FE Hack Reviews #11: ProjectZ by The Emblem Brigade [CH4 REDO] - You can visit destroyed houses?!
45... Well it could've been clearer.
Anyway, with this new factor in mind, the chapter is a lot more involved, and thus a lot more fun. The fact that there are so many houses and not a lot of time means you have to take risks and spread out your units away from the safe zone, adding tension. Additionally, since some houses are too difficult to get with normal units, strategic use of Phoenix and Budgie are needed here. If not for the offensive design decisions involved, this would be a really great chapter.
Speaking of problems:
- Uncle Borrises are placed near some of the more distant houses (There is one at the far left house and one at the bottom right house. The latter one isn't seen in the footage). This is really cheap, especially since you most likely will not see them until it's too late. Bringing Cedar over to those areas is needlessly risky due to her poor durability, so most sensible players aren't going to think to bring her close enough to see the uncle borrises. I suppose you could give the flashlight to other units, but then you waste their turn when you use it, and it gives less vision range than with Cedar, who won't be contributing much to the chapter otherwise, so you'll still be moving too slowly to get the prizes safely, or moving too fast and getting into the range of extreme danger.
- I don't find the hints that you can visit the destroyed houses to be very clear. Put the hint right before the chapter starts (Use the curser event and switch the music to player phase. Those are good cues for "Hint time!"), do something to make it really obvious. There's no reason to NOT make this as clear as possible.
- Kreaper or whatever his name is and Pixie have, like, three lines of dialogue, and all those lines are used for is establishing their single personality traits: They're both creepy dudes who seem to have absolutely no awareness about the zombies whatsoever (And Pixie is gay). Give 'em more development.
- A lot of this chapter involves trial and error due to the combination of fog of war, the arbitrary spawn points of the enemies, and the fact that there are super powerful enemies hidden in the fog waiting to ambush you. The bobbies make this especially bad, and giving one of them a brave lance is just needlessly cruel.
- There's no visual cue to show that you've visited the destroyed houses. This can lead to frustration when the player forgets which ones s/he visited. Put a tile event that makes a closed gate appear over the entrance or something.
My Forum: http://markyjoe1990.elementfx.com/mybb
My Video Lists: http://markyjoe1990.elementfx.com/?page=playthroughlist
My Website: http://markyjoe1990.elementfx.com/
Website: markyjoe.com
Forum: markyjoe.com/forum
Twitter: twitter.com/markyjoe1990
Hitbox: hitbox.tv/markyjoe1990
E-Mail: markyjoe1990@gmail.com
If you like my content, consider donating to my PayPal. Thanks!
Other Videos By MarkyJoe
Other Statistics
Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade Statistics For MarkyJoe
Currently, MarkyJoe has 3,078,378 views for Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade across 270 videos. There's over 4 days worth of watchable video for Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade published on his channel, or 31.61% of the total watchable video on MarkyJoe's YouTube channel.