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| Creator | FrecciaVerde |
| Engine | FE8 |
| Download | Here |
| Score | 28/80 |
| Rank | 12th |
| FEU Link | Here |
Reviews
Judge 1: Darrman
Gameplay: 4/10
As the title implies, A Quest for Gold requires the player to gather gold. 40,000 on normal mode, more specifically. Every unit you are given is very powerful and can fight the enemies with no trouble whatsoever. In order to help reach that goal, every single enemy on the map drops money: usually 250 gold. This results in item get prompts appearing every single time, which slows down the pace of the chapter. At the start of each turn, gameplay halts to give 100 gold per unit alive, minus the lords: this takes upwards of 30 seconds at the start of every turn.
The only enemies that pose any threat are the two bosses and to a lesser degree the late reinforcements: this led me to spread my units across the map before returning to the escape point at the top of the map.
Overall, the concept is interesting, but I didn’t have to make any difficult choices in order to reach the goal amount: I naturally passed the 40k mark fighting the late reinforcements. I finished with 64,000 gold: I did not go for the 100k scene.
Presentation: 2/5
In some regards, the presentation is quite good, with various UI elements changed around and decent custom music. The map also looks very good.
But in others, there were glaring graphical bugs – most notably on the berserker map sprite – and several portraits had incorrectly aligned frames, such as the bishop. These errors do reduce the presentation score here.
Story: 2/5
The story is set between parts 3 and 4 of Temple of Ardesia and features its characters. The premise for this chapter is simple: bandits have robbed the bank in a nearby village and our heroes have to go out and stop them, while collecting all the stolen gold. The chapter itself contains a lot of talk conversations that help to establish each character’s personality, and a few even give items. However, the chapter has a lot of typos and oddly narrow text boxes, which do take me out of the experience. Another pair of eyes on the dialogue to proofread would be very useful.
The ending appears to change depending on your actions: I got a scene where the brawler thanked me for getting his ring back off the reinforcement boss. In the end, some of the money makes its way back to the village…
Total Score: 8/20
Judge 2: BandanaSplitzzz
Gameplay: 6/10
QFG has an extremely solid gameplay loop, where like the name implies, you collect gold and rendezvous. The entire map is a massive, sprawling monster, where you are required to split up to collect as much gold as possible. Since enemies carry gold, almost every square inch of the map is worth exploring, encouraging you to play aggressively to cover ground. It reminds me a lot of a Jugdral map, where you control multiple groups of units spread across a massive map, making it feel like multiple smaller maps in one. Once you’ve reached the difficulty-decided gold requirement, you must activate a seize point at the top of the map. Powerful enemies start spawning later on which can genuinely threaten not only your random units but your game over conditions too. Since your seizers are super powerful, they’re likely on the front lines, forcing you to scramble to escape the map. The entire map has this ebb and flow which is incredibly compelling.
The setup isn’t perfect, however. Base enemies spawn with 250 gold, whereas later enemies spawn with 3000. It almost feels like killing the early units isn’t worth much, since you tend to spike late game anyway. I managed to collect around 75k before escaping, which feels like a super high amount, given I was planning on just collecting 50k and leaving. You’re given 4 separate game-over conditions with inconsistent rules for seizing, which feels out of place and a little confusing. Additionally, lots of enemies have pretty high crit chances, which made me lose multiple times. On such a massive map, mid-round saves would have been greatly appreciated. A little refinement would have gone a long way to making this map shine.
Presentation: 1/5
I cannot lie, this hack looks pretty bad. A lot of these splices and portraits are hand-made, but they are very rough around the edges. The music is grating at times and has very inconsistent volume scaling. The map is pretty but starts to show a lot of tile errors once the many snags start to break. At the start of every turn, every single individual unit must pop up the +100 gold message, which lasts so long it almost comes across as a punchline. What bugs me the most is this really understated thing, where the dialogue at all points has way less room to breathe than should be reasonable. The presentation doesn’t make it unplayable, but it is noticeable and does detract from the overall experience.
Story: 1/5
QFG takes place during a Temple of Ardesia intermission, which is cool! Even though I’m unfamiliar with the characters. The moment-to-moment dialogue is riddled with typos and generally awkward wording. It also frustrated me, since the ever-shifting terrain of the mountain is a perfect opportunity for unique stories, compared to just “brigands attack”. The ending cutscene where the berserker started speaking evilly about how she was going to buy a house was kinda funny.
Total Score: 8/20
Judge 3: Fringus
Gameplay: 3/10
It’s a map with a super unique objective of collecting a bunch of money (50,000 total) on the map, balancing out what you buy to accelerate the process while making enough to get in and get out before things get too rough from the endless tide of enemies.
The major problem is that there’s too many units overall on both sides, and the map is too big, so everything goes on for quite a long time. This is compounded with very unthreatening enemies, so besides the single boss the map, you mostly just split and hold forward on all ends, then converge back. Skillsys is in here, as the usual base, but it’s not very relevant, and moreso appears to be here for consistency with Temple of Ardesia. The only glaring one being Great Shield on generals being a hard foe to bust down, even when applying the right tools.
The other major issue is that the ways you gain gold heavily bog down the pace, especially in tandem with the constant influx of new enemies. For each non essential unit you get 100 gold doled out individually at the end of the turn, and almost every enemy drops 250 gold, making enemy phase each turn take longer because of every drop prompt. While most of the items for sale beyond the 3K Warp/Rescue didn’t feel worthwhile to purchase due to starting inventories being strong and plentiful enough to need no restocking. All in all, it felt like the gimmick would’ve worked much better if the size of most things in terms of scope for the map was at the very least cut in half.
Presentation: 1/5
To start on a positive note, the map is incredibly pretty to look at, clearly has tons of effort put into looking as fresh as it does. But many of the mugs used have very obvious errors in their speaking/blinking frames and a few units just lack them in general. Not only that, but the berserker has a very obviously buggy walking map sprite, and the statscreen clashes with the text and base UI elements from regular FEGBA pretty heavily, ending up not meshing together cohesively.
As well, much of the written text had very unfortunate [A] press placements alongside very tiny textboxes that made reading it more difficult due to so much of the text getting cut off at very inopportune times.
Story: 2/5
It’s a pretty simple, effective story, this group comes to get gold back from the bandits who raided a village’s bank. Everyone gets some talks to delve a little more into their character. Though the writing is somewhat bogged down by typos, it ultimately works as a plot to justify the core gimmick of the map. Though, I did end up feeling like a was missing out on some of overall picture by not previously playing Temple of Ardesia in terms of getting a feel for these characters.
Total Score: 6/20
Judge 4: Electric Serge
Gameplay: 4/10
The gimmick of this map is to collect enough gold (50,000 on hard mode) and then escape with one of your main characters via the northern area. How you get this gold will primarily be from killing enemies (250 gold generally, but some rare enemies exist that drop 1,000-4,000 gold) or through payouts at the start of every turn of 100 gold per currently alive unit.
It’s an interesting concept that’s hamstrung by how enormous the map is and how relentlessly high the map’s enemy density is. The gameplay loop in the later turns essentially amounts to parking everyone in a forest or mountain or jamming a chokepoint, as it’s the only way to stem the tide of reinforcements coming in from every angle of the map. A majority of the enemies aren’t exactly major threats either, what with your units gaining exp as quickly as they do and scaling far past being threatened.
I also had to put up with a couple of strange bugs related to Billy the boxer. Sometimes after actions he would either freeze the game, boot me back to the title screen, or just vanish from the map altogether, with very little rhyme or reason as to why it was happening when other times he could finish a round of combat perfectly fine. To say there’s a lot of room for refinement would be an understatement.
Presentation: 1/5
This is quite the mixed bag. You’ve got a nice looking map, quite a few altered UI elements, and some enjoyable custom music. On the other, said UI feels unrefined due to how the characters’ names overlay on top of it, the textboxes are very short and thus hamper the dialogue, a good chunk of the portraits have pretty rough coloration, and there’s several graphical bugs with both eye/mouth frames and the female berserker’s map sprite. Time taken to iron out these wrinkles would have gone a long way.
Story: 2/5
This is something of a spinoff story to Temple of Ardesia, a hack I haven’t played, but the gist of the tale is that the heroes go to a village only to find it robbed by bandits, and have to knock the stuffing out of said bandits in order to recover the stolen gold. The writing is pretty stilted and riddled with typos to a distracting degree, and the idea of using an area with ever-shifting terrain as a setpiece for a basic bandit attack feels like a waste of its potential. That said, the plot that was here is serviceable enough, and the variation in endings depending on achieving certain objectives is an appreciated touch.
Total Score: 7/20
Results
| Category | Darrman | Bandana | Fringus | Serge | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gameplay | 4 | 6 | 2 | 4 | 16 |
| Presentation | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 6 |
| Story | 2 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 6 |
| Total | 8 | 8 | 5 | 7 | 28 |