Hi!
I recently just finished part one of the hack – played essentially all day to do it – with a few people watching me play as I went. I have a lot to say about it, but I want to preface this first with a few notes.
Firstly, despite anything I may say, my opinion on this hack is overall POSITIVE. I know you’ve been getting a lot of really negative feedback today, and I really hope you’ve been keeping a good head on your shoulders about it because, despite my thoughts on the gameplay, I feel they are outweighed in my mind by the positive experiences of the hack.
Secondly, the reason I wanted to respond in detail, rather than just playing it for myself, is because I want to see this hack succeed. There is some fascinating stuff in here: stellar storytelling, unique ideas, strong characters, some clever uses of eventing. There’s a lot to like, but it’s hard to untangle them from the very messy thoughts I have about the core gameplay experiences of the hack. I’m going to talk about them first, before I get into the plot stuff, and then I’ll return to the gameplay to talk about my feelings on the final set of maps in part one.
I’ve placed everything into collapsible menus, because I had a lot to say and I don’t want to overload anybody with a wall of text.
Early Game
My main opinion on the earliest set of chapters is that they’re inoffensive. Nothing particularly fascinating is being done with the map design or the objectives, but the simple map design gives the player a chance to get used to the unique sandbox that the game’s emphasis on magic, and the larger cast of magic users in general, allows for. Helen and Arachne feel distinct not just due to their statlines, but due to the utility of their spells, and this disparity theoretically would only grow as Helen gains access to a 5 range tome and Arachne finds ways to punch through some of the more res-tanky units that would previously give her and Helen trouble.
However, the first time that those genealogy style cavalry formations start to show up, things change dramatically. Despite the unique qualities of your units, you’re presented with a problem that can only easily be solved by two units – a problem that provides those units with a lot of experience while they solve it. That problem is large swarms of enemies, often with 1-2 range weaponry, who aren’t very receptive to player phase proactive combat. This problem is only exacerbated with time – chapter 7 absolutely necessitates that you have at least one unit who can handle the massive wyvern stack that spawns to the south, and the problem is twofold.
One is that only certain units in your army are even equipped to solve this problem in the first place, which on its own is fine. But the second, larger problem is that every time that unit successfully handles a massive wave of 12+ enemies in a single turn, they walk away with a massive amount of experience that isn’t going to the rest of your army. This last part is extremely important for what happens later in part 1, and I’ll talk about it in a minute, but even earlier than then, you quickly end up in a situation where the next time that problem arises, the only character with enough levels to tackle the job is the one who did it last time, and eventually that unit is so powerful that there’s no reason really to use anybody else. It’s not that the other units can’t contribute, it’s that there’s no point – sure, Helen can have decent damage output, Luke has a cool brave tome, Calista has tons of effective damage, but what does all that matter in the face of a unit that looks like this?
This is a problem large enough that even I had to lean into it, even though I usually try pretty hard not to lean into this kind of juggernauting, because other methods felt so impractical as to be outright futile. I wasn’t try to break the game, but it felt as though there were no other options to me.
Things I Really Really REALLY Liked
All of this was causing problems, but it wasn’t necessarily ruining my experience. The ideas at play were really fun – I love getting these new spells from talk conversations, the churches as a gameplay mechanic felt really cool, I had a great time with how unique each of my spellcasters felt and how important they were to my army + how all of this ties into the worldbuilding and storytelling at play. It’s gameplay-story integration done at a core mechanical level, and it’s fantastic – genuinely.
The storytelling in general is fantastic, and was a large part of why I kept playing – while early on I felt the pacing really drags its feet, with multiple longer conversations that felt largely superfluous despite being fun scenes in a vacuum (I enjoy the discussions Helen and Arachne have in the early-game, but I don’t know if their inclusion actually improves the game due to how frontloaded the script ends up feeling as a result), by the time you past that introductory bandit arc and the plot really gets you into the swing of things, the story was consistently my most anticipated part of each chapter.
Spoilers
Calista’s character arc is fascinatingly mature writing, and the way she and her dynamic with Glenn is portrayed is a fucking absolutely incredible use of the genre to explore a very real and human experience through a high fantasy, high stakes lens. The closer the script gets to endgame, the more of a knot starts to get tied in your stomach, and the steady turn of my understanding of Glenn from “wow, this guy’s an asshole” to “oh my god he’s a psychopathic abuser” and the level to which it keeps escalating, culminating with him absolutely giddy to see Calista reduced to little more than a tool at his disposal is chilling stuff. It takes the subject of this kind of quiet, manipulative abuse, and uses Calista’s position as the Maiden to tell it in a unique and engaging way that really makes it pop. I really want to stress this for a moment: this is best in class storytelling for the romhacking scene, as far as I’m concerned, and you should be extremely proud. I wasn’t playing the game alone – I was talking to other people, shooting the shit so to speak, a generally casual and laidback atmosphere all around, and I was totally captivated by this final set of scenes… which is why it’s such a shame that they take place during the part of the game that they do.
Late Game
While a lot of people have commented on chapter 8, and it is admittedly in need of major, major changes, I want to draw attention to chapter 9 for a minute. I hope you’ll excuse some of my phrasing here, as I’m still coming off the heels of having just beaten these chapters, and a lot of the emotions are still fresh, but I’m going to be frank: Trying to play this level like a Fire Emblem game was one of the more miserable gaming experiences I’ve had, ever. Chapter 8’s problems were big, and I had to give up a unit ultimately to get the win, but ultimately I had options, even if they weren’t very fun ones – I could leave my weakest units in range of sleep, trying to bait it out and leave my strongest units to clear the map for me. I could keep Calista rescued permanently so she was never at risk of falling asleep. Chapter 9 had exactly one solution for me, and I replayed it three or four times before resorting to it, and it’s entirely because of the introduction of an equally long ranged sleep staff, but now one that moves, paired with healers to keep the caster topped off if you can’t kill in one round and a crowd of killing edge myrmidons, high damage generals, and four range mounted archers to keep him protected if you use any of your squishier units to get the kill. The only, ONLY way I could beat this map was by taking Arachne, putting every single unit of my army in a corner, and sending her off on her own. Her res was high enough that sleep would never hit, her defence high enough that every enemy tinked off her, and what little damage she would take was easily healed back by lifetaker.
This exact same problem is present in the third section of the map as well. After spending multiple hours failing at this chapter multiple times, the simplest path to success ended up being the least interesting one: to send Arachne in, kill every 1 or 1-2 range unit in a single turn, and then kill all the 3 and 4 range units over the next several, then having Jake drop Calista off at the gate to seize once the coast was clear. Rinse and repeat for likely about a hundred turns.
Then chapter 10 hits, and I want to reiterate that I tried to level all my units, tried to promote as many as I could, but it was simply not doable with the scale and difficulty of the previous chapter. As a result, I have a 20/20 unit who can handle one side of the map, and then an army of mostly useless filler units who’ve missed out on about 50+ units worth of experience from chapter 9, who now have to somehow handle the other side of the map without getting the lords killed. The only reason I didn’t get outright softlocked on this chapter was because earlier, as a joke, I’d grinded Lucy to level 20 by dodging a ballista infinitely (“she’s never gonna see combat anyway, and paragon makes this fast, so this’ll be funny!”) on an earlier chapter. If she hadn’t been capable of dodge-tanking the whole map and one-rounding with her prfs, there would have been almost 0 potential for keeping the right side of my map healthy, because the first room is so incredibly punishing, with such a wide array of damage types, long range attacks, and extremely threatening units parked on pillars giving them massive avoid stats that punching through it without some serious cheese felt nearly impossible. By the end of this map, nearly every unit in my army was dead – I was down to seven units, two of them being the lords.
When I finally beat the final boss, the final moments of the story very nearly made the effort all worth it, with the culmination to the prior spoiler-texted character arcs really driving the point home in a fantastic way. I, again, can’t commend you enough on the script in this hack, it is the best written romhack I’ve ever seen by an order of magnitude save for its early game pacing issues. But my god, the final stretch of chapters, from 7 through to the end, were an exercise in futility, and beating them was done not by clever strategy or by using my units strengths to the fullest or carefully planning my next move, but by sending my strongest unit forward, killing and units they couldn’t counterattacking on enemy phase, and then hitting end turn, again and again and again.
Balance
I want to draw attention to something briefly: In your latest message, you mention the various skill combos available to a player and their usefulness in combat, and while they’re true, they’re ignoring the more fundamental problem: Putting a character in range of all these aura buff effects requires putting those units on the frontlines, and the sheer number of enemies and the amount of range many of them are given means that this is often too dangerous to risk doing. Meanwhile, a unit like Arachne can do all of this without any positional awareness, without any set-up, without any regard for what kind of enemy she’s fighting, without any regard for ANYTHING. Being able to squeeze an extra 5 defence out of Victor only matters so much when Arachne is rocking 25+ and healing to full every time it’s player phase again, while also dealing magic damage all the while.
About Arachne, I understand where the frustration here is coming from on your end, because I’ve seen the units in my army and I 100% believe that, if they were all trained, they would be capable of some great things, but it’s just not how a blind playthrough will shake out. The truth is that, to a blind player, there’s nothing stopping them from using Arachne to trivialize every map – she’s so easy to use, joins so early, and is so immediately useful at enemy phase tanking that if a player uses her intelligently early, she’s going to end up sucking up a whole lot of experience until, eventually, players have that moment where they realise just how much she’s capable of. In my experience, and apparently in others’ as well, this comes on chapter 3, where even without much investment she outright solos a massive swath of the map. From what I’ve seen, players who don’t train Arachne properly before the chapter with the recurring cavalry reinforcements (chapter 5, I wanna say?) have a miserable time with the map, even if it is ultimately doable. This isn’t a difficult problem to fix – Arachne having less defense, such that she isn’t capable of taking 0 damage from nearly every enemy in the game, would go a long way to fixing it. The hard part is then making sure that Arachne doesn’t just get replaced by another unit that does essentially the same thing – from what I’ve head, Gregory can do much the same thing with Vamp spam, and it’s equally uninteractive, and while he never got the experience to really do it, it seemed clear to me that the gold knight unit, I forget his name, could’ve done great things as well had I gotten him to level 20 before promoting – I really wanted him to get his horse early so he could help clean up for Arachne before I realised how big the difficulty spike was going to be. Designing the game such that the number one answer to most maps, the easiest answer that players are naturally drifting towards, isn’t to send a tanky guy with a 1-2 range weapon to enemy phase the entire map, should be a number one priority I feel.
I feel like there’s more I could say, but you get the point. Some closing thoughts: I wanna reiterate that despite everything I said in those last sections, I like this hack. While I think the last set of chapters is dramatically player-hostile in a really nasty way, with ambush spawns, unstoppable status spam, and some absolutely absurd threat ranges, it doesn’t change my glowing opinion of the script or how excited I am to see if the more unique gameplay concepts can be really brought to their full potential with some balance changes. The character writing is strong, the dialogue has a great flow to it, the world building is strong and feels natural, and the core character arc of the story is best-in-class for the romhacking scene. Beyond any of that, 99% of people in this community can’t say they have a finished hack to their name, and I want you to know that even just being able to say that for yourself is a legitimately incredible thing. I had mentioned it on stream, but it really hurts my heart to think that your main takeaway from the release reception would be one of negativity and dissatisfaction, so I really hope you can keep in perspective just how much incredible work you’ve done so far.
However, I strongly, strongly, strongly recommend you consider dipping your head into the FEU discord and visiting the #playtesting channel. I cannot stress to you enough how much having a wider pool of experienced playtesters experience your hack would have allowed you to catch these problems earlier in development. I fully believe that you and your playtester were able to clear maps the way you intended them to play, but the Arachne juggernauting problem is not just something some people discovered, it’s something nearly every player who’s managed to successfully complete part one has stumbled into independently because it is more or less the first instinct a player will have with the way maps are designed currently. I say this as somebody who most of the time tries extremely hard not to juggernaut in these games: I want to play by your rules, but the game isn’t meeting me halfway. I don’t have the leeway to get creative. I have a massive cast of unique units with distinct skillsets and powerful tools available to them, and I can’t use them without intentionally making the game dramatically harder for myself.
I want to see this hack succeed. I want to so badly that, if you were in the discord and had asked, I would have gladly and without a second thought contributed some of my own manhours to the task, be that helping clean up your splices, working on map aesthetics, helping playtest or proofread, anything. There is so much incredible shit in this hack, and it is currently locked inside a somewhat impenetrably hostile gameplay experience that many players won’t have the patience to see. I think that’s tragic, because there are things in this game that I really like, ranging from kinda nifty or clever inclusions to some things I think are borderline genius. All this needs is the proper scaffolding to support it all – more engaging map design, more balanced unit design, more thoughtful encounters. I’ll say it one last time: this script is one of the best written pieces of fire emblem related media I’ve ever seen.
I plan on playing through part two, though it will obviously take some time as it’s a very large game. I’ll post my thoughts on the project again down the line, once I’ve seen what the full game has to offer. I’m really excited to see where you can take this project, and I really hope you consider leaning on the community for support – there are dozens of people, myself included who would stop at nothing to help you make your project the best it can be, and all you need to do is ask. If you decide to check out the discord, feel free to shoot me a message – my name is the same there as it is here – if you want to ask any specific questions or if you’d like help with anything. I’m willing to help anytime ^.^