Dark Holy Elf
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Posts posted by Dark Holy Elf
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I'm just curious, why did they remove the autosave feature that was in FE 7/8? That was one of the biggest things that attracted me to the series at first and it would be freaking awesome if it returned as a toggleable feature. Granted, back in GBA days you couldn't necessarily flip your system shut and resume from that point in time in the game which may be why it was included. But I will always remember the convenience it was to just turn my GBA off at the end of a band bus ride without needing to worry about saving quickly before turning it off.
I assume it has to do with the speed of saving on different hardware, and/or how well the hardware handles something which makes saves every few seconds. On the GBA the game saved after every action (so that if you turned it off, you'd be right back where you left off), but the GBA saving was very fast and didn't damage the save file to save repeatedly. For whatever reason, saving to the GameCube save file was obviously far slower (you can tell when you choose to save your game), so they the constant saving wasn't practical. And since then they've gotten out of the habit; I dunno if the auto-saving would be more practical on the 3DS.
Someone who actually knows about hardware specifics could probably weigh in further; I'm certainly no expert on the subject.
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I'm currently playing this, just finished chapter 10.
It's a fun game, notably further from Fire Emblem than I was expecting compared to the initial advertisting for the game, but despite loving Fire Emblem I'm not disappointed by this. It's very much its own thing. Definitely enjoying it so far, and I'm particularly enamoured with the huge variety in the PC cast.
My biggest complaint is one I wasn't expecting; it has a clunky interface, which is not the norm for IntSys games at all! I'm annoyed that I can't check my objectives mid-battle, or that the only way to see the party's HP is to hit "end turn" (and then make very sure I don't confirm it!), or that the stats of weapons/sub-weapons can only be seen in very select circumstances (and in particular, not in battle).
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I might add that Casual is helpful for those of us veterans trying to break/dissect the game. Testing a half-dozen variations on movements on turn 4 is a lot less annoying when I can load a save from that exact moment instead of having to play the rest of the chapter back to that point (even if Action Skip is a thing, it's still extra repetitive effort). >.>
Honestly, I'd like if battle saves returned in Classic, too (or at least the map variety seen in FE11-12). While I enjoy the tension of classic a good deal, some battles have the potential to go on for very long (at least in some FEs; Awakening generally didn't favour marathon maps) and redoing a whole battle can get a bit excessive. I'm sure some people will disagree with me and say that redoing a 2 hour battle if your lord bites is completely okay, and I respect that you can do that; I would probably have agreed with you a decade ago. But these days I do appreciate the choice.
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Considering how one of the reasons I became engrossed in FE (other than gameplay) was the cast of characters that went beyond how fantasy men and women were usually portrayaled (not to mention that it had a 1:1 ratio cast compared to the usual 3:1 gender set up in Hollywood and mainstream games).
Fire Emblem didn't really attain 1:1 gender balance until Awakening. If you go look through the PC casts of the older games, it actually tends closer to 2:1, going significantly higher for some games (e.g. FE1/3 and their remakes). The most balanced PC cast prior to Awakening was Radiant Dawn which has 43 men and 25 women in its PC cast (and the NPC cast skews very male, in almost every FE).
... still, 2:1 is a lot better than some of the things you cite, so I'm not disagreeing with your broader point.
Regardless, I do hope that even if the level of fanservice in FE is increasing (which seems possible, depending on what gets included on that label), it doesn't negatively impact the character work. There's certainly no good reason why it should...
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NoA/Europe has significantly changed the subtitle of something like half the FE games released out here, so they're obviously not attached to the idea of keeping them. That combined with the fact the Fire Emblem If sounds, to me at least, a bit odd (Engrishy, you might say) makes me kinda think they'll change it, but I won't be stunned if they don't, since the name could potentially be a rather fitting one depending on exactly what the story ends up looking like.
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A big deal-breaker for me is games which revel in excessive violence and mayhem as comitted by the player. The Grand Theft Auto series probably best encapsulates what I'm talking about here; those games revolt me. I know that it's just a fantasy; I'm not proposing they be banned or anything. But I am personally seriously put off by such games.
From a more game design perspective, I'm not a fan of things which I feel waste the player's time. I have lots of demands on my time, and I like games which respect that. Some common examples of things that annoy me:
-Games which make you repeat lots of action with each death, especially if that action is easy. Oddly enough the three-life system of NES games makes me much more forgiving, probably because now I have more than one mistake's worth of margin for error. But it can still be bad if, say, there's a really easy stage followed by a really hard boss and you have to keep redoing that easy but time-consuming stage. What does that prove?
-Overly long fetchquests. The artifact hunt towards the end of Metroid Prime completely put me off that game, for instance. I'm more forgiving if the game has such great gameplay that I don't mind the blatant padding.
-Games which don't let you save for long instances. Imagine if Fire Emblem didn't let you make suspend saves mid-battle. Terrible, right? I want to be able to put down a game roughly when I want. (I accept not being able to save all the time, like in battle for most RPGs, but the save points should be frequent at worst.)
I also have a particular sore spot for games which don't respect their female characters (e.g. they exist only in narrow female tropes, or exist only to develop the male cast) or just barely have any female characters (unless, of course, they don't have characters to start with; I'm fine with plotless games periodically). I don't think I really need to explain this one.
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You can gain loads of horizontal momentum with the "start running, then duck and jump" maneuver (sorry, I don't know the name; I've sunk countless hours into Mario games but I don't really pay any attention to the community or the lingo).
I'm actually kinda ambivalent about the controls of 3D Mario; they're nothing wonderful and I do get bored of 3D Mario games where the stage design doesn't impress me, so you can take the part you bolded in my comment as a statement of fact rather than something intended to be high praise. If you really hate 3D Mario controls, I sadly don't think 3D World will change your mind.
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NES. To this day, Super Mario Bros. 2-3 and Mega Man 2-3 are some of my favourite games, and I was still playing new NES games (for me) as late as a decade ago.
In theory there's no reason I couldn't play something a bit earlier; I certainly enjoyed Q*Bert and a few other Atari 2600 games, but I've never really felt a desire to seek such games out.
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-I forgot NES Batman's Joker, that is a good one. I never did beat him, though I probably only fought him like ~8 times. (The main reason I didn't fight him more is I wasn't even getting close to winning.) I'm not actually sure how hard he truly is because of the how long it takes to get back to the fight.
-Like many others, Chapter 7, Very Hard, F-Zero GX. Both F-Zero X and GX had loads of difficulty all-around, but no one challenge quite sums up how brutal the game gets compared to that one.
-The hardest thing in a video game that I've actually beaten is probably Mundus on Dante Must Die Mode of DMC1. It took me dozens of attempts but it was extremely, extremely satisfying to get good enough to finally win.
Most of my other most challenging experiences are from self-imposed challenges and those probably don't count for a thread like this.
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Censoring Camilla's outfit would be ridiculous.
We are going to be playing a game in which we, the player, will likely be responsible for what is essentially murder. A game which prominently features death and human suffering. Arguably worse, many of us intend to play a path in which we know the side we fight on in the war will be, at least for a time, morally questionable at best, and we will kill enemy soldiers who oppose us.
By comparison, the level of exposure of Camilla's anatomy should not even be a blip on the radar for things we should be offended by. It's a stupid outfit, we all agree on that, and I've already commented that I personally would be delighted if it is swapped out for something better by the design team, but I think censoring it sends all kind of wrong messages.
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On the one hand, they've probably learned from their experience with Awakening, and know better what to expect now, as others have mentioned.
On the other hand, the Amiibo situation makes me think that maybe Nintendo is just bad at this. So, I dunno!
Sadly, I can't offer any particularly valuable input since I waltzed into a store at random and bought Fire Emblem: Awakening on a whim because I had heard it was good, and I needed a 3DS for the next Ace Attorney anyway. Strange how I loved the game I hadn't planned on buying and disliked the one I had been looking forward to for months.
Funny, I'm close to the exact reverse myself! (Although I still like Awakening quite a lot... just not as much as I'd hoped. DD meanwhile exceeded my expectations because I was a bit down on the core series after Apollo Justice.)
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Removing features is something that is going to happen at various points in any lengthy series. Games are naturally going to try new features (or else they'll get real stale), but if a series is only permitted to add features, and not remove them, you risk creating a system which is overcomplicated, brimming with some holdover features which don't enhance a game (even if they enhanced a previous game!). And that's setting aside the fact that some features may just be bad the first time around so getting rid of them is obviously a valid option.
Sometimes, in game design as in many other things, less can be more.
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Streetpass teams (and their predecessor in the GBA games, link arena teams) were always going to be vulnerable to grinding and degenerate tactics such as RNG abuse, glitches to get supposedly unobtainable items, etc.. Personally I have almost no interest in them as such, but if you do, you would be better off just accepting this inherent property they have.
I don't think Casual Mode is a major factor in making an overpowered Streetpass team, considering the many other options available.
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Since I don't think I've weighed in on it yet in this thread... Senri Kita's work is certainly my favourite as well. Not perfect (her younger female characters sometimes have rather strange-looking eyes) but overall it is outstanding, both the characters themselves and their outfits, and it is a significant of why the Tellius games rank so highly to me.
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I'll admit, I actually forget which characters have "Lord" in their official class title and which don't. I tend to refer to any PC who isn't allowed to die under any circumstances as a lord (though ones who aren't forced, like Robin, are borderline). So I read this topic title and immediately thought "But clearly Kamui will be the lord..."
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Nice work; it's remarkable how much better that looks.
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The one thing that is somewhat weird about FE7's critical formula is it subtracts tactician stars from enemy crit rates, but it does show you the correct final percentage, to the best of my knowledge.
For what it's worth I actually like those low crit rates. They're something I enjoy having to watch for and planning around not risking (more on bosses, for whom it comes up more often... Thunder mages in Radiant Dawn, too). And personally when I see a potentially fatal 2% crit I hadn't planned for I freak out. I totally get that this probably isn't for everyone, though!
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Even better-case scenario: the shots we've seen are just an early build, and have since been replaced with something far better that will be in both the Japanese and Western releases of the game.
(I do like Camilla's design aside from her stupid armour, so let me live in hope.)
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XCOM has very little in common with Fire Emblem flavour-wise (sci-fi soldiers fighting aliens), but is at its core shockingly similar: SRPGs with small numbers where each turn needs to be weighed carefully and permanent unit death is a real concern.
Beyond that, obviously most SRPGs have a fair deal in common with FE, and if you haven't played many I certainly recommend giving the likes of Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, Wild Arms XF, and the N1 games (Disgaea, etc., although the only one I personally care for is Soul Nomad) a try.
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Probably my PS2. It's my window into the libraries of both it and the PS1, which are two systems each with loads of games I love. (I'm a big RPG fan, the sheer volume of quality RPGs for those two systems is astounding.)
My NES is my oldest system, and even though it's not attached to the TV and hasn't been for years (no reason to between Virtual Console and emulation) I would probably have a lot of trouble getting rid of it.
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I've been super-happy with my Wii U, personally. Far more than I expected; it's easily my favourite Nintendo console (not portable) since the SNES.
-Hyrule Warriors was probably the pleasant surprise of last year for me; I never cared for Dynasty Warriors or Zelda much but my partner picked the game up because she thought it looked super-cool... and it kinda is. Fun mix of hack-and-slash with battlefield management, beautiful character design/animations/general sense of style, and ridiculous amounts of content.
-I'm a big fan of Devil May Cry-styled 3D action, so Bayonetta 2 was something I expected to be great, and it pretty much was.
-Mario Kart 8's another solid entry into that series, and Smash 4 is my favourite game in that series to date (see my avatar).
-Super Mario 3D World really impressed me as well. I'd never really loved a 3D Mario before this, except Galaxy with its creativity and gravity physics, but 3D World mixes in the multiple playable characters from SMB2 with the tight stage design of the 2D games and the controls of the 3D games and the end package is a hell of a lot of fun.
-New Super Mario Bros U isn't as good a game, as mentioned, but still solid enough, and is a superior multiplayer experience if you have 2-3 other people to play with.
-I've only watched Captain Toad and DKCTF, but they seem pretty fun too. It also has Rayman Legends, which I haven't yet gotten around to but have heard nothing but good things about, and it is a sequel to a game I am a big fan of.
-Adding GBA games to the virtual console is pretty nice (Metroid Fusion and of course Fire Emblem 7-8 are some of my favourite games) and if you don't have a Wii then the sum total virtual console of NES/SNES/N64/Genesis/GBA/probably more I'm forgetting is obviously amazing.
The console is somewhat limited in genres, pretty much usual Nintendo stuff + some 3D games. It's pretty RPG-parched obviously, even more than past Nintendo systems so far, which is my biggest problem with it. That and no HD Kid Icarus or Fire Emblem sequels, c'mon Nintendo. It obviously depends on your gaming interests but I certainly don't regret picking one up myself, even if it kinda seems like its future could be somewhat limited (hard to say, but it's definitely a worry at this point).
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Dunno, pretty sure Marcus and Pent can still shit all over that map on ENM. Instant promoted Kent and Sain aren't exactly great or anything but I can't see them being liabilities to anything but Valkyries and Heroes, both of which are really rare.
You're coming at this from the point of view of someone who is good at Fire Emblem. I could probably beat that map with just Pent and Marcus, sure, now, but I sure as hell couldn't on my first playthrough. Fire Emblem is not generally considered an easy game, even on ENM; those of us who play the games to death tend to forget this.
I didn't have any trouble with Cog of Destiny myself but I can't count the number of times I lost someone from fog, Bolting, or just Nino/Jaffar/Zephiel dying in Battle Before Dawn. Everyone's experience is going to be different but it's not very helpful to talk down to someone with "you should have just stomped the game with ____". It's not like the experience of overusing Marcus and then suffering for it is at all unusual, that's how jeigans earned their (undeserved) reputation as bad units for a while.
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Shaman in the Dark is a boss theme, so the ability to get such a track is unchanged in the curernt format compared to the previous.
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I don't care for Casual mode (I generally don't feel the game is balanced around it) and I don't intend to play it, but I see no harm in it continuing to exist. Some people like it, thus it brings in more fans to the series, thus more FE games get made for me to enjoy in the future. Seems pretty straightforward.
Games having more options and respecting their players' ability to make choices in regard to their experience is pretty much uniformly a good thing.
Unusual character gender ratio
in Fire Emblem Fates
Posted
I'm definitely very happy with the gender ratio equalising in Awakening, and, from what we can tell, this game. Hopefully this will extend to the important characters too, since so far it seems like the males are still more important (Ryouma, Marx, Garon vs. Aqua). It's still too early to say.
It's funny you say this, because I actually associate Western games being way worse about including female characters and passing the Bechdel test, etc. Maybe I'm just playing the wrong ones!