Joyeuses Pâques and all that. When not otherwise occupied with entertaining and nominal displays of reverence (not in this case at the same time, though that’s always fun) my weekend has been taken up with the Project Exile patch for FE5. I’ve gotten up through Chapter 14, because even with Action Replay this game still manages to be a pain to play. Worth noting is that I’ve only encountered one or two notable glitches. The Crusader scrolls are the buggiest parts of the patch, and more than once the game crashed on me when I tried to read the tooltip on one or when the cursor landed on one in the armory. The armory itself has bits of glitchy text fairly often, although nothing else that breaks the game. So far I’ve encountered only one instance of the text wrapping incorrectly as the older patch did rather often, in a cutscene in Chapter 14. It’s still vastly more playable than the older translation. Thoughts on the script:
Like Project Naga, this patch uses a smaller font than the old patch which is much more pleasing to the eye and allows for more text to appear at once. The menus also look smoother as a result.
Most of the character names are faithful to recent localized sources like Heroes, but there’s a few that have been changed that I actually kind of like and hope IS takes a look at again for a remake. Stuff like Safy -> Safiya (sounds like Sophia/”wisdom” while also retaining the similarity to “sapphic” that they really should do something with), Carrion -> Callion, Perne -> Pan, Machyua -> Macha (still not a great name, but at least I have an idea of how to pronounce it), and Cain and Alva -> Kane and Alba (it would not surprise me at all to learn that these guys’ Japanese names are identical to those of the Archanea Christmas knights - and localizers have been doing their best to obscure that bit of laziness ever since)
I never liked the name Manster District, as a district is to me a municipal division and not an entity large and autonomous enough to be its own country. The translator goes for Northern Thracia instead which better expresses the point that both sides think of the peninsula as one entity divided over an extended family squabble over who gets to rule it. The preeminence of Manster is however preserved in a somewhat odd way, when August(us) refers to it as Leif’s “native Manster” while talking (mostly) about the city during the escape sequence. His point is that the Empire is conducting child hunts in the territories they control, including all of Northern Thracia, but it’s odd since Leif is everywhere else identified heavily as a scion of Leonster specifically.
Kempf no longer makes memes, and even more miraculously his battle tactic that gives Chapter 11x its title gets a rename that actually means something. No more Murder Hollace!
The sexual and romantic ambiguities come largely intact. Nanna’s is referred to early on as both Finn’s daughter and his “ward,” a term one normally does not use for biological children. Homer might swing both ways, but nothing is done with Dagdar and Marty and in fact the script implies that Dagdar has the hots for Eyvel earlier on. There’s less of an implied threat of rape in Tina’s introduction, or at least it’s obvious that the only person is implying rape at all is Saf(i)y(a) leaping to conclusions. Finn remains as impossible to parse as ever.
Bit characters like Ronan and Hicks and even generic house NPCs get some much-needed flavor added, in the form of colloquial dialects and slightly stronger character moments. Other highlights include Fergus talking down to Leif and Karin as children (he is a few years older than the rest of the Gen 2 cohort) and Tina commenting on Salem’s dumb hair.
If the script is indeed unfinished I guess I’ll find out in a few chapters, but so far this is really an exemplary work...pasted onto a nightmare of a game.
