[FE8] Fire Emblem: Sea and Sky (Cancelled)

DOWNLOAD AND CREDITS (Always up to date)

Hello everyone! I’m Citrus, and I’m really excited to share with you all my first release of my romhack, Sea and Sky. I started hacking around August of last year and shifted through around working on 3 or so big ideas, but this is the one I found myself most interested in working with and the only one which got to a releasable state. Admittedly, I’m still an amateur at this, so the hack isn’t very good, but I hope that in time, it can be good.

About Me and the Hack

I started playing Fire Emblem around 2019. I enjoyed playing as Chrom in Smash, and when I showed interest in his character, a friend recommended I play Awakening, and since then I have played every mainline Fire Emblem game. My favorites are FE1 (it’s good I swear), Thracia 776, and Radiant Dawn.

I started making my hack because I played some hacks and just wanted to make something. I more do it for my own enjoyment of the process of hacking rather than a goal for the end product, if that makes sense. I’m not very good at Fire Emblem, so the hack isn’t very difficult. I hope it’s still engaging though!

Plot Overview

Tensions are growing in the continent of Landoria. Trade has slowed down, bandits roam the lands, and the threat of an invasion from the powerful overseas nation of Zengarde looms over everyone’s heads. The Duke of Altman, one of the most powerful dukedoms in Landoria’s largest country, Cordonia, fears that the country of Mandra will side with Zengarde and betray the rest of Landoria, so he hires his old friend Aeneas, a sailor, to silently bring his younger brother back from his diplomatic trip in Mandra. This job will become something much larger than Aeneas ever expected, and he will see faces he never expected to see again…

Features

-No skill bloat: Every mount has Canto and every infantry has Shove. Beyond this, there are no skills beyond what is expected from utility classes such as dancers and thieves.
-Ironman friendly: While ironman is not the intended playstyle, it is certainly viable, as the game gives you several units so that losing one is not too big of a deal.

Screenshots:
may6.emulator-0 may6.emulator-1
may6.emulator-2 may6.emulator-3
may6.emulator-4 may6.emulator-6

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money is important
It looks like you can get infinite money if you reset on preps on chapter 2

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Thanks for letting me know, I’ll fix it when i add another chapter or have more bugs to fix, whichever comes first.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVpKQljWtyo
Put this in the hack and for good measure, have it play in the hardest chapter.

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Only if you add a full manuscript of Pride and Prejudice in J&P.

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Congrats on the release. Looking forward to testing.

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A new hotfix has been released, smoothing out a lot of edges in various areas including the aforementioned money glitch. Patch is the same link.

Hey. Played your demo on the FE Reddit Discord. Congrats on getting out something solid. For things I noticed and could be considered:

-It’s fair for the game to be easy. But the hack honestly felt too easy with the army’s strength. Normal enemies in FE8 are weak, but your units compared to them are far stronger in this than in base FE8 (Obviously discounting Seth). By Chapter 2 my units could frequently ORKO many enemies while not taking much back from them. It may be worth raising their stats a bit to match the better units you have.
-Most units felt good to use. The lord’s bows aren’t super useful since he rarely ORKOs and the other units rarely need his chip to kill things past the first chapter. It at least feels like he could use better growths for more Long-term potential. Mildred got doubled by enemies with her Silver Lance and didn’t One-Shot anything. Ernest joins with stronger stats than Theo, has a horse and can use all of the same tomes. Eliza nearly capped strength by the end of the demo and would OHKO most enemies with an Iron Axe. I feel like these units may be worth revising for balance purposes.
-Chapter 3’s boss only has a Steel Axe and doesn’t move.
-Many enemies had no map icons and looked glitchy as a result. Remember to assign these in the Character Editor.
-The bandits in Chapter 3 didn’t really add anything. They weren’t pressuring the villages since they spawned right on top of my army. Perhaps have them on the map at the start and far away from the villages? (Have the one going after Ernest start in the mountain). It will encourage more active movement from the player.
-The Paladin in this map had very low stats. FE8 Normal mode has a glitch that makes promoted enemies weaker than they’re supposed to be, so you might want to make sure that’s corrected in the patch list.
-In Chapter 4, there’s a nomad near the start that was a tile away from popping out of the fog and sniping my Pegasus Knight on the first turn. I feel like he should either be farther away from you or be an archer with less movement range.
-Partway through the map, a mage pops out of thin air on the center island. Beyond this, he drops his Bolting tome. Something doesn’t feel right about getting it that early.
-There are some typos throughout the script. The cutscenes are clearly early works, but you should give them another proofread to iron those out.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with everything.

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This is really good feedback. Thank you, I will take these things into consideration.

I remember mentioning that paladin to Citrus and he said that he just wanted to have a random prepreomote there so I’d assume its low stats are intentional.

To give more in depth responses to some of your points:

-Yeah, I’ll probably end up making the enemies stronger. The game felt fair to me, but I’m biased, since I would consider myself slightly below average at FE and definitely near the bottom of people who play hacks.

-I am pretty set on having my lord having low growths, but I plan to keep him relevant in the long term with things like new prfs and a good promotion. Mildred is honestly a weird unit and I’m not sure what to do with her, because she’s supposed to be a Jagen but not really? She could def use a bump to strength, speed, or defense, but I don’t know which.

-Eliza is also weird. Fighters are a jank class because they have bad speed, bad defenses, bad skill, and no utility or mount which makes them pretty awful, but I feel like changing any of these things would make them lose their identity as a class, so I just went ham on HP and strength. I probably will tone her down.

-In the long term, I think Theo is better than Ernest as he has better growths and gets staves on promotion while Ernest doesn’t. Obviously this isn’t the kind of thing that matters in a 4 chapter demo though. I guess it wouldn’t hurt to give Theo an edge in speed to be more competitive early game.

-In the patch I’m working on, I had the nomad nerfed to not one shot Zay at base HP and defense, but idk how elegant of a solution that is

-I was fine with giving Bolting since I feel it’s much more useful against the player than by the player, since enemy units are plentiful and expendable, while yours aren’t. Come to think of it though, you could probably use Bolting to cheese what I had in mind for Chapter 5, so I will remove it.

-As MrGreen said, the Paladin was mostly just there to scare the player kinda like the Warriors in Chapter 2x of Thracia. I wanted it to be more threatening than the unpromoted Cavs, but not by too much. I can’t recall its stats though and whether or not that’s actually the case, so I will check them.

-Yeah I’m not even gonna sugarcoat it, the script is bad. I’m bad at writing and not particularly good at eventing. I’d like to think I have some good ideas for the story but have no idea how to convey them well or properly flow between the major beats. Story admittedly is not a huge priority, but it would be nice to make something entertaining.

Again, thank you for the feedback! I will take all of what you said into consideration, however I would like to see more perspectives before I make any drastic changes.

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my quick thoughts-

  • The game is too easy. Basically everyone in the army orkos a significant portion of the enemies and most of them don’t hit back very hard. This probably hurts Mildred as well since she only has a 20 use silver lance to ORKO with when everyone else does the same thing with irons. Of course, if you want the intro maps to be easier than the rest of the game to ease people in then that probably works, but there’s also some weird stuff like the low HP Paladin that makes me think it was supposed to be harder.

  • I think Aeneas is too bulky. He’s basically impossible to get killed since he has high hp, defense, and resistance. Fwiw, I also don’t like Oswin’s design so w/e.

  • map palettes were nice

  • chapter 3 boss just stands still and lets you murder them at 2 range.

  • the bolting mage was really weird.

  • the starting monk in chapter 3 has an iron lance instead of a tome.

  • I feel like some of the enemies weren’t supposed to break the torches in chapter 4.

  • I expect Zay to be kind of broken since his magic stat makes me think he’ll get dark flier and the map design so far is catered to having rescue drop shove trains to kill the bosses. Like chapter 4 takes forever if you go around but Zay lets you complete it on turn 2 with little resistance.

  • Chapter 3 should just say kill boss instead of defeat enemy since killing the boss ends the map.

  • The chapter 4 end event is broken. As in killing the boss doesn’t end the chapter. I cleared it twice, was stuck on one of them, and on the other attempt the demo only ended after the end of enemy phase despite killing them on player phase. I presume the event is sloppy because its the end of the demo, but worth pointing out.

  • enemy portraits were glitchy

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Thank you for the feedback! Some responses:

-Yeah, “too easy” is something I’ve gotten a LOT. I’m for sure gonna buff enemy offenses by a bit in the next patch, then maybe make everyone’s weaknesses more defined so they’re less juggernaut-ey

-I think Aeneas being hard to kill is fair because he has a hard time killing back, but I am aware that fair =/= fun,so I’ll see about that.

-Zay does not go Dark Flier, his high magic is so he can use the Flame Lance whenever I give that out, and just because it reminded me of Karin from FE5 who I lifted his general design as a unit from. Good point on how he cheeses chapter 4, I’ll probably add an archer or two near the boss so he can’t just skip it.

-Some of the errors you’ve mentioned are fixed on the patch I’m currently working on, I’m just gonna make more substantial changes before pushing another release.

New patch!

-Enemy offenses have been universally buffed to make them more threatening

-Chapter 3 now has you start in the middle to make the map length less lopsided, and is now actually a rout map.

-Chapter 4 has included an archer near the boss to prevent you from using Zay to fly over the river.

-Numerous bug fixes, including no more ugly red minimug boxes.

Another new patch, with a few battle palletes (shoutouts to Kyrads for doing one), and rebalanced speed. I tried to seperate enemies into 5 speed tiers and adjusted the base speed of your units to determine what they double or don’t. Hopefully this solves the problem of some units getting doubled by almost everything and eating shit while others double a lot and destroy everything.

Apologies for not dropping a new chapter in a while, I promise the next patch will have one.

Hey, so because I’m dumb I lost my dev roms while in the process of moving to a new computer. So I probably will not be updating in a while.

I’m considering restarting development from scratch, because I was probably gonna need to overhaul everything I had anyways, and that would be easier to do with a clean slate.

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Bad that you lost your dev ROMs during computer transfer. But good enough to start off with a much better approach with how to improve with a clean slate.

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Hey guys, I’d like to post here to say that for the foreseeable future, I’m withdrawing from the hacking community and cancelling the hack.

Over time I’ve come to feel like the FE hacking community isn’t something I want to associate with. Not because you’re all a cabal of evil lizard men who backstab in pursuit of clout. I’ve made a lot of great friends here. But the inadequacy and stress that the hack was causing me was honestly too much. I again would like to say that this is entirely my problem and that I choose to leave because of my own wellbeing and not out of disdain for the community. (As well as a general desire to cut down on internet usage and focus on my real life.)

I’d like to think I’d come back, but if I do, I don’t know when. I can say with a fair amount of certainty that if I do I would make something new, so Sea and Sky is likely cancelled forever. I’ll release all the assets I made for it when I stop being lazy.

I would feel bad if I just dipped and left some people hanging. I’ll still occasionally lurk FEU, so please, if I promised to do something for you, please message me and I will do it.

Anyways, see you guys later. Please pick up where I left off and have more old people as main characters.

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Also, I’ve updated the patch with all I had before I decided to stop working on it. It’s kind of janky, but please check it out.

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Take it easy dude. Be safe.

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