In terms of Pokemon hacking, I once spent an hour many years ago editing pokemon Ruby with the idea that I’d make it much harder so the combat would actually be interesting. I gave one of the first enemies only the move explosion and your starter the move protect. Of course you had no way of knowing that they’d immediately use explosion. Clearly this hack was going somewhere big.
I am very excited to be working on a fire emblem-pokemon hack. I hope I can come up with better ideas now than random exploding enemies.
I was a frequent Nintendo Power reader as a kid in Jr High, one day in the Letters section a kid had written in asking about an “Emulator” they had found online and how is that possible they can play Nintendo games on their PC, of course the NP staff wrote back saying not to do that, but because they published that letter I curiously looked up what an Emulator was (this was before the GBA even launched!) The ones I found were crummy so I gave it no thought.
Fast forwards a few years and I see someone on Serebii’s forums mention an Emulator again (before getting banned) so out of curiosity I went to check it out, stumbling on Virtual Boy Advance.
Now I had just finished playing my first Fire Emblem game, Sacred Stones (and I was a little bit obsessed with it as SS was my gateway drug into Anime, Strategy RPGs, and pixel art.)
Since I was hot into Fire Emblem I got and played Fire Emblem 7, after clearing Eliwood’s story I wanted more so I looked up the series. The dated graphics on 1-5 were a bit of a turn off to me at the time (and young me didn’t even think to see if there were NES or SNES Emulators).
I found FE6 and learned it was a sequel to the game I had just played! Well I downloaded it and even managed to figure out the translation patch.
When I started playing I noticed several sprites were ugly or not as polished as they were in FE7 and FE8 (The Mercenary and Archer, for example) so I really wanted to fix that because it irked me so much.
Well I eventually figured out how to use FEditor to extract the cleaner sprites from FE8 and put them into FE6, of course the Merc pallet didn’t covert quite right so I had to learn how to adjust the pallet, and while stumbling about there I found the text editors and messed around in there for a while too (Even made a version of FE8 that changed the names of several units into the names of some of my friends!).
The rest is history, I’ve never made a full hack, and I don’t know a ton about hacking, but I love Pixel art and like to put my own sprites in official games to personalize it a little.
I used to watch SMW/Smb romhacks back in 2011ish. I think my introduction was either a video titled “impossible Mario” (smb) or “Asshole Mario” (SMW).
In 2016 I got my first computer and played a Pokémon crystal randomizer. A couple years later I played “Hector saves Christmas”
My first experience with ROMHacking is with the Pokemon Randomizer.
My first experience with Fire Emblem ROMHacking is from seeing Blazer’s old animations appear in my recommended. At that moment, 12 years old me loved edgelord Kelik.
I think my first experience with ROM hacking was VincentASM’s early investigations into figuring out how to replace GBA portrait graphics waaaaaaay back in the day. Once he had figured out enough of the details (eye and mouth alignments and such), he opened up letting users submit portraits to replace in the game and I remember making an absolutely terrible splice of Fado’s armor with the Frelian Pegasus Knight messenger’s head and hair that I submitted for the test. It wasn’t my first attempt at spriting anything, but everything before that had been just (bad) art for art’s sake.
The first “ROM hack” I actually played would probably have been the original FE6 translation patch.
At some point later, MK404’s reskin happened and I helped out in a few places with that and one of the FESS moderators started a forum project to do a custom story in FE7 and I contributed some of the early graphics for that as well, though I think they only got to like Chapter 3 before the project got dropped.
But, the concept of hidden things and modifications was what got me into all of this to begin with - after finishing FE7 and going online to look up to see if there were any secrets or hidden things I had missed, I came across what I would later find out was a custom mock battle image between Limstella and Sonia. It was using FE8’s battle frame (since the game was out in Japan already), but I thought that maybe there had been something unlockable that I didn’t know about.
It led me to learning about spriting and pixel art, making mock up graphics for signatures and just for fun, making icons and other graphics and projects, etc. - I really do owe that first mock battle screen for my involvement in the community back then and the whole way up to today, because I wouldn’t have joined FESS and gotten so ingrained in the series (I mean, I still might have played the games anyway, but without the online interaction element), spread out to make all kinds of connections on the forums, IRC, etc., or gotten involved in the fan project end of things.
(My first actual experience of hacking a ROM myself was doing hex edits of Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation 2 to see if I could figure out unknown data and try to modify how weapons and stuff functioned - it turns out it’s very hard to actually make modifications when you don’t have simple tools and data is completely unknown, though I was successful in a limited manner with what I set out to do…)
I think my first experience might have been the translation patch for Fire Emblem 6. I still don’t remember how I had the patience to do this by myself to this very day (I must have been like 13).
It was the patch in which Shanna was called Thany.
Either way, the hacks that I like to consider more as having first been exposed to are MageKnight404’s Fire Emblem: A Sacred Dawn DX (I will never be able to say how much I love the characters there, and especially how the members of a certain Brigade were implemented ) and Alfred Kamon’s FIre Emblem: Midnight Sun (this hack took the creepy, unsettling aspect that I enjoyed from The Sacred Stones and ran wild with it. I ADORE the main character there. The music, and the story… top-notch all around).
After that I remember running into a let’s play of Fire Emblem Bloodlines. I really liked what Ghast was able to do there.
And then Fire Emblem: The Road to Ruin. Now, I hear that this one in particular has a bad rep around here, but for me the engaging character interactions and the story (I’ve only currently played up until Chapter 8) is really well done. The scope seems to be small, but compact, if that makes sense.
Aso, since I’m a big Radiant Dawn junkie, I really don’t mind the Aaron chapters, since they’re a brief little experience. Sure, I don’t get anything out of playing them, but I love the feeling of coming back to the main army right after and getting acquainted with them again.
After that, I’ve had a good time playing through the The Last Promise (though I could really do without the Chapter 1, 7 and 10 music. They kind of hurt my ears XD). A particular highlight for me (played up until Ch.10) is 5x. Venus’ Lighthouse in the background and the overall difficulty is really something to behold for me.
Now in the future I’ll be playing through Fire Emblem: Vision Quest (my file got deleted at 1-7. Really enjoying that one so far).
I think that my first real exposure to romhacking was when an Elibian Nights let’s play showed up in my recommended videos around late 2017. I had been vaguely aware that it was possible to edit text or graphics, but I had never really realized that people were making entirely new games out of existing ones. My first time actually playing a romhack was a bootleg cart of the Last Promise, just because it seemed easier than getting things working on my computer, and I went on to play Requiem the same way a while later.
But during this time, I would think more and more about what I would do if I made me own Fire Emblem game. Eventually, I took the plunge and figured out how to dump my GBA games using a Wii and the GBA link cable. And upon searching for the programs used to edit GBA FE games, the first thing I found was the Nightmare modules and FEditor. And I have to say, anyone who made a full game with those has my deepest respect because they are not nearly as user friendly as Builder. But eventually I found Builder and armed with the knowledge I had gained from a handful of tutorials, Markyjoe’s probably being the most notable, I started making Deity Device in early 2019.
Story is probably the most important part of an RPG to me. No matter what the gameplay is like, an [S]RPG will probably never be more than average to me if I don’t care about the story and characters. And romhacks seemed to have a generally bad reputation for story execution (not trying to impugn any specific game, just stating what I saw as a general perception). Whether it’s an inundation of edgelords or just nonsensical events, people rarely seemed to be into hacks for the story. So I set out to try and make a story-based hack. My biggest motivation to keep going through all of the setbacks along the way was that agents and publishers have yet to show any interest in my fiction writing, so I really wanted to put out a story that I didn’t need to go through any sort of establishment in order for people to be able to experience it. And I thought that in the form of a game it might “trick” people who aren’t inclined toward reading to get attached to the characters and become invested in the story.
That’s actually pretty interesting.
I really enjoy Fire Emblem gameplay, however without an engaging story and characters there will always be something keeping me back from enjoying it 100%.
Also, I’m glad you were able to finish your own hack. Good job!
I have Deity Device downloaded on my computer. Can’t wait to try it out in the near future.
By the way, how did you find Requiem? I have also been curious about that one, but getting to play that one nowadays seems to be a nightmarish process…
I’m not aware of any specific issues with getting it to work.
It’s fun for the most part. I thought it had some balancing issues early game, and some maps feel like filler, but it’s a worthwhile experience. The storyline with the main family seemed better executed than the one about the existential threat to the world.
Thanks for downloading Deity Device. I hope you have fun with it.
the first hack I ever played was a pokemon hack called pokemon resolute, I remember when I used to go to my grandparent’s house my uncle would load all these pokemon romhacks along with VBA onto an old windows vista from a flash drive for me to play, I used to play every single game for hours, I remember how I saw a mario allstars rom on the computer wondering why I couldn’t play it, not knowing it was a snes game.
as for my first fe romhacking experience, about a year and a half ago I stumbled upon a letsplay by [he who shall not be named] for order of the crimson arm, I dowloaded the rom and played it on my 3ds which lead me to want to search for more romhacks, this eventually got me into actually making hacks with febuilder and even helped me find actually good fetubers!
Pokemon Blaze Black, I was bored of normal pokemon and i wanted a challenge. I came across Blaze Black and it looked interesting, so i found the patch and had a blast
I wonder if this ages myself a bit lol but I want to say it was either MK404’s FE7 reskin or Pokemon Shiny Gold. Crazy to think for the latter that we were concerned Johto wouldn’t be remade and now we have Gen 4 remakes in the pipeline. Where does the time go?
) and Alfred Kamon’s FIre Emblem: Midnight Sun (this hack took the creepy, unsettling aspect that I enjoyed from The Sacred Stones and ran wild with it. I ADORE the main character there. The music, and the story… top-notch all around).