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Cythereal posted:My armchair take, based on everything I've heard about the game's development, is that I think more important than time to polish is having a strong and coherent vision from the start. We know that Crimson Flower wasn't even added to this game until late in development, and supposedly a lot of the story that had been planned for Verdant Wind and Claude instead got shoved over to Crimson Flower and Edelgard, leaving Claude and his route feeling toothless and ancillary. Nah, Crimson Flower was always intended from the start, right there in the JP name of Fūkasetsugetsu / Wind, Flower, Snow, Moon. The interview everyone quotes for "Edelgard villain!" and "CF wasn't supposed to exist!" are taken wildly out of context. CF CG cutscenes are slotted between SS and AM on the CG cutscenes viewer with VW at the end. SS and VW got smooshed together as evident from insane things like the nonsensical Fort Merceus plan in SS or dialog being the exact same at certain points even when events/actions are wildly different. Edit: Also there was an update I should probably comment on that. Hey, this is where Dimitri admits he killed children. And also gets the vindication of killing one of the people who caused Duscur. So... Edit 2: Turncoat Felix and Annette are tagged as Old Faerghus Territories ala Gwendal but unlike Baron Dominic who's Faerghus Dukedom for some reason. McTimmy fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Jul 7, 2021 |
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Jul 7, 2021 00:27
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Isn't there some added dialogue if you kill Ignatz with Raphael in the 3 way battle. Or is that a different route.
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Jul 7, 2021 01:25
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While “getting revenge after you stop caring about it” is a bit of a cliche in this sort of story, I kinda appreciate that part of that is Dimitri turning around and finding the right woman to exact vengeance on immediately after he’s convinced to stop going after the wrong one. Cornelia in general is a weird note because it’s obvious she’s a slitherer, everything about her mechanically and her interactions with known Agarthans confirms it, but it’s never really acknowledged in the story despite her honestly having a bigger plot role than any of them except Thales (and arguably even him, the Tragedy of Duscur looms large over the entire story in a way only Edelgard being experimented on can match). Shoot we never even learn her real name. Although as I recall this map I basically ran bow knight Ashe as far as he could go, got into range of Dead Eye and either crit or put her into easy kill range of a flyer, forget which. But then that’s a fitting end for these lamers.
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Jul 7, 2021 01:44
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TheKirbs posted:Isn't there some added dialogue if you kill Ignatz with Raphael in the 3 way battle. Or is that a different route. There is dialogue for that scenario in CF, the only other time you can fight Ignatz as an enemy, but there is none in Gronder 2, no.
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Jul 7, 2021 01:49
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CmdrKing posted:Although as I recall this map I basically ran bow knight Ashe as far as he could go, got into range of Dead Eye and either crit or put her into easy kill range of a flyer, forget which. But then that’s a fitting end for these lamers. Literally exactly how I did this map on my first run, though I can't remember if it was Ashe or Bernadetta. It was probably Ashe, I think that might've even been the genesis of me calling him "my boy."
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Jul 7, 2021 01:58
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Rea posted:There is dialogue for that scenario in CF, the only other time you can fight Ignatz as an enemy, but there is none in Gronder 2, no. Yeah, a lot of "friends fighting friends" won't trigger on Gronder.
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Jul 7, 2021 02:00
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Gronder was a lot of wasted potential in terms of dialogue. Also trivia: it's the only map where you can face Raphael as an enemy in Part 2. Which makes him one of I think two non-DLC characters to not get any specific vs. dialogue as an enemy, not even against Byleth, and the other is Marianne, who doesn't show up at all.
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Jul 7, 2021 14:30
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 Update 111. (SSLP Test Poster version here.) I got distracted for a solid three hours after this update was finished, because I fell down the rabbit hole of checking obscure parts of this game's script.
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Jul 7, 2021 19:10
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I maintain that Dimitri/Marianne is my favorite support line in the entire game. I think it fits perfectly, especially if you get their A support right after Dimitri regains the ability to support in part two: Dimitri was a shoulder of strength to Marianne when she was wrestling with her trauma in part one, and now she returns the favor in part two. I find it touching that it's about Marianne's only support chain where the other person never tries to get her to lighten up - Dimitri knows that trauma and survivor's guild don't work like that, he just wants Marianne to understand that there are people around who care about her. Notably, she's the only person who isn't a Blue Lion who Dimitri can marry in the cast - Flayn joins the Lions on this route the moment she becomes an actual student, and Catherine notes that she was a member of the Blue Lion house when she was a student at Garreg Mach. I read that according to one of the game's writers, when they decided they didn't have the time and money to make everyone support with everyone, they decided that Dorothea never makes a move on the eminently available crown prince because even in part one, Dimitri scares her.  I also can't help but note that Marianne is an extremely astute choice of spouse for Dimitri politically, being the favored (if adopted) daughter of one of the Alliance's great lords, which makes an awful lot of sense from a diplomatic point of view. Dimitri has a number of paired endings that comment that he went on to marry an unnamed woman after the war's end, and I like to imagine that if you didn't recruit Marianne she's the one he goes on to wed.
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Jul 7, 2021 19:33
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The Gilbert support is the only time Dedue ever gets mad.
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Jul 7, 2021 19:44
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I am fully convinced that if someone managed to genuinely anger Mercedes, then they would absolutely deserve the divine punishment that's headed their way. She is just that nice of a person.
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Jul 7, 2021 21:09
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More exposition regarding Patricia is mostly given via the Dimitri Hapi support. To summarise her deal, at least as far as I remember -Anselma leaves the Empire around when the Insurrection happened, changing her name to Patricia. She does not take anyone with her, nor does she know Volkhard’s plan. -Definitely-a-Slytherin-now Cornelia introduces Patricia to Lambert and they get married in secret, but Patricia is effectively confined to the palace in order to keep it secret. -Cornelia manages and arranges the visits between Patricia and Lambert and doesn’t allow them any time to talk without her there. -Patricia finds out how Cornelia is treating Hapi and gets mad. -Cornelia reveals what Volkhardt did and presents it as if Lambert has been intentionally keeping this secret from Patricia all along in order to control her and keep her with him. -Patricia feels she’s put into such a situation where she has to choose between her families, and goes with her Imperial family, helping Cornelia organise the Tragedy in an attempt to escape Lambert. -Patricia disappears in the Tragedy, never to be seen again. Probably murdered by Slytherins before she ever got back to the Empire. Shinji117 fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Jul 7, 2021 |
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Jul 7, 2021 22:27
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How competent TWSITD are is directly proportionate to how on-screen they and their actions are.
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Jul 8, 2021 01:30
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Does the line about Ingrid practicing her makeup only show if you've done her Annette support?
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Jul 8, 2021 03:02
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ApplesandOranges posted:Does the line about Ingrid practicing her makeup only show if you've done her Annette support? Nope, it always shows up.
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Jul 8, 2021 03:18
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Those Who Slither are basically plot glue. Whenever you need someone to act evil to push the plot along, there they are. A holdover of the writing in basically every previous Fire Emblem. Three Houses gets closer to good writing than most Fire Emblems, but aspects of it still collapses due to this reliance.
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Jul 8, 2021 03:31
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To Three Houses's credit, at least it does some interesting things with the Agarthans, even if they are plot glue. There's a lot of open questions left about them in the base game, and the DLC raises even more, but they're all deliberately left unanswered—because ultimately the game's about the machinations of Edelgard, Dimitri, Claude, and Rhea, not the pasty mole people. I like the game dropping hints about the ancient history the Agarthans came from and what interactions they had with Sothis, but never really giving anything approaching an actual answer. Completely serious, by the way, I find all this stuff fun.
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Jul 8, 2021 04:24
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I love that Constance/Balthus support, shows something pretty cool. It's like even Sun Constance wants to chew Balthus out but realises she can't so she makes him follow her inside so she can switch over and start yelling at him. It's not something you'd expect her sunny side to do but it's nice to see the separate personalities come together in certain ways, I think it makes her more interesting.
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Jul 8, 2021 04:42
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Comstance is great. I love that of everything Edelgard endures, it’s an extremely extra ojou-sama who is a bridge too far
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Jul 8, 2021 05:29
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Has the greenhouse always had a titan arum in it? Not exactly the best place to play music or to watch a performance smell-wise.
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Jul 8, 2021 07:47
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Rea posted:To Three Houses's credit, at least it does some interesting things with the Agarthans, even if they are plot glue. There's a lot of open questions left about them in the base game, and the DLC raises even more, but they're all deliberately left unanswered—because ultimately the game's about the machinations of Edelgard, Dimitri, Claude, and Rhea, not the pasty mole people. I like the game dropping hints about the ancient history the Agarthans came from and what interactions they had with Sothis, but never really giving anything approaching an actual answer. I agree with you, it's why I think the Three Houses writing is probably the best of the Fire Emblems. Previous entries, the plot glue evil faction is the main opposing faction, front and center. So it's a lot less interesting. The fact that the Agarthans centrally oppose Rhea also makes the interaction more interesting. Largely because Rhea is not a squeaky clean does-no-wrong saint with sunshine shining out her rear end. Rhea does some really slimy poo poo what with trying to use someone's baby as an avatar to resurrect her mother. And her interactions with other less-evil factions such as the Western Church show how utterly ruthless she is. So any war I can think of between the two sounds like a really nasty piece of work. Though maybe this is kind of an extension of how I just really appreciate Rhea as a character.
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Jul 8, 2021 10:50
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My main problem with the Agarthans has to do with the existence of the CF route. In short, I feel that the Agarthans obfuscate the actions, motivations, and culpability of the Empire and Edelgard to a degree that's damaging to the story. How much is Edelgard's doing, how much is the doing of the Imperial machinery of state, how much is the Dubstep Illuminati, as a friend of mine likes to call them. Beyond that, to me they contribute to my feeling that 3H in general is unfocused. At least for my personal tastes, they either needed to be strictly a background thing with no real role in any of the story routes, or they needed to be front and center in all of the story routes as the main event. I think Claude especially is hurt by that lack of focus, to me at least he comes off as toothless with regards to his supposed plots and schemes (and indeed he fucks off at the end of his story completely, I feel that VW had a huge missed opportunity to not actually go to Almyra), and ultimately ancillary to the plot. Dimitri, Edelgard, and Rhea all have strong and compelling plots to me, and I can see why all three of them genuinely think they're the hero of the story despite all the harm they've done - yes, even Rhea. I think the tragic aspect of Rhea and her possible road to redemption were underplayed and poorly executed (you only really see the latter if you S-rank Rhea in Silver Snow, and that comes more or less out of nowhere), but I can see the bones of it.
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Jul 8, 2021 13:13
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I always assumed Dedue was having thoughts of a goddess of love in that Mercedes support, but I guess if that were it he'd probably have a blush portrait.
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Jul 8, 2021 13:34
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Keldulas posted:I agree with you, it's why I think the Three Houses writing is probably the best of the Fire Emblems. Previous entries, the plot glue evil faction is the main opposing faction, front and center. So it's a lot less interesting. Well there's Fates, but that's just a mess for entirely different reasons. Awakening also has the 'evil faction' flip between Plegia to Valm and then back to Plegia, but it's not very nuanced despite you being able to recruit characters from both nations.
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Jul 8, 2021 20:43
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Awakening has some really good ideas in it. The children of your characters traveling back in time to prevent the ruined future they come from is an engaging idea that lets them pull the eugenics game mechanics from FE4 that are fun to engage with. The actual writing is awful because the villains have absolutely no depth to them whatsoever and eat babies for fun, but I'm sort of forgiving of it with Fire Emblem trying to claw its way back into relevance. Awakening is the taser shot that got Fire Emblem more money from a wider market coming in. The writing here is at least inoffensive, though admittedly I may be forgiving of it due to the aforementioned time travel plot point. Lucina sells it really well. Fates completely squanders that opportunity of mainstream attention with some of the most horrendous writing I've ever seen. The gameplay wasn't actually bad at least for Conquest, even if it went full gimmick. None of the game mechanics remotely sync with the story, with grown children coming in 'just because'. I was a sucker who played Birthright first, and it completely burnt me out on Fates to the point I couldn't even finish Conquest, which was at least vaguely interesting. It was also way too expensive for how little care and attention it felt was being put into the game. So the feeling of being ripped off really didn't help.
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Jul 8, 2021 22:02
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On the subject of 3H mechanics, I learned today that there's a handy list of all the Mt-boosting pairings in the game. Notably, there's two pairings on the list that have no supports together - Bernie and Marianne, and Hilda and Dorothea. It has, however, lead me to an idea: armor knight Flayn. Yes, I'm serious. The theory goes like this: Flayn herself is a kind of iffy unit, both for white and black magic there's other people who do what she can but better, and she has a conspicuous Physic-shaped hole in a character who's supposed to be a healer by default. However, she also has linked attacks with Byleth. All of Byleth's other linked attack pairings are with characters you will want out in the field in their own right (except maybe Yuri, as this run has proven). Flayn, however, is probably not ever going to be necessary to your plans. Now, looking at adjutants, in my experience far and away the most valuable adjutant type is the guardian adjutant. This, however, is restricted to just a handful of classes: the armor knight line, the brawler line, and Edelgard's unique classes. As a woman, Flayn does not have brawler. Thus, Flayn the armor knight. Starting at +3 Hit and Avoid for Byleth, she goes up to becoming a +3 Might, +10 Hit and Avoid backpack who provides anywhere from 10% to 40% damage reduction on enemy follow-up attacks.
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Jul 8, 2021 22:38
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Awakening's gameplay bothers me more then its narrative in retrospect as it just eventually stops having any sort of map design at all. I don't like Fates but I find I'm much more willing to go back to Conquest then Awakening as Conquest actually makes me engage with the gameplay more then Awakening ever does outside of Maddening, which just isn't well designed at all in Awakening unlike later entries.
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Jul 8, 2021 22:45
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Cythereal posted:It has, however, lead me to an idea: armor knight Flayn. Yes, I'm serious. I used Flayn as a backpack for Byleth in both VW and AM endgames for exactly that reason, but it legit never occurred to me to class her into armored knight before doing that. That's an incredibly good idea... I will say that we will get to see the power of Mt-boosting defensive adjutants in AM endgame, since I had Dedue still classed into Grappler, and had him assigned as Dimitri's adjutant. It was incredibly powerful and, as far as I can remember, saved Dimitri from death at least once.
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Jul 8, 2021 22:53
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Awakening's story and setting are bad in the sense that most of it is just performative wallpaper, window dressing basically, made to gussy up the interlude between each rote classic FE chapter, scenario, and 1 dimensional character archetype that the devs wheel out. I doubt even they particularly cared about making anyone feel anything for like Virion's home country or the Samurai lady plot or how egregiously the game switches tracks between Plegia and Walmart and how often the vn time travel plot gets relegated to the background. Fates is a bad story told incompetently in a generic world but through sheer exhaustive 60+ chapter detail so through pure blunt trauma I eventually got the sense that there was some genuine earnest feelings in the terrible story that they came up with
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Jul 9, 2021 02:18
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I feel like that description does a pretty bad disservice to Awakening's story. Awakening is fundamentally not driven by story but by the characters and their interaction with each other as you recruit them. I've said it before and I'll say it again, people who dismiss Awakening's characters as one dimensional never got supports on those characters, because almost every one ends up being multifaceted in a way that reveals more about them and often more about the world through those same supports. The story acts in service to that exploration by providing a broad and compelling enough setting for all of those supports to breath easily. But additionally it does important things in its own right. Act 1 is particularly good in that regard, showing Plegia as a nation that will fundamentally support Gangrel because of the horrors Ylisse inflicted upon them until they are finally swayed by a genuine moment of contrition from their ancient enemy. Act 2 is weaker, but Walhart serves as a decent contrast to Chrom and Robin in his opposition to the fundamental forces they'll come to oppose in Act 3. And yeah, Grima is just a huge big bad, but goddamn if it's not an amazing figure to fight against. All of this is then supplemented by the best DLC that Fire Emblem has ever done with The Future Past giving more light to the fallen future and what the Future kids went through. But mostly, it's okay to have a game that's just positive and simple. Especially when so much of the cast is likable. I'd kill for more games to just go for that than attempting nuance and falling flat on their face as Corrin tries to explain why he genocided those foxes to get his dad to sit on a seat.
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Jul 9, 2021 02:37
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yeah no awakening has some of the best characters in the franchise, calling them one-dimensional is a disservice to characters like mia, ilyana, or shanna, who literally have one thing to say at any given time
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Jul 9, 2021 03:08
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God I'd settle for Corrin and Azura trying to at least mix up their anti-genocide tactics better rather than getting depressed that trying the same thing three or four times produced the same basic results. Then again I'm half convinced that Corrin is a deliberate anti-Sue, the game goes so hard on having them be incapable of getting a win.
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Jul 9, 2021 03:09
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I dunno, because of my playstyle I ruined Awakening by grinding everything out the second it let me because I could grind, therefore I must. What it did was allow me to see a ton of supports and I still think most of the gen1 cast is really shallow and tropey. I just don't like them. The children are way more interesting, but by the time they come in, they aren't important and would be replacing units you've spent tens of hours grinding with. I'll take Conquest's train wreck of a cast any day of the week to Awakenings because I at least found them an amusing train wreck. Though both games are way too straight and I probably hold that against them way too hard, especially Awakening.
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Jul 9, 2021 03:24
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On the one hand you have someone feeling sad about killing the foxes that were trying to murder them and on the other hand you have "hey brah your plan to immoladrown the entire enemy fleet worked perfectly! The threads of fate that bind our friendship are like totally unbreakable dude! High five broseph!!! *Chrom and Robin chest bump over the screams of tens of thousands of conscripted Valm soldiers*"
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Jul 9, 2021 03:28
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Eimi posted:I dunno, because of my playstyle I ruined Awakening by grinding everything out the second it let me because I could grind, therefore I must. What it did was allow me to see a ton of supports and I still think most of the gen1 cast is really shallow and tropey. I just don't like them. The children are way more interesting, but by the time they come in, they aren't important and would be replacing units you've spent tens of hours grinding with. I'll take Conquest's train wreck of a cast any day of the week to Awakenings because I at least found them an amusing train wreck. Though both games are way too straight and I probably hold that against them way too hard, especially Awakening. I feel like spending ages grinding everyone to being gods making the vastly superior child units be useless is probably not on the game! (Also there's DLC for that anyway) I think we'll just disagree on the cast being shallow out of their supports. There's certainly as much to Cordelia or Lon'Qu for example as there is to a lot of the cast in 3h and much more than the paper thin cast in Fates. Perfect Potato posted:On the one hand you have someone feeling sad about killing the foxes that were trying to murder them and on the other hand you have "hey brah your plan to immoladrown the entire enemy fleet worked perfectly! The threads of fate that bind our friendship are like totally unbreakable dude! High five broseph!!! *Chrom and Robin chest bump over the screams of tens of thousands of conscripted Valm soldiers*" I'm not sure I'm going to be rewarded for this. But I do think there's a moral distinction between destroying an invading armada in a defensive war and walking into a neutral territory in an offensive war and then killing everyone who attacks you for entering their territory. Bearing in mind of course that the offensive war makes no sense to begin with because this is fates.
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Jul 9, 2021 11:45
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Fates (conquest) has some of my favourite gameplay in the series but I don't think there's a single redeeming element to the plot that comes to mind
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Jul 9, 2021 11:56
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Perfect Potato posted:On the one hand you have someone feeling sad about killing the foxes that were trying to murder them and on the other hand you have "hey brah your plan to immoladrown the entire enemy fleet worked perfectly! The threads of fate that bind our friendship are like totally unbreakable dude! High five broseph!!! *Chrom and Robin chest bump over the screams of tens of thousands of conscripted Valm soldiers*" People tend to think of Chibi as a heroic victory of well-executed tactics and strategy, and Awakening's fireship thing is pretty clearly a Chibi reference, with Robin as either Zhuge Liang or Zhou Yu depending on which source you're using (Romance for ZL, history for ZY). You have an enemy that vastly outnumbers the "heroes" and if the enemy cross the body of water and land it's all over, but thanks to the decapitation of leadership (due to Cao Cao getting played in 3K, and Robin and Chrom leading a direct decapitation strike in FEA) the less-experienced, badly clustered enemy navy gets destroyed by a fire attack that makes the number of enemy troops irrelevant. The fact that Robin is played up as the greatest tactician in the series, and how Zhuge Liang is basically seen as THE tactical guy in pop-culture (thanks largely to the bias of RotTK) makes it even more apparent. If the battle of Red Cliff wasn't some heinous crime (a view I've literally never seen) then I'm not sure why Robin's plan is. Fire attacks were just...things that happened if the situation was appropriate (see also Drake's attempt at using fire v the Spanish Armada). Shinji117 fucked around with this message at 12:36 on Jul 9, 2021 |
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Jul 9, 2021 12:10
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I know we are past it now but I wonder if edelgard's line about 'creating such chaotic warfare that no-one will tell friend from foe' was a clue that that map was originally designed as a fog map, but perhaps it was found unfun or re-iterated on in testing but the line stayed?
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Jul 9, 2021 18:12
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Captainicus posted:Fates (conquest) has some of my favourite gameplay in the series but I don't think there's a single redeeming element to the plot that comes to mind I rank Conquest specifically pretty high as far as Fire Emblem plots go. I think the highlight for me is when Corrin and Azura hatch the plan to fight the war so Garon can sit in the magic chair, and agree to pretend to be loyal underlings. In the very next scene, the vizier shows up and Corrin is all "hey I murdered some enemy troops because I really love murdering peeps in the name of conquest, hail Garon" and Azura absolutely loses her poo poo at Corrin and has to have it patiently explained to her that this was the plan you'd hatched literally minutes earlier. Conquest is a pretty bad story if you want to read it as the tragic tale of trying to wring some good out of impossible circumstances, but it works a lot better if you read it as the story of a gang of bumbling idiots with zero capacity for critical thought or pattern recognition, carving a bloody swath of genocide across the world, for no reason other than never talking to anyone smart enough to tell them to stop. Birthright and Revelation, on the other hand, are just thoroughly uninteresting stories. I'll take aggressively stupid stories over passively dull ones any day.
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Jul 9, 2021 19:42
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Conquest has a lot of moments that work in individuality but not enough to actually make a good story. The CG Cutscene with Ryoma threatening to tear whatever Hoshidan blood remains in Corrin himself is metal as hell, but then it immediately cuts itself off with "Ryoma will wait patiently," to immediately deflate all the loving tension. Corrin finally snapping and butchering Hans and Iago after an entire game of them attempting to goad you into being a heartless killer like them is also exceptional. Meanwhile Birthright doesn't really have anything offensive aside from the ability to let Kaze die or Flora's AR-95 Bacon Greased People Burger but it's also just not interesting. There's some interesting character moments; Ryoma dumping the entirety of Hoshido's coffers in Shura's lap after being explicitly told (for the first time, even) that Nohr is starving and underprepared for literally anything says more about him than his entire support pool combined, but in terms of plot beats it's so aggressively normal.
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Jul 10, 2021 00:32
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