“When everyone’s a slow little baby, no one is”
-Ghandi or something
I’ve never liked designing armor knights. The idea of a unit who is exclusively valuable for defense has never appealed to me. On top of that, their speed is usually miserable, leaving them open to double attacks (even in FE7, a game with notoriously slow enemies, Wallace will never double and sometimes even eat a double himself.) Recently, I decided to face my fears. I would design more slow units.
Say what you want about my methods, but hey, I like designing slow units now. So there.
Fire Emblem: Doubled or Nothing is a short, somewhat challenging FE8 hack with an important catch. Every single player unit has 0 Speed. There’s little hope of getting more, thanks to a lack of speed growths or Speedwings, and every enemy you face has at least 4 AS. Basically, get used to getting doubled. However, not all hope is lost! Where enemies have their agility, you have your wit, your grit, and your wacky grab bag of powerful tools.
Work through maps that increase in complexity while still building off of each other in unique ways, and do so in either the original design of Hard Mode or the toned down difficulty of Normal Mode.
Features
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Tons of new items. Almost every member of the cast gets new toys to play with, and Prf weapons are kept to a minimum. This leads to a ton of distinct and flexible tools that allow every weapon type to feel vastly different.
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Similarly to my previous custom hack, Bases and Bandits, Doubled has passive stat boosts that incur penalties in addition to their expected buffs. Here, however, they all focus on speed.
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The guide feature now provides hints! After the preps of each map, you get a new entry in the guide talking specifically about the current chapter. These hints are far from required, but they’re there for those who need or want them. Additionally, after Chapter 8, you can check promotion bonuses.
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Bond supports reward reliability boosts for good positioning. Rather than building supports in the traditional sense, units are given instant supports, granting +10 Hit/Avoid per level. Thinking just that little bit longer about where your units are relative to each other will turn those 80s into 90s, drastically improving reliability over the course of a map.
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You’re able to switch the difficulty at the start of each map past Chapter 2! Unlike modern FE, this is a two-way street. Play how you want!
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Every map has a unique map theme, and that song plays continuously throughout the map (imagine modern FE, but without the Calm/Fire distinction.) If you want to use any of the songs in this game, there’s a good chance you can find it in my music thread. I will say that Unsure Journey, Chapter 7’s map theme, is an original song, and as such is not F2U.
Story
lol imagine
In all seriousness, I doubt that Doubled will ever have a full story. I’ve been slowly adding more and more small events to maps, but they’re mostly just banter or gameplay explanations. This is a gameplay hack first and foremost, with the story not even coming second. However, I recommend not skipping most mid-map dialogue, as they often give you information about mechanics or reinforcements or the like.
KNOWN ISSUES:
- If you poison the boss of Chapter 9 with Jormungand and he dies to the residual damage, he will not give you the Reverie Bow. The Reverie Bow is an important weapon that the final map is designed around the use of, but I have seen someone beat the map without having it.
- I think I might have missed changing the battle background for one or two of the tiles in the night backgrounds, so under certain conditions, combat on a night map might use day backgrounds.
- Levianeer doesn’t use Blessing of the Eight Generals I as a battle theme, despite being a special weapon.
