Fire Emblem!

For the most part, yes. This is especially true for those that are Villagers, since they get an additional 10 levels or so as their smaller class, though I'm not certain if they kept that class in Echoes. However, the ones that do not get a third tier promotion still have their uses. They are either the protagonist classes, which often can get p damn good stats or a really powerful weapon to make up for it, or the magic classes, which are always useful in some way. Still use the second tier capped classes, but have your front lines be the third tiers.

 

Question. I know someone who has downloaded a rom of Genealogy, and they have a translation patch for it too. But when they try to load it on their emulator it just gives some information about the rom (package size, name, etc). They're not sure what's going on here. Help?

Edit- it also says "bad checksum." whatever that means.

 

It really couldn't have. The amount of content was way more than they'd ever put into a single, regular-price game, so that sale model was the only way the game could have existed as we know it. Either Birthright or Conquest could have worked just fine as a standalone game, so being able to get one for a typical game price was perfectly reasonable and then getting the other for half price was a great deal. Revelations was pretty bad though.

I have some of my own complaints about Fates, mostly the characters and writing (and outfits), but criticizing it for the way it was sold doesn't make much sense. I get that it looks bad, but in practice it's way more reasonable than it looks.

The class lines that only have two tiers tend to be the ones with better abilities, particularly magic which is very powerful. I'd say that more than balances out the lack of additional levels. Personally, I never hit the level cap for anyone until after I completed the main story, anyway.

Stat caps don't seem to be linked to class at all in this game, just individual characters.

 

I was considering saying something similar but didn't have the spoons, so I'm gonna chime in with one part overall agreement, one part "well, to be fair..."? So: Yes, 100% agreement that they could not have made the product they made and sold it for less; that's just not how money works. Fates, all put together, is enormous—each route is a full game's worth of content, and thus a full game's worth of time and money to develop, meaning they couldn't have afforded to make them all without selling them for a corresponding price. So yeah, "the devs are ripping players off by charging extra for the full game" is nonsense, because that is what the full game costs. It's just an unusually large and proportionally expensive game; presumably that's why they sell it in single-game-sized pieces for a portion of the price, to avoid locking out the portion of the market that's not about to just spring $80 upfront for three sprawling routes of timesink.

That said, there's nothing wrong with just being frustrated about that design/sale model if it doesn't work for you. Not everyone can or is willing to pay twice as much as usual for the latest big game, and it's really frustrating to have to deal with that! "They should have sold this game for less" is a nonsense criticism, yeah, but "they should have made a reasonably-scaled game that wouldn't cost me eighty fucking dollars" is a legitimate complaint, even if it does ultimately come down to a matter of opinion. Some people like developers' choices, some people don't, but there's nothing wrong with not liking them or thinking they're shitty choices. It's just when people start misrepresenting the facts to "win" arguments that there's a problem.

And to be fair, while I agree with you that each route is easily a full game's worth of content, they're still pretty undeniably not the full game. Birthright and Conquest are full storylines with endings, but they're very deliberately incomplete in terms of raising unanswered questions, dropping hints, and leaving plot threads dangling in setup for Revelation. Someone who just buys one route is certainly getting the amount of game they paid for, but they're not buying a complete, self-contained story, they're buying chapter 1 or 2 of a story with most of the payoff left for chapter 3. It's a choice between a huge full game that costs twice a normal game or part of a game at the size and price of a normal game, not a choice between three full games that go together. Releasing games in separate chapters is a legitimate business model, and some people are fine with just getting one or two parts and being done, but it's understandable that there will also be people who don't want anything but a full game and are frustrated it's such an expensive product.

(And yeah, like you I also have plenty of separate Fates criticisms, especially regarding the writing, but I shouldn't get started on those because then I'll be trapped here all day. Though one that might be relevant to this discussion is that, despite marketing touting the "both choices are equal, separate games" angle, the Conquest route is hilariously obviously written as an "alternate" route to the "main" Birthright route, and the writers clearly wrote it under the assumption the player had played Birthright first, to the point where numerous plot elements relevant to both routes are only raised or fully explained on Birthright while being glossed over with little fanfare or skipped entirely on Conquest. I think my brother summed it up best.)

 

Yeah, that was really my main complaint of the idea. I understand that they made a lot of content and wanted to set up a system where they were duly compensated if someone wants to experience the entirety of that content. That part is completely fine, but my main issue is gating the STORY with the price walls. They've achieved large and complex stories before with smaller games, and I'm 100% fine with the idea of direct sequels, I've actually been replaying Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn recently, but the thing is that these AREN'T sequels. They were released SIMULTANEOUSLY, and the advertising they are giving me made me feel like I had to pick one part of the story or another, and I wouldn't be able to get the full narrative experience without paying more than normal.

These aren't inherently awful things, I don't hate the developers, I understand their decisions. But as a customer who is accustomed to a certain system of how narrative in games are structured and the resulting price tags around them, it feels like I'm forced to pay more for the general amount of story I would get in a different game, and I don't like that. I just don't.

 

Though, to be fair, I probably wouldn't have bought fates even if it just came out in one package. Not because of anything about the concept, but more because Awakening kinda soured me on the newer Fire Emblems. I have so many little issues with Awakening.

 

Unrelated: I'm playing Radiant Dawn and Boyd just fucking missed twice in a row with a fucking 89% hit rate and i fucking screamed "BOI-D"

 

Haha, I don't blame you in the slightest. I'd played Awakening, so I had a good idea of what I was likely to get with Fates, and I bought it entirely for the strengths Awakening did have (entertaining if dangerously timesink-y gameplay, fun if tragically underdeveloped characters) + the hopes of getting some Quality Sibling Content and the chance to play around in the fandom sandbox, while fully expecting shallow and disappointing writing and some painfully cringey character design. It, uh... exceeded my expectations in all areas. The gameplay is way improved from Awakening and Conquest's levels were like my dream come true! I really enjoyed a lot of the cast, and while shallow characterization is still a big issue I think there is a bit less constant over-reliance on character gimmicks in lieu of characterization for most of the cast. The Nohr siblings are everything I ever wanted although I'm taking Camilla away from the writers to a place where she gets to be the complex, morally gray character we deserve instead of 80% of her screentime being wasted on generic yandere fanservice, and I have way too many things I want to write fic about already. ... And then there's the writing, which managed to not only live up to my expectations of mediocrity, but far surpass them, to the point where I am genuinely kind of amazed at how much of a disaster it manages to be, and that's saying something because my expectations were based on Awakening. You could fill a good portion of a creative writing textbook just using the script of Fates as examples of what not to do! I find myself regularly tempted to sit down and try to rewrite the script of Conquest myself, just as an experiment to see how much of the damage could be mitigated by even simple edits!

... so yes, I clearly got my money's worth out of this one. :P

 

Haha, that's a great point! While I didn't like a lot of the story of Awakening, that wasn't the biggest issue I had with it. I think the biggest issue I had was that for the last 10-15 chapters of the game I just joined Donnel and Sully and they were literally unkillable by everyone including the final boss. I put only those two in the map, along with Lucina to protect Chrom just in case and I literally couldn't lose. The game was braindead to me. This might be because of the experience I have in the series, but I think it really does come down to the Join mechanic in general, its wayyyyyyyy too strong.

Also there's like one defense mission, right at the start, and that's a shame because they are my favorite.

ETA - Though my 3DS is also broken so I'll have to wait until/if I get a new one before I consider grabbing the new fire emblem games. Echoes might convince me to, though, I'm a HUGE fan of Gaiden.

 

Yeah, Awakening was definitely unbalanced in a way that made it the boring kind of easy (in addition to having largely boring maps I'm), and the Pair Up mechanic was by far the biggest offender. That's the biggest mechanical fix I was excited to see in Fates—they split it up into two mutually exclusive mechanics, "Attack Stance", which lets a non-paired adjacent units make a follow-up attack, and "Guard Stance", which lets you pair units for stat boosts and occasionally block an attack. (They also nerfed the power of follow-up attacks and removed the element of chance from whether attacks and blocks activate, so the "support character effortlessly wrecks everything" setup is no longer viable.) There's also a lot of adjustments to the different types and ranks of weapons to give them all more significant strengths and drawbacks (partly in exchange for removing weapon durability), which I really approve of, even though a couple overpowered ones still slip through, plus general nerfs/adjustments to some of the more blatantly unbalanced options in Awakening.

I've heard mostly positive reactions to Echoes, so it seems like a pretty solid bet when/if you're considering getting it! People definitely seem to appreciate the writing compared to Fates (which isn't hard, to be fair, but still), and while I haven't heard much about the game balance, people at least seem to think it's fun. Here's hoping.

 

Ahh, that does sound more interesting, though I personally liked how the Rescue Mechanic was in the previous games. Made things more of a mad scramble when you made a mistake and had to get a weak unit out of there. The removal of weapon durability is an interesting choice, though my first impression is negative. It could be done well, however, if there is a semi-scarcity of powerful weapons so you gotta pick and choose who gets what. Hard to tell if thats a good or bad impact without playing.

Though, I'll be honest, if I do play Fates I'll probably just ignore the Pair Up feature entirely.

 

Being susceptible to that sort of strategy was a big issue with Awakening. The higher difficulty levels do more to keep that in check, especially Lunatic+ with giving enemies skills like Counter that you can't just storm through, but I have a hard time enjoying them because it's so easy to get screwed by a suddenly appearing reinforcement. Which is a shame, because I really enjoyed Awakening when it first came out, but the issues get pretty frustrating with time.

I think Awakening was a bit of a wake-up call with regard to that sort of thing, though, and the more recent games do a lot to keep it in check. As for Echoes, I highly recommend it; I've been having a blast with it.

Personally, I like how the removal of weapon durability turned out. I'd usually stick primarily to using weapons I had plenty of supply of, and it gives a reason to use more of a variety than one clear best one available. It definitely allows for more scarcity of powerful weapons, like in FE2 and FE4. Some of the drawbacks do a lot to help make for interesting decisions in gameplay, although a few are a bit weird and don't seem to play particularly well. In addition, I feel like Fates really messed up with the personal weapons available to the princes by making them extremely powerful with no drawbacks and therefore far better than anything else available. Ryoma in particular ended up seeming pretty game-breaking as a result, although I ended up avoiding him for that reason.

As for Pair Up in Fates, I don't think it was broken at all. In addition to changing how Dual Attacks and Dual Guards work, Pair Up gives much smaller stat gains than in Awakening, making it nowhere near as game-warping. I found myself frequently switching in and out of Pair Up while playing levels to set up the best strategies, with Pair Up really functioning mostly defensively just as its new "Guard Stance" name suggests, primarily being relevant for blocking enemy Dual Attacks. It's a whole different sort of play than in Awakening and a much more interesting and fair version, so if you do play Fates, I recommend giving it a chance.

 

I actually love FE4's approach to weapon durability. Where it was there, but every weapon could be repaired for some cash. It allowed for very specific powerful weapons(including weapons that you'd grow specifically attached to like Sigurd's Silver Sword), but still forced some strategic thinking in how you use the weapons. I thought it was one of the biggest reasons why that game was so good.

I think the most interesting part of what you mentioned was that enemies could pair up, which wasn't a thing I remember seeing in Awakening? If that's true, and the enemies have the same kind of advantage you do with that setup, it has a LOT of potential, and definitely makes me more intrigued to play it.

 

Yeah, FE4's weapon system was really cool. Speaking of which, I'm curious how they might handle the weapon system if/when they remake FE4. I've been hoping for an FE4 remake pretty much since they started doing remakes, but especially now that Echoes has shown how incredible they can be. I'm guessing like with Echoes, it'd keep things very similar but with additions like forging, which could be really cool with FE4 mechanics. I guess forged weapons would also cost correspondingly more to repair? So it wouldn't even just be a one-time cost.

And yeah, Fates does introduce paired up enemies. Unpaired enemies don't pair up on their own, though; they always start the battle like that.

 

I feel like FE4, while amazing and revered by a lot of the long time fans, is so different from every other FE game that it wouldn't happen. Which is sad, I would love to see a good remake of it, but that's just the nature of it.
Actually, I've mentioned this several times before, but I've been wanting to do a remake of FE4 from the ground up with FE7 style aesthetics and some of the modern quality of life conveniences. If you, or someone you know is good at programming and down for that kind of project in their spare time, that'd be awesome. Programming is one of those things I'm absolutely horrible at.

Hm, Paired enemies are an interesting new kind of threat, but its a little sad that they dont pair up on their own. Bit of potential wasted, tbh, but then again its easier to plan out a strategy against them that way, so I don't fault the designers.

 

Personally, I tend to consider FE4 the second most unusual game in the series, after FE2. They just remade FE2 while remaining faithful to its many quirks with pretty fantastic results, so I think they can handle doing the same with FE4.

I've seen people working on fan GBA-style remakes of FE4 years ago, but I don't know of them getting far.

 

That's a good point. And yeah there were a couple of FE7 Rom hacks that tried to recreate FE4 chapters, but the FE7 engine couldn't handle the wide open maps or the tons of new mechanics from FE4 and they just felt subpar because of that. With a new engine entirely, it would be possible, and I just frankly like the GBA aesthetic more.

 

So I was able to pick up Shadows of Valentia and I'm playing it now, and I gotta say, I'm REALLY surprised at how faithful it is to the original! No weapon durability, but each weapon feels unique and useful. The classes are done the same way, the promotions the same way, even how the dungeons are done(which I was initally skeptical about when I just saw the screenshots of it) are a really great way to translate their relative areas into a modern environment. The game is still pretty damn hard, too. It definitely doesn't hold back in the slightest, which is the part that I am happiest about. Ever since Awakening I was so worried that the 3ds Fire Emblem games were gonna be shallow and so easy to manipulate that I was hesitant to even try the new ones, but Shadows of Valentia has completely changed my opinion.

If you have a 3DS and you love Fire Emblem at all, or even just consider wanting to join the series, PLEASE pick up this game. It's only $40 which is a god damn steal and it is incredibly fun, one of the most fun games I've played in recent memory.

 

Celica is Bi for Alm and Mae
Kamui is gay for Leon.
Pass it on.

 

From what I've heard, there's a lot of gay in SoV, which makes a nice refreshing change from the forced pair-anyone-regardless-of-chemistry-as-long-as-it's-hetero-because-babies of Awakening and Fates. Like, Fire Emblem used to be super gay and as much as I actually liked Fates, I miss it.