Parrhesia

Retrying a map is the nightmare scenario. Resets are terrible failstates that force you to retread a bunch of content. Every FE should have mechanisms in place to disincentivise resetting and push through units dying; whether that's Casual Mode, turnwheel, autosaves, or my preferred method of a game just being ironmannable, where taking some losses won't cripple your prospects going forward. I agree with all Florete's points on why FE10 would have been a great start for Casual Mode, and would also like to add that the cast of each party is very thin, and a single loss could be crippling to a party's long-term prospects of progress. I haven't tried to ironman 10, but I imagine it isn't particularly conducive to it - same with other games with thin casts and characters that aren't easily replaced. And it's that replacement that permadeath is really about. There aren't really interactions with character death throughout the series - outside of story moments, anyway (try getting Matthew killed before the Dread Isle sometime!) - it's just an attritional cost to misplays. You're never in a position where you're spending units, like throwing a dozen zerglings into a handful of marines knowing you'll lose a couple but come out ahead, or trading a bishop for a rook in chess; outside of super niche instances (like warp-hurling dragons to make suicide runs into Medeus in 0%-growth FE11), a guy going down is never a sacrifice for gain. Things become immediately harder short-term (less action economy) and long-term (you now need a replacement), and depending on game you just lost everything that guy was carrying, too. That can be rewarding, if the game is built in such a way that you can sustain those losses; I managed to blind ironman Vision Quest, and that was deliberately built in such a way that a few losses don't snowball into a failstate. But let's not pretend that cold-blooded unit sacrifices are part of FE's gameplay loop. Ultimately I didn't put Casual Mode in DoW, but only because the patch was incompatible with anti-frustration QoL features that I prioritised (it was either the 'dead units dump their inventory in the convoy' or the option to have an autosave at the start of turns). Ultimately, if you don't want to play with Casual Mode, just don't play with Casual Mode. You could argue that the existence of Casual Mode disincentivises IS from making their games playable through cast death... but you wouldn't get far, since FEs have sporadically had paper-thin casts going back all the way to FE2. I'd welcome future FEs adding some middle ground, as well; an option for units to only die on the third defeat or something, perhaps.

Moved to the Awakening subforum.

Ace Attorney's pun names and protracted breakdown animations are stupid indulgences that actively hold the series back, and it's deeply cringeworthy that they've only been ramped up and up over the years. Weirdly, the AAI2 fanslation got the balance right.

As someone who also played Diablo 2 back in like 2005, and later revisited it before playing Diablo 3... yeah, entirely true. D3's launch was awful, D2's impact is undeniable, but in 2023, D3 is easily the better game; I'd recommend it to anyone who doesn't hate the genre, and I wouldn't recommend D2 to anyone as anything but a curiosity. Probably my most controversial gaming opinions centre around RPGs. Specifically: Baldur's Gate 1 is genuinely atrocious, but Baldur's Gate 2 is genuinely fantastic (and Siege of Dragonspear is pretty good! Gamers are just mad because nostalgia and one minor NPC vaguely implies she's transgender.) Anyone with an interest in RPGs should play BG2, and then go on to play SoD if they really liked BG2. Also, Obsidian get a pass that they really shouldn't for releasing unfinished, non-functioning games which papers over the fact that they are often genuinely just bad. Exceptions: Mask of the Betrayer (do not play vanilla NWN2.), New Vegas (this is not an unpopular opinion lol) and the genuinely fantastic Pentiment, which everyone should play, and the existence of which has really tamped down my anti-Obsidian trutherism.

I can't believe that I'm looking at the TV Tropes Characters page because that's unironically the best nexus for full-body character arts, but here goes... In isolation, no real problems here. Sexy valkyrie, in kind of a GW2 Vigil way, it's fine. In isolation. Our second woman in heavy armour. It's not even just a titty-plate, it's two little hats. It genuinely looks like the tits were bare and have been clumsily censored out, it has no coherency with the rest of the design. 'Armour but a bit feminised' was already accomplished by the lace. Just a confused design, top to bottom. Like with the second compared to the first, it's honestly more compromised by just having the single random patch of flesh, and it's surrounded by low armour in, uh, kind of an important place to be armoured. Looks like a level 43 Warrior in vanilla WoW, still wearing a couple of holdover Mail pieces and with engineering goggles for some reason. What's with the furry shin-cuffs? There have to have been better ways to break up the steel. This design just doesn't work. Four for four, compromised by a very shallow and oddly sexless idea of horniness. It's not the only time it comes up, either; Sloane, one of the magi, has an honestly good design that's solely but cripplingly let down by an extremely poor attempt to have her robe stretch to contain the sheer magnitude of her bosom.

Most encouraging is that the guy generally dislikes the writing in JRPGs. Regardless of one's thoughts on JRPGs, a disdain for them is the kind of energy DD's writing needs. Along with some developer notes I've seen about how they'll address feedback and generally tighten the game, I'm honestly pretty encouraged. Bit of egg on my face given I've freely talked shit about the game based largely on reputation, screencaps and word-of-mouth, but hey

Moving to FFtF.

My experience of games as a teenager was of flicking through whatever options we had, pirated or in various CD cases, and of none of them ever quite feeling right. A lot of stop-start progress, a lot of the same old mainstays, a lot of ennui, because it was mostly about killing time, really. It was very rare that any one game would ever truly pick up any momentum, for whatever reason, and I have some fondness for anything that managed to hold my scattergun attention. Even you, Final Fantasy 3 for the DS. Anyway, Rome TW and especially Med2 TW were two that I finished... but only ever one campaign of, and with so many annoyances, and all the while there was the sense that these were great games in theory and scope and only that. Honestly, I'd barely touched a TW since. Then TWW3 came out and suddenly it all came together. It all made sense. It all worked... relatively. Sure, there's plenty of jank, but nothing close to the trauma of the way M2TW besiegers would initiate battle and then refuse to advance, meaning that if you turned off time limits because all teenagers are inclined to play very cautiously and conservatively - the classic 'Gain 7 life' is a good investment mindset, which makes sense until you understand things like tempo - you had to sally forth from your fortress and engage them in the open field just so the battle would ever end. I got sidetracked. TWW3 is really good.

fucking lol ike's on the hook for all of TWW3

I needed a thief, and it sure as hell wasn't going to be Niles. Even if he didn't have 10 strength at the time.

You realise I gave you a reprieve and explicitly didn't actually warn you for the multi-posting, right? But there really isn't anything ambiguous about 'Do not double-post. If somebody hasn't posted after your post and you need to add something, simply edit your existing post.' Nobody's out to get you, and there's no cause for a persecution complex. Just listen to what other people are saying.

Fixed the multi-post. I assume in this instance it was an honest mistake through the Quote feature, but be advised that multiple posts in a row are against site guidelines (unless you're updating a Let's Play or some other project).

Let's wash the taste of Forces out of our mouth. Just now, I got my full 100% in Potionomics! It's like if Recettear wasn't painfully anime. And didn't try to impose a second, inferior sub-loop on your greater, more capitalistic core gameplay loop. Probably not everyone knows what Recettear is. So Potionomics has a simple loop. You have ten days to prepare yourself for a contest. Make potions, sell them at a profit to make better potions, until you have good enough potions to compete in the contest and destroy your rival. But selling the potions causes stress and is hard and Sylvia, initially, is terrible at it, so she also needs to befriend her circle of locals; they'll not only offer utilities, give her deals and help her relax, but hanging out with them will give her advanced rhetoric skills. There's five contests in total, then you pay off your debt, get the McGuffin (Sylvia's last two plot actions are to 'taunt' and then 'flagrantly lie', incidentally) and win. Advanced rhetoric skills here means cards, and what's interesting is that different peoples' techniques offer different ways to succeed. The chilled-out dryad offers ways to handle stress and play the long game; the bard strings together potentially devastating combination plays, the shanty cats as a tandem act generally offer an offensive or a defensive action - which is very useful when you generally only have a hand size of 3-4 - the, um, Silicon Valley moth??? basically lends herself to a blood knight path where you deliberately ramp up your stress to force through interest. But I had the most success using cards like the walrus', who lent himself to big, unsubtle buffs and massive hits, and most tantalisingly the succubus, who basically lets Sylvia sell even the shittest potion at a massive markup by gaslighting, gatekeeping and girlbossing her customers into submission. One of the two weaknesses of the game is that it isn't quite smooth in terms of progression... or it wasn't for me, but that was partly down to the way I played it. Bizarrely, the loop is at its most convoluted in early midgame; options open up, but margins are tight enough that you feel like you have to optimise every action. By the endgame, you're basically too big to fail, and I think the plot knows this, shifting emphasis from sheer cashflow to McGuffin. I entered the final contest week on 20/30 achievements, but by that point I could trivially make any potion, was basically post-scarcity. So I spent it cleaning out the achievement list. The other weakness is basically just that there's a significant item bloat and that there really ought to be slightly better UI in terms of inventory management. If filters were remembered by default. If there was a 'buy all available' button instead of clicking nine times to go from buying 1 -> 10, which you'll do a lot. That kind of thing. I have two pieces of advice for anyone playing Potionomics (which you should). The first is to play fast and loose, don't worry about getting perfect balance on everything, lean on macro, let resources slip cleanly out of your hands. The second is to go for the 100%, which you can absolutely do in a single playthrough. This involves: - Winning the game - Making tier 6 (max-rank) potions of all 16 kinds - Completely befriend everyone (10 characters, 10 ranks) - Fully upgrade the Store - Have an adventurer clear the hardest location - Humiliate an opponent with your superior alchemy The store and the potions are basically a time-locked cash-sink. It's going to take until you have endgame-level cauldrons (which are more robust, so can make better potions), cashflow and resources, but then it's just a matter of brute force - especially since by then you have a way to automatically vendor your excess potions. So almost all my final week was spent ramming the most expensive possible gifts on the companions, having basically cheapskated on them through the game (another thing I'd recommend someone doesn't; my deck was somewhat stagnant as a result), and rushing through the rest of their storylines in a single week. I did actually enjoy that! It felt like good closure, having basically wrapped up the commerce side of the game and attained potion mastery. Clearing the hardest location isn't complicated, because unlike others of the genre, Potionomics doesn't decide to force you to play an inferior RPG or hack-and-slash. It's purely 'match adventurers to dungeons, throw potions at them until they can clear it'. It's not the most engaging, but like, I wouldn't want it to be. In terms of its writing, Potionomics is straightforward 7/10 cozy fare. You have ten friends that each have a Relatable Millennial Experience they're grappling with, that all happen to be able to be solved by bouncing off Sylvia, who is, herself, probably the best part of the story; she's going full pace all the time, she's easily bewildered, she isn't too bright. You'd probably be her friend, too. It's one of those things where some of the characters are going to resonate more than others. Muktuk's a big, exuberant walrus and much of his dialogue is taken up by being a big, exuberant walrus - no bad thing, by any stretch! - but his greater struggle with inspiration and a need to build something that outlived him did resonate a lot with me, as a (massive wanker voice) fellow creative. The succubus has had to fight for everything she's ever had, so shortcuts are tempting. It's one of those situations where you fail the marshmallow test because that's what life has conditioned you to do, the second marshmallow has not, historically speaking, arrived as promised. Sylvia romanced her because I'm predictable, but it isn't really a romance-oriented game; you hit on people or you don't, you only have one forever partner, if you hit on someone else while you already have a date they'll chide you good-naturedly at the threshold for determining friendship vs. romance arc (sorry Xid), and you'll be experiencing basically the same story beats en route to maxed friendship regardless. It's a pretty game. It sounds nice, both in terms of SFX and music. This is important when it's such a vibes-based experience. ... Anyway, while I said you could get your 100% in a single playthrough, I actually only got 29/30 because I'm a cheapskate. One of the achievements is to win one of the challenges by simply having the best potion to the point where you don't need to haggle, but I'd been constantly undercutting as best as I could and making it up with rhetoric. So after the finale, I took like five minutes to go back to my day 9 autosave, make a tier 3 potion, destroy Sylvia's future girlfriend utterly, throw the tournament and quit. Potionomics is very unlikely to be your favourite game ever made, but it's going to be a very good use of 20-25 hours. You should play it.

People who don't know anything about games have osmosed that Mario / Call of Duty / Warcraft exist. People who don't consider themselves gamers but play from time to time have osmosed that Fire Emblem exists. A lot of people who are now vaguely aware of what FE is, and that absolutely wasn't the case a decade ago. Still, big difference between that and being the kind of game that has cut-through with random people.

Oh, yeah! A few weeks back I finally cleared the 100% mark on Mechwarrior 5. Ike already said what that entails. My experience of Battletech, The Franchise, is getting some peripheral knowledge from watching a Battletech streamthrough, finding Battletech itself really didn't click with me somehow, getting a long-threatened copy of MW5 as a gift, figuring it sounded fun on paper and was definitely worth a shot but that I would almost definitely bounce off it too. Why did I think this? Here's the thing: peoples' FPS styles are heavily influenced by whichever one they picked up first, most, best. For me that was Unreal Tournament '99, which is so fucking far and away better than Quake 3, I have no clue how that was even a debate in the era, let alone one you generally see Q3 tipped for. So I play more or less every FPS like I learned to play UT99 (and '04), which can be broadly summarised as the slowest of the classic arena twitch shooters; I'm aggressive in securing space, I seek out enemies and try to bring them down quickly on my own terms, I prefer to be very mobile in defensive play, I'm comfortable settling into a loop of a small area and I don't tend to conserve my own lifepool, because you need to go out and find kills to win a (non-1v1) deathmatch, not play cautiously. My pinpoint aim is poor, but I'm very good at snapping shots to the approximate location of mobile targets. I'm not saying this to brag, because it means my ability in FPS is wildly variable. I'm very good at the UTs (by most standards; anyone still trolling deathmatch multiplayer in TYOOL 2023 would destroy me effortlessly); I'm a very good L4D2 player but a very unconventional one; I'm good enough to beat the CoD MWs on Hardened or wingman for Ike on Veteran, but not to play Veteran alone; I'm pretty good at old-school survival shooters but die a lot (see Doom, Quake); and I was genuinely fucking dogshit at the Wolfenstein reboot. This confused me for the longest time. Wolfenstein was really interesting. Wolfenstein was regarded by reliable sources as extremely good. It felt like it was really good. But I just wasn't getting... anything, from the gameplay loop. And then Ike said something to me about mounting weapons and leaning, and I said something intelligent like, 'what?' Because neo-Wolf is, turns out, all about finding careful angles and vantage points to shred Nazis from, not about surging forward and taking points in a couple of shotgun bursts before ducking away into a hall. Hand me a keyboard and mouse and that just isn't how I problem-solve. (COD:MW2019, incidentally, is pretty similar in this. I found COD:MW2019 far tougher going than COD:MW1-3.) What's this got to do with Mechwarrior? Well, what does someone only good at fast-paced, reaction-centred, close-quarter shooting do when they're piloting a 70-ton juggernaut? Well, I had the above sussed by then, mostly by hearing others tell me what they'd observed, so while I definitely wanted to give MW5 a shot but I felt a fair degree of trepidation. I needn't have worried. Somehow, this shooter that's comprised basically of slugfests between sluggish juggernauts with agonisingly slow turning circles just works for me. MW5 just feels so good, so natural, and the constant dance of resource management - what damage you can put out, what damage you can afford to put out, what point you stop putting out the long-ranged firepower to preserve heat for when you're in close, what point to pull out before you start to lose limbs - leads to a bizarrely cerebral, cool-headed experience as you clinically put 24 missiles into a cockpit. It's somehow zen. And somehow, I'm very good at it, for reasons I still don't fully understand. The STK-3F is the best, by the way. I don't make the rules.

I'll add to this, 'strong enemies' goes both ways; greater offensive potential does not necessarily match greater defensive potential. On the one hand you've got, hypothetically, a group of three fighters, but one of them has a hammer. The hammer guy's going to go down even easier than the others, if you can catch him out, but you aren't going to want to lure him with an armour. If he's got a handaxe instead, by contrast, he'll likely strike from a distance for less damage, but be more irritating to take down, either requiring player phase action or just demanding you the player make sure you have a 1-2 weapon in hand, which in theory is weaker. Then on the other hand you have, at an extreme, FE12 H3 enemies with capped strength and speed, a forged silver, and like 3 defence. In theory, the weakness there discourages enemy-phase reliance more. If three strong and tough enemies crash into a three-wide line of your guys, each is probably going to strike, get struck, and survive. If they're still hitting hard but get one-shot in retaliation, you get, well... So it feeds into Integrity's greater point. Even superficially weak enemies absolutely can pose a threat, provided they have enough teeth to force the player to switch up. There's a reason that one halberd guy in the fog, in Novala's chapter, is notorious as the one dude who actually poses a threat to Seth. And both will improve the value of 'traditionally' weak -- aka, bad in FE7/8, where the headspace of the Western grognard fanbase permanently resides -- units. Archers are most useful where avoiding melee damage is useful, and where you're going to require multiple angles of attack to take down enemies.

Moved thread to Entertainment.

Pentiment's also one of those games that looks kind of odd and jank in screenshots. You really need to play it to get the full impact of the visuals, how it clicks together. I really loved Pentiment. Can't believe Obsidian put together something genuinely and unambiguously great for the first time, but ultimately Pentiment is far, far stronger than my vendetta.

I'm glad you were, in fact, the Only Man Hard Enough to make the Hard Decision to 100% MW19.

Big example of cut content that should've stayed cut was the droid planet in KOTOR 2. God knows that a lot of the cut stuff in that game should have and was, correctly, re-added, but ~3 hours wandering around that acrid hellscape was not to the game's benefit. Similarly, a lot of the cut content in NWN2... some of it would have been nice, but a lot of it would have just further padded an already terminally padded game, and thank fuck it was gone. Oh, Obsidian. Whatever will we do with you.

Re: XCOM -- yeah, Chimera Squad was exactly the right move for the franchise, and it's infuriating that Gamers had to go and be Gamers about it. That's how we ended up with Dark Souls 3, ffs! OpenXCOM beautifully modernises the old game, still very worth playing for any tactics grognard, and I do have to take a moment to underline: turn on 'Psionics require line of sight'. The worst part of original XCOM is that the midgame becomes you getting invisibly mindfucked from infinite range, and then the endgame is that you invisibly mindfuck the enemy from infinite range. Turn on Psi-LOS and you actually get to keep having the firefights that are the core appeal of the game. You also rack up casualties in the high 200s because there isn't that point at which you just stop losing units! It's great! Anyway, I return to announce that I've finally done what I've threatened to do and 100%ed Pyre. I've never heard anyone call it less than good, but it's still generally the black sheep of the Supergiant catalogue (which should be Transistor, which is still exceptional). I suspect it's because Supergiant don't care about gamer instincts and force them to have a good time, creating an experience centred around several things that the audience instinctively shies away from. 1) At the end of each season, you nominate one of your veteran footballers - and it has to be one of your most experienced - to return from whence they came and effectively leave the gameboard. 2) You're allowed to restart on anything but the hardest difficulty, but the game encourages you gently but firmly that it's designed to be Ironmanned. 'Regardless of result, the game will continue,' soothes the loading screen refrain. 'You need only see it through.' Famously, you can still reach the ending even if you lose all 26 matches, and it won't be a bad ending at that. 3) It's about the two things gamers hate most - books, and sport. Now, a run of Pyre takes about 9-10 hours, and by the very nature it's going to change a lot between any two playthroughs. Different people will leave, in different orders, leaving you with different teams to make sense of. And there's also a beautiful alignment of gameplay and story; Rukey the cur has the most pressing need to get home, but he's also your most accomplished goalscorer in the earlygame. Can't he wait just one or two seasons before leaving? Three, four? A couple of characters don't really mind staying in the Downside at all, while your harpy will actively hope you lose if it means her sister can go free. Can I afford to bring back the treant when he starts at a very low-level and honestly is kind of bad? I do think Pyre should be played twice, then maybe every so often again after that, when you're feeling like it. It's certainly a comfort game to me, though I think I'm done with it now (having just beaten playthrough 4 and, well, 100%ed it). There's a really strong emotional through-line through it, about picking yourself up and moving on, that putting your best foot forward is the most important thing. The outcome is there to be striven for, but you can be at peace with yourself so long as you went for it with all your heart. And you'll see different storylines play out every time, different characters' backgrounds get revealed, different interactions, et cetera. And those second etc. playthroughs should be done, I feel quite strongly, on the ultimate difficulty. True Nightwing pits you against strong, well-equipped enemies with the best AI, it enforces ironman, and it unlocks the full range of the shop and of the bonus challenge stars (like appear in most Supergiant games, in one form or another) from the start. Let your plans go awry. Make yourself adapt. Or triumph against the odds despite that, as I did on my final run. 100%ing Pyre is pretty easy and not too time-consuming. A first run on normal or hard, a second run on True Nightwing and a third True Nightwing run to clean up should be all that's required. It requires a bunch of miscellaneous shit you'll unlock accidentally over the course of three runs, plus: 1) Inflicting 200 goals with every character. I unlocked this organically on everyone but the treant, then got him there with some training matches on my final run; this was actually the last achievement I got. 2) Winning a bunch of friendlies in the skirmish mode with various team compositions. 3) Inflict 40 goals in a single blow. My penultimate achievement. The thing with Pyre is that better goalscorers inflict fewer goals with each strike. It's hard to score with Jodariel because she's slow and fat and old, but she massacres the enemy if you can make it happen, and can hit 40 pretty easily. Your crone, who is a lot better at scoring goals, can also reach 40 damage under the right circumstances, though she'll need a max-rank trinket and the full benefits of squad training; just take Vocations at every opportunity, which you probably want to do anyway. 4) Win a match with all 12 challenge stars: this cranks the enemy's stats, means they cheat at some fundamentals of the game, gives them a 60-goal head start and gives them straight-up better AI. In my final run, I tried this on the two tutorial battles and got completely rolled, two of the defeats in a run that ended 21-5. But I managed it twice in the end; first in the first battle against the Pyrehearts, who are an abysmal joke team, and second in... a lategame battle against the Pyrehearts, who remain an abysmal joke team. They managed to score once in the first match and zero times in the second. Notably, it's actually easier to unlock in True Nightwings, because all the challenge stars unlock from the start rather than gradually over the course of the game. Also in the best ending, there's the implication that you fuck a ghost. Play Pyre. Then give it a bit to rattle around in your skull and play it again.

After lying dormant in Concepts for months, I can now proudly announce that v. 0.6 is released! Containing 14 of the planned 21 chapters, a playable cast of up to 39 - if you're feeling merciful - a complete set of supports viable for that stage of the hack, a variety of objectives and a focus on character-driven story.

It sure looks like the RGG team lost their judgement on achievement scaling! Wahey!!!

Slotted in Fit for a King as the F in my list. Without really thinking. That was Fell Seal's slot. But honestly, basically all that was left in Fell Seal was a bunch of grinding with a monster party, so not really much of a loss... I'd 100%ed the game in terms of content. Anyway, FFAK's conceit is basically that it's Ultima, but you play Henry VIII and can act in a debauched and brazen fashion as you, er... well, it basically turns into a collectathon, to find all the stashed money you need to acquire everything. Which isn't necessary, but in lieu of a clearer endgame - and with the game being so short! - it feels kind of churlish to go for anything less. Which is an issue, because, well... My suspicion initially was that FFAK was a cute concept that would struggle not to outlive its welcome. It did outlive its welcome, but only because I was going for full completion; and full completion pretty much completes your whole achievement log. 2.3 hours, of which I enjoyed about one and a half, because the collectathon aspect is... finding about 80% of it is enjoyable, finding the rest is really tedious. It feels very much like a game jam kind of experience. Base price is ... decidedly enthusiastic, but if you pick it up on a heavy sale and commit to going to finish the game the moment it stops being fun, it's a good time and the essentially two jokes won't have time to get old. I feel like that's going to be the story with a lot of my alphabet. I don't have the patience in me to grind the shit out of a bunch of games, so I'll probably end up picking up a lot of minuscule indie titles I wouldn't usually bother with and exploring them. For some of them, that'll inevitably mean trying to squeeze blood from a stone; but that's a course hazard with this kind of activity generally, isn't it?