lenticular

How are you defining CRPG here? For me, I'd use a broad definition that would include series like Pokémon, Final Fantasy, Elder Scrolls, World of Warcraft, etc. which are all pretty obviously mainstream. I'm assuming you're going with a different definition, though.

The mess hall page for Fates lists that the daikon/cabbage food ("vegetable salad") gives Defence +2. Given that daikon and cabbage both give res, I assume that that's a mistake and it's supposed to say "Resistance +2".

It's hardly surprising that it's a bigger deal than the first two Baldur's Gate games. D&D is a way hotter license now than it was 25 years ago, what with Critical Role, Stranger Things, and the general ascent of nerd culture. D&D 5E (the system used in BG3) is also way more accessible to a general audience than AD&D 2E (the system for BG1 & 2). And I'd also add that Larian was a much more respected studio before BG3 than BioWare was before BG1; it's easy to think of BioWare in terms of what they later became, but BG1 was only their second ever game and I had to go and look up what their first one was (it was Shattered Steel).

As a thief, I think he's worse than Yunaka. The best way to build thief, as far as I'm concerned, is to make use of the Covert type to build a terrain-reliant dodge tank, either with Corrin's fog veins or by making use of existing terrain features. If you're doing that, one of the obvious weaknesses is Mystic units who can just completely bypass your terrain bonus, which is why I prefer Yunaka for that build. And if you class change out of thief, he doesn't have that much to recommend him above other units. He joins too late to get credit for helping out in the early game and for picking up skills from the early emblems, and he just doesn't stack up that well against the other units who are joining at around the same time as him. He's still perfectly competent, either as a thief or changed to another strong physical class, but doesn't really stand out from the crowd. 6/10.

It's definitely more important for spellcasters. Spells are categorised by power level, from level 0 (aka cantrips) up to level 6 (level 9 in tabletop DnD, but BG3 has a lower level cap). You can cast cantrips as often as you like, but you only have a limited number of spell slots to cast other spells, which depends on your level and your stats. So, if I have two third-level spell slots, I'm only allowed to cast two third-level spells. These don't recharge every fight, but only when you rest. So there's a world of difference between a fight where you have all your spell slots, cast all your biggest spells and blow everything up, and the same fight when you're completely out of spell slots and just have to plink away with cantrips. Even for non-casters, most of them get some sort of ability or resource that only recharges when they rest, but it's typically not as pronounced as it is for spellcasters.

I have a gnome warlock/paladin who I got to level 5 yesterday. I have mixed feelings about the game, but overall more positive than negative. On the plus side, it does a better job than any other CRPG that I can think of at capturing the expansiveness and open-endedness of TTRPGs. You have so many options for things that you can try or ways you can approach problems, and a lot of them actually work. It manages to have both emergent narative and constructive narative in a way that's really quite impressive. On the minus, side, though, the cost of this expansiveness is that the game feels very janky at time. Stuff like inventory management is a frustrating chore, for instance. Or weird pathing issues where the game makes you move manually. Or the overall balance seems off; without much (any?) disincentive from taking long rests whenever you like, a lot of resource management from the original DnD rules just isn't there, and it can feel weird sometimes. Still a good game and one that I'm mostly having fun with, but a frustrating one too.

Ooh! Ooh! Me! Pick me! That was me! I was, in fact, an active poster on rec.games.roguelike.adom back in the late 1990s. Though I do try not to grognard too hard. But yeah, I also have a big soft spot for Dungeons of Dredmor. I currently sit at 80.1 hours played and 48/122 achievements, mostly between 2011 and 2014. And, remarkably, I do have the achievement for beating Dredmor (on easy with permadeath) but not the achievement for losing to Dredmor. I can't actually remember the fight, but given that pretty much everyone who isn't me says that it's badly designed unfair garbage, I assume I just lucked out. I always described the game by saying that it was to Rogue as Monkey Island was to Adventure. I think I still stand by that description. I remember being excited for Clockwork Empires when it was first announced. It was a cool concept. But then it also happened right about the time I was getting disilusioned about paying money for Early Access games that were cool concepts but not much else. It was right about the same time as Spacebase DF-9, which was the game that pretty much killed Early Access for me. And then the more I saw of Clockwork Empires, the more glad I was that I hadn't just jumped right on it. Which is sad. It probably had the potential to be great if they'd had more time and money for it, but alas, they did not. With hindsight, yeah, trying to make something that would feel like Dwarf Fortress but with an actually usable UI was probably overambitious for their second project as a studio. I actually recommended Dungeons of Dredmor to a friend last year. He was searching for something to play and looking for recommendations, so I looked through my Steam library and said, "hey, did you ever play this..." He actually has more hours in the game than I do at this point. I tried picking it up again last year as well, to play alongside him and so I'd actually know what he was talking about when he told me about different builds he was using or whatever. And, sadly, for me at least, the magic was gone. The whole thing just played so damn slowly. All the attack annimations and the likes are great, but having to sit through them for every single attack made things drag. I do wish that more developers had jumped on the idea of Berlin interpretation roguelikes except with graphics and a UI and stuff. They probably do exist somewhere, but are so buried underneath the modern understanding of the term "roguelike" that they're harder to find than they should be.

Based on the way the case went (and on my lay understanding of the law), not very much. If anything. I can easily see that the original name could have been a trademark infringement, being just about similar enough that I can imagine a confused grandparent accidentally buying Emblem Sage as a gift for their grandchild who had asked for Fire Emblem for their birthday. But, as far as I'm aware, that name was just about the only thing that Nintendo/IS successfully managed to get Kaga to change.

I'd actually been thinking about making a similar thread to this, but focused more on the idea of "just what is the core identity of Fire Emblem?" since that's something that seems to get brought up and argued over in every permadeath discussion. Legally speaking, I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that an awful lot of Fire Emblem's identity isn't protected. It's a pretty well established principle that you can't copyright game mechanics. If I wanted to make a game that has turn based tactical combat on a grid with a player phase and an enemy phase, where damage is strength + weapon might - defense and you get to hit twice if your speed is 4 points higher than the enemy, etc. etc. then I probably could. And a lot of the names of mechanical elements are too generic to have any chance of legal protection. I'm thinking things like "strength" or "steel sword". (There is some history of patent trolling within the games industry to try to get around the non-copyrightability of game mechanics, but to the best of my knowledge, none of them have ever gone to court, and IS and Nintendo haven't tried to take out any patents regarding Fire Emblem anyway, so it's something of a moot point.) The big and obvious legal protection would be trademarks, especially for the name of the series and the games. If I make a new game series and call it Emblem of Flames, with entries like Umbral Dragon, Path of Luminosity, and Holy Stones, then I am absolutely getting a letter from Nintendo's lawyers. Likewise, I suspect some of their characters are protected. If my game stars Marp, prince of Aldea then that's probably not going to fly (unless it's a parody). A lot of elements of individual games would be protected by copyright, but they are typically not stuff that relates to series identity. You obvious can't just directly copy maps, dialogue, art, code, etc. but most of those things are completely new from one Fire Emblem game to the next anyway. In summary: stuff like names and characters are probably protected; stuff like game mechanics probably aren't. And I think that, morally and ethically, the law is pretty much right here. I think people should be able to copy and iterate on game mechanics as much as they want. Because, ultimately, the core ideas aren't what makes the game. The game is about map design, multiple balance passes, character design, combat animations, dialogue, ui, and so on and so forth. If someone else wants to make a Fire Emblem style game, is willing to put in all the work to do all that stuff, and isn't trying to pass themselves off as actually being Fire Emblem, then they absolutely should be able to do so.

For sure. I guess that my argument would be that the learning curve without online is considerably steeper than the learning curve with online. And that I personally found this extra steepness more frustrating than rewarding. (Like I said, my version of all this is very low on the hyperbole.)

I have played without online, and while I don't agree with Mir's more hyperbolic objections, I will say that I had problems with it. Now, it certainly didn't help that this was my first playthrough and I was playing entirely sight-unseen and spoiler-free so I doubtless made a lot of mistakes like putting down buildings in the wrong order or not making enough use of the arena. And it definitely didn't help that the food resource that I randomly got was daikon (which buffs res). The game was certainly still playable, but I definitely felt that there was a certain friction there. Cooking felt useless. Forging felt weirdly restricted. Having way more buildings available than I had DVP to place them made me way more worried about which ones I should build than I should have been. That sort of stuff.

For me, I think it's pretty close and largely depends on my mood. As you say, Radiant Dawn is a more ambitious game, but it only sticks the landing on some of the things it tries and ends up more inconsistent as a result. Radiant Dawn has both the higher highs and the lower lows of the two games. Sometimes I'm willing to sit through the lows to get to the highs, but sometimes I want the more streamlined and consistent package that is Path of Radiance. Path of Radiance was also my first Fire Emblem, so there is definitely at least a little bit of nostalgia bias there. The army splitting in Radiant Dawn never quite worked for me, especially with balance across different units. I always like raising up my group of idiots from zeroes to heroes, so it feels unsatisfying when the game just keeps on throwing OP units at me and I don't have to care about them stealing xp. This is especially the case for the Dawn Brigade, with Sothe, Volug, Tauroneo, Nailah and the Black Knight all fitting into that pattern. I also feel the loss of Support conversations in Radiant Dawn. And I think that removing basic UI features in the hardest difficulty setting is one of the single worst decisions in any Fire Emblem game. So, overall, I'd say that I generally favour Path of Radiance... except that if I were to sit down and replay one of them right now, it would be Radiant Dawn. That's just what I'm in the mood for. So I don't know. Let's still say Path of Radiance, but only by a hair.

Ohhh, that makes sense! I'd best keep that card hidden from my friend who's been building a coin flip deck in Magic recently.

"This card does nothing" (on the card underneath Roy) is my favourite part. At least it's truth in advertising. Commercial TCGs wouldn't ever dare to print that on their crappy pack-filler.

I would definitely count myself among that number. It's very tempting to try to overgeneralise and say tht new fans like x but old fans like y, but I don't think it's actually nearly that simple. For at least as long as I've been playing (since PoR) the fanbase has always been diverse and drawn to different aspects of the games and the franchise. I don't think that Engage did simple and charming well though. Stuff like the multiple overwrought and melodramatic death scenes just didn't fit if that was what they were going for. I see it more as a story that doesn't know what it's trying to be, and as such tries to shoehorn in what are supposed to be big emotional scenes where they just don't belong. I'm pretty sure I'd have had more fun with a big camp romp than with the half-measure that we ended up with. (And my favourite FE games are Three Houses, Path of Radiance, and Radiant Dawn, so my tastes definitely tend more towards deeper and more involved storylines.) I think there are a lot of weird self-inflicted problems with the gameplay as well. The map design and core tactical combat mechanics are largely great, but a lot of surrounding gameplay systems that weren't well-received seem like things that could easily have been prevented. I'm thinking things like the way that skirmishes are balanced, the way early-game characters are almost universally outclassed by later joiners, the gacha system for bond rings, strength training, the Tower of Trials, the reclassing and promotion system and internal levels, character building in general, leaving various systems out of the game at launch to then trickle them in as free DLC. They did a great job of some of the harder aspects of the game, but then scored some baffling own goals with some of the surrounding systems.

Super Hexagon is a weird game. It's super minimalist, with just shapes lines and colours. And music. And it is also hard as balls. The goal is to survive for one minute. That's it. Then if you beat that, there's a second stage which is exactly the same thing except harder. To six stages in total. I only ever managed to beat the first stage and I considered that an accomplishment. Actually, thinking about it, it's kinda like Luftrausers in a way. It's not my favourite game ever, but like VVVVVV and Dicey Dungeons, it's a game that knows what it's trying to be and leans into it. Definitely worth a few bucks to try it out and see if you vibe with it. If you ever do succumb to the temptation to 100% it -- which, for the record, you absolutely should not do -- then my main pieces of advice are: 1. know that you have to disable the DLC to get the "Fearful Symmetry" achievement, 2. read up on how artifacts work because they are not well explained in game and knowing the details makes getting all the artifact wonders way easier, 3. expect to do a lot of save and reloads to get all the "do x action y times" achievements, and 4. rethink your life choices that led you to trying to 100% this miserable game. (Yeah, I finished it earlier today and am still bitter at it.)

Been a while since I posted any of my own 100%s here. Let's fix that with some of my recent ones. XCOM: CHIMERA SQUAD (FIRAXIS, 2020) WE LOVE KATAMARI REROLL+ ROYAL REVERIE (BANDAI NAMCO/NOWPRO/MONKEYCRAFT 2005/2023) DICEY DUNGEONS (TERRY CAVANAGH 2019) SID MEIER'S CIVILIZATION: BEYOND EARTH (FIRAXIS 2014) I now have 42 perfect games, and with the addition of a W and an X, the only letters of the alphabet that I'm missing out on are now E, J, N, Q and Y.

If you put all three characters into Mage Knight, Ivy ends up notably worse than either Pandreo or Anna. Compared to Pandreo she has: equal magic and hp, -3 dex, -2 speed, -11 res, -11 luck, -2 build, with her only advantages being +7 str and +4 def. Compared to Anna she has equal hp, -6 mag, -4 dex, -2 spd, -3 res, and -13 luck; she still keeps advantages in str (+4) and def (+4) and also has better build than Anna (+2). The extra def is certainly nice, but overall, if I want to have a Mage Knight, then Ivy is not going to be my choice. If Ivy is good (and she is), it's because Lindwurm is good. That means that we do need to deal with that class's weaknesses as well. (There is an argument that Mage Knight Ivy is better than Mage Knight Anna because Anna requires more babying to get started, of course. But I don't want to get too deep into the weeds here since I only wanted these numbers to be illustrative rather than exhaustive.) (All numbers taken under the assumption that the characters are promoting into Mage Knight as soon as possible, using a Second Seal at 20 to reset to level 1, and continuing to ilevel 40.) For sure. But the relevant questions are things like: how much investment does a unit take? How contested are those resources? Is the upside of investment sufficiently stronger than anything else so as to be worth that investment? And those are the points where I think Ivy falls down. Lyn is extremely heavily contested. Speedwings are useful to pretty much anyone. If she's getting these, then I want to get an absolutely amazing unit in return, and I just don't see that with Ivy. A very good unit, sure, but there is a ceiling for just how much a powerful player-phase nuke can do. Being able to reliably one-round enemies is very useful, but not something that's unique to Ivy. And while I don't doubt you can do some impressive enemy-phase shenanigans with an invested Ivy and bonded shield, that's throwing more resources at her. That's basically adding a second unit + Lucina into what you've invested in her, and with that much investment then it would be a major letdown if she weren't phenomenal. One thing that I will say, though, in favour of Ivy and against my own arguments, is that I haven't played since the patch that added the Well and (from what I have heard) more easily obtainable skill points. I don't know exactly how that is balanced and how easy it now is to get skill points, but if they are now sufficiently plentiful that they no longer constitute a meaningful cost, then I would agree that that would push Ivy up in my estimation. Probably not enough for me to give her a 10, but maybe an 8 or 9.

I found Ivy pretty underwhelming, honestly. Her speed is pretty poor so she's not going to be doubling much without help. (For comparison: at ilevel 40, Lindwurm Ivy has a speed of 24, Sage Anna has 28, and High Priest Pandreo has 29.) And certainly there are ways to bolster her speed but something something contested resources something something opportunity cost. And while her magic stat is good, it's not at the same level as on someone like Citrinne who is more likely to be able to compensate for not doubling by just hitting like a truck. The Lindwurm class also leaves a bit to be desired. Its class skill is pretty dreadful since she'll often be attacking enemies with no magic stat worth speaking of, so even when it does trigger it won't do much damage. She'd be much better off with Chaos Style instead, for instance. Having the flying typing instead of the mystical typing also means that some of the emblems that are good choices for most magic users just don't work as well on her. Byleth gives her Luín instead of Thyrsus, for example (and Rally Res instead of Rally Magic). Or if she has Celica, she doesn't get the damage bonuses to Echo and Warp Ragnarok. But with all of that said, she is still a flying magic unit and flying magic units are really good. While she does take investment to make great, she's a worthy target for investmant since there is only one other unit who offer that particular niche. And even if you don't invest in her that much, she's still a competent unit with flier mobility who can zip around throwing out heals and chip damage. Overall, I give her 7/10.

As I was initially imagining it, it wouldn't be possible to use a tome without having an elemental type, since all classes/charactrs capable of using magic would have one. I do quite like the idea of having element be linked to some sort of inheritable magic technobabble though, and in that case, yeah, having it default to light magic would be a reasonable way to do things. Or alternatively it could just be raw anima without an associated element. Fire Emblem already has Sagitae as basically that, so it wouldn't be too much of a stretch, I don't think. Yeah, that was deliberate. It's a trade-off between distinctiveness and flexibility, really. Sort of like with reclassing. Too much flexibility and everyone starts to feel like they're the same. Too much distinctiveness and it ends up feeling like you aren't making any meaningful decisions. Finding the happy medium is hard, and this idea definitely errs more towards the "make units more distinctive" side of things.

My wacky, out-there, possibly-terrible idea for this: get rid of different elemental tomes entirely and then have all the diversity come from the classes. So, instead of having Wind, Fire and Thunder as three separate items, we'd just have one item, let's call it Initiate's Tome. Then likewise we'd have Elwind, Elfire and Elthunder all merged into Adept's Tome; Excalibur, Ragnarok and Thoron all merged into Sage's Tome; Meteor, Bolting and Blizzard all merged into Siege Tome. (All names could obviously be changed.) But then, all tome classes would have an innate class skill based on the type of magic that they use. So, if you have someone in the Wind Mage class they'd have the skill Wind Magic: all your attacks with tomes have +10 accuracy and deal effective damage to flying enemies. Thunder Mages would have Thunder Magic: all your attacks with tomes have +1 range. Fire Mages get Fire Magic: all your attacks with tomes deal +1 damage and deal effective damage to beasts. It wouldn't be included in the skill descriptions, but each of these skills would also change the battle animations to show appropriate elemental attacks. The system could also be modified easily enough so that each character had an elemental affinity that was fixed and unchangable rather than having it be done by class. It would also be flexible enough to allow for the addition of Ice Mage, Earth Mage or similar if wanted. The idea behind this is that it would mean that there'd only have to be a single type of tome at each level of rarity/power so you wouldn't ever run into problems like "only Ilyana can use Rexbolt". If you get a rare late-game tome then you'd be guaranteed to have someone who can use it, because all anima magic users would be able to. But at the same time, it would retain a decent amount of the flavour of having different elemental affinities.

At first glance, Jade looks like she's just worse Louis. But she does have one slight advantage over him, in that she has a res stat that isn't completely horrible. So in some respects, she's better thought of as worse Goldmary. Goldmary starts out ahead of Jade for res, with Jade only catching up (assuming both are generals) at ilevel 37 and pulling 1 point ahead at ilevel 40, which is where they stay from that point on since they're both capped. Meanwhile, Goldmary will be fully 7 points ahead in def at that point. Being so thoroughly outclassed by both an earlier and a later unit does not do her any favours. Especially given that even for players who like to use concrete tanks (and I count myself as such a player), it's rarely useful to have multiple of them. One of the advantages that the Lythos/Firene/Brodia units tend to have over the later units is that they're well positioned to inherit some early skills.. However, in the case of tanks, the best skills to inherit come from the second lot of Emblems. Pair Up from Corrin and Resolve from Ike are both much better than anything that the earlier Emblems have to offer, so I'm typically going to want to be saving my SP in preparation. And sure, you can try to do things with her that don't involve tanking, and there are doubtless options where she'd be competent, but again, she's just outclassed in whatever direction you want to look. No matter what you try to have her do, multiple other characters are going to be doing it better than she can. 3/10.

I was pleasantly surprised by Amber. I ran him as a Warrior on Maddening, and he did a decent job. He was never my best standout unit, but he always contributed meaningfully and never required babying or favouritism. 6/10.

Another issue with vulneraries is that they don't give any xp. If I have the choice between healing someone with a vulnerary or healing them with a staff, I'm going to choose the staff because I want to level up my healer. This isn't as much of an issue in modern games as it used to be, but units like Laura or Priscilla want every last scrap of xp they can get their hands on, and using a vulnerary means taking 12xp away from them. Auto-use vulneraries just make me think of berries from Pokémon, though. Which may or may not be a bad thing. There's an awfully big design space they could make use of for "item that a character automatically consumes if certain conditions are met" though, for sure.

Yeah, I agree that there's nuance to things. And there definitely are circumstances where pushing your luck can be the "correct" play, depending on what your goals are. But I think that assuming bad luck should typically be the default position. You have to know the rule to break it, that sort of thing. So, yeah, you absolutely can take risky decisions, but you should typically only do so once you know what the risk is, know why taking risks is genenerally bad, and are able to explain why your specific situation is an exception to the rule.