Part 57: Game Evaluation

Final Update - Conclusion

Before I get this thread ready to be shipped to the archives I still have to write one last summarizing post about this game. We've seen it all and most of us have made up their mind in regards to this game. Well here are mine: Let's begin with the things I actually liked about the game.

The Good

- I love that this game has skills like the old games and newer games. I think it adds to the game, even if some are overpowered or it seems that they forgot to regard skills for some of the bosses (like having the last boss not packing Nihil must have been a mistake, since you could basically oneshot him, then again he had his special victory condition).

- Character menus. The amount of detail and care that went into the menus is something I really enjoyed. Be it the statistics about what kind of units you killed, on what tile and with what weapon (including the bonuses you get from it), graphs for your level up statistic for every single attribute, Nicknames or your movement range for every terrain. Not many games have these and while they are by no means necessary they are still appreciated.

- Promotion. I'm honestly fan about promotions or to be more exact the xp system in this game. Not losing xp for promoting units early (well apart from a Super Proof later) makes it easier to raise units because you can givem them an immediate boost and they still gain their xp like a lvl 10 unit for instance and you just have to use a Super Proof if the unit reaches 30 at all.

- The party scenes. Not really the actual scenes in the game but rather the concept of just having some casual small talk between members of the army instead of being plot focused or having to go out of the way (well stand them next to each other/participate in the same battle[which is a good change]) in order to find things out about your members. Granted this only works if your cast has a rasonable size. Otherwise the FE approach is better by miles.

- Seperate armies. While it probably would have worked better to keep them completely seperated, potentially even as seperate campaigns I personally like the idea behind it because if executed properly you can focus on a much smaller area and give it more personality instead of being forced to travel the whole world showing up at places of importance in the game world for a single fight/chapter. Granted this didn't happen here.


The Bad

- Pacing. The game has a horrible pace throughout the game with filler maps on top of random encounters just to get somewhere. This is just massively annoying in an SRPG like this (in my opinion a least) and detracts from the experience when you have to kill gargoyles or skeletons for the nth time.

- The wood shooter class. While I can accept Maerhen as a practical joke the wood shooter class is just beyond awful. Range characters already have it hard enough in the FE series but if you give them horrible base movement (3!) coupled with special weapons that once used won't let you move again for the rest of the map (!) you did something horribly wrong.

- The story. The story is the most cliché story of all time and has been told way too often (even by Kaga himself). While gameplay is supposed to be the one thing to keep you playing,having a repetetive story (or joke of a story) can still be a real turn off. Then there were the horribly misplaced and in part way too long points of exposition with the most jarring example being the one at the end during the epilogue.

-The cast. 90% of the cast are horribly clichés, while this is nothing new for the FE series here they lacked the charm to pull this off. Also there were too god damn many of them.

-Huge Maps. On top of the pacing problem some maps are just huge and not filled enough with stuff to do. Since movement is on the lower end of the spectrum (barring fliers) it becomes annoying and basically not viable to use any low movement units.

-The enemies. While fighitng a cult and evil nobles isn't the worst thing and not inherently wrong I felt annoyed by how many sympathatic characters you slaughter and quite often for no real reason as well (Barbossa blowing himself up was fine, then came Ernst, the Navy Dude, Julius etc etc. and it became ridiculous). From a mechanical point of view they were lackluster as well with a few ridiculously strong and a whole lot of time wasting enemies. The only danger outside of those stupid boss fights existed because I rotated the cast relatively often instead of sticking to just using a few (or because of horribly map gimmicks, screw you Arkis). Luckily the AI isn't quite as ruthless and doesn't use those witches efficiently...

-Balance. Some units were horribly underpowered while others were literal gods. Some bosses are ruthlessly unfair while the rest sucks balls. Same with equipment. No game should have a sword with 80% base crit or map clearing tomes etc. (Not to mention those horrible wood shooter weapons ).

The Ugly

-The growth rates. Urgh.. these growthrates have to be on the lower end of the spectrum and are really frustrating. While I don't mind the RNG screwing me over every once in a while it became ridiculous in this game. Most units I used in the endgame were relatively RNG proof due to great promotions or skill (or prepromotes like Yoda) or were fed a buttload of stat bosters, or both (Sierra ). I definately enjoy the newer games a lot more where you got a lot more green numbers.

-The translation. While I don't want to harp on it too much since it was a group project of people who couldn't get enough editors it has to be said that the translation became an utter mess towards the end. Most noticeable the constantly changing names and linebreaks (since there was no script to find I had to repeat scenes several times in order to not miss screenshotting a line to type later) probably made reading this quite a pain since I'm sure I didn't stay consistent the whole way through either.

Conclusion

While the game was definately the bastard child of the FE series I don't regret playing it. Still it can be easily said that the FE games that were made after Kaga left are vastly superior to this one so I wouldn't hold it against anyone if they skipped this one. I probably won't replay this one any time soon either.

Thanks for reading and posting in the thread. Hopefully you enjoyed it.