You misspelled Treck as “Trek” in 4-3.
I never left feedback here after my second run, and that’s because it was on Hard Mode. Not very helpful to Pandan probably, since VQ wasn’t designed around it. However to any fledgeling hackers who might read this:
Please make sure your HM is winnable without buying every stat booster under the sun and rigging the RNG for actual multiple minutes.
Maps like 2-4 and 4-E, which were already broken gameplay-wise, since the plentiful, incredibly strong and well equipped enemies start rushing you down very quickly, basically making 70% of the maps wasted space, were exascerbated by HM making them even stronger.
Make no mistake, four autolevels are no joke. Even in my own hack I’ve been running into issues just designing around three autolevels.
I do think what soured me the most on HM was how early game was still really fun. Yes, some maps like 1-8 were nearly unapproachable and I could only beat 1-E because I had a Sage Lera with B staves and two sleeps, but other than those two hiccups it was fun.
And something my brain tried to make me forget, Part 3 was nearly impossible to complete. The leap in difficulty from 2-7 (or was it 2-6?) to 2-E onwards was honestly mindblowing.
Anyway uhh don’t play VQ HM. Stick to the good modes.
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But muh Nazar with HM bonuses
I’m on my 2nd iron man (w/ conditional rewinds for misclicks & checking certain options) playthrough of VQ HM and haven’t had any of these issues. Are you trying to keep everyone alive? I think if you’re playing w/ resets & keeping characters from dying, you’re going to have a bad time, but IMO having characters die makes the game dynamic & forces you to work with what you got. I probs lost 40% of the characters my first playthrough, but that didn’t make it unbeatable at all.
I think the only rewards I was ever scratching my head over how to get feasibly was the Master Seal chest at the bottom of the last chapter in part 1. But I think being able to play through & get EVERYTHING should be considered a perfect high score.
I haven’t played normal mode, but I would absolutely recommend HM for someone who plays w/ perma death & wants a challenge.
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None yet. I recall Derfle expressing interest in making a weapon reversal patch, but we never spoke about it. Kyrads is working on a reverse recruitment patch.
I’m not big into these types of patches, but I’d be open to supporting one if someone was interested in creating it.
I know HM is far from perfect, but that simply isn’t true.
HM is beatable on 0%, which is enough of an indicator that it’s “fine enough”, especially as an extra mode. I know Pushwall was able to do v1 right around release, so I assume it’s easier now. Don’t think they needed to rig, but I’d need to dig through the old discord.
With VQ, I designed normal to be a comfortable difficulty for myself, and HM was above my level of comfort/enjoyment, which I figured was a good gauge for more skilled players who may find NM too breezy or wanted something more challenging/different on a 2nd run. Earlier in dev, a lot of the units that got HM bonuses were often overlooked or not considered to be as good, so I appreciated how HM helped these units find new life. Although it was more difficult, the big thing I liked about HM when designing it was that it felt different from NM. I felt this was appropriate since I wanted HM to feel like an extra mode for people who had beaten the game on NM.
My advice to anyone designing a hard mode is to design your hack around it, then scale down. That’s how I was designing LoT and I think it’s smoother for it. I’ve learned from my mistakes.
I appreciate the feedback and glad you liked most of part 1 - I agree it’s fun on HM. I’d need to play again (it’s been a year or more), but generally HM amplifies what’s good and bad about the hack, for better or worse.
But yeah, to anyone reading this who hasn’t played the hack: Play NM first.
Are you talking about the bottom right chest? IIRC I usually play this map on HM by funneling most of my army to the right and leaving a few to deal with the top left and reinforcements. Maybe 3-4 units up top, the rest go down. If I try to do a more even split I can move down towards the chest fast enough w/o warp. But a lot depends on who you’re using and how your turn 1 pans out. It’s been a long time for me at this point, too, so I am hazy on details.
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Yeah I think it dawned on me towards the end of my 2nd play of this chapter that there isn’t much reason not to really send it down the right side, nothing to miss on the left realistically. Always next time.
I did feel really smart about 1st turn nuking the master seal thief w/ bolting on 2-3 this second time through, i chased him around the whole time my 1st playthrough causing me to miss a lot of other stuff. Live & ya learn.
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Honestly that’s smart, I never tried this. I usually let the thief walk unless I have a beefy Natsuko or someone I feel comfortable warping in to block.
I placed otilie far left in formation, shoved once after taking out brigand in the way to turn 1 steal it and let thief wonder the map lol
I’m not one for iron mans but I did VQ my first time on HM with resetting and trying to keep everyone alive and it was very difficult but it was also honestly my favorite FE related thing in existence.
This was with trying to make Esfir my main unit and sending her out completely alone to get chests all the way on the other end of the map. Tried to get every village but 3-E finally broke me there. Think I also gave up on the robe in 1-E which I later wished I didn’t. Were stat boosters I think in 1-3? (whichever the early fog of war map was) that from talking about with a friend I didn’t even attempt trying to get.
There are mainline FE games with enemies with stats and skills that are completely unfair. I believe no such thing exists here.
Map pressure was brutal but fair. I haven’t played every FE but it’s something I’ve never seen executed well until VQ. It ties in well with the story. It forces me to make use of every unit at my disposal, something I can’t say about any mainline FE game. Nothing feels like a snoozefest or a training map. I had to work hard for everything but I felt rewarded for doing so each and every time.
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A much more elegant solution
I played HM my first time too 
Took me a month to beat WITH resets haha
The challenge was fun as hell but I did normal all my other runs
Is there a Talk requirement to recruit Tien and Freyja? I checked their profiles and didn’t see anyone on their Talk command, so I tried just having them survive the chapter and sure enough they showed up in the cutscene afterwards asking to join my party; however, come chapter 2-1x they were not in my unit list, nor did their names show up in the support menu. I sadly noticed this too late and can’t go back to 2-1 anymore, but I was curious to know if this is a bug or I had to do something else to recruit them.
I don’t know if they auto recruit if they survive the chapter or not but Storch can recruit them by talking to them during the chapter.
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You should be able to talk to them with Storch.
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I see, too bad! I assumed they had to live as NPCs since the Talk option didn’t have their names (like when recruiting Hollace and Zoya, etc) and had Storch on the opposite side of the map. I’ll have to start over to get them again, rip my free time
ETA: oh although how come they still appear in the cutscene asking to join if you don’t talk to them? Is that intended?
I think I originally intended for them to join if they lived even if you didn’t speak to them, but I may have forgotten to implement that - sorry!
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No problem, thanks for clarifying though- I was really confused there, and thanks for making the game as a whole ofc!
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Oh so my eyes didn’t fool me. So Stina only get’s the flower under certain hidden conditions? That’s awesome I love this. For those who do the specific support it will be a pleasent surprise. I was confused when I saw the flower sprite for the first time in the Support library.
As a wise man once said to the arguement he’d never find something like that without a guide - I wonder why this secret is hidden…
As long as it isn’t too eh like some Gen 1 secrets in FE4 it’s fine but even then… The problem nowadays is, now where everyone knows about these things, it kinda feels like you have to get these and even if you do a blind playthrough someone might tell you about them. Because of this they’re rather seen as something tedious to get instead of - secrets.
Personally I like to hide a fair ammount of this stuff that isn’t nessecary to beat but fun to discover for other playthroughs. In the end one or two easier to discover items will end up secret when I’m designing a game - And today there is a big chance that the player will feel sad about missing stuff. I can only reccomend to not think too much about the stuff you miss and more about what you got.
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I mean as dan noted, the change is entirely cosmetic. It’s an apples to oranges comparison with something like FE4’s brave axe or pursuit ring events.
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Yeah exactly. I wouldn’t have let Scraiza make this if it impacted gameplay beyond what the support would’ve done - because it creates the situation like BladerDJ mentioned.
Through the dev process, I grew to dislike secrets that make a gameplay difference that did not have some sort of reasonable hint, but cosmetic stuff from an optional support is totally fine IMO.
All of the info and visuals you’d get in the support room regardless.