Genealogy of the Horny War (Fire Emblem Thread)

2501

captain Did you watch the official Fire Emblem OVA I posted? It’s from the 90s….

captain

2501 I tried it once but thought it was schlocky—compared to the video games!!!!

Tradeghouls 'n ghosts

While I agree with a lot of this, and I know you’re being reductive for hyperbole sake…. Fire Emblem’s story is important in that it’s a vehicle for the real shit, which is the strategy gameplay. The story is there to add depth and meaning to battles, the permadeaths, the unlikely heroes, the close calls, etc. When the story synchronizes with your own experience playing the game it’s uniquely beautiful.

My issue with Engage’s story is by FE standards, the characters lack opposing motivations and as a result every conflict is almost immediately diffused. The game’s opening melodrama had me hoping there would be more dramatic turns, but the game but just kind of evened out because they want every character on team Alear. There was a brief moment that showed promise between Ivy and Hortensia but blink and you miss it. In other FE games, the 4 kingdoms would their own goals and set of internal logic and you’d end up with recruits from all 4 and more interesting supports. Instead, Engage’s supports are just being about what tea flavor is best.

But its still fun flirting with my husbandos about their favorite tea flavor, so idgaf

…Also, screw you all, Three Houses had one of the most intricate and well crafted stories in the last decade of games and apparently no one here played because it was too story heavy lol. I realize no one will EVER believe me, but just put in 100 hours and you’ll see.

captain

2501 Genuinely, playing through the maps on the highest difficulty feels fantastic.

good, Hard felt awful in Awakening which in addition to what you’ve pointed out goes toward explaining why I didn’t have a good time with it

did you say you’d checked out the Gaiden remake

I haven’t. When it came out I was riding high on the Fates Hate Train and assumed it was more of that stuff. Your earlier comments do have me intrigued!

2501 reducing its narrative to a paper-thin excuse to ogle quirky anime friends is not some huge fall from grace

it is if it’s keeping me from these awesome character designs:

sabertoothalex storytelling of this series

The plots are not so special but the interest is in the telling. I thought it was really cool to replay the GBA games and find out more about the world and character relationships through different support conversations and player routes. In FE7 the villain’s goals and motivation are made more complex when, through conversation with several different characters, you find out how he’s related to your guys, and consequently other actors at play. In FE8 the villain’s behavior completely changes based on which protagonist you play as. It’s cool stuff, and appeals to the same brain muscle as item descriptions in FromSoft games—ooh, it turns out this character is this other character’s brother and you’re finding him out here in this map because he felt ashamed of his aristocratic past and is in self-imposed warrior exile. It’s melodramatic and not always particularly deep sure but it’s a matter of tone as much as anything—that it takes itself remotely seriously makes the characters feel human, compared to e.g. support conversations in Awakening about soldiers being bad at making soup.

The stories used to be good, and for kids—these are not mutually exclusive qualities—but now they seem more geared toward 30-year-olds with an ironic interest in anime tropes they’re nostalgic for, which I’m not saying is invalid, but it is meaningfully different from what it used to be in a way I find off-putting. I won’t pretend to have played every game in the series but FEs 7, 8, and 9 tell stories with some dignity if nothing else. 10 is on another level. I think it is worth pointing out when stories geared toward the young are decent!

sabertoothalex the GCN game having one aspect of the story be a little good

It’s all setup for the Wii game!

You people are getting these videos in my YT recommendations I hope you’re happy (I admit I’m entertained)

Tradeghouls 'n ghosts Three Houses had one of the most intricate and well crafted stories in the last decade of games

I am being 100% serious when I say you have done what no one else could w/r/t getting me interested in Three Houses

2501

captain 30-year-olds with an ironic interest in anime tropes they’re nostalgic for

Never have I ever been called out like this on this forum

Anyway, you should definitely play Shadows of Valentia then because it’s basically everything you want. Takes itself somewhat seriously, minimal post-ironic animu nonsense, character designs are geared toward romantic whimsy rather than otaku lust, etc. It’s a largely faithful update of one of the Kaga games and you can feel the difference from the modern games. I don’t remember finding anything in the GBA titles’ narratives especially interesting but Valentia had at least a few bits I was genuinely fond of and I’d probably say it has the strongest narrative of any game in the series I’ve played (for whatever that’s worth). Some of the game mechanics are a little weird since it’s based on the Zelda II/Super Mario USA equivalent of the series but I don’t remember having any huge issues with it. It also isn’t 100 hours long and the DLC will no longer be accessible after next month, so if you still have a 3DS you might wanna hurry!

Also I played the DS remake of the first game and you cannot tell me the OVA isn’t a faithful adaptation, schlock and all… the English version by our friends at ADV (featuring pretty much every dub voice actor from Neon Genesis Evangelion) just gives it a little extra grated cheese on top.

captain

I love Sacred Stones’ GBA instruments

captain

2501 I’d probably say it has the strongest narrative of any game in the series I’ve played (for whatever that’s worth)

The OP video there is kind of rubbing me the wrong way, but I do take this seriously and will probably give it a try now! I appreciate your perspective on it.

the DLC will no longer be accessible after next month

oh my dear, these are details, details…

English version by our friends at ADV

ok I’ll watch it lol

yeso

who is saying they’re disappointed in Engage bc Fire Emblem used to have good writing in the old days? Speaking for myself: Engage is disappointing (wrt to writing, setting aside the other ways it’s disappointing) because it’s obnoxious and rote. And when I describe feeling deceived by reviews calling Engage a return to form, it’s bc I was (foolishly) anticipating that meant a more focused, challenging tactics game with nice aesthetics and a grounded setting (like Radiant Dawn). Also without the weird shit.

I suppose I have Radiant Dawn, Thracia, Tear Ring, and Berwick filed in the Ys section of simplistic, nothing special narratives that have enough forward momentum and leanness that the aesthetics and atmosphere + distinctive game mechanics = greater than the sum of its parts. Engage has a goofy amount of parts that don’t cohere into anything. It’s a big pile of weird chores

2501

yeso a more focused, challenging tactics game

This is the critique I just don’t get - this much, at least, is absolutely in there, certainly compared to the other non-remake _FE_s of the last decade.

Are you expecting something that’s exactly on the level of the pre-10s games in terms of leanness? What difficulty setting are you playing on? Have you tried just ignoring all or most of the Somniel content if you aren’t stuck? It really sounds like you’re engaging in a bunch of sub-mechanics under the assumption that you need to when you actually don’t - they literally all amount to a handful of min-maxing number boosts to make the game easier, and with the rate you’re progressing through maps it doesn’t sound like high difficulty is an issue. What challenge level is good enough in the challenge department? I have not been stringently min-maxing every possible thing and I’m finding Maddening difficulty largely very well balanced.

Like… you seriously don’t have to do the fishing minigame! Or any of the minigames! I’m pretty sure there’s no crucial hidden content locked behind them! The game is definitely not balanced around the assumption that you will do them all the instant they become available! You can go back and do them later at any point if you change your mind! They’re just alternatives to grinding! They’re about as essential to this game as they are to something like Zelda, only in this one you can access them all from a menu.

I know HowLongToBeat.com is a bit infamous for lowballing completion time estimates, but I think it should be pretty telling that even in relative terms this game is listed as being shorter than the SFC games, shorter than the Wii one, and a whole lot shorter than the previous Switch game. If you ignore the Somniel (which, I want to repeat, you are allowed to do!) it is straight up just funneling you directly from map to map, no different from the classic titles. You can skip each and every “walk around the battlefield after a battle” segment and the consequences will be trivial (a couple random loot trinkets on the ground that you could get more reliably through other means). Probably the most important thing you can get from side content is bond points… which the game also throws at you in much larger amounts just for playing it normally. There is so much in there you just never need to encounter if you don’t feel like hitting the menu icon for it, because it is all extraneous to the core experience which is clearly delineated from the side stuff and, yeah, pretty focused! And challenging!

yeso

played on hard and it wasn’t too difficult at least as far as I got into the game

About all the extra stuff and the game being unfocused: sure most of it is optional, but these are games about building characters and putting elements of that behind excruciating adult baby activities is imo not too cool. I’m not crazy about granting that a large amount of the game is trash I should just ignore and that’s something I ought to adapt to. Some of it is just optional yes but the leveling up those rings and social links stuff is connected to important character skills and math stuff. Yes, I could put blinders on and ignore literally everything but the menu actions needed to skip cutscenes and transition into the next battle, so that would essentially make a “focused” game., but that’s not exactly a back of the box feature

2501 There is so much in there you just never need to encounter if you don’t feel like hitting the menu icon for it, because it is all extraneous to the core experience

unfocused is a reasonable critique then?

2501

yeso Leveling up rings and supports can literally be done through ordinary battles in the process of playing the game like a regular, straightforward Fire Emblem. If you want to level them up further you can either grind battles on the world map or you can do any (but by no means need to do all) of the Somniel activities. The only things on the Somniel that don’t functionally boil down to grinding alternatives or minor temp bonuses are the ring chamber where you obtain upgrades and the weapon refinement shop that buffs your items. The game is entirely centered around the completely focused and traditional process of playing through a succession of battle maps - which should rarely require you to grind, if you’re clever - and it makes very clear that all the additional stuff is just alternative means toward the very simple end of giving your units various extra performance boosts without just grinding the old-fashioned way. I’m just not seeing this mass of obligatory chores you’re referring to, and maybe what that boils down to is the understanding that unless you do hours and hours of it, all this extra stuff only amounts to minor boosts that you do not actually need if you would rather just clear the game’s maps using strategy. You’re not limiting your characters’ future growth potential or class change options by not doing every minigame after every battle, it really is just for when you’re stuck or if you’re worried about becoming stuck. I’m not trying to be belligerent here, I’m really just kind of confused by your experience with the game relative to mine - granted I am ironically LOLing at the game’s aesthetic choices rather than feeling tortured by them so I also don’t resent every second this game is asking me to spend in it, and maybe that’s all the difference.

yeso

2501 You’re not limiting your characters’ future growth potential or class change options by not doing every minigame after every battle

I take your point about these features being volitional, but the stuff with the ring level up much faster in that little hut thing on the somniel, to the extent that I don’t think the traits/skills/whatever are mathmatically achievable in just doing the combat side. And the way you use the little hut thing is by picking up “bond points” off the ground and talking to every dumb character when the battles are over. I stuck with the game to I think around the halfway point (maybe beyond) and the rings were at like level 5/20 so. Those rings the headline game mechanic.

I think even if so much of the non-battle side is functionally extraneous, it’s still the game. A no-somniel run is a truncated path through the game, right?

2501

yeso As others have said, you actually can skip the post-battle segments entirely and the game still gives you the bond points! It just dumps them right in your lap. Also at least where I’m at in my playthrough, you earn far more bond points through “achievements” given to you for playing the game normally or just checking out each side activity once or twice than you do from any strenuous minigaming. If you don’t want to have to make hard choices about how to SPEND those points and just get ALL the upgrades, that’s when things get grindy.

Personally I’ve never gotten every heart piece in a Zelda game, because I know perfectly well the games contain way more of them than you will ever conceivably need and treating the minigames and such like chores just isn’t fun. I really think this game’s approach to side content is more in line with that than something like Xenoblade or even Final Fantasy, where there is often truly major stuff locked behind it (character classes and upgrade paths, endgame equipment, questlines and entire areas and game features) and sometimes limited windows of opportunity to get them if you don’t want to be permanently barred from 100% completion on your current save.

captain Curious what’s giving you bad vibes about the intro vid? I promise the game’s narrative is precisely the earnest shonen fantasy melodrama finely aged cheese you’re looking for.

captain

2501 Sorry I don’t mean to be cagey. I guess there are a number of things about this specific slice of Shadows of Valentia that I’m focusing on as differing sharply from what I tend to like about the presentation in other Fire Emblems (even though, I understand, the rest of the game and its narrative presentation may not be wholly reflected by this particular montage of scenes):

the FE games I like don’t really have cutscenes in the first place (Radiance games have very few)—recall the whole narrative element is communicated through mostly static portraits and written dialogue, leaving me to construct the drama in my imagination—so we’re already dealing with a different mode of aesthetic/narrative expression: voice acting (distinctly late-2010s voice acting), character expressions and body language, framing*

*this analysis may be basically irrelevant given that I’m sure most of the game is the same text box drama as the old games, but just for the sake of answering your question

Consequently, you don’t see the following in a GBA Fire Emblem:

there’s this manufactured nostalgia thing going on with the music box and the cute wittle childwen sitting in front of the fire
- “Hey, why did Mila and Duma have to fight so much? Couldn’t they just say they were sorry?” — now you seem to think this game’s cheese is the same as the GBA games’ cheese—I don’t know your history with this series but I’ve played probably hundreds of hours of the ones I like, and in my Fire Emblems if a child character said this I know it would be said by an NPC in the background of a scene and framed as clearly naive, not spoken aloud by our main character in closeup with the music box and the fire and complete authorial earnestness
the Beauty and the Beast-style dance between generic anime characters I don’t know is definitely a post-Awakening/Fates thing
the “clumsy anime girl” run Celica does going up the stairs at 1:25

the funny thing is my dear ol’ Radiant Dawn has a similar kind of opening so it’s not as though the games I like are completely free of this mode of presentation, but it still doesn’t have anyone talking, not even during the cutesy part

IN SUM: whatever aesthetic difference there is between this and this, or this and this, feels illustrative of the grander difference I feel watching this OP (where, in general, there is greater emphasis on characters’ bright faces and eyes than their bodies/arms/clothes). There are things going on here I may not have the vocabulary to describe. Does Shadows of Valentia ever feel tonally like this?

I don’t want to sound like I’m Rifftraxing this or dismissing your opinion, just trying to explain my gut reaction more clearly.

It should please you to know I’ve spent all my game time in the past 24 hours playing Tactics Ogre instead. In fact, now that I’m done typing this……

yeso

agree 2 disagree I guess. I don’t mind games having extra stuff - I just don’t think there’s much game here if you ignore all the optional stuff. It’s then a couple dozen missions of rote gameplay and a totally phoned-in story - which I think relies on people enjoying all the optional content to have any kind of I want to say ‘substance’ but that’s not quite right. Alternately, if you do do give the optional stuff the old college try, you wind up doing lots of chores. But I repeat myself

I mean, buying a game then spending time having to figure how to avoid as much of it as is mechanically possible while still playing is not idea imo

2501

yeso idk my time with the game has mostly been playing the story maps amd trying everything else once or twice out of curiosity without really minding it! It quickly became apparent which stuff is actually important to do vs. which is a momentary distraction, but I guess the key difference is I don’t mind the presence of all the distractions just so long as their non-essential nature is clearly communicated. I won’t deny that the game could’ve pared the sheer volume of this stuff back a bit and been even more forthcoming about what parts of the Somniel are actually important or not, it just doesn’t reach the level of constant stress inducer in my experience.

captain I played both of the GBA games that got official English releases and I guess I just have no exceptional attachment to their aesthetics at all outside of the sick critical animations that are everyone’s favorite. I remember the narratives being very much on the bland side. (Fun fact though, FE7 was localized to English by the legendary Alexander Smith of Matsuno game fame, so we probably owe him a bunch of the series’ English-language conventions like potions being “vulneraries” and so on.) I even looked up some vids from Radiant Dawn due to your enthusiasm and… aesthetically they still look very bland to me!! FE has always been geared toward colorful animu melodrama (literally every entry has characters with green and purple hair ffs) so I have no issue with any game in the series playing up either the color or the melodrama. Anyway I think if you accept that Valentia is not trying to be one of the 00s-era games but respects the same lineage they came from you will get some enjoyment out of it. Also I promise you won’t compare the ballroom dancing scene to waifu-era FE when you discover the story context behind it, which involves what I would easily call the best written (and best voice-acted!) antagonist arc in any of these games.

Anyway yes Valentia does in fact allow itself to have moments of emotional weight where characters pontificate about the Badness of War, although I think you’ll find Tactics Ogre blows that particular field of JRPG storytelling out of the water to an extent that makes most other attempts at it look kind of silly. It’s one thing to have the Good Dude Hero Man in your game observe that people on the other side of a battlefield have families, but only TO will give you a complete life history overview of every generic-sprite level boss character in the game after you’ve killed them.

Also,

captain complete authorial earnestness

I assumed this was implied from the intro but it is intended to be read with quite a bit of irony, because those two characters will grow up to have opposing stances on a war that kills a lot of people! Yes it’s cheesy but its cheesiness is entirely in keeping with classic animu melodrama standards.

captain

2501 (Fun fact though, FE7 was localized to English by the legendary Alexander Smith of Matsuno game fame, so we probably owe him a bunch of the series’ English-language conventions like potions being “vulneraries” and so on.)

I had no idea Smith—AND Rich Amtower!—had anything to do with it, but that surely explains my fondness for the texture of the writing on some level.

aesthetically they still look very bland to me!!

Unfortunately gameplay in the two Radiance games looks pretty weak, I agree—the change to 3D was quite the stumbling block. Models are OK but the animation technique isn’t the best I’d say. Different but also unfortunate for Radiant Dawn is that emulating the game on a modern setup gives you these badly scaled character portraits in dialogue—you can practically count the pixels along their edges, it’s a shame. Music also unfortunately suffers from “realistic” MIDI orchestration but the tunes themselves are good if you can look past it. Anyhow if you don’t like the aesthetic package that’s OK, I wouldn’t presume to tell you to manufacture interest in something if it isn’t gripping

when you discover the story context behind it

…..I am intrigued…….

only TO

I’ve spent so much time reading the Warren Report oh my word

Tradeghouls 'n ghosts

btw if you play as male Alear does Yunaka’s catchphrase change from ‘zappy’ to ‘zaddy’?

2501

Tradeghouls 'n ghosts Really important to emphasize that this character is a dude

Tradeghouls 'n ghosts

2501 Yeah… one of the cutest dudes! I like how all the guys think he’s hot or admire his gender presentation, so much that they get passive buffs from being around him in battle. Seadall trying to steal his skincare routine is one of the best supports. It’s impossible to not love him even when he’s being a little vain.

Between Rosado and Libra, the gender non-conforming characters in Fire Emblem are some of the most fun imo

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