Man, I’m late to whatever’s blowing up this thread. Whatever, I haven’t played the game, so I’ll give it a shot. If I like it, I like it. If I don’t, I don’t.
Dark, cringy, or edgy stuff doesn’t bother me. As long as there’s a story that I can get behind, I’ll enjoy playing it.
Hello There ! I’ve been lurking the forum for some time, but it’s my first message. For some time now I’ve been keeping a close watch on this project because I greatly enjoyed playing the first chapters last year and was really eager to dive into it once finished.
I saw some of the response and criticism you got and, to be honest, they kind of broke my heart a little, even if they were not adressed to me haha. I’m only on chapter 7 right now, but the amount of love and investment you poured in this project is obvious, and I can feel the enjoyment and fun you had writing and making your characters interact with each others. So far it’s the strongest point of your hack. All the character portraits are on point and make them all likeable, you really did an excellent job. The music choices are great too and instantly give the mood of a chapter.
The Arnold betrayal event made me surprisingly emotional considering how little time screen all those characters had before, and I take it as a proof of good writing personaly (though honestly, I’m kind of conflicted and confused about the overal tone of your story, that go to very humorous to grim and dark… maybe that’s a part of your project charm though, I’ll have to keep playing to see).
I’m really not an hardcore FE fan, and to me the difficulty of those type of games have never been the selling point (on the contrary, it have kept me away from other projects that I couldn’t like because they felt more tedious that enjoyable). That being said, I’ve been playing on normal difficulty and the game seems very easy so far, I feel like I could steamroll every encounter with Sylvester alone (and maybe Magam who have insane defense for a mage, but maybe I was just lucky). Was a little disappointed to see that Sylvester doesn’t have a specific “lord type” promotion class.
I’ll be sure to come back to say more constructive things when I’ll be further in the game, but really, you can be proud of you, it’s a very good and enjoyable experience.
First off, hi and welcome to the community!
I’m really glad to hear you did like what you played (At least until now). I really did put a lot of love, fun and effort into this project, even though I am aware I’m not exactly “good” at many things required to make an enjoyable experience.The characters are by far the thing I had the most fun working on, and probably the only thing I can safely say I’m proud of.
The Arnold event is also something I greatly enjoyed, and one of the things I had gotten the most positive feedback for! As for the tone of the story, well, I’ve always liked stories that managed to be comedic with a dark side. In fact, I prefer that to stuff that is always 100% comedic or 100% dark. It can be weird, I suppose, but in the end it’s only a question of balance.
And as for the difficulty, trust me, I’m probably one of the worst FE players ever, hence why this game is so unbalanced. I’m working on buffing the enemies just right so that the next patch will be more challenging while still on the easy side of the balance. I hope the game will be that much more enjoyable! (As for Sylvester having regular promotions, I just didn’t feel like any custom class felt like him as much as Berserker and General do lol)
Thanks again for your support! If you find anything you think could be improved (Be it dialogue, balance, level design…) or a bug, feel free to tell me!
Is this a typo, or is Anastasia really that tall?
And I agree with Warmingbird; the Arnold event was a welcome surprise. I wasn’t expecting something like that from a hack that has been comedic so far. I just finished that chapter, and I hafta say that was a real kick in the feels. Ernest’s death actually made me feel bad inside.
From a writing standpoint, I really liked how the whole chapter was a massive subversion of one of the classic FE tropes. Guess not every mercenary band’s gonna end up like the Greil Mercenaries.
Thanks for pointing the height thing, that’s an oversight !
Also, I’m glad you liked how I tried to subvert FE tropes. This is something I enjoyed doing quite often, especially for character archetypes (The Cain and Abel duo for example)
Yeah, I thought it was a typo. I just got to the chapter with Valkyr, and it looks like that’s where the height number came from.
Hey so I just finished your hack and thought I would add some thoughts, obviously spoilers ahead.
I won’t comment too much on the writing and such as its not really an area I can critique well, but the overall tone seemed to flip flop quite a lot between comedy and dark / edgy and at times clashed. I also felt that for such a hack on the shorter side there were a lot of plot points that possibly moved a bit quick. As others have said the Arnold chapter was pretty a pretty interesting idea and worked well.
Character wise, there is a ton considering the hack length and average deployment limit. With mounted units not being included this led to a lot of overlap between units and some just seemed way better than others. Overall the portraits for everyone were really well done, both playable and enemies and I enjoyed the variety and at times found myself debating over who I’d want to use. Arya, Jukujo, and Sally were among my favourites.
Map design for me was pretty enjoyable, I felt there were some pretty cool concepts and while there could have been more more objective variety I still enjoyed almost every map. Chapter 3 was particularly good with a lot of side objectives in the house / arena boss / recruitments. I also liked the idea of Chapter 8, again due to a lot of things going on. The only chapter that felt like a bit of a slog was the final one, having to run all the way around with the gameplay being interrupted in every room by dialogue. While there’s probably room for a story based chapter I’m not sure how I felt about it being in the final one.
Finally I wanted to touch on the difficulty, I personally played on normal mode as a lot of hacks are tuned to be on the harder side and I like to generally enjoy the game by using whoever I want etc, but the difficulty felt way off in this game. By about chapter 5 or so Sylvester had already outscaled every enemy and would one round everything rarely being hit or taking damage. The same held true for every other unit once they got a few levels as the enemies scaled up really slowly, while XP gain is really high meaning there was never really a threat to anyone. I’m not sure how hardmode fairs as I don’t wish to burn myself out by starting another playthrough right away but I feel like the game has solid potential for ironman runs if the difficulty is raised as there is plenty of replacements.
I should also mention a couple of bugs I found, most of the late game. On chapter 17 if you kill the boss and your weapon breaks the chapter just doesn’t end.
I forget specifically which chapters, but quite a few said to seize but were actually defeat boss.
On chapter 19, there were invisible level 1 villagers that would randomly move about (possibly for eventing?) But trying to move onto their tile or opening their stats page would cause the game to bug out.
On the final chapter after “recruiting” Anastasia she despawned from the map and Arnold got to take his turn again, as if nothing had happened. Also when the boss becomes a dragon, it can’t wield it’s weapon so its just a training dummy. So the final chapter ended up being rather anticlimactic unfortunetly.
With all that being said, hope some of this is helpful to you, and most importantly I enjoyed playing the hack despite the flaws it had.
Thanks for your feedback! I am currently trying to rework the EXP gains so that Sylvester will stop steamrolling over literally anything, while still keeping the game easy enough (I believe there are already enough difficult fangames out there).
Would you mind telling me which units you felt need to be buffed, and which ones did you think should be nerfed? This would be most helpful!
Apart from that, most of the bugs you’ve noticed have already been taken care of lol. There’s only the whole “defeating the Ch17 boss while breaking a weapon doesn’t end the chapter” thing that has never been seen before. I will try to get a closer look into that!
Thanks again for your feedback, and it’s been a pleasure to have given you an enjoyable hack to play!
so theres no fix for the chapter 3 bug?
As far as I’m aware, not currently. It’s really hard to pinpoint why it does/doesn’t do that depending on the person.
Although, one playtester of mine told me uninstalling and then reinstalling the patch worked for them, maybe you could try that?
ill try. i was enjoying it thus far.
Finished !
Overall, I still stand by the points I mentioned in my previous post. The strongest aspect of the game was the characters, who were all likeable in their different ways (and all the character portraits were good, wich I personally find to be an impressive feat).
Sylvester was great and might be one of my favorit Fire Emblem character now, and Arnold story and redemption was done very well, credible, and made him very human.
On the other hand, while the characters interactions and developement were interestings, the overall plot with “Boneface” felt unrewarding and not really engaging.
While I liked the concept of the Amazon people and the evocation of racism and segregation it brought up, I can’t help but say it kind of clashed seeing Arya and the other Amazon with the same battle animations as the other units when they are supposed to be super tall haha (but that’s not really something you could have done something about, except not having any Amazon doing fights so, I understand).
Anyway, on a gameplay perspective now : I liked most of the maps and concepts, and most of them were enjoyable to roam. But for me, one of the major thing I didn’t liked through all the hack was the enemy reinforcement design you took. Seeing those constant enemy spawn behind my group was really anoying, and if any of my units were doing some solo stuff in the back, they always ended up surrounded by enemy spawns that they coudn’t go away from fast enought. The enemy really had tendency to pop up from nowhere without warning, and it was very frustrating at times.
I’ll join what other people have said too, some units were clearly better than others, and it felt kinda sad to recruit so much cool characters but not using them in the end because they were clearly behind, outclassed, or just another bandit/berserker ^^. I would have liked using Arya more for exemple, but at the time she came, her stats were so low that it would have been too much work and risk to bring her in.
Also I don’t know if it’s my fault, but I think I only found 2 Knight Crest in the all game, so I was unable to promote Arnold because I already did with Lucy and Armaduro and gave master seals on other units. Felt kind of weird ^^.
I also said that I liked the use of music you made, and generally it was true, but there was also tracks that I honestly found borderline unlistenable to the point were I was wondering if it was a bug or something as it felt like they were 2 different tracks playing at the same time, creating a cacophony. Had to mute the game in chapter 10 because it was hurting my ears too much. haha
Now for the bugs I remember : in chapter 18, after going in the south village and taking the hero axe, the game crash. And if I was trying to look at the map from the planing phase screen in the late game chapters (starting from chapter 18 until the final chapter ? don’t remember), the screen was turning black and I had to restart. Ended up having to start the chapters in full surprise and without reorganising my troops.
All in all, I found the hack very refreshing and enjoyable, especially because of the characters you wrote and the chemistry between them. Far from being detrimental to the hack, I found the Arya backstory and the other “controversial” (apparently ?) story aspects of your hack to be pretty strong and emotionaly engaging. I’ll remember them. (A little to much use of the word "b**ch toward female characters in your hack for my taste though, some occurance felt out of context, but that’s nitpicking).
If I were to rate it on a scale of 10, I think I would give it a strong 7. Thanks a lot for making this Hack, and I wish you luck for any other project you may do in the future.
Hi! First off, thanks a lot for your feedback!
I do agree that the Boneface plot is very clumsily handled to say the least (I think part of it was due to dumb 16 years old me thinking it’d be funny if the real final boss appeared, like, almost at the end… In retrospect, making her a much more present threat would have been so much better…). I’ll try to find ways to make it better while still not giving myself a massive workload lol. If you have any suggestions, I would be more than glad to hear!
As for the amazons, yeah… My original intention was to give them modified battle sprites and stuff, but this would’ve been a lot of trouble and I don’t think I would’ve been able to pull this through even with my current knowledge.
As for gameplay, well, I definitely suck at this. I’m trying to refine it as much as I can by listening to various people’s feedback, but it’s like being a blind painter or a cook that can’t taste anything.
As for unit balance, was there anyone other than Arya who you felt could’ve benefitted from a buff (Or a debuff)?
The Knight Crest thing is really funny actually because I’ve been told a few times there were too many of them, especially compared to Hero Crests!
As for the music, I apologize but I don’t have much help in this department and I don’t know a thing about it, so there’s several songs that sound horrible or don’t loop…
The map bug has already been reported to me, but I don’t even know what might cause it… As for the Brave Axe bug, nobody ever told me about it, and I think I’ve found what caused it! Thanks for reporting it to me!
Finally, about your feedback on the word “bitch”, I’ll try to downplay it a bit, but I’d like to adress that, being French, a lot of words don’t have the same signification to me, and there are several insults that mainly translate to bitch, hence the overabundance of it.
Thanks again for the feedback, and know that I am very, very glad you enjoyed the hack!
Uhhm hello there, for some reason i cant recruit velvet on ch6, i wait on the ruins but he doesnt appear.
Mh… First off, have you been playing the latest patch? If you’ve seen several NPCs (Palmer, Salvatore and Isabella) during the prison chapter, then it’s all good. If not, you will need to start over again
Next up, on which ruins have you been waiting? You need to wait on the one circled in red right here :
Normally, she should appear as normal.
Ah, I’m sorry to say that but I don’t upload every update on Serenes Forest. Basically, I only release versions I feel are pretty stable and almost bug-free. You’ll have to download it from here (Sorry again)
Just give the thing a dip, I’m like 10+ chapters in rn, and I gotta say, the realistic facet is getting me hooked, so many betrayals, no cheesy one-liner, everyone seems like they are trying to keep their shit together. I haven’t played a Fire Emblem where we have a bandit of all people as the protag before, so you can guess it somewhat gave me a good impression. Noticed some typos and errors along the way but I was to lazy to save them so I’ll pass the checking to another person lol.
Have something to address about the difficulty though. As I said, I’m like 10+ chapters in rn (on Hard), yet the enemies just feel the same throughout, they’re only soldiers most of the times, and most of their stats spreads still only sit at 1-digit, after 10+ chapters. So you can imagine my unit snowballing the real hard and chew them like snacks. Definitely needs some revamping
Alright, I just finished this. I have to say, I got a lot more out of this than I thought I would. The story started off pretty silly, but it really ended up being pretty thoughtful. The strongest point of this hack in my opinion was definitely how fleshed-out the core characters are. I wrote Sylvester off as a one-dimensional wannabe brigand, but man there was a lot more to him than that.
Same with Arnold. Boy, Arnold had a lot of issues.
And a lot of the other characters were a whole lot of fun, too. I think my favorites were Cazadora and Arya.
Thanks for making this hack! I had a good time playing it!
After reading this last, enthusiastic comment, I regret even more that I cannot play this hack on real hardware… 
