Farland Story 5
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Translation by BTAxis (contact at BTAxis@gmx.net)
VERY Special thanks to _Bnu, whithout whose crappy unt.exe and unt2.exe I would never have been able to get this done so easily.
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ABOUT THIS TRANSLATION
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They just keep getting better. Farland Story 5 combines most of the best features from Farland Story 3 and 4. It has a good story, interesting characters and a great ending. There are also some new and exciting features in this one. Check out the area effect weapons - they kick major ass! Also, how about summoning a freebie elemental to fight for you? They are cannon fodder near the end of the game, but for a while they can be a real help.

A nice change in the game mechanics is the new experience calculation (see below), and now BOTH of your protagonists need to die before you are game over. That completely eliminates the need to keep your main hero in the back all the time - he can charge in with the rest of them, now! Incidentally, the main character in this game is a girl. The guy is in second place.

The only thing that I am not happy about is the store effects. Whereas in FS3 all store effects were useful and powerful, the FS5 store effects are pretty messed up. Three out of eight are area effects. No problems there. But out of the remaining five, two store attacks do exactly as much damage as the normal attacks, and the other three are actually WEAKER that the normal attacks. What the hell?

FS5 also has - in my opinion - one of the best music scores in the PC98 Farland series. They always get a little old after a while, but I still liked most of the tunes (as opposed to FS6, where most of the music didn't appeal to me at all).

See you next time!

- BTAxis, 08-05-2003

P.S. This one was never playtested. It WILL have some typos or bugs. Give me feedback if you care.

- BTAxis. 28-10-2003

NOTES WHILE PLAYING
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- FS5 comes with a barcode checking system (the patch will reactivate it if your version had it turned off). Just enter all zeroes.

- You will still need to use a Japanese font to play the game. Some characters are still in doublebyte, and can't be represented in singlebyte (or just look better in doublebyte). This goes for the star symbol, for example.

- Some monster and weapon names, but in particular most terrain names are severely truncated. This has - again -  to do with the names being in the executable, and I can't change the length of the original string. I know it sucks, but there's nothing I can do about it. If you think it sucks, you are cordially invited to do it better.

- FS5 uses a different experience scaling system from FS3 and FS4. The principle is still the same: you gain more experience when your level is lower than your enemy's, you gain less when your level is higher than your enemy's. The greater the difference, the greater the modifier. Easy enough. However, in FS5 you only gain experience equal to HALF of the damage you inflict (as opposed to the full amount), plus level modifier. You still get awarded full points for a kill. This means it is now a LOT more important who gets in the last shot. A typical non-lethal blow will only yield around 4 or 5 experience points, whereas a killing blow will award you around 20. I aimed for that number to be the reward for an "average" character (so if you're boosting one particular character, expect them to gain less from a kill). I applaud this change. It makes the game a lot better. Incidentally, healers only gain 8 experience per heal, not 10. Their levels skyrocket above the fighters all the same, though.

- Like FS3 and FS4, I have increased the difficulty level for FS5. Note that you can revert the game back to its original difficulty by not replacing the stage.unt file. This does NOT affect the changes made to the weapons, so it may unbalance gameplay (well, unbalance it more).

- I have also tinkered with the weapons in this one. Most weapon values I left alone, but some issues were truely appaling. I believe the damage rates are now somewhat more realistic.

- FS5 is the first Farland game using the way cool area effect weapons. You can use them by storing power with some of your characters.