[FE8] [Complete] Blessed Heart v1.1 (1/22/2023 -- Reverse Recruitment Patch Released!)

What’s all the fuss about? What is so special about this Hack to create this frantic anticipation? :face_with_monocle:

Heh… it would be easier to list… What isn’t… you’d never understand…

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Check the OP. Release date is set for the 30th.

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Impatience prevails! Thanks for the release date, shark. And sorry for pestering you about it, I’m just… well, impatient :stuck_out_tongue:

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The 30th has arrived.

I shall await ever more impatiently. Make haste, for i feel I shall soon lose my temper.

And, congrats on the release in advance !

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Blessed Heart v1.0 has been released!

You can download the patch here, or scroll up to the original post.
The OP contains game resources, credits, and a discord link.

It’s been a long journey – and I want to deeply thank everyone who guided me to the finish line.

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Congrats on the release, Shark! Can’t wait to see what you’ve been cooking up for all this time ^.^

After waiting so patiently for the relase of this ROM Hack im so glad that is finally out!!Thank you Shark and everybody involved in this project for putting so much dedication your work is truly apreciated!!

Hey, I’ve played the first few chapters of the hack. Overall, things flow pretty nicely from turn to turn, without too many particularly empty or awkward moments. I’m including my thoughts on each of the chapters (and the units that join within them) in drop-downs below;

Prologue

I’m not a huuuge fan of low-unit prologues, but it isn’t a huge deal. The cavalier charge was actually pretty difficult to deal with in a way that felt safe, since I didn’t actually have the damage in range to kill it without risking the mage overlap killing me back, so I ended up having to pull back for a turn which felt weird. Especially seeing as Linne is just chilling in the house for the whole chapter, I don’t think it’d be a huge loss for her to join here so that you have a way to punch through the cav’s defense stat and more units to play with overall? Ultimately inoffensive.

Aerin has pretty stellar growths and the estoc is real strong, but I was having issues where she just wasn’t hitting her speed growth despite how high it was, leading to her losing the ability to one round brigands and fighters, which was especially important on a later map.

Sera, by contrast, hit her growths pretty hard and was generally quite strong. Not enough strength to one round, but very reliably doubling enemies with a lot of versatility due to her range.

Callahan is great, very reliable chunky damage with a big HP pool. I don’t know how relevant he’ll be long-term with how sky-high some of my units’ growths are, but for now he’s quite strong.

Chapter 1

This one’s a bit odd, because it has a huge playspace but then you only really use the bottom left corner for the whole thing. Enemies charge you, mostly stopping just outside your range or barely managing to attack you, and you kill them in the cluster of woods until the boss shows up, which happens pretty early on. The back reinforcements didn’t really feel like they substantially altered my approach to the map, either – they could have just as easily been on the map from the start and coming at me from the front and I probably would’ve still handled the turn almost the same way.

Linne is very very strong. 75 magic is cap-ramming, and mine hit her defense growth twice in a row. 45 speed is also quite respectable, though her base is certainly not super impressive.

Clement is a healer, and besides being shockingly bulky, he’s pretty typical in how he fulfills this role.

Chapter 2

This map is waaay longer than the others! Had to fan my units all across the map to do things in a timely fashion. That aside, I liked this one; things felt like they flowed well, and I usually had leeway to make some more aggressive plays to speed things up, like opening the door to the chest room early and using shove strats to get Callahan in range to help manage the situation there. However, this was the chapter where Aerin got stuck at 9 speed and was no longer capable of one rounding the fighters and brigands, making the left hand side a lot dicier. Mercenaries are substantially stronger than other enemies, similar to that prologue cavalier, so I often had to make some unintuitive moves to try to survive everything, like choking the door at WTD or with a squishy mage due to how limited my options were. Having Callahan on that side might have made it easier, but also probably would’ve had the new units pinned down for much longer.

Wilbert has some impressive bulk, but I haven’t found him to be particularly useful so far. Especially with how axe heavy the following map is, and how I’m rarely under enough pressure that I feel like I particularly need a super tanky guy to help hold down the fort, his beefy defense has felt pretty unnecessary and I find myself struggling to find reason to invest any kills into him beyond the ones most necessary.

Crow has some scary growths, and I can see that huge luck growth leading to some very cheeky dodgetank strats in the midgame. His speed is high enough that he was actually outclassing the lord in offensive power, which feels definitely unintended.

Chapter 3

Axe units. This is a good chapter for Ashe to show off with the Shield Ring, cleanly one rounding the steel bow archers and being able to tank the myrms and chunk the brigands. Aerin’s speed woes were critical on this chapter; I sent her and Crow to secure the bottom village, and they very nearly failed due to an unlucky hit on Aerin and her inability to double any of them. She and Crow could combine for a kill, but with the healer needed elsewhere, it got dicey a few times. Otherwise, the chapter flowed pretty well – I bought a bunch of handaxes and javelins from the armory, and a thunder + mend + heal from the vendor with the rest of my cash.

Ashe seems very reliable, though I suppose it depends on how much she hits her growths relative to her more jacked peers whether she stays that way or not. For now, I’ve loaded her down with both rings to augment her stats, and she’s quite strong.

Farran seems awesome, but he joins too late to really show off on his join map beyond being able to survive a lot of hits on a gate as a green unit. He has pretty impressive stats, though – very obvious skill book fodder if I’ve ever seen any.

Chapter 4

I played this map for FEE3, but I didn’t give very in-depth thoughts at the time as I wasn’t playing the chapter from that perspective. Now; I really dislike being made to bench exactly 1 unit. It feels really bad, especially when the deploy count is already pretty low as is at 8, and especially especially when one of my new units only just showed up at the end of the last chapter and hasn’t had a chance to see any gameplay. It feels really bad to have to bench only one guy : /

A hero crest this early seems pretty volatile; while promoting Callahan instantly is an option, if not seemingly its intended purpose, I’m willing to bet that, with their growths so high, investing heavily into one of the other hero crest recipients to have them ready to promote crest within the next couple chapters could allow that unit to snowball quite hard.

Lydia’s spawn feels weird, bc she isn’t actually very good at killing any of the enemies down there despite her WTA. She takes three rounds to kill the sword merc, and two to kill the pirate; if the pirate hits, she’s suddenly at a super dicey amount of HP, so she actually has to play really safe. It ends up being a really unflattering first impression of the unit; she struggles to kill a bunch of units that she should be especially good against, and does so for most of the map. With her bases so high and with the growths to back them up, she seems like she’s poised to be an extremely strong unit, but with how low unit deploy is, I can see a lot of people benching her purely off her performance in that bottom left corner of the map.

Marina having 6 move is interesting, and her offenses are pretty strong right out the gate, but this is another “joins at the end of a chapter when it’s basically over” unit where I didn’t really get to see how strong she was before the chapter ended.

Overall

I don’t know what changes have been made to the game in terms of class bases/growths or weapon stats, but I’ve definitely noticed that the various vanilla holdovers (enemy cavs and mercs being weirdly strong, steel weapons being kinda bad, etc) are rearing their heads in the same ways they do in the base game, making those units uniquely difficult to kill and thus skewing things pretty heavily. Fighters are kinda huge wimps, so it feels extremely odd to watch Aerin go from easily one rounding fighters with a 15x2 to struggling to deal more than 6 or 7 damage to a sword-wielding cav.

1-2 range bows as a universal thing is a change I’m not huge on, as it turns them as an enemy threat into “guy with a particularly big handaxe” and as a playable unit into “guy with nearly unlimited handaxe uses,” and given the ways that handaxes and javelins can warp gameplay, I don’t know how well I think it works.

Unit con seems suuuuper low across the board. Most of my units are weighed down significantly by weapons like the armourslayer because their cons have been tuned to be exactly high enough to wield irons; Marina, a speed unit, joins with a weapon that weighs her down by 2; enemy archers, with steel bows equipped, have such pitiful speed that they basically die for free; the only unit in my entire army that can wield a steel without being weighed down is Callahan. This is going to make iron weapons disproportionately strong unless enemy speed growths are so low that I can freely ignore the speed penalties; I know alloy weapons exist, but at this stage without any knowledge of how common those will be long term, it makes a lot of my units look pretty awful. Lydia, in particular, gets weighed down even by an iron lance, which just feels awful from a player standpoint even if it might make sense from a designer standpoint due to her promotion options and her mount.

Having a good time so far, will have to play more later – I’ll make a new post with any further thoughts once I get there.

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Congrats on the release :tada::tada::tada:
Also can we have paired endings guide?

Sera discription of Ranger is only bow. is this intentional for this hack? no
sword?

Crow cannot steal Lockpicks in chapter 2, bug?

Compare Crow’s speed to the enemy thieves’.

Finished my playthrough, and had a lot of fun! The game’s relatively short length (only 23 chapters) is great for gameplay pacing. I especially loved the whole process of unlocking 19x, since it was really intuitive and rewarding. I will say that the game’s fast pace did harm the story somewhat, since a lot of ideas aren’t developed as much as they could’ve been (in particular, Aerin’s aggressive tendencies and her personal feelings on how the war may have changed her), but the writing that was there was solid.

Lastly, I want to bring special mention to Otto. I did not expect much from this little guy, but he turned into my favorite unit, even if he wasn’t my strongest one. He was just so much fun to use, and he deservedly got the final boss kill. Otto for life!

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Created a fully fledged supports guide and added it to the resources section in the OP. Hopefully this helps.

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Jesus Christ your so fast!

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Thank you Sir Shark.

I’m thinking about giving this a try later.

Out of curiosity, is there a reason the resources are Dropbox links to Google Doc files rather than regular Google Doc sharing links? I’ve never seen Google Docs shared in this manner before and it feels a little weird.

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I was just putting everything in one place for supposed convenience, and I didn’t realize that sharing it would end up being janky for others to open up and view.

If it helps any, what I do for each of my Google docs is copy and paste each sharing link individually. These links can be set to allow viewers to only view, add comments, or edit (you probably only want viewing).

Hey Shark -

Congrats on release. I played the first few chapters tonight on hard. Overall I appreciate the simplicity of the hack, albeit at times it felt a little too easy. I’m guessing there will be more ramp up over time.

Few quick things to note - The top right village in ch4(?) (the FEE3 one) doesn’t work properly, the brigand cannot destroy it. Looks like an eventing issue?

I’d also add that universal 1-2 range bows takes some getting used to and makes bows better than most weapon types by virtue of their flexibility. Curious how this will work out long term, but immediately I can’t imagine not going Warrior for all promos that get it because of how useful bows are.

Lastly, I’d encourage you to add some new music and a custom stat screen to help spice things up - the game has nice visual polish w/ mugs and palettes already and think a few extra touch ups here would go a long way in helping improve the overall aesthetic and make the game look more distinct.

Congrats again on release and I’ll share more detailed feedback if/when I keep going.

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