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.

This hack is the result of more than four solid months of dedicated effort by one person. The author hopes to demonstrate that no game with solid fundamentals is beyond redemption, and that the results will inspire and encourage other ROM hackers to improve other games. As usual for a Mentil hack, raw hacking notes are included for those who wish to see everything that went into this.

Jarvas Redux is compatible with the original Japanese ROM, and also with ROMs already patched with the Stardust Crusaders 1.00 English patch. Flips is the recommended BPS patcher to use, although others should be fine.

Major changes:

• Collision detection with the background has been completely reworked. You should get hung up on the scenery less often.
• All known softlocks have been resolved. In order to achieve this, some paths have been modified or added so that if you have the means to reach a location, you also have the means to continue or return. Relatedly, an ability that was very difficult to find has been made much easier to come across, and some things have been modified to utilize it when appropriate.
• The framerate has been improved from 20 to 30fps. Speeds/delays have been adjusted accordingly for everything except the player’s movement, which is no longer sluggish.
• Spells now cast from a new MP stat (instead of from XP). Maximum MP is set to 1 + half your level, and can be restored with Drugs. Spell cost is equal to spell rank. Mages now learn spells 5 levels earlier, thus they start with a spell at Level 0.
• Visiting a Wizard hut (aka House of Shoshin) now restores your MP. Inns of Illusion now live up to their name by restoring your HP and playing a little trick on you. They will both no longer warp you across the world, now letting you exit normally.
• Boathouse interiors now look the part, rather than expositing that you’ve entered one. They can now be exited, and there is now a confirmation prior to setting sail.
• Monsters now drop Gold. The difficulty curve has also been smoothed, nerfing some inexplicably-difficult enemies. Purists can disable these via optional patches.
• NPCs in towns now spawn in doorways and other appropriate entry points, when such a point is onscreen.
• Quests no longer need to be accepted in order to be turned in, fixing a notorious early-game softlock. They now give rebalanced rewards specific to the quest, rather than for the area where you turned them in.
• Touching a duelist now only does 2/3 as much damage as the first boss, rather than doing as much as the final boss. Winning duels now grants 5x as much Fame, and some dueling exploits were fixed.
• The stats screen was rearranged. It now shows XP required to level up, current and max MP, and your total Attack and Defense factoring in equipment. (Contrary to popular belief, equipment always did work, but its effectiveness is only equal to about half of your base stat.)
• A Draft will now permanently unlock passage through a gate, from both sides.

There are numerous lesser changes as well (some of which are nearly as game-changing), detailed in the readme file.

Playing with the sound off is still recommended, though.

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