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So recently I've been replaying Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia after almost half a year of the last time I did so. It's still my favorite Fire Emblem game and I'm enjoying this playthrough, but I have been noticing a lot more of its flaws and rougher spots. Mostly with the story, but also in some cases the animation. It started off rather nit-picky, with simple thoughts of how they could have altered a line of dialogue to make it better, or that the conversation should have been about something else entirely, but they were pretty minor and stuff one realized in hindsight, so it didn't bother all that much. As the game went on, however, these moments piled up, to the point were everytime the game entered the visual novel mode, I found something new that the could have changed with at least one NPC present. The thing was, though, that not all of these moments came off as amateur writing, but instead that they didn't have the time or the money to expand or flesh out everything that they could have. For instance, the only quest giving NPCs I really remembered were the cheese lover, the woman who lost her son, and the pirate who tells you that his father had a tricorn hat. Yet when I played the game again, I thought that they should have been the most memorable NPCs in the game with their unique dialogue, interesting stories that occasionally added to the world, and their interactions with the player. However, this would have required either hiring a new voice actor or extending the paycheck of an already present one, having them record various lines for saying "yes", "no", "are you done yet" and "the quest is done". The voice acting, as great as it was, did mean that editing already recorded lines became an impossibility unless they delayed the game or asked for more money, which isn't always a wise idea in game development. Heck, even something as simple as adding unique portraits for NPC would have cost resources and time, and then they'd have to decide who gets what portrait. Even the animations, great as they are, do have sighs where they were limited in some areas. Every class only has one critical hit animation, there are no variations for critical magic spells (although that has been the case for every Fire Emblem game) the copious amounts of clipping show they didn't have the budget or time to make more animations or fix the clipping issue. Even with the fluid animations and smaller details such as characters having proper footing on uneven surfaces, these aspects are pretty noticeable. This is far, far from saying that the game is unpolished, but I'm curious if anyone else has any thoughts or opinions to share on how the lower budget affected the quality of this game.
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- time/budget
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