Slumber

Oh right, Maximilian Dood and a bunch of other fighting game streamers went to Bamco today to check out the full game.

IDGAF about her character, she seems pretty bland. But she's a solid staffbot. She's like a 2/10 combat unit, though.

He's a slight step up. Bolsonaro just wants to torture drug dealers, not murder them. Though I wouldn't be surprised if he crossed that line very shortly.

I'm fine with Daemon X Machina's over the top anime visuals, since it's supposed to be an over the top action game. Yeah, I've also heard of the Front Mission inspiration. Makes sense, given that it's part of the same universe. Metal Gear probably comes to mind due to Shinkawa's involvement, and that snippit we see in this trailer does look like what was in MGS4, but that mech segment of MGS4 was like, 15 minutes long. Armored Core is also a bit more vertical, but again, this is a few-seconds long preview of actual gameplay. Anywho, giant fighting robots always make me happy.

Looks like we're getting some decent mech games next year.

We haven't proven that we can.

For once I would like the Vikings to be a good team for a whole game.

Nevermind, this NFC Championship rematch is great. If only this is how things turned out 9 months ago. EDIT: Watch the Vikings lose this.

This NFC Championship rematch is pretty boring so far. Also I am still having a tough time digesting the fact that the Browns are an actual team now. A team that SHOULD have more wins than losses.

It's been a bad season for kickers.

The Lions, the worst team in the division, are shutting out the Packers. Which I'm cool with, but it just shows how every team is just fucked.

The NFC North is a goddamn trainwreck.

And on top of this, you'd expect there to be some huge payoff to using Amelia and Ewan if you stick with them. But ALL of the trainees have pretty bad growth rates to make up for the fact that they get an extra 9 levels to grow. Meaning they're also some of the most RNG-screwable units in the game. Ross comes early enough that you can try him out and bench him within a reasonable time period if he's getting screwed. Amelia coming by the mid-game and Ewan joining right before the end-game kicks off is comical. It's a big risk to invest in either of them with really no payoff, and they're far and away the most poorly handled trainees in the franchise. SoV lets the trainees promote into any classline AND every unit is deployable in that game. Fates and Awakening give the trainee units Aptitude, which gives them some of the best growths in the game on top of the extra levels. Amelia and Ewan are just bad units with no real redeeming qualities, besides their characters if you're into that.

Marisa is the Oujay of Sacred Stones. However, unlike Oujay, Marisa is locked into the worst offensive classline in the game and will never get the payoff of decent utility via consistent 1-2 range weaponry. Also, Ewan and Amelia being trainees isn't their only problem. If it was, Ross would get tossed in with them, too.

SS is very easy without grinding. There's always a path to avoid enemies on the map(One of the better design choices in the game), and there's no reason to do them if you don't want to grind. All grinding does is make using units like Marissa, Amelia and Ewan less difficult and impractical.

Low end, you'll see games around 25gigs as far as AAA titles go. Most seem to be around 30-40gigs, which realistically ends up being about 10-12 full digital games at a time. Red Dead Redemption 2 represents the opposite extreme, as that game is 105gigs. I want to say the older Cold Steel games are like 15-20gigs. I have no idea how big 3 is, but I feel like it'd be quite a bit more, being built for more modern hardware. Indie stuff rarely ever gets much more than a gig or two.

As somebody who's not competitively minded, I really didn't care for the gameplay. It was a pretty straightforward(Not to say it was easy or overly simple) puzzle game. The throughline for the game with the story was just terrible, though, and the main characters were pretty thoroughly unlikable. It just ended up being a very unpleasant experience for me when I finished it and let it sink in.

I played the original and hated it. I was actually surprised when I heard about this remaster, because it seemed like one of those games that wouldn't get one.

Collins' justifications lose face when you remember that the senate sat on Merrick Garland for 8 months. Fuck her. Fuck her stupid "the democrats just hate Republicans" bullshit. I don't remember anybody making a stink about Gorsuch. I hate this fucking government.

He joins at level 15 with incredibly good bases, comparable to a level 15/1 Lugh while still unpromoted. Again, Hugh's the RNG-safe Mage. He has the worst growths, but his bases are so rock-solid that they can carry him from recruitment, with slight speed problems. But speed is one of his highlight growths, so it won't be bad for too long. If Lugh and Lilina get screwed, he's a perfectly viable option and you can promote him immediately and have a solid Sage as soon as he's recruited. And even with his crappy Magic growth, it still averages higher than Lugh's. Obviously not as high as Lilina, but he beats her pretty cleanly in every other stat besides Luck and Res. He's a solid Mage, and my go-to because I'm lazy and Lugh always sucks for me.

Brutal. "What do we do about Gale's recruitment?" "No time. Kill him."

I don't see many people who enjoy the way Binding handled its "true ending" and Gaiden chapters. I think the intention is that you're supposed to play the game as fast and as efficiently as is reasonably expected, but the game doesn't tell you that you need to do this to get the true ending, so people don't know that losing a random unit, not beating a chapter fast enough, or killing specific hostile units will completely block them from reaching it. People tell me Lugh's useful, but he's always been bad in my runs. I generally wait until Hugh and just pay out the ass for a relatively RNG-safe Mage, though I'm probably an anomaly in that regard. Sue's strength kinda sucks, so it's not crazy to get 4 levels and no strength. Noah is indeed the worst Cavalier. You can send him to his death after recruiting Fir. I don't think Gale gives you anything. I think it's just meant to be closure for his character if you talk to him with Zeis or Miledy.

I have a lot to say about this, but that'd be getting off topic, as this is a SS thread, not an Awakening thread. Trick might be the wrong word, but it's tough to explain. Sacred Stones borderline fetishizes its characters. A large portion of the cast have essentially gone through their arcs, and basically exist to be perfect role models/weird advisers for the rest of the cast, or just plain better than them. Read through Tethys' support chains, Gerik's support chains, Ephraim's support chains, Seth's support chains, Joshua's support chains, Garcia's support chains, Saleh's support chains, etc... but it comes off like half of the cast has life near perfectly figured out. There aren't many support chains, especially when any of the people I've mentioned are involved, where people are talking to each other on the same level. I can't say any of those that I've mentioned are bad characters(Except Ephraim), but they also don't feel like real characters. I can hear all of these weird tales about Gerik and the things he likes to do, but I don't buy any of it because there's not a single support conversation he has where I'm like "Yes, I totally buy this". It also makes it really difficult to connect to the more flawed members of the cast they talk to due to how one sided a lot of the conversations felt. I can't say it's objectively bad or anything, but once I started getting a similar feeling to a bunch of their supports, the more it started to eat at me. Ironically, Lute, a character who thinks she's above everyone, I find more compelling because her acting like she's above everyone else is shown to be total bullshit, and her acting like a know-it-all annoys people.

This is where I'm gonna disagree. I basically have 4 categories of FE games. Games that aren't very good but are mechanically interesting Games that are good that aren't mechanically interesting Games that are good and mechanically interesting Games that aren't good and aren't mechanically interesting Gaiden/Echoes(I'll just say Echoes as that's effectively replaced Gaiden in my mind) falls into category 1. If I shift my perspective, there are a number of things I can enjoy about Echoes. It's mechanically unique and thus has value in my mind. It's a... pretty bad strategy game, but if I look at it as a JRPG on a grid as opposed to an actual strategy game, I can enjoy it quite a lot. Three games fall into category 4 in my mind, and thus ultimately have the least value. Dark/Shadow Dragon, Sacred Stones, and Awakening. These are the three games in the franchise I have really no reason or incentive to ever go back to. On face value, I'm tempted to say either SD or Awakening is the weakest(They're all very close). However, both Awakening and DD/SD have something I can admire and respect. DD/SD was the game that started it all. Awakening saved the franchise. Sacred Stones was a filler game. In my opinion, it does nothing better than any other game in the franchise. The map design is very mixed, the story is bad, the characters are... fine, but there's a writing trick they constantly pull off in SS that I absolutely hate that makes me like the characters waaaay less, the difficulty is nonexistant, monsters absolutely ruin the pace of the game and just make the puddle-shallow of a game even shallower, Magvel is the most half-assed continent in the franchise, and the unit balance is potentially just as bad as some of the worst examples in the series(It gets a slight pass for grinding being a thing, making essentially everyone good). Also Selena is the worst Camus in the series. Arguably as dumb as Eldigan to boot. The one thing I keep seeing people say is outstanding in the game is the relationship between Lyon and EE... and, to that, I say "It accounts for about a total of 4 chapters of content". It's just an incredibly unremarkable game to me in basically every regard, and I can't give it the meta-kudos that I'd give games I put at roughly the same quality. There's 0 value in Sacred Stones, and it's the only game in the franchise that I feel could have never been made, and it'd have absolutely no impact on the rest of the series. ... And for clarification, I probably came off as really mean to the game in this post, and I know that there are people like @DB4Dwho really like it. But I really have nothing against the game, and think it's totally fine to like. I'm sure there are people who can tilt their perspectives like I could for Echoes and get plenty of enjoyment out of the game. Hell, Gaiden used to be my least favorite game in the franchise until they remade it, so maybe there's hope for SS for me if they ever remake it. I don't mean for this rant to come off as "SS sucks and you're wrong for liking it", just think of this post as the ramblings of a mad man if it helps.

This is funny to me, considering how the beta went. "Hm... people really hated fighting Nightmare... What if we made him 3x faster and he could teleport?"