lenticular

My personal wishes for Smash mostly go against the general direction that the series is taking and the general consensus among its players. As such, I'd be shocked to actually get what I want, but here goes anyway. First, I want a much smaller scale game with far fewer characters. More characters means less star power. I know that every character is somebody's favourite, but as a casual, it's hard to get excited about a lot of the more borderline inclusions. And even harder to get excited about all the other games and series that are getting referenced. "Link is fighting Pikachu!" is fun in a way that "Palutena is fighting Ridley!" isn't. If I had my druthers, I'd probably limited it to about 30-40 characters, would probably go back to only having Nintendo characters, and would limit to one character per game series, with very few exceptions. Second, I want more focus put onto having a better single-player mode. World of Light was a pretty big disappointment for me, mainly because it was just a bunch of individual fights splurged onto a big map without really forming a coherent whole. I don't really care that there wasn't really any attempt at a coherent storyline, but I would have liked for there to have been a more consistent difficulty curve, with easier challenges to begin with growing into more difficult ones later.

Honestly, now I kinda want to do a full big Rate The Unit series where we rate purely on fun rather than efficiency or power or anything like that. Happily, I recognise that I'm far too lazy to commit to such a project. For the sake of clarity, I don't think that RD Hard is particularly difficult. I just think that it's particularly nonsense. Specifically the removing of enemy ranges. Getting rid of UI/QoL/accessability features in the name of "difficulty" is one of my biggest pet peeves of game design. I can go into more detail about exactly why I think this is terrible design, but I figure it's probably a sufficiently uncontroversial idea that I really don't need to explain myself. I don't think I agree with this? I mean, not in the sense that I think people shouldn't use the term like that, but more that I don't think they do. I think that people generally use the same terminology and language regardless of what difficulty they're talking about. I don't have any hard data to back this up or anything, so let's just leave it as saying that the overall feeling and impression that I have is not the same as the one that you have. That's pretty similar to what I was getting at when I suggested time investement. In both cases, it's not about investing some in-game resource so much as it's about what we, the players, are personally investing in terms of our time, effort, and energy. I strongly suspect you could probably do this for most of the series even on the hardest difficulties. At the very least, Sacred Stones, Path of Radiance (international; I've never played Maniac), Shadows of Valentia, Three Houses, and Engage all seem like they could probably be beaten on their hardest difficulties with their worst characters, so long as you make appropriate allowances for places where specific characters are required. I wouldn't be surprised if it was possible for Radiant Dawn, Awakening and Birthright too, though I don't know as much about the harder difficulties of those games. Yeah, I do think that's a pretty fair way of looking at things. If we imagine a graph of power level against time for each unit, then the investment units are the ones which have an upward slope for at least part of the graph. Though this is somewhat complicated by units who have weird graphs. I'm thinking of units like Volke (starts OP, then drops off when other people catch up to him, but then can become great again if you use him) or Donnel (starts awful, becomes great when his growths kick in, then drops back to mediocre once everyone starts reaching caps).

When we're discussing units, we tend to throw terms like "high investment" around quite a bit. The general implication is that while it is possible to make that unit good, it costs more to get them there than other units. But one thing that I've been thinking about recently is what it actually means for a unit to be high investment. What are we actually investing? These thoughts came from a run of Radiant Dawn that I've been doing where the only units I took to the Tower are generally considered somewhere between "terrible" and "ok but high investment". Specifically, I took: Meg, Fiona, Lyre, Astrid, Heather, Mist, Rolf, Nealuchi, Tormod, Pelleas, and Leanne (and the 6 mandatory units). And despite ostensibly having a full team of high investment units, the run wasn't challenging at all. I had more than enough resources to level everyone either to or close to level cap, with most units having capped most or all of their relvevant stats. Now, two things do need saying here. First is that Radiant Dawn is a weird game with a weird structure that overall probably makes it easier than most of the series to train up a full team of scrubs. The second is that I was playing on Normal difficulty (PAL) because Radiant Dawn's Hard difficulty is some egregious nonsense. But even with these caveats in mind, it feels that if these units genuinely require a high amount of investment then it shouldn't be possible to invest in all of them. Or at the very least it should be difficult to do so, but it really wasn't. So what gives? I've been trying to think about what it is that we're actually investing in high investment units, and have come up with a few different possibilities. EXP. This seems to be cited quite a bit, and I think is mostly (though not entirely) bogus. The vast majority of runs in the vast majority of Fire Emblem games have more than enough experience to go around. Especially given that experience is scaled based on character level. If I give a unit slightly less experience now, that's just going to mean that they're going to be gaining more experience/fight for a little while until they catch up again. Specific limited resources. I'm thinking of things like stat boosters or weapons here. "Oh, Jimbob is a great unit. You just need to give him two Energy Drops, a Speedwing, and a Brave Lance and he's as good as anyone else!" That sort of thing. And while it's true that this would be a particularly high investment just to pull someone up to par, there are very few units throughout all of Fire Emblem that genuinely require this sort of favouritism if we want them to be viable. And yes, I know that you're now thinking about Bantu or Karla or similar, but they're very much the exception rather than the rule. Short-term difficulty. I think that we are getting somewhere here, but we're still not there. On the one hand, if I decide to deploy an underleveled unit to a map then that will make that map harder than if I'd deployed the strongest unit from my bench, especially if I'm trying to train them up and keep them safe while I do so. This much is true. But on the other hand, I find that most Fire Emblem maps are generous with their deployment slots and that the presence or absence of my (twelfth/fifteenth/whatever) best unit is rarely going to make any sort of material difference. And beyond that, we do get to choose which levels we use for training. Nobody is going to suggest that it's a good idea to use maps like Conquest chapter 10 or Three Houses chapter 13 as training opportunities. Time. I think that this is probably the most significant investment for most units but is also the one that I see talked about the least. Most Fire Emblem units will become good to great if they are trained up, and can be trained up without meaningfully taking resources from other units, and doing so is not generally particularly difficult, but it often is fiddly and time-consuming. And if someone doesn't want to take the time to raise Rolf/Nino/Clair/whoever then really, who can blame them? We all only have so many hours on this earth. And yet, it does feel like a subjective play-style-dependant criterion rather than anything more tangible. So where am I going with all of this? I don't know. Nowhere, really? I guess just that the more I think about the concept of a high investment unit, the less confident I am that I actually know what one is. So I guess that's my question. What do you think it is? What do you figure we're investing into these units?

Which run? I tend to have different MVP units in each playthrough. For my most recent run, I'd say either Rolf or Fiona. Which sounds like I'm shitposting until I mention that it was a "bad units only for the tower" challenge run, and their competition was the likes of Meg, Lyre, and Astrid. Rolf was probably stronger by end-game, but Fiona was more valuable because of her contributions to Part 3's Dawn Brigade maps.

Endless Ocean! Was not expecting that at all, but I am supremely hyped in the most chill and relaxed way possible, even as I'm aware that probably nobody else cares. I'm pretty sure I've had this on lists of games that I want that are never going to happen, so it's pretty wild that there is a new game coming almost 15 years after the last one. I'm a little worried about the seeming focus on multiplayer and about what the controls will look like (please not just motion controls this time), but it would take something pretty disastrous for me not to pick this up.

Similar to this, I want to see more stories about what happens after the war is over. The phase of rebuilding and reconciliation that shows that everything didn't magically get better the second after the epic climactic victory. I'm thinking things like Radiant Dawn or like XCOM Chimera Squad

Fire Emblem has a whole lot of sibling relationships. Sacred Stones is the one that does its best to have the two be given equal top billing, but there are a ton more beyond that. Corrin and their many, many siblings is another obvious one. But even just among main characters there's also Ike & Mist, Alear & Veyle, Marth & Elice, and Chrom & Lissa. Though Lissa and Elice don't have as prominent a role in their stories as Mist and Veyle do in theirs. There's also arguably the step-sibling relationship between Edelgard & Dimitri. And then if we move on from main characters only, just off the top of my head there's: Rebecca & Dart, Nils & Ninian, Oscar & Boyd & Rolf, Marcia & Makalov, Lethe & Lyre, Kurthnaga & Almedha, Palla & Catria & Est, Say'ri & Yen'fay, Lucina & whoever, Morgan & whoever, Kana & whoever, Felicia & Flora, Kaze & Saizo, Delthea & Luthier, Hilda & Holst, Clanne & Framme, Alfred & Céline, Diamant & Alcryst, Timerra & Fogado, Ivy & Hortensia. And probably a lot more that I'm missing or forgetting (especially since I'm not touching the Japan-only games that I've never played, even though I know that Genealogy is right there). Fire Emblem is a good series to be a fan of if you like sibling relationships. Not so much if you like parent/child relationships. Have you read any of Brnadon Sanderson's Cosmere novels? They're maybe not quite exactly what you're asking for here, but they very much came to mind for me when reading your thoughts about this trope. It feels like they touched on these sorts of ideas a little bit with Tenzin, Bumi and Kya in TLoK, but they could definitely dive into them more deeply if they did it with an avatar and their siblings, for sure. As for my own picks for tropes that I want to see more of: Capricious fey. When I see fey (faeries, elves, whatever) in fiction, it normally goes one of two routes. It's either Disney or it's Grimm's. We either get the whimsical, enchanting and beautiful fairy who farts glitter and rainbows, or we get the amoral fairy who wants to bewitch you with dark magic and take your children. I like seeing a fairy realm that includes both of these extremes, everywhere in between, and moody and capricious fairies who will happily turn on a dime from one to the other. Alien linguistics. Science fiction stories that focus on figuring out how aliens communicate are always fun for me, especially when the writer manages to come up with something that actually feels truly alien. Darmok and Jalad on the ocean.

For specific characters, I generally think it's better to have character designs that push the envelope and will be polarising. Like, I don't personally like Hortensia's design at all, but I'm sure that there are some people who absolutely latch onto it and think "yes! her! I want to use her!" the second they see it. And they get to use a character with a design that they love whereas I just get to bench her and use someone else instead. I'd much rather see more designs like that than very generic designs like, for instance, Beck that nobody is going to hate but nobody is going to love either.

On the one hand: yeah, Blazing Blade is a pretty bad title. I think my biggest problem with it is just how generic it is. It sounds like it should be the title of a bad pulp fantasy novel or something. On the other hand: I find it really, really hard to care even a little bit about titles. I pretty much never think about them once I'm playing the game (or reading the book, watchign the movie, whatever). And I also basically never decide to buy something based on the title. I only really interact with titles as a way of identifying the thing if I'm searching for it or talking about it or whatever. So they could call it Fire Emblem: Turnips and Petticoats as far as I'm concerned. So long as it's distinct enough to talk about it, I'm content.

I like this idea. At first, I was thinking of it as a sort of subversion of "as you know" writing. It would be pretty funny if the characters kept alluding back to the events of Three Houses but without ever actually stating the outcome. Because why would they? Everyone (in world) knows it already! So we could get lines like "this is just like when Edelgard declared war on the Church of Seiros, and we all know how that turned out!" or "Edelgard and Dimitri grew up as friends and I'm sure you don't need me to remind you what happened to them!" But the more I think about it, the more I like it. You're absolutely spot on to bring up the "history war" element of things. The idea that history is written by the winners is a pretty prominent one in Three Houses, and it would be really interesting to see that developed further. In fact, I think it would be fun if we had multiple different factions pushing their own interpretations of history, but that we -- as players of Three Houses -- would know for a fact that none of them were fully accurate, regardless of which route of Three Houses actually happened.

I think that Fire emblem has had consistently strong character design throughout the series. Even the more maligned ones like Shadow Dragon and Engage have a style that fit the games that they are in. Shadow Dragon is more serious in tone with a "war is hell" vibe, a large cast of characters with little to distinguish them, and the expectation that you're going to be losing people regularly. As such, it gets a fairly staid and grounded art style. On the other hand, Engage is a considerably sillier game with big epic moments and larger than life characters, so it gets its very stylised, exaggerated and colourful art style. I can certainly understand why people dislike both of them, but they're a whole lot better as they are than they would be if you switched the art styles between the two games.

That's all very fair, and I don't disagree with any of it. I'm certainly not wed to my interpretation. Rather, I was trying to come up with a theme for every game (that I've played) and that was about the best I could come up with for the mess that is Engage. But I do think there are several points where blood is shown not to matter. Alear and Veyle, obviously. Lumera initially choosing to save Alear. Ivy and Hortensia defecting to join the people who killed their father. Zephia wanting a blood family so badly that she didn't notice that she already had a found family. This all feels like the general area that Engage is trying to talk about, but what it's trying to say is so garbled and inconsistent that it's hard to draw out a single coherent theme.

Radiant Dawn just has a whole lot going on. Too much, really. There's the order/chaos/balance thing, there's the thing about how conflict can have good people on both sides who fight because of circumstances, the thing about how winning the war wasn't enough and now you have to win the peace, the ongoing racism discussion that's carried over from PoR, the idea of corruption, and so on and so forth. It's one of those cases where it probably would have ended up as a better story overall if it had just chosen one or two themes and leaned into them harder than it did. For instance, if it really wanted to push the order/chaos thing, then it could have done more to portray Micaiah as the positive aspects of chaos (choice, freedom, etc.) and Elincia as the more positive aspects of order (stability, the rule of law, etc.), had them clash, but then come to a compromise at the end. It would be a pretty different story, but it would probably do a better job of getting the one theme across coherently and consistently. Actually, I'll say that Radiant Dawn falls into a similar trap to Three Houses, in that it tries to have a story about conflicting ideologies and moral shades of grey, but doesn't really land it properly because of the existence of The Evil Faction. Moustache-twirling politicians are slightly more subtle than mole people I guess. But the conclusion of Radiant Dawn isn't "both extremes are bad and we need to find a middle ground" but "actually, it's order that was bad all along".

I'm going to try to write up my takes without reading what anyone else has said, so I'm not unduly influenced by other people's thoughts. This means that I'm probably going to either repeat or contradict what other people have already said. Skipping over the Japan-only games because I've not played them. Blazing Blade: I'm honestly not sure. Partly because I'm not super familiar with the game and partly because I don't think the story has that much to say. I guess I'll go with the importance of family? Sacred Stones: Grief, and how we react to it. Lyon is the big obvious bad reaction to grief, but there's also Orson, Eirika, and Myrrh. Path of Radiance: Racism. Racism is bad. This one is not subtle. Radiant Dawn: Even good people can end up on the opposite sides of conflicts, but it is important that we are willing to try to put aside our differences and find common ground. Shadow Dragon: Another one that's hard for me, for the same reasons as BlaBl. Maybe something about nobility and duty? No clue. Awakening: The bonds of friendship make us stronger. Congratulations, Awakening, on being even less subtle than Path of Radiance. Fates: Oh boy. I think it's supposed to be about the differences between blood family and chosen family? But if so, then it's fumbled pretty terribly. I guess I'll put it down as being that the person we are is shaped by our upbringing. Shadows of Valentia: Duality. Yin and yang, masculinity and femininity, strength and compassion. And how neither side alone is enough. Three Houses: Breaking the cycle of abuse. Specifically, how Rhea and Edelgard are repeating the same pattern: traumatic childhood, good intentions, authoritarianism. But then we alternatively see other characters (especially Dimitri and Claude) trying to not be defined by their trauma. This is probably the game I have most to say about, but also least willingness to do so because of fear of The Edelgard Discourse(TM). Engage: We are not defined by our blood or our pasts, but by the actions that we take. As for how well they do at communicating their themes: Awakening and PoR have very clear themes but at the cost of being as subtle as a brick to the head. Three Houses and Sacred Stones both feel as if they have something meaningful to say. Radiant Dawn and Shadows of Valentia at least feel like they have a point they were trying to make even if they don't stick the landing. But the rest are just kind of a confused mess.

Not to mention Fódlan, where a single tile can be an entire battalion of soldiers, or it can be a door. There is definitely a whole lot of abstraction going on here. I generally tend to conceptualise things not so much as "how much space does this unit physical take up?" but more as "how much of the battlefield can this unit effectively exert control over?" If Marth is on a given tile, then an enemy unit can't rush past him and through that area without getting into range that allows him to engage them. So, for a group of units all on adjacent tiles, it's more like a skirmish line than a shield wall. There's still a lot of handwaving required to make this work, but it does go some way to explaining the difference in scale between indoors and outdoors, as well as how a wyvern takes up the same amount of space as a teenage girl. I like this take. I wouldn't exactly call this the only problem with war elephants. Rather, I believe that the bigger problem was one of logistics. Elephants eat a lot. This means that they were expensive to raise and train (especially given how slowly they breed and mature), and then expensive to actually get onto the battlefield, where feeding them took away resources that could have been used for feeding men and horses. So if you had the choice between one elephant or one infantryman, you would probably take the elephant. But given that the actual choice was more likely to be one elephant or dozens-to-hundreds of infantry or cavalry, then elephants generally just weren't giving a good return on investment.

I'd count this as a good argument against multi-square elephants. If we're going to have four squares become the standard for units like Demonic Beasts or Corrupted Wyrms, then it would feel weird to have elephants be that same size. I'd rather have an elephant take up the same amount of space as a horse than the same as a dragon.

There already was the Oliphantier overclass from the DLC of Shadows of Valentia, but from what I've seen (I never bothered with that game's DLC) that wasn't particularly elephanty so possibly shouldn't count. I think I'd probably prefer any hypothetical future elephant unit to be kept simple rather than leaning too far into gimmicks. Just make it an armoured equivalent of a bow knight and I'd be happy. As an alternative: elephant beast units. We've had cats, lions, tigers, wolves, foxes, rabbits, ravens, hawks, and herons. Why not give us people who can turn into elephants? Even if they didn't do anything mechanically distinct, it would still be a cool aesthetic for a character or a unit type.

I agree with all of this but will also add that power now is usually more valuable than power later. If you use a stat booster on someone who is near their cap, then you're still getting a good advantage from teh stat booster because it's immediately helping you in the next map, and the next map is the most important one. Yeah, it's nice if the value of the stat booster can keep on being felt right throughout the entire duration of the game, but it's far from necessary. Worrying too much about long-term optimisation is in the same family of ideas as "early promoting is always bad", "I won't use my Jagen because it takes experience from everyone else" and "if I send this unit through these four awful classes they'll have an amazing build for the last three maps of the game".

Quite probably some people do. It's possible to find just about any pronunciation if you look hard enough. But it isn't listed as a pronunciation by either Merriam-Webster or Collins, which are my go-to dictionaries for US and UK English respectively, so if it does exist then it's probably a pretty rare pronunciation.

That's the point of the poem. It isn't trying to rhyme beard and heard. It's having them next to each other as words that look as if they should rhyme but don't, but then the actual rhyme isn't beard/heard or lord/word, but rather heard/word. There are a few instances in the poem where there are dialectical differences or where language has changed over the hundred years since the poem was first written. "Bade" is one that sticks out to me, since that can be pronounced to rhyme with either "played" or "plaid". But beard and heard are deliberately different.

This poem seems relevant. And is quite a trip even to me as a native speaker.

My username is just an arbitrary random dictionary word, picked for no particular reason. Just "I like the word", I guess? For anyone unfamiliar, "lenticular" means "in the shape of a lentil or a biconvex lens". It's a fun word, and I always enjoy getting to pull it out of my vocabulary back pocket, but there's no deeper meaning than that. Just a hastily-chosen name for a site I wasn't sure I'd stick around on. My profile picture is of a lenticular cloud, which is a type of cloud (obviously). It isn't actually particularly lenticular-looking, but it was what I found when I did a search for public-domain stock photos of lenticular clouds.

I remember reading a review of this game on a history blog that I read which approached it in terms of historical accuracy more than gameplay, and one of his comments was that it was weird how easy it was to turn trenches against your enemy, because obviously real historical trenches weren't designed that way. I don't think that needs any further commentary from me.

Ludveck, Elena, Seforia, Kyza, Kostas, Cervantes, Shiharam.

Hey now. I voted for Ludveck. I mean, sure, I don't play Heroes, don't care who wins, and only made meme votes, but I still voted for him!