Fire Emblem: Three Legacies (WIP, 21 chapters plus some gaidens complete so far)

[UltraxBlade]

FEE3 2023: Fire Emblem: Three Legacies by UltraxBlade

Hello, everyone! Welcome to me sharing what I’ve got so far in my first hack, Fire Emblem: Three Legacies! Set primarily as a sequel to a theoretical golden ending of Three Houses, but also expanding to a few other FE settings as the story goes on, it’s planned to be a rather large game – it’s currently complete up to and including Chapter 21x so far on one of the two routes, with plans for the total game to go up to about chapter 30-ish. There is a route split between two of the main lords after chapter 10 that merges back together after chapter 19, but so far I’ve only finished Alexander’s side of the route split, wile Elys’s side only goes up to chapter 14.

Story Intro

The story begins in the unified nation of Fodlan, 20 years after a great war in which the Four Heroes – Edelgard, Dimitri, Claude, and Yuri – defeated the forces of the ancient underground civilization of Agartha and their villainous High Priest, Thales. Fodlan has been unified under Emperor Edelgard, and has since slowly rebuilt itself from the war’s devastation while undergoing governmental reforms. A new generation of students comes to attend the Officers Academy, led by Elys Agastyn, Alexander Kleiman, and Ashley von Riegan. The future looks promising. But peace remains all too fragile…

Across the sea to the west, the continent of Dagda, once split between the nations of Hoshido and Nohr. It is a land of honorable warriors. Its young king, Mizukai, seeks to forge a lasting peace with Fodlan. But his generals, renowned veterans of past wars, don’t share his views…

To the southeast, Archanea. There, an ancient darkness has begun to take root in the mage city of Morfis, built atop the ruins of ancient Thabes…

Each continent’s history is stained with blood. The shadows of the past linger. And now, one vengeant soul seeks to set the world ablaze…

The game features a fairly large cast of mostly new and some returning characters, starring a new generation of Officers Academy students including descendants of members of the original Three Houses cast. Obviously, some things will be clearer if you’ve played 3H, and there will be some 3H spoilers, but you do not have to have played 3H, or any other FE game referenced, to play and understand this hack.

Story includes a 2-year timeskip, with timeskip redesigns for the new students. Gameplay is aimed at the more challenging end while still being fair, with a focus on faster-paced player-phase action. Every unit has their own unique niche – I encourage you to try them all!

FE8-based, download the UPS patch here:

fe3h2_beta.ups

Once you’ve got the patch, apply it to a clean, totally-legally-aquired FE8 ROM (US version) with a patching program like NUPS or the patching function of FEBuilderGBA. See here if you’re struggling with patching: How to Patch a Rom v5

Join the hack’s Discord server here! Server is open to general discussion, sharing your experiences, giving feedback, making suggestions, playtesting, and anyone who wants to help out with the project or just follow along with its development:

Join the FE: Three Legacies Discord Server!

There are two difficulty modes currently available: Normal, a reduced-difficulty mode made for more casual players, and Hard, the intended difficulty targeted at more experienced FE players. There will eventually be a Lunatic Mode, but that’s for later down the line. Difficulty can be changed at the start of every chapter.

While made for classic mode, I have included an option to enable Casual Mode at the start of the game. Unlike difficulty, this cannot currently be changed after starting the game.

Core mechanics are mostly vanilla with added QoL and light use of SkillSys. You can find more details below.

Sorry about the occasional placeholder sketch portraits still lingering around, I haven’t yet finished remaking all of them in GBA style.

Playtesting wanted, all feedback is welcome! You can reach me on Discord @ultraxblade or by replying to this thread if you have any questions, comments, concerns, criticisms, etc.

Additional Gameplay/Mechanics Details

On Classic Mode, when a player unit dies, their items are sent to storage (only once they’ve been recruited – if a recruitable character dies as an enemy or green unit, you don’t get their items).

All non-unique classes have branching promotions. The promotion screen shows the promotion gains so you can compare them (with exception of Con, sorry, couldn’t fit it). Class descriptions for unpromoted classes list what they promote into. Full details for each unit can be found in the character details document linked below.

The Danger Radius and Droppable Item Marker hacks by Huichelaar and Mkol are included.

• Enemies that drop items have a little green “item bag” symbol marking them on the map, and in maps without Fog of War, enemy ranges can be marked to be continuously highlighted.
• Press Select over an individual enemy to highlight/un-highlight them, or press select over no enemies to highlight/clear all – do note that highlighting everything will often cause lag. At the start of your turn, any moving bosses and any enemies with siege weapons are automatically highlighted for you.
• Additionally, I’ve also added Vesly’s Stealable Item Indicator, marking enemies that have stealables but not droppables with a yellow version of the item indicator.

Speaking of indicators, enemies that target villages have a flashing torch icon.

I’ve also added the Convoy Item Combination hack by Tequila, allowing you to merge uses of duplicate items by holding L while depositing them in the convoy.

You can skip battle animations by holding L, and you can fast-forward them by holding R. You can speed up map sprite movement by holding A, with no affect on battle anims.

Attack speed now gives 1 avoid per point, instead of 2.

Weapon triangle is now +/-2 mt and +/- 20 hit.

Terrain healing has been removed to prevent boss abuse.

Outside of a few core class skills, generic enemies will not have skills (Snipers have Bow Range +1. Bishops have Staff Range +1. Swordmasters, Berserkers, and now Assassins have Crit+15, but most enemies have had it removed. Pierce/Great Shield/Lethality have been removed.).

Later on in the game, you can acquire Mastery Scrolls, items that teach a class-based skill to level 10 or higher promoted units – you can find the full list of Mastery Skills in the “useful information” document in Resources below.

If there’s someone on the map that you can talk to, you can see it in the stats screen of the character that initiates the conversation.

In general, I tried to be very clear about hidden conditions, so just make sure to pay attention to the dialogue!

Because there are two dancers who are both combat-capable, dance EXP, and with it steal and summon EXP, is disabled. Bard trains are allowed!

There are secret shops, which, if you get the Member Card, the playable Anna can help you find – if she’s deployed on a map with a Secret Shop and the Member Card is anywhere among your items, she’ll notify you that there’s a secret somewhere. Hint: Look in suspicious locations, you can spot the secret shops by mismatched tiles!

Background lore stuff for those curious (not necessary for the story)

The Golden Ending Explained

The Golden Ending Explained - Google Docs

World backstory/How it all fits together

So, the story here crosses between the settings of Three Houses, Fates, and the Archanea series. Three Houses, but with a golden ending, happened 20 years ago. Fates: Revelation (minus the existence of the Awakening characters) and Marth’s games happened 1000 years ago, and Awakening is 1000 years from now (hey, wait a minute… 1000 years before Awakening and 1000 years after Shadow Dragon… does that mean…). So, how do they all fit together? It all ties back to the Divine Dragons and the ancient human civilizations of Agartha and Thabes.

Long ago, the dragon tribes coexisted with two great human civilizations: Agartha, a scientific people of advanced technology, and Thabes, which had mastered the arts of magic. Agartha and Thabes were close allies, and exchanged their great knowledge of the world, leading both civilizations to develop powerful weapons of war. The dragons came to fear them. This fear drove Duma, right hand of the Divine Dragon Queen Naga and war general of the dragon tribes, to lash out at the people of Thabes, razing the city to the ground. The people of Agartha, seeking to avenge their allies and protect themselves from the same fate, retaliated against the dragon tribes with the full force of their destructive weaponry. The dragons fought back, and the surviving Agarthans were forced into hiding deep underground.

In the aftermath, the Divine Dragon Sothis expended her power to restore life to the world, and the other remaining Divine Dragons went their separate ways. Naga remained in their home of Archanea. Duma was banished to Valentia for his actions in starting the war, and his sister Mila followed. A small group of dragons led by Anankos set off to find a land untouched by the war, and settled in what is now Dagda. Sothis fell asleep in Fodlan, watched over by her children.

The survivors of Agartha, however, would not forget the destruction of their civilization. From deep underground over many generations, they would plot their revenge on the surface world. They sent agents to the surface to instigate conflict in hopes of driving the surface world to ruin. 1000 years ago, they once more went on the offensive. Their spymaster, Iago, traveled to Dagda, using his illusion and manipulation spells to drive the weakening Anankos mad. (Just look at Iago’s art. Compare him to Thales. Primarily black clothes, gold trim, red feathers around the collar, and most importantly, pale white-grey skin. He was an Agarthan.) Other agents traveled to Archanea, where they would guide the dark mage Gharnef to the ruins of Thabes. In Fodlan itself, they allied with the bandit lord Nemesis to kill Sothis in her sleep and massacre her descendants in their home of Zanado. However, these efforts ultimately failed, and multiple underground Agarthan strongholds, including their greatest city of Thinis, fell, with only Shambhala remaining. The Agarthans made one final attempt to destroy Fodlan 25 years ago, but they failed once more, and the death of High Priest Thales put an end to their villainous plans. Or so it was thought…

Screenshots!

Custom Portraits!

Playable roster (warning: spoilers!)

Custom Animations!

Unpromoted Elys (Lord)

Promoted Elys (Agastya)

Unpromoted Ashley (Lord)

Revised version:

Old version:

Promoted Ashley (Wind Lord) - New Design

Promoted Ashley (Wind Lord) - Old Design

The Engineer class

This one, as you can probably tell, used the generic Mercenary as a base for the still sprite, but the rest, including the movements, was custom.

Female Swordmaster reskin (for planned character Ava)

Some major villains (warning: spoilers!)

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Kostas (Warrior variant)

Beta (Blood Lich)

Myson (Biomancer)

Iago (Illusionist)

Drazal (Pirate King)

Shez (Fluegel)

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Character details, including bases, growths, promo gains, and recruitment conditions, can be found here: FE3H2 Character Details - Google Docs

Other useful information, like gaiden requirements, Mastery Skill details, secret shop locations, and so on can be found here: FE3H2 Useful Information - Google Docs

Credits can be found here: FE3H2 Credits - Google Docs
I’m pretty sure I got everything, but if you notice something I missed crediting please let me know so I can fix it!

[UltraxBlade]

Update: I have begun working on the other side of the route split. Elys route’s Chapter 11 is now finished!

I have also made some minor adjustments elsewhere since my initial post, some of which I uploaded without announcing them:
-Two brigands in the prologue were replaced with a mercenary and an archer for some variety
-The boss of chapter 1, Jasper, is now on 2-move AI, approaching as you get close without having to bait him directly
-The thief Jay, recruitable in chapter 3, now has a massively buffed Magic growth (from 15% to 55%), enabling him to theoretically become a decent combatant with magic swords in the very long term, because I wanted training him to do something more interesting than just hit steal benchmarks for those of you who really want to put the effort in to train him. (This doesn’t make him suddenly good at combat, his bases still suck, it’s just a funny long-term payoff to make him more unique.)
-Bug fix: I had the reaver Dark tome, Vexshadow, using the Nosferatu animation, which as it turns out breaks things because it’s not actually draining HP. It now uses the Luna/Ruin animation to fix this. (I’ll get around to adding non-vanilla spell animations at some point.)
-Chapter 21x has been revised.

[YummyCatfood]

Interesting

[UltraxBlade]

New update! No new chapters yet, but still some fairly significant changes.

As I continue planning/working on Elys’s side of the route split, I’ve come to the conclusion that I really couldn’t do an arc spending more time on the Hoshido side of Fates-world/Dagda without having a promoted lance infantry class, and I also couldn’t add a promoted lance infantry class without having a playable one. So, I have now added the Basara class, using Lances and Light Magic (because pure Halberdier/Spear Master is boring), and with it, a prepromote Basara character, Senriko. On Elys route, she is planned to be recruitable in chapter 12. On Alexander route, she is recruitable in chapter 18 (at a higher level than in Elys route, of course). Full details on her stats can be found in the character details document. I have also replaced a few enemies in the later chapters of Alexander route with Basaras.

During the process of implementing Senriko and the new Basara class, I also decided to add a new set of weapons: the Ruby Sword, Sapphire Lance, and Emerald Axe, which you may recognize from FEH and/or other romhacks. These weapons double the effects of the weapon triangle. I have given them similar stats to killer and reaver weapons, and have replaced some enemies’ killer weapons with these new gem weapons from chapter 12 onwards – less annoying crits from enemies, more value in weapon-triangle matchups. Win-win! On Alexander route, the first Emerald Axe can be obtained in chapter 12, the first Ruby Sword can be obtained in chapter 13, and the first Sapphire Lance is in Senriko’s inventory. They’re also buyable in the chapter 16 secret shop, and will be buyable on the world map after chapter 21.

I have also, like I said I would, updated some spell animations! New animations for Ruin, Sagittae, Dire Thunder, Twilight, Seraphim, and Vexshadow, all taken from the repo. Credits to the artists have been added to the credits doc.

There are likely also other minor adjustments that I’ve made while working on this, but that’s all the big stuff. The next update will probably come when I finish Elys route chapter 12. Have fun, and as always, please leave any feedback you have!

[UltraxBlade]

CATASTROPHIC ERROR FIX: The old version of the cutscene after choosing Elys’s route was accidentally wiping the data for Jasper, instead of just temporarily removing him from the party. This has now been fixed. Please download the new patch (same download link) before continuing. If you have already gotten there before I made this post, contact me directly and I can fix your save file.

Other minor fixes and adjustments have been made.

Chapter 12E should be done by the end of the week!

[UltraxBlade]

So, Elys route chapter 12 is almost done – the chapter itself is playable, I just have to write all the dialogue. But I’ve made a number of other small improvements and quality-of-life updates along the way that I’ll go over here:

-I’ve installed a Modular Minimug Box for convenience of seeing weapons, important stats, and skills on the map.

-Low% crit rates have been removed from nearly all weapons. No more random crits from reavers, gem weapons, and light tomes not named Aura. (Luna tome crits are still a thing because I’m still a little bit evil lol.)

-Similarly, enemy Swordmasters, Berserkers, and Assassins no longer have Crit Boost until chapter 13/14, with the exception of some bosses (who were already using high-crit weapons). This has no effect on playable characters of these classes.

-Magic-based weapons (magic swords, Shockstick, Bolt Axe, Shining Bow) are now treated as their normal type for the weapon triangle instead of as magic, even when using magic for attacks.

-The mastery skills for Swordmaster and Assassin have been changed to Darting Blow and Killing Blow respectively, replacing Desperation and Killing Machine.

-Some dialogue has been expanded to better telegraph certain important events.

-When a talk convo is available with an NPC or enemy, such as for recruitment, you can now see the person who talks to them listed in their stat screen as well as in the stat screen of the player unit who talks to them, though it will only show one if there are multiple.

-I’ve made some small adjustments to a few chapters.

I’ll be back soon with the complete version of chapter 12E!

[UltraxBlade]

Alright, chapter 12E is now complete! Also, portrait update for pre-timeskip Kalin, and the usual “I tweaked a few small things here and there that I don’t remember the exact specifics of.”

I’ve also decided to rework class descriptions for more mechanical benefit. You can now see a class’s Mastery Skill listed in its class description, as well as symbols for effective damage vulnerabilities, and promotion gains are listed for promoted classes so as to show up on the promotion branch selection screen! This does come at the cost of the actual “description” part, but no one really reads that anyway.

Enjoy, and as always, if you do give the hack a try, please leave any feedback you have!

[TheSuzakuSeven]

That is so cool! I wish more would do that at the promo screens.

[UltraxBlade]

Smaller update: new (but also not new) character! Seteth now joins as a playable character in chapter 7, because I decided that I actually do want a Jagen available for that chapter but also want to keep the story events that made Felakhos unavailable for it. (I was considering having Seteth join only for that chapter and leave afterwards, but decided to just let him stick around.) Adding a Wyvern Lord prepromote is a pretty big change balance-wise, so his stats are… not great, but still serviceable for the rest of part 1, and looking back on my test runs I believe chapters 9 and 10 benefit from consistent access to a third flying unit without having to train and promote Willow.

I’ve also removed effective-damage weapons from the chapter 6 shop, and in exchange added an obtainable Ridersbane and Zanbato to chapter 7. This is partly for potential balance concerns, but mostly because I don’t want blind players accidentally spending too much gold and locking themselves out of recruiting Ares in chapter 8. Putting those items in chapter 7 also makes the boss of that chapter more consistently manageable without having to know to buy them in advance.

Also, when I made my last post, it turns out I hadn’t quite finished chapter 12E – Senriko’s recruitment dialogue wasn’t finished. Now it is.

[UltraxBlade]

Minor update: bug fixes and slight balance adjustments in chapter 13A, some modified and expanded dialogue in a few places, slight buffs to Ares’s bases, and new portraits for playable Anna (both pre- and post-timeskip).

EDIT: Just caught another similar bug in chapter 11A, which has now been fixed.

EDIT 2: Caught another error, this time one causing Armor Knights to learn Locktouch.

[Klokinator]

I actually wish you’d commit more to the… I’m not exactly sure what art style you’re using, but the more distinct ‘simple’ art style. The different mixtures of art styles or the one all FE hacks use is fine, but this unique style really stands out from the crowd, and while it’s certainly basic, it has a lot of character.

My only real criticism of it is that you should position all the characters the same direction. You’ve got Dimitri(?) hard-facing to the side while Edelgard is faced forward with her eyes aimed to the right.

(Note: I have not played any FE games past 13 and I only know character names from community cultural osmosis)

[UltraxBlade]

Those are my OCs Elys and Alexander, though I won’t deny that their resemblance to the original Edelgard and Dimitri is rather strong.

With regard to the art style, it’s a matter of “either I redo all of the other less-important characters in my old style, or I redo the major characters I drew that way in standard GBA style.” Either way, it’s a lot of work, but I’d want to be consistent with it in the final version.

[Klokinator]

The art style reminds me of the original One Punch Man, by ONE. ONE is not necessarily a traditionally ‘good’ artist, but his art style has a lot of passion put into it and emphasis on making you ‘feel’ the impacts of punches and other such things. Ultimately, his story-writing abilities were so good that a ‘superior’ artist (Murata) started redrawing his work, we got an OPM anime, and so on.

But I still love the original web-novel. It may never be as popular but it has a lot of heart. That’s how I feel about your original mugs in this game.

[UltraxBlade]

Handful of small bug fixes, minor balance adjustments, and dialogue updates have been implemented.

Also, Slim weapons have now been renamed to Bronze weapons, and have been given the additional property of symmetrically preventing critical hits. Bronze Axe and Bronze Bow now exist in addition to the Sword and Lance, and all of them are buyable at the Chapter 3 armory and world map node (Arianrhod), as well as reappearing in a few other shops later for convenience. Jay now joins with a Bronze Sword instead of an Iron Sword, and Jahid joins with a Bronze Axe in addition to his Iron Axe. This gives you some safe ways to handle Luna mages and Killer weapons, as well as additional options for reliability with Bronze weapons’ high accuracy, but this of course comes at the cost of their might being extremely low.

EDIT: Caught another bug, adjusted Chapter 10 a bit, and changed the S rank bonus from +5 hit +5 crit to +10 hit and no crit.

[UltraxBlade]

Just figured I’d stop by to post another update notification. As usual, I’ve been pushing out minor tweaks and changes to things throughout the game - tweaking units, items, dialogue, and enemy placements, fixing bugs, etc. Aside from that, the main substantial changes this round include:

• Titan can now be recruited by Elys in chapter 10, instead of just by Tinker, assuming the conditions are met for him to appear.
• Kalin and Jasper now joins automatically at the end of the chapters they appear in if they’re alive.
• Explicit warning/explanation textboxes have been added in a few specific places. (Some important information and hints are still in character dialogue though, this is not an excuse to skip everything!)
• Art updates!
  Engineers now have a new custom animation and map sprite instead of being jankily-recolored Mercenaries.
  Ryusei and Altenect’s Dawn General and Dusk General classes now have fully-finished moving map sprites, instead of looking like a normal Swordmaster or Great Knight while walking.
  Lily now has a new custom portrait instead of being a L’Arachel recolor, and the Troubadour animation and her battle palettes have been changed to better match it.
  The preparations shop now uses a shopkeeper portrait of playable Anna as long as she’s alive, reverting to the default armory guy if she dies.

Having gone through a full runthrough of the game fixing and adjusting stuff along the way, I’m now currently in more of an art mood than a chapter designing mood, but we’ll see if that stays the same or if I’m back with a new chapter next time. As always, enjoy, and please leave any feedback if you have it!

[UltraxBlade]

Small update: The lords now have an optional story-based promotion trigger at the start of chapter 10, instead of just being given Heaven Seals (declining to promote them gives them the Heaven Seal as an item), allowing them to promote at that point regardless of their level. The reason behind this change is the same reason it was originally not story-based – Ashley’s promotion into a dancer (singer, whatever). My original thought was to require training her to promotion level so people wouldn’t just go “oh well she becomes a dancer anyway, no reason to train her”. However, on further thought, having her as a dancer is so essential to the balance of the following chapters (both routes’ chapter 12 in particular) that I decided to make the change so nobody gets locked out of it, and I believe her combat contributions are still valuable enough to be worth training her regardless. The event promotion is optional for people who want to still level her up more before promoting, but it has a warning message for her specifically saying promoting her is strongly encouraged.

Oh, and also, the secondary boss of chapter 7, Chiron, now has a new portrait.

[UltraxBlade]

After getting some new playtesting, I’ve made some adjustments to the early game to make it slightly easier:

• Willow now joins with a Vulnerary.
• The Brigands from below in chapter 2 now only spawn one wave instead of two.
• Jay can now be recruited by Anna in chapter 3, as well as by Kalin, so you don’t need to recruit Kalin first and can still recruit Jay if Kalin dies.
• Ven now drops a Red Gem in chapter 3, so you’re slightly less tight on money if you miss the hard-to-get chapter 2 Blue Gem.
• The Engineer near where Jasper breaks through the second wall in chapter 5 now has an Iron Sword instead of a Steel Sword, so as to not combine with a hit from the earlier Longbow Archer for a kill. The Steel Axe Fighter Jasper fights now has an Emerald Axe to further reduce his chance of being hit.

I’ve also made some general overarching gameplay changes:

• You can now still take another action after using the Talk command (same for supports if/when I add them).
• The preparations shop no longer has a 1.5x price modifier.
• There is now an option in the game settings to disable staff and dance animations, though it doesn’t seem to work for the special songs (dancer rings).
• Staff and dance BGM has been removed, map music now plays continuously through them just like it does for combat.

Also, Sophia has a new portrait, both pre- and post-timeskip! And her unpromoted moving map sprite has now been updated to no longer hold a staff.

[Goldblitzx]

Hi there,
I just started playing your hack and I have one suggestion so far; change the hack to default to having the speed settings at fast and autocurser off.
This is done through a patch:

The patch has a variety of different options.
This is a minor thing but something I feel is still important to do.

I’ll update this post with more feedback as I continue playing!

[UltraxBlade]

Thanks for playing, and thanks for the feedback! I’ll implement that change in the new update which is out… Right now, by total coincidence! Aside from the default settings fix, some other small changes have been made (some of which were already live, as I tend to push out changes as I make them):

• Here’s the big one: As of this most recent change, on Classic Mode, when a playable unit dies, their items are now sent to storage. Unsellable prfs are also now wiped from your inventories when their user dies, as they are no longer usable. While the hack is not specifically designed to be ironman-friendly, I do want it to be reasonably doable to keep going when units die for people who want to do so, and certain lategame items (such as the dancer rings) would be disastrous to lose access to if you got them killed.
• Chapter 6 is now slightly less overloaded with enemies – it’s meant to be a difficulty spike chapter for the end of the first arc, but it was a bit too much.
• Chapter 12E’s Purge Bishops now have slightly reduced Magic, and Kiri and Akuma are no longer Game Over conditions.
• Fixed a bug where selecting “no” on the lords’ promotion event in chapter 10 wouldn’t work properly.
• New portraits: Willow (pre-timeskip), Titan, and Chiron! Still a whole lot more to go…

[UltraxBlade]

Minor update:

• A few enemies that already basically functioned as minibosses are now actual minibosses with names, portraits, and battle dialogue – specifically, the Runesword Paladin guarding the gate in chapter 13A (now named Faren), and the Bolt Axe Berserker on the secondary pirate ship in chapter 19x (now named Vance).
• I’ve removed the bonus EXP given by Entombed from vanilla, so they now just give the same EXP as other promoted enemies. To account for this reduction in EXP from chapter 15 (and because chapter 16 could use a slight difficulty nerf anyway), most enemies in chapter 16A have had their stats slightly lowered.
• Some dialogue has been updated.

Chapter 13E is now in progress. The map is drawn, I just have to place enemies and write events. I’ll be back with another update when it’s finished!