Awful Emblem - Version 1.0 RELEASE!

[Tequila]

Thoroughly enjoyed this hack. There were a few spelling and grammar errors (which I’ll put in Discord), and a few QoL hacks that I found myself sorely missing, but overall, it was very fun.

Units

Solid lord. Good enough speed to double things, tanky enough to take a blow. Well, physical blows, at least. The slide back on her animation seems a bit fast.

Deleter of Things. He seemed to gain exp faster than my other units (probably has class coefficient of 2, while others have 3), and boy oh boy did he put work in. He did die to a combination of unlucky hits (3 ~30 shots) and poison (had 3 hp left and got hit for a 3) on 5x, but he got better.

The next best units after Rowan. In fact, June might be even better at his level. Gave Angus the speedwing, which he used to hit things hard twice.

Melanie…may have gotten some favoritism? Just a bit? Like, a dracoshield, angelic robe, and energy ring? Definitely worth it, though. Didn’t have Cassandra for very long, but she looks like she would be a very good unit.

The healbots. Beatrice got magic blessed, I think; she’d be a solid unit when she promotes. Niccolo chipped occasionally (and killed Poison Claw!Baels on ch 8), but otherwise didn’t do much. Good unit in a pinch, though.

Thief.png. Pretty bad speed growth for a thief, but she has a solid base. I normally like and train thieves, but as soon as I saw Cassandra, I felt Kate was going to be on lockpick/bench duty.

I tried. They weren’t awful units, and they were good for chipping, but they weren’t spectacular compared to June and Rowan, so I didn’t use them as much as I wanted to (I like shamans).

Did knighty things, like not take damage when people took offense to his face. He might look like a potato in a suit in armor, but he’s a tanky potato in a suit of armor. Benched as soon as I got Sigmund.

Another unit I tried to raise and failed. I really like archers. I like early-game longbows. I like buffed early-game longbows. But she got 1 speed and no strength in 4 levels, and I decided that would not do. Brought her out to use the ballista in ch6, and she barely damaged anything. Pretty sure she got screwed.

Didn’t really use the other units. Was intrigued at Selia being a mage tank instead of a physical tank, but I had Melanie, who was better in all ways. I used Martin for a while early on before June proved to be better. Clover got a couple of kills, but I’m not a fan of myrmidons.

[knabepicer]

Happened to see the VOD for this while I was trawling FE8 on twitch yesterday- cool to see that this is still trucking along, and that y’all have made a good amount of progress. If you intend to do more streams, would be nice to announce them here too

[CT075]

We’ve been getting some queries about why this thread got archived when the project is demonstrably alive and receiving updates, so a few notes:

• Our policy is largely agnostic to whether the project itself “is alive” and more about whether the project is likely to receive further update posts on this forum specifically. I know that our stance on disallowing discussion in “dead” project threads is and has continued to be less than popular, but we continue to believe that relegating such discussion to other venues (such as a community thread or discord) is a necessary evil to prevent pointless “any update?” bumps.

• Regarding the fact that this project is clearly not dead and so there may be further updates on this site, we have reasons beyond the 4-year silence period (that are private and so I won’t get into them) to believe that the creators of this project have abandoned FEU and won’t be posting any updates here. If we’re mistaken on that, we’re happy to un-archive this thread on request from one of the creators, but until then, I’d rather not entertain a false hope that they’ll change their minds and return.

[FPzero]

Hi all, looks like there was a bit of confusion going on here but I do still visit the site occasionally so I’ll do my best to clear it up. Oh, and there’s no bad blood between us and the site or anything, we just don’t post much.

Awful Emblem is not dead. In fact, we’ve been quietly working on it almost every week since posting this demo years ago. You might think, “gee FP, shouldn’t it be done by now then?” and honestly you’d be right to think that. But when I say every week I mean that me and the other team members meet once a week for 2-3 hours and that’s it. Sometimes a little extra work is done by one of us on a random day. All of us are in our 30s now and don’t have the time to devote to these kinds of projects like we did when we were younger. Not calling anyone out for wondering, of course, just explaining how our team works.

But anyway, yeah, the project keeps on trucking along. I’d honestly put us at the 75% completion mark these days. We have seven more chapters to finish and then plenty of stuff to polish. We’ve spent the last month and a half proofreading supports, with more still to check once we’ve formatted them for insertion. Prior to that we were working on the “Act 3” of our game and all the chapters that go along with that–the second half of the game and beyond.

The tough part about FE hacking is that, compared to when I did Mario or Metroid hacking, I find it’s hard to present screenshots or other previews of the game. It is, after all, a strategy game. The most appealing things to see are map designs or cool animations, and the latter have been inserted in our game for a long time now, probably long enough to be in older demos already. I’ve posted a couple maps here and there in Discord, but largely I just never know what to post. Part of it is this possibly unfounded notion I have that people will feel like our game plays like something out of the late 2010s.

I predict Awful Emblem will not light FEU on fire with its gameplay or dazzle it with fancy ASM. At its core, it’s just a game we’ve enjoyed making in the vein of FE adventures we liked playing when we were younger. There are still cool chapters and interesting to play maps, of course, especially a few in the second half that took some real time to work out, and one more I haven’t even started on yet but conceptually should turn out pretty fun. But what we’ve really put a big focus on throughout the game is its story and character development. We’ve had a lot of years to come to the realization that just because this is a romhack doesn’t mean we can’t actually choose to write a decent story. And sure the players will be the ultimate judge of that but I genuinely love our misfit cast of characters and all the story and support moments we’ve written for them. I hope people won’t just skip over dialogue to get to the gameplay, because while we’ve written a lot of words (though nowhere near as many as Sacred Dawn DX) I think it’s worth seeing what we’ve created.

Anyway, this is a lot of words to say that we’re still around. I kinda just wrote what came to mind. I guess I’ll finish out this essay with a few random screens or maps we’ve taken in recent months since whenever we last posted here. Let’s see what I have.

We have Intermission chapters featuring supports-like conversations that aren’t actually supports. They just tie into the current events of the plot after major sections of the story.

I put a boat on a lake and gave it a “cannon”.

I don’t recall where this gentleman shows up but I guess he’s a big boy.

A near-endgame map in a marshy wasteland of sorts.

I don’t have a date for this, but keep an eye out for this hack because we do want to put out some kind of playable demo again soon. It’s been far too long since the last demo and plenty has changed and been added since last time. We do need to do a bunch of testing before we drop a demo though, so it’ll be a little bit before this happens. I’ll try to pop in every now and then with tidbits of what we’re working on.

That’s all I have for now. Far too many words and little exciting substance. Awful Emblem in a nutshell lol.

[darkshockbro]

Awesome to see y’all still alive and working on this! I’ve always been a big fan of this hack, even back when it was in FE7. The changes you made to the Act 1 characters all seem positive, although I would love to see Victoria and Edgar back, they were fun. Just wanted to post saying that I’m looking forward to the new 75% demo and I wish y’all the best of luck with development!

[Artix]

Well it’s been a couple months, and we’ve been plugging away so I guess it’s my turn to do a little PR. I promise we didn’t like, intentionally ignore this site/community (and we would have never gotten as far as we did without help from folks like Tequila), but FP is right - this is primarily a hacking community and we didn’t really have anything interesting to show, but I thought I would at least pull back the curtain a little bit.

First and foremost, actual progress. For those unaware, our game is roughly broken up into four acts: Prologue - Chp 8 (henceforth “Act 1”), Chps 9-17, Chps 18-24, and Chps 25-30. Each act has at least one sidequest, and ends with an intermission where you can wander around and chat with folks a la base conversations from FE9; it ends up being 40-ish chapters altogether when it’s all said and done. While nothing has been balance-tested to the degree that we would like (or at all, in some of the later chapters’ cases), Act 1 and 2 are 100% done and we could press the export button tomorrow to put out a new demo if we were so inclined. Act 3’s main story and maps are all done, but the supports are not, and Act 4 has three(?) maps left, one of which we were working on last night. Honestly, we would have had a demo out a long time ago for Act 2, but supports have been the major holdup; we’ve had them written forever, but I’m the one primarily responsible for encoding them for in-game usage and I’m uh…a little behind the main plot.

Ignoring the black line (everything above it is a repeat), Green is done, yellow is encoded but not tested, and red is written but not encoded. You can see roughly where each act’s characters break by the blue, orange, green, and purple on the far left side - so not only did we start on these much later than the rest of the game, they’re very frontloaded. I don’t have the exact number in front of me, but I think it’s something like 60% of the supports are in Act 1 and 2, so I had even more to do before we could do that Act 2 demo. And now that we’re past that point and I’m on the Act 3 characters…they’re almost done with the actual game part lol. So if you’re wondering why that never materialized, it’s me! You’re welcome.

I do want to stress that the game is genuinely very close to being done. I know we’ve done a terrible job of keeping anyone up to date on this, but I would be amazed if we don’t have at least a “gameplay complete” version of the game by the end of the year.

[FPzero]

Felt like showing off a couple maps from the middle of the game to contribute more proof that the hack exists.

A city in the desert.

A jail in a forgotten fortress.

I have only two maps left to create, with two more in progress and almost finished. It’s hard to believe we’re almost at the finish line. There’s still lots of testing to be done though, as well as a few bugs to iron out and resources to add correctly. I have a couple broken convo backgrounds that really need attention–it’s been years since they broke and since I last tried fixing them.

[FPzero]

Awful Emblem is gameplay complete!

We actually hit this development milestone a few months ago but we’ve been deep in playtesting, bugfixing and refinements since then. The goal is to release by the end of this year but I don’t have a firm date or window to offer.

Hopefully I’ll have more news to share soon. For now, though, this 12-year long project is almost finished, and no one’s more thrilled about it than I am hahaha.

[FPzero]

Awful Emblem v1.0 - November 29, 2025

God help us, it’s finally done.

Awful Emblem is a project that has taken me and the rest of my team 12 1/2 years of work to complete, meeting each week for a few hours every Friday to hammer out a full-length FE8 hack. Why? Because we looked at the state of hacks in 2013 and, with all the hubris in the world, decided “Yeah, we could do that”. Development on this version of the hack started in earnest in 2018, after throwing out the existing, floundering project in favor of a completely rewritten story and a move to FE8 from the original version’s FE7 base.

So what is Awful Emblem, then? Well, the name originates from all of us being members on Something Awful’s Let’s Play subforum. While we tried to come up with more permanent names over the years, nothing stuck quite like the working title. A large emphasis was placed on the story and characters; we wrote a lot of words for everyone. I hope you enjoy our cast of characters as much as we do. The result is a lengthy hack that feels very vanilla or similar to FE7 or FE8 in its design, with a little spice added here and there as gameplay improvements or fun additions. Whether this is a good or bad thing is up to you. There is no skill system to play with, and most chapters do not feature overly complex objectives or setpieces. Expect a Vanilla+ experience the whole way.

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Features:

• A brand new, original story with an original cast of characters!
• An accessible difficulty curve intended for everyone!
• 38 playable chapters!
• 3 Intermission chapters, and a full epilogue!
• 43 unique playable characters!
• Press “Select” on the character stats screen to see character growths!
• Press “Select” on the map to display all enemy ranges!
• An expanded magic system with new tomes and custom spell animations!
• An overhauled and expanded text engine that allows for much more flexible cutscenes!
• An updated unit info box that shows equipped weapons when you hover over units!
• A few new character classes that were not in the original game!
• Custom character portraits for everyone! (except for most generic bosses)
• A complete suite of support conversations for every playable unit with faster buildup of support ranks!
• New custom weapons, animations, and icons!
• Various adjustments to vanilla weapon and class stats!
• Female enemies, animations, class cards, and more!
• Can take actions and even attack after Talking to a unit!
• No Skill System!

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Download the hack here! (v1.05)

If you want to discuss the hack you can obviously do so in this thread but we’ve also included a link in the hack’s Readme to a public release Discord server if you’d like to discuss the hack with us directly.

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A word on difficulty:
Characters won’t die when killed on a map…sort of. If someone dies on a map they will no longer be playable, but they will continue to show up in the story as “retreated” allies. This was to be able to better integrate characters into the storyline and have the recur as the plot called for it. This is not a Casual mode experience, nor is Casual mode an option.

• Normal is the intended experience, somewhere between Hector Normal and Hector Hard Mode.
• Hard mode is closer to a Maddening and is best experienced after playing on Normal unless you are VERY confident in your abilities. (Enemies have extra levels)
• Easy mode should be somewhere between FE8 Normal and Hard modes/ (Enemies have fewer levels)

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Not a Bug/Known Bugs:
-Various map sprites have shown graphical glitches when hovering over them, but it’s inconsistent.
-Pressing B to skip cutscenes can cause the cutscene graphics/portraits to not disappear properly or skip certain item get calls. Press Start to skip instead if you’re looking to skip cutscenes.
-Characters stay grayed out in battle animation when refreshed, but this is purely visual and they will be refreshed appropriately. (Probably a bug with the custom bard sprite/Play command).
-There will probably be typos every now and then. Feel free to report any you see.
-Whatever code we added to debug test the supports viewer at 100% completion refuses to unapply itself, so we recommend not looking at the fully Support Conversation viewer until you’ve beaten the game once. The original intention was to 100% unlock all support conversations as viewable after beating the game once on any difficulty.

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Version History:
v1.05 (12/11/25)
-Fixed a trigger that would cause the game to crash if you didn’t have certain characters recruited (because they didn’t join in a previously bugged patch).
-Chapter 28 should no longer cause game over seemingly at random.
-Chapter 29 has less reinforcements overall and now warns you where the spawn zones are.
-Fixed additional typos.

v1.04 (12/4/25)

• Adds Ferris and June back to the game
• Removed the picture of a dog that blew up the boss quotes table

v1.03 (12/2/25)

• Removed another debug script from Chapter 24
• Fixed more potential instances of inventory resets during prep screens for characters joining that chapter.
• Reduced the number of bonus levels promoted enemies on Hard receive from +19 to +9 (same as Normal)
• Fixed additional typos.
• Purposefully re-enabled the 100% completion support viewer debug feature until we have proper code to unlock it upon beating the game once.

v1.02 (12/1/25)

• Removed a leftover debug script from Chapter 20
• Fixed an instance where Kate could have her inventory accidentally reset when prepping and resetting in Chapter 5, along with another one in Chapter 8

v1.01 (11/30/25)

• Fixed Summoner summons not working
• Fixed Nicaean units in Chapter 7x not having faction descriptions
• Fixed some typos

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Team Members:
FPzero: Project leader, event scripting, mapmaking, battle palettes, general hack assembly
Artix: Project leader, writing supervision, support editing and encoding
Blastinus: Mapmaking, general writing, editing and encoding
PoorlyWrittenNovel: General writing, editing and encoding
ddinkins: Playtesting, general writing, editing, and encoding
nine-gear crow: General writing, editing, encoding, event scripting and additional portraits
Teyla: Portraits artist, additional writing
Tequila: Technical consult, bug fixes, ASM coding

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Playtesters:
SweaterGear
MC50
Kinu Nishimura
Mmmmmmattttthew
SongofSquirrels
Madison

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Resource Credits

Animations:
Judith - Ryushikaze
Soldier M - Alusq
Thief F Recolor - FPzero
Knight Recolor - FPzero
Troubadour Recolor - FPzero
Mage F Ponytail - Lisandra Brave
Great Knight Recolor - Cataphract
Mercenary F - Dei, TBA
Assassin F - moocavo & riku; FPzero
Shaman F Veilless - Black Mage
Bonewalker Axe - MrNight, RenOokami
Great Lord Ephraim - Nuramon
Berserker - Bwdyeti, shadowofchaos
Dragoon - Mercenary Lord, NYZGamer, Pikmin1211, Maiser6
Dread Fighter - Nuramon
Armored Brigand - TBA
Warrior Repalette - Pushwall
Wyvern Lord Repalette - TBA, Feaw
Wyvern Lord Armored - Nuramon
Wyvern Knight Repalette - Feaw, St jack
Magic Tomes - N426
Cursed Sword - DerTheVaporeon, Team SALVAGED
Ghost (Breath of Fire style) - Eldritch Abomination
Living Armor - Sphealnuke
Mage Lord - TytheBub
Black Beauty Falcoknight - TBA
Sonia Sage - Greentea
Custom Niime - Dachi
Bald Swordmaster - Pikmin1211, L95
Swordmaster Variant - Greentea, DerTheVaporeon, ltranc.

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Additional Portraits:
Villager NPCs - HyperGammaSpaces
Magda - Levin64; nine-gear crow
Bardiya, Eusebius - Sphealnuke; nine-gear crow
Maeve, Vasco - LaurentLacroix, Lenh; nine-gear crow
Arges - L95
Istor - L95; nine-gear crow
Alvin - XVI; nine-gear crow
Larun, Malcolm - RandomWizard

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Class Cards:
Cursed Sword - DerTheVaporeon
Ghost - Eldritch Abomination; FPzero
Cursed Tome - N426
Various Female Units - L95
Dragoon - Kenpuhu
Dread Fighter - Nuramon
Living Armor - Sphealnuke

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Spells:
Ooze - Arch
Vortex - FPzero
Shaver - Blazer, BwdYeti
Elwind - Mikey Seregon
Shadowbane - Alusq, FPzero
Meteor - Blazer, Jubby
Tornado - Mikey Seregon
Spiritbane - Arch
Prism - Arch, Comaythanki
Saggitae - HyperGammaSpaces
Crux Magna - vilkacis
Pantokrator - Scriaza, FPzero

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Map Sprites:
Militia (Judith) - Ryushikaze
Warmaiden (Judith) - nine-gear crow
Emperor (Richter) - Aruka, Kenpuhu; nine-gear crow
Exalted (Richter) - Unknown; nine-gear crow
Guild Master - Nuramon, It’s Just Jay
Merchant - N426; nine-gear crow
Hegemon - Nuramon
Cursed Sword - DerTheVaporeon
Ghost - Eldritch Abomination
Magic Tomes - N426

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Weapon Icons:
FPzero
Ereshkigal
GoudaGrabber
LordGlenn
Celice

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Myrina map design by:
nine-gear crow, Captain Fargle

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Special Thanks:
2wb/Eliwan
Arch
Blind Sally
CanOfWorms
Captain Fargle
Circles
Cirvante
CJacobs
Faerie Fortune
Endorph
Kirb
Leonarth
LuigiMarioKOG
Mysticblade
Onmi
Ryushikaze
SCBracer
Shiny777
Smiles
Tanks
Temp
Tequila
TactHack
VennoBennu
Vilkacis
Zane

Everyone else who helped us along the way.

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If you see something you submitted in here and you’re unsure if you’ve been credited, please let us know.

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We hope you enjoy playing our game!

[JrpgAddict]

@FPzero any chance for a Reverse mode toggle when playing Hard mode difficulty?

Gz on release btw.

[FPzero]

None right now. I’m not even sure how I’d begin to implement such a thing.

Also putting that aside, a Reverse mode might make Hard mode easier by virtue of the characters you’d be recruiting first!

[knabepicer]

Huge congratulations on the release, I can’t imagine what it’s like working on something for this long and finally being able to see it to conclusion- big props.

I’ve just finished Homecoming and was looking for something new to play on my hacked 3DS, and this sounds great!

[Hatsuru]

Congrats on the full release! I just found the 1.10 Demo from 2015 in one of my old computers. Excited to see what has changed since then!

[dancer_A]

Welcome back and congratulations on the release

[FPzero]

Oh, good luck playing on hardware! None of us have the ability to play on a real system so hopefully it’s all good on there.

[JrpgAddict]

What i ment was reverse mode so evry enemy has vantage+ and attacks 1st on player phase, not reverse recruitment but i understand since i dont know how to do it either, its a lot of fun though

[Venno]

Dreams do come true. Congrats on the release! I’ll find time to give this a run soon.

[ShirleyVaga]

congrats to the full release and seems like today is a good day to be a fe fan
have to check it out eventually. lucky for me i have most of december off so plenty of time

[Artix]

“We wrote a lot of words” he says; Google Drive tells me that the full script is 444 page (including stage direction and whatnot), and supports are 414. Let no one say we didn’t commit to our story.

[ReedRacer]

Congratulations on the release! I’m looking forward to an experience that is the exact opposite of awful with this awesome project!