Augestein

Is actually decent. We get from it that Vaida is a conclusion jumper and has a bit of a wild imagination. Meanwhile, Dorcas remains level headed as usual. Supports being odd because of incompatible characters can be fine, the issue is when you have conversations where the characters LITERALLY HAVE NOTHING TO TALK ABOUT. Take Sumia in Awakening. Sumia isn't very good socially, so as a result, her support list is very small. Makes sense. Chrom's supports for instance aren't terrible either with the exception of Female Robin. The support amounts are the problem, because if you look at say, the same gender supports in Awakening, most of them aren't too bad. MaribellexOlivia is a real hoot for instance.

Hello there! And yeah, that chin is amazing.

I like it too. I love making full custom teams. I would have no problem with that. It could even make for some interesting challenge runs.

Honestly has potential. I mean... Where WAS he from Chapter 17 of PoR to RD? You could fill in a lot of things. Plus, didn't he like die in PoR? How did he find life? This has all sorts of messed up potential.

Ah, I see. I'm reading it now. I think that's exactly what I was doing wrong. In this regard, I think I can't really improve until I'm able to fix the hair and non-skin shading. I couldn't get back to my home computer to have access to all of my stuff (the computer I have right now is not mine) so I took a stab in the dark. I think he's much better than the MarkyJoe, but he's still not good. The hair... The pixels next to his forehead on the left need to be fixed don't they? and the clones probably look a bit too plain don't they? I think I can salvage this one though, so any advice? Update: Tried detailing him more. Yay or nay on the changes?

If it's anything like his other hacks, don't worry too much. It'll be more difficult, but he's definitely decent about difficulty curves. The game is "hold your hand" easy in Hard mode at he beginning and eases its way to being more difficult. There's much less erratic difficulty going around.

So Mark.

Funny thing is that in Radiant Dawn I actually recruited Stefan through sheer dumb luck. But yeah, recruitment in Tellius was pretty mediocre overall. Yeah, what happened for me is that I talked to him with Rolf, and then nothing happened, so I killed him... With Rolf. Seemed fitting for the student to beat the master. Shinon died...

It's not necessary, but preserving everyone no matter the odds is equally ridiculous. If the characters are in dangerous situations, then there should be permanent blows dealt to the cast. If your story is a comedy and it's a drama like say something like How I Met Your Mother, death is not necessary, and in some aspects can actually HURT the show. So it just depends on the situation. Honestly, I feel that if you have to start thinking of ways to "make a person survive" a situation you put them in, it's time to let the character go.

No it doesn't. The extra little scenes that happen in the game as a result of you being there don't exist, and Athos has no reason to give the tactician the Afa Drops. Again, your role is small, but it was as meaningful as it should be. Was it perfect? No. But first time attempts generally aren't. It was certainly less clunky than Kris, Robin or from what I hear Corrin. As for JRPGs with meaningful choices? Tactics Ogre had some. It ultimately determined your alignment, your chaos frame-- which effected unit loyalty, as well as potential party members that could join AND the ending. Just because there aren't a ton doesn't mean that we should just ignore the fact that these games have choices in them. Or even that they couldn't change and try them out. Think about it, 7 games in to Fire Emblem, we never really had class choices for characters as a standard mechanic, and now since Shadow Dragon that now seems to be the norm rather than a novelty like Gaiden or Sacred Stones. "Choice," "choice," "choice." These are your words. Not mine. You're arguing against yourself at this point. I'm not here to talk about whether you have choices or not, I'm here to argue whether the character is a good avatar or not. A character that speaks but doesn't allow the player any influence is not a good avatar. A character that doesn't speak can still play as a surrogate for the player because it doesn't outwardly express its opinions or commit to any real preferences outside of player choice. Which is good enough. Being able to choose ANY support IS a good thing for a player avatar as it shouldn't have a theoretical preference to anyone. However, having the supports autoplay and go certain directions however, is not a good thing. If the avatar is going to continue to have supports and the character is supposed to be me, then I shouldn't be reading a dialogue back and forth, the characters the avatar supports should be talking to me and I should be given choices to say to the player-- the moment I'm not, it's not really me anymore. Which is exactly the problem. The supports for the avatar should be more akin to Social Links in Persona 3 and 4 for instance if they are going to continue like this and want the avatar to be a surrogate for the player. Making an avatar is by no means an easy feat. Shin Megami games often have the player make choices that affect the story. Say... Devil Survivor for a simple one. Sure the gameplay might be similar overall for the paths but the implications, party members and even some of the fights have some differences. And if you get Overclocked-- on the 3DS, there's even more. And this means nothing to the discussion. It doesn't matter how long they've done things, things change. Like Fire Emblem and their inclusion of an avatar. It wasn't always there, so if they add it, is it too outlandish to expect them to make it good? But if that's the case, why give them a customizable name, a customizable appearance, and sex/gender? Why give them every support in the game and make a completely set of different rules for him/her if it's not supposed to be you? Look at someone like say Claude from Star Ocean 2. You can influence certain decisions Claude makes, but Claude is still very much his own character. They could very easily make Kamui/Corren like that, it'd require less effort too, but they don't. There has to be a reason for that. The issue with Ludger is that he was clearly defined as a character despite being silent. Ludger was clearly a dork, a nice guy, a chef, a man that liked to cook but wanted to be a Spirius Agent... His silence wasn't fooling anyone. Though for a first attempt, it was alright.

Concentrated on programming rather than graphical design. I wish I had actually taken art classes so I could be a better artist. Oh, and actually pursued someone I liked rather than getting cold feet and seeing them get married.

Yes it did. The fact that they were silent meant that it was a character that was you. And your character progression was directly tied in the fact that you were able to raise your character as you wanted to. You were "you," not "Chrom the lord that uses swords and has a sister named Lissa." So this left room to include your character on the adventure without making the character interrupt the story. You still had a role. You were the person that was assisting with the adventure. If you don't want to assist in the adventure, then you don't play the game-- hence why it works so well. In WKC, you were a person that was hired to help Leonard deliver the wine and ended up being dragged along on the adventure-- like Leonard was. It doesn't matter if it's only good for some people. What matters is that the designer picks a medium to use the character and sticks to it rather than try to do all of them at once and fail on all accounts. The reason why the avatars are generally disliked in Fire Emblem is because IS isn't entirely sure WHAT they want to do with them. There has been almost no consistency between the avatars outside of your ability to customize them in the Fire Emblem games. If they make them a character that you can customize that already exists in the universe, that's fine, if they want the avatar to be a character that is supposed to be you in the game, that's fine too, but they need to design the game around that notion. Take Mark for instance, some people say it's weird that Mark wasn't a huge role, but Mark did exactly what Mark did-- was a tactician. He was in pretty much every scene, and the reason that Mark didn't have a canon appearance is because Mark was... You. It works extremely well in this regard. Could they have had more characters directly address you at moments? Perhaps, but for what it was, it was the best "player inclusion" without having your character directly interfere with the plot. If they want your character to be integral to the plot for Fire Emblem and still be your avatar, that means that they will have to allow you make more decisions and be your own mouthpiece.

But there are still examples of silent protagonist in JRPGs, White Knight Chronicles did it, Dragon Quest, and Shin Megami are all examples of games that still use the silent protagonist. The issue isn't necessarily that the protagonist is silent, as WRPGs such as Bioware's games don't have a silent protagonist but still manage to make a decent avatar character. The issue is that the more the character says, the more it needs to be the player's choice. Otherwise you end up with a poor avatar because players cannot relate as well because it talks too much and says more and more things that they might not agree with. The only real choice you have for your avatar in Fire Emblem is the character you marry-- which while this does have some impact for the player, it doesn't have much overall and merely allows them to ship themselves with characters they find interesting or attractive.

For some reason I read that as him trying to somehow make the GBA code compatible with FEXNA. And it seems I wasn't the only one that thought that either.

Seems like that would be an incredible waste of time. By the time you did that, you could easily retype up the whole thing and use XNA's engine to recreate the games from start to finish probably assuming you borrowed all of their assets.

I'm late to the scene: I think that the Avatar is a good idea but done horribly. I think that the avatar SHOULD be the lord instead of there being some forced guy/gal every chapter that's not able to be customized. I'm not even talking about the appearance, I'm talking about base stats, growths, and weapon choice as well. One of the biggest problems I have with FE after they introduced the weapon triangle is the dominance of sword lords regardless. Any person is going to basically choose 1 of each weapon type -- assuming that no one is outlandishly bad or good in the game, to cover all of the various weapons and niches that each weapon/class could fill for their team, so it's always bothered me that you get a sword unit like that. Let's take FE7 for instance, you are basically forced to have 2 sword users and an axe user. Obviously, the first thing you are going to look for are lance users and mages before you look for another sword user, or even an axe user. With an avatar, this is no longer an issue because your hero uses whatever weapon you chose instead.

Why are you pretending to fake expressions? I'm not sure I understand at all.

2010 is almost 5 years ago, going on 6. That's half of a decade and one console generation ago. The 3DS version is the same version as the Wii version, so that's not saying much. The sequel hasn't been released globally and I haven't kept up with it since it's not even released anywhere but Japan. It seems like it could be decent, but I can't say, I haven't played it. Awakening and Fates -- more so Awakening feels like a more polished version of Agarest Wars. Completely with the baby making as well-- although it's more detailed than Awakening but it's smaller scaled and the first one pans over multiple generations which is interesting but a miss overall. Inquisition isn't a bad game by any means, but it has serious problems. Take a look at something like Vesperia, and then compare it to Zestria. Zestria, despite coming out years later, doesn't look much better, and the gameplay isn't much better in some regards (has camera problems, the party is less multiplayer friendly as a result), and still reuses models from the older game and doesn't have much of an increase in monster types or anything despite having assets that they can borrow and reuse. The amount of progress is astoundingly low for how many games there were from Vesperia to Zestria. Simple like say Ar Tonelico on the PS2 versus Ar Tonelico Qoga for instance, Ar Tonelico is a standard turn based RPG with a bizarre element for powering up your mages in the game, which results in a quirky plot that allows for character development between your hero and the female mage of your choice. It has a crafting system that's very simple and easy to follow-- yet it never actually overshadows purchasing items at points and even has purchasable items as a requirement for some powerful crafts anyways. The game is simple and fairly decent and last just long enough to be a fun experience. As opposed to say Qoga which tries to cram an action game, a RPG AND a rhythm game into the mix and ends up failing to deliver on the action game portion AND the rhythm game. It's just plain worse even if it's doing more than the original Ar Tonelico. My issue is that with more freedom with the technology, creators seem to focus less on what makes a game good and instead on what makes it LOOK good. RPGs in general are extremely prone to being broken by the nature of the creators having a nasty tendency to fall victim to power creep in games. Midgames generally tend to be the highlight of RPGs by virtue that this is usually when most RPGs are available enough to make choices, and most of them are still viable. But that's neither here nor there. I'm not so sure though, some of them have changed. Take a look at something like say Lufia: Rise of the Sinistrals and its DS remake Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals for an example. The general appeal and style and ton of their games in general have shifted: You wouldn't know it by looking, but that's supposed to be the same character... I know.

Alright, I tried making another one. I think I'm getting the hues down for various colors like scarves, I tried making this face a bit more custom instead of using direct splices-- however, it's still a splice. I'm still a bit lackluster in the hair department, but I do think I have the face angles and shading for skin a bit better.

So Lyn finds you on the plains right after Chrom and Lissa find you on the plains where Marth swears that he's known you all of this life and that you've trained really hard just so you could protect Prince Marth all the while you desperately try to get home? Okay, I kind of want to see how ridiculous this will be.

Sure, I'm trying to find some good tutorials on anti-aliasing because everyone seems to have their own opinions on how to do it. I think I'll give it a shot when I get back home on another splice.

These are actually pretty fun. How often do these happen? It's a great way to give myself an excuse to keep spriting these faces.

I don't know about The Witcher 3 because I haven't played it (yet), but Inquisition does have some problems. The classes aren't entirely balanced. Tempest/Archer is stupidly OP, so is Knight Enchanter-- even after the patch, it got stronger, not weaker. The crafting system basically takes a massive dump all over the shopping that can be done and loot-- making about 95% of the loot you pick up meaningless filler to be sold for money to get more crafting gear. And a lot of the quest are pretty uninspired fetch quest that barely have any plot or have anything worth noting-- even for gear checks. The hitboxes on enemies are absolutely wretched making Nightmare almost unplayable without insane amounts of management of your teams because the AI is terrible and the disjointed hitboxes allow for sweeping attacks that hit units even when they shouldn't. There's no smart tracking on melee attacks making it difficult to tell the range of attacks-- especially problematic with other races outside of human because the hitboxes are clearly designed around humans heights. And the story is so bad that even Bioware themselves kind of hint that it could have been better. Also, the burst damage system that's used is incredible broken as having even a sliver of guard or barrier is enough to cheese bosses, which results in both the player and the enemy being placed into a rushdown fest to kill each other or the player is so obscenely tanky that the notion of dying is a matter of the player losing interest. It's not bad, but it's certainly far from astonishing. Awakening has been argued to death about it's quality with it being extremely hit or miss. Fates I'm sure is no exception to that. Not only is Xenoblade an older game, so I don't think it's entirely right to use it as a quality of game. The types of games we've been getting for JRPGs are things like Tales of Zestria, which while not horrible, clearly have considerably less effort placed into them than older titles. I think I liked it when RPGs were simple, yet elegant in their designs rather than trying to do a lot and not really refining any of their systems.

Hmm... Didn't know about those extra things in the Japanese version. I'm Ice.

WRPG. Generally they have better character customization, and tactics provided in battle. JRPGs generally tend to have very little meat to their gameplay so there's not much customization and character setups to be interesting and the ones that do tend to be broken messes. There are exceptions, but those are few and far inbetween. As for the stories? Generally both of them tend to be average at best, but JRPGs tend to be more cookie cutter than WRPGs, and that includes the whole "Tolkenisms" that seem to be the standard for WRPGs.