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claire-starsword · 6 months

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The Guardiana Magic School Run -Part 18

Certainly it must be obnoxious that I keep bringing up the novel wherever I go, but consider: 1) i waited years to read that thing so i don't care; 2) translating 300+ pages for free is hella work so i get to brag; and 3) we are literally on Rudo lol i can't stop looking at everything differently now. I know this dog now. I love this dog. She's my friend.

Back to the run, we're still on the spirit of treasure hunts!

After a very fun and not at all garbage puzzle involving unclear map boundaries, we get Musashi, who is not valid for this magic user run. Yes, the guy is invisible and making words pop out of thin air, but he's NOT magical. He's just built different. You would understand if you had studied the blade like him.

We then get Lyle, who is also not for this run. Very sad. But at least they'll kindly donate their weapons to support our magic school. It's not much, but it's the thought tha-

MUSASHI WHAT THE HELL

ARE YOU MADE OF MONEY MAN

so uh, wow! that's something i'd never learn in a regular playthrough. Since it's a unique weapon it goes to the deals section for double the price. The deals section is very clogged right now so I guess we'll soon learn if new deals still pop up or if we're done with it. Not like the useless swords there were helping anyway.

On the topic of weapons, we also get a Holy Staff like I promised last time. I could promote Khris right now, giving up on an early Aura, to use this. Her attack is currently pretty ok (28), so a boost would likely put her in the 30+ with attackers like Max and Arthur. That's wild to think about. But am I going to use her like this with her squishy defense? In the chapter where Golems and Dullahans start to appear? I'm not sure. The next battle is also forest and she doesn't have great movement in that. But we'll be surrounded by spawns, so she might make a difference in wiping out some enemy in that chaos.

I'm pretty afraid of the next battle, so that's what I'm going for. At the end of the day she has four levels to go until Aura and I hate this kind of grinding very much lol

Say hello to Vicar Khris! Boy I hate the stat loss so much. And yet, upon equipping the Holy Staff, she now has the greatest attack in the party. Dog that mauls you for your sins. I'm losing it.

And we're not done with upgrades! First of all I forgot to equip the Soulbuster on Max, but don't worry, it still doesn't make him stronger than Khris.

Arthur on the other hand jumps above the Khris bar thanks to the Chrome Lance. The unpromoted Lowe and mages cannot use the Guard Staff for now, which is a bit of a loss for Lowe, but the girls on the other hand should just be blasting things with magic anyway. Tao might be our greatest weapon against the Golems.

Narsha meanwhile gets the Holy Mace, which is not only more powerful but also capable of Heal 3. Unfortunately I did forbid using weapon effects on my rules, didn't I? Uh oh. Still a nice upgrade, and I didn't have any idea on when to promote Narsha, so let's do it.

Establishing herself once more as the deuteragonist of this thing, Saint Narsha is now as strong as Max, but with a few more points in defense, which is great.

I am still afraid however, so I don't think the upgrades will end here.

I do sit atop a sizable collection of stat boosting items. That I always forget to use in casual play. I would like to not mess my challenge run doing that. The only characters were missing by now are Alef and Torasu, neither of which will need Power Wine, for example. I would also hope they won't need five whole defense potion.

But do I know how to distribute this in an smart and efficient way? Hell no. I do hate seeing Max without defense though, so one potion goes for him, taking him over 20. I do chicken out on using the rest of them though, because I don't think they'll make enough of an impact on characters that are still on the 14-17 range, especially when they don't have enough HP to survive two hits even if their defense was raised.

What I do end up with is using a couple Life Loaves on Narsha. Her defense is now on par with Max yet she has way less HP, so I'm hoping the +3 here helps.

I also end up facing this bizarreness here where the game does not update her current HP? Hoping she doesn't enter battle like this. I can't even use Medical Herbs outside of battle to fix it now.

I also decide to use the Power Wines on Max and Narsha, I'm really betting on them as the frontlines here. So congrats Max, now you're on par with dog girl. Only took a lot of effort.

I also give Anri a Quick Chicken in hopes she'll get more chance to hit the enemies before they hit her.

After all these very insecure decisions, I'm now turning my game off and on again because the Narsha thing bothers me.

:/ it does not fix it

Had to enter this screen and retreat, this is honestly some garbage code.

Anyway, let's finally get to the battle. The clear bonus is just money. Thanks to Musashi's patronage I'm not worried about that. Also no way in hell I'm rushing this battle.

I don't know why I haven't mentioned yet, but Domingo should be the star of this battle. The game even knows it, giving him some extra dialogue here. He has the best defense in the team, floating movement to ignore the forests and mountains, and magic damage against the enemies with high defense.

Arthur is currently the other tank of the team, but being a centaur he won't be moving well in this terrain.

He's at least enthusiastic enough to be the first one to move, but not like there's many threats in this start.

Also I'm just learning that Attack 3 uses 40 MP so, uh. Don't expect to ever see this thing used lol

Very unsure of what to do with Narsha as usual. I might try setting positions to catch Max, Arthur, Hanzou and herself in an Attack 2. I could boost the mages' damage instead but I'm unsure if that will be impactful enough on level 2 spells, and Tao's Blaze 2 is not in a deep need of help. Besides, MP eventually ends, while attack boosts are forever.

After a boring turn 2 we are finally ready to beat these things up. They're doing nothing to Arthur.

No point in wasting Domingo's MP with these weak enemies though. Arthur, Max and Hanzou wipe them out in a single hit each.

It takes me several turns because Khris is slow and has little movement, but I include her in the Attack plan.

In the next turn, I could use a Boost 1 on someone to finish Narsha's MP, but I feel like saving it for Aura in case I need healing.

I seem to have attracted the Artilleries' attention, but not triggered the spawns yet, which annoys me. I don't want those things to catch me off guard.

LIKE THIS YOU KNOW

EXACTLY LIKE THIS

Welcome to hell! The Master Mages have Freeze 2, which is pretty dicey to take on when there's many of them and we're gathered like this. The golems and worms should have a lot of attack, and Domingo and Arthur are my only tanks, so I can't exactly surround everyone else. At least I think the golems can't reach anyone yet since I tried to stay on the bottom, and their movement is not great. The worms should have less defense than the golems. Maybe we can defeat them before the golems arrive! Optimism!

You can already feel the centaur pain with Arthur not even being able to cover Tao here.

But he can one hit a guy in forest land effect.

Also, look! He finally fits this playthrough! Baby's first spell! Will we be using it instead of 20+ chrome lance damage? I don't think so.

Domingo also can't cover Tao, so clearly I screwed up bad. Maybe he'll distract the other worms though.

Max one hit kills a worm, but Hanzou fails tragically at this mage. He gets a level up with +4 attack to ensure it won't happen again.

I hit image limit as expected so, to be continued in a reblog, see i told you this one was more exciting than the last

#shining force #ressurection of the dark dragon #guardiana magic school run #long post

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enbyleighlines · 9 months

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Leigh plays Tellius prt 26

I love how this game does not shy away from how fucked up some of the people can be. Like this man was seriously intending on stuffing a laguz and giving it to his child. The anti-laguz prejudice in Daein runs so deep, man.

It was around this moment that I realized that I didn't have a meteor tome for Soren to use on Micaiah, and if I wanted to get that conversation, I needed to steal the meteor tome on this map. Unfortunately, getting Heather close enough to the mage to steal the tome before the mage used up all 5 durability of meteor AND without Heather dying proved to be trickier than anticipated. And once I finally managed to get Heather to the mage in time, it turned out her strength wasn't at a high enough level to steal it.

And so I had to restart the map from the beginning, return to the base, and try to get Heather's strength stat up. I only had enough bxp to level her up twice, but she needed 3 more points of strength. So I gave her blossom and finally, finally, got her strength up to 19.

All of that hard work for one meteor tome. Ugh. I really should have remembered to transfer Calill's meteor tome to the Greil Mercs via Neph or Brom, but I guess I wasn't thinking that far ahead.

Oh, well. At least I managed to pull it off.

And we're back with the Dawn Brigade! I am glad that Sothe reacts so strongly here. I do understand where Micaiah is coming from— she can read Pelleas's heart, and knows that his intentions are good. Even knowing that, I can't help but feel frustrated at this part in the story. I'm not blaming Micaiah, but man. The whole situation just sucks.

However, I am judging Micaiah harshly for this line. What the hell, Micaiah? Why would you even say that? You do know that's the exact reason you shouldn't be joining this war, right?

Anyway, I'm going to skip ahead a couple of maps. The fog of war map was long and boring, and the whole time I was just distracted by how nervous I was about the next one. In order to get all the extra content that I want, I have to A. have Soren attack Micaiah, and B. have Ike attack the Black Knight without dying.

And I was right to be nervous, because this chapter was a nightmare. I lost count of how many times I had to redo this map.

Getting Soren to attack Micaiah was the easy part. He has already become a dodge tank, so I wasn't worried about leaving him within the range of the wyvern knights. I just gave him an Elthunder and he easily wiped them all out.

Anyway, I love this conversation. I really wish Soren and Micaiah got to interact more. I also love how Soren starts out cold and indifferent, but the second Micaiah brings Ike into the equation, Soren's temper flares to life. To be fair, I always thought it would be uncomfortable to interact with Micaiah. I love her, but imagine being around someone who can look into your heart and read your thoughts. I feel like it would feel so violating. Especially for Soren, a man who deeply values his privacy.

On the other hand, getting THIS conversation took a lot of trial and error. It wasn't necessarily getting Ike and the Black Knight to interact that was the hard part. It was 1. ensuring Ike's survival, and 2. making sure that no one else entered the Black Knight's range. Twice I made the mistake of leaving someone in the BK's range. Once it was Boyd, and once it was Soren. And the worst part was, I had battle saves that locked me into those situations, so Both Times I was forced to redo the battle from the beginning. Ugh.

However, at long last, I finally managed to make it to the end of this chapter without losing a single unit. Thank Ashera.

And that's it for this part. This was definitely the hardest part of my playthrough thus far, and I think I need a little break to rest and recover. See you all in part 27!

#leigh plays tellius #fire emblem radiant dawn #radiant dawn #fe10 #tellius

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sukimas · 2 years

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Have you played every single FE game, and if so, what would a tier list of all FE games look like for you?

i have! for better or for worse.

favorite to least favorite (note: this is not objectively best to objectively worst) by all factors combined (i can make separate gameplay, story, etc lists)

1. fe4. it is the fucking video game. does it have flaws? most certainly. does it scratch the itches of BIGNUMBERS, interesting politics, and grounded but neat characters, all while taking place on maps the size of jupiter? most definitely. almost every quirk this game has is something that actively improves it in my personal opinion.

2. fe5. certainly a Rough game to play blind. but in terms of story, gameplay, and the integration of the two, probably the most seamless. fun to snap in two or to play fairly normally. suffers a little bit in my ranking from being a bastard for blind play and lifting most of its large scale story elements straight from fe4.

3. radiant dawn. almost entirely a gameplay choice; the story is not bad but on normal this game is the most fun to fuck around on of any in the series for me, thanks to bexp abuse and the variety of units you can use. i wish mages were better and the part 3 plot is kind of a wet fart, but overall it’s really fun to play. we don’t talk talk about hard mode. or the changes to laguz gauges.

4. surprise! it’s mystery of the fucking emblem. tis an extremely, extremely silly game gameplaywise, but silly in a way that is very enjoyable. the plot is the template for essentially all femblemembles that follow; fe1 is a rough draft but this is the quintessential FE. VERY done, team. has some of the better music in the series despite being very snes

5. path of radiance. honestly, just extremely solidly done all around. not much that makes it UNIQUE beyond superficially (the laguz can be seen in plenty of other factions in various ways) but it puts everything together so well and world builds excellently. unfortunately gameplay is a total snoozefest even if you actively try to make it more difficult for yourself. not bad by any means but just boring to me.

6. three houses. mostly gets this spot thanks to first playthrough gameplay and story alone; on repeats it really falls off hard. but the worldbuilding and characters remain fairly good (though still number 3 in the series, imho) throughout; despite being unfinished, most of the stories are very compelling and the monastery is very fun on a first playthrough. suffers severely from a case of wanting to fuck rhea. like she’s not even a bad character but the way the game goes out of its way to go You Should Fuck Rhea is something special. edelgard is somewhat different because in the routes where you don’t pick her it is essentially onesided. but anyway despite all that good game. love to play it again someday.

7. echoes: shadows of valentia. they have absolutely shot themselves all the way in the foot with the story on this one. gaiden was limited by the nes’s hardware limitations, so that it managed to have a better story is exceedingly significant; fucking power of love stab in the gut. no dracozombies. the game MECHANICS of this one are quite good (in particular i’m very fond of hp-cast magic) but they do not get to shine because of The map design. the presentation however is top notch. mostly gets this low of a spot because of stupid map design and celica route, but is still a very very beloved game to me; the games here and above are essentially my really liked games tier. below here is Good.

8. first Good game: fe8/sacred stones. does not have much unique going for it i will be totally honest. however, it executes pretty much everything it does pretty well, much like PoR; the problem is it simply is not as ambitious as the former, so it doesn’t get points for, say, fantastic worldbuilding. has an engaging plot, good characters, fun classes, and is an enjoyable game to play if you ignore seth.

9. second Good game: awakening. it may be balanced like shit. its story may be full of holes. it may be full of anime tropes galore. but god fucking dammit it is Fun and this is what matters. got me into the series and i can still toss afternoons into its gaping maw without question. stupid game. it’s great sometimes.

10. third Good game: fe7. there is not much going on here story wise i am not gonna lie. the maps are also fairly poorly put together in much of the game. however the cast dynamics are quite good, and the characters you get are fairly well balanced; it’s a fun game to play even if i don’t think about it often.

11. [deep sigh] fe11 technically counts as a Good game i guess. i deeply enjoy the story of fe1, as it’s not as generic as one might think, and putting the pieces from the manual into the actual game is neat. unfortunately the presentation is shit and the gameplay is less fun than fe3 book 1 in every conceivable way. can someone please make a fun marth game.

12. fates (all routes). irredeemable light novel story. complete garbage. i am also not a huge fan of conquest’s gameplay and map design! i do not like skill memorization; i much prefer interesting weapons and terrible enemy staves to fuck you poison strike. however, this game is quite good at giving you unit customization without the stupidly large ranges of customizability that awakening/3h/marth remakes do. it can be a lot of fun sometimes. but only sometimes.

13. fe6. mystery of the emblem again! but actually, it’s worse in every conceivable way. despite the support system, characters are less compelling; gaiden chapters with no well-telegraphed requirements needed for the true ending, instead of being explicitly told to get the star shards (and getting them being fairly trivial); bland ass protagonist who literally talks to the convoy because he has no other friends; underbaked dragon lore that tries to get you to feel something; overly tanky enemies for no good reason; frankly childishly written antagonists, even compared to the likes of fucking medeus and hardin; and just no fun allowed in general.

14. new mystery of the emblem. have you ever wanted mystery, but with no fun allowed? have i got a video game for you.

15. gaiden. has a better story than echoes. otherwise lol three thousand year animations.

16. fe1. i love the mechanics here! it is unfortunate that they are on a game on the NES from 33 years ago. the story is also pretty good. but generally some weird choices here, good and bad. aged significantly worse than for example famicom wars. RIP. some day, see you again!

#fire emblem #fe4 #(for self categorization. all the others are here too)

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kaelor0409 · 1 year

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youtube

So I've been watching @ohnoitstbskyen's play through of The Mageseeker, and been having a great time. The commentary is entertaining and insightful, as you'd probably expect if you're familiar with his content, and some of his comments got me thinking about a few things myself.

I've been on the fence about Mageseeker, since the whole point of the game seems to be to neatly wrap up the Mage Revolution plot that has been Demacia's ongoing arc for literally years now. I was on the fence about the Mage Revolution plot anyway, since it feels very much like the writers asked "how can we make our Generic Good Guy Fantasy Kingdom more nuanced and edgy", and the answer they came up with is "make them White Mana from Magic: The Gathering".

Still, TBSkyen's analysis in the videos below convinced me that there were interesting stories to tell with that premise, even if some of the writers weren't really handling it with the care it deserved.

youtube

Not having played the game, the concept of The Mageseeker felt like a hasty attempt by Riot to sweep a poorly thought out plotline under the rug so they could move on to other things. Who would have guessed that a "good" faction herding innocent people (including children) into concentration camps would be controversial?

Having watched a good chunk of the playthrough (and skipped to the end to get the final analysis), I can say that my fears were...somewhat unfounded? The game does mostly wrap up the plots around the Mageseekers and mostly puts a lid on the Mage Rebellion, but admits this is not a "clean" resolution and that the struggle will continue.

The real reason I've come around on The Mageseeker, however, is because I think it moves Demacia into a more narratively interesting place. "Outwardly good faction is secretly xenophobia, dogmatic, and committing a genocide" has honestly been done to death these days. What hasn't been done is "good faction realized 'whoops, we "accidentally" did a genocide', now what?". This is honestly pretty relatable, because if you live in Europe or anywhere Europe colonized, your national history probably includes some genocide.

So let's talk about Javan and Garen.

Jarvan ordered a genocide by knowingly signing an execution order for hundreds, potentially thousands of helpless mages (including children). It doesn't matter that he was "reluctant", it doesn't matter that he had to be talked into it, he willingly gave the order to exterminate an entire ethnic group ("magic" is technically not an ethnicity, but let's not split hairs here). Also his "preferred" alternative to executing them was to keep them locked up forever (which, yes, is still technically genocide), so even if you entirely blame the Mageseekers for the execution order he's still at fault.

Garen remained a loyal soldier even after Jarvan gave the order to commit genocide. He did initially object, but his objections were that his sister and friend might also get executed, not that the order itself was morally wrong. Even afterward, he only went outside of his role as Demacia's dutiful soldier to try and save his sister Lux. Only Lux, not any of the helpless mages she was sheltering, and when she asks him to join her in defending these defenseless people, Garen refuses. You could argue that Garen never actually harmed any mages himself (any mages that weren't trying to kill him first, anyway), but he certainly helped and when given the chance to flip to the oppressed side, he turned it down. At the end of the day, Garen was "just following orders", and we all know how much water that excuse holds.

So you have two "good" characters who very clearly did something monstrous. You also can't have them stop being "good" characters, because Riot sure as hell isn't going to go through all the effort to rebrand them at this point. So what do you do?

To be continued...

#league of legends #demacia #garen crownguard #jarvan iv #the mageseeker #tbskyen #genocide #this got so much longer than I anticipated #it was only supposed to be one part #Youtube

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sweetmage · 1 year

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Just some long-winded thoughts on my inquisitor Kest and his very rocky, bloodstained road to becoming a decent leader (or How I Tried To Do A Templar Run But Failed Instantly Because I Am A Softie)

I just finished his playthrough (barring Trespasser) the other day so I'm just thinking about his character progression.

Putting it under the cut because it's kinda long!

Tried to do a DAI Templar playthrough but chickened out and ended up doing a (now former) templar bootlicker who made some pretty shitty decisions early on like conscripting the mages, taking a very militaristic approach to all conflicts even when it was unethical/unadvised, etc. He was on bad terms with a lot of the companions (for good reason) including Varric who he frequently took alone and Solas who he never reconciled with.

Being human nobility from Starkhaven, a land ruled heavily under the Chantry's influence, he believed faith and the word of the Chantry to be the sole determiner in all matters. He had little direct experience with those who were oppressed and underprivileged and held the dangerous misconception that the Chantry strived to help these people, even when such "help" was truly suppression, conversion, or imprisonment. This served as self-justification for his early missteps and cruelties. "I am a leader, the Maker is on my side, I know what is best for them but if they won't listen then I'll have no choice but to show them."

When he initially received the title of Herald he was reluctant to confirm or deny whether or not Andraste chose him because he didn't feel comfortable speaking on her behalf. However, internally, the ego-driven part of him believed that he truly was, that he was chosen due to his experience and strong faith, and that all that he did was in her name. When he returned from the fade, however, he refused to confirm or deny simply because at that point he was fairly certain that he wasn't and he was forced to reckon with the fact that there was no divine support or purpose behind his actions and, for that reason, he began to see clearly for the first time what he'd done.

After having a major crisis of faith and morality in the fade, he reemerged to a world he'd felt he'd left an ugly stain on. Though it would be impossible to atone for the chaos, fear, and destruction he'd caused he spent the rest of his days trying to understand those around him (the quest where Bull took him to meet some of the men that worked under him was very influential and important to him and his development) and wield his power in a way more responsible and beneficial to those he'd previously overlooked and turned his back to.

He also severed his allyship with Starkhaven (where he once served as a prominent member of the guard, very attached to his title and honor) and would not aid in their attempts to annex Kirkwall. Though he was less than a fan of Starkhaven's current ruler, finding Prince Sebastian to be rather short-sighted and impulsive in a way that made him fear where their city may be headed, he had initially taken great pride in being allied with the place he once called home. It was difficult to put aside, but he could not stand by such a request. Had the request come any sooner, however, he'd shudder to think how he might have responded.

He stands in stark contrast to my other canon Inquisitor, my mage Hawke that romanced and supported Anders and has a much more stable, informed, and liberation-focused gameplan and viewpoint from the beginning.

Additionally, he significantly lessened his reliance on Cullen (who he romanced) at the war table in favor of more careful and less destructive alternatives to problem-solving. Instead, he would normally delegate clean-up, rescue, and safety-related missions to the soldiers both to preserve their numbers and to reduce casualties and destruction. Not to mention their presence and careful efforts could boost public morale and local positive influence.

Even as he began to change his stances and actions, he still fell victim to his inherent ignorance and biases on numerous occasions. This led him to eventually turn to his companions of varied backgrounds as well as build a separate council of advisors to help with issues that he lacked the knowledge/life experience to address or that he simply had no place involving himself in. (<-All headcanon but I wish the game would let you do this. I feel weird playing as a human and/or non-mage protag and rocking up to a Dalish camp or group of apostates and playing white knight for all their problems.😅)

In the end, I'm kind of glad that (because I am a softie even though it's just a fictional game) I didn't play him the way I originally intended. He is a very flawed, messy, and at times hypocritical man with a lot of blood and suffering on his hands who is doing all he can to shed his ego and pride and not repeat mistakes. He is one of my canon inquisitors and for better or worse I love the little bastard even though I at times wish to viciously shake him for his actions.

One day I will do the templar playthrough, perhaps. It sounds very interesting, I just keep making mage characters or characters who are very chill with mages and this is the closest I've gotten so far. 😅

#oc: kest #dragon age inquisition #inquisitor trevelyan #except not really because his surname is summerhayes and he's from starkhaven and i threw out the whole canon story but w/e #I sometimes get nervous posting about kest and my other ocs with questionable morals and actions because I don't want my #“this fictional viewpoint is interesting to explore” to be mistaken for “i support this viewpoint”#but anyway there he is! there's my questionable little man!

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freakin-edikan · 2 months

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hi hannah don't look at this it's about bravely i'm gonna talk about some midgame stuff ahahaha

one of the things about Bravely Default is that for some reason even as early as 2013 most of the content of it online was pertaining to minmaxxing/cheese tactics. so you could be like "how do I beat this boss in Ch. 3" and get a response like "easy peasy just grind Black Mage to level 14 and Group-cast All Reflect and the boss will kill itself!" which I suppose you *could* do but considering how after job level 8 jobs go from a couple hundred job points to level up to a couple thousand (starting at 3500 and up to 5000) and battles only start yielding 100+ JP halfway through Ch. 4 and even then 100+ JP isn't guaranteed... think about how feasible it is to max out Black Mage at Ch. 3. It's not

On my first playthrough several years ago in HS I played it all wrong and grinded Black Mage past the point where the game obviously wants you to switch jobs and I only got it to level 14 at like Ch. 6? Meanwhile ppl are asking "where should I grind" and instead of being mature and telling them not to spend too much time grinding and to not worry about job commands beyond level 9, ppl will deadass say "erm, go to vampire castle top floor and grind there" or "buy a growth egg (which is 500,000pg! a lot of pg!!)" It's chapter three!! they're not there yet!! they probably haven't even unlocked the growth egg or if they have they definitely cannot afford it!

That being said, I'm finishing out my second playthrough which I started maybe a year and a half ago or longer, and I did do a little bit of grinding, but only in chapter 4 and pretty much only to level 9 (or 10, if they had enough points up, and I'm going through the Vampire Castle sidequest which requires fighting six elemental dragons and I'm kind of proud of myself for doing these fights using pretty much only level 9 or lower job commands. like I do have a couple jobs at level 10 or higher for certain characters but that's because I have those jobs up for boss fights...

if anyone would like to know what the build is it's this:

swordmaster/ranger - dps. alternates between counters and attacking. i have edea on this and she has attack up and two-handed to make her attack as high as possible. it could also be spell fencer/ranger or pirate or something similar. damage salve-maker/freelancer - freelancer is not high enough level to be doing anything more important than filling out the bestiary however salve-maker attacks using items and heals with widen area, heals 3,000 hp per x-potion bc of healing lore and attack item amp guarantees like 3k+ dmg every turn. also you don't have to worry about losing bp to widen area bc bp recovery gets the bp back from being made element-weak templar/red mage - templar also has bp recovery so every time the dragon casts elemental weakness, it's a free rampart. tbh the secondary could be better but I used it to do dispel on a party member to restore elemental shield immunity. this requires lvl 10 for red mage but only lvl 9 for white mage. templar has high mind so it's good backup healing too ninja/thief - utsusemi + turn tables means every dodge is +1 BP to spend on godspeed strike which pierces defense. kairai is a lvl 10 job command for ninja but having it is helpful sometimes for guaranteeing counters on swordmaster. but it's not necessary

it's not infallible bc it needs a turn or two to set up and it can be broken if I predict incorrectly but it's pretty solid.

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meangimmymachine · 3 years

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Sera Was Never An Agreeable Girl (And Was Never Meant To)

Hello, I am back and with an essay of the ages because I have nothing better to do. Also @gh0stlysbdy is calling me a coward for not writing this out and my ego will not continue to be assaulted like this.

So, first and foremost. I am a Dragon Age enjoyer. I can’t fully say I’m a fan as I’ve only played Dragon Age: Inquisition, however I have a vague understanding of DA:O, DA2, the DLCs, as well as read or am reading the graphic novels and books. I’m a whore for lore. It’s just my nature.

Now, I have played DA:I a total of three times. Once as a female human mage when I first got the game because I thought it was gonna be a really cool game about dragons and magic. Halfway right. That playthrough however, didn’t really end up being fully played because I felt uncomfortable, so I played the second time around as a male elf warrior. I know, warrior mains, ew, but that’s beside the point. Of all the characters I interacted with as the Inquisitor, I have a select few favorites, and Sera is one of them. Dorian is the first obviously, but Sera comes third after Varric.

Thing about Sera is that so many people found her unbearable. I did too, because I played a Dalish elf and resonated so strongly with my character and his culture that I found her comments insulting for years. I got the game back in 2015, and I was really new to everything, especially the anti-mage, anti-elf propaganda that the games really like to dive into. And I, like many others, lashed out at Sera for acting the way she was acting. I wished she would just grow up and accept the fact that she is an elf and that her acting that way towards other elves and even mages is wrong. And I was right, it is wrong, however, the way I and many others have been thinking about her character is wrong.

Let’s start at the beginning. According to the Dragon Age Wiki, Sera was born in the Denerim Alienage in Ferelden. Now already, based on the knowledge of the games, and lore behind it, Ferelden, out of all the areas, has the most anti-mage sentiment. Far more than Orlais and the Free Marches. The only other anti-elf area that could outmatch Ferelden is Orlais, and I have my thoughts on Orlais. Now, from what I know of the City Elf Origin, it is already clear that the environment in which the city elves of the Denerim Alienag live has so many poor, decrepit issues, as well as the fact that humans treat the city elves as lesser beings.

She does say that she remembers the Alienage, but is also quick to deny and almost recant the beliefs that the city elves do believe in, such as the vhenadahl, which is the sacred trees that were planted in the Alienages so that the elves there still hold on to some of their traditions that had been stripped from them.

It is also state in her Wiki page that Sera is an orphan, and that she was caught stealing at a young age. As some players would experience in DA:O, elven criminals are treated worse than others, even on some accounts for no reason. However, in the alienages, city elves have assumed the role of passive bystanders to those of their own kind that are direct trouble. Sera would have probably been caught stealing and not supported or helped by her own community and internalized it as being othered. She was a child. A child who was already exposed to the fact that humans considered her community the ‘others’ and now even she was betrayed by her community’s silence and refusal to defend her. This could and possibly is the root of Sera’s anti-elf sentiment that even now remains strongly rooted in her personality.

And then we go to Lady Emmald, the woman who probably influenced Sera far more than she wants to believe. A human woman that couldn’t have children and was in fact a sick woman. Here is where I believe Sera’s issues with herself as an elf possibly got worse. Here was a little girl, rejected by her elven community, ostracized by Fereldan humans for being an elf, and then Lady Emmald, a woman who wanted to be a mother to Sera but didn’t know how because, as much as I can assume on a woman who is only ever talked about by the little girl she lied to, was never really well connected with her mother. “She hid buying them by keeping me away from the baker. She did that by lying that he didn’t like me, didn’t like elves. She let me hate so she could keep her pride. I hated him so much, and I hated...” And then she stops. Lady Emmald took her in, yes, fed her, clothed her, gave her baked cookies that weren’t even some that she made. But she still lied to Sera, and as Sera says if you question her, “It was not just cookies! Lie to herself? Fair play, only hurts her. But she made me think there was something wrong with me.” That was what effects Sera, even now. When you talk to her after The Verchiel March and accept her actions, she will say “Right then, what do you mean? Because I am really not used to that. Acceptance thing you’re doing right there.” Although internalized, this means a lot more than many people think. She hasn’t had many experiences in being accepted for who she is.

I have a bit of a theory that Sera being raised as a City Elf was what exposed her to Andrastianism, as well as being raised by a human woman, however, I do think that it is incredibly unfair of quite a lot of people, especially in the Inquisition to make fun of her for being scared of magic. Remember that point of Fereldan being the most anti-magic of Thedas? Yeah we’re back to that. Now, throughout Inquisition, I had a really hard time with her the first time around, I was always on the defense. Then I remembered, she was raised in Denerim, during the Fifth Blight. Now, we all know she dislikes darkspawn, however even she states that people paid more attention to being against mages than the Blight. She lived in an area that already demonized magic, and saw it as a precursor for becoming a demon. That exposes a child to develop an eerie sense of distrust towards another person, particularly mages. She’s naturally terrified of anything that could result in a person becoming a demon, and even supports the existence of Circles, to a certain degree, because she believes they will be better off, with a belly full of warm food and a place where she thinks will be a better alternative for others. I do like her interactions with Dorian, as it shows a HUGE difference in the way they were raised and areas that effect them. Dorian has been exposed to magic since he was born, it is as natural to him as breathing and he has lived in wealthy privilege to be able to disregard anyone else’s beliefs and view them as silly. Sera, however, was not. She is a city elf woman, who compared to Dorian would amount to nothing no matter what she contributed to the society that southern Thedas builds. With her talks with Cassandra, she mentions Seekers using their position to seem scary because they can, and knocks Cassandra off her self righteous pedestal by having her realize that those in power are terrifying to those without and it should not be flaunted in people’s faces. She seems absolutely terrified of Cole, as she has been taught that it is justified to be scared of him and dehumanize him. Although to be fair he isn’t exactly human, but still, he doesn’t understand her but does try to. And eventually she just reciprocates communicating with him.

And now finally, the fact that Sera makes the Inquisitor choose to either disregard their own religion, or choose Andrastianism. This actually made some sense to me whenever I played and talked to her. It does make sense what she means. The Inquisitor didn’t choose to be made the Herald or the Inquisitor, but those are symbols of Andraste and the Chantry, and it is expected of the Inquisitor to abandon all that they used to be to become the symbol that the Inquisition is supposed to represent. No matter human, dwarf, elf, or Qunari, the Inquisitor is stripped away of their agency and ability to represent themselves, only becoming part of the Anchor because that is all that they can be. Is it correct? No. But Sera is the only one that outwardly reminds you of who you are to the people. Is she crass about it? Yes. However, she does not truly mean any harm in it. A lot of people take it that way. I took it that way too, but then it felt more of, “Hey, listen, you have people out there that believe in something bigger than you. I need you to understand that. You can’t have people claim you’re the Herald of Andraste and then worship your own gods, you need to keep your appearance to them so they can believe in you.” She reminds me of Josephine and Vivienne, except less subtle and much more willing to antagonize.

Then there’s her antagonization of the Dalish and what happens when its proven that the elves were not in fact gods and merely does not hesitate in tearing the Dalish people’s beliefs down. She does say, “elvy elves have shoved victim in my face a million times, we’re not proper if we’re not sad about the grand history that was stolen from us.” I do think that BioWare could have been less tone-deaf with the argument, however, it does prove that Sera’s not built to please, she’s built to argue her own thoughts on what she believes and be frank about it, even if she’s got some of the facts wrong. Someone so disconnected with their culture, and then ridiculed for not being apart of that culture is something I can relate to, and also leant that same empathy toward Sera. Being told you’re not enough of ____ would drive anyone away from sympathizing or even empathizing with the sufferings of your own people, in this case Sera’s own race.

Anyways, that’s about enough of her that I can speak of, this honestly was a surprise that I hadn’t expected to fully write about, but, I always felt that there was more that people weren’t seeing about her.

#dragon age #dragon age origins #hyperfixiating #hyperfixation #sera #dragon age sera #dragon age inquisition #dragon age inquistor #dorian pavus #vivienne de fer #dalish

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createandconstruct · 3 years

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can i ask about amarant coral? the monk in red himself~

Can you ask about Amarant Coral? *cracks fingers* Oh I insist that you do. Welcome to my Amarant Appreciation Post:

favorite thing about them: First off best thing about Amarant? His theme. The percussion and the guitar. It’s great and it captures him so well. People out here like “take Amarant out of the game he adds nothing.” EXCUSE ME? You remove the Amarant you remove the Amarant Theme my friend and that is something I do NOT vibe with.

least favorite thing about them: I wanna know more about him. Now Amarant doesn’t need a backstory or history in the game. In a sense, he already has one that connects him to Zidane and explains his motives and actions and eventual arc. But my issue is, Square never gave him anything else. If you look at Ultimania there’s additional lore about other characters, like Steiner for instance. You learn Steiner was a war orphan who was saved by the Pluto Knights - explaining his devotion to them. Amarant though? Square was like “uh... yeah he was born....? And then he uh got famous...? Idk then he met Zidane. You figure it out.” Square. I hate you. 18 years from his birth until he became “well known”. WHAT WAS HE DOING. WHY’D HE BECOME A SECURITY GUARD. WHAT WAS ON HIS RESUME. TELL MEEEE. Like, okay, what the actual in-game canon gives us on Amarant is sort of enough. He’s a purposely written mysterious “cool-guy” character so we’re given scraps to make him unknown but come on. In the published after-game canon, like Ultimania, we could have been given a bit more. He says he doesn’t remember anything about his origins or parents, but why. Was he another victim of Gaia’s wars? Probably. Was he born on a battlefield? Fighting for his life, living without comrades, taking scraps whenever he could? Was he betrayed when he was young? Is he a supposed to be a version of Zidane had he not been adopted into Tantalus by Baku??? These are questions I deserve answers to, Square.

favorite line: “’I can't just walk away. It goes against my nature...’ You're a real simpleton. Forget it, guys. There's no stopping this fool." I love this. Amarant figures Zidane out pretty quickly after Ipsen’s Castle. Zidane is hardheaded and also an actor. He acts cool and pretends his reasons for doing things are loose but when he’s decided something it’s always for a reason. You don’t need a reason to help people, but Zidane has his reasons for helping Kuja and while Amarant doesn’t give two shits what they are he knows Zidane won’t be stopped because, despite everything, Zidane saved a loser like him. Also this line “Tell me! Why didn't you kill me!?" Because I quote it all the time and it makes myself laugh. Amarant is such a drama queen and Zidane knows it. Zidane’s like “dude... what is your damage, it’s 5 pm on Tuesday in Madain Sari. I ain’t getting blood on my gloves cause you’re having a temper tantrum.” And then Amarant runs away to have an existential crisis. He’s 26 but compared to Zidane, he’s the real teenager with angst.

brOTP: I could talk about Zidane or Freya with Amarant but instead I’m gonna say the underrated dynamic of Amarant and Eiko (and also Vivi). Amarant with the kids is truly the greatest gift given by his presence in the game. Amarant has never known true suffering until he became a designated legal guardian of a group of minors. It also kills me how he’s the one to volunteer to carry Eiko and Vivi up the Iifa tree. He looks at Zidane and is like “you have seriously been the ‘adult’ of this group???”

OTP: Gotta say the Freya and Amarant dynamic. I really enjoyed their unlikely friendship in the game but then the content. The fan content. The Freya x Amarant fans out there, you win. Ya got me. You captured me and I am now imprisoned by their banter and begruntled allies to lovers story. Even if they’re not romantic I love them together and really wish the game gave us more of them. But even Lani and Amarant together are valid, though I prefer them as butting head bros. Not much content for my girl Lani out there either, she deserves more.

nOTP: Nothing I can think of. I tend to like platonic pairings for Amarant. The dude needs friends because he can barely define the word friendship.

random headcanon: Before Zidane returns at the end of the game Amarant wanders around a bit, unsure of what to do. He doesn’t feel any place with the others in Alexandria, Burmecia, or Lindblum. I imagine he goes off on his own for a bit like before but this time he’s not after Zidane or a fight. Instead he’s got no particular destination. Yet he somehow always finds himself running into people just like him - or the old him - friendless lonely people who are looking for a fight. He doesn’t go out his way to find these folks he simply runs into them and decides he might as well knock some sense into them. He does however make it his business to go after any murmur of people hatching any ideas of going after the far off little village on the Lost Continent. The home of the genomes and black mages. They were so helpless, so weak that anyone who’d want to mess with them is pathetic in Amarant’s book. Until Zidane returns, no one has the chance to even look at the Black Mage Village the wrong way because in the shadows Amarant lurks, making damn well sure of that.

unpopular opinion: I kinda love that he’s just there for most of the game? While I agree he gets the short end of the stick in the same way as Freya, not receiving additional individual character spotlight (which could have very well been supplied through discoverable lore in the world/npcs or through sidequests) I never considered his “standing off to the side” as a detriment to his character.

Many would probably agree that Amarant always felt like a bit of a parody of the loner character, or at least the stereotype of the loner character. Amarant is so easily paralleled with Squall and Cloud’s surface-level attitudes because his dialogue always felt like something to poke fun at. As the player we’re supposed to align with Zidane’s way of thinking and how he views Amarant. When Amarant loses to Zidane and pretty much grits his teeth and goes “KILL ME,” along with Zidane we’re supposed to kinda raise our brow at him and go “...really, dude?”

Amarant’s a character introduced as an antagonist who has more in common with the power hungry villains of the game. Like many of the characters in FFIX, Amarant is in search of purpose in life, which he has never found, because he was always looking in the wrong places - in places of violence and power. Very toxic-masculinity of him. Amarant is “cool” on an aesthetic level but in reality he’s the polar opposite of cool in terms of what FFIX states about the need for others to be intertwined in your experiences so that you can live a full life.

I sort of love that he’s like a grumpy pitball following a 16 year old and his friends around. Then he sits in the corner when they all meet up and discuss current events acting like he doesn’t care (not to mention he casually walks as everyone is running as fast as they can to escape Terra - made me laugh cry on my first playthrough) He is “just there” but that’s because he has no where else to be, no where else to go, he’s a man without a home. And until Zidane offers his hand, at the point where Amarant is most willing to take it at Ipsen’s Castle, he’s not truly a party member. He IS an outsider for almost the entire game but at Ipsen Castle he joins the party, becomes a comrade, and decides he’ll allow himself to change paths and start a life where he has friends and lives, as well as fights for them. Which is why after that moment, Amarant finally has a victory pose.

song i associate with them: I was scratching my head for so long trying to think of a song or track that had Amarant vibes until it hit me. Outskirt Stand by Tsukasa Tawada (from Pokemon Colosseum). Amarant is so chill, he’s not a bombastic guy, so he needs a theme that drops me in the rocky open desert of the Lost Continent like I’m just lumbering around looking for a monkey-tailed menace. Some other Amarant tunes: Pyrite Town, The Under, Snagem Hideout tracks from Pokemon Colosseum. This post is just an elaborate call to action for everyone to listen to the Pokemon Colosseum soundtrack. Tsukasa Tawada is so great and he has a YouTube. Check him out.

favorite picture of them:

Yoshitaka Amano’s Salamander Coral. I love him. He had too much power.

Also everything drawn by @crispy-ghee. Everything. I will think of this Comic forever until I die. Tattoo it on my flesh. The banter, the dynamics, the post-game content, the Zidane prince-consort outfit, the new Amarant outfit, the stuck-in-the-same-place relationship him and Freya have. Perfect. Go read it and consume Crisipy’s stuff. And also check them and their current art out, they just consistently get better and better. Here’s a first panel preview of my fav comic. Read it.

@hannahlady‘s Amarant art and their Freya/Amarant art is just ugh. *Chef’s Kiss* Here is another preview because you should go look at it.

Here’s a piece that deserves so much more love by @snackage. I LOVE how they drew Amarant. Here’s a little preview. It’s SO GOOD

Anyway TL;DR: Amarant is love and life and you’ll have to pull him from my little gremlin hands.

#asks #scriberat #amarant coral #ffix #final fantasy ix #amarant #final fantasy 9 #freya #amarant x freya #lani #zidane tribal #eiko carol

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paragonrobits · 3 years

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Go ahead and tell about the followers/recruits! I'll admit i'm mostly interested in Fallen-From-Grace, but give me the entire list! (You should draw her at some point.)

X D i might consider that!

so im putting this under read more for length

Morte: he's an automatic follower and its best to keep him, especially if you're not statted up as a combat monster, because Morte, despite his appearances, IS. He's a fighter in terms of class and he's actually got some fairly high stats. You need to do some side quests (such as one gained from helping a woman in Sigil named Ingress; you recieved a bag of teeth tat level up with Morte, and are INCREDIBLY useful since you're most likely to keep him throughout the game.) Incidentally, a thing to keep in mind is that Morte IS a chronic liar, but he is the only explicitly Good party member for a reason and while you probably can't trust him to give a straight answer, you CAN trust him with your life. Note, however, that his claims to be a mimir are highly suspect, as they're non-sapient constructs made of metal, and he's rather more similar to the namesake, Mimir of Norse mythology.

Dak'kon: He's a fighter/mage and a really strong one at that. He's probably the most straightforward combat monster in the party in a normal playthrough, and he gets even stronger when you complete his personal quest by going through the dialogue concerning his religion and backstory, which opens up as you learn from it. He's easy enough to get, too, by talking to him at thE smouldering corpse bar. He's also noteworthy in that he retroactively influenced his entire species; prior to this game they were chaotic beings, but afterwards, they were reworked to match his stoic, Zen vibe.

Annah: She automatically joins your party after a certain point in the story, and she's the main thief in the game. You can get trainign to become a thief, and she can help you spec into being a thief if you change class. (She is EXTREMELY tsundere.)

Fall-From-Grace: Again, its actually pretty easy to recruit her, and is almost story mandated; she is in fact the game's primary healer. Eventually you will go to her Brothel of Slaking INtellectual Lusts (a combination of a woman's educational college of sorts, and a debate club that invites people to different kinds of intellectual discourse; FFG has a strange sense of humor). You can recruit her, i think, fairly easily by engaging her in social discourse and doing a side quest; if you have high INT and WIS, though, you can recruit her on the spot.

Nordam: He's actually pretty easy to miss. You have to buy a specific item from a dealer in strange curios in Sigil (in roughly the same area where you can meet FFG); a modron cube, which you can play with like an action figure to annoy Morte, but you can also use it to open a portal to what is essentially a parody of dungeon delving. Torment is unique in otherwise not having much of that kind of gameplay, and it was created by modrons (mechanical spirit creatures from the plane of Order, Mechanacus) to understand adventuring. Eventually you should gain the option to make it more difficult and Nordom is hanging out in a room in the Hard difficulty; its a pretty dangerous area and can take a LONG time to navigate, so be cautious! Nordom's a weird robot guy but is also shaped like a friend. "I think, therefore I am," he says. "...I THINK."

These guys are the assumed default party; the ones most conducive to a Good playthrough, and generally assumed ot be the canon party. There are also two other party members, but you would have to choose not to take oneo f the above to bring them with you:

Ignus: The sMouldering Corpse bar has a perpetually burning body within it, seemingly delighted at its own constant agony. This is Ignus, whom you might have heard as the guy who killed an entire district in Sigil, burning everyone in it alive just to see it burn. If you find a certain item in the catacombs beneath Sigil, during a story-mandated exploration, you can use it on him to wake him up, and you can choose to recruit him. Note that while he isn't evil (and is explicitly of the Chaotic neutral 'force of nature, incapable of understanding the harm he's doing') he is still most approprirate towards an evil playthrough, and he's very unpredictable and prone to lashing out when upset.

Vhailor: Oh man, this guy. You can find him during the latter part of the game, nearly towards the end, imprisoned in a prison beneath a city called Curst. It's actually impossible to miss him, i think; he's a big spiky suit of armor and you HAVE to walk by him to progress. He is a living suit of armor, previosuly the most fanatical Mercykiller in existence, and remains so commited towards the ideal of Justice that it empowers him, even in death, and he's not actually aware that he IS dead. He is able to see the crimes of others, and gain the power to punish it, and gets along poorly with you and your party members. If you're unable to pick the right dialogue options, he may attempt to kill you. As a rule, he's Lawful Neutral, NOT Good. His sect is dedicated to the idea of murdering the concept of mercy and compassion, and he is dangerously obsessive and strict even by their standards. He is cruel, heartless and without remorse, and gets along VERY poorly with Fall-From-Grace, whom he calls 'Mercy's whore'. (For her part, she's adept enough in philosophy to essentially back him into a corner and force him to concede that point.) Its not hard to say that he and Ignus are mutually opposed to one another. I've never seen what happens if they meet, but its probably not pretty.

On the other hand, he's ALSO so ludicrously strong he can solo the final boss entirely on his own. And he's voiced by Keith David.

Generally speaking, my advice is to not recruit Ignus or Vhailor; you CAN talk to them without recruiting them, i think. Alternatively, if you can't find Nordam, pick one of these guys as your final party member, though Nordam is ultimately the best choice. If not in terms of combat ability, at least in character. He's a sweet, confused robot cube who talks to his crossbows. Better that than an omnicidal pyromaniac or a guy who is a living embodiment of how NOT to do a Justice.

#replies #planescape torment

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four-loose-screws · 3 years

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An Interview with Mr. Toshiyuki Toyonaga about Fire Emblem (Claude‘s Japanese VA), Pg. 7

Chatting As Just a Player

As a player, how did you play “Three Houses?”

Toyonaga When I started, I planned to complete two playthroughs, and on my first playthrough, I didn’t look up anything at all. Because of that, I didn’t know things like how to scout the characters from the other classes. Someone told me “It seems like you’re missing something,” and I thought, then maybe I have to raise their support level? But even when I did that, I still couldn’t recruit them, so next I thought that maybe it had to do with stats, and did a lot of trial and error. I only realized that it might have something to do with weapon proficiency (skill levels) and support levels during the latter half of the Academy Phase. Because of all of that, I was filled with wishes that I had recruited this character and that character as I was thrust into the War Phase, and I was filled with regret during the three-way battle. (Chapter 17 and the battle at Gronder)

Because you encountered the other students as enemies, right?

Toyonaga Yes. I remember thinking “Curse you!!” when Bernadetta attacked from the ballista because I didn’t scout her. Laughs. Having to fight the characters that I wanted to come to my side was really painful as I cleared the map. And so, that was how I played the game. I remember thinking it was a particularly pure playthrough. I also remember thinking “There’s so, so many of these!” as I collected the fallen items from around the monastery. When I think of the lost items, I remember stuff like the fish. Laughs. Fishing was fun too, and so was growing things in the greenhouse… though I forgot about it a lot, so there were some plants that didn’t grow. As you can guess, I ended up harvesting what I planted before the time skip five years later, after returning to Garreg Mach.

Which difficulty level did you choose?

Toyonaga On my first playthrough, I chose normal classic. I play with the thought process that has followed me throughout the series, that I can’t let anyone die, so I have never once chosen casual mode.

We’d like to ask you about what impressions you were left with when you played normal mode.

Toyonaga I thought that even normal was hard too! I progressed through the game without utilizing the free maps much at all. I only leveled up by completing the main maps and paralogues, so the War Phase was tough. There were many times where Claude and Byleth did nearly all of the work. I also gave Lysithea Lorenz’s Thyrsus Staff, giving her four range, so there were also a lot of situations where her magic did a lot of work even from far away. There ended up being a huge gap between Leonie and Ignatz’s levels and everyone else’s, and felt sorry about that as I continued through the game.

Did you make Lorenz a physical or a magic unit?

Toyonaga I made Lorenz a Dark Knight. He was closer to a dark mage cavalry unit. Also, I remember thinking it was kinda cool that Grappler Raphael could attack four times in a row as he punched his enemies with all his might. Marianne fulfilled the role of the healer, and Hilda swung around her axe with great force. However, my Hilda’s defense didn’t grow very much, so I kept it in my mind that she couldn’t go out on many risky missions as I played.

What scenes did you like, or what scenes left an impression on you?

Toyonaga I liked the mystery of the scenes where Byleth and Sothis spoke in the place that resembled a throne room, that was a sort of spirit world. I also really liked Seteth and Flayn’s conversations.

They’re all characters that are all similar to each other in some way!

Toyonaga They are. When their allies learned of Flayn and Seteth’s true identities and relationship, a lot happened, and their allies changed a bit… Aside from that, because Claude is an archer, I also really liked being able to hear his conversations with Shamir, as they are both archers. It felt like she was a big sister.

The developers said that this game’s storytelling, and the creation of how noble society functions, among other aspects, were developed with Genealogy of the Holy War in mind, so what sort of impression did that have on you, as someone who has many memories of that game?

Toyonaga There were many times where I thought that might be the case, that Three Houses was based on Genealogy, but as we talk about it now, I sort of think that might be why it was so easy for me to become fond of Three Houses… They both feature a type of war that doesn't really feel rewarding at all… And questions like “Who’s really behind all of this?” and “Is fighting this fight really what’s right?”, that deepened Genealogy's story, were things I also felt really strongly during the War Phase of Three Houses.

We agree! And you can even play the villain’s side of the story.

Toyonaga About that, I thought that Hubert and Dedue’s roles were so unfair! They are considered the closest confidants to Edelgard and Dimitri respectively, existing as their right-hand men. The Golden Deer don’t have anyone in that position… Lorenz would never be someone like that.

Both Laugh.

Toyonaga Lorenz finally comes to support Claude during the War Phase, but the way that Hubert and Dedue are so devoted because they are right-hand men is really moving, and as men, it’s so cool! Oh, I mean “man,” as in “manly man...”* I could talk on and on like this for five minutes about just one character. Laughs.

(above) Hubert and Dedue both serve their lord without any concern for their own well-being. Also, Mr. Toyonaga also told us that he didn’t choose a different class from the Golden Deer even for his second playthrough, so we showed him scenes like how manly (!?) Hilda acts when she faces Claude as an enemy.

It feels weird to hear your own voice

Did your impression of Claude change after recording?

Toyonaga My original impression of Claude was that his core personality cannot be changed, but aside from that, he gives off the mood that he has the flexibility to accept the opinions of many types of people… That sort of image. That part didn’t change the entire time we were recording, so after recording, I don’t think my thoughts changed then, either. I just thought from time to time that he says some pretty snobby things. Laughs.

He does. Laughs.

Toyonaga He talks like that to the professors, to his fellow students in his class… ‘He… He can say nasty things like that?!’ I thought. But I think it’s still a good part about him, or not bad, at least.

So your image for performing Claude’s role was consistent from beginning to end. Does that mean that you didn’t have to do many retakes?

Toyonaga We hardly did any retakes. I corrected myself on my own when I mispronounced town names that were difficult to say, and things like that, but aside from those physically difficult to perform lines, I don’t feel that we did that many retakes.

So how did you feel as a player when you heard Claude’s voice?

Toyonaga This much is obvious, but when I first heard my own performance in a Fire Emblem game, it felt weird. And on top of that, I don’t know why exactly, but I wanted Claude to get married and have a paired ending, and I chose Professor Byleth. So I ended up confessing to myself! Laughs.

Laughs.

Toyonaga I enjoyed the game in a way that only I could. But it was really weird the entire time. Hm, how do I put it… I wanted to express myself in the world of Fire Emblem, and wanted to confirm that I did a great job of that, so I listened really carefully to my own performance as I played the game.

That’s the point you discussed before, that you wanted a portrayal that made the game feel like it really happened in history, right?

Toyonaga Yes. Was I able to express what I wanted how I wanted? I played the game with that thought in my head. ...And lastly, this is completely unrelated, but as I played the game, I was also thinking “Ingrid sure is really cute!” the entire time. Laughs.

#fire emblem #fe #fe3h #fe16 #claude #claude von reigen #toshiyuki toyonaga #toyonaga toshiyuki #nindori #nintendo dream #nintendo #switch #nintendo switch #japan #japanese #translation #claude va interview

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fireemblems24 · 3 years

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SS Chapter 18 & 19

Whew, felt like it took a long time to reach this next chapter. Life's been busier than usual lately, but here we are.

Spoilers possibly up until Silver Snow Chapter 18 (and other routes around the same time).

Pre-Battle 18

Should I tag this as Verdant Wind spoilers since they basically follow the same plot? Only slightly kidding.

We storming the capital now! Woot! Is Edelgard really going down in one freaking chapter though?

Are they finally going to acknowledge that Byleth's marching to chop down his former student? Because so far he's felt exactly nothing about Edelgard. Not regret, not longing, not horniness, not anger, not vengeance. It's like she's some faceless evil emperor he's never meant before for all the emotional impact their former relationship's had in part 2 so far.

ARE WE GONNA GET RHEA BACK SOON??? Please. I want to see what role she's going to play. There's still so much I don't know about her.

Ok, seeing the map, I don't see Edelgard, but I do see both Hubert and the Death Knight despite defeating them a million times already.

They really shouldn't let us fight the Death Knight so many times if they wanted him to come across intimidating. Even early on, Lysithea with Dark Spikes and Dimitri with a horse killer weapon just melt him. Maybe it's harder on Maddening.

Battle 18

Ugh, I hate split maps. No, Seteth, I don't want to split up.

Hubert sounds so sinister. OMG I love him. He doesn't care - at all - that there were his former classmates.

So Lysithea nuked the Death Knight into another dimension . . . again. Is he dead for real this time? Because it seemed official this time. Finally.

Oh, unique dialogue with Hubert and Ferdinand. The drama. Too bad his Boltings have a 0% hit chance on Ferdinand.

Now time to waste Hubert's second Bolting.

LAMO that Imperial Soldier lady also has Bolting, but Linhardt just waited her out. She did a total of 1 damage to him lol. She's got 5 though and that's annoying, so Petra just took her out.

Having Byleth finish Hubert off since I bet there's more unique dialogue.

Hubert threatening Byleth. Name a more iconic duo.

OMG Byleth' gaunlets broke lamo. Guess someone else will actually finish Hubert.

Wow, Hubert's generic dialogue "not even death will make you consequential." Told that to poor Bernie. Still took an arrow to the face though.

And seems like he's dead-dead this time.

Does he always give you a Goddess Icon when he dies. Because that's funny if he does.

Oh - MVP Petra! She deserves it. She's really catching up to Ferdie and Sylvain. It's just - she never dodges like Ferdinand does, and can't take the punishment Sylvain does.

Post-Battle 18/Pre-Battle 19

WAIT - WAIT - WAIT - WAIT. DEDUE. DEDUE IS HERE? MY BOY? HE'S HERE. WHY IS HE HERE? 😭😭😭😭😭😭

Yeah, wtf is he doing in Enbarr?

Oh - Dedue here's for Edelgard's blood. Nice.

Does this mean I get to use Dedue????

Holy shit, Dedue. He infiltrated Enbarr and gathered intell?

What a champ.

Dedue is low-key the best spy in this game guys. Gathered intel to help an invading army take a castle literally under Edelgard's and Hubert's noses and let's not forget how he broke Dimitri out of prison.

Dedue 💖💖💖💖💖💖💖

And Rhea's inside! We get to see Rhea AND Dedue again.

Wait, why is Dedue leaving me? No 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

Don't worry Dedue. In another playthrough, I am pampering you and Dimitri and in the next one, you two are getting married pairing up.

I'm guessing we're not going back to Garreg Mach between these battles? Because that would be - eh - make no sense.

Oh, so now we have the "I don't want to kill Edelgard" or "Can we walk the same path as her." Why are those two my only options though? Where's the "fuck yeah" option? It's way more fun to embrace the kill 'em all thing. Except Dimitri and Dedue because my heart

Ok, Caspar, you're forgiven for your CF nonsense calling Edelgard out.

Why is Seteth always lying to me? He keeps saying "I'll leave it in your hands." But then doesn't and yells at me.

Battle 19

Ok. I decided I'm playing these two back-to-back.

Does Verdant Wind do this too? Fight Hubert and the Death Knight, then jump straight to Edelgard, no month in-between?

Because it if it does - it's going to take forever to get to Azure Moon, because, unfortunately, I won't be able to play this game for close to a month after this because of work and other stuff.

Mannnn, I am NOT looking forward to this map with my VW gang. In SS, my Sylvain, Ferdinand, and Petra are all super reliable. And Lysithea can nuke anything. No one in my VW gang is as good as any of those four (though, Claude has gotten more speed lately - thank the stars).

OMG DEDUE IS BACK. HE came, but he's green. WHYYYYY.

So . . . does Dedue have unique battle dialogue with Edelgard? She's all that's left and he's marching towards her. I think I'm going to test this. I'd laugh my butt off if he crit and killed her.

No unique dialogue, but it feels good letting Dedue get a hit on here. I get Dedue could kill her. I could just keep healing him, and she's got no one left. Should I do it guys?

I think I'm going to do it.

I'll let Byleth peck at her with his puny magic damage so I can get that dialogue, and then Dedue's killing Edelgard next round probably.

LAMO Sothis is a false Goddes, but like, she's living in Byleth's head so. We know she's not false.

Oh, well, Edelgard crit Dedue. So I just reset things and my ever reliable Lysithea nuked Edelgard onto another planet, as she does.

Weird she and Lysithea got unique dialogue though.

Ohhh cut scene. Why does Edelgard have a sword though?

Why is Edelgard asking Byleth to kill her? I guess it makes sense. He was her teacher here.

She does know all these people are killing each other because of her, right?

Oh, wow, he just lopped her head off. That's maybe as badass as when Byleth just offed Randolph (or however you say his name). I'm legit impressed the game didn't milk that harder.

Though they did that "I wanted to walk with you line . . ." Which . . . I'll take it. That's not too bad. She did, but what a twisted path she's walking.

I'm a bit conflicted about her death here though. It seemed kind of . . . weird? I expected Edelgard, from the way she talks in CF, to do down fighting. Not pleading to "my teacher" on her knees and panting.

MVP Lysithea. Guess landing that last hit on Edelgard motivated her.

Post-Battle 19

Are we finally gonna see Rhea?

Why did Hubert right us a letter?

Oh, it's about those mage people. And they want revenge. How original. If they're the enemies of all of Fodlan, why did you fight with them? Like why not take them out, then Rhea, who doesn't . . . you know . . . want to destroy the world?

Hubert and Dedue the real MVPs of this route though.

I can't with the name "those who slither in the dark" though. How lame.

Seteth said "kill every last one of them" though.

RHEA. REAH's BACK. 😭😭

And her hair is down! She looks pretty. She looks sickely though.

Oh, we going to learn some stuff now?

I don't remember who Nemesis is. So he's a grave robber. And a genocider. Wonderful. So is that when Seteth's wife died? Or?

I'm guessing we don't get playable Rhea, though I bet someone would've told me already if we did, because she's in such poor shape.

Now we get to kick the people's ass who killed Jeralt?

RHEA IS COMING WITH US

OMG Caspar wants to carry Rhea on his back 😂and then Dorothea has to point out how that might not work for our short king.

No one really mentioned Edelgard and Hubert dying though. Maybe in the monastery?

Guess I'll find out later. Now to go play these exact same maps, but with the Golden Deer!

#fire emblem 3 houses #fire emblem three houses #silver snow #dedue molinaro #rhea

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felassan · 4 years

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Dragon Age development insights from David Gaider - PART 3

This information came from DG on a recent SummerfallStudios Twitch stream where he gave developer commentary while Liam Esler continued playing DAO from where they had left off in Part 1 and Part 2. I transcribed it in case there’s anyone who can’t watch the stream (for example due to connection/tech limitations, data, time constraints, personal accessibility reasons, etc). A lot of it is centered on DAO, but there’s also insights into other parts of the franchise. Some of it is info which is known having been put out there in the past, and some of it is new. There’s a bit of overlap or repetition with topics covered in Parts 1 and 2. This post leaps from topic to topic as it’s a transcript of a conversational format. It’s under a cut due to length.

The stream can currently be watched back here. Next week LE will be streaming a different DAO playthrough with commentary from another guest. Two weeks from now LE and DG will return to continue this playthrough for another stream session like this one.

(Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)

[wording and opinions DG’s, occasionally LE’s; paraphrased]

The Battle of Ostagar cutscene is one of the first big cutscenes that got made during production. When it was shown to the team for the first time, it was one of those moments where DG felt like “Awesome, this is a game!” Context: During the development of a game it feels more like doing a series of disconnected tasks and assets rather than working on a game, so seeing stuff come together at times like this is rad. The first time it was shown, it had temporary placeholder voiceacting.

Pathfinding is always a nightmare to do, especially in games which involve a party of NPCs. As soon as other characters are involved alongside the PC, it’s exponentially more difficult and takes up a lot more resources. The PC is the most complex thing going on visually on-screen, with so many moving pieces, and in party-based games you have four [etc] of them. So, some critique that’s made of the DA games in regards to this subject which compares it to games like The Witcher doesn’t really make sense, as The Witcher has a solo PC.

‘Weird mage hats’ didn’t really become a trademark ‘DA thing’ akin to their place of random pieces of cheese around the world until later games. For DAO, someone probably asked the artists to create “mage helmets”. Mage hats actually looked better in the concept art than they did in-game. What happened was that they were already modelled and then they didn’t have time to re-do them.

DAO was made for PC first. The plan from the get-go though was that it would be an all-platform release (PC/360/PS3). Games like these are always made for the “lowest common denominator” from among the various platforms that they’re being planned to release for. Games have to be made for the most stringent/basic of the platforms because this makes for less conversion rate. At the time of DAO’s development, the PS3 was getting weak graphically and getting old, and this was quite a limitation: “Why do we have to limit [crowds?] because of this one platform?” “Well, we just gotta”. The original models were a bit too detailed. Later on, the artists started making models that had lower polycounts that they could put in a bit more of. DA was never really focused on making environments realistic in an ambient manner (making environments less “gamey” and more lived in, like having crowded places). They could have put more emphasis there but this would have led to a resources issue. Ambience basically wasn’t a high priority. As a writer DG isn’t keen on this decision and naturally he wanted the world to look more realistic, but he noted that it’s easy for him to say this when this would be work that he didn’t have to do personally.

During DAO development, they might have just had a dev sphere originally that was called “tech design”. DG thinks this was later broken up into systems design, combat design and maybe level design. Level designers are the people that are the implementers of the plot. Narrative design is a branch of the level design spoke. System designers respond to requests from lead designers. Narrative designers and writers don’t interact with system designers much unless they have to. As an example of interaction here, system designers might come to writers and say, “Alright, so we’re doing combat, what are the sorts of things a mage can do in this world?” The writers would be like “Ok, these are the sorts of spells we imagined.” The system designers might then come back with “Ok, that fulfills 2 of the 10 things we need mages to be able to do in combat. Is it possible that mages could do [this]?” Sometimes it is, and other times it would be like “No, that’s really outside of the lore”. Still, sometimes said original-lore-breaking things would be added to the game a week later due to necessity and DG would be like “Oh ok”. This kind of stuff is an insight into how some aspects of the lore came to be or changed over time during development.

The system designers on DAO got a better idea of what could be done and what could not be done according to the lore as things went on. At first, DG had to keep telling them things like “It’s not that big a deal, but in the lore mages can’t teleport. Instant teleportation isn’t possible in the world”. The system designers needed a spell where someone could get from spot A to spot B really fast on the battlefield. DG said that that’s fine in itself, “have them turn into a cloud of bees or have a light that moves between the two places. We can use magic as a transition or as a speed thing, but what is against the lore is instant teleportation, to traverse distance like that”. At first the system designers weren’t on board with it, but they got on board with it later.

This sort of thing doesn’t just depend on the system designers. It also depends on what the tech artists are willing to do. Sometimes a certain request made of them was too hard and they said they weren’t able to do it. Other times it was a matter of DG not communicating the request properly, or the tech artists had already done the work and so throwing out all their work to re-do it just because he didn’t communicate clearly wouldn’t have been cool. So sometimes the originally planned lore got contravened, and sometimes things other parts of the team implemented in the game became the new lore.

LE made an insightful observation at this point: You can’t think of game development as a cohesive series of decisions that everyone on the team is involved in. This simple isn’t how it works at all, especially on large complex projects. There are processes at some studios for decision-making, but most of the time, a bunch of decisions get made by system designers. Others get made by level designers, still others by narrative designers. Situations then arise where someone notices a certain decision and that that decision and another one contradict each other. This is where conflict arises and a solution has to be negotiated. This is why often in games we get elements in the end product that are dissonant, because it was discovered too late or by the time it was realized, it was too difficult to change. It’s actually a miracle that on a game of DAO’s depth and scope that all these things largely hold together. [My note: With this insight and the context below on documentation, it makes sense how BW sometimes appear to ‘forget aspects of their own lore’ or end up contradicting parts of the lore in different parts of the franchise]

Sometimes such things would be noticed in time and DG would go and say, “Can we not do that or do something else instead?” and the relevant parties would be totally accommodating and do it (depending on how much time they had or how much time it would take to remedy). Sometimes this worked out and sometimes it didn’t. For the most part, everyone wants to work together. DG couldn’t be involved in every aspect of systems design “like some kind of All-Watchful eye of lore”, so he had to rely on the people who were there knowing enough from the documentation. Not everybody reads every document however. There was so much documentation even back during DAO. DG can only imagine the sheer amount of world/lore documentation that now exists now in the run-up to DA4; he said he thinks that nobody at this point on the current team has read it all, as editor/lore-wrangler Ben Gelinas isn’t with BW anymore. Lots of legacy documentation accumulated very quickly. Sometimes, the old document would still be there. Over time it became harder for people to discern which was the most recent version of a particular document. Sometimes people didn’t update the relevant documentation after changing things. Lore documentation was particularly bad for this issue. BG wrangled all the documentation and created an internal reference wiki (essentially acting as a lorekeeper). He was constantly coming in and picking DG’s brain to clarify conflicting aspects or obtain the correct, in-date information etc (“Good on him”).

DAO was the first time DG was involved in voice-recording. Prior to that he was only on the receiving end, in that the recordings would come in and he’d review them as they did so. DAO is when BW set up their own VO department and where Caroline Livingstone came on. CL wanted DG and Mike Laidlaw to be more involved in the casting process. As a result, the writers then were to write casting scripts: like, ‘For Morrigan, can you write a 1 page script that goes through 3 big emotions? [like regular talking for a bit, then here’s a bit of heightened emotion such as anger, then here’s a part where they’re being funny if they were a comedic character] These scripts had to be kept short so that the recording that was made from it wouldn’t be more than 30-40 seconds in length.

For the initial VA sessions, DG and CL flew down to Technicolor studioin LA and they had all the major castmembers there (later on, recording sessions were done a lot more remotely; this became easier as BW’s setup got more sophisticated). The idea was that they would both be present live in-person for the first 2 or 3 sessions to help each VA find their ‘voice’, and for DG at the first session to sit down with each VA and walk them through who their character was, what DA was about, and help them figure out how their character should talk. Claudia Black was the first of these sessions and he was “a wreck” going into that one. It got easier after that however. CL gave directions into the soundproof booth and DG was present to give notes on things like pronunciation or the intentions behind some lines. He says he learned everything he now knows about VO direction from CL. The things and tricks CL can do to get a performance out of an actor are amazing. Sometimes an actor would get a bit fixated or stuck on a particular way of delivering a line. CL had atrick to help them past this; “I want you to clear your mind, and I want you to give me a version of this line that’s more yellow”. The idea is that they just had to break out of where they had been stuck in that mindset, and the thing was that it doesn’t matter what “yellow” meant, but what was important was what “yellow” meant to the actor. They could then take that new varied delivery and progress from there.

Alistair’s dialogue when the PC talks to Flemeth outside her hut was the first complex conversation DG wrote for DAO. It was the first one that had a lot of branching and fiddling to it. The hardest conversations to write are the ones with a lot of exposition, and when they do have exposition still making this interesting and natural. At this point in the game, the player has no agency, just reactivity. The devs talked a lot about this subject when they wrote the origin stories. Some of the stories allow the player to initially say no and refuse to join the Wardens, but you always end up being railroaded (the devs here ended up doing a form of the trope ‘But Thou Must!’). Do you give the player the option to say no? Is it important to allow them that option? At some point, writers have to accept that the player has some level of buy-in and is game to play. They discussed a lot where they sat on this and what is agency. “Maybe don’t worry about offering the player every possible choice, but about having reactivity.”

Loghain wasn’t okay with letting Cailan die. He didn’t sit and angst about it openly where the player could see, and once the decision had been made, it being Loghain, it was Made and Had To Be Done (he felt that it was something that had to happen). But he didn’t kill the son of the woman he’d once loved dearly as a random off-handed thing.

The Solas twist was planned from the beginning, from the DAO dev days. Such big things/broad strokes have stayed the same. However, some of the details have changed or been added along the way. They didn’t know for instance that Solas was going to be a companion; that was something they came up with when they were planning DAI. Flemeth’s true identity has never changed.

Zevran says Rinna was an elf, but WoT says she was a bastard child of a noble in line for the Antivan throne (the Antivan royal family being human). When asked if this was an oversight, DG said yes she was a bastard, but she may have been really far down the line of succession, i.e. technically in line, but would probably never have been allowed to take the throne in practise had that scenario ever actually arisen.

DA was maybe inspired a bit/some by ASOIAF. This was way before it was on TV of course. DG at the time had read the first book or so. He liked the fact that it was a fantasy setting but low-magic, and was about the people in the world and their politics rather than magic, prophecy and other high fantasy stuff.

It was only by DAI that the system designers decided that it was okay to think of banter as an “activity that players engaged in”. In previous games, the devs had inadvertently managed to ‘train’ players to immediately stop when companion banter fires so that they could hear it all (because if you do something else, it gets cut off). When the level designers put together the spaces, they accounted for what players would be doing i.e. how much time between combat. They didn’t however account for like “You’re travelling down this hall and there’s a banter for half of that space. This is an activity, so it’s okay not to put anything in there”. This is how the inadvertent training happened, when originally banters were supposed to be a thing that ran as you move around the world (as opposed to stopping and standing still).

When asked if the Blight resulted from the creation of the Veil or pre-dates it: “I think you’ll probably have to wait on the game[s] for that answer, if it ever explains it”. He was also asked whether Arlathan is the Golden City. He won’t answer such questions naturally because they are “DeepLooooooore™~~ ♫”.

DG isn’t sure that he will play DA4 when it comes out. It’s not that PW and the team won’t do a good job, they will, it’s just that when DG plays RPGs he has an analytical mindset going on and finds it difficult to slip into the game and just enjoy. For DA4, as he was previously so involved in DA, there’ll naturally probably be an extra level of that with feeling like “What would I have done [for particular parts of the game’s design]?”. Alternatively he might instead feel like “Wow, this is awesome, here’s a game I would have made but didn’t have to do any work on!” DG stressed that it’s important to him to be fair about the work of his former colleagues - he wouldn’t want to come out and be like “I wouldn’t have made [this or that] choice”. He also noted that just because something might be a call he personally wouldn’t have implemented in the game, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad call. There are people out there where if DG intimated at all that there was an aspect of DA4 that he wasn’t keen on, he’s worried that they would pounce on it and use it as ammunition against the current team (who are his friends that he really cares about and wants to do well). He walked away from DA voluntarily and is happy his game will continue on. PW popped by in chat at this point and agreed that it’s definitely hard to play something that you used to work on.

Other assorted tidbits:

DG really opposed the part at the Battle of Ostagar where mabari are set to charge the darkspawn horde - “That’s not how you would use dogs [in war]”

There was supposed to be a cutscene where Flemeth rescues the HoF and Alistair from the top of the Tower of Ishal in her dragon-form. This was cut. DG remembered being angry about this like “nobody is gonna buy that you fall unconscious and then wake up in the hut totally rescued. [...] I guess I’m not always right”

When DG went to Beamdog there was a period where they thought about making a Baldur’s Gate 3. They put together a pitch and had a long series of discussions contemplating things like “What do we need from BG3? What do we expect it to have in order to have the BG name? What is needed and not needed to connect to from the previous games?”

DG isn’t sure who designed the DAO inventory system

PW in chat recalled a game writer from another company who was really ragging on DAI on the Christmas Day after release

Narrative designer and system designer are very different positions/roles with very different responsibilities

Simon Templeton as Loghain did all his voicework stuff in one take, which was very impressive

It would have been the marketing department that chose 30 Seconds To Mars for music. DA was really good at choosing up-and-coming acts for this that weren’t huge when they used their songs, but became huge afterwards

During work on Baldur’s Gate 2 was the most DG has ever crunched. He slept in the office a few times

“As soon as you get both Alistair and Morrigan in the party, that’s when it’s like ahh yes, this is a BioWare game”

Were Flemeth and Morrigan’s interactions with each other and the PC when Morrigan is being told to leave the Wilds and go with the Hero an act, considering that Morrigan did know about the OGB plan? No. That was The Plan, but said plan wasn’t like “Ok, she’s going to leave Right Now”

The elves and the inversion of the traditional elven trope are DG’s favorite part of the world/world-building

One of the original intentions for DAO was to make it so that the player wouldn’t need a healer in the party, or that there would be different kinds of healing, or that healing itself wouldn’t be a thing, but this just didn’t work out

The Imperial Highway used to be a really important part of the lore but it kind of got forgotten a bit

It’s kinda funny that after release some players expressed that Corinne Kempa’s accent as Leliana was “sooo fake”. It’s not fake, she’s actually a Brit that moved to France when she was young, so she has the exact type of accent that Leliana would have (Leliana was born in Orlais and is culturally Orlesian, but her mother was Fereldan and she considers herself as such)

They talked some about the need for documentation and how doing this can feel beurocratic and uncreative and how like you’re not working on a game or writing. PW in chat expressed that there was a year where they spent a lot of it working in PowerPoint and Excel, “so I feel this”

When they switched art directors to Matt Goldman, his first big complaint was about all the brown. He came to DG like “Is there a lore reason for or are you particularly in favor of the brown for story reasons?” DG was like “Uhh no” and Matt was then like “Ok good”

Console codes/commands aren’t usually stripped out of a game before release, they are usually still in the built, just disabled. The system itself is not removed but how to access said system is

BW doesn’t crunch as bad as we hear some companies do, and kind of prided itself on “not being terrible at crunch”. But BW’s “not terrible at crunch” is still crunch. We obviously don’t commend abusive family members for only abusing people on certain days of the week or whatever

Kate Mulgrew is American but she at times did the same thing a lot of the British VAs did, which was that the devs had a lot of struggle with getting them to say “darkspawn” correctly, with the emphasis in the right places. They’d say “dark SPAWN” as if it was two words with an adjective, and the stress put in the wrong place

Lack of children in DAI was a resources thing. They only had time to make a certain number of models. There was a series of meetings where they had to decide what things to cut. In the last meeting it was like ‘Here’s a bunch of things you don’t want to cut, we need to cut 4 of them’

They decided to put horned qunari back in DA2 because then they had the resources to do so. They then ended up having to explain why there were hornless qunari at the same time, and make this an in-world explanation as opposed to just ‘We didn’t have the resources, that was totally intentional’

Lots of players missed out on recruiting Leliana and/or Sten on their first playthrough and didn’t even know they existed/could be recruited. “Apparently we weren’t that great at pointing players in the right direction”

Tevinter is inspired by the Byzantine Empire (which wasn’t called that at the time incidentally, this is a name given by historians after the fact), what used to be the Roman Empire after the western part fell. This is the era Tevinter today is meant to encapsulate: decadent but clearly in decline, far away from the heyday and the heights of the former empire [source]

[Part 1]

[Part 2]

[Part 4]

[Part 5]

[Part 6]

[‘Insights into DA dev from the Gamers For Groceries stream’ transcript]

#dragon age #bioware #video games #morrigan #queen of my heart #alistair theirin #fav warden #dragon age 4 #the dread wolf rises #solas

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chibi-pix · 3 years

Text

Wild Magic has come to an end. And it’s been a wild ride with this fic. After nearly a year of writing and just over a year of uploading, I reached this point. And now it’s time to go over some things with it.

As a warning, some things may be spoiler territory. I will do my best to talk about the last few chapters, but for those who haven’t started reading but wish to or gotten far, please be warned.

I had originally started writing it April 18, 2020. At that point, a title I was considering was The Princess, the Mage, and the Wolf. All of which pertained to Pidge, the main character. The fic even originally started with Pidge, as Katie, saying goodbye to her parents before they depart for the kingdom of Altea, it even showed Colleen giving Katie the dagger. However, something about the intro didn’t sit well with me. So, a month later on May 18, I started again and we got the intro we saw in the official update. And I continued writing the chapters off and on until April 28, 2021 when I got to the final chapter. It was pretty much a year long journey with this.

We know Wild Magic wasn’t the first choice of a title, but it wasn’t the second. At one point, I had actually considered calling it Wolf Mage, but I wasn’t liking that very much. I believe it was @rueitae who suggested the title Wild Magic and I liked it. Though in a way, Wolf Mage stuck around, as we see with the logo used with the fic as banners.

If there is one thing I love, it’s size difference. I love giant creatures. Now, while Pidge as a wolf isn’t nearly as massive as my mermaid Pidge fic, she is still pretty big, at least big enough to ride. And the other guardian wolf was even bigger. It was fun. I think the giant creatures thing is what drew me to the movie, Princess Mononoke.

Speaking of Princess Mononoke, some would probably suspect that that was part of my inspiration. The thought of riding wolves did come from that, but what initially sparked this was an unlikely title. Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Yeah, you read that right. Twilight Princess inspired this fic. I was watching a playthrough of that game, wanting to since it’s been so long since I saw my sister play it and I didn’t have the game or a means to play it. And while watching, my brain went “What if something happened in a fantasy AU and Pidge transformed into a wolf.” At one point I had considered Pidge being cursed, but cursed was just so... common. Learning on her own through magic? Now that seemed interesting to me. And it was fun to work with. That’s about it for how Twilight Princess inspired me. But, I’m glad it jumpstarted the idea.

From early on in the fic, I had known I wanted Pidge to have negative interactions with Sendak. I wanted, in a sense, for them to be rivals, even if he’s a grown ass commander and she’s just a kid. It seemed night. And fairly early on, I wanted her separated from her family and raised by someone else, Krolia being the one chosen for the task. It’s one of my favourite things to have Pidge raised by someone who isn’t her family by birth; I love that about families and it means a lot to me.

I’m going to talk about Sendak’s final fight against Pidge. If you’ve not read that far, feel free to skip this section. I knew Pidge and Sendak were going to meet again when she would finally take the commander down. Even when she falls, that was initially planned from the getgo. But their fight had changed from my original idea. Originally I planned to have them duke it out on a bridge as a sort callback to their first interaction. At some point, with explosives already on the bridge, something would spark it and destroy it, separating the two from the rest of Pidge’s company, leaving her to fight Sendak alone. In a sense, I struggled to figure out how to make it work out. Thus we got the fight alongside the gorge, the two still going over and Pidge taking Sendak down.

Moving on. Let’s talk plance. I typically like my fics being general initially, letting ships figure themselves out if at all. But early on, my brain, out of nowhere, decided it needed to be Plance, have Lance crushing on Pidge from the get go pretty much. Even when he thought she was a boy and when he found out she was a girl, nothing changed. I couldn’t shake it from my mind and we ended up with Plance. And we even got to see Pidge discover her own feelings for him. Oh how fun is that?

Anyway, this has been a fun fic to write. At times I wondered if I really could write it and even finish it and I did. I really did. It’s a grand victory to me. Well, that’s about it for some of the trivia and thoughts on things. For those who have read it, I hope you enjoyed the fic. For those continuing to read it, I hope it will continue to entertain you. For those who haven’t read it but wish to, I hope you find satisfaction in this adventure of shape shifting, magic, and ending a war to restore balance to the kingdoms. Until next time.

#VLD #Voltron legendary defender #fanfic recap #a year of writing #Plance #Pidge #Lance #Wild Magic #Wolf Mage #it's been such a journey #and i'm so proud of it

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