FEU Vs Requiem

Smilies took too long so I’m finishing this

I took a lot more pictures but batch upload keeps fucking up the order and I’m not doing this one by one so I’m just gonna reduce how many I stick in this post.

Final Chapter oh boy

Alright now that that’s out of the way let’s look at some of these baddies.

…I see.

Yeah sounds about right.

This chud showed up again.


Hmmmmmmmm

Instead of posting another hundred+ screenshots I’m going to give you the cliffnotes version.

Ash knocks out Val and Andrei, Josie protests, Rayden and Alicia back Ash up, Ash goes into some other chamber, talks to the spooky darkness, binds it into some body idk.
Does that. Kills him, then Ash withers and dies in Alicia’s arms. Rayden and Alicia destroy the place because something something we can’t let this evil happen again.

Val becomes queen of wherever she’s from, Rayden/his wife suggest she unify the continent and become Empress, she’s not on board with the idea (spoiler, she does it anyway). Andrei was nowhere to be found during some speech she made, Val finds Andrei off somewhere else, Andrei shows her a statue he made of himself, her and ash. All the characters say their goodbyes, the FE7 ending stuff is still shown briefly.

I don’t regret doing this to our turncount.

And that’s Requiem! Took a bit but we finally managed to finish one of these damn things.

6 Likes

Took us long enough!

6 Likes

amazing

And so it ends…

The journey was as uncomfortable as I expected it to be.

1 Like

I’m not sure how to feel for you guys having this as the hack that you completed, considering how it went, but thanks for sticking through with it until the end either way.

tbh I felt like the game needed more time in the testing oven, by no means was it the worst hack I’ve ever played, but I also don’t think I’d rate it too highly in its current gameplay state. Probably a bit too late for that since the project has been out for a hot minute, but there was a lot of turns where nothing happened and some of the chapters really felt like they dragged on to me, which killed a lot of the fun for me.

1 Like
final thoughts

Requiem is a project that you can tell was created with the intent to tell a story. This seems like an obvious thing to say, but the reality is that the more common approach in FE modding is to start making your game and write the story as you go. Requiem’s story, although not perfect by any measure, is consequently what I would call the best story in FE fan games in general (although there are several other stories that I like more, none of them are actually complete). The focus on familial relationships (as opposed to romantic ones) that we see in the family of Olva is fantastic, which leads me to perhaps the biggest point in the story’s favour— Requiem’s hero is actually allowed to be heroic. I genuinely didn’t believe that the game was going to let Ash sacrifice himself until he did, and there’s no Brammimond to conveniently bring him back as there is with Ninian in FE7. I’m sure we can agree that FE7’s story isn’t very hard to surpass in terms of quality (it’s all over the place and expects the player to just go along with a lot of things), but this is still a very good example of a mod exceeding the game upon which it is based. Where FE7 arbitrarily brought back Ninian so the player would be able to get a “perfect” ending with Eliwood and Ninian living happily ever after until FE6 happens, Requiem has no such pretense. Does the story have a happy ending because the world was saved? Val and Andrei probably wouldn’t agree with that until they had grieved for their brother long enough that they could accept and honour his sacrifice. In a game series where it’s easy to assume that the main character has plot armour by default (their death is what gives you a game over, so they can’t die, right?), Ash subverts this assumption.

Gushing about the story aside, I now have to talk about the gameplay. There’s often a point where, as a fan game maker, you go from “I want more [game, e.g. FE7]” to “I want to make a new game that builds upon [game]”, but Requiem feels like it never passed this point. With my mention before about how it feels like the game was made to tell the story rather than the other away around, does it need to? It wouldn’t if it were more fun to play: the enemy counts are Dynasty Warriors-ian (“I’m not angry; just disappointed” —Zhang He) more often than not and the maps are gigantic, sometimes separating the player and the enemy to the point where you need to spend an entire turn moving before you can attack things. To be completely honest, during my first playthrough of the game, it didn’t take me long at all for me to start RNG-abusing crits and level-ups all over the place so I could get the gameplay out of the way and see what happened next in the story, and it still felt like a slog at times. The quintessential example of this is the nighttime chapter where you save Laraya, a sprawling fog-of-war map with a rout objective. Finally, the game works against the player by arbitrarily re-naming many if not most classes and items. While there are some that are warranted (Pirates not being called Pirates makes sense because pirates aren’t a staple in Requiem’s setting and the diversity in axefighters is welcomed), the lion’s share of these name changes only confuse the player: when you see that hefty-looking sword in your inventory called the Militant Edge, it takes a second to remember that it’s nothing but an iron sword. This isn’t just me being dumb: when you’ve had iron swords baked into you for years playing these games, you will get confused at least once. Making changes for the sake of making changes is one of the most obligatory and notorious problems in FE fan games; replacing the item icons (especially those of the physical weapons) is one of the first things that novices do because “I’m making my own hack; I’ve gotta have icons!”. Such changes can go to good use when you are re-balancing the game, giving items/classes/etc new stats, or otherwise doing something that is going to require players to break from their usual FE-playing habits, but calling iron swords Militant Edges or a female myrmidon a Swrdswoman does little else but confuse the player when your gameplay experience is very vanilla in the first place.

Thank you very much for make, Sacred Blaze! I may have a lot to harp on about your game but I’m a fan.

6 Likes

That’s fair enough. It really didn’t get nearly as much testing as I imagine most hacks do these days, or even back when this was made, other than myself going through the game. If I do get anywhere with another project, I’d definitely try and get a demo out before just releasing the whole thing in order to iron out a few glaring issues with other people’s help. And I do take the point of what pretty much everyone who’s ever played the hack has said about the majority of the maps. I did make some attempts to change things up, even after release, but perhaps the only thing harder than making one of these hacks in the first place is working up the will to go through the entire thing and redo it. (Seriously, because this version of the hack is a remake of an even worse version in the first place.)

Also, it’s a little funny to me how much the name changes actually got on some people’s nerves. True story - the point at which I decided to change some item/class names and create new weapon icons was during a point where I sort of burned out on the development of the hack. I guess the idea was that it was supposed to be something I could do that wasn’t in the standard cycle of Plan Chapter -> Make Map -> Write Events and so on, but then it got done and well… that was it, I guess.

But anyway, thanks again all. I won’t try and make any further excuses at this point and just leave it at that.

10 Likes

Boy have I felt this a few times with going back and changing SoA maps, at least in our situation we’re incomplete and our revisions will be spread out more over time so it’s less of a bear to deal with. I definitely think that you’d be able to produce something really good if you end up doing another project, given lessons learned from Requiem and also any beta tester feedback you get.

2 Likes

This is not the project thread for Requiem, I don’t think there is one on this site. If you want to contact Sacred Blaze, I would try Serenes