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the thing about awakening is that even if i'm not crazy about the world map structure, that's really the smallest of its design flaws. sacred stones had the world map too and my only issue with it is that it's short and fairly easy
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May 16, 2015 22:26
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Cake Attack posted:the thing about awakening is that even if i'm not crazy about the world map structure, that's really the smallest of its design flaws. sacred stones had the world map too and my only issue with it is that it's short and fairly easy Oh yeah, it's not the world map that I hate about Awakening. Though I do dislike having unlimited shopping available, as I've said before.
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May 16, 2015 22:39
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I kinda miss some stuff Sacred Stones did. Also Gaiden.
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May 16, 2015 22:48
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Honestly, the main thing I appreciate about awakening is making the support system far more transparent, and letting me see pretty much all the supports without having to play the game several times through.
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May 16, 2015 23:08
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warhammer651 posted:Honestly, the main thing I appreciate about awakening is making the support system far more transparent, and letting me see pretty much all the supports without having to play the game several times through. Yeah but then the supports themselves were lousy. And the pair up system encouraged really dull tactics- if you even want to call them tactics- compared to most of the previous support bonus systems.
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May 16, 2015 23:30
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The supports were great though? I mean yeah it sucked that they couldn't get unique parent and sibling supports for everyone but it was also totally justified. It's not that pair up did anything to the way you actually played the game, it's that the maps only ever allowed for one thing: kill the boss. Pair up made the game a lot easier but it didn't affect your strategy. Galeforce did though.
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May 16, 2015 23:35
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Melth posted:Yeah but then the supports themselves were lousy. And the pair up system encouraged really dull tactics- if you even want to call them tactics- compared to most of the previous support bonus systems. The supports were about as good as you can expect from such a large cast. i.e. very hit or miss. And I was more talking about the game throwing up little hearts every time a unit did something that added points to their support, and the HIT +10 AVOID +10 etc that would pop up when the stabbing started. Pair Up did kind of break the game, but that seemed more due to it being something the enemy couldn't do rather than an inherent flaw. Something the devs seem to have recognized and are attempting to fix in the new game (or is it games?)
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May 17, 2015 00:04
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Supports in awakening hit more than most de games, it also missed a lot because it had the largest support conversation collecting despite the relatively smaller cast. If is three games that branch very differently after early game. Hoshido is more open world awakening style, Nohr is more traditional with no world map, and pair up seems more balanced.
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May 17, 2015 00:40
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Melth posted:Yeah but then the supports themselves were lousy. And the pair up system encouraged really dull tactics- if you even want to call them tactics- compared to most of the previous support bonus systems. For all its faults, I think Awakening's localization was pretty good. Gregor  I do agree that Awakening felt rather light on the tactics - you could easily brute force your way through most situations. Being someone who has to get everything he can before moving on with the story, doing the child missions and the grinding required trivialized the game. Not to mention I feel that grinding goes against the spirit of Fire Emblem, but some people seemed like it. Like my brother, but he never beat a Fire Emblem besides Awakening on Casual.
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May 17, 2015 01:01
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Mr.Morgenstern posted:For all its faults, I think Awakening's localization was pretty good. Gregor You didn't need to grind to beat awakening in the slightest. You only really have to if you're an obsessive completionist that needs every unlockable skill on every unit  Doing pretty much any of the children missions shattered the difficulty curve like glass though.
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May 17, 2015 01:20
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I don't think he was saying you needed to grind, but rather that Awakening allowed for infinite grinding and that breaks the difficulty curve.
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May 17, 2015 01:22
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Manatee Cannon posted:I don't think he was saying you needed to grind, but rather that Awakening allowed for infinite grinding and that breaks the difficulty curve. The only Fire Emblem games that didn't allow for grinding since FE6 were PoR and RD though. And they had BXP which was hilariously easy to manipulate to get whatever stats you wanted. Everything else has arenas or world maps. Though I will admit the arenas in this game are... uh, not easy to grind in. Especially if you don't have speed.
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May 17, 2015 01:25
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Zore posted:The only Fire Emblem games that didn't allow for grinding since FE6 were PoR and RD though. And they had BXP which was hilariously easy to manipulate to get whatever stats you wanted. Yes, but the arena had the potential of actually killing your units. You could simply replay a map in Awakening where the enemies have no way of harming you for essentially free and rack up the XP. Pair Up made this even easier. Have a unit with poor defense? Pair them up with a general! And then there were the DLC maps explicitly made for grinding.
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May 17, 2015 01:27
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i've never really bought the infinite grinding argument because technically you can grind up to level 99 in the first dungeon of almost every jrpg ever made and no one ever argues that the game balance is fundamentally shot because of it
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May 17, 2015 01:29
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It's just really easy to do in Awakening, because you can skip the enemy turns and just see the level screens. Whereas in most RPGs grinding to 99 in the first dungeon would take so long as to be pointless. Also, not counting the arenas (which not everyone figures out how to use right) XP is generally a limited resource in FE.
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May 17, 2015 01:31
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Yeah it's way easier to grind in Awakening or FE8. You aren't stuck grinding on the lowest level enemies, you can use the legacy characters to have enemies as powerful as you want them to be (this isn't a thing in Lunatic though). Or the grinding DLC, if you're willing to pay the money. It's fundamentally different because of the time investment required. You also increase your support rank (important for pair up) and you weapon rank (allowing you to use more powerful weapons). You don't get that kind of benefit in the starter dungeon of a Final Fantasy game. Awakening and Sacred Stones are both easy games anyway so it's not a huge deal but it does make a difference.
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May 17, 2015 01:34
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where is the line between easy enough that it affects the balance curve, and hard enough that it can be considered insignificant though? ultimately, in either case the player is going to be making a decision not to take advantage of infinite resources. especially since my level 99 example was an obvious extreme, you could wreck the difficulty curve via far less
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May 17, 2015 01:35
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Mr.Morgenstern posted:Yes, but the arena had the potential of actually killing your units. You could simply replay a map in Awakening where the enemies have no way of harming you for essentially free and rack up the XP. Grinding on hard or above without DLC is difficult to impossible unless you want to spend several weeks or months doing so. Reeking boxes cost 4800 gold, and usually have at most 1000 gold in items or weapon drops including the shiny squares. Enemy encounters don't spawn that often and usually have 6-10 enemies, scaled to the level you were when you completed the map. Its available, but you need either some of the DLC maps or the patience of a saint if you actually want to grind in Awakening. Arena grinding is waaaaaaay quicker. Even if you're using the bonus box characters, you're hemorrhaging money unless you're using the Falchion solely. And in game money will not last you long without... the money DLC. And I don't understand people who complain "drat, this game is so easy since I bought an addon specifically designed to give me tons of exp and gold and used it" and then turn around and claim stuff literally built into the levels like the arena doesn't count because...? Zore fucked around with this message at 01:41 on May 17, 2015 |
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May 17, 2015 01:36
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Again, it's the child missions. After Chapter 12 IIRC you get the opportunity to recruit new units, the fruits of all those supports you've been making. Fun! But the enemies are way harder, so the player has an incentive to grind that they wouldn't have had before. If the child missions didn't open so early people wouldn't be as likely to grind. And by the time you can take on those missions, your party needs to move onto the main story which is balanced for a lower level party, thus making it a cakewalk.
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May 17, 2015 01:41
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Mr.Morgenstern posted:
Only on normal, there you can make enough money per box to offset the loss. On Hard/Lunatic the price is 4800.
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May 17, 2015 01:42
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Zore posted:Grinding on hard or above without DLC is difficult to impossible unless you want to spend several weeks or months doing so. Reeking boxes cost 4800 gold, and usually have at most 1000 gold in items or weapon drops including the shiny squares. Enemy encounters don't spawn that often and usually have 6-10 enemies, scaled to the level you were when you completed the map. Alternately, this is irrelevant because there's oodles of money, plenty of random encounters, like 50 sidequests, and probably DLC stuff that I don't know anything about since I never did any DLC. Arena grinding took forever unless you were playing on an emulator because you had to spend like 3 minutes just rejecting fights until the arena guy finally gave you one for 600 gold or something. Otherwise someone would die and you would have to restart everything. Now Awakening isn't the easiest game to grind in; by far the easiest was FE8. The tower of Valni first floor would typically put an entombed or two within 1-2 turns' reach, plus some revenants, which were all totally helpless against even level 1 characters.And you could just leave, re-enter, kill the entombed, leave, re-enter, and so on for massive XP with 0 danger. But the second easiest is undoubtedly Awakening. Plus Awakening's game difficulty completely implodes with even a tiny bit of grinding. So much as 1-2 extra battles (such as any of the sidequests) will give you enough of a lead in stats, supports, and other advantages to trivialize most of the game even on the highest difficulties. Melth fucked around with this message at 01:51 on May 17, 2015 |
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May 17, 2015 01:48
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Mr.Morgenstern posted:Again, it's the child missions. After Chapter 12 IIRC you get the opportunity to recruit new units, the fruits of all those supports you've been making. Fun! But the enemies are way harder, so the player has an incentive to grind that they wouldn't have had before. If the child missions didn't open so early people wouldn't be as likely to grind. And by the time you can take on those missions, your party needs to move onto the main story which is balanced for a lower level party, thus making it a cakewalk. The child missions had a scaling difficulty progression to them and if you took them in order you could do them without grinding easily. And then crush the rest of the game with your 20/20 army when the game is expecting you to be around 18 - 20/1. Melth posted:Plus Awakening's game difficulty completely implodes with even a tiny bit of grinding. So much as 1-2 extra battles (such as any of the sidequests) will give you enough of a lead in stats, supports, and other advantages to trivialize most of the game even on the highest difficulties. And because all the children characters are optional you get like, 20 of the darn sidequests.
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May 17, 2015 02:02
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Cake Attack posted:where is the line between easy enough that it affects the balance curve, and hard enough that it can be considered insignificant though? The line is different for everyone but most people that play Fire Emblem a lot seem to agree that hard isn't hard on its own merits in Awakening, with or without grinding. And I feel that, regardless of how extreme it is or not, the Final Fantasy comparison doesn't fit because of all of the side benefits you get and just how much easier and quicker it is to do. But I kinda feel we're in different arguments here because I never said it isn't down to player choice to grind. Yes, you don't have to do it, but I never said that you did. But if you're on average 2-5 levels above the enemies, that's a huge advantage that only takes a couple legacy/risen encounters to accomplish. And that's not including support bonuses and weapon ranks you'd potentially get. If you're saying that grinding isn't inherently a bad thing in and of itself then sure, I agree. But it does make the game easier when it's there because if you have trouble you can back out of a map and grind a few levels, rather than rethink your strategy. Brute force is a much more viable option now.
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May 17, 2015 02:10
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Manatee Cannon posted:Brute force is a much more viable option now. Another two factors also strongly play into that: reclassing and pair ups. In most previous FE games, relying on just a handful of strong units to whom you gave every kill to do absolutely everything was a boring, mindless, but completely viable strategy. Still, eventually you'd hit the level cap and then start getting weaker and weaker. Awakening's reclassing made that not a concern. Reclass even once and you'll surely cap everything important, plus you can grab whatever crazy ability combo you want and become an invincible death machine. And that didn't require any grinding at all, just funneling all the kills to a few strong guys- which was already the easiest strategy. Then pair ups allowed you to stack absolutely gigantic cap-breaking bonuses on top of your already amazing stats to go completely off the charts. The result was a game where not only the easiest but the BEST strategy was to use only like 4 guys to whom you gave every single kill all game long. They'd quickly get so strong that you could play nearly every map just throwing them at the enemy in different directions and skipping everything. Brute force has never before been such a good substitute for actual tactics.
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May 17, 2015 02:24
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Melth posted:Another two factors also strongly play into that: reclassing and pair ups. After many restarts playing FE7 (I'm a very bad FE player), it felt so good to wreak havoc with a bunch of overpowered units.  'Course, if you actually like using strategy, that's not so good.
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May 17, 2015 02:29
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I dunno, that's pretty much on the player too. You can decide to never grind or reclass (especially since raising levels gets slower and more tedious the longer you do it), and the game is far from impossible that way (unlike certain very grind-heavy games that pretty much force it, like every Digimon RPG ever). I don't mind the game giving players tools that they can decide to use or not. My main problem with Awakening is the lackluster map design. It pretty much encouraged just attacking with no regards for anything else, and that's coming from someone who truly enjoyed Awakening. My main hope for If is that it will have cool, varied maps. Plus, it's not like "choose a few units, break everything" was a bad strategy in some older FE. Ike exists, after all.
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May 17, 2015 02:36
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I agree with the assessment that resetting level when class changing was a bad idea, and it's maybe my biggest concern for If. If you want to use the reclassing, you have to reset your level, and its relatively expensive to do so if you haven't been grinding. I preferred the New Mystery swap or Sacred Stones branching promotion method much more. It seems silly to say "well, just don't class swap" when it's a mechanic that's almost as central to the game as promotion. It's just handled badly, and was handled better in earlier games.
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May 17, 2015 02:37
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Lotish posted:It seems silly to say "well, just don't class swap" when it's a mechanic that's almost as central to the game as promotion. It's just handled badly, and was handled better in earlier games. Yeah, it's fundamentally the same thing as saying "well just don't promote".
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May 17, 2015 03:53
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I know OFS already fanarted something to this effect, but 1 range manaketes are so lame I had to do it too. I didn't colour it because I'm a lazy drunk.
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May 17, 2015 05:05
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MarquiseMindfang posted:I know OFS already fanarted something to this effect, but 1 range manaketes are so lame I had to do it too. I didn't colour it because I'm a lazy drunk. Awesome.
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May 17, 2015 05:35
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Well good news for everyone who was interested in Fire Emblem: the tabletop game. The friend I made that with and I have gotten to work on a second edition.
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May 17, 2015 21:58
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I have a bunch of leftover notes from the attempt I made a few years ago at tackling that exact idea. The general thing I got out of it is that Fire Emblem would work much better as a game similar to Descent than a strict pen-and-paper system, because of the much heavier focus on combat and lack of any kind of social stats/abilities. Also make skill 5% hit per point and lower all weapon hit chances to compensate, but that's an issue with Fire Emblem as a whole.  Great LP by the way, reading step-by-step ranked HM is really interesting from a strategic perspective.
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May 18, 2015 06:45
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The Shortest Path posted:Also make skill 5% hit per point and lower all weapon hit chances to compensate, but that's an issue with Fire Emblem as a whole. then everyone misses all the time in the early game. the skill contributes to hit the exact same as speed contributes to evasion, so hit stays near constant if you and an enemy get stronger in around equal doses.
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May 18, 2015 06:57
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It's probably going to be a few more days till the next update.
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May 19, 2015 04:59
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Melth posted:It's probably going to be a few more days till the next update. You've blazed through this game and the last at record pace, it's no big deal if you have a break.  Plus it's free entertainment you have no obligation to provide etc, etc.
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May 19, 2015 07:03
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Lotish posted:I agree with the assessment that resetting level when class changing was a bad idea, and it's maybe my biggest concern for If. If you want to use the reclassing, you have to reset your level, and its relatively expensive to do so if you haven't been grinding. I preferred the New Mystery swap or Sacred Stones branching promotion method much more. Hmm...here's an idea. What if future games kept the reclassing mechanic, but did something like FE2, where there were base stats for each class, except instead of being bumped UP to those stats, the character would actually be bumped DOWN to those stats? That way, we can still collect skills, but there would be a huge hit to stats to deal with?
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May 19, 2015 23:26
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Well that's weird I go to sleep and when I wake up there's been a tonne of new information. I'm still buying the game, but I fell like Intsys is trying to fix what wasn't broken. And breaking what needed fixing.
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May 20, 2015 02:27
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I for one have faith in intsys. They'll release that new advance wars title any year now... annnnnyy year.....
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May 20, 2015 02:49
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Man, I'd love a new AW title. That series doesn't have any one game I think is up to the quality of FE7, but every game in it is consistently really good. Albeit in different ways.
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May 20, 2015 03:42
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Fionordequester posted:Hmm...here's an idea. What if future games kept the reclassing mechanic, but did something like FE2, where there were base stats for each class, except instead of being bumped UP to those stats, the character would actually be bumped DOWN to those stats? That way, we can still collect skills, but there would be a huge hit to stats to deal with? You could jut do reclaassing like a normal JRPG with class changing where it adjusts your stats but not your level and you get class EXP for fighting in that class. Adds a ton or replayability to the game without breaking the difficulty curve.
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May 20, 2015 03:59
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