Souls old and new; share your FE stories

Back in like 2006, a coworker wanted me to play Fire Emblem (and Advance Wars) in order to understand the tactics genre, because we were working on a concept for such a game (AFAIK it never happened). So I did. Eventually I got interested in the hacking aspect, don’t really remember how exactly. Pretty boring, I know.

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yawnnnn

Whooo, it was really interesting to read the stories of the senior members here. XD
I guess it’s my turn now?

Let’s see…
Ten years ago I stole a random japanese GBA game from a friend of mine 'cause I was a terrible kid. Of course that was Fire Emblem: Rekka no Ken. I remember playing the game for like 2 minutes, without being able to understand what was happening or wtf the characters were saying, then getting a game over and promised myself not to play that obnoxious game anymore. Pokémon was so much better.

After some time I was bored so I tried to beat that mysterious game again, and this time I managed to get to the last chapter with only the lords left – I didn’t even know you could promote units, lol. I was like “OMFG THIS OLD GEEZER IS AWESOME”
After that, I think I beat Rekka no Ken about 20 times. It was becoming an obsession. It took me 10 playthroughs to understand how to recruit Raven! (not being able to understand a word of what they were saying didn’t help at all)

Then I bought the English version of the game (I was in Switzerland at the time and for some reason they didn’t have the PAL version) and… well, that was pretty much how I learnt most of my English; through Fire Emblem (and Pokémon, to some extent).

Some years later I bought FE8 but I really hated it, I remember being so jealous of my neighbour because he had Path of Radiance and it was so much better from my point of view. I think that the insatisfaction I felt that time was what drove me to hack FE8 instead of FE7, and make a better game out of it, actually…

I played all of the FEs that came out later, and I was reaaaaally disappointed with Shadow Dragon. The only good thing about that game was the online imo – It felt so underwhelming after playing the GBA FEs.

I joined SerenesForest in 2012, mostly because I wanted to share my hack.
I remember how sad and frustrating that period was to me – my life sucked at the time and all I had left to feel ‘alive’ was that little project that was constantly bashed by other members. However, I didn’t give up on that dream and I created Midnight Sun. Looking back at it, while the very first moments of my hacking experience have been terrible, I had so much fun later on. I met some awesome people thanks to Midnight Sun (first of all Regina aka Arcfalchion) and I believe I spent some days doing what I really wanted to do. It was satisfactory.

Despite saying, back in 2012, that I’d never abandon Midnight Sun, I have to admit that I have little to no motivation to work on it anymore. Midnight Sun was born out of my insatisfaction for life, out of my boredom, out of my lack of love. I wanted to be acknowledged by others while doing something that made me feel alive at the same time. Now that I’ve achieved both of these goals, and now that my life doesn’t suck anymore, I don’t have much motivation anymore.

But a promise is a promise, and I don’t like to leave things unfinished.
“I won’t abandon this project, it’s important to me. It has a special meaning. So, I’ll bring it to an end, even if it’ll take me months, years!”
See ya, folks of FEU!

P.S. I love this place.

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F-Freddy-senpai is so inspiring…

Pls… notice me…

bubububububut. . . agro your suppose to be my senpai. . .

any ways err story time is it. . .

well i got into the fe fandom through the wonderful portal of shadow dragon, i had a passing interest in it via smash, but that was only for marth and roy (my two mains in that game) as fighters in smash really. shadow dragon was my first real fire emblem game experince that i have full memories of (played a little POR before shadow dragon but i both didn’t know what it was and didn’t actually own it.)

after playing and failing shadow dragon horribly i started to get more into the idea of fire emblem but again had more of a passing interest. it was only until watching marks ragefest competition (the original i believe) that my interest grew. After watching a few more videos and the like and after watching the emblem brigades collective submission my interest peaked and i joined there forum for awhile, though mostly as an unnoticeable ghost.

after wandering the shadows for awhile i ended up leaving the emblem brigade mostly due to my own personal embarrassment then anything else and eventually joined serene’s forest (again mostly as a ghost) during all these interludes i went around looking for hacking resource’s to try my hand at it and in my naivete try to make a ragefest sub for marc myself (it would have been awful in retrospect, and include a lot of sand) but never went through with it.

well ghosting around, leaving serenes and trying other fourm’s to ghost around i practiced mapping and got okay at it, along with spriting in general. not great but okay. and then taking about a year long break from fire emblem related stuff in general i joined serenes again (and fe universe and the failed fe cafe) and. . . thats pretty much it.

though the only other noteworthy thing i did was assist in the fire mumblem reboot were i learned how to actually hack a little bit better.

all during this time i tried avrious fire emblem games and for the most part enjoyed all of them.

and now here i am as a second class ghost member with a little bit more prominence then before (its almost negligible.)

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you forgot to mention the part when you stole my avatar

im sorry kitty senpai please forgive me!

Oh yeah I forgot about that. Now I remember getting really confused on Shrine of Seals.

Since I’ve finally signed up here I might as well write something… um…

My history with Fire Emblem sadly isn’t probably all that deep, to be honest, nor have I been playing the series for very long. Come to think of it, it’s strange to realize that I started playing FE7 almost two years ago. -Has my life really been going this fast?- I actually wanted to start playing a bit earlier, but I was unable to find a copy of any Fire Emblem game at any price (much less a reasonable one), so it was a while before I just decided to give up and emulate the game. (I did find out that quite a few of my classmates had played games in the series, but they had either all emulated the games, or only played Awakening.) I actually wanted to play the series not only because I thought it would be interesting, but because it might help me with my thinking. See, I wasn’t really satsified with the way I played video games and approaced problem solving in general, so I figured that if I could force myself to stop and think about things, I could become less impulsive, or something. I hadn’t really played turn based strategy games before then - a few games of Sid Meier’s Alpha Centuari, and a few other things I borrowed from friends or relatives for a few hours - so I thought I could actually force myself to strategize instead of just mindlessly playing games without any logic at all. In fact, I said to myself right before I started that I would do an ironman run.

Hahaha, nope. I gave that up four chapters in and started playing like everyone else does. I did finish the game with everyone alive, but on Uhai’s level I ended up breaking my no-savestate rule and pretty much didn’t care for the rest of the playthrough. Also, I really heavily relied on a walkthrough - to be honest, it’s been an extremely long time since I’ve been a full-length game without following a walkthrough at every step, since I’m terrible at figuring out things by myself and I’m constantly afraid of missing permanently missable things. At least I was 16 when I played the game and knew about the beginner traps beforehand (i.e don’t only use the Jegian, don’t attempt to train everyone), so I guess I did better than people going in blind did? I’ve gotten better since then at FE, or at least I hope I have.

From there on I got Awakening as a Christmas present, and emulated FE6. I’m still trying to find physical copies of FE8, FE9, and FE10, but to be honest I’ve never seen a physical copy of the Tellius games in person. Ever.

I haven’t been involved in the FE community at all until now, partly because I regard making an account as incorporating something into a major part of my identity, and I get worried that things might not turn out so well for some reason or another, among other issues I can’t really explain. Even for communities I do sign up for, I’m constantly worried that people might have negative reactions to my posts. I have lurked around Serenes and r/fireemblem for a long while, though, in addition to this community as well. I also don’t really have much to offer in general - I’m not all that good at Fire Emblem (and competition honestly sort of cripples me) so LTCing and such is out, I’ve never really developed that much skill in art for some reason, I’m not very good at programming and haven’t done it in my spare time in six years even though I’m a math major and I’ve taken computer science courses every year, and I just find it really hard to write anything, even though my friends say I’m decent. But I’ll try. I guess writing’s really the the main thing I have to offer, if anything, though I at least seem to be improving in art.

I actually learned of this place through @Crazycolorz5, who I met a year and a half ago on another forum totally unrelated to FE. I actually didn’t realize he was into Fire Emblem like I was for a long time, until I brought up the topic of me playing one of the FE7 randomizers and having difficulties with the desert level, in which Pent was severely nerfed from the base game. After a while he linked to me here, and well… that was a while ago.

So yeah. That’s my FE related introduction. I’ve probably omitted a lot of stuff that I still technically remember but can’t recall of right now, but I’ve written what i can.

Time to fire up Dolphin, then.

Funnily enough, those are the only two games I still own the physical copies to. Love me some Tellius saga! First time I played FE9, I basically grinded Oscar to a Paladin by the end of Ch7 (Ike and Titania were his sidekicks, and all it took was three units to roll on through the game).

Just in case you misunderstood.

What I meant was that I hadn’t seen any copies in any game store, ever, or in the possession of anyone I know in real life (though I do know people who have RD in real life.) I’ve seen pictures of physical copies of the games online. I went to a game store a while back and they said they had a copy of PoR recently, but they sold it for $140. That is not a typo. I know PoR is really expensive for a GCN game, but it isn’t THAT expensive, right? I feel like the local stores in my area price gouge anything that isn’t new terribly. Not just games, mind you: I’ve had the same issue with Magic: the Gathering singles as well (but this isn’t a Magic forum so whatever.)

Yeah, I only have Awakening, and that’s the least favourite by far of the three FE games I’ve played. I mean, it’s not terrible, and i would still highly recommend it to people, but I just don’t like it. Not even for the usual reasons, either; I really don’t know why I like some things and dislike others. So no collection picture for me.

Now i feel envious, ha ha ha. I still feel bad that I don’t have a physical copy of anything but Awakeing. But oh well. Not really a huge issue anyway.

since i can’t find physical copies of any FE game other than Awakening, does that mean I have to play Battle for Wesnoth for my turn based strategy fix? But the setting is so generic Tolkien it’s painful. I mean, I tried counting the fantasy cliches when I tried out the game for a few hours and the list isn’t countable on one hand, and it probably wouldn’t be countable on all my digits if I cared to play more. … is this going to turn into a wesnoth bashing thread?

Edit: I don’t even know if the copy was sealed or not. It might have not been. I wouldn’t mind having the disk only if it meant that i could play the game at all. Oh well.

Edit 2: The same store sold one of the Golden Sun games for at least $40 at the same time, just the cart. I got both my copies of Golden Sun and The Lost Age at less than half that, combined, in an American Gamestop a few years before that. Just a measure of comparison.

About PoR, $140 is a price I would expect for a sealed copy, though amazon does have $98 used copies…

I am still glad I got my copy used for $15 from gamestop some time back lol

There are a lot of impressive folk posting here whom I can’t possibly stack up to, but I want to introduce myself anyway. I’ve lurked for too long.

I’ve been hanging/lurking around the FECommunity for a while, but never really /did/ much. My journey into the endless depths of FE modding started on YouTube, when I found videos of rom hacks of… Super Mario World. Astounded and amazed that my daydreams of “man, what if I could make my own video game levels??” could be realised, I tried to start modding that game with little success.
But then I thought why stop at Mario? I searched for hack videos of my favorite game ever, Fire Emblem, and found that yep, they existed. I can’t recall whether it was Google or GameFAQs that led me to a forum called Shrine of Seals— but I ended up there. I joined the forum when it only had about a month of life left, if I recall correctly, and didn’t post much. Having no idea of the forum’s significance as the failed successor to the original FEU(?), I made judgments about it pretty quickly, deciding that it was pretty closed off, the veterans’ mood about FE modding seeming pessimistic and the newcomers not really mattering since a shutdown of some sort was looming.

My next FE forum after SoS anticlimactically poofed out of existence was the Emblem Brigade (from a banner in Hithere’s signature— thanks dude!), whose community was incredibly welcoming, and I actually recall being in disbelief that everyone was so /nice/. Obviously I was interested in its zombie apocalypse FE hack like all new members, but I understood there were no more slots for playable characters (until years later, when the dastards insisted on my inclusion), so I started an FE7 reskin and posted about it. I knew about Serenes Forest, but, well… forums terrify me and TEB was a very comfortable nest. Honestly, it was probably the right move. My reskin was extremely typical, with it at first being a “role-change” mod that changes everyone’s classes and/or place in the story (Matthew/Leila and Legault/Jaffar switched places, for instance), then becoming less ambitious in the form of character replacements by crossovers (Mia, Ronan/Orsin/Halvan from FE5, and Kamui from FE2… for some reason) and the dreaded OCs.

After I lost interest in my reskin and learned events thanks to Cedar’s Eventiel tool, I started on a full-custom mod, billing it as a community project by opening character submission to people (since it was no secret that the zombie hack had grown stale). With each chapter made, there was a collection of choices that people could make about how the game would play out, and I’d select a random answer for each question out of what was given to me. By keeping making the game entirely in my hands, I would ensure that it wouldn’t grow stagnant, the destiny of all community projects that have a larger scale than just a few chapters. However, this ended up as less of a “community project” and more “Alusq’s hack that has some random people’s characters in it and some weird design decisions”.

The “community project” saw its death after a heavy dose of scathing criticism from a certain “snarky foe”. He was pretty damn relentless in comparison to the lighthearted crowd at TEB, but I knew that I needed to be humble and be open to criticism, so I bent over and took it, trying my best to justify everything he had issues with but ultimately admitting that yeah, I did bad (the story, for one thing, was a generic mess). I set aside the project permanently until some time later, when I decided you know what? I can stand up for my project and still get better. So I posted another response to the guy’s post, a little more impassioned this time. I pointed out that quite a bit of the stuff he was calling bad was just him being a jaded Scrooge— keep in mind that I had no experience with SF’s community except from lurking the forums and reading the verbal beat-downs that occurred here and there, so this was the first time that one was aimed at me, at /my thing/. I topped that off with a declaration: the project in its current state was toast and I would be restarting it with a far clearer image of how I wanted gameplay and story to play out. I decided it would have the works from release one: the graphics, the music, the game mechanics, no more placeholders acting as excuses (which tended to stick around for entirely too long).

I’ll be brief from here (sorry my post is so long— I’m nothing special at writing stories for FE games, but damn if I don’t like yarning about it on the internet). I restarted the project, even keeping to it after TEB started quieting down and I was laughed out of the place anyway (which actually gave me the opportunity to clean up/freshen the character roster), making progress at a crawl. But then newFEU, this forum, appeared, and I was inspired again by the sheer amount of innovation coming out of it. Here were problems that people had been talking about as either pains in the ass to do or unsolvable for years, solved in just days. In particular I want to thank Crazycolorz, Gryz, and Venno right off the bat— you guys are greatness incarnate (thanks to Arch for making the place too!). I am still seriously impressed by the variety of people who are making serious contributions to the FE modding scene through this forum.

I’m done being a leech who just utilises the resources that others have made. I’m giving myself a month to get my goal of a 5-chapter demo done and release it, as well as my battle animations and notes if I can organise them into something useful.

And thus I submit a resounding “'sup?”.

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hi Alusq ur my frend! :333333

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this topic is fantastic (oh and pretty old heh), it was really fun reading your guys’ stories! also it gives me a reason to post on FEU. LEMME TELL YOU MY STORY~ If you don’t know me, I contribute mugs to hacks, hang out in a few different skype chats, and hang out on SF’s creative section. still consider myself kind of newish and joined SF in 2012

SSBM introduced me to Roy and Marth and I loved Roy’s design and thought Marth was a weird princess. Anyway that led me to emulate Blazing Sword on a GP2X after I found out it was a SRPG (I love Disgaea) when I was sitting on the bus to school (hour long bus ride) and i’d do like a chapter or so per day. I suck at them however~

I would have never joined the community if not for Klok (lol) searching for a CG artist on Newgrounds for his old FEXP game. Hadn’t played FE for years when I came across that so the past few years have been a total revival for me. I joined his forum and got to know a few of the members and eventually got into spriting thanks to SF’s splice comp.

i don’t have any pet projects and would love to learn more about hacking at some point (always wanted to do a really short 3 chapter hack), i’m a bit bare on time though and spend most of my free time working on sprites for others’ awesome projects <3

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Maybe sprite for the eventual but inevitable [Blazing Renaissance][1]?
[1]:[Working Title] Blazing Renaissance

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I’m not primarily an FE hacker. I was never a massive fanboy towards the series. I enjoyed the GBA games but that was about all I’d played until Awakening came out. Instead, my romhacking career came from Super Mario World and Super Metroid hacking.

I was a part of SMWCentral, the largest western Super Mario World hacking community, for many years, even if I wasn’t always developing hacks of my own. At one point I helped organize and begin our website’s first collaboration hack, “An SMWCentral Production” before passing it on to someone more capable. I was also a part of what eventually became Metroid Construction, what’s probably the largest western Super Metroid hacking community. While both games are fun to hack, I eventually lost interest in hacking them. I still hang around but I’m hardly as active as I used to be.

In early 2013, there were a bunch of FE LPs being done on Something Awful, including the FE Romhack thread. At some point during the thread, we were discussing a hypothetical romhack made by SA members and instead of waffling around on the issue for any longer, I spoke up and suggested we actually attempt something. Because of my prior knowledge with romhacking, I offered to lead the project and figure out how things work. it was an entirely new set of tools to learn as well as an entirely new console, but we put out a proof of concept map just to show that we had to capability to make something and it was well-received. That’s how the Awful Emblem project got started, back in April 2013.

I’ve still never played the majority of the series. I’ve only beaten 6, 7 and 8. Something about 13 made me never get around to finishing it. I guess that must make it seem weird then that I’m the leader of the romhacking project for a game in this series. We’re having fun making it.

I joined here around September last year after we took part in FEE3. I’d had an account on SF for some time but never used it for much other than browsing the forum for resources. Now it looks like I’m getting more and more involved here, looking to help progress our hacking knowledge in addition to working on Awful Emblem. I like it here a lot more than Serenes so far.

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@Crazycolorz5 Its a possibility the idea is cool to me~

Back in 2014 I was finishing middle school, and I wasn’t all that social, so I didn’t have many friends in the real world.
One day I just grew tired of always sticking to Mario or walking around in the DS Pokémon games that my brother owned, so I recalled an excellent Italian Let’s Play of Path of Radiance that I had watched years ago.
Though I didn’t remember anything about its plot at the time, I recall really enjoying it, so in my thirst for RPGs with good stories I somehow decided that the GameBoyAdvance would become my home???:face_with_raised_eyebrow:
I seriously cannot remember my reasoning there. I guess it was because it had Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga on it.

Anyway, I managed to download VisualBoyAdvance and the roms for Fire Emblem, Mario and Luigi and Mother 3 all by myself. I’m still impressed that I have managed to do so by myself to this day😁

Getting back on track, soon my loneliness stopped being as pungent whenever I booted up the especially immersive world of Mother 3, and the incredibly fun-to-explore Beanbean Kingdom from Superstar Saga. But most importantly, I got to meet Lyn in FE7.
I’m sorry if this will sound wrong to you, but to a 13-year old me, she looked positively mesmerizing. I loved her looks, and as I got to spend the following chapters with her and celebrating getting the Mani Katti with her, as well as seeing the group expanded in Chapter 3 and so on while being adressed… it really was something else.

I guess I have to comment on my gameplay skills now. Let’s just say… they were abysmal😅 Even though I knew English pretty well at the time, every time Florina would die I would restart the game from the prologue, because younger me was dumb and didn’t know how to "Restart Chapter"XD. I had gotten so tired of the first 3 chapters, but eventually I managed to beath Chapter 3 with both Wil and Florina intact😂.
From there on it went on the following way for me: “Oh, a new chapter. This looks cool!” “Did I seriously lose another unit? Restart!”
Don’t even get me started on how giddy I got when I met Serra and Erk, and ran into magic for the first time. I used Erk the most out of every one XD

After getting trolled into thinking that Lyn’s Chapter 10 was the final chapter, and considered Eliwood’s story to be a post-game challenge until the Dread Isle, I had loads of fun with each new challenge thrown at me.
From there I went on to play FE8 and fall in love with its small little story. Chapter 5x, especially, was so cool to me. I still love everything about it to this day, and think it flows almost perfectly.
After that I got very confused when I got my hands on a translated rom of FE6 (the one where Shanna was still called Thany), and saw that while it acted as a sequel to FE7, the gameplay felt like a step backwards, especially the preparations menu featuring no story.:joy:

Then Agent Elrond’s wonderful Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn Let’s Plays came around, as well as footage of Alfred Kamon’s Midnight Sun and Ray’s “A Sacred Dawn DX”; then the 3DS games were released (which I really liked), and the rest is history.

Now I’m just and undergraduate hoping to graduate away from this pandemic mess of a reality, start looking for a job so I can financiate myself, start a Youtube Channel, and play some official games, but especially some hacks, 'cause let me tell you, you guys come up with some amazing stuff! Right now I’ve only played up until Ch.9 of The Last Promise, 1-8 of Vision Quest and Chapter 8 of The Road To Ruin.
Also, sometime in the future, I would really like to learn about the FE10 engine, so I can learn to hack it for my own interconnected stories that I would like to tell, because I hate myself, and I would really like to enact those stories using the Tellius format.

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holy 6 year necropost batman

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