What's Eternal?
Oh god why did I decide to post this at this hour?
Eternal is a rom hack for FE7 that seeks to focus in on the combat of FE, giving the player waves upon waves of enemies to face off against. Ideally, each wave asks the player many questions, it tests their fundamental ability to get out of a tight spot in FE.
Rescue is key to success, good planning is, positioning is key.
There's no real objective beyond just
not dying but this objective can prove quite hard, and the loss of even a single unit is even more devastating than in a regular FE game, you only have 6 units the entire game.
Dilly-dallying is punished and quick, decisive but ultimately
thoughtful gameplay is rewarded. Enemies will be powerful and very threatening, they spawn on a turn based system so those who can kill them quickly will be rewarded with the extra time to reposition, safely heal up, buy equipment, etc. those who cannot? They will be swarmed and eventually lose.
The beauty of Eternal is you never really lose in the course of a single enemy phase - you have no lord to protect to give you that instant game over. When you lose in Eternal, it's a slow, painful death. It's something that happens because 10 turns ago you screwed up and it's started eating away at you ever since then. But this also means if you make some particularly fantastic plays you can also recover spectacularly from these falls from grace.
You'll be given 2000G roughly every 10 turns. You will have very restricted funds for this fact, and you'll have to seriously consider how you play and what to buy for that fact. Healing is expensive and more powerful weapons don't last forever.
This becomes more true when the game isn't only 15 waves long.
On the tenth wave of our current 15 we see our first "boss wave" - this will be a spike in difficulty that will leave you feeling incredibly pained but should you survive it you'll have a short hiatus to heal up and things of that nature.
How do I play it?
You will (I'm pretty sure) need
NUPs.
If you're unsure how to do apply the patch, it's quite simple!
Here's patch V0.03 - Get yourself a clean ROM of FE7.
- Get NUPs and create a folder for it, "extract here" (probably requires WinZip but I assume you already have that).
- Open NUPS.
- Hit "apply a UPS patch to a file".
- Next to "file to patch" hit browse, and find your clean rom of FE7, select that, try to have multiple copies of the rom just in case.
- Next to "UPS patch" hit browse, find the file that I linked you and select that.
- Hit "Patch" and if all goes well it should give you a confirmation message you'll be ready to load the ROM and start playing.
How can I help?
Glad you hypothetically asked.
There's a short list of things you can do for me, while the list is short it's a lot of help and it's a lot of work.
- Play it.
This is the number one thing. Just playing it will help me be motivated to pump out updates and continue to stride forward on this, it's a lot of work to make this. I love making it, but I wouldn't spend as much time without knowing other people will play it too.
- Give me your thoughts.
I will watch every second of your playthrough if you make one. I will read every word of your response if you write it. I am genuinely interested in what you have to say no matter your skill level.
I may not get around to it instantly, I admit, but I will in time and it will help me.
I'm especially appreciative of bug reports. Currently I am aware of inconvenient but ultimately unimportant black screening.
What's new?
Honestly, this is largely just a refinement of last patch and cleaning up a few things before I make a gigantic mess screwing with weapons
next patch. That said . . . Funny enough,
this patch is a gigantic mess. I did a really bad job with actually keeping track of what I did. It tied up loose ends but I can't really express that to you because I'm a dumbass. Anyway,
WAVES. - Extended by 5 waves, first 10 waves have been brushed up and I believe are quite satisfying. The changes are incredibly numerous, so I'd recommend just playing to properly understand them.
UNITS. - Isadora has had her strength and speed decreased to cut down on the incredible amount of ORKOing she'd do. Her durability has also be decreased decently, overall this should make her threatening and with any one other unit probably kill one of your dudes but as an individual not quite as crazy and frankly boring to deal with.
- Lowen has been given some extra durability and bit of health.
- Death quotes have been modified to exclude Lyn.
I have plans for these in the future, but for now they're just bland.
It was particularly hard to test Serra's death quote.
WEAPONRY. - Descriptions have been added to many items.
- A variety of non-player weaponry has been adjusted it. For example, steel blade has had +30 accuracy applied to it and had it's weight lowered to help units that will appear later on be more accurate and damaging.
Spears have also had their weight lowered, their might lowered, their crit lowered, and their hit increased.
- Steel sword accuracy increased by 10.
- Steel axe and lance accuracy increased by 5.
- Sleep durability down by 10, price increased by 200G.
- Iron shortbow's MT is lowered by 1, it's accuracy by 5.
- Iron longbow's MT is increased by 1, it's accuracy by 5.
Iron longbow's WT is increased by 7, leaving Rebecca with -2 speed while using it.
- I . . . Think I changed silver weaponry to be a higher rank and steel to be a lower rank? Sorry, I really had no idea I kept such poor track of things this patch. Won't matter anyway since next patch it'll probably change.
- Iron runes are buyable for 1K. Not worth it. But they exist. For some reason. Thought about putting them in the starting shop for 200G.
MAP. - Biggest changes to the map are just these. The forestry by the shop gives the player a few more options early on and just makes things easier and the top island further encourages the idea of using Florina to attack from far away, practically speaking the second change does basically nothing.
- There's also a little house. Dude's not worth talking to. I regret everything.
- Also there's a secret! It's a location based event. Not entirely sure where said secret is going buttttt eh, we'll see. It's something. It'll be more in the future.
Plans for next patch.
- Weapon balance. A lot of it.
Next patch I intend to make gigantic, sweeping changes to weapon . . . Well, weapon everything.
WT, MT, ranges, pricing, etc. We're going to see more options for everyone early on, hopefully, and make weapons that currently are quite shit to buy, such as steel weaponry, useful again.
- Wave rebalancing.
This is a necessity of making gigantic sweeping changes to weaponry. I'd rather do it now instead of later though.
I'd rather balance the waves around good weapons than the weapons around the waves (good or otherwise).
Shouldn't have waited this long, honestly. Still, the general idea of waves is a lot harder than actual statistics of it all so it's not a big deal.
- Unit rebalancing.
Again, this will need a lot of work after we make a ton of weapon changes.
I'll really have to balance units and weapons in tandem though, to make things work well.
- Better planning. This one's key.
I'm working on spreadsheets for all the weapons we currently have, looking at things like that will make making changes and such much easier.
Similarly I'm going to take a lot more notes, any time I notice something that I want to remember I'll write it down, no more "damn, what was that idea again?"
I'm not going to forget, when I write something down it's not going to be vague either. Ultimately this means next patch, and just future patches in general, will be much better, much quicker, with greater focus and documentation.
- Considerations from the community.
Naturally what you guys suggest to me is going to have a big impact on the next patch.
Thanks for reading / playing.
