#BUT ALSO it's stupid to act like FE hasn't historically also run on flat gimmick characters | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

holdharmonysacred · 2 years ago

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Started writing a post about unit blorbofication and story depth in FE in light of the latest round of past FEs VS 3H VS Engage discourse, someone remind me to go back to writing it later when I get my brainpower back.

#tl;dr preview i think what's going on is kind of a conflict between differing tastes in terms of Level Of Character Depth In Units #caused by the franchise's struggle with balancing the blorbo genre of emergent gameplay #it's definitely stupid to act as if character depth and intensive backstories are somehow exclusive to 3H #and all other FEs run on flat gimmick characters #BUT ALSO it's stupid to act like FE hasn't historically also run on flat gimmick characters #because the fact is that flat gimmick characters are just what happens in any game where the cast is too damn big #and the game doesn't have the colossal space needed to give everybody depth #+ the franchise's permadeath mechanics tend to impede the writers' ability to develop said units anyway #in 3H's case i would argue that it also has a problem with faux depth where the writers WANT it to be complicated and deep #but also it's REALLY goddamn obvious that they're interested in some parts of their story more than other #and that they bit off way way WAY more than they could chew when it comes to building their fantasy world #and these other issues just compound the problems that normally come with 'too big cast in a game where permadeath real'#it is kind of a sad reality that someone would fall into 'the players have to make up their depth' eventually #because it's just kinda impossible to develop *EVERYONE* if you don't have infinite ongoing serialized story space #but there are ways of managing that cast scope creep that the FE writers aren't quite good at wrangling #do to the aforementioned conflicts of interest in mechanics and general care #engage i haven't actually played yet or watched somebody else play so the best i've got is 'it's fun trash/trashy fun'#so i can't judge how it handles its own cast scope creep #but i get the impression that it falls back to flat characters and generic plot #which obviously isn't going to be very filling if you prefer meatier narratives and characters #but that's just how the nightmare tightrope of cast scope creep rolls

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