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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   3075 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 16, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics, this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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clowning

Yeah...that's a fairly appropriate descriptor.

The other thing they remind me of is Gundam characters. As the FE team keeps experimenting with different military aesthetics I guess some end up closer to Napoleonic. The supporting cast looks much more traditional for (post-Awakening) Fire Emblem, which may or may not be a good thing. Which game would you say had your favorites?

rolling back the Persona elements

After a trailer featuring ghosts as equipment?

permadeath

Given the formula changes made in 3H, I'm optimistic that the design will at least gesture towards permadeath. Rewinding time was an attempt at letting permadeath stay in while signaling really hard that it can and should be avoided. They just...failed to follow up on the cases when it happened anyway.

Contrast games like XCOM (or X-COM) which offer "ironman" modes and little to nothing in the way of loss mitigation. They're appropriately designed to signal "yeah some dudes will die for the cause." I'd love to see a FE game handle that better, if only for thematic consistency, but I'm not so optimistic.

Wild guess: a band-aid solution where permadead characters show up as Personas or otherwise stick around for cutscenes?

My favorite character designs overall are in Genealogy and Three Houses. Certain characters in Awakening and Fates, like Robin, Tiki, Selena, Oboro, Niles. The heroes art for most of the Genealogy characters modernized their designs really well, even if it took away from some of that sick 90s artstyle.

After a trailer featuring ghosts as equipment?

Heh. If this is what it takes to get Sigurd in an English release...

Regarding permadeath, if the games are going to put a lot of work into the supporting cast as 3H did, then they should allow for some ludonarrative dissonance and let all of them show up in cutscenes and have a role in the story even if they "died" in battle. It is... frustrating to have characters as important as Seteth, Felix, Ingrid, and Sylvain barely do anything in the story. They should just write the story and let the supporting characters have actual roles and show up in cutscenes as if they hadn't died, even if losing them locks you out from using them. Basically, your second guess.

Some of the older games, mainly the Marth titles and Binding Blade, really make the mechanic work. More characters than you could ever use, so you tend to play past mistakes unless you lose someone really important. Few characters have any story to miss, so you don't feel like you're locking yourself out of important content by saving over their death. If the meat of the game is in its supports though, you're always going to be incentivized to reload on a character death, which just feels bad.

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