Thanks very much, Terra! I'm pretty much the same way with not commenting on other mappers’ work I'm not familiar with. It can certainly explain my low post count when compared to other regulars here. Maybe I should remedy that...

I tend not to worry all that much over missing things. There have been the few occasions where that's happened to me with previous map sets, but I don't stress over it. If it happens, oh well. I just revise the　map and get it updated on the site.

When I'm in the labeling phase of mapping, I usually have a few walkthrough sites handy to make sure I don't miss anything. There have been times where I find something that wasn't listed on those sites, but it doesn't happen often.

Although I haven't formally announced it yet, I've been working on Light Fantasy on and off for several months, and if it weren't for this one walkthrough site I've been referring to, there would have been a ton of hidden items I'd have never known existed. I've attached one such map to this post. All the hidden items are found in the trees. If you weren't told about them, you'd never think to look there, right? I wonder if it's ever brought up in the game manual.

But even so, if I had sent in the maps without those hidden items pointed out, I doubt anyone would complain over their absence. I don't think this game is well-known enough to warrant that kind of response anyway. So in conclusion, I'd just say don't sweat it.


Trop, even if you manage to get your karma down to zero, it's still very possible to get it back up to 100. Every time you meditate at a shrine for leveling up you get 10 karma points, so stealing the odd thing here and there isn't going to make the game unwinnable.

Thanks very much, Trop.

Well, it's something I've been meaning to do for a long while now. There's tons of really cool stuff to get in the game, and I've yet to see anyone lay it all out like I'm doing. For instance, as far as I can recall, you don't really need to buy any magic equipment at all; you can just find it all in the dungeons.

Of course, that will lead into my next problem these days which is that I rarely find things that I both want to map and aren't already mapped by someone else.

With me, I seem to be pretty lucky in that most of the games I tend to want to map are available for the taking, which is a little strange since a number of the games I've mapped are from very popular series (Final Fantasy being the predominant example). Even Jon has made that observation numerous times over the years. And even if someone does take on a game I would have liked to do myself, I usually see that as a good thing; it's one less game that I have to worry about.

Having said all that, when the game happens to not be an RPG, they usually tend to all be taken though. That can explain why I mainly work in that genre exclusively (with a couple of exceptions here and there).

Also, nowadays I'm focusing more on obscure Japanese RPGs that almost no one has heard of, so I don't really have to worry all that much about people "taking" those ones away from me, haha.

Update Time!

I have updated a number of maps (FF4, FF5, Dragon Quest 1+2) which had some mistakes or missing things. I also added the Chocobo Forest maps for both versions of FF4, which I had completely forgot about. I only realized that map was missing when I was playing through that game again and ended up stumbling upon an item in the grass!

Besides that, I've given some attention to Ultima VI: The False Prophet again. I've done a couple of the smaller dungeons and a few other things. Besides the dungeons, I'm also gonna make individual maps for all the towns, buildings and shrines, detailing all the items that can be gotten within them (though most of the stuff if taken will lead you to losing karma, heheh).

Still no progress with Final Fantasy VII.

But I have laid out most of the areas in Final Fantasy III though! I got around to playing it from start to finish last month, so now I'm very familiar with that Final Fantasy at long last. You'll probably see maps for this come out some time in June.

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.