Slumber

Three Houses is also Langrisser and Persona. And it's a game made after 2013, so it's also The Last of Us.

DQ7 is actually my favorite game of all time. I really enjoy the story and the way Orgodemir/Satan and God are involved. Though the reveal that kind of undermines a lot of what makes the set-up for the game cool.

Hard mode is trickier. If you don't need him, he's passable. Niime still has use.

I've got a few hours into it. Really like it so far.

IIRC, he actually doesn't need much to get going. You can even insta-promote him and he'll turn out fine, since he starts out at level 12 and has pretty solid bases. He'll have slight speed problems if you do this, but he's got a decent speed growth as-is.

Magic in DeS is so insane. I thought I was really clever when I came up with the Light Weapon/Blueblood sword combo. Then I learned it was like, the top rated build on the DeS wikidot for a long time shortly after DeS came out, purely because everyone was already like "Well duh. Blueblood is amazing, Light Weapon is amazing."

Raigh's real good. Niime's a very good staffbot. Sophia can eat rocks.

Rules of the run, now with a DkS3 section:

The thing with Thracia is that its BS tends to go both ways(Barring fog of war and warp tiles). As much as FE5 has BS, knowing how that stuff works cuts down on a lot of the "BS". It's not like FE4 where there are just things that are inherently bad/inferior in your hands, and I'd argue(And I know quite a few people who have played FE5 a lot would also agree) that it also has the most balanced cast of characters in an FE game, gameplay-wise. Due to the mechanics of the game, just about everyone has a use, or something that makes them different in a positive way from their competition. There are still cases where some units are better(Dagdar being a better capture bot than Marty), but even Shanam, the joke character, is your best merchant and he can save you a ton of money in the late game if you're hurting on supplies or really want good stuff for the last chunk of the game.

I give FE4 some slack in that regard because it was... let's say experimental. When Kaga's like "Fuck it, I'm going to do something different", it tends to be very... quirky and imbalanced(Gaiden and FE4). But when he sticks to the core FE experience that we now know and think of, he tends to make the games pretty balanced, and he's still doing so. The one standard FE-like game that I can think of where he fails at this with is FE1, which, you know. First try and everything.

The Church is absolutely not a good entity in FFT, but it's kept around for a reason. Beyond Simon, there's also Isilud and Meliadoul, both Templars, essentially the military wing of the church, and both are decent/good people(Beyond their taking questionable orders from higher up). Isilud hunts Ramza as a heretic, but he tries to do the right things, but is unaware of the Lucavi and dies because of it. He was straight up not morally corrupt enough for a Lucavi to take advantage of him. Meliadoul is very similar, but finds out about the Lucavi before she can meet the same fate as her brother. Actually getting her as a playable character means a lot here. True, there are the Crusaders in Spira who are a bit more noble than the Templars, and their overall goal is to protect(The people of Spira) rather than serve(The Church) but we only really ever get a feel for Luzzu and Gatta, and both are fairly minor characters in the grand scheme of things. AND the Crusaders go on to form the Youth League, the group opposed to New Yevon. The Summoners... Aside from Isaaru, they all denounce Yevon when they find out about Yevon's true purpose. Isaaru pretty much remains the one sympathetic person actually involved in Yevon throughout the whole game. Anywho... I ordered the Switch version of Ys VIII. I've been looking forward to it for a while, as it felt like the Switch is the perfect platform for it.

I always do. As mentioned, Geitz and a better(Though not for LTC) map. Plus, getting Lyn/Eliwood to level 15-20 ASAP and not worrying about them for the rest of the game is nice. It probably has been nearly 15 years since I last did Lloyd's map.

Would you explain, if you don't mind me asking? At the top, they're both not super fantastic. Corrupt churches that came about during major hardships in the world, with only a few at the tippy-top who know of the true purpose. But what Tactics does, and what X doesn't, is show a plethora of good-hearted people working within the church. The very first scene of FFT, is some of your main characters praying and getting help from the Church of Glabados before battle. Throughout the game, characters like Ramza, Agrias, Alma(Despite basically being the vessel for Satan), and a handful of others remain committed to the religion throughout the game, and they acknowledge that even if the church is corrupt because of Folmarv abusing the Lucavi and political handwringing from Funebris, it's still better that the world have something to have faith in. Which is also why it's stated that Ajora having been targeted by the Lucavi was the one detail that stayed hidden when the Durai Papers were finally put out. Even Delita, who waged a one-man war against the upper class of Ivalice, vowed to stop petty political nefariousness, and became a full-on atheist after Tietra died, decided to stay quiet on the whole deal, despite being just as in-the-know as Ramza. He could have easily said "Hey, you guys were actually worshipping the anti-Christ.", which probably wouldn't have been too much of a problem, since Delita was the one the world saw as the savior of Ivalice, not Ramza. And to top it all off, while it's built on twisting the truth, there is a tangible basis for the religion as a whole. Ajora was a real person who performed Jesus-like miracles in front of many people and built the church himself. What was twisted was that most people didn't know that Ajora was Ultima, effectively Lucifer from Paradise Lost, if we're bringing back subjects already talked about. The general message of FFT very much feels like "Glabados is bad, but religion and people having faith necessarily isn't". I find that a lot more nuanced than what X did, which basically amounted to a summoner going "Hey, what if I used Pyreflies to make a giant monster so that I can conjure up a fake reality from the Fayth that none of you are ever going to see? And then you guys can do whatever from there. I'm a tick now byeeeeeee." And then we got other people building the Church of Yevon, and they used it to cheat death and become zombies. And the follow-up we get to what happened to the Church isn't a very flattering one in FFX-2. It doesn't feel like there's an overarching theme or message with Yevon other than just "Yevon, the one religion in this universe, is bad."

Fiona joins before part 1 ends. None of her peers are going to even be promoted yet. MAYBE Nolan, but none of the other DB units, and even the prepromotes you get aren't "fully fleshed out" units who also have plenty of growing to do. Sophia may not have great growths, but neither does Fiona. You're arguing that a unit that is underleveled, but joins earlyish in the game and has normal growths is an Est, while an underleveled unit who joins late in the game but also has normal growths isn't. Fiona's total growth rates equal out to 360%(And they're distributed awfully). Nolan, meanwhile, who is borderline a Jeigan for the first few chapters, has 390%. Leonardo and Edward both have 380%. Meg and Aran have 375% total. Laura, your squishy non-combat unit, has 380%. Fiona actually has worse growths than any of your core DB members. She joins early in the game, has bad growths, and she's relatively not too far behind the rest of your unpromoted DB members. She's not an Est, she's just a shitty unit. Sophia actually does have the best growths of any of her relative peers. They're still not mind-blowingly fantastic, but it's better than Lugh, Raigh, Lilina and Hugh.

Yeah, Wallace's growths aren't nearly good enough to catch him up to Oswin, even WITH the insane preference and babying he'd need to get there by the end of LHM. It does a good job showing why Wallace is considered one of, if not the single worst, units in FE7. For many reasons.

I'm pretty agnostic as well. I have a pretty firm "I don't know. Nobody knows." attitude towards religion. Could there be some higher spiritual force at work in the universe? I don't know. Nobody knows. But I still try to see the good in religion. It gives a lot of people a sense of place, and it gives them hope. Some people use it for bad purposes, and like with business, plenty of sociopaths use it to gain power and abuse people. But I'd say the vast, vast, vaaaaast majority of people out there who are religious just go on, day by day, using religion as a guide. That's something I like about Dragon Quest. It's one of the only JRPG franchises I can think of that consistently portrays religion in a positive light(It's actually the only one I can think of off the top of my head), even though the games aren't religious in the slightest and it only plays a major part in the plot in... two of the games? Maybe it's because Japan is a very secular nation, but it seems like any JRPG that focuses on religion ends with "It was evil the whole time." Most don't go to the borderline comedic lengths FFX does to show this, but it's still generally not all that nuanced, which I really think they should be when you're tackling a concept as heavy as religion.

That ending of Megalo Box sure was something. I honestly don't know how to feel about it.

Sophia. Nino at least isn't terribly crippled(She's still crippled) by her weapon type. Sophia never gets trained up to dominate the battlefield(Or at least do relatively well) like a lot of Ests do, she gets trained up purely to survive. Or bench her. Much easier to just bench her.

If your entire worldview is shattered, you generally show some sort of confliction over it. ESPECIALLY when it's tied directly to the problems plaguing the world, and the fact that it's also the driving force of the mission that you're embarking on that's assumed to lead to the death of a person who has been like a little sister to you. More than a small handful of scenes with Wakka going "Man, I can't believe it" would have been nice for him to show actual character development. He got this with the Al Bhed, why could t he get it with Yevon? Him being a devout Yevonite to him just accepting that Yevon is a zombie religion is more of a 180 than him actually time to think about and contemplate what just happened. And what I was getting at with the earlier post was that this should have been a much more gradual thing. Rather than having the cop out "Your religion is actually the reason for all of this! And they're all evil zombies!" forcing him to immediately reject the religion he once committed damn near his whole life to, an actually more realistic depiction that probably would have resonated a lot better and have made for much better parallels with the real world would have been something like: Wakka hates Al Bhed and machina, loves Yevon. He sees Yevonites using machina in an attempt to stop Sin, betraying the whole idea that Yevon is adamantly anti-machina like he believed, and he has to confront the idea that not only is this view counter to his, he also considers that his religion forced his brother to use machina in the fight that led to his death. He later gets to Home, and the scenario plays out as usual, except that certain Yevonite Maesters are now ordering the execution of the Al Bhed as "heathens". After helping the Al Bhed escape and spending time with them, he learns that they're just people, too, and he has been taught to target them for the wrong reasons. And finally, when he gets to Bevelle, he learns that only a FEW Maesters are evil(Rather than all but one, with the one who isn't bad being killed by the rest. Also preferably that they're not zombies, it's just Seymour with convictions strong enough to continue on as an Unsent), and Yevon isn't a complete lie forced to feed Sin and empower Yu Yevon. This would have been gradual growth for him, he'd have to consider what he's been taught, he'd have to reevaluate everything he's spent his life believing. We already infer that he does think about some of these things, as Chappu's death clearly paints his views on at least the use of machina. And it ends without him being explicitly shown that his religion is a big bundle of bullshit. But I guess it's a JRPG, so I shouldn't expect anymore than "Nah jk, religion is just evil", which means I shouldn't expect much out of Wakka.

Again, I'd argue that this isn't wholly true. The parallels are true, but how Wakka's handled doesn't come off as a guy clinging to hope in a hopeless world. And it's almost all due to Yevon is revealed to be a lie that exists to keep Sin going, and Wakka has... One or two scenes where he reflects on this? All things considered, he sure takes the revelation that not only is his religion a lie, it's a lie that has explicitly been keeping the thing tearing his world apart going, purely because some zombies love cheating death, pretty damn well. His devotion was so integral to his character that it was actively making him a shitty human being, but after a few scenes, he's back to being regular old Wakka, just with slightly less reason to hold racial prejudice, which was already happening just by him spending time with Al Bhed. I feel like there are a million better ways to develop a character like that outside of making them loathsome, and they only ever get over it when they realize zombies are controlling their views.

That's why I said he has an "us-vs-them" mentality. If you're not a filthy heathen or somebody with spiral eyes or on a different Blitzball team, he's fine with you and is just a lovable oaf. If you ARE one of the things he doesn't like, then, well, apparently you deserve to die by Sin's hands... flippers. I'd say he'd be well written if his religious extremism/racism was more of a focus on his character and people just stopped and said "Hey dude, you're not being cool right now" more often. When he gets REALLY extreme, they don't really treat him any different than they treat him when he's just being an idiot, which is a really bad way to treat a character flaw. His worse attributes get glossed over pretty quickly, and even the line where Lulu says that Wakka absolutely cannot know that Yuna is part Al Bhed just comes and goes, despite the implications of that claim being REALLY bad for Wakka's character. I don't even remember if anything ever even comes from his "They deserve to die" mentality he has towards people who use Machina. I think it's strongly hinted that he has that mentality over Chappu, but I don't remember anybody ever going "Wakka, that's really fucked up, there are dead bodies on the beach right there, and you knew some of them". I'll agree that he's better written than most FFX characters, and they're attempting to actually say something with his character, which is more than you can say about most FF characters in geneal, but I still don't think they handle it particularly well. I think that of people not even putting together that he's supposed to be a religious fundamentalist nut should say a lot about how they handled this. Most people remember him just being Tidus' bro, and a "lovable idiot" in a cast with 3 "lovable idiots". The post that started this was about @DragonFlames having a recent realization about it.

I guess it depends on how into the Gambit system you are. Because most of them can be built around when you fight them. Also the Zodiac Edition buffed the Espers considerably, so they're more worth it there.

I actually really like how the Lucavi/Espers are handled in FFXII. I think a few too many of them were hidden, but they were the most fun things in the game to hunt down, in a game where the best part was hunting stuff down. I also like how they're handled in the Zodiac Edition. They unlock parts of the license grid, so actually unlocking the Espers can be a big part of building a character.

Wakka is like a caricature of religious extremism, though. He's racist, holds an "us-vs-them" mentality, is so unstable that the party is afraid to tell him that Yuna is half Al Bhed, and that Rikku is full Al Bhed, because they have no idea what he'd do, but he's also too stupid to notice the racial traits that both of them have. And at the end of his "character development" in FFX is him going from "They deserved it"(When a bunch of people are slaughtered during Operation Mi'hen for co-operating with the Al Bhed and using machina) to "Sucks for them"(When Home is destroyed and the Al Bhed are effectively left without a place to go). If there was something beyond this, maybe I'd be inclined to empathize. But no. Wakka sucks. He's the worst member of a relatively bad party. No I don't give a shit that he names his kid an Al Bhed name, FFX-2 is basically glorified fanfiction.

Shadow Dragon or Fates. SD had the opportunity to really meaningfully expand on FE1 and modernize it, and... it didn't. Fates, on the other hand, was so close to being great, but it fucked up in too many ways for the things it did right to shine.