[FE8] Fire Emblem: The Rise of Dragons (6 chapter DEMO!)

[Alice]

The continent of Elibe… ~1000 years after the Disturbance of Bern…

Fire Emblem: The Rise of Dragons is an Awakening-style FE8 hack, set in the world of Elibe, taking place 1000 years after the end of The Binding Blade. Featuring new and colorful characters (And a few returning ones) in a familiar setting.

Follow Ruby, the Princess of Lycia, and a scholar of the forgotten art of Wind magic, on her journey to uncover the mystery of her own father’s corruption, and the return of the enigmatic Manaketes that once roamed the land.

It’s highly encouraged to read all the dialogue, visit all the houses, and read all the descriptions. See what all the characters have to say!

Currently there are 6 playable maps. Prologue + Chapters 1 to 5

Features

• A revamped Skill system
  Say goodbye to skill clutter! In this game, units will only have at most 2 or 3 skills. And vanilla class abilities, such as Canto and Steal will occupy one of these slots.
  Player units feature Personal Skills, that are unique from their class skills, and showcase their personality. Bosses may also have Personal Skills to change how you approach fighting them.
  There are almost no proc skills in this hack, except for a few that don’t affect combat at all.

• Accessory Items and Shields
  Throughout your adventure, you’ll find certain items that grant skills when held in your inventory, similar to FE4 and FE9. And also Shields from Gaiden/Echoes that boost your defense, but lower your speed. But be mindful: Only the one that’s highest in your inventory will take effect!

• Unique Weapons and Items
  Compared to vanilla, you will find that there’s a ton of weapons to be found that have special effects, such as a Constitution equip boost, Effective damage against Thieves and Brigands, and also items with intriguing effects, like a Staff that places Light Runes from afar, and even Warp Powder.

• A variety of Chapter Objectives
  Long gone are the days of FE6 where only Sieze existed. This game will feature many different Chapter objectives, such as Escape, Defend, Arrive at multiple points on the map, and more!

• New and returning Classes
  Across this game, you will find both allies and foes who belong to a few intriguing new classes, as well as a few returning ones. These classes include playable Sodiers, Nomads, Ballisticians, Ice Dragons, and a new Generic Rapier Lord class!

• Other Miscellaneous features
  Kaitou style Modular Minimug, Class and Item descriptions with Icons, tweaks and improvements to several vanilla Icons, scrolling background on Statscreen, Merlinus style supply unit.

Screenshots

Future plans...

• Fully implement a World Map, with branching Paralogue nodes
• Aiming for a lenght of 25-30 story chapters, not including Paralogues/Gaidens
• More portraits for characters
• Improve enemy placement and stats
• Add custom enemy AI
• Fully fledged Support conversations

Credits

7743, for FEBuilderGBA
Vesly and and all the contributors of the Github SkillSystem

Battle Animations:
JonoTheRed, N426, HyperGammaSpaces, St Jack, Pikmin1211, Russel Clark, RiriK, Jubby, fuzz94, Maiser6, Shtick, Glenwing, JJ09, Andy, SD9k, ltranc, Loe_Link, eCut, Mikey Seregon, RRSKAI, Nuramon, Eldritch Abomination, FEGirls project, Orihara_Saki, Ukelele, Temp, Black Mage, Wan, Sme, Circleseverywhere, Seergiioo, TheBlindArcher, Spud, MeatofJustice, Drozz, Flaushban, Knabepicer, Hairyblob, Mageboy, Xenith, DerTheVaporeon, ZoramineFae, SHYUTERz, Marlon0024, SqRtOfPi, shadowofchaos, Melia, Feier, Azbel.

Spell Animations:
SHYUTERz, BwdYeti, Mikey Seregon, Orihara_Saki, Struedelmuffin, Alusq, 7743, Blazer, Arch, HyperGammaSpaces, Beansy.

Portraits:
Its_Just_Jay, LaurentLacroix, Ildar, Smokeyguy77, Levin64, DerTheVaporeon, Jeorge_Reds, Relic, CapibaraInSpace, Peerles, EldritchAbomination, knabepicer, Kanna, CanDy, Epicer, Sphealnuke, AmBrosiac_5, RedBean, BreezeBender.

Icons:
Rubber, Mikey Seregon, MeatOfJustice, MintX, Azbel, Maximus, PhantomSentine, Zane, EldritchAbomination, Indogutsu Tenbuki, Ereshkigal, BatimaTheBat, Snakey1, 2WB, GabrielKnight, LordGlenn, Seal, SacredWar, SacredStones, Jubby, Zarg, Cardcafe, Maxim, WhydidImakethisaccount, Lisandra Brave, Rootrick.

Music:
Tristan Hollow, Psyche, Azula, Disquietude, Treatstar, Tambo.

New Skills coding:
Mikey Seregon, PhantomSentine.

And EXTRA Special thanks to…
SomeonePassingBy, for helping me fix a ton of bugs and errors. I wouldn’t be here without them.
Breeze Bender, Doodle Poodle, Magra Artworks, Jay Idyata, and Kuni. For letting me use their wonderful characters as units in this project.
Zeldacrafter64 and DarkShockBro, for play-testing and giving me great feedback, and help with spell-checking.

(Any assets not credited were made entirely by me. If not, I mistakenly forgot to credit. If so, please let me know so I can correct it)

DOWNLOAD THE PATCH HERE

This project is very early in development, and it has been a passion project of mine for a few years now. Aside from the play-testing and some help with bugs, I’ve made it entirely by myself. I cannot possibly complete this hack alone, so I want to ask that if anyone is interested in joining the project, and you have some ROM hacking skills, you can contact me on Discord @ thealice, or via E-mail at thealice2001@gmail.com.

Updates (SPOILERS)

• Oct 11th: Small update. Kublai doesn’t come with Point Blank at base anymore. He instead learns it at level 5. In the future, other Nomads promoting to Ranger will learn Point Blank at level 1.
• Oct 12th: Slightly nerfed Derrik, and buffed Blair. Changed Blair’s personal skill to Forceful Partner. Buffed Ch5 boss Cable, and upgraded his weapons. Green units will no longer be able to pass through player units. This also applies to Purple units in Ch5.
• Oct 13th: Overhauled Chapter 2 map (Yay!) And fixed some enemies that didnt auto-level weapon rank. Removed some dropable items. Added a cool character in Ch1. Wait until turn 11 to see her
• Oct 16th: Fixed a bug in chapter 4 where beating the boss wouldn’t end the chapter. Oops.

Current known glitches (SPOILERS)

• When Marlene is the last to act in a given turn, the game will automatically auto-end and not let her move. This doesn’t happen on her join chapter.

Share this project with your friends! All feedback is appreciated.

[Dellhonne]

very cool proyect i follow is and see

[Fanoffireemblem1986]

Wow looks awesome too and playable as well

[Freefall]

Sick I’m hyped congrats on the progress Alice

[MageBoy]

I was told to give my thoughts on the thread, so I shall.
It’s a neat little demo so far, it’s not long enough that I can comment on it that much but I will give my first impressions of the demo.

Most of the characters so far are really charming. The units themselves are pretty good as well, even the armor knight.

I personally find it a bit silly that black fang would survive this long (unless it’s different band of assassins who have similarities to the original).

[adalvar]

Ok, so i’m gonna go more in-depth on this demo later on, but there is one thing i wanna comment on as mere food for thought. You can take it to heart or ignore it. I don’t get the hatred this community has for skills. The Skill System has been expanded so many times and has so many unique and game-changning skills that it’s criminal to not maximize the slots affored to a unit. Now i will admit that some of said dislike is likely due to the fact that alot of hacks have had very poor skill distribution which is what perhaps creates the notion of “skill clutter”. But i do think that a well thought out skill spread on max 6 slots can open up some nice options in terms of carving out niches between classes and units aswell as creating fullfiling power fantasies. That’s just my 2 cents on that.

As for the hack itself. I do hope to see multiple Manakete classes based on the original Dragon Tribes. To me that was one of the biggest missed chances from both the OG FE6 and subsequent hacks. Anyway i am excited to see the hack in full swing. Good luck to you.

[Alice]

You can bet there will be multiple Manaketes. I have at least 3 different ones planned!

As for the skills, I feel that most people agree that proc skills and such are too chaotic. I actually did a survey on that a while back. And that’s why I decided to take a more modest approach for skills. But worry not, because this hack is built on a buildfile that uses all the 254 skill slots to it’s fullest potential! There are a ton of new unique skills to be seen.

And thanks for the feedback!

[adalvar]

Sure…if you ever want to discuss things like balance and how to allocate skills, send me a message if you ever fancy it. Get some brainstorming sessions on.

Hum…3 is a very nice start. Again looking forward to this.

[Ultimiter]

Man, I’m really looking forward to this. I love the concept, and no skill clutter is always nice. Also, is that the covert cloak from SV?

[Alice]

I just got the name idea from Pokemon. Here it works differently. It’s an item that grants the Pass skill

[Goldblitzx]

I played through the demo last night, took me about 50 minutes or so.
Thought it’d post some thoughts.

I will not be commenting on the story because that’s not really my forte.

Prologue

This is…almost just vanilla’s prologue. The enemy slots are the exact same(including the two enemies with differing personal bases), the boss’ dialogue is vanilla, the end cutscene is mostly vanilla dialogue. It’s also a two unit prologue.

Kublai onerounds almost every unit on this map, Ruby can contribute, but it feels rather pointless to have her do so.

All in all, I would suggest cutting this map, and just put in all of the important information into the Chapter 1 start event.

Chapter 1

One of two unique maps in this hack.

The turn flow is rather boring, it’s just the exact same for the entire map, have Ruby move forward, and have Kublai and the armor just tank.

This is an issue I’ll discuss a bit more later, but can you stop giving so many items, it’s basically guaranteed you’ll have to throw out an item.

This map was really quick, definitely a step up from the Prologue, but it was still rather boring. I’d suggest not just making the map a straight line with some chests for Cedric to stop by.

Maybe remove one or both of the droppable javelins, as I only have one unit who can use them in this chapter, and won’t gain another for a couple of maps.

Chapter 2

This map reuses Fe7 E11 verbatim, kinda boring.
There’s nothing to do turn 1, you start way to far away from the enemies, so much space of the map goes unused. I don’t really understand why you reused E11 when most of the map goes unused.

Once again, the drop item issue still comes up.

I’d suggest completely redoing this map to have a unique map that properly utilizes the space given, I get that this is set in Elibe, but that doesn’t mean you have to completely reuse Fe7/6 maps.

You are given a supply after the map, so the issue of having to drop excess items no longer occurs, thankfully.

Chapter 3

The other non reused vanilla map.

Chapter 3 is rather inoffensive, only issue I really have with it is that you can like, two turn the map because the flier starts almost exactly underneath the boss, and can fly over most tiles on the map.

I really have nothing to say here, the map is fine, just kind of boring.

Chapter 4

Chapter 4 reuses the first trial map from Fe6, except it removes all the mountain tiles from the center passage.

Another inoffensive map, fire tomes being able to be used as torches is neat.

Maybe make it a kill boss map, instead of a route map. Since the map is a fog map it’s impossible to know how many enemies are left, and that’s just a bit inconvenient, especially since for the most part you’ll have killed most on map enemies before the boss due to it being very linear, so the change wouldn’t hurt anything.

Chapter 5

This map reuses the Fe6 version of the Laus map.
This map is probably the best map in the game, since there’s actually more than one thing to do, the villages are an actual anti turtle incentive here.

The third faction is interesting, I like how they will charge the red units and block off one of the paths for the boss to reach you, it was rather interesting and I enjoyed how that opened up different avenues of play.

I’d take a look at Blair Vs. Derick, Blair is almost completely worthless against Derick, she has more skill, and that’s about it.

General

I mentioned this issue a bit above, but PLEASE quit dumping items on players in the first couple of maps, the player doesn’t have a supply, and all four of your units will have full inventories, resulting in the player having to through away their items.
Either give the player the ability to send to supply, or stop giving so many items in those early maps.

You reuse a lot of Elibe maps verbatim, while there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, it does get rather boring, and often times large sections of the map are unused and feel like they shouldn’t be there, as was the case with Chapter 2 and most of E11 just going unused.

Enemies are far to weak to magic damage, I found Ruby had begun consistently onerounding around chapter 4 and left a lot of units in the dust, I dunno if this is an enemy or a Ruby issue, but I would address that.

The flier is also broken as hell, from my experience she onerounded almost every enemy with a wing lance, and due to her pretty decent hit points, didn’t have to worry about the damage she took back.

Please continue to work on this hack, as I would love to see it improve over time.

Uhh idk how to close this off really.

[Alice]

Pushed out an update today! Changes are mostly to Chapter 5

[OverZealous]

Heya Alice!

Played through the demo, and wanted to give some thoughts on what I saw.
(P.S. Didn’t catch the recent Ch5 changes, seems I downloaded the patch a bit early XD)

Story Comments

• I really liked the world-building ideas that were introduced in this hack. My personal favorite was the idea that Wind Magic is practically a lost art, which is a really interesting concept that I hope gets explored later on.
• Obviously, the main plot is far from finished (or even fully planned out), so I won’t be too harsh. I did think that the betrayal of Ruby’s father would have hit far harder if we had a few chapters to get acclimated with our protagonist: at the moment, I find it hard to really care for Ruby’s predicament. Obviously, a chapter or two of filler bandit murder is not very interesting, so I understand why you would rather jump straight into the action.
• Cedric’s cryptic warning at the end of the Prologue was entirely unnecessary and doesn’t make any sense in hindsight. Why doesn’t he say that he works for Ruby’s mother and that her father is trying to kill her? It’s not like things would have played out any differently if the assassin hadn’t been there: Cedric could have just been sent by Ruby’s mother to help Ruby escape in Ch1 once she hears she’s returned. Also, we already had a dream sequence where Ruby is betrayed by her father, so… why?
• In Ch3, Jason has a talk with Doug… in which nothing happens. Like, Jason just asks Doug if he’s okay, and that’s it. Why does this convo even exist? (In general, I would like to see the mercenaries fleshed out a little bit more. Shoot, Dieck and his mercenary squad had more personality than these guys, even though each of them have unique personal skills that practically act like secondary descriptions!)
• I’ll be honest, I’m not the biggest fan of including the Black Fang as if they weren’t… completely decimated in FE7. Wouldn’t it be cooler if the complete destruction of their leadership caused splinter groups to form? Maybe you could have these groups even battling between each other like ninja clans! (Take this with a grain of salt obviously XD)

Gameplay Comments

• I share a lot of Goldblitzx’s sentiments regarding the gameplay, especially around the maps. Obviously, we’ve seen this continent twice before, but it would be nice if the repeat maps were a little more interesting than normal. I did enjoy the Ch5 “mandatory Laus revisit” since it flips the idea on its head, being a defense map instead of a seize.
• I… don’t like Fire being a reusable torch. Not only for balance reasons, but also because it is super annoying trying to equip a fire tome only to accidently use it instead.
• Why is everyone so FAST?! Like holy cow, everyone barring the Jagen has over 50% speed growths, which is insane! Kinda makes everyone feel a bit samey, although I suppose it isn’t the worst problem to have
• A few items that I picked up felt kinda… pointless? Why would I ever need a Laundry Pole, Sleet tome, or Slim Tonic?
• Really liked the ideas for held items, and I can’t wait to see more!

Bugs I encountered:

• In Ch1, the Wind Tome you grab from a chest has 1 use. Not sure if this is intended or not, since Wind being rare seems important in the story.
• Thief in ch4 with Thieves Gloves can’t use steel knife (only has D-rank Swords)
• Whole slew of weird stuff with the supply convoy girl. She apparently joins you regardless of whether you choose her in the deployment slots, the level-up screen for her is glitchy, and if she’s the last one who hasn’t been moved the turn will autoend.
• Ch4. Boss has a stealable bullion M but also Watchful. (Mean…)
• Adrian’s “Keep Up” skill sometimes doesn’t work until you check her description.

Overall, it’s a decent start to a project with a lot of potential! I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on this in the future!

[Alice]

Thanks for all the feedback!

A couple of comments (Spoilers for those who haven't played

• Supply girl can’t be deployed in the preps screen. If you try to select her, it won’t let you. She still shows in preps so you can trade with her. You can only deploy her by selecting “Yes” at the prompt at the start of the chapter, just like Merlinus in FE7
• Laundry Pole and Sleet are just joke items. A joke told through gameplay, if you will. Modern games have had a few joke weapons since FE12.
  *Slim tonic is actually really useful if you know how to use it. Because of how Aid works on the GBA games
• The Ch3 talk was a leftover, sorry. I will remove it.
• The units so far being speedy is mostly part of their characters. The mercenary group are called “The Speedwings”, so their gimmick is they all have 50+% speed growths, Adrian is sorta like a male Effie: Sporty and speedy armor gimmick. As for the others, Cedric is a thief. He needs speed. Ruby is a mage Lord. She also needs speed. But don’t worry, you’ll get slow units later on.
• I will definetely work on those other bugs you mentioned.

[Alice]

Pushed out an update today! Main thing is I overhauled chapter 2 map!

[ArkhamWizard]

Hello I just finished the hack, I overall enjoyed it. Units feel good to use the Jagen sets up kills and Ruby does decent damage. Favorite unit is the Armor Knight though The skill seems a little bugged though cause I would have him next to the Jagen or the cavs and his skill wouldn’t activate.