#FE8 Rom Hack

[alexissara]

Drums Of War Review

Drums Of War is a Fire Emblem romhack Roxelana, Calista and their band of soliders as they are pulled between toxic powers and try to just live in the complex landscape that is being at war. This game doesn't have as many of the elaborate features of some other rom hacks but it does have a lot going on for it with a refined fire emblem formula.

Drums Of War is a hard game, a little too hard even for me who has played FE since the first game released but this is a problem across Fire Emblem romhacks. The base level is kinda made for people who play these games on their hardest difficulty and find that too easy so they look for ways to make that harder. They aren't typically made that hard but they are what that kind of player thinks is a fair challenge which can lead to a struggle to play. This game does had a nice feature where you can rewind to the start of a turn rather than the last action which is great but ultimately I suggest if you are like me to use save states, they will take you further. Eventually I hit a stride with the game, I had enough units I liked and learned to save state hard enough where I felt like I as going through maps at a good pace and the too hard turned into fine for me. It may just be a bit of a bump in the road until you hit I'd say about act 2 of the game.

Note since I wrote this review an easy mode has been added you can play, I haven't tested it but if your looking for an easier time but like the sound of the game there is an option.

Despite the difficulty the gameplay does add a lot of interesting little things to the classic GBA Fire Emblem formula without ever radically changing it from what you might have expected as a follow up to Fire Emblem Sacred Stones. After clearing most maps until fairly late game your given a chance to recruit a character or ransom them for money. Some people want to be sent back home, some want to join the army, some are gonna be thrown into a cell, you get a diverse set of situations to make a moral call but also a gameplay call. Would this unit do something for you that the money wouldn't, what's more valuable, do you like the character more than you like the money? This little tweak to recruitment makes it where maps are extra exciting when you see a boss you like the look of cuz your gonna get access to that character most likely.

It makes other tweaks that your millage may vary on, classes are remixed to have different weapon lay outs, archers got a massive expansion to their stats and an additional range for non mounted archers. This makes Archers probably the best class in the game, the whole game archers are this extremally annoying threat, I hated it, I hated dealing with enemy archers but the maps were at least designed clearly with these buffs and changes considered even if I think the game was way too hard on flying units for the FE community's perceived sin of them being too good.

Narratively, this game presents a complicated political war situation and for a long time I wasn't sure what the game wanted to say or where it was going with the politics but ultimately it landed in a fairly decent place. You end up leaving behind all the toxic powers your tossed between and leading your own front for your own ideals. Roxelana and Calista don't have wild ambition but even in earlier parts of the game it's clear that above everything the priority is to the lives of the people Roxelana has sworn herself to lead.

What the game does more impressively is have extremally captivating leading women and a lesbian romance at it's center. These sapphics are constantly flirting but Roxelana is living with the death of a previous girlfriend and so she pushes the romance away. We have other side sapphics including a blonde swords woman who falls for Roxelana as well and is as ride of die as Calista. This games take on queerness doesn't present us in a world with no homophobia or heteronormativity, no this shitty world full of shitty leaders of course is full of terrible bigots. However, it doesn't linger on it, like a real queers life they deal with it if it comes up which it rarely does because straight people mostly aren't very smart anyway.

The approach to characters and this slow burn romance are really what kept me hooked even if it was using a fairly limited support system where you can get unlimited B ranks with characters from a characters extremally small support pools and one A rank. I wanted to see what sweet little things were hidden in the games surprisingly solid writing. It was a captivating war story, it didn't present an anarchist utopia or how to build that but it did present hope for a better future by rejecting the idea of serving the lesser of two evils and fighting a hard fight even if it is so much harder then standing by a powerful persons side. This game is really fun and special and I think if you like hard SRPGs or just think the story or characters sound interesting you should check it out.

If you enjoy these reviews you can read more, I write lots of them and if you really enjoy them I can always use support over on Patreon and Ko-fi.

[real-fire-emblem-takes]

my favourite thing to do in febuilder is create stupid crossovers for romhacks i'll probably never finish (also sans in a custom class which limits his hp, def and res to 1)

.

[jebbeesketches]

I've been playing FE8 and something is a little different...

WHO IS THIS---

Well this is my boy Jasper, I put my OC into FE8 for fun and Because I wanted to try ROM hacking :3!

Rom hacking is HARD. but with FE builder it was pretty simple, once I understood everything lmao

Also here are his stats (I accidentally gave him base 16 speed whoops...)

[silent-partner-412]

i haven’t touched any fire emblem rom hacks at all (feel like i should focus on getting through the actual series first idk) but the sacred echoes hack of sacred stones is one that’s really caught my eye, especially as a resident echoes hater who specifically dislikes that game for its gameplay. i know the hack alters the gba formula to have a lot of the gaiden game mechanics introduced, but i find the gba gameplay 1000x more tolerable than the echoes gameplay and i really wonder if that hack would be worth checking out just to see the end of echoes’ story

[myfridgebutnot69]

Cormag WL Reskin + New Spell

Had an unexpectedly productive art day, almost done with this Cormag reskin as well as a new animation and spell to let Genarog breathe fire as an attack! Really liking how its starting to come together :))

[latenitewaffles]

See the fun thing about making a Zelda AU is that I can make the Gerudo not be racist stereotypes AND not have the evil guy be linked to the "ONLY" male of their race

Anyways the male Gerudo prince is going to be named Dagda and he's Zelda's childhood friend and a Lord

[sacredechoes]

I'm thinking of trying my hand at some GBA Fire Emblem ROM hacking, and I was wondering, what software/program/whatever was used to make Sacred Echoes?

My workflow for Sacred Echoes ended up being pretty similar to how the original devs built FE8 - meaning I was mostly working with source code and the compiler with various command-line utilities to convert my asset files into a data format the GBA could handle. When I started the project in mid-2018, I already had some formal education and work experience in programming, so I was past the steepest part of the learning curve for these specific tools.

Please note that my methods are NOT the methods I would recommend for a first project unless you're already familiar with the software development process and using command-line tools. I went into Sacred Echoes knowing I would need to write a bunch of custom code to modify the game mechanics beyond what the beginner tools at the time allowed me to do, so I chose the more complex path. If you're looking for an all-in-one graphical editor that's more friendly to beginners, FEBuilder is amazing and constantly updated with new functions. Whichever method you decide on using, the FE Universe forum and discord are full of resources, tutorials, and helpful people, and I wouldn't have been able to succeed without them. Best of luck on your project!

That said, here's all the technical details and links to all the tools I used:

Sacred Echoes was built using a combination of GNU make (a build system used to automatically detect and compile changes to source code in large projects) and Event Assembler, a utility primarily built for editing the GBA Fire Emblem games. Event Assembler is used with a method called the buildfile, which is essentially a fancy text file with instructions for Event Assembler to insert source files into a ROM and linking different parts together. This meant I used different tools for creating each type of data. Unlike with a ROM editor (such as FEBuilder), I wasn't constantly saving my changes to the same ROM file, but instead freshly building it each time I made a change and wanted to test. This meant that if I messed up (very common when writing custom code), I could just comment out the relevant code or instructions in the buildfile and rebuild from source, rather than try to pick through the ROM by hand to fix issues.

There were cases where I would need to view and edit raw binary data with a hex editor (usually to find a pointer to compressed graphics or a data table); I prefer HxD for that.

For graphics, use any program that can edit and save .PNG files (I used MS Paint and GIMP), and then a tool for game graphics called Usenti to put them into a format the GBA can read. If you need to find and rip graphics from a ROM to edit them, GBAGE is the gold standard (and comes built-in to FEBuilder).

Maps are built from the tileset graphics using a program called Tiled.

For music, the GBA uses MIDI sequences, so any audio program with MIDI support works fine for that. (I used Anvil Studio). The MIDI file is then converted to GBA with a utility called midi2agb.

For unit data and other large data structures, I used a spreadsheet in CSV format, which can be edited with a program like Excel or LibreOffice Calc.

For map events and loading units, the GBA FE games use a scripting language called Event Assembler Language, which just gets written in a raw .txt file. A good plaintext editor like Notepad++ or SublimeText can help keep track of language syntax and keywords.

For assembly code, it is also written in a text editor, and then compiled to bytecode with devkitARM. Most of it I wrote in raw ARM assembly language (which is specific to the GBA's CPU), but in more complex cases towards the end of the project I wrote the code in the C programming language and compiled it with devkitARM.

To keep track of my source files and changes, and to make backups and version control easier, I just used GitHub because I already had an account, but you could also use GitLab or Bitbucket instead.

Finally, I used some tools made by the FE hacking community specifically for automating some tasks and formatting data - most of these are Python scripts, but some can be downloaded as compiled executables. I used "lyn", "TMX2EA", "C2EA", TextProcess and ParseFile, and AnimationAssembler. Ask on the FEU discord or check the forum's toolbox tag.

[mageknight404]

OC Lore ~ Julie Eilert

Well I did say I'd try and do these on this site again, but I haven't really felt like it. But I'm up for it now!

Now would be a good time as any to lead on with my premiere OC, Julie. Anyone who knows me at least slightly will have seen her somewhere. She is my favorite and means very much to me in general.

Pretty much most of what I covered on my Twitter thread will be done likewise here. A lot of it will be rambly, but that's just how I am.

I had just gotten interested in Fire Emblem after FE7's North American release and began working my way backwards in the series, very quickly endearing me to the franchise. Instinctively I wanted to tell my own story with an FE framework and got to work making a bunch of characters.

Julie and her older brother Josh were the first, styled after Eirika and Ephraim a little bit as Sacred Stones just released in Japan. I was a burgeoning spriter and made some of my first splices into their likeness. Julie's future as an eventual spellblade began here as well.

(FE4 and 5 had a pretty tight grip on me in 2005)

I wrote a number of drafts of the story I wanted to tell, with Julie comfortably sitting as one of three central protagonists, each having a separate route until they all converged midway. This was the first draft of what eventually became my FE8 reskin ROM Hack: FE A Sacred Dawn. Julie and Josh slid into the protagonist roles there.

I wanted to have a Dancer Lord for one of the three protagonists and Julie was the perfect choice. She was set as a young, cheerful and adventurous, but naïve everygirl. Her core look started taking shape as I drew and sprited her more in various different looks. She was a common drawing subject for me back in high school and one of the first subjects I wanted to try and draw when I made the jump to using GIMP as my art program of choice.

During A Sacred Dawn's third draft, a theme I wanted to explore with Julie and her character development were her insecurities. Being thrown into a conflict at an early age, she has trouble coping and has nightmares involving being badgered by her darker emotions given form - "Nega Julie". Unfortunately, the draft never made it past the first few maps due to me getting seriously burnt out and demotivated, so this facet of her character was only minorly explored. I did keep the idea for further refinement of Julie's character though, to the point where her darker half can be considered a separate character. But I still need to draw her on day...

Julie and Josh were originally written as my self-insert character's children with FE5's Linoan (long story) during the early days of my ROM hacking (even sharing my surname) but eventually she would end up having a new mother character, an old standby of mine name Megan. She was initially written to have been killed off during Julie's youth, with the Eilert kids being orphans, but I eventually hated that trope being used in Fire Emblem all the time, so I brought Megan back and gave her a new father character as well - Blythe Eilert, who inherited my artistic traits and a few other bits.

Julie's looks kept getting refined over time. She lost her "Myrmidon" headband, but otherwise her design remained steadily consistent between iterations. Her magical sword Thunderblade was renamed to "Fulminus".

Though I never ended up finishing ASD (not even close!) I still wanted to tell that story and lore one day, so I refined it into an original setting with the help of my best friend. I insisted that Julie become the center protagonist of said story we were writing, due to my attachment to her and wanting to draw out her potential. She'd share the role with Josh and their mutual best friend, Ruby Emina, as they bond over the troubles provided by the world at large.

Julie continues to deal with nightmares from all of the fighting she has to do and develops plenty of fears, but halfway through this story she ends up overcoming "Nega Julie" and the fears that plague her mindscape and heart, attaining a renewed perspective on life. To boost her self-confidence, Ruby gives her a new "Dancemaiden" outfit, which is basically a fancy dancer's dress meant for performance.

As this essentially serves as a Fire Emblem-style class change, I wanted to contrast this look with her normal green and yellow outfit. I eventually settled on black (to signify her accepting her darker self) and sky blue (to signify her purity). The hairband she used to wear returns as a normal hairband to give the look a bit more girliness. As this is primarily a performance outfit, she has kneepads to help ensure they're not scuffed during a fight or a botched performance. Even comes complete with a dancing ribbon, later affixed to her arm!

I'm still writing this story and it's a very slow process but I would love to be able to share this other people one day as a game and tell Julie's story for real. I have not lost that passion, and I would do anything to make that dream a reality one day. Drawing and refining her over these past few years has been wonderful, to the point where I've finally hit the point where I feel she's fully realized from what I envisioned her as years ago.

Here's Julie in her casual clothes, what she wears at the very start of her story and what reflects her at her core - a typical downtown farmgirl who wants to smile and make friends. The first one of these was done when I just got a feel for drawing realistic proportions. These last two I just finished!

[circle-bircle]

just finished fire emblem: the last promise. i gotta. i gotta talk

play tlp.

ok well don't if you don't want to. but the sheer SCOPE of this is un-freaking-REAL. i think one that really shines out to me is chapter 26 where it's basically a fe4 map in fe7 - you're going around conquering places and also THE SCENERY CHANGES FOR THE TIME OF DAY!!!! plus holton is basically a bootleg valter. always appreciate that. gosh. i just. hnng.

the plot? it's definitely fire emblem. i won't get into spoilers too terribly much but one of the main lords... isn't even playable in the final chapter, where he really should have been to complete his character arc. all i'm saying. but other than that it's good. you fight a dragon in a gaiden chapter

the gameplay? WOOAOW it's fire emblem alright!! lots of characters. gba supports though so i didn't really learn about most of them. but they're all fun and feel like their own characters. but there's lots of weapons, you don't get the convoy until CHAPTER 17!!!! though so be prepared to manage items. a lot of items. i didn't think it was UBER hard but there were definitely some challenging points in it. of course i talked about chapter 26 but one i also liked was with the next chapter; 27 was a DOOZY. it was very tough but very very fun and the boss can teleport (he's also sexy - yes, i have a thing for blondes. obviously.) and kill your convoy!!! so. RIP convoy man but not really. :P there's a few 'solo' fights, where shon (a lord) fights some guys and he goes on a sidequest if you choose to do it which is very cool i think. and kelik fights literal zoro from one piece (no, I am not kidding. it is Zoro from One Piece) and someone else who is a spoiler but it's sick as hell. not to mention the creator really loved the kaga sagas. like, really loved the kaga sagas.

the technicalities of this game? wow. it's built in fe7 - roms nowadays are usually built in fe8 due to... storage, i believe? or just because it's the most polished gba fe - but i haven't played much with fe roms so i wouldn't know for sure. there's voice acting! VOICE ACTING!!!!! and there's even dynamic voice acting for a character where they say something different depending on how far they are in the story. not to mention this was created when fe hacking at all was pretty underdeveloped - it still holds up today IMO. of course there's some jank but it's relatively minor.

ok have to talk about the characters now. first, not actual characters but there are... fe4(?) characters here. claud and julius.

or well. "claud" and "julius". no, i never met claud again. so. :/.

i can't really talk about kelik without going into spoilers. but he is unabashedly sick asf!!! he goes through a great character arc and gets a fairy sword :). there's also a difference in his ending whether or not you win/lose a very specific fight for vengeance or whatever. in his world of worlds every step meets the rest. inb4 weight of your sins. something something. play tlp.

spoilers spoilers spoilers:

i love galagar. he's just very cool. except when you get an infodump right before the final... chapters.... about his life...... you know it'd be nice if we learned a little bit more beforehand but c'est la vie.

tl;dr: tlp good. play :)

[gascon-en-exil]

I don't often dabble in FE rom hacks, but I came across one recently that's been pretty interesting. Sacred Echoes is, as the name suggests, a demake of FE15 based on FE8. It finds a good compromise between the gameplay of Echoes and that of the GBA titles, and there's a bunch of new supports that so far seem to be pretty good at preserving the overall tone...including the addition of a bit more queer content than FE15 already has. Don't often see that in these full game rom hacks.

[eat-a-dicker]

so there's this fe8 rom hack called fe6 in fe8 and they straight up made lugh fucking useless

[owlphaace]

How many FE8 Rom hacks do you download in a week?

[real-fire-emblem-takes]

I'm a newbie in the fire emblem fandom and only got into it this year, I've only played Engage and Three Houses. What are some other fe games I should try? I only have a switch and a Wii u and I'm too lazy and stupid to attempt to pirate any DS/3DS or other games that aren't available on those consoles.

i would recommend pirating fe8 sacred stones on your phone! its really easy to set up! just download a GBA emulator from the app store (I use Pizza Boy) and get a file of sacred stones from a trustworthy website :) after that you can just start playing

Once you finish you can start playing fe7 and fe6 or if you're really cool like me, you can start playing fanmade rom hacks!

[archer3-13]

What was your first FE ?

First one i was ever exposed to was i think fe9 at a cousins house but i didnt know wtf i was looking at.

first proper introduction to fe i got was probably smash melee where i mained marth and roy alongside kirby. me and my sister then concocted an entire make believe story around those characters before i even touched an actual fe game.

first fe game I ever owned and played was shadow dragon on the ds, which still holds a special place in my heart today and if ya can believe it i managed to get the side chapters to that game completely by accident. over the years id also mess around with the game with an AR for fun and hilarity [enemy control codes are hilarious] so i can pretty easily sweep my way through that game now just by knowing all its knocks and crannies.

the game that got me into fire emblem though was emulating a rom of fe7, followed by fe8 and just generally getting into the rom hacking community for a bit.

after that i've gotten my hands on the tellius games [in reverse order I believe] and started to keep up with the series regular releases.

[umbrastar]

Path of the Midnight Sun Released Today!

Path of the Midnight Sun, an indie JRPG inspired game that originally started out as an fe8 (Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones) rom hack just came out today on January 10th, 2023. It is currently available on Steam for $22.49 USD (it’s 10% off until January 17th, it’s normally $24.99)! As someone who knew about this project from way back in the rom hacking days, it’s incredible to me that it has become a fully-fledged original indie game with supposedly over 30 hours of content!

[calico-strawberry]

And who said Rogue's don't have fantastic combat