lenticular
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Posts posted by lenticular
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22 hours ago, Acacia Sgt said:
Personally, I've always felt that was always a thing, even if left unsaid. Healing magic can repair the body, but like, what are you going to do with an illness caused by, say, bacteria? Can't exactly kill them with healing magic, now does it?
Well, the Restore staff can cure poison, so I don't see it as much of a stretch to go from there to curing infections. Maybe it just purges the bacteria from the body? Or maybe it stimulated the immune system enough to let it fight off the infection itself? Or maybe it just temporarily removes the symptoms and you're still going to have to spend a week in bed afterwards recovering, but you can at least manage to get through the rest of the battle. It's never really clear.
And then there's also all of the stuff with the Galdr of Rebirth and the Feral One drug, which is a specific example, but does at least show some of the potential for healing magic.
22 hours ago, Acacia Sgt said:Like, there are Cleric-like Mirages, but their Class is the enemy-only Beast (likely since they only show up as enemies). Meanwhile, skills and abilities are learned via Carnages, as in, weapons. Tsubasa is the one who gets just about many of the Recovery category spells. Thus making her the Healer of the group. Though Kiria at least also learns some Recovery skills.
So you can say it's the Pegasus Knight who is the healing class, thanks to their Carnage available. Since, Touma who also uses lances, can't use the same ones and thus learns different skills from Tsuaba despite both using the same weapon type.
Yeah, that sort of thing is always complicated. When there's only a single individual of a given class, it's impossible to really say which of the abilities are from the class and which are from the individual. Does Pegasus Knight learn healing skills, or does Tsubasa? There's no real answer. So I guess that for a question like this, it's fine to just handwave it and go for whichever answer best fits what you want to do.
15 hours ago, Jotari said:I don't think Fire Emblem magic does break conservation of energy. Because durability exists meaning something in some form is being used up and eventually deplenishes (if that's a word, I think it's bit, but, bah). I guess there are some unbreakable tomes, but my brain is actually drawing a blank thinking of any other than Yune blessed tomes or Engage where durability does exist.
That is possible, but it also raises a whole lot of new questions. Mainly: how are tomes even made? If we're assuming that they are loaded with magical potential energy, then that energy has to have come from somewhere. And in the case of something like a Meteor tome that drops a giant flaming rock on people, that is a staggeringly enormous amount of energy. Who is even making these tomes to begin with? How? What is the energy source that they're using? And why are they not way, way more expensive than they are?
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29 minutes ago, Jotari said:
Hmm. An interesting loop hole, but I question if your Pegasus Knight could function in Japan. I don't remember the precise details of TMS's lore, but I'm pretty sure they only ever use their super natural powers in specific magical areas. Presumably they just don't have them in Japan as is and anything that happens there follows conventional laws of physics. So your Pegasus would break it's bones and fall apart on a cellular level right away, or, at best, be a regular horse with useless vestigial wings. If supernatural powers are presumed to work, then absolutely Curate and Japan, where I could use my healing skills to help thousands of critically injure people (though replenishing staves in Japan might be harder, so perhaps a Three Houses style healer with set charges would work better).
Three Houses healing does come with the downside of being confirmed in-lore (in a conversation with Manuela) to only really be good for trauma, battlefield medicine, emergency medicine and other similar situations, with regular medicine required for more long-term healing. So while it would still be miraculously useful in a real world situation, it would also be relatively limited. Possibly better to go with Shadows of Valentia magic, that also doesn't require staves, but doesn't (that I know of) have that lore restriction that Three Houses does. Yeah, it drains your health, but so long as you have a good supply of food on hand, you'll be fine. Eating two sausages is enough to cast Fortify 5 times. Sacrifice would also be a fun option, but the original rules disallowed Lord classes, alas. Or maybe the best healing option would be a Heron. If we're allowed Manaketes and Taguel, then Herons should be fine too, right? Blessing and Galdrar should be phenomenally useful, especially the Recovery Galdr which is completely useless in game. And you could fly. Sadly, the rules limit us to classes from the game that we're choosing, so if we want to be in Tokyo, then we're limited to TMS classes, which doesn't give us a whole lot of choices for healing. I don't remember TMS all that well, but I don't recall it having any dedicated healing classes unfortunately.
Though honestly, I think I'd be more inclined to go for black magic rather than white. Even pretty basic magic effects tend to violate fundamental laws of physics like conservation of energy, so there's a good chance you'd be able to set up perpetual motion machines, provide clean energy sources, etc. Although this does risk running into the Superman power plant problem, so might not be the best idea after all. But then, if you were the only person with magical healing powers, you'd have a similar situation, where you either become an amoral greedy bastard and get to charge everyone through the nose, or else you'd find yourself stretched far too thin trying to help everyone.
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4 hours ago, EricaofRenais said:
This interesting, I like LOTR and my mom loves it so I may have finally found an anime we can watch together. There was a "Lost Tales" about Rohan so this could use that as the source material. Rohan was always my favorite LOTR country, so this being about Rohan makes me interested.
I would assume that they're in a similar position to Rings of Power where they only have the rights to LotR and The Hobbit but not to Lost Tales or The Silmarilion, so they have to extrapolate from the stuff in LotR's appendices instead.
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11 hours ago, Randoman said:
I'm just really ticked off at the hypocrisy of this situation.
I'll largely just echo everything that SnowFire said, but I do want to add one more thing. Wikipedia can be, and often is, inconsistent, but that inconsistency isn't usually the result of hypocrisy. Rather, it's just the consequence of a very decentralised administrative structure without a single decision-maker. Instead, there are or have been hundreds of thousands of different editors over a period of over two decades. And while there definitely have been hypocrites (and all manner of other bad actors) among that number, the vast majority of Wikipedia editors are well-intentioned and doing the best that they can.
There absolutely are articles on Wikipedia that are worse than Marth's article in pretty much every way: worse writing, worse sourcing, less notable subject, everything. And yeah, it's definitely easy to look at those and see unfairness or hypocrisy, but I really don't think it's actually there. Instead, there are a few different possibilities:
- It might just be that nobody who has seen the article has thought to nominate it for deletion, and if it ever was nominated then it would be deleted too. There's a pretty low bar for creating new articles, and some articles that get created probably shouldn't be.
- If it has been nominated for deletion but kept, it might be that a different group of people were the ones discussing. Different people are going to have different opinions, different standards, and different ways of interpreting Wikipedia's rules. If you think of it less as "Wikipedia decided that..." and more as "these specific individual editors decided that..." then it can still be frustrating when there is inconsistency, but it doesn't seem malicious or hypocritical in the same way.
- Sometimes standards change over time. What was a reasonable article in 2001 might not be a reasonable article in 2024. And given how large and lumbering a beast Wikipedia is, change can happen slowly, and somewhat inconsistently.
So, overall, I don't think it's particularly productive to look to other articles and say "but if [bad article] gets to exist, why doesn't Marth?" Instead, it's like SnowFire says. If you're passionate about this, then you can try to hunt down the sources and commentary that would justify the article.
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Looking into it, Marth's article was discussed in Wikipedia's "articles for deletion" section back in February, with the consensus in that discussion being that there isn't really enough coverage of the character to warrant an independent article, and that any relevant content should be covered on the article for SDatBoL. Which, honestly, I think is probably fair. If you look at the latest version of Marth's article before it was redirected it seems to have a lot of padding and trivia. Stuff like "Marth's character designer is currently unknown" or "in 2013, Complex ranked him 36th among the 50 greatest soldiers in video games" is pure padding, and then there's a bunch of stuff about all the games that he's appeared in, which is fine for a dedicated gaming wiki, but kinda trivial for a general encyclopedia.
It has been a couple of years since I edited Wikipedia at anything above an "occasional typo fix" level, but going from memory, if people would like to see the article restored, your best bet is to hunt down a bunch of good sources for information about him. If you can find significant articles from prominent/reliable sources that discuss Marth in detail, talking about, eg, his character arc and characterisation in the story, the motivations about his creation, etc. then that would probably be enough to warrant revisiting the discusion and potentially restoring the article. But short of that, I don't think it's likely.
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On 6/5/2024 at 11:17 PM, Original Alear said:
TBH I don't buy that most things are bad. Like, most restaurants I've been to have decent enough food, even if it doesn't excel. And there's a ceramics place in this city I've been to a couple times w/ many artists making their own pieces and most of the ones they put on exhibition this one time were good in some way. There are a bunch of other examples. I just think that even something that stands out as quality is overwhelmed in a vast ocean of quality.
It depends on what population you're selecting from. If I walk into a bookshop, most of the books there are probably at least decent. Maybe not to my tastes and interests, but not bad. But then consider that the books in the shop have all been chosen by the bookseller as the best ones that they think will sell. And then there are even more filters behind that. The booksellers can't choose to sell books that are long out of print because nobody liked them. And the selection of books that are published in the first place is higher quality than all the manuscripts that get sent to publishers by aspiring authors. And the manuscripts that people send to publishers are, on average, going to be better than the ones that people finish writing but then never do anything with them because they don't think they're any good. Which are better than books that people start but then abandon before they finish.
So if the question is "are most novels crap?" then the answer is a resounding "yes!" if you're looking at the level of "unfinished NaNoWriMo projects" and a resounding "no!" if you're looking at the level of "the bookseller's choice shelf at your favourite indie bookshop", and somewhat vaguer and more equivocal answers as you move through various filters between these two extremes.
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21 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:
Certainly when I look back on my own contributions, I know my own works of writing left far more of a positive impact on others than my trying to convince folks that [unit x] is better than [unit y].
For the record, some of your arguments that unit x is better than unit y have also had a positive influence on me, both in the sense of "that was a fun discussion" and "that has changed how I think about things".
19 hours ago, Nozomi Kasaki said:This is honestly the best post I have ever seen so far. Props to you Ienticular-san
Thank you. That's very kind of you to say.
19 hours ago, Nozomi Kasaki said:Meanwhile there are a few who I talked with who have an even extreme negative view of fanfics stating that they are a disgrace to literature for copying another professional writer's characters and settings and stuff like that.
I see this argument floated sometimes, and honestly, I think that it's dumb as a box of rocks. It is perfectly common for writers to use the characters and settings created by other writers, and many such works have been commercially successful and critically acclaimed. Just think for a moment baout how many different writers have written Bruce Wayne, Luke Skywalker, Jean Luc Picard, Lara Croft, Nancy Drew, Bart Simpson... and many, many others.
As an example, consider the film, The Dark Knight. When that came out, did anyone talk about how much of a lazy hack Christopher Nolan was for using characters that others had created, and how he was a disgrace to cinema, and how nobody but Bob Kane and Bill Finger should ever have written Batman stories? Obviously not. Instead, it was the highest grossing film of its year and won so many awards that they have their own Wikipedia page.
There is no inherent artistic difference between Nolan and a random fanfic writer. There is a definite legal difference, of course. Nolan has explicit permission from rights holders whereas fanfic authors are generally relying on fair use provisions and the likes. But I for one have no interest in letting a Warner Bros executive have the final say on what is and is not a valid display of artistic expression within our culture. And there is, on average, a significant difference in quality. But again, we're getting deep into dystopian territory if we're starting to demand that only "good" (whose definition of good?) art is allowed to be created or shared.
19 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:I don't recall ever reading one except in a context where, say, a youtube video was presenting passages from an outrageous one to me. There's also the Lindsay Ellis video series about the Omegaverse lawsuit. Hilarious, though I really wish I wasn't exposed to the definition of "knotting". That's not even kinky, it's just degenerate.
Omegaverse is... weird. And I always struggle figuring out exactly what I think about it. Because on the one hand, there is definitely that visceral "ewww, gross! I did not need to know that!" reaction to it. But on the other hand, if that's how other people get their jollies, then who am I to tell them not to? So long as they aren't actually hurting anyone, then they can have whatever weird interests and hobbies they want. Just so long as they keep it well away from me.
16 hours ago, vanguard333 said:Where I do think a problem rises are the rare cases where a fanfic author changes the names and tries to deny the fanfic origins so they can sell it as an original work. But the problem then is not fanfiction; the problem there is someone trying to pass off something derivative as something creative.
This sort of thing is pretty interesting, honestly. Because even highly derivative works are typically legal. If I wanted to write a story about a bunch of people in a medieval fantasy world fighting against a dark cult and their dragon god and then being helped out by their children who traveled back in time from a world where the dragon apocalypse had happened, then I totally could do that. I couldn't lift chunks of text directly from Awakening (copyright infringement) or call the main characters Chrom and Lucina (probably trademark infringement), and I definitely couldn't market it using the words "Fire Emblem" (or anything Emblem, as Kaga found out). But just the general story outline is fine. Highly derivative, of course, but on a firm legal standing. And even being derivative isn't necessarily a bad thing. There are, after all, no completely new stories. Every story is inspired by other stories that went before.
9 hours ago, Randoman said:It's not really my thing to write fanfic or read it these days (I did in the past very rarely), but if others want to do it, go for it...
...so long as it's safe for work and not done with the intention of degrading other characters and exalting others. Bad/inexperienced writing in and of itself is understandable enough, since not everyone can start off as writing experts.
I am curious what you have against NSFW fanfic? It isn't typically my thing, but I have no problem with it existing. So long as it's suitably labeled so that people who aren't interested can avoid it, of course. And I think there's a decent argument for avoiding adult content in fanfic based on works that are explicitly aimed at children (no BDSM Frozen or drug addiction Pokémon, for instance).
9 hours ago, Randoman said:Though personally, I think people should stick to original story ideas. You have so much more creative freedom that way, and you're not bound by the rules of any specific fictional universe. I find that being crazy and out there with your ideas (yet being grounded within your story universe's rules) is the most fun and enjoyable part of story writing and world building.
I think there is fun to be had both ways. Creating original characters and an original world is definitely a lot of fun, for sure. But I think there are also advantages to using pre-existing characters and setting. For one, I think that they're nice for especially short fiction. If I only have the time and energy to write a 2000 word short story, then it's nice to be able to dive straight into whatever I want the story to be about and not have to spend those limited words on establishing the characters. The other big one for me, frankly, is readership. Part of the fun of writing is having other people read what you wrote, and that's a whole lot easier with fanfic than original fiction. And yeah, to some extent there is feedback loop/self-fulfiling prophecy/network effect going on here. Maybe if fanfic was less prominent then there would be more people willing to read my amateur-hour original fic, but that's not the world that we live in.
8 hours ago, Imuabicus der Fertige said:If you don´t have the courage to show the thing that you made, then why bother with the thing that you copied?
What on Earth does courage have to do with anything? I write as a hobby because I enjoy it, not because it's a test of my bravery.
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Well, I both write and read fanfiction from time to time, so unsurprisingly, my thoughts on it are generally positive.
Is it plagiarism? No, definitely not. A key component of plagiarism is that you are trying to pass off someone else's work as your own and not giving credit. Fanfic is pretty much the opposite of that. Fanfic wears its inspiration on its sleeves and says "hey! look! this is the source I'm drawing my inspiration from!" It is, as a whole, a very intellectually honest medium.
But is it copyright (or trademark) infringement, though? I don't know. Probably not? I'm not an intellectual property lawyer. But based on my understanding of copyright law and what I've heard from people who actually are intellectual property lawyers, my belief is that it is probably legally fine in most cases.
But is it ethical? What if the author/copyright holder doesn't want fanfic of their work? Personally speaking, if the copyright holder is a corporation, then I don't care what they want. It's not my concern if fanfic marginally hurts the bottom line of Disney or Nintendo or the likes. However, if the original creator of the work is also the copyright holder (eg, most books or indie games) and they have stated that they don't like fanfic of their work, then I won't write or read anything in that fandom. No disrespect to anyone who chooses otherwise, but that's where I'm most comfortable.
But also, most creative types are fine with fanfic being written of their work. At least, from what I've seen. When creators do actually have an explicit policy or statement about fanfic, I see a lot more that give explicit permission than that ask (or demand) that nobody writes fanfic of their work. It's quite common to see creators request some sort of limitation on fanfic writers ("please show me!" "please don't show me!" "please explicitly credit me!" "please don't include anything that wouldn't be age-appropriate for the original work's target audience!") but relatively rare to see creators who have a blanket opposition to the whole concept.
Beyond that, a lot of professional authors either are or have been involved in fan fiction. The two obvious examples for me are Naomi Novik and EL James. Novik was heavily involved in setting up the Organisation for Transformative Works (which is the group behind the AO3 website, among other things). James wrote Twilight fanfic which she used as the basis for her Fifty Shades novels. But there are countless others out there as well.
But isn't most fanfic absolutely dreadful? Why yes. Yes it is. But that's Sturgeon's Law for you. 90% of everything is crap. And crap fanfic at least has the benefit that nobody is trying to charge you money for it, which you can't say about a lot of media. Furthermore, most people are going to be crap at pretty much anything when they first try it. Fanfic is just a more public space to be crap at something than when you first stumble your way through Wonderwall on your new guitar, for instance.
But what about all the sex!? Please won't someone think of the children!? And assorted other pearl clutching. I mean, this is daft, right? We all know it's daft. But just for completeness' sake: a. There is plenty of fanfic that doesn't include sex at all. b. Sex also features prominently in moveis, literature, games, and pretty much any other artistic or entertainment medium you care to name. c. Fanfic is more likely to explore female sexuality and queer sexuality than most other media, and I don't think it's a coincidence that it gets targeted for this reason.
My ultimate parting thought though, is this: adapting, changing and reworking stories has been an integral part of our culture for as long as our culture has existed. Have you ever tried to study Greek mythology, for instance, and discovered that it's all a big confusing mess where different myths seem to directly contradict each other? That's often because they do, because the stories were retold many times and they changed in the retelling.
Or consider just how many modern works are essentially adaptations of Shakespeare. And that a lot of Shakespeare's work was adaptations of classical stories. If it's OK for Shakespeare to take Pyramus and Thisbe and turn it into Romeo and Juliet, then for Sondheim et al to take Romeo and Juliet and turn it into West Side Story, why is it not then OK for a random fanfic writer to take West Side Story and turn it into something new? Obviously, an average fanfic writer is not going to be nearly as talented as Ovid, Shakespeare or Sondheim, but restricting the right to make art to people who make "good art" is an obviously horrendous idea.
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28 minutes ago, Integrity said:
fuck you're objectively slightly better at pool than i am. this sucks
Look. You have 166 perfect games on Steam and I only have 54. You have to give me something, man.
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On 5/29/2024 at 7:00 PM, Integrity said:
RACK AND SLAY (LUDOKULTUR, YESTERDAY)
Finished: 5/29/24. Playtime: 7.8 hours.
I have also now 100%ed this. My experiences were pretty similar, though a little less positive overall. I took 7.3 hours, and I ended up still having a few unlocks left when I unlocked the last achievement. I also felt as if the game was starting to wear out its welcome just a little bit at around about the time I was finishing it, but that's no bad thing. I was glad it finished when it did, but I didn't spend a long time before I was done wishing that I was finished. Which is pretty good pacing. Definitely worth the 5 quid price tag.
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2 hours ago, Jotari said:
It does bring up an interesting idea, what if dancing wasn't an exclusive ability? What if each game gave us five or six dancers? Of course, the balance would be hilariously thrown out the window if you could field six dancers at once, but, ignoring that and just focusing on the dancers themselves, if we had six dancers in competition with each other who could be simultaneously fielded, we probably would view the more like staff units and judge them more on their stats, like how well they can take a hit or how good their combat might be on promotion (even if you're probably never going to actually put them in combat), or additional skills they might have access to, resulting in them having more broad of a placement on a tier list. It's been a hot minute since I've looked at a tier list, but staff bots are not typically crowded around the same placement in a tier list, I think. Most people are probably going to place a the best staffer at the top, and the worst staffer nearing the mid bottom even though realistically, while Moulder is better than Natasha, the lead he has in actual practical utility on the battlefield is going to be pretty negligible.
We do have that. Sort of. In Three Houses. We only get to field one dancer, but we have a couple dozen choices for which dancer we want. And yeah, the general consensus is that some units do make better dancers than others (due to spell lists, personal abilities, support lists, stats, crest, etc.) but that these differences are marginal and almost totally irrelevant when it comes to choosing your dancer. Instead, the best choice is usually going to be "who aren't you using for anything else?"
At the same time, though, let's do a thought experiment. Someone makes a fan game, and they implement every dancer (singer, heron, etc.) in the series into this game. Right at the very start of the game, before you know anything else about it, you get a dialogue box asking you to pick your dancer. Who do you choose? Almost certainly not Tethys. Or the related thought experiment: you have to pick one game to play without using a dancer at all, which one do you choose if you want to see the smallest difficulty increase? Possibly Sacred Stones. (Forum consensus last year was that Sacred Stones and Awakening were the series low points for dancers.)
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that for utility units, the differences within a game tend to be relatively small whereas the differences between games are considerably larger. If we're ranking staffbots, the most important consideration is how good that game's staves are. If we're ranking thieves (for their utility), the most important consideration is whether the game has a lot of stealable items, unlockable chests, etc. Other factors aren't nothing, but they're secondary. Dancers would be similar. In the hypothetical six-dancer game, the important consideration is what the core dance mechanics of the game are. Do they get to refresh multiple units in a turn? Do they get special dance? Canter? What's the class's move stat? If we're assuming that all our dancers are in the same class, rather than having Radiant Dawn style design where their abilities are all different, then there probably wouldn't be that much to choose between them.
3 hours ago, Jotari said:(no, I'm not counting the sparkly item pick ups as an online feature)
(There is also the weird hide and seek minigame in the monastery in Three Houses. This counts even less than the sparkly item pick ups.)
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53 minutes ago, Jotari said:
To a slightly lesser extent, all of this also applies to staff bots as well. Staff bots usually just have more competition than dancers and what they do can be replicated by other methods, but they're still pretty vital. A no-staffs run of Sacred Stones will probably force you to play more intensely and intelligently than a no-Seth run. I once made a thread for the best overall unit throughout the entire series, and someone layed out the criteria for a unit saying the best unit should have fantastic availability, useful throughout the entire game, equally good for new players and veterans alike, has a niche that can't be replicated by other units and the game is harder if you don't use them. I said, completely unironically, that that means Safy is the best unit in the series, because it was all completely true for her and how she functions in Thracia. But look up a list of Top 10 best Fire Emblem units and you are very unlikely to see Safy appear there.
I believe that I was that someone. And I would still broadly stand by those criteria for what makes a unit good.
I'm not sure that no-staff vs no-Seth is particularly a good comparison, though. Maybe no-Seth vs no-Moulder would be a better comparison? In which case, no-Moulder would probably be easier, since you could just stomp the game with Seth up until you get Natasha. Or the alternative comparison might be no-staff vs no-cav/paladin, where I'd go the other way and say that it'd be easier to play without cavs/paladins than without staves, though that one's probably closer?
Continuing your analogy to sport ratings, I wonder if there's any way that we could extend the idea of "Wins Above Replacement" to Fire Emblem. I intuitively feel that Tethys isn't really doing that much to make the game easier -- I can't imagine anyone thinking of no-Tethys as a notable challenge run, for instance -- but I'm not sure how we'd even try to quantify that. It isn't clear to me what would count as a "win" nor what would count as a "replacement level unit". Of course, compared to sports statisticians, we don't have nearly as much raw data. It would be really interesting if we somehow had stats for every game of Sacred Stones that had ever been played and could actaully see whether teams with Tethys in them had a better success rate than teams without Tethys in them, but we're obviously never going to get anything even close to that so we're just left with vague personal feelings and intuitions instead.
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2 hours ago, Jotari said:
Honestly, both of those sets looks pretty poor to me. I could be wrong, but it looks like the brick count is very low and that both are just a large base with some bells and whistles thrown on. I do agree that the Himeji Castle is the better of the two (and that it's still well overpriced), but neither seem as good as some of the sets I had as a kid.
How much do you trust your memory for how good things were as a kid? I know I was completely non-critical as a kid, and a lot of things that I loved back then are absolutely not as good as I once thought they were.
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7 hours ago, Jotari said:
Lego being capable of charging as much as they do for their product is very baffling to me.
The licensing is certainly contributing a whole lot to that price. Just from a very quick look at Lego's website, I found this Himeji Castle set, which is $160 for a 2125 piece set. Compared to the Deku Tree, which is $300 for a 2500 piece set. And honestly, I think the Himeji Castle is a better looking set as well. Obviously, $160 is still expensive, but it's not nearly as exorbitant as the price you have to pay for something with the word "Zelda" on the box. I would be very curious to know how much of the price hike is Nintendo's cut of the pie and how much of it is just because Lego think they can get away with charging more for the licensed product. We'll likely never know, but I suspect that both factors are quite substantial.
19 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:Plus, combine it with the existing sets for Mario and Sonic, and we're halfway to a Super Smash Bros collection!
There's Lego Animal Crossing now too.
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7 minutes ago, Integrity said:
i fear balatro primally. i have not let myself buy it because i know it's going to go the slay the spire / shotgun king route where i bash my head into it for dozens of hours because i won't be beaten
Yeah, that's exactly where I'm at with it. It's a fantastic game, but oh man, it's completionist achievements are absolutely brutal. I'm at 156 hours and counting, and still have a fair way to go for them yet.
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8 minutes ago, Integrity said:
ROGUELIKE. DUNGEON DELVING. BILLIARDS. Sometimes, you can tell a game was created entirely out of someone mashing [Keyword]s together like in a CRPG and trying to realize the concept, and by God, this one did.
Looking at the Steam page, I see that the same developer has also made a Wikipedia trivia roguelike. Mashing unlikely keywords together is clearly their jam.
I might pick this up, though. It looks neat, and I need something to distract me from the pain of banging my head against the brick wall of high-stakes black-deck Balatro.
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1 hour ago, Dark Holy Elf said:
This is of course very fair, and it's an excellent point that you don't need everyone to do everything. That said, I do think if everyone is straitjacketed into a single role it can become limiting sometimes. Sometimes there are three heroes coming at you at once and it's nice if at least one of your axe-users has an answer to them. This is more true the more axe-users you have... which is certainly something that can occur on teams considering how good Wyvern is.
I think this is an insightful observation. I know that I rarely have a lot of wyverns on my team, probably averaging somewhere between one and two on a typical run. This isn't because I think that this is optimal, but just because I have more fun using a lot of different classes, but it certainly makes sense that my play-style has then evolved around this choice. Because I use more classes, I'm more likely to have a unit that is well suited to each job, so I'm going to need generalist builds less, so I'm going to get less value from things like dual-faire classes. Whereas I can definitely see that for people who tend more towards the "oops, all wyverns" style of play would definitely want to have more flexibility of builds.
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17 hours ago, Jotari said:
This one feels a bit nitpicky.
16 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:Kurthnaga feels like a huuuge reach as a "crossover element".
Yes. My intention was to try to construe "crossover" as broadly as I could. Something along the lines of "here is a list of things; you choose which of them you think are significant". I'm certainly not trying to claim that all items on the list are equivalent.
17 hours ago, Jotari said:Feels like you're missing here the most significant plot based crossover, that being Naga and Salamander's appearance in Genealogy of the Holy War. Though, maybe you consider that shared world building? But no more than Camus and the Whitewings.
Yeah, I probably should have included them. I could vaguely claim that they are just shared worldbuilding, but the truth is that I've never played the Jugdral games, so I missed them.
18 hours ago, Jotari said:And among the more serious effort crossover stuff, I'm either free to like it, which I often do, or I'm completely free to ignore it because I just don't care about it
That's a fair point, and I partially agree with it, but only partially. Some things are easy enough to ignore, others less so. If I don't like Heroes (I don't) then I can easily just not play it. Simple. But if I don't like seeing a bunch of Awakening characters show up in Fates (I don't) then they're much more difficult to ignore. Sure, I can just not use the characters, but they're still prominent enough that I'm going to be at least a bit exposed to them (and I wouldn't want to do Conquest ch. 10 down a unit anyway). Similarly, while I can ignore all the spotpass and DLC stuff in Awakening, I'm still probably going to stumble across Micaiah's Pyre or Ephraim's Lance or something whether I want to or not. Similarly in Three Houses if I stumble across Gradivus or Mercurius (oops, forgot that one in my original list). It's not as if this sort of thing is a huge issue, but it is just a little bit of unavoidable friction that slightly lessens my overall enjoyment.
Or consider the post-game stuff from Shadows of Valentia (which is another one I forgot about on my original list). I can and did completely ignore that and doing so didn't harm my enjoyment of the rest of the game... but it is still a part of the game that I had paid for and didn't get any value from. If it hadn't existed then we might have got a postgame that meaningful continued the story of the game itself, or the deelopment time might have gone to expanding and improving some of the main game.
18 hours ago, Jotari said:I would even go as far as to say I'd rather more cameos from mid level important characters in other games in the vein of Camus and the Whitewings. Yes, Fates handled its cameos awfully and has probably ruined the idea for a lot of people, but Fates handled almost everything about its narrative substandardly, it doesn't mean the basic idea of "X character traveling to Y setting" is horrible. It's fun to see a familiar character in a new setting, especially if it's a character you already like. So long as they resist the temptation to shill lords, I would be fully onboard for each new title having one character from the previous title, so long as it makes sense and is integrated well.
For me, this mainly depends on the settings of the games, whether they're in the same world, etc. I'd have no problem with -- for instance -- Leonie and Shamir showing up in a hypothetical Morfis game or Naesala and Leanne showing up in a hypothetical Hatary game. But if the next game was in a brand new setting on a new world with new creation myths but Panette and Pandreo show up there, then I wouldn't like that.
20 hours ago, Saint Rubenio said:Then there's Anna. If they're going to keep shoehorning this pointless character as a playable in every game - and I'd much rather they kept bringing Cipher characters back instead, Anna is really boring - at least they should have some fun with her instead of just, "here's the obligatory Anna." Kid Anna from Engage was a step in the right direction, just because she's different
even if I would've taken Mitan over her a million times but I digress. Let's do more of that. Elderly Anna, Male Anna, Monster Anna, heck Villainous Anna, why not? Anything but just Anna again, please.I agree with this. I dislike Engage Anna less than I dislike any of the other playable Annas.
17 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:And I can't even say that anymore with that Warriors Remake. I've literally had people say I didn't understand the plot of Three Houses, because I failed to Play Three Hopes and experience its rewrites. It's asinine. The crossovers have broken our brain
Yeah, I've seen that sort of attitude too, and I also completely disagree with it.
10 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:There's an interesting question of "canonicity" here. Like, suppose Hopes confirmed that Ignatz had a pet rabbit growing up. Is this detail also canon to Houses, since it was set before any plausible "canon divergence"? Likewise, if Houses says that Annette has a peanut allergy, but it's never mentioned in Hopes, then is it canon to the latter entry, or just the former? To what extent are these the same characters, and to what extent different?
I find canonicity to be a largely meaningless concept because it's always subject to change. One day, a bunch of Star Wars expanded universe works are considered canon; the next day, Disney decides that they're now all getting shunted over to be "Star Wars Legends" and aren't canon any more. So what? This isn't going to change how I feel about Knights of the Old Republic or the Thrawn trilogy, or anything else. They aren't better or worse as artistic works just because they are or aren't canon.
And the same is true for Fire Emblem. Let's imagine that someone at IS comes up with a cool idea for a Three Houses sequel, but that it completely contradicts Three Hopes. Do we really believe that they'd let that stop them from making this new game that they were excited about and thought would sell well? Or do we think they'd go ahead and make it anyway and explain that Three Hopes was just a hypothetical what-if side story? Or likewise, if their idea does absolutely rely on some plot element from Three Hopes, do we believe that they wouldn't be quick to declare that Hopes is completely canonical?
Canon mostly means "the version of the story that we're continuing to sell you going forward". And that can have some value to it. it's useful to know which version of The Hobbit has the best continuity with Lord of the Rings, for instance. But I generally think that it's a concept that fandoms as a whole tend to give far more importance than it actually deserves.
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12 minutes ago, Saint Rubenio said:
This point being in the second section irks me a little, considering FE characters have been appearing in Smash since well before Awakening.
I did have Smash in the first section as well. My point wasn't "this is a new thing that they've started doing", but "this is an old thing that they've continued to do but ramped up". Same as I have both sections including Anna and the Gaiden/Echoes cameos.
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25 minutes ago, Jotari said:
Might be a weird question, but do we actually know if Sothis actually is a dragon? I know she kind of feels like one, and her children definitely are, but I know enough ancient mythologies to know that's not necessarily an indicator of anything. Deities don't really adhere to the species designation. Granted, she is a Breath unit in Heroes, but one that automatically negates dragon weaknesses.
Well, in addition to having children who are dargons, we also know that her humanoid form has the same features (pointed ears, green hair, extremely youthful appearance) as other Fire Emblem dragons do while in human form. We also know for sure that her bones look indistinguishable from dragon bones, and that a weapon made from said bones can be repaired with the same material that is used to repair other dragonbone weapons. Rhea also says at one point that she (Sothis) "changed her form to resemble that of a human", so (with caveats about Rhea being an unreliable witness), we also know that her humanoid form isn't her true/original form. None of this is entirely conclusive or definitive, but I think that on the balance of probabilities, I would say it's considerably more likely that she is a dragon than she isn't.
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I heard some talk recently about how media crossovers in general are oversaturated to the point where most of them have lost whatever meaning and appeal they might once have had, and that set me off thinking specifically about Fire Emblem crossovers, and how ubiquitous they have grown. In particular, I want to take a dividing line at Awakening.
Here are all the crossovers (broadly construed) that I can think of from before Awakening:
- Anna appearing in most games without any sort of explanation.
- The Whitewings and Camus show up in Gaiden.
- Getting to see art of GBA characters in Path of Radiance if you connect the games with a link cable.
- The original TCG.
- Marth, Roy, and Ike appearing in Smash Bros.
- Occasional easter eggs and references in character names, like Kurthnaga.
I'm deliberately not including direct sequels and prequels here, nor shared world building. There are probably some things that I'm forgetting about or don't know about, but the point is, there weren't really a lot of crossovers here.
Then, from Awakening onwards:
- Awakening is full of DLC characters, spotpass, einherjar, items named after legacy characters, and so on. It's a very crossover-heavy game.
- Fates has a half dozen characters from Awakening plopped in with changed names.
- Shadows of Valentia still has the Whitewings and Camus, but also adds Cipher characters as DLC.
- Engage is even more crossover-heavy than Awakening, with the Emblems, bond rings, the various paralogue maps, etc.
- Heroes. Enough said.
- Cipher.
- Tokyo Mirage Sessions, is a crossover of Fire Emblem with another series (Shin Megami Tensei) and contains a bunch of crossover characters from both Shadow Dragon and Awakening.
- Warriors is similar, crossing FE with Warriors/Musou and also using FE characters from multiple games.
- Three Hopes doesn't really do character crossovers, sticking exclusively with Fódlan, but is still a gameplay crossover.
- Anna is still ubiquitous and has grown even more prominent, now typically being a playable character.
- Fire Emblem characters in other games including: Smash Bros, Code Name STEAM, Warioware, Mario Maker, Dragalia Lost, Project X Zone, Club Nintendo Picross+, probably others that I don't know.
- Most Fire Emblem games having some sort of amiibo compatibility, with unlocks ranging from music to characters.
The least crossover-y game in this time period has been Three Houses, which only really has playable Anna and music unlocks via amiibo. Everything else has had a level of crossover ranging from "fairly substantial" (eg, the Awakening characters in Fates) to "that's the whole point of the game" (eg Heroes).
Personally, I am over it. Admittedly, I'm not really a big fan of crossovers to begin with, so maybe this is just my biases talking, but I just don't care about these any more. I'd be much more excited if the next Fire Emblem game was an entirely new setting with no old characters than I would with yet another crossover game. What do you reckon? Do you also feel crossovered out, or would you still be excited for another chance to see Flora meet Fiora or Ashe fight Ashnard?
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I would discount both Sombron and Anankos, on the grounds that both of them get defeated in battle by another dragon (Alear and Corrin respectively). Sure, you oculd argue that Alear and Corrin both have assistance from their friends, but it's not as if Sombron and Anankos were fighting alone either. Each of them, even with their giant zombie armies, was no match for their kids with their small human armies.
Like others, my initial instinct is to say probably Naga, but I think that Sothis has a pretty good shout too. She's capable of interstellar travel, defeated the technologically-advanced Agarthans, was only able to be killed while she was asleep, is able to (sort of) come back to life after she's been killed, shrugs off the setting's most powerful forbidden dark magic, can manipulate time, and is strong enough that her presence alone is significant enough to flip the balance of a major war.
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11 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:
The issue, I think, is that Nintendo has a captive audience for their games. People will put up with shoddy hardware to play the next Fire Emblem game (or Mario, or Zelda, or Metroid, or Pokemon, etc.). It's possible for a third-party controller maker to get in on things, and I certainly have some of those too, but most of them have some issues of their own.
That is definitely a thing, for sure, but "captive audience" feels like too strong a term to me. There are plenty of other TRPGs out there (or platformers, metroidvanias, etc.) so it's not as if we don't have any other choices for games to play. And if the follow-up to that is "but Fire Emblem is the best/my favourite!" then I don't see that as a bad thing. Regardless of the quality of their hardware, I'd rather see Nintendo putting out great games than terrible ones.
I see the whole situation as a little bit like a restaurant with great food but awful service. Maybe the food is good enough that I'm willing to put up with the bad service, or maybe the service is bad enough that not even the best food in the world could make me go there. But either way, I'm making my choice as a complete package, weighing the individual factors against my own personal priorities.
Which isn't to say that I think it's fine if Nintendo makes shoddy hardware or if a restaurant has bad service. It's not, and both should absolutely be criticised for it. But there's also an element of personal responsibility and caveat emptor here: if the Switch U comes out and reviews say that it also has joycon drift but I decide to buy it anyway because I really want to play the next Fire Emblem, then that's on me as well.
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Fire is definitely Litten. Grass is definitely Turtwig. Water is much closer; I said Poplio today, but if you asked me on another day I might have said Squirtle or Piplup. Generally speaking, I think that generations 1, 4 and 7 have great starters, and the other generations are pretty underwhelming. I am curious to see whether the "every three generations" pattern will continue when we reach gen 10.
Is Seth better than a Sniper Rifle?
in Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
Posted
I'll take the sniper rifle. It does depend on stuff like durability and weapon ranks, of course, but if you make favourable assumptions then I think the sniper rifle is better. I'm going to assume it's a magic sniper rifle that never breaks, never needs to be reloaded, and can be used by anyone.
One good thing about the sniper rifle is that you can use it to feed kills to anyone you want. Even your weakest unit is getting an almost guaranteed kill every player phase, or two kills per player phase after you recruit Tethys. They will very quickly gain levels to catch up and even to get ahead of the curve. Making sure Eirika got enough experience without putting her in danger would be effortless. Levelling up any of the trainee classes would be a breeze. Seth is great, but there's only one of him. All the experience he gets is for him alone. The experience from the sniper rifle can be split as you need it, ensuring you get a full army of strong high-level characters.
Sniper rifle is also disgusting when paired with Pegasus Knight. From the moment you recruit Vanessa, you can give her the sniper rifle, have her fly somewhere inaccessible, and then have her take out the entire map with impunity. Since we also have infinite accuracy and damage, we also don't need to worry about stat penalties from rescuing, so if we want to we can just have Vanessa rescue Eirika before she does this. No need to even bother to deploy anyone else if we don't want to.