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Heaven's Bloom is a surprisingly obscure hack for its sheer quality, though I believe this is because the developer released the hack out of the blue with little fanfare.

However, everything this hack sets out to accomplish, it does masterfully, and that's why I wish to outline why this hack is worth your time.

• Story-

Hacks with a satisfying story are hard to find, and Heaven's Bloom creates a grim but not overly edgy story that supercedes anything Sacred Stones offers. Its one of the few hacks with a fully functional support system and A rank supports. For the first time I wished Sacred Stones didn't have a 5 support limit because the dialogue was so intriguing in terms of both characterisation and lore. I found myself invested more for the lore behind the characters than the overarching plot, not that it is anything bad. The story of Heaven's Bloom, while short, is better than most official titles.

• Gameplay-

Heaven's Bloom offers a very different experience from the average Fire Emblem. RNG has a much reduced impact, with both your characters and enemies having high hit chance and damage. That means while you can expect characters to eliminate enemies, you cannot rely on RNG to survive attacks. This means the game plays out similar to Into The Breach where you must plan out all moves exceedingly carefully because you must expect enemy attacks to land.

The map design is what really makes this hack stand out. Almost all maps are non linear, many with small side objectives like chests and droppables awarding risk. The action starts fast and hits hard and no section is tedious. Shops offer a variety of equipment, including offensive staves, and enemy formation is carefully placed.

Another excelling point is how the developer always offers choice in gameplay to the player. Offensive and defensive staves and plentiful, and enemies drop a variety of weapons, but it never feels like too many. Gold is evenly distributed to allow the players the stock up on what the need. Even the warp staff is available for truly desperate times.

Heaven's Bloom has the interesting gimmick of all characters being deployable. The total deplorable characters max out at around 16 near the endgame, but it never feels tedious because of how important each character is. The skills system give each unit a vital niche. Felix the armour knight has rally defence, Fordra dies in two hits but is the best stave user and Keena is the only reliable dodge tank. No one on the party feels unneeded. On the other hand, certain enemy types have skills unique to classes to mix up the gameplay.

The last thing to address is the difficulty. I say this now, most players will have no chance on hard mode. Hard mode gives all units (you and enemy) more hit and makes certain objectives harder, and is ruthless to any mistake. However it is never unfair, there are no stat inflated enemies and very little is left to luck. If one wishes to tackle it, I recommend full abuse of staves and enemy AI.

• Conclusion-

Heaven's Bloom is one of few hacks competent in both story and gameplay, and I encourage any experienced fore emblem player to play it.

Heaven's Bloom is a hack that just showed up on Serenes Forest one day. It was already done, out of the box. The hack is a fairly recent hack, having been released in 2018, using FEBuilder as its tool of choice. I will note that I haven't finished the hack, and that's because I don't think it's a very good hack.

The hack itself focuses on the protagonist, Cassius, as he goes searching for a magical tome to cure his sister's illness. Along the way, some bad guys are causing a problem in the Kingdom of Adestria, where the hack is set. (Any resemblance to Three Houses is completely coincidental, it wasn't announced yet.) Society is split between the people with magical blood, who rule, and the normal humans, who are mere slaves. I don't really remember much of the story, since it's been quite a while.

Gameplay is the most important part of a Fire Emblem hack. Unfortunately, the gameplay is hardly what can be considered fun. Like many new hacks, it takes advantage of Circleseverywhere's skill system. It does not put it to good use. Players and enemies get large assortments of skills, typically designed to be as annoying as humanly possible. To quote the author's perception of difficulty...

"Regarding difficulty, I honestly have no idea how hard or easy this game would be considered relative to other FE games. My perception is skewed after playtesting it so much and learning the optimal strats for everything."

In other words, it falls victim to "too easy for the author, too hard for everyone else". The first six chapters aren't too bad, but Chapter 7 is where things get annoying. My own playthrough was on hard mode, and it hadn't seemed too hard. This chapter changed that. The chapter is set in a city, with civilians running all around the place. Enemy civilians. To make matters worse, annoying enemy reinforcements spawn from behind forcing you to rush, right into more reinforcements from the front. Killing the civilians denies the player a recruitable character, so they must be kept alive, while they constantly block the road. I ended up stalling out all of the reinforcements before doing anything. I should note that the game is designed like Gaiden or FE4 in that all your units are expected to be used. You cannot afford to miss anybody.

Chapter 8 ended up being worse, with your army trapped in a mountain pass while flying units flanked them from all sides. I was forced to use a glitch in the skill system to savescum unit deaths and low percentage hits. Chapter 9 made me quit hard mode, with spiders running around with the Seal Speed skill, which reduces already low speed stats even lower and taking a very long time to wear off. Combined with high enemy density and an out-of-the-way recruitable unit, the chapter became unbearable and I gave up for the longest time. After downgrading to easy and finishing the chapter, I find chapter 10 is a desert map. That's where I'm currently located. In general, player units are fairly weak and enemy density is too high. I do not find it to be too fun, and I have a hunch that it was designed around save state usage.

The graphics can only be described as looking completely awful. The character portraits weren't drawn from scratched or spliced together from pre-existing GBA portraits. They were instead generated with a portrait generator tool. This tool is not designed for hack insertion, and results in ugly portraits with strange skin tones and with random transparent pixels scattered all over the place. They are not very visually appealing. While I understand making art can be difficult, they have the potential to detract from the experience.

Despite being a relatively modern hack, it is missing several quality of life hacks that I consider to be vital, including Danger Zone and the hold L to toggle animations on the fly hack. The health and safety screen is also not disabled, making resets that bit more annoying. All of these factors add up to the point that I would recommend avoiding Heaven's Bloom. If you really want to play it, play it on easy mode.