I still don't get the praise of this game...

[dondon151]

Feel free to lecture us on objectively good tactical gameplay (I think I know the arguments, but others might find them enlightening) and the literary/artistic value of Fire Emblem (you did make the analogy, no?).

any literary or artistic value has been touched on by lumi to a better extent than i could have done. the tactical aspect has been covered before by me and many other users here. if you wish to continue the discussion, ask me about certain mechanics and i'll tell you about them.

I don’t claim to know the intentions of others, but I’ll speculate FE13 was made primarily for entertainment and for profit, and was bought by consumers for entertainment/fun. I’m sure there’s a fair sense of “good design” in the success there (sales, critical/professional/industry opinions, even wrt to the ratio of hours played/actual cost, compared to other media forms.)

i have already agreed that FE13 is wildly successful at being fun and at making money for IS. novels such as twilight and films such as transformers are also successful at entertainment and making money. you will not find many literary or movie critics who praise twilight or transformers for being a good book or film, respectively.

(And what exactly are you referring to with “ease of being optimized”)

FE13 was broken apart almost immediately after decent players got their hands on it. i'm fairly sure that FE13 strategies are more optimized than the strategies of most of its predecessors. there are two possible reasons for this: there were more players for awakening, and its mechanics and map designs were more flawed than its predecessors. there have been no shortage of good players ever since SF began attracting a wide fanbase after FE10, so the better explanation is the latter one.

this is the reason why the following statement is merely glossing over the problem:

Also, no one (afaik) claims to discount broken mechanics, the issue is typically brought up when people claim that previous games were exempt.

previous entries were not exempt from having broken mechanics; the difference, however, is that they didn't have as many of them, and the mechanics themselves weren't as easy to abuse.

Also @dondon. You claim that Awakening isn't as good because it was made to have a wide appeal. If that isn't elitist, then clearly the word means something different than what I think it does.

did i say this? i submit to you, please tell me where i said this.

i made two claims: FE13 has broad appeal, and FE13 does not have good gameplay. i did not claim that FE13 lacks good gameplay strictly because it was designed to have a broad appeal. the poor gameplay could have arisen from design choices aimed to have broad appeal, but the mere fact that many players like awakening does not make me dislike it.

there is absolutely nothing elitist about this. i can be critical of FE13's gameplay and also think that it's a fun game.

[The Geek]

did i say this? i submit to you, please tell me where i said this.

i made two claims: FE13 has broad appeal, and FE13 does not have good gameplay. i did not claim that FE13 lacks good gameplay strictly because it was designed to have a broad appeal. the poor gameplay could have arisen from design choices aimed to have broad appeal, but the mere fact that many players like awakening does not make me dislike it.

there is absolutely nothing elitist about this. i can be critical of FE13's gameplay and also think that it's a fun game.

Okay, I thought you were one of the "grr Awakening no good common denominator weeb shit" crowd.

Sorry about that.

[Vennobennu]

WRT trivializing gameplay; it's not just that certain mechanics can be exploited to negate the challenge of most maps; the other half of the problem lies in that these mechanics are central to the game and advertised to the player. The Warp staff in Shadow Dragon would probably not be gamebreaking if you only had seven charges of it (and no Hammerne, for the sake of example) for the entire game.

Pair Up is available early and forever, and the game encourages its use whenever possible. Pairing up all your units and rolling them forward is the simplest, easiest and most effective strategy for almost all maps in Awakening. Alternatively, Rescue staves can be bought on the cheap and can let you finish any given Boss chapter in a turn or two. The game even hands you two good prepromotes to make it easier. These strategies are both easy to understand and apply, and do not vary with the map you're on. Characters like Avatar and Nowi could be considered game breakers themselves

It's arguably not so intuitive that investing everything into Caeda, the Wing Spear and Warp is a great idea in Fe11, or that Marcus can stay ahead of the curve for a long time by taking boss kills and perhaps stat boosters - and that the other prepomotes are more than enough to pick up the slack later on. Awakening doesn't demand that you divert the lion's share of resources to an otherwise unassuming unit to break the game; its broken things practically stare you in the face.

What I mean to say is, not breaking the game in past FE's comes down to not employing a specific strategy. In Awakening, I have to deliberately avoid what should be normal parts of the game in order to maintain a decent challenge, and that's not interesting to me. I really want to like the game, it has a lot going for it, but it just falls short in too many ways.

[XeKr]

i have already agreed that FE13 is wildly successful at being fun and at making money for IS. novels such as twilight and films such as transformers are also successful at entertainment and making money. you will not find many literary or movie critics who praise twilight or transformers for being a good book or film, respectively.

But Awakening got overwhelmingly positive critical and user reviews (by metacritic, etc).

FE13 was broken apart almost immediately after decent players got their hands on it. i'm fairly sure that FE13 strategies are more optimized than the strategies of most of its predecessors. there are two possible reasons for this: there were more players for awakening, and its mechanics and map designs were more flawed than its predecessors. there have been no shortage of good players ever since SF began attracting a wide fanbase after FE10, so the better explanation is the latter one.

If I’m interpreting you correctly, your standard for “decent/good” players seems overly strict. If it were so easy to optimize FE13, Lunatic(+) wouldn’t have a reputation of being masochistically challenging or “luck”-based because many people would (easily, as you claim) figure out the solutions without consulting a guide.

Moreover, we probably should have heard more about how silly Veteran and Rescue Staves are, rather than all the pre-hype over Nosferatu, Rally Spectrum, and Galeforce. Or heard more about Sol, avoid-stacking, Panne, Nowi, Tiki, Bows in L+, etc. The fact is that even here and other gaming sites, with ostensibly veteran and smart players who knew how to trivialize other games, for many months no one realized (or shared so) that you could snowball Avatar so quickly in the higher difficulties with the correct Asset. Or the implication of all the aforementioned things pretty much on the level of Nosferatu (essentially why No Nosferatu should not have been a hyped restriction). Or the proper levels to reclass/promote to keep other units viable in higher difficulties. Or actually “optimized” postgame pairings and realizing how good VV and Dual Strike+ are. And so on.

I’ll also note that +Def Avatar-centric strats certainly weren’t intuitive to me initially. And to my knowledge, I will play my hipster card and say I was the first, lone advocate for it here at SF in the Lunatic Club (tho I don’t claim credit for finding it) and I was one of the first to excessively hype buyable Rescue Staves (I suppose notably in an early gfaqs draft, but even prior).

Incidentally, it took quite some more time before a “decent” player found out you could adequately snowball Avatar very early without +Def/Hp in Lunatic, and very efficiently at that. And things like the water trick and Bows being useful in L+ weren’t realized until even later. All this certainly is suggestive that it’s quite non-trivial to figure this stuff out.

Wrt to lower difficulties, for a long time, Hard was considered to be well-balanced (still is, I think, in some circles). I still think there’s lots of optimization to be done in higher difficulties, given the early routs and how sensitive the game is to exp allocation. And there’s definitely tons of optimization to be done in Lunatic+ but no one bothers because it’s actually stupidly hard.

previous entries were not exempt from having broken mechanics; the difference, however, is that they didn't have as many of them, and the mechanics themselves weren't as easy to abuse.

Nitpicking degree of brokenness/intuitiveness is hard (and pointless) to quantify. And anyways, it’s probably harder to get to the DLC on Lunatic+ than to steamroll some games with their Jeigens.

@Vennobennu: Let’s see you try that on Lunatic+. And unlike some units we know, at least Avatar/whoever needs babying, plus you need to train someone for the final boss (unless you want to brute force it, but that’s a trivial solution to FE).

Edited June 5, 2014 by XeKr

[Baldrick]

Okay, I thought you were one of the "grr Awakening no good common denominator weeb shit" crowd.

Sorry about that.

And they say the Anti-Awakening brigade are elitist!

[PKL]

Drafters like Horace and me were 60 turning in our first playthrough ZZZZZZ.

And I used +Def in my first Lunatic playthrough. And I spammed buyable Rescue like no tomorrow. This game is hella easy to figure out compared to the rest of the series.

[The Geek]

And they say the Anti-Awakening brigade are elitist!

I can't stand haters. Sometimes I'm overzealous. Deal with it.

[XeKr]

Drafters like Horace and me were 60 turning in our first playthrough ZZZZZZ.

And I used +Def in my first Lunatic playthrough. And I spammed buyable Rescue like no tomorrow. This game is hella easy to figure out compared to the rest of the series.

1. Define "figuring out". You think it's easier to "figure out" Lunatic+ compared to various hard modes in previous FE? Why do you think community consensus doesn't reflect this?

2. You're essentially implying a bunch of players (including some importers who seem imo very smart/perceptive) who didn't recognize that broken stuff are bad tacticians or something? After all, it's "hella easy", no?

Sometimes I don't know why I bother.

EDIT: Also, don't think I forgot who had Awakening as their favorite game and a certain red-haired forum avatar.

Edited June 5, 2014 by XeKr

[Baldrick]

@The Geek; IMO you're a hater towards people who don't think Awakening is the best game in the series. It doesn't bother me (entitled to your opinion etc etc) I just find it amusing you're calling others elitist.

@PKL; You guys have had plenty of experience in LTC, so I don't think that means much. It seems to me that Awakening's stomping strategies are more complex than many games in the series (competent mount/flier rush, infinite-range Warp)

[Vennobennu]

You might be right that those strategies don't work as well on Luna+; I've never gotten very far on it myself. Resetting chapters until you get a workable set of enemy skills isn't enjoyable to me. Even if broken Lunatic strats aren't broken anymore in Luna+ (and I doubt that lowmanning with a few support pairs isn't still the best way to go), it isn't worth what it does to the overall playability.

Also: community consensus isn't a great metric. People can believe whatever they want, but that doesn't make it true. Even the idea that earlygame Paladins are great isn't actually common outside of SF.

Edited June 5, 2014 by Vennobennu

[Loki Laufeyson]

This thread has convinced me that everyone who dislikes Awakening is an elitist.

This thread has convinced me that everyone who dislikes Awakening so much, plays it incessantly just to torture themselves with the thing they dislike so much.

IMO you're a hater towards people who don't think Awakening is the best game in the series.

IMO, the lot of you are insufferable and need to get out more.

[Constable Reggie]

Even though I consider Awakening to be a pretty big disappointment for the FE series, I would still rather play it than most other games. Keep in mind that since this is primarily a Fire Emblem forum, Awakening is usually held to the series standard, not video games overall.

[The Geek]

@The Geek; IMO you're a hater towards people who don't think Awakening is the best game in the series. It doesn't bother me (entitled to your opinion etc etc) I just find it amusing you're calling others elitist.

Uh, I don't think Awakening is the best, check that little thing under my avatar that says "Favorite Fire Emblem Game" I just think people give it way too much of a hard time on issues that aren't actually issues.

Awakening is outclassed by several other games in the series in several aspects. Story? Mystery of the Emblem had a story so good that every game since has ripped off something from it. Characters? Nothing beats the tight-knit group feel of the Sacred Stones cast. Gameplay? Radiant Dawn's mechanics blow it out of the water.

[HF Makalov Fanboy Kai]

where do i fit in?

i hate awakening, i but i don't care if other people like it or not and i stopped playing it after i started it not like it.

[Czar_Yoshi]

And there’s definitely tons of optimization to be done in Lunatic+ but no one bothers because it’s actually stupidly hard.

I do, and I've actually found some potentially useful stuff. But for some reason threads like this blow up more than threads that are actually about how to play the game, and I almost get the impression that nobody cares.

About Awakening's strategies being more precise: this is almost completely due to infinite grinding. Grinding assures that all units will be able to cap all stats- in past games, growth rates were king (even in Sacred Stones, while you could cap all your units it just takes so long). But in Awakening, it's safe to assume you know exact numbers for your unit's stats before you even start your file, and you can then make crazy calculations and cut things so close that one less in any number of stats on any number of characters means defeat. About the FF example where all your characters turned generic after enough work, that's absolutely not true for Awakening when pushed far enough, because with the amount of precision you can get every point matters.

So if past FEs could allow you to reliably reach specific stat totals, they'd be heavily optimized too. The size of the fanbase doesn't have as much to do with it as you'd expect, because the people who are most likely to go for extreme optimization are also the ones most likely to get the game because it's FE and not because it was marketed well or has features. And actually, past FEs (the GBA ones, at least) can be perfectly predicted- here's an example of what happens when that's taken advantage of: http://tasvideos.org/1843M.html

I eagerly await the day when Awakening can do that.

Edited June 5, 2014 by Czar_Yoshi

[Florete]

1. Define "figuring out". You think it's easier to "figure out" Lunatic+ compared to various hard modes in previous FE? Why do you think community consensus doesn't reflect this?

2. You're essentially implying a bunch of players (including some importers who seem imo very smart/perceptive) who didn't recognize that broken stuff are bad tacticians or something? After all, it's "hella easy", no?

Sometimes I don't know why I bother.

EDIT: Also, don't think I forgot who had Awakening as their favorite game and a certain red-haired forum avatar.

While I think your overall point may be good, I do agree that some specific points you made aren't completely accurate. I was about a month late to the (English) Awakening party, but I didn't read any discussions before beating it, and when I noticed that Rescue staves were buyable and E rank (and yes, I did notice this on my first run), my thought was, "Well, there goes every boss kill map in the game." Honestly, we've been using the same Rescue staff tactics for much longer than Awakening has even been out in PoR and RD. I also didn't even use Nosferatu on my first run at all, so the idea of a "no Nosferatu" run seemed like just a normal run to me.

Things like snowballing Avatar, avoid stacking, and Sol I would agree probably weren't as intuitive.

This doesn't apply to Lunatic+, though, because that mode is dumb.

[The Geek]

where do i fit in?

i hate awakening, i but i don't care if other people like it or not and i stopped playing it after i started it not like it.

You're okay. You can dislike it, just don't try to point out to us why we shouldn't like it.

Posterity: God I really do sound like an asshole.

Edited June 5, 2014 by The Geek

[Loki Laufeyson]

This doesn't apply to Lunatic+, though, because that mode is dumb.

Probably the biggest pile of truth in the last page.

Also this has been a PSA from your local god of mischief:

[eclipse]

There are those who like the game, and those who don't like the game, each with their own reasons. I don't think there's any need to jump on one side or another for their opinions on something as trivial as this.

[Baldrick]

BUT MR. LAUFEYSON

It is OK to not like people not liking things?? Or to not like not being a dick???????

Edited June 5, 2014 by Baldrick

[Czar_Yoshi]

As long as you aren't a jerk about them disliking it/them being a jerk, I'd say it's fine.

[Loki Laufeyson]

BUT MR. LAUFEYSON

It is OK to not like people not liking things?? Or to not like not being a dick???????

DONT BE A DICK ABOUT THE THINGS YOU DONT LIKE.

[dondon151]

But Awakening got overwhelmingly positive critical and user reviews (by metacritic, etc).

and? these guys are not necessarily strategy game experts. their job is to play a wide variety of games from different genres and scratch the surface deep enough to write a palatable review. if the game has enough bells and whistles to cover up all of the mechanical flaws, then of course it's going to get good reviews, because hardly anyone is going to notice that a supposed strategy game doesn't require a whole lot of strategy to beat. raising, customizing, and pairing characters is addicting (hello, pokemon). pure strategy is not.

If I’m interpreting you correctly, your standard for “decent/good” players seems overly strict. If it were so easy to optimize FE13, Lunatic(+) wouldn’t have a reputation of being masochistically challenging or “luck”-based because many people would (easily, as you claim) figure out the solutions without consulting a guide.

i would suggest you not bring to your defense a game mode that bears all of the characteristics of an afterthought. that lunatic+ has a reputation of being "luck"-based (and rightly so) purely because a certain subset of randomly generated enemy skills can make a map unbeatable is not a testament to FE13 having good gameplay. quite the opposite.

Moreover, we probably should have heard more about how silly Veteran and Rescue Staves are, rather than all the pre-hype over Nosferatu, Rally Spectrum, and Galeforce. Or heard more about Sol, avoid-stacking, Panne, Nowi, Tiki, Bows in L+, etc. The fact is that even here and other gaming sites, with ostensibly veteran and smart players who knew how to trivialize other games, for many months no one realized (or shared so) that you could snowball Avatar so quickly in the higher difficulties with the correct Asset. Or the implication of all the aforementioned things pretty much on the level of Nosferatu (essentially why No Nosferatu should not have been a hyped restriction). Or the proper levels to reclass/promote to keep other units viable in higher difficulties. Or actually “optimized” postgame pairings and realizing how good VV and Dual Strike+ are. And so on.

this thread, made less than 2 months after the game's release in the states, indicates that we already knew about the potential for veteran, galeforce, and nosferatu to trivialize the game: http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=40325&hl=veteran&page=1

and if this thread is anything to go by, it took less than a month for people to start complaining about how easy lunatic is (and how bullshit lunatic+ is): http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=37802

while earlier entries have some potentially trivializing heuristics, in practice they're not a walk in the park. marcus, sain, and florina trivialize FE7, but we haven't really LTC'd that game to its full potential. same thing with FE8, FE9, or FE10 (though horace and chiki are getting pretty close).

Nitpicking degree of brokenness/intuitiveness is hard (and pointless) to quantify. And anyways, it’s probably harder to get to the DLC on Lunatic+ than to steamroll some games with their Jeigens.

it's not at all pointless, and i won't permit you to simply handwave it away. FE13 has, what, veteran, pair up, galeforce, rescue, nosferatu, kill boss, and forging among its mechanics that make the game super easy? and then it also has gamble, avoid +10, and the entirely of lunatic+ to add more frustration. this is not merely nitpicking; even FE11 does not have this level of lazy design.

[Chiki]

Awakening isn't generally a very interesting game in terms of design.

When I LTCed it for the first time it only took a couple days as far as I remember, and I got the lowest possible turn count. When most LTCs are supposed to take a lot longer than that, and they're also much harder to get the lowest turn in. It goes to show how little planning there is apart from Galeforce and Rescue.

Apotheosis takes a lot of planning, knowledge and skill to LTC well, though. You need to have an in depth knowledge of how the positioning works.

[The Geek]

Not everyone is suited to Fire Emblem. I have a friend who's really good at a lot of games, but he can't beat Sacred Stones. On Easy mode. I know for a fact that there are plenty of people who stay away from Fire Emblem because of its notoriety. Hell, I deliberated for about a year before getting my first FE game because I wasn't sure about the whole perma death, but here I am and I've played about half the games in the series, and beaten all but one of those.