This is probably the hardest Fire emblem experience you can get in vanilla games that isn't bullshit (looking at awakening lunatic+).
Lunatic reverse is such a satisfying challenge to face. The game always puts you in a difficult spot and it just makes you feel good when you're done dealing with its bullshit. Managing to get every side objective and keeping every character alive makes you feel like you completely dominated the game and I love it.
Overall solid but I don't think I'd replay it on lunatic reverse if I had to ever revisit.

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.

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.

I went into this thinking it'll be a generic "dating vn", but I found out I was completely wrong, the effort put into a game that's literally free is astounding. I've currently completed 3 of the routes Emi, Lily and Rin. Each route has their own strength as they're all written/drawn by completely different people. Each girl have widely different personalities and goals that they wanna achieve the biggest takeaway from this game was despite them all being "disabled" in a way their problems are still that of the everyday person.
If you want a break from le generic dating vns/sims, I highly recommend this to you all.

Personally not a big fan of this one, I think it has some of the best worldbuilding in the series and it really tries to give you the impression you're fighting a war with all the giant maps that look exactly like they are on the continental map. But I still did not enjoy going through it at all, you have to sit on your ass to play through these chapters for way too long, like a lot of segments of the game is just moving your units at a snail's pace because the 5 mov units slow you down like crazy so you're away from a lot of the action for a very long time, if you cut down the maps' gigantism in this game, it would probably be the shortest experience in the serie. The way the inventory was handled in this game wasn't my cup of tea either, I hated having to exchange money between units or having to go through the arena to gain money to put specific items on specific units, I don't understand why they couldn't just let us trade between units.
I will most likely not revisit this one but who knows.

This was by far the most challenging Fire Emblem experience I've had to deal with so far. I started this game on lunatic out of pride and oh boy did this game make me realise how much I suck at strategy games. I did manage to get through nonetheless through countless attempts and many sacrifices on endgame but it was all worth the satisfaction it provided. The intricacies of the combat system in this game and the design of the maps was so refreshing compared to other fire emblem games, there was something new to discover on every chapter of this game. I also really liked the characters, their designs and all the support conversations they had between each other. While all of what I said so far was sweet, the game does have very noticeable flaws. The plot is basically non-existent, there are plotholes all over the place and it makes no sense. And the other beef I have with this game that I can think of right now is the late game. Some of the decisions that were taken to make the maps difficult at the end were just down right vile. Who thought it was ok to have the debuffs of maids and ninjas stack ? As if ninjas weren't hard enough to deal with when they couldn't stack debuffs on you. The debuff stacking isn't the only problem with maids though, why the hell were they allowed to have an infinite amount of staff use ? The whole point of status staves is to make you consider each and every step you make so that you don't fall in a situation where you're too weak to fight the enemy, but instead you have to go for the kill on them asap and hope to survive the hordes of enemies that are around them on enemy phase to not get hexing rod spammed (which should have never existed tbh). All of this kind of forces reckless play on the final map if you don't have specific characters or ones that just aren't good enough to one round/two round enemies. This all leads to having to rely on rescue cheesing through endgame if you don't wanna retry the last map + chapter 27 for god knows how long. Some may compare having to do chapter 27 again to the endgame of fe6 and fe7, but they just aren't the same situation at all. The final bosses of fe6 and fe7 are total pushovers so having to do the earlier part of them again is never a factor. In this game you have to go through the easy chapter 27 again and again then have to do the actual hard part. Both are bad design philosophies imo, if you're gonna design a hard final chapter, make it so we can save before it and that's that.
Well anyway, that's all I have to say about this game, it was quite a unique experience to go through it and I will remember it for a long long time, Idk if I can claim that I will replay it in the future right now because endgame caused a mental trauma for me.

Too much to talk about so I will try to keep it short. I liked this game and it doesn't really have any major flaw, what did bother me is the amount of stuff it takes to do a 100%, I really didn't like having to beat the game all over again just to get specific achievements. You may say that this is a non-factor and these feats only try to add replay value for future playthroughs but it just bothers me when I beat a game and do not try to finish everything it has to offer as a completionist. But yeah, I feel like beating this game again and again will make you start to hate certain aspects of it which are totally harmless, it totally affected my rating here and I won't lie that this game probably doesn't deserve 7/10.
On a side note fuck those hooded flying enemies in tower of fates 2.

Entertaining game that had enough differences in mechanics to differentiate it from FE7. However a lot of these differences are just bad... Like the fact every map objective is seizing the throne or the fact that there are ambush reinforcements which can be very egregious when you're playing slowly. Thrones grant defense and 30+ evasion which means that a lot of your scrubs like roy,sue,shanna,etc can't get some juicy exp because the bosses are just too fat. My last beef is with the unlocking of the last 3 chapters, sealing a very relevant part of the game behind requirements most people won't satisfy is just dumb.