The gimmick is that your jagen is a staffer with no offensive spells, and your only staffer for the whole game.
unless. The creator, FEU user SaintRubenio, is also responsible for the Eckesachs and Dark Stone hacks, aka Villain Route rom hacks of FE6 and FE8, and HiW is his first fully original project, which kind of came right out of nowhere. The other two hacks I just mentioned are also worthwhile, but I didn't finish them
because they're hard and I'm easily distracted. SaintRubenio is pretty unique as an FEU user because he is consistently able to both start
and complete projects, but I digress.
So, I, an evil KF FE-community-nazi&or/rapist sympathizer, enjoyed HiW, which is why I'm taking the time write all this stupid shit instead of just driveby AGP Dart shitposting. Even for a typical 20-ish map campaign, there's an impressive amount of consideration put towards additional features and easter eggs. Stuff like characters' portrait descriptions changing over the game, a joke ending for chapter 1, characters having different classes depending on when they're recruited, different escape dialogue depending on the chapter, different dialogue in
base conversations if certain characters die, the list goes on. There's even a postgame and NG+ where even more things slightly change, and the game's spritework and soundtrack are consistently solid. I don't have the words to really go into it, but I generally like the writing in SaintRubenio's hacks. I think they're fun and well-rounded tonally despite some occasional strange turns, as well as good at building a world without making it feel like a loredump narration jerksesh over a map jpg. A common recurrence among them is silly bandits which, by the way, you get a triangle attack early in HiW-
-in a game where the final boss is set up perfectly to get fuckin wrecked by triangle attack oops spoilers. Lopez has a personal skill, but most units don't; skills are mostly based on what promoted class you're in, and it's FE8 branching promotion rules where you've got two options depending on your base class, though not nearly as lopsidedly imbalanced as FE8. It's not my favorite system because a unit's "build" is complete when they promote, but HiW succeeds in making each blob of numbers feel distinct from another and valuable in some way, so it's solid as far as "classic" GBAFE goes. For me though, everything after promotion just feels like a victory lap, which is why I didn't complete a 2nd playthrough.
By the way, did you hear that music? There's actually quite a bit of good shit and deeper cuts in here (battle preps, chapter ?? player phase & enemy phase, another battle preps):
Is it just me, or does that first one sound like "the bells of notre dame" in that one part 35 secs in? You can even fit "the hag in white" to that rhythm too if you felt like it, just for fun. Anyway, it's cheating slightly because they're not original compositions, and it's
double cheating slightly because Castlevania music is very difficult to fuck up
, but I wanted to shoutout the music anyway for being particularly well executed and appropriately used. There is a very specific kind of rom hack dread that comes with having to spend an hour on some stupid mind numbing task while being screeched at by a shitty ill-fitting Touhou MIDI, which HiW largely avoids. You get to enjoy them over the course of a map too, since there's no generic battle music to interrupt them. Maps are also generally well paced and varied. One of SaintRubenio's hallmarks imo is using reinforcements to keep a fire lit under your ass from turn to turn as opposed to stalling a map out, though the second half of the game does rely somewhat on infinite reinforcements, which I know some people really hate on principle, but I don't. Also, you've heard most of the tracks the game has to offer not too long after the halfway point, which is disappointing.
who cares? post the funny cringe already.
Honestly, you've already seen most of it. But yeah, AGP Dart is your armorer, so he can't die despite being story-irrelevant. Since he's not story-relevant, most of your conversations will be in the base camp where he lovebombs Kyra with several unique weapons that can't be gotten anywhere else, while simultaneously bringing up potential romance in the middle of a war, named character deaths, and betrayals and shit. I was rather impressed by the accuracy of the AGP tranny character being a mannish, pushy, tonedeaf, horny autist. I haven't mentioned it yet, but supports work differently in HiW: they're fixed. Units will always support the exact same units at the same time every playthrough, unless there's some shenanigans involved with avoiding certain supports and killing off certain units, which there very well could be. HiW is that kind of game; there's these two gay guys in it with an A support, and if you let one of them die, a base conversation later on will change to reflect the death.
The point of this is that AGP Dart is, to my knowledge, Kyra's only potential A support, potential romance option, and paired ending. Though if you just choose to ignore AGP Dart in the base camp, which I did in my 2nd playthrough, Kyra doesn't gain those supports, meaning it may be possible to get a different, non-paired, transphobic Kyra credits ending by simply ignoring AGP Dart. HiW surprised me a lot with it's care and attention for small details like that, and I'd like to take now as the time to remind (You) that the annoying, ugly gay characters are the exception, and not the rule; I enjoyed most of the characters for what they are, but where else can you talk about the ways FEU's stink looms over this thing?
Thanks, doc. Believe it or not, Jane here is never described as trans like AGP Dart is, though she and that other weirdo are explicitly lesbians. As far as these things go, it's relatively inoffensive; they're just two shallow, goofy side characters, but I wanted to establish them first before describing another lesbian relationship that I found more tasteless. Possible big spoilers, though ultimately not
that big.
There's a woman at one point who sees her husband and child who she loves murdered in front of her, and in the base conversation afterwards --because she immediately joins your army after being subjected to this -- in your group she finds her, until now, unmentioned secret lesbian lover who she then shares a mutual bittersweet joy towards being able to grow old together with, even though her kid just got murked. I might've just been too stunned by this revelation to catch it, but this interaction and progression were written that it felt like it was supposed to come across as sympathetic instead of kinda callous. It feels incredibly out of place and none of the other LGBT shit, let alone villains in the game, left anywhere near as sour of a taste in my mouth. To be completely honest, I don't even think most of the LGBT shit in this game is more offensive or forced than anything in even, like, Rebellion Saga with Jacob.
Sorry, I got a little distracted. Jane still looks retarded and not like a woman, and for that matter, neither does the oompa loompa you play as. I've been dancing around Kyra's design up to this point, but holy
shit dude.
You are looking at Devdan's inbred cousin here the
entire game. This bitch looks like when you click random in Fromsoft/Bethesda character creators. She's made to look like this with
intent too; weirdly, her combat sprites don't even match her portrait. She uses the generic FEU Huntress sprites, so in combat she has pigtails and wears a hat, so she always feels slightly out of place from moment to moment in her own game. You saw Lopez earlier, he's a Norwood Fucked in his combat sprite too. You might've also seen Polonius, who keeps his funny beret. Not Kyra though, for some reason. You can see for yourself in that 4 min clip I posted above.
Another weird thing about Kyra is that she's commonly mistaken for a man (mostly for humor by bumbling type characters), but only
just that, and it never develops or is acknowledged in any way beyond occasional initial mild confusion. Nothing comes close to any conversation or revelation about gender or being
plug ugly, even when AGP Dart is traumadumping to her. With the way she was designed to look, and is very pointedly a
she in her skill, class,
and portrait descriptions, it's surprisingly restrained that Kyra being androgynous is repeatedly emphasized, only to be left completely unexplored for the fags who play this shit to come up with their own shitty goonsesh material. It hung over and distracted me over the entire first playthrough like the sword of Damacles, but it never actually fell, and was just allowed to be what it is. And I really like that.
This was alluded to earlier in a throwaway remark, but it's kind of funny how HiW is accidentally based in a few small ways. Only the characters who look like trannies are attracted to trannies, your plucky band of racially and sexually diverse psychopaths and criminals are a rebellion against a religious theocracy, and not the brown noncisheteronormative
(holy fuck, spellcheck is ok with that word) kind, lots of small things to enjoy like that if you're into that angle. But still, even with how benign HiW is about its small amount of cringey gay shit, I imagined what a nightmare it would be to poker face it blind in front a Youtube audience with $$$ on the line. The reveal of AGP Dart alone had me laughing and questioning aloud to noone in particular for a good 5 minutes. It's very sad that you can't even just blindly fire up and enjoy a FE romhack anymore without considering in advance if it'll have things like this in it, and if you react to even one of them slightly incorrectly, blackbragirl, Reddit, and Dani Doyle will try to drive you to suicide.
