Just beat the Vision Quest hack. My thoughts:

Just finished the Vision Quest hack today. Huge props for the crew that put this thing together. They've created something that outdoes several official Fire Emblem titles. I thought I'd throw out my thoughts on VQ out into the void here. Keep in mind I've only just finished the hack once, and I played a Hard-difficulty ironman.

There are spoilers below, so play the hack first before reading on.

TL;DR

It's better than the real games. Seriously.

Gameplay:

The addition to skills was greatly appreciated. I got a lot of mileage out of the Shove, Swap, and Reposition skills. And skills like Natsuko's 3-item limit skill had me running niche strategies on certain characters. I did, however, find the Nihilist skills quite useless, as most of the enemies lack skills (aside from Shove, not that it matters). It baffled me why so many units had Nihilist as their personal skill.

The maps were, quite simply, fantastic. The variety was insane. Not only in locale, but in objectives. I thoroughly enjoyed having to split my forces to accomplish multiple objectives at one time, and often under a time limit.

Reinforcements were executed exceptionally well. I found they were always telegraphed appropriately, and would appear in spots that made sense. They also had a good balance between being a legitimate threat, but never in a way that seemed unfair.

Quality of life improvements like showing enemy stats (including calculated damage, attack speed, and defensive stats) and equipment icons right on the map overlays was a welcome addition. This was especially useful in identifying which units carried bows or anti-cavalry weapons. Speaking of which:

I found the amount of horseslayers, halberds, and rapiers to be a bit absurd. From the mid-game onward, they were everywhere. I suppose the designer really wanted a check to the objectively-superior mounted units, but there were some issues. For one, the anti-cav units often carried multiple weapons (such as a halberd AND a silver lance). This made some foot-locked units unable to effectively take on these opponents on behalf of the cavs, because while they would theoretically tank a halberd hit, they might not survive if the enemy were to attack with the other weapon. Therefore, anti-cav presence usually resulted in me simply baiting the enemy and wiping them out on player turn. This way, I got to have my cake and eat it too; for the most part, my entire army were mounted, despite the effective weaponry. Still, I applaud the effort to limit the mounted unit's effectiveness. Admittedly, I struggle to think of a better solution than what we got in VQ.

I absolutely LOVED the paradigm shift to Waluyo and his pals. Changing protagonists mid-game was a novel change that rarely happens in Fire Emblem in general. Being forced to fight with an all-new cast was a breath of fresh air. I also enjoyed the sense of survival the Waluyo missions carried, since a majority of the missions were Escape maps filled with daunting reinforcements and a very limited selection of equipment. One thing I appreciated with these chapters were the limitless potential for promotions on offer. Every unit in the cast joined at around level 15, and over the course of the Act, several earth seals were given--but not enough to promote the entire cast. This meant that the player would have to pick and choose which members to give their seals to, and this choice would determine your preferred strategy. It seemed like the designers were aware of this. For example, I gave my first seal to Ketut the cleric. Then I regretted that choice, because I realized she was still staff-locked, until a chapter or two later an enemy dropped the Shine tome. Now, no other unit on Waluyo's crew could use light magic (until you get the valkyrie on the end chapter) which meant that this Shine tome was specifically given for Ketut. So the designers knew the players might want to promote the cleric, and made the choice actually viable. I appreciated stuff like this.

Locking first-stage classes into using a single weapon type really helped balance classes in the early game. No longer were cavaliers the top dogs, being able to switch between swords and javelins on a whim. This system also paved a way for new classes to be created. Axe mercenaries, bow fighters, sword knights, etc. were welcome additions to the game. This added an extra layer of variety to the units that was thoroughly appreciated.

I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of items held by units that did NOT drop. IE how many items had to be stolen by a thief and not simply given on a kill. This did wonders for making thieves actually viable. Entire strategies had to be formed around how to safely get my thief to steal a gem or earth seal without dying on enemy phase. That being said, I wasn't a huge fan of locking several earth seals behind a steal requirement. Gems and stat boosters are one thing, but promotion items are too important to possibly miss out on, especially given the large cast of unpromoted units. Granted, earth seals did become available to purchase from shops in part 4, but it's a little too late to still be dragging around first-stage units at this point.

The fog-of-war maps were problematic. This is not exclusive to VQ, but are an unfortunate staple of GBA fire emblems as a whole. I appreciated the plentiful amount of torch staves and torches on offer over the campaign, but these didn't mitigate some problems. For one, flying enemies were often unfairly utilized in fog maps, due to their vast movement causing ambush attacks. Their movement often out-ranged torches, so they were almost always an unwelcome nuisance. And two, effective weaponry was absolutely not a welcome surprise. It certainly did not feel great to have a longbow sniper pop out from the darkness to shoot down a pegasus knight. Perhaps the intent on these maps were to use torches and thieves far more often than I did, but I can't help but insist that giving enemies OHKO equipment should be exclusive to maps where the player can actually plan ahead. Fog maps felt cheap at times.

Characters:

The variety of the cast is to be applauded. Not only in terms of the size of the cast, but also in terms of how they broke the mold compared to typical Fire Emblem archetypes. It was such a relief to not have your typical christmas cavs, Jagens, and Ests. I liked breaking away from FE tradition just for the sake of it.

I also noticed that almost the entire cast was viable in some way. Mid-game and late-game additions didn't pale in comparison to your early units, and prepromotes were quite comparable to growth units stat-wise. This made VQ quite the pleasant experience to ironman. I never felt like all was lost when losing a unit, and I enjoyed using new units.

Personality-wise, however, a lot of the cast was pretty weak. Maybe I didn't unlock the right supports, but I found almost all of them pretty surface-level and unremarkable. Perhaps this is a result of GBA limitations, or perhaps we can chalk it up to a quantity-over-quality mentality, given the immense amount of characters.

Storch was a neat protagonist, though I found him a bit too naive at times. Still, his isolationist, simple-minded personality was fun to watch interact with others. He certainly beats the typical blue-haired, innocent mary sue lord stereotype.

Titus was a novel noble deuteragonist. I enjoyed his subtle decline from well-intentioned noble to selfish usurper, but I also liked how he did end up being the right man for the job. I thought his vision quest subplot was kinda dumb. Like, really--eating a cactus and wandering in the desert is what kicks off his entire arc? The twist at the end about his sterility came out of nowhere. A setup where we learn earlier on that Titus desired to raise a family of his own would have been nice (maybe that's in a support?). As it stands, the epilogue comes out of left-field.

Festan's backstory was a really cool idea. A prince and the pauper story turned sour was an original idea, and I enjoyed how Fredericks didn't fall for it, but ended up playing along regardless. And it served for nice motivation for the Empire to work with the extorting cultists. I do wish an attempt was made for Titus and crew to actually chat with Festan first though, considering that was what the party intended to do throughout Act 4.

Art:

Portraits were consistently good throughout. None of them felt out-of-place, nor did they really resemble the original portraits they came from. My personal favorite was Cashew's, though I also loved Onderdonk's and Natsuko's. Tein's portait bothered me though--he looked like his neck was broken. I also wasn't a big fan of some of the Nevanese generals through. Most of them did NOT look like villains. Shoot, most of them didn't even give the impression that they were seasoned, intimidating warriors.

I do wish Storch got some sort of avatar change post-promotion. Felt a little strange how he went through the entire game with a ratty, torn-off sleeve. I also wish Titus and Horvath had different portraits showing their age in the epilogue.

I loved the new animations created for new units. Axe mercenaries and bow fighters being my favorite additions. For the most part, adapting existing classes to use weapons that were not originally native to said classes came out pretty well. Notable examples include Titus the mage general and wyvern lords using axes.

I will say though, not a big fan of Honeydew's animations. Her body just seemed too big and stocky for her.

Also, Waluyo's hand axe animation is one that I can confidently say is objectively terrible. It's lacking an anticipation pose--something essential to all attack animations. I know hand axe throws are quite snappy in GBA sprites, but for Waluyo in particular, the motion of throwing the axe just isn't readable. I know there's a smear to display the axe in motion, but it's not doing it for me.

I also didn't like the lazy approach to the bald characters. Their spites still had "hair", but they were dyed to a color that kinda matched the skin tone. Yet the black pixels used to separate the hair from the head remained, so it just looked like these guys were blondes rather than baldies. I wish some effort was put in to alter the bald sprites altogether.

Music:

I loved the song used for each ending chapter. I don't know if that was an original track or not, but it was a great motif to use at the end of each act.

I did NOT like the amount of licensed music remixed into the GBA soundfont. Hearing Zelda music in this Fire Emblem hack was quite distracting. I would have preferred the use of original music, or at the very least, more obscure OST's.

I hated the music selection for the preparation menus. None of the tracks had the correct tone, and they were all quite ear-grating. The worst was the use of the Animal Crossing theme used in Part 2. I often muted the audio when preparing for a chapter.

The music selection for many story beats was also questionable. Rarely did the music match the tone a scene was trying to portray.

Miscellaneous:

For what it's worth, my favorite units ended up being Vagelis (which I wish were named Vangelis, since that is an actual name), Onderdonk, and Marlen. My army took advantage of a ton of archers, mounted units, and fliers. I found mounted units objectively superior to other units in almost every way (with exceptions to Vagelis, Onisim, Lera, and Cashew) and tried to use them as much as possible. That being said, I lost every flying unit except Onderdonk over the course of the story, so there's that.

I found bow units in general (snipers, forrest knights, and warriors with bows) to be my favored class, funny enough. Bow units usually get a bad rap in FE games, but VQ made the viable for several reasons. One, most enemies lacked ranged weapons, making bow units great for safely chipping dangerous opponents (if not killing them outright). Two, there were a ton of longbows available, so my archers could safely target 1-2 range units, or easily killed off problematic units like thieves and sleep mages from other rooms. And three, I noticed VQ heavily favors player-phase. Most units aren't able to take more than 2 attacks enemy-phase. So bow-locking units and making them unable to kill off melee units on enemy phase was actually a boon for most of my strategies. By the end-game, my team was stacked with way too many archers.

There are waaaaayy too many conversations about food. In supports, in gaiden chapters, and in the main story. It felt like the author's go-to whenever they had to write small talk dialogue. Often such conversations did little to flesh out the characters who were gushing over the wine and cheese selection.

Speaking of bad writing, the conversations between the nobles of Belaro in Part 1 is pretty rough to get through. It's hard to put to words, but it seemed like the author tried to use a sophisticated sentence structure when having nobles talk. This resulted in characters awkwardly using "smart" vocabulary and clunky grammar. It came off as an amateur's first attempt at fanfiction. Though I will say, the writing does indeed get better as the game progresses. I have to speculate if the first part of the game was written first, and very little redrafting took place.

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Anyway, that's all my thoughts about Vision Quest. I want to give Pandan and friends a huge thank you for putting in the time to create this. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed it.