This my first Fire Emblem hack that I’ve worked on in the previous month and I wanted feedback regarding ways that I can improve the beginning of the game so far thus I will be posting a very rough early beta-test for it in order to find thing’s such as bugs/glitches and more I will gladly take all criticism to further improve this hack.
Plans:
-12-30 chapters (Not sure yet if I should make the maps FE4 style or traditional so far there’s only 2 chapters)
-30+ characters
-20 hours of game-play
-T3 promotions (unsure of this as of yet)
Notes:
-skill systems are included
-Thracia trading is included
-characters and dialogue is greatly shortened however they will be extended later on (or later chapters)
-There’s a bug with the female pirate moving map animation
-This game I intended to be above average when it comes to difficulty which is what i’m striving for(this is especially shown in the 2nd chapter.)
Screenshots:
2 things from the screenshots alone. 1) Turn off the filter/video setting that makes everything look like clay and 2) The mountains look really unfinish/broken
I’m not going to beat around the bush, “a very rough early beta-test” is an apt way of describing this project as it is now. Map aesthetics aside, there are a lot of grammar errors. Typos are a one thing, but there’s also a lack of punctuation and capital letters. While perhaps not the worst of offenses, it does give off the impression that you’re either rushing with this project or can’t be bothered with it.
If you want to use custom chapter names (which is preferable), install the “Convert Chapter Titles to Text” patch. Now, when it comes to the maps themselves (I played on Normal difficulty):
Prologue:
When all the enemies are coming behind you, the fog serves little to no purpose. The same goes for the two Armories: if you don’t give the player access to them, whether that is by allowing players to buy weapons or placing other events in them, there is no point in keeping them.
I’d argue the snags by the river are the only ones you need. You also might want to either highlight the escape area or use a visual indicator (Chapter Editor > Withdrawal Point) to show where the player needs to go.
There’s an incentive to defeat the boss, which is good, but since he’s not marked as a boss unit, you don’t get boss exp from defeating him.
Unlike I first thought, there’s also an anti-turtling incentive. Good work. You might want to tweak the timing a little, so that you encourage escaping as fast as you can over EXP grinding on the reinforcements.
Chapter 1:
There are several issues with this map. First of all, it’s basically a long winding path, and those are very tedious to play. Secondly, due to the high enemy density the best course of action, more often than not, is to just sit at a fort/ forest, spam Rally Defense and slowly make your way through the map. The fact that there are several chokepoints doesn’t do the map any favors. The high enemy count is also questionable, given that they’re supposed to be a threat that overwhelms you but in the end this map is very grindy. Take a look at this:
By placing Nakana here I simply farmed me some EXP.
Since the enemies are numerous but can’t do much against Dande, the player is inclined to use him and mop up the majority of them. For what it’s worth, though, you have placed effective weapons on enemies. That’s a good choice.
The objective display is wrong. I defeated all the enemies and the map ended. I never seized neither the fort or the castle. Nakana also talks about escaping to the forest, but I never did that either. Either there’s several cases of misleading or the chapter doesn’t work as intended.
The talk conversation between Nakana and the pegasus knight is one-sided and works only if Nakana initiates it. This is because you have set a duplicate conversation:
Just swap them around in one of the convos and you’re good.
Speaking of the pegasus knight, she seems really weak in terms of combat. The sheer number of brigands makes her borderline useless, aside from ferrying Nakana that is.
Another issue is the total lack of any anti-turtling incentives. I was in no hurry to reach the villages, and thus could sit back and farm EXP on the reinforcements for all they’re worth.
Here’s a quick edit of the map I made. I decreased the size by 10 tiles (from 26x20 to 16x20), and opened up another path. This way instead of having to go through this choke-y one-tile long-winding path the player can split up their units.
Needless to say, this is nowhere near complete. You don’t have to use this one at all, I made this just to show you how the map could be improved in practice.
As for some other issues:
Dande, despite being an armored unit, can walk on mountains
Axe Cavs have 4 move. I think this is because they replace a trainee class. Be careful with the stats if you replace existing classes. You can change those in the Class Editor. Don’t forget to change their movement penalty as well.
If you’re not going to use the world map, I suggest you install the “Skip World Map Fix” patch.
If you want to make longer chapters, I suggest placing them somewhere in the later parts of the game. I also recommend prioritizing enemy quality over quantity. In it’s current iteration this map has over 100 enemy units in total, and it’s only the second chapter in the game. If you prefer to make the map an escape map, you can still use reinforcements, but make them fewer and much stronger. This way they cannot be just killed for EXP and instead push the player to actually escape.
Many of the plot points such as the countries/places/cultures are intented to be explained after chapter 2 as I wanted the very beginning to be more focused on action and less dialogue to give it a mysterious feel to it.
