Adventure Legends: Emberbond — 灯の契約

An original Game Boy Advance action-adventure about a small light and the companions who travel beside you.

The complete adventure has 78 areas, 128 companion forms across 60 families, 48 equipment items and 64 global quests. This release brings 23 original regional music cues, individual companion collection browsing, equipment previews and lasting boss treasures, connected roads, native GBJ text and ending credits. See music and reproduction and source publication.

The world fills the native 240×160 screen with floating corner controls. No commercial-game ROM or extracted game assets are needed. 日本語の遊び方、ネタバレなし

Start playing

Open emberbond.gba in mGBA or another accurate GBA emulator and set your keyboard/controller mapping. At the title, Up/Down chooses and A confirms. Choose Continue for an existing save; Start also starts or continues directly. New Adventure opens with a short village story: release the title button, then use fresh A presses to advance or Start to skip. Continue resumes without replaying it. The first save starts after the opening finishes.

Button	In the world
D-pad	Move and face; follow roads across map boundaries and walk through doors/stairs
A	Attack, talk or examine; hold and release to fire a bow
B	Use the selected companion’s power; a recalled companion joins you automatically
Short L press	Switch to the next occupied party slot
Hold L, then Left/Right; release L	Browse every owned companion, including reserves; B cancels
R	Call or recall your companion
Start	Open or close the menu
Select	Unused

People and puzzles use A. Exterior roads connect at the north, south, east or west boundary of the map. On a scrolling map, the edge of the current camera view is not a map exit. Walk through building doors and stairs where the scenery leads into them. Closed routes show a visible barrier and a brief hint without opening a dialogue. Deliberately talking to people and examining objects still uses A. Area names appear on arrival; the corner companion bar shows power recovery.

Choose a menu, then press A

Start opens Items & Money, Equipment, Party, Skills & Evolution, Map, Quests, Controls, Return to Adventure, and the Collection journal. Use all four directions to browse the hub and A to enter. B goes back one level; Start closes. Directional browsing repeats while held; A confirms on a fresh press.

• Equipment: Left/Right chooses the body part; Up/Down previews its items; A equips. Choose the explicit removal entry and A to remove it. Removing a weapon returns to the protected starter sword
• Party: the 001/072 indicator means individual 1 of 72 owned companions; No.001 is that individual’s stable storage number, retained through evolution. 枠1 means currently assigned to slot 1; 控え means in reserve. Empty shows 000/072 and is not included in the owned count. Left/Right chooses a slot; Up/Down browses owned companions or Empty; A opens its description, then a second A assigns or swaps. Empty followed by A clears a slot. One companion must remain, and only one legendary may be active. No owned companion is released or duplicated
• Skills & Evolution: view the companion selected with L in the field. Current level, bond, and EXP needed for the next level are shown. Up/Down chooses command or evolution. Left/Right previews learned commands; A opens an explanation, then a second A selects. Up/Down in the explanation switches combat/field help. Recovery is shown in active-play updates, which pause in menus. Evolve with A opens all current/required level, bond, story, personal-trial and resting-place goals, even before they are met. Up/Down shows the authored trial clues and the new form's phase, polarity and technique. Left/Right chooses an alternative form and its exact trial. When every requirement is met at a resting place, a separate fresh A confirms the irreversible evolution; B cancels
• Collection: the counters record forms obtained out of 128 and families joined out of 60, including forms retained in history after evolution. Up/Down browses discovered families; Left/Right filters discovered, currently owned, or still incomplete families. A opens a family, Left/Right browses its forms, and A on an owned form opens that exact individual in Party for deliberate assignment. A on a missing form with an owned predecessor shows read-only growth goals. Previously obtained forms remain recorded; unseen families stay hidden. Browsing never assigns, evolves, consumes supplies, or saves
• Quests: choose a region with A, then a named request with A to open its clues. B returns through the request list, region list and hub. Map opens at the current place. Up/Down examines exits, A opens known places, Left/Right chooses a known region, and A inspects the chosen place. B returns one step. Undiscovered detours remain unnamed

Previewing changes nothing until A. Equipping never heals. Finish an attack, recovery or live arrow before changing equipment. Attack and defense use game stat points; health is in hearts; ordinary walking speed is indexed at 100.0. The arrows compare current and selected equipment after active treasure effects and caps. Companion recovery is approximate active-play seconds for the selected command; a smaller value is faster. Weapon reach is the ordinary opening attack in pixels, and stagger applies to ordinary enemies. Recovery gear affects future companion uses without restarting a timer already running.

A short L press switches once to the next occupied party slot, skipping empty slots and wrapping in the existing party order. Hold L until the horizontal carousel appears, then press Left or Right to browse every owned individual, including reserves. Holding a direction repeats after a short delay. The center card is the preview; the small cream marker identifies the active individual. Release L to choose, or press B to cancel. A reserve replaces the current party slot; a legendary reserve replaces an existing legendary party member when necessary. Displaced companions remain owned. A summoned companion is replaced immediately; a recalled one stays recalled. A long neutral hold keeps the current companion. A direction during a short hold suppresses the short-press cycle. After cancellation, release L before reopening.

Menus and the picker pause the world and power recovery. Opening the picker cancels a power that is still being aimed, without refunding its cooldown. Already emitted effects keep their existing lifetimes; changing an individual, command or party can require that companion's field action to be started again. B uses the selected power and automatically calls a recalled companion. R calls or recalls without using a power. When R and B overlap, release B before using a power again. Evolution changes the same individual, preserves familiar field powers and may be deferred. Completed evolution cannot be reversed.

Swords link three cuts, lances make a narrow longer thrust and bows can be charged. Opening a menu or the field picker cancels an unfired bow draw.

Money, supplies and treasures

Combat briefly shows the EXP actually awarded and the G actually earned. The notice waits while menus, dialogue or the held-L picker cover it, so opening a pause menu does not use up its display time. Check your wallet under Items & Money or at the first village's shop. The A symbol appears when the village shopkeeper is in talking range. Talk with A, browse with Up/Down (hold to repeat), and use A to review and confirm a purchase. B cancels. Prices, owned quantities and the selected effect are shown together; controls remain visible after a refusal.

Heart Tonic restores two hearts. Spirit Tonic clears the companion power's current wait. Iron Edge is a one-time permanent +4 attack-point upgrade. Select a supply in Items & Money and confirm with A. Full health or an already-ready power prevents needless consumption.

The three original-chapter bosses and four later main-boss reports award money and unique permanent treasures. The receipt explains the effect and shows the G actually credited; later reports also show any actual earned EXP. A continues, B closes. Owned treasures work automatically without equipment slots or bag space, and their effects can be checked in Items. Undiscovered names stay hidden. For an older completed adventure, the village shop highlights a missing-gift entry; review and confirm with A. The original report point can also deliver a missing gift. Each treasure and its money can be collected once. Loading alone claims nothing, and recovery does not replay quest EXP or refill health.

Save and continue safely

Progress saves automatically. Routine travel and combat saves use a small indicator while play continues. Some purchases, equipment changes and important rewards wait for recording to finish. Let saving finish before closing the emulator.

On failure, the last successful record remains. Open Start → Controls → A Retry save and retry before quitting. The failure clears only after success. After defeat, A retries; completed progress and owned companions remain.

Before upgrading, copy the ordinary .sav as a backup. Match ROM/save basenames, such as emberbond.gba and emberbond.sav, choose Continue with A, and wait for loading. Transfer ordinary SRAM across versions, not emulator save states.

This update writes Save5 content revision 11. Ordinary saves from Village Morning G7, Connected Roads C4, Experience Polish P2 and Player Feedback R7 (content10) migrate forward without resetting progress. Supported formats2–4 and Save5 revisions1–9 also migrate. A cold Continue uses the retained safe checkpoint, which can differ from the transient position just after a road crossing. Never open a migrated content11 save in an older ROM; use the untouched pre-upgrade backup when returning to an earlier release.

To intentionally replace progress, select New Adventure with Up/Down and A, then confirm again with A. B or Start cancels the replacement prompt.

Build

Requires GNU Make, Python 3 and ARM bare-metal GCC. Generated data ships with source, so a ROM build does not require art fonts/Pillow.

• With the official devkitPro GBA toolchain, set DEVKITARM and run make
• Or use compatible arm-none-eabi-gcc / arm-none-eabi-objcopy on PATH
• Or make ARM_PREFIX=/absolute/path/to/arm-none-eabi-

Output: build/emberbond.gba, plus ELF/map/symbols. Tool setup describes the isolated official Debian packages used in verification.

make assets regenerates original graphics, text, creature tables and puzzle data. It explicitly selects the reviewed Connected Roads world successor for the two historical creature-prefix guards; see the generation contract. It needs Pillow and the Noto Sans CJK font used by the generator. Generated C arrays remain in bounded include chunks; do not combine them into huge monolithic files.

Test and capture

Install the documented Linux mGBA dependencies and build the native bridge with ./tools/build_mgba_bridge.sh; make test-tools checks that bridge. The pinned isolated dependency layout is documented in tools/README.md. Tests that use native mGBA require those local tools; they are not bundled binaries.

make test runs the equipment/treasure host aggregate and retained gameplay, menu, economy, migration, geometry and save interruption checks. Specialized current checks include:

python3 tests/test_companion_browsing.py
python3 tests/test_ending_credits_host.py
python3 tests/test_gbj_font.py
python3 tests/test_horizons_audio.py
python3 tests/test_field_controls.py
python3 tests/test_field_carousel.py
python3 tests/test_short_l.py

For current release acceptance, run both suites:

python3 tools/run_gameplay_ci.py --suite host --output build/ci-host
python3 tools/run_gameplay_ci.py --suite native --output build/ci-native

These exercise physical B powers, the preserved short-L party switch, and the held-L+Left/Right owned-companion carousel. The native capacity gate separately labels historical and prepared 160-companion saves. Older standalone control routes explicitly refuse current acceptance; their original tests remain available in the historical checkout.

Native scripts under tests execute the actual ROM in mGBA. Run their --help for explicit ROM/symbol hashes, output and dependency options. Start every run in a fresh output directory with the matching ROM, ELF and symbols. Synthetic late-game preparation is distinct from controller-earned travel. Host passes do not establish native timing, physical hardware behavior or a complete fresh 78-room campaign.

Older scripts target their historical releases and may require archived producer evidence. See publication scope before treating those scripts or old reports as current release acceptance. A clean forced build must reproduce the accepted ROM hash; source hashes alone cannot prove that reused build objects were current.

python3 tools/package_source.py produces a deterministic source ZIP. Generated C arrays stay in bounded include chunks. Build outputs, ordinary runtime saves and compiled dependencies are excluded.

Credits and limits

Project licensing is recorded in LICENSE. The original project world, characters, code-native pixel art and original regional music are credited in the ending roll. Third-party GBJ, Noto and DejaVu fonts retain their separate usage permissions and license notices; see assets/fonts. Handheld top-down adventures inspire readability and movement; no Nintendo characters, maps, music or extracted game art are included. The standard cartridge boot-identification header is included for GBA compatibility.

Physical GBA hardware, flash cartridges, other emulator/compiler releases and the macOS native bridge-build path are unverified. Source/signal checks and emulator capture do not establish subjective listening quality. The hosted gameplay regression workflow and local reproduction steps are described below; review the exact candidate checks before merging.

GBJ font successor

GBJ / GBJ-Slim by GeeBee: https://geebeegb.itch.io/gbj. Both official atlas/config pairs are included untouched. The GBA pipeline precompiles their native pixels into UiRuns; no GB Studio engine is required. All story, menu, map, companion, gear and treasure labels use GBJ where available. Kanji and unsupported symbols use Noto Sans CJK Bold at 10px; lowercase uses DejaVu Sans at 8px. Existing compact dynamic stat digits and the authored title wordmark are intentionally retained to preserve narrow numeric cells and performance. See font provenance and usage.

Regenerate font text only with make font-assets (Pillow, fonts-noto-cjk, fonts-dejavu-core required); make assets also includes it through the existing individual generators. Native GBJ glyphs are never rescaled. Existing text IDs and vertical layout boxes are retained. All contributor, asset and tool credits, including GeeBee and the official URL, appear only in the ending roll. Source legal notices remain bundled. The title has no author-credit footer.

After the ending card, the credits scroll automatically once controls are released; A starts them sooner. B or Start returns to the village. The final thanks screen waits for A to replay the roll or B/Start to return. With a completed save, open the journal, choose Quests, select the first/current-journey entry, then press A on its ending-replay prompt. Replay never resets progress or requests another save.

Automated gameplay debugging

The Gameplay regression workflow runs clean reproducible builds, current host/sanitizer checks and bounded native mGBA controller/save/menu/early-combat tests on pull requests and main pushes. It retains logs, replay inputs, test saves, screenshots and native audio/video for debugging. See coverage, limitations and local replay. Synthetic diagnostics and inherited cold-Continue stalls are labeled separately; this is not a complete campaign or physical-hardware certification.