lenticular

I really liked how the War of the Chosen expansion for XCOM 2 handled recurring boss enemies. There, when you faced them, they had an enormous health bar, and instead of killing them, they would flee from battle once you did enough dmaage to them. Then, next time they showed up, all the damage that you inflicted first time around would still be present, and you'd be able to whittle them down even further. Then once you got them down to 0hp, they were dead for good and wouldn't show up again. It really felt as if you were making progress towards defeating these perpetual thorns in your side, and it was suitably frustrating when they ran before you could do much damage and satisfying when you finally managed to take them down. I can imagine that a similar system could be made to work decently well in Fire Emblem, with a few tweaks. Edit: As I'm thinking back, I'm starting to doubt my own memory on this one. I'm not sure if it was actually War of the Chosen that did this, but it was definitely somewhere in XCOM. Which makes no real difference to my point, I just wanted to be as accurate as possible.

I don't think that there's much in Radiant Dawn that really requires Ike either, unless I'm forgetting something. There's stuff that needs the Greil Mercenaries, but most of it would have worked just the same without Ike. They could still have rescued Lucia just fine, could still have been dragged into the war on the laguz side, Soren could still have been condescending at Skrimir, they could still have squared off against Micaiah and co, and still have united under one army against Ashera in Part IV. Again, you lose the final Ike vs Black Knight showdown in the tower, but I can easily imagine that as a Titania vs Black Knight battle instead, where Titania takes up Urvan and bests the man who killed her mentor, despite the fact that she has weapon disadvantage. You'd also need for someone else to be blessed by Yune to land the final blow on Ashera, but that would be easy enough to do since there's no shortage of characters who are both strong and storyline-important by that point. And of course, Sothe wouldn't be able to have a big crush on Ike for Micaiah to get annoyed over. He'd just have to have a crush on either Titania or Elincia instead, which would have a totally different dynamic.

It does have one other use that I know of, but that's so niche that it may as well not exist. (Discussion of bond ring effects below for anyone who is extremely spoiler-averse.) Humourous irony aside, I was pretty disappointed with how they implemented Aymr. While it's probably for the best that they didn't try to reproduce the ability to take multiple turns from Three Houses, changing it from that into a slow and lumbering smash attack weapon was a weird choice. Oh well. Personally, I like putting Byleth on mages to give them Thyrsus, since +2 range to tomes is still every bit as good as it was in Three Houses.

I'm not sure how I feel about this one. On the one hand, this is two characters who I actively dislike, two that I'm fairly neutral on, and one who I'm fairly positive about. So that's not good. But on the other hand, I already had a pretty negative feeling about the DLC, since it seems wildly imbalancing and pay-to-win, and having characters I don't like makes sure that I won't have any sort of temptation to spend money on it. So, yay, I guess?

I think that definitely used to be the case, but is becoming less so with more recent games. For Awakening, I think that Robin and Lucina are both hugely important drivers of the plot. Then in Three Houses we have Byleth and Edelgard (even in the route where Edelgard is protagonist, she's still active rather than reactive). Basically, as we're moving towards having the main characters be dragons and gods, they're becoming more integral to the worlds around them. My selection for "not as important as they seem" would be Ike. If you got rid of him, you'd lose the subplot of his personal quest for vengeance against the Black Knight, but that's about it. Titania could lead the Greil Mercenaries, they'd still have found Elincia and taken her to Gallia, still be entrusted with her care by Caineghis, Mist would still have the medallion, and everything would play out in largely the same way as it did otherwise.

For me at least, it's not so much that I was trying to play optimally as that I wanted to experiement.I was looking to try out different things, see what worked, what didn't work, what I liked and didn't, and really try to get a feel for the game and its systems by engaging with them as much as I could. And it felt like I got shut down pretty hard on that. It was definitely a very deflating moment for me. For the avoidance of all doubt, I'm not saying that literally nobody likes Thracia 776 or that it's wrong to like Thracia 776. I'm just saying that the vast majority of their playerbase has never played it. Despite having never played the game myself, I'm glad that Leif is included in Engage, and I do hope that his fans got something out of his inclusion and his portrayal. But I don't think it would have been the right choice for IS to have prioritised the experience of this small minority of players over the large majority for whom Leif is a guy they don't care about from a game they've never played. I mean, that's kind of the point of queer coding, no? It's that they aren't explicitly gay; it's just somewhat suggested that they might be. And having effeminate male characters is definitely a trait that is commonly used to suggest it. I mean, I'll just quote directly from Wikipedia's page on queer coding: "The only characters in fiction that could be perceived as homosexuals had evil roles and were punished throughout the work. Thus, villains became noted in particular to have effeminate characteristics, behaviors or gestures that could be perceived as LGBTI." And then subsequently: "However, queer coding may have a negative impact on perceptions of queerness in media; villains are often queer-coded, leading to the pejorative perception of queer traits."

My picks:

I was so incredibly glad that in this incarnation they have finally got rid of the "awfully stereotyped queer-coded to denote evil" thing that the bandit twins have historically had. It's well past due for that to be gone. I normally hate the bandit twins because of it, but Tetchie and Totchie were pretty fun. From a gameplay perspective, yeah, I think having Leif there would be a good change. But from the perspective of story and presentation and player emotions, I don't think it would have worked. "Yes, this is your darkest hour, but fear not! Here's a guy that you don't care about from a game that you've never played!" just isn't going to inspire anyone. I don't think it's a coincidence that they gave us two massively popular characters at that point.

The taking away of the Emblem Rings is my single least favourite thing about Engage (so far). It'll probably be fine on subsequent plays, but I don't like how it played out on the first time through. That's because the game's skill system and reclassing system are heavily tied to the Emblems, so taking them away has a high chance to completely wrecks any long-term planning the player may have had. If you lose the Emblem before you have a chance to inherit an important skill or learn an important weapon proficiency, then that build idea is definitely delayed and quite likely to just be completely dead. To me, it just felt as if the game was telling me not to plan ahead and not to engage with its systems, because the rules could change at any moment. I hate it when games teach me not to trust them like that (see also: Foreign Land and Sky, Kaze in Birthright, etc.).

None of them, but I don't really do "so bad it's good". Or rather, I can do for maybe a minute or two, and then the novelty wears off and whatever it is just goes back to being so bad it's bad again. There are certainly moments in several FE stories that cross the line beyond which I can only laugh (Fates, Sacred Stones, Awakening, and Engage all have moments that come to mind), but when they sustain the abysmal quality, I'll quickly stop getting any sort of joy from them and just get annoyed instead.

Doing a maddening run as your first run is pretty ambitious. Definitely possible, but I'd only recommend it if you're very experienced with Fire Emblem or similar turn based tactics games or if you're the sort of player who really enjoys struggling through difficulty. Addressing your questions in order: Fliers are generally considered the strongest classes, yes. Doing an exact ranking of what classes are next in line behind them is tricky and people will have their own opinions, but War Master and Bow Knight are certainly good classes, at least. Bow Knight Dimitri isn't a build I've ever used, nor have I really seen many people advocating for it. It could probably work OK, I guess, but it isn't an OP must-have build or anything like that. The main selling point of gauntlets is that you get to attack twice (or four times if you would otherwise double attack) when you attack on player phase. Basically like Brave weapons in other FE games. They indicate a budding talent. Basically, if you tutor the unit in that weapon enough times, they'll become proficient in it and gain an extra skill. Nope, no fixed growth mode here. Up to you. Engage is new, so it's probably easier to find people talking about it, while Three Houses is older so there's more and better information about it available. Engage is probably closer to a traditional Fire Emblem experience, whereas Three Houses is a bit more of its own thing and has more social sim elements. Go with whichever one sounds more fun to you.

Personally speaking, I have done ironman-style runs in the past, of Shadow Dragon (DS) and Fates (Birthright), and that's enough to convince me that I just don't enjoy that way of playing. I know that people who enjoy ironman runs tend to speak of the increased emotional stakes that it brings, but I found the absolute opposite. When I know that anyone can die at any time, I end up just not getting attached to anyone and not caring when they die. When I know that I'm not going to keep everyone alive, I become more willing to just sacrifice units. Is my brain weird to respond that way? Maybe so. But it does. Ironman style is not fun for me. Equally, though, I've tried playing in Casual mode (in Awakening) and not enjoyed that. I had even less fun with being able to beat basically every level by attrition and meat-grinder strategies than I did playing Ironman. So as a result, I'm left with either Classic-with-resets or Classic-with-time-rewind as my preferred way to play. And yeah, I'd like to see some sort of intermediate option between Classic and Casual, where there is some consequence for letting units fall in battle, but it is less severe than having that unit be gone forever. I don't really care what that option is, and I'd probably have to play with it before I could decide whether I actually liked it or not, but it's definitely a space that I'd like to see IS explore. In terms of storytelling, I think that it's a little bit odd how the game is almost trying to tell two different versions of the story to different kinds of players. For ironman players, it's a story with death and fallen comrades, where nobody is safe. Whereas for Casual players and reset players, that isn't the experience at all. It's more like a story of larger-than-life heroes who are unstoppable in battle. And while either one of those stories can work, I think it's much more difficult to make both of them work at the same time. Not impossible, but difficult. While I would be surprised if IS got rid of Classic mode entirely any time soon, I wouldn't be surprised if they kept only the mechanical aspects of it but abandoned the storyline implications of permadeath. They are already going in the direction of dead not actually meaning dead for a lot of characters, both allied and enemy, so I could easily see them going all the way with that. It's kinda weird in modern Fire Emblem games that some characters are able to shrug off a fatal wound and say "oops, I'd better retreat" but others are not. If they changed it so that everyone just retreats, that would at least make the game feel consistent again, and the mechanics of permadeath could be maintained by having any defeated unit be unable/unwilling to fight any more. I don't think this would be my personal preferred solution, but it's one that I think might happen. One other thing I will add that I don't see people talk about very often is this: if permadeath were removed entirely, that would open up a lot of design space that is currently closed off, and potentially allow for innovations in level design, possibly including some more difficult individual levels. As things stand, Fire Emblem maps basically have to be beaten without losing anyone. Without permadeath, there'd be the potential to see more difficult maps where you pretty much need to sacrifice units just to eke out a victory. Without permadeath, nasty surprises like fog of war and ambush spawns stop being rage-inducing and instead become punches that you can roll with. This would be a pretty big change and would end up with a very different feel to current Fire Emblem, but change is not inherently bad.

In chess, there's a concept that I've heard referred to as "full board awareness". I'm not sufficiently familiar with proper chess terminology to know if this is a proper official chess term, or just some term that some people use sometimes, btu it basically means what you think it means. It's about being aware of what's going on all over the board so that you don't fixate on what's going on in one part of the board and end up blundering because you didn't notice a threat from another part of the board. I'm going to refer to the Fire Emblem equivalent as "full map awareness". Being aware of the whole map so you aren't caught unaware by stepping into the range of some enemy unit. Because I have to say that I make a lot of errors of that type. "Oh no, I didn't realise that I was leaving my pegasus knight in range of the enemy sniper. Guess it's time to reset again." That sort of thing. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that, for me, that sort of thing is by far and away the single most common cause of unit death/reset/turn rewind. And it isn't even close. And while I have generally got better at full board awareness as I have got better at chess over the years, I still suck at full map awareness in Fire Emblem. I don't think it's particularly difficult to see why. In chess there are 64 squares, a maximum of 32 pieces on the board at any one time and only 10 of those pieces actually act at long range. Whereas in Fire Emblem, the maps are much bigger and you're keeping track of a lot more moving parts. I don't know what map has the single most units of the whole series, but one that quickly comes to mind for me as having a lot is Radiant Dawn III-E, "From Pain, Awakening". Per the wiki, that starts with 116 units on the map, with another 43 appearing as reinforcements as it progresses. Keeping 116 distinct items in your head at any one time seems like it can't be humanly possible. I know it's certainly well beyond my mental capabilities. So, generally speaking, I don't even try to maintain faull map awareness. Instead, I recalculate at the start of every turn. Which are the enemy units that I actually need to think about this turn, and which are the ones that I can just ignore? I then set the ignored ones out of mind, and take my turn to deal with the current threat. And if all goes well then I'll do that, hit end turn, watch the enemy react on enemy phase, and then at the start of the next player phase, I'll go through the process again and figure out which of the enemies that I could previously ignore are now ones that I had to deal with. But more often that I'd care to admit, not everything goes well, and one of the units that I thought I could safely ignore turns out to be in range to kill one of my units. And on the one hand, the answer for this is a simple one. I need to be more careful. I need to be diligent in checking ranges for all enemies and I need to repeat the process if ever I find that I'm advancing further than I was expecting to. But on the other hand, doing so is boring. Going around and highlighting a bunch of units to show their attack ranges isn't fun. Manually counting out movement is even less fun. It's sometimes a necessary part of playing Fire Emblem, but it isn't one that I particularly enjoy. Which means that it's very tempting to cut corners. If a unit looks like it's something I can safely ignore then that means that it probably is. Most of the time, that level of extra care and attention genuinely isn't necessary and would only be wasting my time. I can hardly berate myself for not doing that. Honestly, I think that one of the reasons that Three Houses is my favourite Fire Emblem is that it has the red aggro lines. These massively reduce my cognitive load and let me avoid the busywork of repeatedly checking enemy ranges. I know that these aren't universally beloved, though, and I do sort of see why. Having enemy intent being shown so clearly can make it easier to cheese the AI. And there are occasional problems where the UI says that an enemy will attack one unit but they actually attack another, which can lead to player frustration. They definitely weren't perfect, but I love them because -- for me -- they solved the problem of an enemy coming from seemingly out of nowehere to kill a unit that I thought was safe. So, having rambled on for a while, I have three questions: Do you think that having full map awareness for large Fire Emblem maps is something that is humanly possible, or do you think that it's pretty much required to ignore a lot of units each turn and only focus on what's immediately at hand? For people who are less prone to making "oops, I didn't see that enemy" style mistakes, do you have any tips for what I should be doing to better avoid them? Is it a play-style thing? Are you just more meticulous than I am? Better at concentrating on more things at once? Or are there tips and tricks that I could use to get better at this? How do you feel about the red aggro lines? Do you think that they do a good job of mitigating the problem of the inherent difficulty (impossibility?) of full map awareness? Or do you think that there are better ways that the problem could be addressed in the UI to take that cognitive load off the player?

Oh, wow. It is wild to me that that actually exists. I looked it up on Steam and... yeah, the reviews are pretty much exactly what I would have expected. What I am genuinely curious about, though, is the motivations of the developer. Was this a cynical cheap cash grab, exploiting the fact that of course a bunch of people are going to buy this either because it's the Bible or just as a cheap gag? Or was it a genuinely well-intentioned but completely inept attempt to produce a good digital Bible? It kinda looks like the latter, but who even knows with something like this. I'd assume that they chose WEB over NIV because the former is public domain while the latter is still under copyright. Not including KJV at launch is a completely baffling decision, though. I'm an atheist* and even I know the significance of the KJV. *At least, that's the best first approximation descriptor of my religious position, and nobody needs to read the essay that it would take to give the full version.

It's like this. I don't particularly care for big action movies. They just aren't my thing. But this doesn't mean that I never watch them. If I'm with other people and they really want to watch an action movie, then I'll go along with it. I don't hate action movies. Sometimes, if they're good I'll even be able to enjoy them well enough. But mostly, I'm there because I want to spend time with friends or family. The company makes the movie way better than it would otherwise be, especially if they're really enthusiastic and into what they're watching. But if you ask me what I want to do, I will basically never be the one asking to go and watch the action movie. On the other hand, I really hate horror movies. They are not fun for me at all, no matter who I'm with. If you make me sit through one, I'll be miserable, on-edge, and generally in a much worse frame of mind than I was when I started watching it. Even if it's an objectively great horror movie. I don't care who you are or how much I care about you, I'm not going to go and watch a horror movie with you. And if you respect me at all then you aren't going to try to make me. For some people on the asexual spectrum, sex is like an action movie: not something they'd ever choose, but something that they'll happily do for the sake of a partner and can even get some pleasure from. On the other hand, for other asexual people, sex is more like a horror movie. They absolutely hate it, want nothing to do with it, and would have a miserable time if they were made to. (And yes, I also fall somewhere on this spectrum, but no, I'm not going to say where because that's my business.)

Thanks to everyone who contributed here, and an extra thanks to First Mate for all the effort of running it. It was a fun thread to participate in, and the combination of having to explain my own thoughts and reading what everyone else had to say has really helped to consolidate the way that I think about battalions in this game. I'm confident that whenever I end up doing my next run of Three Houses, I'll be making better battalion choices than I would have been otherwise. I also think that the final list that we ended up with is pretty solid. Definitely not perfect, but by and large it looks about right. If a new player came to me and asked which battalions were worth using, I'd not hesitate to point them here. And that's about as good as we could have hoped for, I think. I'm fairly sure that my gradings were a little eratic and incosistent at time, since I didn't keep a full list of the scores that I gave, so had to go back and check whenever I thought that two battalions should get similar scores to each other. I'd intended to go back and do some last minute corrections for that sort of thing, but real life ended up getting in the way of that, as it so often does. But I think that having scores from several different people helped to minimise the effect of that sort of thing, leading to a very solid final list.

For me, this year's game of the year is pretty clearly and obviously Wordle. (Yeah, it technically came out at the tail end of last year, but it only took off this year, so I'm counting it.) Wordle was by far and away the most popular game of 2022, and reached a level of cultural phenomenon that is matched by very few other video games ever. When was the last time that a game was the most googled term of the year? Has it ever happened before? It was also the best value game of the year, coming in at the bargain price of completely free. In terms of dollars per hour ratio, nothing beats it. The gameplay itself is fun and catchy, and while the graphics are simple, they are the perfect choice for the game. But like many other great games before it, it really shines on its social aspects. It's just that much better when played with friends and family. For me, the absolute highlight was being able to talk about it with my septugenarian mum, who otherwise doesn't play games. Having it as a way to better connect with her far outweighs anything that any other game has done for me this year, making it an easy game of the year. (Vampire Survivors and Victoria 3 were both pretty fun too.)

I would recommend it. The achievements are actually pretty good, generally. They mostly strike the right balance of coming in at a decent pace but not too quick, and with the hardest ones being challenging enough to be interesting but not so hard and grindy as to be frustrating. Provided that you actually like the core Stardew Valley gameplay, and you're good enough at twin stick shooters to beat the minigame, doing the achievements is a good. You know, I can't even argue that. When you put it like that, you are right, I am wrong, and HoI4 is far too bellicose. What I meant was that buying SDV specifically to be a hypercapitalist is a lot like buying HoI so you can do a pacifist Switzerland run. But that wasn't what I said. The only one of those that I've played is FF7, and I pretty much hated it. Honestly, I've only played three mainline FF games (7, 13, 15) and I didn't like any of them. As far as I'm concerned, the best Final Fantasy game is Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As A King. And if you're getting hate for liking FF8, I'm getting more hate for saying that I like FFCC:MLAAK way better than FF7. I do intend to get around to trying FF6 at some point, though. For Chrono Trigger, though, there aren't any random encounters. Even the most basic mook fights are in set locations, and mostly have the enemies appear on the map where it's often possible to dodge them. The good side of that design is that it means that there's no need to grind, and you don't get into the tedium of being interrupted by endless random encounters when you're just trying to go from point A to point B. The down side is that it's difficult to go much faster than the pace the game prescribes for you. If the general pacing that it offers works for you, then it's great; if you want something either faster or slower, then I can imagine it being frustrating.

STARDEW VALLEY (CONCERNED APE, 2016) Finished December 15, 2022. Playtime: 703.7 hours. Stardew Valley is one of my favourite games of all time. But I would bet good money that literally everyone who reads this post has heard of it and either played it or decided that it's not for them and they have no interest in playing it. Which means there is no point in my talking about the game. However, my journey to 100% completion was interesting enough that I want to talk about it. There are 40 achievements for Stardew Valley. I got my first achievement on March 9, 2016. I got up to 38 achievements on 17 December, 2017. Then I got my 39th achievement on 14 December, 2022 and finally grabbed the last achievement on 15 December, 2022. This is pretty unusual in and of itself, btu not unprecedented. I have a few games with achievement dates that look like that. What it normally means is that I played the game a bunch, got most of the achievements, then lost interest, didn't play for years, and then finally came back to finish off the last couple. But that's not what's happened here. As I said, Stardew Valley is one of my favourite games of all time. I think I've played it to some degree in every year since it released. And I would guess that I had something like 200 hours in the game when I hit 38/40 achievements, before getting to 40/40 at about 700 hours. So what's going on. Well, of the 40 achievements, there are 37 that I would characterise as being stuff that you get just by playing Stardew Valley. Sure, some of them are considerably more difficult or time consuming than others, but they're all along the same line. They ask you to do things that you're gong to do anyway if you play enough. That leaves only three remaining. Two of these three are for success in a specific mini-game. If you go into the saloon in Stardew Valley, you can find an arcade machine, and you can actually play it. The game is a twin-stick shooter which plays completely unlike anything else in Stardew Valley, is occasionally janky, and is actually legitimately tough. One of Stardew Valley's achievements asks you to beat this game. Another asks you to beat it without losing a single life. These have been achieved by respectively 1.6% and 1.0% of all players, making them the third rarest and the rarest of the game's achievements. Back in 2017, I managed to beat the minigame and earn the first of the achievements, but I decided that I just wasn't good enough to have a realistic shot of beating it without losing a life. 100% achievements was a lost cause. It just wasn't going to happen for me. Time passed. I played a bunch more Stardew Valley. Found a bunch of other things to do. New content dropped for the game, and I played that too. But 100% was still the impossible dream. And then the 1.5 patch came out at the end of 2020, and added a new feature where you could leave the arcade machine part way through your game, come back to it later, and carry on where you left off. And this opened up a new possibility: savescumming. I made a mental note of this at the time, but never got around to trying for the deathless run until just recently. And with savescumming, I managed it without too much difficulty. It took me maybe about an hour a day, for 4 or 5 days, something like that. And with that, I was at 39/40 achievements. The final one being, essentially, the closest thing that Stardew Valley has to the evil route. See, for anyone who isn't aware, a big part of the plot of Stardew Valley is about a conflict between, on the one hand, a quaint and idyllic rural community and the nature spirits that watch over them, and on the other hand, the completely amoral profiteering megacorp that is looking to exploit the heck out of them all. And the game gives you the choice: which of the two do you want to side with? And, of course, most people choose to side with the local community against the megacorp. Because of course they do. Not that there's anything wrong with just wanting to greedily make as much money as you possibly can in a video game, but if that's what someone wants, why did they choose to pick up Stardew Valley, of all games? It would be like trying to play Hearts of Iron and complaining that the whole game was too hawkish and bellicose. But the route exists, and it has an achievement, and I had never done it, partly because most people don't (only 3.9% of all players have the achievement) and partly because I'm a bleeding heart. And anyway, I never felt compelled to do it for the achievement, because it wasn't as if it would put me up to 100%. Up until it would. At which point, I finally sat down to do it, and picked up that achievement too, the very next day. It's super easy if you have the sort of game knowledge that comes from having sunk 700 hours into a game.

I'm curious to see what they do with pikachu going forward. Ash's pikachu has always been a big part of its status as the mascot of the series, and that's presumably going to go away now. I'm sure it will still get a lot of attention, but probably not as much any more. And any new -- especially young -- fans who get into the franchise aren't going to be seeing as much pikachu going forward. I wonder if that will end up doing anything to hurt its longterm popularity or recognisability. (This does assume that they aren't just going to immediately give a pikachu to whoever the new anime protagonist is, of course, but that seems like it would be a weird decision.)

School of Sorcery Soldiers: 6.5/10. Would be pretty great if they showed up earlier, with great stats for the C authority requirement, and the best offensive magic gambit. As is, they arrive past the point when you're typically relying on C authority battalions, and you probably have better choices by the time you get them. Even so, they can still be a good choice if you have multiple mages or if you have someone (maybe Hapi) who is lagging behind in authority. Church Soldiers: 0/10. What if we took Alliance Physicians, but gave them to you a chapter later, and only give them to you if you do a paralogue that's one of the hardest in the game to access and one of the hardest in the game to complete? Bergliez War Group: 2/10. +8 to physical attack is great. Everything else varies between mediocre and terrible. The only time I'd even consider equipping this would be if I somehow didn't have any of the other +8 attack battalions and I absolutely needed all 8 points of that in order to secure some break point. But realistically, that's never going to happen, and you're always going to have better choices by the time you get this. If you ever do get it, given the awkward paralogue requirement. Aegir Astral Knights: 5/10. The paralogue that gives these is the one that I've done least in the game. Not only is it inaccessible in Crimson Flower, not only does it require two characters from different houses, but one of those characters is Ferdinand, who is probably the most awkward recruit in the game (heavy armour requirement, and no B support until post-skip). I think I've done it once or maybe twice. Realistically, this makes this somewhere close to being a Silver Snow exclusive battalion. Yes, you can grab it in Azure Moon or Verdant Wind, but there's a pretty high opportunity cost to doing so. Once you do pick them up, though, they're pretty nice. I'm not really a fan of grounded dodge tanks, but if you're running one then this is as good a choice as anything. But the niche role and the poor availability stops it getting anything above a middling score. Ordelia Sorcery Co: 5/10. Great stats, but same terrible availability as the Aegir Astral Knights, and the worst of the three Resonant gambits. In a way, this is actually pretty similar to the starter battalions from back in chapter 2: I'm probably going to use it for a few chapters, but it gives a small enough bonus over what I would otherwise have that I wouldn't miss it too much if it wasn't there. But this also has the disadvantage that I'm only seeing it in a small fraction of games. Opera Co Volunteers: 7.5/10. Worse availability than the Blue Lion Dancers, but lower authority requirement. Honestly, it's a little tricky to say which I prefer. Since I'm so hesitant and generally of two minds, I think it's fair to say that there isn't that much difference, so they deserve the same scores.

Brigid Mercenaries: 0.5/10. It's unlikely that you care about E-rank battalions by this point and even if you are, then you're probably preferring Jeralt's Mercenaries, Almyra Mercenaries, Seiros Mercenaries, Essar Research Group or Seiros Holy Monks. Giving it a half point partly because it is unique in offering both crit and hit at E rank, but mostly just because I'm in a generous mood today. Brigid Hunters: 5/10. Only really worth considering if you're running a grounded dodge tank, and that's not a build that I particularly care for. And even then, you're only choosing this if you really care about crit as well or if you don't have the Gautier Knights or Aegir Astral Knights. Still, it has a niche which means I'm not going to give it lower than a 5, but it's a narrow niche which means I'm not giving it more than 5. Varley Archers: 2/10. Stacking hit tends to run into diminishing returns earlier than stacking most other stats, so a battalion that goes all-in on hit just isn't good. Especially if you aren't doing good damage with those hits. At least Fusillade is good. Hevring Prayer Troops: 4/10. In order for these to be worthwhile: You have to want Blessing. You have to want Blessing at some point after doing the Leonie/Linhardt paralogue. You have to be on a route other than Verdant Wind (since you have Alliance Sages there). You have to either not have used used another Blessing battalion before getting these, or you have to be using Blessing sufficiently often afterwards to make it worth leveling these up. Admitedly, I'm not a fan of Blessing to begin with, but I'm just not seeing the opportunity for this one. Sauin Militia: 1/10. And about 0.9 of that 1 is for the excellent gambit. 20 hit is good, but not exceptional, which means it doesn't even have the hypothetical "what if I just really need to stack hit?" niche. This is basically a sidegrade from Alliance Archers, which was available 7 chapters earlier and required a lower authority rank. Holst's Chosen: 4/10. Competent, but nothing more. Might see play in a low recruitment run, given how poor the competition is from CF native paralogue battalions. Edmund Troops: 6/10. The hit-stacking battalion that puts all other hit stacking battalions to shame. If you're really looking to stack hit, this not only offers more of it, but also gives you some solid damage bonuses to back it up. Still, stacking hit still isn't particularly strong, so that's not a huge endorsement. But even beyond the hit, this isn't bad. At +5/+5 this probably isn't your best attack boosts for hybrid attackers, but it's solid and is definitely a contender if you have more than one such unit. The gambit isn't the best, but is also prtty solid. Overall, you've got a battalion that is excellent at one thing and then solid across everything else, which means that it's pretty easy to find a place to slot it in.

Sweet, thanks. That will save me some hassle. There are few forces in this universe as strong as spite and stubbornness. With both of them, I am unstoppable. Agreed. I think it still holds up well today, and I think that there's a solid argument to be made that it is the best JRPG for the time that it was made, but in terms of absolute quality, I do think that other more recent JRPGs have surpassed it, simply in terms of being able to do so much more thanks to a quarter century of technological advances. I'd call something like Dragon Quest XI a pretty unambiguously better game than Chrono Trigger. Though I will say that I'm an absolute sucker for time travel stories, which certainly helps bias me in favour of Chrono Trigger more than it necessarily deserves. Not going to go into this in detail because most of what needed saying has already been said, but I want to clarify one point. When I spoke of wasted potential I do not mean "there was potential for Chrono Trigger to be a good game but because it phoned in the achievements it has wasted that potential and is now a bad game". What I actually meant was "Chrono Trigger is a good game. On top of that, it also had the potential to have a good and interesting set of achievements, but it wasted that potential and instead has a mediocre to bad set of achievements." I was talking about potential for the game's achievements only. Not for potential in any larger sense. I feel you. A friend who knows I'm doing this challenge recommended me a game for it last night. Weaves of Fate. I don't have a W yet and it's a little indie game that he says only took him 2.5 hours to get 100% on. And the temptation is strong. I'm planning to at least look at some other W titles before I take that road, but knowing I have a fallback is going to make me less inclined to be excessively stubborn on any of them.

Welp, I've gone and added three more letters to my A-Z challenge since I last posted. C, U, and Z are all in the books. Let's talk about them, and all the different ways that their achievements sucked. Unpacking! Zachtronics Solitaire Collection! Chrono Trigger! I don't suppose you happen to remember the correct configuration for this, do you? I'm thinking of making this one of my next achievement hunts, and don't want to go the wrong way.

I'm the other way around. I think that if you're expected to pay up-front for an expansion pass, you at least deserve to know what's in it, since that allows you to make a vaguely informed decision about whether you want to buy it. Keeping everything secret means that a lot of people are going to imagine the DLC in the best possible light, buy it based on optimism, and then be disappointed when it doesn't deliver. Like, for the emblems, a lot of people are going to be thinking about all of their favourite characters who could be there. I'd love to daydream about getting (for instnce) L'Arachel, Elincia and Tibarn. Those are some of my favourite characters. But it could equally well have Camilla, Xander, Tharja, and Kris. Who are... let's say that they're not my favourite characters. And there's really no way for me (or anyone) to know whether the DLC as a whole will be worth it without knowing what's actually going to be in it. And yet they're expecting people to buy it anyway because of FOMO, instant gratification, and not wanting to be left out of The Discourse. (None of which should in any way be taken as an endorsement or defense of Ubisoft, who are a wretched company who I refuse to do business with.) (And the worst of the worst, in this respect, are companies who say exactly what they're going to do in great detail, and then go back on their word and deliver something else, which is invariably considerably naffer.) And on the subject of Nintendo specifically, they've always been fairly hostile towards their customers. The big legal battle that they had with Galoob and Codemasters over the Game Genie was over 30 years ago now, for instance. This is very much not a new thing. They might be getting somewhat worse or somewhat more brazen in recent years, but they've never been anything approaching good.