This game is probably my favorite FE hack, and it serves as both a great demonstration of Thracia mechanics done right and a fantastic game in its own right.

You can be rotating like 25 units by the endgame, and still that’s barely over a THIRD of the total cast size (this game has 73 units, and they’re all pretty unique thanks to personal skills, greater emphasis on base weapon ranks, and a couple of fun gimmicks, like a Ballistician, a Manakete, a Bard who can only use his 5 personal weapons, and a Sniper who’s treated as a flier.)

ff8 is a game that is very hard for me to compile my thoughts on, but i thought i might as well try now that it's been a bit since i've finished it

i can get 8 not being somebody's favorite final fantasy, but this is such a beautiful piece of art to me that it feels like most of the game's bad reputation is just a mass gaslighting campaign perpetuated by early 2000s gaming magazines and kept alive by people who are scared of earnest emotionality in their video games. not everything that happens in this game is necessarily logical and it does have its flaws—the main antagonist is good but far from the series strongest and the disc 2 twist, while not nearly as bad as anyone has ever made it out to be, is delivered a little bit clumsily—but i feel like that's in service of being such an emotionally resonant game that it can barely be seen as a downside. the story of squall and rinoa is so beautiful to me in a way that so few love stories between a man and a woman can be for me and there were multiple points where i started to tear up a bit just because of how much i loved my experience with 8's story and characters.
when it comes to ff8's gameplay the junction system is unironically one of the few times that the atb battle system has been even remotely enjoyable, and while it isn't as strong mechanically as materias from 7 and the tutorials conveying the system in game aren't the best, i think it's a bit sad how having to engage with the mechanics differently is enough to put people off to the game's combat. with just a little bit more time in the oven and an audience more willing to engage with change, the junction system would probably be one of the most celebrated battle systems in any square enix jrpg with dickriders at the level of smirk and press turn from smt, and maybe in general final fantasy 8 would be more celebrated for the amazing game that it deserves to be seen as.

also gunblades are raw as shit and are by far the coolest weapon that any square enix game has ever had don't @ me

Mandatory to listen to this on loop while reading

The Last Promise is one of those rare fangames with such a legacy to it that it might as well be counted amongst the official series. To the casual observer, that legacy is just the scene where the protagonist gives an edgy speech about handling the weight of death and kills a bunch of knights while a Sonic 06 midi plays. But to those too far gone into FE communities, it's seen as an technically impressive feat that, especially for a time where FE rom hacking was in its infancy and even more especially when you realize it was made primarily by a teenager. It is not an understatement to say that the current FE hacking scene owes its existence to this game. Playing it and checking off other FE games you unironically prefer it to in the same way a military sniper checks down their kids is a time honored rite of passage. I've seen a fair bit of people echo the sentiment that it's better than all three of the official GBA FEs and while Sacred Stones has too much personal significance for me to fully agree, I absolutely can see where these people are coming from.
Mechanically, it doesn't do anything particularly unique among other FEs. It's just a really good example of the enemy phase focused gameplay associated with 7-9. At its best, you get creative maps like Chapter 12, a Thracia style escape map balanced around having limited resources at your disposal, Chapter 5x, the rare defense map that's actually good, and Chapter 27, a map with gimmick so good that Engage may or may not have ripped it off a decade later. At its worst, you have to deal with a couple long and boring maps which are nowhere near the worst ones official FE games have churned out.
Narratively, it's a mix of genuinely cool stuff and stuff that's ironically funny. Whereas most pre-3DS FE games try to use prose that fits a medieval setting, The Last Promise is written with a bluntness that feels "online" for lack of a better term. This results in a lot of scenes taking on a more comedic tone than intended: the infamous Sonic 06 midi speech, the earlygame chapter where Siegfried gets mad at some random village for not having a milita in a way that can only be described as the former being portrayed as the Chad and the latter being portrayed as the Soyjak, and a major boss who's so edgy that his description reads "Plagued by a hatred for anything that lives, he is 'the Blood Reaper.'" But still, there is a fair bit of genuinely compelling stuff here. The prevailing dynamic between Siegfried and Kelik both being bound to a promise they made because of the death of a respective loved one but the former being an idealist who carelessly rushes into battle and the latter being more aware of his material conditions and working within them, at the cost of having a hard time trusting most people. Both learn and grow from each other as seen in the opening of Chapter 23 and a subsequent optional talk conversation where they get genuine and emotionally vulnerable with each other and their dynamic with each other culminates in an awesome climax. It's nothing groundbreaking but it's impressive for a teenager and I'd put it above most FE stories (low bar admittedly).
However, what really makes Last Promise stand out as special isn't so much any individual aspect mechanically or narratively but rather the end of an era it represents. The patch completing the main story was released on August 17th, 2012, just four months after the Japanese release of Awakening and six months before the Awakening release of said game. The Last Promise feels like a time capsule of when FE was seen as this niche thing that you played for the mystique of a game where characters can actually die and not a mainstream seller of millions of copies that you played because you wanted to date and/or fuck the characters. There's so much little things that give me anemoia for FE communities I was never in, be it Siegfried's personal weapon Nothung harkening back to a time where calling a unit a "mage-killer" wouldn't cause you to get laughed out of the discussion, the character portraits being collaborative effort by multiple FE forum users, and the use of bit crushed OSTs of more niche RPGs like Valkyrie Profile and Ys hammering that this was when most people saw FE as just like those games. Playing The Last Promise a decade after its release gave me a feeling of discovery that I haven't had with new FE games for a long time.
Is The Last Promise a masterpiece either mechanically or artistically that's worthy of a 9/10? Probably not but review scores are bullshit and shouldn't be seen as anything grander than "I like this game this much." The Last Promise just has an indescribable aura to it that transcends traditional quality. Maybe being an FE fan for this long has done too much damage to me mentally and these paragraphs seem incomprehensible to normal human beings idfk.