Omegaprism

Hey, I just finished it too! It was certainly quite an experience in changing the way I approach games like these, but when the final screen faded to black and I was greeted with the title once more I was left with a great sense of accomplishment. I also want to chime in and say that Aethin's English translation patch is top notch, and I am so grateful that someone took the time and effort to make this game playable to an old anglophone like me. Great stuff! Now at last I have checked that big item off of my mental list, and I can tackle Vestaria Saga. Onward!

That's not a bad list of elements you've got. Overall I would say character connection is priority number one for me, to the point that I can trudge through an awful story for the sake of seeing more of my favorite characters in a game doing stuff. Second on the list is the rpg elements. I naturally gravitate towards raising up at least one unit that needs a lot of babying in every game (shout outs to Mozu), because the payoff is usually quite satisfying. The story is usually a really nice bonus for me. If the game has a good story, I'm all in. Inject it into my veins! But in the more likely scenario that the story is mediocre or even really bad I will give the game a pass if every other element is still really good (my example here is Engage, which is among my least favorite FEs storywise, but there are a few characters I really like and the gameplay just really hits the spot for me). The other elements are all great, but some solid rpg elements and fun characters will give a Fire Emblem entry a lot of credit in my eyes.

Oh man, the Ursula quest is such a friggin' grind. It'a great for quickly gaining affinity with common blades, though. I've been sitting on my game in chapter 8 because I feel like I have to complete the charts for a bunch of my rare blades or their related side quests will reset or glitch out (although that got patched, right?). Am I worrying needlessly? Should I just finish the story and power through on new game plus? Apparently it's just way more convenient.

I often fantasize about being a supervillain in the classical comic book sense (super smart, an army of minions, infinite money, and a sweet secret base) so that I could actually make the world a better place. Trying to change big things will instantly earn you the label of villain from those in power because they like things the way they are, even if you are doing things like curing diseases and planting super crops in starving countries. They will use excuses like, "You didn't go through the correct diplomatic channels," or, "You violated a trade agreement," or, "You stole some corporation's patents to do this (my absolute favorite made-up excuse, because copyright law is so screwed up in favor of corporations that they don't even have to have a legit claim, they can just say they do and immediately ruin everything)." And if I had to genetically engineer an army of mutant super panthers to protect my hard work from the corrupt and the powerful, so be it. All I want to do is make a post-scarcity society, where people focus on self-improvement instead of accumulating wealth. History will remember Dr. Ultrapocalypse as a futurist and a humanitarian! *Shakes fist*

Anybody here old enough to remember the ancient (by internet standards) webcomic Megatokyo? Way back in 2001 it was the bee's knees. Then an extremely erratic update schedule and a series of questionable creative decisions pretty much tanked its popularity. I went back and looked at the site a few years ago, just to take a trip down memory lane, and the comic was still going, to my surprise. No idea why anybody still reads it though. I saw somebody mention Shoryuken.com and I can't disagree there. It also reminded me of a sister site, called Eventhubs (yes that is one word in this context). They put up a paywall to access the site a few years ago and it killed their reader traffic. Actually, I used to cruise through a whole bunch of fighting game centric communities, and they went through something of a renaissance after Street Fighter 4 released. Almost all of them have since deflated back to their default state of half-death since then due to the fact that fighting games don't get annual releases and are not popular with the tween and college bro crowds.

Bayonetta 3 (switch) The Takeover (PC) Dragon's Crown (PS4) Fire Emblem (switch) Devil May Cry V (not announced yet, but I'm calling it for PS4) Also, any Wii U exclusives that are not Smash Bros, Zelda, or Mario that get switch rereleases, I will encourage with my money. I'm looking at you, TMS#FE.

The "bullet sponge." This is the kind of enemy that has a truckload of life, damage reduction, periods of invulnerability, and super armor. Their attacks are hard to avoid at first, but easy to see coming after you get clobbered once or twice. Then the fight becomes a boring slog as you dodge their massively damaging attacks and chip away at their deep well of life because your weapons and attacks are universally like hurling ping pong balls at a tank. These guys are most often associated with the fake difficulty that @Hawkwing was talking about. For a fine example of a game built on bullet sponge enemies, and how it fails to make the game any fun, look no further than Devil May Cry 2.

Right in the first chapter they make a big deal out of the torture attacks. These are good silly fun, but largely unnecessary unless you really like using the angel weapons that enemies drop. The real big damage comes from Bayonetta's Wicked Weave attacks (the giant demon fists/feet/etc typically at the end of a button string). Don't worry about racking up style points at first, and just focus on landing those big hits. They give you breathing room, do a lot of damage, and are worth plenty of points. Also, really small enemies and ones that fly are mostly not worth chasing down with your melee attacks until you get pretty good at the game and buy the rest of Bayo's moves. Just use your lock-on gun attacks to clear them out. Also, since you're just starting out, do not neglect the lollipop creation! breaking furniture and stuff around the stages nets you a whole bunch of materials for free, and using an invincibility lollipop to just wail on those really troublesome enemies while they slash at you in vain is a great relief. Using items tanks your score, but for your first time through the story, who cares? Save your pure platinum aspirations for after you unlock all the stages. Invincibility lollipops will make your life so much easier, and so will the life refill lollis. You can mostly skip the magic refills, though, unless you really love the torture attacks. One final thing: The accessories in Rodan's shop are fabulously expensive, so it's best to aim for one and buy it, then kind of ignore the rest until you buy out all of the witch hearts and moon pearls. Most players, myself included, recommend the Moon of Mahakala(sp). It gives you a parry with no limits that grants total invincibility... provided you can time it right. It's also one of the few accessories that doesn't cost any magic to use. In all likelihood you're not going to unlock a more useful accessory until well into the postgame. Once you get that, the flock of bats, and the aerial dodge, your umbra witch will be much harder to kill. I keep thinking of more advice, but it's starting to get granular. Just enjoy it, and be prepared for a challenging, but rewarding, action game experience!

After blowing over 120 orbs on the fallen heroes banner without even a pity breaker, I got mah boi Grima. A timeline of my thoughts: Welp, I've got 9 orbs left. I haven't gotten a green orb to show up in a while, so this will be my last desperate gasp Oh, hey there green orb! Where ya been? C'mon c'mon c'mon c'mon c'mooooooooooooon! YES! Ooh, a SPD base of 8! Is he a speedster? That'd be weird and awesome. Oh, nope. No he isn't. Aaaaaaaaaand he has a RES bane. And it turns out RES is his superbane. Well, at least I got one. Would it be worth sacrificing a Valter to give him Panic Ploy? That is a lot of HP. Hmmmmmmm...

I can assure you, Astra makes a world of difference on Camilla. I haven't tried out Minerva yet, but if she shares her moves with Camilla, it will have the same affect on her too. The wyvern rider type gains the most benefit from Astra in your army. It is like playing a different character.

Ugh, that reminds me, the first six rare blades I got were Zenobia, Dagas and Agate on Nia, and Boreas, Floren, and Kora on Rex. Gatcha elements! F#$&'em, right?

Whoops! You are right. I guess I just missed it when I gave a cursory scan. My bad!

As a self-described crusty old man by internet and videogame standards who grew up playing and loving beat'em ups, this venture pleases me. If you play some of them on weekends (say, Fri-Sat in the US) I might even be able to join in for some co-op action. I'm starved for people to play these games with. I would ask that, if you stream them, maybe put a VOD up on your youtube pretty please? I live in Japan and have a soul-sucking full-time office job on a school network that blocks darn near everything on the internet worth looking at, so I usually have to catch up after the fact when somebody does something cool. Also, you already have a massive list, but have you ever played the 90s Capcom Dungeons and Dragons arcade games? They've been remastered and put on PS4/Xbone/Steam as a 2-game package, and there is a ton of fun to be had with them. Six playable characters (up to 4 player co-op), a truckload of secret areas, branching paths, a frankly ridiculous amount of items, equipment, and magic spells you can pick up along the way, and it combines that 90s Capcom magic with a bunch of classic DnD stuff. I know you're probably already full up on titles to play, but I recommend you check it out.

Yeah I've got Gorg on my Rex, and it is a really nice feeling when somebody breaks a hardcore unique monster and I can just topple-launch-SMASH and watch that life bar lose a chunk all at once.

This is just opinion based off of my experience so far, but would it be possible to switch Agate and Wulfric in that party? Rex is reeeeeeally slow with axes and Zeke's megalance arts have so much wind up I swear it's a private joke by somebody who coded them. My only other advice would be that variety is the spice of life, and thus Theory and Aegeaon on the same driver might be a little redundant, but if you like chroma katana, more power to ya. I personally like the weapon type so much I'm trying to get a rare one on each possible driver (so far I only have Aegeaon and Newt). Has anyone tried experimenting with reflect damage builds? Every time I fight a unique driver enemy with a katana they instantly KO one of my party with spike damage or reflect damage or something (why did spike damage have to come back?), so I'm guessing there's got to be a pretty simple blade/accessory/aux core combo floating around reddit, but my work computer blocks all the fun social media sites.

Yes to Command Mission, please! I know objectively it wasn't that great, but I was in full-on MMX fanboy mode when it first released, and I loved it. Among the features I thought it really should have had was a new game plus feature. There is a bunch of cool stuff you can only get from the final boss or after you beat the game, and you never really have any use for it, because there's basically nobody and nothing to use it on. Axel's final morph and weapon, all of the super force metals, and even X and Zero's ultimate weapons (okay, ultimate other than the OP as hell turbo buster) are basically just trophy prizes to say, "You did it!" It would have been really cool to be able to blast through the game again all tricked out with your postgame equipment and powers, but eh. I also would have really liked a sequel to tie up the truckload of loose ends in the plot, and to give us more time with the new characters they introduced but you never see in any other game (except for Cinnamon, but that's mostly my distaste for all the tropes she exemplifies). I have devoted many hours of imagining what a new X game set after Command Mission could play and be like (For example: Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams-style action RPG where you could also play as Marino and Maximo, and Cinnamon is your mobile home base feature for saving/healing/item creation), but these days I think Capcom is done with any Megaman that isn't just classic blue bomber. We'll see if after they rerelease the X series about five more times they feel nostalgic and decide to make a single new X game that forgets about all the unanswered questions and gameplay refinements the latter games left behind and reverts to 2D SNES style game design, wherein all the other cool main characters become NPCs or just disappear with no explanation, but games media praises it for its, "Back to basics," approach, while simultaneously throwing shade at longtime fans who just wanted some closure, using such incredibly reductive phrasing as, "Was all that convoluted continuity really the reason we enjoyed these games in our youth?" I had two or three more paragraphs of ranting about the X series' unfortunate fate inside of me, but I deleted them before posting, because It's not like I'm bitter or anything.

Sorry @Armagon, but I couldn't help myself. I put XB1 on the backburner because, honestly, the Mechonis section of the game is a chore, and 2 is flat out more fun. I forgot how hard it could be to even see what was happening in combat sometimes in the Wii game. I'll still grit my teeth and trudge through it at some point, but I have enough frustration in my life currently, and XB2 has a kind of narrative momentum pushing me to keep going for the time being. I'm currently treading water in Ch. 8, trying to find the last several unique monsters to slay for Zenobia's affinity chart (I can't believe how lucky I got in getting her fairly early on), and I have to say, it feels like I must have left the game running while doing some household chores or something, because my playtime is about to hit 120 hours, and I feel like I've got a crap ton of sidequests I haven't even touched yet.

Time for me to catch some heat, but I wish they would drop reclassing. In my personal experience it doesn't add to replay value, it just makes you want to stretch out a single playthrough, waiting until you finally have that perfect skill combination on your favorite units. This leads to otherwise pointless grinding. Fire Emblem was at its best when it wasn't about mindless grinding, and IS seems under the mistaken impression that having a single battle that you can repeat over and over again makes the grinding fun. If reclassing must make a return I think it needs to be neutered, and the skill system needs to take much more inspiration from the pre-3DS games. Have skills be a precious limited resource. Instead of grinding for 50 hours to get a dozen units with Duplicate and Luna, give us a scroll that can teach a single unit Duplicate (though I despise skills like that, personally), or have two units who max their support rank be able to teach each other one specific skill each. Rather than five or six open slots, give each character a skill capacity number, and have the crazy skills like Galeforce take up more than the tame ones, like smite. Reclassing has not increased unit variety or replay value. It has homogenized our armies. Not to mention the fact that whenever somebody gets reclassed, 98 percent of the time they just get their head on the stupid default body for that class, and they never let us buy any of the generic units' helmets to accessorize with. I wish they would let us customize our armies' color schemes, or insignia, or cover their faces.

Well, those are some relevant questions that I definitely have well-thought out and cogent answers to! >_> Allow me to attempt to do so: It depends on how promotion works in the game. in the 3DS era, two or three +1s and a single +2 (maybe +3 HP) would be plenty generous. In the GBA era the promotion gains were considerably more stingy, so all I would personally give them is +1 HP and +1 to another stat (maybe Skl or Def). They already gain more Move and a new weapon rank, so I have no sympathy for them. I do include flyers in my general mount-hate! Flying units have the undisputed best mobility in the series, bar none. As for Pegasus Knights, it's true that they generally have underwhelming Strength, but consider that their primary targets are magic users, the squishiest unit type in the game. If a peg knight isn't designed to kill mages without doubling, give them a skill kinda like light magic users had in Sacred Stones, but for magic users instead of monsters, or some other ability that crushes tome users. Fire emblem offers such a wide variety of unit types that specializing them isn't such a bad idea. For promoted units and dismounting I say let them keep their weapon ranks. Indoors they would already just be infantry with lower stats, so what's the harm in letting them carry around multiple weapons? In my fantasy land of nerfed mounts they would have lower max weapon ranks than, say, weapon specialized infantry and armors, and that would probably be enough of a restriction. This would be a rare case of letting real life bleed into game design, as historically cavalry actually wielded bigger and longer weapons into battle than footsoldiers. There would still be certain weapons designed specifically for other classes that would remain restricted, though.

Here's my unpopular stance: I hate, hate, HATE mounted units. Nerf them all. The better the movement, the lower their bases and growths should be. If you are mounted, using boots does not improve your Move. Multiple weapon ranks should only happen upon promotion. When assigning weapon ranks and skills, treat having a mount as a skill or weapon rank when deciding unit balance. You get two Xmas cavaliers at the beginning of damn near every game. They don't both need sword and lance ranks. Give one a sword rank, and give the other a lance rank. Give a horseback unit decent def (not good, decent) or decent res (once again, not good, decent), and tank the other stat. When promoting, they should either get +1 Move and damn near nothing else, OR decent promotion bonuses, and no move bonus. Canto should disable their ability to double. Forced dismounting indoors should come back. Would any one of these changes balance out mounted units? No. I would implement all of them. Every game in the series, with the exception of, like, Radiant Dawn, is dominated by mounted units. Their availability is pervasive, and they trade next to nothing for their superior mobility. There is never enough risk in sending all of your mounted units ahead of the rest of your army and having them gobble up all of the experience, with the exception that flyers are typically vulnerable to archers and wind magic, and there is almost never a way to have your infantry and armor knights catch up. Life is too easy when you're a mounted unit. Screw them, and the horse/wyvern/flying horse/giant bird they rode in on.

I have so many consoles. Here's a list: GBA SP DS (Yup, the clunker model) DS lite 3DS XL New 3DS XL Wii Wii U Switch PSP (1 Korean, 1 Japanese) PS Vita TV PS1 (1 US, 1 Japanese) PS2 (1 US, 1 Japanese) PS3 (320GB) PS4 (1TB) Sega Genesis (needs fixing) Sega Game Gear Sega CD (Also needs fixing) Sega Dreamcast Xbox 360 Wow, I've been playing videogames since Ronald Reagan was the POTUS, and it shows if you ever look at my storage bins! I used to have a Sega Saturn, a NES and a Gamecube, but the NES and Saturn both broke when I was too young to understand how to fix busted parts and I traded in my Gamecube (like an idiot) to pay for my Wii (still got the games though). As for which ones are gathering dust, The only home consoles currently hooked up are the Wii U, Switch, PS3, and PS4. I go through phases where I get back into portables, but I haven't charged up any of them since, um... I wanna say since I beat FE: SoV, which was about a month after it came out. Now I'm curious if anybody on this forum can out-old me with an Atari 2600 or an Intellivision or something. It only counts if you owned it when they were still selling them in stores, though.

I stand corrected on the FF7/8 thing. It's... so beautiful... Don't you be teasing me now with this World of Final Fantasy business, though! It was so hard to accept reality and move on! My heart can only take so much!

So much love for Xenogears in this thread, I love it! I should have saved the word-vomit I did in Armagon's Xenogears review for this thread. Oh well. Xenogears will always be my first or second choice for a remake. The only other title that rivals it is another ps1 JRPG, called Legend of Legaia. The setting was great, the combat system was fun (if time-consuming by the end), and the characters were generally fun and easy to understand. Plus, it was a game that, like BK: Origins, had a playable cast of only three characters, and as a result all three of them got character development and story relevance basically throughout the whole of the game. I really love this game, and the fact that the North American version has a progress-killing bug in emulation kills me on the inside. Once the last playstation dies I may never get to enjoy this game again. The only ting that would need revamping are the incredibly dated graphics. If you ever get the chance, I highly recommend playing it, but if you're an English speaker, get the European version. Supposedly it doesn't have the game-breaking bug when you play it on PS3 or emulator.

I saw your avatar change to Bart and thought, "Does that mean he played Xenogears recently?" I am pleased by this news! Many people had their first foray into JRPGs with Final Fantasy VII, but for me Xenogears was my most formative experience with PS1 RPGs. That Christmas (I think it was 1997? 1998?) I got a bunch of cash, and my dad drove my brother and I to the local Gamestop (or maybe it was still Software etc. at the time), and having read some gaming magazines I knew I was going in with the express purpose of buying games for our shiny new playstation that had the word, "gear," in the title. I got Guilty Gear, Metal Gear Solid, and Xenogears. I have never been given reason to regret those choices. Anyway, on to discussion of the game! Every two or three years I get a weird seasonal urge to play Xenogears again, to the point that I've convinced my wife to try it out while I watch and coach her through the more obtuse parts (also she hated the platforming segments, including the escape from the sinking sand cruiser towards the beginning). If ever there was a magic videogame wish granting genie, My first or second wish would be for Xenogears to get the kind of remake treatment that Square-Enix is currently attempting with Final Fantasy 7. The story of the game's development just makes me long for that what if scenario. Gears was originally going to be Final Fantasy 8, before Square decided they needed Final Fantasy to be way more generic for mass appeal. Then, roughly halfway through the development cycle, the bigwigs decided to cancel the project in favor of what would become what we know as Final Fantasy 8. Having poured months of their lives into this abandoned game, the dev team implored their bosses to let them release the game, on the condition that they turn in a finished game with minimal extra funding and time. They did, and it really shows in Disc 2. It should come as little surprise that Takahashi left Squaresoft not long after and started his own company with his wife and a few other former Square employees. In my imagination, a remake of Xenogears would not necessarily have to have the most polygons, the highest resolution, or the most detailed models (though, realistically, most people say if a remake doesn't have those things, what's the point?), but would clean up the muddier backgrounds to make them easier to navigate, improve the UI, and fill out the massive swath of game that had to be cut. The abandoned subplot with Rico, Emeralda's character development, the two other anima dungeons, the other omnigears, the character never got to be playable but was planned to do so, the whole portions of game that turned into people sitting in chairs on a black background, all of that stuff deserves to be restored. I might personally prefer some minor rebalances of character and gear abilities, but that would be a low rung on the remake priorities ladder. The heartbreaking reality is that Squeenix will never relenquish the rights to any of Xenogears, and nobody in that company is interested in rehashing Xenogears. I don't even think Mr. Takahashi himself, now with a successful development studio that has proven that they can make JRPGs with positively ENORMOUS worlds to explore, would want to go revisit his old pet project, and would prefer to move forward . But I continue to hold a torch for it. I got a little sidetracked there. Let me try again. After several playthroughs I tend to think of Fei more as a playable MacGuffin than the real protagonist. The real main character is, uh, somebody else [I forgot how to spoiler]. You may have noticed that Fei lacks any real agency for most of the game, just reacting to the increasingly crazy events that surround him rather than taking the initiative. From a certain point of view that's the point of his character, and he has a very convincing reason for such passivity, but the in-game result is that you have several long conversations about some pretty important stuff where Fei, our erstwhile hero, literally says and does nothing. He just stands (or sits) around in the same room while Bart or Citan or somebody else makes all the decisions and does all the talking (and man oh man, Citan talks a lot). Believe it or not, this doesn't even bother me that much. It's just an observation I've had after playing one of my favorite games like, ten times in as many years. On a gameplay related note, I actually really liked the way gear combat worked in relation to on-foot battles. It was a nice balance that I haven't seen in a Xeno game since. Make no mistake, I love Xenoblade X, but I found myself missing the mecha combat in Xenogears. I'm not a fan of cooldown-based specials, and combining that with fuel consumption in XCX's skells just seemed unnecessary. I'm really hoping they develop the skells more in general in a hypothetical XCX2, and it wouldn't hurt to have a look at Xenogears for inspiration.

When I was a kid I was really into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. If I could have, I would have themed my entire life around those green boys and their colorful masks. Instead of getting a SNES for Christmas one year, I got a Sega Genesis, and that was fine. It had a few TMNT games, such as the Hyperstone Heist. One of these Genesis turtles games was TMNT: Tournament Fighters. I loved it with all of my being, and I played the hell out of that cart just trying to beat the final bosses. While many people got into fighting games because of Street Fighter, I learned to be a fighting games guy from the ninja turtles. Decades later I found another copy and, afloat on nostalgia, booted it up to see how it had aged. The verdict: terrible. Everything I had learned about fighting games in the intervening years bashed against the incredibly stiff controls and harsh design decisions, and I suffered that fate that all people who grow up and develop taste know: I knew I could never recapture those good times as a boy in the early nineties, and I knew that it was because I was a dumb kid, and ignorance is bliss.