Vestaria Saga I: War of the Scions

I will start by saying I am a huge Fire Emblem fan and have played almost all the games. I can't remember entirely how I learned of this games existence but after hearing it was made by Kaga who originally made Fire Emblem, I knew the moment I got a PC I had to play it. In short I will say overall I had my fun with it but comparing to Fire Emblem it would rank somewhere close to the lower middle. Beginning with the good. The gameplay is solid with it feeling much like Thracia with its skills, weapons and map objectives. The story is about what you would get from Kaga in his old Fire Emblem games but the characters are fun and memorable with again unique skills, personal weapons and classes. They each have nice personal stories you can experience throughout the game and with this game not having something like supports, they did a great job making me not miss them. You will pretty much want to keep your units alive and I don't feel bad about resetting if a run goes bad, in fact the game basically tells you to as every five turns in a map you can save your progress. Which you will need as this game is very difficult, bringing me to my thoughts on the bad. I did two playthroughs of this game. The first I went in blind, not resetting as I enjoy playing most Fire Emblem games this way. However I ended up in a situation where I was pretty much softlocked (thanks to chapter 17) and had to do a second playthrough. This time I had a guide in hand and did I miss tons of things. There is much to miss that I don't know how anyone would find out. And these things might as well be necessary to finish this game with how brutal it gets. Thank the devs for adding that save feature cause otherwise this game would have been dropped immediately. The enemies and map design can feel unfair at times with skills or my least favorite the invisible assassins. I understand that Thracia was hard but this blows it out of the water so for anyone interested in this game be ready for that. My last complaint is this games presentation. I understand the small team that worked on it but its hard to play when it doesn't have modern quality of life features like a proper Fullscreen or an exit to the main menu. The sprites and artwork are good but the battles themselves are lacking. The battles aren't smooth, appearing like a stop motion and the lack of amazing crit animations made me just play without them on, which I'm thankful that was an option as well as enemy speed up. personally it's hard to get emersed in the game because of what looks and sounds like assets. I know the cell door opening sound FX is the same as in Daggerfall. To end it off I still enjoyed my time with this game and will be playing its sequel. There is still fun to be had and its interesting to see how Fire Emblem would continue if Kaga was still at the helm. So my recommendation would be if you are interested in this game I would try a game like Genealogy or Thracia first before trying this game if you haven't played those. However chances are you probably only know of this game because your a die hard Fire Emblem fan, which in that case if you like Thracia, you will likely enjoy many moments in this one.