Esperia ~ Uprising of the Scarlet Witch ~ Reviews

Mechanically, this game was Fire Emblem+. There were a lot of stat boosting staffs, or stat lowering ones. You could increase your move, your def, lower enemy speed, different staffs to stop magic from casting or prevent physical attacks. There were staffs that did AOE damage, transformed a square into a forest or mountain tile, or turned it into an impassable hole. I especially liked the concept of the staff that blows up everyone within three squares of the caster. On top of this, the skills were sometimes more interesting. Like, there was the basic lategame skill of vantage, or galeforce, but there were weird ones like +3 speed only on enemy phase, become untargetable while on a forest or don’t suffer move penalties on forests, can’t get doubled. Bows were awesome in this. They had native 2-3 range with longbows going to 4, which gave them crazy utility, especially against mages. Their damage was solid, and later you get a unique bow that heals on hit. Big thumbs up. Gameplay wise also pretty good. There was variety on map goals- escape, rout, kill the boss, some had timed objectives, some split your forces into two completely different arenas, and generally the design was solid, with some boxes, and with some real standouts. I've played a lot of FE games, and think I'd rather replay this one before many of the others. It's not a perfect game to be fair, I think there are some writing choices that I don't quite agree with, but it is still enjoyable to play through, and it touches on different fantasy ideas and tropes in some less conventional ways.