The Binding Blade "Remake" Isn't Very Good.

The Binding blade remake is the title of a rom hack that ports fe6 into the engine of fe8 an act the creator has referred to as pulling a Thanos on Nintendo because he's The Binding blade guy these two gifts were at the top of his Forum post for the first 5 months instead of like the download link which people were having trouble locating you even used to have to scroll past images of his Fire Emblem heroes account if you wanted to download the patch I'm not here to police cringe but the reason this Creator's overwhelming confidence is so funny is that what actually got released was mostly a copy and paste of a different Fire Emblem 6 remake with extra content added on top that was worse citing the well-known fp6 remake project Ember as a slight inspiration The Binding blade remake borrowed a few things such as some of ember's new playable characters all of the recolored terrain Sprites changes to map layouts and enemy positions in some of the chapters character dialogue such as newly written support conversations numerous recolors to character portraits and more when people began complaining almost immediately some of the aforementioned borrowed elements were hastily removed project Ember was then newly cited as a base for certain parts of the game which was elaborated on to include map textures and item icons however the Creator did not credit Ember for the recolors of the character portraits he used instead claiming to have done them himself citing Wendy's armor as a target for something that he personally fixed which is interesting because his Wendy Sprite is almost perfectly identical to project ember's recolor not only does he disrespect the original artwork of fa6 by calling the portraits disgusting he took credit for changes that he did not make some of the assets used are properly credited taking from a public repository that creators are expected and incouraged to use with credit however one of the only things the Creator actually credited project Ember 4 the item icons aren't from Project Ember the Ember team didn't create them they used weapon icons off of the public repository which they credited in their readme and the names of these artists have been scrubbed out under the leful gaze of The Binding blade guy before I continue for the love of God do not track down and post in this forum topic after watching the video if I see any harassment I'm going to throw all of you into the ocean any discussion can take place in my comment section so what changes are original to this remake and are they any good having just completed a full playthrough I can share with utter confidence that this remake is a buggy poorly balanced wreck the main gameplay change is the addition of skills a lot of skills each named character gets a personal skill and they will go on to receive five more from their class dumping a long list of modifiers and abilities onto both players and enemies typically applied in bulk without care or Nuance the skills in this rom hack are taken from a public Community patch called skill systems the choices of skills that were distributed are so clumsy that some of them don't even work lot's alert stance is bugged failing to Grant him an evasion bonus upon taking the weight action a bug affecting both players and enemy troubadors with the skill a sto's resourceful also does literally nothing supposedly making effective damage weapons have extra punch but it seems that was never actually tested because the weapons behave like normal when they do work as intended these personal skills alone are enough to run Havoc with character balance in vanilla fe6 fur is already considered to be a storebrand version of Rucker since she joins in the same class with four stats several chapters later however the Remake widens the Gap considerably Rucker's personal skill is killing machine doubling his critical rate quite a meaningful change as this remake also nerfed the critical boost on sword masters from 30% down to 15 fur in comparison gets a Walmart brand version of Wrath giving her a far inferior critical boost to Rucker while also requiring her to be damaged for it to take effect there are several skill-based dichotomies like this where a unit that was already a worse version of another unit back in vanilla really got the short end of the stick Ellen gets Liv to serve a skill that heals her for the same amount that she heals her allies a dubious Prospect as the average Ellen disintegrates into Cosmic dust if a physical enemy so much looks in her Direction this isn't a unit that typically gets hurt in a normal fashion unpromoted enemies in this remake have 20 strength and silver weapons Saul in comparison to Ellen gets drive speed granting four bonus speed to all allies around him which is even better than it would be otherwise as unpromoted enemies in this remake also have 20 points of speed to overcome unless they're lowlevel then they only have like 17 if you've played this hack and know the class skills off the back of your hand you may be tempted to inform me that Ellen gets miracal at level 10 and can consistently survive lethal blows and then heal back up with live to serve however bishops get imbue at level one a skill that regenerates life equal to your magic stat at the start of the turns so live to serve is still bad because the typical Ellen's magic is more or less equal to her HP stat anyway and all of this was just a giant segue to talk about how clarine as the only trador in the players's Army has unique access to power staff a skill that gives her twice as many turns on player phase if she uses any staff making her twice as good as any other staff user and she has a horse now don't wag your f and bring up Cline's low magic stat because in the infinite wisdom of the Creator's idea of game design he allows you to easily pick up dozens of spirit dust to casually cap the magic stat of any unit that could conceivably make use of it which makes Ellen even worse than she already is when comparing her skills to Sal and clarine as her only Advantage is her overwhelmingly High magic which is now worth nothing I sort of have to talk about send home units the only source of spirit dust and the reason you can cap anyone's magic stat I'll mention again that this remake is in the engine of fe8 which only allows for 50 playable characters in your army before you start to encounter bugs however the player can recruit far more than 50 units as you no longer lose out on units on account of Route splits and there's also a bunch of returning cast from F7 on top of bonus playable characters from the story of F6 to account for these extra characters going well over the safe limit the Creator simply asks you to dispose of your unwanted units by grinding their bones down into Spirit dust for your Mages to snort since the number of playable characters vastly exceeds the number of units you can use in any given map you can easily get like three dozen Spirit dust this way without really impacting your game play you are prevented from killing important characters such as Walt it goes without saying that your base stat and growth rate for magic doesn't really matter anymore and you can even play a round of magical light brands on non-magical characters if you feel like it despite handing out Spirit dust like pixie sticks on Halloween and giving like seven different characters gale force these aren't even the most broken things about the game balance the worst offender is actually capture capture is a skill that P over a mechanic from F5 you can engage in combat with heavily reduced stats rewarded by the ability to take the enemy stuff if you defeat them the ability to take anything you want has large implications that were very much not accounted for you can even rip the teeth and claws off of monsters because the fe8 Tower of vony is here for some reason and if you're enough of a historian to know about the vanilla fe8 dark magic glitch if if you somehow get your hands on Monster magic your units can actually use it normally you need to glitch the game to do this but capture just lets you take the Spells off of the monsters and this isn't even the funniest thing you can do with capture it's actually the ability to steal firestones hey your maniy was buffed heavily absurdly so to be honest but it's at least balanced by the idea that her use is limited by the durability of her Dragon Stone but since you can capture you can set her up with an infinite use fir Stone and solo the rest of the game fairly easily f is nearly impossible to kill since she has 40 defense heals herself constantly cannot be crit automatically cures negative status and has Miracle to automatically survive lethal blows if she has over half HP allowing her to muscle through an effective weapon that has 84 might against dragons since enemies can have random skill procs that just kill you like 20% of the time having Fay to mitigate that really helps this abuse of capture isn't some kind of isolated oversight in the Creator's game design the Remake is absolutely riddled of frustrating oversight to either detract from the experience or trivialize it chapter 14 is a good Showcase of the low level of foresight and polish present in the game play lolina and gvir have unique Mage classes but the Creator forgot to give them freedom of desert Movement Like sages Shaman and Bishops which causes them to get outrun by clarine who's on a horse also while thieves are supposed to consistently pick up desert treasure Kath can't because she's a woman I am not making that up only male thieves and Rogues work for this because the Creator didn't install the patch to expand the number of class IDs that always find desert treasure however since I had already put Chad into the bone grinder and I promoted aalo into assassin none of my available units could pick up treasure without getting lucky this isn't the only map with notable Problems chapter 22 didn't have enough reinforcements you're meant to encounter heavy waves of extra wyverns if you step within certain zones of the map and while the sizes of those zones and the reinforcements themselves are properly defined in the editor by the rom hack Creator the event flags are broken for several of these and I could not get them to spawn like they do vanilla F6 I'm seriously wondering who tested this and why it didn't get fixed on the other hand chapter 23 has way too many reinforcements causing them to Spring forth repeatedly from the same tile as if exiting a clown car because they seem to be spawning in before you reveal zeph's throne room and stacking up inside of each other if you wait enough turns before knocking down the door you can probably stack them 10 to a tile before hitting the enemy Unit C there was also a hilarious bug in sake where the true boss guarding the mullar was supposed to spawn in for a showdown but she didn't show up and the map's clear condition resolved when I killed a random unnamed unmarked Nomad in the corner of the map guess we know who the real boss was chapter 16x was mired in visual bugs rapidly changing the color of the skyline every turn sending me deep into outer space and also apparently the guacamole Dimension putting the bug Maps aside many chapters suffer from Bad design even when functioning as intended while Roy's Army heads to Ilia elliewood brings a B team of F7 veterans to sake to fetch the migar for Roy 90% of the sakan enemies are nomads with bows and you get lovely characters such as Florina a flyer weak to bows with no dely Shield nor javelins with which to fight archers even funnier every single Nomad has bow breaker and as part of some weird arms race between the player and the enemy the player archers also need bow breaker to cancel it out and make it possible to engage in combat without losing 50% of your accuracy except Rebecca's bow breaker stops functioning if they swap to swords and they still have bow breaker activated on her making her close counter skill really bad bad for retaliating at one range she also didn't even have bow breaker on her Rebecca's bow until an update 5 months after the game was released so she had an enormous handicap versus 90% of the enemies in sake chapter 13 is also pretty messed up because the bosses have passive leadership stars that Grant hit and avoid bonuses to All Enemies on the map and cutscene zephiel and narian standing around for a few turns unintentionally stacks on 11 of those bad boys giving the enemies plus 55 chance to hit and 33 to dodge which made them nearly kill geese by punching straight through Lance Breakers 50% bonus evasion against lances in general most of the maps are typically identical to either vanilla or project Ember and the only notable changes involve giving the enemies massive stat inflation and 5 million skills yeah unpromoted and mmons have 25 speed the only maps with particularly notable new content outside of sake are the Guiden chapters which add boss fights versus the heroic spirits who originally used the Legendary Weapons however Roland was too weak to handle Wendy and some of the bosses didn't even spawn in so I've missed out on two of the fights I do want to praise this change for making the Guiden chapters less susceptible to warp skipping and the addition of an extra boss as well as Treasure Chest to earn made me actually not only play but enjoy 14x on its own merits just kidding 14x is still fundamentally terrible because all enemy sages have a chance to proc glaes adding an unexpected random 20 to 25 damage to their bolting TOS I also warp skip 16x 20x and 21x anyway because an extra boss simply couldn't stop Bay in general giving not just bosses but also some generic enemy types these small random chances to do an alarming amount of extra damage is frustrating and always has you planning for the worst case scenario mercilessly killing you if you forget even one of the dozens of relevant enemy skills I ended up killing zephiel of Sophia because Sophia's knee hill cancels all enemy skills and I didn't want to take an extra 50 points of damage from resolve and Vengeance kicking in simultaneously I found that the Remake shares the vanilla fa6 problem where the early game is harder than the late game but it was a bit more extreme in this as chapter 4 is straight up nightmare territory on hard mode but once I hit chapter 8 and really started scaling up some of the hilariously overbuffed units like Shauna and Wendy the game ended up getting considerably easier and many units can outright trivialize the last third or so so if I didn't enjoy the game play what about the other stuff there are story graphical and musical changes although most of the music changes are simply on account of fe6 and fe8 using different sound fonts and excellent tracks sometimes got completely replaced with new themes that didn't really fit the vibe there are many changes to the game script and I do like some of them conceptually the script of F6 is fairly dry and is told mostly through Roy speaking to less every chapter the Remake puts an emphasis on characters such as lolina giving them major speaking roles and giving Roy people his age to connect with and show more emotion I've long held the opinion that lolina should have been a proper Lord and Story character in practice I do not like the execution the Roy lolina romance is pushed heavily relying on anime tropes like jealous cat fighting Delina is incapable of acting remotely normal if other women are on screen or mentioned which makes it really funny that I paired off Roy with Shauna something I will praise is gwy ofir taking a more active role in the story as well as joining your army she proactively tries to talk down Bruna to avoid further unnecessary Bloodshed of burn and she's there for Roy's promotion and zeph's death what's a bit odd is that there's a enormous bias for Walt who almost completely replaces Merin and calls people older than him young man as a result Walt gets inserted into almost every scene from chapter 1 to final and while I understand that Roy deserves a friend his age and that the two grew up together the blatant Walt favoritism in the script is so Stark that the original release of the game featured a Roy and Walt solo of chapter one you didn't get to use Marcus Lance Allen or bores all of this is made funnier by the fact that Walt is still pretty bad outside of his Walt bow usually the names of prf weapons are just copied over from Fire Emblem Heroes no matter how awkward those names are like the cell Spell Tome if there wasn't anything to copy from the mobile game the Creator typically went with names structured as character name space weapon also geese mysteriously has the Riptide from Project Ember actually that was later renamed to the flowing axe to Reference fire em Heroes again but the weapon stats are still from ember's Riptide in fact this level of unoriginality permeates throughout the original cut scenes added to the game as most of it is just referential slop that brings up Fire Emblem 7 as often as possible which makes the game script no longer stand on its own without essential outside context of a different game sometimes the new scenes are just complete rewrites of old scenes such as Florina showing up to to fly away from archers while screaming in order to get elliewood to come to Lyn's Aid which is exactly the plot and dialogue of f7s noble Lady of Kalin nothing in this remake seems to exist without being derivative of something else that already exists and if it is completely original I don't like how it's written elliewood makes a big showing in chapter 3 in an elaborate Showdown to come to Hector's aid but isn't actually present for Hector's death he's just sitting outside the room while his best friend's last words are shared of his son and this entire time I've been generous and kind regarding the Creator's original dialogue it's not just subjectively bad from my perspective it's riddled with typos and missing commas all over the place and Falls far short of the quality standards set by the original script it's not just the script that lost a level of quality and polish as part of the update the graphical overhaul is also full of holes a large number of the game's animated assets were placed of new versions from the public asset repository but were treated with a clumsy hand when it comes to character specific color palettes take the boss from chapter 5 the outline and Shadow under his feet are pure black failing to match the unified standard set by every other Sprite in the game and presents an issue with contrast the two colors used to shade the pants are barely different have poor readability do not provide appropriate highlight or Shadow and make the lower half appear washed out and homogeneous which is made even worse by the incredibly harsh outline character portraits also occasionally have severe issues that should not have survived 3 seconds of testing the boss of 12x has green teeth when he speaks and the outline on the side of his head blinks in and out of existence every time he closes his eyes some of the new character portraits are far inferior to the quality standards of the vanilla game to use the Creator's own words when he was talking negatively about the base game's art Direction I Would like to say that in this case I am quite convinced that the portraits are disgusting actually the reason for this ugly mug used for HART moot the original wielder of The Binding blade is that he originally used a portrait stolen from Queen sword hold on he stole from something that wasn't project Ember that's character development baby most of the rest of the cast is either copied from Ember or an earlier version of ember's current Sprites you can actually see where he tried to lift peral's black armor from Ember lifting completely identical Shades of Black but he forgot to remove peral's blue eyes to compensate and ran into the color limit running out of space to include the darker purple color on the scarf resulting in a blurple monstrosity that doesn't know if it's supposed to be saturated with color or not this all ties back to the general idea that The Binding blade remake is essentially just a riff on other existing versions of Fire Emblem 6 but worse if you overlook the quality control issues and don't cheese the game as badly as I did with the layers upon layers of exploitable nonsense I didn't even fully cover I'm sure you can enjoy the gameplay for what it is because it does succeed at fulfilling a power Fantasy by making characters like Roy and lolina strong enough to truly run Havoc when they hit a high level however at as an established ROM haacker myself I can only condemn the Project's use of assets I understand that a rom hack is a derivative work and that you're already building off of an existing game without permission but at a bare minimum everyone involved knows that you did not make the original game that you built on top of and I find it unacceptable that so much from Project Ember was passed off as a Creator's own work such as his claim to have done his own character portraits and if nobody had complained there would have been so much more remaining in the project that this guy would have taken credit for like the original support conversations from Ember some of which were written by a friend of mine the craziest part of this to me is that I don't even like project Ember I mean sure it's very well produced but I dropped off less than halfway through because I didn't like the game play I only mention it so often here because the binding blade remake bothers me from an Integrity perspective ultimately I do do not want anyone to track down and harass this guy nor do I want to dissuade anyone from getting into ROM hacking and toying around if your favorite game if there's one thing I want anyone to take away from this please pour your own creativity and passion into your work not someone else's [Music] [Music]

Channel: Shark3143

Views: 123,877

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Id: k9FS3ZIO73E

Length: 24min 30sec (1470 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 26 2024