I downloaded the patch ages back but didn’t give it a try. Now that I’ve had time to do so, I can say it’s pretty interesting. I’ve played up to chapter 8, and I have some feedback to share.
Story (spoilers)
This is quite the bold move for the story. The ‘whole amnesiac meets a cute girl’ gets beaten up and tossed in the trash.
However its difficult to buy the fact that 6 people the majority of whom have no little combat experience were able to take down an empire’s capital in 6 chapter (in a lot of FE’s there is the assumption that there is a large army accompanying the lord but here there’s nothing to indicate that) even with the excuse that most of the army were unavailable, but I recognize that the prelude section shouldn’t take too long.
The ‘commoner to consort’ background of the lord is quite interesting, especially with the ‘existing relationship’ dynamic which has some potential.
I also like the fact that the village genuinely was destroyed by Rebekka’s actions and that Jacob and co. have genuine motivation beyond ‘brainwashing’ rather than it being a cop out and Rebekka is did nothing wrong moment.
While I haven’t finished the current build yet, I believe how Roman’s reputation as ‘chopping through imperial forces as a band of 6 superhumans and then suddenly switching sides’ having consequences may be interesting later on, to the local population and imperial soldiers.
Gameplay
Note: This is my experience on hard mode
As a whole I feel like generic enemies are far too weak, and juggernauting with a strong unit is not only possible, but optimal. As a result there a lot of chapters where its just throwing units forwards and watching them go to town on large hordes of generics who get either one rounded or close to such.
It’s fine for the first few chapters but very soon Lily practically stops taking damage and Rowan level capped in 3 chapters withing needing to spoonfeed him exp.
I feel chapter 3 houses are a counterproductive as it takes up turns to actually visit them and the message is ‘hurry up’, and said running enemies weren’t even hard to take down since units can juggernaut fairly easily.
Chapter 4 was probably my biggest issues with the weak enemies since Lily can solo an entire section on her own with a javelin and the constant reinforcements feel like a massive grind.
Chapter 6 was quite annoying in that the chests were on every end of the map and droppable chest keys coming in 1 was very difficult to inventory manage especially since units other than lord can’t directly supply. This is compounded by the fact that units can only trade once.
I suggest perhaps having 1 or 2 droppable 5 use chest keys, and I think adjacent units being able to directly supply from lord and/or Thracia trade would makes it much less irritating to swap around items.
From a glance, units seem to use default skill system class skills. I believe this is inadvisable as fairly little thought has been put into skill system defaults, and many players experienced with skill systems are put off by such. An example of such is the focus mages which gives just enough crit to be able to screw over your game.
I think aptitude is a really pointless skill, just give the unit more growths.
I recognise Sabrina is meant to be funny gimmick unit but she feels awful to use.
She has less defence than Saif, Roman and Reiner and is perhaps one of the squishier units due to her speed.
6 strength is awful especially for a low speed unit.
Such problems are magnified because every other unit has great damage output and can easily 1 hko or 2 hko most enemies, while Sabrina not only struggles with 4 move but even killing. While she can 2 hko Mogalls she is either 3 hkoing or 4 hkoing every other enemy, and it is a genuine struggle to even get enemies down to her kill range.
Sasha was even worse, not being able to 1 hko mogalls while everyone else can. However, I soon discovered that this is because I got an especially bad autolevel.
I greatly suggest against autolevelling player units as this can cause some very iffy stat variations, as shown here:
This the Sasha I had. No str in 4 auto levels.
This is another roll. That makes all the difference from a worthless unit to a mediocre unit varying for players. This isn’t a one time occurrence either, in about 6 rolls I got 6 str archer twice.
Misc Suggestions
Note: Up to chapter 6 I was using the second oldest patch, so some of my suggestions while not mentioned on the post may be outdated.
It seems optimal in chapter 6 to dump inventories of all units into supply before ending the chapter. I feel like having the characters all drop their inventories into supply may be better even going against story gameplay integration because otherwise dropping all items in supply is the way to go.
Speaking of which, its a bit odd that Miriam’s mixes are still very much available, I suggest removing them from inventory and supply in between chapters which can be done.
In Saif’s boss dialogue, and as well in conversations in chapter 6 endscene, there’s a lot of ‘…’ that gets skipped over without player input which I think is very weird, either not have them at all or still let the player press [A].
There’s a lot of odd transitions between scenes where palette goes wack or flashes of maps.
Alice has no dialogue, she seems to spontaneously appear.
Ultimately I think from what’s trying to be done with the story the hack stands out, but I think there’s still some polishing to be done.