Here you go my friend
But really, wasn't a common criticism that being able to recruit most students and other members (with some limitations) pretty much made the separation between houses useless. Like "Catherine, Shamir, arm up, we are going to fuck up the church" "Sure boss, just let me pray to seiros and thank Lady Rea for everything she gave us". I still have issues with Petra and Caspar being in the same house considering their past and Marianne, the most religious one in Claude route
Hahahaha. I love that you had such a good natured reaction to my obvious joke during an obvious drunk post. You're great. Thumbs up to you, my friend.
Ok, so.............
In this game's narrative fashion -
Chapter 1: Eagle Moon
So I had to do a cross-atlantic international flight there and back since I last posted. With layovers. And delays. Ohhhh the delays.
All told, 37 hours of travel. Ouch. Upside? It let me not only complete Crimson Flower but also complete Azure Gleam.
Needless to say, I have many thoughts. About....a game no one seems to care about anymore but is one of three I've played this year, so bear with me...
So, first of all, this game is fundamentally bad. I know, I know. I've kind of stated that, but let me explain.
The fundamental problem is with the adaptive material. It's trying to make an action game out of a strategy RPG.
Now, as a pretty big fan of Fire Emblem, I have criticisms of Three Houses which I won't elaborate here. Mostly because none of the following really hits that game. The problem with this adaptation is that it tries to bleed over the root game in WAY too close of a fashion without the development resources to do so.
Including, but not limited to - a gigantic cast, a leveling category system, three paths orthodoxy, enemy heterodoxy, and most importantly - REPETITION.
Chapter 2: Rage Mountain
Let's break it down.
1) Gigantic Cast -
Look, by my count there are 3 unique characters in a playthrough of this game, 1 given to the player at start (shez). 1 given to the player by choice/sacrifice (lord), 1 additional granted by convoluted method in-playthrough (hidden guide-based bullshit). Now there may be 3 more if you count the post-game wierdness of "you can't really use them, but technically you can" (renown). And, of course, there are the other 2 Lords if you want to spend another however many hours - But that crams
everyone else into the gigantic pool of "avatar."
What a terrible decision by the game designers.
In a stategy RPG it works. Because you have this gigantic base of usable characters at a given moment, the nature of the gameplay allows for flexibility based on this plethora of characters on the field. It's fundamental to the genre.
Here?
I can't imagine what type of person would bother to max out all of these silly avatars. There's just too many.
The problem, of course, is that it only benefits you to concentrate all your efforts on an exceedingly small amount of characters. Your limited resources will stretch thin, and wasting them on 22 units serves no purpose. You are almost forced to focus.
2) Category Leveling System
I get it. It was an reference to the Fire Emblem class-up that seemed somewhat cool. But it doesn't work here. The base classes are useless and fly by in 30 seconds. The intermediate classes are a means to an end. That was a complete waste of game-development resources for this purpose no matter how derivative they are.
More importantly, the final classes are lame in an action sense. I don't need multiple horse classes. They're all essentially the same. Some weird ass animations with a horse doing 360 jumps and damage output that doesn't really seem to be any different? Does anyone really care?
Am I wrong? No, I'm really not.
You can go look at any "Tier List" to see that half of these are pointless.
Look, I get the weapons triangle but even in the core series it's pretty nerfed and here it's no different. Arrows kill flyers. Outside of that, you can probably manage. It doesn't help that "flyers" don't really do anything in this game. None of the "warp points" matter and they don't have any greater mobility than other units. It's basically just an excuse to let your own archers feel cool.
A-rank battalions seem to be better than any other weapon advantage no matter how you slice it. It's just not that big of a deal here, in which case - what are we doing? Seeing different attack animations for destroying things? Then why are they so unsatisfying?
Part of the problem is that they don't want to commit to the differences. Ranged attackers don't mean anything (attack power always trumps range in a game where there are literally enemies all over the place). White Mage/healer is a ridiculously stupid class in an action game where you have constantly replenishing healing items anyways..... I could go on, but let's just sum it up. You aren't
really controlling a squadron, you're controlling an action game characters. And an action game character is best at damage output. This ruins most of the SRPG class types and they should have realized that.
I'll jump the gun and point out that the enemies follow the same damn class tree you do. How many times have you seen the brawler, the mortal savant, the pegasus knight? It's forcing you to fight the same enemies over and over and over and over. With the same basic types of your units. Over and over and over and over. It's all the same.
3) Three Paths Orthodoxy
By this point I guarantee that only die-hards are willing to read this far and they're all foaming at the mouth ready to talk about story. Ok. Let me disappoint you.
I don't care about this story because there isn't one.
Try to object. There literally isn't. There is no story here. Nothing matters, nothing sticks, nothing is weighted.
The problem with the Three Houses approach is in overdrive here. All that actually exists is characters in a scenario. Beyond that, we have multiple different versions of what COULD have happened, and then different ways in which what COULD have happened COULD have been different.
Great. Excuse me while I yawn.
Look, I enjoy SRPG gameplay, and the Three Houses approach gave me an excuse to play through multiple times on multiple difficulties with some slight differences. But I'm not going to try to pretend like it was some magnum opus of storytelling, and I'm certainly not going to pretend like fucking around with those stories made them better. Especially with this crap.
The whole thing comes across like Pokemon ULTRA Sun & Moon. Shez/Azral...or whatever his name is.....add less than nothing. In my opinion, they actively make the whole thing kinda dumber. If you felt differently, more power to you. But come on. Don't tell me going to the omega realm, or whatever it was called, made this thing better.
4) Enemy Heterodoxy/REPETITION
Listen, I cheated and touched on this earlier, but every map in this game is essentially the same. Because all of the enemies are the same. And the bases are the same. And the goals are the same. And it's all the same, made more obvious because there are A LOT of the same things.
Going through 1 path with all sidequests was already stretching thin how much actual videogame exists here. Going through 2 with sidequests is a bit painful. I have no idea what 3 would be like, and I feel for anyone that tries.
There are almost no unique bosses, there are almost no unique attacks.
By the end of your first playthrough, you should be recognizing everything that happens. The "strategies" and "fire floors" and whatnot don't matter. It's all just the same thing over and over and over.
Now, I'll admit it - the rhythm of grinding, for those that like grindy video games, can get in your head. It did in mine. "Just how badly can I absolutely obliterate everything in front of me if I up this stat?" Well, the answer is ridiculously so. Yes, I know that world.
But by the time you wrap around with a fully-stocked homebase, know the enemy patterns for perfect guards, know how to maximize gains, and start to unlock sacred weapons and class skills? "Maddening" difficulty falls like a house of cards.
Is that something to be proud of? I mean.............
Chapter 3 Glory Hill
Ok, so Catherine. When I rounded the corner to Azure Gleam, I was S-ranking every map, collecting every reward, stacked about 1M in cash, saving all of the power-up items, and I blew it all on that unit.
I'm not going to lie. It was pretty damn satisfying blowing past everything in the game with a ridiculously overpowered stacked-up character of my choosing. But that shouldn't have been the case. This game could do better than giving me that moment.
Here's my suggestions that could have made this game immensely better.
1) Focus on 1 path.
Ok, you're in charge of this game. You have an incredibly small financial development budget (I'm assuming) and can only make Shez and the lords unique. Damn that sucks. More, you're stuck with the fact that you have to fan service in all the house members. You have 4 simultaneous playable characters.
These are some limitations. Don't make them worse.
Make it so people can maximize in one path. I have a tough time believing that even .001% of people actually play all three paths in this game. That's wasted effort. New Game+ resets almost everyone you have, with only SOME of the units carrying over, and MOST of the units not unique beyond supports and appearance. Poor incentive.
More importantly, you could offer something unique. A path where the lords all unite against Those That Slither in the Who Cares and do something that people would be interested in more than beating Arliss or whatever. Give an excuse to bring all these extra characters in, give an excuse for people to want to power-level, and give an excuse for the extended nature of any route.
Make it an event that doesn't read like a "if we did a director's cut of three houses....."
2) Forget the level-up tree
Just make fun-to-use classes. No one cares about the path to it. Everyone just wants to blow shit up with fantasy characters. Forget white mages and have the Gremory actually do something cool.
Use the battalions in some way to make it actually feel like a group attack.
Do some crazy thing that would make this more exciting. Do something............like...............
3) Do more ridiculous shit
Age Of Calamity was great because it let you play with a bunch of idiots you couldn't touch in the main game. But it was also great because the attacks felt crazy. For some reason, this game doesn't even give you the ones they have in the base game, and then they don't do much of anything they didn't do before.
I mean, I was shocked when I realized how few of the special characters are here. Just an example - they have a Gilbert model in this game. Gilbert was playable in Three Houses. And pretty damn well loved. But..........not here? Why? That's only one example.
Sure, they gave us Rodrigue and Monica and..........Holst? Wait, let me check that for accuracy..................yeah. "Holst." ok.
But actually what would anyone who played the base game care about. These? As generic class-based avatars? Really?
You don't think they'd be asking if they can blow shit up with Rhea? Well............ok..............you know. I mean, I don't wanna use tags or whatever.
Look, it's either gotta be something I can't do in the base game or it's just.....
4) Just make Three Houses Definitive Edition if this is what you focused on........
Tell me for real that it wouldn't have made more sense. Add in all this story effort and lore to that thing and use the dev time to make killer attacks or whatever. Damn, it would have been better.
Chapter 4: Is this too long?
So, I had to check. I'm not crazy. Now I actually saw things saying that Fire Emblem Three Hopes: Anvil Edition was the best Warriors game ever, and I can't imagine what they are smoking. After completing these two routes, I went and fired up Age Of Calamity again.
Just to see if I was crazy.
Was I crazy?
No. I was not. The variety in that game between playable characters is immensely stronger. There are quite a few different unique enemy types. The graphics are stronger. The environments are WAY better. The gameplay mechanics are better. Literally everything about that game is way stronger.
Maybe you have an intense love for Sylvain, and find him to be the superior red-haired horse-rider of Fire Emblem lore or whatever, but this GAME is severely lacking.
Try it yourself. I challenge anyone to actually tell me this game is better from a game point of view.
With that, I'm out.
Friday comes Xenoblade 3, and damn I'm hoping it fills in better than this thing. Because I don't have another international trip. And I don't have another Catherine.
Cheers all.