Just finished my full playthrough! The game was enjoyable, and the story and villains were engaging.
While I find myself recommending the hack to my friends who play fire emblem, I do feel like there’s some issues with the game’s tuning that held it back from being a truly great romhack.
Exp/Scaling
Both experience rates and growth rates are incredibly high – but enemies totally fail to match my unit growth in any capacity.
I found myself fighting skeletons in chapter 20 who had, at best, a 10 in any stat. They don’t pose any threat.
I found there to be no real challenge to be had once you have a couple powerful units, and the game feels more like a sandbox to see how utterly broken you can make a few units of choice.
Since even promoted units gain buckets of experience killing weaker enemies, it really encourages funneling a few units into invincible juggernauts.
Meanwhile, the poor unpromoted foot healers are gaining 11 xp per staff use and are guaranteed to fall hopelessly behind, as they can’t partake in getting combat experience like everyone else, and it’s hard to get them off the ground and promoted.
Enemy Quality
I have to elaborate more on this from the previous section.
Not only are enemy base stats on promoted units quite low compared to how powerful player units become, but the accuracy issues are even more of a problem.
I find myself throwing my units with low defenses at the enemy with no real concern for their survivability because the enemies often end up with 10-15% hitrates on my fast units, which, given the 2RN truehit system in GBA fire emblem, comes down to a extremely low chance of actually taking a hit.
I found myself purchasing several nosferatu tomes for my Harrier so I could charge the enemy without any sort of strategy required, and I didnt even equip them very often because I wasn’t actually taking any damage to heal back.
Promotional Items / Money
The rate you get promotional items is kind of weird, you’re sharply limited early on and filling the gaps at the secret shop, and lategame there’s quite literally more than I believe are possible to even use?
I ended up selling extra whips, orion’s bolts, and ocean crests that had no applicable targets even if I promoted everyone.
I also find it weird that chapter 20 gives out so many promotional items… I’m not sure who these are intended for by this point.
If any promo item would be increased in quantity and more frontloaded, guiding rings would be nice, there’s around 7 characters who can use it off the top of my head, and the low accessibility of them early on really exacerbates the challenge of trying to use the foot healers.
The high value of promotional items means I found myself with 50k excess gold by the end of the game that I had no real desire to spend on anything beyond what I had already purchased, and “big ticket” items like the 9000 gold fenrir aren’t even worth using for free if I had one due to the absurd 18 weight.
Recruitment
The player unit recruitment in this game feels really backloaded? Units like Elias come off as really generic filler, since he joins unpromoted at the very end of ch17 as your 3rd cavalier.
It’s very easy to train up new units with the generous experience rates, and I did so multiple times, but you end up getting buckets of new units when your deploy limit is fairly tight and already full of powerful units, so I feel like much of the cast is destined to be sidelined.
Bugs
It’s been mentioned many times in this topic, but wEXP being inaccurate feels very weird. You need extra training past the moment you obtain A or S to actually use the weaponry.
Lots of glitchy graphics during cutscene transitions due to a lack of fade in fade out to hide it.
Chapter Specific Issues
1
Couple enemy mercs have a weird ‘half-range’ AI where they won’t strike on enemy phase if you’re within reach but too far out. Just make em’ hit me normally.
Upper left snag feels really extraneous and causes fighters to dead sprint away from me to go hit a log as far away on the map as possible.
3
Who hid the bridges
Can’t have shit in feuerburg
8
Flip the flag for Emil’s battle quote dialogue in the event that recruits him, had him shouting like an enemy boss even as a player unit attacking a generic enemy.
I don’t know if this applies later in the game to future recruitable red units – but check them as well.
10
Add a text warning that the pursuer will be a reoccurring threat rather than a one time chapter gimmick.
I left units behind to fight stragglers so I wouldn’t have to move every unit across the huge map, and he jumpscared me by spawning directly on top of me.
I had to restart as several units couldn’t escape, and I just killed him on this chapter so he wouldn’t show up again, despite his annoying critrate.
12
Given that this is a shopping focused chapter with very few enemies, I found the void curse reinforcements to be an irritant. They don’t really add anything to the map besides pestering the player for doing their shopping.
15
The enormous quantity of NPC green cavaliers slows down the gameplay considerably, and the very weak enemies meant that I really didn’t need their help.
I ended up with a ball of 12 green units wandering the map like a swarm of bees that just got in the way.
17
Jacob is when the bosses in this game started feeling a bit weird to fight. He can one-shot most units, but still wasn’t hard to kill. It’s just a raw stat check and nothing else?
20
The promotional items in the numerous chests were more or less useless – I didn’t even really need the money from selling them, and it’s not like we get extra deploy space to bring a thief. They don’t make for a meaningful side objective.
22
There’s no need to deploy anyone else besides the lords who can quickly rush the boss, and the chests feel extraneous with the difficulty of actually using the items before the game is over. Perhaps a series of switches that reveal a path to Moria in the corners of the map would justify deploying units to all corners of the map?
22x
Final boss was not interesting, and instantly died in two hits from Roman’s Heimdallr. I don’t like that she has a fairly high critrate from her high natural skill, since you might just have a main character randomly die – her skill stat should be lowered and weapon hitrate raised to compensate.
Seems to be a sequel hook at the end, so I’m very interested in any future projects you’re considering working on. If I seem very critical, I was to reiterate that I really enjoyed the game, and all my detailed nitpicks exist because I want it to be so much better.
