Jotari
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9 minutes ago, Revier said:
You've really got to wonder how exactly the Loptyrian cult and Julius got enough legitimacy to sideline Arvis, the emperor himself. Like, don't people know they are trying to resurrect Satan? Aren't there other people in the royal court who aren't part of their schemes? Shouldn't going against the empress herself have triggered bigger schisms?
We can only speculate (that is to say contrive explanations), but the fact that every second or third castle has a Lopt Bishop on it during the second gen seems to suggest that Manfroy has very successfully managed to infiltrate every part of the upper echelons with his own men over the years, there's even a Lopt Bishop in Thracia, somehow. And, somewhat ironically, the presence of the rebels over the years might have done more to prevent schism in the empire than entice it, as people would see unity as more important than religious intolerance. Cohen strickes me as an example of a minor character who in his short time on screen comes across as very anti-Lopt, but very pro-Empire. He would almost certainly side with the Alvis faction if a civil war came, but since that's not happening, the rebels who want to tear down both the Lopt Sect and the Empire are the bigger problem.
And in regards to Alvis naming Julia heir, I meant to say it above, but the big problem with that is that Julia was missing presumed dead for years now. She wasn't around for Alvis to displace Julius with. Yet he did still try to displace Julius and exile him, which didn't work. That's possibly one of the most interesting lines in the entire game that goes absolutely nowhere. Why didn't that work and cause a schism? Whose backing did Julius get that turned the tide against Alvis? Hilda, perhaps? How complete was that exile. Did Alvis just say the words and Julius laughed at him, or did Alvis successfully force Julius to live in Orgahil or something for a few months? How did Travant react to that? Since we'll probably never know, to fanfiction we must go.
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2 hours ago, Magenta Fantasies said:
It is true that it’s pretty easy to ignore most Fire Emblem characters you don’t like. That is probably why I don’t dislike that many Fire Emblem characters. I’d struggle to name 20 I actively dislike.
While I agree that Gaius is less popular (but also less polarizing or disliked) than Tharja or Cordelia, he’s probably the most popular male Awakening character after Chrom and Robin and maybe Owain and Inigo. Robin and Chrom aside, Gaius is by far the most popular first-generation male.
At the time of Awakening's release, yeah. But, as I said earlier, that popularity did not last. Donnel and Lon'Qu got better than him in the first CYL poll. And I think even at the time of release Henry's popularity rivaled if not surpassed Gaius's. And his popularity further plummeted after the first CYL. In the most recent on he got less than 400 votes.
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5 hours ago, Shaky Jones said:
So people were reading my thread. Nice.
Okay so I've been having this on the back of my mind for a while now. Even today I've been talking with others about my passion of map design and how I wanna come back to this, but the reason I stopped was because I got incredibly sick and couldn't get out of bed for weeks. Then I got preoccupied with multiple dentists appointments that have finally caught up with me and now the government has decided I owe them free labor once again.
As for personal excuses, I've been playing a lot of mods on my new laptop and my brother naturally wants to borrow my laptop to play some games we couldn't run before. Right now, I'm playtesting for a new upcoming hack by none other than Mr Fe6 boss man @Saint Rubenio, and im doing a bit of Garonquest and FE6 Archanea to the side. Furthermore, me and my brother enjoy playing board games, and pre ordered ones are barely starting to show up now, and now I have to play a game I've never heard of to catch up on references ill otherwise miss when playing with him.
I bet your dog ate your copy of New Mystery too.
5 hours ago, Shaky Jones said:Also what do you mean by awful maps? Just you wait until Nerring Gaming.
I find the key to that map is that Nerring stops the reinforcements. Trying to do it conventionally is borderline impossible. You've got to risk everything and blitz him LTC style.
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5 hours ago, Etrurian emperor said:
I've always had a strong dislike towards the argument that Engage is different from Three Houses because Engage toned down the 'social sim elements''. I think its an argument that sets people on the wrong expectation and that its not even true to begin with.
The difference between the game is one of narrative tone and gameplay styles(the later of which in Engage's favor even), but all the social sim features that Engage supposedly doesn't have are found in both games. Okay, you can't decide the romantic ending of your entire army but that's about the only limit on the social sim I can think of. Running around the Somniel isn't unlike the monastery. You can still have supports and your avatar can still marry who he wants, you can still take characters out to dinner, dress them how you want and do weird minigames with them. If the monastery drew you in then the Somniel should be enough.
Putting emphasis on this supposed lack of social sim mechanic to differentiate the two sets wrong expectations. It implies Engage is the more hardcore title that can get down to business now that its unburdened by husbandos and waifus. It invites the conclusion that Engage is the hardcore Shin Megani Tensei equivalent to Three Houses Persona, but that's not the game Engage wants to be. Its proudly lighthearted and beginner friendly. Uh...well in theory at least. Its what the game wants to be but the stages are quite a bit too hard for the game to be as welcoming as it thinks it is.
I think what people are really getting at when they say that is that the social sims aren't pushed as much. You're much more free to ignore them in Engage than Three Houses. And indeed I did ignore pretty much all of that stuff aside from late game cooking in Engage. Just trying out each minigame once to see what it is (and not even that for fishing). Of course, it is entirely possible to ignore all the monastary stuff in Three Houses if you really want to, and people feeling like Engage is providing more freedom to do that might just be down to exhaustion of such features after Three Houses and no individual compulsion to (heh) Engage with them. Then again, the Monastary limits its features with a gauge of points that only let's you do a set number of activities. And we all know the way to pressure someone into doing something in a game is to limit how often they can do it. So that aspect might be real. Of course, a really big difference is probably just the plain loading times. Engage is not without it's unacceptably long loading times (very glad they patched skill inheritance into the arena area), but it does at least feel better than Three Houses. I certainly feel like at any moment I can get into a battle much faster in Engage than Three Houses.
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9 hours ago, BrightBow said:
Let's not forget Travant.
Egads, you're right. How neglectful of me.
5 hours ago, ping said:
: "You overestimate her threat, milord. After all, the Book of Naga remains under the strictest lock and key in Belhalla. Without it, I cannot fathom now Naga's soul could ever come to dwell within that girl..."
That might be a goof. The Book of Nafa is in Belhalla? Because you get it in Velthomer in the next chapter. It being in Belhalla would change everything, as you'd need to go through Julius to get it. Of course the real goof is that the bad guys didn't just burn it and remove it entirely. Though that might be mitigated by them not having access to it without the circlet. But then why would it be in Velthomer with a magic Heim lock?...I've got it! The Miletos problem. How to solve it feeling irrelevant. We just make it part of of Jugdral. Make it the Velcomher dukedom. We do fight Alvis at the end anyway (even though he's at Chalphy). Fitting all of the Dukedoms of Chalphy into the final map (except Jungby) gets very crowded. None of them seem to have any territory. Stick one of them, if not Velcthomer then Freege since Hilda is here, will just immediately make it a relevant place. But I suggest Velthomer because then the actual Velthomer castle, which is just a stone's throw from the capital, can be made into some other castle important to Heim so the Book of Naga both being there, and protected from the bad guys, would make sense. Hell, it'd actually be really appropriate if it were Darna, though that would make the borders of the previous war a bit funny.
5 hours ago, ping said:I know that Julius and Ishtar will both leave the map if the respective other is defeated in combat - so realistically, killing Ishtar is the way to go. With how Julius is introducing them to the map, I also assume that they leave if they kill one of your units, so the easist (and lamest) method would be to allow somebody to get killed and then use Valkyrie to revive them. And finally, if Seliph just runs around them to kill the boss and seize (not difficult, between Leif's Rescue staff and Leylia's dancing), I would guess that they disappear, too?
Killing a unit is indeed the lamest way to deal with them. The most based way to deal with them is to have them deal with each other.
5 hours ago, ping said:
: "Once, long ago, you were a confidante to Sigurd, were you not? ...You already know what you must do."
: "Y-yes, sire..."
Hmm. Are you really? I don't recall seeing you in the first generation. In fact, I don't think Sigurd ever even mentioned you.
5 hours ago, ping said:Seeing Arvis this pathetic is a bit hard to believe. I appreciate the shock effect - the mighty and prideful Arvis is now cowering in fear before Julius and Manfroy, not daring to defy their orders openly - but considering that gameplay is about to present him as a still incredibly powerful fighter, I have to question why he doesn't even make an attempt to stand up to Manfroy.
Would be nice if we got the implication, or even a scripted battle, that Alvis was willing to fight, until it came to the moment where he actually had to trade blows with Julius and he just couldn't. Despite everything he couldn't fight his own son. And Julius would miss the weight of that entirely believing it only to be his own power.
3 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:Personally, I like the way FE4 handles it. I much prefer "a point of Res gives either 0 or 100 Avoid against a status staff" as opposed to "a point of Res gives 5 Avoid against a status staff". Like, FE4 is the one game where I have use for the Silence Staff. In other games, it's almost certain to miss the targets I'd want it to hit.
For status staffs in general, I'm with you. Having them be binary yes or no means you have to find specific ways to deal with them. Rather than them just being annoying low hit but very effective problems you just gamble on. That being said, I really like on a conceptual level how the Old Mystery Silence Staff works. In that it hits everyone on the map, ally and enemy alike. You just remove all sound from the battlefield. I don't remember it actually being very useful despite the endgame dark mage spam. Like, I'm sure it is, I just don't remember it ever coming in super clutch for me, though, now, looking at the wiki, I see it worked the same in New Mystery, which I assumed it didn't because the Again staff was no longer map wide. I feel like yeah it would have come in really useful against those Glower Mages, especially in the final part of the first dragon table chapter. Anyway, I'm getting a bit rambly. My point is that it's a cool idea to just shut down magic for everyone for one turn, especially since it gives you questions about your turn order, and if in a game outside of Mystery of the Emblem where hybrid classes exist, it would give more utility to often pointless physical weapons on magic units.
2 hours ago, Interdimensional Observer said:As for naming a daughter when a son lived... I'm not sure if I can think of any IRL examples of that.😅 Though not at all the same, the Pragmatic Sanction is coming to mind. Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI died, leaving only daughters behind and no close male relatives within the House of Habsburg to inherit. For years before his death however, Charles VI had labored away to create the Pragmatic Sanction. This agreement provided for both internal HRE and international recognition of Charles's elder daughter, Maria Theresa, as the sole inheritor of the Austrian Empire, her husband Francis Stephen's election as Holy Roman Emperor (although Marie T would be the true HRE ruler in all but title). Charles VI spent plenty of time and effort on bribes and making promises to keep his family's good fortunes afloat. ...But as soon as Charles died, many who had said they would accept Maria & Francis in fact reneged the Pragmatic Sanction, and the War of the Austrian Succession broke out. Without Forseti on hand to protect the territory, Frederick the Great of Prussia stole Silesia from Austria in the ensuing conflict, although Maria and her husband ultimately got to keep everything else they stood to lose (meaning, basically everything).
I recall one instance of a kingdom naming a girl successor over a boy. It was really unpopular with the nobility who loved the prince and ended with the father trying to assassinate his own son only for the son to fake his own death and stab his father at his own would be funeral. I think the name of the kingdom was something like Biran or something.
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16 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:
I coulda sworn we fought her back in chapter 7...
Thinking about it, portraits could be the very reason why we don't see her. The number of enemies they redesigned for the second generation sits at just 1 with Alvis. Manfroy just didn't age. And Shannan and Oifey's portraits are so different it almost feels like they were using npc villager palette swaps for them. Meanwhile Fin barely changed at all. It pains very much a picture of "let's do as little as possible on the front". Showing Aida in the second gen would mean coming up with a new design for her and, while that shouldn't be hard, it might be just a bit too much work for anyone to care enough to do. Still, should have at least references her in some capacity.
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22 minutes ago, Revier said:
Pretty sure we're more likely to get a Genealogy remake than a direct follow up. Not only is it hard to create a direct follow up in the same setting, given the nature of these stories, but a Genealogy remake is far more marketable, given that it can be easily sold as a proto Three Houses and has a fair bit of nostalgia around it, despite never formally releasing outside of Japan.
Yeah, but the issue there is that the Genealogy remake has been just around the corner for, like, seven years now. It's like the inevitable thing that's just not happening. The Nuclear Fusion of Fire Emblem games.
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I would say highly unlikely. Sure Three Houses was a big success, but so was Awakening and they didn't even give that a sequel. Most it got was some Fates cameos. Revisiting settings once they're done with it is simply not something they do. Archanea is the only exception and that's mostly die to it being very early in the franchise's history when it was still Kaga's pet project. The only possibility is if they work Koei again and Koei are the ones who decide to use Fodlan again because they're comfortable with the setting. But even then, where would you go with another Fodlan game? Sequels are going to face the canonical route problem (and probably have a pretty contrived conflict) and another parallel game based on the same conflict is going to be more than repetitive after the seven+ routes we got between the existing two games. Prequel is another option, but that's where Fodlans robust world building will come back to bite it as there's no obvious conflict to utilize. It would either have to be a Blazing Blade style lower stakes plot about a secret event in history, or you'd have to go so far back to the past and focus on one of the historical wars where you have only the immortals to work with from the established cast, and an ending that's preordained. People suggest using one of the other countries, and I would personally love that for creating series wide continuity between games like the old Archanea days, but a game set in Dagda or Almyra is going to be by design very different and not feature much overlap with Fodlan.
So all in all, not impossible, but I don't think it's very likely at all. It's just not generally how Fire Emblem does things.
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14 minutes ago, Revier said:
I mean it doesn't take much thinking to realize that abducting women was seen as wrong, no matter the excuse. Even in an ultra patriarchal society, where women would be seen as property, they would still have some value, and "stealing" them would still be seen as a crime. Now add all the bits about couples needing to stick to marriage vows, about extra marital romances being frowned upon, and about such customs being codified in Christianity, a widespread religion that held a lot of influence among most of the populace, and it gets extremely dubious.
Part of the problem is that invoking Middle Ages aesthetics and tying it to your story's setting brings with it a bunch of assumptions, including some unfortunately inaccurate yet widespread ideas of the period. You can attempt to counter them by specifically defining the world even further to concretely dispel them, but that does take up time and space, which may be better served on the core story. Or you could just accept those assumptions and go along with them, or perhaps even play a little with them.
The larger point I was trying to make is that we wouldn't necessarily see it as abduction if a teenager wanted it, but we would see it as rape (or at least rapey) if a teenager wanted it, while for the people of the society it's the inverse. The age is no problem but the "stealing" is tantamount to rape. He should be an immoral guy by either standard. But if you mix standards then can come away looking like a hero who rescued a fair maiden so they could love happily after after (only they don't because it's George R.R Martin so they both die).
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24 minutes ago, ping said:
Fire Emblem has the aesthetics of Medieval Europe, but outside of feudalism being the mode of production, its settings are very much modern in terms of social norms. That's not meant as a criticism (FE never pretents to be "historical"), but it means that "this is how it worked in 1200 AD" is basically a non-argument when talking about anything FE-related.
It's pretty standard fantasy in that regard. Even historical fiction set in medieval Europe is going to have a largely modern thinking characters, because they'll be written by modern writers.
This came up in an interesting way in a debate I was read in regards to A Song of Ice and Fire, which as a whole does try replicate medieval values more than most other fantasies, but still makes some obvious and self confessed compromises. Anyway the example in question was with the character of Rhaegar and how creepy his relationship with Lyanna is or is meant to be seen. The situation presented by the "protagonists" at the start of the story is that Rhaegar kidnapped and raped her. But later revelations guessed by the fanbase and confirmed by the show is that Lyanna was consenting and they had a genuinely love affair with Lyanna doing so in part to escape a fiance she didn't care for. Problem is Lyanna was only 15 while Rhaegar was 23, married with two children. Which if you tried to pull off in the modern day, yeah, that would be kind of fucked up. We see 15 year olds as children. But people who romanticize the incident would cite that such ages were okay for the time period. But problem with that argument is that if we're to judge Rhaegar as a man of his time, then by the standards of his time he absolutely did commit a major crime by stealing another man's betrothed and breaking his marriage vows, Lyanna's opinion on the matter would be considered pretty meaningless, not because she's too young bit because she's a woman. He can only be seen as good if you selectively apply what standards should be viewed through a modern lense and what standards should be viewed through a medieval lense. Which obviously doesn't make sense. But it's something people do a lot when viewing fantasy characters.
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2 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:
Hm... if Travant creates a problem... maybe they could say that the original inhabitants of Southern Thracia were darker-skinned? But when Dainn and Njorun split up, and the Kingdom of Thracia was founded, most of the original inhabitants were driven out. Either leaving overseas, or settling in neighboring Miletos.
Nah, best not. When you have to go justifying stuff like that by building more complex lore that isn't actually designed to interact with the story then it's going to feel contrived. Trading hub with a possible southern continent is a much easier and more natural fit then a major genocide of indigenous people.
1 hour ago, Revier said:The real question here is: how come Reptor and Langbalt made their frame job stick? It seems foolish not to immediately smell foul play with claims like blaming an extremely honorable, venerated man for assassination. Sure, they try to handwave it with Arvis siding with them, but...how much power does Arvis actually have? All we know is that he's the leader of the Royal Guard, and never involved himself in politics before the job. Besides, he is a bastard child of the Velthomer family, though from what we see it doesn't really affect his claim to the leadership of Velthomer or his royal post back then.
Azelle was the bastard, Alvis is the legitimate child of Victor and Cigyun who were married. Deirdre would be a bastard too, though never expressly identified as such.
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13 minutes ago, ping said:
To be honest, I didn't expect Sigurd to be exalted to this degree. I appreciate that he's remembered fondly by the people he fought with (for example, Erin telling her children stories about him), but making him into the great hero whose "second coming" (in case somebody still didn't pick up on Seliph's messianic vibes) will deliver mankind from all sins seems more than just a little disproportional. He drove off barbaric invaders, yes, but those aren't connected at all to the current catastrophe, and his following victories all took place outside of Grannvale. When he returned, he was basically tricked by Arvis to help remove his rivals for power, Langbalt and Reptor, before immediately getting murderised himself.
The way I interpret it (possibly backed up by some village statements or Kaga notes, or Thracia or something, possibly just my own creation, it's kind of hard to keep track of things with how scattered some of this information is), is that the Empire's propaganda against Sigurd has backfired on them. They painted him as a devious rebel who wanted to snatch the throne for himself. But, because the empire turned out so shitty, Sigurd as the enemy of the early empire instead became the only sane man who saw the writing on the wall and tried to stop all the tragedy before it happened, at least in the eyes of the common people. The dramatic irony is that he wasn't that either and was really just a dude trying to protect himself with no real knowledge Lopt Sect plans or possible future beyond the vaguest knowledge that they existed.
13 minutes ago, ping said:
That's not dark sorcery, that's blue sorcery!
It's dark blue! Well...kind of. It certainly isn't light blue....well...it's not cyan.
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18 minutes ago, Revier said:
Speaking of Aida, where do people get the idea that Arvis was in a relationship with her? Is it something that Thracia 776 brings up?
Yes. Well...probably. Saias is a character in Thracia 776 who is revealed to be Aida's son and has the mark of Fjalar on his body which neither Julius or Julia are said to have (even though Julius does have minor Fjalar blood). On looking at the script Alvis isn't expressly identified by name, the only time he's mentioned is a brief mention of Amalada admiring him, but we do know, Aida is Saias' mother, Saias has major Fjalar holy blood and that Alvis has major Fjalar holy blood. So unless Victor slept with one of his cousins and did the whole blood mingling trick and then that guy got hitched with Aida, Alvis is the only possible candidate to be the father. Looking at the sources on the wiki (how nice), it does seem there is official confirmation from a Nintendo website that Saias' parents are Alvis and Aida.
https://www.nintendo.co.jp/n02/shvc/bfej/data/chara/index.html
Of course since it's not mentioned expressly in game, feel free to imagine the bastard of a bastard secret major holy blood half brother of Alvis. It's pretty far from occum's razor though. As for a relationship with her, that is very much open to interpretation. It really depends on how you view their characters. It seems almost certain he didn't marry her. But it could have been a one time thing resulting in a kid, or it could have been an on going relationship lasting months or years.
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2 hours ago, Interdimensional Observer said:
I don't deny that. But with exception of carryover portions of map and returning to Grannvale, Genealogy insists on visiting somewhere new every single chapter. That developer decision perhaps either forced Miletos into existence, or forced it to be visited when it could've merely been a "filler location" on the map (not like you visit everywhere on the parchment in every other FE).
Was it because Kaga thought so little of Sigurd that retracing the failure father's footsteps was deemed unexciting? Or that total map reuse, even with changed enemy formations or whatnot, was frowned up as too repetitive to feature? -I would strongly assume the latter.
I would expect you're right. Though as an outspoken critic of Book 2's approach to reused maps, I have to say that Ping's suggestion for map reuse is one I can get behind. Blended reuse. It's not the exact same map as the prologue, it's the same map shifted to give it a different vibe. Like Renvall in Sacred Stones or Castle Ostia in Binding/Blazing Blade. Maps that are reused in a partial way that you probably don't even realize they're reused just because you're exploring the territory at a slightly different angle. Hell even Book 2 does this with the Raman chapter. And I really wish they'd done it with the other reused maps. But I've ranted about that before.
Instead, let's look at the gameplay and narrative goals of Chapter 10. I think these are the beats they wanted to hit.
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Manfroy kidnapping Julia(it's there, but really they barely even tried)*Confronting Hilda in some manner
*Seeing Julius in action for the first time
*Getting Tyrfing
*Killing Alvis
Would all that be possible in the proposed Prologue Chapter 1 hybrid map? Probably, but it might be a bit contrived. As I suggested above, we arrive in Genoa and Hilda is stationed in Evans. Why is Hilda in Evans? That...would be slightly weird. But not entirely unworkable. Friege is just north of there, though there seems to be a few mountains in the way. Hilda's presence in Miletos is written away by just making her Queen of the entire place. So we could make her Queen of Verdane or Agustria, particularly the latter since was already set up that the Friege family would get that kingship.
Next, Julius. This might be the hardest part to accomplish. Chapter 10 makes him work by putting him directly beside a castle you can seize to avoid fighting him (in addition to killing Ishtar instead). But to do that with Jungby or Chalphy has the issue that you could just skip him. Which might be okay. Another option would be to plop him down on the other side of the river beside Evans and because the area is so wide, you basically can't avoid him. You have to kill him or Ishtar. Or, we could have a turn counter where he automatically gets bored and goes home after five turns on the field, while you're meanwhile trying to fend off the reinforcements from Verdane, Agustria and Silesse.
Getting Tyrfing in Chapter 10 is done by having to fight through and army to rescue Palmarch. We might actually be able to pull that off in the same location if we cut off more of the west of Ping's map and push Evans right up against the right hand border to give more space in the east. It would also make the rescue less of a "Just throw your fliers at the dark mages" solution and force you to deal with the army in a timely fashion. Though, without changing the geography of the prologue map (which was probably one of the first maps designed as is tailored pretty precisely to work the way it does) we're still left with the issue that Jungby can just be ignored. We could make it so you have to seize both to end the chapter, but Scipio, or anyone else you can put there is not going to have the same punch after beating Alvis. The other option would be to make it completely optional, and put Tyrfing there for...some reason. With you having to capture it to get Jungby, but they'd later do that with Naga and Velthomer, so it'd be a bit repetitive. The best solution would probably be to put in a bunch of thickets that aren't there in the prologue with gates between them locking off the east side of the chapter.
Killing Alvis is going to be the same since we want to end up in Chalphy for the final chapter, as that's by far the most appropriate home castle on a thematic and geographical level. Why Alvis is even at Chalphy, I don't think is explained in actual Chapter 10. He's just there because he's taking the threat seriously. Which is fair enough. Of course we also have ghost Sigurd scene afterwards as a secret event, but that could happen literally anywhere.
So, in conclusion, yes, it could probably work. But it would take a little bit of forced designing of things, particularly in regards to Jungby and what role that can play. Miletos's design is very intentionally designed to funnel you into that end conflict. Of course, it's not like the chapters as are aren't afraid of just altering the geography a good deal. Coming to think of it, a bunch of thickets are added directly west of Chalphy specifically just to make the final chapter function better. So the prologue has already been changed to accommodate that.
As a side bar, while I like Hilda's appearance in this chapter, I don't like that we fight her here. Julius I can tolerate killing twice because he's optional, and he's also the big bad, so he gets some leeway in being powerful enough to shrug off HP to 0. But Hilda is such a literal why? Chagall is pretty much a forced fight twice because of the plot, but Hilda absolutely could have walked away only to be fought in the final chapter. Or even just killed here. Her and Bloom's wedding rings must be like the Focus Sash from Pokemon or something. But anyway, the reason in particular that Hilda being a boss of this chapter annoys me in particular. It's because there's another vampish Velthomer lady who is conspicuously absent.
Aida! Where is Aida! Well, I know precisely where she is, she's dead because Thracia 776 tells us she is, but they shouldn't have had to! It shouldn't have been Thracia's job to fill up Genealogy plot holes. And I call this a plot hole. Because Aida, while being a pretty minor character is still a pretty important one. She is one of the people who killed Sigurd. Alvis gets all of the credit, but she was in on the conspiracy. She was the one that fooled Sigurd, gained his trust by helping kill Reptor and then sent him into the meat grinder. She is massively culpable in the biggest plot point in the game. She deserves to reappear and get her comeuppance,or redemption or something. It's like if, I don't know, Danglars just vanished from the plot of the Count of Monte Cristo because a long time has passed. We don't even hear he's dead, he just vanishes. No explanation. Aida absolutely should have been fought in this chapter and Genealogy is a lesser story for not even explaining that she's dead. Hell, why not just straight up make her be Hilda? I think we view Aida as slightly more sympathetic a character because of the Saias retcon, but one of the collaborators of the conspiracy that took out three different Dukes (Reptor, Sigurd and, probably, Claude) would be a reasonable to be rewarded with marriage into the Friege family and a Queenship. And wouldn't that be great for making her more of a hate sink, which is basically Hilda's whole purpose? She tortured Tine, hunted children and KILLED SIGURD! She also killed Reptor and then married his fucking son, probably without telling him (Hmm, coming to think of it, isn't that a bit of a plot hole too? Surely Bloom must of learned that Velthomer played a role in his father's death. Did he just not care? Was getting Leinster to placate him?). But really she doesn't need a role even as big as Hilda's. That's just one possibility. She could have been placed basically anywhere with little fanfare and it still would have meant something for the plot. Aida is missing for no good reason, and while I appreciated Thracia for providing an explanation, that was never Thracia's job to do (and is delivered pretty hamfistedly there too).
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20 minutes ago, lenticular said:
Fair enough. I wouldn't argue with that. But if that's your position, then I think you were vastly overstating it originally with the way you worded things.
Well I did preface the rant by admitting it was a bit of toxic cynicism XD
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40 minutes ago, Revier said:
On the contrary, I have to imagine it would be a constant flashpoint, given its proximity to Grannvale and the unfriendliness of both Verdane and Agustria. The Verdanites did launch multiple raids on Grannvale in the past, and I have to imagine some opportunistic Augustrian king could have thought of using it as a launch pad for their raid/invasion. Granted, we know little of how Verdane thinks of Augustria, or vice versa, and we know little of the Grannvale/Augustrian border either, but we can presume it must be fairly defensible for Elliot to choose striking at Evans instead of any of the Grannvalian cities.
Oh we're of course free to presume that. It is, after all, precisely why it ends up being the only location other than Chalphy to be in three different chapters. I just mean in how it's never referred to in the plot and is kind of a forgettable place when listing the names of sigificant locations from the game.
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1 hour ago, ping said:
As comparison, my much simpler suggestion of smushing ch.1 and the prologue together:
So basically, Seliph arrives at Genoa by boat; from there, he captures the strategically important Evans; after that, the Grannvale reaction is to attempt a surround with collaborateurs from all over Jugdral: Verdanian axe bois and hunters from the southwest, Agustrian paladins from the northwest, Silessian pegasi from the southeast where there is just the ocean and definitely nothing else, and probably some dark mages stationed in Jungby. Could possibly make for the equivalent of Victory or Death in BlaBla, Murdock's map in BinBla, Clash! in PoR etc.pp.
If Kaga absolutely wanted Miletos to exist on Jugdral's map, there could still be half of an island in the bottom right - with the castle just out of sight, similar to Nordion and Marpha on the other side of the map, so that Seliph doesn't have to go seize it. Plonk a village or two on there that only Fee or Altena can reach, and you can have a little bit of backstory fluff about Miletos, too.
I agree that it makes sense for Seliph to first operate at the fringes of the Empire's control. However, I still think that you don't actually need Miletos to create that story structure, and that the story doesn't actually do anything with the new setting it introduced. Hilda could be stabbing children in Verdane (or Agustria, but that doesn't work geographically) just as well. Narratively, I think it would me much more interesting to return to Sigurd's old stomping ground - it's a cause to reminisce about Sigurd meeting Deirdre, or a little drama that Ares, Nanna and Dermott must fight their countrymen, or even the question if Sigurd is to blame for the desolation in Verdane (and/or Agustria) because he was always thinking with his seize button.
I'd absolutely be on for some revisit to Verdane and Agustria even if its just the fringes, just so we can have some idea of what happens there. So would we get Hilda at Evans, Scipio at Jungby and Alvis at Chalphy? Would Julius and Ishtar still appear (oh, eh, you do know he takes the field in this chapter, I hope). And how can we force a Jungby seize before Chalphy? Usually the force the final castle to be seized last using mountain valleys or a river crossing, but it's a bit more blatant if you're just having yellow tiles on an empty field. Either Jungby should be skipable or we'd need to alter the landscape of the prologue a bit, maybe by tossing in another river or something, so Chalphy is isolated enough to block the player off from it.
My issue is still be just how geographically far that is to transit off screen. Even Miletos is a bit of a hop, but this is half the continent. Therefore I propose a restructuring of the continent to look more like this.
Isaach is moved further south while Munster and Thracia have been rotated slightly and moved south west into Miletos's position. This layout would change remarkably little in terms of gameplay.
Also I have to point out that your suggestion would put Evans on a total of four different chapters. Which I just find kind of funny given how unimportant it is as a location in universe, being basically just a border fort, but being positioned at a tripoint that just gives it an excuse to keep coming back.
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6 minutes ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:
We don't know how he miraculously survived the first time. Dude just has nine lives don't question it. How will I convince him? Okay, I choose to be part of the Medeus Faithful and my plan to convince Gharnef (and the thoroughly annoyed soul of Medeus) to try a third time is pointing out that Medeus saving the world would immediately sway the people of Akanea to our side. Doing away with the heretical god Narga and pleading for our Dominion.
I'm betting the Monado has a very liberal notion of what a human is. As seen with the Face Mechon which lacks any recognizably human features or even a human will. The reason the Monado can't cut the outer shell of these clearly robotic beings is that it detects some human life inside. And it would be bold to assume the rules would change just because the world changed. For all we know, the Monado in a world that lacks Ether would never turn on and simply be a plastic toy.
Also I'm not convinced of the designation "sentient life". As you can cut down so many organic creatures of Bionis. Surely some if not most of them meet even the most conservative definition. Furthermore, When you're ambushed by High Entian assassins, Shulk's attacks do no damage to them. So don't go accusing them of gameplay/story segregation. What counts as 'Human' is probably just the ability to verbally communicate.
Assuming the Monado Works, and works how it does in its own world, my expectation of the Black Knight interaction is that it would either glance completely off the armor like with Face Mechon, or it would cut the armor and stop short of cutting the human inside. Now it's awkwardly lodged in his armor. You'd need about a dozen clean hacks to cut the armor off and what you're left with is still one of the best swordsmen in Tellius. It's a losing fight. I'd sooner put my money on Mog.
The High Entian assassins is precisely the reason I say sentient life from Bionis rather than humans. Because the High Entians aren't humans. They are creatures from Bionis, however. And, while we have no gameplay opportunity to fight a Egil or any other Machnia before the Monado is powered up, I reckon it would be able to hurt Machina. I mean, Egil's not a coward and is pretty smart; if the Monado was kicking his forces' collective ass so hard in Dunban's possession and he was fully immune to it because he's human shaped then he no doubt would have taken to the field and fought Dunban himself. Plus, we have to question why the Monado even has this limitation in the first place. What I definitely don't think is that it's because Zanza is a super nice guy and didn't want any "humans" to die. Nah, Zanza is a total dick. He might harbour some secret desire for companionship very deep down, but the guy is a total douche who doesn't really give a crap about the life he created. What makes much more sense that he made it so his Monado can't harm him specifically, and the Monado mistakes life from Bionis of sufficient development as part of Zanza himself.
Of course this is all moot as the Monado can be powered up to harm human-like life and the OP never specifies what Monado it is. So I choose the end game Monado III, which I can only presume is more powerful since it overcame Zanza and Mayneth's Monado at once. Of course everyone has their own Monado as it's almost literally the friends we made along the way, being nothing more than the manifestation of self-acutalization of programmes in a computer system modeling its own universe. Man, I fucking love the first Xenoblade game.
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58 minutes ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:
Come to think of it - this would've been, essentially, the path that Quan and friends took to meet up with Sigurd, way back in the Prologue. I like the idea of Leif, in particular, taking the journey his mother and father once did.
Well, no, because that map is my completely fan made idea for what we could have got if Miletos didn't exist. The bit of sea south west of Melgen (which I had to turn into a lake) suggests there isn't a path there because there's a mountain in the way. The path Quan and Ethlyn most likely took was the same one we see them on in Chapter 5, only from there they would have turn west and approached Edda from the south.
58 minutes ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:By the way, loving your custom maps. One of my favorite aspects of FE4 is everything melding together like this. I'm literally playing upon the world map!
I'll brook no praise for them. They are not good. The mix of palettes is hideous and I have a forest poking out into the ocean. This was a very time consuming low effort activity when I really should have been doing something better XD Genealogy's maps are just fantastic for that scale and and immersion of the story though. It was a ballsy move making every chapter in the game almost 4,000 tiles big and half coveredi n mountains and ocean the payer would never go to, but it was one that paid off.
58 minutes ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:Hear me out - the fact that we don't see anyone from Miletos means they could actually be black. And, there's more men than women in Gen II, so why not a black woman? And and, IS has definitely been more willing to include LGBT characters in their games, so a black trans woman from Miletos... farfetch'd, but not impossible.
...Make her a War Mage with Elthunder named Laverne. Laverne Shox.
Well we do see the children running from Ridale who are presumably from Miletos. And they're typical generic anime white children. That being said, I wouldn't be entirely against blackening up Miletos a bit of it were to get a few characters. It's in the south after all, and that's mostly what I'd care about when it comes to these things. Though, I suppose, Thracia is just as far south as well, and I don't think I'd react kindly to black Travant, but, idk, Miletos just feels sunnier because they used a dark palette for Thracia and a surprisingly bright one for Miletos. You also have the exotic trade hub angle with Miletos as well, which would make the idea more palettable. Maybe there is a southern continent they have access to which gives rise to all this trade and foreign travelers (though introducing something like that to the setting would give the inevitable question of why Lopt never conquered, though I suppose Lopt did know about Archanea and never found his hate boner for the mere existence of humans so great as to invade his homeland where all the humans he actually hated in life lived).
58 minutes ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:Wait, never mind what I said before. Turns out, we had a trans icon hidden in the Arena this whole time! Kaga, you magnificent dastard.
SNES just had the character limitations stopping the class from being named "Drag Queen" (don't think too hard about what that might suggest for Hilda).
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9 minutes ago, AnonymousSpeed said:
I'm not sure where you're getting the idea for either of those questions, neither lent nor I have implied that you're completely wrong or that more popular media is better (either necessarily or probably). What we are saying is that, if we watch cape-crap, it's our own fault. The most reasonable alternative would be to read and watch things you expect to actually be good.
Oh of course. We're adults. We determine what society is. Everything is our fault (not facetious). But that goes back to ShantyPete's initial comment which he deemed "toxic positivity", which I would say is just plain true (the content of the comment, not the branding of it as toxic). There isn't much merit in getting upset in trends in media when the option to just watch other media in a huge landscape of options is right there.
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22 minutes ago, AnonymousSpeed said:
I'm confused, these two positions seem absolutely at odds. How can these things be readily available to us and yet we are still at the mercy of a system? We have the means to ingest the best books of Victorian England and we choose not to.
Saying we're at the mercy of the system is perhaps a bit too dramatic a statement. But I think it should be undeniable that advertising and ease of access absolutely influence what we choose to do and see. Those things are there and aren't too troubling to get, but it is still easier than sitting down on Netflix or Youtube and watching just whatever is suggested or whatever everyone is talking about (whether they're saying good things or bad things). If I'm completely wrong then what's the alternative? That the media we choose to consume is purely meritocratic and that this is the best of the best even though we spend half the time complaining about it?
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15 minutes ago, AnonymousSpeed said:
Iunno. I hate to derail the thread (natural occurrence) but I feel like hanging around, while inferior to being there for your kid, indicates a conscience which isn't totally seared.
He pretended to be her uncle or something, didn't he? She was only pissed when she found out the truth during the generation skip. I think. And by then he was already pretty damn committed to the whole continent spanning war thing that was going on.
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Pyrathi is the only obvious choice for the country to live in. No matter how powerful your Monado and Yoshi riding skills are, the simple truth is that three days is not a lot of time to cross a continent. Pyrathi, however, happens be right on Akaneia's doorstop. To get there on time you'd would also want to be the unit with the best capacity to move around, which is a Wyvern Manakete.
6 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:Having a Monado is no good since I can't use it. The only Fire Emblem character I'd suspect who can is Robin, since he and Shulk have extremely similar situations to the respective villains of their game. Even if any of us could use it, it specifically doesn't hurt humans! So while I'm sure it can hurt Majora, I have no idea whether Skull Kid is human (he has a beak, but otherwise has regular human features)
Monado can hurt humans. What it can't hurt is sentient life from Bionis. Which skull kid is almost certainly not.
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3 hours ago, lenticular said:
That's something that I tend to see more from fans than from writers. Writers usually (not always!) manage to have a bit of a more nuanced take on things, but I've definitely seen who will scoff at anything with a lighter tone and call it immature or unrealistic, which, yeah, definitely comes across as immature. It has the same sort of energy as a teenager who is desperate to avoid anything that can be seen as childish.
I broadly agree with this. While there are definitely tropes and trends that I roll my eyes at, I do usually find it pretty simple to avoid them in favour of other media that are much more to my tastes. The only caveat that I would add, though, is that it can be somewhat tricky to do so when there's a work that is mostly to my tastes, but then has one trend-chasing section that's been shoehorned in (often but not always by a meddling studio or similar). That sort of thing can be harder to avoid and does get frustrating.
Speak for yourself. My main media consumptions are games and books. For games, I mostly (maybe about 90%?) play indie stuff. For books, I do tend to skew towards more recent and towards British and American, but far from exclusively. I probably have a couple dozen or so different nationalities of authors that I've read over the last year or two, at a guess. And while I haven't read anything from 1878 recently, but I did read At The Back of the North Wind last year, which was published in 1871, and is at best the fourth most famous book sold in England from that year (behind Through The Looking Glass, Middlemarch, and The Descent of Man).
Which isn't to say that this is the right way or the best way to consume media. If all you want to do is watch the latest movies from Disney and play the latest games from Nintendo, then that's great. But if you're going to watch movies that you know are going to be bad, then that's your fault, not capitalism's. It really only requires the tiniest amount of effort to ignore the stuff that corporate marketing puts in front of you, and acting as if they're impossible to exist is crediting them with far more power than they actually have.
My point wasn't that it's impossible to ignore such stuff, in fact it's rather the opposite, it's all there and easily accessible. My point is that the vast majority of people simply won't.
How likely is another game in this universe?
in Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Posted
Musou Engage isn't something I've ever talked about. What would that even look like, I wonder. Three Houses at least had a pretty clear multi faction split to built a story around, while Engage is everyone against Sombron. Would we have stuff like Solm fighting Firene? Or would it be a game with basically just two sides? And from a gameplay stand point, how would Emblems work? Has Musou ever done something like them before? Could they be the key to making Musou gameplay actually good?