Can you help me find a GBA Fire Emblem Hack that fits my needs?

Hi there,

Recently I got into playing Fire Emblem Hacks. I just love the GBA games and thus far have played Vision Quest, The Four Kings and Justice and Pride. So can anyone suggest another Fire emblem Hack to me? I’m asking for the best of the best. Here are my criteria:

These are NECESSITIES:

  • It has to be finished

  • It has to have a “complete” interface. Justice and Pride for example would actually show the inventory of each unit while hovering over it on the map… but not some basic, necessary stats like Attack Speed or Defense? Got really irritated by that. So yeah.

  • It needs to have a lot of chapters, roughly 30 or more and the party that I control should rather not be segmented. I am the type of player who wants to stick with his 15 Units until the end.

  • It needs to have skills or something similar to spice things up, like preferred weapons.

  • It needs to be a good challenge. Justice and Pride was rather easy, the other two were just right.

These are not necessary, but greatly appreciated:

  • It should be based on FE8, since it has the most variety of content that the hackers can base their gameplay on.

  • It should have apprentice units. Just can’t help but love them.

  • It should have branching promotion paths.

  • It has to have a “complete” interface. Justice and Pride for example would actually show the inventory of each unit while hovering over it on the map… but not some basic, necessary stats like Attack Speed or Defense? Got really irritated by that. So yeah.

For the record, you can use FEBuilder to install your own version of MMB (which is what I assume you’re referring to here) on whatever FE8 hack you like. Vision Quest’s MMB is included in the default selection of MMBs.

Thanks, I will check it out.

While I’m at it: Can someone help me how to get proper Bilinear Filtering on mGBA?
Browsing some Fire Emblem Youtubers I realized how nice it looks then: Fire Emblem: The Four Kings Let's Play | Part 1 | "Some High Octane Reading, Also Walter's a Dick" - YouTube

However, when I turn it on at my mGBA Emulator, it just looks very washed out and blurry. Anyone an idea?

If you haven’t done this already, play Vision Quest again (on normal mode if its your first time doing this) and live with your descisions (no resets if units die I mean) would be my recommandation.

Aside from that I would just recommend you to go to the Fire Emblem Fangame Directory. Click on whatever interests you the most. Many hacks out there are fun despite not hitting one or two of your criteria and I think that finding something you might enjoy by yourself will lead to the most fun.

That’s not bilinear. That looks like Super Eagle or HQ2x. I recommend xBRZ or Quilez if you have to apply a filter. The latter isn’t packaged with most emulators.

Thanks for the reply. I might have to do some catching up there tho.

How do I apply xBRZ and Quilez? Isn’t xBRZ for images only?

As far as I recall mGBA doesn’t have those filters. If you must have filters perhaps you should use Retroarch. You can install the mGBA core in it and apply filters to whatever you are playing.

While in the game open the Retroarch in game overlay, go down to Shaders → Load → Shaders slang. There are multiple folders within which each have multiple shader options which you may find to your liking. xBRZ, Super Eagle, and HQ2x that Yasako mentioned are all there.

30 chapters+ is a pretty tall order, most hacks usually don’t go out that far for good reason, and the few that you have played do because they’re impressive in the tenacity of the hacker.

You’re basically gonna filter out almost everything at that point, 20-25 chapters seems like a more reasonable ask.

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I’ve installed retro arch before but was pretty stoked at first because of its plentyful features.

Now, after an hour or two of setting up save directories, controls, short cuts I’m pretty pleased with how customizable it is.

Tho, back to filters again, they just seem to be “too much”. Trying 4xbrz, it looks like this: (picture attached). HQ2 filters on the other hand look way too blurry and washed out, just like the one from mGBA.


Are there any other filters among these with some sort of a lighter variant of this effect?

I can’t really say what filters there are with a similar affect without doing a bunch of testing. Maybe one of the Eagle shaders like super-2xsai will be more to your liking. I’ve never personally been a fan of how most emulator filters affect the image and generally don’t apply any.

Try Omniscale:

Or if your device is powerful enough, nedi at 4x/2x/2x plus an additional pass at the end for scanlines:

Pictured: Hope’s Trail Endgame.
@EAALen let me know if I should use a different hack for examples for spoiler reasons

Edit: ScaleFX is also nice and neutral like Omniscale.


(FE: Genesis by Melledoneus)

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These images hurt my soul.
Even so I had no clue there were so many screen smoothing filters to choose from.

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Thanks!

After quite a lot of testing by myself, I stumbled upon xbr-lv2. With that, the sprites don’t look too crunchy, but also not too sleek:

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Just so you know, I don’t play with filters 99% of the time. Occasionally a hack will have portraits that just happen to play nice with the upscaling algorithms so then I turn it on for fun.

With that shader/ filter thingy out of the way, I am kinda struggling right now to get that mmb editor to work in FE Builder. :sweat_smile:

Github Page says this: "To install the Modular Minimug Box (henceforth just the MMB) you simply need to #include one of the MMBInstaller files in the Installers folder. There are multiple variants of the installer included with the MMB, so pick your favorite to install or use as a starting point to customize.

The MMB takes up a considerable amount of freespace and is made by default to be included within a larger EA buildfile. If you’re installing the MMB on its own, you’ll need to modify your installer to assemble the hack to freespace. The easiest way to do that is to add the line ORG 0x00B2A610 as the first line in the installer, replacing 0x00B2A610 with the offset of some available space."

I gotta ask thix because information science is not my profession: Do these files usually come with an .exe file? In order to run an app which would load the MMBs? And if so, why is it that git hub downloads usually don’t feature an .exe file? I’ve had the same obtuse problem with FE builder itself until I would just download it somewhere else.

If the files don’t come with an .exe file, how or where do I load them with FE Builder? They seem to be .event files.

And if so, why is it that git hub downloads usually don’t feature an .exe file? I’ve had the same obtuse problem with FE builder itself until I would just download it somewhere else.

I’m not sure where you were looking on the febuilder github, the releases page has the exe (although compressed as a .7z file):

Anyways you seem to have not looked in the patches section of febuilder itself:

Thanks a lot.

For the record: I tried downloading it here: GitHub - FEBuilderGBA/FEBuilderGBA
I cllicked on code/ download zip. It wouldn’t have an .exe file then.
So yeah, I just had to click on the respective version on the right-hand side, the more you know. :roll_eyes:

Typing in mmb in the filters doesn’t show any results:
(Edit: Probably because the hack I’m trying to play is based on FE7)

Yeah I specified in my first post in this thread that MMB is for FE8 only.

Welp, I see.

At least it’s all set for the next FE8-hack now. So thanks, I appreciate it.