Fossil Fighters: Champions is a creature-collecting RPG in the vein of Pokémon. Being a sequel to the game Fossil Fighters, it shares the same general gameplay, and carries over (almost) all creatures while adding a great many more. Other additions include giant and two-sided fossils, the expansion of the battle field from four zones each to six (which are freely rotated around like a rotary phone), masks that ensure you only dig up fossils of a certain type, and a wide variety of side-quests. The most important addition of all is that Champions has online multiplayer, kept alive today thanks to fan servers. This also helpfully neutralizes Champions' biggest weakness: its absolutely abysmal AI. Finally, Champions has been found to contain two unused but complete DLC-on-disk dig sites, which include fossils not found anywhere else (such as the non-head fossils of E-Raptor). One can only speculate why they were never released.

As anyone who has ever played an online match will tell you, the default FP recharge at max level (230) is far too much, taking away a great deal of tactics in terms of having to prioritize one move over another. This hack reduces that FP recharge to the same as Fossil Fighters' final amount, namely 180, while keeping the maximum 900 in order that all moves might be usable. Additionally, it makes the FP recharge and maximum the same for levels 10 through 20, so you can play multiplayer without having to do a bunch of tedious side-quests.


Do note that online multiplayer for this game is now done exclusively through fan servers (Wiimfi). For information on how to connect, you can read https://docs.google.com/document/d/12nBHrmNMbRC6MXts5dRpSus8OTjOxV1eLw54LS2ksO0/edit for consoles (you'll also need a flashcart or homebrew if you want to use the hack with this), or https://melonds.kuribo64.net/board/thread.php?id=285 for the emulator MelonDS (which can be downloaded at that same site).


Finally, if you happen to be a Fossil Fighters fan excited at the prospect that this game is now editable, check out:

- the decompressor and image-file-to-PNG convertor, made by jianmingyong: https://github.com/jianmingyong/Fossil-Fighters-Tool

- the table splitter, made by the author: https://github.com/opiter09/FF1-FFC-Chunk-Editor

- documentation for various files in the games, also made by the author: https://github.com/opiter09/Fossil-Fighters-Documentation


CREDITS

As mentioned before, jianmingyong created the decompressor for this game, and cannot be thanked enough. The files for this game and its predecessor were thought impenetrable for years, with their intimidating lack of file extensions, but jianmingyong was able to decipher the many layers of archiving and compression to make all this possible. So truly, hats off to them.

Database match: Fossil Fighters Champions (USA) (NDSi Enhanced)
Database: No-Intro: DS (all) (v. 20210227-111036)
File/ROM SHA-1: F8263E010974259A955124B5395EC00F25079C35
File/ROM CRC32: 4B3BCD26

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