LogFAQs > #937113168

Let's get the good stuff out of the way first. The early game, barring 2x with its fog of war (oh right, Thracia fog of war blocks out the terrain too, did I mention that? So you don't know where you're going even), is pretty solid, and the first few turns of 4x are a very nasty little challenge. Chapter 6 is trivial but has a neat gimmick of escaping through the winding city streets and 7 can be a hectic rush if you don't cheese it by blocking the boss and his reinforcement squads. Chapter 13 is oddly fun, with its playable generics and enemy composition that changes based on killing the boss. The final chapter is at least a pretty good concept, with six separate mini-bosses in six separate rooms you need to kill to open the path to Veld, an idea you may have seen reused in FE7, though in practice this map falls victim to how many mindlessly broken tools you have at your disposal.

However...the rest of the game tends to be a mess. Chapter 4 is tedium followed by opening a door into a room you can't see inside that has an ambush that will ruin you with reinforcements coming behind you for 60 turns (another trend in this game). Chapter 5 has a few challenging parts in a sea of walking through empty hallways. Chapters like 8 and 15 might as well not exist with how dull they are. Then there's all the maps built on just throwing a million ballistas everywhere that kill most units in one or two hits, like 10, 16A, 16B, 17B and of course, 21 with its 11 ballistas, which are either tedious (if you stall them out), random (if you count on dodging) or trivial (if you warp skip) but rarely interesting. And speaking of tedium, you have 16B which I already wrote about earlier on my worst chapters list. Then there's all the maps built on your party being split up and needing to put the appropriate units in each group to handle the task in front of them...in a game that does not allow you to control which unit starts where. This includes the final battle, and chapter 24 where dialogue even talks about the importance of picking the right units for each group even though you can't do so in any normal way! And then there's 24x, the worst map in all of Fire Emblem which I already ranted about at length...

A recurring problem with Thracia maps is that they have nasty surprises, often in the form of reinforcements (chapter 20's reinforcement ballistas and siege tomes come to mind), that will fuck you at first but are of little note once you know they're coming. Another is that the enemies tend to actually be pretty shit, barely progressing in stats throughout the game for the most part. This results in a lot of chapters where if you don't know the gimmick in advance you get wrecked by it, but if you do you can just kind of brute force through everything because the enemies can't threaten your strong units. This just...isn't interesting. It's fun to overcome a challenge, it's not fun to not know what you're facing until it has already put you in checkmate, then beating it for free once you've seen it in action before.

Then there's the way this game practically tries to bait you into softlocking chapters or entire playthroughs, but that's enough for now about the gameplay side of things.

I'm not going to as in depth on the story, largely because this has already gone on long enough. Suffice to say, it fails to impress. It has a good concept, as you experience what brought Leif from FE4 to the situation he was in when you met him in that game, but the execution is rather lacking. Leif ends up feeling like a useless puppet who just gets jerked around by an "advisor" the story seems to want us to think is the real hero, and the main villains are...oh boy. You know what, I'm going to put that off for a moment to cheer myself up a bit and say that I do mostly like how the game tries to add extra depth to the conflict between the two halves of the Thracian peninsula, with it giving us the glimpse at the softer side of Travant that we needed in Genealogy to round him out. And I guess Reidrick, despite being almost completely absent for most of the story, isn't really bad? He's just a generic evil nobleman but at least he pulls the cliche off decently, albeit he seems awfully easily foiled in the early game.

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Meow!