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I recently played the romhack called The Sun God's Wrath and wanted to do a quick write-up. If you want the tl;dr rating, it's A tier. A fun game whose pros outweigh its cons that's held back by one major weakness.
Quick Summary: For those of you who haven't played or even heard of The Sun God's Wrath, the game has a lengthy list of all the following mechanics:
- FE 5 Capture
- Fatigue
- Third Tiers
- Dragon Veins
- Lots of skills
- Pursuit Critical Coefficient
- Crusader scrolls from FE 5
- Universal promotion items
- 1 RN
Boo
Basically, it has a bunch of mechanics from Thracia 776. For me, that was the main appeal of the hack going in. So, what are the pros and cons of its gameplay?
Pros
Skills, skills, skills!: This game has a wide variety of skills from all over the franchise. Examples of the skills that it has are:
- Proc skills like Aether, Sol, Luna.
- It has Rally skills, the Breaker skills, and the Awakening skill that buffs the activation rates of your proc skills.
- Nihil.
- Skills like Night Tide from Radiant Dawn which give major stat buffs to adjacent allies.
- Wary Fighter, Poison Strike and Trample from the Fates games.
You name it, this game probably has that skill. It made playing the game fun because it gave the cast a wide variety of additional abilities. It also made enemies more powerful. I liked how this game required me to check enemy weapons and skills before having to fight them.
One skill I was particularly impressed by was the skill where enemies took no damage from range. This made it so that I would have to get my units over to that enemy and attack them from a range where that enemy could counterattack from. It made those bosses tough, but fair.
The only skill I didn't appreciate was the skill Haweye, which a few enemies had. Wasn't a fan of how some enemies had automatic accuracy regardless of my unit's avoid. Early on in the game, there was a unit named Dexithea who joined with the Bowbreaker skill in the same map where a bow wielding boss had Hawkeye. I find that design decision odd as it felt like the designer had unintentionally undermined that character when it would have been an opportunity to get the player to use Dexithea in a fun matchup situation.
# 2- Tough, but fair difficulty
I played this game on Normal Mode instead of Hard, since I saw in a reddit thread that it's better to start a romhack blind on the easier difficulty. I still thought that Normal Mode of this hack was significantly more challenging than most of the official games in the Fire Emblem franchise. Enemies had powerful stats, powerful weapons, and a nice variety of threatening skills. It makes me want to go back and beat it on Hard Mode to see how the designer increased the difficulty. Whenever one of my units died, I felt like it was because I made a bad choice instead of being screwed over by the game. Another reason why the game felt fair was because this game had.....
NO AMBUSH SPAWNS!!!
# 3 - Telegraphed fast clear rewards
Early on, this game will tell you that if you beat X chapter in Y turns, you get Z reward. It was a great way to incentivize me to play faster. Sometimes you also got penalties for beating the chapter too slowly. All of this information is easily accessible to the player too.
# 4 - Dragon Veins are Awesome
This game has a well executed version of Dragon Veins. Anytime the player activates Dragon Veins, all enemies on the map cannot move for one turn. It was easy to understand, incredibly useful, and didn't feel gimmicky. I ended up using them whenever they were available and they felt helpful.
# 5 - Good units and good weapons
This game gives you access to the FE 4 Regalia. Tyrfing, Balmung, Mysteltainn, Helswath, Gungnir, Gae Bolg, Forseti, etc. They were 20 might and gave + 10s and + 5 stat boosts. They were super fun to use. This game also gave the player Thani and Urvan. Urvan was like a Brave Axe, and it made the brigand who used it fun to use.
This game also provides a wide variety of useful units to use, and they were generally fun to use. I had a ton of fun using an archer named Lex who got Galeforce AND Double Lion. Every attack of his was a Brave Weapon combined with being able to attack twice each turn. It was awesome witnessing an archer that powerful. Astraea, the main character of the game, was fun to use once she promoted. She made excellent use of the game's magic swords, and with a few Crusader Scrolls stacked on her she became one of my best units.
This game also had fun manakete units that could wreck face with a dragonstone or they could heal / use a Thani tome. It made for a good time having a variety of useful units to use.
Cons: Bland Map Design
The only major criticism that I had was that the map design felt bland and uninspired. The game defaulted to wide maps with heavy enemy unit density, which meant that in many cases it felt like the correct move to make was to play slowly and make sure none of my units were in range of too many enemies.
The early maps frequently use the Survive objective, which felt repetitive and underwhelming after a while. I wonder if the designer figured that the turn rewards were sufficient enough to get the player to play faster. I would have appreciated more turtle disincentives. Also, I wish that the villages and treasure chests got actually threatened by the enemy. Most of the maps felt bland with the exception of one map that I made me react like "No...you didn't."
Thracia Chapter 24x Revival
Of all the chapters from Thracia 776 to take inspiration from, The Sun God's Wrath decided to make its own version of Chapter 24x from Thracia 776.
- Invisible warp tiles? Check.
- Said warp tiles warp the player's character to a spot on the map that they can't normally get out of? Check.
- Fog of War? Check.
One Nitpick: Capture isn't as fun.
One minor nitpick is that this romhack loves to give enemy bosses, and powerful enemies the "Watchful" skill. This skill prevents enemies from being captured.
I get the logic behind not wanting the player to acquire powerful enemy weapons and have that break the game, but the end result was that capturing enemies felt less satisfying than in Thracia 776 because the kind of stuff that I could capture seemed less impressive.
The only exception to that rule was the extra Warp staff that an enemy had in the infamous map that I talked about above.
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Final Thoughts
When I saw that this game had all these mechanics from Thracia 776, I expected that this game was going to be S tier. It wasn't, but I did enjoy it overall and I do want to go back and replay it again. Any game that makes me want to replay it right after beating it is clearly doing something right.
I recommend this game to any Fire Emblem fan that:
- Likes Thracia 776
- Likes challenging gameplay
- Likes being able to use different units and mix / match growth boosting items and scrolls.
Overall Rating: A tier. A fun time overall.
