Welcome to the FE8 Chaos Randomizer!
(This is FE8 only for now, and for the forseeable future will not be for FE6/7. Please don’t ask, you have no idea how tedious this has been XP)
I’m not going to bother you guys with the introductions. We all know each other, except for those who don’t! And if you don’t, I’m Klokinator, the guy who has been in the FE community for longer than just about everyone yet has only ever contributed a silly reskin hack or two! (I also donated to help Yeti release FEXNA, but that’s not exactly a contribution)
HOWEVER! That all changes now! Having taken the source code for OtakuReborn’s randomizer on Reddit/Serenes, I have begun work on the most exhaustive possible randomizer that I possibly can!
What his randomizer did before:
-Randomized weapons (Might, hit, crit, weight, durability, and even adding random traits!)
-Randomized classes (Player characters only)
-Randomized player affinities
-Randomized player character bases
-Randomized player character growths
-Normal, Randomized, and Reversed recruitment
-Increase enemy growths, including bosses, up to OR exactly to a certain percentage
-Randomized CON for all classes (Affects enemies)
-Randomized movement for all classes (Affects enemies)
This is good stuff, however, in my mind, I could take this further. I wasn’t, and still am not much of a coder, but I could maybe screw with the source code and figure some stuff out. And I did! It was actually fairly easy, IMO just about anyone could do what I’ve done… but it was also super tedious as hell. Still, the results have been worth it! Let’s go over new features specific to the randomizer itself.
-Randomized items (A vulnerary in someone’s inventory might become something else, and later this will perhaps be fleshed into ‘tiers’ of items, or fully random, at the player’s discretion.)
-INCOMPLETE: Randomized Chests
-INCOMPLETE: Randomized house rewards
-INCOMPLETE: Randomized shops
…Alright, that was underwhelming. The thing is, there’s only so much I could do within the Randomizer itself. Not because it’s impossible to do, but because I’m a terrible coder. However, with OtakuReborn’s help, I received some code snippets that allowed me to add one other super cool thing; Randomized enemies!
Yes, now enemies have randomized inventories, stats, and growths! Boss classes can change, as can a variety of other things involving them! The catch is, this is still using the player randomization algorithm. As such, the enemies can only randomize within a ‘character slot’. I altered a base rom, however, to create a desirable working method of randomizing enemies.
Something occurred to me though… people may remember FE7 Chaos Mode, a project I created a couple years ago, that featured all kinds of crazy new things that involved just changing how Fire Emblem works by refocusing the focus of weapons and classes and units in general. I thought to myself “Well heck, if I’m going to have to edit the ROM to get randomized enemies working, why not take it a step further? Or three steps?!”
So I did. Now, there’s a lot more than just enemy randomization that will be in the final version of this release.
-INCOMPLETE: New classes, including a massive number of animations and map sprites created by the fan community!
-INCOMPLETE: Third tier promotions! (Many, many more than FE7CM)
-INCOMPLETE: Reclassing?!?!
-Completely altered weapon system. This is not something like “Weapons are slightly stronger and have more durability” or other minor tweaks. Every weapon is totally different from what people are likely used to. Based on very extensive playtesting, this has massively altered the early, middle, and late game battles.
-INCOMPLETE: New classes will (may, depending on dem asm coders) have new skills, and ideally I’d like to implement an actual skill system, but this is not set in stone.
-New weapon mechanics! As an example, the Devil effect has/will have a few new variations and forms, and there are/will be a couple new Devil weapons.
-Heavily altered enemy stats. We all know FE8 is the easiest FE, but now it will be difficult in a novel new way. Note that like Markyjoe, I’m not a fan of ‘luck based’ difficulty, and I’m not a fan of just pumping stats upwards to make battles longer or more tedious. If you want to understand how the combat will change, play FE7 Chaos Mode. It’ll give you a good idea of what to expect.
-New weapons! No longer content with 6 anima tomes, there are now TWENTY! Fire, Wind, and Thunder have their own branches, while light has a branch for general purpose utility and one for monster slaying, and dark also has an additional branch of tomes! There are also new ‘Great’ weapons, like the Iron Greatbow!
-FE5 Critical system! (Pow x2 plus weapon might (And relevant slayer bonuses) minus enemy defense, instead of [Displayed damage times three]). This was a controversial addition, but I’ve found it helps weak units punch through general shields and whatnot.
-Stat growth color system! This has been in my fix patch for years, but it’s here as well!
-SO much more!
I literally can’t remember all the community fixes and tweaks I’ve applied. I never kept a changelog, because I’m stupid and also dumb, but I’ll add anything else I remember here in the future.
This project is well underway and while currently stable, only goes to about chapter 12 in FE8. It’s lacking a lot of things that I want to add, but I will eventually get around to them in between writing my book and doing literally nothing else with my life
No release as of the moment, but if someone wants to help me with adding literally a few snippets of code to the randomizer, please let me know. The randomizer is, I believe, written in C#, or possibly Visual Basic. I know so little about code I can’t even tell what language it is, but I’d place money on VisualBasic.
As far as what I need? I need to add a snippet of code for tiering items (We have full randomization at the moment), and another snippet of code for randomizing a single byte at a time, for the chests and whatnot throughout the game.
I probably need a few other things, but those are the most pressing issues. Aside from that, a Version 0.5 release will be coming along… eventually! For now, here are a few patches to play a few hacks generated by this randomizer! Have fun!
[Download Link (removed, prepatched rom]
Patch 1: Normal recruitment, original base stats
Patch 2: Normal recruitment, randomized base stats
Patch 3: Reverse recruitment, original base stats
Patch 4: Reverse recruitment, randomized base stats
Patch 5: Random recruitment, original base stats
Patch 6: Random recruitment, randomized base stats
I hope you guys enjoy! This will be released eventually, but I can’t promise any dates at the current moment.