Play as a bunch of peasant rebels in way over their heads
Overcome superior foes with status effects, buffs, debuffs and AoEs
An excessive variety of weapons and items
Everyone comes with canto+/shove for quick smash and grab
Inspired by rebellions in ancient China, not a good time to be alive
My ego has been excessively inflated by this being ranked first in the MARTH contest,
though I still think Trader Raiders is more deserving for being extremely awesome.
All credits in the folder.
Shoutout to Vesly and Retina for helping me with technical issues, and to Bpat, Loog, Kyrads. Roze
and TorT for playtesting to refine the hack.
Roze made several player portraits (for a 1 chapter hack!), absolute legend.
Thanks to everyone for participating in MARTH, I had a lot of fun going through every public entry.
If there’s every another one, I am totally up for judging (I am too insecure to hand out any bad scores.)
Beat this hack, it was pretty easy. Honestly, it’s Canto+ the breaks the hack, as it allows for efficient hit and run tactics to push objective quickly. Lei can easily run in, OHKO a signalman then canto to safety.
The Lantern is also very useful, since you can combo this with the Armor and easily bait in several at once.
I rarely ever resorted to using the consumable at all. Clever baiting and 2-range barrages meant that you rarely actually needed to cripple an enemy to kill them; simply swarming them and not getting countered was enough.
As a result of that, I’d honestly say I probably could have said screw the cutscene and gotten at least part of the party out through the entrance. Consumables are busted and can effectively cripple prepromotes without much issue.
I don’t think the auto save feature is installed.
If you do install it additionally, the following patch is recommended.
NAME.en=Auto save function vesly's custom(with SkillSystems/EMS)
INFO.en=When resuming from an interruption, add a setting that can be returned at the beginning of the turn, not the last action.\r\nThis patch rewinds one turn time, like Do-Over(Turnwheel, Divine Pulse).\r\nThe original version allows players to switch by hijacking terrain options, but this version doesn't.\r\nJust install this patch and it will take effect.\r\nit so it'll only autosave at the start of your turn if you have the same number (or more) units as you did last turn. This way if a player is late to reset, they can still resume to the previous turn.\r\nThis uses a byte in ram. I've made the default 0x202bd33 which is padding in gChapterData.
AUTHOR=7743,aera,FE8 Girls , Vesly https://feuniverse.us/t/veslys-asm/12011/95
That was pretty dumb, I guess I was going to install it and somehow forgot since I wasn’t playtesting around using auto save. It should be properly installed now.
The speed up animations hack is a bit buggy: it also speeds up the battle quotes and makes them difficult to read.
Changed the button to same as open inventory, which shouldn’t cause the speeding up of battle quotes when pressed.
The script could have done with another proofread: there were several typos and the grammar was a bit clunky at times
Went through that new round of proofreading, fixed a few typos/grammar issues but there is definitely more I am sure.
it’s really hard to know how the houses becoming ruins affects the map movement.
Found this to be annoying too, alternatives of making ruins either cost 1 (faster map travel) or impassable (prevent opening up enemy attacks) could trick a player as well, so I guess leaving it be might be least harmful.
Most importantly change of all, (and I’m sure you all really care about this) made ‘armor’ and ‘armour’ spellings consistent. I wanted ‘armour’ but due to ‘suit of armour’ not fitting without narrow text, settled for the alternative.
The gameplay here in the hack has already been gushed over some, so I gotta say, I really admired the story that was involved in it. I’m a sucker for dialogue, so I didn’t mind the long opening cutscene, and it really did paint the rebels’ hopeless situation in such an intriguing light. I wanted to see their last struggle, their closing act.
Spoilers!
The dialogue throughout the chapter was immensely engaging as well, being able to paint the harsh, strict setting that the rebels found themselves with-- of course, based off of Ancient China. Corruption, a divine ruler with an iron fist rule which spares no one under the chain of command…and especially the situation of the commonfolk. It really resonated with me, seeing all of that thrown into light as I took back the fort, and it made playing the hack all the more worthwhile. Especially that ending cutscene, watching the rebellion fizzle out with only a small hurrah, and Shen Lei having death as a mercy…damn.
That final scroll of text at the end…that really hit me. The struggles of the characters we saw for only a chapter, yet we got to deeply understand their surrounding circumstances and desperations? A mere footnote in history…just as the rebels had feared.
Heartbreaking to hear, and makes me yearn for these guys, wishing their rebellion could be salvaged, or hell, if Shao Yu could’ve been able to get her last wish out…but ah, that’s the point of bad ending stories, isn’t it? No hope on the horizon. Amazing how much flavor you could put into one chapter-- wonderfully done, really.
oh shit i love the inspiration for this hack! the peasant rebellions of china were always interesting to me even if they never succeeded lol
excited to try the hack out!
This was a whole lot of fun! All the interesting ways you have to get an advantage against the enemies were really cool to play around with, I’d love to see an LTC of this.
The story was pretty amazing too, I especially love the little blurb at the end of what was recorded in history, it really put the whole thing into perspective.
All in all, this definitely deserved the MARTH win, congratulations!
I’ll still play it