Let's Play Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones (Restoration Queen Edit)

shepsquared · Mar 10, 2024

Vocalist said:
Artur: And please, just call me Artur. I appreciate your respect for my work, but I don't fully identify as a "Brother," so to speak.
Neimi: Oh…

…Oh.

I'd like to take a moment to work through my feelings, because they are complex. And at least part of the answer might be that I'm just…somewhat transphobic, and I need to deal with that in a clear-headed manner. I feel safe enough to do that in this thread because I only have, like, ten readers, I trust the SV moderators, and if worse comes to worst my real identity isn't connected to this account.

I've been thinking about this and this is a big misstep by the mod authors - not that Artur is nonbinary or any similar changes are made to the characters, but that this is the reveal of that for Artur.

I'm looking at the tumblr link for the mod download and there's nothing in there about changing any of the character's gender identity. And it didn't seem to come up in Artur and Lute's introduction. If the reveal of that is restricted to support conversations then we get the Awakening problem, where every one of Artur's C rank supports is going to include "btw I'm non-binary" and dealing with how the characters react to that. Or worse, it only comes up in the conversation with Neimi and you could reach one of Artur's paired endings and be left wondering why Artur's pronoun is suddenly ze.

They did release the full support log for the mod and apparently they have posts that chronicled the dev process, but the logs were released years after the mod and if I were playing this mod I wouldn't be looking up supports in advance, I'd just be trying to get as many girl/girl supports as possible because that's what they told me the mod was about.

It seems to work for Myrrh because it at least comes up in the first scene, though I'd argue she'd be a better character to leave the same as the base game due to how vague her presence in the game actually is at first and the recommendation to play Eirika's route.

fishsicles · Mar 10, 2024

Catching back up on the thread.

As an NB person myself, the Artur change has never really sat well with me in RQ. Setting aside that Artur's like... the most stereotypical choice for it, the way it's put into the existing script makes it feel like tokenism. (then again, I'm a round-faced curly-haired noodle-armed academic so who am I to complain about stereotypes) RQ's developers have said their main reason was just that they wanted an NB person in, which... doesn't really help on that front. (They'd already committed to having the manaketes use gender-neutral language, but wanted to have a human as well, to avoid falling into the "gender neutrality for non humans only" trope, which was kind of a hole they dug for themselves?)

It's also notable as the only instance of a character having their gender identity changed - while other characters are written in RQ as transgender, their original identity remains, and IMO it's worked into their supports pretty well. Maybe it's a strange line to draw, but to me the two are very different situations - especially when you're marketing yourself as making only specific revisions to the script.

(Also, Artur's pronouns are inconsistent within the mod itself; I can't recall if the script "officially" uses masculine, they/them, or a neopronoun. Which again doesn't fill me with a ringing endorsement for the representation.)

I'll spare the thread the full details on subjective personal experience and philosophy, but to borrow your metaphor, personally it feels like looking at both the masculine and feminine as someone speaking Turkish. As you say, it's a big tent - I'm usually taken as a dude in my daily life (though when I grow my hair out, I have been mistaken for a woman from behind - which amused me more than anything), and don't really have an issue with people taking me as one (honestly it's usually less work to just have people assume I'm a cis dude than go through the whole gender blender rigamarole every time, and I don't usually get dysphoric unless I'm separated from my razor and shower for more than a couple days). At the same time, I know people who'd find that mortifying, and people whose notion of nonbinary is more "I'm sort of a binary gender but not".

But honestly, the fact that it's a big tent makes it hard to address in these kinds of small asides, especially when rewriting a character as nonbinary. Especially with GBA-style supports on a secondary character, and doubly especially with the already thin worldbuilding that FE8 has making it difficult to establish what the binary expectations are, let alone how a specific person lives outside it. So even coming from a very different angle, I find the Artur rewrite a bit uncomfortable, and think your view on it is reasonable.

McFluffles said:
That said, maybe-controversial take here on the Restoration Queen changes that's been on my mind since the prologue - I'm honestly a bit torn by how even Valter has been hit with the "less casual misogyny" stick? No complaints most other places like rewording some Ephraim conversations to be less "silly Erika you are frail girl sister, you should stay behind and not fight", but Valter just strikes me as the kind of guy who's supposed to be a slimy, evil asshole who treats women like objects to be won... so you can get the eventual satisfaction of beating his face in and dumping his corpse in a ditch.

Yeah, this definitely hurts the RQ script for me. Its criticisms of the original script are very legitimate, but it's a little indiscriminate. Valter is clearly intended to be over the line in the original script, and while I can understand the argument against using misogyny as a character trait, he just comes off as... sanitised. Though it was something that came out in what, 2016? The FE fandom was a pretty contentious place at the time, so I can understand the desire to play things "safe", especially for the target demographic of this kind of hack.

(My preferred solution would have been to increase how much he creeps on Ephraim. Diversity win; the world's worst human being is bisexual.)

McFluffles · Mar 10, 2024

fishsicles said:
Yeah, this definitely hurts the RQ script for me. Its criticisms of the original script are very legitimate, but it's a little indiscriminate. Valter is clearly intended to be over the line in the original script, and while I can understand the argument against using misogyny as a character trait, he just comes off as... sanitised. Though it was something that came out in what, 2016? The FE fandom was a pretty contentious place at the time, so I can understand the desire to play things "safe", especially for the target demographic of this kind of hack.

(My preferred solution would have been to increase how much he creeps on Ephraim. Diversity win; the world's worst human being is bisexual.)

Hah, that probably would have been a good way to do it. Granted, then depending on other added bisexual characters from the mod you run into one of those other potential stereotypes of "omg the gays/bis are just predatory!" since Valter as a whole is... well, a rather predatory person towards his obsessions.

fishsicles · Mar 10, 2024

McFluffles said:
Hah, that probably would have been a good way to do it. Granted, then depending on other added bisexual characters from the mod you run into one of those other potential stereotypes of "omg the gays/bis are just predatory!" since Valter as a whole is... well, a rather predatory person towards his obsessions.

Yeah, which is why I suspect they didn't go for it. Though they do miss out on the chance to actually address those stereotypes in the process - which their medium, modification of an existing primary script, would have had an interesting position to do so. At the end of the day though there's only so much room in the script, and there must be a threshold for how large of divergences an adaptation allows.

(A while ago, someone was proposing a hack/AU which essentially swapped Ephraim and Eirika's characters with the script otherwise unchanged, as another way of dissecting FE8's gender roles, though I don't think anything ever fully came of it. It'd be another interesting way to look at how these things come across, though.)

A_Somebody · Mar 10, 2024

Vocalist said:
(I wonder how he would react if he knew how Ephraim escaped this exact situation in Chapter 5X?)

His teeth would be ground down to bone meal

I admit, I find Innes to be pretty endearing. This chapter definitely shows his best side so I find his specific fixation on EPHRAIM!!!! to be amusing

Graveless · Mar 10, 2024

fishsicles said:
(A while ago, someone was proposing a hack/AU which essentially swapped Ephraim and Eirika's characters with the script otherwise unchanged, as another way of dissecting FE8's gender roles, though I don't think anything ever fully came of it. It'd be another interesting way to look at how these things come across, though.)

This one did come out. Fire Emblem 8 Sibling Swap is the name.

fishsicles · Mar 10, 2024

Graveless said:
This one did come out. Fire Emblem 8 Sibling Swap is the name.

Oh, good to know. I'll have to check it out next time I do an FE8 run.

Ghoul King · Mar 11, 2024

Vocalist said:
Tethys tells both of them to stop being ridiculous. Innes is still fuming, so Tethys points out that, seeing as he's fired them, he doesn't have the authority to order them to leave anymore. Innes gives up, muttering about how mercenaries are supposed to be venal and disloyal, and tries to come up with a new plan. Then Tethys notices something else.

I really enjoy Innes' character in this scene. It gets even better if you do Supports and stuff, but even my first time through I enjoyed how Innes was already established as brusque-at-best and here he is deliberately leaning into his own character in an attempt to be nice to Tethys and Gerik by exaggerating his own dickishness in an attempt to drive them off.

I've come to appreciate it still more as I've seen so many other stories try to replicate this basic scene, but get the details wrong such that the Innes-analogue doesn't come across at all well in the equivalent scene.

Vocalist said:
Ah, perhaps I'm a bit too eager. But, hey, what is up with her death quote? I haven't commented on any of the death quotes so far, but…Tana…what's had her thinking about death for so long? She's seemed so cheerful and innocent, from what I've seen. I need to dig into her supports.

The timing of Tana's blink animation there gives that a rather different feel from the intended reading...

Vocalist said:
In the games I'm familiar with, Dancers are like Thieves, in that they have weak combat but make up for it with special utility. In this game, Tethys has no combat. She has one Strength. She doesn't have a weapon. She dances, and that's it. She gains exp for dancing, but it's almost unnecessary. So what if she gains stats on level up? Her stats don't matter because she's never going to see combat. At best, they will help her survive a hit if you mess up and leave her exposed, but Tethys is so fragile that you're better off avoiding that.

Actually, Tethys is a pretty good tank, especially against magic, with outrageous ability to dodge attacks and fairly good Resist. Her ability to soak physical punishment is more luck-based, but she can still often survive a single attack, and you don't have to worry about her killing people until one of them kills her.

Vocalist said:
I knock out all the enemies between Gerik and Marisa, and he advances to ask her why she's wearing red.

Note that unlike Joshua with Natasha, Marisa will happily murder her way through whoever you need to recruit her with, which is very in-character but also very inconvenient.

Especially in Ephraim's route, where the recruiter in question is much less able to survive her attention.

Vocalist said:
Their conversation is remarkably calm, for all that they might be about to kill one another. Marisa's dilemma is as follows: She could try to kill her friend and comrade, and, given the gulf in their stats, probably die. Or she could desert, and damage the reputation she needs for her livelihood. Well, she trusts Gerik:

Marisa: C'mon, Chief. What would YOU like me to do?
Gerik: Well, that's easy. I'd like you to come over and join my side.
Marisa: Right. Done.

The gameplay doesn't bear this out, annoyingly, but the writing is completely consistent that Marisa is a terror and would probably win in a duel between the two.

Her Supports are actually pretty great in general, so I'm frustrated she's such an awkward unit to actually use, largely outclassed by Joshua and then further impaired by the ongoing 'adult women who swing giant pieces of metal for a living have the same Constitution as a literal child' nonsense. I preferred using her to Joshua as a kid, because I like her look more and love her writing way more, but I was pretty aware this was only sometimes mechanically smart to do. (I did have runs where she turned out clearly better than Joshua aside the Constitution thing, but it wasn't a common thing)

As an aside, Marisa is the main person I was thinking of when I was talking about 'wait, how do you ship these two together while staying at all in-character?' Her character doesn't seem to have come across all that clearly to you off just this chapter's writing, but Marisa is really not someone who fits inside stock romance tropes.

Vocalist said:
A man explains that the Republic of Carcino has no king, and "anyone can be a leader in Carcino if they are old enough." I assume that this means that anyone above a certain age can run for election to the Council of Elders, and not that rulership is bestowed by law upon the oldest people in the country.

As a republic is a government based on the public being represented by people who at least theoretically answer to said public, yes, most likely they were voted into office.

Though I've always had it in my head they were more a merchants-as-nobility-replacement sort of government, due to how the story is written. I'd kind of forgotten that what we're told is at least theoretically more voting-democracy-y than what's always been in my head.

Vocalist said:
Someone else worries that Councillor Pablo is using the army of mercenaries he hired with his massive wealth to overthrow the Council and set himself up as dictator.

This touches on something I always found frustrating about this whole thing: why does Pablo have a giant pile of money and influence, yet the entire rest of the Council is apparently completely helpless and useless?

The real answer is this is a video game and so for various reasons it's better to have the player handle basically anything of interest, and so allies tend to be useless or only do useful things 'off-screen', but I really wish the narrative suggested an actual explanation. The game seems to be relying on mercenaries to say that Pablo having a military advantage in no way correlates to being more popular within Carcino itself, but that's really a cop-out, especially when it's not clear why Pablo would be not just wealthier than his peers but I guess so much wealthier he can more readily afford mercenaries than all of them combined.

This is kind of easy for a casual play-through to gloss over as Klimt and Pablo are literally the only Carcinite Councilors we ever see in the entire narrative, but the dialogue makes it clear we're supposed to think Pablo is The Exception and there's a half-dozen or whatever other Good Carcinite Councilors, at which point all the above is difficult to ignore.

Vocalist said:
Pablo is a Sage, a promoted class that uses light magic.

Actually, they're traditionally the Anima class promotion. Sacred Stones ended up making promoted magic classes a lot more versatile, possibly as a side effect of trying to juggle the branching and intersecting promotions, and so they have Light as an option in Sacred Stones, but outside promoting a Monk (ie Artur) into one, by default they're primarily Anima first.

That Pablo is liable to be a player's first sighting of a Sage is kind of weirdly misleading.

Vocalist said:
What's more, he's ensconced in a wee little place such that only two people could have room to attack him in a single turn (I mean, unless I had an archer up here to equip the Longbow that just dropped, then a third person could attack him from three tiles away, but Neimi and Innes are hunting pegasus knights at the opposite edge of the map).

This specific spot is where I first started feeling pressured to actually do Rescue Shenanigans, as they can allow you to get a lot more than 2 attacks in on Pablo in a turn, and the way I play this map I always end up with the rest of my army milling about with nothing to do anyway. And the Gate means that trying to wear him down slowly is going to take especially long and all...

Vocalist said:
Why is that damage so low? Why do the arrows show weapon triangle disadvantage? Does the runesword…count as dark magic? Huh. Well, I guess there is such a thing as a magic sword-user in this game. It's wonky implementation though, running off his Strength like Seth is throwing the sword at people, and Pablo's Resistance means it can't help me here. I sigh and let Eirika finish this herself on her next turn.

All magic swords in the GBA games count as a specific magic element, yes. And they use only half the user's Strength, too, so their damage potential is not so great. They can be useful for bypassing a target's Defense if its Resistance is much lower, and the Rune Sword leeches so it can be used to survive being dogpiled, but there's definitely limitations in their utility.

Oddly, the GBA games seem to think of them as godly-ultimate super-swords, as they're largely reluctant to give you more than one of each in a given run, and mostly they only show up pretty late. Rune Swords being a random drop off monsters and so accessible really early in Sacred Stones and also possible to make a standard part of your arsenal is hugely abnormal.

For reference, the Anima sword can also be looted off monsters at random... by which I mean the Tower of Valni has a single monster on the final floor that always carries some kind of rare, valuable loot, with the Anima sword being just one of the possible things it can drop. And not the most common one or anything. So yeah. These games really do think of these swords as super-awesome, and they're... not. Its one of the design elements of the GBA games I find most straight-up confusing.

Vocalist said:
"Dessert" implies that he already had plenty of fun just watching the battle. So Valter just, uh, leaves. He leaves; he doesn't try to capture Eirika or say anything about Glen, he just came to Carcino to watch her and then he leaves. I…think this counts as stalking? Is it possible for someone who's been hired to capture you to also be your stalker?

Valter is written as a thin metaphor for a sexual predator stalker of the real-life sort, quite constantly. And it's a topic that Japanese pop culture is pretty heavily concerned about.

So: yes.

Vocalist said:
Innes: If the two of you hadn't stayed with me back there, I would not have survived. Gerik, Tethys…Thank you. You have my gratitude.
Tethys: Prince…Did you get…er…hit on the head during that last skirmish?
Innes: That's unkind. My neck is not so stiff that I cannot show gratitude.

We've seen a lot more of Innes this chapter. Like most of the characters in this game, you only get a small slice of him in each scene. It turns out that what I saw in the introduction was a bit skewed – Ephraim was there, whom he hates, and that caused him to go Maximum Prick. The rest of the time he's stiff, and cold, and prideful, but he also has a strong sense of justice and a penchant for flowery language. And he runs a spy network!

I love Innes' line about his 'stiff neck' here. He's shockingly self-aware about how he comes across, particularly to strangers. And it works nicely with him being a prince -like Eirika, there's a sense that we're substantially seeing a mask worn for the sake of duty, which is derived from their core personalities but is still inaccurate to think of as Just How They Behave.

Vocalist said:
Ewan explains that, in the mountains of Eastern Carcino lies a village named Caer Pelyn, where his teacher lives. His teacher – not Ewan – knows everything about the mountains, and he can surely show them a secret route. Oh, and this teacher's name is Saleh, which I recognize as the name of Myrrh's travelling companion. Is Saleh a Manakete? Ewan would mention if his teacher wasn't human, right? I wait for Myrrh to react, but…

Where is Myrrh? The screen can only hold four character portraits at a time, so during group scenes people pop in and out as they speak. Even if someone isn't speaking, it doesn't mean they aren't there; Myrrh is shy. And Myrrh isn't part of the army, of course, because we don't have a Dragonstone, but…did they accompany Eirika or not? If not, where are they – back in Castle Frelia? With Ephraim? I feel like it shouldn't be this easy to lose track of a dragon!

She's running with Ephraim. This inexplicably gets no reference within Eirika's route, possibly because of the rushing, but Myrrh's presence in Ephraim's route is... more or less plot-important?

McFluffles said:
So in the GBA games, status staves and how effective they are depends on both the caster's magic stat, and the target's resistance stat. So this early on, with babby clerics it's not a huge deal, but some map later might go "hey what if 22 magic druid had a Berserk Staff" and suddenly if you don't have someone with a Restore staff handy to cure status effects... well, it is incredibly not fun to have one of your best combat units suddenly target your own squishies.

Range is also a factor in chance of success, though not as strong of one as I personally feel it should be.

McFluffles said:
That said, maybe-controversial take here on the Restoration Queen changes that's been on my mind since the prologue - I'm honestly a bit torn by how even Valter has been hit with the "less casual misogyny" stick? No complaints most other places like rewording some Ephraim conversations to be less "silly Erika you are frail girl sister, you should stay behind and not fight", but Valter just strikes me as the kind of guy who's supposed to be a slimy, evil asshole who treats women like objects to be won... so you can get the eventual satisfaction of beating his face in and dumping his corpse in a ditch.

"We don't like misogyny being presented as good and normal, so we made the outsider creepazoid literally everyone hates less mysogynist" has come across to me as an odd decision the whole time, but I didn't want to say anything initially in part because at the time Valter's character was still substantially waiting to be seen/expanded on. (And partially because I was trying to figure out how to word my statements)

It's not as if Valter is being rewritten to be more sympathetic or anything like that, which would be a pretty stereotypical reason for wanting to soften an offensive character's offensiveness. So I'm just left... confused.

fishsicles said:
(My preferred solution would have been to increase how much he creeps on Ephraim. Diversity win; the world's worst human being is bisexual.)

Valter already does that, most likely as part of the broader tendency for pop culture to associate 'creepiness' and 'not-strictly-heterosexual behavior'. He's basically written as an indiscriminate bisexual stalker creep. He just gets more screentime with Eirika than he does with Ephraim (In part because she gets almost everything before the route split to herself), and some of his dialogue creeping on Ephraim hits this note I've noticed other people inexplicably respond to with 'this is two men talking, so it's definitely not sexual at all, even though I'd instantly assume it was sexual if being said by a man to a woman'. So yes, I'd say he creeps on Eirika a little more than Ephraim, but not particularly disproportionate to how much each twin interacts with Valter.

I have mixed feelings about this whole thing, as I'm almost completely certain the motive for the original script writing Valter this way is something I sigh at, but I still prefer the result to if Valter was written as strictly a creepy stalker of women in specific, so... I kind of want to be positive on his writing anyway? I certainly at minimum like him as a villain more than most of Fire Emblem's other various Male Sexual Predator Villains, such as Narcian of Roy's game...

Terrabrand · Mar 11, 2024

Vocalist said:
Tethys, as I said, is a Dancer. That's not just her profession, that's her class. They can Dance for adjacent allied units. The ally becomes refreshed and can act again. In FE, Dancers are unique units – in the sense that you only get one of them in each game. Even in the modern style of Fire Emblem, where you can field an entire team of Swordmasters if you like, this holds true. I'm sure you see why the developers go to such pains to make sure the player only ever has one Dancer – two dancers on the same team could dance for each other, making the player phase endless, and opening the way to some game-breaking nonsense.

Fire Emblem Heroes instead resolves this by making dance units un-danceable, but yeah.

Vocalist said:
Then she ruthlessly turns on that priest and cuts him down in cold blood. Or, at least, she tries, but misses. Yeah. I didn't inspect her stats too closely, but I definitely noticed that she has an accuracy problem. I think she looks really cool, but I'm not sure it's worth raising her when I already have Joshua.

Marisa unfortunately tends to pan out to being a worse Joshua. On paper she's pretty competitive, in practice both of them have the same problem; their on paper growths are misleading because they have simply too much in skill and speed, so they usually cap both before promoting and again sometime after- I've noted that the difference between best and worst growths is about 100% total, and Joshua, meanwhile has 55% in both skill and speed growths, which means once those are capped his growths are functionally bad. And then Marisa is even worse off, boasting a better speed and resist growth by 5% but a worse strength, HP, and defense growth, which tends to be what the two live and die by thanks to the slant on their stats.

She's a great character, in the personality sense, but unless your Joshua just hates being any good (in which case this is hardly a game with a shortage of sword users!) it's probably going to be hard to justify Marisa as a unit choice on any practical merits and not just 'I think she's neat'.

Vocalist said:
Why is that damage so low? Why do the arrows show weapon triangle disadvantage? Does the runesword…count as dark magic? Huh. Well, I guess there is such a thing as a magic sword-user in this game. It's wonky implementation though, running off his Strength like Seth is throwing the sword at people, and Pablo's Resistance means it can't help me here. I sigh and let Eirika finish this herself on her next turn.

Yep, Runeswords count as dark magic- you also have a sword type that counts as anima and one that counts as light. They have a bunch of weird calculation jank that tends to make them bad overall, practically swords tend to be less flexible in sacred stones because lance and axe have proper range one to two options that hit physically etc while swords have rare magic swords and blah, no just Throwing Sword or whatever.

(to be precise, magic swords use only half strength. In theory, rune swords let you punish knights and anima mages and such, and leech in the deal. In practice, the damage tends to be super anemic)

Vocalist said:
Ewan proudly announces that, now that he knows some real magic, he can help her in her battles. He tries to demonstrate and she cries out not to use magic in the middle of a crowded street. Ewan persists in his desire to protect her.

Hm. While I agree that Tethys does need protection, I'm not sure a frail little mage like Ewan would be the best candidate. Somehow I doubt that he has more HP than she does.

Well, Tethys is worn down, and promises to talk to the Chief (that's Gerik) and Princess Eirika. She does not mention getting Innes's permission. He would probably be insulted if he knew that.

Ewan is another one of the recruit units, like Ross. At level 10 he will automatically promote to your choice of Shaman and Mage.

I highly recommend using him because specifically of the Shaman potential- Dark Magic has some powerful spells and Sacred Stones gives you staggeringly few people who can use dark tomes at all, limiting your ability to punish anima mages and use powerful spells like Luna and Nosferatu. The other options tend to be worse than Ewan, so while it takes some raising unlike the other recruits there's not really any good alternatives out the box if you want what he potentially offers.

Like as a mage he's a largely questionable choice because... Lute's right there. But making him a Shaman gives you something valuable and in short supply.

McFluffles · Mar 11, 2024

Ghoul King said:
Oddly, the GBA games seem to think of them as godly-ultimate super-swords, as they're largely reluctant to give you more than one of each in a given run, and mostly they only show up pretty late. Rune Swords being a random drop off monsters and so accessible really early in Sacred Stones and also possible to make a standard part of your arsenal is hugely abnormal.

I'm at least somewhat convinced that the game devs just thought having easy access to 1-2 range on swords was too powerful as an option or something because of the magic swords, so they made them rare. Could be a gameplay thing, could be a "story" constraint of "these swords are magical so obviously more rare than things like Javelins and Hand Axes".

Either way, the end result in FE7/FE8 is still that Lances and Axes tend to be superior weapon types because of lower enemy quality meaning you can often just slap a 1-2 range weapon you bought for dirt cheap on a tanky enough unit and watch them clear entire squads of enemies solo, while sword users are predominantly stuck at 1 range with the lowest damage type weapons, but hey, they have great accuracy! ...to hit the maybe 2 bosses in the entire game with a functional dodge rate and luck stat (seriously enemy luck is atrocious in FE7/FE8, and this noticeably tanks their dodge rates not to mention crit avoid).

Then bows just kinda get dumpstered at the bottom of the physical weapon pile because enemies are rarely dangerous enough that you need that chip damage access and they can only wipe out enemies with counterattacks either against other bow units, or with very careful positioning against 1-2 range weapons. FE6 at least balances it slightly better by making lances and especially axes atrociously inaccurate so sword accuracy is a reliable option, and enemies are often dangerous enough that the chip damage of bows is welcome, especially when the Wyverns show up.

Broccoliccoli · Mar 11, 2024

The usual argument for toning down stuff like Valter isn't that they are offensive but that they are annoying in a boring everyday way. 'If I wanted a creepy misogynist to make weird sexual comments at me I would just go talk to my boss' and all that.

StormyEyed · Mar 11, 2024

Catching up a bit myself:

As an enby person myself, I also have mixed thoughts on Artur being nonbinary rep here. He does seem like the... safe(?) choice to make there? And from what little we've seen in his supports, it seems like it's less "yeah my pronouns are he/they btw" and more that he has a complicated relationship with his own gender, which... I worry about the ability to expound on that in the limited medium of GBA FE support dialogues. It's not bad exactly, but it does make me feel a bit weird about it.

And on that note, I was actually a bit frustrated at Myrrh being made nonbinary as well, with my first thoughts being "oh of course they made the token nonhuman character nonbinary" - but I wanted to wait to see how they handle it moving forward before really going into it.

At least it sounds like they realized it was weird optics, and that's why they added another enby in? But also if they realized the issue with the nonhuman nonbinary route, maybe they should've considered... not doing that.

I don't know, it's a weird scenario, and I kind of want to see some support logs to see what the big picture of how they address this is.

As for the actual chapter! I forgot how may units you got at once here, wow. Gerik is a fantastic unit, able to hold his own and kick ass with a bit of training, Tethys is a dancer so she's automatically dancer tier, and Innes exists. Granted he's quite good for an archer, and if Neimi's growths haven't panned out or you've been neglecting her, he functions as the occasional archer you use to press delete on a flier. Situational, but he has his uses.

I actually remember not liking him as a person too much back in the day, but reading it now I'm really coming to appreciate him. He's intentionally leaning into his princely persona to get what he wants, and what he wants is people not throwing their lives away on his behalf. He's prideful, but he knows he's prideful and has the self awareness to still be humble when it's appropriate - I get the sense that it does not come naturally to him, but it is an active effort on his part, which I deeply appreciate.

Marisa is... not great. She's even worse on Ephraim's route, where she joins even later, but even here she's difficult to use. Which is a shame because I like her character. FE8 character pacing is just very strange.

As for Ewan, I'll echo Terrabrand's suggestion to raise him into dark magic. There are some fun spells there, and only like two characters that can access them, and Ewan can wind up never being able to. I'd definitely suggest throwing him at the Tower until he's a usable level, trying to train a level 1 trainee at this stage - even if he's a mage and will have a slightly easier time than the others - will be an exercise in frustration.

As for Valter, I don't think I mind the toning down that much, if for nothing else than the evil vaguely bisexual creep is well-worn and kind of tiring. It seems like they might be going for the weird fightsexual angle with the rewrite, which I think hits a similar overall tone while being less overtly creepy.

As for the overall story, I think Carcino might be one of the weaker parts of it? It's the odd country out, being a merchant republic instead of some variety of hereditary monarchy, and it pulls a surprise mercenary army out of their pockets to get in the way for a bit. Really it winds up feeling "as shit we need some fights for Eirika's route, how do we pad that out a bit uhhh. Mercenary army, sure." I'll wait until we finish out their involvement to get more in depth on it, but their intro isn't terribly compelling.

Gameplay wise though, I do like it - there's a fair few things going on at once, you have people to recruit to get you to hustle, while meanwhile promoted units are showing up to keep you on your toes. FE8 has a reputation for being easy, but if you aren't abusing grinding there are absolutely times where there is some challenge to be had, with this chapter having a good example.

McFluffles · Mar 11, 2024

I'll wait to give any feedback on Ewan and his potential paths for now, seeing as... well, he hasn't actually been recruited yet. I mean if he were recruited now, that would help boost him just a bit in the usefulness tiers because of more time to train him up, now wouldn't it? (Though as always, grinding available, etc.) Suffice to say though I do have some opinions on Dark Magic users in FE8.

StormyEyed said:
Gameplay wise though, I do like it - there's a fair few things going on at once, you have people to recruit to get you to hustle, while meanwhile promoted units are showing up to keep you on your toes. FE8 has a reputation for being easy, but if you aren't abusing grinding there are absolutely times where there is some challenge to be had, with this chapter having a good example.

Yeah, the more I play of the game as a no-grinding Hardmode Ironman, the more I realize while it's not super difficult (there's some wild difficulty levels in other FE games), there's still the occasional spike or enemy formation that can leave you scrambling if you aren't just going "full LTC Modo, rush chapters ignore useless objectives, funnel all EXP into 3 god units including Seth". Chapter 9 wasn't particularly hard in and of itself, but the extra objectives incentivize rushing the villages and Amelia before they're out of reach, and Chapter 10 has the Innes Gang under enough threat that you need to send someone to assist, along with some very dangerous reinforcements once Marisa is recruited in the form of the Ranger in the bottom right, and a massive swarm of Pegasus Knights (+1 Falco Knight) who if not taken care of quickly on an open air map like this can easily slip through your formations to blenderize your squishier units.

Vocalist · Mar 11, 2024

McFluffles said:
I don't think there should have been any exp dropoff on healers? I know in some FE games they get less exp per heal as they level up, but in the GBA games it's determined entirely based on the staff used and whether or not the unit is promoted. So a basic Heal staff will always give you 11 exp per use, a Mend will give you 12 exp, and then most of the utility staves tend to be particularly useful for both normal exp and staff rank since they can give 20+ exp per use - in Sacred Stones in particular, spamming Torch on FoW maps, or Barrier in general is a great way to level up your staff rank for recently promoted mages to get them to actually useful things like Physic or Warp (often giving them better range than your traditional staffers, since someone like Lute is likely to have a higher magic stat than Moulder or Natasha).

You're right, I counted and they're always getting 11 exp with a Heal. I just percieved it as dropping off because the process of leveling them is so slow.

McFluffles said:
That is, 100%, absolutely a Lute thing to do. She's a little gremlin and we love her for it.

I wouldn't call Lute a "gremlin" because gremlins cause problems on purpose. Lute causes problems because she doesn't understand what other people want, or because she's dismissed them as unimportant.

fishsicles said:
Yeah, this definitely hurts the RQ script for me. Its criticisms of the original script are very legitimate, but it's a little indiscriminate. Valter is clearly intended to be over the line in the original script, and while I can understand the argument against using misogyny as a character trait, he just comes off as... sanitised. Though it was something that came out in what, 2016? The FE fandom was a pretty contentious place at the time, so I can understand the desire to play things "safe", especially for the target demographic of this kind of hack.

(My preferred solution would have been to increase how much he creeps on Ephraim. Diversity win; the world's worst human being is bisexual.)

McFluffles said:
Hah, that probably would have been a good way to do it. Granted, then depending on other added bisexual characters from the mod you run into one of those other potential stereotypes of "omg the gays/bis are just predatory!" since Valter as a whole is... well, a rather predatory person towards his obsessions.

StormyEyed said:
As for Valter, I don't think I mind the toning down that much, if for nothing else than the evil vaguely bisexual creep is well-worn and kind of tiring. It seems like they might be going for the weird fightsexual angle with the rewrite, which I think hits a similar overall tone while being less overtly creepy.

I think a sexual predator villain is so easy to fumble in so many ways, and even if you avoid all the common pitfalls there are still lots of people who will just hate it on personal preference. So I can't really blame the modders for trying to tone him down. I would have to play the original to say which version I prefer, but I will say that Restoration Queen Valter has still been a) eminently creepy and b) a stand-out villain. Most of the antagonists in the game have been causing problems because they're being paid to do it, or because they're being ordered to do it, but Valter...well. He's special. More on that when I write up Chapter 11.

Ghoul King said:
Her Supports are actually pretty great in general, so I'm frustrated she's such an awkward unit to actually use, largely outclassed by Joshua and then further impaired by the ongoing 'adult women who swing giant pieces of metal for a living have the same Constitution as a literal child' nonsense. I preferred using her to Joshua as a kid, because I like her look more and love her writing way more, but I was pretty aware this was only sometimes mechanically smart to do. (I did have runs where she turned out clearly better than Joshua aside the Constitution thing, but it wasn't a common thing)

Terrabrand said:
She's a great character, in the personality sense, but unless your Joshua just hates being any good (in which case this is hardly a game with a shortage of sword users!) it's probably going to be hard to justify Marisa as a unit choice on any practical merits and not just 'I think she's neat'.

You know what? I do think she's neat. Thanks for inspiring me.

Ghoul King said:
This touches on something I always found frustrating about this whole thing: why does Pablo have a giant pile of money and influence, yet the entire rest of the Council is apparently completely helpless and useless?

The real answer is this is a video game and so for various reasons it's better to have the player handle basically anything of interest, and so allies tend to be useless or only do useful things 'off-screen', but I really wish the narrative suggested an actual explanation. The game seems to be relying on mercenaries to say that Pablo having a military advantage in no way correlates to being more popular within Carcino itself, but that's really a cop-out, especially when it's not clear why Pablo would be not just wealthier than his peers but I guess so much wealthier he can more readily afford mercenaries than all of them combined.

It wouldn't have required any real gameplay change to suggest that Carcino is undergoing a civil war rather than Pablo taking it over basically unopposed. If we're suggesting changes to the gameplay, add some NPC allies sent by the other councillors to rescue Klimt.

Ghoul King said:
And they use only half the user's Strength, too, so their damage potential is not so great. They can be useful for bypassing a target's Defense if its Resistance is much lower, and the Rune Sword leeches so it can be used to survive being dogpiled, but there's definitely limitations in their utility.

See, that this sword uses half the strength stat is the kind of thing that I really wish the game explained, but even more I just wish the game had a strength/magic split so it wouldn't need that mechanic. Although, the presence of the magical swords in these games is interesting, in that they're the ancestor to an odd quirk of the modern games. Namely, that hybrid weapon-tome users are most likely to focus on swords, and that magical swords are way easier to acquire than magical lances, axes, or bows. The Levin Sword calls down lightning, it can be used with C rank in swords, and you can usually just buy them about halfway through the game. Meanwhile, other magical weapons require B or A rank, or they're one-of-a-kind relics, or both.

StormyEyed said:
I actually remember not liking him as a person too much back in the day, but reading it now I'm really coming to appreciate him. He's intentionally leaning into his princely persona to get what he wants, and what he wants is people not throwing their lives away on his behalf. He's prideful, but he knows he's prideful and has the self awareness to still be humble when it's appropriate - I get the sense that it does not come naturally to him, but it is an active effort on his part, which I deeply appreciate.

I think Innes would be exhausting to work with in real life, but as a character the way he plays off Eirika is just great.

McFluffles said:
I'll wait to give any feedback on Ewan and his potential paths for now, seeing as... well, he hasn't actually been recruited yet. I mean if he were recruited now, that would help boost him just a bit in the usefulness tiers because of more time to train him up, now wouldn't it? (Though as always, grinding available, etc.) Suffice to say though I do have some opinions on Dark Magic users in FE8.

Yeah, Ewan hasn't actually joined my army yet.

McFluffles said:
I assumed it was more of a "ah geez we can't do anything without getting killed ourselves, I really hope the Prince makes it out alright".

I saw the same lines, I just assumed that the aide was recommending that he reveal himself as a distraction. But upon re-reading, it's ambiguous.

McFluffles · Mar 11, 2024

Vocalist said:
You're right, I counted and they're always getting 11 exp with a Heal. I just percieved it as dropping off because the process of leveling them is so slow.

I wouldn't call Lute a "gremlin" because gremlins cause problems on purpose. Lute causes problems because she doesn't understand what other people want, or because she's dismissed them as unimportant.

Yeah, staff user leveling rates are basically locked to "how often are you taking damage to heal" and then only getting ~11 exp per turn barring special staves, so whether or not a staff user feels under or over-leveled tends to depend entirely on how you're playing the game. Going for decently fast turn counts, avoiding grinding? Healer might not get that many turns to heal, might not even keep up with the army sometimes. Taking it slow, turtling a lot, spamming heal on the slightest of cuts or even abusing the poisoned condition? Well, then your GBA healers are probably going to be your highest level units, making it even more appealing to have them be your first Guilding Ring promoters.

And fair, Lute has a gremlin personality kinda, but it's more that she either doesn't understand or doesn't really care about social norms in her conversations. I've heard some takes on whether or not she's autistic-coded, so there's always that possibility.

A_Somebody · Mar 11, 2024

Vocalist said:
It wouldn't have required any real gameplay change to suggest that Carcino is undergoing a civil war rather than Pablo taking it over basically unopposed. If we're suggesting changes to the gameplay, add some NPC allies sent by the other councillors to rescue Klimt.

I mean yeah that'd be a cool thing from a narrative perspective, but at the same time my eyebrow can't stop reflexively twitching at the idea of adding more suicidal Green NPCs who need their own damn player where I watch them joyfully leeroy their way to death

fishsicles · Mar 11, 2024

A_Somebody said:
I mean yeah that'd be a cool thing from a narrative perspective, but at the same time my eyebrow can't stop reflexively twitching at the idea of adding more suicidal Green NPCs who need their own damn player where I watch them joyfully leeroy their way to death

Or worse - successful green NPCs who cut into the EXP curve.

Ghoul King · Mar 11, 2024

McFluffles said:
Yeah, the more I play of the game as a no-grinding Hardmode Ironman, the more I realize while it's not super difficult (there's some wild difficulty levels in other FE games), there's still the occasional spike or enemy formation that can leave you scrambling if you aren't just going "full LTC Modo, rush chapters ignore useless objectives, funnel all EXP into 3 god units including Seth". Chapter 9 wasn't particularly hard in and of itself, but the extra objectives incentivize rushing the villages and Amelia before they're out of reach, and Chapter 10 has the Innes Gang under enough threat that you need to send someone to assist, along with some very dangerous reinforcements once Marisa is recruited in the form of the Ranger in the bottom right, and a massive swarm of Pegasus Knights (+1 Falco Knight) who if not taken care of quickly on an open air map like this can easily slip through your formations to blenderize your squishier units.

As a kid, I quickly moved to a minimal-grinding style of play, initially just because grinding is boring, and then later because I found the campaign to be mostly decently-tuned if you used grinding not at all, or at least only for minimal, targeted purposes. (Like getting trainees to stop being trainees, or for bumping somebody 20 XP from level 20 to level 20 so you could promote them with no efficieny loss of any kind before starting the next mission)

And when I went on to check out Roy and Lyn's games, I found that they were more difficult than even a no-grinding Sacred Stones run, but mostly... 'illegitimately'? Like, Roy's game has so much of its 'difficulty' tied up in the reinforcements spawning in with zero warning and immediately moving and often being positioned so that natural first-time play of a map will have vulnerable people perfectly positioned to be instantly killed. Lyn's game doesn't have that nonsense, thankfully, but I still mostly came away from missions feeling like a given mission giving me trouble was designed to punish reasonable play with 'gotchas' as the primary reason I was having difficulty.

(To be fair, I didn't play on Hard Mode much in Lyn's game; I completed a run of Lyn's personal campaign, then got... halfway-ish through Eliwood's Hard Mode? And I think I got like three missions into Hector Hard Mode. So I don't have a strong sense of how the hard modes of that game compare to hard mode in Sacred Stones. But I didn't finish those hard modes because they mostly seemed to double down on the above problems)

Vocalist said:
See, that this sword uses half the strength stat is the kind of thing that I really wish the game explained, but even more I just wish the game had a strength/magic split so it wouldn't need that mechanic. Although, the presence of the magical swords in these games is interesting, in that they're the ancestor to an odd quirk of the modern games. Namely, that hybrid weapon-tome users are most likely to focus on swords, and that magical swords are way easier to acquire than magical lances, axes, or bows. The Levin Sword calls down lightning, it can be used with C rank in swords, and you can usually just buy them about halfway through the game. Meanwhile, other magical weapons require B or A rank, or they're one-of-a-kind relics, or both.

Fire Emblem took a long, long time to start defaulting to explaining its mechanics in more than the most general of terms, yeah.

And yeah, I think the more modern state of Magic Swords being something of a distinguishing quality of the Sword category works pretty okay, where Swords have easier access to magical versions compared to other weapons. I kind of wish the series would've done something like made, say, Myrmidons have a decent Magic score to have a more obviously distinct niche from Mercenaries, but I do think this is a step in the right direction and have more interest in seeing what future games do than I did when the Telius games were coming along. (I'd honestly kind of given up on the series up until Fates surprised me)

McFluffles said:
And fair, Lute has a gremlin personality kinda, but it's more that she either doesn't understand or doesn't really care about social norms in her conversations. I've heard some takes on whether or not she's autistic-coded, so there's always that possibility.

I'm autistic and have already described Lute as being Basically Me.

I heavily doubt she was written intentionally to be autistic in the sense of 'written by someone familiar with the autism spectrum was consciously aware they were writing Lute that way', but I've long suspected this is something like 'she was heavily inspired by real experiences someone had, where those experiences involved people on the spectrum, and so Lute is meaningfully patterned after people on the spectrum'.

StormyEyed · Mar 12, 2024

Ghoul King said:
And when I went on to check out Roy and Lyn's games, I found that they were more difficult than even a no-grinding Sacred Stones run, but mostly... 'illegitimately'? Like, Roy's game has so much of its 'difficulty' tied up in the reinforcements spawning in with zero warning and immediately moving and often being positioned so that natural first-time play of a map will have vulnerable people perfectly positioned to be instantly killed. Lyn's game doesn't have that nonsense, thankfully, but I still mostly came away from missions feeling like a given mission giving me trouble was designed to punish reasonable play with 'gotchas' as the primary reason I was having difficulty.

Ah yeah, Asshole Reinforcements are my single least favorite Fire Emblem mechanic, and every game that uses them should feel bad for doing so. I do enjoy FE7 a lot, and I've played my fair share of Hector Hard Mode, but there's always a bit of a sense of having fun in a challenging game but also you have to remember to counter the gotcha traps because the designers were dicks.

Sacred Stones has a couple of fairly rude moments, but they're more along the lines of spawning some guys by your starting position to punish you if you've left your healers behind and undefended, nothing quite like "if you left a squishy within 8 tiles of this random tile on this turn they are now dead, enjoy."

McFluffles · Mar 12, 2024

Ghoul King said:
As a kid, I quickly moved to a minimal-grinding style of play, initially just because grinding is boring, and then later because I found the campaign to be mostly decently-tuned if you used grinding not at all, or at least only for minimal, targeted purposes. (Like getting trainees to stop being trainees, or for bumping somebody 20 XP from level 20 to level 20 so you could promote them with no efficieny loss of any kind before starting the next mission)

And when I went on to check out Roy and Lyn's games, I found that they were more difficult than even a no-grinding Sacred Stones run, but mostly... 'illegitimately'? Like, Roy's game has so much of its 'difficulty' tied up in the reinforcements spawning in with zero warning and immediately moving and often being positioned so that natural first-time play of a map will have vulnerable people perfectly positioned to be instantly killed. Lyn's game doesn't have that nonsense, thankfully, but I still mostly came away from missions feeling like a given mission giving me trouble was designed to punish reasonable play with 'gotchas' as the primary reason I was having difficulty.

(To be fair, I didn't play on Hard Mode much in Lyn's game; I completed a run of Lyn's personal campaign, then got... halfway-ish through Eliwood's Hard Mode? And I think I got like three missions into Hector Hard Mode. So I don't have a strong sense of how the hard modes of that game compare to hard mode in Sacred Stones. But I didn't finish those hard modes because they mostly seemed to double down on the above problems)

Yeah, what actually makes a map difficult can vastly vary in my experience. Sometimes, it's like these last couple maps of Sacred Stones that Vocalist has played through where it's "we have multiple timed side objectives which are optional, but you probably want to take care of because you'll get some cool stat boosters and new party members". Other times, you've got nonsense like Same Turn Reinforcements spam or some really bad Fog of War Maps.

That said, sometimes the worst sin a map commits is just... being downright boring, with minimal actual threats so it's less "play this tactical RPG map" and more "play this move units simulator until the chapter is done." Of maps covered so far, I might give a pass to the Prologue and Chapter 1 as being basically playable cutscenes because they also exist as tutorials... but then after Chapter 2 ramps up to things like threatened villages and NPCs, Chapter 3 suddenly wraps back around to "here's a bunch of bandits dicking around in individual rooms that only you can open, there is literally zero time pressure on this map." Or Chapter 7, the initial approach to Renvall, where there's zero enemy reinforcements, most of the enemies are programmed to just wait for you to eventually reach their threat range instead of rushing you, and even if they did rush you could easily just turtle up at the chokepoint bridge the map starts you in.

That's not to say I think every single map should be time gated, I've played a few romhacks with what I've seen described as "Fire Emblem Reddit Approved ™️ Map Design" where literally every single map has super strict timers to save villages or constant overpowered reinforcements from your starting area to force you to finish quickly, but there's at least a few more maps coming up that can feel a bit... disappointing, compared to the better ones played.

As to other games Hard Modes... setting aside Same Turn Reinforcements, I think FE6 has a better hard mode than FE7, particularly Hector Mode. Where FE6 is mostly "enemies are a huge threat now, enhance the Tactical Gameplay" in a way FE7/FE8 rarely have good enemy quality, Hector Hard Mode just has shit like massively reduced EXP for killing enemies lower than you in level, adding Fog of War in some maps that didn't previously have it, and most egregiously imo it actively cuts down on your total deployment slots. Where in say Sacred Stones you can pretty reliably expect to have 11-12 slots (including your lord) from the route split onwards, Hector Mode will pull shit like "in Chapter 21, Hector, Eliwood and Ninan are force-deployed and you only have 6 more slots. BTW Fog of War Map so you'll probably want a thief or a Torch Staff user too hope you didn't like the idea of actually using more than half your team".

StormyEyed said:
Ah yeah, Asshole Reinforcements are my single least favorite Fire Emblem mechanic, and every game that uses them should feel bad for doing so. I do enjoy FE7 a lot, and I've played my fair share of Hector Hard Mode, but there's always a bit of a sense of having fun in a challenging game but also you have to remember to counter the gotcha traps because the designers were dicks.

Sacred Stones has a couple of fairly rude moments, but they're more along the lines of spawning some guys by your starting position to punish you if you've left your healers behind and undefended, nothing quite like "if you left a squishy within 8 tiles of this random tile on this turn they are now dead, enjoy."

I've met the occasional FE player who will actually try to argue "well you see, Same Turn Reinforcements are okay" and it always seems to wrap around to either "it's fine if they're telegraphed" (great but they aren't always telegraphed well at all), or "It's fine just have a map up the whole time you play/memorize the reinforcements" (Eat shit this is not good gameplay advice). Normal reinforcements near the starting position on the other hand, I'm not particularly against... though I'd hope it's at least somewhat telegraphed, even if it's just at two line conversation of "Boss Person, the allied knights will arrive soon" "haha yes soon our enemies will be flanked from behind!" Just a basic warning to tell the player "yo don't loiter too much at the beginning of the map or leave your squishies behind doing absolutely nothing productive.

Ghoul King · Mar 12, 2024

I must soften my doubts about Lute being deliberately written autistic, as I'd forgotten that With The Light started serialization in 2000, ie a good 4 years before Sacred Stones released in Japan, and won awards and whatnot -Autism awareness was already on the rise in Japan during the game's development. Intentionality is very plausible.

StormyEyed said:
Ah yeah, Asshole Reinforcements are my single least favorite Fire Emblem mechanic, and every game that uses them should feel bad for doing so. I do enjoy FE7 a lot, and I've played my fair share of Hector Hard Mode, but there's always a bit of a sense of having fun in a challenging game but also you have to remember to counter the gotcha traps because the designers were dicks.

Sacred Stones has a couple of fairly rude moments, but they're more along the lines of spawning some guys by your starting position to punish you if you've left your healers behind and undefended, nothing quite like "if you left a squishy within 8 tiles of this random tile on this turn they are now dead, enjoy."

The Elibe games are particularly terrible about functionally lying to the player, where the geographic and political/military situation is such that reinforcements should be completely impossible from wherever they show up. (Even aside absurdities like 'have a Manakete in a box 50% of the time") I don't exactly like when Sacred Stones spawns units from the starting area, but it's usually plausible or downright realistic for it to be happening.

I actually do like one specific case of this, even, and have been planning the whole time to point it out when we get there.

McFluffles said:
That said, sometimes the worst sin a map commits is just... being downright boring, with minimal actual threats so it's less "play this tactical RPG map" and more "play this move units simulator until the chapter is done." Of maps covered so far, I might give a pass to the Prologue and Chapter 1 as being basically playable cutscenes because they also exist as tutorials... but then after Chapter 2 ramps up to things like threatened villages and NPCs, Chapter 3 suddenly wraps back around to "here's a bunch of bandits dicking around in individual rooms that only you can open, there is literally zero time pressure on this map." Or Chapter 7, the initial approach to Renvall, where there's zero enemy reinforcements, most of the enemies are programmed to just wait for you to eventually reach their threat range instead of rushing you, and even if they did rush you could easily just turtle up at the chokepoint bridge the map starts you in.

I think the GBA games were struggling with this, where the devs understandably viewed 'map is a snorefest' as a problem... and then seemed to mostly think up really obnoxious mechanics when trying to solve this problem. And then defaulted heavily to considering Being Boring to be the worse sin. Thankfully the series seems to have drifted overall in the direction of 'soft' time pressure as the primary solution, which is a a reasonably good and pleasant solution, but I feel like the devs didn't recognize this as a relevant tool in its own right until Shadow Dragon/New Mystery of the Emblem.

So while I still really dislike the Elibe games' design tendencies, at this point I can see why they came out this way.

DragonUnitOmega · Mar 12, 2024

Vocalist said:
Vanessa introduces herself as the captain of Frelia's pegasus knights, and her pegasus as Titania. She has a name? That's interesting. The Fire Emblem games vary in how important the mounts are – not from game to game, but from character to character.

I was astonished to see that name in the support and HAD to look up if that was in the original script or if that was added through the mod. And I found it very funny that it is, in fact, in the original script. Why? 'Cause there's a character with that name in another "pre-Awakening" Fire Emblem. Though thinking about it, I wonder the name being therr was because, iirc, Sacred Stones and Path of Radiance were both "coded named" as "FE8". I forget if it's because Path of Radiance was meant of be 8 but got delayed so Sacred Stones ended up being released first, or if them being both "FE8" was for a different reason entirely. Either way...as someone who has played the Tellius games, it's very funny knowing the pegasus is named Titania. XD

The rest of the support... Not too much to say. It's a nice little interaction showing off Lute's personality leading to some silly moments and a bit of pegasus lore in this game. Speaking of.

Vocalist said:
This is actually a Greek legend, that Pegasus (which was one singular unique horse, not a whole race of them) was born from the body of Medusa. That one's always confused me. If anyone here is a classicist and can explain what train of logic the ancient Greeks were following when they thought a winged horse should be born from the death of an earth monster, I would love to hear it.

...i am no expert, and definitely haven't looked that deeply into medusa specifically...but I am an enthusiast of mythology, so I'll have my say on this!

As Indivisible has said, one version of Medusa's story, the more known one as far as I'm aware, has Poseidon rape her, and thus that is why when she's killed, Pegasus and Chrysaor popped out afterwards. While I'm not entirely sure about why Chrysaor is the way he is (he is usually human, or at least humanoid, but also has a version of him being a winged boar, the only similarity with Pegasus), nor do I know why Pegasus is winged except "tin foil hat"-type speculations (because I doubt the fact that the one version of Medusa being a priestess of Athena, who is associated with owls, is a good reason for why Pegasus has wings...), but I do have a more solid idea why Pegasus is even a horse in the first place, despite being born from a human turned into snake monster (at least, assuming the version of Medusa born from two gods isn't older than the human turned into Gorgon version...and even then, it's similar to the previous parenthesis sentence just feels a "little" less "tin foil-y"). Poseidon is associated with horses (I forget if this is the exact reason how, but I suspect it's because of his Mycanean version being both a sea god AND a cthonic/earth and Underworld god) even though he is a sea god. Case in point, his chariot is pulled by hippocamus, fish tailed horses. So knowing that, it made sense why Pegasus was born from Medusa and Poseidon.
...tho the more i talk about this the more i realize this is more me speculating connections and that i really need to look deeper into this...
... ...excuse me geeking out. it's just a thought ive had about mythology for a long while. Ahem.

Artur and Lute!

Vocalist said:
Forgive me for ranting a little, but this is a personal bête noir. I have loved not one but two people who sincerely believed that making me do things I hate/fear would make me stronger, and for all their good intentions and professed love for me, it destroyed our bonds.

Oh. It's fine. I don't mind. You got good reason for it. ...or at least I found it reasonable, at any rate.

Vocalist said:
These two supports paint a good picture of Lute as someone who truly loves learning and nature, a natural philosopher so to speak. She's incredibly smart and observant, but not so great at understanding people and what they want. Or, to put it another way, humans are generally less important to her than other creatures. Her primary means of communication is infodumping – we saw this from her very first appearance in Chapter 4, remember, when she was all too eager to cite everything she knew about monsters even when it made the others uncomfortable.

Hmm. I mostly agree with you, except for the "humans are generally less important to her than other creatures" bit, unless I'm also being like Lute and misinterpreting what you meant by that. I agree in general she likes to learn and infodump (especially since I'm not much better), but, like Ghoul King said, I less saw it as she "didn't care as much about people" and more "obliviously doing things with either good intentions or none at all", because, as Ghoul pointed out, Lute was willing to stop doing the things that bother, or terrify, Artur when he tells her that they are, indeed, bothering him. It doesn't help that, similar to me, it seems like he just didn't speak up about it bothering him because of both presuming Lute's intent and him trying to be kind and accepting of her personality, so she probably didn't know until then. So again, that's how I see Lute.

Vocalist said:
Artur is quite smooth, isn't he? Colm is going to have to work harder to stay in Neimi's good graces. He shouldn't just assume he's winning her heart by default. Let's see what he brings to the table in their B support.

I think the actual topic in Neimi and Artur's C support is nice. Mostly because, eeeyyy, we get more story on her mirror, the keepsake that led her, and to some extent Colm, to being introduced to Erika. As for Neimi and Colm's B support... Aw yeah! Le's gooooo! Unsurprisingly, I really like this one, and that's (one of) the reason(s) why I was so worried on how the mod changed it. I appreciated that, yes, Neimi is a crybaby but can still be strong when she puts her mind to it, and that Colm has gotten more mature and accepts that is part of her nature. And I'm glad that the mod kept to the spirit of convo while fixing some of the aspects that would definitely bother some(? either that or a lot of) people. Add this to the pile of "reasons why I'm fond of Neimi and Colm".

As for Tower of Valni... Ironically, despite playing this several times, I have never beaten this place, afai remember, because I used this solely for grinding, redoing the first floor again and again, mainly for grinding Amelia or any characters who join later at low levels, or grinding supports of characters I don't use. So I can't say much more on the tower itself besides, yes, the green drops are random, I can say that...hey! Mauthe Doog! Design wise, because I like dogs, I always liked these monsters. They can be a pain to deal with thanks to their speed, but honestly it's another type of monster I didn't like dealing with more than this thing...

As for the next chapter...wooo. A lotta characters again, but I'm getting ahead of myself. First off, I never thought too much about Glen leaving Cormag behind. Yes even when I got older. Because yeah, it does make sense to bring whatever family you have with you if you do defect. But I think I never thought of it even as an adult because...well, that would be spoilers (though I have no idea if I'll remember to talk about this later), so let's just say later events made me not think of that. Similar to Glen's line: "what lies have you told the emperor". I hadn't noticed how much he still trusted Vigarde. And...actually also the whole scene with Innes. Oh sure I liked it even as a kid, but that was for Gerik and Tethys showing how, despite being mercenaries, they still have standards, not Innes, and the show of his character. I didn't hate him per se, but I was just "eh", but your observations make me like this scene all the more. And Innes too. Next...I think this is the map where I usually get Joshua and Natasha's B support, and if not...then at least this was the map when I got it on my first playthrough, cause the top half of the map is my memory's "default" background whenever I remember their B support. And Eirika and Seth's B support now that I think about it. Next, as others have mentioned...Myrrh isn't reacting because she's with Ephraim...and for VERY good reason, or rather important plot reasons. You'll find out eventually what that entails. And after that...hmm. Yeah I think that's all I got to say on the map. I could talk more about the chapter, but I don't have much thoughts on that...mostly 'cause, plot wise, this one never stood out to me. The characters and its moderate difficult, which was hard when I was a kid, sure, I remember, but otherwise it's just...another piece of a whole. That's it.

Oh wait. I almost forgot.

Vocalist said:
But, hey, what is up with her death quote? I haven't commented on any of the death quotes so far, but…Tana…what's had her thinking about death for so long? She's seemed so cheerful and innocent, from what I've seen. I need to dig into her supports.

Huh. Unsurprisingly, I never have seen the death quotes, or perhaps more accurately...I don't remember any of them, so I'm surprised to see that be her death quote. Mostly because I'm like "Huh. I think I know what she's talking about. I'm surprised it gets referenced like this." Keyword: I think. I don't remember all of Tana's supports.

Vocalist said:
Even in the modern style of Fire Emblem, where you can field an entire team of Swordmasters if you like, this holds true. I'm sure you see why the developers go to such pains to make sure the player only ever has one Dancer – two dancers on the same team could dance for each other, making the player phase endless, and opening the way to some game-breaking nonsense.

-Opens mouth to talk about that-
-Terrabrand says it before me-
Drat. I got beaten to it...
Screw it, I still wanna say it.
Yeah, as Terrabrand said, Heroes just make Dancers unable to refresh other Dancers.
However, because you can have multiple Dancers, a Galeforce attacker, AND Dancers with Galeforce...let's just say it proves the point why there's usually only one.
Usually.
There is one game that is an exception to "no more than two dancers at the same time per game" trend (because, for plot reasons, there are two dancers in Genealogy of the Holy War but you can't have both of them at the same time)...at least in theory. Because one, it's been a long time since I played it so I can't remember if it actually is possible; two, because of that I actually don't know if dancers can't refresh each other; and three, I'm not sure if I still have my saves to test it myself.

Vocalist said:
In the games I'm familiar with, Dancers are like Thieves, in that they have weak combat but make up for it with special utility.

I was about to say one character's name and their Legendary version in Heroes because I really like using that version and can't help but mention it, but I realized it'd be spoilers for you because you haven't played the older games (besides this one).
...but then again, Heroes is its own beast, so I probably should minimize mentions of it...

Vocalist said:
Colm opens the city gates, with style. I'm loving his new Rogue animations; they even include hair flips.

Once again, I was about to say why the animations are the way they are...until I realized they're technically spoilers for this game. So yeah. Never mind. I'll put a pin on this and hopefully remember later.

Vocalist said:
Joshua dies. I sigh. I imagine training up Marisa to replace him. I imagine how sad DragonUnitOmega will be. I think of Gerik again. I reload.

OH MY GOSH. My effin' heart skipped a beat until I finished that sentence... I'm so glad you did. You didn't have to, but still I'm glad you did. I appreciate it. Especially because of spoilers for the game I can't go into now.

Though speaking of Marisa...NOW I'll talk about the characters!

And first off, I'll start with her since I mentioned her first. Character wise, I really like her. The no-nonsense response on Gerik's opinion about them being enemies leading to her being recruited, her design, and being a myrmidon just makes her really cool to me, and that's not even mentioning how she is in supports. ...but (unsurprisingly) I love Joshua, and pretty much use him in every playthrough, so (also unsurprisingly) I haven't used her beyond this initial map or grinding supports. Which is a shame. Again, I think she's cool. I just...like other characters more than her for one reason or another so they get the slots instead of her.

This is pretty much the same for Innes and Gerik. I...think at most, I've used the former once for the main story (i suspect it was in my first playthrough considering i lost neimi), while usually I just grind his supports with others. While the latter...I have never really used him? I think, at most, for filling out slots for one specific chapter. Character wise, I think they're neat. Innes, well, I'm appreciating him more now with this LP, and I've always liked his design, while Gerik is just cool all around, with his class having some of my favorite animations. Just...not enough for me to use them. The other two though... Yeah, I have always used Tethys. After getting a taste of dancers in Blazing Sword, I knew she was going to be on my team. Helps that her animation and music is one of my favorites for dancers. I sometimes leave the animation on because I just so I can see and hear it. Meanwhile...Ewan! I know he's not officially recruited yet, but really, what I will say has been mentioned, and it's not much anyway. Like with Amelia, Ewan is another trainee I use if I'm in the mood to use him, and he's pretty much always a shaman. Why? Because I effin' love the shaman/dark mage animations, but as Terrabrand mentioned, there is another shaman that is playable, so sometimes I use that other shaman instead of Ewan. Either way, I always use a shaman.

Indivisible · Mar 12, 2024

DragonUnitOmega said:
I was astonished to see that name in the support and HAD to look up if that was in the original script or if that was added through the mod. And I found it very funny that it is, in fact, in the original script. Why? 'Cause there's a character with that name in another "pre-Awakening" Fire Emblem. Though thinking about it, I wonder the name being therr was because, iirc, Sacred Stones and Path of Radiance were both "coded named" as "FE8". I forget if it's because Path of Radiance was meant of be 8 but got delayed so Sacred Stones ended up being released first, or if them being both "FE8" was for a different reason entirely. Either way...as someone who has played the Tellius games, it's very funny knowing the pegasus is named Titania. XD

The rest of the support... Not too much to say. It's a nice little interaction showing off Lute's personality leading to some silly moments and a bit of pegasus lore in this game. Speaking of.

...i am no expert, and definitely haven't looked that deeply into medusa specifically...but I am an enthusiast of mythology, so I'll have my say on this!

As Indivisible has said, one version of Medusa's story, the more known one as far as I'm aware, has Poseidon rape her, and thus that is why when she's killed, Pegasus and Chrysaor popped out afterwards. While I'm not entirely sure about why Chrysaor is the way he is (he is usually human, or at least humanoid, but also has a version of him being a winged boar, the only similarity with Pegasus), nor do I know why Pegasus is winged except "tin foil hat"-type speculations (because I doubt the fact that the one version of Medusa being a priestess of Athena, who is associated with owls, is a good reason for why Pegasus has wings...), but I do have a more solid idea why Pegasus is even a horse in the first place, despite being born from a human turned into snake monster (at least, assuming the version of Medusa born from two gods isn't older than the human turned into Gorgon version...and even then, it's similar to the previous parenthesis sentence just feels a "little" less "tin foil-y"). Poseidon is associated with horses (I forget if this is the exact reason how, but I suspect it's because of his Mycanean version being both a sea god AND a cthonic/earth and Underworld god) even though he is a sea god. Case in point, his chariot is pulled by hippocamus, fish tailed horses. So knowing that, it made sense why Pegasus was born from Medusa and Poseidon.
...tho the more i talk about this the more i realize this is more me speculating connections and that i really need to look deeper into this...
... ...excuse me geeking out. it's just a thought ive had about mythology for a long while. Ahem.

Artur and Lute!

Oh. It's fine. I don't mind. You got good reason for it. ...or at least I found it reasonable, at any rate.

Hmm. I mostly agree with you, except for the "humans are generally less important to her than other creatures" bit, unless I'm also being like Lute and misinterpreting what you meant by that. I agree in general she likes to learn and infodump (especially since I'm not much better), but, like Ghoul King said, I less saw it as she "didn't care as much about people" and more "obliviously doing things with either good intentions or none at all", because, as Ghoul pointed out, Lute was willing to stop doing the things that bother, or terrify, Artur when he tells her that they are, indeed, bothering him. It doesn't help that, similar to me, it seems like he just didn't speak up about it bothering him because of both presuming Lute's intent and him trying to be kind and accepting of her personality, so she probably didn't know until then. So again, that's how I see Lute.

I think the actual topic in Neimi and Artur's C support is nice. Mostly because, eeeyyy, we get more story on her mirror, the keepsake that led her, and to some extent Colm, to being introduced to Erika. As for Neimi and Colm's B support... Aw yeah! Le's gooooo! Unsurprisingly, I really like this one, and that's (one of) the reason(s) why I was so worried on how the mod changed it. I appreciated that, yes, Neimi is a crybaby but can still be strong when she puts her mind to it, and that Colm has gotten more mature and accepts that is part of her nature. And I'm glad that the mod kept to the spirit of convo while fixing some of the aspects that would definitely bother some(? either that or a lot of) people. Add this to the pile of "reasons why I'm fond of Neimi and Colm".

As for Tower of Valni... Ironically, despite playing this several times, I have never beaten this place, afai remember, because I used this solely for grinding, redoing the first floor again and again, mainly for grinding Amelia or any characters who join later at low levels, or grinding supports of characters I don't use. So I can't say much more on the tower itself besides, yes, the green drops are random, I can say that...hey! Mauthe Doog! Design wise, because I like dogs, I always liked these monsters. They can be a pain to deal with thanks to their speed, but honestly it's another type of monster I didn't like dealing with more than this thing...

As for the next chapter...wooo. A lotta characters again, but I'm getting ahead of myself. First off, I never thought too much about Glen leaving Cormag behind. Yes even when I got older. Because yeah, it does make sense to bring whatever family you have with you if you do defect. But I think I never thought of it even as an adult because...well, that would be spoilers (though I have no idea if I'll remember to talk about this later), so let's just say later events made me not think of that. Similar to Glen's line: "what lies have you told the emperor". I hadn't noticed how much he still trusted Vigarde. And...actually also the whole scene with Innes. Oh sure I liked it even as a kid, but that was for Gerik and Tethys showing how, despite being mercenaries, they still have standards, not Innes, and the show of his character. I didn't hate him per se, but I was just "eh", but your observations make me like this scene all the more. And Innes too. Next...I think this is the map where I usually get Joshua and Natasha's B support, and if not...then at least this was the map when I got it on my first playthrough, cause the top half of the map is my memory's "default" background whenever I remember their B support. And Eirika and Seth's B support now that I think about it. Next, as others have mentioned...Myrrh isn't reacting because she's with Ephraim...and for VERY good reason, or rather important plot reasons. You'll find out eventually what that entails. And after that...hmm. Yeah I think that's all I got to say on the map. I could talk more about the chapter, but I don't have much thoughts on that...mostly 'cause, plot wise, this one never stood out to me. The characters and its moderate difficult, which was hard when I was a kid, sure, I remember, but otherwise it's just...another piece of a whole. That's it.

Oh wait. I almost forgot.

Huh. Unsurprisingly, I never have seen the death quotes, or perhaps more accurately...I don't remember any of them, so I'm surprised to see that be her death quote. Mostly because I'm like "Huh. I think I know what she's talking about. I'm surprised it gets referenced like this." Keyword: I think. I don't remember all of Tana's supports.

-Opens mouth to talk about that-
-Terrabrand says it before me-
Drat. I got beaten to it...
Screw it, I still wanna say it.
Yeah, as Terrabrand said, Heroes just make Dancers unable to refresh other Dancers.
However, because you can have multiple Dancers, a Galeforce attacker, AND Dancers with Galeforce...let's just say it proves the point why there's usually only one.
Usually.
There is one game that is an exception to "no more than two dancers at the same time per game" trend (because, for plot reasons, there are two dancers in Genealogy of the Holy War but you can't have both of them at the same time)...at least in theory. Because one, it's been a long time since I played it so I can't remember if it actually is possible; two, because of that I actually don't know if dancers can't refresh each other; and three, I'm not sure if I still have my saves to test it myself.

I was about to say one character's name and their Legendary version in Heroes because I really like using that version and can't help but mention it, but I realized it'd be spoilers for you because you haven't played the older games (besides this one).
...but then again, Heroes is its own beast, so I probably should minimize mentions of it...

Once again, I was about to say why the animations are the way they are...until I realized they're technically spoilers for this game. So yeah. Never mind. I'll put a pin on this and hopefully remember later.

OH MY GOSH. My effin' heart skipped a beat until I finished that sentence... I'm so glad you did. You didn't have to, but still I'm glad you did. I appreciate it. Especially because of spoilers for the game I can't go into now.

Though speaking of Marisa...NOW I'll talk about the characters!

And first off, I'll start with her since I mentioned her first. Character wise, I really like her. The no-nonsense response on Gerik's opinion about them being enemies leading to her being recruited, her design, and being a myrmidon just makes her really cool to me, and that's not even mentioning how she is in supports. ...but (unsurprisingly) I love Joshua, and pretty much use him in every playthrough, so (also unsurprisingly) I haven't used her beyond this initial map or grinding supports. Which is a shame. Again, I think she's cool. I just...like other characters more than her for one reason or another so they get the slots instead of her.

This is pretty much the same for Innes and Gerik. I...think at most, I've used the former once for the main story (i suspect it was in my first playthrough considering i lost neimi), while usually I just grind his supports with others. While the latter...I have never really used him? I think, at most, for filling out slots for one specific chapter. Character wise, I think they're neat. Innes, well, I'm appreciating him more now with this LP, and I've always liked his design, while Gerik is just cool all around, with his class having some of my favorite animations. Just...not enough for me to use them. The other two though... Yeah, I have always used Tethys. After getting a taste of dancers in Blazing Sword, I knew she was going to be on my team. Helps that her animation and music is one of my favorites for dancers. I sometimes leave the animation on because I just so I can see and hear it. Meanwhile...Ewan! I know he's not officially recruited yet, but really, what I will say has been mentioned, and it's not much anyway. Like with Amelia, Ewan is another trainee I use if I'm in the mood to use him, and he's pretty much always a shaman. Why? Because I effin' love the shaman/dark mage animations, but as Terrabrand mentioned, there is another shaman that is playable, so sometimes I use that other shaman instead of Ewan. Either way, I always use a shaman.

The Gorgon sisters are sometimes depicted as having wings, so Pegasus is likely a case of Wings (Medusa) plus Horse (Poseidon) equals Winged Horse.

StormyEyed · Mar 12, 2024

DragonUnitOmega said:
As for Tower of Valni... Ironically, despite playing this several times, I have never beaten this place, afai remember, because I used this solely for grinding, redoing the first floor again and again, mainly for grinding Amelia or any characters who join later at low levels, or grinding supports of characters I don't use.

While I avoid using it for grinding, I will say that it's probably worth going through a full run of Valni at least once when it fully unlocks, there are a couple of floors with mechanics unique within FE8, and some of the later floors do have a bit of challenge to them. Though it's your call on if you want to do it as it's unlocked or as more of a postgame thing.

Broccoliccoli · Mar 12, 2024

DragonUnitOmega said:
There is one game that is an exception to "no more than two dancers at the same time per game" trend (because, for plot reasons, there are two dancers in Genealogy of the Holy War but you can't have both of them at the same time)...at least in theory. Because one, it's been a long time since I played it so I can't remember if it actually is possible; two, because of that I actually don't know if dancers can't refresh each other; and three, I'm not sure if I still have my saves to test it myself.

9&10 go as far as to feature a genocide against that world's Dancer ethnicity

And beyond that joke FE10 has a lot of convoluted plot stuff to ensure none of the three playable survivors are ever deployable on the same battlefield.

Let's Play Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones (Restoration Queen Edit)

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