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ROM Limitations - Lyn Mode, Eliwood Mode, Roy Mode


Cecil Hoshino
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Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem, did something that I always thought was brilliant: it included two "books," a remake of the first game and then a full on sequel, while the whole package was a refinement of the systems already established in the first game and (to a lesser extent) Gaiden. The idea of having the prequel and the sequel together in one place always delighted me, and, so, for someone looking to get his start with ROMHacking, a thought a neat idea would be doing the same treatment for Fire Emblem 6 and 7, where, instead of Hector's Story, you played Roy's Story, which was Fire Emblem 6.

Mapping out the Chapters (including trimming Lyn's story down to 7+1 Gaiden chapter, 30 Eliwood Chapters in a mix of main, Gaiden, and A/B Route splits, and trimming off just one Chapter of FE6), not only is there enough room for all the Chapters from 6, there's room enough for one more chapter in FE7 to better tie the two together.

However, there are other limitation concerns I was wondering about:

1. Character limitations. Counting Wallace/Geitz, Nils/Ninian, and Harken/Karel as one unit each, Fire Emblem 7 has 46 available characters by the Finale (45 if we consider Merlinus's lack of deployment and Athos's ability to deploy as them exchanging character limit positions). Applying the same to Lalum/Elphin, Echidna/Bartre, and Dayan/Yuno, Fire Emblem 6 has 50 available characters (51 if we count Merlinus). Is there room enough in Fire Emblem 7's ROM to accommodate 50/51 available, deployable characters? What's the hard cap for available characters?

2. Speaking of Character Limitations, while you'd never have them all in one room, that is still 103 individual recruitable characters, not to mention all the new bosses (even if we trimmed out all the Monke's down to 1 in the Sacae Route Gaiden Chapter). Can the ROM support all that character, unit, and portrait data, let alone potentially 7 new playable characters (5 NPC's and Bosses promoted to playable in FE7, 2 NPC's/Bosses in FE6)?

3. Support Limits. Restoration Queen ran into technical problems with FE8's ROM, working around new paired endings, that some of the originals had to be cut. A potential "Elibe Book 1, Book 2" project would have all the supports from 7, AND from 6, AND all the endings from both (the shortened endings would obviously be cut, but that's still all the full character endings). What are the hard and fast limits on new supports and new paired endings (if, say, one of the new playable characters had a support and paired ending with one of the original characters?)

4. Would it just be easier to remake both FE7 and 6 in Microsoft XNA like FE7x is doing? It'd technically be more work but there would be so much hardware room to work with?

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Yeah, Arch, Yeti Skitty and I all took some time a few months back to discuss the specifics of a FE7 -> FE6 combo game. We had some insane zany ideas, even FE7x -> FE7 -> EN -> FE6 combo game was one hilarious thought, but that level of work is so stupidly convoluted it'd be way inadvisable. We ended up with basically "Rewrite FE7's script and pairing to make FE4 generations style possible" but it's also stupidly convoluted and it would be a hell of a mess. FE4 works because it's 5 chapters for half the story and 5 chapters for the second half. It also has less than half the characters a FE6+7 combo game would have. You literally need to divide the number of chapters by at least 3 (Given FE4's insane chapter length) and the number of characters by half to get a game that would still take a professional game dev team on a paid salary years to complete.

And all this, done by a single guy or a small unpaid internet team? Get real, it won't happen. FE7x is the highest quality game in the fandom, and it's only doable because Yeti has put 5+ years into it, and he's an extremely proficient programmer. Making a game twice the size and length with a convoluted new generational system just ain't gonna happen.

However, remaking FE6 and FE7? Perfectly doable. Tedious, time consuming, but quite doable.

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The idea of this project, for me, was to get my feet wet with using either XNA or RomHacking in general, and for that aim, I thought a minor "expansion" adjustment to FE7 and FE6 would be a good, simple start; nothing too major, just a little expansion here or there, just to get a feel for the systems in place before taking on more ambitious projects.

Although, from the sounds of it, the expansion is fairly ambitious, itself?

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