lenticular

Yeah, I liked that way of doing it as well. It felt very natural, and solved the problem without really creating a new one. I also found it pretty intuitive to pick up on "huh? why did that enemy hit me for 1 rather than 0? Oh, because 1 is the minimum damage. OK!" It did seem particularly well suited to the legions of summons that SoV throws at you, but I don't see why it owuldn't also work in other games.

I'd draw inspiration from CCGs. Magic: the Gathering has been around for almost 30 years and is still a juggernaut, so they're obviously doing something right. Their solution is to have a constantly rotating set of legal cards, with every year seeing new sets released and older sets rotating out. That way, they can potentially lower power level if they want to, just by letting the most powerful cards rotate out. At the same time, they also have a bunch of different formats, with old cards being legal in some of them, so people don't ever have to feel that their old cards are now completely worthless. And, well, the proof of the pudding's in the eating. It's worked for them. They've remained culturally relevant since the 1990s, and sold tens of billions of cards. Unpopular opinion alert! This is why I really wish that they would completely get rid of the National Dex from Pokémon. The more different pokémon that get added to the game, the less and less likely it is that they'll be able to retain anything that remotely resembles balance.

How do people generally feel about this mechanic whereby the AI will ignore anyone they can't hurt? For me, it's one of those "good in theory, annoying in practice" things. I like the idea of making the AI slightly less stupidly suicidal. That seems like a good thing. But in practice, it just ended up feeling like yet more annoying bookkeeping. If the enemy deals exactly 1 damage then that's scarcely any more threatening or less suicidal than when they deal 0 damage, but they'll still make those attacks without hesitation. Which means that you often have the tedious task of a Price Is Right style challenge of trying to get your defense up to the enemy's damage but without going over. I am fully expecting most people to like this, since most of y'all seem to enjoy the stuff that I think of as tedious bookkeeping, but I am interested to hear thoughts on it even so. And speaking of things that I like in theory but not so much in practice: this level. My big problem with it was the Stoneborn, and how their ranged attacks can make any non-combat units or frail player phase units feel like an absolute liability. I am generally not a huge fan of long-range enemy units in Fire Emblem, because of how much they distort how you play the level. Which is typically either "use your two or three best units who can tank everything" or "carefully dance around everything without getting into range until you have killed everything else". I don't mind if it happens once or twice per game, but with the combination of Stoneborn, offensive staves, and siege weapons, there are just too many of them in this game for my tastes. I like the idea of having the infinite no-experience reinforcements spanwing behind you to hurry you along, but it just didn't work all that well for me in practice.

There definitely are ways to have a captured unit shift loyalty, but it is the sort of thing that needs an explanation. The default assumption would be that someone captured and forced to fight on the opposite side would be disloyal in some form, so if we're being asked to believe that they won't be then I want to see some story or dialogue or something that explains why. If that works for you, then great. It's not for me, though. I just don't really enjoy FE very much if I don't connect well with the characters. Different strokes for different folks.

Not if it looks like it did in Fates, and probably not at all. There are three main problems that I have with it. Having it tied to specific characters and their personal skill. If you don't want to use those characters or if they're dead (or not recruited or otherwise unavailable) then that completely disables the mechanic. And it also makes those characters worse than they otherwise would be, since whenever you aren't capturing, they effectively don't have a personal at all. Captured characters not being fully realised. By which I mean a full set of supports, their own personal, etc. Without all the trimmings, captured characters feel flat. With the exception of the few capturables with interesting skill combinations, you're generally just getting inferior versions of what you already have. Which sounds like it might be useful as a way to pick up replacement units in a struggling ironman, but see point 1. It can't even be reliably used for that since the only character who can capture might be dead. Story concerns. It often just doesn't make any storyline sense. We capture someone from the opposing army, imprison them, and then they say "sure, I'll fight alongside you now" so we let them out and completely trust them to help us invade their home territory and kill their royal family? And don't ever stop to think that maybe they were just telling us what we wanted to hear so they could either betray us or just escape? Are we complete idiots? If I had to design a capture system that I wouldn't hate, I'd start off by having it tied to a class skill rather than a personal skill so that it isn't tied to specific individuals. Then I'd make it so you could only capture named enemies, not generics. Everyone you can recruit by capturing would be a fully realised character with a personality, supports, a personal skill, etc. For most of them, capturing would be one option and not the only way to recruit them. For instance, if there's an enemy character that is normally recruited by talking to them with a specific allied character, you might be able to capture them with a different unit, then recruit them after the battle. A few could be recruited exclusively via capture, though. Give them enough personality and backstory to make it believable that they would switch sides and that we have reason to trust them. Also make it so that capturing can give different results other than just recruitment. Some you might be able to ransom, some you might interrogate for intelligence, some you might be able to take their equipment, etc. I still wouldn't be super thrilled with capture even if they did all of that, but I'd be much more interested in it than I am in the Fates version.

Nope. Or at least, not really. It was on a 3DS (as opposed to a 2DS), but I always play with the 3D slider turned down to nothing, so there's no stereoscopic effect. But even then, there still feels as if there's a depth difference between the foreground and background images. It doesn't usually bother me all that much, but for whatever reason, the visual effect of the wind really hit me.

Oh man. This chapter. This chapter was such a headache. Literally. I could only play it for about 10-15 minutes at a time because staring through the visual noise of the winds strained my eyes, gave me a headache, and honestly made me feel a little bit ill. I'm hesitant to blame this one on the game, since I don't think this is a widespread problem, but yeah. That did not improve my disposition towards the chapter, and it's already pretty well disliked for other reasons.

World of Warcraft: Chromie is a transgender dragon. It's the explanation that makes most sense to me for why her dragon form has a name that follows male naming patterns, but her humanoid form definitely presents as female. Fallout 3: Moira Brown is related somehow (probably a descendant of) Doc Brown from the Back to the Future trilogy. Just because of the shard name and the similar hyperactive scientist personalities.

I could argue other details here, I suspect that the main difference is that I probably value those 4-5 activity points more than you do. Especially since they're fairly early in the game when professor level is still fairly low and activity points are in shortest supply. And doubly especially since faculty training doesn't give professor xp meaning you're not only losing those 4-5 activity points, but also more of them down the line when you increase your professor level more slowly. Obviously, you sometimes need to use faculty training, dpending on what your plans are for Byleth and which units you're hoping to recruit, but I always do so somewhat begrudgingly.

Pegasus Knight is good, but it has the standard flier problems of not wanting to have too many of them, and there are plenty of other units who benefit from it as well. At the very least, you'll have one of Petra, Ingrid and Leonie, and it's also a good choice for Bernadetta, Manuela and Hilda as well as an off-beat but reasonable choice for several others. Byleth also has a harder time training flying than other characters, needing to use either faculty training or seminars. So while I can see the argument for Pegasus Knight if you're trying to maximise Byleth, I think in terms of the overall power of the complete army that any gains are marginal at best.

I use female just because I almost always choose the female option for player characters in games when they are available as that is more personally identifiable for me. In terms of game mechanics, I don't think there's that much difference. Falcon Knight and War Master are both good classes but neither one is so far better than any other choice that you're really missing out if you don't have access, and the free recruitment of Sylvain can be nice to have but it's not going to make a huge difference most of the time.

None manage it completely, but it's a sliding scale and not a simple pass/fail. Fates is one of the ones that is furthest away from what I want in this regard. Yes to some extent but never really committed to it, absolutely yes, not in Fates but yes in Awakening, arguably yes depending on exactly what you consider to be breaking the game. I consider all of these things to be examples of breadth, not depth. There's a lot of stuff that you can do but most of it is very shallow. Regardless, this is getting further and further off-topic at this point, so I'm going to bow out. You have right of reply if you want it, of course, but I don't plan on replying about this any further.

It depends exactly how you define your terms. First off, if you don't mind, I'm not going to talk about go since I just don't know the game well enough. I've played it a little bit but not enough to be able to have informed conversations or meaningful opinions about it. So I'll just keep the conversation to chess and Fates. Next, for picking the game up as a complete beginner, I'll assume that we're playing chess on a computer and not over the board, so that there is at least some feedback as to what moves are legal, etc. Obviously, if you just hand someone a chess board and a set of pieces, they aren't going to invent the game for themself if they don't already know the rules. Given a decent computer interface, I think that it's comparably easy to pick up the absolute beginner level basics of each game. However, I also think that this isn't a particularly realistic situation. In reality, tutorials, guides and rulebooks all exist and people are going to use them. And if the question is reframed as "using all available resources, is it easier to learn all the rules of chess or all the rules of Fates?" then undoubtedly chess is easier to learn. As for mastery, it depends again on exactly how you define mastery, but almost certainly I would say Fates is the easier game to master. For Fates, let's say that mastery is being able to routinely complete the game without ever resetting or losing a unit, and to be able to do so using different unit compositions. For chess, let's say that mastery is reaching the title of Candidate Master, the lowest open title awarded by FIDE (the international chess federation). By those definitions, Fates is easier to master and it isn't even close. Maybe that answer might change if you required a higher level of mastery for Fates or a lower level for chess, but I can't imagine a different answer for any reasonable definition of mastery. A summary of my position would be this: having to think ahead is good. Having to check, recheck and remember unit skills, weapons, etc. while thinking ahead is bad. "Complex" was perhaps a poor choice of words on my part. Rather, let's say that I like the depth of chess and dislike the fiddliness of Fates. Chess is narrow but deep. It has few rules, but many ways to apply those rules. Comparitively, Fates is broad but shallow. There are more rules to learn and keep track of, but fewer consequences of those rules. As an alternative, consider the game design maxim of making a game easy to learn but difficult to master. Even putting aside chess and just comparing within Fire Emblem, let's compare Fates to -- for instance -- Shadow Dragon (DS). I think that most people would probably agree that with all the extra mechanics that it brings to the table, Fates is both the harder game to learn and the harder game to master. Harder to master is generally considered a good thing whereas harder to learn is generally considered bad. The different weights applied to these two conflicting requirements are going to vary from person to person, in accordance with individual preference.

Come on, man. Ridiculously paraphrasing what I said into a flimsy strawman argument for you to disagree with? Really? As a point of comparison, I also play chess. In chess there are exactly 6 different pieces. There aren't any further modifiers on top of the pieces' baseline abilities. No stats, no weapons, no skills, nothing. Go is an even more extreme example, having only a single type of piece with no variations. Yet both chess and go manage to have astonishing amounts of tactical and strategic depth. That is the sort of thing I ideally want from any turn based tactics game: rules and systems that are simple and quick to learn and understand, but have great nuance and complexity in the emergent systems that derive from those simple rules. You picked stats as one example of something that is the same for all units on a map. And I agree that this is a good thing. But since skills and weapons do still differ, they can still make a strategy fall apart. And while it's good to have a heads up on the details of the unit you're just about to attack, that isn't always helpful. Oftentimes, making the first move of your turn can be commital. Once you've moved one unit, you then need to make sure that you kill everything else in range before the start of enemy phase. This means that for that first attack, you need to be cognisant of the skills and weapons not just of the unit you're attacking, but of everyone in range. It is common to have to be mindful of more different variants of units in a single turn of a single chapter here than there are different pieces in the entirety of the game of chess.

There wasn't all that much that really stood out for me. The only two that really caught my attention were Road 96 and Cris Tales, both of which seemed like they might be neat. I do wish that they focussed more on stuff that was closer to release, though. A lot of the time with the Indie Showcases, I see something that seems interesting, but then by the time it actually comes out, I've forgotten about it. Without the endless hype cycle of AAA marketing budgets, promoting anything that's more than about a month from release seems almost wasteful.

I quite like it as well. It changes up how you have to approach the map, is very easy to keep track of once you understand how it works with hardly any extra cognitive load, and as a one-off gimmick on a fairly short map it also didn't outstay its welcome. At least for me. Fun level. What I don't like is the initial explanation of the gimmick, which I didn't find at all clear when I first read it. I understood it as "there are a bunch of illusory enemies who will body block you and be generally annoying, but then the illusion will fade and they'll vanish" rather than "there are a bunch of real enemies who have an illusion buff on them and when the illusion fades only then will they attack you". Which immediately got one of my squishy units killed. I can't remember what the actual explanatory text is, mind, so I'm not sure if it's genuinely badly described or if I just wasn't paying proper attention. Speaking of things I can't remember, is there any dialogue in the game that explicitly links the kitsune generation of illusions with the location they're fighting in? It would be nice to have some sort of storyline explanation for why Kaden can't pull that trick when he's recruited in Birthright (even though the real reason is obviously that it would be overpowered in gameplay rather than anything to do with story).

Trust me, I'm not overlooking this. I make no secret that ironman isn't my prefered way to play, but I have done ironman runs and I know damn well that good observation and diligence are valuable skills for that style of play. My point here is twofold. Firstly, I do not think that they should be such valuable skills, because I don't believe they are fun or interesting. Secondly, I believe that Fates in general and Conquest in particular require these skills more than is typical for the series as a whole because of the density of mechanics and number of things that you have to look out for. There is nothing difficult or interesting about this sort of diligent observation. If someone handed me a Fire Emblem game-state and told me to list all the enemy units present, all their weapons, skills, which of my units they could attack next turn, and so on, then I could pass that test literally 100% of the time. Probably everyone else here could as well. It isn't difficult. It's just time-consuming. That I sometimes fail to do so during the course of a game is not because I lack the necessary skill but because I am not willing to spend the required time doing rote busywork. And I'm not learning that dangerous weapons can be in the back row of a pair-up duo, because I already know that. Failing to check something like that isn't a sign of lack of knowledge or being a bad player or whatever. Rather it's a sign of -- at worst -- carelessness or laziness. If a game asks me to do something which isn't difficult but I choose not to do so because it isn't fun or isn't a worthwhile use of my time, then that's on the game, not me.

It's more of a sliding scale than a binary yes/no sort of situation. The level with Nemesis is almost entirely about the level itself and the army vs army combat, with Nemesis himself being almost an afterthought. Provided you're not trying to low turn/cheese/flex and are killing the elites first, once you reach Nemesis the level is basically over. I wouldn't quite go so far as to say that he's trivial. He's a little bit dangerous, but not really. Not to anyone who's managed to get that far. On the other end of the spectrum there's Aelfric, where he is the entire level. Getting to him is, obviously, entirely trivial. The other three lie somewhere in the middle. On the scale going from "the map is the boss" to "the boss is the map", I'd order the bosses as follows: Nemesis, Edelgard, Rhea (CF), Rhea (SS), Aelfric. Not coincidentally, that is also my order of preference from most to least favourite. I just don't enjoy the big single target piles of HP.

For me, Nemesis. I'm just not a fan of big single target bosses in Fire Emblem. I don't think that the mechanics of the series really lend themselves well to that sort of fight being satisfying. Army vs army fights are more interesting and more satisfying, and that's pretty much what Nemesis is. Aelfric is my least favourite because he's the furthest away from the army vs army paradigm, with his entire map just being him. I found him very easy to kill but also incredibly slow and tedious, to the point where he's not just my least favourite Three Houses end boss, but up there as one of my top three least favourite levels in all of Fire Emblem (the other two being The Feral Frontier and Winds of Change).

For me at least, I want deaths to be due to my failures in tactics or strategy, not my failures of observation. A few examples of deaths that I consider to be generally interesting, desirable, or fun: Overextending myself going after a secondary objective and leaving myself too open to enemy attacks. Needing to split my forces and misjudging how many units to send each way, leaving one flank with insufficient forces to deal with the enemy. Being too passive at the start of a level and allowing the enemy to swarm me. Not having enough class diversity and running into a chapter which heavily punishes the class I've over-invested in. Relying too hard on a small number of units and letting everyone else fall behind. Positioning myself in such a way that the enemy can take advantage of terrain and attack me from cover. Etc. I don't consider the most recent death in your run to be an failure in analysis but a failure in observation. Your analysis was correct based on the units that you believed were present. If the enemy units were what you thought they were, then you'd have been fine. Your mistake was just that you didn't notice that the maid was there. If you enjoy meticulously checking and double checking every single move just in case there's something you haven't noticed then fair play to you, but for me that is nothing but tedium. I don't play Fire Emblem (or anything else for that matter) to test my observation skills. I play Fire Emblem for the tacical gameplay and for the colourful characters. When I lose a unit due to a failure of observation, there's nothing that I can learn from it, no way to improve my skill as a player, no chance to try to change my approach next time I play the level. The only thing I have to do is remember that there's an entrap maid behind the "beware the leopard" sign.

"Repent from the grave!" -- Catherine "You're making me work!" -- Hilda

Are they moles? I'm not actually familiar with them, since I've never actually played any Kirby games (I know, I know...) but I googled them and they don't look like moles to me. Are you sneakily trying to smuggle non-moles into my wonderful moley paradise?

I would say yes. It's a thing that the game does that increases the probability of you losing units in frustrating and unsatisfying ways. Which is compounded by the game also encouraging you to routinely have Corrin in harm's way, increasing the probability of getting a game over in a frustrating and unsatisfying way. Essentially, if there's too much going on for a player to be able to reasonably and reliably take it all in, then you're playing with incomplete knowledge. Which is the same problem with fog of war, ambush spawns, unclear descriptions, etc. It's still a case of "I made correct decisions based on the information I had, but I did not have all the information". The potential difference here, of course, is that you potentially could have had all the information. It's all there. However, while the Fates UI is decent, it's still not able to convey all relevant information quickly and easily. It's not like, for instance, a chess board where you can take in the entire position at a glance. You need to check every unit individually, look at their stats, their skills, their weapon, their pair up partner, etc. This leads to one of two possibilities. Either you play utterly meticulously, being incredibly careful, always checking and double checking every single move that you make or you occasionally get hit by some ridiculous out-of-nowhere gotcha. The first option absolutely kills the pacing of the game and turns it into a tedious, joyless slog. The second option gives the frustrating, unsatisfying, "doesn't feel like there was anything I could do about it" deaths that are the antithesis of ironman. I am reminded of the quote from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Just because the information is technically available doesn't mean a thing if I can't be reasonably expected to have seen it.

Three Houses is generally not too bad in this regard. Not perfect, but not bad. It typically has Dukes with the most power and prestige (eg Duke Riegan, Duke Aegir, Duke Fraldarius) and Barons having the least power and prestige (Baron Dominic, Baron Ochs), and even manages to successfully have the Gautier Margraviate be on the border frontier. There are a few weirdnesses that do seem to have been chosen in accordance with what sounds cool (having the Germanic "Margrave" in the middle of otherwise French style titles, for instance) but it doesn't do a bad job overall.

I don't believe there's anything given in game, but I assume that they would follow basically the same ranking as in real-world Europe. Which would generally be duke > margrave > count > baron. For extra fun, the title of margrave was traditionally given to nobles who controlled border territories, so it's entirely appropriate for Gautier to be a margraviate given its position on the border with Sreng.