lenticular

A lot of the most interesting utility effects were put onto gambits instead of spells ofr Three Houses. Effects like Stride, Retribution and Impenetrable Wall could all easily have been white magic spells, either as is or reworked into single-target versions.

Way too many games to list all of them, so I'll keep it to two recent (and probably controversial) ones. The Legenda of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. This was he reason I bought a Switch, given how much everyone loves it, and oh, how I hate this game. I found it slow, boring and empty. The weapon durability system did not work for me at all because it removed all sense of progression. Finding a new item wasn't exciting when I knew it was going to go away again soon, which removed a big part of the motivation to explore. The cooking system was a clunky, uninuitive mess. Having out-of-combat running be tied to a stamina gauge was so horrible a decision that I could rant exclusively on that topic for paragraphs. I could forgive the lack of story or the lack of dungeons, but not having either brought the game down. The whole "sheikah slate" thing was a terrible idea which was obviously designed for the Wii U gamepad (which was, itself, a terrible idea) so was doubly out of place on the Switch. The whole thing played like a really terrible walking simulator: the whole emphasis was on wandering around, exploring, and finding interesting places, except that the world was way too big for that, meaning that the density of interesting places was way too low. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Conclusive proof, if it were needed, that bigger does not mean better. This game would have been so much better if it had been smaller. Having a bunch of characters who I don't care about and in some cases have never even heard of us dilutes the core premise of a bunch of all-stars from different games going up against each other. Mario vs Sonic? That's great. Link vs Samus? Sign me up! Wolf vs Palutena? Um... who? Why am I supposed to care? Get rid of half the roster and leave me only with characters I care about. And then there's World of Light, which was a hot mess. For one, it has the same "I have never heard of this character" problem, except far worse. Just throwing more and more characters in to say that they're there and for the sake of "representation" does absolutely nothing if they aren't placed in enough context for me to be able to appreciate them. There is also a complete lack of any sort of a difficulty curve in World of Light, with levels of all difficulties thrown all over the map. You don't start out easy, get better, and then start having progressively more and more difficult challenges. You just have more and more of the same thing thrown at you again and again and it gets tedious. So, that's the single player, but how about the online multiplayer? Oh. You need to pay extra for that? But people are saying it's laggy and kinda broken? Yeah, don't think I'm going to bother with that, then.

New ideas and original concepts are inherently iterative. It's basically impossible to come up with an idea that is completely unlike anything that anyone has ever seen before. Instead, we take what has gone before and we refine it, add to it, or combine it in interesting ways. Any new game is going to take elements from existing games, just as those games took inspiration from what came before them, and so on. So long as a game is iterating even a little bit, I don't see any problem.

One of the other problems with White Magic Avoid (and Black Magic Avoid which is almost as bad) is that it's almost useless on player phase. With Sword Avoid and Brawl Avoid, even if you aren't building around them, they can be nice to throw in just to be hit by slightly fewer counter attacks. They're not great like this, but they're definitely worth throwing into your build if you don't have anythign better. With magic, though, how often are you getting counter-attacked? All your attacks inherently have 1-2 range, which means you can attack anything that doesn't with complete impunity. And of those who do have 1-2 range, you're probably not attacking spellcasters anyway, because they usually have high res and low def. So that leaves hand axes and javelins (and their upgrades) and bosses with counter. It's better than nothing, but not by much. If you want to get any use out of it, you pretty much have to build around it and make an enemy phase dodge tank build, which brings us back to all the reasons why that is terrible and doesn't work. What if the budding talent were White Magic Uses x2? That still wouldn't be great, but would be better, and having doubled uses on Aura would make a Byleth focussed on White Magic more viable. Maybe also put White Tomefaire onto Enlightened One? That sounds like it would be fun to use, at least. Or for a totally different design direction, what if Byleth got some sort of healing ability from their budding talent? I'm imagining something sort of like Sacrifice (from Radiant Dawn) except not terrible. Maybe have it be functionally equivalent to the Heal spell, except have it be a combat art so you can use it in any class, even non-magic classes. I don't think this would be particularly good, but it would be unique and thematic.

The other advantage to Seraphim is that it actually has a decent number of uses. Even if you do go up to A faith and pick up Aura, you're still seriously hampered by it only having three uses. The spells with high might but low uses are fine when you have a solid spell list of more basic damage spells to fall back on, but terrible if you have to rely on them for your primary damage output. Seraphim at B would definitely go a long way. I'd also be tempted to get rid of Aura entirely and replace it with Silence, but I think I like Aura too much thematically to really want to do that. I do think Silence would be more fun to play with, though. For her reason list, I don't think I'd want to give her anything dark magic, since I don't see it really making any thematic sense. I would probably try to keep to only 4 reason spells, to avoid being as good as the pure casters, but I'd definitely change them up. I don't like spell lists that get two of fire/thunder/blizzard/wind, since they're basically redundant with each other, and I like it even less on lists with only 4 spells. That would then mean the spell distribution would have to be changed, because getting a more powerful spell at D+ would be kinda broken. I would be tempted to change it to: Thunder (D), Cutting Gale (C), Fimbulvetr (B), Ragnarok (A). Most lists stick to just one or two elements, so having Byleth's list be so variable would make her stand out as being different and other, which I think I like.

First, thanks to everyone who has replied and helped sate my curiosity. This is really interesting to me, because it's completely different to the way I'd look at things. I'd be more likely to look at the time to learn the game at a basic level, by comparing Settler difficulty in Civ VI and Normal/Casual in FE:TH, which I think can both probably be beaten by a first time player, though it's been so long since I've been a new player for either that I'm probably not well placed to judge the new player experience. Regardless, I'm pretty sure that the skill floor for both of them is fairly low; it's fairly easy to learn either one of them well enough to muddle through on easiest settings. I do definitely agree with you that FE:TH Maddening is easier than Civ VI deity, but I would count that as a point in Civ's favour. I like having a higher skill ceiling because if a game captures my interest enough, I like having more room to improve. These are things that I value a whole lot as well, but I've never particularly considered them great strengths of Fire Emblem. I guess a lot of it depends on what other games we've played and how well FE does these things relative to those games. Agreed with this. And I do kinda see not being able to sacrifice as something of a weakness to FE's gameplay. Maybe I should start a "permadeath is bad for gameplay" thread and see if I can make everyone hate me. 😄 For me, there are two answers to this, depending on whether I'm comparing to big budget games from major companies or to indies. When it comes to big budget games, the big draw is the genre of gameplay attached. For instance, I love the universe and the characters of Mass Effect, but they come attached to a third-person shooter, which isn't a genre I particularly enjoy. Mass Effect 1 in particular, I hated the gameplay, so I turned everything down to the easiest possible settings and suffered through the gameplay sections as quickly as I could to get back to the story parts that were interesting to me. Obviously, having good gameplay in a genre that I enjoy is far preferable to that. On the other hand, there are indie games, and I think that a lot of the best storytelling in games is in the indie sector. And with indies it is possible to get games that are essentially all story and no game, in the form of visual novels and walking simulators, both of which I play. And while I love the storytelling in games like Gone Home or Analogue: A Hate Story, one area where they absolutely cannot match games like Fire Emblem or Mass Effect is in budget and production values. Just think of something like voice acting, for instance. A really good indie might be able to have a couple or even a handful of decent voice actors, bu there's no way any indie is having a fully voiced cast of the same size and quality as something like Three Houses. That's just not happening.

I appreciate the replies! You say tactical RPGs; does that also mean you haven't played other strategy and tactics games that aren't RPGs? If so would you mind if I ask why? Lack of interest? Lack of knowledge? Intimidating learning curves? Something else entirely? I can certainly see why you're perspective on the genre would be radically different from mine if you've played relatively few games from it, but I'm genuinely curious why you never wanted to branch out. A lot of what both of you describe aren't things that I think of as unique to Fire Emblem. For instance: This is something that I would consider pretty standard across most strategy games. Or at least, I would consider it fairly standard to at least have a game-mode where decisions are permanent. All of the games that I mentioned above can be played that way, for instance (with the possible exceptions of chess and go, where it's somewhat debatable due to individual games standing alone rather than being joined together into a longer campaign, but even in chess, if you lose a piece, it's gone until the end of the game). If you really want to turn the permadeath side of things up to 11, then there are classic roguelikes (the likes of Nethack, ADoM and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup). I get how the lack of graphics and the steep learning curve can be a turn-off for a lot of people, but I think they do tension due to the constant possibility of death a whole lot better than Fire Emblem does.

A genuine question for the "gameplay reigns supreme" crowd: what is it that draws you to Fire Emblem specifically in preference over the many other strategy and tactics games that exist? I ask because I've never considered the core tactical gameplay of Fire Emblem to be particularly strong. It's not bad, by any means, but I think I would mostly describe it as unremarkable. If we removed all the story and characters and all the other fluff and pared everything down to an abstract game, then I don't think that Fire Emblem would hold my interest very long at all. There are many other strategy and tactics games that I would rather be playing instead. Chess would probably be the big one for me, but also XCOM, Battletech, Bloodbowl, Europa Universalis, Go, etc. Except that, obviously, I do like Fire Emblem a whole lot, otherwise I wouldn't be here. For me the big unique selling point that Fire Emblem has over any of the other games I just mentioned is its characters, worldbuilding and story (in that order of preference, for me). Those are the things that can make me choose to sit down and play a Fire Emblem game in preference to some other tactics/stratgey game. Hence my question. Why Fire Emblem? I don't mean this as some sort of trap question. There's clearly something that you find compelling about the series, and your reasons and your tastes are every bit as legitimate as mine. I just don't understand what they are, and I would like to.

I think it would be fine for local PVP or even online between friends. If you're playing with someone you know, it's easy enough to make house rules to limit its use, and I can definitely imagine circumstances where it could be useful, like to undo an accidental button press, or as part of a teaching game ("no, see, that doesn't work because I can do this in response; go back and try again"). Having it as a part of PVP with random matchmaking would be disastrous, though.

I had managed to somehow completely forge about that, and I have no idea how! I know that I have seen that support and I'd have thought it would be the sort of thing I'd remember, but apparently not. Oh well. Thanks for setting me right, both. Objection withdrawn.

Edelgard is too avatarsexual for my tastes. Outside of her pining after Byleth, I don't know of anywhere that shows or implies her having even the slightest bit of romantic interest in any other female characters. I wouldn't be against the portrayal of a character who was mostly interested in one gender but had one person who was an exception. That could make for an interesting character and an interesting story. There's a lot of ways you can go with it or things you can do. With Edelgard, though, I never really felt as if they did any of that. Maybe I'm unfairly biased because I dislike avatars and avatar-worship to begin with, but I mostly got a sense of "Edelgard only likes guys (except for you; you're special)", which didn't make me feel tha Edelgard was bisexual so much as that avatars break the rules of time and space. For any bisexual women who played the game and did really identify with Edelgard's situation, then that's absolutely great. But having her sexuality be so tied to the avatar stopped it from working for me. As for a transgender character, in theory that would be great, but in practice I would be nervous. I think that transgender characters are genuinely difficult to write well in video games. There are two opposite traps that you can fall into with them. On the one hand, you can have it be too front-and-central to the character and have their gender identity be all they ever talk about. That ends up creating a shallow, cartoonish character, which sucks. On the oher hand, you can write a character where their being transgender is scarcely mentioned at all and is jus a bit of background information that's easy to miss. But the problem there is that it can too often come across as tokenism if it's completely unnecessary for the character or the story. There is a middle ground, of course, but hitting the sweet spot is difficult and is not something I would trust most video game writers to get right.

A canonically queer main character. (Avatarsexuals don't count.)

Yeah, I wouldn't have expected him to be super popular for that reason, but I would have guessed he'd have snuck into one or two lists, in the same way that a few other non-playable characters did.

In terms of playable characters, there are a few that aren't getting much love, but the only ones I'm not seeing at all (unless I've missed something, which is very possible) are Gilbert and Anna. This does not surprise me even a little bit. One character that I am a little bit surprised not to have seen anyone mention at all is Jeralt. He's not my favourite, but he's a decent character who gets a lot of screentime.

Given that I literally just mentioned how I find Sacred Stones unintentionally hilarious, you can probably guess my view. No matter what they were aiming for, if my reaction to that moment (and several other moments) on my first time playing through the game was just to burst out laughing, then that's a sign that the writing has failed. The overall quality of the writing just wasn't very good, probably due to the game being rushed and having corners cut, and didn't make me care about much of anything in the story. I'm not even going to say that Eirika is dumb; I'm saying that I don't care enough to analyse whether she's dumb or not. Obviously, you do care enough about the story to want to analyse it, and I have no desire to take that away from you so I'll leave further discussion to people who do care, but I felt as if I had to say something given that I'd just mentioned Sacred Stones in the post above yours.

I think it would be interesting, instead of tomes, to have a rare consumable item that would allow a unit to permanently add a single spell of your choice to their list of learnt spells. For levels of rarity, I'm imagining that over the course of the game, you might get one to teach a white magic spell and one to teach a black magic spell, and that's it. That would be enough to give anyone a decent spell list or could be used to cover gaps in your chosen team (eg, you would always be able to have a warper without having to recruit one of the few characters who learn it naturally), but it would retain a lot of the flavour of unique spell lsits.

Such is the paradox of Fire Emblem. Planning for long-term growth is fun, but given time we inevitably end up optimising the fun out of the game. The ideal would be to be able to take a random unit and turn them into a ridiculous badass, but have it only really come into fruitition for the last level or two where you get a brief moment to revel in your glory and then the game is over before staleness sets in, except it pretty much never turns out like that. Which isn't really a fault with design. Trying to pace things that way is hard, and trying to pace it so it works out that way for a diverse playerbase with many different playstyles and ability levels is pretty much impossible. This is actually one of the reasons why I rarely play FE games on their hardest difficulty settings. Set the difficulty level too high and I feel like I have to optimise too much of the fun away. On lower difficulties, I can treat the game more as a sandbox, play around with the systems, and create my own difficulty by self-imposed challenges. Personally, I find Sacred Stones hilarious. Sadly, it isn't actually trying to be funny. (At least, not the parts I find hilarious.)

Very subject to change, but right now this second: Dorothea Seteth Catherine Ingrid Flayn Mercedes Ferdinand von Aegir Hilda Petra Claude

Get rid of player phase and enemy phase and have all units have their own initiative order instead. Collect clothes and accessories, play dress-up with your units, and receive bonuses based on the coordination of your outfit. Instead of just double attacking if you have 4 more speed than your enemy, if you have 8 more speed you get to triple attack, 12 more speed you get to quad attack, and so on. Child characters who you can only recruit if they are adopted by two parents in a same-sex relationship. Get rid of the square grid and instead allow free movement in all directions.

Keep The new magic system. Having spells limited on a per-map basis was great for getting rid of the "too good to use" syndrome that often accompanied rare staves and tomes in other games. Front-loaded recruitment. I know that ironmanners hate this, and I completely understand why, but from my perspective, this was great. It means that every character gets a lot of screentime and chance to shine, which suits my tastes and preferences much better than having awesome characters who I want to love except they only show up near the end. Keep but needs refining An explorable hub. I liked the monastery and the idea behind it, but it definitely still needs refinement. I like the sense of place that it gave and the fact that every character had at least something to say after every battle, but it was a bit too much overall. Something smaller would probably be better going forward, and I would prefer if most of the out-of-battle stuff was kept as pure flavour and characterisation and not anything that gives mechanical advantage. Let it be more easily skippable for people who don't care or people on second and subsequent times through. Free class progression. I had a lot of fun coming up with interesting builds or running bad builds only as a challenge run, and I really like how a lot of characters had kits that were built to encourage that sort of experimentation. But there's definitely stuff that didn't work for me. RNG based class changes needs to go, and they also need to either work on class balance or come up with some other method of encouraging class diversity, because having everyone going down a select few class progressions is not fun. Self-imposed restrictions are all well and good (and were what I did), but they aren't a substitute for a well-balanced game. Maybe, but probably not Fódlan. I really liked the setting and the characters a lot, but I feel Fódlan's story is pretty much told at this point. If they have some amazing story idea for a sequel, prequel, or side story, then I'd welcome a return to Fódlan, but what I 100% do not want to see is "oh, this game did well so let's make another game in the same setting even if we have to use a really unimaginative, weak, derivative story". Not as a series staple Monsters. (By which I mean, Three Houses style monsters that take up multiple squares of map, have shields, etc.) I never found them that compelling to fight in the first place since they were mostly just damage sponges, and I can't see them getting better with age. Batallions and gambits. They're too heavily tied to monsters (to the detriment of both systems, honestly), didn't work particularly well graphically, added extra busy-work to manage them, and added UI clutter. I liked some of what they did and would like to see some of the gambits reworked as either spells or combat arts, but I think the overall balance on these was negative for me. A school setting. It was fun once, as a change-up to the more traditional Fire Emblem formula, but that doesn't mean I want it to come back. Burn with fire Dismounting. Mounted units are generally strong in Fire Embelm games. Giving them an easy and free way to negate their weaknesses is not good. It is doubly not good in a game with completely free class choice. Fishing. I'm actually the sort of person who quite likes fishing minigames. Take the fishing minigame in Stardew Valley, for instance? I know a lot of people who hated that. I loved it. But the fishing in Three Houses has two big issues. First: why is it in a Fire Emblem game? And second: why is it really terrible? Begone from my sight.

It's been long enough since I played Radiant Dawn that I'm probably forgetting all sorts of canon details that make all of these impossible, but here goes anyway. Jill and Haar: Haar is contacted by one of the survivors who once served under Shiharam. He is now shunned by both Daein and Begnion for his role in the mad king's war, and turns to his old Captain for help. Lucia and Heather: Bastian needs some information from one of Heather's underworld contacts, but Heather wanrs him that her contact won't speak to men, so he sends Lucia instead. Hilarity ensues. Fiona and Tauroneo: Lanvega never spoke to his daughter about his time as one of the Four Riders. Tauroneo takes her on a mission to explain why, and recover a lost weapon.

For me, a bigger part is the difference between retrying the part of the level where I died (which is fun to me) and having to go through the motions on the parts of a level which I feel as if I have already mastered (which is not). How much this is a problem depends on the game and map in question, but in general, if ever there's a point in a map where there's a let-up in enemies and I have time to reposition my units, heal up anyone who needs it, etc. then that creates a disconnect between what happens before and what happens after. Improving my strategy before that point doesn't do anything to help me out afterwards, so replaying it is just repeating the strategy I've already found. So, for instance, consider a 5 turn defend map. There's a constant stream of enemies from beginning to end, and any decisions that I make will have ramifications that last throughout the entire battle. If I fail the map or lose a unit on turn five that doesn't necessarily mean that I made a mistake on turn five. It might mean that I made a mistake on turn one, then managed to struggle through to turn five anyway before my mistake caught up with me. That level sounds like it would be fun to replay. On the other hand, consider a very large rout map, full of wide open spaces, with several distinct groups of enemies who won't move unless approached who are far enough away that they can be fought separately. If I make a non-fatal mistake at the start out of that level, then I'm going to be able to stabilise from it. I can take a turn or two to reposition, heal and essentially reset the level. It's effectively as if the level has several small and distinct sub-challenges which are entirely independent of each other. If I make it through three groups of enemies flawlessly but then make a mistake on the fourth group and need to reset, then that does not sound like fun to me at all.

I don't feel swords are in that bad a place in Three Houses. It's a very player-phase focused game, which means that the lack of 1-2 range physical swords hurts a lot less than it otherwise would. You also get access to fancy named swords a lot earlier in Three Houses than you do in some other games in the series. Sword of the Creator and Thunderbrand are both great and are both available from early on. Yeah, there are definitely still problems with swords, and they're probably overall the second weakest weapon type in the game (after offensive white magic), but they're still plenty usable and have definitely been worse.

May love and wine their rights maintain... No complaints sire! ...And their united pleasures reign... -- The military advisor, Civilization II. Sure, the song isn't originally from a video game, but the delivery with the intervening line is, and that's the part that's memorable to me. Go for the eyes, Boo. Go for the eyes! -- Minsc, Baldur's Gate. Extremely memorable and isntantly recognisable to anyone who has ever played the game. I didn't even like the game that much, but the line has always stuck with me. Had to be me. Someone else might have gotten it wrong. -- Mordin Solus, Mass Effect 3. Brilliance, arrogance, selflessness, repentance, and humour, this summed up a wonderful character in a pithy and succinct 11 word send off. Did you know that people with guilty consciences are more easily startled by loud noises? [train horn] I'm sorry, I don't know why that went off. Anyway, just an interesting science fact. -- GLaDOS, Portal 2. GLaDOS mde me laugh more than any other character in any video game, and she has so many memorable one-liners to choose from, but I think this is my favourite. Ooooh, we've got this notion / That we'd quite like to sail the ocean / So we're buildin' a big boat to leave here for good / We're not keen on sinkin' / So we're all sittin' here a thinkin' / Cos we built it too big and we've run out of wood / Eidle eidle eee / Eidle eidle eee / We simply can't leave til we get some more wood. -- The sailors, Black and White. I don't think I've touched this game since 2001, and yet I still sometimes find myself getting earwormed with this song. This is both extremely good and extremely bad. Reticulating splines. -- Sim City 2000. And many others since. But I believe that was where it was first used. My the way of the Hero lead to the triforce. -- The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. One of my favourite games when it was released, one of my favourite games almost 30 years later, and I still feel triumph and determination whenever I see that one line. You know that we're all superstars / We're the ones who made it this far -- Pauline, Super Mario Odyssey. I could have put the entirety of Jump up Superstar here, but let's go with this. It was so damn gratifying to see Pauline turn from being an archetypal videogame damsel in distress into a kinda badass mayor and performer. As a celebration of the history of games and how far they have come, that part at least really hit home for me. The last day dawns on the Kingdom of Ascalon. It arrives with no fanfare, no tolling of alarms. Those who will remember, will speak fondly of the warm morning breeze. People carry on with their daily lives, unaware that in a short while... Everything they have ever known will come to an end. -- Guild Wars (Prophecies campaign). I spent way too many hours in this game, and always loved this as an opening cut scene to introduce the tranquility of the tutorial area and portend the more calamitous events shortly to come.

I actually did. As well as scrambling, it can also mean scratching or scribbling, and can be used as both a verb and a noun. And apparently this sort of obscure and useless knowledge is what I get from my mis-spent youth playing way too much Scrabble. Well, there is Mia at least. While she did meet Greil before she met Ike, she wasn't really a core member of the group in PoR and she never really served under Greil. I always figured she was supposed to be the token new member of the group, though I do agree that it would have been better if they'd chose someone who didn't have any connection to Greil at all. I think it would have been great if they'd had a laguz member, but I don't think any of the PoR laguz units would have made sense to have leave their original roles. I liked that part since it shows Ranulf as being cognisant of the capabilities and weaknesses of his bird laguz allies, rather than just thinking about beast laguz. Though, if memory serves, the battle itself only gives you Gallians as allies. Am I remembering that right? If so, I might be giving the writing more credit than it deserves again. Hah! That is a perfect way to introduce Skrimir.