Holy heck, this is epic!! Thanks for doing this, feels super legit.
I’ll be honest that I thought Festan in the background was Kelik at first, but the armor made me realize pretty quickly who it was lol.
Great job!! Do you mind if I put this in the OP?
Yes, this is correct. The idea was that it would present a tradeoff to early promo. (ie do I want stats now or do I want to hold off til level 15?)
At the time, I was concerned the game would be too easy early on if you early promo’d because of the big promo gains, and then the late game would be too hard, because you missed out on early levels. In retrospect, I should’ve worried less about this and instead lower promo gains across the board and remove the class skill to give the player more flexibility.
Hope the info (and my monologue) helps!
@Pandan of course! Use however you want, these are yours!
I’ll be honest, I havent even finished Part 2 yet so maybe there’s a big bad I should be replacing Festan with but I was too excited to not make a little fan art!
Hey man, I generally don’t want to be someone who “calls out” people, but you claim this to be “do some sort of cover painting”
However, this is so blatantly a trace on most of the parts of this box art. It’s a good thing to be inspired… but not cool trying to pass off using official art of things as your own original work.
It’s cool now, don’t want to delete post though
Correct! I never claimed I drew all that from scratch, I pieced and painted over various characters from other fe games to give it the same feel as those classic games, considering this was a rom hack and many portraits and sprites were made the same way I didn’t think it was an issue. Sorry, thought it was obvious where the character framework came from. Titus uses pieces of armor from Hector.
Ahh, gotcha gotcha.
I think I was just being a stickler because I couldn’t tell if it was deliberate at some places it if that was the point or not.
I really appreciate reflecting the source text to make it clearer for everyone!
Added the great art by Wes to the OP. Appreciate you taking time to make it.
We also hit 40K downloads. Pretty wild to see so many people try out the game over its life and many versions. Big thanks again to Pushwall for sprucing things up.
Thanks again for giving it a try and sharing your thoughts over the years. If you have any feedback or questions, happy to chat about it in this thread. 
We’re roughly at about ~5 years ago when I first started drafting the original part 1 outline. It’s interesting to see where things are now and what I learned about hacking upon reflection. It’s cool that the game’s made an impression on many people over the course of that time. Grateful for the experience and learning (and yes there’s a lot of things I’d do differently now, but that’s part of the process). Appreciate all of the help, support, and guidance over the years.
Happy American Thanksgiving, all.
Really nice hack! I enjoyed how things turned out in my playthrough of this game.
Story Spoilers
Favorite Units: Honeydew 1st place, Titus 2nd place, Sigrid 3rd place
Honeydew is a really fun character, since her first appearance breaking the fourth wall making fun of the blue/red color scheme on units, to a really mundande but funny gaiden. Titus is by far the best lord and true protagonist of Vision Quest, most of the trials and enemies you face are more related to him than anyone else, a goofy but paranoid scheming noble was the last thing I expected from a Fire Emblem Lord. Sigrid was really fun to use in the few chapters she was available, sadly for most of the story she is captured we can’t see in action for too long, but I guess if that were the case she would lose her Est status.
Favorite enemy bosses: General Bromhilda 1st place, Emperor Festan 2nd place, Colonel Kitosawa 3rd place
To think the last 2 chapters would only have bosses that I didn’t want to kill at all, especially Bromhilda for all the help she gives during the journey, and for cutting TItus’ BS the moment they fight each other haha, Kitosawa is a really funny edgy swordmaster, with his special skill being both hilarious(man literally teleports behind you) and fitting for him, as the suicidal revenge-driven maniac he is.
Strongest Unit in my Playthrough: Sigrid(all capped but con)
A question to the creator, since it’s been quite some time since you first made the game’s story, would there have been any major changes to the current story if you had made Vision Quest today? If yes, which?
Thanks for playing and sharing the summary. Glad to hear about the parts of it you enjoyed
100%. This is a big question, so I’ll do my best to answer as best I can. (And luckily today is slow for work, so I have time to lay a lot out).
For context, most of the game was written on my phone during 30-60 minute commutes on the train. I did limited editing and generally wrote too much as a result.
I was focused on finishing the game (there were hardly any [complete] projects at the time), so there are def some warts I ignored during development for the sake of completion. I didn’t want this project to spiral in a polishing phase forever. So that colors why some things stayed the way they were even if there was a fairly obvious opportunity for improvement, both narratively and in gameplay.
Note for those who haven’t finished the game, this post contains spoilers
To provide some background here, Vision Quest was originally conceived as part 1, with that being the entire length of the game and story I wanted to tell. It wasn’t until I was close to finishing part 1 and started to get feedback from folks that I considered what a next part would look like and how I would continue this story. This meant that basically everything after Part 1 was done “on the fly” in some sense because I was enjoying the process of building and wanted to keep going with the base I’d established in part 1.
Because of this, I ended up meandering quite a bit and didn’t really work back from a desired ending until I figured out what I wanted to transpire in part 2. The idea around 2-3 being a major turning point because of the titular vision got me jazzed about where I could bring Titus as a character and how these types of experiences shape how people go about their lives.
The gap was that I was tethered a bit too much to Storch as the main character, and it didn’t really strike me until I was writing part 4 that Storch was getting in the way of the more interesting and pertinent pieces of Titus’ tale.
At the time, I justified this because I thought seeing this through Storch’s eyes would be interesting, but ultimately found it difficult to write for Storch since he was really just there out of this sense of obligation and the fact he was getting paid big $$$ to be there with his pals.
So when it comes to broader changes, I would’ve had Titus more front and center for parts 2 and 4 and allow Storch to shift into the background, sort of like how Lyn gets screentime, but is hardly central to Eliwood/Hector’s tale in FE7 (for lack of a better comparison).
I spent a lot of time cutting back to Storch, and it wasn’t until part 4 that I was actively writing him out of scenes that he didn’t add much to. I always liked him as a foil to Titus and as this unassuming figure that Titus was jealous and fearful of - Titus goes off quite a bit about how he can’t really figure out why Storch is there, but recognizes that Storch could be quite powerful if he had an ounce of cunning that Titus possessed - I thought this was a cool way to highlight Titus’ paranoia and how he’s baffled by people who aren’t motivated by the same things he is, while how people like Storch potentially sell themselves short by having narrower, simpler views of the world and their place in it. I found this dichotomy fun to explore with the relationship between these 2 characters, and the uneasiness felt for them in their partnership - it’s rare in media to see the 2 main characters not really trusting of each other, and I felt that highlighting their “partnership of convenience” was a neat angle to explore.
So that’s one piece I would’ve changed - less Storch, more Titus (especially after part 1’s conclusion)
Part 2 in particular was where I considered doing a massive re-work after finishing v1. Beyond my dissatisfaction with the gameplay in the original release (leading to development of Part 3 to ‘take a break’ from making maps for this party), the narrative also wasn’t spectacular.
Part 2 went under the greatest number of changes from its original incarnation in around v06, namely adding more gaidens (2-1x, 2-3x, 2-5x) and mainline chapters to make the transition into part 4 more natural (2-6, 2-7), but it didn’t have the same narrative arc or conclusion that made part 1 as satisfying, which was a miss for me. It’s a patchwork of ideas that meander plot-wise.
I never got super far in re-imagining what part 2 could look like if I did rework it, but I would’ve likely placed more focus on Titus, less on Storch, and did a better job of teeing up what was to come in part 4. The rebellion plot in Mahala is not really explored, and the journey to the frontlines after the council w/ the other Nevanese lords is stapled on, making part 2 not really a clear storyline in the same way part 1 was. So I could’ve spent more time in Mahala and making the conflict there more central to what was to come later, or shifted it to focus on the different lords of Nevan, which could’ve been neat to interact with them before they ultimately choose sides in part 4. Maybe it’s really two separate narratives that could’ve had their own “part” assigned, but this didn’t really emerge until after I was pretty spent on developing the game and felt it was ‘good enough’, especially on a micro-level (specific scenes, specific chapters, etc.)
So the TLDR here is I’d prob rework part 2 from the ground up for both narrative and gameplay reasons. A big reason I never did is because 1) it worked well enough by the end, 2) reworking isn’t fun, and 3) some of the writing in this part is among my favorite in the game. While I think the narrative piece is lacking, I felt some parts of the character writing were strong and was hesitant to remove, in addition to some chapters being well-received.
Part 3 was really my ‘break’ from the main story – by this point, I’d built ~18 chapters of part 1 and 2, was unsatisfied with how part 2 played out, and wanted to take a break but keep hacking, so I shifted perspective to set up a party merge. Part 3 I focused mostly on gameplay (and it’s my favorite part of the game to play on repeat plays), with the narrative taking a backseat. This was a bit of a miss on my part, but the nature of a manster-inspired escape sequence that was map to map w/ limited breathing room for storytelling was in part intentional. I’d probably revisit this entire part and pepper in more narrative stuff since Waluyo is admitteldy not the best character and certainly one of the more forgettable characters. I tried to make him a bit like “what if Storch grew up like Titus”, but he’s more or less a non-factor, and I could’ve done more with him and his character. So that’s another thing I’d aim to improve since he struggles to find a proper place in the story.
Part 4 gets flack for its anti-climax, but I am of the view that not all stories need to have a neat and tidy ending. I was particularly inspired by my readings of various historical episodes, where the seeds for the next ‘era’ are sewn towards the end of the current one, with every victory leading rise to a new problem or challenge. Vision Quest was always meant to be a snippet into a window of history in a fictional world vs. a grand tale.
Additionally, part 4 was conceived and written long before I ever considered writing a sequel.
I initially wanted it to be left up to the player’s imagination to think about what would happen next, and make it clear that not every ending answers all of the questions. Some might say it was lazy, but it was an intentional choice to leave a lot hanging to consider for what the future would look like after the main point of contention was largely resolved and that there would be enough peace to warrant ‘ending’ the story as seen on screen here.
I don’t regret much of how I handled that. I will say it put me in a box though when coming up with ideas for the sequel, and had I considered that I would actually work on Lengths of Time while working on Vision Quest, I might’ve handled this part differently.
I didn’t really consider working on a sequel until I started messing around with builder using some of the newer tech available and experimenting with new gameplay ideas (I focused chiefly on supports for 6 months, so I was itching to actually make gameplay), and the idea for a sequel came about after seeing a lot of feedback feeling like there should be one, as well as me initially thinking it’d be easier to make a new hack in my own pre-existing world (spoiler: it was not, at least for me).
So the short version of my answer is “yes, I would change a bit”. In summary, I’d probably do the following:
- Rewrite part 2, possibly split it into multiple parts (mahala arc, ‘getting to Kuching’ arc). Consider some gameplay changes as well.
- Slow down part 3, maybe figure out how to make this part more meaningful. Do more with Waluyo’s character vs. using this part as a way to keep me sane after being disappointed w/ part 2.
- More Titus, less Storch after part 1’s conclusion
- Consider how Part 4 wraps up knowing I would later attempt a sequel. (although this particular change I’m iffier on since I shouldn’t have attempted it in the first place and don’t think it would’ve made me want to work on the sequel anyway)
There’s definitely a few more micro-level adjustments I’d make, but these are the big ticket items IMO.
I hope this is helpful and sheds some light into how I feel about it today, and how my own feelings and priorities during development shaped where we landed.
This isn’t to say I’m not proud of the achievement, but I recognize the game has a few issues that I’d be better able to resolve with the experience I have looking back now than I did when I worked on it. So much of the game’s story was written and completed 3 years ago. The supports were all written in 2020, but the rest was finalized in 2019, more than 6 months before I released the game.
I am currently taking a break as I focus on work and stuff, but my approach for a project I may seriously pursue is much more systematic than it was when I did VQ, and I have the lessons learned from this experience to help me do something that I think could be stronger and more cohesive narratively.
In general, my tastes, feelings, and views on FE have changed, but VQ captures a good moment in time surrounding what I felt would be good after playing classics like TLP and Road to Ruin, and what I felt would be fun to make back in the fall of 2017. It’s been cool to see how folks critique and enjoy the game, and also see how its inspired others in their own work. The bar for hacking continues to get higher and I’m glad to have a chance to make something people (mostly) enjoy and can draw from to make their own work better.
Thanks for playing and I hope this explanation (if long) is satisfactory!
Feel free to let me know if you have any follow ups. Appreciate you coming to the thread to share feedback and questions. Thanks.
Hi. Does anyone around here has a save file for Vision Quest 3.0? I accidentally lost my savefile which is in Chapter 2-1. I just don’t have the time to start all over again. I’d appreciate it if anyone could help. Thanks!
I’m currently playing through Vision Quest as my first rom hack and my savefile includes a save at Chapter 1-11 (on normal mode). If that works for you, message me I suppose?
The reason I joined though is to ask what other hacks might I like if I’m really enjoying the story, gameplay, and especially quality-of-life changes in Vision Quest so far? The level of care put into this is obvious and if there are any more complete romhacks (for any game) like it I’d love to know.
Thanks! I’ve sent a message. 
Hello! I have a problem regarding the 1-3 chapter completion. Whenever I finish it and porceed with the cutscne, halfway through it the screen turns to black. I have no idea what to do, I tried to load the save, it didn’t work. I tried to load a save state from the emulator, it did not work. I tried to replay the chapter, same thing. I even tried to create a new sacred stone patch and play from it, the thing wont let me continue. Is there any way for me to fix it? Any suggestion would very be helpful.
Thanks for reporting – are you using mGBA?
Hi. I’m having the same problem. I am using JonhGBA for Android. And I patched v.3 by UniPatcher.
It is probably an emulator problem – this issue has cropped up a few times over the years, and usually mGBA users don’t have this issue. Not sure what causes it as I haven’t been able to reproduce it.
Apologies if that isn’t a satisfactory answer, but I’d recommend trying a different emulator if you can’t get past that scene.
I feel bad nobody has answered this, so I’ll throw a few names your way:
-Embers Entwined (Touched by the Writing Wiz Xilirite himself)
-Four Lords (Heard a lot about this one)
-The King’s Last Wish (This one seems very well-thought out and it’s complete)
-FE: Genesis (Yes, this one is mine, but I wanted to throw out a hack I know personally has a lot of effort and story in it)
Thanks for the recommendations, I’ll definitely be checking them out! I got a few more recs as private messages as well so no worries.
I just finished my playthrough with my army of mages terrorizing the final map with accumulated Sleep staves, I’m way late to the party to share impressions so I’ll leave you all with my favorite screenshot:
Added you on Discord, so theres an easy way to just apply these pallettes to a regular VQ 2.3 rom?
The only difference with my rom is I removed forced deployments.