Fire Emblem: Code of the Burger King
is a ROM hack of Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones created primarily by Retina. It can be best described as an Affectionate Parody of the game's ROM hacking community as a whole, though with gameplay that helps it to stand alongside its more serious-minded counterparts.
The player's army is led by one BK, the Burger King, an armored fry cook with a familiar appearance. On a typical day of work, he winds up snapping after dealing with one particularly annoying customer, killing him before going on the run with life partner Sephiran. The rest can't quite be described as a Random Events Plot, though it winds up going places one isn't bound to expect.
The cast is primarily comprised of various Fire Emblem characters from the series' past, though with occasional memes and (yes) actual people thrown in for good measure. The game is full of secret items and characters, and the gameplay is different enough (featuring high stats across the board and a reclassing system unique to itself) that it's bound to leave a lasting impression on the player, assuming everything else doesn't first.
The main campaign (around 26 chapters including the Gaidens) is complete, and a post-game area with multiple trial maps and unlockables is still in development.
Not to be confused with Fire Emblem: Code of the Black Knights. To quote Retina, "it's just a funny name."
Tropes in Code of the Burger King:
- Adorable Abomination: Bigle, a monster who communicates through gurgling noises and emoticons.
- Affectionate Parody
- Anti-Hero: Perne is described as having "a dancer harem and child slaves," yet he's perfectly happy to lend his aid to your team.
- Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: 19th-century abolitionist John Brown appears as a playable unit, where he's shown to not only be competent with swords and magic, but also to be good friends with, out of all people, Chungis.
- The Cameo: Various characters only appear briefly for the sake of a gag. Examples include Micaiah, Sothe, and Pelleas in Chapter 15 giving you Valaura, and Bob Ross handing out the S-rank axe in Chapter 12—but only if the person visiting has the weapon rank to use it.
- Early-Bird Cameo: Late-game recruit Samto appears in a village in Chapter 5, where he claims to be Nabarl and refuses to join your party.
- Denser and Wackier: Compared to Fire Emblem, or even most ROM hacks in general. Pure absurdity is the main driver of the game's events from minute one.
- Eagleland: One of the enemy factions is "America", who you fight from around Chapter 7 to Chapter 10.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Two playable units, Soldier and Generic Ilian, are only known as such.
- Guide Dang It!: You're very unlikely to know how to get the secret characters unless you go into the developer's Discord or watch a video for each chapter, and it's possible to miss a character as early as the prologue.
- Hide Your Lesbians: Played for Laughs with Rebecca and Priscilla, who are very clearly a couple, yet their paired ending concludes with "Historians call them good friends."
- Hint System: Has a Days of Ruin-styled hint system called Tactics, though unlike that game it doesn't act as a Silliness Switch due to everything already being very silly.
- Humanoid Abomination: Lynhardt and Bernie, two characters who are quite literally composites of three different people each. Lynhardt appears to have a single consciousness in her head, while Bernie is stuck with all three people's minds switching control.
- Job System: Technically, through the B-side system; despite the game having reclassing, it instead works on a rotation, with each class only being able to reclass into one specific class. The list goes on a loop (with different classes being part of different loops), so a character can technically become any class in the chain, but only through the use of several B-sides.
- Monster Clown: Ronald McDonald, the true Big Bad.
- Mythology Gag: The basis for a good chunk of the game's humor.
- When Sephiran gives BK his personal weapon, the Ettard, he makes an offhand comment about how he thought its name was Alondite. While Alondite is what the Black Knight's sword is known as in the English version of the Tellius games, it was named Ettard in the original Japanese version.
- Sail's name is a reference to an old translation of Darros' ending in Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light, which says that he "became sail".
- Noodle Incident: The "delislicer incident." Whatever it was led to whatever Bernie is today.
- Rare Candy: In addition to the usual stat boosters, there are various CDs one can find throughout the game. These give much larger stat boosts at the expense of incurring a stat penalty as well.
- Rule of Funny: All the time. Things often happen or are allowed to happen simply because they're funny.
- Secret Character: Has multiple spanning from beginning to end. The conditions for recruiting them are often obtuse, though deliberately so.
- Ship Level: Chapter 6 features your army on a boat being attacked by pirates, led by Arrrvis.
- Shout-Out: There's a fair bit of reference humor if one's into that.
- A notable conversation between late-game recruits Samto and Papaya briefly mentions Gachimuchi.
- One of the bosses is Komaeda, though he's mistaken in-universe for real-world Fire Emblem writer and director Maeda.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: The recruitable unit in Chapter 16x is "Not Kelik".
- Take That!: Chapters 5 and 16x feature you fighting characters from Duo Geno Escapo, with jabs directed at the quality of the writing. It's one of the few times where characters from another hack are deliberately shown for a parody.
- Take That, Audience!: The boss of the final Gaiden chapter, 18x, is The Player, who speaks with poor grammar and struggles with the ROM patching process. He's meant to be a parody of people who either give up or don't even try to use a ROM patcher and just ask for a (potentially disallowed or illegal) ROM on its own.
- Vulgar Humor: Used very little, but it's seen in a few character names (Deke and Bors) as well as the new name for the Bonewalker class (Boner).
- Weapon Specialization: Many characters have personal weapons that only they can use that are usually hidden on some random tile on the map (though their locations are at least hinted at). Notably, most of them can be used regardless of the character’s current class, so someone like Rebecca can still use her personal bow even if reclassed to a Pegasus Knight (which normally can’t use bows).
