Fire Emblem: Illuminated (31 Mainline Chapters - Complete)

[Sokaballa]

Patch/Hotfix Day! OP has been updated to 1.0.3.

Patch Log:

• There were several instances in the game where units under the effect of an Aer Distillate (adds 5% to growth rates) were having this buff removed. This has been fixed.
• A rare issue was identified in Chapter 25x that was causing problems in the final two chapters. It was resolved. If Jay does not show up in Chapter 26, PLEASE let me know.
• A bug with the finale chapter when the sub-boss was killed during enemy phase. This was causing really big problems and this has now been fixed (I hope).
• Syd now has +2 Con to fill out the role of a tank a bit better. Dracoknight has also gained +1 Con and +1 DEF on promotion, helping Syd to have the chance to become the unit with the largest CON in the game.
• Frederic now has +2 Skill at base to help with some shaky hit rates and to help him fulfill his role has a speedy, reliable hitter.

This patch is compatible with previous versions. Thanks for all those continuing to provide feedback!

[Kijaw]

Hey so, I just reached chapter 21 but while doing the preps I noticed there’s an extra deployment space. Am I supposed to already have all 16 characters by thus point? Cause I have 15 and haven’t seen any other opportunity to recruit someone

[Sokaballa]

Hi Kijaw, welcome to the FEU community! Thanks for playing Illuminated.

The 16th character to recruit comes in Chapter 20, so potentially you may have missed it. There is a small condition that must be done in order to have her appear. I’m going to list in spoilers below.

Summary

The 16th character is Rachael. In order to have her appear, you must speak with her during Chapter S-4 with Ophelia. This will turn on a flag that makes her appear at the beginning of Chapter 20.

If you have missed her, I’d be happy to help you in getting her assuming you have a save file you can send me from Chapter 20.

Hope this helps. Let me know if I can help further. If you did the above and did not get her, please let me know as I will need to investigate this bug.

[Cath]

Small bug report (latest patch 1.0.3), chapter S-4:
Jay has 2x the skill Shove:

A crash happens if you are in prep, in the supply screen, and try to open the item description for Crude Club or Door Frame:

Spoiler

Completely unnecessary to have a second option here

[Sokaballa]

Hey Cath, thanks for the reports. The first one I am aware of and was a result of me slightly screwing up Jay’s skills when I first released the final version. It functionally won’t change anything but will allow him to now actually learn a 6th skill at promoted level 20.

Unfortunately I’m aware of the bug with the crude club. In preps, if item descriptions are more than 2 lines, this crash can happen. I may need to put a notice of it in the guide.

For the spoiler…

Summary

That’s a lot of money! But yes I have never done that. May increase the amount to make it a bit more appealing.

Thank you!

[Cath]

Another finding, in chapter 21, at the beginning of turn 2, this tile changes into something else, and if you select it with the cursor, the game crashes:

The game is fantastic in every aspect! I hope everyone is giving it a try, so many fun but also challenging levels. Hard to imagine how much time and effort and you put into this!
Big R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

[Sokaballa]

Hey Cath, thanks for the report. Never seen this before and I’ll check this out.

Glad you’re enjoying it and thanks for the kind words!

Edit: Checked it out and found an odd tile change I don’t remember. Will be fixed for the next version!

[Cath]

Arrgh… stupid phantom is trying to kill the torches… forever…
Why did you mark the torches as an enemy?

And is it intentional that there are 3 chests in the map, but only 2 keys? I think this is the second map where this happens, or do I always miss one?

[Sokaballa]

I’m gonna see if I can set the AI of phantoms to not attack torches and rocks haha. Either that or set the torch to NPC and not have enemies attack it. It really should account for phantoms.

As for the chest keys, this is intentional.

Summary

There is a house event in the first shop chapter that tries to indicate very strongly the importance of having spare chest keys. I wanted them to be a real consideration when shopping, so consequently, there are less droppable keys per chapter than chests.

Hope this helps!

[Cath]

That’s perfectly fine, it’s an issue on my side, doing a break of several month in between playing the hack

[CaptainEXE]

So I got to chapter 23 and I just wanna say how I was screaming at the big reveal. But there’s some stuff that’s bothering me about the game right now. Let me put it in spoilers:

Summary

Having reached chapter 23 and am curious to know, do we ever get to go to Verum or the Glades? I’m just curious if those areas will ever be relevant or play any part in the game.

Also, Rachel was a cool inclusion but I am NOT a fan of how every single chapter after her recruitment has been a race against the clock chapter. It makes it hard to grow her since you’d have to put her near people who might be in the thick of danger at all times and makes it even harder to safely place her near melee units without her dying. I wanted to give her Swords to have a third sword user since I am sorely lacking in coverage with them and Finch and Beran are like my main/only real sword fighters. I gave her a Support with Lana to make sure she could at least heal and provide some sort of niche. But given the push to support her with Ophelia right away, I feel like Rachel was built with some kind of Magic bias in a game that already has a lot of good mages in it. She’s got tons of competition and the only thing I could do more with is Anima because Cordelia has awful speed and just cannot reliably kill most things and Cather–ahem SERA is off with the other mounted units doing her own thing. But I guess my point is that I wish we had a less “WIN IN 12 TURNS OR ELSE” chapters so I could take some time to get her to a decent place. Or she could join a little earlier like Gerry.

[Sokaballa]

Hey @CaptainEXE , firstly thanks again for playing! Spoilers below.

Summary

The world map is the very first thing I made when I started Illuminated. It’s incredibly primitive as you can see and a couple areas of the map I never even ended up using in the game. If I had some art skill, I would return to the world map and redesign to still fit the narrative while omitting areas that are unnecessary… But my art skill is very poor haha. Sorry for the let down there and I do think it would help a lot, but I just haven’t been able to make something myself worth putting in.

As for Rachael, yeah she is a bit tough to train. Really the biggest asset in training her supports is the ability to heal units and that helps her a bit in developing her support levels, but the timed chapters make it a bit difficult to train here. She is not a necessary unit by any means, but more of a thought experiment to me in making a unit who primarily grows a different way. I’m not saying her implementation is perfect and I think you bring up some valid criticism of it, but at this point, events are inlaid enough in the game that I don’t want to have to re-do all of it (also some folks have sent me some photos of her being absolutely cracked too so I’m afraid to make it easier for her).

Thanks again! I would love to hear your thoughts on the story once you’re finished!

[CaptainEXE]

Yeah, I think the final unit is good and a neat concept either way.

My thoughts on the plot:

Summary

This game feels like I’m reading an entire novel sometimes. I even made a post calling it something like that on Romhacking.net. Now, I love the plot. Love it. I love the cast and how open and honest they are to one another. But sometimes I feel like there is just SO MUCH TALKING when there shouldn’t be. Mostly in the middle of actual maps/battles. Why are they out here having these elaborate, heartfelt conversations while people are trying to kill em?

That being said, there is one thing I’m really curious about. What happened to Dirk? The plot twist on 23 really did have me screaming when I saw it. I had to put down my Steam Deck (I play on Retroarch) for a few minutes while I composed myself. In fact, I was CONVINCED the hooded person WAS Dirk because of his sudden disappearance from the plot. It just felt like it fit. Unless the idea was to make Dirk be a red herring. I don’t even know anymore. I’m on Chapter 24 and somewhat stuck because there’s just so much coming down on the group at once. I’ll have to see if I can get past it today.

As for the map, it’s not a huge deal. Does seem like wasted real estate space, though. I figured there’d secretly be some massive kingdom or something on those areas that people just didn’t know about. Sorta like the dunes or the cult on the island. But I guess not. Again though, it’s not a big deal.

[KainLegacy]

Bro, loved the hack, the only thing that i can bring “bad” about it, is that you get the same ending in the new game +.
For the good tho…
Loved the story.
Loved the characters (Especially Danielle).
Loved “THAT” Paired ending.
So let me say thank you, for this awesome hack.

[Sokaballa]

Yeah, there is a LOT of text and there are certainly parts that are overdone text wise. I’m not offended when people say it is too much sometimes because I agree.

The truth is, this was due to poor planning when I first started development over 6 years ago. I didn’t intend to make such a long hack when I first was learning FeBuilder and definitely didn’t have a story in mind, so for many stages of story development, I was pretty much writing as I went. I had so many different ideas that I was interested in including as I built it, but many ideas just didn’t make sense for the style of the game and the sheer amount of what I was thinking. There were so many lore threads that I thought were cool but ended up having to cut. The game also would have taken years more to develop, and to add to this problem, I started to quickly run out of rom space because of (again) some poor planning in the beginning phase of development, so I started having to jam things together in chapters that I would have liked to have spread out.

Lots of lessons learned. At the end of the day, when I was writing, I was simply just trying to make it engaging to read. I agree there is fat that could be cut, but after so long in development, I reached a bit of burnout and don’t have the drive to curate it at the moment. May come back to it, but my focus right now is on bug fixes and trying to flesh out some lesser known characters a bit more (the irony of adding MORE text is not lost on me).

Outside of that, thanks for the compliments and I’m glad that it was enjoyable enough to stick through for ya. As for the character you mention, there’s some reasons for the ways things ended up. Hit me up either on FEU or discord when you’ve finished and I’m happy to explain it further.

@KainLegacy Thanks so much for the kind words and I’m so happy to hear you enjoyed the game! I agree, it would be cool to have an additional ending of sorts for NG+, but for some of the reasons mentioned above, it never materialized. I’ve maybe 200kb left in the ROM and I’m trying to preserve it in case of game breaking things I need to fix.

Thank you both!

[ootdega]

Okay so, there’s a few problems I’ve found.

First: Playing on the original VBA causes a crash whenever Sam’s attack animation plays on a Forest tile. Also glitches where it almost crashes with stave animations. I get that VBA-M is supposed to be used, but I freaking hate VBA-M, it causes me so many problems. I’ve played multiple other FE hacks that had no issues on the original VBA, so this was unexpected to say the least.

Second: The stave animation sometimes gets confused with whether it’s one or two tiles away.

Third: The Siphon spell doesn’t work on the enemy’s turn. It will show health being recovered, but it will not stay. Ophelia died to discover this.

Fourth: Poison weapons still cause poison status if the enemy would have survived without the timed hit.

Fifth: The Savior perk does not work. Clinton still has penalties when rescuing someone.

Lastly: You should rename the Gift Card to something else. Calling it a gift card implies that you can redeem it, when in reality it’s a membership card that just grants access.

I also cannot save the game after I imported a save state from older VBA. I will have to continue the game exclusively with save states and I will not be able to play New Game+. I don’t know whether this is the ROM’s fault or not, but I am still sour about it, because I didn’t discover this until I the crashes forced me to download VBA-M around chapter 8, and I really don’t want to restart the game.

[Sokaballa]

Hey @ootdega , firstly welcome to the community and thanks for playing Illuminated!

As for the bugs you mention, some I’m aware of and some are new to me. I will preface this by saying that I do all of my testing and playtesting on VBA (not VBA-m) and have never had some of the issues you have mentioned, especially related to save issues. I’ll keep an eye out for if more reports corroborate some of the things you’re saying. I’m also happy and more accessible to answer bug questions on the Illuminated discord which I view a bit more regularly.

Bugs I’m aware of (most are small bugs related to timed hits that are well beyond the scope of me repairing):

• Life draining magic does not work with timed hits and can sometimes crash the game. The best thing to do is to hold L before the battle starts to default to map animations.
• Status weapons, like poison weapons, will still inflict status if a unit ends a battle earlier because of a timed hit. The system does not account for this unfortunately and is something beyond my ability to fix.

On my end, savior is working with no issues. Not sure why it is not working for you.

Sam is not causing issues on forest tiles for me. I’m wondering if your save was corrupted at some point or if something is going on with your rom. This is the first I have heard of this problem.

Staff animations are a bit funky due to staff savant and my very old skillsystems not being able to adapt to it. Small visual thing there but nothing too crazy.

I will rename the Gift Card now that you mention it. I’m gonna call it the Club Card and it will be changed in the next update.

Sorry you’re having issues and if I can help further, please let me know. Thanks for reporting these things! I ought to put some of the bugs in the guide so players are aware of it.

[ootdega]

I dunno man. VBA-M has also been giving me problems that apparently nobody else has experienced. The worst is sometimes the Shift key just gets ignored and so it loads the state instead of saving it. EXTREMELY frustrating and usually requires a full restart of the emulator to fix it.

But yeah, every time Sam’s attack animation played on a forest tile, the game freaked out, graphical glitches and everything. If it was at night, it froze with 100% consistency no matter how many times I replayed it. Fighter animations in general didn’t seem to play nice. Staff animations also had graphical glitches and stutters sometimes, but never froze the game. I don’t really think it had to do with corruption, since VBA-M hasn’t been replicating those issues. It’s version 1.0.1, and with VBA-M it’s been 100% stable. So that probably also rules out a hardware fault.

My issue with life-draining magic didn’t have to do with timed hits, and those have actually never crashed on me. The only dark magic that timed hits actually work on are Void, Siphon, and Ophelia’s Wolf spell, and my impression is it’s because of the sheer length of the animations. Timed hits with any other dark magic have never once worked. The sound plays, but the damage is unchanged in either direction.

My issue with it is the health drain doesn’t work on the enemy’s turn. If Ophelia gets attacked with Siphon equipped, it will show her health recovering when she retaliates, but with the next battle, or the beginning of my turn, her health is still where it was after taking the hit. Her health didn’t actually recover. On my own turn, it works fine. So Nosferatu tanking is not possible, and I have to treat her like she’s made of glass paper. Because she is.

Savior truly did not work. I rescued someone with him and his accuracy was awful. Loaded a state before I did that, and his accuracy was perfect, with a double attack. Same enemy, same position, same weapon. Never did it again, so I have no other data points.

Right now, the staff animations will play the long-range version seemingly at random, even when Ophelia does it. Lana is a Sage now, so she doesn’t even have Staff Savant anymore. Which was a surprise and a bit of a disappointment.

Uh, another suggestion: Give literally any access to a Restore staff. The only one I have been able to get is the one from the house during Teddy’s chapter. And I, uh, forgot to get it. So if someone gets put to sleep, they stay that way. Poison is really just free staff experience, but sleep is pretty much a restart.

Gerry (my absolute LAD) has always dodged it somehow. Boy is just an indestructible wrecking ball with legs. And a gun. And now he can fly.

[ootdega]

Couple more things to report

First, I think I was right about dark magic. All the ones with shorter animations function with timed hits.

A couple bugs I just found:

Pressing R to inspect the Door Frame while it’s in the Supply hard-crashes the game with a sound that can only be described as the death wail of a thousand banshees.

On the map where you have to escort the merchants after the teleport scene, if I Summon a phantom, it will appear in the center where the merchants gather intead of where I Summoned it.

Aaaaand now he’s attacking the rocks…

Finally able to buy a Restore staff, thank the lord. Not gonna complain about 16-bit Man with the Machine Gun either

[Minnnt]

I just finished the hack and wanted to share my thoughts:

Gameplay

In terms of gameplay, I played it on hard mode and found it to be consistently challenging, but not unfair, when a character died, it usually felt like my fault. The maps were well designed and I rarely ever found I had characters ‘sitting around’ for a turn; almost everyone has to actively contribute every turn, which I think makes for more engaging gameplay and enjoyed. Enemies regularly have different items than just the standard iron/steel lances, so you gotta plan around them rather than just always charging ahead. I also appreciate that there were often a lot of side objectives in each chapter, so that if you were paying attention, you could be rewarded with items, convos, hints about future chapters, etc. The only chapter that was a definite miss for me was 17-2. The enemies moved in ways that often just led to me standing in a safe place for multiple turns to memorize their routine. If they moved in between two spots, sometimes they would wait at the same spot for a turn, sometimes two, and then move back to the other spot, but only stay there for one turn, etc. I get that this was likely done to avoid layover of enemy ranges, but it just felt frankly annoying to maneuver through, and I ended up just opting out on my second time playing through the chapter. I also think Chapter 6 could be balanced a little better, it is very heavy in the first half, but the last couple of turns the lack of enemies and what not often leads to a deflated ending. I don’t want to be necessarily pushed back to the throne area, but I think there could be some better balance as to when reinforcements arrive so that the last 2-3 turns don’t just feel like a cleanup while the first couple of turns are extreme fights for your life that one wrong move can lead to the death of a character.

I’m generally not a fan of ‘Skill Emblem’, which I think is more a personal preference. I find you end up getting bogged down in menus and often all the skills that both you and that enemy has that difference in damage/hit calcs etc. end up seeming almost arbitrary, because especially if enemies get clustered, becomes difficult to keep track of it all. Which, to be honest, I still mostly felt in this hack. I find I generally prefer hacks that have little to no use of a skill system (Lonely Mirror, Dream of Five) or ones that employ really unique signature skills so that they feel more impactful (Cerulean Coast). Once again, this is mostly personal preference and the map design and enemy placement shone through and I felt the skills impacted the gameplay, but didn’t bog it down.

Characters

I loved the smaller roster of characters, I find a lot of the times in romhacks, and even some standard Fire Emblem games, it throws characters at you and they often feel inconsequential to the gameplay, and more importantly, the story. I would say even the two most removed characters, Syd and Frederic, still have a couple of scenes that made them more included in the story. I do wish that there were a couple more talk scenes throughout the chapters, especially near the end, they were prominent in the first part and led to more character moments, weapons, items, etc., and I would love to have seen that keep going throughout the campaign.

None of the characters feel really game breaking and they all feel more balanced than when I originally played. The earlier builds Danielle and Gerry often felt more like burdens than helpful units on the field and now that is definitely not the case. Danielle was a pretty solid wall and her prf was great in early game chapters. Gerry likely varies so heavily in each playthrough based on the growths/class, but as a standard growths paladin, he capped speed and strength near the end run, and with some bucklers and health items was able to a solid hit and runner. MVP probably goes to Ophelia, the summoning ability just comes in so clutch when you need to distract enemies.

Story (Spoilers!!)

Now as for the story, I played Illuminated back in the day when it went up to Chapter 16, which after completing, definitely feels like the conclusion to almost an Act 1 to a 3 Act story. The idea of the characters being stuck in a time loop is interesting, and it was written well, but I really wish there was more foreshadowing to it in the first 16 chapters of the game. Maybe there was, and I missed it, but for essentially being the crux of the conclusion of the story, it was really an about face turn alluded to in Chapter 17 and not really seen too much of beforehand. Yes, there’s the mysterious hooded figure, but I would love to see some kind of hint or convo about how things are moving differently this time, etc. I also think if you’re going to utilize a time loop, it has more impact if we see how the time loops have iterated themselves in the past. You have scenes with Jay seeing Caius’s past and vice versa, would have been interesting to maybe show scenes that were from an alternate past, or alternate future, and Jay/Caius are unsure of the truth of them, if they’re just a dream, etc. The arc of the first 1/2 of the game, the war initiated by Lumen seems to be pushed to the side for the battle to stop Lancaster, which is fine, but it makes the ending of Lumen seemingly just changing his conquest goals and Finch working for him does not feel truthful to either character. Lancaster wanted to end the world, sure, but it seems to me heavily implied that the timeloop of a Luxin empire siege is not his design, he’s simply taking advantage of the human nature of the events to try and finish his great experiment and return to his timeline.

Ultimately, I think the story was an intriguing premise and the characterization and the writing as a whole is great, but there seems to be some narrative dissonance from the first half of the story to the second half of the story that made the ending feel somewhat unsatisfying. It’s an intriguing premise, and built to an interesting conclusion, but I think you could have used the narrative structure of a time loop more to your advantage. I am also curious to know if there’s any additional/alternate endings if you do play the New Game+ that take advantage of the recurring loop idea. I still enjoyed it, still thought it was well written, but wanted to be honest in my thoughts about the conclusion and the last arc of the story.

Overall, awesome hack! I’m glad you kept up with it. For anyone reading this comment, play it! You won’t regret it - great characters, solid map design, intriguing story, and fun turn-to-turn gameplay. One of the better romhacks I’ve ever played.