Tag: Fire Emblem

Radiant Dawn, no. I don’t want to be fighting the Greil mercenaries with the Dawn Brigade. You have this backwards. Shouldn’t I get a say in this?

I mean it’s great that they went to all this effort to make us fight from all the different country’s sides and make us feel sympathetic to everyone…but this is a global war. I feel like once the prologues are over I ought to be able to choose which army to follow.

And it will always be Ike’s.

Also it doesn’t help that all the army jumping is done a little bit confusingly. I mean WHY have we suddenly switched to the Dawn Brigade again? Shouldn’t they be off rebuilding their country after their war for independence or something?

Having spent several agonizing days playing through Radiant Dawn (though I’m still only about halfway through) I finally have some more things to say about it.

It’s really fucking frustrating. NOT because it’s difficult, though it is. You expect that in a FE game. It’s frustrating because there are, in any given level, about sic or seven people you have to keep alive (this is opposed to the usual one to three people).

I’m not the sort of person who plays trying to keep everyone alive. There are a few units I will always restart for, but other than that, if you die…too bad. I’m not restarting. So being forced to restart for a character I don’t even like is extremely aggravating.

Also giving you two people, one of whom is a shitty unit (I’m looking at you, Michiah) and expecting you to be able to clear an entire map is all kinds of ridiculous. Yet this has happened twice. Ugh.

And the supports are fucked. I don’t even know what they were thinking. So there’s that.

On the plus side, though, I do really like the story line. It’s different from most, being extremely political. Basically everything going on is all caused by the “normal” FE storyline from the first game. Apparently not everyone gets to live happily ever after, and that makes sense. So I like that.

I hate most of the characters I’ve gotten so far though. Other than like, Nephenee, Kieran and the Laguz, they’re all characters I purposefully killed off in the first game.  So that’s fun. :I

More Fire Emlem stuff

So actually spending so much time talking about Awakening makes me want to talk about other FE games as well. I’m sorry. (no, actually I’m not. I’m not a super fan-type person, and I only care about two things: Fire Emblem and Redwall. I have no one to talk with about either of those things. So all of you get to suffer.)

So anyway, while I like pretty much all of the FE games I’ve played there are some that I just don’t like as much. I’m listing them from least to most liked and talking about why. Onwards!

Least favorite: Shadow Dragon. Ugh, where do I even start? First of all the graphics are really weird. Everything looks blurry and I can’t even handle Marth’s stupid chin. For another thing, the game is super imbalanced. I was playing on normal but even still, the healing staves only restore ten HP points ever, and no one has very much HP to begin with. I’ve got characters leveled all the way up who have less than 40 HP. I can’t count on any of my characters because the enemies are so much more powerful. Everyone but Marth is pretty much worthless to me. And I don’t like the characters much either. I basically like one character and he doesn’t even have any good supports. What even. Also I hate the fact that I HAVE to sacrifice certain people. I mean sure I usually use all the characters I don’t like as meat-shields anyway and send them onto the field with no weapons to die…but that doesn’t mean I want to sit there and look at my army and be like “you, you get to die for the greater good. Off you scoot.” So actually I don’t like Shadow Dragon very much, but it’s still a FE game and I’ll still play it more than once, probably.

Second Least Favorite: Sacred Stones. Sacred Stones is…er…not a FE game to me. I talked about it when I talked about Awakening, that I don’t like how easy it is or how you’re fighting monsters instead of people. None-the-less I do like a lot of the characters and the story is super depressing which is how I like it. And it does have good-ish mechanics. So it’s better than Shadow Dragon and I did like it, but I don’t really like it as a part of the FE lineup.

The middle: Awakening/Radiant Dawn. Ok well I talked enough about Awakening, which I love. Honestly the only reason it’s down in third is because, like I said, I find a lot of the characters very boring. Except for Chrom/Me/Family and Panne…did I mention how much I love Panne? I know most of the other games also have animal shape-shifters but they’re all pretty generic things. Dragons…cats…wolves…but rabbits? I LOVE IT. I love that they took something like a rabbit and made into this huge demonic TANK of a fighter and they are totally unapologetic about it. I mean one of Yarne’s critical attack lines is even “don’t mess with a bunny”. That is fabulous. I love the Taguel, like many other things about the game.

Aah, Radiant Dawn. I feel weird talking about it because I’m only half-way through it. Also since it’s such a close sequel to PoR, and I’ll talk about everything I love there. But dude the support conversations are super screwed up and that loses you brownie points. Sorry, Radiant Dawn.

Second Favorite: Path of Radiance. I love this game.  Seriously, after I got it I did nothing else. I beat the whole thing in two days. I love the story, I LOVE LOVE LOVE the characters – pretty much all of them. At first I felt so weird playing a FE game on something other than a handheld but man, I love it. The only problem is that it was so easy for me to beat. Next time I’ll play on expert mode. I assume expert mode for this game is like normal mode for the others. But still, I can’t say a lot of shit about this game. And Soren is still one of my favorite characters in anything ever. Also, if you know how to read the dialogue properly this game is super dirty and that makes my life.

Favorite: Blazing Sword. I don’t even know what to say really. I know that it was the first one and I played it the year it came out and some might attribute my unholy, unrelenting obsession to nostalgia, but that’s not really it. First of all I love the characters (well except two. Eliwood is a tool and Ninian is a twit, but that’s beside the point). I found this game super hard to beat. I got it for Christmas in 2003 and I didn’t beat it until the beginning of last year. Which is sad, but whatever. In my opinion Blazing Sword is the hardest and that’s part of why I like it. I was never really a gamer. I played a handful of GBA games but none of them held my interest for long. But Blazing Sword is INTERESTING, and it’s a challenge. I like the mechanics of it, it’s incredibly fun to play, I love the characters and the plot is pretty good. This is the game that I’ve wasted a decade of my life playing over and over and over and over. The only thing, though…the villain’s name is Nergal? Really?

And also I’m still kind of in love with Hector after all these years. My car is named Hector. My OTP is Lyn and Hector. That has never changed. It never will.

So anyway I really really really like Fire Emblem and I always want to talk about and I never get to. So, sometimes I just have to let off some steam by posting giant rants about it on the internet.

FE: Awakening – A Review

Ok, guys, so I beat Awakening today and I’m gonna talk about it. So if you don’t care about Fire Emblem, just skip this post.

So Awakening is pretty awesome. There are a lot of features that I really love about it, but there are still a few that I don’t like, and a lot of those came out in the final battle, actually. But more about that later.

First off, the difficulty. Until the Endgame chapter, Awakening is squarely in the middle of the pack to me. It’s easier (though not by much) than Blazing Sword and Shadow Dragon. It is, however, much more difficult than Sacred Stones, Path of Radiance or Radiant Dawn (from what I’ve seen, I’m not too far into RD yet, so I won’t talk about it much). It does mimic some of the features that makes SS so easy though, the random monster battles. SS has it’s tower where you can go and just fight monsters forever and level up and what-have-you, Awakening has a few, maybe forty, chances to have mini-battles with monsters. That’s great for leveling up weaker units and getting those elusive supports.

I also approve that the monsters were not the main enemies. That was something I really disliked about SS. It didn’t feel like a FE game because you were killing monsters, not ripping your way through armies three times the size of yours. But Awakening managed to include monsters in interesting ways without having them take over the game. You still fought humans more than the Risen, but the Risen were there for a little variety. And being sort-of zombie creatures the Risen still seemed a lot more human than the floating eyeballs and whatnot of SS.

And back to supports…oh, the supports…in this game the support engine is GREAT. Most of the other games have a five support limit, meaning A support with one person if you can manage and then two others. Awakening doesn’t have this. Instead they have S support, where the characters get married. And then you are free to develop as many supports with as many people as you see fit. I love this, because it gives you a lot of chance for character development and also means that no matter who you’re standing next too you’re probably going to get some kind of support bonus after a while.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the characters are as entertaining as in previous games. There are some I love, that’s for sure. But a whole host of characters I didn’t really care about. And granted there’s always going to be a bunch of characters in FE games that you don’t care about just because there are so many. But it’s a far cry from Blazing Sword or Path of Radiance where I loved almost everyone and (in PoR especially) the supports made me cry laughing (or just cry). There were a few really good supports in Awakening, like my supports with Chrom and Tharja, but a lot of them were pretty Meh.

The fact that you the person you’re standing next to gets drawn into battle with you is great. Having a second person is super useful. Sometimes they block enemy attacks for you, and sometimes they attack with you, meaning your characters are a lot less likely to die from a fluke of the RNG.

However they seem to have forsaken the “Rescue” function for a “pair up” function. Now in some cases this is fine. I used it shamelessly to further my support goals and things like that. But in the final battle against the dragon, it really came back to bite me. Usually in the fight against the dragon you have your healer, then rescue them and draw them out of range. No such luck. My healer was like, the first person to die. So that was fun.

Also the final level: WHAT THE HELL. Usually there are like, maybe ten enemies right? And the dragon. At any rate you can concentrate on the dragon and let your other characters watch your back. In Awakening there are almost forty enemies and constantly respawning at that. I think I lost more characters there than I did in the entire rest of the game (this is a lie, but it was certainly the most I ever lost in a single level).

Granted I could have avoided this by turning off permanent death but please. Why is that option even there? Permanent death is one of the best things about FE. The stakes are so high. Don’t give us the option to welch out on that. Pah.

I do really like the fact that you can customize the tactician and can use yourself as a playable character. YES PLEASE. I think that may have had something to do with why I got so super involved in this one, to a degree I haven’t done since Blazing Sword. There aren’t a ton of options, but there are enough to make it feel really personal.

And I love the fact that you, as the tactician, are actually a MAJOR part of the game. I’m not going to give spoilers though, but it’s pretty cool. Although the story is a lot like a really nonsensical fantasy soap-opera at parts…and there were times where I was just “What is even going on, aaah this game”. Overall the story was pretty good. I like the fact that they give you direct control over some things, literally making you make yes or no choices about the fate of the world. And they’re always big things too. Part of me hates that though because I feel like a terrible person no matter which ones I choose…but I think it’s really cool. I’m basically going to go play through the game and take all of the opposite choices just to see what happens.

Another little thing, I love how they have so many nods and winks to the other games. Like you can find/buy/steal the weapons of other FE characters (like Hector’s Axe, Erica’s Blade) and so on. I used all those in the final few chapters and it made me really happy.

Ok this is getting really long so I’ll wrap it up. Overall, I LOVE the game play of Awakening, with few exceptions. As far as game play goes, I think it’s the best. The story is entertaining, but most of the characters are on the edge for me. Still I would say it ranks between Blazing Sword and Path of Radiance in my ever changing tie of which FE game I love best. I will definitely play it again. Maybe a lot. We shall see.

And now I’ll do you all a favor and stop spamming up your dashboards with it. Still, don’t think you’re free of FE forever. I am about to go finally finish RD. Hahaha!

Lano out!