A GBA-style tactics game where every blow is a math question.

The game

The four houses

+AddermereGreen infantry · Sir TallisSum of Shields: +1 Def per adjacent ally

×MulthorneBlue cavalry · Lady TwylaTwofold: strikes twice more easily

−MinorvalePurple magi · Lady LessaLessen: spell hits take away Def

÷DividrakeRed fliers · Duke HalvardSunder: foes lose their terrain bonus

Weakness loop: + beats × · × beats − · − beats ÷ · ÷ beats +. Opposite houses are neutral. Advantage adds 2 damage and 2 seconds of thinking time.

Features

• The Math Duel. Every strike in the battle scene is a three-choice question. Time slows while the attacker winds up, so the blow lands just as the timer runs out.
• Fast answers are criticals. Answer within three seconds for triple damage. Enemies never crit, so only the player gets that thrill.
• Four houses, four operations. Each house asks its own kind of question, and recruited rival lords bring theirs with them.
• A closed weakness loop. Plus, Times, Minus and Divide replace the sword, lance and axe triangle.
• Real GBA battle animations. 29 classes from The Sacred Stones era, played from their original animation scripts and recoloured into the four house palettes.
• Terrain is thinking time. Forests, forts and mountains add seconds to your dodge questions, the way they used to add avoid.
• A complete story. A prologue, house intros, rival duels, boss quotes, a mystery told through clues, a finale about why zero matters, and an epilogue for every lord.
• Built for kids. Three number tiers for ages 5 to 10, a Relaxed or Off timer, the right answer shown after a mistake, and units that retreat instead of dying.
• Plays everywhere. Touch, mouse, keyboard or gamepad, in any modern browser, with progress saved after every chapter.
• Pixel-perfect. Native 240×160 with bitmap fonts and GBA-style windows. Nothing is smoothed.
• The real Sacred Stones sound effects. Hits, criticals, footsteps on each terrain, spells, arrows, the phase banner and the level-up fanfare are rendered from FE8's own sound bank, and each battle animation plays the same sound cues it plays in the original game.
• An original chiptune score. Title, phase, battle, boss and ending themes, synthesised in the browser.

Why math duels

Math drills and tactics games ask for the same thing: a calm head and a quick answer under a little pressure. The Sacred Stones already has a moment where everything stops and the player watches a single blow play out. Math Emblem puts the question inside that moment. The animation slows, the question appears, and the answer decides the blow.

Hit chance is gone. There are no random rolls, so a child always knows why a blow landed or missed. The weapon triangle became a loop of the four operations, which quietly teaches that every operation has a partner and a counter. Terrain avoid became extra seconds, so a forest is worth standing in for a reason a child can feel.

Each house asks its own operation. A child who picks Minorvale practises subtraction for the whole first chapter, then meets multiplication when Multhorne’s lord joins the army. By the finale, the Null asks all four.

Art

The units, maps, portraits and backgrounds come from the community Fire Emblem Graphics Repository. The battle animations are driven by their original scripts: frame timings, hit frames, dodges and criticals. The four house colours are the four allegiance palettes the GBA games already used, so every sprite recolours cleanly. Everything else (fonts, windows, the HUD, the logo, the crest, the platforms and the spell effects) is new pixel art at native resolution.

Sound

The sound effects are the real ones. FE8's sound bank (its SoundFont and song data) was rendered sample by sample, and each battle cue in the original animation scripts is mapped to the same sound ID the game uses, taken from the community decompilation. Footsteps change with the terrain, swings and hits land on the right frame, and the level-up fanfare, phase banner and chapter jingle are the originals. Menu blips, which the GBA made on its square-wave chip, are recreated with matching pulse waves.

The score is original chiptune: square-wave leads, triangle bass and noise drums, in the spirit of a GBA soundtrack, with title, player-phase, enemy-phase, battle, boss and ending themes synthesised in the browser.