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A friend of mine gave this to me back in the 1990s, when we were in highschool, and showed me the basics of how this game works. The graphics and sound are pathetic for an SNES game, and while the story is okay there isn't anything too special about it.

What really sold us was all the stuff you can do outside of storyline progress. You can just forget about your mission and screw around for years of in-game time. I wanted to explore all of Japan and find the towns that you have no real reason to go to. My friend liked recruiting all the generic characters just to sell their stuff and kick them out of the party. We both liked tracking down the characters that are hostile towards the hero, so we could challenge them to a duel and beat the CRAP out of them. Later on in the game I found out you could take spying and sabotage missions, and even help out in wars between provinces. I tried to turn the entire mini-map of Japan yellow (for Tokugawa Ieyatsu) but only conquered half of it before my generals were stretched too thin.

That was a nice story about how even bad games can entertain and influence you. 

If I had made a list of games that influenced me, it would probably only have been a bunch of NES games. One I could think of right now is Swords and Serpents, a not so great NES game. Borrowed it from a friend at school, he hated it, but I really liked it despite its many flaws. Just this thing about exploring a big mysterious dungeon, building characters and having to draw maps by hand. So it's a game that strongly contributed to my interest in RPGs and game maps today.

Zagato, why did you pick Inindo: Way of the Ninja? I haven't played it, but it has really mixed reviews online and doesn't seem very good. Plus, it's made by Koei. 

Is it worth playing anyway?

I played a few stages in Super Mario World. Happy MAR10 day!

Choosing just 10 games is hard, but I tried to pick some favorites from different genres that I really like.
Final Fantasy 6 (SNES)
Super Metroid (SNES)
Settlers IV (PC)
Silent Hill 3 (PS2)
Castlevania SOTN (PSX)
FlatOut 2 (PS2)
Secret of Mana (SNES)
Solomon's Key 2 / Fire 'n Ice (NES)
Guardian Legend (NES)
Super Probotector / Contra 3 (SNES)

I thought the game was good enough to deserve a map. In order not to spoil the whole game, I left out the ending for now, but I might submit an update with the ending after 1-2 years.

If you're even remotely interested in puzzle games, you should give Crater a chance.

They haven't contacted me about hosting my maps either. It's pretty obvious that it's an unauthorized clone of the real VGMaps.

But like FlyingArmor, I don't really care. It's very hard to control things you've uploaded online. I've found my maps on some very strange sites, some even made changes to them (e.g. removed my name) which at least Better VGMaps hasn't.

I guess the biggest problem with Better VGMaps is that it might be stealing traffic from the real VGMaps. Most people who contact me about my maps found them via Better VGMaps (I always tell them to visit the real site instead) which is a bit worrying. I wonder why Better VGMaps seems more popular in search engine results than the real VGMaps?

Any progress on your Tom and Jerry maps kiddingfan? You seemed very committed to mapping this game, but have been worryingly inactive since your first post.

Nice maps eishiya.

How did you map this game (tools, methods, etc. used)? Ripping the parallax layers separately in a PC game must have been difficult. It also sounds like you were able to rip the tiles from the game. How?

Good. Not sure it surpasses GTA V's size, but, that does place it above San Andreas' size by a few miles.

I haven't played GTA V yet, but it having a world almost twice as big as Oblivion sounds insane to me.

I should say this, with all the bigger landmasses, any playable character's already bound to have their own physical workouts from all the running they've done without using vehicles... not that I've thought of such little outcomes before.

Funny you should say that since moving around is how you increase some skills in Oblivion. Considering also how much inventory (weight) you can carry the player must get a real workout.

I've been playing Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion recently and its open world is huge. By far the largest world I've experienced in a game. According to the numbers I could find online, Oblivion's world (Cyrodiil) is roughly 41 square kilometers (about 16 square miles).

The Shivering Isles DLC adds another 10 square kilometers. It's a separate island that you can warp to from Cyrodiil so it doesn't really expand the borders of the original world though.

Welcome to VGMaps.

Nice work on your maps so far, but I really hope that you only used JPEG, a lossy image format, for the attachments. A lossless image format like PNG is preferable for 2D maps to preserve the ripped images. High quality (low compression) JPEG might be okay for images with millions of colors like 3D maps though.

Manually stitching screenshots is something I did in my first mapping project to and it's tedious. One alternative is to try Maxim's autostitcher. It can stitch maps from a lossless video (something the BizHawk emulator can record). Record a video of playing a stage and then feed it to the autostitcher. Results may vary though.
https://www.smspower.org/maxim/Software/ScreenshotAutostitcher

However, I highly recommend looking into lua-scripting with the BizHawk emulator instead. You don't need a lot of programming experience to create scripts that can automate a lot of the stitching.
https://tasvideos.org/BizHawk
https://tasvideos.org/Bizhawk/LuaFunctions

I put together a lua-script for Tom and Jerry that you can use. The layers for the first three stages and the script can be downloaded from here:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/ycugr6or75fl6zs/Tom+Jerry+Frantic+lua+20250805.zip/file

Run the game in BizHawk and then select Tools -> Lua Console and open/run the script in the opened dialog to stitch the current stage. I only tried it on the first three stages, but it seems to work. Before running the script you can configure visible layers in GEN -> Settings. Set 'use custom backdrop color' to true to make it easy to remove transparent sections (magenta) in layers.

Personally I like to script-stitch the main and sprite layers separately and then compose them in an image editor. That way you can remove or move sprites on the maps in an image editor. The sprite layers I ripped are a bit messy and need to be manually reviewed. I hope you at least consider adding non-moving sprites to the maps. Makes them more complete IMO.

Feel free to ask if you have any questions.

Most Mana games aren't very satisfying to map because the "rooms" are disjoint (of course a Metroidvania map enthusiast would think that xP), so kudos for putting in all that work and making something interesting and useful!

Almost all the games I've mapped are "disjoint". It's a challenge to find good map layouts for them, but I kind of like that part in mapping projects. It's like putting together a puzzle with weird pieces that don't quite fit  .

I'm pretty happy with the layout of most of the LoM maps except Flames and Jungle. Theirs are really messy, but it was the best I could come up with after spending days trying out many different layouts.

I do have one tiny complaint though - the extra grey pixels in the text that were presumably added to smooth the font out for use at 2x size make it look blurry, and I kept checking if I was viewing the image at the correct zoom ): I think it would've looked better as just a straight Nearest Neighbor upscale without any smoothing. Or maybe even just 1x - the text is more legible large, but the maps are still at 1x and many details are hard to see without zooming in anyway, so the larger text doesn't have much benefit.

I only added grey pixels to the "thin" parts of characters. This made texts more legible when zoomed out (helps with downsampling fine shapes). I prefer maps that can be zoom fitted to the screen and still be used/read while playing the game so I don't have to constantly zoom in/out.

Doubling the font size was necessary to make texts readable even when zoomed out. A 1x font would've been way too small. 1x is what I use in the map title cards if people want to get an idea of just how small LoM's font is at its original size.

I don't find the 2x font with extra grey pixels to be distracting, blurry or too large even at 100% zoom, so for me it's only beneficial to the maps as texts are legible even when zoomed out a lot. Thanks for the feedback though, I'll keep it in mind for future mapping projects.

I've gotten some complaints over the years and almost all of them were about the maps' font: it's too small, too big, too blocky or too blurry. Oh well, it's hard to please everyone.

Thank you! 

Legend of Mana is a game I always wanted to play, but never got around to until last year. I thought it was pretty boring to play (too cryptic and unrewarding), but the graphics and music are amazing so I just had to map it.

It took me almost a year, which is the longest I've ever spent mapping a single game. Much of that time was actually spent just playing through the game multiple times and checking multiple guides to make sure I didn't miss anything (which I probably did anyway).

It's probably my biggest project too. I checked its folder and it contains 1662 png images and 399 paint net projects (mostly for dealing with layers). It was a lot of work, but I'm very happy with how the maps turned out.

The junkyard map is one of my favorites. That place is really confusing to navigate and in dire need of a map. It wasn't until I started mapping it that I realised it had two intertwined "sides" of similar rooms. A really clever and simple way to turn a place into a maze. I've never seen that construction before in any other game. Does anyone know of another game with a similar design?

There are many more 2D RPGs that I would like to map, but knowing how long time they take is daunting. 

Guess you had a tough time trying to get to the end. Well, there's already maps, so no need to fret about getting by.

I beat it on an emulator with the help of a ton of savestates. The game punishes you hard for even the slightest mistake, so savestates help a lot. Savestates are also helpful considering it's a long game with no passwords, which it really should have had.

I wasn't thinking about mapping it. It was just a childhood game that I never beat and a game praised by many so I just wanted to finally play through it.

You like it? Really accentuates their technological style. Even in some stages.

Not sure. Hard to say without actually playing the game. It felt a bit overused, but on the other hand it gave the game a coherent and characteristic style. That's something I feel is important in games. If you can tell what game/series/company it is just by a random image or sound clip, then it has good characteristic/soul (not sure what's the right word).

You mean Maximum Jumbo and Tri-Transforming Wall Walker? Oh, yeah.

I didn't know they had names. Thanks for telling me.

Thanks also for the concept art/development doc links. It's always interesting to see the groundwork behind a game.

I've only played "Blaster Master (NES)". It has some cool (and big for the NES) bosses for sure. Nice graphics and music too, but it's way too difficult. I also don't like the controls, especially with the Wall 1&2 upgrades. "Blaster Master Zero" looks fun though and something I want to play sometime.

I haven't played "Hard Corps: Uprising", but I took a quick look at some YT-videos and I understand why you pointed out the green lights style. It's everywhere.