@“yeso”#p101991 I’m not gonna like defend the design integrity of the “walk around the empty 3D battlefield picking up shiny crap” segments but I am pretty sure you can get away with ignoring a pretty big chunk of that stuff unless you’re SUPER hardcore min-maxing for 100% completion or whatever. Most of the meta-mechanics seem to just be about giving yourself temporary stat boosts or grinding party support levels, neither of which is mandatory at all. The “bond points” are currency for the gacha game that just gives you stat-boosting accessories of semi-randomized potency levels, and the game outright tells you you can skip the exploration segments and still get those points. Even if you do them it isn’t nearly as time-consuming or important as the management sim/Hogwarts crap in 3H. This game’s pacing is pretty brisk, all things considered. The obvious lack of effort in the storytelling so far falls more in “lmao” than pure pain territory for me, but obviously YMMV. (Play Tactics Ogre)
@"chazumaru"#p101984 Was *Ender Lilies* good? I saw the trailer for this thing a couple months ago and despite all the impressive resumes attached to it the game itself looks kinda forgettable. I’m here for all conspiracy theories about Tomokazu Fukushima being the reason only MGS 1-3 had good stories though.
@“2501”#p102001 Hmmm define “good”. Ender Lilies was a decent success, mainly driven by social network recommendations and positive Early Access impressions, so it definitely found a welcoming audience (especially many people digging the setting and the soundtrack).
From my perspective, Ender Lilies has many interesting ideas and the difficulty is balanced well enough, but the level design is lacking, which I find a big issue for a Metroidvania, and I find the good ideas not developed or questioned enough to make for something unique and inspiring in the genre.
It’s probably a game I’d recommend to people who were interested by the sales pitch of Hollow Knight but found some aspects too frustrating: maybe there was too much exploration, too much backtracking, too tough of a challenge near the end, punishing deaths against Bosses, etc. For those people, Ender Lilies should be a more enjoyable, Diet Coke version of that experience.
That being said, the team clearly has talent and a vision. So I would be rather hopeful about their chances regarding a solid dark tactical game focused on a small core squad. I worry that it faces steep competition in the genre and a crowded release plate overall.
@“2501”#p101950 re-centered this game around shuttling you from challenging battle to challenging battle
This is how Fates Conquest was described to me—how much has the level and mission design changed compared to that? Three Houses seemed quite different from Fates so I take it it's in a different place now
Personally when I’m ready for a Fire Emblem I’m getting back to Genealogy of the Holy War, that game is awesome
But it‘s true there is literally no reason for it to be there except to make it feel like Animal Crossing where you can decompress with little chores and routine after a tense hour long map. Adopting animals to lay eggs to make meals to eat on the battlefield is actually money poorly spent, you’re much better off just buying elixirs and spells. The buffs from minigames don't make a difference, you could just buy stat boost consumables from the item shop without ever going to the Somniel.
The Panzer Dragoon and DDR minigames are kinda fun and I find it oddly satisfying to see the maps as a contiguous setting from the character's perspective after the battle. You'll get the bond points and items even if you don't talk to anyone or pick stuff off the ground.
@“captain”#p102006 tbh I skipped the Fates series(?) entirely. I’m still to this day not even clear on the release history. It was like Pokemon, with three versions, but only one version got a full NA release and one or both of the others were DLC? Or something? Anyway that game seemed like the tipping point into excessive waifu sim business after Awakening tested the waters/soft rebooted the franchise, so I don’t feel too bad about taking a pass on it. (I do however congratulate Yusuke “No More Heroes” Kozaki for making character designs subtly horny enough that Nintendo can plausibly market the game to tweens but you also don’t feel like a complete weirdo imagining them fucking, which Awakening with its revolutionary breeding mechanic pretty openly asks you to do, regardless of your own sexual preferences. This is how you do correctly what Xenoblade 2 did wrong, in that that game’s sole “fanservice” audience is a very specific type of porn-addled dude, it’s never less than obvious, and yet the game creepily stops short of ever acknowledging actual sex.)
Anyway you might want to hold your breath on Genealogy cuz the same leak that spoiled Engage last year said that one’s getting a remake, and the FE Gaiden remake was pretty good. (The same leak also said Engage was being co-developed by the Atelier studio though, which doesn’t seem to be true - the art direction just makes it look that way.)
@“Tradegood”#p102009 Yeah I’m playing on max difficulty meaning each map is several hours of grueling strategy, so the opportunity to decompress with some silly minigames and/or score little tiny statistical advantages going into the next battle is welcome. Critically this stuff feels like light distractions you can do as opposed to grindy chores you must do at the risk of missing some crucial part of the game structure.
Honestly though I think the game does a pretty good job of keeping the side content light by communicating how inessential it is. Take the gym/strength training minigame, which on paper sounds like pointless busywork in the extreme. You go and check it out and the game tells you very clearly what it’s for: perform well in the game and you’ll get a marginal stat boost, but only for the next battle. Get a high score and the game will record it, but there’s no trophy or anything. Do it once and the game is again very clear: you can keep playing but you won’t get any more bonuses for now, it’s strictly for fun.
Sometimes this level of transparency in game-to-player messaging is good. The whole exercise here is letting you know not to take this stuff seriously and do it even if you’re not having fun, and it wants you to know that because too many games and too much Gamer Logic will teach players that when a minigame pops up in a JRPG there’s always some hugely important bonus locked behind it and you’re going to have to treat it like a job instead of a hobby if you want the Full Experience. Well, enough of that! This game knows that you’re here for the main event and isn’t going to strongarm you into doing something you didn’t come here for. I appreciate that, and it makes these simplistic minigames enjoyable (or at least, inoffensive) as exactly the trifling little novelties they ought to be. You can get a useful reward from playing, but it isn’t too useful.
Hey @yeso when inept or silly dialogues and characterization prevents you from enjoying the good parts (in this case the excellent battles and difficulty balance), why don’t you switch the game’s language to Spanish instead? (Or Polish when available.)
Here you can even change the language in the game’s main menu. At least you’ll get some fun studying and the low intellectual level of the narrative will become an asset as it will make the game much easier to understand than Spanish Disco Elysium (I guess).
is it ever explained why there are a total of 37 people populating this game’s entire planet? Why do they walk everywhere? They have horses. They don’t have to literally walk across an entire continent to talk to a king in person, why not send a letter. I’m at this part where the former villains join the party. These are the people who killed a 12 year old character 2 missions ago, but everyone’s like ‘welcome aboard’
walking around a desert and just ran into some guy out there. Did the battle and find out hey the guy is actually a prince?! Ha ha why didn’t he say so from the beginning?? (this is the 3rd time this has happened so far in this game)
why are people so surprised when this happens? In this game there’s like a 70% chance the random person you see like in a field somewhere is either royalty and/or a divine being
@“2501”#p102040 It was like Pokemon, with three versions, but only one version got a full NA release and one or both of the others were DLC?
It was like Pokémon in that they released two three games at once with different subtitles, Birthright and Conquest, but unlike Pokémon these are mostly different games with different missions and characters. The third game, Revelation, is a continuation(?) of the other two and is download-only in the US. I played like 6 hours of Birthright and only 3-4 of Conquest (though that‘s skipping the intro)—they do seem to detectably differ in their level design, in that Conquest actually poses some kind of challenge, though it wasn’t enough to win me over (the narrative is bad and the art not to my taste).
The enthusiasm here is coming closer than anything else could to get me to consider playing Engage, but then I remember how much I disliked Awakening and Fates, which suggests to me I'm probably better off with something else.
you also don’t feel like a complete weirdo imagining them fucking
believe me I do
that one’s getting a remake
I started the SFC version already and it's really good! But slightly more than I could handle a few months ago so I put it on pause. There are some wrinkles in inventory management compared to later games (no trading items) but it's nothing too frictional. Though given what I've heard about the Gaiden remake I would consider giving the new Genealogy a shot.
@“captain”#p102092 The enthusiasm here is coming closer than anything else could to get me to consider playing Engage, but then I remember how much I disliked Awakening and Fates, which suggests to me I’m probably better off with something else.
If you disliked Awakening I don‘t recommend Engage. I think battles and maps are better in Engage, but it’s ultimately structured the same and has the ‘turn back the clock’ mechanic and optional side content a la Three Houses. The reviews saying it was a return to old Fire Emblem seem to have been comparing it to the games from 10 years ago, not the games from 20 years ago.
Awakening was my first game, and Sacred Stones and Three Houses are probably my favorites, so I recognize I'm more predisposed to enjoying breezy atmosphere of the newer "less Puzzle, more RPG" philosophy of the new games than most people here. For example, every character in Engage is customizable and you can easily create a party composition however you want, whereas with the older games I think a lot of the appeal was about working around limitations. You have less characters like Seth who can just steamroll everything and less characters who will just never be good.
I think Fire Emblem, more than a lot of series, has a Ship of a Theseus going on after 33 years and 17 games slowly evolving into something much less recognizable. Going into Engage expecting Thracia is as ill-advised as going into Thracia expecting Engage. Some research student should honestly examine FE fans because I think its synecdochal with what will happen to other series now that media franchises never die.
@“captain”#p102092 I liked Awakening well enough when it came out (you have to remember that 1) the series was on death’s doorstep up to that point and 2) the 3DS had not gotten a lot of major RPGs in the first couple years of its lifespan) but in the larger series context my main issue with it isn’t so much the silly animu bullshit as the game’s overreliance on class/skill grinding to make it 80 hours long and the team-up mechanic making strategy generally less important or varied. On these fronts Engage seems like a major improvement and closer mechanically amd structurally to the old games, with a moderate but not overwhelming sprinkling of the new ones. And yes, it contains the silliest animu bullshit ever, but is also so blatantly unserious about it that picking apart how dumb the story is feels like analyzing plot holes in Captain Planet. (And everyone who’s been in the TV thread recently knows yeso and I are on the same page when it comes to picking apart, say, The Last of Us.)
I guess I’m also realizing from this that I must be pretty immunized to animu bullshit so long as it’s, like, classic animu bullshit and not the hypersexualized porn-adjacent crap of today. Engage feels like a really dumb anime from, like, 15-20 years ago. Or more specifically, a really dumb anime spinoff game for the Game Boy Advance. Ironically the more juvenile art direction, low-effort narrative and the fact that the game lets nostalgic cameo characters from more aesthetically competent past games upstage its own cast all make it feel like a handheld spinoff of a popular console game series, whereas the actual handheld _FE_s impressed everyone by feeling like full-effort console titles that just happened to be on handhelds.
My point is, for me (and, I’m assuming, everyone else with positive impressions itt) it’s nostalgic schlock. And I don’t expect or need much more from Fire Emblem - if I cared about this series actually trying in the narrative department, I wouldn’t have ditched Three Houses the second I realized how much time it expected me to invest into “getting to know” the characters.
I‘ve never seen an anime so I don’t have whatever coping mechanism you all have. I think if the game was serious about integrating all the extra mechanics and letting players approach them in the way that best fits their interests, you should get gold or bond points or whatever each time you press the skip cutscene button
Also for as much as I respect the older games I genuinely don’t think I can go back to a world where you’re expected to waste turns passing the correct equipment around from one unit to another, keep chump enemies alive so your weakest unit can score EXP, and - most crucially - reset the entire battle after every mistake. It’s really hard to overstate what a good and necessary QoL improvement the turn rewind mechanic is, not just for strategy games in general but particularly for a game that can absolutely fuck you with RNG or scripted shenanigans as hard as Fire Emblem. There is no worse feeling in the world than making every move right for 45 minutes only to lose a crucial unit to the most mathematically improbable hit/miss/critical or a surprise enemy spawn on your flank because you triggered an event flag on the other side of the map - never mind if you actually made some mental slip. Because its uses are limited, the rewind mechanic doesn’t meaningfully change or diminish your actual strategy (unlike save states or the ability to turn off permadeath) - it just drastically lessens the severity and cheapness with which the games can punish you by wasting your time doing the exact same shit repeatedly. Remakes for me, please.
