Fire Emblem: The Beginning of the End (FE8 Hack - In Progress) - Featuring at FEE3!

Projects
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Discord Link now in the OP below the download link!

What is this?

This is an in-progress hack featuring a new story and a new cast. Currently, we’re at 9 chapters completed at a planned total of 17 with the current chapter 10 in the hack but incomplete.

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Features:

  • Original story - Follow a short story about a group of mercenaries who are stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time as the entire country of Helos collapses under a curse.
  • Original cast - A cast of 20 original characters with 16 currently of them playable. And uh, a guest star or two. Get back to me on the second one.
  • FEU’s FE8 skillsys. Skills are mostly restrained sticking to either class skills or a personal skill or two for certain units with some units not having skills at all.
  • Capture - You can capture enemies and steal their weapons. I’ve added plenty of new items to make this appealing but make sure you’re on top of things because you’re not getting many chances to buy weapons here. Capturing has been made easier with capture stat penalties being reduced.
  • Early endings - The thrust of this hack is that at multiple points in the game, you’ll have a chance to fight a boss. If you can defeat the boss, you’ll get an ending. But if you can’t defeat the boss, you can flee until you meet them again at which point, you can have another attempt. But every time you do, the world gets a little bleaker.
  • Base conversations - There’s no need to get supports to learn what characters have been up to you, you’ll have the chance to peek in any many different characters actions including ones with rewards and completely optional talks, all labelled.

The current patch is available here with 9 chapters complete and a 10th chapter in progress and partially done. I’ve done my playtesting on hard personally, I like to leave normal free for people like an old friend of mine who liked FE but was bad at it.

Credits - Let me know if you see your work in my project and I haven't noted you. I'm fairly certain this should be up to date but let me know if it's not.

Special thanks go to:

  • SkillSystem developers. I left their credits in CREDITS.md but you can always find that on Github.
  • Zane for the MMB hack. Thank you for letting me make a hideous box (actually my box is good)
  • Snek for the Support rework, base conversations, convoy save/load
  • Teq for capture and convoy rework
  • Pik for the guide macros
  • Huichelaar for allowing guide category extensions

Graphics:

  • Gamma for the village night palette, Elisanne mug
  • Levin for F2U Cedric, Chad, Brad mugs
  • LaurentLacroix for F2U Gunther, Shahid, Talia, Viktor mugs
  • Leo_link & epicer for the Bow Fighter anim
  • PrincessKilvas for the axe mercenary anims
  • Saxor for the Battle at the Abandonded church theme, stat screen bg
  • BoneManSeth for Knut mug
  • Lenh for the mug for that guy I haven’t put in yet or decided on a name yet. I wrote this down a while back but I’m still not up to that, I guess this is a TBD. Does anyone read these?
  • Der for the Lazarus mug
  • Alusq for the update battle anim off graphics and hp bars
26 Likes
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Congrats on the first release.
Trying to patch with presumably fe8 USA with NUPS comes up with a mismatch error.

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Yep, FE8 U. I forgot I was building off an unclean copy of FE8, I’ve just updated it with a version that should be built off a clean copy. I’ve just reuploaded another copy of the patch, this one worked with my clean copy.

4

Oh a Mystic hack, if I don’t like this I could risk being banned from the discord!

Anyway, this will be cool to see develop. Definitely very curious about how this works:

Early endings - The thrust of this hack is that at multiple points in the game, you’ll have a chance to fight a boss. If you can defeat the boss, you’ll get an ending. But if you can’t defeat the boss, you can flee until you meet them again at which point, you can have another attempt. But every time you do, the world gets a little bleaker.

Is it an incentive for multiple plays? Are new players likely to always end up at the end of the game? Is it a new game+ shtick like Lavos?

Definitely gives it a unique identity right out of the gate. It’s a good look.

5

Extremely excited to check this out! Here’s an exhaustive list of my thoughts/suggestions/impressions/bug reports for each chapter.

Chapter 1
  • The aesthetic is great all-around: the gray map sprites and menu palette convey a stronge sense of decay. The one aspect I don’t like is removing the character’s name from the MMB, it’s really annoying to have to pull up a character’s info whenever I have to write their name here.
  • I love capture hacks.
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  • A couple of classes (mages, fighters) need their descriptions updated to reflect new weapon access.
  • Each of the units feels distinct to use and they all have their niche. At first I thought Gunther would be outclassed by Brad because of the latter’s axe access, but he quickly proved me wrong.
Chapter 2

-The two mercenaries at the top are probably too strong. Unless the green unit armor knight gets a few lucky dodges, the mercs do too much damage (4 * 2 * 2 = 16) for the knight to out-heal with a vulnerary. That
-Other than the knight, the other green units weren’t difficult to defend at all.
-Viktor is insane. He has enough speed to not get doubled and enemy mages aren’t strong enough to threaten him. Combined with 5 movement and solid base stats, he’s probably the best unit right out of the box.

Chapter 3

-Astraea’s class has no name or description.
-Not a chapter 3 issue itself but this is where I first noticed it. The Rtext on the weapon rank stat screen page is wrong.

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-Astraea is… well, I shouldn’t have to tell you she’s completely useless. She has no bulk, no speed, no offense, and no utility. Elisanne said at the start of the chapter that it might be good if she rescues Astraea to keep her safe, but I don’t find that decision very strategically interesting. Maybe you could give Astraea Charisma or Charm or some incentive to keep her on the field that doesn’t involve tanking another unit’s combat.
-Viktor held the initial chokepoint like a goddamn champion. None of the axe cavaliers were able to scratch him. There was a guy with a hammer on the left side of the map, but that’s very far from the place where Viktor is most relevant. I’d give that hammer to one of the axe cavaliers on the right and replace the initial hammer with a halberd.
-I thought I would have to place Shahid on one of the lab tiles to trigger the event, but apparently it’s connected to the death quote of the left mage? An area event that checks if Shahid is within a certain range would make much more sense here.
-These two mage reinforcements have weird AI. I put Cedric there to block them off and enemy phase them, but they didn’t attack on enemy phase.
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-Astraea isn’t a game over condition. I presume she should be? She also doesn’t have a death quote.
-I only found out about the game over condition thing because stepping on the escape point with anyone other than Astraea softlocks the game! Lol!

Stopping here for now, I’ll edit this message with further chapters when I get more time. This hack has a great premise and I’m excited to get farther in, you just need to sand off the rough edges.

1 Like
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I believe this is because it is actually an area event, but one that anyone will trigger, not just Shahid.

2 Likes
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Hey, glad to see you’re enjoying it so far. Yeah, I mentioned this on the discord but I kept meaning to put this up for a public playtest but I put it off for too long and I had to get the thread up for FEE3.

Scuba - Yes, the intended experience for new players is to go to the final chapter. Once I get the rest of the final boss encounters done, I intend to tune down the boss on lower difficulties. Getting the earlier endings will be about either going for a lower difficulty or either figuring out how to properly break the game/prep for that fight.

Dragz, I’ll just put my response to your crit in a spoiler tag for the others.

Dragz, C1-C3

Yeah, I forgot that mogall still had Evil Eye. I swear it was Flux in the recent version, must’ve forgotten that when I replaced the chapter a while back. Fixed. I’ll take a gander at the class descriptions soon.

The mercenary at the top is definitely a problem, I might just need to use a fixed unit for that. I’ve had some weird problems before with it rolling high on STR but I don’t think I encountered an impossible scenario, just an unusually hard one.

I’m not huge on aura effects personally but I can see if I can give a reason to keep Astraea around. To me, the decision was to either have Astraea on the field or to keep a unit useless while you have her rescued. She’s useless by design since she’s a temp unit.

The Shahid event is an area event, yes, I appear to have forgotten to make it Shahid-exclusive. That’s my bad, good catch on Epicer’s end.

The mages are on default AI. Not sure how to replicate that bug.

I have managed to get Viktor killed on these early maps before, a lot of steel weapon users can chip him down fast enough in my personal experience. I’ll keep an eye on him though, I definitely recall wondering if he was too much when making him.

The final area event is well, kind of busted in general. I’m not sure why it works, I’ll probably just take it the doctor at some point.

1 Like
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Oh, that would make sense. I thought it was a death quote because the event activated after I one-rounded the mage with Cedric.

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fyi you can get infinite money by saving and resetting at chapter 4 preps repeatedly because it gives you the red gem every time you do that

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1 Like
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Thanks Red, I’ll look into that. There’s bit of awkwardness around base convo’s in general so that problem will be occurring for all cases of items being given in events for now, I’ll be putting in some fixes for that later.

Right now, I’ve got two things to say. The first is that there was a pretty critical bug that was leading to Cedric/Gunther both being tagged as escaped after chapter 1 which meant that the AI would not target them and that if they were the only units on your team that hadn’t moved, your turn would end. This is responsible for some of the weird AI that Dragz ran into. If you’ve got a save already and you don’t feel like restarting, let me know, I’ll see if I can setup something to fix it back up from the event end. There’s a fixed version of this in the OP now that won’t be facing this problem going forward.

The second thing is I figured I might as well make a discord server for this.