Forum - View topicHow Fire Emblem Became a Phenomenon
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Vaisaga
 Posts: 13224 |
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Unfortunately I'm kinda terrible at strategy games and I'm especially afraid to try Fire Emblem because of the perma-death.
So outside of Smash Brothers I only know Crom and Lucina because of Project X Zone 2. I'm rather fond of them in that game, but like I said I'm hesitant to try their home game. |
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Saffire
 Posts: 1255 Location: Iowa, USA |
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I played the Gamecube games and liked them well enough but Awakening was fantastic. Fates isn't grabbing me to the same extent right now cause I don't actually like most of the Hoshido cast...maybe Conquest will work better for me. Last edited by Saffire on Fri Mar 11, 2016 11:37 am; edited 3 times in total |
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Vaisaga
Posts: 13224 |
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Good to know, thanks. |
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GVman
 Posts: 729 |
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Nice article. I passed over Awakening because I got sick of FE and its permadeath junk and the super animu-Ness put me off, but I might have to check it out.
On another note, can we please, please, pleas stop it with this gift madness business? If I want to read an article, I don't want to be distracted by 3-second loops of animation that play forever; I had to cover part of my screen with my hands in order to finish reading. Couldn't y'all inbed webms? They have a smaller file size, take less time to load, have higher video quality, can have sound, AND you can pause/play them at will. Otherwise, I wish ANN would forego this gif nonsense entirely. There's no sense in making y'all's articles look like gif-happy tumblr blogs. |
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Vaisaga
Posts: 13224 |
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The gifs in this article are pausable.
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Somewhere
Posts: 361 |
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I've seen this comparison elsewhere and I can see where the guy is coming from: Awakening was the Persona 3 of Fire Emblem.
On the one hand, the changes made brought in a ton of new fans. On the other hand, it's rather divisive and a lot of the older fans point at it as the time where the series lost its soul. I'm not the longest time FE fan (I started with 7, then played 8,9, 6, and then 3, then picked up 14), but reading around the various opinions, I can understand the sentiment being a SMT fan from pre-P3. |
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stowrag
Posts: 47 |
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The thing about the support changes in Awakening is I'm still playing Awakening.
It took me forever to decide how to pair the first generation and now I have to pair up their children (primarily by getting the support for every pair and judging who has the best chemistry). I have 80+ hours invested and I'm pretty sure the final boss is going to be a pushover at this point, but I still feel like I have a lot of grinding to do. Honestly, much as I'm liking getting into Fire Emblem, I don't know if I'll ever return to the game, so I feel like I have to get everything right the first time. Hopefully I'll get to Fates sometime this year. |
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meiam
Posts: 3442 |
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It's great that people are now discovering the joy of fire emblem but to me awakening is the game that killed fire emblem. Almost everything that I liked about FE was severely dumbed down or removed.
The game used to have exquisite balance that came from simple mechanic, because you had limited number of encounter you had to very carefully manage your troop and balance using your powerful but limited unit with your weak with great potential, now you can just grind your weaker unit. The game also usually had just one difficulty, now there's 3 (4?) with permadeath on or off leading to 6 (8?) different difficulty setting, that's impossible to balance well and it showed on the higher difficulty of awakening. The grouping feature, were you fuse two character in one unit, also severely reduced the complexity since now you don't have to carefully arrange your unit position to protect your weaker back line character, you just pair them up with meat wall and positioning hardly matters. Apparently the latest instalment even removed weapon breaking, so now you don't have to carefully weight the pros and cons of using specific weapon in each situation and you don't have the possibility of going all out by breaking out the legendary, you just always use them. I could go on, now there's no problem with other simpler game existing and people enjoying them. I'm just a bit sad that one of my favorite franchise is dead and the crowd is cheering its killer who now wear its title. |
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Plasmaeclipse
 Posts: 153 |
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I'll admit to being one of those people who wasn't blown away by awakening. It was a fun game don't get me wrong, I spend weeks with it trying to get through all the content, but I don't think I ever found myself connecting with it. The support mechanic never really grabbed me. Having options is fun and all but despite being a rather rabid shipper I could never find myself all that invested in the support mechanics. I really threw most of my pairings together based on stats and whatever leftovers I had afterwards so I could get all the Gen 2 characters.
I haven't really bothered with Fates either. The idea of a literal black and white route split is already kinda blegh to me (I'm sure it's more finely nuanced than that but it's a bad first impression is all I'm getting at) coupled with the very obvious sales tactic I just don't want to buy it (there's also the translation thing which I'm mostly upset that they altered some serious content into lame jokes) I think I'm gonna be one of those crotchety hipsters waxing on about how things were better back in mah day. Nothing against the new games I just haven't found myself wanting to go back it compared to the GBA/GC/Wii ones. |
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Peebs
Posts: 419 |
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I have put all my anime shows on hold to play Conquest when I get home from work. That's how much I'm enjoying it.
The problem I'm having, and this may be due to not looking under every rock, is not having all the facts when I placed my pre-orders. The folks at GameStop were not helpful at all. They did ask me if I wanted to pre-order the SE and I asked what was so special about it. The girl mentioned the goodies that came with the SE and nothing else about the cartridge or the games. Searching online, more specifically Nintedo's website, was confusing. So in the end I pre-ordered both Conquest and Birthright. When I picked them up, I pre-ordered Revelations and paid for the map expansion pack. It wasn't until I was happily playing Conquest that I wanted to play Birthright. The game played the nice intro but with the Hoshidans taking center stage. And what threw me for a loop was having to create the avatar from scratch. That made no sense. So after doing more searching, reading Kotaku (which I had read before playing those pre-orders) again and finding no clue there, I went to the Nintendo forum looking for an answer. I finally found it and was disillusioned. And the more I went over what happened, I got angrier and angrier. So now I know what the SE really entailed and it's too late for me. Not only is it out of stock everywhere, but I already paid for the digital version of Birthright which takes up space in my 3DS's external memory. And yes, I can trade Birthright in, but that's a hassle I always try to avoid. It feels as if nothing was clear for me and only served to confuse me and make things harder than they should've been. And from now on, I'll buy my games from Amazon and not GameStop. |
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Somewhere
Posts: 361 |
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The grouping up/Pair Up mechanic, from what I've read about Awakening and from reading a Let's Play, was mainly problematic in its execution. From a design perspective, it was a fake choice. When you decide between Pairing Up and not Pairing Up, it was almost always overwhelmingly in favour of Pairing Up (I don't think I've heard anybody disagree with this regarding Awakening).
So it was a mechanic that was supposed to add to the choices you could make, but it failed on that count. And this is something I would mark as an objective failure in mechanics/game design, where the name of the series doesn't matter. It's like the decision on whether to pair up or not in Super Robot Wars K was horribly lopsided in favour of not grouping up after a certain point due to the existence of... chain attack I think it was called? Unbalanced/Fake choices are just design failures. Clearly, Intelligent Systems heard a sufficient number of complaints about this as they tinkered around with it for Fates to add nuance and make Not Pairing Up not always a terrible decision. The removal of weapon durability in Fates is a mixed bag. I can understand the response of that decision making it less Fire Emblem-y. On the other hand, the changes they made to balance things out (mainly adding various side effects to practically everything) were interesting conceptually. I think that it's one of those things where if you covered up the name of the game, this design decision would be generally well received. When you do factor in the name of the game, I still don't think it's that egregious of a change. The gradual process of making weapon weight obsolete* was probably worse, as I don't recall anything added to balance things out decision making-wise until Fates straight out added avoid/AS reduction effects to Steel class weapons. *originally, there was nothing to reduce the effect a weapon's weight had on your speed. Then later a new character stat was added to mitigate weapon weight. Then later again, weight mitigation was shifted over to Strength, so that it was generally easily possible to eventually make weapon weight meaningless. Then finally, weapon weight got outright removed. |
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AiddonValentine
Posts: 2203 |
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Funny thing about Rhajat is that her resemblance to Tharja goes beyond mere homage spoiler[with her support conversations with Corrin hinting she might be a separate incarnation of Tharja.] She always amused me due to how she had a serious case of DGAF which led to a wicked sense of humor. Being voiced by Stephanie Sheh was also a bonus.
I first got started with FE via Path of Radiance after playing as Ike in SSBB and deciding to check things out. Definitely one of the best entries of the series and it made me follow it up with Radiant Dawn before going back and playing the GBA entries and then tracking down ROMs of Genealogy and Sword of Seals. Of the classic style I'd say I prefer PoR and Sacred Stones due to a rich skill system in the case of the former and the ease of character growth and branching class system in the case of the latter. I just finished up with Fates' 3rd path and found the game satisfying no matter which path and am now awaiting the DLC that is being released piecemeal over the next few months. With series' interest revived I imagine it won't take long for IS to work up another entry with a unique spin. |
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Merxamers
 Posts: 720 |
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The game sounds cool, but i know that if i pick it up, odds are i won't finish it any time soon. I have three 3DS games; Pokemon Y, Pokemon Omega Ruby, and Bravely Default. I have finished none of them (tho i'm at the elite 4 in Y; i just haven't felt like finishing
 ). One of these days i'll put the time into it, i swear...
Fire Emblem does sound fun tho; if i can ever find Awakening on sale or something i'll probably pick it up. |
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Jayhosh
 Posts: 972 Location: Millmont, Pennsylvania |
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A little melodramatic with that one, I'd say. |
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SpeckTech
 Posts: 195 |
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I started with Shadow Dragon. I made it to the second to last chapter. But barely. I had nearly everyone killed off, except Minerva. Like literally half my army was just generic filler characters provided because too many people were dying. Then Minerva died and I was like, well f***. So yeah I figured I should restart and probably get some help... But this was back in middle school so like 6th or 7th grade? Def not 8th grade I can remember back that far. That year was when I got into Halo and played Tales of Vesperia.
AFAIK Fire Emblem has always been anime styled, just it reflected the anime of that era so you could say old fire emblem games were made in a "traditional" anime style by today's standards. Anime a decade ago definitely wasn't full of moe. I really hope for the next Fire Emblem game, they don't do multiple versions. Not because of money's sake (I would've paid $80 for everything anyway if it was all on one cart. *glances at special edition* oh, wait...) but just because it's easier. Making the future games more like Conquest would be cool too. The unique mechanics like surviving, escaping or having to activate all the dragon's veins on the map makes for funner gameplay. Just routing the enemy becomes monotonous. I would personally love to see the children mechanic go though. As cute and totes adorbs Morgan and Kana are, it's literally just shoehorned in really, like the My Castle stuff. It's not really implemented well at all in Fates because of how fast the story moves. The plot of Fates seriously can't take a year. In Awakening, the woman never got pregnant because of time travel. In Fates, it's implied because afterwards they store their children in a deeprealm. But actually having time for the woman to be pregnant... It just leaves a gaping plot hole. Also the supports with those of the same gender are more limited. Likely because they focus more on writing for each potential pairing. TBH I'd love it if they only made each person able to marry a limited number of others so there's more room for supports with other characters outside of the family and opposite sex. If you play the awakening dlc map and have one of the totally-not-awakening-children-copies in your group, you'll get to talk with Chrom. It pretty much all but confirms that THEY LITERALLY ARE THE AWAKENING KIDS! No other explanation after seeing not-Inigo's conversation and it just comes off as really lazy to me. Sure, you can definitely relate some fire emblem characters to anime tropes, but literally reusing the characters outside of a sequel/prequel is just plain lazy. And I thought just reusing the designs was being lazy... Also, in regards to the images in the article: -Path of Nohr best path for... reasons. -lol those princes of Nohr. -according to the awakening shipping chart, Robin hates Lucina and Severa. And loves Cordelia. Okay that last one is totally true and I have proudly preordered that $115 figure of her *drools a bit*. But seriously, hating Lucina and Severa? One's become a waifu and the other's my fictitious daughter, who I totally didn't marry in the second awakening playthrough. -Personally I'd love more games based on the vibrant J-Pop Akiba culture. A lot of games nowadays made by big companies are either played safe, made super kiddy, or made so dark and edgy like Shadow the Hedgehog. |
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