Anatomy of a Clusterf*ck (FE4 vs FE13)
Mar. 28th, 2013 07:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mark_asphodelSo, I made some new pals over on GameFaqs after some of us hijacked a troll thread on the FE13 forum and turned in into a debate over whether Sigurd, Eltoshan, or Cuan was the biggest dumbass in Jugdral. (Hint: Sigurd.) And one of these new pals compared the plot of FE4 to FE13 in that both start off very strong and turn into a "clusterfuck" (though s/he also took points off FE13 for blatantly riffing off FE4).
I think "clusterfuck" is a strong term for Gen 2. It's dramatically flawed to the point where it both challenges adaptation and undercuts its own "aria" moments in the script, to be sure. I've pondered before what precisely is so bad about it, and I had a handful of answers.
1) We never get a good sense of Isaach despite the fact that our hero and his core posse live there and their opening campaign is its liberation. It's the sketchiest of the Jugdral satellite kingdoms. But man do we learn a lot about Thracia. You'd almost think that was the part the writers really cared about.
2) About 2/3 of "Seliph's" story is really about the Fall of House Freege and the Dain/Nova descendants and anyone who isn't them can GTFO for, like two and a half chapters. When Oifaye and Shanan reappear in Chapter 10 with actual dialogue it's like, "Oh yeah, you guys were supposed to be important or something. We're y'all just having a coffee break the last chapter?"
3) No bro action for Our Heroes. The script tells us it matters that Seliph hooks up with Ares and Leif, but both pretty much ignore him the entire game and just worry about their own shit. And they never talk to one another. The closest Leif comes to talking with Ares is if Ares bangs Nanna. So what was that all about?
4) No bro action anywhere else, really... for the eugenics babies. At least Tristan and Roddlevan have their sparring match and Dimna has that girlfriend back home.
5) The plot-point deaths really misfire. The impact of the choice between the Dozel boys is blunted in that we don't even know these clowns. Clown One or Clown Two, take your pick. As for Ishtar, whose death is clearly meant to be the "money shot" dramatically... I dunno why it doesn't feel stronger than it does, and I suppose the context is to blame. For all the screen time given to the Freeges their plot arc sits uneasily in the storyline.
6) Whereas Gen 1 feels like a genuine unspooling of events from the Prologue through the end of Chapter 3 (Chapter 4 is more a self-contained adventure), the chapter breaks in Gen 2 feel like arbitrary quirks of geography and not punctuation marks in a storyline. Stuff just happens, and more stuff happens, and different stuff happens, and hey now we're in Miletos.
PS: Chrom's ultimately a bigger dumbass than Sigurd, too.
3) No bro action for Our Heroes. The script tells us it matters that Seliph hooks up with Ares and Leif, but both pretty much ignore him the entire game and just worry about their own shit. And they never talk to one another. The closest Leif comes to talking with Ares is if Ares bangs Nanna. So what was that all about?
4) No bro action anywhere else, really... for the eugenics babies. At least Tristan and Roddlevan have their sparring match and Dimna has that girlfriend back home.
5) The plot-point deaths really misfire. The impact of the choice between the Dozel boys is blunted in that we don't even know these clowns. Clown One or Clown Two, take your pick. As for Ishtar, whose death is clearly meant to be the "money shot" dramatically... I dunno why it doesn't feel stronger than it does, and I suppose the context is to blame. For all the screen time given to the Freeges their plot arc sits uneasily in the storyline.
6) Whereas Gen 1 feels like a genuine unspooling of events from the Prologue through the end of Chapter 3 (Chapter 4 is more a self-contained adventure), the chapter breaks in Gen 2 feel like arbitrary quirks of geography and not punctuation marks in a storyline. Stuff just happens, and more stuff happens, and different stuff happens, and hey now we're in Miletos.
But these are issues that can conceivably be fixed. I don't know if they're make Gen 2 genuinely good, but I think tweaks along these lines would mitigate things. Do I think a remake would do the trick? HAHAHAHAH. No.
Not least because FE13 is a genuine godawful clusterfuck. I said before that for the first eleven or so chapters-- despite glaring missteps like the fuckery with the Hierophant, the cheap introduction of Cordelia and the equally cheap handling of Phila-- I felt that Awakening might really turn out to be the best entry into the series. Then the Valm Arc happened. And then our heroes went back to Ylisse and the story got even worse. The false choices. The utter pointlessness of the time travel. The irrelevancy of the child characters, which stems directly from the breeding free-for-all among the parents. The utterly uninteresting villains (I cannot dignify them with the label "antagonist"). The shoddy, shoddy worldbuilding. The moral derangement of our alleged heroes. The cheap cheap cheap cheap stupid cheap fucking cheap you-insult-me-sir ending.
That's a clusterfuck. It fails in a narrative sense. It fails in an aesthetic sense. I would argue it fails in a moral sense. It makes the convoluted irrelevancies of FE7 look like halfway decent storytelling and it makes Gen 2 look like a mild-to-moderate letdown.
I'm sorry you can't turn off the storyline the way you can turn off animations and just play the damn maps. It doesn't mean I hate the game, though I'm somewhat repelled by it overall and have mostly lost interest in playing it. It doesn't mean I hate the characters, though I'm deeply, deeply conflicted about Chrom and Robin both and resent how Lucina was handled. But the storyline is beyond redemption because the core of it-- Robin-- is more decayed and hollow than the Sigurd/Deirdre nonsense that's supposed to anchor FE4.
Worst of all, FE13 has pretensions-- intermittent pretensions. Like a shitty novelization of Lyn's Tale, it's a comedy that wants to convince the player of its depth, its grandeur, its tragic heft. Well, some of the time. Then it's back to the pratfalls and fluff. FE4 has some murky parts to its philosophy but there's not any doubt that the core people working on it thought they were crafting something genuinely meaningful. FE13 by contrast is obvious pastiche-- it's not Dark Side of the Moon, it's The Australian Pink Floyd come to town to bring you excerpts from Dark Side of the Moon and a passable light show. I'll go out on a limb here and say it feels very much like the work of ascended fanboys, people who grew up on FE3 and FE4 but didn't understand what made either of them work. Or not work. Or why.
And the only way to "fix" any of it would be to throw the entire draft in the shredder and start over.
That's all for now.
That's a clusterfuck. It fails in a narrative sense. It fails in an aesthetic sense. I would argue it fails in a moral sense. It makes the convoluted irrelevancies of FE7 look like halfway decent storytelling and it makes Gen 2 look like a mild-to-moderate letdown.
I'm sorry you can't turn off the storyline the way you can turn off animations and just play the damn maps. It doesn't mean I hate the game, though I'm somewhat repelled by it overall and have mostly lost interest in playing it. It doesn't mean I hate the characters, though I'm deeply, deeply conflicted about Chrom and Robin both and resent how Lucina was handled. But the storyline is beyond redemption because the core of it-- Robin-- is more decayed and hollow than the Sigurd/Deirdre nonsense that's supposed to anchor FE4.
Worst of all, FE13 has pretensions-- intermittent pretensions. Like a shitty novelization of Lyn's Tale, it's a comedy that wants to convince the player of its depth, its grandeur, its tragic heft. Well, some of the time. Then it's back to the pratfalls and fluff. FE4 has some murky parts to its philosophy but there's not any doubt that the core people working on it thought they were crafting something genuinely meaningful. FE13 by contrast is obvious pastiche-- it's not Dark Side of the Moon, it's The Australian Pink Floyd come to town to bring you excerpts from Dark Side of the Moon and a passable light show. I'll go out on a limb here and say it feels very much like the work of ascended fanboys, people who grew up on FE3 and FE4 but didn't understand what made either of them work. Or not work. Or why.
And the only way to "fix" any of it would be to throw the entire draft in the shredder and start over.
That's all for now.
PS: Chrom's ultimately a bigger dumbass than Sigurd, too.
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Date: 2013-03-28 11:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-29 12:20 am (UTC)But it's so tragic! So many feels!
(really, though, probably the worst ending.)
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Date: 2013-03-29 02:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-29 03:57 am (UTC)FE13 was made to sell, and it shows.
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Date: 2013-03-29 06:54 am (UTC)And it works, since even with reviews like these, I'm still going to run to the Micromania next door in... about three weeks now, yeah !
But, since I chose to spoil myself thouroughly (I had to if I wanted to read Mark's FE13 posts), I will have very little expectations about the plot.
Not that I paid much attention to it before...no subject
Date: 2013-03-29 06:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-29 12:26 pm (UTC)And boy, did it sell! I have to respect that level of (Idea Factory-ish) cold calculation. "What will get this particular fan base to turn their pockets inside out?" Niche marketing, but on a grand scale. Even if the storyline
after Chapter 11is utter poop (which it is) and cribs from everything under the Sun (which it does), as long as the game hits those specific marketing points, they might as well have the characters quoting the phone book, because the game will still sell.I mean, they even made sure to exceed my quota of badass redheads in this game. o_O And then got the English dub cast of the Persona games to provide voices. They wanted my dollars, and, by golly, they got 'em.
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Date: 2013-03-29 07:24 am (UTC)Speaking of FE6, the Valm arc actually reminded me of the Western Isles arc from that game. Doesn't really have much significance to the game other than to ramp up the difficulty and provide some good units (Gonzales and Tiki in each respective game).
In conclusion to my pointless ranting: FE13 doesn't have a bad plot, it's just that basically everything is either reused from a previous FE game or has been seen an endless number of times in other stories. (I quite literally burst out laughing at Validar's "I am your father." speech)
Rant end.
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Date: 2013-03-29 11:40 am (UTC)Yeah, I can't begin to do real meta or 'ficcing for it. Everything I'd bother to reconcile in another game just strikes me as a plothole here.
Speaking of FE6, the Valm arc actually reminded me of the Western Isles arc from that game
Interesting.
I quite literally burst out laughing at Validar's "I am your father." speech
I was OK with the idea of Validar as Robin's "father" in a Frankenstein sense, but when it became clear that's not what they meant I was deeply disgusted.
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Date: 2013-03-30 12:48 am (UTC)Chrom, on the other hand, doesn't need an arc to justify his place as the main character, though. He's the ruler of the halidom, the inheritor of Falchion, not the squishy 15-year-old son of the marquess of a little county. The arcs might be similar in some respects, but overall I wouldn't consider them equivalent.
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Date: 2013-03-30 01:16 am (UTC)You have a point there. Western Isles was to show just how much of a good guy Roy was, but Valm was more of a "Hey J-Fandom! Remember FE Gaiden? Good times." with no real effect on the overall story.
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Date: 2013-03-29 08:57 pm (UTC)And uggggggggggg, I was so excited about Lucina and the possibility of a kick-ass female lord (Eirika and Micaiah don't really do it for me) and while she is still amazing the sheer amount of lost potential was painful.
Also where is this thread because that sounds hilarious. Don't really want to trawl through Gamefaqs for it.
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Date: 2013-03-30 04:27 am (UTC)while she is still amazing the sheer amount of lost potential was painful.
Word.
Also where is this thread because that sounds hilarious.
http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/643003-fire-emblem-awakening/65802042
Necro posting, but oh well
Date: 2014-01-01 02:19 pm (UTC)I have to say, as I'm currently working on a fix-it 'fic for FE13, that this sentence is largely the truth of it. I wanted to take the original storyline and fix some of the glaring plotholes while bringing some of the old Archanean lore back into it (think nods to holy weapons being powered by dragon stones and things like the Aum staff), seeing as FE13 laughs in the face of any Archanea and Jugdral aficionados out there. I sort of envisioned an Awakening where actions had stronger consequences and villains had stronger motives than, say, Validar. But such a concept is a monster to tackle, and the transition from ideas to story is ruthlessly complicated. For example:
-Wyverns in Archanea were renegade dragons who lost their minds in the degeneration. However, Cherche tamed Minerva while she was still young. Can Cherche be reconciled in terms of character if Minerva as a concept is drastically altered?
-Time travel is an important element of FE13 yet only serves as an excuse to allow the heroes to succeed and still have Grima be "resurrected." The children (outside of Lucina) are ultimately unnecessary. How do you deal with that? Do you remove the rest of the children altogether? Or only some of them? What about the whole issue with Nah? What about Morgan?
-What about characters that feel more like gimmicks than actual characters? (Say, Kellam for example) How much rewriting needs to be done to make them work? Is it okay to rewrite Kellam if the whole concept of "Kellam" is changed in the process?
-How can the Valm arc make more sense than just needless wandering across the world?
-How many changes can you make before you've completely rewritten the whole story?
It's horrible, it's frustrating, but the need for something closer to respecting the old games is so strong that I keep teetering back to the computer in an attempt to write it. Working it so that Robin can still have an impact on plot while other characters still get important spotlights upon them is difficult, and I want to at least retain a bit of the time travel so that people can still look at it and go "Yeah, this is definitely building off of the structure of FE13." Do you have any suggestions that might help with this?
Re: Necro posting, but oh well
Date: 2014-01-01 03:34 pm (UTC)I've really given up on any serious tinkering with the world of Valm and Ylisse. It's just too damned nonsensical.
The question you raise about Minerva is interesting, though. Maybe over 2,000 years, degenerate dragons settled into their new forms somehow, stabilized as creatures that were no longer godly but weren't outright crazy.
As for Kellam, "If you can't write 'em, ignore/kill 'em," I always say. I've written buckets of FE4 fiction by now and I don't know that I've mentioned Arden once, much less given him a speaking role.
It's horrible, it's frustrating, but the need for something closer to respecting the old games is so strong that I keep teetering back to the computer in an attempt to write it.
Years before FE13 came out I started working on an FE3/8 crossover story involving Archanea, Valencia, gateways to another universe, zombies, and Marth's daughter. I'd invest my energy in something like that before I tried to actually fix the utter mess of FE13, sorry to say.
Best of luck, though!
Re: Necro posting, but oh well
Date: 2014-02-05 11:49 pm (UTC)Gangrel arc
The Arc deals with the past and overcoming the scars it left.
Ferox would be a proper antagonist seeing as how they were mislead by Plegia's attempts to frame Ylisse as their enemy, not to mention that Chrom's father was into the war thing.
Gangrel is out to get Ylisse's royal family if not Ylisse itself.
Emmeryn dies in order to protect the capital from destruction.
Valm arc
The arc deals with how unity by force is set to fall to pieces.
Chrom's fleet meets the Valm fleet and wins. The ship burning as done in Awakening is gone.
Elaborate more on the dynasties. Make sure that the point comes across that they AND Chrom's army had Wallhart fall and the alliance's victory shows how Chrom's philosophy is the right one. And the dynasties are capable of taking care of the continent.
Grima arc
The arc deals with a person's ability to do good or bad and how circumstance can lead to either of these things.
Grima!Robin awakened and Playable!Robin didn't. There would be more exploration into what led to Grima!Robin becoming what he is now.
Grima!Robin's obsession with Playable!Robin is tied to how she noticed how Playable!Robin did things differently from what she did and maybe wanting to prove to himself that how he awakened is and was guaranteed to happen, even if she does have regrets.
Others:
Chrom would actually become king.
No Tanguel. They don't cover anything that the Manaketes don't already cover, both mechanics wise and story wise.
There would be a different art director. The Victorian look, can stay though.
There would be an option to select a different skin color for the Avatar.
There's even more that I've thought of.