DOWNLOAD - patch to FE7
Map by GenericCivilian3
Portraits by Coby (mostly)
Everything else by me
TL;DR: Back when Ghast was hosting MAFC I made this submission for a potential MAFC 4. It is a fourth wall-breaking sequel to my MAFC 3 submission, The Burdened Advance, that attempts to fix the concept and make it more fun. Now that Alusq seems to have appropriated MAFC and it’s doubtful Ghast will do another one, I figured I might as well release this. Warning, this hack is ragefest-level difficult.
That’s pretty much all the essential information if you just wanna play it. Now for a longer explanation.
Back in October of 2016 (!), Coby (spriter who’s not really in the community anymore) and I decided to enter the third edition of Ghast’s Make a Fun Chapter contest. If you’re confused by that, Ghast was the one who originally started the MAFC series on SF, and only recently was it taken over by Alusq after a long hiatus.
Anyway, our submission, The Burdened Advance, came in last place. When we made it, we had this concept in mind of a powerful unit that had 0 movement that you would have to place in specific areas to progress. The result was… unfun, to put it bluntly. In the video Ghast is trying very hard to hide his boredom. And it didn’t help that the difficulty was more akin to a ragefest submission than previous MAFC submissions.
The whole thing was pretty embarrassing for me and Coby, and honestly I think it contributed a little to him leaving the community, which I feel bad about. But at the time, it only served to make me more determined. I immediately started work on this hack (keep in mind this was back in early 2017), revising the concept to make it challenging in a fun way rather than a repetitive slog. I also removed a lot of the dumb low-effort humor. I made all these changes using The Burdened Advance as a base ROM, so you could say that this is basically what that hack should have been.
I’m honestly kind of amazed at the drive I had to make this hack back then. The MAFC 3 video for The Burdened Advance was uploaded on February 28, 2017, and by March 19th I already had this hack ready to go, aside from a few minor changes. All that was left was for Ghast to announce MAFC 4, which seemed like a sure thing in those days. There were rumors that he’d host a new MAFC every spring and fall.
Fall of 2017 came, no word on MAFC 4 at all. Then on February 16, 2018, Ghast posted this in the FEU discord:
And that was the last we ever heard from Ghast about MAFC.
Now to be clear I don’t hold it against Ghast at all. It’s my fault in the first place for prematurely working on a submission for a contest that hadn’t even been announced. On top of that, at the time I’m sure growing his Youtube channel was the priority and hacking contests just don’t have the same traction that other content has. I understand completely and if you’re reading this Ghast I hope you don’t take this as a personal attack.
I also wanna say that I’m so glad the new MAFC is happening. I never would have thought a contest in this community would have such a massive turnout. Anyway if you read this far, thank you and I hope you enjoy the hack.