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cosmosbunnies · 7 years ago

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How Fire Emblem Fates tried, and failed, to live up to Awakening.

Fire Emblem Awakening was a tonal and mechanical masterpiece. It set a new bar for Fire Emblem games and the like, so Fates had a lot to live up to. And boy, did it try. And fail. I've got about a million complaints about this game, but I'll list my top three here:

Setup

Fire emblem awakening's avatar, Robin, was relatable. Not in deep ways, but we could sympathize with their situation. They knew exactly what we knew about the world – nothing. They awoke with amnesia and were found by the royal family. Amnesia is a wrote plot point, but its popularity is not baseless. In games especially, dropping the player into the second act allows for swift action, and playing catchup in the story comes for naturally to a player who knows everything their character does, meaning dialogue and exposition can come across as being natural and not ham-fisted.

On the other hand, we have Fates. Mind you, I have only played Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest, but I believe these problems extend to Birthright as well; the setup is bad. Instead of giving our player character no knowledge of the world around them via amnesia, they use a different method; seclusion. Corrin as a character is locked away inside of the Nohrian castle throughout their entire childhood and is only allowed in the outside world during the rising action of the story. This, akin to Robin, gives them no knowledge of the world around them. There's one key distinction, however; the family. In Conquest, Corrin knows their family well, and there is an existing dynamic that was built up long before we, the player, entered the scene. So, while Corrin knows nothing of the war and the land, they know much of these characters – and we do not. This flows very poorly. The characters end up awkwardly barking out their relationship to our main character in expositional dialogue before we ever end up even fighting alongside them, instead of having those relationships grow in real-time as we play and allowing us, the player, to form a relationship with the cast based in mechanics while Corrin gets to know them in the narrative. Corrin already loves the cast, regardless of what we think, and we have no choice in the matter. Fates makes the erroneous assumption that the player's interest in the world around them exists in a vacuum, but in reality an average player is interested in how the world exists in relation to the established characters and mechanics, not in the Deep Lore. In fact, Deep Lore is called just that because players who desire knowledge of the world are willing to go to greater lengths to uncover it than players who do not care. This is what in-game history books are for.

Marriage

Fire Emblem Awakening introduced a new mechanic: marriage. Your characters' relationships would grow organically as they fought, and this would eventually lead to (straight) marriage, which would eventually lead to children. The plot of the game involved time travel, and thus a new system was born; the child soldiers. Children are born of your units, your units die in the future, and those children grow up alone and scared, learning to fight for themselves. Eventually, they all get together and use the fire emblem to go back in time. They meet their parents. They introduce themselves. They fight, as they always have, but this time with hope renewed. This created a fantastic dynamic; a younger solider in their prime, with a child they know they'll eventually have but are meeting for the first time. Throw in some well written, natural dialogue, a few fun time travel jokes, and you've got yourself a compelling personal story. It also tied into the main plot in a significant way, having Lucina be a product of this same time travel fiasco. Fire Emblem Fates takes a… different approach. Halfway through act II of the story, you enter an alternate universe. The place is strange, scary and full of mindless evil entities. You meet a character who had been presumed dead, and you fight your way out with him in tow. Upon leaving, you're informed that if any of your characters mention this alternate reality to anyone, they will cease to exist. The point is then dropped, and the unrelated story continues. This puzzled me… A lot. Why did this exists? Was is setting up a structure for a future plot point? Was it world building? I had no idea, I was completely confused.

And then Corrin married.

This was my first marriage in the game, as honestly, none of the characters (save for Niles/Odin, and Effie/Mozu) had what I saw as a real connection, so I waited some time. Corrin and Keaton got married. A popup appeared onscreen afterwords. “A baby was born. The baby is placed in an alternate reality to grow up safe from harm, but a side effect of this reality is that time flows differently, making the children grow up very quickly.” Ah. I see. It makes sense now – the alternate universe is a plot contrivance, created in service to the brand of “You can have children and fight alongside them.” So then you pluck these kiddos from their isolated homes one by one, skipping over the major plot hole of 'Corrin spent nine months fighting while pregnant and then had a baby in the middle of a war? How long did this war take?' and jumping right to “Let's recruit child soldiers.” And so you do. You recruit every child to fight, much to the apparent behest of the mother and father. There is no reasoning to explain why these sensible adults are asking young teenagers to fight in a deadly war. It's simply a fun mechanic, and the game does not expect us to think about it. Except it strips the system of its most important aspects: A) The children do not HAVE to fight to save a doomed world, and B) The parents and the children know one another well. This has removed both the believability of the plot point and the charm in the interactions, leaving us with strange relationships bland dialogue that has an overabundant use of the word “daddy,” which should be purged from every writer's page as it is written.

Incest

You can just. You can just marry your siblings in this game. And have children with them.

At first I though Camilla's apparent attraction to the player character was simply because she was explicitly designed for horny fans to drool over. While this is still true, it's not the only reason she shows an interest in her sibling, as she's more than willing to marry and have children with them. “Oh, it's fine!” You might say. “They're not siblings by blood, you see, so it's morally fine!” Which is the stance the game seems to take. I am not going to explain why incest bad. I will also not drone on about how in the game's counterpart, Birthright, your player is related by blood for plot purposes, but as not to miss out on banging your siblings, each sibling will explain just before marrying you that you're actually not related to them by blood either. Nope, definitely not going to touch that subject.

Small gripes:

I lied about only listing three things. Here are a few notable issues

-You can dress your characters up in stupid looking accessories that add nothing to the game and 95% of the time clip heavily inside the character's model. The characters ASK you to dress them up, and some of them even comment on how silly this is during a war.

-“A+” rank is a cop-out created in an attempt to appease the Queer community without alienating any fans, and the fact that they couldn't be bothered to write any dialogue for the A+ rank relationships shows their lack of interest in queer representation while they sit back and get praise of major publications for “progressivism”

-In the Japanese version you pet your friends on the face Pokemon-Amie style to get them to like you more. I am glad they removed this for the western release

-In the final cinematic, they paid a team of animators to animate your character's first-person experience as they run face-first into their sisters boobs, which joyfully go “Boioioing” and shake like maracas as you reel.

-Sometimes you walk in on your allies naked in the hot springs. You walk all the way in, sit down, relax and stare at the naked peer for seconds before they say “Hey I'm uh… Naked here.” As which point Corrin goes “Sorry!” and sprints out of the room with the speed of a cheetah. I do not know why this happens.

-Keaton is unreasonably erotic when you marry him. Fully voice-acted, he whispers sweet nothings into your ear as the screen fades to black. He is a furry's wet dream. This is not a complaint.

-The story toys with this “abusive father with a family of children who are closer for having a common enemy with whom they have a love/hate relationship” thing, but fails to say ANYTHING meaningful on the subject. It's just empty story dressing

-At one point, you have to choose to either kill or spare a person who just tried to kill you. If you spare him, he joins your party. This goes nowhere, and puzzles me as a narrative choice. He doesn't even bother to betray you or anything, he simply stops mattering.

-Nohr should be dark, gloomy, fun and interesting, and instead it fails to spark the imagination even slightly, instead being “Bland fantasy setting but some of the trees are dead.” Give me some purple and black in that color palette! C'mon!

-There are two wolfskin characters. They are different genders, different heights and weights, but use the same exact model in wolf form. Compare these to the bunny people in awakening who have my heart forever, and this is a major insult.

Thanks for reading

#this post is for NOBODY #video games #fire emblem #awakening #fates #conquest #critisicm

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