My game is freezing at a black screen after finishing chapter 3. Help!
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Hello.
I know weāve discussed this on the Discord, but I want to make this clear for anyone else reading the thread. Some emulators donāt play nice with how save points are implemented in this hack. In some cases, they can mess up game flags when you reload to them from the title screen.
Until I can pinpoint what causes this, the best work around is to utilize your emulatorās save state function before interacting with them. Should it turn out that these break on your emulator, reload with save states and use that as a substitute for the save points. I know itās an awkward thing, but it is the best that I can offer for now.
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I finished this game recently and it was good! I have a lot of thoughts on it but I want to start by saying I really liked this hack and had a good time with it overall. Itās also by far the longest hack Iāve played due to the sheer quantity and size of maps, with the game clock at 47 hours in my epilogue save. For those who havenāt finished, the rest of this post will contain minor spoilers. Anyway, please keep in mind that I enjoyed this hack a lot since I find it easier to talk about things I donāt like than things I do.
Units
Shackled Powerās unit design was cool. For the most part, units had clear strengths and weaknesses and I rarely felt that units were redundant, which is impressive considering how many there were. Though the power level of units varied a lot, only a few units felt completely useless (looking at you, Barbara) and I could have slotted most units into my team. Lots of prepromotes felt very competent and they would likely outclass units I promoted early. Some of them even outclassed units that I promoted at 20! The units I ended up bringing to endgame, aside from the mandatory ones, were Lou, Annie, Hute, Eileen, Silph, Alta, Wyler, Nello, Cadence, Orville, and Nidas. I also deployed Darrel and Melanie for large portions of the game but didnāt have the deploy slots for them in the end.
The gimmick of giving each axe unit a prf was interesting, though I ended up not using any of them long term because most started with bad hitrates or underwhelming stats. I understand that supports are meant to help with this but many axe users didnāt give me a strong first impression. Flying units had particularly neat designs, where Eileen is pretty great against mages but her str and def are awful, Cadence can actually do damage when trained but has an awful start and needs a lot of investment, and Nidas can take hits and Bloodaxe sword users but heās never doubling many enemy types. I canāt say much about Rita because I looked at her stats and concluded that 18 spd was pretty bad on a unit that probably isnāt getting more than one more point from levels but sheād work fine with a few speedwings and has decent mixed bulk. On the other hand, thieves felt like theyāre mostly meant to replace the previous thieves, since Orville is a massive upgrade over Darrel and Kassandra has endgame ready bases (though only A rank swords is unfortunate). This mostly works fine since you donāt really need multiple thieves, but itās a bit awkward since I need to actually bring Darrel to lategame maps for recruitments despite Orville being way better.
Prosel and Marilyn both suffer from really late promotions and this hampers their viability as units significantly. Proselās promotion sadly comes at the point of the game where bombs are no longer better than killer and effective axes but he can throw atom colliders when he really wants to kill something dead without risking a counter. Itās a shame that bombs arenāt that great on him because a lord using bombs is just cool. Shove makes him relevant all game, though I used it a lot more early than late. Marilyn is straight up bad and I would never deploy her willingly but at least she can physic which is always helpful.
Lastly, Wyler is cool. I donāt have a ton to say about him but heās essentially what a trainee should be: rough but workable start with actual payoff, though far from game-warping. Helps that he supports Prosel and Nello too.
Weapons
Iāll preface this section by saying bombs are cool. However, many bombs feel very hard to justify using as a player, like the ones that reduce stats. I barely ever found myself using bombs that werenāt the basic bomb, power bomb, or atom collider since when Iām using bombs, I mostly want to kill something dead. This being said, I really like the dynamic they added to thief gameplay where thieves become strong magic units on player phase but canāt easily replicate this on enemy phase. I wish I had more chances to use them but hitting res became unremarkable once I started facing promoted enemies; wyvern lords in the final chapter only have 9 more def than res and thatās the biggest gap I noticed. Similarly I was underwhelmed by light brands, they were better than hand axes and javelins on units like Annie, Cadence, and Nello but not by a ton because Iām not ORKOing with them unless I crit even on capped mag units.
This brings me to my next point, towards the end of the game, the only way Iām killing most enemy types in one round is using effective damage, a brave weapon, or landing a crit. Gunnar is legitimately worse than a killer bow, and the S rank tomes are worse than shredder and thani. In the shopping map, I stocked up on a bunch of killer, effective, and 1-2 range weapons, and my biggest mistake there is that I actually bought too much useless things I didnāt need like silvers and reavers when I should have bought more shredders, effective weapons, and javelins (Wyler easily burns multiple javelins a chapter). There was no reason for my tome users, Silph and Alta, to ever touch tomes that werenāt shredder and thani after this point aside from saving uses when finishing off damaged enemies. Of course, this isnāt necessarily a bad thing (though I wish the S rank weapons were significantly better), but the amount I relied on killer and effective weapons in Shackled Power really stood out to me.
Enemies
Iāve never seen such varied and complex generic enemy inventories until playing Shackled Power. Many generic enemies have 2 or even 3 weapons, often threatening to kill my units through effective damage. This made it very important to kill enemies on player phase when possible, since they might switch to a more problematic weapon on enemy phase, and also made it so I had to be careful picking which units to bait enemies with. Overall I found this interesting, since it kept me from steamrolling everything with the same few units. Something I liked a lot less, however, was the prevalence of reaver weapons and especially killer weapons (and critboost enemies in general). Personally, I donāt find that passing around a hoplon guard makes for interesting gameplay, and lots of maps involved spreading units out widely enough that it is hard to make sure hoplon guards are on the units that need them. In the shopping map I bought like 30 goddess icons to boost everyoneās luck really high to avoid this issue but I still found the amount of enemies with high critrates frustrating to deal with, especially when many of them are realistically going to attack me before I can kill them on player phase.
Not sure where else to put this but lategame enemies really struggle to hit. In the final chapter, generic enemies mostly have 105 to 120 hit, and my capped speed capped luck (trivial with goddess icons) Annie has 82 avoid without any supports. Icon shops are important with the amount of high crit enemies but it does result in goofy gameplay like being able to put Annie on a fort with a light brand and have her kill everything unless she gets hit by three or so low hitrate attacks.
Bosses in this game were very strong compared to other hacks Iāve played. Sometimes this works fine because you have the tools to handle them, but sometimes itās very frustrating. Mirales in chapter 9 was an extreme case of being a huge pain to deal with but several other bosses were similarly very hard to manage. Fortunately, there arenāt too many cases like this and a lot of the other scary bosses had reasonable counterplay like Aspria. Also, while important bosses having skills is mostly fine, some of them felt a bit random, especially vantage on a certain lategame boss (totally unrelated to him killing Prosel due to me not checking for skills haha).
Also screw Rikkan, why is a legendary assassin stealing my stuff instead of actually trying to kill me? I donāt understand why his unique class needs to exist when heād fit naturally into the assassin class. This guy sucks and itās really annoying for him to steal my weapons at the end of a very long fog map.
Chapters
The chapters in this game are long . With a couple exceptions, most maps were very big and took a while to play past the early game. Personally I found I enjoyed the shorter chapters more than longer ones on average, so I wish there were a few more of these, though several big maps were also quite cool. Iām not sure if there was a fluctuation in design philosophy at some points, but I found the midgame stretch of chapters 15-20 to be the gameās highest point; each of these maps was fun in its own unique way. Chapters 17 and 18 were especially great, and these are probably my favorite maps in this game. Several other chapters that stood out as particularly good were chapters 6, 8, and the final map (aside from the final boss moving after defeating a certain other enemy, I felt zero shame loading a savestate when this happened). The weakest chapters in my opinion were chapters 9 and 13. Chapter 9 was a confusing fog map with a crazy strong boss, and chapter 13 was a long fog map with crit enemies. Maybe this is just me being a fog hater but honestly all the fog maps would have been significantly improved if the fog was simply removed, though chapter 16 at least played well as it is.
Minor nitpicks
Didnāt know where else to mention these things but I feel like itās important to bring them up despite them being a bit nitpicky. I can tell that a bunch of bombs, prfs, and S rank weapons used skills straight from skillsys. In my opinion, tweaking these skills to be more deliberate instead of using whateverās in skill system would have improved the game a bit. I also strongly dislike the 5 support limit, it creates a sunk cost that makes it very difficult for me to justify benching units who got support ranks with units who I donāt want to bench. Making it so you could get unlimited B supports would be a huge improvement, even if support bonuses were nerfed to compensate. A bunch of random lategame enemies had void curse, presumably to stop player units from ramming the level cap, but I had many units at or near the cap anyway by the end. If you want to slow down experience gain, modular EXP would work better since void curse felt arbitrarily distributed and itās bugged to not work on enemy phase. An easy fix for the bug is to give void curse enemies the demon king bit, as that should also prevent experience gain from them.
Story
I donāt have a ton to say about the story but it worked well overall. I liked a lot of the minor villains, and it was neat how few chapters past the early game had throwaway bosses that werenāt important to the plot. The villains did a bit too much talking for my liking and it did slow down the speed at which I played the game, since thereād be a ton for me to read with each new chapter, but the writing itself was solid. Prosel and his supporting cast were fun to follow, with each of them having unique and strong personalities. Nidas written quite well despite having much less screentime than Prosel and Haban, I found his character really neat.
Iāll end this long post with my endgame Annie (my MVP), she used a bunch of boosters but the strength, magic, and speed is all natural 
6 Likes
Thank you for playing and providing so many thoughts on it all. Iāll try and address as many things as I can.
Units
-Iām glad to hear that the cast was varied enough for your liking. I generally tried to make most of the prepromotes sidegrades to their unpromoted forms (I.E. Vicks has great mixed bulk and generally acceptable stats all around compared to Louās strength/defense focus and Vesperās speed/resistance boons). In some cases growths may not even the odds, but stuff like that happens.
-I just like axes, so I wanted more special ones. I get the axe units not standing out to you since a lot of them do suffer from accuracy/speed problems.
-I absolutely understand not liking Prosel/Marilynās promotion timing, but it felt like the only spot in the story where it would make sense for them. I would have had to change a lot of things to get them to work otherwise.
-I disagree on bombs not helping Prosel. Their high accuracy, power and ability to target resistance gives him solid ways to cripple/chip non-magic enemies.
Weapons
-Most bombs admittedly work way better as weapons for the enemy than you, but I donāt like giving enemies lots of weaponry exclusive to them.
-I find Light Brands to be really strong for units with decent magic. Majen and Cadence in particular can straight up demolish 90% of the enemies they face with their unnerfed might compared to the regular options.
-Enemies being that durable feels good to me. I went with patterning bulk after most decent beat-em-ups: Once the end is approaching, it becomes very difficult to wipe out one enemy before another finds a window to get in on you. Proper utilization of effectives feels good compared to being able to do the jobs with less specialized stuff against what theyāre supposed to demolish.
-Perhaps I could have gone harder with the S-Ranks. Iāll give you that. Their skills didnāt end up being as great in practice as I envisioned.
Enemies
-Enemies getting larger inventories later on is important to not letting you roll them off of weapon triangle. It encourages you to be proactive if you want to kill them optimally.
-I donāt recall such a huge amount of enemies being given access to killers. Admittedly some lategame maps do have a lot of crit-boost enemies. I find it better encouraged people to stick archers and mages in to soften them up safely.
-Of course loading up a speed demon with luck and supports will make enemies be near unable to hit them. I just didnāt want to risk nerfing dodging too much, as then it feels like weāre getting rid of part of what made the vanilla games fun for a lot of people.
-I donāt get the high strength of the bosses (Sans absurd ones like Mirales). Looking around at other hacks and even some vanilla GBA games, the boss stats donāt seem that high in comparison. Especially in regards to HP.
-He steals because he wants to cripple your ability to fight back. He has the droppable secret book just so you donāt lose something important if you donāt read his skills.
Chapters
-My design philosophy was whatever theme popped into my head. Admittedly I was introduced to hacking via The Four Kings, so maybe that made me think that was how big maps should be. I could have cut some down had I caught them in time, definitely.
Nitpicks
-I didnāt know how to edit/make new skills outside of the available patch adjustments. Said boss has Vantage because I wanted them to have something that went off when they fell to critical health, and fast reactions felt fitting.
-Thatās a vanilla carryover because I like singular supports being big boosts, but not letting too many boost you to insane levels.
-Most, if not all, of the Void Curse enemies do have that fix.
Story
-Admittedly it would have been to the storyās benefit to make the dialogue more brisk. I have a bit of a problem with making people talk too much because I want all the details to fit. Perhaps in the future I can keep this in the back of my head to mindfully improve.
Once again, thank you so much for playing all the way through.
5 Likes
Hi is there any other way to download the ups I am not able to from the link given above the one thatās for 1.2 
Hey, I only recently started playing andā¦
is there any reason why the Suspend feature isnāt there?
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In the hack there is a map save function that saves during the map so if you return after you fail, you can start back from that checkpoint instead of starting all over again. However in order to implement the feature, Sphealnuke had to erase the Suspend option as the patch that allows those savepoints basically use the Suspend option to make a save, so if it was available, you would essentially be able to save anywhere youād want by suspending and then coming back, so to make sure it cannor be abused, Sphealnuke had to delete the Suspend function. This also means that if you quit a map via reset or because of a crash, you will not keep your progress. Also some save points are apparently bugged for some emulators and may cause a crash, so be careful of that and make a savestate should you save your progress with a map savepoint.
Is the link not working for you? No one else has reported a problem with it.
The best idea I can think of is that you could pop into the Discord for a bit and I could directly send you the patch there.
Anyone know how to find the exit in chapter 17x?
I touch 4 switch and the exit not have
Hello again. Iāve put out another patch even though I said 1.20 was the last one I intended to make. This is just a minor bugfix patch for some oversights/problems that have been brought up to me. I apologize for letting these inconvenience everyone affected.
Thank you and continue to enjoy FEU.
Patch Notes
-Chapters 17x, 19 and 21 now have their switches act as visit points rather than range events. This should fix rare issues where hitting all of the switches wonāt complete the chapter.
-Proselās mouth now moves when he explains that he just hit a switch.
-Fixed Promoted Prosel taking effective damage from the Thani tome.
-Minor text/graphical adjustments.
EDIT: Fixed a slip-up that could crash the game at the end of Chapter 18ās intro cutscene.
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chapter 2
RNG hates me.
3 Likes
Same with me
I truly wanted to love this game, the maps are so fun and plenty of the side characters are also very fun to play with, but Prosel is such a terrible character, the story has so many senseless parts and a lot of the dialogue is also tough to get through, like, wtf is the whole āking dadā thing, if itās supposed to add personality to the main character it doesnāt work at all.
The last straw was on chapter 19, the whole confrontation between the main characters and how it develops itās just bizarre, I couldnāt keep using a main character like that, and is not that I dont agree with their morals, itās fine to have flawed and morally ambiguous characters, but the way it plays out is so bizarre that ruined the whole experience for me.
Iām sorry if I coming out too harsh, I really appreciate the game until that part besides my personal gripes with it, and your artistry with the animations is also really cool, I just failed pretty bad in understanding and getting on board with the main characters motivations and development.
I hope you do more stuff in the future, you have really cool skills with the animation and map designing.
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Iām sorry to hear that the main character was making the game unbearable for you. Itās always a pain when the dealbreaker is the one guy that you canāt avoid seeing.
Iām at least glad to hear that there were parts that you could enjoy separate from the story. I can tell you that FEU is expansive enough to have something else that youāll be likely to enjoy fully, since you now know what you donāt want to see in one.
Thank you for giving it a chance. I canāt make something for everyone, but this will give me the means to look at Prosel more critically for if I can get a sequel off the ground.
3 Likes
Fantastic Game!!! 
1 Like
Hey, It has been a while since my last post.
I wanted to come back and thank everyone that checked this hack out again. It makes me glad to know that something I poured so much time into managed to be a fun use of time for so many people. The support and joy Iāve been shown since really does mean the world.
Such support includes this piece of fanart by JadeSnapArt, commissioned by Misosoup247. Go check them out!
But Iām here today to put out a minor bugfix patch for the game. Hardly any changes, but it was stuff I got tired of leaving in. The link in the OP has been updated to include this.
Patch Notes
-The switches in Chapter 21x now follow the behavior of all similar switches tied to a single objective.
-Fixed the Chapter 14 boss having an incorrect inventory on Easy Mode.
Right now Iām still spending my time working on animation commissions, but I may be putting out something small for this in the near future that has been sitting in my computer library for ages. I guess you can look forward to that.
11 Likes
Itās great, but Iām looking forward to the sequel more than this.
can you make a link in mediafire or mega? I canāt download it, I donāt know why.
Hey, Iāve made a new bugfix patch in light of recent reports Iāve received. My apologies if any of these impacted your playthroughs.
Patch Notes
-Temporary Flag 15 is no longer used on most maps. Save Points would actually trigger this flag when used, making for some instances where some events couldnāt trigger after using one. Most importantly, it fixes softlocks that could be triggered in Chapter 17x and 19 by using the save point before all of the switches have been pressed.
-Fixed some incorrect terrain tiles in Chapter 5.
-Fixed a hidden house convo in Chapter 10 checking for the wrong unit.
-Fixed access to Chapter 14x being determined by the wrong village.
-Fixed the villages in Chapter 14 running on flags meant for other ones, resulting in some situations where you could visit a village after it has been destroyed.
-Fixed Chapter 18ās end event using the wrong map sprites for some characters.
-Fixed the Muscle Drinkās description being cut off in its Use menu.
-Changed the item type of the Play function to hopefully prevent a crash on certain emulators when examining the option with the R button.
-Minor text/graphical adjustments.
Thank you all again for playing, and I hope you continue to enjoy FEE3 this week.
7 Likes
So today is the 1 year anniversary of Shackled Powerās initial 1.0 release! Itās kind of weird how time has flown since then, but I do want to thank you all again for checking it out since then.
I didnāt have a big celebration planned, so I just wanted to put out a new patch. This cleans up a couple of weird things, raises some sudden drops in deployments and gives some buffs to known underperformers. I hope this will make any future playthroughs smoother for everyone.
Patch Notes
-Additional deployment slots were added to Chapters 14, 20 and 24.
-Wylerās AI as an enemy was altered in Chapter 9. He should now be more likely to use his javelin and thus have a lower chance of getting himself killed trying to attack you.
-Grantās base speed was very slightly increased.
-Vesperās base speed was greatly increased and her base HP was slightly increased.
-Elizaās base speed was increased.
-Vicksā level was reduced from 5 to 3, his Bow rank was increased from A to S, and his base HP, Skill and Resistance were increased.
-Barbaraās base Skill was greatly increased and her base Speed was slightly increased.
-Rubenās base Strength and Resistance were increased.
-All of Boddasonās growth rates were slightly increased. Additionally, her Axe rank was increased from B to A and her base Resistance was increased.
-Krunkās base Skill was increased.
-Fixed Prosel being unable to shove new recruits in their joining chapters if they were set to be stationary prior to recruitment. (Thank many)
-Fixed an incorrect tile in Chapter 1. (Thank Toffee)
-Minor text/graphical adjustments.
I know I said last patch was the last one, but thereās no reason we canāt just not improve things a bit.
I hope you all have a wonderful day.
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