1. ミーネの砦 Miene Fort
2. ジャングル Jungle
3. 古代の洞窟 Ancient Cave
4. ガデス遺跡 Gades Ruins

@Will: Okay, thanks for letting me know. If I ever get to it, it'll certainly be a while, since I gotta play through the game first of course.

@Jon: Ultima VI is my favourite as well. It was also my introduction to the Ultima series in general. One thing I like about it is the strange perspective it utilizes for presenting the world. It certainly takes a bit to get used to, but works very well.

I really liked Ultima VII: The Black Gate's story and presentation very much, and I feel the same about Serpent Isle as well, although I haven't played that game all the way through (mainly because a bug with either the game itself or Exult stopped me from progressing). But the combat system is quite a chaotic mess, especially when compared with Ultima VI, which is much more structured and orderly.

Yeah, it's interesting comparing these long-running series with each other and finding these bizarre parallels. I wonder how Dragon Quest would compare?

Final Fantasy IX is probably my favourite Playstation Final Fantasy game, even though I like Final Fantasy VII quite a lot. So if there was a program like 7mimic for Final Fantasy IX, I would jump at the chance to map it! *hint hint*

Oh I do enjoy mapping Final Fantasy games, even if they can be a pain sometimes.

I have thought of mapping Final Fantasy III before. I did in fact map the first cave just for the fun of it, but never bothered to post it anywhere. I do remember Will submitting maps for it however (checking the update log, back in September 2014), so I'm not sure if he's still keen on continuing on or not. But if no one steps up to the plate, I would indeed be interested in mapping that game as well.

Since my last post, I haven't worked on them at all. But I suppose now is a good time to get back to them. I simply haven't bothered to progress the game to get to the next area for map labeling. So I can have about six or seven new maps ready by Friday or so.

As for Ultima VI, I have started doing maps of the dungeons and caves, but I've only worked on the small ones (like the Spider Cave for instance). I'm still deciding upon how to label the item legends, so once that's sorted out, you can be sure to see them in your inbox before too long.

I recall other people asking my about mapping the dungeons in the past, so you're not the only one. Just thinking about mapping some of those dungeons is a great deterrent to working on them, since many of them are so incredibly massive, not to mention dragon-infested!

[Final Fantasy VII]

It's been a few months since I had last submitted maps for Final Fantasy VII, and that is mainly because I was stuck on how to present the "Great Glacier" map in a aesthetically pleasing way.

I was wondering whether or not to include all the transition scenes between landmarks. If I did so, I think the map would've been next to useless since it would've been so vastly huge, making it a chore to find the areas with items present. In the end, I decided to not bother with the transition scenes (except for one because there was an "Added Cut" materia to be found there) and simply used arrows to indicate which areas connect to where.

Hopefully the map isn't a complete mess with all the arrows everywhere.

Besides that, I've been working away on a new RPG, Silva Saga II for the SNES. I had played this a couple of years ago and found it quite nice, so why not map it as well. I got quite a number of maps laid out already, so once I get most if not all of the game mapped out, I'll start labeling them up. There are tons of hidden items that can be found in towns, so it'll be quite the task to find them all!

Just as I finished making my previous post, Dr. Mario immediately popped into mind, so that's definitely another example, for sure.

Games that were released around the same time for both systems I didn't count, Wario's Woods, being one such example. Though looking up Tetris 2, it looks like the SNES version came out about a year later, so I would count that as an upgrade since the visual style is completely different.

The great thing about Dragon Quest is that is helped simplify RPGs overall. Games like Wizardry were hellishly brutal, judging from the game diaries I've read of the first few titles. The Ultima series I find a bit more forgiving, though compared to Japanese RPGs, is still quite intricate and complicated, such as its system of casting magic.

I tend to prefer Japanese RPGs because of their simplicity. I'm not much of a fan of creating my own characters, which is much more commonly found in Western RPGs. Distributing points in statistics is not my idea of fun. I find it a troublesome obstacle if I just want to see what a certain game is like if I'm new to it. I simply want to start a game and have the story begin unfolding right away. And because I am learning Japanese and play a lot of JRPGs for that very purpose, I don't want to be bogged down in minutiae; I want to concentrate on what the characters are saying. I think this is probably the big reason why all I ever play these days are RPGs for the SNES, Playstation, and other early consoles. It certainly doesn't hurt finding them on eBay for $10 or less per game.

Thank you very much for honouring another piece of my work in this way.

Speaking of games from the NES era getting updated for the SNES, I can't really think of any other than Super Mario All Stars, and the first three Dragon Quest games. There are probably others though.

The reason I use the word "garish" is because many of the colours used are very pure and rather bright on the eyes. Although I first assumed that all the colours used had a colour depth of 4-bits (reminiscent of the colour palette found in the Windows 3.x operating system, for instance), I checked a number of them and they're not quite the same, although they are very close.

Just for fun, I made a modified version of one of your maps, changing a number of the colours to ones I would personally find a bit more pleasing to look at. Of course, this is the opinion of an artist talking here, so I would be a bit more stringent about such things as colour harmony, contrast, not allowing certain colours to dominate over others, etc. You're completely free to dismiss this nitpick of mine however. As I have said before, the maps are still very readable with the colours you have chosen.

If you need any help with the Japanese, I would be happy to lend a hand.　君がそう望むなら、僕に手伝わせて下さい！

Wow, you sure do have quite the lengthy resume!

To comment on the Etrian Odyssey maps, they are very well laid out and easy to read. The garish colours are not something I'm terribly fond of, but they certainly don't take away from the map's readability. The only thing I would point out to improve things would be that the blue tile which indicates the entrance to the labyrinth isn't very readable with the S coloured black. If it were white or cyan blue, then it would be far easier to read.

It's nice to see you take up Sansara Naga 2. I have yet to play that game in earnest, but have dabbled with it from time to time. I remember years ago trying to play it (back when my Japanese was far less competent) and trying to figure out how to get past that very first area you start out in. All the slangy Japanese didn't help either, haha.

Sure, I don't find anything wrong with grouping all the Midgar areas under that category. And the same applies to Junon as well. I will however be putting the emergency stairs in the Shinra Building as a separate map, which I placed under the "Shinra Building" category. Not sure if that will cause any problems with organizing them.

The Chocobo Race Waiting Room is technically a part of Gold Saucer, but I didn't group it in with the rest of that map because it's an area you only ever visit once and can never return to afterwards. But if you're looking to place it under the "Gold Saucer" category, I won't object.

If you count the number of maps already up on the site, you'll find there's 61, so it's already surpassed FF4 (which has 41), and is closing in on FF5 and 6 (which have 71 and 69 respectively). From what I can tell, it may look like Final Fantasy VII will get pretty close to 100 maps. Part of that however is me splitting up huge areas into multiple maps, Junon being one such example.

If BumFengShui hadn't pointed me to 7mimic, I'd probably still be having a hell of a time trying to capture a lot of the areas manually. It only looks like I'm zipping through them because much of the organizing and layout work was done before June.

Mapping this game has had its challenges, but I'd say a lot of them had to do with presentation. Since there is no 16 x 16 grid that everything fits into anymore, I had to come up with different ways of denoting things, like using icons for treasure chests and save points, and arrows for indicating scenery changes in the case you cannot return to the previous scene. The rest is still pretty much my usual way of mapping things though.

You would be correct about the game data without the movies fitting onto a single disc. It sure does make mapping FF7 that much more convenient! No having to worry about disc swapping. I've never heard about that other thing though, haha.

That's pretty cool. It's like a Let's Play without the commentary to go along with it.

I think about half of the total number of maps are up on the site right now, so there's still a lot left to go through.

Oh yeah, it's definitely a very different style compared to its predecessors; having modern feel to it, although still situated in a fantasy world. I think Tetsuya Nomura wanted to have Final Fantasy VII set in the modern day world actually, but that idea was scrapped early on I think. Final Fantasy XV seems to be going in that direction however.

I would say the areas are fairly well designed so that there isn't really any ambiguity as to where to go or where you're situated. But in the off chance you are a little confused, there is a feature which will point out where you are, where the exits are, and what things you can climb. As Jon said, the characters are very easy to pick out in the environments.

I took a look at the first Alone in the Dark game, and I can understand what you mean by the navigation. Final Fantasy VII's navigation is nowhere near that clumsy; there is no abrupt switching between views while walking in a single room for instance.

It's funny you mention the Alone in the Dark games, because I read in an interview with Yoshinori Kitase that those games were a major inspiration for Final Fantasy VII. I think he talked about how they could have gone the route of having 3D environments and pixel-drawn characters, like what Xenogears and Dragon Quest VII did, rather than what they did end up doing.

It certainly wouldn't hurt to try it out! Thanks for the kind words, Terra!

Jon: At this moment, it's still just a thought in my head. I'm thinking of perhaps making it appear like it's drawn on parchment, and have any colours appear more subdued than what you'd see in-game. The way J.R.R. Tolkien presented his maps of Middle-earth in his novels can help give an indication of what sort of direction I may end up going for Final Fantasy VII's world.

I thought that teaser trailer was pretty impressive. It really makes Midgar look like this insanely gigantic city, which is not the impression I get when looking at the city in the original game, and especially not so when I was working on those maps. The sectors seem so small and dinky.

By the way, I noticed that the link for the Nibelheim map links to the Cave of the Gi map. All the other links look okay however.

Oh! Have they finally decided to go ahead with that? Wow, that's quite the surprise! I'll have to look into that.

I actually have my sights on getting everything mapped and labelled (except for the overworld) by the end of June. I have most of the rest of Disc 1 already laid out (which I think is somewhere around 25 maps), all ready for me to go through the game and label 'em up. So I'm confident I'll be able to complete this project long before the remake comes out.

As far as the overworld is concerned, I am planning on drawing and painting that myself, which would be far easier for me to do than try and figure out how to rip the data from the disc itself. I have no idea how long that would take though, but that is the plan.

Just in case you were wondering why no maps have been coming in the last few days, I've been taking a little break away from it, mainly playing Wild Arms in its stead.

Yesterday, I put out a much more substantial update for Final Fantasy VII, which takes things up to Sector 6. I only have about eight maps left of areas in Midgar. The Shinra Building will be the one map I will have to leave until later since there are a number of items that can be accessed at the end of Disc 2, and I would prefer to have only one map of that area.

I made a small change in how I point to items that people have or other things in the maps. I now simply use a glowing circle instead of the person icon I had used before. This also works great with the Turtles Paradise News flyers that are scattered about the world.

Another thing I finally figured out is how to expand the backgrounds of some areas where the given background doesn't cover the entire space the area takes up. You can see the results in the "Lower Sector 4 Plate" map. The only down side is that the illuminated bits that seep into the black that would normally be filled in with the background aren't as bright as the bits that illuminate the foreground only. But the effect is close enough to what is seen in-game that I'm not worried about it.

Hard at work on the rest of the maps in Disc 1!