It cannot be understated how much of an improvement this game is over its predecessor. I feel like this game became the west’s introduction to Fire Emblem and its standard for a reason—everything that made FE6 feel rough around the edges post-Kaga has been refined here to make a quintessential game for the series. If you’ve already played it, I really have to recommend playing FE6 and then replaying this to see just how much it improves.

The changes are all little, and a lot of them are very technical aspects of the mechanics (which you can see in a great breakdown here: https://www.reddit.com/r/fireemblem/comments/cck83m/sequel_talk_mechanical_changes_from_fe6_to_fe7/), but when they all come together they make the game that much better. There are maps with varied objectives; no more needing to seize every map. Classes get reworked or buffed to make them more usable in the long-term (stinks that assassins can’t steal once they’re promoted from thieves tough). Gaiden chapters are no longer gimmicky maps that you need to do to get the game’s true ending, feeling more like worthwhile but non-necessary rewards for going out of your way in the main story. And it’s not just mechanics that got changed, the storytelling of the game was tremendously improved. You don’t get thrown 10 characters in the span of 2-3 chapters, so you actually get to spend some time with the ones you’re fed bit by bit. Side characters have interesting arcs beyond their introduction and maybe a recruitment conversation. Oswin, Matthew, Pent & Louise, Hawkeye, Legault, Jaffar & Nino, you’re not even guaranteed to get or keep all of them, but when you do they become a much more active part of the story than almost any character from FE6 did. Same goes for the enemies; I think the Black Fang and Nergal are some of the most dynamic antagonists in the series.

I don’t mean to just trash FE6 here, because I still do like it. I just think that if you know how much about it this game improved, it really makes FE7 seem like that much more of an achievement. It’s super worthy of praise on its own, though, and I think it’s worth it for anyone remotely interested in Fire Emblem to play.

Extra notes: I have to put this stuff somewhere it really just amazes me. They had to at least have planned that all the absent parents from FE6 were gonna be in this game because they feel so naturally integrated in it. As opposed to just cameos they’re real characters who were awkwardly absent from the last game. Really like how all-around, this game scales back the scope of things in Elibe, too—we got a lost about Bern and Eturia and Ilia in the last game, so focusing on Lycia for the most part with some characters from all around the continent really helps the worldbuilding more than jumping around everywhere in the previous game did. Even if we don’t go everywhere on Elibe, the people who come from all around it bring the places they live to life (this is true for Sacae especially, and it really makes the tragedy of the nation in the previous game feel so much more powerful).

And here we are. It has been a long read to make it to the end of the Sci;Fi Adventure series for me (well mostly, I still plan to play My Darlings Embrace at some point, but the main line ones have all been crushed now).

A series with so many highs, and some very low lows, and it feels fitting that this game kind of encompasses that perfectly. What a wild adventure though, and the highs in this game are just so damn high that I can't help but love it.

This game is insanely paced. When you look at a game like Robotics;Note which is basically all character development until chapter 8 or 9, and then compare it to this, which is so so plot heavy, and story based, and basically starts in chapter 1 and never lets its foot off the gas, it's a pretty giant difference. And in fact that is my biggest complaint about this game. I loved every single character in this game. Pollion and Momo are probably both my second favorite pair of this entire franchise, but GOD I just wish there was a few extra hours of character building in this. My total clocktime for this game was around 15 hours (fast reader) and by far the quickest in the sci;fi adv series for me. Most of these games normally took 25-30 hours for me.

Still though, the actual plot is great, and what this game hints at, and sort of does for the entire universe is nothing short of insane. I know a lot of people had said you're fine to play this without any of the others one, and at a base level, sure? But having played through all of them (but ESPECIALLY Steins;Gate and Steins;Gate 0) made this so so much more rewarding for me.

This game is meta, it's awesome, I just wish it had a little more room to breathe at times, but it's still an adventure worth taking.

Hack into god!!!

So, there's a bunch to say about this game. First of all, everybody should play it as it is not praised enough overall, for a VN released a decade ago and being remastered and bundled-in, in more recent years almost nobody has seem to have played it. I certainly haven't, tried it once because it came on a Nintendo DS ROM pack I downloaded off the internet, and didn't really stick with it.

Now, getting to the present; Holy shit. This is certainly one of the best written mystery, thriller-esque closed doors type of scenario I've experienced in a long while. Everything is so damn good, ranging from the escape rooms themselves which set off a good test for your skills on puzzle-solving in general, to the characters having something to attribute in general and being so well written, to the music being pure brain-food puzzle-solving-techno, to the setting being a sci-fi gloomy atmosphere, reminiscent of Children of Men, to the story being one giant mystery with layers and layers to unfold one after another, it even tickles the 4th wall a little bit.

It's just absolutely great. Everybody should play this if they're interested in any sort of "killing game" type of novel, It's safe to say that this one VN is better written than a lot of them.