I just finished this hack and had a great time, here are my thoughts. I guess you must get stuff like that every other week, but I still want to throw my hat in the ring and share the experience I had.
Spoilers, I suppose.
The writing was stellar, and the gameplay, while I do think the game drags a bit towards the end, it feels like the game has six final maps. Though I understand that’s a preference thing, not enjoying fire emblem once all my units have reached level 20 and promoted as then the “getting stronger” aspect isn’t as relevant anymore.
But don’t get me wrong, the game is very fun! The gimmick of limited healing felt very natural. Though this game’s main appeal does lie in the story, and story gameplay integration, but I won’t complain, I am a “Story first” kinda guy. The game’s script is top notch, and thus the cast is great, even though I couldn’t use everyone (and I did use more people than I need to for the fun of the game), I cared about pretty much everyone.
It’s amazing that a bunch of fans can make a game that is better than what a giant company can do. It also feels significantly less hardcore than Vision Quest, the last romhack I played. I can imagine a non fire emblem geek to play this as their first and fall in love with Fire Emblem.
Now that I think about it, both Vision Quest and Hag in White did the “Regular person accidentally gets involved in nation wide business” and while in Path of Radience it didn’t capture me (though PoR had some great scenes) both Vision Quest and Hag in White made their escelation feel so natural.
Though I get that to some extent Hag in White is great BECAUSE it is a fan work made to be good and not successful, Real Fire Emblem would never take Pheme and Soter away from you, and it would have a more plain cast with less diversity. Real Fire Emblem would never make a game this simple again, it would need skills, reclassing, fishing, amiibo support. (Not the cool kind where you can scan in the waddle dee amiboo and have waddle dee and pluto get a C support.)
Well, I am glad I played Hag in White, thank goodness I ditched Soter because he got low speed and Alonso had speed.
PS: It would be really funny if Alonso would be in Heroes, like, the only fangame character to ever be put in heroes, without any explanation, he just gets shadowdropped one day.
I think there’s something up with glaucus’ Gamble skill. This enemy has 34 avoid, his hit in this screenshot is already halved down to 78 from gamble. There’s no universe where 78 plus WTA is below 30 Hit. Even if it was quartering his accuracy the numbers wouldn’t make sense.
Triangle adept seems to only work when initiating? The WT doubling doesn’t seem to happen on EP. EDIT: It does, but only for Begona, not the generic goon here.
Likely to be both the first and last piece of Alba fanwork ever lmao. Was going to add Lorenzo at first but I scrolled past Alba trying to find a reference image and figured she’d be a lot funnier. I stand by that decision.
I talked about this with SR on Discord and got some clarifications. Triangle Adept affects the user’s WT bonuses/penalties on both phases, but only affects their opponent’s WT bonuses/penalties when the user initiates. This is a known issue, but SR hasn’t been able to find a benevolent coding wizard who can fix it (for free, anyway).
@SaintRubenio Maybe the Triange Adept thing should be added to the Known Issues section of the opening post?
Just finished my second playthrough. Definitely had fun! In fact, I enjoyed it even more than the first time, as I could observe the details much more closely. Aside from the rich storyline, I particularly like how the colours of the base camp tiles change as the plot progresses.
The first time I played, I recruited the other two mercenaries and then benched them. It’s not a wise choice, because Vasiliki is more useful when on the bench. So, when I started my second playthrough, I decided to choose Vasiliki in the 2nd Roadside Stop and deploy her no matter what. I even gave her the +5 growth rate scroll. And she didn’t let me down (B 100 W 66).
And a few scattered thoughts: one-way conversations and supports served the plot very well; Nicaea and Demeter’s lines are beautiful, and sometimes unsettling; by training Phobos, it was quite something to see his lines with the final boss; the flash that appears when entering a specific area to trigger reinforcements is a useful reminder, although one time it came so suddenly my brain felt like it’d been electrocuted.
All in all, a brilliant hack. I like it even more than when I last finished it.
I don’t know if I am just really bad or I got Stat screwed but I cannot get past chapter 15. I usually end up with all my units dead (playing on Casuual though). It’s driving me a little crazy because I am pretty sure nobody else had much issue getting through this chapter. And also I want to continue the plot.
Well, if you feel like you can’t keep going and just want to experience the story, you can always change to Story difficulty at camp. No shame in it - that’s why the mode exists!
I am not sure if it’s a bug but if Pheme uses maelstrom as fighter (which she can), the game crashes.
Edit: oh wow, looks like someone else said it just a while ago
As a bit of an experiment, I added portraits to the character descriptions section of Chapter 7x, since the visuals are part of the joke. Don’t expect me to do this for every chapter, but tell me what you think.
(I also added an “explaining the joke” section for Hayden, now that I’ve played Dark Stone and actually get the joke.)
Not an explicit one afaik, but you should be able to run the Hag Self Randomizer and set all settings to vanilla bar 0% growths. Pretty sure it’s based on an older update, though.
it’s 5am and I just finished my first play through. my god i love this hack so much, so much so that i made an account just for this to say this. Genuinely made me tear up. Orlaith was wonderful, everyone should use her in all their runs
also came here to ask about 0% growths but someone literally just answered lol
Poor Roy, as a Roy fan, the FE6 vilains hack was horrible in the end. Funnily enough, I never cared for Marcus & Wolt but the last chapters made them my absolute favorites. The boss convo between Erik and Construct-Eliwood made me so salty, I suicided Erik against the manaketes reinforcements.
Do you think you’ll ever do an archive for Dark Stone?
"I’m finally engaging with the FE community (instead of just lurking) because of your hack. Congratulations on creating such an incredibly good game! THANK YOU SO MUCH for the amazing female characters and for exploring diversity while avoiding the usual ‘medieval society’ binary bullshit. Your storytelling and character development are awesome. Thank you for the best FE hack I’ve ever played.
I see that the generic enemies in the 3 endgame stages have the map icon typically used for inhuman enemies like FE7’s Morphs or FE8’s Monsters despite them clearly being human, is there a reason for that?
I loved reading Glen & Caellach’s friendship, as well as Lyon’s story, thanks for making it easily accessible