lenticular
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Posts posted by lenticular
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8 minutes ago, ARMADS!!! said:
The calculations are as complex and annoying to make as nowadays Fire Emblem Heroes with a bunch of damage reduction, extra damage and reduction of damage reduction stacked. You have no battle forecast to help you with it.
There is a battle forecast, and it's actually well-made and helpful. However, it's actually explained in-universe that the main character is a master tactician because they can see potential futures, which is an ability that they only have because of a specific magical macguffin. Said macguffin gets stolen by the enemies after chapter 3 and you don't get it back until halfway through the final map of the game, so you're playing through almost all of the game without it.
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13 minutes ago, Jotari said:
The traditional gift for 35th anniversaries is...Coral...huh...well, give me Pirate Emblem then!
Pfft. Pirate Emblem? Nah. Give me Mermaid Emblem! There's a lot you could do with a fully underwater setting.
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10 hours ago, Integrity said:
I think this is the first time I'm posting about a game after someone else in this thread did.
I think that I also did We Love Katamari before you, didn't I? But our opinions were pretty different on that one (I liked it more than you did). Regardless, I'm glad that you played this and glad you had a similar sort of experience with it to what I did. I've been spending the last decade on and off recommending it to people and having nobody listen to me, so it's good to actually see someone else playing it for once. I did see the sequel announced recently, which I was not expecting at all. Will definitely be interesting to see what they do with it.
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All enemy attacks have a floor of 1% chance to crit, that the player cannot mitigate in any way.
There's a PvP mode, and it's mandatory. Partway through the game, you get shunted into PvP and you have to get some obnoxiously large number of wins before you're allowed to continue back to the main story. You have to repeat this every time you play. And yes, of course there are pay to win microtransactions.
All your units are laguz who start the map with transform gauge at 0.
All enemy mages have at least one of: Meteor, Berserk, Sleep, Entrap, Hexing Rod.
There's a hub area. It is large and sprawling, but also completely empty and lifeless. There is no fast travel, and loading times suck. There are lots of situations where you have to go back and forth between rooms multiple times to hit as many loading times as possible. Every time you want to do anything, you have to talk to someone, and then sit through a long, poorly-acted, unskippable voice line while they reply. These are completely generic and don't change at all over the course of the game. The whole place is full of button-mashing minigames which will destroy both your controller and your hands. There is face-petting. Everything advances on a real-time basis. And literally all of this is strictly required to get even the most basic resources that you need to get through the game.
Supports exist, but they have no mechanical effect, and the support conversations are Radiant Dawn style.
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Hopefully, nothing.
This isn't to say that I hope that there won't be any new Fire Emblem in 2025, but I hope that whatever there is will be part of the natural release cycle that'll we'll get because it's ready and not specifically part of a marketing-led anniversary event. Anniversary events generally end up with either dubious quality tat, limited-edition false-scarcity FOMO nonsense, or deliberately slowed down releases to coincide with the event. I'd much rather they just make games, take the time they need to make them good, and release them when they're ready.
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This isn't an entirely new class, as such, but I'd like to see them continuing to develop the idea of unarmed combatants that they had in Three Houses and Engage. My thinking is that we could see two different class lines using brawling/arts/whatever they decide to call it, and give them distinct abilities and stats so they feel distinct from each other. First, have the Brawler class line as the strong but slow version. High strength, high def, low speed. Maybe a skill along the lines of Wary Fighter (but still allowing the unarmed brave effect). Then have the Martial Monk line be the fast and agile version, with great speed and dex but low def. And a class skill that gives them more/better crits.
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5 hours ago, Magenta Fantasies said:
As far as fan art, fan fiction, general observations in the fandom/just generally being talked about, etc. Gaius is definitely more popular than Lon’qu or Donnell, although those aren’t perfect metrics, either.
For fan fiction in particular, it's pretty simple to gauge popularity just by looking at tags on AO3. This is an imperfect metric for multiple reasons, of course, but it does give us some actual numbers to compare rather than just general hand-wavey personal experience. Looking at the counts for the different character tags, I see:
And to add a few extra data points just for comparison:
(Full disclosure: I see slightly different numbers when logged in compared to logged out, presumably due to some configuration setting that I have while logged in. The numbers I've shown are the logged out ones, though the logged in ones are not substantially different enough to change any overall conclusions.)
Pretty clearly, we see Gaius, Henry and Lon'qu at very comparable levels of popularity, with all of them being quite clearly ahead of the likes of Donnel and Basilio, but quite clearly behind Frederick. Again, this is a single metric and an imperfect one at that, and it's unwise to try to extrapolate it too far, but my limited conclusion here would be that there is no evidence from this dataset that Gaius is notably more popular among fan fiction writers than other male Awakening characters.
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1 hour ago, Fabulously Olivier said:
* Reduce score to 8/10 on initial release of game with day 1 Prothean dlc, and war assets locked behind multiplayer.
I have some seriously mixed feelings about Mass Effect 3 multiplayer. On the one hand, it was actually a lot of fun and I have some really fond memories of playing it and the people I played it with. On the other hand, it also had pay-to-win lootboxes, and is one of the big reasons why I don't let myself touch anything with microtransactions these days. Which is probably why the war assets were locked behind it, to funnel as many people into this exact scenario.
1 hour ago, Fabulously Olivier said:- Controversial ending (personally, I think the hate is way overblown)
I agree with this, though. I really didn't have a problem with even the original version of the ending. And while there were some completely valid criticisms of it, so much of the hate was just Whiny Gamer Tears (TM).
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I never found Team Rocket to be particularly compelling or effective. In theory, sure, an organised crime boss should be more grounded and compelling than some of the super villains that followed, but I never felt that this really meshed well with everything else the game was doing. Because ultimately, there are two unescapable facts about Team Rocket: in gameplay, they're all a bunch of incompetent mooks who you will breeze past without breakign a sweat; in story, their entire crime syndicate gets taken down by a ten year old. I find it impossible to take them seriously, so I prefer the more over-the-top teams that lean into the fact that they are jokes.
(Though my favourite team are Team Yell, because I think there's some interesting commentary about class dynamics hidden under their goofy exterior, but this probably isn't the right topic to go too deep into that.)
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On 4/26/2024 at 7:48 PM, Revier said:
I think a finer version of that point would simply be, "Not every scene/dialogue in a story needs to have deep meaning or purpose."
Agreed, and I'll add to this that not every part of a work has to have the same purpose. It's perfectly fine for a single piece of media to have one part that is deep meaningful commentary about the futility of war, another part that is a fluffy romance story, and another part that is just fart jokes. In fact, I'd say it's generally better if not everything about a story is a part of a single unified focus. For anything longer than a short story, if you don't have these tangents, then the work as a whole will tend to get very tedious and repetitive. A good story should be able to make multiple points or evoke multiple emotions.
On 4/26/2024 at 5:54 AM, Jotari said:To defend our taste in fictional universes, Fire Emblem is much less a franchise than most franchise. Since it entirely changes it setting and cast every five years. Sure we have fifty something versions of ghost cameo Marth, but by and large each new Fire Emblem entry (or every second entry) is a new story and not a sequel or a reboot. It is a franchise in the technical sense, but compared to other franchises Fire Emblem functions more of a brand name than a real franchise.
Yes and no. While the settings and casts do change, a lot of the other baggage stays the same. The game mechanics mostly just see minor tweaks and refinements, and a lot of tropes and themes get reused time and again. Nobody is going to be surprised if the next Fire Emblem game has a setting that feels vaguely like medieval Europe except with magic, has dragons that lose their minds as they get old, and has a protagonist whose dad dies. As fans, we can easily point out the differences, but I imagine that's true for fans of pretty much any other franchise. A fan could probably tell me why Big Brother 24 was actually totally different from Big Brother 23 (they have a completely different cast, after all!) but as someone who isn't a fan, the differences are meaningless to me. All I see is yet another series of a show that I don't care about.
On 4/26/2024 at 5:54 AM, Jotari said:Not sure I explained that well, so I'll just post a Simpsons clip that encapsulates what I'm talking about.
I am absolutely that person, with the exception that what I was with was never it to begin with.
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On 4/26/2024 at 4:56 AM, Hrothgar777 said:
Unrelated to the poll (which I did answer), remaking these games would be an amazing opportunity to let you play the villains for once. Team Plasma was about the only team that had an actual, coherent, morally relevant point and they weren't bat$#!+ crazy.
Personally, I'm a big fan of Team Yell (despite not liking SwSh overall) and think that they also meet those criteria.
Anyway, thinking about this further, I'm going to posit an unpopular opinion: Gen V (and subsequent generations) shouldn't be remade at all. We all expect that they will be, because remakes are just a thing that Pokémon does at this point, but really, what purpose does a remake even serve at this point? Yeah, the remakes would be more accessible than the originals, but that can be solved easily enough by sticking the originals up on Swith Online or the equivalent. And OK, there's some issues with translating the dual screens to systems that don't have them, but that only really needs a fairly basic port rather than a full remake. I feel there are a bunch of more interesting games that could be made with the resources rather than just another remake of somethign that already exists.
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I can't see this working very well for Gen X
or any other generational cohortbut it could make for an interesting spin-off game. For the main series, I think there have just been too many things that have been added over the years, and while most people would probably agree that only a few of those things are core to the series, they probably wouldn't agree on exactly which things. What are we keeping and what are we cutting? Breeding? Shinies? A large pokédex? Abilities? Held items? Natures? Double battles? A battle facility? A post-game? Character customisation? Move deleter? Move relearner? The physical/special split? And many more. I know there are some of those things that I wouldn't want to do away with and others that I could happily do without. You probably have your list as well and they are probably not the same list. So it seems like it would be a big risk for them to do this with their flagpole release and risk alienating a bunch of people.But for a spin-off? Yeah, absolutely. Go with 2D pixel graphics, have a limited pokédex of only 151 pokémon, very simplified story, minimal extraneous features, and maybe a $30 price tag? That sounds like a lot of fun to me, and probably more likely to get me personally back into Pokémon than actual Gen X (still funny) will. And since it would be a lower effort and lower stakes game than the main series, it would probably be more reasonable for them to put something like that out into the world and just see how successful it would be and what sort of appetite there is for it. I doubt that they actually will do something like this, but I would like to see it.
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Games that are just straight-up clones of other games are pretty rare when it comes to major publishers and full-priced games. Presumably because if you're copying another game so closely, you have built-in competition right from the beginning, and that competition is much more established than you are. If someone else put out a game that was Fire Emblem in everything but name, then who's the market for it? People who didn't want to play Fire Emblem probably arne't going to want to play your new game either, and for the people who were playing Fire Emblem, a lot of them will be thinking "yeah, but I already play Fire Emblem so why do I need this too?" And sure, there'll be some die-hard fans who will just be hungryfor any new content they can get, but for a clone to do better than the game it's copying, it would pretty much have to be phenomenally good. And this is fine if you're a small indie studio and have relatively much lower standards for success. And this is fine if the game that you're copying is CoD or WoW or something else that is just printing money. But otherwise? Probably not.
I mean, thinking about it, there are a lot of very popular games that have few or no direct clones. How many games can you think of that you'd describe as Animal Crossing clones, or Legend of Zelda clones, for instance. I can think of a few, but not many, and most of the ones that do come to mind for me are smaller indie titles. That isn't to say that there aren't other life sims or other action adventure games, of course, same as there are absolutely a lot of other TRPGs. But direct clones are pretty rare. Games like Triangle Strategy or Unicorn Overlord do things that Fire Emblem don't do, which means they can potentially attract people who don't want to play FE, for whatever reason.
On 4/26/2024 at 5:00 AM, Revier said:By letting the player build friendships and romances between their characters, the games let them write "their" fanfiction and watch it play out, in a sense. Of course, the exact lines, outcomes and events are still predetermined, but there's certainly an element of player creation/choice in the whole system, which some people frown at. I personally don't have too much trouble with the idea behind it, I just wish they were implemented more organically.
OK, so a few comments here.
First, I'm still confused by why you brought up slash fiction. If I'm wrong here, then please correct me, but are you using "slash fiction" as synonymous with "fan fiction"? Because that's not what the term generally means. The exact definition is somewhat difficult to pin down, as you'd expect for a neologism that's only been around for about half a century, but slash fiction almost universally refers to fanfiction with same-sex romantic or sexual pairings (sources: Wikipedia, Urban Dictionary, Fanlore) so if you're using it more generically then you're likely to generate a lot of confusion. and if you aren't using it generically, then I'm very confused, because Fire Emblem has only a handful of queer characters across its 30+ year history.
Beyond that, I still don't think that I agree with your overall point. While support conversations are a pretty well established part of Fire Emblem's identity these days, I don't think that explicitly romantic support conversations really are. Unless I'm forgetting something, they've only been particularly prominent in Awakening and Fates, and are much less important in other games. (I have not played it, but my understanding is that Genealogy also has prominent romance, but not through a supports system.) So while I would agree that there are some people who don't care for Fire Emblem's support conversations, I don't think that it's the romance elements that are turning them away.
And finally, I think that the association of character-based storytelling with fanfiction is a strange one. I don't doubt that it's an association that some people have, because if the Internet has taught me anything, it's that no idea is too weird for someone somewhere to genuinely hold it. But I still think this is a weird one. Plenty of stories across all media put much more focus on characters and their relationships than Fire Emblem ever has. The two main complaints that I see from people who don't care for FE's support systems are that they think they're poorly written (subjective, but fair enough) or that they personally want games with more emphasis on tactical combat and less on storytelling (again, entirely fair to have that preference). The fanfic connection is just bizarre to me.
So, in short: I am still pretty confused by your comment, but I am trying to understand.
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On 4/20/2024 at 2:43 PM, vanguard333 said:
Even the director of Three Houses: Toshiyuki Kusakihara, had that mindset; saying in an interview about Three Houses' development that, "I don't think there's much value to a story you can easily predict."
I'm entirely in agreement with everyone else saying that twists for the sake of twists are terrible and that there are no truly original stories. So I have to wonder if something was lost in translation here. Because, honestly, this kind of just makes him come across as a bit of a bozo. It just makes me assume that there is some sort of context or nuance that isn't coming across.
On 4/19/2024 at 1:24 AM, Jotari said:My point wasn't that it's impossible to ignore such stuff, in fact it's rather the opposite, it's all there and easily accessible. My point is that the vast majority of people simply won't.
I was thinking about this some more, and realised that there is a pretty notable exception to this general trend: music. Sure, the absolute most basic and milquetoast taste in music is just to listen to whatever happens to be in the charts at that the time, but listening to decades old music is pretty common and unremarkable. If someone is really into 60s music or 80s music then that's not likely to raise eyebrows in the same way as someone who's really into 60s movies or 80s novels.
I wonder if this is just because of the relative time commitments. Watching a movie takes about 2 hours. Reading a novel takes maybe 5-10 hours. Listening to a song takes about 3 minutes. This means that most of us are going to be listening to a whole lot more songs than we are watching movies or reading novels, so maybe that's what encourages us to be a bit more diverse in our consumption?
Back to the main topic, I've also thought of another trend that I am weary of: endless sequels, prequels, midquels, remakes, demakes, remasters, reimaginings, spin-offs, adaptations, extended universes, cinematic universes, alternate universes, and so on. Which isn't to say that media franchises are inherently a bad thing. I mean, we're sitting here having this discussion on a fan site for a game series that has seen somewhere between 14 and 25 games, depending on how you count. Any individual new game or movie that's part of a bigger franchise isn't really the problem. Rather, the problem is the absence -- or at least the paucity -- of original stand-alone titles.
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On 4/25/2024 at 1:37 AM, Revier said:
b. Romance/Support systems. While a decent portion of the Fire Emblem fanbase likes them, many outside it think that they are a bit cringeworthy, as they basically validate slash fiction. Also, it is rather absurd to have people fall in love on a battlefield, so having these systems at all can make a game look more ridiculous.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by the bolded part here? Because, honestly, this just seems like such a completely nonsensical statement to me that I figure we must be coming from a radically different understanding of things, and I'm really curious to know what you mean here.
On the main topic: yeah, it all depends on exactly how similar to FE we're talking about. If you're willing to accept anything that's even vaguely similar if you squint enough, then there are a ton. If you're only looking for games that are basically Fire Emblem with the serial numbers filed off, then there aren't many. A more fruitful question might be to ask about games that share more specific qualities with Fire Emblem. So, "TRPGs with clearly divided player phase and enemy phase" or "TRPGs with simple enough combat mechanics that you can do all the arithmetic in your head" or so on.
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8 minutes ago, Fabulously Olivier said:
Frankly, Gen 4 is also bottom tier Pokemon, salvaged only by Platinum fixing some of its issues. So the lack of quality in BDSP wasn't even surprising.
Honestly, Gen 4 is the generation that I personally had the most fun with. Admitedly, a big part of that was the people that I played it with, but I also didn't really have any of the problems with it that people often talk about these days.
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When you pick your units for the tower, you must pick your 10 lowest level units.
The intent here being to turn it into a "use everyone" sort of run, since if your lowest level units are completely untrained, then they aren't going to help in the Tower. But at the same time, having only the single point where the rule is enforced allows you more flexibility in how you approach things, and exactly when, where and how you decide to train everyone up.
(And yes, there are obvious cheese strats that you could do here, either by deliberately getting a bunch of bad units killed or by low-manning 4-E with the handful of compulsory units, but I think we all know better than to play self-imposed challenges in ways that remove both the challenge and the fun.)
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My guess is "poorly". Given how underwhelming BDSP was, and given how Gamefreak seems to be overstretched trying to hit the deadlines for the main series titles, it's hard to see Black and White remakes getting a whole lot of love. My best guess is that we'll see a minimal viable product remake of Black and White at some point, and Black 2 and White 2 will just be forgotten about. I am not, by nature, an optimist.
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24 minutes ago, Jotari said:
I would barely even count Awakening. Given that they used basically nothing from the previous Archanea section. It's just Tiki and the visual image (but not the mechanical use) of the Binding Shield. That being said, however, they went back to Archanea after creating Valentia, and if that doesn't count because they're in the same psychical plain of existence, they went back to Archanea again after making Jugdral for Archanea Saga. Though, again, you might discount that because it was a spin off...ish.
Personally I would count Archanea and Valentia as all being part of the same continuity. It's the same world, the same time period, and has multiple crossover characters. If you'd prefer to classify them differently, then that's fine. There's not a lot to be gained from nitpicking terminology. But at the very least, I think it would be uncontroversial to say that Valentia is more closely related to Archanea than Elyos is to Fódlan. That said, you are right that I forgot about Archanea Saga. Though, as you say, that's also a weird special case that doesn't offer much in the way of precedent.
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11 hours ago, Etrurian emperor said:
If the monastery drew you in then the Somniel should be enough.
For me, as someone who liked the monastery but disliked the Somniel, I think there were two main differences. The first is that the monastery felt more like a real place populated by real people. If you walk around it and talk to the people then they'll have different things to say each month that will be at least vaguely relevant to what's happening in the plot at the time. Try to do the same thing in the Somniel and you just get the same generic lines repeated over and over.
The second is the resource management aspect. In Three Houses, you have a limited number of activity points and have to decide what to spend them on. In Engage, all of the stuff was just there, and the only decision was whether to bother with it or not. And doing all the things was clearly the "optimal" choice, though typically not the fun one. Engage also leaned more heavily into minigames than Three Houses did. If I want to do choir practice in the monastery, then I press a button and it's done; if I want to do strength training in the Somniel then I have to play a minigame for it. Basically, they made the entire Somniel work like fishing in the monastery: no resource management cost to it, but a time-consuming minigame instead. And fishing was my single least favourite thing about the monastery.
Now, don't get me wrong, the monastery wasn't a world-beater in either of these aspects. Both the dialogue and the resource management were pretty simple and rudimentary. But they were there and, for me personally, that was enough to make the difference.
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In the past, when FE has returned to settings, it's typically been in the immediately next game. Excluding remakes, the only time that FE has ever returned to a setting after having moved away from it is for Awakening, which is a weird case which comes with all sorts of caveats and asterisks. So for them to make Three Houses, then go off and do Engage, then come back to Fódlan would be largely without precedent. This doesn't make it impossible, of course, but I would be surprised.
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It is the far future. Far beyond the events of Awakening, even. Aliens have invaded the planet (they look like dragons, of course). They have travelled back through time and abducted and cloned legendary figures from history. Not just Alm and Marth, but Sigurd and Chrom too. Now, they are forcing them to repeatedly fight to the death and making a TV show out of the spectacle (and then resurrecting whoever died). To start off with, you play the different heroes as they are pitted against each other in progressively more and more contrived and ridiculous scenarios, but eventually they start to figure out what is going on and join forces with each other, breaking out of the TV set, and ultimately fighting and defeating their alien dragon overlords and reclaiming the planet for humanity. Also, it's the future so there are laser swords.
Is this ridiculous? Yes. Is it a terrible idea? Absolutely. Is it any more ridiculous and terrible than what the original premise deserves? Not remotely.
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7 hours ago, AnonymousSpeed said:
While I don't know your steam library, I also feel that a lot of indie games are part of the "mainstream" of video game culture. They are "indie" in funding and production but not really spread.
I play a mix of "mainstream indie" and "weird and obscure indie" (aka, "hipster indie"). Like, yeah, I'm currently playing Stardew Valley and Balatro, which are extremely and moderately well-known respectively. But then looking at other games I've played recently, there's also stuff like Regency Solitaire II and National Park Girls, which probably nobody else here has even heard of. And then the full spectrum of mainstream/obscure between the two extremes.
Though I will add as well that even for the most mainstream of indie games, they mostly tend to reach the mainstream on merit rather than through corporate marketing juggernauts. If there's a widespread buzz over some indie game, it's probably because a lot of people like it; if there's a buzz over the latest title from EA or Activision, then it's probably because they spent a lot of money advertising it. So even for mainstream indie, I do think there's still a meaningful distinction, for the sake of this discussion, from games made by big corporations.
9 hours ago, Jotari said:My point wasn't that it's impossible to ignore such stuff, in fact it's rather the opposite, it's all there and easily accessible. My point is that the vast majority of people simply won't.
Fair enough. I wouldn't argue with that. But if that's your position, then I think you were vastly overstating it originally with the way you worded things.
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On 4/17/2024 at 4:44 PM, vanguard333 said:
Yeah, grimdark was a really annoying trend for a while; I'm really glad that it's waning. Unending doom and gloom just doesn't hold interesting, and I'm sorry, but trying to make a story seem "more mature" by making it all doom and gloom just makes it come across as immature.
That's something that I tend to see more from fans than from writers. Writers usually (not always!) manage to have a bit of a more nuanced take on things, but I've definitely seen who will scoff at anything with a lighter tone and call it immature or unrealistic, which, yeah, definitely comes across as immature. It has the same sort of energy as a teenager who is desperate to avoid anything that can be seen as childish.
15 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:As for the answer to the question... uh, nothing I can really think of? Maybe I'm not an overly critical viewer. There's just so much media out there - free and paid, cable and streaming, in theaters or your local library, in print or on the web. So many stories, that if you're not seeing what you want - or seeing too much of what you don't - you can look somewhere else. Heck, in an age of fanfiction.net and AO3, you can write and share your own.
I broadly agree with this. While there are definitely tropes and trends that I roll my eyes at, I do usually find it pretty simple to avoid them in favour of other media that are much more to my tastes. The only caveat that I would add, though, is that it can be somewhat tricky to do so when there's a work that is mostly to my tastes, but then has one trend-chasing section that's been shoehorned in (often but not always by a meddling studio or similar). That sort of thing can be harder to avoid and does get frustrating.
14 hours ago, Jotari said:And here's where the cynasicism comes in. Because all that is true. And it's also irrelevant. Because you are absolutely not going to watch the latest Iranian drama no matter how good it is. Unless you have a friend who's really into it and recommends it. And while you might read the best book sold in England in 1878, you're not going to read the second best book because only scholars with a specific interest in the period are even going to know about the second most famous stuff. We are, as we've always been, at the absolutely mercy of the capitalist system and what they want to show us. All of it is there, but you're only going to watch what's put in front of you and pushed by the algorithm and marketing titans. Which means a bit of your local stuff, a bit of Britain, and lot of America, and any noteworthy foreign language work these days will almost certainly be Japanese or Korean. I think we have all seen far too many movies that are well known to be bad, well reported to be bad and then watched and found subjectively bad, but watched anyway just because they were the trend everyone's talking about.
Speak for yourself. My main media consumptions are games and books. For games, I mostly (maybe about 90%?) play indie stuff. For books, I do tend to skew towards more recent and towards British and American, but far from exclusively. I probably have a couple dozen or so different nationalities of authors that I've read over the last year or two, at a guess. And while I haven't read anything from 1878 recently, but I did read At The Back of the North Wind last year, which was published in 1871, and is at best the fourth most famous book sold in England from that year (behind Through The Looking Glass, Middlemarch, and The Descent of Man).
Which isn't to say that this is the right way or the best way to consume media. If all you want to do is watch the latest movies from Disney and play the latest games from Nintendo, then that's great. But if you're going to watch movies that you know are going to be bad, then that's your fault, not capitalism's. It really only requires the tiniest amount of effort to ignore the stuff that corporate marketing puts in front of you, and acting as if they're impossible to exist is crediting them with far more power than they actually have.
1 hour ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:Sure 'binge-watching' is its own marketing buzzword, but it's not the default state in which we consume media.
I don't think there really is a default state for media consumption. By and large, what tends to be "default" changes a lot over time, as well as being different from one medium to the next. A steady release of new content over time is pretty common for TV or for comics, but is much rarer (though not unheard of) for books or games, for instance. So the problem isn't really with how we consume media overall but with how people are accustomed to watching TV in particular.
If I buy a new game -- let's say that it's a pretty chunky RPG like Fire Emblem, for instance -- then the default assumption is that I'll go through it at my own pace. Depending on how fast I play and how much time I have to devote to it, maybe I'll get through it in a week or maybe it will take me months. And that's just expected and normal. Nobody is suggesting that Fire Emblem would be better if it had a staggered release with only two chapters coming out every week. And personally, I feel the same way about TV. Like, I know that season 5 of Star Trek: Discovery has started to be released, but I'm not going to start watching it until the whole thing has come out, because then I'll be able to watch it all at my own pace, whatever pace that ends up being.
Which isn't to try to discount the psychological pressure that "must catch up on this!" can exert. If you do fall into that mindset then it absolutely can stop you from enjoying something as much as you would otherwise. But I do think that there isn't any inherent problem with the release schedule, more just that people are needing to adjust their mindsets, which inevitably takes time.
My Rebalancing Patch Discusson
in Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Posted
I'm not entirely sure what your overall purpose is here. Is this supposed to be something that you're releasing for the community, or just something that you're making for your own use? If it's just for your own use, then I'm not really sure what you need our feedback for? But if it's something for the community at large, then you seem to be leaning into your own personal preferences a whole lot.
I'm also not really sure what your motivations are for some of the changes here. Like, changing Shamir from a lance proficiency to a sword proficiency just seems completely random. I guess it makes it slightly harder for her to go into Falcon Knight? But it's hard to say whether I think this is a good change or a bad change without knowing why you're doing it in the first place.
Anyway, with that said, let's look at some of the specifics. I'm sure I'll miss a few bits that I have thoughts on given that it's a long list.
You aren't mentioning here what you're doing with unit-specific combat arts. The current system is that unit skill proficiencies exactly correspond with the weapons that the unit gets extra combat arts in, and I definitely think that that should be kept. So for any extra weapon proficiency that you're adding, it'd be nice to know what combat arts are going along with it.
This one makes me a little sad. Ingris has always been one of my favourite units to build, in part because she doesn't have any weaknesses, which makes her a good fit for pretty much any class. I don't think it's over-powered, but it does make her fun to use.
Personally, I'd like to see Catherine with a boon in Faith. Partly because I think it's a good fit in terms of lore/character, and partly to give her a slightly smoother path into War Cleric to make use of her Brawling boon. Giving her Seraphim at B Faith could also be fun, though not particularly impactful given her low Magic stat.
Having Seraphim come after Aura for female Byleth feels really weird, given that Seraphim is the lower damage of the two, and that everyone else who gets Seraphim gets it at either C (Lysithes) or B (everyone else) in Faith. Getting it at A, after having already learned Aura, seems backwards.
This seems like a pretty big nerf to these characters. Seteth especially seems like her would be hit quite hard, given that you don't really have as much time to build him as you want, and to some extent just have to take him as he comes.
I'm a big fan of these. This would make them much more relevant.
This is a move in the right direction, but feels to me like it doesn't go far enough. 5 x 30% is only 150% of a regular attack, and while there are some other benefits like increasing the reliability of crit builds, it still pales in compariosn to the likes of Swift Strikes and Hunter's Volley. Especially given that Hunter's Volley can be done from range 3 and Swift Strikes can be delivered from a high movement class with Canto. Maybe make it 5 hits at 50% damage, while keeping the increased hit and crit and the reduced cost?
I agree with what's already been said about this not being necessary. I think that Paladin is in a pretty good place in the base game, honestly. It's a solid option for some characters and builds, but not so strong that it dominates the meta or that you try to force characters into it even when it doesn't really fit them. Aegis is a pretty underwhelming mastery, but with high move and canto, it's strong enough as is that it doesn't need a mastery to rvial Hunter's Volley or Fierce Iron Fist.
It is, and I'm in two minds about whether I think that's a problem or not. Overall, I think probably not? Characters who learn Thunder generally aren't overpowered (at least, not as mages) so giving them a boost doesn't seem like the worst thing. That said, if Thunder does get 3 range, it probably shouldn't have anything else going for it. If it was both the weakest of the D rank spells and the least accurate, then the extra range would still be enough to make it the best of the bunch, but not by as big a margin.
I would maybe go something like:
Offensive White Magic definitely needs buffing, for sure. The reduced weight for Nosferatu seems good, though honestly I might go even further and take it down to 2 or 3, and maybe even give the spell a little extra might. The limited uses inherent in the way that Three Houses' magic system works means that it's never going to be the menace that it is in Awakening, so I think it would be fine to tune it aggressively. Turning Abraxas into a high-range spell is a fun idea. Though at that point, I might just go the whole way and make it 3-10 range to make it a Faith equivalent of Meteor and Bolting. (And at that point, I'd probably just rename it to Purge for series consistency.) For Aura, I think that it would probably be fine to raise its hit and keep the crit. It still wouldn't compare favourably to the best Black Magic of comparable level (especially your buffed versions).
I'm not sure what to make of these. My first impression is "they were bad before and they're still bad now", but I know that I'm just fundamentally not a fan of low HP builds, so that might just be my biases talking. It also might just be that they usually come online so late that I ignore them, and improving availability might save them. I really don't know. One thing I wish is that the effect could scale based on how much health the unit is missing. If it was "gain 1 [stat] for every 10% health below maximum" then I think I would probably like them better, but I don't know how difficult that owuld be to add in a balance patch.
But I think that the biggest problem that I have with Defiant skills is that they just aren't very interesting. Having so many late game classes have a Defiant skill as a mastery just makes me tune them out, honestly. Maybe keep around some of the better ones (like crit and avoid), combine others (eg, Defiant Def and Defiant Res combined into a single skill) and then create some new skills in place of the more uninspiring ones?
This is one of those areas where it makes a big difference whether you're building this for yourself or for everyone. Because I just fundamentally disagree with this motivation. Units with crests already feel as if they have a pretty big advantage over those without, if only for their ability to safely wield Heroes' Relics, and I wouldn't want the game to feel that all the commoners were just the objectively worst characters.
I wouldn't mind seeing some of the weaker Relics (eg Aegis Shield, Blutgang, Crusher) buffed a little bit to see them brought in line with the stronger ones, but the likes of Thyrsus, Thunderbrand, Lance of Ruin, and the Lord-exclusive weapons feel plenty strong already.
Of course, if you're just doing all this for your own use, then you should prioritise whatever would be most fun for you.
One thing I notice here is that you've mostly left the Intermediate level classes untouched, whereas to me, they're one of the biggest problem points in the game. There's such a heavy incentive to pick up Death Blow or Fiendish Blow, Darting Blow if female, and maybe Hit +20, and the other mastery skills here don't compete at all except for some occasional builds that want Vantage. This leads to this tier of play feeling very stale and repetitive a lot of the time.
My first attempt at a rebalance of the Intermediate tier masteries:
unless you're doing a challenge run where you aren't allowed to use any items, but who would do that?so it needs a buff. I don't know what can and can't be added to something like this, but my first thought is that fighting unarmed should grant something like +4 AS and +10 avoid, to compensate for the loss of might.I like this. It doesn't offer all that much in teh way of extra power, but it's a good flavour win, and it might come in handy from time to time.
Seconding this. I know that Mortal Savant has a bit of a bad reputation, but I think it's mostly fine as is, as a choice for characters with good magic sword arts. Maybe it could do with a bit of a boost to its speed, but this seems like overkill.
There are lots of different potential ways you could take Holy Knight. Personally, I'd consider giving it Canto, White Tomefaire, and White Magic Uses x2, but pretty much anything is an improvement over Terrain Resistance. I'd probably give it a new mastery as well, since Defiant Res is terrible.
Maybe replace Sol with Aether? Although that might be harder to add.
This is an interesting idea, but possibly too powerful? Falcon Knight is already very strong, and with the nerfs you're proposing for Wyverns, I think there's a good argument that it's already the strongest class in the game. Maybe give it magic at half uses, just to pull things back slightly?
This is definitely welcome, but I think the Emperor class needs more than this. Maybe getting rid of the Armored Lord class entirely, and just having Edelgard start Part 2 as an Emperor, sicne Crimson Flower is shorter than the other routes? I also want to tie Raging Storm to the Emperor class, somehow, though I'm not sure what the best approach would be. But doing so would be a big buff to the underpowered Emperor class, and a nerf to Edelgard overall, since beign able to have Raging Storm on a high movement class is just busted. Maybe this:
I have probably made this too powerful, but in fairness, vanilla Edelgard is already too powerful and I'd rather have her be too powerful in her unique class than too powerful on a wyvern.
I like the second part of this but not the first. I always thought that class masteries came in at about the right rate. Especially for Noble/Commoner, Beginner, and Intermediate classes. Maybe make Advanced classes a little bit faster but not so much as halving. Master classes do seem like they could do with beign faster, though.
Yeah, I'd support something along these lines.
I do like giving faculty members the masteries for their lower-tier classes, though. Not only would this get rid of some busywork, it also gives a bit of a buff to these characters, which I feel is generally needed.
Dual faire skills mostly just aren't very useful, IMO. There just aren't very many reasons to switch between different weapons, so it's usually better to just stick with a single specialisation. That way, you get to higher weapon rank, don't need to equip two Prowess skills, and so on. Adding magic to a class is generally good (since it gives access to the healing and utility of white magic), as is adding a mount for extra mobility. But I don't think that adding a second weapon type is ever going to be worth the cost.
Interesting question. I think that -faire skills generally do a decent job of keeping classes associated with their weapons, which does a decent job of encouraging class diversity. In the vanilla game, this gives choices like "do I put my lance user in paladin for maximum damage, or on a wyvern for extra flight?" and encourages me to have at least one sword class (typically Assassin) because I want someone to wield Thunderbrand. That sort of thing. And without that, there'd be generally clearer "best " classes, and the only question would be whether you could reasonable certify for them (which would only encourage savescumming certifications at low success chance). I mean, think how bad wyvern hegemony is, and imagine how much worse it would be if other classes didn't have advantages at using lances, swords, and bows. But that said, if you can keep class identities through other means (like with unique combat arts), then that might be enough to mitigate that concern. I think that the game would feel quite different without -faire skills, and my immediate reaction is that it would probably be a change for the worse, but I'm not confident of that.
Oh, but one thing that I will say is that if -faire skills were removed, that would make Catherine and Shamir a good bit weaker when they're initially recruited and have them lose a lot of their niche as pre-promotes. Not the end of the world, but it would be a loss.