Story
Ngh… this is terrible… House Akaneia must truly be cursed. As you know, two years ago… Hardin and Princess Nina were wed. In order to restore Akaneia to glory, a king was needed. There were but two suitable individuals: King Orleans’s younger brother, Duke Hardin, and you, Prince Marth of Aritia… Princess Nina begged me to wait just a while longer, but once I insisted of its absolute urgency… She said that it could not be you, for Princess Sheeda would grieve. In the end, Hardin was our only choice…
– Bishop Boa of Akaneia, talking to Marth, as he lays dying in front of Pales Castle
In this scenario, Hardin of Orleans had married Nina, but she did not return the favour. In truth, she loved General Camus of Grunia, who was thought to be long dead… That is how it goes in the original Mystery of the Emblem. But what if Nina chose the other option available to her? What if she chose to wed Marth instead, regardless of any grieving Sheeda might go through? Biraku Emblem serves to explore this alternate history of Akaneia.
This story begins when instead of appealing for help to defend Orleans, Hardin fought to defend it by himself at all costs. Join Biraku, loyal knight of Hardin, as he tries to make sense of it all. Along the way, he finds himself involved in many misadventures…
Information
Biraku Emblem is the first hack of Mystery of the Emblem to be more than a simple reskin. Initial development of the hack consisted of a reskin of Book 2, with a new storyline generally described in the above paragraph. Biraku, known as Vyland in official translations of FE media, is now the main protagonist, and Marth ultimately becomes a villain. The maps and events are largely unchanged, though there are enough minor alterations that makes it worth a run through. Book 1 is the interesting half of the game. The map order is completely rearranged, and several custom maps have been created. Maps remaining from vanilla have had their events rearranged to fit the new plot, and the characters recruited have also been changed.
Its technical accomplishments are impressive, but the storyline contents are questionable. Portions of the dialogue are somewhat vulgar with several sexual references present. 7743, the creator of FEBuilder, described the most notable character modifications and explicit content in a post on the FEU thread. He did it better than I can, so I will link to this post here. Points of comparison can be drawn between Biraku Emblem and the western GhebFE: impressive technical abilities for the time, but crude text pulls things down.
Project Status
The current patch translates almost every menu in the game, with the main exception being the initial file select menu. This menu uses the dialogue font, which has not been touched as the actual dialogue has not been translated. A complete translation with no relation to mine has since been made by brandnewscooby. It is available on Fire Emblem Universe, on this thread.
Gallery
Downloads and Links
Download (1/5/20, v1.0): Here
Fire Emblem Universe thread: Here
Project source is here
Romhacking.net page is here