Inspirations for your works

We all have our inspirations, whether it be for storytelling, artwork, music, or what have you. Perhaps a book, movie, or video game story (or another romhack!). Or a particular piece of music inspired a song or three you composed.

What are some of the things that inspired or is currently inspiring the things you might be working on?

Might introduce some people to works they might not have considered or heard of before!

For me

A lot of RPGs have inspired my random fits of writing growing up. Without getting too long, I’ll just say Final Fantasy probably has been the largest influence on me in terms of RPGs (VI, IV, and XIV being my favorites. Especially XIV since Heavensward dropped like 6 years ago [insert Go play the FFXIV Free Trial meme here]).

Books were an influence as well, I like fantasy stuff if it wasn’t obvious. Lord of the Rings is probably a given. The Wheel of Time is very good too, though the writing is rather drawn out (hope you have time for like 14 or 15 books! Maybe the Amazon series coming out soon will do the series justice too).

This will get rather long if I don’t limit myself. There’s a lot more than above, but I want to keep it condensed. Now then, back to procrastinating from working on my hack.

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A lot of people don’t realize this because it’s a bit obscure, but my project is actually inspired by this old gameboy game called Pokemon Red/Blue.

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My main project is a recreation of “Nausicaa of the valley of the wind” (mainly the comic), so I think I’ve taken too much inspiration from it :sweat_smile:

I think I was inspired a little by all the works I enjoyed, from Full metal alchemist, to the lord of the rings to martian chronicle

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I made my thing back in a 2 year college to prove I can accomplish something. I guess my inspiration was to push myself.

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Tried to play FF games, couldn’t make it pass the grind. This mechanic is unfortunatelly not for me. And that’s a shame, the story is great.

Well now I’m using Roman history.

Does Genealogy of the Holy War count? In all seriousness, most of my hacks boil down to some funny idea that had popped into my head and wouldn’t get out of it. This has a strong tendency to involve SNESFE’s characters. Perhaps some of these things would be better suited to Fanfiction dot net, but I just like the thought of “apply patch to FE8.gba”. To give some examples…

MAFC2: Barhara Revisited, my first chapter, was a simple what-if: what if Chapter 5 didn’t end the way it did?
RF5: Though half-baked, Julius’s Revenge is similar: what if the bad guys won?
MAFC3: I was hacking FE1 for Get the Pants. Naturally, my inspiration was the let’s play.
BoxMAFC: It’s been a while since that, and I’m not quite sure where I got the idea for a door maze from. Doorway of the Fang was a thing regardless.
MAFC4: I have played a few games of mafia in my time on the internet, and since it was on my mind I felt like adapting it into GBA. I think Akaneian Mafia went quite smoothly.
MAFC5: Somehow the idea of simulating politics got into my head? I must have been playing some Paradox grand strategy or another at the time. Parliament of Heroes was rushed and clunky: FE8 really isn’t the engine for it.

AF2017: Alm conquering the world is a funny concept. Part of me wants to see a real Book 3, even though I know there’s no room to actually execute one. I kind of want to give FE GAM a redo.
AF2018: A long-running gag in my works is a shipping war between me and a friend on who Celice is paired with. FE3 Chapter 3 is also a “favourite”. Big Hill was meant to have FE4 Marpha to Verdane too, but the 1st of April is a hard deadline.
AF2019: I like SNES RPGs. How else am I going to get Mario Mario, Cecil Harvey, and Sigurd Chalphy in one rom? By doing it myself. I’ll get the serious release of Arch of Coups out some day.
AF2020: I always release something on April Fools. I had been working along on Old Mystery and saw fit to get a release in.
AF2021: Over the past year or so I’ve gotten quite into Fire Emblem Cipher and started dabbling in other card games. I made a chapter where the goal is to defeat Cipher’s meta deck.

Writing all of this up has made me realise it’s been a long while since the last one-chapter hacking competition. And that I haven’t released anything in half a year. Ideas? Sure. But the willingness to put them to paper? That’s another matter.

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FF7 and FF13 have become pretty big inspiration on my ideas both for character design and for their stories, but before then I was very inspired by the story/design of Sailor Moon and Warcraft 3

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Oh gosh, there’s a ton of stuff I like and am inspired by. I’ll put it in spoiler tags so it doesn’t clog up the thread, but…

Of particular relevance to Fire Emblem fan stuff

In terms of things from the Fire Emblem series I’m particularly inspired by, I really love the more Greco-Roman-inspired setting of the Archanea-Valentia trilogy (as opposed to how later games seem to lean more into medieval European-style settings). Kaga’s Fire Emblem games, in general, tend to have this feel to them that’s very… epic, in the classical sense, and at times almost mythological, and I really dig that vibe, too.

I also appreciate how his map designs feel very much focused on communicating a particular situation, both spatial and in terms of the state of the whatever conflict is being portrayed. It doesn’t always result in the most balanced maps, admittedly, but I rarely find (non-Gaiden) Kaga-era maps to be uninteresting.

There’s honestly just a lot I like about the classic FE titles that inspires me and that I want to draw from and tap into the appeal of… not uncritically, though, of course.

Maybe this is a bit weird, but I actually find myself inspired by the class roster of the Fire Emblem series as a whole sometimes. In particular, by the more obscure “flavor classes” such as are used in a number of the games, or classes with few or zero recruitable representatives (i.e. characters who are “canonically” that class; characters who can reclass into the class don’t count). This is more something that inspires me for individual characters, but those classes often get me thinking about, if there was a recruitable character of that class, what kind of person would they be? What factors in their life led them to being that class, and how and why do they find themselves allied with the story’s other heroes? The nature of Fire Emblem as a series starring a huge array of characters from all walks of life makes it really fun to come up with characters, and the weirder, more obscure classes make great “prompts” for that, I feel.

For non-FE stuff that I find particularly inspiring when it comes to FE fan stuff, I really love classic, like '70s, '80s, and '90s, manga and anime aesthetics. This is kind of by its very nature a strictly-visual inspiration, but I find that those sorts of fantasy designs combine very well with the sorts of stories Fire Emblem tends to tell, or at least the stories and worlds from the series that I’m most inspired by.

More general inspirations

This stuff does inspire my Fire Emblem-related ideas, but it’s more stuff I just find very inspiring and interesting and that informs my creative works in general.

Recently, I’ve been pulled back into Toby Fox’s stuff (Undertale and Deltarune, primarily), which I honestly just adore. I love how dense and packed with personality it is, and how it’s able to cover such a wide tonal range. It’s also helped a lot by the fact that Toby’s writing seems to almost always be coming from a place of genuine empathy and compassion for his characters… Not necessarily in the sense of always writing good things happening to them (goodness knows that’s not the case), but in the sense that nearly all his characters, even the most minor and incidental, feel, to me, like he’s seeing them as multidimensional (fictional) people worthy of being thought of, cared about, and recognized as such. It’s not easy to clearly put this into words, but it’s a feeling I get very strongly from what he writes and it’s probably the biggest singular aspect of his stuff that inspires me.

Following from that, the MOTHER/EarthBound trilogy is another big one. Yes, all three. Yes, even the first. In some ways especially the first, actually. Shigesato Itoi’s writing and sensibilities have their own charming je ne sais quoi, I feel. They are quirky and often silly, and there’s obviously EarthBound’s infamous swerve to borderline-horror for its finale, but the real heart of the series is how much, well, heart, it has. There’s a sense of warmth and humanity to it. Mother 3 is the only game in the series that I feel could really be argued to be “visually-impressive” in any capacity, but all three manage, at least for me, to be very evocative and compelling due to how much thought and care went into their creation and how much thought Itoi clearly put into giving even incidental set dressing NPCs personalities and even little stories. Undertale and the MOTHER trilogy also have something in common in terms of how they set up their final bosses with much greater emphasis on them being satisfying interactive narrative moments than on them necessarily being hard in a gameplay sense (Giygas is one of the easiest final bosses in the genre if you know how his attacks actually work, and Undertale’s true pacifist final boss fight is literally unloseable), which I’ve always found very interesting. There’s obviously a time and a place for it, and not every story or game calls for that kind of finale, but it’s definitely a tool I’m glad I picked up from those games.

Moving on from this, I think the biggest remaining one is… honestly most of Squaresoft’s classic Nintendo-era catalogue of JRPGs. The first six Final Fantasies, obviously, but also the early SaGa and Mana titles, Live-A-Live, Chrono Trigger, etc. Specifically Final Fantasies VII and X, I’d also include in this. I haven’t played many more of Squaresoft’s PlayStation-era JRPGs, so I can’t really weigh in on those. This is kind of too broad a category to go into too much detail on, but for a few specifics, I love how bizarre and experimental Live-A-Live and just… Every SaGa Game is, and I actually have a Fire Emblem fan plotline that’s rather inspired by Chrono Trigger in particular that I’ve been rolling around in my head trying to figure out the best way to construct it.

This is obviously incomplete, but this is the stuff that’s been on my mind lately in particular as inspirations.

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