Initial Thoughts of Berwick Saga

 

So I started playing Berwick Saga. I'm only a few chapters in, but I wanted to share my thoughts so far:

The Good

• The Base Menu: 
  
  
  

I'm only a few chapters in and I already love this base menu so much! It feels like a perfect middle ground between the exploration of the monastery in Three Houses versus the bare bones simplicity of the older titles. There's plenty to do, and there's story events that happen in a good number of the chapters. Each section gives a compelling reason to visit it, and helps the city you live in to feel like an actual place to live in. 

To go along with this, there were some fun mechanics that I saw here that I'm a fan of. Take the Kingfisher Pavilion for example: 

This mechanic reminds me of the Mess Hall in Fates where food gives stat bonuses for a chapter. I think I like this version of that concept more than the Fates version since the Kingfisher Pavilion requires money to use, which means that there's more resource management involved. Plus I also like that the player at least has a little more control over who gets what food. There's a wide variety of dishes to select and you need to know which characters like which foods. 

• Mercenaries & Recruitment: 

Another neat feature of this game that I really like is that you can recruit characters with money to join your army. These recruits don't stay in your army for forever unless you complete certain requirements. I like this approach to recruitment the most since it feels like you need to be deliberate and thoughtful with who you recruit, and how many that you need. Recruitment becomes more thoughtful and deliberate, and if you know what you need to do in order to permanently recruit them, then you need to factor that into your strategy. This approach makes recruitment more thought provoking and strategic and I love it!

The Stables

I like the fact that you can purchases horses, that they have HP, and that horses are just another resource that you have to manage. Horses having HP also means that they can die. So you have to be more careful with them, and charging headlong into an enemy army can be bad news for your mounted character. 

Wtf? x 10? Is that I what I get to look forward to?

Resource Management
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that Berwick Saga absolutely nails resource management! You have enough gold to do what you want, and you have a lot of places to spend it. Food, recruitment, weapons, horses, etc. There's a lot of places where you can spend your money. It makes purchasing stuff a strategic choice with trade-offs and opportunity costs. You're always wondering if you should have spent your money on something else, which makes shopping more strategic overall. 

Unit Balance
I'm not very far into the game, but so far I feel like I can use whoever I want and there's a valid reason to use that someone. Each unit also feels unique and serves a purpose. Everyone I've seen seems to be saying that same thing. Well done Kaga! 

Skills

I'm a fan of how this game handles skills based off what I've seen. While there are some skills that are RNG based, there are also plenty of skills that are passive commands (although admittedly it doesn't always seem like you can activate them?) that can be consistently activated. Skills like Desperation and Deathmatch are awesome because they provide powerful bonuses in the form of extra attacks, but they have enough drawbacks that prevent them from always being used. It feels like there's a trade-off as you have to consider whether you want to use the skill now, or wait later. 

Units Don't Counterattack If They're Dealt Damage

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but based on what I've seen and heard, it seems to me that if a unit takes damage in battle, they do not get to counterattack unless there's a skill involved. I actually like this change. It makes the game more player phase oriented, and prevents the game from being soloed from massive juggernauts. It's another nifty change that works really well.

A Healthy Amount of Sidequests

I'm a fan of having sidequests and other things to do. I like the idea of there being citizen requests, and opportunities to find items that you can give to certain npcs in exchange for stuff. 

The Bad

Holy Hit Rates Batman!

My least favorite part of the game so far is the absurdly low hit rates for this game. It feels like most of my army is averaging between 5- 60 %. I thought the hit rates in Binding Blade were bad enough, but this game makes FE 6 look like freaking Bullseye from the comics:

It makes the game very RNG reliant and I can't say that I'm a fan. In some cases the game slows down because trying to hit your target can take a while. Thankfully this game provides ways to increase the accuracy of your army, so I expect this issue to go away in time. 

 The Tweaked Turn Order

Another major change to this game is that instead of having one phase for the player, and one phase for the enemy, this game alternates between player units and enemies getting a turn. The best way I can describe it is that it feels kind of like Turn Order and Priority in D&D. I'm not a fan of this change. 

For starters, there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason between who gets to go, and how often different units go before the player / enemy gets to react. As a result, it's perfectly possible for your healer to get ganged up on and beaten before you get a chance to react (that's happened to me a couple times). It also means that if you have a character on the verge of death you have to prioritize getting that unit away from combat asap. 

Tl;dr version - I like this game a lot already! The gameplay has me hooked, and there are several things about this game that I wish other Fire Emblem titles tried to do.