#when i first played through 3H i never fast-traveled in the monastery so i really got to feel as though i was IN Garreg Mach

[butwhatifidothis]

hmmm, 🔥 about fe3h, but make it something that would actually be one in your specific mutual corner of Tumblr as well, and not just the fandom in general (because that would be too easy)? 👀

Well funnily enough the one hot take I for sure know the majority of my mutuals don't particularly agree with is one I literally just saw one of them say LMAO but I think the monastery is not NEARLYYYYYY as bad as people try to make it out to be. I never once found it to be tedious and I loved running around talking to all the NPCs loitering about the place, and call me an omega nerd but dammit I liked reading the shit in the libraries 😭😭😭

[senpai-no-lie]

So I Finally Finished A Route in Three Houses: A Review of Mechanics

I also finished the DLC, but I figured I’d split my thoughts of the DLC, the first route I played, and my general opinions on the mechanics into separate posts for length and coherency reasons 

Overall: I liked the idea of a lot of what they tried to do, but the execution was hit and miss. Additionally, some of the stuff that was interesting and new at first quickly became a chore. Purely on mechanics, I would say 3H was worse than both Fates and Awakening; Echoes is a toss-up. 

What I Think 3H Improved Upon: 

Combat Arts! I loathed how combat arts worked in Echoes. Attached to the weapon? So freaking dumb. I thought there was a good variety of different arts your unit could learn, and if they decided to keep weapon durability, I think having combat arts tie into that was a good idea

Forging. Ugh, do I hate weapons durability, but at least I could repair my weapons pretty easily (outside of the Relics, which I hardly used, as a consequence). Realizing I could craft Levin swords was also a big game changer for me. I also hated how limited and mysterious forging was in Echoes, so I’m glad 3H didn’t hide what the weapon could become behind ???. Still think Awakening had the best forging, as broken as it kinda was lol 

Paralogues...? I thought most of the paralogues were a fun challenge and were good opportunities to learn more about the characters who aren’t as vital to the main (meager) story. Sort of wished you could’ve recruited some other the other houses’ members via paralogues (akin to picking up your children from Time Travel/Deep Realm daycare) 

Demonic Beasts I liked them. They were a change of pace from regular enemies, which is a plus in my book.

Stat Gains and Level Design, at compared to Echoes. I feel like they borrowed a lot of ideas from Echoes, since that was the last game (excluding Warriors), but with some improvements. The stat gains in Echoes were notoriously awful, and as someone who is a bit...anal at times about evenly leveling all my characters, it was the Literal Worst to put all that work into chumps like Est and Atlas and Clive and they still sucked. Also, the maps in Echoes started to run together and just be like a slog, so good job, 3H, for not being as bad as your predecessor. (Though the general lack of gimmicks in the story chapters and reliance on fairly so-so maps with objectives like route the enemy/defeat the commander over and over could’ve been furthered improved upon)

What Was A Bit Meh: 

Timed Activities This is petty, but it just stressed me out when a game put a timer on something. I stopped doing the advice box and didn’t bother with tea parties pretty quickly because while I could suspend the software to have the extra time to look answers, it wasn’t fun or a good use of my time. 

So Many Activities During Exploration Too much, in my humble opinion. A good chunk of them were ways to gain support with units or minor increases in skills, so I think it would’ve been better to condense activities. Like, lost items??? I was able to A support every single available unit on my first playthrough without to much difficulty without that. I’d scrap the advice box and also combine seminar with the tutoring in some way. 

Classing System It was a neat idea, to have that much freedom with classing units, and tying reclassing to skill level instead of purely level, but it was also equally annoying to spend in game weeks trying over and over to get a character to pass an exam. And the concept of the exams make even less sense post-timeskip. I liked the flexibility, but I think they could’ve scaled it back a bit (especially to make the game less intimidating to new players) so it wasn’t so tedious. 

DLC I like the creativity of deciding to just do an entire side story DLC instead of typical bonus maps. However, having completed the DLC side story, outside the notion the chapters were a bit more challenging (which in itself is a balancing act between engaging and tedious), and perhaps giving us more info about Byleth’s mom... it was kind of meh. Story was fairly cookie-cutter and the lack of any animated cutscene was a bit disappointing, those some of the stills were nice. 

Things I Just Didn’t Like:

The General Aesthetic Is this a mechanic, not necessarily, but it’s more appropriate to talk about it here than another post. For one, I just never liked how plasticky all the characters look. I commend them, I suppose, for deciding to fully voice act the game like Echoes, but I wish they hadn’t if it meant I had to look at vacant-eyed characters talking in a half-circle before every fight and after every fight. You can’t unnotice that almost every cut scene if all the characters standing perfectly still, talking in a half-circle. Additionally, sometimes their mouths don’t even move when they talk!! The face portraits had maybe a quarter of the personality they’ve had in previous games, and I miss how crits were done in Fates. 

Non-Mission Activities Made the Actual Story Chapters Feel Secondary For my first playthrough, I just decided I was going to grind for as many supports as possible, since the first half (or more than half) of each route is exactly the same. However, I noticed that I often felt that having to stop and do the mission was getting in the way of my other aims, or I would more or less forget what was going on in the story by the time I had to do the mission. 

Reliance on Using the Monastery as Homebase I know a lot of people ripped on Fates’ My Castle, but I feel like that was a much less intrusive base of operations than the monastery, because none of the things in My Castle had to be acknowledged if you wanted to bulldoze through several chapters in a row or do paralogues or DLC or whatever. I understand they put a lot of work into the Monastery, but it was hell to navigate around (I just fast traveled rather than navigating lol), made a lot of story chapters feel awkward (we’re in the middle of a war, but after every battle we gotta go back to the Monastery and dick around for a month), and really bloated up the game.

Recruitment At first, I was pretty gun-ho about getting all the units I could, and it was exciting to get a bunch of new units based on my efforts to seduce recruit them (especially Ferdinand-- he was such a bastard to get despite being the second unit I tried to recruit), but then you have them all and suddenly Edelgard’s enemy forces feel like a joke (it’s just her and Hubie Dubie, p much) and you realize everyone feels like a flake if they’ll join pretty much any side no matter. Additionally, because of how recruitment works, outside of Byleth and the main lord, and to a lesser extent the retainer, a good chunk of the characters have very limited to no importance to the plot. The rest of your house has about average FE involvement in the plot, such as commentary or exposition dumping, but they don’t feel like they matter when you can feasibly never use them if you recruit enough from the other houses. 

[the-jellicle-duelist]

Ryan’s Top 10* Video Games of 2019

I don’t write blog posts but it’s time for Video Game Top 10 Lists for 2019 and I have no where good to put it! So congrats tumblr you get it. I’ll also tweet about it but in a much smaller scale. Anyways if you don’t care that’s fine! But if you do! It’s under that read more baby!!

*there’s always more than 10

First, some honorable mentions.

Dragon Quest 1 

Dragon Quest 1 is the oldest JRPG (I won’t check if this is true) and I finally got around to it this year when it come out on Switch. The nice thing about Dragon Quest 1 is that it is masterful in its simplicity: you are one person. You fight one monster at a time. You go to one town at a time (mostly). You are on one quest (again, mostly). There’s only a few handfuls of anything like weapons, items, spells, monsters. They all work really well in concert with each other, and the package as a whole is this cozy, comfy less than 20 hour JRPG experience that I really enjoyed.

Best MMO I Refused to Get Addicted to in 2019

Final Fantasy XIV

I sure did hear a lot about Final Fantasy XIV this year. From podcasts to people just talking about it on twitter it seemed to be in the cultural zeitgeist this year. I downloaded the client and put about 15 hours into the base game. If I would have had the right combination of time/money/depression at that time I know I would have gotten deep into it. I’m fine that I didn’t, I think. But the potential was there.

Okay list time here we go:

10. Baba is You

Baba is You is this a coding game? You’re manipulating verbs that are represented by blocks, and pushing them next to noun blocks, to make the objects in the world do things, so that you can get Baba to touch the win object, usually a key. It’s great fun! It got really difficult around the third world and I had to put it down but boy did I like messing around. There were several wonderful “YOOOOO” type moments, and the puzzles when you solved them were great for making you feel very cool and smart. 

9. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is From Software doing From Software shit in a way I wanted to like way more but ultimately it’s Here on this list. I liked Sekiro fine but it didn’t click with me like Dark Souls 3 or Bloodborne has in the past. The best parts of Sekiro for me were nailing difficult and tight blocking windows, which gave me an absolute rush every single time. I only got to what I assume was about half way through the game, so I don’t know if this changes later, but for a From game where the bosses were for the most part A Person, the boss encounters were interesting and varied. Also the world design was stunning.

8. Dragon Quest Builders 2

Dragon Builders 2 rules, first off. I wanted to put it higher on this list but I think it fell short because it was so heavily iterative and didn’t do a whole lot to progress itself from the first game. But, there were several quality of life improvements, and there was a big cool area to build in that was permanent and part of the story. I think if they added some more cool things, and made the dialogue not be such a slog to get through, this could have been way higher up on this list.

7. Kingdom Hearts 3

God, Kingdom Hearts 3. I was convinced for about 7 years that KH3 would not only never come out, but it would keep getting bad handheld games until I died. But they finally did it, they made the thing. It felt like a PS3 game which is the wildest thing. (It probably was a PS3 game for a while). It was very fun to play mechanically; the part of KH that was always pretty good was the action RPG stuff. The story is bad tho! The reasons you go to the different world’s is the thinnest it’s ever been, and there’s almost no real lore until the last two hours where you get all of it at once. KH3 was clunky, but I still liked swinging the keyblade and shooting fireballs.

6. Judgment

Shout outs to Judgment: I own it. I never played it. It is number 6 on my list. This probably says more about how I felt overall about games this year than it does about Judgment. Judgment comes from the Yakuza studio, and by all accounts it was so close to that vein, that I am confident and comfortable putting it at this number 6 spot without having ever launching the game. I have second hand accounts that it slaps, and will do for me everything Yakuza does for me, which is fine. I just ran out of time. 

5. MiSTer FPGA

I love MiSTer. Wow do I love MiSTer. It’s got everything: old games, tinkering, assembling parts. If you are unaware of the MiSTer device, it’s a custom FPGA board with add-on boards, that developers have written Cores for classic consoles that all run in this FPGA environment. As opposed to emulators, an FPGA as I understand it is mimicking real hardware and then running games ontop of it. It’s a great device, and plays the things it plays (NES, SNES, Master System, Genesis, Game Gear, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, NeoGeo, loads of Arcade games,and more) really well. I have really enjoyed playing games on it, and tinkering with it this year. I spent a lot of my time this year with it. 

4. Slay the Spire

This is where the list starts to get Real. Wow does Slay the Spire rule! Holy shit. Rogue like, deck building, choice making, hard as fuck, big time strategy, unique characters. It’s really got everything. And it’s dense. This was absolutely my “just one more X” game this year. I put hundreds of hours into it. The way all of the cards interact with each other, the way you can really craft so many kinds of specific decks in each character, in each run, really worked for me. The ever-growing engines you could make, and the way that, even if you have a not great deck, it never feels bad. It’s one of the few rogue likes where you feel like when you’ve lost it’s your fault in a good way. It’s tuned to feel good no matter what. It’s tuned to feel tense. God Slay the Spire rules. And there’s a new character on the way? fuck.

3. Monster Hunter World: Iceborne

I loved coming back to Monster Hunter so bad y’all don’t even know. They added a ton, so many good monsters that I love to fight. Tigrex? yes. Zinogre? Yes. Velkhana? YES. The variant monsters are great, too. I just love Monster Hunter World so much. The clutch claw rips ass. This game is so good, and chunky, and feels good to play. I really mastered the bow this time around, but I started off with Hammer again because I will always have a torrent love affair with Hammer. Clutch Claw Grab with the Hammer is the best feeling you can get from video games. 

2. Pokemon Sword/Sheild

Good Pokemon games! They’re good! It was nice to go through all the motions of a new pokemon game this year: rumors, leaks, having a reaction to all the starters and their evolutions, getting my hands on it, catching them all. It’s just a good Pokemon game. It’s not the best one (Black and White still got that crown) but it’s good. And I like a majority of the new designs. I like how they culled the dex to a nice, satisfying but manageable number. Anyone who’s mad please fuck off.

1. Fire Emblem: Three Houses

WE ALL KNEW THIS WAS COMING. Anyone who follows me on twitter, you know. God where do I start. So, I played all the way through Three Houses six times. I did two runs of Golden Deer, two of Black Eagles, one Blue Lions, and one Church of Seiros. I love all of my students. This game hit hard for me for a few reasons: they did Fire Emblem again, but its bigger and there’s more moving parts. More need for spreadsheets, which is stuff that I eat up. Yum yum good. Adding an overworld even in the scope that was as small as, the Monastery School, to this Fire Emblem was a BIG risk because they have been down this road before, and have not really nailed it. But I think with Three Houses they struck a really good balance, and it never overwhelmed me. They took a big page out of Persona’s book here which did wonders for me. You have this big map and it LOOKS scary, but in reality with fast travel and the limited number of actual activities/quests, you can do everything you want very quickly. 

The thing that shined that brightest was the characters. I love them all, even the ones that aren’t cool, and even the ones that are Bad. I love all my kids. I have a lot I could say about how having all of these story routes, with their inconsistencies and their only slightly subtle variations bummed me out, but I did think if you take a macro look at the plot, this is one of the only well-written Fire Emblems ever. There was like, magic and dragons and things like this, but the thing that worked for me was their commitment to keeping the story grounded in the people that were in it? It was a story about three lands, vying for power in their own ways, and the actions/consequences that would follow. They really leaned in to the human part of it. It was not as much Kingdoms doing Politics, it was people doing things, and I think that worked for me.

Honestly the weakest parts of FE:3H was the Fire Emblem parts. The classes are just okay, and they took out a lot of the limitations of weapons/magic and so it was really a class change system about skills mastery, which I think they didn’t hit a home run here, but it was fine. And I liked doing it, clearly. The maps were a little samey in, especially in the first Part of the game. 

All of this said, FE:3H slaps so much fat juicy ass and it is absolutely my game of the year for 2019.