Not to continue to get off topic, but it is the case that in vanilla GBA FE, there is no sword user that loses AS from an iron sword. Hacks can be different.
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Thanks! I definitely agree with you that the story and gameplay should take more priority. Itās better to have a completed experience and then refine from there - at least, thatās been my thinking.
Sometimes though, I get in the mood to work on portraits, so maybe a Leah rework will pique my interest one day. My recent project was creating the boss of Chapter 22. I have like five new characters (mostly antagonists) coming in the story, so lots of portrait workā¦ oh, and Faithās return for all the Faith fans.
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I think for anyone who dislikes the art needs to remember that Caladrius has worked on the entire project alone - itās a massive undertaking and a huge achievement.
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Honestly, the art isnāt purely bad like certain ones Iāve seen. I say youāre doing pretty good for being only one person doing the portraits, the art should be focused last after everything has been fully set in stone and you just focus on the bugs, tweaking on it and put the time on the art. Polishing art takes much more time.
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Not to mention once people play the project and enjoy it theyāll want to contribute art for it.
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Speaking of that, i could probably do a few splices for minor characters/bosses if you want. Let me know if youāre interested.
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Iām still waiting for @Pandan to finish his LP of Lonely Mirror
and Leah is fine the way she is maybe she could use a boost of strength but thatās all her portrait is okay and if @caladrius wants to update it in the game then they can
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Thank you. I definitely appreciate the offer. This project is certainly on the lengthy side, so Iād welcome any assistance or thoughts with some of the character portraits. I believe that I donāt have too many left as I tend to create my portraits a couple chapters before I need it. There are certainly a couple more central characters and enemies that will need work. Just shoot me a PM with your thoughts.
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As of now, my next planned official release will be after Chapter 26 is completed. That being said, I understand the value of receiving circular feedback on individual chapters to make this project better. Ergo, I have uploaded a new UPS file titled FE_LonelyMirror_21_DEV.
Consider this an unofficial release Chapter 21 of The Lonely Mirror. Keep in mind: I have only tested Chapter 20 and Chapter 21 together. I have not done full play tests for this. It should work though, right?
New Features and Bug Fixes:
- Chapter 21 is fully playable. There are 2-3 character recruits on this chapter. Liang is recruitable if he did not join in Chapter 11.
- Slim Swords and Slim Lances grant +3 speed when holding. While they are still weak weapons, I think the boost in attack speed could be helpful in certain situations.
- Restore Staff now has a range of 1-3 instead of just 1.
- A message was added to Chapter 10 to note Supply will be lost (i.e. go wild with stat boosts).
- Adaptable enemy unit reinforcements on Chapter 16 that depend on where units are placed during battle preparation.
- New Leah portraits have been added! They are actually by @LaurentLacroix and are amazing! A huge thanks to him.
- Other minor changes (text and enemy units).
Chapter 21 is titled Resilience.
I actually found this map to be challenging. There is an interesting mechanic. I also wished I had 1-2 Divine Pulses while playing, but wrong game.
Stay healthy and safe out there everyone.
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Hi! I played the first part of this hack, up to Prelude III, on Hard Mode. I generally enjoyed it but some of the maps have some design flaws that make them a little luck-based. Especially after chapter 6 there are relatively many enemies pulling single-digit crit rates on your units.
Some thoughts on specific chapters:
Chapters
Prologue:
-The enemy Archer does not attack, but just moves next to Grant
-Not much strategy here; Grant goes east and tanks on the pillar, Leah and Vergil fight west
-The initial turns are a bit iffy with Leah starting near two Fighters who together can two-shot her. I guess you can pull back and only fight one at a time
Chapter 1:
-Typo in the intro: āI can barerly tell where we are going.ā
-Also some shading errors, with tiles below walls and the chest lacking upper shadows
-I like this map. The way all three of your combat units can combine to kill the first Soldier is neat, and the Slim Sword comes in handy right away to help Leah fight the Myrmidon without getting doubled.
-However, the way the map flows the chest can end up a little out of the way if you push southeast, and in my case I had to take a detour after everyone but the boss was dead to collect it from the south.
-I did like the reinforcements on Turn 7 - good way to encourage the player to hurry, although theyāre not so strong you canāt tank them out if you really want.
Chapter 2: An intense first few turns with enemies closing in from all sides. The Pegasus Knights really amp up the pressure and encourage you to deal with as many of the initial enemies as possible before they overrun you. After that itās just a leisurely walk to the gate (plus an optional fight with the boss), but that doesnāt take long at all.
Chapter 3 I liked too. Itās enemy phase-focused but you do have to think about where to put your units so that they can take out the enemies without facing too many attacks. I had Grant mostly solo the west half of the map since heās tanky enough to handle things while the others fought around the northeast quadrant; Brett was great for fighting those scary Wind Mages, especially when he could sit in that little offshot and Fire them through the wall. The generic NPCs die like dogs on Hard Mode of course but they distract the enemies just well enough to make the first few turns easier.
Chapter 5: Itās interesting how you have to play defence here, especially when the boss and his crew come at you - itās a tricky but manageable challenge to fend them off. I would say the Turn 11 reinforcements from the northeast are a little pointless - the map should be pretty much over by then, so a few extra guys just makes it take longer. I did have Faith over there so it was a bit of a rush to get her out of there pursued by a Fighter and two fire Mages, but I donāt know if most people will play the map like that.
Chapter 6: Another unorthodox map. I airdropped Leah over the NW cliff which may have been a mistake given all the heat she attracted, but she managed to deal with the Fighters with ease and by sitting in the mountains with Majestra cleared out all the enemies in that area, including the Peg reinforcements. Good job on those btw, theyāre difficult to deal with but you can surely avoid them if you open the gate fast enough. Everyone was useful here, except Atticus who I benched - his combat is poor and thereās nothing to steal anyway.
Chapter 7: Kind of a slog. Thereās not much reason to move forward quickly and doing so is very risky, so you end up camping outside the stairs to the west until the aggressive enemies peter out.
Prelude I: I like the concept of this map, but between very shaky hit rates and (in Travisās case) low% crit rates along with the small unit count itās very easy for a single bad miss or enemy hit to force a reset. On Hard, Winifred is one damage short of being able to kill the first Fighter after Caspian chip with the Iron Bow, forcing her to use the inaccurate Longbow instead. Giving her +1 base STR would be nice. Similarly, Travis having +2 base Luck with -5% or -10% growth would go a long way to making using him less frightening.
Prelude II: This map was a lot better. The way the groups of enemies close in on you from multiple sides (Revenants from above, Shaman from the east, Mercs/Bonewalkers from the south) makes for a very hectic battle around the ice lake. Good use of AI settings. I suppose thereās nothing forcing you to move along so you could turtle the map more than I did, but not every map has to be high-pressure and it might be necessary to go slowly if your teamās gotten bad levels all around.
I noticed that some monsters had a lot more strength than others - eg, one Mauthe Doog had 10 STR while the other had just 5 and thus could barely hurt anyone, and similarly for the Revenants and Bonewalkers. Was this intentional? Also, the boss wonāt attack after moving, which makes dealing with him pretty easy.
Prelude III: A very interesting chapter, and one that can play out in a lot of different ways. Which is a problem: high enemy density, durable enemies with too few player units to handle them, combats with middling hit rates, and NPC characters in the mix make this chapterās difficulty extremely variable, and since itās already very difficult itās easy to just lose through no fault of your own if Myles gets crit by the Wo Dao Myrmidon, or Joseph canāt fight past the Wind Mage on the way to the prison, or if the NPC Cavaliers die too quickly, or half a dozen other things that can screw you over happen. Once you get past the initial 5 turns and have a little breathing room with the released Thieves it gets a little better, but getting there is no mean feat. I have no idea how youāre supposed to save the Body Ring village without some insane luck.
I liked the art for the hack and the story is keeping my interest, although spelling and punctuation errors are fairly commonplace. It doesnāt impede readability but you could use a proofreader.
A few bugs I noticed:
Thunder Mageās map sprite has a graphical error (just above āmageā in the image)
Prelude IIIās status text is cut off:
I will keep playing and give my impressions of the later chapters.
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Hi Venno,
I appreciate you giving your feedback and experience on these chapters. I will definitely go through and make some edits here. For instance, I know the enemy archer in the Prologue used to actually attack. I wonder what happened. 
As a whole, I do recommend playing this hack on normal difficulty. While hard does exist and should work functionally, I havenāt even started balancing that mode. I can imagine certain chapters on hard mode feeling a bit unfair. Yes, Prelude III does come to mind as that chapter took me a while to balance on normal. I will definitely need to work on its hard variant.
Hmmā¦ A lot of people have brought up that Thunder Mage issue too. I did table that bug, but I can look into it. I can also fix the Prelude III text cut off too.
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Iāve been playing this hack for quite a while so far. And by Chapter 14, I already found a bug involving both Helga and Benji. If I give them anything besides their starting equipment, or change up their equipments, their equipments disappear completely if I reset the game and load the save file again, and are left with the equipment they came with. Not a to mention, I am able to generate infinite gold from those two alone.
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Cool find, marks3684! I actually was experiencing a similar issue with Joseph on that chapter a while back, and it took a while to fix itā¦ I suppose the same is also happening for Benji and Helga too. Iāll definitely add this to my list of things to look into. For now, either exploit or donāt exploit the infinite gold bug, and if you do, load up on Forseti from the secret shop; I always seem to break mine.
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Your welcome. And yeah, the other ones who were recruitable (Saoirse and Joseph) are fine. Though being able to get infinite gold cause of that glitch is pretty hilarious.
Also, you might need to take a look at the Waste Tome animation. I had to restart a run in the next chapter (Chapter 15) cause during the battle animation against the waste tome user, the entire screen went completely white and I couldnāt do anything afterwards.
Speaking of that chapter, for some odd reason, whenever I have a single unit at the lower half of the map during the Enemyās End Phase, the game keeps fading into black for a bit.
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Regarding the Waste tome, do you remember which unit you had defending against the waste tome and what their class was? Example: Myles as an Assassin. Some of the classes seem to not be compatible with new animations, so Iāve had to do some tweaks.
Does the fade to black happen after Shane shows up? If so, that is happening because I have a lot of conditional checks running in the background. I might try and streamline this later, but I havenāt experienced it being a showstopper - just weird transitions between turns.
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I kinda forgot, but I think it was either Saosire, Travis, Helga or Silvan I was using against the Waste Tome user. And they were still Mercenary, Sword Knight, Sky Knight and Brigand class respectively. And nope, I was actually attacking that Dark Mage with the Waste Tome, not defending from him.
About Shane and fade to black, that wasnāt the case whatsoever, since it was happening way before I fought the first boss and seize the gate. It was mostly at the lower half of the map where it was happening.
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Actually, yeah, seems like itās the mercenary and hero class that have this problem with the new magic tome animation spells it seems. Hero Caspian and Hero Saosire also had that happen in Chapter 18 as well, involving a Thunder Mage with a Elthunder tome.
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Thanks for investigating this for me. I will play around with it and try to get this one fixed this week.
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Was looking through the thread and saw someone reporting the animations problem. Iām gonna assume waste has its own custom spell animation, since I had it happen once in my own hack. Youāll need a patch called āFix dodge to front glitchā
(Fix a freeze bug in CSAcreatorās dodge motion(MISS)
I donāt know if youāre using febuilder or build files, but thatās how itās called in febuilder, it should probably be available outside of it too.
Good luck!
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Hi MoncholoX,
Thanks for pointing this out. I actually believe I fixed the problem yesterday. I tested the mercenary and hero dodge animations against elthunder with success. Iāll look into the dodge motion patch too in case there are other animations that could be problematic.
Iāll likely patch the UPS this week too. The thunder mage map sprite animation should also be fixed too.
1 Like