#I really enjoyed this route in terms of gameplay
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Definitive “Feelings On 3H” Post
So I’m making one big post on my feelings on major things worth discussing about 3H and how I feel about it. Don’t feel obligated to really interact with this one much, it’s mostly just for my sake, as something I can just link to and say “go to section X about how I feel about Y”.
The reason behind this is I just don’t really want to actively engage in 3H discourse anymore. I feel as if I’m a broken record at this point. If I have new things to say about it somehow, I’ll say it, but for the most part, I’ll refer people to this if they wanna know how I feel about general 3H talk.
Story
Story Section 1- General narrative feelings on each route.
Azure Moon is, in my opinion, the most solidly constructed route in terms of writing, character development, and storytelling. It knows what it wants to accomplish and, aside from a few gripes, I will always applaud it for that. Verdant Wind and Silver Snow meanwhile, aren’t bad and I certainly didn’t have a terrible time playing through them. However, the unique story bits in each route don’t justify the gameplay experience you have to work through in order to get to them. Still, the big reveals in each route were nice to hear for the first time, and specifically for VW I enjoy Claude very much. Crimson Flower I don’t enjoy that much at all. Its story is what I can only describe as a static, eye-roll inducing victory march, which makes up for its lack of length with its seemingly intentional negative character development; everyone is ignorant, an asshole, or sad as fuck aside from the CF exlcusive cast. I would give the route props had the game bothered to stand in its foundation rather than flounder and make numerous attempts to depict every perspective as absolutely equally valid and righteous.
Story Section 2- In trying to appeal to every perspective, the game lacks focus, foundation, and respect for itself.
It should be expected that a game with multiple routes tackle different specific subjects. However, in Fire Emblem, there always, always manages to be a unifying theme or foundational story philosophy-an Aesopian type moral if you will-no matter the route. Alm and Celica learn that their one individual philosophies can’t exist on their own, and that leadership requires strength and compassion of equal measure. Eirika and Ephraim learn that personal wishes must take a backseat for the good of Renais and Magvel as a whole, as their routes in FE8 use their own weaknesses to develop them as leaders and royalty. Corrin’s one constant in the Fates games is that conflict is inherently meaningless and does nothing but perpetuate a brutal cycle of hatred, vengeance, and violence.
Even in games like FE7 and FE10, where the technical ‘route splits’ are more unconventional, there’s still unifying themes that manage to wrap back around at the end (7′s ‘single-minded pursuit of justice and strength/power to protect can actively hurt you and those around you, especially if you are ignorant to the pain others are going through’ and 10′s ‘people have as much capacity to be good as they have to be evil, they will hurt each other due to petty misunderstandings and bigoted views, however, they are worthy of living as they are because of the ability to grow, change, and aspire to something better’).
3H, to put it simply, does not have any grand unifying theme unique to itself. The closest examples I can think of is ‘It’s worth it to reach out to those around you to share your pain so you don’t become engulfed in it’ and ‘no matter what side you fight for, war makes everyday life a living hell for everyone’.
But to me, both of those things are just... basic truths and story elements present in every dialogue heavy FE game. War has been showcased as being terrible since FE1, where characters were held hostage, threatened to fight for a cause they didn’t believe in, innocent villages were destroyed, there was a literal child slave market, etc. And sharing your pain with those close to you in order to bear life’s challenges has been a constant trope with many FE characters, story significant or otherwise, since at least FE6 with Guninivere (probably earlier if I’m missing something from FE4 or 5). The only difference is that 3H has a fun little song to go with it.
That leaves the specific themes of each route and perspective, but because each leading character is so different from the other, and the writers didn’t want to overtly favor one over the rest, every dialogue regarding these things feels compromised; half baked, or lacking a point.
‘Crests are symbolic of a harmful power structure but also are a symbol of justice used to ward away threats but also are a tool used to gain social and political capital in order to change the world but also are an ancient power obtained through destruction that must be used with wisdom.’ Four different perspectives from four different routes that the game attempts to depict in a balance in almost every single dialogue regarding them. And this same process is applicable to the game’s attempts at discussing race/ethnicity, xenophobia, classism, religious views, mental health, etc. There always has to be two, three, four, or five sides to every story in 3H, and that results in an exhuasting and stretched thin narrative that, in its attempts to appeal to everyone, ends up lacking substance in every point it tries to make.
Now, that itself would make for a fascinating and meta theme for the game to uphold, where ‘attempts at trying to balance and accept every perspective leads to an ineffective world that desperately needs unwavering, unconditional, and compassionate leadership’ but 1) that would require the game to play up the need for ‘seeing every side’ as something to be deconstructed, and the game doesn’t do that, it’s played painfully straight, and 2) when it’s one major power (Edelgard) vs. three major powers (Dimitri, Claude, and Rhea), the attempt at balance fails no matter what you do. This lack of focus reads to me that there was lack of respect for the game’s story itself.
Story Section 3- “It insists upon itself, Lois.”
Every time I think about the finer details of story bits in 3H I don’t care for, my brain always comes back to that Family Guy scene where Peter talks about not caring for The Godfather and saying that it’s because the movie insists upon itself. Now, that was done for comedy, but for 3H I must say that it’s a perfect sentence to use. 3H insists upon itself. This is in spite of the fact that there’s no one unifying point that it’s trying to convey to the player, beyond what any other FE games was able to do. So to make up for that, each small instance reads like the game beating the player over the head with whatever minute moral or lesson it’s trying to convey.
Crests are bad? Roll out the Edelgard, Sylvain, or Lysithea dialogue saying so. Church is sus? Get Edelgard or occasionally Claude. Nobles are pretentious? Get the sad NPCs or the few actual commoner characters to imply it. War is bad and cruel? Fire the next “Sad Dorothea” dialogue at the player’s face. Interactions feel artificial, ostentatious even. Part of that is because there’s no other way to get these points across due to Byleth being a silent avatar, the other part though? Feels as if the writers were overtly proud of themselves. “Wow, the war means Bernadetta leaves her room more often, isn’t that a sign that it really changes people?” Yeah, no shit.
Perhaps the most egregious example is the endless instances of the game pushing the idea that there’s “no good side” in war or that “war is a battle of ideals and no one is fully correct” or other moments that want the player to know how deep and Morally Gray the narrative is. It’s cheap and inauthentic, especially when you have a faction like the Slithers. You can’t prop up Gray Morality and have an inarguably evil underground terrorist group.
To be crude, this game explains things to you like you’re five despite being rated T for teens in a series catered mostly to young adults. I get the point you’re trying to make, you did it poorly, now stop repeating yourself, your final grade is a D+.
Story Section 4- 3H likes spectacle over substance.
3H revels in being showy over being constructive. There’s great moments, but there’s not a great plot.
For example, Byleth has many flashy moments that show how awesome they are! They’re connected to a goddess, they can wind back time, they have a super cool historical sword, they’re a top tier mercenary, they’re a great teacher, they’re next in line for Archbishop or the throne for all of Fodlan, their Crest is the game’s version of the Fire Emblem!
Cool! What’s the significance behind all these choices in the writing room? Seemingly next to nothing other than it sounded cool. That’s how it feels anyway.
The SotC doesn’t do anything in the story beyond be Sothis’ bones, likewise the Crest of Flames is nothing other than symbolic since it lacks gameplay or story significance beyond “main characters have it”, Divine Pulse has weak narrative justification for what should be a simple gameplay exclusive rewind, the goddess in question is an underutilized character who checks out before part 1 ends, there’s no gameplay basis showcasing that they’re any better at fighting than their students, and every high level position Byleth is granted makes no sense for them to have given what little established character we get.
That’s 3H in a nutshell. Crests don’t matter other than to be a story device. Being noble or commoner doesn’t matter. The hidden technology doesn’t matter. Abyss is a joke. And on and on and on. 3H profits off of being enticing and cool looking for the sake of it, without actually utilizing or explaining any of this flashy stuff that matters for a video game medium. It makes for underwhelming gameplay and artificial characters. Example, for as much as I love Yuri, take a few minutes to read his backstory; it’s batshit and nigh unbelievable. And it’s indicative of the fact that 3H cares more about including things that sound cool than it does about making sense of anything. We see the impact, but never any material significance, which is the opposite of what you want in a detail oriented narrative like this.
Story Section 5- 3H has very gross tropes.
During 3H’s first year of being out, I desperately wanted to stay true to a view that “hey now, just because it’s depicted like this, doesn’t mean we should blast it, it’s just a video game” but, y’know. I grew up. And part of growing up is recognizing the nuanced parts of these kinds of things.
I won’t accuse the writers of being actively ignorant or bigoted, cuz I don’t know anything about them. But fuck. Fuck, does this game read worse and worse over the years in terms of how utterly terribly it handles sensitive issues.
Multiple brown characters treated like trash by the white/pale majority, with countries said brown characters hail from described as savage and animalistic. Rampant misogynistic tropes, most notably selling women off to be married. Strange, and incessant sympathy for the character starting a war that upends the lives of common people, said character also allowing human experimentation to occur. The offensive and archaic handling of mental illnesses, specifically anxiety disorders, personality disorders, and PTSD in certain instances (IMO only Dimitri and Marianne are done with any sort of grace). And that’s just the explicit stuff! Just the other day I was talking about how there’s incredibly disturbing anti-Semitic undertones regarding the Empire (confirmed to be based on Germany btw) and the Nabateans, something that’s, at times, uncritically repeated by people in this game’s community. This game is mired in terrible allegories and metaphors, which make me cringe the more I think about the real world implications that these lines of thought can have on people in volatile corners of the Internet.
And the kicker is that the writers are so committed to making these things relate to Crests or nobility, as if either of those things are strictly the reason why oppression or discrimination occurs.
The game employs drastic harmful stereotypes, and undercuts all of them by foisting its half-baked unique gameplay/lore toy onto the conversations. It fumbles the ball and didn’t even clean up the mess well.
Characters
I have a tier list of how much I enjoy the characters right here.
Long story short, when the characters are good, they’re good. Like, holy fuck, love them. But when they’re bad? Throw them away. Can’t stand them. And sometimes characters fall in the middle where I see the good but they’re at times written in ways that piss me off.
Worldbuilding/Setting - More is not always better
First off, when you make a character tell the player “Go read in the library for lore”, you’ve lost me. There’s nothing fun and interesting in 3H as a game for you to read in the library.
Fire Emblem’s gameplay cycle doesn’t mesh too well with the typical JRPG standard of storytelling, so the common solutions to building the world and crafting the stories was 1) make as much use as possible of cutscenes, art/cgs, and narrations to communicate the important details before and after battles and/or 2) make an intuitive inclusion to ‘break the pace’ between maps, such as a home base, in order to supplement what’s already present. Alongside this, support conversations were an ingenious tool to develop the characters and the world at the same time, as your varied and quirky cast can help you infer what their place of origin is like. Plus, the game actively rewards the player for seeking this auxiliary information out, granting extra stat bonuses when you purposefully put characters next to each other.
3H, on paper, understands this well. However, the game has too many minute details for a typical FE game structure to handle. The devs themselves even said the game became a “living creature on its own” and claimed no one on the team knows everything about 3H’s story or world. Ignoring how that’s a serious flaw for a video game narrative, what this ultimately means is that since cutscnes and a standard base can’t cut it, we need more and more and more. Libraries, side quests, tea time, ally notes, gifts, NPCs that exposit at you, etc. The DLC even added another damn library for you to sift through, as if the first one wasn’t a pain already.
And though these little flavor texts, landmarks, and set pieces are fun to read about... that’s it. The game hardly uses any of it. It’s flavor without substance, once again. It’s why half the fucking fandom is confused every other day when you bring up these tertiary details as evidence to prove a point, since the active story is too busy trying to weave the other 600 plot threads together to use any of it. That means, for all of this supposed great details regarding each nation and the important territories, we hardly see a damn thing that’s actually different. More is not always better, and in this case, it’s actively worse for both the game experience and the community experience. Not a good look for a game that the devs explicitly wanted people to talk to each other about.
As a fan of FE ever since 2013, who has gone back to play several of the games to see how they tick, 3H’s methods of describing its setting are just so antithetical to what makes the series enjoyable, and for so little reward. It sounds hypocritical given that I love Fates and Engage, but those games actively set up their glorified bases to be as unintrusive as you want them to be. 3H, however, has its gameplay built around a boring and unintuitive cycle.
Gameplay- Fire Emblem but half the time you’re not playing Fire Emblem
Gameplay Section 1-Monastery
The monastery is the most debated gameplay aspect of 3H, and IMO, for good reason.
It sucks.
Worldbuilding wise, while it makes sense that an important location is the hub for the game, that doesn’t account for how dull it is. 12 months and 4 seasons pass and does the place ever look different? No. A shame, since an improved aesthetic would drastically help ignoring the fact that the place is a bitch to traverse. For as fast as Byleth can run, they can’t outspeed the load times. Quick travel only makes the issue more apparent, as well. From door to door, and from week to week, you’ll endure more load times in one in-game month than an entire playthrough of a GBA FE game.
The other aspects of the monastery gameplay, such as teaching, activities, professor level, and motivation, while freshly fun in a first playthrough, become a repetitive slog in subsequent playthroughs. Giving gifts and lost items, eating meals, planting the right things for the garden, optimizing support point gains, using the sauna, taking care of the statues, etc. This cycle is not something I enjoy in an FE game, and unlike Fates or Engage, I can’t actively ignore it without huge penalty.
You can skip right to each main mission, but you’d be giving yourself a huge handicap by doing so; not actively teaching students at max motivation in order to maximize skill point gain is a huge detriment in the long term. It means longer wait for better weapons, longer wait for better spells, longer wait for class change, and longer wait for better skills and battalions. Now on Normal you can get away with this, not as much on Hard, and sure the fuck not on Maddening. To me, it feels like sloppy balancing on top of an already exhausting and dull game cycle. Why let the player skip months if you didn’t bother to carefully balance the game so that the players who do skip months could have even a small chance to clear the game? Honestly, it just feels as if they thought “people might find it annoying so let’s just tack on a skip feature”, and that’s disappointing and lazy.
Overall, I hope nothing similar to the monastery’s implementation is included in any future Fire Emblem game. It’s too antithetical to FE’s main gameplay structure, IMO.
Gameplay Section 2-Battles
To be honest, Fire Emblem has never been the pinnacle of balanced gameplay, and frankly I don’t want it to be. It’s a single player game with fun anime sword guys, magic powers, and dragons. So long as it’s not dreadfully easy or overly complicated, I have no qualms about certain classes or characters being better or worse than others.
3H though is a mess. A fun mess, but still a mess. Movement decrease to foot units means you want a mount cuz the game’s maps are big, and the speed penalty for cav classes means you want a wyvern or a pegasus. Physical units do just that (or maybe War Master for Quick Riposte), you get your dancer, have a Stride unit, have your Magic units and warpers where you need them, and congrats! You solved the 3H meta.
Half-joking, honestly. The game is extremely easy to break, the hardest part is getting to that point (after all, slugging through the monastery is a bigger test of your patience than anything else). Maddening mode, of course, you have be extra careful in the beginning (cuz they probably didn’t play test it cough cough) and utilize your combat arts and gambits effectively, and being extremely conscious of positioning. But, much like Awakening before it, 3H is very easy to snowball. Especially on NG+. That doesn’t mean it’s not fun, but it can get mindless. I don’t personally play that way, but even still, tools such as weapons mostly not being class restricted, Crests, combat arts, gambits, and accessories make the game incredibly simple. It’s a breeze, and only gets harder when certain things are stripped away from you or your debilitated somehow. Again, it’s still fun, because FE is always fun, but challenging? No. Not in a way that I find meaningful, anyway.
The maps themselves? Meh. They look pretty! Lots of small missable details that you wouldn’t see if not for the zoomed in view, that was a neat feature. Not at all useable for actually playing the game, of course, but fun to mess with and to sight see. It does make me resentful, cuz again, we could’ve potentially seen lots of rich, detailed, and varied locations bustling with townsfolk and entering villages to really feel each location. But alas, this is as good as we get.
Anyway, the maps are...fine-ish? Part 1′s maps are seared into my brain, for better and for worse (mostly worse) cuz you have to play them at least 3 different times for all the routes. Prologue through Chapter 5 are either boring, terrible, or both. Chapter 6 is the first map on my most recent playthrough that I say I had fun with in Part 1, then it continues for 7 and 8, then nosedives for 9 and 10, before picking back up for 11 and 12. In short, more than half the story maps for part 1 I find are either unexceptional or plain bad.
Now Part 2? Hunting By Daybreak is atrocious, Garreg Mach defense is pretty fun, Ailell is boring as fuck, Myrddin Bridge and Deirdru are good, Gronder Part 2 ebbs and flows between being awesome and awful, Merceus, Enbarr, and Fhirdiad are okay but tend to drag, Tailtean is alright, Shambhala is hot garbage, CF endgame is pretty fun, AM endgame is okay, VW endgame is awesome, Snow endgame is terrible. I think all routes’ part 2 is better than part 1, but not by much.
All of Cindered Shadows is peak, every map was good IMO.
Paralogue maps I have no opinions on, they are recycled maps with nothing meaningfully interesting about them that I remember aside from Dedue’s, Ashe’s, and Petra’s.
In short, the battle maps in 3H are okay for FE standards. It’s just pretty fucking insane how many times they get reused, so I got tired of them very quickly.
Fandom
Last but not least, just a shoutout to a very unpleasant community experience. Though it might be the best selling FE game as of now, it comes with the price of having some incredibly disrespectful, vicious, and ignorant fans.
Never have I been witness to or been the target of as much harassment on the internet as I have with certain 3H fans. Entire discord servers made to make fun of groups of people with differing opinions, taking over old blog domains to mock people, deliberately seeking out people who want nothing to do with you just so you can defend your favs, etc. And that’s just on this site! There’s editing wars on TV tropes and the wikis, mods on various sites having to do deleting sprees of 3H discourse, artists being harassed on Twitter, and in general just... inserting yourselves into places and spaces where you were not invited nor encouraged to comment. Some of these people lack basic human deceny, respect, and boundaries, and it’s not cool.
Part of the reason why I’m breaking away from 3H now is because this behavior is something I got wrapped up in too, and I’m deeply ashamed of it. It’s toxic, and not at all something I want associated with one of my favorite video game series anymore. I got real life things to worry about and other games to play.
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Anyway, that’s pretty much it. All of my general thoughts on 3H, localized on one post. Sayonara, Fodlan Discourse, you won’t be missed. 🤗
#fire emblem discourse#edelgardiscourse#three houses discourse#rant#definitive 3h post#seriously though this stuff gives me metaphorical hives#and this will save me headaches and brain power in the long run
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a persona 3 reload review
uuuuuuh so i was meant to post this like... two weeks ago, but then real life hit me in the head like a frying pan. now that i've had the time to edit this though, here are my thoughts on p3re! this is also a minato route review, as i played kotone's in P3P (i know it's not his canon name, but i don't want to use makoto due to P5 confusion).
on the whole, reload is a fantastic game. the gameplay easily rivals P5R, and surpasses it in some aspects. the new content is typically great. i also enjoyed minato as a character (well, as much of a character as persona protagonists are anyway), though that leads me to the main gripe i had with reload...
... and that's the lack of kotone's social links. to be precise, two of her social links, the absence of which greatly hurts the overall story.
don't get me wrong, i'd still rank reload a solid 8/10, but it could have been a 10/10 with the addition of those two links (plus one other spoiler thing), and I think that's a shame.
my in depth analysis is under the cut - note, it's very much not spoiler free.
okay, so, i'm gonna split this into 3.5 segments - the good, the mixed, and the bad (you'll find out what the 0.5 is later).
1. the good:
minato - while i'm still a kotone girlie at heart, he's not a bad protagonist at all! his dialogue options have a very distinct personality to them unlike joker and yu, and his character arc is one of the best of all of the persona main leads. an aloof, apathetic boy who learns to love the world/his friends so much he's willing to die for them... it's good!
koromaru - minor, but worth mentioning. you can pat him, and it's so cute. in fact, everything about him is perfect. from his all-out attack screen, to his animations, to... well, everything. no joke, if I needed to sell this game to a non-persona fan, i'd use him as the main draw.
hangout events - while I think being able to chat to everyone in the dorm already made SEES one of the more developed casts, having additional scenes really helped flesh out the party members who are less prominent in the plot (fuuka, pre-january aigis, ken). more things to do at night is also great, given there was nothing to do in the evening after maxing your social stats in the older versions. the perks they give you are great too, but i'll talk about that more later.
voice acting - not gonna lie, i generally don't like the persona dubs, and normally always play with the JP audio. given reload features some of my favourite voice actors though and was basically fully voiced, i decided to give it a chance this time. and i don't regret it! while some actors are definitely stronger than others, none of them were actively jarring, and quite frankly, they hard carried a lot of the social links. kudos to the cast!
strega - while they could have gone a bit further with it (jin needed a linked episode for sure), takaya finally got the development he sorely needed, and his and jin's final battles were actually interesting, instead of being annoying distractions from nyx. in fact, i'd say takaya's new content is easily the best of the new reload exclusive material. in portable, he made no impression on me whatsoever, but now, he finally gets to be the anti!minato he deserves to be.
1.5. the tartarus (aka good part 2, electric boogaloo):
i have so many things to gush about in terms of the new combat/exploration system, i decided it needed its own section! the glow-up tartarus got was massive. i was pretty disappointed when i heard they were keeping it randomly generated, but somehow, atlus pulled it off! i'll talk about individual things below.
collectables/monad doors - one issue with OG tartarus is that it's monotonous. breakable collectables make it much more entertaining to romp through though, as smashing things is Fun. the monad doors interspersed throughout are another good addition - if you want a break from roaming, you can challenge them, but if not, that's fine!
floor layout - another thing that makes tartatus more fresh to explore is that the HD graphics really make the differences between the blocks pop out. the generally smaller floors with more unique layouts really helps too.
shifting - it's baton pass, though without the ridiculous power/sp bonuses that made baton pass a little bit too gamebreaking in persona 5. in other words, perfect!
theurgy - out of all the battle-specific improvements, theurgy and the personality traits have got to be my favourites. showtimes were fun, but too random/gimmicky to be that useful, and ultimate skills tended to fluctuate between being absolutely gamebreaking or too SP intensive to be worth using. blending them into one feature with a content-specific gauge fixes all the problems with them while keeping everything that made showtimes/ultimate skills good.
ambush mechanics - this was one of the things i was most worried about before playing reload. ambushing in P5 is fun, but ambushing in the other persona games...? not so much. reload manages to fix this though by making the shadows less sensitive, which makes the early game a lot better, and but introducing dash-ambushes once the floors get bigger. if the persona 6 ambush system works like this, i'll be happy.
navigator skills - fuuka being retooled to work more like a playable character was an A+++ decision. making her skills player-activated but with an SP cost is so much more immersive than randomly getting a stat boost/enemy info.
unfortunately, while i think most of the tartarus additions were great, there were a few new mechanics which weren't... dreadful, per say, but could have been implemented better.
great clocks - they're better than nothing, but quite frankly, i would have preferred it if benched units got 50% exp instead. they incentivise you to drop two units for a period of time, which is annoying, given i want to use everyone on my first playthrough. late game, great clocks are also a pain to summon, for reasons i'll talk about below.
twilight fragments - i think they're a neat idea in theory, but they need to be easier/more reliable to farm. once you finish off the bulk of your social links/elizabeth's requests, replenishing them becomes a nightmare, which is annoying because you need them for great clocks.
2. the mixed:
while reload did a lot of things right, as per above, there were some things that didn't quite hit the mark.
linked episodes - i'm gonna be blunt. anyone who thinks these are better than social links is smoking something. one thing i like about party member social links is that it gives them a subplot outside of the main story, focusing more on their mundane struggles as opposed to their supernatural ones. half of the linked episodes just develop the main plot more though (and really should have just been included in it), meaning the linked episode exclusive subplots are underbaked.
another problem is that some of the linked episodes are just... kinda badly written. ryoji's completely lacks his existential dread, akihiko's comes off as a poor attempt to make his arena behaviour less OOC, while shinjiro's... it feels like persona 5 writing, in the worst way possible. it's like atlus completely forgot that subtext is a thing that's Good, actually.
while I have been fairly critical of them so far though, there are a couple of linked episodes i liked. koromaru's actually worked with the format, given he's a dog, but the real winner here was takaya. i loved all of his. if linked episodes appear again, i'd rather they be locked to antagonists like him.
art direction- i'll say right now - the UI is fabulous, the model shaders are great, and tartarus looks fantastic. the environmental design on the whole though is a bit iffy - a lot of the environments didn't translate to the super HD very well, and the lighting sucks in general. i needed to turn down the brightness it was so eye-searing. the animation of the 2D cutscenes is also pretty mediocre, and while the 3D cutscenes tend to look better, they're held back by some of the character models looking a bit goofy (mitsuru's is probably the biggest offender). i also think they were too scared of making the sprites 'ugly', and therefore on the whole they're slightly less emotive than the ones in the older versions of the game, which is a pity.
3. the bad:
minato's social links - the vast majority of the minato-exclusive social links are just flat-out not great. serious props to the voice actors here, since they hard carried them. quite frankly, they're just... bland, except for maya's and suemitsu's, which. uh. have problems. on the topic of social links, while i'm happy the romance isn't mandatory anymore, i don't like how half the girls explicitly confess to you. i much prefer the more subtle vibes of the P5/P4 romantic options, as yeah, most of them can lead naturally into romance, but they don't make the MC feel like a harem anime protagonist (derogatory). it kinda brings to mind this twitter post; sometimes, subtlety is simply better.
the absence of shinji and ryoji's social links - i can live without saori, rio, and most of the new and improved SEES member social links, but this is where i draw the line. while shinji dying is better storytelling, just like with chidori, having the option to save him is also important. lock it behind new game plus, yes... but keep it. also, him priming kotone to support akihiko one he's gone is far better than him just flat-out telling minato that he's dying. ryoji's missing social link though is infinitely worse. where is his slowly mounting horror as he starts poking holes in his backstory? his desperation to validate that he's actually real? that he exists?! like yeah, it's nice that the linked episode doubled down on his bisexuality, but i'd rather keep the psychological breakdown aspects of it, y'know?
the difficulty - i started playing reload normal - the level i'd typically use for a blind run of a persona game - aaaaand swapped to hard the second i unlocked theurgy. even then though, the game was a cakewalk until january hit. while i love theurgy, the game is absolutely not scaled around it, especially since you can charge/concentrate them. doing that, you can easily rack up thousands of damage without even going ham with fusion. unfortunately, reload is just... really easy.
the plot's too faithful to the original - while reload added new content, it pretty much left the story untouched outside of the beach scene. that's... not good, as persona 3's narrative had some pretty big problems. the biggest issue is the unchanged pacing - the strega storyline really needed to start a month earlier, and ryoji needed an extra month to integrate with the characters due to his lack of social link. this is one of the things i'm explicitly docking a point for - reload still doesn't kick off until the yakushima arc, which is well over a third into the game.
despite my criticisms, i do want to note that my experience with reload was predominately positive. it's (extremely) sad that you still need to play portable to experience the full persona 3 story, but p3re is still a fantastic game, and has a lot of gameplay features i'd be delighted to see in persona 6.
that's all i've got to say for now - until next time!
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Fire emblem tier list based on my own personal enjoyment of the games. Don't ask what happened to the colors I'd like to know too. Tiers are ordered.
Obviously heavily biased towards my own tastes, but also to the expectations I had going into each game. This is in no way intended to indicate the actual quality of the games.
Short thoughts on my experience on all the games below. It adds up to a pretty long post.
Fates: I originally played it back in late 2016. Dumb as I was, I thought "oh hey if I just play revelation it'll kind of be like I get to experience both routes right?"
Well it turns out revelation sucks ass. I got to the final chapter but Soleil (I had an affinity for lesbians back then. Wondered why that was) got countered with a 3% crit, I ragequit, and I haven't touched any of the games since.
New years resolution is to play conquest. I've heard good things about it's gameplay so if I go in with 0 expectations for the story I think I'll be able to enjoy it.
Dark dragon and the blade of light, as well as Gaiden, have several problems that can be very neatly summarized: they're old. Not much here in terms of story to comment on.
. . . Engage. Let's start with the good: the gameplay is fantastic. One of the best in the series. Most games add some unique spin on the formula to make it their own, and for most it works out well. Engage takes that and goes above and beyond. Smashing weapons (forgot the term) is a fun addition. Engaging is also a really interesting strategic aspect. Skill management is really, really good. (although I wish weapon durability had also been a part of it.)
Problems start coming with the story. It's pretty much a stock standard Fe story. Evil dragon gets resurrected, we gotta stop him. This is considerably less interesting here than with Marth though. Marth was kind of a nobody (crown prince of a minor country but who is keeping track) while Alear is like. The Divine Dragon. Everyone knows them and loves them and is willing to bend over backwards or the nearest countertop for them. It just does not make for an interesting story for me.
There's also the Emblems! As said, fantastic gameplay addition. Story wise they first make no sense. Secondly, if you're going to put some of the most beloved characters from a franchise in a game, you should make sure they represent how they were in the game. Engage kinda falls flat here imo.
Then there's also the artstyle. I dont think Mika Pikazo is a good fit for fire emblem. It works for a few characters, but overall it leaves me wanting something else. Especially for the Emblems, I don't think I like how any of them look except like Roy and Camilla.
For most of the games in the series I can genuinely say that my critique comes from a love of the game. Im not sure I can say that in regards to Engage. It definitely comes from a love for the series as a whole, but I think engage is the only entry in the series which I actually dislike.
Shadow Dragon! Not too much to say here. It's Marth! You girls know Marth right?
The plot and gameplay are both very basic, and not much to write home about. Marth being s bit of an underdog makes him more interesting than Alear. The reclassing is interesting in concept, but I never really got into it.
New mystery of the emblem is kind of just more of the same, but with a larger cast and everything is happening again. It kind of works.
This entry and Shadow Dragon could kind of go either way, but ultimately the Gaiden chapters are enough of an interesting addition to put new mystery ahead.
Three houses was a pretty fun game! But I don't think it's a good fire emblem game. there's a lot I could say about the monastery and the class system, and the skill system and the grinding and the completely uncapped levels! I have a hard time considering it a mainline entry.
In short, around 70% of the game is either grinding or non-FE gameplay and I didn't enjoy that. What's more, I started with CF, and that route is straight up unfinished.
Three hopes isn't here because it's not a mainline entry but unironically enjoyed it more than Three houses.
Binding Blade! Good game. Good FE too. Pretty basic plot, but it's good enough. I'm not at all fond of the "true ending" stuff and also there's the hitrate issues for everything that's not swords. Roy as a protagonists is also one of the weaker ones in the series I think. Sorry man.
If I had played fe6 before 7 & 8 I'd probably have rated it higher. But all the GBA games are good, and everything that's C-tier and aboveis something I'd recommend.
Genealogy of the holy war is a very different fire emblem, but unlike 3H it is still distinctly Fire emblem. I didn't have much in terms of expectations going into this one. It has a lot of quirks, both good and bad.
The typical story formula has a very nice twist on it this time and keeps things interesting. Which is good since the story is one of the biggest draws, since the game offers a bit less in terms of challenge when compared to the other games in the series.
The gameplay quirks are very interesting, such as weapon kills, but because some units are extremely heavily favored in this game, it only ends up mattering for very few units or if you go out of your way to use other, worse units.
Shadows of Valentia is a game I really would've liked to put in high A-tier. It is probably the best remake of a game I've ever played.
But it's too faithful to the original. My problems with Gaiden were not just that the graphics actually hurt my eyes and that the menus were confusing and everything looked kind of weird. The maps. . . . also kind of suck.
There's too much weird terrain with too powerful bonuses. There's also too much open field. Enemy starting locations feel random. Many maps have one chokepoint to get through and that's all the features there is to it.
And then there's the story. One problem with having the script be about 300 times that of the original is that you can fit so much more misogyny in there. And they did.
Thats the negative stuff out of the way let's go to the positive. The class system rules. I'm a big fan of promotion bonuses going to a class base stat instead of adding flat numbers. The magic system with learned spells and HP cost is also really cool.
The weapon system is also great, with being able to promote certain weapons into other things with special features and skills. I like it! It's interesting! Items are kind of whatever though.
Radiant dawn is a mostly fantastic game with two very big problems and one major nitpick. The latter is that there's true ending bullshit again.
The problems are: the new support system. It's boring. Less opportunity for characterisation for everyone that's not a major player in the story.
The later chapters are also just a slog to get through. If you've been in the Fe fandom for a long time you've probably seen memes about RD enemy phases. It is like that.
Good things! The bonus XP system! It's fantastic. Being able to almost pick which stats you want a unit to grow in if you know what you're doing is great! Makes it so practically every unit can be good.
They did kind of screw over Laguz units though. And the Renning bullshit pisses me off so bad.
Blazing blade is a very good game and was many peoples first FE game. I don't have many thoughts on this. If Blazing blade was a dish it'd be bread dipped in olive oil. Simple. Fantastic. You don't need much more.
Awakening was also the introduction to fire emblem for a lot of people. According to some it saved the franchise, according to others it killed it.
Personally I had a lot of fun playing this. It has many well designed chapters, and a simple and fun skill and class system. Though, it has some issues in overleveling and access to grinding. The pair up mechanic is also somewhat of a double edged sword, which I really like. Do you want one stronger unit, or multiple strong ones? It's interesting! . . . . Until you get to A support or unlock dual guard+ at which point there's just one correct choice.
I really liked how silly the writing in awakening got. Very funny script, and a lot of memorable characters.
Mystery of the emblem turns 30 in a few days, and looks surprisingly good for its age. I started playing this a few months before three houses came out, and I had already played all the other games in the series ('cept fates) at that point. I had low expectations considering how bad DD/Gaiden felt to play, but mystery of the emblem feels almost good to play.
I don't miss weapon level being a stat like all the others. But I do miss the starshards (growth modifiers my beloved) and the very funny again staff.
S tier :)
Sacred stones was the first turn based strategy game I ever played and I've been hooked since. No, real chess does not count.
It has a really good tutorial, it's not that difficult of a game, and it has a very simple and easy to follow plot. It's definitely the best game to play if you want to get into fire emblem.
Chapters are well designed, the graphics are charming, and the characters are too.
Again, all the GBA games are very good. There's not too much to say here.
Path of Radiance features several of my favorite characters in the series. Titania, Ike, Soren, Lethe, Jill, "Eat rock" guy, Leanne, and Lucia.
This is probably the best the series ever got in terms of writing. It breaks of from the typical "oh no the evil dragon is being revived" formula and manages to have a plot that feels much more centered on the characters, which I love. The base conversations really help with that.
It's not just the story that's phenomenal the gameplay is also really good. The skill system is a bit limited, but the decisions feel all the more impactful because of it.
The class system has a pretty unique twist in that your units are promoted by leveling past level 20 this time around. The bonus XP system also helps a lot with that, although the Bonus XP system this time is just random stats, unlike in Radiant dawn.
While not the game I enjoyed the most, it's definitely the game I recommend the highest.
Thracia 776 is almost infamous in the fandom. Its known for being one of the hardest, if not the hardest game in the series. It has a lot of peculiarities, like capturing, leadership stars, movement stars, movement growths, magic and resistance being the same stat, stealing equipped weapons, forced dismounting, no Langes indoors, FUCC, Infinite duration statuses etc. . . Theres a lot going on.
But most of it is really good. And more importantly. Almost all of the bullshit goes both ways. Sleeping enemies sleep permanently. Enemies can capture your units, too.(which also has strategic value since it halves their stars) Your units have leadership stars. The fucking thief staff.
It also features one of my favorite mechanics, the crusader scrolls. It's essentially the same thing as the starshards but this time around they also help preventing crits. The modified growths together with thracias extremely low stat caps means effectively every unit can become very strong. Though there's still FUCC, movement stars, and skills to consider. All units are not created equal.
Thracia also has one of my favorite narratives. It is the smallest scale conflict (except Lyn mode) in the series and it makes for a very interesting change of pace. It's not a grand heroic adventure, but just about Leif trying to live to fight another day.
And that is also pretty well reflected in the gameplay. Thracia introduced both Escape and defense maps. It would've been a very different game if it had been all rout and seize maps.
All in all though, the game does at some points feature some actually unfair and unfun things too. Xavier's recruitment. 24x's warp tiles. Ch.4 if you don't know. Going into Thracia completely blind is a decision you'll have to make on your own. I tried doing that and had to hard reset upon hitting chapter 4. Then I opened a guide, and honestly, I don't regret it. But you should play the game if you haven't. It's good.
Also here's a tier list on how good of a game I think every game is, while trying to be impartial.
#fire emblem#long post#fire emblem path of radiance#fire emblem thracia 776#fire emblem awakening#fire emblem mystery of the emblem#the rest dont need to be tagged i dont think.
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Triangle Strategy
My obsession since a month. I finished all the routes and played so many hours, I'm finally ready to present it to you and I hope my review will pique your interest and that you'll join me in this then xD (because I LOVE IT TOO MUCH).
Triangle Strategy is a tactical rpg that also flirts with the narrative genre, in which you juggle between fights, cut scenes and choice phases that will influence the fate of Lord Serenor and the future of the continent of Norzelia. Let's say it right away, I devoured the game; I haven't enjoyed a tactical game this much since Fire Emblem 3H! The game has a lot going for it, both in terms of gameplay and narrative, but there are a few disappointing points that could have been better executed by Square Enix.
❤ The story is excellent, very well written and very engaging. The geopolitical conflict is coherent, and we don't just see everything through the eyes of the MC, there are also side moments to follow the plot from other points of view. It's easy to see that the game isn't at all Manichean; each character has their own vision of the continent's prosperity, and as a result, nobody really embodies evil or good. There's a real maturity of writing here, making TS not at all predictable or cliché.
❤ This feeling is reinforced by the choice system, since in wartime, no choice is fair to all, and concessions have to be made. This makes it almost heartbreaking to decide. The game offers us 2 forms of choice. First, dialogue choices to reinforce your character's convictions, revolving around 3 main themes: Morality, Liberty, and Utility. Then, scenario choices that will influence your game, based on a debate with your group; in fact, the convictions you've strengthened will help you win debates. It's an essential part of the story, and adds a lot of spice, if I may say so, as well as replayability (4 endings, including a "true end").
❤ Let's talk about combat. The tactical aspect is fairly basic and easy to learn. On the other hand, it offers real diversity in terms of combinations. Each recruit has their own combat specialities (2 archers will not have the same attack and defense characteristics, and will have very different skills too). As a result, you really get caught up in studying the field, weather and enemies to come up with the best possible strategy. What's more, the game offers a fair amount of challenge in certain battles, so you'll sometimes have to start them all over again, which really pushes you to persevere and find the best possible combinations; it was extremely addictive for me.
❤ In terms of artistic direction, the 2d-hd pixel art is really beautiful, with superb lighting effects and depth of field.
❤ For the audio, the game is already fully dubbed (Japanese or English), which greatly strengthens our attachment to the characters and our immersion in the story. I played it in Japanese and recognized some big names in dubbing, so it really is a top-quality cast. Now I'd like to turn to the thing that most amazed me about this game: the music. Composed by Akira Senju, whose music for FMA Brotherhood I already greatly admire, he created here an absolutely incredible soundtrack! All the themes are memorable and effectively accompany the atmosphere of every moment in the game. I can say without hesitation that this soundtrack has immediately become one of my must-haves <3
+/- The group's main characters are very likeable and pretty well developed over the course of the game. It's a pity that this is not the case for the other units in our group. Their recruitment is done in a very expeditious way (the characters are accessible as soon as you've increased your convictions enough) based on a short scene like, "Hi, I've come to fight by your side". And then you unlock 2 extra stages if you raise their stats enough, and that's it…at least in Fire Emblem, the appearance of secondary units was done through combat, which allowed us to learn and test their skills, it was much more useful.
+/- NG+ is really cool if you want to keep playing and unlock new characters or scenarios. On the other hand, why doesn't the option just appear in the menu, it's pretty confusing to launch (because yes, I relaunched another day and had forgotten about the little explanatory window, but come on!).
✖ Some combat animations are quite slow, and you can't really get past them even when speeding up.
✖ The exploration phases are not very interesting (only 2 phases have a real impact on the scenario, otherwise it's just to recover items).
✖ The game's OST is neither sold on Steam, nor accessible on Spotify or anything else, I want to tear my hair out in frustration. PLEASE SQUARE ENIX, LET ME OWN THIS MUSIC!!!! (;;)
As you can see, after 80 hours of play, Triangle Strategy is for me an excellent game in its genre, thanks to its narrative and strategic qualities, and I can say that I felt a great sadness to have finished it x') However, I'd recommend it to those who like to read, because yes, the dialogues are rich and abundant, and I think that might put off a lot of people expecting more combat and less blah-blah.
As far as I'm concerned, it's this balance between narrative and combat that gives this game its charm and strength, and which I'm sure will convince other lovers of the genre. I'm convinced of it.
youtube
➡ My Steam page
#triangle strategy#I knew this review was going to be SO LONG x')))#thank you to those who took the time to read it (and congrats XD)#I MISSED THE CHARACTERS SO MUCH ALREADY#what to do now.....jk I have plenty of games to try lol#personal#Lola plays games
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I half agree with you regarding Vandalize
As its own song, I think it's a jam, it's catchy, I love singing it, it's my style :P and I enjoy applying the lyrics to toxic ships lol
But as a Sonic song... why is it here? The theme is very obviously a failed romantic relationship, with the singer being full of regret and bitterness. It has nothing to do with the series, let alone Sonic.
According to the wiki, "Vandalize" has been described as a collaborative song between the band and Sega to reflect both the vast gameplay environment and the high-speed action you can expect from Sonic Frontiers". So... was it chosen because it sounded like Sonic, and nothing more?
When the song was released, I was baffled by how many people assumed it was a Sonamy song. Sonamy? Why are you painting Sonamy with lyrics like "Said you'd keep me safe, now you're tearin' me down, am I laid to waste now that you're not around?"
And now... people seem to have decided it's a song about Eggman and Sage. As if Dear My Father wasn't enough. bruh.
Vandalize is a microcosm of all of my problems with Frontiers. On the surface, it seems Sonic-like in terms of aesthetics, but when you start to question its overall purpose, the foundation starts seeming a little flimsy.
The sense I've always had from this game is that Sega tossed in various elements in order to appeal to hardcore Adventure-era fans, but missed or otherwise forgot what made those elements cohesive in their respective games.
Maybe I wouldn't have minded the srs bsns voice acting if Amy actually emoted sometime before the 15-minute mark. Maybe I'd be less harsh on the open world if it didn't constitute a good chunk of the game and wasn't drab to look at. Maybe I'd appreciate Eggman's, er. "Character arc" more if there were some kind of onscreen build-up instead of pretty much all of it being left in Egg Memos.
I hate to say it, but to me it feels like Sega really took a desperate Hail Mary pass, "quick, the fans are revolting, throw everything and kitchen sink in" kind of approach to this game, and it shows. Frontiers gives off vibes that it's almost... uncomfortable to be a Sonic game for fear of backlash.
And, like, I'm sure Frontiers has some good points like the combat system. I'm not gonna go the Forces hater route and say it's all irredeemable trash. It's just there's a lot about it whose existence feels questionable or forced at best.
Shame, too, because Sega really could have hit it out of the park with something truly original had they not been hamstrung by their fear of not playing it safe. You could have improved the final boss mechanic: why did you go with the same old usual? Oh, because you assumed the mere existence of a final boss other than Eggman would ingratiate it to fans on general principle. And it worked. Okay.
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yo, owner of daily demon spotlight here, what'd you think of smt v? i wanna have tempered expectations for when vengeance comes out, so i was curious how someone who played it felt about it. ty in advance! :)
hi!! overall i really liked smtv tbh, at least enough to keep playing to get every ending (and then see the vengeance reveal THE NIGHT I FINISHED MY LAST RUN 😭)
i'll try to keep it a little vague in case you don't want too many spoilers but......there's still some spoilers lmao i'm so sorry but i at least tried to leave out the huge details or not explicitly say them
in terms of gameplay, it's really fun!! it's pretty difficult at first (i played on hard mode my first run but i've read that normal and casual can be challenging too i guess esp if you're new to the series) but it gets easier as you progress. a lot of people seemed to have a problem with the level scaling, esp for the shiva battle since he's a lv96 superboss (optional really but required for the secret neutral ending) but the bosses in the very final dungeon are like......lv80-85. even the final boss is only like lv85 unless you're doing the secret neutral route then he's lv90 i think. i didn't really think much ab the level scaling until i saw other people talking ab it but.......yea i had HUGE problems with shiva, i had to max out the level of my whole team just to take him on, but then it turned the endgame bosses into a total joke. i had a hard time with some of the other bosses too, the ones i remember the most being hydra, nuwa, lahmu, surt, and vasuki but it might be different on lower difficulties. the magatsuhi gauge + the skills were fun to use but the one you get at the very beginning that just comes with being a nahobino is.........kinda the only one you really need a lot of the time since you can just crit everything when you use it. it didn't really make all of the other ones obsolete tho since some were really good for survival like buffs/healing, it's just that it was a little too easy to get away with using the critical one for most of the time
oh, the unique skills were a good addition too, a lot of them were super useful like idun's, demeter's, and danu's since they all had good healing + extra effects. a lot of the new demons were good too, i haven't used all of them but the ones that i did use either really saved my ass or i just enjoyed having them on my team. although, i'm pretty disappointed the last 3 bosses aren't fusible and i'm ESPECIALLY disappointed that lucifer isn't fusible considering he was in apocalypse. he has such a good design in this game i'm so upset i can't have him on my team 😭 oh yea, and demons being locked behind an alignment is a little annoying but i don't really mind it much????? idk i feel like it gives the game a little more replay value, so i don't mind as long as it's not overly difficult to get. danu. inanna. and maria being locked behind certain alignments and ALSO being locked behind 70% compendium completion was a little annoying, but if you've got the macca to burn you can just summon directly from the compendium for new fusions until you get 70%, so it's not overly difficult to do. maybe a little tedious. i also liked the essence mechanic, but getting them was SUCH a pain since there isn't really any consistent way to farm them except for the aogami essences which are a little easier to get. i prefer the demon whisper from iv/a tbh but essences makes it easier to get certain skills on demons without having to do fusion gymnastics to get the perfect build
another thing is that there were only two real dungeons since the open areas were kinda supposed to serve as dungeons to a certain degree, but those two dungeons were........pretty underwhelming. the first one was really annoying cus it had a fan mechanic that would blow you to certain areas around the rooms and you kinda had to be careful with the timing on certain ones. it wasn't overly difficult to get around, it's just the fans that were a pain. the second dungeon was also the second to last area you go thru in the whole game and the setup was so ridiculous??????? like, it had a ton of long hallways and dead ends which is kinda to be expected but when you see a pic of the whole map for each section it's like "who the hell designed this?!" it's not even difficult to get thru, it's actually SUPER easy even with the time stopping doors gimmick which you can just......ignore entirely and the only consequence is losing out on some treasure. the layout is just weird and chaotic and seems like it might've been rushed cus it's also pretty empty, tbh both dungeons are
for the game's story..........oh god. it's pretty clear it was really rushed cus it was super underbaked. i didn't hate it, i actually liked the beginning a lot! but it falls off really bad after the second lahmu fight imo and the pacing just ends up all messed up. like the second lahmu fight feels like you're still early in the story but it's more like closer to midgame. and after finishing each major area, you end up going back to tokyo and having a meeting with your friends and director koshimizu at the research center, so all of those cutscenes look more or less the exact same since it's always in the same room and even the placement of the characters is almost the same. i've seen some people complain ab the lack of world building and while i don't think it has as much as iv/a did, a lot of the world building just ends up coming from talking to npcs and doing side quests instead of the main story. idk if that's good writing/design really but it's how the game ended up. there's also a few parts where they seem to be building up to something really big, but then the thing they were building up to ends up being mostly underwhelming. like the part where you meet yuzuru in da'at in front of the broken train, it feels like something is ab to happen, like a demon is gonna ambush them or they're gonna run into another friend like dazai, but then the convo ends and nothing happens. but it feels like something should've happened! and the pandemonic summit should've happened a lot earlier imo, idk i just feel like the placement of it is off cus after the summit, you're in the last main area and the end of the game is basically right around the corner. as long as you can beat the shit out of odin, zeus, and vasuki, you can get to the end relatively quickly, but it feels like more should've happened between the summit and the end of the game
i really liked a lot of the side quests tho! i think the khonsu one was my favorite and i wish he and miyazu didn't get sidelined so badly 😔 but the gameplay was really what kept me coming back for ng+ so many times tbh
the characters are all severely underdeveloped too, the only character that gets much at all is dazai tbh. yuzuru is off doing his own thing for a huge majority of the story and his sister miyazu is completely useless, getting minimized to being the chronically ill girl who just hangs out in the fairy forest the entire time. she get sidelined so badly which was so sad to me cus i ended up loving her, esp after the khonsu quest. sahori could've been given a little more, i wish she had a bigger role or something. tao also could've been expanded on a lot more especially considering her role in the grand scheme of things. even aogami doesn't get much of a backstory but it seems like they meant to try and touch on that but couldn't cus of time constraints. dazai is the only one that gets much of an arc at all, and it's decently interesting. i get that they might've wanted to try to do what nocturne did where you almost immediately split off from your friends and only meet intermittently, so their development happens offscreen, but i don't think this game did that very well. it also doesn't help that the world of v is so much more whimsical compared to nocturne
and oh god the ending...... i thought the cutscene where you finally ascend to the throne was beautiful so i don't necessarily hate it, but the way they tied the ending in with everything else was so obviously rushed and not well done. if you've played any of the other mainline games (mostly nocturne and iv/a are my frame of reference since i haven't played i or ii and haven't finished strange journey redux yet) it's really different in a way that i didn't really like. after you beat the final boss, the cutscene where you'd see or at least get an idea of the kind of world you created is so.....disappointing a little bit???? i won't spoil the endings for the other games in case you haven't played them, but the gist of them is that you're with your respective alignment rep and they're talking to you. but in v it's just.....you're getting narrated at by some guy! the whole thing is kinda just an info dump of how the new world turned out instead of getting to infer from the conversation with the alignment rep you sided with! like, really?? it would've been nice to see how the alignment reps felt about the new world at least
i was treating this as kinda a spoiler but tbh if you've played any other mainline game you can kinda expect lucifer to be the final boss or an endgame boss, but they basically used him as a huge infodump at the end?????? if you do the secret neutral ending he starts talking sometimes mid-battle about stuff about the universe that was never mentioned earlier in the story???? like, he talks about how the universe is doomed to reincarnate (which i know is par for the course in smt but still....) and that you have to kill him to break the cycle, but nobody else really mentioned that during the story. and i guess you could suspend your disbelief and say only he knows about it since he consumed the knowledge of the creator so of course none of the other characters would know, but that whole thing just felt really random, like the devs suddenly remembered that smt is supposed to have themes of reincarnation so they threw that in at the end. i don't think he mentions any of this in the other endings, and you don't even fight him in the normal neutral ending! and then after you kill him and see the cutscene about the new world, you find out in the post credits cutscene that none of that shit even worked!! so what the hell was all that for!?!!?!? i get that smt always has huge nihilist themes so the whole "you just did all of that for absolutely nothing cus we're doomed to reincarnate forever" thing isn't out of left field, but man seeing that post credits cutscene REALLY made it feel like i just did all that for absolutely fuckin' NOTHING. i'm kinda conflicted about it honestly, cus it was an interesting twist! i was surprised by it and the way they revealed it was really cool! but it also felt like it just diminished all of the world building lucifer just dumped onto us literally 10mins prior
the requirements for the secret neutral ending also felt really weird cus you're supposed to help all of these demons and it's basically showing you that even the demons aren't completely evil, but then the ending for that route is just "nah fuck all of them, this world is only for humans" and i just don't think it was a very good writing choice. the requirements make you feel like maybe there IS a solution for all of this conflict and maybe there is some kind of way to coexist with demons in a positive way, but then you see the ending and it's like oh......nvm then. maybe it turned out that way cus of time contraints, i don't know. i pretty strongly believe the secret neutral ending was meant to be a route centering around miyazu and khonsu considering the requirements to get it, but then the time constraints made atlus have to dump khonsu and miyazu off into a side quest and shift things around
overall, i'd say it was a good game! the gameplay is a lot more compelling than the story, but the problems with the story really only become glaringly obvious if you play it 4 times over like i did lmao. i've seen some people ask if they should play the game or wait for vengeance, or say that they got the game to play while waiting for vengeance to release and tbh.......i don't think it's all that worth it, if i didn't have the game already i'd just be waiting for vengeance since the story of the original game is still gonna be available, it'll just be a different path entirely. plus vengeance is supposed to have a lot of improvements both storywise and gameplay wise, so i feel like it's better to just wait. i'm really looking forward to it tho, i've been loosely following the trailers/news and it looks like miyazu will have more of a role and they've added a lot of cool gameplay mechanics 🥰
i wasn't expecting this to be so long, but i feel like there's a lot to say about the game even if it seems like there isn't. i just really liked the game despite all its problems and it's in really close second as my favorite after iv, so the release of vengeance makes me wonder if it'll top iv as my favorite. thanks for giving me a chance to word vomit ab it lol
#save#ask#excuse any fucked up spelling/grammar i am like slightly wired from a long day lmao#but i have the energy to answer this so i dont mind doing it now#the gameplay problems i mentioned are prob going to be fixed/improved on for vengeance#i saw news ab a more reliable way to get aogami essences so im hoping that also goes for demon essences too#and i think they've tried to improve on the level scaling issue too#i doubt they're touching the original's story tho so you can still play that within vengeance#ill be really surprised if they do anything to it tbh#but even if they do fix it up a little itll prob be a better experience than the original#so i doubt you'd end up missing out on anything#EDIT OH MY GOD I JUST REALIZED I COMPLETELY FORGOT ABOUT YAKUMO WHEN I TALKED AB THE CHARACTERS#i mean tbf he didnt have shit going on either#i thought his relationship with nuwa was sooo cute tho
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What was your favorite dungeon in P5?
hmmm. well ok this is embarrassing to admit as someone who is openly obsessed with dungeon-based games but i never actually fully completed a single dungeon in p5 lmao. i would secure the route as quickly as possible and then get out. my honest opinion is that as far as dungeons go persona 5's design is kind of lacking. it's very stealth-based which is already a downside for me bc i hate stealth and most of the puzzles are either super obvious and involve fighting something for a key to the next room or are basically portal mazes. that's not to say the dungeons were BAD or took away from the gameplay, (not usually at least) but they were means to an end more than anything. p5 to me is much more of a visual novel than a dungeon crawler so i think some lackluster dungeon design is fine/to be expected and doesn't really take away from my overall enjoyment even as someone who enjoys good puzzle & dungeon design.
as for. your actual question. i am wracking my brain here trying to remember all the dungeons because honestly all i remember is a lot of tedium LMAO. okumura and futaba are out of the running instantly because they sucked. kamoshida wasn't BAD but it was the tutorial dungeon so i probably only liked it because it was easy LMAO. madarame and kaneshiro are kind of equally unmemorable to me? i think madarame had some cool stuff going on in terms of like. set design. i remember thinking the fact that he had his former pupils up on the wall as his work was a cool visual metaphor. i also liked that brief little section where you had to walk through the painting maze. i kinda wish that was implemented in more than just that one room. uhhhh who am i missing here. sae and shido?? and maruki ig but im not rlly counting him his was just boring lol. sae's was kinda cool i liked cheating at gambling and it was fun to infiltrate with akechi even though it ended Like That lmao. shido's was just. LONG. so long. and there were a bunch of parts where you had to trigger certain conversations in order to even get your key into the next area to SPAWN and i kept missing them and running around like an idiot trying to find whatever random npc i was supposed to talk to so that was fucking annoying. but um tldr i guess madarame's was the best??? at least i cant think of any open complaints about it LMAO
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What do you consider the best FE games in terms of gameplay?
Bearing in mind that my parameters for what constitutes good FE gameplay are very different from those of pretty much anyone else who talks about this online:
Replayability and completionist goals like support logs are very much a part of gameplay even if most people disregard them.
Fun unintentional metas
Notably, these are the only games that I can fully enjoy even without cheating (not that they wouldn't be even more fun with cheating).
FE16: 100% completion, I have a playlist all about it, and alongside my favorite ships it's the best thing to have come out of this game in my opinion.
FE10: The game forcing stat points on level ups (at least +1 in combat, +3 with BEXP) as well as the battle save feature makes it feasible for units to cap all stats without grinding or using a bunch of stats boosters...which is good since they're finite here. It's also a lot of fun for draft runs with all the army switching.
Better with cheating, good replay value
FE4 rises above the other Kaga games by virtue of its eugenics babies, which really add to the replay value as you try out different combinations. There's also, unexpectedly, a charming smallness to its overall limited inventory and fewer chapters.
Not a ton of replay, but more interesting gameplay than below (esp. with cheating)
Basically what it says. None of them have universal support logs so that concern isn't there, but they can be fun to replay with different characters. FE5 especially though needs cheating, because I'm not a masochist.
Whoever designed the GBA support system should be ashamed
...Yeah. Good games, but the grind is miserable especially in FE7. Also, FE7's ranking system is awful and annoying although I can't fault it for that as it originated back in the Jugdral games.
Postgame is just a grindfest, but at least it's fun getting there
To this day I still haven't finished all the supports and bond conversations, mostly because I lost interest. There's just too much to collect or achieve postgame and almost no incentive to do so. As many have said though, the gameplay is fun and dynamic - yes, even on Normal.
Play it once (or play the remake) and that'll do it
FE6 would be up with the other GBA games if it had a support log, but since it doesn't there's no reason to get supports aside from the stat boosts. The Archanea games and Gaiden all feel small and outdated now, and there's not much point to going back to them. I ranked the DS remakes below the originals because while they're more up to date they also have more annoying features, like unlocking paralogues in FE11 or Kris in FE12.
Oh my God how did the support log get *worse*!? (Apotheosis meta is alright at least)
Grinding out every variable parent-child support line is a nightmare, and there's no sense of accomplishment because they're so repetitive. The gameplay is dull as anything, and while this is a game for min-maxing that will require lots of grinding. At least Apotheosis exists as a goal for that.
See Awakening, but somehow even worse except for the maps
(Note that this is FE14 in its entirety, not just Revelation - no idea why so many of these tier list makers break up the routes of Fates as if they were separate games)
Much less completionist-friendly than FE13; the support log is even bigger with even more variable parent-child lines, growths are lower and it's harder to level infinitely, and there's no serious postgame content to work toward. The maps are fun and I appreciate what they were going for with Phoenix mode even if no one else does, but there's a reason I haven't come back to this game in years and it has nothing whatsoever to do with moral outrage or nitpicking over plot holes.
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“books-are-my-life-stuff: Oh, you reminded me. Alola was actually my second favorite region after finishing Pokemon Moon for the first time. Despite the unfair difficulty of Totem fights, I enjoyed the environment, lore, legendaries, and especially characters of Alola. They were great, they felt welcoming, the characters felt very close to me, I love the tradition, and I felt "at home" in Alola.“
That’s fair, I won’t really argue that. I do like the legends and the UBs, and I can get that someone might enjoy it.
“However, Alola now falls to fourth place after playing Ultra Moon only in span of a month after Moon. It's probably my fault, I should have given more time between the two games, but back then I didn't expect 80% of USUM as just rehash of Pokemon Moon, and the changes that USUM made, some are great (the QoL improvements, Hau being more awesome) but some are...not as much personally (Lusamine's character, the Rainbow Rocket postgame).
After some time, the flaws of Alola games for me start to show as I slowly get over the hype. I think it has similar problems as with every games in later gens: they leave other characters severely underdeveloped. Sure, it's not like Kalos where every single character is underdeveloped, but characters that aren't the Aether family are very much overlooked. SwSh fixed that a little bit but Marnie is still underdeveloped compared to Bede and Hop.
As a result, fans tend to focus solely on the developed characters: the Aether family, especially Lillie. Alola characters that aren't Aether family tend to be great as groups but as individuals they don't have much, there are obviously some exceptions like Hau, Kukui, Guzma, but even then they're still underdeveloped compared to Aether family. And the manga of Alola generation doesn't fix this at all, even though the XY version of the manga was great.”
In fairness, a lot of the “third” games tend to just be...mostly the same exact game, so I don’t think that’s what hindered it. Almost the opposite; what they did change just wasn’t changed for the better, like the adjustment to Lusamine or the inclusion of Rainbow Rocket. Other characters have always been fairly under-developed, but I think the problem is that as the games became more story-centric, it starts to hit a little worse. When the games were mostly just straight gameplay with very few stops, it didn’t matter that gym leaders and the like weren’t that well developed. You get a little bit, and you develop from there. But in games where every goddamned route is at least one cutscene, sometimes multiple, it starts to hurt that you don’t actually know much about them. It always especially bothered me in Gen 7 that you don’t actually battle the trial captains. They may as well not even be there. I know there’s supposed to be some what to face off against them, but for the life of me I don’t think I ever figured out how to do it. So I don’t blame anyone for latching on to the few that did get that focus.
Also I’m kinda surprised the manga doesn’t do more. I figured that was one thing I could count on with it. I think the anime involved a lot of the trial captains. I guess if you want character, that’s what you have to go with.
“I dunno, maybe I'm just holding an unreasonably high standard for modern Pokemon games in terms of story and characterization after Unova, which I still consider as the best, but Unova really did a great job in making a lot of characters memorable and relevant to the plot somehow, modern Pokemon games tried but kept failing to do so. If only the focus weren't too much on the Aether family and more balanced, the Alola characters would probably be stronger.
I still like Hau the most among all Alola characters though, despite him being underdeveloped and the manga proves that he still can be sidelined even further than the main games.”
No, I think that’s fair. Considering they did do a good job with the development of a cast with Unova, I think it’s reasonable to expect a bit more from the later games as well. There shouldn’t be any reason for the reduction in quality of what’s produced, and personally I’ll go to my grave blaming the decision to move to 3D models without extending the development cycle. I feel like it’s super easy to track that as soon as they made that shift, things started falling apart in terms of content being cut or not fully fleshed out or recently just kinda not looking great. It’s messy.
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OK, VW is now complete.
Overall impression: It can't even begin to scratch my emotional investment in Chrobin, but it also wasn't mindbreakingly frustrating like Echoes. It's a fairly shallow, at times stupid story that is dragged down by rather poorly used gameplay systems.
I am aware that VW is only one of 3.5 routes, but ultimate it still took me over 50 hours to complete, and that's not a small time investment. I think it's quite fair to judge it on its own merits.
For VW, the story's greatest issues:
1) Characterization Lite(tm)
2) Claude's motivations, aka "your Almyra is in another continent" and "Church Bad"
3) bad integration of game systems like calendar, route split, etc
In general, this route is deeply weighed down by a whole bunch of pointless threads from other routes... including what feels like the entire war phase until the last two battles. The war comes out of nowhere, means nothing, and ends without fuss. It's entirely about characters we barely know, and while it might be read as showing how big of an issue the Agarthans are because they puppeteer it, we spend disproportionately long on it.
This leads to most of the war phase being a rather boring progression of military battles with no investment, and then the thing the route has spent most of its previous chapters building up (dragon magic) gets shoved into three exposition dumps and two battles at the end.
The time allocated to the sections is completely disproportionate, to the point that imo we shouldn't have actively engaged with the war at all. But they had to reuse Gronder, I guess?
This is an issue that seems to arise from the route split being handled very poorly. Another major problem is the calendar, which really screws up the pacing and pointlessly inflates the game time. Most of the game systems are some combination of wasting your time and failing to add to the story. It's really unfortunate and makes the game much more tedious to play than it really should be.
There were certain parts I enjoyed tho.
I'm not a hard sell, emotionally, so the combination of using them in battles, their supports and their paralogues did foster an affection for these characters in me. The side content about the characters was probably the most enjoyable for me.
I also did find the setting fairly interesting, at least in terms of the concepts presented. I just wish they'd actually used any of this for something.
And of course, I think Claude's face is really cute.
Final verdict: Not completely awful, but shouldn't be 50 hours. Shame that they won't ever provide a good follow up or expansion.
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Zhou enjoys best two days in F1 with Spain outing as Alfa showed were ready to fight
Zhou Guanyu was in high spirits after the Spanish Grand Prix as he matched his best result of the season with a strong run to ninth position, ending Alfa Romeo’s sequence of point-less races in the process.
Having bagged two points in Australia earlier in the season, the Chinese racer repeated the feat at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya with a confident and productive performance on race day.
READ MORE: Alfa Romeo announce shake-up as James Key takes over Technical Director role
Zhou had qualified 13th, three places and three-tenths ahead of experienced team mate Valtteri Bottas, but shot up to ninth on the first lap and remained in the top 10 battle as the race developed.
In the closing laps, Zhou went wheel-to-wheel with Yuki Tsunoda for P9 and ultimately claimed the position when the stewards determined that the AlphaTauri man had defended too robustly.
Reflecting on the result, Zhou said: “I really enjoyed today, it was a well-executed race from my side: I think these have been some of the best two days for me in Formula 1, in terms of performance.
Alfa Romeo have been part of a close midfield fight in 2023
“I had a good first lap, and that was crucial to give us the opportunity to get something out of this race: our pace was strong, although there were times in which we had to manage our tyres wisely.
“I knew I had to keep the pressure on the others to bring home a result and, when the opportunity was there, I tried to force them to make a mistake.”
POWER RANKINGS: Who makes it into the top 10 after a tough Spanish Grand Prix?
As for the moment with Tsunoda, he added: “At the end, I knew I had the pace to take Yuki: I had DRS, I was half a car ahead going into the corner, but I wasn’t given any space and didn’t have any other choice than to take the escape route to avoid contact.
“In the end, things worked out well and we were able to bring home two points, which was a good result.”
Meanwhile, Team Representative Alessandro Alunni Bravi praised Zhou for driving “very well” as he pushed Alfa Romeo back into the points-paying positions amid a fierce midfield scrap.
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Zhou Guanyu: Penalty for Tsunoda was ‘the right call from the stewards’
“Today, we showed that we’re ready to fight for every single lap, every single tenth of a second on track,” he commented.
“We have shown that, working together with determination and as a team, we can deliver the result we all, and our drivers, deserve.
READ MORE: Pre-orders for F1 Manager now live as launch date revealed and new gameplay trailer drops
“The field is very close, we saw that today: every thousandth of a second matters so we need to be aggressive, have a results-driven mentality.
“We had a hard fight on track with the Haas, the Alpines, the AlphaTauris and to come out of this with points is a very positive result.”
Alfa Romeo sit eighth in the constructors’ standings after the first seven races of the season, with their tally of eight points putting them ahead of AlphaTauri and Williams.
via Formula 1 News https://www.formula1.com
#F1#Zhou enjoys ‘best two days’ in F1 with Spain outing as Alfa showed ‘we’re ready to fight’#Formula 1
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yeah, a timing mechanic is horrifying.
Also, limited saves. Hatoful boyfriend did that to great effect.
(For context, If you do all the routes, you unlock a 'truth route'. and basically, a lot of games like to have a story where the general appearance of the game is silly, but the game itself goes into much deeper and darker themes then you'd expect. Cute and Horror are good friends.
In Hatoful boyfriend, each of the 'bird dating routes' was really to learn more about the characters, and the school. So that during the truth route, you knew them all already, and could focus more on the horror and character development as it happened.
Once you're on the Truth Route, nothing you do could possibly cause a game over. All you need to do is "enjoy "the ending. However, they take away your ability to save the game at any point, making you go back to a certain room periodically to save the game. This did wonders for adding to the tension and horror of the game, and Its amazing just how far a simple thing like that can take you. )
Continuation of this ask
I have seen a little of the game Hatoful Boyfriend but never played/watched gameplay; it certainly seems like a more humorous game on the surface! I mean, it’s talking birds at a school!
But man! Taking the save mechanic and twisting it like that with all of those new restrictions on the Truth Route is very, well…unsettling to me? (In a good way!) That does sound like it would add a lot of tension. It takes away a safety feature of sorts that you presumably had free rein over before, and only gives it to you on its own terms. I am sure other games do that too, and it does seem like it would add to the horror!!
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My second playthrough of Engage is going well (just finished chapter 17) and I’m still enjoying the gameplay and have definitely had a better time getting supports with my knowledge of how to game the arena as well as having access to the new support-gaining options from the start. However I’m starting to worry about the game’s long-term replayability.
In most FE games, even if the gameplay is only so-so, I can power through several runs basically because of shipping - I’d play the game multiple times to get different paired ends. I’ve already complained about that a lot in other posts, so I won’t rehash it here beyond saying obviously that’s not possible in this case. Sure, you can get different paired endings for Alear, but honestly most of the pact ring scenes and ESPECIALLY the endings are weak. Even for the people who care more about the self-inserting and picking who they want to be with as opposed to matchmaking, I doubt this would be satisfying enough on its own to merit multiple runs of the game.
So if that aspect and reason to replay the game is gone, what’s left? Gameplay, obviously. And yes, the gameplay is good - great, even! This is the most fun I’ve ever had in an FE game when it comes to actually playing the maps. However I can already feel myself falling into complacent gaming - I KNOW from a previous run which characters are better (unless they get super RNG screwed) and which combinations of emblems/units works best, and I find myself defaulting to those rather than experimenting.
It doesn’t help that this game makes it kind of difficult/punishing to do so. There are A LOT of resources to track and use in this game, and they’re all somewhat limited. Up until chapter 17 you’re limited on how many master/second seals you can get, and even once you have unlimited access... they’re expensive! And more than ANY other FE game, this one makes it hard to get money. Even knowing NOT to spend as much money donating to the countries on a second run, you’ll probably run out of cash FAST between buying seals, weapons/staves, and forging the weapons.
There are certain units that basically NEED to be reclassed in order to perform well - in particular, Anna, Etie, Lapis, and maybe Clanne would be better in classes they can’t promote to naturally. But it’s hard to justify using them and wasting TWO seals (a master AND second seal) when the rest of your army only needs one seal to do well or comes as a VERY good pre-promote. That’s not even getting into how due to the relative lack of seals and their cost, I’m less inclined to reclass units just for fun or to see how they fare in radically different roles.
3 Houses had a lot of flaws and overall the gameplay is NOT as good as Engage, but I DID appreciate being able to build my starting class however I pleased. It was a tedious process, but it was rewarding to play the same route multiple times and use most of the same units, but with VERY different classes/roles. In particular, the more balanced, well-rounded units were SO fun to teach since they could perform well in almost any class!
Meanwhile in Engage, I spend a lot of time LOOKING at the classes available to everyone and thinking it might be nice/fun to reclass some people, but ultimately, they’re doing “well enough” in their default class and I can’t justify wasting the seal(s) just for an experiment that might not pan out. If I use that seal, either one more person doesn’t get to promote/reclass or I’m wasting 2500+ gold.
That’s not even getting into the scarcity of the forging resources or how quickly you can blow through your bond fragments (and in ways that aren’t ideal) if you’re not careful. With so many resources to manage, all of which you CAN technically gain more of but only through playing extra battles (which are at best boring or difficult, and at worst DEADLY on classic), it really feels like you’re discouraged from experimenting. You want to hold onto as many resources as possible for as long as you can, so you can’t throw them around for fun to see what works.
What this game needs (as several people have pointed out already) is some kind of new game plus. There NEEDS to be a version of this game where you carry over at least SOME of the things you gained/accomplished into a new game. Personally I’d like to see it carrying over your donation levels, emblem bond levels, and MAYBE bond rings and the weapons you had/forged (though obviously removing any engravings. Also probably still erasing all the special S rank weapons).
I don’t see HOW people are expected to “complete” the game without that, honestly. Donating to the countries is too much of a money sink for one contained run, but if you had multiple playthroughs to do it, it wouldn’t be an issue. Especially since you’d get a bunch of money at specific chapters each run, and if you retain weapons too, you’d spend less of it on forging. If you don’t retain weapons... well, at least the higher donation level means you’re getting more iron/steel/silver from every map from the start, so you don’t HAVE to do skirmishes just to get resources.
Retaining bond levels means you don’t have to waste fragments getting the SAME bonds and skills and conversations with the same units. Instead you can chip away at the CBA bond level for every Emblem/unit pair. As for bond rings, I’d mainly want to see them retained so you don’t have to deal with as much gatcha hell in getting all the rings.
And of course on a new game plus, with all the extra resources at your disposal and less ways you NEED to spend it, you’d be free to experiment more with reclassing units!
I’m just disappointed because I genuinely LOVE this game but there are so many ways it could be better and give me a reason to keep playing it. A lot of the characters are great and I honestly see a ton of shipping potential in the supports... but they all go nowhere without paired endings. The gameplay is the best it’s ever been for FE, and I’d love to experiment and come at it with different units and builds... but I’m so scared of wasting valuable resources that I’m mostly unwilling to experiment and instead stick to the units that are reliable as-is.
#fire emblem#fire emblem engage#fe17#we should be getting one more free update to go along with the 4th dlc#so there's a slim chance we'll get new game plus or paired endings then. but i wouldn't bet on it#it's just depressing because honestly EITHER ONE of those by itself would mostly save the game for me#either i could focus on shipping and replay for different paired endings#or with new game plus i'd be able to relax and actually use my resources. so the gameplay would get a shake-up#and every run being more unique i'd be able to get by more on gameplay alone. right now it's getting a bit stale#for the record i haven't bought the dlc so i don't know how much it impacts the whole resources issue#i know you get a bunch of free money which would be nice but... the story AND gameplay are SO tightly designed#around having specifically 12 emblems (plus the lategame spoiler)#HOW am i supposed to get into chapter 11 or 22 when I have an army of dlc emblems?#or 17 which is explicitly a 6-on-6 emblem war? but uh with dlc that's very much not the case#hell the final battle specifically wants you to have and use all 12 emblems. but if you have dlc you probably used some of them instead#i like the added CONTENT of the dlc - more maps and more characters that the units bond with#but i don't like how they break the story and probably also the game. so i've abstained.#i know i COULD buy the dlc just for the story. but it would feel ridiculous to HAVE these characters and powers and NOT use them
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Finished playing the Golden Route of Triangle Strategy!
Loved it a lot overall :D I don't have a very strong impression of the ending though, because it felt more typically jrpg ending in term of writing. The reveal about the hierophant didn't feel like a huge surprise because people are always mainly talking about Idore when they talk about Hyzanthe so I always figured he was the figurative puppet master if not quite so literally the one. It was fun though, and I liked everyone having a word to say to him.
Before that I was glad that we left Lyla alive, if only for Quahaug's sake. (There is things to say about female antagonists being allowed to be sympathetic and to survive in a way male antagonists do not, but otoh I find Lyla genuinely interesting and also very complicit and we got characters like Erika (as an antipathetic female antagonist we do kill) and Sycras (as a sympathetic male antagonist we don't kill ourselves) to balance things out IMHO)). It's also good we had someone left to lead Hyzanthe and there was not a lot of choices left.
Gameplay wise the maps were pretty simple. It was fun to use Quahaug's abilities against his mother to prevent Serenoa from s'plode with Turn Back Time. Idore's map felt like total bullshit at first, but we used Quahaug's (again) Distorted Space to bring him to us and just piled on him to kill him very quickly, ignoring the rest of the map.
I also got the rest of the character stories I had left (we grinded some easy mock battles to get them). Picoletta (cute), Avlora (good and *swoon* worthy as usual), Maxwell (interesting), Giovanna (ok), Rudolph (good), Milo (interesting), Decimal (aww) and Quahaug (nice).
And that's it for now. I might g back to play the other endings someday but not right now.
I enjoyed this game a lot. I might even feel ready to play this on my own (perhaps on easier mode) instead of relying on playing with a friend who gives tactical advice lol. The story is really top notch, the writing is impeccable and the translation incredibly good. The characters are overall very interesting and compelling.
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My Thoughts on FE Engage
Aight I had all this sitting in a google doc for a while and now that I’ve sat on this for a while I figured I could share what I think about this game. I have A LOT of thoughts so buckle up. These are all just my personal opinions and I’m not some kind of Maddening/Classic player that is gonna analyze how the game is balanced or anything. Spoilers for the whole game btw.
Overall
In general, I definitely enjoyed this game. I think if Fates was only one route then it would honestly be pretty similar to this one.
Game play is fun, characters are amusing, if a bit flat in some cases (but honestly I was a little surprised with some of them). The story is kinda lacking, but some aspects of it were fun and even interesting.
Most of my gripes from this game come from me thinking about cool shit it totally had the set up and then it not doing anything with those cool things. Lots of missed opportunities for a game that has so many references to older games in the franchise.
I do think this game is a step down from three houses in terms of characters and story tho
I played in English with the Japanese audio and wow I’m not very happy with the translation. They leave out a lot of things and even change characterization pretty drastically in some cases (Louis’ “people watching” and Amber/Diamant’s entire support chain as a few examples). The English dub is pretty solid from what I’ve heard though
I didn’t really think about graphics or art design much with this game, but I will say the discrepancies between the in-game and rendered cut scene models was insane (I don’t mean quality, like these characters just look different). Also Sombron’s model was ugly as fuck. Also lots of clipping and also sometimes only one eye would move on a character and that was always a little jarring
Gameplay
Kinda hard to fuck up the basic gameplay in a fire emblem game tbh
My main gripe is that the difficulty difference between “normal” and “hard” is fucking insane. Hard is pretty fuckin’ infuriating, but normal is piss easy, I really needed an in-between difficulty there.
Also it’s really hard to grind characters if you leave them for too long since the skirmishes scale with your main story chapter (I know this is more similar to older games but I got used to being able to grind all my characters okay :p)
I miss the crit cut-ins :(
There’s so much shit to do in the Somniel it’s kind of overwhelming and a bit tedious after a few chapters
No weapon durability, which I personally enjoy
I don’t think the soundtrack is anything special, but there are definitely some cool tracks that I like a lot esp near the end of the game
POG you can be gay with everyone
Emblems
Aight let’s get the big boys out of the way
I LOVE the emblem mechanic. I think it’s super fun and creative. It adds another layer of customization to your units and the nostalgia factor is not lost on me either
Visually I think engaging is super fun, love that the outfits are a version of the emblem’s and the cool hair colors
I think inheriting skills from emblems is a super neat thing, esp if you have a unit that works well with multiple emblems (grinding SP is kind of a chore tho)
INSANE that they wrote three part supports for every character with every emblem, they’re fun I like that you can learn about the emblem and what game they’re from in all of those
I think their choice of characters for each emblem mostly made sense, there were definitely some choices that made me go ???, but I’m fine with them and I’m glad they tried to balance out the genders since a lot of fe lords are dudes
Emblem ring polishing really fucking weird, don’t like the sounds they make oh god, I avoided that shit like the plague
Classes
Big fan of the way they do classes in this game! Rather than weapon proficiency determining what class you can turn into, the class you pick determines your weapon proficiency (for example as a high priest you get access to B rank tomes, B rank fists and S rank staves)
You get weapon proficiencies from using emblems as well, and you gotta use the specific emblem that gives you that proficiency
The classes aren’t as customizable as they are in three houses, but there is more customization than in older games. For most martial classes you can pick what weapon they specialize in (paladins, hero, berserker, etc)
Because of the way weapon proficiencies work your access to better weapons is a little more sparse since they don’t want you buying silver weapons for everyone at level 10, I think they pace it pretty well tho
YEAH BOY THEY BROUGHT BACK THE AWAKENING 2ND SEAL TRICK
Some of the outfits for classes are kinda... (looking at you sage and warrior)
Kinda crazy that all the royals have their own special class. I like it for flavor obvi, but it’s funny since they’re a big chunk of your playable characters
Maps
Pretty good in general
I think some more variety in winning conditions would have been fun, almost all of them were “Defeat enemy commander” and then there were two “Escape” maps. The last 5 chapters or so all did something fun so I’m not too beat up about it really
Lotta dark maps on this one, more than we’ve had in a while I think
Mostly a me thing, but I’m mad you can’t rotate the map 360 degrees anymore
FUCK CHAPTER 17 UGH
THE EMBLEM TRIALS ARE SO FUCKING COOL OH MY GOD, maps that look like iconic maps from their original game?? Dude fire emblem fans are EATING (don’t even get me started on the music remixes AOUGH)
The last level is piss easy if you’re over leveled and I think it makes it less impactful because you can skip the fun unit thing it has set up
Combat
The addition of Break and Smash mechanics was pretty neat, I think they made the combat a little more dynamic
Weapon advantages matter even more now since you can break an enemy with them
Smash is cool since you can wack enemies around the map, I will say tho, you often do so much damage with the great weapons that you often kill the unit before even pushing them
Also depending on the unit, the fact that you have to tank a hit first can deter you from using them
Somniel
There’s so much shit going on on the Somniel and thankfully you can skip a decent chunk, but it does get more monotonous than three houses I think since you go back a lot more often
I wish there was a thing i could click that would gather all the items lying around for me, I’m lazy, make Sommie do it
Characters
I was pleasantly surprised with the characters in this game. I was expecting more of them to be boring and one note, but there’s a surprising amount of depth with some of these guys. Depth that was not shared equally mind you, but it’s there.
This game has a bigger cast than it needs I think, but it’s not bloated like Fates.
Supports/Interpersonal Dynamics
This is also a story flaw that I’ll get into later, but there’s not really any interpersonal conflict going on in this game, everyone’s pretty nice to each other and where it would make sense for there to be conflict there is none (and sometimes there’s random superficial conflict that doesn’t need to be there, read: white bitches being racist to Fogado)
I’m not saying I need characters to hate each other, but there’s very little character growth or reflection going on. Like the game makes a point to show you that each of the four kingdoms have very different values and ethics, so you’d think that would come up more, but tbh it only really does with the crown royals and their supports
Also Alcryst having beef with Ivy, but not Hortensia was a choice
I also think more people should have been upset with Veyle, like I think it would have been cool to see them have to overcome their feelings since the evil Veyle was quite literally someone else and they had to come to terms with that in some way.
Instead it all comes from Veyle being like “oh god I’m so sorry please let me atone somehow” when literally everyone is like “oh no sweat we’re chill”
EVERYONE IS OBSESSED WITH ALEAR PLEASE GIVE ME ONE PERSON THAT DOESN’T LIKE THEM IMMEDIATELY. AAAAAAA
Yo why doesn’t Alear act like they’re from a thousand years ago
Story
Setting
The world is pretty typical for a fire emblem game I think. You got a handful of kingdoms, one is kinda evil-ish, one is super peaceful and there’s probably a trade based, “free” kingdom, and another one rolled at random on a list of kingdoms, in this case one that’s obsessed with strength.
3 of the 4 kingdoms are allies/neutral and of course it’s just the “evil” kingdom picking fights, which I think is kinda stale esp since they’ve been at peace for a while. Not saying there needs to be a war or anything I just want more political intrigue and tension
Elyos has also been ruled by dragon gods since forever, never elaborated?? Where did normal people come from? Were they the same?
I’d love to learn more about what happened during those thousand years tbh
Also what was the world like a thousand years ago? I wanna know more about Gradlon, did people live there? How was Sombron as a king? What about the mage dragons?
Plot
There’s not much in the plot of this game that sets it apart from older fire emblem games
Like a good chunk of plot beats are very similar if not exactly the same as fates
MC is dragon child with mysterious past and everyone loves them immediately
Mom dies in your arms by jumping in front of something purple to save you within the first 5 chapters thrown by a hooded figure
You fight a resurrected version of your mom who is now a little evil and actively obstructing you
Evil kingdom king was controlled by evil dragon
You turn out to be the child of the evil dragon
Evil dragon is some bitch from another world
The antagonists are pretty comically evil until they die and then the game tries to redeem them or make them seem like round characters, but I don’t think you really get enough of that side for any of them. And it’s not like the pacing felt rushed, you were definitely just dicking around in there for a few chapters in the middle, those could have been used to flesh out the antags
They faked you out and made you think Alear was evil in the past, but oops nah he was nice then too
It was pretty obvious from the beginning that you were Sombron’s kid, and Veyle’s sibling, her evil reveal was pretty neat tho
Chapters 21, 22 and 24 went hard I will say. They had a lot of cool shit happen in there and even some stuff I wasn’t expecting! I’m still mad Alear wasn’t evil
COME ON SOMBRON’S FROM ANOTHER WORLD? AND HE’S JUST EVIL CUZ HE WAS A PISSY LONELY BITCH THAT MISSED HIS GHOST BF
Last level was equal parts cool and disappointing. I guessed correctly that Sombron would bring all the past antags as emblems which GOD IS SO FUCKING COOL, but they’re just like generic hooded figures which is so LAME. Like come on you’ve already put in this much to have a nod to the older games you can make a few more assets :/
Fell Xenologue Thoughts
Gonna be real I liked this vibe a little more than the main game’s vibe. No dlc is worth the money, but I at least didn’t regret buying this one.
Also the plot made me more emo than it should have gonna be real
THE FUCKING MUSIC GOES SO HARD. They only added a handful of tracks but they all slap
All the extra writing they did for the royals when they meet themselves or a retainer holy shit dude, some of those hurted
Setting
The setting is much more grimdark in this (as much as this game can be anyway). Just having conflict baked into the world does a lot for the vibe
The world is very bleak and filled with animosity, grief and pain but also those who would try to persevere despite that
Very fun seeing all the vibe swapped kingdoms even if they were quite superficial. Love the mirrored map too
Plot
Aight I think one of the themes for this dlc was love and aaaa I think that’s so sweet
Familial love between Nel & Nil/Rafal + Four Winds
Romantic love between Nel and her divine dragon
The distinct changes in the relationships between all the royal sibling duos I think also kinda focuses on the lack of familial love they share in this world vs your world
Also just how Rafal has just been searching for validation and meaning (i.e. love) and not getting it through his thick skull that everyone around him love him until the end
The twist villain was fun, I saw it coming, but not cuz the game was obvious I’m just too genre savvy (in fact I think a little foreshadowing could have been cool)
I think the Nel evil fake out was cool, but it was resolved way too fast, esp because they teased it in the trailer, but didn’t really go anywhere with it
I really liked the ending!
Nel saying she knew Rafal replaced Nil all along but still grew to care about him all the same
Nel saying she can’t bare to lose another sibling so instead she’d die to take Rafal’s pain away
Rafal refusing to let Sombron’s “curse” on the dragon stone dictate his actions. He was a shitter all of his own choice, he doesn’t regret it and he’d do it again
Not getting to tell Nel his true name before she died
Saying he’ll stay with her for a thousand years until she wakes up
Alear saying they are invited to come over to his world and Rafal in response saying no, but also that 1000 years is a long time so maybe that could change
THEM BEING THE LAST TWO PEOPLE ALIVE IN THIS WORLD
I get why, but I wish we didn’t get Nel and Rafal as units, because after having that whole emo ass see you later and knowing Alear has to wait 1000 years to see them again is so bittersweet, but then you literally get them back after the end credits because whoops I guess time moves differently there now
Characters
I like the dragon siblings a lot actually. They have interesting personalities and their dynamic is insane, especially after the thousand years when Rafal was able to reflect.
The other three however, Zelestia, Gregory and Madeline, I don’t like that much
They essentially took these villains who had fun quirks and were somewhat interesting, but sanitized them and made them SUPER boring.
I get what the devs were trying to do. They made the villains sympathetic and then created a way for you to have them on your team in some capacity. The thing is, these three are so different they are basically different characters, so it doesn’t even fulfill that want
Added on the fact that they don’t have supports with anyone outside of their squad so we don’t even get to see what other character’s reactions are to seeing people who look like the Four Hounds but aren’t them (not that there was much of a reaction anyway since according to Madeline they were all welcomed easily)
I think they should have just found a way to redeem the Four Hounds OR bring their other world counterparts but have the other world counterparts be more or less the same, but maybe fighting on the “good” side still with the dragon sibs
As for the personality swapped royals, I found some of them quite interesting like Alfred, Celine, Hortensia and Diamant. Alcryst was also fun but he was just quite literally a true opposite to himself. Fogado was fun but WHY was he like that. The game doesn’t tell me soooo. Timerra and Ivy were just funny, I’m sorry.
I think what they should have done is instead of just trying to make everyone a true opposite (still not over the Timerra being vegetarian and hating music) they should have taken one important part of the character and changed it, but then kept everything else the same.
Take Timerra. Keep the fact that she’s more stoic and less flexible in this world but maybe she still loves music, but doesn’t have time for it or it has less priority in her life
Stuff I Think Would Be Neat
This is just my “oh what if they did this?” section, it doesn’t really have much to do with my opinion on the game
I think if evil emblems talked this game would have been so fuckin juicy. Like you have fused with these people, they know everything about you, if they were evil they could tear you apart and I think that’s fuckin metal. I just want Marth to be evil and mean as a treat
Past Alear being actually evil would have been super interesting, esp if after dying a second time they only retained their evil memories and briefly turned on their allies
EVEN BETTER: if they made it a gameplay mechanic! Like Alear is red and fighting on the enemy phase
I think limiting the units you have on each map on the xenologue to the relevant royals and retainers would be good too. Since everyone is a default class anyway you don’t lose anything and it invites you to get all the special dialogue with the royals and retainers
And that’s all! If you made it all the way through this, wow thank you for reading all of my rambles. I really love the fire emblem franchise and even if this game wasn’t the best I still enjoyed myself while I played it. Until next time!
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Why I love Mass Effect 1's gameplay (spoiler-free review)
Very recently, I completed my first ever playthrough of Mass Effect 1 - a well renown, beloved game that has nevertheless received quite harsh criticisms for its gameplay. The somewhat rough-around the edges shooter gameplay, the confusing inventory system and frustrating Mako controls were the most common complaints, some of which BioWare addressed in the recent Legendary Edition remake of ME1.
Still, after some extensive research, I decided to buy the old trilogy version anyway (call me oldschool if you like, but I'm a bigger fan of some of the OG light effects) - and imagine my surprise when despite having signed up for a somewhat more tedious gameplay experience, I came to actually enjoy it. In fact, I think ME1 does a lot of things right that other RPGs do wrong - to this day, I might add. For analysis purposes, I will be using the game NieR: Automata (© SquareEnix/Platinum Games, 2017) as a comparison, mainly because I played these two games back to back.
The level system
One thing I absolutely loathe about modern RPGs is how you can essentially break the game by overleveling yourself - not by conscious grinding, but by simply knowing what you're doing. While the level of some enemies in Nier Automata - especially during Route A - may seem daunting at first, all of this can be completely bypassed with the help of one little trinket: the EXP+ chip. While the effect may not be immediate, you will eventually reach the point where you surpass everything the game throws at you in terms of strength - by nothing more than understanding and making use of the game's mechanics. Nier Automata tried to remedy that by introducing a level scaling system, and while this worked out fine in Route B, it appears the developers were too lazy to properly implement it during the endgame: In Route C, all of the enemies are stuck at level 50 (60 for some bosses), so they really were no match for me at level 95. At some point, I got tired of all enemies keeling over if I so much as blew in their general direction, which was one of the reasons why Route C just felt so lackluster to me.
Because of this, I decided to play Mass Effect 1 on Veteran difficulty from the start, just so I don't accidentally make the game too easy for me again (despite having never played a shooter before, lol). However, little did I know there was no need to worry, because somewhat miraculously, Mass Effect 1 manages to avoid any kind of level exploit entirely: The reason for that is that unlike in many other RPGs (including Nier Automata), leveling up doesn't give you an inherent boost to your attack/defense - instead, you have to allot points to specific skills to improve your base values. However, while a little bonus to your stats certainly helps, it's the combat skills that you should focus on: To gain the upper hand in battle, you have to make use of abilities such as temporary damage immunity, overloading the enemies' shields or making them more vulnerable to your attacks. Although this means that you will be spamming abilities pretty much non-stop, you don't have to worry about robbing yourself of any challenge, as the game will keep you on your toes from the first battle right until the final boss. Also, since the level cap is set at 50, you can't simply max out all of your skills, which acts as a nice counterbalance and compels you to distribute your points wisely. (Imagine if the level cap in Nier Automata would've been 50 - perhaps that would've made the endgame actually challenging.)
Another thing I really appreciate is that the equipment you find is always appropriate to your current level. This is because once you start a mission, land on a planet or enter a facility, the equipment you can loot is randomly generated on the spot (you can see this if you revisit a place you went to before but didn't loot: the items will always match the level you were at during your first visit). This not only prevents you from potentially finding an OP weapon early on which you can solo the whole game with, but also the awkward situation of stumbling into "low-level" sidequest when you can no longer use the items you get from them. Also, since the enemies' strength relies just as much on equipment as your own, you always fight on pretty even ground, which means you will neither run into an overpowered squad too strong for you nor an underleveled group which goes down faster than a cardboard wall. Now, that's a way to implement proper level scaling.
The game economy
Another problem that many games suffer from is that you get tons of money, but have next to no opportunity to actually spend it on anything. In the first half of Nier Automata, the "Half-wit Inventor" quest may give a motivation to invest your money into something, but once you accumulated the 180,000 G, pretty much all you need money for is buying and upgrading your weapons, and finding the materials to do the latter is generally more of an issue. The one really cost-intensive thing you need currency for is fusing chips, but since the max chip level is 6 and your capacity is limited anyway, you will arrive at the point where you neither can nor want to upgrade your chips any further. As one might guess, this resulted in me amassing huge amounts of money (in no small part due to my extensive fishing trips), but since there was nothing that I could spend it on, the numbers didn't do much besides looking good.
Mass Effect, on the other hand, possesses a very effective game economy which gives you ample opportunities to make use of the money you earned - if you're focused on optimization, that is. Even though you will find plenty of equipment lying around, it's worth checking the shops from time to time, since they sometimes offer items slightly above your current level. Of course, the prices are accordingly high, and I often had to use almost all the money I made by mining minerals, looting chests/safes, etc.
I will say though that ME1 lacks any unique weapons - ultimately, there are 1-3 "high-end" items for each equipment category (often with marginal differences in stats), while all the other inferior products can simply be disregarded. This means that you usually want to pick the best weapons and armor possible and pimp them with mods as much as you can, while the rest of the stuff is there just for selling. However, even though this may be a bit of a chore, it actually benefits the game economy as a whole: Right before the final mission, I bought a high-end armor for Wrex and two level 10 mods at the Emporium on the Citadel, almost exhausting my entire money reserves - something which wouldn't have been possible without the few extra credits I made by selling superfluous equipment to the outfitter on the ship. The only criticism I have is that there is no "sort by" filter for the selling screen (e.g. selecting that you want to sell shotguns, assault rifles, etc. instead of the standard arrangement by item level) - that would've made things less tedious and time-consuming.
Saving
This may sound silly, but one thing I honestly perceived as such a quality of life improvement when I started playing Mass Effect is that you can not only save literally everywhere, but you will also continue exactly where you left off upon loading. In Nier Automata - and quite a few other games for that matter - you can either only save at certain checkpoints, or the game will automatically place you next to the nearest checkpoint upon loading your save (which may be a fair walking distance away from where you actually left off). However, in Mass Effect, you won't find yourself in the general vicinity of where you last saved, but at the exact same spot - a true blessing that spares you a lot of backtracking and frustration. (I know some people like to call this "save-scumming", but believe me, when one of your squadmates can't join you in battle because they got stuck behind a closed door - which happened to me with Wrex on Noveria - you will thank every god in existence that you're able to load a recent save game.)
Exploration and sidequests
If there's one aspect where Nier Automata and Mass Effect are actually tied, I'd say it's the open world exploration. All criticisms aside, the environments of Nier Automata are a true highlight, and I spent hours walking around just enjoying the scenery, atmosphere, and music. Although Mass Effect is understandably more limited in the graphical department due to its release in 2007, the extraterrestrial landscapes nevertheless manage to look truly captivating, and I had fun taking screenshots of some of my favorite views. However, while you usually explore the world of Nier Automata on foot (or with a mount of your choice), you inevitably will have to use the Mako for Mass Effect's planet-bound missions. Admittedly, the Mako has absolutely earned its reputation as a bouncy vehicle with next to no roadholding, and the physics of that thing are occasionally quite insane. Still, from my experience, it's not completely uncontrollable, and as long as you don't drive like a madman and try to avoid steep terrain, you should be fine - unless you have no other choice than to vertically drive up a cliff (P.S. I hate you Eletania).
Nevertheless, my little excursions in both Nier Automata and Mass Effect ended up having a similar, very relaxing effect on me - which is something that actually surprised even myself, since I'm usually not the biggest fan of open world games. I guess that's because a lot of them tend to have huge, overwhelming maps, and while having the biggest open world is something like a "status symbol" among game developers these days, it doesn't really do anything except making me feel lost and confused. Meanwhile, the free-roaming areas of Nier Automata and Mass Effect are quite spacious, but not so large that you lose any kind of orientation. Also, another thing many open world games do (and that really annoys me) is that they simply put a bunch of symbols on your map for you to traipse around, which is really nothing more than an employment-creation measure for the player. In contrast, Nier Automata and Mass Effect deliberately avoid putting all points of interest on the map - instead, you have to find chests, minerals, and all kinds of other treasures by yourself. While this may be perceived as "userunfriendly" by some players, I think it actually encourages you to go out there and explore, and the feeling of being rewarded for your own curiosity is immensely satisfying - a thousand times better than having everything served on a silver platter.
Last but not least, although Nier Automata is the one that always gets praised for its ambivalent, disturbing sidequests - and rightfully so (in fact, you could say I enjoyed the sidequests more than the main story) - Mass Effect is in no way inferior to it: Just like in Nier Automata, there are sidequests which really make you feel pensive and empty by the end. Personally, "Citadel: Signal Tracking" and "UNC: Geth Incursions" were the ones that unsettled me the most, but "UNC: Missing Survey Team", "UNC: Dead Scientists", and "UNC: Besieged Base" are also runners-up. In general, many of the quests ultimately leave you wondering "what did I actually do right now?" and whether your actions were justified - it truly feels like an insolvable aporia with no right or wrong solution, the only difference being your own moral perspective.
Furthermore, I think it's noteworthy how sidequests are utilized in both of these games from a storytelling perspective. If you take Witcher 3, for example, you will notice that the game tries to make its sidequests into their own independent storylines - a story in a story, so to speak. Meanwhile, the approach of Nier Automata and Mass Effect is completely different: Instead of treating its sidequests as separate entities, they act as little snippets presenting themes and topics that tie directly into the main narrative, enhancing the story as a whole. Together, all these pieces form an intricate, well-constructed web, making up the essence of the story when viewed in its entirety - a strategy which I personally find way more appealing.
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Conclusion
Despite feeling a bit dated, Mass Effect 1's gameplay still holds up surprisingly well - in fact, the game manages to avoid a lot of pitfalls that many RPGs struggle with even today. Thus, I think the first entry of BioWare's hit series truly sets the standard for what is a good RPG, being an example that all game developers should learn some valuable lessons from.
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