okay, so i beat this roughly 3 weeks ago. i didn’t originally plan to write a review, but then i realized there wasn’t any reason why i shouldn’t, and i do want to share my experience with this hack.
i’ll just get the basics out of the way first – the hack was very good. i enjoyed the main cast of characters, especially storch, and i think the writing in particular deserves a highlight; the dialogue writing is excellent and made me laugh many times, whether it was due to a reference that i picked up on or due to it simply being amusing. i also enjoyed the dialogue writing in the more serious moments. apart from that, i enjoyed the overarching theme of food; in terms of story, it didn’t have direct relevance beyond early part 1 (for the most part), but i did enjoy it as a recurring thing, as i believe stuff like that adds flavor to a hack (ha!) and it definitely did here.
in regard to gameplay, i also thought it was quite good. i played on normal mode, as that was the recommended difficulty, and my experience was pleasant. i liked most of the maps and i particularly appreciated the use of reinforcements; i’d heard negative opinions about vision quest reinforcements, but since i’d recently played a hack where reinforcements kept arriving too late, i really enjoyed the reinforcements here, because they didn’t arrive late. i found that they were all rather well times, barring an exception i will go into later that could very well be a skill issue on my part.
if i had to highlight specific maps i did not enjoy, one of them would be the blaine map (4-1), as it ended up just being a bunch of turns spent moving through a chokepoint. i know that was the entire concept, it just didn’t play very well in my opinion, because the map had a lull in the middle when i was just killing stuff on the bridge. i would also highlight 2-e as a potentially problematic map – i can see a lot of people being incentivized to skip it, and it’s not particularly difficult to do so, and you do have the tools for it. playing it straight feels a bit awkward, because you aren’t engaging with the whole thing, your path is laid out from the beginning.
finally, speaking of skipping, i think 2-4 is probably a polarizing map by design and i belong to the camp that didn’t like it. the way i played it was that i ignored every reward and went straight northeast, toward the boss. the justification i had for it was that i didn’t have enough sufficiently strong combat units to stretch myself thin and pick up items from enemies in every segment while also preventing everyone from dying. i did attempt to play it as intended for a bit (getting all the stealables, defending from every direction) but then i realized i couldn’t be bothered to do so and just went for the boss. i at least appreciate the fact that going straight for the boss is an option, i think that was a good call.
one more thing: i found 2-7’s pacing rather awkward. i had no idea how quickly i was supposed to move through the fog, nor did i have any idea when reinforcements would show up to threaten the logs at the starting point. i initially assumed that there would be some reinforcements there early on, but they didn’t show for several consecutive turns. finally, i decided to move the units i left with the logs in order to have them get some action elsewhere on the map - and THEN the reinforcements spawned, which i felt was far too late. i was almost approaching the boss at that point, and i wouldn’t say i was rushing at all. i lost some logs to that, and i didn’t bother to reset because it just felt awkward and out of flow with the map, which is not something i’d attribute to most other maps in VQ (they are generally in good flow). it’s also worth noting that 2-7 is relatively easy to skip, but skipping it does require foreknowledge and setup, which i’m okay with.
also, a more minor point: in 3-e, the last 4-5 turns were dead for me because i killed essentially all the enemies by then and visited all the villages, so i was just waiting in place and killing reinforcements. that likely would not be the case on hard mode, as i would spent more time dealing with the enemies, but on normal mode, that’s what happened. perhaps my units were unnaturally blessed, but i did rely a lot on waluyo, whose base stats are equally good for everyone, so.
in regard to stealables – i appreciate the fact they’re there, but i would prefer there to be fewer stealables – with more relevance. there are many more stealable teal gems in this hack than anything else, and past the earlygame i didn’t bother to pick them up because i wasn’t spending enough money to justify it. and indeed, i only shopped twice in this playthrough, once in part 2 and once in part 4. i didn’t feel any regrets about this and i had a ton of items to choose from in part 4, largely because every unit that joins you comes with an inventory you can yoink. i’d appreciate it if the stealables were fewer in number, but greater in importance – not so great that missing them cripples you, but significant enough that you do want to get them. steal+ doesn’t count, though i did notice the fact there are tons of steal+ targets in part 4, which is good. that’s when i got steal+ on dreyfus. i know that people grind him up a bit to get steal+ earlier, but i didn’t do that because i almost never do combat with thieves, and while using him like that, i had to kill some of the axe users in the southern part of 4-2 for him to actually get to level 5.
i suppose i should talk about units now. i did definitely have standouts, but i will say that every unit seems viable, which is probably what you were aiming for. this hack would likely be quite good for ironman playthroughs, given the number of units you have available and how frequently you get them, without even having to keep certain units alive for the most part. i might attempt an ironman sometime in the future.
however, i also did get quite a few units that got sent straight to the bench because i didn’t feel like they had a niche which justified adding them to my existing team. this was particularly prominent in part 2. at some point in part 2, i sent about a dozen units in a row straight to the bench, and i don’t think i’m exaggerating with this number. perhaps slightly. i had a core team and the new units felt more like replacements – which isn’t inherently bad design, just something you might want to take note of. i just yoinked their inventories and had them sit around and watch from the sidelines.
also, the start of part 4 is pure pain. radiant dawn is my favorite fe game, so the perspective shift in part 3 was something i really appreciated, and the cultural shift + big group of new units + an entirely new party kept things fresh. i also think this shift was a good maneuver for the story’s sake. however, what it led to in part 4 was that i had a ton of units i wanted to use, but far from enough slots, so i had to regrettably drop many of them. this isn’t an issue unique to vq – radiant dawn has it as well (the tower) and it’s also painful there – but in radiant dawn, many units are such no-brainer deployment choices that you aren’t left with all that many “flex slots,” so to speak. in vq, on the other hand, i felt like i could use twice as many units as i was allowed to deploy, and the only no-brainer choices (the lords) were force-deployed anyway. perhaps radiant dawn’s approach of having you divide units into three armies would work better in part 4, though i am not sure if that’s possible to implement in a gba romhack. it would even make sense in my opinion, as we do already have three lords, so why not? at least it would mean i wouldn’t have to completely bench a bunch of units i think are still viable and would do a good job.
i don’t think this deployment thing is a big deal, but i did want to talk about it for a bit. in regard to the units themselves, larisa is the best armored unit i have ever seen in a romhack, and mine wasn’t even particularly blessed. she is super useful early on for tanking, and continues to have good combat later on. kir is also a quite good armored unit, funny how that works. so is titus, but only after he promotes; he has a slump in between his dire thunder breaking and him promoting. waluyo’s defenses didn’t scale very well, but his offense was consistently good, and he was the sigurd of part 3. storch was extremely strong, but i did give him plenty of boosters, so his performance likely wasn’t representative of the average storch. my tien was very fast and had good magic, making him a great combat unit that doubled as a healer, and i also used dewi + onisim full-time for extra staffing, adding anwen into the mix when she joined in part 4. sarka is an absolutely epic pre-promote whom i sadly benched in part 4 but who did a lot of good work until part 3 (she also has my favorite portrait in the hack), my surya was rather stat-blessed which made him really good, erasmus was surprisingly solid despite his stats not looking so hot, and my cajon had very good stats (presumably also blessed) alongside bringing a valuable skill to the table. vagelis was a consistently useful bow user, i used cashew as a temporary unit until the end of part 2, i used esfir and/or dreyfus for thieving, arckady until the end of part 2 (mine got a lot of speed, which helped his longevity), and i think that’s it. i tried to use lera and marlen, but both ended up with very underwhelming stats, which is a common experience from what i’ve been told, especially in lera’s case. i love their dialogue and interactions in the story, though.
sorry if this was hard to read up to this point, but i find it easier to convey my thoughts when it’s like this. thank you for making the hack, this was a very pleasant experience. it did have hiccups that i talked about above, but nothing that made me thoroughly not enjoy the hack. i finished it in a timely manner because it kept me engaged and it played well, and i believe that you successfully avoided difficulty hiccups, which always annoy me when they occur in other fe games/hacks (and they occur quite often).
one thing i might also mention is that almost every map was small, and while i personally didn’t mind it, some variety wouldn’t have hurt. i appreciated the part 3 gaiden that involved waluyo’s past largely because the map was… well, larger, making it feel distinct. though the green units killed the boss before i could do it myself, which was pretty funny. the endgame being small and the boss moving also surprised me, and it led to me completing that map in 5 turns – which may not seem like much, but which is very low for me, even though i tend to play fast. i don’t remember ever taking this few turns in endgame unless i was skipping it, and i didn’t skip this one at all – i just played it straight until the boss started moving and then i killed the boss. i wouldn’t say this was a negative, this was just surprising. i also enjoyed the full backstory on the boss being revealed before we killed him, that was nice.
speaking of the boss, one final thing that involves story spoilers.
major story spoilers
everything revolving horvath obviously suffers from this hack not getting the sequel that it was designed to get, which is unfortunate. it makes this hack feel like path of radiance in terms of story, but without a radiant dawn to complete it – except it’s structured more like radiant dawn than path of radiance, which makes this analogy slightly weird (but i provided it anyway). i still think the story was overall good, and i really loved the final scene where everything came full circle and titus turned into a red unit. i also really liked the scene where storch decides he doesn’t want to serve titus and is just going back home, i think that made perfect sense for his character and stuff like this is a major reason why storch was my favorite lord. he just has simple priorities and sticks to them, and it’s not a bad thing that he has them. he contrasts quite nicely with titus, who starts out with noble intentions but allows his ego and promises of power to get to his head because of that stupid vision that he turned into a quest. waluyo is… i’m honestly not quite sure where he fits between them, he’s kinda like sigurd in terms of approach to warfare and he wants to do right by his people + is rather warlike but i didn’t see any obvious parallels between him and the other protagonists. i think he was a fine character and i liked the fact that we got to play as him for a bit, i’m just not sure where to place him as a person in terms of story structure.
and that’s it. again, thanks for reading my musings if you got this far. i probably should’ve spoilered this whole thing but i didn’t.