Automatically unlocked support conversations and sound test.
Sure, players COULD spoil the story for themselves by checking what the main protagonist has to say to whoever looks important and is near the bottom of the character list. But it’s nice when developers trust the player to not do that. We’re not all spring chickens with all the time in the world to replay games we like 20 to the power of 20 times to unlock every optional scene.
Not being afraid to remove or overhaul the built-in GBA mechanics. There was a topic made about it.
It can really set a hack apart.
It’s from my own hack but…
Using the flags in character data to give character’s attributes separate from classes
This will work without skill system and could be used to great effect in non-skill system hack to give character to units, for example a former assassin could have the silencer flag despite not being one, or a skill swordsmen that is in non swordmaster class line could have Wo Dao access.
Another example is the map in TLP were all enemies have silencer, although that one is less good.
I wonder if it’s a base map.
It is one of the most common elements in JP’s work.
I sometimes see it in EN as well.
In the base map, there are no enemies at all and players can shop, Support, etc.
Shinan is another common element.
Shinan is an additional event in which the character’s dialogue gives information about the chapter’s strategy.
It is interesting to see stages that have elements that destroy the map.
I think it would be interesting to have a stage where walls and buildings on the map are destroyed rapidly by bombardment or something, and you have to change your formation flexibly.
Maps that switch between day and night are also interesting.
It is also interesting to have a stage where the sun sets or dawns with the passage of a turn during the stage.
There are two ways to implement this: using a patch to have the palette change converted by a flag, or using the LOMA instruction.
Similarly, an event that extends the map using the LOMA instruction is also interesting.
The roof is fine, but I think the LOMA is more likely to surprise the player.
I think that QoL elements such as AutoSave Patch, MMB, enemy boss forced animation on, damage number popups, etc. are also more examples of adoption.
Adding another tier to the Iron/Steel/Silver tiered weapon system. It really goes miles for making your hack/fangame stick out with creative new tiered weapons added to the roster. One of the things I remember fondly of FE: Road to Ruin is its Crystal weapons thrown in the mix to add more diversity to the player, and enemy units.
I really like what @Parrhesia did in his hack Drums of War, which imo is still the best hack on this website, by a good amount. Here’s a few things from that hack and others i really enjoyed.
First of all: Less support partners (most units have 2-3), however you can have as many C or B supports as you want, and one A support. This not only is much more doable for a hack than the 5-8 you sometimes have in normal FE Titles, it’s also arguably more balanced, and since you frankly just need to write less, you can make the ones you do write feel less like filler and more actually impactful to your character. Pretty much Quality>Quantity
Second of all, and this is imo a major selling point of the hack, and my favorite part about it: After defeating certain bosses you can choose to either ransom them for a few thousand bucks (and money is quite rare!) or recruit the boss (without their Equipment). Although these bosses were sometimes not quite as strong or had quite as much lategame potential as your other units, they always felt useful or had a fun character quirk that made you want to use them.
Examples include: a brigand, an earlygame prepromote General, a Niime-like Druidess and her flying eyeball companion, an earlygame pegasus with overall slightly worse stats than the one you get afterwards.
These recruitments would not be handled via a thracia-like capture mechanic but rather via a simple post chapter event whose only condition was beating the boss in gameplay. These “bonus” characters tended to have less supports (1-2 usually) but still were quite fun
Alternatively to DoW’s Support System we also have @SaintRubenio’s Amazing FE6 Eckesachs mode, where you play as the Bosses of FE6. In his hack support conversations did not exist and were purely gameplay based. However to still have Characterisation you instead have event based talk convos in chapters. The game will for example tell you before a chapter that “Available Talks: Roarz x Arcardo”, so if you care about these units you can bring them both and have a nice talk that actually fits perfectly into the current chapter and where the story is situated at that point. I honestly prefer this way over most others because you write dialogue where it fits, making it feel more organic, instead of trying to stay within the 3 convo structure of talks that can happen ANYWHERE and AT ANY TIME in the game, meaning they cannot really reference events in the story, and are often relatively Shallow.
Actually useful Slim Weapons. In DoW slim weapons usually had 1 more might and around 10 more hit than iron weapons. They were generally better but also more expensive on a per use basis. Instead of being a more expensive but worse weapon, which is only situationally useful on certain characters, they became a good alternative to iron for units which needed the hit, might or didn’t have the con.
There is another hack made by Voldemort and his dark wraiths which also had a great way to make them actually useful in having them give double the WEXP compared to iron, have more hit and are cheap, but have less might. The major thing that made them genuinely fun to use was the crit you had on short swords (15). Especially on units with brave lion, like the super hero themed character Miss Victory, short swords were some of the most fun things to use.
Playable Monsters, Boats, or other Unique Classes. DoW had a Flying eyeball, a Skeleton, and a Wolf
“Gamerules”: This is a thing Paradox Interactive does in it’s Grand Strategy games like Hearts of Iron, Victoria, Crusader Kings or Europa Univeralis, but a Roguelike hack called Hope’s Trail made by @EAALen also Implemented it in the way of + Mode. Essentially Game Rules are an additonal set of Rules set at game start. In Hope’s trail it adds, iirc, an extra random skill to all of your units.
But this same system could be used for many things, be it disabling Gaiden chapter requirements, reducing growths to 0 for an easy 0% growths mode, Randomised recruitment or classes, making a random event always happen, and so on.
Enviromental Gameplay: I don’t recall in which hack i saw this, and i don’t think it was ever fully explored. But you could for example break down a bridge and have enemies on it drown. Or imagine first pushing down an Oil barrel down a cliff then using a fire tome to light it and any enemies standing in the oil get lit on fire. Or maybe you’re being hunted by a gang of pirates and completely outnumbered, but as they swim over the river to you, your thunder mage electrocutes the River, doing massive damage to the pirates and saving the day.
I’m biased, but both of Battle of Kin’s TLP unique gameplay features (both the day/night cycle in the 72 turn-limit chapter, and the reinforcements based on the units you deployed) are somewhat very satisfactory elements of that chapter, as well as giving that chapter a more “epic”, arduous vibe to it.
I want to think about having potential positive “consequences” to investing on units that go beyond their stats or combat utility - f.e., if you invest on a determined early pegasus before X chapter, they could end up becoming a captain of their squad, leading to this unit being able to summon pegasi on a later determined chapter.
The ability to speed up battle animations by pressing a button: actually I rarely found it, I don’t even remember where. 
The pair up mechanic from awakening and onward. It’s been in one hack (I think made by sme?), character creation like legends of avenir, a password system, a promotion option without the use of a seal or upgrade item, free move, ending finishers like sacred echoes and a reclass system option before battle. If it was possible to add a defend mechanic like rpgs when you didn’t attack but can defend and resist certain attacks at a fraction of the HP, that’d be badass.
Sorry for how messy this looks. Randomly woke up from sleep.
Come to think of it, those GBA games where you can see a highlighted unit’s stats and inventory without having to click them and go through the two pages of character information with this information… They’ve got the right idea. More games should have that.
It’d be even better if there was a button you could press like Detective Mode in Batman except it makes this information appear over the heads of every enemy onscreen.
Edit: Also, removing RNG from attacks hitting/missing is better for everyone. It stops particularly lucky or unlucky playtesters from saying “Make it harder” or “Make it easier” when it’s their luck that made things too easy or hard. It ensures the game can be beaten by unlucky people if they’re smart enough. Plus, just look at how trivialized the game can get when dodge tanking is a viable option. Nobody likes it when your success in this chapter depends not on skill or strategy or preparation, but on how many Luna+ Vantage+ enemies the game decides to throw at you.
There’s a lot of small QoL things, I’ve seen a lot of UI refinement in various games that synergized really well with the mechanical changes they made. Aside from that, though, the biggest thing is just finding something to make magic more interesting. Personal spell lists definitely help in this regard, as do methods of limiting use other than just plain ol’ weapon uses. Additional effects are great too (though I understand they can be difficult to add sometimes). If magic is more than just a 1-2 range bow that targets Res, it’s some degree of a win in my book.
Hard disagree here. If you’re talking about something like Grandmaster mode in Lion Throne, that’s one thing, but it seems like you’re talking about more than that. There’s two interperetations here:
Hit is decreased/avoid is increased, and whichever one is higher determines if you get hit. Every time. No RNG. This is… the better of the two options, but it’s not very good. Moreover, given your disregard for dodge tanking, I’m assuming the method that can give you guaranteed dodge isn’t what you’re going for.
Remove the hit/avoid stats altogether. Every attack hits. At this point, I’d go as far as to say this doesn’t really play like Fire Emblem at all. Assuming there’s no RNG interference in the form of crits either, Skl becomes useless, as does Luk. Since it can’t be used for dodging anymore, Spd decreases in value as well. This means that the lighter, faster, more consistent half of the roster becomes useless in favor of high Str and high Def characters. Battles are going to turn into DBZ fights, where you just bash high-bulk characters against each other until one breaks, throwing in heals as needed. The “game” is played during battle preps, and then you spend the rest of the map watching the inevitable play out. I like strategy as much as the next guy, but FE is a strategy game, not a math class.
Like, if you enjoy that, I’m not going to stop you, do whatever you want, but the idea that it “makes it better for everyone” is… no.
do I need to tap the sign guys
I don’t like making every attack be guaranteed to hit. Making everything hit basically invalidates the existence of swords as their advantage is having the best hit at the cost of might. It would also make classes that rely on dodgetanking like Swordmasters very bad as they rely on dodging to survive attacks. Doing so would make classes like Generals, tanky Cavaliers and the tanky hackrom Shaman with Nosferatu and anything else with high defense more broken. You either have to increase axe weight to oblivion so at the cost of high might, axe users will almost always get doubled or do what LT does with one of it’s possible gameplay functions, where if set, everything hits, but the damage is lowered corresponding by the hit rate amount you have e. g. your fighter does 20 damage and has a hit rate of 75%, the fighter will deal 15 damage, though this will make attacks harder to calculate since you’ll have cases where for example, a general with a steel lance will have a hit rate of 61% and deals 23 damage, so any sort of simple math will basically cease to exist unless you have a calculator at hand. Some FE games and hacks do have high hit rates to the point where dodging is basically impossible/might as well be worthless for the player, but that only really works if you plan and balance the gameplay carefully like in Souls of the Forest where no class really bulldozes the game (except for maybe Eldritch Knight in some earlier versions) due to the enemies also having high attack next to high hit due to the buffed weapons.
I changed the part talking about the dark lord who shall not be named. I did not realise you were so strict on these sorts of things. I hope this is adequate.
I disagree.
Why should swords have the hit advantage when hitting someone with a lance is easier? Why should axes and lances hurt more than swords when getting hit with any of them should be the end of a man? These are acceptable breaks from reality for the sake of gameplay, but the gameplay can be changed further so that swords don’t need to be “the high hit chance weapon” to have something over lances and axes. In my game Swords, Lances, and Axes have their hit equalized, and the Weapon Triangle advantage grants each one identity and value. A Weapon Triangle advantage means doubled damage dealt and halved damage taken.
RNG has value in tabletop roleplaying games because when you and your friends get together and immerse yourself in your characters and their varied capabilities the uncertainty of success or failure can make for more interesting outcomes.
But in a true intellectual challenge the outcome should never rely on luck. Imagine a platformer or shooter or puzzle game where the unpredictable inconsistent unreliable fundamentally flawed physics implementation can make the game reject correct answers or accept bad answers as correct.
Nobody would praise that unless it sold itself on being a janky farcical “comedy simulator” or had other qualities to distract you from the negative impact unpredictability has on the outcome of the challenge.
In Fire Emblem’s case, the characters and stories distract discussion from the gameplay’s flaws. We argue over Corrin’s righteousness and Camilla’s outfit instead of whether it’s BS that RNG can screw anyone at any moment through no fault of their own and the optimized safe strategies this encourage makes you take slower, safer approaches that can be boring compared to more dynamic strategies that push your units and tactical skills to their limits.
Modern FE games expect you to grind and optimize the challenge out of the game and buy DLC to purchase in-game power or speed up the process of gaining more power or both. RNG hangs over your head like the Sword of Damocles, encouraging you to not take calculated risks for fear of luck making those calculations wrong and punishing you for doing nothing wrong.
Was it truly good game design when Fire Emblem Awakening invalidated your strategies by giving overpowered skills to many random enemies with random chances to trigger?
That time your DND party’s Halfling Rogue got unlucky and bungled a pickpocket attempt creating a wild tavern brawl in which your normally inept Dragonborn Bard hit a natural 20 and did something uncharacteristically amazing can make for a fun story. That time RNG ended my ironman run and killed my lord when he missed a 99% hit chance on a nearly dead boss and died to a 1% crit all because he was falling off from getting stat screwed and needed the boss kill EXP is not a story, it’s a punchline.
okay but i like gambling thats why i play fe
plus, wesnoth is a pretty solid example of a high-strategy game thats built on usually shaky odds and some rng. it’s a matter of knowing how to work with it via mitigation vs high risk/high reward tactics. its always a matter of people actual capitalizing on the strengths of the design which comes with good use of rng in a strategy game.
so how do we tell him about the inherent randomness present on a huge amount of games spread across today
Random chance allows for emergent storytelling, if you were truly as “intellectual” as you sell your arguments to be then you’d at the very least try to understand why so many people find value on such randomness.
Taking chances is not devoid of strategy. And having to work to give yourself the best chances possible can also be part of a gameplay system. It’s why irons can still be used even though steels are also readily available usually after a certain point. Sure sometimes it can go a bit far like with FE6 but that’s still an a facet of the system being taken to an extreme that just so happened to not have worked in that environment.
If you’re not playing casual mode you are acknowledging that you can either be forced to reset or fail your Ironman because of the odds swinging out of your favor. That’s part of what makes such playthroughs so exciting for so many, it’s an interesting dichotomy of random chance and pure numbers.
Removing chance also just makes it REALLY REALLY boring. If you can plan your entire run from the word go then there’s no hype moments of 1% crits or units being blessed by the RNG gods and somehow surviving a lethal enemy phase, it’s taking the human interaction out of these games. There’s also the factor of getting screwed over by the RNG being absolutely hilarious in retrospect.
Assuming you’re not lying about your Ironman failing bc of a 99% miss and 1% crit… That’s fucking sick, that’s absolutely incredible I would laugh my ass off if I saw that with my own eyes! It’s such a waste to disregard how comedic these games can be!
