#bylethposting

[regina-bithyniae]

I'm sure Edelgard was very chill & understanding about her colony declaring independence

[pestillenceposting]

Rral

so funny to me how emblem byleth is just "emblem of the academy" considering literally everything else about them

[regina-bithyniae]

Fire Emblem: Three Houses: Crimson Flower arc seems basically like a "who can commit the most depraved and evil act" contest between Edelgard and Rhea, and as of the start of the final mission it appears Rhea has eked out a narrow lead.

[regina-bithyniae]

Thinking, how many combat-relevant mechanics does 3H have? This is a main part of why I dislike it.

Unlockable skills

Switchable classes

Crests

Holy Weapons

Combat arts

Gambits

Crafting

Combat support

White magic

Academy instruction and seminars

Follow-Up Critical Coefficient

Compare to Genealogy of the Holy War (FE4):

Skills are locked from inheritance and classes

Classes only rank up

Holy blood

Holy weapons

Weapon triangle

White magic

Or Thracia 776 (FE5):

Skills are locked from inheritance and classes

Classes only rank up

Weapon triangle

White magic (which has major emphasis here)

Scrolls (which just boost your growths, marginal)

Follow-Up Critical Coefficient

Or Fates: Conquest (FE14):

Unlockable skills

Switchable classes

Crafting

Pair Up (offensive and defensive)

Weapon triangle

Or Shadows of Valentia (FE15):

Switchable classes

Combat arts

Combat support (minimal)

White magic (moderate emphasis)

Crafting (sort of)

FE5 is notably considered the most technical game in the franchise, but mostly because of the major use of Warp spells and intricate map design.

I've been a Three Houses hater since it came out and this is why I don't like the gameplay. There's too much going on and the result is a mess, and this part of the design philosophy leaks into the storyline as well.

Three Houses even tells you exactly who enemies are going to attack on their turn complete with damage and hit percentages, which in other games you have to guesstimate on your own. And they need to, because that would be just another piece of cognitive load in an already overcomplicated combat system.

[regina-bithyniae]

>placing all the Fire Emblem on chart of difficulty versus fairness

>doesn't actually define either

[regina-bithyniae]

Ah fuck

Edelgard is going in 100% on the "tech CEO billionaires undermining the Dems" theory of defeat.

You know, a lot of the Biden staffers who ended up in Harris's election campaign staff apparently criticized her for not hyping up Biden's accomplishments more; I wonder how many of them were old enough to see Al Gore try to do that after Clinton's scandal and learned the wrong lessons

[regina-bithyniae]

After the timeskip in Three Houses there's a lot of cases where enemy characters are friends or family members of people in your party and if you're not setting up the most emotionally traumatizing kills possible then you're playing the game wrong.

[regina-bithyniae]

Your mute bimbo professor calls you into her office for some "one on one" instruction at night and gives you this look, wyd?

[regina-bithyniae]

Genuinely think I've had more fun mocking Fire Emblem: Three Houses than I ever had playing the game

[regina-bithyniae]

More on Three Houseslop - the tankies latching onto Edelgard is strongly overdetermined. Her objective is in no way obviously better than the status quo even ignoring the costs of getting there and the narrative is pretty clear about this.

But her total lack of doubt and full reliance on killing people is like crack to them - some lines about overturning the old order and some extreme violence and they're immediately on board.

[regina-bithyniae]

Edelgard: This path, it leads to the death of the archbishop and all her followers. How can you choose to join me?

Byleth: I was having a great time hanging with my dad, stealing things, killing people, living the mercenary life, and then oh no! Rhea wants me to teach calculus to retards!

Edelgard: But that was our class--

Byleth: And office hours, every Tuesday and Thursday! Parent-Teacher Association meetings, absolutely garbage pay, the bedroom right in the middle of the student housing so I hear Sylvain and Dorothea fucking all night, the disciplinary committee getting on my ass, (...)

[regina-bithyniae]

God this mission was weird. It's like 90% Slowing Fire tiles (in red) and you've got to constantly turn around to fight off pegasus knight cruise missiles that spawn behind you.

Then once you get to Rhea up top she barely does any damage, but right next to her is Cyril who is some sort of medieval Brave Axe kamikaze pilot and will kill whatever he touches.

(The real final boss of Crimson Flower, FE16's Marauder Shields)

Unless I snake Shamir up the side and pop him with Hunter's Volley. Then Edelgard just punches Rhea to death while she flails impotently.

---

And then storywise I just feel nothing. This isn't an intelligent story with themes but is dead set on pretending to be one. Sets us up for Edelgard doing Permanent Stalinist Purges against Those Who Slither In The Dark, her... coalition partners in destroying the Alliance, Kingdom, and Church.

Even the BL route was better than this

SO it turns out that if you disengage from Three Houses support conversations (because they suck) hard enough not to S-support anyone with Byleth you accidentally stumble your way into committing fem-pederasty with one of the worst pieces of art in the game

[regina-bithyniae]

Further right is more fair, further upwads is more difficulty, he labelled the axes backwards to what people usually do. Interestingly he seems to view it being quite strongly correlated apart from Awakening/3H/SS, where the more difficult games are also more fair, though he never commented on this!

Thracia is probably the most controversial placement. It's notable that 3/4 of my favorite games (Thracia, Genealogy, SoV) are in the Unfair+Easy corner, while my other (Conquest) is the Hardest+Fairest.

I wouldn't disagree with placements on the games I've played, but defining terms was really needed. If I made a stab, Unfairness is the extent to which a reasonably capable player making a blind run would get screwed by factors out of his control. Difficulty is the extent to which a player has to optimize play to the game mechanics in order to win.

Unfairness:

combat systems not adequately explained (mostly bad on early games)

so many combat systems that predicting what will happen based off player-available information is infeasible (3H, so bad that even with it displaying enemy intentions these often turn out inaccurate)

many out-of-combat systems which are time-prohibitive but required to actually play the game (literally just 3H)

enemies which spawn in without warning, close to your units, and immediately attack (i.e. ambush spawns)

RNG-heavy sections which make or break missions (particularly bad are the randomized ballista gauntlets in Thracia, Genealogy)

things that fuck with your composition like randomized mission deployment locations, party splitting or characters being unexpectedly unavailable

The thing is that properly implemented surprises and breakable mechanics can actually make for a very fun gaming experience. Thracia is unfair in a fair way, giving much leeway for the player to abuse Warp staves and capturing+robbing enemy units for broken items which otherwise would be fired in your direction.

(Thanks Reinhardt, I'll take those!)

And in Genealogy, major Holy-Blooded characters with insane holy weapons are twice as powerful as mundane characters and some later chapters have extremely wild fights with some of these on both sides.

But, if you try to play Thracia blind you will have a miserable time, and the player-experienced difficulty is very high even if much of this stems from Unfair mechanics, not pure "Difficulty."

>placing all the Fire Emblem on chart of difficulty versus fairness

>doesn't actually define either

[regina-bithyniae]

Well,

Rulers in general: don't like breaking up the territorial integrity of their state

weakens their international clout

signals weakness and the inability to stop said breakup

That's our starting position. What we know about Edelgard is that she's conquered the other countries of Fodlan and wants to restore Adrestia's glory. So, probably not a Gorbachev

A war between them and the empire in very recent history would also probably point away from Edelgard letting them go.

So it's stupid. But that matches the rest of 3H's writing so it's all good.

I'm sure Edelgard was very chill & understanding about her colony declaring independence