So I’ve beaten chapter 11 by now, and I decided to write down some thoughts, since I do intend to keep on playing and I’m worried I will forget what I wanted to say if I wait until I finish.
I’ve had fun with this hack, it’s certainly playable though that’s no surprise. I don’t consider myself to be fairly good at FE, I played on Normal difficulty, and the difficulty has been uh mostly manageable. Chapter 10 was something. (I know Normal isn’t the “intended” way to play, but I had to juggernaut those waves with Shorn, Rivkah and Griss a lot so that felt a bit off compared to the game philosophy). I did manage to somehow beat it on my first attempt though. The enemy number seems somewhat high, Edric is now sitting on level 20 on chapter 11 already and I kinda have to not use him now because he still hasn’t promoted (though I haven’t checked if I could maybe promote him with a hero crest? seems unlikely though). I really really like Rivkah, she hits hard, has consistent high crit with her skill, and is really durable, which is helpful fighting swarms of enemies with high enough HP that most units can’t one round them. (If she decides to leave me, don’t tell me. I’ll bear the brunt of my own failure)
I think some of the portraits need work. Edric, Harlan, Elyse, Rivkah, they look fine, but there are others that aren’t as much so. Shorn’s skin feels like it has way too high contrast compared to the skin of all other units, and Hilda and Catrine feel kind of choppy, not sure how to describe. Nadya also feels a little off, though maybe it’s just me. And I think Zeddard should maybe have a portrait that isn’t just a recolored Uther? Making portraits isn’t easy I suppose and it’s just visuals, but at least for me, it took a little from the surprise of fighting Zeddard for the first time when I see that it’s just Uther.
Story and dialogue wise, I had to recheck the first chapters with FEBuilder, because I remembered the dialogue being kind of rough. Seems it wasn’t actually that bad, I’m not sure where I thought that now, but there were some instances of [A] used a few words before the end of a sentence, creating unnatural interruptions in the middle of a character’s statement - which is a bit of a pet peeve for me. If you ever go back to the first 10 chapters, looking out for those might be worth, since those initial chapters are what make the impression for new players.
Story wise, it didn’t initially grab me. The setup seems very clearly FE9 inspired and so is the opening of the hack - you spend a handful of chapters being removed from the plot at large, taking on bandits and then Ormer, and learning some bits and pieces about the overarching plot as you go before you’re thrust into it. But it feels a lot slower than FE9 in that, y’know, each of the chapters are actual chapters, not glorified tutorials - so while you could reasonably play FE9 all the way to Greil being killed by the Black Knight in your first sitting, playing this hack all the way to the twist in Ch9 which essentially kickstarts the “real” plot (or you could argue the twist is in Ch7, but the same still applies I feel) is going to take you hours. So it felt like I was barely progressing towards the plot and spending busywork in a war that I already expected to be plot-twisted into a whole other conflict from the tropes and hints. Or, I don’t know, maybe this is just my personal experience. I don’t dedicate a lot of daily time to play my FE game/hack of choice, so I usually only beat one or two chapters at a time, thus it felt really long to see where the game was leading to.
But once the twist in Ch9 happened it was pretty good, not revolutionary when it comes to storytelling but it works - and Ch10 certainly strengthened the impact of that twist, both in how overwhelming it feels and in all the characters we previously knew reappearing to drive the point home. I liked it, it was pretty nice. As I said, I’m going to keep on playing and see where this leads to.
Also, one more thing to add. Having done a bit of hacking myself, I certainly know it’s really annoying to have to keep track of which characters are alive and which are not for every chapter’s story beats - but I’m not sure if I like the solution of “make every other character forbidden to be killed”. I feel it lessens the point of playing a game with permadeath when for some time the only characters in my party who were even allowed to be killed were… Hilda and Dwalt (I think. I haven’t gone back and checked, but I definitely remember almost everyone in my party being a story important character.)
