FIRE EMBLEM - Code of the Black Knights: Decisive Edition (30 chapters)

Chapter 2x is not that fun…
And dialogue:… The princesses …wtf oliver and gray are girls???
And oliver doesnt keep another 2 heal staffs i gave him bruh
Rip

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The bandit leader’s using “princesses” as a derogatory term. Of course they’re both dudes :v
Also what do you mean when you say that Oliver isn’t keeping the staff you give him? Is it vanishing mid-chapter or at the end?

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No
I bought 2 extra 30 use of exp farm (yeah heal staffs) for him and he only carrying one of them at ch3
Another oof
And there are split points? I dont see except (kill every last one of them)

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There is one split point at CH6 that changes the next chapter and another one much much later in the game.
Also, not doing something specific at CH4 triggers a specific event that changes the ending on CH8.

(kill every last one of them)

By the way, Dimitri was wrong, don’t do this xd.
“Defeat boss” means “Kill the boss”, not “Kill everyone then kill the boss”, not “Kill everyone then seize”. With a few exceptions, if you don’t defeat the boss as soon as possible, heavy reinforcements spawn and you’re going to make the chapter needlessly complicated.

The bug with the staff does seem weird though, I’m going to try to replicate it. Thanks :v

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Good news! I’m finally done writing the second act, which features 9 chapters, several intermissions and another side chapter. (Not much to show because word documents are not very interesting :v)
So I can actually continue the hack >:D. I think the next release should be around early april.

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That’s wonderful to hear. I hope to see this project finished.

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What if
You wanted to upload a new patch
But dropbox said

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Glad to see this ain’t dead.
I’ll be covering this as I go along before I forget’em.

So far I’m on Chapter 2 (Hard Mode), and I gotta say…

Quick Notes

1st chapter is fine. Nothing too bad.

Chapter 2 on the other hand…

The first thing I notice in the level is Oliver- kid’s a frail defenseless Cleric.
So I put him in the fort that’s conveniently nearby.

Now, the enemy AI does go for him, and reinforcements to save him dont show up until turn 3.

This would be fine, except…

Unless the intended strat is to literally send Hermes back to where Oliver is, Rescue him, and carry him all the way back (which I feel like is a bad idea given the circumstances), this is a problem, as despite the kid being on the fort, there are two enemies that get a free shot at him before he gets saved:

A Myrmidon who doubles him, who can and likely will land both 77% chances to hit WHILE OLIVER IS IN THE FORT, and shave off Oliver’s HP bar down to almost nothing. (Plus a 1% crit which is really scary given the circumstances, as that means Oliver potentially has a chance to get wrecked before you can do anything to save him.).

The second is a Brigand who only has a 41% to hit him while he’s in the fort… but if he hits that, Oliver is going down.

Miracle won’t save him either because the window for that is gone with the Myrmidon’s hits.

And honestly, things like that make it feel like it comes down a bit too much to RNG imo.

Even the reinforcements that show up- a fighter and a sword cav- well…

The fighter is the only one of the two who can kill the Myrmidon without a crit; and because of Weapon Triangle, they’ve only got a 56% chance to do so, which tbh is kinda scary.

Even then you have a third enemy- a brigand who can potentially attack Oliver- and the way the level is set up, odds of the kid making it out if the Myrm doesn’t go down aren’t looking good as it stands.

So what I think should be done is two things:

The first is that you move the fort up by two, then one to the left- this puts Oliver out of range long enough for backup to arrive.

The second is that you give that Myrmidon a Iron Blade instead of an Iron Sword- this means she can still be a threat, but not nearly as much of one as she was before (and her stats on paper look intimidating enough to match either way.).

This also makes her more easily handlable; I think by that point the fighter also has a more reliable hit rate on her.

(Oh, and uh, is Shotel supposed to be speaking if someone other than him attacks Oliver? JW.).

That’s all I have so far. I’ll let you know what else I come across so far.
Thanks!

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Given that there is literally special dialogue for choosing to do this, I’d say it’s at least worth considering.

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Thanks for the feedback! About the second chapter, the idea is that you have to have Oliver basically stay out of range until reinforcements arrive. Then you have several options:

  • A) You use both of them to bodyblock the bandits, while oliver heals and the rest of the party does stuff in the other side of the map.
  • B) You move Hermes there to clear the bandits faster.
  • C) Same as above, but instead you have him use rescue, as shown in the video.

(The special dialogue was mostly meant to be an easter egg :v)
The myrmidon has an iron sword, so she deals next to no damage to Josephine (Sword cav). Josephine, on the other hand, can kill the myrmidon in 2 rounds IIRC.
The thing is that, since the video shows that Artemisa is gaining unpromoted EXP and there are way too many red units, I think it was an old version, which makes me wonder if I actually updated the last version XD.

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Ok, I checked and fortunately I was worrying over nothing.
If my (Admittedly atrocious) internet allows it, a new patch is dropping today. :smiley:

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Ok, so I decided to say “Screw you dropbox” and started using mediafire.
The new patch includes an interlude, then chapters 9, 9x, 10, 11 and 12.
At the end of chapter 12, both lords get promotion items. (The promotions themselves aren’t implemented tho :v).
The good news is that there are no major engine changes, so the new patch is probably compatible with current savefiles if you were playing the latest patch.

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Okay! I’ll be trying that later today then!
(Also, that video was helpful. Also, I see… hm.).

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Okay so I beat Chapter 2 and 2x.
Some thoughts:

Chapter 2 and 2x:

Chapter 2: Okay, that went better this time.
That hidden dialogue was funny.

Chapter 2x:
Found a Typo: ‘princesses’ should be ‘princes’. (Because as girly as Oliver may look, he’s still a guy.).

Beat it after a few tries once I worked out the strat. I personally think the spot where the fire mage spawns shouldn’t be a forest tile (as it prevents Zero from really taking care of them then and there due to having an unreliable 46% or so), but otherwise, it’s not too bad once you work out what you need to do.

About the village you get trapped in… does the key you get in that one house do anything?!

Because it seems like the Door Keys Anna comes with don’t work and unless the keys you get from that house are somehow different (which is kinda hard to tell since they seem to have the same name.).

It’s either that, or I’m not understanding how to unlock the village.

So with that in mind… Anna IS supposed to Rescue-Carry, right?

Liking it so far.

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Heard about this hack and played it in a Discord stream for a server. We’ve gathered a collective of observations, which I will try to recount here and keep mostly limited to gameplay, as some aesthetic elements and writing can be very YMMV in terms of how it’s received. Keep in mind I played through only one route, and it was played on Standard (unsure if there’s differences between Standard and Hard implemented as of yet or planned). This was played on the previous version of the hack on VBA, before Act 2 Part 1 was released, so some things like tiling issues may have been addressed already. Choices I’m aware of being potential splits will be listed under Spoilers. For readers who haven’t played, light spoilers exist in the other topics as well, though I’ll attempt to keep those to a minimum. Be aware that the sections beyond Spoilers are rather long, even after splitting them up into General and Chapter Specific.

Edit: There’s one issue with the Prologue I was reminded of, where at first you can’t skip the narration at all, and then something… buggy happens once the image of the map changes and you’re allowed to skip again and choose to skip. This gets especially painful if Schwarze dies (which he easily can) and you have to sit through it again while avoiding skipping, even while holding Turbo.

Spoilers
  • Showed mercy to the bandit ringleader and ended his life.

  • Chose to defy Vert, resulting in what many of us considered to be the best scene in the entire hack.

General
  • Generally, aside from prepromotes like Artemisa or lategame units like Hall and Mithra, Player unit bases are extremely low with growths that I think are intended to make up for it, but a few units like Maria and Josephine lack those growths from what I recall (Maria is mostly a hodge-podge of 30s and 35s with a few standout ones in areas she’s already not lacking in; Josephine seemed to be an Armor Knight on a horse who had trouble accomplishing anything, even with her Rapier). Most units’ Base HP was noticeably low, even with the former taken into consideration. This was especially noticeable on Schwarze, who is far from his title of “Undying Knight” with 5 base Defense and 19 base HP and with his growths focused moreso on offense. Noir managed to catch up and contribute thanks to Gawain (which is D Rank instead of a Prf, by the way; are there no other Dark users intended?), but Schwarze was almost always just kind of there unless we needed an extra hand to nuke a Sword Cav, especially since his weapon besides his Prf in the Prologue reduces his already-low Speed base by 3 or 4 (I’m failing to recall the exact Wgt of an Iron Blade in this hack, but I remember his Con was 9 or 10). These bases seem like they’d be right at home in FE7 or FE8, but enemies were much weaker in general in the base games compared to here. My main roster I relied on consisted of Noir, Cecil, Artemisa, Elizabeth, Zero (to a much more limited extent), Hazel, Mithra, and Hall. Oliver still served as a staffbot when there was room after getting Mithra and Hermes’s flying utility still made him usable, especially in my version of Chapter 7.

  • Specific prices in shops seem to be altered in strange ways. There seem to be no changes to Iron weapons aside from the number of uses on Iron Swords being reduced to 40, yet an Iron Sword now costs 600 Gold while Iron Lances and Axes still cost 360 and 270, respectively. This exacerbates Schwarze’s issues with weaponry, since it cost so much money to get a lighter Sword in a hack that seems rather strict with funds, to the point where I didn’t bother trying to remedy his situation at all. I initially intended to use Flux as another example, but it turns out the base version of Sacred Stones had Flux tomes cost 900 Gold as well. Anyone reading this who tuned into that Discord stream, know that this was unchanged rather than made more expensive, unlike what I assumed.

  • Tiling issues. Most notably in Chapter 3 where many carpets with Chests on them seem to have the edges cut through the middle of the carpet near where the chest is.

  • The mechanic of Leadership Stars on generics, even if they’re named something like “Commander” or “Chief,” rubbed many of us the wrong way, since despite the fact that we have Leadership Stars of our own, our perception of it tended to skew towards how much free Avoid the enemies were getting despite the Hit we’d get from our own. Also, none of us could come up with any reason Zero would have a Leadership Star since he’s a bumbling isekai character with no knowledge of tactics or warfare and barely 3 archery lessons from years ago.

  • Forts lowering your Hit by 10 when standing in them is baffling and serves to suddenly make a valuable piece of terrain an active disadvantage to be around in terms of fighting back against the enemies you’re choking at a point. As far as any of us are aware, this works with any unit you put in a Fort, even enemies, and there are no Skills that explain this situation, so I can only assume this was intentional.

  • Scenes between certain chapters, particularly between Chapters 2x to 3 and Chapters 7 to 8, take ages to finish. “They’re still talking” came up several times between Chapters 2x and 3, especially. I’d recommend finding some way to cut down on some fluff, perhaps redirecting it to Talks on other maps. This is a part of the narrative I feel is of the utmost importance to bring up despite the general YMMV nature of criticizing narrative.

Chapter Specific
  • The Red Gem Thief suddenly diving out of the action without any warning was aggravating, and since it was just a Red Gem, I did not want to bother restarting for it despite how strict Gold is in this hack.

  • It was generally agreed upon in the stream group that the Mercenary/Fort being where the gate would normally be and thus locking your unit in to wait for Anna to ferry them out was not a great decision. I’d recommend trying to find some way to have the Mercenary/Fort moved 1 tile south while keeping the threat against them, if you’d still like to do that, such as a Thicket or Peak with the village moved up slightly to allow room for that terrain while leaving the River where it is (the Mercenary was never under a significant threat of death even with the Fort moved up like this, honestly).

  • The chest contents in Chapter 3 are… strange. One chest in particular, the rightmost of the southern pair, seems to contain infinite Green Gems, and keeps the Thief distracted unless a unit blocks that door. These Green Gems appear to disappear from the inventory of my units (in this case, Maria) upon completing the chapter, so I’m unsure of this chest’s purpose; I had initially assumed it was a method of converting extra Chest Keys into Gold, though it’s a very unconventional and somewhat obtuse method of doing so, but that’s either not the case or it’s bugged at the moment.

  • Several magic users throughout the game, particularly a Mage or two in Chapter 4 and some Shamans in Chapters 3 and 8, boast a ludicrous Magic base in the mid-teens, for a total of roughly 25-27 ATK on the Shamans due to the Might on their weapons and Malefic Aura. No one on the team appears to have a reliable Res stat except perhaps Oliver and Mithra, who cannot fight, and Elizabeth, who is unavailable for at least one of these and doesn’t fare well against the Anima examples of this, so combined with the former issue of notably low Base HP, most encounters with these magic users become a matter of hoping they miss or you crit. I was saved in various attempts on these by either Cecil growing well (the only one of the initial unpromoted units to do so) or Zero getting a crit where he would’ve died from the retaliation; Zero’s Mage Slayer does nothing to make up for the fact that he has a tendency to explode when faced with magical damage on the scale that these Shamans and Mages present.

  • Chapter 4 has severe pacing issues. The initial onslaught works out, and I rather like the bit where they mention they don’t have time to prepare, though there were no instances of the Prep screen before then as far as I can recall, so it perhaps wasn’t necessary to note that in red text. After the initial bout, however, the chapter becomes an act of hiking across a monstrously-sized field of plains with little else happening, and the final push of racing against the cavalry and Mercer to defeat the boss was nigh impossible to get right on the first go, and this chapter is incredibly long. On top of that Oliver’s interaction with the boss has several issues, including how the walls crumble into Ruin terrain instead of Floor or Plains, which throws a massive wrench into a Talk plan without knowing that beforehand, and I’m still unsure what Oliver’s Talk even did. It seems to make the boss not aggro on your units for 1 turn (though he’s still fully willing to counterattack at all times), but by that point, enemy units are closing in on you and there’s little to no time to take advantage of this. In addition, the boss’s other units aren’t affected by this Talk, leaving Oliver horribly exposed if you opt to avoid killing the units (like the Village in the southeast tries to advise; I’m still unsure what they meant aside from maybe Mercer, who I avoided killing) by taking the Wall path instead of the Door, especially since, again, the player has no way of knowing how the boss will be affected by this Talk the first time they attempt it, and the chapter is so long that they’ll hope and pray it’ll be an instant win or something. I know I certainly did. I was fortunate enough to have made a save state before attempting anything with this fortification the second time (when I knew when reinforcements/Mercer were coming so I could get to the fort with enough time to do something without several deaths being imminent).

  • Chapter 5’s Stairs, noted by Artemisa to lead directly to the boss’s room, do not function properly. There’s a quick blip of the unit appearing at the stairs on the other side of the map, but they almost immediately get yanked back to the Stairs, immediately triggering the Stair effect that simulates Canto on any unit but from where they attempted to use the Stairs. This made walking back quite a chore. Also, the boss moves off of his Throne in a Seize chapter. I’m lucky this didn’t get my units in the adjacent hallway killed, but it’s also an issue in that the boss is reduced to a side objective instead of what’s standing between you and victory when he’s initially presented as a standard Throne boss; there’s no reason to assume he would move, if this is intentional.

  • Chapter 7’s stealth version is made tolerable by extremely liberal use of Rewinds and Save States. This sort of chapter is extremely hard to execute well, and the way it works here doesn’t help. The Goggles increased Vision slightly, but not to the point of a Thief, leading to just flying up and hoping the Mage had finally left that general area on my second attempt at the chapter. Schwarze’s advice of having him go to the house alone is one I don’t understand, either. I assumed he meant no one else could stand in the area with houses, but this restriction would make having him visit without getting caught impossible. On the second attempt, I had Hermes ferry him there, and all was well. As much as the Torch Staff helps with figuring out where enemies are and where they’re going, only foresight from prior experience with the chapter will get you through before you run out of stealth time while still visiting the house with Schwarze due to how careful with positioning the flyers need to be when navigating around the mountain and tower to the east. I’m not sure why the door to the west is presented as an option, either, when the Fighter, Mage, and Archer form a perfect wall of vision; the only way through unseen is with fliers using Rescue, and navigating through the Soldiers takes far too much time, leaving the only option being to brute force the Archer pathing in the tower to lower the emergency gate.

  • Also, the Torch Staff and Elixir in Chapter 7’s opening and the Light Brand in Chapter 8 replicate themselves if you Save and Restart Chapter, which would’ve helped the issue with strict Gold amounts if there were any shops to spend it at by that point besides the heavily-inflated prices of the Convoy Armory. I’d recommend asking other hack creators about working around this issue, as it has come up before and I believe the people behind Legends of Avenir have had to fix this exact issue.

  • Chapter 8 is a repeat of Chapter 4 in regards to pacing. It’s quite long, again, and the fact that GBA Ballistae are difficult to discern the actual damage of (due to them being structures you can’t R Button the stats from) makes losing an irreplaceable unit like Artemisa likely, forcing a restart where you play even more conservatively. All of the deployed units also gain 150 EXP at the start of the chapter, forcing you to sit through 12-24 level-ups, which is time-consuming even with the Turbo button since you’ll at least want to see what stats your units get. I made a save-state after the second time I sat through it to avoid this from coming up again. Back to the Ballista issues, using your own Ballistae is also generally a bad idea aside from the lower left one, as the rightmost pair of Ballistae will both get dogpiled by up to two Ballistae and a stampede of Cavaliers while the Northwest Ballista has no relevant units to target, though it serves its purpose as an opening scene prop. The central temple is also rather inconvenient to use since it only exits south while you have an Eastern side to defend as well, though I suppose this is a double-edged sword situation since I had Taurus snipe some Cavaliers from there. The enemy Ballistae are far too dense, to the point where so many of my units may as well have not existed until my Cecil finally broke the enemy lines only to discover that Green Units would’ve gotten to that Ballista anyway. The tiles I can only assume were the “metal shards” Noir mentioned aren’t very noticeable; I took damage from them far too many times before finally noticing what was going on. I assumed it was the Anima singularity mentioned at the start randomly hitting my units until I eventually saw the grass was a shade whiter with some thin lines on it. Note that FE6 made sure there was heavy contrast on the damaging tiles in the fire caves. The ruined house down south dealing 20 damage to anyone who stepped on it was equally strange, though it mostly penalized the enemies in that case since a Fighter walked on it twice, getting herself killed. It’s unclear whether the boss moves; I assumed he’d stand still since he was perched in a cornered Forest tile. Instead, he moved, though luckily my Cecil and Elizabeth had been promoted by this point. Lastly, Mercer seems… out of place here. We didn’t need yet another reason to rush at the boss when the threat of running out of time is a Game Over, and Mercer gets himself killed against the Green Wyvern Rider, anyway, since he refuses to unequip Bolting. I’m unsure if I was supposed to keep him alive, but the Green Units made that decision for me. Also, as much as the water evaporating attempted to increase the pressure, by that point, all of the units I wanted for the boss were prepared to charge through the lower walls, which made the new passage through the center of the map not very practical for either faction aside from Elizabeth taking a detour to finally deal with the far Ballista.

Edits, 4/5/2020
  • As others have pointed out and reminded me, Chapter 3 has a Magic Mine somewhere. I never discovered where this mine is, but at some point, I unlocked the Door nearest the boss and tried to move next to the mage and immediately lost my turn, taking no damage. I believe this Mine is bugged, but honestly, I don’t feel like a Mine would be underneath a Door in the first place.

  • The Supply Whistle basically has me never use the Convoy. It makes it so that the unit using the Convoy can only withdraw up to 4 items due to the Supply Whistle taking up their inventory. I initially assumed that equipping the Supply Whistle would cause the equipped unit to have the Supply command around them like Eirika/Ephraim in FE8, but this wasn’t the case. I was also incredibly concerned with what would happen if I sent the Supply Whistle to the Convoy, and never attempted it mid-map out of fear.

  • A bug that Rewinds saved me from: when clicking certain units in the Items menu of the Prep screen (in my case Schwarze and Hazel; I’m unsure what causes this, but Schwarze was the second unit in the list and Hazel was the 7th or 10th, if that helps), the game locks up. No commands appear, and all button inputs do nothing, but the music and animations continue as if nothing is wrong. I had to find units who did not lock up the game to access the convoy and Trade items to the bugged units in order to properly use the Convoy with the bugged units.

Even with all that said, I can tell an extreme amount of effort was poured into this hack, and it especially shows during a scene referred to in Spoilers. I hope you continue to learn and improve, and I may find myself revisiting this in the future.

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I hate that mine tho
(Btw i forgot what was the second thingy in ur spoiler tag?)

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Alright so preliminary thoughts on Chapter 3…

(Allegedly) Quick (Spoiler Warning!) Notes for Chapter 3

Zero’s entrance scene with the hood is… kind of cringe, but I think that’s the idea? (If so, then the last line said by that old man made me laugh so hard.).

Also, this is more of a Chapter 2x note, but… calling it ‘Null Factor’ is honestly a really interesting (and clever) choice. (I had to look up what that was; and it fits what Zero is.).

This is more for other people’s sake than anything, but for an explanation: The term ‘Null Factor’ seems to be reffering to the Null Factor Law which is something used to solve quadratic equations.

This law states that if the product of any two numbers is zero, then one or both of the numbers is zero. That is, if ab = 0, then a = 0 or b = 0 (which includes the possibility that a = b = 0).

So in the context of the hack, it seems Naga is a mathematician with a sense of humor, as it chooses to solve the problem at hand in 2x by throwing in a ‘Zero’ as a variable to change things.

This changes the results so that there’s (hopefully) 0 casualties for the side of Oliver and company, 0 villages are destroyed (ideally), and 0 reinforcements from Layla come to help the bandits in Chapter 2 as a result.

In other words, ‘Zero’ creates a scenario where 0 bad things occur; hence 2x being called a ‘Null Factor’ since he causes everything that needs to be negated for the story as we know it to continue on to become nothing.

Of course, this is only my thoughts on the subject, so take it as you will.
(If the creator of the hack is reading all this, feel free to let me know if I’m on the right track or not.).

Though back to the topic at hand; Chapter 3 is… well…
I wish Oliver could do something to snap the brainwashed soldiers out of it. Ah well. (At least he gets an unlock staff, so yay!)

Supply Whistle is… honestly, it’s kinda convoluted to work around with since it basically makes itself an inventory management puzzle where if it weren’t for how this hack has Thracia trading (I think it does, anyways), it’d be an even bigger pain in the ass to work with.

It’s a clever idea in theory to make it an item, but the execution feels kinda clunky (having to equip it to use it, only the unit with the whistle can actually use the whistle, etc.).

Also, uh, it looks like you can put the Whistle into the supply, and that worries me because it means should you ever put the whistle in the supply by accident in the middle of the battle, you lock yourself out of retrieving anything from the convoy for the rest of the battle.

I think I have an idea on why you chose to do this, but I don’t know if it’s correct so for now I’m gonna keep my mouth shut on it.

The Shaman with Ichor on Chapter 3 is also scary as hell; he one-shots pretty much any unit that’s not Oliver and/or Artemesia, which honestly makes me glad he doesn’t seem to move. (If he did, this would turn it into a even bigger pain in the ass.).

Otherwise, I think that’s all I have to say on the matter for now…

(Also, is there a recruitable thief in this chapter? Those lockpicks on a Archer as a stealable seem mighty suspicious to me… and there’s only three chest keys that drop total…).

I really do like this hack though. Keep it up!

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My Own Thoughts (Put Here Because Spoilers)

Zero’s leadership star is… personally, I think he’s supposed to have one because he’s an isekai protag- he’s supposed to have one because it shows potential to become an actual leader. Forshadowing, I think?

I didn’t know that standing in Forts reduces your hit by 10 either. Or that the red gem thief leaves after a certain amount of time passes. (I think I just moved fast enough to avoid it.).

Btw, just curious, but was I one of the ones that reminded you of the other issues?

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Yeah, I was trying to remember the events of a long stream over the course of at least 2 days, so I forgot a few things. You reminded me of the Supply Whistle, someone else’s comment reminded me of the Magic Mine, and in the process I reminded the issue with the Items section of the Prep screen.

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Ahhh, I see. Glad I could help you!

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