lenticular

As I have mentioned in the past on these forums, I don't think that Fire Emblem's gameplay is particularly great when viewed in a vacuum. At it's best, it's pretty fun! But I can't think of any cases where it's truly compelling enough that it would be enough to carry the game on its own. And at its worst, it can become a tedious slog. If Fire Emblem were an abstract strategy game without any story, characters, music, setting, etc. then I would not play it. On the other hand, I also don't think that Fire Emblem's stories are particularly great when viewed in a vacuum either. They also range from "pretty fun but not compelling enough to carry a game on its own" to unqualifiedly dreadful. And yet, when you combine "bad chess" with "bad anime", you end up with a series which I like enough that I choose to spend my free time talking about it with strangers on the Internet. So what gives? I think that what it ultimately boils down to for me is this: moving my pieces around the board is more fun when I am emotionally invested in them. This is a combination of plot, characterisation, character design and art, voice acting, dialogue, and everything else. And is different from game to game and from character to character. But Fire Emblem is consistently good at making me care. And once I care, then it's fun to make a terrible unit great, or a good unit unstoppable. It's fun to build my own mini-narative about what's going on in individual maps. As an example: I remember one time when I was playing Path of Radiance and doing the bridge map with all the pit traps. And for some reason, I ended up having Boyd fall into the pits over and over. If I didn't have any sort of emotional connection with the characters, this would just have been a horribly frustrating experience. But because I did, I couldn't help but imagine Boyd as the hothead that he is just rushing ahead into each and every trap while all the other characters around him were facepalming, so the whole thing just became funny. And it can work the other way around too. Using a character in gameplay can make me care more about what happens to them in story. Especially when the ludonarative harmony is there and the gameplay and the story are working together to reinforce the same message.

90% of everything that I create derives from this feeling. "Oh, ffs humanity is that the best you can do? Why has nobody made this properly yet? Fine. Fine! I guess I'll do it myself then." This has given birth to everything from game guides to fanfiction to entire wikipedia articles. Exasperation is a powerful creative force.

I've always interpreted the "el" prefix as being from the term for God/a god in various Semitic languages. So, "God's fire", "fire of the gods", or something along those lines. I've no idea if that was what the original creators were going for, but it's how I always see it.

One other issue I have with recurring bosses is that they can push balance a bit askew by putting a premium on characters/tools that can deal with them. The Death Knight is possibly the worst offender here. Because you have so many fights with him, you're incentivised to make sure you have a way of dealing with a high level mounted unit. Lysithea would still be a good unit even if the Death Knight didn't exist, but because she learns Dark Spikes Τ she is also a premiere counter to the toughest enemy of a lot of chapters. If his three appearences in White Clouds had instead been a Fortress Knight, a Falcon Knight, and a Gremory (or special unique classes based on them) then we'd have to use different characters/classes against each of them.

I don't think that's an insurmountable problem. It's been a while since I played, but aren't there places where you fight Hounds but they aren't actually using Emblem Rings? Looking it up, both fireemblemwiki and Triangle Attack list that Marni and Mauvier arne't actually using rings in Chapter 16. Is that right, or are they both wrong? From what I'm seeing online, there are three chpaters where you fight the hounds without Emblems: Chapter 14 (Zephia, Marni, and Mauvier), Chapter 16 (Marni and Mauvier), Chapter 21 (Zephia and Gris). If this is accurate, then just replacing them with single-chapter bosses in these instances would have gone a long way to improving things. If they could have cut the hounds down to just an initial encounter in chapter 11 where they're scary and you run away, then the big 6v6 where you win but they run away, and then one additional encounter with each of them where you get the catharsis of taking them out, then I think that would have worked. But even beyond that, I think there are other ways that the story could have been written to allow for "we beat a boss with an Emblem but we don't recover the Emblem" that didn't involve fighting the same enemies over and over. Just off the top of my head: Sombron has put some sort of enchantment on the rings so that they teleport away as soon as their owner dies (as in Chapter 11). We have to find a way to break or work around that enchantment. The bosses with the rings manage to escape, but Sombron executes them for failure and gives the rings to someone else. We recover the rings but they've been corrupted to the point that we can't use them and we have to find a way to purify them. We kill the boss, but at the same time that we do so a vast army of corrupted reinforcements show up and we don't have the time to recover the ring before we have to flea. It's really not that difficult to hand-wave other justifications. And yeah, they can be a little contrived, but there's no need to use the same justification every time. If you only use each of them once, then they don't become nearly as stale.

Radiant Dawn 2-E is also at least adjacent to the idea. You don't choose which units are reinforcements, but it absolutely runs with the idea of the units you used in the prior map not being able to return in time for the start of the battle. And it even has Marcia on her pegasus arrive fastre than the rest of the knights on their horses, which I think is a nice touch.

I agree with this. I'm not a fan of the Black Knight character design (those pauldrons are absurd!) but I do think they absolutely nail it in terms of gameplay/story integration. I'd point to the Four Hounds as a particularly egregious example of this. It's impossible to take an enemy seriously after you've already beaten them multiple times. The Death Knight is almost as bad, but at least taking him down starts off as an optional challenge, so it takes a bit longer for him to become completely impotent.

I don't think it would be too hard for Ludveck to discredit Renning in this circumstance. "You abandoned us at our time of need and only come back after I've rebuilt the country!" "You aren't actually Renning, just some cheap lookalike that my enemies are trying to use to discredit me!" "The trauma you suffered during the war was too great, and you should live out a life without the pressures of rule!" "Your niece disgraced your family and took away your line's right to rule!" And so on and so forth. Yeah, the logic is pretty dubious, but there's enough there to build a case. And if there are enough people, either noble or common, who want to be convinced then the strength of argument doesn't matter for all that much.

I agree with this. He comes across much more as a populist and an opportunist than a conviction politician. He likely doesn't have that much of a strong opinion either way about war with Daein, but he would go for it if he thought it was a popular move that would consolidate his power. Similarly for his relationship with laguz. He might or might not be a racist, but I doubt he would let that stop him from fanning the flames of racism in his subjects if he thought that havign a scapegoat would be politically expedient. So my assumption is that he would side with Begnion against Gallia, both because Begnion is more powerful and because war against laguz would be an easier sell.

Part of this is definitely just personal preference (this is the unpopular opinions thread, after all). I like more grounded characters and motivations, and I'm a big fan of the "we've won the war and now we have to win the peace" trope, so I am just predisposed to like Ludveck more than a lot of other antagonists. But even with that said, I do have some problems with all of the other three that you mention. Ashnard comes across as weird and inconsistent to me. On the one hand, he has his utmost commitment to social darwinism, the triumph of the strong over the weak, and the desire to test himself in fights against the strongest opponents. But on the other hand, he also has magic armour that renders him effectively impervious to harm from almost all enemies ensuring that he almost never enters a fair fight. And he also used a blood pact to come to power which goes against his philosophy of strength of arms. And then there's the whole dragons eating people's faces party thing, where he was trying to awaken the "dark god" even though there was no reason to suspect that would end well for him. There are things to like about Ashnard, for sure, but he's a bit too muddled for me to truly like him. Deghinsea, I think, is a good character but a poor antagonist. For the majority of the duology he's a hardnosed isolationist and pacifist, neither for nor against the player, and I like him in that role. But when you fight him near the end of Radiant Dawn, it's mostly a case of "oh yeah, and this guy is here too". He doesn't really have much agency of his own at that point. We're fighting Ashera, and he's just another roadblock that she puts in front of us. Because fighting dragons is cool, I guess? Sephiran is somewhat similar in that I like him as a character but not as an antagonist. He never feels like the guy who we are working against, even when he is. He's too deep into the background. It's obvious that there's something weird going on with Sephiran that we don't know about, but we only really learn about it as we're about to fight him. For an antagonist to really work for me, I want to see more push and pull of the protgaonist and antagonist at odds with each other and actively trying to outmaneuvre the other. With Sephiran, we just get the big reveal that he had been plotting everything in the background all along, and then he dies/repents.

I don't think he's super deep, no, but we are grading on a curve here. A lot of Fire Emblem antagonists are just straight up members of the Leopards Dragons Eating People's Faces Party, who seem to want to bring about the end of the world without stopping to consider that they are a part of the world. Hyacinth would be a particularly egregious recent example of this sort of thinking. Yes, Ludveck is mostly just seeking power, but he's doing so in a very human way. He's seeking political power by using subterfuge and military might. I find this way more compelling and believable than any other FE antagonist I can think of. Yeah, I know. That's why I said that bexp was the main method of catching up and Paragon a supplemental one. You use a combination of bexp and a bit of regular fighting to get her to her first promotion, and then you can give her Paragon if you want to speed her up even further. (This isn't hypothetical; I've been using her to good effect in my current game. She's a level 5 Silver Knight as I'm about to start Part IV.)

Unpopular opinions, Radiant Dawn edition! (AKA, no prizes for guessing what game I've been replaying.) 1. Ludveck is the best antagonist in the history of Fire Emblem. He has decent characterisation and motivation rather than just being a Saturday-morning-cartoon mustache-twirler. He's also actually pretty smart, coming up with decent plans and strategies that we need to thwart. 2. Ike should have been a Gotoh. His presence through part 3 and the pre-tower parts of part 4 add nothing to the game, and going through the process of training him up from zero to hero again detracts from his Path of Radiance arc. Much better to have him be mysteriously absent through most of the game ("he disappeared after the Mad King's War and nobody has been able to find him") and then give him an epic moment of triumphant return as we're about to enter the Tower. Some combination of Soren, Titania, Mist, Ranulf, and Skrimir would have been more than enough to fill his story role, and it's not as if the Greil mercs are hurting for strong units. 3. Escort missions are good actually. Do you remember 3-P? That's the one where Skrimir and his Gallian army go full Leeroy Jenkins on you and you have to run to keep up with them and try to take out mages and ballistas. It's a pretty easy level, but as I played it, the one thing that I kept finding myself thinking was "Three Houses should have had a level like this where you have to chase after Boar Prince Dimitri". 4. 3-12 archer is better than 3-13 archer. They're both pretty easy levels, so it's ultimately inconsequential, but the archers who sit at the top of the western cliff and let you completely ignore that side of the map are way more convenient than anything that 3-13 archer accomplishes. 5. A remake should have unique support conversations for every possible pairing. If we ever get one, that is. Common wisdom seems to be that of course there aren't support conversations in Radiant Dawn, because with every pairing being allowed and the cast being so big, that would just be too many supports. I do not agree with this common wisdom. I'm not saying that there should full length support conversations, but little one-liners are entirely within the realms of possibility. Think of something of comparable length and complexity to what Engage has for the conversations with Emblems. Or, for that matter, think of the few unique support conversations that already exist in Radiant Dawn. Like, did you know that Lyre has unique lines for when you support her with Oliver? I wonder if anyone has ever actually seen that in game. 6. A Faint Light is the hardest chapter in Radiant Dawn. For anyone who doesn't remember and is too lazy to look it up, A Faint Light is chapter 1-3, aka "the one where you recruit Aran and Ilyana". I don't know what it is about this chapter, but I seem to end up resetting in it every single time that I replay Radiant Dawn. There are other chapters that give me problems sometimes, but none of them nearly as consistently as A Faint Light. 7. Fiona is a pretty decent unit. Yeah, obviously she's greatly underleveled when you recruit her so she's going to be a bit of a project if you do want to use her. I'm not denying that. But Radiant Dawn is a game that makes it really easy for underleveled units to catch up, mainly through bexp btu also through the existence of multiple paragon scrolls, so if you do want to catch her up then it's really not remotely difficult. And then if you do so, she does have some genuine upside with inate Imbue and Savior and an Earth affinity. The combination of Savior and Earth affinity means she can effectively have a stat backpack, turning a deployment slot (which the game gives us way too many of) into +45 avoid. Combine this with high speed and you end up with a unit who seldom gets hit. And then when she does get hit, high def means she doesn't take much damage. And then when she does take damage, she heals it back again with Imbue and (eventually) Sol. She's not the greatest unit in the world, but she is pretty decent.

Heck yes. That is a fun fact! When you do get around to going for 100%, I'd say that the two hardest achievements, by quite a distance, are Auckland and Berlin. The rest were just a case of sitting down to do them, maybe taking a couple of tries, but no big deal. But those two felt genuinely difficult to me. I have poked a bit at Mini Motorways too, but it didn't hold my attention in quite the same way that Mini Metro did. Maybe I will give it another chance at some point to see if my brain is in a more receptive state for it. Thanks!

Number of Fallout games that I own on Steam: 6 (1-4, NV, and Tactics) Number of Fallout games that I've ever actually played: 2 (3 and 4) Number of Fallout games that I've ever enjoyed at all: 1 (3) Number of Fallout games that I have any desire to play as of 2024: 0 Yeah. I played Fallout 3 when it was originally out, and I liked it a lot. Then I skipped New Vegas because of a bad interaction with community managment. Then I played 4 when it first came out, and thought it was complete garbage. I do not know if that's because 4 actually was notably worse than 3, if it wasn't as attuned to my preferences, or if I'd just developed better taste in teh intervening years. Possibly all three. I've occasionally thought in the intervening years that maybe I should stop holding my petty grudge on New Vegas and actually play it, since it is one of gaming's sacred cows, so I'm really glad to read this post that tells me that no, I'm really not missing anything and I can happily go back to forgetting about the series. The way I've always heard that particular legend be retold isn't so much "this should have got a higher metacritic score" but "why on earth are we using metacritic score for anything important". On an unrelated note, my most recent 100% was MINI METRO by Dinosaur Polo Club, which I completed on Saturday, scoring my 50th perfect game on Steam, which I am quite happy with myself for. My review of the game is as follows: fuck Auckland. That's about it. Any questions?

I don't think that's even Edelgard's dumbest moment. Consider: In the prologue, Edelgard is attacked by Kostas and very nearly ends up with an axe buried in her skull. She only survives because Byleth decides to leap in front of the axe (which doesn't qualify for dumbest lord status itself on the grounds of being an instinctive reaction rather than a considered one) and then lucks out by happening to have the ability to control time. In chapter 2, we learn that Kostas has been acting on behalf of his employer, the Flame Emperor. In chapter 11, we learn that the Flame Emperor is, in fact, Edelgard. In conclusion: Edelgard orders Kostas to kill Edelgard, without seeming to have any sort of plan to prevent this, and only survives due to ridiculous luck. Edelgard is the dumbest girl.

My interpretation is that all the other rebellions that spring up and all the troops that flock to their cause are as a direct result of their actions. They make a very specific set of choices which inspire the populous, make smart tactical decisions, and so on. So while they aren't fighting the most difficult fights, the path to success that they have to thread is an extremely narrow one. Of course, it certainly helps their cause that Micaiah is a seer with magical precognition and can discern the exact path that they have to take. And if anyone wants to argue that this makes it so their fight wasn't a difficult one, then I certainly wouldn't say that you're wrong. But to me, it's more that it was a very difficult situation that Micaiah was uniquely well suited for. I guess my metric is: if you took all the other lords in teh series and put them in the same situation, how many of them would have succeeded? Which I think would be few if any of them, because they don't have Micaiah's prophetic abilities.

No clue. I've never played Thracia and know basically nothing about it. I guess I should have explicitly stated "of the games that I've played".

I'll say Radiant Dawn, Part 1 as the hardest. I think it has the biggest disparity between where they start and where they finish. What they accomplish isn't as impressive as most other games, but their starting position was so much worse. Most games have us playing as lords or princes, with commensurate resources. Even when we see the rulers of fallen kingdoms, they have diplomatic connections that can provide state-level resources. At the start of Radiant Dawn, we have a small group of five insurgents with minimal resources and connections, and their goal is to overthrow the occupying empire. A surefire losing bet if ever there was one, and yet they succeed. I agree with Fates as the easiest on the grounds of pocket dimensions. Not only can they step outside of time whenever they need a break, they also have the ability to breed and age up new soldiers for their army instantly.

For me, it varies. There are some series where it either fully or mostly applies, but others where it just isn't the case at all. First, the ones where it holds mostly true: The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past was my first, and is still my favourite by quite a distance. I still go back and fully replay it every so often, and it was the only Zelda game that had managed to hold my interest enough for me to complete until the Switch remake of Link's Awakening. Super Mario: Technically, my first was Super Mario Bros 3 on my cousin's NES, but the first I really got into was Super Mario World when I got a SNES. These days, I'd say it's pretty much a tie between World and Odyssey for my favourite. Fire Emblem: My first was Path of Radiance, and while I don't call it my absolute favourite these days, it's still up there. There really isn't much between Path of Radiance, Radiant Dawn, and Three Houses for me. Now ones where it doesn't: Mario Kart: Super was my first, but Double Dash is my favourite. Civilization: My first was Civ II but my favourite is a tossup between 4 and 5 (or Alpha Centauri if you count that). Life Is Strange: My first was the original, but my favourite is True Colors. XCOM: I started with Enemy Unknown, but my favourite now is Chimera Squad. Mass Effect: I started with 1, but vastly prefer both 2 and 3. The Sims: Started with 1, favourite was 3. I suspect that if I tried hard to think of more, it'd be easier for me to come up with ones where the rule didn't apply than ones where it does. But I will say that The Legend of Zelda is the one example where it really holds up for me. I've spent thirty years hoping for a game that hits me in quite the same way that Link to the Past does, and nothing else in the series has even come close. And I doubt that it ever will, because no matter how good the game is, it just has too much inertia of nostalgia to compete with at this point.

It would be horrifyingly dystopian because of what omniscience does to free will. Consider: Alice and Bob are fighting each other. Alice chooses to feint left before slashing right. But Bob knows everything, so he knows this is coming, so he counters Alice's move. Except that Alice knows that he knows so she changes what she was going to do to counter Bob's counter. Which Bob knows she will, so he changes what he's going to do, and so on ad infinitum. There are basically three ways out of this bind. One is just to throw your hands up, declare that we have a paradox, and as such it was never possible to have two omniscient individuals to begin with. The second is to say that while they technically have all the knowledge, Alice and Bob are limited by the processing speed of their brains; they can't act on the knowledge because they can't think fast enough. Which is fine, except that this puts a meaningful limit on how much they can actually know, so is really just a fancier way of restating that they aren't omniscient after all. The third resolution is to say that they genuinely do know what's going to happen next, but they can't act on it. Free will is thrown out of the window. We're all just observers watching the world unfold around us, taking the actions that we are fated to take, knowing that tragedies are coming and that our loved ones will hurt and die, and not being able to do anything about it. There's a definite air of psychological horror going on here. The third option could make for an interesting art piece game. It's Fire Emblem, except you have infinite time rewinds. Whenever you miss an attack, your player character knows you were going to, so you rewind and try again. The future is laid bare before you like a painting. You can try as many times as you like and find the perfect strategy. Of course, your player character already knows the perfect strategy, but this is a game, so you the player get to figure it out. Except, that when you figure out the perfect strategy, you aren't actually allowed to do it. The game shows you one possible tragic future, invites you to explore countless alternative options, so you find the one you like best, commit to it, and then it doesn't happen and instead the game plays out exactly as you saw in the first place. With your kingdom fallen and your mother dead, and so on. Sorry, would-be hero, but just because you can see the future doesn't mean you can change it. This would not be a fun game to play.

I do not think I will ever understand why all the movie adaptations and spin-offs from this book seem to want to focus on Wonka. To me at least, Charlie Bucket is by far and away the more interesting character. Wonka isn't even a character, really. He's just a piece of plot that happens to Charlie. The heart of the story is about the working class kid who has never had any opportunity in his life, but suddenly gets one and ends up being able to seize it better than his far more spoiled and pampered contemporaries. But Hollywood isn't interested in telling that story, for some reason? (Also: agree that Dahl varies from "a product of his time" at best to "bigoted doggerel" at worst.) (Also also: I definitely won't be seeing this on the big screen, because I hate going to the cinema with the passion of a thousand fiery suns, but maybe I will see it when it makes its way to the small screen.)

To be fair, there is quite a gap between "do you guys not have phones listen to music?" and "do you guys not listen to experimental J-pop B-sides?". I'm not as high on the Katamari soundtrack as some people (except for this big band jazz cover of Lonely Rolling Star which I cannot get enough of) but what I will say is that it wasn't really like anything else that I've heard. Which isn't to say that it isn't like anything else that exists, of course. But it's tapping into a musical tradition that I know basically nothing about. And I would guess that it's similar for a lot of people who wax poetic about it. If you've never listened to J-pop before then it's going to be a very different experience than if that's your musical genre of choice. Every so often, something like this will happen to remind me that GFWL was a thing existed, and I feel compelled to momentarily give thanks that it is no longer a thing that exists.

Personally, I'd like to see more names on covers, not fewer. I like to watch movies made by people who made other movies that I liked and read books written by people who wrote other books that I liked. But for some reason (spoiler: the reason is money) video game companies want to make it hard for me to know which people made the games I play so it's harder to follow individuals. As a point of comparison: if I look at my blu-ray of Interstellar, there are five names on the front of the box and an additional fourteen names on the back of the box. Meanwhile, if I look at my copy of Super Mario Odyssey, there are zero names on the front and an additional zero names on the back. Because the powers that be at Nintendo want us to imagine that games are just protruded out of the magical Nintendo factories without any actual people being involved. (I've no opinion about Kojima specifically, though. I've never played any of his games. They just don't seem like my sort of thing.)

One interesting wrinkle is that for a lot of resources, even if they exist, they aren't necessarily going to be in a form that people from our world would recognise. Not so much for something like coal, which will look pretty similar on any world where it exists because of the confines of physics and chemistry, but more so for biological resources. Rubber is an example that comes to mind that has been and still is massively important to industry. And it's likely that (e.g.) Tellius doesn't have the rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis. It might have some other plant that can produce a very similar organic polymer that could be used in much the same way, but the expertise from Earth just wouldn't carry over. We wouldn't know how to recognise the plant, how best to extract rubber from it, whether the same processing techniques (vulcanisation) would work in the same way, and so on. Even for a modern country running at full capacity, it would still likely take us decades to go through the process of finding a suitable tree in the forest of Gallia, then propagating it, starting up Gallia rubber plantations, experimenting with processing and so on until we get a new rubber industry again. The same would apply to other bioresources. Which local trees have timber suitable for different purposes? Or for making charcoal? What plants make the best biofuels? Which ones have medicinal properties? Unless the Fire Emblem world has exactly the same species as our world, we wouldn't know and wouldn't be able to use these new resources even where they exist. Presumably charcoal, same as happened in our world.

On the one hand: I don't typically like avatar characters in games where story is important to the experience. I don't think they've added to my personal enjoyment of any Fire Emblem game that has featured them, and I almost always just keep to the default name (the one exception being Mark, who I renamed to Maria because Mark seemed a strange name for a woman). My own preference would be for them to go away and never come back. On the other hand: Enough people seem to like them, and IS seem sufficiently committed to them that I doubt they're going to go away any time soon. So it seems like a waste of my energy to really care about them too much. They're an annoyance, for sure, but a sufficiently minor annoyance that I can live with them.