Ever wanted to play Elden Ring, but as a turn-based strategy RPG?
Me neither, but here it is!
Elden Emblem is a FE8 hack I made based on FromSoftware’s Elden Ring. It is currently a WIP, but I think it is at a good stopping point to be made playable as a first version release. You can think of this as a finished Part 1 and Part 2 will come later. To give an idea of where this version ends, for those of you who played Elden Ring, it goes up to Leyndell and ends after the Morgott fight. This is probably about 60-70% of the game. Despite it not covering the entirety of Elden Ring, I would still consider this version to be a fairly complete release with a firm ending and it will probably be a while until I finish the rest of it. There is also an optional superboss spoiler[/spoiler], but that fight is not quite well-tested yet, and isn’t really intended to be super beatable yet.
Key Features:
- Playable units all from Elden Ring, including Alexander the Jar Warrior, Ranni the Witch, and a customizable Tarnished One.
- Custom maps based on Elden Ring locations. My goal was to capture the essence of each location while still making (hopefully) good Fire Emblem maps.
- Epic boss fights! (More on that below)
- ~20 chapters so far. It’s hard to give an exact number because some maps are optional and some are boss maps, so it’s difficult to say what counts as a chapter. To give a rough idea of the length, my typical playthrough takes about 8-12 hours. My time might be on the quick side because I made it, but I also tend to play games slowly.
- Unbreakable weapons! Each weapon you obtain is an exciting permanent addition to your team’s arsenal!
- Buyable stat upgrades! Since you don’t need gold (runes) for weapon maintenance or healing, you spend your runes to level up instead!
Download Link:
To play Elden Emblem, download the ups file from the above link and patch it onto your own Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones rom.
For the age rating, I put 13+. Elden Ring is 17+ for violence and blood/gore. This is based on Elden Ring, but with pixelized gba graphics and nothing gory is shown, so I think 13+ is appropriate. However, some of the writing taken directly from Elden Ring may describe some gruesome imagery which may be disturbing.
Boss Battles
Boss battles are not common in Fire Emblem games, but they are an important part of Elden Ring and Souls games in general, so of course this rom hack has some maps dedicated to bosses. How most of them work is: You bring your Tarnished One and one other unit of your choice to accompany you. Most bosses have their Move reduced by 1. This makes it so that you have the opportunity to maneuver around them rather than just being forced to engage in combat repeatedly every turn. Most bosses will change their weapon kit each turn, and the change will happen either at the start of Player Phase or at the start of Enemy Phase, depending on the boss. Paying attention to their weapon patterns will help you know when to attack and when to back off.
More specific gameplay-related things to be aware of
- Weapon Triangle effects increased so that disadvantage causes -20 hit and -2 damage instead of -10 hit and -1 damage.
- Crit damage reduced from 3x to 2x.
- Weapons/Staves have no durability
- Healing from staves is lowered. Base heal only heals equal to the healer’s Mag stat.
- No consumable healing. However, there are some healing tiles that allow a unit to heal to full health once, marked by a Dragon Vein flame.
- Gold (called “runes” in this) is used almost exclusively to buy stat upgrades rather than weapon upkeep. Stat upgrades are generally intended for the Tarnished unit, but feel free to use them as you like. The only other use for runes is for a few small shops, so don’t be shy about spending them for stat upgrades (there is also a quest in Liurnia that requires runes, but you can earn enough within that map).
- Each character has a personal skill and each class grants a skill upon promotion. The Tarnished One’s personal depends on their chosen class in the tutorial.
- Many events are triggered by using the “Interact” command on certain tiles. Be on the lookout for secrets! This is also how you open chests, you do not need a key.
- There are some optional maps in the direction of Limgrave East. These maps can be re-challenged if you want to grind or if you missed some of the goodies in those maps.
- Growth rates work similarly to Three Houses (character growths + class growths). Growth rates in Elden Emblem are probably a little lower than in most Fire Emblem games, especially for the Tarnished One. This is because you are expected to use runes to buy stat upgrades throughout the game at the Roundtable Hold.
- Promoting does not reset level, so you are encouraged to promote as soon as you can. The level cap is 20, which you can expect to reach or get close to for some of your characters around the time you get to Leyndell. Promoting does slightly reduce EXP gain, but it also slightly increases growths.
- Some weapons and classes are tagged in their description with a word in parentheses, for example (Greatsword) or (Dex). A weapon with such a tag can only be used by a class that also has that tag, and only if they meet the appropriate weapon rank. For example, the Claymore is tagged with (Greatsword), so you would need a class that also has that tag such as Mercenary or Hero.
- Class differences:
Many classes have tweaks to things like stat caps, growths, weapons, promotion branches, and each class has a skill. All playable classes are foot-locked. While Torrent exists in Elden Ring, mounted classes don’t suit the style of gameplay I am going for. All classes have 5 Move except the Bishop class which has lower move to balance its skill. There are some differences in weapon access for the classes in this game. For example, Assassins can use bows and Sages only use Anima. Units also do not lose weapon ranks when promoting to a new class, allowing you to carry over weapon types to a class that wouldn’t normally have them.
Support Affinity bonuses
Support conversations are not in this game, but you can still get supports for gameplay purposes. The stat boosts from supports are a little different and simplified in Elden Emblem.
Fire: +1 power
Thunder: +5 crit
Wind: +5 hit
Ice: +1 defense
Dark: +5 avoid
Light: +5 crit avoid
Anima: +2 hit/crit/avoid/crit avoid
Recruitment Guide (Spoilers!)
- Tarnished/Melina: Joins automatically in tutorial
- Roderika/Hewg: Joins automatically in Limgrave West
- Alexander: Talk with Tarnished after lowering his HP to <= 50% in Limgrave West. Can get again in Liurnia if missed.
- Corhyn: Joins automatically after Limgrave West
- Nepheli: Talk with Tarnished in Stormveil 2
- Thops: Talk with Tarnished in Liurnia
- Rya: Visit at the large ruins in Liurnia to receive quest to retrieve her necklace. Get her necklace from the shack for 1000 Runes, then go back to Rya with a unit who is holding the necklace and she will take the necklace and join.
- Ranni: Visit the top left tower at Ranni’s Rise
- Blaidd: Talk with Ranni or with Tarnished after recruiting Ranni at Ranni’s Rise
- Goldmask: Talk with Corhyn at Altus Plateau
- D: Talk with Tarnished while holding a Deathroot in Limgrave East. Deathroot can be obtained on the same map from the Tibia Mariner at the top.
- Sellen: Visit the shack guarded by a Pumpkinhead with a character who has at least 7 Mag in Limgrave East.
- Millicent: Talk to Gowry in Sellia while holding the Broken Needle obtained by defeating O’Neill in Caelid. Gowry will then turn the Broken Needle to an Unalloyed Needle. Then talk to Millicent with a unit holding the Unalloyed Needle. This will cure her from her illness and she will join. Must be quick so that you can get to her before she dies of Scarlet Rot (however, if she does die, I’m pretty sure she will respawn if you try the map again).
- Gostoc in Stormveil 1 is not recruitable, however there are different ways you can decide to interact with him. If you take the left path and he is alive, he will take 100 runes from you every turn. Also, if Gostoc is alive, going into the room with the chest and the knight will trap your unit inside until another unit waits by the door. If you attack Gostoc, he will open the central door and become hostile. If you kill Gostoc, you will not lose runes every turn or get trapped in the room. However, if you clear the map without killing Gostoc, he will reward you with 3000 runes after defeating Godrick.
- Seluvis at Ranni’s Rise is also not recruitable, however you can visit him at the bottom-left tower of the map. He will tell you that he is looking for Nepheli. If you bring Nepheli to him, he will give her a potion that kills her, and in exchange you get her Stormhawk Axe, except it is no longer prf-locked. You can also bring Thops to Seluvis; Thops will die and you get Thops’ Barrier. You can also bring Sellen, who will die and you get a Starlight Shard. Only meet with Seluvis if you are absolutely sure that you will never want to use these units. In short, be wary of wicked sort.
Difficulty Modes: Which mode should I play?
Normal mode is the intended game mode, and almost all of my testing was done on Normal mode. For Hard mode, I increased the enemy Hit rate by an additional 10%. Another minor difference is that the stalker enemy Crucible Knight in Stormveil 2 will appear 1 turn earlier on Hard Mode to apply more time pressure. I have not done much else with Hard Mode and have not tested it much at all, so I recommend Normal mode for now. Normal mode should still provide a good challenge. This game probably leans a little more on the difficult side, which is where I want it because it’s based on Elden Ring. I removed Easy mode because that would be un-soulslike.
Known Bugs/Glitches
There are a few visual bugs that I experience occasionally but I don’t think there is anything game-breaking. Please let me know if you encounter other glitches as well.
- Not really a bug, but something I would like to fix: Text for items on menus gets cut off (would love to remove the -/- durability marker since durability isn’t a thing in this game, but I haven’t found a way how.)
- Sometimes numbers on the combat forecast look glitched. This doesn’t seem to affect the gameplay at all and can usually fix itself if you exit out of the forecast and try again.
- Sometimes promoting a unit will cause a glitch where it skips the level up animation and seems to simulate a weird combat encounter on a black screen. The unit will still gain the stats for promoting, so if you encounter this glitch, you aren’t missing out on any stats. It can just be annoying to not see what was actually gained. It seems to happen with Nepheli the most for some reason.
CREDITS
Patches used:
Circleseverywhere - Skill Systems
Monkeybard & Black Mage - most skill icons
Blaze - Stance skill icons
Tequila, Rossendale, StanH, Leonarth, Teraspark, sd9k, Kao, blademaster, Snakey1 - skills
Primefusion - test map
Huichelaar - Damage numbers in battle
Vesly - Auto save function to resume chapter at start of turn
Contro - Battle Forecast Fix
Circleseverywhere - Convert Chapter Titles to Text
Mohka - Class change expansion to allow classes additional promotion paths
Contro - Crit Cap to make crit above 100 display as 100
Circleseverywhere - Map Danger Zone by pressing Select
Vesly - Draw attack effect on map animation when battle animation off
Brendor, 7743 - Remove Enemy Control Glitch
7743 - Display Escape Menu. This is used a lot for calling events and much of this hack would not be possible without this patch. I changed the text “Escape” to “Interact” to better fit its function within my hack.
7743 - AddEvent Functions: Get HP, Get Unit Statis, Set Unit Status, Item Check, Lose Item, Silent Give Item
7743, Aera, Vesly - Give Unit Experience
Stan - ExModularSave, ExModularSave with Supply 200
Vesly - Expand weapon description field from 1 line to 3 lines
Tequila - Show battle stats when animation are off
7743, originally by Tequila, jjl2357 - Enable Locked Weapon Prf Constrants on staffs and items as well
Hextator - 01command hack for custom battle animations
Hextator - 48command hack for custom battle animation sound effects
Hextator - Anti-Huffman to edit text
7743, original: HyperGammaSpaces - FillAIDangerMap Efficiency Fix, to make enemy AI perform faster
7743 - Crash prevention in the clear turn list
Tequila - fix_lz77decompress
Vesly - Group AI, to assign enemies to a group so that if one is aggro’d the entire group is aggro’d
7743 - Use HandAxs motion as generic motion for throwing axes
Increase Enemy’s hit rate
Circles - HPBars with warnings
Leonarth - Less Annoying Fog, so that units do not immediately end their turn if they run into an enemy in the fog
ipatix - m4a hq mixer
Sme - Magic Sword Rework, to have more flexibility for weapons with magical damage properties
Stan - Skip World Map Fix
Scraiza - NarrowFont
7743 - Switch the death quote for each unit who is killer
Nintenlord - Remove Easy Mode, (it wouldn’t be a Souls game if it had an easy mode, now would it?)
Circleseverywhere - Range-Animated Weapons List Installer, to allow some weapons to always use a ranged animation
7743 - Simple setting of Sacred Weapons 2
DurabilityBasedItemEvent
Snakey1 - Stairs
7743, boy - TorchWeapons
7743 - Allow 3 or more trainee to be registered, this patch is installed but I believe Mokha’s class expansion list is what I actually used to expand the promotion list of the “Wretch” class
Stan - UnitActionRework
Krib - Effective damage multiplier (changed from default of 3x to 2x)
7743 - Change Effectiveness damage coefficient of the weapon (used to make effective multiplier on Litany of Death 4x)
Circleseverywhere - Actions after talk
7743 - Add Event: Remove Trap
7743 - Add Event: Display and recover the effect when using the item
7743 - Allows detailed setting of weapons held by summoned units
Battle Animations
Knight: [Knight-Variant] Generic [M] by Salvaged
Halberdier: Dragoon - original by Mercenary Lord and NYZGamer, repallate by Pikmin 1211, Lance animation by Maiser6
Warrior: [Warrior Base] - Repal Leather [M] - Repalette by Pushwall, Sword/Lance by LoreLeek
Female Fighter: [Fighter-Reskin] Long Hair Repalette [F] by BlackMage, Repalette by SageHapuiaJDJ
Assassin Bow: [Assassin-Reskin] Ponyail by Keks_Krebs, Beccarte, SD9K
Holy Knight: [Custom-FE10 Style] Base by Iscaneus, Animation/Scripting by Nuramon and Jeorge Reds, Magic by flasuban
Cyclops [Bow]: Bow by Pie1055, scripted by Orihara_Saki, Boulder animation by TytheBub
Berserker Sword: [Berserker-Base] Vanilla +Magic [M] Sword (Durandal) by tatata
Map Sprites
Soldier (M) FE10-Style Lance by flasuban - used for Halberdier
Halberdier (U) Lance by Dei, dondon151 - used for Holy Knight
Walking Mausoleum by me
Portrait Sprites - All character portrait sprites are taken directly from screenshots of FromSoftware’s Elden Ring, and modified by me to fit the format for character portraits in the GBA games, resulting in reduced resolution and simplified color palette compared to the source material. The portraits definitely look ugly in this GBA format, but I think it fits the gritty atmosphere of Elden Ring.
Most of the writing in the game is taken directly from Elden Ring, with occasional minor differences so that it makes sense in the context of the gameplay. I didn’t want to add too much of my own writing other than gameplay-related text so that it can be as close to the source material as possible. Elden Ring’s lore is very cryptic in typical FromSoft fashion, and I did not think it would be appropriate to insert my own theories into Elden Emblem. This is also why there are no support conversations. Characters in Elden Ring never actually talk to each other directly, and adding in my own conversations would feel unnatural (however, there are still supports for gameplay bonuses between characters that are connected in some way).
About Me
Fire Emblem and the Souls series are two of my favorite franchises, so I wanted to merge the two with this project. I am fairly new to rom hacking and this is the first rom hack that I am making public. I have dabbled with a few other FE hack projects before this while learning FEBuilder, and now I feel pretty comfortable with it, though there is always more to learn. I have always had a passion for game development and have worked on my own games in Gamemaker as well.
Progress/Plans
As of now, I estimate that Elden Emblem is 60-70% complete, and I figured that Morgott would be a good place to stop for now, make it public and see if I could get some feedback. I plan to hopefully finish the rest of it someday. For mandatory content, I still need to add the Mountaintop of the Giants, the Fire Giant, Crumbling Farum Azula, Maliketh, and then the boss rush at the end. I plan to balance those areas around the expectation of having a team of units who are level 20 with competent builds. The level cap will have been reached for these areas, but rune gain on these maps will likely increase so that you can continue leveling up in a sense. Major areas that could potentially be added as optional content are Nokron, Nokstella, Mt. Gelmir, the Volcano Manor, and maybe the Consecrated Snowfields and the Haligtree. Also, I just remembered, the Maiden’s Blood… It doesn’t do anything currently, but it might do something important in the future. I don’t know what exactly, but possibly to fight the real Mohg? It sells for hella runes though…