A mediocre fire emblem experience made extremely worse by its sexual-assaulter director inserting his weird racism and misogyny everywhere. the first half of the story is an allegory for the drama around mangs' sexual assault and while the second half is somewhat decent, the entire thing is a giant mess. the map design is equally uneven, with the first half of the game being comprised entirely of chapters with the same exact pacing (running away from a killsquad towards the objective) because they couldnt come up with any other anti-turtling methods, and the second half being a series of gimmicky maps that are overall a better experience but share the same issues (reinforcements spawning out of nowhere and spawning constantly, terrible unit balance, etc). the massive cast makes me think the game was intended to be ironmanned but everything about the map design feels like it was made for divine pulse; you constantly face enemies with high crit, reinforcements often come out of nowhere and if you dont know the exact turns they spawn you will lose.

So any discussion about this game kind of has to have a big label on it about your thoughts on Mangs. I'm not gonna do that except for like two instances that I think are funny and if it's relevant to the game itself. Which it is minimally. I want this to be as unbiased a review as I can give.

So, Andaron Saga is actually pretty good? Frankly I was surprised I enjoyed it much in the first place. I like a lot of the spritework and character designs, and there's full art of all the characters that many hacks could only dream to have. Maps are (by majority, I'll mention a few stinkers) really tightly designed, there's good difficulty and challenge here. It's also pretty ironman friendly, you have a very full list of units by the end of the game if you're resetting with deaths. The story does a sort of FE4 thing where your lord changes partway through the game, and it becomes kind of obvious when you realize the starting lord is a prepromote. As a hack that uses skills patch, it does something I like a lot: through supports, you can gain skills. Supports are gained just by deploying units together, and supporting units can give you an extra skill on one of the unit. Skills are pretty sparsely distributed, usually only one per character to differentiate them, and the only way to get more are special events like those supports. You can also get items and even new weapon types usable on certain units. There's an archer you get in the second chapter named Runa that has a fantastic magic growth but an awful strength growth. If you support her with a certain mage, she gets the ability to use anima magic as an archer. Promote her to sniper, and she has the crit boost from the sniper class with anima magic! It's a cool system! There's also a lot of custom music that I'm pretty sure was custom made for the hack, which I enjoy. On Lunatic mode only, there's a secret objective you can get for every map. If you get them all, you unlock Chapter 32x, which is a fight against the devs. Hate Mangs? Well, you do get to kill him here. I didn't play this map because every map also has a turn limit you must stay under to get it, and I played on Hard mode for my playthrough anyways. Every map also has a random event that can happen on it, usually they're about a 1/25 or 1/50 chance. Most are just something like a random green unit shows up, or you find a special item. One's a whole recruitable character, who makes a Rick and Morty reference and calls you a cunt. Despite being so hidden, he's actually kind of awful in gameplay. I managed to get that character, which segways into my biggest complaint: The whole game is very juvenilely written. Writers were actually paid to write for the game, which confuses me - there's an awful tonal dissonance present in the game. There's a stupid running joke where they keep calling one character's lance small. It's just a dick joke. They will make this joke at the dumbest times, even in the middle of serious scenes. In one scene you can have what is meant to be pitiful and hopeless as you find the corpse of someone you knew and were betrayed, in the next it's a Metal Gear Rising reference. This happens constantly throughout the game.

There's also one of the worst Fire Emblem chapters I've ever played featured in this hack: Chapter 24. From my knowledge, this chapter's quite a controversial one, some love and some hate it. I hate it. It has thracia fog, and you have to find 3 thrones and take them. Your army gets split at the start, but it keeps getting split as the map goes on, as you're exploring a cursed tomb. There are mogalls that all have the skill Devil Reversal that essentially makes any weapon you use on them a devil weapon, chest mimics that are basically necrodragons that pierce defense, and plenty of other random mook monster enemies. It's impossible to control if you backfire on the mogalls, and even if you had a unit with Nihil, the way the map splits your units up means it's not consistent that you'll even be able to hit the mogalls with them. With thracia fog, you can't see the full map of the tomb, so you also can't figure out where to go immediately. Sometimes you just get tracked down and killed no matter what you do! There's also a fun guy named Nemesis that roams the map, and if he catches you, it's likely a reset. Now what if I told you after getting to all 3 thrones, you have to escape? And Nemesis blocks you? You essentially have to bait the AI into going for Ahmed, who is a resummonable skeleton. But you have only 10 turns to escape, as the tomb is collapsing. You basically have to hope the AI goes for Ahmed every time, and it doesn't always do that if it sees it can kill another unit it values more. It's very annoying. Imagine my shock when I learned this was one of the chapters that Mangs made entirely himself. Fitting. There's a few other maps I found to be lacking in quality, but none were as bad as this.

Overall, I really respect this hack on the merits of a hack and that alone. The writing is dull and juvenile, but I enjoy far more maps than I don't like, and frankly, you can see that there's production value in this hack that just can't be in others. Of course there's custom music and art and animations - thousands were spent to make it, unlike most hacks which are a labor of love alone. It's up there in terms of Fire Emblem hacks. Apparently there's to be a small prequel hack in the process of being made and there's sequelbait at the end of the game... I hope some of the mistakes made here are figured out in those. And keep Mangs away from the map design. Actually just keep him away for the most part.