 |
|
| Creator | Booster_seat87 |
| Engine | FE8 |
| Download | Here |
| Score | 48/80 |
| Rank | =3rd |
| FEU Link | Here |
Reviews
Judge 1: Darrman
Gameplay: 5/10
An Informed Second Look is one of those submissions where I can’t give a very high gameplay score, but I accept it is in service to its story and is very much part of the intended experience. After seeing a few different versions of the story, the player is given control of a strong army of brigands fighting off imperial forces. The goal is to merely fight, not kill, the boss. The other goal is given as “Find the truth”. As the map passes, the narrator makes a few adjustments to the story. Actually, there was a dragon. Actually, there was a winding maze. Actually, this unit’s tier changed. Actually… I won’t spoil the last one.
The gameplay itself is fairly simple, with the plot beats exacting their toll on the player as time goes on. Many of these manifest themselves in vicious traps without any warning, eventually resulting in an impossible situation. This is as the story intends. I wouldn’t call the gameplay particularly fair, yet at the same time if it was, the experience would be lessened. I will say
trying to avoid a scripted kill on turn 2 will crash the game when trying to drop the deceased.
Presentation: 4/5
A lot of choices here helped to set the scene well. Almost every unit is a simple shadow, with no name given at all. The rain falls, making things more miserable, only slowing the monsters down. The music was also quite nice to listen to throughout the chapter. The narrator’s portrait was a bit rough, but that may well have been by design.
Story: 5/5
The story opens with the player receiving some propaganda from the narrator.
However, it’s all completely wrong. The official account is that the brigands destroyed the village and stole the emperor’s sword. Except the empire destroyed the village and the sword was always the brigand’s! The story does an excellent job of sowing the seeds of doubt. What will come next? What detail was wrong? More often than not, these revisions to the story made things harder for the hero. The ending events are best experienced for yourself, so I won’t spoil them here. I will say that I ended up playing through the chapter again to see if I could change them, and my efforts were acknowledged. The presence of character endings was the cherry on top here. Even now, I’m still not completely sure what the truth actually is… Well done.
Total Score: 14/20
Judge 2: Frog
Gameplay: 3/10
This chapter has a very cute premise: it is the recreation of an old battle of legend, except with the addition of a (slightly eccentric) narrator modifying it as you go to match her own recollection. This starts harmlessly enough in the opening cutscene, with the destroyers of the village being the empire instead of our heroes, but quickly escalates as the turns go by – a dragon appears, the terrain rearranges itself, and your allies get demoted before finally betraying you. This was a really cool gimmick and awesome gameplay-story integration! Unfortunately, I believe it’s also the hack’s greatest weakness, gameplay-wise: most of these events are very mean-spirited – especially the ally demoting ones – with no way to prepare for them in advance. Getting sucker punched constantly makes a ton of sense in the story, but really sucks as a player. I do appreciate that these are mostly area events, so they (usually) shouldn’t mess up the player too much, but there’s no way to know that in-game.
Gimmicks aside, the map worked well enough, but didn’t leave a strong impression. The skills here felt very superfluous, barely affecting the player units and making some promoted enemies needlessly luck-based. Hit rates were also pretty low across the board, alongside low-percent crit rates being relatively common, further exacerbating this issue. The hallway-forest was also pretty miserable to walk through.
Presentation: 3/5
I liked the custom portraits here! They were a bit rough but clearly had a lot of effort put into them. The map also looked nice, especially with the nighttime palette, rain and music choice contributing a lot to the mood. The rest was pretty unremarkable though, and some aspects like the unmodified stat screen or music could’ve been better.
Story: 4/5
This was clearly the main focus here, and it shows! I loved so many parts of it: the initial premise, the unit descriptions (although Joelius’ broke character), having all the minor characters be nameless extras forgotten by history, and especially the ending twist & character cards! This is also where all the mid-map events really shined, adding a lot to both the story and experience (at the cost of being kinda unfun). Shoutouts to the villagers retreating affecting the ending as well! I only wish the writing was slightly more polished – it had a few typos and some repetitive dialogue – but otherwise, really awesome work!
Total Score: 10/20
Judge 3: Struedelmuffin
Gameplay: 6/10
To properly explain how I felt about the gameplay, I feel I need to first say that I really loved the way this story was told and how it impacted the chapter. The premise of this chapter is that you are witnessing a flashback of a historical battle where the narrator is constantly interrupting the recounting to add corrections to the version of events being told. Each of his corrections has a significant and unpredictable impact on the chapter progression, which felt super cool at first. Sadly I do have to say “at first” here, though, as the corrections do become a bit unreasonable the further in you get. I ultimately lost on account of the final (I think?) correction causing my entire army to turn against my lord, instantly killing him before I could do anything about it. Based on the ending I got, that seemed to be the closing act players were intended to experience. It was an interesting conclusion narratively, but I am deducting points ultimately due to how unsatisfying it feels from a purely gameplay perspective.
Presentation: 4/5
The presentation here is quite good and sets the tone for the chapter well. Using the shadowy, faceless units as allies helped sell the idea that it was a hazy retelling of a story, which was a great touch. Some of the custom portraits are definitely higher quality than others as well, while the map itself is a bit blocky and has some room for improvement. Despite a few visual shortcomings, the presentation here is very solid.
Story: 5/5
Definitely the strongest aspect of this project, and my personal favorite story out of all of the entries. I found the flashback premise to be super fun and interesting, and I was entertained by the writing throughout the entire playthrough. I love that we’re initially starting out by retelling some propagandized version of events (history is written by the victor after all) that is slowly unraveled by the revelations we receive from someone who was actually part of the battle. The shadowy portraits of your characters imply that they were forgotten to history, which is a fun touch as well. I think my favorite part was a joke where one of your units was revealed by the narrator to have been much weaker than what we initially believed, causing them to be demoted and heavily nerfed in the middle of the chapter. Just a very fun and novel premise here, great job all around.
Total Score: 15/20
Judge 4: BandanaSplitzzz
Gameplay: 4/10
An Informed Second Look is a neat little kill-boss map that dynamically changes depending on the revisions the story’s narrator makes. The narrative is that this chapter is a piece of imperial propaganda, and one unnamed character is giving “An Informed, Second Look”, correcting mistakes and inaccuracies. As they comment on it, the map changes to suit his version of the story, changing terrain, units, factions, and anything you could think of. The story and gameplay are integrated well in that regard. It’s fairly interesting to see the map change in various helpful and unhelpful ways while he talks about the true nature of the situation.
The problem is that when playing, this map is pretty centralized around a long, winding chokepoint in the middle. The majority of this map was spent traveling through a pretty egregious chokepoint, before you make it through, and your lord is betrayed by his buddies (spoilers!) Death becomes inevitable, if it wasn’t already. There’s not a lot of time to engage with the map, and I really wish there were more events that genuinely changed the pacing and tone of the map. I also think that the structure could, hilariously enough, use an informed, second look to sort out the pacing issues.
Presentation: 2/5
There are several graphical errors in this chapter that appear frequently, mainly with the cutscenes bouncing around the map. I really like the music in this hack, which sets the tone for this historical tragedy whose conclusion is already set in stone. This map is also a little blocky, mainly at the top portion with the cliffs. I have to give credit to the very original premise for this hack, which does a lot of heavy lifting for its tone and presentation.
Story: 3/5
You are an unseen character, reciting the evil empire’s reports of a small rebellion being quickly (and violently) put down. As stated before, a primary source of the event listens to your story and corrects your retelling with what truly went down. What he says directly affects the gameplay, almost magically. The vibes are completely on point, as listening to him dryly recount the deaths of innocents, or the incompetence of the player or enemy party, is somber and thoughtful. I think the story didn’t really nail the ending, as the subtle buildup of the macguffins given to Secco wasn’t addressed, in favor of a fairly obvious twist.
Total Score: 9/20
Results
| Category | Darrman | Frog | Struedel | Bandana | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gameplay | 5 | 3 | 6 | 4 | 18 |
| Presentation | 4 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 14 |
| Story | 5 | 4 | 5 | 2 | 16 |
| Total | 14 | 10 | 15 | 9 | 48 |