Vindicated by History

[AvatarofDiscord]

So as much as I love Fates and FE, i've noticed that more people are starting to hate on Fates less and less.

Why do you all think that is the case?

Personally for me, I went back to Fates being my favorite when I realized Three Houses gameplay wasnt as fun as I thought it was first time.

[AnonymousSpeed]

Aw, I thought this was going to be a thread about James Buchanan.

I have noticed something similar, with popular perception in the fandom turning against FE16 and in favor of Fates. I think it has a lot to do with tempers cooling down. Fates has a lot of things that are easy to get irritated about, and justly so, but many of its worst aspects are narrative. Narrative failings are broadly unimportant to video games, and as games they make for a pretty fun experience. Even someone who dislikes the story of Fates can enjoy it ironically.

Three Houses always seemed to be carried by hype, so once that died down and people were able to assess it on its actual merits, the critical voices came out of the woodwork and gained more traction.

This is great, and this is sad.

One's an icon, one a fad.

A game for kids, a game for dads.

Fates is good, 3H bad.

[vanguard333]

I think it's more just people moving on to the next thing and not the game being vindicated by history; complaining about Fates right now is a bit like a Star Wars fan complaining about The Rise of Skywalker at this point; it's old news, and not much can be said at this point that hasn't already been said.

Plus, whenever there's a new game in a series, odds are that there will be people insisting that the previous game was better regardless of whether or not it's true or what the consensus is. That does not mean the old game has been "vindicated".

[Jotari]

I wouldn't say people have really shifted their opinion on Fates much. Fates is just old hat now. It did come out seven years ago, it's pretty natural people talk about it less now. And Awakening was in the same boat before Fates and before Awakening it was people complaining about lack of supports in Shadow Dragon etc. Three Houses will be the same five years from now when we have one or two more Fire Emblem games to bitch about. It was always burning, since the world was turning.

[ciphertul]

Passion eventually fades, unless you hold a fierce feeling towards it good or bad. Those who hold a moderate feeling or less will slow shift towards neutral in time.

When Fate came out I loved it, thought is was great but... the more I played the less I enjoyed it. As it sits it's my second least favorite FE (in FE terms) when it started far higher on the list. Three Houses is the same loved it but slowly started liking it less, while not as sharp as a drop as Fate. However with each new release you have those loving the new features and those hating the loss of old mechanics, once you get used to it you stop having a strong opinion towards it.

[Shaky Jones]

19 minutes ago, AnonymousSpeed said:

Three Houses always seemed to be carried by hype, so once that died down and people were able to assess it on its actual merits, the critical voices came out of the woodwork and gained more traction.

I know this could probably be applied to many games, but I do think it was especially apparent for 3H. People couldn't even make reviews on its first year of release without being absolutely flamed on not calling it the best FE game, and so many people were on a 3H craze. Even I had a phase with the game for a little while after a played it. Played it about 3 times before even making any thoughts on it.

While that isn't too relevant to Fates, I did feel like it was worth mentioning for a few reasons. Fates was (and still is to an extent) widely despised by fans for basically providing an absolutely awful story, and some hated how Fates' popularity combined with its level of fanservice began painting the series to look like every game is simply like that. While I don't really care much for that part of Fates, I do sometimes get annoyed when friends of mine assume 50% of my thoughts are just "Camilla hot' when I mention Fire Emblem, because that's how they see the series when not knowing much. As other replies say, a lot less people bring this up now mainly because it's old news. There isn't much need to keep bringing this up, as it's practically a topic that's been beaten to death by now. Right now, 3H isn't too far from new, and now with 3 Hopes, more reason to keep talking 3H exists, but it's at least been long enough where the hype is gone. There's a lot to talk about with that game, but with Fates, the game's story was such a glaring issue, that it stands out enough to be the big punching bag of fates for years, making it easy to point at as "the bad game". Of course, people can dislike it for possibly not finding interest in the gameplay, but it was mostly poor writing. By now, many FE fans have been agreeing that Fates is still a pretty enjoyable game, but it's hard not to call the game a meme for all the ridiculousness in the plot. Depending on how seriously you take stories, this is either a deal breaker, or a hilarious journey. I love how stupid the plot of Conquest and Rev are, and the gameplay is solid. I'd definitely rank Fates higher on a tier list, despite the bad story. Nowadays, I don't think you'll get too much of a reaction from that, especially if it's conquest, but I'm sure you would've been insulted back then. I guess you could say the opposite for 3H. It was S for everyone then, now it's wherever you think it belongs. You'd mainly be seen as a mean elitist for not liking 3H, because the hype was very high, and not being a part of it yourself might seem like you're trying to hate on the new game just because. Now more people can see it's issues and can (sometimes) respect the other's opinions on it. I think it's similar for Fates now. The opinions are generally the same, but to less extreme level. Hating on Fates isn't really the big thing anymore, and more FE players are appreciating the gameplay it provides.

TL;DR: Fates had a bad story that was really easy to hate on, and it's popularity (along with awakening) caused a major divide in the fanbase that made hating on games pretty common, but that has mostly died down nowadays, and Fates, while still know for having the worst story, is a game that most people agree provides pretty fun gameplay, and it being 7 years old gives it not too much reason to be brought up for the purpose of trashing it. There have been and will probably always be people hating on the new by insisting that the old was better, and people's emotions will overtake their rationality at first. Over time, that changes. I think Fates is pretty good. It's fun, the plot is hilarious, and it has Big Garon. What's not to love? 

34 minutes ago, AnonymousSpeed said:

This is great, and this is sad.

One's an icon, one a fad.

A game for kids, a game for dads.

Fates is good, 3H bad.

This is just beautiful. It's almost signature worthy. 

[Jotari]

I'd also add that it's not like we don't talk about Fates at all either. Make a passing mention of Fates in the Unpopular Opinions Thread and Ottservia will immediately spawn to defend it, while three more users will appear to criticize it.

[Florete]

I thought Fates was vindicated back when Three Houses packaged four "routes" full of recycled content into one package, retroactively justifying the choice to have Fates' routes sold separately.

Are people really being less harsh on Fates now? I haven't noticed myself, but I was also criticizing Three Houses much earlier than most.

[Saint Rubenio]

Well, folks have come to appreciate the gameplay's greatness in recent days. But I still see a lot of "but story bad tho, never forget story bad" type of responses to positive Fates discussion.

Which is a shame. I love Fates's story. In the same way I love movies like The Room or the original Super Mario Bros, sure, but that's still undeniably love. I honestly had a ton of fun with Conquest's story. No other FE character has made me laugh as consistently and as hard as Garon has. I have to call him one of my favorite characters in the series, to be completely honest. Every single scene with him was pure joy.

25 minutes ago, Shaky Jones said:

I do sometimes get annoyed when friends of mine assume 50% of my thoughts are just "Camilla hot' when I mention Fire Emblem

A friend of mine once made fun of me for this, having seen the Camilla scene in Birthright. This led to that, and I ended up explaining to him the full extent of people you can marry in the game, from the old grandpa who raised you to your underaged sister who is sorta related to you by blood but not really.

By the end, he admitted to me that Camilla was actually pretty ok. Success!(?)

Edited February 19, 2022 by Saint Rubenio

[Etrurian emperor]

I'm not really sure. Even the detractors of fates typically conceded that the gameplay was very well. So comparing it favorably  to the gameplay of Three Houses isn't exactly a retroactive vindication. And I believe that for all the things that Three Houses got praised about in comparison to Fates the gameplay typically wasn't among them. 

[AvatarofDiscord]

19 minutes ago, Etrurian emperor said:

I'm not really sure. Even the detractors of fates typically conceded that the gameplay was very well. So comparing it favorably  to the gameplay of Three Houses isn't exactly a retroactive vindication. And I believe that for all the things that Three Houses got praised about in comparison to Fates the gameplay typically wasn't among them. 

Can't say I found the story better than Fates tbh

[Jotari]

8 minutes ago, AvatarofDiscord said:

Can't say I found the story better than Fates tbh

Three Houses only looks like it has a better story only because it slants more mature and political, but it's really riddled with just as many problems. Despite being part of a saga you're intended to play from beginning to end, Birthright and Conquest still somehow manage to work better as complete narratives than any Three Houses route (with the possible exception of Azure Moon...possible). They're stupid and nonsensical, but at least they're stories that can stand on their own, unlike the three kids in a trench coat rolling around on the ground fighting each other that Three Houses is. 

28 minutes ago, Etrurian emperor said:

I'm not really sure. Even the detractors of fates typically conceded that the gameplay was very well. So comparing it favorably  to the gameplay of Three Houses isn't exactly a retroactive vindication. And I believe that for all the things that Three Houses got praised about in comparison to Fates the gameplay typically wasn't among them. 

Fates gameplay does have some detractors. Conquest specifically has some really obnoxious maps and few people are particularly fond of Revalation's gimmicky maps.

Edited February 19, 2022 by Jotari

[AvatarofDiscord]

1 minute ago, Jotari said:

Three Houses only looks like it has a better story only because it slants more mature and political, but it's really riddled with just as many problems. Despite being part of a saga you're intended to play from beginning to end, Birthright and Conquest still somehow manage to work better as complete narratives than any Three Houses route (with the possible exception of Azure Moon...possible). They're stupid and nonsensical, but at least they're stories that can stand on their own, unlike the three kids in a trench coat rolling around on the ground fighting each other that Three Houses is. 

Honestly Fates' story wasnt even that bad, it was just a case of the game being WAY TOO OVERHYPED before release.

[Sidereal Wraith]

Because for years people continuously poured libations to the altar of Awakening on a daily basis, saying that the game was the messianic savior of the series.

[Medeus]

3 minutes ago, Jotari said:

Three Houses only looks like it has a better story only because it slants more mature and political, but it's really riddled with just as many problems. Despite being part of a saga you're intended to play from beginning to end, Birthright and Conquest still somehow manage to work better as complete narratives than any Three Houses route (with the possible exception of Azure Moon...possible). They're stupid and nonsensical, but at least they're stories that can stand on their own, unlike the three kids in a trench coat rolling around on the ground fighting each other that Three Houses is. 

I have to disagree with Conquest being a more complete and better narrative. Fates' story wants you to play all three routes to get the full package and as a result a number of details are intentionally locked out until you get them, and that hurts all three games to varying extents with Conquest getting it the worst. If you don't play any of the other two routes you miss out on much of the context to plot elements like Takumi's possession, Gooron, the visit to Valla, why Azura is cagey about Valla, why Azura outright disappears at the end with no explanation, and so on. Additionally, some of those affect how the plot progresses as Azura being forced to not talk about Valla means she's forced to dance around telling Corrin about Anankos and thus you have to concoct the infamous plan to conquer Hoshido to expose Garon as a workaround to solve the issue, which leads to a number of other issues like Hinoka easily forgiving Corrin for destroying her homeland. 

That's not to say that TH (or Echoes for that matter) didn't have a number of narrative flaws. I could list you a number of problems I had with each of the individual routes of TH and how they fall short in different ways. That said, I still hesitate to put Conquest anywhere above them when it suffers the most from having key details locked out of it and even ignoring them still has narrative failings in its own progression and character handling. 

[hi_scroes]

It's kind of just the way things go with games. Every fighting game series, for example, has a similar trend where every new game is a sinful travesty that betrays the fandom, but then the new new game comes out and the old new game is looked back on fondly. Not to say that complaints of this nature aren't justified (people don't just make things up, generally speaking), but it is interesting to watch how often people will reminisce about the good old days once a new game releases. Maybe it's not so much nostalgia for the game but nostalgia for when it released; the past always has warm sepia tones, and so when people return to these games that they once reviled, they're reminded of the little things they did like at that point in their life and they wind up feeling more emotionally connected than they expected.

Nostalgia like that comes easily for Fates, as I think a lot of the motivation for the reevaluation just comes from how plainly cool the game is. Yeah there's plenty of weird and uninteresting bits in it (I myself can't bring myself to beat Conquest's story, which I find a slog), but overall "knights vs. ninjas" is the Ol' Reliable of coolness and Fates relishes in it. Every unit, including the NPCs, have awesome designs and they bring the world to life, and the intricate mechanics let the numbers get big which makes you feel all the more powerful and cooler. You can build your own castle, you can marry your pick of attractive one-man-armies, you can visit other players and fight them... it really does have all you need to make the player feel cool, and "feeling cool" is a very specific and hard-to-hit emotion. Even though I have no desire to go back and beat Fates, there are so many cool aspects to the games that I can't help but feel a fondness for them.

20 minutes ago, AvatarofDiscord said:

Honestly Fates' story wasnt even that bad, it was just a case of the game being WAY TOO OVERHYPED before release.

It feels like this has kind of happened to every game since Fates, too. I've yet to beat SoV but it felt like all of these games were marketed as "realistic" struggles between two morally neutral forces, and in the end that's not really what they were (3 Houses being the closest to that). At the very least, that's what people wind up expecting, so when that inevitably ends up not quite being the case, people are upset. I know that's what happened to me.

[Jotari]

17 minutes ago, Medeus said:

I have to disagree with Conquest being a more complete and better narrative. Fates' story wants you to play all three routes to get the full package and as a result a number of details are intentionally locked out until you get them, and that hurts all three games to varying extents with Conquest getting it the worst. If you don't play any of the other two routes you miss out on much of the context to plot elements like Takumi's possession, Gooron, the visit to Valla, why Azura is cagey about Valla, why Azura outright disappears at the end with no explanation, and so on. Additionally, some of those affect how the plot progresses as Azura being forced to not talk about Valla means she's forced to dance around telling Corrin about Anankos and thus you have to concoct the infamous plan to conquer Hoshido to expose Garon as a workaround to solve the issue, which leads to a number of other issues like Hinoka easily forgiving Corrin for destroying her homeland. 

That's not to say that TH (or Echoes for that matter) didn't have a number of narrative flaws. I could list you a number of problems I had with each of the individual routes of TH and how they fall short in different ways. That said, I still hesitate to put Conquest anywhere above them when it suffers the most from having key details locked out of it and even ignoring them still has narrative failings in its own progression and character handling. 

Those key details kind of just don't matter though. Because they, while important to the overall Fates narrative, are, individually, minor points (yes, even though one of them is literally the final boss). Fates isn't interested in exploring Anankos or Valla in Conquest, they serve as sequel hooks more than genuine story beats. Compare and contrast to Azure Moon, where stuff like the Agarthans and Rhea are genuine plot points that the story does dedicate time to exploring and are then unceremoniously dropped without truly being addressed at all. Conquest still didn't do basically anything in its plot well, but you could still have Conquests plot in isolation as a standalone narrative with Valla and the like being mysteries. But for Three Houses you simply lack the context for anything to actually look like a complete story playing one route alone.

Edited February 19, 2022 by Jotari

[Medeus]

2 minutes ago, Jotari said:

Those key details kind of just don't matter though. Because they, while important to the overall Fates narrative, are, individually, minor points (yes, even though one of them is literally the final boss). Fates isn't interested in exploring Anankos or Valla in Conquest, they serve as sequel hooks more than genuine story beats. Compare and contrast to Azure Moon, where stuff like the Agarthans and Rhea are genuine plot points that the story does dedicate time to exploring and are then unceremoniously dropped without truly being addressed at all.

I can't say I agree with that. Takumi's descent into being the final antagonist is something Conquest does highlight and not understanding how or why Takumi gets possessed in Conquest is a pretty major plot point to not explore as it means if you don't play the other two routes you're almost completely left in the dark to why he became the way he is. Same with Garon who has the entire plot warped around revealing his true nature and we get little explaining how he got to that state in the first place. Additionally, the game nudges you into wanting to know about those details that aren't explored, with Valla in particular might as well have a 'curious, buy Revelations' sign plastered all over it for how much it leaves the player wanting. 

In the end, I don't see how Conquest went about withholding plot details is any better than TH doing the same. Azura, Takumi, Garon and the like are just as central to Conquest, if not more so, then Rhea and the Agarthans are in Azure Moon, yet they're given worse treatment in how the plot handles the progression of those storylines.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

5 hours ago, AvatarofDiscord said:

So as much as I love Fates and FE, i've noticed that more people are starting to hate on Fates less and less.

Why do you all think that is the case?

There's nothing new to say about it.

If I dislike Fates less now, it's only because the experience has faded further and further away in memory. I remember when Garon was added to Fire Emblem Heroes, and I made a casual accusation that they were making crap up about how he fights as some kind of dragon. Then somebody politely informed me that's the final boss of Birthright. I slotted Fates into my 3DS to look at my save files. Confirming that I did indeed finish Birthright, I just couldn't remember a single detail about it. 

[AnonymousSpeed]

5 hours ago, Jotari said:

It was always burning, since the world was turning.

We didn't start Fire Emblem

Kaga did it first

Ever since is worse

5 hours ago, Shaky Jones said:

TL;DR: Fates had a bad story that was really easy to hate on, and it's popularity (along with awakening) caused a major divide in the fanbase that made hating on games pretty common, but that has mostly died down nowadays, and Fates, while still know for having the worst story, is a game that most people agree provides pretty fun gameplay, and it being 7 years old gives it not too much reason to be brought up for the purpose of trashing it.

Oh yeah, this too. There was a lot of irritation towards "Fateswakening babies" (actual term I saw a guy unironically call people on this website) back in those early days, motivated in part by concerns over what direction the series would take going forward. Clearly we were right to worry, since the series produced Three Houses.

5 hours ago, Shaky Jones said:

This is just beautiful. It's almost signature worthy. 

I stole it from KnowledgeHub, but go ahead and sig it if you want.

4 hours ago, Saint Rubenio said:

Well, folks have come to appreciate the gameplay's greatness in recent days. But I still see a lot of "but story bad tho, never forget story bad" type of responses to positive Fates discussion.

Which is a shame. I love Fates's story. In the same way I love movies like The Room or the original Super Mario Bros, sure, but that's still undeniably love. I honestly had a ton of fun with Conquest's story. No other FE character has made me laugh as consistently and as hard as Garon has. I have to call him one of my favorite characters in the series, to be completely honest. Every single scene with him was pure joy.

Super Revelations Party Captures Only Run.

Ruben is also in the Super Mario Bros movie good club? Amazing. Will you join me on pilgrimage to the site where they filmed it?

4 hours ago, Saint Rubenio said:

A friend of mine once made fun of me for this, having seen the Camilla scene in Birthright. This led to that, and I ended up explaining to him the full extent of people you can marry in the game, from the old grandpa who raised you to your underaged sister who is sorta related to you by blood but not really.

By the end, he admitted to me that Camilla was actually pretty ok. Success!(?)

I mean...eh? I feel like this is an effective psychological trick, but doesn't actually prove anything is okay, or even "not as bad". It simply shows that it's not the worst possible, and past a certain point I think putting sins in a hierarchy of severity gets kinda silly.

3 hours ago, Jotari said:

Three Houses only looks like it has a better story only because it slants more mature and political, but it's really riddled with just as many problems.

The superficial resemblance of substance as compared to actual substance? I'd certainly say Three Houses wants to look like it has deep themes and messages, despite...not.

5 hours ago, Jotari said:

Make a passing mention of Fates in the Unpopular Opinions Thread and Ottservia will immediately spawn to defend it, while three more users will appear to criticize it.

lmao

Not anymore.

2 hours ago, Medeus said:

I can't say I agree with that. Takumi's descent into being the final antagonist is something Conquest does highlight and not understanding how or why Takumi gets possessed in Conquest is a pretty major plot point to not explore as it means if you don't play the other two routes you're almost completely left in the dark to why he became the way he is. Same with Garon who has the entire plot warped around revealing his true nature and we get little explaining how he got to that state in the first place.

I'm just saying, when I read the Bible, I don't need the backstory on every demon Jesus casts out.

That said, the plot details being withheld in Conquest is less egregious for a few reasons. The first is that it has an obvious profit motive- there's no illusions about what's going on. Secondly is that Three Houses very much wants its story to be taken seriously, whereas Conquest mostly doesn't give a hoot. Lastly, each route of Fates ends in an essentially satisfactory, thematically resolved way. You could play Conquest and only Conquest while feeling like things wrapped up nicely in the end.

[vanguard333]

4 hours ago, Jotari said:

Three Houses only looks like it has a better story only because it slants more mature and political, but it's really riddled with just as many problems. Despite being part of a saga you're intended to play from beginning to end, Birthright and Conquest still somehow manage to work better as complete narratives than any Three Houses route (with the possible exception of Azure Moon...possible). They're stupid and nonsensical, but at least they're stories that can stand on their own, unlike the three kids in a trench coat rolling around on the ground fighting each other that Three Houses is.

I'll be the first to say that the story of Three Houses bit off more than it could chew and has a lot of problems, but Fates' narratives are far worse than that of Three Houses. Conquest and Birthright do not work at all as narratives; they rely way too heavily on contrivances and people making horrible out-of-character decisions, and are just nonsensical in so many places. They do not stand on their own.

But, honestly, the main area in which Three Houses shines (in terms of story at least) compared to Fates is the characters. The characters in Three Houses actually have depth to them and are interesting and fascinating characters that do stuff that makes sense for them to do given what we know about them. 99% of the characters in Fates have no depth to them at all; Corrin is a Mary Sue, the royals are inconsistently-written, and pretty much everyone is defined by a single gimmick with no depth to them beyond that. Azura possibly has the most flesh out of the whole cast if only thanks to being the mysterious-deuteragonist character, and she is generally relegated to being just a plot device. At least the plot in Three Houses is actually character-driven.

 

4 hours ago, Jotari said:

Fates gameplay does have some detractors. Conquest specifically has some really obnoxious maps and few people are particularly fond of Revelation's gimmicky maps.

And I'm one of them.

Yeah, the maps in Fates generally stink. But the gameplay problems run deeper than that. Every gameplay element is just thrown in haphazardly, as if they just threw in everything they could think of. Three Houses, for all its problems, at least has focus. Detractors complain about exploring the monastery taking too long and being boring on repeat playthroughs (and I can somewhat agree with that), but you can't deny that it's a core part of the game that serves a clear purpose and ties into everything else.

Edited February 20, 2022 by vanguard333

[AvatarofDiscord]

17 minutes ago, vanguard333 said:

I'll be the first to say that the story of Three Houses bit off more than it could chew and has a lot of problems, but Fates' narratives are far worse than that of Three Houses. Conquest and Birthright do not work at all as narratives; they rely way too heavily on contrivances and people making horrible out-of-character decisions, and are just nonsensical in so many places. They do not stand on their own.

But, honestly, the main area in which Three Houses shines (in terms of story at least) compared to Fates is the characters. The characters in Three Houses actually have depth to them and are interesting and fascinating characters that do stuff that makes sense for them to do given what we know about them. 99% of the characters in Fates have no depth to them at all; Corrin is a Mary Sue, the royals are inconsistently-written, and pretty much everyone is defined by a single gimmick with no depth to them beyond that. Azura possibly has the most flesh out of the whole cast if only thanks to being the mysterious-deuteragonist character, and she is generally relegated to being just a plot device. At least the plot in Three Houses is actually character-driven.

 

And I'm one of them.

Yeah, the maps in Fates generally stink. But the gameplay problems run deeper than that. Every gameplay element is just thrown in haphazardly, as if they just threw in everything they could think of. Three Houses, for all its problems, at least has focus. Detractors complain about exploring the monastery taking too long and being boring on repeat playthroughs (and I can somewhat agree with that), but you can't deny that it's a core part of the game that serves a clear purpose and ties into everything else.

Honestly, I cannot see Corrin as a Mary Sue, sure things benefit him in the story, but honestly I found Alm much more of a Mary Sue with extra plot armor, at least Corrin's canon mistakes come back to bite them in the butt.

[vanguard333]

35 minutes ago, AvatarofDiscord said:

Honestly, I cannot see Corrin as a Mary Sue, sure things benefit him in the story, but honestly I found Alm much more of a Mary Sue with extra plot armor, at least Corrin's canon mistakes come back to bite them in the butt.

Alm is definitely a Mary Sue as well. But Corrin is definitely also an example. It's not just about things benefiting them; the true indicator of a Mary Sue is that the plot is unnaturally distorted around them, and that's definitely the case for both Alm and Corrin.

Also, when did Corrin's canon mistakes ever come back to bite him? Normally, the plot finds a way to go, "No, that wasn't actually a mistake, and if it was, it wasn't Corrin's fault."

 

In any case, another problem with Corrin, which admittedly is a problem with all the avatar characters, is that they're just not interesting or well-defined characters. However, unlike Robin or Byleth (in 3 out of four routes of Three Houses at least), Corrin is placed front-&-center; it's Corrin's story. In Awakening, it's Alm and Lucina's story as they're the lord characters. In every route except Silver Snow, it's the respective House Leader's story (though admittedly Verdant Wind suffers from largely retreading Silver Snow and thus reducing how much it is Claude's story). Corrin was front-&-center, so they needed to be compelling, but IS couldn't write Corrin as a compelling protagonist, because they needed to write Corrin as an avatar. As a result, they somehow failed to find the compelling protagonist in a human-dragon hybrid from two royal families that go to war against each other; how does one do that?.

[lenticular]

Meh.

Fates is a decent game. Three Houses is a decent game. Both games were well received. Three Houses has a Metacritic score of 89 and a user score of 8.8. Fates: Conquest has an 87 and 8.0. In that sense, they are roughly about as good as each other. Neither one of them is anywhere close to the pantheon of truly terrible video games nor anywhere close to being an industry-defining masterwork. Twenty years from now, both of them will be little more than a footnote in gaming history. If Fire Emblem is still around twenty years from now, they'll just be two more entries in the series.

We're all going to have our personal preferences, of course. Some people will love Fates and hate Three Houses, some will be the other way around, some will love both, and some won't like either of them. But that's got a lot more to do with personal preferences and taste than it has to do with the objective quality of the games. I could write essays talking about the things that I enjoy about Three Houses and the things that I dislike about Fates, but what's the point? Would anyone actually care? Would it actually change anyone's mind? And more to the point, why would I even want to try to change anyone's mind? It's perfectly fine if not everyone in the fandom likes exactly the same things.

[AnonymousSpeed]

1 hour ago, vanguard333 said:

But, honestly, the main area in which Three Houses shines (in terms of story at least) compared to Fates is the characters. The characters in Three Houses actually have depth to them and are interesting and fascinating characters that do stuff that makes sense for them to do given what we know about them.

Yeah, the maps in Fates generally stink. But the gameplay problems run deeper than that. Every gameplay element is just thrown in haphazardly, as if they just threw in everything they could think of. Three Houses, for all its problems, at least has focus.

It's funny, because I actually feel the complete opposite way.

Three Houses characters have more complex family trees than Fates characters, but I think that just draws more attention to how shallow they actually are. Fateswakening characters aren't very deep, but they're at least campy and quirky.

Meanwhile, Fates actually has very tight and interesting gameplay, while Three Houses feels like a bunch of mechanics and ideas that sounded good on paper thrown together with an understanding of how to make them work or interact.

1 minute ago, lenticular said:

And more to the point, why would I even want to try to change anyone's mind?

Because pedantry is fun.