Saint Rubenio

I gotta ask though, IntSys the heck did you do with Engage? While there are major improvements, Ryujinx still struggles to run it in certain situations. For instance, the blizzard pastlear map (where I left off) chugs immensely. Meanwhile Sparks of Hope throws me into this absolute clusterfuck of particle effects and it runs without a hitch. Or, at least, negligible enough hitch that it's not really noticeable. How? I had very little expectations for Sparks of Hope...

True... It's not like there's a cheat code I can use to give myself all the resources so I don't have to ever bother with Fates's stupidest mechanic. Of course, how could there possibly be such a thing in my completely legit Nintendo PC that I use to play this game. Haha. Haha...

I don't like them, I don't use them and I don't give them the time of day. To be completely fair, to get this line of dialogue you need to go up to him (presumably bringing your crotch along) and talk to him. A situation easily avoided by not going up to him and talking to him, like I do with all the royals. Grandmother is so cool though. She smuggles a mop into prison so she can tidy up her own cell. Then she gives said mop to Emma and Emma cleans house with it. And then she recruits Lea! Is there anything this woman cannot do?

I often forget royals exist. Shura exists for like five minutes in Birthright. ...Fair. Fair.

Engage does the cross-hair thing a few times. Pandreo, for instance, has a really nice design but the hair is just... Why is it like that? It's even worse than Alear's, because the strands crossing his face are even longer. ...I do feel at least female Alear pulls it off better. Her bangs are generally longer so it's not as pronounced as male Alear, who just has two strands crossing his entire face from the top.

And the best part is that the portrait is an edit of a vanilla FE7 portrait - Heath, to be specific. His colors were different but he has the same ridiculous two-colored hair. People bashed Alear like this had never been a thing before in the series lol

One of my favorite characters in the series, if not my favorite period, is Arran, from Archanea - specifically, his New Mystery of the Emblem inception. The concept of a Jeigan whose bad potential is justified not by age, but by a terminal illness, is quite interesting, and it makes him the one FE unit for whom death during the campaign can be argued as a fine ending to his character. This is already pretty neat, but in New Mystery he gets a support chain where he discusses what it means to be a knight with Kris. He once served an unnamed lord somewhere in Archanea, and he believed absolute, blind loyalty to one's liege was the duty of a knight. Basically, he used to be a Camus. But one day, said lord ordered him to put down a rebellion. They were only peasants, starving after a bad harvest and making themselves heard to survive. Arran followed the order. Wracked with guilt, he wandered the world until he met Marth. Serving him, he discovered the true meaning of being a knight. "A knight isn't a puppet that blindly follows orders. That is not loyalty. To fight for a cause I believe in, under a liege I believe in. That is what it means to be a knight." Still one of my favorite lines in the series to this day. By the time you get his A support with Kris, he's likely already close to falling off. Him dying a hero's death shortly after this conversation is a truly compelling end to his character arc. Or, you can keep him until the end so he can get a glimpse of the peaceful world he helped created before he succumbs to his sickness. There is no cure and no way to save him, but however he dies, he dies happy and without regrets. Beautifully tragic concept for a character that was greatly expanded upon in the remake. New Mystery supports are a bit hit or miss and there needed to be more Krisless supports, I won't deny it, but there are still some gems to be found there. As cool as the concept is, without the FE12 support he'd just be a guy that doesn't speak a word in the entire game. Haha, well, it's just a little FE6 redux. I just added a few bossmen from other games to bolster the playable cast. Ended up adding one for each game. I have a huge fondness for Setsuna. Her voice lines melt my heart and she's a fun project. I know everyone's always raving about archer Mozu, but I prefer Setsuna. She's not even that bad. She has boatloads of speed, so all she needs is a stronger bow to alleviate her lower strength.

G G H . . . G G H . . . People need to accept that you can love a fictional character who is evil without trying to justify their actions. It's okay, villains are cool. (For context, this is a boss in an old hack called Order of the Crimson Arm. Came out a good decade before Engage. The hair would be funny enough but the fact that his shirt is white too is just too perfect) Pretty sure in the old translation it was just a generic "Lord Julius... Please forgive me...", and Project Naga tried to combat this utterly awful piece of dialogue by wording it in a more exotic way. Which does not help the fact that it's shared by all three garbage bagmen in the thrilling conclusion. Simply murder anyone who gets too close to Seliph. Curse of Artemis all over again, baby!

Yeah, of course, but still. In the All Stars + World with the Newgrounds Luigi sprite (you know the one), they went the extra mile of making sprites for Luigi doing the castle destruction gags, but they still had the text say "Mario"! What gives, Miyamoto? You got two sons!

I appreciate this. It doesn't call it "Mario's party" like Mario World did. That was always so funny. Mario selflessly gives Luigi all his lives and proceeds to trip over a Koopa and die, and the narration after each castle still claims Mario did anything when it was all Loogi. Truly, the future is now. No, I'm talking mainline series here. SRPGs.

Oh boy. I hope this, the thrilling conclusion, does not have yet another fucking Loptyr recolor with the exact same fucking combat dialogue ...Honestly, I'm amping up the angery for dramatic effect here. This isn't my least favorite map in the game (that'd have to be Silesse, probably) but I find it so funny (derogatory) that the final chapter of the game pulled this. I guess you can make a point of it showing just how deep Manfroy's influence runs when every other castle has a recolor sitting on it but... C'mon, at least give them different quotes than just three consecutive "Lord Julius... Please forgive me..." It happened to me. I am not disappointed. I'll say, rather cathartic to watch after my run where he couldn't even be defeated. Alas, such a tragedy, the life of... no wait, I already made this joke... Uhh... Uh... Monty Python! 'Tis but a scratch! I just like how this literally is just proto-Jahn. ...Except Jahn was a comparatively smaller part of the game. This is the equivalent of the entire Bern arc being Jahn delivering nuggets of exposition to Roy for every castle he seizes. Lewyn is an asshole. Did you not get enough proof of that? He inherited his looks, exactly, but he didn't inherit any of his holy blood. Dude drew the short biological straw, huh... This one isn't even a fucking good recolor. Why is his robe's brightest color blue, but the shadow colors are red? Ah yeah, there he is. Palmark 2. Instead of being a confidante of Sigurd we never saw that saved some children, he's a confidante of Arvis we never saw that saved some children. He is also Spanish! I wouldn't if the onscreen Ishtar didn't gleefully get into murder competitions with her boyfriend, Satan! Once again, brain moment. Seriously why are there so many recolors in the final chapter? If the game had come out 20 years later we would've gotten Travant discourse.

On a completely unrelated note that has nothign to do with what I was talking about before, I have finally got around to trying out Mario Wonder. Yeah, it's as fun as it seemed to be. Honestly, good. I needed a bit of bright lackadaisy after all these months of writing evil people doing evil things. Ah, well. You know. Fire Emblem 18.

Wow there's even a certain game that runs like a dream. No stutters, no issues, nothing at all, it just chugs along. Fucking Yuzu deserves to rot where it is.

Dang, the other Switch emulator has improved so much in the past year. Where Engage stuttered like mad last year in that emu, the stuttering is now minimal. Heck, from the five-minute test I ran, it seems to run better than Fates did on Citra now! Not bad. Yuzu who, again?

I mean, it takes all of five minutes to get a glimpse of Luca. I will say, the intro is really good and definitely makes an impression. If the translation wasn't what it is and the game required a braincell to be played I probably would have gotten more into it, because there's a very good story in there. At least FE4 benefitted from having a fanslation made in the 2010s instead of a godawful official translation made in 199X like Suikoden. Project Naga actually feels like the person who wrote it knows how to write.