Fire Emblem Awakening Enhancement Hack is intended as both an authentic and faithful minor revision of Awakening, as well a meaningfully distinct and more engaging gameplay experience, that I would describe as an “unearthing” of the core design buried within the game’s established mechanics, maps, and balance. It’s like if Conquest had originally shipped a broken character called Super-Seth who effortlessly destroys everything and basically overrides all decision making in a run, meaning that game with him removed would have far more thoughtful design and balance that gets overlooked under the weight of his presence.
Every change that was made here was either specifically targeted to showcase facets of the game’s design that get overwritten by these mechanical imbalances or design limitations, or to unintrusively buff a few otherwise unviable options just to make them more fun to play around with without radically shifting unit playstyles/identities and intruding on the established meta. Everything that’s good in vanilla Awakening will still be good here, just with most of the weird gameplay annoyances removed. The game has been playtesting incredibly well and I’m very proud of how these changes work out in practice.
The difficulty curve has been massively improved and the game will actually gradually get harder over time rather than easier, despite no alterations to EXP scaling or direct changes to any of the maps except for Endgame. This is despite explicitly aiming to never place my hand on the scale and tweak the game’s difficulty progression by hand, this improved game pace revealed itself completely naturally as just a consequence of couple of these rebalancing changes. Character and class diveristy feels significantly more well-rounded. Mileage will vary on this opinion, but I think even the map design plays significantly better when you’re actually forced to thoughtfully engage with the threat of every enemy layout rather than just being able to skip over them with invalidating mechanics.
The goal of “unearthing” the fundamentals behind the game’s design is one that I feel was met incredibly successfully. Hard+ does a fantastic job of filling the difficulty gap and allowing a more accessible means of experiencing the game’s core intended challenge in its map and unit design that was previously impossible from the limitations of the Hard and Lunatic gap. Taking Nosferatu and Sol out of the game removes the player’s ability to scale sustain healing off of the number of enemies fought, preventing units from effortlessly becoming statistically (or luck-resettingly) invincible and forcing players to engage with the map layouts more, improving their design and fixing the difficulty curve notoriously scaling downwards instead of upwards.
Robin’s nerf turns them into a unique stat specialist rather than do-anything generalist, with the capacity to overrun and invalidate the whole game far more reduced than low-investment support builds. Now when Veteran overlevels them, they’ll still have much closer stats to their teammates, letting them progress in combat potential at approximately the same rate guilt-free. The changes to Endgame facilitates far more diverse army building options as the pressure to create a one-turn Grima kill combo that can end the game before ambush spawns destroy you no longer hangs over a run’s investment prospects, allowing far more diverse options for full-game planning. The game is very much still not a perfect experience or anything.
But only a few changes fixed lot more flaws are fixed than I expected, and it’s a lot more fun while maintaining most of the unique engaging draws of vanilla Awakening. Iconic powerful mechanics such as Galeforce, Pair Up, and Rescue remain completely unchanged, and they are far more balanced and enjoyable to fully leverage against the powerful threats of the higher difficulty enemies in this environment, as they do a great job of promote diverse interactivity against powerful enemies rather than streamlined End Turn botting. The game’s identity as a customizable unit building sandbox really shines for giving a lot of powerful and distinct routing options with unique strengths to leverage into the lategame depending on how you build, rather than everything just being overrun by Sorcerer and Hero spam.
Overall, these changes feel incredibly cohesive with uncovering the surprisingly thoughtful hidden balance tucked away inside the game that was always already buried there. I really hope you’ll be interested in trying this out and be able to find some solid enjoyment out of what it offers.