So I know people love the Fire Emblem series, a strategy RPG series with Final Fantasy-esque approaches to new games. Instead of numbered entries, they just slap a new subtitle on it but ultimately each entry is it's own game. Which means a newcomer to the series like myself can freely pick up the latest game on the Switch and not be lost in the exposition.
Gameplay wise the only thing I know about the series is that it is brutally hard and your characters die permanently so save scum like every other tactic series out there (looking at you x-com). 3-Houses does well to enforce this idea to you because the game gives you an INSANE number of chances to save. You save before selecting a battle, and then you save right after the battle loads in case you weren't sure if you saved before. You can also save after the battle, after a meal, after a conversation, and after taking a shit. While this approach is a nice convenience to the player, it makes you wonder why they bother making permadeth a thing when any mistake that leads to the death of a character you like is quickly reversable. But I suppose the hardcore players with play honestly and it's merely there for the people that can't handle it, though there is also a difficulty mode that just turns the permadeath of characters off, so why not just chose that if you don't want to deal with it in the game.
Anyway I'm about 5 hours into the latest Fire Emblem game now, and I don't get it. Like Breath of the Wild, I can see HOW this might be considered a good game. It's polished, well put together, the gameplay is as deep as you want it to be, but personally....I just think it's stupid.
First off the story begins in which your character is chilling with a mercenary group when Three noble kids (from different houses) flee out of the woods being chased by Bandits. You and your mercenary leader take this chance to help the kids by leading them in a tutorial battle. After the battle it turns out these kids are from some kind of military academy and your mercenary leader was once a Knight that help protect the school and the students. Turns out he was also like the greatest Knight who ever lived and also by the way you are his kid, therefore you are immediately recognized as also being the greatest thing ever because if your dad is great then you also must be great because that's how genetics works.
You and your dad are brought back to the academy where you dad doesn't wanna go back to being a Knight, except he does for no explained reason. You are then given the job of PROFESSOR and are immediately put in charge of one of the three houses. Again, because your dad is awesome, you are awesome by association and must be capable of turning whatever house you choose into the greatest house ever. The whole set up is rushed and makes no sense.
Nevermind the fact that these three ruling nations just happen to send there kids off to the same military school so they can all learn how to fight themselves? I am not sure how the politics work with that. Maybe there is an outside nation as well but that's not introduced in the story up to my point yet.
Anyway you become the professor and are given a monthly allowance of money and a schedule. You are given 1 mission that essentially is a battle at the end of each month which you are supposed to spend preparing your students for. You do this by lecturing, doing activities to boost moral, side mission battles for exp, and running fetch quests for people to level up as a professor. Everything you choose to do will benefit your team in some way so there doesn't appear to be wrong choices, only better choices.
Sounds fine right? You have a month of days to prepare for the big end battle, and you just need to train up your folks as much as possible. Well the game features a calendar system kind of like a Perona game. You see a map and your 8-bit avatar marks what day it is. However you only get to do things on Sunday's, with minor events that happen randomly during the week. So you mostly watch the marker skip 90% of the month giving you a small number of options to choice from on Sundays, and before you know it, it's battle time.
I hate this. Why even have the month laid out if the game doesn't let you chose what to do during those days. You can completely remove the calendar and just jump cut the to gameplay available sections without it. It makes me feel panic as I watch the battle rapidly approach, knowing that I'm not prepared for it but unable to do anything about it.
Yet this stuff is all just the fluff around what the meat of the game is suppose to be and that is the tactic battles. If you've played a Strategy RPG before (either a previous FE game or Final Fantasy Tactics, or Age of Argest, or anything of the sort) then you know what this is gonna be like here. You move your characters across the battlefield in turned based battles, trying to out position your enemy and knock them down without anyone on your team dying themselves.
The problem is that the combat is sooooooo RNG focused, that you are going to loose characters and there is fuck all you can do about it.
At the start you have your character and the head of the house (whichever one you picked) being "hero" characters, which means they basically start a few levels above everyone else. Characters earn exp in battle by doing things, either healing your friends or attacking an enemy. You gain exp per attack, so a character doesn't have to get the finishing blow on an enemy to level up. So you want to keep your stronger characters up front (to eat the hits) while protecting the weak characters in the back. The problem with that idea is that if you don't make those weaklings fight then they will never not be weak.
Normally when you attack, the enemy gets a counter attack. With a couple of exceptions you can use to mitigate this, like melee people cant counter a ranged attack from bows or magic. The sames goes for you, when your character is attacked, there is a chance for a counter attack. This RNG system in a game with permadeath fucking sucks. The RNG can simply fuck you, a counter attack can be a crit you can't possibly see coming and your character can be 1-shot. I've save scummed so many times because I foolishly try to level up my shitty level 1 or 2 characters only to have their attack not only miss, but to be 1-shot on the clapback.
Oh and let's talk about skills for a minute. Like Breath of Wild, your character's weapons can break and if they break in battle, that character is useless for the rest of the fight. Also Skills eat up more durablity than normal attacks, but they also don't do any more damage than a normal attack and therefore are fucking useless. (at least early-game, things might change later admittedly). The only difference I see from skills is that have different hit ranges, so while your normal attack can't hit a certain enemy you might be able to use a skill to hit it. But that doesn't seem very common.
How is this strategy? Or even good game design? What about this is fun for people?
A buddy of mine really likes the challenge from these games, but randomly getting gibbed doesn't equal challenge, it equals bullshit.
So I hate Fire Emblem. I don't know how this game is getting near perfect reviews from just about everyone. But the fact that nobody mentions how RNG can just shit in your mouth is mind blowing to me. Again, I can see how this is a good game for some people. But with terrible combat, a stupid nonsense story, annoying mechanics, I just don't get it.
Gameplay wise the only thing I know about the series is that it is brutally hard and your characters die permanently so save scum like every other tactic series out there (looking at you x-com). 3-Houses does well to enforce this idea to you because the game gives you an INSANE number of chances to save. You save before selecting a battle, and then you save right after the battle loads in case you weren't sure if you saved before. You can also save after the battle, after a meal, after a conversation, and after taking a shit. While this approach is a nice convenience to the player, it makes you wonder why they bother making permadeth a thing when any mistake that leads to the death of a character you like is quickly reversable. But I suppose the hardcore players with play honestly and it's merely there for the people that can't handle it, though there is also a difficulty mode that just turns the permadeath of characters off, so why not just chose that if you don't want to deal with it in the game.
Anyway I'm about 5 hours into the latest Fire Emblem game now, and I don't get it. Like Breath of the Wild, I can see HOW this might be considered a good game. It's polished, well put together, the gameplay is as deep as you want it to be, but personally....I just think it's stupid.
First off the story begins in which your character is chilling with a mercenary group when Three noble kids (from different houses) flee out of the woods being chased by Bandits. You and your mercenary leader take this chance to help the kids by leading them in a tutorial battle. After the battle it turns out these kids are from some kind of military academy and your mercenary leader was once a Knight that help protect the school and the students. Turns out he was also like the greatest Knight who ever lived and also by the way you are his kid, therefore you are immediately recognized as also being the greatest thing ever because if your dad is great then you also must be great because that's how genetics works.
You and your dad are brought back to the academy where you dad doesn't wanna go back to being a Knight, except he does for no explained reason. You are then given the job of PROFESSOR and are immediately put in charge of one of the three houses. Again, because your dad is awesome, you are awesome by association and must be capable of turning whatever house you choose into the greatest house ever. The whole set up is rushed and makes no sense.
Nevermind the fact that these three ruling nations just happen to send there kids off to the same military school so they can all learn how to fight themselves? I am not sure how the politics work with that. Maybe there is an outside nation as well but that's not introduced in the story up to my point yet.
Anyway you become the professor and are given a monthly allowance of money and a schedule. You are given 1 mission that essentially is a battle at the end of each month which you are supposed to spend preparing your students for. You do this by lecturing, doing activities to boost moral, side mission battles for exp, and running fetch quests for people to level up as a professor. Everything you choose to do will benefit your team in some way so there doesn't appear to be wrong choices, only better choices.
Sounds fine right? You have a month of days to prepare for the big end battle, and you just need to train up your folks as much as possible. Well the game features a calendar system kind of like a Perona game. You see a map and your 8-bit avatar marks what day it is. However you only get to do things on Sunday's, with minor events that happen randomly during the week. So you mostly watch the marker skip 90% of the month giving you a small number of options to choice from on Sundays, and before you know it, it's battle time.
I hate this. Why even have the month laid out if the game doesn't let you chose what to do during those days. You can completely remove the calendar and just jump cut the to gameplay available sections without it. It makes me feel panic as I watch the battle rapidly approach, knowing that I'm not prepared for it but unable to do anything about it.
Yet this stuff is all just the fluff around what the meat of the game is suppose to be and that is the tactic battles. If you've played a Strategy RPG before (either a previous FE game or Final Fantasy Tactics, or Age of Argest, or anything of the sort) then you know what this is gonna be like here. You move your characters across the battlefield in turned based battles, trying to out position your enemy and knock them down without anyone on your team dying themselves.
The problem is that the combat is sooooooo RNG focused, that you are going to loose characters and there is fuck all you can do about it.
At the start you have your character and the head of the house (whichever one you picked) being "hero" characters, which means they basically start a few levels above everyone else. Characters earn exp in battle by doing things, either healing your friends or attacking an enemy. You gain exp per attack, so a character doesn't have to get the finishing blow on an enemy to level up. So you want to keep your stronger characters up front (to eat the hits) while protecting the weak characters in the back. The problem with that idea is that if you don't make those weaklings fight then they will never not be weak.
Normally when you attack, the enemy gets a counter attack. With a couple of exceptions you can use to mitigate this, like melee people cant counter a ranged attack from bows or magic. The sames goes for you, when your character is attacked, there is a chance for a counter attack. This RNG system in a game with permadeath fucking sucks. The RNG can simply fuck you, a counter attack can be a crit you can't possibly see coming and your character can be 1-shot. I've save scummed so many times because I foolishly try to level up my shitty level 1 or 2 characters only to have their attack not only miss, but to be 1-shot on the clapback.
Oh and let's talk about skills for a minute. Like Breath of Wild, your character's weapons can break and if they break in battle, that character is useless for the rest of the fight. Also Skills eat up more durablity than normal attacks, but they also don't do any more damage than a normal attack and therefore are fucking useless. (at least early-game, things might change later admittedly). The only difference I see from skills is that have different hit ranges, so while your normal attack can't hit a certain enemy you might be able to use a skill to hit it. But that doesn't seem very common.
How is this strategy? Or even good game design? What about this is fun for people?
A buddy of mine really likes the challenge from these games, but randomly getting gibbed doesn't equal challenge, it equals bullshit.
So I hate Fire Emblem. I don't know how this game is getting near perfect reviews from just about everyone. But the fact that nobody mentions how RNG can just shit in your mouth is mind blowing to me. Again, I can see how this is a good game for some people. But with terrible combat, a stupid nonsense story, annoying mechanics, I just don't get it.
