What is your unpopular Fire Emblem opinion?

[Ottservia]

47 minutes ago, Etrurian emperor said:

Firstly I don't think something being the point is enough to make it good. With Garon it could have been the point to make him as boring as possible but that doesn't prevent it from being a mistake that made Fates less interesting then it could have been. The weird hyperbolic time chamber for the second gen being bizare could very well have been the point but its still terrible. Bad ideas can just be bad which means that implementing those ideas as intended would naturally lead to a bad result. 

You seem to misunderstand what I mean when I say that’s the point. There is no such thing as a bad idea in regards to story telling just simply bad execution. The reason the hyperbolic time chamber is dumb is because it doesn’t add anything nor does it make any sense. There’s no point being made with them other than the fact that they wanted child units again. 

 

47 minutes ago, Etrurian emperor said:

But I also don't agree with you on Xander. Its an interpretation but only that. And while its theoretically possible I do not think its likely. The disconect between the Camus being depicted as noble while willingly serving the worst people imaginable has always existed within Fire Emblem. I'd sooner search for Xander's flaws in that tradition then any thematic meaning behind Fates. The game itself spends far too little time condemning Xander for me to imagine that they wanted the player to think him as any less than a paragon of virtue. But being a paragon of virtue and being Garon's willing crony mutually exclude each other and the game has a very hard time recognizing that. Ultimately I think that is where the disconnect many players have with Xander comes from. 

Need I remind you that Xander was forced to accidentally kill his own younger sister and essentially commit suicide at the hands of his younger sibling thus dying a martyr. I don’t about you but I don’t think that’s the story’s way of saying he is correct on anything. He contradicts himself and so he dies and loses the ideological battle. That’s just how thematically relevant story telling works. Naruto didn’t lose to Sasuke in their first clash because he was weaker no he lost because he contradicted himself by forcing his will onto Sasuke without trying to understand him. 

I don’t see you presenting any better interpretation so I’ll hold by mine. Like how else would you explain his actions besides him being in denial? And don’t give me any of that “the writers just didn’t think of it” garbage that I so often hear.

47 minutes ago, Etrurian emperor said:

also don't think Gooron being so unbelievable evil was meant to fit with any thematic point. It was just the writing team being extremely lazy with their grand villain. Its theoretically possible that the team did put some thought in him but if so then they evidently failed to competently get that across. Your take on Xander might have worked if Garon actively encouraged his son to think there was still good left in him but he never even tries.

I never said it was executed particularly well mind you but the fault is more on Garon than Xander. I completely agree that we should’ve been able to see glimpses of the real Garon to try and convince Xander and everyone else that he is indeed the real Garon. We should’ve had more of that. It would’ve done a lot more to help better sell the ideas already present in the narrative. Hell what would’ve made it better if Iago was a vallite and the one manipulating Garon on Anankos’s behalf. It would’ve made for a good twist honestly. 
 

however, as it stands I don’t think it’s as egregiously terrible as you seem to be making it out to be. The ideas are definitely there but the execution is definitely lacking. My point is that fixing Garon would take much less rewriting of fates’s narrative than it would to fix the agarthans in 3H

Edited July 20, 2020 by Ottservia

[Gregster101]

5 minutes ago, Ottservia said:

You seem to misunderstand what I mean when I say that’s the point. There is no such thing as a bad idea in regards to story telling just simply bad execution. The reason the hyperbolic time chamber is dumb is because it doesn’t add anything nor does it make any sense. There’s no point being made with them other than the fact that they wanted child units again. 

 

Need I remind you that Xander was forced to accidentally kill his own younger sister and essentially commit suicide at the hands of his younger sibling thus dying a martyr. I don’t about you but I don’t think that’s the story’s way of saying he is correct on anything. He contradicts himself and so he dies and loses the ideological battle. That’s just how thematically relevant story telling works. Naruto didn’t lose to Sasuke in their first clash because he was weaker no he lost because he contradicted himself by forcing his will onto Sasuke without trying to understand him. 

I don’t see you presenting any better interpretation so I’ll hold by mine. Like how else would you explain his actions besides him being in denial? And don’t give me any of that “the writers just didn’t think of it” garbage that I so often hear.

I never said it was executed particularly well mind you but the fault is more on Garon than Xander. I completely agree that we should’ve been able to see glimpses of the real Garon to try and convince Xander and everyone else that he is indeed the real Garon. We should’ve had more of that. It would’ve done a lot more to help better sell the ideas already present in the narrative. Hell what would’ve made it better if Iago was a vallite and the one manipulating Garon on Anankos’s behalf. It would’ve made for a good twist honestly. 
 

however, as it stands I don’t think it’s as egregiously terrible as you seem to be making it out to be. The ideas are definitely there but the execution is definitely lacking. My point is that fixing Garon would take much less rewriting of fates’s narrative than it would to fix the agarthans in 3H

You know having Iago actually be a Vallite who's manipulating Garon on Ananko's behalf would actually somewhat salvage him. It would certainly explain why he also has an unexplained hate boner for Corrin as well, since he has the power to destroy Anankos. He'd still probably be a shitty villain mind you cuz Fates writing, but it would at least elevate him from the nothing character that he is in Fates proper.

I'm still not convinced that the Slitherers are worse than the Garon Squad though.

[Ika Musume]

Three Houses is only worth playing for Crimson Flower. Even Fates gave more reason to play other paths imo (shrug)

[Samz707]

16 hours ago, twilitfalchion said:

I think FE needs to approach the naming of its difficulty levels a bit differently. Instead of calling the beginner difficulty "normal," it makes more sense to call it "easy," since that is the logical difficulty for those new to any game series to choose. Likewise, "hard" should be called "normal," as it's described in most FE games as "for experienced players." Normal FE players would be prepared for a difficulty like this because it's not their first FE game; they're ready to handle some challenge. And lunatic (or its equivalent) should be called "hard" because by its nature a hard mode in any game is tailored for advanced players looking for a serious test of skill.

That's a common issue in games in my experience.

In some games (Such as Oni by Bungie), Normal is still fairly challenging but not super-hard usually while in other games the Normal difficulty is rather Easy and the actual Easy mode is practically a cake-walk.

13 hours ago, zuibangde said:

To add on to this point, the reason why TH (and SoV) are praised for its storytelling is partly due to the fact that it's fully voice acted. The voice acting helps the player to develop an emotional response much easier than reading the text themselves. I can't really explain it clearly but it's similar to why many people turn to audiobooks in real life instead of physical books. The content is the same but audiobook makes it seem that the book is 10x more interesting which makes it 'better'. 

 

For me personally I did enjoy SOV partially because of it's voice acting but I actually do not like TH's story telling for various reasons. (Stuff like character's weapons inexplicably vanishing such as Edelgard's axe really annoys me whenever video games do that, if a plot point requires a character to suddenly be unarmed/poorly armed just after a level where they almost always/outright will be heavily armed in games it always bothers me..)

Also I feel like half the "Mystery" so far comes from Byleth just not asking obvious questions (Such as asking Jeralt why they shouldn't trust Rhea or not asking Leonie/Jeralt how they met.) which feels contrived and only makes me care less about the story when the writer has to literally just have the main character not ask an obvious question for a forced attempt at mysteray.

Also the fact that some of the new stuff just heavily back-fired poorly for me, Such as everyone getting a "first kill" reaction...except they didn't code the basic combat dialogue to be disabled, so I got this bit of dialogue from Lindhardt:

"It must be awful, losing to me." "I... killed them. What have I done? The blood..."

So Lindhardt taunts a dude after cutting him down with no emotional reaction then suddenly cares about the fact he's killed someone, that kinda sloppy stuff only makes me care less about the story. (So I actually consider most FE games not adressing the nature of taking a life for the first time better since at least they don't completely screw it up like Three Houses does.)

 Your point makes sense but so far I would still rate TH worse than FE7 regardless of the fact it has voice acting in the story department since I didn't have anyone taunt a dude after killing him only to suddenly poorly go through the "I killed someone for the first time" stuff.

Then you have flat-out crap like Byleth magically knowing that Dimitri has an inner-darkness, because lord forbid the writers actually write some way to interestingly show off that maybe Dimitri has a dark half when your wonderful OC can just magically know it after knowing the dude for less than an hour because plot.

(Also Byleth magically becoming friends with everyone, off-screen, in one week is god awful writing.)

Yes Voice acting helps but if your script is terrible that's not going to fix it usually.

Edited July 20, 2020 by Samz707

[Icelerate]

8 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

By complete accident, as a joke, in a way that was meant to imply that Mareeta is some kind of martial genius, but yeah.

It was a pretty funny moment lol and I agree that the moment was to show Mareeta being a prodigy and also gullible. 

One can argue that in Three Houses case, it's to make gameplay more practical. Also, it is possible to teach techniques that one does not know how to. Just ask Naruto and Kakashi. Kakashi didn't know anything about FRS but he did help him invent the brand new technique. 

[null]

2 hours ago, Ika Musume said:

Three Houses is only worth playing for Crimson Flower. Even Fates gave more reason to play other paths imo (shrug)

Blue Lions would like to have a word with you. In my opinion, Dimitri's arc is just as substantial as Edelgard's (once you're past White Clouds). They parallel each other very well as characters, both going through their own internal battles and having both positive highs and tragic lows to their stories. I think it's well worth it even though you have to play through White Clouds twice to see it. But I also understand not wanting to have to play through all that to get to the meat of the house's path you chose.

[Ika Musume]

Substance plot and character dev wise it's just as good if not better but my soul tears at my body when I try to play it soooooo

[null]

25 minutes ago, Ika Musume said:

Substance plot and character dev wise it's just as good if not better but my soul tears at my body when I try to play it soooooo

Well, fair enough. If you dislike it enough, I get it. I wouldn't want to play something I dislike so strongly either.

[Ottservia]

30 minutes ago, twilitfalchion said:

Blue Lions would like to have a word with you. In my opinion, Dimitri's arc is just as substantial as Edelgard's (once you're past White Clouds). They parallel each other very well as characters, both going through their own internal battles and having both positive highs and tragic lows to their stories. I think it's well worth it even though you have to play through White Clouds twice to see it. But I also understand not wanting to have to play through all that to get to the meat of the house's path you chose.

My personal issue with blue lions is that a lot of Dimitri’s development feels shoehorned? For lack of a better term. Like aside from the final fight with Edelgard not much of what happens is thematically relevant to his character. I like the scenes with Randolph and Rodrigue’s death but it just kinda feels those moments didn’t have anything to do with the battle that just happened prior(okay well Dimitri killing Randolph does make sense to happen at that moment). Like after the battle of Gronder, Fleche is just kinda there because plot has to happen. I’m usually not one to complain about stuff like this but like the scene in question has like nothing to do with what just happened in the battle previously. There’s like no connecting thread for why this event had to happen at this moment which just makes it feel shoehorned in and forced.

[Samz707]

2 hours ago, Ottservia said:

My personal issue with blue lions is that a lot of Dimitri’s development feels shoehorned? For lack of a better term. Like aside from the final fight with Edelgard not much of what happens is thematically relevant to his character. I like the scenes with Randolph and Rodrigue’s death but it just kinda feels those moments didn’t have anything to do with the battle that just happened prior(okay well Dimitri killing Randolph does make sense to happen at that moment). Like after the battle of Gronder, Fleche is just kinda there because plot has to happen. I’m usually not one to complain about stuff like this but like the scene in question has like nothing to do with what just happened in the battle previously. There’s like no connecting thread for why this event had to happen at this moment which just makes it feel shoehorned in and forced.

Yeah I don't like contrived bits either, while I doubt I'll get to Blue Lions (Since I'm on Crimson Flower and I'm seriously doubting I'll ever actually replay this.), Stuff like Edelgard's axe vanishing so Blyeth can get themselves killed is contrived as hell and the devs should have realized it was a terrible idea to do it.

[Ottservia]

20 minutes ago, Samz707 said:

Yeah I don't like contrived bits either, while I doubt I'll get to Blue Lions (Since I'm on Crimson Flower and I'm seriously doubting I'll ever actually replay this.), Stuff like Edelgard's axe vanishing so Blyeth can get themselves killed is contrived as hell and the devs should have realized it was a terrible idea to do it.

like my issue isn't that it's contrived because story telling is inherently contrived but rather that it just kinda feels awkwardly sandwiched into the story without any sense of flow. Like what the hell was even the purpose of the battle of gronder? How does that chapter at all further Dimitri's character arc. The stuff that happens after does but these two events just don't feel connected like you could outright remove the battle of gronder and nothing would really change because nothing that happens in that battle affects the event that happens after it. Like you don't need the battle of Gronder to happen for Fleche to try and kill Dimitri. You could replace that chapter with a fucking bandit and nothing about that scene would change and that's really my issue with it. The sequence of events don't naturally flow into each other. There's no "but" or "therefore" just kinda "and then this happened" which just makes the overall story feel clunky. There's no cause and effect here. There's a cause and there's an effect but the two don't correlate.

Edited July 20, 2020 by Ottservia

[Jotari]

8 hours ago, Ottservia said:

My personal issue with blue lions is that a lot of Dimitri’s development feels shoehorned? For lack of a better term. Like aside from the final fight with Edelgard not much of what happens is thematically relevant to his character. I like the scenes with Randolph and Rodrigue’s death but it just kinda feels those moments didn’t have anything to do with the battle that just happened prior(okay well Dimitri killing Randolph does make sense to happen at that moment). Like after the battle of Gronder, Fleche is just kinda there because plot has to happen. I’m usually not one to complain about stuff like this but like the scene in question has like nothing to do with what just happened in the battle previously. There’s like no connecting thread for why this event had to happen at this moment which just makes it feel shoehorned in and forced.

And yet it still feels more like a naturally developing arc than anything Silver Snow or Verdant Wind gives us.

[Ottservia]

25 minutes ago, Jotari said:

And yet it still feels more like a naturally developing arc than anything Silver Snow or Verdant Wind gives us.

These are facts

[zuibangde]

Honestly I feel like all four routes have their own fair share of contrived moments (although I'd say VW is the worst offender for this). I feel like it's really down to the personalities of the characters in each house that determines which route people prefer more. 

Edited July 21, 2020 by zuibangde

[Jotari]

1 hour ago, zuibangde said:

Honestly I feel like all four routes have their own fair share of contrived moments (although I'd say VW is the worst offender for this). I feel like it's really down to the personalities of the characters in each house that determines which route people prefer more. 

I think play order plays a huge role in it too. Claude is probably the lord I like best but playing Verdant Wind second straight after Silver Snow hit the quality of it hard for me.

[Sidereal Wraith]

I'll never understand why people praise Gaiden (the original, NOT SoV) to the moon and back. Famous FE YouTubers like Ghast swear up, down, left, right and sideways that Gaiden is some lost masterpiece from the Famicom era that to few people have played. Mageknight404 even claimed that Sacred Stones was 'Gaiden's lesser' which made me fall out of chair with uproarious laughter. 

As somebody who has beaten both Gaiden and SoV I can easily tell you there is no reason to go back and play the original. While it does have good music and some interesting gameplay concepts in theory, it's map design is easily some of the worst in the series, which SoV sadly still suffers from. Gaiden is just an absolute choir to play through, without much of a plot and a cast of characters you barely learn a thing about, save Celica and Alm. Grinding is a pain and the dungeons (especially the last one) are incredibly boring and monotonous. I hate that certain monsters can seemly respawn more at infinitum, dragging out battles much longer then they need to be. And Cantors suck in this version even more so then in the remake. If you need to play this game, play the superior SoV remake. It may still have many of the map design flaws of the original, but at least you get all the modern day FE convinces, a fleshed out story/cast, and Mila's turnwheel. 

Edited July 21, 2020 by Wraith

[Jotari]

2 hours ago, Wraith said:

I'll never understand why people praise Gaiden (the original, NOT SoV) to the moon and back. Famous FE YouTubers like Ghast swear up, down, left, right and sideways that Gaiden is some lost masterpiece from the Famicon era that to few people have played. Mageknight404 even claimed that Sacred Stones was 'Gaiden's lesser' which made me fall out of chair with uproarious laughter. 

As somebody who has beaten both Gaiden and SoV I can easily tell you there is no reason to go back and play the original. While it does have good music and some interesting gameplay concepts in theory, it's map design is easily some of the worst in the series, which SoV sadly still suffers from. Gaiden is just an absolute choir to play through, without much of a plot and a cast of characters you barely learn a thing about, save Celica and Alm. Grinding is a pain and the dungeons (especially the last one) are incredibly boring and monotonous. I hate that certain monsters can seemly respawn more at infinitum, dragging out battles much longer then they need to be. And Cantors suck in this version even more so then in the remake. If you need to play this game, play the superior SoV remake. It may still have many of the map design flaws of the original, but at least you get all the modern day FE convinces, a fleshed out story/cast, and Mila's turnwheel. 

Can't walk around the villages and no trap maps in the Final dungeon in Shadows of Valentia. 0/10.

[Sidereal Wraith]

On 7/20/2020 at 12:40 AM, Alastor15243 said:

Agreed wholeheartedly. The near unanimous praise it got at launch and to a lesser extent even to this day terrified me for the future of the franchise, because it managed to systematically strip the series of damned near everything I love about it.

What are some of the things you love about FE that you feel TH stripped away?

[Ottservia]

Just now, Wraith said:

What are some of the things you love about FE that you feel TH stripped away?

Fun and interesting map design for one

[Sidereal Wraith]

2 minutes ago, Ottservia said:

Fun and interesting map design for one

Yes, I heard that maps are reused way to often among all the different routes.

[Alastor15243]

43 minutes ago, Wraith said:

What are some of the things you love about FE that you feel TH stripped away?

For one, like... the actual gameplay. It's padded out to ludicrous extremes by this stupid monastery exploration system that takes up like half of the time you'd spend actually playing the game, if not more, with several obstacles and subtle punishments for trying to avoid doing it, since there are so many little bonuses that pile up from doing everything the monastery "offers". Seriously, there's no need for tutoring to happen every week. Just make it a passive weekly bonus that you set "goals" for at the start of the month.

Second, the supports. I have never played a game that inspired groans of pain from me when supports were finally unlocked, rather than excitement. Making them so ridiculously easy to get that you get your entire house to A rank with everyone without even trying or thinking at all about placement... turned supports from special, playthrough-unique treats that I had to work for... into a ridiculous chore that caused every single character to outstay their welcome. Three Houses might have an awesome cast. I wouldn't know, because I'm just that sick of all of them from being bombarded with so many supports that I couldn't summarize even 20% of them for you if you asked me. I sat through two Lord of the Rings movies worth of support conversations in my first playthrough. That is absurd. It doesn't help that all of the support bonuses are so bland that it barely even feels like a support system anymore. Give me the affinity aura system of 6-10, or the personalized stat boosts of Fates, any day.

Third, the entire system of permadeath and balancing the game around it. This game seems to solidly affirm the use of the turnwheel as the "new way to play Fire Emblem" despite how blatantly broken and imbalanced it still is, to the point that the devs don't appear to have even given the slightest consideration to how the game plays if you actively refuse to use it. The game's recruitment is so absurdly frontloaded, and the game so riddled with a mountain of unfair annoyances that punish not being psychic, that my blind ironman run of CF nearly drove me to madness, despite me somehow managing to complete it through sheer dumb luck. I saw so many things on that playthrough. Tripwire reinforcements making me terrified to move anyone outside of a single group. Units the game said wouldn't move, but then gave back their move on enemy phase after unknown triggers were fired. Reinforcements that appear upon the death of an enemy unit, no matter on what phase or even when in the phase said death happens. Units that spontaneously transformed into completely different units with better stats on enemy phase. A map that lied to me about the win condition and then sent a massive same-turn reinforcement wave at me for trying to complete that condition. Other games have had blind-unfriendly mechanics before, to be sure, but the sheer variety of ways in which the game screwed me over, the sheer number of rules it brazenly broke, is basically unprecedented. Most games only have one, maybe two types of ways to fuck you up if you haven't played before, no matter how smart you are. This game has dozens.

The game seems bizarrely optimized to perfectly make me personally hate every aspect of it in so many ways that those three barely scratch the surface.

Edited July 21, 2020 by Alastor15243

[Samz707]

49 minutes ago, Wraith said:

What are some of the things you love about FE that you feel TH stripped away?

This is going to be a bit of rant but here goes:

Pacing.

Yes, the GBA games have small maps, but you're in one-fight after another, so small, frequent battles.

With Three Houses, I play for an hour or two to get into a fight that's actually practically just as basic as the tutorial stage of FE6  and I'm over 3 hours in at this point and I've only been in 4 barely more than 10 minutes fights and one of them (my first Aux battle) was literally beaten by camping in forest/vegetation tiles at my spawn since I spawned with the  enemies and tiles next to me so I basically just let the enemies suicide on my and barely actually played the strategy part of a strategy game.

 

Characters.

I think when I'm 3 hours in, I can compare the characters to another game I'm roughly the same time in, On FE6 so far,  none of the characters have annoyed me, infact some of them (Such as Clarine) have actually made me interested in finding out more about them, I want to get supports to see more of these characters.

In Three Houses, I could give less of a pegasus dung about anyone, when the game asks you to pick your house despite knowing nothing about anyone (With the game's only real information being Blyeth knowing about Dimitri having a dark half because of this psychic ability called "Reading the script" because the writers are bad at their jobs.), oh maybe I'll get to know a bit about everyone when we're training for the mock batt- oh, wait no, the game just skipped all over Byleth's first week actually training everyone and Rhea is now asking me if I'm friends with my students, who Byleth has only interacted with for a week and I, the player have  not interacted with at all, I swear FE manages to actually make the friendships between characters worse the more they try to focus on it so most of my students are ok with my mostly mute generic protagonist and way more buddy-buddy than most people are with teachers that have actual personalities in their first week.

As for individual characters, well Bernie magically now suddenly is ok with Blyeth despite knowing them for a small period of time since I got her C-support before I even had my first non-mock battle, so this shy character who's timidness was the only character I cared about, wondering how the devs would handle it, I no longer care for since clearly Byleth's protagonist friendship powers beats any sort of social barrier via the power of buying a girl spaghetti like once.

Lindhart killed someone in the first real battle, taunted them over it and then 180'd into "OH MY GOD I KILLED SOMEONE" Mode so he literally just flip-flopped between emotions because some programmer didn't realize you should disable the combat taunts if someone's supposed to be horrified by killing people so by the virture of this I have offically stopped caring about anyone since the game's developers clearly didn't because why should I get invested in anyone when it's clear the devs couldn't be bothered to put any effort in.

Florina's supports with Hector look like the Shakesphere of Fire Emblem Writing for shy characters compared to the C support of Bernie, if that C support at least took most of the game to unlock, I'd be fine with it but I've literally only been in a single fight with her at that point.

 

Tactics

Weapon Arts are just boring objectively better than regular attacks, as opposed to the HP costing and situational and overall more fun weapon arts from Echoes, Batalions are just boring super moves/stat boosts that should have been the actual weapon arts and the weapon triangle was removed and at least one fun spell (Thunder) has been nerfed to the point where it's pointless.and just a bootleg version of another spell. (Fire)

Visuals

It looks worse than Echoes, there's less colour, everyone's faces look terrible in Battles due to the jagged edges, up close in the monestary everyone's faces look terrible due to the awful nose outlines that someone who shouldn't be working on any 3D art thought looked okay and just in general, it looks bad, Echoes was a decent looking game that felt like it only didn't look better due to being on a 3DS while Three Houses feels like a game that's just barely better than that and only by virtue of being on a console rather than any actual talent.

Also the constant fade in/out of "Mook" characters in battles was a terrible idea, that only serves to highlight how little people are actually fighting (a fact I rarely noticed in previous FE games.), looks awful as people clearly load in/out of battle and if anyone levels up then you're going to see the generic dudes fade out while the camera is still zoomed in and in general the battles actually look worse than Echoes but they threw a bunch of fancy visual effects on scree for when you use stuff such as Curved shot, which only just makes it look silly when Bernie causes a mini-helicopter updraft over 5 time a battle since that's the only way to have Archers have actual range and never really was cool in the first place.

Deadly Premonition was a video game on the 360, it was lambasted for it's PS2 looking visuals when it came out. why do I bring this random game up? because it has a switch port and it looks better than Three houses in just about every way.

Oh and the mini-map is pointless, since it just shows Units by what weapon they have equipped, which considering this is Fire Emblem (With Perma-death and limited units and also because TH got rid of weapon-restricted classes anyway) tells me absolutely nothing about which unit it is, you HAVE 2D GBA-style art for characters in another menu, why not use that in the mini-map so it's actually worth a damn.

Performance

Somehow this runs worse than Echoes, I've had note-worthy lag when fully zoomed out, the Monestary lags constantly when you run (as the game stops Byleth running entirely to let the game load), characters obviously fade in/out of existence in it, Most characters can't actually walk which makes it feel super fake (Seriously even Postal 2, one of the most infamous "Worst games ever made", managed to have NPCs walking around and some more Dynamic behaviour that is not in Three Houses.) and just in general, the game looks bad and runs bad in my experience.

Again, Deadly Premonition, set in a small town and every single named character has their own unique little routine they go through every day, every character has their own unique path of doing things (Not counting generics who you'll see in certain areas/occasionally on the road), so Three Houses looks like a baby's first indie game compared to an actual indie game from the 360 Era that just had a Switch port and there are roughly 28 characters in Deadly Premoniton so I'm sure a triple A game like TH could manage to have a unique path for all your recruitable characters if they cared about having the monestary not be a massive time waster.

It pretty much does everything worse than the other FE games I've played, I think Awakening is a trainfire but at least in Awakening, I can boot up the game and try to enjoy a battle, in Three Houses, I boot up the game and I might spend an entire hour without any actual meaningful gameplay going on.

 

 

Edited July 21, 2020 by Samz707

[Sidereal Wraith]

10 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

For one, like... the actual gameplay. It's padded out to ludicrous extremes by this stupid monastery exploration system that takes up like half of the time you'd spend actually playing the game, if not more, with several obstacles and subtle punishments for trying to avoid doing it, since there are so many little bonuses that pile up from doing everything the monastery "offers". Seriously, there's no need for tutoring to happen every week. Just make it a passive weekly bonus that you set "goals" for at the start of the month.

Second, the supports. I have never played a game that inspired groans of pain from me when supports were finally unlocked, rather than excitement. Making them so ridiculously easy to get that you get your entire house to A rank with everyone without even trying or thinking at all about placement... turned supports from special, playthrough-unique treats that I had to work for... into a ridiculous chore that caused every single character to outstay their welcome. Three Houses might have an awesome cast. I wouldn't know, because I'm just that sick of all of them from being bombarded with so many supports that I couldn't summarize even 20% of them for you if you asked me. I sat through two Lord of the Rings movies worth of support conversations in my first playthrough. That is absurd. It doesn't help that all of the support bonuses are so bland that it barely even feels like a support system anymore. Give me the affinity aura system of 6-10, or the personalized stat boosts of Fates, any day.

Third, the entire system of permadeath and balancing the game around it. This game seems to solidly affirm the use of the turnwheel as the "new way to play Fire Emblem" despite how blatantly broken and imbalanced it still is, to the point that the devs don't appear to have even given the slightest consideration to how the game plays if you actively refuse to use it. The game's recruitment is so absurdly frontloaded, and the game so riddled with a mountain of unfair annoyances that punish not being psychic, that my blind ironman run of CF nearly drove me to madness, despite me somehow managing to complete it through sheer dumb luck. I saw so many things on that playthrough. Tripwire reinforcements making me terrified to move anyone outside of a single group. Units the game said wouldn't move, but then gave back their move on enemy phase after unknown triggers were fired. Reinforcements that appear upon the death of an enemy unit, no matter on what phase or even when in the phase said death happens. A map that lied to me about the win condition and then sent a massive same-turn reinforcement wave at me for trying to complete that condition. Other games have had blind-unfriendly mechanics before, to be sure, but the sheer variety of ways in which the game screwed me over, the sheer number of rules it brazenly broke, is basically unprecedented. Most games only have one, maybe two types of ways to fuck you up if you haven't played before, no matter how smart you are. This game has dozens.

The game seems bizarrely optimized to perfectly make me personally hate every aspect of it in so many ways that those three barely scratch the surface.

Damn. Looks like I’m going to have to raid my local liquor stores in preparation for playing Three Houses. If it’s that crazy I’m going to need to hit the hard stuff to get through the game. 

Edited July 21, 2020 by Wraith

[Samz707]

13 minutes ago, Wraith said:

Damn. Looks like I’m going to have to raid my local liquor stores in preparation for playing Three Houses. If it’s that crazy I’m going to need to hit the hard stuff to get through the game. 

You could just not play it.

I only even got since Echoes made me hopeful FE would be going in a direction I'd actually enjoy and I can safely say I was more disappointed than even before I played Echoes and assumed Three Houses wasn't that good. (Since even stuff that I didn't even consider they could screw up, like a mini-map, are completely screwed, It's pretty much safe to say I like absolutely nothing about this game I'm over 3 hours into.)

Edited July 21, 2020 by Samz707

[null]

39 minutes ago, Ottservia said:

Fun and interesting map design for one

True, but this has been a trend since Awakening, where a lot of maps were just open areas with forts in them. Fates (BR and RV at least, haven't played CQ) may have had different map designs, but it was still overall very boring to play through.