Trivia / Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones

• Creator-Driven Successor: Prior to later games also revisiting those mechanics and the Shadows of Valentia remake, Sacred Stones took the most inspiration from Fire Emblem Gaiden, including the branching story, branching class system, the usage of monster enemies, and the revisitable overworld map with dungeons.
• Dummied Out:
  • Bosses like O'Neill, Bregeut, Saar, and Bone have hidden palette swaps within the game data.
  • The dancer's rings from Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade still exist in the files and Tethys can still use them with the same effects they had in The Blazing Blade, but they've all been renamed "Dummy" and cannot be obtained without the use of a cheating device.
  • Portraits exist for generic enemy rogues and wyvern knights, which were never used since the only enemy units from these classes are Rennac and Valter respectively.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • Unlike the Elibe games, Binding Blade and Blazing Blade, The Sacred Stones was ported to the 3DS, but only as part of an Ambassador Program. The program itself had long since come and gone, making this port incredibly rare, as it can only be found on 3DSes that had installed it before. Fortunately, it was unaffected by the closure of the 3DS eShop. The same isn't true for its Wii U Virtual Console port, since as of March 27th, 2023, it cannot be purchased anymore.
  • While the Elibe games were rereleased onto the Nintendo Switch Online service via the Game Boy Advance expansion pack, The Sacred Stones has not yet been ported into the service.
  • For reasons unknown, The Sacred Stones never had its entire soundtrack officially released on CD. Some songs from this game do appear in other Fire Emblem albums, but that's the closest the game's soundtrack could get to an official physical release.
• New Work, Recycled Graphics: Like Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade before it, The Sacred Stones reuses a number of animations and sprites from Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade.
• What Could Have Been: The community does actually have a prototype alpha build of the game that was obtained off a mistakenly-open Intelligent Systems FTP server. It revealed quite a few differences from the published game and gave some indications about how the game and it's characters developed:
  • The biggest difference, for certain, is flying trainee Amelia, princess of Frelia. That would've changed a number of character dynamics substantially (among other things, the "Frelian princess" would've been younger than the twins and likely had a different relationship with both of them), and also led to one of the trainee units being mounted. As a result of this, Tana's appearance was originally intended for L'Arachel; the final game introduces Tana as the Frelian princess and gives L'Arachel a new design.
  • The other really big one is "Dancer Neimi"; initially, the dancer character was going to be a younger character who looked generally like Neimi, except this character had red hair and eyes and a more traditional dancer's shoulderless top and armband. It's fairly clear, looking at the final product, that "Neimi" was somewhat awkwardly palette-shifted and had her upper body hastily redrawn (the alpha dancer has a somewhat more visually appealing color balance and a less visually "busy" top compared to retail Neimi) when the dancer character was redesigned in concept and the previous dancer was reworked into the archer Neimi character that went to print.
  • Forde and Kyle's status as the game's red and green knight was originally inverted in this build; Kyle has less messy hair, while Forde's hair is spikier and lacking his trademark ponytail.
  • Saleh was supposed to appear much earlier, actually, and even kills the chapter boss (Novala) himself. See info here.
  • Morva was supposed to be travelling with Myrrh.
• Working Title: Fire Emblem 8. This wouldn't be too noteworthy, except Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance also happens to have the same internal name, as that game began development before this one. As a result, there is no Fire Emblem game that internally refers to itself as "Fire Emblem 9".

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