[FE8] Fire Emblem: Malice's & Dice's Odd Jobs (7/7)

Gunnar · February 2, 2024, 6:39pm

Greetings, FEU!

Gunnar here with a new little hack centred around Malice and her father Dice!
This is an atypical FE game, since you will only control two units for most of the time, with occasional playable characters depending on the chapter. The game itself is pretty short, with only 7 chapters (“jobs”), with varied objectives. On their journey, the duo will team up with some recognizable faces from the Archanean games. So, for any Malice & Dice fan out there (if there’s even someone like that) or Archanea games, this may be for you. Or if you just want to try something out of the ordinary.

The game is play tested for the most part, but if you find any kind of problems (bugs, typos, etc…) tell me in the comments.

Ver. 1.0.
Ver. 1.1.
Ver. 1.2.
Ver. 1.3.
Ver. 1.4.

Synopsis

In debt with a notorious crime lord from Port Warren, Dice teams up with her daughter Malice to earn all the gold they can to pay his debt. Failure and bad luck will follow them around, making their quest for money a tough one that will bring them from the streets of Port Warren to the plains of Aurelis and back.

This hack includes

-7 chapters (jobs)
-2 permanent units, 12 temporary units
-No money, no shops, and no supply nor battle preparations (at least until Jobs 6-7)
-No easy mode, just normal mode. Hard mode is not tested, but you are free to try it.
-Possible bugs: when you return to the main screen, the image sometimes will face off, but it won’t affect anything else.

Screenshots

Malice Dice Dahl Dice in action Ogma Samson Dahl & Malice Caesar & Radd

Credits

+Character Portraits
Malice - Zelkami
Dice - Emperor Haardin
Ogma - Thorn
Dahl - Kanna
Hardin - Thorn
Wolf - Thorn
Sedgar - Thorn
Vyland - Thorn
Roshea - Thorn
Caesar - Thorn
Radd - Thorn
Samson - Thorn
Etzel - Thorn
“Magnus” - Thorn
Gazzak - Thorn
Gomer - Thorn
“Hugh” - CanDy
“Nestor” - Matthieu
“Zeentrah” - Parrhesia
“Theodor” - RandomWizard
“Generic brigands” - SSHX
“Kurd” - Crusticus
“Sweet Pete Jay” - BoneManSeth, MeatofJustice
“Keith” - Matthieu
“Thug” - Thorn
“Jilocashim” - Zmr

+Animations & Sprites
SSHX - Gladiator sprites
Rasdel - Female mercenary sprites
Waleed & 7743 - Gladiator animation
IS & TheBlindArcher - Female Mercenary animation
knabepicer & NightBloodKT - Hunter sprites
MeatofJustice - Hunter animations

+Other
7743 - Boat night
Icestone - batima

+Patches
Circleseverywhere - Chapter Text Converter, Skip Intro cutscene, Skip New game Text
7743 - Tutorial disable
Nintenlord - Easy move removal
Stan - Skip World Map
Tequilla - Battle stats with anims off
7743 - Null Move Display
Circleseverywhere - Map Danger Zone

SmeargleDBZ · February 2, 2024, 8:54pm

Love this as a BSFE Enjoyer, will be playing this when I get a chance

cb1052 · February 2, 2024, 10:20pm

Played on hard mode. Limitation of 2-3 units in most maps was very noticeable, so Malice and Dice got to snowball hard. There were several typos, at least one in almost every conversation, and a text formatting error with Vivica uh, Zeentrah’s mid-map dialogue in chapter 3. Also, a quick thing to note is that it is generally recommended to install QOL patches, at least the “global enemy range toggle”, “display enemies that don’t move” and “battle stats with anims off”.

Other comments:
— Lack of supply until, like, chapter 4 or something was annoying. I didn’t like having to discard items in chapter 2.
— A big one: The ending of chapter 5 was broken. Idk if it was because fuckin’ Roshea died to a crit or not, but I killed the boss and waited out all the turns and no end event played.

Miscellaneous

Die-39
Die-44
Final stats of the main characters. They were able to snowball hard in chapter 5, and the other units sucked in comparison.
Die-13
Text formatting glitch mentioned earlier
Another thing to note is that a lot of the bosses are stationary when they shouldn’t be, or something. Like I didn’t expect Nestor in chapter 2 not to move, or the boss in chapter 1.

Commenting on the story, it seemed… alright, but there were a lot of grammatical and formatting errors. I did like Malice and Dice’s dynamic though.

Also why does dice get weighed down by every axe lmao, couldn’t you just give him 2 more con and 2 less speed

Chapters

Chapter 1 – was fine, although the bishop’s absurd stats and tendency to spam sleep made it easy. The boss not moving was kind of strange to me, felt like the chapter would have been better if he moved.
Chapter 2 – Other than Nestor not moving, this chapter was fine. The water tiles were a bit odd though.
Chapter 3 – probably the most fun and well paced chapter of the hack. The stream of reinforcements was pretty cool although I wish there could have been more on map conveyance, like stairs or something.
Chapter 4 – This one was a lot of enemy spam of mostly weak enemies that Malice could solo. The whole back section of the map was really empty for me.
Die-21
(my status after turn , uh, 11 or something)
Chapter 5 – Malice and Dice are far stronger than other units by this point, and far more capable than everyone else. The ballista was a neat touch, but the lack of reinforcement trigger conveyance was a bit strange to me. Also, Sedgar and Wolf have – res which means it’s negative.
Die-34
I basically had Malice solo the entire top half lol.

Gunnar · February 2, 2024, 10:53pm

Thank you very much for playing!
The snowballing was kind of unavoidable, since the rest of characters don’t stay for long in the party, so I will try to make some changes here and there. Also, glad that you liked the dynamic between Malice and Dice, since they were the moving factors of the story.
I will work out the different errors for the next version as soon as possible, and thank you once again for playing.

P.S.: The water tiles in chapter 2 are a pond.

Gunnar · February 3, 2024, 2:12am

Version 1.1. is out!

QOL patches added
Supply added
Chapter 5’s objetive changed, troops edited & map slighly redesigned
Minor errors and typos corrected (although there may have escaped a couple, so if you find anything weird, just tell me)

cb1052 · February 3, 2024, 3:29am

Misc things that I forgot:

— You should try to give the characters battle anim palettes.

uh i swear there was something else here but i forgot

Gunnar · February 3, 2024, 9:01am

Yeaaah…
That will take time. I’m really bad at making battle palettes.

Darrman · February 4, 2024, 1:15am

Kaga-era Fire Emblem is my favourite, and a hack surrounding some of the BSFE characters interested me. So I played it through. As mentioned, it’s pretty short: I was done in about an hour and a half total and I only died once. It was definitely an easy hack: Dice and Maris are both very strong and only the end of Chapter 3 put up much resistance. The story did its job: Dice is in debt, and we see him and Maris get into all sorts of trouble trying to pay it off. It absolutely needs more proofreading, however, as typos and awkward phrasing are ever-present. For example, “temporal units” should be “temporary units”.
I did run into several bugs, which I will report below.

Letting the bishop die in Chapter 1 does not cause a game over or any other punishment.
Trading has been disabled, which means it is impossible to keep Dahl’s items as you can’t trade them away from him as you only gain a convoy in Chapter 3.
The Chapter 5 win condition is broken: the chapter ended upon routing the enemy and the boss never spawned.

Not bugs, but extra quality of life hacks the hack could have done with include Danger Zone (it’s in the credits, but I couldn’t get it to work), removing the health and safety screen, and defaulting the options to higher speeds when starting a new game, along with removing the unedited guide entries.

Overall, I enjoyed myself. I certainly wouldn’t consider this hack to be ambitious, but it did what it set out to do.

Gunnar · February 4, 2024, 1:37am

The whole point of the hack was to make Malice and Dice star in their own story, and I’m glad I at least manage to accomplish that.
I will get with the bugs & other problems as soon as I can, and maybe do something with the snowballing of the duo too.

Gunnar · February 11, 2024, 11:40pm

Ver. 1.2. is out!

Enemies with better stats during chapters 4 & 5
Theodor’s, Dahl’s and Hardin’s deaths now cause game over.
I don’t know what may be causing the supply bug, so I just decided to make enemies drop less items.

MaxRed · February 12, 2024, 6:39am

Man, this hack is right up my alley One thing I hate about FE is how long levels take, so short maps with 2-3 characters are A-OK with me. The story’s pretty good too (though it could use a proofreader), and the gameplay is solid without any hurdles. I still have 4 and 5 to do, though, so there might be some hurdles later.

Looking forward to finishing this, probably tomorrow!

Jotari · February 12, 2024, 2:50pm

I see Dahl! Love minor boss appreciation. Especially minor Archanea boss appreciation. I will definitely give this one a go, and look forward to anything else you have set in Archanea.

MaxRed · February 13, 2024, 12:54am

Ok, finished! The good news is, I got the Ch 5 boss to spawn from the southwest fort, and killing it did end the chapter immediately. Maybe those who didn’t get the spawn had someone in the fort at the time? The bad news is, the boss’s dialogue is broken - the lines of text are longer than the dialogue bubble, so some words can’t be seen. The hack did end successfully though, returning to the title screen after the ending.

Overall, I quite enjoyed this mod Playing shorter maps with fewer characters was tons of fun, and even the last map didn’t overstay its welcome. The story was nice too, with a few genuinely sweet moments sprinkled in. The mod might be a little easy for most people, though, even with the buffs you gave the later enemies. And some new music tracks and palettes (or at least one for Malice) would help a lot with the presentation.

Thanks for the fun!

Jotari · February 13, 2024, 5:11am

Alright, I’m done. I enjoyed it. The arena fight in Chapter 3 was my favourite chapter. So simple to have a blank fighting area, but the rate of deployment of enemies and having only two characters made it surprisingly interesting and challenging.

Dice was absolutely useless for me. He got doubled by everything and even one rounded by some enemies. He definitely needs a few more points of Con so he’s not constantly at a disadvantage.

I’m surprised the story ended right there. It seemed set up that you’d eventually fight the debt collectors later given how much focus they got. I also thought things might be tied into the actual BS Saga by having us playthrough the Archanea castle chapter where they were introduced. But the resolution with Hardin was nice enough. I guess all of this is meant to take place pre war of Shadows entirely. Overall, kudos making a hack about some of the least popular characters in the franchise XD Dice in particular has been very consistently at the bottom of CYL. But you gave him an enjoyable arc and did justice to their characters, so I liked it even if I could have done with one or two more chapters.

Jotari · February 13, 2024, 5:45am

Honestly, for a game as short as this, I’d rather ditch the convoy entirely and make the gameplay more resource management focused.

Gunnar · February 13, 2024, 9:00am

Yes, the game takes place before the War of Shadows, about a year or so. And about the debt collectors, well, I was reserving that for a possible sequel set after the War of Heroes, but who knows? Maybe I will add a couple of new chapters in the future.