Fire Emblem: Three Houses - Give Me Orders Daddy

I can only agree with your take on Three Houses, Fronk. Fire Emblem feels worse when it's bloated to high heaven with additional features and faff. I'm concerned that the stuff with the school will distract from the actual core premise of the game.

I don't even think you need to go as far back as the GBA Fire Emblem games - Shadows of Valentia felt like a good balance between the over-laden mess that was Fates and the older titles.

Well, preorders are now up, and I now wait to get my first physical Switch game of the year along with some Waifus.

masofdas wrote:

along with some Waifus.

On a happier note, a Famitsu preview of this has revealed that it's got that time rewind mechanic from Echoes, which I'm all about as that really helped in eliminating some of the utter bullshit from getting randomly hit by a critical or moving a unit to an area that suddenly spawned reinforcements.

I'm also about the husbando's as well

Equal opportunity - I respect it, Mas.

My Robin didn't end up with Chrom for no reason.

It was obviously to create the most broken version of Lucina, right?

More info gets dripping out from Japan on these, be it character trailers.

Recently though Famitsu has a article and well sounds like Three Houses is Fire Emblem X Persona X Harry Potter.

As you have a monthly calendar which each day you can do various social link like stuff at the school, then at the end of the month you go battle.

Does make me wonder the overall story part from running a school.

It's about time, quite frankly. If there's one area that hasn't been explored enough in Japanese media, it's high school drama.

Yep... that about sums it up. I'm going to be very tepid on this game come its release, I feel.

I'm still going to pick this up when it comes out as I really like tactics games but I am pretty apathetic about this one so far.

I'm super excited

1) Because I like the more let's call it social aspects post Awakening (should have something up soon)

2) I've not used my Switch since Christmas and I want a big Switch game to play as it's been ages since Let's Go

Maybe the social aspects will be alright. The problem is I don't think they've ever been good to date (although not played anything since Fates). They tend towards giving you absolute controls over your peeps, rendering them more dollies than characters in my book. Everyone can date everyone, and the dialogue tends to be a train wreck, with an inexplicable turn towards suddenly being married and then no further dialogue. I'd rather play The Sims if I wanted to micromanage some dollies.

It's not an aspect of the game that's ever really appealed to me though because I much prefer my pawns to have a semblance of free-will, as in The Sims (at a very basic level) or your simulation/building games like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress (at a much more involved level). Or a system like the Witcher 3 where characters will call you out for being voyeuristic and having your cake and eating it.

Socials aren't interesting if I'm an incorporeal cupid.

But I haven't been closely following this so maybe things will be different here.

Thing is I don't want to play The Sims, I still want a RPG but the social aspect make it more interesting than others and a interesting feature.

There's definitely a market for the way things are done in JRPGs. I know people who enjoyed the romance system in, say, Persona 5. But for me those systems are laughably silly. I remember getting a girlfriend in Persona 5, deliberately being the worst person possible to her, literally told her to go away on Valentine's Day, and she still popped up in the end game to tell me how great I was.

Which is the problem I have with FE. The characters don't really have any agency. But an RPG like the Witcher is way, way, better in that regard.

Maybe it's how we play as I treated Makoto like the best girl she is in Persona 5 and didn't even think this was pointless.

We definitely played it differently. I gave up on P5 because I thought the game was wasting my time. When you vanquish the third big bad, your teenage chums spend the next few days spending the next few days constantly asking about whether or not the change of heart will work... just like they did the previous two times... and there's no quick skip, you have to spend at least an hour wading through stuff that, if cut, would have made the game better imo. But I also found the characters quite bland and one dimensional, and all the social stuff to be super bland and uninteresting.

But in a way, that kind of fits in with how the game ultimately deals with romance. It doesn't matter if you pick the sub-optimal options constantly, demonstrating a complete lack of chemistry with your mark, taking them to places they don't like, giving them gifts they hate; as long as you spend enough time with whichever woman you choose, they will always fall in "love" with you as long as you're single.

At it's core, P5's social system, from love to friendships, is one of brute force. It's just that as players, we get to influence how much brute force is needed to win a character over by choosing how much chemistry the characters have.

I know it's just a game. But I guess I just don't care for the crass gamification of romance or friendships when the "character" you're wooing doesn't ultimately have any agency, and therefore becomes less character than prop.

Crusader Kings 2 is great because of its RPG elements. Your character will have a series of traits, some changeable, some less so. If they're slothful, you can, to some degree, mitigate the extent of their slothfulness, but you can't just brute force them into being ruthlessly efficient. This is the same for all the other characters in the game, be they shy or gregarious, greedy or frugal, a lunitic or a genius. The game gives you the outlines of characters in their traits and beliefs, which in turn affects how other characters see your character, all modified by the honorable/dishonourable actions characters have taken/ whether you've or they have had a hand in plotting against their/your family or the laws you've implemented. But, unless you cheat, you can't ever brute force someone to perma-like you, or (generally) do something totally out of character. You can make an honourable character plot to kill, say, their brother in order to eliminate his claim to your titles, but if you got caught you'd lose the honour trait and become known as a kinslayer (unless you have the piety to repent before the Pope). You can also arrange marriages, but you can never force your husband/wife to love you... in fact it's quite possible that they might hate you, or be indifferent, or cheat on you, or plot to murder you - based on their desires/traits.

Rather than being a system of brute force and player voyeurism, Crusader Kings 2 invites you to collaborate with the characters in game. You'll still often marry people for eugenical purposes, or role playing purposes, or for claims - but these things are always woven into an engine that gives the other characters in the game purpose beyond your omnipotent control.

It's not like Western RPGs haven't made their characters, characters, and not props, cough Witcher 3, through giving it's characters some agency. But contemporary Fire Emblem is a series that always lets you heteronormatively marry anyone you want to anyone else. It doesn't matter if the characters have no chemistry in their cut scenes, there's always an inexplicable turn to marry in the final scene, as if they really did love each other all along.

And it's that kind of stuff that seriously turns me off because it allows for the complete disservice of character, and there are no design choices made in FE games that can lead such choices to ever bite you in the rump because the characters always end up content.

I'd hope that in a scholarly setting, the Archer and the Knight who fight alongside each other form an understanding that allows you to train a Horse Archer, instead of them getting married. But, well, it's a Fire Emblem game.

But I guess if you're happy with the way P5 worked, then there's no reason to be worried by any FE meets P5 Meets HP news so I'm glad you're excited to have a big Switch game on the horizon.

See it's the in-between almost visual novel like bits that makes Persona 5 so good and why I would go far as saying it's my favourite game of this generation (I know it's on PS3 as well), I do think the characters are worse than Persona 4's but that's another subject all together.

Same sort of goes with Fire Emblem Awakening being my favourite 3DS game.

Can the systems be improved sure that things like getting a horse archer to happen, but I sort of doubt it.

That it might come down to how you treat the game much like I said about Makoto.

Muss wrote:

Maybe the social aspects will be alright. The problem is I don't think they've ever been good to date (although not played anything since Fates). They tend towards giving you absolute controls over your peeps, rendering them more dollies than characters in my book.

That's pretty much spot on. None of the characters in Fates and very few of the characters in Awakening felt anything more than one-note caricatures designed for the dating sim crowd to fall in love with. That was driven home by the petting minigame from Pokémon rearing its head in a much creepier way in Fates. The characters are becoming painfully dull and there's little complexity to them - compare them to the likes of Soren or Shinon from the Tellius games and you'll quickly see the gulf in character development.

The "waifu" culture which I'd hoped was cordoned off in Heroes has definitely bled into the main series and it's all becoming a bit too much for me. It makes me roll my eyes at points - whilst there's nobody as obvious as Camilla in Three Houses, the difference in design between the male and female protagonist should hint strongly that they're trying to appeal to a certain type of player.



It's why I can't see the news of a bigger focus on the social elements as good news. It distracts from the main draw of Fire Emblem in my eyes, which is the strategy and the tension in losing your favourite characters. To be honest, the way the series has been heading, I can see them scrapping the perma-death element entirely in due course. I don't even know if I'll pick this one up at launch considering how disappointed I'm feeling in regards to how it's turning out.

JayMoyles wrote:

...the difference in design between the male and female protagonist should hint strongly that they're trying to appeal to a certain type of player.

decentmaledesign.jpg fetishisticfemaldesign.jpg

Oh for God's sake.

At least Edelgard is close to her male counterparts

Holy hell, those are some bright contrasting colors

JayMoyles wrote:

I can only agree with your take on Three Houses, Fronk. Fire Emblem feels worse when it's bloated to high heaven with additional features and faff. I'm concerned that the stuff with the school will distract from the actual core premise of the game.

I don't even think you need to go as far back as the GBA Fire Emblem games - Shadows of Valentia felt like a good balance between the over-laden mess that was Fates and the older titles.

Yeah, pretty much. The high production values not only make it harder for the team to iterate on new ideas but it just becomes a bigger risk to shake things up as well, since the game now has to sell a few million copies to justify its existence. And like you say all this stuff is likely to detract from the core premise of the game.

The sales figures points raises something interesting - I just don't think Fire Emblem is geared towards me anymore. My favourite Fire Emblem games are the Tellius duology and I'd love to see a sprawling, epic fantasy SRPG like that again, but considering those games nearly led to the death of the series, I can't fault them for selling to the market that are lapping up their games.

So what you're saying is, no waifu no laifu (for the series)?