Thank you, I was a complete amateur when I first started the original project so it’s good to see I’m improving.
Hello! I’m the guy who over-critiques every little detail of every little hack. I think I have issues.
Most of the criticism up to now that I’ve seen is critique of gameplay, which is definitely the most important part of Fire Emblem. However, for people with eyes like me, map design–both visually and gameplay wise–are very important aspects. For example, the Ch. 4 Sea and Cliff tiles.
Let me go into detail.
Part 1: Visual Map Design
#1: Cliff Corners
These bad boys right here make your cliffs look less like sudden starts and stops, and more like one long cliff. The color also continues, and it generally looks better.
The next problem I have with these is:
#2: Cliff Variety
These are all one type of cliff tile. As someone who has lived on a mountain and seen a waterfall in-person, I can assure you that this is not natural. Use the different types of cliffs to make your cliffs less bland, like so:
(Used all of the ones in the tileset for example’s sake)
#3: I Don’t Know What to Call this One
My third (and final) critique on these sea tiles is that they’re too straightforward. They get the job done gameplay wise in preventing anyone other than Max from getting to the chest, but the cliffs just go too straight? I think this is entirely opinionated, but I personally would go for something like this:
That’s it for that Sea critique (get it? Because it sounds like “secret technique”? No?).
The last thing I need to say: Place forest tiles, please. There is no part 2. I just got mad over how maps look.
(Also, what’s up with the dragons that spawn on turn 255? Please tell me, xD)
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Subaru.
I’m not sure whether I should laugh, cry, or be mad.
Thank you for the advice! I’ve been trying to make the maps look better stylistically so this helps a lot!
The dragons on turn 255 are just there bc when I first made the map I had no idea how to delete events, I just forgot to delete them once I learned how
The unused part 2 maps are very old, don’t worry I’ve learned from them
All three at the same time
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version 0.3 is live!
Major changes have been made to both the graphics and gameplay of part 1 and part 2 now has 4 playable chapters!
I’m very happy with this current version and am excited to hear feedback!
Edit: seeing the two months ago banner is… Wow it doesn’t feel that long…
4 Likes
Played this, have a lot of things to say
Minor Stuff (Not Gameplay Related)
- Please get the patch that turns gamespeed and textspeed up to fast automatically
- There are a LOT of grammar errors, capitalizations, run on sentences, etc. I thought of getting screenshots of all of them but there are just too many. I would recommend looking over the script again or having someone else help you out with that.
- This actually persists into gameplay somewhat, with stuff like the ch1 skeleton enemies being called “skeleton” instead of the properly capitalized “Skeleton” and their description not being properly capitalized as well. The named characters don’t seem to have this issue, though, besides their class descriptions also not being capitalized.
- In addition to character descriptions, some weapons don’t seem to have proper descriptions, grammatically speaking. An example would be the Mage Killer axe description not having a period. Mini Bow description isn’t capitalized, I could go on.
- In Ch2, if you look at the water in the bottom left corner, it doesn’t animate properly. The tile animations make it look like the lake is at war with itself with currents going every which way. I’d recommend replacing those tiles with ocean tiles
Chapters
Prologue thing:
Why? I don’t get it. You have a single unit and then take out 2 trainees and a cav, and then get gold. Nothing of story importance happens. This isn’t a good tutorial either because you don’t tell the player anything explicitly, if that was the intention. Could easily be cut to better serve the pacing of the game.
Ch1:
Why can’t solum talk to the two recruits???
Why does sagitta straight up ORKO Mick when he is the one meant to recruit her, I really don’t know what was intended here. I can use Fidem but she has such a huge range that it’s so easy to even accidentally put the cav in range of this instakill trap basically.
Why is Fidem in a field of lance users so that when he’s recruited he will be facing WTD immediately? There’s maybe 2 mercs on the entire map and no fighters, pretty bad first impression for a unit.
Why do I just start with 2 units on an unnecessarily large map with little enemy variety and 0 terrain tiles? Seems like a pretty uninteresting map gameplaywise.
Not sure what the point of the guy saying they’re gonna summon more skeletons is, I assume it’s meant to be telegraphing but they say them on the same turn the reinforcements spawn.
Install the hack that lets you see if an enemy doesn’t move. If you don’t know where to get it, here you go. It can be a bit tough to find. Zeroing/nullifying mov FEDS style (based on AI parameters?) - #43 by Venno.
Why does the boss tome have poison? It’s still pretty pitiful damage so just kinda wastes time.
Why doesn’t Tobias have the boss flag? This is also a problem in later chapters.
Ch2:
Kinda weird that the wyvern lord has same con as the base cav, but I get it for mounted aid purposes. Still, I think 12 mounted aid is quite a good amount, or you could just lower the cav’s con, seems a bit high to me.
What’s the sniper here for? They don’t even kill the WL or bring him near death.
On that note, all of these enemies are ridiculously chumpy, like even more than vanilla FE8 enemies. I’d recommend buffing some of their stats.
Why is there dark magic in the armory? For that matter, why’s there a vendor with anything but a vulnerary? I don’t have any magic users.
Why does a ch1 merc have a killing edge? The only one who can take him on is the ridiculously buff WL jagen who flies over the whole map and dominates so extremely already.
Ridersbane seems kind of low uses to me but I get this is a shorter hack so makes sense.
What’s the point of the seize objective? Every enemy charges you already and there’s no advantage to seizing since there’s no antiturtle. The seize point is also kind of unclear because a ruined village doesn’t really convey seize point on its own, I’d recommend marking it with a thief escape tile marker.
End of this chapter has a bunch of awkward expositional dialogue that feels kind of forced. Would look into rewriting this so it flows better.
Ch3:
Talking to Cory should recruit Sal at the same time.
There’s not much interesting in the way of how this chapter is designed. It’s an open field of axe users with some forests so you can enemy phase them with your sword user myrm and wyvern lord. My other units didn’t really get any use and I was able to easily clean up the map for all the exp due to no anti turtle incentive.
Not sure if this is a bug or what, but noticed that swordsmen don’t take terrain penalties from forests. Forests on this map are classified as “Villages” for whatever reason, so might want to fix that.
Why do I get a hammer here? The armor knights have 4 mov and are ORKOd by my 12 def mage (cool concept btw, big fan of tank mages).
What was up with the reinforcements? Just more grinding fodder? They didn’t seem like there was any point to them showing up when they did.
The boss here incentivizes just using the jagen since he’s the unit who doesn’t take any damage and thus can’t be annoyed by nosferatu on the boss.
Ch4:
Didn’t play this one, but I looked the map and it looked pretty empty again, I’d recommend adding a few forests.
Enemies from the stats also looked pretty easy as the rest.
Sorry if I came off as harsh, my intention was not to simply bash on your hack. I don’t think these issues would be too difficult to solve, actually. A lot of it is just polish or slightly buffing enemies or stuff like that, and I definitely think there are some interesting concepts here. I wish you the best and hopefully find my feedback useful 
. Seems like lately you’ve been needing some more testing so hopefully I was able to push you in the right direction, at least. If you have any more questions please let me know.
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Thank you so much for the quick look! Overall I intended for the the first part of this hack to be a sort of fun kind of easy while the second part ramps up the difficulty a bit.
I’m not very good with capitalization or punctuation, I’ll definitely look that over.
the chapter 2 map animation was actually something I noticed post release and plan to fix next update.
perhaps I will cut the prologue, I haven’t considered that, it was mainly meant to be a mini puzzle where you have to take out the trainees and then the cav as charging for the cav will get Solum killed if he doesn’t crit.
Solum can’t talk to the recruits bc I didn’t really notice it, I find Mick able to easily recruit Fidem on turn two then Fidem recruit Sagiita.
I’ll look into the movement patch, thanks for the directions
Dark magics whole ‘‘thing’’ in my hack is that they are accurate and hard hitting with some effects, but you don’t get many dark magic users as they are rare in universe. I’ll think about removing poison.
overall I do believe I should increase the difficulty a bit with the first part, looking at this feedback I can see that I shouldn’t have neglected difficulty in part 1 as I did.
Again, thank you so much, I’ll be sure to take your criticism to heart and work to improve my hack! My only question would be if you intended to continue with it? I’m curious as to what you’d think of part 2’s approach as I believe I ramped up the difficulty quite a bit to give it a different feel.
Yeah, that’s what I did too. It was just annoying to misplace my cav on a third of the map and have him get instantly obliterated, and doesn’t really make sense to me that the lord can’t recruit these two units, since there’s no story reason given.
This is less of a puzzle and more of a troll, I’d say. Not malicious, but this is what I ended up doing. My thought process was that the trainees would be really chumpy, and when I got killed and figured out the “solution”, it didn’t feel too rewarding.
That’s fine, honestly, but poison is just a boring effect. You could do something with funny statboosts if you were lacking in ideas, maybe. I also think that if I don’t have any dark magic users in a certain chapter, there’s no reason for a shop to sell the magic. It confuses the player and is redundant.
Sure, I can do that. I just found the first part of the game easy enough that I wasn’t feeling like continuing the whole thing in a single session, but still had a lot to write about that seemed like it’d be good to let you know.
I think if you’re going for a fun kind of easy feel, I would definitely increase enemy bulk a bit, at least, and increase variety. I think that every enemy getting so utterly dominated by every player unit gets pretty boring fast, especially with the game falling into the normal FE trap of being really dominated by mounts. The jagen being a Wyvern Lord doesn’t really help because instead of being regular FE gameplay but more relaxed, it turns into spam the unit with 8 mov everywhere on a map that has no restrictions on his movement. Definitely see if you can get people to play it after making these adjustments because it’s a very difficult balance to strike, I feel, since there’s a line between easier FE gameplay and more mindless gameplay on the level of something like Awakening, for example. Right now I think it leans towards the latter but I think there’s no reason you can’t pull it back to the former easily.
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understandable, I didn’t really think about changing it at all, I’ll cut the shop things too.
Thank you for that, I appreciate the feedback, lucky me that my next planned update was going to just be a single chapter addition to cut back on update wait time, I look forward to whenever you decide to continue.
thank you for the advice, I’m contemplating whether or not to do that or to make the difficulty similar to part 2’s, I feel like I should probably stick to one type of difficulty.
Chapter 4
- Fidem’s palette is borked
- Objective is broken, it ends when I kill the boss, didn’t know this and wasn’t able to get anything from the shop
- Don’t get why the dark mage can summon ridiculously buff phantoms that can one shot and dodge so many enemies
- Spent most of the map holed up here like this because it’s filled with just axe users that all gravitate to your position with no incentive to move forward
- The ballistician in the corner feels pointless, why is he there if the wyvern is the only one who can reach him and faces no risk cause of the ballista only being 5mt? You keep putting all these bow units to check the wyvern, and here they actually do 2HKO him, to my surprise, but it doesn’t actually solve the issue of him dominating the entire map while your other units are left behind thanks to their lack of invulnerability and 8 flying mov.
- What’s up with no healers and being stingy with healing items? I’m having to use forts to heal.
- The end of chapter dialogue here is pretty hard to read with the grammar being poor, the text cutting off when it switches to the world map view, and the subject matter of solum possibly being the demon king or his general being conveyed really badly. I think that even just trimming down unnecessary dialogue and getting someone to fix the grammar would help a lot, since so much of it is talking about some war with elves and the demon king and it reads like standard boring fantasy stuff to me. There’s some text skips in here too (missing [A]).
Chapter 4x
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Feels super random honestly, the portrait that is meant to be young solum doesn’t really convey it, he just starts saying sharen, having a flashback, he runs into a bunch of enemies, chapter starts.
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Where is Anna before the chapter starts? I can’t see her in preps. Just spawn her in green and turn her blue when the chapter actually begins if you don’t want her position or inventory adjustable, though I don’t see a reason why she can’t just be in preps.
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Why is deploy being limited when I have 8 units? Just because you have preps doesn’t mean you need to limit deployment and it feels really awful.
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On that note, what does Sal contribute? He’s just worse than cory because he has lower def and worse speed growth, and worse than Tobias because he can’t summon busted phantoms.
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Swift Edge desc is borked, also would rather you actually tell me what the weapon does.
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Random thing I noticed, promoted Solum here and the merc contract text cuts off. Tobias’ name also cuts off on the preps menu, I’d recommend just naming him Tobias or using narrowfont. If you want a distinction between him as a boss and him as a player, when recruiting him have the game erase the boss version and load in a new player tobias.
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What’s all this stuff about restricting paths with the guiding ring? It feels relatively unnecessary, honestly. It’s already magic wielders only, why make it lock you into a single promotion instead of the 3 you get with a master seal. The fun of branched promos is getting to customize every unit you get, not just one.
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Game glitched out on me heavily after trying to see what Tobias’ promotions were and backing out of the menu
Fixed itself after I waited a few seconds, though. -
Much like the other maps, this map is quite barren in terms of both gameplay and aesthetics, just mostly empty field.
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Expected this map to play the same way, where every unit just charges you and you have to choke a small area. My prediction was spot on and much like ch4 it plays really boringly since these enemies pose no threat and you just EP them all. I wouldn’t recommend just making them stronger, because then you’d just die. Vary the AI and let the map have an actual flow as the player moves through it.
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Oh, and these guys have recovery AI. Get rid of that, it serves no purpose.
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Noticed here that the mage killer does a pretty awful job at what it’s supposed to do. It’s a great weapon, because 1-2 range is great, but mages are so squishy that it is irrelevant.
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The entire bottom half of the map is completely irrelevant because there’s nothing to get there. If you have a map then the entire map should be serving some purpose. If you haven’t, actually, I’d recommend watching this video and this video, as well as maybe even this video.
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Not a requirement but in my opinion thracia trade is pretty sick and you should put it in
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Why give another hastam? It’s a ridiculously buff weapon and mine was only at 21 uses by this point.
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When you get to this point, why does every enemy just immediately charge? The game’s not hard, so all I really want to do is just wall em on a fort.
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Max still way busted but really no one else takes hits so I wouldn’t recommend just jacking up enemy strength without changing the overall design of the hack.
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Why does the boss have a killer lance when there’s no way to mitigate it besides max?
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Why are mage knight gains so neutered in comparison to sage? I would have picked it because Cory is so busted already, but really, I don’t really see a reason to pick the thing that gets -3 mag, -1 spd, -2 def, and swords instead of staves for 1 point of mov.
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Anna says she wont pay me, then I get 2000 gold? huh??
Chapter 5
- The dialogue here feels very stilted. I’ve neglected to mention it but it’s been this way throughout the hack, so like I said, if that’s something you struggle with, definitely see if you can get someone to look it over.
- 7 deploy, again???
- What’s up with the dancer having swords, staves, dance, AND canto+? I maybe get having swords or staves, but both? When her combat stats aren’t even good enough to justify swords, and warp isn’t as good as just dancing the WL?
- I don’t get the insistence on putting the chest on an almost inaccessible island on the corner of the map.
- Why does the boss have a nos weapon again? It’s just annoying.
- This map isn’t as empty as the other maps, but feels very aimless to me. The way it’s set up visually just seems very messy and doesn’t imply a strong direction. It’s not strictly necessary, but that’s the way I think maps where you’re supposed to be moving towards a certain point should be.
- It’s been this way for the past 2 chapters as well, but enemy variety is really poor here, just a bunch of swords and axes loosely slapped on the map.
- Almost forgot until now, but I’d recommend installing MMB. It’s a great feature to have.
- Will probably play Ch5 and 2 more chapters tomorrow, played less today because 4/4x’s stalling tactic took about as long as 2 earlier chapters.
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Thank you for the follow up!
I’ll be taking gameplay suggestions into account as always, due to my particular playstyle I don’t notice when a map can be stalled since I like to make progress towards the objective every turn so getting another viewpoint is appreciated.
What do you mean by this? Could you be more specific, I’m looking at his palette and I don’t see anything wrong.
That’s likely because phantoms were only meant for a promoted class and phantom strength ties directly to level, I’m looking for a way to fix this.
yeah noticed that upon my recent testing of making part 1 harder, I thought it only did that on route.
the main point of the ballista is to deal small chip damage to your units while you made your way to the boss, there’s treasure there mainly to hopefully steer Max away from the main action if you want to play fast.
just a design choice I like, robbing the player of healers early game is a good way to give them a reason to not waste their healing items and to play more risky, which I feel is more fun, when things feel dangerous and loose.
as for story related things, I do want to revise some of my ealier cutscenes.
there’s a story reason for why Solum then and Solum now don’t look all too similar. It’s also a gaiden with a requirement, meaning that it needs to be unimportant to the plot and merely give some backstory.
hadn’t thought about the green to blue unit trick, she’s not in the preps due to being able to move her around in preps.
I liked doing small maps earlier on, small maps require smaller amounts of player units.
he doesn’t, that’s the point. Bad units are funny.
oh I did not recall it being broken, what emulator are you using, I didn’t encounter the Tobias glitch either, I probably should’ve specified this but this hack has been tested on mGBA.
eh, it just feels right to me to restrict the path for a more specific promotion item.
I’ll take a look at them, thank you.
not sure why I didn’t, I already put in things like super canto…
ranged attacks or a hammer are incentivized here, I believe most of these design problems come from Max being way more busted than I thought lol
honestly didn’t see that difference, I believe I just forgot to adjust MK bonuses
just a decision made waaay early on that I neglected to fix, warp is fun and some promoted classes get C staves.
what is this? I’ve never heard of it.
I look forward to it, after chapter 7 you get to what I consider to be the ‘‘meat of the hack’’, particularly chapter 11
As always the help is very much appreciated, having someone actually look at my work lets me improve while I’m still actively working on it.
There’s nothing technically “wrong” here, but to my eye these look way oversaturated and ugly. I’d recommend checking in with the feu spritans channel on discord to get more concrete tips on what’s wrong here and how to improve since I’m not an artist by any means and my paletting skills are beyond awful, so my feedback is not going to be very in-depth.
The thing is that the player is not rewarded for playing fast, only punished. Since every unit comes to me, I’m naturally incentivised to stay back and turtle until the enemy numbers have thinned out, and I don’t consider myself someone who plays FE super slowly or anything like that. There’s no side objective on any map that is constrained by time or anything like that, and every factor of the game seems to be asking me to take a slower route by placing my units on a forest or fort and clicking end turn.
The thing is that there’s such little danger because I’m dodging most attacks by sitting on a fort or forest tile, and stuff doesn’t feel risky when the game is constantly encouraging me to sit back. Having no healer and fewer healing items just makes me overrely on the units that don’t take any damage, like Fidem against axes, or Max and Cory being near-invincible due to their high defense stats. Once any other unit takes damage, I’m more likely to just stop using them than to play fast and risky. Also, on sending Max away, again the map doesn’t want me to, because I can just clear out enemies and get to the ballista risk free. All these issues kind of just go back to the point of the pacing not being conducive to fast play and no anti-turtle incentive being present.
I’m a fan of smaller maps too, but limited deployment feels really bad when your units are still in the single digits. This isn’t an actual problem because as far as the maps go you maybe need 3-4 units total, but I do enjoy using units that have been provided to me. I’d also say that even though these maps are small, it feels constrictive because the main unit is Max, who can cover most of the map in a single movement. I think small maps definitely work, but with an 8 mov flier as the jagen, it brings the enjoyment level down significantly. Like I mentioned, I also just think these maps don’t make use of their space fully and could be paced better.
Bad units can be funny, but there’s also a way to do them that’s wholly uninteresting that I think he falls into. I don’t really mind Sal being bad, but you don’t even really get a chance to see him be bad because he doesn’t ever get to engage in combat.
Using mGBA.
Well I didn’t use Max here, I just baited out the javelin with the cav and iron axe’d him since he doesn’t move. I don’t really think it’s an interesting decision since all your 2 range options are pretty busted and the cav would outrange the armor by a lot even if the boss moved.
Not to be too rude but I think that the meat of the hack should not be starting at the 8th chapter I play, because I feel most players lose interest long before that point, but I feel like you know this already.
Also I’m glad to help, I know the feeling of not getting enough eyes on your work where even one test can be helpful.
Oh yeah, MMB is just basically an easy way to see enemy/player stats like attack, defense, AS, etc, while still on the map instead of having to go into the status screen to check. If you’re using febuilder, it provides quite a few options that you can take a look at to decide which suits your preferences.
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I’m gaining a lot from this, I see that I mainly need to work on ai variation and enemy strength
I’ll do that, thank you.
I’ll probably bump up deployment by one for a few maps, I like forcing the player to make choices in which units to invest in but yeah, the units are still weak.
that’s so strange, I’ll need to do more testing on these occurrences…
yes and I mostly mean that the way this hack’s plot will progress has the hack sort of have a ‘‘fresh start’’ at 8 to be vague. With your advice I’ll try and make the hack more fun to play so that the player is engaged until the big moment at the end of chapter 7 happens which I hope will be impactful enough.
oh I’ll look into that, thank you, it seems really convenient.
Thanks for the follow up, it’s much appreciated!
I think these are good things to focus on, but here I think I’d recommend maybe going back to some of your favorite maps in the series or even other hacks and trying to examine them under a really specific lens to understand why you enjoy them and how you can replicate those elements. The videos I linked I believe do touch on this a bit but definitely something that can help if done properly.
Also, just try to get more people to play it and give feedback, since more opinions gives you a better holistic perspective on the gameplay. It’s difficult to do anything about as an individual (though again via the feu discord, they’ve got a #playtesting channel where you can drop a patch and get people to test certain chapters of your game and give feedback) but really one of the best things that can be done with regards to these issues.
2 Likes
Chapter 5
- The talk between the cav and the soldier isn’t both ways for some reason, pretty easy change
- Same issue with every enemy charging and the chapter turning into a slogfest with me choking a single point with cory to make all the enemies go away. I wouldn’t just buff the enemies because there’s so many units that cory is the only reasonable way to handle them
- Forgot to get the chest so if I’m missing some easy solution to something later that’s probably why
Chapter 6
- 7 deploy again really sucks, but again not of much actual consequence
- Why can’t I just buy regular tomes? Only having a 60 hit tome for cory really sucks.
- Not sure why these dragon enemies are extremely buff in terms of defense when already most of the army lags behind Max and Cory. It just incentivises juggernauting even more.
- What’s up with the random dragon reinforcements with no telegraphing? When it’s one at a time it is okay, but there’s no indicator there’ll be two coming at a time afterwards. They’re not threatening enough to be “oh shit” enemies, but also kind of annoying to kill for exp. This part isn’t a huge deal, it just confused me a bit.
- Overall I felt like this map once again just leans into making the player turtle and rely heavily on max/cory/summons instead of making use of every unit.
Chapter 6x
- +1 deploy, yay!
- Why should I split here? Every objective worth getting is on the bottom of the split (shops + chest). I’d recommend spreading the side objectives out so the player really wants to go both ways, if that was the intention, at least. If not, then don’t mind this.
- Some things here that I feel are really just annoying are a crit enemy with no high def unit or iron rune to mitigate it, heal AI enemies, and physic on the enemy side. It feels like it just makes the chapter play much slower.
- Again, this chapter repeats the issue of just having every enemy charge, making me have to turtle or just die. Even Cory struggled a bit here, to my surprise. Enemy strength is nice, but the chapter was not actually that difficult, the main thing that surprised me was Cory taking damage. Again, please don’t just do a flat increase, because it makes the chapter unmanageable then.
- Thief stole a master seal from me, not cool lol. I assume this is an oversight, but I guess they drop it anyways, so not a huge deal, I guess? Though it left me unable to get the chest.
- Hellen is really strong lol, she’s like slightly worse Cory with much higher HP, though the swordmaster did scare me when they crit her. Makes the rest of your units not named Cory, Solum, or Max look even more like chumps. Luckily she survived pretty easily.
- Solum caps look weird. Also, he’s extremely busted and once I promoted him he just trivialized the map. Not sure why he gets canto+ on top of just having crazy stats and a broken prf but I’m not complaining.
- Some guy poisoned Cory, wasn’t a big deal but poison is still annoying. Not gonna hammer it in, though, I know I’ve already said this.
- The non telegraphed back reinforcements are not cool though also not super threatening, though I lost 2 units to them because I just wasn’t expecting these extremely jacked enemies to come behind me when the rest of the game was not particularly punishing. I definitely turtled a bit but definitely kind of excessive, at least without telegraphing. I’d warn the player at least 1 or 2 turns in advance, and if I missed the warning, ignore this.
Gotta replay 6x so Cory and Hellen don’t die lmao, but here’s my initial thoughts on Ch7 after doing a preliminary run
Chapter 7
- imo, the fire dragon here is kind of ridiculous with the amount of damage. I did a quick solo run with op Solum and he took 25 damage, which is kind of ridiculous, since he was one of my bulkiest units. I realise that a casual solo is not super accurate to how a map plays, but the description of the dragon’s weapon doesn’t even mention any sort of effectiveness.
- Archer who moves with ballista seems kind of silly, that’s what, 15 effective range? Covers almost the entire map.
- Hastam is nuts! I only broke it near the end of the map in my solo. Still beat the rest of the map pretty easy with just an iron lance, lol.
- Not much to say on the twist because I kind of stopped reading story, but I feel like it’s a decent twist that I feel didn’t land very properly, and was kind of heavily foreshadowed (in an uninteresting way, it kind of just reveals it all randomly) by Solum’s promotion. Not really the biggest writing guy, so I’d ask elsewhere for better advice.
Went ahead and played ch8 since it seemed unconnected gameplay-wise.
Chapter 8
- Not a fan of the jagen with 0 luck, but I guess 0x3 damage is still 0.
- Jagen also being able to ORKO or do kind of pitiful damage feels very, how do I say, extreme? I feel like maybe lowering his strength and giving him an iron sword would help him chip better, though I’m not sure. Might want to play around with that. He’s also wayyyy dominant when not using the training sword, which I suppose is reasonable for a jagen, but he ORKOs the boss. Just seems a bit too high on power and quite spammable, since those bases look like they’ll hold up for quite a while.
- Sal’s prf being unbreakable seems kind of questionable. I do like the practical description, though.
- This map seems much better than everything coming before, with actual side objectives. Howver, it seems quite large to me, with the enemies not being distributed great. It’s like a wave of swords, a wave of axes, and then a wave of lances, which makes them relatively trivial to take out. I’d experiment with mixing up weapon types a bit more. Also, it feels like the left side kind of gets the short end of the stick. with an axe unit + sword unit + the peg I sent being bombarded by swords and bows.
Ch9
- Didn’t really play this one, but I would recommend not doing fog. It’s more of a preference, but I just really hate fog in gbafe.
- Also, having a ballista you can’t see in the fog feels a bit cheap, so I’d remove that if you planned to keep the fog aspect of the map.
- I like how the green units come out to defend their village, that’s cute.
I’ll replay ch6x-8 and play ch9-11 at a later date, sorry for being late with this. And apologies if my feedback is a little incoherent, will hopefully have more to say after my replay.
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thank you so much for the continued feedback!
nothing much, just a silver axe.
this is a bit of a problem I’m having rn, thunder is a bit too strong to have on hand imo but at the same time having only a 60 hit tome isn’t that great, I’ll probably make a new tome entirely that fulfills the purpose of fire.
Trained units handle the dragons pretty well from my testing, Sagiita has high strength, bishop’s slayer works on dragons to make up for the lack of monsters, Anna has good bases and 1-2 range
I keep forgetting to add a sort of indication for reinforcements on this map
I plan to add another dragon type to give some variation to the map.
from the map view I believe the GK was intended to move along the top, although the ai doesn’t like the idea… Will definitely fix this up.
haha yeah I’ve been having trouble figuring out how tf thief ai works, I’m changing Porter’s class next update so he doesn’t move to steal something since he’s a trickster.
I suppose you can call her a gato
Slight spoilers but you prob could've guessed since you're beyond chapter 7
this is the same class as the final boss class, I’ll probably fine tune the stats once I get to the end and change the caps accordingly.
changed the effect of Aspect of Truth since your first comment about it, it’ll be changed next update.
it’s some sort of side effect of the holy weapons being effective against the class, I don’t think I’ll change it since it keeps Solum from just walking to Lia with no problems (once I fix the balancing)
I’ve changed the idea around Miles just yesterday, he has worse stats and weapon ranks and has higher luck but not much. Makes the general idea of being more prone to danger as the game goes on more fun.
it’s a steel sword with no effectiveness, extra speed, and I believe more hit. I think it’s not too much of a broken thing.
added more variety since then.
it’s very weak and inaccurate chip, it’s more something for Garth to go after so that I can actually place one or two hunters with little guilt.
if you find that the female mercs are weaker than the male merc, that’s because I forgot to even the class bases, it’ll be fixed next update.
No need to apologize! You’re not obligated to review this hack, any sort of feedback is appreciated no matter how small so this much feedback is amazing!
The thing is that I am not training these units because they are completely useless in the 3-4 maps preceding the dragon one, and you said yourself that Sal is meant to be bad. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t consistently bench Sal unless they knew this was coming.
slight spoilers
Just make a dupe class with lower caps, then. Should solve the issue.
Really, at least let the player know this, is my main thing. It feels cheap to have no indicator of this being true and then being killed.
Not sure how much the wranks would change how he works but seems like a good change.
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yeah I’m just saying once I fully rework the difficulty of the hack the dragons won’t be as much of a problem and that the intended way of clearing maps makes this particular one less problematic. Sal’s case is a niche one, Cory also promotes to bishop with an alternate band.
oh yeah, I’ll prob do that thanks.
yeah I’ll probably add some dialogue about this particular thing, it’ll probably have to be slightly vague since I don’t think there’s a check I can use to check if Solum is a master soldier, if there is then that makes things easier.
The thing is that he has 2 other promotions and I didn’t even consider using the alternate band on him for one second. I’m guessing that bishop has lower gains than sage (or whatever else it’s called, I forget) for an overall minor benefit, since the chapter is definitely still beatable without the tools mentioned. Though if the archer and Anna become units that are useful to deploy, then this doesn’t really matter, since you’d have more options.
This should work. Just check if Solum has the promoted flag.
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Host of the Dark 0.4 is live! Many changes were made in this patch, in particular QoL patches were added, part 1 was almost completely rebalanced and made harder as a result thanks to @Relic 's extremely helpful feedback, as well as others on Discord who’ve helped me greatly!
Alongside that a lot of the story was rewritten to better make sense and scenes were added or removed to better help the narrative flow.
I’m excited to hear feedback with both the story and gameplay! I’m truly thankful that I’ve been able to get such helpful advice thus far!
For those who've played up until the end of the previous patch
Sagiita’s part 2 character ID was changed, if you want to use her I recommend restarting from the beginning of part 2.
part 2 Fidem has been given a prf weapon
Chapter 11 now has a new character, Tatiana who can either be a rouge or a trickster
many bases were changed
Miles is now a GK with a silver lance and has nerfed stats
Raigholm was buffed
Atom was buffed
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