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


Alastor15243
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1 hour ago, Alastor15243 said:

Yeah, but Part 1 is probably the weakest from a storytelling perspective. My opinion improved since that, though not my enjoyment of roasting it.

What did you think about part 4 as a whole? I found the first half to be pretty filler. 

As for what parts of the story are the best, I'd say part 2, first half of part 3 and second half of part 4 are great. 

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1 minute ago, Icelerate said:

What did you think about part 4 as a whole? I found the first half to be pretty filler. 

As for what parts of the story are the best, I'd say part 2, first half of part 3 and second half of part 4 are great. 

I actually liked Sanaki's character arc for the most part in Part 4, but yeah, other than that it was fairly filler and "loose end tying".

Yeah, Part 2 has probably the overall best story in the game.

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1 minute ago, Alastor15243 said:

I actually liked Sanaki's character arc for the most part in Part 4, but yeah, other than that it was fairly filler and "loose end tying".

Yeah, Part 2 has probably the overall best story in the game.

Do you think Naesala and Laguz Emancipation Army should have had a bigger role in part 3? I think Naesala should have helped Daein try find a solution to the blood pact due to his own experience. I'm sure he's smart enough to connect the dots that Daein is being coerced by a blood pact. Then Daein can send him to go after Lekain to tear apart the blood pact but it is too late and fighting starts happening anyway . 

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2 minutes ago, Icelerate said:

Do you think Naesala and Laguz Emancipation Army should have had a bigger role in part 3? I think Naesala should have helped Daein try find a solution to the blood pact due to his own experience. I'm sure he's smart enough to connect the dots that Daein is being coerced by a blood pact. Then Daein can send him to go after Lekain to tear apart the blood pact but it is too late and fighting starts happening anyway . 

Honestly, I think any chapter where a laguz army is in charge would have been fascinating.

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Just now, Alastor15243 said:

Honestly, I think any chapter where a laguz army is in charge would have been fascinating.

I agree. I think the reason we don't get to control them despite their plot importance is because IS thought that having too many laguz units to control would be awful due to lack of 1-2 range and the weird transformation mechanics getting in the way. 

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On 10/7/2020 at 2:04 AM, Jotari said:

Did you pronounce it as Shiida? Or was it just fhjkdfhjkdgh?

I figured I would add my two cents to the pronunciation of Caeda, I always pronounced the Cae the same way as in Caesar, so either -də, or kae̯-də if I am feeling like using pretentiously Latin like pronunciations

 

19 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

Ideally I'd like a system that keeps track of what your averages are and, like, makes sure you're no more than 3 ahead or behind in any one stat. And maybe checks your overall average too, and also keeps that in check. I like how randomized level ups keep units from being exactly the same every time, increasing replayability, but I don't like how it makes it so easy for units to be way, way worse than they should be.

Its probably been already said, but that is basically how Berwick Saga does it (although the growth rates in that game are low enough that I legitimately thought you only gained one stat point per level-up for multiple maps...)

 

19 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

 

Unfortunately that's proving to be insanely unreliable, so I'll have to risk Jagen's life with a 2% crit in order to get a good silver lance hit in to get us going.

...Aaaand after that failed to get him close to death, we managed to kill him with an obscenely lucky crit from Abel.

I seem to remember this being an issue early-game on the higher difficulties of FE11, where the only characters with defense high enough to take a hit, have lucks low enough to risk a crit...

 

19 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

They translated this to modern dialogue scenes with one portrait on one side and one portrait on the other...

...but they didn't actually give Marth any new lines, so he's just kinda standing there listening quietly, and by modern standards that is so fucking weird.

This is another thing that bothers me about this game's story, as this whole Marth sits around getting talked to thing happens a few times, and its always a little weird...

 

18 hours ago, Shadow Mir said:

Speaking of, are you gonna avoid Lunatic in New Mystery for the same reason?

FE11 H5, and FE12 Lunatic are very different difficulty modes, and I suspect Alastor will avoid for different reasons...

Spoiler

H5 has a lot of early game BS like having to break early boss weapons (or bank on a crit), and the choice between surviving a hit or risking a crit aren't there, but it also doesn't have the gamebreaking aspect that make the difficulty much easier in the midgame (like the dominance of a forged Wing Spear, or Wolfe and Sedgar, although I suppose FE12 has the Axey Boy Triangle attack to compensate as well), and the final boss is less easily cheesed. I have generally found FE12 to be staggeringly difficult, but fair, although the highest difficulties of FE12 were not made with blind player in mind. Class changing to reach specific benchmarks to survive rounds of combat on maps is a necessary from chapter 1 in that mode, and some of the most dramatic difference is about how the AI was changed (I suppose the removal of the warp staff is fairly dramatic too, especially with how it also prevents you from reaching the dragon stone secret shop, and from getting the Aum staff, and the second Hammerne), and reinforcement are used as very clear traps, with the save points there to let you experiment and determine enemy AI behavior, and how to deal with reinforcements (I will have a post about this latter when they come up, but I generally find the placement of Save Points tends to cue the player into reinforcements, or where you are likely to engage enemies).

 

18 hours ago, Shadow Mir said:

And then they go and do it again in the next game. Whoopee. I mean, when only the main character can reasonably be expected to do anything to the final boss, but they need to be capped to not die horribly AND you have to hope you have someone else that can pry the one weapon that can do anything to the boss from the cold, dead fingers of the prior boss (which all but mandates THEM being capped as well), you dun goofed.

Those are very different fights.

Spoiler

In the FE11 H5 Medeus fight, a capped Marth gets doubled and killed if he fights, and having your divine dragon sacrifice herself (preferably twice with the Aum staff) for massive damage is often the easiest way to deal with that fight. FE12 Lunatic does make a capped speed Marth (or getting him close enough that you can use one of the speed bonds you get from maxing certain support to reach the cap) with Falchion is one of the best ways of dealing with him, but that isn't the only way, for example preparing a magic oriented character to class change into a Sword Master able to survive combat and use a forged Levin Sword deals a lot of damage to him (the 0% growth run of FE12 Lunatic Reverse with no dodge/crit rigging ends up using reclassing Palla to sword master with enough stat boosters and forged Levin Sword to deal with him).  One of the big things about that fight is that you need to reclass into those with the highest speed caps to deal with Medeus, but reclassing to reach benchmarks is something FE12 forces you to learn from chapter 1...

 

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Shadow Dragon Day 4: Chapter 2

Alright, let's keep it moving!

...So, we're in Galder Harbor... apparently? Except no we're not, we're in a massive grassy expanse separating us from Galder harbor. But like... bitch, what? How did we land ashore if not in the harbor? Did we catch wind of the bandit attack and do an emergency departure on the coastline? If so, why did Ogma know to meet us here?

Honestly, the only reason I'm even thinking about this is because looking at the Galder narration graphic made me realize we don't fight there, and that made me realize that FE1 really only has two kinds of maps: zoomed-out outdoors, and zoomed-in indoors. Far as I can remember, we never get zoomed-in outdoors. We never actually get a map that's just... in a town. It's always in a big building, or in the massive verdant plains that separate major points of civilization, zoomed out far enough that an entire village or castle is just a cluster of squares on a map.

This isn't really a huge problem, but it is curious to notice the limitations this remake is shackled by due to being a remake. They couldn't just replace a chapter with something new in order to add things the original lacked. 'Course, maybe the gaiden chapters fix that, but I don't remember them doing so.

Anyway, we get Ogma, Bord, Cord and Barst, and while you get some pretty kickass hit and evasion bonuses from this set of four if you deploy them a ton and train them together... given that Bord is virtually unusable thanks to his atrocious speed, and that this would really only be useful for securing hits since I can't rely on dodgetanking, and that I'd be banking an entire character choice on assuming I keep all four of these guys alive in a game that has ambush spawns... yeah, doesn't sound wise. I'll be using Barst though, he seems pretty good, and Ogma too, definitely in the short term at least. Let's see how his growths hold up.

Incidentally, Barst's defense growth has been nuked into oblivion to the point that promotion doesn't really make up for it, but I've got other options for tanks, and his other stats are pretty good.

Anyway, as very, very long-time readers might remember, I had something of an incident with Darros on my first attempt at an ironman of this game (which incidentally, I didn't lose, I just didn't finish it). When Darros came over to recruit himself... he moved first. Before the other red units. And then all of his erstwhile allies, to use the phrase I used last time, promptly ripped his spine out through his butthole before I could do anything to save him. Here I'm hoping to avoid that by putting Marth at the very edge of Darros's movement range so he gets as far away from those guys as possible. Not that I plan on using Darros. He's utterly terrible, especially his speed, though not quite as bad as his heavy weapon and low strength make it out to be. But it's the principle of the thing. Plus he's got a steel axe that would be handy to have for someone actually good.

...I underestimated pirate water-walking, and I had the poor judgement to position Marth somewhere at a diagonal where Darros had his own incredibly idiotic choice of space to recruit himself from. Darros is dead. Again.

...Didn't even have the decency to put a scratch on the pirate who killed him.

Yeah, this, uh... this got messy pretty fast. There are a lot of enemies you need to kill pretty quickly, and the pirates' water-walking makes it surprisingly difficult to wall off your weaker units. I would've lost Cain if I hadn't caught that in time, but thankfully I did, and going on the offensive managed to kill the pirate who would've killed him.

This game has a similar problem to Path of Radiance (and to a lesser extent Radiant Dawn) where the “camera zoom” is so close, and unit movement ranges are so large, that you can't see mounted units' full range while the camera's centered on them and you can see the blue and red spaces. Hence you really have to rely on those range highlights. Good thing those are so much better in this game.

With that initial northern wave done though, all that's left of the aggressive units is the cavalry. I had Barst take a swing at both of them, and he took out half of their HP while surviving. He won't be able to take another hit though.

Ah yes, and... what should I spy coming up on the horizon...

...but the save tile.

Yes, in this game, you get one or two single-use tiles per map that let you create an infinitely reloadable battle save. This isn't the first time the series has done something like this, and it...

Cough cough...

...won't be the last.

But frankly, I'm noticing a pattern here. It seems like every time they do this, it's a bandage they put over their insecurities about a game with some broken element to either its difficulty or the consequences for failure.

Genealogy has comically long maps? Let the player save-scum!

Radiant Dawn is ludicrously enemy-phase focused and has really long and tedious rout maps it'd be a massive, massive pain to do over again? Let the player save-scum!

Shadow Dragon brings back ambush spawns and has hard modes so profoundly unfair that the most reliable strategy for early-game bosses is to literally make them break their weapons? Let the player save-scum!

It really feels, in every case, like an amateur quick-fix born of an insecurity in the entertainment value of the product on its own merits and a lack of a desire to address the fundamental problem. They know the base game has serious core problems, but they're simply hoping nobody will complain about it as long as they never have to do anything over.

And the worst part is that judging by Echoes and Three Houses...

...That actually worked.

...I'm going to have a lot more to say about this later, but given that I won't be using the damned things, and given that my only clear memory of ever using them was to warp-skip save-scum the final boss on my first playthrough... that's all I have to say about them for this game.

Moving on...

I've been training up Cain's lance rank at basically every given opportunity, what with how important javelin access is going to be.

Anyway, so, they added a talk between Ogma and Caeda in this game. They added a lot of little talks for new recruits, something I appreciate, even if I still really wish this game did something like support conversations to flesh out its massive cast of criminally underdeveloped characters.

Alright, for the first time in the series, Abel has officially become better than Cain thanks to some lucky level ups. Good for him! But I'm still gonna try and make Cain good since he's only had two levels and is hardly a lost cause. He still has so much going for him.

Yep, got Castor, so now it's time for the final stretch.

Ooooooh! Cain's catching up! Abel still has better defense, but Cain just caught up in speed and beat him in strength! So now it's more skill and defense versus more luck and strength!

Anyway, we're up to the boss now.

Oh sweet! That reminds me!

This game finally takes away the movement stat of enemies who don't move!

Yep! Hooooo boy, the things I didn't appreciate about this fucking game back in the day. Not saying I'm convinced it's actually good (way too early to say that no matter what my first impression is), but there's so much to like about this game that I just could never appreciate as a teenager.

This guy has a hand axe, which is gonna be a pain. Plus side: I have more guys who are guaranteed to survive a round of combat with him, and he's way less accurate than Gazzak, so I won't need to heal the melee fighter literally every round. Unfortunately, I also can't reliably have my fragile units do chip damage to him from afar anymore, so this might get tedious due to the limited healing I have access to at the moment.

Yep, and Gomer name-drops Shanty Pete, everyone's favorite English-canon-only character.

Oooh! Almost forgot the village! The color palette doesn't make them stick out as much. But we got 5,000 gold from villagers worried about Lena. Score!

I'm currently healing up everyone who can possibly stand up to Gomer, and the plan is to, once they're all healed at the fort, have them enemy-phase him one at a time, tagging out when they're wounded, wearing him down as much as we can until he's taken out.

But given the ridiculous amount that gates heal... not many of my units can actually break even with just enemy-phasing. So I'll have Barst try to chip in attacking with a hand axe from the forest near the gate, where Wrys can heal him with impunity. Hopefully that'll work out.

...That might not have been wise, since the inaccuracy of his hand axe attack might cripple our more reliable enemy-phase damage.

...Yeah, this is... really, really a slog. It seems that even on H3, making Gomer run out of hand axe uses is the only reliable plan, and it'll take forever.

...Except that yet again, we got a lucky crit, this time from Ogma, and now he can probably be taken out this turn!

Right, we're done! Thank goodness that worked. Technically that could've gotten someone important killed, but it was either that, or wait around for like another half hour slowly getting rid of this guy's hand axe, and seriously, fuck that.

...Yeah, yet again, the end-of-chapter dialogue just has the villager guy's lines worded in such a way as to keep Marth from needing to speak, despite him being on-screen. Honestly, this is... kind of alarmingly lazy of the writing team, come to think of it. I know they're going to add new dialogue later, but right now they've barely added any to the main story. They're just re-worded the lines that already existed.

...Hell, I've gotta wonder how different the Japanese versions of the text of FE1 and FE11 are...

But, uh... that's all for today I guess!

Stay safe, everyone!

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Oh wow. I didn't realize Bord's speed was that insanely bad. I used to use him the most out of the axe fighters as he has the best weapon rank so he can get off the ground quickest with better weapons.

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10 minutes ago, Jotari said:

Oh wow. I didn't realize Bord's speed was that insanely bad. I used to use him the most out of the axe fighters as he has the best weapon rank so he can get off the ground quickest with better weapons.

Yeah, 10% speed is really terrible. He does get buffed a lot in FE12, though.

#EndgameBord! Make it happen!

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2 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

...I underestimated pirate water-walking, and I had the poor judgement to position Marth somewhere at a diagonal where Darros had his own incredibly idiotic choice of space to recruit himself from. Darros is dead. Again.

That's actually kinda funny...

 

2 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

 

Yes, in this game, you get one or two single-use tiles per map that let you create an infinitely reloadable battle save. This isn't the first time the series has done something like this, and it...

Cough cough...

...won't be the last.

I am not entirely sure how well this works in FE11, but I found in FE12 that the locations of the save tile were often cluing the player into a difficult section of a map, and when you couldn't seen why it was there, with the enemies already on the map, it was hinting that reinforcements were coming when you reach it.

Figured I would add this little insight, and see if it holds any water in FE11, or from your own experiences in the next game...

 

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5 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

Yep, and Gomer name-drops Shanty Pete, everyone's favorite English-canon-only character.

By the bejeweled eyepatch o' Shanty Pete! Ah, I remember sailin' the high seas with Gomer - he and aye would play pranks on Nedata. Like the time we drained his Venin Axe, and filled it with grog instead! A real fine matey, that one.

5 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

Yes, in this game, you get one or two single-use tiles per map that let you create an infinitely reloadable battle save. This isn't the first time the series has done something like this, and it...

Cough cough...

...won't be the last.

I like these, as a way to negate the tedium of having to redo an entire chapter. There is the issue that you can leave a unit in a "guaranteed death" position, so make sure it's the first action you take on the given turn. I definitely prefer it to the "save every turn" model of Genealogy - in fact, I wouldn't mind an FE4 remake that implements a "one save per castle" standard. But I'm also an apostle of Divine Pulse, so this may just have to remain a difference of opinion.

5 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

It really feels, in every case, like an amateur quick-fix born of an insecurity in the entertainment value of the product on its own merits and a lack of a desire to address the fundamental problem. They know the base game has serious core problems, but they're simply hoping nobody will complain about it as long as they never have to do anything over.

And the worst part is that judging by Echoes and Three Houses...

...That actually worked.

Is the save/rewind a part of the problem, though? Like, they could release the game with the problematic mechanics, and without a way to obviate them, and that would be worse. I get going after same-turn reinforcements, for instance - I would prefer that they not exist. And I think there's a case that some higher-difficulty bosses are overtuned a turn. But these elements aren't unique to games with a save/rewind mechanic - Awakening Lunatic+, for instance, is a mess without such "fallbacks". I don't agree with treating the save system as a sort of "scapegoat" for flawed game design.

5 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

But given the ridiculous amount that gates heal... not many of my units can actually break even with just enemy-phasing. So I'll have Barst try to chip in attacking with a hand axe from the forest near the gate, where Wrys can heal him with impunity. Hopefully that'll work out.

Thinking about it, I actually preferred how Echoes did healing tiles - a flat 5, regardless of max HP. It really offset the benefit of high HP, and obviated absurd situations (like "yay, I just hit the boss for 8 damage... aaand they healed 8 HP between turns").

Also, here's a thinker - why do bosses attack on enemy phase? They know they'll lose if they die, and attacking a playable unit who can counter puts them closer to death. It's in their best interest to never initiate an attack, unless they can kill the target in one hit (or the target doesn't counter, or deals no damage). I have to wonder - would the game even be winnable against such an AI?

5 hours ago, Benice said:

Yeah, 10% speed is really terrible. He does get buffed a lot in FE12, though.

#EndgameBord! Make it happen!

I'm using Bord now, and his speed is going nowhere slow. That said, he just hit B Axes, and I got a Silver Axe from the chapter 7 boss, so... this could be fun.

Cord, meanwhile, is putting in surprising work as an Armor Knight. Only 21 HP, but an astonishing 16 Defense. He's basically my best answer to enemy swordies.

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22 minutes ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

I like these, as a way to negate the tedium of having to redo an entire chapter. There is the issue that you can leave a unit in a "guaranteed death" position, so make sure it's the first action you take on the given turn. I definitely prefer it to the "save every turn" model of Genealogy - in fact, I wouldn't mind an FE4 remake that implements a "one save per castle" standard. But I'm also an apostle of Divine Pulse, so this may just have to remain a difference of opinion.

Funny thing, I was actually debating bringing that up! This feels like something that would've made sense and been reasonable in a game like Genealogy.

22 minutes ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

Is the save/rewind a part of the problem, though? Like, they could release the game with the problematic mechanics, and without a way to obviate them, and that would be worse. I get going after same-turn reinforcements, for instance - I would prefer that they not exist. And I think there's a case that some higher-difficulty bosses are overtuned a turn. But these elements aren't unique to games with a save/rewind mechanic - Awakening Lunatic+, for instance, is a mess without such "fallbacks". I don't agree with treating the save system as a sort of "scapegoat" for flawed game design.

My opinion on the rewind system is... very complicated, and I'm thinking I shouldn't really tear into it until it actually happens in Echoes, or when the consequences of its introduction rear their hideous sevenfold hydra head in Three Houses.

But since you asked, I suppose I owe you at least a response.

It's true that there have been games that have been a mess despite lacking broken save scumming mechanics. But this philosophy of assuming everyone will be using it when playing the game has clearly made those sorts of things even harder to recognize as problems. I've said this a few times, but if Three Houses' divine pulse didn't reduce even the most psychotically unfair instance of fake difficulty into a trivial setback, then I have serious, serious doubts that any self-respecting developer would entertain the idea of lying to the player about how to win and then ambush-spawning them when they try it. That is an idea that could only have come up if the developers stopped thinking of unit death as a big deal.

Hell, Three Houses doesn't even send you to the game over screen when Byleth dies. It just tells you to rewind time, and you have to insist on taking the death before it'll send you there. Contrast this with Echoes, which at least sent you to the game over screen and then asked you if you wanted to rewind time, and it's clear that there's a concerning difference in attitudes at work here.

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9 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

...I underestimated pirate water-walking, and I had the poor judgement to position Marth somewhere at a diagonal where Darros had his own incredibly idiotic choice of space to recruit himself from. Darros is dead. Again.

...Didn't even have the decency to put a scratch on the pirate who killed him.

...Ouch.

9 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

This guy has a hand axe, which is gonna be a pain. Plus side: I have more guys who are guaranteed to survive a round of combat with him, and he's way less accurate than Gazzak, so I won't need to heal the melee fighter literally every round. Unfortunately, I also can't reliably have my fragile units do chip damage to him from afar anymore, so this might get tedious due to the limited healing I have access to at the moment.

 

9 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

...Yeah, this is... really, really a slog. It seems that even on H3, making Gomer run out of hand axe uses is the only reliable plan, and it'll take forever.

Spoiler alert: The next boss is even worse.

 

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5 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

So I've heard.

Enough speed to double almost every unit you got, and enough strength to translate that into 1RKOs. Need I say more?

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Bosses in FE11 are ridiculous. From what I've heard the strat for the next boss on hard 5 is to save scum and hope for lucky crits with Oguma

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3 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

My opinion on the rewind system is... very complicated, and I'm thinking I shouldn't really tear into it until it actually happens in Echoes, or when the consequences of its introduction rear their hideous sevenfold hydra head in Three Houses.

But since you asked, I suppose I owe you at least a response.

It's true that there have been games that have been a mess despite lacking broken save scumming mechanics. But this philosophy of assuming everyone will be using it when playing the game has clearly made those sorts of things even harder to recognize as problems. I've said this a few times, but if Three Houses' divine pulse didn't reduce even the most psychotically unfair instance of fake difficulty into a trivial setback, then I have serious, serious doubts that any self-respecting developer would entertain the idea of lying to the player about how to win and then ambush-spawning them when they try it. That is an idea that could only have come up if the developers stopped thinking of unit death as a big deal.

Hell, Three Houses doesn't even send you to the game over screen when Byleth dies. It just tells you to rewind time, and you have to insist on taking the death before it'll send you there. Contrast this with Echoes, which at least sent you to the game over screen and then asked you if you wanted to rewind time, and it's clear that there's a concerning difference in attitudes at work here.

I see what you're saying, certainly. While I prefer being able to rewind right away from a main unit death, I see the case for why declaring "Game Over" beforehand would reinforce the significance of that outcome. They do flash a "You have been defeated" message, which is the same in theory, but lacks the finality of a "Game Over".

The argument you make re: the development process is... plausible. That we wouldn't have a "Foreign Land and Sky" moment in a game without Divine Pulse. I feel weird defending the developers, by saying I have less confidence in them - that I'm not entirely confident they wouldn't try to push such bullshit in a pulse-less game. Consider the very difficulty name, "Maddening", and there's an argument that STRs and Pass Thieves from chapter 2 are, more than anything else, an attempt to troll and frustrate the player.

But, while I'll maintain that the game is *technically* beatable on Maddening pulseless, I do agree to the point that it should be designed in such a way that said victory requires neither advance knowledge, nor tremendously favorable RNG, nor tons of resets. So far in my Hard 5 playthrough, it feels less bullshit than Maddening (you get a ton of good tools beyond the first few chapters, like reclassing and forging, and I don't think enemy density has been dialed up). I'm content to think of these save points as a safeguard against a misclick, an oversight, or a single-digit crit. Admittedly, while I always save on them, I haven't restarted from one yet this playthrough, so...

Didn't mean to divert this into a whole 'nother topic. I wouldn't mind diving more into it when Echoes comes up, in... oh, say, 10 months from now.

28 minutes ago, Hello72207 said:

Bosses in FE11 are ridiculous. From what I've heard the strat for the next boss on hard 5 is to save scum and hope for lucky crits with Oguma

My strategy was, have either Ogma or Navarre right next to him, Killing Edge in hand. Counter-attack on enemy phase, and hope for a crit. If Hyman misses, stay put; if he hits, move out for healing, and trade the Killing Edge to the other Sword boyo. Drove my Killing Edge down to 1 use.

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Shadow Dragon Day 5: Chapter 3

Jesus Fucking Christ that narration graphic. What the fuck is with how pointy those mountaintops are!?

Well, I see why they call them the Ghoul's Teeth! Are those mountaintops or stalagmites!?

Man, Julian just makes me wish even harder this game had support conversations. His lines are just great. They managed to spice up what would otherwise be an almost verbatim scene from the original by giving Julian personality and showing the huge contrast between his and Lena's backgrounds. I'm glad he got a couple of talk scenes, but he deserved soooooo much more.

Tick-tock, now move that frock!”

Anyway, the enemies are coming in two stages, and yet again, just like in the original, there's a whole lot of nothing in-between. However, I did check out both the maps and my notes for the first three chapters in FE1, and I did notice that there were definitely some enemies on previous maps that weren't there before. I suppose they didn't find it necessary here, or didn't want the player to be swarmed before they could deal with Navarre's group.

Incidentally, I also happened to notice, and be reminded of, how much fun I was having with Dark Dragon in the beginning. I couldn't help but notice my use of the phrase “refreshingly simple”.

Christ. Not being Three Houses after you just blind-ironmanned Three Houses is a hell of a drug.

You have Three Houses to thank for this project even getting off the ground, honestly. The prospect of playing FE1 first was the big hurdle that made me cautious of attempting it, the other being fear of failing to follow through to the end. I knew FE1 was going to suck, and worried I'd let everyone down by turning out not to have the patience for it. But as I thought that, a little voice popped into my head:

Ahh... but is it going to suck more than Three Houses?”

Aaaaand... the rest is history.

Moving on, man, I love this exchange between Caeda and Navarre, especially Navarre's response:

Caeda: Leave this rabble. Lend your sword to our cause. Or, if you will not, then turn it on me now instead.

Navarre: ...Nay, I'll turn no blade of mine on a woman. If you're willing to pay for your services with your life, then consider yourself the high bidder. My sword is yours.

Anyway, with Navarre recruited (Caeda's flight makes that thankfully very easy, despite what the presence of a nearby hunter might make you think before you find out it doesn't move), it's time to deal with this lot. If you move Navarre onto the mountain one up and to the right from where he naturally lands on the end of his second enemy phase, then put another unit where he previously was, then you can create a diagonal sort of bottleneck where the enemy gets only one melee fighter up against two of yours. Better yet, at least for now that unit is a weakling thief! And since the enemy doesn't have any hand-axes or anything, this should be totally manageable, and I might want to divert some of my attention towards the incoming fighters now.

...Okay, I've gotta ask... why is Ogma faster than Navarre?

And also, neither of these guys have the base speed to double these fighters, which is... sooooo pathetic.

Man, this early game, when player phase is crucial but hit rates are shoddy and every attack matters, is always scary. I've had a tendency to get lucky in those moments, but it always feels like there should be just a little more reliability.

Caeda hasn't been getting the best level ups. Two consecutive ones where she only gained speed. I think I'm gonna reclass her into something slower but beefier to see if I can get her other stats up, because that wing spear means she's still easily worth trying to make good.

I am absolutely terrified of critical hits at the moment. More specifically, the idea that the units bottlenecking up north are gonna crit and face two enemies at once.

Oh yes, and here's the infamous devil axe conversation. I said this in the playlog for Dark Dragon, but I still can't decide which I like better. The blunt simplistic charm of “never use it”, or the idea of an old man hamming it to the max while lugging a huge cursed axe in his arms to hand to a hapless and confused Marth. Also “Oh, ho ho! Don't you look young and full of life!” is just so funny to me. This old man is crazy.

Honestly, I'll keep it around for now, but given this is an ironman, I'd have to be in pretty dire straits, or its accuracy would have to neutralize a much greater risk, before I'd risk using this thing.

Ugh. Cain got two consecutive terrible level ups yet again, and is once more behind Abel.

The critical sound effect in this game (which I've heard a lot in quick succession this chapter, thankfully never at an inconvenient time) is pretty cool, honestly. It almost sounds like the scream of a bird of prey.

Speaking of which, enemies globally don't have luck in this game. That's nice for crit rates, but it also means that bottlenecking is unreliable. I mean... arguably that could be the point? Not sure. It is a nice side-effect though. Even though bottlenecking was the best strategy I could think of today, I probably won't do it again.

...Jagen just got speed and luck on his first level up, which is... way better than I could reasonably hope for from him, sadly. That's enough to get rid of some enemies' crit rates on him for a little while.

...Christ. Now we get to the frustrating part.

The boss.

Seriously, I don't know how anyone thought this would be fun. If we had access to buyable heal staves? Maybe. But having to pace the ones we have, only having forts to heal on otherwise, and then making the enemy capable of obliterating basically anything... Holy shit.

Also...

Since it obviously has to be said...

In Archanea, Hyman break you!

And speaking of breaking, thanks to this guy's frankly ludicrous stats, I really have no option here except to wait until he breaks his fucking hand axe.

And that's gonna take fucking forever.

Turn 36. I just got Navarre a level up due to his high evasion letting him get enough chip damage in. He got strength and luck, which means he's now capable of using the killing edge against Hyman without being doubled.

Turn 39. Ogma also got a level up, and is also fast enough to avoid getting doubled with his better weapon. He also got a crit, which is now tempting me to use my vulneraries and what remains of my heal staff to apply pressure with Navarre and Ogma and hope for another good crit to finish him off. If that fails, I'll have no choice but to play the excruciating waiting game.

Turn 42. No crits yet, but thankfully both Ogma and Navarre can do juuuust enough damage that they're hurting him more than he's healing.

Turn 45. Navarre missed, costing me a lot of my forward momentum. I could've risked it all earlier to try and kill him when he had 16 HP and would go down in two hits, but that miss is reminding me why that wouldn't have been wise.

Turn 46: ...Ogma missed as Navarre was backing away to heal. And like that, literally all of my forward momentum is gone. I need to pray for a crit.

Turn 49. HOW FUCKING HARD IS IT TO GET A CRIT WITH A 25% CHANCE!?

Turn 50. FINALLY! Only took the eighth fucking use! Okay, now I just need one more.

Turn 51. Okay, if we can go one more turn without missing, we'll be able to reliably finish him off with just one player-phase attack next turn. Game, do not fuck me on this.

Turn 52. Oh, now you crit, Navarre, right when it literally doesn't make a bit of difference!

Hyman's down. We have officially popped this fortress's insufferable cherry, and Navarre gets a speed, luck and defense level up. I'll take it. Now let's check out the armory and get the fucking fuck out of here.

And we get 15,000 gold for our trouble. Thank goodness something nice came out of this horrible, horrible ordeal.

Y'know, if Navarre and Ogma had the ability to do that at base? I probably wouldn't mind so much. It would still be pretty annoying and mindless, but manageable.

But it was only because I got lucky with my level ups that my strategy there was even possible. So yeah, fuck this chapter, it deserves all the hate it gets on higher difficulty settings.

And I didn't even beat the hardest one!

Alright, yeah, I'm in a bad mood. Here's hoping things are more fun now that we're over this ridiculous hump.

Also, do note, Marth is still silent during the end-of-map cutscenes. I'm going to wait to see how long it takes for them to write him a damned line for one of these things, and then I'm going to check to see if Marth had a line for it in the original anyway.

Stay safe, everyone.

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On 10/8/2020 at 4:40 PM, Alastor15243 said:

Yes, in this game, you get one or two single-use tiles per map that let you create an infinitely reloadable battle save. This isn't the first time the series has done something like this, and it...

Cough cough...

...won't be the last.

But frankly, I'm noticing a pattern here. It seems like every time they do this, it's a bandage they put over their insecurities about a game with some broken element to either its difficulty or the consequences for failure.

Genealogy has comically long maps? Let the player save-scum!

Radiant Dawn is ludicrously enemy-phase focused and has really long and tedious rout maps it'd be a massive, massive pain to do over again? Let the player save-scum!

Shadow Dragon brings back ambush spawns and has hard modes so profoundly unfair that the most reliable strategy for early-game bosses is to literally make them break their weapons? Let the player save-scum!

It really feels, in every case, like an amateur quick-fix born of an insecurity in the entertainment value of the product on its own merits and a lack of a desire to address the fundamental problem. They know the base game has serious core problems, but they're simply hoping nobody will complain about it as long as they never have to do anything over.

And the worst part is that judging by Echoes and Three Houses...

...That actually worked.

I find that it's particularly weird in Shadow Dragon. Shadow Dragon goes out of its way at every possible opportunity to really hammer home that the game was designed to be played iron-man style. From forcing you to sacrifice a unit in the prologue to all the visit conversations about how sometimes you need to lose people to the gaidens you only get by losing people to the literally endless stream of replacement units you get. Everything about it comes across as being designed to be ironmanned. I generally don't like to play ironman style, but I did so anyway when I played Shadow Dragon, because it was so heavily pushed and felt so much like it was the design intent. And then they put in the save points anyway, making it seem like a game with an identity crisis.

Three Houses, on the other hand, is completely terrible to try to ironman, but nothing about it feels as if it was ever intended to be an ironmannable game. There's basically nothing in the way the game is presented that tries to push a player towards ironman, and several things pushing players away from it. To me at least, Three Houses feels like a game that is secure in its own identity and that largely achieves what it sets out to accomplish. Obviously, what it set out to accomplish isn't going to be to everyone's taste, but I never got the same sense of identity crisis in it that I got from Shadow Dragon.

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5 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

 

Seriously, I don't know how anyone thought this would be fun. If we had access to buyable heal staves? Maybe. But having to pace the ones we have, only having forts to heal on otherwise, and then making the enemy capable of obliterating basically anything... Holy shit.

As soon as you get access to the prep screen shop that problem gets solved, although with based Wrys healing less than a vulnerary, I find you generally need multiple heals to do any good with them in a timely fashion.

 

5 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

 

But it was only because I got lucky with my level ups that my strategy there was even possible. So yeah, fuck this chapter, it deserves all the hate it gets on higher difficulty settings.

And I didn't even beat the hardest one!

Alright, yeah, I'm in a bad mood. Here's hoping things are more fun now that we're over this ridiculous hump.

That was the last bad boss for a while, as the next 5 (ignoring the gaiden) are vulnerable to the Wing Spear.

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53 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

Man, Julian just makes me wish even harder this game had support conversations. His lines are just great. They managed to spice up what would otherwise be an almost verbatim scene from the original by giving Julian personality and showing the huge contrast between his and Lena's backgrounds. I'm glad he got a couple of talk scenes, but he deserved soooooo much more.

Tick-tock, now move that frock!”

#ArchaneaRemake2

53 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

Incidentally, I also happened to notice, and be reminded of, how much fun I was having with Dark Dragon in the beginning. I couldn't help but notice my use of the phrase “refreshingly simple”.

Christ. Not being Three Houses after you just blind-ironmanned Three Houses is a hell of a drug.

It is going to be wild reading 3H after everything else.

Hopefully I'll have finished Maddening by then.

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Dark Dragon Day 6: Chapter 4

Well this is interesting.

Somehow, I feel like doing a weekend playlog today! Apparently making me fight through ridiculously tedious bosses isn't as demoralizing to me as writing and proofreading pages upon pages of commentary on Tellius lore.

I'm not sure how to respond to that knowledge about myself.

Okay, so, I was noting to myself how odd it was that Marth was talking in this scene, but then I realized this was a new scene added to talk about the introduction of the preparation menu. Funny that, since the original game already had a preparation menu, but whatever, I'll take it. This is a good thing to have.

Anyway, now that we're at the prep menu, it's finally time to forge the Wing Spear. Not sure if you can add on to a previously-forged weapon later, so I figure I'll spend about half my money on a forge. If I had a bit more I could've gone completely insane and more than doubled the weapon's base might, but alas, I can't, and it wouldn't have been wise anyway. At this point the weapon can one-shot literally anything mounted or armored, and will continue to do so until who-the-fuck-knows-when.

And I decided to go for the cheap shot and name the Wing Spear the Win Spear, learning in the process that you can just backspace like a normal computer can in this game, rather than having to rewrite the entire name past the point you want to take a letter from. Nice!

Also, yeah, it's either FE12 or FE13 that adds the “unload everyone” option, because this game doesn't seem to have it yet.

Aaaaand I just tried out the reclass option, and apparently girls can't be cavalry in this game! Which means that if Caeda wants to use the Win Spear, she's gotta stay a pegasus knight. It would've only been a 5% increase to her strength and defense growths even so, but I still would've preferred it.

But speaking of...

I heard this trick a while back from Mekkah, but yeah, since you can always have members of a class category equal to everyone you recruited in that class category plus one, I can reclass Jagen to a dracoknight to have some more mobility in my army! Might as well, right? I assume this is why people say Jagen is so good, as this means he can use a forged ridersbane and basically be a second Caeda.

In general though, something that puts me off reclassing in this game is that they did this really weird thing where the class growth rates can vary pretty drastically between classes and can have some huge boosts, and so they reduced a lot of characters' personal growth rates to compensate. As a result, a lot of characters are only remotely well-rounded when they're in their starting class. For example, Barst literally has 0% personal strength and HP growths, Ogma has a 10% speed growth, all three of the starting cavaliers have a better personal speed growth than Navarre, and Draug, the memetic choker of points, has a 0% personal defense growth.

Also, beyond that, class changing is limited, which is nice in theory, but not in the way Awakening or Fates does it. Here, there are just three sets of classes you can belong to. “Male finesse” (not sure what the actual terms are here), which is cavalry and mages and archers and the like, “male power”, which is knights and fighters and mercenaries and the like... and then “female”, which is clerics and mages and archers and myrmidons and pegasus knights.

At least in my experience, all of this tends to make your options kinda boring and limited. I can only think of a few units we'll be reclassing in this game.

Moving on...

So, this game no longer has “equip” and “use” as separate commands on the item menu, and instead it just lets you access your item menu and do those things there, which makes sense.

The prep armory doesn't price-gouge you like the Sacred Stones one did. Noted. Which means we now finally have heal staves. No more fort-sitting for us!

I'm pretty sure I get Merric here, which means I want to get some fire tomes so he doesn't have to waste his insanely useful Excalibur. Also, his magic growth is actually good in this game, so that's something!

Alright, I'm terrified I forgot something, but there's not much point standing around and waiting until I figure out what, if anything, that is. At any rate, planning in advance is a bit tricky anyway, because how this map proceeds depends mostly on how the enemies move.

The boss talks about how he'll “litter the lea with [my] cavalry”, and yeah, uh... good luck with that when you're stuck on a fort.

So, I'm basically being swarmed in a pincer attack, but thanks to some lucky crits, I managed to thin out the herd a little. I still have very little time before the cavalry is upon me though, so I've gotta think fast.

Alright, so, I managed to deal with the pincer attack. I had Marth and Jagen form a bottleneck on the 2-wide northern bridge, and then I had Lena and Wrys (who had no hope of outrunning the cavalry by going to the east) hide behind them to keep them healed up while Marth and Jagen used weak weapons to avoid over-fighting the cavalry or accidentally killing Matthis. Everyone else made a break for the northeastern area the fighters came from, except for Caeda, who hid over the water on standby in case anyone needed to be nuked.

Turns out, nobody did. And I managed to feed her a kill without the Win Spear!

Man, this feels like Binding Blade's early game. Granted, that's probably my least favorite part of Binding Blade, but it beats some other games I've played, I can say that for sure. And man, for a while, I was really thinking I might have misjudged the enemy approach and that I'd lose someone.

That's a sort of interesting aspect of this style of unit placement, where the nearest enemies are placed several turns away from you and then charge: you're forced to think multiple turns ahead, and try to visualize what the battlefield will look like when it finally happens.

At any rate, Matthis is... garbage. I don't think this even bears discussing, his speed in particular is terrible, base and growth.

Huh. According to a village, only knights and cavalry can use ridersbanes. Curious. That would suggest pegs and dracoknights can't, unless they count as cavalry.

Do they? The definition I'm seeing talks about being on horseback, and while they're rare, we have used other animals as mounts in real life.

Anyway, I'm trying to lure out these horsemen before they can cause me any trouble. Caeda can just barely tank a hit from one, so I can use her to bait them out from across the river.

Wow, that's cool. If you fight on top of an arena, the backdrop becomes the arena backdrop. That's kind of an amusing picture, having two people just barging into an arena in the middle of their battle to the death like they're Peter Griffin and the Giant Chicken, and all the guys watching are like “uh... is this part of the show? Fuck it! GO FOR HIS SHINS!”

After baiting out one of the two archers guarding the bridge just in case... I'm disappointed to discover that this game does in fact not take away the movement from everyone who won't move when approached. The knight here isn't budging an inch despite units being in his range, which suggests... that they literally just did it for bosses, which everyone generally already assumed anyway.

Laaaame.

But we have Merric now! Sweet! Finally we've got some magic attacks to add to our player-phase options!

Okay, so Merric says he “caught wind of a war brewing” and went to seek Marth out.

I'm uh... gonna assume he's not talking about the war that started three years ago, and that he's actually talking about the new one Marth seems to have started waging. It's kind of weird that we've shifted from fighting bandits to waging war with... basically no story fanfare for the transition. But then, like... okay, where are we...?

...Okay, so fair enough, Khadein is closer to Aurelis than we were. Okay game, I'll buy that for now.

Magic is pretty dang accurate in this game, especially for a 1-2 range weapon. Both fire and Excalibur have 100 hit. As do swords, like most of them did in Dark Dragon.

Yeah, um... this game pretty heavily nerfed dodgetanking. Not just with access to really accurate weapons, but by basically bringing the evasion formulas back to the level of the original game. Now, as that... video I showed you indicated, that pissed me off as a kid, and I found it extremely infuriating later when I discovered that the mainline games seemed to get their evasion formula nerfed every time they remade an old game, to the point that in Three Houses it's back to one for one.

Now, however... I'm kinda torn.

Don't misunderstand me: the formula that Shadow Dragon uses is blatantly flawed.The skill stat is borderline worthless in this game when each stat point only provides a single percentage extra chance to hit, and hit rates are so manageable with several weapon types anyway. There is no way that skill as it stands is a remotely worthwhile or balanced stat, and that needs to change.

However... over the course of this marathon I've found that in games where dodgetanking becomes viable, it makes it absurdly easy to abuse it, and that makes ironmanning less interesting when assuming every attack will hit is no longer even remotely necessary. In fact, in every game so far that used the double formula, I've been able to turn most of my units into nigh-unkillable dodgetanks by abusing some aspect of the system.

So really, it feels like neither system has really managed to be devoid of problems. I'll have to check out how I like the 1.5 formula of Awakening and Fates, though I feel the problem with skill won't be fixed unless the formula is even higher than double, or skill is given some extra effect like speed to make a single point matter more often.

Yep, so, that explains it. The knight was programmed to start moving when attacked, one of those tricks you can't do if you disable their movement entirely. Frankly, I don't find it worth it. At all. It's a nasty trick for more trusting players, and it causes the more paranoid and careful players to feel like a total idiot at the end of all their unneeded caution. Neither experience is fun. Also, again, once you know the AI, it loses all of its power forever.

Anyway, I could obliterate this boss with Caeda, but I think I'll instead have my cavalry take some potshots at him to get a bit of a boost to their lance rank. Abel's really close to being able to use that ridersbane, after all.

Merric got the kill and got a speedsauce level up. Hardly the worst sauce to get, but still, definitely below what he can normally get. Oh well, that just means his growth rates are boosted a bit now.

Yet again, Marth isn't saying a word for the end-of-chapter conversation.

And... we're done! Hope you liked the surprise update!

Honestly, one thing I can say for this game despite everything else I'm unsure about... it's keeping me on my toes! I can definitely say I'm having more fun not just playlogging, but just flat-out playing this game in general, than I was with Radiant Dawn. Hell, maybe I'll even do an entry tomorrow too!

Stay safe, everyone!

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It's amazing how much effort you put to write all this. I'll be keeping an eye from now on.

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