Sidereal Wraith

Banned for not singing a last song of Valdese.

Banned for not venturing in the lands of Zothique!

Emperor save us all...

Yes?

The Emperor protects! Oh and 35,740 I guess.

This is probably the strangest anime I’ve come across while on the internet:

Is it true that which is not dead can eternally lie and with strange eons even death may die?

Speaking of D&D.

(Continues snoring)

(Snoring loudly under a table)

And another thing... (falls off the pub stool and crashes to the ground)

You know...(takes another drink) everyone keeps saying that it all of a sudden started to hail outside because I pissed on a Welsh Neolithic burial mound. I didn't so I don't know why the gods were so pissy today. Next rounds on me!

By the black throne of Tsathoggua we have some bloodthirsty customers here.

*Drunk* Yeah.. eradicate the moon so that kids these days can be good Cthulhu-fearing cultists.

*Drunk* You kids these days and your animated Japanese picture shows.

Will understand the revelation of the Taken shortly.

Indeed, it is a tragedy. At night, under a gibbous moon, I can still sometimes see the ashes from Battle of Belhalla being spread on the four winds.

I thank you for remaining civil @Slumberdespite our differences of opinions on FE. Lord knows in the past I haven’t been to chivalrous when discussing some of the...spinoff games I dislike in the series. Anyway I’m in Wales with my family and girlfriend, enjoying the witch-haunted vistas of this antique land, replete with Leo Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’, Glen Cook’s ‘Dreams of Steal’, and Thomas Ligotti’s ‘Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe’ so I cannot complain. You guys have a nice rest of your weekend while I kiss my liver goodbye.

Of course FE has always had anime tropes within all the games. My issue is that in the newer games (Awakening onwards) many of the more pernicious tropes of modern anime have been more present and on the nose then ever before. Things such as revealing female clothing, one-note villains, fan service characters, inconsistency in tone, the power of friendship will save the day and over the top melodrama have really been more in your face then the earlier games. Don't get me wrong, all the games in the past have had these tropes to a certain level , but not to such a cartoonish degree that the 3DS games had them, specifically Awakening and Fates along with Heroes. When a series like Langrisser gets a mobile game and has many sexualized female characters I' m okay with it because the series has always had that kind of aesthetic design since its inception. However, for FE, I think that in the older games this trope was more toned down compared to the more recent games were you have characters such as Tharja and Camilla who exist solely for eye candy with little depth to their character. This cheapens and degrades the series as a result by dumbing it down and adding in popular tropes for a wider audience appeal instead of relying on its past strength and improving on them in modern iterations. Past FE games are not supposed to feel like the Tales of Series or a Hyperdimensional Neptunia games, because it had its own unique identity. Change in a series as old as FE is inevitable and not always a bad thing, but many of these recent changes have in my opinion been detrimental rather than positive. Thankfully 3 Houses seems to be curtailing these recent developments to come across as a more classic FE game instead of a modern one.

Call the police.

I feel the that the series really lost its mojo during the 3DS era. It feels like the core identity of the series was sacrificed for juvenile fan service and anime tropes. A lot of people to me seem to misinterpreted the series as a "dating simulator" when really only three, maybe four games include an Avatar that can marry other characters. Games like TMS # FE and some of the character designs in Heroes help to muddy the waters of the series' identity for neophytes. Fire Emblem at its core is a War Epic which focuses on the twin themes of fellowship and tragedy forged in the crucible of war. The series shows how the conditions of battle can not only create powerful relationships between soldiers but also how it can just as easily rip them apart via death. There was also a stronger sense of grey morality with more interesting villains that the 3DS games lacked, especially Awakening and Fates. 3 Houses has done an admiral job getting the series back on track, however I've been more reluctant to play it then any other game in the series. Having spent the last two years and some change reading both classic literature and fantasy fiction, I feel as if I have inadvertently desensitised myself to this series. While 3 Houses looks to be an excellent game, it still has the same anime tropes that turned me off from this genre to begin with. I'd rather spend my free time reading the works of Clark Aston Smith, Glen Cook, Lord Dunsany, and Thomas Ligotti among many others because their works seem to contain a special ineffable quality which I find lacking in the FE series and many JRPGs in general. There is a kind of sophistication in these author's works that seems to elevate them to being what I would consider art that I no longer find in the FE series. Maybe it's just that as I get older I want the entertainment I consume to be more then just cliché tropes and cute anime girls. Maybe I'm just being unfair to FE and anime in general by comparing it to the works of some of the greatest fantasists who ever lived. Either way I still want to take a genuine crack at 3H and see if it can deliver some of that old Fire Emblem magic.

The Langrisser 1 and 2 remake looks interesting to me.

Valkyrie Profile Covent of the Plume is a really good dark fantasy RPG on the DS. The Majin Tensei games in the Super Famicon were also excellent in their own right.

I'm listening to War and Peace.

Banned because Stormbringer to the face!