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Alastor plays and ranks the whole series! Mission Complete! ...For now.


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19 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

But... if that's the case... they failed. They set it magnitudes too high, by the admission of basically everyone in this thread, even the people trying to defend it. Their "safety net" for the player is still an astronomically absurd time sink. Nobody is contesting that spending four hours of a playthrough fishing is madness, the only thing we're arguing about is whose fault it is, the devs for making it or the player for doing it. So by your own hypothesis, the devs categorically failed.

So I finally played a bit more 3H today in the Monestary.

While I didn't buy a ton of bait, I did use up the bait I found/was given and my save file is 33:27, just before starting the Chapter 11 battle, so to my knowledge, that's over 30 hours before the half-way point where my decisions actually matter. (Aside from going with Edelgard to the Capital, which felt really kinda rushed considering how her dad doesn't even acknowledge our presence and it was literally once scene and back again.)

I'd say to my knowledge, the limits don't work, they don't sound like they stop you being OP and if anything end up encouraging to over grind stats/fish/supports because "If I don't do it now, I can't do it later." 

I'm not even sure I was 20 hours in around chapter 20 of Blazing Blade, it really does suck up an absurd amount of time and I wasn't exactly trying to min-max. (I did mainly do battles when possible, I guess but still.)

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7 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

That's...

...Please try harder to read what people say before arguing about it. That isn't even remotely the subject.

...Whenever you do the monastery chores, like working at the stables, pulling weeds and patrolling the skies, you are rewarded with money and ore by the church. My question is why on earth this would still generate income after part 1 when the only people in a position to pay us for doing these chores... is us.

I don’t recall ever receiving money or Ore when I played Part 2 doing those activities. That being said, it’s been a while since I played Three Houses so it might be blanking my head. I know you get resources after you do Auxiliary battles, and in that case it can be speculated to be a prize from a villager or a gratuitous Noble. In that same case, perhaps the prizes for those activities come from donations from wealthy nobles who want to see the Empire foiled. And on a last note, is it really worth arguing about? It’s an incredibly minor detail that I never paid attention nor have I heard anyone else complain about until you brought it up. Not to sound rude, but between this and the whole fishing debate, I do echo some other people here saying are you just playing this game overusing the activities just to complain about it.

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2 hours ago, Acacia Sgt said:

That could've been easily solved by creating a new set of chores where you help out the surrounding towns. Having they pay for those jobs would've make good sense.

Well they do change on chore from being weed picking into rubble removal. It still doesn't explain how you're getting paid for having your soldiers remove rubble from their own castle, but as a change I appreciate it as it shows what work needs to be done. Also makes more sense that removing rubble could build an armour rank  better than...weed removal.

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1 minute ago, Jotari said:

Well they do change on chore from being weed picking into rubble removal. It still doesn't explain how you're getting paid for having your soldiers remove rubble from their own castle, but as a change I appreciate it as it shows what work needs to be done. Also makes more sense that removing rubble could build an armour rank than...weed removal.

Dimitri: ...You know, technically salt is-

Dedue: Your highness. Please. For the love of Sothis.

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23 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

That's...

...Please try harder to read what people say before arguing about it. That isn't even remotely the subject.

...Whenever you do the monastery chores, like working at the stables, pulling weeds and patrolling the skies, you are rewarded with money and ore by the church. My question is why on earth this would still generate income after part 1 when the only people in a position to pay us for doing these chores... is us.

Isn't it just a case of throwing story out of the window for the sake of convenient gameplay, (similar to how you can essentially travel from the monastery to anywhere in Fodlan and back in a weekend)? If anything, I wish 3H did that more often, Hunting by Daybreak was really annoying.

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27 minutes ago, UNLEASH IT said:

Isn't it just a case of throwing story out of the window for the sake of convenient gameplay, (similar to how you can essentially travel from the monastery to anywhere in Fodlan and back in a weekend)? If anything, I wish 3H did that more often, Hunting by Daybreak was really annoying.

No, that's the thing, it made sense in part 1. I think they just didn't notice.

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1 hour ago, Alastor15243 said:

No, that's the thing, it made sense in part 1. I think they just didn't notice.

It's not a major issue either way. Call it an acceptable break from reality or gameplay story segregation. Though it would have been interesting fir ganeplay if they did account for that by giving you a big payout at the start of part 2 when you seize the monenastary's assets and then refused to pay you for the rest of the game. Largely though I never seem to find money to ever be an issue in this game.

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3 hours ago, Jotari said:

It's not a major issue either way. Call it an acceptable break from reality or gameplay story segregation. Though it would have been interesting fir ganeplay if they did account for that by giving you a big payout at the start of part 2 when you seize the monenastary's assets and then refused to pay you for the rest of the game. Largely though I never seem to find money to ever be an issue in this game.

That'd be a kind of fun idea, actually. There should be a game that does that.

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5 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

No, that's the thing, it made sense in part 1. I think they just didn't notice.

I think the best justification for that money/ore is that some of those taxes the army is levying against the local peasantry is used to hand-waving a lot of fiddly maintenance costs for running and maintaining the Monastery, and having your units do those maintenance tasks themselves lets you free up funds and resources that would otherwise be used to have nameless NPCs do these task. Alternatively if they were being particularly feudal about the taxation, the peasantry pays in either labor or wealth, and not requiring the labor lets you demand forms of wealth, like gold and ore.

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Three Houses Day 61: Chapter 18 Week 2-4

So, fun fact: over the weekend I confirmed something that has been gnawing at my very soul for ages now. Remember that 3DS launch title, Kid Icarus Uprising, which got repeatedly shit on for its bizarre and uncomfortable controls involving holding the handheld one-handed and then using the stylus in the other, while still pressing a shoulder button despite your weak grip? A game that needed to come with a plastic stand in order to be remotely playable for tons of people?

Fun fact: there was a way better solution.

Through the magic of Ebay, I managed to finally get my hands on something I loved but lost ages ago: an old DS wrist strap, AKA the single most under-appreciated Nintendo accessory in human history. The thing was fucking genius. At the end of it was a little nub of stylus plastic, and the wrist strap let you secure it snugly to the tip of your thumb, turning your thumb into a stylus. The problem is, the thing wasn't continued with the 3DS for some reason, and for reasons even more incomprehensible to me, nobody, nobody on the entire planet as far as I have been able to tell, has ever decided to sell a replica of it. There are no third party thumb stylus wrist straps for sale on Amazon, no bootlegs of the product on Etsy, nothing. If you can't get your hands on the original, you're sunk. And it makes playing Kid Icarus Uprising so much more bearable. I still have my complaints about the game, but I'm actually managing to enjoy myself now.

So yeah, that's what I've been up to. I've been using a 17 year old accessory to play a 9 year old game.

Now back to doing something even more ridiculous: playing a game I hate for science and the amusement of strangers.

As I mentioned previously, this month is largely gonna be focused on skill-training Ingrid and Leonie to improve their accuracy. They've got their knowledge gems, so this shouldn't take too many weeks, especially not when I can do three battles in one day.

First, a doubled-rewards DLC auxiliary battle.

...It really annoys me how this game doesn't really give you any means of getting a proper look at who exactly fortify will be affecting. This feels like a recurring issue, and I wish I remembered exactly which games were and weren't offenders. In fact, one of my biggest regrets with this marathon is that I didn't compile a list of a bunch of the random quirks constantly changing between generations of Fire Emblem games so I could make a who's who of them as I played, keeping track of which games do which little things. Because I often find myself thinking “wait, did this game do that again?” for some random little quirk and knowing there's no way in hell any wiki will answer that question.

I was profoundly confused why the game wouldn't let Leonie attack an enemy who was clearly in her displayed range... and then I checked, and the enemy actually wasn't in her range. It was an optical illusion created by the downward-sloping stairs between her and him.

Alright, now for the next battle.

...The battles I have available are exactly the same, including the one I just beat. Weird.

Also, I'm training different battalions on Leonie to see if any can give her some nice defensive stats. The Nuvelle ones give some really nice res bonuses, and one of them also gives her monstrous attack, so maybe I'll go with that one. But defense would be nice too, since hers isn't the best.

Well, the Conand Tower one worked pretty well as far as training went, so sure, let's do it again with slightly different enemies.

...Not even. It's the exact same enemy types on the map, it's just the details of what position is filled by what type that have changed.

...Same droppables too? If I do this a third time, am I really going to get a third speed carrot?

...Yes. Yes I am. Fuck it, sure.

...I mastered sniper... pointlessly. Because it's archer that gives you hit+20, as I only just now remembered. Well, fuck. I still have time before Ingrid masters her class I guess.

At any rate, I like how they went to the trouble to give Dimitri two sets of post-timeskip quotes, for before and after he gets over his numerous issues. They kind of had to, but still.

Flayn just got excalibur, well done there. Now then...

...I send Dimitri through the arena after stopping to feed everyone and buy more master seals, and it takes until the semifinals before he fights an enemy he can't one-shot, and it takes until the final battle before he takes a single hit.

Alright, now for a battle at Lake Teutates. Let's see what this looks like...

Leonie can use b rank battalions now, so I'm having her train up one of those to see if it can get her some good defensive bonuses.

Aaand Ingrid has uncanny blow! Excellent!

Okay, this time, weirdly, the dlc mission doesn't repeat. I wonder what's up there.

So this second time we're doing it in the forest.

Leonie only needs 5 more fights to master archer, so after that we don't need the sixth battle. So I probably won't even bother with it.

I have Ingrid use the nuvelle fliers, since she has the worst magic of my dark fliers and could use the boost. Annette really doesn't need any help to kick ass at this point.

Alright, and now Leonie's all set. She has hit+20. And she can enjoy it immediately, because I remembered to take a skill off her in advance so it's automatically added. Because you have to do that in this game.

...And that's it for the week. I'll quickly do supports tomorrow, and then it'll be mission time.

Stay safe, everyone.

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6 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

Three Houses Day 61: Chapter 18 Week 2-4

So, fun fact: over the weekend I confirmed something that has been gnawing at my very soul for ages now. Remember that 3DS launch title, Kid Icarus Uprising, which got repeatedly shit on for its bizarre and uncomfortable controls involving holding the handheld one-handed and then using the stylus in the other, while still pressing a shoulder button despite your weak grip? A game that needed to come with a plastic stand in order to be remotely playable for tons of people?

Fun fact: there was a way better solution.

Through the magic of Ebay, I managed to finally get my hands on something I loved but lost ages ago: an old DS wrist strap, AKA the single most under-appreciated Nintendo accessory in human history. The thing was fucking genius. At the end of it was a little nub of stylus plastic, and the wrist strap let you secure it snugly to the tip of your thumb, turning your thumb into a stylus. The problem is, the thing wasn't continued with the 3DS for some reason, and for reasons even more incomprehensible to me, nobody, nobody on the entire planet as far as I have been able to tell, has ever decided to sell a replica of it. There are no third party thumb stylus wrist straps for sale on Amazon, no bootlegs of the product on Etsy, nothing. If you can't get your hands on the original, you're sunk. And it makes playing Kid Icarus Uprising so much more bearable. I still have my complaints about the game, but I'm actually managing to enjoy myself now.

 

Those complaints about Kid Icarus kind of irritate me. Namely because you can disable touchscreen controls entirely and the game plays just fine.

 

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3 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

..I mastered sniper... pointlessly. Because it's archer that gives you hit+20, as I only just now remembered. Well, fuck. I still have time before Ingrid masters her class I guess.

That's a bum steer. It's weird that mastering Sniper doesn't give you Fistbreaker (which is programmed into the game, but unobtainable), particularly considering that Grappler gives Tomebreaker and Warlock gives Bowbreaker. Maybe they thought Hunter's Volley was a prize enough for mastery?

6 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

Aaand Ingrid has uncanny blow! Excellent!

Very cool! Hopefully this makes her more reliable moving forward. It's done major favors for my Dark Knight Lysithea. 

7 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

So yeah, that's what I've been up to. I've been using a 17 year old accessory to play a 9 year old game.

I mean, I've been using a 6-year-old system (New 3DS XL) to play a 21-year-old game (Pokemon TCG GBC). Unironically, this system is the best way to play Game Boy and Game Boy Color games.

11 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

So, fun fact: over the weekend I confirmed something that has been gnawing at my very soul for ages now. Remember that 3DS launch title, Kid Icarus Uprising, which got repeatedly shit on for its bizarre and uncomfortable controls involving holding the handheld one-handed and then using the stylus in the other, while still pressing a shoulder button despite your weak grip? A game that needed to come with a plastic stand in order to be remotely playable for tons of people?

The all-important stand turned into something of an in-joke between me and my friends. "Pay $40 for this lovely stand, and get the game for free!" That said, I never had any issues with the control scheme. Maybe I would if I revisited it? I dunno.

The wrist strap sounds cool either way. Shame they never made a 3DS version.

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15 minutes ago, Jotari said:

Those complaints about Kid Icarus kind of irritate me. Namely because you can disable touchscreen controls entirely and the game plays just fine.

I tried multiple setups ages ago but they all felt unnatural and awkward, especially since you either had to map shooting to a non-analog movement system (xaby) or move with your right hand instead of your left.

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29 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

So yeah, that's what I've been up to. I've been using a 17 year old accessory to play a 9 year old game.

Dang, KIU really is nearing a decade. I hate this.

Never used the stand that much, but I enjoyed playing the game nonetheless. It's, uh...charming?

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On 11/14/2021 at 12:48 PM, Jotari said:

Well they do change on chore from being weed picking into rubble removal. It still doesn't explain how you're getting paid for having your soldiers remove rubble from their own castle, but as a change I appreciate it as it shows what work needs to be done. Also makes more sense that removing rubble could build an armour rank  better than...weed removal.

Dedue: Please do not eat the weeds.

On 11/13/2021 at 11:16 PM, Jotari said:

Even in maddening it's almost always better to use a unit's turn to kill something than to self heal. Safety in Fire Emblem comes more from minimizing threats than enduring a war of attrition. It's like we were saying with Linhardt's personal ability, it's one of the worst in the game and that's not just because you could use a healing item instead (which, being a mage, he is sure to have inventory space for), that's part of it,  but even if if healed a lot more it would still be rather useless because it gives up his turn (I think you even agreed with me on that point).

True, but realistically, it's not like one will always have the luxury of having their healers ready to go at any given time - especially early on, when you're really feeling the constraints of  Early Game Hell, which includes, but is not limited to, halved spell uses for mages and healers (also, we're talking about a game where even late in the game, Physic is restoring less than 20 HP unless the user is a Bishop, has a Healing Staff, or both). Anyway, I was watching someone play chapter 14 on Maddening, and they got themselves into serious trouble because they were much too stingy with healing items (which is precisely why I brought this up in the first place; having only weapons with the exception being an accessory *really* sounds like a noob trap, and is something I wouldn't even consider entertaining if I was trying to beat this game on Maddening). 

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6 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

Three Houses Day 61: Chapter 18 Week 2-4

So, fun fact: over the weekend I confirmed something that has been gnawing at my very soul for ages now. Remember that 3DS launch title, Kid Icarus Uprising, which got repeatedly shit on for its bizarre and uncomfortable controls involving holding the handheld one-handed and then using the stylus in the other, while still pressing a shoulder button despite your weak grip? A game that needed to come with a plastic stand in order to be remotely playable for tons of people?

 

Yeah I did.

A friend got me it for my birthday...for the past few years, a different friend borrowed it, because I really hated it.

I do want to maybe give it another chance some day but it just felt like a not-very well made incredibly simple TPS. (Also they had dodging mapped to moving twice in one direction, which is absolutely terrible, the only other game I can think of which did this was Cry of Fear but that at least let you turn it off and the actual aiming

But yeah if you have to sell a stand, for your handheld console, you did not make good controls, it simply didn't click with me, even the humor was more grating than funny generally. 

That said, I hope absolutely no game ever copies it's difficulty system, nothing like getting less rewards/patronizingly having the difficulty lowered because you died thanks to the bad controls meaning you sent Pit dodging off a narrow ledge trying to simply slowly edge your way forwards.

Edited by Samz707
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6 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

Through the magic of Ebay, I managed to finally get my hands on something I loved but lost ages ago: an old DS wrist strap, AKA the single most under-appreciated Nintendo accessory in human history.

Well this isn't an object of conversation I would even think would come up in this topic.😆

I actually had one myself, thought I used it only maybe twice and it's been long lost and unloved. TBF, the only game I used it on, was SM64, which was shoehorned touch controls trying to compensate for the lack of a control stick/slide pad.

As for the also-unexpected topic of KIU. I did enjoy it. Maybe the game went on a tad too long I felt, but I enjoyed it. The controls were never a problem for me. The humor seemed worthy of any good 3D animated children's film (and I dislike that genre of films).

My biggest issue with KIU would be the weapon fusion system. It would've been nice to get great weapons for playing on higher intensities and online, but, why'd they have to make it difficult to make top-quality weapons? I'm used to a fusion chart, I play Shin Megami Tensei. But, with the exception of Strange Journey, the games have improved the fusion system over time, which includes letting the player freely select what skills get inherited by the resulting demon (barring a handful of exclusive skills, and now demons have affinities towards certain types of skills more than others).

Edited by Interdimensional Observer
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Loved KIU. Its controls are a bit tricky to figure out but I certainly found something that worked for me (supporting the 3DS with my right pinky while holding the stylus with my right hand and the D-Pad and L button with my left worked well), and I thought it was a pretty great game past that. Sunk lots of hours into it, beat it on super-high intensities, etc. Never really cared about the weapon fusion system that much.

Though I gotta say, while I obviously respect criticism of any game, and certainly the controls of the game deserve to be talked about, you have to live in quite the bubble if you think that shitting on the game was or is in any way common...

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11 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

I tried multiple setups ages ago but they all felt unnatural and awkward, especially since you either had to map shooting to a non-analog movement system (xaby) or move with your right hand instead of your left.

I'm left handed so that might have something to do it, but moving with the A B X Y buttons felt fine to me. Especially given (I think) you have to move in the same direction twice to dodge, which seems more naturally on a button input than anything else.

9 hours ago, Shadow Mir said:

Dedue: Please do not eat the weeds.

True, but realistically, it's not like one will always have the luxury of having their healers ready to go at any given time - especially early on, when you're really feeling the constraints of  Early Game Hell, which includes, but is not limited to, halved spell uses for mages and healers (also, we're talking about a game where even late in the game, Physic is restoring less than 20 HP unless the user is a Bishop, has a Healing Staff, or both). Anyway, I was watching someone play chapter 14 on Maddening, and they got themselves into serious trouble because they were much too stingy with healing items (which is precisely why I brought this up in the first place; having only weapons with the exception being an accessory *really* sounds like a noob trap, and is something I wouldn't even consider entertaining if I was trying to beat this game on Maddening). 

Getting into a position  where you desperately need to heal with an item rather than killing something Sounds like the noob trap to me.

Edited by Jotari
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5 hours ago, Samz707 said:

That said, I hope absolutely no game ever copies it's difficulty system, nothing like getting less rewards/patronizingly having the difficulty lowered because you died thanks to the bad controls meaning you sent Pit dodging off a narrow ledge trying to simply slowly edge your way forwards.

Funny thing I think it’s the difficulty system used in Smash Wii U’s Classic mode (probably the earlier smash games as well but I don’t think it’s part of World of Light) which makes sense since they’re both the creations of Sakurai.

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2 hours ago, Jotari said:

Getting into a position  where you desperately need to heal with an item rather than killing something Sounds like the noob trap to me.

Maybe that's because you only think superficially. It doesn't do me any good to kill something when it puts my unit at risk of dying to others that are in range.

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6 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

Though I gotta say, while I obviously respect criticism of any game, and certainly the controls of the game deserve to be talked about, you have to live in quite the bubble if you think that shitting on the game was or is in any way common...

Shitting on the controls happened all the time.

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7 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

 

Though I gotta say, while I obviously respect criticism of any game, and certainly the controls of the game deserve to be talked about, you have to live in quite the bubble if you think that shitting on the game was or is in any way common...

15 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

Shitting on the controls happened all the time.

I distinctly remember panning the controls being a really common thing back when it was new. Looking at Metacritic, of their 75 critical reviews, 29 of them talk negatively about the control in just the short blurb. Quite a few of the reviews in the 80-90s cite the controls as what is holding it back from a higher score, or talk about having to overcome its control scheme.

 

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