FE13: To Chapter 17, Plus Xenologue 2
Feb. 15th, 2013 05:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mark_asphodelI enjoyed setting Sigurd on fire.
Ahem.
In a sense, the concept of this game is a present to fans like me.
I mean, seriously. Future!Archanea/Barensia tie-in with Marth and Tiki and the Fire Emblem and Spheres all of that? And a pretty damn cool female Lord? I wanted that. I was asking for that. Hell, I even got a mid-ocean battle. I also wanted sea dragons and a female Peg Knight Lord, but I guess we can't have everything.
Anyway, now that we're on Valm and have encountered Tiki, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the execution of it all. I'm also feeling increasingly iffy about the entire time-travel gambit and how it all comes together. I guess I'll just have to keep plowing ahead.
So far I am unhappy with the way Tiki being sleepy is played for a lark. She was traumatized by her long sleep and dreams in FE3. She didn't want to go back to sleep. I assume she's not having nightmares anymore... except the Shield of Seals clearly got trashed again, so why wouldn't her sleep still be unpleasant? IDK. Maybe my fears on this will be allayed, but taking a major character's worst-case-scenario and plopping them back in it for a giggle kind of sucks. Hey, let's make feral laguz and play that one for laughs while we're at it.
Other things I don't like:
So, Valm has a million-man army. Some over yonder on SF are upset about this, because medieval warfare blah blah. Um... a really long time has passed since the Marth games which means it's been even longer since Jugdral. By my estimates, Ylisse is as far removed from Jugdral as we are from the actual Trojan War. So if we want Walhart to have a million-man army, that's fine by me. My problem is that 1M Valmese are apparently going to be Dealt With by Chrom and Friends, and while Chrom clearly has invisible soldiers tagging along, he doesn't have anywhere close to a million... and right now, he's the invader. Yes, Robin has a Plan; as Plans go, it's pretty nice. But he concocted the Plan after they already landed and engaged the Valmese! So... what was the strategy gonna be on the front end? No, really! Have you guys ever heard of an exit strategy?
Oh, and what's happening back home? Is there a reason BOTH Khans of Ferox are fighting abroad? There's two of 'em-- why isn't one minding Ferox? Yeah, they're both cool and I like them as characters, but that's just dumb.
Oh, hey, I found one of the supports that genuinely turned me off Frederick when I read the fan-translation, and it still sucks in NoA's version. Frederick/Henry shows off Chrom's right-hand-man in full-on Training Freak mode, and it just doesn't work for me. Look, Frederick is supposed to be wary, suspicious, mature, looking out for the good of the team and all that. When confronted with Virion, he was pretty annoyed and guarded about Virion's entire act. When confronted with Henry, what concerns Fred is not that Henry is a disturbing little blood-lusty fucker who is, oh yeah, Plegian and into dark magic... it's that the boy has a lax attitude toward training. FAIL.
And this hits my overall problem with the characters-- the quirks really are too quirky. They're tics. Compulsions. Nutty. Adding flaws to characters is good, but undercutting their entire purpose and making them ridiculous is... ungood, man. And while some of the quirky, crazy Sheperds skirt ungood on sight (hi, Miriel), branching out into the support network pretty quickly hits some deeply ridiculous stuff for people I'm supposed to be taking seriously.
And again, why is no one more concerned about fake!Robin and Robin's nightmares and headaches and the mark on his hand?
Basically, it comes down to this: I'm not surprised these people all died horribly in their original future. I haven't seen a cast begging to be smacked down by fate so badly since the last time I played Gen 1 of FE4. Sigurd and his posse weren't cut out for what they were facing and neither are Chrom and his buds. And this, I presume, is a timeline in which they're growing and learning and developing as people in ways they didn't the first time around!
Pairing update: Anna and Robin tied the knot, so I get to recruit Morgan. First I need to "unlock" Owain and Inigo, though.
Anyway, I finally ponied up the cash to play Roy's map. It was cute. I really like "Roy's" inquisitive personality! All the legacy characters are an interesting thing to see in action because it's like canon fanfic-- how do we characterize Leif and Seliph in a few lines? How do we deal with multiple Marths? WHY multiple Marths? Is this a nod to his incoherent retcons? Yeah, there's the ass-pull excuse of "It's not really them," but it's kind of interesting if not totally satisfying. I do give "Leif" and "Ephraim" a passing grade, though. Not sure about some of the others...
Ahem.
In a sense, the concept of this game is a present to fans like me.
I mean, seriously. Future!Archanea/Barensia tie-in with Marth and Tiki and the Fire Emblem and Spheres all of that? And a pretty damn cool female Lord? I wanted that. I was asking for that. Hell, I even got a mid-ocean battle. I also wanted sea dragons and a female Peg Knight Lord, but I guess we can't have everything.
Anyway, now that we're on Valm and have encountered Tiki, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the execution of it all. I'm also feeling increasingly iffy about the entire time-travel gambit and how it all comes together. I guess I'll just have to keep plowing ahead.
So far I am unhappy with the way Tiki being sleepy is played for a lark. She was traumatized by her long sleep and dreams in FE3. She didn't want to go back to sleep. I assume she's not having nightmares anymore... except the Shield of Seals clearly got trashed again, so why wouldn't her sleep still be unpleasant? IDK. Maybe my fears on this will be allayed, but taking a major character's worst-case-scenario and plopping them back in it for a giggle kind of sucks. Hey, let's make feral laguz and play that one for laughs while we're at it.
Other things I don't like:
So, Valm has a million-man army. Some over yonder on SF are upset about this, because medieval warfare blah blah. Um... a really long time has passed since the Marth games which means it's been even longer since Jugdral. By my estimates, Ylisse is as far removed from Jugdral as we are from the actual Trojan War. So if we want Walhart to have a million-man army, that's fine by me. My problem is that 1M Valmese are apparently going to be Dealt With by Chrom and Friends, and while Chrom clearly has invisible soldiers tagging along, he doesn't have anywhere close to a million... and right now, he's the invader. Yes, Robin has a Plan; as Plans go, it's pretty nice. But he concocted the Plan after they already landed and engaged the Valmese! So... what was the strategy gonna be on the front end? No, really! Have you guys ever heard of an exit strategy?
Oh, and what's happening back home? Is there a reason BOTH Khans of Ferox are fighting abroad? There's two of 'em-- why isn't one minding Ferox? Yeah, they're both cool and I like them as characters, but that's just dumb.
Oh, hey, I found one of the supports that genuinely turned me off Frederick when I read the fan-translation, and it still sucks in NoA's version. Frederick/Henry shows off Chrom's right-hand-man in full-on Training Freak mode, and it just doesn't work for me. Look, Frederick is supposed to be wary, suspicious, mature, looking out for the good of the team and all that. When confronted with Virion, he was pretty annoyed and guarded about Virion's entire act. When confronted with Henry, what concerns Fred is not that Henry is a disturbing little blood-lusty fucker who is, oh yeah, Plegian and into dark magic... it's that the boy has a lax attitude toward training. FAIL.
And this hits my overall problem with the characters-- the quirks really are too quirky. They're tics. Compulsions. Nutty. Adding flaws to characters is good, but undercutting their entire purpose and making them ridiculous is... ungood, man. And while some of the quirky, crazy Sheperds skirt ungood on sight (hi, Miriel), branching out into the support network pretty quickly hits some deeply ridiculous stuff for people I'm supposed to be taking seriously.
And again, why is no one more concerned about fake!Robin and Robin's nightmares and headaches and the mark on his hand?
Basically, it comes down to this: I'm not surprised these people all died horribly in their original future. I haven't seen a cast begging to be smacked down by fate so badly since the last time I played Gen 1 of FE4. Sigurd and his posse weren't cut out for what they were facing and neither are Chrom and his buds. And this, I presume, is a timeline in which they're growing and learning and developing as people in ways they didn't the first time around!
Pairing update: Anna and Robin tied the knot, so I get to recruit Morgan. First I need to "unlock" Owain and Inigo, though.
Anyway, I finally ponied up the cash to play Roy's map. It was cute. I really like "Roy's" inquisitive personality! All the legacy characters are an interesting thing to see in action because it's like canon fanfic-- how do we characterize Leif and Seliph in a few lines? How do we deal with multiple Marths? WHY multiple Marths? Is this a nod to his incoherent retcons? Yeah, there's the ass-pull excuse of "It's not really them," but it's kind of interesting if not totally satisfying. I do give "Leif" and "Ephraim" a passing grade, though. Not sure about some of the others...
no subject
Date: 2013-02-16 01:45 am (UTC)(The Sigurd comment made me smile more than it should.)
no subject
Date: 2013-02-16 02:08 am (UTC)Well... initially, I figured that the time-travel thing was going to be Lucina going back after everyone died to try to get at the root of the problem-- as simple as that. Things went to hell, so she charged back in to try to prevent... whatever. But she knows too damn much, and the past she describes is problematic. She's altering events that took place not when she was a child, but before her own conception and before any of her comrades could've been conceived-- before some of their parents could ever have met! That's stretching the boundaries of my disbelief. This isn't Seliph going back to tip off Sigurd's crew about the ambush at Barhara-- it's like Seliph going back and mucking around in the Prologue and then Sigurd marries Aideen or Aira and things get weirder from there.