MSX Visuals Mod

There have been many releases and rereleases of the original Final Fantasy on various systems; one of the least-known ones is Final Fantasy for the MSX personal computer (specifically, the MSX2). It was released after the original Famicom release, but before the US NES release of the game; as a result, it's closer to that original version of the game than the later releases that took the NES release as their basis (so it has the original Beholder sprites instead of Eyes, the topless Medusas, the neat-haired Master sprite, etc.), but it has several advancements of its own that set it apart from the original Famicom release.

As for what those advancements are that set it apart, the MSX (and especially the MSX2) had more powerful visual and audio capabilities than the Famicom/NES; as a result, the MSX release had more and more varied colors in many of its sprites and higher-quality chiptune music. On the downside, as a computer in the 1980s, it was distributed on a 5 1/4" floppy disk (and required another to save), which means long loading times for...just about anything. In addition, as as a multipurpose computer, the MSX was considerably less optimized than the Famicom/NES. As a result, in addition to the loading times, FF for the MSX is considerably slower than the original. There are also other minor differences, such as the random encounter grid being slightly different than the original and a far more wildly inconsistent encounter rate.

This mod attempts to visually turn the Pixel Remaster into something as close to the MSX release as I can get. Right now it only includes party and enemy battle sprites, battle backgrounds, map sprites for party and NPCs, and replacement of the world map tileset as well as the exterior map tileset for Cornelia. (Note that the world map tileset is incomplete: I'm not sure how best to handle the transparency in the "earth rotting" animation from the prologue, and obviously the map is different from the actual NES/MSX version, so I've done my best to MSX-ize the PR map. I hope to do more to fix it later.) I've also included some UI options to mimic the MSX version's interface. Eventually I hope to expand it to include equipment sprites (including new MSX-style shield sprite) and replacement of the various town and dungeon map tilesets into something much closer to the MSX style.

This mod is highly indebted to Axel Voss's FFI Pixel DEmaster, which does the same thing this is trying to do but with the NES version of the game; several elements (most notably the general structure of the battle background setup and several of the new battle sprites that weren't in the original) are patterned off of his mod.

This mod also makes no gameplay changes to return the game to its original NES/MSX difficulty, because a mod already exists for that: Origins Normal Mode Rebalancing, which returns various parts of the game back to the versions used in the NES/WonderSwan Color/PlayStation "normal mode" versions. This includes enemy HP, formations, experience, and gold; party experience needed to level up; removes the remake-added items from shops and restores treasure chests to their original rewards; and much more. To ensure enemy formations show as intended, you will probably also want to use the optional addition to that mod, for compatibility with the Pixel DEmaster, that restores enemies to their NES placement. While this isn't entirely accurate to the MSX release - it's using the NES encounter grid/rate rather than the MSX's - it's definitely closer than the vanilla PR gameplay.

As the MSX version never had an official US release, there's also no "official" English text for it, so you have several options for how to handle it that are all of equal accuracy, in addition to the vanilla version. A fan translation of the MSX version was released several years ago using the original NES translation, and some support to mimic that version exists with my NES Text mod, which changes most of the text of the game to reflect the NES version (and thus, the MSX fan translation). The aforementioned Origins Normal Mode Rebalancing mod includes by default game text changes to do the same with the PSX Origins names and usage of various things, so if you choose to use that mod, you can either keep that part in or remove it (the mod page gives you instructions on removing it if you wish). And finally, I have two other mods that edit the text: my Consistent Terminology for FFI revises the vanilla PR translation of this game (as it does with all the other FFPR releases) to be consistent with each other in their use of shared terms, and my [url=https://www.nexusmo