The Dink Network

077: Friends Beyond 3: Legend of Tenjin Author: Wesley McElwee Release Date: November 16, 2000

REPUTATION NOTE: This DMOD is one of the select group to have a score of 9.0 or better (9.1) on the Dink Network.

The final installment of McElwee's trilogy (how about that, a trilogy with an actual third part that exists!) is far more ambitious than its already ambitious predecessor. It's the first (only? I haven't a clue) DMOD to get around the 768-screen limitation by including a second map file.

I am playing this mod with the last of Ted Shutes's patches, released in 2002. This patch doesn't rewrite the game like the FB2 modification, but it fixes many bugs. Some of the bugs it fixes would really drag the game down, so definitely use the patch if you're playing this one.

With his "Friends Beyond" series, Wesley sought to bring the Japanese RPG feel to Dink, and with this third installment, I have to say that he succeeded. The first game was kind of a mess that just seemed like little more than a chance to learn DMOD authoring. The second did some impressive things, but was ultimately fractured and frustrating. With Legend of Tenjin (heretofore referred to as "LOT"), though, he nailed it. I really got the same feeling playing it as I do when playing a good sprawling JRPG, and I enjoyed it very much.

In the words of Mr. Bean, "first of all, it's big." Now, as much as I liked "Quest for Dorinthia 2," I have to say that this is only the second DMOD that really felt like an "epic" to me, especially if we're going with the stated definition of "as long as the original game or longer." It took me 8 hours and 42 minutes to get done with this one, shattering my record of just over five hours with Prophecy of the Ancients. I could have finished it quite a bit quicker, I'll admit - I adopted a "kill everything" policy here, resulting in my setting a new level record of 15 as well - but the point is that there really was a ton of stuff to do. It's a meaty one.

What put me in the mindset of those great roaming RPGs was LOT's well-constructed open world - two of them, actually, but I'll try to focus on one thing at a time so the rambling train wreck I call "prose" doesn't get even sadder. A lot of mods either funnel you through a mostly linear sequence of areas or have one area you spend all your time in. Actually, even the original game was a bit like this, gating you off one area at a time. There's nothing wrong with these approaches, and they have their strengths - if I didn't think so, I wouldn't have just made such a mod myself. LOT features a number of different areas you are allowed to explore, each with things to do and tasks that interrelate with one another, and this gives the gameplay a certain feel that put a smile on my face, maybe because of all the memories of other fun RPGs it brought to mind.

With more screens than any two other mods I've played so far put together, I was quite concerned that LOT would suffer from a serious case of Big Empty Map Syndrome. Impressively, I did not at any point find this to be the case! Unlike FB2, which frustrated me with large vague areas that got me lost for long periods, LOT's maps feel very purposed. I felt like I had a general idea of where I was and what I was doing at all times, and there were lots of enemies, locations and objects to find. The availability of a clearly labeled world map certainly helps, as does the fact that you may obtain a ribbon that stands in for the herb boots via a sidequest early on. Incidentally, I didn't find this to unbalance the combat at all - in fact, I found the various swords better for fighting in nearly every case, the exception being weaker creatures without a base attack.

A lot of things about this DMOD are customized, from the HUD (I don't terribly care for the texture, honestly, but I got used to it) to the basic sound effects that we're all used to being replaced. You get "points" to put toward stat increases at level up, but honestly, unless I got the full 8 points (enough for two stat ups) I usually loaded a save. There's a lot of new magic, including a heal spell that's usable but not so good it makes fights pointless and a meteor spell that I friggin' love. There's also a fruit mixing system for potions, but I didn't use it much and I think it could have been done better. If you are into it, though, a separate DMOD is included so you can mix to your heart's content.

LOT begins with a long cutscene showing the key events of FB2 as well as giving you a vague idea of what Dink did afterward. This DMOD stars Dink, but not the Dink we know. LOT's Dink is a descendant of the original Dink Smallwood, two hundred years later. He comes from a long line of heroes, but has not been prepared for such a life himself.

This might seem like a bit of an odd direction to take, but I thought it really made this DMOD much better than it otherwise would have been for several reasons. First of all, we get to drop all of the "Dink Smallwood" baggage including the first two games of this series. Something that limits DMODs in general is the need to keep in line with at least the original game, if not a number of other things that have been vaguely established through various other DMODs. Dink is an established character, and there are things in his past that can't be responsibly ignored. You can do a lot with that, of course, and use it to your advantage, but it isn't right for every type of story. This is why a lot of RPGs - the first six Dragon Quest games, Lunar, Phantasy Star, debatably Zelda - use this sort of "generational" conceit - the story of the callow youth coming of age and overcoming the odds to save the world doesn't make sense with a character who's already been through that arc. Here, we get to see another young and inexperienced Dink go on a whole new adventure. He's even quite a different character - nicer, maybe a bit less assertive - and that's fine because he's just not the same guy.

Like the original Dink, this one lives alone with his mother. Unlike him, though, it doesn't take this kid until it's too late to realize how much he cares about his mom. At one point when he thinks he's lost her forever, there's a long cutscene looking back on their happy life together. It's an emotional scene.

There are several parallels between this story and the original, and it's interesting to see the differences. Also like his ancestor, Dink Jr. lives in a small and cozy village that he soon must leave. This is hard because he has closer ties there - a best friend and a "will they/won't they" girlfriend named Laura. There's a scene of the two of them walking together that I really enjoyed. There aren't any words, just a silent montage, but to me it conveyed their relationship in a way that would have been difficult to do with words. Little things like having them turn to face each other with just the right timing to make it seem like they're conversing in a natural way made me forget, amazingly enough, how limited all this Dink stuff is and think of them, just for a moment, like real people. Actually, this DMOD was packed with effective cutscenes. It's one of my favorite things about it.

I won't go into every detail of the plot. LOT is packed with quests. Dink Jr. gets a job, he gets pulled into a rebellion against a king, he gets thrown into jail. You find out that the successor Tenjin mentioned at the end of FB2 is a Dink recolor named Sid, and as you progress you see some scenes of him making progress on his own evil quest. He succeeds, and destroys the world. Dang, I hate it when that happens!

Included with the DMOD is a second map.dat and dink.dat file, to be swapped with the ones you're using at this point (3:35 for me). I was skeptical of this method, but it works perfectly. The process is as unintrusive to gameplay as swapping a disc on a console game, right down to the screen telling you to save and swap files.

There's a lot to the map swap apart from simply making the game bigger. The rest of the DMOD takes place in the world after the destructive event. It's almost exactly like the "World of Ruin" from Final Fantasy 6. In the second segment of the game, you can choose which of the islands you want to warp to and complete the quests in the order you please, which is nice. You can even go to the end early, but if you haven't completed all the quests, you won't be able to get the best ending.

There are three endings. The worst one is incredibly silly. The middle ending is actually pretty happy apart from the implication that evil will return. It's worth seeing for the drop-dead gorgeous scenes, which simulate lighting and use the whole screen with sp_noclip to wonderful effect. As for the best ending, I don't want to spoil it for you, but I'm too excited not to mention that Dink successfully collects all of the Chaos Emeralds and gains the ability to turn into Super Smallwood. Okay, that's a lie. Neither of those things happen. That is a real screenshot, though.

Wow, that was a wall of praise. Despite how much I liked LOT, there are still some problems I had. First of all, even with Ted's patch installed, the mod is still kind of buggy. There are hardness errors, things that you can push from the wrong direction and have move on top of you, at least one item that freezes the game if you try to "use" it, and quite a few cutscenes fail to freeze you, so don't touch the controls or you can have big problems. The warp points also fail to freeze you during the warping process, which can get you stuck. I had one nasty problem where story didn't get incremented when it should have, getting me totally stuck. I'm almost tempted to fix these problems myself, but there's got to be even less audience for that than there is for a new DMOD at this point.

The other problem is the writing. Now, to be clear, the writing is fine. It's certainly well above the standard of the average DMOD. The thing is that this worked so well as a game that it made me want to judge it above that standard. The actual story was fairly solid, usually making reasonable sense (more than I can say for any Final Fantasy Plot later than 7's). It's just that the dialogue could really use some punching up. It's stiff and overly simple. It's not quite to the point where I was like "geez, people don't talk like that," but a lot of it totally failed to grab me. Also, the themes explored could have been deeper. I honestly thought that Friends Beyond 2 (at least, Ted's rewrite - is that the issue here?) did a much better job of discussing the nature of evil than LOT. I'd much rather have "some people choose the wrong thing to believe in" than "an evil force made evil people evil." Mind you, these two explanations aren't incompatible - maybe this evil force can easily lead astray these people who are already lost and looking for something to believe in anyway. That's actually kind of interesting, in fact. Without that aspect, though, it becomes terribly facile and cliché. The "fight evil with goodness and friendship" speech from the middle ending was also a groaner.

I actually had the most fun with LOT due to the gameplay. I always felt like I was doing something, often several things at once. It was great fun to have such a sense of both specific and grand purpose. As a game, minus the inferior writing and humor (although this mod did have some funny moments), LOT works better than the original Dink Smallwood. It joins POTA, Crosslink and Dorinthia 2 in my top-tier favorites.