For the past 4 or so years, I have been developing a GBA demake of Fire Emblem: Shadows of Valentia, and the time has finally come where it is in a finished enough state to release. It has been a long journey and I am incredibly grateful for all the help and support I have received along the way.
The setting and characters of Valentia have always meant a lot to me, even since the NES era, while the GBA Fire Emblem games were what inspired me to pursue pixel art and served to inspire much of my writing career. It was SoV which reignited what was once such an important part of my life; this project is a love letter to both of these inspirations. It aims to blend the best of both SoV and GBAFE and address some of the (very few) misses and wishlist items I and many others had for a Valentia remake. This game features a complete support room and additional writing for nearly every character, as well as retooled maps to bring more depth to the gameplay.
The patch, as well as the readme file and full credits list, can be downloaded at the link below.
Latest Release: 2023-01-06 | Content Rating: 13+ (mild language, suggestive themes, alcohol) Sacred Echoes is a demake of Fire Emblem Ec
hey! i’m running into a little glitch involving the postgame “support conversations” extra. is there any way for me to report this / see if there’s a way to fix it?
thanks!!
Yeah, send me your .sav file through a file uploader or through the project discord
I talked about Sacred Echoes again in my latest video, on trans and nonbinary characters in FE. I wanted to highlight the work your project did with Jesse as a great example of exploring gender identity in fanwork in a way that IS almost certainly never will. I got a comment this morning on it asking about the rationale behind leaving Jesse out of both gendered promotion trees. I don't know if you're active on YT, but it would be interesting to hear what you have to say there.
I don't have a YouTube account myself, so I'll answer here.
That was somewhat of an unintended consequence, actually: I made the decision to change Jesse's class first, with the idea that people often overlook him for being yet another underleveled sword unit. I figured people would be more likely to use him if he had a more defined gameplay niche, and his class was the most logical spot to give Celica route a thief. It was much later that I got the idea to write him as trans.
To get meta about it, though, consider this line from Jesse and Saber's A support:
Jesse: [...] A country made for folks like us, free from Zofia and Rigel both. No nobles! No commoners! Just a place where anyone can live free.
His end goal is to create a place outside the dichotomy of Rigel vs Zofia where people can live the way they want as equals. I can see him extending that line of thought into "taking a third option" in his choice of unit class.
i finished playing SE last month, but i havent been able to figure out how to get the postgame stuff? all i’ve been able to do is run around on the world map and rerun shrines. did i miss something?
The postgame stuff is accessed from the main menu; hit "Extra" and then "Map" and choosing your Epilogue save.
I didn't have time to add a ton of postgame content, but once you switch your lord at least once, you'll see a new map below the Tower of Duma which lets you do a boss rush map.
Also, each time you clear any map in postgame, there's a small chance of unlocking one of eight bonus characters... Four of them have unique classes, and one of them unlocks some extra supports. The chance to unlock increases based on the Luck stat of your active lord (and yes, the Angel Ring counts towards that)
finished my cross stitch forsyth!! the art is his map sprite from @sacredechoes with very slight modifications to reduce the number of thread colors i needed :D
I'm thinking of trying my hand at some GBA Fire Emblem ROM hacking, and I was wondering, what software/program/whatever was used to make Sacred Echoes?
My workflow for Sacred Echoes ended up being pretty similar to how the original devs built FE8 - meaning I was mostly working with source code and the compiler with various command-line utilities to convert my asset files into a data format the GBA could handle. When I started the project in mid-2018, I already had some formal education and work experience in programming, so I was past the steepest part of the learning curve for these specific tools.
Please note that my methods are NOT the methods I would recommend for a first project unless you're already familiar with the software development process and using command-line tools. I went into Sacred Echoes knowing I would need to write a bunch of custom code to modify the game mechanics beyond what the beginner tools at the time allowed me to do, so I chose the more complex path. If you're looking for an all-in-one graphical editor that's more friendly to beginners, FEBuilder is amazing and constantly updated with new functions. Whichever method you decide on using, the FE Universe forum and discord are full of resources, tutorials, and helpful people, and I wouldn't have been able to succeed without them. Best of luck on your project!
That said, here's all the technical details and links to all the tools I used:
Sacred Echoes was built using a combination of GNU make (a build system used to automatically detect and compile changes to source code in large projects) and Event Assembler, a utility primarily built for editing the GBA Fire Emblem games. Event Assembler is used with a method called the buildfile, which is essentially a fancy text file with instructions for Event Assembler to insert source files into a ROM and linking different parts together. This meant I used different tools for creating each type of data. Unlike with a ROM editor (such as FEBuilder), I wasn't constantly saving my changes to the same ROM file, but instead freshly building it each time I made a change and wanted to test. This meant that if I messed up (very common when writing custom code), I could just comment out the relevant code or instructions in the buildfile and rebuild from source, rather than try to pick through the ROM by hand to fix issues.
There were cases where I would need to view and edit raw binary data with a hex editor (usually to find a pointer to compressed graphics or a data table); I prefer HxD for that.
For graphics, use any program that can edit and save .PNG files (I used MS Paint and GIMP), and then a tool for game graphics called Usenti to put them into a format the GBA can read. If you need to find and rip graphics from a ROM to edit them, GBAGE is the gold standard (and comes built-in to FEBuilder).
Maps are built from the tileset graphics using a program called Tiled.
For music, the GBA uses MIDI sequences, so any audio program with MIDI support works fine for that. (I used Anvil Studio). The MIDI file is then converted to GBA with a utility called midi2agb.
For unit data and other large data structures, I used a spreadsheet in CSV format, which can be edited with a program like Excel or LibreOffice Calc.
For map events and loading units, the GBA FE games use a scripting language called Event Assembler Language, which just gets written in a raw .txt file. A good plaintext editor like Notepad++ or SublimeText can help keep track of language syntax and keywords.
For assembly code, it is also written in a text editor, and then compiled to bytecode with devkitARM. Most of it I wrote in raw ARM assembly language (which is specific to the GBA's CPU), but in more complex cases towards the end of the project I wrote the code in the C programming language and compiled it with devkitARM.
To keep track of my source files and changes, and to make backups and version control easier, I just used GitHub because I already had an account, but you could also use GitLab or Bitbucket instead.
Finally, I used some tools made by the FE hacking community specifically for automating some tasks and formatting data - most of these are Python scripts, but some can be downloaded as compiled executables. I used "lyn", "TMX2EA", "C2EA", TextProcess and ParseFile, and AnimationAssembler. Ask on the FEU discord or check the forum's toolbox tag.
Hey! So I've heard a lot about your ROM hack, and I want to know if the rumors I've heard about more characters being queer is true. The TV Tropes page said Jesse was made trans which is metal as hell (tysm for that), but there's no way that was the only character made queer. I'm only on chapter 7 and there's no wiki, and I don't have time to play fire emblem at the moment, so can I get like the full list of queered-up characters or smth? Thanks!
(P.s. I think the ROM hack is interesting I'll have to see how it goes as I play more, whenever that happens, but it's been a neat experience so far)
Hi, thanks for the ask! Quite a few characters have new supports and/or endings with each other:
Acantha and Silque's support chain is romantic
Valbar is straight but is a close friend to Leon and they actually discuss what Leon's feelings mean for their friendship
Leon and Atlas's support chain is romantic
Kamui and Leon's support is a bit flirtier than the original
Nomah and Mycen used to be seeing each other ~30-40 years ago and can get back together with A support
Fernand's feelings for Clive are explicitly romantic and play a major role in his character arc
Clive has some repressed bisexuality he comes to terms with in light of his history with Fernand
Forsyth and Python have a bit more chemistry going on (beyond what they already did) but it's left open
Clive and Jesse are old friends and Jesse's backstory is revealed in their support
Silque and Faye's supports have been rewritten to touch more on Faye's feelings for Celica (this one's more just subtext)
I interpreted Conrad as already being aroace given the canon text of his ending!
But I will go ahead and confirm that Lukas and Conrad were written here as explicitly aroace. Lukas and Python's support from the DLC is here and unchanged, which is incredibly strong evidence for aroace Lukas in canon, and Conrad's new support with Boey does have him bring up that romance is "completely foreign" to him and he doesn't give those matters any thought.
Hey! So I've heard a lot about your ROM hack, and I want to know if the rumors I've heard about more characters being queer is true. The TV Tropes page said Jesse was made trans which is metal as hell (tysm for that), but there's no way that was the only character made queer. I'm only on chapter 7 and there's no wiki, and I don't have time to play fire emblem at the moment, so can I get like the full list of queered-up characters or smth? Thanks!
(P.s. I think the ROM hack is interesting I'll have to see how it goes as I play more, whenever that happens, but it's been a neat experience so far)
Hi, thanks for the ask! Quite a few characters have new supports and/or endings with each other:
Acantha and Silque's support chain is romantic
Valbar is straight but is a close friend to Leon and they actually discuss what Leon's feelings mean for their friendship
Leon and Atlas's support chain is romantic
Kamui and Leon's support is a bit flirtier than the original
Nomah and Mycen used to be seeing each other ~30-40 years ago and can get back together with A support
Fernand's feelings for Clive are explicitly romantic and play a major role in his character arc
Clive has some repressed bisexuality he comes to terms with in light of his history with Fernand
Forsyth and Python have a bit more chemistry going on (beyond what they already did) but it's left open
Clive and Jesse are old friends and Jesse's backstory is revealed in their support
Silque and Faye's supports have been rewritten to touch more on Faye's feelings for Celica (this one's more just subtext)
Clive and Fernand's support chain from Sacred Echoes. Functioning somewhat more like a memory prism and unlocked after the game's completion, this reveals the backstory of Clive and Fernand's relationship as we follow its deterioration across several years.
For April Fools' 2017, Nintendo of Japan put up a joke page announcing a Fire Emblem game starring Valbar, Leon, and Kamui set in the Meiji era. The page is archived and some in the English fandom have heard of it, but I don't know if the page ever got a full translation.
Below the cut is my attempt at localizing the text of this page.
Fire Emblem: 維新大乱 ~Battle of Revolution~
(see note 1)
A return to where it all started…
"For 15 years since taking on the role of Fire Emblem series producer, I have been thinking about how to make the game more accessible to a wider audience. I have been thinking of new challenges to attract more customers, such as creating TMS#FE based on the idea of what would happen if we tried to make it a modern drama, or creating Fire Emblem Fates based on the idea of allowing people to enjoy multiple stories in parallel. In that sense, you could say that 'I want to increase the number of customers' is the starting point of my approach to Fire Emblem. And now, the theme I have decided on for further leaps forward for the Fire Emblem series is 'Jidai-geki' (historical drama). I have been working with Intelligent Systems to create a Fire Emblem game that takes place in the late Edo period and vividly depicts the activities of talented local warriors as they work to create a new world. Experience a passionate story of men in the late Edo period while maintaining the fun of playing with swords, bows, and sickles, bow effectiveness against flying ninjas, and other interesting aspects of the Fire Emblem series. Please look forward to Fire Emblem: Battle of Revolution!"
- Hitoshi Yamakami, Nintendo Co.
STORY
Some things are more precious than life itself...
In a time called "Bakumatsu", the sun has begun to set on Edo and the Tokugawa Shogunate. A great famine stretches on, and many communities near their breaking points. The world of Edo is burdened by a state of terrible unrest. Though the land of Hi-no-moto has observed a long period of isolationism, the waves of distant nations have begun to break on its shores regardless.
In a distant corner in the countryside of the fiefdom of Barenshia lives a man named Barubou. Our tale begins when he is unexpectedly appointed to the Sofia Security Corps, the bodyguards to the fiefdom's daimyo Seirika.
To bend the knee to the shogunate, or to advocate its overthrow? For either path this land might take, men clash fiercely with their beliefs held high and proud as banners.
Meeting a sworn ally, and then, farewell. With the nefarious conspiracies of the shogunate's underbelly unfolding before his eyes, Barubou is shaken to his very core.
When all is said and done, which belief will he commit his faith to? The stage is set for this decisive battle in the port town of Toba...
GAME SYSTEM
Command your comrades to win the battle!
Playing the role of Barubou, you will work with your comrades to achieve each map's victory condition.
A profound and moving tale
Catch a glimpse into each major character's rich past through Imperial Orders ("sub-episodes"), as well as through Public Service ("sub-quests") packed throughout the region.
The permadeath feature that defines the Fire Emblem series persists in this instalment, and a unique new system using elements of hanafuda cards debuts in Battle of Revolution. Powerful animations breathe life into battles.
SPECIAL EDITION: Barenshia Emaki (Picture Scroll)
Scroll One: One Hundred Flowers Blooming (see note 2)
Scroll Two: A Friendship like Fish and Water
Scroll 1, which depicts the everyday lives, traditions, and culture of the people of Barenshia, and Scroll 2, which details the specifics of Barubou, Ren'o and Kamucho's lives not told in the main story, will be distributed as a set.
DLC
Running Marusu - Cost: Free
This epic quest follows Marusu, a young courier from Akaneia Fiefdom, which neighbors Barenshia Fiefdom. The boy's star-crossed fate compels Marusu to single-mindedly run around to every corner of Akaneia Fiefdom, and how all of his travels weave together to earn him the title of Daimyo of Akaneia Fiefdom.
※Delivery date yet to be announced.
CAST
馬流暴 Barubou (Valbar) (see note 3)
Despite his humble origins in a farming family, his natural talent together with his compassionate, sincere, and heroic personality led him to be selected as the head of the Sofia Security Corps. His hearty laugh is so powerful that it can even be heard at a distance of 1 ri away. Since entering his thirties, his few worries are mostly consumed these days by the size of his belly.
恋男 Ren'o (Leon) (see note 4)
A runaway ninja of the Iga school. His intense admiration for Barubou drove him to join the Sofia Security Corps to stay close to the object of his affections. Every day, he applies rouge to his eyelids a little differently in relentless pursuit of being the most fashionable man in the Security Corps. He is incredibly precise with his makeup brush, among other fine motor skills, and is often asked for help by the village girls.
暇武猪 Kamucho (Kamui) (see note 5)
Formerly a ronin. He once crossed blades with Barubou in the past, but was touched by the man's personality and joined the Sofia Security Corps. While he hates feeling constrained and lives an idle and carefree life, he has considerable skill with a sword. Although the pretty girl who advertises for the general store has caught his attention, he's never bothered to actually speak to her.
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Translation notes
(Ishin Tairan - lit. Revolution Uprising - "Ishin" often refers to "Meiji-Ishin" or Meiji Restoration). The game is set in Mie prefecture in historic Japan, in the Bakumatsu era. (between 1853-1867)
(T/N: simultaneous emergence of many talents and achievements; lit. hundred flowers blooming in profusion)
(T/N: written with kanji meaning lit. "Force of a Rushing Horse". The kanji on-reading give "Barubou", but could be kun-read as the name "Managashi Sueo")
(T/N: written with kanji for "love" and "man". Kanji on-reading give "Ren'o".)
(T/N: written with kanji for "leisure", "martial arts" and "boar". Kanji on-reading give "Kamucho".)
Kanji names are given for all characters and locations. As such I have romanized them very loosely rather than using official names (usually given in kana). As noted with the main cast's names, these kanji names are some degree of pun and not chosen solely for the sound. Celica's, for example, includes the kanji 聖 which means "holy" and 里 which can mean "place of origin", fitting as she grew up in a priory.
A fairly coding-intensive new feature planned for the v1.1 update: improved options menu! Previously, upon choosing the difficulty level, only the option to play on Casual or Classic was given after that. The new menu adds the option for Fixed Growths Mode, 0% Growths, and 100% Growths.
You'll also be able to choose whether to play using the existing GBA-style RNG (where 2 RNs are rolled and averaged together), the single-roll NES-style RNG, or the 3DS-style RNG which Fates and SoV used that curves slightly in the player's favor.
Big thanks to Smethlyn and circleseverywhere for the jumping-off point as I settle back into working with C code.
