Favorite game is either POR or Fates despite the weird homophobia with the latter. Favorite characters are Lucina and Soleil.
I actually play on casual so I am looking forward to Echoes but I don’t know which features they’ll take expand etc from Fates. Think they’ll keep gay marriage in?
I would be amazed if Echoes had marriage at all, honestly. If Shadow Dragon and New Mystery are anything to go by, IntSys generally seems to keep things as close to the original as possible (for better or worse). Hopefully they’ll at least bring things up to a modicum of sensibility (2 did some really weird shit, like casting magic costing health (including curing!), 5 range bows, allowing you to turn anyone into more or less any class, etc), but I expect that it’s going to be a very weird game, even in the context of 8 which stole a large chunk of its mechanics from there.
I guess in other news, Heroes is okay? I understand why it was simplified, but it mostly just makes me want to go play Conquest instead. Which I suppose means it did its job. :v It’s weird to look at the stuff they removed, realize how much of it was all luck-based (hit rates, crits, skills, etc) and still say “yeah but I want it back.”
They did show off though random battles and seeing how poorly Shadow Dragon sold I imagine it would be a merger. Still do we really need class specific class change items? Honestly 9 had the right idea although I don’t know how it works with multiclassing
My friend, this is not a conspiracy theory. It is implicit in their every interaction. It could only be more overt if Intelligent Systems came right out and said it (Or actually put in dialog where Ike says, “I’m gay.” And Soren says, “Me too.” And then they kiss. ::starts writing the fanfic::). Ike is Canon Gay and he’s in a relationship with Soren. For Christ’s sake they all but declare their love for each other when Soren thanks Ike for bringing him food and showing him kindness in the gated event.
Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn are the ONLY FE games where I didn’t mix-max and exploit elemental pairings (Ike’s earth/earth pairings though :vince:) because I could not deny their love and relationship. I A rank them every time, no regrets. I am on this ship for life. They are in love and in a relationship and if you disagree you are wrong.
When Fedule did his Radiant Dawn LP I was like, “You better have fucking A ranked Soren and Ike or I will burn this thread down!” But Fedule knows his stuff and revealed that he had right out the gate. And when he went back and played PoR (because Ghandichan’s LP died, RIP God Marcia) he A ranked them too because he knows what’s up. They are a couple and IntSys should just announce it and make it canon already because we all already know it’s true.
I can’t imagine they’ll stay that close to the original Gaiden. Thus far it seems like they’re going for something different, what with the dungeon crawling stuff. But I doubt they won’t go for supports in this game given the focus on those these past few games, even if they’ve got their work cut out for them giving any sort of personality to the cast of an NES game. That being said, I really hope they keep Rudolph’s dumb motivations from the original even if they expand the story.
Yesterday I would have said Heroes was surprisingly addicting despite a few frustrations but then I got an entire set of 3-star heroes with two Lazlos so actually it’s garbage and bad. I just really want Lyn and Florina and this gachapon is refusing to comply.
You realize that dungeon crawling was in the original Gaiden, right? It’s in 3D now by virtue of being on the Fates engine, but the fact that it’s there implies that IntSys is playing it closer to the original, not farther from it.
And yeah, I expect it to have supports. Even fucking Shadow Dragon had supports. I just think that expecting anything close to what Awakening or Fates offers is a pipe dream, but we’ll see!
Been playing since the Blazing Sword days and have finished every game since (plus Genealogy of the Holy War and Binding Blade). Ike is, indeed, canon gay, and that is why PoR is the best.
Personally I think it’s a smart move to have Echoes be something of a return to the basics. While Fates was a fine game I felt like it was dragged down by their ambition exceeding their limitations; it seemed to me they were trying to squeeze three games into space that only fit one and you could see the stretch marks as a result. I dunno, maybe that’s just me.
@Artix I meant different from the standard series, since that sort of free movement hasn’t appeared since Gaiden (though I guess My Castle from Fates sort of counts?)
@ConfusedMoogle It’s hard to tell if that was strictly because of bad writing or bad writing and spreading everything over three games. Because Fates’s plot was conceptually pretty cool, but none of the games really… do anything. So maybe they could have had a “choices matter” plotline had they not spread themselves so thin.
ive got back into this series thanks to the mobile game. i only played awakening but i never finished it, so i’m starting fresh. Easiest difficulty, just going to have fun because i am BAD at these games. I figure this time I should be doubling up units as much as possible right? I didn’t do it much before but it is probably better to do that?
When I finish I want to get Fates but i have no idea which version of it to get. One lets you be a lesbian right? I want that one.
Tharja is best girl dont @ me
You’re in luck, the lesbian one is Birthright which is also the one that builds off of Awakening and has a similar design ethos.
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@Fefnir Yeah, that’s what I was getting at. They were trying to do too much with too little, resulting in a whole lot of good ideas that all desperately needed more focus than they were able to give them. Thing is, I’m not sure what they should have done instead; maybe had a whole game of just Hoshido’s Faux-Feudal-Japan aesthetic and saved the conflict between the two for another game.
They might have been able to accomplish what they were actually trying to do if they had, say, made the game for the Wii U and, by extension, had a bigger budget… but then they wouldn’t have had anything to build on like Fates had with Awakening, so I dunno. I guess it’s just academic at this point anyway.
Still, I suppose being over-ambitious is better than not knowing what you want to do at all, considering Fates is at least worth playing, unlike certain games I can think of whose creators had no real ambition.
(I will say they shouldn’t have brought back the children mechanic. I get why it was in Awakening but holy hell did it feel forced in Fates.)
Fates had a lot of story issues especially Conquest. Although gameplay wise it was better the predecessor. Basically I like the characters but the stories could use work.
Birthright has a better story than Conquest, but they’re both pretty bad. That said, Birthright has better gameplay than Awakening, and Conquest has way better gameplay than either. I’m not exaggerating when I say that Conquest is the best tactical RPG I’ve ever played, and that’s with the crappy story.
@ConfusedMoogle: Totally agreed on the children mechanic. It didn’t need to be in Fates and the way they implemented it was forced as hell. I hope it never comes back. I get the desire for it in both a story and a gameplay sense–it is fun to think about what combinations of characters will pair well and also what combinations will lead to crazy strong offspring–but it only made sense in Awakening because there was literal time travel and it should’ve stayed there.
It was also understandable in Awakening because they were on the verge of being cancelled and so were using absolutely every element from previous games that people liked; everyone liked the multi-generation setup of FE4, so that got thrown in. Fates, on the other hand, had no such worries; it seems like they only brought back the children mechanic because it was in Awakening.
I just pretend the whole kid mechanic in Fates takes place after the main storyline and ignore any references the kids might make to the current ongoing conflict. It’s a lot of headcanon-ing, but it makes way more sense for me. :v
I honestly wouldn’t have minded if they just brought back time travel out of nowhere. I like the child characters and the potential of parental interactions, but holy hell the Babyzone is pretty much the worst excuse they could have come up with. And there aren’t even any significant time skips to excuse any part of it, so it still makes no sense on top of being bad, (like, do the women just go to the Babyzone for the equivalent of nine months in the middle of raiding the opposing castle?) Plus (FE4 spoiler), nothing’s gonna beat the Battle of Belhalla in terms of integrating the second generation into the plot.
I’m biased since Soleil Forrest and Ophelia are the best characters.
Also Rahjat is well the token option.
I played Blazing Sword, love love loved it. It’s still my favourite. And I’ve played almost all the rest up to and including Awakening (not any untranslated works though.) I also really liked Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn - beat that one on Hard mode too.
I … didn’t like awakening. Never played Fates, but story is what keeps me playing Fire Emblems so if it’s bad I’ve got no interest in checking it out. I’m part of that old guard that doesn’t like the kids or the shipping and the mere fact that you can grind in the new games throws off all pacing to me. Game seems too hard if I don’t grind, but too easy if I do and finding a middle balance is impossible.
You might like Conquest? The actual map design and gameplay is fantastic, and it’s structured like the older games where you just go from map to map without stopping. That said, Fates’ story in general is a tire fire at the best of times, and Conquest is arguably the worst of the three games. It would depend a lot on what exactly you didn’t like about Awakening.
It’s been about 2 years since I tried it, buuuuut from what I remember…
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Didn’t really like the story. It was okay but the pacing was off because of extra stuff between story missions. Also I can’t remember pretty much any of the main cast besides the main guys in your crew when you start, and Lon’qu (I like swordsmasters.)
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Pairing up felt wrong. Much like grinding, if I didn’t use it I was denying part of the game but BY using it things got broken easy.
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Support / Marriage - too much of it. I liked the older games where you had to be picky with your supports, and they took a LONGASS dedicated time to get. Actually felt rewarding instead of being a checklist to go down.
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Marriage + Kids in general - gotta understand my mindset, Jim Sterling had a good way of putting it when he was talking about pokemon. I don’t like playing games to minmax, but I do want to know enough about what I’m doing to not waste effort on bullshit. I play Fire Emblems with guides on who’s got the best growths, and I don’t feel guilty for it. SO by having kids with so many combinations I felt compelled to figure out the “best” ones which totally ruined natural flow by having to plan so far in advance and avoid certain supports, etc. Plus the kids idea just felt stupid to me in general. They didn’t have a key part in the story. Lucina did sure, the rest were just… there. But by not using them I’d be specifically missing a key part of the game. (Plus I just detest shipping.)
I don’t like feeling compelled to do something I find disinteresting, basically, and Awakening felt full of stuff that I didn’t like but felt compelled to do because it was obviously supposed to be a main part of the game.
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Oh and I remembered last night as well, the whole thing with class changing. Also doesn’t feel right to me. Much like the kids, the knowledge that I can switch classes around automatically starts me borderline obsessing over what the ideal candidate / combination is for each class I want. That too made the characters / story feel weaker, because Sully doesn’t feel right with her head plopped on Tharja’s Dark Mage body (or other examples). I want a person to just be a class and they grow in that way. Options and choices everywhere doesn’t appeal to me, I like simple linearity and challenges designed for those limitations.