I totally hear where you’re coming from. I think I’ll drop the levels down a bit on the enemies. It’s actually meant to be a good opportunity to train Sheila and Donnal! 
You should feel off-balance and under pressure - that’s the design of it, considering where it sits in the narrative. It should be hard. It’s the finale of the early game.
BUUUUUUT it’s shouldn’t be punishingly hard. Definitely some tweaks needed. I appreciate your comments, there. Congrats on making it through! 
One thing I’d love for you to do in that regard would be to have the chasing boss have a lot less crit. If your available units didn’t get the greatest level ups it can be very difficult to advance quickly and you’ll be forced to stall him out with Shorn or Edric, my Shorn was able to dodge tank fairly well and survive a hit, but the crit still made that more RNG prone than it needed to be.
No kidding. My Miley was completely useless until i got the Kiss of Death bow, even after using the Energy ring. Then she turned into a killing machine.
Hi, I am interested in this hack and will be giving it a try.
Since most characters are essential, is there an average limit on how many characters you can take into battle.
And are there hints as to where secret shops are
Hey ShinryuShadow21! To clarify, some characters are plot essential meaning if they die then you get a Game Over and have to start the chapter again. This doesn’t mean these characters need to be deployed every Chapter. Usually only Edric, the main character / lord-type guy, is force-deployed. Sometimes, one or two other relevant characters are force-deployed, as well, for a given chapter.
The amount of characters you can deploy gradually increases over the course of the game. By Chapter 6, you can deploy 12 characters in the chapter. This inches up to 14 characters around chapter 12, eventually 16 characters at Chapter 19. Chapter 24 is the biggest chapter in the game, demanding a 20 characters be deployed! The final chapter has 16 deployment slots.
But note that some chapters, for narrative reasons have a very small number of deployment slots or force you to play the chapter with a few units that need to be there for narrative purposes. For example, Chapter 5 has only 4 deployment slots, and all of them are force-deployed. Chapter 18 has 7 deployment slots, again all of them force-deployed.
As for the secret shops…
There is only one secret shop in the game. It is located in Chapter 24.
The secret shop looks like a house you cannot visit (without the Member Card, that is). It is right beside some other shops and armories. You can’t miss it.
The Member Card is also found in Chapter 24. There is an enemy sage to the middle left of the map, on his own, that drops it upon being slain. Killing this sage and returning to the Secret Shop house before the map gets truly filled with enemies and crazy hectic is a bit of a challenge, but doable with a warp staff, a rescue staff, and a strong flying unit.
The secret shop sells boots for 10,000 gold each. 5,000 with the Silver Card (found in a village in Chapter 21).
Now that I thin about it, you could try to apply the FE8 logic if a plot character dies, they don’t really die, they just step back from the front lines. For example in FE8 if Seth dies, he just stays back.
You could try to do that without forcing the player into a Game Over.
Walked into this 106 replies late, but I’m also playing this hack for what my input’s worth, with some early reviews - by one side story praise and narration that I’ll go over at a later point, and some nitpicks and issues with the gameplay (mainly chapter 5. Hoo boy.)
This chapter can get very scuffed very quickly. Edric and Elyse are quite awkward in my run (Elyse got TWO strength levels instead of the stats she uses), making the initial section hell.
The gameplay there has gone from trying to rush and find effective movements and enemy phases with the solo thief by one side to literally praying nobody hits Elyse while in a forest to prevent every archer in the vicinity from potshotting her and killing her. It hasn’t been good.
What I’m meant to say here is that Chapter 5 isn’t accounting for the possibility of poorly grown Edric/Elyse, featuring the complete incapability to one-round fighters due to not doubling (Elyse) or not having enough strength to kill the one single archer he doubles (Edric). I’m not kidding.
This chapter was very exigent on keeping the tempo and being quick paced, but one single high-odds miss or one single low-odds hit pretty much sets your survival odds while acquiring all five chests ablaze.
Painful experience here - and if it wasn’t for the fact that the chapter ends before the full enemy phase happens because the boss kills itself - it was very possible that I could end up getting on a very sticky situation due to being pitted awkwardly at the end of the map.
I swear to all that is throughout heavens and earth, I alone am the one fucked over by 5% growths.
Lesk out. Dwalt supremacy.
I’ve just finished The Dark Amulet. Many hacks are simply great, or simply bad, and I often have few things to say beyond a brief summary of my experience. The Dark Amulet is not simple. It is good and bad in myriad ways, spanning both gameplay and story. Thus, rather than a summation, I’ll bring up some individual bits of the hack that stood out to me while playing. These will contain spoilers, both for the story and gameplay.
The Dark Amulet gives you the fattest fucking trainees you will ever experience. Hilda decimates armies for the first half the game. Once she falls off, the good prince comes in and does the same for the second half, but at 1-3 range. Personally, I think this is good within the broader context of the game; they are incredibly satisfying to use, but do not individually trivialize maps too often, due to the density of enemies. One could consider each trainee to be functionally similar in application to a Warp staff within the context of this game, for better or worse (more on that later).
The first arc of The Dark Amulet is very well written, as others have likely discovered for themselves already. It presents a reasonably involved political field that is easy enough for the reader to understand, with a variety of factions that have either relatable or at least understandable motivations.
However, there is an unusual flow shortly after the first arc, in the darkest hour when the protagonist is forced to flee home after being declared a traitor. Despite this ostensibly being one of the story’s darkest hours, it has the highest density of comic relief scenes, such as four of the ladies talking about big E’s suitability as a groom, as well as Ruslan and Eleanora being exceptionally light-hearted characters by the cast’s standards.
The story recovers a graceful flow thereafter and maintains what is, in my opinion, a good, consistent quality until the end, barring a few relatively jarring cusses from characters that had not indulged prior. In this case, “until the end” may not include the actual end (more on that later).
This game has really fun and funny PRFs. I still have no idea what the fuck Chivalry is actually effective against. The pace at which Edric gains Broadswords is nearly perfect.
As setpieces, the jailbreak maps are all very cool. Narratively, they’re hype moments where supporters of the protagonists come together in the MCs’ times of need to get them out of a tight spot, and I believe the maps evoke that emotion appropriately…the first go around.
It’s highly likely that these limited deployment maps will need to be replayed multiple times, often with a defeat near the very end or in the middle. The trickiest segment to untangle in Edric’s jailbreak is the armor formation near the end. You have a hammer to work with, sure, but are your axes sufficiently trained? Is your Edric -3 on SPD and -3 on DEF compared to average after being given a speedwing? Did you promote Shorn with the Hero Crest? (I did, barely saved the run, that one.) As for the Julia jailbreak map, the fat load of reinforcements as you approach the end, while exciting once, kind of kills the mood when it causes a reset.
Barring substantial changes to how these maps function, I highly recommend playing them with savestates, even for people who normally abstain. This will allow you to retain the emotional high that the author has intended without losing large amounts of time to bizarre traps for which your pre-determined units may be underprepared.
There are a lot of reinforcements in this game. Sometimes it’s cool. Sometimes it’s not. I have no centralized thoughts on this because whether the reinforcements elevate or shit on a map varies wildly between maps. Oftentimes they’re a cool way of forcing you to make a final, desperate push and possibly ignore some side objectives. Other times, especially during rout maps, they just make the map feel like a slog, mostly because you’re already emotionally primed for the map to be ending soon when, bam, 4 more turns of new guys. The worst is when the reinforcements spawn closer to the center of the map, possibly cutting off units you would not reasonably expect to be cut off. Then there are the mid-turn reinforcements, which are kind of a war crime in any FE game that doesn’t feature a turnwheel. On that note…
This game acknowledges the useful properties of Warp directly in story. One might believe this means that the creator intends for you to use Warp as needed. This is…risky. This game makes a great deal of assumptions about the pace at which a player should play and the approaches they should take. The consequence of this is that if you do something like use Warp on a map where the creator didn’t see it coming, weird shit will happen. Sometimes weird shit will happen even if you don’t use Warp. Here are some examples:
That being said, there are many maps where you can and should just Warp past your problems. Just…maybe save state first.
This is the first blatantly pro-monarchist hack I’ve ever seen, bringing up various moral and practical issues caused by bloodline succession only to go “nah the ‘other option’ here would be eternal war anarchy”. Despite the writing itself being good, this felt bizarre to me considering alternate forms of government have been around since the BCs. In particular, the story goes out of its way to illustrate legimitate grievances against the current system by both the MCs and the antagonists just to have no real development on improving any of those by story’s end. That being said, this may be appreciated by the monarchist FE fans in the crowd.
Of course, there’s an obvious reason for this, being…
This is a whole-ass sequel bait, like a double down, “destroy any semblance of closure the story might have” level of sequel baiting. Save for the immediate issue of Zeddard, just about every plot thread is left hanging. The Sleeping God remains an open thread through the Dark Shard. The aforementioned “man monarchy is kinda shit huh” is mentioned when the MC’s mother is like “haha yes I did all this because I could (???)” and then left unresolved as well, presumably because she’s going to be an antagonist in the future? Idk? The secret of the MC’s birth is made apparent to the reader but left as a mystery in-story, making it still hold narrative tension. And of course the actual sequel hook of Zeddard’s last vision exists as well.
This is very distinct from most sequel hooks, even ones where the creators knew there was a ‘next story’, such as FE7. Other than a sentence in the MC’s end-card, very little “and then people were happy for a time at least” is shown. The entire plot of the epilogue is just “hey guys it ain’t over yet”, which is extremely all-in. I personally find it questionable to so actively deprive the player of all narrative closure (even going so far as to leave the theme of bastardry/bloodrights itself just dangling/“bad guy wins” with no resolution), but I would re-evaluate this if the sequel was bomb or smth.
It’s interesting to see units going into romantic territory straight away in their B supports. This makes me wonder if you could see a romantically entwined B support after getting an A support with someone else if you intentionally held off on doing the support long enough. Cheating Edric canon??? Overall, I like the idea though.
20 MAG cap? Really? Considering other new classes have MAG stat caps adjusted, this appears to be intentional, which is fucked up. Justice for Galen! At least give it like, idk, 22.
Overall, cool hack, idk, 7.5/10? I rarely finish hacks and I finished this one, so yeah.
Hey, unfortunately I havent been able to advance at all because of work, but I forgot to ask about something. Do the gaidens have secret requirements to achieve or is it all very clearly divulged?
Paired endings for those curious on planning supports:
Edric and Shorn
Edric and Freya
Edric and Elyse
Edric and Catrine
Edric and Julia
Shorn and Miley
Shorn and Gareth
Shorn and Sheila
Miley and Galen
Dwalt and Rivkah
Harlan and Julia
Hilda and Alexias
Catrine and Leandra
Sheila and Tancred
Edgar and Donnal
Edgar and Eleanora
Eleanora and Donnal
Eleanora and Alexias
Hadima and Ruslan
Griss and Rowan
Julia and Morgana
Morgana and Rowan
Sophia and Freya
Sophia and Othello
I forget if there’s any others but this is what I remember seeing
Thank you so much for your detailed feedback, BigMood! I loved reading through all of it.
My thoughts on your thoughts…
Trainees that grew strong and kick ass are just plain awesome, alright. Glad you enjoyed turning Hilda and Alexias into absolute heroes. Bonus points if you paired them together, too.
I tried my best to craft a narrative that flowed well and drew the player / reader in. With regard to the levity that occurs in Chapters 11, 12, and 12x, the idea was to give the player some breathing space / emotional catharsis after the betrayal and intensity of Chapters 9 and 10. Maybe I missed the mark a bit, but that was the goal.
Yeah, PRFs are awesome.
Chivalry is effective against all classes that can use lances. I’m actually laughing to myself imagining you using Chivalry and every time you attack an enemy, you’re thinking “Will it be effective? No idea! Let’s find out!”
They’re tough to balance. I don’t know how strong or weak the force deployed units will be. Chapter 9 and Chapter 18 are probably my favorite maps to play and replay, personally. They’re better when you know they’re coming and can give the right units the right equipment before the Chapters hit.
I have an idea about how to make Chapter 9 a lot more consistently bearable. It’ll happen when I issue out the first update to The Dark Amulet.
I’ve put in just a few mid-turn reinforcements. They represent the party getting well and truly ambushed. Punishing, yes. Maybe even unfair. But I just… gosh, I just like them. There are maybe 4 instances of them in the entire game. Still, I totally appreciate the complaint.
I’m a huge fan of tactical warping. Getting to a village quickly. Jumping over enemies. Sending a reinforcement to aid an isolated unit under pressure. If you warp skip to the boss, you do so at your own peril
I wouldn’t say the game is pro-monarchist if what you mean by that is that the game is trying to convince the players that monarchy as a form of government is effective or just or moral. The characters in the game genuinely see monarchy as the only proper form of government. Nobility hold title, land, and power in exchange for fealty and taxes to their liege. A bad time in a kingdom doesn’t mean the concept of a kingdom is bad (in the view of the characters), it just means the king is bad and needs to be replaced. A bad king has likely insulted the Gods. A good king would honor the Gods who would bless the kingdom as a result.
I wouldn’t bother applying modern political philosophy to this fantasy world and its roughly medieval era analogue.
Hey, the story is the story. A happy ending is fun, and this ending is mostly happy. The kingdom is saved. For now, at least. A good man is king. He’ll have to live a lie, and his mother reveals herself to be truly self-obsessed, power-hungry, and cruel, but that’s the price of peace. That’s not too shabby! It can’t all be butterflies and rainbows. As you see in the endings, most characters end up happy.
The secret of the Main Character’s birth is revealed to the reader and in-story. Edric’s father is a random commoner. He has no true claim to the throne of Redenze. He’s as much a bastard as Zeddard before him. But Zeddard was right that it isn’t bloodline that matters for a ruler. Instead, it is about the mind and heart of the ruler. Edric will do better than Morven or Zeddard because he understands the plight of common people, but his heart hasn’t been turned to coal by hatred. Or so we hope, at least.
Will there be a sequel? Only if I feel like making one
I like romantic supports happening in B and even being hinted at in C level because it makes the shift from platonic to romantic less abrupt, and more natural. It’s hard for anyone to ‘fall in love in three conversations,’ but being romantically inclined throughout the support chain certainly helps.
Cheating Edric is not canon but can definitely happen if you experience the supports in a weird order. I’m personally a fan of Edric sleeping with Catrine and then falling in love with someone else. The man plays the field.
Good point - I’ll fix that.
Hey uh, back again with another issue from Normal Mode difficulty (probably?). On Chapter 14, when I try to confirm ANY action, the game gives me a game over screen for some reason, and when I go back to the title screen to select a savefile to continue on “resume chapter” (restart chapter is fine), I can’t pick, so I’m forced to go for the top one, and when I do it sends me right back to whatever action I did on chapter 14 and gives me a game over again. What is happening??
I have no idea. That’s wild. Can you come to the Discord channel and walk me through this issue in more detail?
Great game, I’m enjoying it so far. I’m currently in Chapter 10, and Gareth appeared, but he never spawned in. Is this a bug or was it because his spawn tile was covered?
@Gabe_Is_No Gareth is currently bugged in normal mode. He won’t spawn, but I’m working to fix that in an update I’ll likely release later today. If you’re playing hard mode, then a unit may have covered his spawning tile. I’ve also fixed that in the update that will be released later today.
Hey, unfortunately I haven’t been able to advance at all because of work, but I forgot to ask about something. Do the gaidens have secret requirements to achieve or is it all very clearly divulged?
@sekihoe All Gaidens are automatically achieved, no requirements, secret or otherwise. They’re Gaidens because they are kind of adjacent to driving the plot forward, but they’re not actually optional missions. Just ‘side chapters.’
was it an intentional running joke, or an accidental coincidence, that so many characters remind each other they have had incredible weapons on in their scabbard the whole time? I seem to recall at least a few characters question where the rest of your party is pulling these incredible tools out of their ass,
@WaywardTroper It’s funny you ask about that! I’d say there are two light running jokes going on in The Dark Amulet. First, as you noted, people noticing random (powerful, magic) weapons in other people’s scabbards. I like to imagine the Gods just warp the weapon to the person without them noticing, so the person beside them is like “Where’d that glowing lance come from?”
The other running joke is “Do you need healing?” “No, nothing like that.” So many mid-battle talk conversations, especially Support conversations begin that way. Everyone’s always asking about healing. I mean, why else are you walking up to a healer in the middle of a battlefield?
These didn’t come from playtesters or anything like that. I just kept doing it and found it funny
The Dwalt agenda must go on.
Enjoy him while he lasts. God Emperor Dwalt is in need of a bit of balancing
He’s entirely fine (he only kicks this hard because I’ve funneled most resources and kills on him) on my honest opinion - so unless I do juggernaut Chapter 10 (and/or kill better Zeddard), I think he’s okay.
Totally hear you - I don’t want to nerf him into uselessness. I think his personal weapon is super cool, but considering how its effective against so many common enemy types, it doesn’t need to be so super strong or accurate (right now its an axe that is more accurate than swords).
That, plus maybe a -1 to his SPD base, and he’ll be okay. For now I’ll let him keep Resolve and Heavy Strikes as skills, because they’re so much fun, but I know they’re wildly strong.
THE DWALT AGENDA IS PRESERVED