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| Creator | Rivian |
| Engine | FE8 |
| Download | Here |
| Score | 71/80 |
| Rank | 1st |
Reviews
Judge 1: Darrman
Gameplay: 7/10
Your units aren’t very strong, and many of the enemies very much are. You are given plenty of tools to deal with these enemies: smart use of them is required to succeed. The goal is interesting; you have to visit every village, and each village is spread across the map. Group AI is heavily used and telegraphed with unique items indicating which group a unit belonged to, if any.
Every unit has Shove and Canto+, giving a lot of flexibility in positioning.
The pacing is lenient: you can generally take your time going around the map. There is incentive to hurry up, but I was never in danger of running out of time and triggering reinforcements. After getting a promotion and the Provoke item, it was easy to bait out the last few groups.
Presentation: 3/5
The graphics are reasonable; they get the job done. The new music is nice, but there’s only a boss battle theme; the map music continues in battle and the heal music is vanilla.
The speed up animations hack is a bit buggy: it also speeds up the battle quotes and makes them difficult to read.
Story: 5/5
The story premise is interesting – you’re playing as defeated rebels with nothing to lose. The characters had motivations for doing what they’re doing, and wanted to make what difference they could – by burning any compromising information to save who they can. The setting was cohesive – this chapter wouldn’t be out of place in ancient China. I also like the funny item descriptions.
The title is also fitting: this is the “closing act” of the rebellion. I’d be interested in seeing the earlier battles.
The script could have done with another proofread: there were several typos and the grammar was a bit clunky at times, but the story is overall worthy of a perfect score here.
Total Score: 15/20
Judge 2: MCProductions
Gameplay: 8/10
Decent map that reminds me greatly of the burn supplies map in FE10. Enemy quality is high really selling what the story tells you. Good fun.
Presentation: 5/5
Looks really good. Not much else to say.
Story: 5/5
This is a bad ending story. I like bad endings.
Total Score: 18/20
Judge 3: 2WB
“Endgame”
nope
your hack is bad
every time i’ve seen this so far in a one chapter submission it’s a miserable slog of an experience
Gameplay: 10/10
“Your entire army has canto+” is… Is that a gimmick?
I’m not sure. It’s… cool, but I also don’t like it because it’s something that actually blows open so much strategical ideas, both in letting them be done and invalidating old ones.
Giving each enemy a “squad” item that tags them to reveal their AI is a good decision.
Making it be only identifiable in the status menu makes it extremely difficult to figure out which units are on which squads because it is NOT just “who is next to whom”?
But something is SO much better and nicer than nothing.
There’s a lot of things going on that make it *extremely* hard to track where to go, but realistically, the only major complaint I have — I was in the middle of the map when I started getting tired so this isn’t really a slight to the effort, it’s really hard to know how the houses becoming ruins affects the map movement. I expected it – but I didn’t remember the move costs for the terrain correctly.
I don’t really like the leadership stars thing – it’s certainly better than the alternative – but it gives me this apprehension whenever I start an attack, seeing the low unit hit rate.
Presentation: 5/5
The title music’s got a squeaky part that hurt my ears but it’s really good otherwise.
The choice to exposit over crickets and rain is nice. Aesthetic.
The music is good and quite jamming stuff, I just
I can’t strategize to it. It’s too much going on.
But there’s so much choice polish in lots of events. I feel not just for the six characters I’ve gotten, but the environment around them. It’s a fantastic package overall.
As an example, I noticed “oh, hey, the Young Master is memetically squishy”, and I decided to instantly kill him… and I got a special dialogue for it.
The whole thing is filled with these. I’m sure there’s some I couldn’t manage due to not having time to do multiple full playthroughs, since each would take an hour.
Story: 4/5
The text *started* to drag. And then it ended. Right as it was getting to be a little too long.
It was good text, that exposited a lot of important surrounding context around the units.
… I cried at the end.
The story suffers from being a conclusion and thrusting into the direct middle of an involved conflict, necessitating a lot of Nounage, which is bad for comprehension. By the ending cutscene, I’d forgotten pretty much everything exposited about the guy who showed up; because my brain just was loaded up too fast with too much and then interrupted by the gameplay.
So, I said the thing I said and I eat my words. This was GOOD.
Total Score: 19/20
Judge 4: theghostcreator
Gameplay: 10/10
The gameplay was very unique and it felt like every unit had a use of some kind. The smoke signals were good ways to reward fast play and it never felt like I was forced to deal with more than I was able to. The set of armor was really nice too since it let anyone promote, I gave it to the village girl with the harpoon since she had a really nice portrait and I felt bad for her. The squad indicators were also great quality of life features that helped planning big time.
Presentation: 4/5
The presentation did its job with setting the scene for sure, and the entirely custom music was a real treat to listen to, the custom title screen was also nice.
Only gripe are some of the battle animations and the lack there of for a few units, it felt kind of inconsistent but I don’t think there was much that could be done there, overall it is a great looking and sounding hack.
Story: 5/5
Absolutely amazing, felt very self contained and made to be a one chapter hack. This hack knows how to create emotion in the player, it doesn’t show anything graphic, but merely alludes to it and tells of the fates of the characters. The ending scene was absolutely heartbreaking too. One of the best I’ve seen from a romhack, this highly encourages me to check out any other creations from the writer.
Total Score: 19/20
Results
| Category | Darr | MC | 2WB | Ghost | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gameplay | 7 | 8 | 10 | 10 | 35 |
| Presentation | 3 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 18 |
| Story | 5 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 18 |
| Total | 15 | 18 | 19 | 19 | 71 |