DSAI Int.2.3.3 changelog (in progress)

GENERAL
- Fixed a lot of typos. This should all have been pretty unambiguous/uncontroversial stuff, so I won't be listing them all here.
- I've toned down some of the more ridiculous item/monster names and descriptions (mostly my own).
- Made capitalisation consistent wherever possible. In general most important things are capitalised (Gate, Gate Key, Shadow, Introspection, Shadowmancy etc), but "antimatter" isn't.
- Removed inaccessible status effects like poison and blind from bosses' scan messages.
- Changed skit activations and Maelach's Iravena powers to use the shift key.
- Updated the battle messages with the Steam version of RM2k.
- The heal point graphic was out of line with the save point graphic and it was driving me CRAZY. I fixed it, and everything looks much nicer as a result. I can't believe we let this issue stay around all this time.

DATABASE STUFF
- Slashing, Bashing and Piercing now have the original 50% effect for E resistance, rather than 0%. It was changed to 0% to ensure we could make enemies straight-up immune to physicals, but now that we have a blanket physical element to serve the same purpose, this wasn't really needed any more, so these are now back to KoE's original intentions. Following on from this, enemies that are supposed to be totally immune (such as the ghosts in Athaera) now have Physical immunity set.
- Gave Elbow Slam back its original animation. Given that it's a blow to the head, the original animation really made more sense and I was silly for changing it before.
- Removed the agility penalty from the Aurealian Boots, since it didn't really have any reason to exist.
- Skeleton Warrior and Fairy's moves have been renamed to sound less boring and generic. They are now "Skull Slash", "Dark Touch" and "Bone Thrust" for Skeleton Warrior, and "Fairy Aid", "Healing Aura" and "Shining Ray" for Fairy.
- In addition to being renamed, Skeleton Warrior's Dark Touch now has 10 attack + 5 skill influence. Since there are no other physical dark attacks in the game, it gives him more of a unique niche that he was previously lacking, as well as serving as a buff in general (since you no longer need to give up on his physical attack to maximise his dark offense, or vice versa). I also increased Dark Touch's TP cost from 15 to 20 to compensate for the extra damage it's getting, and buffed his other two attacks from 15 base power to 20 to keep things uniform.
- Golden Slime's Slimeshot now has a more spruced-up animation to better fit its description (it said it fired a ball of goop at the enemy, and the animation now reflects that).
- There was a typo on the monster selection menu where Golden Slime's "Absorb" is displayed as "Absorbs"! I took the opportunity to fix it and renamed it while I was at it, naming it "Mass Absorb" after Carol's move from TCG. I also buffed its base power to 15 to maybe make it a little more useful.
- Behemoth had ATK influence on Hellfire for some reason? It's not displayed in the description or on the monster log picture, and doesn't make a lot of sense, so I removed it. I also cleaned up Behemoth's monster log picture since it was kind of cropped weirdly.
- Leviathan has lost its redundant Whirlpool move and been given back its original Taunt ability (causing berserk to all foes). Not sure why I ever thought this particular replacement was a good idea, other than a generic "status moves suck" mentality, but having 2/3 offensive moves on a defense-focused monster was just silly, not to mention that losing the berserk effect removed some of the strategy from the boss fight.
- Okay, this caused me to also notice that the berserk status effect was weird for some reason. It cuts defense (which isn't mentioned anywhere in the tutorials), has a 25% chance of going away every 3 turns (???) and reduces hit rate (also not mentioned anywhere??) Anyway, I've made it more like traditional berserk and just kept it as a "locked out of doing anything but attack" thing, which I think is perfectly useful enough, and made the chance of healing every 3 turns 100% so that it can't potentially last forever.
- Ziz's Piercing Beak has been buffed from 10 base power to 20. I figured a significant boost compared to Scissorhand was warranted given the increased TP cost and the much more restricted access Vern has to it.
- Ziz's Hurricane is now multitarget, and had its TP cost increased to 30 and base damage reduced to 40, in line with Earthquake and Flood. Fixed up its monster log picture as well, which was horrifically sloppy before.
- The use messages for the three beasts' moves have been changed to read "Behemoth does X", "Leviathan does X" etc rather than "The Behemoth" or "The Leviathan". Just seemed more consistent with how they're referred to elsewhere.
- Elice's Fortify and Vern's Aqua Barrier now increase resistance to the blanket Physical attribute rather than Slashing/Bashing/Piercing separately.
- Elice's Shadow Gather description was changed from "Focus on gathering shadows to add magical power" to "Focus on gathering shadows to increase TP". "Add magical power" seemed vague and weird from both a lore and a gameplay standpoint.
- Medicinal Glyph's description still said "Can restore HP", despite glyphs now having a small base effect without any inscription (so it will always restore some HP). Changed the descriptions accordingly, along with that of the Glyphic Charm.
- Coryn's Morale Dance use message changed from "There's still fight in us left!" to "There's still fight in us yet!", which sounded a little more natural.
- Hansi's speed has been significantly buffed; he's one of the faster characters now, where he was probably below average before. Getting buffs off fast is pretty important, after all.
- Hansi's Dissonance was buffed to 15 base power as per KoE's testing in-stream.
- Hansi's Consonance had its animation changed so that it sounds different from Dissonance.
- Consonance and Dissonance are no longer locked out by certain instrument types.
- Hansi's High Note now actually cures status effects.
- All of Hansi's skills are now blocked by silence.

MENU STUFF
- The data log now works entirely through pictures instead of teleporting you to another map and using panoramas. This means that using the data log will no longer reset the positions of events and is also just a much saner way of handling it anyway.
- The awkwardly presented options menu that used to open the game is now gone; the options have now been incorporated into the Data Log instead (the same way the DSV remake does it). This means the redundant Configurator item no longer exists.
- In the same vein as the above, the Monster Log has also been removed since that information is readily accessible from save points anyway. We now only have one CMS prompt item clogging up the inventory instead of three, which is some kind of improvement.
- The tutorial menu had some weird areas where I somehow accidentally threw in some random differently-coloured pixels without noticing. Those should be gone now.
- I thought the way switching between acts on the tutorial menu worked was slightly confusing/unintuitive, so I've made use of the lovely shift key functionality to improve it. Switching to the second page of tutorials is now handled by hitting the shift key, complete with a cute blinking notice on the menu to alert you of this once you finish chapter 5. This is completely inaccessible in the game itself as of now, but hey!

PROLOGUE
- The game no longer starts with that unnecessary and awkwardly presented options stuff. The options have been moved to the Data Log menu instead (the same way the DSV remake does it).
- The skit tutorial has been cut down a lot.
- Miles's "Nothing's tried to take a bite out of us yet" line has been changed to "No giant monster's tried to take a bite out of us yet", since there is in fact now a scorpion who attacks you before this part. I'm not exactly sure about what I changed it to, though; I imagine KoE could probably do better if he wants to revise it.

CHAPTER 1
- I changed several instances of "nevermind" to "never mind" in KoE's chapter. Everything I could find on Google said it should be two words, so.
- KoE said Trianna's introductory lines should be less cryptic and mystical-sounding, but I think he'd be able to rewrite it better than me. Just making a note of it.
- Changed Kato's line to Trianna in the first skit from "Who are you" to "What are you" as per KoE's (two-year-old) suggestion.
- Changed Kato's "advanced tech at Kassal" in the warehouse skit to "advanced tech ON Kassal", again, at KoE's suggestion.
- Also generally rewrote that warehouse skit since it's mine and it was pretty clunky and stilted before.

CHAPTER 2
- At KoE's suggestion, I edited the conversation at the start of the caves to remove the idea that Gate travel time can vary by hours, since it does open up a big can of worms for not much reason. Instead I had Trianna say that travel time can vary a little, but not usually by this much, but then she quickly brushes off the issue saying that such questions can wait until the thief is caught. This actually makes for a faster and more natural conversation than the original brief exposition did, so it's a win all around!
- There was a one-use full heal point at the start of Chapter 2 which seemed...really silly? I just added an auto full heal to the end of chapter 1 instead, given that it's a perfectly natural place to recover and there's a timeskip where they would have been able to rest while the experts looked into the Gate anyway, so, yeah, I have no idea why this was ever a thing that I thought was necessary.
- The full heal before the golem being one-use also seems completely random, and theoretically lets you lock yourself into a situation where you're saved before the boss with low HP/TP and have used the heal point. I mean, it would be dumb to actually DO that, but I don't see any actual reason for the heal point to be limited there given most people are only going to be using it once anyway, so it's a regular infinite-use one now.
- I cut the "Immune to acid" from the golem boss since acid isn't even a status effect any more.
- Trianna's exposition on magic got some minor rephrasing.
- Changed Ryneth calling Trianna "the girl" to "the Guide".
- The stalagmites in the cave moved slightly when Trianna ran away from the demon due to map revisions at some point. Fixed.
- The Maelach/Ryneth scene now just opens with Maelach walking straight up to Ryneth's throne from the entrance, rather than warping around with the Gates. The latter was a pointlessly long intro and just spoiled the surprise of the weird layout of the castle later, so I don't know why I thought that was a good idea.
- Made the guy under the Confluence stop talking about the "lack of traffic" during Chapter 2, since the TP is supposed to be open by then.
- Made some minor alterations to Kato's interrogation scene for better flow. (It also occurs to me that the whole interrogation thing seems incredibly pointless in light of Maelach being able to Introspect any information he wants from Kato, which also makes their reason for wanting to capture Trianna pointless, but I'm not really sure what to do about that. I suppose it can be handwaved as Maelach not wanting to let Ryneth know about the full extent of his abilities since it could cause Ryneth to demand him to use them more, or to fear how Maelach could use those abilities against him.)
- I changed Vern saying the guard must have "put his key in something in this room" to "hidden the key somewhere in this room". I don't even know what to say about the original phrasing.
- Mecha Mk2's map sprite is recoloured now because why not.
- Added a screen flash to indicate that Mecha Mk 2 exploded when you beat it because I DON'T KNOW I JUST WANTED EXPLOSIONS OKAY
- Toned down Derporthrus's special attack. You could easily get heal-locked against it while soloing with Trianna, which isn't fun for anyone. I decreased its confusion resistance a little to compensate and make the dungeon slightly less of a confuse spamfest. I also replaced one of the Derporthrus encounters with two Angrier Birds since there were a little too many of them IMO.
- I cut Vern's second line when you first enter Arain City, where he points out "the Gate Key isn't here, so we have no reason to go after Ryneth or Maelach right now". For one thing it seems kind of OOC for him to be the one to bring up the gate key, which he shouldn't even care about, and also it's just a redundant line since it's already prefaced by two other dialogue boxes of people giving good reasons not to stick around the city too long.
- Made Vern have a unique (PENSIVE ELLIPSE) reaction to the mansion in Arain City if he's the leader, rather than just calling it "a mansion like this" as if he doesn't know it. (This is technically inaccessible until chapter 5 but it's sort of chapter 2 content okay)
- For the Cannibal Fly sidequest, I rewrote Kato and Vern's exchange to make Kato less dumb and Vern more characteristically prickly.
- Everything in Athaera is heavily revised as described elsewhere.
- You can now run away from most enemies in Athaera.
- The Shadow Ichthyes enemies in Athaera are now slightly different from the ones in Kato's dream. They have a stronger curse and higher agility, to make them less of a joke for fighting with a full party. They also give less EXP.
- Made the two-Gargoyles fights in the Zaura lookalike room into three-Gargoyles fights, for similar reasons.

CHAPTER 3
- Adjusted some of the early dialogue here to account for Kato already knowing about Shadowmancy from the whole extended Sable subplot. Rodpop might want to mess with this as some of it is kind of rough.
- I changed Elice's reference to gradually gaining power "as long as I can sense Shadows in the area", because Shadows shouldn't just be floating around non-antimatter space as far as I know. It now reads "as I gather more Shadows to myself", as I'm assuming she's summoning/manifesting them from her own antimatter or something to that effect. I may have misunderstood something here, so this is all obviously subject to change.
- Implemented Elice's new staff system as described in the other thread. There's a new conversation when she learns her first skill (as long as you do it by the end of Chapter 3, which should basically always be the case unless you deliberately unequipped her weapon the whole time or something), so Rodpop might want to look over that.
- I cut Kato and Trianna's interjection about the Gate in Arain Castle being a natural Gate, because a) it broke up the flow for the sake of establishing something that isn't really important at all and is covered later anyway, and b) it's just weird in general (Kato just seems to magically sense that it's not an artificial Gate without any particular basis).
- The Midspace Dungeon is no longer accessible at this point, and the conversation at its entrance is changed accordingly.
- Changed Elice's "Not because I, or other Shadowmancers, particularly want to" when talking about her reasons for corrupting antimatter to "Not because I, or [b]most[/b] other Shadowmancers, particularly want to", to account for people like Sable.
- The save point in Elice's antimatter now has "do not overlap" checked, so Eliza will no longer walk all over it and make KoE sad.
- Removed the trees around the Shadow Depths entrance since they made it unnecessarily annoying to navigate.
- Made the buying swimming shop a little harder to see.
- Changed Maelach's "sworn enemy of Introspectors" to "sworn enemy of [b]all[/b] Introspectors".
- Changed Maelach's dialogue when you talk to him again to sound like a slightly more natural follow-up from the previous conversation.
- Fixed passability issue where you could walk off the edge of a platform in the Shadow Depths.
- Made a new faceset for the Shadowmaster to account for his sprite now wearing a hooded cloak instead of a helmet.
- At...someone's suggestion (it was in my notes but idk if Rodpop or KoE suggested it), I abbreviated the Shadowmaster's "You are a number in my system" to "You are merely a number".
- Fixed up some of the grammar in this scene in general since it had some rewrites that hadn't been checked over.
- Changed Mamma Margret's dialogue from "especially in areas with glass tiles" to "even in the depths of the darkest abyss", since the area is no longer glass tiles.
- Moved the out-of-place Variena scene at the end of this chapter to the end of Ryneth's antimatter in the interlude.

CHAPTER 4
- Made Vern respond with an ellipse to Kato's thanking him to make it clearer that his lack of response is an actual character moment and not just a random pause in the scene.
- I made Otto mention that he and Laryn run the train station, since I don't think it was mentioned anywhere. (This...is actually the case, right? I didn't imagine it?)
- Rodpop said some of the trees in Celesti were bugged, so I...tried to mess with them a bit...? I'm not sure if I actually got this right because looking at those events just makes my head hurt
- I changed the little chat about the haunted theatre into a skit rather than a mandatory event, since it pretty much seemed like one (the switch for it is even called Skit Skat!). This also made me realise the earlier skit in the theatre had an overly generous cut-off point (you could still get it at any point up to Chapter 5, even though it has stuff like Coryn not knowing who Kato is), so I switched the cut-off for both skits to be after you rescue the other party members.
- Changed one of the NPCs' sprites in Celesti since two of them were recolours of each other.
- Made the chest containing Aurealian Boots and Dark Robes into two chests, since having two items in a chest doesn't really happen anywhere else.
- Fixed Rodpop's new silly comedy scene in Celesti making the screen tone go back to default, and made the screen transitions quicker while I was messing with it.
- The "hey these guys leveled up" notifications no longer intrude into Arval's DEEP EMOTIONAL TRAGEDY. They now come up when you regain control after that whole sequence.

CHAPTER 5
- Made Dana get angry if you try and open her house while she's standing outside, as KoE suggested.
- Made it impossible to go wandering off into the mountain while the party is split up.
- Moved the displaced scan point on the stalagmite in Issalia Cave.
- Made the Issalia Cave room exits more obvious.
- Corrected Flashbang's chest message to say confuse instead of silence.
- Removed the random skill influence on the wasp's poison sting here because uh why REDDAP???
- Made Cave Goblins weak to corrosion to make sure Jet didn't suck too much here. (It's very possible for the player not to have a L2 glyph at this point, after all.)
- Both types of snake here...resisted heating and freezing, but not corrosion? That just seems counterintuitive to me, and gives you a weird situation where the Acid Glyph is somehow the best option for Jet against a poisonous snake. I made them resist corrosion and lose their freezing resistance instead.
- Also buffed the enemies' skills in general. They were doing less damage with their single-target moves than the Clubs in the previous chapter who could hit the whole party. And we didn't even have a full party then.
- Also buffed the enemies' durability a little to hopefully make them go down slightly less easily. (The WASPs' durability has been decreased, though, because it was kind of crazy.)
- Replaced the Issalia Path music with sol_cave010. I think it has a similarly energetic vibe without sounding quite so over-the-top and dramatic for a random little transitory dungeon.
- The enemy variety on Issalia Path is a little better. Added a new Mountain Goblin enemy (a counterpart to the Cave Goblin with a multitarget attack), and changed up the formations to be more varied.
- Changed Vern's "Now is an opportune time to go kill him" to "Now is the perfect time to go kill him", because the former seemed sort of tonally weird.
- Reworded Coryn's last line and removed the "Cheer up Verny" part which didn't really make a lot of sense.
- Trianna also said "There's" here, which is fixed.
- The secret REDDAP/Rodpop scene is gone. It was just too silly, I'm sorry. RIP.
- That one NPC in Nandu Village no longer has green dots in her hair.
- I made the houses you can actually enter in Nandu have different door sprites, since KoE evidently ended up missing Ki Sacrifice by assuming they were all locked.
- The Ents in the Land Temple are now weak to Slash and strong to Pierce, because nothing in this whole section had physical weakness/resistance and it bothered me.
- The elemental properties of the Land/Sea/Sky themed enemies were all over the place. I've standardised it to this:
Land Avatars are weak to Water/Wind/Freezing, resistant to Earth/Fire/Heating.
Sea Avatars are weak to Fire/Heating/Zapping, resistant to Water/Freezing.
Sky Avatars are weak to Earth/Corrosive, resistant to Wind/Zapping.
This is not perfect and still makes me kind of wince at how asymmetric it is, but there isn't really any neat way for it to work and it's at least less of a horrible mess than how it was before.
- Also altered the three beasts' weaknesses and resistances in line with the above. Ziz is weak to Zapping and resistant to Corrosive rather than the reverse, though, since it has a corrosive dart move itself.
- There were a lot of weird bugs if you tried to re-enter some rooms in the Land Temple after completing the puzzles. These should hopefully be ironed out now. (This would have been a lot easier if REDDAP didn't fill all his switch names with song lyrics, I'm just saying.)
- The Forsaken Beast sign no longer says "phystical". Another tragic loss that will be greatly mourned.
- The Power Whip was moved to serve as an extra reward for the Forsaken Beast fight, rather than just sitting outside. It seemed like a big enough upgrade that it shouldn't just come free.
- And I figured I may as well move the Cipher Whip to the Jewel Beast's room while I was at it, for symmetry's sake. Its original chest in the Midspace Path now has ten Nonplussed Ethers instead.
- Jewel Beast's HP has been buffed to 1400, to be closer to the Forsaken Beast in difficulty.
- Made the Forsaken Beast and Jewel Beast neutral to energy, rather than both immune to it. Energy deserves love too, okay.
- I added a charge of 300 GP to the Arain inn, since Elice and Ryneth talk about needing money to stay there in one of the dream scenes.
- Swimming can now summon two rock friends if you are very lucky/persistent/both.
- I made Swimming give a failure message if you use it twice during the Not Brian fight, rather than removing the skill after using it once. The latter just seemed confusing given that it doesn't happen on any other battle, and there's no notification of it.
- The Barrier Gloves in the Midspace Path have been switched with the Brigand's Gloves in the Midspace Labyrinth. Just made more sense to have the weird sidegrade option in the labyrinth rather than the straight upgrade.
- KoE's Hack message has been changed from "hacks away at the party" to "hacks away at the foe" since it's a single-target move.

INTERLUDE I
- Made Elice comment on the URMOM grave for justice.
- The whole "It's not like I'm some kind of MANLY MAN who feels uncomfortable with girls talking about girl stuff" line in the Elice/Coryn scene was bothering me, so I went ahead and replaced it with an older version of the dialogue slightly tweaked to the new context. (Rodpop may want to fiddle with this some more.) I don't normally change stuff like this on scenes that aren't mine, but in this case it's such an unnatural line that it feels like it breaks character and hurts the flow of the dialogue just for the sake of delivering a hamfisted meta joke specifically at my expense, which seems silly. I don't really resent the jab itself - I know I was consistently a jerk about this scene back in the day and did not do a good job of articulating my reasons for disliking it - but I don't think the line needs to stay in the game. Hopefully this is not a problem.

INTERLUDE II
- Altered Maelach's dialogue to talk about "getting rusty" rather than just being "bad at reading people".
- Fixed the weird issue with Maelach having two different Black Blades.
- Fixed the time stop activation points not working if you have fireballs equipped.
- Made Ryneth not talk if time is stopped.
- Unflipped Eland's face in Ryneth's antimatter.
- Generally touched up the dialogue in the flashbacks I wrote here.
- Gave the fish an obtain message.
- Fixed up some weapons for Lucia and her Shadows that didn't have the Physical attribute checked (which was preventing them from using their physical skills).