I’ve finished the game and thought I’d leave my thoughts. Overall, it was an enjoyable experience. I think that Parts 1 and 4 are the strongest parts of the game while Part 3 and most of Part 2 kind of felt like filler, which caused a lot of the chapters in those parts to run together. Unfortunately, the game consistently crashed while displaying the turn list, and I wasn’t able to skip it either. So I had to read the rest of the ending and the extra chapter in FEBuilder. Anyway, I put more detailed thoughts below.
Gameplay
I’ll start with a confession. My motivation to try Vision Quest started with some comments within the first few weeks of Deity Device’s release comparing it to Vision Quest (mostly because of them both being quite long hacks I think), to which another user replied something along the lines of “Vision Quest is much better than this.” So I wanted to see what Vision Quest was all about and what it might have that I was lacking. So part of this was research, I guess, but I had fun along the way. And after playing Part 1, I wound up completely redesigning one of my maps for the later versions because I just had to admit to myself that it wasn’t fun and I was feeling inspired by the sorts of indoor maps that Vision Quest had, so thank you for that!
With that all said, I’ll get to actual commentary. And I played on Normal by the way (I hope that doesn’t make me lame). But I pretty much always play games on normal the first time I play because I assume it’s closest to the intended experience.
I apologize if this is beating a dead horse since I brought it up before, but Reaver Weapons on enemies are annoying. I also don’t really think they serve much purpose on generics either. A Lancereaver is useful to a sword locked player unit in order to expand the types of enemies that he can effectively fight within the limitations of the Lancereaver’s durability. However, when placing enemies, an enemy Myrmidon doesn’t have to be a Myrmidon. If you as the game designer want an enemy that is strong against lances, then why not just put a Fighter or a Pirate where that Lancereaver Myrmidon would be? I just think that makes for a more intuitive experience for the player.
By contrast, there were only a few specific instances where effective weapons were annoying. One was in Fog of War with 4-3 being particularly painful in this regard. Your units are bunched together leaving the buildings they start in, and there’s an open area laced with enemies without much ability to plan for them, so one of your units might get randomly clobbered by a surprise Halberd or Moonrazer.
The other instance when effective weapons were annoying was when they appear on reinforcements in defense maps. Maps like 2-4 require you to spread your units thin in order to do the extra objectives like visiting villages, stealing valuables, and fighting the boss with Tien. So even with a varied pool of units, what I have access to in any of five or six fronts is limited. So it’s frustrating when a Pegasus Knight with a Rapier shows up and works over Larissa when there’s not really any way to get her out of its range once it appears.
I know that you set up enemies the way you did because you wanted players to use different units rather than ignoring unmounted units, but if anything, the enemy inventories made me dig in harder to the way I typically play Fire Emblem, which is building up the mages (it’s actually kind of rare for me to use Cavaliers and Paladins in GBAFE). But mages don’t have to deal with much of what physical units have to deal with in Vision Quest, so they feel a lot easier to use. Though I will say that after I promoted Vagelis, he was the first Warrior I ever used in GBA, so that’s something.
I also wanted to mention the pacing of the chapters. So “anti-turtle” seems to be something of a gold standard, and I understand the purpose of having things to make the maps feel exciting. However, whether it was from reinforcements or something else, there was rarely a time when I felt like I had gained control of the battle and could approach it on my terms. And it’s a good thing to put the player on his toes, but the fact that just about every map plays this way makes the tension feel a bit samey. It doesn’t feel so much like an obstacle as I am waiting for something bad to happen.
For starters, Vision Quest loves to have reinforcements spawn near the start of the map or other areas of the map that I had cleared. It became quite common for me to be ready to make a push forward only to be pinned down by reinforcements from the rear and needing to take some stronger units off the front. This became less of a problem near the end of the game when more units were capable of independent action, but these reinforcement splinter attacks felt like they dragged out several chapters. I began to think that the characters shouldn’t be doubting Titus because he’s overly ambitious but rather because he’s a dolt who consistently allows his army to be circled around by the enemy.
And while Bandit placements were consistently fair as far as saving villages, Thieves going after treasure were rarely if ever reactable. They would appear out of stairs right next to the treasure and flee from those same stairs. It’s true that I expected Thieves to come for the treasure, but I didn’t know when they would appear, and it was sooner than I thought more often than not. I often had to resort to Warp/Rescue shenanigans to have a shot at the treasure because there’s no time to do anything else.
The reinforcements could also get a bit annoying in the protect the green units maps. It wasn’t because the green units were under threat. It was because the map would often reach a state where the enemies were cleared out except for whatever reinforcements would appear, and it became a guessing game as to where the threats would be and whether I had enough units to deal with them. In 4-2, I beat the boss and all the starting units less than halfway into it, then it just became watching the green unit parade make its way to the fort while I hoped I could keep them safe from reinforcements. Then 4-3x felt like it was trolling me toward the end as I had units stationed around each point where it was hinted reinforcements would come from, but it ends with four turns in a row of enemies coming from the same spot in the Southwest and nowhere else, which just happened to be the lightest defended area with only Waluyo and Ketut stationed there until I decided I would risk leaving other areas undefended to help them.
I also wanted to mention a bit about my Part 3 experience here. The resource crunch in this part didn’t make it feel great to play. I would have given up any reward in the game just to have been able to do some shopping and buy some basic items like Heal Staves and Flux Tomes. My guess is you didn’t want Waluyo’s party to be able to spend Titus’s gold, but having to hope I would find the right stuff as item drops wasn’t that fun. It almost feels like this part was designed with something like Thracia’s capture mechanic in mind, but it doesn’t have it. And the reward for saving gazelles in the Gaiden was gold that I couldn’t even use.
But Bulan and Waluyo had the army on their backs during this part, and Bulan was really hurting for gear, and then she had to share the same pool of items with Radoslov. I didn’t even have a staff to give her to act as a secondary healer for some time after I promoted her. And it wasn’t as though I was only using those two. All of the units Waluyo started with reached level 20 and promoted during Part 3, though only Waluyo, Bulan, Ketut, Radoslav, and Michael saw continued use after the parties merged.
The other resource issue I wanted to bring up was the gold crunch in Part 2. It felt to me like a good amount of the gold in mid-late Part 2 depended on stealing the various gems that were scattered around the enemies. This is fine, but I hit a bit of a wall where there were times when none of my thieves had the speed to steal something I needed. Maybe it’s my fault for not making much effort to level them up, but I can’t help but think that if stealing was going to be such an important part of the game that Esfir should have had a higher speed growth so that she can reliably steal.
So that probably seemed like a lot of critique, but those were just the things that seemed not so great. It wasn’t as though I spent my time playing while feeling aggravated. It was mostly enjoyable. Though I have to wonder what the point of the third party in the final chapter is. With Festan moving, I can’t see how they would ever get to the throne room in time to do anything.
Story
I’ll start with the elephant in the room and say that I wasn’t a huge fan of Storch. I know you wanted to make a character who wasn’t a noble (or a secret noble, becomes a noble etc) and wanted to make an ordinary guy protagonist. But I think you might have done that a bit too well because it never seemed like he really did all that much to affect the story. He felt more like a foil to the story than a part of it a lot of the time. As in characters like Titus would be doing stuff, then the scene would switch to Storch and friends discussing why the stuff the others were doing was some combination of annoying, stupid, stuffy, underhanded, and necessary.
And I guess that I didn’t really buy the whole “Hero of Port Irene” thing. He chased some pirates away and then ran away from Belaro’s army, and suddenly he was known as the Hero of Port Irene throughout the region? I also thought that he could come off as a bit wishy-washy. After he decides that he needs to stop the injustice in Belaro at the source and confront the lord, it’s only a chapter or two later that he’s saying how it’s too much and he really doesn’t want to do it anymore only to be told that he should keep doing it. Titus always felt more like the main protagonist, though a very personally flawed one, even before he was playable.
I didn’t hate Storch or anything, but he always felt like someone who was just kind of there rather than someone who mattered all that much. I think Part 2 (where Storch is barely present and it really feels like the Titus show) might have been better used to portray the idea that Titus’s troops are more loyal to Storch than to him and bring out his paranoia. This is really only done when saving Lori’s boat in 3-E to my recollection.
I also think that you might have played the storyline with Horvath too close to the chest. He comes in and out of the story in a way that makes him never really feel like a consistent factor. And the player doesn’t really get anything about him other than that he’s probably evil and pulling the strings behind the emperor. Then after 4-4 Cassius just does a massive info dump about Horvath and that there’s an evil sword and a Fire Emblem. It might have been more effective if it had been woven into the plot more gradually. Also, the way that 4-3 portrays Horvath as this unbeatable force only for him to be beaten (and escape somehow) one chapter later felt awkward. Maybe this was all to go along with the game’s theme of appreciating the simple things in life and all that dire magic stuff doesn’t matter to people like Storch, but it felt a little clunky.
The plot twist at the end with the Emperor not being the “real” emperor was kind of out of nowhere. I’m not sure if it was to try and develop some last minute sympathy for him, but it seemed odd. The flashback sequence was actually pretty interesting and well written, it just came too late to really affect my feelings toward him. It sort of reminds me of a pet-peeve I had with Three Houses’ storytelling where it felt like a lot of characters had some sort of secret attached to them just for the sake of seeming like there’s mystery around, but by the time it’s explained (if ever in Three Houses’ case) it comes too late for it to really matter anymore.
Part 3 also isn’t the best story wise. You kind of said as much in your Q&A video from last year’s FEE3. Waluyo and his party aren’t really built up to at all. It might have been better to show more of what he was doing as the invasion of Kuching was started. And all that happens throughout the several chapters of playing as him is that he’s making his way to the border, so the chapters ran together. Several of them didn’t even have an end event beyond Waluyo saying something to the effect of “Let’s get out of here.” The final chapter of Part 3 is one of Storch’s few moments of moving the plot, so that was cool.
So what did I like? Like I said, Titus was the most compelling of the protagonists, and I liked his dynamic with Helga (though Cajon and Stina kind of felt like a repeat of them, and Cajon’s face even looked like Titus’s to me). The idea of writing a story around such a flawed protagonist who the audience might not even root for is an interesting and risky idea, and it’s something that I don’t think I would be very good at without destroying his likability at some point. I actually felt like some of the others were a bit too quick to condemn him for not being a saint fighting with no self interest.
The food talk was charming, though it did often go over my head as I tend to gravitate toward very simple foods (my preferred way of eating vegetables is raw without any seasoning or preparation). But it added some flavor to the characters. It kind of reminded me of Tales of Graces where I can still remember most of the party’s favorite foods.
The characters mostly felt like real people in a lived in world rather than cutouts with one or two character traits. The only bad habit with character dialogue that stuck out to me is that oftentimes when Storch meets someone from outside of Nevan, they will monologue about their culture for a while in a very “This is for the player” sort of way.
Units
I don’t have final party screenshots because I didn’t play on my PC. However, Lera was far and away the MVP of the run. Granted, I gave her pretty much all of the statboosters during the early game. But that was because she was filling a very important niche as an offensive spellcaster. The party is starved for magic damage for quite a long time to the point that seeing that Osane was a “Staff Mage” was quite disappointing. And while Bulan surpassed Lera in raw power, she was still my most reliable unit as her high luck made her rarely take a hit. I even continued to field Marlen throughout the game despite him being extremely mediocre because he was Lera’s support bot.
Bulan was probably number 2. She was pretty much the Lera of Part 3. She capped Magic and Speed and could kill most any generic with Flux.
Here’s who I used consistently:
Storch
Vagelis
Lera
Marlen
Larisa
Nazar
Dewi-dropped for Part 3 units after party merge
Sri-dropped for Part 3 units after party merge
Titus
Waluyo
Tien
Michael
Ketut
Bulan
Sigrid
Osane
Radoslav
Waluyo was probably the only “Lord” who was reliable in combat, though he was also the most frail. Storch was about as average as his character and struggled to do much in Part 4. Titus was pretty bad until he promoted. Then he got a series of three or so levels in a row with magic and speed and was good for a while before falling off again.
Pretty much all of my Bishops were magic screwed, though Tien was my fastest unit for most of the game, and Sigrid’s Soma Thera made up for her magic not growing much until after her promotion. My Dewi had such atrocious level ups that even though she promoted at level 20 she had lower stats than Maelle at base.
Most of the time when I would get a new unit, I didn’t feel an especially compelling reason to train him or her. Most units have unimpressive bases and their growths don’t promise much, so I felt like I was piling up bodies to make Mt. Meh whenever I got a new unit. I understand that it’s part of the iron man aspect of the game, but so many units seem underpowered at join that consistently training up the newbies isn’t something I think I would enjoy. It made it kind of annoying that so often my deployment slots were eaten up by force deployed newbies that I didn’t want. And Gaidens typically meant unearthing someone from Mt. Meh and forcing me to deal with him or her for a chapter.
I guess Vision Quest is a world where anyone can suck or anyone can be amazing depending on luck. It’s very different than the way I designed units where the player characters are pretty much exemplars of their respective classes, but that’s also part of the beauty of this community that there are so many different approaches.
That should cover everything. I hope that was useful. Since you’ve offered to help me so many times, I feel I should reciprocate, so if you ever want advice on cutscene eventing feel free to get in touch.
