#anyways fire emblem should make more dramatic games

[sexysilverstrider]

man i miss fire emblem 3 houses

[gascon-en-exil]

i feel like the discourse could be solved if we remember that everyone in fire emblem is a war criminal anyway and we should think about which character should bone which (this is a very dramatic oversimplification)

Ah, but then there would still be the shipping wars, those timeless staples of internet arguments.

What's most helpful to me when it comes to war criminal discourse is to remember that it's an absurd metric to try to apply to FE in the first place, when the games have never cared about that - and the fandom never did either until Three Houses came around and gave us a handful of fans willing to use any method, however absurd, to attempt to prove that their villainous fave is not, in fact a villain.

Other anons under the cut.

three hopes seems to destroy the idea that dimitri needs byleth, i wish this meant dimileth would lose popularity but eh we already know people don't care about canon, just their fantasies

I suspect Byleth ships will maintain popularity, even though there's apparently little to any of them in Three Hopes. There's already a chunk of fandom saying that this game's lack of paired endings and S ranks means that Three Houses takes precedent for endings.

Even so, I am very much loving all the attention given to Dimitri's established support network. It didn't even require any tweaking of canon either; just cut out (most of) the self-insert pandering and Dimitri's team of boyfriends and father figures comfortably runs itself.

If in SB Dimitri survived and all the others include Dedue died, it would be more cruel to him than CF's ending...not sure it is a good thing for him to live on in this situation. But I will wait and see if Dedue, Sylvain, Roderigue and Felix manges to survive in SB.

Very true, which is why I don't think it's at all likely that those characters will die even on SB. A shame for those of us who enjoy dramatic death scenes - I'll also be lamenting the missed opportunity for a Ferdibert death scene in AG with all their characteristic flair - but I suppose it's to make all the endings more feel-good/tie into the combined resolution thing with Arval although I'm still not too clear on how that bit works.

[uwua3]

your name (pt.1)

❄️📚 tsukioka tsumugi

part 1 — part 2 — part 3

summary: being an adult is tiring, tsumugi knows that all too well.

warnings: class divide (struggling financially), food

author’s note: this is the first ever series i’m doing! please anticipate the next installment of the “your name” series tomorrow :D i’m so excited to share this since part 01 is my first ever wip for a3 ever 🤍 please enjoy!

word count: 2,932

music: kimi no na wa soundtrack – radwimps

Running with reckless abandon, a boy trips amidst the bustling public traffic in the station, books flying out of his arms from the sheer force of his turn. Passer-bys barely spared a glance at the panicked tutor as he bent down to gather his academic papers, all imprinted by strangers’ shoes. In a moment of lifelong embarrassment, the world continued to spin as nothing rippled the fabric of time.

Murmurs spread across the crowd, daily small talk between people who would never see each other again on the complex train system. Students shared personal gossip too loud for their own good as their prestigious private academy skirts flew past him. Businessmen burdened themselves with client phone calls as they were all weighed down by the same leather briefcase. Employees wore their customer service mask, smiling politely before dropping their act immediately afterwards when they thought no one was looking. As expected, there was no time in the schedule to stop and help a recent university graduate out of his clumsy peril. Everyone was too distracted by their own problems to consider breaking their routine.

Perceptive by nature, Tsukioka Tsumugi didn’t need to glance at his watch to know he was late to his study session. The automated female voice sounded dull over the speakers, announcing his designated train was to depart in five minutes in a monotone attitude. Tokyo was a busy city with no mercy for those who didn’t plan every second of their future. That much was understandable by the aspiring teacher who quickly pulled out his outdated flip phone as he carefully eyed the assignments back in his possession.

A single tone rang before a drawl was heard in poor quality, with a shit–eating grin Tsumugi knew all too well.

“Tsumu, did you finally realize I don’t need your tutoring?” Settsu Banri mocked, the distinct background noises of his new video game obsession making Tsumugi speed walk even faster. With his books held tight against his chest, he sighed and almost pinched the bridge of his nose before realizing none of his hands were free. Placing the phone in between his shoulder and ear, Tsumugi rolled his eyes as he attempted to organize his mess.

“Banri-kun, please refer to me as Tsukioka-san. I am your senior by years, if I may remind you.” Tsumugi reprimanded, noting Banri’s agitated groan and muttered under his breath about the age difference between them. Unlike the other students Tsumugi tutored, Banri was defiant. Over–the–top, lazy, and arrogant—but deadly smart. Ever since Tsumugi carefully took off his shoes in the Settsus’ overpriced apartment, Banri took it upon himself to make his life a living hell by refusing to do the work but getting every question right. The only thing Banri cooperated with was talking about video games, which distracted him from his innate ability to be the best at everything. So on Friday afternoons, Tsumugi would visit to recap the weekly curriculum and try his best to stay patient with Banri’s snappy attitude.

“Why’d you call anyways? You’re late, by the way.” Banri pointed out right before Tsumugi fell through the two closing doors on the train, tumbling into a displeased but silent group as he gripped the overhead. Spectators only stared for a second before turning away as Tsumugi blushed under the attention, stammering back a half–assed apology of how he was going to be twenty minutes late for their session.

“Hold on, am I talking to the right person? Tsukioka Tsumugi, late? Real funny, just tell me you quit or something.” Banri feigned a bothered persona, but it was nice to pretend he was actually worried over the possibility of not seeing Tsumugi. Apologizing quickly to a corporate worker he bumped into, Tsumugi fixed the bag slung too low on his right shoulder as he took the phone back in his hand. At the same time, the zipper on his decade old bag gave out as it took his foot’s entire strength to keep the folders in place. Great, another thing to replace.

Staring outside the window, the school year was coming to a close as the heat of incoming summer air made him grip the phone in case of vicious sweat. “Banri–kun, you know I value our study sessions together.” He didn’t respond, just a resigned hmph before hanging up as Banri started swearing into his gaming headset. Tsumugi closed his eyes, getting his minutes of shut-eye for the first time in days as the sun glowed. Time didn’t stop for anyone, especially not Tsukioka Tsumugi.

After being greeted way too properly by the Settsu chain of servants, Tsumugi could hear the exaggerated game sound effects throughout the rather empty mansion. Walking carefully into Banri’s wide open door, Tsumugi grimaced at the sight of the energy drink cans crushed and thrown haphazardly near the trash can. Junk food wrappers were kicked underneath the expensive furniture as Banri was focused on his two–screen gaming setup. The rainbow LED keyboard was smashed expertly by Banri’s quick fingers all without looking down, getting him a #1 win as he boredly stared at the victory. As expected of NEO-san, a top league player. Or so Tsumugi’s heard by his other student, Taichi, who dramatically cries every time he loses against Banri.

“Banri-kun, please excuse my interruption.” Tsumugi announced, holding up the textbooks he had carried with a strained smile. Banri didn’t even look over as he logged off, saying something about GG to his teammate by the name of “Taruchi” before pushing the cat headset down around his neck. Spinning around in his black gamer chair, Banri raised one eyebrow at Tsumugi’s disheveled appearance panting slightly in the doorway. It was unlike his composed, proper tutor to be... like every young adult out there? Tsumugi didn’t seem like he had all the wisdom and knowledge in the world, he looked more... confused than anything.

“Geez, Tsumu. Didn’t think you’d sleep in, watched the meteor strike last night?” Banri smirked, rolling his chair across the room to his school desk as he put his legs up, stretching his arms beneath his head lazily. How he hadn't changed out of his white t-shirt and sweatpants was beyond Tsumugi as he sat in his normal chair silently, unlike the loud high schooler who glanced at the folder of work with a yawn. Grabbing some trendy bucket hat, Banri shoved the brim over his eyes as he took a break from the flashing neon blue light from his monitor.

“Meteor strike?” Tsumugi questioned innocently, attempting to hold conversation as Banri hummed a game soundtrack absentmindedly. Nodding, Banri pulled up his modern phone that made Tsumugi wince thinking of the price of that thing. Shoving the screen in front of Tsumugi’s wary red eyes, he blinked rapidly to adjust to the bright overpowering pixels. Tsumugi noticed an event marked that raved about the phenomenal light show the day before. Thinking back on the train incident this morning, Tsumugi remembered the excitement buzzing through the students a week prior as they whispered about a new chance to wear their best yukatas to celebrate. It had been so long since he was in school, that he completely forgot about all the childish euphoria that came with change.

“I must’ve slept through it. I didn’t notice at all.” Tsumugi admitted, tilting his head as he tried to remember the news every morning the past week. He couldn’t remember a single story of the astronomical event, although every day felt the same as usual. It was peculiar; Tsumugi was awake all night, too. He couldn’t sleep without his medication... maybe he should have looked up for once.

Taking his phone back to check the game notification popping up on screen, Banri chuckled as he shoved a stick of chocolate pocky in his mouth. “Mhmm, said it was a historical event n’ all. Supposed to be life-changing.” Banri offered bare minimum detail on anything and everything, but it was enough for Tsumugi to have a slight understanding as he set up the workspace. Banri noticed the distant look in Tsumugi’s eyes, the tiredness stifled underneath the graceful mannerisms as it looked like he was going through the motions. Attempting to lighten the mood, Banri’s voice came off meaner than he intended. “Aren’t you like? 25? How come you don’t know this stuff, you’re no boomer.”

Tsumugi frowned, glancing at Banri who looked away immediately with a flustered expression. Leave it to Banri to overthink whether or not he overstepped a boundary but refuse to acknowledge it. Tsumugi kept the meme going, sarcastically deadpanning, “Haha” before tossing a new eraser at Banri’s mushroom hair. Banri caught the gift in one hand easily as he slowly turned it over, turning his body to fully face his tutor. His feet dropped to the floor with a bang, startling Tsumugi to straighten his posture and stare directly into Banri’s curious face that had a glint of... concern?

“What’s all this? A gift to make me like you or something?” Banri jokes, nudging Tsumugi’s foot with his own. Tsumugi couldn’t help but notice the tight death grip Banri had on the small, game controller shaped eraser he had found at his full time work as a florist. Across the street was a one dollar convenience store, where teenage workers stood at the register on their phones as Tsumugi checked out the stationary. Wearing his dirt–stained apron, he remembered coming across miniature, adorable erasers that made him think of his students. Especially the red and blue Nintendo Switch joy con erasers that made Tsumugi think of Banri’s whole rant about the superiority of Fire Emblem: Three Houses’ Black Eagles for the potential wife girls. Sure, it was a hit on his already fragile bank account, but it was worth it to see Banri genuinely happy about something for once.

“You already do, I’m the longest tutor you’ve had.” Tsumugi didn’t need the thanks, because it was clear in the way Banri for once put something down without throwing it. Banri scoffed, mumbling a weak comeback as he flipped open his notebook. He even tossed his hat off his head, revealing the messy long hair tucked behind his ears. Oh, he did his homework for once, Tsumugi mused with satisfaction before trying to flip to the appropriate page in the school’s textbook. It was open to a section on meteors, and glossy colored pictures of the sky made Tsumugi’s eyes focus. The image seemed familiar. Perhaps he stared a moment too long, because Banri took the book himself and thumbed his way to the marked section, warily sparing a careful glance.

“Hey... you good? You don’t look... normal.” Banri roughly phrased, trying his best to emote like a normal human would. Tsumugi nodded, not convincing anyone he was off. Brushing his sweaty palms upon his jeans, Tsumugi pushed his hair back as he started reciting what he knew of the topic and reviewed the homework, failing to catch Banri’s attentive stare at Tsumugi’s cheap, hole-ridden pants and bag bursting at the seams.

Tsumugi went back on the same train. The people were the same, his schedule was the same. Banri was different today though, paid more attention today despite knowing it already. Maybe he just wanted to get it over with, probably some tournament tonight.

In the face of the orange sunset above the skyscrapers, Tsumugi walked home with a slow, natural pace that fit his time slot he allocated for transportation. The mental reminder allowed him to look up for once, seeing the birds fly together around the quieter part of the city as a golden haze reflected off the glass. Community members said their usual predictable greetings as he waved back, respectfully wishing good health to his elders and telling funny jokes to the youth playing sports. Yet, it didn’t bring him the fulfillment he got before when he was young. Being an adult, was tiring.

It was the same everyday, as Tsumugi left the residential area and climbed through the back alley to a slum part of town. Lights flickered as abandoned businesses creaked amidst the silence. He escaped the prying eyes of neighbors and unlocked the door to his dingy, unsafe apartment. Closing the door quietly, Tsumugi stared at the studio as silence overtook his surroundings. Dust floated in the golden hour as everything was where he exactly left it.

“Welcome home.” Tsumugi whispered, his own voice echoing in between his four walls. Alone, again. It was the same everyday.

Heating up the instant ramen expired in his cupboard, the microwave sparked every once in a while as Tsumugi leaned against the counter. Each surface he touched creaked with uncertainty, as if it didn’t know how long it could last. His one–room housing felt cramped despite the lack of furniture around Tsumugi. His run–down appliances, aged decor, and rising rent made the location even better as Tsumugi did the usual routine of eating half the calories he needed and staying up browsing job listings. This time, the ramen wasn’t as satisfying as the pastry Banri stuffed in his hand before he left.

“What’s this?” Tsumugi remembered asking, immediately feeling sick to his stomach once he saw Banri’s serious expression stare back at him. At the moment, it felt like Banri was his teacher. The sweet, strawberry mochi wrapped in plastic felt warm in his palm as Banri stood at the door of his own home, leading Tsumugi out with a gift.

“Mochi. You’re Japanese, dipshit. Just a thanks, I guess.” Banri bullshitted, rolling his eyes as he stuffed his hands into his pockets. Tsumugi noticed they began to fidget a little bit as Banri tapped his foot against the welcome mat. “School punk named Juza bakes or whatever, has a family business so thought you might like it. Or whatever.” Banri elaborated, using one hand to tug at the already loose v–neck collar of his week old t–shirt. Was that a blush Tsumugi saw on his rather indifferent student? No matter, it wasn’t his business to ask about a troublemaker turned pastry chef.

He’d make sure to thank his student next time he tutored him, which would be (Tsumugi checked the wall calendar disappointedly) next week. Banri was a good kid, even if he had his teenage angsty rebellion phase for a while now. Privileged kids liked doing that, pretending the whole world was against them despite having everything, Tsumugi thought bitterly. Even he was slightly surprised and caught off guard by his own pessimism, before the microwave beeped, signaling its task was done.

When Tsumugi tried to pull open the door, the handle snapped off and a quiet sigh escaped Tsumugi’s lips. Guess no dinner for tonight, then. Tsumugi didn’t have enough fight in him to care, so he dropped the handle onto the counter with a clatter. Inside this studio room, there was nothing for Tsumugi here. Not even his own food.

So, Tsumugi sat down on the couch that groaned beneath his weight. Except, it wasn’t his own body that made his sofa creak—it was the stack of papers needing to be graded in his arms. With a red pen tucked behind his ear, Tsumugi began marking his students’ work. A minute passed before Tsumugi quickly turned the television on, letting the sound of the news distract him from the unbearable loneliness.

Sure, it was going to increase his bills but... the money would be worth it to make his thoughts quiet for a moment. Tsumugi had a job to do, and he wouldn’t let his mindset get in the way. Being an adult was something else, indeed.

When had he fallen asleep?

Tsumugi blinked slowly, finding that his cheek was resting against a substantially smaller stack. Another pile that was distinctly red ink was on the other cushion, the pen without its cap rolled across the carpet. Tsumugi subconsciously winced when he realized the T.V. was on, the same channel on in the background.

Lifting his head, Tsumugi tried to comprehend the visual of the screen through his blurry vision. Tsumugi’s glasses must’ve dropped somewhere; he hoped he didn’t step on them. From what he could hear, the duo of news anchors were animatedly discussing some supernatural phenomenon tonight. Tsumugi rubbed his eyes, leaning closer to the small box screen ahead.

There was no way he possibly heard that correctly. Yet, there it was on the T.V.: “Historical Meteor Shower Tonight!” in big bold letters at the bottom. Tsumugi could remember Banri talking about something like this, but it had occurred last night. Was there another one? How common was it for two meteor showers within a span of mere hours? Sitting up, Tsumugi watched the pair talk about the light show.

“This is said to be the first event of its kind in Japan!” The host exclaimed, the screen switching to a picture of the meteors. A sense of familiarity struck Tsumugi once more, the same feeling when he had seen Banri’s textbook earlier that day. “It’s said to be life–changing—” The other one replied, Tsumugi’s wide eyes focused on every single passing word and image. Could deja vu possibly last this long?

As Tsumugi fumbled for his phone, he made his way out onto his balcony. Something inside him was telling him to get some air as Tsumugi dialed Banri’s number. Before Tsumugi could confirm the call, a bright light appeared out of the corner of his eye.

Tsumugi looked up to see two bright meteors splitting from one another. At the sight, Tsumugi’s phone landed upon the balcony floor.

[loreweaver-universe]

And that’s...the show.

What a clever way to get Lake off the train.  On multiple levels!  Not only was it clever in-character, but her escape came from her accepting her nature at long last--which was what would have brought her own number down to zero.  That’s such an excellent way to end her journey--truly, she was the same as a passenger the whole time.

That was a good finale.  Not the action-packed ending that season 1 got, but it didn’t need to be, really.  It was different from Tulip’s journey in ways where a bigger action sequence than what we got wouldn’t have been appropriate.  In fact, the fight with Sieve feels kind of like an afterthought--it wasn’t obviously, it tied off an important loose end and gave Alan Dracula something to do in the final two episodes, but it didn’t really feel like a proper focus of the episode.

Showing off One-One’s weird blue-and-orange morality system was really cool.  Watching him actually get trapped in logic loops was fascinating, and I think he was used VERY well here.

Alan Dracula was a fun sideshow character, but often felt like he was just there for the animators and writers to play around with, rather than an essential part of the team like Atticus and One-One were in season 1.

Jesse was a good deuteragonist!  Shut up, Tumblr spellcheck, that’s a word.  Jesse’s journey was simple--come to terms with the fact that he and his friends were bullies, and it was very deftly done.  The fact that the train reorders its cars and constructs them for individual passengers’ journeys makes it interesting that his final obstacle was confronting the Apex--the train even works other passengers into its plans.  Which, ironically, makes the Apex more denizen than passenger.  Anyways, Jesse’s journey was simple and well-handled, which is good because he wasn’t actually who the story was about.

That would be Lake.  Mirror Tulip.  Horseradish, as I’ve been tagging her since season 1.  The Chrome Car was my second-favorite episode of season 1, due to excellent character drama, excellent horror, and excellent writing all around.  I remember wishing very much that Lake had joined Tulip on her journey--clearly, the people writing the show wanted to keep telling her story, too, because we got a whole season of it.  Lake’s journey of self-discovery and self-actualization was a really fascinating one.  Watching her slowly come out of her prickly shell until she was finally ready to accept herself for who she was was an excellent journey.  I really do think it’s SUCH good writing that she basically got her own number down to zero right when she got One-One to let her off the train.

Mace and Sieve turned out to be excellent villains, as well--Mace more than Sieve, really, but Mace got more focus and had more presence, and rightfully so.  My favorite episode of the season focuses on him and Tulip, after all.  What an excellent bastard.

All in all, a good season, but not quite as strong as the first one.  That’s not a low bar to fail, though.  Excellent work all around, and I’m delighted with the ending.

The final episode just wasn’t as strong an ending as season one’s though, and wasn’t the best episode in season 2 by a couple places.  The Tape Car was creepier and focused on horror, which I liked a lot, and The Wasteland was just fantastic.  It also has to compete with some VERY strong episodes in season 1--which, again, is not a low bar to fail.  All in all, I’d place The Number Car at my new #3 for season 2, between The Lucky Cat Car (which was very funny, but didn’t have the emotional or dramatic stuff The Number Car did) and The Tape Car (which I’ve already covered), as well as my new #7 overall, between The Lucky Cat Car and The Cat’s Car, which did drama and horror VERY well.

That’s it for Infinity Train, at least until we maybe get a third season!  In a couple days, I’m going to make a post on my Patreon asking for show suggestions for what to replace Infinity Train with in the main slots, and then we’ll have the poll to replace it a few days after that.  I’ll keep you posted as to what the results of that are!  In the meantime, up next is going to be this month’s Patron Picks--as usual, I’ll be doing Paranoia Agent, Baccano, and then A Place Further Than the Universe.  After that, we’ll be getting back to She-Ra for a solid while--I’ll be starting Season 2, so stay tuned for that!

Streamwise, I streamed the first part of my blind playthrough of Transistor yesterday (which you can view here) and will be starting what I think will be the rest of the game shortly.  If you want to tune into that live, head on over to my Twitch channel and give me a follow!  That should be happening within the hour.

As always, thank you all for tuning in, and thank you very much to the 62 patrons who make it possible for me to do this for a living!  I’ll see you next time!

IN OTHER NEWS:

I recently completed my blind playthrough of Transistor!  You can see the full playlist of those streams by clicking here!

I recently completed my playthrough of Final Fantasy VII Remake!  You can see the full playlist of those streams by clicking here!

I recently completed my playthrough of the second story campaign in Fire Emblem: Three Houses!   You can view all the streams of the Golden Deer and Black Eagles routes I have done by clicking here!

If you’d like to help me pay my rent, buy me some food, or help with my bills and medicine, please use my direct donation link!  If you’d like to support me per liveblog completed every month, please pledge to my Patreon! Becoming a patron not only allows you to vote on what shows I do whenever I choose a new one, but also grants access to the community Minecraft server to $5 patrons or higher!

You should also go pledge to Gio’s Patreon–our Discord server maintenance tech, creator of Rubybot, and community Minecraft server overlord deserves far more than I can afford to pledge to him by myself.

If you’d like more of me and my content:

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It’s your kindness and support that lets me do this stuff, and I wouldn’t be where I am without all of you to do it for.  Thank you all so much for your support, and for tuning in every episode!

OTHER PEOPLE YOU MAY ENJOY:

I may have been one of the earlier Steven Universe liveblogs, but a whole community of livebloggers has sprung up over the last five years!   I linked to a bunch individually for a few wrap-ups, but honestly, this end-slate is already eight billion miles long, so I’m just gonna link to my links page.  Click here if you want recommendations of other livebloggers, or other neat people, or webcomics and podcasts that I recommend.

[sylvanfreckles]

Day Five: Mistletoe

Fandom: Fire Emblem Awakening

Summary: Chrom and Lissa recruit Robin to help plan a solstice festival for the Shepherds.

(Yep! It’s the third of my top-three game series!)

After nearly an hour of poring over the field reports brought in by their scouts, Robin slowly became aware that someone was standing in front of him. “Oh. Hello, Lissa. Did you need something?”

Chrom's sister was smiling down at him—which usually meant trouble—with both hands innocently tucked behind her back. “Do you know what date it is, Robin?”

“It's, um,” Robin shuffled through the reports. One of them had been dated. “It's...winter?”

“It's nearly solstice,” Lissa explained cheerfully. “You know what that means?”

“Uh...” he squinted up at her. “The...shortest day of the year?”

Lissa giggled and brought one hand out, holding a sprig of some kind of plant and dangling it over Robin's head. He stared up at it in confusion, then looked further up to the gleeful expression on the young cleric's face. “Lissa?”

“Holy wow,” Lissa rolled her eyes. “You really don't know anything but strategy, huh? This is mistletoe.”

“Okay?” Robin shrugged. Mistletoe was a parasitical plant, and Miriel used it in some of her research. That was about all he knew of it. “What about it?”

“Duh. When two people are under the mistletoe they're supposed to kiss.”

Robin felt his cheeks burn bright red and he tried to scramble away from Lissa. “That-that wouldn't be appropriate! You're the princess...Frederick would...and Chrom...!”

Lissa just giggled at his consternation and leaned over to place a dramatic kiss on top of his head. “Solstice is a time to celebrate, Robin. We're just trying to spread a little cheer! Put your books away and come to the mess tent, Sumia and Stahl are talking about making a special meal.”

He let her grab his wrist and tug him to his feet, following the flounce of her yellow skirt through the camp to the mess tent. “Maybe you can help me convince Olivia to do a special dance,” Lissa continued brightly. “Or-or at least convince Henry not to. And Mirabelle's looking for anyone who used to do those old Yule plays in school...but I guess you wouldn't remember that...anyway, here we are!”

With a dramatic gesture, Lissa swept the mess tent's entrance flap aside. Inside, several of the Shepherds were busy arranging boughs of evergreen branches along the tent's frame. Nowi seemed to be helping Cherche untangle a mass of red and white ribbon, but Robin was fairly sure the Manakete was just tangling things up further on purpose.

“Chrom! I found him!” Lissa waved at her brother across the tent and pulled Robin through the chaos. “Your favorite tactician, big brother,” she announced, shoving Robin forward.

The Exalt chuckled, resting his chin in one hand. “He's my only tactician, Lissa.”

“All the more reason he should be your favorite!” she replied with a cheeky grin. “Now, here, you two work on your plans. I'm gonna go hunt for more mistletoe.”

“Keep it away from Tharja!” Chrom called to his sister's retreating back. He offered Robin a warm smile and patted the empty spot on the bench beside him. “We've been planning a little celebration, and I was hoping you'd help me.”

Robin sat and rested his hands in his lap, fingers twisted together. The bustle around him was so cheerful, so comfortable...and so unfamiliar. “I don't...Chrom, I don't remember anything. From before.”

“Hey,” Chrom's hand on Robin's shoulder was warm. Comforting. “We're making new memories, right? I'm not asking you to come up with anything, I just need my favorite tactician to do what he does best.”

He couldn't help but smile at Chrom's words. “And what's that?”

“Strategy,” Chrom held up a few loose sheets of paper. “I've been trying to think of different things we could do, but I can't seem to get it into any kind of order.”

Robin flipped through the pages and nodded to himself. “I think I can see what you mean,” he said, digging for a spare quill in his robes. He took a scrap of paper and roughly sketched out two-hour blocks of time and started filling them in. “You want to have active events, like the wrestling tournament Sully wants, a couple of hours after a meal. Mirabelle wants to do a play or recital, that should be directly after lunch.”

“We could have an informal dinner,” Chrom suggested, spreading the loose pages across their knees. “We used to have a solstice ball every year...it could only be something small out here in the camp, but I think everyone would like it.”

The tactician's quill darted across the page as he made notes. “Does...does this page just say 'candy'?”

Chrom groaned, crumpled the page up, and tossed it over his shoulder. “Gauis was here a few minutes ago.”

“Right.”

Robin leaned over the paper, making new notes and crossing old ones out, drawing lines to move events around. Eventually Chrom got up to bring him more paper when their notes began to overflow the pages. Someone brought them bread and ale at noon, though they were too busy arguing over whether or not to include a horse race for the solstice festival. At one point Vaike simply dragged their bench over to one side so he could decorate the tent pole that had been behind them.

“...look, all I'm saying is, Cherche always wants someone to pet Minerva,” Robin explained, leaning back away from Chrom to keep his quill out of reach. “She doesn't need a special day for a wyvern petting zoo, I'm pretty sure she slipped that into your pocket while you were asking Sumia if she knew how to make mince pies.”

“I know that,” Chrom retorted. He planted a hand on Robin's shoulder and held the tactician down long enough to pluck the quill out of his outstretched hand. “I'll ask you this...do you want to tell Cherche we left Minerva out of our solstice festival plans?”

Robin shuddered at the thought and watched Chrom scrawl Minerva's name next to the box for Sully's wrestling tournament. “Right. I think we have a good schedule here. Maybe...”

“Robin!” Lissa pelted into the tent, leaves caught in her blonde hair. “Oh—Chrom! You're both here!”

“Lissa?” Chrom was already on his feet, holding his arms out to stop his sister's mad dash. “What's wrong?”

Lissa doubled over, panting for breath, hands resting on her thighs. “It's awful. I was looking for mistletoe, and she...Tharja followed me. I didn't know she was there, I swear!”

“Tharja?” Robin felt another shudder run up his spine. He climbed to his feet, papers scattering around him, and clung to the back of Chrom's tunic to steady himself.

“She found the Mistletoe! Oh, Robin, you have to hide!”

“Follow me,” Chrom seized Robin by the wrist and fled the mess tent, pulling the tactician along in his wake. “Frederick is working in the armory today, he'll know what to do.”

Robin stumbled along, nearly tripping over his own robes as Chrom pulled him between the tents. “This is...is solstice always like this?”

Chrom smiled back at him over his shoulder. “It is when you're a Shepherd!”

* * *

Next time: Trifles - “No”

* * *

Day Four - Master List - Day Six

[theoceanswaves0]

SPOILERS AHOY (ISH)

It’s been like four years since I did a post like this, so here’s me dumping my thoughts on various, random things I’ve been into/thinking about lately.

I’ll be covering Miraculous Ladybug S3, Fire Emblem Three Houses, My Hero Academia, The MCU, Chocolate/Zen: Warrior Within, Pokemon SwSh, Victorious, BtVS/Angel, and Star Wars: RoS so just a warning for potential spoilers. Also, there will be salt and gushing, so proceed with caution.

Victorious

--> Ok, so this show came out when I was already in high school, so I think some of my opinions and takes on the show are going to contrast with the general consensus.

--> But I’m firmly in the pro-Tori Vega camp. Do I agree with her kissing Beck in the pilot? No. But considering that Jade humiliated her in front of her class for a small misunderstanding that could have been easily cleared up if Jade took five seconds to hear Tori out, I find it difficult to feel bad for Jade. Plus, Tori gets called out for this a couple of times in later episodes anyway. 

--> As for Cat’s BF, yeah, that was shitty too but A. He was originally Tori’s BF and they only broke up a year prior to the episode and B. Not only does Tori feel immediate remorse for what she does (spraying Cat with cheese and then kissing her bf in front of her), but she apologizes and never does anything like it again for the rest of the show. BTW, these are both season one incidents, so clearly Tori grows out of this.

--> Plus, I can relate to some of Tori’s awkward traits, like being kind of annoying, not having the best verbal comebacks and feeling pretty average.

--> On the other hand, I can’t stand Jade. Her attitude reminds me of a girl I used to be on and off friends with in middle school. She ended up embarrassing me in front of the cast of our fall play in eighth grade and never apologized for it. Plus she would say or do things that, in hindsight, made it clear she didn’t want me around.

--> But I mean, at least that girl didn’t steal a pint of my blood meant to be used in a mutual friend’s operation, so...

--> Although clearly, Rex the Puppet is the worst character on this show. Jade at least does stuff, why do we need to have Rex around...?

--> My ships are Tandre (Tori/Andre) and Catrina (Cat/Trina)! Tori and Andre always look like they have fun performing together or just hanging out, and their friendship is just so precious. I wish Cat and Trina had more scenes together, because I loved their road trip in “Tori the Zombie” and they’re both dysfunctional in their own ways, but trying their best!! 

BtVS/Angel

--> Nothing new really. But my Tandre feels reminded me how much I also loved Gunn/Fred and wished that they stayed together. Even their ship name, Funn, is precious and gahhhhhhh breaking them up was a mistake!

My Hero Academia

--> It took me like 3-4 years after watching the first episode, but I finally watched it.

--> I’m surprised by how much I really like Izuku. Like, I normally like the protagonist fine, but Izuku just really stood out to me. He’s socially awkward, but in a pretty understandable way, intelligent and passionate without using any of it to put other people down, and ofc he cares about his friends and saving other people because what shonen protagonist doesn’t? The only thing I don’t like about him is his hero worship of Bakugo, but that’s just my bias.

--> Oh, yeah, I don’t like Bakugo. 

--> Relating to Aizawa the most, and realizing that it’s because I’m getting older hukjdshfaskdnfj 

--> I don’t have a ship I’m the most invested in, but I like Izuku with both Todoroki and Uraraka, and I also like Uraraka with Tsuyu. Erasermic is also really good.

--> Not a fan of Eraserjoke. I don’t like the way she continues to ask Aizawa out and then plays it off as a joke when he rejects her like. Like, it’s such a high school thing to do, it’s so weird seeing two grown adults do it. Just take the L and move on, Ms. Joke. Not only is it creepy to continue asking someone out when they say no, it’s annoying to pretend that you didn’t really mean it because it makes it difficult to read you in future scenarios. 

Fire Emblem Three Houses

--> Love it love it love it.

--> Like Fire Emblem has always been more of my brother’s thing, but with Awakening, Fates and Three Houses introducing easier difficulty options, I’ve found it much easier to get into the series. Like, I’m a pretty casual gamer so I’m not looking for anything too challenging most of the time.

--> Ofc I knew going in I was picking Golden Deer, and I was not disappointed. I love everyone every single student in there. The atmosphere was so chaotic, that I just knew recruiting everyone that I could to make it more so just had to be done.

--> Claude and Hilda are the best lord and “retainer” respectively, don’t @ me.

MCU

--> Uh, I haven’t really kept up with MCU stuff since Endgame (which I didn’t care for tbh). I just wanted to remind everyone that I hate Tony Stark :)

Miraculous Ladybug S3

(me @ this entire season tbh)

--> I don’t really post much about ML on this blog anymore because I ended up making a side blog (for salt mostly tbh). But in case anyone doesn’t keep up with what happens over there, I basically hated this entire season lol.

--> Ok, I loved Silencer. Best episode in the season period, no questions asked. I also really liked Kwamibuster and Startrain. Desperada grew on me over time, while Bakerix was... okay, I guess. And Felix was entertaining, even if I felt that the message that they were trying to get across was forced and meant to shut the fandom up. Oblivio was good until that ending, and once Silencer came along, I quickly learned I had no use for it anyway. It being an amnesia episode did it no favors, either.

--> Just as I feared, the season revolved more around humiliating or putting Marinette in really embarrassing situations for the same of “drama”. The Puppeteer 2 is a really good example of this. And it’s upsetting, because none of this actually does anything for Marinette’s character. She’s not even allowed to breakdown or be upset about anything that goes wrong for her until the end of “Heart Hunter” and even that only lasts, like, ten seconds.

--> Also, I don’t ship the Love Square anymore. Lukanette all the way, baby.

--> Let’s be real, Marinette/Happiness should be the real OTP of the show.

--> The fact that every episode of season 4 is supposed to be as dramatic as Chat Blanc does not leave me hopeful for the future. Like, really, you’re going to use an episode in which an entire timeline’s worth of events gets erased and leaves everyone with no memories of it as the basis of your emotional impact going forward? Um, thank you, next.

Rise of Skywalker

--> Haven’t seen it and after seeing the spoilers, I don’t plan to. I really liked TFA, and was excited to see what they did with the Rey-Poe-Finn dynamic. I was not here for Kylo Ren or Reylo. I guess Finn/Rey is joining Tandre and Funn in my “missed opportunity OTPs” corner. D:

Chocolate/Zen: Warrior Within

--> OMG one of my fave movies of all time. Like I appreciate it more and more with age. It’s basically everything I want in a movie.

--> The scene where Zen discovers that her mom’s hair is falling out and she blames herself for it always gets me. Like I always forget about it, so when I see it again, I can’t help but nearly breakdown myself, because I know exactly what Zen’s thought process is without her even having to say anything. I feel just as overwhelmed as she does in the moment and nearly cry every time watching it.

--> One of the few movies that I wish actually got a sequel. Like I have so many questions that could be answered. How do Zen and Moom adjust to living in Japan? How does Zen’s father try to relate to her and Moom? Do they make any other friends? Will Zen get access to resources that will help her? Will they be further ostracized because of their status as outsiders? As someone who already struggles verbally, how will Zen adapt to living in a country that primarily speaks another language? 

Pokemon SwSh

--> Multiplayer is so much fun and wayyyy more accessible than in the past imo. A bunch of people at my martial arts school would do raid battles before classes, so I would always leave to get there early and play with them. 10/10 experience, and it makes me excited to get Animal Crosssing to do the same thing.

--> But on the other hand, I feel like this game has a lot less going for it than SuMo. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it feels like too much is missing. Like I still enjoy it, but it’s more for the gameplay and less for the story. I’m also not nearly as invested in my team like I was last time (I loved my Sun team so much, I basically kept it the same for US, minus one or two changes). I’m trying to change it fits a “Psychedelic Ocean” vibe (Water/Psychic), and then do an “Earth” themed team for my Shield run but I just haven’t picked it back up since beating the game.

--> The characters were alright. I wasn’t as attached to any of the rivals like I was in SuMo. Leon is my bro though.

[teardropsonrooftops]

Robots and Fire are a Bad Combination - A Field Trip Fic

Also found on AO3

Peter gets an ominous text from Ned in sixth period. He doesn’t think much of it until after school. Ned doesn’t fanboy about his life, doesn’t talk about his day, instead, he just smiles and sends Peter off to Happy’s car with a wave. It’s suspicious to say the least.

Since it’s Wednesday, Happy drops him off at the tower with a tray stacked high with cups of coffee. Peter balances them with one hand, maneuvering through the security of SI’s lobby with ease. He greets the security guards, complimenting Sally’s new haircut as he goes. Friday takes him up to his regular Wednesday lab. He steps into the chaos with a sigh. He missed these guys.

“Thank you,” Ryan quickly says as he jogs past, grabbing his coffee from the top of the stack. He almost trips over one of the team’s robots, but he swerves at the last second.

Maya smiles as Ryan regains his balance. She gestures to the comm in her ear, indicating she’s on a call. and takes her own cup. Peter almost laughs as her face goes from friendly to serious. She steps off to the side, arguing furiously into her comm.

He does laugh when Ryan runs into a wall.

Bella calls him over from her hunched position over her desk. She holds out a hand, trusting him to give her the correct cup. He thinks about giving her Max’s for a second, but ultimately decides against it. Last time Bella didn’t get her coffee, things didn’t end well. She takes a sip, not taking her eyes off the experiment in front of her.

Peter snickers. Luke grabs his shoulder, pulling him towards his own desk, littered with papers and scraps of metal. Luke takes the tray from him and grins.

“You will never believe what I found,” he says, a slightly manic tone to his voice. There are bags under his eyes, and Peter wants to scold him.

“When’s the last time you slept?” he cuts Luke’s next sentence off with a frown.

“That doesn’t matter. You know that material we’ve been looking for? I found the formula. Isn’t that great? We can just make it ourselves.”

Peter levels him with a glare. Luke shrinks under the gaze. “When was the last time you slept?” he repeats.

“Yesterday morning,” Luke admits.

Peter sighs. He looks around the lab, searching for something. “Misael,” he calls out, “can you take Luke down to the bunks? Minimum of six hours. And, while you’re at it, you should stay. I can look at your equations while you’re gone.”

Misael looks up from his work, blinking sleepily. He muffles a yawn and nods. Luke sends a pleading look in Maya’s direction, receiving only a smirk in response. Misael grabs Luke’s arm and drags him into the elevator. As the doors close, Peter sees him lean heavily against Luke’s shoulder.

He sighs again. They really are messes.

His attention is pulled to Ryan as a boom sounds through the lab. Everybody stops, looks at Ryan, and continues on with their business. Ryan gives Peter an uneasy grin, shrugging. His desk is on fire.

It will be a long day.

When Peter finally stumbles into the elevator near midnight, he’s sporting a wide smile. His face is covered in dirt and grease, but he’s happy. He collapses onto the couch in the living room. Friday will wake him up before school.

“Underoos? That you?”

Peter blinks slowly at the blue light approaching him. He covers his giggles with a cough, thinking about what Tony would be like as a wisp. His mind conjures the image of a floating blue ball of energy, bells chiming angrily around it when Peter does something stupid. He’s not sure if he’s successful with his cover up.

“Come on, kid. Let’s get you to your room. Geez, did you take a bath in oil? Why do you smell like a car shop?”

“Saahir,” he mumbles into the crook of Tony’s neck. His hands stick to Tony’s shirt, holding him up effortlessly.

“I should have known. That man brings trouble wherever he goes. What was it this time?”

Peter detaches himself from the shirt and smiles up at Tony. “New robot idea. This one flies.” He ignores Tony’s heavy breath out through his nose, instead focusing on not falling as he washes his face in his bathroom sink.

He yawns once more, pushing the door shut after Tony hands him clean clothes. He changes into them, only missing the arm hole of his shirt twice. He hears Tony laugh as he steps out, almost falling asleep where he stands. Peter yawns again. He closes his eyes and feels himself start to fall, but then it goes black.

He wakes to a slight beeping. He groans, flailing out his arm to hit the alarm clock. It tumbles to the ground, but he can’t find it in him to care. It’s time for school.

The smell of pancakes greets him as he steps into the kitchen. He takes a deep breath in, savoring the smell of syrup so early in the morning.

“Look who’s finally up,” Tony chuckles. “Sit down, Happy’s running a little late this morning, so we have some time. Want pancakes?”

Peter smiles. He loves his life.

Happy drops him off at the front steps, early enough that nobody questions it. The only students outside give him a wave as he steps happily up into the school. He sees them every morning. At first, the early arrivals were curious, but Peter explained his internship, and they forgot about it.

He meets Ned and MJ in the library. MJ, headphones in, gives him a slight nod. He returns it with a wide grin. Ned greets him, but it seems off. Peter brushes it off, putting the information aside for later use.

Ned fills the time before class with a rant about one of their teachers, and everything is back to normal. Or so Peter thinks.

Then, at lunch, Ned gives him a specific smile, one he only uses when he’s hiding something. Peter knows something is wrong. The last time Ned smiled like that was when he was planning Peter’s surprise party.

He decides to ask MJ about it, because MJ knows all.

“If he’s not telling you, what makes you think I’ll tell you?” she says with an unimpressed scoff. “Focus on your work, loser.”

Peter shrugs it off. If it’s important, Ned will tell him. Right?

Friday arrives, and Ned still hasn’t told him what he’s hiding. Peter feels off about the whole situation. It doesn’t help when Flash increases his taunts, even going so far as to push him harshly into the lockers after lunch.

Happy picks him up after the last bell ends. Peter frowns, lost in thought, not noticing Happy eyeing him from the front seat. Finally, Happy sighs, getting his attention.

“Alright, kid. What’s wrong?”

That’s all it takes. “Ned’s keeping something from me, and it’s making me uncomfortable. I know it’s not bad, because he would tell me if it is, right? He’s been acting like this since Wednesday, and at first I thought it was just a minor thing, but now I’m not so sure. What should I do, Happy?”

“Have you tried asking him?”

Oh, shit. That’s a great idea. He searches through his bag for his phone, tapping at the screen and finding Ned’s contact. He decides to text him.

“Hey-” he starts, but he stops when he looks up. Happy has rolled up the visor. Oh, well.

Peter - Hey, dude. Is there any specific reason that my Spidey Senses think you’re keeping something from me?

He thinks that’s the best way to ask. If he involves his powers, Ned will probably fixate on that, gushing over how cool it is he can detect stuff like that. He waits, fingers tapping out a quick rhythm on his thigh.

Ned - How did you know???

Peter - I told you, Spidey Sense. It knows all.

Ned - Amazing. I promise I’m not hiding something huge!! It’s just a secret, well, kind of.

Ned texts like he talks, all emphasis and run-on sentences.

Ned - My Math class is going on a field trip tomorrow, is all. It’s not that important, but I figured you’d be jealous that your class doesn’t get to go. You know, since you guys lost the competition!

Of course he would hold that over his head. Peter makes a note to get back at him for that.

Peter - It’s cool. I didn’t want to go anyway. :(

He tucks his phone into his pocket as Happy opens his door. He does his usual routine, greeting the guards and the workers in line for security. The elevator, empty except for Peter, speeds up to the communal floor, doors opening with a slight ding.

Clint waves from the couch, eyes fixed on the television displaying his character beating Sam’s in a racing game. Peter rolls his eyes. He throws his backpack into the corner and perches on the back of the couch, watching the game from behind the players. They trade positions as the day goes on, the sun eventually setting behind the buildings on the horizon.

Eventually, Steve calls everybody to the communal kitchen. He hands out plates stacked high with glorious smelling foods. Peter gets the biggest plate; he takes it with a grin.

“How was school, Pete?” Clint asks, mouth already full of food as they settle down at the table.

“You spent four hours playing video games with him, but you didn’t ask about his day?” Natasha asks, eyebrow raised. Clint pointedly ignores her.

“It was pretty good. I aced my chem test, got the highest grade in my class. Oh, and at lunch, MJ gave me this sketch of my face when I got my test back. It was pretty cool. She’s a good artist when she wants to be. I’m still convinced she transferred out of art because she didn’t want the attention. She claims it’s because she’s not good at it.”

Clint nods along, but Peter can tell he’s not paying attention. He looks to Natasha and finds her staring at Steve, face blank.

Steve seems to be arguing with Thor about politics, so Peter turns to his food. One time hearing that conversation is enough. They basically repeat it every time.

The next morning, Peter wakes up feeling refreshed.

He heads down to the labs after breakfast, skipping over to Saahir’s station. Their robot buzzes overhead, and Peter can hear each part moving as it spins its rotors. It sounds good, but it looks even better. Peter had convinced Saahir to paint it in Spider-Man colors, red and blue with a black spider emblem on the bottom. Peter loves it.

“The question is,” Peter says as he dramatically lowers himself into his chair, “what do we name it?”

They bounce names off of each other, but they get distracted by Maya pretty quickly. She causes a small explosion with the chemicals she’s pouring. Peter rushes over. He gets Friday to switch the smoke fans on, his voice a little bit panicked.

The elevator dings, which is the least of Peter’s worries, but he still registers the small noise. He’s too busy trying to convince Saahir’s drone away from the fire to hear the dozen or so heartbeats that enter the room. He jumps from his spot on top of Maya’s desk, grabs the robot from midair, and lands with a roll to save his bones from the tile floor. He’s still a little beat up from patrol on Thursday.

He stands, brushing off his jeans, and it’s then that he hears the silence. The lab is never silent, so he knows something’s wrong. He turns around slowly.

The sixth period AP math class of Midtown High stands in the elevator, eyes wide and jaws hanging. Ava, the tour guide, looks unamused, but Ms. Warren regards him with an awed expression.

The lab goes back to normal, back to the organized chaos that it is. Saahir gently pries his robot from Peter’s hands and backs away slowly. Maya puts out the fire with a fire blanket handed to her by Luke. Ryan runs past them, always rushing off somewhere.

“So, Ned, you didn’t tell me the field trip was to Stark Tower.”

The class erupts into questions. Ned looks ecstatic. He waves towards Luke with a wide grin. Betty and Abe are the loudest, asking why there was a fire on a lab floor and why Peter was taking care of it. Flash looks angry. Oh no. Ava steps in, clearing her throat for the class’ attention.

“As you can see, the lab floors take safety very seriously. We have precautions in place to stop accidents like this, but it might be too early in the morning for a bunch of scientists to use their brains.” She aims that last part at Maya. Maya looks unapologetic, eyebrows raised as she sips stale coffee from the crappy coffee maker in the corner.

“Is Peter an intern here?” Cindy asks, her hand slightly raised.

“Yes, he is. Well, maybe not an intern anymore, more like a younger scientist. He is Mr. Stark’s protege, but Stark lends him out to the labs sometimes.” Ava ignores the gawking looks. She leads the class around the lab, introducing each scientist and what they’re working on.

Peter pulls Ned away from the group.

“Ned! What the hell were you thinking? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Oops? I know this isn’t the best situation, but, hey, now they know for sure that you have an internship! Flash won’t bother you anymore.”

Peter almost growls. Instead, he looks up to the ceiling and prays to Thor, which probably isn’t the best idea, considering the god is in the tower. Whatever, he decides, Thor doesn’t hear his prayers anyway.

Ava moves the class back into the elevator, deflecting any questions about Peter and the fire.

The doors close, leaving Peter to collapse in a chair, provided helpfully by Misael. He groans into his hands.

“Friday?”

“Yes, Peter.”

“Tell Bucky to meet me in the gym.”

“He is on his way.”

Peter lets himself fall into a fighting stance. It comes easy to him now. His shoulders roll, his heartbeat slowing to a steady rhythm. He dodges Bucky’s punches and kicks. His body bends unnaturally to avoid the hits, something almost inhuman.

He’s completely at ease. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t hear them enter.

“Is Peter fighting an Avenger?”

“Is that actually Peter?”

“He’s fighting the Winter Soldier!”

“No way can Parker fight an Avenger.”

Peter freezes, a bad move when Bucky is throwing punches at him. He ducks under a right hook, twisting his body to see the class huddled in the corner of the gym. Bucky uses this, but Peter flips out of the way. He calls the fight, making a ‘T’ with his hands.

“Bucky,” he whispers. His eyes dart to the group gawking at them.

Bucky straightens, shoulders set and jaw tense. He steps in front of Peter, shielding him with his body. He clears his throat.

“Hello,” he says, “Ned, what’s going on?”

Ned knows all of them, and Peter can hear bucky’s heart calm when he meets his eyes. Ned has a calming presence.

“Our class is on a field trip! Ava said we could visit the lower gym, but we didn’t expect anybody to be in here. It’s nice to see you again, Bucky!”

“You as well,” he says, his lips twitching with the hint of a smile.

Peter catches Flash’s glare, and he shrinks back. Bucky doesn’t notice.

“I’m going to go clean up, Bucky. That okay?”

“Of course.”

Peter passes him, slightly freezing in front of the crowd before pushing through them. They follow him out, asking questions and shouting at him. He fixates on Ned’s heartbeat, the steady thumping keeping him level through the noise.

Flash’s voice cuts through the shouting. “What did you do to get this job, Penis?” He doesn’t say it loudly, but everybody around him quiets, leaving only silence around his words. “Did you beg? We all know you don’t have the money to pay them off. Do you get on your knees? Did they use you?”

Peter spins on his feet, face flushed with anger as he eyes down Flash.

“You don’t get to speak that way about my family.” His voice is low, but there’s a fire in his eyes. “I earned my place. You’re disgusting, Flash, and I hope you realise that some day. But for now, I’ll be here to remind you.” Peter steps back, and the crowd parts like a wave.

“Well,” a new voice cuts in, “that was a fun display. We rarely get to see angry Peter these days.”

Peter smiles. He turns to Tony and gives him an unimpressed scoff. “You see me angry enough.”

“Yeah, I guess I do. Too bad this beautiful moment is about to be ruined. A certain someone heard a prayer earlier and wants to help.”

Shit, he thinks. Thor.

“Tonyson!” Thor shouts. He steps through the door and opens his arms. Peter doesn’t hesitate to jump into a tight hug. “I have missed you!”

“You saw him last night, Sparky.”

“Shut up, Tony,” Peter mumbles into Thor’s shoulder.

“Um, excuse me,” Abe says softly, his voice wavering, “what’s going on?”

“Friday told us there was something going on down here, and Thor wanted to see Pete, so we came. Now, Eugene Thompson, my lawyers will be talking to Principal Morita on Monday. I recommend you tell your parents you’ve been bullying my kid. Any questions?”

Peter moves to stand beside Tony.

Cindy hesitantly raises her hand. “Peter, how did you fight like that?”

“Um, I practice? It’s all training, really.”

The class nods, pleased with the answer.

“Now, if we’re done here, Peter and I have nanites to attend to in my private lab.” He guides him away with a gentle hand on his shoulder. As the three board the elevator, Peter gives one last wave to the group. They disappear from view.

Betty leans over to Cindy. She whispers behind her hand, “When do you think Peter will realise we know he’s Spider-Man?”

Cindy shrugs. “I don’t know, but as long as Flash doesn’t know, we have free entertainment.”

[chromsai]

Rules: List your five favorite anime characters and tag some people.

Tagged by @pendulum-sonata (thank you dear!.... sorry for this being hella late OTL BIG GOMEN)

So I had like half this post typed up last night weeks ago but my dumbass accidentally deleted it so here goes take 2...

Also I just wanna take this opportunity to gush about my absolute favorite characters so I’m gonna cheat a lil bit by using some video game characters if y’all don’t mind...

Now, without further ado...

1.

Chrom - Fire Emblem Awakening

So, I love Chrom a lot, I figure y’all know that by now right? Chrom is admittedly, como se dice, not the most complex of characters. He is a simple man, really. Prince of Ylisse who doesn’t know much about life outside of leading his rag-tag Shepherds into skirmishes to protect his kingdom, family, and friends, or breaking a few things here and there (because he’s a total klutz). He doesn’t really know how to dress himself properly, as you can see (no, Idfk what he’s wearing either), and he’s terrible at diplomacy (he said so himself). Yet, despite his hopelessly dorky but somehow handsome appearance, he’s also incredibly stubborn and hard-headed, ignorant sometimes but not naiive, extremely loyal, and sometimes even awkward, but he’s always, always seeking to learn from his mistakes and the world around him. He may struggle against his own impulses, but he’s aware of this fault of his and, despite it, fights fiercely for his comrades and works to be someone reliable for them. He’s the man you want by your side because he won’t allow you to drag yourself through the mud, and if you are dragged, then he’ll drag himself right along with you just to make sure you’ll have someone to lean on when you’re struggling to stand right back up again.

Chrom is so unapologetically himself in any situation, be it formal or informal, and it’s inspiring to me in ways that words fail to describe because just watching him go about his life simply being himself and urging you to do the same reminds you: maybe you don’t have to be perfect, and that’s just perfectly fine. He is a reminder of what unconditional love is supposed to look like and it’s a simple thing but it’s always appreciated.

“Remember that you are yourself before you are any man’s son/daughter,” he says to you. I know that he doesn’t think of himself as being very charismatic but everything he does and says would claim otherwise.

1.

Yuya Sakaki - Yu-Gi-Oh! Arc-V

He’s also my number 1 and that’s not a mistake.~

I’ve been a fan of YGO since the anime series debuted in the States (DM). Since 2001, I’ve followed each subsequent entry in the anime franchise and, although I’ve loved this franchise overall, I’ve never really been attached to any of the characters from any YGO show enough to go “Omg I love them.”

That was up until Yuya.

Yuya’s personality resonates with me a lot in various ways. For example, I’m not quite sure how obvious this is to people but I LOVE to make others laugh and smile. It’s one of the best feelings in the world. Life of course unfortunately isn’t just that, and, for better or worse, Yuya knows life’s wide range of emotions all too well. The trajectory his development took from day one all the way through episode 148 was one that touched, broke, and mended my heart on a level that I haven’t felt before or since (and one that, to be quite honest, I’m afraid to experience ever again).

I call him my son because he is truly precious to me. His story changed me and my views on life, all for the better. Lastly, his persona is not only one that I love, but also one that I admire; Yuya Sakaki’s kindness and philosophy is goals. I love him eternally.

Bonus: He is just a damn well written character and has one of the best developments I’ve personally witnessed. He’s raised the standard of what I expect a great shounen protagonist to be.

3.

Lelouch - Code Geass

Look at this asshole.

You don’t know how refreshing it is to view a story from the eyes of a character who is, without a doubt, very morally grey. Like, sure, I’m sure there have been more stories since (and even before) that try this approach but I haven’t ever really found any other characters like him to be quite as compelling. Half the time you really are on his side, and the other half you wish he would just drop dead (not because you hate him, but because you know that’s just the right thing he should do). I know to a lot of people that haven’t seen this show he seems like a basic edge boy, but I assure you he’s quite an idiot. A smart idiot, but still an idiot. With a terrible sense of humor. He very much deals with the consequences of his actions throughout the story and sometimes it’s satisfying (because, yes, he’s a jerk), and other times not so much (because he ultimately does have a heart of gold). He’s just a little tsundere and stubborn and he has very exploitable weaknesses (read: very) so it really does help that he has a flair for the dramatic. Anyway, Lelouch, his wide range of emotions, and his story are extremely entertaining to watch and I love his stupid sassy face.

4.

Neku Sakuraba - The World Ends With You

I love this kid.

So Neku is another character that looks edgy as hell, admittedly, but I assure you he’s soft. Or at least not entirely at first. Yes, he’s also a jerk, but he has his reasons (teen angst, what can I say) but watching the process of him opening up slowly in real time is just *chefs kiss* amazing and heartwarming and gives you hope for the youth of the world. I’ll admit, I first played this game when I was like 14 or so and going through some of my own teen angst, so I found the jerk side of him to be somewhat relatable back then, but the moral of his story didn’t fly by my head even then. It made me happy and it was something nice to learn at that age. Years later, I’m back here playing this game again and I think the lessons Neku learns throughout his little journey in Shibuya really hit you right in the feels, perhaps even more, idk. He’s really inspiring and, like I said, heartwarming and ultimately brings a smile to my face every time. God. Bless this kid. Please.

He needs it.

5.

Rosalina - Mario Series

Did y’all know I fucking LOVE Rosalina. 

She’s not a terribly revolutionary character, but her backstory was so touching to me and I love her character design (f me up she’s fucking gorgeous). My reasons for loving her a pretty simple like that, though on top of it all I relate to her; What with her tendency to adopt cute lil Lumas and giving up everything for them (but also using them to hurt others), Rosalina gets me. She’s also just so cool and calm but she has a fun side to her too. Simple as my reasons are, she’s up there with my favorite characters ever. God I still remember booting up SMG and meeting her for the first time yeah I fucking loved her immediately. Damn. Can’t get me enough Rosalina~

I love her relationships with her precious Luma children so much, I named my car Luma lol

okay, done! Again, thank you for tagging me Rose! Sorry I took forever~ thanks for letting me gush about my faves for a bit, it was very relaxing~

I’m tagging: @dancerladyaqua @pxiao @yutoknight @entermates @skittymon @theabcsofjustice @blueeyeswhitegarden @heliosknight @orasforlife @lilias-amell@moshimichi @timahina @seasaltmemories and @cypsiman2 and anyone else who wants to participate~ you don’t have to if you don’t want to!

[kiederen]

Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE review

I said I would give my impressions on #FE and I neglected to do so till now, but better late than never.

I’ll be talking about:

Story

Setting/Theme

Characters

Gameplay

1. Story

The story is nothing special - I enjoyed it, but it's a fairly typical jrpg "power of friendship and bonds" deal that is only made unique in any capacity by the idol culture that frames it. It's not bad, but it's not groundbreaking either. I wish the story were a bit longer to give more of a build up into the final confrontation. The earlier stages slowly start to set things up but even just one more dedicated chapter to ease into the final arc would have probably made the ending feel less rushed. That and I just enjoyed playing it overall and would liked more content.

The distinct chapters format to the flow may have been meant to simulate FE chapters while still also representing how persona stories often have noticeable breaks between dungeon arcs. In TMS though, it felt a bit more artificial, not damningly so, but I think the plot momentum was a bit worse for it. 

The set up for each chapter break also revolves around Itsuki himself improving as an entertainer, even though he doesn’t know what direction he wants to focus on, and while it’s most emphasized early on, this aspect of Itsuki’s development himself feels almost abandoned or ignored through the mid and late game until the very end. The solution does make some sense, but some of the details that enable it to happen are a bit questionably contrived, and like the overall story, it felt a bit rushed in the final hour, based on what I remember.

Otherwise, the story did a good job of setting itself up, providing the characters with adequate motivation and means to seek the goals they set and each dungeon gave reasonable purpose for the main characters to tackle it.

The final chapter seemed to be trying to make up for the lack of build up by twisting and turning a bit more than usual, but most of its attempted twists were fairly standard fair for trying to draw out suspense and unfortunately were somewhat predictable for it. I was a little surprised at the host for the big bad, but mostly because I hadn’t been paying close enough attention so that was on me.

2. Setting/Theme

The Tokyo idol scene setting is the most interesting aspect of the story and while I can see it being polarizing, I found it novel myself. Mechanically, it does a good job of unifying the dungeons under a common theme of "things idols do" - such as posing for photo shoots or acting on TV.

Beyond dungeon design, the idol theme also naturally informed character designs and the multitude of costumes that appear throughout.

You can even see this thematic flair in the way that spell casting involves a character signing their autograph as a glyph!

If there’s one oddity that stands out to me about the aesthetics of the game, it’s that the monster designs seem to be unable to decide whether they should be FE inspired or SMT inspired or neither, but even in the latter case most don’t seem to fit in with the idol theme in any capacity.

Even when enemies are FE inspired, they seem to have gone through a similar (if not more extreme) filter that the Mirage characters went through - becoming dramatically stylized and the only real purpose I can conceive for it is to make enemy classes that were definitely human in FE appear non-human here. For instance, the middle and right monsters above are myrmidon class enemies - unpromoted swordmasters from the FE universe.

Not to mention: Why do their out-of-combat sprites look like Organization XIII members!?

3. Characters

Like the story, the characters are good if nothing particularly revolutionary. Most seem built around one or two tropes but then are fleshed out beyond that which is fine. You learn more about them as you do their individual side quests (social links) and these do a good job of giving the feeling of evolving your bond with that character. The pacing of the side stories is mostly okay, though the gameplay reward for those that are plot locked to be very late doesn't always feel equal to how long you had to wait to do them. There's a bit of persona syndrome wherein all the chars get plenty of opportunities to interact with the MC, but would benefit from more time interacting with each other as well.

I liked all the characters in the end. There's a good variety between both the girls and boys, though because of join times some chars got more focused screen time than others. Again, I think a longer late game with more story side quests (instead of fetch quests) would have helped balance things out. 

If I had to be as base as to rank the girls in terms of waifu ratings: 1. Eleonora 2. Tsubasa 3. Kiria 4. Maiko 5. Mamori = Tiki Though it's worth noting that top four are all really close, and each slot only wins out over their competition by a small margin. I don’t dislike Mamori or Tiki, I just am not into the little sister appeal.

I suppose Barry Goodman is worth mentioning as well. Barry is a foreigner who settled in Japan and behaviorally embodies the most cringe-worthy aspects of otaku culture. He’s heavy-set, roughly groomed, and somewhat aggressive/abrasive about his passions. I’m not one to judge him for the subject of his passions, but the way he interacts with them would make me uncomfortable around him had he been a real person. Ultimately he is a good person at heart, but his poor people skills are unlikely to endear him to anyone on first impressions, and the fact that he doesn’t care only exacerbates his problems.

Finally, and predictably most disappointingly, the FE chars (heroes and villains) are barely developed and could be replaced with persona or persona like motifs without changing the overall plot. The FE aspect is little more than a coat of paint that gives secondary theme to the invading 'otherworld,' and it's a real shame and waste of potential.

Aside from the Mirage characters and Tiki themselves, there are however a few unmarked references that are at least self aware enough to be welcome Easter eggs for fire emblem fans:

Anna is your convenience store shopkeeper, and there’s even a ‘shadow anna’ who will sell you more dubious dungeon consumables that a normal convenience store wouldn’t stock.

Ilyana works at the cafe, keeping close to her beloved food.

Aimee runs the jewelry store as she was the item store merchant in FE9 and 10

And Cath runs the costume shop. She’s a thief in FE6 with a distinct affinity for money, not unlike Anna, though not as extreme either. Admittedly, it’s been a while since I’ve read over her supports though.

I saw an npc employee at one of the random background shops in Shibuya central street that could also be Brady from FE Awakening, but the camera never got close enough to see him clearly enough to make a positive ID.

Finally, I found it amusing that all the playable chars' names are class puns/references 

蒼井樹 = Aoi Itsuki > Aoi means blue in reference to FE lords typically having blue hair

織部つばさ = Oribe Tsubasa > Tsubasa in reference to her peg knight class

赤城斗馬 = Akagi Touma >  赤 (Aka) gives us “red” while  馬(uma) is “horse.” Red cavalier (partnered with a green cavalier) is a reoccurring archetype in FE. The Red cav tends to be the hot-headed one.

I can break down the others if desired, but these will do for examples.

4. Gameplay

Going to break this into a few parts:

General

Combat

Dungeons

1. General

The real reason this game is compared to Persona; gameplay mirrors a lot of persona's elements and it's almost easier to describe how it deviates from the Persona format than spend time detailing how they're the same. That said, if you like the persona formula (as I do), you'd probably enjoy TMS's gameplay flow as well.

While the lack of daily life and day limits for dungeons removes a lot of the tension of time management for them, I think it's fine since a lot of persona players rush dungeons in 1-2 days anyway and in TMS, once the dungeon is done, you don't have to worry about doing busy work to tick off the days until the plot is allowed to move forward again. The lack of social stats is an element of depth removed, but without a time cost element to activities, it makes sense and is probably a good thing for it to be absent from TMS (even if story wise it could have actually be viable as Aoi and the others grow their skills as performers).

Using the WiiU game pad as a smartphone screen to facilitate off-screen character interactions as well as display more detailed enemy information was clever if perhaps unnecessary (as persona 5 showed). Having the only map on the game pad actually made it a little disorienting to reference for me since my eyes had to leave my tv entirely, leading to me either holding my game pad up or bobbing my head up and down to compare my map with my surroundings. On the DS, the two screens are at least close by. I’d like to say there may have been a better use for the game pad, I’m not thinking of anything off the top of my head, so it may have been wise to minimize its use as a gimmick anyway.

This is already in your phone history when you start the game, but it’s still probably my favorite moment from the text message logs:

#relatable.

Replacing persona fusion is a more straightforward crafting system that is the source for your weapons and passive skills, and in turn, much like Tales of Vesperia, your weapons are the source of your skills, both active and passive. The system sounds more grindy than it is in practice though. Simply advancing through the dungeons and fighting 70-80% of the monsters you encounter naturally will provide you with enough materials to forge most weapons as they become available. In fact there were a number of times when I ran out of new weapons to forge and had to push on with already mastered weapons equipped. I liked that bosses and some savage encounters would drop mats of a higher tier than what was readily available from current monsters, and you had to spend them wisely before advancing the plot to the point where those mats became common. It let you preview the next tier of weapons and abilities for select characters but who you gave those weapons to was never overly stressful since you could get the other weapons you passed on later anyway.

Rare monsters drop unique mats that can make weapons that give unusual or otherwise off-type skills to characters and it makes catching rare monsters that flee rather than engage the player rewarding. IIRC, I encountered fewer than ten rare monsters in my entire play through though, so I did not feel it worth the time to actively hunt them unless there was some trick to make them appear more reliably (and catching them was also a bit dependent on the surroundings). Like treasure monsters in P5, they usually had some kind of gimmick where they were only weak to one thing if they had any weakness and the latter ones also came with dodge [weakness] passive and had a chance of just up and running from battle.

2. Combat

The one-more mechanic is replaced by "Sessions" which are not unlike self contained one-more combos anyway. The tag in attacking animations were pretty fun and though late game sessions can get quite long, there’s no way to speed up or skip session animations, possibly in part because of the existence of duo arts which use the session animations as a timer. They could have prohibited skipping prior to deciding on a duo art and then allow skipping or speed up after, though. Long session animations didn’t bother me, personally though, as session attack animations were varied and interesting enough that I never got tired of even the early basic ones (most of which were replaced by late game).

Openly displayed turn order, plus some late game skills that can actually influence turn order were both welcome features as well. 

Beyond sessions, specials, duo arts, and ad-lib performances were great at providing extra variety and changing the pace of what might otherwise be rote combat. While duo arts and ad-lib performances were rng bonuses that you mostly just take whatever you can get and be grateful, specials were more deliberate, needing a resource that builds slowly at first. Later on, with longer sessions and meter boosting passives, the sp gauge builds up much faster, but even then specials usually should be selected carefully, especially within boss battles where recovering lost sp is a bit trickier. 

That said, special skills were not created equal. Even though buffs and debuffs are powerful, some of the later buffing and debuffing specials came late, at a point where I already had normal skills that could buff or debuff at almost if not the same potency without spending SP. Similarly, as my repertoire of skills grew, my ability to hit weaknesses improved and using specials to break through resistances became less necessary, even as monsters began appearing with more resistances. 

Finally, Itsuki’s second special - “Strike A Pose,” was absurdly good and only got better as my session combos grew longer late game. The ability to give everyone twice the actions in a turn opens up so many other combos that often times, there was little reason to use offensive specials in favor of either two individual sessions or a concentrate/charge boosted session. 

Inversely, I found myself using healing specials a lot less, and perhaps it was because I used Tsubasa a lot less late game - I made Chrom a great lord which gave Itsuki healing and support which was kinda Tsubasa’s niche previously, so with Touma able to out damage Tsubasa and Elly covering flying enemies, Tsubasa just wasn’t out in combat all that often, which meant Mamori was the only one with healing specials (which were helpful on occasion) but in the end using Strike A Pose allowed me to get normal heals out in extra abundance while still enabling attackers to make a play to help clear troublesome enemies.

The FE weapon triangle’s representation in strengths and weaknesses among weapon types (not extending to magic though) gave a welcome way to predict weaknesses for enemies I had not encountered yet. One of the frustrating things about persona had always been that weakness/strength attributes for new monsters were difficult to predict and late game could cause you to walk into a bad situation that was never really your fault. Not only did the weapon triangle help mitigate some of the arbitrary mystery, but weaknesses were frequently consistent across similar enemy types at different levels even outside of the sword/lance/axe trinity. For example mage type enemies were, with few exceptions, all weak to swords and fire. Skills that deal effective damage (i.e. horseslayer/armorslayer) were also a great addition that gave characters tools to start session combos on enemies that they might otherwise be powerless against. The player also gets other ways to work around pesky resistances, features that are both welcome and necessary because...

If I have one glaring critic of the battle system it’s that Itsuki, like persona protags is mandatory. However, unlike persona protags, Itsuki has static combat tools and extremely limited ability to influence his own strength and weakness attributes. He’s always weak to fire and lances and since you can’t remove him from the front line, you always have someone in combat weak to those elements. Fortunately this is less deal breaking for the fact that Itsuki dying in combat doesn’t immediately game over (hallelujah!). In addition, later in the game most chars get passive skills that greatly increase their avoid against elements they’re weak to, Itsuki included. Still, being able to remove Itsuki from the front line would greatly increase your party diversity and flexibility. For a while after recruiting a second sword character, I had difficulty justifying putting him in the active party because Itsuki already filled the sword role. Eventually, I promoted Itsuki to a more support role and let the other char handle offensive sword plays. 

One more minor complaint I have is the inability to swap out fallen allies. Having only three party members means that even one of them dying can be crippling, especially later on and on harder difficulties. I’ve wasted turns reviving downed allies and trying to heal back only for enemies to just repeat what killed someone in the first place and put me exactly where I was last turn with less healing items or sometimes in an even worse situation. While the boss dichotomy of easy/impossible with little in between that some persona bosses suffer from is present here, the existence of specials, ad-lib performances and duo performances that heal or revive greatly alleviate some of the comeback struggle that has a tendency to snowball in this combat system. As the only active non-rng option, specials in particular are important to the system. The severity of boss gimmicks isn’t quite as punishing in TMS compared to persona, but TMS’s smaller party size, can still cause a bad situation to cascade into unsalvageable territory.

3. Dungeons

The dungeon design of TMS is interesting in that it departs from persona 3/4′s formula of randomly generated floors in favor of deliberately organized floor plans with usually only one correct path to the end. The linearity is sometimes broken up by treasures that you’ll have to backtrack for, but aside from that, there’s little mandatory backtracking within a dungeon. Dungeons stick around even after you clear them, allowing side stories to ask you to venture back over familiar ground for one task or another.

That said, the linear nature isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In TMS’s case, it allows the developers to give the player a learning curve for the dungeon’s mechanics and then challenge how well the player understood the earlier lessons, because the devs can guarantee that the player experienced the earlier sections before the later ones. It may sound obvious on paper, but it means that the developers can have a better awareness of the player’s competency at any given point in any dungeon, which is something that can’t be tracked when the player can go multiple routes at any given time. But I digress.

Another mechanical difference of note is how the player, Itsuki interacts with enemies pre-battle. In persona 3 and later, you could swing your weapon to hit an enemy in the field and that would start combat (at an advantage if they didn’t notice you), but in TMS, striking an opponent on the field knocks them back and stuns them, giving you the choice to then get closer and touch them to begin combat at an advantage or to avoid combat entirely. I like this greater degree of choice and it fits within the philosophy that TMS dungeons are made to be less stressful - less about meticulous resource management - than persona games. There’s still an incentive to engage in combat: you need to keep up a certain amount of level growth just to have the raw stats to beat bosses, but if you’re low on health and/or healing items or just plain short on available play time and you think or know there’s a checkpoint up ahead so you just want to make a push to reach it, you aren’t forced into battles you don’t want to engage in... with the exception of “Savage Encounters,” which are challenge monsters that seem to just exist to screw with you anyway. I think there was only one area prior to the last or second to last dungeons that had savage enemies I could actually beat albeit with great effort.

Playing TMS after Persona 5, it was also apparent that TMS’s idolaspheres were prototype palaces, from the set floor layouts and linear progression to the overarching themes of the dungeon informing its aesthetic and unique mechanics. In fact there are a number of things that TMS pinoeered for Atlus that then went on to feature in P5. You can read about some others here.

Puzzles were almost entirely navigation in nature - that is, how to use the dungeon mechanics and infrastructure to get from your start to your goal. It may be because it’s been a little over a month now, but none particularly stand out in my memory as being exceptionally good, while one or two I remember for being somewhat arduous or tiring. I’m still of the opinion that areas that the player is trying to solve puzzles in should have lower if not 0 encounter rate with random enemies, as battles, especially turn based ones that don’t tend to resolve in a single turn, can disrupt problem solving trains of thought.

Overall the dungeons are good though, and that’s important as they’re the meat of the gameplay. They are generally well paced with plenty to do and some minor stuff to find on your way to your target goal. Each dungeon’s unique mechanics fit with the dungeon theme and aside from a few exceptions the enemies are fairly distributed.

5. Conclusion

It has its flaws but I think, in the end, Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE gets more right than it gets wrong. Even though the story was standard fair for this genre, I thoroughly enjoyed it and wished it had more content to its core for me to experience. I know there’s dlc, but the nature of dlc means that it’s nothing integral to the story and I’m not sure it would scratch the itch the way I want.

The setting is unique and the game fully embraces the themes it sets up and the themes in turn inform and affect almost every aspect of the game, giving it a unified appeal.

The combat is arguably more interesting than persona. It takes the same core formula of targeting weak points for massive damage but allows players more tools and freedom to circumvent bad matchups, make carefully planned strategic plays, or simply style on enemies with flashy satisfying attacks.

[moczothe1st]

Let’s Play Fire Emblem IV: Genealogy of the Holy War, Part 21: Thracial Tensions

Part 20

Welcome back to FEIV! You may recall last week I spent about an hour freaking out in terror over a teenage girl killing me, just like I do every week in real life (Go home, Jessica!).  This week, however, we have no enemies left on the map and get to enjoy a nice normal time of things as we go to save everyone from the broken and fleeing Imperials, and surely Travant won’t fuck it up.  

Before anything else, though, I use the newly-acquired castle to run Faval through the Arena, since he joined up after everyone else was already done.  

Faval: Seven wins, gained two levels:  +3 HP, +2 Skill, +1 Strength, +1 Speed, +2 Luck, +1 Defense

Not bad at all! End turn, and let’s get the story rocking along.

(Kinky.)

Travant, Ugh: Now’s our chance to help ourselves to the north, starting with Manster! Altena! I leave the capture of Manster to you. I’ll send General Coulter with you. If anyone stands in your way, suppress them without a second thought. I don’t care if it’s a little kid with a wooden stick. Cut them down!

(You may remember the name Altena from part one, if you think back; yup, it’s Quan and Ethlyn’s kidnapped daughter, raised by the enemy. And yes, just in case you thought he might have gone fully sympathetic anti-villain last week, this whole conversation is good proof he’s still a dick.)  

Altena: Hold on a moment, Father! I’m as eager to challenge the Empire as you are, but killing innocents makes no sense at all! We’d be better served forging an alliance with the liberators. We’re already surrounded by enemies. Why make more?

Travant: Altena, I have no interest in one of your little lectures. Keep your mouth shut and do as you’re told!  

Altena: But, father…

Arion: Please, Altena, just listen to him. Father and I must return to the capital.  We’ve some further preparations to make. Best of luck holding the border, Altena.

Altena: Arion… very well. I’ll do it.

Travant: Then don’t waste your time dawdling! Do it!

(What a dick!)

Travant: I haven’t seen a woman so brash since her mother… quite the family resemblance there!

Arion: Father, you surely must realize that Altena means you no ill will. You needn’t be so harsh on her.

Travant: Yes, that much is obvious, thank you!  

(I have to point out that this means he realizes he doesn’t need to be harsh on Altena, but does it anyway. What a dick!)

Travant: … Let’s head back to the capital, Arion. We need to ready the army to claim this peninsula as ours, once and for all!

Ced: I suppose it was only a matter of time before Travant showed his true colors…                        

Needy McNeedypants: The liberation army’s sure to want to aid us, but they still haven’t crossed the river! What do we do?

Ced: Everyone! Get out of here and run for Connaught! I’ll stay here and fend off the dracoknights for as long as I can!

Waaaaaah: B-but that’s impossible, Sir Ced! Not even you could survive a dracoknight assault by yourself!  

(*snerk* Yeah, Ced’s in mortal danger.)

Ced: I know, but I can’t risk any lives but my own.  Don’t worry. I won’t go down without bringing a few Thracians down with me! Please, we’ve no time to waste!

Poor Listener: Sir Ced…

Now. We do need to hurry here, but it’s most definitely not out of any worry for Ced’s life. Bluntly speaking, he could kill the entire Thracian army by himself, provided his weapon doesn’t break from hitting  them all too hard.  But the thing is, he’s currently a neutral unit, not part of our army, so if he wipes out the Thracians right now he won’t get a drop of EXP from it.  Furthermore, just like way back in Silesse, every one of those civilians we can successfully rescue will give a free level to the unit that talks to them! That alone is worth going to war with Thracia, frankly.    

Oh, and there’s some villages off to the east across a small mountain range, being burned by bandits. Because screw you and screw your happiness.  Time to start running, kids.  First, though, Nanna and Ares can have a chat; Cousin Fun Time!

Nanna: I’ve been hearing you’re the son of Lord Eldigan. Is there any truth to that?

Eldigan: There is. Of what concern is it to you?

Nanna: Oh, I knew it was true! I’m the daughter of Raquesis Lachesis, Lord Eldigan’s sister!

Ares: C-can this be?! Are you truly my aunt’s child?

(Why won’t anyone in this army say the word ‘cousin’?  Leif and Seliph are cousins, and they said ‘aunt’s child’ too.  There’s a word that means ‘aunt or uncle’s child’, writers!)

Nanna: Of course I am! You know, my mother was really worried about what happened to you. It must have been her search for you that brought us to Leonster all those years ago…

Ares: My father knew well that the stormclouds of a brutal civil war lurked across Agustria.  

(“He could have stopped it and saved thousands of lives, but that would have required admitting the evil king was evil, and he psychologically couldn’t do that.”)  

Ares: I was a mere infant and my mother was in poor health, so he bade her to seek refuge with her parents in Leonster. Alas, Leonster too fell afoul of a war of its own, and my mother lost her life to the Empire’s invasion.

Nanna: That’s where Jabarro comes in, right?

Ares: Indeed. Jabarro found me and took me in as his own, and with his mercenary corps I traveled the world and learned the art of war.

(“And then, he left my friend to get raped and mocked me for getting angry about it. That was awkward.”)

Nanna: SO that’s why I’ve never found you before…. Listen, Ares. My mother left me something to give you if we ever met.

Ares: Oh? What is this… is this… is this Father’s?!

(Ooooooooh, what is it?! A sword? Spear? Kickass magic ring? Go on!)

Nanna: It is! A letter from Lord Eldigan, and it’s address to you, Ares.

(… Lame.)

Ares: I can’t believe it…

Nanna: This should sort everything out! It says your father and Lord Sigurd were the closest of friends and held each other’s deepest trust.

(“It also says other plot-convenient things, like a detailed explanation of how you ended up getting your dad’s sword after he died in another country!  Also he stops to specify that he never touched my mother seven different times, which I felt was a bit odd.”)

Ares: So it says… wow, I… I’ve been so, so wrong for all this time…

Nanna: Please look after Lord Seliph, Ares. He really is depending on you!

Ares: I will, I promise you… say, Nanna. How would you like a quick lesson in swordplay. Here, pay close attention…

Nanna gains +2 to her defense from this conversation, and I enjoy that because if she’s going to be a melee fighter, she might as well go all out.  

Now then. There are six civilians to collect, and obviously we have more than six units, so let’s see who’s currently the lowest. Tinni is level 10, Faval, Patty, and Fee are 12, Arthur, Larcei, Dermott, and Lester are 13. We’re about to fight a shit-ton of wyverns, so Lester and Faval are gonna be just fine, and obviously Arthur is invincible; I’ll give two to Tinni, one each to Patty, Dermott, Fee, and Larcei. Thankfully, like actual people they do have the politeness to run toward us, so I can get most of them right away.  

Tinni: +2 HP, +2 Skill, +2 Speed, +1 Luck, +1 Defense, +1 Resistance

Dermott: +1 HP, +1 Defense

Patty:  +1HP, +1 Strength, +1 Skill, +1 Speed, +1 Luck

Dermott, what the Hell man? Though I guess Defense is what you need most of all, so… okay, I’ll allow it.  Way to rock out Patty, though.  Anyhow, my other two civilian rescuers don’t get to reach them this turn, but enough people do get there that no wyverns will be reaching them. End turn!

….

Yeah, the wyverns take awhile to get to you, nothing happens on the enemy phase.  Time to get the remaining civilians.  

Fee: +1 HP, +1 Strength, +1 Skill

Larcei: +2 HP, +1 Speed, +1 Luck, +1 Defense

Not bad! And off to the east, the team sent to clear out the two villages reaches the first one and removes a bandit with extreme prejudice…

And Seliph, taking advantage of his new horse, runs down to recruit Ced.

(“At last”.  You might notice that I actually arrived before those enemies you were planning to make a dramatic last stand against, bro.)  

Ced: Sire, I implore you! Save this world! Too many of us have already given into despair.  The city of Manster has been robbed by the Empire of countless young children. All were sent to dark shrines in Miletos… I… I couldn’t save even a single child. Me, brave? Ha! I hardly deserve such a lofty label. I’m just another coward…

Seliph: That isn’t true, Ced! If I were to fight alone as you have, I know there’d be precious little I could do. It was uniting the strength of my friends, a team effort, which brought us this far. And I believe that your strength could be a valuable part of our cause. Please, Ced the Brave. Grant us your power!

Ced: Thank you, sire… you’ll have my loyalty, no matter what!

So here’s Ced, Erin and Azel’s other child and Fee’s brother.  He’s… he’s really awesome. Ced is one of those kids who is impossible to fuck up, he’s going to turn out kind of overpowered no matter what; he can use both staves and any kind of magic other than Dark, so he has tons of offensive options. In addition his base stats are absurd, with magic and speed already within sight of the cap at level 14. Those are really all he needs, but he still also has decently above-average values in everything other than strength, seemingly just to taunt the enemy. If you pair Lewyn/Erin like the game clearly wants you to do, he’ll end up stupidly overpowered thanks to starting with Forseti and being unquestionably the best person to use it, but that does also mean you don’t get it back until now.  Ishtar says ‘hello’.

From here, there’s not much else to do; just run everyone up to the castle, and get ready for the wyvern rush. End turn!

Maykov: Men! Bolster our defensive line! Until His Majesty returns, we must protect the border at all costs!

(Bring it on, bitch. I beat Ishtar, you and your mooks are nothing but free EXP to me.)  

(… Why do you guys hate Johan so much? I mean, other than all the obvious reasons to hate Johan?)

Altena: Wait here with the squad. I’ll see if I can negotiate a surrender.

Coulter: You know I can’t do that. My orders come from over your head. You can spout all the lovey nonsense you wish, but the king forbids me to stay my hand.

Altena: Are you questioning a direct order from your commander and your princess, General?!

Coulter: These are my men, princess! If you don’t wish to partake yourself, then stand aside! Make yourself useful and watch our backs! Now then… is everyone ready? Prepare to strike Manster! Leave no survivors!

(You know, it would be easier to sympathize with the plight of the Thracian People if 95% of them weren’t total douchebags.)

Altena: Coulter! Get back here at once!

Why do they hate Leif so much?  … It’s the hair, isn’t it? Dammit, guys, he can’t help it. Bad Hair is genetic in this land.

All right, time to slaughter, I think.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Okay, only a handful of them are left, but Lene is in range of a few so she might die and force a reset here. Try to not do that, Lene. End turn!

… Seriously, though? That was… I mean, that one who died on Shanan could have stabbed my weak sissy little dancer. Why…? Oh, who cares. Let’s just finish them off.

That was fun. Oh, and we can run Ced through the Arena while we’re here. Gee I wonder how that will go.

Ced: 7 Wins, gained levels: +1 HP, +1 Strength, +1 Speed, +1 Magic, +1 Luck, +1 Resistance

Nobody even hit him. *sniff* Welcome to the team, Ced.  

And with that, we have crushed the original Thracian assault. Altena is still chilling over the mountains, she can’t fight us, so we start moving past her toward the last castle.  End turn!

Where did he come from?! Yeesh, that actually got me, I totally missed that one of the wyverns had run off to the side and was hiding over the water for some reason. What the what, guys.  And to the other side, one of the bandits actually moves to go after Ares! That’s also weird!

Not a threat, but weird!

Our turn starts, and Tinni claims my vengeance on the Surprise!Wyvern, Lana gains a level from healing, and Fee is clearly enjoying her work clearing out the last village.

Beautiful, Fee. For that level, you also get the village money.

Creepy Old Lady: Either way, I want to thank you for coming all this way for such a small and remote town. This here trinket’s a thief’s band. She’s an odd little thing: slip her on and you’ll soon find yourself stealing like you’ve done it all your life. Hoo hoo hoo! Take care of yourself dearie!

Hoo hoo hoo indeed. She does need some money, so this will be helpful for her. In the meantime, though, Tinni of all people already has the money to purchase the Paragon Band, so I have her drop by the shop to grab it, then shove her to the front of the army.  Oh, and Faval has been waiting to chat with Seliph for all this time, that’s nice.  

Seliph: Relax, I understand why you did what you did. You’ve nothing to worry about.  

Faval: I don’t think so, sir. Letting myself work for the very same Empire I’ve supposedly been opposing? That was shamefully half-witted of me…

(I mean, you said it, not me.)

Faval: Sir, I swear I’ll make up for my bad choices. I’ll do everything I can to aid you!

Seliph: Thank you, Seliph. We’re glad to have you.

The army runs forward, being harried by ballistae as we go, and that’s okay. Because it means there’s some healing to do on the way, and from this healing…

It is time.  

You know, on the next turn. Because on this turn, I kind of moved into wyvern range too. It’s okay, the wyverns are losers, we can-

…. Really, dude? Wyverns and ballistae? That is what breaks you?! I have never before wanted to leave you dead before, Ulster, but this did it. *sigh* Reset.  I do the last few turns roughly as before; they were mostly just random moving around anyhoo; this time, I have everyone stop right on the edge of the evil damn wyverns, so only the ballistae can attack us. We probably won’t die from just them.  And then, when we KILL THEM, we can stop in a nice defensive formation to protect Ulster from getting nasty booboos.  I also have Lana end her turn by zapping Julia back to home base after she gets herself the exact same pretty good level.

Let’s try this again.

Much less interesting; much more better.  Now, before anything else:

Uweeheeheeheeheeheeheehee. Look at that delicious +8 to speed. Speed is one of Julia’s most important stats, because her growth in it is only average; if she’s gonna get screwed at anything that she really needs, it will be Speed. That did not happen here.  UWEEEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHE.

Now, time to remove some siege engines.

…. Erm… let’s remove… one. Siege engine. There’s a lot of mountains in this area, and it was hard to get enough units down there to… to actually help.

This may go badly.

… Or the enemy may totally forget that whole laser-focus death attack that ruined everything last time, and just randomly throw themselves against anything nearby, achieving absolutely nothing.  I mean, works for me, but…

Oh, let’s just finish this off.

Now see, this is the kind of turn I like, kids.  Ares and Nanna are still running home and won’t make it in time for the battle, but that’s okay; there’s only one enemy left, the boss. I stop to give Ares a village because he’s worth it.  

Info Master: With his heavenly lance, Gungnir, he dared to challenge the king of demons himself! Rumor has it that Nova of the Crusaders, ancestor of the lords of House Leonster, was in fact the sister of Lord Dain…

Oh boy, more Thracian political history. End turn!

,.. Oh right, there’s no more enemies.  Well, let’s just close up. I spend a few turns moving everyone up, only stopping to let Fee talk to her brother.

Fee: I’ve been looking for you, of course! I mean, you’ve been gone from Silesse for so long, and we had no idea where you were!

Cedsy: I know, Fee, and I’m sorry…. See, what happened was I was passing through Manster in my search for Father. I would have moved on, but the people’s plight was nothing short of heartbreaking. I couldn’t just leave them to waste away…

Fee: I should’ve known. That is so like you, Cedsy! And here I was, almost starting to forget why you’re so incredible.

(Oh God, they’re not gonna be another incest couple, are they? I’m sensitive whenever siblings act too nice to each other in this game.)

Cedsykins: You’ve joined the liberation army, then?

Fee: Yep! I just knew I had to help Lord Seliph.

Cedsy-poo: Is that so… you’re even more like Mother than I thought! Not once in her life did she ever turn her back on someone in need.

Fee: You’re just like her too, Cedsy…. Poor mom, though. Just thinking about how Dad left her… it makes me so mad!

Cedsy Wedsy Pudding and Pie: I still can’t make sense of his actions. What could he have possibly been thinking…

Their dad was Azel, and I’m pretty sure he died at Belhalla.  See, the game sort of assumes their dad is Lewyn, because… well, because the game does everything short of have Lewyn and Erin already be married when they join, mostly. Anyway, this conversation gives Ced a point of Luck, because he really needed it.  

Now for the boss!  This guy is not particularly dangerous, not gonna lie to you here; however, you should not fight him at range if you can avoid it. Whyyyy?

E-yup, Jamke’s old Killer Bow!  Neither of our archers really need it, so there’s no need for them to get fighty over it; in fact, I think I’m going to try to get it to Leif, since he can use bows after he promotes. Besides, you really do not want to fight this fucker at range, have him activate Pavise to survive it, and then crit you with that thing.  Melee units, to the front!

*sniff* I love it when a plan comes together. Seliph, bring us home.

(… You mean they’re a level lower, right?)

Seliph: It almost feels as if each blow is fueled by pure desperation…

Lewyn: Thracia’s always had a bad lot in life… much of its land is consumed by mouintains, farming its own food is a near impossible task, so they struggle to keep themselves fed. Thracia’s men seek mercenary work to find the money to stay alive, while its women are stuck in whatever dreary jobs they can dig up.  Don’t get me wrong, King Travant is an awful man, but there’s far more than his own petty gain at stake in his schemes.  

(Protip for writers: If you want people to find your anti-villain sympathetic, be sure to keep his smug cackling, kidnapping babies, and ordering the mass slaughter of civilians to a minimum.)

Lewyn: The Thracian army is as loyal to Travant as they come. They ardently believe it’s him who will guide Thracia out of its endless famine.

(“I mean, yes, he’s been trying for almost two decades with no results and has now led them to another crushing defeat the instant he chose to become involved with international affairs again… but… look, they’re loyal, not smart.”)  

Seliph: I see… that does make sense…

Lewyn: The thing is, no amount of poverty can justify Thracia’s aggression.  Travant’s brand of nobility and justice would never be accepted anywhere else in the world. All other nations can see are rowdy aggressors who threaten their peaceful lives. As harsh as it may seem, Seliph, I trust you know you can’t afford to stay your hand here. The Thracian royal family is the enemy, and a grave threat to the north’s peace. Stripping them of power is the only choice. That task falls to us, and we can’t fail now.

(Dammit, game, stop making me agree with Lewyn!)

And with that, Altena flies away, and the battle ends. Be sure to sign in next week when we… *sigh*… spend another map worth of Thracian peninsula politics.  Good times, good times. At least we finally get a wyvern knight in the army! And I don’t consider that a spoiler because neither does the game, bluntly.  Laters!  

Resets: 25. Way to drop the ball in the 9th inning there, Ulster.

Part 22

[roxannarambles]

This is a story about spoilers and betrayal. I'd like to discuss the deeper nature of spoilers, as both a positive and a negative force and how they've played out in my experience of the Fire Emblem series. Your obligatory spoiler warning, of course: behind the cut I discuss major plot points of Fire Emblem Birthright and two of the GBA games, Blazing Blade and Binding Blade.

Let’s Plays and First Experiences

I was introduced to the Fire Emblem series a number of years ago when one of my favorite pokemon Youtubers did a Let's Play series of Blazing Blade. I'm an individual who plays very, very few games, although I watch plenty of Let's Plays just for entertainment value. I was intrigued by the Fire Emblem series and thoroughally enjoyed the Let's Play series, loving the colorful story, rich characters, and strategy-focused gameplay. At the time, it didn't occur to me to play it myself. Like all the other Let's Plays, I simply enjoyed watching it and then moved on.

Something about Fire Emblem stuck with me, though. The YouTuber did several more Let's Play series based on Fire Emblem games, and I really enjoyed those, too. I started warming up to them to such a degree that I felt the urge to do something I almost never did-- actually try playing one of the games myself.

Already very familiar with Pokemon ROMs, it didn't take me too long to actually locate a copy of FE7 and give it a go. I was incredibly uncertain at first while playing, intimidated and convinced it would be too difficult for me to get the hang of. Picking it up was actually very easy, though, and it rapidly became an addictive and deeply absorbing game for me.

Because it had been quite some time since I'd watched the initial Let's Play of FE7, many of the story details had, at that point, faded. Therefore I came at it fairly fresh, and much of the story was exciting and 'new'-- or a 'oh yeah I totally forgot about that until it happened again just now!' sort of situation, which is fairly close to experiencing it new firsthand. There was enough familiarity-- oh yes I remember Kent, I always liked him-- that it was nice to see familiar faces, but enough time had passed that it felt like a fresh new adventure again; plus, this time, I was in charge. It really allowed me to experience it as my own thing.

Some plot details, of course, I hadn't completely forgotten about. Those major plot twists/reveals/very dramatic events are going to probably stick with you forever, and no amount of time will make them fade. So yes, I remembered Ninian and her brother were dragons; I knew at some point in the story, Eliwood accidentelly killed Ninian in dragon form. I also had a vague memory of the final showdown with Nergal, although many of those details had faded. Interestingly, the detail that Ninian was miraculusously saved from death had also faded from my mind. It helped that it really had been a few years since I watched the Let's Play before I tried playing the game on my own. In the end, it made for a very enjoyable experience. Yes, some major details were not a surprise to me, but I didn't mind that in the least. It didn't stop me from absolutely falling in love with the game and playing it several more times over.

Eventually, I decided I wanted to try some more games from the Fire Emblem franchise. The second game I played through was Binding Blade. Overall, I found the gameplay and the increased challenge of Binding Blade (when compared to FE7) to be very enjoyable and satisfying (with a couple REALLY frustrating exceptions, namely a few maps with freaking Bezerk staffs all over the place), although I found the characters and story to be a little lacking when compared to FE7. The writing just wasn't as top-notch and I didn't fall as deeply in love with the cast of characters. Of course, some of that could be attributed to the fact Binding Blade was a fan translation. It was an excellent translation, but even the best fan translation probably doesn't compare to the professional localizations. Even with that consideration, though, I suspect FE7 is just stronger in terms of story and characters. I'm hard pressed to point out ANY character from FE7 that I don't like or can't find some sort of interesting thing about them, and the game is just brimming with richness and depth in storytelling. Still, FE6 had been well worth playing.

Something made me stop right on the final chapter of Binding Blade, however. And I'll get back to that later and explain why.

Modern Fire Emblem

After completing Binding Blade 99%, I felt like it was time to try out one of the more modern games. As I mentioned previously, I've never been a huge video game person, but I did own a 2DS-- mainly to play Pokemon on. Although I was very attached to the GBA Fire Emblem games and loved the art style and feel of that era of games, I was also intrigued by the idea of trying one of the more modern games. The new art styles, the new system, the new mechanics and all of that would take some getting used to, and lacked the charm of the GBA, but still, I thought it was worth looking into. Why was that? Because once again, I had seen some Let's Plays, done by that some YouTuber. In particular, the series had been on Awakening. I had really deeply enjoyed the characters and story from that series, and it seemed like it recapured a lot of what was special about Fire Emblem. There was its share of problems, sure-- I wasn't blind to the gross fan-pandering "waifu" phenomenon and its objectification of a lot of female characters-- but overall it seemed like an excellent game, and really, you're going to find flaws in any game. The Let's Play series convinced me that the newer, modern games were worth trying out.

There was a problem, though. The Awakening Let's Play was still fresh in my memory. It hadn't been several months or a year since I'd seen it; I'd only watched the last of it a week prior or so. I wanted to wait before buying Awakening to play for myself, wait long enough for some of those memories to fade. My solution was to buy a different game in the meantime, but still one of the newer ones. After some research and deliberation I chose FE Fates: Birthright.

Birthright

'What fun,' I thought to myself, 'The first Fire Emblem game I'll be playing completely blind! Not even the slightest vague memories of Let's Plays about it!' I read enough about Fates to know it branched paths as 3 different games depending on which kingdom you sided with, but I really did know little more than that. It seemed like a great opportunity to go in 100% spoiler-free. So many great surprises awaited!

Once I started playing, I found Fates was . . . definitely not as good as Awakening. The story just did not appeal to me as strongly, and many of the characters failed to appeal to me, either. They seemed more tropey than usual (and yes, I admit FE characters always are tropey to some degree, but they felt even more so), the ideas more bland or worn-out, and the game seemed to suffer from the problem of even more gross objectification of women than Awakening. The cutscenes with the character models (as opposed to the full-fledged cinematic cutscenes) were awkward at times and hard to take seriously. (When the Avatar falls into the bottomless pit of doom or whatever, their wooden figure falling stiffly just looks utterly ridiculous and makes what's supposed to be a tense, dramatic thing and unfortunately makes it purely moronic. Not their fault, just the limitations of the technology right now.)

So, yeah, all in all, Fates seemed OK, but not the best. I wasn't really digging a lot of the plot and characters, and the maps were often a little on the bland side, but it was alright. I took solace in the parts that I actually did enjoy. A few of the characters were pretty neat. I liked Subaki, and I liked Kaze, and I liked Silas. Jakob seemed pretty cool, too, and I liked Hinata and Hinoka. I was enjoying the MyCastle stuff, even though it's a bit silly. Capturing units in a jail to recruit was intriuging, and forging weapons was fun. I liked inviting allies over to my house, and I was enjoying the support conversations. I was also enjoying learning the new support mechanics that were so new to me. I was slowly but surely grinding Moku up to a decent level and I was just starting to Master Seal some of my units and think about my choices for promotions.

It was going pretty decently! I had A-support with Subaki, and was ready for S-support, but I decided I wanted to get up to A-rank with Kaze and Silas first before making the final choice. And then I went off to play chapter 15.

No, I didn't know I was about to get screwed over by the game. The plot killed off Kaze because I wasn't currently A-rank with him; when the chapter ended I hit the 'save' without even thinking about it. Just ingrained habit. Besides, surely if the game killed him off as a plot point, it couldn't have possibly been prevented, right? So there was no need to avoid saving the game anyway, right?

Nope. Because I failed to fulfill an arbitrary requirement that the game didn't inform me about, I was now locked out of the 'good' ending for Kaze. If I wanted to continue with the game with my unit (which I dumped a lot of resources and time into, by the way) and get his good ending, I would have to start the game completely over.

This is just bad game design. I'm not even about to argue that a unit should never be killed off by a plot point instead of during battle. Sure, it would be very annoying and upsetting to have a unit you spent a lot of time investing in to be killed off no matter what you do, but at least there would be a purpose to that: to serve as a surprise, to demonstrate death cannot be avoided sometimes even when you replay a chapter, to be a poignant and meaingful plot point in the overall story arc. Kaze's death was none of those things. The scene was awkwardly shoved in there, completely void of any emotional impact, and entirely meaningless. (Basically, rocks fall, Kaze dies.) But, worst of all, it could have been avoided if you had simply been "in the know" about a very easy secret requirement to fulfill (a-level support). One stupid little thing like that, sullying my entire run.

I mentioned I stopped playing Binding Blade when I was 99% complete. And the reason why is largely the same kind of situation. In the GBA games there are these Gaiden Chapters that can be unlocked. Often the requirements for unlocking them are pretty secret and arbitrary. You have to either stumble across them or look at a Wiki. The idea of these easter egg chapters is to increase the replay value of the game and have extra added bonuses, and that's fine. Nothing wrong with that idea. I ended up playing most of the Gaiden chapters in Binding Blade just for fun. I knew they existed from the Let's Play I had watched, so I made sure to look up in a wiki how to unlock them.

I did not know, however, you needed to complete 100% of the Gaiden chapters to unlock the full, true ending of the game.

Now, something like that isn't as bad as what Birthright did. I would argue the the "full, true ending" was supposed to be more like "bonus content" to reward players with more stuff if they want to replay. But not knowing about the secret, arbitrary requirements ahead of time and thus playing through the entire game only to be locked out of several of the final chapters? It left a bitter taste in my mouth, enough that the desire to even finish the last chapter of my current run just was killed. To this day I still don't know how Binding Blade actually ends. I always meant to return to it eventually-- I just didn't feel like replaying the ENTIRE game again anytime soon to get the true ending.

Well, after Kaze died and I was locked out of using him ever again, I'm pretty much in the same boat now. It leaves a very, very bitter taste in your mouth. As much as I'd been enjoying playing, it pretty much kills all desire to continue with the game. If Kaze was destined to always die due to plot reasons, I would have been completely fine with continuing onward. But the fact that one small mistake due to not knowing a secret requirement means he's gone? That's beyond absurd.

I honestly don't know what to do now. I would love for my desire to play the game to return to me, but I really don't think it will at this point. I certainly don't want to continue with the bad ending, but I don't want to spend the enormous chunk of time and effort to get all the way back to the middle of the game again. It's a massive shame. And, quite frankly, even if I did continue, how could I trust the game at this point to not screw me over again in a similar manner with more secret requirements?

Playing a game blind means you, as a player, are giving a certain amount of trust in the game to give you a satisfying experience. That's not to say you don't thrust surprises upon the player. Of course there should be surprises. A good story has surprises and heartbreaks. But to break the basic rules of the game itself and say, "Oh yeah, you get the bad ending, and it's your fault, because you didn't do this thing I didn't tell you that you needed to do" is just assholery. You are betraying the trust of your players. And that's not necessarily something that can be quickly regained once it's lost.

Conclusion

So that's my tale of spoilers and betrayal. Spoilers can be such a double-edged sword. It was because of Let's Plays that I discovered Fire Emblem to begin with and sought it out to play on my own, so obviously some spoilers are not bad. Often spoilers can completely rob a story of its emotional impact, though. We know this. So we try to minimize them.

But spoilers could also have prevented the bullshit I ran into that trashed my run of Birthright. So, it's tough. I guess a good policy might be "no spoilers, except for extremely bullshit DICK MOVES that the game is going to try and pull on you." I don't know.

In any rate, if anyone actually read even a part of this post, I would really love to hear your opinions and thoughts on the issue. Did you also have Kaze die in your run/save over it? How did you react when you learned it could have been prevented? Is Fates too shitty of a game to bother playing anyway? (lol) I admit part of why I am so salty is because I dislike so MANY of the units in this game, so when I'm locked out of even using one of the ones I happened to like, it certainly didn't do me any favors.

Or do you think I'm being a dramatic asshat? Whatever your thoughts, I wouldn't mind hearing. In any case, thanks for reading!

[youngjaaes]

also i really want to write a magical starsign au???? 

like, i’ve been playing the game recently and the story is so good? i feel like it would really work as a fic. and get this: there are six main characters! so like yeah it would be cool to try and write a fic based on that game. 

but knowing me i’d probably make it jae x everyone lololol i ain’t kidding around. i love allllll the jae ships.

it’s basically: b.a.p as magical wizards who go on a space adventure and save the entire universe

(you don’t have to read the next paragraph. it just gives a lil context)

and so....magical starsign’s plot is basically these six kids go to this magic school and then one day boom theyre going on a space adventure but everything goes real bad and shit because like they all end up on different planets. and the main character (playable character? you? idk what to call it? the equivalent of ‘my unit’ in fire emblem) and the first character end up on the earth planet and save these people that live underground (from starvation or something? i can’t quite remember. its like in ‘a bug’s life’ where they fight an enemy taking the food...or something) and then they get this neat ass rocket and when theyre taking off (theyre aiming for the wind planet here) they get attacked by MOTHERFREAKING ROBOTS YES and shit happens and they end up on the water planet. and on the water planet, its frozen over?? funky. anyway they find the body of a robot that suspiciously looks like their robot friend (recruitable character ay yes) but he’s missing a head? anyway turns out sOME GUY STOLE THE HEAD TO USE AS A BATTERY FOR HIS HEATER BECAUSE HE COULDNT FIND HIS REGULAR BATTERIES and then boom boom pow you defeat freaking space pirates and shut down the ice machine that froze the planet over, thus saving the people yayyyy. then you choose which planet to go to; wind planet to find someone theyre looking for or wood planet to defeat more space pirates (to me the story makes more sense if you go wind planet tho so i’m going with that for now). right so they go to the wind planet and turns out your other wizard friend is there being hunted by the space police and you get to save hiiiiiim and then its all happy. also you meet a twig that can walk and talk and its called ‘twigdamus’. i love it. so then they get their asses to the wood planet where this village has taken your fourth buddy and has him tied to a pole because their forced to give up magicians to the space pirates (or else). and bam later he espaces on his own and you have to make your way through the mighty jungle to get to the space pirates and when you do, you find your fifth and final recruitable character but she’s like fucked in the head or something because she basically goes “fuck you guys” and leaves with the space pirates for the fire planet. then the five people you do have haul ass to the fire planet and dwnjnf it takes forever but eventually you get her on your side and then....i dont know the story keeps going. basically you find there’s a guy called kale who wants to destroy the entire universe and the six kids have to stop him;;

(you can read the next paragraph. it’s ??? a thing??? i talk about ships)

sooooooooooooooooooooooooo i’m thinking; youngjae would be the main character (helloooo he’s my hero, he should be the story’s main hero) and he winds up on the earth planet with jongup. (i’m so into youngup rn its insane). also because theres a big rocket crash...i need a cute healing scene like??? a lot??? anyway these boys save the underground people because theyre flipping amazing. also, having jongup be first means youngjae spends the entire adventure with him and for some reason thats just so cute to me??? like one of those ‘together through it all type things’. also means jongup practices wind magic which tbh based on the game, i feel like would be really cool for him. then they haul ass to the water planet and i know they find a robot so it should be junhong but i’d probably get rid of all that jazz so theres no robot. instead, i’d probaly make it that they basically go straight to defeating the pirates and since we know the pirates are kidnapping mages, i’d have youngup free the imprisoned mages and one of them happens to be a member of b.a.p. and i’m thinking yongguk. bc i freaking love bangjae and i need them to have 14848252 interactions. also that means that yongguk practices earth magic and i’d say thats pretty spot on. also just picture...bangjaeup hanging out on the beach together after unfreezing the planet *heart eyes*. aight then they go to the wind planet. who should the space police be after??? my mind screams junhong just because i feel like he could accidentally get himself into trouble or something idk its 3 am. also i need like a....’youngjae saves junhong and then junhong gives him the biggest and cutest fucking hug ever’ type scene. theyre hugs are cut af. and that means junhong practices wood magic (basically plants n nature n stuff ooooh) which i think is really flipping cute???. yeah so then they get to the wood planet and theres the village with the next b.a.p member whose been captured. i initially thought daehyun but after careful consideration im thinking himchan. idk why. but like i just feel like it fits. and like that means daehyun gets to be the betraying snake dude later. which also means when they reunite, daejae will have the most dramatic flipping reuinion in the wholegame and i live for drama. and then theyre all together and the six of them save the entire universe!!!! while five of them just love and adore youngjae and wanna be with him because he’s amazing and everybody loves youngjae and whooooo jaeships 

i want this so bad. freaking B.A.P AS MAGICAL WIZARDS WHO GO ON A SPACE ADVENTURE TO SAVE THE ENTIRE SOLAR SYSTEM

[dlamp-dictator]

Allen Rambles About Fire Emblem (Allen’s Rambling XXIX)

I’ve reached my usual 30-hour mark with Fire Emblem Echoes, so I think it’s about time I actually talked a bit about my experience with it and the Fire Emblem series in general. For the last few weeks I’ve been saying I was going to dig deep into this game and more or less tear it apart while discussing why I like Fire Emblem Fates a lot more, but... I’m not. I thought about it while trying to finish the map against Jedah, and as frustrating a time I have with that map and the game as a whole, I’m not going to start whining about it. Well, not in a petty sense anyway. There are still a few issues I have with Echoes, but I won’t be a baby about them.. I hope.

Ah, but before I get onto that...

My History

I feel it’s only fair to discuss my history with the Fire Emblem series in general before getting to talking about Echoes, just so people know where I’m coming from. I’m gonna’ be honest, it’s not much of a history. Much like Dangan Ronpa (another series I need to talk about at some point), fandom discourse got me interested in this series. I heard a bunch of complaints about Fire Emblem Awakening when it first came out. Complaints about how anime-esque it was, how it’s “waifu-baiting” was ruining a serious game known for itself dramatic story-telling, how making it was easier and more accessible for newcomers with Casual Mode would kill what the made the series great, how easy it was to break the game and created no challenge for what was suppose to be an intense strategy game. Honestly... I was getting flashbacks of the Guilty Gear and SMT fandom complaining about Blazblue and Persona, so I ignored it and the series in general while that was going on. 

That, and I didn’t have a 3DS at the time, so I honestly didn’t care. But then I eventually got a 3DS somewhere around the time Fire Emblem Fates came out. I originally got the 3DS to play Senran Kagura Burst and Burst 2, play a few of the Pokemon games I missed out on, as well as a few unnoticed JRPGs that I don’t feel like talking about. But anyway, Fates had came out at the time I finally started caring about my 3DS, and I heard much worse complaints about the newest entry at the time. I’m not going to go into detail on what the issues people had with Fates was, but I’ll just say from an outsider’s perspective it sounded like the Awakening complaints times ten. 

And that got me curious. Was the game really that bad? Was the game that pandering? I had to find out for myself, so I did a bit of research on how to play the game, and bought Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright. Now, when I say ‘research’, I mean I went deep into how Fire Emblem gameplay worked. I studied which characters had the best growth rates for tanking and attacking, I looked at skills and how they’d help make each unit’s job easier, I studied which characters were worth keeping around until endgame, which units should be reclassed at which times for getting the optimal skills, and so on. If I was going into a series who’s biggest feature was perma-death, I wasn’t going in blind. 

Anyway, Birthright had optional grinding in it, and as a newcomer I didn’t want to get destroyed my first time playing the series. I played it on Classic Mode at first like most of the fandom recommended, and I got use to the concept of perma-death. Since a lot of the fandom focused on optimizing party members and viewing most of the characters for there stats than their personalities I didn’t get too attached to many characters outside of Azura and Silas (who is best girl). 

I have the say, playing this game on Classic Mode was a trip. I honestly couldn’t stand Corrin’s pacifist personality in a game where enemies permanently killed your characters. To just see him/her refuse to kill others because of his/her soft heart after they killed so many of my own units made me rage. THESE SCUMBAGS KILLED HINOKA AND RINKA. MY DEFENSIVE CHOKE POINTS ARE RUINED. CORRIN YOU USELESS WHORE, STOP SHOWING MERCY AND KILL THEM! 

...

...

...

Ahem.

That aside, for a game that had perma-death being its most prominent feature, I was a little annoyed by seeing “dead” characters in cutscenes due to them being “vital” to the plot at points. Death didn’t seem to have much weight when characters were technically not dead and just unable to fight due to injury, and when the fandom kept saying how vital that aspect was when the game didn’t treat it that way, I felt cheated. I felt like my actions had no consequence outside of gameplay. No one berated Corrin for letting people die under his/her command, no one lamented in the base how certain characters were “critically injured” and couldn’t fight back. Hell, no one even brought attention to the fact that Corrin’s base was in basically the Hyperbolic Time Chamber between chapters. Things just... didn’t have emotional weight to it outside of gameplay. Still, I kept going while on Classic Mode, despite losing half my army. I didn’t know soft resetting was a thing so I just... dealt with it... by force. 

And then Sakura died, and I lost my (main) healer. 

So, like the filthy casual I am, I made a new file on casual mode and never looked back. Yeah... losing healers is kind of my sign for sucking the game so much I need a handicap for it. Around that time I figured out how to soft reset, but I still saw that as cheating, so I just stuck to casual mode. I found the game fun after that. Corrin’s pacifism made a bit more since when lost allies merely retreated at 0 HP instead of died. Every survives, no one was killed, and Corrin’s army didn’t kill in turn, so Corrin’s pacifism didn’t make me want strangle him/her, and I could tolerate the story a little better.

But moving onto the game itself, I liked all the strategies and crazy combination of skills you could have. I loved how you could break the game with the right skills and pairings around mid game. I loved the pair up system and how it could save you so many times in dire situations. I had a lot of fun with Fates, I even bought some of the DLC for it. 

It’s got its flaws though. Some of the support conversations were just terribly written, the story felt like it was trying to appeal more so to thirteen-year-olds that an older crowd with how one-note a lot of the characters felt, and how... obsessed with Corrin they were. I mean, the game was rated Teen, but I’m 23 and I expect a game that had a perma-death system to have a better story than... Birthright. And honestly, for a game that was hated to the point of being call “Waifu Emblem” because of the anime style and marriage system, very few of the girls were written well enough or even looked hot enough for me to attach myself to. Honestly, Azura, Elise, Kagero, and Charlotte were the only girls I liked out of all the girls, and only 2 of those 4 had decent supports. Like I said, the game is fun, but the story... not so much.

So with all that out of the way, let’s get onto what I really wanted to talk about.

Fire Emblem Echoes

So... my thoughts on Echoes can basically be summed up as Echoes being the better story, but Fates being the better game. I’m more invested in Alm and Celica’s situation than Corrin’s, and I find their story more believable. Well, not as cheesy anyway. A bit of explanation on the Brand would be nice, but I kind of get the point of it so I’m not gonna’ whine about that too much. The only thing I’ll say against it is that Alm doesn’t seem keen on becoming king at this point in the game, yet his army pushes him to that role and he... doesn’t really react to it much. I find that a bit strange, but I’m still on Act 4, so... maybe I’m just missing something. 

Something else I’m having trouble dealing with in Echoes, gameplay wise, is... well, how different it is from Fates gameplay-wise. It’s good gameplay overall, but it’s making me think in a way completely opposite of Fates. With how... well frankly, with how bland the maps are in Echoes gameplay can feel boring at times. Mountainous and swamp areas are especially annoying since it turns the map into a crawl. I’m down with a slower, more methodical approach to this game, but... eh, I’m not feeling these maps. Not to say Fates didn’t have its fair share of boring and uninteresting maps, but Echoes has it worse, and with spawning enemies and maps I have to cross through just to do things like upgrade weapons and class change, they feel less like optional grinding and more like unnecessary battles. 

There are a few other issues I have with them, but I’ll save them for a later segment.

Speaking of my issues...

The RNG

Look, I’m just gonna’ say this flat out. The defensive, slow, strategic way I feel this game wants me to play feels moot when the RNG comes into effect.

I’m sure everyone that’s played Fates knows that infuriating feeling when Kaze's 97% hit rate misses and he dies when an enemy’s 2% critical comes in. I feel like Echoes has this even worse than Fates. Few weapons have a 100% hit rate, and even 30% enemy hit rates feel risky at times. I really feel that this higher focus on strategy is downplayed by the fact that a lucky critical can utterly destroy a defensive line. Alm died on the first turn of enemy phase to a 2% crit when I was playing defensively, and it sucked. It feels like the gameplay contradicts itself. This was an issues in Fates too, but since you could more or less break the game around chapter 16-ish with the right skills and pair ups it didn’t sting as much. Here? With Echoes? With how they do skills and with the fatigue system? With how skills are tied to weapon experience? Yeah, you can’t really break the game, you have to play smart, so every instance of RNG nonsense that kills off a character with a single-digit chance of a critical just... sucks.

So... with that out of the way, I’ll move onto to talking about... 

The Good

The Story

Like I said, I find this story leagues better than Fates’ story. Alm wanting to save his country even if it means taking on a role he didn’t ask for, Celica wanting to be a devout servant of Mila to the point of near martyrdom. This is all good stuff, and the story highlights a little about war and what it can do to people, how politics can ruin friendships, how faith can be tested in unforseen ways. I like it a lot. Every character feels real and understandable. No one feels like an outright jerk without a good reason behind it. I read that Echoes was a remake of an older Fire Emblem game, and if this is the kind of quality of writing we missed out on in Fates then I am deeply disappointed in the writers of that game for not living up to the expectations of its predecessors.

The (Fully Voiced) Supports

In the words of TFS’s Vegeta: 

“Never in my life have I needed something so much and never known until I received it.”

I lost my mind when I saw how these supports were being done. Actually chatting on the battlefield in real time (as real time as turn based RPGs get anyway), hearing characters actually speak their lines. I... I legitimately screamed when I heard Alm and Faye chatting with each other. It... it made so much sense, of course it should be done this way. I wanted to buy five more copies of this game just to see it done again in the future. It actually reminds me of how Disgaea 5 and D2 had certain characters chat to each other when they stood next to each other. I only wish it was an automatic thing like in Disgaea 5. And the supports are well-written as well. Character development is done solely in the story, while the supports are little extra bits of character relations and how they grow and improve over time. My only regret is that certain characters didn’t get supports with each other like Clair and Clive, but... I suppose it’s fine.

The Waifus

For all the talk I hear about Echoes breaking the “Waifu Emblem” stigma, this game has sooooo many girls I like in them. Genny is precious, Clair is a lovable and cheesily haughty noblewoman, Faye... is my second Pegasus Knight with decent defense and high mobility, Mae’s bubbly, tomboyish personality is endearing, Sonya X Genny needs to be a thing, and do not get me started on the GODDESS that is Matilda and her 10 resistance. No, this is Waifu Emblem as far as I’m concerned, and all it took was a decent writer to make me care about these girls.

The Bonus EXP

This really helps me out when trying to grind the weaker units. Forsyth and Python are actually useful to the army now because of it. It’s nice to get an extra reward for completing the map, and it makes all the spawning enemies and replaying of maps a little more worth it, as much as I don’t like doing it.

Upgrading Weapons

I really like how upgrading weapons is paid for with money instead of praying you had the right gem type like in Fates. Makes it so much easier to upgrade weapons. Now if only Gold marks came by a little easier... but that’s what DLC is for. The upgrades feel more optional if anything, an Iron Sword is good enough of a boost on itself, and so on, the boosts help though.

Leon the Mage Killer

I love Leon. I love Leon almost as much as Leon loves Valbar. In an army full of Mages and Dread Fighters, this man and his Steel Bow activated criticals on just about every mage on the map. For at least 6 maps he was the mage killer until Saber became a Dread Fighter. I think he does it solely to protect Valbar and his non-existence resistance stat, and that’s okay. You do you Leon, you magnificent Mage destroyer you.

Dread Fighters

Well, Celica’s army is made up of dread fighters for a reason. They’re just soooo handy to have, especially with all the witches and arcanist I have to face on her route. The ninja aesthetic is real man. It clashes with Saber’s design, but it’s real, and it feels good.

Zeke

Zeke is voiced by Patrick Seitz and has decent stat growths, this can only lead to good things.

The Not So Good

Celica’s route and her finding optional party members is so annoying... I swear, I picked up Catria and Palla AFTER I rescued Est because I figured that automatically join after I saved her... three maps later and they didn’t, and now I’m stuck grinding them... it sucks.

Again, the RNG in this game makes the more strategic way I need to play feel unrewarding when it can boil down to a lucky critical on enemy phase.

As much as I like how you upgrade weapons, getting the money to do it is a pain. There’s DLC maps, yes, but... it doesn’t feel worth it to mean unless you’re trying to break the game. And this isn’t really a game that’s fun to break.

Speaking of weapons, gaining skills through weapons doesn’t feel good to me. I can’t switch out weapon without sacrificing utility, and on Terror maps, Conrad and the Pegasus Sisters are the only useful units. I’m not giving anyone a Blessed Sword when they have fulled upgraded Brave Swords, Silver Bows, and Ridersbanes.

The fatigue system, dear lord. This isn’t Dark Souls, why is there a stamina system in this game? I just... I just can’t even man. The climb of Duma Tower was NOT FUN.

 Arcanists with Death and Fortify. That’s... that’s just annoyingly unfair.

Witches and the fact they can teleport to my armored units without any cost on the first turn of enemy phase just destroys any strategy I can make against them, and it sucks.

Dracoshield enemies... Dracoshield enemies on maps where taking them out is optional and the game doesn’t tell you... Goddamn, need I say more?

So yeah, I still think I like Fates more to play, but Echoes is definitely the kind of challenge I need in my strategy RPGs, especially for my handhelds. I’ll probably try a Classic run of Echoes when I beat it on casual mode, but I’m having fun with it at the moment, so... yeah. I recommend you guys get it if you’ve got a 3DS and the cash. I might save up for Awakening too and see how that plays out since I love breaking video games.

[maxa-postrophe]

About Fire Emblem - Conquest

Wow it was longer than I thought! Don’t worry, this is a one time thing only!

This text will explain my perception of the story of Fire Emblem Fates : Conquest. Expect some ranting,  spoilers (if you didn't play the game yet) and a lot of english mistakes (sorry for that). Also, I still have the final maps (27-28) to complete so I can't talk about the end of the game.

 This game... ah, well, to begin with, I must say that I liked this game  despite its flaws, as it's a really solid tactical rpg game. It's seem very odd why I want to write such a wall of text on a game, because it's not the only one with a story far from perfect, but, let's say it's professional deformation. As a comic author, I'm often thinking about stories I watch. I 'm not saying I would have done better, but this story in particular made my brain race for some reason.

As you already know, fates is about the hero/heroine Corrin choosing between two nation : Hoshido and her/his real family, or Nohr and her/his adoptive family. of course whatever story you choose, expect internal conflict, tragedies and drama. Since Nohr is the "invading ntion ruled by evil king", you can expect Conquest to be a thorny path. And, boy, I didn't exect that many thorns.

1 - Of Black and White

To put it bluntly, the story doesn't make mystery about making it a war between the white country of good and love versus the black EVIL country ruled by an EVIL king with EVIL monsters and basically anything EVIL you can find. And that's okay. The point is to support your adoptive family you care about and the nation you grew in, despite their flaws, over your newfound family whatever well intentioned they are. So by trying to end the war from the inside, you're between the hammer of our real family you're fighting and the anvil of your king (and adoptive father) you will betray.

On paper, I find it more interesting than magically making Hoshido an awful and demonic country all of a sudden. However, like everything, if you're not balancing some things, it falls. And in this case, it's a big, loud, hard fall. Hoshido and Nohr couldn't be more caricatured. It's not only black and white, it's plain PURE white versus EVIL black. From the first chapter, you discover a country that seem to be in an eternal night, dark and hostile, and aside your adoptive siblings who are pretty cool, you have all the time to see EVIL king asking you to do EVIL executions, then proceeds to do a couple of EVIL tricks like an EVIL terrorist attack, then you discover Hoshido and everything is  in light and there is flowers and everything is so welcoming (except Takumi, thank you for being an asshole in this ocean of sugar)... and in this time you don't have many occasion to sympathise with your Nohrian family, so they don't mean that much for the player at this point, so, in the end, when the game asks me to choose... I really, really searched for a reason to do so, and I didn't find any, aside "the nohrian royal family is kinda okay". I understand that siding with the ones you grew up with should be the "natural choice" I'm not talking about the country because the main character is spending most of his time in a tower so he doesn't know much about Nohr in the end), but the game made a terrible job at this and it doesn't seem natural at all. Anyway, I chose Conquest so hello, Nohr.

problem : The game concept IS to fight Hoshido's army, but your goal is to dethrone Garon. In other words, the main plot is contradicting the gameplay. And since the developers didn't want to make Hoshido look remotely bad in any way, all those battles against the white country seems really forced. Honestly, you could have kept the whole black and white stuff, only by making minor tweaks. The game suggests that Garon was originally not a bad ruler. I also read (may be false though) that one of the original ideas was that Nohr was a poor country so they had to invade Hoshido who was wealthy and didn't want to share anything... so the ideas are there for making an interesting setting. Unfrotunately, the gme don't say anything about that. Can't you at least explain us how this war originated? Plus, a lot of Nohrian characters are nice, aside from a couple of psychos like Camilla or Peri, when you see someone like Arthur, who is basically Captain Nohr, or any other nice people fighting with you, you can expect they wage war for a reason, right? But no, get only muhahahaha we will conquer the world and exterminate everyone.

There is a mission about a vassal country of Hoshido, telling you that Hoshido too had some expansionist views, and since Hoshido is basically Japan, that didn't sound all that surprising, and I was really motivated about this imperialist side , thinking at least you could liberate a vassal counrty, but, hey, guess what, turned out is was a dirty plan, and the local chief is a total scumbag, because you know, you HAVE to be on the evil side, always, and Hoshido are GOOD, always, so when you're freeing any Hoshidian people by pure chivalry spirit (misplaced, you chose the evil path, why being so wary of ethics, now?) they express their gratitude by... actually they don't express their gratitude, because you're Nohrian scum, and they would totally do the same in such situation because they are the good people, so why just thanking you?

 And that's it, the only dot of black in all this white is the latent xenophobia of hoshidian, which will consider "Nohrian" as an insult by default. But honestly I'm not sure this racism thing is on purpose. I mean, after all, Nohr is the agressor, and they show an impressive display of dirty deeds, so in the end, such a behaviour isn't really  a surprise. And considering it's fantasy japan made by japan people, well... let's say there is room for doubts.

2 - You shall Suffer

I said it at the beginning, reading at the main plot, your hero can expect to suffer, and in Conquest, you will suffer even more. However, there is a thin line between telling a tragic story and create cheap drama. There is a simple rule , which is, not any chapter of a story can be a climax, because if there is too much dramatic spikes, it becomes flat. However, in Conquest, you know that something unpleasant will happen EVERY. FUCKING. CHAPTER. It works for some time, but, chapter after chapter, the process grows duller, to the point I was rolling eyes at each dickish move after a certain point. I am honestly really surprised Hinoka didn't die yet and Sakura didn't suicide herself at this point. It becomes really baffling in contrast with the support dialogues or paralogues who are often lightheaded and comical. Don't misunderstand me, I am welcoming the oxygen brought by those sequences, but those bubbles of humour and the dark, emo story are totally separated, so those two parts doesn't mix and it feels... really weird.

Come to think of it, it could have been a way to balance it : My Castle phases are those instants of peace of friendship that helps Corrin to remain strong and don't succumb to suffering and sadness... but you can't really say this is lampshaded.

One  thing to note is Garon HAS a real reason to act like a total dick with you, which is likely to make you suffer so much it breaks your spirit, so you can become a vessel for Anankos, so, as unpleasant as it is, this incessant display of cruelty has at least a plot motivated reason. However, this point is never really addressed, since your hero may be sad and discouraged, but we never see any sign of losing his sanity, so as soon as it becomes obvious hat the role will be fulfilled by Takumi (poor Takumi....joking, I hate Takumi), every additional dick move by Garon or Iago only seems to be gratuitous excuse to cause easy drama. So yeah, another missed occasion to make a more consistent storytelling, I'd say.

3 - Sockpuppet Rebel

Changing things from the inside is a tough task, and, as a hero, you're prepared to suffer and to dirty your hands...but, only to a certain extent. Honestly, I understand your avatar's problem. While you're trying to take the burden, you have your ethics and moral code, and don't want unnecessary bloodshed, so, at leas at the beginning, being hesitant and unresolved is fairly understandable. However, I got the impression that the creators were half-assed doing it. I'm not saying that Corrin should have turned into a cold blooded monster, mind you (could have been interesting, though), but from a practical point of view, the main character is making very weird decisions on a regular basis. So, punishing rebels, obeying your father's orders however vile, is okay, but, trying to get rid of Hans or Iago, for example, seems out of question. I can understand for Iago as it's kind of the first counsellor, but Hans, while still under Garon's protection to a certain extent, is a mere thug. You have the entire royal family on your side, you're a Nohrian prince yourself, and considering how he behaves, showing disrespect or even tried to kill you, you have plenty of excuse to execute him at least a dozen of times. You will tell me "But Garon could execute you". No, he can't. The game forgets it, but we're talking about a country. This country has several factions, every member of the royal family have vassals, which means lands and troops. No matter how ruthless Garon can be, he absolutely, definitely can't take direct action against you as long as you have the support of your brothers and sisters, and punishing you for killing a stupid thug can’t justify the risk of a massive rebellion. And even without that, he can't kill you, he needs you alive as a vessel for Anankos.

Also, having the entire Hoshidian family imprisoned which means virtually the end of the war, isn't even raised as an issue because "it's neutral ground it's not right to do so". yeah, if there was a lot of countries, and if Nohr was wary of being invaded by a coalition after seeing a neutral place violated, I could understand, but since there isn't any other country of importance, well... this is a massive strategy mistake, even if you don't kill them, you could have keep them captive (and they die later anyway, so...).

So, my main gripe is the hero appears too passive, he is not working towards his goal, he is pushed by the current and can't seem to take a decisive initiative. You basically do everything Garon tells you for THE ENTIRE GAME minus three chapters! And since you are the "player", it's pretty frustrating, right?

 Now, you will tell me, yeah, but your nohrian family are spineless retards, they wouldn't move an inch to save you. Well it's true to some extent. Again, it's not like Conquest is totally wrong every time. Xander chooses to be blind by living with his memories of the good Garon the King was at one point. And regarding he others, they lived under terror of their father since their birth so, yeah, I can understand that they won't oppose openly to their father, and acts out of fear. Camilla even states something along those lines. In order to convince them to kill Garon, you must conquer Hoshido's throne... that sounds pretty good. But actually, I was imagining more something like an official coronation ceremony, where all important people of Nohr could witness that Garon became a monster, something that would prevent a rebellion because the king was assassinated (again, I recall this being stated in the game). But in the end, the only witnesses are your own family, so in the end, it's not that different than attempting to assassinate him more or less anywhere, except the only sacrificed life here would be yours (instead of countless hoshidian people). In the end, it's "all this for only that" ? Plus okay, let's imagine Garon isn't a slime monster.... well, does that change anything ? He is still an evil ruler, he is still committing war crimes and devastating foreign countries, so, in the end, it doesn't change much to the problem : Garon must be suppressed, I think even your stuck up adoptive siblings could understand that after a while, right?

4/ Routes

When you think about it Conquest could have been, with some tweaks, a splendid standalone game. less gratuitous drama, less black and white morality, less passivity, more boldness, more work on characters and even politics, less "I want to do something adult but not too much don't forget ethics", and you could keep a lot of current elements.

But the thing is, Conquest, Birthright and Revelations are meant to be a package, so, we don't have three games in one here, we got one game split into three, which means there are some holes that are left on purpose. Conquest is the hard path, the path of thorns. It's also the hardest of the two starting routes; so you can expect be rewarded to your effort, like a more satisfying end, or interesting plot points. However this would have deprived people buying Birthright, and, more than that, Revelation would become useless. And they WANT you to buy Revelations, so, no, you won't have your satisfying end (from what I read, revelations isn't that satisfying, though). So the reality is that they chose to sell you an incomplete game to make you spend more money on the other routes, making the flaws even more apparent.

5-Lost in translation

A last word about the localization. I understand that a good adaptation isn't about literal translation, however, changing characters personality (Effie for example who is supposed to be timid) and thus their dialogs is unacceptable, even if it's for minor support conversations. It doesn't matter that "original lines aren't better". translation isn't about thinking I can do better than the original. It's about keeping the core of a work and bringing it to you. I heard it's not the first time and I will really be careful about that in the future, because I don't want to ask myself each time "okay, but did he really say that ?". Also, censoring part of the game is also something I really don't like. I understand it's for a minor stupid petting game, I understand people not wanting to play it or reading embarrassing lines, but in this case, please, make it an option to deactivate it from the game, because whatever you call it it's "removing content", and I don't like the idea of having "removing content", especially from a game which already is already incomplete story-wise. But you wouldn't want age restriction to lessen the amount of copies sold, right?

In conclusion

As solid as the game is from a gameplay standpoint, it's leaving to me an intense frustration, that you can feel through the need of writing this huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge wall of text. A lot a ideas, likeable characters and a story with a lot of potential, all of that was wasted to me. I really hope the next game will not repeat the same mistake and sacrificing a great potential on the altar of a commercial strategy.

[julystorms]

I've seen a lot of people consider these pairings "canon" in Awakening (they're not lmfao) but I'm throwing them right back at you: Chrom/Sumia, Henry/Olivia, Lon'qu/Lissa, Cordelia/Frederick.

{do i ship it?}

LMAO “canon” is such a bullshit term in the Fire Emblem fandom. There are like 10 canon pairings across all the games. Everything else is a giant shrug emoji.

Chrom/Sumia: I don’t get the Chrom-as-husbando material thing at all. He’s not a bad dude but I just never gave half a shit about him. He felt like a personalityless blob, kinda like flavorless Jell-O. Chrom/Sumia was only ever useful to me as a fallback-background pairing: specifically to make Cordelia’s crush on Chrom more fun (read: complex) to write about. “My BFF is in love with and going to marry the guy I’ve had feelings for for years” trope can be pretty shitty but there are interesting ways to write it. I like to think Cordelia and Sumia are really close and willing to support each other in All Things, and while feelings are fickle, traitorous scumbags, they talk this through and become better friends through it. I also kind of like the idea of Chrom not being oblivious toward Cordelia’s feelings; he just doesn’t know what the actual hell to do about it/to make it better, and he’s a nice and considerate guy who would never go out of his way to hurt someone else’s feelings...

Anyway idk. It’s an okay pairing I guess, but IMO not for its own sake.

I married Sumia myself and found it more interesting. (I mean, c’mon, Sumia and Robin bonding over trashy romance novels. Give it to me.)

Anyway, Chrom/Maiden is the best Chrom pairing because you can actually imagine it being extremely interesting for its own sake. I mean, what IS the story there?! And it’s kinda nice to be able to completely avoid the whole BFFs-like-the-same-man drama. It’s fun to think about one day out of the year, but every other day it’s tiresome and trite. And I like writing dramatic angsty bullshit!

Henry/Olivia: I never really liked Henry much. I think in part it was his localized Jokester™ personality that threw me off, but really, he read to me like an Edgy Teenager with a Dark Past and I’ve seen enough of that to last me the rest of my natural lifespan. This pairing is good fodder for an inquisitive writer, one interested in exploring a unique relationship dynamic, but for me, anyway, it’s not really a ship I can get behind or get invested in beyond the one-off story exploring their relationship. (Which, btw, I would not say is especially healthy, but that’s just me.)

Lon’qu/Lissa: I can get behind this one. I don’t think it’s any more canon than anything else in this godforsaken hellscape of a series, though. I wanted to like Lissa and Frederick for more Knight/Royal Action™, but unfortunately that made me yawn loudly and I found Lon’qu’s relationship with Lissa to be more interesting... That said, Lon’qu as a character never really appealed to me. I thought he was a poorly-written character who had potential that was squashed because they made like 98% of his personality “I’m Afraid of Teh Wimminz” and it made me want to puke. I like that they tried to explain it, but the explanation didn’t cut it for me at all. It was crammed into too many different supports, I guess you could say, and because of that it fell flat. Lon’qu should have only had one or two marriageable options, which might have helped, and I really wanted his “fear of women” to be discussed with other men for some reason. (IDK, male bonding time??? Who knows.) Blah blah nobody cares what I think of Lon’qu. I do wish their supports were better/more believably written, though. Lissa comes across as rather childish at one point, IIRC, and I didn’t appreciate it. But compared with how childish Nowi is, it’s easier to swallow. Haaah.

Cordelia/Frederick: I contributed to this fanfiction pool, so I do ship it I guess, but it’s one of those pairings that has to be treated very carefully for it to work. It’s like, “this could be interesting...in the right hands.” Not that my hands were the right hands. I think there’s something appealing about the general dynamic: he thinks she’s awesome and cool and she has her eyes on someone she’ll never have. Some subsets of fandom think the two of them bond over loving Chrom and not being able to have him, though I personally don’t like to subscribe to that theory. The only really shitty thing about this pairing is Severa; it’s hard to imagine Cordelia being a decent human being when you hear Severa talk about how all Cordelia talked about was Chrom all the goddamn time. But eh, I think this falls heavily into the same category Olivia/Henry does: could be interesting or even romantic in one or two scenarios written by a good author, but in most regards it’s likely to read as Unhealthy and Undesirable but good fodder for a curious author who likes to explore various ship dynamics. Something that sets it apart, though, is that I do think it makes a reasonably good “Marriage of Convenience” ship, for those who like that trope.