Final Fantasy VYUOKITE Avengers Part I
Jul. 12th, 2023 09:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingVYUOKITE is a Game Genie code for Final Fantasy on the NES. If you look it up, you'll find results that suggest it allows you to pick from "over 250 different characters" when you start.
I've been a long time enjoyer of the Final Fantasy NES board on GameFAQs. Every so often, someone (like ChaseXtreme) would post about this code and its effects. The oldest thread I found on the subject was this one by spriteless in 2010. ChaseXtreme also brought it up a few times: first time was here in 2016 and the second time was here in 2017. The earlier ones didn't seem to garner much interest, but in Chase's 2017 thread there was more interest, including my own.
What it seems it's doing, technically, is changing exactly one byte in the ROM that is the upper bound of the number of classes you're allowed to select from when you're choosing your party.
The normal list of classes you can pick from in the game is like this, indexed 0 through 5: Fighter, Thief, Bl.Belt, RedMage, Wh.Mage, Bl.Mage.
The list of classes that are normally used in the game is like this, indexes 0 through 11 (hex x0B): Fighter, Thief, Bl.Belt, RedMage, Wh.Mage, Bl.Mage, Knight, Ninja, Master, RedWiz, Wh.Wiz, Bl.Wiz.
With VYUOKITE, that index "5" that the class selection would normally cap at is changed to something close to its maximum value. The class names end up being each successive delimited piece of text that appears in the game's data, so after Bl.Wiz it goes like this: HP Wiz, Wiz, ST Wiz, PO Wiz, PO Wiz, LUTE, CROWN, CRYSTAL, HERB, etc. This ends up including every item, weapon, armor and spell in the game (but not every monster or piece of dialogue).
I was curious about this, so in 2017 when Chase was talking about it I analyzed the bytes for each class based on how many bytes classes normally use. In this post, I shared this Google doc where I tried to predict the values for each class. This prediction didn't work. To this day, I don't know why, but I wonder if perhaps the classes are accessed out of RAM instead of ROM or something like that.
Testing my hypotheses, anyway, I decided to give it a try. A themed try, at that! I had been hearing suggestions about how so many Final Fantasy things are also names and then, as a big MCU fan, I decided to go with something Avengers-ish.
This was the sidebar that hovered beside the gameplay while I played on Twitch:
Just to be clear, the theming was just for fun and didn't actually impact the way the game was played at all; these characters were, for most purposes, random.
You'll note the "quality-of-life" codes mentioned there. This was really a playthrough of curiosity rather than a challenge so to make the early game viable (in some cases) and less mind-numbing (in others), I wanted to be able to give the characters a strong start; this idea, and even the specific codes, were stolen from ChaseXtreme.
I started playing on May 26, 2017. Shortly after this run I changed to my current YouTube account so the dates on the videos you'll see embedded/linked here won't be 100% accurate. It was also just the second run I ever streamed, so I was new to it and had an awful echo on my microphone. As always, take it or leave it.
At level 3, Luke went up to 2 max HP.
We grabbed the Cap from the Temple of Fiends and we found that all four characters could equip it. Thor dealt 439 damage to a Spider before Garland, so I figured there wasn't much risk in fighting him. That was valid.
The trek to Pravoka was pretty uneventful; Luke's evasion had underflowed by wearing the Cap, so he wasn't damaged on the way and the rest of the team neatly handled the offense. I attempted to figure out which magic people could use and spent the majority of my money before even looking at weapons and armor (which was dumb). With the leftovers, I did buy a Scimtar but literally nobody could wield it. We also found that nobody could use a Wooden Shield but everyone could equip Gloves, so I spent the rest of my money on Gloves.
I actually backtracked a little bit hoping to encounter just a couple of Imps to boost Luke somewhat and solve my financial issues before fighting the Pirates. Luke started to be able to deal reasonable damage, actually, where Iron - who had no weapon - still couldn't.
When we did fight the Pirates, unfortunately, literally the first action of the entire battle killed Luke - who had 5 max HP at level 6. Everyone else was fine, of course.
It didn't make any sense to do a grind before the Marsh Cave with my quality-of-life Imp-based codes active, nor did I really see the point of it, so after healing and shopping in Elfland I wrapped up for this first session. Between Pravoka and Elfland, the only weapon upgrade anyone got at all was Luke using a Large Knife.
Armor was going okay, though. The more universally-equippable items by the game's logic also seem to be pretty well universally-equippable when we break the game's logic.
Given Thor and Cap's absurd stats, I'm sure we're more than ready for not only Marsh Cave but quite possibly endgame, although it would be maybe sort of nice if Luke could participate. I guess we'll see how that develops.
I've been a long time enjoyer of the Final Fantasy NES board on GameFAQs. Every so often, someone (like ChaseXtreme) would post about this code and its effects. The oldest thread I found on the subject was this one by spriteless in 2010. ChaseXtreme also brought it up a few times: first time was here in 2016 and the second time was here in 2017. The earlier ones didn't seem to garner much interest, but in Chase's 2017 thread there was more interest, including my own.
What it seems it's doing, technically, is changing exactly one byte in the ROM that is the upper bound of the number of classes you're allowed to select from when you're choosing your party.
The normal list of classes you can pick from in the game is like this, indexed 0 through 5: Fighter, Thief, Bl.Belt, RedMage, Wh.Mage, Bl.Mage.
The list of classes that are normally used in the game is like this, indexes 0 through 11 (hex x0B): Fighter, Thief, Bl.Belt, RedMage, Wh.Mage, Bl.Mage, Knight, Ninja, Master, RedWiz, Wh.Wiz, Bl.Wiz.
With VYUOKITE, that index "5" that the class selection would normally cap at is changed to something close to its maximum value. The class names end up being each successive delimited piece of text that appears in the game's data, so after Bl.Wiz it goes like this: HP Wiz, Wiz, ST Wiz, PO Wiz, PO Wiz, LUTE, CROWN, CRYSTAL, HERB, etc. This ends up including every item, weapon, armor and spell in the game (but not every monster or piece of dialogue).
I was curious about this, so in 2017 when Chase was talking about it I analyzed the bytes for each class based on how many bytes classes normally use. In this post, I shared this Google doc where I tried to predict the values for each class. This prediction didn't work. To this day, I don't know why, but I wonder if perhaps the classes are accessed out of RAM instead of ROM or something like that.
Testing my hypotheses, anyway, I decided to give it a try. A themed try, at that! I had been hearing suggestions about how so many Final Fantasy things are also names and then, as a big MCU fan, I decided to go with something Avengers-ish.
This was the sidebar that hovered beside the gameplay while I played on Twitch:
Just to be clear, the theming was just for fun and didn't actually impact the way the game was played at all; these characters were, for most purposes, random.
You'll note the "quality-of-life" codes mentioned there. This was really a playthrough of curiosity rather than a challenge so to make the early game viable (in some cases) and less mind-numbing (in others), I wanted to be able to give the characters a strong start; this idea, and even the specific codes, were stolen from ChaseXtreme.
I started playing on May 26, 2017. Shortly after this run I changed to my current YouTube account so the dates on the videos you'll see embedded/linked here won't be 100% accurate. It was also just the second run I ever streamed, so I was new to it and had an awful echo on my microphone. As always, take it or leave it.
At level 3, Luke went up to 2 max HP.
I also took some time to inspect my magic, which is interesting, not only because of the spells characters could learn but because of the way their earn their MP/magic charges:
Note that characters don't necessarily follow a pattern of level-by-level spell increases. In fact there's mostly no pattern at all. For now, this was the Thor and Cap show with two bystanders.We grabbed the Cap from the Temple of Fiends and we found that all four characters could equip it. Thor dealt 439 damage to a Spider before Garland, so I figured there wasn't much risk in fighting him. That was valid.
The trek to Pravoka was pretty uneventful; Luke's evasion had underflowed by wearing the Cap, so he wasn't damaged on the way and the rest of the team neatly handled the offense. I attempted to figure out which magic people could use and spent the majority of my money before even looking at weapons and armor (which was dumb). With the leftovers, I did buy a Scimtar but literally nobody could wield it. We also found that nobody could use a Wooden Shield but everyone could equip Gloves, so I spent the rest of my money on Gloves.
I actually backtracked a little bit hoping to encounter just a couple of Imps to boost Luke somewhat and solve my financial issues before fighting the Pirates. Luke started to be able to deal reasonable damage, actually, where Iron - who had no weapon - still couldn't.
When we did fight the Pirates, unfortunately, literally the first action of the entire battle killed Luke - who had 5 max HP at level 6. Everyone else was fine, of course.
It didn't make any sense to do a grind before the Marsh Cave with my quality-of-life Imp-based codes active, nor did I really see the point of it, so after healing and shopping in Elfland I wrapped up for this first session. Between Pravoka and Elfland, the only weapon upgrade anyone got at all was Luke using a Large Knife.
Armor was going okay, though. The more universally-equippable items by the game's logic also seem to be pretty well universally-equippable when we break the game's logic.
Given Thor and Cap's absurd stats, I'm sure we're more than ready for not only Marsh Cave but quite possibly endgame, although it would be maybe sort of nice if Luke could participate. I guess we'll see how that develops.
