The pandemic left many of us with a lot of time on our hands. For someone like myself, whose industry of employment was effectively completely and utterly shuttered for long periods of time, it left some of us with a lot of time on our hands. After cleaning my house, browsing Reddit for far longer than I should and doing my best to avoid watching Tiger King (boy howdy, do Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin memes feel like a lifetime ago), I found myself trying to find new ways to occupy my time.
As a result of that, I found myself on Twitch browsing random streams in the Retro section. I stumbled across someone streaming the Final Fantasy 4 Free Enterprise romhack, which is a randomized version of the SNES classic. I was intrigued seeing someone play a game out of order while trying to conduct a scavenger hunt through the game world. I had a lot of questions, the first being is it impossible to obtain key items that would let you complete the game? (Answer: randomizer creators go to great lengths to try and ensure that they don’t get ‘soft locked’, ensuring that necessary items needed to progress to other areas can be obtained.)
From there, it was making sense of everything and the rules that come with running randomizers. It didn’t hurt that FF4 was one of the first video games I had played as a kid.
Take an old game that you’ve played and make it interesting again
Let’s back up a moment and explain what randomizers precisely are, for those who may be unfamiliar. Randomizers take various elements within a game — items, weapons, monsters, dungeons and bosses, to name a few — and redistribute them around in a way that can completely change the way a game is played. You take the original game files (which you have legally obtained) and run them through a website or a program you have downloaded (for older games found on the SNES, for example) or install a mod (for PC games.) You’d then set a variety of settings (commonly referred to as ‘flags’) which modify the contents of the game and then a modified version of the game (a ‘seed’) is then generated and the game is played either through emulation or on your PC.
Players may find themselves put into really challenging circumstances, perhaps starting out more disadvantaged than you normally would be, or being gifted with an early boon through a really good item or, say, a legendary Pokemon, while skipping huge swathes of the game. Many players will try to speedrun through and attempt to get solid times on them, while others may merely try to complete the game as best they can. Players are encouraged to play the game in a different fashion than they may be accustomed to, utilizing mechanics that they wouldn’t normally make use of and taking different paths.
The great thing about randomizers is that no two seeds are the same. Your experience will vary from seed to seed, forcing different strategies and approaches while still creating a familiar world to engage in. As the time spent in lockdown has shown, people love revisiting things they enjoy, and being able to experience something familiar, but different, is an easy sell.
The randomizer that got me really hooked was the Worlds Collide randomizer for Final Fantasy 6. FF6 is my favorite video game of all time, so when I stumbled across folks playing Worlds Collide, I was excited. The game has a lot of flags to play with, from basic equipment, character abilities, obtainable characters, boss encounters, Espers and more. Plus, this was the first time I had been able to use General Leo’s Shock ability on command (outside of weird bugs or hoping that Gau will use it when I chose the appropriate Rage) so that was cool as well. Difficulty can be scaled in a lot of different ways, allowing for a very hard or a very casual experience. Being a FF6 vet, I hopped straight into attempting Standard Race seeds, trying to reach a reasonable completion time, while for now avoiding some of the more challenging seeds that are posted on the Worlds Collide Discord.
But if Final Fantasy isn’t your bag, that’s okay, there are a ton of other randomizers to check out.
The possibilities are endless
Arguably the most popular one out there is the A Link To The Past randomizer, with the SNES classic showing up as the very first result when you Google “video game randomizer.” Super Metroid is another game that has a randomizer that is pretty popular and is, to my understanding, one of the earliest incarnations of current randomizer romhacks as we know them. Interestingly enough, both of those games have a combined randomizer which has the player bounce between playing as Samus and Link as you work to complete both games, creating situations where you might find, say, Link’s Boomerang while exploring Zebes as Samus.
The Dark Souls series also has randomizer mod for its various titles, which can affect both item and enemy placement. Crazily enough, someone managed to jailbreak their PS4 and has run some randomized instances of Bloodborne, although that’s somewhat out of the scope of my own experiences at playing randomizers.
Nintendo’s mascot Mario has a few randomizers available, including fairly popular ones for Super Mario World, Mario 64 and Super Mario Bros. 3. The last one, incidentally, has the option to introduce some levels that were actually not used in the finished game but existed as dummied content within the game’s files.
If none of those tickle your fancy, you can check out this huge list of randomizers, which include everything from The Little Mermaid NES game to Doom Eternal. Alternatively, you can check out the Randomizers tag on Twitch and see if someone is playing a randomized version of your favorite game.