Banner of the maid - END
I'm done with my first blitz game. No fancy ending screenshot, sadly. This is the best I can do:
Overall, I really liked the game, though it also has a number of things I wasn't too fond of. It does a good job of taking everything that makes the basic Fire Emblem gameplay fun and adds some changes that make it feel a bit more fresh. The French Revolution setting is also a welcome change compared to the usual medieval fantasy setting that's present in every FE game, and a ton of other RPGs as well.
It's not an amazing, genre-defining experience, but the core gameplay is fun and the mission design is mostly interesting and varied. Most of my impressions from my
last post describe the things I liked about the game pretty well and they mostly still hold after finishing the game. In addition to that, there's a couple of outstanding missions in the mid-game that are just super good. One that really stands out is a hard defense mission that forces you to defend against enemy waves coming from all directions. However, unlike most defense missions in games, trying to play super defensively doesn't work since you quickly get overwhelmed by a large number of units. Instead, you have to aggressively take on the enemy waves, making sure to match up units with enemies they are strong against and blocking the enemies coming from the back. It's unusual to see a defense mission that requires you to be super aggressive, but it works really well. I think one dialogue choice makes that mission easier, but if that's true I'm really glad I didn't pick it.
The difficulty felt pretty good for me overall. There's were some really tough missions in the mid-game, though I can't tell whether that was because I managed my EXP poorly and didn't have enough upgraded units. Even those were completely beatable with the correct strategy, and beating them felt great. The end-game was too easy though. My army was incredibly strong at that point and the game didn't do anything to really challenge it. There are optional missions you can grind to make the game easier, and I think a self imposed challenge of completing every optional objective without losing a single unit would prove to be a big challenge. Possibly even without doing optional missions, though that might just turn out to be impossible.
There are also some things from the initial impressions that I have to follow up on:
Money actually turned out to matter a lot. It's needed to upgrade units after they reach max. level and it's not exactly cheap. A mid-game mission can give you enough money to upgrade 1 unit if you do it without losing a single unit, it can give you around half that if you lose 1, or it gives nothing for losing more than that. So if you're sloppy, you can quickly end up not being able to upgrade units. While the game does have optional missions you can grind, they don't really give out a lot of money.
Unfortunately, this means that after you've upgraded everyone, there's no real reason to care about that anymore, which makes the game much less interesting. Optional objectives also primarily give you money, so there's no real reason to care about those either (except for achievements and personal satisfaction). While money is also used for buying weapons and skills, those don't really matter.
The above are all the unit types the game has, so there's not as much variety as in most FE games. And while there is some variation between units in the same class (some infantry has long-range attacks, there's a light cavalry unit with a gun instead of a sword, and some other minor differences) it still feels less interesting compared to pegasus knights, wywerns, archers, mages, assassins, dragons, and all the other fun stuff you get in Fire Emblem. This also means that units that join late game aren't very interesting. Getting your 5th light infantry unit just isn't very exciting when you already have 3 that are super good.
Later in the game, unit counters become extremely important. They become so strong that a unit can effortlessly solo half a map worth of units it's strong against but immediately dies to a unit it's weak against. I'm not the biggest fan of rock-paper-scissors systems like this dominating everything else. Still, it's also kind of a good system, for the following reasons:
- It eliminates a common problem in FE games where a couple of units become strong enough to basically beat everything single-handedly while all the weak units just stand around awkwardly. In this game, even the strongest unit gets demolished when facing the wrong type of enemy, so you still need to be quite careful about that even later in the game.
- The game is quite good at mixing enemy types together. This means you can't just send units to always fight things they are strong against, because they will often be next to other types of units.
- The fact that there's four unit types helps slightly because it means it's not just rock-paper-scissors. There's always 2 unit types a unit can fight - the one they counter, and the one they don't counter but aren't weak against either.
So it's a pretty interesting system overall. I'm not a huge fan, but it also fixes one of my major complaints with some FE games.
This turns out to matter quite a bit in longer missions later in the game, where it's actually possible to completely run out if weapon uses. Additionally, there's a unit that's capable of restoring those uses and he turns out to be quite useful.
There's a bunch of other stuff that also isn't that great. The optional objectives more or less always alternate between "finish the mission in X rounds", "kill all enemies", and "nothing", which does get repetitive after a while. Although surprisingly, even such simple and repetitive objectives help with making the missions a little more interesting and while I'm generally not a fan of time limits in SRPGs, I quite liked having one every couple of missions for some variety. Aside from the optional objectives, the map design is very inconsistent. There's some incredible missions (as mentioned above), but there's also a bunch of missions that are just about slowly marching up the field killing everything in your way without anything interesting happening.
The last part of the game is also quite disappointing. The map design isn't all that great in the later missions. The last mission (well, the one before that since the real last mission is more like a pointless epilogue) stands out by just being completely terrible. As mentioned above, late-game missions are also too easy. There's also a lot less story in the later parts of the game, with a number of missions that barely have any story between them and an ending that's barely built up and therefore isn't really any good. Granted, a translation that's actually good might improve on that, but even without one it's pretty evident that the late-game story leaves a lot to be desired.
The game also lacks a lot of non-combat stuff that a lot of people seem to really like in FE games. There's no support conversations (unless I'm just dumb and managed to get through the entire game without noticing them, which would be pretty embarrassing), no children, no base-building stuff, no story branches, barely any voice-acting, and the music is bad. The optional missions also re-use maps from the main missions, though they do tend to change things up quite a bit so that you're at least not just doing the same thing all over again.
There's also a lot of enemy reinforcements, which can often really mess up your plans when you're not expecting them. Which is cool in a way but can also cause you to lose a mission without being able to do anything about it. Thankfully, missions are quite short with animations turned off, so even if you lose it doesn't take much time to get back to where you where. I think easy mode also lets you save mid-mission but I'm not completely sure.
So all-in-all, it's a simple FE-like game (especially compared to the more recent FE games) with solid core gameplay, some good mission design, a fresh setting, and some nice ideas (optional objectives, a different take on penalties for losing units...) that help differentiate it from actual FE games. On the other hand, it's also missing a lot of things that I think a large number of FE fans enjoy. Apart from the core gameplay, there's really not much there but thankfully that + the mission design was really enjoyable for me.
Next up, I think I'll go with Yakuza 0. It seems like a good change of pace.
