What is your unpopular Fire Emblem opinion?

[Imuabicus der Fertige]

On 8/22/2020 at 11:21 PM, Samz707 said:

FE simply doesn't feel balanced for casual, you can very easily cheese out maps in my experience if deaths don't matter,

I would argue simply adding a secondary Lose Condition, such as “Suffer defeat upon losing more than X units” would fix this rather easily. You have more room to chill but you will not go unpunished for all too careless play.

While certainly not the correct thread for this, I also think that secondary map goals would make a neat addition to the game, not quite unlike the BExp from the Ike Emblems. Beating the map within a certain amount of turns, beating a certain (group of) enemy (-ies), acquiring specific treasure within a specific amount of turns, stopping a specific enemy from escaping, protecting a location or an NPC, escorting an NPC safely, preventing certain structures on the map from taking damage and whatever else I´m currently not thinking of. Completing these side objectives successfully may yield additional loot, items, weapons, money, unique promotion items etc. pp.

[Whisky]

59 minutes ago, Imuabicus said:

While certainly not the correct thread for this, I also think that secondary map goals would make a neat addition to the game, not quite unlike the BExp from the Ike Emblems. Beating the map within a certain amount of turns, beating a certain (group of) enemy (-ies), acquiring specific treasure within a specific amount of turns, stopping a specific enemy from escaping, protecting a location or an NPC, escorting an NPC safely, preventing certain structures on the map from taking damage and whatever else I´m currently not thinking of. Completing these side objectives successfully may yield additional loot, items, weapons, money, unique promotion items etc. pp.

This exists in various forms already, though I wouldn’t mind seeing more of it. Visiting villages before they get pillaged by pirates, getting chests before they get looted by enemy thieves, keeping green units alive, recruiting red or green units. These are all secondary objectives that the games have and there are some others.

[NaotoUzumaki]

Another of my unpopular one is that Crimson Flower route is the canon. The game tells you via Sothis to make your Own Choice (Byleth) following their heart and the HeartBeat at the Choice to Kill/Protect Edelgard is the heartbeat of Byleth. Sothis gave her powers to Byleth and became a fragment of Byleth. This also the route of the most of ´´Each action has Consequences’’ you see Rhea/Seiros going insane unable to revive her mom Sothis and not taking responsibility for creating a church and ideology to resurrect Sothis.Dimitri goes insane and dies against Edelgard for his family and stepmother death but the Agarthan and Arundel/Thales and Cornelia are responsible for this duscur. Rhea lies about the 10 Elite otherwise the church monopoly wouldn’t be exist.  Edelgard is my favourite route because her ideologies and methods are questionable but her attitude is basically “ I know what I’m doing and what it is going to bring and accept the cost/responsibilities but can you to Rhea/Dimitri/Claude” her A support with Lysithea shows that she knows that she gonna dies because of experimentation on her but has a plan for an heir.

[Samven]

On the subject of Vestaria Saga, I am ambivalent.

[ZeManaphy]

I don’t understand what people mean that the 3DS games onward have “anime-ed” the series. Fire Emblem is a Japanese game initially, so of course it going to take heavy inspiration from Anime and Manga. That’s what the Japanese grew up with.

[starburst]

14 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

I, for one, don't feel bad about using a Divine Pulse to reset over, say, an 80% miss and 95% hit, and to then alter my turn order so I go with a 95% hit first, and an 80% hit next. Either way is a valid turn, one order is just more appealing to the Random Number Goddess than the other.

But that is not how probability works. You could rewind ten times and still miss that 95 %, it is simply less probable.

Say that you are six hits away from completing a map and they have these probabilities 93 %, 89 %, 97 %, 87 %, 91 % and 85 %. All fine and dandy, right? Well, the possibility of landing them all is 54 %.
And if you calculated the possibility of landing all the successful hits that you had in the entire map (even if they all had a very high hit chance like in this example), the result would certainly shock you. You simply have never thought about it.

If I understood you correctly, you believe that the magical mega Wheel "corrects" these "imperfections", but the truth is that the entire map already takes place in an imperfect environment. You just choose to replay what bothered you. This has nothing to do with probability. One can repeatedly miss a 99 % hit, that is exactly why it is not 100 %. Or you may land five consecutive 35 % hits. Life is like that.

Nothing personal, mate. But I believe that the super mega Wheel contradicts a fundamental mechanic in Fire Emblem, which is factoring chance.

[Acacia Sgt]

12 minutes ago, starburst said:

But that is not how probability works. You could rewind ten times and still miss that 95 %, it is simply less probable.

Say that you are six hits away from completing a map and they have these probabilities 93 %, 89 %, 97 %, 87 %, 91 % and 85 %. All fine and dandy, right? Well, the possibility of landing them all is 54 %.
And if you calculated the possibility of landing all the successful hits that you had in the entire map (even if they all had a very high hit chance like in this example), the result would certainly shock you. You simply have never thought about it.

If I understood you correctly, you believe that the magical mega Wheel "corrects" these "imperfections", but the truth is that the entire map already takes place in an imperfect environment. You just choose to replay what bothered you. This has nothing to do with probability. One can repeatedly miss a 99 % hit, that is exactly why it is not 100 %. Or you may land five consecutive 35 % hits. Life is like that.

Nothing personal, mate. But I believe that the super mega Wheel contradicts a fundamental mechanic in Fire Emblem, which is factoring chance.

It depends, because some games load a string of RN's that are rigid no matter what you do, short of using them up. So yes, if that 80% missed but then the 95% Hit, then you rewind, while there's no guarantee the 80% will hit, it's now likelier the 95% may hit. Of course, this assumes the exact number of RN's get used up. Since that 95% may have hit because the enemy used up a few RN itself because the 80% missed, so even that is now at odds. So it's still up in the air, but not because the numbers shifted.

You'll get a better "randomization" in games with Battle Saves, since usually the RN's get reset upon rebooting the game, instead of just rewinding.

Though then, I don't know what system each game does. I only know the GBA games load RN's in advance, while the Tellius games reset the strings every time the game is loaded.

My point is that rewinding can be exploitative like that if the RN strings are rigid, as it makes the system less random than first thought.

Edited August 31, 2020 by Acacia Sgt

[Samz707]

1 hour ago, ZeManaphy said:

I don’t understand what people mean that the 3DS games onward have “anime-ed” the series. Fire Emblem is a Japanese game initially, so of course it going to take heavy inspiration from Anime and Manga. That’s what the Japanese grew up with.

Well the designs kinda changed a good bit for isntance

Compare the designs of Armor Knights in the Elibe games to Awakening as well as the Legendary weapons of Elibe, Armads looks mostly like a normal Axe in FE7 yet in Awakening it's...well, it's an eye sore IMO and I don't think I can state just enough how awful armor knights look in Awakening.

Edited August 31, 2020 by Samz707

[ZeManaphy]

18 minutes ago, Samz707 said:

Well the designs kinda changed a good bit for isntance

Compare the designs of Armor Knights in the Elibe games to Awakening as well as the Legendary weapons of Elibe, Armads looks mostly like a normal Axe in FE7 yet in Awakening it's...well, it's an eye sore IMO and I don't think I can state just enough how awful armor knights look in Awakening.

Armads looks different, but it does not look like an eye sore. What's wrong with it?

[Acacia Sgt]

Anime itself has changed, hence FE also changed. That's pretty much what it is.

If you want a good example of FE being anime since Day 1, compare it with anime of the era. Like, say, the Kaga era games with Legend of Galactic Heroes. For example. If not, there's plenty more you can find to see if they match.

[starburst]

2 hours ago, Acacia Sgt said:

My point is that rewinding can be exploitative like that if the RN strings are rigid, as it makes the system less random than first thought.

It is not even about the numbers, but about the logic behind them. The super Wheel contradicts the very nature of factoring chance, which is a staple of Fire Emblem.

Does 90 % hit chance seem fair to you? Well, landing two of them has a probability of 81 %. Landing five of them, 59 %. Ten of them? 35 %. What about thirty of them? 4 %.
Any map features more than thirty hits, and they all would never have 90 % hit chance. But let us go on with it.

In this scenario with fixed 90 % chance hits and only thirty interactions, one has a 4 % chance of connecting all hits. By definition, before one even decides to play. The probability of missing at least once is 25 to 1. The odds are clearly against one. Yet one chooses to play.

Now, why would someone in this scenario get angry at a miss!? It was crystal clear, from the very beginning, that missing at least once was highly probable (96 % chance), and yet one whines!?
Moreover, to counter the whining, they included a magical Wheel that would let you re-roll your misses, so that you can secure at any cost that that 4 % chance of success will always happen. What the fuck!?

See the perversion? It is simply not understanding the game. If you get angry when you miss, play something that does not factor chance.

The divine Wheel exists because people do not understand chance.

Edited August 31, 2020 by starburst

[Samz707]

1 hour ago, Acacia Sgt said:

Anime itself has changed, hence FE also changed. That's pretty much what it is.

If you want a good example of FE being anime since Day 1, compare it with anime of the era. Like, say, the Kaga era games with Legend of Galactic Heroes. For example. If not, there's plenty more you can find to see if they match.

Pretty much but Awakening in particular feels like a bad parody of FE that plays up the anime-ism, with the overdesigned weapons in Elibe's case and the frankly bad unit designs like Sully, because wearing a skirt instead of any armor as a Cavalier makes sense.        

Awakening pretty much feels like a bad parody with stuff like the focus on shipping, exaggerated character quriks, the way the self-insert is handled and the dialed up anime fight scenes in cutscenes that kinda just look terrible with how hard they're trying to be cool.

Echoes came out later and it's definitely not the same kind of "Anime" as Three Houses. (Since Anime is kinda not all the same.)

1 hour ago, ZeManaphy said:

Armads looks different, but it does not look like an eye sore. What's wrong with it?

Well, frankly, to me it's an overdesigned mess, we went from a somewhat natural looking Axe (Since it's very clearly not like that in FE7.) to a frankly almost edge-lord like design, It's got a rib-cage thing in-between the blade and the handle, it's entirely golden now for some reason (Which is a pretty dumb material to make a weapon out of.) and on the concept art-work it even has a Red eye on the blade and a skeleton hand grasping the red gem thing at the bottom., we've gone from a somewhat fancy and still reasonable axe that has the fact it's actually a sorta evil weapon be a twist, to something that looks like it was drawn for someone's edgy OC that could only look more edgy if it was blood red, it looks like it was made out of a skeleton for some reason and is almost entirely golden.

It simply looks like someone's edgy decorative axe than something that would actually be forged to fight dragons during a war and I'm pretty sure someone in FE7 would have commented if Hector's new axe looked like it was made of some dude's skeleton and entirely gold, it'd be a pretty cringe-worthy design on it's own right but it doesn't even remotely resemble it's original design, it's pretty much different on every level.

 

Edited August 31, 2020 by Samz707

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

3 hours ago, starburst said:

But that is not how probability works. You could rewind ten times and still miss that 95 %, it is simply less probable.

Say that you are six hits away from completing a map and they have these probabilities 93 %, 89 %, 97 %, 87 %, 91 % and 85 %. All fine and dandy, right? Well, the possibility of landing them all is 54 %.
And if you calculated the possibility of landing all the successful hits that you had in the entire map (even if they all had a very high hit chance like in this example), the result would certainly shock you. You simply have never thought about it.

If I understood you correctly, you believe that the magical mega Wheel "corrects" these "imperfections", but the truth is that the entire map already takes place in an imperfect environment. You just choose to replay what bothered you. This has nothing to do with probability. One can repeatedly miss a 99 % hit, that is exactly why it is not 100 %. Or you may land five consecutive 35 % hits. Life is like that.

Nothing personal, mate. But I believe that the super mega Wheel contradicts a fundamental mechanic in Fire Emblem, which is factoring chance.

Just so we're on the same page - in Three Houses, when an attack is performed, there's a number assigned to it (technically, an average of two numbers, 0 - 100, in 2RN). If the hit rate is at or above that (invisible) number, the attack lands. If below, it misses. So if the number for the first attack is 84, then an 80 will miss, while a 95 will hit. If the number for the second attack is 33, then both an 80 and a 95 will land.

In theory, the chance of both attacks hitting should be independent of move order. In practice, however, this discrete series of RNs exist. So an 80 followed by a 95 is a miss-hit, while a 95 followed by an 80 is hit-hit. And rewinding, via Divine Pulse, does not change it. Either choice of order is equally strategically valid, but one has a better result than the other. So by Divine Pulsing, I can create the "best possible" version of a turn (or at least a "better possible"), by overcoming information the game does not make available to me. You need not agree with this practice, but I ask you to understand the process behind it.

1 hour ago, starburst said:

It is not even about the numbers, but about the logic behind them. The super Wheel contradicts the very nature of factoring chance, which is a staple of Fire Emblem.

Does 90 % hit chance seem fair to you? Well, landing two of them has a probability of 81 %. Landing five of them, 59 %. Ten of them? 35 %. What about thirty of them? 4 %.
Any map features more than thirty hits, and they all would never have 90 % hit chance. But let us go on with it.

In this scenario with fixed 90 % chance hits and only thirty interactions, one has a 4 % chance of connecting all hits. By definition, before one even decides to play. The probability of missing at least once is 25 to 1. The odds are clearly against one. Yet one chooses to play.

Now, why would someone in this scenario get angry at a miss!? It was crystal clear, from the very beginning, that missing at least once was highly probable (96 % chance), and yet one whines!?
Moreover, to counter the whining, they included a magical Wheel that would let you re-roll your misses, so that you can secure at any cost that that 4 % chance of success will always happen. What the fuck!?

See the perversion? It is simply not understanding the game. If you get angry when you miss, play something that does not factor chance.

The divine Wheel exists because people do not understand chance.

For my part, I'm not whining or getting angry. I can see, though, why it'd be tempting to paint those who disagree with you in such a color. I'm simply doing something about it, using the tools available to me. I understand chance, but I also understand how the game is designed. And even with Divine Pulse, there are cases where a "tough RN" makes my desired version of a turn impossible - in which case, I have to adapt, and take the turn more conservatively. In previous games, an overextension means either losing a unit, or having to reset the whole map. Divine Pulse, however, allows the period reset to be a briefer.

At the end of the day, I'm not going to tell you you must like, or even use, Pulsing mechanics. But I'm a long-time fan of the series who finds it a genuinely great feature. That's where I'm coming from.

[starburst]

1 hour ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

Either choice of order is equally strategically valid, but one has a better result than the other. So by Divine Pulsing, I can create the "best possible" version of a turn (or at least a "better possible"), by overcoming information the game does not make available to me.

You bet, rolled a die and disliked what you got. Then asked not to pay, to ignore the previous bet and to roll again. What kind of bet is that?!
It is not that you are patching a flaw or anything. You simply disliked the outcome of the bet that you just placed.

You want chance to allow you to dodge and to land improbable hits, yet you Rewind when you miss. 😂

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

16 minutes ago, starburst said:

You bet, rolled a die and disliked what you got. Then asked not to pay, to ignore the previous bet and to roll again. What kind of bet is that?!
It is not that you are patching a flaw or anything. You simply disliked the outcome of the bet that you just placed.

You want chance to allow you to dodge and to land improbable hits, yet you Rewind when you miss. 😂

I mean, yes? I made a bet, against a computer, not another person - so my loss is no one else's gain. I made a bet, in the context of a system that allows said bet to be undone if it doesn't pan out. I then had to figure out how to progress through the turn without making that exact bet - either by selecting a higher-hit option, taking the turn in a different order, or totally reworking my approach for the given turn.

How is it different, really, than resetting when one of your units dies? You made a bet, your unit dies, but now you refuse to pay? In either case, you're going back to an earlier point and replaying. But with Divine Pulse, it's a turn back, rather than back to the start of the map. It simply cuts down on tedium.

And for the record, I'm not against playthroughs where you "pay the price" - say, Ironmans. I completed my first Ironman, Revelation Hard, earlier this year, and had a blast. I accepted my missteps (Azura in enemy range) and bad luck (Rinkah got 3% crit). Still, that's just one way of playing. And the "keep everyone alive" style, whether done by Pulses or chapter resets, isn't willing to pay the price of the bets it makes.

Anyway, I enjoy playing it this way. If you think there's something unethical or dishonest about how I'm playing my single-player video game, then... fine? You're welcome to believe that. Regardless, I'm going to play the game in whichever manner provides me the most enjoyment - and I encourage you to do the same.

[starburst]

9 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

How is it different, really, than resetting when one of your units dies? You made a bet, your unit dies, but now you refuse to pay?

The five, ten or sixty minutes that the replay may take are the price that I paid for the bet that I lost. Or I let the unit die (less common.)
 

9 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

In either case, you're going back to an earlier point and replaying. But with Divine Pulse, it's a turn back, rather than back to the start of the map. It simply cuts down on tedium.

Using the magical Wheel and restarting a chapter are not equal, and you know it. The former implies that every single move and roll up to that point would always be exactly the same, which is not true. Every run is unique, precisely because chance is factored; you adapt on every change. And it is naïve to think that every single move of your previous run was the best that it can be.

I laugh when an improbable hit or miss happens to me and a unit dies. I may not replay the map immediately, but there is nothing to complain about, I simply lost a bet. And I enjoy replaying maps; the resets certainly help me improve my game play. I try different approaches, get to know the units thresholds.

I do not celebrate when I miss and die, but it is part of the game. One can dodge precisely because one can miss, they are two sides of the same principle. I do my best to prevent it and succeed, but missing is always an option.
If chance is part of the game, Rewinding after a bad roll is contradictory to the game itself. There is no thrill when there are no consequences.

[Atlos]

I like fire emblem

[starburst]

37 minutes ago, MSAtlos said:

I like fire emblem

This is so true.
220 pages (and counting) of unpopular opinions, but we are all here because there is something interesting enough, entertaining enough about Fire Emblem for we all.

[Emmy]

45 minutes ago, starburst said:

This is so true.
220 pages (and counting) of unpopular opinions, but we are all here because there is something interesting enough, entertaining enough about Fire Emblem for we all.

 

At least we have one thing in common.

 

[AnonymousSpeed]

2 hours ago, starburst said:

stuff

Yeah but like, you can only use it a few times.

[Samz707]

2 minutes ago, AnonymousSpeed said:

Yeah but like, you can only use it a few times.

Yeah but there's also really no limit on how far you can go back and it's restored for free every battle in Echoes. (And it's the same in Three houses I think?)

Also sometimes (and I've seen people argue it's been this as far back as Echoes) it's arguably a crutch for bad game design.

[Alastor15243]

22 minutes ago, Samz707 said:

Yeah but there's also really no limit on how far you can go back and it's restored for free every battle in Echoes. (And it's the same in Three houses I think?)

Also sometimes (and I've seen people argue it's been this as far back as Echoes) it's arguably a crutch for bad game design.

Bingo. Imagine pitching the gimmick of Petra and Bernadetta's paralogue in a game that didn't have rewinds. You'd have been thrown out the nearest window at speed.

[Samz707]

13 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

Bingo. Imagine pitching the gimmick of Petra and Bernadetta's paralogue in a game that didn't have rewinds. You'd have been thrown out the nearest window at speed.

Yeah I haven't gotten far enough to get to any Paralogue's in Three Houses, I just know that people say the Rewind is used mainly to crutch for bad game design.

Though looking it up, it does seem like an absolutely godawful level. (and there goes my motiviation to continue playing TH for another while.)

 

Edited September 1, 2020 by Samz707

[Whisky]

26 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

Bingo. Imagine pitching the gimmick of Petra and Bernadetta's paralogue in a game that didn't have rewinds. You'd have been thrown out the nearest window at speed.

I don't disagree with you, but the counter argument would be that older games without Divine Pulse already had bad game design. I say just design the games fairly to begin with and then we won't need Divine Pulse, so remove it. Any death at that point would be your own fault.

[Alastor15243]

1 minute ago, Whisky said:

I don't disagree with you, but the counter argument would be that older games without Divine Pulse already had bad game design. I say just design the games fairly to begin with and then we won't need Divine Pulse, so remove it. Any death at that point would be your own fault.

No arguments there. My issue is they already achieved that with Fates, and then the very next game had rewinds and that started getting thrown out the window.

Edited September 1, 2020 by Alastor15243