Boatinater

Hello! Just wanted to echo some of the appreciative sentiments in some recent posts. I've been lurking since about the beginning of your Shadows of Valentia play log and have made it a regular part of my reading diet. The logs themselves and the conversation they have sparked have been a nice way to relax these past few months. Three Houses was my first FE game, and I only found out about it because I was complaining to someone that I miss Advance Wars. I had loved AW when I was in high school and, in retrospect, it's stunning that I never connected the dots between Smash Bros and the GBA games. That same friend has been into FE for years now, and he helped me get started on playing through the old games when I decided I wanted to do that during lockdown in May of last year. I've since played through everything except for 1-3, which is still up in the air as to whether or not I actually want to take that on as a thing. Fire Emblem seems like such a strange thing to love, because I don't even know if I could articulate what I think the platonic ideal of a Fire Emblem game is. They all have the same bones to suck you in, but they're different enough that there are always things that I wish were different or better in each game. Sometimes there are things that I think are cool and interesting, but I also don't know if I want to see it ever again. I feel like each game ends up being more than just a sum of its specific parts, and my enjoyment of the series as a whole seems to be similar. Who knows? I'm still pretty early in my Fire Emblem experience and maybe some day I'll be able to better understand what it is that I find so appealing about it. Whether or not that happens, I'm sure the discourse in this thread will have something to do with that, so I wanted to make sure to stop in at least once and say thanks to you and your interlocutors. 🙂 I hope you enjoy your well-deserved break! And I look forward to checking in on any future play logs you feel like doing. Until then, I guess there's still a couple hundred unread pages here for me to pass the time. 🙂

This is good to know, thank you! I haven't gotten around to purchasing all of the stuff from these platforms I wanted yet since I've come back into gaming more recently, so it's nice to not feel as much of a rush.

Three Houses. I was having a conversation with a newer friend and I was explaining how much I used to love Advance Wars when I was younger. I was complaining about how there hadn't been any new games in forever and he explained that the same people made Fire Emblem. I bought Three Houses when it came out later that year and fell in love. I have since gone back to play almost all of the older games and have been kicking myself about missing out on these for so long. 🙂

I don't think they're bad; if they were, I probably would have just done this on a laptop instead. It's definitely not garbled the whole time. I haven't run an SNES emulator on anything else so I can't compare it to other experiences, unfortunately.

I think that you can inject some SNES games into a 2/3DS, but both of the Fire Emblem games are too large. I've used the injector to play all three GBA games and it's been great, just like you said. I'm using my 2DSXL to play FE4 using the SNES9x emulator and it works okay. It skips periodically but it is very manageable. I started about a week ago and have been playing pretty consistently. If you want the portability, I would definitely recommend. 🙂 One plus of having to use an emulator instead of the native firmware is that you can put the system to sleep by closing it, similar to normal 3DS games. When injecting the GBAs, you have to treat it more similarly to an actual GBA and close out - closing the screen just turns off the screen, I think, but the game keeps running. The GBA games were obviously meant to be portable anyway, so it's not a big deal and it saves all the time. The emulator also means you get save states, but honestly, I just use the regular auto-save that's already built into FE4. I'm happy to help if you have any other questions! 🙂

Hello, again! I have another maybe-an-error-but-maybe-not thing. In Chapter 20 of the Ilia route, I think that the conversation between Roy and Guinevere ends prematurely. I missed the gaiden because Zelot is dead, but when I reviewed the script on the SF page doesn't involve the gaiden, so I'm not sure it matters. The music starts to switch to the song that has the FE theme in it, but it starts while the screen is fading to the save screen. I also missed the Angelic Robe because my berserk'd Fir killed some NPCs. This might not actually be a problem, but wanted to make you aware of it just in case. The other times I've played this map I went on to 20X, so that's why this stuck out to me as seeming different. Image of the last slide before it goes to the save screen is in the quote below. Maybe not an actual issue, but an FYI nonetheless.

Haha, thanks for the clarification! I remember having seen the Klein one but haven't noticed the others yet. One of the many things that add up to give FE6 its unique personality, I guess. 🙂

I'm not sure if this is an issue or not, but it seemed weird to me and I'll share anyway. I am playing the newest version, 1.1br7, and I don't remember having noticed this in previous playthroughs. In Chapter 4, there are the two forts in the bottom-right of the map that spawn Pirates at some point. For whatever reason, the left Pirate spawns one square to the left of the fort instead of on top of the fort. This happens for both of the first two spawns, but I'll just show screens from the first. (and apologies again for poor images. this has been the main downside of playing on a 3DS). This also happens if you try to block the fort with Shanna: the guy still spawns to the left; however, if you put Shanna on the spot where the dude spawns, then it actually blocks it. Anyway, I don't know if this guy has always spawned like this, or if the recent update quirked it up. It doesn't affect much since these guys have to trek across the sea for a few turns to attack, and there probably isn't anyone in range of being attacked when they spawn, but still. Thanks again for all of your work on this over the years!

I had also interpreted him as being the same guy, so I see why you'd change it; however, I think I'd leave something like this alone. It may be a mistake, but there is precedent for leaving mistakes alone in remasters/remakes. I'm thinking of the Nosferatu-killing-Duma thing from Echoes, which I understand to have been a glitch in Gaiden that they intentionally left in the remake. Framed another way: Have you made other similar changes to correct errors? I know that some things have been added or changed to bring the game more in line with its GBA successors, but this is a little different. It's a slightly different approach, even if it is a minor one. That said, swapping out this image is clearly minor, so I doubt there would be much pushback either way. But, if you're looking for opinions, I would prefer to err on the side of leaving the original thing intact.

Is this bit of injected code what also causes giant stat inflation when a save file from a previous ROM version is loaded into a newly-patched version of the ROM? Here is a reference to what sounds like a similar bug in Gringe's translation thread made by CT075 about half the way down Page 43. Source (as of 2020-11-20): I'm curious if your changes would end up fixing this parallel issue as well, or if it would only apply to Hugh. There appears to already be a known workaround for the "patching a saved game" issue (e.g. start a new save file), but it would be a nice side benefit of fixing the Hugh bug.

You still have another mage coming up in... Chapter 16, I think? As long as you have some gold on you, anyway. :-)

Teeny tiny typo in Chapter 20 (Ilia). Please forgive the poor screenshot with my scrawled note. The rogue brace ( ] ) after "safe," scrolls by pretty quickly, so that's why the rest of the text in the conversation is still being typed out. I got this in conversation after recruiting Juno with Thea and then having Juno Talk with Shanna.

Just signed up to the forums to say thanks for the patch and I'll be installing the updated version shortly and will happily join the testing brigade! The timing of this update is pretty funny because I have been reading through this thread intermittently for the past few weeks and just now got up-to-date only to see that there was an update posted last week. Whaddayaknow! For what it's worth, I played through the v1 version of this patch using a New Nintendo 2DS XL with custom firmware installed, which means it's not actually emulating a GBA and is running directly on the 3DS. I was able to apply the patch to the ROM on my PC, convert the .GBA to a .CIA using 'Ultimate GBA VC Injector for 3DS' and install the game directly on the home screen of the 3DS. People may already be familiar with this method, but I wanted to point it out since there have been posters looking for a way to play this on original GBA hardware. It's not EXACTLY the same, but I've loved having an easy way to play the GBA Fire Emblems on a Nintendo handheld and wanted to make sure others were aware how easy it is. I'll be sure to post if I notice anything fishy while playing through with the updated patch. Again, thanks so much for your work on this! Three Houses was my first FE game and I had just finished playing through all of the Western releases a month or so ago, so having this available was great. Gringe & Co. have done an amazing job and I hope that I'm not too spoiled if I ever try out the other Japan-only games. :-)