[b]TLDR:[/b] For older fans of the Fire Emblem franchise, I recommend this as an engaging and largely fun game in that vein. I recommend that new players to that franchise, or those not used to Strategy RPGs like Fire Emblem, to play slow and take full advantage of multiple save slots.
At 14.7 hours, I have finished my blind playthrough of the Grey Heritage: Noble Duty on hard difficulty. This game feels the most like a mashup of the GBA Fire Emblem titles and something like Thracia 776, which seats it comfortably in my favorite of the Fire Emblem eras. I appreciated most of the experience, finding it fun and challenging, but with a handful of flaws that did negatively affect the game.
[b]Positives:[/b]
Game: The skill and reaction systems that this game introduces are excellent and feel well integrated with the map design. The characters that make up your company each have a fleshed out niche in combat, and learning their strengths/weaknesses and where to position them is enjoyable. As other reviews have mentioned before me, positioning is very important in this game, moreso than any of the Fire Emblem titles this game takes inspiration from. There are some additional notable differences from Fire Emblem games that, while positive, are worth knowing about before you play:
- Characters do not have promotions in this game, and do not cap their levels at twenty. Three will get mounted forms, but that is the extent of class transitions. Get comfortable with the skill system and weapon preferences of your units, because these options will not change significantly over the course of the game. While I would have preferred promotions and evolving classes personally, the small roster and specifically tooled classes does help you get a complete sense of battle by the time you're in the back half of the game.
- There is a unique class that this game introduces to take advantage of the custom elemental reaction system it uses. While the class may feel underwhelming at first, it is to your advantage to at least keep the system in mind, as the back half of the game significantly benefits from your exploitation of the reaction system.
- There is a robust autosave feature every turn that you can reload to at any point mid-chapter. In tandem with the lack of permanent death for your units, this allows for a great deal of trial and error until you're comfortable with the mechanics. While I would've preferred permanent death and perhaps the disabling of autosaves for the harder difficulty, I recognize these features as crucially beginner friendly, which is something this genre has always struggled to be.
Story: Your companions and the secondary protagonist are a highlight. I felt that they were well written and want to see more of them.
[b]Negatives:[/b]
Story: The single biggest pain point in the game, unfortunately. In part due to the status of this game as a prequel, the story struggles to engage you in the struggles of the main character of Noble Duty. The two main antagonists feel less like characters and more like caricatures. They lack depth and behave like villains from a children's cartoon, which makes it all the worse, then, that they so handily trounce the main character at every turn. Instead of building narrative momentum around the main character's journey, the story sees you lose more ground and be in a worse position with each passing chapter. The one time in the entire story where the main character behaves like a protagonist and actually advances the plot, comes as a jarring and petulant change in their objective in the final four chapters of the game. It is also easily the single dumbest decision made by any character in the story, and there was some competition up to that point. Rather than concluding itself with a bang that generates excitement in the sequel/original game, the narrative whimpers across the finish line. It was a deeply unsatisfying ending that ultimately could've been handled in a variety of other ways that would've felt more in-character and appropriate.
Game: While it fares much better than the story does, the gameplay does have some holes that become more apparent as you reach the final third. These are the immediate availability of preferred weapons and the odd implementation of currency. To start, both the main character and their personal knight start the game with very strong and infinite durability weapons, which are best-in-slot for almost every single battle they will experience. Having these availability at the very start of the game encourages unhealthy reliance on these two characters in the first two-thirds of the story. As with 'Jagen' units in most Fire Emblem games, it doesn't take long before you must rely on your other characters to clear the chapters, but their weapons will degrade and break quickly, and can only be reliably replenished by spending gold at shops every three or so chapters. This leads me to the second poor design choice - the only way to earn gold is to finish off enemies with specific units, of which you'll only have two. If these two units are neglected, or not used at all, a new player will lack the funds to replenish weapons and supplies and ultimately may softlock themselves in some of the worse maps in the game.
Fortunately, there are only a few "bad" maps in the game (Chapter 5 is my personal least favorite), but the most egregious section of the game is the gauntlet of levels from Chapter 10 through Chapter 12. You're given no rest or opportunity to restock supplies, and Chapter 12 requires a significant number of healing resources to survive (on hard difficulty, at least) due to the way your company is split across the map. If you do not hoard restoration consumables, or lack the gold required to resupply prior to Chapter 9, many new players will absolutely find themselves unable to beat the map. I don't imagine many will bother to restart the entire game ten hours in, if this happens. This issue can be circumvented entirely, though, by simply rewarding the player with a set amount of gold around the midpoint of the story, or more clearly communicating the importance of gold to the player throughout the game.
[b]Conclusion: [/b]
Ultimately, I had more fun and this game did more right than it did wrong. With so little competition on the market for Fire Emblem type games, I'd like to see from this IP. I'll be giving the original game a try next, but I recommend that future titles spend more time developing the narrative and ensure that the story can stand on it's own two feet. Noble Duty would've been a far more compelling title with the main character's sister in the driver's seat.
