and the first of a few threads i will be making in the period of ?? about things i have made that relate to touhou a non-zero amount
between october 2020 and 2021, i went and pixeled 200 lil dudes. why? i dunno
but by the end i was like "man i should. do something with em. can't include em in anything i'm making since the artstyle and resolution are totally different" so i made this whole thing to contain them in the span of a week
playable on NEWGROUNDS with ACHIVEMENT and SCOREBOARD support because why wouldnt i want to destroy the entire project file by implementing an api accessing library that doesnt work and then trying a different one that requires me to zip the game and upload it every time i wanna test
but its a hit ya gotta take you know because now you can play this thing and you know we got a bit of touhou a bit of len'en a bit of everything i could possibly think of
if you want any 16x16 pixeldudes simply post and one will show up in a reply within 0-3 business days
ok I got like 23/185 I have seen a handful of these characters before but I do not know who they are the one recommendation I have is allowing the third among us to be called sus amogus drip to allow a varied and unique response to the insurmountable challenge
sorry I only know Yu "Chad" Narukami AKA Souji Seta from Persona 4 The Golden Animation Dancing Arena Ultimax for the sonyntendo playstation triple, the micro-saturn entertainment U, and the personal computational vita-3000 23/185 is how much mp he has left after hassou tobi-ing your MOM ohhhhh snap social link rank 10 bay bay gonna be able to fuse brody from yo mama, ultimate persona of the "fallen" race
>0-3 business days i'm pretty sure christmas and the day before are not business days and today is sunday so i am in the clear
thank-a you so much for to playing my game i am sorry i only know about obscure indie freeware japanese horror rpgmaker 2003 games (i do not regret it) 23/185 is respectable and 53/185 is pretty rad
here is yu "souji "chad" seta" narukami from persona 4: dancing all night (you did not request it but i have decided to inaugurate him and he will be included when i update it eventually) (he is schmovin)
i will add among us to be called sus
some of the names are a bit specific
rys i am newgrounds chump extraordinaire, something perhaps surmisable by me existing on forums of ye olden age
christmas eve and christmas are business days my friend I am sorry but we must shut down your blibbeo game due to negligence and tax evasion the bank will be seizing all 185 of the characters within
ok good yu "chad" narukami AKA souji seta from persona (spanish word for person) cuatro (four) the golden (and the original) dancing fighting arena ultimax ultra suplex hold all night the animation Q(2) released on nes, snes, nintendo 64, nintendo gamecube, nintendo wii, nintendo wii u, nintendo switch, playstation, playstation 2, playstation 3, playstation 4, playstation 5, xbox, xbox 360, xbox one, xbox one X, game boy, game boy color, game boy advance, nintendo DS (lite), nintendo DSi, nintendo 3ds, nintendo 2ds, new nintendo 3ds (XL), new nintendo 2ds (XL), playstation portable, playstation vita, nintendo virtual boy, sega saturn, sega genesis, CDi game system, and PC (steam) has been included in your game now I shall get 24/186 very soon just you wait also by the way if you want a variant you can literally color his eyes yellow and now he counts as "shadow yu" and everyone who played p4au will know who it is
also I cheesed it out of curiosity by looking up characters I can identify the series but not name of to see if I knew any more than 23 characters legitimately (no I did not save on leaderboard or anything) and I have one more thing I must mention the training and arcade versions of little mac only allow I think "jacket" and "wireframe" for some reason otherwise everything else is fine (though I do not know who these people are)
the training and arcade versions of little mac only allow I think "jacket"
how did i think of bikes and not this
Haven't played any of the Persona games, any good? All I know is that they're JRPGs/dating sims/arcade dance machines(???) and what's his face got put in smash. Either way, if I didn't see him get posted here I guess I'd be at 95/186 then.
truly the dark souls of the identifying portraits of random characters genre
ok there is a lot to say on the subject of personas considering both the length and material of the games and the age and crust of 3+4/fanbase-ruining events concerning 5 (tfw persona 5 twitter causes the conception) I am just gonna assume this post is gonna end up extremely long even if I try to make it not-so-long (and maybe not make any sense because the subject matter is unknown to everyone else but I hope it makes at least some sense) WARNING WARNING longpost WARNING WARNING
after writing the post I realized I said basically everything I could possibly say to someone who hasn't finished the games and this post appears to be the longest one I have ever made it's so long I cannot reasonably expect a response so don't feel like you must I'm not joking go to recent posts and scroll down from the top of the page this post is literally half of the page there's 15 posts per page so this is basically equivalent to 7.5 posts (suika sneezed)
I am aware that I am responding to a casual and conversational two sentence question here so I have included a part at the beginning where I "briefly" answer the question in a very short seven full sentences read on if you dare
short answer:
I did not play persona 1 and the 2 duology yet but 3-5 are good if you like JRPGs basically JRPG+social/dating sim I enjoyed all of them and they were also gateway to the rest of megaten which is also real good (DDS and catherine best) they're 70+ hours long and the gameplay is probably the weakest in megaten (very easy even on hard and system isn't as good) but it's still completely fine and the story+characters make up for it games have their twists and major events so avoid spoilers as usual as long as you have the systems (or the ultimate PC) to play it and enjoy JRPGs and are willing to play long gaem then I'd say yeah worth it spinoffs are mostly fine too play it all in release order (if you continue past this point there is no going back)
long answer:
see short answer for introduction and prepare uranus because it's time for persona 3: typing all night (it has been three hours) 3 is the first "modern" persona and since it's still coming from the more smt-like persona 1 and 2 the social links (basically the social sim character interactions), story and dungeons are pretty different from how 4 and 5 do it character development ISN'T locked behind social links in persona 3 unlike 4 and 5 which is one of the reasons I enjoy it the most and since the character development is incorporated into the story it makes the story actually feel like a story instead of "the thing that makes you have to do things" in most of persona 3 (other than december) you actually get to see how the characters change or their backstories without having to whip out a guide to see whether you should buy futaba a cactus or a disposable camera to get social link points^tm and learn anything more than "gamer" about her in p5 strangely enough it makes the game feel the most like a social experience despite half of the protagonist's responses being "I don't care" and the theme of the game literally being apathy and death instead of social links feeling necessary to learn about the main cast it's kinda just "do them or don't" and side characters are just on the side like they are supposed to be
the main (and pretty much only) dungeon is tartarus, 264 floors of randomly generated floor layouts open that video in a spare incognito tab so you don't accidentally get recommended major story spoilers from every single megaten game to ever exist or just don't click depends on how much you wanna risk also there's random chances for things to occur like party members being scattered when entering a floor or the floor having no shadows at all if the floor is filled with gold shadows only though run
at least half of the people who played persona 3 despise tartarus but honestly I do not care it is good because it sucks you can only save at the entrance so be prepared to get mudo'd before learning to always have null light+dark and then lose three hours of progress game also contains everyone's favorite toaster (this series has many fun toasties play the answer and p4a for more)
persona 3 has no "definitive" version unlike 4 and 5 there's two "best" versions (FES and portable) and some argue over them while others hope for a remake (we all know there won't be a remake) the rumor going around right now about a persona 3 portable remake or port is probably going to amount to nothing just like back in 2018 when P3D was announced and everyone suddenly said "persona 3's getting a remake with high quality models!"
portable has fully controllable characters and some other minor changes but lacks cutscenes, 3d overworld outside of tartarus, and the answer (basically an FES-only mini-sequel thing that couldn't fit on a psp game) also for a second playthrough p3p has the femc route with new social links and a more persona 4-like "we are all friends" as opposed to the male protagonist's "we are all part of the same group" if you play femc first it aint the same so I would only recommend for a second time around (though it's quite a good second time around)
persona 3 FES has the 3d overworld and all the cutscenes and stuff (also the answer but almost everyone hates it and doesn't play it) but it lacks fully controllable characters, instead using AI "tactics" where you command the AI to act a certain way also it lacks the femc route and minor changes in portable but it almost never matters so I guess FES is kinda the "more definitive definitive version" in that way
using tactics works fine 99% of the time but a lot of people leave the characters on act freely so you get crusty 2006 may mays like mitsuru marin karin I don't know if this image is even readable but lol 200x was good times
I would say play FES (the journey) and if you thoroughly enjoy it play the answer and persona 3 portable's female protagonist route
to not briefly get into what "the answer" is and why almost everyone hates it people hate it because it's like 30-40 hours of dungeon crawling but it's p3 combat (some of the worst megaten has to offer but at least it's not p4) and the dungeons are tartarus-mini (called "abyss of time" and just like tartarus it has a very nice theme that changes as you progress) and the game is locked to hard (which matters if you didn't play on hard) and there's no compendium (a place where you can get old personas back for a fee for easier fusion) also there are no social links and there's like maybe 5 hours of cutscene/story spread thinly throughout the whole ordeal the story is also pretty controversial because some people say it ruins certain characters or feels entirely unnecessary or like a crusty fanfiction so that may also be an issue for me I didn't care because I get not one but TWO toasties (yin-yang flavor) in a godawful 95% dungeon crawling with the worst megaten combat type 35 hour epilogue and I genuinely enjoy that kind of timewasting treash but if you don't then just watch it on the youtube dot com like everyone else did and say "that was certainly Persona 3 FES: The Answer"
p3 has pretty much just two spinoffs (persona 3 dancing and persona q) and four movies that I didn't watch that were apparently "pretty good" (also a manga and four of those japanese-only novels most megaten games used to have) persona q is a crossover with persona 4 and plays like etrian odyssey it's pretty good but not a "must play" basically 100% fanservice and japes persona 3 dancing is much less stellar I saved up all my money ($160) to import persona 3 and 5 dancing when they were released and last time I checked you can buy each one for less than 10 dollars each in japan because demand for those games is so low they play like p4d except the gag of "holy shit persona 4 has ALL the spinoffs! look, they're even DANCING!" is now "fatlus wants more cash again" and since it already happened before nobody laughed the second time the music is fine enough and it looks nice but honestly a waste of moneys and they even split the one game into two games so they could sell two and make double money both released at the same time, uses the same UI and whatnot and the DLC works on both games it's not pokemon levels of samey but it's obvious they split the game into two I could have digitally purchased literally every megaten game on the 3ds for the amount I spent on those would not recommend
anyway after that too many words there is persona 4 golden is the definitive version and was considered so good that it was "the game worth buying a vita for" I had to buy not one but two vitas to be able to play it because of stick drift on the first one and funnily enough both vitas came with a copy of the game because it's just that popular on the vita nowadays golden is on PC and atlus is also porting over the arcade version of persona 4 arena ultimax back n mah day you had to shell out forty bucks for the not as good ps3 version because the arcade one was well arcade only persona 4 g4m3rs have it good because fatlus decided to continue milking their game for 13 years and counting and now two of the four notable persona 4 games are on/coming to PC you can snag p4g and preorder p4au on steam for like $35 with the bundle which aint too bad I think that's 5 bucks less than what p4au on ps3 used to cost (now it costs $100 because ebay scalping)
persona 4 golden was fun to play and very memorable like a slice of life anime but you actually get to play it so now you get to be yu "souji "chad" seta" narukami from persona 4 the golden arena dancing all ultimax hold animation telling rise she sucks ass at origami and should stop doing it maybe not the most amazing writing or anything but it was all entertaining and enjoyable other than having to hwhip out a guide to find out how to not get the bad-bad ending or the bad-good ending and instead to get the true ending to not miss out on like two dungeons and an extra month give this game to a sad child and they will remember their yasogami high days fondly
dungeons aren't one massive dong rising into the sky this time they're now randomly generated dungeons with a theme based on each character within the visuals and music change in each one which is probably why nobody has an issue with it but honestly it's just tartarus split up because randomly generated is randomly generated
for p4 spinoffs arena is good (also apparently considered a genuinely good fighting game), dancing is funny and I put whatever 65 hours in it and persona q is fine too didn't see all of the anime but what I saw was good also there's a second anime, a manga, a persona q manga, and like two japanese only novels none of which anyone has ever touched and you shouldn't either why? I dunno lol
now there's persona 5 back unnnn me day there was no joker in smash and no persona 5 twitter or the entire rest of the smt and persona fanbase hating the persona 5 fanbase currently there are a bunch of people who think persona 5 is literally the best piece of media to ever grace this barren earth and curse atlus daily for not porting it to switch and say anonymous or whoever is the phantom thieves and if you say persona 5 sucks they'll send you a calling card with your IP on it and then a bunch of people who are the opposite and say it's overrated garbage and post images of them cutting the disc in half (real but three attachment limit) who are equally as awful yet equally as funny to watch I was a lucky one to experience the game before all this but these days it aint so good so I would advise staying away from those areas if you do not want to experience pain because they really really bring on the pain there are videos out there containing just slideshows of persona 5 twitter and though some are obvious bait that the uploader fell for some other ones I'm not so sure about which makes it 100% worse
to actually talk about persona 5: the game uhhh eh it's probably my least favorite megaten but it's still pretty solid and I would probably play it once more before exchanging it for a carbonated beverage containing a tasty fruit as a JRPG it's fine but as a persona/megaten ehhhh number rating system usually sucks but if I were to rate persona 3 and 4 a 9/10 this is like 7.5/10 a lot of the low points of persona 4 like the near-required party social links and the "anime" type character writing just got worse in p5 but the way the game actually looks and plays massively improved so it got pretty and smooth but it takes everything p4 did wrong and does it wronger at least I didn't have to wait 9 years since persona 4 for it I don't remember a lot of persona 5 because after the first dungeon the game was not my favorite and the characters didn't feel as interesting or fun as 3-4 either persona 3 tells you everything about the cast and persona 4 makes you want to do their social links to learn about them but persona 5 never made me want to learn about anyone other than yusuke and his not enough money (thank you inari) the social links are much better but then again I don't particularly care for the feature and that doesn't make the playable party good it's fine enough I guess but the characters are barely likeable and interesting enough for me to remember them all and I found myself sticking with basically the first three party members introduced for the whole game as a result
the dungeons/palaces themselves stay cool throughout and they're not randomly generated this time they look and sound nice and it's refreshing to see demons instead of a chair with a face or hulk hogan but since the gameplay got so much easier most of my entertainment was fusing the best possible stuff and then steamrolling everything in one day unless the game physically prevented me from doing so I did the same in p3 and p4 and I enjoyed returning to tartarus/p4's dungeons after to explore or just jape around but p5 literally destroys the palaces once you beat them so you can't go back and your reward is reverse tartarus I aint even joking the non-palace dungeon of the game is literally just tartarus except it goes down instead of up named "mementos" honestly I like it but nobody else did I think I heard royal does something with it that made people like it but I don't know for sure anyway I would recommend not doing the entire palaces in one day if you want to fully experience what they have to offer
outside of the dungeons I spent most of my time fishing after I finished the get smoked kid's social link and dated kawakami lol there's more to do than that like eating the big bang burger which makes you courageous (it's p5's version of p4's massive beef bowl) or continuing ohya's social link not because you like ohya or you want her abilities but because you want to fuse beelzebub and the game makes you waste like 10 in game days to finish a social link but eh I just wanna fish for YHVH's sake
music is still good and the visuals are the best persona has to offer (and arguably all of megaten since the style and appearance is fancier than SMTV and SMTV is on the switch so it looks not as good as p5 on the ps4) gameplay is also the best persona gameplay but that's not exactly impressive it flows nicely though which is impressive in SMT nocturne press turn makes the game fast because you accidentally used agi on a pyro jack and now your entire turn is gone instantly so the enemies can smack you in the face one by one with no break in between until you see angels and in this game you hit an enemy weak to bufu and now everyone's baton passing and backflipping and it is very stylish and cool actually it feels dynamic while nocturne feels die-namic
I've heard persona 5 royal adds a lot of good stuff and is the best version by far but I've heard tons of people say it's the "easiest persona/megaten game I have ever played" depending on whether you like to use luck builds and/or play on the hardest difficulty and die more times than live or actually play the game like a person who wants to beat the game this is either a very bad thing or a very good thing royal wasn't even announced when I played the original and I only have a ps3 so I can't say anything about its improvements and difficulty though you can probably buy kaguya picaro and win the entire game immediately with shining arrows again though
spinoffs of p5 are much weaker than p4 as far as I know people have wanted "persona 5 arena" for so long but it never happened instead we got some persona 5 strikers thing on PC that I never touched or wanted to touch because I've had enough of those darn phantom thieves and I don't want to play their soccer game or watever it is never heard anything about strikers either and I didn't even realize it was released in the US or japan until I saw it on steam p5 is also in the sequel to persona q, persona q2 it contains the cast of 3-5 but it's basically a persona 5 game because it emphasizes the phantom thieves way too much again it's easier than persona q and you have to play as joker so the cast of 5 is eternal while the cast of persona 3 and 4 just exist you don't even get p3's cast until halfway through the game p5 also has a manga I know nothing about because only persona 1 fans read the manga lol also there is persona 5 the animation don't watch persona 5 the animation whether you like the game or not it is universally agreed on by everyone that persona 5 the animation sucks all the megaten fans put aside their differences this one time to agree that persona 5 the animation sucks and you should not waste your time watching it
ok this horrendous post is almost over worry not
I would say 3=4>5 but honestly I'm not sure if I can say there's a "best one" and your enjoyment of 5 basically just depends on whether you care about the cast which I didn't though there's not a "best persona game" it generally is agreed upon that each game has a strength 3 for story, 4 for characters, 5 for like gameplay or style or something I want to say gameplay but then why not just play like SMTIV:A or SMTV or something at that point so it'd have to be style but that makes it sound really not good compared to persona 3 or 4 I guess he has style and he has grace but this game has a funny face
3 is pretty flawed in its whatever the hell crusty tartarus and less emphasis on social links and friendship but it's my favorite (also best music) and 4 is also very good and has infinite spinoffs and potential so it never feels like it's over (persona 4ever) 5 looks and sounds nice and that's about it it only feels like the game would work if you really like the phantom thieves already and I didn't really care about them persona 4's story was just "save person, person gets persona, repeat until twist and game ends" and it worked because everyone likes the cast but persona 5's story is also just "make bad person good, get new party member, repeat until twist and game ends" but the cast kinda sucks so it doesn't work anymore dunno about royal but base persona 5 aint the best even as good as it looks and plays that won't save the actual story and characters of the game atlus also seems to have flubbed SMTV in the same "story sucks characters suck but everything looks and plays nice" way so both of the most "modern" entries in the two series went the same not great way (well SMT is usually about the gameplay but still it's an issue) hopefully persona 6 don't go the same way
be wary of the ungodly time it takes to finish these games if you play em if you think this post is too long you're gonna need to read it fifty times over to prepare persona 3 took me some 90 hours, if you play the answer that's another 30-40, 4 was 75, and 5 was 150 (yeah spent twice as long on p5 as I did p4 and royal adds an entire extra semester so that could be up to 200+ hours) for persona 3 and 4, time well spent, for persona 5... ehh I could have beaten both persona 3 and 4 new game plus in the time it took to get to futaba's palace (halfway through persona 5 unless I remember wrong) and I would have enjoyed my orpheus telos and izanagi no okami more than whatever lv40 thoth I recruited in the palace I didn't even end up good at the fishing game or anything so hopefully royal is a genuine improvement to make p5 good (though I can't play it either way) if you go through the spinoffs you have to play the games in order or else you won't know what's happening (or in the case of arena/dancing games you will see many spoilers) arena won't make sense without 3 and 4 the spinoffs aren't nearly as long other than persona Q which is still 80 hours
also important: I would advise to avoid the hell out of spoilers like don't even look up videos or social link guides or anything other than a gamefaqs spoiler-free walkthrough if you want one everything spoils the games even atlus expects you to know the spoilers because all the dancing games have DLC where the evil twist people dance crazy and p4a gladly included the culprit of p4 to ride off the popularity p4a spoils both p3 and p4 by the way both in art and in the game I literally watched like two videos, listened to a music (tartarus theme very cool), and looked up a social link guide for devil arcana to get beelzebub in p3/4/5 (this was not a good decision but I want fly) and I got spoiled about all the deaths, all of the culprits in persona 4, and multiple major plot twists in 3 and 5 just by seeing thumbnails, comments, and recommended stuff so if you intend on spending 300 hours playing these games I would say to go NEET mode for about a month and a half and then you are safe either that or look up/watch nothing ever it is a cruel world out there
and since I don't know where to toss it in persona's got that kinda jojo influence where it's people summoning these strange extensions of themselves wwwww also persona 3's "full moon shadow of the month" and jojo part 3's "stand user of the week" both persona 4 and jojo part 4 are solving a murder mystery and both persona 5 and jojo part 5 are a group of lawless people aiming to reform society is pretty funny lol not relevant at all but it's something didn't read stone ocean yet and it has not been fully animated but perhaps it will accidentally spoil persona 6
at the end of this I realize I have said probably like two positive things about persona 5 at most I honestly don't feel the game had anything to make it "the best JRPG ever" or even "the best persona game" but I'd still say it's worth playing once out of all the JRPGs I have played it is certainly one of them I only kinda sorta regret the 150+ hours I dumped into the game but at least I know what happens in the game now and what to expect also getting to become a rat in the rat puzzle dungeon and getting to see beelzebub and metatron in glorious better-than-2003 graphics royal probably makes it better considering what I've heard from all sides of the megaten fanbase
and to make this relevant to the thread uhhh uhhhhhh there are pixels on a screen and you must have a screen to play these games if you do not have a screen, it's an IMPOSSIBLE PIXEL CHALLENGE because you cannot reliably beat the game without having a screen to look upon it ok good now I am safe
wait I tried the game again and now I actually have a relevant thing here I see you have allowed sus amogus drip splendid now at 24/185 only because I remembered zatsune miku
sorry for spawning tartarus in your thread not even gonna bother with the word count this time just assume 2.5k this is significantly longer than the favorite themes 1866 worder so 2k is the minimum no idea how to consistently make spoilers work because I haven't done it in like 8 months so this one-meter long post will serve to make the recent posts page look bigger
i cannot believe i have never summoned the demon by asking about persona directly because sponge drops funnies and tunes from it so often. i will now read and respond to the longest post quotes take up a ton of space so im just going to respond in plaintext as lunyred (god) intended. who knows what im looking at? its a puzzle game
short answer: oh mannnn fake fannn i tooootally played about two hours of persona two i really liked the uh. the pixelart was pretty nice i think and you could undertale the enemies which was cool but i got stuck because i just could not figure out where to go from the way you describe them: social link things seem like supports in fire emblem: they are mandatory to figure out what is going on with any individual unit but totally missable. i think it works pretty well there since you have an ass ton of characters so on second runs you could see totally different supports but i can see how massive development bits locked behind grindy/not entirely related to the story/really specific situations is dumb
single dungeon with randomly generated floors honestly and genuinely seems like one of the most grueling ways to endure an rpg. i am very sorry. but i like that video a lot it has my two favorite things: yukari and recursive loops i do like the idea of there being random cool events like floor filled with gold shadows. the only mmo i ever played (spiral knights) you just go do dungeoncrashing and sometimes you could get a really messed up one where you will just eat shit and die with spooky goasts
i know about the robot girl she looks like a homie
i like the way persona 3 looks its like peak ps2 if they remade it i bet it would look jank
i understand why people hate 30-40 hours of dungeon crawling even in good combat with minimal story BUT i respect the grind since locked to hard makes it seem like it is for pros (i do not respect grinding you know what i mean)
always heard that there were persona dancing games. dancing = rhythm yes? i know a bit about rhythm (games). i will finally look these guys up okay not exactly what i expected. morally opposed to this input style where half of them are on the other side of the screen as the other half. looks like they just use jumps and freezes i mean cmon guys the dudes dancing in the middle and the ui is pretty cool. maps seem to never get super difficult but on the harder difficulties they start following the vocals when possible instead of just the bass (very good thing). actually you know what i really like this map im lookin at now (brand new days, p3 dancing moon light, hardest difficulty) it also uses the same disc scratch thing sound as osu. hitsounds could stand to be a bit. tuned. or something. you can probably turn them off though oh wait its got some full circle SCRATCH thing you gotta do. alright well i have no chance at beatmania so i would get nuked
okay persona four my sister got golden for twenty bucks and we played it for a few hours before she remembered she hates all rpgs of all kinds. this is unlike me, who hates only most rpgs and not all of them and the ones that are good are very good. i am pretty sure i would not have hated persona four although randomly generated dungeons still sounds a bit dangerous
i take my true endings hard so i do not mind having to do shittery to get them but in big rpg where it would take 40+ hours to do another run yeah maybe taking it easy would be good
there IS persona anime dude i totally forgor
persona five is the best addition to smash bros in the series history i am not joking i am not jesting i am not a funny man with unusual implements to be giggled at: nothing else has the style of joker before or since and i basically lost all hope in official smash when i realized he was the only one that was so cool. now i play rivals and everything is cool B] i dont know anything about persona five other than the guy, the funny cat, and that it took a while to come out i am very sorry to hear that it is not as awesome as the other ones: i have suffered similarly when fire emblem three houses released (very nice art voice acting wow cast is annoying stages suck skills suck story is the same between routes many other things) and god damn it it got easier. i hate it when they do that especially in rpgs
i have heard of persona q. know nothing about it
thank you for all of the information i have learned a lot. if i play a persona game again anytime soon it will probably be three and then youre tellin me how long they are. damn. but well sometimes thats just how it is gotta front a cost for a masterpiece and it isnt gonna be cash (i will download pers0na tres free rom iso ps2 emulator 2017 working illegally)
that is some pretty dangerous spoilers. i am safe and sound so far
jojoz bizzare adventure.......it was intentional so here is my prediction for the next persona game: they will go to florida
in fifth grade my pal got me a gamestop card and told me to go to a really specific one that had persona 3 for ps2 and i went there and they did not have it. i would probably have played most of them and understand all of this if he did not lie to me (i got fire emblem awakening instead (literal canon divergence event))
about impossible pixels: i will add evil yu narukami thank you for the info training and arcade little mac: understood i shoulda done the research and well done rys you are cracked. but are you cracked enough to see the end of the game at 100 pixels guessed? ho ho ho he he he
also looking things up is not criminal, i don't give you much to work with if you dont already immediately recognize it so full respect for the lads punching everything they can into google (this is what i do every day to get code to work)
horry sheet you have responded to the longest post in modern lunyred history
yeah the undertale actually got monster/demon negotiation from SMT if I recall toby fox interviews from like half a decade ago correctly it was either that or the alignments (law/neutral/chaos became pacifist/neutral/genocide) I forgot maybe both
SMT as a whole (and classic persona as a result) is usually "uhh where the hell am I supposed to go next exactly?" and then you gotta whip out a guide to find out you're supposed to talk to person a and then go to person b and then go back to person a who tells you to get an item from person b and then bring the item back to person a so person a can unlock the next area in which you will have to go through a dungeon that looks like this 15 million encounters as you're doing it by the way so you better max out that agility to run away or strength to kill everything in one hit (other than in SMT2 where maxed strength does so much with a tarukaja or two it rolls over) modern persona is much better about that though I don't think there was even one point in persona 3-5 where I didn't know where to go or what to do
social links go from basically just "interact with this person for fun" to "interact with these people by a certain date or they'll miss out on two persona evolutions" and then in persona 5 it's that plus "interact with these people or else you will miss out on every single extra ability" it's even worse if you want your ultimate persona because you have to max out every single social link in one playthrough to do that aka you have to use gamefaqs (or buy a guide if you're living in 2006) also pretty harmful for the relevance of characters in the story because in persona 3 half the party members just straight up didn't have social links and yet they were more memorable than the cast of 5
tartarus is probably the best worst dungeon I have experienced probably did a good job instilling dread in the players when they realized "I have to go through 200 floors of the same poorly designed concept-game level dungeon" so they can burn their bread like nyx intended there is also an eat shit and die type floor in this game it's where the floor is filled with difficult red shadows that almost certainly will kill you in one turn and make you stop playing the game for a month on gold shadow floors you can at least send yukari to die as you run to the next floor
toasties is friends
honestly the persona 3 remake thing is weird because they have like a bunch of locations and most of the characters modeled for p3d already the day when p5r is ported to PC persona 3 remake will be announced (never) at least it aint gonna get a nocturne port though lol
the answer is kinda one of those things where nobody will respect you if you did it because it's like watching endless eight as in "why would you do that" if one day you complete the answer though I shall respect your courage to not watch it on the youtube instead
the persona dancing games were designed for vita so the inputs are like trying to look round I guess lol left side is for left thumb right side is for right thumb and scratch is for whatever L/R so portably it's pretty nice I king crazy'd all the non-dlc songs in p4d on all night but in p3d and p5d a couple of the songs (mostly DLC) are just a pain in the ass I think one of them I couldn't even complete normally the dancing games are said to be pretty low difficulty compared to the average rhythm game though so probably I am just bad you can change the hit and scratch sounds to a decent amount of other things which is nice one of which is literally just character voice clips like you scratch and it plays junpei saying "yahoo!" or whatever lol is pretty good I went from buying p4d on amazon dot com in january of whatever the hell year I bought it and being unable to play on easy to beating everything other than four songs by the end of march so it's pretty easy to git gud (pirate the games do not pay fatlus a penny for their crimes of making persona dancing: red and blue version and then selling like $30 of dlc after)
p4g is honestly like the worst persona game in the entire series for someone who hates rpgs to start with because persona 4 starts out slow and I mean slooowwwwwww I had to hit it with a stick for like 10 hours for it to actually pick up but I am glad I did because otherwise I would not have gotten to catch the big legendary fish p4g isn't AS bad compared to the other smt games when it comes to the "true" ending (well in SMT atlus really likes neutral so that's pretty much the true one) in smtiv for example pretty much every dialogue choice influences your alignment so you're always floppin between alignments and directly before the alignment lock there's a boss with only two dialogue choices which give either +10 law or +10 chaos so you can literally be too neutral (and this is quite likely by the way, neutral requires between +7/-7) and get locked out of the neutral ending and have to replay the entire game (maybe 35-40 hours to get back to that point) because you were a good neutral child beforehand like humanity intended in p4g there'll be a dungeon where immediately upon seeing it you'll say "ok this is the last dungeon before the ending lock" and it's only in/past that dungeon that your choices matter for the ending basically just be suspicious of the dialogue choices and make like 10 saves and you should be good to go also max the aeon social link as soon as you can (yes it's you real) to unlock the p4g-exclusive dungeon
looks like persona 5 man make the smash bro go good!!!! all I heard is he uses a gun also there's that one blinny binesauce clip I saw him in if persona 5 is not great at least he is good in the smash's bro lol
speaking of fire emblem games there's that SMTxFE crossover which apparently looks, sounds, and plays good buuuut you guessed it story and characters suck ass black sheep of both franchises from what I've heard there must be some evil force at play making all the games look, sound, and play good but suck ass man
if you want p5r to be hard there IS one thing you can do: challenge run it's honestly easy enough to do a challenge run the first time maybe you can play solo or with only one party member like joker+ann for healing or joker+ryuji for big damage or use arsene only (wild card? whaddya talkin' about?)
persona q and q2 are honestly not worth hearing about unless you already played the whole persona 3 and 4 also physically they cost a kidney or two last time I checked (especially q2 because it was the last game ever to be physically released on 3ds) digitally they're on sale for like 7 bucks though so not bad
very good 3 best (well other than its 99999 issues but you can't beat emo jesus and shooting yourself in the head to summon persona) if you emulate you can probably spam savestates to save yourself from the SMT experience^tm (getting back-attacked by enemy and then having protagonist be killed immediately, losing five hours of progress and 1/100th of your lifespan)
wait is stone ocean in florida probably I should just watch it then because it's god damn florida wonder if they got good crusty stuff like "jolyne fights rabid trash man whose stand is garbodor"
lol it seems the paths have split I must play Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, released on the nintendo family computer AKA nintendo entertainment system (pirated on the 3ds) and use savestates so every character gets max luck to repair this tear in space and time
from what I remember persona 3 sold like ass in america and atlus was already pretty close to bankruptcy around that point (which is why persona 4 is like persona 3: yellow) usually they printed very few copies of games in the US already both then and now (and especially in europe) so it is possible your friend did not lie but instead you got atlus'd due to these two events it probably was like trying to find pikmin 2 or devil summoner where you roll a 100-sided die and if you get a prime number you have a 1/256 chance of seeing a single copy on the shelf
to maek post relevant: haha his eyes is colored like the pee pee
that dungeon. my man. oh my god. its key takes up more than the entire alphabet. absolutely scourgeful (not a real word)
the ultimate persona unlocked by talking to your friends. maybe i would have the ultimate persona if i responded to all the posts on time
i do not think i can handle the answer i am very sorry. the most annoying rpg i can handle is probably lisa arkantos, a mod where everybody has a million hp and you only get one party member and you have to run halfway across the map to a save point after every battle because if you die on the next one you will have to do the first one again (sucks) but luckily it is not super long
vita that makes way more sense i was imagining trying to do that on a computer or tv but handheld not so bad rhythm games have an unlimited skill cap and if you put that in a game as a company you will die immediately so big company console rhythm games are usually pretty easy in comparison to the crimes i am used to. doesnt mean theyre bad though, and being able to git good on something that isnt trying to kill you is not a bad thing
yeah it was bein pretty slow when i played it with sister. a solid 70% cutscenes, 20% walking, and 10% battle were a bit straining on our popcorn resources the every choice means something is very cool. but scary. i played one game (iconoclasts) that was like that but i didnt even know choices did literally anything since the same thing happens after no matter what you pick but hoho i tricked you there is a number secretly increasing and decreasing in the background, and only if the number is as high as it gets which you have to do by changing your morals to suit the person you are talking to, do you get the secret final cutscene and that too neutral bit is hilarious. is neutral like true ending? im so happy to be included in the dlc for persona four Golden steam edition if you get all my supports and social link points you get the secret dungeon and the bonus robot outfit for all of your party members
he uses a gun and he has a KNIFE with cool red line effects (not normal!; high school boys usually do not carry knives. this makes me interested into his reasons for acting like a thug even though he is a nice young man)
oh my god dude i always forget about tokyou mirage scessions hashtag fe i did not play it but i heard a bit and it all lines up with what you are sayin it has no fire emblem gameplay and they are just like weird cameos that the anime cast has to deal with while they become magic idols or something
the best rpg challenge run: low xp this solves so many things mostly not having to ever even consider random encounters, you also dont gotta waste any items on em or do sidequests or anything. just fight bosses win the game and if low xp run is not possible then i condemn the game that makes me do random encounters to win and does not give me cool science tools to get through with smarts i hate them
oh well well well a 3ds game? thats expensive? oh daaaamn damn i cant even think about playing it on my tricked out evil crimes 3ds
stone ocean is in florida. and [SPOILERS]she fights rabid trash man whose stand even grosser[/SPOILERS]
i highly recommend never playing most fire emblem games. i will not make an equally massive fire emblem post right now but the quality scale is all over the place and generally the gba games are the dinkiest you wanna get while still being playable and the 3ds games are the coolest (do NOT ask other people about this they will try to hurt you)
i may have gotten atlus'd. man shoulda just told me to pick it up on ebay
he is a sly fox but we have found out his deepest darkest secrets
I didn't get there yet but yeah mega crust dungeon that has made many a person drop smt1 smt1 already has probably the crustiest gameplay out of all megaten because megami tensei 1 and 2 were apparently remade with smt2's mechanics and nobody plays ronde and no crab or shrimp walking in smt1 you have to press the turn button and move forward always so having such a dungeon in the game is just the diarrhea on the vomit cake I cannot wait for it
perhaps your ultimate persona is the skull man halloween from the cover of lafcadio hearn's kwaidan: stories and studies of strange things released on physical paper book entertainment system (I got a hearnbook only 3 more months until I actually respond to the thread) he will be a new fiend in funny game persona 6 and will make sounds like this the joys of being a tier 2 ultimate persona with at least one absolutely broken skill that costs 300mp to use (bone-rattler: makes all enemies have bone hurty for three turns) you will need to waste 10 days learning about how (person) has collapsed and (social link) has a new perspective on life after this traumatic event that has happened to half of the other social links because writing (protagonist) also gave them a potted plant and now they can summon megasatan from the (social points)
that lisa arkantos sounds like 'cturne on hard where you spend an hour draining trumpeter's MP and then run back to an area to save just to be crit by a random encounter and die in front of the save terminal because this is what you signed up for when you chose "hard"
the dancing games also got ported to ps4 for god knows what reason so in that way you are correct that is not very good originated on vita though which is where I would recommend "obtaining" them on legitimate and authentic PKGJ
lol the combat in the beginning of p4 is also really damn slow I remember the second boss took me like 20+ minutes to beat which is more than the final boss took by a good amount just wasn't doing enough damage and didn't have enough good stuff because it's the first dungeon and all you get is like pixie or whatever the hell mokoi I forgot I guess you gotta work for the good stuff
SMT is supposed to be about law/neutral/chaos but atlus is usually heavily and obviously biased towards neutral so it's usually the "good" and "preferred" ending in SMT1 and SMTIV neutral is the "true" ending in that it's literally canon (SMT2 and SMTIV:A proceed with the previous game having been a neutral ending and they both count as canon as far as I know) which makes the difficulty of getting neutral in SMTIV even worse because that's THE ending also every main game is typically associated with an alignment (despite neutral always being the "good" ending other than in nocturne where there is no neutral) and the game usually pushes you towards that one SMT1 pushes you towards neutral and calls the other alignments evil, SMT2 pushes you towards law to the point where just using the default character names gives a ton of law points, SMT3's chaos ending literally just requires you to beat all of the game to get it, and then SMTIV uhhh makes you say "aw god damn it" and pull up gamefaqs every time a dialogue option appears persona 4 golden has a handful of endings but most are basically either "you found out the whole truth" or "you did not find out the whole truth" so you just gotta whip out the guide once they start asking about that kinda thing mid-late game instead of worrying for the entire game you're gonna get a garbo ending
I am sorry to say but the aeon rep is quite uhhh unsavory please understand fatlus needs to include a new girl every rerelease or else nobody will buy their game worry not, however, for the aeon rep in p3fes is very, very cool and epic (and allows you to fuse metatron when maxed)
joker from persona 5 royal: the animation dancing star night Q2 manga carries a knife because we live in a society! and he has to bring a gun because we live in a society! he may be named joker but he is serious business and he has a knife AND he has a gun so do not mess with him he is persona 5 joker I am serious I am joker
yeah tokyo mirage recessions aint lookin too good with no idol crust crossover anime game I heard majin tensei is similar to fire emblem in its gameplay and devil survivor is apparently like a spiritual successor to it lazulum approved so that must be the true fire emblem crossover very well I shall play fire emblem: shadow dragon and I don't want to go find out what the second part of this title was again on the 3ds as it is a 3ds game (played on 3ds (jape)) and perhaps accidentally stumble upon a certain green-black website starring many fire emblem 3ds titles for the price of zero US dollars (I have now every game that will run on the 2ds)
are the fire emblems kinda like uhhh ok the only series I know that started around the NES and is still going today with many games on the 3ds is megaten again is it like that where half of the games are at least 20 years old and play like absolute ass and are only worth playing if you enjoy experiencing a cereal box maze in first person with a random encounter every 5 steps for 40 hours or whatever the fire emblem equivalent of that is (I do) if the older and crustier fire emblems are like trying to sprint underwater perhaps I will go directly against your advice and start from the bottom because it is funnier that way or pick one out of a hat and then steal obtain it legitimately and without going against public morals and standards I have heard your opinion on the matter but also a completely opposite opinion from an equally reputable person so I will reject both of you (I am the weird type of neutral that does that) and play blazing blade, the first game in the series to be translated instead of playing the first game to be released or the first game to make the series popular overseas 13 games and 3 remakes so assuming is good and not 50 hours each it can be another game series that I have almost fully pirated (buy a single game to not get cursed) and tossed into a folder on the 2ds I think I am the only one here who has not fire emblem'd in any way so I will likely do that (however when it comes to fate which everyone here also knows I am satisfied with knowing only everyone's favorite toaster, mech-hisui, and otherwise not touching the spider-web timeline of god knows what and where you WILL rate each toaster from each game series the highest in your list even if she shows up for one joke ending in PoDD only) I am only aware that one of the fire emblems has a purple one that wants you to call her "big sis" and a decent amount of gameplay from the one known as づん without the thing that changes the pronunciation I forgot the name of
ok I have seen that some games have like 3+ routes and the routes are said to be 30+ hours each generally are all routes necessary to see story or is it minor differences type stuff also I saw some of the games have like "lunatic" difficulty and such and lol many people said it is a massive difficulty increase and only gods can conquer those one guy said it made him want to smash his 3ds is this perhaps the "git gud" mode I aint sponge-brained enough to think it fit for a first go around especially not ever having played a game of this type but lol I am glad to see this series has its own treash hard mode where the odds are stacked up so high against the player you have to learn to climb
low xp run is probably doable in persona 5 royal without it being like jim reaper's minimum exp DDS2 run persona has crusty level scaling so you can't play it like smtiv low level runs where you defeat lv45 tree demon at lv10 and win but you can still definitely make it work well enough due to the game having not very hard bosses I'm not completely sure but I think level also affects hit rate to some extent in p5 so you will need them accuracy buffs and debuffs also all the enemies are overworld and the game tries to do a form of stealth that makes metal gear want to cry because of how not good it plays but you can basically just run away from enemies or use the crusty stealth only issue is you get new personae via negotiation which is only in random encounters so you would probably have to just like run and hide, and if you mess up, recruit if you do low level I would not recommend playing on merciless though I think EXP, money, and damage are less than half compared to normal and you take far more damage wait never mind I checked and p5r made EXP and money 1.2x normal while the original had 0.4x for those??? I guess this is that "easiest megaten game" thing then hardest mode got unharded so never mind I guess it works too
I bought smtiv on the nintendo 3ds Eshop for 19 US dollars and 99 US cents and persona q: shadow of the labyrinth from ebay dot com for 24 US dollars and 99 US cents and then proceeded to uhhh mysteriously get every single atlus game released on the 3ds through unknown methods (legitimate) for the low low price of 0 US dollars and 0 US cents they say "if you can't afford games you don't get to play them" and I say "haha I don't know how shin megami tensei: devil survivor overclocked got on my nintendo 2ds system"
ok if that kinda stuff happens I should probably get to watching stone ocean have not seen any japanese animes since joe joe part 5 in like april 2020 or something so this will be a good one
tfw you want to buy shin megami tensei: devil summoner: raidou kuzunoha vs the soulless army for the sony playstation double but gamestop doesn't have it so you go onto ebay and (I know it's like 10 years later and emulate>buy for ps2 if you don't have one but funny)
ok it has been over a day but I just remembered about the openings here they are if you still linger here (as usual, open an incognito tab and DO NOT read the comments I saw major story spoilers in all three lol) Burn My Dread (Persona 3) Pursing My True Self (Persona 4) Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There (Persona 5) the original OPs are usually regarded as the best and most accurate to the idea and style of the games I think only persona 3 uses both burn my dread and FES/portable's intro (whenever you die because you got smacked in the face by a table or whatever it plays burn my dread for the "memento mori" funny) so it is nice to see them here to know what you're getting into instead of having to suffer with shadow world in p4g and never knowing the truth
bone-rattler skills are my favorite i will use it right after i have buffed my axe man up and he will use "bone-breaker" the skill that makes rattled bones broken
that sounds like arkantos except instead of random encounter you accidentially jump off a cliff and die. going fast back to save point means i forgot there was a ledge there uh oh
20+ minutes to beat a major boss seems pretty reasonable to me which is fairly weird considering everything else still sounds fairly lengthy
default name for law points is actually a hilarious move that makes so much sense whipping out guide is balls you should be able to just do your science and save in a different slot to figure it out, although even if the latter was useful im not sure anyone is gonna wanna be replaying massive segments of rpg just to change a few numbers that only affect stuff near the end
aeon rep its ok she looks competent. very eloquent too
i cant believe i was tricked... the joker is like the joker. welcome to my twisted mind
majin tensei looks pretty fire emblem-like. i saw ten seconds of footage and saw both dance and counter so probably lines up. there are other kinds of srpgs so who knows though
listen alright i know okay dont try and trick me i know what つ "suote" ん has told you but dont listen to him he has only played the oldest ones which as far as i and the world at large is concerned are basically tech demos. unbearably clunky, poorly balanced, poorly explained, takes eight years to do anything, and exist solely so that the future games can QUICK FIRE EMBLEM REVIEW: 1-3 are the description above. balls. nobody will tell you it is a good idea to play these considering they all have remakes that suck a lot less 4 is where it starts to become a real game but its really slow and enemies are very boring and all cool strategies either kill or softlock you so you will always use one strategy i refer to as "sigurd + trees" (stand in trees and next to a fellow named sigurd and you will never lose) 5 is weird, i dunno, this is the one i would defer to tsun's experience on. 6-8 are like normal. when people say fire emblem they mean these. they have really nice battle animations :] but i did not finish any of them 9-10 are really cool and feature ike from smash bros. things actually start getting cool here with the introduction of consistent logic for how skills work and making supports (social links) not suck 11-12 are remakes of games 1 and 3 respectively, i never liked the way they looked but probably not bad ones 13 is awakening and has the best endgame in the series. i could say many things and maybe i will later but id say its the second best. skills and supports are very good here 14 is Fire Emblem Fates, which is The hip and happening srpg. a lot of people thought it was stupid when it came out but have now realized its the best one actually. it is stupid expensive and has a shitload of dlc so you basically have to pirate it but if you do its second best game on 3ds easy and absolutely the best in the series in almost every aspect and cumulatively. has a few problems and dumb stuff in the story but the cool stuff outweighs the bad by a massive amount 15 is remake of 2. has a bunch of cool additions and looks really nice but they kept the worst part from the original in (bad map design) and added something that lets you reverse time at will (insanely busted) 16 is the newest one on switch and its so LONG why does it take so LONG when stages are normal length and why do they reuse so many stages. whatever i dont care its got full voice acting and i can crush it between my fingers its alright the gacha game is ass. ive never played it but well. gacha
14 has 3 routes, they are all very different and good (one of them is better than the others), as well as a bonus side story that is basically its own route but doesnt gets its own save or anything. story-wise the route order is 1 and/or 2 and then 3 and then bonus but honestly 1 and 2 are fine to just play by themselves 16 has 5 routes, but two of them are nearly identical aside from your units, one of them is really short, one of them sounds stupid i havent played it, and one of them is cool. story-wise some things are unexplained if you havent played a certain route before but honestly it takes so long to do any of them you might as well just pick your favorite (or the coolest one, the red one) and be done with it
im not going to cause crimes so here is aeon's RECOMMENDATION (noncompulsory): awakening is the best game to both start with and to only play if you only ever want to play one of them. if you want to be a big serious man who knows he will play many of them then 9 is a better starting point but blazing blade is not a bad choice either
you are correct that there is a purple one in one of the fire emblems (14, fates) BUT she is very annoying and i have never used her i highly recommend never looking in her direction
there is a lunatic difficulty, quality of them varies between games but it is very good (not recommended for first run) in 14 and supposedly in 9/10 but i havent played it in there. you gotta be doin long term science to win and really balancing your stuff. basically like lisa on pain mode but over more time, although thats another game you havent played its just the best example can you believe i can play lunatic and fire emblem and unreal in len'en but still cannot consistently be a real luna shooter? i gotta get good
no more fire emblem! no more tactics! no more aeon talks about fire emblem! no. more. trolls.
i forgot you get important things by sparing enemies yeah low xp would be pretty tough although cool to know that its possible
your twods might be cursed dude you cant have illigitimate copies of games........this must be the work of the evil megami tensei.......or whatever the bad dude is...
stone ocean is pretty cooooool i read the manga a long time ago and basically forgot all of it before the anime started. they are apparently releasing another 12 episodes in january so now is not a bad time to check it out
the persona openings are all very stylish and stylized and funky. thats one thing ya wont find in indie games, fully animated music videos don't just come outta nowhere. i was gonna pick a favorite but the 3 and 5 ones are so cracked for opposite reasons
very excited to continue to contribute to the longest page on the forums since pages are increased after x amount of posts instead of x amount of text
post number 360 we have come full circle bay bay (no we haven’t) ok I missed 360 but it was ALMOST 360 for a little while there it is april fools haha jape day ha here is my jape (my jape is that the post took so long that I missed april fools too I have spent 31 hours in the past two days slappin this garbage into a palatable form) the post you have all been waiting for after many a days of 10+ hours of game only 75 days late (at least it aint hearnpost) the length is quite unholy but if you want to skip major portions just ctrl+f “endgame” or “fe(game number)” I was writing the post as I was playing each game detailing the journey in real time (well as I am writing this I found out apparently only in the latter half did I do this) this post will kinda take up like 80% of the new posts page so I am really hoping this shit doesn’t make it lag like hell trying to fit each part of this in spoilers would also not work at all because of embedding images and whatever other stuff I gotta do
obviously this will contain spoilers for like every damn game so if you intend on playing a game and you ctrl+f and it’s here don’t read it
also I am some ninety images over the attachment limit so I had to use imgur for everything images are going to be of varying sizes and I cannot be assed to make every single one a decent size because that would take another five hours
I started playing the first few chapters of 1/7/13 and immediately finished all of lyn mode when I began it tsu “つん” n’s gameplay of fe1 about a month before we talked in this thread was the reason I was interested at the start I already had the game on 2ds before this thread because when he show merrrth kill piryot and bald man who heals your injuries I knew I had to do it but because I had never played a game of this type before I decided not to start with it after a few chapters of not knowing what was happening I thought awakening’s appearance and music was the worst of the three and I had also heard it uses things from other games in the series so I didn’t start with it either (also seeing it after the other two made me understand the megaten->persona thing) fe7 was a good medium between the extremes in its gameplay and characters and I thought it physically looked the nicest so that’s the one I began with
FE7: sword of raging fire (epic)
"fire emblem blazing blade, also known as blazing sword (apparently the correct translation but not official and sounds worse), originally rekka no ken, the sword of flame, the sword of raging fire, and also known as just "Fire Emblem" or "Fire Emblem GBA" (which one???) in the united states, is a game where the most common and official english title shares its acronym with binding blade, also known as sealed sword, the sword of seal, and sword of seals, as well as BS fire emblem AKA Fire Emblem: Archanea Saga, BS being for “blazing sword” because of this, I will refer to "blazing blade" as "the sword of raging fire", and I will refer to "binding blade" as "sword of seals" (and refer to BS fire emblem as nothing because lol) eliwood wields this sword of raging fire to do 7x2 damage to his enemies with 70% accuracy, in a bind because of the weight of his blade, making it a fitting title for the epic and roy's power is sealed until chapter 21x, allowing his level one self to cheat and promote 9 levels before everyone else so he can wield a blazing blade"
ok I vividly remember detailing my playthrough of fe7 with one such moment being the chapter with the secret card but apparently I didn’t…? I have almost zero written records of my playthrough of this game and somehow I didn’t find out until just now
so here we go, we’re starting and ending with battle before dawn!
ch26: battle before dawn (law theme noises)
lights are out so it’s “fog of war” two optional units at each end of the map, and both are required for the gaiden you have to have nino talk to jaffar so you either have to risk bringing her through the middle of the stage or have jaffar+nino+rescuers just sitting at the top waiting zephiel is weak as all hell and you get the rescue staff IN this chapter so you can’t use it here (not that I would have because I didn’t know what it even was lol) thieves come by to steal all the good shit so you gotta go even quicker to stop em my first time around after over an hour I got all of the chests, everyone lived, nino talked to jaffar, and as I was making my way down to zephiel with kent and then “tell me… are you afraid to die?” so on my second attempt I whipped out the guide to see where she was and avoided that shit like the plague fe7 is bebby game so bolting showed up literally only one time before this in the gaiden when I saw it I thought “what the FUCK” but it was almost immediately sealed and never saw use so I ended up having zero concept of siege tomes at all my team was also utter garbage so nobody other than oswin and maybe pent or someone could survive a bolting regardless another hour or so later and I had finally done it battle before dawn is OVER no more apparently on HHM turn 13 ursula starts to move lol
I have a very limited amount of details of my experience past this but they were written: it was only in ch26x that I realized peggies can and should be using rescue frequently and also all of my non-prepromote units started to get weaker with age and did like 5 damage for some reason I gave boots to florina who was level 7 unpromoted and tried to have her go over to the bolting mage at the bottom to kill him but she got hit every time for seven attempts (tfw GBA rng) and only finally then did I realize I also had bolting and this kills the bolting mage also lol with berserkers being able to walk on water I just imagine hawkeye with a completely stone-like expression swimming through purple water while dodging lightning bolts
ch30 took three and a half hours for my single attempt this chapter has 25 enemies and ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY NINE REINFORCEMENTS you know what I did? I fought them ALL because I didn’t know thank god I wasn’t in HHM where there is 39+268 lol I brought rebecca and rath here because I felt like it and by the end of the chapter they reached ~lv17 and promoted oswin and jaffar got to lv20 in this chapter there was an eclipse mage but hawkeye gave not one fuck and he had a 0% chance to be hit so I had him work his way over to the ruins thing is the ruins were destroyed and sophia was in there so uhhhh lol rip I guess hawkeye actually has unique dialogue with her but nah she dead
endgame: final chapter took me many attempts my team was absolute garbage and even athos can’t carry me the entire way through so this took hours had to try to rely on osWIN but even he can’t stand up to the mages one time I got to the end and then the top opened up and the druid berserked hawkeye who hit, crit, and killed marcus to cause my fourth reset once I finally got through I saw the cutscene and thought “holy shit I’m about to fight a muhfuggin DRAGON!” and then there was no save point in between and that joy slipped through my hands like sand actually made it through completely fine though thankfully and that was fe7 didn’t recruit guy or legault because for guy I forgot “talk” exists and for legault it took like four tries to beat chapter 19 first time around I almost got him and I got the member card second time around was just member card third time was neither and fourth time was not fun and I got absolutely nothing so I know nothing about fe7’s secret shops
here is my team for further study: honestly I am not sure how I even made it to the end
game being easier is definitely a good thing here
to talk about lyn mode as a tutorial it’s quite solid and it shows you the mechanics both with dialogue and incorporating it into simple maps if I did not play this I would have been so fucked as a first game mode it was actually quite nice enjoyable little cast, not super difficult, tells a complete story, but it wasn’t just a complete snoozefest for me I was like grandma trying to figure out how to use the ipad for the first time the peak was at the end when wallace shows up and you promote him to show how the mechanic works and suddenly he’s massive and he kills EVERYTHING that boss fight was a clash of the titans while everyone else just sat back and watched and it was the coolest damn thing ever
I heard PoR has a tutorial just as extensive as this though I can’t play it so I can’t say for sure and the tutorial of awakening was ass and dark dragon literally doesn’t have one in fact the only game I played with a tutorial that wasn’t extremely basic WAS fe7 here’s the thing though: on a second go around, lyn mode suuuuuuuuucks it’s easy, slow, filled with annoying dialogue and the game literally forcing your hand to make you move your unit everything is scripted in the early chapters like lyn critting batta the beast or sain missing with his lance and then sword and it makes a weird thing where it was amazing the first time around and then painfully dull any other time I tried to go through it almost all units benefit from lyn mode with the only exception being rath as far as I know and many people playing on hard even use the knight’s crest on sain for another marcus and it’s to the point where a certain major story-relevant gaiden is dependent on you playing lyn mode tutorial killer probably makes this much more bearable but I would almost say I’m glad I played fe7 first just because I wouldn’t be able to have fun with lyn mode otherwise
also this is possibly the only game in the series where assassins are cool depending on how they fare in fe8 (every game past fe8 makes silencer weaker and weaker starting in fe9 where bosses can’t be silencer’d)
overall game is solid looks, sounds, plays nice and it’s definitely one of the best GBA games I have played in general because it’s actually fun to play unlike *cough cough* mario kart super circuit *cough* has its issues but I don’t care it’s an rpg-like game that isn’t megaten that I actually enjoyed playing in 2014+8
ok now fe1 akaneia… home… people may say this game aged like a fine pilk and that it’s one of the worst in the series but it’s surprisingly solid consistency is what this game has and it’s something the series needs more of also if you don’t like a map you can just warpskip it because you get the first warp staff in lena’s inventory and she joins turn 1 of chapter 3
this one somehow became my second favorite funny portraits, charming sprites, one player phase theme for 24 maps and it’s one of my favorites in the entire series, crusty, and fun don’t care about no “objectively worse” or “outdated” or “lacking modern quality of life” after this I’m returning to my SMT1 luck build anyway it’s kinda hard to rate these games because there’s one I definitely like the most, one I definitely like the least (“like” is a strong word) and one I think is painfully mediocre but the rest are very close to each other I think this one has a slight edge over many of the others so it’s around 2nd favorite
anyway this game has one big big big major cheese that no other game allows: savestates well fe4 allowed them but it’s fe4 why would I care this game may be pretty slow but savestates made this the fastest game as I could restart a turn if something went terribly wrong and it has 25 chapters with no gaidens and warp also nobody will call you an anus for using a guide to see how certain things go like what’s in the chests or what do you need for falchion or who do you need to bring to recruit all units this game actually made me get into a habit of checking who is recruitable every map in every game so I don’t have to restart halfway through due to not bringing sheeda
the balance is also wacky as hell you get 21 warp uses not counting hammerne (was that in this game I think it was) spread over three staves and you get at least three units who can use warp automatically because this game uses weapon level and not weapon ranks marth also goes from pretty crummy in chapter 1 to a god by like chapter 5-6 and the marth train never slows down give him your insane statboosters for even more fun especially boots which give +4 move marf be walkin move over social knight chumps I didn’t know at the time but with this unit balance I was experiencing awakening early
anyway despite all this cheese there was one point where savestates couldn’t save me I brought saji to chapter 10 but the .cia is absolute rubbish so there is no reset option, only savestates I was being lazy and making my save each turn on slot 1 and not using any of the other slots midway through a turn I tapped the bottom screen as a pause function and then accidentally saved when returning saji was within range of an archer with 9 health with his turn ended and on enemy phase he kept dying and I was so damn sure there was no way to save him I took a picture and had a whole jape memorial goin on even tried to have marth kill himself to restart the chapter but marth just killed all the enemies that attacked him instead the archer wouldn’t attack anyone other than saji UNTIL I found one spot where I put someone (forgot who) and suddenly the archer didn’t go for saji anymore saji was now a god damn hero (not the class hero) who died four times and rose five a very similar situation happened like 5-10 chapters later except this time it was at the beginning of the turn and it was three enemies with ~70 hit saji could not take all three hits but marth already soloed half the map and there was no way he’d be able to kill himself with his current power so I basically had to just keep trying for like forty minutes until one time he eventually lived would not recommend using fighters in fe1 please do not do that saji is a hero and had a permanent place on the team but that’s because 2/3 of my team spent their turn catching up to marth in hopes of getting one single kill since marf be walkin and all
to speak of the gameplay unit imbalance everywhere but nobody expects anything else so I think it is funny, enemies are mostly pretty weak, marth is god, statboosters break game, gameplay is actually pretty simple and fine, item management is aids and only fe6 had even close to this level of “inventory is full!”, and somehow the maps are the most consistently good out of any of the games I’ve played there are no god maps in this game but everything ranges from 7/10-8.5/10 and I sure as hell would rather take consistency in my maps over what some of the later games have you’re definitely gonna want a guide for a few things in the game (at the very least know that you need the starsphere and earthsphere to make starlight for falchion and you need someone to use starlight) but most games I come from are like that anyway so I really don’t care warp is also OP but I generally didn’t even find myself wanting to use it I warpskipped ch21, 24, and 25 21 was because the map looked pretty 7/10 and I wanted to warpskip at least once 24 was because I wanted to finish the game that day and it was like 02:00 and 25 was because uhh well that’s actually the one chapter I described in detail so let’s do it
endgame this is your map that’s right, an endgame map that DOESN’T suck rare, I know anyway I wasn’t paying attention so I brought riff and sheeda for old time’s sake and obviously my team consisted of units like saji and four bishops and jeigan and whoever so it’s not exactly like I had a strong team I tried to play it regularly so I saved at the beginning of every turn but the enemies on this stage OHKO like absolutely every one of my garbage units even the units I actually trained up like oguma and hardin and minerva could barely take on more than a couple at once to protect the rest of the wet paper towels now here’s the thing about this stage though: manaketes can’t be attacked with magic and almost all of my good units were mages mediuth has a manakete in front of him and it takes two turns to kill mediuth himself so by the point where I was almost fucked there wasn’t much I could do I had to have marth go into piles of enemies and take 2-3 damage per enemy because of his near max defense, luck, and speed and 30hp while I watched the rest of my army turn to ashes (you’re all diamonds…) one archer even missed the final 90% accurate hit that would have done marth in and I had to sit there for another enemy phase after this jeigan posed a query
(cool hand or whatever that is in the reflection) words of wisdom to live by I actually wanted to play this one legit but there was absolutely no chance of that happening after warpcheesing it, credits the game so obviously doesn’t expect you to keep everyone alive there were two knights with the exact same portrait and like half the “where are they now?” was just “he helps rebuilding villages” saji is busy cutting wood I really like this game
I cannot show a team because of the lack of a restart button there is no savefile and I am savestated on the credits and literally cannot ever access the save again just assume marth+saji+jeigan+3 warpers+starlight
I like the music probably 2nd or 3rd favorite out of these games magic also sounds very neat it is like weird old computer noises instead of the usual bzbzbzbzzztzt fwooooosh also I like how it physically looks though that goes for basically every game before tellius animations pretty cool
story is a very simple “hero stops evil dragon and evil mage guy” and so it ends up better than like almost every game I played and it’s consistent overall despite being the first game it’s quite solid and it has charm so I actually like it quite a bit it’s not exactly a pick up and play type game and it also lacks one version that has everything I would want (book 1 gets rid of multiple maps, characters, and replaces the music, shadow dragon DS has all the maps but uses book 1’s music and also every portrait looks oily and ass) but eh I’m fine with that also the thing about the units completely lacking uniqueness: I’m guessing fe11 has to have fixed that to some degree, right? because otherwise you get stuff like all the unit types that can’t promote and go into the dump or units that are objectively inferior to the others and have no purpose to exist like you got doga who can tank hits for like twenty minutes and fuck shit up good and his lack of a promotion makes him inferior to paladins and heroes and whoever else can take hits and deal back more damage and he sits on the bench for the rest of the journey here is my playtime and another one from the most impressive day wow
by the way I forgot to mention the dates is like that because my flashcard has a time bomb so I set it back like nine years a while ago so I wouldn’t have to keep doin it 9/15/2011 is 12/4/2021
fe13 awakening is next uhhhhhh well when I mentioned a very mediocre game up there this is that game it seems very focused on the characters and supports but when I heard supports is like social links I didn’t expect it to be this close as in a thing required to play the game well but that isn’t actually super well done I don’t care about a lot of social link characters outside of persona 3 because they’re just “eh” and their social links don’t really make me like them any more than before in awakening I felt a large portion of the cast was “eh” and I can’t even recall all of the non-children cast, much less the kids (to this day I’m still seeing characters I don’t know and finding out they are awakening kids) and the supports really just didn’t do anything to change that when watching the supports of fe6/7 I found myself liking characters I already enjoyed more and finding characters I didn’t care about before to be more noteworthy but when reading awakening supports I just don’t really care it’s weird because I don’t actually know if there is any real difference between the two but GBA supports are one of the reasons fe6 is my favorite overall (spoilies) while awakening supports are the reason I don’t really want to play it too much since awakening is supposed to be the start of “persona emblem” or whatever they call it I mentioned social supports first (I like social knights better) anyway as a game ehhhhh you know how one of the arguments as to why this should be someone’s first game is because “they won’t want to play this after playing fates” yeahhhh fates is a straight upgrade over this in nearly every way save for being able to recruit sophia and getting forseti oh well fates lacks henry too so that’s another one
also for some reason the UI in fates is worse than this???? you can’t see effective damage and I think there were a few other things like that as a bonus I heard nearly every place on the internet saying “play awakening on hard it’s so easy on normal it’s not even fun anymore” back when I was playing I would have said “do not listen to that” but after seeing some of a normal mode playthrough I have found there is literally no good difficulty in this game normal is babby mode, hard is pain, and lunatic… seriously I tried starting up lunatic with a guide just to witness the sorcererstomp for myself and even the guide was saying stuff like “if you don’t get to this minimum defense stat, reset” or “if the enemy goes into this position and not the other one, reset”
anyway game itself
gator the maps are pretty damn bad a lot of them are just a box or two connected boxes and with enemies dumped inside if you bait one, you bait them all, but none of my units other than chrobin could actually take on more than two enemies at most other than the maps generally not being fun there’s also the issue of hard having STRs in fe1-6, STRs are generally fine because the maps are damn big and they almost never reach you on the same turn because they come from an edge or corner of the map sometimes they can reach you in one turn like rutger in chapter 4 fe6 but the game also tells you in a cutscene a turn before that this will happen and usually it’s like that but in awakening, I recall only a handful of times where you are alerted to reinforcements before they happen, and the maps are also quite small so they become a genuine problem it goes “what? you’re just gonna spawn in some reinforcement peggies? gonna fuck me up the ass for the fifth time today? can’t let ‘em finish the chapter, no, gotta go kill lissa! yeah! good!” one map had STR wyverns and it took some nine attempts and two and a half hours to actually beat this stage there are first wyverns around the cliff that I need to kill on enemy phase because I can’t reach them, and then STR wyverns to the left that tear anyone nearby apart unless that someone is chrobin so I sent over chrobin and I win I come from megaten where you can lose three hours worth of progress due 100% to RNG by being mudo’d (well you can have null dark to prepare against it but let’s say it’s earlygame) so this idea of “random shit comes out of nowhere and kills you” is not new at all but when you get mudo’d it’s funny because you know with 100% certainty that was bullshit while STRs in awakening don’t feel like that and it just ends up irritating and no laughs are had because you’re gonna have to deal with the same damn thing again next try there was also a desert level where I felt like I could do nothing but pray to get out of it with everyone alive gregor and nowi die quick and even nino who I hired a couple chapters before wasn’t enough there almost certainly has to be something here that I should be doing but don’t know how to do but as a result of that awakening as a whole was miserable I finished an average of 1-2 chapters a day when spending the entire day playing as opposed to when I spent the entire day playing fe1 and beat half the game also this game absolutely favors using less units over more the stereotypical lunatic playthrough uses two units and there was one chapter I had a lot of trouble with so I just paired GATOR with chrom and lucina with tharja and I immediately had zero issue another time I just straight up only used GATOR and chrom and I won piss easy main reason I even found myself liking these games is I can use a full team of units instead of being restricted to the grody JRPG four-member party I didn’t want to grind because that was very annoying but after that one chapter with the weird tree branches where it’s hard to tell what you can even walk on and STR falcoknights from the middle and STR mercenaries? from the bottom I just grinded to hell and back and stomped the rest of the game
bosses had 30% hit for 4 damage and walmart died turn 2 I saw like 0% growths lunatic LTC or something like that and every unit demolished enemies so easily so I dunno what I am doing wrong
soon before I went to the grind though chapter 14 and henry now henry is henry
but here’s the thing: this is hard mode awakening so on his join chapter when fighting most enemies, he had a 50% chance to hit, 55% chance to crit, and would die in two hits that is some gud shit it’s like gambling with the hammer in fe6 with its 45 hit it’s great I even reclassed him into a berserker because that idea was funny as hell also ruin was such a weird ass weapon that I honestly assumed it was a PRF or something because 50% crit on that thing but nah you can buy em at shops just like how you can buy the dragon-slaying luna for like twenty bucks in fe7 I am glad I got to experience such a thing though a unit where a coin flip determines utter decimation of enemy or self a glass cannon but an awful one
the jape weapons are very good when you give freddy a log and he “pick a god and pray”s and I trained up gregor’s axe rank with a ladle because I forgot bronze weapons existed that was fun
also awakening’s story it’s pretty “eh” again but the ending I do not like that power of friendship stuff where the “risk” means nothing and you know it means nothing because it’s a JRPG with power of friendship stuff also the fact that it’s literal “I am a shadow, the true self…” come on man also in awakening reclassing and skills are probably at their worst because everyone can reclass to like 10 things and they have to go through every class to pick up the skills if you want to make a god while in fates you can just grind money DLC once and then go to a few castles and within 20 minutes your ophelia has 70% crit
cast is weird because as I said earlier I remember like 60% of the cast maybe but there are also some of my favorite units of certain classes across the series henry may be my favorite dark mage (even though he is in awakening where dark mages can use all magic, disgustan) and gregor is a very good mercenary cherche is a wyvern rider who can use AXES!!! and isn’t camilla or scarlet thank god and freddy is a jeigan who gives you a pebble in fates that I took to lategame in all my playthroughs so of course he is cool all jeigans are cool but he gives you a pebble because he knows it’s not safe (if chrom stepped on it and got debuffed -4 in both defenses who knows what could happen!) I struggled to put together a team though and right now I am far too lazy to take a picture of it so basically just know tharja+henry beat the entire game once grinded up they’re my team that’s good enough I got like three kids without support grinding and sadly I missed epic chad owain, one of the only memedons in the series I actually like also the avatar in this game is done not awfully which apparently cannot be said for many games in this series (fe7 being another one because mark barely even exists so he can’t be bad)
also awakening dlc was pretty neat I did not play all of it because come on but it’s dlc that isn’t completely bad
very cool
overall awakening is fine I suppose it’s absolutely better than pokemon and I’d take it over that any day but in this series of games worth playing there’s no reason to pick this one over those unless I really want to play it I actually quite like how the game’s story and cast feel in the first ~5-7 chapters when things are new but it’s a modern FE game that is mechanically just fates but worse and also 3d battles look like ass and soundtrack is a lot less good than the other games (though the grinding theme and the beach DLC theme and battle prep those are very good) it also has a sort of playful feeling to it at times that no other game had so I at least remember it somewhat fondly despite the pain I think I’ll go back one day but not any time soon
fe14 fates is next now I am positive I wrote at least some stuff when I was playing fates and there’s already a lot to say about it so this is where it gets long remember when the unfinished form was ~25-30k words? this next half is why (yeah this is only the middle of the games)
when starting out fates it was just really damn weird here’s six chapters, only one of which is actually decent, now pick a side to stick to for the entire rest of the god damn game based off of this very limited and also biased information it just feels like two sides saying “I HATE YOU (other side) I FUCKING HATE YOU” with way too little context both as to why this is and why I should care also anyone who picks to side with nohr legitimately based off the information given is either a japemaster or a moron and the game pretty much never stops trying to make nohr look like the “bad” choice even after the split those who do not live free also literally can’t make that choice because the physical copies of birthright and conquest force you into the route before you even know either cast to any degree I guess they just wanted you to pick based on ads or physical appearance or something? I dunno anyway I had absolutely no idea what to do here I only intended on playing one route and I would have to make that decision based on piss poor information I am assuming it wasn’t supposed to be an informed choice though SMT has you forming your opinion on alignment over 30-40 hours of gameplay before being locked in while this game has you playing for like two hours before your time is up so I really really hope this was not supposed to be a well thought out choice
by the way, this first playthrough was an uhhh it’s not a pure “ironman” because lol restart if GATOR dies nor is it an impure ironman because I was playing like five chapters per day basically the way I’d do it is that if someone dies I don’t give a damn about resetting I allow resets outside of chapters in case I buy something stupid and realize “no I don’t want four heart seals” and also on the first turn of a chapter before enemy phase if I forgot something and realize “wait a minute”
I thought revelation would be one of the cool kinds of neutral (too lazy to type em out go find some guy’s 200000 word essay on SMT alignments) and based on what I saw it definitely wasn’t so I went conquest no expectations for the story past this point especially when ch6 birthright is “in the white light” and ch6 conquest is “embrace the dark” finished ch6 in all three routes and honestly it feels like revelation’s ch6 is the one that actually would have been chosed the intention of mending the two sides was clearly always there and revelation is just doing it immediately anyway though none of that it’s conquest time nomaru modo scrub because I learned from awakening hard gator after about two hours this knife-throwing maid is much better than another knife-throwing maid we all know about alright wait hold on turns out I DIDN’T detail every chapter of conquest either so we’re starting with chapter 10, the one people call “best chapter in the series”!
ch10: unhappy reunion
pretty damn wacky is it the best chapter? lol I dunno because not enough games but it’s a good one for sure definitely best in 3ds though because the only one I didn’t play is gaiden and there are no words to describe those maps waves of reinforcements every turn and arthur missing all his hits because lol axeuracy this chapter was actually tough while being fair and fun unlike literally any awakening chapter nyx was on the fire orb, mozu and niles on the ballistas since I know the power of having a promoted stomper I just slapped a master seal on effie and gave her horse so I sent her and arthur off to one side while our new guys camilla and beruka (not severa because lol) go to the other I accidentally left nyx in the hit range of an axe guy with 60% hit chance but 2RN so die not that I expected her not to die but more that I’ve missed my fair share of 90-95s in fe1 and this reminded me 2RN existed best moment was on turn 10 after nyx got bonked when I realized “oh shit I’m on turn 10” everyone had low health and since nyx died there were three axe guys one turn away from the defend spot gator and camilla couldn’t reach so beruka killed one but that aint much better obviously they’d go directly for the spot so they all need to die but aint nobody there to do it but then I realized elise had rescue (which I almost left behind for a vulnerary lmao) and that was when I first experienced the wonders of actually using all available resources camilla killed one guy and azura sang as we won after this I used the dragon vein point on the arena and the notification was annoying as hell so I sent camilla to get rid of that shit because she never dies and then she missed an 85 and immediately got berserker crit’d they wouldn’t let me get rid of the notification and it was so annoying seeing one single notification on the bottom screen though lol the speed and context to this event was so damn funny turns out the fates arena doesn’t actually have any punishment at all for losing unless you count losing a single infinitely and easily farmable resource as a punishment but lol I reset and never touched that shit for the rest of the playthrough because I just wanted the notification gone man I aint gonna lose my basically a jeigan for a reason like that I was expecting to not care about the conquest cast at all but we got meido-san and mista merika and definitely-not-severa and scummy archer man honestly it’s pretty decent it would be a shame if they died and perhaps this risk is what made me actually give an ass about half of these characters also generic meidos and shrine maidens and whoever the hells? named bosses with unique portraits you can actually recruit? honestly wished I realized capture existed before birthright because I'd have made a whole team of those guys
mini bits: in chapter 14 I forgot effie was on a horse so I sent her against a beastkiller guy to save a poorly placed silas lol died immediately directly after this charlotte died because I didn’t think about the 70% accurate miss that is axes stupidly enough silas died three chapters later anyway so rip horses I didn’t realize the mage was a mage because somehow I still couldn’t recognize the sprite after finishing half the game and I didn’t check first game over was on chapter 15 I didn’t detail how and because it’s chapter 15 I really truly do not know how but that’s when it was ch17 was easy no deaths and xander held off the entire bottom area with vulneraries ch19 is utter garbage and pretty much the start of a streak of pain in the ass maps literally just slapped a beastkiller on benny and paired him up with severa and gator with gunter ch20 is one of those ones where first time around it’s awful and once you find out how it works it’s just tolerable conceptually it’s cool but when you play it absolutely not second and third and fourth game over was here after gator got blown into mages and whatever else like that one time I used a dragon vein and instead made the mages come to me also for a small funny an enemy hit a 6% on the fourth attempt it didn’t change anything but it was funny I do not like this level man is not gud two ass maps in a row now chapter 21 lol chapter 21 is a pretty wacky idea that makes you escape with all units alive and all the guys do 20% of your hp with their passive plus 30-35 damage which sounds like a gargantuan pain in the ass benny+camilla and dragonstone+ GATOR+gunter though they can't actually take damage because they have JUST enough defense with the tonics and the poison passive can't kill as I learned so I spent the entire damn thing slowly moving through waves of these bastards with 1hp for like half an hour lol anyway after getting what I believe is stuck I found out you can just use flyers to beat it in like five minutes so I did and won I suppose you can count this as my 5th game over to spare GATOR from his persona 2: eternal punishment he gave his life to let benny and camilla escape this map is pretty ass too so that’s three after this I was greeted with a cutscene that made me realize why people say fates story sucks ass BUT when GATOR yelled I thought "oh shit that's liquid innit?" and yeah it is hello, brother! it’s been too long! (keep reading he’s not the only snake in fates) chapter 22’s gimmick is having your team split into two but guess what: I’m obviously going to be pairing up my units before starting each chapter already, and this gimmick is wholly destroyed by just doing that, so I actually did it without thinking and accidentally ruined this stage’s gimmick apparently sakura was supposed to do something but that never happened and I just stomped the left half of the stage and even had enough free time to defeat sakura and take her shit before seizing chapter 23 though oh no on turn one there are four reinforcements that take three of my units with their 75% accuracy to kill one and there’s already some 5-6 enemies at the top that are the same way and suddenly like three of my guys are dead so I just rush to ferry GATOR up in hopes he can finish this chapter before anything else bad happens he just gets stuck in a loop of 70% missing then runs out of vulneraries and dies fifth game over I actually saw the enemies playing defensively for once in this chapter which was neat and it seems this one was going to take a while I promoted and heart sealed anyone who could become a flier and had like 4-5 fliers to maybe do something here flew everyone over and then getting up the stairs was a massive gangbang beruka died when I missed a hit on a mage and then izana died, his final wish being to “keep the party going forever” I am glad I got to have such a fuckin cool guy in my party man and I chose to honor this wish and neba gibbu appu fucked takumi up and that was the end of chapter 23 after that I went to the hot spring in his memory and all the gray-haired survivors were in there for what was, unknowingly, many of their last baths
chapter 24: hinoka the gimmick of this chapter is that the dragon veins halve the movement of fliers/non-fliers and double the movement of non-fliers/fliers depending on who uses it I went in with fifteen units and left with seven camilla, benny, severa, xander, shura, meido-san, niles, and lazlom died gator went home to an empty house that day
past that point my viable offensive units were GATOR and leo azura was still alive and peri had shelter so double dancing was an option jakob and elise also lived and could use staves thankfully all dead unit items went to the convoy and this was mostly important for staves I was one chapter away from getting new meido-san so I allowed myself to go to before awakening since at this point I’m already fucked I basically discarded the rules and made it objective:survive in conquest DLC doesn’t give exp and I’m pretty sure not gold either so this was purely to be able to get my moral support meido who could give me a fighting chance also I got hit by a 2% for 0 damage in the before awakening dlc is that a new record freddy’s pebble here gave debuffs that helped a decent bit for the hard times anyway chapter 25 it’s literally just a starter pokemon battle next chapter 26 this is the last chapter I played legit after I beat this one I tried 27 and it wasn’t going well and endgame is straight up not happening with this team especially since you can’t save in between in ch26 I had three stave users who I could tonic up and they could use freeze and entrap and enfeeble and all this chapter had me glad I didn’t want to use peri because she looked like a cotton candy emo because without double dancing I would not have made it this chapter took maybe four attempts because I had to both decide what I wanted to do and then how to make use of what I had first two attempts for some reason I tried to train up arthur and keaton on the enemies??? they didn’t die but obviously that was utterly worthless so third time I just went to the right only and tried to freeze all the mages so I could safely take out that room elise and jakob had garbage accuracy and that one went into the trash fourth time I just double danced flora and she had 95% accuracy so all three freezes hit and that room was done after that I basically just got rid of those berserkers by baiting them just out of range and killing them then backing up slightly entrapped one berserker who was too close and then later used it on hans to kill him after that it was just iago and then we were done now more cutscenes and lol garon is a slime tried and failed so I went looking to see what I can do here and it turns out there is a my castle known as “farmer’s castle” I recruited a little midori packed full of power and paired GATOR up with her gave her a tree branch and she slayed gods almost got to the end normally but oh well
conquest was nice but the maps in lategame are some dubious shit and I feel it stopped being a great experience past chapter 18 you get a slew of crusty maps like kitsune genocide and fuga’s wild ride and stairway to heaven and pair up paradise and great wall of hoshido and peggy pegging and starter pokemon battle chapter 26 I liked and I can’t really say for 27/endgame but not being able to save in the middle is a sin I had to think my view of those maps over for like six weeks before finally thinking of most of them as “decent enough” also best battle prep theme of the three this run was such a shitshow that despite conquest not being my favorite game this is definitely my favorite run now after playing conquest I knew that wasn’t enough the game was like 22 chapters total because nobody in their right mind would call prologue-6 full legitimate chapters when you get maps like this I chose to go for rev after that I chose to go for birthright
gator birthright is cool because you can do whatever the hell you want and it works apparently this is also doable in conquest but I’m not god so for me birthright is where you can do that who cares about dumping 2k on a heart seal or forging ROFLstomper ultimax if the game gives you so much crap to sell story is also terrible but hey you get a bunch of units and money and reclassing is actually acceptable here so I aint complaining also it was here I found out two things about my castle: I can run, and I can look in first person haha cowe pretty cool
birthright is supposed to be extremely easy but it was only slightly easier than conquest normal really I didn’t deploy ryoma until ~ch20 so probably that’s why not saying it was hard but other than the AI being dumb as bricks here compared to conquest (why do they suddenly attack for 0 damage) it was pretty much just conquest but maps aren’t as good and potential for japery is higher there is one jape that cannot be done though: sakura so little babby sakura sucks, right? plays babby game, healer that sucks earlygame healer in a game where even damn falcoknights use staves and your kinda jeigan uses staves I used her anyway because lol but this is the one route in which you can’t reliably get a shining bow I raised her up all the way until finding that out why they do that they even gave her a unique priestess costume I’m pretty sure and yet this is what they did GATOR also got screwed over completely by this but that didn’t matter because the game isn’t particularly tough also charming shit unit of the game: hana when I first saw hana in the armory and she welcome welcome'd me to katanas on sale I knew I had to take her in 9 strength with a 65% growth, 11 speed plus a 75% growth, 20 hp with a 35% growth, 6 defense with a 20% growth (-1 because using katana), what's there to say? memedon brought her to every map and she was like a 1-range archer always did enough so anyone else could come in and pick up a kill, but always ALMOST to the point of defeating an enemy her defenses are laughable and she could only ever take one hit if an enemy doubles her somehow despite her speed, she can't fight and there is no rescue in fates, the closest you have is shelter which is only on like one single unit in the entire birthright if you don’t reclass (silas, the guy who is definitely a person who exists and also happens to be your friend) this is no GBA where you can have a moron go out and kill an enemy then survive with 3HP to be rescued, oh no no no this is fire emblem fates hana got to level 20 and is a swordmaster now she has recieved nearly every defensive and offensive stat booster to keep up throughout the game and she's still almost good the enemy defenses get better, but her defense and her weapons don't and it's very, very late in the game when I realize: she has vantage meaning she will attack first on enemy phase, meaning if within the range of only one enemy, she actually CAN survive and most likely will this fatal error has resulted in a hana who is ever fated to realize the struggles of an archer, always to double but never to kill, finishing blow snatched away by a cavalier or mage like a vulture…
I also wanted to pay tribute to midori by making another midori kaze+azura, S support, done buuuuuut kaze got birthright’d killed off in a cutscene for absolutely no good reason whatsoever just gone along with midori
also lol ch16 reused the exact same already bad plot thing as conquest absolutely no shame dishgrashefur
ch17 is just that one conquest chapter but worse and they even kill off moral support meido for no damn reason (if she killed herself here why not in conquest or revelation) another one bites the dust it’s also weird how they die and then there’s almost no mention saizo said absolutely nothing when kaze died and meido-san was sad about flora’s death for like fifteen minutes and that’s it lilith’s death is stupid both story-wise and mechanically because she’s still in the castle and does the exact same thing, she’s just a ghost now pray tell, if you are a ghost, how do you still shit gold bars?
ch18 azura accidentally killed a faceless when I went for a flyskip because they were that weak and ch21 was downright awful lava stage the gimmick is using a dragon vein will cause either a path to open or lava to flood the area and you can tell which is which by the orb but I aint gonna notice that the first time so this was just painful when I got to the second floor I didn’t even touch a dragon vein yet the lava spawned anyway 51 turns and used up almost all my staves ch22 was the one time nohr was actually given sympathy and it was showing how it was always dark and dangerous with scarce resources and everyone was miserable apparently there was supposed to be a thing where nohr is dark all the time and can’t grow vegetation well which is why it’s economically poor and the people there are corrupt and shitty and hoshido is supposed to be bright and prosperous which is why they are all “honorable samurai” type but I don’t actually recall this concept being mentioned within the game and upon hearing it I immediately understood why a lot of the stuff that was happening happened so I have no idea if I missed that line or if they only put it in supports or something for some reason revelation decides to do away with this concept entirely and instead making the two sides fighting because loldarkdragon
anyway anyway ch26 both elise AND xander die, and for what purpose? I have heard that apparently xander would have just been slicing at air because corrin is too far away (I don’t really remember I was too focused on these damn deaths everywhere) and the reason ryoma died was because garon literally ordered it but the reason xander died is because… uhh… he wanted to????? endgame: midoriko’d endgame because it once again does not look like something I want to play and thus, with a skip, a dance, and a comical critical hit, midoriko once again slayed the grand dragon with the help of the tree branch... both routes kinda fell off after ~chapter 20 honestly most of the maps past that point I had to convince myself are decent enough if I remembered them at all it’s kinda problematic because the game basically starts at chapter 7 so that’s maybe 12-13 chapters I like and the rest I just tolerate birthright’s lategame was more tolerable by far but it’s still not something I would want to do frequently and it’ll definitely impact how replayable I find these games there’s a ton of japery to do and I like that about it but I’d be dreading lategame every playthrough these still feel like games I’d come back to semi-frequently but those lategame ones aint great
also supports again shouldn’t have done it man there’s so damn many (I counted but I dunno which numbers are what so I can’t really include it) and they are cronkey god knows how many character traits I’d end up missing because I don’t want to watch like fifteen arthur supports in elibe I can just watch the ~5 short supports per character and now I know everything it also goes in a pretty similar way with persona characters don’t have social links with everyone, just the MC it’s not an unmanageable thing if you see a character’s social link, you’ve seen everything there is to see I like me elibes man alright now I don’t want to sift through the remaining 30000 words of shit I made to find anything else about birthright so basically it’s nice, it’s fine, japery to the moon but story is ass and will kill your kaze also lategame maps are eh music is nice though I like other game musics better generally also with fates in general man those 3d models in the rooms when you gain support points with someone jesus christ I wish I did not have to see those
now it’s the one you have all been waiting for (like two people): rev fire emblem fates: revelation for the nintendo 3ds released for twenty bucks on the nintendo eshop please don’t make me do it I have to do it? revelation… revelation is a game that you can play with your friends yes certainly I uhhh I have tried my hardest to be the best holy and loving neutral party but this game this game… isn’t good. I have seen what you said about it in this thread and I have heard your opinion of the game, aeon of the aeon arcana but but this game it’s a game that can be played with your friends it’s a golden route, yes yes ummm I made it through the entirety of endless eight twice I saw the entirety of watamote I saw all of to love ru: darkness I saw all of eromanga sensei in one sitting I beat pokemon X three times I spent 900 hours hatching eggs in pokemon alpha sapphire I beat pokemon sun, then moon, then ultra sun all within around the span of a year I played mother 3 five times despite knowing the story very well after the second I beat persona 5 but rev? rev was too much, man rev is SHIT
(law theme noises) ch1: footsteps of fate(s) seventy hours of fates later, I have reached revelation the “neutral route”, the “golden route”, a route made likely to siphon cash directly from the wallets of the indecisive, fire emblem fates: revelation this game starts off by spoiling major plot points from the other two routes as well as imposing its own idiocy upon the already poor stories of the other two already the first map is godawful dead ends and japes, it’s almost fog of war except the thracia type, you get four units consisting of healer/debuffer servant, dancer, GATOR, and gunter once you make it through, you get to play that one birthright map except bad and from the bottom, and upon the completion of this, you get your first taste of rev’s balancing…
ok they put ads on my video I did not do that anyway if you thought that sucked, there’s more: fuga’s back, and he’s lookin for some fun you now have to complete a babby mode fuga’s wild ride as your third real map in the game along with your comically bad new units essentially this is a GATORstomp, and that’s what this entire playthrough consisted of punished, “capitalismus” GATOR, a man forced to play revelation, traversing the lands with his shitty luck build with hopes of making riches selling the gold bars he generates for more than 300 bucks a pop oh, and you thought it ends here? no, no! it keeps going! the ride never ends! utterly reprehensible this map is a common contender for the worst map in the entire series you’ve heard of “best chapter ever” conquest ch10, now how about “worst chapter ever” revelation ch11? statboosters and promotion items everywhere, there are eleven of them in this one stage, and you have to break every damn bit of snow to find each of them this chapter took me seventy-three turns and my reward was izana’s comedic death seriously I didn’t even realize he wasn’t joking until they started being all sad 11 is that one birthright ninja map, objective route, but here’s the thing: in birthright you start to the left, and in here you start in the middle so you have to actually go back to finish routing this map and since it’s filled with traps with long ass damage animations, yeah… fun they also made saizo+orochi+reina NPCs just to make sure you definitely won’t enjoy this chapter now ch12 this is commonly considered one of the most laughable chapters in the series because not only is its gimmick godawful, it completely fails at making you actually want to tolerate it by giving you reina in the previous chapter who moves eight and can allow you to reach flora on turn one if you tolerate the gimmick you have to sit on the boats until turn 6 the rewards for tolerating this gimmick is one chapter of EXP, a basic thunder tome, and a master seal you might say “wait hold on master seal???? is gud!” and I thought that too, so I sent GATOR down with subaki to kill the guy who had it and then killed flora in one turn I would say “what were they thinking????” but perhaps they weren’t ch13 is… weird? it has a gimmick that actually isn’t godawful BUT it’s on a kill boss map so whyyyy exactly did they do this? who knows? this map is even unique which makes it stranger that they decided to make it kill boss just flyskipped it because I’m not dealing with that shit they just gave me camilla a chapter after giving me reina why would I even bother anymore ch14 it’s conquest chapter 10! and they turned it into a rout map! yeeahhhhh!!!! also elise joins and is shit because revbalance ch15 it’s that one chapter from both conquest and birthright except even easier and with two recruitable units that make you laugh when you compare their stats ch16 you must be shitting me right please cut me some slack man I just wanted to give this game a chance why you do game why you do ch17 let’s remove the option to save also SHITTER SQUAD!!!!!!! hello units that die in one hit and do three damage back also let’s do the entire plot of the other two games condensed into 10 chapters that’ll get em good yeah yep ch18 scarlet dies and hmmm I wonder who just clearly admitted to knowing what happened and definitely won’t become a plot point soon this chapter is ehhh I don’t care about it but it’s not the worst thing I ever laid my eyes upon this is also the chapter where I ditched my team for a GATORstomp ch19 is just that one conquest one except weird not an amazing chapter in either route but again, not the worst ever ch20 a weird thing where you can just turtle for a few turns, kill all the kinshis, then flyskip have we not learned from past chapters, mister revelation? ch21 a baffling gimmick that demotes and promotes depending on the area …but it only affects enemies so what's the point? why should I give a shit that the fighter turned into a warrior? do you want me to say "woah bro, cool unit you got there! nice promo!"??? it's chapter 21! TWENTY-ONE! regardless of whether it's a fighter or a warrior, in about five seconds it's not breathing! also boss suicided against GATOR I didn’t expect him to move but he did and then I won ch22 by this point I just chose to midoristomp I couldn’t be assed to play this legitimately anymore but I have an option to cheese and so I shall ch23 I could have sworn this was ch20 but nope it’s just like well the way anyone would play it (turtle+flyskip) is functionally the same but you get to kill dead scarlet if you want I guess that’s something wacky ch24 hrgnnnn steauhlllthhhhhh the thing is, the reason stealth games work is because they aren’t turn based this is just really weird this is like putting mayonnaise on pizza it’s weird enough to note but not outright vile it’s really damn easy especially if you’re all bootsed up and in this chapter less is more pretty sure GATOR can ORKO boss mom but I forgot anyway this was just really strange and didn’t work well ch25 this chapter is bad this chapter makes me mad it just neeeeever stops it makes no attempt to make you not feel like it’s wasting your time but you have to complete it to beat the game no warp, just a rout map in disguise with the longest animations every god damn turn I thought ch11 was bad because it’s slow as balls due to how it plays but you can at least finish it quickly if you genuinely don’t care about the items but this is bad because regardless of how you play it’s gonna take a long, long time sitting through all that crap even with midoristomp and new farmer’s castle niles stomp this still took 30+ minutes so god knows how long it’d be without and I eventually had to straight up change settings to skip all enemy actions because it was so bad ch26/27 let’s ruin gunter’s character! also the map in ch26 and 27 is pretty much the same thing it’s in the same location sure but it’s just two very quick and easy chapters followed by: endgame once again, can’t save in between you’re fighting evil dark dragon honestly out of the final bosses this one seems pretty nice actually but I wouldn’t know because I just stomped attack the hands then the head like typical game fashion so your guys are all actually doing stuff instead of sitting back and watching the ORKO
I went through all of it thinking it would get better there’s no way it’s all shit, right? it’s all shit. there’s no other way to say it it’s just bad
revelation was bad, man dangerously bad it almost made me stop wanting to play the rest of the series and just make the damn post only thing that saved me was wanting to return to elibe, seeing a webpage with the alternate routes and true ending of fe6, and immediately regaining interest and spending a full day thinking out a team and how I wanted to do things and checking out a couple maps and remembering the series isn’t like this and rev is an exception
all in all revelation is absolutely the worst game I have played in this series by far not only is it horrid to play and see, but it’s also inferior to the other two routes which are LITERALLY IN THE SAME GAME so there is zero reason to touch this outside of whatever the hell JRPG grinding or PvP only revelation can be a game so bad it’s outclassed by its own game in almost every single way hell, I’d argue it’s the worst game on the 3ds because if you pick up a 3ds pokemon game you know damn well what you’re gonna get but in rev it’s surrounded by two completely fine and fun games to mislead you into thinking the next 30 hours of your life will be enjoyable I know I jape about how 15.5 is ass and all but I at least had mild enjoyment in 15.5 when we played it compared to rev where the very first map made me go “aw hell nah” and I played the entire birthright route just so I wouldn’t have to keep going with rev
in 2023, revelation will become impossible to purchase well, that is, outside of the special edition which currently goes for over $500 cartridge-only also for 3ds in general the gaidens/paralogues/sidequests/whatever most of em are locked to kids and as a result I barely saw em awakening has enough chapters to make up for it but fates certainly doesn’t with its 27+1-7 chapters and typically only three paralogues I got per route (mozu, kana, shigure) I dunno why they kept going with the kids thing and why almost every paralogue had to be kids but I barely saw em
route split also felt like a bad thing to have instead of making one good game they made “the one with the good gameplay”, “the easy one”, and “the one nobody likes” and as a result every game feels incomplete in some way the whole “pokemon” comparison doesn’t even work here because they were trying to make like 2.5 games while the difference between two pokemon games is usually like three pokemon and sometimes a character or two and that’s it they literally tried to make two and a half games and have it be one game and you can see the consequences of this story’s all over the place, doesn’t feel like it has enough chapters, there’s a bunch of weird things that just seem out of place like the deaths you even get stuff like hinoka where she feels out of place and you find out she wasn’t part of the original script jokerthebutler.tumblr.com/post/134931464083/another-interesting-bit-of-fates-plot-and-the fates kinda just feels like wasted potential it plays nice, looks fine, sounds nice, and then it feels like they rushed it out for whatever reason now we’re just imagining what could have been (this is a real fire emblem:if) you get weird stuff like how one country is portrayed as good and one is evil but then not a whole lot of attempts to show why and there’s stuff about the countries themselves like the light and dark thing you don’t actually see outside of the (far too many) supports hell we don’t even know where this game takes place there’s weird stuff about corruption and some “concubine wars” thing in the nohrian government that you rarely hear about and all sorts of stuff that makes the world more fleshed out that you will never find unless you actively search it out when it comes to the story and cast I honestly feel if you just cut out anything related to valla such as evil dragon+corrin+azura+whatever other story-ruining things there were that I forgot about that it would significantly be improved just make it hoshido vs nohr and ryoma/xander are the lords make them play like sigurd I don’t care it would be so much simpler and work so much better just country vs country, no dark dragon, no familial disputes, just war use the time wasted on the other crap to add to each country so both routes are interesting to experience also there’s one idea I heard before I liked remember how corrin is supposed to be pacifist and be “injuring” everyone in conquest and he’s portrayed as naive and his attempts aren’t realistic that, but elise a little princess troubadour lord who just wants to stop all the fighting and she's naive because she's god damn twelve it sounds funny and actually interesting because you have a lord that ISN'T a sword-using 16 year old that can snap the game in two/loses to chapter 1 bandits and you can actually try the pacifist angle without looking like a fucking donut there are so many things you could do to make fates not be like that but it do be like dat doe
anyway fates in general conquest/birthright good revelation genuinely bad to the point where it’s not even funny anymore wasn’t able to try out heirs of fates but I heard is gud
I encourage you to visit my three houses: wait all these codes are the same ok I encourage you to visit my house, whichever one this is: 12987-16307-16108-94398
now fe4: genealogy of the holy war this is another game I am not sure how to feel about basically the opposite of fates: it plays pretty ass but the story and cast absolutely makes going through this game worth it
for some reason I apparently just did not detail prologue and chapter 1 at all in prologue I saw how the bandits did against my christmas cavvies and wondered “man how the hell do I do this” and then I saw how sigurd did against them and lmao that is literally all there is to say about it
chapter 1 awwwww shit recruiting ayra is awful and she chased my units around for like forty minutes forgot nihil existed because that aint in the 3ds games so I just had midir go against her in hopes he’d not die because he can’t attack her back also getting dew and aideen to not die is awful as well they just sat in trees for half an hour dodging hits or making me restart from the previous turn until sigurd got there and killed all the bandits also forest of pain feels like a rev gimmick I also got japed thinking my castle would be fucked and arden would die but nah man is just cutscene within gameplay which is actually pretty neat
ch2 is weird and it takes a long ass time because you gotta seize a castle across the entire map from the final one and you have to go all the way around I just slapped my guys close enough and they dealt with the reinforcements enough so sigurd could get the rest also alec got sleeping then sylvia got sleeped and lewyn took some twenty minutes to catch up with the rest of the group sent erin to deal with the ballistas (hahaha save every turn) and the rest was pretty easy also beowulf suicided against sigurd oooops that was not supposed to happen! big and slow chapter though like every other I remember fondly
none of these chapters are very arden-friendly and this is one thing I gotta say: skills in this game are generally not bad but there’s two major offenders pursuit and pavise pavise is supposed to be level% but we all know that shit’s 50% minimum there is no way it could activate so much with a 20% chance and it blocks ALL DAMAGE and pursuit makes good units great and crummy units awful you get the top ~10 units and then everyone else is competing for the singular missable pursuit band that I only knew existed because of arden jokes I gave pursuit band to koish at the end of chapter 3 because ethlyn passes it down to leaf but honestly that makes gen 1’s bad units even worse for two full chapters they just warm the bench and I wanted to use arden but by that time it was far too late at least his spiritual successor, hannibal, is an RNGod in the arena who dishes out those 40% hits and dodges them 80% enemy attacks
chapter 3 this one well bottom is super easy, top is a pain in the ass on the bottom, it’s just some guys who you can sigurd and when eldigan’s army comes out just put quan nearby in a tree with javelin and their entire army dies in two enemy phases quan could almost kill eldigan but I just had lachesis talk and I got the earth sword which went to erin to turn her into a demigod and one-woman army top is awful pirates everywhere and you have to keep a bow user, healer, and very not good mage alive well tailtiu is a bad unit but she is very cool thunder mage it’s just that since it’s genealogy I can’t really make any use of her compared to other games where raising up shitters is fine also I got many blank level ups throughout gen 1 but this chapter had the most: five blank level ups finn, ethlyn, lachesis, claude, and sylvia thank god for that blank level up rerolling in GBA so I can get my +1 res on niime like god unintended also I had to replay the last few turns of this some 3-4 times to get all the right crap on ethlyn and finn had to make arden walk all the damn way down to sell the leg ring so ethlyn can get it arden got fucked over so bad when I play this again in like a damn decade I’ll come back for you buddy you’ll get pursuit AND leg AND knight AND speed ring and be a pavise god general
in chapter 4 quan, finn, and ethlyn leave and hoooo boy that is not fun quan was pretty much equal to sigurd, finn literally just promoted, and ethlyn was my best healer because lachesis didn’t promote due to being too damn weak to actually kill anything and get EXP
when sending erin to the arena to kill everything she faced off an axe user with 4 hit and she did some 3 damage each hit so I pissed off and when I returned fe1 best player phase theme was playing very nice moment this is the one game that remembered thank you genealogy
this chapter is weird because there’s a part where you’re supposed to be moving everyone down and like 10 turns of gameplay cutscene where you watch a bunch of peggies fucking die and imagine the riders falling to their deaths because that’s what is happening when you shoot peggy with arrow and it is terrible I just left sigurd up there because I learned from ch2 and he slowly killed all reinforcement peggies and then I got forseti and lewyn immediately became the best unit in gen 1
now chapter 5 this is the first time I actually knew what was going on past a very basic sense getting tyrfing from byron is some of the coolest shit how they put him in the best class in the game but make him all weak and shitty so you have to go out of your way to rush over there and there’s the desert section where quan and ethlyn are finally back with babby altena then a few minutes later you’re seeing them get absolutely fucking torn apart by horseslayer wyverns and babby is taken away the entire struggle of getting through the desert chapter with the meteor mages is a pain in the ass but somehow it worked for me past this point I pretty much just had lewyn forseti the final guy and his entire army ah ah ah ah’d and it was time for the final moment this entire chapter has actual atmosphere that no other game managed to match up to when my units started telepathically going into relationships the conversations made it very clear things were not normal and then once you talk to the castle lady, you get a whole cutscene with arvis but you know that shit aint right and your whole army is there being congratulated then spaghetti and meatballs rain from the sky and everyone is fucking dying and sigurd gets valflamed I can’t believe arden is fuckin dead man first he’s mocked, then his hope (pursuit band) of being good is taken away, then he has to walk across half the map to sell his last chance at viability, he sits in the castle, and now he’s fucking dead arden… had a hard life.
seriously though holy shit no other game I have played, know, or even heard of has the balls to kill off your entire god damn army like that and the next thing you see is ~15 years into the future
ch6 this is a weird one you start out with seliph and two memedon friends and eventually get more and more units as the chapter goes on there is a clear imbalance between who you get seliph has the godly 100 kills silver sword and, with the paragon band, can be thrown at armies he wouldn’t be able to take on and by the end of it he’s leveled up so much that he makes it happen anyway oifey is your jeigan and does well memedons have like 6 skills each and kill everything or at least do a ton of damage fee is erin again and then you get arthur, lester, tristan, and johavalier (if you recruited him) they are not good but that aint gonna stop me now I don't like grinding, I don't like trying to make instant gods (just add water), but what I do like is funny, and that's what this is the boss has no ranged weapons and ass hit rates with his axe so I spent sixty turns breaking their weapons against him did it pay off? ehhhh they were all solid now but they weren’t really necessary arthur did well enough but you don’t really need him in most cases tristan killed things decently enough but his peak moment was using the sleep edge on hannibal and critting because he crits so damn much (no hannibal didn’t die but it was almost bad) lester with the brave bow kills anything BUT he isn’t super bulky and he only has 2-range so eh why bother in gen one any of these three guys would be top 10 or even top 5 but in gen 2 you don’t really need em remember that thing about benching most genwunners without pursuit? well here comes gen 2 where pursuit won’t even save you not even pursuit AND a horse can necessarily save you this isn’t even because gen 2 units suck, it’s that they’re ALL too damn good so now the best ones absolutely obliterate everything in their paths and nobody else is even needed and sometimes is even a liability if used by ch10 almost every unit was just there for show and I moved them because it was normal but deep inside I knew it was a futile effort anyway ch7 seliph promoted after the arena accidentally didn’t put patty in the one spot they won’t go for her and lost like 50 minutes also I don’t remember when but I noted in this chapter that a bandit dodged a 98 yeah this chapter basically consisted of throwing julia at armies and watching them melt though also leaf at the bottom struggling to survive like it’s fe5 all over again
ch8 everything I said here was about how much I hate the arena so I’ll go look at the map and try to remember what happened oh this is the forCEDi map nothing else needs to be ced here so I’ll go talk about how much I hate the arena silver blade swordmaster that is all you thought gen 1 volcanal baron was bad? try harder wait wait one more thing leaf was getting adept and crits on every damn wyvern and the boss went up to him and said “I pity you… for this is where you die!” and then threw a 28 hit javelin that would have done 3 damage and immediately died ok wait wait wait I forgot another thing another just one more when I began ch8 and they were talking about two halves of the thracian peninsula, one in the north a prosperous land blessed with great land and pastures, and the other in the south, a wasteland with few resources and poverty abound those in the south are constantly attacking the north but don't have the manpower to win and they have the reputation of being villanous and ravenous sound familiar? yeah, it's extremely close to what fates tried to do but failed at replace "north" with "hoshido", "south" with "nohr", and bam, it's the whole fates thing or well it was before the whole "dragon is making everyone fight guys! that's the only reason they're doing it!!!" that revelation shat out as far as I know fe5 is literally all about the impoverished thracia and is extremely good at portraying the idea so jugdral straight up did one of the praised hidden concepts of fates significantly better and far more clear than it did 15-20 years earlier in fact jugdral even made an entire damn game to explore that idea if I’m understanding the premise of fe5 correctly fates got fucked over hard by whoever made it turn out like this man poor fates
ch9 shitton of villages to the left, hannibal in the middle, altena to the right I spent a ton of time trying to find how to make altena not die until realizing I could just like put leaf outside of her range and then talk to her with his 12 move after that travant comes up so I try to yewfelle him haha (still forgot nihil existed)
please forgive the 20 seconds of uncut video before and after this 10 second long clip recruiting hannibal was a pain only because I sent arthur and tristan along with seliph when I should have just sent seliph it became trying to make them not die with the slow ass trees movement and that was not something that went well so it took many an attempt eventually it worked and I had lester stand in front of the castle and hannibal just shimmied around for ten turns until cairpre got over there after that I had cairpre warp everyone for glorious EXP and sent leaf and seliph down to absolutely decimate the ballista army what I didn’t know is: wyvern haha four arrows of wyvern towards every single castle so I just had to leave shanan/ayra/whoever on top while everyone else ran the hell away and tornado leaf and forCEDi stomped do you want to see one single enemy phase from this moment? yes you do I know you do after this I just left animations off and thankfully so because the little map animations are so cool they don’t take as long but they still have animation to them and every weapon even has a tiny little unique sprite I checked with altena and all four of the weapons she had were physically different when attacking this way I honestly like those animations more than the actual battle ones especially with the little horse dodges or the swordmaster flips it’s quite charming compared to animations off in gba/3ds which is just “move forward and make damage noise”
now ch10 revenge on arvis this shit is FILLED with sleep and siege tome guys and I still didn’t know that if your res>enemy’s mag they can’t hit so I spent like twenty turns getting rid of the initial formation until realizing they never tried to sleep ced and going to find out why after that I just threw ced at absolutely everything in this chapter to the point where he could barely afford more forsetis and I had to give him all the villages and he sold everything else I even threw him at julius to bait him out because I saw his stats and weapon and thought “oh shit” I’m guessing the game expects you to bait out julius then defeat ishtar but instead this happened
and lol yeah it’s fourCEDi after this you gotta go save bishop man from annoying ass dark mages for tyrfing and then you get to fight arvis with easily one of the best boss themes in the series did I also mention how each chapter has a unique theme where you can literally hear that theme and think “oh yeah it’s that chapter!” and you can also take the chapter and look at the jugdral map and immediately know where the chapter takes place because they all fit into the shape of jugdral good shit after that I go stand on the beach because I heard you’re supposed to do that and that is definitely a thing you should do even if you don’t care about the scene the revival band given will help seliph immensely in endgame though how would you not care about the scene it is a very nice scene
speaking of endgame though:
endgame it’s an actual map, that’s right, NOT a boss in a box, holy shit, no way. here’s the thing though: seliph I just slapped the leg ring on him and he ran past army after army when you seize, the entire enemy army disappears including the plot-important bosses so I was able to seize all but two castles on the map with little effort other than sending ares to guard the castle to the right with the axe morons when I say all but two I mean because of ishtar causing a ton of trouble had to warp ced over there and he accidentally killed her lmao you’re supposed to kill her but he did it in one battle and I just warped him there so the castle wouldn’t be seized back julia got deirdre’d back in chapter 10 and now she returns except brainwashed because for some reason that happens manfroy had zero reason to let her live but he did so I tyrfing’d him and he died and julia, who was sleeped, was recruited and got naga the guys in front of julius’s castle were a pain in the ass but naga and forCEDi got rid of most final battles, final seize, and there are actual scenes for each group of character to show where they go after this I don’t mean the credits character cards that the other games do, I mean actual dialogue and then the map showing where they all went back to very cool
also in the intro arden misses a 99 and then gets astra’d and dies again he’s just this game’s punching bag isn’t he poor chap
this game was really god damn long I played some binding blade early on during genealogy and I got to chapter 8 and completed chapter 1 three times in the time it took me to complete an average-length genealogy chapter (~6-7 hours) I’d say it was worth it though it’s literal persona game length and I wanted to do one chapter a day and each day probably took a month off my life when animations are off I honestly think these are my favorite animations in the series and the game physically looks quite nice sounds nice too and the concepts of the game like the map thing and fighting entire wars is cool I felt gen 1 was stronger in characters, villain, music, story, and pretty much everything other than difficulty gen 2 only has like four guaranteed units I’m pretty sure and everyone else can be subs so it makes sense enough but it’s something I felt like noting here arena, giant ass blobs of enemies, money system and pawn shop, and the fact that half of my favorite units are ass because they don’t have a horse sucks though anyway though this might be extremely god damn slow and far from the strongest gameplay wise, I like it I wanna try out thracia (after mystery) for more and also go see the books and the manga with apparent incest sex scenes
is this what kaga wanted
shit's cool man though the game itself I can only see myself playing in a decade just like the persona games this took literal 90 hours and so, just like those games, when I am a sad 30 year old man mopping floors and plunging toilets filled with concrete and vapes, I'll pull out ol genealogy and persona 4 to remind myself what it was like back in the good ol days
now finally tis the end we return home to elibe for fire emblem 6: sword of seals anniversary was like three days ago but I could not manage to complete seven chapters a day so I did five and here we are
this is binding blade yes, that’s right, this right here is all of fire emblem: sword of seals
this game has it all everything I wanted in a fire embem game was here big cast, little supports, enough units of every class to do an entire run based off one concept (axes only, magic only, swords/lances only, cavaliers only, mounted units only, prepromotes only, girls only (no boys allowed), infamously shit units only (roy, wolt, wendy, sophia, elen, wade, ect)), story is simple, minor route splits so things don’t get shitty, and this time it’s kiiiiinda not all from the evil influence of a dark dragon what I mean by that is idunn is definitely a dragon and a dark dragon but as you’re playing you learn that it was actually zephiel who brought her back and she was basically being controlled into making bern’s manaketes so it was more like zephiel fits the “dark dragon” description and idunn is the one being manipulated here if I understood it properly this is why the “true ending” involves idunn not dying and being alive that part I don’t really care about though because I’m here for the elibe and this is some damn good elibe apparently throughout this entire thing I have constantly thought I made a thing for each chapter but I didn’t in this one case though I KNOW I did because I literally just finished the game two days ago so there’s no way I could have forgotten so here we go, the most goodest one:
ch1 immediately one of my favorite first chapters because it actually feels like the beginning of a journey while in most other games ch1 feels like a tutorial or not spectacular it can’t beat fe1 ch1 but then again nobody can when I said I replayed this three times up there, that was for wolt he has a 40% strength growth and I replayed it a lot until he actually got strength from what I recall the first two attempts he literally didn’t get it but then the third time he somehow got strength every single time so that is ch1 you’ve got the christmas cavvies and marcus and three shitters
ch2 it’s just a semicircle with forts in here you get deke (epic), shanna (epic), wade (lol), lot (7/10), and merlinus (debuffed as hell) didn’t use wade or lot because I already had a full team chosen by this point but eventually I want to use em there’s not much more to say about this chapter but there is still something to say we have to talk we have to talk about this happy camper her official name is shanna right and the fan translated name or crusty old translated “official” name is thany now if you look at the kana it’s “shani” and if we’re talkin back from 2009 when people went all “huziwara no moko!!!! sugoi desyo!!!!!1” it’s “syani” so what is “thany” where did they get that from who is “thany” what does “thany” mean it’s not a real name or a real word I look it up and all that shows up is her page and an urban dictionary is it some mangled attempt to make a name with not-japanese origins that resulted in creating whatever “thany” is supposed to be “shanna” is an actual name and “shani” sounds enough like a thing someone could be called maybe like its own bastardization of a name or something but “thany”? what is a “thany”? where does it come from? what does it do? I don’t understand
ch3 it’s a chapter where at the beginning like half of the fe7 cast dies because all of hector’s forces were killed and then hector himself you see the first of narcian who is funny so that is good and then you go through a castle thing also this is where you get lugh now you see lugh he’s a damn coin flip you either are gonna get a lugh that will carry you or you’re gonna get a lugh that gets completely screwed and tastes bench either way he’s lugh so of course I gonna use him ol captain lugh albano otherwise again it’s just a chapter
ch4 rutger this is that infamous one where rutger comes out and you actually see STRs in action and not across the entire map if you go too close to the castle and ignore the warning you gonn get crit thing is, though: enemies in this chapter don’t attack clarine so you can literally just recruit her and then leave her there and recruit rutger piss easy otherwise it’s a map that you can play with your thumbs and your eyes
ch5 it’s a weird ass map you either go allllll the way around OR you go in front of the gate to the left opens up and puts you right next to the boss but also spawns a ton of reinforcements you basically get to choose if you want it to go fast or take it slow I tossed lugh and wolt on forest tiles and they just killed all the bandits there was a damn queue for the fort and the bandits politely waited their turn to heal and then fail to kill lugh again unlike wolt who got strength on like every level (but not speed at all) lugh got speed like every time and magic twice in eight levels with the 40% growth
ch6 it’s a castle map where there are guys from both sides and also the middle immediately a big crunch because all the guys from the middle come down and will reach you quickly my healers leveled up many times that day there are eight rooms to open up and I think four were legit and four were japes? two of them are empty and spawn STRs a few turns after, two have enemies immediately in them, and the others are treasures and sue (hello sue) fine chapter but I should have used my door and chest keys here (I think I had those right) because you only have chad by this point
ch7 this is another one of those infamously hard ones on hard, that is I knew about the whole treck spawn point thing because I considered him on the team and he got cut to to literal 20 members so I just slapped roy as far as I could and sent everyone else to go deal with houses or prepare for the wyvern nice level that makes you split up your team and focus on not dying as you do this after I had visited every village and there were only like three enemies left, a soldier suicided against roy (yeah that's right a soldier died to ROY) and the archer behind him done diddly went down and killed sue so since I aint doing no ironman I reset it was just as easy second time around except I even managed to steal the wyvern's red gem this chapter also has reinforcement cavaliers from the bottom on turn 10 thing is, they didn't actually show up until I was one turn away from killing the boss anyway there's so many enemies initially you can't just take it slow and I ended up visiting most villages by turn 6 and all the enemies were dead by turn 7-8 I had already triggered the upper reinforcements by like turn 8-9 so anyone who would have been even close to those guys was now either dealing with the upper reinforcements or killing the boss I dunno what this level would be like on hard but for normal it is a good one I think it's neat
ch8 this one no no no long ass castle, also includes this game’s shitter squad up top along with cath’s second appearance and lilina lilina moves out of archer range for two turns and then makes you select “end turn” every turn after when the archer leaves and you have no reason to scroll over to her this is a slow ass chapter you just move through halls with like three enemies in there that you can feed to your meme units until you get to the chests don’t go too fast when you get to these chests though why? cath she shows up on turn 10 and moves directly towards the chests but here's the thing: if you went fast and opened all the chests, she'll unlock the door, say "it smells like the absence of treasure", and then fuck right off to the bottom of the map and make her way past the boss to the other equally good and please do not missable treasures I had to basically get zealot and marcus (holding roy to make cath fuck off) and noah to run like hell just to be able to stop them from taking the treasure and leaving (I'm assuming they leave from the bottom which is two turns from the chests) and this ALMOST went well zealot could hold his own against the weak ass enemies that did a maximum of 5 damage with a 50% hit rate and he was so close to the chests but then deke missed an 85% accurate hit against a mercenary and then enemy phase began and they started suiciding against marcus BUT: there were two enemies left, an archer and a soldier (I think) noah was two hits from death and clarine was nearby to start healing and according to the wiki turn 19 is when reinforcements stop and that's the turn I was on those two fuckers with their 35% hit BOTH hit noah and he died I had to restart the chapter I had just spent like 70 minutes on (also deke got an actually good level up and sue got strength) thankfully second time around was much less problematic because I knew what to do and I could now give lilina kills instead of sending zealot out to do his best sigurd impression or at least that's what I WOULD have said but then cath appeared and a stolen weapon can't be stolen back by other thieves so I tried to hurry up a little I put lugh in range of an armor knight with like 40% accuracy because he kill that shit real gud but I forgot to account for the fact that armor knights move four and soldiers move five, two different numerial values not even me thinking "oh yes the RNG will certainly work in my favor oho" I literally just forgot that soldiers are more than things to give sue level ups anyway so the dead armor knight will allow the not-dead soldier to move up dunno the soldier's accuracy because I turned animations off halfway through and didn't bother checking and the armor knight hits and now he's dead and the soldier comes up aaaaand it was time to stop playing after that attempt I spent an hour grinding lilina and then I forgot that since an armor knight dies, that means someone else can move in and kill her again on attempt numero fouro I actually thought before doing things and then I succeeded the most irritating part is that this chapter is super long it's not hard at all either, you just have to really pay attention if you want a specific unit to get the exp like any other map and I didn't three times in a row this one just takes ~12 turns to get started unless you just throw iron lance zealot and iron axe marcus at literally everything which then you'd probably finish in 12 turns lol anyway this took a combined maybe four? hours making it equivalent to one (1) awakening chapter how disappointing
ch8x hahahahahahahaha binding blade gaiden I hope you like long ass animations and not good maps also the home of henning, one of the least-liked bosses in the game with his high ass evasion luckily I just got a crit with my epic banana and he die this is not that moment this is just a similar gif
ch9 the first fog of war chapter I had played in almost three months and oh god I actually got through it the first time without a ton of issues but reinforcement pirates spawned everywhere and caused so many problems problem is, this aint no genealogy where you can save every turn I had to play this one twice and I didn’t want to have to go through another 90 minutes of playing this one so I tried to just go through it quickly with marcus and zealot and deke didn’t really work out because of all the stuff near the castle so after a few attempts I tried to flyskip it did I mention that the only torch you get before this is a torch STAFF and the place where you can first buy normal torches is chapter 9 so I had to just hope shanna was in a spot the archers couldn’t reach and that I counted properly I just dumped deke over there and he dealt with it decently enough though there’s still “aw shit” moments like halberd fighter who doesn’t move unless visible and will demolish marcus or when you try to killing edge the boss but after five uses it does not kick in and shanna dies haha fun :( ooooog... eventually got it though for B route
ch10a this map isn’t very hard at all BUT berserker in the middle 35 crit, 37 avoid hitrates aren’t high but you just know it’s gonna hit this wouldn’t matter normally but for me it did because on this chapter lilina got speed and saul got mag, skill, and speed, and elen got mag, skill, and res and lugh actually got mag for once and deke got a PLUS FIVE level up including str, skill, speed, def, and hp and another one with more str and speed I also got both gonzales and geese without any issues so I was not about to even try to fight that zerker because of this I ended up having shanna ferry zealot and then roy over to the bottom and praying shit doesn't go wrong thankfully my normal mode strats paid off and now I get to keep these godly levels
now ch11a lalum chapter and also pain in my ass objectives: kill boss before he can spawn more reinforcements, recruit klein, have klein reach thea, have shanna talk to thea so she doesn’t try to attack my units, save all green units to afford guiding rings later, recruit echidna, and visit all villages to get the hero crest for gonzales took seven attempts and seven hours on the fourth attempt I recruited klein, got thea to npc, accepted I wouldn't get the hero crest, and had only four enemies left on the map until three same-turn reinforcements spawned and went for clarine who immediately died on the 6th attempt I recruited klein, stopped the bandits from killing the villages, killed the boss before he could call in reinforcements, but then lalum was slightly too far to the left and the peggies went the wrong way did you know lalum has a unique battle theme despite not being able to attack? because this is how I found out
I basically tried my hardest to have klein go up and recruit thea because of this I brought him up with zealot and was hoping to be able to drop then dance him wolt had 6 aid and klein has 7 con marcus and noah are carrying the green units so they don't go suicide and my only choices were either to seize and lose 10k+items+two units or to pray to rngesus nobody gets killed and then lilina immediately died so lol nothing there on attempt number 7 which was my most successful yet thea didn't move every other time she moved but not this one apparently there is a bug where thea just won’t move sometimes shanna dodged all the javelins and nobody died though I recruited everyone and also got all the items from saving the green units gonzales got a few levels from beating up reinforcement bandits too and everything went well after so long
ch12 raiiiigh raiiiiiiiigh also weird ass map where your army is split into two one side goes after the chests while the other goes through a path of archers and mages after turn 10 a bunch of powerful reinforcements come and kill your guys if you are too slow I barely made it to the boss room and the reinforcements were like a turn away killed the boss but roy was one space away from being able to seize (dammit roy you had ONE JOB) and two fighters spawned from the stairs they both missed though so I made it within like two turns of the gaiden limit
ch12x is armads map honestly pretty bad it’s fog of war and the enemies are pretty much all weak bandits that anyone can take on easily the real threat is thieves stealing everything except most of the chests in this chapter are filled with crap so as long as you get the red and white gems you’re fine one thief got the red gem and almost ran away but I bullied him into a corner and took all his shit did I mention thieves in this game they can steal regardless of speed and you get three of em thieves in this game are cool but there aren’t a ton of games where you get to use them all the time and they get to steal a lot you can bring a thief to pretty much any chapter here before lategame and they’ll be able to steal at least a bunch of vulneraries and elixirs I didn’t have to buy any vulneraries throughout the entire game because I just stole em you can also steal lockpicks and it’s funny because the thief just gives up and goes home after you do that
ch13 you CAN recruit perceval here but why subject yourself to that pain anyway this is that one chapter with the this
and the this it’s like two highways bringing you from one end to the next the top has a killer ballista and perceval+his cavaliers but they all leave after turn 6 or 8 I forgot so the bottom route is the one to take you got two ballistaguys down there and I had wolt using one to chip the cavaliers that came down there’s also two more cavalier squads as reinforcements so I used them to get them gonzales levels wyverns come down the middle so I had raigh nostank and he actually got pretty nice speed he was almost lv20 by this point and he was soon to become that guy who kills absolutely everything also melady or miledy or milady or however you spell her name joined here and was another soon to kill absolutely everything milady is funniest so that is her name now
ch14 arcadia you know it it's a fog of war desert map with hidden items all over the map, two units that make it somewhat of an escort mission, a hidden 25 turn limit for the true ending, reinforcements that spawn near your spawn point so you have to have everyone move, wyverns, manaketes and mages, in the top left and bottom right corners that you won't see until it's too late, and, for me, this is the second most important chapter in the entire game because it's when I can get the silver card to make this dumb team actually workable and it's also one of the few times in the game I can buy aircalibur and nosferatu now I'm gonna need every hidden item to sell to be able to afford all my shit and without thieves that's a 9% chance there is a way, however; a map exists showing all hidden items without enemy locations and a glitch exists to always get the hidden items since I already spent like six hours on ch11a I used this knowledge I already had before I even played the damn game lol and spare myself at least some of the pain turns out, that was ALL of the pain sage lugh, hero deke, ~lv18 lilina, two healers with high staff rank for shenanigans, two fliers including a promoted shanna (I think I forgot honestly), the only thing I regret is bringing wolt because he does absolutely nothing in this chapter this is also the chapter with our two new friends a shitty 2-skill dark mage weighed down by flux and vulnerable to die in one hit in a fog of war desert map named potential worst unit in the series and hard to train with no payoff, the future-telling half-dragon priestess, sophia, kyaaaaaaa~ and a decent valkyrie who leaves the worst first impression in the series by having one move and low avoid on a fog of war desert map, frequently misunderstood and ignored and believed to be useless, the etrurian mage general who has a lower magic stat than your promoted 10/1 lugh (not mine, though), cecilia, uwaaaaaa~ tossed sophia angelic robe plus speedwing plus secret book plus body ring all this investment and she only did better than raigh in damage and that was near the end of the game these helped her hit a liiiiitle bit more and not die as easily and not be weighed down by literally a book but she still always had hitrate issues and her growths aren’t very est-y at all with binding blade’s growths you can say her magic and resistance are very good, her skill is good, and everything else is average or poor but then again “good” in binding blade is 40% and we all know how lugh’s 40% mag goes sohpia’s first level was +1 mag that’s it anyway I sent lugh up top with aircalibur and he was directly next to a manakete that left him with 5hp but he dodged FOUR 25% wyvern hits and killed ALL OF THEM with aircalibur see this is why aircalibur coolest tome ririna almost got wyvern'd but thank god I promoted shanna so she just barely rescue and then deke is deke so he made the entire wyvern species go extinct afterwards raigh is godly 13 magic, 14 skill, 14 speed he doesn't give a shit if he's slowed down by flux he doubles anyway cecilia almost got bashed in by the flamboyant desert bandits but luckily shanna saved when I had almost a problem with the mercenaries near the boss, deke and then after buying ~8 aircaliburs and nosferatus and fluxes and four elfires it was done without too much issues
ch14x another godawful legendary weapon gaiden it’s water with floor but the floor disappears and reminds you of 15.5 for psychological warfare I was told barrier gives 3 wexp but nope, everything in fe6 seems to just give 1 so I wasted 14 turns having elen use barrier in hopes of being able to warpskip this chapter nope you have to deal with it wolt, lilina and gonzales were a few levels from promotion so I fed them pirates I also had sophia attack a druid who only had physic and got healed by another druid with physic for some twenty turns to rack up them levels took like two hours to do this chapter and it’s not interesting at all I generally like the idea of the legendary weapon chapters but god they are all awful for some reason I feel they’re still fitting but that doesn’t make them not godawful they are so bad
ch15 THIS is the perceval chapter perceval is like a mid-late game jeigan or in other words he has high ass stats for his join chapter and the point in time where he WOULD fall off doesn’t exist I didn’t use him but on hard mode he’s a staple because he gets hard mode bonuses too to speak of the chapter itself I feel like I’ve played or seen almost this chapter in at least three games where it’s just “move around a circle of mountains then defeat the enemies and seize” anyway I gotta keep perceval’s greenies alive so I can afford random garbage and this served to be not easy that is, until I just threw everyone powerful up top and then immediately won recruited garret without any issues too he is another unit I cannot fit on the team but if axe-only he’ll be joining
now ch16 this one is the most important in the game for these types of moronic teams it has the secret shop where you can buy promotion items AKA only damn way I can make this work also hugh and preparation for the route split sadly since this is not crusty old fan translation I can’t get uberhugh though he actually turned out quite competent with about equal defense and res in my team of stupid sages with 6def and whatnot my choices for fighitng physical attacking enemies was either take a ton of damage, throw deke at it, waste a bunch of nosferatus, or use hugh and so hugh absolutely proved his worth both to the granny who shits on him for anima and to me for paying 10k by becoming my most viable sage and most epic red pepper anyway this map is long as hell also douglas has to live so I burned through all three sleeps before slowly getting him over to the left to block him with lalum this was basically just chokepoint+pray map though because of all the reinforcements to the left douglas dies pretty damn easy and he almost did when he woke up and attacked lugh I just got lucky tons of good shit on this level but 2/3 of it is just trying to get everything without douglas dying sophia also got a +1 hp level up like a true est also new boss theme for very kuhl und epoch narcian long ass chapter but everything went well enough and I have my guiding rings
you may be expecting 16x next but lolno I still have the save for 10b and I need to finish 16x twice so I may as well do B route first
western isles B is one of two B routes in the game, and also one of two B routes that everyone hates (people do not like B routes) also fireemblemwod calls the A routes the B routes and the B routes the A routes but the reason the echidna/ilia routes are A is because the game defaults to those if the conditions to neither are met so if you don’t call western isles right village route “B for Bartre” I will brave axe you wait I checked again and they call the western isle chapters properly but not ilia and sacae??? whatever B for Bartre
B route is like A route, except reverse 10B is like 11A and 11B is like 10A I found out I absolutely didn’t need to keep the greenies alive to afford the guiding rings so I was lazy and considered completing 10B with just all recruits alive a win I was also even lazier and lugh and deke were already lv16 and shanna was somewhere around lv12 or 13 so I just promoted them all klein comes from the bottom left and thea comes at the top but so does gonzales and there’s also two villages up there you want wade or lot visiting for the best rewards there’s a ton happening and it’s absolutely a massive pain trying to keep greenies alive so if you want that money don’t go B I didn’t care though so I just barely managed to get everyone and finished the chapter in one attempt this isn’t completely awful but the positions each recruitable unit joins in are really bad for keeping the greenies alive the peggies spawn near reinforcement bandits and the archers spawn near reinforcement cavaliers and in my experience the archers at the bottom literally didn’t even move one chad archer dodged like four hits in a row but in a few turns they were all dead as hell it’s basically 11A but a bit sooner and weirder
11B is basically waiting for the two ballistas to run out and then you win villagers come from the castle and if they all live you get an energy ring but they are under no threat unless you seriously can’t take care of the four enemies in between them and their retreat point the ballista won’t even try to attack them he’s being paid minimum wage he don’t care enough to commit war crimes for etruria the chapter makes your army split into two but who cares you get geese here and eventually bartre spawns and he is very epic has the nickname medieval mario and he is one of the units I wish I could use the most he aint amazing but he’s bartre and had I not needed to go for A route for better gonzales I’d definitely have at least recruited him anyway in this chapter I was literal one turn from seizing a few turns ago the boss talked about reinforcements and the reinforcements came out and I think they stopped so I thought things were done then a reinforcement archer spawned except one of my units was directly behind the castle so he spawned in range of shanna and then shanna died for the 69420th time I literally didn’t care because I wasn’t keeping B route and I was far too close to the end for it to matter B route is a tad bit worse in that gonzales sucks in this route and if you train him up he is honestly insane and you also can’t get echidna who is arguably a better unit than bartre due to higher speed and swords but if you want bartre and you prefer elphin to lalum this route is fine in normal I dunno hard
now it’s 16x time and ohhhh god this one this is my least favorite of the gaidens berserk boss, silence sage, two bolting mages, two purge bishops, and they all stand completely still until they suddenly get pissed for some reason and all start moving at the same time the first time I played this I was training up shin so I had to basically slap deke and douglas on the stairs while constantly healing and then rescuing to manage the entire damn stage coming down at once by the way, this stage has very fun random arrows of light that come down and do 10hp of damage to anyone who is hit by them, enemy or not these arrows stole so many damn kills and created so many undesirable situations they fall in the same pattern every time (that or there’s something wrong with the RNG when played on 3ds and if this is the case you may laugh when you read about 20bx) like the wind in fuga’s wild ride and this is equally not fun until you figure it out which then it’s just tolerable the arrows of light will never hit enemies in their default positions so if you keep your units aligned with that they’ll not ever get hit issue is they all move at one point so you won’t know where they were anymore in the most important moments and also light can fall on the stairs and steal like five kills at once which is just awful all of the elements of this stage come together to make it just plain awful whether you want to go fast, slow, or anything in between I beat it and got my save, but then I had to do it again for ilia and I tried to warpskip at 02:00 and spent hours and hours because for some reason the concept of warping up multiple powerful units did not exist and I instead always spent 10 turns baiting out boltings and then warped up deke to durandal the boss (and miss then get berserked and die half the time) and then warped up roy who is within 5 spaces but can’t seize because the throne counts as a movement limiting terrain or something I guess I eventually just played it legitimately and it was still utterly terrible because the exact same two hour long experience I had the first time was repeated though sophia may not be great she did have a high ass res and could tank all of the siege tomes easy hugh and raigh promoted and suddenly hugh has 20 mag/15 speed and raigh has 19 mag/18 speed lilina has 25 mag/15 speed and lugh has 17 mag/17 speed these epic magic users pretty much just killed everything because they double and then hit the weaker defensive stat with high accuracy for a lot of damage
17a is a pretty “eh” map where you just deal with some enemies and then a few turns later a path opens in the sea to let you access the boss easy you can also just go through the forest instead to reach that point basically this is that one revelation gimmick with the boats except done properly and even when done properly it’s nothing special so I dunno what the point is also this chapter takes place in a place called “remi” ha almost as good as ebolacum sophia and milady promote here and now the entire team is composed of gods
ch18a is a weird gimmick where eventually the rivers freeze over again it’s not the most notable thing ever but eh it’s a thing nonetheless I was hoping to just have milady kill the boss because boots+stats but barrier is gone and I don’t think I had any pure waters so it just turned into a pretty slow map also berserk and siege tomes again
19a is a fog of war map with mountains and ballistas and whatnot niime’s join map too on this map I literally just had milady go scout out the level and she came back with another 10 kills and had the archers waste almost all the ballista ammo also astol destroyed some bandits with their piss poor hitrates and reached lv20 and I fed some kills to roy because wynaut milady makes the game too easy because she has a high ass defense and also delphi shield so on normal at least she is at no risk of dying to anything that is not a mage or a boss but I also didn’t really have anyone who could rescue and move far other than shanna who is absolutely destroyed by the ballistas everywhere even with delphi shield so not sure what to do
20b is a little castle thing and this one I ended up making wacky sleep and berserk and ballistas all the good stuff I had niime berserk the berserker (not the class the guy) in hopes he’d kill himself but lol somehow he was too good and killed everyone else in the room but the boss things were looking piss easy until I realized astol somehow didn’t have the lockpicks on him I’d assume maybe I tried to steal something but didn’t have enough space and traded the lockpick for some reason? on that very same turn two thieves spawned but there was also reinforcement fighters soon after this chapter also has a time limit to get the gaiden and rewards for keeping the villagers alive and they’re suicidal as hell so I basically had to drop astol over to steal a lockpick and bring him immediately back to take as many treasures as possible and unlock the door raigh burned though 30 nosferatus and merlinus was full so to get the boss’s red gem I had to have juno take all of shanna’s crap so shanna could take all of astol’s crap so he could get it I missed probably all but two or three chests and barely got the gaiden but hey is good playing maybe I forget lockpick again sometime also juno was originally a team member (and so was thea) but there were so many ballistas all over the place that none of them were really viable
ch20bx weird thing with breakable walls and your army is split into three you uhh you break the walls and then you kill the boss and you seize that’s it
now? you're going to sacae
I don’t think I’ve seen one single person who ever even thought of considering for a single moment that they may, perhaps, think sacae is anything better than the worst B-route in the series
anyway is sacae time here we go
ch17b fog of war villages don’t really matter at all it’s an eclipse tome you will never reach because melady dies to the mages and sages and then tina’s staff tina’s someone from the manga that I did not read but apparently her staff is a cross between a heal and a mend and you just have to walk down for three turns to get it so eh may as well there’s pretty much no reason to go any way other than the bottom and you can pretty much just throw someone with high defense in the front and you should have no issue with this map a bunch of reinforcements seem to have spawned at the top but I only ever fought like 3 nomads past the bridge so I have no idea what spawned up there but this is definitely the map I know the least about there could be like 5000000 mages and nomads and thieves up there having a party and I would never know
ch18b
monke it’s a weird wide open map with a river around your starting point map is filled with nomads and memedons nomad troopers can cross the river so you gotta watch out for em since this is nomadland I decided I may as well bring douglas because he can take 0 damage from all of these guys already almost everything on this stage has 30+ avoid and the nomads all move seven so they outpace most of my units I spent one turn buying from the shop and moving my guys slightly out to not bite off more than I could chew and this one move resulted in the next 40 turns being turtling after the entire clan died out I made my way to monke see the circle of huts? they randomly spawn nomads and nomad troopers the turn after you enter you definitely can’t just cover all the huts up nor can you predict what type will come out so you kinda just gotta stay away I had douglas and milady go down and you can see how that went from the very fun video of fun times for most of these chapters I gotta give the condensed version but just know it took 106 turns and that video was only a snippet of the whole experience indeed
ok next map ch19b it's weird this physically is the reverse of that one thracia defend chapter nomads then wyverns and then a city and the door into the city can't be opened but there's cracks in the walls to the side (that I didn't notice for a while) to get in the boss says there’s gonna be reinforcements soon and when he says soon he means SOON (also image of the boss is the other guy in the monke picture) clarine barely dodged all the wyverns and every damn enemy in the city went straight up to around the wall so chokepoint city again all three sacae maps so far have been basically a form of this because nomads move seven and the maps all have a section that makes chokepoints happen whether you want em to or not maps that look cool initially and then take like a god damn hour because nobody can actually take on all the nomads can't even nostank because short bows have 10 crit memedon ultra make funny sound against milady
also I have been training roy against all these nomads as a joke but he is already lv17 so soon I can't do that no more killed boss and that was the end
now ch20b fog of war castle with berserk sage, two bolting sages, and turn limit I planned to warpskip this because I still had six more chapters to play that day but it turns out it goes so damn fast warp is a waste of time dayan shows up turn 2, you recruit him, and then you just move through a handful of enemies to the left, break the wall, kill boss, seize it’s a really small and strange map for sacae because even the alternate route to the right with the chests is barely longer and the boss is a general
ch20bx this is the one chapter in this game I have never completed in any way there are six castles to seize but only one is legit if you seize and it’s the wrong one, instant reinforcements it’s just a god damn jape chapter RNG determines which castle it is but since fegba rng works the way it does I have no idea if the castle is determined in a separate way or if you immediately turn on the game and start up the chapter it’d end up the same every time or what assuming I had a fair chance there was a 16% chance of me getting it and I made 14 attempts to warpskip this and never got it this would probably be fine if played normally if not a bit tedious but I just wanted it done fast and after fourteen attempts I was willing to take the loss
sacae is weird I like how it looks and the idea of it but it's a really weird thing and a pain in the ass at times (probably always when on hard) so I get why nobody wants to go there honestly I kinda love it it's so damn dumb lol and the peggies are useless on either route because wayyyyy too many ballistas everywhere while shin and sue are solid nomader where you go the weird thing where your units usually can’t fight back on enemy phase and the nomads can’t usually fight back on player phase makes it a really strange experience combined with the japey maps but honestly if played in moderation the humor would outweigh the asspain
now that alternate dimension roy with his unpromoted nomad friends has taken down bern's forces in sacae via cheese whiz, it's finally time for chapter 21 the long short journey is coming to a close this chapter has a new theme (do not listen it’s best enjoyed when you earn it) you get yoder here which is a shame because he’s almost like a gotoh that comes too early to have the “doesn’t need a slot to be deployed” benefit but a unit that comes too late to actually be incorporated into any team I planned to use him but it was pretty difficult to try and make that work if I didn’t want to bench elen or saul anyway this chapter if there is any one chapter that makes you think “wyvern” this is the one in fe4 the wyvern chapter is big and they’ll take a while to reach you and all spawn at once but here they spawn once you hit certain reinforcement points and up to 96 can spawn so better have your units all move in one big ball this chapter to me felt like using all of my units and resources to their full potential all of those aircaliburs came out during this chapter, warpers and physics users, peggies ferried, even merlinus came along so that milady could buy boots and roy could immediately access them for ezseize loy be walkin gonzales stood on the peaks and took down wyvern after wyvern as they attacked him with single-digit hitrates and he attacked them with 90% hit and 60% crit also I was japing around so much I didn’t remember the turn limit so I checked one turn and I was on turn 26 barely made it to around the boss room and roy had to be physic’d every turn so he could continue walkin and ignoring those bolting haters on player phase turn 29 milady had only gotten one crit out of 6 killer lance hits over the past few turns and I thought it was all over murdock OHKOs both lilina and lugh and they’re the only ones close enough to fight he has a 46% hit rate on both of them I attack with lilina anyway she hits, he misses, and then she misses at this point he has one hp and it’s all down to lugh with his 82% fire and he hits that shit and murdock dies literally one single move away from missing the gaiden and having to do it all over again but I made it
now the gaiden last gaiden in the same and as per usual it’s ass fog of war and it tries to have you split your army into two but since you don’t know about the brave sword hero and the silver sword hero it’s best to just send everyone to one side I just warped milady up to ORKO the boss and then warped up loy who be walkin and then he promotes psh dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dulululululu duhhhh duh duh duh duhhh duhh duhhhhhhh I’m not joking by the way that’s promoted roy
ch22 is next this is where you get to fight the big man zephiel himself lol now this is the part where I say I honestly wish this is where the game ended it’s an actually good final chapter your army is split up into two and then joins at the end to storm zephiel’s room and defeat him enemies aren’t dark dragon level so I can actually defeat them you leave a unit on each of two red spots and then have roy wait in front of the door to enter and reinforcements spawn from your starting points so you have to be decently quick and the zephiel fight is actually cool and he’s a human final boss that I want to fight but also understand the motivations of he’s not a dragon, he’s not a dark mage, he’s not a slime, he’s just a normal king who did all this shit I’m fine with fe1’s final chapter which is also really good yet stars a dark dragon as the final boss because it’s the first time this was done so these two would have been the best ones if ch22 counted
but nah, now time for chapter 23 you’re fighting off the last of bern’s forces and also getting karel who is absolutely useless if you already have a durandal user (and how would you not) this is basically the last chapter in the game because 24 is legendary weapon spam and 25 is a boss in a box this was basically just aircalibur map and all the ballistas and stave users ran out quickly the guys guarding brunja are really damn weird though one had a blue gem and I wanted that so I tried to bait all of them out and they wouldn’t do it so I had milady kill one with her javelin and suddenly instead of trying to attack her, they went towards sophia? and then I moved sophia a little back and they all returned to their previous spot and ignored milady tried this again except this time they didn’t even move towards sophia so I tried this a third time and for some reason the manakete attacked and nobody else moved killed him and I just bolting’d everyone but the blue gem druid I put lilina within range of him with bolting equipped and you know what he did? he walked towards her and then just sat there like saying “please kill me everyone else is dead” I have no idea what is wrong with the AI on these guys but eh stole the guiding ring from brunja and then loy be sittin
ch24 technically one of the largest non-genealogy chapters in the series but it’s 75% empty space only 10 units allowed and roy and fae are required so more like 8 infodump and legendary weapon spam chapter anyway here are our users: binding blade: roy durandal: deke maltet:zealot armads:gonzales murgleis:wolt forblaze:hugh aureola:lol, lmao even apocalypse:raigh/sophia (sharing is caring) too good to need a legendary weapon: niime with her 22-range physic awful:fae this one aint spectacular also you know when people say “roy is shit until he gets the binding blade and it singlehandedly makes him a good unit” no don't believe that because my roy promoted at lv15 and he still can't even ORKO the first manaketes in this chapter he does like 10 damage to anything that isn't a manakete and all he do is walkin he's literally only useful against idunn and to a much lesser extent than I expected sophia ORKOs the manaketes with flux yet roy can’t do it with a legendary weapon at one point gonzales got an armads crit which totals up to 183 damage very cool
anyway turns out ch24 is connected to endgame so endgame ok I can't say I regret this being my endgame team lol the quotes just remind me I like all of these guys but there is one thing: isn't base roy supposed to be able to 2RKO with the binding blade, and a roy ~lv10 should be able to ORKO? did I just horribly misinterpret this? he doesn’t even kill on enemy phase roy doesn't double with this thing and he only does 38 damage which means three hits are needed to kill idunn he would also die immediately if he fought idunn up close because she doubles for absolutely enough to kill any roy that isn’t my angelic robe jape roy roy just sucks always man he's only good when he walkin when I played roy also missed an 83 and I almost got a game over because of that people say this is the easiest final boss in the series but it really isn’t it’s not HARD but stuff like the dragon in fe7 or mediuth is literally just “hit with your guy until dead” and here if you try to do that without yoder (who doesn’t make a lot of sense to bring due to slot constraints) you just die
I don’t know if the dragon is supposed to be harder in HHM or if mediuth is suddenly difficult in fe11 but this is definitely not the easiest final boss fight in the series this chapter at least lets you save directly before though there was no battle prep screen so I didn’t have a proper opportunity to back up this chapter before continuing so now I must overwrite 21bx muahahaha I will never complete it now for some reason it only shows the full end cards of the team you brought to ch24/25 and everyone else gets like three words and a title I don't even think I saw miledy in there I dunno what happen man I guess they don’t want to show almost fifty full endcards but holy shit half my team just got shafted by that 10-2 unit allowance considering I’d say it consisted of a minimum of 15 units and more like ~20
overall this is my favorite though I like how GBA plays the most and this is a pretty ideal form of it it has enough things to make you go "oh shit" like berserk bolting sleep purge silence wyvern land (I don't think any maps did this but if you told me one did I would believe it) but is also definitely manageable and once you learn how stuff goes things are pretty nice also nice OST and cast and the route splits aren't an extremely major decision which is a plus I have one pretty major problem with this game though: the true ending was not worth it at all it WAS cool seeing all of the locations the legendary weapons were held in and I would never wish for the gaidens to be taken out but really, everyone says that those gaidens are shit and I agree you need to do ALL of them for the true ending and that literally just consists of one real map, a loredump, and then a boss in a box ch21 and 22 were amazing and then it just nosedives afterward ch24 plays like ass because it’s just going from room to room for 45 minutes until you kill jahnny boy and then 25 is just a dragon boss fight it seems the game only wants you to give a shit about idunn if you have the requirements to fight her because the only thing you hear about her before chapter 24 is “she is dark priestess and probably generating bern’s manaketes” but if her entire character is just infodumps in chapter 24 and then a few credits scenes the final boss is just gonna feel like another dragon fight and it did mediuth was cool because everything in fe1 looks cartoony and then he’s a detailed ass dragon but idunn and the fe7 dragon and the fe13 dragon and the fe14 dragons are all just dragons I don’t really care about any of them if zephiel counted as a final boss he’s honestly the coolest one because the game actually makes you give a shit about him yet also want to defeat him for a first time I don't regret getting the true ending just to experience it but it's gonna make replays of the game weird on one hand I kinda want to experience those shitty gaidens again but on the other hand oh my christ this game has enough stuff I like about it to be top tier though definitely better to take it slow though and not do like 5 maps per day because ooooogh also lol in the fe6 trial maps basically gaidens guess what map theme they have
this is the main team past 16x shanna had very little roles because you can’t ferry when there are three ballistas just waiting to kill you on every chapter marcus and zealot obviously fell off but eh brought zealot back for maltet because he got a few decent levels early on and wasn’t completely bad and the honorary members those who I either used on other routes or didn’t use enough to count as mains actually planned to use juno and yoder but juno came too late without a real niche (shanna already saw very little use and was better) and yoder didn’t really fit in chapter 24/25 which is the only place I can actually see him having a real use with staff of the saint
after playing all of these games obviously I gotta rate how much I like em it’s pretty difficult though
fe6>1>4=7=CQ=BR>>>13>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>rev I guess?
can’t really determine which I like most of 4/7/CQ/BR so let’s just do equal I suppose I like pick up and play but 4/7/CQ/BR all have somewhat large flaws that impact this in some way as well as the first experience as a whole I guess whatever that means all are good and worthwhile but aint at the top
misc
I honestly feel supports in the newer games make them worse it’s the persona problem: if you give supports/social links to plot-relevant characters, then what’s gonna happen when that character undergoes changes in the support/social link? how will it be reflected in the main story? and it isn’t support conversations didn’t exist until fe6 (fe3 had support bonuses without conversations and fe4 had “talk” and marriage but it aint there yet) and I honestly feel out of what I played they were done best there they’re actually achievable without absurd conditions unlike fe7 and almost nobody playable other than roy and merlinus (who can’t die either because it’s a game over or because it’s merlinus) has a major story role that is an issue in itself but it allows supports to do absolutely anything they want with no issues because there’s nothing TO contradict or change you just see em or you don’t and that’s the end of it compare this to conquest where xander is like two different characters in the story vs the supports and it just doesn’t work at all
I honestly don’t think I have ever seen such a divided fanbase before early kaga fans(1-3), late kaga fans(4-5, tearring/berwick/ect), gba fans, tellius fans, DSFE, awakening fans, fates fans, three house fans, unranked or casual play vs LTC/0%growths/whatever the hell, casual vs classic mode, and the people who look for high difficulty games only, and somehow ALL of these groups shit on each other constantly some get along better than others but the only groups I don’t frequently see shitting on others is tellius and DSFE and kinda GBA in ol megaten land you do get the major megaten vs persona thing as a whole and a very minor early persona vs new persona but within the rest of the megaten series everyone gets along you can see fans of any part of the series or any of its spinoffs getting along with others and sharing things about the games and everyone likes pretty much all of it if you were to shit on someone for liking DDS or devil survivor or anything people are gonna call you an asshole because you are being one but here in fire embem land you can directly witness jugdral fans flinging plague corpses at fates fans via catapult with archanea fans dying in the crossfire as awakening fans are dogpiled to death and LTC players RNG manipulate to kill all casual mode players within three turns I get the way the franchise is going is basically when fatlus replaced SMT with persona as the main cash cow to milk but this just makes the entire fanbase shit can’t we just all agree that revelation is garbage and anything without “warriors” in the name gets the job done? even revelation is fine enough if you just want to grind up units so there’s no way 99% of this series is supposed to be shit, right? maybe there can be actual discussion instead of generational wars and waifu wars and playstyle wars nahhh though is innanet gotta be a tad bit rumpish a wee donkey small helping of dong
reclassing is weird dunno how it is in DSFE but in awakening it’s utter shit and really annoying (though it can be funny sometimes like armor knight tharja or berserker henry) and in fates it’s far better I much prefer the idea of branching promotion or at least having skills be locked to being in the class that has them but fates did it almost good enough and it lets you buy skills so honestly it’s fine there
pairup in awakening sucks but in fates it’s cool shelter also makes a lot of stuff possible I like pairup as a movement option because you can move a unit across the entire damn map if you set that up and it’s basically rescue except it doesn’t punish you for it rescue halves your skill and speed because the game expects you to use it to save units from dying after messing up while pair up is supposed to be an intentional thing but both can be used in similar ways and are nice
I like the crummy lords over the actually good lords honestly I like hector and sigurd and I think chrom is fine but gameplay wise it’s funny when the lord is absolutely abysmal yet required everyone’s gotta deal with a shitter
my favorite things: 1. fire embem 2. shitty units with a minimum of one infamous trait 3. the little map animations in genealogy (honse dodge) 4. the little profile icons in GBA 5. odin dank's aching fingers (gamer injury +10 aim when mouse has 10 or more buttons) 6. two thieves one vulnerary (gone crazy) 7. aircalibur 8. healies 9. oswin 10. the arena in fire emblem 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 16 because I do not have to play it
I think the series looks worse in 3d it’s kinda like when pokemon changed to 3d no purpose for it and it looks bad for more effort the my castle in 3d looks nice enough for a 3ds game and the 3d fates and awakening cutscenes look fine but the battles suck so I always leave animations off
I don’t really feel the newer games are “objectively better” it’s definitely more a view thing but when I see the crust of games like fe1 I just think “that’s part of the game” but when I see it in a new game I expect way more because it’s a new and shiny modern thing and that very same issue I will likely see as annoying also the way they physically look with the sprites is weird the sprites look nice when up close but when the map is zoomed out to see what’s actually happening and all the sprites get blurred I feel like an old man trying to read kanji also some things like master seals and skills and whatever is seen as “modern” but I don’t really care for those I like unique class items and when classes either have skills locked to them or when classes just have inherent bonuses instead such as berserker/swordmaster inherent +30 crit
I like big maps sometimes but GBA always tends to have nicely sized maps that take 30-50 minutes and I think that’s the best way fe1 is also like that most of the time genealogy maps are too damn big obviously and 3ds maps are all very small
all of the games have good musics but dark dragon and sword of seals are #1 spot while genealogy is 2nd sword of raging fire+fates 3rd and awakening 4th funnily enough the games with arguably the least tracks and variety are the ones I like the most and fe1's map theme plays for 24 god damn chapters in a row but it's still probably my favorite probably because whenever I hear it I think of the game and whenever I think of the game I hear it compared to fates which I remember having like 12345654321 map themes and I don't think I can remember a single one of them other than maybe the first revelation map's theme best recruitment theme is fe4, best battle theme is fe4, best battle prep is awakening, best title theme is fe1 (also awakening’s title theme sucks)
I like when games have more classes like fe4 or fates and also light magic is very cool which is why I like GBA healers a lot dark mages being able to use all types of magic in awakening is ass
don’t really like the whole unit building thing that the series seems to be adopting I much prefer the idea of building a team than reclassing and supporting and whatnot to create a specific unit with a set of skills because it feels too grindy and pokemony I always had most fun with pokemon when I just chose the ones I wanted to use and used them as they were instead of having to EV train and breed and all and the same goes for fire emblem which is why I like GBA where you just pick units and level them up fates definitely improved it but I still prefer just picking someone I like and leveling them up and that being all I do
I like fe1’s warp you don’t have to use it but it can help you out in a pinch and it also allows you to skip chapters you don’t like honestly wish this type of warp existed in more than what, just archanea games (including gaiden) along with thracia? fe6’s warp is also really good in that it doesn’t directly let you warp anywhere but you can still move quite far with it so it’s not completely OP but it’s still absolutely worth it and great
not a fan of kids they don’t really work in fates and in awakening they were incorporated somewhat but I honestly feel I’d have liked it better if we actually got to play using all the kids and with lucina as the lord or something wacky like that is heirs of fate like that? I know you get to play as owain/severa/inigo but is it just them fe4 did kids in a decent enough way even if I don’t like the kids mechanic because it’s not “make supports to get kids”, it’s “make pairings to impact your entire future party”
I like the high-ranking weapons and PRFs and stuff if they fit well like how in fe4 you have holy weapons that are your birthright and holy blooders are untouchable when they fight it’s god vs god and pretty wild and in fe6 you have legendary weapons conceptually this is cool but I expected it to be cooler than it actually was it’s kinda like a minor form of the holy weapons where instead of “descendants can wield these weapons used by great soldiers in the past” it’s “those proficient in a weapon type can wield these weapons used by great soldiers in the past” but almost every animation other than the tomes is the same as using a normal weapon other than for a white flash if I equip durandal on deke or armads on gonzales it looks the same as if I gave them an iron weapon or literally anyone else other than the white flash I get they wouldn’t exactly want to make so many unique animations for every single character compared to in fe7 where there’s one durandal user and one armads user (also unpromoted eliwood and hector don’t even have unique animations here) but it just isn’t as cool and part of the reason I like mages it’s still much cooler than in fates though where the S-ranked weapons are only usable by a select few classes due to how the weapon rank system works and a lot of the weapons have pretty bad debuffs and aren’t worth using instead of forged stuff anyway or in fe7 where the weapons that aren’t on a lord or athos are literally dropped in the final chapter so they will likely not see any use
so that’s it huh three months ~27k words is good gaem worth playing game made sure to buy a game so I don’t get the curse huh? oops looks like a fusion accident has occurred
it’s been a long journey after this I think I’ll go home and accidentally visit my dog three times because I’m not used to the controls anymore
you remember ol pascal, don’t you?
anyway uhhh play a real sheen megoomi tensei game like noketurn or strange jerney also use buffs and stuff
take as long as you’d like I know what it’s like for a postin crunch though by the time you see this you’re done anyway so
indeed
