Remember that slow-ass boat map that had you wait to be able to board the ship with weak pirates and a great knight? Well, now we have DRAGONS! These bois will be thick and deal meaty damage but they don’t have much movement, and remember hellen? She’s still here!
I’m looking to get the first version of Relight out a little after day 5 of FEE3 (can you guess why?) and I am oh so eager to hear feedback once it drops!
Sorry if this is a dumb question but what do you mean by Relight?
it’s just what I’m calling the major overhaul to the hack, scroll up to the poll for details on what’s happening.
Oh gotcha, I totally missed that while reading it lol thanks for letting me know. I am very excited to see how this turns out!
Host of the Dark has had its showing at FEE3, much love and thanks to everyone organizing the event, there have been some really nice projects announced and shown (my personal highlight would be Subtitle
and with that showing of Host of the Dark I would like to unveil the first version of this hacks major overhaul.
(as an aside I kind of feel bad that I immediately release a patch that redoes a lot of what was shown… I’m not sure how to feel about it but I do think that this is something that needed to happen regardless of what was shown, well, I did keep the characters and basic story so it’s not a totally new thing.)
Congrats for the showcase at the FEE3 !
But don’t feel bad about releasing the rework right after it, it’s your game after all ! If you feel that you can improve the game to the point that it needs a complete rework, go for it ! 
Patch 0.2 has just dropped, this will take you all the way to chapter 8, otherwise known as the end of part 1, I am eager to hear any feedback, no matter how small!
cough cough Dusty in here, isn’t it?
So it’s been a bit and unfortunately, I don’t have a new patch ready just yet, I want there to be at least three more chapters of content and currently, I only have 1 1/2 more chapters done, in the meantime though here’s gameplay of chapter 8.
Be aware though, this does contain spoilers for chapters 1-7, you have been warned.
video link
anyway please let me know what you think, I’m always eager to hear feedback of any kind no matter how critical or how small!
NGL that looks much better than the OG Host of the Dark
Thank you, I was a complete amateur when I first started the original project so it’s good to see I’m improving.
Hello! I’m the guy who over-critiques every little detail of every little hack. I think I have issues.
Most of the criticism up to now that I’ve seen is critique of gameplay, which is definitely the most important part of Fire Emblem. However, for people with eyes like me, map design–both visually and gameplay wise–are very important aspects. For example, the Ch. 4 Sea and Cliff tiles.
Let me go into detail.
Part 1: Visual Map Design
#1: Cliff Corners
These bad boys right here make your cliffs look less like sudden starts and stops, and more like one long cliff. The color also continues, and it generally looks better.
The next problem I have with these is:
#2: Cliff Variety
These are all one type of cliff tile. As someone who has lived on a mountain and seen a waterfall in-person, I can assure you that this is not natural. Use the different types of cliffs to make your cliffs less bland, like so:
(Used all of the ones in the tileset for example’s sake)
#3: I Don’t Know What to Call this One
My third (and final) critique on these sea tiles is that they’re too straightforward. They get the job done gameplay wise in preventing anyone other than Max from getting to the chest, but the cliffs just go too straight? I think this is entirely opinionated, but I personally would go for something like this:
That’s it for that Sea critique (get it? Because it sounds like “secret technique”? No?).
The last thing I need to say: Place forest tiles, please. There is no part 2. I just got mad over how maps look.
(Also, what’s up with the dragons that spawn on turn 255? Please tell me, xD)
Subaru.
I’m not sure whether I should laugh, cry, or be mad.
Thank you for the advice! I’ve been trying to make the maps look better stylistically so this helps a lot!
The dragons on turn 255 are just there bc when I first made the map I had no idea how to delete events, I just forgot to delete them once I learned how
The unused part 2 maps are very old, don’t worry I’ve learned from them
All three at the same time
version 0.3 is live!
Major changes have been made to both the graphics and gameplay of part 1 and part 2 now has 4 playable chapters!
I’m very happy with this current version and am excited to hear feedback!
Edit: seeing the two months ago banner is… Wow it doesn’t feel that long…
Played this, have a lot of things to say
Prologue thing:
Why? I don’t get it. You have a single unit and then take out 2 trainees and a cav, and then get gold. Nothing of story importance happens. This isn’t a good tutorial either because you don’t tell the player anything explicitly, if that was the intention. Could easily be cut to better serve the pacing of the game.
Ch1:
Why can’t solum talk to the two recruits???
Why does sagitta straight up ORKO Mick when he is the one meant to recruit her, I really don’t know what was intended here. I can use Fidem but she has such a huge range that it’s so easy to even accidentally put the cav in range of this instakill trap basically.
Why is Fidem in a field of lance users so that when he’s recruited he will be facing WTD immediately? There’s maybe 2 mercs on the entire map and no fighters, pretty bad first impression for a unit.
Why do I just start with 2 units on an unnecessarily large map with little enemy variety and 0 terrain tiles? Seems like a pretty uninteresting map gameplaywise.
Not sure what the point of the guy saying they’re gonna summon more skeletons is, I assume it’s meant to be telegraphing but they say them on the same turn the reinforcements spawn.
Install the hack that lets you see if an enemy doesn’t move. If you don’t know where to get it, here you go. It can be a bit tough to find. Zeroing/nullifying mov FEDS style (based on AI parameters?) - #43 by Venno.
Why does the boss tome have poison? It’s still pretty pitiful damage so just kinda wastes time.
Why doesn’t Tobias have the boss flag? This is also a problem in later chapters.
Ch2:
Kinda weird that the wyvern lord has same con as the base cav, but I get it for mounted aid purposes. Still, I think 12 mounted aid is quite a good amount, or you could just lower the cav’s con, seems a bit high to me.
What’s the sniper here for? They don’t even kill the WL or bring him near death.
On that note, all of these enemies are ridiculously chumpy, like even more than vanilla FE8 enemies. I’d recommend buffing some of their stats.
Why is there dark magic in the armory? For that matter, why’s there a vendor with anything but a vulnerary? I don’t have any magic users.
Why does a ch1 merc have a killing edge? The only one who can take him on is the ridiculously buff WL jagen who flies over the whole map and dominates so extremely already.
Ridersbane seems kind of low uses to me but I get this is a shorter hack so makes sense.
What’s the point of the seize objective? Every enemy charges you already and there’s no advantage to seizing since there’s no antiturtle. The seize point is also kind of unclear because a ruined village doesn’t really convey seize point on its own, I’d recommend marking it with a thief escape tile marker.
End of this chapter has a bunch of awkward expositional dialogue that feels kind of forced. Would look into rewriting this so it flows better.
Ch3:
Talking to Cory should recruit Sal at the same time.
There’s not much interesting in the way of how this chapter is designed. It’s an open field of axe users with some forests so you can enemy phase them with your sword user myrm and wyvern lord. My other units didn’t really get any use and I was able to easily clean up the map for all the exp due to no anti turtle incentive.
Not sure if this is a bug or what, but noticed that swordsmen don’t take terrain penalties from forests. Forests on this map are classified as “Villages” for whatever reason, so might want to fix that.
Why do I get a hammer here? The armor knights have 4 mov and are ORKOd by my 12 def mage (cool concept btw, big fan of tank mages).
What was up with the reinforcements? Just more grinding fodder? They didn’t seem like there was any point to them showing up when they did.
The boss here incentivizes just using the jagen since he’s the unit who doesn’t take any damage and thus can’t be annoyed by nosferatu on the boss.
Ch4:
Didn’t play this one, but I looked the map and it looked pretty empty again, I’d recommend adding a few forests.
Enemies from the stats also looked pretty easy as the rest.
Sorry if I came off as harsh, my intention was not to simply bash on your hack. I don’t think these issues would be too difficult to solve, actually. A lot of it is just polish or slightly buffing enemies or stuff like that, and I definitely think there are some interesting concepts here. I wish you the best and hopefully find my feedback useful 
. Seems like lately you’ve been needing some more testing so hopefully I was able to push you in the right direction, at least. If you have any more questions please let me know.
Thank you so much for the quick look! Overall I intended for the the first part of this hack to be a sort of fun kind of easy while the second part ramps up the difficulty a bit.
I’m not very good with capitalization or punctuation, I’ll definitely look that over.
the chapter 2 map animation was actually something I noticed post release and plan to fix next update.
perhaps I will cut the prologue, I haven’t considered that, it was mainly meant to be a mini puzzle where you have to take out the trainees and then the cav as charging for the cav will get Solum killed if he doesn’t crit.
Solum can’t talk to the recruits bc I didn’t really notice it, I find Mick able to easily recruit Fidem on turn two then Fidem recruit Sagiita.
I’ll look into the movement patch, thanks for the directions
Dark magics whole ‘‘thing’’ in my hack is that they are accurate and hard hitting with some effects, but you don’t get many dark magic users as they are rare in universe. I’ll think about removing poison.
overall I do believe I should increase the difficulty a bit with the first part, looking at this feedback I can see that I shouldn’t have neglected difficulty in part 1 as I did.
Again, thank you so much, I’ll be sure to take your criticism to heart and work to improve my hack! My only question would be if you intended to continue with it? I’m curious as to what you’d think of part 2’s approach as I believe I ramped up the difficulty quite a bit to give it a different feel.
Yeah, that’s what I did too. It was just annoying to misplace my cav on a third of the map and have him get instantly obliterated, and doesn’t really make sense to me that the lord can’t recruit these two units, since there’s no story reason given.
This is less of a puzzle and more of a troll, I’d say. Not malicious, but this is what I ended up doing. My thought process was that the trainees would be really chumpy, and when I got killed and figured out the “solution”, it didn’t feel too rewarding.
That’s fine, honestly, but poison is just a boring effect. You could do something with funny statboosts if you were lacking in ideas, maybe. I also think that if I don’t have any dark magic users in a certain chapter, there’s no reason for a shop to sell the magic. It confuses the player and is redundant.
Sure, I can do that. I just found the first part of the game easy enough that I wasn’t feeling like continuing the whole thing in a single session, but still had a lot to write about that seemed like it’d be good to let you know.
I think if you’re going for a fun kind of easy feel, I would definitely increase enemy bulk a bit, at least, and increase variety. I think that every enemy getting so utterly dominated by every player unit gets pretty boring fast, especially with the game falling into the normal FE trap of being really dominated by mounts. The jagen being a Wyvern Lord doesn’t really help because instead of being regular FE gameplay but more relaxed, it turns into spam the unit with 8 mov everywhere on a map that has no restrictions on his movement. Definitely see if you can get people to play it after making these adjustments because it’s a very difficult balance to strike, I feel, since there’s a line between easier FE gameplay and more mindless gameplay on the level of something like Awakening, for example. Right now I think it leans towards the latter but I think there’s no reason you can’t pull it back to the former easily.
understandable, I didn’t really think about changing it at all, I’ll cut the shop things too.
Thank you for that, I appreciate the feedback, lucky me that my next planned update was going to just be a single chapter addition to cut back on update wait time, I look forward to whenever you decide to continue.
thank you for the advice, I’m contemplating whether or not to do that or to make the difficulty similar to part 2’s, I feel like I should probably stick to one type of difficulty.
Feels super random honestly, the portrait that is meant to be young solum doesn’t really convey it, he just starts saying sharen, having a flashback, he runs into a bunch of enemies, chapter starts.
Where is Anna before the chapter starts? I can’t see her in preps. Just spawn her in green and turn her blue when the chapter actually begins if you don’t want her position or inventory adjustable, though I don’t see a reason why she can’t just be in preps.
Why is deploy being limited when I have 8 units? Just because you have preps doesn’t mean you need to limit deployment and it feels really awful.
On that note, what does Sal contribute? He’s just worse than cory because he has lower def and worse speed growth, and worse than Tobias because he can’t summon busted phantoms.
Swift Edge desc is borked, also would rather you actually tell me what the weapon does.
Random thing I noticed, promoted Solum here and the merc contract text cuts off. Tobias’ name also cuts off on the preps menu, I’d recommend just naming him Tobias or using narrowfont. If you want a distinction between him as a boss and him as a player, when recruiting him have the game erase the boss version and load in a new player tobias.
What’s all this stuff about restricting paths with the guiding ring? It feels relatively unnecessary, honestly. It’s already magic wielders only, why make it lock you into a single promotion instead of the 3 you get with a master seal. The fun of branched promos is getting to customize every unit you get, not just one.
Game glitched out on me heavily after trying to see what Tobias’ promotions were and backing out of the menu
Fixed itself after I waited a few seconds, though.
Much like the other maps, this map is quite barren in terms of both gameplay and aesthetics, just mostly empty field.
Expected this map to play the same way, where every unit just charges you and you have to choke a small area. My prediction was spot on and much like ch4 it plays really boringly since these enemies pose no threat and you just EP them all. I wouldn’t recommend just making them stronger, because then you’d just die. Vary the AI and let the map have an actual flow as the player moves through it.
Oh, and these guys have recovery AI. Get rid of that, it serves no purpose.
Noticed here that the mage killer does a pretty awful job at what it’s supposed to do. It’s a great weapon, because 1-2 range is great, but mages are so squishy that it is irrelevant.
The entire bottom half of the map is completely irrelevant because there’s nothing to get there. If you have a map then the entire map should be serving some purpose. If you haven’t, actually, I’d recommend watching this video and this video, as well as maybe even this video.
Not a requirement but in my opinion thracia trade is pretty sick and you should put it in
Why give another hastam? It’s a ridiculously buff weapon and mine was only at 21 uses by this point.
When you get to this point, why does every enemy just immediately charge? The game’s not hard, so all I really want to do is just wall em on a fort.
Max still way busted but really no one else takes hits so I wouldn’t recommend just jacking up enemy strength without changing the overall design of the hack.
Why does the boss have a killer lance when there’s no way to mitigate it besides max?
Why are mage knight gains so neutered in comparison to sage? I would have picked it because Cory is so busted already, but really, I don’t really see a reason to pick the thing that gets -3 mag, -1 spd, -2 def, and swords instead of staves for 1 point of mov.
Anna says she wont pay me, then I get 2000 gold? huh??
Thank you for the follow up!
I’ll be taking gameplay suggestions into account as always, due to my particular playstyle I don’t notice when a map can be stalled since I like to make progress towards the objective every turn so getting another viewpoint is appreciated.
What do you mean by this? Could you be more specific, I’m looking at his palette and I don’t see anything wrong.
That’s likely because phantoms were only meant for a promoted class and phantom strength ties directly to level, I’m looking for a way to fix this.
yeah noticed that upon my recent testing of making part 1 harder, I thought it only did that on route.
the main point of the ballista is to deal small chip damage to your units while you made your way to the boss, there’s treasure there mainly to hopefully steer Max away from the main action if you want to play fast.
just a design choice I like, robbing the player of healers early game is a good way to give them a reason to not waste their healing items and to play more risky, which I feel is more fun, when things feel dangerous and loose.
as for story related things, I do want to revise some of my ealier cutscenes.
there’s a story reason for why Solum then and Solum now don’t look all too similar. It’s also a gaiden with a requirement, meaning that it needs to be unimportant to the plot and merely give some backstory.
hadn’t thought about the green to blue unit trick, she’s not in the preps due to being able to move her around in preps.
I liked doing small maps earlier on, small maps require smaller amounts of player units.
he doesn’t, that’s the point. Bad units are funny.
oh I did not recall it being broken, what emulator are you using, I didn’t encounter the Tobias glitch either, I probably should’ve specified this but this hack has been tested on mGBA.
eh, it just feels right to me to restrict the path for a more specific promotion item.
I’ll take a look at them, thank you.
not sure why I didn’t, I already put in things like super canto…
ranged attacks or a hammer are incentivized here, I believe most of these design problems come from Max being way more busted than I thought lol
honestly didn’t see that difference, I believe I just forgot to adjust MK bonuses
just a decision made waaay early on that I neglected to fix, warp is fun and some promoted classes get C staves.
what is this? I’ve never heard of it.
I look forward to it, after chapter 7 you get to what I consider to be the ‘‘meat of the hack’’, particularly chapter 11
As always the help is very much appreciated, having someone actually look at my work lets me improve while I’m still actively working on it.
