Princess Minerva English Language Patch V1.02


Introduction:



	Japanese Developer:				Riverhill Software
	Japanese Publisher:				Vic Tokai Corporation
	Japanese Release:				June 23, 1995
	English Patch Production:			Dynamic-Designs



Dynamic-Designs Patch History:



	V1.00:  Initial Dynamic-Designs Release:	December 23, 2017
        V1.01:  Release to fix intro overruns:		December 24, 2017
        V1.02:  Release to fix enemy names in combat:   December 26, 2017



Dynamic-Designs Production Credits:



	Project Coordination:				Taskforce
	Hacking/Tools/Bug Fixing:			Bongo`
        Assembly: 					Bongo`
	Translation:					Eien ni Hen
	English Graphics:				Taskforce
	Script Writing:					Wildbill
        Script Writing Support:				Taskforce and Draken
	Beta Testing:					Draken, SylarDean, MariusB and hausen
	Splash:						Taskforce



NOT FOR SALE INFO

This game in English or patch to make it English is
NOT for sale under any circumstances!  If you paid
for this game in any way, including in a cartridge,
demand your money back immediately!  File a complaint
with your credit card company and/or paypal as well!
Especially if you got this game in cart form!



Game Description:

Description Partially From Moby-Games: http://www.mobygames.com/game/princess-minerva

Princess Minerva's game's intro starts when Minerva gets bored one day and decides she is going to
form a group of bodyguards because it seems like it would be a fun thing to do.  So, she does
exactly that.  She forms a group of bodyguards from various ladies of differing backgrounds and
hopes to see them in action fighting very soon. It isn't long until she gets her wish either.
Bluemoris, her trusted servant and aide, doesn't like the idea much but is powerless to stop her.

The gameplay portion begins when the girls are already united.  Dynastar tells her old master she
must leave him and sets the stage for her plans to attack the country of Whistler and its territories.
Then the game switches to Minerva and her party doing training in (aka lazying about) the castle's heated
pool.  As Minerva laments the fact she hasn't had a chance to see her bodyguards in action, one of Dynastar's
minions attacks them and sets the stage for the rest of the game.  Minerva gets her wish to see just
what her team of lovely ladies is capable of as the team sets off to stop Dynastar and her dastardly
plans.

Your party contains nine girls, each one with various statistics and magic spells.  The large party
is divided into three smaller ones, and you switch between them at random while participating in
random battles.  You are however allowed to choose who fights when fighting bosses. The combat is
turn-based and is viewed from a top-down perspective, like the locations you visit. You travel on
the overworld map, visit towns, and descend into dungeons. During combat the three active girls in
your party can also unite to perform combo attacks. 

Princess Minerva also inspired anime, mange and light novel franchises.  The anime has been released
in both English-subbed and English-dubbed versions.  The manga and Light Novels have not seen releases
outside of Japan.  It should be noted that the anime, manga and games have unique stories that do not
cross over.



Special features of this game.

This game has quite a few fairly unique features.  

1. You may save anywhere unlike most RPG's.  However, most people overlook the way to do it.  You
   have a magic spell in Arts named Record.  This spell while costing a bit of MP to cast allows you
   the ability to save anywhere in the game.  Pretty handy.

2: You have a nine member squid divided into three teams which all get used during combat. Most of the
   time they're chosen at random but all team members must fight.  The exception to this rule is boss 
   fights.  During boss fights you either chose the team or in some cases even the members which are
   sent to battle.

3: Experience gets divided up into 5 types of categories.  These are Fighter, Fencer, Mage, Elf and
   Cleric.  These have a percentage that determines how much of your experience goes where.  When
   one of these categories reaches 100 points, you gain 1 overall level.  And that category also
   gains 1 level.  The total of all 5 categories makes up your overall level.

4: There are three types of Arts.  And each has its own allotted points to use. Most games you just
   have HP and MP to worry about.  But Princess Minerva has 3 different MP-like stats:  MP, TP and
   SP.  MP is Magic Points and is used for Magic, Cleric and Elven skills.  TP is Technique points
   and is used for skills associated with Fighters. SP is Skill points and is used for fencer
   skills.  This is why we call them Arts and not Magic.  It was the most appropriate term.

5. Your party is all Female.  The main enemy force is also all Female.  Now similar to what our
   translator Eien ni Hen said at one time, we're not sure exactly what audience they had in mind
   while making this game.  See, it has the whole girl power thing going for it but it also has a
   lot of things associated with the younger male demographic as well. Lots of breast jokes and the
   like. This does help it appeal to more fans.  It can also turn some off.  I will tell you there
   is nothing particularly vulgar in the game. Just a lot of teasing banter that stays fairly clean.
   We quite enjoyed it and we hope you do as well.

6. Once you've finished a chapter, you cannot backtrack to that chapter again.  Please make sure
   you've done everything in that chapter before you move on.

7. You may visit several towns at the start of chapters.  And dialog will change in those towns once
   you've progressed the story.  Mostly this isn't important dialog but I just want people to be
   aware that this is the case.

8. All equippable armor has an image of the girls wearing it if you care for that sort of thing.



Fixed bugs from the original game

1. In two areas of the game.  Several monsters had a major bug that let them swap names and get a
   new color pallette when you selected them after your first time.  Bongo` has squashed this bug
   and it no longer happens in our patch.



Bugs still left from the original game that won't be fixed

1. There is a REALLY nasty bug that if you hit start too quickly, the load/new game screen will not
   show up and the game will freeze at a black screen.  This is even worse on game resets as it can
   happen even if you don't hit start at all.  Just reset the game until you get the load/new game
   screen. 

2. The wind tower name keeps popping up after battles when you are on level one of the wind tower.  

3. If you try to buy something that you can't afford multiple times very quickly, the bought sound
   effect will sometimes play instead of the not enough money sound effect.  However, you still do
   not actually get the item even if the wrong sound effect plays.

4. Goddess Tear is supposed to give you 80 MP, TP and SP both inside of and outside of battle.  The
   description in the Japanese game also says it should, however, this item is messed up and only 
   delivers the MP portion while in battle.  You do get all three if you use it outside of battle though.
   Our description was changed to reflect the bug.

5. The game has multiple issues with animation at times.  Putting them in improper places.  This can
   happen on both monsters and players.  Including misplacing the highlight line in the menu as a player
   is healing another player (not during the selection phase, just during the use animation.)

6. At one point in the game you can repeat a certain quest involving a letter over (but you do not have to).
   The quest resets after you've delivered the letter.  And you may pick up the letter and do it again.
   There is absolutely no need to repeat this, we just wanted everyone to know it was possible.

7. Sphinx Quiz game.  During the first round, if you get all answers wrong, the game will tell you that you can
   take all the treasure, even though it won't let you take any.  After the first round the game behaves properly.

8. And finally, there are areas where you can step on wall tiles as the movable path overlaps the wall tiles now and
   then.  It doesn't happen often, but it is there.  This happens in many RPG's though.

We're not sure how this game ever got released with the amount of bugs it contained, but otherwise
its a pretty good game and we tried to squash as many of them as we could!  Unfortunately, do to 
the lousy programming in the game, only one was able to be squashed.



Production and Testing:


This game's production unfortunately took far longer than we had hoped.  Taskforce asked if we might
want to tackle this game as he played a bit of it and liked the mechanics.  Bongo` had a look and
decided he'd give hacking it a shot.  Sometime later we had a script dump in hand with special
assists getting the table created by Filler.  Eien ni Hen came along and agreed to translate it
after that.  Then things slowed.  Taskforce's time got limited, and it took a long while to get the
initial work on the game done.  Once he finally finished that, he passed it off to Wildbill for
writing, but unfortunately Wildbill's time also became quite limited as well.  Sadly, this caused
years of delay to happen, and the game has now taken around seven years to reach completion.  

Translations are a big bottleneck to releasing games, and I'd personally really like to give Eien ni
Hen a lot of thanks for jumping on this and knocking it out as quickly as she did.  I'd also like to
apologize to her that it has taken us this long to get it to this point.  I hope you didn't completely
give up on us getting it done.

Special thanks goes to Bongo` for going above and beyond on assembly work by fixing problems in the
original game.  Every problem was investigate whether it could be fixed or not.  He did an excellent
job!

Finally, I'd also like to thank Bongo`, Filler, Draken, Wildbill, my beta testers and all the guys
at Dynamic-Designs (including the forum users) for putting up with me while I got this game done.
Thanks for helping me get this game to completion.  

And that brings me to my final thoughts.  Before anyone brings it up elsewhere.  I will tell you;
yes, this game has altered non-important dialog throughout.  The reason for this is simple.  50% or
more of the non-important dialog was just dry repeated text over and over and OVER! I wasn't sure
how many times a game could say the same thing, and then I found Princess Minerva. You can only read
"Have you heard anything about monster girls roaming around?" so many times.  And this game repeated
it at least 5 times (usually more) in every single town in the game.  I wish I was kidding you about
that, but that is the honest truth.  We hope you enjoy the humor we tried to inject to liven the
game up in those cases. 


-Taskforce-


Patching:

Contained within this archive is an IPS (international patching system) file or a patch file in another
format for the end user's convenience that when used in conjunction with a ROM file will make the
game playable in English.

Do note that this patch is a result of countless hours of love and labor. Hence, they are not meant
to be sold at any price under any circumstance, be it in digital form or burnt into a donor cart's
ROM chip.

To patch the ROM file, one needs to procure a patcher for their preferred format, a widely available
class of programs, many of which can be found at http://www.romhacking.net/ for one source.  A few
can even be found on our download page for your convenience at
http://www.dynamic-designs.us/downloads.shtml.  Look at the bottom under utilities.  We did not make
these utilities, we just provide them for your convenience.

At some point, ROM sites may upload pre-patched ROMs of our Princess Minerva translation. Obviously,
Dynamic Designs cannot endorse playing these versions, nor will we support resolution of any
associated problems. Moreover, pre-patched ROMs may float around the web for years.  Only by
downloading patches containing just our original work from D-D's web site may gamers obtain
revisions to these patches - if any - and take advantage of possible bug-fixes and corrections.

Below is the information pertaining to the ROM file our patch requires, according to Nach's SNES ROM
Tools:






---------------------Internal ROM Info----------------------
       File: Princess Minerva.smc
       Name: PRINCESS MINERVA         Company: Vic Tokai Inc.
     Header: None                        Bank: LoROM
Interleaved: None                        SRAM: 64 Kb
       Type: Normal + Batt                ROM: 16 Mb
    Country: Japan                      Video: NTSC
  ROM Speed: 120ns (FastROM)         Revision: 1.0
   Checksum: Good 0xE28B            Game Code: AVAJ
---------------------------Hashes---------------------------
      CRC32: 213368D5
        MD5: 87ED5084BCC4130099543B467E0EE54F
--------------------------Database--------------------------
       Name: Princess Minerva
    Country: Japan                   Revision: 1.0
     Port 1: Gamepad                   Port 2: Gamepad
    Genre 1: RPG                      Genre 2: Unknown


**Also take SPECIAL NOTE that the original rom lacks a header.  You may have to remove the header
from your ROM file, but don't worry as there are a variety of programs that do this, such as
SNESTool, Smile, Toolbox, etc.  



Size before patching: 2.00 MB (2,097,152 bytes)



Size after patching: 3.00 MB (3,145,728 bytes)


Alternatively, most emulators support a feature called soft patching, which keeps the ROM file
intact, merging the patch data only during run time. To make use of it, make sure both the ROM file
and the IPS are in the same directory as your emulator of choice and have the same name, but not the
same extension. Do note that this is case-sensitive.  (Also, do note this soft patching is only
available using the IPS patch file, and may NOT work with the other patch file formats.)


e.g:  Princess_Minerva.smc and Princess_Minerva.ips will trigger soft patching at the emulator's run
time.






Emulator Compatibility:


The game behaves itself properly in a wide range of emulators such as ZSNES, SnesGT, Mednafen,
SNES9X and Higan/BSNES.





Special Thanks:


Without these people, it just wouldn't have been possible or fun: All of the great staff at D-D.
Eien ni Hen for translating the game, Bongo` for hacking, Wildbill for writing and putting up with
me as I  asked for writing alterations and of course the rest of the D-D forum community!


Dedicated to the Memory of Bo Bankson (aks Postman77)


Readme 2017 Dynamic-Designs