[FE8] [COMPLETE] Sacred Light of Promise - Rewrite, Rebalance, & Reimagination!

[ReturnOfTheBlackKnight]

@CT075

I’ll be real, I’m not sure how someone gets more than five minutes into the game and not realize that it’s a joke hack. The “die” button alone should be the big tip-off that this is not meant to be taken seriously

I’m not sure what’s even the point of making a topic and main post as if this is some great rebalance and rewriting of orginal FE8. Why decieve people into downloading something that they’re not interested in ? A meme hack should be named a meme hack from the get go.

@CT075

On the other hand, a big public meltdown over the devs “not accepting criticism” isn’t it, either. Fine, you’ve said your piece, this project isn’t fun to play and the devs should feel ashamed of themselves for wasting your time. Yeah yeah you got made fun of a little, move on and go play a hack that you do enjoy.

I’ll admit that the amount of rage post from Black Mage Yuri was unnecessary but don’t you seem to be contradicting yourself ?

“Yeah, yeah you got made fun of a little, move on and go play a hack that you do enjoy” downplays

@CT075

but making a big dog and pony show of laughing at someone who didn’t get the joke isn’t the kind of atmosphere we want to cultivate.

This.

Black Mage Yuri raised a valid point that we would ignore reading the thread in order to avoid spoilers considering, the game involves “Rewriting and Reimagination”. Main post, titles, tags exist because it helps people find what they want. If it’s clearly stated in the main post that this is a meme hack then nobody should have a problem. I’m surprised at the fact that despite all this drama, the main post still remains the same. A bit of clarity isn’t a sin to ask when you’re clearly saying things about your hack which isn’t true.

@Fringus

This is, before anything else, a love letter to FE8, a swansong to refine everything that we’ve both once loved and learnt to appreciate on our time hacking this game. One which has taken us more hours to create than we could count on both hands.

Overall, you can expect this to have quite a more bite than usual FE8, with maps both big and small getting minute and major changes. All hopefully still having that same feel, but greatly improved where they missteped. With the same amount going towards keeping a faithfulness to the original writing, while breathing new life into the underexplored aspects of the game.

This is downright misleading and I cannot fathom why you haven’t told him to change all that. I don’t have a problem with a meme hack. Just state that “Its a meme hack”.

I hope I didn’t offend anyone, and I mean no harm. But OP needs to change it. I’m sure plenty of people are frustrated but they won’t say it out loud.

[Tezuka_Yamigami]

A dream for a world where every man, woman and child experiences the joy of Gensou no KeifuHajimari no Miko (Classic, Normal) and suffers for it.
A dream for a world where they learn to suffer, and in suffering learn to become something even greaterSuffering Builds Character than they could’ve ever imagined.
You see, Fire Emblem Universe, I wish for a world where the masses play through Gensou no KeifuGod’s Punishment Upon Man and suffer. They will suffer through Chapter 6The Duel against a promoted Yuugi HoshigumaThe Unexplainable Being with an underleveled Suika, weep through the Eientei Defense ChapterR Corp Rabbits Raid when the rabbits clear 3 or more gates while they’re busy defending the centre, cry through the Moon arc as they are ambushed by legions of invisible siege tome mounted unitsThere is no bit this shit actually happens here, like for real it just does.
For suffering builds charactersuffering builds character. And gods know if the average Fire Emblem player base needs some of it.
Hell, it might even get them paranoid and traumatized enough that they start actually reading. Looking at the enemy, analysing them, figuring out how best to proceed with the cards they’ve been dealt.
I want the Fire Emblem fanbase to be traumatized wrecks who cannot lay still without the fear of Bane Larges and unsuspecting Meteor Homings carved into their consciousness.
This is why I’m telling youFire Emblem Universe to play Gensou no Keifu. A fangame clearly made with Touhou before Fire Emblem in mind, balanced like Awakening Lunatic except with none of the randomness and all of the unfair stat inflation you see in JRPG slop produced for the sake of having a portfolio.
But a fangame that will make you revisit the series in a far different light than before33550336.

You must understand.
YouFire Emblem Universe must feel the same sorrow as I have. No, you must feel even worse than that.
You want to know what Gensou no KeifuGod’s Greatest Mistake did to me…? It is EVERYTHING to me. I sat on my hands as I watched the roster I raised die, and I even killed my TrinitiesThree Fairies in that final battle, just for this moment. All for this very moment… I’ve been awaiting this chance to finally enlighten someone.

I’m done with the façade now.

I’ll do everything I can—in ways beyond your imagination—to give you Gensou no Keifuthe most painful Fire Emblem experience possible. And I’ll do it right before you could even playtest the board game’s main content. I’ll rob you of everything.

Gensou no Keifu.As it should’ve been.
Gensou no Keifu.As it is now.
Gensou no Keifu.As it will always be.

[Rye_on_Speed]

Local FEU user falls for bait and asks for mods to help them fix their gullibility issue

Imma be real here if you’re making this big of a deal over getting baited by a shitpost you could’ve spent this time actually looking for a good hack to play instead of typing an essay on why the mods should kill the subtlety in a joke about fe8 rebalances

Next time consider opening the hack for 5 minutes, discovering it’s bait, and then commenting “nice bait bro” on the forum instead of acting like it’s some conspiracy by the evil dark FEU regular dev council to waste 5 whole minutes of your invaluable time to ruin your life

[ZZZMETA]

IDEAL

[Yasako]

The rage is because even after someone is clearly distraught, you continue the bit, and it’s been over a week. This can be a very sore spot for some people. Haven’t you ever gotten bullied in high school? They weaponize in-jokes. Things like refusing to give up the ghost even after all this really do contribute to the cliquey feel that FEU has been accused of.

(To be fair, scrolling through like three posts makes it obvious it’s a joke and Discourse has spoiler tags, so “avoiding spoilers” isn’t much of an excuse.)

also the furigana manifesto rules. Anyone else notice the sheer amount of furigana abuse that Chinese gacha games employ these days?

“You’re ruining our fun by asking us to be considerate” especially after the bit has gotten old is just childish playground behavior. If anything, one might reveal it after a period of time as a sort of post-post-troll, where new audience cannot experience the same bewilderment that the original one did.

[Fringus]

i was writing up thing but yasako basically said alotta it better than i could for how this got capital B Bad, lol

yeah once it got to the black mage yuri posts it was just kinda clear that none of what was happening was funny anymore. it was just a bunch of people being sad and major assholes at worst and at best it was still just endlessly unfunny. as basically every team member has prolly heard me yell at them multiple times by now.
genuinely woulda done more to stop it in the moment if these things didnt keep happening while i was away.

keeping up the bit by then was just driving it all towards an endlessly dismal swamp all around
truthfully i kept not doin the sign/warning cause i legit thought it was finally killed and dead now, that was a big mistake

also to just answer one other thing

@ReturnOfTheBlackKnight

I’m not sure what’s even the point of making a topic and main post as if this is some great rebalance and rewriting of orginal FE8. Why decieve people into downloading something that they’re not interested in ? A meme hack should be named a meme hack from the get go.

it’s because the point was that it was bait/a troll born off turning our impromptu 30 minute blitz into a wider gag. so it made seeing people trying to give feedback about stuff like the player hostility of the “die” button or the horseslaying vuln really amusing to me. the bit was basically on those who don’t know for those who played to laugh about, or to just laugh at the absurdity of.
ofc if its funny or not is always to personal taste, comes with the grounds of what was done here.

[Starshadow_Melody]

to be fair, as someone who was actively filtered by the appearance of a proper, serious FE8 rebalance, and would’ve been filtered by the “meme hack” status anyway, “horseslaying vulnerary” does at least sound like a funny bit if properly signposted. Absurdism. That’s- that’s what that one is.

… if a weapon has a use function, can a unit without the ability to use that weapon use the use function?

[Solstice]

5 minutes in and I stopped laughing and started coughing uncontrollably, I think I hit my own die button

[AlemOwl]

Oof, get well soon.

[mai]

As an outsider who likes using this forum to find good romhacks, I did download this hack last week thinking it would be fun to play and quit after a couple chapters because I didn’t enjoy it. I did not get the impression it was meant as a meta meme (as in the entire post is an in-joke to begin with) because there are hacks with wacky and strange presentations that are real games - for example, Code of the Burger King. I didn’t bother posting at the time because I found another hack to play, but after thinking about this one again I wanted to check the comments to see if I should give it a second chance, only to stumble upon this mess. It doesn’t seem fair to judge or laugh at people who thought it was a real game because that is how it’s presented. If you present an inside joke to the public, people out of the loop will be confused.

Just my two cents for what it’s worth.

[Citrus]

@Solstice

5 minutes in and I stopped laughing and started coughing uncontrollably, I think I hit my own die button

Thanks for playing! As a quick request, would you mind signing this before playing any further?

[Parrhesia]

I should say that it wasn’t anyone’s intent to, like, ‘yeah let’s pull one over on these fucking rubes’, but it’s easy to see how it seems that way from the outside. So, I’m not really apologetic for people who have allowed this to take up a truly outsized level of importance, but I do feel legitimately bad for anyone who skimmed the OP, wasted five minutes downloading and patching the ROM, fatfingered ‘Die’, muttered ‘fuck’s sake’ and uninstalled.

Look, the point of the ROM was that we all had 30 minutes per chapter to fuck shit up and then pass it, untested, onto the next guy. Some people added interesting things, intentionally or otherwise. The result became something that, if you were willing to gut through the more Ragefesty elements, did have some bizarrely interesting design elements and gameplay implications in it. And there were jokes, intended to be played, yes, at the player’s expense, but with the player knowing that. For the right kind of player (I am not this kind of player), maybe there’s value in that. Ragefests were a thing for a while, after all. The big frontloaded signposts – the Die / Turnwheel buttons, the unit palettes (my fault), 10-move armour, no actual QoL features – were intended to basically tell the player, yes, this is what you’re in for. If you keep pushing on, the assumption is you’re in on the joke. But they aren’t apparent from the OP alone, and it might be best to ditch the kayfabe. The kayfabe is really funny if you’re returning to the OP in the exact right spirit and frame of mind. Most people aren’t, most of the time, and they aren’t at fault for that.

Somehow the metaphor of it being a haunted house seems to fit perfectly. We’re all just teens in facepaint and seasonal Dollar General costumes.

So, if it seems like this was a bunch of people working at cross-purposes to create something that rapidly got out of hand, it’s because it was. But that’s all it was.

(For clarity, I’m not responsible for anything good. My changes were pretty much all either deliberately frivolous, a joke at the expense of 2011 Nightmare rebalances or at myself. I never really expected we’d get as far as posting it, until it turned out it had been posted.)

[JasonGodwin7]

Some people complained that the Genocide route in Undertale or the Snowgrave route in Deltarune are painful to play. And they are, because they’re supposed to be. They hurt to make a point: that doing wrong feels wrong and making bad choices can ruin the experience.

This? This is just a troll game that’s bad on purpose for no real reason. Juvenile, obvious, and fundamentally hollow. Yes, “SLoP” spells slop. Yes, a support conversation is just “…”. Great foreshadowing, would have worked better if every aspect of the praise you heaped on your own game was comically faint and backhanded instead of just a lie. The “joke” is just a bait-and-switch. It’s rickrolling, one of the internet’s oldest and most played-out jokes. Some of the people on this site are younger than rickrolling.

If it was supposed to be commentary, it drowned in smugness. If it was supposed to entertain, it failed. And if it was supposed to provoke? Congrats, it provoked apathy. You tricked people into downloading and patching a bad game. That’s it. Once the “twist” hits, there’s nothing more to it. Seth can kill himself if you click the wrong thing. Wow. Comedy gold. But… why? Where’s the commentary, the insight, the joke? The download link could have just been a rickroll and it would’ve had the same impact, except more honest and with less wasted effort keeping this joke going past its expiration date.

There’s no contradiction explored. No genre deconstruction. No ludonarrative dissonance. Just…

“Haha, you thought it would be good, but it’s bad. Get it? Because we made it bad. That’s the joke. We called it slop. You played slop. Please clap.”

Maybe in the next game you can give characters Skills like “Smelly” and Combat Arts like “Blinding Stupidity”.

If you actually want to satirize Fire Emblem, making fun of the eugenics waifu incest franchise with gacha and the babyrealms and fanservice and terrible gameplay-story integration isn’t exactly hard.

• Seth with a Javelin can solo his game better than the divine twins with their sacred weapons.

• Alm is deadlier with a Killer Bow any peasant can use than his royal chosen one sword.

• Byleth the product of incest so infinitely recursive he needed surgery when he was born dates his own child soldier students and earns Strength +2 by fusing with his divine self, absorbing a tsundere barefoot dragon loli brat that’s also his grandmother’s mother.

• Miklan dies screaming for wielding a weapon that will make your Crestless units take 10 damage.

• Marth can genocide route any% his entire army and no one blinks.

• Corrin claims he’s never killed anyone while the gameplay says otherwise.

• Symbolically important personal classes get tossed aside for riding dragons.

• Most Combat Arts are just “hit harder” or “hit that harder".

• Most Skills are just “hit harder” or “there’s a chance you hit harder”.

This series is inherently absurd. There’s so much potential for smart, subversive, funny commentary. But that takes effort. Insight. Actual writing. SLoP’s one and only joke is that people expected better from these creators.

To see my full video essay on this game, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

[Parrhesia]

Yeah in hindsight if we were going for the social commentary angle we really should’ve added a scene where you bombard civilians with white phospherous, but unfortunately, time constraints

[ATHATH]

I’ve just uploaded the (hopefully) final version of my fan-patch! v10, like v8, is a doozy.

Changes in v10 (compared to v9):

• REWORKED FINAL 1. The deadlords move now! And a few more deadlords have been added. And the map has pressure now. And I fixed a hard crash. And some other things too.

• Improved the consistency of Ch. 4 by making certain threats easier to answer.

• Touched up my Lagdou Ruins edit, which included adding a new ATHATH boss conversation and a new ATHATH boss theme.

• Applied my Eirika Ch. 16 changes to Ephraim Ch. 16 as well (oops).

• Updated some names, icons, descriptions, and dialogue.

• Spent far too much time combing through dialogue, descriptions, and names to ensure consistency with regards to certain terms.

• More siege enemies who are immobile are marked as such.

• Tweaked some shop inventories.

• Tweaks some unit inventories.

• Fixed and aligned some palettes.

• Tweaked the opening cutscene of Ch. 4.

• Ch. 6’s victory condition is accurate now.

• Fixed a bug related to the Franz-Amelia recruitment conversation.

• Fixed a vendor in Eirika Ch. 10 having a misaligned location.

• Made Pablo more consistent.

• Fixed and tweaked some Kyle content.

• Added a Fimbulvetr to Eirika Ch. 14 so that both routes get one.

• Slightly adjusted a certain unit’s starting location.

• Tweaked some AI settings in Ch. 18.

• A certain unit in Ch. 19 should end up on the same tile as another unit less often.

• Souped up the Ch. 19 secret shop.

• Characters are addressed properly in their endings.

• Fixed an error in a certain character’s ending text.

• Reduced the number of instances of enemies being unable to use items in their inventories.

• Tweaked the final boss.

• Pontifex now counts as a promoted class, preventing S rank loss.

• Buffed Ch. 20’s boss.

• Buffed monster weapons again, including one I had missed the first time around.

• Buffed the volt lance.

• Buffed the halberd.

• Buffed Zethla’s Bow.

• Buffed the doobreaver.

• Buffed steel swords, but made them more expensive to compensate.

• Updated the anima triangle.

• Adjusted some item prices.

• Applies the bow range buff to some bows that were forgotten about.

• Reverted a nerf to Nidhogg v1 had made.

• Fixed some oversights in effectiveness data.

• Fixed an oversight related to promotion items.

• Rebalanced speedwings and angelic robes.

• Toned down some sources of flat EXP gain.

• Tweaked Franz.

• Nerfed Tethys.

• Nerfed Saleh.

• Nerfed pegasi.

• Made promoting to druid more appealing.

• Reverted part of a buff that v9 had made to Natasha.

• Nerfed Dozla.

• Buffed Nate.

EDIT:
Also released v10.1, which fixes a minor error with the Con of one of Final 1’s deadlords (Labaatan). It shouldn’t affect much, as they’re a siege unit with 2 AS, but was mildly bothering me.

EDIT 2:
Also released v10.2, which corrects 1-2 in-game text boxes that previously contained misinformation. This should make one of my other changes easier to understand.

EDIT 3:
Released v10.3. I had forgotten one of the promotion items when I did my oversight correction. This has been addressed.

EDIT 4:
Released v10.4. Fixed a bug that could prevent the auto-end turn function from working properly if Saleh was not deployed in Scorched Sand.

EDIT 5:
Released v10.5. Fixed a bug I caused that made performing the Amelia-Franz recruitment conversation disable the Amelia-Gheb boss quote. Also fixed another bug I caused that made opening Tana’s door in Ephraim Ch. 9 cause the cavalier reinforcements that normally only spawn from opening the big door to appear.

EDIT 6:
Released v10.6. Someone else had attempted to improve enemy arena weapon scaling, but messed up, causing enemy arena weapons to never scale. This has been fixed. Additionally, a weapon that was incompatible with arena combat has been removed from the arena weapon pool and replaced by a different weapon.

Sneak Peak at One of the New Deadlords

There’s also an endgame save file in there in case you want to see endgame but are too lazy to actually play through Sacred Light of Promise.

[ATHATH]

I personally enjoyed SLoP’s humor (which was a large part of why I made my fan-patch). You just didn’t get to see much of it because you quit before you got very far.

[Dooblerino]

buffed the what?

[JasonGodwin7]

And here I was thinking the game already committed war crimes against player time and expectations.

All of this could have been avoided if you’d just said “This is a meme hack we made quickly” so players would set their expectations appropriately.

[Dooblerino]

none of these bullet points are even true you cant even mario weed mushroom about them

[LeskLyfeld]

@JasonGodwin7

If you actually want to satirize Fire Emblem,

Dies Emblem is a couple threads down this one, please pick up your GenAI claws