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Delphisage posted:The changing nametags here are still a better issue to deal with than FE5's lategame enemies having affiliations that crash the game. To be fair that was specifically the old school FE5 translation patch that was incomplete and famous had stuff like "In America"
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Aug 28, 2022 02:34
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Next Time: A filler level, followed by a lady so boobalicious the fans actually asked the developers to tone her design back. I'm just gonna give a hearty lmao to that.
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Aug 28, 2022 03:51
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Now, I don't understand why adepts - who at this level are basically just spearmen - provoke this level of hatred when Alden, the literal child wizard can do more arcane damage at longer range, but you do you game. Because hating low level adepts makes them pout at you but hating low level mages gets you a magic missile to the balls.
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Aug 28, 2022 07:27
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Honestly the support writing isn't bad? It's not ground-breaking, but it's at least establishing personality decently well. It's still a lot of words at once though, not really paced well. I'm also going to disclaimer a little since due to that I've only read the first 3 at this time.
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Aug 28, 2022 11:04
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Black Robe posted:Because hating low level adepts makes them pout at you but hating low level mages gets you a magic missile to the balls. I'm guessing it may be a "Mages are taught magic, Adepts know it naturally" thing that you sometimes see in Fantasy. Wizards and Sorcerers from D&D would be a decent example of where else this popped up. It does seem kind of weird that there's an actual persecution of Adepts that ends if they join the army though.
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Aug 28, 2022 11:10
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Keldulas posted:Honestly the support writing isn't bad? It's not ground-breaking, but it's at least establishing personality decently well. "Not bad, but not ground breaking" sums up most of the game imo
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Aug 28, 2022 20:07
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Is it personality? So far they all seem to have exactly one character trait.
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Aug 28, 2022 22:39
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anilEhilated posted:Is it personality? So far they all seem to have exactly one character trait. This is GBA-era Fire Emblem too so it's faithful in that respect.
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Aug 29, 2022 00:28
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Please, there's hints that there's tragic pasts involved in at least several cases so it's everything past the GBA era as well.
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Aug 29, 2022 00:47
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bewilderment posted:This is GBA-era Fire Emblem too so it's faithful in that respect. Have you actually read the GBA-era supports?
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Aug 29, 2022 03:03
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Delphisage posted:Have you actually read the GBA-era supports? Sometimes you get the Cannes, but sometimes you get the Dozla. And then sometimes you get Moulder who is probably the fastest-benched non-Jeigan character I've ever seen casually, but I'm not deep into the games. I bet 90% of people who played Sacred Stones couldn't tell you a thing about him. edit: apparently I am wrong and statwise he bests Natasha. Huh. bewilderment fucked around with this message at 06:28 on Aug 29, 2022 |
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Aug 29, 2022 06:26
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anilEhilated posted:Is it personality? So far they all seem to have exactly one character trait. C: Two characters get mad at each other's one-note personalities. B: Exactly the same as C but this time it's somehow worse. A: Randomly has the best character interaction in the entire game. S: You clicked this by accident and now they're making out oh gods
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Aug 29, 2022 07:15
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bewilderment posted:I bet 90% of people who played Sacred Stones couldn't tell you a thing about him. Yeah, he's stronger than Natasha, people just kinda forget about that because they got forced to use her for Chapter 5 and it stuck because now they can use her for the sake of her supports with Seth, Franz and/or Joshua. I actually remember Moulder's support with Gilliam being about ceremony bells ringing in their heads and their memories of King Hayden of Frelia's coronation without looking it up. Weird.
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Aug 30, 2022 14:08
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Grinding Advance... of BOOBIES! Welcome back! Last time on Dark Deity, we, uh...fought some bandits who apparently had a big plan to attack the town with the royal army currently in it. Now we're going to go to the crossroads and I guess bait the bandits out?  Before we get into any fights, we may as well upgrade the weapons. We've earned two "Tier 1" tokens from our misadventures accomplishing... nothing.... and now we can spend them.  Ha ha. Of course we can't have melee units with ranged attacks, what do you think this is? Anyway, we'll upgrade Bianca's spear because it's low weight, high damage, and she doesn't really have issues hitting anything. The Power weapons hit hard but are slow and less accurate, Finesse is for high crits, Focus is for correcting characters who hit like crap, and Balance is just kind of your midpoint. We go for Balance on Bianca because she is 100% going to be in the endgame team unlike a LOT of these characters.  You can upgrade your weapons 8 times, twice with each token. We don't manage to turn Bianca's spear into a "new" weapon (read: it has a new name that's vaguely synonymous with "spear") but she gets a bit more damage out of it. Notice also that Lincoln and Bianca are coming in at a much higher level than our guys.  I whiffle on what to give Alden before settling on Arcane Missiles. This is the system that replaced Fire Emblem's equipment system, and I have to be honest, it's not very good. GBA's Fire Emblem's equipment system is surprisingly deep in that there are a lot of weapons which can do things like turn melee units into people who can fight at range, steal health, increase your crit rate, reverse the weapon triangle, and of course hit harder. Now, all the Fire Emblem weapons have durability, so you can't just spam Excalibur into people and kill them for 1 million damage or whatever, and you are attritioning resources in every fight. If you break out the Hammer now to get through that boss you might not have it when you need it later for Attack of the Knights. Dark Deity has absolutely no attrition at all. Healers have infinite heals so as long as you can clear an enemy pack without getting outright killed the army will have its full firepower and recovery capabilities and continue its slow grinding advance across the board.  Lincoln also showed up with this, which I will horde until the end of the game because decisions are hard.  We can also just...buy all the stat boosters. Did you know Avocado Toast makes you more magical? I don't even know where this vaguely European preindustrial society is getting avocados, because they're a New World food, but what do I know?  It's time for more words!  : Positions, everyone. Let's make short work of these criminals. I guess Garrick and Cia are prettying to be married while the rest of the sorcerers and plate wearing warriors hang out 30 yards down the road.  : Maybe if you'd listened to me instead of stuffing your face full of biscuits at the palace- : It's not the biscuits, dear, I assure you. It's all this GOLD.. Couldn't those bankers have spared us an rear end or two? Or perhaps a few bodyguards to protect it?: They're much too miserly for that. Besides, the King[sic] keeps these roads in good shape for travelers like us. The bandits, having not noticed that their assault force never returned nor bothered to put any men in the trees above the road where all our guys are hiding, obligingly pop up to confront Garrick and Cia about the gold that is very much not in evidence or whatever.  What, her prominently displayed chest?  TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
 This mission is weird. I'm pretty sure we can pull the squadron out of attack range and hit end turn and just cheese it that way. It's also thoroughly dull and leads to Dark Deity's main problem the thread kind of hinted at.  The optimal way to complete Dark Deity is to slowly form an infantry square, march slowly across the board, and defeat the enemy in detail.   As long as you don't get people chipped down, you can keep on trucking.  On a happier note Bianca is a beast. "Yield or die!" is her crit quote.  I don't understand why this is the generic barbarian. Rest assured, things will get more confusing.  This is Lincoln. This passive will be surprisingly useful in a few minutes.    The grind continues. Irving labors under the delusion he's a valued team member.  Bianca gets a marginal level.   I don't remember Elias' crit quote.  Cia is widely considered really good as a dodge tank, but is locked to 1 range attacks until tier 3.  Operation Boring Infantry Square is go!  I'm cutting out a lot of combat because it's boring!  Cia's crit quote is "it's rude to stare!" It's like the writers know the most notable thing about her design is the massive booba being so heavily centered.  Funnily enough her battle sprite is much less horny, which makes me suspect they animated it by adding heads to a generic class sprite.  There's just not much to say about this mission, and it's a huge problem with Dark Deity in general. A lot of LPs are on the archive complaining about IntSys' dumb gimmicks like thieves stealing treasure or enemy recruitment and whatnot, but those are actually good for the game! Yes, it's annoying when the villageburner bandits show up, but they offer the player an incentive to actually use their mobile units and do something other than "slow, grinding advance in infantry formation". Every single Dark Deity battle is applying your infantry square to defeat the enemy in detail and then Roman tortuga cosplay as your tougher/dodgier/lifestealier characters absorb the enemy phase. Dark Deity jettisons all of this - I suspect because the developers had real difficulty coding the base gameplay - in favor of rewarding more gold for turns taken.  I want to say there's maybe one mission with a time limit in the game, but this is going to be your life from now on. Astute observers might have noticed I left some enemies alive, but I'll be honest: as long as your chosen few get enough XP to keep up, the game is really forgiving about XP because it keeps throwing more and more characters at you. I think the final count is something like 30?  This screen shows up again. Pay attention to the kneeling figure's staff.  It's time for more words.  You know, this is not nearly as clever as amateur writers seem to think it is.  Yes, you're making fun of how stupid it is (although real history is full of this sort of thing, see Robert E. Lee's secret plans and a cigar) but it has to be done well and be funny. It's a lot harder to pull this off and media is oversaturated with these attempts at satire nowadays. : Well, let's hope he was a better cartographer than bandit.It's just  level writing.: Tell me, Elias, do you know anything of this place? : Not specifically. The Drakenweld family was once quite influential in Duskwater, and partly responsible for its founding as a mining town. It's just over the hill there. : What happened to them?: What always does. One bad heir and a whole lot of empty coffers.So, is the Drakenweld family commanding the bandits? We will never know, and this will never come up again.  The game desperately wants you to believe in Irving as a great military commander, but it's clear the developers have never read about or met any great military commanders, so we get generic advice passed off as wisdom. Coordinating a night assault without radio is actually really difficult and this force started fighting together literally a day ago. However, we get obvious advice like "nobles might fortify their holdings" tossed in as well.  So we need Lincoln, the experienced and principled commander singing Irving's praises as well. This wouldn't be so bad if Irving actually came across as a heroic leader instead of a condescending teenager with no ambition other than STERRRLING, but he doesn't and here we are.  : At least all those drills wiping windows are finally starting to make sense.: Speak for yourself...TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
 Every time you save the game asks whether you want to "load" a save slot. I get that this is a small studio and this is their first game, but man does this look sloppy.   : They plan to take the night to prepare for a full assault.: Drakenweld Manor, a dilapidated noble estate in the forest, has become home to a hive of brigands. : Having heard mention of prisoners, the party agrees to make the safety of any captives their top priority.I'm not sure what's up with the prisoners but we'll get to that in a moment. TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
 Preserve me, Lord God, for I trespass into the lair of the bonds once more.  :Or seasoned minced meat:Well, Lincoln, Sterling spoke quite highly of you.Captain, meet underling.These still aren't very interesting. I'm sorry.  Moving on! I upgrade Cia's knife to a dirk, the tier 2 balanced knife. It's still not very interesting, but it does more damage.  Alden gets his nutshot missiles upgraded, and Bianca's spear becomes a pike offscreen. Because the first mission was a boring nonevent, let's do one more, shall we?  Don't worry, the house isn't actually fortified. In fact, I don't think this game has terrain effects at all. : Well, no use knocking I suppose.: We should be careful. The first bandit mentioned prisoners.Yes, thank you Irving, the game has told us twice. You can even see the two women in cages right there.  : Speak for yourself, I'm rather fond of chicken.: You may have noticed we're short on hostages, Cia.You know, we could have taken one of those guys from the last map alive. It would have been less stupid than the map thing. : The sooner we ensure their safety, the better.Wow, thanks Irving! You hold no actual rank nor possess any real insight, so why don't you just shut up and let the adults talk? : Maybe if we're lucky they'll help us fight our way to the leader. This isn't clever. I get the game wants to be cute about Fire Emblem tropes, but so far it hasn't delivered any real insight and almost everything is worse than real FE.  : Well, let's hope we're in one of those kinds of stories then. Let's do this.TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
 This triggers... another loading screen.  I don't care because I've got thousands banked and am not planning to use half these characters moving forward anyway.  The game's tilesets and sprites are fine, but every time they need to render an environment effect or interactable it always looks like poo poo.  We're going to vary the usual formula and do a two-front grinding advance temporarily. I know, it's very exciting. In the prison rooms we have a bunch of dangerous promoted units. The left room, with our mystery red-haired maiden, is full of extremely dangerous promoted mages that have a nonzero crit chance and will kill anyone not named Alden if they crit. The rightmost room is full of melee guys we can have Alden murder through the wall, so we're going to clear out the bottom area as a split party and then unify for the assault on the redhead's prison.  This is how eunuchs are made.  Cia continues her murder spree.  Girl, please get some strength. Although, her primary role is "dodge tank" so more speed is welcome.  Fortunately for me Garrick is not staying on the team long term.  Ok Irving, if I find a warrior build that's not trash you MIGHT see endgame play.  Whee!  Lincoln continues to be immune to most of the physical guys in the area.  Bianca continues impaling men.  Excitement abounds.  Cia at least matches up favorably into hallway mage.  It's not a great level, but Alden's already kind of nuts.  Please get some speed.  Oh, you did, baller.  Jesus Christ, Bianca.  Team Right Side is going to clear the stairs and hallway and is making good progress.  I figure I can offer Irving as bait to get one of those guys into range for Garrick to kill him.  Holy poo poo! Yes, Irving's fortitude isn't great, but that bandit can absolutely one-shot anyone in team left. The only guy who can hit them through the wall is Lincoln, and of the three guys and Bianca on team left side I don't think they can cut through both mages after opening the door. If he'd done a critical Irving would have gone down and taken a permanent stat penalty (which would probably force a map reset).  Jesus Alden. Alden is sadly on team right so we're going to wait a while.  "It's rude to stare!"  Eh, I'll take it.  ALDEN NO NOT THE BELT  I'll take magic, though speed would be good.  I'll take it!  Eh, sure.  More murder.  Having cleared out the hallway, Alden can kill the armored guy then we can storm the area and kill those two chumps.  Adjacent characters will comment like Maren here whenever you get a kill. Maren's line is "was that really necessary"? Well, I dunno, these bandits are going to fight to the death for their right to keep women in cages I guess.  Maren is really good, y'all.  Left team will now dork around until the rest of the square shows up to storm the area. Those two are real dangerous.  I think the game wants me to promote Elias to a magical adept class. More on that later.  Alden finishes the right side guys with another barrage of dong seeking missiles and we can get one of the women out of her cage.  Not before Alden continues his reign of terror, of course.  It is perfectly acceptable to be confused by what Sloane (this lady's name) is saying with respect to the proper noun, but it's a nobility thing. Val' is apparently the prefix for nobility in this game, because, uh, I dunno, apostrophes are more fantastical. Or something. Look, when even genre authors are mocking this crap I don't have to do much.  So, let's talk about Sloane. She's another mage, and was good enough to live on my endgame team. Her speed growth isn't the greatest, but we can fix that. She also comes in at a healthy level seven, which is why I'm fine skipping a bunch of these bandits because I don't need the XP. Dark Deity throws an absolutely insane amount of characters at the player, and while you eventually get up to a 14 unit limit, the pro move is to deploy under the limit and cheese the maps. Trust me, I'll show it off. More notable about Sloane is that her original design was so horny the developers had to change it after fan pressure.  I legitimately don't know what the gently caress that is supposed to be. Why is there a V thing above the bikini bottom? Sloane has a 3 page backstory as well, where she was a girl from a rich noble family who trained as a mage in secret to impress her dad then used wind magic to lift her parents off the floor and her dad got mad and used his magic to kick her rear end because he thought she was attacking him, so she became an amoral power broker luring everyone with her sexy ways until she ran off to hang out with Sophia (the redhead in the other room) after her dad fathered an illegitimate child to get rid of her and disowned her. I feel stupider just typing that. Anyway, Sloane is a good unit and gets to stay on the team.  I took a real stupid risk here. On the plus side, healing Alden to full means these guys can't kill him.  Lincoln promotes after healing up Alden and gets to choose from four classes. The inquisitor is a melee class that gets two skills: Inqusition, which raises power by 40% of enemy's magic stat, and Righteous Cause which causes healing to increase accuracy by 25% by one turn. I don't care about it.  The Guardian gets a horse, the ability to turn their healing into a heal over time, and defense increases as their health goes down. I still don't care.  The Priest throws around holy magic, gets +1 to healing range and increases their dodge by 15% of power. We don't have the dodgy cleric yet, and while this is closer to being good the last class is kind of absurdly better than the other 3.  Yup. Don't care. It does sadly lower Lincoln's high defense growth, but lifesteal and holy magic is much better than what the other losers offer. (The other skill is getting more crit chance as you heal). Now, the priest does unlock holy magic, which lets you attack at range 1-2, but they don't get lifesteal. This also gives our man more speed. Acolyte makes pretty much every healer in the game a viable endgame unit. In fact, the developers nerfed this down from 33% as one of the balance updates. We'll see how Lincoln does.  No not my ding ding dong!  So, holy magic in this game is weird. Each of the four spells corresponds to some OC do not steal fantasy god you don't care about. The power spell literally rips the blood out of someone's body.  This particular spell calls on "Koeli-Sumash" (  ) to peer into your opponent's soul and at the highest level to destroy their soul entirely. Keep this in mind for later. The holy effect, even though half the spells are poo poo that would get you the evil tag in D&D land.  Having taught Lincoln holy blood magic, we can now break our new ferret loving friend out of her prison.  I'm not really sure why the bandits were keeping the women. Fortunately this game was not made by the ATOM crew or we'd get 60 text boxes about sexual assault. That said, they're not trying to ransom them or do anything banal like have them clean the floors of the bandit base or recruit them as bandits. Who knows.  A lot of people like Sophia. I think it's the ferret.  Now that all the thought is no longer required it's time for... a grinding advance up the left staircase. Yes, there are a whole bunch of guys on the right. No, I don't really care that I'm giving up all the XP.  Bianca dodges an enemy rudely going for her lady parts and gets a level for her trouble.  I will tolerate this.  There's an argument for the gods being evil in this setting that we'll get to, I swear.  Sloane is taking to mass murder well.  Lincoln rips at another man's soul.  Bianca continues her insane rampage. The goal is to get her promoted this mission.  I would argue that we're taking Sophia's innocence here, but she did train a ferret to murder people.  There's a chest on the other side we're missing. This one had a Tier 1 weapon token. Anything in chests you can buy in shops, because... Dark Deity, everyone! There is one class of unique items that we can use to slightly customize characters, but those are guaranteed at certain progression points so there's no real reward to exploring the map. It's kind of amazing.  Elias is about to waste the last bandit between us and the boss. This is a kill boss mission and we can't sneak past him to the other side. Oh well.  You're definitely promoting to Blaze or Surge, buddy.  The boss suffers from the Curse of the Inconsistent Nameplate as he whiffs on Bianca. He's an advanced rogue class I think?  He is also surprisingly stabbable.  I refuse to be mature about this.  Jesus Christ, Alden.  Sloane... you know what, he had you in a cage potentially doing all kinds of creepy poo poo. Go for it.  Bianca finishes him off for funsies.  Yea!  Gale is a melee class that has a chance to proc more damage and a 10% chance to "hit again". It's a melee class. Next!  Now we're talking! Blaze is a fire magic class, so we get 1-2 range. The skills we get are a 33% proc for 1.6 damage and 4% power per kill, which considering the amount of murder Bianca does is going to turn her into a powerhouse of nonsense. It keeps her high speed growth mostly intact while keeping her magic up, so we can turn her into a fairly dodgy incinerator.  Surge exists, I guess. It increases the range of her chain ability by 2 and has a proc for a 33% chance to autohit and increase crit. Meh. Keep in mind we can promote to a third tier class independently of what we pick here, but Bianca is pretty fast already.  Reverie is a weird class that used to be better before the lifedrain nerf. Yes, it is a melee class, but you can slog through it to get the now 20% lifedrain and its ability to ignore 20% of enemy defense stats to turn any one of the tier 3 classes into an insane murder powerhouse. I'm not going to say there aren't characters who won't benefit from it. I was going to make Elias one but his magic is on par with Alden's.  I end up making Bianca a Blaze because the more 1-2 range attacks we have the better. Dark Deity really favors its magical classes, followed by its rogues. There are a few really dodgy rangers who can be useful. The warriors... exist.  The grinding advance stops for no one.   Sloane is voiced by Kira Buckland. I don't normally comment on voice actors, but I do think it's funny they spent their budget on getting celebrity voicing instead of fixing the bugs or fun gameplay. I guess "expanded voice acting" was a stretch goal, as well as the stuff in the DLC like "Beach Mode" and "Villain Side Stories". You know, the stuff you have to buy separately. Then again, they also promise this:  I feel like every time I look at these kickstarters it's full of bullshit promises that spew out cliched inept garbage.    : Well, it's over now. Ok, game, you got me, that's a good line. : If you don't mind my asking, how were you captured? : It's a pretty funny story, actually. : Ok, that may be true, but it was still funny the way it happened.: They got you along the road?: We were taking a shortcut through the forest, maybe a half league east, and ran straight into them. Didn't stand a chance to get away. : If we'd just taken the road like I'd suggested, we would have been fine! Clunk! Looking at the kickstarter these guys are all fresh out of college, and boy does it show. Very ambitious, though. : You couldn't possibly say that with any degree of certainty. This guy randomly flies in on a wings of shadow effect I fail to capture. : And what might this heirloom look like?Remember how Black Geyser started with a moderately interesting premise real people could relate to (the civil war) and then devolved into fantasy nonsense?  : An amethyst. Quite a large one. Translucent, but poorly cut. Have you seen anything of the kind? If I could but retrieve it I'd be well on my way.Yea, this guy is evil because we saw him in the spoiler loading screen (check the staff), but also because he flew in on wings of shadow and crap. Never mind that every one of our priests can use blood magic and soul destruction. : It has been with us for uncountable generations, and my father has gone mad with grief from its loss. I fear he may soon pass from this world, and would love to look upon it one last time.: I don't know that we've come across anything of the sort, but you're welcome to take a look around...: I thank you, regardless, as I'm sure my father would if he were given the opportunity. Oh goddammit. Will contrived coincidences never cease? : What gave us away, the dead bandits?Well, at least the new lady has a tasteful yet attractive design, I -  Oh goddammit!  : The only good bandit is a dead bandit. We came to do the job it appears you did for us.: How serendipitous that the bandits go unopposed for weeks, but we both arrive on the same day.Game, calling out that this is all contrived does not make it any less contrived.   Well poo poo, how ever will poor Akmenos compete with all the boobs?  Well, drat, we have a bunch of pretty young ladies on one side and an old man wielding the powers of darkness. Hmm. : Translucent, but poorly cut? : Ah, so you've found it? : It is clear that one of you, if not both, is lying. No one so much as touches this gem until we sort out what's going on. Akmenos doesn't take this well. Bad play, buddy, you're trying to convince Supreme Commander Irving, a moronic teenager, to trust you over some attractive ladies. : You would deprive my dying father of his last wish?A little thick there buddy. : Calm down, if it really is yours we'll figure it out.: I think not. If I return without the stone, my father will have my head! Agh, Enough! [sic] Now step aside or you will leave me no alternative but to destroy you.: I'm not sure that was the wisest threat when you're outnumbered ten to one.: Outnumbered? Me? Hahahahaha, I'll show you outnumbered! The screen blinks a vaguely ominous shade of purple.  So, he summoned a bunch of generics? Those guys up top are holy casters, there's a dragon rider, a bunch of generic swordsmen and archers... huh?  Oh. Ok. We've turned hard into fantasy mcguffin land, I see. Whatever happened to that war? : Well.: Hey, you three. If you feel so confident about handling yourselves, maybe you want to lend a hand here?: Gladly.: As I said before, the only good bandit is a dead one. Let's make sure these one stay that way.Oh, he reanimated the bandits? Which I guess turned all the mages into priests of the gods and adepts? Where'd he get the dragon?  : I suppose that means I'm in too.TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
 I'd love to learn why the game always has to load after overlaying the level.  Brooke promotes on joining and I put her into the assassin class. Cruel Efficiency helps her finish off people below an HP threshold, and honestly she's probably getting benched in favor of Cia and future units. We'll cover rogues when Cia promotes.  Likewise, we'll cover mages when Sloan and Alden promote. Sara and Samara are leaving us after this battle, not to return until an extremely dumb plot reveal.  Samara immediately goes Acolyte.  Next time: The laziest undead in.. a teleporter dungeon!
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Sep 4, 2022 07:15
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: We are robbing you now?
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It's true, having an adorable attack ferret is a very strong selling point for a character.  That other character's original design though...  The fact that you just don't care about half the exp and loot is incredibly damning of DD.
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Sep 4, 2022 08:42
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You're right, that is incredibly booby. The thing that gets me about the sprites is that they're just doing the pixel art Fire Emblem thing by sticking the character's head onto a regular sprite. That's fine for the most part, but when they go out of their way to make extremely booby character designs, it gets incredibly jarring when the sprites don't reflect the character at all. Fire Emblem didn't get really booby designs until they started having 3D models, so that said booby designs could have their own matching model. They may have looked incredibly stupid in context, but at least they were consistent. This game takes the later Fire Emblem boobiness, cranks it up to 11, combines it with early Fire Emblem sprites, and it gets a much worse result than either for it.
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Sep 4, 2022 09:11
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Yapping Eevee posted:It's true, having an adorable attack ferret is a very strong selling point for a character. Yeah, ferrets are awesome. Also it's nice to see one lady wearing actual clothing. I would like to request we keep her for as long as possible just for contrast.
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Sep 4, 2022 09:33
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Sophia is an extremely good character design in the midst of a sea of mediocrity, and she was my strongest archer.quote:There's just not much to say about this mission, and it's a huge problem with Dark Deity in general. A lot of LPs are on the archive complaining about IntSys' dumb gimmicks like thieves stealing treasure or enemy recruitment and whatnot, but those are actually good for the game! Yes, it's annoying when the villageburner bandits show up, but they offer the player an incentive to actually use their mobile units and do something other than "slow, grinding advance in infantry formation". Every single Dark Deity battle is applying your infantry square to defeat the enemy in detail and then Roman tortuga cosplay as your tougher/dodgier/lifestealier characters absorb the enemy phase. Dark Deity jettisons all of this - I suspect because the developers had real difficulty coding the base gameplay - in favor of rewarding more gold for turns taken. This. The best FE maps are those with a ton of different things happening at once and you have to split your army accordingly to achieve all the objectives, usually with a flexible time limit but a time limit nevertheless. In Dark Deity, nothing happens every map apart from your team slowly walking up and taking on the same group of enemies over and over again. That's something most indie game designers don't grasp (or grasp but takes out because they hate time limits) and the game suffers for it.
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Sep 4, 2022 09:52
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Oh wow yeah, the 4 weapons are pretty dreadful huh. I had some hope when you first mentioned it because hey, that gives you a lot of room to differentiate characters! You don't even need unique weapons, you could easily make warriors unique depending on which 4 weapons of the 10 warrior weapons they have! For everyone to essentially have the same 4 weapons is...terrible. Great LP, I love seeing a good dumpster fire.
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Sep 4, 2022 09:59
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…Two sisters called Sara and Samara? Cripes. It bears repeating, considering the D&D inspirations here: Map design and secondary objectives are the kind of thing that takes new DMs a lot of time to master, too. If you want your PCs to go fast, you have to design encounters that give them a reason to: competition for their goals, rising physical danger, reasons to work independently rather than stay together. A big part of it is giving your enemies a goal to work towards, which Fire Emblem does through the bandits and thieves, along with recruitables who need your help or initiative to retrieve. It takes practice, especially when the “acceptable” starting point is 5 orcs in a featureless square room. …TL;DR: Maybe some of that kickstarter money shoulda gone to playtesting.
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Sep 4, 2022 10:16
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Arzaac posted:Oh wow yeah, the 4 weapons are pretty dreadful huh. I had some hope when you first mentioned it because hey, that gives you a lot of room to differentiate characters! You don't even need unique weapons, you could easily make warriors unique depending on which 4 weapons of the 10 warrior weapons they have! For everyone to essentially have the same 4 weapons is...terrible. The additional problem with the 4 unique weapons thing is that you have to upgrade each weapon individually, so in effect each character only has 1 weapon past the early game anyways.
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Sep 4, 2022 10:58
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This is a very ... interesting game. It's easy to see the influences; the game plays like a Fire Emblem, but the story progresses like a Shining Force, including the just-before-combat unit joining and the more fantastical elements and child soldiery (never forget Shining Force 2 literally took school children and turned them into a fighting force).TheGreatEvilKing posted:More notable about Sloane is that her original design was so horny the developers had to change it after fan pressure. Jesus loving tapdancing Hubert Cross Christ, what the actual poo poo. The V thing above the bikini bottom is supposed to be part of the Fantasy Corset holding up those water balloons masquerading as boobs, and of course the entire thing is painted on so it's not even a corset and gravity is just completely ignored. Her new design isn't great, either, the loving neck pain of having her tits supported by her mantle and cloak strapped around the back of her neck must be insane. TheGreatEvilKing posted:
A femme-presenting individual who doesn't have tits out? I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
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Sep 4, 2022 15:35
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Welp. Definitely glad I never bought this one. This whole game feels incredibly childish, from the character designs to the writing to the world-building. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 17:15 on Sep 4, 2022 |
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Sep 4, 2022 15:55
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:It's just Outdated terminology. Nowadays it's called light novel writing, or Cinemasins nitpicking. Though I also have a pet term of "narou-kei". I don't understand why you'd commission female designs this blatantly fanservicey, unless these just came out of some kinda RPG Maker auto-generator. Wasn't modern FE's character designs and personalities devolving into fetish appeal supposed to be a criticism people had instead of a selling point? Or are there really that many people who think Camilla and Charlotte are good characters? Delphisage fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Sep 4, 2022 |
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Sep 4, 2022 16:30
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Delphisage posted:Outdated terminology. Nowadays it's called light novel writing, or Cinemasins nitpicking. like in so many other artistic endeavors, it is a major criticism and -also- a major selling point, and so designers keep trying to find the best way to simultaneously have their cake and eat it too. of all the things I'm reminded of an early Bond flick where the chief henchwoman fucks Bond, and then gives a nice little speech about 'did you really think that your magic dick was going to make me not a villain anymore,' with the implicit 'the fact that happened in the last movie was hosed up huh' unsaid. the designers are trying to find the balance point where they can appeal to the horny creep audience without turning off the wider audience, and that is an exercise with no successes, just degrees of failure.
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Sep 4, 2022 16:51
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Ugh, I don't even know what to say about most of this, it's just incredibly dull. (And the less said about the horny concept art the better, who even is the audience for this?) That said, this probably warrants explaining: quote:So, apparently they've decided to reference random youtubers in their item names? Guga Foods is a guy who does a lot of strange meat- (and especially steak-) focused cooking videos that I'm having a hard time thinking of how to explain. He does a lot of bizarre experiments just to see what happens, which can be fascinating even as it also seems incredibly wasteful. I see his name come up a lot in the larger context of cooking/food youtube but outside of that I'd generally be surprised if anyone knew who he was.
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Sep 4, 2022 17:16
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Val' is apparently the prefix for nobility in this game, because, uh, I dunno, apostrophes are more fantastical. Or something. consider: Valdistar, Valmyren - works for establishing the nobility pattern, until you get someone named, I dunno, Jill Valentine ValDistar, ValMyren - multiple capitals look weird. Weirder than apostrophes. Val-Distar, Val-Myren - hyphenated names typically mean the person married and wanted to take their spouse's name but not give up their own. "Who is this Val family that every noble on the planet is related to?" Val Distar, Val Myren - "why do all these nobles have the same middle name?" val Distar, val Myren - works, but could run into text parsing issues because of the space. Val'Distar, Val'Myren - highlights that Val means something on its own, while still showing that it's part of the last name. there's so much else that is wrong with this game, and yeah, there are fantasy authors out there who seem to throw around apostrophes in every syllable break, but these guys actually seem to be using the apostrophe in a sensible manner.
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Sep 4, 2022 18:53
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Dark Deity is in a lot of ways a very average game, and the plot is certainly pretty hokey, but I enjoyed my time a lot with it. I played back when the balance was still pretty messed up, so it's hard to say how it feels now in comparison, but on Deity mode I was able to get through without a lot of fuss as a new player and now maps got me stuck. I think some of the biggest issues it has as a game is that it's aimed at an audience it expects to already be diehard Fire Emblem fans, and so a lot of its aims are done to be different from that general mold without necessarily doing enough to stand apart. Things like its randomizer modes, challenge run options, and time-based map scores all are things that the FE community has done after spicing up the same game over and over again. I liked that it tried to do some of its own things, even if they mostly don't work. The armor system is too dense to read at a glance, and the weapon system has too many duds and you can't afford to upgrade enough weapons on each character to really make it feel like you have more options. The class system, too, is plauged by there being a 'right' choice a little too often. And, on higher difficulty, trying to add new characters onto your team can feel like trying to jump onto a running train. Much better to consolidate down to your tried and true early game stars. It reminds me a lot of Kaga Emblem games, or his new Vestaria Saga. Is the game a masterpiece? God, no. But there's enough creativity here that I had fun with the bumpy ride and I'm excited to see what the next draft is gonna look like. But I'm a filthy Thracia 776 liker so maybe I was a little pre-disposed to enjoying a clunky FE adjacent experience.
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Sep 4, 2022 20:59
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Personally, I still can't get over how everyone is always carrying around 4 of roughly the same type of weapon. Which is weird because you can do the same exact thing in Fire Emblem and it doesn't feel the least bit incongruous there. Perhaps it's because weapons in Fire Emblem have limited uses and so it just feels more natural from a gameplay standpoint?
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Sep 4, 2022 21:04
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IthilionTheBrave posted:Personally, I still can't get over how everyone is always carrying around 4 of roughly the same type of weapon. Which is weird because you can do the same exact thing in Fire Emblem and it doesn't feel the least bit incongruous there. Perhaps it's because weapons in Fire Emblem have limited uses and so it just feels more natural from a gameplay standpoint? It feels artificial for everyone to show up with exactly four weapons. While your units on the lategame might end up with that many weapons, in universe that was unusual, the privilege of being successful murder hobos. Enemies and new recruits tended to show up with a more reasonable 1-2 weapons, maybe 3 if the were a well equiped member of a flexible class. Plus those different weapons actually had distinctions beyond tiny stat changes. Expensive limited use weapons, weaker weapons with better range, weapons that countered specific enemies all provide more meaningful decisionmaking than "do you want damage, accuracy, or crit chance?"
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Sep 4, 2022 21:28
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I shared this on discord and someone pointed out that her bikini bottom and gems look like a pokemon face, and now I can't unsee it.
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Sep 4, 2022 22:30
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On top of everything else, how do you decide to put the word "voulge" in your game without knowing how to spell it
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Sep 5, 2022 00:23
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I think the thing that bothers me the most so far is that most characters are weirdly nasty to each other. Irving and Garrick snipe at each other, Maren and Alden have "you're overprotective" tension, everybody treats Cia like trash including her alleged friend Elias, and Sloane is introduced being nasty to Sophia. The only conversation so far where people seem to be getting along without low-grade heat in the background was the Maren + Elias support and I think Irving talking to Alden... although I'm not going to go back and check, because Irving is every bit as intolerable as TheGreatEvilKing describes. God, I despise Irving already. At least most FE protagonists have the courtesy to just be boring. Despite not having any real personality to speak of, Irving somehow still manages to make the few traits he has as tedious and grating as possible.
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Sep 5, 2022 01:53
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That's some pretty blatant fanservice which generally doesn't bother me that much, but this is high end enough that I'm going to laugh. With the amount of attention she obviously got from the dev team, tell me she at least has two whole personality traits. The four weapons being extremely slight variations on the same thing while the original inspiration does it right and has at least a few of them being meaningfully different is a pretty amazing case of just not getting it. I can't say I'm a lover of artificial time pressures so they could have put something somewhere to force the player into action. Luninareph posted:I think the thing that bothers me the most so far is that most characters are weirdly nasty to each other. Irving and Garrick snipe at each other, Maren and Alden have "you're overprotective" tension, everybody treats Cia like trash including her alleged friend Elias, and Sloane is introduced being nasty to Sophia. The only conversation so far where people seem to be getting along without low-grade heat in the background was the Maren + Elias support and I think Irving talking to Alden... although I'm not going to go back and check, because Irving is every bit as intolerable as TheGreatEvilKing describes. Low tier moody assholeishness between characters is easy to write and since it is some form of conflict, some poor writers of, for example, bad games, confuse it for actual conflict you can base an entire thing around, I'm not saying it is one of these games, thankfully it seems an inane fantasy plot is there to take the weight off that, but it sure helps pad interaction time.
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Sep 5, 2022 04:29
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Grinding Advance... in a Teleporter Dungeon Welcome back! Last time on Dark Deity, the infantry square slogged through a bandit house. Then a random necromancer appeared looking for a McGuffin, but a bunch of boobily dressed women showed up to reveal that he was going to use it for evil. Then he got pissed, summoned an army of undead, and teleported out to go get nachos or some poo poo. He left us an army of extremely lazily sprited undead to deal with though, so here we are.  Here we go. I think the pink fence is supposed to be Akmenos' evil arcane power, which forces us to split into two whole grinding advance squares. This level used to have colored whirly things instead of shapes, now, however, the symbols on the circles correspond to where you teleport to (ie. cross to cross). You teleport after the enemy phase. For a game that hates Intelligent Systems' good gimmicks so much this is an odd decision. The assets also look kinda like poo poo and I suspect they're upscaled.  I suppose this is one way to get around having a "no rout missions" promise. You only have to clear half these guys. I'm going to kill them all for XP anyway.  I probably should have tried to steal these off Sara and Samara. I'm not sorry.  This is the one itemization aspect in Dark Deity that can in theory shake things up. We'll get there when we get our own aspects to play with.  Thrilling. So, remember how Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones had a whole bunch of monster units that had different abilities from your human enemies and could do wacky nonsense like petrify you?  Undead enemies in Dark Deity are humans with a lazy palette swap.  Left side team is going to be aggressive here.  Bianca is a lil OP, guys.  Sloane gets a level.  One of Samara's crit quote is "The desert sun burns!" Hmm. I wonder if she's not from our home country?  The right hand side forms into a square to absorb the incoming enemies.   The thread requested that we take Sophia as far as possible, so I'm gonna try to take her to endgame.  So far so good.  So, funny story for the right hand crew. Do you see those two priests by the middle right teleporters? They prioritize healing (with a range of 2) over attacking. Now, those guys in front of them are swordsmen with no ranged attacks. What this means is that someone like Alden, who can strike at range 2, can beat on these guys with no consequences and - as long as he can't one-round them - has an infinite punching bag he can farm for XP.  ...not this one, though.  Garrick is desperately trying not to be put on the bench. He's going on the bench.  The game's balance favors magical units to an absurd degree. In fact, it's fairly easy to make mages durable, much like on how non-Lunatic Awakening you grabbed as many sorcerers as you can and low key put all the conventional tanks on the bench.  Brooke instakills this man.  Cia's getting promoted this episode.  It's... it's a strength level I guess.  Alden no. That's gotta be some kind of war crime.  The left side is cleared out quickly and it's time to kill as many people through the wall as we can. I don't remember class balance being this terrible in the original Fire Emblems, but the magical classes really do just kind of dunk on sword guys here. Archers are still limited to not fighting in melee, and while the Rogue Trickster class gets throwing knives at Tier 3 (my eventual plan for Ms. Cia) having actual range is just too good to pass up. Oh, also, there really aren't flying units in Dark Deity, so the Fire Emblem archer's traditional role of "popping those goddamn peg knight reinforcements before they ruin your poo poo" isn't a thing they can do. We're still keeping Sophia.  The game's class system and abundance of characters work against us here too. In the early game of GBA emblem you don't have a huge wealth of characters to choose from, and the vast majority of them are going to be warriors. Canas is a very good unit, but he's also your only dark mage. He can't be everywhere!  Dark Deity frontloads a bunch of strong mages on you immediately. Alden is a starting unit, as is Maren - who we could have promoted to Acolyte by now if I'd prioritized it. Bianca and Lincoln join immediately and promote into magical attackers. Sloane is another mage who joined us last week. That's half our force, and because they're so easy to use I find they tend to pull ahead.  Alas, poor Elias.  Expect to see this a lot.  Oh, you're here I guess.  I might try making Elias a Surge.  I probably need to hold off using Bianca next level, she's far ahead of everyone else.  Cia's apathy is becoming legendary.  Yeah, we're keeping this one.  Another day, another explosion.  Fire magic turning blue on critical is a nice touch.  Alden begins Operation Farm XP.  Wheee!  Meh.  I'm not sure what distinguishes a happy critical from a sad critical, but her quote here is "bottoms up!"  "It's all in the execution"  Irving has really fallen behind and I'll be honest, I'm not mourning it.  Cia's just much better at tanking than he is.  Even Elias does the melee tank thing better, and there's a light at the end of the tunnel where he can stop being a melee unit in 2 levels.  "Ahahahaha! DIE!"  You seem to be under the impression you won't be becoming an Acolyte.  By now we've got most of the middle cleared. I'm doing a slow grind on the right through those guys. Brooke provoked a melee dude through the teleporter, and the enemy priests are healing up Alden's XP pinata. There's going to be a much better infinite XP punching bag in the future that I plan to exploit the hell out of later, specifically one particular boss.  Sophia continues shooting people.  Eh, I'll take strength. You're literally behind Maren right now, but murder ferret and the will of the thread counts for a lot.  This is a joke.  The grinding advance continues.  Sloane gets another level.  Whee!  That was not a smart move, buddy.  I said we'd take a look at the rogue promotions when Cia promoted, and that time is now.  You've seen the Stalker. It's what Brooke's rocking right now. It has the ability to instakill (5% chance) a la FE assassins, and it automatically hits targets at 40% health or lower.  The thief gives us "armor penetration" based on speed. No, don't ask me what that stat is or what the ratio is, I do not know. I think it's like the reverie's ignore 20% of target defenses? It also gets a disarm range of +2, but you will never use that because disarm loving sucks.  The duelist is a weird one where you get a bunch of buffs when there are no adjacent player units, but you're still a 6 mov foot class probably getting pasted by 3-8 guys. They get 20% of their power stat added to defense, but you could just go for more dodge and live your best life instead.  The raider is a weird one. You get 35% more power against full health targets and a 3% chance to get a stat item on killing people. You also get a horse, which is useless in this game because you don't need to scout and you're probably deploying as a full infantry square. I end up making Cia a thief to send her down the path of the dodge tank further.  I guess that armor pen passive is more hardcore than I thought. Good bye, random moron.   Grinding continues.  I don't have a lot to say. We haven't lost any characters. We continue our slow, grinding advance across the map. Whee.  The teleport gimmick is cute but not interesting. We can bait out those two swordsmen on the bottom without aggroing the boss. We can kill the top two swordsmen through the wall and they can't fight back. The archer will aggro and we can kill him too.  I guess we could try to turn you into a dragon knight, if the thread wants to see that?   Maybe I should have gone for those guys in the last two levels... eh. We're not struggling at all.  You can proc skills on a critical in this game.     This is basically a formality. I realize there's no documentation easily googleable about how to calculate damage in this loving game, and I've played enough FE where exposing the wrong character to a boss is certain death. I pick Brooke because even if she takes a permanent debuff she's probably stuck on the bench anyway.  Oh, this is it? Pfft!  We have enough guys to surround the boss and carry him off to give him a swirlie. He has no ranged attacks, so Sophia attempts to farm some XP.  Elias we are trying to farm - oh, whatever.  This gets Alden his promotion.  Arcanists get a 25% power bonus if they don't move and can use their mastery stat to increase accuracy. They do arcane damage.  There are characters who do battlemage a lot better. Battlemages add 10% of magic to their defense and +15% power to nearby allies after attacking.  Conjurers are your fire mages. They get the 20% life drain skill and a 33% chance to add 15% of current HP to damage. There's a guy coming later who's absurdly good at this, and Alden is fast enough we can make him Dodge Man instead.  The Magician is a weird class. They get +1 to the range of Phase, which lets you teleport people through walls instead of carrying about the terrain. You also get an aura that gives people +20 accuracy and high speed growth. We made Sara one of these, and we'll probably make Sloane one to fix her meh speed growth. Alden becomes an Arcanist.  Thank god.  Oh, cool, we can upgrade someone's weapon further.  I'm sorry Irving, who said you can do the talking? Lincoln is the commanding officer here!  The sad thing is if Akmenos hadn't lost his cool we probably would have just given it to him. : Not exactly.Gee, thanks for putting all our lives at risk by antagonizing the insanely powerful necromancer who can reshape the land on a whim. : Samara!: I think it's obvious we can trust them at this point. They could have easily killed us and taken the stone for themselves by now.: Tried, perhaps.: Well, while your faith in our character is quite flattering, I think what Irving was getting at is how do we know we can trust you? Ah, of course. I wasn't aware Irving was promoted to any rank outside of "cadet force-graduated early" but apparently he can just make that decision for the unit. : Hm. Very well.I get why Sara agrees, they're outnumbered 3 to 1.  : If you truly feel they can be trusted, then there's no harm in it. Besides, surely they're more capable of defending the stone than these bandits. If it stays with them at least we know it's safe.  Well Akmenos the necromancer I guess? : Wonderful...: These stones - most of them have been lost to legend for centuries, but recently many have been popping up again. Really.  Maybe these are the kinds of questions you should have asked earlier before you committed the unit to taking the stone. : That's just what we came to investigate. And unfortunately our next lead is somewhat time sensitive.: So you're just letting this legendary stone go? After all that?: No... Brooke will remain with you, as she has a good grasp of what we're dealing with. Samara and I will pursue this necromancer. We'll have more to share when next our paths meet. : I'm so glad we get to keep the pleasant one. Lincoln's not bsing us here. These women really are from Aramor. You know, the country the opening narration told us King Apostrophe Badman started a war with based on unproven allegations by murdering an entire city full of civilians? : Earlier today, I wasn't aware the undead were even real. Now, we stand over their twice-slain corpses.This is the equivalent of a Russian army unit meeting a bunch of Ukrainians and deciding to trust them. The people of Aramor should have every reason to despise Delians - King Badman started a war of aggression by breaking a peace treaty and then committing war crimes.  But... why? I know it's the cliched fantasy trope that necromancers === bad, but our commanding officer literally kills people by draining their blood with magic. It's vaguely implied the undead are the original person enslaved by the necromancer, but nothing about these guys is horrific or unnatural. They're just lazy palette swaps.  Lincoln continues to be, at least temporarily, the smartest man in the room. Irving is a dumb teenager who has spent his entire life at school in a small town. Lincoln is an experienced military officer. It's very kind of Lincoln to honor this at all instead of just telling Irving to shut up and sit down.  I think the idea is that Irving is supposed to be an antiracist, but the Delian army has proven they should be treated with contempt through their actions. There are other questions as well - this is a Delian backwater town. It's nowhere near the border. Are there more teams of Aramorans? Is this secretly a sabotage operation? Was this all an elaborate charade with Akmenos to slip a spy into the Delian ranks? Samara just admitted they weren't being honest and their lies started an avoidable fight with an extremely powerful foe. This is an army. Irving does not make these decisions.  You're the commanding officer. Just loving say no! Furthermore, these women are essentially at this point paying Brooke to assist in murdering their countrymen. That should really raise eyebrows at this point. What are you doing?  That's exactly what a spy would say. You're dressed like a spy. You're wearing a catsuit and carrying shurikens and ropes and poo poo. Of course, Brooke is a professional assassin and not a spy, which makes this entire situation even worse.  Is it too late to find Akmenos and give him the stupid rock? You have the rock. You don't need Brooke. There has got to be someone, somewhere, who knows about the rock. You are reporting to the king, a man who needs a means to win the war. Maybe he'd be interested in the magic rock.  They don't all feel this way. It's just Irving and Bianca for some reason.  I don't understand this dynamic at all. There's one thing that kind of explains it, and we have to turn back to the kickstarter because the verbiage in game is clunky and awkward.  Irving is Sterling's younger brother, and Sterling commands the entire army. This really should be Lincoln's decision. Lincoln is the commander, and the game will prove to us that he really does hold command of this expedition. Yet at every turn he seems to defer to Irving and constantly praises how smart and skilled Irving is. It feels less like Irving is that smart and skilled and more like Lincoln needs to kiss his rear end or be fired. Now, I don't think that was the writers' intention at all. Every time Sterling is described Lincoln looks up to him and they talk about how he's not a braggart and doesn't hype up his achievements. The writers clearly want Irving to be seen as a natural commander who steps up in a time of need, but this clashes headlong into him being conscripted by Lincoln and Bianca, who are experienced officers who presumably went through similar education that Irving did in addition to fighting in the field. Heck, Lincoln's support with Irving describes Lincoln as a special forces covert operative. There is no void of leadership for Irving to fill! A smarter writer would have had Lincoln recognize Irving's potential and delegate tasks to him ("you lead the flanking force") while Lincoln does things offscreen, OR Lincoln and Bianca would have died and the only person left to command was Irving, who Garrick/Maren/Alden trust with leadership and the newer characters just kind of go along with it. : You won't regret it. Handle that stone with care. It's more powerful than you think. But... we're not on the same team. Our two countries are at war. You have told us nothing about this stone or what it is, and then assigned a professional assassin to tail us. We answer to the king of Delia. He has a right to know that there are necromancers and undead roaming the kingdom. Even if we don't trust him, we should at least tell Sterling so that the military knows to look out for this. TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
 We are 1/6 of the way through this game supposedly about a bunch of kids being drafted to fight in a war and we have yet to fight in the war.  Oh, a cliched anime man villain. His face looks like poo poo both in game and in this screenshot, so I'm going to just use an emoji.  : The stone is of little concern. Quite forgettable, actually. The foul kingdom is rife with them.: But your failure to obey I find quite troubling. Has my judgement of character fallen so far in my isolation?: Of course not, Master. There was a group of young warriors there, which we had not anticipated. Pitiful, really. They wanted to vanquish the bandits for the sake of a local backwater town.: Pitiful indeed. Tell me then, how is it that these 'pitiful' youths bested you?: I felt it unwise to reveal the full extent of my powers over such a... trivial matter.: Trivial? Make no mistake, Akmenos, you only draw breath because you are useful to me. There are many ways to obtain the information I need. I was born of the eclipse, I have nothing but time.: I understand.: Do you? I could reduce you to dust and think nothing of it. You've been a plague on Terrazael for too long.: Such wanton destruction is the folly of weaker men, but I will make an exception for one who treats my life's work as a triviality. This is stupid. : I left a parting gift for them, Master. An army of undead. It is unlikely they survived.: Unlikely? Then you have failed even to see their deaths through to the end. Know this, we are not the only ones in search of the Aspects. I won't have us discovered so early.Why not? I get secrecy is useful, but you can seriously just leave armies of undead lying around. What was the army of the undead supposed to do after killing Irving and company, dick around in the woods? Near a town? : See to it that your baseless assumption is correct. If their bodies are absent from the manor, I will require more from you on this matter. Waste no more of my time.: Of course, Master.TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
The problem with this game mocking its own stupid writing is that it's still stupid writing. Our mysterious anime man seems powerful enough to cow Akmenos into calling him "Master" and casually threatens him, something he sicced an army of the undead on the party for doing. Akmenos even said: Last update posted:
So he's willingly risking punishment from his master for... what reason? Is he a coward? He didn't seem to be afraid of Irving. Are we to assume the mysterious master is all bark and no bite? He gives a halfhearted lecture on how if you didn't see the bodies, they're not dead, but doesn't seem to bother verifying any of it. For that matter, Akmenos specifically told the dragon rider guy to report back. Are neither one of them going to question - gently caress it.  : They are attacked by a powerful necromancer, who came under the less-than-believable guise of the search for a family heirloom.: Sara, Brooke, and Samara, three mysterious women from Aramor, band with the party to defeat the undead.: Sara and Samara set off to continue their search, leaving Brooke with the party.: Though Lincoln's sense of order and duty is conflicted by allowing this, there is more to this necromancer than they yet know.: They head now for Sojourn, preparing to face the anger of King Varic.  : Lincoln is the most capable soldier I've had the privilege of commanding. He would have had good reason.It's this line that makes me think we're not supposed to see Irving as a mini tyrant throwing his brother's weight around, but the writing in this game is so poo poo I don't know anymore.    : All of the competent ones, your Highness. : Exactly. I am patient with you because I trust your brilliance. I'm not so sure this Lincoln merits the same respect.: All he requests is that his group stays together. Oh, ok, he's a dumbass. : That is most generous, your Highness. How_kings_get_deposed.jpg : Understood, your Highness. I wouldn't dream of it.TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
 I upgrade some weapons. Bianca gets a spear upgrade, Sophia gets a recurve bow because hey, we're using her now, Lincoln gets an upgrade on his yellow spell which becomes "Promise", and Sloane's Arcane Missiles become Mystic Volley.  You know what? I think we're going to do all the supports in a separate update. Next time: Supports!
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Sep 5, 2022 04:57
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Yay, my least favorite vehicle of video game writing. Having the player see scenes between people who aren't the party as a way to build suspense! Never mind that this is incredibly expositionary and is just plain loving boring! Also, we're 1/6s of the way through the game? Nothing's loving happened!
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Sep 5, 2022 06:52
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As far as showing off weird promotions and stuff goes, I personally vote for ripping the game balance in half. Ultimately, I'm in favor of you doing whatever you want to to keep the playthrough interesting, but I don't think this game deserves the respect of engaging properly with its systems instead of just picking the most powerful stuff up and using it to bludgeon everything else to death.
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Sep 5, 2022 07:13
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I remember watching someone who really liked Fire Emblem games play this, and while they liked it on a moment-to-moment basis, it was also clear to them that the writing was an utter mess. The issue with the class system and the character customization was that in order for it to work in order to flesh out your armies with a complete kit, you'd need 4 characters per base class, at least. This meant the cast of non-antagonist characters began inflating more and more as the game went on. In regular Fire Emblem, this wouldn't be a problem, with the threat of permadeath-or-the-bench hanging over things. We won't be so fortunate here, though. It gave me a newfound appreciation for how some of the Kaga Emblems were constructed; how they could keep the story consistent across multiple maps, especially when you know the design and order of those maps must've changed throughout development. This game, conversely, has a lot of maps; thus the story connecting those maps together is going to bend in whatever ways it can to use as many of those maps as possible, with as many of these characters as possible. It's a system which guarantees bad writing could be the only possible result. The plot is going to begin demanding a lot of strange things to keep this train moving. It also made me much more amenable to the strategy games where they either keep the cast of characters small or when they front-load the number of joiners to your army. People who play Fire Emblem haven't really needed to learn that lesson in the way that, say, the Front Mission series did. Morroque fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Sep 5, 2022 |
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Sep 5, 2022 07:46
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...gently caress all of these people. Can we put the ferret in charge?
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Sep 5, 2022 13:43
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| # ? May 8, 2024 23:43 |
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the fabric over Sloane's bodacious knockers looks like dark green mozzarella being pulled apart, and it almost irritates me as much as her v1.0 tiddy mage outfit does
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Sep 5, 2022 20:24
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