Download for Long-Lost Friends (v0.1.2 Patch + Credits)
Long-Lost Friends is an FE8 romhack developed by one person with the help of many F2U/F2E resources, for both mechanics and aesthetics. This patch has 5 chapters (Prologue - Chapter 4) and only the default difficulty (Normal Mode).
I’ve edited both the Guide and Help Text to (hopefully) make learning the many changes LLF brings to FE8 easier to find. I highly recommend looking at both of those ingame resources. Besides things like new items, item stats, and class bases, here are the mechanics that I think are the most impactful:
Brief List of Changes (not exhaustive)
- The Weapon Triangle and Magic Triangle adjust Mt by +/- 3. The effect on Hit is unchanged (+/- 15).
- Plan: This map command lets you move and act with ANY unit on the map. Use it to help create strategies and reduce the mental load on you by enacting what you want to do in the game…in the game. Select “Future” to activate turn events, or select “Act” to go back to where the game was before planning started.
- To prevent exploits, no permanent progress is made if planning is on. Additionally, a RN randomizer has been implemented.
- Tome Range is not universally 1-2. Some may only be locked to 1 or 2 range for a different benefit.
- Bargains: The preparation shop changes the first three items in its selection every chapter. Each bargain can only be bought once.
- Modern unit cycling (press “L” on an enemy to go to the next enemy, instead of a player unit), an accessible Guide during preparations, toggles for whether you want to see enemy unit AI and/or reinforcement warnings, and other QoL changes.
Skill Usage
Opinions on how Skills should feature in Fire Emblem varies widely, so here’s a section on how they’re incorporated in Long-Lost Friends:
- Almost all player units have just one skill. This is generally a utility skill like Shove or Savior. Mounted units have Canto for this purpose.
- 3 of the playable units have skills in addition to their utility skill to further differentiate themselves from the rest of the cast.
- Bosses have at least 1 skill to improve their combat. There are three such skills that exist in the current patch, but they’re very simple and not as “conditional” as you may be expecting. For instance, the most common skill always increases their Hit by 15.
Known Issues
- Player units don’t have unique death quotes
- Units don’t have custom/ ”expected” battle palettes
- After setting an active support, the rank display may mistakenly change (this is only a visual issue)
- Glancing Blows do not have a visual cue; you can only tell one has occurred if the damage is halved
- Promotion information can be accessed from character helptext, but not class helptext
- If you select an enemy or NPC while planning, their map sprite may disappear (until the game has to reload the sprite)
- If animations and planning are on and a player unit’s death would trigger a Game Over, the graphics will be a bit buggy after the “planning game over” notice goes away.
- If a unit is rescuing someone, the stat screen shows a red arrow next to Pow instead of Spd
Personal Thoughts/Future Plans?
I’m not sure if I’ll continue development on this particular project, but as someone that’s basically lurked in the FEGBA hacking scene for 10 or so years, I’ve axed many projects that were never publicly shown. While I’m not proud of this project as a whole, I wanted to…
- …have a “place” for the things that I’m actually proud of making to exist in.
- …release before Engage comes out, so that deadline put pressure on me to actually work on this.
- …release before I axed it (despite the short length of this demo, its development time is embarrassingly long).
- …hopefully reveal any bugs in assembly hacks unique to LLF before I make such hacks publicly accessible. (I also want to do a look at everything and see if I can make it more friendly as standalone downloads too, so that’s not the only reason these aren’t available)
Thanks for reading and/or playing, if you decide to do so! I don’t have a discord server for this, so please leave any thoughts in this thread; posting this has made me pretty nervous, but I’ll try to be somewhat reasonable with my reply timing.