**Latest Version: AE Demo 1.10 **
I think it’s high time we made a real topic about our hack over here.
This is Awful Emblem, an FE7 hack made by various members of Something Awful’s community. The idea came about in 2013 during a Let’s Play thread about FE romhacks, where, after talking about it a lot, we decided we may as well see if we can make a hack of our own. Fast forward nearly two years and here we are today.
The game is divided into three main Acts. Act 1 is essentially Lyn mode mechanically. It follows the story of Judith, head of the local militia. As the story begins, she heads to the local lord to petition for aid due to recent bandit attacks, only to get wrapped up in an assassination attempt and things escalate from there. Act 2 begins a few months after Act 1 ends, giving characters enough time to split up again before rejoining the party you play. Act 3 isn’t its own game mode but you can liken it to the shift in focus after Dragon’s Gate in FE7.
We’ve made a number of gameplay changes that we feel enhance the gameplay. For example, Soldiers are no longer a throwaway class and can instead be likened to Lance Myrmidons, though not as fast. They can also promote into Halberdiers. Mercenaries saw some nerfs to differentiate them from myrmidons as well by making them stronger but slower in their bases. They’re probably still too good. Knights have 5 Move. Archers have instant access to Longbows, which have been made lighter and stronger and lock to them. A number of “crutch” weapons have been added such as a low weight lance for Pegasus knights and a high hit, low might axe for Fighters. Classes that retain a single weapon type on promotion will also be given a +15 natural crit, which means your Snipers and Halberdiers can become critting monsters as the game progresses. (We’ll have to see how well this balances, we’re not that far along yet.)
The magic system has had a sizable overhaul. It always bugged us that the number of available magic weapons was so small compared to physical weapons, so we got together and hashed out an expanded magic system. There are now 12 tomes per branch of magic, with each branch having a Reaver tome and at least one Effective tome. Other new tomes include a middleground damage tome for Dark magic since there used to be nothing between Flux and Fenrir, a Killer tome in Anima, a damaging Siege tome in Dark that isn’t Eclipse, a Brave tome in Light, a Poison tome in Dark, and if we can get them working properly, a Sleep tome and Silence tome in Light. The hardest part is the animations obviously, but if we or someone else scripts the monster magic from FE8 we should have enough to cover all the new tomes.
We have an older demo that we released following FEE3 last year. It’s pretty outdated at this point as we have since gone back through Act 1 and rebalanced everything in preparation for Act 2, but if you want to try it out, you can click here:
I’m FPzero, the main project lead. I do most of the tasks that actually make the game function, such as all the eventing, most of the mapmaking, hex editing and hair pulling when things frequently go wrong. I like to post pictures of me breaking the hack as I develop it, as well as progress, so check back over time to see both.
The other members of the team are:
- Artix - Lead writer, Hard Mode
- Blastinus - Mapmaking, Writing
- Tyty - Portraits
- PoorlyWritten - Writing, Text encoding
- SCBracer - Writing, Editing
- ddinkins112 - Writing, Supports
- Ryushikaze - Battle animations, Map animations
Special thanks to Can of Worms for always being around to help when I inevitably blow something up.
To start us off, this is Chapter 11, the second chapter of Act 2. Judith and co have been sent to investigate both a bandit problem and an old ruin in the frozen north. They end up split apart from the ruins team when the bandits attack them. Reunite the group and take on the boss!
