There aren’t support conversations. We have chapter conversations and the support bonusses work just fine, but no support comversations.
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Hello,
This issue happens because some emulators/systems do something funky with your save before this chapter occurs - unfortunately replaying the chapter or changing emulators at this point doesn’t do anything because the problem with the save is already present. I have also seen the save corrupted in different ways at different times for different individuals, so there does not seem to be one single way the bug occurs.
I have not experienced the bug myself, and unfortunately I would have no idea how to go about fixing it, as the problem both occurs outside of the chapter in question and I have never replicated it myself. The bug also has not occurred on my playthroughs on real hardware, so I am mostly left to speculate that the issue is some weird emulator/system issue that only happens some of the time.
I have been fairly busy recently with my job, but if you want me to try to advance your save past this chapter, you can send it to me and I can give it a look at some point. I apologize that you are experiencing this issue.
Hello,
Welcome to the forum! There are no support conversations for this romhack, although supports can be built and are functional for gameplay purposes.
There is also no plan to add support conversations in the future. As LewynCollins state, there are quite a few talk conversations within chapters that serve a similar role to support conversations, and you may find these talk conversations to be an adequate substitute.
Disclaimer: I didn’t play past Chapter 14, so this review will not include anything that happens after that.
I didn’t like this hack, which is why I dropped it. And I didn’t like it for a variety of reasons, most of which were gameplay-related.
I will say this: I think the presentation is great. On an audiovisual level, the hack is very polished and pleasant – credit where it’s due. In terms of story, I also think it’s a functional tale without any major hiccups, although I can’t judge it in its entirety due to the fact I didn’t actually finish the game.
My issues lie in the gameplay, and those issues are pervasive throughout the game, which is why I simply couldn’t continue at some point.
- The enemy placement. This is by far the biggest gripe I have with the game. Enemies are almost never in formations – they are just scattered haphazardly across maps, and they are always placed in such a way that engaging one on player phase means facing one or two other enemies on enemy phase. This makes setting up for enemy phases quite annoying, because if I want to take out enemies proactively, I then need to send in support and reposition the units I just attacked with (most of the best player-phase units are NOT the best enemy-phase units in this hack). There is virtually no way to have a player phase during which you take out every nearby threat and your injured units (some of them probably took a counterattack due to the hack’s very high hitrates) DON’T have to face enemies on enemy phase (who will probably kill them if they are not healed or otherwise supported/repositioned). And as far as repositioning tools go, they are extremely limited, which makes this problem a lot worse than it otherwise would’ve been. There is no Shove, no Reposition, no other skills that increase mobility. There is no Canto+ for mounted units. Finally, there is no unit you can move in first and who can safely PP+EP enemies consistently. That unit would be…
- The Jagen. There isn’t one, and this is the other part that really frustrated me. In a LOT of the early maps, I would’ve truly appreciated having a Jagen, but I didn’t have one. To make matters worse, the story consistently teased me with pre-promotes joining, but then they didn’t actually join, or they were relegated to side-story chapters. This meant I had no proper frontliner to work with, and I had to fiddle around with my units to make sure they could somehow take out threats proactively on player phase while not dying on enemy phase while they are injured. It was not fun to do this; it felt like my options for facing enemies were far too limited in terms of positioning and that I could never set up enemy phases like I wanted to. To make matters worse, the more mobile units in the army, and the tankier ones, are constantly gated by enemy effective weapons and magical attacks that make it impossible for them to extend too far forward and consistently lead the charge. I thought the problem was at its worst in Chapter 3, where the game suggests you to lead the charge with Sammy (and yet there are two armor effectives waiting for her on the left side of the map), and where the enemy Archer placement is extremely limiting to Sarah’s movement, but there were other maps where this was annoying.
- On some maps, especially the early ones, I felt like my options were too limited. What compounded the issues caused by the enemy placement was the fact some maps seemed to only have one solution in mind. A lot of them are early maps, too, which honestly gave me a poor first impression of the hack.
- The consistent strategy for the Prologue is to chip the top Revenant with Arianna, move Scott in between the two Revenants, trade Arianna’s Vulnerary to him, finish off the Revenant and EP the other with an Iron Axe, then finish off the injured Revenant with Arianna on turn 2, move Scott full-Mov to the right and chug the Vulnerary before EPing the two other Revenants. I actually lost in that chapter numerous times because I didn’t trade the Vulnerary on turn 1, which is pivotal for Scott being able to face both Revenants on turn 2 (Arianna isn’t tanky enough to face both of them).
- Then there is Chapter 1, which is set up strangely; Scott’s only decent action on turn 1 is to head straight into the forest, but that means Arianna can’t trigger her talk conversation with him without being attacked instead of him (which is suboptimal, as she can’t counter and she takes more damage), so her only remaining action is to… move and do nothing (there are no enemies in her range on turn 1). Weston and Sarah combine for a kill on the Mercenary in their range, but the optimal attack order for them is to start with Sarah and finish with Weston, which gets Sarah injured – and an injured Sarah can’t attack anything else on this map without dying, so she needs to chug a Vulnerary next turn and do nothing else (you have no healer).
- Chapter 2 is a bit similar; the best approach to the Will recruitment is to chain a rescue-drop with Weston and Sarah, recruiting him on turn 1 after dropping him in front of Kayla/Scott. Then you send someone to the bottom right village while sending Sarah to the top left one (since getting the top left village with someone other than Sarah is a lot more annoying movement-wise). Then you engage the enemies up north, but Scott is by far the best unit to do that with, because he has riverwalk + 1-2 Range + enough durability to not die almost instantly (which Will doesn’t have), so it’s best to just have him do all the work while he’s standing on the river and heal him with Kayla as needed.
And I’m talking about these “optimal strategies” as if they’re dogma, but really, I think these maps don’t offer much in terms of alternative strategies that don’t suck in some way, and the railroading annoyed me a bit. For the sake of comparison, I can bring up the first map of Vision Quest here; you can send any of your units to any of the houses and you will probably be fine, as long as all of them are moving forward, which they will be. Moving, say, Esfir to pick up the lower house instead of the upper house won’t turn the map into a mess, while something like trying to tackle the northern enemies with Weston in Chapter 2 will (because he’ll take forever to kill them). And the alternatives there are Arianna (she can’t EP, she’s an Archer), Kayla (she can’t EP, she’s a healer), Will (he can’t EP, he’ll die), Sarah (she can’t EP, she’ll die, and even if not, she won’t kill anything). Similarly, if you don’t send Scott into the forest on turn 1 of Chapter 1, that means half your units are doing nothing on turn 1, while the other two are killing a single enemy (and one of them has to heal next turn if you want her to ever enter combat on this map again while there’s a chance of her eating a counter). And it’s not like Scott having to fight a sword enemy inside the forest on turn 1 is great to begin with, since he’s an axe user; thankfully, the high hitrates in this hack prevent the situation from being TOO terrible.
But yeah. I think if the abovementioned issues didn’t exist, I would enjoy the game as far as the gameplay goes. Unfortunately, because those issues were pervasive, I couldn’t continue.
And as far as the story goes, I see what it’s going for. It’s a tonally consistent, heartwarming tale of familial support and relationships and such. I get the thematic resonance here and I don’t have significant issues; I can’t say it ever gripped me, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s bad. Unfortunately, it wasn’t good enough for me to continue despite the issues I had with the hack’s gameplay, but I also don’t think the story is at fault in the first place, so.
This isn’t a discouragement from you making hacks or anything; I just wanted to elaborate upon the reasons why I didn’t enjoy the hack and ended up dropping it before the end.
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Already sent bro waiting for your response since many months ago hahahahaaa
I’m having this same bug. Game crashes when I receive the gauntlets. Could I get some help progressing my save past this chapter?
Hello,
Thank you for your detailed feedback.
Some of your observations on the earlygame are things that I have been aware of for some time, and some in fact are intentional. Due to the nature of how this hack was made, it was simultaneously made for the religious hack audience, and an audience that has not played much Fire Emblem at all. The intent of some of these early scenarios is to teach several lessons (trading, attacking at 2-range, rescuing, consequences for slow play) in a more controlled scenario for new players, but in scenarios that experience players can breeze through swiftly. I admit that my execution may leave plenty of room for improvement. If I were to re-do these chapters, I would probably make a few changes, as the maps have a hint of the controversial “FE12 Prologue” feel to them, but at this point, I do feel they are in an adequate, if not exceptional, state. I apologize for your poor experience with them.
On the enemy placement, the scatter of enemies with a limited number of formations was a very intentional choice. The style of Fire Emblem gameplay that I tend to enjoy involves quite a lot of overlapping, but hopefully not overwhelming, enemy ranges, with an active mix of player phase attacking while preparing for an incoming enemy phase. I found over time that maps I made with more discrete enemy formations tended to have more inconsistent pacing and balance, getting either bogged down at thorny formations, featuring more “dead” turns between active PP/EP engagement, or limiting options for engagement with a clustered threat.
This isn’t to say that a formations style of enemy placement can’t be done well, or is never warranted - I simply found I preferred a more scattered approach. I realize that this stylistic choice isn’t to everyone’s liking, with some preferring a more tilted focus toward player phase or enemy phase play, and some preferring the greater freedom of movement that comes from more discrete formations and open space on a map. There is a definite “push and pull” to 7S, but this is by design. In fact, your statement in the second point that “I had to fiddle around with my units to make sure they could somehow take out threats proactively on player phase while not dying on enemy phase while they are injured” is exactly the type of gameplay I like and tried to create!
On the Jagen, this was another intentional choice, and one that I’ve gone back and forth on multiple times. While I personally greatly enjoy combing for kills in the “scrub squad” aura of earlygame Fire Emblem without a suitable Jagen, I do realize that even a modestly strong Jagen can help take some of the rough edges off of the earlygame. If I were to re-do the game, I might reconsider unit availability to smooth out the experience slightly.
I greatly appreciate your feedback, and thank you for giving the game a shot.
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Hello,
I’m sorry you are experiencing this issue. If you’re still interested, I could try to advance your save past this point if you send it to me. I finally have a bit more free time after a busy few months and I was already able to fix a couple of saves today.
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Yep, I figured the design was intentional. I would still recommend this hack to people, though; just because it wasn’t my cup of tea personally doesn’t mean it’s bad. If I thought it was objectively bad, I would be upfront about it. It’s not. I’m sure a lot of people will like it.
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This is some great discussion, thanks to both of you for putting such detailed thoughts together. I want to throw out there that I found the push & pull to be a bit outside my optimal experience, but at the same time I thought it was pretty tightly done and I enjoyed the “fairness” of the whole leading edge of the formation being in danger on EP. Just made the gameplay somewhat slow for me. Cool to know that was such a focus for you design wise and absolutely intentional. I played years ago but this discussion has me wondering at a replay 
cheers!
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Back on the Warpath (pun intended) again after the man fixed my save (big thanks again to him!)
Beat Chapters 10 and 11. (Forgot what difficulty though at this point…)
Spoiler Thoughts
Chapter 10 isn’t that bad all things considered. Chapter 11 however…
Scott and his convo with Brandon I hope didn’t give anything here because I couldn’t get it. Just getting to all the chests alone took so much time (along with the reinforcements) that by the time I finally got done there was no more time left. Like they start on opposite ends of the map that are both far and hard to get to from each other’s parts- and the only point they meet in the middle isn’t exactly easy to break through, to say the least.
What does that convo give anyways?
I mean it says 11 turns but I feel like (or it might have just been me) that it was counting both the enemy and player turns with it.
Also I swear that on some chapters, if you only have one unit with a Convo deployed (as in not their partner also), it doesn’t show, while for others, it does.
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Hello,
Glad you were able to progress. Thank you for your feedback.
Responses
The Scott-Brandon convo is just some flavor text, so no worries about not getting it. It is a bit of a hard-to-get Easter egg as it contains a bit of history about each character, if I recall correctly.
The 11-turn limit is only incremented after everyone has moved. The chest are designed to be fairly difficult to get, but the chapter can be beaten fairly quickly by just rushing the center. A common strategy I would recommend would be to go after chests with 2 of the 3 groups, and punt on chests with one group to go after the boss - this makes things easier while still getting a good amount of the rewards.
You may be right on talk convos being funky. I haven’t looked into it much myself, but it’s entirely possible it can work how you describe.
Thanks again!
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Hi, first time I am posting, though I have been around and played FE romhacks for a longtime.
I faced the gauntlets bug at the end of chapter 9x. I know pretty much nothing about romhacking, but this I was frustrated and wanted to play the game further, I went and tried to solve it myself.
What I did is I downloaded FEbuilderGBA, loaded the ROM, deleted the conditional event for the gauntlet so I get it whatever the case, and deleted all the events related to changing the party, as they also occur at the start of chapter 10.
Result: no crash anymore.
Reading previous replies I have absolutely no idea how my sav file got corrupted and whether it really did, but changing the events in ROM directly worked.
Great hack anyway!
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Hi can anyone spoil me on the special recruitment if possible
It’s Kenneth
I’m sorry you experienced this issue, but glad you were able to get past it! If I knew how to fix this issue, I would, but I haven’t been able to do so as of yet, and I apologize for that.
Major Spoilers on Secret Unit
In Ch. 19xx, if you speak to Kenneth with all 7 of the siblings and then defeat him in battle, he should join as a player unit in the Endgame chapter.
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I tried the download link but I get an error that says “can’t load this file type” and “this file type is unsupported here.” I haven’t had an issue like this before but I am admittedly a little computer illiterate. Any suggestions or is there another link I could use? Thanks.
Hello,
I’m sorry you are experiencing difficulties. Could you give more details about the platform you are on? I was able to access and download from the link on my own machine with no issue.
Hi! Sorry to butt in, but I think I understand the issue. I’m guessing you’re seeing this?
In that case, you should be fine to download it. That’s just something Dropbox shows by default when it can’t show a preview thumbnail for the file in question (which is the case if the file isn’t an image or video or something along those lines)
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