Project Thabes, FE13 hack [v0.9.8 12/17/23]

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I’m entirely unsure if this is something that people would even be remotely interested in, but I intend to work on it to completion regardless!

Over the past few months I’ve been diving deep into romhacking FE13, Awakening, using several tools. Namely, the incredible accessibility of the Paragon tool has allowed me to learn how to do a lot of interesting things. I’ve worked to create the beginnings of a lore-indulgent romhack for Fire Emblem Awakening that also alters the gameplay mechanics in a way that will hopefully keep it fresh enough to play over again, one of my main goals being to increase the desire to try a wide variety of classes and characters. This mod in particular is designed for Citra, the 3DS emulator, first and foremost.

THE STORYTELLING

My main goal when creating this hack was to add little easter eggs to a lot of the small things in the game, namely the available items. It quickly became significantly bigger than that. Awakening has a lot of plot holes and shallow storytelling that is only answered by later entries on the 3DS. I aim to put the story together in a more cohesive way by fleshing out the dialogue and information provided based on what’s given by other sources, as well as improve lackluster parts of the game’s storytelling in general.

There are various things I aim to change, including

  • Giving Robinsexuals additional support paths
  • Including new dialogue in story exposition and supports or even redoing supports entirely, while still making everything new feel like it belongs.
  • Answering things that aren’t answered in the game with information provided from other sources such as later games or commonly accepted community knowledge.
  • Fix inaccuracies, weird inconsistencies, and stuff that might not make sense in the big picture.
  • Many, many other things.

THE MECHANICS

One of the other main issues that is often raised with Awakening is how easy it is to break mechanically. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and lent itself nicely to Apotheosis, it does make it a little easy to rush to the end of the game and get to the postgame grind. I wanted to take the opportunity to make the mechanics fresh as well as the story. Thus, I began testing small gameplay changes. THESE CHANGES ARE NOT DESIGNED TO BE EXTREMELY HARDCORE BALANCED. They are, however, designed around Hard/Classic play. In effect, this is less of a “rebalance” and more of a “remix.” The changes in mind include

  • Class fine tuning, attempting to give each class its own niche, or at least make them more divergent and improve the ones that fall behind.
  • Removing STRs lmao
  • Make characters that are less viable more enticing to use, and if need be slightly toning down characters that tend to be used more.
  • Add a fresh take on weapons and balancing, including adding siege tomes, nerfs and buffs to weapons, and changes taken from other fire emblem games to put a spin on the gameplay. These are not intended to be the most balanced thing in the world, but they should mix things up.
  • Villager now promotes into Soldier, and Soldier has had its caps and growths significantly altered to bring it in line with other advanced classes.
  • Recruitable Mustafa with fully fledged supports
  • Recruitable Phila with fully fledged supports
  • Tons of other changes.

NOW COMPATIBLE WITH GAY AWAKENING!

I don’t know what the record for most edits to a post is, but my inability to proofread anything whatsoever means I’ll probably have broken it way before this hack is complete.

v0.9.8 is finally here after, uh, nearly a year. Engage came out and I learned assembly and… yeah, a ton of stuff. Demoiselle has had its gender conditional removed and it now affects all allies. The Dread Scroll and Bridal Bouquet items have been unlocked for both genders as well.

Here is a link to the modded files. As ever, you need to dump your own roms.

To install, simply right click on the game in Citra, select open mod location and paste the unzipped files into the romfs folder there. If there isn’t a romfs folder, you just need to make one and then put the unzipped files in there. This tutorial will help for those of you with a modded 3DS or flashcart.

You can view the notes for v0.9.8 here, and the full changelog here (finally remade and functional!)

Making this possible and accessible in the first place is because of Thane98. Thanks to the amazing tools in Paragon and Exalt, progress isn’t as slow as it could be. With enough feedback, I could make something cool out of this. This will probably be quickly updated, as I’m still playing around with a lot of the gameplay changes. There is a lot I still want to do!

Oh yeah, and I have a discord for it too now. I want to build a space that helps progress 3DSFE hacking in general!
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you may want to include some screenshots, just to let people better understand the hack before downloading, especially with how much larger CIA files are compared to GBA files.

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I intend on adding some soon, however, there’s no CIA to download here, simply a patch. It’s approximately 900kb uncompressed. Putting a CIA download would be piracy lol.

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I don’t think you understand what I’m saying…
You need a CIA file specifically for this hack, once it is patched it cannot go back to its original state, meaning they would need one CIA file for base Awakening and a copy of it for your hack, CIA files are around 600 mb - 1 gb IIRC.

either way pretty pictures are nice and will get more people to play the hack

Surprisingly, no, you don’t. Citra has the ability to load files on the fly from a different directory.

Simply right click on the game in Citra’s game selector, hit “open mods location.” create a folder called “romfs” immediately where it is opened, and drop the patch files in to the romfs folder. Then it will automatically patch the game on the fly without needing to directly modify the rom.

To my knowledge, homebrewed 3DSs can do the exact same thing, especially Luma with LFS. Check the tutorial linked!

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Now that the main content is fully(?) completed, I’m gonna bump this post. The remainder of development will be bugtesting and support writing before the full release. Feedback is always appreciated.

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Recruitable Mustafa nice.

Hey I’ve been playing the hack a bit today and it’s pretty fun. For some reason though, every time that I beat chapter 7, the game crashes. I’m playing on a homebrewed 3DS btw. Just thought I’d let you know or maybe see if you could help me figure out a way to get past the crash.

Delete data/dispos/007.cmb and see if that band-aid fixes it. Working on a more long-term fix, should be up soon. Let me know if that doesn’t work.

patch should fix it now.

Question? Are they more new playable characters in this hack besides Mustafa?

Phila is also added, and has as almost as much content as Mustafa does, though she is slightly newer and rough around the edges.

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Well are there any more plans on more new playable characters in the lineup besides those two?

There’s no real characters I can think of adding who would fit, really. Most named bosses are generic baddie archetypes. What exactly did you have in mind?

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Probably Cervantes Pheros or heck maybe even Vasto?

I’ll consider it. Adding characters is a lot of work, and I don’t just want to add them for the sake of it. Plus, I have to find fitting places to put them in. That’s going to get cramped and bloated after a while.

I think just the two we have now are comfortable in the game, but I’ll keep it in mind.

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bumping this again because 0.9.3 is possibly one of the biggest content additions in one patch that we will have for the entirety of development. Check it out, if you feel like.

First of all, love the mod. The existing and planned new supports are nice, and Chrom being able to marry any woman from part 1 is really cool, even if most don’t have supports yet.

One suggestion:
One of my biggest complaints about the vanilla Awakening story is that Naga and Tiki oddly have nothing to say to each other at Mt. Prism. We know from M!Morgan and Nah’s supports that Naga can talk to Manaketes long distance but this would be the first time Tiki has seen her mother in person in a very long time. It feels odd that she would say nothing. My suggestion is that if she’s in your army she chimes in during Naga’s explanation that she can only seal Grima away by recounting Madeus’ last words in New Mystery of the Emblem(About how he’ll always be able to revive as long as men hold evil in their hearts).

Also one minor correction:
Chrom says Manaketes have been gone since the War of Shadows, but he should have said the War of Heroes, as those were the events of Mystery/New Mystery.

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Thanks for the feedback.

Hey, I haven’t seen the hack yet but I’ve been following it until it’s completed, but do the child units have any S rank support outside of themselves? I always found the idea of ​​this happening especially in optional units like Donnel or even Thatja interesting, as you might not get them or kill them accidentally thus making them possible non-canonical