[FE8] [COMPLETE] Call of the Armor v1 (20 chapters + 3 Character Selection Interludes) + Reverse Recruitment Patch (13-Apr-22)

[tbone]

Finally got around to playing this hack. I won’t write up a detailed review since it seems like this project was a one and done kinda thing. Overall, I was pretty impressed what a group of ppl in a small amount of time were able to put together.

For a vanilla/minimalist hack, the maps and balancing were very strong. I thought the first few chapters were a little slow cause my team was very weak and felt I kind needed to turtle a bit more than I’d like, but by chapter 4 or 5, I felt like I was hitting my stride and was really fun until the endgame. But all fire emblem endgames end on a whimper in my opinion so that’s just normal FE.

A few standouts for me were:

Memorable Chapters Summary

An early/midgame chapter (can’t remember the number) where you have the choice to recruit a dark mage or a wyvern lord. When i first saw that map, I was shaking. Lots of enemies, so much loot, boss swordmaster and my units were trash. I was like “okay this is where I drop the hack”. But i started playing it and realized many units don’t move and the chests were actually obtainable by other means, and it went super well. Felt very proud of myself. Very fun and fair in the end.

Chapter 13 (the one where you can split several ways and you need to really push to get all the loot and get the boots/swiftsole off the boss) was a highlight for me.

All the maps were very decent until the last few chapters I’d say:

Late game chapters Summary

Chapter 18 felt very gimmicky to me, I was confused about all the reinforcements, traps, shifting walls and NPC helpers. I just was overwhelmed by everything, didn’t know how to adapt to anything then all of a sudden it opened up and the bosses rushed me and it was over. Maybe a non-blind playthrough is better cause you know what to expect. I’d just either cut down on all the things going on or telegraph it more clearly.

Chapter 19 was fun, albeit long/slogy. Was cool to have a late game boat map. Felt pretty epic. Final map was fair as well, nothing to complain about.

Overall, very fun hack. All maps were super well designed and I’m just nitpicking overall. Story was fun, light hearted. I enjoyed the humour and not taking itself too seriously. I like that the story aspects were shorter initially. Nice and quick, to the point.

I never played a game with chapter interludes where you have a choice between different units. What a smart way to increase replay-ability, adapt to whatever units you’ve lost and encourage iron-manning. I’ll definitely be revisiting this hack in the future. Hope it gets some love to polish the UI issues. I think it deserves it.

Good job team distant roads!

[Clarenz]

Is Yen Taje recruitable?

[Pandan]

No. You do get Kilian in ch2 at least.

[retrohacknerd]

After playing Bells of Byelen I had to give this hack a try. It’s really great.

I do miss having skills, the game could really use the item combine feature, I wish there was a 200 item convoy, and I kind of got lost in the details of the story a little bit (as in, I am not 100% sure of what’s going on), but that’s also because I play FE for the gameplay and tend to skim the text or skip it lol.

But those are really nitpicks. The units are fun and interesting and I appreciated that some of the maps were genuinely easy. I kind of get fatigued late game in some of these hacks as the maps get really large and the missions get really difficult.

High quality game for sure!

[RRS_KAI]

Thank you, Team Distant Roads. I finished CotA in about 4 months with 29 in-game hours and 203 turns.

The Good

• Varied map objectives
• Classic gameplay
• No skills
• Good unit diversity
• Funky narrative
• Knights and the Trainees get 5 move
• Archers
• No early game Cavaliers
• Lord on healing duty

Spoiler: A certain character

I had an idea of making a Pre-promote Jaegan with bad growth rates who gets a second promotion just to be relevant for longer. I looked at Killian’s description and thought he would fit the bill. Then I got to the map, and I was in awe when I saw that it actually happened.

The Not So Good

Can be ignored because I am spoiled by VQ

• Master Seals are slightly scarce, I had to buy 4 worth 10,000 gold.
• Lack of dark tomes. It’s Flux and Nosferatu for 80% of the game. Would like to see one more mid-game option.
• I only warp-skipped Ch.18 because I was tired. I did get the W.Exp boost.
• Split promotions are untouched, which means that some classes are strictly inferior.
• Weapon ranks are low because promotions don’t give much. Conversely, this means that pre-promotes are even more valuable.

I would like to see these in an update

• Increase secondary weapon ranks to D (better if C) and give the Sniper bonus to Crit.
• Split promotions increase replayability, so if you ever update, please try balancing.
• Item convey-combine would help with inventory management.

Split Promotions Problems

• Ranger with +3 Con vs Sniper with no Crit bonus
• Wyvern Knight with +4 Con vs Falcoknight with E swords
• Hero with C Swords vs Warrior with E Bows
• Mage Knight with +3 Con vs Sage with D Light
• Summoner > Druid but both get E Staff
• Great Knights have 6 move
• Generals with 5 move, E Axes, and E Swords

My final units

[knabepicer]

Sequel is out

Play it I think it’s good:

[FE8] Tales of Kotor [COMPLETE]

[tales of kotor-7] Download Link Hello everyone, and welcome to Tales of Kotor, the long awaited sequel to Call of the Armor! This FE8 romhack is in an anthology style format, with 12 different tales all featuring different characters, and can be played in (mostly) any order. Like CotA, this hack was made in a telephone style by different creators making different tales.

Story

A certain soul has found themselves in a blisteringly hot cave, with only an eager serpentine storyteller for company…

[Pandan]

epic hack linked above

[Kliss88]

Besides this and Bells, are there any other hacks with those Tear Ring Saga style recruitment chapters?

[Telos]

Beat Call of the Armor at last. Wooooo!
In the end, I would say that this was honestly quite fun.

Endgame Team

(This is Excluding the units that joined at Endgame because they didn’t level up).

Except for exactly Venus and Alair; all of them were promoted at level 20. These stats are all natural; no statboosters were used in the making of these units.

Honorable mention goes to Floor, who was not deployed for the final chapter due to space.

[knabepicer]

With help from @SubwayBossEmmett the Reverse Recruitment patch has been updated! Many errors have been fixed, and units have been rescaled generally assuming level 15 promos instead of 20, as well as other tweaks to make the game slightly more balanced.

cota rr.zip

[ATHATH]

Bug report:
Soma’s spirit hammer prf is not effective vs. mage knights, who wield anima magic. It’s effective against druids, who wield anima magic as a secondary magic type, so I assume that this is just an oversight.
I’d post an image of it here, but, uh, I can’t yet, since my account is too young.

[knabepicer]

The spirit hammer is supposed to be effective against all magic users.

[ATHATH]

Even, say, bishops, who don’t use anima?

[knabepicer]

Correct. It appears the issue with mage knights is that it’s only set to be effective against female mage knights.

[ATHATH]

The removal of proc skills should probably also be added to the list of changes from vanilla fe8, especially since that can affect which classes you decide to send units into (e.g. Vectar).

[ATHATH]

2 crash reports:

1. If Killian receives his Prf in Ch. 10 and checks his inventory before ending his turn, the game will crash once his turn ends. This might be tied to using the B button to end his turn instead of clicking Wait? I’m unsure.
2. Venus’s talk convo in Ch. 19 consistently crashes the game if she accepts her Prf. I thankfully savestated right before doing it, so I was able to do some testing. Specifically, the crash happens after the message saying she’s received her Prf disappears. If she says “No” instead of “Yes”, the game continues as normal, but she doesn’t get her cool Prf and special thing. Either way, you don’t get the fili shield that the boss is supposed to drop (unless you steal it beforehand), which is a bit lame.

I’m… very curious as to how 2. got past playtesting, seeing as how it’s a pretty easy convo to get and the cool and interesting option crashes the game every time you select it.

My emulator is mGBA, if that’s relevant.

[ATHATH]

I have a save file from right before the Venus crash that I can send to you on Discord upon request, but I can’t upload it here.

My Venus was unpromoted, which could be a condition for the crash. Pushwall didn’t get the crash, and his Venus was promoted.

EDIT: Uh, an additional bug report: Vectar’s ending gives him the correct title of “Old Swordsman”, but uses the description from Dozla’s ending in vanilla fe8.

EDIT 2: Talking to Sovnya with Ikech in ch. 17 plays Geirhardt’s interlude 1 dialogue, complete with the yes/no choice about whether or not to recruit him. I haven’t checked to see whether or not saying “yes” silently adds him to your roster or if it does nothing.

This is clearly further proof that nobody uses Ikech. /j

[AzureHinko]

I have finished this hack at last. Overall it was a nice experience, the story was obviously a bit messy due to the nature of the project, at times I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to take things seriously or not which I personally didn’t like. Daisy’s chapter in particular was kind of ridiculous because I didn’t understand a thing and her getting a PRF named “Croissant” was certainly something that happened. However, there were many characters I liked and the majority of maps were entertaining to play. Difficulty seemed fine until chapter 17 or 18 were I really struggled. The amount of enemies and gimmicks was a bit over the top, but I managed to complete it in the end.

MPV’s were Geirhart, Floor and Fernandez. Geirhart in particular was a joy to use as a Berserker. Also his backstory was pretty much awesome.

Overall I liked this hack, so thanks to the team! I’ll go play the sequel soon

[Archer]

Hey there. I’m pretty new to the FE romhacking scene, having only played two so far and one of them being Vision Quest which was great. Associated links brought me to your other romhacks so I thought I’d try this one out, but I’ve run into an issue very quickly. I’ve tried both VGA and mGBA buit I run into the following issue on both.

About every 1-2 minutes, the game will lock up. Unit sprite animations still sway around, but the game stops responding and the music hitches and for all purposes becomes softlocked. Restarting the rom and resuming chapter fixes it, but only for another minute or two. I’ve made it to chapter 3 hoping it might work itself out, but nothing so far. It doesn’t seem to happen during intermissions, NPC conversations or supports, only when actively scrolling around the map or entering battle. Save stating seconds before a softlock will always lead to that softlock.

I made an account just to reach out, since I keyword searched the thread to see if anyone had similar issues and couldn’t find anything. This might just be an amateur mistake on my part but I’ve never run into anything like this before and browsing around I can’t find anyone reporting similar issues. So far it’s only happened with this rom. I really like the concept of telephone FE and like the protagonist so I’m hoping it’s just a setting I’ve missed.

[knabepicer]

I’ve never heard of such an issue.