Short Version:
• Valencia Saga is an independent fan-game base on Fire Emblem Gaiden from the NES, expanding the original story and scope of the maps, while leaving out the free exploration.
• The game is made with SRPG Studio and features a mix of stock and custom assets with an amateur english translation that has missing bits, weird grammar and spelling issues here and there.
• The game is really challenging, slow peaced and long with chapters lasting up to 4 hours to beat, but features an easy mode without permadeath for mid-core fans of the genre.
Long Ass Review:
The presentation is pretty decent, the game maps and sprites look like they are from the 16-bit era but without the limits in color palette, and the menus and portraits looks beautiful and modern. If the maps and sprites look familiar to you, that would be a side effect of the game being made with SRPG Studio using a fair bit of the stock resources and custom assets made to fit into the same style to keep everything cohesive.
On the negative side, the translation is incomplete and broken at times but still everything is readable enough… but this is something to be expected since it was made by friends of the developer and not a professional translator. In my opinion it adds to the charm of the game were you see stuff like “Enemies are be normal” but there isn’t any particular phrase so badly translated that it became memorable, except for those parts that are not translated, nothing big like whole conversations, but sometimes you’re gonna see some names or a phrase that is still in chinese… and sadly an example of this is the extra menu with all the classes statistics left completely in its original lenguage.
The story follow the struggle of two childhood friends Arcel and Cecia on two different quests, Arcel joins the resistance to liberate Sophia from a usurper to the throne and Cecia must travel to the Temple of the Goddess Ira to unravel the mystery of her disappearance. This two quests intertwine as the mysterious cult of the Doom God starts showing its influence on the events on the continent of Valencia. If this sounds a lot like Fire Emblem Gaiden or Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, it is not a coincidence, Valencia Saga could be considered an unofficial remake of Fire Emblem Gaiden, and in a way it could be something of a missing link between Gaiden and Echoes. Way more dialogue and plot development than Gaiden but not all the visual fanfare and polish of Echoes.
The gameplay is the classic SRPG formula of player phase – enemy phase, you deploy a certain number of units to fight an uncertain number of enemy units. In that way the game follows the Fire Emblem formula with a few variations. You can save your game at the beginning of each turn, and let me tell you, you want to save your game each turn and kept multiple saves in case mistakes were made 5 turns or more ago.
At the start of the game you follow Arcel and his 3 friends as they join the resistance and turns the tides on battle on their guerrilla war against the usurper Desse. Then you change perspective to play as Cecia and his companions as they travel to the temple of the Goddess Ira. After this, the routes splits 2 more times, you always play Arcel’s and Cecia’s routes, but in the next splits you can choose which one to play first. This creates a bit of a flow problem since by the time you finish one route you have played around 10 or so chapter of increasingly difficult battles only to go back to the other party having to play with characters that may be 15 levels behind throwing your feel for unit power off balance until you get used to the current power level.
The game doesn’t feature any shops, so you can only obtain new gear at specific points in the game, dropped by an enemy, in villages, treasure chests or other story related events. This adds an interesting layer of planing as the game progresses since you have a limited stock of weapons to distribute to your army. But worry not, you always have at least one weapon on each character since the basic default weapons can’t be removed from their inventory. Also the game gives you a lot of tools to play around but the most interesting ones, like the warp staff or a nullifying magic shield are hidden behind special events that may be easy to miss on the first run, I’m sure I missed a couple of them since I had some rare unusable items in my inventory by the end.
Another important part of equipping items is that they can give different skills to your characters that you can use to boost their strengths or patch their weaknesses, all the skills in the game are passive in nature and go from simple stat boosts to specific probability based trigger skills.
Each character has their own class and promotes in a linear manner up to 2 times. Promotions are really important here and luckly promotion items are enough to promote all characters but they come at uneven times so choosing who to promote first is mostly about playing favorites.
The map design is were this game may or may not be for you, the game starts with some medium size maps that can be beaten in 8 to 12 turns, but quickly starts scaling into massive maps with an increasing amount of enemies, and don’t think the enemies are a case of quantity over quality, each enemy has the potential to kill a unit in a bad spot, this makes that later chapters can take hours to beat, just to give an example the final chapter took me around 70 turns with 4 in-game hours that amounted to 8 hours in three sessions with all the times I had to reset different turns to avoid people suffering horrible deaths.
The difficulty of this game is no joke, remember when I said you face an uncertain amount of enemies, well, that is because one thing that this game does a lot is reinforcements, the ones that appear and act on the same turn making an unlucky unit near their spawn point dead on arrival. You’re gonna experience this time and time again with no way of telling when those reinforcements would appear, sometimes they appear from forts, stairs, a magic circle, or just the edge of the map.
So lots of strong enemies and lots of reinforcements, are this the only challenges? No way, the bosses in this game are on a whole different level, some require specific strategies to beat while others are beasts in human disguise that would require you have 4 or more units able to survive the damage and strong enough to deal damage. Sadly there are a couple of gimmicks used on bosses that get tiresome pretty quickly, specially the passive health regeneration and effective damage reduction, a lot of bosses and a specific class just half all damage recived, this makes killing them more of a chore that anything else by the end.
You’re gonna struggle and reset, and struggle again, miss a 97% hits and be killed by a 25% hit, and reset, and keep doing it until you beat this beast… if that is your kind of deal.
If you have kept reading so far, I guess you have notice this game is not for everyone, and you would be right. Casual player looking for an easy pick and play SRPG or even their first Fire Emblem clone on Pc should avoid this game. For mid-core SRPG fans I would recommend easy mode, it keeps most of the things that make this game hard but it removes perma-death from the equation and just that makes this game way more enjoyable, but only if you haven’t played FE Echoes, otherwise the story would only feel derivative and probably less appealing. On the other hand if you’re a hardcore SRPG fan, one of those that enjoys those Lunatic, Lunatic+ or other maddening difficulty modes, this game may be just for you, so if you have grown tired of the easy and casual friendly new fire emblem games this is a Fire Emblem clone that takes the difficulty up to eleven. Just be prepared for a long journey, a really long and hard journey.
