In a fantasy world, a soldier from the imperial forces deserts after witnessing the massacre of innocent villagers by his unit. He is sent to jail to be executed, but manages to escape with the help of two former unit colleagues. The group flees through the country-side, while being pursued by imperial soldiers. On their way, they join forces with other rebels to fight against the enemy, while uncovering hidden secrets and evil plots by the Empire. Feda: Emblem of Justice is a strategy RPG similar to Shining Force and other titles with preset characters and linear gameplay. The player commands a party of varying size and characters with diverse skills. In the main battle sections, the player and the CPU-controlled enemy take turns moving the troops and giving orders. A menu at the bottom of the screen shows all the possible actions, where soldiers can defend, move, attack, or use an inventory item on each turn. The range of their movements and weapons vary according to their nature. A crossbow character can shoot from the back, while most sword and knife users have to be adjacent to their targets. Magic offensive powers have different ranges as well, reaching enemies that are far away from the attacking character. Health points can be recovered by eating rations or by magic, where a healer can restore points to several characters at once. Each party member has separate health and magic points, as well as other statistics like defense and attack power. They receive experience points after slaying an enemy or casting a spell, and extra points at the end of the battle. Their skills increase after surpassing 100 points. The map screen shows the party and groups of enemies traveling through the landscape in turns. The menu has options for moving the group or camping. In the encampment, one of the characters around the fire pit saves the game, while another inside the tent provides system options to change the interface color, adjust sound volume and rename the party members. In some locations like temples, villages and towns, the party has to explore the place and talk to the citizens to move on to the next section. In later battles, the player has to make a moral choice about attacking mutated humans. At the end of each battle, the party is assigned a dark or light emblem, and certain party members choose to leave or stay in the group based on its alignment.
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FEDA, I believe, is one of those games that could have done well if it had been published in the USA. It is a strategy RPG with a lot of depth, and is probably most similar to the Shining Force series published by Sega. The game has some kickin’ graphics, but the music is kinda ho-hum, but I'm playing it on an emulator so it probably sounds totally cool on a real SNES. Anyway, give the game a try, I'm sure you'll totally love it. Unless you're Spinner 8. Then you'll try it and totally die a lot.
The game is a turn-based, grid sectioned RPG where you fight against the ruling government who have become corrupt as the main character refused to kill the innocent children and civilians who were minding their own business.
After escaping, you find yourself simply trying to get away from the army as they're hunting you down, but you also fight them off and end up with the military targeting the innocents, soon leading up to these wayward soldiers joining the resistance and actively fighting the empire.
All actions have an alignment to them and your medallion changes form depending on what other things you do such as what actions lead to more deaths, killing soldiers unnecessarily and also leading to that grinding punishing your alignment standing towards the more chaos route.
Beyond that though, a real pain is that it's not obvious as I didn't know about this until accidentally doing this and then there was a moment where I needed to take a route I was totally unaware of existing, but you were meant to do so and I got punished for not seeing this which made the game very frustrating and led to me putting this game on the metaphorical shelf for the moment and to return to it at a later date.
Gameplay + Stream
It's...an okay game. It suffers more than anything from just being cumbersome about everything it does. Some examples:
-- Text is SLOW and there's not really a way to speed it up unless you're just fast-forwarding on an emulator.
-- Some text prompts are bugged. When you first meet Eris, you're asked if you'll accompany her to the next area of the game and you're given the option to say NO, so you can resupply before you leave. If you say NO, you mention needing to resupply, she tells you that she understands, and as soon as the dialogue ends...it takes you back to the beginning of the dialogue exchange you just had again, forcing you to keep saying NO until you give up and say YES to move on without resupplying.
-- Enemy behavior is largely poor and skills are super-strong. AI will give you every reason to cut it down with very little resistance. I won the major boss fight at the end of Chapter 2 in two hits, and I didn't need the first hit. The boss waltzed right up to attack one of my slow-moving units after I moved him first, so I just brought the hero up as the last action for that turn, then when everyone re-cycled and became available again, I just moved the hero over next to him and used the special ability to do exactsies. Two potential healers nearby could do nothing about me one-shotting him and didn't even try to remedy the damage done by the hit that didn't matter.
-- The Law and Chaos emblem alignment system is a neat idea, since it rewards you with unique party members that will come hang with you if you're far enough in one direction or the other...except it's not always apparent as to where you stand with some characters. I got one early in Chapter 1 who just left after I cleared a mission by following the mission rules, but I was too CHAOTIC because I had been killing enemies up to that point and not escaping from battle -- something the game doesn't even tell you about. Then I got another character in Chapter 2 who left after the first fight he was involved in because I became too LAWFUL, even though I had no idea I was even close to that point because again, no warning.
-- To add to that, this means that upgrading character equipment is a risky venture because you don't always know who might just peace out on you. A few spell out their rules, but if you're not consulting a guide, good luck.
-- Equipment is really just weapons and healing items, but even this is convoluted, because it doesn't feel obvious as to whether there are equipment limitations or not, and it's never clearly stated that in order to equip something, you simply need to buy it and you automatically can select it in battle because NOTHING IS ACTUALLY EQUIPPED. If you're like me and spending extra turns camping out so you can use the storage system to check stuff, overworld enemies could come up on you simply because of how pointless the equipment system is along with storage at campsites.
-- The alternating turn system for characters and enemies seems interesting at first, but it becomes apparent quickly that since you can control your order, you're never really in any danger if you think about tactics because even when there's less enemies and the smaller number start getting multiple actions, there's gap periods where they still have to wait on enough of your units to go, so you can always stack formations in your favor to avoid leaving a healer or archer open to major damage.
I didn't make major headway into the game because it just felt like a slog to deal with the first several chapters, but I'll also say that IF the translation is remotely accurate, the dialogue is kind of a mess and feels like something out of some really bad anime. Some of the exchanges are just beyond goofy and apparently, every dude is a horndog, I guess. I won't fault the game for that since I don't know what the original dialogue was like, but the translation definitely didn't do me any favors for enjoying it.
I doubt I'll ever go back to this again, but it was nice to spend a little time with a different attempt at a Shining Force-type game, even if it never seemed to live up to that caliber of quality.