Staff edit: The contents of this project may be considered objectionable. Play at your own risk.
A princess fighting to free her kingdom…
A ranger running from his past…
When their paths collide, the course of history will be changed forever…
This is the story of the Black Dragon.
Download:
[Temporarily redacted by the staff]
Story
One thousand years ago, the continent of Rhoden suffered a terrible Cataclysm that devastated the land. Mankind would have perished then, if not for the valor of the bishop Altair, who led the people through the crisis and restored the ruined land. With catastrophe averted, Rhoden entered a golden age of peace, and its people prospered. Altair’s followers founded the Church of Valkyrion to spread his teachings to the people. From this church rose a great nation, the Holy Empire of Damaria, which would soon come to dominate the northern half of the continent. But the Damarian Empire’s expansion would sow the seeds of conflict on Rhoden once again, for on the southern half of Rhoden, the Republic Kingdom of Maridia would soon grow to rival the power of the empire. These two great powers of Rhoden would become locked in a ceaseless battle for power known as the Hundred Years War, which continues to rage on to this day.
Ranger Zean O’Drake has spent the past ten years of his life trying to put his sordid past behind him. Once a respected warrior of the Damarian Empire, his world was turned upside down after he was framed for the murder of his adoptive father and exiled to Maridia. But when a chance encounter with a Damarian noblewoman forces him to confront the past he thought he’d left behind, Zean, along with a ragtag band of close friends, embark on a dangerous journey with the goal of bringing the Hundred Years War to an end. The quest will force Zean to make new allies, confront an old friend, and uncover a plot that threatens to unleash a second Cataclysm that will destroy Rhoden. It is a tale of love and hatred, despair and hope, of loss and redemption. This is the story of the Black Dragon.
Gameplay
Features that are implemented:
-Character and class skills
-A variety of new and returning classes, including female fighters, nomads, and a special playable wolf character.
-Three lords, each one specializing in a different part of the classic weapon triangle (though the axe lord doesn’t appear in this build of the game)
-Weapon triangle grants bonuses of 20 hit/avoid
-Staff of Ages-style character conversations to give characters little nuggets of extra development, as well as giving players the option to choose whether or not they want to view tutorials and gameplay tips.
-Ability to see character growths on the status screen by pressing the Select Button/Backspace key
-HP bars and dangerous enemy graphics
-Bloodlines-style interlude chapters to allow players to explore in-universe towns, giving the characters room to express themselves while allowing for worldbuilding opportunities.
Features I want to implement:
-A bunch more classes, ranging from playable soldiers and brigands to dark fliers and mounted mage units.
-Other quality of life fixes, like being able to highlight enemy attack range
-New weapon types like knives to give swords a non-magicsword ranged option
-Good level design lol
-Brand-new world map that is fully traversable with skirmishes and optional chapters
-proper support conversations
-A bunch more magic spells (hot damn is importing magic animations into FEBuilder a pain in the dingdong)
-Proper character designs
-map sprites (apparently they exist on this website, but I could not find them to save my life…)
Features I would implement if I had infinite resources to do so:
-Three-tier class promotion system
-Morality system based around actions you take in the game
-Capture system that interacts with morality system to make players consider how they approach battles
-Support convos taking place in the Base rather than on the battlefield (don’t know if people have made this already)
Screenshots
Known Bugs
-The Aircalibur tome may freeze the game if it doesn’t kill the enemy you engage when using it.
-Certain bugs occur when skipping scenes with Enter, use the B button to skip cutscenes
-A handful of typos dotted across certain text
-Grey’s fang is supposed to be effective against nomads, but isn’t because I forgot to add that feature in.
Credits
-Hack assembled using FEBuilder GBA, made by 7743 (thank you very much for making this program, it’s the only reason I was able to make this hack at all)
-ROMHack assembled by Bahamut (Me)
-All mugs are pulled from free-to-use sources, either used as they are or palette edits of the original creation
-Mugs used in this hack made by: Imperial, SacredStones, HyperGammaSpaces, Flasuban, Ereshkigal, AmBrosiac, GabrielKnight, Laurent_Lecroix, Nuramon, Tchyrimi, Der, BatimaTheBat, BorsDeep, Ganondorf, Yang Kai, Atey, SmokeyGuy77, FireEmblemier, Beccarte
-Battle animations used in this hack made by: Pikmin1211, Maiser6, Skitty, GabrielKnight, flasuban, Nuramon, Leo_link, Alusq, MK404, Team SALVAGED, IS, ltranc, Genocike, Kao, DerTheVaporeon, Primefusion, Mikey Seregon, Alfred Kamon, PrincessKilvas, Spud, Blue Druid, Yazuki, ZoramineFae, Maiser6, Raiden, Jeorge_Reds, Lisandra_Brave, TBA, Teraspark, Aruka, Kenpuhu, Seal, Retrogamer
I’ll say right now that this hack is very, VERY rough. This is my first attempt at making my own fangame, and there are definitely places where my inexperience shows. Then again, I assembled this entirely on my own in just over a month, so I guess it’s not that surprising that certain parts of it (especially the level design) aren’t so hot. My focus here is on telling a good story(hopefully I succeeded and making the game fun; I’m not really looking to do anything especially innovative with the gameplay, outside of adding in a handful of QoL fixes from newer FE titles. I know that I have a lot of room for improvement as a game designer, and I hope that spending time hanging around this website will help me do just that.
I will drop a quick warning that the story is a good deal darker in tone and more mature in its subject matter than typical Fire Emblem; something more in line with what you’d see in Berserk, Game of Thrones or The Witcher. Be aware of that if you are sensitive to certain mature themes.
The plan for this hack is to get through the first quarter of the overall story. This first arc will be somewhat more intimate and small in scale, though later arcs will ramp up the scale and stakes significantly.
OBLIGATORY RECRUITMENT CALL: As you can probably guess, I would very much appreciate having other people to help me with creating this hack going forward. I would like to therefore put the call out for people interested in this project to please send me a message, because I’d love to work with people. Examples of people I’d like to have on board:
-Graphics people to make mugs and possibly new battle animations
-People to read my story/support scripts to help me improve them
-People to help with map design, because I am noooot good at it lol
-People to help me with designing the world map, making it function in the game, and helping me figure out how to do world map exposition scenes (because god damn did trying to do them on my own make my brain hurt)
-Experienced hackers whose brains I can pick for general advice
-People to maybe help me implement new skills into the game
If you want to follow updates on the project, give me a follow on my Twitter here:
https://twitter.com/TheKingBahamut
If you’re feeling lazy and don’t want to play through the game, you can watch me play through my hack on my YouTube; the first episode will go live tomorrow morning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lqIP6hHglg
And finally, if you’d like to support this project, consider hopping over to my Patreon and donating. Even a single dollar helps:
https://www.patreon.com/TheKingBahamut
Thank you so very much, hope you enjoy the hack!