Good to hear...keep us updated. I'm trying to finish NEO this week so I can start it.
Im about halfway through now, here’s my spoiler-free thoughts on the mechanics! I think it brings a lot of really interesting ideas to the mix despite wearing its influence on its sleeve.
1) The basic classes split into four promote options at level 10 and another four at level 30, so there’s a huge amount of options. For example, cleric, your basic healer, promotes into Guardian (mounted healer, heals units over time, with heavy armour, can really take a punch). Also Inquisitor, which gives them heavy armour and high magic defence- both of these can hold their own healing your front line units. Can also promote to Priest, giving them higher healing ability and being able to do it at range if you want them to maximise that but keep them at the rear. Finally, they can promote to a magic combat class that both heals and casts attack magic.
‘Warrior’ promotes to the usual frontline classes. Knight (infantry with higher attack power), barbarian (infantry trading defence for attack), defender (infantry trading attack for defence) and dragoon, but the latter is really interesting in that it does more damage depending on how far you move. It’s advanced promotion also turns you into a dragon knight with fire magic options!
Archers have cool promotion options- they can turn into a ‘ranger’, where they wield two swords but ignore weight penalties, making them really fast and dual attacking. Comes with a reference to Aragorn, these are really strong melee units. They can also promote to ‘witch hunter’, which is a mounted archer that trades speed for a massive damage boost vs enemy magic users, which is really useful when unit HP pools are a little higher than FE and the magic users are generally the most dangerous enemy troops.
The most interesting set is ‘adept’, who are elemental martial artists of various spheres. They promote into classes using fire magic, or high speed with a spear as a ‘wind’ class etc.
2) While FE units being able to shove/rescue/pull back each other has been a thing for a very long time, here every class has a non-combat ability, meaning they have functionality even if they can’t hurt the enemy.
Adepts can ‘chain’ the enemy, stopping them moving. Rogues can ‘disarm’ the enemy, removing their weapons attack power, which is really useful when their knives can’t touch a heavy armoured unit. Warriors can still ‘shove’ your troops 1 space, but wizards can teleport troops from one side of them to the other, allowing you to pull troops out of danger or get them to where they need to be. Archers can grant +1 move to their allies instead of attacking. All of this works to mean that units that aren’t attacking each turn aren’t falling behind in xp as you can often find something for them to do.
3) instead of a weapon triangle, each unit’s vulnerabilities is defined by its armour type. Each unit has four weapons you can freely select from, prioritising speed, accuracy, strength or criticals, that you upgrade seperately. Helpfully the game flags up a tiny red or green arrow when you select a unit, so you can see which enemy troops they will be most effective against. This is so useful.
The base conversations between units are really good and add nuance to a huge cast. Some of them are lighthearted tropey stuff, but lots are really thoughtful, particularly amongst the more veteran characters and adepts that join your cause. Which I found really disarming and heartwarming in places, they are worth reading, the friendships and romances develop gradually and carefully. Great stuff.
4) The scenarios. There’s a mix of ‘reach x point’, ‘interact with multiple y points’, ‘kill z’, and ‘wipe out the enemy’. There are a lot of really interesting ones here- one in particular changed halfway through that I really enjoyed.
The story is by-the-numbers FE- warfare between nations with some dark magic behind it is no spoiler here. It’s nothing special but does the job.
A couple of criticisms-
1) the character design is all over the place. Even units from the same background don’t really hang together as a cohesive force, but then it’s not like FE’s do either. The difference though is that this translates to the battlefield. Your units are blue, enemy are red (just like FE), but your leader’s main art is red. Also, while the sprite’s change to represent promoted classes, character art doesn’t. So I’ve got a ranger who has never loosed an arrow (they promoted to twin-swords immediately on joining), but his character art still has him with a quiver. Same for several others, holding weapons and wearing armour they haven’t used. There’s also the usual JRPG stuff of exposed thighs, cleavage and boobplate on veteran female knights, which is just ridiculous. However, all that crap at least is not embedded in the dialogue and story etc (and crucially the rather sweet romances), it’s just the single character portraits.
2) Irving, the main character. In most of the FE games, there’s a reason people follow the leader. Often they are royalty on the run with a handful of their best people, so it makes sense that every new recruit noticed who is in charge. In this though, Irving is just a rookie from a military school. By a few missions in, even his senior officers and officials from every organisation on the planet are deferring to him, seemingly for no good reason other than he hasn’t said anything offensive and is the generic anime teen with a sword. He’s amongst the least qualified people in the group for anything, knows nothing about what’s going on, is surrounded by more capable commanders, seers, leaders of organisations dedicated to opposing their enemy, veteran troops and royalty, and has very little stake in it compared to half a dozen of the others. But somehow is the centre of everything for reasons that aren’t really explained other than ‘you’re the player stand-in, therefore you must have leadership skills and everyone likes you’. JRPG cliche, but then it’s not like the story is a strength of the game here, the mechanics are.