vanguard333

I've honestly never been a fan of westerns. The only ones I can think of that I've actually seen are Rango, Cowboys & Aliens (simply because the premise was so weird that I had to see it), and the Lone Ranger film. Funny enough, that anime I posted videos of earlier: Golden Kamuy, does have a lot of elements of the western genre despite being very Japanese and taking place in 1907 Hokkaido. Anyway, with the upcoming film The Batman demonstrating that Warner Bros. definitely has an emergency, "If DC films stink, make gritty Batman origins film" button somewhere in its HQ, I recently came across what is quite possibly my favourite moment in any of the Batman films: the climactic battle in Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LikMS5gDDI For some reason, YouTube is only allowing the video link to be displayed as a link. As a precaution in case there's something wrong, here's a different video of something entirely different that you can watch instead (just make it clear which one you chose to watch when posting your opinion of it):

Indeed. I know I have already said what I wanted to say about Fates many times. Speaking of Fates having been ambitious; ambition has often been the enemy of the FE series; hasn't it? I'm not saying the series shouldn't strive to do new things; obviously they should, but it's interesting just how often the series tends to bite off more than it can chew when it decides to be ambitious. I hope that, for the next FE game, they find a way to do something creative without overreaching in their ambition; Path of Radiance comes to mind in that regard.

@AvatarofDiscord Forgive me for taking a while to reply; I'm in the middle of watching a helpful video on plotting out a novel (I'm an aspiring writer). These read like scattered points. I'll do my best to respond to them. Honestly, I'm fine with the sword choosing Corrin and don't really count it as an example of them being a Mary Sue, especially since Revelations' reveal about the origin of the sword and of the Rainbow Sage's past heavily implies that the reason it chooses Corrin is that Corrin is that Corrin desires peace, which would fulfill the Rainbow Sage's atonement. I prefer to cite other examples, such as everyone plot-relevant fawning over them except for those who have something "wrong" about them related to why they don't fawn over Corrin, the story bending over backwards to glorify Corrin, etc. And all those characters you listed have no bearing and immediately trust Corrin anyway. How do your last statement there argue against that quote? Aw, that's too bad. He and I were in the middle of a long conversation about different anime and I was hoping to talk to him about one that I recently watched called Golden Kamuy. Now who am I going to talk to about anime? I can back it up though by pointing out the ways in which Three Houses' gameplay interconnects. There's a clear focus on the "teacher" aspect, with customization of the students being key: the class change system working by reaching certain skill levels interconnects with directly upgrading the students through the teaching mechanics, which interconnects with the other monastery activities; most of which are about either raising support or raising skill levels, the "weapons can break, but can also be repaired" interconnects with how combat arts work, etc. Proving that the characters in Three Houses have goals, multiple traits, beliefs & convictions, etc., would lead to us being here all day as the only way to prove that definitively would be to list those things for every single character. But, at the very least, you can't deny that the characters in Three Houses have clear beliefs & convictions. As for the wyvern lord remark, class balance has never been a strong point of FE, so that's rather unfair. Fates isn't well-balanced with its classes either. I understand; it's hard to convey tone online as it's all just text. I struggle with it as well, and my autism making it that I struggle with tone even in a normal conversation doesn't help. Weird remark, as I literally cited a cartoon as an example of my point that you responded to there.

Okay. I never said anything about family trees; I think they have depth because, well, they have depth: they have goals, they have beliefs and convictions, they have personalities beyond just one shallow gimmick. I'll agree about Fates having interesting gameplay, but I definitely will not agree about it being tight. It is perhaps the most scattered gameplay I have ever seen in an FE game. With Three Houses, there at least is a clear focus and the different gameplay elements, aside from stuff like the fishing minigame (which I suspect is only there because fishing minigames are everywhere these days), actually do interact and work together. I mean... okay; you can make a cast of quirky and shallow characters for an FE game and make it work, but you have to admit that such a cast is ill-fitting in a game story like Fates that has pretentions of being nuanced and morally complex (I say "pretentions", because every time the game is about to present something that could be nuanced or complex, it immediately backs out of it). I don't think depth has anything to do with maturity of the target base; deep characters and shallow characters alike can be enjoyed by older and younger audiences. Just look at something like Avatar: the Last Airbender for deep and compelling characters in a story targeted at a young audience. @AvatarofDiscord I can hardly read a word you typed without hurting my eyes as the tiny font is straining my eyes. Please reply with the standard font & size. @AnonymousSpeed I'm interested in hearing what happened as well.

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?.

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.

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".

Yeah. I'm not one to complain about graphics too much either, and even I notice various issues it has. For me, what saves it is that there's at least a coherent art style holding it all together (I'm not an expert by any means, but it looks like it's trying to mimic Meiji-era art like how Skyward Sword tried to mimic impressionist art).

…Not-so-happy ending?

I remember reading about things that IS had apparently planned for Three Houses only to scrap them, and one of those things they apparently scrapped was that Edelgard being something of a counterpart to Byleth via her Crest of Flames being a lot more important to the story, including giving her the power to interfere with the divine pulse ability. The more I see of this mysterious captain edgelord, the more I'm reminded of that idea, especially since them breaking Byleth's sword doesn't matter much if Byleth can rewind time back to before it broke. Perhaps this character, alongside other things, are going to be how Koei Tecmo recycles some those scrapped ideas?

…What's this song about? Some Norwegian pirate? Interesting tune though.

I see. Thanks for the info.

Quick question as someone who has yet to play the demo: what is saving like in this game? I feel that strategy RPGs, due to their slower pace, really need to allow the player to save at any point. I'm not a fan of how FE games tend to limit saving, with the most generous of them offering a suspend-save during battle, while I really like how games like Valkyria Chronicles allow the player to save at any point and have a ton of save files.

I see. You'd probably enjoy it. By the way, earlier I mentioned that I recently finished watching an anime called Golden Kamuy. Have you heard of it?

I see. That sounds a bit interesting. By the way; it was a bit unclear: have you already seen the show I was talking about earlier?

I see. That sounds rather weird, but also a bit interesting.

I've honestly never really heard of SpyXfamily apart from its trailer occasionally appearing on my youtube recommended.

I see. I never heard about Celebi's time travel because it's a gen 2 Pokemon (I never played gen 2) that I was never very interested in obtaining and I never played Mystery Dungeon. Anyway, what did you think of the rest of what I said?

I recently began watching a new anime called Love of Kill, simply because, when I saw the trailer for it, I thought it seemed very, for lack of a better way of describing it, "fascinatingly weird." I have now seen all six episodes that have aired so far, and "fascinatingly weird" is a perfect way to describe the show. The premise is that it's an action rom-com where one of them is an assassin and the other is a bounty hunter in a country where bounty hunting is very much illegal, and I'm six episodes in and I still can't say if it's taking it's own premise seriously or it's supposed to have at least some amount of farce. What I can say for certain is the characters are interesting and the story has some charm to it, if largely because of how weird it is. It's too bizarre for me to recommend it, so I will just say this: normally, I would not be watching a rom-com; it is not a genre I enjoy in any sense of the word, and yet, I am watching this show.

I wouldn't know if those things aren't Warriors-esque; I've never played a Warriors game. They might go the route of only involving Divine Pulse in the plot and not in the gameplay.

Now that I think about it, there were a few things they apparently had planned for Three Houses that got scrapped during the game's... ambitious development. One of which, apparently, was that Edelgard's Crest of Flames was going to have a lot more importance, including enabling her to interfere with Byleth's divine pulse ability. I wonder if they're going to use this game as an excuse to recycle some of Three Houses' scrapped ideas. The purple-haired guy that seems to be presented as something of a counterpart to Byleth could be them recycling some of the ideas they had for Edelgard, for instance. It wouldn't surprise me if it turns out that this guy can interfere with divine pulse.

To be fair, it probably would've been perfectly clear if you were talking about any pair of Fire Emblem games other than Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn: the two that happened to have base mechanics.

I forgot about Celebi... and this is the first I'm hearing about Celebi having time powers. Yeah, I know; I was just making a joke about that new bit of info. They could easily go the ancestor route. I don't think Rei/Akari are supposed to be Lucas/Dawn, if only because their names are Rei/Akari. But that might be because whichever one the player doesn't pick is actually from the past.

Perhaps @Jotari should change the title from "comparing bases" to "comparing base stats" to make it more clear.

I'm not sure how they can do a Legends game set in another region, as no other region has Pokémon with powers over time, so how is the protagonist going to end up in the past?