 |
|
| Creator | prezp00nage |
| Engine | FE8 |
| Download | Here |
| Score | 15/80 |
| Rank | Disqualified |
Reviews – ENTRY DISQUALIFIED
Judge 1: Darrman
Gameplay: 0/10
Chapter unwinnable: game frequently and randomly crashes upon enemy phase start once the third area of the map is reached. It is not consistent, but there is no way to consistently avoid crashes and when playing without save states such a crash will end the run.
Even without the game-breaking crash, the chapter would only score about 2~3/10: it’s a walking simulator. Enemy quality is generally low: Fin and the other mounts slaughter most enemies. The map is also massive, like FE4. Unlike FE4, GBA move values are used, which results in even more walking. Also in the vein of FE4 are staggered enemy groups, but new ones load in by just crossing invisible lines. Another question I have are whether Leaf and Nanna are meant to be able to use the Light and Earth Swords as they have no weapon ranks, but I assume that’s intentional. In short: walk, walk, and walk some more.
Presentation: 1/5
This chapter is clearly rushed: presentation is an afterthought. All the character portraits are “clay soldier” portrait creator sprites, including canonical character Fin, who has free to use sprites in the graphics repo. Some weapons have random other weapon names appear in the description too. There’s also instances of the same text boxes appearing twice in a row.
Story: 1/5
I love Jugdral, and I naturally was excited to see a hack set there. However, there’s barely any story here. It’s set during the Fall of Lenster, and the goal fits in with that: get away as fast as possible. But after the opening cutscene, there is no more story. There are several natural points to play a cutscene of some length, but all that happens are enemies popping up out of thin air. What little text there is doesn’t always agree with FE4 and 5: for example, one of the units is named Xavier. He isn’t the FE5 Xavier.
Total Score: 2/20
Judge 2: MCProductions
Gameplay: 0/10
I cannot finish this submission because of crashes.
Presentation: 1/5
Extremely ugly character sprites, a WTF tier map, and vanilla music.
Story: 1/5
Have you played FE4 and 5 before? Quan and Ethlyn didn’t die at the Battle of Belhalla, nor did Calf die during the Aed Massacre.
Total Score: 5/20
Judge 3: 2WB
Gameplay: 3/10
Due to the implementation of Canto+, I have to press the A button three times to end a unit’s turn if they had remaining movement.
This sucks. A lot.
The tiiiiny gradations in the weapons available make it really annoying to figure out if I actually want to bother capturing an enemy, since there’s so many uses.
But also I have a red gem, a goddess icon; for 6500 gold to purchase Javelins, a second Heal, and vulneraries with. Scrumptious gold.
The little children bein allowed to use their preference weapons is… interesting and I think weird.
The first boss, Gerrard, literally not acting at all, is extremely weird and frustrating.
Correction. The fact that he does not act EXCEPT TO HEAL HIMSELF is INCREDIBLY FUCKING DUMB.
The >>gigantic overwhelming reinforcements<< from when progressing to the fortress that blocks the way is.. tilting. Because it makes enemies show up -after- I've committed an action, which deprives me of set up time? But this is honestly fine; and appropriate for the environment, I just.. it feels off. And makes me worried about how far I'm going to have to go and how many enemies there will be. Enemies spawning from behind with no warning pan! My favorite! I love it. By that, I mean I hate it. Though it's good in this map to force me to actually be moving forward; if they're turn based and not infinite I could just camp them. And if they are infinite, then I can clog the map so the enemies don't spawn with them! :D
There’s so.. little for me to say. I sat in this middle section for a really disappointingly long amount of time to get the Berserker to an HP level where capturing him’d be easy. This took far too many turns because I didn’t want to ever engage with his berserker-sourced critical chance nor his having Wrath critical chance.
Then I trigger the next group because I figure it’d be fine and there’s a whooole ton of enemies that jump out which is… pretty irrelevant honestly, because I have a strong armor knight and a one tile choke with a fortress. But what was really obnoxious was the brigands spawning in behind me, because they happened with no warning no fanfare and just… in the middle of my strategizing. It was sheerly luck that I was able to actually then guard Leif and Nanna from being slaughtered.
The game crashes if there isn’t a player unit in a vague “western” piece of the map starting on turn 42. I assumed pathfinding on the Brigands or an incorrectly implemented AREA event.
I tried many things – for around 20 minutes to try and debug this issue.
I could not get farther without restarting the whole run due to, well, *not having back-up savestates* since that was the stated condition under which we were told to judge.
What I did see was not bad but desperately wanted to work some way besides “you got to the next area, now let me spawn in 10+ enemies for the next group”.
The capture mechanic is kind of boring in this context. I greatly enjoyed the really small number of skills used but I almost wish there just were even fewer – I never used Nihil, Gamble, Wrath; the Knight’s Adept only had the ability to hose me because I never strategise around random procs…
Additionally: Anyone can use Finn’s Brave Lance! Aaaa. And Killer weapons – and the Shine tome – suck! A lot! I love losing my Thief to a 5% critical and having to do really stupid things to deal with an enemy killer lance on a flier that’s moving into my party (that’s also not weak to bows because reasons).
After getting forward back to where I was, I was unable to progress much farther, because the game repeatedly crashes when approaching the last castle. I tried a lot of things and had a lot of different savestates to try things from at this point, but I couldn’t get it to not lock up.
Presentation: 1/5
The map is well done -given- that the mountain seams “must” exist due to the sheer size of the mountains in play here. They don’t look good, though, and looking at it is very displeasing. Similarly the water at the edge of the map animates in every direction but I know that’s hard and obnoxious on a good day.
The cliffs in the north-east middle area are… painful.
The repeated view of one tile chokepoints is not nice to look at.
The character mugs feel like portrait generator output with no cleaning, except for Tychus.
The minimugs are kind of painful to look at due to being the whole mug resized instead of a crop, and are totally uncleaned.
Finn and Simon’s palettes are garbage black with random gold pixels instead of unified darkness that yields way to a gold trim; and are also darker than the outline internally and use darker tones where lighter ones go.
Irena and Enoch’s palettes have…issues, but are mostly tolerable.
Tychus’ palette is default.
Flor’s palette scares me. The face and hands just are doing something and I don’t know what it is and it scares me.
The music is vanilla but I can never, ever, ever be upset at using Treasured Memories as a map theme. It’s a good song.
A few weapons have the description “Shortsword” because their description ID shares with the ID that was used for the item. Other items have incorrect descriptions – For example, the Iron bow says that it’s an “Axe made from a dragon fang. Michael.” which is quite obviously just wrong.
New items reuse vanilla icons which is mildly confusing at first but not a large problem due to their names not looking like the identically iconed item at all. It does pose some problems though (Short / Steel Lance).
“All that’s left is their leader” — thanks, I knew I was playing an FE8 hack, Finn!
>support
>”Neimi.”
I knew I was playing an FE8 hack, Thaddeus/Simon! I didn’t need a reminder…
Story: 3/5
The intro scroll is a nice summary of fe4b1’s conclusion and how it pertains to the moment of the story that is depicted.
The characters are given actual characterization; the story is simply the dire escape of Finn with the children in tow. It had only minor hiccups in that regard.
I didn’t particularly find what I saw to be endearing but it had no flaws and was mostly sensible; while I wish there was more – and that I saw the end – I understand there isn’t really too much room to play with the basic idea, which I think works out well.
Total Score: 7/20
Judge 4: theghostcreator
Gameplay: 0/10
I take back what I said about the untitled entry… This chapter took me more than two hours to complete due to the no save states clause… Before I realized there was a game breaking glitch letting me just warp rescue drop Leif to the arrive point.
Also, one of my resets was caused by a bandit going to one of the boss forts which then crashed the game. There is no interesting gameplay here, you walk forward with the great knight holding some javelins and handaxes and you just win. I genuinely wanted to quit so many times with this entry, I was miserable the whole time.
Presentation: 2/5
Commend the effort with the huge map and custom portraits but both of them look awful, there’s no custom tracks at all, and the palettes look even worse.
Story: 2/5
Neat concept but it doesn’t go far with it.
Total Score: 4/20
Results
| Category | Darr | MC | 2WB | Ghost | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gameplay | 0 | 0 | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| Presentation | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 5 |
| Story | 1 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 7 |
| Total | 2 | 2 | 7 | 4 | 15 |