Lynsanity

I want Twilight Princess HD, mostly because Zelda games are just better in HD and played with the WiiU gamepad. Wind Waker was hugely improved just by being able to access sea charts on the touchscreen while you're sailing. Weirdly, the ugly minimap from TP was still on the main screen in the footage they showed, just taking up less real estate in HD. Hopefully they let you move it down to the gamepad completely. Here's the thing though: I don't want to pay $60 for this game. I hope it's a budget title, considering they're not updating it much, and it probably went into production right when they delayed Zelda WiiU in March. I know WWHD was full-price, but it was easy to get it as part of a bundle at that time. Plus it had more work done on it, from what we've seen. The timing is also odd: if this full Zelda game is in March, I wouldn't expect Zelda WiiU until at least the fall. The idea that it will get a dual release on WiiU and NX is looking more and more likely.

Yep, and the American direct mentioned that Revelation wouldn't be available on launch day. The website blurb saying all 3 are on the same cart is probably a mistake.

Wow, didn't think it would sell out that fast. I placed my order at a leisurely pace and was lucky enough to get it through in time. Hopefully they print more to meet demand. Having both routes on the same cartridge is the only way the choice at the center of these games is actually presented as a choice.

I used to tell people they should play Mother 2 and 3, but now I'll just tell them to play Undertale instead. It does things I've never seen a videogame do before, things that weren't possible for Nintendo to do 10 years ago. It takes the general spirit and concept of those games and refines them so much, in such a well-paced and consumable package. Other RPGs look crude and violent in comparison. This game wouldn't exist without the Mother games, so you should check them out if you're curious where a lot of those ideas came from. Mother 3 in particular had a cool rhythm based mechanic in its battle system, instead of Undertale's little bullet hell business. But man, play Undertale. It's as conceptually sound as any game you'll find.

This is kind of my thinking as well. Kamui is the only royal sibling with no shoes, and the only one that turns into a dragon. You can imagine Garon ordering Kamui's armor to be made shoeless and then being elusive about it like "don't worry Kamui, it's for the best in case some... power is awakened within you, or your feet need to do something surprising, I'm not saying that will happen but what if, y'know?"

Is this confirmed? That would be sad, as I was hoping to see full-body official art for all the characters, like in past games.

I'm pretty disappointed about this too. Even though the lines didn't fit like 40% of the time in Awakening, the times when it worked, it really added to the supports. And it's unusual, looking at all the other feature carry-over, for them to remove something like that. Probably after a few supports we'll all get used to it and able to hear the characters' voices well enough in the dialogue. But still! I seriously think this had something to do with it. Not so much for recording the lines, as combing through the pages and pages of support dialogue and syncing them with both voice clips and facial expressions, in addition to all the stuff they did for FE Amie. That's a lot of work.

It does have a very purple tinge to it though. Maybe it's a magic lake.

I'm sorry people don't always stop to articulate this, but "it's optional" doesn't mean "I would never criticize an optional feature," it means "this feature is not objectionable enough for it to impact my playthrough, when I can easily enjoy the game w/o interacting with that content." It's pointless to respond to that with "but what about this other thing that would be 50x worse than Fates' content?" Obviously the reception to that would be different. Unless you actually think, to reference the argument I was responding to, photographic gore is equally problematic to what we're seeing from Fates. I would assert it's much worse, but I guess I don't speak for everyone. How do you mean? Going to My Castle, then going to My Room, then selecting Invite someone seems to fall pretty safely on the optional side of wherever that line is. So does marrying certain characters and playing dress-up. Sorry, does this involve a story spoiler? I have no idea what it's referring to.

It now says it's down for server overload, but not before I got in and puttered around for a bit! It's really cool! I may or may not have made an expy of Furiosa from Mad Max that wound up looking like this. Unfortunately there's no facial marking that looks like engine grease spread across the top half of her head

The lines really aren't that arbitrary. Pixelated face-rubs and pg-13 lewdness aren't harmful or objectionable to the extent that real-life gore would be, for obvious reasons. I'm open to tone arguments about how the potential for all the characters to fall in love with the avatar hurts their overall characterization. But these ad-absurdum arguments don't get us anywhere. "But what if there was an OPTION for your 3ds to COME TO LIFE and KILL YOUR DAD" Like you're comparing something either impossible or entirely against the goal of videogames to something that's a pretty linear progression of FE's focus on relationships and immersion.

Forget the themes, I want the normal-sized new 3ds there. ;( I must be the only one still waiting for a release in north america. Still puttering around with my OG 3ds

The weird thing is, we've seen both male and female dark mages as map sprites. Could the portrait be used for both of them? Could we be missing a portrait?

Uh, how would that even work? Movies aren't a participatory medium. Video games are. When you play a video game, you create the playing experience. Obviously the developer does too, with what content they include, which parts of it are must-complete, etc. But the whole point of the "it's optional" argument is you're not getting fan-serviced unless that's the gameplay you seek out. It's not part of the main storyline. It's not canon. It's not happening in the middle of SRPG gameplay. It's not an auto-play reward for completing a mission. It's something you, the player, have to choose to interact with. There's not a comparable feature in other media, so please don't pull some "you can just close your eyes for parts of a movie so they're optional!" BS. The format, the consumption, the intent of the creator are not the same at all. Movies and books are meant to be experienced linearly, and all parts of them are part of the vision. Games are often made more like platforms, with lots of different stuff to do, some less important than others, and that's been going on for like 20 years. I wouldn't criticize, say, Final Fantasy X because Blitzball was in it. Blitzball was a dumb sidegame I didn't like, so I didn't play it, and in fact I had to look it up just now to even remember what it was called. No, I would criticize that game for annoying characters and stagnant gameplay, which are things you can't avoid if you want to progress through the main game and see what the developers most wanted to express. Skinship and so on is similarly not a big part of FE Fates. This is ridiculous and pretty much Godwin's law. Nothing in this game remotely approaches how bad making light of genocide would be. Find a more fitting analogy, like say a beach volleyball minigame, and suddenly this issue seems a bit less severe.

So... how come the support conversations don't have any voice clips in them? Was that the case with the Japanese version of Awakening too? It's a small bit of immersion, but usually they don't pass on chances for characterization like that. I hope they weren't so busy syncing skinship dialogue that they had to make supports into silent slideshows.

This is really the only "fanservice" I have a problem with, because you're taking a story scene and framing it in the most male-gazey way possible. Unless Marx's confrontation starts with him walking down some stairs with lingering ass and crotch shots, we have a problem here.

I like to think this, but Inigo and Owain reference the "other world" they came from, and wondering if it was even real. I guess they could mean "world" metaphorically, like Europeans calling the Americas "the new world", but they probably wouldn't be so spacey about it if they just looked at a map and hopped on a boat. Also there's the thing with them telling Lucina's amiibo that she's not the Lucina they knew. That suggests outrealms stuff, though it could just be for the amiibo functionality and not their actual backstory. But overall, I'm not hung up on this anymore. These characters used outrealms once already in canon, to travel back in time, so it's not so weird to think they'd do it again. Dimension hopping and time displacement really messes with a person!

That's exactly what motivates me to play Fire Emblem, Kazahana! Nice lampshade hanging!

Man I hope this is this the case! Getting bit by a werewolf turns you into a werewolf, marrying a prince should turn you into a princess, and marrying a spirit fox... uh... I guess it's like you got taken to the spirit world? To also become a fox? Well, characters who start out promoted still have a base class associated with them, since they have 2 skills from that base class. For instance, Frederick in awakening had cavalier skills, not knight skills. So marrying him in Fates would probably give you cavalier class options.

So Ophelia is probably the blondish dark mage we saw in that intro trailer right? It's weird how she's the only child character to turn up pre-release, when Nyx is already in Nohr... Anyway, I'm really liking Foleo, Ryouma's son can get it, and I like how pissed off Velour looks in all her portraits. Her dad looks really easygoing so it's probably played up for contrast. Lutz I can't get into for whatever reason. Looks like Harold is going to stay single. Edit: Also I read somewhere that Soleil is a girl? She totally read male to me but if that's the case, I'm a big fan of her as well.

I thought A+ was basically going to be the implied gay couple pairings, the "gal pal" support level if you will. And there's far more than 2 A+ pairings, from the looks of things. So what will the mechanical difference be with same-sex S supports, when neither result in children? It's curious, but both features go beyond what my expectations were for Nintendo. So yay.

Not only will some of these lines be ripe targets for the NoA dubhammer, but the translations we're getting right now aren't necessarily accurate. The "are you limp" one in particular is apparently off, she's saying "soft" and it's in reference to Kamui's hands.

Freckles! On a fire emblem lady! Freckles on a real fire emblem lady!

I think the special edition puts both routes on the same cartridge. Can anyone confirm? That's definitely what it looks like, and definitely the version I want to play. :P

Another thing: