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Three Houses
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I guess my unpopular opinion is that I don't think that "2D Mario" is a single coherent group of games that it makes sense to talk about collectively. I'd split them up into at least three different groups which are sufficiently different in how they play. First, you've got the classic Mario games released between 1985 and 1992: Bros, Bros 2 (both versions), Bros 3, World, Land, and Land 2. Then there's the New Super Mario Bros (NSMB) games released between 2006 and 2012: NSMB, NSMB Wii, NSMB 2, and NSMB U. And then finally, there's the two Mario Maker games released in 2015 and 2019. These three groups feel different enough to me that I don't see the benefit of trying to group them together. (There's also Mario Wonder, but I haven't played that yet, so I don't know where it would be classified.)
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Something like that would fit perfectly into one of the weird fourth-wall-breaking endings. There's already one where a bunch of different developers talk to you, so it would be easy enough to riff on that and include some time-travel discussion to honour Toriyama, and anyone else who worked on the original game but has died in the intervening decades.
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I'd theoretically be interested in a fully standalone version, but I find it hard to imagine that it could ever happen in a way that I would care about. There are two main problems that I see: The first is that, in order to actually work as a standalone game, it would take an absolute ton of reworking and rebalancing. Resource acquisition and unit advancement would have to be remade from the ground up, old content would have to be balanced against new, and so on. I don't doubt that this is possible but it sounds like an ungodly amount of work if they want to get it right. And are they really going to want to put that much work into a project for a game that's no longer popular enough to keep the servers up? It doesn't sound like it would be worth it, from a business perspective. The second problem is that what I would want, as someone who doesn't play Heroes, is probably substantially different from what an avid Heroes player would want. They would want a way to transfer their existing data and have it still be meaningful. I would want a game where it doesn't matter that I'm starting from nothing and I can still beat -- and even 100% -- the game in a reasonable timeframe. I don't see any way of balancing the two competing sets of needs. So my assumption is that if anything like this ever did happen, it would end up being a fairly minor rework that was designed to appeal to the remaining holdout player base rather than something that would really work well enough as a standalone to interest me.
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Ah well. Thanks for taking the time to look, regardless. Regardless of the immediate proximate cause of this topic, there are a few other people here with animated profile pics, and I mostly like and respect them apart from the part where I don't want to have to look at their blinking shit. Yeah, I've ended up resorting to uBlock for this. It's kinda awkward, like I said in the OP, but it does (at least seem to) work, so I don't need any help. Thanks for the offer, though.
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I'm guessing that this is going to be a great big "nope", but I figure I may as well ask just to be sure. Is there any way to hide other users' profile pictures? There are a few people on this site with pics that I'd really rather not look at (specifically, those with animated gifs as profile pics, which have all sorts of accessibility issues). I know there are ways I can block these through my browser, but they are kinda awkward and it would be nice to have a native forum option.
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ike's steam platinums blog (latest one: 150. final fantasy vi)
lenticular replied to Integrity's topic in General Gaming
This reminds me of the skill system in FE Awakening and Fates. This is not a good thing. Yeah, that's the one thing that Fire Emblem has never figured out. If you want to pick up some specific skill in FE, you sometimes have to gimp your unit for half the sodding game to get it. It sounds like a much more appealing system if you can just quickly grab what you want and move on. I am sorely tempted. I have been meaning to try at least one of the SNES FF games for years and years at this point, but never got around to it. Either I'll like it, which is good, or I'll have another string in my bow for all my "actually, FF just sucks" hot takes, which is also good. I have way too many games on my plate at the moment, but I think FF5 has earned a spot on my Steam wishlist, at least. -
For me, it's got to be Three Houses. I'm not really a fan of the "keep these two units glued to each other" play-style that a lot of support systems lead to, since I prefer the tactical flexibility of being able to "reassign" units on the fly as battlefield situations change and different units are needed in different areas. So the Three Houses style of "everyone supports with everyone" (at least in-house) works well for me. I also find that it communicates the fantasy of improving unit cohesion better than more restrictive support systems which feel more like "I want to show off in front of my crush" than anything else. Brief thoughts about the specific mechanics of support bonuses from other games that I've played: GBA games: Honestly, I have no idea how the bonuses work in these games, because actually acquiring the supports in the first place is just way too much of a hassle for me to have ever bothered wtih. Tellius: I want to like the affinities, but I feel that they're more interesting in theory than practice. It mostly feels that earth affinity is busted, anything that gives attack boosts is kinda nice, and everything else is too situational to really care about. Shadow Dragon: I think this game technically has supports? Awakening: Stat backpacks are powerful, of course, but there's no interesting tactical depth here. Fates: The first time I played Birthright, I nearly missed that child units existed because I didn't find anything about the support system fun or interesting enough to engage with. They're better once you actually know the classes and class skills so can meaningfully plan around reclassing, but that isn't really a thing on an (unspoiled) first time through. Shadows of Valentia: Fun touches like Faye and Alm aside (and it truly is a fun touch), there's not much here. Engage: Honestly, I couldn't remember how support bonuses in Engage work and had to go and look them up. It seems like it should be a good system, except that they're so obfuscated by the game that it feels like it would be a pain to actually really make the most of them.
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Which FE game is the least likely to be someone's favorite?
lenticular replied to Ruy's topic in General Fire Emblem
Definitely BS if it counts, no doubt. If it doesn't count, then I'm going to guess at Thracia 776, just because it's the one that fewest people have played. People will latch onto games as their favourites for all sorts of reasons, some of which make very little sense, so any game will have some adherents. The only sure thing is that you need to have played a game for it to be your favourite, so Thracia is fighting a losing battle just by having a lower player pool to try to draw from. What's more, most people who have played Thracia are going to be big Fire Emblem fans who have played a lot of other games in the series, which means it's competing with more other titles. -
ike's steam platinums blog (latest one: 150. final fantasy vi)
lenticular replied to Integrity's topic in General Gaming
Yes. This. I've never played FF4, but this entire write-up of why ATB sucks so much was right on point. I think another part of the problem that I have with it is that you don't have any sort of control over where you spend your time. Compare to something like blitz chess where you only have 3 minutes to play the whole game, but crucially you get to choose how you spend those 3 minutes. If you go fast through the less complicated moves then when you get to a really key tactical moment then you can use up some of the bank of time you've built up to give more thought to an important move. In ATB you don't have anything like that. It's like a metronome. You have the same amount of time to think regardless of the actual complexity of the gamestate, which is sometimes too much and sometimes too little. I also find it deeply unsatisfying. And since I'm here, my own personal history with Final Fantasy: I have played exactly 3 mainline Final Fantasy games (7, 13, and 15), and pretty much hated all of them. But, uniquely, they all managed to make me hate them for completely different reasons. Good job, Final Fantasy, that's actually impressive. As far as I'm concerned, the only good Final Fantasy game is My Life As A King, which sadly has never made it off of Wiiware so basically doesn't exist any more. -
Who was the best unit in your run of Radiant Dawn?
lenticular replied to Ancient Gai's topic in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
Worrying overly about caps always seems like a bit of a dead end to me. Once you get to the point where you're starting to butt up against caps, pretty much any unit is going to be pretty great. You could make the argument that capped cats and ravens are still pretty weak, but anyone else is going to do just fine. I find it hard to conceive of anyone who is sufficiently good at the game to get to the Tower and have units pushing their stat caps but will have any difficulty at all getting through the Tower because they decided to bring Silver Knights. That sort of difference can absolutely be worth worrying about for highly-optimised runs like speedruns or LTCs, but I don't think it's relevant for most people. -
Who was the best unit in your run of Radiant Dawn?
lenticular replied to Ancient Gai's topic in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
Depends what you're counting as a bow user. If you include Silver Knights, then Oscar and Geoffrey and Fiona both take less effort to get ready for the Tower. But they're also capped at A rank for bows, which means that they can't use the Double Bow and are probably going to just pretend they're still lance-locked. Do it! -
My personal wishes for Smash mostly go against the general direction that the series is taking and the general consensus among its players. As such, I'd be shocked to actually get what I want, but here goes anyway. First, I want a much smaller scale game with far fewer characters. More characters means less star power. I know that every character is somebody's favourite, but as a casual, it's hard to get excited about a lot of the more borderline inclusions. And even harder to get excited about all the other games and series that are getting referenced. "Link is fighting Pikachu!" is fun in a way that "Palutena is fighting Ridley!" isn't. If I had my druthers, I'd probably limited it to about 30-40 characters, would probably go back to only having Nintendo characters, and would limit to one character per game series, with very few exceptions. Second, I want more focus put onto having a better single-player mode. World of Light was a pretty big disappointment for me, mainly because it was just a bunch of individual fights splurged onto a big map without really forming a coherent whole. I don't really care that there wasn't really any attempt at a coherent storyline, but I would have liked for there to have been a more consistent difficulty curve, with easier challenges to begin with growing into more difficult ones later.
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Honestly, now I kinda want to do a full big Rate The Unit series where we rate purely on fun rather than efficiency or power or anything like that. Happily, I recognise that I'm far too lazy to commit to such a project. For the sake of clarity, I don't think that RD Hard is particularly difficult. I just think that it's particularly nonsense. Specifically the removing of enemy ranges. Getting rid of UI/QoL/accessability features in the name of "difficulty" is one of my biggest pet peeves of game design. I can go into more detail about exactly why I think this is terrible design, but I figure it's probably a sufficiently uncontroversial idea that I really don't need to explain myself. I don't think I agree with this? I mean, not in the sense that I think people shouldn't use the term like that, but more that I don't think they do. I think that people generally use the same terminology and language regardless of what difficulty they're talking about. I don't have any hard data to back this up or anything, so let's just leave it as saying that the overall feeling and impression that I have is not the same as the one that you have. That's pretty similar to what I was getting at when I suggested time investement. In both cases, it's not about investing some in-game resource so much as it's about what we, the players, are personally investing in terms of our time, effort, and energy. I strongly suspect you could probably do this for most of the series even on the hardest difficulties. At the very least, Sacred Stones, Path of Radiance (international; I've never played Maniac), Shadows of Valentia, Three Houses, and Engage all seem like they could probably be beaten on their hardest difficulties with their worst characters, so long as you make appropriate allowances for places where specific characters are required. I wouldn't be surprised if it was possible for Radiant Dawn, Awakening and Birthright too, though I don't know as much about the harder difficulties of those games. Yeah, I do think that's a pretty fair way of looking at things. If we imagine a graph of power level against time for each unit, then the investment units are the ones which have an upward slope for at least part of the graph. Though this is somewhat complicated by units who have weird graphs. I'm thinking of units like Volke (starts OP, then drops off when other people catch up to him, but then can become great again if you use him) or Donnel (starts awful, becomes great when his growths kick in, then drops back to mediocre once everyone starts reaching caps).
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When we're discussing units, we tend to throw terms like "high investment" around quite a bit. The general implication is that while it is possible to make that unit good, it costs more to get them there than other units. But one thing that I've been thinking about recently is what it actually means for a unit to be high investment. What are we actually investing? These thoughts came from a run of Radiant Dawn that I've been doing where the only units I took to the Tower are generally considered somewhere between "terrible" and "ok but high investment". Specifically, I took: Meg, Fiona, Lyre, Astrid, Heather, Mist, Rolf, Nealuchi, Tormod, Pelleas, and Leanne (and the 6 mandatory units). And despite ostensibly having a full team of high investment units, the run wasn't challenging at all. I had more than enough resources to level everyone either to or close to level cap, with most units having capped most or all of their relvevant stats. Now, two things do need saying here. First is that Radiant Dawn is a weird game with a weird structure that overall probably makes it easier than most of the series to train up a full team of scrubs. The second is that I was playing on Normal difficulty (PAL) because Radiant Dawn's Hard difficulty is some egregious nonsense. But even with these caveats in mind, it feels that if these units genuinely require a high amount of investment then it shouldn't be possible to invest in all of them. Or at the very least it should be difficult to do so, but it really wasn't. So what gives? I've been trying to think about what it is that we're actually investing in high investment units, and have come up with a few different possibilities. EXP. This seems to be cited quite a bit, and I think is mostly (though not entirely) bogus. The vast majority of runs in the vast majority of Fire Emblem games have more than enough experience to go around. Especially given that experience is scaled based on character level. If I give a unit slightly less experience now, that's just going to mean that they're going to be gaining more experience/fight for a little while until they catch up again. Specific limited resources. I'm thinking of things like stat boosters or weapons here. "Oh, Jimbob is a great unit. You just need to give him two Energy Drops, a Speedwing, and a Brave Lance and he's as good as anyone else!" That sort of thing. And while it's true that this would be a particularly high investment just to pull someone up to par, there are very few units throughout all of Fire Emblem that genuinely require this sort of favouritism if we want them to be viable. And yes, I know that you're now thinking about Bantu or Karla or similar, but they're very much the exception rather than the rule. Short-term difficulty. I think that we are getting somewhere here, but we're still not there. On the one hand, if I decide to deploy an underleveled unit to a map then that will make that map harder than if I'd deployed the strongest unit from my bench, especially if I'm trying to train them up and keep them safe while I do so. This much is true. But on the other hand, I find that most Fire Emblem maps are generous with their deployment slots and that the presence or absence of my (twelfth/fifteenth/whatever) best unit is rarely going to make any sort of material difference. And beyond that, we do get to choose which levels we use for training. Nobody is going to suggest that it's a good idea to use maps like Conquest chapter 10 or Three Houses chapter 13 as training opportunities. Time. I think that this is probably the most significant investment for most units but is also the one that I see talked about the least. Most Fire Emblem units will become good to great if they are trained up, and can be trained up without meaningfully taking resources from other units, and doing so is not generally particularly difficult, but it often is fiddly and time-consuming. And if someone doesn't want to take the time to raise Rolf/Nino/Clair/whoever then really, who can blame them? We all only have so many hours on this earth. And yet, it does feel like a subjective play-style-dependant criterion rather than anything more tangible. So where am I going with all of this? I don't know. Nowhere, really? I guess just that the more I think about the concept of a high investment unit, the less confident I am that I actually know what one is. So I guess that's my question. What do you think it is? What do you figure we're investing into these units?
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Who was the best unit in your run of Radiant Dawn?
lenticular replied to Ancient Gai's topic in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
Which run? I tend to have different MVP units in each playthrough. For my most recent run, I'd say either Rolf or Fiona. Which sounds like I'm shitposting until I mention that it was a "bad units only for the tower" challenge run, and their competition was the likes of Meg, Lyre, and Astrid. Rolf was probably stronger by end-game, but Fiona was more valuable because of her contributions to Part 3's Dawn Brigade maps.