Hey everyone, Kobazco here. You might remember me from the glorified reskin that was The Sacred Stones Weapon Reversal, which was a project I worked on a long while ago. This time, I’m bringing an early look at something I just recently started working on with FEBuilder, called Antagonist Emblem.
Basically this hack is Sacred Stones, but it follows a different story centered on Lyon and all of the bosses you fought in the base game.
Big disclaimer, I am NOT a story person. The story currently present within the game is just something very rough I put together so it would somewhat make sense.
Without further a do, here are the features:
All playable units are planned to be the bosses you fought in Sacred Stones, with some new additions.
Various new classes and adjustments.
Maps are edits of existing Sacred Stones maps, featuring varying objectives.
Images:
I want to make this my next big project, as FEbuilder is very fun to use. Although as usual there are things I can’t do so if anyone is interested in helping out with things such as telling me how tf to edit the World Map, or just someone who believes they can take the story in a better direction than I can, please tell me. I really do lack the ability to tell a new story, and like I said all the dialogue and such is VERY rough and placeholderish.
On that note, none of the world map stuff and various death quotes have been changed yet.
Editing the world map, I believe FEBuilder has some editors for it? I can’t really offer any specific advice given that I use buildfiles and have only modified the events, not the map itself.
Gave the patch a shot. Not going to comment on the story/dialog, but here are my random thoughts:
Prologue:
I fully approve of making Selena the jeigan. Jeigans that can heal are the best.
Is the NPC bandit in the top right corner of the prologue intentional? Seems very random.
You should probably change the chapter titles (ex: prologue to “The Fall of Grado”)
Franz having Seal Attack is annoying, given that the debuff carries onwards into ch1. Might be best to change his personal skill?
Ch1:
I like how you have time pressure this early on.
Wrath Breguet with high skill growth? Interesting. But with 2 base speed and 20% growth he’s gonna get doubled by everything ever. I’d definitely make him somewhat faster.
You probably already know this, but the talk conversations are the same as in vanilla fe8.
Murray’s palette looks very strange. He also feels like he’s going to be stronger than all the other units so far, with his fantastic speed + being a cav (access to two weapons and move 7 are big). You may want to consider splitting cavs up into separate classes for each weapon, in my experience that helps make them more reasonable.
Ch2:
A survive mission with a bunch of summoned monsters on your side? Neat.
However, this chapter lags. Fairly heavily too, it’s enough of a pain that I think I’ll hold off on playing it until it’s fixed.
This does look neat enough that I’ll be keeping my eye on it.
Turns out that turning HP Status Bars off (though the option is marked “subtitle help”) gets rid of the lag. So…
The thief on ch2 promptly turns around and leaves the map.
While I am completely onboard with making axe units that don’t suck, O’Neill’s damage dealing capability is absurd. 11 atk, and 65% attack growth is too much, especially when he also has fiery blood boosting it.
An archer that can actually kill things, sweet.
Feels like there are too many throwing weapons on the enemies (especially the fighters with handaxes). Those and the archers make using Lyon an extremely risky proposition, since he’s quite squishy.
The steel lance soldiers can do some seriously huge damage - two of them and a javelin soldier managed to bring my Breguet from full HP to dead in one enemy phase. Partially just the RNG giving them 9 atk each, but yikes.
Meanwhile, the monsters on the left side die very quickly, leaving you little wiggle room if you’re going for the chest. The ones on the right seem to last a reasonable length of time, though.
Speaking of Breguet, it’d be nice if he spawned with a vulnerary like everyone else.
It’d be better to put the chest key on someone who isn’t so likely to get killed by the monsters. Right now it’s fairly possible for the soldier to die to them, which means no key and no chest for you.
Gilliam ran up and killed my Lyon through a wall, which was not a fun surprise. He should probably not have attack in range AI here. Or at least he shouldn’t have throwing weapons.
Two game overs and a reset thanks to Breguet death, think I’m gonna take a break from this. I definitely like the overall design of the chapter, but right now the enemies are overly harsh.
Thanks a lot for all the feedback, I’ll go ahead and respond to everything now.
Prologue:
The bandit was more of a test for the NPC’s are a third party patch. I really should get rid of him lol.
I tried changing the chapter title but had some issues for some odd reason. I’ll look into it again.
I agree about Seal Attack, I’ll replace it with something else.
Chapter 1:
Thanks, I think I did a good job with this chapter/the whole Gilliam thing.
I think at the least yeah I’ll buff his base speed, I didn’t realize it was that low.
Yeah I haven’t changed those convos yet.
I don’t have a palette for him yet, yeah. In my experience he hasn’t been too powerful but I do agree about speed being strong. It is what I want to make him good at, after all. I’ll htink about splitting cavs but I’m not too sure how I feel about that considering how many Cavs you might end up with in this hack.
Chapter 2:
Oh… that’s odd lol thanks for catching that I suppose I always skipped past it somehow.
O’Neill might be a bit strong, I agree. I think I might look into at nerfing either his Bases or attack growths. Its a good point that Fiery Blood is gonna boost that damage as well, so I think I’ll nerf his attack base.
I agree with the too many hand axes. I had the same issue you did with them in my first test.
I also agree here, I think I’m gonna put the steel lances on only the back/reinforcing Soldiers instead.
The Monsters get doubled yeah and die kinda fast on the left for my liking as well yeah. I might add 2 more or try something else with them.
I also had that issue, I think I’ll instead put it on an Archer in that group.
I didn’t know Gilliam could do that, I should’ve checked his range better sorry about that. I’ll take away his throwing weapon.
Another thing I forgot to mention, the portrait for the Skeleton summon, Barry II, is currently a placeholder. Please let me know if anyone wants to make a more definitive one.
Only other thing I might have to suggest is making Lyon a bit tankier irt his base stats. With his speed and 0luck he won’t be dodging anything, and with his 2 def + nothing special in terms of hp he can’t really afford to face tank hits either. His fantastic growths will most likely fix this in the long run, but as is he’s a bit prone to causing the Game Over screen.
