Jotari
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Posts posted by Jotari
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58 minutes ago, Saint Rubenio said:
My favorite part of FE12 is when Wrys says "that wasn't even my best trap," unsheathes his levin sword and defeats Hardin singlehanded.
Anyway, yeah, this map's always a fun time. If only the rest of them could've been more like this.
Honestly I feel like Riev doesn't even do anything at all. He basically stands around looking menacing and then you fight him twice near the end where it's a moment of "Oh yeah, that guy's still alive." Like, correct me if I'm wrong, but he actually has zero connection to Lyon's experiments or corruption and stuff. That's all Knoll's territory. Lyon just got corrupt all on his own and Riev basically just showed up afterwards to do the Demon King's bidding, being lucky enough to be the one crazy satanist worshipper who happens to be alive at the same time his god is actually returning by sheer happenstance. Not saying it be necessarily better if Riev was the man behind it all, it's good that Lyon is corrupted via his own ambition and naivety rather than some obviously untrustworthy guy telling him to do something obviously shady. But it does leave Riev largely without a role or purpose in the plot other than to be basically Xemcel (I do wish Xemcel got to stand around looking menacing earlier in Shadow Dragon though).
Riev is by far the best bonus unit though. A staffs+slayer+defense better than Moulder = a monster's worst nightmare.
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I wonder where Areone was hanging out before he appears on the map. He specifically says he doesn't live in Thracia anymore, but Thracia and the more recently liberate Miletos are the only things in that direction. He must have flown out east of Belhalla at turn 0 and just spent ages travelling south to flank Seliph from a position where no one is likely to be.
Lopt Sect = Bad. This is true. But, what's really shocking and kind of sad...they are, at least in my opinion, by far the best evil cult the series has done.
Gharnef is great by himself, but his larger support system is non existent beyond exp bags. We get no other named characters of his heretics, and the closest we do get, Ereimya, is just mind controlled.
The Duma Faithful are...alright. They don't really do anything though. And what Jedah does do with Celica is, controversial, to put it mildly. They're also literally summoning monsters and sacrificing their souls to Cthullu. And, like, the lopt sect may be ridiculously evil, but at least they're evil as humans. The Duma Faithful are almost literally becoming unhuman in their evil. Though I guess they get some style points. Alright, I'll call it a tie for them.
Elibe doesn't have any evil cult, unless you want to count Nergal and his morphs. Neither does Sacred Stones. Ping praises Novala, and I agree, he's a bit of fun (Sacred Stones bossmen=Good, as Ruben's next game shall demonstrate). But I think he's just a dark mage working with Riev who is mostly by himself in his inexplicable worship of satan.
Again no evil cults in Tellius (unless you want to count the senators, but they're more polticans than cultists despite their classes). We took a big break from them after Kaga left, huh? But then Awakening comes crashing back into bad evil cult territory with the Grimleal. Whose main goal is literally to get themselves all eaten by a dragon.
And then the worst of them all is the Agarthans in Three Houses. Because they are actually an interesting idea! They're not just crazy evil cultists for the sake of crazy evil cultists. Their a millennia old Illuminati style conspiracy cult with super science! That's fun, that's cool. But they're the worst because they just fuck it up entirely by doing absolutely nothing with them and making the bulk of their evil mostly pointless and just for the sake of having a completely morally black faction.
Uh...sorry, that might have been a bit off topic. Thank you for coming to my seminar on Fire Embelm's worst recurring trope and how the Lopt Sect are only bad in the absolute sense, and not the relative sense...
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1 hour ago, Metal Flash said:
I remember seeing a Summoner that had low move and could only use staves, but could do so twice each turn. I think that would be interesting to see implemented in a official game, even if balancing them would rather difficult.
Seconding armored mages like the Barons I saw in a (attempted) FE4 remake. There was also bow using Armor Knights, though I`m unsure how well that would work.
There was also a Spartan class in a few hacks, but it just seemed to be a spear using Hero (strong stats all around).
We already had bow using armoured knights on the DS. And the answer is, they work rather well. It helps increase their effective attack range and gives them anti flier capability. Really bows are the best sub weapon for basically any class for that reason. Generals in Genealogy itself also had bows but they never really get into combat so that was more useful for arena cheesing.
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3 minutes ago, Imuabicus der Fertige said:
Improve Weapon: Target ally with weapon eqipped. This weapon deals +6 damage, Hit+10, Crit+10 and effective damage is improved to x4 (*presuming it´s x3; if x2 -> x3). Does not stack.
They actually had that one in Engage's DLC.
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1 hour ago, Shaky Jones said:
0 Dollar footlong, because you didn't pay for this game.
I actually have paid for a copy of New Mystery. Because I was under the impression original DS titles didn't have region locking only to be cucked by the fact that New Mystery has online features or something and thus is region locked. Stupid DSI.
1 hour ago, Shaky Jones said:This chapter is neither of those thing, and is therefore the only good gaiden map in this game.
Hey, I liked the Legion gaiden. Especially on Normal Mode where it's a whole map based around the arena concept of "How long can I gamble on grinding using this before I lose someone". On Maniac it became more of a desperate rush to the top right Legion and hope the rng made him the real one (it is randomized, right?). But in fairness to be I was doing a challenge run on Maniac so the normal mode vibe might be more easily felt if you're not stuck using the newly recruited Dice and Malice (Horace will still be there dying like wet tissue paper though).
1 hour ago, Shaky Jones said:Now let me talk about the REAL reason this chapter is amazing, past the map design. This chapter respects Wrys. Many units in FE12 are simply thrown in for the sake of "Everyone is here!". But my guy the one who cannot fight gets his own chapter, and it's actually good! Tell me that's a coincidence! To top it off, he even re-recruits himself with his iconic catchphrase: "Rebellions are like seeds".
The assassins are going out of their way to murder this particular old man, while people like Athena are simply thrown at you at the start of 13x, and Ceasar and Radd are simply there because mercenary moment, although Ceasar is a bit interesting to me. To Oblivion with Malicia. Wrys is where it's at!
You find Caesar interesting?
Well let me direct you to this fangame in which he starsOkay, I'll take a break from shilling Pyrathi this time. Instead I'll shill this threadBecause it's about that very concept and you're right. Wrys getting a moment to himself is good. Shame New Mystery barely bothers to do so beyond that.
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Armoured Mages! Armoured Mages! Armoured Mages!
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1 hour ago, Saint Rubenio said:
If I had to add one Krisless support for everyone I do feel he could've had an interesting talk with Samson, being that they used to be neighbors and they did on some capacity know each other, since they namedrop each other when recruited in the first game.
Hey, hey, hey, I made a thread for that talk two months ago. Post there if you want to talk about adding Krisless supports!
1 hour ago, Saint Rubenio said:That being said, in Arran's case I agree he doesn't need a Krisless support as much as most. Not only because of what you say, but also because they use the one support so well. What could another support really add? Just go over the backstory again? The support is so incredibly good that I genuinely don't think he needs more. Save the writing chops for Cain. Now there's someone who desperately needed another support where he doesn't just talk about training with the avatar. Why not Abel/Cain, IntSys?
Supports don't necessarily have to be a two way street. I think it's fine if some supports are basically about one person while the other is just a sounding board. Like, there's certainly a lot more that can be delved into about Samson's backstory. His Kris support is a bit underwhelming, being basically entirely about his romance with Sheema, but dancing around actually talking about her because she might be dead (at least from what I recall). As far as Samson goes as an actual person, we know basically nothing about him. All that Sheema stuff is recent in his life, what was he doing before that? Where is he even from?
All that being set, mechanically Samson would be a terrible support for Arran, as Samson is a late game unit and Arran is an early game unit, and unlike a lot of Jeigans, you absolutely are meant to stop using Arran at some point.
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20 hours ago, Tybrosion said:
If I counted correctly, there are now 25 Mythics from FEH itself as of Mythic Loki.
If all of those spots went to main series characters, then yeah we would definitely have multiple Crusaders instead of just Ullr.
25 is a pretty big number At that rate we could have all the Crusaders, all the Eight Legends of Elibe, Anri and Artemis plus the expected ones like Deghensea and Lehran. In fact, they could effectively retire Mythics entirely and start focusing on giving us Emblems more regularly in their place. Assuming the House Leaders and Eirika-Ephraim are split into separate units (not necessarily a guarantee), we have 25 potential Emblem units (12 wheel Emblems+Ephraim+2 Alears+3 House leaders+6 DLC chapters+Chrom). That's enough for two solid years of monthly Emblem releases (if the multi character Embelms are combined that brings us down to 20, which is still pretty high). But since we're not getting monthly Emblem releases and are still getting Legendary/Mythics, there does seem to be significant chance that not all potential Emblems will get into the game.
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20 minutes ago, Magenta Fantasies said:
Choose Your Legends isn’t a good metric for popularity. There are all sorts of reasons why some characters can place higher than others. Maybe people thought Gaius was a shoo-in for being added to Heroes, but Lon’qu and Donnell’s futures were less certain, so they voted more for the latter two. Henry is almost certainly more popular than Lon’qu or Donnell, but he’s also much more polarizing than them or Gaius. Lots of people like Henry, but I’ve met plenty of people who dislike him, myself included. As far as fan art, fan fiction, general observations in the fandom/just generally being talked about, etc. Gaius is definitely more popular than Lon’qu or Donnell, although those aren’t perfect metrics, either.
In fact, there are several characters who have placed weirdly high in CYL, such as Dorcas. Outside of the occasional poisoned mutton meme mention, does anyone talk about him? Even in 2017, that meme was fairly obscure and I don’t think the ad it originated from ever aired in Japan. I never saw this meme until a year or two ago, and I’ve been a Fire Emblem fan since 2009.
CYL is not a perfect assessment of popularity, but it is far more objective than any personal observations and the first CYL in particular is going to be a lot more indicative of popularity as that was before the release of Heroes itself which will obviously be influenced by Heroes as a game. Nonetheless, while a character who isn't popular might do well in CYL for memes or heroes related quirks, there's no reason to assume the contrary, that a genuinely popular character wouldn't do well in CYL.
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2 hours ago, Humanoid said:
Which three schmucks would accompany Virion in our tutorial team then?
Cord, Nephenee and Shiva.
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I wonder what Heroes would look like if they took a hard stance of "No OCs" from the beginning. We'd have more than Ullr representing the Crusaders I'd expect.
Translation of the above statement, I don't remotely care about Loki.
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To get even more meta and deconstructive with it, what even is a main story? For example, in the Third Doctor run of Doctor Who, the actor, Jon Pertwee (also know as the best Doctor, don't @ me on that unless it's unconditional praise) insisted on several scenes at the start of the story where the Doctor is teaching his partner something. He (the actor) called them "Moments of Charm". Said scenes almost never come back for the "main plot" being the monster of the week. And if they did then it'd feel a bit choreographed, like James Bond getting the exact gadgets he needs. Which isn't bad, just different. But the point is, what is the "main story" of Doctor Who? Because while these Moments of Charm don't contribute to the story of the then monster of the week episode, they do contribute to the over all character arc of the Doctor and the relationships he's building with humans while exiled on Earth. So what is the main story? The main episode (or rather series of episodes as classic Doctor Who serials was always several episodes long before a new story started) or the overall series long story of the protagonist? This might seem like a niche example but it's also kind of not. Every story of sufficient length is going to be broken up chapters, maybe even whole books. Even individual scenes are going to have their own flow and intention. Like, if I write a paragraph about the weather, it is not contributing to the main story (unless the story is about metrology or something), but it is contributing to that individual scene to set the tone and possibly invoking emotion. It's making that scene work and that scene should be making other scenes work in tandem. And we can argue about what those collection of scenes mean for a main plot (is Shadows of Valentia about killing gods and man standing up for themselves or is it about finding a balance between hedonism and tough love, or is it saying religion sucks. All of those? None of those because they contradict? For it's failings at least there's a discussion and different perspective and interpretations to be had), but what's ultimately important is if the individual scenes and moments are engaging. I don't think I've ever walked away from a story saying "man I hated every individual scene of that but the overall work really spoke to me"*. At best I'd say "I got what they were going for but the execution fell flat." On the other hand I have definitely walked away from something saying "that was bad overall, but that one moment was really great." One of my favorite writers, Kurt Vonnegut, lacks what you could easily identify as a Main Plot in most of his books. He usually just has some interesting characters with a themeactially interesting scenario. And in one book, his most famous, Slaughterhouse V, he has an alien character describe their alien literature by saying
"There isn’t any particular relationship between the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time."
Which not only ties into the stories own themes of the story's approach to time but perfectly describes how the book is structured.
so tl;Dr I fully agree every scene has to have a reason and purpose, but I reject the notion that a story has to have a main plot, or that a main plot is even something necessarily important.
*Okay I can think of one work where I walked away saying individually nothing worked but I liked the overall product, and that's the first Devil May Cry game which thought had a lot of issues but managed to come together into something greater than the sum of its parts. Though that's almost entirely gameplay related and not narrative as it barely even has a story.
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Well it's only been two days since I redid the menus for promotion, but I'm glad to announce another two major developments. The first is Easy Mode. It now gives all playable units Paragon to increase exp gain. This is something I've been intending to do for a while, but I had to do it manually for each character recruitment. I think I covered everyone, but if you see anyone who doesn't have Paragon on easy mode, or who inexplicably has it on normal or hard mode, then please report it.
The second major change is some alterations to Chapter 3. There are now two gatekeeper npcs who will get a few hits in on the enemies before they're swiftly slaughtered. And the two now has four NPCs scattered about whom you can warn to go inside and gain 50exp to whatever character talked to them. The enemy levels have also been reduced slightly. Hopefully this will make the chapter feel more dynamic and interesting.
The third major change is the you can now revisit Port Warren. Marisha has been moved from the Salamander statue to here and it's also where you need to go after the route split to find Malice. It also lets you recruit Spartacus or Anna if you failed to recruit them earlier, and go at a certain time and you can recruit Rollo several chapters early too. If you visit after the route split a Dagon will be attacking the town and by defeating it you can get the powerful Dracoshield+. Finally, Caesar's sister Iulia is there for a bonus conversation that just exists for its own sake. Because, well, I made the portrait for Iulia for one very brief cutscene in the Mace route and thought she should have a bit more presence than that.
For anyone in the middle of a playthrough right now, you won't be able to visit Port Warren on a current save. You'll have to start the game again, or send your save file to me and I can individually modifiy it to open Warren access. Because of this I've labelled the most recent UPS file PyrathiWarlordsV1.1
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8 hours ago, Imuabicus der Fertige said:
@Jotari You have me curious, knowing of your seemingly endless enthusiasm for FE projects... may I ask what you need the map for?
And all the links are from the wiki.org site, for clarification.
It's very early days yet, in fact I'm not meant to be even working on it at all until I finish off my Masters. But, basically, with Pyrathi done, the next planned project is a Macedon prequel with Minerva as the protagonist and pacing reminiscent of a Mega Man game.
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29 minutes ago, Imuabicus der Fertige said:
File:FESD Archanea.png - Fire Emblem Wiki Size of this preview: 800 × 598 pixels. Other resolution: 1,024 × 765 pixels.
And this one is a bigger version from the link on that page:(1,024 × 765 pixels, file size: 1.1 MB, MIME type: image/png)
Nice. Perfect I'd even say.
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26 minutes ago, lenticular said:
I'm entirely in agreement with everyone else saying that twists for the sake of twists are terrible and that there are no truly original stories. So I have to wonder if something was lost in translation here. Because, honestly, this kind of just makes him come across as a bit of a bozo. It just makes me assume that there is some sort of context or nuance that isn't coming across.
I was thinking about this some more, and realised that there is a pretty notable exception to this general trend: music. Sure, the absolute most basic and milquetoast taste in music is just to listen to whatever happens to be in the charts at that the time, but listening to decades old music is pretty common and unremarkable. If someone is really into 60s music or 80s music then that's not likely to raise eyebrows in the same way as someone who's really into 60s movies or 80s novels.
I wonder if this is just because of the relative time commitments. Watching a movie takes about 2 hours. Reading a novel takes maybe 5-10 hours. Listening to a song takes about 3 minutes. This means that most of us are going to be listening to a whole lot more songs than we are watching movies or reading novels, so maybe that's what encourages us to be a bit more diverse in our consumption?
This is true. Or, at least, it is more true than it would be for other forms of media. There is definitely a stereotype when it comes to music of old people not being able to relate to youths and being shocked when young people have never heard of a given band that was popular several decades ago. Not sure I explained that well, so I'll just post a Simpsons clip that encapsulates what I'm talking about.
Though, to counter my own point now, I think as time goes on "who" made a piece of music becomes quite irrelevant compared to the actual music itself. Which might play into that perception. An old person might be agahst that some youngesters don't know who the Beetles are, but if you play a few songs they will probably recognize the most iconic ones. For my own direct experience of that, I've asked some Japanese kids if they know who Queen is and virtually none of them do. But tap out "We Will Rick You" and they'll recognize it instantly.
So, uh what am I trying to say with all this. I... don't really know to be honest. Your time investment point is probably correct though and my final addition would be that as young people age and start making stuff like TV shows and movies, they often carry along the music of their youth with them and put them in soundtracks. Music is also so emblematic of a specific decade, at least for the 20th century, that it's often used to set the tone for a scene set in the recent past. It's easier and impactful for visual media to play a recognizeable 60s song than it is to show off a book or movie from the era to set the mood (though they do do that in occassion too).
26 minutes ago, lenticular said:Back to the main topic, I've also thought of another trend that I am weary of: endless sequels, prequels, midquels, remakes, demakes, remasters, reimaginings, spin-offs, adaptations, extended universes, cinematic universes, alternate universes, and so on. Which isn't to say that media franchises are inherently a bad thing. I mean, we're sitting here having this discussion on a fan site for a game series that has seen somewhere between 14 and 25 games, depending on how you count. Any individual new game or movie that's part of a bigger franchise isn't really the problem. Rather, the problem is the absence -- or at least the paucity -- of original stand-alone titles.
To defend our taste in fictional universes, Fire Emblem is much less a franchise than most franchise. Since it entirely changes it setting and cast every five years. Sure we have fifty something versions of ghost cameo Marth, but by and large each new Fire Emblem entry (or every second entry) is a new story and not a sequel or a reboot. It is a franchise in the technical sense, but compared to other franchises Fire Emblem functions more of a brand name than a real franchise.
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A small update, but one that took a tonne of time to implement.
I discovered the menu split patch and implemented it for class change. So you can just directly choose what you want instead of being prompted yes or no for a dozen options on loop. Much more professional looking. -
Depends how you want to play. If playing most optimally for Awakening then Chrom is a backpack who never fights by himself and Robin is magic focused (particularly Dark Magic) and the sole receiver of any exp. But that's one hell of a boring way to play the game. Awakening isn't the kind of game with any bad builds. It has good builds and it has curbstomp builds. You can build Robin anyway you wand independently of Chrom.
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33 minutes ago, Saint Rubenio said:
One of my favorite characters in the series, if not my favorite period, is Arran, from Archanea - specifically, his New Mystery of the Emblem inception. The concept of a Jeigan whose bad potential is justified not by age, but by a terminal illness, is quite interesting, and it makes him the one FE unit for whom death during the campaign can be argued as a fine ending to his character.
This is already pretty neat, but in New Mystery he gets a support chain where he discusses what it means to be a knight with Kris. He once served an unnamed lord somewhere in Archanea, and he believed absolute, blind loyalty to one's liege was the duty of a knight. Basically, he used to be a Camus. But one day, said lord ordered him to put down a rebellion. They were only peasants, starving after a bad harvest and making themselves heard to survive. Arran followed the order. Wracked with guilt, he wandered the world until he met Marth. Serving him, he discovered the true meaning of being a knight.
"A knight isn't a puppet that blindly follows orders. That is not loyalty. To fight for a cause I believe in, under a liege I believe in. That is what it means to be a knight."
Still one of my favorite lines in the series to this day. By the time you get his A support with Kris, he's likely already close to falling off. Him dying a hero's death shortly after this conversation is a truly compelling end to his character arc. Or, you can keep him until the end so he can get a glimpse of the peaceful world he helped created before he succumbs to his sickness. There is no cure and no way to save him, but however he dies, he dies happy and without regrets.
To add to this, while he's certainly not a minor character, I do like how Athos just dies at the end of the game. But he's still a playable character that you took to the end of the game, and thus he's still entitled to his own ending card, wherein all they can tell us is "yeah, he died. You were there, you saw it." Well I try to put an amusing spin on it, but really they do genuinely make it work. The whole "we won the final battle, but important ancillary guy died!" is a very common trope in video games in general, it's quite surprising Fire Emblem only did something like that once.
36 minutes ago, Saint Rubenio said:He once served an unnamed lord somewhere in Archanea
I wonder where. He does specify that he's an Altean Knight when Marth actually meets him Shadow Dragon. But if course Already is a good guy nation with no bad aristocratsTM. And he says another kingdom. If New Mystery was more interested in utilizing it's full cast Tellius style, it probably would have been Lang that ordered it and Arran could have a personal thing with him. Still, on the other hand, the world does feel bigger when it's not anyone you meet and just some guy that exists somewhere. Still, I'd like the country to be specified. I nominate Gra.
33 minutes ago, Saint Rubenio said:Beautifully tragic concept for a character that was greatly expanded upon in the remake. New Mystery supports are a bit hit or miss and there needed to be more Krisless supports, I won't deny it, but there are still some gems to be found there. As cool as the concept is, without the FE12 support he'd just be a guy that doesn't speak a word in the entire game.
People love to blame Kris for everything, but there was really never a chance of having a full support catalogue in a game with 70+ characters. That being said, I think everyone should have had at least one Kris Convo and one non Kris Convo at minimum.
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27 minutes ago, Saint Rubenio said:
To be really perfect, he needs the heterochromia.
10 minutes ago, Saint Rubenio said:And the best part is that the portrait is an edit of a vanilla FE7 portrait - Heath, to be specific. His colors were different but he has the same ridiculous two-colored hair. People bashed Alear like this had never been a thing before in the series lol
I'm fine with Alear's hair. It's the two pieces that cross like an x right over their forehead that drives me nuts. Like, it looks like those two strands are glued together. And they should be annoying as all hell to Alear themself for always brushing against the edge of their vision. Genuinely ruins the whole design for me.
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19 minutes ago, Imuabicus der Fertige said:
I think the Kitsune map fucking over any horse based army is splendid.
That's kind of the issue, isn't it? Fliers have a built in weakness to bows. Armoured have an effective weakness to magic. But there's no weapon wide counter to horses. Horses just win. Even though pike walls were the famous counter to cavalry; certainly a lot more so than shooting down a freaking flying horse or using a flame thrower on someone in plate mail. But make horses weak to lances and you have an issue that it's just weird for the weapon triangle and probably nerfs cavalry too much. But if we had beast units just casually in the enemy ranks at the same ratio as bows then cavalry would have a pretty solid counter.
Or, yeah, just more ridersbanes on the enemy in general. Now that they've innovated that little exclamation mark bubble there's really no good reason not to kit the enemy out in them more if horses are dominating things. That being said, cavalry domination hasn't been too bad in the most recent releases.
19 minutes ago, Imuabicus der Fertige said:Mountains should probably affect fliers as well... I ain´t heard of no gawdamn birb on Mt. Everest (but maybe I just don´t listen)
According to our lord and savior, Google, the highest flying bird is Ruppell's Vulture, which can reach heights of 11,000 meters. While Everest is 8,000 meters. So, yeah, birds above Everest are possible. Which is pretty freaking wild. Still I doubt Ruppell's Vulture could carry Ruppell up there, and without oxygen masks and a good parka, the riders are still going to feel some impacts of those heights.
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3 minutes ago, Revier said:
Tbh I kinda wonder what it is about the NES portraits that make them look so goofy. Theoretically they have the right overall shape, and not too bad shading. Perhaps it has to do with their chins being really large?
NES portraits are just wildly variable in quality.
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25 minutes ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:
Fire Emblem players are only expected to know basic addition and subtraction. And the real nerds may know some stats. Like the odds of a 20% true hit, 30% crit hitting and also killing Rutger. 6% any time that berserker is alive to swing at him.
The only thing I can say for certain, is that 30% of the time, Rutger crits every time.
FE12 Fan Criticizes FE12 Maps For Far Too Much Of His Time
in Fire Emblem: Heroes of Light and Shadow
Posted
That's what happens when I post after my bed time.