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Storyline Speculation (now with character wishlist)


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1 minute ago, Slumber said:

Gen 3 was awful, and gen 4 being simply unremarkable was a step up

I just don't think a water-centric world map for an FE game would work with the gameplay. It works in Wind Waker because it's open world, real time, and just as sailing starts to get tedious, you get a warp song, things that don't necessarily work in FE without drastically changing gameplay to basically an entirely different genre.

yo fight me irl you scrub gen 3 is one of the best gens in the game as far as creativity and longevity goes, it's far far better than the trash that was gen 4 and the buggy mess that was gen 1

Not necessarily. Considering that other than Gaiden and Sacred Stones, the world map in all FE is just "your army is battling at [location] this chapter for [reasons], and now your army has moved to [new location] to battle because of [reasons]," open world and real time has nothing to do with it. And even in the former games, it's not like you're literally running across the world map to get to places. I mean, you don't have to spend weeks or months physically sailing the ocean to Talys from Altea at the beginning of Shadow Dragon. You're automatically there to start the first non-Prologue chapter.

I see no reasons why an ocean-centric FE wouldn't be the same. Chapter to chapter, you'd automatically move, and the chapter would start out in that new location. It wouldn't be an entirely different genre at all.

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1 minute ago, Extrasolar said:

yo fight me irl you scrub gen 3 is one of the best gens in the game as far as creativity and longevity goes, it's far far better than the trash that was gen 4 and the buggy mess that was gen 1

Not necessarily. Considering that other than Gaiden and Sacred Stones, the world map in all FE is just "your army is battling at [location] this chapter for [reasons], and now your army has moved to [new location] to battle because of [reasons]," open world and real time has nothing to do with it. And even in the former games, it's not like you're literally running across the world map to get to places. I mean, you don't have to spend weeks or months physically sailing the ocean to Talys from Altea at the beginning of Shadow Dragon. You're automatically there to start the first non-Prologue chapter.

I see no reasons why an ocean-centric FE wouldn't be the same. Chapter to chapter, you'd automatically move, and the chapter would start out in that new location. It wouldn't be an entirely different genre at all.

Please. Longevity? Nobody sane wants to replay a game that requires two water focused HM slaves to purely get around half of the map, and only see the same 5 shitty water Pokemon over and over for the whole game

But, as a pirate, or any kind of seafarer, the idea is that you spend most of your time fighting at sea. Ship chapters work roughly once per game, and only once. You can only do ship chapters so much, because the scenery and objectives are always the same. 2-3 wooden boats, surrounded by seas, that you're only able to traverse via planks, kill the boss. Typically tons of archers to discourage just rushing the boss and ending the chapter immediately. You might be able to get away with a siege chapter at sea, but almost any other kind of objective makes 0 sense for ship combat.

If you decide to purely just show port-to-port scenes, it still wouldn't really help, since again, there are only so many scenarios and settings you can do with arriving/leaving a port.

To get any sort of decent map/objective variety, you have to spend most of the game somewhat inland. And at that point, there's really no reason to do a "high-seas Fire Emblem".

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9 minutes ago, Slumber said:

Please. Longevity? Nobody sane wants to replay a game that requires two water focused HM slaves to purely get around half of the map, and only see the same 5 shitty water Pokemon over and over for the whole game

But, as a pirate, or any kind of seafarer, the idea is that you spend most of your time fighting at sea. Ship chapters work roughly once per game, and only once. You can only do ship chapters so much, because the scenery and objectives are always the same. 2-3 wooden boats, surrounded by seas, that you're only able to traverse via planks, kill the boss. Typically tons of archers to discourage just rushing the boss and ending the chapter immediately. You might be able to get away with a siege chapter at sea, but almost any other kind of objective makes 0 sense for ship combat.

[snip]

To get any sort of decent map/objective variety, you have to spend most of the game somewhat inland. And at that point, there's really no reason to do a "high-seas Fire Emblem".

No see, your problem is that you didn't pick Mudkip, which is the best starter in gen 3 hands down. You don't even need to bother with an HM slave when you have a badass water pokemon ready to learn surf anyway which is a great move for it regardless not to mention you can just fly, and fly HM slaves are common in most games in the series. and 5 same shitty water pokemon? hey, the sea routes in earlier games were tentacool and magikarp. at least gen 3 diversified that, plus all the new pokemon are much more creative than the awful gen 4 ones and a lot of the later ones

I didn't say the campaign would have to take place entirely on the high seas and feature nothing but ship combat, because that would get stale fast. I mean, in something like One Piece, you have characters exploring and interacting with various islands and such much more than they're at sea. I imagine that a sea-based FE game would be much of the same - you'd have these huge island kingdoms, pirate warlords, and whatnot, and each island could have different features, terrain, and special qualities in the vein of Wind Waker. While you'd definitely have the boat chapters, you'd also have more traditional chapters based on islands - and not necessarily the small islands like the Talys map in Shadow Dragon.

Island to island isn't inland; I'm thinking there's no big mainland at all. For me, the reason would be variety and interest: We'd finally be getting something other than the same land-based kingdoms we get over and over.

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27 minutes ago, Extrasolar said:

No see, your problem is that you didn't pick Mudkip, which is the best starter in gen 3 hands down. You don't even need to bother with an HM slave when you have a badass water pokemon ready to learn surf anyway which is a great move for it regardless not to mention you can just fly, and fly HM slaves are common in most games in the series. and 5 same shitty water pokemon? hey, the sea routes in earlier games were tentacool and magikarp. at least gen 3 diversified that, plus all the new pokemon are much more creative than the awful gen 4 ones and a lot of the later ones

I didn't say the campaign would have to take place entirely on the high seas and feature nothing but ship combat, because that would get stale fast. I mean, in something like One Piece, you have characters exploring and interacting with various islands and such much more than they're at sea. I imagine that a sea-based FE game would be much of the same - you'd have these huge island kingdoms, pirate warlords, and whatnot, and each island could have different features, terrain, and special qualities in the vein of Wind Waker. While you'd definitely have the boat chapters, you'd also have more traditional chapters based on islands - and not necessarily the small islands like the Talys map in Shadow Dragon.

Island to island isn't inland; I'm thinking there's no big mainland at all. For me, the reason would be variety and interest: We'd finally be getting something other than the same land-based kingdoms we get over and over.

Creative=/=good. Gen 3 started the awful trend of making Pokemon look like Digimon, with not only the 3 main legendaries both looking like straight up robots, but with the 3 minor legendaries actually being robots. The simpler designs of gen 1 and 2 worked better. Plus, look at Luvdisc and tell me gen 3 was "creative". The thing's a goddamn cartoon heart with a mouth. And picking Mudkip doesn't help at all when the majority of the Pokemon you encounter throughout the game are water-types. And the routes are STILL mostly Tentacool and Magikarp. Only now you get Wingull, who was another joke Pokemon until gen 7. Rarely you'd run into Barboach and Wailmer, who are also both boring. The only truly interesting water type you could run into was Carvanha, which you only found if you were crazy and actually used a rod to actively encounter MORE water Pokemon. It doesn't help that literally half of the map is water by design, because of the absolutely stupid villain teams in gen 3.

The original comment I was responding to said FE at the high seas. That's where my comment of "Water focused FE doesn't really work" came from. One Piece, from what I understand, is not a turn-based strategy game. That series is what? 800 chapters long? It takes a lot of time to establish the places characters go to. It helps in a game like FE where you stick to a handful of areas in a country/continent. You really only have to build up the grander setting, then explore a bunch of smaller settings in more detail. Look at how FEs that handle "arcs" are typically received(Though it's really only one game). Valm/Walhart got like, 7 chapters of build up and development, and people STILL don't think that part of the game was very fleshed out or fulfilling.

It's better, for FE, to focus on one biggish location. The structure isn't there for the franchise to hop around continents/countries/islands that are completely disconnected. In medieval settings, going somewhere new by boat is almost like going to a completely different world, like what happened when you go from Ylisse to Valm, or even mainland Elibe to the Dread Isle. It worked for the latter, because it was small and relatively inconsequential belong just giving Nergal a base of operations. It didn't work for Valm because it was supposed to be this big, military nation, and it just never got the development is needed, despite taking up roughly 1/4 of the game.

Look. Nobody wants more pirate/open sea games like I do. I love Sid Meyer's Pirates!, I love Wind Waker, I even put up with the shitty Assassin's Creed conventions for Black Flag, and despite Microsoft disappointing me at every turn, and Rare being a shell of their former selves, I desperately want Sea of Thieves to be good almost purely because it's a pirate game. But Fire Emblem is just one of those franchises that doesn't make sense to make sea-focused.

Edited by Slumber
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19 minutes ago, Slumber said:

Creative=/=good. Gen 3 started the awful trend of making Pokemon look like Digimon, with not only the 3 main legendaries both looking like straight up robots, but with the 3 minor legendaries actually being robots. The simpler designs of gen 1 and 2 worked better. Plus, look at Luvdisc and tell me gen 3 was "creative". The thing's a goddamn cartoon heart with a mouth. And picking Mudkip doesn't help at all when the majority of the Pokemon you encounter throughout the game are water-types. And the routes are STILL mostly Tentacool and Magikarp. Only now you get Wingull, who was another joke Pokemon until gen 7. Rarely you'd run into Barboach and Wailmer, who are also both boring. The only truly interesting water type you could run into was Carvanha, which you only found if you were crazy and actually used a rod to actively encounter MORE water Pokemon. It doesn't help that literally half of the map is water by design, because of the absolutely stupid villain teams in gen 3.

This is getting overly long so I'm spoiling it, lol.

Spoiler

Pokemon looking like digimon? No. Not really. Digimon designs are way different, and only people that have a surface knowledge of Digimon designs make that claim; not to mention, Digimon is awesome, so it's not like that's a strike against the franchise in general. Picking Mudkip helps because not only is it one of the best Pokemon in the game stats-wise, but if the problem is surfing, you already have a free surf Pokemon. And yeah the majority of Pokemon in the game are water types, but water is literally the most common type in the every single game to begin with .Also, Luvdisc being uncreative? Muk is literally nothing but a pile of slime. Magnemite is a round metallic eyeball with two magnets stuck on the side. Voltorb is a goddamn oversized Pokeball with no button.. Calling Luvdisc uncreative means you'd have to call the majority of previous gen uncreative just as hard, if not more. And the villain teams of gen 3 are stupid? The first two gens literally reused the same "oh yeah we're crime dudes and nothing else with no other relevance" team. At least Team Aqua and Team Magma had actual villainous designs and actually threatened the stability of the world. Plus there's nothing about Kyogre or Groudon that looks robotic, and Deoxys is a space alien that can rewrite its DNA at will, so it looking robotic makes sense. Unless you're talking about the Regis, which are literally golems, so them being robotic makes sense.

 

19 minutes ago, Slumber said:

The original comment I was responding to said FE at the high seas. That's where my comment of "Water focused FE doesn't really work" came from. One Piece, from what I understand, is not a turn-based strategy game. That series is what? 800 chapters long? It takes a lot of time to establish the places characters go to. It helps in a game like FE where you stick to a handful of areas in a country/continent. You really only have to build up the grander setting, then explore a bunch of smaller settings in more detail. Look at how FEs that handle "arcs" are typically received(Though it's really only one game). Valm/Walhart got like, 7 chapters of build up and development, and people STILL don't think that part of the game was very fleshed out or fulfilling.

The genre is honestly irrelevant in this case. Unless you want to argue that every single FE game sucks in worldbuilding because it doesn't devote pages and pages of description to each location you go to, you don't have to take much time to establish locations at all, especially if they're islands. And especially in an FE context "This is X Island, home to Y Kingdom ruled by X, Y, and Z and inhabited by the XZ people, known for its y" is more than enough worldbuilding than we need right off the bat; and indeed, a lot of the time that's as much worldbuilding as we get in a main FE story. What do we know about Macedon, for example? It's a highly militaristic country with a focus in wyvern riders and pegasus riders. Not amazingly detailed. Or Altea? Island kingdom, friends with Talys, has a tradition of knights. Not amazingly detailed or fleshed out.

And really? People think that the Valm arc was fleshed out? Uh, I disagree heavily, because it was unceremoniously tacked on to pad the game before we got into the third act, and not only did Walhart (and Yen'Fay) get painfully little character development (and the latter especially, for how "sympathetic" he was supposed to be), but Valm itself felt flat and one note. I have literally never seen anyone defending the second arc of Awakening; if anything, it's the most criticized just for how shoehorned and out of place it is.

19 minutes ago, Slumber said:

It's better, for FE, to focus on one biggish location. The structure isn't there for the franchise to hop around continents/countries/islands that are completely disconnected. In medieval settings, going somewhere new by boat is almost like going to a completely different world, like what happened when you go from Ylisse to Valm.\

Which you can still do. Call it The Great Sea, the FE Archipelago, whatever, with the islands being smaller locations. And I'm not saying that the islands are going to be thousands of miles apart. They can be within a few dozen miles of one another, and still interact with trade and diplomacy. Calling it going into a completely different world would be kind of a stretch, imo. These aren't different continents, unless you think something like the Hawaiian islands are completely different worlds.

Edited by Extrasolar
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42 minutes ago, Extrasolar said:

This is getting overly long so I'm spoiling it, lol.

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Pokemon looking like digimon? No. Not really. Digimon designs are way different, and only people that have a surface knowledge of Digimon designs make that claim; not to mention, Digimon is awesome, so it's not like that's a strike against the franchise in general. Picking Mudkip helps because not only is it one of the best Pokemon in the game stats-wise, but if the problem is surfing, you already have a free surf Pokemon. And yeah the majority of Pokemon in the game are water types, but water is literally the most common type in the every single game to begin with .Also, Luvdisc being uncreative? Muk is literally nothing but a pile of slime. Magnemite is a round metallic eyeball with two magnets stuck on the side. Voltorb is a goddamn oversized Pokeball with no button.. Calling Luvdisc uncreative means you'd have to call the majority of previous gen uncreative just as hard, if not more. And the villain teams of gen 3 are stupid? The first two gens literally reused the same "oh yeah we're crime dudes and nothing else with no other relevance" team. At least Team Aqua and Team Magma had actual villainous designs and actually threatened the stability of the world. Plus there's nothing about Kyogre or Groudon that looks robotic, and Deoxys is a space alien that can rewrite its DNA at will, so it looking robotic makes sense. Unless you're talking about the regis, which are literally golems, so them being robotic makes sense.

 

The genre is honestly irrelevant in this case. Unless you want to argue that every single FE game sucks in worldbuilding because it doesn't devote pages and pages of description to each location you go to, you don't have to take much time to establish locations at all, especially if they're islands. And especially in an FE context "This is X Island, home to Y Kingdom ruled by X, Y, and Z and inhabited by the XZ people, known for its y" is more than enough worldbuilding than we need right off the bat in an FE context; and indeed, a lot of the time that's as much worldbuilding as we get in the main story. What do we know about Macedon, for example? It's a highly militaristic country with a focus in wyvern riders and pegasus riders. Not amazingly detailed. Or Altea? Island kingdom, friends with Talys, has a tradition of knights. Not amazingly detailed or fleshed out.

And really? People think that the Valm arc was fleshed out? Uh, I disagree heavily, because it was unceremoniously tacked onto pad the game before we got the the third act, and not only did Walhart get painfully little character development for how "sympathetic" he was supposed to be, but Valm itself felt flat and one note. I have literally never seen anyone defending the second arc of Awakening; if anything, it's the most criticized just for how shoehorned and out of place it is.

Which you can still do. Call it The Great Sea, the FE Archipelago, whatever, with the islands being smaller locations. And I'm not saying that the islands are going to be thousands of miles apart. They can be within a few dozen miles of one another, and still interact with trade and diplomacy. Calling it going into a completely different world would be kind of a stretch, imo. These aren't different continents, unless you think something like the Hawaiian islands are completely different worlds.

 

You see, with gen 1, the somewhat simple designs are understandable. They're built off of a concept, and made into animals, and all very simple in design... barring the "humanoid Pokemon" like Mr. Mime and Jynx, who are just awful. Voltorb being a Pokeball is dumb. Always has been. But when the design philosophies were relatively simple, you could see it existing next to something like Pidgey, which is just a bird, or even next to Mew. Same with Muk/Grimer. A fish looking like a heart being put next to something like Groudon, and they don't even look like they're part of the same series. It's not just that Luvdisc is a dumb, it's that Pokemon design is now wildly inconsistent. Whereas it was pretty much just Jynx/Mr. Mime as the odd ones out, now is all of... most of the legendaries, Ludicolo, all of Wurmple's evolutions, Shiftry, Exploud, Volbeat/Illumise, Cacturn, and probably a few more that don't come to mind that just... don't look right.

The genre is absolutely relevant. The Witcher's setting would not work as a first person shooter. The Witcher is something that really only works as a big RPG. Settings and ways of storytelling are absolutely helped or hindered by their genre. And no, FE doesn't fail at worldbuilding because it doesn't devote pages and pages to it. My point was that the only real reason Fire Emblem's world building(typically) DOES work, is because you're so tied to the locations they take place in. Would anyone give a shit about Tellius if halfway through PoR, you just left, never to come back? Would the whole commentary on racism get the attention that it does? No, probably not. And PoR manages to convey its own sort of personality, and the racism/religion commentary happens pretty naturally, because there's a lot of time spent on characters talking about it. Obviously in some FE games, countries get less exposure than others(Like Isaach in Jugdral, which never really gets the focus compared to the others. Or Hatari in Tellius.), but they're typically not that integral to the story, and these places are typically isolationist by nature. You'll still get a lot from player units and enemies, and their standing in relation to the rest of the countries is usually pretty clear.

No, I said people DON'T think Valm was fleshed out, to further my point. The one time in FE history where you go to a completely different continent and experience a totally foreign land, and it's supposed to have this big relevance to the story. But it doesn't get the development it needs, because you just go there halfway through the game. It's similar to how an FE where you island hop would be. You essentially abandon one plot, only to immerse yourself in a completely different one by traveling to a different continent and dealing with the problems there. Only instead of doing it just once, you'd be doing it multiple times throughout the game.

Comparing traveling between Hawaiian islands, and comparing sea travel in medieval Europe was WAAAAAAY different. When Vikings traveled to England and conquered it, the countries were so different that Scandinavia's influence over England basically changed England forever(You can basically thank the Danish that the English language structure is the way it is), and mainland Europe was severely caught off guard by the Viking culture when they raided, and never fully understood who exactly the Vikings were until literally about 600 years after Vikings stopped being a thing. These were legitimately "new worlds" to these countries that were separated by substantial bodies of water. Hell, the Americas were called the "New World" for precisely this reason. And THIS is why Valm didn't work, and why island hopping wouldn't work in an FE setting. So much is learned about the worlds just by being in these places for FE. Moving from place to place robs these islands of development. It works is big, open RPGs/adventure games where you can talk to NPCs and locals at your leisure to learn about those kinds of places, or even explore the lands up close. Fire Emblem would have to adopt entirely new gameplay conventions to make this work.

And again, I feel like you're getting away from the heart of a "sea-faring" game. You're arguing that it wouldn't have a big impact on gameplay, maps don't have to take place at sea or on ports, the islands wouldn't be all that far apart, and they wouldn't have to feel all that different. At this point, it being a game about the sea doesn't really matter. This could just be any other Fire Emblem. You're just substituting "countries" with "islands". Which would be fine, but I feel like it gets away from the point of being some kind of ocean adventure.

Edited by Slumber
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19 hours ago, Slumber said:

And no, FE doesn't fail at worldbuilding because it doesn't devote pages and pages to it. My point was that the only real reason Fire Emblem's world building(typically) DOES work, is because you're so tied to the locations they take place in. Would anyone give a shit about Tellius if halfway through PoR, you just left, never to come back? Would the whole commentary on racism get the attention that it does? No, probably not. And PoR manages to convey its own sort of personality, and the racism/religion commentary happens pretty naturally, because there's a lot of time spent on characters talking about it. Obviously in some FE games, countries get less exposure than others(Like Isaach in Jugdral, which never really gets the focus compared to the others. Or Hatari in Tellius.), but they're typically not that integral to the story, and these places are typically isolationist by nature. You'll still get a lot from player units and enemies, and their standing in relation to the rest of the countries is usually pretty clear.

But you're assuming that you wouldn't revisit islands at any point. Like you said, some locations are more important than others, and some would be revisited and emphasized. Just because they're on an archipelago means they're suddenly incapable of boating back to a previous island, or spending more time on one particular location. Again, we're talking some of them being huge, huge and very populated islands, enough to house kingdoms - several miles across at least. More than enough material for multiple maps taking place on a single island if that's the case.

And you're missing the point: The entire archipelago is the equivalent of the continent, or the larger world. Leaving Tellius for an entirely different continent is different than simply moving to a different island (a smaller location, as you put it). You're still in the FE Archipelago, you just have a change of scenery. It's the equivalent of moving from Crimea to Daein, not leaving Tellius overall.

I'll agree that Tellius worldbuilding is done well, but I'd argue that it's done well through the characters, not the locations themselves. Honestly, we learn so little about places like Kilvas and Phoenicis that they're more or less irrelevant; we remember them because we get Naesala and Tibarn representing them. Same deal: We're attached to Crimea because a lot of the beloved characters we get in POR are from Crimea, and are fighting for its freedom. The kingdom itself? Meh, a bog-standard "good" kingdom with a tradition of knights. I've seen that before.

19 hours ago, Slumber said:

Comparing traveling between Hawaiian islands, and comparing sea travel in medieval Europe was WAAAAAAY different. When Vikings traveled to England and conquered it, the countries were so different that Scandinavia's influence over England basically changed England forever(You can basically thank the Danish that the English language structure is the way it is), and mainland Europe was severely caught off guard by the Viking culture when they raided, and never fully understood who exactly the Vikings were until literally about 600 years after Vikings stopped being a thing. These were legitimately "new worlds" to these countries that were separated by substantial bodies of water. Hell, the Americas were called the "New World" for precisely this reason. And THIS is why Valm didn't work, and why island hopping wouldn't work in an FE setting. So much is learned about the worlds just by being in these places for FE. Moving from place to place robs these islands of development. It works is big, open RPGs/adventure games where you can talk to NPCs and locals at your leisure to learn about those kinds of places, or even explore the lands up close. Fire Emblem would have to adopt entirely new gameplay conventions to make this work.


Valm didn't work because Valm had absolutely nothing to do with Ylisse at all. That was a completely different world. But that's not what I'm suggesting with my idea.

As a whole, these islands would operate as a single "world." All the characters would be native to this island chain, barring perhaps a few from other places like Kamui is new to Valentia. They wouldn't be traveling from a continent to the islands. They'd be born and raised in the archipelago itself, and the residents of the island would be in conflict with and mingling with each other.

Like I said above, you wouldn't have to leave the island immediately; the larger ones would get more time, and the smaller ones would be those FE trademark sidestory, non-relevant one-off chapters in an odd and not very meaningful location. I mean, we've got all the framework already, and I'm not suggesting anything that FE hasn't done already, just in a new and exciting setting with new and exciting flavor.

19 hours ago, Slumber said:

And again, I feel like you're getting away from the heart of a "sea-faring" game. You're arguing that it wouldn't have a big impact on gameplay, maps don't have to take place at sea or on ports, the islands wouldn't be all that far apart, and they wouldn't have to feel all that different. At this point, it being a game about the sea doesn't really matter. This could just be any other Fire Emblem. You're just substituting "countries" with "islands". Which would be fine, but I feel like it gets away from the point of being some kind of ocean adventure.

I think we have a disconnect here. You seem to associate "seafaring" with 100% ocean and on a boat all the time. But I'm arguing that it doesn't have to be this way. Even the original seafaring adventure, Treasure Island, too place mostly on an island. I mean, like I said, One Piece and even Wind Waker which both count as seafaring adventures did and do more than sailing all the time, and each island was made relevant. I'd say that the island/ocean flavoring would matter regardless.

My idea isn't an ocean adventure in that it's nothing but sailing, because that would get stale and redundant fast. Variety is the spice of life in everything; honestly, getting terrestrial-based kingdom after terrestrial-based kingdom is getting a little old. "Any other Fire Emblem" doesn't mean it can't be ocean-based.

And by the logic that if you weren't on the ocean 100% of the time then it wouldn't "matter" as a setting, then none of the FE settings "matter" because you're not traveling overland 100% of the time. To be quite honest, the setting in FE is a vehicle for the plot and as a way to get a change of scenery and different maps from chapter to chapter. If it doesn't matter, why can't we have an ocean setting?

Edited by Extrasolar
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On 3/23/2017 at 1:56 PM, Slumber said:

Look at how FEs that handle "arcs" are typically received(Though it's really only one game). Valm/Walhart got like, 7 chapters of build up and development, and people STILL don't think that part of the game was very fleshed out or fulfilling.

Every FE has story arcs to some extent, albeit not so gigantic or radically disconnected as Awakening. PoR: everything up to Greil's death is one arc, the chapters thereafter are not so arc-ified, but when we land in Begnion, another arc begins which ends with Ike being promoted and the invasion of Daein. Once Nevassa is conquered the last arc, reclaiming Crimea, begins. Genealogy is basically two arcs, with Gen 1 possibly divisible into three sub-arcs. FE7 has the search for Elbert, figuring out what to do post-Elbert's death, the Bern and Fire Emblem arc, and then the time to kill Nergal final arc.

Curiously, Kid Icarus: Uprising has a similar number of chapters to Awakening, but actually runs through 5 arcs. The difference is that Awakening takes itself seriously, KIU does not. The result: KIU is not lambasted for its arcs, Awakening is.

And a personal critique of mine of the Valm arc falls on Yen'fay. With Gangrel at least we got to see him kill Basilio as a badass gameplay representation of his power. Yen'fay appears not whatsoever prior to his one battle and thus we have no appreciation for his strength or talent, ever, which means the player is not at emotionally hyped up/fearful when fighting him. The game could call him the Lord of All Creation at the start of his fight, and it wouldn't matter if we saw nothing of him beforehand.

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