Fire Emblem!

Ohhhh yeah, there's a whole support conversation where Mae does the thing where she tells her crush(Cecila) that she likes "someone" but is anxious about it, and Cecila goes "Oh? Oh!" And plays along like "Oh don't worry, you're adorable and a great person and I'm kinda into you too" and its so wholesome and gay and amazing.

Along with that, there's a separate conversation where one of Alm's friends, Faye(a girl), is hopelessly in love with Alm and its incredibly obvious that even Alm notices, but he's not into her the same way. But she does like these self destructive things like rushing into combat for him and doing dangerous stunts and he's just like "um... chill???" and its great to see that kind of shit? Like it really goes out of its way to criticize the stereotypical hetero pining and shit.

 

My only question (mostly jokingly) is why all the archers are gay. First Niles was bi, now Python and Leon are both gay. "Straight as an arrow" my ass, lol.

 

loooooooool I mean, all the MODERN archers are gay. You go back to the FE7 and before days and they were actually super macho and shit. It's kinda surprising how much they've changed, lol.
I like it.

 

You know, I think Fire Emblem may have had my first lgbt ship with Lyn and Florina. Although I was younger then, I'm not sure how much I understood "shipping."

 

Blazing Sword held an unprecidented wealth of lgbt ships (and ships in general) for me. Like, at the time, I don't think I'd seen that much perceived queerness in one place before. And Sacred Stones and the Radiance saga continued the trend. Looking back, GBA/GC-era Fire Emblem was probably one of the main catalysts of my own realisation that I was queer.Which is why Awakening's sharp veer into compulsory het was so disappointing to me, even if it was 'necessary' for storyline purposes. At least Fates had the token bisexuals and was more liberal with same-sex chemistry.

 

There is SOME lgbt in Awakening. Admittedly not much, but some. Severa and Kjelle comes to mind.

 

So I'mma do a quick review of Shadows of Valentia(No spoilers) because I have a ton of thoughts

First of all, this game is genuinely amazing.

Fire Emblem Gaiden, the basis for Shadows of Valentia, was already a great game with a lot of interesting design ideas. However, Gaiden was held back by a lot of little issues that kept cropping up. Low graphical fidelity, animation times that'll put me in my fucking deathbed for how long they take, barely any real story given to the player, incredibly flat characters, and a ridiculously unfair RNG. If you could look past these issues(mainly with an emulator so you could hold down fast forward 90% of the time), Gaiden is a really fun game with a lot of unique twists on things.

Shadows of Valentia fixes all the major problems that Gaiden had. It looks amazing, you can actively speed up all the animations to be really quick, there's a much larger emphasis on story and character interaction, and an RNG similar to FE4's or FE6's RNG. Still difficult, but not crazy unfair. This alone would make Shadows of Valentia a "need to buy" game for Fire Emblem fans, but the best part about this game is that it adds so much more to the package, enough that I would say it's practically its own game and should be treated as such. That, in itself, is what makes me recommend this game for even people who have never touched Fire Emblem in the past.

Shadows of Valentia adds several new mechanics, mainly Food, the Smithy, and a completely reworked Dungeon system. These are my absolute favorite parts of the new game, and they show just how smart this game was made.

Food is used as healing items, and you find them in towns or scattered in dungeons. They can be equipped on a character to be used at any time, or they can always be used if they are within one space of the leaders, Alm and Celica. Different foods heal for different amounts, and while it's not often that you'll run out of food over the course of the game, I have been in a few difficult chapters and almost ran out of my current supply while fighting, leading to a really interesting tense moment. There's a second use for Food as well, healing Stamina. Stamina drains whenever a unit participates in combat, and eventually runs out, lowering their stats heavily. On the world map, stamina is healed to full after each battle unless someone's stamina is depleted entirely, so there's not a huge risk of plowing through food there, but in Dungeons, stamina levels persist until you leave a dungeon, eat food, or make an offering to a Mila Shrine. We'll talk about dungeons in more detail in a second, however.

Another great new mechanic is the Smithy, and upgrading weapons you find. Weapons aren't used like they are in all the other Fire Emblem games. You can always attack even without a weapon equipped, but equipping a weapon increases your attack and hit chance. You can only equip one item at a time, however, so you are sacrificing room for food, or defensive equipment like shields or support equipment like rings. In the Smithy, you can upgrade weapons, increasing their stats to surprisingly high levels. Because of this, along with the Skills that each weapon provides, even weapons like the Iron lance/sword are still useful throughout the entire game, being not quite as strong as a Steel weapon, but much lighter as a result. The game has an edge of inventory management due to the equipment and food, and its a much needed secondary goal to have in the game.

The best added part to this game is the new Dungeons. You actively run around, find items, and chase down enemies to do a mini-skirmish. Since you can't save until you leave, and stamina levels aren't replenished until you leave either, it makes the dungeons feel like a long, constant battle. It's meant to be draining, it's meant to be exhausting, it's meant to test your limits, and it makes for some really tough and tense moments because of it. Every little piece of put together really well.

There are some issues I have with this game, because of course I do. The added parts of the story are so damn predictable I saw both main plot twists within 30 minutes of the game, and some of the character motivations make? no? sense? Like at all? They just... do stupid shit. Usually that's the villains, however, so I can forgive that. Fire Emblem has really never had a strong, complex series of villains.

Along with that are issues where you lose a character for literally no reason. On the world map, enemy squads can randomly form and move spaces. If they move into a space where you are, they start first, and you can't choose where your units are positioned. This happened to me once, and my healer was at the space literally closest to the enemy, wherein the enemy moved without me able to do literally anything, and killed the healer in one hit. Situations like that really shouldn't happen, but it's difficult to say exactly how you're supposed to stop it. I'm overall in favor of the idea of enemies attacking you, and the roles are reversed from the normal fights, but I would NEVER have put my healer that far forward if I could have avoided it.

Another big problem involves Mila's Turnwheel. Now, when I heard about this I was initially skeptical. It's an item you get that allows you to turn back to previous chapters during a fight. I thought it was going to involve microtransactions somehow, because that's the scummy developer thing that EVERYONE is doing these days, but thankfully it doesn't. You get a limited amount of times you can activate it per battle, and you can go back any number of turns you want. This is typically used to reverse a mistake that made a character die. There's a GLARING issue, however, in that if Alm or Celica die, you can't use the Turnwheel to reverse THAT mistake. It instantly goes into Game Over and you gotta start back from where you last saved, either right before the battle or maybe even further back if you didn't save like an idiot.

This is contextualized in-game by having Alm and Celica be the only ones who can actually use the thing, so if they die the others can't use it in their stead. My suggestion, gameplay-wise, is to have it automatically activate, if possible, whenever Alm or Celica take mortal damage. However, this might create a plot hole in the story that wouldn't be worth that minor gameplay tweak.

Now, admittedly, these issues aren't huge. Most of them are minor and nitpicks. This really should go a long way to show just how completely amazing this game is. I just love it so much, if you're a fan of turn-based strategy at ALL, please go buy it.

 

Also I should note that I picked up Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest lately on an impulse buy, and that I'm SUPREMELY happy that I played Echoes first, because I feel like if I played Conquest first, I would have abandoned the 3DS Fire Emblem games entirely, and that's really not fair to Echoes.

Conquest has one of the absolute worst and most confusing fucking openings in any game I've ever played. It forces way too much exposition into your face, doesn't explain 3/4th's of the shit it brings up, then forces you through 3 incredibly patronizing tutorial chapters, even though this game is supposedly for the veterans of the series. Yes, there's new mechanics like the Dragon Tear, yes the weapon triangle is changed, but it forces me to learn how to select and move characters and that's just insulting. They could, at the very least, have pushed all of that info into ONE tutorial chapter, or even the fucking side prompts that the game ALREADY HAS and fucking FORCES YOU TO GO THROUGH ANYWAYS.

On top of that, you go through all this confusing exposition, get introduced to like 20 characters all in the first 5 minutes of the game, but I've played upwards of 30 minutes and I still don't even know what the fucking COUNTRIES OF THIS WORLD ARE! I know there's Nohr and that one asian place but that's it, and I know exactly nothing about what they are like, except that Nohr is comically evil.

Like, I mentioned in my Shadows of Valentia review that Fire Emblem hasn't really had a good complex villain, and normally that's fine, but this is a story that is presenting itself with a cast seemingly made entirely out of anti-heroes. You start from the villains side, and you turn against them with your friends. ...but the villains are all comically evil and dictators that love murdering people for literally no reason. Proper character motivations and decisions were absolutely needed in this story. Maybe this gets better, I don't know, but the beginning soured it for me a LOT.

Also, is it just me, or is the Avatar's arm fucked up? Like it looks like the animation isn't working properly. All of the character's animations look like shit, and I don't get why? I mean, fuck, AWAKENING had good combat animations, why does this look so weird?

And my last big issue is the fact that there's another Avatar character. I hate this shit. I hated it in Awakening, and I even disliked it back when you were just the strategist in FE7. I don't want to see myself in the game because that's character space wasted, when there could be a very interesting and complicated character in my place. I don't NEED to be in the world, I'd rather just watch and be detached. Though, I understand that not everyone shares this thought.

I guess I'll try Conquest after I finish Echoes? I'm definitely wary about it.

 

Aw man, you poor thing. Welcome to Fates' writing. It is terrible, and the only reason I'm not jumping right in to join you in complaining is that then I'll be here all day, and I've already spent way too many hours venting about everything this game does wrong. (God, though, that opening especially is hilariously bad. HI, WE'RE THE KINGDOM OF NOHR AND THIS IS "TELL, DON'T SHOW"!)

Anyway, uh, I hate to say it but don't get your hopes up for Conquest's story, because it's pretty much 100% trainwreck. Like, I'm hardly going to say Birthright is well-written, and it's still a palpable bump up in quality compared to Conquest. @_@ (Take a shot every time the writers of a story about actions with consequences are allergic to their hero's actions having any consequences! Down the whole bottle when the entire plot collapses in on itself in a black hole of illogic!)

 

I've played through all three routes and I have no idea what the world's geography is like or what countries there are other than the main two, Hoshido and Nohr. Lack of establishing a world map with clearly identified borders and locations was a really weird decision.

 

Having played through Awakening repeatedly, and played through Fates- Revelation once, I gotta say Awakening was better, despite the rather simple plot and lack of character exploration for anyone but Chrom, Robin and Lucina.

 

Okay, they NEVER establish the fucking WORLD!? Literally every other Fire Emblem game does this right at the start because they want to, I don't know, HAVE WORLD BUILDING?!

Jeeeeeeeesus christ. I guess I'll just skip literally every cutscene in Conquest from now on.

 

THIS JUST IN: CELICA IS A FUCKING IDIOT AND SHE DESERVES EVERYTHING COMING TO HER

 

Was that not the case on Gaiden?

 

I am so sick of enemies who can summon more enemies. I'm used to reinforcements bringing in maybe three or four units every few turns. But in this game? Enemy cantors and witches can summon up to six minions at once. Each. And I have now encountered witches who can summon other witches. And they can just keep doing it until the summoner is killed, so until I reach the summoner, it doesn't matter how many of the minions I kill, more will just take their place. Why did they think this was a good idea?

 

It's one of the holdovers from the original 25-year-old game, when that kind of fuckery was a lot more common.

At least Expel works on a lot of them? I thought it was an interesting variation on gameplay, although it does get rather repetitive when summoners get so common.

 

I mean, I guess it is cause its techincally the same game, but you gotta remember that like 95% of the story is made for this game, and wasn't in gaiden at all. Gaiden had NOOOO story.

I actually like this idea, especially because YOU CAN DO THIS TOO. Invoke summons soldiers equal to your average level/class. For instance, late game it'll summon Dread Fighters, and sometimes a lot of them. I like this, though, because it makes certain enemies a priority, and when you kill the summoner, all the summoned monsters instantly die. So ignore the summoned monsters, Expel them if you need to, and send your archers and mages straight for the summoner. I think it adds some unique spins to the strategy.

 

Which class you summon isn't based on where you are in the game; it's based on which character is casting the spell. So Genny always summons Soldiers once she learns Invoke early on, but Silque learns it much later and summons Dread Fighters once she does. But yeah, it's a really fun and powerful spell.

 

Finished Echoes. Time to play more conquest to get a fair analysis of it.......
....I might just play Genealogy again... maybe Thracia... haven't played Thracia in a while...

 

I've been replaying a lot of FE games since playing through Echoes; it really reinvigorated my interest in the series. Currently most focused on 5 and 8 with plans to do 4 as well, although I also started 3 in an attempt to finally play through it. 3 certainly shows its age. Plus a speedier playthrough of Echoes, since apparently there's an achievement for beating it in under 500 turns and I really took my time on my first playthrough. It's quite a different experience this way; even the earlier levels get pretty intense.

I still haven't finished Conquest on Lunatic, need to do that eventually as well.