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Fire Emblem 4 has been one of my favorite games, a game I have sunk hundreds of hours into - three full playthroughs, plus a full playthrough of Binary. It is a deep game - deep story, deep mechanics, deep strategy, but yadda yadda, you should already know that.

Team Binary, in their first effort, took that deep gameplay and refined it. Branching promotions, changes to combat mechanics, new items, different inheritance patterns, they took a deep game and gave it a new layer of complexity.

In Genealogy of Tordo, they once again put new twists on the old Genealogy formulas. The result is the fine-tuned strategy RPG gameplay you've probably come to expect from these guys. There's one more twist to Genealogy of Tordo: the story is also swapped.

Now, I went into Genealogy of Tordo expecting something completely different. In reality, it's mostly a game of musical chairs. You're moving through the same maps in the same sequence, it's just the Beige Ritter have been replaced by Swordsmasters under Shannan's command. The result is slightly-tweaked gameplay, mostly owing to your new unique units (you start the prologue with a Dragon Rider, and you get a Dancer in chapter 1. These two things definitely alter gameplay). Overall, though, the changes are not especially drastic.

There are some story changes, as far as I can tell. Unfortunately, this game is exclusively in Japanese, except for a menu translation patch you can find on this site. It's a shame, they had a lot more cutscenes, and it really seemed like there was more story under the hood that I wasn't really able to parse.

This hack has a lot of characters and sprites from FE5, so familiarity with that game might help you considerably in playing this one.

I will say this - for all the credit that I give to Binary and this hack for creating a deep and refined gameplay experience, I will complain about the abrupt difficulty spikes. In vanilla FE4, I've been able to get all As - once you know how to do it, it's not that hard. Only the three Pegasus Sisters from the final chapter are really tough, everything else is very doable. Meanwhile, in Binary and this hack, it feels like I need to do a 3-hour save-state party at the beginning of each chapter to clear the arenas and maximize growths, and even then I get stomped by certain bosses. This hack had the first time I just gave up on fighting enemies - the 12 Dreadlords have been replaced with the 12 Crusaders, each with maxed stats, and each bearing their own Holy Weapon. At that point, I basically threw three of my units to the wolves, snuck behind them, and killed Julia (the final boss), one of the first times I've ever done that in any version of FE4.

This is definitely made for people with a deep appreciation for FE4 and FE5. It's a game by the fans for the fans.