Feda: The Emblem of Justice (1994)

Beat with highest law reputation; Fedein. Looks like an angel. I did not know about reputation when I started and decided to beat each mission with optimal tactics. The 1st mission was to flee but I killed everyone and became phantom. After that completing the mission objectives was tactically superior and my reputation went up to Fedein. I assumed it was a simple matter of winning by completing objectives vs killing everything. So I started killing as many as possible to farm as much xp and money as possible, only leaving 1 or 2 alive and winning by completing objectives. This worked well for a while until my reputation started to drop. I completely missed an optional path that skips a few battles and ended up having to slaughter them all. My reputation kept dropping until it was at neutral. The law characters were complaining and I was worried I would drop into chaos and lose them. I was using most of them in my battle team and they were much higher level than the neutrals I was not using. I started minimizing kills, especially for weaker enemies that would not give much xp anyway and my reputation slowly climbed back up. In some missions I had to kill quite a few enemies to avoid my own losses, and my reputation dropped to valkyrie a couple times.

The early game was ridiculously easy. I never had to use healing items or upgrade weapons. Brian and Ain used the starting short swords for most of the game until I found some free upgrades. I bought the middle bow for the archer, which was worth it because it increased her range. In late game I bought the best bow and gun, the best spear for Shane (which had as much range as the bows and guns and for some reason only he could use) and blew the rest on blade resist armor for 8 out of 10 characters. I had enough money before the final boss to buy some upgrades but pressed to the end instead because I would have had to fight a generic battle and risk dropping to valkyrie again. Game got much harder with time. Brian, Ain and Shisima were the front line tanks using their special attacks to burn down enemies. Ain especially was such a tank that in the final battle I sent him by himself to offtank several enemies. I had 2 centaur cavalry and 3 fliers that had great mobility but not great damage. They were good for killing generic enemies but not vs bosses. Raven and Dora hung back with ranged attacks and I had to prevent enemies from being able to attack them. Raven got the killing blow on the final boss with his special that did more than twice the damage of Brian and Shisima, while everyone without specials was hitting for pitiful damage. I used the mage and a healer until replacing them with more offensive characters.

The translation was terrible but I could understand the story. Might want to see if there is a better English patch if I play again. The rom also ran terribly on my PSP; I had to load state every few minutes or the emulator would slow to a crawl. Overall very good game. I especially liked the way the turns switch back and forth between you and the enemies between each move, which is a nice change of pace from the usual move everyone in one go of Fire Emblem.

7.8/10

End stats:

Brian: level 55 with executor and blade resist.

Ain: level 54 with doom edge and blade resist.

Shishima: level 54 with calamity edge and blade resist.

Shane: level 53 with best spear and blade resist.

Raven: level 52 with best gun.

Jeda: level 51 with trident and blade resist.

Meraneus: level 50 with trident and blade resist.

Chris: level 50 with chrome lance, javelin and blade resist.

Jenny: level 49 with chrome lance, javelin and blade resist.

Dora: level 49 with best bow.

Not in party: El 44, Aria 40, Ellis 35, Lois 35, Tobikage 38, Arby 34, Dan 36, Richard 42, Shim 38, Conolly 40.