ThatOneGuyWhoDoesThings

Hi! I'm going to give my first impressions of this, if you don't mind. Opening Narration This is kind of bugged. There's a stray "o." when the game starts talking about Norcrest. Also, when they show Richard, the narration regarding Norcrest is repeated. Art assets could do with a bit of sprucing up, but this is definitely not a deal-breaker. This is seen in the attachments below. Prologue I'll admit, that little bit of intro with the spiders made me giggle. Regardless of how much this changes over the course of development, please keep that scene. I also feel that maybe a tiny bit more writing for the villager girls would give the player some reason to slightly care about their death. It reminds me of FE7 Lyn Mode... in a not good way, unfortunately. If this were likely to be played by someone who had no experience of the series, then it would be fine; a simple map involving a weapon triangle-advantaged main character against two bandits. However, because it's a hack, only experienced players will likely, meaning you can experiment with more than a simple (but nonetheless effective) sword-user v bandits + forest set-up. Midnight Sun is a good example of a hack with a great first chapter. It subverts expectation (which is a nice extra) with a Shaman lord who is better at Def than Res. The catch is that while there are physical enemies she can do fairly well against, tackling them is pointless as they infinitely spawn and you have a Jagen-esque NPC who can deal with them for much longer. You're now forced into Shaman v Shaman combat where they hit hard, but you also have some free Avoid in the pillars on the map. This is all capped off with a Shaman boss who, if memory serves, can 3-shot your Lord. It's a really cool and novel first map and I feel that you could try something like that, e.g maybe add a few more enemies and make it an escape chapter? FE6 also really puts you in the deep end with its first chapter. Sure, it's not hard (on Normal, at least) but it gives you a fair whack of units and expects you to use them well (e.g place a character you want to train on the upper side of the cliff, while Wolt also helps tink damage against the enemy, etc.). Something like this might also be cool if you decide to change to include multiple units in the Prologue. Plotwise, it's fairly normal FE stuff here. I do love Richard's off-kilter personality and that he actually collapses when his friends find him at the end. I look forward to seeing him develop in the future. Chapter 1 Before I go to gameplay, Maxim isn't mentioned by name in the Prologue unless you hover over his character, so you might want to fix that to clear things up for people who didn't check his stats. Gameplay wise, Lee (IMO) needs some stat reductions, or Fiona needs some buffs. Looking at FE14's amazing archer classes (Archer's skills are OP, they've access to flying classes in Kinshi Knight, bows are as strong as axes, Outlaw has thief utility (and Capture utility with Niles)) made me realise exactly how awful Archers are in the GBA trilogy. Effectively losing EP hurts bad, especially in FE6 and 7 with no Ranger. I like that a Mercenary-esque unit has trouble doubling right off the bat. That's good balance. The worst thing about this chapter, though, is that it has no anti-turtling incentive. Players can take it at their own pace and don't have to make hard decisions. An easy way to resolve this would be a few extra enemies who are carrying some nice loot, e.g special weapons, maybe a statbooster if they're fairly far away; or to keep some villages untouched as bandit houses you raid for cash. These enemies would be running off into the blank spaces on the left-hand side. Players now have to rush their fairly fragile brigade through some bandits and mercs to get that sweet loot. Maybe if you're taking it really slow, Wilmark and Kormac show up early (this would probably require lots of rewriting but when the player sees actual promoted enemies' stats, they'd get ultra-frightened). Give the boss a Hand Axe so the answer isn't so obviously "use Lee and maybe Richard to block him from attacking". Dory in FE6 Ch. 5 is a genuinely threatening boss because he has a Hand Axe which will really hurt your ranged, but he also has a Killer Axe so you can't really trust any 1-range unit except Rutger and maybe Dieck to withstand him in combat. The seniority of Wilmark and Kormac isn't immediately apparent as to how it works. Are they close to the kings, are they simply provincial commanders. This could be made clearer in some expository dialogue. In file 3 is the line I take most issue. If it turns out that our fantastic trio are from Earth and that vortex brought them to Eldrahgo, yeah, it's fine by me. However, otherwise I think that should be changed to be more in line with what fantasy people would tend to say. The description of Richard and his actions in the last cutscene of Chapter 1 are still good. However, I feel that with him being pragmatic, a little bit more dialogue from him (even just 1 line) would help before going into the lovely spiders section. Chapter 2 OK, getting the backstory here is good, although it does risk turning Desmond into Exposition Guy. Thankfully, we see enough human interaction between him, Kraig and Wilmark that he doesn't quite come off as such. YES YOU DID THIS GAMEPLAY CUTSCENE THING WITH WILMARK. I'm a really big fan of when games show powerful NPCs through gameplay, so keep that no matter what. Liking the early playable Soldier. Now the player has full WTC, bows, magic and staves. Kraig suffers from Fighter Syndrome and +1 to base Spd/-1 to base Skl would solve that. Makes him more Gonzales-y, where the issue is whether he will hit as opposed to will he double or how much damage will he do. Alesha is already better than Ellen and looks good with those stats. The odd thing now is that you seem to have learnt to threaten objectives. The brigand being one tile away from the village on the 1st turn can be killed if you move forward with Richie and Lee, but the side effect is that the player is now worried for all the villages as opposed to just the one. Good job! Quite like Alesha's battle sprite. It just doesn't really match with her portrait that well. That last village doesn't contain quite the reward I hoped it would. Given that the brigand rushed the first village, I assumed all brigands would chase after villages, meaning that last one would have something really cool. Then again, they were stationary, so you probably chalk that up to me being thoughtless. A cool FE14 mechanic which might be useful to you is distinguishing between Village-killing and non-Village-killing thieves and brigands with different move values, e.g in Fates Outlaws who can shut down Villages have 3 or 4 move as opposed to 6. This would require repositioning the first brigand to make sure he still nearly reaches the village on Turn 1, but it's a neat idea that I don't think most people would think of for their hack. Again, give the boss a Hand Axe. Like the dynamic of Alesha and Richard. Gives character to the normally character-less first healer. Overall The script needs a fair bit of proof-reading, but this is a minor issue that can be fixed later. Transitions are jarring and sudden. It always made me wonder whether the chapter would end now or if it would have another cutscene. Definitely shows promise. These are the issues I found when I was specifically looking for issues. The only other complaint is that you could increase the enemy density on all three maps by just 1 or 2 enemies. That would probably make it more of a challenge. Good job, and all the best on your continued work on the Book of Eden! :)