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| Creator | Lowres |
| Engine | FE8 |
| Download | Here |
| Score | 38/80 |
| Rank | 16th |
| FEU Link | Here |
Reviews
Judge 1: Darrman
Gameplay: 4/10
The chapter is a puzzle map. All of your units are staff units, and none of them have any weapons. There’s a boss with a 100 crit Luna on the throne, and the goal is to seize. The player is given various tools to try to keep the enemies away, such as a staff that summons light runes. However, not all of these work as intended. The rescue staff claims to have total range, but still has its usual magic/2 range, though with a glitched range display. The entrap staff has highly inconsistent range, and I ended up crashing the game once as it let me use it with no enemy in range. The again staff doesn’t work on the dancer, but that oddity is likely intentional.
I thought the solution was to grind staff rank with the Hone Staff in order to use the renamed berserk on nearby enemies to kill the boss, but after getting mauled by promoted arena enemies I moved the boss with Entrap. I have no idea if that was the intended solution or not, and I manipulated the AI to run in circles around the central courtyard by blocking my units inside. Overall the idea of being unable to attack at all is interesting, but the execution could be better and I was frustrated at times pointlessly arena abusing. A bit more time in the oven would go a long way.
Presentation: 2/5
The mugs look fine and the map is decent. Animations are off by default, with most staves having unusual animations and vanilla music, but these weren’t meant to be seen so I won’t dock marks for them. The title screen is completely unchanged and vanilla elements such as “the army of Grado” remain unedited on the enemy descriptions. The Hone Staff causes many unusual graphical effects, mostly causing almost every tile to glow green once leaving the arena. It’s inconsistent whether or not it clears when moving a unit.
Story: 1/5
The opening cutscene is decent: as soon as the signal goes off, rescue the other half of the army who are scouting an abandoned university. However, the magic bags and money bags were confused, leaving them helpless to fight and requiring the units outside to charge in. There is an intermediate cutscene explaining the nature of the Hone Staff and how important it is to make sure the bandits don’t burn the place down, but there is no ending. The story is not finished, and Eirika and Seth’s replacements just recite the prologue ending. The lord’s death quote is also unedited from Eirika’s. Since there’s no resolution at all, I can only give a 1.
Total Score: 7/20
Judge 2: Rivian
Gameplay: 6/10
An all staff team is definitely quite the interesting team. Besides vanilla staffs like sleep, physic and movement staffs, there are also staffs that allow for light runes, arena grinding and rescuing enemies, which is necessary to use the s rank staff to clear the map. The map is pretty open and I was unsure which direction to go and quickly found myself trapped by enemies and killed. On further resets, I got better at leveraging my staff usage to block or slow down enemies with staffs and try to get chests as fast as possible before my resources ran out. With the staff armours splitting to lead several enemies away, I was able to safely acquire the objective. It is an interesting experiment in pacifist fire emblem and leveraging only staffs. Perhaps it is because I’m not familiar with such strategies, but I found it pretty hard to intuitively grasp what I was supposed to do. There were also some oddities such as the anew staff not being to target allies occasionally and hone staff causing serious visual errors.
Presentation: 2/5
Pretty good portrait choice. There doesn’t seem to be animation palettes but that’s understandable given the non-combat nature of the hack. The map does feel rather visually bland with lots of empty repeating space, but I do recognise a lot of space is needed for the player units to have time to retreat.
Story: 2/5
The starting scene is pretty brief, but it shows the group is undertaking a botched raid. The dialogue ties in directly into gameplay implications. The end event text seems to be vanilla, presumably due to time constraints.
Total Score: 10/20
Judge 3: Legend of Loog
Gameplay: 6/10
The gameplay here is centered on staff use only, where you largely try to avoid enemies and make your way around the map to pick up chests. This is cool in theory, but there are some unfortunate things holding it back.
For starters, a good number of the staves have some kind of bug or oddity about them. Anew, the dance staff, is inconsistently applicable. Obliterate, the S rank staff that is the map’s victory condition, is incorrectly labeled with the Berserk desc, which could cause difficulties if the map is in a dangerous state and you take it at face value. Hone, the staff that lets your characters get Obliterate rank, can cause a game hang if it is used when not adjacent to any allies and triggers an Arena battle, which is fairly unreliable and could kill off your unit in an unexpected way.
Despite this, the map still has a lot going for it, and planning out a strategy to get most of the chests while surviving against the enemies is fairly interesting. Making use of the two “good” units on each side and tactically taking hits while moving forward both made for a unique gameplay experience. A bit more terrain would’ve been nice, especially towards the top side where it’s very open. Overall, the chapter’s focus on staffing helps engage the player, but it could have used a bit more time in the oven.
Presentation: 2/5
Eventing is minimal, mugs are solid, and the map’s visuals are fine. There are a couple graphical glitches, like rainbow movement tiles resulting from using Hone or some floating pixels on the staff armor map sprite. The presentation is in general fine, but nothing stands out in particular.
Story: 2/5
The start event has a fairly unique story setup, with a group of mages taking back a variety of staves from a fallen building (but they forgot their tomes). I liked what I saw even though it was brief, but unfortunately, the end event is vanilla FE8, so there’s not too much to say here.
Total Score: 10/20
Judge 4: Levin64
Gameplay: 7/10
A chapter that revolves only around staves? Combined with puzzly objectives? Sign me up! It is a puzzly map with no player phase combat whatsoever. The objective is to seize the throne, yet the player is incentivized to grab the chests for utilities needed to tackle the main objective. There are lots of different staves that can be used, like Blockage that makes runes, or Entrap that actually teleports an enemy to the caster. Some staves are kinda buggy, specifically Entrap, Rescue, and Hone. The main idea of using Hone (which is basically a “teleport me to an arena to grind my staff rank”) is a simple yet interesting trick; but the staff makes the map buggy after the unit is done with the grinding.
Overall, I love the “pacifist” way of playing the chapter (pacifist as in not using any offensive weapon) as this hack is definitely a puzzle chapter, but it can still be improved more.
Presentation: 2/5
Portraits are good, the map is decent albeit too repetitive and plain. Battle animation is off by default, and some staves use weird animation that doesn’t really match the function of the staff (like Thief staff that uses Fortify map anim). Title screen and theme is still vanilla, and outro is still vanilla. Presentation that is integrated to the gameplay is fine, but everything else can be more improved.
Story: 2/5
The intro is rather brief, as they want to grab every single staff stolen by the enemies inside the building. The premise is promising, but sadly the outro is unedited from vanilla.
Total Score: 11/20
Results
| Category | Darr | Rivian | Loog | Levin | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gameplay | 4 | 6 | 6 | 7 | 23 |
| Presentation | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 8 |
| Story | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 7 |
| Total | 7 | 10 | 10 | 11 | 38 |