Axie

i am way too annoying to be neutral on something fire emblem lol but i am not particularly pro or anti awakening. i recognize all of its flaws as a game, but also don't think it did anything particularly egregious that also became the new standard of the franchise, so i am glad it existed and was such a huge success, but it's not my favourite FE or anything. i am interested at how... easy you are making lunatic sound. maybe i should try it out? never saw myself as competent enough to play lunatic in any game, to be honest.

give it back and give it in the "everything is part of the triangle" fashion of fates we could have the trinity of magic not be useless in the possible elibe remakes that way!!

what is the popular opinion about the convoy anyway? i am fine with infinite access to the convoy via lord, to be honest. merlinus is a shit character and i want him retconned out of elibe regardless though.

are we talking lunatic (where, i assume, most units are not very good anyway)? because donnel is piss easy to grow in normal even without grinding lol.

1. caeda - so incredibly written for the simplest scripts in the franchise, they managed to write her as the love interest to marth without making her character all about him. as a bonus, she is very very good in gameplay too. best character in archanea. 2. wolf. the wolfguard doesn't get a particular lot of script time, but whatever they do get is pretty nice, their designs are cool as hell, and wolf/sedgar dominate SD. wolf is the coolest looking and also the leader of the wolfguard (i mean, it has his name, so), so he gets to represent them. 3. merric. desert clooooooooooothes. excaaaaaaalibur. also very likable and well written character. i do wish we got more marth/merric dialogue, though. (4. katarina. i love the assassin subplot, both in writing and in batshit gaiden chapters, and katarina is a simple yet well sold character. i wish she was better in gameplay, but this is the game with a free silvers tier, so...)

i agree! eirika keeping it bottled in despite acting (increasingly) emotionally is acrually compelling, and the only time that writing lets me down is when they imply she finally breaks down and doesn't show us that on screen. we should have seen her finally cry. it doesn't ruin her entire characterisation, though, and it's still so much more than the three BlaBla lords. how does eliwood get almost no emotional development despite all of his struggles with loss? BinBla does more with roy in a more simplistic script, even.

ah, the privilege of not needing to fight for any measly crumb of representation in entertainment. i can and WILL argue in behalf of a popular male protagonist character having been canonically gay, thank you.

you really should just have a category to quantify how mentally demanding it was to critically review the game for a playlog because that definitely has not alligned with your opinion on the game's quality every single time. you have ranked PoR highly, and deservedly so, but i was surprised reading the playlog that it drained you enough that you needed a break. it's the second last game i'd guess one would need a break on (last is awakening, so let's see how you feel about it lol).

my stance on priam has always been: you claim to descend from ike himself? show me the aether receipts. got none? didn't think so, you mythomaniac. in all seriousness though, the team that decided to create priam as fanservice clearly isn't the same team that crafted ike's character as possibly gay/asexual in the tellius duology, so not much of a point to expect consistency there. i think this falls neatly into headcanon territory. i like to think priam descends from mist myself. team gay ships always.

oh, new mystery actually isn't as low as i expected it to be, but i guess not having the balance category helped it. that's the one category it could be very low and i wouldn't feel like it would be lowballed on. (as i definitely feel like it was in some, though the writing ranks are so different from what i would do that i am not sure what counts as a lowball for me there) looking forward to the awakening playlog! we may not agree about writing much, but god it's gonna be fun to read a roast of awakening in your style. it's such a lovably roastable game. i'm unable to hate any of it, as clearly batshit as all of it is.

i actually think how they characterised eirika's struggles with emoting is, while not the best writing in the franchise, better characterisation than any of the three BlaBla lords, who have mostly static characterisation and do not develop much at all. tears? i like how they wrote SS and it's a self-contained story that while not free of holes, doesn't have nearly as many as BlaBla, which also does a disservice to a much superior game which had a good world build set up for it. but to each their own! i understand the appeal of BlaBla's story and i actually greatly enjoygoing through the story of the game in MST3000 style.

i definitely felt like awakening had more of such units, but also my experience with fates is more recent and i didn't do much post-game in it, so i don't doubt you might be right. looking at the growth rates for both games, awakening doesn't actually seem to have many more opportunities of mixed units than fates, so it might be just the former having more opportunities of leveling up than the latter. either way, it's a bit weird how fates added the mixed classes, but didn't really give most people the stats to fully explore them in main story play. i agree the other games don't have the same potential, but really only jugdral games actually attempted it anyway (and i still got some mixed unit action out of genealogy).

oh, the kids definitely need to have different hair colours according to father, at least one of them and then the other always has the same hair colour as the mother. also, the replacements need to stay. this isn't fateskening where you have all the time in the world to get your kids, and i don't see how they can change that without some absolutely unnecessary "chrom marries Nameless Maiden"-esque shenanigans. the replacements exist, some of them are actually sort of interesting, keep them!

option A in how that marth/avatar interaction happens is good to me? yes, the avatar isn't doing all the fighting or strategising alone, and it would be preposterous to assume so when the game explicitly tells you katarina was a strategist in the prologue, and jagen is also there afterwards, and marth isn't some helpless chump, but the avatar was a game changer (gameplay even supports this!), and marth would feel inappropriate not acknowledging this. it's an entirely fine exchange which fulfills all of its purposes well.

you can play however you want, you can solo T776 with ronan for all i care, just... don't expect game design to take all of your playstyle ideas into account lmao

how do you have literally no units left... ever? in what occasion? how did the lord somehow not die yet and get you a game over (unless this is casual mode and then who cares)? how did you not even reset long before getting to the point of the lord being your last unit, even in an ironman setting? this worry is absolutely not realistic.

yes, as i mentioned, fates is pretty good at not giving physical people a magic stat. which is weird for a game that introduced three new weapon/tome classes, kept one more from awakening, and also made one of the promoted lord classes that........ still, every time a mixed unit kind of worked for me, other than celica, was always when a physical unit promoted to a mixed class with a magic stat serviceable enough that the convenience of tomes was undeniable. lachesis and leif in genealogy, dark fliers in awakening - it's never spellcasters obtaining weapons because other than gaiden/echoes (and 3H? haven't played yet), there is no incentive. most of the time, weapons offer no tangible advantage. even tellius and its shitty tomes couldn't make a spellcaster pick a weapon, not that THAT counts as an actual attempt to make a mixed class happen (or that they even tried to make spellcasters happen in RD at all tbh).

congrats on finishing new mystery! i was almost caught up with the thread so i think i might just follow awakening as it happens since the game is pretty fresh in my mind. prepared to silently weep for new mystery's overall rating. my second favourite fire emblem and it sounds like it will be roasted harder than a christmas chicken. IT'S FINE I AM FINE.

BinBla is the clear standout in both gameplay and storyline, so this comes down to whether i like BlaBla's gameplay more than SS's by more than i like SS's storyline more than BlaBla's gameplay is the most important aspect for me but BlaBla isn't that much better (and in fact would be worse were SS not so damn easy), while SS trounces BlaBla hard in story and writing. my vote goes to BlaBla.

i mean, sure, but most of the time, magic has not been remotely balanced in itself, only balanced by who has access to it. for example, the DS games actually put negative base growths in defense for mages so you can't just reclass someone with a good defense stat to mage and wreck shit with magic because that's a clearly superior weapon type. wouldn't it be better to fix how magic itself works and allow a wider variety of unit types to have access to it, rather than "glass cannon" be its only flavour?

so! i have been thinking about how magic as a weapon type is inherently bonkers unbalanced. ranged, accurate, hits defensive stat that mostly isn't even there, sometimes has nice additional effects. why not? other than the tellius games paying it absolute dust for their might values (remember when A-rank tornado had the might of the E-rank iron bow in PoR? oh, good times), magic only seems to be not very usable when its users are bad (which tellius... also does with RD. what was their problem with magic?). the reason mixed classes have never quite worked in fire emblem is because magic is so much better that, if the character even remotely has the magic stat for it (not always the case *glares at fates*), physical weapons are obsolete. have you ever made arthur use a sword in genealogy gen 2 even with a physical dad for him? how much does your awakening avatar really use a sword as a tactician, unless it has a special effect? the only time i recall really having a mixed character work in my hands was celica, because in gaiden, magic consumes HP and she has the option of saving HP by using a sword. it seems to me making magic unlike weapons and limiting its uses might be the way to go, and might actually allow intsys to stop gimping spellcasters as a balancing measure and let them actually have speed and defense sometimes. however, both games that limit magic by not making it easily purchaseable and replaceable also work with a learning list per character upon level up (gaiden) or weapon rank (3H), which i do not enjoy. ideally, every character has access to every spell with the correct weapon rank (other than personal tomes and the like). i was thinking if introducing a compromise mechanic would be more interesting, such as a) purchaseable tomes with very little, 3H-esque number of uses, but not much cheaper than weapons, forcing the player to be smarter with the convoy; b) purchaseable tomes with little uses, with full or partial recharge after a map; however, if you deplete a tome's uses in battle, it permanently loses some uses, so at some point you'd need to replace the tome. it's more complicated but less of a logistical nightmare than a), and maybe could also be applied to things like holy weapons and dragonstones, so they can be reinstated to their former glory instead of being lame like they are now; c) just plain purchasing and teaching a spell to a character in an appropriate class like in an old school final fantasy game lol. have any of you thought about this and have a better idea to balance the use of magic in fire emblem or do you think any one fire emblem has already dealt with the issue well?

i think spriting will never be done again, so they should just do the "3D models but actually 2D battles" like DS again. they never got 3D battles as good as even the DS ones, and they can only improve on the latter if they keep trying, so...

oh, back when i was reading the playlog i played it off as "well, if you just removed moonstone from the script" which qualifies it as a minor writing issue for me, but looking at the script for 5x, that wouldn't even be necessary as long as you just assume ephraim didn't get news of current events instantly as people seem to in the rest of the game (or other fire emblem games lol). valter's dialogue with him definitely reads as "renais is already entirely dust", which is post chapter 2 and post his promotion. as for the new mystery prologue, i understand you not wanting to dissect it further now! agreeing to disagree is fine and people should do it more often. though i feel bad though that new mystery isn't entertaining you very much, it seems. definitely my second favourite in the franchise. but definitely not ironman friendly at all.

story-wise: ROY THE GOOD BOY!! i get why people gravitate away from the marth-esque, endlessly kind and not much else lords, but not all attempts at doing something different have been nearly as good as marth and specially roy. they really deliver their simple premises very well. gameplay-wise: ... not roy lol most lords are either kind of bad units or are in piss easy games regardless so it doesn't matter as much how good they are. RD ike is both great and in a hard game, but then i don't like how the game pushes him on you lol. i guess SELIPH is my favourite lord in gameplay? starts out adequate, not too bad or overpowering, will get a holy weapon and turn out incredible but late enough that it doesn't trivialise the game, is necessary to defeat the final boss either by using him in the battle itself or by using him to recruit back the cheese you need to make it easy. it's a good balance.

and this is one of the many reasons why BlaBla's storyline is a disastrous atrocity that blows a hole in the tidy worldbuilding of elibe that BinBla had set up. did we NEED to question why this kind of crap just doesn't have any long term impact somehow? brammimond is clearly not around in BinBla at all, but that makes no sense with how they set them (brammimond was non-binary sort of?) up in BlaBla since your reasoning is sound and and correct. there was no reason for that. how does this game manage to have a storyline that at the same time has nothing effectively happen to the elibe timeline and yet all sorts of weird consequences to the worldbuilding? BAD, NAUGHTY WRITING. how people say any non-fates game has worse writing than this one is beyond me lol. (maybe 3H too since i haven't played it yet) headcanon: the remainder of brammimond's soul lives in the apocalypse tome. its user explores it and finds themselves staring right back because brammimond is there. spookeh.