Hello! I am TheHydea, and I’m proud to present my first ever romhack, The Cursed Corsair! The Cursed Corsair is a full-length game following Gretz and his crew, the New Dawn pirates, as they set out on a grand adventure across the seas!
The Inichel Archipelago consists of thousands of islands spread across the vast Hasek Ocean. Many islands are populated, but there are very few large and powerful kingdoms, with most islands governing themselves. The lack of any central authority means that lawlessness runs rampant throughout the world. Roving pirate crews looking for goods to plunder are a common sight on the open seas, often leaving a bloody trail in their wake.
On a small unnamed isle, one of these random, vicious attacks is about to change the fates of three friends, and the world, forever…
Features
30 chapters
30 recruitable characters
Full Support Conversations (70+ in total)
Tellius-style supports
Paired endings
New classes
New items
New music
New graphics
Class Skills
Various quality of life features
Two difficulty settings (hard mode available but still being balanced) and casual mode available
The Cursed Corsair is my first Fire Emblem hack. Actually, it’s my first hack of any kind! With this in mind, The Cursed Corsair was intended to be a “beginner project” for me to learn how to use FEBuilder and all the other aspects of designing/writing a game. So, this isn’t a very mechanically complex hack. I chose to keep it simple, hewing closer to a vanilla FE experience. The focus for this hack was story and dialogue, although I certainly still tried to keep the gameplay entertaining! I’ve definitely learned a lot and have lots of good ideas I plan to implement into my next project, now that I have a comfortable grasp on FEBuilder. (Why would I choose to make a 30 chapter game as a tutorial project and not, oh, say, a 5 chapter demo? Good question!)
The specific hack that inspired me to embark on this project was Blessed Heart. That’s a decent frame of reference for how Cursed Corsair plays. If you liked that, hopefully you’d like this.
There are two difficulties here: normal and difficult. Normal is a little tougher than base FE8, but I didn’t want to make it too challenging. Difficult just adds a few extra levels to every enemy. I haven’t playtested it, but if you’re a Fire Emblem expert, you can probably handle it no problem. (NOTE: I am currently playtesting hard mode to balance it better. If you plan on playing hard mode, then you might want to wait until further notice.)
The beginning is a little slow, and there are lots of tutorial hints that are located in the houses throughout the game that will be obvious to most FE veterans. I made it this way because I know someone close to me will play this, and she’s brand new to FE. (Hey, AG!)
Approximately 95% of the graphics and music was taken from the various repos. My artistic abilities are slim to none. Big shout out to everyone who contributes.
Characters should be able to have a support with up to 5 other characters, instead of just 5 supports total. Only one A support is allowed per character, however.
There are two versions of the game available down below. The only difference between the two is that one version has all support conversations unlocked in the support conversation viewer in the main menu. I did this so that if someone wanted to read more of the supports, then they easily could. I worked hard on them!
I used mGBA to test and play this. I tried to polish it as much as I could over 3 playthroughs, but undoubtedly there will be bugs/errors. If there are, let me know, please.
I began working on this December 2025. Version 1.0 finished and released September 21, 2026.
I’d love to hear from anyone who plays this. Any feedback or just want to chat about it? Please message me! I’m either here or on discord as TheHydea.
I’m a big ice hockey fan, and as such, 95+% of the characters and locations in my hack are named after professional players. If you’re into hockey as well, you might get a kick out of all the little references. I’ve included a link to a guide that lists them all out, if anyone’s curious.
Congrats on the release! Some issues I’ve found though:
Hard mode falls flat from the start. The first chapter seems to be balanced around enemies having exactly the stats they have on Normal. On Normal, Jagr and Marie are exactly fast enough to double the brigands that comprise most of the enemy forces, Jagr and Marie are exactly strong enough to three-shot said brigands, Jagr is exactly durable enough to survive two hits from said brigands, and Gretz is exactly fast enough to not get doubled by the mercenary. “Just a few extra levels” causes all these matchups to stop functioning, and when that many matchups stop functioning at the same time, you cannot play at the same speed that you can on Normal. Slogging through a map where your entire team gets two-shot by every enemy and you can only kill one enemy per turn because each individual one requires damage input from your entire four-man team sounds like it’s technically beatable with some elbow grease and playing a lot more slowly than you would on normal mode, but then the death squad shows up and make it very clear that you’re expected to kill enemies exactly as fast as normal mode allows. The other chapters I’ve played so far are massively more lenient in their anti-turtles so hard mode’s stat boosts would at the very least not be an automatic softlock in those, but as for whether they’d play well, who knows! So at the very least maybe the first chapter should not have those boosts.
Numerous village dialogues - as early as the first one in the game, as even - are set to a black void instead of a background.
The near-victory music on every chapter is set to complete silence. In other words, the map music just stops playing entirely once you’re close to routing. As someone who isn’t a fan of near-victory music, I approve of removing it, but… let the map music play instead at least? If that was your intention, you can do that by setting each chapter’s VictoryBGM(# Foes Left) to 0 in the Chapter Editor.
Nobody can recruit Kozun. Finishing the chapter doesn’t help as he doesn’t autojoin and nobody acknowledges his existence. And in spite of this he has growths, palettes, supports, endings and even paired endings. Is this a mistake or some joke that non hockey fans won’t get? I looked the guy up and all that seems like it might have any correlation to this is that he got hit with a temporary anti-doping suspension, but welcome to sports I guess, highly doubt he’s the only one with that distinction.
Enemy mercenaries have a blue palette.
Is there a purpose to the overpriced vanilla-stats Toxin Lance in the Ch6 shop?
The promotions for Jagr (the only unit I was able to promote at the introduction of the first promo item) are all kinds of jank. He’s missing his promoted palettes (despite them existing in the rom), has no promotion gains as a hero, changes gender when promoted to swordmaster, and has the female hero map sprite as a hero.
Sundin can’t promote with the “physical units” promotion item.
I have just released a new patch which should fix all of the issues Pushwall listed (plus a few extra, lol). Thankfully they were all easy fixes. Thanks to them for diving in and pointing out my mistakes.
If you have downloaded the patch, please re-download it. The first version is pretty much broken. Hopefully should be much more playable now (although I’ve no doubt more bugs lurk).
I see you’ve toned down the autolevels for hard mode quite a bit after Pushwall’s review. Heads up, once enemies become promoted, there’ll still be a 10+ autolevel difference between normal mode and hard mode:
Basically, in vanilla fe8, on normal mode, promoted enemies have stats as if they promoted at lv. 10 (while still giving exp as lv. 21+ units), while on hard mode, they have stats as if they promoted at lv. 20. If your lategame enemies were suspiciously understatted during testing (or overstatted on hard mode, if you had increased promoted class bases to compensate for this), this is why.
There’s a specific list you have to add units to in order for them to be able to summon phantoms while in Summoner. I think there’s a dedicated page for it in febuilder?
Yeah, that’s what I’m referring to. Units have to have data defined for their summons in order to actually be able to summon anything (or even see the Summon command), even if they’re in a summoning-capable class.
Thanks for letting me know about the hard mode levels and the summoning. I’ll fix them tonight.
I’m also currently working on a hard mode playthrough to balance it better, so if you’re wanting to play hard mode, you might want to wait a little bit for that.
Thanks to everyone for all your input. I’m a little disappointed I released it with so many issues, but I’m still learning. Hopefully people are still getting some enjoyment out of it.
Yeah I think it was dialled back too much, it now has +0 hard mode levels until chapter 11 which means the first 10 chapters are completely identical to normal mode. My concern was solely with the first chapter since you couldn’t even get past that without degenerate levels of cheese and RNG; the next few chapters don’t force a pace the way the prologue does so those next chapters would have given a better look into how tolerable +1/+2 levels are under standard circumstances. So maybe +0 for chapter 1, then +1 until the first promo items and then scale up from there? Though with the class growths being about twice as big as vanilla, the +9 vs +19 promoted levels thing is going to be even more pronounced than in vanilla, so with the HM curve as it stands, you’re going to go from no changes in the first 10 chapters to a very slight change after to a sudden mountainous spike as soon as promoted enemies start making an appearance.
Another issue: Selanne and Olli can’t be shoved after recruitment until memory is flushed. This is a common issue people have when making stationary recruits, so if there are any others in future it probably applies to them too. The fix is to add a Set Unit Status command to the recruitment event that changes their AI4 to 0.
I agree with you. I dialed it back to at least try to make it playable as a temporary fix, while I’m completing my hard mode playthrough to balance it better. I wasn’t aware of the promoted boost, but I’ll definitely take it into account.
Thanks for the update on the recruitable characters. There’s one other chapter that I’ll probably have to fix as well.
Yeah - having made it back to chapter 9 on hard mode on the new version, vanilla’s quirk of having drastically different promotion levels for generics between normal/hard is already rearing its ugly head on the very first promoted generics you encounter:
These have 34 attack with demon surge. Almost every unit I have right now gets oneshot by 34 magic attack, including the new recruit who is oneshot exactly (on top of being doubled). The only unit who survives is Sundin who only survives on account of some lucky growths (he’s made it to 35 magic bulk AND 10 speed). Promotion bonuses aren’t enough to let anyone else survive either. And it’s a rout map so you can’t just ignore them.
Here’s how they look with only 9 promoted levels and 2 hard mode levels (instead of 19 and 0). I still have a few units who would get oneshot by this (most unfortunately, Marie who has the effective weapon and doesn’t oneshot), but most importantly the three most recent recruits are all able to survive at base (Goring is one speed away from being doubled), and it’s still strong enough that nobody can shrug if off effortlessly which is also fair.
Got it. Yeah, before ATHATH said something, I didn’t know those hard mode promotion bonuses were even a thing.
I’m at work right now, but when I get home my current plan is to lower the bonuses so it’ll be feasible to complete, even if it’s not optimally balanced. Hopefully I’ll be able to do that with another playtest, but it’s going to just take me a little more time.
No worries. even ones that have many playtesters and it feels to them like nothing else could be wrong still end up releasing with bugs, and even some triple A titles end up having to patch a bunch of things after launch
