Land of Books and Memories

I finished my third FE4 playthrough, so now's a good time for a bigger post about it.

( Extremely lengthy thoughts )

The Kent/Karla support has been drafted, leaving two to go (and two to re-draft but still). Progress! Once all supports are done, basically all the text will be done.

I'm still debating whether to do final battle quotes, because I might have to revamp the opening text for that chapter to make it work but I like what I have currently. So it's a maybe. But that would be quite short. And there's a handful of paired endings still to draft, but those are also very short. There'll be small incidental pieces of text, like faction names for units and stuff, but that's more a matter of figuring out where those are stored in the ROM than drafting them. So we're getting very close to the next stage! Which will be the most time-consuming and difficult...lol...but, progress.

At the start of 2025...there are officially only five supports left to be drafted! ...and two I want to re-draft, and I need to edit them all...but still, enormous progress! I've also started drafting the paired endings, now that the supports are mostly finished. After that, the chapter 32x convos need to be written...and then I think all the major pieces of text will be done.

Of course, creating the chapter events will be the most difficult piece...but still: progress!

( Still working on paired endings )

I'm continuing to actually make progress on SoS (which is no longer titled that lol). I wrote a bunch more support levels (I have 18 full supports so far!), finished all the chapter maps, finished all the portraits, and finished all the stat edits (those may get edited far down the road after playtesting). Not bad!

I know that full supports are not needed to finish the hack...but I just really want to do them lol. So that's going to take ages. I may try to focus on that for NaNo, actually. Once I have all of those written...at that point, the remaining tasks are:

1. palettes. All the characters that are in different classes from canon need a new palette, and Ephidel needs a palette since he was never fought in canon. Limstella also needs a new palette since her portrait was recolored.
2. paired endings. I already wrote all the solo endings but I'm waiting to finish the supports before settling on the paired endings.
3. boss stats. Once I decide on which characters to use for which chapters, I'll need to edit the stats to suit where they're located in the game.
4. chapter events. this is the biggest thing other than the supports, this is the Event Assembler files that create each chapter (unit placements, running cutscenes, etc). I'm basically saving that for last...because it will be by far the most difficult lol...

And since the FEBuilder tool was created since the last time I was working on SoS...I guess I'll have to learn to use that once I'm actually ready to insert data into the ROM. Hopefully it'll make things easier rather than harder lol.

Well, it's still a long way from being done, but I'm pleased with my progress. Me, actually making some headway towards finishing a project? It's a rare sight...

The draft of the story text for Sword of Shadows...IS FINALLY DONE! I also wrote the tactician convos (the brief dialogs that can be had with a specific character before each chapter), the fortune teller dialogs, the houses/villages text, and all the recruitment convos. I'm leaving boss convos for later because I haven't hammered out every single chapter boss yet. The like, plot-important bosses are all set but the random subordinates aren't.

This has been over a decade in the making...obviously I still need to edit it, and finish other pieces of text (loads of supports still to write), and do way more stuff (maps, events, character palettes)...and I also still want to add one or two more recruitable characters so that'll need some additional text...but still! This is a big accomplishment for me! Having an actual draft instead of just vast piles of notes! Gonna just enjoy it for a bit before I start getting bogged down in all the remaining work lol.

When I finally finish the whole thing I definitely need to do an LP of it just to like...record all my behind-the-scenes commentary lol. Probably no one will ever watch it, but I'll enjoy making it, at least.

Also, I'm actually thinking of changing the name, because it occurred to me that the big plot-important magic item should of course be called...the Fire Emblem. I mean, that's FE tradition. But all my tags for it and all the folder names and stuff are SoS because that was the name for so long! Oh well. Undecided on the subtitle, maybe like, The Forgotten War or something? The Lost History? The primary focus of the plot is on how a conflict that occurred two hundred years ago was all hidden from history and now has reemerged.