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FE: Fates survey result will be revealed in this week's Famitsu


Ryo
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I don't mind the children as individual units and I like a fair deal of them this time around, but they do feel very out of place in Fates. Their spots could be used to create characters actually relevent to the Hoshido/Nohr plot, since the kids have nothing to do with the conflict and have no experiences about it that makes them relevent to the story.

I also don't really like what it does to the roster. Almost everyone's young or at least of marriageable age. Characters like Niime or Yodel are pretty much impossible and even if they weren't they'd be reduced to "Avatarsexual" characters who are lucky to get more then one support. Character ages tend to make everyone more varried since both fates and awakening lack in the older, more experienced general/retainer/mage/mercenary department.

I guess we have Gunther, but thats still one character in two fire emblem games.

There is a bit of a problem with removing the child mechanic though. Its in two games now so people have grown acustomed to the pairing and optimisation thing. Its true that more limited supports or a better story are good directions to take, but it will probably still lead to complaints about the game having less features then the previous one.

I think limited supports would be an extremely bad idea. Some people were drawn to the series by the expanded support system. What good would limiting it do other than turn away the people who are more interested in the support system as it is now than the average player was to the limited support system in the past?

Edited by arvilino
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Good stuff, way better and more detailed than whatever I would've come up with. You (or whomever wrote it) even threw in some stuff for those who say Chrom's got nothing going for him

Gonna clarify that I didn't write that. I basically have it around to remind myself that Robin was actually a good character, even though I know alot of people disagree (though I must say my image of Robin is embellished). What I am so dissapointed with many Awakening fic is, quoting from the site, "Suffice it to say, Robin is not your confident badass JRPG protag" which many writers just love to put in, along with being a ladies' man with minimal effort.

It didn't help that IS went and exactly did that as well. I don't know if Robin's character was accidental or some are just good at analyzing the character but it baffles me how IS just went backwards with the Avatar. Can't we have an interesting protagonist for once that isn't purely related to their appearance?

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I admit that I'm one of the people who was psyched at the news that the avatar is now the protagonist whose actions will have drastic impact on the story. The premise has a lot of potentials. But now, I'm not sure if I would ever want to see an avatar lord again, or any avatar for that matter...

Actually, the only reason I wanted the avatar to be the main lord if the avatar had to exist was because I didn't want the main lord to lose their spotlight to the avatar in either the game or the marketing (Kris basically took over and Chrom gets neglected in favor of Robin and Lucina in marketing at times).

But if Kamui is what their avatar lord is going to be like, nope. I can't believe just how badly the ball was dropped on this one, just …

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One thing about the children though is that they pretty much replace a lot of the filler units. I'd rather characters related to the main cast and be an extension/incentive of the support mechanic than characters who exist purely as afterthoughts. In any other Fire Emblem(except Awakening and Genealogy) Sophie and Siegbert would be two nobody cavaliers created purely to replace Cyrus if he died.

Yeah. Thats kinda how i saw it. Two birds with one stone. This idea and delivering the fanservice that drew in people with fe13. People loved pairings and eugenics, so they gave them that again while also giving extra units to an already small cast.

Not saying it was the best decision, but likely what was being discussed in the boardroom.

Also, i like Kamui's design.

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I admit that I'm one of the people who was psyched at the news that the avatar is now the protagonist whose actions will have drastic impact on the story. The premise has a lot of potentials. But now, I'm not sure if I would ever want to see an avatar lord again, or any avatar for that matter...

It's okay I was one of those people too. I didn't want the main lord to lose the spotlight again so I was happy about the idea. There was a lot of potential with having the avatar as the lord who makes decisions that impact the story, but it came out be a giant mess. I am not going to be excited about that idea again especially if Kamui is their idea of a avatar lord. They dropped the ball so bad.

Edited by Frelia
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Yeah. Thats kinda how i saw it. Two birds with one stone. This idea and delivering the fanservice that drew in people with fe13. People loved pairings and eugenics, so they gave them that again while also giving extra units to an already small cast.

Not saying it was the best decision, but likely what was being discussed in the boardroom.

Also, i like Kamui's design.

I feel the system itself is still a better choice gameplay-wise than what came before, especially the way it works in Fates. Despite the fact they can be recruited at almost any point across the game and dynamically scale with the enemy levels they join(or after promoting with the child seal) they're some of the most appropriately statted units in the entire series for the point in which they join the party. In addition being flexible in when you can recruit them while also allowing customization offers something the old recruitment methods couldn't do(even Genealogy doesn't let you recruit the children in the order you wish). For example I was able to use Eponine straight away in Lunatic chapter 25 of Nohr route after recruiting her and she contributed extremely well without being OP or needing special treatement.

When in the past IS went between having fixed characters joining at specific points of the game fluctuate between OP and near uselessness(especially filler characters). I just find it bizarre to see "IS need to stop doing this because story". To be honest I think sacrificing improvements to the gameplay on the grounds of story or requiring an airtight in-universe explanation for something that enhances the gameplay is and always will be a load of bollocks. If it was a boardroom decision it shows they've got their priorities right and understand this is a videogame that they're making and not a novel.

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I think limited supports would be an extremely bad idea. Some people were drawn to the series by the expanded support system. What good would limiting it do other than turn away the people who are more interested in the support system as it is now than the average player was to the limited support system in the past?

But it's a common complaint even among people new to the series that characters just have too many supports and many of them are between characters who simply have no chemistry. The marriage system also means a lot of forced romance and you can't have platonic supports between the opposite sex anymore, so it comes across as forced.

If there are people who really are turned away from a new game in the series because characters can't support with everyone in the cast, then tough luck honestly. There's much better games suited to their needs than Fire Emblem.

On another note, it's possible to make late recruits scale with the player without children. Just calculate their base stats based on the average level of the party or the average level of the ten highest level units and give them free invisible level ups based on that. Done.

NOTE: I just want to point out that the whole "this is a video game, not a novel so who cares about the story" is a bullshit excuse and is holding games back as an art form. Besides, this game (and a lot of FE games honestly) put an effort into the story, no matter how badly executed so clearly, the people making the game do care. I don't think wanting a mechanic to fit in storywise is not too much to ask for.

Edited by Dark Sage
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But it's a common complaint even among people new to the series that characters just have too many supports and many of them are between characters who simply have no chemistry. The marriage system also means a lot of forced romance and you can't have platonic supports between the opposite sex anymore, so it comes across as forced.

If there are people who really are turned away from a new game in the series because characters can't support with everyone in the cast, then tough luck honestly. There's much better games suited to their needs than Fire Emblem.

I wouldn't be turned away from the games myself, but I value the fact the flexibility of allowing supports between almost all of the cast(the closer split between male/female characters helps). It's actually a bit like my previous post about the children but from my perspective it needlessly limits the support mechanic gameplay-wise now that you can only get one set of stat boosts from supports at a time(pair up) and the way the support bonus itself works if only specific members of the cast can support with each other. Additionally it would almost force you to use combinations you don't like just to see the conversations or get bonuses.

Not to mention how most supports are platonic until S-rank considering another complaint is that the marriage comes out of nowhere, with some exceptions based on the support content each character can roughly only have one forced romance per character per playthrough and the rest C-A are largely platonic with exceptions based on certain characters. There's also the question of whether those who like the old system actually like that one more than those who like the new system like the new one.

Edited by arvilino
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Maybe another solution would be to allow people to support everyone, but only give certain pairs conversations and marriage potential so players can still reap the benefits of supporting units without forcing conversations between incompatible pairs.

Additionally, there's some merit to limited supports anyway. Yes you get less options, but more options is not always good and it's often more fun to try to work within certain parameters than to give everybody every possible option. Restrictions breed creativity or at the very least, they can make units further distinct or give limitations to work around. I suppose its subjective to a degree but eh.

The question of whether there are more people who like the older support system better than the newer one is a rather skewed question (which I suspect is partly why you asked it) is because a sizeable percentage of people who played Awakening and Fates never played older FEs before and some of them never will. And certainly I've seen people who've gone back to older games in the series after starting with Awakening prefer the older support systems (FE9's mainly). In any case, Awakening's and Fates' sheer popularity and newcomers who lack FE experience are likely to outnumber those who prefer the older support system, but numbers do not tell the whole story.

Edited by Dark Sage
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I like FE13/14's support speed, and being able to get supports in a reasonable amount of time without turtling is good. I like that. However, on a more writing level there's a lot of pairs that are really just text fodder that really don't say anything new about the character. Sure, some of them actually could have pretty good character chemistry if the writing team didn't fuck up royally on the support or the character as a whole, but there are others that just really have no business talking with each other and no real compatibility based on personality alone. In those cases, when there just lacks whatever kind of chemistry that can tell more about at least one if not both characters, it's kind of a waste of writing, really. I feel like fates on average has better quality than awakening supportswise, at least, from what I've read, but there's still a sizeable amount of pretty repetitive ones even on characters I like, and there's also a couple of...well, quite questionable ones, too.

In the mean time, characters being MU-sexuals also limit their potential interactions with characters who may have good chemistry, excellent even, and really curbs their development. I also miss having some pent-and-louise type relationships where the characters are already joined at the start.

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jbGegwd.gif

If this is going to be in every Fire Emblem from now on they better learn how to write them better. In Genealogy they were superb, in Awakening they were mixed, but they had plot important, in Fates they were in there for no real reason, and despite my love for a few kids, they aren't even really popular in Japan judging by the polls. And if they keep using flimsy excuses, people will start getting tired of them and they'll be taken out, and it'll just keep declining. SO they better either write them better, give a damn good excuse for why they're in there, or remove them entirely.

No, I was one of them too, don't worry. I think a lot of people were, and it could have been a good idea, it just fell short.

I do typically, only because I'm so use to it from being a little kid. Except in other people's houses unless I know them well and they don't care. And... idk... they're part dragon... maybe they have hard feet? /excuses

My impression is that while some people don't like the children mechanic (or the children characters themselves) in terms of writing, a majority like it for gameplay and shipping reasons. The next game could have children be spawned by pixie dust and delivered by storks and people would still be for it because people who care about writing quality are a minority. I'm sure that's why people can marry their siblings, because they don't care about Kamui as a character and just want to pair characters with whomever they please. As much as I want to blame IS for their writing/gameplay priorities, the fans are almost as much to blame.

I like FE13/14's support speed, and being able to get supports in a reasonable amount of time without turtling is good. I like that. However, on a more writing level there's a lot of pairs that are really just text fodder that really don't say anything new about the character. Sure, some of them actually could have pretty good character chemistry if the writing team didn't fuck up royally on the support or the character as a whole, but there are others that just really have no business talking with each other and no real compatibility based on personality alone. In those cases, when there just lacks whatever kind of chemistry that can tell more about at least one if not both characters, it's kind of a waste of writing, really. I feel like fates on average has better quality than awakening supportswise, at least, from what I've read, but there's still a sizeable amount of pretty repetitive ones even on characters I like, and there's also a couple of...well, quite questionable ones, too.

In the mean time, characters being MU-sexuals also limit their potential interactions with characters who may have good chemistry, excellent even, and really curbs their development. I also miss having some pent-and-louise type relationships where the characters are already joined at the start.

Nonsense. Everyone can bond over farming. Mozume has chemistry with everyone.

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I think people who don't give a single shit about the story and care ONLY about shipping and pairing and children, and would sacrifice the quality of all other aspects of the story just for shipping, might be better off playing a dating sim game.

While I'm not going to claim that FE stories were ever masterpieces, what they did do better than Awakening and Fates was that they didn't portray once side as in the right and the other side as in the wrong. In some games the bad guys' motivations and reasons were better detailed. Even if you didn't agree with the motivations or think it was lame.

Why did Ashera want to destroy the world? Because watching the laguz and beorc fight was like watching her children kill her other children, and she thought that if all they were going to do was fight there was no point for them to exist. Why did Zephiel want to hand over the rule of Elibe to the dragons? Because he was so jaded by his asshole father (who did what he did out of jealousy and resentment) that he felt that humans sucked. What happened with Lyon? He was distraught by the death of his father the emperor and he tried to bring him back to life, and got possessed while trying to do so. Why does Garon want to invade Hoshido? Oh wait, that's Hydra? Why does Hydra want to invade Hoshido? Oh, he wants to see Nohr and Hoshido burn? Well, why? Because the humans forgot his gratitude? What was that act of gratitude? … Anyone?

War is a really complicated thing that affects our lives to some extent whether we know it or not. FE is a game in which war is a major theme, and I think that they should at least try to take it seriously. Why do I think Nohr's story sucked so much? Because the writers took what could have been a very interesting personal AND moral dilemma … and then they completely dropped the ball so that Kamui's actions are excused and/or justified because they don't want the player feeling bad. WAR IS SUPPOSED TO MAKE YOU FEEL BAD. There is no person who can remain so "pure" and "untouched" in war, that's bullshit! If you want to write a feel-good story about how this one "pure" and "chosen" person is always right where being able to marry everyone is the most important part of the story, then choose a setting where that can at least be justified! Like a dating sim! If you're going to write a story where the characters are involved in war, I think the consequences that has on people and the player is more important than who you're gonna fuck.

Edited by Sunwoo
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I can understand the appeal behind shipping and children, but I don't know. The general quality of supports in Fates and the implementation of children in the game; I just don't see the appeal here.

I don't even bother doing S supports anymore when I play Fates. I'd like more meaningful (at least for Fire Emblem) conversations, and a storyline that properly integrates a second generation.

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I feel like if you wanna have kids, fine. But don't throw them in so cheaply as Fates did. Children should have an actual reason to be around, if they're gonna be implemented, not hyperbolic time chambers you conveniently just place them in. I didn't like the time travel in 13either, but at least it's a plot related reason that the kids are around and is preferable to how fates handled kids, even if Awakening's plot is all over the place.

FE4 did it the best wrt kids, imo, in terms of story-integration and level of actual importance of the kids. I can't see them having the guts to TPK the first generation again though (and really, I wouldn't want them to do it in the exact manner as FE4 anyway, that should belong with FE4, but something that makes more sense using FE4 as an example, anyway)

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stuff and things

You make some solid points, but I don't think the recent quality drop from the story is really related to the supports. It may seem that way, but they are pretty independent from one another. The writers just need to step their game up in the plot department, a little further out of the Shonen range

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You make some solid points, but I don't think the recent quality drop from the story is really related to the supports. It may seem that way, but they are pretty independent from one another. The writers just need to step their game up in the plot department, a little further out of the Shonen range

I don't think the quality drop is related to the supports alone. I think it's related to IS trying to please everyone and not being able to take a stand and to "take a risk" with FE14. The marriage system didn't have to be exactly like it was in FE13. Characters could've had limited marriage options. The children didn't need to be in FE14, they have no plot relevance. And the plot definitely needed to be less worried about "offending" players and call out the avatar when they did a stupid and let them learn from it, instead of coddling Kamui about giving them passes.

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Yeah one of the absolute most disappointing thing is that, they built up Nohr to be a very complex plot, with some interesting possiblities, then it just ends up being.

Kamui is Garons bitch. Until he finally can't take anymore.

Like Robin would have had a better way of working around that for crying out loud. Actually as a character Robin would have worked much better in Fates than Awakening now that I think about it.

Edited by Jedi
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*Reads translated polls*
Well... This is it... I think I should start playing... XCOM... yeah. And I ain't just mad about the whole pandering and "Everyone can marry everyone" thing. Just the general strategy feels taken away through the hundreds of skills and pairing mechanics and build stuff. I just have nothing to say anymore. Just tired of repeating.

Funny though, I see a monkey paw in this. For a series that came back to life, people sure do love it for being a zombie.

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I don't see how that takes away strategy…. if anything, it adds more of it, especially if we're considering a no-grind run.

Skills are new factors that need to be accounted for, giving you novel ways to approach the situation or forcing you to be extra cautious around the enemy.

Pairing mechanics: Likewise, you can alter the capability of the units to fit your needs, but giving them strengths in some areas from the parent might cost them in others. Also, there's the question of the timing of the parents (is it better to delay getting the kid in exchange for a better parent, or is it better to get them earlier on [even with a possibly worse parent], before your final team is solidified and when the kid has more time to contribute).

Builds: Trade-offs…. that's a long-term strategic situation… I can go to this other class to pick up these skills, but I won't be in my original, so I'll function differently… does my team depend to much on me being in my original role? Can I afford to switch, or will I make things difficult for the team? Will I have good enough weapons to carry me through my time in the other class? And seals costs money or a limited number of drops? Is what I want worth spending the seal? Does another character want it more for strategic considerations (like them getting a new skill that helps out your team, like a Rally or Battle Command).

Basically, Great Geargia Gateway, I cannot understand at all where you're coming from here, because the skills/class system seems to achieve the opposite of what you're implying; it introduces MORE strategic considerations; it doesn't take them away.

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Like Robin would have had a better way of working around that for crying out loud. Actually as a character Robin would have worked much better in Fates than Awakening now that I think about it.

Actually, I would prefer if Robin wasn't in Fates, if anything in a more fleshed out Awakening plot. Fates revolve around holy weapons and dragon's blood and chosen one to make Kamui as special as possible without having done anything prior. Robin is at least a self-made man/woman. Even if he/she inherited the blood of Grima, there is no indication that it had any bearing on Robin's tactical prowess, which evolved from Robin's own dedication and passion.

Robin was unique in the concept that they were a blank slate, with an inherent curiosity in tactics, which evolved over time. This drew an unique parallel to series newcomers like me, who liked strategy games but was totally oblivious to how FE handles it. With time, I managed to learn the tricks of the game and manage a no-death Hard Classic run (I ain't no lunatic though).

Kamui is closer to being a stereotypical FE lord, like Marth or Chrom, and damn much harder to identify with. How many of us here are shounen protagonists with unlimited powers (he wins battles without killing, wtf), inexplicable magnetism (like wth, does he even do anything in the supports?) and THAT personality?

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Kamui is closer to being a stereotypical FE lord, like Marth or Chrom, and damn much harder to identify with. How many of us here are shounen protagonists with unlimited powers (he wins battles without killing, wtf), inexplicable magnetism (like wth, does he even do anything in the supports?) and THAT personality?

Kamui's personal skill: Miraculous Charm (不思議な魅力) :E:

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*Reads translated polls*

Well... This is it... I think I should start playing... XCOM... yeah. And I ain't just mad about the whole pandering and "Everyone can marry everyone" thing. Just the general strategy feels taken away through the hundreds of skills and pairing mechanics and build stuff. I just have nothing to say anymore. Just tired of repeating.

Funny though, I see a monkey paw in this. For a series that came back to life, people sure do love it for being a zombie.

Personally from you know...playing the game these things only adds to the strategy to the point that position in which a character attacks a specific enemy from becomes important for both Attack Stance Dual Strikes and also the aura skills like Demoiselle, Devilish Wind, Battle Command can become rather important.

What avenues of strategy have been lost going to this that haven't been thoroughly exhausted by New Mystery of the Emblem? And what's to lose from mechanics that simultaneously appeal to a new more casual audience while existing as features long term players can appreciate when playing the higher difficulty modes? If you call a game that reinvigorates the gameplay being a zombie, what do you call the period of staleness before Awakening?

Edited by arvilino
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Kamui's personal skill: Miraculous Charm (不思議な魅力) :E:

The moment I saw that skill, all the things that Kamui can do, and that personality I knew something wrong was going to happen. From what came out about the game a lot of things went wrong with Kamui. It also doesn't help that some of the characters who are devoted to Kamui like Suzukaze for example feel way too devoted to them at times.

Edited by Frelia
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