Alundra

A pointy-eared boy is shipwrecked on a strange island plagued by nightmares. To solve the island's mystery, he must journey through a series of dungeons, collecting swords, bows, bombs, gloves that let him throw rocks, and a rod that shoots fire.

So yeah, imagine Zelda with a heavy emphasis on puzzles and plot, and a very high body count.

To do: Debug leftovers.

Unused Items#

There are two unused items in the game that are upgrades of existing items, and take their places on the menu if hacked in.

• Oak's Ring - Yes, it's called a "Ring" despite that the icon is clearly a necklace (and a palette swap of Nava's Charm). It raises strength, making it a better version of Olga's Ring.
• Refresher - Basically a better version of the Recovery Ring that restores your HP quicker.

Secret Warp Zone#

Use an Action Replay device to enable high jump and land directly on top of the fountain in the middle of the village. A dialog will pop up allowing you to cycle through all the Chapters in the game.

Regional Differences#

To do: European version differences (save text regenericization, etc.) Revisional differences between USA 1.0 and 1.1

Script#

"Dude, it's okay if not everyone here believes in the gods.
The faith of a few and a little weed is all we need, bro."

This game was "localized" by Working Designs. Next, please.

Intro#

In the Japanese version, the intro video that plays after the opening logos consists of a long string of prerecorded gameplay videos set to the game's main theme. Working Designs, noting not-unreasonably in the manual that "this didn't get us too excited about the game", decided the best thing to do was put together their own intro instead. They accomplished this by cutting up footage from the game's animated ending sequence and splicing it together with their own gameplay videos (which seem to be offscreen camcorder recordings, complete with visible game HUD). This was then stitched together with poorly-overlaid CGI effects and set to some new RAWK 'N' ROLL music that clashes quite frightfully with the game's orchestral soundtrack.

Surprisingly, the original intro was actually left in. It now plays after idling at the title screen for a while.

Gameplay#

Please elaborate. Having more detail is always a good thing. Specifically: Specifics on the easier switch puzzle.

• The Japanese version defaults to "Start" on the title screen if no save files are detected, and selects "Continue" otherwise. The US version and its European descendants always default to "Start". This may have been changed to avoid checking the memory card prior to the title screen, on the off chance of some sort of problematic data corruption.
• The timing of a switch puzzle in Elene's dream was made more forgiving in the US version.
• The US version switches around the button assignments. Aside from accommodating the PlayStation controller's regional X-O button swap, it uses L2 and R2 instead of Start to open the menu.

Enemy Stats#

Here's what the US manual says with regard to changes in the game's difficulty:

"Monster difficulties were also rebalanced, generally to make a few of the bosses easier to kill. However, bosses were also made more dangerous in that if they managed to hit Alundra, their blows were much more lethal. This lessened some of the boredom of the later bosses, where they really weren't much challenge to fight, but took forever to kill."

That doesn't sound so bad, except it's completely wrong. In reality, the vast majority of the enemies in the game – all of them, not just bosses – were made more difficult by increasing their HP and sometimes Attack. There are only two enemies that were given slightly less HP, and there appears to be exactly one case where a boss was made easier in any way – and even then, it was given 50% more HP!

While the HP and Attack values in the table below should be self-explanatory, the Magic columns require some explanation:

• The damage "bonus". This is a constant added to the total damage done after the multiplier bonus has been computed.

As shown, the only instance in which those settings were touched was for a single boss, where the bonus for all magic was increased from 6 to 8. This essentially means spells do 33% more damage against that boss in the US version.

In lieu of proper names, the "Index" column here refers to each enemy's entry number in the index of BALANCE.BIN, which contains the enemy difficulties (among other things).

In the tables below, instances in which a stat rose have been marked in red. The rare cases where a stat actually decreased are marked in green. Instances in which a stat rose by more than 5 points and constituted a change of 50% or greater from the original amount appear in magenta. Enemies whose stats didn't change are omitted.

To do: Enemy names. Also, double-check to make sure none of the entries below are spurious, since BALANCE.BIN also seems to contain some non-monster-related stuff.

References#