[FE8]Fire Emblem: Pyrathi Warlords [Complete]

In Chapter 9 of Shadow Dragon Marth invades a neutral kingdom and kills its immortal monarch. The story then moves on without ever giving a second glance at Pyrathi. Pyrathi Warlords asks the question “And then what happened?” We get a view of what Marth might look like to the people who are considered his enemies and what unintended consequences are born from desperate decisions. Similar to Thracia 776, it takes a look at one part of the continent and makes it the main setting of the game. A lot of care was taken so that the game could be consistent with Archanean lore and character endings. Gameplay also follows a familiar Archanean style with a few additional add ons.

Story
*A story with your favourite Archanean characters (everyone loves Radd and Caesar, right?)

*A World Map that dynamically shifts with the plot

*A route split starting from chapter 13. Total 23 chapters for each route (24 if you count the end game as 2) as well as 8 post game chapters.

*Full support lists

*European Names version. A second UPS file where all the names like Caeda and Dolhr are changed to Shiida and Doluna so anyone who has nostalgia for the original European translation can feel catered to.

Gameplay
*Two separate promotion options and methods; one for classical Archanean promotions using Master Seals, one for unique Pyrathi promotions gained via praying Gaiden style

*Crossbows, a weapon type used primarily by the main character. They deal fixed damage based on the weapon, ignoring the user’s strength and enemy’s defense, making them a lot like FE1 Tomes (this is a lot more useful than it sounds).

*Skills via inventory items. Archanean games don’t have skills, but they do have stuff like the Life Orb that grants renewal. There are a host of items that grant skills, which means you need to be careful about inventory slots, but also that you can trade around skills mid battle.

*BEXP granted to undeployed units after every battle, so your back bench will passively get stronger, giving you more options as to who to take into battle each chapter.

*Since it’s become a thing in modern Fire Emblem, cooking is a mechanic here. In most maps if the character Damian is deployed he will cook a meal at the end of the chapter with the strength of the meal depending on his level.

*Bonus mercenary missions. If Radd is deployed, at the end of most chapters he will have the option to leave the army to do a mercenary job by himself for one chapter, bringing back money and a weapon when he returns.

*Class Change. Use a Master Seal on a Salamander Statue to class change to any other class of the tier. Class skills are not carried over and weapon ranks are reset to C for Tier 1 and B for Tier 2 (though could actually be a buff if you have low weapon ranks).

*Replacement characters. If you have less than 12 characters any time after the first few chapters then generic units with a random name and class will join your army, just like in the other Archanea (DS) games. Mostly for fun, I don’t think they’d be necessary as the game isn’t that difficult and the BEXP system keeps your back bench healthy.

Known Errors
*The Nihil skill does not work as an item or weapon at present. So the Nietzsche item is useless and Starlight, which is meant to have built in Nihil, isn’t as good as it’s designed to be. Since Imhullu is in this game, the work around to making Starlight work is to directly teach Nihil to a unit which you can do by using Starlight as an Item. Only one unit can be taught Nihil at a time using this method.

*There seems to be some graphical glitches on Chapter 21 where characters map sprites are weird and don’t match their class. It doesn’t always happen though.

*There are no invisible stat increases like later games with reclassing have. Which means you can get some negative results if you reclass away from a class that has reached its stat cap. Though I don’t expect you’d have much cause to reclass in such a way where this would be noticeable.

*The Weather Staff, Rain Staff and Anew Staff are not used via the Staff command. You need to use them as if they are an item. They still require a staff rank however. Attempting to use one without a staff rank will expend a use without doing anything.

*Master Keys are useless. They’re meant to be lockpicks anyone can use, but the patch allowing anyone to use lockpicks isn’t working for me.

*Sometimes there seems to be an error that strikes at random when trying to leave the Salamander Statue side map. If retreating doesn’t work, move the south to try and finish the level that way. If that still doesn’t work, reload a save and try again. It’s infrequent, but a reset should fix it.
Download Link:

Link to discord

Link to character recruitment doc

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Wow! This looks really interesting. I’m especially looking forward to see where you go with the Mallory character. I hope he gets a really cool custom sprite.

Aw man, I always loved the setting of the first Fire Emblem games, especially all those countries that didn’t get much fleshed out, this sounds pretty interesting!

Also, if there’s anyone who’s really into sound design or music then they’d be welcome on the project. It’s not my biggest concern, personally, as I find the default Sacred Stones soundtrack to be capable enough and I know how to import midis of tracks from the DS games which I’ll use when I feel like it, but largely for the sound side of things I’ll be finding the first track that is “good enough” rather than trying to expertly craft a soundtrack, which is something that can really enhance a project, especially if it has original music or arrangements.

The second demo is now out. This has the Prologue and Chapter 1-4. So three more chapters than the previous demo. I urge everyone to play it and tell me what you think. Hopefully it should give a much better sense of where the project is going and what shape it is taking than the rather limited first demo.

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I’ve implemented a new feature. Bonus EXP. However, unlike Shadows of Valentia and Tellius, it works a bit differently. Bonus exp is automatically given at the end of every chapter to units whom you did not deploy in battle. Meaning your benched units will continue to grow throughout the game. This should hopefully allow for a wider diversity of units you can select to tackle each specific chapter, as you’re not forced to depend purely on who you’ve trained. Benched units get 40exp if you finish the chapter in less than 10 turns, and 20exp if you take longer than ten turns.

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No way… Fire Emblem Pyrathi 612

…In all seriousness this is a really cool idea! The events of FE1 Chapter 9 never really sat right with me, honestly. The game elaborates so little that I suppose you could interpret the whole battle there as Marth fighting back against a hostile army that decided to kill them regardless of how willing they were to leave peacefully, but, y’know… you could just as easily assume that that’s just what Marth and his troops thought was going on, or even read it less charitably than that.

Honestly, I have a massive soft spot for projects that aim to take events that are largely not that important to their home stories and are largely glossed over like this and flesh them out into the full stories they have the potential to be, so I’m definitely interested to see where this goes!

Incidentally, a minor bit of writing feedback: In “Either way, get out of my village now you shower of cutthroats!”, there should probably be a comma after “now”, and I might use a word like “gaggle”, “swarm”, “load”, “mass”, “mess”, etc. instead of “shower”, or even “deluge” or “flood” if you wanted to retain the simile to water in the word used. Admittedly, that last bit is kind of nitpicky; the line just reads a bit awkward to me.

Glad to see you’re interested…And you know what, I might seriously steal that name. Though it happens in 608, the same year Mystery of the Emblem ends (though much like Thracia, I might note a change in year). I’ve been having some trouble coming up with an appropriate name, just calling in the Pyrathi Project in all my files, but invoking Thracia might unironically be the best title, as, you’re right, it is very much similar, focusing on one specific region in a more focused light. I even take small areas from Chapters 8 and 9 to base maps on.

And you’re right, a comma is warranted, I’m an English teacher, so I should know that XD. But I’m sure there are plenty more typos and grammar errors in there. Give the demo a try and if there’s anything you can contribute in terms of assets or character ideas then join the discord and share!

I’ve decided to implement two different promotion systems. There is the regular Master Seals, which promote units to the classes they all have in the DS games, and there’s also the ability to pray at Salamander Statues across the world, which provides alternative promotions. This was done so I can have my cake and eat it to in regards to being authentic to the established Archanea class lines while still having more interesting class variations in, and because it shows how Pyrathi’s isolation has made it more distinct from the rest of Archanea and more similar to Valentia (Master Seals are specifically going to be noted as something new to Pyrathi and most Pyrathi enemies will have the alternative promotions).

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Here’s a video of an animation original to this project. I didn’t make it myself, but the guy that did just made it as a gif, so I had to put in the work to actually make it a functioning battle animation. I’m pretty proud of the result.

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Okay. Big update to the demo. The game is playable up until Chapter 8. After which you can get access to Pyrathi promotions (Master Seals are now available as early as the Port Warren chapter, though you probably won’t want to be, or be capable of, promoting that early). All classes are available. Though there’s no actual part of the game to try them out on, unless you want to just play whatever remains of Vanilla Sacred Stones by continuing. Pegasus Riders do not promote using Salamander Statues, as I’m turning the presence of Pegasi into something of a plot point and wanted to implement the whole Master Seal/Elysian Whip dichotomy Shadow Dragon went with (the first Elysian Whip will be available in the next chapter). I also plan on putting in Dread Contracts so Thieves can have two promotion options. Oh, and the main characters now have custom portraits of their own made by me using the portrait builder. I hope everyone can spend a few hours playing the new chapters and tell me what you think of them. There won’t be any more updates in December as I’m off on a holiday without my laptop later in the week. Enjoy your own Christmas and New Year.

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Here I am. Without having tried it yet: So the first chapter takes place during the War of Shadows. I guess there’s a time skip to a certain point after the War of Heroes, since the game takes place then. I don’t know if you’re planning to do this but, seeing how much you respected Thabes Lore with how little knowledge we had about that city, I expect to see and not see some stuff.

First of all, obviously, NO Camus/Zeke/Sirius, since he’s living peacefully in New Valentia after saving Nina one last time (let the poor guy rest, for fuck’s sake :rofl:).

If you’re planning to highlight Abel’s character I expect him to be broken, since Est left him after Mistery of the Emblem. This goes for any character from Mistery of the Emblem, of course, respecting their endings on that game.

Those are just 2 examples of stuff that make sense to me, I don’t know how you see it.

I have no specific plans to include Abel, but in general character endings from New Mystery are respected. Also there’s a typo on my end. Prologue takes place during the War of Heroes, not the war of Shadows.

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After playing till chapter 2:

The game looks good so far, no bugs encountered. Some enemies have their character descriptions like in vanilla Sacred Stones (The Wolf Guard being officials of Grado, for example) but I guess that’s the stuff you chance in a later development stage.

Same goes with the character sprites, being a lot of them low quality portraits fron Marth games or simple from Sacred Stones and Blazing sword (it is quite disturbing someone with the appearence of Rennac called a girl). Again, I guess that’s the kind of thing you change in a later development stage.

Lastly, the world map. Amazing. Many games simple leave the Sacred stones map and call it whatever they want to call the continent. Happens in Eligor’s Spear and early stages of The Sun God’s Wrath. Meanwhile, you changed the map to be Archaneia accurate. Lovely.

Yeah, the portraits are of low importance in the overall scheme. I definitely intend to have original art in the finished project, but it’s not something I can easily do, so they’re mostly placeholders. There is a portrait generator out there that let’s you mix portraits, and I have used that for some of the more important characters, but the issue is that it’s not designed for game implementation, so it creates portraits twice the size. Rescaling them then messes up the palette. It also has a hard time getting skin tones right and you have to create your own lip flaps and blinking animation. So it does the job for making something, but I really need a dedicated artist to take over as portrait lead designer.

Yes, I’m quite proud of the map. I think implementing a map feels daunting, but it’s actually quite doable once you mess around with it a bit.

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Just to put an update here, I have found an artist willing to work on the Archanea portraits which is a huge help. The project has also been steadily worked on and it’s coming together pretty nicely. I hope to have A route completely finished by Mid June. What I am far behind on is supports. I’ve done a few, but there are still a lot more to go. So if anyone is interested in support writing feel free to sign up and involve yourself in the project.

Here’s the character list if you’re curious

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Chapters 20 and 21 are up now, Chapter 21 is a big one being the battle against Marth. Entering the home stretch (for A route), as there’s only the two part final boss chapter remaining. Link is in the OP.

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I’ve just finished my most recent test playthrough and I can comfortably say that Route A is finished! While there’s still a lot more work to do, you can now play the game from start to end without significant issue so long as you ally with Danu on the route choice.

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