FEE3 Hype Thread

Community
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FE7x likely holds the distinction as the fan game with the most FEE3 footage. There were multiple years where there were 6 hours of footage across 3 videos. It’s pretty amazing how far ahead of its time FE7x was, especially in the early days.

This particular showcase is one of my favorites. It was one of the first times the Tristan arc was shown, and this particular chapter is one of my favorites in the game.

“Are you ready for another survive chapter with fog?”.

Yes. Yes, I am.

But seriously, Ray and Mel’s commentary is high energy, and anyone following the project over the years would’ve been excited at some of the character, class, and feature reveals. Considering the previous ~5 years we had seen mostly Uther, seeing the “new” party was particularly exciting.

FE7x has been such a highly anticipated project since FEE3’s inception, and I found that this video does a great job of capturing some of its unique qualities and the energy that’s surrounded the excitement around the project.

Slow staff is also cool and this chapter design is worth reviewing on its own merits.

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Can’t wait to see Immortal Sword to be in this year’s FEE3 for new progress, if it’s not, then there’s always next year FEE3.

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There are few names on credits lists as pervasive as NickT, one of the community’s most well-known artists. I’ve used his mugs, the hacks you’ve played have used his mugs, and chances are, you’ve used his mugs, too.

Worth calling this out since at least as far as one can tell in FEE3, this is the first trailer to announce the release of F2U portraits. I don’t know if this release started the trend, but since then there’s been an avalanche of stuff for everyone to use.

The shift towards shared community resources has helped accelerate hack development while enabling more accessibility. It wasn’t that long ago that you had to make everything yourself, and now there are hacks made entirely with community mugs.

You can see the collection still here, now in the context of a massive collection of community built assets. Very cool.

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I always love to see new animations from Nuramon. His stuff is so awesome it’s great to see new high quality GBA FE animations. Not to mention that every F2U animation brings up new ideas, possibilitys, etc. to the table. The charme of pixels if used correctly is unbeatable (aside from handdrawn animations) and it’s one of the reasons why I was immediately into the Fire Emblem series I bet.

Aside from that I’m hyped that it’s my first time having a project as a part of FEE3. A bit nervous but also excited.

Aside from Nuramon I also remember that the first trailer to Sacred Echoes left me impressed. One of my fav 3Ds games ported on my favourite system of the series. And since then the stuff HyperGammaSpace and his team have done with it has become more and more mindblowing. This was the first FEE3 we’re I started looking more into FE Hacking, GBA especially. And it’s always great to hear the reactions when they realize how much SoV is in this hack. Especially considering how far this project has become today.

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As a romhacker, hearing from fellow developers is always valuable. Hearing this interview with Primefusion, developer of Road to Ruin, is one of my favorite dev interviews we’ve had at FEE3.

Not only is hearing someone reflect on ~7 years of work insightful, but getting a sense of what it was like to hack in 2009-2016 is also neat to look back on.

On a re-watch, the takeaway that resonated with me the most is the discussion Ghast and Prime had regarding the first release and how TRTR, like many hacks (especially in the old days), got roasted pretty hard by the community in its earliest stages.

They talked about their own experiences handling feedback and taking it in stride to make something better, and that’s an important thing to consider and remember for our own releases.

Cool interview, still worth a listen today.

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Up to this point, the [complete] hack project was elusive. You could probably count on one hand the number of custom projects that finished, and all of them were multi-year efforts, with some development cycles taking close to a decade.

So when Void’s Blitzarre Adventure was fully playable in a week, people definitely noticed.

I’d say VBA was notable for a few reasons:

  1. It was finished faster than any project before.
  2. It was the first [complete] project using buildfile and the now ubiquitous skill system
  3. It was a community effort, popularizing the “blitz” format.

VBA definitely played a role in re-shaping how many of us think about development and community engagement, and certainly in the way we make projects.

It’s no surprise that after seeing success of the format and method that we’d have 5+ more blitzes since, but it (alongside the release of FEBuilder) would also coincide with a massive influx of projects in future FEE3s.

2017 had 23 videos. 2020 had 69.

Regardless, the video captures the excitement of the release and highlights the zaniness that comes with the way it was built. Worth a look.

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I rewatch Mel reading the unit descriptions of VBA pretty frequently, definitely one of my favoirte FEE3 moments.

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“Look at this Elibe hack!”

There have been many hacks that started out taking place in the fabled continent of Elibe, but Extinguished Blade’s 1 FEE3 video remains notable for taking such a sad tone in its interpretation of Elibe and the events of FE7.

It’s also one of the first hacks to show off the skill system w/ a custom implementation of skills, as well as some new animations. It’s a pretty hack and worth looking at. The menus are slick, too. Worth looking for some notes on nailing a sad aesthetic and tone.

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The Extinguished Blade. The Darkest Timeline of Elibe. As much knowledge about this ROM hack, I don’t know if it continued or got shelved/fridged into Cancellation.

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While FEE3’s primary focus is GBA romhacking, it’s always cool to see the innovations happening in other FE games.

It feels like a distant memory now, but there was a time where the best way to play Thracia was with a patch that broke when you looked on random enemies, had a bunch of stuff not translated, and reminded you, the player, that you fell for the antagonist’s trap “In America”.

The menu translation is incredible and laid the ground work for new, more accurate translations and other QoL hacks for Thracia to be made to make the game more accessible. Big thank you to Zane, Kirb, and others who made this possible.

Glory to Thracia!

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I really hope that Thracia Hacking will evolve in a good way. The game should have all the ingredients to make hacks similiar to GBA games right from the start. I’m sure people would like a new look when starting a hack after so many GBA games.

By the way. I don’t know if Heart Hero will be on this years FEE3. But he is working on these awesome DS FE tools (similiar to the GBA FE Builder). It’d be another two game that’d become more accessible to hack. I’m especially looking forward to them because Shadow Dragon became one of my favourite games in the series.

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I also submitted my hack to FEE3 2017:

FE5 has plenty of similarities to the GBA Fire Emblem games to players, but internally there’s plenty of things about the game, and the SNES as a system, that make hacking it a much different problem.

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It’s a shocking revelation to modify the hack of Thracia 776 is very unique to see in the FE Community.

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Wow I haven’t seen that before. It’s awesome!

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There are few community names in animation more well-known than Nuramon. Their showcase is often a highlight and one of the most viewed showcases of the past few years.

It’s cool to see how much the general quality of animations has evolved from the early days, and we’re rapidly approaching a stage where some would say that the community could replace every vanilla animation with a superior, community-made one.

There’s definitely been an explosion of F2U animations over the past few years and this showcase highlights many of them.

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Nuramon and his animations are so top tier since 2018. Can’t wait to hear what he has in store for this FEE3.

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I went back and forth on including this video for obvious reasons, but ultimately I thought it’d be a good backdrop to cover a few topics. There’s a lot to unpack in the thumbnail alone, including the lovely Beta Storch, Beta Vagelis, incorrectly placed map tiles, and of course, my beloved co-host, my mouse cursor.

2018 was the first FEE3 I’d been personally involved in. I’d viewed at least some of most of the FEE3 events to this point, and thought it’d be cool to get my fledgling project immortalized. In addition, when I learned they needed volunteer LPers, I wanted to put my new mic to the test.

This video is special to me because it was both the first showing of my hack, but also my first attempt at video recording. After FEE3 2018, I started doing more video recording for work and helped me get a raise, so I can safely say that Fire Emblem romhacking helped me professionally, in a roundabout way.

On the hack side, it’s clear that the project is in its nascent stages. I’m sure some people watching would probably feel hesitant to submit their project to FEE3 in this state. However, I’d argue that one of the coolest parts about FEE3 is how inclusive of an event it is and that anyone with a project can opt in.

Immediately following this showcase, I started working with more people who now knew what the hack was and thought it had potential. It was a bit of a lightning rod for sparking development and future polish, and the finished project today would likely not be in the state its in had I not submitted to FEE3 in 2018.

Since I started following the hacking community, people have increasingly been willing to share incomplete work with others - this is critically important to getting feedback and developing the best work, and FEE3 (at least for me), was a big turning point in getting more feedback to build a better project.

Showing off your project at FEE3 can feel daunting, especially as a newbie, but if you give it an effort and are willing to learn, people will help you! Even if you leave the cursor in your video.

A little over one year after its release, Vision Quest has over 20K downloads (or at least Dropbox clicks) lifetime, which is more interest than I ever could’ve bargained for.

EDIT: Upon review, I realized that my cursor was not in fact in the thumbnail, but that I left my cursor over the thumbnail of the video in the preview while writing this. I’m not surprised I couldn’t tell the difference.

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2018 of Vision Quest. The early beta ROM hack of where Pandan starts in his early days of ROM hacking.

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I’d argue that in the era of FEBuilder and Buildfiles, as well as with our increased knowledge and resources surrounding the technical side of romhacking, doors are open to focus significantly more on gameplay.

While older hacks generally operated in a realm not far removed from vanilla, newer hacks look to stand out by more closely emulating other games and integrating the numbers, mechanics, and overall game feel to make them distinct from vanilla as well as other hacks.

Souls of the Forest is probably the most well-regarded hack today, and it is for good reason - it improves on FE12’s brand of difficulty, it is remarkably fair and transparent, and it is pretty.

It’s fun to go back and see Scraiza’s custom mugs (all of which have since been replaced to look more like FE). SotF’s aesthetics and crisp map design have inspired many hackers to give their hack a more distinct look and feel, attempt to have their own numeric identity divorced from vanilla FE7/8, and create difficulty in map design through careful placement and number crunching (I used a calculator when I played on lunatic, aka the souls of the forest companion app) rather than ambush spawns and sucker punches.

Watch this and you’ll see why some new projects claim to be “Souls of the Forest inspired”.

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Souls of the Forest. The OG of making FE Hackers by implementing their ROM hack to be “Souls of the Forest inspired”. Some succeed and others don’t.

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