The Optimal Way to Enjoy Requiem: Skipping Val Mode

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This is the prologue map of a hack called Requiem, by Sacred Blaze. This map is infamous for several reasons (2 blue units who are both crappy swordlocks, reliant on a bunch of green units, big open rout map with a lot of enemies, etc), and generally leaves a terrible first impression for the game to anyone who plays it.

Requiem, being an old FE7 hack, reuses vanilla FE7’s story structure with the various modes. In this case, Val Mode and Ash Mode. Val Mode encompasses the first 9 chapters of the game, while Ash Mode is the remaining 17. I think it’s pretty safe to say Val Mode is the worst part of the game, and I don’t just mean the prologue, although it is a microcosm of the mode. The maps all tend to drag a lot, and your units are far too weak. The exceptions being Rayden and Josie, the jagens who join midway through the second map that are effectively Pent and Wyvern Seth, respectively. They can solo basically the whole mode, but at the cost of training anybody else. So when they all rejoin in Ash Mode with their Val Mode bases, or close to them, they’re borderline unusable. Your best bet is to have Josie and Rayden do the bulk of the work, since nobody else can actually do it, while you try to train up one or two units (namely Keiran, the early wyvern who is blatantly the best exp target). But overall, not a fun time, and it has knock-on effects that drag down Ash Mode, too.

The other main lord, Alicia, does not have a mode to her name. Instead, upon beating the game, you can use the vanilla FE7 difficulty selection screen to choose “Alicia Mode” which is just a one-chapter extended epilogue. However, Ash Mode is also something you can select on this screen, which I somehow never thought to do until a couple of days ago. Turns out this actually works properly, letting you skip Val Mode entirely. I decided to do a run of this out of curiosity, and was absolutely floored by how much more fun this was than playing with Val Mode!

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Unsurprisingly, skipping the least fun third of the game improves the overall experience, but it goes further than that. In vanilla FE7, if you skipped Lyn Mode, units who normally join in Lyn Mode first will now join in the main game with new, higher bases. Turns out Requiem units also do this, but to an even greater extent. Everyone who rejoins now starts out between level 10 and 14, depending on who they are and when they show up. For some units (like Val), they get fixed bases, while others (like Linda) just get autolevels, but the effects are the same: these units all become a lot more usable and fun.

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These units also get higher base weapon ranks too, which avoids the usual problem of units joining with weapons they can’t actually use. For instance, Linda rejoins with an armor-effective D rank bow, but if you played Val Mode and never trained her, she would still have E bows. Val meanwhile gets a whopping base B swords, which is just rad.

For my playthrough that I finished today, I selected Ash Hard Mode on a whim. After finishing the game and checking it out, I learned that this does actually have slightly reduced exp gain just like vanilla FE7 hard vs normal mode. Exp gain in Requiem is already kinda low, due to enemy levels stagnating for a while, and now with a lot of units joining with very high base levels, it’s a little more noticeable. But I didn’t really mind, and actually felt like the game’s overall cast balance was improved. Since the fliers couldn’t get power-leveled as quickly, and most everyone had more competitive bases now, there was nowhere near as big of a power gap between the mounts and everyone else. I still used a bunch of mounts, of course, but for most foot units, I could totally see myself using them on a replay. With some exceptions (re: Nala).

(I also did scope out the hack in builder, and it looks like there are some extra autolevels on hard mode. I didn’t notice a huge difference, but I still enjoyed hard mode!)

Another added bonus of skipping Val Mode is just cutting the game’s overall length. It sounds kinda mean to say “the game is better because it’s shorter,” but Requiem’s maps are pretty large for the most part. Being 17 chapters as opposed 26 chapters is a much more fitting length, and helped me enjoy the game a lot more this go around. One thing I sadly can’t comment on is the story, since I already read it before and thus skipped it this playthrough. You may still want to at least look at Val Mode to understand some story bits, but I also have no idea how it reads if you skip Val Mode. So maybe someone else can find out and report back.

Obviously the game’s still got its problems, like every game does, but I was just flabbergasted by how much my enjoyment of Requiem improved with this one little thing that’s been available for years, and nobody ever thought to try. I seriously recommend any of you with even a little interest try this out. I’ve linked the patch download and my completed save file down below for you to do this yourself.

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Also I just had to post my final Linda. With Val Mode, she is literally just Rebecca, but when skipping Val Mode, she turned into my favorite unit thanks to her actual base speed and her access to good weapons early (armor-effective bow she joins with, and soon after she gets a magic bow), as well as a fun crit boost on promo (enemies don’t get this). Hope you enjoy if you play this yourself!

Download Requiem by Sacred Blaze here!

Download a completed Requiem save file here!

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After playing one map and looking at the next in Val mode I swore off ever touching Requiem again but I think I’ll have to take a closer look and actually play this sometime soon.

I’ve heard the map quality does get better over time so skipping the Lyn mode (probably the first maps they made) and getting pre trained units does sound like a win win.

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I can totally see myself doing this in the future.

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As I thought, Linda is sleeper OP…

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I played Requiem five or so years ago and remember struggling quite a bit to get past the first map. I also remember manipulating RNG with the movement arrow to get good level-ups because the experience gain in Val mode is so low, and I wanted to make sure my units improved when they did finally get a level up. Enemies have low levels with high bases, and I remember some units feeling unusable because they came with high levels and low bases. I remember the Val mode Pegasus Knight being a particularly bad offender in that regard, being level eight with no decent stats to speak of and almost impossible to level up because of her high level relative to the enemies. I had fun with it, but the unit balance does feel unrefined. I remember Linda actually being a really great unit, but take that with a grain of salt because I didn’t exactly have an authentic experience.

I do think the narrative would lose a lot from not playing Val mode at all, but the first map is such a struggle, the option of skipping straight to Ash mode makes the hack a lot more approachable.

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Perhaps one could just stomp Val mode with said cracked jagens krash referred to just to get through the plot then just go to an Eliwood mode that doesn’t transfer any of the lyn mode content via new game.

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I’ll just say that this Val’s bases are better than my 10/1 Val’s stats (I played Val Mode and Ash Mode).

Val is genuinely a terrible lord imo, but she seems actually solid here.

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The primary issue with this method lies within the fact that Val Mode and Ash Mode really weren’t designed to be standalone, independent stories. Many of the introductory Ash Mode scenes (especially Ash’s conversation with Drake before the first chapter, his talk with Alicia after the chapter, his musings about how Rayden apparently understands his intentions, and almost everything involving Bran) likely make little to no sense without prior context, and this is only the beginning of the many problems that pop up without Val Mode as a foundation.

Story things you lose out on (moderate spoilers for the entire game are within)
  • Snippets of Legato acting suspicious, which sets up his betrayal of Alicia in early Ash Mode and makes it significantly less out of the blue.
  • A notable amount of what makes Drake an interesting character, along with some good moments between him and Andrei. Losing out on this also means losing out on the parallels between him and Alicia. This is particularly important when Drake is one of the better side characters in the game imo.
  • The foundation of Alicia’s entire story arc. Personally I don’t think Alicia’s story works quite as well without establishing her as a villain in Val Mode. Seeing her take charge in Chapter 14 for Ash’s sake doesn’t have the same oomph when the reader isn’t familiar with who she used to be, and therefore won’t pick up on how different she is now. Skipping Val Mode also means her relationship with Bran comes off as a bit more undercooked (though one of my gripes on a replay is that Val Mode doesn’t do enough to showcase her relationship with Bran onscreen).
  • A lot of buildup for many members of the cast. Without Ash Mode, many of the characters lose out on their initial impressions in the story, and when they rejoin they show up under the assumption that the player is already familiar with them. But when the player doesn’t know who they are, many of these characters would likely feel a lot more tacked-on, as the story rarely if ever stops to highlight context that was already covered in Val Mode. Bringing up the Ash Mode introduction again, the story never stops to introduce Bran because it already did in Val Mode—but without Val Mode, a lot of the details around him would likely be confusing and unclear at first, especially in the earliest parts of Ash Mode. I think Josie, Rayden, and the Tiomare cast would also suffer notably from this.
  • The death of the siblings’ mother, along with Ash burying her and making a gravesite for her. Without this, Ash talking about their mother’s death and gravesite in the epilogue comes completely out of the blue, undermining one of the more prominent callbacks of the game’s ending.
  • A lot of smaller details that aren’t properly established in Ash Mode

Requiem was one of the first hacks I played in my romhacking career, and my memory of it was very hazy, so upon seeing this post I thought it would be worth giving a complete replay a shot. As someone who’d already read the story I can’t speak from a totally blind perspective regarding how Ash Mode might read in a vacuum, but I can’t advocate for diving straight into Ash Mode without reading Val Mode when so much of the story will likely get mangled in the process. If one is truly that desperate to avoid the first few maps (which, I should add, is honestly pretty valid considering how those maps are), perhaps the actual ideal way to play would be to implement a Val VN mode that makes the entire Val Mode a cutscene instead.

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