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


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1 minute ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

From what I remember of SD and Old Mystery B1, that was Minerva's AI. She moves herself into a waiting position in the north, and then comes once Maria is recruited to speak with Marth. She doesn't offensively come at you. Which from a story perspective makes sense, she summoned you here to save her little sister.

Ah, I see. Well I was hardly going to take chances with that at any rate, given how old the game is 🙂

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5 hours ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

From what I remember of SD and Old Mystery B1, that was Minerva's AI. She moves herself into a waiting position in the north, and then comes once Maria is recruited to speak with Marth. She doesn't offensively come at you. Which from a story perspective makes sense, she summoned you here to save her little sister.

Are there any green units in Archanean history? Because her being labeled as an enemy no doubt spooked a few players.

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9 hours ago, Glennstavos said:

Are there any green units in Archanean history? Because her being labeled as an enemy no doubt spooked a few players.

Green is an invention of Jugdral, as is Yellow.

Green in FE4 is uncontrollable allies of the player, Yellow is neutral units. Although Green can fight Yellow, while Blue can't, which FE4 uses once, maybe twice. FE5 does away with Yellow until FE9 bring its back, but it does have Green, which is uncontrollable allies again, but for one battle, it is actually used to indicate a new enemy separate from the rest you're fighting at that moment.

Edited by Interdimensional Observer
Uncorrected myself. Since Valbar's trio doesn't actually appear on FE2's map, and Zeke's group turns Blue when recruited.
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Alright guys, for the time being I'll be taking weekends off from this project, just so you know. But I have a few questions for anyone following along:

*Any thoughts on my coverage so far? Any questions about some aspect of the game I haven't been talking about?

*Any questions about the ranking system, or any potential issues you see?

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Dark Dragon Day 9: Chapter 11

Well, now that I’ve finally seen Ballisticians in the game, it’s time to copy their weapon stats into the text file (I did it as weapon types appeared so as to not make it a ton of work at once). And…

…what.

WHAT.

THEY DIDN’T ORIGINALLY HAVE LONG RANGE!?

THE BALLISTICIAN CLASS WAS ORIGINALLY JUST A SLOW ARMORED BOW UNIT WITH ITS OWN CUSTOM BOWS!?

Well. This is definitely a convenience given that this game doesn’t have enemy range highlighting in any capacity whatsoever, but holy cow does this kill my interest in using Jake. Anyway… moving on.

Hmmm… I wonder in what wide open space I’m going to be starting on this map? Hmmmmm… It couldn’t be the place at the very beginning of the long, empty, winding road to the castle, could it?

Seriously, while I know for a fact it’s not gonna be the worst in the series, the pacing in this game is easily going to be the biggest problem I have with it. Oh well. Let’s get it over with. If warps were more common you have no idea how often I’d just be warping Marth ahead to keep these things moving forward.

Hmmm… Shitton of sword users and no bows? Looks like Caeda’s flying over this mountain range to the village! Minerva follows her so she can use the convoy to get some less-specialist weapons.

So it seems like the initial wave of enemies includes some fliers that will hound me from across the mountain. You know, if they keep the reinforcements coming, this might actually be interesting.

Also, looks like Jake is one of the units guarding the castle. Curious. I don’t remember that being how you recruited him last time. Maybe the answer is in the village somewhere. Not that I’m keen to use his slow, 2-range ass.

It would seem that the Marth magnet does in fact have its limits, in that if enemies can’t hurt Marth (which applies to quite a few enemies now), they won’t try. So instead the pegasus knight attacked Wendell, who for some reason didn’t have a tome equipped. Maybe because he last healed?

Anyway, the map’s been pretty damned uneventful. Not as slow as last chapter (at least not yet) but really the first thing I have to comment on since the initial wave is that Linde was given an alternate portrait for her initial cutscene, which is pretty cool. Anyway, Linda… okay she’s a mage with a Prf tome, and I have some spare slots to add her, but she’s basically Merric, but obtained almost half a game later. Aura is pretty damned strong though, so I’m going to keep her for now. No way I’m waiting on her before I finish off the castle enemies though.

Shit. I keep forgetting that only the one guarding the actual seize point is obligated to hold still. I was so freaked out by the number of forts I was instinctually plugging up that I didn’t notice. Thankfully Jake didn’t hit anyone vulnerable, and reminded me via his combat dialogue how you recruit him: with Caeda. Because girl.

That said, did we actually talk to Anna before now? I really, really don’t remember that conversation happening in this game. If I'm right, it's weird how Caeda references a talk with Anna.

This is why I hate ambush spawns, and talk so much about honor being important in a Fire Emblem game. Ambush spawns don’t even have to actively be happening to make the game less fun. Do it even once, and it prompts an extremely unpleasant and thoroughly unenjoyable feeling of paranoia, at least until you’ve played it at least once and know every trick it has. Which is why when I saw all of those forts, I basically needlessly shat myself. I had no idea if those forts were, under some condition, going to all spawn horsemen or beastkiller cavaliers or what. I have no idea what kind of dickheadery this game is capable of, so I basically had to play super slowly and cautiously in anticipation of the shittiest hypothetical reinforcement I could think of, making all of my units cover up every fort in the last area that it could. And it STILL WASN’T ENOUGH PEOPLE TO COVER THEM ALL. Thankfully nothing happened, but the game gave me absolutely no way of trusting it. I would have had a lot more fun if I knew I didn’t have to go that far, and what I did to get through this “ordeal” was not remotely a demonstration of skill of any kind.

Looks like next map is another castle map. Which means that I’m probably going to have to use warp again, if the pattern holds.

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23 hours ago, Glennstavos said:

Ballisticians...?

I dunno who you mean, I only see a bunch of tanks.

This one shoots elephants.

Ha ha.

 

Dark Dragon Day 10: Chapter 12

Okay, looking at this map, I see a few things:

* Way more convenient thief placement than I was expecting
* A completely fucking empty locked room with one-tile-thick walls surrounded by a mage and archers. And I am noticing a conspicuously low number of recruitment slots. If I have allies placed in this room as prisoners I have to rescue then this is going to be a problem.

Speaking of a conspicuously low number of recruitment slots, I’m going to have to cut some people, at least temporarily, to make room for the really important units and the thieves. Anyone who isn’t a rider and has no niche a rider can’t fill is getting cut for this map, so that means Barst, Jeorge, and Bantu are getting the temp-axe. I also ditched Hardin mostly because Abel’s been getting pretty neglected at this point while Hardin is level 12, and I wanna see if I can catch Abel up. I’ve got plenty of mounts so the loss in mounted manpower probably won’t be too bad.

Right. So. That explains why numbers were so tight. Yes. I don’t just have a couple of prisoners in that room. I have FIVE. And all of them are unarmed. On the bright side that means I have an opportunity to clean out storage to arm these guys, and one of them might even be worth using: Midia. She’s a paladin, and her growths are pretty dang okay. Bases aren’t the best, but a paladin is a paladin. Now to keep them all from dying.

On the plus side, looks like I start further into the castle than I thought. I just assumed, based on the placement of the thieves, that I’d be starting in the courtyard outside and have to rush in to intercept the thieves, which already seemed more generous than the usual indoor map.

Doesn’t seem to be much of a rush. Enemy AI placement screwed the enemy over after I moved the knights to bait the archers, and the mage didn’t even do anything. Also… the thieves didn’t fucking move. I sent Wendell over to attack them while everyone else advanced, and they did… literally nothing. I guess because they didn’t have a clear path to the treasure chests at that moment (since I was rushing everyone into a tight gap to fight the knights) they didn’t even try? Testing that hypothesis now.

Caeda gained power and defense on her level up, killing the mage who decided not to threaten the prisoners.

Hypothesis proven. If thieves don’t have a clear path to the treasure, they will do literally nothing, even if someone’s taking potshots at them from range.

I wound up throwing away an iron sword thinking I had no space left in storage when I really had four. I just didn’t want to lose the elfire tome because I figured if you said yes to storing it while storage was full you’d just auto-drop it. Seems like the sort of thing this game would do.

Turns out one of the thieves had a warp staff! It’s kind of annoying though that when you pick drop you can drop anything, but when you pick store you have to store what you just got.

A loooot of chests here. First one has an orion’s bolt, which I have basically no use for, and for that matter I’m not even sure if I can sell it. I’ll keep it for now.

Caeda’s luck with defense growths has suddenly returned with a vengeance. She’s gotten two in just this chapter and now has 11.

These maps… are just so… fucking… LONG. They twist around and around and make you zigzag across the map to get all the cool shit… WHY?

My efforts to improve Abel have pretty much been in vain. He’s followed the same pattern he usually has of gaining basically nothing but skill and weapon level. He’s still a passable unit because so many important stats grow so slowly and caps are shit, but any hopes of making him as good as Cain or Hardin have been pretty dashed by this.

Not sure what happened, but the boss dialogue only appeared on enemy phase, and was glitched to hell and meant nothing.

I killed Himmler with Minerva and got a knight’s crest. Given there aren’t any huge promotion gains from it, I might just keep it until someone reaches level 20. Then again, the extra move might be nice…

And a chest gave me boots! Marth’s getting that, no debate whatsoever. Yoink.

Aaaaand… after a lot of tedious post-victory inventory shuffling, I finally seize the throne. It feels like this has been getting worse every chapter. I really hope it reaches a peak soon and isn’t a continuous trend. I can’t even imagine what it would have been like to, say, have Cain die to a crit from the boss after what felt like two hours of getting there.

At any rate, looks like I got the lamest of the regalia, Parthia. Well, Jeorge will be getting that at any rate, but I can’t wait to get Mercurius or Gradivus.

While the newcomer units are mostly pointless at this point, I do appreciate how many units the game throws at you to make sure that an ironman run is realistic even with the awkward design scheme. Hmmm… that really is something that some games struggle with, especially some of the later ones, and it really is a point in the game’s favor, proper pacing of unit recruitment, but I can’t think of where exactly to give the game points for that. If I renamed “honor” to “ironmannability” I suppose this would boost that ranking, but otherwise… Thoughts on that?

Well anyway, Chapter 13 is next, and… oh god I think I recognize this shit from Shadow Dragon. The fact that this map was originally designed with 2-range ballisticians… explains… SO much.

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5 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

If I renamed “honor” to “ironmannability” I suppose this would boost that ranking, but otherwise… Thoughts on that?

I am in favor of the "irommanability" rename, as it sounds like what you were shooting for with that ranking.

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Dark Dragon Day 11: Chapter 13

I just learned that by pressing left or right on a unit on the character select screen, you can see their inventory at least, though I haven’t figured out a way to see their stats other than level and HP. Well, at any rate, seeing their inventory is useful at least.

Jesus Christ. Split deployment destinations. It never even occurred to me that the game would think that would be a good idea when you can’t control who goes where. And the worst part is that due to how the ordering works, the ones lowest on the list, as in the ones you use the least frequently and are thus most likely the worst, are all placed at the bottom, and in a smaller group. Thank goodness I dropped Hardin last chapter and thus he’s now among them. And also thank goodness that Bantu and Jeorge are pretty okay.

Okay now this is just psychotically unfair. The interface here is making it a massive pain to properly distance myself from the ballisticians. Mostly because when you select a unit to move it, you can’t move beyond their movement range to move the screen to actually see the enemies they’re getting near the ranges of. In fact there’s no way for me to move Hardin while those ballisticians are still on screen, so I’m going to have to find a space that’s a good distance away, and then count by hand over to Hardin and back, because the terrain is so bland and devoid of landmarks that I’m sure I’ll screw it up if I eyeball it.

Note from later: this mostly only applied to the first turn, due to edge-of-map camera issues. But still.

…The boots. Increase your movement. By FOUR. HOLY SHIT.

Anyway, while I’m definitely glad these ballistae can’t shoot beyond 2 range, I’m still struggling quite a bit with their impressive defense and high attack. It took basically my entire cavalry using silver weapons to take out just two of them. This could get messy.

I just recruited the hero Astram. His stats aren’t the greatest, but they’ll do for now.

I just got Beck the ballistician too, from the village Marth could now easily reach with his ridiculous bootlegs. Funny. I don’t remember there being two ballisticians in Shadow Dragon. But the wiki insists he was there.

I have to say, while the map is still huge, I like how it’s generally in one direction. Making my army split up and go through three paths is way more interesting than fighting the same amount of enemies spread across a winding labyrinth, and involves way less boring busywork.

…Was this on purpose? Did they really, really forget that Beck can’t leave the plateau that his village is on, and that he’d be stuck in that little strip of forest capable of doing absolutely nothing the whole map!? Oh god I think I remember him now… but at least in Shadow Dragon he could DO shit, because he had 10 range!

I really don’t get what the thief is trying to do now that the village is safe. He seems to be darting back and forth, alternating between advancing and running away. Wish I knew what was going on in there.

“So you finally came. TAKE THIS! ELEPHANT!”

…

…I’ll just let that hang there and speak for itself. I must admit though, a lot of effort was put into the ballistician class. They have multiple different sprite sheets, one for each weapon, because each one is drastically different. I just wish it were put on a more useful class.

At any rate, right before the map ended I finally remembered to give the Parthia to Jeorge, only to realize he’s a weapon level shy from actually being able to use it. Now that hasn’t happened in a while.

I have a feeling that those insane boots are going to really reduce the tedium of later maps. They feel utterly broken, but at this point I’m not complaining! Hopefully there will be more maps like this in the future and less like the previous few. This was definitely a more fun change of pace! Less empty space, more difficulty. Still not fantastic by Fire Emblem standards, but certainly okay and enjoyable!

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Dark Dragon Day 12: Chapter 14

It’s utterly surreal that something I knew about since the prologue in the remake is only being told to me now, that being Gra’s betrayal of Altea. It’s just, right when we get to the absolute last moment, the map where we fight Jiol, the game tells us “Hello. His name is Jiol of Gra. He killed your father. Prepare to kill!” This isn’t just a story constrained by script limitations and old hardware. It really, really feels like there could have been a better, earlier time to tell us this even with all the limitations the game was working with.

Merric’s nearly capped out his level, but he won’t be getting his promotion item for like five more maps. Incidentally, he’s also capped out his Wpn Lvl, which is… well, I mean it’s a bit of a disappointment that the game doesn’t provide you anything you can do with that.

That’s rather curious. The game says I can only bring 14 units, but I can only see one place where I can potentially recruit a new one this map, that being the village, so I wonder where the second one is.

I do not get what is up with these thieves. I warped Jeorge in to fight the sniper and gain some more experience towards being able to wield Parthia, but the warp was wholly unnecessary because those damned thieves didn’t move! Are they supposed to hold still until someone gets near them, like I’ve seen in FE4 with some bandits? Because otherwise, they have a clear path at least to the village, even if we assume somehow that the developers forgot to let the thieves’ pathing know they can unlock doors!

Okay, I’d like to take a moment to compare the stats of my three cavaliers to demonstrate what a garbage fire Abel’s level ups have been.

Cain:
Lvl 14
Power 11
Skill 14
Wpn Lvl 14
Speed 14
Luck 8
Defense 9

Hardin:
Lvl 12
Power 11
Skill 9
Wpn Lvl 14
Speed 12
Luck 4
Defense 9

Abel:
Lvl 11
Power 7
Skill 14
Wpn Lvl 14
Speed 11
Luck 4
Defense 8

Abel is supposed to have a better power growth than both of them, and yet he’s gained 1 power in TEN LEVELS. He pretty much completely relies on silver weapons to be useful, just like Caeda, but without the ability to fly. It’s insane I haven’t dropped him yet.

Wait… that’s odd… the village didn’t have any recruitment at all. All it had was what I suspect was Camus, giving Marth a thoron tome. Which is great. It’s functionally identical to excalibur, just with fewer uses, available in stores, and usable by people other than Merric. But still, I wonder who those two units I can recruit here are.

So that’s it. Palla and Catria just spontaneously show up as ambush spawns with no fanfare, not even from a fort. That’s apparently something the game’s decided to flex on me. “I can do that, you know. I can spawn enemies anywhere. At any time. Whenever the mood takes me. Just wanted you to keep that in mind whenever you do anything. Forever."

What I’m saying is that if this isn’t a one-time thing they do for these recruitable units, holy shit am I going to be pissed.

At any rate, Marth is so insanely fast he manages to get into Catria’s range. I managed to get everyone else away from them, except for Julian and Bantu, where I used the latter to shield the former in the doorway by the shops.

Thankfully it seems that, like people in the thread have said, a lot of red units behave more like green units. Palla had no interest in fighting Bantu and made a beeline for Marth, doing nothing else that turn. It’s weird that Marth can’t talk to them though, he has to wait for them to talk to him.

Those thieves. Still have. Not moved.

And I almost did something very stupid on accident. I accidentally blocked off Palla’s path to Marth while I was moving everyone forward, but thankfully when that happens she does nothing because she’s not here to fight. Still, for a split second I was worried that would make her revert to traditional red programming due to an oversight or something.

Also, after being suspicious at the repetitively non-javelin-selling shop list, I looked some stuff up, and… apparently if I wanted a supply of javelins, I should have stocked up a while back, because they’ve stopped selling them for literally the rest of the game. What I’ve got is what I’ve got. For good.

…Well. I know what I’m using the hammerne staff on now.

…They sent more pegasus reinforcements from off-map. That’s a thing the game has officially declared it is willing to do. Oh goody, another entry for the checklist of paranoia. And another big, black mark on the game's honor. And yes, I am heavily considering using the term "ironmannability" for the rating, but I will still be heavily discussing the concept of honor as an aspect of that rating.

Looks like the thieves… just started moving when the knights in the throne room did. And I have no idea why beyond that.

…Unless I was actually right and they didn’t raid the treasure chests because a door was in the way. Because that also changed that turn.

Thieves. That don't realize they can unlock doors. That... that would be too fucking ridiculous... but then... they did put Beck in that village...

At any rate, Jeorge gained a level, but only increased skill. Still can’t use Parthia.

On the plus side, I gave Wendell the thoron I found, and holy shit is it powerful. I can't wait until I have access to more of these things. MINIMUM 26 DAMAGE, GUARANTEED.

Okay, I just got the silver card, and it just occurred to me that the clunkiness of this system, and all the subtle ways in which it prevents and punishes multitasking, means it’s going to be a pain in the ass to take advantage of it. Since you can’t send stuff straight to storage from the shop, it’s a back and forth of buying, at best, three items every two turns, unless you do some complicated "give chain" involving dumping your inventory into one guy, giving the silver card to another one also adjacent to you, and then having him buy more. Ultimately, however, I decided to give Bantu the silver card for now since he needs little else in his inventory beyond his fire stone. Later, if I can spare the deployment slot, I might switch this out for Jagen.

In the process of switching my inventory around, I decided to give Abel some slayer weapons. Seems as good a way as any to give him some situational usefulness given how far he’s lagging behind.

On the plus side though, looks like not all reinforcements are endless. The pegasus knights eventually dried up here at least. But not before I was able to milk a pretty great training opportunity out of it for Cain and Catria (mostly for the latter, Cain was just the toughest guy I had and I needed someone to keep the pegasi from overwhelming her). And as if Cain weren’t already absolutely ridiculous, he just gained several consecutive level ups of power, speed, AND defense. He’s currently sitting at 14/19/12 in those stats respectively, at level 19, and I can’t even conceive of anyone but Marth becoming more powerful than him at this point. Hell, if I have him kill the boss, it might be time to give him the knight’s crest!

…It would have gotten him to level 20, but Wendel unfortunately got a critical and kill-stole it.

And with that, looks like next map is a desert map. The first one in the series. Let’s see what mistakes they made the first time around, shall we?

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On 8/17/2019 at 9:34 AM, Alastor15243 said:

*Any questions about the ranking system, or any potential issues you see?

Do any of the fields talk about each game's Economy? I always found it fascinating how the various games in this series handled their finite (or infinite) resources. The rules are always changing. Some games have arenas giving you access to infinite money and experience, others have random encounters to grind in. Some games have weapon forging to spend excess money in, while others have straight up indestructible weapons or weapon repairs letting you use the good stuff forever. 

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4 minutes ago, Glennstavos said:

Do any of the fields talk about each game's Economy? I always found it fascinating how the various games in this series handled their finite (or infinite) resources. The rules are always changing. Some games have arenas giving you access to infinite money and experience, others have random encounters to grind in. Some games have weapon forging to spend excess money in, while others have straight up indestructible weapons or weapon repairs letting you use the good stuff forever. 

I do plan to talk about that to a degree, but it doesn't strike me as its own category, as I've seen various aspects of those systems done well even on the opposite ends, and there's no real right way to do a few of them. It's really more a question of making sure the system gets along with everything else. Depending on the specific ways they succeed or fail, I'd probably have that impact balance or difficulty.

Edited by Alastor15243
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Dark Dragon Day 13: Chapter 15

Right, so, I vaguely remember this map. Which made me realize that the priest in the corner is Gharnef. His stats are a bit nasty, but I just ran the numbers, and Merric is already fast enough to double him with starlight even as he is. Gharnef will be no match for him by the time he’s a bishop too. But for now, he’s untouchable. That damned tome of his can’t be pierced until I get starlight, and if this is anything like I remember Shadow Dragon being, my only option here is to wait until he teleports away after a few turns. If it’s any different, I’ll have no choice but to warp a thief into that treasure room after beating everything else, grab a treasure, tank a hit from Imhullu (or Maph as it’s called here), grab the second chest, and then seize.

But at any rate, it’s nice to have a drastically boosted air force just in time for the desert chapter. Incidentally, I just checked the terrain data, and… apparently while yes, the “mages can walk on sand with ease” thing has been around since the very beginning, it’s only mages, and not any of the other magic-using classes. Not even the class the mage promotes into, priest. Bizarre. But as there’s usually only one, maybe two desert maps per game, this might not even matter for Merric.

My opening gambit gives a fantastic power-defense-and-more level up for Catria, which is extremely promising.

I found myself stocking up on killing edges last chapter. They’re basically steel swords with the accuracy and weight of iron swords and a crit rate. They’ve proven quite useful for a lot of my army.

And I’ve finally promoted my first unit! Cain is now a paladin, and I got to see the FE1 promotion screen for the first time! Bit anticlimactic, using the series’s traditional big dramatic musical buildup, only to cut it off with the generic level up sound of the game rather than anything unique to class changing. Oh well. At least Cain’s a paladin now and has an insane 10 move. He’s capped speed, and his lowest stat is defense. AT TWELVE. Cain is easily gonna be one of the MVPs of the rest of this game, and I can’t wait to promote more.

For now, however, it’s time to focus on my new air force. I’ve always wanted to create an air force in a Fire Emblem game, using a ton of fliers, but it’s never seemed a practical, realistic, or bright idea. Here, however, one plus side of the slow pace is that it’s made raising a bunch of fliers into a massive no-brainer. …Hell, I might even be able to justify using Est, given how great base stats are in this game. And that would make this the second game I’d have managed to use the triangle attack in, after Echoes.

A mage just spawned out of thin air and walked out of the treasure room. That is a thing. That this game has decided it’s allowed to do. This game seriously feels like it’s trying to flex on me until I become a paranoid wreck.

Jeorge gained another level. Power and defense. Fantastic. But no wpn lvl.

An enemy scored a critical hit on Merric. Which struck me as odd as he had no luck, 3 skill, and a weapon crit rate of 5 when Merric has 10 luck.

And then I checked the calculations page again. Enemy critical hit rate… isn’t actually reduced by your luck. So criticals are just going to… randomly happen. All the time. With increasing frequency.

Tidings of merriment and fucking jubilation.

Thankfully Merric is a pile of HP so he easily survived, but holy shit. Sooner or later that’s gonna cause a reset, I just KNOW it.

Man, it can get really annoying keeping track of people’s hit points in this game. I nearly sent Hardin to his death because I didn’t realize how much damage he had taken so far.

Catria nearly died when I forgot to check the priest’s speed and it turned out to be way, waaaay more than I expected it to be. Luckily he missed one of the four attacks he managed to get off before I could heal her or get her away. But then a wyvern came in and attacked with a javelin. And I had to reset anyway.

I got careless again, but holy shit does this game make it tedious to be careful. The lack of a combat window is a nightmare for this sort of thing. I never really thought about how useful that shit was until it was gone.

…So, upon replaying, I accidentally… somehow… performed a triangle attack. Without Est. I did have a third flier nearby, that being Caeda, but she wasn’t quite adjacent to the enemy. Upon looking things up, it seems like, if you have two of the whitewings surrounding a foe, and then you move one of the pegs from one of those four spaces to another one of the unoccupied spaces, then the game treats it as if three whitewings are occupying spaces around the enemy because it counts the space the whitewing moved from and the space she moved to as occupied.

Moving on.

Weird, I got the exact same level up for Jeorge. Power and defense, no wpn lvl. Which is exceptionally bizarre, because I know that I got other level ups differently on the replay. But at any rate, what I’ve wound up having him do is stand on the eastern bridge and counter-kill all the reinforcement mages as they approach.

That priest from last time is freakishly fast, capable of doubling almost everyone, including Marth, and Merric if he tries to use excalibur. So I’m gonna have to bait him out and then, if all else fails, bring out my new mighty paladin Cain to clean things up.

What I actually wound up doing was make Cain soften him up first in the hopes of giving someone else the kill. Unfortunately he critted. Looks like the kill-stolen has become the kill-stealer.

And after holding the line against the reinforcements for a good few turns, Jeorge has finally gained the ability to use Parthia! Good! 17 might, 3 weight, 100 accuracy. Good tool to have in my arsenal.

I just experimented with Wendell, and turns out I found a mistake with Serenes Forest! Turns out promoted mages can walk on desert just fine! I would’ve believed the game would have made a decision like that, given how bizarre and arbitrary half the shit in the game is, but good to know it’s not true in this case.

The boss is also freakishly fast, though with a much, much heavier tome. At any rate, I’m sure the pegasi can handle him as long as he doesn’t double.

Just like in the remake, Gharnef left eventually.

…And Cain keeps up the kill-stealing crits, unfortunately. At least he gets a good level up out of it.

The shop is selling a wide variety of magic, but the stuff just keeps getting slower and less accurate, so I won’t be needing much more of the heavy stuff beyond what we find.

…Then again, it is the only way for mages to do more damage… so I might as well get a bit more…

So Gotoh finally shows himself. Or as he’s known in this game, Gato. Yeah, can’t imagine why they changed THAT name.

Anyway, while I’m curious what happens if you fail to get starlight and retrieve the falchion, I’m not keen to actually play through that over the proper path. So, off to get the starsphere and lightsphere! Eventually. For now, I’m signing off.

Edited by Alastor15243
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22 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

…So, upon replaying, I accidentally… somehow… performed a triangle attack. Without Est. I did have a third flier nearby, that being Caeda, but she wasn’t quite adjacent to the enemy. Upon looking things up, it seems like, if you have two of the whitewings surrounding a foe, and then you move one of the pegs from one of those four spaces to another one of the unoccupied spaces, then the game treats it as if three whitewings are occupying spaces around the enemy because it counts the space the whitewing moved from and the space she moved to as occupied.

Moving on.

So Solo Triangle Attack wasn't the first non-standard triangle attack.

Holy shit that's a top tier glitch.

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31 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

 So Gotoh finally shows himself. Or as he’s known in this game, Gato. Yeah, can’t imagine why they changed THAT name.

Somebody parody Gato's song from Chrono Trigger for me. I'm not creative enough.

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On 8/22/2019 at 5:23 PM, Alastor15243 said:

…They sent more pegasus reinforcements from off-map. That’s a thing the game has officially declared it is willing to do. Oh goody, another entry for the checklist of paranoia. And another big, black mark on the game's honor. And yes, I am heavily considering using the term "ironmannability" for the rating, but I will still be heavily discussing the concept of honor as an aspect of that rating.

 

Don't mean to ruin some of the blindness, but forts/stairs is still the way, with minimal exceptions. I think the point with the treasure room in the desert fight is that it is "indoors". I know FE3 has reinforcements in its version of the final battle that come in via doorways on the edge of the screen, but I'm not sure of this one.

 

On 8/20/2019 at 3:16 PM, Alastor15243 said:

While the newcomer units are mostly pointless at this point, I do appreciate how many units the game throws at you to make sure that an ironman run is realistic even with the awkward design scheme. Hmmm… that really is something that some games struggle with, especially some of the later ones, and it really is a point in the game’s favor, proper pacing of unit recruitment, but I can’t think of where exactly to give the game points for that. If I renamed “honor” to “ironmannability” I suppose this would boost that ranking, but otherwise… Thoughts on that?

I'm not aware of what sources outright say this, but I have heard secondhand that FE was originally meant to be played ironman. Characters like the excessive cavaliers exist in case someone dies. Sure they'll be inferior to your first picks, but that is the price of your "stupidity" I suppose.

It too might be why the Marth AI obsession exists, since if you won't reset when you lose most characters, killing Marth is the only way to make you restart.

 

4 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

tank a hit from Imhullu (or Maph as it’s called here)

The proper romanization of the Japanese name is "Mafu". "Fu" meaning "wind", and "Ma" being a very dense ideogram able to mean "magic", "supernatural", or "demon". So given the context of Gharnef being an evil guy, a good translation would be "demonic wind". But that sounds boring in English I guess, so the SD localizers replaced it with a name taken from some mythos and has something to do with evil winds as well I think.

 

On 8/22/2019 at 6:40 PM, Alastor15243 said:

I do plan to talk about that to a degree, but it doesn't strike me as its own category, as I've seen various aspects of those systems done well even on the opposite ends, and there's no real right way to do a few of them. It's really more a question of making sure the system gets along with everything else. Depending on the specific ways they succeed or fail, I'd probably have that impact balance or difficulty.

As I am playing it right now, I'd tell you that should you play TearRing Saga, which chronologically would between Thracia (1999) and Binding (2002), the game would get a very poor rating here. The game has given me money once besides starting funds and a handful of Gold Bags (each worth 2-4k). Though on the other hand, its special powerful weapons have plentiful durability.

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On 8/9/2019 at 3:01 AM, Alastor15243 said:

So, during the utter madness that was my first Three Houses playthrough, I started thinking about the fact that I hadn't actually played every game in my favorite video game series of all time.

How do you know it's your favourite video game series of all time? Have you experienced the entirety of time, including all future time?

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4 hours ago, Jotari said:

How do you know it's your favourite video game series of all time? Have you experienced the entirety of time, including all future time?

One could argue that the future doesn't exist yet and thus isn't a part of "all time".

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3 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

One could argue that the future doesn't exist yet and thus isn't a part of "all time".

Well then one could argue that the past has stopped existing and thus there's no such thing as time at all. Time is a dimension. We travel through it just like we travel left and right.

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Dark Dragon Day 14: Chapter 16

Aw shit. We’re getting Xane this map! Score! Xane is a shapeshifter who basically lets us copy any one of our other units and do whatever they can do, with all of their stats!

And I think, unless I’m very much mistaken, this is the map where you only get one of two characters. For the sake of experiencing the game how people would have experienced it back in the day, I’m not going to look up which is which, and I won’t be resetting just to change my choice. But I hope I get the paladin! Hopefully a house will say.

We’ve got another long and winding map, but with Marth having 11 move that probably won’t be as huge of an issue as it was earlier in the playthrough. Anyway, nearly all my star players are mounted, as is everyone I’m hoping to train. So it’s not a huge deal anymore. Still though… honestly this is a puzzle. Should I mark it down for balance because the most fun and convenient way to play involves ignoring half the cast, or should I just mark it down further for pacing because of how much longer it takes to use a team of non-mounts?

Moving on.

I thankfully notice that two of the three wyvern riders that will probably assault me from the start have a beastslayer and armorslayer. I’ll be sure to be careful about where I place my cavalry when baiting them out.

Eight fucking forts placed haphazardly on a single square island with nothing else on it and a position on the map that means you don’t even pass through it on the way to something more important. No way in hell that thing isn’t sending out ambush spawns, but fuck if I know what or when. I’m getting all my fragile units past that island as soon as possible.

Yet again we have a map where the enemies are gathered in a single group at one end and I fight them whenever we collide. This is an interesting concept, but it really should be supplemented with enemies scattered around the map too.

Sweet mother of Naga, the positioning for enemy thieves seems totally arbitrary. They always seem to be either too close to intercept without warping or boots, or too far away to pose any challenge at all. And in this case it seems to be the former. Thankfully, Marth does have boots, so no warping today.

Luckily, it seems I was right. The game tells you which village has which unit if you go to the nearby house. Looks like I’m going west for Alan then.

I accidentally left Caeda in range of the central island and survived only because one of the cavaliers had a javelin and attacked her before one of the horsemen could do it.

…Actually no, looking at their stats she still probably would have survived, only really vulnerable to a critical hit. Her bulk is pretty damned good, which makes it still crazy to believe that the devil axe was strong enough to one-shot her.

Just got Alan and… he isn’t great. The defense stat of 10 is pretty cool I guess, but his other stats are fairly mediocre for this point in the game, ESPECIALLY his HP. Still, he’s a paladin. He may very well find use.

It occurs to me just barely too late to want to restart that I’ll need keys to get to Xane. Hopefully I’ll find some in the shops in town. Otherwise there will be some really inefficient warping shenanigans.

HAHAHAHAHA! Oh my god! This is just like in the opera map in Birthright! I can use a flier to hop in and out of the charging enemies’ attack range to stall them if I want to!

It’s weird that they say the village has closed its gates to you for visiting the other one first, but the gates don’t actually close and you can still visit it, only to get the message “the gates are closed”, and  even after telling you that, the graphic STILL shows the gates open. Surely it would have been simpler to just have visiting the village close both gates?

I forgot about the placement of a horseman and nearly lost Caeda trying to use her to shield my cavalry from a beastkiller cav. Luckily, Caeda is a tough girl and survived a steel bow arrow to the face.

Beastkillers apparently don’t work on horsemen. The more you know.

Caeda just got a defense and power level up. She is 3 levels away from promotion and practically at dragon rider’s power and defense bases already. How the hell did this happen!?

Lucky me, the shop does in fact sell door keys.

The fuck? NOW the game starts arbitrarily deciding that different shops in the same area sell different products? Why the hell would they establish the opposite only to do this randomly later!?

On the other hand, I like that the game at least lets you see what’s in storage via the menu without having to go to a storage space.

Yep. Surprise reinforcements from that island. Just as I thought. Thankfully my entire army was well past that area by the time they came.

I just got Xane, and he’s basically a hair’s breadth away from being as good as a dancer. Certainly less fragile, though we’ll have to see if leveling up accomplishes anything for him. Or if he even can.

It’s weird. Every character that SF insists has more than 20% in their defense growth has gotten bad defense procs on this playthrough. First Barst, now Catria. The only defense proc she got with her 30% defense was in the run where I had to restart. Thankfully, however, defense growths before becoming a dragon rider basically don’t count.

I was torn between giving Minerva or Marth the speedwings, but decided to give them to Marth to make sure he hits 20 (which he definitly won’t do with the number of levels he has left). Minerva is a very close second however, since she’s easily the best unit I have who needs more speed.

…Aaaaaaand Minerva accidentally dropped the speedwing instead of giving it to Marth. Because the game doesn’t give you a warning and the options are right next to each other. I have literally never, ever accidentally discarded an item I wanted to keep in a Fire Emblem game before. Holy shit that hurt. That really, reeeaallllly hurt.

Finally beat the level. However…

That’s it, my storage issues are getting really out of hand. Next map, I’m going to suck it up, take fewer units than usual, and just get a bunch of my empty-handed benchwarmers to clean this shit out.

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1 hour ago, Alastor15243 said:

Aw shit. We’re getting Xane this map! Score! Xane is a shapeshifter who basically lets us copy any one of our other units and do whatever they can do, with all of their stats!

According to @Glennstavos here or someone else, Xane's untransformed level is supposedly used in the Arena. As he doesn't gain EXP from fighting while transformed, you can have him copy some level 20 capped stats unit and clear Arena battles with ease. -Supposedly.

1 hour ago, Alastor15243 said:

Just got Alan and… he isn’t great. The defense stat of 10 is pretty cool I guess, but his other stats are fairly mediocre for this point in the game, ESPECIALLY his HP. Still, he’s a paladin. He may very well find use.

 

He always has the nicer stuff though, carrying two weapons to Samson's one. Statwise though, Samson is much better:

Samson: HP 24 Str 10 Skl 14 WpnLvl 10 Spd 15 Lck 7 Def 9

Redundant with Astram, but he is better. Similarly, Arran does outdo Midia. 

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