Alastor15243

Right... I can't make any promises given how often issues seem to come up, but I will be starting work back up and try to get the next part out this weekend or next.

Yeah, Rena sounds like a completely different person singing the Dark song, and it's waaaaaaaay better, there's a lot more emotion in it and I adore it. If only there weren't those few hiccups with the lyrics it would be awesome, I wish there were a full version.

I'm really sorry about not updating here. Basically, in the middle of that "What I'd do with Fates" thing, I realized I can't really do it justice until I complete this, as there are several ideas in there that I want to use that are actually ideas I'm going to use for this as well, and thus could potentially make readers suspect significant developments in advance if I did that first. I didn't make an announcement in case I changed my mind about that, but yeah, it's looking like that's the case. I've been doing other things to clear my head and write away the burnout and writer's block, and it's having some success, but I think the biggest obstacle that this playthrough has is just how fucking boring Revelation is to play. I mean considering how I made the mistake of upping the narrative stakes here to have Dakota facing the full might of the true enemy, it's really, REALLY unfortunate that Revelation is by far the most boring path in the game so far and I've gotten too skilled at the game for Revelation Hard to prompt any challenge-born commentary in me. I mean I write these entries, doing my best to make the story exciting and the stakes high, and then suddenly the battle kicks in and nothing interesting happens. Honestly since I'm still pretty early in I'm thinking about restarting on Lunatic after completing the entry for chapter 9 and continuing on that file from then on. What do you think about that? Does Lunatic Revelation wind up getting really really crazy or something? I'm thinking it's the only way to keep me engaged like I was with Conquest. Anyone have any other suggestions?

Without a pairup bot to shore up his shoddy speed, Xander's going to have some problems. Honestly it comes heavily down to luck. Rhoma's not going to take too many hits, but Xander's hit rate is pretty shoddy and Ryoma's quite strong himself so Xander won't be able to tank him for too long. But Xander he does have access to lances which might be decisive if that's allowed, since it would cripple Ryoma's ability to dodge Xander's heavy-damage blows. But it sounds like you're saying they don't get any weapons they don't come with. I'm assuming if everything but their legendary weapons are banned then it's an assumed identical weapon rank in swords then so that the rules don't unfairly advantage Ryoma by letting him use the benefits of only having access to one weapon (S rank weapon bonuses).

Cecilia isn't that bad, maybe you just got level ups heavily distributed to the upper levels? She's not stellar though, which is a shame because she has great skills.

Am I correct in my impression that none of the existing characters are mounted units that use bows? Jugdral has no representation yet so no Midir or Lester or such, none of the nomads from 6-7 seem to have been introduced, and since it looks like this game uses base classes and doesn't assume any radical change upon promotion, that discounts 3DS game bow knights as well. Am I wrong? Did I miss one somewhere, or is it indeed currently impossible to pull a mounted archer hero?

I'm pretty sure everyone's going to have a purple swish special attack at some point, I mean why give them special attack portraits if they don't plan on it?

Azama's pretty great. Really durable for a healer and he can heal himself with his heal, along with having a +10 to his healing every other turn or after he attacks.

No. Personal code, I never buy consumable microtransactions. And when a game offers a premium currency bundle more expensive than a full console game, I don't even play it, though I've made an exception to that here.

That's not what the stamina system is for. If it were, then they wouldn't let you bypass it with microtransactions. This is not a benevolent feature implemented for the benefit of the player, it's to milk money out of the people who really want to keep using their most powerful characters for longer than a quarter of an hour. It's not meant to protect people with poor self control, it's meant to exploit them.

Honestly what annoys me about the whole stamina thing and the pay-to-replenish system is that I have a deep, visceral hatred for the concept of consumable microtransactions to begin with. Spending real money on things that have a permanent effect? Sure, go ahead. But by charging for consumables and then making those consumables near essential to enjoying the game properly, they have essentially all but created a continuous fee to play their game, which I think is tantamount to proclaiming that your game is worth infinite money. I personally believe no publisher has any business demanding continuous payment to enjoy their game unless that game requires a continuous cash flow to maintain and that required cash flow is because of a feature that actually makes the game exceptional or something that can't be gotten from a game with a flat development cost. A prime example of such an exception would be MMOs that allow you to enjoy simultaneous multiplayer with thousands of people, or, back in the day, video arcade cabinets, which at the time had vastly superior graphics and processing to their home console counterparts. I don't think any iphone game has any business charging that kind of money. They're just unilaterally not good enough.

Well yeah, but difficulty already balances experience game like it does everywhere else.

Personally I don't understand why harder missions take more stamina in the first place. What's the point? I suppose it results in harder maps having higher stakes, but that should just be for final missions in each chapter, otherwise you basically can't use your high-level units you worked so hard to train for longer than a few minutes without it being a cakewalk.

Yes. Battles are so quick and later maps are so stamina intensive that you can expend four hours of stamina in ten minutes. I'd agree with you here if they didn't give you the option of paying to refill it and if the later maps weren't so insanely expensive. It turns a "letting people with jobs stay competitive" mechanic into another case of the game being pay to win. Circumventing the stamina system costs four dollars an hour, even more if you do the higher-level lunatic missions. It's absurd.

Basically she has a zone of control, to use the strategy game term. You can move on to those spaces just fine, but then you lose all of your movement.

I'm a bit concerned about our chances of seeing non-dragon shapeshifters in the game. They don't have any weapon type set out for them. Given that the dragonstone users use a category called "breath" and the Falchion uses that category to define its effectiveness against dragons, it's unlikely beasts and birds would use that weapon type. Are they just going to add in a new one for beasts and birds later? I mean it would be weird if we eventually got every character in the game except those, especially considering how popular some of them are. Are "claws" going to be added as a new weapon type in a later update when the game gets to them? Or do you think what we see is what we get when it comes to weapon types?

Looks like I just got a really good one. 4* Azama at least is definitely worth a slot, he heals 7 damage one turn, 17 damage the other, alternating, and he heals himself too when he does this. He also has quite high defense and an attack called pain that inflicts a fixed 10 post-battle damage in case you need some extra muscle or want to train up weaker units.

That would definitely help, but I personally think this game has no business having a stamina system at all. It seems like a simultaneous cash grab and attempt to pad the game out.

Ah, see, I have Azama, who has a one turn cooldown special that makes him heal 10 more, and he heals himself, so I've found he's always been useful.

Yeah, but thanks to the stamina system it's nearly impossible to play this game as anything more than a coffee break game without eventually paying far more than the cost of Fates to play it for any significant extended period of time. You can exhaust your four hours of stamina in about ten minutes, and paying for refills will cost you about four dollars an hour if you play the 12-13 range stamina levels.

The fact that it costs less to buy Anna in Fates than it does to buy a single character in this mobile game is definitely worthy of several thousand raised eyebrows.

Based on my experience with the game so far, you want a good variety of movement types (at least one cavalry and at least one flying) and a few movement-based support skills like pivot and swap. That will help your team move more freely and not get caught up due to the limited movement range in this game. You also want full weapon triangle coverage, and that includes a mage with a raven tome for effective damage against colorless units. And you definitely want a healer.

Oh I know, it's just that at times it felt like they were writing for kids, so when Zacharias came up after a couple rounds of the exact same plot happening in each world I was in a mood to say "the masked man's totally Zacharias and they're just too thick to recognize him".

Yeah, but the game's excuse plot and ham-fisted attempts at drama didn't exactly fill me with confidence that it wouldn't do something that silly.

I've got a team of four stars, a Marth, a Subaki, a Cecilia and an Azama.