Drums Of War is a Fire Emblem romhack Roxelana, Calista and their band of soliders as they are pulled between toxic powers and try to just live in the complex landscape that is being at war. This game doesn't have as many of the elaborate features of some other rom hacks but it does have a lot going on for it with a refined fire emblem formula.
Drums Of War is a hard game, a little too hard even for me who has played FE since the first game released but this is a problem across Fire Emblem romhacks. The base level is kinda made for people who play these games on their hardest difficulty and find that too easy so they look for ways to make that harder. They aren't typically made that hard but they are what that kind of player thinks is a fair challenge which can lead to a struggle to play. This game does had a nice feature where you can rewind to the start of a turn rather than the last action which is great but ultimately I suggest if you are like me to use save states, they will take you further. Eventually I hit a stride with the game, I had enough units I liked and learned to save state hard enough where I felt like I as going through maps at a good pace and the too hard turned into fine for me. It may just be a bit of a bump in the road until you hit I'd say about act 2 of the game.
Note since I wrote this review an easy mode has been added you can play, I haven't tested it but if your looking for an easier time but like the sound of the game there is an option.
Despite the difficulty the gameplay does add a lot of interesting little things to the classic GBA Fire Emblem formula without ever radically changing it from what you might have expected as a follow up to Fire Emblem Sacred Stones. After clearing most maps until fairly late game your given a chance to recruit a character or ransom them for money. Some people want to be sent back home, some want to join the army, some are gonna be thrown into a cell, you get a diverse set of situations to make a moral call but also a gameplay call. Would this unit do something for you that the money wouldn't, what's more valuable, do you like the character more than you like the money? This little tweak to recruitment makes it where maps are extra exciting when you see a boss you like the look of cuz your gonna get access to that character most likely.
It makes other tweaks that your millage may vary on, classes are remixed to have different weapon lay outs, archers got a massive expansion to their stats and an additional range for non mounted archers. This makes Archers probably the best class in the game, the whole game archers are this extremally annoying threat, I hated it, I hated dealing with enemy archers but the maps were at least designed clearly with these buffs and changes considered even if I think the game was way too hard on flying units for the FE community's perceived sin of them being too good.
Narratively, this game presents a complicated political war situation and for a long time I wasn't sure what the game wanted to say or where it was going with the politics but ultimately it landed in a fairly decent place. You end up leaving behind all the toxic powers your tossed between and leading your own front for your own ideals. Roxelana and Calista don't have wild ambition but even in earlier parts of the game it's clear that above everything the priority is to the lives of the people Roxelana has sworn herself to lead.
What the game does more impressively is have extremally captivating leading women and a lesbian romance at it's center. These sapphics are constantly flirting but Roxelana is living with the death of a previous girlfriend and so she pushes the romance away. We have other side sapphics including a blonde swords woman who falls for Roxelana as well and is as ride of die as Calista. This games take on queerness doesn't present us in a world with no homophobia or heteronormativity, no this shitty world full of shitty leaders of course is full of terrible bigots. However, it doesn't linger on it, like a real queers life they deal with it if it comes up which it rarely does because straight people mostly aren't very smart anyway.
The approach to characters and this slow burn romance are really what kept me hooked even if it was using a fairly limited support system where you can get unlimited B ranks with characters from a characters extremally small support pools and one A rank. I wanted to see what sweet little things were hidden in the games surprisingly solid writing. It was a captivating war story, it didn't present an anarchist utopia or how to build that but it did present hope for a better future by rejecting the idea of serving the lesser of two evils and fighting a hard fight even if it is so much harder then standing by a powerful persons side. This game is really fun and special and I think if you like hard SRPGs or just think the story or characters sound interesting you should check it out.
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