The "notawaiter" code just removes them entirely, beginning a battle on this step. I'll keep mentions of this to a minimum as there isn't much to talk about, just know that it tremendously speeds up the beginning of the game.



Our first battle, and the sprites aren't that big of a change. The original guards here are just a different guard sprite, and random chance gave us this guard sprite instead.

Chrono Trigger - Battle - Our standard battle theme replacement.

Their stats aren't anything special, pretty comparable to the original fight here. Random weaknesses, immunity, automatic buffs, etc. Ambusher means that you'll always get a Back or Pincer attack if that enemy is in the battle, unless the particular formation doesn't allow it for some reason, like this one. Difficult to run is exactly that, and Humanoid is for certain things like the Man Eater that does double damage to Humanoids. Rage/Control/Steal all refer to the commands, and Morph is what happens when you use the Ragnarok Esper to change the enemy into an item. The 6% here is the odds of it working at all, then the item you get is an equally random chance from those four items. Locations are a little weird to follow sometimes but this particular enemy will appear in a treasure chest at some point.



Our Magitek commands. Fire/Bolt/Ice Beam aren't randomized, and the fourth slot is random but with a bigger chance of Heal Force appearing. Biggs and Wedge will always have Exploder, as a failsafe in case you encounter an enemy that absorbs all elements. It looks like one of our guards has a gambling problem too.



Shrapnel spins some blades around the enemy and does pretty heavy damage for this point of the game. For reference, the Beams have a Spell Power of 60 compared to Shrapnel's 120.



We also learn our first dance! We'll look at that in a future update.



The second battle in the intro, definitely different from the normal beast sprites but still in the guard theme.

Much like the previous fight, these guys don't bring much. They have no special skills and so will only ever use Fight and "Arrows" which is just Fight with extra damage.



New monsters!

Obnoxious monsters, at that. You cannot run while they're alive, and their special attack will put you to sleep.



Moving into the cave, we find a scorpion (the Nautee) and uh.. mouse (Asce) living in harmony.

While very low on hitpoints, they have some neat abilities. Nautee's special will hit you, then turn you invisible, rendering you invincible to any further physical attacks. Asce is immune to the Haste status, if somehow it were cast on it.



The Big Bad Babby's First Boss is here and absolutely rocking that pink shell.

Xenogears - Knight of Fire Our new normal boss fight music.

Why no, those names aren't confusing at all. Head is the actual head, and Whelk is the shell.

The hitpoints are close to the originals; you can kill the shell in the original game if you're patient enough. Nothing too bad on the head. Slow is annoying but it's an easy fight anyway. The shell doesn't actually attack normally, only if you hit it with something that does damage. Healing and nullified damage don't provoke an attack back. I didn't actually attack the shell to find out if it would cast Sour Mouth in response but that is likely the case.

Watch the full fight here.



It doesn't take long.



After talking to the Esper, we mysteriously wake up in a bed. Can we remember our name?



Hello Saber. It's nice to meet you! What an adventure we're going to have.