Alastor15243

I don't really want to spoil anything.

Entry 6 WOW HOLY SHIT YEAH UH YEAH UH YEAH SORRY GUYS I hope this thing that cannot possibly be worth the ridiculous wait was worth the ridiculous wait. As I said before, basically a combination of poorly-timed writer's block and full-on Fates burnout are to blame. I just could not think of a good way to finish off this entry due to a variety of factors. But I decided to basically just suck it up and release it anyway so you have something to read while I try and get all of the images ready to do the rest of the story. Hope you enjoyed!

OUCH. That's no fun.

Huh?

...WELL. This certainly changes things. Right, no more delaying things, the Invisible, Inc. playthrough is going to have to wait. Because it can wait. And apparently this can't. I only have two more months to get the pictures for the rest of book 3 before conventional screenshotting becomes impossible on the 3ds. Fortunately, if I hold off on the major writing and just write general commentary notes for the battle, I think I can push through the rest of the game and finish it easily within the next two months just like I did with Birthright, get all of the appropriate pictures for what I'm planning, and then once all of the images are safely secure, I can take what time I need for the more detailed conversations and narration and plot. I know I haven't exactly been an examplar with my capacity to update in the year 2017, but the idea of this literally becoming impossible to finish is just unacceptable to me. It's now or never. And I choose now.

Edit: damn phone double-posting.

After a lot of annoyance with this game's utterly broken class system, I came up with an idea to just have fun with it and abuse the hell out of it, and I'm trying to gauge if it'll work or not. The idea is to do a Ram Village solo run of Alm's story, using only Alm and the four Ram villagers. The idea is to make Faye a cleric and the boys all mercenaries and loop them through the mercenary line before finishing them off in more diverse classes. So I'm wondering how many times, if any, I'll be able to loop the boys through the mercenary loop and still have time to make them fully promoted in their final class by the end of the game. Keep in mind the plan is to do no grinding and only be allowed to fight random battles the first time I enter a dungeon and only get to fight them on the way in and out.

Yes, but we're talking about one of those transparent, objectively wrong, "this had to have been designed by a howler monkey" balancing decisions of the weird before-times, like making all of the tomes identical except certain elements are 5 to 10 points lighter.

So it's pretty clear to me that armor units have pretty consistently gotten the short end of the stick balancewise. Frankly I think that comes down to a few things: 1: They have low movement, so they can't keep up with the rest of your group, reducing their viability in any map where you actually have to go somewhere (which is most of them). 2: They have low speed, giving them extreme difficulty in doubling (and thus killing) most enemies. 3: In spite of the above major flaws, the developers somehow deemed it appropriate to give them an effective weapon to negate one of the only two strengths they do have: their defense. Even when they're already vulnerable to magic, they seemed to want to make sure that even the units they're supposed to give a hard time can tear through them like butter. So this got me to wondering about how I, personally, would design knights and generals to be properly balanced. Here's what I'd do: 1: Nerf effective weapons to hell and back. From now on, effective weapons only do a fixed 10 extra damage. No more. Not just for armor units either, I think this should apply to mounted and flying units too, because effective damage can get kind of ludicrous with the latter. It's fine to have physical weapons that do better than normal weapons against armor, but they shouldn't be so unfathomably strong that any unit using one can flatten a general in two strikes. 2: Give them full weapon triangle access. Swords, Axes, Lances. First off because they should have some advantage to make up for their poor movement, and having a crippling weakness in the most important stat in the game generally means it probably won't be statistically. So they should have full weapon triangle control. No reason why they shouldn't. Plus, sword-wielding generals are just awesome and should come back. It was utterly embarrassing that the Black Knight had to use a lance in Awakening. 3: Give them a skill that actually lets them serve their purpose. A skill that lets them shield their allies from harm, like the knights in other games like Final Fantasy. Maybe a skill that lets them take hits that would normally kill allies adjacent to them, or a skill that lets their allies perform actions from the back of guard stance so that they can keep a healer with them and let them heal while guarding them. 4: Design more maps to make them useful. Defense maps, maps with rear-guard reinforcements that try to exploit your ill-defended rear when you've already moved out. Basically, more situations to make sure that having 4-5 movement only gives them fewer options rather than none at all. What do you think? How would you personally make them viable?

Frankly I'm concerned that if they're not willing to fix obviously imbalanced features like this, then when it comes time to remake FE4, nigh-objectively the worst-balanced game in the entire series, I'm scared it's going be a nightmare.

Yeah, seriously, why are heavy armors so continuously shafted and yet somehow deemed in need of a slayer weapon? Hammers and Armorslayers should not exist. There is no balancing justification for creating a weapon that neutralizes one of the few advantages a class has. And for that matter, they should have full weapon triangle access. Bring back swordfighting generals, and have their only weaknesses be speed, movement and resistance. That should be enough.

The Fire Emblem Gaiden class system just kinda... offends my every gaming instinct, and it's easily my least favorite part of the game. It punishes you for not doing what the rest of the series trains you to see as an easy way out that will bite you in the ass in the long run; it doesn't give an equal number of promotions to everyone; and they even kept in that weird dread fighter to villager abuse that makes no sense either from a balance perspective or from a logical perspective. It just annoys me to no end that some classes will not only get fewer levels than others, but they will get those levels slower due to having their level reset less frequently. It's by far the most poorly-designed and obviously aged part of the game, and if I had to pick literally one aspect of the game's mechanics that needed to be updated for this remake, I would have picked that. I would have rebalanced the game so that each class tree has the same number of promotions and that high level unpromoted units don't level slower than low level promoted ones. Does this annoy anyone else?

HOLY SHIT HAS IT REALLY BEEN THIS LONG SINCE AN UPDATE!? I'm so sorry, I didn't realize it had been this long, a combination of having a busy schedule and some other things caused me to put this on hold, but when I realized just how long it had been since I updated this I realized I needed to find the time to get one of these done. So sorry I let it go this long without saying anything! Mission 13

When WORK slows down, as in in real life. I've been busy lately.

Hmm... actually... that may help give some context to what I have planned for "the three". I'll consider it once I finish up Invisible Inc once work slows down a little.

Right, sorry for the week without updates, bit of a busy schedule last week and had some stuff going on. Here you go! Mission 12

I mean I get how it mechanically works; when the wall itself doesn't completely break line of sight and just serves as a cover object, when you open the door there's no more cover object. It's just that it makes no goddamned scene when you think about the actual real-life mechanics of it. I've never used shade. I've never gotten it, or at least not in a situation where I was at liberty to buy it. The biggest things about expert + are as follows: First, you don't want to peek through closed doors anymore. Before it let you tell if a door would be noticed if you opened it to do the full peek, but now it tells you nothing of the sort, so you want to skip that step and open doors, making sure that when you do so you do it from the side and there's AP left to run to cover if a guard sees it, and be sure to peek around corners so you don't run straight into an unseen guard's line of sight, an in fact move into unexplored territory one space at a time if you can remember. The second is that while combat is still extremely useful (to the point that even with the consciousness monitors on every guard I still consider Nika to be the best agent in the game), you really need to make sure you ambush since you can't KO guards from the front anymore, you really only want to use combat for emergencies and escapes, because otherwise those lost turns before the big 6 really add up.

Mission 11

Don't know, never took it so I've never tried. Always considered it too weird and exploit-y to try. Anyway... Mission 10

Mission 9 OOC Commentary (slight endgame gameplay spoilers):

Sort of. He summarized it in the first bit, the introduction in the OP.

Mission 8

Genny: Physic/10, with easy access to a blessed ring allowing her to spam it like there's no tomorrow. Saber: Easily the best all-around physical unit and the most durable all-around unit on Celica's path, beating out Valbar by virtue of not getting doubled by mages.

Mission 7 Out of character comments:

I have had whole missions get this close to being completely ruined due to that damned tactical vision thing. Anyway, as for how long I've played, Steam says I've clocked 226 hours into the game, though admittedly that's probably increased very slightly by the fact that the game takes longer to play when you're LPing since I keep the game open while screenshooting, uploading, typing and image-linking. I got the game in November of 2015 and after dropping the game for about a year I recently got back into it. Christ I love this game, it's seriously one of my favorite games of all time, right up there with IS's games, the Zeldas and Castlevania.