Fundamentally, magic is probably pretty terrifying to the average civilian. You don’t understand it, but it can do any number of horrific things to you. Given a powerful enough sorcerer, it becomes far too trivial for one person to negatively impact the life of an entire town, or worse. Maybe it’s for the best if magic simply… didn’t exist. Life would be safer, fairer, more predictable. Does that not sound better for everyone involved?
Faces of a Stranger is a new, simplistically experimental hack I’m working on. What’s here is fully written, with distinctive music and some distinct systems that still preserve the basis of why I love this series.
Feature Overview
9 Chapters, covering the entire first “Act” of the game.
19 Playable Characters, carefully balanced to all feel distinct without need for skills, personal weapons, or personal classes.
Weapon Design Inspired by TRS, FE6, and FE3, primarily focused on making weapon types feel meaningfully distinct through stats, tools, and price.
2 New Weapon Types, in place of the typical magic types. Eschew tomes in favor of Knives and Bombs (the latter heavily inspired by Shackled Power’s Bombs, just with a dedicated bomb rank.)
Medicine instead of Staves, which brings a few mechanical differences. Medicine heals for set amounts instead of scaling off of Power, and non-healing medicine focuses more on buffing.
A ton of custom ports, featuring a lot of songs outside the realm of videogames. Every chapter has its own player phase theme to keep things fresh.
7 fully custom songs, including some you may recognize from my past projects!
A very special trainee, gifted with exceptional power.
Gameplay
By default, most classes in this game have two weapon types. A small handful of classes are left with only one weapon type and instead compensated with higher base movement.
Classes also no longer get additional weapon types on promotion. Their existing ranks are still improved, and every class still receives +1 Mov.
In general, this increases individual unit flexibility and unit identity in a fun way, especially since weapon stats have been tweaked such that each weapon type leans further into its strengths. Note: everything here also applies to enemies.
Magic is absent from the standard weapon type list, and its role has been split into Knives and Bombs. Knives get universal 1-2 range, while Bombs get to target Res. Both weapon types are a bit more limited in options than their standard contemporaries.
Story
Alaine is a hunter from the Estranei countryside who travels to the capital to attend the country’s premier knight academy.
Her training very quickly becomes anything but standard, when a routine march leads her to Silt, a mystery man with abilities that go against possibility. When those same abilities get him into trouble, Alaine tries to help him. Initially only hoping to learn more about his situation, Alaine soon uncovers a deeper truth about the world, one she may be unprepared to deal with…
this is very fun and I really recommend people trying it. archer described it as “the rebirth of mario 64 ds” to me and when I playtested I couldn’t believe the vibes were just like that. can’t wait until it’s finished, it will be a good addition to the archerverse!
This hack’s goated, your honor. Really fun unit and weapon design, great map flow, and if you play this muted you’re missing out on one of the best and most unique hack soundtracks around. Highly recommend. Another ArcherBias banger.
Incredibly tight, fun gameplay. Despite not having skillsys, this hack just crafts such cool scenarios through amazing weapon design and unique and memorable map objectives. This plus the amazing music is just gonna keep me coming back for more.
When the hack is awesome. You’ve seen archers design discussions,( if you haven’t you should read them) he knows his stuff. When it comes to the miniscule details and tweaks that make a hack click archer has his finger on the pulse. No stranger(heh) to experimentation Faces builds upon the foundation of traditional FE gameplay and injects it with a fundamentally different class system and a plethora of tools at yours and the enemies disposal. Combine this with one of the best musicians in the sphere unrestrained and you have Faces of a Stranger. A fun AF hack that as lowres aptly put it has me coming back for more.
Hack’s good. Shoutouts to Ballister and Ferris for being awesome, but in general, this hack does unique things with unit identity that you won’t find in a lot of other ones. Def recommend trying it out.
Slight fixes uploaded just now. Draven’s promoted class now has promoted Exp gain, and the C9 village can now properly be destroyed by the Dread Talon Thief.
Alright, so first off, I love it. Second, can Ballister have a little more? I mean, his main problem is that he’s fast and starts off with great weapons, but… then he has the massive problem of having low power, which is kinda odd considering he’s been injected with magic for who-knows-how-long. This would be fine if his magic was low but his strength was decent, but since those stats are shared as power, it’s just really odd to me, especially given that he’s designed to have no luck at all.
Eternally low power is an intended weakness of Ballister’s. I’m not big on how trainees sometimes feel like they grow into massive unstoppable statballs, so I wanted to try something different. I’ve also seen a lot of players get some good value out of his oddball kit!
Yeah I retract my “Ballister needs more” statement. He’s been amazing. I will say not being able to buy tomes hurts both him and Silt. Instead, I think the units who may need more are actually Alaine and Zorei. They are both strangely weak. Zorei it makes sense kinda, because she’s a theif, but Alaine is essentially a lord, which is why her low strength is really confusing. Comparitively, Scramblit can do exactly what Alaine does, but she can also heal. Zorei is a strange case, since she’s a theif, so I don’t think she really needs more strength (maybe a little bit), but rather more hp and skill. You can’t really put her in many situations because she’s basically made of paper, so could she have more hp or at least more skill?
Alaine’s absolutely fine where she is. Compared to Scramblit, Alaine has a pretty significant advantage in Skill and Con, and will usually be ahead on speed. All of these things allow her to more easily use stronger weapons like Steel Bow to make up her strength deficit, where Scramblit suffers from shakier accuracy and frequently loses her ability to double when picking up a heavier bow. Scramblit also has 1 less point of movement than Alaine, and the chapters before she joins usually put Alaine in the lead on bow rank, allowing Alaine to access the Longbow before Scramblit can. Even an Alaine that levels poorly on Strength can still pick up kills just fine with her prf Fletch Bow – don’t be afraid to use it when needed – while one that gets a few Strength levels can quickly become a Steel Bow killing machine who easily beats out Scramblit’s accuracy and mobility. And obviously, Alaine will always be deployed, she doesn’t have to compete for slots on your team – even if Scramblit ends up being better, you’re inherently deploying both at that point and there’s plenty of bows to go around.
As for Zorei, she’s definitely one of the weaker units in the cast, especially on a blind run. She’ll generally find herself benched in chapter 7 and probably not brought back, since Scramblit can fill your thief needs past chapter 6. But there is something of a trick to making Zorei work if you know to plan for it: Super Bomb. The difference between ignoring Def and hitting Res is pretty negligible here, most enemy types have 0 or near-0 Res anyway. Super Bomb has 10 might, twice that of a Steel Knife, and Zorei’s fast enough to double with it if she gets a few speed levels (in which she has an incredibly high growth). She starts at E-and-a-half in bomb rank, and is free to deploy through chapter 5 and usually forces her way into chapter 6 for fog vision and stealing the Secret Book, so she has plenty of time to get in the 8 rounds of Basic Bomb combat she needs to hit D by the time she’s facing deployment competition – you can even get her there in time to take Charsiu’s Super Bomb in chapter 6 preps, since he can still do what he does just fine with the Basic Bomb. From there, she doesn’t need many strength levels to kill stuff so long as she doubles – quite a few enemy types in chapters 7 and 8 don’t need her to level strength at all.
That said, as the guy who figured out and tested this Zorei strategy, I have discussed some very minor buffs with Archer that may or may not be slated for a future version: namely, we discussed giving Zorei +1 Con so she only needs 2 speed levels to double chapter 7’s Mercenaries with Super Bomb, and we discussed nerfing generic Brigands’ Res base by 1 so she only needs one Strength level to kill the ones in chapters 6 and 7 with Super Bomb. She doesn’t actually need much else besides the foresight to build her bomb rank to make her into a solid unit, it’s just something you need to think of to do, and if you didn’t this run, that’s fine, you can bench her once she’s done her job and try her out some other time if you ever give the game another playthrough.
anyway play the hack peeps, it’s genuinely up there as one of my favourites due to the really tight design and playing with basics to keep a very unique and fun experience throughout.
This hack’s really fun. It’s cool how varied all the characters are, even without the typical skills system. Bombs and knives were interesting to play around with. Alaine kinda fell off towards the end with the abundance of other bow users, but she at the very least had her prf bow and the longbow.
Are you sure she “can’t confront”? Being able to get a consistent 20~ damage vs all enemies, usually also doubling, made her stupidly good. Shown above, her easily killing the boss of chapter eight.
I did it as a joke, but genuinely liked that there was a secret for killing Bailey with the wyvern (even though he took Sarya’s Hunter’s Mark with him…). Makes me wonder what other secrets I may have missed.
Issues?
Chapter five’s pacing felt kinda weird. There’s nothing to really push you forward, and the Hoplon Guard even encourages you to camp the start so you can steal it.
More generally, I was caught off guard by some of the reinforcements, most notably the archer & soldier squad in chapter eight, which ended up with Orland dying to save Zorei. This group is especially evil because of the seemingly safe to steal energy ring. I think if there were a few instances of: “Oh, some guys are going to arrive from X location”, it would feel a lot fairer.
Also, the music is as good as you expect. It’s an Archerbias hack though, so that’s a given.
I honestly didn’t think a single person would get that event. Thanks for proving me wrong! And yeah, I had Kierel take any items you gave him. It’s a bit of a “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” type of deal. I figured the type of player who’d do this at all would be willing to deal with some playful sabotage.
Chapter 5/8
The Iron Rune in chapter 5 was not meant to be stolen, hence why that enemy’s speed is so high. I’ll remove it in the future. In general, that Sarya seems very overleveled, and if I had to guess, that boss might be part of it? I kinda threw those back guys in without thinking, so this one’s on me, haha
Chapter 8’s fucked up house guys are mean, yeah. I put them in knowing that they were mean, too. They’re Hard Mode Exclusive, and I thought they’d be an interesting addition, but I have seen a few complaints about them feeling bullshit. I figured that Bowmen and Soldiers are easy to kill, but then again, I am the dev. I’ll keep it on my radar.
In all fairness, I did feed Sarya most of the boss kills (including the Experiment), the angelic robe and energy ring. My next highest level unit was Ferris, at level 11.
