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[theresattrpgforthat]

Any TTRPG recommendations for fans of Fire Emblem's gameplay? Specifically the lite-tactics combat and the class-change system?

THEME: Fire Emblem.

Alright, so I had to call in a friend to explain the class-change system you’re talking about in Fire Emblem. Based on his explanation, it sounds like this involves being able to switch your character class and carry-over some of your previous class abilities, but also experiencing a different style of play or strategy.

I’m not confident that the games I found do exactly what you’re looking for, but I have some thoughts about where you can start looking if you decide to play with mechanics a little bit to make an experience work for you!

Tacticians of Ahm, by Meatcastle Gameware.

Tacticians of Ahm is a tactical combat-focused tabletop roleplaying game in the corrupt3d fantasy world of Ahm. A bit-rotten blight has appeared in the Northern Sea and from it flows the Corrupt1on, fractured light and shattered shapes sowing chaos across the realm. As Tacticians, you alone are prepared to face the darkness spreading across the lands and reunite the scattered peoples of Ahm.

What I think you’re really going to like about Tacticians of Ahm is the tactics and combat - it gives you the thrill of moving your little guys around on the grid, but rules-wise it advertises itself as streamlined and fast. The game also definitely has classes, with abilities and attack patterns restricted to / defined by your character class. Your character is also definitely levelling up, with at least 4 levels in the game in its current iteration. I don’t think this game uses currently uses class changes, although it’s still in a non-final stage of development, so I’m not 100% sure what character level looks like.

Fabula Ultima, by Need Games.

FABULA ULTIMA is a Tabletop Roleplaying Game inspired by Japanese-style console RPGs, or JRPGs.  In Fabula Ultima, you and your friends will tell epic stories of would-be heroes and fearsome villains, set in fantasy worlds brimming with magic, wondrous locations, and uniquely bizarre monsters!

If what you’re looking for is diversity in character options, Fabula Ultima will definitely have something for you. Beginning characters must have 2 different classes at minimum, and after you level up a certain amount, your character is expected to take on a new class. However, you’re not leaving your old classes behind; your character is growing and expanding their skill set as you play. The fighting mechanics are also somewhat streamlined, with your hit and your weapon damage determined in a single roll, but I don’t think they’re as abstracted as, say, a Powered by the Apocalypse game or Forged in the Dark.

In terms of genre, Fabula Ultima is very much inspired by Final Fantasy, but not exclusively. I’ve heard Final Fantasy and Fire Emblem being mentioned side by side in various contexts, so I think if what you love about Fire Emblem is also commonly seen in other JRPGs, you might feel at home here.

Relics of Empire, by Prey Species.

Relics of Empire is a tactical skirmish ttrpg that takes heavy inspiration from Fire Emblem, Tactics Ogre, and Mordheim.  Best played with 1-3 people, Tacticians will develop their own Units and fill up their armies, while the Game Master develops a campaign and villainous factions for the Tacticians to tackle. Tacticians will level up their Units, unlock new weapons, and even discover secret Classes hidden behind locked missions.

I’m seeing some similar terminology in this game description, and the mention of unlocking classes as you play sounds like it might give you the thrill of discovering new ways to use your character in a way similar to changing classes in Fire Emblem. I noticed that the pdf attached to the storefront says 5e, but from the description, it sounds like the game designer is using a combat system and a role-play system, using terms that don’t feel like they match the stats and systems of D&D.

Heroes of Lite, by nattwentea.

A Tabletop Roleplaying Game created to emulate the Fire Emblem experience, Heroes of Lite takes inspiration from games across the entire Fire Emblem series. Most prominent are influences from the Radiance games, Sacred Stones, Awakening, Three Houses and the mobile game Heroes. Being that Fire Emblem games run a lot of math under the hood and that emulating that math in a TTRPG context would be both painstaking and time-consuming, Heroes of Lite streamlines mechanics when possible. The result is a game that is easy to play either digitally or traditionally.

Heroes of Lite uses a d20 system that might be familiar to folks who are acquainted with the rules of 5e, with detailed and crunchy character creation and combat that centres itself around different weapon types. The creator describes the rules system as “streamlined,” but the game certainly feels a bit more on the trad side compared to the rules-lite games that I typically surround myself with. There’s a few sign posts that make this game feel very tactical to me - your characters have movement types, which determine how they move (or don’t move) through terrain, and a heavy differentiation between different weapons types, meaning that you’ll likely have advantages and disadvantages for whatever you choose to wield on the field of battle.

When it comes to the themes of Fire Emblem, Heroes of Lite is probably the most on-the-nose out of what I’ve found, but I’m not necessarily certain that it’s the play experience that you’re looking for. Luckily the system is pay-what-you-want, so you should be able to check out the rules for free to decide whether or not it’s for you!

Cloudbreaker Alliance, by CJ Leung

Two thousand years ago, for reasons that remained unknown, darkened clouds fell from the sky to engulf the world. What followed was the near obliteration of all civilizations by rampaging monsters that lurked within the murky mist. That event came to be known as Cloudfall.

Cloudbreaker Alliance is a counter-apocalyptic tabletop roleplaying game about reconnecting with long-lost civilizations and uniting against the monsters that destroyed the world two millennia ago.

The Kickstarter for Cloudbreaker Alliance describes your class system as a mix-and-match system that expects you to create a unique character by multi-classing as you level up, or even take ranks in extra classes. It looks like you can switch your character classes out for something else, but judging by the levelling system (accumulating XP after every mission to gain levels) it doesn’t look like your character completely re-sets if they switch classes.

If you want to learn more about how this game works, you can check out this series of introductory videos, published on Don’t Stop Thinking’s YouTube Channel. (#6 covers multi-classing specifically!)

Terra Machina, by rollbard.

Over the course of millennia, what began as a world of fantasy and myth advances beyond its ages of primitivity, agriculture, conquest, exploration, and industry. It is now an age of technology. Life transpires on the spectrum of science and sorcery. It is a world where the gods of the machine coexist with the gods of the natural world. Welcome to Terra Machina.

Terra Machina is a tabletop RPG that imagines a fantastical world where time has passed to the point where technology is just as powerful as magic. Taking inspiration from Japanese roleplaying video games of the 32-bit console era, it is a unique experience that hopes to combine the best elements of fantasy, science fiction, and action.

Another d20 game with an XP-leveling system and a concept of character classes, Terra Machina feels unique on this list mostly due to the way you improve your character. You spend your experience points bit by bit to gradually improve your character sheet, choosing a single improvement every time. These improvements might be stat or skill bonuses, but you can also choose to gain a new skill from something called a Class Crystal, or to gain a new Class Crystal alogether. You can multi-class in Terra Machina, but you have a class cap of three - if you want to take on a new class after the fact, you must swap it with something you already had.

Since levelling is incremental, I think you might get that experience of improving stat bonuses (and keeping them) while switching out class abilities when you tire of what you have. Unlike a few other games on this list, rather than choosing from a list of weapons, it looks like you can design weapons from scratch, with outlines as to how expensive it should be to create that weapon, and what kind of modifiers you can add to make it unique.

Theme-wise, I don’t think Terra Machina fits with the genre or setting of Fire Emblem, other than the fact that it’s inspired by JRPGS. Then again, when I checked the rulebook, most of what I saw was rules and stat blocks, and little to no lore, so it’s possible that you could take the game rules and play with them to fit a setting that works better for you.

Other Thoughts..

Funnily enough, if you dive into a completely different side of design, I think Powered by the Apocalypse games can do a little bit of what you���re looking for, because while you can keep a few stats and abilities when you take the “choose another playbook” option that is present in so many PbtA games, your character class can change quite drastically when you choose a new playbook. Typically I’m playing PbtA games to explore different character journeys, so I don’t know if there’s a game out there that’s as tactical as you like, and I don’t think that you’re going to see the difference in character competency as you play in the same way a levelling system will give you, but I do think it’s kind of neat that switching playbooks can give you a different play experience even though the rules feel a lot simpler. You might also be interested in Lancer and games that branch out of it from a mechanical standpoint, even if the genre is far afield from what you're looking for. Each time you gain another license level, you can choose to either upgrade your current license or spec into an additional license - and you might be able to rule that players can dump the license levels they took previously in a system they no longer want in order to upgrade a different license level even further. You can still hold onto stat bonuses that are attached to your character though, since your character is separate from their mech.

[emblemxeno]

Cindered Shadows Thoughts

Btw if you don't wanna see thoughts on my 3H playthrough block this tag #playing fe3h

-Finished it in exactly 8 hours, at least 2 of which could've been an email /s

-It is truly a microcosm of my foundational issues with 3H as a whole, besides two things

-One is that exploration isn't as tedious because Abyss isn't as big as the monastery, but I guess that isn't really a point in its favor since that's the whole point lol

-The second is I feel like Byleth's dialogue and text selections with the characters is a bit better. There's less instances of , what I describe as "characters extrapolating how Byleth feels in 1-2 text boxes before actually responding to what they said", which I swear is a cause for why the main game reads as if it's 10% longer than it's supposed to be.

-IMO unique map objectives don't save map design that's pretty uninteresting at the end of the day.

The first map's layout is cool! Until it gets reused in chapter 4, where it's only saving grace is a new objective utilizing prior knowledge established in chapter 1. Clever, but still a reuse in a game that infamously spams repeat maps. And outside of Chapters 2 (a slog where you defeat enemies in waves which isn't fun in FE) and 7 (a cramped hall where you have to brace against a monster boss), the other maps are reused from the base game, even chapter 3 is a slightly modified sealed forest.

-Combat itself is so slow, I'm really just debating turning off animations in general when tackling the main game. Not only do the animations take forever, but they don't look interesting, are surrounded by washed out textures and models, and-my personal biggest grievance-have absolutely no momentum nor weight behind them. The Tellius games, from what I've seen, yeah the animations take decades, but from a visual and sound design point, fighting feels significant. 3H also being sandwiched between Echoes (the gorgeous culmination of handheld 3D Fire Emblem presentation after half a decade) and Engage (which to me set a new, high bar standard for 3D FE presentation going forward) is an extremely unfortunate situation and I feel really sorry for it.

-Music still hits though, Shackled Wolves never gets old

-Another thing that 3H does that this DLC reminds me of is the amount of -Stand Around- cutscenes there are. It confused me that Engage gets the most heat for this, when this game does it more, due to more drawn out dialogue, simpler camera angles, stiffer models with fewer animations, and an absolutely diabolical background setup. For a game with an expository selling point, it repeatedly falls short at being engaging in a visual sense, with its scenes always being saved by the phenomenal voice acting. Almost always, at least. The scenes where the Wolves are getting their blood drained while they just stand there is so jarring and bad, it's nearly funny, when it's obviously not supposed to be given the lines, their delivery, and the accompanying music.

-The story from A to B is sweet I guess, but given that the devs said the Cindered Shadows version of events is basically non-canon to what happens in the main game sours me on it. Like, yeah it's cool that the Wolves can technically be capable enough to do it offscreen on their own, but then what's the incentive then for me to recruit them beyond the player's pre-established care? There's no narrative payoff in the grand scheme :/

-Also the whole plot is "what if Yuri, Rhea and somewhat Claude/Linhardt do everything and also these other goobers are here" which became really funny, because after a while even the lines had characters deliberating the sheer amount of coincidences and melodrama that was occurring. 3H style writing shoved into an 8 hour timeframe is accelerated, exhausting nonsense.

-Sothis not being in the plot is fine, because even though it doesn't make sense why she wouldn't comment, it's not like there's anything of value she would contribute beyond her usual schtick of "bratty banter, where are my memories, i sleep now".

Not having Jeralt though? Absolutely ridiculous. I don't like Jeralt as a character (he's my idea of pretty face and that's it), but there's no convincing me why he couldn't be here but Alois can. Love Alois! But he was a device used to have the Knights on standby and nothing more, which Jeralt could've done and it would've let him have a proper impact on the ordeal with Aelfric.

Speaking of which, revisiting this DLC had me thinking... wow this love of Aelfric is veering very close to cult-like, and it's cut short after chapter 5 because we don't go back to abyss once that map's done. I'm left with wondering how the Abyss denizens would feel after knowing that their caretaker was Like That™️, which is a completely foreign feeling to me when discussing 3H's narrative since the game normally never lets it be remotely unclear how the characters or the player should feel about anything ever. So... props for that for making me flex that part of my brain! You did it Fodlan, the creepy custodian plotline that was left dangling was great fridge horror material.

-The constant suspicion throwing and animosity towards Rhea and the church is tiring as usual, and also sometimes downright baseless. Like, at one point it's said that orphans are among those who are relegated to Abyss or otherwise ignored on the surface which is flat out not fucking true, Rhea literally takes in former bandit kids and Remire orphans, what are we doing here.

-Balthus has a cringe "fight the system line" meanwhile he's an irresponsible jackass pushing 30; Constance is written like a joke; Hapi's writing is a joke; Yuri is as incomprehensibly competent and storied as ever and I love that cuz it's nonsense.

-Overall, not godawful terrible, but nothing in it that's worth coming back to in my eyes.

[halfcourtyeet]

This Week's News, 3/22 (And SRPG Dev Lore)

Hey. I'm going to try posting regularly on what I'm working on creatively. It's always very satisfying to show my friends, but now I'm wondering if I ought to keep a log of it.

We'll see if this pans out, but here's some stuff in the meantime.

I went to GDC

(pretend there's a photo here. I hit the image limit on Tumblr.)

It was awesome. Those who know me have probably seen the photos of me with Tarn Adams and Derek Yu. It was a seriously great event, much more chill this year than usual. I feel like I met less people, but made stronger connections overall.

If it wasn't 11:30 at night I'd draw a picture of bunny me with Tarn.. I wonder what Tarn Adams' fursona would be. Let me know if you're reading this.

I've really enjoyed getting to know devs in the Bay Area. Since I came home in September it's felt really lonely, but in the last few weeks, it seems like everything changed, and I couldn't be more grateful.

This DOOM level's coming along

This is like a 15-20 minute level. That's a pretty long level. If you look closely, you can see I'm revealing a secret to you when you play it.

I'll be releasing on Doomworld, most likely. It's not my first foray into DOOM either, as I made a 5-level WAD in 2020. As a summer project, it was really my first attempt at doing a somewhat long-term project in games, since it took (to my memory) 2-3 months.

Concept Album is coming along, too

Damn that's blurry lol. Sneak peek of some of the collage I'm doing for an album cover.

I didn't do much music work this week, but I am still working on my concept album. A lot of it was just talking to people about it at GDC, without revealing too much.

To be honest, I've been listening to a lot of great songwriters lately, and it's making me want to rewrite a lot of the raps on my album.

What is the album about? I can't say. It's very personal and introspective, and kind of about light vs. dark.

If it wasn't for the damn concept album I'd be working on my SRPG again

You go, girl!!

I learned so much over the past few weeks, not just from my new pal Nathaniel Jones, but from plenty of other people about Game AI and how to make a strategy RPG.

For context, when I return to this midway through the year (assuming things are still stable enough to just work on games), It'll be my... technically 5th attempt lifetime to make a Strategy RPG engine.

You know, I almost feel like showing you each of the 4 times I tried to make a strategy RPG. Next week's blog isn't gonna be nearly as long, I'm letting myself have that.

Attempt 0

So this all started when my Game Systems professor had us play a game called the Battle of Dan-no-Ura. It was an old Japanese electronic board game, and we were assigned to make mods for it. In many ways, it was like a strategy RPG. All units moved on one team's, then another. There were some really cool mechanics related to movement advantage based on turn (water flow) and zone-of-control. Our mods involved a "comeback" system and cards that increased the "drama" by having certain things happen.

But the whole project got me back into Fire Emblem. I played most of the remake of the first game on SNES on our apartment's big-screen TV, while my roommate watched. And to be honest? Aside from a few really tough missions, I felt like it super held up. The simple gameplay, vibrant graphics and strong cast of characters (now considered archetypal and serving as blueprints for many future characters in the series) drew me back into the series in a way I didn't know was possible. I had finished Fire Emblem for the GBA back in 2022, and always enjoyed Advance Wars as well... And spent dozens of hours in Final Fantasy Tactics, which is my favorite game of all time... Maybe I should have seen this coming.

Well, what came next was, my Game Programming Patterns professor wanted us to do some sort of topological grid-based game for a programming patterns final. It didn't even have to be a game- it just needed a few specific criteria like a domain-specific language (DSL) in the code (internal or external), and a few other features like on-the-fly translation. This build doesn't seem to have any of that, but you can see what started to form.

Attempt 1

Going into my capstone in the second of the 3 quarters of the school year, I really wanted to try to do an SRPG, but with in-battle gardening mechanics. Here's one of the only prototypes we made, and that it's broken should tell you something about how things were going otherwise.

Attempt 2

Started from scratch and achieved the most pedestrian gameplay in a 6-day solo coding marathon. Proud of how fast I worked, but it fell apart fast. This was in like, the last two weeks of that capstone class, which is not when you want to barely be getting something running based off of someone else's tutorial.

I have a lot of thoughts about these first two attempts, but it's getting late and I'll have to go over them someday. But yeah, overscoping and boilerplate and not knowing architecture or doing enough research on architecture, will burn you bad. Also burning out will burn you bad. I burnt out super hard in the middle of my senior year of college.

Attempt 3

This was after I got home in September, and is built out of Attempt 2's code. Okay, this also deserves its own like, separate article, because I started trying to do video devlogs during this time, but once again, burnt out hard. Still trying to do Fire Emblem with plants though.

Gave up, burnt out again, released a PICO-8 game on Steam, and now we're in the present.

Attempt 4

Yeah, they're from an asset pack- but man, do those characters look spiffy! And behind the scenes, started writing a story i was really excited about. But of course, things went south again.

The new issue I ran into on my latest attempt was trying to polish too much before I got the bread-and-butter (Enemy AI, pathfinding, equipment, etc) working. Also just did the architecture in ways that are really frustrating to debug. This is about when I met Nathaniel Jones from above, who has been absolutely cooking at making the same sort of game, and has been incredibly generous in sharing a dialogue with me, and giving me tips for how to code all these damn systems.

Lately I've been talking with Nathaniel about SRPG dev extensively. Since I'm on break from actually working on an SRPG right now, I've just been figuring out how to ambiently plan to do it next time, which will be technically the 5th attempt. But only once this album is done. So, that's where I'm at.

Thanks for reading through all that. Remember: Fall down seven times, stand up eight.

Let the sauce of the JPEG drape over your eyes.

[airlock]

mathematically determining the best cooks in Fire Emblem Engage

I need to keep my hands busy to focus in class, and the way I usually accomplish this is by punishing them with some inane statistic exercise. in my most recent one, I calculated the odds of the meal outcomes from every FE17 character, and then took a stab at ranking them accordingly

these are, do duly note, not objective rankings per se; some subjective judgement goes into deciding what kinds of chance spreads are better than others -- plus, while these are ordered within the tiers, many characters do tie against each other numerically, meaning I can only tiebreak between them by basing myself on textual information

in any case, below the cut I'll provide a more in-depth analysis of each blorbo's cooking proficiency, as well as a short explanation of how the cooking roll works

so, what's cooking, good-looking?

I'm citing information from Serenes Forest, which in turn has pulled mostly from the official Fire Emblem Engage guidebook.

the basic odds on a given cooking session are thusly:

55% chance of one of the character's personal Meal Titles

35% chance of a D-rank meal

10% chance of a E, F or G-rank meal

each character has 3 personal Meal Titles assigned to them -- you know, those prefixes that run the gamut of "Firene-Style", "Spicy", "Your Favorite", etc. each of those titles is also affixed to a specific rank of meal, which can potentially vary from as high as SS to as low as G (although none of them are D-rank).

effectively, this means that the meal titles available to a character determine if and how often they'll ever soar high with their cooking. thusly, the quality of the characters' meal titles determines where the chances fall for them.

(actually using meal ingredients, and/or having the character cook meals they're Expert, Skilled or Capable with, increases the chances of landing a personal meal title and decreases the chances of a forcibly D~G-rank meal. if they're Eager with the meal, the chances of a personal title AND the chances of an E~G meal both increase, with the chances of a D-rank meal plumetting.)

with that out of the way, let's get in-depth!

X-TIER: The Master Chef

1st place: Bunet (40% S-SS, 0% A, 15% B, 35% C-D, 10% E-G)

shocking news for us to start with here: lit oventops are hot, and Bunet, the guy whose literal job is to cook excellently... can, in fact, cook excellently,

the specifics are somewhat worth enumerating, at least. Bunet is, for starters, the only character in the entire game with more than one S-rank or higher personal meal title, which makes him likelier than anyone else to hit the absolute highest marks. speaking of which -- the absolute ABSOLUTE highest mark, double-S-rank, is only available at all to two characters in the game, of which one is, naturally, Bunet here.

and of course, all the chance spreads I'm providing here assume a meal with no ingredients given and with which the character has no expertise; cook more normally, and you'll be inching ever closer to the point where he bangs out a meal to die for as often as 50% of the time.

S-TIER: Great Cooks

2nd place: Clanne (20% S-SS, 35% A, 0% B, 35% C-D, 10% E-G)

3rd~4th place: Goldmary, Zelkov (20% S-SS, 20% A, 15% B, 35% C-D, 10% E-G)

5th place: Gregory (15% S-SS, 20% A, 20% B, 35% C-D, 10% E-G)

we start this one with a slightly more unexpected outcome! yes, Clanne is indeed the second best cook in the entire game, ahead of Goldmary, and actually not so far behind Bunet that the comparison would actually be as crazy as it sounds. let's take stock of it.

all of Clanne's meal titles are either S-rank or A-rank. therefore, even if you're making him cook unfamiliar recipes without a single ingredient, there's a 55% chance he'll come out of the kitchen with a culinary miracle in his hands -- better than Bunet's 40% chances in such a scenario (as he has one B-rank personal title), and indeed, better than absolutely anyone else's chances. although he can never hit the elusive double-S-rank, Clanne's chances of cooking wonderfully only increase the more you don't subject him to utterly ridiculous conditions.

long story short, this kid makes a good fucking pickle.

narrowly yet still decisively behind comes along Goldmary -- and, numerically tied with her in another interesting twist, Zelkov. they're both capable of landing an S-rank meal, and also bat at A or higher a very solid 40% of the time. comparing the two to each other, naturally the text is far more supportive of Goldmary's cooking ability, and besides, the A-rank title that she can hit, Decadent, just sounds better than Zelkov's, which is Trendy.

inching just behind those two we have Gregory, with a very similar chance spread, just weighted 5% less in favour of hitting S-ranks.

A-TIER: Solid Cooks

6th~7th place: Framme, Timerra (40% A, 15% B, 35% C-D, 10% E-G)

8th place: Céline (15% S-SS, 0% A, 40% B, 35% C-D, 10% E-G)

9th~13th place: Merrin, Louis, Amber, Rosado (20% A, 35% B, 35% C-D, 10% E-G)

one tier down, we start looking at characters who (with one exception) aren't capable of coming through with an S-rank meal, but nonetheless have outstanding odds, etching high results frequently.

Framme and Timerra share an excellent 40% chance to make A-rank meals, as well as an overall 55% chance of batting at B-rank or higher (technically the same as Bunet, you may recall). comparing the two of them, I go off their A-rank personal meal titles -- Framme's "Divine" sounds best of all, although "Your Favorite" doesn't speak to much being that I don't know what kind of food Alear likes actually; whereas Timerra's "Courageous" and "Audacious" have me thinking that A-rank might be a pretty generous way to describe what sounds less like cooking skill and more like... inventiveness.

Céline figures here, another one boasting a 55% chance of making B-rank or higher meals. she doesn't often exceed B-rank, but when she does, it's for the S-rank.

and lastly, we have a close tie between Merrin, Louis, Amber and Rosado. not only are their chance spreads identical, but they have quite similar personal meal titles as well, with all of them potentially hitting their local "[country]-style" meal -- which is non-indicative -- and with all but Rosado also sharing the "Extremely Rich" B-rank title. comparing A-rank titles, Merrin's best is "Tasteful", Louis and Rosado share "Dainty", and Amber comes out with "Robust". and to the best of my knowledge, the only one whose cooking abilities are further remarked on textually is Rosado, who falls noticeably short of Goldmary (but still valiantly tries to make up the difference).

B-TIER: Cooks with Potential

14th place: Anna (20% S-SS, 0% A, 15% B, 55% C-D, 10% E-G)

15th place: Boucheron (20% S-SS, 0% A, 15% B, 55% C-D, 10% E-G)

16~17th place: Saphir, Alcryst (15% S-SS, 0% A, 20% B, 55% C-D, 10% E-G)

our next several cooks are -- again with just one exception -- the last few in the game who are capable of landing S-rank meals. they just aren't quite as consistent as other characters who can do so, though -- so while they're not bad, the stars have to align for them to really show off their best.

Lady Anna firmly leads this tier as she is, in fact, the one character who shares Bunet's ability to make a double-S-rank meal -- "First-Rate", as it were. Boucheron has a very similar chance spread to her, but his absolute best is only S-rank instead of double-S.

Saphir and Alcryst tie for the spot beneath those two, being just that last 5% less likely to make miracles happen in the kitchen. between the two, Saphir is textually put up as an experienced-if-not-fancy cook, capable of going head-to-head with Goldmary on a good day -- whereas Alcryst's cooking skills do not, to my knowledge, ever directly come up in his supports, but we all know that at heart he's our failgirl even if he's doing surprisingly well here. (in fact -- better than diamant! pew pew peeeeeeew)

C-TIER: Decent Cooks

18th place: Seadall (55% B, 35% C-D, 10% E-G)

19th~20th place: Jean, Lapis (20% A, 15% B, 55% C-D, 10% E-G)

21st place: Nel (15% A, 20% B, 55% C-D, 10% E-G)

22nd place: Jade (40% B, 50% C-D, 10% E-G)

23rd~25th place: Lindon, Kagetsu, Fogado (35% B, 55% C-D, 10% E-G)

by this tier, we're looking at characters who can't possibly cook an S-rank meal, but still have fairly good chances of pulling out A- or B-rank meals; they are, thusly, some of the last characters on the roster that we could fairly describe as "good at cooking". indeed, this is also where we'll cross the 20th and 21st places, and therefore, the line past which we're looking at the bottom half of the list.

Seadall heads up this tier with a sterling 55% chance of producing a B-rank meal (although he is the first character we're looking at who can't possibly make something A-rank or higher). he'll get solid results more often than not, even when if you make him cook Florida Man-style. not bad for someone who's probably shaking and crying over the smell rising out of the cookpot the entire time

and speaking of filling up on smell alone, Jean and Lapis tie for the next spot with surprisingly robust rates. their personal meal titles both generally sound humble, even at A-rank, but at their most unremarkable, Jean's C-rank meals are described as "Fresh" (or "Carefully Crafted"), while Lapis's are "Kind of Odd" (or "Delightful"). my gut tells me that in Jean's case, the more unpleasant meals you're getting just taste too much like spearmint and cough syrup, but in Lapis's case, you might have to explain that no, actually, people don't normally add that crunchy finish by pouring on ground pebbles.

Nel is just narrowly below those two, being 5% less likely than them to land on an A-rank meal. she is pretty much the most bog-standard cook in the entire list, with her chances spread pretty evenly across the most normal outcomes.

Jade is similar to Seadall in her solid chances of managing at least a B-rank meal. that's what writers are well known for, after all: consistency. anyway, wow, look at that over there! it's a guy falling off a llama to distract you from me kicking my WIPs under a rug!

Lindon, Kagetsu and Fogado, being that precious last 5% less likely than Jade to make a B-rank meal, are where our chances having a nice meal are starting to get shakier, which they'll only get moreso as we continue going down the list. Lindon is ahead of the pack here textually; his culinary experiments might not be safe or entirely ethical, but surely he's learned a thing or two from performing them. the other two are very closely tied, and so once again, my best bet is to vote against the one who's sometimes coming out with "Kind of Odd" meals (and in this case, it would be Fogado).

D-TIER: Mediocre Cooks

26th place: Ivy (40% A, 0% B, 35% C-D, 25% E-G)

27th~28th place: Vander, Diamant (20% A, 15% B, 35% C-D, 30% E-G)

29th place: Alfred (20% A, 20% B, 35% C-D, 25% E-G)

30th place: Hortensia (35% B, 35% C-D, 30% E-G)

31st~32nd place: Madeline, Etie (20% B, 70% C-D, 10% E-G)

33rd place: Citrinne (15% B, 75% C-D, 10% E-G)

34th~35th place: Chloé, Pannette (90% C-D, 10% E-G)

for the first several places on this tier, we're looking at our first cooks who have at least one negative personal meal title -- that is, one in the E to G ranks. our first order of business, then, is to understand what this does exactly to their chances.

the first thing to it is that, under our usual perfectly neutral and perfectly stupid conditions, these characters will be noticeably likelier to completely screw things up. moreover, though, you might remember that, if we give them proper ingredients and have them work with recipes they're skilled with, that increases their chances of making a meal with one of their personal titles -- including the negative one. when you crunch the numbers on it, the result is that having these characters cook properly will affect their chances of catastrophic failure minimally if at all (although their chances of putting out good results still increase -- as the chance of pulling out an underwhelming D-rank meal are also still decreasing in this case).

incidentally, a quirk of these conditions is that giving these character a shot at a recipe they're Eager to try is an especially risky affair. having them cook in the first place is already a form of playing with fire; giving them too much creative leeway as well is where we approach the point of playing with Bolganone.

and speaking of magic tomes, Ivy is the first one up here. a 40% chance to make an A-rank meal is excellent, meaning she's not overall a bad cook, but the chance of catastrophic failure is always just right around the corner with her.

trailing a few ways behind her we have the similarly screwup-prone Vander and Diamant. there's little going on to distinguish between them textually, but I'm just going to throw out a wild out-there guess that, on average, being terrified of fire can be a disincentive towards learning to cook.

on the surface, Alfred looks to have slightly better chances than those two, but there's a particular issue that weighs against him. so far, the characters we've covered have personal E-rank meal titles, which is true of the majority of characters who have negative personal titles. however, when Alfred screws things up, the result he's most liable to turning up with is a "Stomach-Churning" F-rank meal!

Hortensia doesn't fail quite that catastrophically, but unlike the other ones we've seen so far, her risk of failing isn't quite offset by a risk of actually making something amazing; she's the first one we've seen so far who can't make A-rank meals, although she still has a pretty decent chance of making it as far as B-rank, at least.

after this battery of adventure and danger, we come to the latter half of the D-tier: characters who generally won't surprise you with their cooking -- for better or for worse, as it were.

Madeline and Etie are overwhelmingly likeliest to turn up underwhelming dishes, at the C or D ranks; Citrinne is another 5% likelier than them both to make no impression whatsoever. between the former two, Madeline's personal B-rank title of "Well-Balanced" seems just a touch more inviting than Etie's "Mild".

Chloé and Pannette bottom out the tier; they are two of the only three characters in the game who cap out at C-rank, and never cook any better than that. comparing those two, Pannette is indicated in text to struggle with cooking (even under Goldmary's guidance), whereas Chloé might possibly serve something nicer if she simply doesn't insist that it should be washed down with civet coffee and snake wine.

F-TIER: Bad Cooks

36th place: Rafal (15% A, 0% B, 55% C-D, 30% E-G)

37th place: Mauvier (15% B, 55% C-D, 30% E-G)

38th place: Veyle (15% A, 0% B, 55% C-D, 30% E-G)

from here on downward, every character we cover has a negative meal title, as well as unimpressive chances of making something particularly good.

Rafal and Mauvier both have only a 15% chance of batting above C-tier; rather little to compensate for their naturally higher chances of screwing things up. at least, when Rafal gets it right, he makes an "Audacious" A-rank meal, while Mauvier's absolute best is a B-rank... "Firene-style"?? huh. I don't think I uncovered that tidbit about him anywhere else so far.

Veyle ranks lower than the both of them, in any case. that is because she shares with Alfred that special aptitude for turning up "Stomach-Churning" F-rank meals. possibly something to do with her affinity for inhumanely spicy food, which perhaps helps to paint an unpleasantly precise picture of how you'll feel when you try some of the worst she has to offer.

L-TIER: Horrible Cooks

39th place: Zelestia (15% S-SS, 0% A, 0% B, 35% C-D, 50% E-G)

40th place: Pandreo (20% B, 35% C-D, 45% E-G)

41st place: Yunaka (70% C-D, 30% E-G)

and here we are, at long last, in the absolute bottom of the barrel. boy, is there some and then some to be said for the absolute accomplishments in failure we're looking at here

Zelestia and Pandreo share a spectacularly unique dishonor: they have two negative personal meal titles. this not only makes them more likely by far than anyone else to screw things up, it also means that they actually become LIKELIER to fail if you give them proper ingredients and a recipe they supposedly specialize in. (although again, the chances of their unlikely positive results also go up in these cases, if much too little)

even compared to those two clowns, though, Yunaka lies down a cut below the rest. firstly, because unlike the two of them, she won't cook an impressively good meal even by accident, being that she caps at C-rank. what's furthermore notable, though, is that she is the only character in the entire game with a personal G-rank title -- "Completely Burnt". in other words, Yunaka will never surprise you with an unusually good dish, but she will, on roughly every fourth attempt at cooking, burn water.

go girl! give us nothing!

[calamitaswrath]

Lucia plays Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn: Part 3 Endgame

Oh damn, some belated Ashnard backstory! And him outright using a blood pact to secure the throne for himself. . . oh, that's dark. I love it!

I have to say though, it is somewhat easy to tell that the writers had to write around the possibility of Pelleas being either dead or alive. You would think that his death would majorly affect Daien's forces and heavily impact their will to fight, or that alternatively, it could be used to show just how the people of Daien put so much more faith in Micaiah than they do Pelleas. But since that would be a major story beat, they can't really go there. I definitely appreciate the ambition of these story beats, but other parts had to noticably suffer for them.

A battle at dawn? It's not really reflected in how the map looks, but this is still a nice touch. Considering the title of the game, this feels like it's supposed to be the central thing.

Base conversations! Uh, there's one for Mist and Boyd, but I don't have their A support, so I didn't get it. Oh well. Still, reading over it now, it's a nice one. Mist still having hang-ups over how her father died, and wanting to stay with everyone else despite not feeling too well.

Rolf and Shinon - after his showing in the conversation with Lyre and Kysha, it's nice to see another side of Shinon again. Not necessarily a nicer one since this is Shinon we're talking about here, but at least a more sympathetic one. But, uh. . . I already got one of those bows I got from this convo.

Now the actual battle - oh my god the sheer number of units here! And that ominous number ticking up at the top right corner. . . yeah, that one definitely doesn't mean a thing. Not at all.

Also a shit ton of conversations going on, of course. I obviously didn't even come close to seeing all of them, but at least I can read over them now.

The conversations with Micaiah - oooh, the one with Zihark hurts good. Just the sheer desperation of seeing his country having falling like this, and Micaiah just completely unable to say or do anything about it. The one with Jill is also nice, though not as good as the one with Zihark. And she gets one with Reyson, too! Shame that one isn't as in-depth, but it's cool to see them interact. And Ike. . . it really does show his character development from last game that he keeps seeking out conversations with her, if given the chance.

The conversations with Sothe - damn, he actually has a really nice one with Astrid! I'm actually quite surprised there. Illyana too, since she's allowed to be serious for once. . . but not without entirely escaping her gimmick.

Conversations with Tauroneo - not much to note on those, but it's appreciated to see him interact with Zihark and Jill. I couldn't actually have seen them for myself at all since I let those two stay with the Dawn Brigade, though - they need every help they can get. Either way, I'm actually shocked that he also got convos with Rolf, Calill and Ilyana! All pretty good ones, especially the one with Calill. I wonder if they had supports in PoR? I'd need to check.

Conversations with Nailah - are we sure that she and Tibarn want to fight, and not do something else? Cause it really sounds like they want to do that instead. Other than that, the one with Ranulf stands out to me, cause he really has been getting tossed around a lot in this part.

Not gonna comment on the ones with Pelleas. Since he died in my playthrough, I'll follow it through for this as well.

I'm also gonna skip over some of the other ones - the ones with Zihark and Jill are pretty similar to the ones from a previous chapter, and this journal's already getting long enough as is.

Oh, the conversation between Tibarn and Rafiel is amazing. Who knew that the way to get Tibarn to drop his tough guy persona is to act like a wet towel in front of him?

Now, as for the actual battle! The friend I was streaming was already gushing about this one beforehand, and I 100% see where she's coming from. The way the number slowly ticks up, getting more intense the higher it goes, and all the little cut-aways at specific points. . . that's really just making the most out of this entire thing.

Speaking of the cut-aways - the first one with Sanaki and Naesala was fun. Maybe a bit inappropriately so for the point in the story we're at, but I still enjoyed it.

And Leanne just ominously unconscious on the floor. . .

So, the battle is over in terms of gameplay, but still raging on in terms of the story, and all the important players are leaving the battlefield. It's medallion time.

Since I voice acted every single character for my stream, I actually got to really play it up for the scene where Tibarn meets Naesala again - in a way, that really just kinda bonded me to their story, I think? Idk if that makes sense, but I'm here for the bird tragedy though I suppose my friend's own bird brain worms and her influence definitely helped there

Awakening. Ashera's, too, and an Ominous™ conversation to go with it. And Micaiah gets to be possessed. . . ergh, I was already spoiled on her becoming a vessel for Yune, but even before I played further I already had a hunch on how this'd proceed. This is seriously going to come at the expense of Micaiah's screentime and development.

And all that's left is statues. I don't know what Ike's English voice acting is like for this scene, but his German one. . . it's absolutely laughable. Also funny how he is the main protagonist (regrettably, in some regards), and yet it took this long for him to have a speaking role in one of these animated cutscenes.

[fiannalover]

Flawed and debatable compare-and-contrast take of the day: Final Fantasy and Fire Emblem had the exact same Game-and-Fandom Evolution Process across their first 4 games.

1: First Game in the Series, you know how it is

2: Somewhat erratic expansion of the first's that laid a lot of groundwork but is comparatively ignored, with many mechanics that never returned or were spun-off into other things.

3: Actual Refinement of 1 that gets magnum opus treatment in old-school JP Fan base. Lion's share of "back to basics" games, reimaginings, homage, etc, actually refer back to this game more than the first one.

4: I'm don't think I need to say anything here, I am completely sure that 90% of the people who played both games have said games as their favorite for the same reasons.

Already said in the above statement but must be said on its own disclaimer: Said comparison Does Not apply to any of the games released after 4. You could argue that FE 7-8 relationship is comparable, though severely scaled down, to the FF 7-8 one, but that is the singular moment where the comparison holds some water again, and, come on.

Concession: trying to brute force comparisons between the two franchises anyway does result in some very funny suggestions to FE 14.

[olivine-ocean]

top 5 games and top 5 fave characters :^)

Oh boy both of these r hard bc I’m indecisive

Top 5 Games

Mostly based on nostalgia or otherwise, most were radio show eps I did

1. Pokémon Heart Gold and Soul Silver

2. Kid Icarus: Uprising

3. Kirby Super Star Ultra

4. Fire Emblem Echos: Shadows of Valentia

5. Stardew Valley

Bonus entries go to Pokemon Legends Arceus and Splatoon

Top 5 Favorite Characters

Giving into the predicable kin picks… I’m gonna list some of my somewhat long lasting favs

1. Pit - Kid Icarus

2. Ethlyn - FE 4

3. Adaman - PLA

4. Meta Knight - Kirby

5. Risotto Nero - JJBA (can’t not include him)

Shout out to newer entrants Hector and Zelgius FE, and old faces just missing the mark with Bucky Barnes Marvel and Polnareff + Jolyne JJBA

[gravitas-game-and-book-dev-blog]

Dev Diary 3: Battles

In this weeks dev diary I want to discuss the implementation I am working on for the turn based battles. I've pitched this game as a cross between Fire Emblem and Grand Strategy Games, so today I want to dive into the battles which will feel familiar to Fire Emblem, with several big alterations to the formula, the first of which is the distinction between Phases and Turns. Before I go into that, let's just describe the flow of a battle and army composition.

Battles will be initiated either by an Event or when 2 hostile parties meet on the map. Unlike in Fire Emblem, your armies will be composed of Troops, which represent a whole battalion of soldiers. Some Troops, like your Generals, will be named characters and some Troops are unique and lead by a Unique Captain Character, however the bulk of your armies will be made up of more, shall we say disposable, cadets. One Troop will usually represent 1,000 men and an Army can have up to 20 units in it, so that they have somewhat realistic numbers. Once a battle begins one party is designated as the attacker and the other as the defender and each side is given a deployment zone where they can freely arrange their troops before the battle starts. Once a battle begins, the Maneuver Phase begins.

Maneuver Phase

The attacker always gets to move first and during this phase they get to move 1 Troop of their choosing, but they cannot attack during this phase. Then, the turn passes to the defender who can likewise move a single Troop before passing it back to the attacker. Neither side can move the same Troop twice until all Troops have moved, which will end the Maneuver Phase and Start the Combat Phase.

Combat Phase

This phase progresses much like the Maneuver Phase, each side issuing one order and passing to the other until all Troops have their orders, except during this Phase Troops can't move and instead are told who they can attack within their range. Melee units can only attack adjacent enemies while ranged troops can attack between 2 and 4 spaces away or engage in a melee attack, though their melee stats are quite bad. Once all orders are set, Troops deliver their attacks in succession and we return to the Maneuver Phase repeating the process until the battle ends.

So why not just do things the way it works in Fire Emblem or other Tactics games? My reasoning for structuring turns like this is to encourage more aggressive play, which might not be immediately obvious. If you've ever tried or seen multiplayer Fire Emblem, it just doesn't work. Whoever is able to have a longer threat range via movement or other ranged attacks has such a significant advantage as they will be able to attack when they can inflict enough damage to kill something, forcing the other player to come forward and respond with potentially fewer units dragging them into a usually devastating follow up which ends the match. They revolve around turtling and there are limited options for handling the fact that the enemy will be able to move and attack with all of their units before you can respond. Structuring turns this way makes it so with each move, the opposing player is able to respond like a game of chess and not only that, by cleverly positioning your Troops, you can essentially force them into making certain moves, limiting their options if you're brain is wrinkly enough.

There are a few additional rules that add some layers to this, such as zone of control, which makes it so that if a unit moves adjacent to an enemy that will use up all of their movement. If a unit starts in an enemy's ZoC they can disengage and freely move away, but they will suffer an opportunity attack(1/2 normal damage) for doing so. This rewards aggression, as plunging into the enemy first can force them to get stuck into the fight, or suffer free damage for trying to pull away. On top of that, if a unit moves at least 2 spaces on the Maneuver Phase, they will deal additional Charge Damage on their turn which can be very significant. In practice this means, if you rush your opponent, they might not have the space to mount a counter charge, which might be enough to swing things in your favor.

The fact that everyone gets to move before attacking also limits kiting with ranged units as after they attack, they will frequently be within movement range of many Troops, meaning there might be an opportunity for your opponent to close the distance and get them stuck in melee or force an opportunity attack.

There are additional things like flank attacks, but rather than getting stuck in with details I want to take a step back and look at one of the other big changes, morale. Most battles throughout history have been decided by the ability of one side to crack the resolve of the other and seeing as we're representing full scale battles, we'll do the same. Morale effectively serves as a secondary health bar for a unit. When Morale reaches 0, a unit will become uncontrollable and will automatically begin fleeing to the edge of the battlefield. Once it reaches the edge, after a turn they will 'rout' fleeing the map. This gives you a chance to run down enemies as in history this is actually where the bulk of casualties are inflicted. Morale will take damage from attacks, but certain things increase morale damage, the number of nearby enemies vs allies, proximity to your General's Troop, flanking and more. Concentrating fire and focusing on breaking unit's morale will be key to secure victories you might otherwise not win.

That ends it for the day. Tune in Wednesday where I'm hoping to have a really rough prototype ready to demonstrate some of these things.

[codenamesazanka]

video games + fantasy and magic + quirk society + League:

*

“—So they’re all quirkless… But Shuuichi-kun just said some of them can shoot fire or shadow blasts.”

“Those aren’t quirks. It’s magic.”

“Like what Mister does?”

“No, it’s real magic. Er, well, real magic inside the story.”

“Sounds incredible! What the heck is real magic.”

“Ah, that. Magic is the stuff of dreams, of wonders, and grasping it within the palms of—“

“That’s got nothing to do with Insignia of the Inferno: Emergence. Don’t listen to him. Magic is a skill. It’s a supernatural power that performs ranged attacks which affects the stats of the target. You know, their condition, their health points, them as a character!”

“That just sounds like a quirk…”

“Well it isn’t! It’s fantasy. That’s how fantasy games and stories worked back then. Classical fantasy, about ancient and feudal times.”

“Ehhhh. All the stories I read when I was little had quirks. Like, Beauty and the Beast? The Beast Prince is a heteromorph, and Belle could touch mirrors to see faraway things! Or! Or like Momotaro can talk to animals, and Usagi had a transformation quirk—“

“Those don’t count as classical fantasy—“

“All those stories have all been changed from the original ones, to suit this modern extraordinary age. Remember, Toga-chan, no one had quirks back then. For most of human history until relatively recently, we were quirkless. In those original tales, the folklores and myths, the characters instead had divine blessings or otherworldly gifts… Magic, as it were.”

“Hmm…”

“Yeah, what Mister said. In Insignia, which is classical fantasy, everyone is quirkless. But! Some people, called mages, could do magic. And magic can be learned. As you level up, you learn more spells, you can use different types of attack depending on the kind of enemy. Back to the story, Alouet discovers a magic tome that contains the three ancient spells to seal away the—”

“That sounds unfair. They can do magic, but also have multiple magics?”

“Toga-chan is right, that’s cheating! And also sorta like your teacher, Shigaraki.”

“…Heh.”

“I told you guys, magic. is. not. quirks. And all mages know multiple—”

“Okay, okay! I know, magic is magic. So what happens next? Keep going, Shuuichi-kun.”

“I am! Alouet discovers the tome, and realizes that to seal away the Seven-Eyed Beast, they must travel to the each of the Three Celestial Dragons’ realms. At each realm, Prince Rhod - who has the Grace of Dawn that’s passed through the royal bloodline - performs the ritual to summon—”

“The Prince is a mage?“

“No, he’s not. Remember? The royal family had sworn to forsake magic—”

“But then how can he have this dragon summon power?”

“It’s not magic. This is something only the royal family have—”

“So they’re the only ones with a dragon quirk. I get it! I’m completely lost.”

“How many times do I have to—”

“It’s all game mechanisms, none of it has to make sense. Magic is just an attack that deals damage. Think of it as different types of weapons. Bow and arrows, throwing daggers, swords. You can get any one of them. You can use each one. That’s what magic spells are. Weapons.”

“Ooh, gotcha. And Prince Rhod?”

“Demigod. He summons dragons because they recognize him as a descendant of their former masters.”

“And then?”

“He gets the dragons, they kill the Beast, they retrieve the crown, and he’s King. The End.”

“…That’s it?”

“There’s more than that! And Prince Rhod isn’t—“

“King Rhod, now that he has the crown. Great! Wonderful retelling. Only took up…three-fourths of the hour. Now, it’s getting late—”

“Mister, I’m not finished.”

“He’s sick of your stupid video game story, Spinner! I liked it! But not really.”

“…It’s more fun to play it.”

“You’re just also a big nerd, Tomura-kun. You and Shuuichi-kun both are, classic-magic-quirk-fairy-tale-fantasy-whatever video games otakus.”

“Magic isn’t— You’re doing this on purpose, Toga! Hey—!”

“But don’t worry, I’ll still hang out with you guys~~”

*

tl;dr: Imagine how much nerdier Shigaraki and Spinner might actually seem when they have to explain historical conceptualizations of magic on top of the game mechanisms itself. RIP

[vonaegiremblem]

Now that Dragalia Lost's story is over and it cruises towards EOS, I would like to reflect a little on why it really did not succeed that much. I want to log why I, as someone who played the game every day from launch until the final chapter released, think it failed. You know, beyond just "it didn't make enough money." We all know it didn't make enough money. I want to dive a little bit into why it didn't make enough money, because it really wasn't just one thing. Dragalia Lost was a game slain not by a single fatal blow, but by a thousand smaller injuries. Also, fair warning: I'm going to be talking about FEH a lot since it has passed the one billion dollar revenue mark at this point, and because I think the reasons why FEH is so successful can explain some of the reasons why Dragalia Lost wasn't.

1. The first challenge Dragalia faced was that it was a new IP. It was always going to be an uphill climb trying to get people interested because it had no other media to fall back on. The biggest things that could bring people in were the story and characters. Cygames is, admittedly, really good at character design, but the story that these characters were in was really average at the beginning. Also, if you liked characters outside of the main cast, then you had to hope that they would be featured in an event, or just live with their five adventurer stories. They did expand on this somewhat with Dragalia Life, castle stories, and non-limited alts, but for the most part you didn't get much for non-main characters (especially if your favorites were in the initial batch of 3 star units).

FEH, on the other hand, already had an install base from the start. Fire Emblem is the most popular SRPG series, and making an accessible version of it that features characters from every game in the series was a pretty easy selling point. Also, every Fire Emblem character is unironically somebody's favorite. It doesn't matter how useless, obscure, or unrecruitable they are, someone is willing to summon for them.

2. Speaking of summoning, let's talk about Dragalia Lost's summoning mechanics. Dragalia Lost was both too generous and not generous enough. Cygames admitted in a rather well-known interview that they could have made Draglia more profitable (read: exploitative) but Nintendo stopped them. Dragalia was generally pretty generous with wyrmite and summoning tickets, sometimes even making summoning tickets rare drops from certain raid bosses, but in the beginning summoning was awful. There was a time when wyrmprints were in the summoning pool, and you could be pity broken by a 5 star wyrmprint. They removed that feature pretty quickly. They did at least add sparking to the game during the 2nd anniversary update, but they also made the game as a whole way less generous with summoning materials, which pissed a lot of people off. To further add to this issue, sparking cost 300 summons, which was a lot. Sure, you could now guarantee a unit you really wanted, but consider: the cost of purchasing enough dimantium to do a single 10-fold summon is $25 dollars, last I checked. There is a reason I, and a lot of other people, never spent money on this game. It was fundamentally not worth it given how expensive it was for a single 10-fold summon. Admittedly, they did halve the amount of summons you had to do using payed-for currency to spark, but that's still a lot of money to spend. Sure, there were the platinum showcases, which guaranteed a 5 star, but you weren't guaranteed a 5 star you didn't have (at least not until some of the absolute last platinum showcases). For reference, it costs like $12 in FEH to get enough orbs for a full 5 summons, and in FEH sparking costs 40 summons. Without optimizing purchases, it costs ~$100 to spark in FEH. It costs $325 to spark in Dragalia. Also, for perspective, FEH gives about 300 orbs a month. That is enough to spark twice a month.

3. I'll talk abut FEH's systems first for this part. FEH's summoning system works so well because it feeds into three other systems: traits, merges, and skill inheritance. There is never a useless unit to summon. If you already have a unit, getting another one of them means a chance to get better IVs or a chance to merge the two together to make a stronger unit. If they have good skills, you can consider using the duplicate to pass those good skills onto another unit. Even lower rarity units can pass on lower level versions of skills so you don't have to waste as many inheritance slots when passing on good skills from another unit. Also, the max amount of merges a character can have is 10, meaning that you have to summon 11 of them to get a character to their max potential. That is, of course, assuming you only want one +10 version of that character. I'm pretty certain the theoretical max is 7 +10 versions of the same unit, meaning you would need 77 of them. Needless to say, you can really whale in FEH if you feel so inclined.

Compare this to Dragalia Lost where once you summoned an adventurer, there was no reason to try and summon them again. You couldn't have more than one of the same adventurer, and there was no merge system for them. The only thing you got was Eldwater, which while useful for upgrading other units, there were ways to get outside of summoning. The only characters you could merge were the dragons, and the game, surprisingly, provided plenty of ways to get merges for them without summoning. The dragons also only took 5 to get to MUB, and you usually only wanted at most two of the same dragon on a team, so you'd really only need to summon 10 of the same dragon ever, assuming you weren't using any of the ways to get free merges.

4. Now's as good a time as any to talk about multiplayer. Dragalia Lost from the beginning tried to frame itself as a somewhat multiplayer experience. Basically everything outside of the main story mode could be played with other people. This encouraged community growth and involvement, and could be used as a way to convince friends to join the game. It also helped make high level content viable early on, since you only needed one good unit as opposed to the four you needed in solo. It also helped that the AI in early Dragalia was really bad. The only problem was that Dragalia's multiplayer community was toxic throughout the entirety of the game's life. The devs literally removed the Cleo Nope! sticker because people were being so awful about other players bringing off-meta units. Sure, it got better as time went on, but I know it was still happening through the addition of Trials of the Mighty because it happened to me. I didn't have Gala Jean for the Thor fight, so the owner of the room kept using the arrow sticker to point at me and eventually just closed the room.

Look, I kind of get it. Dragalia really marketed its high level content. The boss fights were intricate and had complex mechanics. They also lasted upwards of 10 real life minutes, and it sucked if you had to keep retrying because someone kept dying or you just couldn't do enough damage. The amount of effort you had to put into learning boss fights, building characters and backup characters, and actually doing the fights was a big ask, and finding three other people who were good enough to do it could take an excruciatingly long time. Dealing with toxic people and also dealing with people who were not good enough to do high level content is a big reason why I, and probably a lot of other people, switched to just doing solo content. I'm pretty certain there are still some High Dragon trials that I haven't done in multiplayer. And I will probably never do them.

5. This next point is kind of difficult to explain succinctly. Basically, due to differences in gamemodes, AI, and player interaction, FEH encourages players to build and summon for units more frequently than Draglia Lost did. Several major gamemodes in FEH involve AI controlling teams you create. Arena and Aether Raids are the big ones, but things like Rival Domains also use units you and other people build to make teams. Since the AI in FEH is so dumb and exploitable, one of the best ways to make your team win is by building an incredibly busted set of units. FEH also has a real-time PVP mode that can be played without any unit restrictions, meaning that you will almost certainly need a team of busted units to compete against others. You are also encouraged to create at least one very strong unit just so people you've friended can use them in the brigades. Creating busted units in either case requires summoning for merges and summoning for fodder.

In Dragalia Lost, there was one PVP mode, and unit stats and builds didn't matter. People could use a character you set as a helper, but outside of Shadow adventurers being able to equip Ramiel to give you dragon prep, they basically did nothing and were outshone by weapon abilities or shared skills. That basically left high level content as the place where unit build in multiplayer really mattered, and as time went on for the High Dragon and Agito battles, it started to matter less. Sure, when each type of high level content came out, you were expected to use the meta units, but as more units became more viable for it, it really stopped mattering who you were using and how they were built, so long as they fulfilled their role well enough. It also helped that actually controlling the character could make up for sub-optimal unit build. At least, all this was true until they added Curse of Nihility, which I'll get into later.

6. All you Josh Strife Hayes lovers out there might recognize this next point. Dragalia Lost did not bring in enough content for new players. It mainly focused on making content to keep old players, which is a losing tactic. The three consistent things that were added to Dragalia were new story chapters, new high level content, and new events. New story chapters and high level content were not going to appeal to new players. The high level content wasn't appealing because it was too challenging and required too many resources to try it. The new story wasn't appealing because you had to read all of the other chapters first for it to make sense and be impactful (also the chapters get too hard for a new player to handle). So, you're left with events. In theory, they should have appealed to players of all levels, but they just didn't. The problem was the difficulty scaling. First off, and this is a side note, Dragalia never had good metrics for how difficult content was. Once the "suggest might" value went above, like, 10,000, the game lied. Depending on the difficulty of the quest, you needed 5,000 to 10,000 more might than what was listed. Not being able to tell how the actually difficulty of a quest was extremely frustrating to new players, but I digress. You had five main kinds of events--Raid, Facility, Onslaught, Defensive, and Invasion. All of them had problems.

One of the biggest overlapping problems was that to receive the best rewards in these events, you basically had to be able to do the hardest content consistently, excluding Omega Raids (which still gave you good, but not necessary, stuff). Onslaught and Defensive events were arguably the least offensive. They both required you to battle to earn enough points in the bonus bar to see the whole story. The problem was that the bonus bar was set up so that you basically always unlocked the story so long as you went through and did every level once. If you were unable to complete every level, then you were going to have to grind to see the whole story, which means you were more likely to miss out on the story if you were lower level. This sucked because the writing in Dragalia was generally pretty good. Facility events were just far too grindy for new players (especially the kind that had the "Extra" battles). Getting the facility bonuses was important, but starting from scratch and going to level 35 was slow and required a lot of a battling. Also, the challenge battles to fill up the rewards bar faster were very difficult for just-starting-out players. Invasion events were also grindy and expected you to have specific overdamage and high-hit teams ready to get good scores. Raid events were perhaps the biggest offender. The thing that generally made raid raid events so appealing were the cool boss fights. The problem was that new players just didn't get to experience it. If you were a new player and you got paired with anyone who had played the game for, like, at least 6 months, you were not going to get to experience the Standard, EX, and Nightmare raids because the boss would basically be instakilled. This left you with the Omega Raids, which were way, way too hard for new players to attempt. In the end, new players were going to feel like they were missing out on something in each of the event types.

FEH generally has more new player appeal. Difficulty scaling tends to be handled better, and its easier to make a team that can do hard content. Arena, Aether Raids, and Summoner Duels try to put you against similarly ranked opponents, so that you don't just get absolutely destroyed by their teams. Basically every event has a variety of difficulty options that should allow everyone to get all the rewards, presuming they put the time in (with the exception of Rival Domains, where you do have to do the highest difficulty stuff consistently to make it to tier 25). A player can also probably take on the easiest difficulty of the most recent story maps within their first day of playing if they train up their free units. FEH, overall, just handles new player experience better.

7. One of the biggest things that I think really hurt Dragalia was that neither of the two most recent non-boss battle gamemodes that were added encouraged summoning. Alberian Royale was true competitive multiplayer, but characters you had summoned (except in very rare cases) didn't effect it at all. The Kaleidoscape (which I only just realized is not called the "Kaleidoscope") was really fucking cool and a great game mode, but it was an entirely singleplayer mode and you didn't need specific characters to get specific effects on the wyrmprints you received for completing it. Both of these modes probably took a lot of time, effort, and money to make, but neither of them seemed like revenue generators.

FEH's newest gamemode is a real-time competitive PVP mode where you make and use teams from characters you have summoned. I do not need to explain how this makes people want to spend money.

8. Alright folks, here's the big one. The one I actually almost made a very long post about when it first came out, but didn't: Curse of Nihility. I said that Dragalia was felled by a thousand minor injuries, but this one was perhaps the most damaging. Here's the thing: Dragalia was no stranger to arbitrarily hard content that almost entirely limited team composition. The High Dragon trials were like this initially. You had to use up one of your two wyrmprint slots on the dragon's wyrmprint, you had to have enough HP to survive the initial attack, and you had to deal enough damage to beat them in the time limit. This all came to a boil with the release of the master level difficulty for High Jupiter, where you basically could only run one of two units in public rooms: Gala Cleo or Veronica, and the former was very much preferred. Master High Jupiter was the first time the awful toxicity of the community was really apparent. If you were not running either of those two, you would be Nope! stickered out of existence. (Fun fact: Gala Cleo was so dominant that basically all dark content for a significant amount of time was balanced around her. Someone made a chart of the Fafnir Roy battles, and you can see that the light Fafnir Roy just had way more HP for a very long time because of Gala Cleo. She was even put into "Tier 0" on gamepress due to how meta-defining she was. The only other adventurer to ever be put on that will be talked about shortly.)

Alright, fast forward a little bit and the Agito are coming out and people loved them. The battles were interesting, tough but fair, and well-tuned for the most part. Also, you were relatively free to use units you wanted, so long as every requirement for the battle was fulfilled. Sure, you might have had to change to a secondary unit if someone had already taken you role you want to fill, but you could generally play who you wanted to play. They did make Volk a little too hard at the start, and then made Ciella and the Twins too easy, and then went back to making Kai Yan and Tartarus way harder. Overall, though, they were great battles and with them came the mana spirals, which allowed for older units to be enhanced further so that they could more easily be used in newer content. This was the first step to Karina becoming an absolute monster of a unit. The other two parts she needed were the Shared Skill update (not entirely necessary, but nice to get) and the 2.0 update. The 2.0 update completely rebalanced the game (and absolutely gutted Chrom) and brought major changes to wyrmprints. Wyrmprints after 2.0 all had basically one skill, but you could equip five of them at a time. A team of mana spiraled Karinas with a full deck of doublebuff wyrmprints and Patia's and T!Hope's shared skills could easily immediately get over 50 buffs at the start of a battle. Karina's S1 had its power boosted based on the number of buffs she had. A team of Karinas could eviscerate every single Agito. Needless to say, this was a problem for balance, and the devs were going to need to make changes for Sinister Domain.

Now, I'm not saying Karina was the only reason they added Curse of Nihility, but I think she and buff-stacking as a whole played major parts in it. I also think one of the intentions the Dragalia team had for CoN was to not implement pure powercreep. They wanted to make it so you couldn't just destroy the newest high level content with old units while still not making them wholly outclassed by new units. It's a reasonably noble goal, but it was implemented so, so poorly.

The first issue with CoN was that the replacement for standard buffs, amps, were just not fun to use. The mechanics for how they stacked together were much more complicated than standard buffs, and they couldn't go nearly as high. Also, there were only three types of amps, as opposed to the myriad of buffs available. The second was that not all unique buffs were immune, and the ones they decided weren't seemed kind of arbitrary. They were so arbitrary, in fact, that sometimes they decided to just make ones that weren't originally immune, immune in an update. Yeah, originally Ilia's Alchemical Cartridges weren't immune, despite being a major part of her gameplay, and they decided to just make them immune in the beginning of 2022 (I assume this was to make Dragonyule Ilia, who used the same mechanics, better). Making some character's unique buffs capable of being ruined by CoN made them basically unusable in high level content. Even if they were still reasonably okay, they were boring because they lacked their central gimmick.

In a game that relied so heavily on people becoming attached to specific characters, CoN made it so that there was a very real chance you wouldn't be able to use your favorites. Everyone who knows me knows that I used Mym as my main flame unit the entire game. As soon as she came out, I used her because I liked her design and her character. I also really enjoyed her gameplay loop of trying to gain dragon gauge as quickly as possibly to turn into one of the most powerful dragon transformations in the game and buff herself. I used her extensively before they made her good in the 2.0 balance update. I used her even more after that because she became the unit with the highest damage potential in the entire game (and I think she still technically is). The problem is, I couldn't really use her in either Sinister Domain or Primal Dragon fights because CoN, for some reason, got rid of her personal buff, which means her S2 couldn't be powered up to its full potential. Furthermore, I couldn't do the fun loop of stacking Dragon's Claws and Dragon's Skill to get permanent buffs. I genuinely avoided all the high level content with CoN because I couldn't use my favorite character, and I knew that my other faves from the other elements might not work either. I had some hope when they announced Mym would be getting a spiral, but they did not make her personal buff immune when it was added. At that point I basically swore off high level content. And mine is not a unique story. Anyone who liked support units, anyone who liked buff-stacking units, anyone who liked characters with unique buffs affected by CoN all probably felt the same way. If you look up CoN in a search engine, a ton of the top results are forums and threads of people talking about how they don't like it, or how their favorite character got destroyed by it, or how they were worried that a character's buffs would be affected by it.

I genuinely believe CoN was the final push for Dragalia to fail. In an already struggling game that was for the most part kept alive by people's interest in its difficult and engaging content, and their love for specific characters, CoN appealed to neither of those things. Bosses in Trials of the Mighty, Sinister Domain, and Primal Dragon fights became health sponges, now that most characters couldn't build themselves up with buffs. People couldn't use their favorite characters because the meta was so insanely rigid. People couldn't even hope that their faves would become usable because unlike the Agito and High Dragon battles, where new weapon and wyrmprints could make up for a subpar unit, the devs could not implement an "ignores CoN" weapon effect or wyrmprint because it would trivialize all content the new high level content. It was a recipe for inactivity--for stagnation--where people just waited for event reruns and half of a story chapter instead of focusing on the new content being put out. And in the end, Dragalia died for it.

The death of Dragalia Lost really is tragic because the devs clearly intended for the game to go further. The last New Year's event laid the groundwork for new characters to show up in the next New Year's event. The last summer event established an entirely new city that was supposed to ally with the Halidom. The rebellion in Svenitla never got its resolution. The Dragalia Mini comics showed the final Valentines dragon, and implied that he was coming next year. The team had so many more ideas for Dragalia but ultimately the plug got pulled because it just wasn't making money, and I kind of doubt we're going to see any more Dragalia content for a very long time, if ever. Still, the devs did at least get to finish their story, and I think it would be a shame to disregard it just because so many other things had to be left behind in the process. It's important to enjoy what we did end up getting to experience from a fun little game that never really took off, and if you never actually tried it, then maybe give it a go. Try it out, and see why people are genuinely sad about its finally before the entire thing inevitably gets taken offline. I mean, after all, it's free to start. Goodnight Dragalia Lost, I'll miss you.

[person8789]

Breakdown of Twst’s Opening Movie

Basically how it’s foreshadowed things so far and theorizing what other things it might be foreshadowing

Source from YouTube: Twisted Wonderland Opening Movie by Night Raven

Spoilers for the entirety of the game released this far, including the newest update in chapter 6!

Part 4/5

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5

First we get a close up of Lilia with a smirk seemingly powering up for some kind of attack, then the shot pans out to reveal that Silver and Sebek are next to him on both sides, either acting as guards or aiding Lilia with the attack. The last shot is of the attack itself, weather it’s supposed to be fire or wind based…. I’m not really sure. Either way, it’s a strong attack that’s aim.. most likely somewhere past the screen.

This probably has something to do with those other shots of Diasomnia in the thorns and Malleus on the hill. I don’t think it’s unlikely for them to actually be attack against Malleus here, weather it be because he’s overblot or otherwise.

Next we have some kind of… dramatic shots of Crowley in the courtyard. The first features an upward shot from a behindish-sideish view. The next is a close-up of Crowley smirking (hrmm..) and the last is a pan out of him walking through the courtyard.

Um… suspicious?? Very suspicious?? I don’t really know what this could be about, to be honest. It’s definitely highlighting Crowley to be suspicious… I think. Especially with the smirk.

Ok so once again this gives a series of shots of all of the characters that I’ll list out what’s going on in all of the shots before diving into it all:

First we get a close up with Riddle with the Heartslabuyl emblem in the background, then a pan out to the rest of the Heartslabuyl characters in cool poses a lineup:

1. Ace in front, bawling a fist

2. Riddle, looking to the left (possibly to Ace?)

3. Deuce facing away from the screen with his hands on his hips and looking the same direction as Riddle.

4. Trey facing and looking at the screen

5. Cater with his hand on Trey’s shoulder and looking to the left, not at Trey, but past him.

Next we have a close-up of Malleus with the Diasomnia emblem in the background, which then pans out to the rest of Diasomnia, all standing either next to or behind Malleus all in an upward shot.

The next shot is of the Octavenelle trio, no close up of Azul beforehand. Another upward shot, Azul is sitting down in a chair which Jade and Floyd are both leaning on the chair, all are facing and looking at the screen. Octavenelle emblem is in the background.

Next we have the Scarabia duo, Jamil taking up most of the screen in front, flashing a smile to (or maybe past) the screen, while Kalim, vibing giving a smile in the background, there is a Scarabia emblem here as well.

The next shot is of the Savanaclaw trio, Leona sitting on top of a big rock while Ruggie and Jack sit next to the rock below. Ruggie is holding something and showing it to Jack, Jack is looking at… whatever it is that Ruggie has. I can’t tell exactly what it is. Food, perhaps? Savanaclaw emblem vibes in the background.

Next we get the Shroud brothers standing back-to-back with Ortho in front. Idia is facing away from the screen but still half looking at the screen, with a bitter expression. There is some techy stuff and the Ignihyde emblem in the background.

And lastly we get a shot of the Pomefiore trio, with Vil taking a majority of the screen in front and Epel and Rook somewhat in the background, both giving side glances to the screen with Rook also giving a smirk. Vil is looking somewhat to the side and past the screen, and the Pomefiore emblem again vibes in the background.

Ok, now that we’ve gotten through that, let’s try to break it down:

First: the emblems. Say it with me everyone: they put the emblems with the dorm leaders and members so they associate those characters with that dorm.

The first dorm we see is, as usual, Heartslabuyl. The lineup of the characters here is intriguing to me, though, since it’s not what you would expect. You would expect Riddle to be in front with adeuce to be behind him then Trey and Cater, but here get get Ace first, then Riddle, and Deuce, and etc.. another interesting thing is how they shot Heartslabuyl as a lineup specifically, especially with the kind of power structure Heartslabuyl supposedly has, with Riddle at the top having absolute power. Here, though, Riddle is seen next to, and mixed in with the rest of the Heartslabuyl cast, and it’s apparent here that he’s a lot smaller than they are. Now, if you were trying to show a character with “absolute power” over their peers would you show him mixed in with the crowd so to speak? And with him… definitely not seeming like the most intimidating person in the room? Probably not, and this definitely wasn’t done unintentionally, considering the positions of the characters in some of the other dorms, so why show Riddle as an equal? This one might actually be foreshadowing for book 1… kind of. I believe Ace is in front because he’s the main catalyst for book 1, the main one going against Riddle, and the one who’s eventually able to reach out to Riddle. Ace was exactly what Heartslabuyl needed, and was the reason things were able to change. The placement of the other characters (specifically Deuce, Trey and Cater,) but there is one minor thing I wanted to mention about Cater and Trey here. I’ve seen some people mention how they think it’s like… a big deal that Cater has his hand on Trey’s shoulder. While I do think it’s (again) trying to get us to associate one character with the other (associate them as a duo), I don’t really think it means much more than that.

With Diasomnia (and with later shots), the upward shot is definitely supposed to give the characters an intimidating look. Malleus having the biggest presence, even when the shot pans out to all of the dorm members, is supposed to indicate that he’s more intimidating than even the rest of them. Lilia having the smallest presence (despite being the most powerful member of the dorm) is supposed to show that he is the one actively working to make connections with people from other dorms and trying to eliminate the stigma surrounding Diasomnia, like we see with Lilia in book 1. The fact that he is the closest to Malleus in this shot also shows that he’s emotionally closer to Malleus than Silver and/or Sebek, who are both standing off to each side, away from Malleus.

The upward shot for the Octavenelle trio is, again for the intimidation factor, except is slightly different than with Diasomnia. For Diasomnia, the fear the other students have for for students of Diasomnia is a stigma, everyone believes Diasomnia students are terrifying because of their power. Malleus specifically has to deal with this more than the other students because of his status as well. Even though this isn’t the reality of the situation, they almost seem… untouchable. It’s definitely not done on purpose, in fact, they’d rather not have this stigma surrounding them. Octavenelle, on the other hand, definitely is doing the intimidation technique on purpose. Just like always, Octavenelle is using fear to get people to do what they want. Something I find interesting about the specific positions Azul is in compared to the twins, is that I believe it’s actually somewhat of a false set of for the trio’s dynamic. In this shot, Azul is center attention sitting in a chair, boss style, while the twins are both to the sides of the chair. This is obviously supposed to send the message that Azul is the big boss, while Jade and Floyd are supposedly “henchmen”. In reality, though, this is far from true, and Azul has said specifically that he and the twins are equals, and that they are in no way serve him and may very well leave him if they see fit (weather they actually would or not is a completely different conversation..). Azul had said that Floyd pretty much never listens to Azul (or at least when he’s not in the mood to), and that Jade isn’t bound to Azul in the same way the other vise dorm leaders seem to be with their leaders. (He actually seems to be something afraid of Jade, as mentioned in Beanfest.) All of that said, why would they divert our attention from their true dynamic in this shot? Well, I believe it may be foreshadowing to book 3, since it does something similar. It sets up Jade and Floyd to do Azul’s bidding in the beginning, only to reveal throughout the book that they, in fact, aren’t bound to him and are part of the reason his plan fails.

Moving on, the Scarabia duo are in much different positions than the last time we saw these two, where they were both taking of half of the screen each. Here, Jamil is taking up the majority of the screen while Kalim is more or less in the background. This may be to highlight the kind of dynamic they have up until the end of book 4, where Jamil is making a majority of the decisions and is (quite literally) in control of Kalim. The fact that Jamil is smiling here despite the fact that he is normally a more serious-toned character might be a small foreshadow to the fact that he has a facade- even though he doesn’t use a smile as a mask specifically he still does use “politeness” as a mask.

Next is the Savanaclaw trio, in which Leona’s position causes the same upward shot to be there as with some of the other characters, while Jack and Ruggie are pretty level with the screen. Now, Savanaclaw in general is supposed to seem (at least physically) intimidating at first, but here it highlights Leona as such more than the others. This is probably a foreshadow to his nature of seeming cold in order to shut people out and seem more like a “loner” despite the fact that he actually does care about his dorm members. Ruggie and Jack are likely not in these positions to foreshadow that they are different than other Savanaclaw students.

With the Shroud brothers, there’s two likely reasons they are in the positions they’re in. One more simple explanation is the fact that if it was the other way around, we… literally wouldn’t be able to see Ortho at all and a back-to-back shot makes sense with being able to see all of the stuff in the background. There is another explanation though that I believe also makes sense. With the way that they are positioned here, even with his bright, blue flaming hair, Idia seems almost like a shadow compared to Ortho, who has a “brighter” presence on screen. I believe this is meant to symbolize and foreshadow the fact that Idia is living in the shadow of his trauma, the “Ortho” in this shot being a symbol of that trauma since he was created as a trauma response. That’s also most likely the reason for the bitter expression on Idia’s face.

And finally is the Pomefiore shot, which tbh I don’t think I have as much to say about this one. (Watch me go on for another long paragraph, calling it now). The upward shot here seems different from the others, I don’t believe it to be used for intimidation. I more believe it is trying to give a mysterious and “untouchable” air to the Pomefiore trio. I believe Rook and Epel’s distance, as well as Rook’s smirk and Vil’s “ignoring” of the screen to be working to try to achieve the same effect, as well. Vil likely has the biggest presence here to foreshadow the fact that he, as a celebrity and as a person, seems to leave a big impact or “presence” on everyone he meets.

Ok so I realize that this post is far from “short”, but I couldn’t make the image limit, so…

Have to cut this one a bit short since the next segment is 10 images by itself- yes, I’m talking about the ending segment that has a bunch of totally not spoiler clips that go by quickly!

On the plus side the next part should be the last!

[nowis-scales]

FE Liveblog Updates

Hey hey! It’s been a little while since I last did any live blogging — and maybe you care, maybe you don’t — but as I have… a lot of potential live-blogging to do, I wanted to give some updates, notices, and minor thoughts. So if you’ve been following along with any of them, here’s where you’ll get your info. Yay!

‣ Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia:

Hmmm… what is there to say about this one? I need to continue it, first of all. It should hopefully be picking up sooner rather than later, finishing off Act 2 in Celica’s path, and then presumably switching back to Alm. I don’t have too much to worry about here, just making sure that I’m getting a healthy dose of support conversations! If I don’t by the end, I may just play again and see what else I can gather. Otherwise… I’m considering a more stack-em-up style to my posting like the other playthroughs, just so it’s less of a spammy feeling. If you have any opinions, please do let me know!

‣ Fire Emblem Engage:

Yep yep, I’ve already got a liveblog of this one set up! As I write this post, I have just beaten Chapter 3, so you will soon be able to find the liveblog under #koto plays engage , and avoid spoilers with #Fire Emblem Engage Spoilers. I’m very excited to share my thoughts so far, so it should be super fun to share! I don’t know when exactly I’ll get that set up, but probably towards the tail end of the next liveblog I’ll be talking about…

‣ Fire Emblem Three Houses: Crimson Flower: I think, with my desire to introduce an Engage liveblog, continue the Echoes one, and someday continue this one… I might get back to this one sooner than I anticipated? I’m still somewhat iffy on this one, just because… well, in the event that you’re new here, let’s just say that CF as a route is just very much not for me. That’s not to say that I look down on or would chide anyone who enjoys it — my rule is, forever and always, as long as you’re kind I don’t mind — but it’s just not the most positive playthrough. So while I’m leaning more towards yes to going back to it, I want to make sure that it’ll be an okay experience for everyone involved.

The good news is, I have newly set up some measures to keep all of the critical stuff contained where you want it. Firstly, I have a new tag I’ll be using to tag posts with the super critical stuff (#Fódlan Fault Finding) and of course I still have the tag meant for criticism in relation to EdeIgard’s character writing in the route (#Shut up about Del). I also have a series of emblems I’m going to be using, to mark each section of the post based on how critical it is. So for example, if you only want to read the positive stuff, you’ll look for a flower with both black and white on each petal, like this: ❃ There’s about four total, ranging from positive, neutral, joking criticism, and hard criticism. That way, you can pick what you like, and go from there!

Otherwise, I think I have about 12 posts already (some of them are leftovers I missed before I stopped before) built in a Google Doc just so I had time to organize my thoughts and review them for sharpness. I’m considering posting them twice a week just to get things moving along so I don’t have a gazillion playthroughs ongoing, but let me know if you have any good ideas! I could even intersperse the posts with live blogs of the other games just to keep things cheery, if that’s preferable.

‣ Fire Emblem Three Houses: Azure Moon & Silver Snow:

These ones, I am… stumped on. I’d like to chronicle them as well, I find live-blogging a super fun endeavour (even if I realize the live-blogs mostly entertain me instead of all of you), but again that’s something to run at the same time as all the other liveblogs. I could wait until Echoes concludes, I could just pick Azure Moon up once CF concludes, or I could intersperse playthroughs with CF and AM to balance out negativity like I just mentioned. It’s hard to know exactly what to do, and even in posting AM, I’m wondering if I should just post SS at the same time… I think probably not, as that would get really confusing, but it’s also the nature of just not having so many on the go. So… yeah, I dunno! Just like for the others, thoughts are welcome.

As you can see, at the moment, it’s all just a matter of figuring out where to put what!

[seer918]

Comparing MegaMan Robot Masters to their NetNavi counterparts; a thread in...probably a lot of parts

Because I’m hyped for the Battle Network collection’s anouncement I figured I’d shamelessly rip off a video by BumblesMcFumbles. Also it’s like way too fucking hot and I need something to hyperfixate over before I combust

Now just to note, I AM more of a fan of the Battle Network series compared to original MegaMan, hell my introduction to Megaman was the Battle Network anime so expect some bias.

(and once I’ve got the collection in hand and actually play more than just a version of 4 and 5, I’ll probably do a thread just talking about every named net navi)

Going in Robot Master Order (even if it will mean the quality of the net navi designs will go up and down as they got more used to the new design theme)

Cut Man and CutMan.EXE

Out of all the old designs that BN’s ocasional ‘chibi’ look touched, CutMan is probably the best. Never been too sure on the ‘ears’/handles on his head but the more sentai/super hero vibe I get from the BN design is rather cute. It’s a simple base design and they did all they could to it while still keeping the overal original vibe.

Though honestly I think it’s a tie because they’re just too similar and I’d have to start nitpicking to find differences. 1-all

Guts Man vs GutsMan.EXE

A complete overhaul of the original design, putting more of an emphasis on the construction equipment envoking yellows and greys than the original’s red and black.

The over pronounced chin and squaring of the head also invokes a loader. Not too sure on the backpack on EXE but I like how they turned the power crystal on the base design into the ‘emblem’ of EXE’s. The addition of green is also nice, just enough to pop but not enough to distract.

GM-EXE takes it, 1-2 in favour of Battle Network

Next is a pair I’d love to have right now to deal with the heat, Ice Man and IceMan.EXE

This one...did not take the chibification too well. And granted this picture isn’t...great for EXE’s head shape, I’m doing my best to ignore it....it’s like a ham chunk stuck in a glove...

Er, sorry. The shades of dark green and mint green aren’t really doing it for me, and are just making me wish for mint choc chip ice cream...The face swirls are...there, I guess...I like the contrast between the boots and gloves vs the rest of the design...

Yeah, classic takes it with a less is more approch. 2-2, tied up again

Bomb Man vs BombMan.EXE

...man, this was the coolest villain grunt from the show growing up, him and StoneMan.EXE introducing the concept of userless navi and how their looks are sometimes vastly different from ‘tame’ navi.

I like the overal, vaguely grenade like design for his armour decals, even if it cribs a bit from Grenade Man.

And I much prefer a ‘visable’ hammer space for pulling bombs out of-his shoulders-compared to them just appearing even though it’d make more sense for the virtual being to pull them out of thin air.

Obvious winner, 2-3 back into BN’s court

Fire Man vs FireMan.EXE

Doing my best to just let the designs do the talking instead of my love for .EXE’s user Mr Match, who was Scottish in the dubbed anime.

I really enjoy the colour inversion between the armour vs main body, with the splashes of blue and gold-y yellow adding more to the simple base design.

I can see why some wouldn’t like the head of EXE but since the clasic doesn’t have a mouth anyways, might as well go whole hog and create an imposing, slightly off-humanoid design

MMC 2-4 MMBN

And last of the first game’s robot masters, Elec Man vs ElecMan.EXE

Deffinitely my favourite change, and not just because I prefer the purple to the 4th robot master with red and/or black as their design

This took the concept of the digitized beings going more form over function (since so long as the code was good they COULD function) and ran with it. The tesla coil back spikes, the helmet mimicking the shape of the original’s...why does EM have a domino-mask, anyways?

Point being, a very imposing design and a superior one to the original

And so for this round, we end with a somewhat noticible gap of 2-5, and it would have been worse for MMC if I didn’t count draws as points for both sides. As we get further into the classic series it might even out a bit more

[repentantsky]

6 Times Nintendo Asked for Too Much Money, for Too Little in Return, on Switch, or Despite It

I’m critical of anyone who I think is ripping people off, and Nintendo, sadly, espeically since it’s games don’t drop in price, has done that a lot. That’s not to say Sony and Microsoft have never done it before, but since the Direct was an egregious reminder of how they mishandle business, I thought now was as good a time as any to remind people, they kind of have a history. 

6.  Charging over $100, for a remake’s full content

Now, I will say, in most cases a remake can go full price. If it’s ground up like a remake should be, and adds extra features or content to sweeten the deal, that’s fair play, however, locking content behind a paywall is cheap. Enter Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadow of Valentia. While the base game was just full price, which was 40 bucks on the 3DS, it cost far more to unlock all of it’s extra content. A $25 dollar Amiibo combo back, which unlocked special content, and a $50 dollar season pass, which was mostly just new dungeons and weapons, brought the total to $115 dollars for all it’s content. Hey, I get it, DLC is a thing, but a season pass that costs more than the base game, is just a shitty thing to do. Nintendo even went so far as to alter how they added it up, to make it seem cheaper than it was. To make matters worse, they did all this while giving out free content like crazy on Nintendo Switch games, kind of telling everyone who wasn’t an early adopter of the system, to screw off. It was also the first real screw ball thing they did after Satoru Iwata-San had passed away. Talk about a spit in the face. 

5. Overcharging for MicroSD’s.

One of the major problems of the Switch, is that it has too little space for all the games Nintendo wants you to buy on it, and to be fair, that we also want to buy on it. While most first party titles are pretty small in terms of what they require from the Switch, it has a massive 3rd party library as well, and how does Nintendo handle that, by charging double for what anyone could get for MicroSD’s that do exactly what the Nintendo branded ones do. I mean, seriously, imagine paying 100 bucks for 256GB of space, when you could pay 50. Be careful about that though, some MicroSD’s couldn’t be formatted, which would mean you couldn’t you them on the Switch. While that seems to have calmed down more over the years, it still happened at the time, and it still sucked. Overcharging because your name is on a product, is shameful, and screw everyone that does it, Nintendo included. 

4. Charging for Nintendo Online. 

I get it, Microsoft and Sony do it, and I hate that as well, but at least in return, you can get some actually decent games, and better deals on products, espeically with PSN for the latter, and come on, Game Pass is worth it no matter who you are. Nintendo though, even though it’s cheaper, has thus far refused to release any games past SNES era, a large portion of games released on Nintendo Online are cheap 3rd party rip-off’s of first party Nintendo games, and it really doesn’t appear like Nintendo plans to make the service truly worth it any time soon. As much as I love Nintendo, it’s really hard to justify paying for an online service that nets you so little, but alas, here we are. 

3. New Super Bros U Deluxe 

Yeah, a full price port of a game is never a good idea, and this whole list could have been made of them. Instead, I’m only going to include a few, but this one might be the worst. I mean, Super Mario Bros U is a great game, but it’s not worth full price just because it got ported. There’s not that much content there, even with the added Luigi U content inspired by the year of Luigi. It’s a hard sell trying to convince a logical person that the same 4 hour game, with an extra hour to hour and a half of content, which is just levels you already played as Mario, is a good buy, because it isn’t. I don’t know what Nintendo was thinking with this port, and it’s sad to see it, but alas, like all Nintendo games, it’s still full price on their store.

2. Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE

I will put it on record that I love Tokyo Mirage Sessions, it’s a somewhat more light-hearted game than the it’s source material, at least from Atlus’ end, but that doesn’t make it bad at all, in fact it’s great. However, it kinda failed on the Wii U, quickly leaving store shelves and never being heard from again until it’s Switch version was announced. It’s still a great game on the Switch, but either Nintendo got greedy, or Atlus let them, and a game that basically a commercial failure, came out at full price same as before, and that was easily a deterrent for many, as it should be. Selling a port of a game that flopped on a system that flopped, isn’t exactly a good consumer move, and yet, it’s exactly what happened. 

 1. Asking you to pay more for Miitopia

Look, I get that there is certain difference between playing a game on a handheld, and playing it on your 4K TV if you have one, and I’ll admit the idea of play Miitopia on my 4K display is both appealing and hilarious, but it’s just a port. It’s not a remaster, it’s a port. And for that extra 10 bucks we get what, a horse and some makeup? How people can justify that is beyond me. The “Oh I didn’t play it on 3DS so this will be my first time buying it” is an excuse to hide behind because your love of Nintendo is too strong. If don’t call out a company for it’s bad practices, or buy into those practices, they are only going to do worse, and if this list isn’t proof of that, that I don’t know what to tell you. Charging more for a port than an original release is shady though. 

And that’s my list, did I miss anything you think was too much on the Nintendo Switch? Let me know in the comments below, reblog this post if it interested you, feel free to leave a note, and hey, if you think I’m biased against Nintendo, just look at the photo I post that’s coming directly after this goes live. Have a good freaking day/night whatever your time zone’s got you on.  

[calamitaswrath]

Lucia plays Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn: Part 3 Chapter 8

Compared to the previous chapters, there really is a whole lot less setup for this one, huh? But I guess when your characters are just trying to escape, there isn't much to go into strategy or what politics are at play - just gotta make a run for it.

It's nice to see though how the actual geography of Tellius comes into play for setting up the story and maps here. Based on everything I've seen thus far, this setting feels like it's one of the most fleshed-out that Fire Emblem has ever had, easily up there with Fòdlan. But becaues Three Houses and Three Hope just tend to reuse maps a lot, Fòdlan just really lacks a whole lot of the visual identity that Tellius has. That's something I was actually talking about with my friend as I was streaming for her and she also pointed out that this makes the journey (as in, the physical one, not the emotional one) that the characters go on just a whole lot more believable, which I honestly also really agree with. 3H didn't really have that.

Senator Valtome. Urgh, this guy really looks like an offensive queer stereotype, and behaves like one, too. What a wonderful type of character to have as an antagonist.

Base conversations - Skrimir really showing off his character development here. I do feel like it has happened a bit fast, but. . . ehh, let's be real - with him not being the main protagonist, it's already plenty that he's getting some at all. Not everyone gets that.

Lethe and Lyre have a bit of sibling talk! Not much to note here, but it was a nice one. Based on the title, I wasn't actually certain about which siblings this would be - my first guess was Oscar, Boyd and Rolf, my second guess was Lethe and Lyre, and then my third guess was Ike and Mist. Shame on me that I remembered them last, especially since I gushed about their sibling dynamic a while ago! . . .But also, my friend was probably having some fun listening to me trying to figure that out before I viewed the conversation, especially when it turned out to be Lethe and Lyre, after all.

Now, as for the actual map - heeyyy, it's this guy! The boss! The guy who ran away in the prologue of part three! Fat load of good that did him in the end.

You know, this whole setup and actual map reminds me rather a lot of the chapter in Awakening that takes place in the Demon's Ignle. Protagonists on the run from overwhelmingly strong enemy forces, fleeing through an area with a lot of lava, random area effects from the surroundings. . . guess I now know where they got that inspiration from.

Come to think of it though it's generally just really interesting to see so much of the DNA of the presentation that would manifest itself in a different way in Awakening and Fates here in Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn - what with the bust up body portraits for characters, the different expressions on those (though they really are more pronounced in the 3DS titles) and using the 3D models for some simple cutscenes in the background. . . it's neat to see.

Pffft, the boss doesn't have any ranged weapons. Well then!

Hey, we're in Goldoa! I was wondering when that'd come up, seeing as it was set up in the first game and then not a whole lot happened with it.

Dheginsea really is very committed to being neutral, huh? And Tibarn definitely has some good reasons for having beef with them.

Oh, Nasir and Ena are back! Nice to see them. But this really was a short meeting in the end. No way they're not coming back, though.

Come to think of it, though - Soren was once again mysteriously absent for this scene as well, no? He knows he's a branded, so he must be at least somewhat aware of his heritage.

[puppyluver256]

[Image descriptions: Three Pokemon Trainers with the fan-made Pokemon Chikret, Calflame, and Haymuth. Three more images break them into individual Trainer and Pokemon pairings.

The first image is the feminine Pokemon Trainer. She has light skin, shoulder-length brown hair, and blue eyes. She is wearing a pink hat with button badges attached and a Pokeball design, a purple short-sleeved shirt under a creamy yellow shirt with ruffled trim, a green wristband, blue shorts with pink lace trim, aqua knee-high socks, and pink and blue slip-on shoes. She has a tan backpack with purple straps on her back, and as she is walking forward she is looking back and waving at those behind her. Beside her is the fan-made Pokemon Chikret, which is a blue egret-like creature with big blue eyes. It has its wings outstretched and is running alongside its Trainer.

The second image is the androgynous Pokemon Trainer. They have somewhat light skin, short dark brown hair, and trey eyes. They are wearing an aqua green hat with teal accents and a blue Pokeball design, a purple button-up shirt over a darker purple shirt, a green wristband with an aqua Pokeball emblem, a green jacket tied around their waist, denim cutoff shorts with purple and pink leggings underneath, and purple slip-on shoes. They have a tan backpack with purple straps, and are scratching the back of their head nervously as they walk. Beside them is the fan-made Pokemon Calflame. It is a small calf with red fur and eyes, stubby horns, brown hair on its head, and orange and yellow hair on its tail resembling fire. It is running alongside its Trainer in an attempt to keep up.

The third image is the masculine Pokemon Trainer. He has medium-brown skin, short blonde hair, and green eyes. He is wearing a backwards-turned green and black baseball cap with a Pokeball design, a red collared shirt over a dark violet t-shirt, a green wristband with an aqua Pokeball emblem, denim pants, and green and grey running shoes. He has a tan backpack with purple straps on his back, and he is excitedly running ahead. Beside him is the fan-made Pokemon Haymuth, a yellow and green mammoth covered in grass-like hair. It is happily running alongside its Trainer to keep pace with him.

End ID.]

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Introducing the player characters for Pokemon Plow and Circuit! And yes, there are three basic options available, the "girly" one that people taking my survey decided was their favorite, the "neutral" one, and the "boyish" one. And I gave the players the design elements and starter Pokemon based on what shared their placement in that survey: everything with girly placed first, everything with neutral placed second, and everything with boyish placed third. ...Okay so there were a few ties in there, but I settled them with coin flips hehe. So how do they look? If you wanna draw 'em yourselves sometime and make 'em look however you want I can throw the base ref atcha that shows the basic options, though feel free to get crazy with the hair and eye colors as I can imagine that the realm of salon dyes and colored contacts could lead those bits to some wild fun hehe :3

While the players' skin, hair, and eye color can be determined by the hypothetical player (and the hair and eye color can be changed later), these are the looks I'm going to personally stick with for any Cantessy drawings featuring the player going forward.

For storytelling purposes only, each of these player characters has a hypothetical "real" person behind them who made them look as close to themselves as possible. The girly character is Mira, and she chooses Chikret when playing Pokemon Plow. The neutral character is Briar, and they choose Calflame when playing Pokemon Circuit. And the boyish character is Jake, and while he will eventually choose Haymuth, he is currently more focused on other games and will play either Plow or Circuit when he can get both as he'd rather have the full experience. Wait, why am I so specific on which version the players pick? Weellllll...if ya know, ya know. If not, you'll find out :3c

💖🐶 Check out my pinned post for ways to support my artwork, among other things! 🐶💖

~If you like, please reblog to show your friends! Likes are appreciated, but reblogs let more people see my content! If you have something to say, feel free to give feedback in tags/comments/replies as well!~

Pokemon and related concepts © Nintendo/GameFreak Cantessy player characters, Chikret, Calflame, Haymuth, the Cantessy region, and artwork © PuppyLuver Studios