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The Flying Twybil posted:Awakening is the only modern Fire Emblem I've played. Most of the ones I've played are the older ones. Oh god, it's been so long since I played Sacred Stones that I totally forgot about every map being Seize Throne/Gate. I'm generally fine with 'Do your best to get through this map quickly so you can save/recruit the jailed unit on the map in time' scenarios. I just don't ever want to have to deal with this nonsense in a game.  As much as I enjoy strategizing around troops and stuff, I don't want figuring how to keep out of people's line of sight to be a concern at any point.
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Jan 28, 2020 08:44
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RareAcumen posted:
Just ignore the stealth and kill everyone. The combat exp makes up for the lost bonus exp.
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Jan 28, 2020 13:39
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I want to say I really enjoy the current thread subtitle. Every time I read it, I imagine it said in that fed-up-anime-character tone, and I laugh. It's a good response to Fates, and my suggestions of a 300% playthrough.
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Jan 28, 2020 14:01
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RareAcumen posted:Oh god, it's been so long since I played Sacred Stones that I totally forgot about every map being Seize Throne/Gate. In my personal IRL headcanon, the founders of Klei Entertainment played this mission in PoR, and said to eachother "man, this sucks, but what if we made an entire game out of this concept, and made it the best game ever", and then made Incognita, later renamed Invisible Inc, a perfect video game.
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Jan 28, 2020 14:18
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Fedule posted:In my personal IRL headcanon, the founders of Klei Entertainment played this mission in PoR, and said to eachother "man, this sucks, but what if we made an entire game out of this concept, and made it the best game ever", and then made Incognita, later renamed Invisible Inc, a perfect video game. Yep, that'd be something Klei would do. And we already know they can pull it off because Invisible Inc. is awesome. Also that mission looks dreadful.
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Jan 28, 2020 14:43
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Klei made Mark of the Ninja, so they're cool and good in my book. I was pretty sour on Fates when I tried it. I picked Conquest and it just didn't gel with me at all, so I never finished it. It wasn't even an issue of me not liking the gameplay style, since I finished Awakening. I just didn't enjoy it at all. Also, Corrin's dumb barefoot armor design looks stupid and off-putting.
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Jan 28, 2020 18:42
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I don't think I ever realized that was supposed to be a stealth mission in FE9 tbh. Anyway yeah fates, Like every fire emblem between radiant Dawn and three houses, It's a terrible game. There's probably video evidence of this
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Jan 28, 2020 18:49
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Rody One Half posted:I don't think I ever realized that was supposed to be a stealth mission in FE9 tbh. Awakening is better than Radiant Dawn. This is not exclusively because Awakening is good, you understand. It's also because Radiant Dawn shits the bed in a staggering variety of ways, including pretty basic structural stuff.
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Jan 28, 2020 23:26
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I can't rate any game with Pair Up higher than games without Pair Up but I REALLY dislike that mechanic. It's like I have an army of cool dudes and I want them to do cool stuff but the best play is to instead give up half of my units and turn them into stat sticks that do nothing, not even get exp. At least they get support points but still, it's so criminally boring.
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Jan 28, 2020 23:37
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Eimi posted:I can't rate any game with Pair Up higher than games without Pair Up but I REALLY dislike that mechanic. Paired up units get XP in Awakening whenever they do followup attacks (which is fairly often when paired with units they support). It's designed to encourage using both units, with stat boosts increasing as the units in question get better stats. Two strong units put together are much better than a strong unit paired with a useless backpack. It's also busted as hell, don't get me wrong, but Awakening had a much clearer idea of how things would work thematically.
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Jan 29, 2020 00:07
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chiasaur11 posted:Awakening is better than Radiant Dawn. Yeah, Radiant Dawn was my first Fire Emblem game and wow, that game has some weird issues (especially the difficulty curve, which is flat out insane, not because it's steep but because it goes all over the drat place)
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Jan 29, 2020 01:56
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I still like Radiant Dawn, if only because of BEXP shenanigans allowing you to create god-units. Which is nigh-on necessary on the highest difficulty, which is also something I like -- games that allow me to build crazy powerful stuff and then never actually require that level of power, even in optional content, are annoying. Atelier usually gets this right too. Also having a limited number of skill scrolls to shuffle around is a lot better than building out all your units in identikit gamebreaker builds by gaining more levels than god, split over 14 different classes. Where the sheer stats gained in the process usually invalidate the skill build anyway. It doesn't feel great to come up with a cool skill combo, and by the time you've finished building it, realise that you've essentially constructed an elaborate machine that functions better as a blunt object. Functionally infinite levels in FE just feels wrong, but that's probably the bit about the series' soul having shifted coming up again -- FE isn't about managing your resources anymore, it's about the characters and, to a degree, matchmaking. Which isn't bad, I absolutely don't mind more focus on character development, it's just a shame it came at the same time as core gameplay cutbacks. We could've had it all! I like a lot of what 3H did, especially relative to Fates, but it still feels like I'm only really happy because they gave back half of the stuff they took away in the first place. Though I do recognise that as much as I might've liked to see the evolution of FE as a strategy series, that might not have been commercially viable. It still makes me sad though.
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Jan 29, 2020 02:38
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The idea of whether or not "Classic Fire Emblem" can have the mainstream viability of whatever exactly it is that Fire Emblem is now when you remove the character writing is fascinating. Personally, I'm not convinced at all of the notion that people will be specifically turned off of a game if it is difficult even if it is otherwise charming; this has become increasingly less theoretical over the course of the 2010s and now that we're in a post-Celeste world I think we can be forgiven for not giving it any more credence. People are fine with difficulty. People - lots and lots of people - will push themselves, will engage fully earnestly, will be moved, to master all sorts of extremely difficult games, just so long as you can check a couple of other boxes too:
I feel like each of these bullet points could have a medium size book written about it, but that's the summary. Classic Fire Emblem - which is to say, if we just took say FE7 and released it as is today and forget about graphics - does have some problems. These problems are not that the game is difficult, or even that it's particularly unfair in and of itself. The problems are that the game is obtuse and time-consuming; there is entirely too much that you need to look up in guides if you decide you want to fully engage with the things it offers you to engage with (actually, some of these things are still true as of Three Houses), it's not altogether apparent to a completely new player what the game considers important and how it wants you to think, and too much suboptimality too early on can irrevocably inflict lasting consequences that take too much to mitigate. The extents of these various issues have ebbed and flowed as the series developed (eg: FE8 was an early example of letting you grind out of a statistical rut, FE9 was fairly impeccably balanced and FE10 went right out of the window on that front), but they're broadly all still there. The underlying logic of Classic Fire Emblem is all fine, but it needs something of a mechanical facelift, it needs to reconsider how it introduces you to it, basically. (A couple of obvious cues can be taken from Invisible Inc actually; Inc, being a roguelike, obviously has a fairly short main campaign but weighs its progression appropriately; it expects you to replay it a bunch, and also to fail entirely sometimes. It wants you to carry all your mistakes forward, but also lets you (if you choose) carry 99 turn rewinds into every mission.) There have also been a couple of interface issues that kind of affect difficulty and which have kind of been addressed as Fire Emblem has moved from the GBA's screen into 1080p but also kind of replace with new ones. The big one is basically enemy stats. It used to be the case that you couldn't see anything about an enemy other than their HP without opening a menu, which was usually not a huge problem when you could get a feel for the power of most given enemies, but it started getting hairy when specific important weapons were thrown into the mix. There was a particularly infamous map late in FE7's Hector Hard Mode where more or less every enemy was a Berserker, and they all had one of three weapons: Silver Axe, Tomahawk, and Swordslayer. What this meant was that at a glance the map was full of identical enemies but they all needed to be approached very differently, and you had to go to a bunch of effort to dig up which one was which, and then remember all of that, and then do your strategy thing. The concept of the thing was impacted by the practicalities of the interface, and it was kind of an accidental difficulty element. Today, however, enemies are all rendered in glorious 3D along with their equipped weapon, and you can not only see it with a mouseover but more often than not you can actually see it at a glance. This is great! Now the only problem is enemies with multiple weapons, which isn't as huge a problem but is still just one of those things you have to scrutinse. Unfortunately, as of 3H, there are so many more things enemies can have equipped on them, that you have to check manually. Between weapons, skills, combat arts, batallions, gambits, and a handful of specific gimmick effects, there's now even more stuff that you can't see at a glance, that basically just obfuscates the thing that's supposed to be the difficulty you're engaging with. I don't know how I would solve these problems. The point is, this and other things are important because they play into mechanical, strategic pacing, at the turn-to-turn level, is going to be absolutely paramount to making an approachable Classic Fire Emblem, because what you want is for players to spend a minimum of time finding out what the variables even are and proportionately more time actually thinking about the things the game tells you are the things you think about when playing the game (once again, look to Invisible Inc for a masterclass in this). I came dangerously close to typing "gameplay loop", or, worse, "gamefeel" there, but I restrained myself. My point is, the tactical difficulty of Fire Emblem of old can absolutely be sold to the masses combined with the newly reinvigorated character writing of New Fire Emblem, as long as it's tinkered with a bit in the right way, and as long as IntSys has the faith in people necessary and a little bit of courage in the face of maybe revisiting one or two of the core Fire Emblem tenets that haven't changed across 17 titles and maybe could stand to but nobody's bothered because they always were that way and now they're all just a part of the mechanical aesthetic the game wears. Yes, the game should let us see unit growth rates. Yes, I will die on this hill.
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Jan 29, 2020 04:17
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And then you have people like me, who don't much care about the strategy game part of it all (it's fun, but it's not what I'm here for) and care primarily about the story and characters. I beat 3H on Hard once to prove to myself that I could, but I honestly prefer Normal because it lets me relax with the game instead of working for my wins.
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Jan 29, 2020 04:23
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Three houses is the first time I have ever played a fire emblem on the bottom difficulty or turned casual on, simply because replaying white clouds every time is such a slog if you don't. Honestly though I think the big thing three houses brings back- Well technically valentia did this but no one likes FE2 -is actual good art design. Cause god from Shadow Dragon through Fates The games just became so ugly
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Jan 29, 2020 08:31
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I like the general look of characters in Awakenings well enough, but it’s marred by more specific problems. Nowi, and all the evil characters being dark skinned.
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Jan 29, 2020 18:36
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One thing I really want to see happen is for permadeath to be removed from the default playstyle and replaced with perfectionist, basically making recruiting every unit and having every unit survive each battle turned into mandatory objectives instead of optional objectives. There can still be optional objects that give items and money as a reward. But forcing the player to have every character available up to that point opens up a world of options in both strategy and storytelling. All of a sudden, recruit-able non-lord characters can be critical to the plot, since the developer knows they'll still be alive at any point. For that matter, playable non-lords are easier to put into cutscenes because the developer doesn't have to create alternate versions for every playable character. Also, late game maps can become much more challenging because there's less of a chance of a dead-end run. For example, Athos can basically solo the FE 7 final map since the game is balanced around the idea that everyone except for the lords and Athos might be dead. But if everyone is alive at that point, the map could be re-balanced to be much more challenging. Anyway, aside from the Marth games, FE games feel like they expect the player to reset/turnwheel/divine pulse when anyone dies. That has become the Fire Emblem way. I don't see much of a change if then simply made that the default playmode. As for skill creep, having too many skills does make the game messier. But I don't think the series can ever hit the level of elegance that Fedule wants. Even if you remove all the skills and make all the weapons the same, so much of the tactical layer in FE is based on hitting critical thresholds in Attack, Speed, Defense, and Resistance. That much info cannot be communicated in a single sprite/character model. That sort of info demands some sort of detailed stats display. At which point you might as well have the difference between a horseslayer and a killer axe. After all, it's easier to check four enemies for effective damage weapons than it is to check for potential lethal damage on four enemies with iron weapons.
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Jan 29, 2020 22:24
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A game is too easy when bad game journalists call it too easy like Vice did
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Jan 30, 2020 00:57
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HitTheTargets posted:I like the general look of characters in Awakenings well enough, but it’s marred by more specific problems. Nowi, and all the evil characters being dark skinned. Walhart's generals were light skinned. Meanwhile Basilio and Flavia are the two darkest skin people in the game, as opposed to the weird grey Gangrel had, and they're leaders in the good guy army.
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Jan 30, 2020 01:24
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golden bubble posted:As for skill creep, having too many skills does make the game messier. But I don't think the series can ever hit the level of elegance that Fedule wants. Even if you remove all the skills and make all the weapons the same, so much of the tactical layer in FE is based on hitting critical thresholds in Attack, Speed, Defense, and Resistance. That much info cannot be communicated in a single sprite/character model. That sort of info demands some sort of detailed stats display. At which point you might as well have the difference between a horseslayer and a killer axe. After all, it's easier to check four enemies for effective damage weapons than it is to check for potential lethal damage on four enemies with iron weapons. To be sure this kind of thing is a balancing act. You're tasking the player with a series of very specific judgements of very broad information; you want there to be a challenge here to rise to, something that good players can be good at and the best players can be the best at. There has to be some capacity for nuance, knacks, experience, and raw talent. The reason I think the situation I described is a failure is because the challenge becomes not making the judgements but perceiving the context in the first instance. To stick with the berserkers because it's such a clear cut example; the key differentiator is an extremely broad one, namely, the kind of threat each unit represents by virtue of their equipped weapon. This isn't quite the same as units with different stats posing a different extent of threat, because in that case you're applying yourself much more granularly, fine-tuning your tactics. At this scale, requiring a bit of scrutiny is more acceptable. Fire Emblem prides itself on being upfront, but in my opinion having the information be present but difficult for the human player to check is only very slightly lesser a form of dishonesty than hiding it completely. I think the challenge is supposed to be, eg, "how do I get my sword boys in position to cut these guys while keeping them safe from the swordslayer guys" but onto this is accidentally layered "wait, which one has the swordslayer again?". What I ask here is not necessarily some lowered maximum of complexity but to make the amount of detailed scrutiny necessary to play scale better with respect to complexity. My thesis is that putting skills and batallions and gambits on enemies is intended to make the game more difficult in a certain way and to possibly acknowledge that enemy armies should have some of these niceties too, but actually additionally makes the game more difficult in other, unintended ways, ways that don't account for the burdens the human player that the AI commander does not (like needing to spend time reading menus). I've long held, on record in my LPs, that IntSys has a problem in Fire Emblem of not fully appreciating the asymmetry involved in playing their games (even though it does broadly account for the asymmetry of your fifteen god units versus its fifty mooks), handling eg critical hits in a manner that is equal yet not equitable, and having its AI behave in ways that take the role more of an antagonist to the player than the commander of the opposing army in a given battle. I implied before that Classic Fire Emblem is dead now, but I think there's more of it left than might be obvious at first glance; I think both the AI complaints I had then (and kinda still do) and the complexity/interface complaint I have now are borne of the same source, which I consider to be a philosophical failure of the developers. ...and again, I'm not completely sure how I would address this, if I were hired as IntSys's Chief Tactics Officer tomorrow. It's a doozy, and it's fascinating, and there's honestly only so much that I can actually hold this stuff against them even as I call their attempt a failure (in part); its failure is just a detail, really, and I don't think many games have succeeded at this kind of problem without also being about fifty times as constrained as Fire Emblem (see: Into The Breach, and, again, Invisible Inc).
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Jan 30, 2020 03:33
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I understand what you mean, but in most of the FE games I've played, there isn't nearly as much differentiation between the melee classes once you hit the point where the player stops caring about the weapon triangle. At that point, berserker translates to another melee unit with probably has middling speed, high crit, and meh defense. But there's nothing stopping the game developer from putting in a berserker with massive res if the enemies aren't hitting their class caps, which they really don't aside from the games with BEXP. I agreed that adding a bunch of small bonuses to most units greatly increases complexity without increasing depth enough. But far too much of the differentiation in FE enemies is based on suggested stats. Armors are supposed to have low res. Swordmasters are supposed to have extreme speed. And while IS has held to those stereotypes for the vast majority of enemies, many of the more recent games have shown that they are willing to break with those trends for playable characters. At which point there is no difference between a strange peg. knight with high def and low res, and a stereotypical wyvern knight. What I'm trying to get across and probably failing to is that your idea of "how do I get my sword boys in position to cut these guys while keeping them safe from the swordslayer guys" is based entirely on rules of thumb. And for most FE players, they play based on rules of thumb. But at some point, more advanced play goes beyond Sword > Axe, to actually calculating the odds. At which point more interesting strategies appear like, "As long as they don't get three crits in a row, my two prepromoted palidins with elixirs and lances can handle the entire right side. This means I can afford to split my force three ways and end the map 30% faster." It also doesn't help FE doesn't respect the weapon triangle that much except in a mobile game. Being able to break the weapon triangle is pretty normal for a very strong character in the non-mobile FE games. If you really want to be able to rely on rules of thumbs all the way to very hard/lunatic/etc. you'd need a weapon triangle as ludicrously strong as the Fire Emblem Heroes weapon triangle. golden bubble fucked around with this message at 06:19 on Jan 30, 2020 |
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Jan 30, 2020 06:05
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 new video Ep 90 - Chapter 27 - King Garon (part 3) chome died on the way back to his home planet
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Jan 30, 2020 07:46
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Xander died not knowing his dad was a huge dragonman, he probably regrets it now.
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Jan 30, 2020 13:47
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Soo... do they ever explain how come Garon can turn into a dragon? I mean, apart from "it happens in every other Fire Emblem".
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Jan 30, 2020 13:51
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I think you have to go to the artbook to learn that this Garon is actually a zombie dragonspawn that has body-snatched the real Garon, who has been dead for a while now. And that is exactly as dumb as it sounds.
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Jan 30, 2020 15:10
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It's explained in the other 2 routes.
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Jan 30, 2020 15:27
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Wasn’t the explanation for Chome being a dragon just “oh yeah, the royal family has dragon blood so that happens now and then”?
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Jan 30, 2020 15:48
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golden bubble posted:I think you have to go to the artbook to learn that this Garon is actually a zombie dragonspawn that has body-snatched the real Garon, who has been dead for a while now. And that is exactly as dumb as it sounds. It sounds like the kind of thing that would partially explain why Nohr has gone full into cartoon villainy and the why Garon’s kids are so convinced that he was a good man. Oh well, guess you just have to give IS more money to find the “real” story. Disclaimer: “Real” story is not guaranteed in other games.
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Jan 30, 2020 16:54
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Chome being a dragon is also explained in the DLC route because of course it is.
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Jan 30, 2020 16:56
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Does the DLC explain why theoretical real not evil Garon never went to Hoshido and told them 'hey we can't grow food because of the forever night thing and my people are dying please help'? e: at least the 'forever night' curse explains why they spend almost all their budget on candles Zanzibar Ham fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Jan 30, 2020 |
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Jan 30, 2020 17:00
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Zanzibar Ham posted:Does the DLC explain why theoretical real not evil Garon never went to Hoshido and told them 'hey we can't grow food because of the forever night thing and my people are dying please help'? Of course not that would make too much sense.
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Jan 30, 2020 17:08
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Chome's dead comrades encouraged him to rise from the dead because the alternative was them spending eternity with Chome.
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Jan 30, 2020 23:19
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Zanzibar Ham posted:Does the DLC explain why theoretical real not evil Garon never went to Hoshido and told them 'hey we can't grow food because of the forever night thing and my people are dying please help'? Not only does the DLC not explain this, the DLC third route tosses in a new plot point that makes Hoshido not knowing about this already even more absurd.
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Jan 31, 2020 03:25
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I love Chome's T-Posing to protect his friends. And how his friends just get stomped on by a dragon anyway.
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Jan 31, 2020 03:31
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Shiny777 posted:Not only does the DLC not explain this, the DLC third route tosses in a new plot point that makes Hoshido not knowing about this already even more absurd. do you mean the DLC, or the DLC DLC?
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Jan 31, 2020 06:21
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I assume the DLC-Alternate route/Revelations, as opposed to the DLC-'explaining why they used the designs of Awakening characters', or DLC-'Everyone is fighiting to take a vacation so they can send a instagram-photo of their vacation to Chome'. (Or DLC-Money/Xp grinding, etc.)
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Jan 31, 2020 12:00
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So there’s Revelation, aka Chome doesn’t pick a side, and Heirs of Fate, aka Chome gets owned and Kanna & friends have to do it for themselves.
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Jan 31, 2020 15:02
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And the DLC that literally explains why the three awakening kids are there and why Lilith is important (and also why everything bad was happening)
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Jan 31, 2020 17:25
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So basically the DLC has all the story and the main game is 90% bandit ambushes?
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Jan 31, 2020 18:00
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I'm sad that Chome didn't get to see his mom or his Nohr bodyguard that fell down the gorge or Hans or that one evil guy he spared who turned good before dying. Those were all
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Jan 31, 2020 20:16
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