I like keeping my blogs sorted, so this is a blog for stuff on any video game I've played except Xenoblade and Hollow Knight due to already having blogs for those. @xenoblade-misadventures @hollowknight-confessions
There are so many AUs where Artificer's blue slugpup is taken by scavengers and raised by them . When will there be an AU where th GREEN slugpup s taken away by leeches and raised by them, huh?
Did you know green lizards are immune to reds, so reds get their shit rocked by a big dumb green lizard
I do! Its fucking hilarious
I found out while playing around with safari a while back. Tried to kill a green and was extremely confused by the fact that i couldn't lmao
Does that mean my special talent is terrorism against Pegasi?
go to random word generator and generate two words. these two words are now your pony name. im
JUDGEMENT DRILL
based on this, my cutie mark will be some sort of awesome drill and my amazing talent would be judging who lives and dies and delivering justice by killing them with said drill. this is moral bc its my special talent. ok now you try
Ok, so, I also want to bring up since this was technically a blind Ironman that this feels like the way the game was meant to be played. Doesn't feel like blind Ironman is intended for some of the later games, especially 3H, but for Sacred Stones, the permadeath really did add to the game. Like, Seth would not feel like nearly as much of a godsend as he did if his role of "the one early game unit who probably wouldn't die" wasn't paired with high impact of death.
Also, I could really feel with Erika's struggles. She's not a master tactician, she's a refugee, at least, at the start of the game. So, she would lean heavily on the handful of experienced soldiers guiding her and a lot of her men would die to completely avoidable mistakes. And that builds into her deciding "no I must fight" at the end of the game, because she's seen death. Because the player has seen the deaths of likeable units.
It also makes the rough parts of the run feel extra meaningful. I went through a lot of the maps unable to deploy the maximum number of people because quite literally everyone was dead. The game would say "you can deploy up to 12 units for this map" while I only had 8 people left alive. This was especially true for the early game. Which made me get attached to the early units who made it through to mid-to-late game since all of them pulled their weight when push came to shove. In general, it felt like the majority of units pulled their weight at one point or another. Every death mattered, but it wasn't game-ending.
And, like, this is all with the context that I am not good at strategy games. Like, during my playthrough, I very regularly deployed soldiers, only to realize after the battle started that they were unarmed. I did not reset maps for this. Alongside, the vast majority of my units died to dumb errors. Stuff like putting my mages in range to be ambushed by 5 people, not paying attention to the map or enemy placement, forgetting to heal my tanks on player phase, forgetting to check how much damage my unit would take from an enemy before clicking the "start combat" button. It's a particular slap in the face to lose a unit while grinding. Rip Kyle and Artur, but it's part of the game's experience, and it was fun. I even screenshotted the majority of the deaths because I was ranting about the game to a friend over discord.
I just beat my first playthrough of FE Sacred Stone.
This is a quick chart of which units died and who reached the ending.
As you can see, everyone fucking died. Good times.
every single time israel fires on people picking up food or humanitarian aid it truly cuts me to the core. obviously it's equally horrible to fire on civilians escaping the invasion or to bomb hospitals or refugee camps or people just living in their own homes. but there's something so brutal about hitting people right when they have gathered for life-saving aid. by firing on them there the IOF have set up an impossible dilemma where starving people have to choose between death by bullet or death by hunger. they have left no room for palestinians to choose life. i do not know how my government or any other government can just sit by and watch while innocent people continue to be gunned down for the crime of existing in israel's eyeline.