MuteMousou
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Posts posted by MuteMousou
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12 hours ago, Shaky Jones said:
I don't think I'd call the design wonky, aside from chapter 3 and some of 2, but it's definitely not as well crafted as some other ones. I mainly appreciate that the base design of the game overall allows you to do so much even at really high difficulties.
What I mean is that I think leaving warp the same as in FE3 creates sort of a weird balance, especially considering that this mechanic was nerfed pretty heavily in both fe3 book 2 and the 2 other Kaga games after it. The fact that they changed a lot of other things, such as weapon rank, forge, and so on, to match how they are in Radiant Dawn, but left warp as something you get for free in chapter 3, with infinite range and no mechanical limitations, is kind of weird, especially considering warp was also nerfed in the Gaiden remake even though that is generally a more faithful remake than either of the Archanea ones. But yeah, I don't really disagree with what you said or anything, just kind of clarifying what I meant.
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12 minutes ago, Shaky Jones said:
I agree. Hard 5 is very unique. There's no other game that takes quite the same approach. It's difficulty also curves quite drastically. It's known for it's brutal early game, but that doesn't make it the hardest game overall. I can only compare them to how much I struggle with other FE's at. And then H5 has the infinite range warp staffs, or General Sedgar/Wolf that can destroy the challenge of the game if trained enough. It stands out. I think its difficulty is rather flexible, and your ability to properly utilize the gold, units, effective weaponry, and general player phase strats massively affect how hard the game is, whereas something like conquest lunatic or New Mystery lunatic is just consistently difficult for the most part.
Part of that I feel like is just wonky design because I think they just left things a certain way because that's how fe3/fe1 did it. I do think fe12 and conquest do difficulty better, though.
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I think I've only played H1? I would compare it to a relatively less difficult RD Hard? Otherwise Idk, has anyone ever even played all of the difficulties to compare all of them? lol
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23 hours ago, TheSandsOfFate420 said:
Alright, so I own a copy of FE Conquest. and I am almost done with it. I thought to myself while doing a chapter, is there anyone that has completed a FE game to it's max constent (DLC, Supports, Stats, units so I have to pick shura, also I will not max out movement, because there isn't enough boots in the game for that and gold). I want to do this for FE Fates, but I stumbled upon a roadblock. I would have to clear every single support conversation in FE Fates. Since I can buy the path Hoshido, I have to max supports for both Nohr and Hoshido. I first want to know in the comments if anyone has ever 100% a Fire emblem game and any exploits, or suggestions to help me complete my goal.
No FE game defines what 100% is so it is completely subjective what this could mean. There are many other games that have a completion meter that define objectively what 100% is in those games. As far as FE, 100% could mean getting every single item, support, character, and so on, but there is nothing to tell you that this is any more 100% than just getting every character or something. I think the closest thing to 100%ing an FE game that the game actually defines for you is full recruitment, as every game shows how many characters are alive at the end. Also, full recruitment is generally the most interesting thing for a "100%" FE speedrun category as sitting around and getting every item does not sound very interesting, though I suppose also that recruiting every character in some FE games is also pretty boring ( especially 3H lmao). Also you can't really carry over proof that you got all of x in multiple playthroughs because in many cases it is impossible to get everything in one playthrough.
Anyway, didn't mean to say you can't do what you're doing but what I mean is that given the game not defining it for you, you can sort of do what you want to define what "100%" is to get around whatever limitations the games have. -
On 11/13/2021 at 11:21 PM, Jotari said:
Not super relevant, but I just want to throw out there that Galzus isnt that great a person. He has no issue working with the Loptyrians at all. It's only when he comes face to face with the prospectively fighting his estranged daughter (whom he abandoned) does he swap sides. They guy is possibly the most mercenary mercenary we've had in the series, at leastnon the playable side of things.
I don't necessarily believe that being a "good person" is something that can exist in a lot of senses with what you're referring, what I think with writing these kinds of stories is that the point is to show you that people often do things such as joining the loptyrians or whatever because of something out of their control or because it seemed like it was the best choice at the time, which if you look at real world history this is pretty close to why people might have been on the |wrong side" at times, so I think if we want to get the intention of the story we kind of have to look past what we could see as "morally wrong" at face value to understand why someone did something. So if there are some at least somewhat morally objectionable people joining the player's party, then I think this perfectly aligns with what war stories should be about.
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I think it would be okay if they did it right but thematically, allowing him to be recruited just seems kind of overkill since you already recruit Saias, an enemy commander, and Galzus, a really strong enemy mercenary, in the same game within 2 chapters of the Reinhardt chapter. It just seems kind of dumb if you just recruit all the enemies to your side and never deal with the thematic element of war stories of characters who are against the protagonist but not terrible people having to be killed sometimes.
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Unless you're using Eirika heavily I wouldn't suggest using it on her, it's probably better to just use it on Neimi or Vanessa. It overall isn't a huge deal though so I wouldn't overthink the possibility of "using it wrong."
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1 hour ago, Whisky said:
For that definition, well, to each their own I guess, people can have whatever preferences they want, but I think it’s a shame people would limit their experience like that. I think for some people, it’s their own play style and mindset that makes the idea of ‘permadeath’ seem more intimidating than it really is.
Tbf the newer games are poorly designed around permadeath so I can see not liking it, I think it would be pretty alright to do conquest hard or lunatic on casual because you lose a lot if just one character dies.
1 hour ago, Whisky said:Ironically I think people who are put off by the idea of ‘permadeath’ aren’t playing casually enough and are instead stressing themselves out about things that don’t even matter that much. I wonder if people who are scared of ‘permadeath’ also reset when missing a village or chest? From what I’ve seen, I think some people play FE games with sort of a completionist mindset of wanting to get everything and keep everyone alive, to the point of stressing out over it, not realizing that the games become easier and less stressful if you just play through them more casually without trying to be perfect.
People can play how they want, but yeah if you're not having fun with something there still is a possibility it has something to do with how you're playing it. The game gives you the option to not do certain things so you don't have to do them, I get annoyed sometimes with being seen sometimes as "doing things wrong" for not experiencing every single thing in the video game. The common meta for FE imo is just kind of weird compared to other series I play, people don't seem to feel as compelled to do literally everything in Dark Souls or Shin Megami Tensei in my (anecdotal) experience
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On 11/6/2021 at 11:35 PM, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:
Isn't that true of any game in the series, though? Like, someone could totally go Path of Radiance -> Radiant Dawn -> Three Houses, if they're just not into handheld systems. Or Sacred Stones -> Echoes -> Three Houses, if they have a thing for killing monsters. Or just FE7 right onward, if they're leery of emulation.
Idk people are very arbitrary in what they like sometimes.
This is only tangential to what you were talking about but idk it feels relevant and I wanted to say it anyway even if it's not specifically a response to anyone.
One thing I think is a problem for this series in general is both because there are 16 games, which is even more than the current number of single player FF games, and also the series is not split into spinoffs such as the Megami Tensei/Persona and Final Fantasy series, people will often group the entire FE series as a whole and judge what is appropriate based on that whereas in Megaten you are given pretty clear divisions on what each part of the series is and people can more easily recommend based on that. In FE we're kind of left with just a big group of games with no actual definitive division between them, which as far as I see it causes us to sometimes view the series as a whole as one thing that certain games are when still a lot of games are not that, since it's kind of hard to subgroup and judge what certain people will like due to them not being in a sub series or spinoff or something.
It does make sense for certain games to be generally better to start with, but I still think that games such as fe6, fe3, or fe11 can be overlooked as being one of these. Persona and Shin Megami Tensei might be very similar in a lot of aspects but there are also certain other aspects between them that will divide who will like each part of the series more, and is fine and also an easy way to recommend things to other people. A lot of the time I see people suggest that a person's first Megaten game can be SMT nocturne or Digital Devil Saga or something even though those are often seen as "difficult" games, which I haven't seem many people that seem to disagree with them being a possible starting point, and I haven't seen many people saying that you have to start with only persona 3-5 or something. Still, I do think you can start with any game and you should judge what people like based on who they are instead of only on the meta of what other people tell you is a good game to start with. -
15 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:
Tell that to someone who can't read Japanese.
What they intended the game to be doesn't have anything to do with who can read what, what I mean is that I think people leave out the manual as something relevant to a game from that time when they discuss the game not telling you things, and also a lot of people have the context of the (bad) original translation which doesn't properly get across a lot of the things the Japanese script says. Sure, you can criticize the game for not specifically appealing to you if you can't read Japanese, but that isn't the fault of the game design. Advent, someone from the fe5 hacking community, is currently working on translating the manual anyway.
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5 minutes ago, AnonymousSpeed said:
You know, that reminds me. You can actually get the true ending in your first playthrough of FE6, whereas you have to unlock and beat Hector mode to get the true ending of FE7. People have mentioned downloading save files before but I think we've already discussed that, and really, I just thought it was interesting to mention.
I already mentioned this before but I do think that games don't have to offer everything to you on the first playthrough, and that the true ending can be seen as a reward for repeated playthroughs as a player gets better. In the FE series, it's normal to have only 1 ending because all of them except 2 do that so it makes the multiple ending ones seem weird in comparison, but I think if there were more games in the series with multiple endings then people wouldn't cite this as an issue nearly as much.
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6 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:
Mario Brothers and Fire Emblem don't even compare. They're completely different games.
I don't really see what them being similar or not has to do with the point I was trying to make.
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7 hours ago, Samz707 said:
I highly doubt Thracia should be someone's first game from what I hear and just because in theory, every game could be someone's first game, that doesn't it mean it should. (I literally quit the series for a while because I assumed they were all like Awakening due to me only hearing praise for it at the time, same with a friend who's first experiences around the same time were Awakening and Birthright and hated them for near enough the same reasons.)
Every game in the series was made so that it can be your first game in the series. The biggest thing with fe5 is that you could potentially not understand some story things but honestly it can pretty much stand as a separate thing from fe4 for the most part, but I would still recommended fe4 first just for story context even though it's a worse game in every way. There is also a manual for fe5 that explains pretty specifically many basics of the game such as moving your unit, they definitely intended for the game to be playable to new players. Not to mention that many of the things that I often hear complaints of never being explained in the game are also explained in the manual, (the Shaya patch also contributed to this with bad translations in parts) I feel like people forget that in the 90s and 2000s, game manuals existed and people actually read them. But regardless I still think fe5 would be an easier first entry than conquest, but you can still do either as your first if you want, it wouldn't be that insane really, since I think the main reason people have issues with those games is just because they're different from other FEs, which would not matter to someone who hasn't played FE before.
7 hours ago, Samz707 said:For FE6 in particular, you can not only lock yourself out of the true ending by whoever was carrying a Legendary weapon dying but the throne bosses are so stupidly strong that there's a reason Critger is a meme, if the player kills/has Rutger die at any point, they are pretty much just relying on RNG to defeat any bosses.
I can see that mattering mostly only for 8x which is a bad map anyway and is still bad like that even if you have rutger who always faces crit rates from the boss there (unless you grind supports i guess). But I think the true ending thing makes sense with what the game was going for, since it's designed around permadeath and based around the fe3 ending basically. So essentially it's rewarding you for being better at what the game doesn't require you to do to finish it, which is cool imo. I also think it could be really rewarding for first time players to have more deaths in the first playthrough, then get more content and enjoyment out of playing the game again and being better at it. Regardless, the final 3 maps are kind of bad barring the first one, I don't think you're missing a whole lot if you don't play them and you can just play the game again if you really want to see them.
7 hours ago, Samz707 said:Meanwhile, in say, Awakening, the game never I think actually explains that Mountains have a drastic movement penalty and this is your first encounter with them, on a map filled with ranged flying enemies that can ignore it, so losing a valuable unit, crippling you for the rest of the game since you also lose their child unit due to how Awakening handles late-game recruitment, (Not to mention ,your next healer, Not-Lucius, is literally near the end of the pre-time skip for my example of Lissa.) is a massive penalty for the rest of the game that doesn't feel like the player's fault, same with Ambush Spawns. (The game literally gives you the tutorial page on Ambush Spawns after the first ambush spawn has already happened, which for a Young Samz new to FE, was after one spawned, killed Chrom and forced a reset.)
Afaik the enemy phase reinforcements don't exist on normal, so that probably won't be an issue for new players. Regardless I generally wouldn't recommend Awakening to new players over any of the other 3DS and newer games since it's the worst one out of all of them. The effective strategies in it are so incredibly braindead that it kind of ruins your playstyle for other games in the series also.
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3 hours ago, Jotari said:
I'd say the opposite. Radiant Dawn is one of the few games where you have a used for almost every member of your army at some point. Half the units in the game probably aren't Tower Worthy, but they almost all of them contribute something at some point in the game due to it's army swapping feature.
Yeah I'd agree that most of them can be useful at some point but not very many can be useful in endgame. I think if there was more unit differentiation (stat averages matter less in this game than in any other because of how BEXP works) and higher caps in tier 3 it would allow a lot more diverse teams in the tower but of course if that were the case it would make characters like Caineghis and Giffca not as good.
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I think in general there's a lot of characters in RD who just won't have many chance to do a lot. It's just kind of the nature of the game, but I think ilyana does offer a lot of help in 1-3 and 1-4 at least, so that's definitely pretty good compared to a lot of RD characters but also mages in this game in general are just bad later on because of their terrible caps in basically everything, limited move, enemies have 9 million res, and tomes just generally having really ass might. I get the complaints but also RD in general is just an incomplete game so I think this criticism goes to a lot of things in it.
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On 10/12/2021 at 7:39 PM, Clear World said:
Nope. It is definitely in line with what you were talking about because if the game is designed to make players be fine with breaking weapons, but then also base additional gameplay behind not breaking certain weapons, there is a conflict of interest.
The main game mechanic of weapons being breakable versus that being tied to a completely separate mechanic of that affecting an ending of the game are entirely different things. We were talking about weapons breaking in normal gameplay and how that relates to player expectations then you brought up this one thing that does not matter hardly at all in most contexts in which you are talking about the general FE mechanic of weapons being able to break, this is like saying that "characters being able to die and then you lose their items is dumb" is an argument against the permadeath mechanic rather than realizing that this is actually a criticism of the fact that the game decided against letting you keep items of dead characters.
On 10/12/2021 at 7:39 PM, Clear World said:Never say this was an exclusive issue for FE6.
You entered the thread stating that you wouldn't recommend fe6 to new players for reasons that are related to what this was talking about, and you specifically mentioned FE6 literally in the paragraph before you stated the thing I responded to here.
On 10/12/2021 at 7:39 PM, Clear World said:Except, it can get a lot harder if the unit(s) the player are losing are the one they have been pouring exp & resources towards. Getting a massively weaker unit than the player lost would easily be consider a set-back for most. Lose too many and the player digs themselves in a hole they might not be able to recover from.
That's the entire point is that you lose things when characters die. Like if you're going to make a specific argument about how the game doesn't design around it with what characters it gives you, then that would make sense to use to argue as the game being too difficult for what it tried to do, but if you just explain that "this thing can happen in the game," that doesn't tell me much about how feasible that actually is, so I'm not really sure what your point is. For example, if I said "you can lose all your lives in mario brothers and have to restart a world so the game is too hard," that doesn't really tell me about how often or easily this can actually happen, or how much this actually sets the player back.
On 10/12/2021 at 7:39 PM, Clear World said:You clearly seem to want to ignore the actual point: Making mistakes & losing units or weapons can have long term effects & also have a delay negative impact on the player. Instead of just letting them make the mistake and hope they figure, it would be better to give them the information on what they can be doing so that when they do fail, they have an actual baseline in what they could've done to make a better decision. It's easy to overlook and/or to not be able to pinpoint exactly what were all the wrong choices made that cause the bad result when it could've been coming from multiple directions at different time, and this all assumes the player was even aware of most of the things that were affecting the outcome. You can't really learn about a thing when you don't know that thing exist.
What is the "actual point"?
I don't even know what you are arguing against because I never claimed that the game shouldn't inform the player on how the game works, I think you are taking "I think the game is better if it informs the player in certain ways" for "the game should not inform the player at all," if the game cannot inform the player of what is happening through gameplay then that is the game's fault, it doesn't have to wall of text explain everything to you what's going on for you to understand, because it is a video game and not a book. -
On 10/14/2021 at 6:19 PM, Samz707 said:
Yeah but players need a bit of a safety net. (I struggled with Awakening as my first game, because Lissa has the durability of wet tissue paper and the game loves fliers with 2 range weapons as well as Terrain that you may not realize is impassable and accidently trap your healer in range of them.)
I'm not entirely sure what your overall point in saying this is. The thing with popular anything in general is that people may never know if x game in a series would be one they actually like because everyone on the internet is only ever recommending the same game in a series that has 16 games, when pretty much all of them could reasonably be played as your first in the series.
On 10/14/2021 at 6:19 PM, Samz707 said:As for the Hector situation...We literally know practically nothing about him from FE6 before he dies, almost all of Hector's character is from 7, he's mostly just "Mandatory Dad who dies" in 6, his most distinctive character trait in 6 is that he's allowed to bleed in a mostly bloodless series.
I think in general prequels pretty much always will develop certain characters more than the parent story did. Hector is Lilina's dad, one of the most important characters in the game, as well as a friend of Eliwood, the protagonist's father. Prequels in general do not focus on characters who played a huge role in the parent story, it's not like you really know very much about Obi-Wan in Star Wars episode IV, or about the protagonist of Halo Reach in the previous games. Even if you could experience Reach as your first in the Halo series, you wouldn't really understand the context of why the story matters in relation to the rest of the world if you did so.
On 10/14/2021 at 6:19 PM, Samz707 said:As for Elibe, while it has been a while, even if we remove supports entirely, I swear FE7 fleshes out Elibe more than 6 does, with more of the narration in the pre-chapter map screens talking about the Continent than 6 does. ( I at least remember being disapointed than 6 seemed to have alot less to say about Elibe.)
I'm not necessarily saying it's about how much you know about the continent, it's about the fact that you have the context in which the story takes place at all. The entire idea of a prequel in most cases is that it builds upon something that you would understand more why it matters if you experienced the parent story first. If you know Eliwood as Roy's dad at the beginning rather than just being some dude then that on its own already gives you far more reason to have some kind of emotional attachment to the story.
On 10/14/2021 at 6:19 PM, Samz707 said:And if the player gets the wrong idea of what's expected of them, it can be frustrating, especially since Perma-Death and the other more punishing elements of FE.
With how I see it, people can be frustrated with anything no matter what you do, the idea that potentially bad things can happen to a new player should not be a reason to not recommend the game to them, there can be consequences for anything in any game and the player will have to come to terms with them eventually anyway. It's all a matter of what people might want.
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On 10/14/2021 at 6:29 PM, Shadow Mir said:
The problem is, Eliwood and Hector's appearances in this game only amount to bit parts, meaning that you'd need to play Blazing Blade to know anything about them.
I don't understand why that matters, Darth Vader's backstory is also not explained in the original star wars trilogy but this is just a random detail and doesn't directly relate to if the creators wanted you to experience the original trilogy or the prequel trilogy first.
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I know that Ilios vs Olwen was a meme so I just had the idea of comparing Olwen to base F mage knight and base Miranda to see the difference, because at a glance olwen's stats don't seem that different from shanam's who is literally just 1 luck away from base M swordmaster stats.
So Olwen's base stats are
24 HP
5 STR
10 MAG
8 SKL
10 SPD
5 LCK
4 DEF
5 CON
base female mage knight
18 HP
3 STR
4 MAG
4 SKL
5 SPD
3 DEF
4 CONthe difference between Olwen and F mage knight is 6 hp 6 magic 2 str 4 skl 5 spd 1 def 1 con
Now, let's look at the funnier comparison. Miranda is widely regarded as the worst character or at least one of the worst characters in FE5, so I think this should put into perspective what this means
Miranda base:
19 HP
0 STR
7 MAG
2 SKL
8 SPD
7 LCK
1 DEF
3 CONat base Olwen only has 5 hp, 3 str, 3 magic, 6 skl, 2 speed, 4 defense over Miranda
However, keep in mind Olwen is promoted, Mage knight gives 3 STR, 2 MAG, 3 SKL, 1 SPD, 3 DEF and 1 CON
so, without the promo bonuses, the only difference between Olwen and Miranda is 1 MAG, 3 SKL, 1 SPD, 1 DEF, 5 HP
also keep in mind that base Miranda has 2 more luck than base Olwen
Average stats for Miranda if you promote her at 10 are 22 HP, 3 STR, 12 MAG, 7 SKL, 12 SPD, 8 LCK, 4 DEF, 4 CON
This doesn't take into account you could just use scrolls on miranda and increase her stat gains, but the fact that she on average is still better at the earliest promotion than Olwen in every stat except STR and HP and DEF without any scrolls is pretty funny.
You could also say that Miranda's base stats are pretty alright and she also joins later so they're higher, but keep in mind that the only difference between base Miranda and base Asbel, who joins far before either Olwen or Miranda, is that Miranda has 3 MAG, 1 SPD, 2 LCK, and 1 DEF over base Asbel. Miranda has 3 less hp and 1 less skill than base Asbel also.
So, the conclusion here should be pretty evident. Either Olwen is really terrible or Miranda is actually better than we thought she was, or maybe both. Of course, Miranda does join later, meaning her having equal stats to Olwen means less, but having 12 magic and 12 speed, in say, chapter 17B or 18 would let Miranda one round KO almost every generic enemy in those chapters aside from a few using a wind tome (which she can also use before promotion!) I know that Olwen has the direthunder and this pairs well with vantage, but the only utility I feel like this meaningfully offers to Olwen is that she can use it to capture enemies, possibly more effectively than anyone else in the game (but mostly only in outdoor sections of course). Otherwise, a brave tome does not offer much worth that can still be done by any other mage with a wind tome or something worse like a thunder or fire tome maybe, almost everything is going to die in one round of combat from every mage in this game provided they can double and have a decent tome (of course a lot of bosses can't be by Salem or Sara maybe, but Asbel can ORKO every enemy in the game except 3 or so with the grafcalibur reliably). Ilios can also use the brave sword, master sword (which he joins with) or king sword to capture, and he has much great defenses than Olwen while only having 1 less base magic. So if Olwen's base stats are hardly better than who is largely considered the worst character in the game and the only unique thing she has is a tome that really doesn't offer much in terms of anything that almost every other mage can't already do, then what is the point of ever using her over Ilios? -
3 hours ago, GonzoMD1993 said:
As I understood it, the point of the thread was to discuss whether you should play FE6 before FE7 or the other way around, not if you should play FE6 or FE7 as your first FE game ever. At the very least, I've been posting under that assumption.
It can be either depending on who we are talking about. Sort of the main idea is that I think
1. FE6 makes more sense to play first story-wise because FE7 was made after FE6 and most likely intended as a supplement to it.
2. I think you can start with either FE6 or FE7 whether you are new or a returning player, but that the English community in general overlooks FE6 as a potential starter for either group, which I disagree with. -
Quote
Note how much of this introductory scene from FE4 is them having the characters explain mechanics of the games in-universe, AKA a verbal tutorial teaching things like:
- Characters can die in gameplay
- You should visit villages before they are destroyed
- Armored Knights have less mobility than Cavaliers
- You should leave someone to defend the castle to prevent losing.
and there are more of these throughout the chapter. Looking at the manuals that come with it (admittedly my Japanese is a little shaky) you see things like a list of 2-4 things that every single button does (this they felt was important enough to also include on a seperate card so you don't even need to open the manual to find it), a section talking about the starting game menus, what the color of units mean, how to get a game over, how healing works, etc., it has over 40 pages of game specific information there for you to read, ignoring all the pages with story/character fluff.
As for the "show don't tell" style tutorials, they don't really appear again...
I think we are talking about different things as far as what "show don't tell" means.
I consider story integration of gameplay explanations to be far different than magical disembodied text that breaks the 4th wall, and generally prefer the former. I also think the tutorial houses in the early games are a good way of incorporating things because people will probably visit them and returning players won't need to see them. As for actual "show versus tell," fe3 and fe4 do not really tell you how to directly approach anything at all at any point, they kind of just tell you things that would otherwise be impossible to know if you want to know them but you're otherwise kind of just expected to be fine, which I think is good, as the first chapters of the SFC games are not difficult at all. In particular fe4 prologue shows you the importance of villages, terrain, castles, etc, as well as what you can expect from the game because your only option from the beginning is to just throw sigurd at the enemies, which goes well, so the player is probably going to realize how that will work well in the future. There are a lot of good examples here of showing you how the game works without verbally telling you, in my opinion.
9 hours ago, Eltosian Kadath said:In action games, buttons have a general use, with only special instances of context specific use. In SRPGs buttons always have a context specific use. Pressing the A button in an action game makes your character do something, in an SRPG it takes multiple presses in specific places, with different additional inputs in-between to get any of your characters to do anything. Sure there will be things that take multiple specific inputs in an action game as well, but those aren't necessary at the beginning and just mashing each of the buttons is enough to get an idea of where to start. Figuring out how to start in an SRPG is a lot less intuitive, and the game often has to accounts for that in tutorials. Action games also end up investing a larger part of their challenge into timing, and button execution, SRPGs on the other hand focus all of their challenge on understanding the situation of the map, and how you can best influence it. Put simply that isn't something you can just stumble through or overcome with good reflexes, you have to learn how to play SRPGs, whether that is through tutorials, research, watching, or being taught. Sure its easy for you to decipher now, but you didn't always know how to play, and there are players that don't now, and even if you do understand these games, the more you learn about them the better you will be at them.
I do agree that different games will require different kinds of tutorialization, but I just don't really see how it is going to be that insanely different between action games and non action games. There are plenty of times you can not be sure what to do in an action game, if you consider games like the Tales games or Star Ocean to be action games, these are not easy at all to understand as a newcomer, and I would maybe say they require more understanding to get started than any FE game. Sure, you can just mash buttons at enemies and attack them, but this will not be very effective usually, and you need to understand the other mechanics of the game before you can have any idea of what to do to actually get anywhere.
On the other hand, I still don't see how it is that hard to just press buttons in a turn based game and figure out what is going on, the commands are literally labeled according to what they will do, "attack" "rescue" "defend," and so on. In any case I think you could almost argue it's easier to figure out what to do with them than action games sometimes. The deep mechanics that the player needs to work to understand exist in strategy games just like they exist in action games, sure, you could say it takes more effort usually to understand the more complicated parts of an SRPG, (there are still dumb things like this in dark souls such as different enemy resistances, i-frames, weapon requirement scaling, etc) but I don't think this is really to a degree to where it drastically changes what you can expect the player can figure out to the point that you have to completely change your philosophy on how you convey things to them. -
20 minutes ago, Eltosian Kadath said:
To quote one of the developers of the game
"People are used to action games and shooting games, and in those all you have to do is press the A button and the B button and you’ll soon understand how to play.
But for SRPGs, you’ve got to know the rules before you start."
Egoraptor even covered scenarios like this early on when talking about how you need to be taught a lot of traditional games, like Solitaire (which is ironically played more in digital formats than physical ones nowadays...)
Gaiden (and Echoes by extension) tried something like that with part 2, and people hate those boat maps even more than Lyn mode. The designers learned a valuable lesson about how well those "show don't tell" tutorials work in SRPGs with that one. Honestly, the only people that like those maps (myself included) are those that recognize they are tutorials, and even then only for game design reasons.
I don't quite get your point about the boat maps not working well or what this has to do with show versus tell, if the devs learned a lesson from that, I'm not sure what you mean because the 3 games after that also don't have a verbal tutorial.
I think that developer quote is kind of stupid considering action games aren't really that simple, knowing how to do one thing by pressing one button doesn't inform you of any of the mechanics of the game, I really question if that developer actually understood anything about how action games work. By the same logic, you could find out that pressing buttons in an SRPG causes certain things to happen and figure out the game that way, it's not like SRPGS are like in some undecipherable code that you need to bring up a key to even begin to understand what is going on. -
8 hours ago, Shadow Mir said:
The problem is, if a player loses a unit that they invested a lot of resources in, that would be a massive setback. Also, depending on when it happened, it might be too late to try to train up a replacement for said unit, and the scarcity of promotion items doesn't help. The result is that if it happens too many times, they might be unable to recover, and thus their run is doomed to end in failure.
Well, of course it can have bad consequences? I really need to put into perspective just how unnecessary most of the things given to you in every FE game are in order to complete the game, most players aren't going to be using like 80% of fe6 characters in a single playthrough, and you're probably not going to be using every durability of every weapon, staff, and consumable you get. Most players are going to end the game with like 200 or so items in their convoy that they never use. The scenario you're describing seems nearly impossible for any player to do outside of like, a literal 5 year old playing a video game for the first time, a boomer who has never played a game in their life, or just any random gamer who has no interest in seriously playing an SRPG. People will generally bother to try to understand the game if they have any interest in playing it.
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4 hours ago, KMT4ever said:
Sure, but a first-time player is liable to have those things happen more often than not. FE7's tutorial allows them to initially make mistakes in a comparatively consequence-free environment, while FE6 is closer to the equivalent of throwing them into the deep end to sink or swim. There are a lot of mechanics that aren't ever explained even in FE7, such as Constitution, the experience-level curve, or the 2RNG system. In the end I simply think it's better to start a new player off with something easy and let them increase the difficulty if they feel up to it.
I don't really think this is a fair comparison as fe6 is not that hard early on, you don't need to have an entire handhold consequence-free section for the player to understand that there are consequences for them making mistakes. Fe6 normal is not like, that hard, finishing an FE game in general definitely doesn't assume perfect play, as long as you make it to the end with the lord alive, you finished the game, you don't need to save every item and have every character survive to the end, the games were designed specifically around this, which is why people always note the phenomenon of FE games always tending to get easier as they go on, this is because you weren't generally expected to just have a group of ultra strong units survive to the end, you were more expected to just have some of them die along the way and continue with the game.
The Official "I don't watch anime" Thread
in Far from the Forest...
Posted
This discussion AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
I get how the definition of anime just being japanese animation is lame, but I blame that on the definition of the word deciding to just be "country + medium = thing" as if that really says anything about it at all, it's like if we made a specific word for German food instead of just calling it German food, implying that the word means literally anything other than the fact that it is just saying something came from somewhere. Animation being made in Japan doesn't make it special or anything, Japanese animation is just as diverse as animation is anywhere else on earth, so trying to genrify everthing just because it came from a certain place is, in my opinion, pretty stupid.
However, I don't think there is any way you can define "anime style," anime has a diverse range of styles, and nobody would ever say any cartoon from japan is not anime, yet for some reason not-japanese things have the debate as to whether they can be anime or not. Something like Kaiba does not fit the colloquial meaning of the word "anime," yet by definition it is anime. So, I think the word is both kind of meaningless in its definition and also that the word outside of its technical definition doesn't mean anything other than what non-Japanese people just "feel" like is anime, I've yet to see anyone define what "anime style" is, because trying to condense things from an entire country as if it's a genre is just nonsensical. Overall, I think we should just call everything cartoons, that would make more sense and involve less pointless semantic discussions