Custom Campaign List -- Vetted and Complete GBAFE Fangames and ROMhacks

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Custom Campaign List

Above is a vetted list of complete custom campaigns, here defined as full-conversion ROMhacks and Fangames, along with a couple of notable rebalances. This is not an exhaustive list; for that, you want the Fangame Directory. My objective was to create something smaller in scale and more controlled in scope to present most players with a solid list to choose from, succinctly describing the core appeal of each hack with an efficient and easily-browsed layout, while remaining neutral in tone.

This list has been cooking for awhile, and it’s on Serenes Forest mainsite somewhere, but I never posted it on FEU for whatever reason. I’m posting it here in large part for Search Engine Optimisation, so here goes:

NOTICE ME GOOGLE-SENPAI

Fire Emblem ROMhack Fangame Lex Talionis FEBuilder Sacred Stones Last Promise and Friends Complete List Best Ultimate Supreme All Games Free Full Movie Download Sport Stream Ad-free Hot Singles In Your Area

Kindly do not ask to have your campaign added or argue over what should or should not be included.

WHAT IS A ‘CUSTOM CAMPAIGN’?

The majority of these projects are full-conversion ROMhacks, which do not simply rebalance or overwrite vanilla Fire Emblem, but uses its engine and some of its assets (and assets built to complement or inspired by its existing assets) to build a new SRPG experience. Some are similar in gameplay to the source material, while others use it as a springboard for adding completely novel systems.

Some of these campaigns are built in the Lex Talionis or FEXNA engines, which more or less look to build a GBAFE+ system from scratch instead of using GBAFE itself as a base and thus being beholden to its technical limitations.

The vast majority of custom campaigns take place in original settings that have no direct connection to pre-existing vanilla universes.

WHY ‘CUSTOM CAMPAIGN’?

‘ROMhack’ is both far too broad and overly exclusive, and carries a lot of baggage as a term. A custom campaign, a PME, a rebalance and even a standalone engine hack are all technically and accurately ROMhacks. ‘Fangame’ is better, but really more accurately describes LT campaigns while also carrying a little baggage (it’s a lot further removed from the source material than, for instance, ‘fanfiction’.)

The preferred term in the RTS community is custom campaign, which accurately – if a little clunkily – describes what these campaigns are, particularly for full-conversion ROMhacks. Much as Age of Empires and Blizzard RTSes came packaged with a Scenario Editor (the latter famously being the origin of MOBAs), FEBuilder and Buildfiles effectively serve the same function using GBA Fire Emblem as its base.

It isn’t perfect, given that that rationale doesn’t fully hold for LT games and also there are one-shots here, but it’s still my preferred term.

WANT TO MAKE YOUR OWN?

Designing Your Campaign from Go to Whoa
How to Excel at FEBuilder Without Being Good at It
Ultraxblade’s FEBuilder FAQ

THEORYPOSTING

Effortposts Around Units We Like
Effortposts Around Chapters We Like
Effortposts About Design Arcs in Development
Class Design Compendium

25 Likes
Getting Started
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Well hold on, what CAN we argue about, then?

Jokes aside, thank you for putting this together! I think it’s nice to have a medium between Krash’s recommendation doc and the Directory, which this fulfills nicely.

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I take issue with hacks like Shackled Power and Lord of the Seas being classified as having “Skillsys” gameplay while actually having minimal implementation of skills.

Also I think difficulty would be a good field to add rather than merely sometimes mentioning that in the description. Though hacks many let the player choose difficulty so I recognize that makes it complicated. I think it should still be a priority to indicate difficulty since the entire point of the list seems to be to recommend these campaigns to more casual fans, and hacks are almost always harder than official games. Someone could start out with a hack that many talk about and be turned off by the difficulty or mechanics perceived as stressful or unfair, even on the easiest difficulty. For example, Vision Quest has multiple early game maps that spawn reinforcements behind you as time pressure.

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The labels are deliberately extremely broad. I didn’t want to go into the weeds. If I can figure out a way to neatly split Vanilla+ and SkillSys into three categories, I’ll implement it. Lords of the Seas feels a particularly unambiguous SkillSys Type of Experience, though. I mean, there’s dismounting, transferrable swimming, the Bolt Axe, debuffing knives, the guy who summons submarines… there are elements peculiar to LotS and reliant on SkillSys that are far more impactful on the gameplay loop than ‘FE8 but everyone has, like, Fiery Blood’, and so it seems pretty clearly one step further removed from vanilla GBAFE. SP is more fair, but with the current split, I’m comfortable with its placement. Since it… literally does use SkillSys, and through it, skills.

Difficulty’s in the eye of the beholder, and it’s impossible to gauge on a broad scale like this. I’ve seen people say the NQR hacks are notably easy. I’ve seen people say the NQR campaigns are notably hard. Even within them, I’ve seen them ordered basically every possible way when it comes to difficulty. And difficulty options don’t just make it complicated to put in a single word, but impossible. Hag on Story Mode is, from what I can tell, basically a cakewalk (which is fine and good, it’s a… story mode). But if I say that it’s easy as a result, then someone rolls in and plays Normal, have I fucked them over? Basically the only viable option would be to rank based on whatever was listed as the ‘intended difficulty’, but that doesn’t feel terribly helpful, either, and there isn’t always an unambiguous answer. Besides, while hacks are almost always tougher than FE6/7/8 on Normal mode, I would argue the majority are easier than or at most as tough as FE6 Hard, let alone some of the more recent Lunatic difficulties. If anyone produced FE11 H5’s earlygame, they’d be hounded out of the community. I guess at best would be some kind of system where there are checkmarks for ‘easy story mode’, ‘challenging veteran experience’ and ‘will kick your teeth in’, but I’m not feeling it.

Ultimately, going into how difficult these campaigns are is just going to be granular beyond the scope of one keyword in a broad overview, and it doesn’t warrant more space than that. If the audience wants to know more about a given campaign, look at the thread.

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Maybe we could make a distinction between “Enemy Phase” and “Player Phase” focus? It doesn’t really matter what difficulty you play Four Kings on, you’re gonna get merced if you leave anyone not named Vin in a pile of enemies, and even then he’s gonna need his dodge sword. On the other extreme, you can put Larissa from Vision Quest just about anywhere you want and she’ll just get a bunch of tinks, although you won’t necessarily be better off doing that every turn given the tasty side objectives you’ll miss out on.

I don’t think player vs enemy phase is entirely indicative of difficulty either; lots of people think Curse of Lagdou is easy, and it is, but just because you get so many fun and powerful tools that are best utilized during Player Phase (good luck building your crit up when you can’t choose where you’re getting hit from).

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Enemy vs player phase gameplay as a description is incredibly reductive, and also vague enough to be very unclear with many games.

Most people would describe Fates Conquest as a “player phase” game due to the often brutal combination of enemy skills and the prevalence of skills that only happen on player phase such as quick draw and poison strike, but you often also do a lot of your combat on enemy phase, whether that be a sweeper or nos-tanking, or even just a bulky enough unit like Camilla or Xander.

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Yeah I’m not huge on the PP/EP game distinction esp when playstyle diffs also get involved

I played 4kings hm lategame with a 3 tank frontline (max with some supports, shelby, and runesword booster candace, and if yufin doesn’t get onerounded he can also tank some targets via nos) and even with cerulean crescent, which is probably the closest thing I’d say that actually has a proper player phase skew, only does so because a lot of maps can just be one turned. For CC maps that I took more than 1 turn on–and sometimes even 1 turns (notably the chicken gaiden 1 turn rout is done like 90% on EP) I did a hefty amount of EPing for.

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What does “vetted” mean? Vetted for what?

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Nothing specific. Fairly notable for one reason or another. Reasonably well-polished and won’t fall apart. I don’t necessarily like every campaign on the list, but I could see how someone would. There are good campaigns that aren’t on the list. Some I’ve overlooked, some I just haven’t heard of. But, like… I have to draw the line somewhere, right?

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