What One Change Would You Make to Your LEAST favorite FE Game?

[Jotari]

2 minutes ago, samthedigital said:

If I'm being honest I don't know if you're disagreeing with me or just going on a tangent about how Three Houses could have been better in those aspects if they had prioritized that for the Switch. If it's the latter then I agree with you.

Both really. I'm disagreeing in the sense that I don't think any better hardware would have actually made a difference. It's not a hardware issue.

[samthedigital]

7 minutes ago, Jotari said:

Both really. I'm disagreeing in the sense that I don't think any better hardware would have actually made a difference. It's not a hardware issue.

So you're saying that Three Houses ported to a more powerful console couldn't produce better load times and framerates because the coding is bad? Why do you think that? I'll note that you can already do that unofficially with a somewhat modern PC.

[Jotari]

16 minutes ago, samthedigital said:

So you're saying that Three Houses ported to a more powerful console couldn't produce better load times and framerates because the coding is bad? Why do you think that? I'll note that you can already do that unofficially with a somewhat modern PC.

If we're talking about the game Three Houses that already exists, then yes, I believe you can boost it with a high end PC. But I'm saying if it was developed for that high end PC it would still come out looking like Three Houses.

[Shaky Jones]

8 hours ago, Dayni said:

It's a fair point against it, considering it's BinB I'm arguing about instead of SD which I also raised as a candidate and one whom likely would be more about redesigning all the enemies and what's being carried because it's based off of games with no weapon triangle. For BinB's case, bad hit rates are the effect that is being raised, but it's partly a consequence of weapon factions.

All I know is that I complain about bad hit rates, only to use axes and ignore swordies and mages completely. Really, the lance spam helps me, but why do irons have 65 hit to begin with?

8 hours ago, Dayni said:

Miss me with that.

No more doggo. What will you do now?

5 hours ago, lenticular said:

or if we're including spin-offs too.

My change for 3 Hopes is to scrap the game entirely. Just cancel it.

5 hours ago, lenticular said:

Which, conveniently, have exactly the same single fix: make it less of a tedious grindfest to actually gain supports.

FE7 tactician watching two people develop a loving relationship (he is forcing them to stand next to each other for 50 turns)

5 hours ago, lenticular said:

If we're allowed spin-offs, I do have a clear least favourite, which is Heroes where my one change would be to remove all gacha elements. Which might be too broad, but I can't think of any way to be more specific with this.

My change for Heroes is to scrap the game entirely. Just cancel it.

5 hours ago, lenticular said:

I mean, it's a good change, but if I only get one change to Engage then I'm getting rid of Emblems. (I ought to make a separate thread about this at some point.)

Okay so now we have a game with no Sommie or Emblems. We've lost both the marketable and gameplay identity of this installment. It's just Fire.

5 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

Series' greatest heroes:

5. Izuka

4. Valter

3. Lifis

2. @Shaky Jones

1. Garon

You're so kind!

5 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

Jagen, I'm literally neurodivergent and a minor."

Rom Hack: FE6 but Roy speaks like the 15 year old he is.

5 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

This would be great, because bringing everybody back undermines Mystery's story. If "somehow Gharnef returned" once, what's stopping him from doing it again? Why do any of these wars matters, if they have no permanent effects?

I still can't believe there was a high chance that if Kaga was still the lead dev, most FE games would be "Medeus and Gharnef have returned! Get the falchion and bring peace to Altea!". You ain't the next Zelda buddy.

5 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

Ah yes, Fire: Engage.

We're not even engaging anymore! Just scrap the maps and make it a Somniel simulator. Throw in Diamant's Poker while you're at it.

4 hours ago, Saint Rubenio said:

Heh...

Yeah yeah go back to your 0 luck spider cave Spanish man.

4 hours ago, Saint Rubenio said:

Well, simply raising stats is never a magic fix but I do feel a decent increase of like, 4-5 to all offensive (strictly offensive) stats for all enemies in PoR would be a good start. Make them more threatening without the JP maniac issue of the game just taking a thousand hours to complete because the enemies are too tanky. Though, being honest, that game's difficulty problem needs a lot more than any one change. This probably wouldn't stop the game from breaking on Tanith's gimmick or any BEXP-boosted unit or Titania.

It goes from a whopping last place to....right above Awakening!

C'mon, I'm right aren't I? Tell me I'm right.

3 hours ago, Sidereal Wraith said:

didn’t write the script, for if I had I probably would have made Alear more like Rafal only less stupid and actually made the whole being a god to the people of Elyos thing actually mean something in the story.

I had to look up Rafal and remember that the DLC exists.

You know what? I'm removing that too. OP privledges. Unlucky. 

I will never forgive locking my silver card behind a 30 dollar paywall.

3 hours ago, Jotari said:

Medeus gleefully says he's going to keep coming back again and again and again. Honestly, if it wasn't for Kaga wanting to switch gears entirely with Jugdral there's a good chance Fire Emblem would have been the never ending Zelda style never ending battle against Medeus and Gharnef. Thankfully it didn't, but now Medeus' comment comes across as a bit funny because he doesn't end up coming back again (unless you want to count TMS) and by leaning into that whole thing it kind of did a disservice to the actual interesting backstory that New Mystery gave him by just making him generically evil.

I think odds were pretty high he wanted to switch every other game. Thracia was only a full game by accident of too much bias for his own worldbuilding. Kaga made it very clear he wanted to do way more Archanea post Genealogy, and I reckon IS only let him do BSFE to appease that thirst while ordering him to work on what would've been FE64.

I'm telling you, we'd have like 6 FE games by now that are literally just Zelda Marth. I both dread and fantasize that future. 

2 hours ago, X-Naut said:

I posted in a topic about dismounting on another forum yesterday and you hit one of my big critiques (the other is being too reversible outdoors), so I'll repost my thoughts here: it would be more productive to nerf mounts indoors by making indoor terrain less favorable to them. 3H stairs gimping cavalry was a start that can easily be taken further. Make pillars infantry-only so they have a unique cover option. Make one-tile doorways their own tile type that blocks mounts to create infantry-only zones. Heck, make indoors the desert equivalent for fliers! You can add dismounting anyway to give them an out if reclassing isn't there to make it pointless!

This is why I didn't say "remove dismount" entirely. There's certainly things you can do to make this work and the clear intention is to nerf the overpowered funny move class, but the way FE tends to go about it is often lackluster or it just doesn't attempt at all. At least 3H tried, but this is the game where you can just become a wyvern lord and make a game breaking dodgetank while spamming swift strikes, so did it really change anything?

1 hour ago, samthedigital said:

3 hours ago, Jotari said:

Okay, I'll rephrase that, worse decisions. The problems with Switch Fire Emblem are problems programmers managed to figure ways around back in the Nintendo 64 days. Give them more power and they're going to use more power intensive methods of rendering higher and higher quality images that still don't actually look any better than the stuff we were getting in other games fifteen years ago. The hardware is not the problem here, the problem is that they simply aren't prioritizing this aspect of game design. It's the same reason every single cutscene has characters just stand statically there staring at each other. They simply don't think load times or a lack of cinematography is something that needs to be fixed. To stay on brand and shamelessly shill and old thread of mine FIRE EMBLEM NEEDS MORE TABLES

If I'm being honest I don't know if you're disagreeing with me or just going on a tangent about how Three Houses could have been better in those aspects if they had prioritized that for the Switch. If it's the latter then I agree with you.

Best 3H Animation

Worst RD Animation

[Imuabicus der Fertige]

Fuck you, I´m removing all the support conversations from Three Houses. No more discussion for you, ceterum censeo no immortal rulers on human thrones tyvm.

Actually, in all seriousness, I´m removing Norne from SD, redheads and especially redhead archers are too powerful.

 

Then again, if we could take all the effort put into making Echoes look/sound pretty and put it towards making Echoes an actual game beyond Foodstuff Yoink Simulator on a 32x32 empty field with an unhappy lil tree in that one corner over there, that´d be great.

[Sidereal Wraith]

4 hours ago, Shaky Jones said:

I had to look up Rafal and remember that the DLC exists.

You know what? I'm removing that too. OP privledges. Unlucky. 

I will never forgive locking my silver card behind a 30 dollar paywall.

Rafal maybe completely forgettable as a character, but at the very least he has a personality and motivation unlike a certain divine doofus I could mention.

[Fire Emblem Fan]

It's too easy for me to say my least favorite is the original Gaiden or Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, because they're just dated games and it's very difficult for me to think of anything to change. Plus, I actually kinda don't mind most of SDatBoL, for the most part? I guess just actually highlight movement spaces so I can see it and check enemy range easily?

Eh, anyway, for my least favorite game that I could actually think of a significant change for... Fates, a complete overhaul of the story. All of it. Because it's just not very good.

[The Roger The Paladin]

10 hours ago, Shaky Jones said:

I had to look up Rafal and remember that the DLC exists.

You know what? I'm removing that too. OP privledges. Unlucky. 

I will never forgive locking my silver card behind a 30 dollar paywall.

I'd actually forgotten about the day one DLC announcement at this stage. That was the point I decided not to buy the game on launch. Which is what happened with Fates due to the route-split being separate carts.

[Jotari]

12 hours ago, Shaky Jones said:

I still can't believe there was a high chance that if Kaga was still the lead dev, most FE games would be "Medeus and Gharnef have returned! Get the falchion and bring peace to Altea!". You ain't the next Zelda buddy.

 

It seems the opposite to me. Sure, Kaga talked of returning to Archanea, but he eventually did with Archanea Saga. It might be that those stories or stories like them are all he wanted to tell. Given what we got with Tear Ring which seemed to be related to Archanea only in the tangential way that Jugdral was, he probably would have continued down that route. Meanwhile IS deprived of Kaga defaulted back to Archanea right away and just changed all the names giving us Binding Blade.

[SnowFire]

On 8/15/2024 at 5:16 PM, Etrurian emperor said:

Shadow Dragon: Make its cast and writing less of a direct port of a decades old, wildly outdated NES game. The biggest problem of Shadow Dragon is that its world, story and characters refuse to be anything more then they were in the NES era. Gharnef is still a bare bones NES villain, Marth still mostly just talks to the boring advisor and the plot princess, Hardin' still doesn't have a role setting him up for villainy, some characters still only have a death quote as dialogue and the story is still bland as toast. 

Doing that would fix a lot because the gameplay sure isn't a flaw in Shadow Dragon. Its the traditional FE experience, but just with an allergy to any sort of bells and whistles. So if we add the bells and whistle we'd have a solid game. 

If Echoes can take a bunch of non entities and make them a very engaging cast then so could Shadow Dragon. 

I'm just stealing this.  Yes I know OP said don't do "I'd fix the plot" comments but...  it's hard to come up with specific fixes for Shadow Dragon plot because the story is so damned threadbare.  There just aren't very many lines of dialogue, and many of the lines we do get boil down to "Why are you fighting for evil when you could be fighting for good?"  It's fine to be a gameplay-first game, and it's fine to have a young adult safe plotline that is not attempting to be particularly deep.  But even within those constraints, bleh.  The writing is just so uninteresting it's a disincentive to replay it.

Given Marth's later canonical depiction as being about friendship and believing in each other and such, a good start would be dropping deathless flags onto a few characters so that they can talk in cutscenes (say Caeda, Draug, & Ogma).  And also maybe figuring out something interesting to do with Nyna.  Hell, lean into the Camus soap opera if nothing else, something better than "Pls Marth-san help me!!"

[Alastor15243]

Three Houses: Make divine pulse purely a gameplay mechanic without even the slightest effort to make it canon.

I chose this because I know full well that my issues with Three Houses are so manifold and comprehensive that no one single change will ever make me actually like it. But at least I can use this mysterious reality-warping power to set a precedent that future games don't have to do that, thereby hopefully setting a trend that they don't, and in the process saving the stories of future better games and entirely eliminating the risk that the writers of the eventual Genealogy remake would be foolish enough to attempt it.

[Etrurian emperor]

9 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

Three Houses: Make divine pulse purely a gameplay mechanic without even the slightest effort to make it canon.

I think that's the way for rewind mechanics in general. Silque giving the mechanic to Alm or Alear finding a stupid time travel stone aren't required. Just have it be a gameplay mechanic that exists entirely outside the story. 

I mean if Hector gave Eliwood a secret scroll that allowed him to ''save'' so he could safely go to sleep and return fully rested then it be really stupid. So why would a rewind feature be treated any differently?

[Shaky Jones]

22 hours ago, Imuabicus der Fertige said:

Fuck you, I´m removing all the support conversations from Three Houses. No more discussion for you, ceterum censeo no immortal rulers on human thrones tyvm.

Me when no more racist supports (it's actually super deep and Hilda never getting called out for it is symbolic of life becau-)

Me when no more Mercedes Annette B support

22 hours ago, Imuabicus der Fertige said:

Actually, in all seriousness, I´m removing Norne from SD, redheads and especially redhead archers are too powerful.

I'm adding hard 6. Every archer is a redhead.

22 hours ago, Imuabicus der Fertige said:

Then again, if we could take all the effort put into making Echoes look/sound pretty and put it towards making Echoes an actual game beyond Foodstuff Yoink Simulator on a 32x32 empty field with an unhappy lil tree in that one corner over there, that´d be great.

Dev: "I want the modern audience to experience the authentic experience of the childhood classic of my time".

The Classic:

18 hours ago, Sidereal Wraith said:

Rafal maybe completely forgettable as a character, but at the very least he has a personality and motivation unlike a certain divine doofus I could mention.

The best 30 dollar personality I'll never learn about.

14 hours ago, Fire Emblem Fan said:

It's too easy for me to say my least favorite is the original Gaiden or Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, because they're just dated games and it's very difficult for me to think of anything to change. Plus, I actually kinda don't mind most of SDatBoL, for the most part?

FE1's the game I hate for very little faults of its own. Too much of it is just having the mindset of "I could be playing Shadow Dragon" every minute I play 1. 

For the first FE, it's quite commendable, but man is FE not something that works on NES. That convoy system especially ruined the experience for me. You know what? Change that. I'll tolerate the game way more.

13 hours ago, The Roger The Paladin said:

I'd actually forgotten about the day one DLC announcement at this stage. That was the point I decided not to buy the game on launch. Which is what happened with Fates due to the route-split being separate carts.

Trust me. The separate carts were a good thing. We were not well off with 3H as a route split game.

Well all you need to know about Engage is that it's the peak elderly experience. First time in ages we got multiple based old people, and finally an old woman. We haven't seen one of those since.....Niime? Is this seriously only the 2nd one we've had all franchise? Damn.

11 hours ago, Jotari said:

t seems the opposite to me. Sure, Kaga talked of returning to Archanea, but he eventually did with Archanea Saga. It might be that those stories or stories like them are all he wanted to tell. Given what we got with Tear Ring which seemed to be related to Archanea only in the tangential way that Jugdral was, he probably would have continued down that route. Meanwhile IS deprived of Kaga defaulted back to Archanea right away and just changed all the names giving us Binding Blade.

Dude TRS 100% would've been pure Archanea if Kaga could've gotten away with it. Bro thought he was gonna have his Tiki and Xane in this shit. 

I still firmly believe Kaga would've gone all in making FE super Archanea heavy with more loosely based tie ins being every other game or so, depending on how much Nintendo pressuring him to do so. IS was kinda funny in that by kicking the Archanea lover out and tryna stray away from it, they forced themselves into making what was basically an FE1 clone with Binding Blade. Comedy gold.

6 hours ago, SnowFire said:

The writing is just so uninteresting it's a disincentive to replay it.

Start button my beloved

4 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

Three Houses: Make divine pulse purely a gameplay mechanic without even the slightest effort to make it canon.

I like how 3H made the mistake fall so hard that Engage had to pretend the time crystal didn't exist, except for 1 chapter for an admittedly really cool gameplay concept.

I don't remember where, but I heard that Edelgard was originally also gonna have these powers (I imagine it'd be linked to having the crest of flames in general) and the narrative usage of divine pulses would come through Edel stopping Byleth's time powers with her own and whatnot. But I reckon there were too many ridiculous complications writing this and then actually giving her a rout would make things goofier, so then it got scrapped, but Byleth being able to use it in the plot at all was still left in as a concept, and it really shouldn't have. Did we really NEED the beginning of Byleth almost dying to the square man to meet Sothis as our introduction?

4 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

and in the process saving the stories of future better games and entirely eliminating the risk that the writers of the eventual Genealogy remake would be foolish enough to attempt it

my pessimistic ass would love for an fe4 remake to be completely butchered. It'd be the absolute funniest thing to see in the fandom for years. I'll take that over people shilling funny bbq game all year while I question If I'm the only person with standards.

4 hours ago, Etrurian emperor said:

I mean if Hector gave Eliwood a secret scroll that allowed him to ''save'' so he could safely go to sleep and return fully rested then it be really stupid. So why would a rewind feature be treated any differently?

I mean Tear Ring Saga had a staff that lets you save. Wasn't ever mentioned in the plot though. Imagine Runan just reset when any of the princesses got kidnapped.

14 hours ago, Fire Emblem Fan said:

Eh, anyway, for my least favorite game that I could actually think of a significant change for... Fates, a complete overhaul of the story. All of it. Because it's just not very good

I don't get it...I just don't get it. Is there something I'm doing wrong? Was explicitly using examples not enough!? Do I have to highlight it and paste 5 times over!? How am I getting multiple people doing the ONE thing I requested against? It's them damn YouTube Shorts, isn't it?

6 hours ago, SnowFire said:

I'm just stealing this.  Yes I know OP said don't do "I'd fix the plot" comments but...  it's hard to come up with specific fixes for Shadow Dragon plot because the story is so damned threadbare. 

I'll be grateful you acknowledged it...

Anyways, that's what I respect about Jotari's answer. He focused on one element and honed in on how that was a major issue for him. The idea of the post is that you can't just make a "This is how you make the game good". It's not meant to be possible, unless you legit only have 1 extremely specific issue that completely ruins the game. With only one fix, you try to do as much as you can, and then highlight whether that alone really does much for ya. I didn't want "Fates story bad" because that's so predictable and it doesn't say anything. At least follow it up with either "I'd make Azura not a fucking idiot" or "Garon wins and becomes the world's greatest farmer".

I can't really give a good example about SD because I love that game and am perfectly fine with its simple classic tale. Honestly, I mainly wish its villains were more involved. The only real noteworthy ones are just Michalis and Gharnef while Camus is meant to sit there and look pretty to cuck Hardin. Other FE's and even TRS occasionally make decent side villains work and even manage to have generic one offs stand out more through clever writing in their brief appearance that integrate their political involvement in how the continent was structed into becoming what it currently is, or they're just really funny. Most SD bosses JUST exists for the sake of blocking the throne. I only really remember Harmein for his brief interaction with Minerva. Even gameplay wise, too many bosses only have 1 range. That's stupid. 

Heck, Morzas is the boss of chapter 17. You know, where you get your bloody home back! Not only that. He's the bastard who killed your mom. By all means, he should be a really important boss, basically the Narcian of the game. But be honest. How many people do you think even know him or the fact that he killed Marth's mom? Love the game but man can I never get Ruben to make a Shadow Dragon boss hack. There's nothing to work with. 

And now Jotari's gonna inform me about every boss being extremely important in the manga that we can't read. And then rant about Pyrathi.

[Saint Rubenio]

15 hours ago, Fire Emblem Fan said:

Eh, anyway, for my least favorite game that I could actually think of a significant change for... Fates, a complete overhaul of the story. All of it. Because it's just not very good.

 

On 8/15/2024 at 10:13 PM, Shaky Jones said:

There is 1 rule to this, and it's that you can't be too broad with the change. Anyone can say "I'd fix the story of Fates"

You know, there's a certain irony in judging Fates's story when you failed to read up to paragraph 3 of the opening post.

[Sidereal Wraith]

47 minutes ago, Shaky Jones said:

The best 30 dollar personality I'll never learn about.

And remember this needs to be finished by Friday because there’ll be a quiz worth 10% of your overall grade.

[eevee_em]

For Fates: Turn down the characters so that they're less over-the-top and comedic. While not ideal, I don't mind characters based around a single trait or "gimmick" - In fact, I like the casts of Awakening and Engage on the whole. But a lot of the Fates characters have such outlandish personalities, and those traits are leaned on so heavily, that they lose the capacity to take part in serious discussions. The most obvious example is probably Arthur- if he's not falling victim to his horrible luck, then he's arguably acting out of character. And the fact that the game is trying to tell a serious, tragic story just makes the absurdity of the characters more glaring.

This should go a long way towards improving the support conversions. As it is, a lot of them (I want to say the majority?) are basically "let's throw these two extreme personalities together and watch what happens". Toning that down would make more room for other things such as exploring character backstories (which exist already but are barely touched on), giving world building tidbits, and having sweet moments that aren't getting undermined by jokes. Which are things most people expect from support conversations.

Fates is flawed game in many respects, and would probably still be my least favorite if this change happened. But at least finishing that massive support log wouldn't be a total slog.

[Dark Holy Elf]

I don't like Shadow Dragon much. Or New Mystery, really. I have some issues with other FE games, but both SD/NM fall in this zone of not really having much to recommend them. At least FE4 is a genuinely unique experience, while DS Fire Emblem feels kinda like the GBA era, only with worse characters, weirdly bad visuals, and ambush spawns.

I imagine the single thing I'd want most is for the games to make me care about the characters. At the moment they largely do not, and this hurts the games for me. I don't just want to play with a bunch of numbers attached to an ugly portrait, I want to care about the characters behind them, too. So in many ways this is the thing I'd want to see fixed most. I'd probably forgive every other complaint I have about the games and play them both half a dozen times if they managed this.

But y'know that's a vague change (so against the spirit of the rules here), and anyway, with a remake, greatly changing the writing runs the risk of angering people who liked the original, threadbare story. And the fact of the matter is, you can always press start to skip bad writing. But SD/NM are boring games even when I do that, so there's gotta be more to fix.

So I suppose the relatively easy fixes I'll settle on are:
1. Change the bizarre sidequest requirements of SD to literally anything else. I actually think the SD side chapters have the slightest glimmer of worthwhile writing unlike the rest of the game, it's a shame that almost nobody sees it because you need to orchestrate mass murder of your own team to do it.
2. Get rid of ambush spawns. Nuke them from orbit. I can't stress this enough. SD/NM are too easy on their default difficulty, so I want to dial up the challenge. But that means dealing with ambush spawns, in games that don't have rewind or "save whenever you want". And I just don't enjoy that.
3. I suppose I'll mention one more point, which is fix some of the wonky balance of the harder difficulties. I remember on Shadow Dragon H3 the first three chapters (particularly the bosses) were way harder than anything else not ambush spawn related. And while I grew tired of NM before dealing with any difficulty above Hard, I've generally heard terrible things about both the prologue (in that it might not even be reasonably beatable with some Kris builds?) and Medeus.

[Fire Emblem Fan]

8 hours ago, Shaky Jones said:

I don't get it...I just don't get it. Is there something I'm doing wrong? Was explicitly using examples not enough!? Do I have to highlight it and paste 5 times over!? How am I getting multiple people doing the ONE thing I requested against? It's them damn YouTube Shorts, isn't it?

Well, I am dyslexic, I oftentimes have to read something more than once. If I missed something, that's likely why.

[Jotari]

8 hours ago, Shaky Jones said:

Dude TRS 100% would've been pure Archanea if Kaga could've gotten away with it. Bro thought he was gonna have his Tiki and Xane in this shit. 

I still firmly believe Kaga would've gone all in making FE super Archanea heavy with more loosely based tie ins being every other game or so, depending on how much Nintendo pressuring him to do so. IS was kinda funny in that by kicking the Archanea lover out and tryna stray away from it, they forced themselves into making what was basically an FE1 clone

Only to the extend of what he did with Jugdral. Tear Ring Saga quite clearly has a different setting from Archanea with a whole different political set up.

8 hours ago, Shaky Jones said:

Anyways, that's what I respect about Jotari's answer

Oh wait, I'm getting praise. Ego stroked, I take it all back. Tear Ring is completely Archanea and Runan is Marth (Holmes is idk Malledus). Flattery will get you everywhere.

8 hours ago, Shaky Jones said:

And now Jotari's gonna inform me about every boss being extremely important in the manga that we can't read. And then rant about Pyrathi

The manga we can't read doesn't get as far as Altea, but the manga we can read ends with the fight Morzas and it's a little underwhelming. It's clear the author just wanted to finish up by that point. Khozen, Volzhin and Jiol are there bosses who shine in the manga (but that manga still dropped Pyrathi so it's a 0/10).

[The Roger The Paladin]

9 hours ago, Shaky Jones said:

Trust me. The separate carts were a good thing. We were not well off with 3H as a route split game.

I'm never quite going to be convinced the separate carts serve any benefit when I've played the special edition, which I'm of the opinion should have been the standard. Though I'm sure IS would find a way to make that worse.
 

9 hours ago, Shaky Jones said:

 

Well all you need to know about Engage is that it's the peak elderly experience. First time in ages we got multiple based old people, and finally an old woman. We haven't seen one of those since.....Niime? Is this seriously only the 2nd one we've had all franchise? Damn.

Tell you what, if I ever do make a romhack, that's probably the thing I'm most intent on changing. The age range of playable characters.
 

8 hours ago, Sidereal Wraith said:

And remember this needs to be finished by Friday because there’ll be a quiz worth 10% of your overall grade.

What is going on here? Something positive about Engage? What have you done with the real Wraith?

[SnowFire]

I don't want to nitpick other's fixes too much, but I find it a little surprising that others consider Divine Pulse in 3H such a big deal.  To be sure, if you put me in charge, I'd do what Echoes did and basically say "our heroes have a magic good luck charm that is the player manipulating fate to favor them but it's completely uncontrollable by the heroes in-setting."  I like consistent settings where Our Heroes are doing their best with all the tools they have available. 

But 3H & Engage making it an actual plot point is...  fine?  Like, it's no big deal.  No worse than "in this superhero universe, this power is way too good and the writers don't let the hero solve everything with it!"  Well yes, that's how OP powers go sometimes.  And giving Byleth SOME sort of superpower seems relevant to sort of explain both why the Slitherers are after them and as an explanation for why their side always wins.  Even if we accept for a moment that it weakens the setting, it's at worst a "internal consistency / 'realism'" nitpick.  Those can be annoying, but tons of well-loved stories have them anyway.  The real killers are THEMATIC problems with a plot (exhibit A: FE Fates Conquest).  Put things another way, "why doesn't Superman instantly abduct all supervillains and drag them to prison at infinity speed" isn't a big deal, but a plotline with "Why did Superman kill 1000 innocent kids in a forbidden sacrifice to Loptous yet the writer still acted like this was a good and moral idea" has larger problems.

10 hours ago, Shaky Jones said:

Start button my beloved

 

I'll steal from Elf and say that the larger problem here is that I fundamentally don't care about the Shadow Dragon cast and don't think their quest is very clever with maybe two half-exceptions.  (Minerva trying to reclaim the throne from Michalis is a simple but interesting plotline, slightly undermined by FE12 inexplicably redeeming Michalis; and I think the fact that the game lets you fail to get the Falchion and be forced to do some emergency begging for aid from Naga / Nagi is interesting and helps sell the threat of Gharnef when you're not guaranteed to beat him.)  My memory is pretty good.  In games with sceneskip, I'm still enjoying hanging out with characters I like and can remember the good plot just fine.  If the plot is bad, then skipping it only helps a little, because SD's plot is so aggressively bad that it reaches the point of really diminishing overall investment.

Or, to flip the scenario around, there are plenty of games that have objectively "bad" gameplay that I and others are happy to replay if either the cast is likable, the plot is interesting, or preferably both.  It's really important!  If you have a good gameplay game with a bad plot, it's competing against, like, actual chess rather than anime chess now.

Quote

I'll be grateful you acknowledged it...

Anyways, that's what I respect about Jotari's answer. He focused on one element and honed in on how that was a major issue for him. The idea of the post is that you can't just make a "This is how you make the game good". It's not meant to be possible, unless you legit only have 1 extremely specific issue that completely ruins the game. With only one fix, you try to do as much as you can, and then highlight whether that alone really does much for ya. I didn't want "Fates story bad" because that's so predictable and it doesn't say anything. At least follow it up with either "I'd make Azura not a fucking idiot" or "Garon wins and becomes the world's greatest farmer".(...)

And now Jotari's gonna inform me about every boss being extremely important in the manga that we can't read. And then rant about Pyrathi.

No, I'm gonna beat Jotari to the punch.  https://serenesforest.net/shadow-dragon/scripts/game-script/chapter-9-a-wyrm-kings-wrath/ This one was so jarring I remember being surprised in-game.  Why the heck are we invading this random island again?  It's incredibly poorly explained!  Just general strategy game logic of peacefully uniting the world under Nyna's just rule by invading every neutral, I guess, but then the game should "own" that a little more.  Have the token unsympathetic character (your FE9 Shinons of the world) talk about how all this loot we took from the Pyrathi capital is gonna pay our wages for months, and have Malledeus (or whatever Merlinus equivalent you want) talk about seizing Pyrathi ships to use to maneuever the League's armies better, similar to how Awakening (!) of all games bothered to explain about Plegia offering its fleet to help out against Valm.  And if we want Marth to be a little sympathetic, he can feel bad after some little boy runs up crying about how the League should give back all the stuff they stole from daddy.  To keep it real-life kid-friendly, Marth can then give some orders to be nice to the newly conquered subjects.

But I guess this gets at what I was saying before: the real problem is just that the Shadow Dragon script is too short.  You can make a nice poem with one page, but you can't write a novel, and a one-page summary of even The Best Novel is not going to become The Best Nanostory.  That Pyrathi arc just needed more words (similar to your example of the Morzas showdown needing more words to milk some melodrama - hell, even if Morzas is too pumped up and just wants to fight, then some words from MARTH (and/or Elice?  Where was she then, still in captivity?) on what exactly this means to him.  So a lot of the fixes inherently would have "and also write 5x as much dialogue" that replays can still Start-skip but remember as explaining things.

Okay so that's one tiny fix on Pyrathi.  I'll give another incredibly tiny one that wouldn't even require majorly expanding the script that serves as a decent example.  A story is more than just the macro overarching plot.  It's also the little things it wants to draw attention to - Nils' bad fortunetelling, Ike having a meta conversation about strategy board-games and moving pieces immediately before a map that encourages shoving, etc.  So there's a little gameplay decision in C16: do you want a Paladin or do you want a Hero?  Sure.  It's fine to lay it out like that to the player.  But we get this sparkling dialogue to justify it:

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Old Man:
“Listen well, because this is very important. There are two villages in the northwest of Altea. The westerly village is home to a paladin named Arran while the westerly village is home to a hero named Samson. They’re both fine men and warriors, but their villages have been feudin’ for years. You should probably resign yourself to the fact that you’ll only get one of them to join your ranks. Give it some thought: the hero to the west, or the paladin to the east?”

This is way too game-y.  A nameless old man talking about two nameless villages that are feuding because...  well, it's unsaid.  Look, laying the gameplay on the table is fine, but you really couldn't do anything better with the justification here?  This is like free world-building!  Why would you not take advantage of it?  And hell, this is in Altea, where people should in theory be MOST willing to jump to Marth's cause, rather than somewhere else!  Also we have an army!  The post-recruitment quotes act like the problem is that we simply can't get to our other recruit, rather than them being unwilling to join us, but rest assured, we can get to both recruits with our elite troops just fine (I dare you to close your gate against my Lvl 20/15 unit), so I don't buy it.

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“Prince Marth!  We need ya to settle a dispute in the northwest of Altea.  Ever since the swine Hollstadt came, he's been playing us off against each other, inventing petty privileges he can dispense and revoke at will.  You gotta step in.  The village of Gen to the east was crushed under Grust's heel for so long, but their count Eliwood made a deal.  He's now been put in charge of Iga to the west, which used to be the more prominent of the two villages.  If you can offer him a pardon and continuation of his rule under the Altean banner, I'm sure he'll let you have his best man, the Paladin Arran, in gratitude.  Flip side, if you visit Iga to the west and offer their mayor his standing back, I bet that cowardly Eliwood would turn tail and run.  I bet the Hero Sampson, a native of Iga, would be happy to serve you in gratitude. Give it some thought: the hero to the west, or the paladin to the east?”

Now do this 30 more times for every other little thing in Shadow Dragon...

Edited August 18 by SnowFire

[Florete]

I'm going to answer for three games: Three Hopes, my outright least favorite game with "Fire Emblem" in the title; Thracia 776, my least favorite non spin-off; and Three Houses, the one that disappointed me the most.

Three Hopes: Change the story to be like what the first trailer made it look like. Byleth is still the protagonist, Shez is a new villain. Before the game launched I had a theory about the game being a pseudo-sequel to Three Houses via time shenanigans, which I would have liked waaaaay more than what we got.

Thracia: Remove capture and rebalance the game around it not existing. There's a lot of annoying crap in this game but I feel this is the most pervasive.

Three Houses: Make hard mode harder. There are a ton of reasons this game was a massive let down for me, but most of them could be forgiven to some degree if I could just enjoy playing the game, which I can't because hard mode is too easy and maddening swings too far in the other direction. Alternatively, create a 4th difficulty between hard and maddening.

[Jotari]

10 hours ago, Shaky Jones said:

finally an old woman. We haven't seen one of those since.....Niime? Is this seriously only the 2nd one we've had all franchise? Damn.

There's Hilda, if you want to count her as old. Though given she has a teenage daughter she's probably only like 38. Course internal data says Saphir is 35, lol.

[Fire Emblem Fan]

I'll be more specific rather than just "change the story of Fates." Instead, focus on the "you vanish if you talk about Valla." Specifically change that. Because it's stupid. Think of some other reason why Azura can't talk about Valla.

[Shaky Jones]

22 hours ago, Sidereal Wraith said:

And remember this needs to be finished by Friday because there’ll be a quiz worth 10% of your overall grade.

A test? In 2024? Get real. Everyone cheats nowadays. You can't stop it.

21 hours ago, eevee_em said:

For Fates: Turn down the characters so that they're less over-the-top and comedic. While not ideal, I don't mind characters based around a single trait or "gimmick" - In fact, I like the casts of Awakening and Engage on the whole. But a lot of the Fates characters have such outlandish personalities, and those traits are leaned on so heavily, that they lose the capacity to take part in serious discussions. The most obvious example is probably Arthur- if he's not falling victim to his horrible luck, then he's arguably acting out of character. And the fact that the game is trying to tell a serious, tragic story just makes the absurdity of the characters more glaring.

So quirky le good. One note le bad. Fair.

Honestly, I feel mostly the same. Most people around my circle tend to hate on almost everything modern FE, including characters, but i personally like a lot of them. Let's be real, most of old FE characters weren't exactly deep serious individuals who didn't just play into some anime trope.

That said, many Fates units are a little bland, something I'd mainly say about half of the FE6 units, given how utterly bland so many FE6 supports tend to be. I don't care enough about the writing to offer suggestions, because Fates is always high tier for me purely from gameplay, but I'm sure you could add to their character without removing their gimmick.

That said, don't change anything about my boy Arthur. He's the absolute best joke unit. He's the one meme guy I know I can use in Conquest runs for a stupid fun time whacking the silly foreign men with my American comic book walking tragedy. Out of the quirky people in Fates, he's easily my favorite and I legit love how stupid the unluckiness gets. In this instance, I feel that giving him anything serious would actually ruin his character and clash heavily with his jolly comical lifestyle. He's Arthur! 

17 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

both SD/NM fall in this zone of not really having much to recommend them

18 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

1. Change the bizarre sidequest requirements of SD to literally anything else. I actually think the SD side chapters have the slightest glimmer of worthwhile writing unlike the rest of the game, it's a shame that almost nobody sees it because you need to orchestrate mass murder of your own team to do it.

Shadow Dragon gaiden chapters walked so Excelblem's channel could run

18 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

2. Get rid of ambush spawns. Nuke them from orbit. I can't stress this enough. SD/NM are too easy on their default difficulty, so I want to dial up the challenge. But that means dealing with ambush spawns, in games that don't have rewind or "save whenever you want". And I just don't enjoy that

On one hand, everyone gets what you mean. On the other, Archenea reinforcements really were designed around ambush given that's how they were, and being someone that loves over-analyzing and praising Archanea maps, I feel that too many maps would be ruined if you could just spawn camp them. At least for SD, 90% of reinforcements are easily predictable and most can be blocked from forts if you're fast enough. Most forts that come to mind are either relatively far from the seize gate so you're not obligated to walk next to it and get jumped (ch5, ch8, ch18, etc), or give you plenty of time to block the fort or prepare for the assault. 

At least they have save circles, so most times you die to ambush, you barely lose progress. That doesn't make it a good excuse though. Just an okay one. I never forgive 3H for legit having the worst ambushes in gaming. Don't even bother giving me 10 pulses if you're just gonna try to forcibly remove them through ambushes that are borderline impossible to avoid without intense trial and error. Unlike Archenea, 3H wasn't designed around ambush. Just give me 3 pulses and good game design.

18 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

3. I suppose I'll mention one more point, which is fix some of the wonky balance of the harder difficulties. I remember on Shadow Dragon H3 the first three chapters (particularly the bosses) were way harder than anything else not ambush spawn related. And while I grew tired of NM before dealing with any difficulty above Hard

Ironically, difficulty is often what FE fans praise DSFE most for, and I'm certainly one of them. Most FE's have stupid issues about hard modes, and other than Conquest, DSFE probably has the least amount of issues. Unfortunately, the one bad thing about Shadow Dragon is the early bosses. Most die hard SD fans will admit that the first 3 bosses are abysmal on H5. The game is considered to get much better past chapter 3. Other than that, there's no wonky balance, as the changes are very simple and minimal, slightly adding increments of stats and weapon changes per number, giving the player a good range of choice on just how tuned they want their enemies to be.

In other words, I'd probably reword that as "fix the first 3 bosses". That's really the only thing it does that feels unplaytested. Okay, that and the chapter 3 fighters with like 40 HP. That's also stupid.

I won't bother with FE12 because I don't feel like turning this into a giant "FE12 is actually good guys" discussion, especially since you didn't even try maniac. 

Yes yes, prologue le bad, I've made multiple posts partially defending it, but yeah it's not the best, but overhated and something something skill issue telephone response.

Lunatic Medeus is complete garbage though. That's my FE12 change. Actual worst boss in the series.

16 hours ago, Fire Emblem Fan said:

Well, I am dyslexic, I oftentimes have to read something more than once. If I missed something, that's likely why.

There's at least 7 jokes I could make about this, but I won't.

You wouldn't be able to read it anyways.

15 hours ago, Jotari said:

Only to the extend of what he did with Jugdral. Tear Ring Saga quite clearly has a different setting from Archanea with a whole different political set up.

On 8/17/2024 at 9:59 AM, Shaky Jones said:

Anyways, that's what I respect about Jotari's answer

Oh wait, I'm getting praise. Ego stroked, I take it all back. Tear Ring is completely Archanea and Runan is Marth (Holmes is idk Malledus). Flattery will get you everywhere.

Good, it's annoying to back and fourth when I know I'm right. 

15 hours ago, Jotari said:

The manga we can't read doesn't get as far as Altea, but the manga we can read ends with the fight Morzas and it's a little underwhelming. It's clear the author just wanted to finish up by that point. Khozen, Volzhin and Jiol are there bosses who shine in the manga (but that manga still dropped Pyrathi so it's a 0/10)

Fuck me, that right there proves my point. I like Volzhin and he absolutely should shine, but I literally forgot about him for the last post because the game doesn't do anything to make him shine when he probably would've been a small but noticeable highlight in a different FE game. Instead I mainly remember Heimler because Himmler, or Kannival, aka Canaris aka

Son of a fuckin-

14 hours ago, The Roger The Paladin said:

I'm never quite going to be convinced the separate carts serve any benefit when I've played the special edition, which I'm of the opinion should have been the standard. Though I'm sure IS would find a way to make that worse.

I reckon all the CQ fans would hate to spend 60 bucks for 2 routes they'll never play. Some consider Fates to just be conquest.

Ugh, imagine paying 100 bucks for 4 routes of 3H...I'd sooner jump off the bridge at the Bottomless Canyon.

14 hours ago, The Roger The Paladin said:

Tell you what, if I ever do make a romhack, that's probably the thing I'm most intent on changing. The age range of playable characters.

This should be a given. Truly a society moment. I weep.

14 hours ago, The Roger The Paladin said:

What is going on here? Something positive about Engage? What have you done with the real Wraith?

They promoted to Mainreal Wraith.

14 hours ago, SnowFire said:

I don't want to nitpick other's fixes too much, but I find it a little surprising that others consider Divine Pulse in 3H such a big deal

FIrst of all, feel free to nitpick. I don't care about boundaries.

As for the divine pulse, is it really surprising? It's like when you add time travel to a piece of fiction. Now people who wanna immerse in the story have an infinite possibility of hypothetical choices they'll be mad the protagonist doesn't make. "Why didn't Byleth try to help Rodrigue?". "Why didn't Byleth just try again with Jeralt and Monica by just going back further and just sticking next to Jeralt the entire time?". "Why didn't Byleth just use divine pulse as they were falling at the end of part 1 to not get themselves in that situation?". And then tryna justify it will always sound tacky and desperate, which leads to this bad taste of poor writing that clashes with the emotional and/or dramatic moments they're trying to make you feel invested in.

14 hours ago, SnowFire said:

I'd do what Echoes did and basically say "our heroes have a magic good luck charm that is the player manipulating fate to favor them but it's completely uncontrollable by the heroes in-setting." 

I will say, I remember getting really mad when I made it floor nine of Thabes in act 6, losing Alm to defense piercing dragons that swarmed me, then finding out in that moment that Alm can't reset with the wheel if he's the one who died. I used zero wheels by then. I thought I was fine....

At least it technically makes sense. If Byleth can use it whenever....why don't they?

14 hours ago, SnowFire said:

But 3H & Engage making it an actual plot point is...  fine?  Like, it's no big deal.  No worse than "in this superhero universe, this power is way too good and the writers don't let the hero solve everything with it!"  Well yes, that's how OP powers go sometimes.  And giving Byleth SOME sort of superpower seems relevant to sort of explain both why the Slitherers are after them and as an explanation for why their side always wins.  Even if we accept for a moment that it weakens the setting, it's at worst a "internal consistency / 'realism'" nitpick.  Those can be annoying, but tons of well-loved stories have them anyway.  The real killers are THEMATIC problems with a plot (exhibit A: FE Fates Conquest).  Put things another way, "why doesn't Superman instantly abduct all supervillains and drag them to prison at infinity speed" isn't a big deal, but a plotline with "Why did Superman kill 1000 innocent kids in a forbidden sacrifice to Loptous yet the writer still acted like this was a good and moral idea" has larger problems.

I somewhat see this as a red herring of sorts. Yeah, there are worse stories and bigger ways to mess up a story, but we're not talking about Conquest of the state of comic books. We're talking about divine pulses being a poor writing element, which it is.

I do think it depends on the person for sure. Some might go "okay, this is a little silly" then move right on to enjoying the well written parts of the game as few as there are. For others, this completely ruins the big moments. This could be its own post on how much it matters per situation and how would you crack down how damming it is on an objective scale.

After all, I'll choose to not really care about silly story moments with something like the Blood Pact given how much I like the rest of the story and at least can see the idea of stupid unqualified beta prince being manipulated by big scary senate into being their bitch working as a narrative, but then get super dumbfounded when Byleth just lets Rodrigue die and then Dimitri's biggest leap into sanity is just "yoUr HanDs aRe sO wARm". You practically chose to kill Felix's dad just so you could rizz your mentally ill student.  I'll admit the blood pact certainly is bad and should've been handled better, but I clearly don't have the vehement hatred that many others do have, outright believing it ruins the entire story, but I can't pretend I like Byleth in the slightest with garbage like that. I'll still love a lot of what Azure Moon provides, but man what an awful transition into Dimitri's next arc. I suppose this is both a gameplay/story integration flaw and a thematic flaw that fuse into a foul moment in my eyes. Even without the pulse, I wouldn't like it that much, but I could understand the angle and be okay with its existence, but man the pulse factor adds a comical element of either stupidity or sinisterness (I'm always told when talking about this that Byleth intentionally let it happen to "fix" Dimitri and I'm always like "THAT'S WORSE!").

14 hours ago, SnowFire said:

If you have a good gameplay game with a bad plot, it's competing against, like, actual chess rather than anime chess now.

We got rid of the anime? Finally!

14 hours ago, SnowFire said:

No, I'm gonna beat Jotari to the punch.

A little late, but you explained in far more detail, so you get a B+.

14 hours ago, SnowFire said:

But I guess this gets at what I was saying before: the real problem is just that the Shadow Dragon script is too short.  You can make a nice poem with one page, but you can't write a novel, and a one-page summary of even The Best Novel is not going to become The Best Nanostory.  That Pyrathi arc just needed more words (similar to your example of the Morzas showdown needing more words to milk some melodrama - hell, even if Morzas is too pumped up and just wants to fight, then some words from MARTH (and/or Elice?  Where was she then, still in captivity?) on what exactly this means to him.  So a lot of the fixes inherently would have "and also write 5x as much dialogue" that replays can still Start-skip but remember as explaining things.

Yeah I'll agree with you there. I think I'm on an identical but smaller boat as Jotari, who I assume likes the Archanea game a lot, and has a large investment in the plot that basically has to be obtained through outside factors because the real games explain jack shit. Obviously, I'm far more indifferent to the plot that most others because I just like gameplay, but I relish in reading vague articles or getting the 30th anniversary book just to look at Archanea trivia because it's my favorite duology in the series. It's probably the lack of extreme detail like in TRS that allow me to easily ease into the worldbuilding of Archenea while taking interest in what started everything, but then a remake chooses to do very little else to expand, which is kind of sad, and yet there's always something about these games that hook me the most despite most other FE games having more to them. Oh well. As long as the games are fun, I'll treasure it. Honestly, it probably only needs to be 2.5x as long if you just write in a clever way. 

14 hours ago, SnowFire said:

ow do this 30 more times for every other little thing in Shadow Dragon...

Most houses in these games are meant to just be gameplay tips to the player, more than proper worldbuilding. Should they have changed it? Probably, but I guess I don't blame them for not doing so. I just wish more FE games had Samson/Arran moments in general regarding replay-ability and only picking 1. 

One of the first houses of Mystery/New Mystery is just a lady telling you that Arran falls of and you should bench him. I always found that to be hilarious. Imagine Kris was just an elitist and they sat down and nerded out over how "actually, jegains are good, don't fall off, and are optimal because-" only to be kicked out.

14 hours ago, Florete said:

I'm going to answer for three games: Three Hopes, my outright least favorite game with "Fire Emblem" in the title

Absolutely based.

14 hours ago, Florete said:

Thracia 776, my least favorite non spin-off

14 hours ago, Florete said:

Three Houses, the one that disappointed me the most.

Me when the entire fandom of 2020 said it fixed Fire Emblem (nothing happens for half of the game)

the funny part is that you could argue I'm talking about either part

14 hours ago, Florete said:

Three Hopes: Change the story to be like what the first trailer made it look like. Byleth is still the protagonist, Shez is a new villain. Before the game launched I had a theory about the game being a pseudo-sequel to Three Houses via time shenanigans, which I would have liked waaaaay more than what we got

Fans Before 3 Hopes Came Out: "Oh come on a golden route? That's so dumb! Look at this stupid edgelord lookin ass! 

Fans After 3 Hopes Came Out: "We should've just gotten a golden route....."

What was the point of foreshadowing Shez's past? Why even mention a mother if you're not going to do anything with it?

14 hours ago, Florete said:

Remove capture and rebalance the game around it not existing. There's a lot of annoying crap in this game but I feel this is the most pervasive.

Aww but I like capturing.

14 hours ago, Florete said:

Make hard mode harder. There are a ton of reasons this game was a massive let down for me, but most of them could be forgiven to some degree if I could just enjoy playing the game, which I can't because hard mode is too easy and maddening swings too far in the other direction. Alternatively, create a 4th difficulty between hard and maddening.

I always say maddening is a garbage difficulty. The easiest way to annoy me is to say "just play hard". My brother in Christ, I can't. There is no game there.

14 hours ago, Jotari said:

There's Hilda, if you want to count her as old. Though given she has a teenage daughter she's probably only like 38.

I'm talking playables, but damn, you barely see even old woman. Middle aged is the best you get. Now THAT's actually pathetic.

14 hours ago, Jotari said:

Course internal data says Saphir is 35, lol.

This is the equivalent of reading an article about Trump "falling down" at his rally.

14 hours ago, Fire Emblem Fan said:

I'll be more specific rather than just "change the story of Fates." Instead, focus on the "you vanish if you talk about Valla." Specifically change that. Because it's stupid. Think of some other reason why Azura can't talk about Valla.

"What are we gonna do guys? If we tell anyone about the ground hot dog we ate, the hot dog man will come and turn us into hot dogs and eat us!"

This is a plotline on the same level as a children's show. This is arguably the best part about Rev because it falls the most under "so bad it's funny" while almost everything else is just boring or sad. "Here's Valla. It's all destroyed now.". Okay...wanna tell me about how it used to be? No? Oh we're already starting a filler arc. We just got into this magical land, and we're already abandoning the setting's narrative for filler.