The Reason for the Problems With Awakening

[Sentacotus]

I used to enjoy the classic titles, but Awakening murdered my enjoyment of anything older than Shadow Dragon. I say this as a player who was introduced to the series at Radiant Dawn; while I enjoyed going back and playing the GBA titles at first, as of a couple years ago I simply can't stand them anymore.

Unpopular opinion alert: games should be fun, and the fun:work ratio of Awakening is the highest of any game in the series. Everything about the UI and game flow is designed to stay the f'n hell out of my way, and let me do cool things. By comparison, Blazing Sword feels like going to the Post Office.

I still think RD and PoR still hold up pretty well today and yeah the GBA titles are looking pretty dated especially with the convoy system but they're still fun.

As for the UI yeah Awakening's is the best helped particularly by having two screens to display things. Although being the most recent in the series I would certainly hope that it would be the best one to date.

[Baldrick]

the player has no access to them

The players has access to a lot of things the computer doesn't in return.

In earlier games, the same strategies always work as long as your stats are high enough, Lunatic+ is the first hard mode that tries to make counter-measures and challenges the status quo.

they always proc

You can account and plan for it, then. A random% skill like Miracle would be unfair because it randomly occurs to ruin your shit. 100% proc skills means you use strategy to overcome them, rather than getting lucky with the RNG.

From what I can tell, the rest of the post doesn't have an argument, repeating "the enemies are hax" doesn't mean anything.

Edited March 5, 2015 by Baldrick

[Ownagepuffs]

I don't hold the highest opinion of Awakening but holy shit it has one of the smoothest UIs/Game flow out of any video game I've ever played. I've played a lot.

You can skip entire EPs and combat phases. There is a fast forward button (RD could really have used fast forward). The game moves every bit as fast as you want it to. Everything is where it should be. It's awesome.

That being said, aside from C6, C21, and P17, the game doesn't really give you varied objectives. The incentives to move quickly and it's approach to treasure is definitely the most well done in the series. Recruiting characters is also really well done. The Chrom talks to everyone part is eh, but the situations some characters find themselves in is really cool. This goes mostly for the children. Inigo, Donnel, Cynthia, Noire, and Severa have frustrating but creative recruitment situations.

"Pear uhp eez oh pee" tends to come from people who have never played above hard. It sounds elitist, but that really seems to be the case most of the time.

[Czar_Yoshi]

I already noted my reasons of why luna+ Skills are not fair the player has no access to them they always proc and dont promote challenging AI ts the same thing as luna with giving the enemies haxor skills that will always proc

The player also has no access to hackforges, no Hit+10/Dragonskin/RG, no 50 deployment slots, reinforcements, no penalty for losing mooks, no requirement that their whole army must be defeated to lose, no Throne for their Lord and crazy caps in Apo. Enemy and player sides serve different gameplay purposes and can't and shouldn't be equal (this is incidentally why multiplayer is a bad idea). The player also has a lot of things the enemy doesn't, so saying that something is bad just because only one side has it is silly. Again: the player side and enemy side are different.

Lunatic+ skills do not always activate, they simply don't randomly activate. There is a difference.

Take Vantage+: if you're fighting on Player Phase, it will activate and may or may not make a difference in the battlers' HP after the fight. If you're fighting on Enemy Phase, it will never activate; there will be no difference between Vantage+ foes and non-Vantage+ foes. This is not random. It's based entirely on how you approach them- you have complete control over when the skill activates. Notably, this is a lot better than skills with actual random activations or skills that simply increase the amount of RNG present: it's very difficult to tactically negate things like Gamble and Avo+10 in bulk. Those just give an RNG advantage and can only be properly taken care of through sheer statistical superiority. But they aren't unique to Lunatic+, are they?

Having the normal versions of PavGis and Luna on enemies wouldn't change the proper strategy. They'd make it easier to just reset bomb your way through (not what you're supposed to do, so why would they make it easier for you?), but trying to deal with them tactically would be exactly the same (and possibly even more frustrating, since during bodyblocking situations you often want to miss KOes and PavGis can help with that).

Weapons like the Levin Sword, Shockstick and Bolt Axe have what seems to be arbitrary rank requirements.

Bolt Axe B and Shockstick 1 range are indeed annoying. My theories on why they are the way they are are to stop Libra from instantly taking the Renown Bolt Axe and stomping without training first (but seriously, he doesn't need a combat nerf. Give him the instant Bolt Axe and nerf its uses if it's a concern) and the Shockstick is probably to stop Pegs from using it to mitigate their low Str while training to level easily (but given how random it is to obtain, this isn't important or needed).

They both should be fixed. However, I do find Levins to be in the right place regarding rank and mt. There's not really a need for E-A versions of them, they're primarily gimmicks/alternate forms of attack, not all-out magical versions of the whole weapon tree.

Game mechanics and formulas and whatnot: there's a line between ease of use (compare FE's formulas to Pokemon's. Which ones do you think most people could do in their heads?) and how closely they can model the behavior you want your game engine to exhibit. I personally would love to see an alternate version of Luna+ for Apo that multiplies the target's Def such that when their Def is at 0 or 100, 0 or 100 will be returned, when their Def is at the user's Skl then Def/2 would be returned, and the rest given by a curve generated to fit those points. It would essentially make Luna's damage more easily mitigatable through high Def and more punishing of low Def, which would in turn make Def actually change the number of hits you die in there. But such a skill would be completely impossible for the end user to figure out in their head, so you'd be gradually trading the ability to strategize on the spot for balance that it's likely people won't be able to notice as well since they can't see what's going on. As a consumer, I know I prefer the simpler formulas, especially since they still give a lot of room to do stuff.

Edited March 5, 2015 by Czar_Yoshi

[Varidan]

Objectives are useless visual noise when your maps accomplish the same thing just with their design. Awakening isn't perfect in this regard (as I said, the later maps are uneven and will fall into "open plain full of stats"), but generally speaking they had the right idea early.

After thinking about it, i feel like IS was trying to give us a feel of armies clashing on an open plain, but went about it badly. Yes THEY have an army, but my meager numbers does not encourage charging headlong into the fray, but rather turtling in a corner, unless one of my units is God it becomes RAID BOSS mode. If they want to encourage a feel of large-scale war, something like Geoffrey's Charge in RD was a good way to go (except watching ally units i dont even care about duking it out for 10 mins before its my turn again gets old fast).

I also find the complaining about objectives, or lack there-of, to be silly to me. (This doesnt apply to LTC'ers) I generally try to Rout the enemy anyways, or kill as many as i can while defending for 10 turns. Awakening actually keeps them interesting somehow. The only Routs that wear me down are RD's entire Part 4... dear god they take forever, and the reinforcements are never-ending...

Edited March 5, 2015 by Varidan

[Knusperkeks]

Am I the only one who appreciates the odd thief wandering about the map and stealing the contents of treasure chests? I think that's a very nice touch.

Was that included in older titles of the franchise as well, in this or a similiar form?

[Ownagepuffs]

Yeah there are a couple of instances of thieves/nefarious individuals going after da lootz in the past. Same for the brigands attacking villages.

No matter which game it is, it always feels good to kill 'em.

[Czar_Yoshi]

Am I the only one who appreciates the odd thief wandering about the map and stealing the contents of treasure chests? I think that's a very nice touch.

Was that included in older titles of the franchise as well, in this or a similiar form?

Yeah, they've been there forever (and I'd hate to see them go). Awakening actually has a good deal fewer chests to loot than most FEs.

[Ownagepuffs]

The few chests is does have are tricky to reach. I like how they handled treasure for the most part.

[Irysa]

I dont like that a lot of treasure chests are just sitting in the middle of nowhere though. Sure, random chests with phat lewt in castles isn't exactly terribly realistic either but why the hell are there treasure chests sitting in the volcano or in the middle of a field.

It's good mechanically but it's like a 101 example of horrible ludonarrative dissonance.

Edited March 5, 2015 by Irysa

[Knusperkeks]

Say'ri mentioned that people are really scared of the volcano, so bandits might have stored them on top of it, as a safe location, while they're off to steal someplace else.

The bandits didn't expect the place to become a battlefield, so they are forced to abandon their loot.

I'm pretty sure the writers at nintendo can do better than what I just made up, hehe.

[Baldrick]

why the hell are there treasure chests sitting in the volcano or in the middle of a field.

They're probably leftover from the Age of Pirates.

Why did the creator of RPG world delete his archive... so inconvenient.

[Mufanda]

I don't hold the highest opinion of Awakening but holy shit it has one of the smoothest UIs/Game flow out of any video game I've ever played. I've played a lot.

You can skip entire EPs and combat phases. There is a fast forward button (RD could really have used fast forward). The game moves every bit as fast as you want it to. Everything is where it should be. It's awesome.

That being said, aside from C6, C21, and P17, the game doesn't really give you varied objectives. The incentives to move quickly and it's approach to treasure is definitely the most well done in the series. Recruiting characters is also really well done. The Chrom talks to everyone part is eh, but the situations some characters find themselves in is really cool. This goes mostly for the children. Inigo, Donnel, Cynthia, Noire, and Severa have frustrating but creative recruitment situations.

"Pear uhp eez oh pee" tends to come from people who have never played above hard. It sounds elitist, but that really seems to be the case most of the time.

This is something that bothers the hell out of me. It must mean a game is boring or too simplistic when I don't even want/need to watch the AI at all in the game. It's 13 games into the franchise and we praise the fact that we don't have to watch the computer because it never does anything interesting enough to be WORTH watching? This... Bothers me a lot. Because let's face it, the AI in this series sucks ass. It never does anything that just generally surprises me or doesn't give me an incentive to watch. The UI is pretty solid, I suppose. It's a functioning UI. Woo. I shouldn't praise it for something it should have had. I do appreciate that they do allow me to use multiple styles of UI though. That's nice I guess (ooh look, praise).

The reason Chrom talks to everyone is simply because the characters all seem to not know each other or have any real prior relationships with each other so there's no way that could happen. I actually didn't have a problem with this, because I hated having to field random losers that I wasn't planning on using to recruit someone else that I might want to use or even just strip them the next chapter after I recruit them.

Pair Up is not really balanced well though. In lower difficulties, it's imbalanced, and in higher difficulties, it's not really optional (which is not necessarily a bad thing to be optional, as expecting a player to actually have MASTERY over a system on higher difficulties makes sense... The problem is there REALLY isn't anything to master about Pair Up outside of you know... doing it which is what causes people to even moan about it. You can't realistically use Pair Up better than someone aside from the person going well out of there way to make bad pairs.). I suppose that's really the issue with Fire Emblem. It's too simple. Literally most of the people that are "strategic vets" or whatever have simply... Played the game more. It's not really like they are better at tactics or strategy, it's just they've seen the chapter so many times that they pretty much HAD to get something right at some point. And I get what it's supposed to be going for thematically, but it still bothers me because it feels like a "MORE STATS" sort of thing, and I don't like that Fire Emblem games seem to become progressively more obsessed with high numbers. I wish there was more to it outside of just getting more stats. Skills like Dual Guard+ are a start with encouragement of pairing up because it's an ability that can be used between two units, I just wish there were more interesting skills like "pass" that allowed people to do things that they normal can't do on their own but can with a friend. Otherwise Pair Up is totally boring to me. It's like "hey guys, we just realized that WE CAN FIGHT TOGETHER!" You don't say...? Man, Robin you sure are smart realizing that an army can fight together! What's next!? Horses run faster than people? Brilliant!

Admittedly in Lunatic(+) I have used it for psuedo-rescues and chained switches and transfers at moments to move people farther than before, but still I feel like Pair Ups could use a lot of work. Make them less boring. Good instances of pairs being sorta interesting is stuff like Flyers x Anything. It gives you the ability to transverse terrain that you normally wouldn't. There should be more things like that except with more emphasis on each class bringing something special to the table aside from stats. Hell, maybe make it to where certain combos do things! Like Sage and Sorcerer get some special unique spell between the two of them. Perhaps a Hero and a Swordmaster get a special unique Pair Up skill between them (hurray? A reason to use swordmaster aside from getting swordfaire?). I guess my beef with Pair Up is that it's just so dag-blasted boring to me.

As for the story, I honestly think that Awakening's story is the worst in the series. Bar none. It has a lot of ideas and it's all over the place and doesn't really do anything particularly well. Act 1 should have just been longer and possibly the whole game. It would have been nice to have your characters in a situation crafted because of their ancestors and having an antagonist that, while misguided, did have a somewhat justifiable rage towards your characters. Also, Robin is just an awful avatar. I especially love the chapter where Robin makes a plan that even the player isn't aware of with Basillio. It really sums up how bad of an avatar Robin is. An Avatar should never know more than the player does at any moment. I thought the whole point of you being an "avatar" in this case was to justify you moving all of these units around. NOT so you could actually play a vital role in the story. Next Fire Emblem, I hope they either drop the avatar or just make the avatar the lord. It'll save everyone the headache.

Let's be honest, Fire Emblem Awakening kinda sucks at moments, but it's level of suckage isn't much more than any of the other Fire Emblems. I kinda don't like the first two Fire Emblem games, and I kinda like 3, 4 is probably the most interesting one mechanics wise, but my god is it really imbalanced. I like 5, no problems there, and the GBA ones are fun little handheld games. Honestly, looking back, Awakening sits in AT LEAST the middle of the series. So why are we being so hard on this one...? Probably because we expect it to learn from it's mistakes... And instead it seems to sometimes willing embrace them. Map regression is kinda unforgivable for instance.

[Czar_Yoshi]

Durandal was in a Volcano, so the series does have a precedent for putting stuff there.

So why are we being so hard on this one...? Probably because we expect it to learn from it's mistakes... And instead it seems to sometimes willing embrace them. Map regression is kinda unforgivable for instance.

Because it's the most recent entry. Until there's another game that does some things worse than Awakening, its good parts won't be ingrained in the argumentative side of the community's memory because there's no context for them.

I can't really tell whether the rest of your complaints are based on gameplay or aesthetics, but...

I'm going to completely disagree that you can't use pairup "better" than anyone else. On the surface level, different pairs give different stats and pairing up units with complementary boosts is a lot better than pairing up units without them. Going a step deeper is deliberately using short-term pairs to hit thresholds on the fly (such as Fred with a Virion support OHKOing non-forest Mercs in Lunatic(+) Cht.1), and going deeper than that is juggling your pairs while keeping track of exact support gains to get a lot of supports extremely quickly- and that's all without discussing inheritance. It's true that any two units can DS and DG and give eachother Hit and some stats, but that alone is not getting nearly as much out of pairup as possible.

I'm also not entirely sure how it's the AI's fault that you want to skip EPs. I skip tons of stuff- PPs as well as EPs, map animations on, etc whenever I feel like it, not because of anything the AI is doing or not doing but because I'm focused on gameplay at the moment and not aesthetics. I also sometimes do aesthetics playthroughs where I pair whoever I like and don't skip anything- the AI has nothing to do with it. It could dance for all I care, it won't change when I watch it and when I don't.

Edited March 5, 2015 by Czar_Yoshi

[Knusperkeks]

You have no right to complain about having the option to turn off animations. It's not like the renders just got scrapped and aren't available for you to see whenever you wish.

I do not need the game to show me what happens because I calculate dozens of different scenarios for each encounter before it actually happens and choose the best one, sometimes that takes at least a minute for me. When I send my unit, it will fulfill it's purpose, whether I watch it or not.

This doesn't mean that I will ever get tired of my Assassin Lucina chopping somebody up with Sol and 70% crit (I mean Sol the weapon, gorgeous sword texture by the way).

You can tell the game which specific unit you want to watch do battle. This is a great feature, not a flaw.

Whenever I play some old RPG, I wish I didn't have to wait for the endless "encounter engages" transition to end (Legend of Dragoon for example). Depending on the game, these transitions might soak up hours of time just by themselves without accomplishing anything besides stall for time for the hardware to load.

We're past those times (thank <insert your prefered diety>)

Stats got bloated because people complained about too random unit growth patterns. All I hear as a onlooker is "oh god my roy ended up with X Str at lv 20", now that it got resolved (somewhat) people are complaining about it? Give me a break.

I can't compare plot developments, writing and story since I lack a comparative example.

Edited March 5, 2015 by Knusperkeks

[Baldrick]

Stats got bloated because people complained about too random unit growth patterns. All I hear as a onlooker is "oh god my roy ended up with X Str at lv 20", now that it got resolved (somewhat) people are complaining about it? Give me a break.

If anything stat inflation makes stat screwage worse, because you become accustomed to getting high-stat levels. In any case, that's not the reason people complain about stat inflation.

[Czar_Yoshi]

It certainly means getting screwed hurts more. If my Spd is 30% below average, I'd rather it be 14 instead of 20 than 28 instead of 40.

[Knusperkeks]

What I'm saying is that overall, more level ups result in a much more homogenous unit over the course of the game.

The chances of having 30% below average speed growth is much less likely after having 80 level ups than it is to have after 20 level ups.

[Mufanda]

I'm going to completely disagree that you can't use pairup "better" than anyone else. On the surface level, different pairs give different stats and pairing up units with complementary boosts is a lot better than pairing up units without them. Going a step deeper is deliberately using short-term pairs to hit thresholds on the fly (such as Fred with a Virion support OHKOing non-forest Mercs in Lunatic(+) Cht.1), and going deeper than that is juggling your pairs while keeping track of exact support gains to get a lot of supports extremely quickly- and that's all without discussing inheritance. It's true that any two units can DS and DG and give eachother Hit and some stats, but that alone is not getting nearly as much out of pairup as possible.

Yeah, but realistically, that's making use of pair up. I'd be hard pressed to find someone that wouldn't make usage of short term pairs to win. In my first Lunatic+ playthrough, I definitely made use of Fred x Avatar even though I wasn't planning on using Fred until the end. Perhaps it's that I've gotten better and I'm having a hard time putting myself in a "bad" player's shoes or something I'm not sure. But I definitely feel like Pair Up is not very difficult to master.

I'm also not entirely sure how it's the AI's fault that you want to skip EPs. I skip tons of stuff- PPs as well as EPs, map animations on, etc whenever I feel like it, not because of anything the AI is doing or not doing but because I'm focused on gameplay at the moment and not aesthetics. I also sometimes do aesthetics playthroughs where I pair whoever I like and don't skip anything- the AI has nothing to do with it. It could dance for all I care, it won't change when I watch it and when I don't.

The AI is so simple that it would never do something that would make me feel like I need to watch it... Ever. Like for instance, in XCOM, I watch the enemy AI because I need to understand what it does so that way I can better combat it when I get further in the game-- or at least remain viable with it. Here? Not so much. The aesthetics stop mattering so you don't watch it, and the AI never does anything so radical that I NEED to watch it is kinda my beef. Skip is nice, but I feel like when there is a skip to the point that I'm not even watching WHAT the AI is doing, there's kinda something wrong. Especially when it's not like say, Chess where the enemy can only move one unit, we're talking about 5, 10, 20? Units at once and I don't even need to watch it. That's my complaint.

You have no right to complain about having the option to turn off animations. It's not like the renders just got scrapped and aren't available for you to see whenever you wish.

I do not need the game to show me what happens because I calculate dozens of different scenarios for each encounter before it actually happens and choose the best one, sometimes that takes at least a minute for me. When I send my unit, it will fulfill it's purpose, whether I watch it or not.

You aren't getting my complaint: the game is too simple, and the fact that you can skip everything and not feel like you need to see it can be an issue in itself.

Well yeah, but we're talking about the AI's actions. The fact that the AI is so simple that you don't need to watch it does bother me. I can predict what the AI does. But it does kinda bother me that I can predict it to the point or feel comfortable enough to not even need to see it at all. It'd be like playing a game of poker and not needing to see any of the other player's prior hands or expressions and being able to still comfortably win against them.

This doesn't mean that I will ever get tired of my Assassin Lucina chopping somebody up with Sol and 70% crit (I mean Sol the weapon, gorgeous sword texture by the way).

You can tell the game which specific unit you want to watch do battle. This is a great feature, not a flaw.

You missed my point. We aren't talking about watching the animations versus not. We're talking about watching the turn itself.

Whenever I play some old RPG, I wish I didn't have to wait for the endless "encounter engages" transition to end (Legend of Dragoon for example). Depending on the game, these transitions might soak up hours of time just by themselves without accomplishing anything besides stall for time for the hardware to load.

We're past those times (thank <insert your prefered diety>)

Length of animations has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Rolling with your Legend of Dragoon example, it would be like if you inputted your commands, and then did something else productive every time the AI did something. As in, you didn't even need to see what the boss was doing because it doesn't matter because it's not able to do anything that can even bother you at all.

Stats got bloated because people complained about too random unit growth patterns. All I hear as a onlooker is "oh god my roy ended up with X Str at lv 20", now that it got resolved (somewhat) people are complaining about it? Give me a break.

Uh... Bloated stats cause more problems, not less. When my characters are expected to get 4 points per level and get a dud 2 level up, it hurts a heck of a lot more than when I'm expected to get 2 points per level and I get 1.

What I'm saying is that overall, more level ups result in a much more homogenous unit over the course of the game.

The chances of having 30% below average speed growth is much less likely after having 80 level ups than it is to have after 20 level ups.

More level ups have nothing to do with higher, bloated stats in general for the games.

Edited March 5, 2015 by Mufanda

[Baldrick]

It's more likely that you'll be X points below your average speed with more level ups, and people generally don't judge stat screwage in terms of percentage.

[Knusperkeks]

Well, thats not how stochastics and probability theory works, but I'm not here to discuss this specific topic.

About AI behaviour: I did read some comments about the enemy units not taking bait as easily as they did in the past, instead waiting for the player to overextend more, which enables the AI to attack with multiple units at once. isn't that progress?

[Kuroi Tsubasa Tenshi]

Yeah, the AI won't mindlessly attack unarmed units regardless of HP/Def/Res levels, anymore. They also prioritize killing now, preventing situations in the older games where they'd run off and hit separate targets because the net damage was higher. Now the AI will pre-compute to see just how many units they need to focus fire someone with and pre-plot where everyone will be standing. It even adjusts on the fly to take into account procs that just went off (but it will ignore potential procs, even if the rate of occurrence is 100%). Sometimes it'll even move units out of the way to allow others with better hit/damage in (although, only sometimes, as Archers/Snipers will still often get stuck at one range, even if his buddies have only jammed up some of the area behind him). Of course, weird stuff can still happen under the current AI, such as ninja Fred.

[eclipse]

Your post had so many cool points that I felt it was worth responding to.

Weapons like the Levin Sword, Shockstick and Bolt Axe have what seems to be arbitrary rank requirements. Levin/stick have C rank, why is the Bolt axe on B? By the time I have a unit with high magic and B rank axes, it doesn't matter anymore which weapon I use. Hand axes come at C and are much cheaper and more readily available.

Their rarity makes them too awesome to use, which will lead to nobody using them.

I wish there were D rank, or even E rank equivalents of these magic based weapons (BESIDES TOMES). Give them the same might as their physical counterparts, and suddenly you can increase resistance bases/growths on every single character which is lacking it. Same with defense.

Levin Sword is cool because it gives a normally melee-locked weapon a ranged option, albeit at a slight cost (it doesn't slap mages the same way it smacks cavaliers). With its C-rank requirement, it'll also deal +1 damage. . .and the magical-ranged sword is typically C-ranked (exceptions apply, and RD/whateverthefuckFE8didandFE7failedat doesn't exist).

Shockstick is cool because it allows a magically-inclined Dark Flier/Falcoknight to wreak havoc. I'll. . .explain why I think the weapon was designed the way it was at the next bullet point.

Bolt Axe is cool because it gives War Clerics a chance to use their magic stat. I'm fine with it being B-ranked, as it's quite strong.

Why does the Shockstick have only a range of 1? I'm almost certain this is an oversight in game design.

I don't think it is. Of the Gen 1 non-avatar pegasi you get, Sumia is a coin toss in terms of offense (I've seriously had one that was better at magic than regular lance attacks, and goodness knows almost all of mine fail at physical attacks), Cordelia is usually physical (but this can change if she got a bunch of levels in Dark Mage and its related classes), Olivia fails at all offense, and Lissa/Maribelle will almost always be magical. IMO, a ranged Shockstick would've turned the promoted pegasi classes (who are already pretty good) into outright monsters.

I never understood the reason why the males were specialized in defense, while female characters are good in resistance.

In earlier Fire Emblems (like the GBA ones), the female versions of a physical class would have one less STR to cap. I'm glad they more-or-less abolished this, and caps are now tied to character.

Luna should be skill*2%, chance to ignore 25% of def/res, Sol should be skill*2% to heal for 25%, Aether should be skill% with these changes in mind.

Given that it's possible to go over 50 Skill. . .Luna/Sol would activate all the time, with these numbers.

Delete Nosferatu.

How 'bout making it so that it can't counter-attack, instead?

---

Yeah there are a couple of instances of thieves/nefarious individuals going after da lootz in the past. Same for the brigands attacking villages.

No matter which game it is, it always feels good to kill 'em.

In older games, it was almost a given. . .and some had the nerve to steal YOUR stuff!

---

I got my money's worth with this game, and I'm happy with it. I wasn't expecting perfection, just something that would keep me entertained, and it did a fine job of that. The only thing I think could've been changed was Henry's history. His personality makes a lot more sense given his Japanese past.

[Czar_Yoshi]

You aren't getting my complaint: the game is too simple, and the fact that you can skip everything and not feel like you need to see it can be an issue in itself.

Considering as you have no opportunities for input during EP and there's nothing relevant that can occur there that you would be unable to determine from analysis of the map afterword, there is no way to fix this by changing AI alone (assuming it even needs fixing, which I don't think it does). You would have to fundamentally change the game mechanics so that something happens during EP that is both relevant and not detectable afterword, and at that point you've no longer got a FE game.

I got my money's worth with this game, and I'm happy with it. I wasn't expecting perfection, just something that would keep me entertained, and it did a fine job of that. The only thing I think could've been changed was Henry's history. His personality makes a lot more sense given his Japanese past.

I wasn't expecting perfection either but Sticker Star set my expectations so low I'm still hard pressed to see it as anything else. Awakening is flawed and I'm well versed in its flaws, but see if I ever stop defending it.

Edited March 5, 2015 by Czar_Yoshi

[Baldrick]

You would have to fundamentally change the game mechanics so that something happens during EP that is both relevant and not detectable afterword, and at that point you've no longer got a FE game.

Is that so? Hypothetically speaking, say Fire Emblem If gave you a choice between using "counter" or "defend" on the enemy phase (a la SRW) where the former uses the traditional battle progression, and the latter reduced the damage in exchange for you not being able to counter. It's weird, but could you really say it's not a FE game? It wouldn't be the first time FE has adopted a mechanic previously seen in SRW.