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Do you hate Avatar character(s)? If so, why?


HTakara82
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Do you hate Avatar Character(s)?  

209 members have voted

  1. 1. If Yes, Why?

    • Yes
      47
    • No
      99
    • Indifferent
      63


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Nohr and Hoshido are the dominant forces of the West and East respectively. Their governments could both have policies that are predatory, or are at least doing what they can to keep their neighbors under their thumbs. Hoshido in particular could have been revealed to engage in war crimes against enemies, or to have ethnically cleansed Rinka's culture.

''asshole faction vs asshole faction'' as you call it can have a place in FE.

But Fire Emblem is at its heart an idealistic series. It always has been. There's always been some morally grey areas and I would like to see that expanded, but what you're proposing is simply making everybody suck and the main problem with these types of stories is that it's hard to care about the characters if there's nothing about them to like or admire.

Like, a lot of people would agree that Hoshido shouldn't be perfect and Nhor shouldn't be so blatantly evil, but it's ok to have one party be more in the wrong than the other, as long as there's a genuinely good reason for it. Maybe Hoshido has a strict caste system with a great gap between the poor and the wealthy; maybe there's some corruption by the local lords that they get away with due to money and connections; maybe there's race issues, with poor treatment towards mixed blood children and Nohrian immigrants. In none of these cases do you have to make them unsympathetic or mustache twirling like you seem to advocate. People want the there to be problems with Hoshido society, but in the way other nations have problems, in that the people are imperfect, but not aggressively corrupt or malicious.

Before the game was released, my hope and expectation was that the dilemma was less about family or good and evil and more about your chosen ideals. Do you abandon the country you grew up in and the family who raised you for humanitarian and idealistic reasons, or do you agree to invade a generally non-aggressive nation and sacrifice their people to save your own? Tactics Ogre's first route choice did something like this and is a good example of how, even with one of the choices has you do a blatantly evil act, there's good reasons for people to choose either side. Do you sacrifice some of your people to save the rest, or do you refuse to shed innocent blood and risk total annihilation? Making Hoshido just as bad as Nohr cuts out that depth just as much as the way the game already does it because instead the dilemma becomes less of pragmatism vs idealism and more 'what can each of these countries do for ME'.

This game REALLY needed additional choices beyond the initial one, and some that could actually change your route. I've often said this, but instead of there simply being a third path, each route branches: if you sided with Nohr, the branch would be whether to go through with the invasion and stay loyal to Garon, or rebel and try to actively reform the country from within; with Hoshido, it's branch would be something like whether to simply defend your land and strike back against Nohr, risking the disintegration of both its people and all future opportunities for peaceful relations, or attempt to find a more peaceful end to the war to save both kingdoms, even if it means fighting some of Nohr and some of Hoshido. How does this relate to the avatar feature? For the choices (both real and theoretical) to really work, you need to either have a defined protagonist or you need to have an avatar that's a silent protagonist to meaningfully reflect your choices and personality. This game doesn't commit to either, so you get this character that's supposed to be you and is generally bland and inoffensive in most ways, but at the same time too well-defined for their personality to reflect your decisions. It fails at being a good self-insert for the player to put themselves into and fails at having a protagonist that's not a bland piece of cardboard.

The Avatar as is done also doesn't really work with the support system either, because the support conversations are all fixed dialogue. Supports were designed to be tools to add additional backstory, depth, and personality to the characters. The problem with how the avatar is done is that because its supposed to be a stand-in for the player, they can't fully commit to any personality, so that means they can't have the character change or develop in any fashion. Their supports end up being a tool exclusively for the other character's benefit, with the avatar being a purely reactive force. When you combine that with the fact that the Avatar always supports everyone, there is inevitably going to be instances where how the avatar acts in one support is inconsistent with how it acts in another support. In order for the avatar to truly reflect the player's personality, there'd need to be dialogue choices and a lot of branches in each conversation, but since IS seemingly can't be bothered to do that (since it really is a lot of work after all, no sarcasm), we're stuck with what we have.

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Hoshido could use some more bad spots, but I don't think they need to be just as bad as Nohr or become much more morally gray. My biggest concern isn't that Hoshido is right and Nohr is wrong, but that Nohr is wrong for the sake of being wrong. Nohr can still be the agressor, but they should still have their reasons for attacking Hoshido, outside of that stupid Garon reveal. Have Leo and Marx admit through gritted teeth that the spoils of wars could at the very least save the poverty stricken Nohr or something. Now Xander especially just comes across as spinelessly following a "muhahahah" villain. The conditions of Nohr and their reasons for attacking are barely touched upon in the main story and from what I heard Garon doesn't use it to motivate his troops or the people of Nohr either. I think the whole IK stuff dragged the story down and made it much more simple then it could be.

In other words I would rather have the Nohr story to be the selfish path instead of the evil path. Have them do the wrong things for more justifiable reasons.

I'm not too opossed to people like Gantz or Mcbath though. Mustache twirling villains aren't that uncommon in Fire Emblem and if they're good at it they could be good villains. The problem would only occurs if they're the only villains of note.

The avatar itself could work wonders in this story if used correctly. Have the side you pick actually affect the relationship you have with the characters. Unfortunately everyone still seems to love Kamui even though he goes against their interest and can kill several people from the other side. Right now the game seems to miss people judging Kamui. Apearantly the game does judge you for going Nohr, but the characters themselves don't, aside from Takumi.

Edited by Sasori
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Nohr's a serious mess. Apparently it's portrayed as the "wrong" path for all of Kamui's whining about picking it … but at the same time Nohr seems to try OVERLY hard to make Kamui seem in the right the entire path outside of the choice as well!

Outside of the choice itself and Kamui's regrets about picking Nohr, the plot seems to go out of its way to defend Kamui from all the stupid following choices he makes. Was invading Hoshido to sit Garon's ass on the throne to reveal his true self a good idea? NO. At the very least, not before talking things out with their Nohr siblings first. Kamui never seems to really talk to his siblings about Garon or the orders they follow in depth, if it exists it seems to be on a surface level thing that never goes too far. And was that seriously the only plan both he and Aqua could come up with? Seriously?

Characters like Suzukaze and Mozume don't react to having Kamui destroy their homeland. And part of that may be because they are plot irrelevant and an optional paralogue character. But Suzukaze is actually not all that plot irrelevant and he can even die in Hoshido if certain conditions aren't fulfilled. It wouldn't have been complicated to have him express some doubts, OR TALK TO SAIZOU IN THE LAST BATTLE THEY ARE IN TOGETHER, maybe express some sadness for Saizou's death.

Ryouma dies to save Kamui. And the thing is that I get that Ryouma had no real way out. It was either die by Kamui's hand or die by Garon's hand and watch Kamui die. But I'd have liked to see him go out in a "screw you both, I'm going out on my own terms" kind of way rather than to save Kamui, who turned their back on Hoshido when they needed them most and after being partly responsible for the death of Mikoto. Hinoka and Sakura forgive them too fast when Kamui and Aqua's stoopid plan is the reason the brothers are dead. Kamui apparently wining battles without killing a single soldier in earlier chapters is equally dumb. And I really do not want to get into a full-blown rant about how Takumi was portrayed in Nohr, so I won't. Just know that his character suffered especially in the end just to make Kamui look good.

spoiler free tl;dr is, when Kamui makes the "wrong" choice, the game tries "too" hard to make him the purest pure paragon that has ever been a pure paragon who is forgiven by everyone.

EDIT: I really would've liked to see Nohr as a "selfish" route and not an evil one. No one on Nohr has to be evil for them to be the aggressors anyway, and Hoshido doesn't have to be perfect for it to still be the victims or the invaded in the war. But apparently, being "selfish" is not a good trait for a protagonist to have! Not that canon!Kamui is a good protagonist anyway.

Edited by Sunwoo
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Actually, I say you could certainly frame both choices as ''selfish'' if you were to take Fates away from its actual direction.

Going Hoshido? Kamui's staking claim to his Birthright. Going Nohr? He's seeking validation.

Edited by Alazen
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Kamui doesn't even have a birthright in Birthright because of spoiler-y reasons. Also, Kamui still needs to be sympathetic. Some of the changes I've seen you want to make towards Kamui just makes them an unlikeable asshole in the other direction, which is not where I would like to go.

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I still don't know why...

My guess : they were lazy XD (Too many texts, I guess).

There were alternate versions for nearly every single line; this includes supports, people.

As many things Awakening's localization did wrong, I think not including the silent avatar option isn't one of them; it would be a ton of extra work for something that next to nobody would use.

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