screenshot Ike's FE Megathread {15.5}

[Integrity]

yeah the thing is, fire emblem stories are Bad. character development aside, the overarching plots are just Not Good.

EDIT: actually, i have an entire essay post or two planned on fire emblem's handling of character development :D

thracia's is actually one of the least not good, though, and i'm not just focusing on what the fire emblem stories do badly - fe4 actually opens up with a good bit of storytelling! - so there's always stuff to talk about.

suffice it to say, fire emblem rarely does things adequately; it really tends to do things Badly or Well.

related: fe4's prologue should go up tomorrow! stay in touch!!

Edited April 30, 2016 by Integrity

[IceBrand]

This ruffles my jimmies....I'll stay a bit longer.

[Jedi]

What also hurts Thracia is we still don't have a proper full translation of it, but the ideas and themes are at least present in the... mangled translation we do have.

[Tryhard]

is fire emblem really a series worth writing essays over

[Serpent of Sheol]

is fire emblem really a series worth writing essays over

general banzai would say yes

[Tryhard]

it was literally the worst thing ever, he nitpicked fe7 to continue the opinion that fe8 is the best fe

[Integrity]

is fire emblem really a series worth writing essays over

hell no, but i have a slow summer

[IceBrand]

hell no, but i have a slow summer

You could go on a vacation.

[Integrity]

no i can't, i'm working

[Darros]

this truly is the thread ive been waiting for

EDIT: and you're starting with my favorite game this is radical

Edited May 1, 2016 by Papyrus

[Integrity]

Hello! Let’s talk about –

Yeah, you all know it. It’s FE4 time. Let’s talk about format. I’m going to mostly be talking about whatever I feel like talking about, with screenshots of what’s going on in the campaign to punctuate. Most of the time it’ll be about what’s going on in the story, for good or ill; occasionally game mechanics. We’ll explore it more as I go on. I'm using strictly Awankening's name translations whenever they exist, since the site disagrees with the translation patch I have and also with itself so it's just more convenient for me that way. When the Awankening ones don't exist, I'm using whatever I feel like. You guys can pick it up from context.

For now, here’s the opening roll.

Here’s something that’s going to come up later: people have completely forgotten about the Loptyr Cult, which established an empire that stood for like two hundred years before it got knocked down. It got knocked down about a hundred years ago – the game starts in year 757, and the demigodly Crusaders destroyed the Loptyr Empire in year 648. Fire Emblem isn’t a series known for its sense of time, particularly, but that’s three generations, tops.

The opening narration rolls. The full transcripts are accessible on this site, but I’ll give the highlights.

On behalf of the aging King Azmur, the government was administered by the highly regarded Prince Kurth.

Assisting the prince was his confidant Lord Vylon of Chalphy, and Lord Ring of Jungby.

Prime Minister Leptor of Freege felt his position was being undermined.

Calling on the avaricious Lord Langobalt of Dozel, the two formed a coalition opposing the prince’s authority.

Here’s a problem Genealogy has in the first generation: the secret evil sect has literally all of the power, and is pulling literally all of the strings. Global conspiracies can be pulled off with some good writing – which Fire Emblem doesn’t have now and won’t ever have – but in this case we’re going to watch as the Loptyr cult orchestrates a string of wars that throws the entire world into a state that they can just happily perch on top of it. It’s, frankly, insane.

Otherwise, Verdane invades Grannvale. We’ll talk about Verdane a little bit later, they’re funny for the wrong reason. The invasion is unprovoked; the king of Verdane is a decent and good man, and his sons are awful and barbaric, but it’s actually the righteous king who ordered the invasion. The plot here is, actually, decent!

Meanwhile, Fire Emblem continues to struggle with scale. This is a problem that the series will continue to struggle with forever – and, hell, I can’t blame it, it’s really hard for video games to nail – I just find this particular line really funny. Yeah, Verdane sent its entire army, Sigurd’s going to go tank it alone. End of story, bitches.

Unfortunately, we can’t go the whole conversation without descending into anime. There’s an invasion going on, have the decency to act like it.

Anyway, let’s talk about Verdane. Verdane is the bandits you’re used to dealing with in every Fire Emblem, except they’re actually a whole organized nation. Well, “organized” is kind of stretching it – there’s nothing about Verdane that suggests that they’re anything close to civilized, and we’ll have the citizens of Verdane complaining about how barbaric Verdane is shortly, since the rulers of the castles in the area are known for raiding their own villages. How quaint.

Verdane’s difficulty is that it’s never conveyed as anything but a coalition of bandits, except for the one person who joins us (and the aforementioned righteous king). Man Parrhesia describes it as “a kingdom comprised of shirtless thugs” and while that’s probably hyperbole, Genealogy doesn’t really give us any evidence to the contrary. After this and the next chapter, it’s gone. It’s not brought up again in any major fashion for the rest of the first generation, and I don’t think it even comes up in the second generation. I think it comes up in Thracia, but I’ve only re-read the first generation of this game so far.

Point being, Verdane is like the villainous early bandit foil to your heroes – except it’s an entire kingdom. An entire kingdom characterized by being the early game bandit foil. I’d swear this was a parody, honestly, in another game. Maybe it is in this one and I don’t give Fire Emblem’s writers enough credit.

Genealogy also has a funny problem with scale that the other Fire Emblems don’t really in my recollection. Dude walked all the way back to Verdane while we were getting our shit together. It’s more funny than bad – look, video games make some sacrifices by definition – but it’s exacerbated by the fact that most of Jugdral is actually represented in map form, unlike all other Fire Emblems which are sort of nebulously scaled. Thanks to that, we can say that the dude walked approximately a sixth of the width of the continent of Judgral between our turns. That’s impressive.

Hell, close enough.

A turn passes of really uneventful shit, and then this conversation happens. This is one of Genealogy’s (first generation’s) two or three major sticking points, in my opinion: tone. I’ll drop the conversation here in a spoiler for reference.

[spoiler=lex and azel arrive] Azel: “Lex, looks like we made it in time.”

Lex: “Geez… Looks like Sigurd is taking on the entire Verdane army! He’ll sure be happy to see us. You just can’t stay out of these things, can you, Azel…”

Azel: “Yeah, but with the military on engagement to Isaac, Grandbell’s completely strapped! Sigurd and the few soldiers left in Chalphy are out here fighting for their lives! I can’t just leave them hanging…”

Lex: “Oh really… I’m not quite buying your story, Azel. What aren’t you telling me?”

Azel: “Wh…what’re you talking about!?”

Lex: “I’d surmise that you’re all worked up about Lady Adean of Jungby. I know you like her.”

Azel: “Y…you’re nuts!”

Lex: “A-ha! Face is getting red there, buddy! You little player you.”

Azel: “Lex, knock it off! Now come on, let’s get going.”

Lex: “Hahahaa… Alright, let’s do this. Finally, a chance to kick some ass.”

Now, anime isn’t bad, necessarily. The difficulty with anime is when you’re having a serious problem (Verdane is invading and has kidnapped a lord of the realm) and you have a man treating this with the appropriate gravity (Sigurd) and a game that’s trying to have a tone to fit that gravity (Genealogy of the Holy War), and you supplement them with a conversation about how we’re here to murder some dudes because the kid has a crush on the kidnapped lord, ha ha ha. You can do it, mind, and sometimes it’s good; remember the thing about character exploration? You can define someone this way as trying to make light of a bad situation or maybe just as a sociopath, but Lex and Azel don’t come across this way. It’s just anime.

Meanwhile, Sigurd goes south, everyone else goes north, Noish swings south after the forest to secure the village. I’m not looking up what treasures are or what the village rewards are; I half-remember most of it but I don’t remember specifics so I’ll probably forfeit some or a lot of treasure to the void, no big deal. Fire Emblem isn’t exactly hard.

Let’s transition to gameplay and talk about something I really like about Genealogy for a change! Despite what it sounds like, there’s a lot about this game I do like – just almost none of it is in the plot.

Genealogy has a peculiar layout. You run from castle to castle, sieging, seizing, reforming, and repeating. It’s a good rhythm, and it just feels nice when you’re not playing it for maximal turn count. Since enemies spawn at the next castle, it doesn’t (typically) overwhelm you for not knowing what’s going on, while giving you something to prepare better for if you do know what’s going on.

Fire Emblem, and gaming in general, has a huge problem with balancing between things that are hard on repeated playthroughs versus things that get you on your first one. In general, people take the lazy way out, implementing something that hoses you on your first game but is trivial to plan for on subsequent runs. Think about the reinforcements that move after they spawn in a lot of Fire Emblems – you literally cannot plan to accommodate for them without foreknowledge in a lot of instances. They’re only difficult, per se, the first time around, when they can pop up from apparently nowhere and annihilate a unit without you being able to react. It’s bad design.

Essentially, you want to strike a balance. You want your challenges to be surmountable the first time around, but retain a level of difficulty when the player goes back through, or if they’re cheating with a guide. Go too far to the right, and you get a Final Fantasy where you cannot experience all of the content without a guide, even on repeated replays. Go too far to the left, and you get a game like Bastion that’s amazing the first time around and then kind of just feels like the same game the second+ time.

Actually, a series I think pulls this off really well, in my limited experience, is Touhou. In my repeated attempts to still not beat Perfect Cherry Blossom, there’s been no point in the game where I went “well, fuck, if only I’d known that ahead of time I could have done it.” On the other hand, there aren’t any parts of the game that have become trivial enough to shut my brain off and cruise through it because, Christ, this shit again? Even the first time I made it to the mid-boss of Stage 5 (of 6) with one life left, I managed to zen my way through a good few of her phases before I finally missed a dodge and caved. Practice in that case is just practice, not foreknowledge of bullshit you need to foreknow, which is how you make good difficulty and not bad.

I can think of a hundred more examples of this done both well and badly, but let’s stop the digression for now and go back to the plot. I ran straight by this motherfucker and had to turn around and run Sigurd’s entire distance to talk to him. You might have seen him in the previous screenshot chilling with the group in defensive formation, at the reform phase before moving on to the last siege. Let’s talk about Arvis.

Contrary to the mean shit I’ve said about Genealogy so far, Arvis’ portrayal early on is very well done. We’re not outright told that this is a bad dude – in fact, the opening roll just said he was uninvolved in governmental affairs, a neutral sentiment – but here he shows up low-key talking shit about Sigurd behind his back. If you’re playing this game normally, and not like a total cheeseball, you’ll probably see Arvis close in on a bandit and entirely annihilate him, period. The game sets up, as organically as Fire Emblem’s medium allows, that Arvis isn’t an entirely nice dude and that he’s someone to watch out for.

Then he talks to Sigurd and he’s all smiles and promises. He gives Sigurd the Silver Sword. He forgives Azel straight up for leaving home and joining Sigurd. He’s portrayed as a totally different dude than the guy who just walked in, throwing shade and dropping bodies, and this time Genealogy doesn’t come across as discordant because it’s anime, but because it’s meant to be. This works. Arvis is obviously something more, and he has an angle, and the game conveys it in one short monologue and one short dialogue.

That’s actually one of Arvis’ strengths as a villain early on, in my opinion: he’s not. He gets this short monologue and dialogue (compared to Manfroy, about whom we’ll have words later) and then he basically fucks off and does his own thing. In some chapters, he shows up as a schemer behind bad things happening to you, but unlike the Loptyr plot it’s organic, because this is an actual man of power who’s proven himself to us, not some really comically evil-looking fuck who throws shadow magic at you and dies to a breeze and is dressed like a hundred other cultists, but apparently seduced King or Duke X’s ear. Arvis is good.

Observant eyes will note that I managed to truck Arden across the entire map and gank the boss with him without holding up unnecessarily. Go me. 16 turns clear, I think that’s reasonable enough for a game I haven’t played since drafting was a thing.

Anyway, we’re at the end of the first update. Something silly happens here that I alluded to earlier with the comment about issues of scale: an envoy from Belhalla immediately arrives. Belhalla.

That’s a third of the continent away. Is Jugdral the size of Cincinatti? That kind of checks out, actually. Til next time!

[spoiler=a nitpick that bugs the fuck out of me]

Cuan: “Remember the academy? We all met at the military academy back in Barhara. It was the three of us. You, me, and Eltshan. We were talking late that one night. And we took a vow to help each other out if one of us was ever in a bind.”

are you fucking serious augustria and grannvale are shown to have rocky relations at best what were an augustrian and a thracian doing training at a military academy in the capital of grannvale

[Tryhard]

that sure is a lot of words, but:

fe4 is good until you go to play it again

my sub run is dead in chapter 7 due to tedium

Edited May 1, 2016 by Tryhard

[Parrhesia]

lmao verdane's such a shitty wasteland that it doesn't even get capital letters on the map

[HF Makalov Fanboy Kai]

pretty good read overall, i'd be surprised if someone could find something entirely out of place.

[Serpent of Sheol]

my favorite part about verdane is that your early game bandits literally constitute a significant portion of jugdral population

and they're never heard of again pretty soon after

the entire country is inconsequential

...

i love you FE scale

[master egg]

integrity playing fe and giving opinions? gimme gimme gimme

[Ansem]

nice

and i get you have a slow summer and all but i hope you're not serious when you're looking for /quality story telling/ in a video game. im sure its been done well before(ocarina of time comes to mind) but at the end of the day it was a video game designed kids to play. if you want a good story go read a book or something.

[Nightmare]

Okay I'll bite.

and i get you have a slow summer and all but i hope you're not serious when you're looking for /quality story telling/ in a video game.

First, I don't think he's looking for that per se, but just trying to solidify his opinions on the stories in these games. Second...

im sure its been done well before(ocarina of time comes to mind) but at the end of the day it was a video game designed kids to play. if you want a good story go read a book or something.

Combined with what you said in the previous quote: if a game is trying to tell a story, then it's perfectly fair and reasonable to assess and criticise it. Generally, if a piece of fiction is trying to do something, then that something should be good, and thus we have a right to scrutinise it. Furthermore, video games can tell a story in a way no other medium can, which is through interactivity, and while that may or may not be directly related to Fire Emblem, it is as a whole a very worthwhile topic to explore.

The condescending remark about video games being fit for only kids is a whole can of worms I don't want to get into right now.

[Julius Nepos]

This looks great, I'll be following it.

Sigurd's decision would have been bad either way. It's either "charge alone and die, so my three knights will live a few more days - until Verdane gets to Chalphy and kills them" or "charge with my three knights and die together, leaving Chalphy completely undefended." But of course, this is Fire Emblem, so four knights (nine eventually, thanks to outside help) can totally take on Verdane's army.

And I never got Verdane's constitutional law (yeah, I'm a jurist, I think in terms of constitutional law). On the one hand it's some really centralized state, with the king ruling over the entire nation and each prince ruling a portion of the country in his name (hell, that's more centralized than Grannvale, even), but at the same time it's just clans of brigands and barbarians infighting and doing whatever they want?

[Tamanoir]

This comment about anime reminds me of a comment Clyde Mandelin's FF4 analysis about J2e translation : They présents it as an epic Shakespearian tales, but adds stupid pop cuture reference, which create some sort of dissonnance.

At least, at this point, Fe didn't makes comical characters and then gives them horrible origin story (Or present horrible horrible characters as comical. We'll get back to this when Awakening's turn will come....) One of the primary example of this is Guy in Tales of Abyss (Tales of stories are a whole different can of worms. Story is definitely not the serie's forte.)

 

Okay I'll bite.

 

First, I don't think he's looking for that per se, but just trying to solidify his opinions on the stories in these games. Second...

 

Combined with what you said in the previous quote: if a game is trying to tell a story, then it's perfectly fair and reasonable to assess and criticise it. Generally, if a piece of fiction is trying to do something, then that something should be good, and thus we have a right to scrutinise it. Furthermore, video games can tell a story in a way no other medium can, which is through interactivity, and while that may or may not be directly related to Fire Emblem, it is as a whole a very worthwhile topic to explore.

 

The condescending remark about video games being fit for only kids is a whole can of worms I don't want to get into right now.

There would be a lot to say about story telling in Video Games.

I think that Video games could (can) be an amazing way of conveying strory, since it doesn't have to do it through text alone.
Being able to freely explore a whole city, or conveying information through gameplay. Even playing with the video game format itself.
​This haven't been fully exploited yet (Truth be told, it's barely exploited at all), but there's a golden mine of story telling there, I'm convinced.

I may get back to this in more détails when Thracia 776's turn arrive, but its gameplay works pretty well to convey the overall ambiance of the story. Edited May 1, 2016 by Integrity

[Integrity]

nice

and i get you have a slow summer and all but i hope you're not serious when you're looking for /quality story telling/ in a video game. im sure its been done well before(ocarina of time comes to mind) but at the end of the day it was a video game designed kids to play. if you want a good story go read a book or something.

ocarina of time's story is bad, though

EDIT: and undertale's is good

Edited May 1, 2016 by Integrity

[Tryhard]

lowercase has come out again but in the chance of serious undertale's story is not good but its characters are written well there is a difference

[Integrity]

fair

[MisterIceTeaPeach]

I'm mainly looking forward to Tharcia's LP because it's the most controversial FE game Imo, at least gameplaywise.

There's a large love- and hate-public towards FE5's mechanics.

[SB.]

I never noticed Verdane disappeared after Chapter 1 before. I don't think IS realised either.

This is pretty interesting to read, following.