Thracia is a beautiful video game and a bit of a standout in the Fire Emblem series. In FE you often play as a prince or princess with the support of the crown, yours or another, at your back. Knights, resources, loyal retainers, and the like. You go forth and fight for your kingdom, your friends, and what have you.

Thracia is a bit different. Leif is a minor prince in exile, and your brigade is the local militia. So much of the game is spent struggling against overwhelming odds; running away from a superior force. You have very little gold, so you need to capture enemies and steal their equipment. Every victory feels desperate and well-earned.

The game is full of bullshit. It is a bullshit game. Don't have enough keys at this very late chapter in the game? Sorry, buddy, you're softlocked. Oh, you're in the bandit gaiden? Get ready for the girl with the Thief staff to steal your equipment from across the map. Deal with it. Got a powerful unit in the middle of your army? Sorry, she got hit by the berserk staff and just killed your best healer. Walk out into the dark forest? That's a shame, this random bandit just hit you with a sleep staff, captured you, and stole all your equipment. Oh, and the boss hit you with a long range sleep staff, too. Don't even get me started on the long range siege tomes through fog of war.

The game hates you. The game spits on your face. You think you're having a continent-spanning adventure as the Hero-Prince Marth? Who the fuck do you think you are? You think you're having a geopolitical Shakespearean drama, an ancient epic with larger-than-life heroes blessed by the blood of ancient warriors, of the very gods themselves like in FE4? Get real, twerp. You're a two-bit prince with a bunch of militia troops, freedom fighters, and mountain noble knights (later), and you've got to run the fuck away before you can reclaim your kingdom. Every battle is desperate. Every victory is hard-won.

The beauty of the bullshit is that you also have bullshit. Staffs are busted. Warp across the map, who cares. Make the enemy berserk, whatever. Thief staff the boss's weapon away, what's he gonna do about it? When you're this desperate, who the fuck cares about 'fighting fair'? This game was meant to be cheesed, because it's cheesing you. It feels like the director Kaga is challenging you, personally, to a battle of wits - a contest you're going to rise to the challenge of.

One part that stands out to me is a mission later in the game, a tense defense mission where you have to hold out for reinforcements. When it is finally done, the protagonist of FE4 appears with a host of troops to bail you out and give you the thumbs up before going back to doing incredibly significant, world-saving epic shit. You, as Leif, and all of your struggles, have just been a footnote in the greater narrative of FE4. Your 16+ chapters of blood, sweat, tears and loss are just a single map to the other guy.

It's beautiful.

Most significant to me is the penultimate map, right before the finale. I won't give details of the reward, but it is the height of the game's bullshit, of its player-hostile design. Seemingly-random tiles teleport your units to a room in the bottom where they are beaten to death by enemy reinforcements coming out of stairways from which there is no escape. Fog of war concealing Berserkers with extremely high crit and damage, all but guaranteeing a one hit kill on any of your unfortunate allies. Constantly dark mages warping towards you from across the map. It is perverse. It is disgusting. It feels like something out of like a cruel romhack, like a particularly rough Kaizou Mario.

Yet it has great purpose. If you go through it, even though your best units will likely be fatigued and thus unusable in the final map, where you will need them most to actually beat the game - even though you will gain no new items, no new weapons, not even a powerful party member - you are instead rewarded with the best cutscene in the game and incredible emotional catharsis.

It is completely optional. It is in your best tactical interest to not do it. The requirements to unlock it are slightly difficult in the previous map. Yet, the game looks you in the eye, narrows its own, and asks you how much you want your happy ending. Because if you do, you'd better come and get it, motherfucker.

I love Thracia 776. I don't think we'll ever get a game in the Fire Emblem series like it again, but I deeply cherish my time with it and hope anyone else interested in Fire Emblem gives it a try, ideally after getting a few femblems under their belt.

A comparación de Genealogy, Thracia se presenta como un Fire Emblem mas tradicional, con mapas de un tamaño normal y sin el sistema del castillo, pero al igual que el juego anterior, Thracia puede volverse tedioso en muchos momentos. Con FE4 el problema eran los mapas tan ridiculamente grandes que se volvian aburridos, en FE5 el problema es lo difícil que puede ser en varios momentos. Unidades que se encuentran debajo del nivel de otros personajes, enemigos con bastones silenciar, dormir y berserk por doquier o escondidos en lugares, lugares llenos de ballestas que pegan un montón, falta de tiendas con objetos utiles obligandote a robar objetos de las maneras que sean necesarias, etc. Fuera de la dificultad, Thracia puede ser un juego bastante entretenido, haciendote pensar en varias ocasiones que hacer, o si es que reinicias un mapa puedes hacerte una mejor idea de que hacer para avanzar mucho mas rápido, ademas de tener una de las mejores historias y personajes dentro de Fire Emblem. Hablando de personajes, este juego presenta MUCHAS unidades, y en una partida normal se espera que ocupes todas gracias al sistema de fatiga, el cual hace de que no puedas utilizar tanto tus tropas cada mapa. Lastimosamente, muchas de estas unidades son bastante meh tirando a malas, por lo que podrias irte a farmear a un coliseo y comprar Stamina Drinks que te permitirán usar a tus unidades buenas incluso teniendo fatiga.
Con todo esto dicho, Thracia sigue siendo un buen juego, uno complicado a cagar, pero uno que disfrute la mayoría del tiempo, una experiencia que me hizo pensar bastante y que me hizo aprender de mis errores durante cada mapa el cual terminaba reiniciando.

This might be my personal favorite Fire Emblem game and I feel like it stands equal to FE4. In fact I feel like part of its greatness comes from its context within the broader FE4 story. The atmosphere of this game is immaculate; seldom have I played a game that so perfectly captures the feeling of a rag-tag group of revolutionaries, from its music, to gameplay mechanics and dialogue. It makes some improvements on some of Genealogy's aspects while returning to a more "traditional" Fire Emblem experience. It's reputation as difficult isn't unearned but I feel like its severity is vastly overblown.

I just finished my ironman of this game, it was the first ironman I've ever attempted and I can confidently say that you should at least try ironmanning a game in this series at least once. I didn't reset my entire game if I got a game over however and if you just want to casually play around with permadeath I recommend you do the same. Permadeath is actually a really fun mechanic and can really bring some overlooked units into a new light. For example I used Kane in my playthrough because aside from Finn all my other cavs had died and he was the next best thing and he ended up being one of my favorite units to use. I can say the same about Homer who got 2 lucky move level ups on the map he joined in and with use of paragon I was quickly able to turn him into a power house. Permadeath is a really interesting mechanic, and it'd be a shame to not at least do one playthrough of any fe game enforcing it. Kaga was right, you shouldn't worry about the perfect ending where everyone lives or the super optimal plays everytime you play this game. Create your own story of how Leif clawed his way back and retook Leonster while preceding to take down a faction of the Loptr church. You'll probably make an unforgettable playthrough and discover some favorite units you would usually overlook.

(i love thracia)

thracia is almost the perfect fe game. thracia is considered by many to be the hardest fire emblem game (excluding shit like lunatic+ and all that, that isn't really "hard", it's more just bs imo) because a lot of the chapters are enemy sided. they're usually equipped with siege weapons like ballistae and siege tomes, enemies can have leadership stars to increase their general army's stats by a tad, fatigue can exhaust a unit making them undeployable in the next chapter unless you use a stamina drink, etc.

again, it can be a bit annoying when you're the one getting beaten and worn down per chapter--but imo that's the fun of it all. defying the odds and all that shit

Kaga: It’s not a big problem if some of your characters die in Fire Emblem; I want each player to create their own unique story. Don’t get caught up trying to get a “perfect ending.” Have fun!

Fire Emblem’s synthesis of two core ideas - RPG elements and permadeath - work together as a powerful combination for creating unique experiences. Different units will grow in different ways and between the dicerolls and each player’s personal preference, they’ll end up with armies that look and function largely differently from each other. Throwing an extra curveball in this is permadeath, as poor planning or just plain rotten luck can lead to favourite units dying and being unavailable for the rest of the game, with the consequence usually being to try training a new unit - likely one you didn’t have much attachment to in the first place - bringing further diversity as well as a new story to tell.

Thracia 776 is by far and away the best Fire Emblem game at creating these emergent stories. The first reason is that it’s easily the most freeform game in the series for a number of reasons. Stat caps are fairly low and growths can be boosted by holding Crusader Scrolls, letting just about any character be endgame-viable if you want to put the work in as well as making it easier to train up a new unit to recover from a particularly crushing loss. Other factors like skills, personal weapons, movement stars and FCM, as well as the fabled movement growth, keep everyone feeling unique and give you something to get attached to. All these tools bring the gameplay to feel incredibly open - while Thracia has a well-earned reputation as the “staff game”, as status staves are just as hilariously overpowered as they are hilarious to use, it’s more just the most easily-observable result of this. The game gives you so many powerful tools - between items like insane personal weapons and staves, as well as mechanical tools like Canto and infinite trading - that there’s so much individuality and expression in how you approach a chapter or weasel yourself through tight situations, which is only compounded by how uniquely any one person’s army is going to fall together. Fatigue seems like it would take away from this uniqueness by forcing everyone to use most of the characters across the game, but it makes each chapter’s potential difficulty and solution vary even more depending on when you have access to your strongest units.

The second is its tendency towards surprises, and though the aforementioned movement stars and movement levels, as well as the tendency of crits to skew heavily in your favour, all play into this, its more interesting display is shown through its chapter design. Thracia’s design mentality would be absolutely aggravating in any other game, as each chapter aims to properly convey the situation that Leif’s army finds itself in - this means it often puts you in heavily disadvantageous positions and loves to throw heavy curveballs at you as the chapters’ stories advance and the opposition’s own plans advance alongside yours. What makes this feel reasonable in Thracia is the sheer strength and number of tools you have to navigate around these tricks. They will catch you off guard - and likely steal some of your soldiers away from you - but they rarely felt outright unfair, instead feeling like I could have prepared better, or could have played better. Chapters often feel like real opponents constantly trying to keep you on your toes, and while it’s crushing to lose a strong unit to something you didn’t expect, the stakes make it even more satisfying to defy the odds.

Its story compounds those themes held up by the gameplay, as while the broad strokes involve the reclamation and unification of an entire country, the details focus on the people of the story, their victories and losses, their choices and resulting consequences, their perseverance or lack thereof. Leif’s inexperience leads him to struggle to lead the Liberation, making multiple brash mistakes that set back his goals and get those close to him killed, as he stumbles forward in pursuit of a personal goal that almost none of the other fighters can even relate to, all while being overshadowed by the fighters beyond the borders. It’s his perseverance, in spite of all his losses and heartbreak, that leads him to eventually recapture Munster from the Empire. Just as Leif’s own quest is imperfect, the game expects yours to be, as not only can multiple events only be seen with certain characters kept alive, but small details change when certain characters *die* - Leif can even fail to achieve his own strongest motivation if the right mistakes are made. Why bother implementing these, if not for these losses being an expected part of the experience?

After all, if everyone’s story was perfect, nobody’s story would be unique.

There's no way you could make a Fire Emblem game like this now. You can make a hard Fire Emblem game, sure, but not one that is this scrappy and seat of your pants. There's no other Fire Emblem game like it. It's so busted. It's a ROM hack with the polish of an official product and therein lies it's charm.

The game has some of the absolute strongest map design in the series. The gameplay, story and map fusion is exceptionally strong. However, it can come at the cost of the chapters feeling reliant on gimmicks or pretty much requiring a warp skip to beat. Still, the gameplay lends itself to truly incredible moments and overall provides many ways to play and beat maps (even if you really gotta be capturing those warp staves and killing edges).

If there's one gripe I have about the game it is about how underutilized the cast feels. Some characters feel like they are introduced but aren't really given enough back story or time to shine. Unfortunately, some characters can also be basically disposable despite the fatigue mechanic.

Overall, I loved playing Thracia even if it would drive me mad with its difficultly. I can only pray for a remake that is able to polish and improve upon such a truly unique game and make it more accessible to modern audiences. In the mean time, you'll just have to play this any way you can.

thracia is a game that really wants you to reexamine some behaviors and thoughts that you may have considered intrinsic to playing video games. is it worth it to strive for perfection? is fairness really the end goal of difficulty? is there really no honor in cheating? the most common statement you'll see about this game is that it's brutal, and the second most common statement you'll see about this game is that it's "just unfair to new players, but not that hard". neither of these statements are quite true; thracia is a very difficult game, and it is especially unkind to blind players, but it's paradoxically very effectively balanced. for the most part, this isn't a game where you're being put up against enemies way stronger than you, or a game where the enemies are given tons of toys you can't have. thracia is about trying to turn every disadvantage you're given into an advantage, and trying to win by choosing not to play within what the game presents as it's "rules" at all. to me, thracia feels very genuinely revolutionary in a way the prior 4 FEs, all also about revolutions, did not. the fatigue system means you are not allowed to be picky about your units, and you do not get your usual assortment of nobles and world-renown warriors. instead, you get a heck of a lot of bandits and sellswords, not to mention a handful of priests and illegitimate children. speaking of those bandits and priests, they are universally your MVPs in thracia. thracia has a very strong sense of materialism, both in it's plot and mechanics, which means that stealing and capturing weapons is simply your only option for acquiring weapons and money. this means that utility units are much stronger than in any other fire emblem game; not only because you have to steal to survive, but also because disarming is often a better option than just directly killing. why should i murder reinhardt when if i berserk him then sleep him i can get him to thin his troops and steal his gear? why should i bother fighting all these mages when i can send lifis in and just take all their books instead? this stuff brings a really interesting sense of resource management to thracia, and means that the player has theoretically nearly infinite opportunities to get good weapons, but has to gauge whether or not it's worth going for them each time they fight. this is furthered by making villages occasionally very difficult extras to get, and the addition of missable gaiden chapters help this greatly too. thracia has a very strong conception of risk vs reward; to simply clear the maps, you often have very easy and simple options, but simply clearing the maps is rarely enough. you are forced to take gambles to survive, but you are never expected to be perfect. a 100% playthrough of this game would likely increase the playtime by more than half off resets alone, but i don't think that that is a mistake or a negative. to me, thracia is rather genius in that it puts so much decisionmaking in the player's hands, and so little of that decisionmaking directly relates to killing. a good amount of your units can reliably crit, so cutting through enemies isn't something you need to worry too much about.. instead, what you're concerned with is not bleeding out on resources, making sure your units can avoid status effect spam, making sure you can have your units available when you need them. is it bullshit that you can be hit from halfway across the map by a sleep staff in enemy phase? sure. but i can silence that staffer, i can berserk them, i can steal their sleep staff.. you just have so many options, and just killing them is usually the least effective and least interesting one! in another strategy game, this sort of thing would be considered cheese, but here, it's life. you have the option to play "honorably" and fight like a man, sure, but are the enemies fighting honorably? hell no. fuck em. to me, this is exactly the sort of difficulty a strategy game should have. extremely lethal, extremely diverse, and not fair at all... but filled with options for interesting decisionmaking instead of just overstatting brute force ai. there is very little division between what you can do and what the ai can do. the defining difference is that you are not a bot.
STORY SPOILERS AHEAD
storytelling in thracia is another big strength. i think that the very restrained focus here helps a lot with character building and thematics. prior fire emblem games were all extremely grand continent-spanning high fantasy stories, which isn't a problem for those games at all, but i do feel that occasionally the macro scale of those stories meant that we could not feel the struggles of individual characters so closely. even mystery of the emblem, which does have a similar style of gameplay and a comparable story to thracia, is so zoomed out that i could hardly tell you what marth or caeda are feeling about what's happening. by contrast, leif is excellently built up, undergoing strong development through many losses. leif is someone who was born into natural conditions fit for traditional heroism, but is also someone who is given plenty reason to believe that his rebellion will only crush hope. prior lords had generally been characterized by naivety and great kindness; marth had been unable to accept that his allies had turned against him, sigurd had so much faith in the goodness of others that he ended up blind to conspiracy, celica loved alm so much that she was willing to suffer and sacrifice her cause for his sake. leif is anything but naive, and his kindness is often hardly virtuous. leif is racked with self-doubt at every turn, and when he is not, his ignorance and rash attitude bites him in the ass. he wants to save his people and repay the debts of his childhood at all costs, even though it has him taking on more than he can handle. his nobility alienates him from causes that much of his army is fighting for. many of his flaws would make him seem not so dissimilar from the friegian generals he's up against, but the important part is that leif learns from his mistakes as time goes on, and he never gives up. by the end of the game, his title of sage-lord doesn't feel farfetched. the enemy factions in thracia are also very well characterized. one detail i especially like is that the infamous thracian dracoknights rarely show up at all unless they're trying to seize an objective before you, and they're extremely lazy units. they don't leave their posts until you get in their range or split up your units, and they always leave the map when you kill their commander. this gets across very well that south thracia has little passion for the war they've been paid to fight in, they only see their alliance with the empire opportunistically. my only complaint with the story is that the final few chapters feel like a bit of afterthought or obligation story-wise, the audience just doesn't get a lot of in-universe justification for why the strategy is being executed the way it is, probably because it diverges from genealogy at this point. saving eyvel and defeating raydrik both make sense, but the loptrian church has very little personal relevance to the cast here. it didn't bother me because the last stretch of the game is sheer excellence from a gameplay perspective, but i do feel it's worth noting.
some minor notes i couldn't fit in here:
door key softlocks are really dumb and probably the single worst part of this game
chapter 12x and 14x are objectively quite poorly designed chapters for very different reasons; 12x is a chapter that feels almost deliberately designed for you to not engage with playing it, and 14x is a fog of war chapter that has long range troops and random pegasus knight spawns which can capture your units but you can't capture back. i think 14x is still effective narratively, but it's one of the only moments where i felt that thracia was sadistic in a way the player could not appropriately respond to or work around without foreknowledge or with clever strategy.
the variety in objectives is a huge plus for thracia and something i wish had been implented sooner. escape maps and survival maps are both awesome

I played FE5 almost as a joke so my friends could watch it kill me in real life. I don't even like FE4. I wasn't prepared for this game to own. I wasn't prepared for it to unironically be series Top 3 material. What the fuck.

With a lot of beloved hard games, the refrain is that they're Hard But Fair. (I think it started with God Hand commercials?) Thracia's difficulty probably lives up to the hype, and the game is amazing, but I cannot overstate how much it's not fair. One of the great things is that it's hard to sum up why it's so difficult, because it's not any one main reason; the game is inventively sadistic. Every other chapter it pulls some shit that warrants brand new amendments to the Fantasy Geneva Conventions. In one map you may have to outrun an entire squadron of wyvern riders with Killer Lances who spawn closer to what you're trying to protect than you do and you're on slow ass mountain terrain. In another, you want to turn a bunch of powerful enemies into friendly green units by allowing them to talk to specific other green units, with no ability to steer either party toward each other, and also the enemies who are still red will immediately start butchering the turncoats. The game is an endless bag of absurd, dirty tricks being played on you personally, and it's honestly both hilarious to fail and immensely satisfying to finally solve the puzzle.

There are also a ton of little mechanical quirks, some of them infamous and none of which would be back-breaking on their own, but the cumulative effect requires your entire strategic mentality to be completely different from in any other game in the series. For example, most stats cap at 20 for every class, and a lot of your units honestly have pretty great growth rates, so that drastically changes the value of something as basic as EXP. The game actually has a Konami Code-style cheat you can use on the main menu to literally double everyone's EXP gains, but there's debate over whether it actually makes the game any easier. You gain items over the course of the game that increase a unit's growths, so everyone ballooning two thirds of the way to level cap before you get most of them can actually kind of fuck you. Love it or hate it, I think it takes an incredibly interesting game to make a unilateral gigantic level boost potentially disadvantageous to the player. Also, you've probably heard that healing can miss; that's not actually one of your bigger problems (though it can really come in clutch to ruin an entire plan sometimes), but it is an extremely funny indicator of the game's overall attitude towards the player. There are a lot of other innovations you don't hear about as oddities because they simply stuck around; weird and brutal as it is, the game feels shockingly modern (or I suppose I should say "like a 2000s-era Fire Emblem") compared to the other Shouzou Kaga games.

But the most important feature, and another one you've probably heard of, is the capture mechanic--you can actually nonlethally disable enemies (and steal all their shit)! But something you might not pick up on until you're playing the game is that it's basically your only source of income. You get a pretty typical number of items from treasure chests and villages, sure, but enemies never drop anything when killed, shop prices are fucking exorbitant and you NEVER, at any point in the game, get any money in any way other than selling items. There aren't even gems or anything that exist only to sell for a lot, everything you can sell is potentially useful in its own right and you get peanuts compared to how much it would cost to buy the same thing. It's not a minor or optional mechanic; if you like it when your army has weapons, you need to be capturing on an extremely regular basis. It makes for a really crunchy, interesting in-game economy where you're basically always tense about your equipment.

Luckily, the other really important thing about capturing is that it's really fucking hard and dangerous. You have to defeat the enemy anyway to capture them; you can't do it on enemy phase so it often requires some tricky baiting; some units can almost never do it at all because you need higher constitution than the enemy; doing it with other enemies around will definitely get someone killed because you have severe stat penalties while holding a captive; and worst of all, using the Capture command instead of Attack also gives you stat penalties. It turns out fighting with edged weapons is harder when you're trying not to kill the fucker, what's up with that?

This also means the better the loot, the harder it is to get, since rare and valuable items tend to be carried by stronger enemies who are deeper behind enemy lines. You're basically running a cost-benefit analysis every time you see something you really want; you may have to stick your entire head in a blender to get it, but can you afford to pass it up? The game is hard right now, but it's not gonna get any easier later on, especially if you're not building a stockpile of exactly this kind of resource. That extra Warp staff will be a huge lifeline. Did I mention that the guy is using it every turn, so by the time you get to him and take it, having run fucking pell-mell through an obstacle course of siege weaponry and cavalry that overextended you for the rest of the map, it has one cast left? The game is littered with honey pots like this, where it dangles something you DESPERATELY want in front of you, then makes it so difficult and costly to get that you don't realize it's not worth it until you're already hard committed. I hear you laughing at me, Kaga, you weird chauvinist fuck! This still doesn't make you cool!

So obviously I'm an idiot masochist, but there is more than pain here. Counterintuitively, for how much you're suffering, you get to fuck around with some of the strongest units in the series. (Relative to the game around them. Their stats cap at 20 they should not fight FE10 units--) You form the kind of attachment to characters like Mareeta and Asbel, to name just a couple of the more extreme examples, that you can normally only get with people you've ACTUALLY been to war with. They're your fucking rock. A fixed point you can rely on when you need them most.

It also helps that, in moderation, you get to be just as sadistic as the game. I know I just spent a small novel hyping up the scarcity of resources, but the thing about the game making you fight like hell to get anything is that it can make a lot more crazy stuff technically available. You won't get out of this map with a Brave Sword, a Sleep staff, a promotion item and two Silver weapons--but with some elbow grease you can probably get a couple of them, and that actually gives you a lot of freedom. Your toolkit is both limited and potentially really potent, and sometimes you realize you have the right combination of staves or something to completely ratfuck a challenge that looked impossible at first glance, as a reward for having worked hard earlier in the game. That's a rare, amazing feeling.

Okay, this is a stupid sentence but it's my review and it can be stupid if I want: I haven't played Pathologic, but FE5 kind of makes me feel the way people describe Pathologic. I mean, I wouldn't call them similar games, the narrative here is not exactly high art, but it's a story about being a scrappy underdog rebel faction fighting a huge empire and the gameplay genuinely commits to that feeling. It is impossible to forget while playing this game that everything is working against you, you have nothing but what you can desperately claw out of somebody else's hands, and you cannot win by fighting fair. Thracia really is a harrowing game, but inside the infamous struggle is something that sticks with you; something bold, fascinating, and incredibly rewarding.

although Saias being arbitrarily immune to Sleep and Silence in chapter 22 is fucking--

Fire emblem Thracia 776 added a lot of new innovations that make it quite unique in this series. For all the good stuff that was added like rescue dropping and capturing there is also the more akward stuff such as staffs being able to miss and fatigue which are annoying but not too bad either I guess. And then you have nightmare fuel like near infinite ambush reinforcements, fog of war which is used abundantly throughout the game and finally the siege tome/ballista/infinite staff range spam on late game maps.This game wouldn't be anywhere near as bad if it didn't rely so much on the player's ignorance of what's going on to simulate difficulty.

PEAK!!!!!!! But seriously i do believe Thracia is the gold standard for fire emblem games. Every map has a legitimate reason to exist in the story with no filler and lots of different objectives to fulfill, not just 95% rout/kill boss like many of the other games in the series. Nearly every character has some kind of niche to make them usable in some situation, which is accentuated by the fatigue system forcing you to cycle out 1.5x the amount of units than youd normally use, and really forces the player to evaluate the map and decide on what units will be effective there, and not just powerleveling the generally best 10 or so guys. Capturing throws another bit of mechanical depth in there since this game really starves you of gold and item handouts, but asks the player to take initiative and obtain what they want/need on their own terms. Only real complaint is theres a couple of things that you just could never guess on your own like promoting lara into a dancer and having to sleep and then capture a pegasus knight to recruit but all in all they are decently transparent about special events especially for a SNES game.

Considered one of the hardest games in the series its easy to figure out why thats the case as theres various mechanics that will either screw you up or benefit from (so can your enemies) from heal miss to infinite status effects and range to no true 100% hits this game can be frustrating if you dont know what you are doing. This game felt designed in a way you had to have a manual or guide to go with it. Despite it all, if you plan ahead and know somewhat what you are doing it can be (mostly) fun to play through. As for the story, we get to see the POV of Leif as he takes back thracia and its gives a better perspective of how he feels and what he goes through during the events of ch 6-8 of Geneology before and after he meets seliph. although supports werent created at this time, the character conversations throughout the game are great and give more personality to the characters. i think overall it was a decent game to the series