I like to play through all the significantly long games that people make using the Lex Talionis engine, and then offer my critique. This was a pretty fun game to play, especially because the plot and worldbuilding reminded me so heavily of my very first attempt at making a Fire Emblem game; this was almost like looking through a fun-house mirror at my first attempt.
Anyways, LuckyStart said I could post my review publicly here, so let’s get started.
Plot & Lore
Let’s start with what I consider the weakest part of Absolution, the plot.
I’ll be the first to tell you that the plot of a Fire Emblem mostly doesn’t matter. It just needs to be strong enough to ground the characters in some sort of conflict, and move the story along from chapter to chapter so you have a reason to fight in all the normal Fire Emblem set piece battles. Nevertheless, I feel the plot of this game does not match the quality that the rest of the game shows.
I was never invested in what was going in the world, and rarely cared about Valentina’s struggle. Also, I believe that Absolution spends too much time, especially early in the game, setting up the world, that would be better spent getting the player quickly into the gameplay. You can move the world lore to later in the game.
My advice would be to shorten all instances of the plot, and to spend more effort trying to invest the protagonist (and the player) with some reason to care about whatever is going on in each chapter.
The world lore runs into the same problem. The places in the world are never differentiated interestingly. The names, especially for countries, are too long, too hard to understand, and don’t describe anywhere unique. The countries in Fire Emblem are generally tropes, because tropes are easy to remember: Sacae is nomad plains, Bern is big Germany (but from Japan’s point of view), Etruria is fancy religious Britain, Ilia is cold mercenary pegasus land, Arcadia is desert land, etc. You can remember what these places are Renoir is ?? Opinicia is ? Fymea is ?? Lufthrasir is ?? I definitely couldn’t tell. Also, you should aim for no more than three syllables for your names. Opinicia and Lufthrasir and Jormungandr are mouthfuls.
However, the world map is very well done! I really liked it.
Writing & Editing
The character writing is fantastic. I loved both the base conversations and the support conversations and am looking forward to seeing more. And anytime two characters were onscreen without reference to the plot or the lore was great fun. Writing in other scenes lacks the same power.
There are lot of spelling mistakes throughout the game, which immediately brought me out of the story. You don’t necessarily need to focus on fixing these immediately, since I would recommend editing a lot of the scenes anyway, but keep this in mind for later.
Music
I felt by about Chapter 9, that some of the pieces were getting a little old, but otherwise the music is great! It’s fully custom, right? If so, that’s awesome!
The ambient owl hoots are too frequent though.
Sprites
The character chibi portraits need work, but most of the main character portraits were great. Some character portraits were fantastic (Gabriel, Genevieve, Hildegard, Ife, Kayin, Lakshmi, Mango, Nadia, Trudy, Valentina), but some need another pass (Hati, Malcolm, Ojala, Raymond). The general map spriting was great.
The intro screen is AMAZING; it’s legendary what you were able to do within the Lex Talionis engine. It honestly looks professional.
Gameplay
Now we focus on the most important part of the game… the gameplay.
Overall, generally very good. This section is going to seem like I have more things negative to say than positive, but rather the negative things are very minor while I had an overall positive impression of the gameplay.
I liked most of the personal skills in Absolution. Some of my favorite personal skills were Trudy’s Duelist, which made her really fun and interesting to play, and Hati’s personal, which made positioning really interesting. Bookworm was also meme-tastic and I loved it. However, early game Wrath on the protagonist is not necessarily a good idea, because the protagonist should not the one taking risks. Later in the game it mostly became a way of bulking her up, but early game it added a strong push to be risky with the protagonist, which can just screw over the player when they make one mistake.
Some of the characters you get later in the game don’t seem good enough to keep up with your main army, namely Zahir, Ojala, and especially Drake. Evelyn was overall awesome.
Many of the same gameplay mechanics from the Lion Throne showed up again here, which I was happy to see; 2-3 range bows are just correct and Mend is so fun to use.
Map designs were overall great. My favorite levels were 3, 5, 6, and 9. Having fun map gimmicks and multiple primary objectives made each map unique and challenging. However, I didn’t like all the enemy units that don’t move; it made certain levels very easy, like Chapter 7 where you just don’t have to interact with half of the map. I felt the reinforcements were well-balanced, and they pushed me forward on several of the maps – I was going slow and ran out of time on level 3 and level 6, which makes the maps fun to try and work your way out of with a time limit.
Slight gripes with no buyable knives, and the regenerate staff being completely garbage – I just sold it immediately. I liked how even the game pointed out that you’d normally have two healers by Chapter 7, but I did find myself struggling prior to Wesley’s arrival. Maybe vulneraries should be cheaper? I ran out of money in the midgame, but I was never in the dire straits.
The Bottom Line
Overall, I think Absolution has so much potential and I really want to see it be the best it can be! I recommend it to anyone who wants to experience some great FE gameplay with novel mechanics and great characters, and I will be playing through this again when the release is finalized.
! Most of the work lately has been writing and implementing cutscenes, so I don’t have too much to show for it. For now, I’ll leave you with these:
