Seafarer
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Posts posted by Seafarer
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4 hours ago, ping said:
The main storyline of PoR - the liberation of Crimea - is very much a Disney fairytale in which good triumphs over evil and everyone is happy in the end and there's ice cream for everybody... (...) And second, we see the parts of the fairytale that Disney had left out. We see that, in the wake of the war of liberation, the population of Daein has now become the oppressed and abused, breeding even more resentment. And we see that the story of the princess doesn't just end when she becomes queen.
I just want to point out that there are already hints towards this in PoR base conversations during the Daein arc. The main characters are all somewhat upset about doing to Daein what Ashnard did to Crimea (their goal ends up being to kill Ashnard ASAP explicitly to stop everyone's suffering), and there are uncomfortable conversations involving Jill and Sothe's responses to it (the latter of which foreshadows his role in Part 1 of RD).
Also, while I'm being pedantic: @Jotari New Mystery doesn't have support conversations. The ranked base conversations are entirely divorced from the support mechanic; they unlock at different times, and you can get support bonuses without ever reading the base conversations.
On to the topic: to me, the OP just reads like a list of personal opinions on the relative value of a range of design choices, so I don't see much value in arguing over it. There are some things in there I don't agree with (Maniac mode harder in PoR than RD? get outta here), but I do like Path of Radiance better overall, so yay?
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On 2/12/2024 at 12:25 PM, gringe said:
Thanks! There's one last step to confirm, which is the most time-consuming...
At least one character needs a full set of support conversations, and we need to be sure the green name for that character displays properly if other characters have incomplete sets of support conversations. When I was thinking about how to test it, I think Lance would be the quickest character to finish all his support conversations for.
Wolt's looking good to me. Hopefully that's everything.
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13 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:
Potent is "神速" (shinsoku), "Extreme Speed". "神速" (shinsoku) literally translates as "divine speed". It's also the Japanese name of the move Extreme Speed from Pokémon, and I'm using it here over alternative options because the translation is more than accurate.
Is that the same Japanese name as the Divine Speed skill in Engage? Seems weird that they didn't just use that translation here, too.
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I almost thought the Three Houses dominance was over after last year, but nope. Three Houses still holds *nearly half the CYL places since its release, which is insane.
EDIT: Whoops, forgot CYL6 only had one TH winner. I think the point still holds, though.
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9 hours ago, XRay said:
I think post-game Awakening and post-game Fates would be the next closest contenders, with more resources available to maximize stats to facilitate one round kills, and access to Galeforce to kill multiple foes in one turn or to retreat. If we narrow it down by mode though, then I think PvP in Fates is the most Player Phase dominant in the entire series, even more so than Summoner Duels in Heroes. With max stats, Galeforce, Warp, and Replicate, Enemy Phase simply is not really viable.
I'm not familiar with the modern Lunatic+ strats, but Awakening is otherwise by far the most Enemy-Phase game in the series. The dominant Lunatic trivialisations are Nos- or Sol-tanking, to the point where Galeforce is more useful for getting into position to EP a bunch of enemies in a rout map than anything else, and even Apotheosis-secret is readily beaten by Vantage-Vengeance strats (that's the Limit Breaker-less strat).
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As for Heroes, I think it's hard to say about the game as a whole. I haven't played the PvP or pseudo-PvP modes in a bit, but I had a mixed-phase build on my Nino right to the end, and she worked fine. Other parts of FEH's history have centred around EP units. Compare that to New Mystery, where there's one single way to reasonably live multiple combat rounds in a single EP, and it's locked to female mages. You just can't send a unit into a pack of enemies in New Mystery and expect them to come out alive (at least on any real difficulty mode), whereas there have been units in FEH where you could very much do exactly that. So I'd say FEH can't really claim the top place, just because it contains multitudes, not all of which are PP-focused.
I do think that XRay has the right idea that true PvP modes are always majorly skewed towards PP, because you can't rely on a human opponent to throw units away by attacking into combats they can't win. On the other hand, I find that post-game content tends towards EP strats, because the player's units continue to get stronger, while enemies don't really scale up with them, and EP focus tends to correlate with lower enemy quality compared to player units (the only exception here is Apotheosis, which scales beyond Lunatic+'s Endgame, but that can still be Enemy-Phased).
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14 hours ago, Othin said:
Not quite. 10 Skl is needed to get staff accuracy to the maximum, but hit rates in Thracia are bound to between 99% and 1%, both for staffs and weapons. So even 10 Skl won't avoid the 1% chance of missing.
Nope, not true. Staves stop checking for accuracy completely when you reach 10 Skill; they're not capped at 99 hit like attacks in combat.
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9 hours ago, Mercakete said:
I'm always open toward and happy to read other information germane towards story theory that others have picked up on that I've missed, so this is fun! 🙂
Regarding the part where Kvasir says "But there is one part of my memory I've lost," I interpreted that as referring to just after meeting Njordr (especially since she also says that Seidr is aware of that part of missing memory and what it's from.) Seidr says that she was taken in by Njordr and was raised by him, and Heidr eventually came into the picture, too, and they lived as sisters (which all lines up with Gullveig's machinations to get Seidr to turn into her and continue the cycle, so that's very likely the reason why things played out that way) Basically, her memory starts there, which means that she loses her memories of being Kvasir and Gullveig after coming into Njordr's care. It could be that she lost her memory twice, though (maybe once after becoming Kvasir from Gullveig and once after becoming Seidr from Kvasir.) Maybe instead of development, she had more of a metamorphosis at each phase, during which her memories get scrambled? The only one we see, really, is Gullveig becoming Kvasir, but instantaneous transformation makes sense when going backwards like that.
And yeah, I've been thinking about that, too (regarding the Japanese perhaps being clearer in intent) but it's actually a very contextual language, so maybe not. That said, I'm still somewhere between beginner and intermediate in my studies of the language, so I'm really no expert. That said, hopefully the translators IS picked are doing the jobs they were hired for and properly giving us exactly what is intended in the story.
Anyway, do you have anything to say about the quotes in the opening movie for the Seer's Snare? I feel like that really adds some structural integrity to the "Kvasir was born from a flaw in time" theory (well, sort of theory. I feel like it's one of the few overtly stated things we have here.)
As for the Alfador theory, maybe? I feel like that's kind of reaching, though, in that there's not a lot of evidence to support it. So, I'd be cautious about leaning too much into it, especially since IS likes to keep their books fairly stand-alone. I was surprised they even mentioned Freyr/Freyja in this book, since they have stated that they'd like to make it so that new players can jump into the latest book without needing to play previous ones for context.
Whatever the case, I'm looking forward to this story stabilizing. Speaking professionally, if your story is done (no sequels planned, etc.), then you should have as many threads tied off by the time the consumer finishes it as possible and not leave plot holes. So it's annoying that there's so much that isn't explained even though the book's done. At least they gave us Kvasir quotes to fill in some of the gaps (that's how it looks to me, anyway) and maybe we'll get a TT+ main story to help for the fallen banner again (that Seidr pulled Kvasir and Gullveig into herself and even talked about how they'd kind of fill in the gaps in each other's memories could be a hint towards this "collaborative introspection") but I still wish that the book ended more satisfactorily, personally speaking.
For the bold: I assumed she was addressing Gullveig, not Seiðr, since that's who replies to her. Actually, I wonder when Gullveig got all her memories back, because she seems to remember being Kvasir...
I did look at the Seer's Snare intro, but I didn't think it was relevant, given that a) it's still Gullveig speaking, so it's subject to the possibility of her memory being incomplete and b) she just calls herself a paradox, which she is: a bootstrap paradox; but a bootstrap paradox can have an origin in the context of multiple timelines; it's only observing a single timeline externally that causes it to be paradoxical. In other words, it's possible for there to be an "original" timeline that did not have the time loop, but in which events transpired to set up the time loop that is all we can observe from our vantage point.
The Alfaðör thing was just a bit of wild mass guessing, lol. But it's a possibility that could be confirmed well before the TT story, given that I'm fairly sure Book 8 is going to be Asgard, and I drew the connection because Kvasir also mentions Asgard in her lines (which I forgot to mention in that post... whoops!)
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12 hours ago, Mercakete said:
Not at all. I thought my earlier comments made it clear that I liked the other theory better than what the new data seems to be pointing to. I'm just taking in the new data and adding it to the whole to figure out what the canon really is. Canon trumps theory as far as what reality within a creative work is, even if it's canon that makes less sense than the theories. That said, once something stops making sense in the face of the data, I discard it. The theories posed here made more sense than the one I'd had before, so I discarded it. But then the new data came out and so I talked about how it adjusts what can or cannot be. That's all.
We know for a fact that Njordr had a part to play in the curse's continuation, but it seems that the curse and Kvasir were both made by the same glitch in time, based on what's been released (Kvasir's quotes as a summoned unit, and that one Seer game mode's intro vid.) It would be nice if we could get more data, though. Confusion in the consumer isn't great when it's about things that are supposed to be clear in a story.
There are three quotes that I think are relevant to this, and I think you're picking one of them and reading too much into it.
First, there's her summoning quote, which includes "...I was not created—I simply am."
The second one is the one you're leaning hard on: "I was born from a flaw in time. Without it, I would not be."
The third one, though, is from her friend greeting: "Where I came from is unknown to me..." And that, I think, provides enough doubt that we can't completely discard theories where she has an origin that she's simply forgotten.
Also, there's one line in the book's ending that I find interesting: Kvasir says "But there is one part of my memory I've lost... But I believe you know what's missing." I propose that that may refer to her origin, and is intended to be the hook for the eventual Book 7 TT+ story. This line also casts doubt on some of Gullveig's statements about herself, given that she may not remember all that she claims to; plus she tends to claim she has no beginning in the same breath as she claims she has no end (see 13-1 and 4-2), and we've definitively proven the latter claim to be false.
I wonder whether the Japanese is any more explicit? Probably not, but it might be worth a look if someone speaks Japanese.
EDIT: Ooh, alternative hypothesis that fits both "Kvasir has an origin she can't remember" and "Njörðr is and always was a patsy": Alfaðör created her as Kvasir with false memories of having already done what he wanted her to do. He's been described as having unlimited power after all, and I believe that Freyja's warning of Alfonse ceasing to exist at his will was a reference to Gullveig's actions at the end of chapter 13, strengthening the link between this book and Book 4.
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14 hours ago, Mercakete said:
I mentioned this on the Kvasir+Gullveig banner thread, but Kvasir's quotes answer some questions. She says that she came from a flaw in time, and that she was not born or created, but simple is. So...Njordr really had nothing to do with all this, except as Gullveig's pawn, it looks like.
I think you're over-extrapolating to suit conclusions you've already come to. Kvasir wasn't born or made, but the curse itself is an entity separate from its host, and it is not part of her while she's in the Kvasir phase. So it's still entirely possible (though obviously not certain) that Njörðr had a hand in the curse's origin (and Gullveig's quotes don't shed any time on the matter...).
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On 11/26/2023 at 6:45 PM, Mercakete said:
Gullveig was the one doing the planning and manipulated Njordr, I'm pretty sure. All the events surrounding it points to this. I used to think he was the mastermind, but IS decided to go the other way, but that leaves a LOT of plot holes (mainly, "where did x come from" with x being various things. The curse is one of them, but another is Gullveig's choice to make this plan to begin with. These two alone are HUGE to the plot, and yet have no explanation for them except for where they came from after the first (and onward) loop. Not where it came from before the first loop.), let alone things that are just implied instead of overtly stated. (There's a difference between a plot hole and something that isn't directly shown to the consumer, but has evidence to imply an answer.)
She manipulated the Njörðr that we see, but it makes no sense for her to have manipulated the original Njörðr, because she didn't have knowledge of how the timeline would play out back then. My theory is that the original timeline involved Njörðr hatching his plan and infecting the original Kvasir with the curse, then, for subsequent timelines, she shows up to tell him that previous-him executed the plan that he's starting to conceive for himself, so he goes along with what she says because she obviously led to his desire for the end of the mortal world in previous timelines.
So, by the timeline that we see, Gullveig's the one with the plan, but only because she knows how what was originally Njörðr's plan is meant to go and has the power to make sure it goes that way. Looks like a classic Dragon Ascendant thing, right down to Njörðr outliving his usefulness.
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On 11/23/2023 at 9:49 AM, Mercakete said:
One thing that never really go addressed, though, was where the curse came from in the first place. It only exists in this one time loop. So, was it the serpent which circles the world, except as a sort of a metaphor/reinterpretation? That still doesn't explain how it all started in this story, though. It just "always was, except not since there's a timeine in which it doesn't exist." Also, it has an end, but no beginning. Yeah, that's one perplexing plot element there.
This is something that I brought up to my friend after Chapter 12, too. I assume, since the curse gets powered up each time it infects Seiðr once she's recovered Njörðr's Ár, that it was originally his plan and the curse was made from his power, but that's obviously speculation. I guess they had to leave something unresolved for the eventual Book 7 TT+ storyline, and since Gullveig is available inside Seiðr's mind, she might be able to fill in some of the gaps.
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Does anyone know what, if any, personal skills count as Rally Assists for the purposes of weapons like Spy's Shuriken? I'm looking at Gold Serpent in particular, but I'd like to know if there are any others.
EDIT: I guess there's also Harsh Command(+) that I'm not certain of.
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11 hours ago, Aedan7479 said:
So, what was the point of the weird chapter numbering? The Story certainly isn't coherent if you play it in numerical order.
The point is the chapters are numbered in external time, while we got them in the order of the characters' personal experience.
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6 minutes ago, Tybrosion said:
There is a NPC in Halcyon's village (in SoV at least, don't know about Gaiden) who hints the way of getting around Jedah's gimmick, but yeah most players aren't going to figure out what Jedah's deal is on their own (if they don't already know).
The best part is that is gimmick is actually different in Gaiden than it is in SoV (and vice versa). So, even players who have played Gaiden won't immediately know what to do against Jedah in SoV (if, again, they don't already know).
Edit: Actually, ignore the second part. I might be wrong on that.
Don't worry, you're correct.
SpoilerIn Gaiden, Jedah's vulnerable on turns divisible by 4. In Echoes, it's every 4th round of combat. Honestly, I prefer the Gaiden incarnation.
I wonder whether Thracia is going to get a banner soon enough to play back-and-forth with Engage on my "highest percent of playable characters missing from FEH" list, or if Engage has already overtaken it for good. I appreciate a good Isadora, but Thracia needs a banner soon.
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Welp, pack it in everyone, nothing's ever going to be more impressive than this.
(Now someone just needs to record Lunatic+ Awakening and flawless 0% runs will have been done in every game's top difficulty... which is nuts)
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1 hour ago, Jotari said:
Multiple S ranks is indeed possible in Binding Blade, but I'm pretty sure you can't actually raise weapon ranks in trial maps.
Either way, her having S Light isn't what's preventing her from getting an S in her other weapons, which is what I inferred Ice Dragon believed based on his wording.
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16 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:
Guinevere's gimmick as a trail map unit in her source game is the fact that she has an S rank in light magic despite the Sage class not having access to the weapon type normally (which also prevents her from reaching S rank in anima magic or staves).
Minor correction, but: no it doesn't. Binding Blade lets you S multiple weapon types.
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On 9/16/2023 at 2:35 PM, Fire Emblem Fan said:
Yeah, I agree with pretty much all of that. Book 7 feels pointless, the OCs are all really lame, the pandering to the avatar is insane, it's all just...ugh. I swear, if one of the winners of the next CYL is another situation where the character has only existed for a week, I'm gonna scream.
CYL voters presumably lean more towards being FEH players these days, and all the really super-popular characters from older games have already won. On the other hand, Engage-sweep seems fairly likely for CYL8, so you'll probably end up not having to scream. 😛
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Well, that answers all my concerns. Gullveig goes back after she's "won" because her - or rather the curse's - end goal is increasing its own power forever, and we can break the loop because Gullveig didn't expect Nerþuz's plan to work on account of having seen it fail untold times before.
I now want to know why we need to kill Kvasir, who isn't all-powerful and probably can't force the timeline back onto the Gullveig path on her own, but this is overall a much more satisfying ending than I was expecting.
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I... am now confused about everyone's motivations here. What does Gullveig want?
She's not Njörðr's mindless tool, though that much was obvious the whole time. She wins - destroys the world - then... decides to un-win by going back into the timestream as Kvasir? Why?
Is she destroying alternate worlds each time? Like, every time an Askr gets past Hel, she pops in in time to manipulate that Askr down this timeline? She seems to be able to exist outside of time, after all, unless I've misunderstood something about her domain. But, one way or another, the whole thing is only a loop for her, and only because she chooses it to be. So what does she want? What's important enough to go back and risk losing this time every time she wins?
...and how are we going to fix her? Obviously, our Seiðr is going to be cured by goat auntie ex machina, but is that enough to write Gullveig out of our timeline? What's going to happen in Chapter 1? Still kill Njörðr? Kill Kvasir? Something else? And why did no previous iteration of Askr figure out what we're going to do (beyond narrative causality, obviously)? What's different this time that Gullveig has missed? I'm so lost...
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I've been playing Path of Radiance a bit recently, and I was wondering what the general consensus on this question is. Obviously Maniac mode has higher enemy stats and density, plus it lacks the critical bonus on a couple of classes, but the international Hard mode has some extra restrictions on forge and (iirc) shop availabilities, plus it lacks the glitch-forge option, and the critical bonus could be seen as not particularly relevant given how bad the classes that get it are.
Obviously I expect Maniac to be considered harder, but I figured I'd ask just in case anyone has Thoughts on the situation.
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Astra kinda has to be rolled before anything else, because it's a chance to turn one attack into 5. Each of the 5 attacks has a separate chance of hitting or critting, and it'd be a bit weird if the first attack always hit because you had to hit before you could proc Astra.
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Spoiler
Damn, the chances of me getting anything worthwhile from the 4-star Special Heroes is tiny. I have all but 3 reds, all but 2 blues and greens, and all but 4 colourlesses. I guess that means I'm going colourless...
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17 hours ago, Mercakete said:
See, the goal has always been to make it so that Gullveig never comes into power. If personal history and world history were tied together intrinsically, then altering one would affect the other. However, the story has already proven that this isn't the case within this canon. Those who went through the events with the time traveling (Njordr (having used his Ar and thus knows about events going on, whether or not he traveled through time himself or just looked into the various timelines), Seidr, and the Askrans(time travelers)) have basically half-anchored the events of the book into place. The goal is, and always has been, to collapse the time loop so that none of the bad events ever occur. So, if the world history is rewritten so that the golden serpent curse never comes into being, those not involved in the time traveling would have never gone through those events, and would see it as never having happened. However, those who have and are aware of the time loop which never occurred in the world history, but did in personal history, would just continue on in their original times with the knowledge of it having happened.
This is where the genius comes in: living something that no one else did -- having real personal history that never counted as world history -- is very much like dreaming. And who, exactly, is Njordr, Seidr, Goat Aunt, and Heidr related to? Freyr and Freyja, whose realms are the dream and nightmare realms. Time that happened, but didn't happen: it's the same as dreams. It all fits extremely nicely into IS' preestablished canon, and them all being related makes perfect sense in terms of powers and domains this way, too.
So... if I'm understanding this correctly, we need to change history at a point earlier than full-powered Gullveig has ever travelled to, because otherwise her personal history is intersecting with world history at some point and she therefore still exists?
Anyway, I don't think it's a time loop at all, now that I think about it. It's just... the history of Midgard. And we're trying to change it, while Gullveig is trying to keep it the same. But I did think of a way to make the ending make sense to me, and it involves us setting up an actual time loop where Seiðr comes to us when she did and takes us back to kill Njörðr (having taken his power as Kvasir when we defeat him), before bringing us back to the present.
Anyway, I feel a bit better about the story now. Thanks for discussing it with me!
Why PoR is better than RD
in GameCube and Wii Era
Posted
Bold: fair, but you did title the thread "is better than" rather than something like "why I prefer". Softeners matter when trying to invite discussion rather than an argument!
For the rest, I think RD's earlygame difficulty is more important than lategame, when you have a bunch of resources available and a concomitant plethora of options to deal with stuff. I don't think PoR Maniac really does much to stop the typical "bulky 1-2 go brrr" strats that work in Hard, and the only real difficulty earlygame is learning to use Titania for like 50% of everything. So I think (and this is something that I have seen many people expressing similar sentiment to, so it's not just me) that RD's steep difficulty in Part 1 alone makes it harder than Maniac PoR.