I from prologue to 10 on lunatic difficult, thought it was overall pretty great and I enjoyed a lot of the features that the buildfile format enabled.
Units
The playable cast had very well defined niches and with everyone being full deployed the whole way, there was no one that I wanted to swap out.
The skills felt impactful and were a crucial part of the gameplay rather than the ‘gain 2 dmg on Tuesday’ kinda deal which was great.
Favourite unit overall is the thief healer. Levin sword was great as an early game crutch, on top of all the movement skill and rallies. She’s about as far way as thieves that feel like trading a deploy slot for items as it gets. Got the canto scroll so she can reposition easier.
Another personal favourite is Natasia because funny fighter big damage.
My best unit across the run was Kenneth with his mixed bulk tanking. Gave him the lightweight so he gets doubled less and since he didn’t have many weapons anyways.
The mercenary with decent bulk and awesome damage, one of my favourite archetypes.
I laughed at Peggy. Turns our that was a mistake since provoke ended up saving my ass. Sadly, never did get a staff bonk kill.
Stefan really grew on me, I could afford to burn weapon uses on adept and he actually got to one rounding without it. Also just being a cav is points in his favour.
All in all, a solid set of playable units thus far and having to bench is going to be tough.
Maps
In summary, I felt that each map flowed well, not having many points of slowdown or excessive drag. Being lunatic difficulty, as a player with little skill but a lot of experience, to me it offered a significant challenge that really encouraged employment of player tools available and with (one exception) didn’t feel unfair.
My favourite chapter is chapter 4 both due to my escape map bias and also because I thought the map flowed very well.
This is the actual feedback part, if I don’t say anything about a map safe to say I thought it was solid.
Chapter 2 felt like an extreme difficulty spike compared to every other map on lunatic. I don’t think the survive format where one gets swarmed is suited for effectively 3 units (the 4th being very hard to recruit), it felt like a puzzle map that I had found a’correct’ move just to progress.
There’s also the factor that a player most likely goes for the left village since they’re probably not sure if the unit is actually missable, and I think going left makes life a lot harder for less reward overall as they do join (though I do appreciate the fact she is not missable).
I think the map would have been better off if the 4th unit joined at the start of the map since I think the map needs a bit more breathing room, and to give the village another reward alternative and let the player pick their path from that instead.
Chapter 5 being a swamp fog map sounded pretty sketch but the map itself worked out rather well. My only complaint would be that the last torch feels like a trap with the boss overlapping its range and brings no benefit.
I found the early turns of chapter 9 to be quite frustrating due to having a ton of units being funnelled through one tile chokes. While I understand this was a very intentional decision, I think in practice it ends up with choking the top with one unit while a lot of units cannot contribute, and this is on top of having to fight for space with green units.
Misc
The base system and support rework are things that have been around for a while, but I haven’t played a hack utilising it until now and I thought it worked out great here. I am not a fan of the regular GBA support system so this alternative felt far superior.
A rather minor note is that with how high hit is, supports that gave minuscule amounts of hit and avoid didn’t feel very meaningful.
The interlude chapters didn’t overstay their welcome and had some nice dialogue. The yoink staff was a neat little thing to pick up.
As usual, hope for more updates in the feature.