Zapp Branniglenn

My last playthrough of Path of Radiance was in 2020, but my last playthrough of Radiant Dawn was over a decade ago. I know for sure my preference back then was Radiant Dawn and I can't imagine it being different today. I still use "Best Fire Emblem since Radiant Dawn" as my top barometer for quality. I liked the new characters, I liked the more mature tone from the get go more than "Boyd, you're such a loser" "Shut your trap!". And I think Radiant Dawn's a contender for best battle animations in the series - but ultimately loses to Echoes. Anybody else watch these back in the day? Plus I think the gameplay is just really solid with a lot of memorable maps. The multiple army perspectives got us asking for them to do that or Route Splits again for every new game in the series - until Fates tainted the ideas forever by making it DLC.

Everybody's gangster until they see my goomba deck. They just keep comin'. Should have a mechanic where you have to roll to see if your guy bounces off them into a bottomless pit

Gotcha. Guess I have nothing to worry about. I think Alm was already tainted with a level up. When I revisited shrines I just hit auto battle and then throttle the game at 5x speed. I'll keep the support bonus between Alm and Celica in mind for the finale though. That sounds useful.

So I just got Celica's promotion and noticed that her HP stayed at 24 instead of raising it to 36. That's the suggested base HP that every FE2 resource claims the Princess class has. So, okay, not surprising to discover false info on an old, underplayed game. But then I started to get worried. What if the info was correct and the story based promotions just fail to raise that characters' stats to the class bases? I'm asking because of Alm. I haven't been raising him, and you need him to kill the final boss. People who played Echoes a lot know that Alm has to get an unrealistic amount of level ups to surpass the Hero's base stats, so it would be a waste to feed him kills. Has anyone who played FE2 know if that exploit works for him in the original? I haven't touched his Act 3 campaign at all, so if it turns out he gains nothing from promoting, then I guess I'd better start feeding him exp while it's still possible. I'm playing an unpatched rom, so I know it's not a bug introduced by a patch.

Oh buddy I've been flaunting that same video link for six years. I'm not sure I really cared about the narrative potential of permadeath before Echoes. The spark was me getting Est killed and hearing her call out to her sisters. Hearing, not reading like we did in previous, un-voice acted games. And the thing is modern Fire Emblem already has massive writing staffs. They'd have to be to turn in a script as lengthy as Three Houses. It's just a shame none of them went credited. Not a single writer/editor aside from the names under Localization (those are, understandably, writers) and the three names under "Scenario". Those are the Big Idea guys that might not have penned a single word in the finalized script. Let me take these underpaid, contracted, un-credited writers, and turn them onto subjects more interesting than Support Chain #12 for bad Gimmick Character, 'what does Hanneman say when you cook with him', and 'What does Raphael think of Crimson Flower chapter 14 when you talk to him in the Monastery'. Then I'll slip their names into the credits secretly and get fired from the japanese games industry.

Between-chapter narration does a lot of heavy lifting too. Setting a stage, giving us a vibe of the current conflict and its major players. But sure, I don't see a downside to a Malledus. And most people won't if she's a super hot babe whose unplayable yet plot important. Or maybe she and the Lord are a tag team, so a death doubly justifies the game over state. But man if it's me, I'm hiring on twice the writers and we're hashing out all the divergent scenes according to specific character deaths. Funeral scenes. Guilt trip-laden flashbacks. Cutting to the family that unit left behind. Discovering all of that would be way more interesting than reading the latest Bernadetta support where she flips out for a slightly unique reason. Then have some point-based unlock system for players to see all of that in the Event Recap instead of actually playing the game so many times for each permutation. No self-respecting writer would look at permadeath as a barrier to great storytelling. It's a distinct opportunity. An artistic license power trip.

Despite setting aside time for them, I had to work to fit in three July releases. And I haven't even gotten to the Mother Encore demo yet! Banjo Kazooie The Jiggies of Time Gravity Circuit Punch Club 2: Fast Forward Rayman Origins & New Super Mario Bros Wii Pikmin 4 No Fire Emblem this month? Yeah, FE12 is what killed the consecutive streak. I was not having a fun time. I'm still interested in Fire Emblem though and hope to play more soon.

I understand the Binding Blade has had a bit of a poor reputation over the years. We make fun of Roy's combat ability. Many call it the "worst of GBA era" which is like saying Ringo is "The Worst of the Beatles". Some Kaga purists might even lament the loss of mechanical depth coming off of FE4/5. And with it being one of the seven Japan Only games, the only folks that have given it a chance are the ones with the knowhow and ten minutes to spare to download and patch a ROM. Instead, most modern fire emblem players will tell you they're content to wait for the official remake. Just like FE4. That sucks, for both games. Let's stop talking about this fantasy, unannounced remake and instead talk about what we remember liking most about FE6. It's a cute approach for a Fire Emblem Reboot. Look, the franchise just lost its dad. Got booted from home consoles. FE6 needed to be a fresh start in a fresh world. But the attempts at shouting out FE1 are fun to discover for yourself. Most early game units have direct Archanean counterparts in terms of classes, appearance, and stats. They brought back dragons and a toddler manakete girl. Every map is a seize map. You've got the whitewings. You've got a True Ending if you picked up all the macguffin weapons. There's a shop selling infinite stat boosters at the end - not even the Shadow Dragon DS remake got that part right. And look at the first chapter. It's just Talys Island flipped clockwise 90 degrees. Thank god they don't force Roy to visit villages too. Kid's shoes are worn enough as it is. That timeless GBA FE aesthetic. Does this need an intro? I'm not sure I would have become a fan of this series in the mid 2000s if not for FE7's battle animations, and they were born here. The GBA's graphical capabilities are debatably on par with a Super Nintendo and yet I can't imagine a SNES game having such fluid animation. FE3/4/5 have their moments, sure, but FE6 rocks some serious artistic talent. And it's not just appreciation of the swordmaster's afterimages. You've got character portraits that gyrate and move around, adding a physicality to scenes for comedic effect. The chibi versions of character portraits on the map screen. Sachiko Wada is absolutely nailing the vibe of characters at first glance. It's good to iron man. Losing your freshly promoted Rutger to the first Berserker's 20 Hit / 30 Crit can devastate your chapter 9-12 experience, but other than that, nobody's particularly essential. The game is feeding a lot of great units as it goes on. Especially on Hard Mode where they have even more stats. FE7 is a little like this too, most of the worst additions to your army are in the first half. But everyone from Milady onward is an easy unit to recommend. So don't sweat the early deaths and keep pushing forward. Rescue is fun. I don't think I'll ever master what Rescue can do for me on every turn, but attempting to make use of it only makes the game more interesting. In Fire Emblems past, when a unit ends their turn, it's set in stone unless you use a warping staff. But Rescue allows for so many micromanagements - debatably more than Canto since non mounted units can do it in a pinch. Nobody's move is permanent. You can use Rescue to save lives, save turns, get units where they can most contribute. Just you wait, when they bring back Rescue in the next Fire Emblem it's all we'll talk about. What do YOU like about FE6? Bonus points if you can do it without dragging down other FE games. I almost succeeded in that regard.

Item management is rarely the make or break point of strategy. Just make sure all your units have something to fight with. Iron weapons are fine if you want to be frugal with your money. I don't often use vulneraries because my healers can gain exp out of that heal instead. A lot of specific tips are going to be game to game. Stuff like don't give Florina a steel lance because it will weigh her down by 9 points. But Sumia would be fine because weapon weight is not a thing in her game. Really a lot of what makes a good fire emblem player is just knowledge about that game, and taking the time to do some math on whether all your units will survive the upcoming enemy phase assuming every enemy in range A) targets them and B) hits them. My best general tip for a new player is don't take on more than your units can handle. Run the math regarding their Attack stat and your guys' defenses and HP. You can take your time through most maps because 99% of them have no time limit. Not every map has something that's prompting you to move quickly. Like a thief stealing treasure, or a bandit approaching a village. And if a map does have those things, identify those early and think hard about who you need to send to deal with it. Ideally someone with high movement and good enough at fighting that he won't need to retreat to heal (in fact this is the most common) scenario where I'll put a vulnerary in someone's inventory and use it, so that they can keep moving and stay topped off on health). Even if you fail one of these side objectives, it's not the end of the world. Just like how losing a unit is not the end of the world.

Talk about being born in the wrong generation, when Ayra walks the earth and you're not alive to date her. 1960s counterculture movements inspire Jugdral citizens to Give Gold and items to anyone before marriage. Pegasus Knights are the cornerstone of the US' 1973 Endangered Species Act. By the twenty first century pegasi are found all over and you can eat a Pegasus Burger with a clean conscience. Tbh they're a little gamey. Loptyr Cult easily infiltrates the Televangelist industry. Somehow causes less damage overall? Lachesis becomes one of the most popular, least understood feminist icons of her era. She gracefully left behind few words or recordings. A statue of her as a master knight stares down The Bull of Wall Street. Fantasy epics take over Cinema four or five decades earlier than the double whammy of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. Everything is shot in Verdane, making the film industry only slightly less seedy than in California. Now it's the biggest mega city on the continent. Thracia's wyvern riders are gainfully employed by drug cartels to smuggle cocaine into the American south (wyverns don't get picked up on radar, too small, no emissions). CIA knows but turns a blind eye so that they can take reconnaissance photos and supply guns to revolutionaries for counter-communism. In 2017 we get a really fun movie about these escapades starring Tom Cruise who nearly kills himself trying to learn how to ride a wyvern. As for the big question: Jugdral, Capitalist or Communist? It costs gold to restore health at a castle. I think the answer is abundantly clear.

I like the underdog feel of the group too. The Protect Micaiah chapter is definitely there to communicate to us that the Dawn Brigade are not the big players of Tellius. Even a level 20 Michaiah will just die if you don't hide. I can only assume it was intentional story integration just as the Act 3 maps aren't Seize or Rout, but rather "just kill enough of them and/or Defend this Point" But I guess if you're super dialed in to the gameplay all you can really think about is how unfair the game is being in Act 3. How you must have done something wrong in Act 1 if the Dawn Brigade is that much weaker than Ike's crew who you just got done steam rolling maps with. It's a demoralizing situation that leaves little way for the developers to say "no, this is normal, just stick with it" One approach they could have taken is just reduce enemy density. Design the enemies to be even tougher, but make it so the player can dogpile them a few at a time. I think you can still get the underdog angle across that way. But the immediate issue with that is the less combat exp means the Dawn Brigade falls even further behind. You could pump more bonus exp into the player to compensate, but there's always that type of player that compulsively saves every finite resource handed to them - a blind player wouldn't know this is the hardest part of the game and that this is the time to spend. The next issue is that the victory conditions of these specific chapters is Defeat X amount of enemies, so that number would need to be adjusted accordingly.

I'm trying my best to answer the OP. That part of the post was directed at that (not you, if it needs to be said). I'm sorry if it sounds like I'm dodging the question, I'm just coming at it from a perceived developer point of view. If you were working on the next fire emblem and asked your Twenty Years Your Senior Japanese Supervisor if we could remove permadeath, what do you figure his response would be? Would he even even offer a reason while saying No? No I didn't. Because I'm not just talking to you. It's an open forum. The topic's question is asking "what does this mean to you". A lead developer could pop in to give his two cents, and it still wouldn't be the definitive answer. I only addressed your response to my post. And you were free to respond to me in the first place. But you're acting pretty hostile considering we're not really in disagreement about anything as far as I can tell? What do I have to say other than I'm sorry my post drew such a visceral reaction. Was not the intent.

Okay lemme try again at the core of the question. Permadeath may very well still be in Fire Emblem "Because it was there in every previous game". We'd have to ask the developers for confirmation how they feel about it. But I'll counter the question with: Isn't that reason enough? Franchises carry things over all the time without interrogating every single thing. Especially gosh darned Nintendo games with their bedrock branding. When Mario stomps a Koopa, it makes that "No-Ko" sound. Sure it could make a different noise, but what is the pressing issue that makes us want to change it? That's how I feel whenever someone makes a thread trying to argue why permadeath "isn't necessary" in Fire Emblem. It's the exact same thing as me saying Casual Mode isn't necessary. I'm more receptive to ideas that replace, rather than exclude. What needs to be overhauled? I know some games have done more than the binary "HP reaches 0 = dead forever", but even if Fire Emblem adopted more mechanics, would it really be such a huge departure? Huger than the advent of Casual Mode, or Battle Saves, or Mila's Turnwheel? Fire Emblem is still here in 2023, I'm thinking it's pretty malleable at this point. Sorry, a FE11 Lunatic run is still fresh in my mind, so maybe I did phrase that a touch too sociopathic. A good third bullet point would have been limited exp - because the amount of enemies you face is finite, usually. But yes, I spend lives. I don't go into a battle pre-empting to do so, but there's a resource outside the video game that I also value: Time. I don't like to reset unless it's the first turn and I forgot to do something in battle preps. If I find myself staring down the next enemy phase where somebody is about to die, and I can offer up a less valuable unit to body block, I'm going to consider that as the last resort. Sure it hurts to lose a good unit, but I'm finding the game gets more interesting when I can't rely on old standby units. I've played enough fire emblem to know that the average loss is not especially large on the grand scale of the playthrough.

Fire Emblem is all about resources. Gold, weapon uses, human life. It's how we choose to spend those resources that defines our playthroughs. Each one is unique to another players' and each one is unique to our previous run. Fear of permanent consequences gets the player thinking harder about their decisions than they would otherwise. During the Ending unit scroll we take note of how far our units have come. What their endings might say if they weren't dead. That's only some of the ways Fire Emblem engages you in ways that it could not if permadeath weren't there. Just because permadeath hasn't been incorporated into narrative since Echoes doesn't mean that it couldn't in the future. You can't point to all this untread ground and say "we've tried everything, time to hang it up". I recently played a game that has a special funeral scene for the first unit death. And character specific flashbacks that also play to hammer home that loss. Might be more that I haven't experienced, I didn't finish the game. These are just ideas that I and other have thought about idly over the years, imagine what someone paid to make games could cook up if they had also believed in the potential for permadeath as a concept?

I'm all for more options and modes of play, even when it's an option I will never select. But I think a lot about how three of my close personal friends got their start on casual mode Awakening. None of them picked up any fire emblem game since. Yet the one friend that got his start borrowing my copy of Path of Radiance - and Radiant Dawn after he finished? He gave Three Houses a shot and stuck it out to the end. Wants to try out FE7 on the Switch once he has time. Just wants to re-experience that magic of that first playthrough. And every buddy I let try out Sacred Stones/FE7 back in middle school was obsessed and repeatedly asking to loan it for the years that I still knew them. I think Classic mode just leaves a stronger impression and understanding of Fire Emblem as a strategy game more than "Just another rpg". And since a lot of those friends that lapsed after Awakening still play and love Xcom, permadeath might actually be the difference. So on that note I think Awakening was the right time (Well, FE12, but for anybody reading this, Awakening). The series was at its lowest point of the twenty first century. A shakeup needed to happen. And as far as shots in the dark go, this one was pretty smart and (relatively) harmless. If Awakening only featured Classic mode it would still be the most casual, sandboxy entry in the series. Casual mode is just extremely marketable too. Because it sounds like a problem has been fixed for players that hate the idea of permadeath, whether they've taken a chance on it or not.

FE3 Book 1 will get you missing Wrys. No healing staves until you get the mend staff off of Chapter 3's boss.

I feel like options 3 and 4 have a cause/effect relationship. Nobody out here is saying give me games as they are and also "don't you dare make new ones with all these development resources we just freed up". Even when my favorite games are remade I usually have no plans to buy it. Just Resident Evil and Metroid have my full faith because those are entirely new games that don't try to overwrite the original. When something is ruined, it's heartbreaking to think that this will be someone else's first experience. When someone plays Link's Awakening and says "meh, that was alright", well yeah you paid sixty dollars to play on a system whose controllers don't work. A top down adventure game with no D-Pad support. And you could have downloaded it to your crusty 3DS for four dollars and had a much better time with the original developers' vision

I'd rather not think of a universe in which my favorite and least favorite games get freaky friday'd. Incidentally I do think both games had less than a year development cycles. But the decision to remake FE1 on FE6's engine sounds bizarre considering FE6 is itself kind of a reimagining of FE1. Probably wouldn't have gone over well among Japanese fans. FE8 has my favorite cast of characters. To think of them, support-less and in a graphics engine on par with cell phone games of the same era. An aspect ratio wide enough to see only within 4-6 tiles of your cursor's current position. Learning ten years later about Marisa, Knoll, and Syrene as your replacement units if you kill 80% of the cast - and they're still not good units. L'aRachel's childlike smirk replaced with a far meeker smile in her portrait. The Trainee units would probably be un-reclassable dorks with a level cap of 30 and no promotion.

There's a line early in FE12 that absolutely floored me. In the Prologue when Elice takes Kris aside to tell him "Actually, Marth is baby gamer that can't stand the thought of his comrades dying. That's why he resets over every death and why we invented Casual Mode last week and brought Frey back to life despite his death being supposedly canonical". I'm paraphrasing of course, but would you lay off, Sis? Excuse Marth for losing sleep some nights like any normal person does. Every leader feels guilt over their mistakes, whether they're justified feelings of guilt or not. She could have skipped ahead to the "Please Protect his Ideals" part of the pep talk. Anyway, back to Shadow Dragon, what they really could have used was a conversation between Marth and Jiol (Chapter 14 boss). In the FE11 cannon, the prologue shows us that it was that man and his troops, specifically, hunting Marth. But more importantly we know he's responsible for Marth's Dad's death. Possibly Mom too, we never get any context on how or when she died. And yet Marth makes no comment on Jiol's death. He also doesn't seem particularly conflicted about making a big detour into the Desert when his homeland is right there waiting to be liberated. What a massive vacuum of missed characterization opportunities, all in one chapter.

Hey I'm ready to dunk on fire emblem crossovers as much as the next guy, but let's not leave the sequels, prequels, and remakes off the hook. They've got some stuff to answer for. Karel is a big missed opportunity in FE7. In FE6 they make a big deal about Karel the Sword Saint, and how he's troubled by that name. Rutger says everyone that wields a sword knows his name, but in FE7 he wants to duel every sword user to the death, that doesn't leave a lot of people to sing his praises or call him a Saint. FE7 is a chance to for them to write a story about how a man so influential got that name, and they blew it. I know it's hard writing prequel stories to Mentor-Type characters, because almost anything can seem unsatisfying or Not Enough. Karel is not a major character in FE7 but like, he could have been if they wanted. My suggestion in that thread was to replace Jaffar with him. Have him be a highly skilled member of the Black Fang that leaves due to his conscience and spends the rest of his life atoning, starting with Nino. That's what makes a Saint instead of just any old legend. And it's more believable than a psychopathic murderer deciding one day on his own that killing isn't right. Smol illiterate child could be his turning point like it was for Jaffar. The Karel we did end up getting is less than one-dimensional. And him being an assassin back then hammers home that change in character - he literally class changed between games to a swordmaster. In an era when reclassing was not a thing!

Sakurai once admitted he really wanted Marth to be in the original Smash, but was cut for time. His reasons beyond that never sat right with me though. The four bonus characters were decided based on the potential to reuse model assets and animations (most easily seen with Jigglypuff looking and attacking like Kirby). But Link was right there. Marth could have been derived off of that, just with a new set of (probably boring) special moves. I really don't know why Sakurai omitted the Fire Emblem from his Melee design. Then the FE11 developers, with no admiration of the original game, decided that Melee depiction should be their basis for Marth's animations. The Ret Con lives on to this day. I do think giving him the shield can be an attractive detail. Marth's not a crowd pleasing character, so he needs some shakeup to generate hype. As for what Marth should do with his shield, I suppose the cleanest idea is just him assuming a defensive stance for his existing Down B Counter. I wouldn't be opposed to him stealing Hero's two part F-tilt where the first hit is a shield bash. A paralyzing light blast is a fun idea though. A mid range threat that inflicts a stun if charged up. Could be a good replacement for neutral B. Especially since shieldbreaker's appeal is setting up that potential stun for a tipper kill. And you just know Sakurai's picture of the day is him using the Emblem against Corrin. Or any other character associated with dragons. Kiryu Kazama. Fun detail about FE3. Chapter 1-5? No shield. Then he gets the Fire Emblem, and that's where it shows up on his battle sprite. They pull the same thing in Book 2. FE1 Marth has the shield the whole game for the record.

By my count it's Awakening DLC (and I guess spotpass Marth too. I wouldn't double count in a single game, because with Heroes that's an unfair rabbit hole) Fates Amiibo (yes I agree that Fates is three separate games, but the Marth business here is the same in all three, so doesn't feel fair) Echoes Amiibo Heroes TMS Warriors (was there some business about these not being the real characters or forgetting their time here once they leave? Whatever, ghost or no ghost, Marth's inclusion there is as interesting as a man wearing a bed sheet Engage Smash Bros I give a pass because IS doesn't make that, or commission some other developer to make that (but yeah Smash Ultimate features Spirit Marth in its campaign mode, what an annoying coincidence). My point with this dumb exercise is that nobody cares about more crossovers. All of these came out in the last ten years, the idea was done to death several times over before Engage was announced. Make a new game and have the courage not to have 'Marth From Smash Bros' appear in it.

Fire Emblem tbh. FE6 and Awakening are already reboots in my eyes. and it's been another ten years so the timing feels right. Though to prove those were Reboots, we'd have to interrogate the definition of the word "reboot" that was born on the internet rather than from the mouth of any game developer tasked with making "a new _____ game". I just want a game about dragging and dropping units. Pixel art over 3D graphics. Strategic army building instead of between-chapter-minigame chores. If you want to honor the legacy of Fire Emblem, do so with a really polished strategy rpg rather than a trend chasing life sim game that lets us fight alongside Ghost Marth. We don't need Game #8 of Summoning Fake Marth (seriously, count them up. And I only counted Fates as one game instead of three).

Let's say that they did incorporate the RT time limit and scoring system for those maps. I do wonder if we would be sitting in that alternate reality saying "I wish they did the BS maps like normal trial maps instead". The grass is always greener, but I expect I'd err on the side of "at least they took the opportunity to give us something unique in a side mode you never have to play" FE12 didn't release on the Satellaview or on the arcades. There was no real time element to the platform they had to design for. When FE12 makes cuts to it's mechanics, there's usually a logic to it. Take for example Chapter 1, they expanded the size of the valley and removed the mountain tiles. In FE3, that's an organic Dismount tutorial. Meant to show the player that your cavs can't cross mountains, but Marth has no problem. So the player that probably never selected the Dismount command will say to themselves "oh, that's why that's there". And now they know without Sothis having to pause the action to break out a five minute primer on how Monsters work. Why did FE12 remove dismounting in the first place? Nobody could say. It'd be like removing Canto from an FE4 remake. Senseless debauchery of game design.

Oh and let's not forget the biggest offender Normal types are immune to Ghost: I can't speculate on what it's like to be hit with a shadow ball, but I do know that regular people are susceptible to a good spook. A battle with fear is a battle that comes within. There is no natural defense against it other than telling yourself that ghosts aren't real. But in the pokemon universe, ghosts and ghoulies are real. This is a good one, though I do think it's possible that they were thinking of body decomposition with this relationship. A spirit that has left the body may not care what happens to their corpse. But then again, all the myths surrounding hauntings suggest that spirits can be very petty about what the living does to them and their former possessions. But But But, when have you ever heard of ghosts haunting animals that don't know any better - specifically the lowly maggot? But But But But every pokemon is presumably possession of conscious thought and awareness to the point of accepting commands from humans. I realize now that what I should have written in bold is Electric is neutral to Water, since that's what I'm taking issue with in my writeup. Still you ought to have read beyond the bolded part. I think you have this backwards. I'm guessing their justification was simply plants feed off the very ground they sit in. But a Ground type is not a clump of dirt. It's a creature that also thrives off the very earth they live in. And farming crops is just as much about warding off these varmints than its is warding off bugs who will eat the top parts of the plant. It's not so much volume of ice, but quickness of the temperature change. An ice type using moves like Ice Beam is flash freezing their opponent solid. This doesn't exist in nature, just like flame throwers don't exist in nature. Temperature change is gradual, and that's what makes the top layer of a body of water freeze over and not the rest of it. The ice sheet is a barrier to the rest of the cold. Steel should not have resisted half of the moves it resists, but it's as you claim. They were thinking of game balance. And they've only patched out two resistances: Dark and Ghost. Psychic is definitely in that same ball park of warranting justification. Could be that pyschic powers are often depicted in their most basic form as telekenesis. Throwing objects at a dense steel type wouldn't be effective and neither would throwing them against a surface that's less dense than themselves. But if you asked me what it's like to be hit by "a psychic blast" I wouldn't know what to tell you. Sounds like something that would give you a headache, and no external armor would defend against that unless steel types don't have an organic brain. It's hard to pin down what they may have been going for with Ice other than it being a counterpoint to a steel type's weakness to fire. But I can see arguments for Steel being weak to water and especially electricity before fire in the first place. Metals are not flammable, but every metal rusts and conducts electricity. It can bend when it's hot, but that requires hours of exposure to flame. And open flames (like a flamethrower) would have an even harder time getting the job done. I tend to contextualize steel types as being organisms that are part machine. Not in a strict computer sense, but in a "not relying so much on what organics need to survive" sense. Like how rock types are living rock golem creatures, steel types are that but more "functional". Prosthetic limbs, fashioned tools, inner magnetic field that can serve the functions of a skeleton and muscles. There's less of their body that's vulnerable to conventional threats. If it is pollution, then plants are no more susceptible than another other creature that lives in that ecosystem. Plants actually prefer environments with greater air pollution (they eat carbon dioxide), while other organic life does not. Anyway here's a list of poison type moves. And I can't find a single one that's depicted as an herbicidal spray. Most of them unambiguously involve some sort of venom, which is obviously no threat to a plant that lacks blood vessels.