Fire Emblem: Champion's Revolt [COMPLETE, 4/4 Chapters]

[Darrman]

Story

A Tale of Two Accounts

The continent of Elibe had recently endured a great war. The traditional account of the Disturbance of Bern begins with King Zephiel of Bern invading Ilia and Sacae, before turning his attention to Lycia, following into an account known as “Sword of Seals”. However, recently, a competing account of the war, named “Champion’s Sword”, has been gaining in popularity.
To keep a long story short, Champion’s Sword’s major difference is retelling the Disturbance of Bern from the perspective of Al, the “Blue Champion”. Many discrepancies can be found between the two accounts.

To use one example, Sword of Seals says General Legance launched a rebellion in Ostia. He took Lilina as a hostage, and sought to ally with Bern. Roy then rescued Lilina, killed Legance, and obtained Durandal before Cecilia chased Narshen out of Lycia.
Champion’s Sword instead has the Lycian League, with Eliwood as its leader, fully operational in Ostia. The revolt was instead led by Kruzard, a mercenary and a friend of Lance, one of Roy’s knights. He launched a rebellion he hoped would fail, in order to unify Lycia against him and take any potential traitors down with him. Al then fakes Kruzard’s death to save him. Ostia is briefly seized by Marquess Zem, but Al and Lance quickly chase him out and Kruzard then kills him. Narshen leaves on his own accord without Cecilia intervening, and Legance is never mentioned. Durandal is missed, though Lilina is later seen alive and well in Roy’s army.

Disappearances

Starting in the march of Tania, copies of Champion’s Sword begun to spread rapidly across Elibe. Nobody knew where it was being printed, but the author, Viscount Al Eldreed, soon became a household name. Sword of Seals, as penned by Roy, remained the official account within Lycia. At the same time, notable people from all across Elibe were starting to vanish. First, Lance disappeared from Pherae. A few weeks later, Wolt vanished. News from the Western Isles suggested Echidna had left one day without any warning. When word came to Ostia that Eliwood, Roy’s father, had disappeared, his patience wore out. Letters were sent to friends across the continent, asking for any information on Al or the disapperances.

There was soon a knock on the door from Cecilia, Roy’s former tutor. She had received an invitation from the “Blue Champion”, directing her to Graizel Prison, located near Tania. Roy and Lilina knew that Tania’s marquess, Tiena, was staunchly pro-Al, yet neither of them even knew of her existance until recently. Cecilia also noted that many prominent Etrurians had received invitations. She read a chapter of Champion’s Sword, but realised it was implausible and decided to meet with Roy. The three soon decided to investigate Graizel Prison. Roy expected a fight, so he hired some mercenaries he knew from the Disturbance of Bern. He also gathered the remaining knights of Pherae before marching on Graizel.

Little did Roy know he was about to uncover a massive conspiracy, threatening to burn Elibe to ash…

Information

Fire Emblem: Champion’s Revolt is an FE6 romhack. It stars Roy and his friends, as they attempt to investigate a conspiracy involving the production of many copies of Champion’s Sword, the tie-in manga starring Al.
Champion’s Revolt had several sources of inspiration. Champion’s Sword takes many liberties compared to Sword of Seals, so the idea of Roy and Al fighting was a prominent one. Another element I wanted to include were the lost FE6 trial maps. There were four in total, but nothing survives of Defeat Bandits. Graizel Execution Court, the V-Type Map, and the J-Type Map are all present here, though I modified all of them slightly to add buildings, or in V-Type, have a chapter gimmick.
Champion’s Revolt also served some educational purposes: I chose to use FEBuilder as I do not know of any public FE6 buildfile, and with the prompt being so strongly tied to Sword of Seals, I felt that it would only be proper to make this in FE6. Overall, hack development took about two weeks.
The initial FEU release for April Fools Day (or International Hack Release Day) was disguised as a honest port of Champion’s Sword (Hasha no Tsurugi) to FE6. Champion’s Revolt quickly diverges from the Hasha plot. The original OP can be found in a spoiler at the bottom of the post.

Features

• Four chapters
• 2-3 hours play time
• Droppable items
• Pre-defined supports (Roy X Lilina, most prominently)
• Based off of Gringe’s translation, v1.2.1

Known Issues:

• Checking the map status screen in Chapter 1 crashes the game.
• Skipping the Chapter 1 world map scene when a country is highlighted may crash the game.
• The cursor palette is broken: this is related to world map modifications.
• Chapter 1’s goal is to kill the dragon. When it dies, wait with any unit to end the chapter.
• Testing was done on Normal mode. Hard mode is available but untested beyond Chapter 1.

Screenshots:

1st of April OP

The Disturbance of Bern is usually seen as a war between Roy of Pherae and Zephiel of Bern. However, a manga adaptation exists of FE6. This hack aims to port some of this adaptation back to its game of origin.

Screenshots:

Download:

Click Here to Download
Apply patch to vanilla FE6! It will not work if applied to a patched rom.

Happy Easter. Also, happy International Hack Release Day.

[ScubaLuigi]

He did it guys
he has J

[Darrman]

Alright, April Fools Day is over, so it’s time to come clean.
I don’t think anyone truly fell for it (at least, I didn’t see anyone on FEU and I did post it way too late) but this isn’t actually an accurate Hasha no Tsurugi port. The first chapter is an attempt to recreate Hasha Chapter 1, but after that I go and tell a completely different story.
My motivations are in the OP, but I wrote a ton of stuff there and I cut out a giant FE6 vs Hasha comparison, so in short, I liked the idea of Roy vs. Al, and I also wanted to give the lost trial maps a day in the limelight. I hope you enjoy.

That’s “hack FE6” off of the hacker’s checklist!

[Kemui52]

@Darrman

Checking the map status screen in Chapter 1 crashes the game.

Ah, I know this one! FE6’s status screen needs Roy (character ID 01) to be in your army. The quickfix I know of is to load Roy into the player’s army, then use an ASMC to flag him as dead. This lets the status screen use him as the army leader. It won’t fix the auto-cursor defaulting to an odd place, but it will go to Roy’s last position so you can use his placement to set it to a better default than 0,0.

Below is the ASM that I use. To bring him back, it’s the same thing, but with MOV r0 as a 0x00 instead. (Though, you could prolly delete him properly and load him in a second time normally.)

SHORT 0x4901 //LDR r1; loads the bytes four sections down as a pointer somehow
SHORT 0x200D //MOV r0, #0x0D; writes register0 with 0x0D (hidden, dead, undeployed)
SHORT 0x7008 //STRB r0, [r1]; pokes r1 with r0, I guess
SHORT 0x4770 //BX LR; ends the routine, probably
WORD 0x0202AB84 //RAM address to poke; this is first player slot's flags section
//Based on memory poke template by Brendor:
//https://feuniverse.us/t/fe7-start-chapter-on-the-enemy-phase/131

//Here's an event snippet for example:
LOU1 RoyGoesHere //Roy loaded in
ASMC asmHideRoy //Roy flagged as dead temporarily
LOU1 StandardUnitsSpawn //Loading other units will hide Roy automatically

I know this is all EA format, but I hope it’s simple enough to translate into FEBuilder UI.

Alternatively, you could swop Roy and Al as characters, but then Al will be shown as the army leader and get force deployment (if that matters). It’d also be tedious to fix everything that references the two.

---

But, hey, cool. An FE6 hack! Sometimes I think I’m the only guy who has an easy time hacking FE6, but then I remember I’m prolly lucking out by being too lazy to edit the world map text.
This exercise wet my beak to play more and looks short enough to not compete with the several long-form games I’m currently on, so I’ll likely give it a try. Hope I helped!

[Kemui52]

Heya, I played through the hack and had a pretty fun time, figured I’d write up my opinions and stuff. I enjoyed watching how the story all unfolded and loved where it ended up. Speaking as a slow player, it took me about eight hours to get through everything, which seems about on par with my track record. The challenge felt largely good for a quick hack, too, though that final chapter was a rather major difficulty spike. I think it can do with some improvement, which I’ll detail later.

Bug list (has spoilers)

@Darrman

Chapter 1’s goal is to kill the dragon. When it dies, wait with any unit to end the chapter.

You should be able to make this smoother with Event Type 1 “Flag Condition (AFEV)”, just make sure the Trigger Flag matches the Death flag and set the Completion Flag to something else.

• The first reinforcements in Ch.2 spawn with weapons that can’t be used. The ones afterwards can use their weapons, though. Also, they’re pretty ambush-y for how close they are to the start point.
• The scene with Roy and Wolt in prison incorrectly plays at Turn 9. Looks like a leftover event?
• You misspelled “receive” in the Ch.3 intro when Echidna is given Armads.
• In Ch.4, the line “…I distinctly recall you betraying Andy…” is played twice.
• Tiena can give her boss speech when healing someone. I’m…not sure how to solve this without adding an exception to every player unit or every enemy unit. Could maybe reword the dialogue to be less of a direct confrontation.
• Echidna’s battle quote cuts off the “t” in the word “must”.
• Breaking down the wall in Ch.4 doesn’t work because it becomes a black square if you do. Looks like you hijacked another chapter’s Tile Changes and, in an outstanding coincidence, an old one is taking priority in that very spot. Not only does this make the entry impassable, it also makes the Secret Shop inaccessible!
• Niime can say her battle quote when she’s on the player’s side. You can probably set the flag in the event to fix this.
• Two-range Idunn looks a little weird and I never found a solution to this. @ me if you ever find one!

My thoughts on the final map

That final chapter is brutal. I’m not an expert FE player, but I’m also no slouch when it comes to considering my options and it looked like I had very few. It seemed every time I overcame a hurdle, another obstacle would slap me in the face. Did Al make you design it this way? Ha ha, if that’s the joke, then I get it. I mean, I definitely enjoy the core challenge the map presents, but it’s just too many things going against the player and it feels…nigh unbeatable. It’s as if there’s only one specific way to finish the map.
For instance, I fought tooth and nail to find a way to reach Niime safely just to discover Tiena has a Silence staff and I found out I couldn’t reach the Throne in time even if I had an answer to that. But it’s not like I can skip that, I still need to do something about Niime because she has six Berserk uses that’ll never miss. I think the biggest issue is how many status staves there are, all of which have 100% hit rate (except two). There’s just no counter to 'em at all if you don’t find the Secret Shop in the prior chapter. And even with it, I can’t see it helping much with only one trained staff user. I say either find a way to nerf their hitrates or just don’t have so many staves. The Silence and nearby Sleep are what I’d remove since by that point the player doesn’t have time to deal with healing a status. Maybe you can give a couple extra turns, too, since tackling a boss and a final boss is a whole ordeal on its own.
As it is, I don’t see myself reaching the ending despite getting one space away from the end. It took a lot of save scumming just to prove I can reach Al in one piece, so I can’t see myself doing better unless I start resetting the game to reset RNG or flat out cheating.

Again, I like the challenge the final chapter presents overall. It’s a fun amount of pressure and you gotta split your attention real well, it just needs to scale back, I think. And of course, the rest of the hack was very fun and escalated nicely.

[Darrman]

Thanks for playing! I’ll be making a bug fix soon with the stuff you’ve reported. As for the final chapter, the “deadline” was approaching and I didn’t test things too much. It is winnable, but probably could do with revisions, least of all making the secret shop actually work. I do have a few ideas to make things a bit fairer, and I’ll hopefully get some more eyes and opinions on it.