Kysafen

If I hated Fire Emblem Fates' dialogue, am I going to hate this, too?

These are the people that gave Final Fantasy XIII a 39/40 and XIII-2 a 40/40. Why the fuck should we care about this news, again? And furthermore, are all 4 reviewers' judgment on video game writing actually sound (read: they've read a single fucking piece of literature in their lives)? It's a number. A number that says absolutely nothing of the qualities it has, and what its deficiencies are, what its themes are, refinement of mechanics, to say nothing of authorial intent, voice acting quality, musical production... Maybe the reason nobody posted it yet is because nobody asked, which if so, gives me hope for the standards of the people on this forum.

The fact that

This is just my opinion, but I think it isn't "minimalism" as much as it is "subtlety". Yeah, in JRPGs everybody tends to put their heart out on a string, but life doesn't work like that. In life, not every time is appropriate to blurt out everything you say or feel. Thing about Walter and Jonathan was that, throughout the course of the game, they revealed what they truly thought about Mikado and their place in the world even before they became Samuai. Walter always wanted a chance to strike back against the Luxurors, saw Tayama as the Luxurors' ideology taken to the extreme, and personally believed that he was good enough to be one to the point where he thought teaming up with Yuriko was a good idea. Chaos Hero in SMT1 was an underdog that was pushed around, and let his newfound power get to his head. Walter profoundly similar to that regard. Same rule applies to Jonathan; he always felt Mikado's duology of Luxurors and Casualries was the right way for things to be, raised to believe that Mikado's was the way God intended for humanity to live. Unlike Navarre, however, he didn't let it get to his head and actually respected Casualries, thinking their working for the Luxurors was the highest form of dignity they could hope to have in a world fundamentally unjust and, as such, respected that dignity. But, when confronted with the idea that the status quo could change, he made the foregone conclusion that the incivility would lead to a societal breakdown (which in the Chaos Ending, kind of does). Both characters' storytelling is done through the establishment of the game's setting which infers the ideologies each character has. The first 20 minutes of the game you can infer: -The Casualries are basically complacent and have not much of an opinion of their lot in life -The Luxurors are usually pompous assholes that demean you -Walter, upon gaining status as a samurai, actually gains the courage to express just how bullshit Mikado's Caste system is, and finds the Luxurors mostly incompetent and undeserving of their status, eventually to the point where he decides that even a total lapse of societal civility is a cost worth paying for a system where the strong lead. -Jonathan is a respectful kind of guy, but only as a result of his upbringing as a Luxuror, raised his whole life to believe that all is good and well and right with the world as thanks to god. Seeing the four archangels descend upon Mikado only cements this view of his; it was a feeling he believed in deep down, otherwise he wouldn't have chosen to side with the Angels. He never questioned whether or not his belief in god was as a result of his upbringing, instead opting for faith. Faith is the center of Jonathan's character, and faith is his ultimate undoing. SMT IV, hell, SMT in GENERAL doesn't spoonfeed you the story. When you enter a new town, instead of some cutscene playing where all the anime cliche characters go on for minutes talking about how they feel, the game lets the players themselves come to their own conclusions about where they are. Instead of entering a town and getting the town's introduction, you instead actually HAVE to talk to NPCs to even get a rudimentary understanding of your surroundings, who's who, where things are, hints as to where to go, etc. You get a sense of isolation, in that the way you progress in the game hinges not on an NPC nor a party member telling you what to do at all times, but instead you have to gain an appreciation of navigation skills and information gathering, usually on your own, in order to even so much as progress. The reason I like SMT is that it's a game about ideology. It gives you a setting, characters, a status quo, and then tells you "okay.... so what do YOU think? And do you REALLY believe it that much?" It's a game series that provides not answers, but questions. Yeah, the NPCs articulate what they feel, but your own ideology, YOUR own choices, is what defines the ending. Might also be the reason why SMT: Apocalypse's story grates hardcore fans, as it spoonfeeds a lot more story to you. Everybody has an opinion, but nothing to say. lol

Majin Tensei 1 doesn't have an English translation, and as far as I can tell, Majin Tensei 2 has zero connection to Majin Tensei 1. It's basically a standalone game in the series.

I'm not going to say people should feel bad for liking JRPGs that are all about "defeating evil with the power of friendship", but... I am sick to death of this trope. I want games with messages that challenge me. I want works of art that give me new perspective. That's why Shin Megami Tensei knocks it out of the park for me. It asks players what is the value of free will, and is it worth the amount of sacrifices necessary? And it's compounded even more by that no matter which path you choose, there is no "soft free will" or "soft lawful control"; otherwise all the players would go for those options, which would undermine the point. It also challenges the idea of the Semitic God by showing God from a non-Eurocentrist perspective, casting the idea of an all-powerful, omniscient and omnipotent being as a loathsome, genocidal maniac that doesn't hesitate to kill billions. Edgy? Maybe, to someone brought up on Christianity, but it made me consider how the religion I was brought up to believe (and then discard) would be seen by outsiders. Considering how fearsome and terrifying a religion based on accepting salvation through death is only something Breath of Fire 2 has done, and Final Fantasy/Tales has NEVER made me question my ideology.

(Not sure if someone put a thread for this before, please let me know) Thanks to the efforts of DDS Translations, Majin Tensei 2: Spiral Nemesis, is available to play beginning to end in English! (not gonna post any links here, just Google "Majin Tensei: Spiral Nemesis English Translation") I've never played any Devil Survivor, but I have to say, this is exactly what I wanted to see when I saw a "SMT x Fire Emblem" project: SRPG gameplay, recruitable demons, mechanical differences between your human and demonic allies. Unfortunately, the game plays at a very slow pace compared to current-gen titles like Fire Emblem: Echoes. It takes the game at least a couple of seconds after the "enemy phase" beginning for even the first enemy unit to move. You will want to use a "Fast Forward" key for how slow this game's normal pace moves. Majin Tensei 2 seems to put everything in an isometric perspective in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics or Berwick Saga, a shift from Majin Tensei 1's top-down perspective. I'm not gonna lie, I was ready to give this game up thinking it would try to juxtapose a "diagonal" cursor movement scheme onto the D-pad like Sonic 3D Blast. Imagine my surprise when I found that the way the game's creators worked around this control problem by the cursor moving "half-steps" with single d-pad presses. That immensely made the game's control scheme playable for me. It's a dumb thing to point out, but "game feel" can make an otherwise mediocre game enjoyable. I'd still have preferred it if Majin Tensei 2 was top-down, but eh. There also seems to be a very SLIGHT delay between input and game response. Anyone who's played Mystery of the Emblem on the SNES knows what I'm talking about when I say this. It's not a dealbreaker, but it does take playing the first couple of chapters to get into the rhythm of. Presentation-wise... holy crap. This game sounds fantastic. The presentation is superb, the opening cinematic looks like something out of a thriller. That's a feat I thought unthinkable on the SNES, but Majin Tensei 2 just pulls it off like it's nothing. Sprites are easy to read, and you can immediately tell the different units apart. Gameplay-wise, it has a biiiiit of a difficulty spike at the beginning chapters, like when you start out with three party members, then you get reduced to just using 2, then 1, and then the very next chapter throws you up against about 7-9 demons with the expectation of the player learning how to recruit demons. Chapter 4 has you pitted up against a Tan-ki which, if you haven't put all of your main character's stats into speed, will likely double you and kill you, and the heal spots it runs to, combined with its 10 MOVEMENT AND ranged attacks (like wtf), made it almost impossible to clear the chapter. Demon recruitment in SMT in general is always slippery and bears no chance of success whatsoever, and this game is no exception. Chapter 5 is VERY "Sink or Swim", in that you need to recruit demons, FAST. It teaches players that they can't always recruit demons, but amassing an army of demons is necessary to even so much as survive. You can actually CHOOSE which stats to level up your human characters with, so hooray, no RNG statscrewage! Your item inventory and macca is shared. Unlike Fire Emblem there are no "item slots", and every unit has access to your item inventory; imagine if you had 10 Vulnerary uses, and each unit could use it on their turn no matter where they were. Putting speed into your MC's level-ups is critical; again, the Tan-Ki in chapters 3/4/5 have insanely high speed and will kill you if you don't put your first level-ups into speed. It takes a difference of 5 Speed in order for a unit to do a "double" attack, like Fire Emblem: Awakening. Saving takes its cues from Fire Emblem 4, in that you can save at the beginning of every turn. Magic takes MP, just like SMT, but because of how powerful it is, it takes a lot of MP. Pixie, likely the first magic-using demon you acquire, can only use Zan twice before running out of MP, but those two Zio attacks go through enemy HP like a hot knife through butter, making them like heavy artillery uses. Heal spots heal a huge fraction of HP and MP at the beginning of your turn, which means you want to take those spots, and gang up on any enemies that take them. It also means that so long as you have a heal spot to retreat to, you can use Pixie's magic pretty often, if you're willing to accept a high turncount. When you recruit a demon, you can either talk to it, or offer it macca. Macca seems to be more sure-fire, but takes your resources, whereas talking may give you the demon for free, but has a MUCH higher chance of failure. You gain EXP, macca and magnetite from defeating demons, and like Fire Emblem, 100 exp levels up your characters. When you successfully recruit a demon, it disappears from the map, and you have to spend additional magnetite to summon it. When you summon, both you and the demon you summon use up you AND the summoned demon's turns. It's a "risk versus reward" system that seems to be SMT's answer to Fire Emblem's weapon triangle, and I freaking love it. As for the translation script quality, the character writing sure as hell isn't as good as BwdYeti's, but it's leagues ahead of the translation quality of SNES games released at the time. Had this game's English translation been commercially released at the time, I'd imagine a lot of us would've hailed this translation as one of the best of the best for its time. One of my complaints is that (apparently?) you can't see your demon's stats until you summon it, which kind of stifles your capacity to make an informed choice of whether or not to summon a demon. The game's OST ranges from "serviceable" to "holy crap this is pretty freaking great". I love how the game's "boss theme", when you whittle the enemy force down to just one unit, plays both on the map screen and the battle screen, and it is T E N S E, and I love it. All in all? The game has a lot of polish for its time, and getting into its game flow makes it easy to forgive what little design flaws it has. So, should you play Majin Tensei 2? Well: -Do you like SMT's brutal difficulty spikes? -Do you like SNES games? -Do you want to see basically what everyone was expecting when they announced "SMT x Fire Emblem"? -Are you willing to wrap your head around the game's antiquated aspects, such as its slow engine? -Do you like the SNES's soundchip? If you answered yes to all of these, then you've got yourself one hell of a time. Play it.

The role of an avatar is an entire discussion unto itself. When you're playing Fire Emblem, you're playing an abstraction of the role of the commander of an army, with your representation being the "lord" you represent. The whole "character creation" thing is a construct of deception that your agency in Awakening or Fates is your own original experience, when really every bit of Corrin or Robin or Chris' dialogue affects absolutely nothing about the story and how it unfolds, and the player has zero control over their personalities. You cannot change the physical appearance of Flynn in SMT IV except for his clothes, and he has little to no dialogue other than the dialogue options that you choose. The player projects their personality and philosophy onto Flynn, and the character creation lasts through the duration of a playthrough in which you define who Flynn really is right up to the ending you earn, a choice among many others that causes you to become a person totally different from another Flynn that made a different choice. Contrast to Fates, in which Corrin and Robin's character remains static no matter which option you choose, in which Fates becomes a matter of which mapppack and roster you select, and in Awakening, literally nothing changes at all. When you play non-avatar Fire Emblem games, there is no illusion of which character the player becomes: you enter the mentality of Marth or Leif, youths that had their kingdoms destroyed and brutalized. Sacred Stones, you're either an heiress with conflicted feelings about the catalyst behind the unfolding conflict, or you're a badass heir to a demolished kingdom looking to find out why the conflict has unfolded, and you won't let anyone get in your way. The player BECOMES the lords they play as, because if they die, the player-agency is lost and the game ends.

Calling it now. Awakening and Fates have proven beyond a doubt Intelligent Systems have no idea how to write a story that takes any kind of risk whatsoever. Writing that takes no risks at all is just white noise. Obviously I'll buy, and play it for the gameplay, but I cannot imagine IS not taking a plot that had potential like Fates and utterly squandering it. Who are these nations? What do they believe in? What are their natural resources? Do they have different religions, different languages, different philosophies of life, different works of literature that define their philosophies to the point where the masses of each decide that the other is incompatible? What are the "crests" and what effect do they have on the nations? Are we going to explore the reason why the crests are "bad", are we going to have a multifaceted discussion on each nation in general? Or, are we going to get yet another dumpster fire heap of anime tropetastic characters with zero depth to the appeal of otaku shut-ins who will deem them "waifus" and "husbandos", along with yet another disposable, forgettable villain who's so cartoonishly evil you cannot help wondering why the populace would ever accept them as their head of state. Feel free to lock/delete this thread if you like, but my point stands. Fire Emblem has the capacity to raise the bar when it comes to its storytellng and character writing. I'm sick to death, hell, and back again of game localizations that are bereft of flavor, subtlety, or style, sick of localization teams in this industry that think their job is only to convey a surface-level understanding of the dialogue without considering all context of the game's plot as well as the manner-of-speaking that characters have (fun fact: different people have different patterns of speech, believe it or not). I will concede that, in the past 10 years of Fire Emblem games, Echoes remains the single exception to most of my complaints here. If we can get characters with designs that actually stand out, are voice-acted and written with nuance as much as Echoes had, then I will eat these words and admit I was wrong in my prediction. But I sure as shit won't bet the bank on it.

No, I want Fire Emblem to have good writing. Which with the exception of FE7x, the series has never had.

Kudos to the hacker. That said, if you removed everything wrong with SD (lack of support conversations, lack of WTA dodge advantage, the poor map/battle sprite art design, the utter lack of characterization for its cast, that pretty much every chapter is a Seize chapter, the broken forging and reclass mechanics), you'd be left with a completely different game that'd probably be best suited to either a romhack, FEXNA game, or even an SRPG Maker project.

I would be more than willing to help in this department. I'd totally be down to help with this project!

*eyes roll into the back of my head and die along with my interest in this game* They couldn't have made this character a preview of an archer unit from Three Houses, huh? All about those dank meme characters, huh? 12 Archers (13 if you wanted a RD AND PoR version of Rolf) from actual Fire Emblem games they haven't even used yet- and that doesn't even count all the enemy archer units- and they opt for name recognition, huh? Reply to this post with "aren't we a bit salty?" all you want, defend every bad decision the developers make to your dying breath, but this is just unimaginative. I come to the home site for news about the next mainline series title, or maybe an interview with the developer, and it sucks that the regularity of Heroes updates renders the home page a base for the next whale bait unit, and this latest news wouldn't be so pathetic if the lack of originality wasn't addressed before. I guess this is the new "normal" now, and I guess people get excited for it, and good for them, but honestly? I liked the community better before Heroes came out. Really speaks volumes when it's the fangame makers of this community that generate more original content than the official company.

So how about that SCOTUS nominee, huh? As a gay man, I can't wait to live the next 20-45 years living in fear that my marriage rights be taken away (by determining my right to marry shouldn't be nationally observed, like anti-segregation laws or equal voting rights, but rather determined by individual states, of which some wouldn't hesitate to refuse to recognize gay marriage) because 3rd party/non-voters thought "the lesser of two evils is still evil".

I speak for myself and myself alone. If they want to be disrespectful towards the fan-translator's time that's their lack of humility, not mine.

It's not that we're entitled or anything, it's just been how many years since literally every other FE got a full-playable translation and after years of needing to put up with the Shaya patch (in America!), NoA's total abandonment, and Project Naga not really giving us much of anything beyond FE4, we just want this one to be THE ONE that seals the deal. Because we love FE5, in all its flaws and fucked-up quirks, and we want everyone to know what it feels like to play it without the bullshit of the Shaya patch's fucked-up menus. We get it: these people have actual jobs that pay actual money that work actual hours to make an actual living to pay for an actual room, actual insurance, and save up for actual retirement. Work's long and hard and at the end of the day, more often than not, I wouldn't feel like doing a translation patch in what little free time I'd have on every single day. To say that doing this stuff isn't taxing is a total lie, and even more so to have a schedule to do it, and the pressure of actually finishing it- let alone with a degree of quality you'd find yourself satisfied with- is fucking overwhelming. We just... hope, you know? That they can rise up and make it, this time. Like rising against the Loptyr Sect, you know? Personally? I'd be one of the first to hop on if the translators made a patreon, or a GoFundMe, or a Ko-Fi page (and if you're worried about legal issues from Nintendo, the translator could just draw pictures of stickmen and we'd be funding stickman drawings, or something). Otherwise, our best wishes are all we can give.

Evayle: My daughter is trying to kill me what the actual fuck *Reidrick liked this tweet*

The amount of work you've had to put in to understand how maps are inserted, how events are managed, not to mention the dialogue, the fantastic portraits... all I can say is: Elimine bless you, Zane.

Ronan: Okay, so I'm from a fishing village, but hear me out: I really, really fuckin' love magic.

If we got a sequel then I'd be seriously considering that the execs at IS/Atlus have a combination of some sort of psychosis and being thoroughly out of touch with their fanbases.

Step 1: Realize there are over 40 recruitable characters from your game to choose from. Because, come on. It's Heroes, where even the most obscure characters have a chance of making it in. Like, Raigh? Where the hell does he rank on the "overall series popularity list"? But he still got in, because Heroes. So remember: don't be afraid to use units that people don't recognize through some fucking moronic in-joke meme. Step 2: See the classes of the characters you're willing to put in. So say, if you're absolutely insistent on making it a mounted mage and a mounted sword user, look at all the classes you can recruit in the game! There are tons to choose from, and you've got at least one unit for each weapon type! No need to get repetitive and use the same characters over and over, because there's at least 2 other mage knights and 6 other mounted sword users. Step 3: Choose which characters fit the classes you wish to put in. So if you had to put in a mounted mage, there is a temptation to lazily rely on overblown memetic recognition of character to do another iteration of them, but you're too professional for that. So instead, look at another choice, like Eyrios! He's got a cool character angle, like being a commoner but hates the lack of class mobility in the feudalist/royal class structure! Or how about Miranda! Her distrusting attitude from the empire hunting Leif creates a unique characterization, with the conflicting feelings between blaming Leif and blaming the Empire for the brutalization of Alster, caught in between impossibly brutal times and circumstances that allow no real satisfying resolution! Intriguing! And if you needed a mounted sword user, maybe you could give that to, I dunno, maybe Fred! He's actually recruitable in the game he's from, and even has a relationship to Olwen, a character you already put in and has absolutely no fucking need to have another version of. Or how about Fergus, or Diarmuid, mounted sword users who not only are actually recruitable, but have a personal weapon that actually existed in their game! Cheers!

Idea: Make FE4's two halves as separate games in the vein of FE5, with smaller maps and tighter level design, and use the same engine to basically remake Thracia 776. You save money by using more or less the same engine 3 games in a row and you don't have to waste all that time in chapter 4 moving all your units around that fucking mountain range.

Welcome to 9 years ago, where the hopes of playing a version of FE1 with all the modernized mechanics and visual/audio aesthetics of the GBA games were mercilessly dashed in favor of crap mechanics and poor polish. I'd say things like "the Falchion being underpowered in lieu of a forged wyrmslayer is a symptom of the broken forging system" or "even if Marth did get a custom animation it would still look awful because the visual design is awful" or "the hitrate calculations are bullshit why would you even use terrain if the enemy hitrate is going to be over 50% regardless" or "the map is way too damned zoomed in for how large the maps are", or "why the fuck do we care about these characters if 95% of the cast gets zero dialogue beyond their recruitment convo and death quotes", or "what the fuck were the designers smoking when they chose what the gaiden chapter requirements are", but it's pointless. Even if you were to fix all of those things, you wouldn't even have Shadow Dragon anymore. It'd be a different engine, and mechanically, a different game. Thracia 776 may have its bullshit reinforcements and guide-dang-it moments, but Shadow Dragon is just shameful. The biggest problem to have with Shadow Dragon is to play it.

Is it okay if I post a playthrough on YouTube?

I'd totally be up for writing. :D Feel free to PM me.