The problem, as usual, is that everyone has ambitions but few have execution.
The hard truth? People like @Crazycolorz5 have authentic leadership, which means they have respect of their peers. This is why when CC runs a blitz, people actually do something.
The failed blitzes are started by… Well, I’ve never even heard of half the users.
As I am often told, if you want something done properly, do it yourself.
Ouch, I did dun goof. Won’t be making a mistake that large again.
I like the concept of the Resource Blitzes, but I can’t help but feel like the Quantity Over Quality mantra really does them a disservice. For examples, the recent Mugging Blitz had somewhere over 200 mugs submitted but a lot of them were either memes, basic edits, a combination, or just things that you can’t really use in a serious hack. The same goes for the Music porting blitz, where much of the music ported probably can’t be used in a serious hack because the tracks won’t fit an FE hack tonally. One person submitted a ton of stuff but self-admitted that the quality on most of them were “garbo”. Like, what was even the point of making them if the final product is of terrible quality? That was the blitz I was most disappointed by even if there were some good tracks that came out of the whole thing.
I get that the blitzes are meant to be open and accepting to people of all skill levels. That’s not a bad thing. But I wish some people put a bit more effort into their submissions so that others can actually use what they’re submitting outside of some weird meme hack.
I can do nothing but agree. I only posted a few songs I thought would fit FE, and did mugs that were actually good.
If you’re going to post something serious, or make a serious hack, don’t ever lean into straight-out cancer. I swear, 70% of Mugging and Music Blitz looks… off, and I only found a few usable FE-styled mugs. 
As the writer of Void’s and outliner of Resonance’s plot, the Blitz “Lore” is the biggest mistake I have ever made. I’m still willing to write chapters for people who elect to not include writing in future Blitzes, but the so called “Blitz Lore” will be quite changed. Tl’dr, leave the writing in Blitzes to me, I’m still down for that, but this “deep lore” shit needs to go. The first Blitz’s plot was a giant shitpost on my end, and before I lost the faith in Resonance to write it, IT was to be a giant shitpost. My Blitz writing is not a lore, it’s a shitpost meant to give people who want dialogue in the Blitz hacks dialogue. Nothing more, nothing less.
Disclaimer: My involvement with VBA consisted exactly of helping circles fix a few git issues. I have little to no stake in this game.
I poke my head into the various biltzes organized on the forum, on our discord server, etc occasionally. One thing I’ve noticed is that, for at least the full projects, at least one of the organizers seems to have some expectation of quality coming into it. Whether that be writing, map quality, whatever – the organizers have some idea of what the final project is going to be, as far as it being “finished” goes. And this idea happens to be in everyone’s heads before the “blitz” is done.
If you ask me, there’s nothing blitz about that. That’s a semi-curated community hack. And that can be fine, provided that the organizers are actually willing to stick it out (from what I’ve heard of Resonance, most of them weren’t). Everyone is actively working together to reach some semi-realized “final product”, and I get the impression that people expect it to look something like Void’s Blitzarre Adventure.
I followed VBA a bit more than I’ve looked at any of the others, so I can say this with a bit more confidence than anything else – the highest expectations VBA were held to, internally, were that the game wouldn’t crash too much on a “reasonable” playthrough, and that the game would be theoretically beatable. That’s it, really. From my memory, a few last-minute tweaks were made to achieve this, but for the most part the first release wasn’t changed much from “the least-buggy least-unbalanced combination of the community submissions”. Of course, the final release of VBA was generally more polished by scriptwriters, bugfixes, balance tweaks, etc, but that’s beyond the point (if it were up to me, I would never have touched the project beyond the initial release, and forced any script/balance/etc changes to be released as a fork) – the original project only became what it did because Circles held everyone to a very strict deadline. In fact, I’d argue that’s even why it’s called a “blitz” – it’s a tight-ish deadline, so you have to blitz a bunch of chapters quickly to get anything out at all!
Let me reiterate that there’s nothing inherently wrong with trying from the get-go to assimilate a bunch of community-submitted chapters into a semi-cohesive result. A little-known fact is that Dream of Five was birthed from the ashes of an old Serenes Forest forum hack attempt. But I think many people looked at VBA, saw that it was Good-ish and was (allegedly) the product of nothing more than a bunch of middling hackers throwing chapters at a wall. What a lot of people don’t see is that the project now known as Void’s Blitzarre Adventure went through a more traditional polish round by the team, and from what I could tell, that was controlled much more tightly. Making the game actually cohesive wasn’t really a concern until after every chapter was in (or even until the first release was out!)
This is incidentally why I think resource blitzes are dumb. The whole “quantity > quality” idea works for chapters because the end goal is to create a full hack, and the bare minimum for a hack to be playable is pretty low (“stable enough to play through most chapters without crashing”, “not blatantly unbeatable” and “not eyebleedingly shitty graphics”). What’s the end goal of, like, a mug blitz? A picture book? A meme mug repository? I agree with @FPzero’s comments in that if the goal is to create a large collection of usable mugs, then the mug blitz has completely failed that purpose (who wants to sift through 50 “garbo” mugs to find one that actually works in a non-meme hack?)
I swear the one day i go to sleep early shit goes down
From someone who didn’t follow the blitzes much at all, this was very well written. But I would have liked it better if you stayed objective the entire time, like a historian looking back rather than a critic adding his two cents.
It’s meant to be an essay, so it’s not purely a documentation of historical fact. Personally, I liked the analysis on why some blitzes were successful and others weren’t.
The issue with blitzes is the format itself, aptly described by the community as quantity over quality. You can’t really expect to churn out content in such a mechanical way and expect anything good to pop out of it.
I don’t agree with that. The first release of Void’s Blitzarre Adventure is demonstrated proof that you can absolutely make something releasable under a blitz format.
If anything, I would argue that the failure of the other “blitzes” is because the participants didn’t embrace the format enough.
As a counterpoint, VBA is certainly playable (as you say, releasable), but is by no means a grail of quality.
Nobody said it would be, nobody said it is, that was never the objective.
So is the goal to release something of adequate quality or to release something good? Because VBA, at it’s best, was adequate (and fell short of adequate numerous times as well).
This is, of course, speaking merely of the gameplay itself - half of fire emblem is the writing and characters, which is wholly absent in VBA.
Was it meant to be?
I would hope not, but if the goal is to release something mediocre, then be my guest?
Would you rather release a mediocre product or no product?
None, preferably.
Well, this is the fundamental philosphical difference. I would personally rather see ten 5/10 projects than zero perfects.