So I started playing this, and so far, I'm not impressed. Of course, it's early days, it's far too soon to make any kind of grand judgement on the game, but since this thread is "what are you playing" not "what have you played"...well, there's a reason why I've written multiple posts on the same game. Not that anyone seemed to care...sniff...
Anyway, SoV is a remake of FE2, a.k.a. "Fire Emblem Gaiden." Never played that game, but I've been itnerested in trying SOV for a long time, in that a) I heard a lot of good things about its story, and b) it's an exception to the weebofication of FE that's been going on since Awakening (broadly speaking, that's a whole other kettle of fish). Having since started the game...I can't believe I'm saying this, but it almost has too much story. So far, I've probably spent more time in cutscenes than gameplay, and said cutscenes go on, and on, and on. Now, it's not like this story focus is new for FE per se (even if some games have more story than others, though like most IPs, the series has had more story over time, not less), but of all the FE games I've played, I've never seen this much dialogue. Dialogue that's voice acted, true, but dialogue all the same. Characters standing around, talking about life, the universe, and everything.
Now, this is kind of par for the course with JRPGs, and I can enjoy long cutscenes if the dialogue is good enough, but as of this point in time? It's...fine, really. Just fine. Characters are also "fine," but as of this point in time, there's little to say about any of them. Concerning worldbuilding, SOV doesn't do much for me, at least not yet. FE9, for instance (the last FE game I played sans Heroes, and one I gushed about on this thread), has a setting with about 9 nations, where the player encounters about 8 of them over the course of their journey, each of which has their own agenda, the result being a continent-spanning war that, shock of all shocks, actually felt like a war. SOV, on the other hand, has two nations - the Rigelian Empire and Zofia. After the prologue, we have a situation where the Zofian monarch has been overthrown by his chancellor, a resistance group called "the Deliverance" has formed, and meanwhile, Rigel has invaded from the north. With all this going on, bandits have overrun the countryside.
See the difference? It's not that SOV is lacking entirely in complexity, but when your setting is just two nations, the amount of intrigue you can get out of it is drastically reduced. This could change, of course, but as of this point in time, it seems like "good kingdom has coup, evil kingdom invades."
So, alright then, the story isn't much to write home about right now, what about the gameplay? Again, so far, not much to write home about. I'll have to get used to playing an FE game withou the weapon triangle, but that aside, there's not much to say. SOV's structure is unlike anything I've seen in an FE game, with perhaps the exception of FE8. It uses an act rather than mision structure. Far as I can tell, the "act" means you need to go from point A to point B along a route. Some battles are compulsory, dungeons are optional. That might have appeal to some people, but so far, every battle I've taken part in is pretty much the same - wide open field/cave with a few pieces of terrain, rinse and repeat. There's nothing interesting about these maps in terms of design, so Mila help me if this is what awaits me over the entirety of the game.
There's also dungeons. In these segments, when going through, you take control of Alm in a third person over-the-shoulder perspective, where you can either evade guards or engage them. Hitting them in the third person causes all enemies to be with half health in the battle that follows. On one hand, dungeons are a good way of getting XP. On the other, you have to worry about your units' stamina within dungeons. I'm really on the fence with this system right now. Thing is, from a gameplay standpoint, I play an SRPG for the, well, SRPG gameplay, not a pseudo JRPG.
So, yeah. Early days, but I'm not a happy manakete right now.
