Pancake Balls and Path of Radiance

[mark_asphodel]

I got suckered into the current aebelskiver/apfelskifer trend a while back, when Williams-Sonoma first began carrying a 'skiver pan and touting "cherry-filled ricotta pancakes" in their recipes section.  The combination of cherries and ricotta is something I can't resist, so I bought the pan... and stuck it in a closet for a couple of years.  Well, now we're in business; I made savory aebelskivers filled with cubes of high-quality imported Gouda cheese this morning, and once I ran out of cheese I put dollops of lemon curd in the final batch.  The pancake balls turn out beautifully shaped if NOT filled; filling them with sweet stuff results in leakage and caramelization of the filling about 50% of the time.  Clearly I need to improve my technique... and my speed.  These little suckers cook fast-- you'd better know what you want to put in them and have the filling ready to dole out before you start cooking.

Also, I can't find my DS charger right now, so the urge to get deeper into FE7 will not be satisfied at present (I never did have a GBA, though my excellent spouse has three or four of them... somewhere).  So I finally popped in Path of Radiance to tide me over; my spouse actually decided to make a communal event of it and took up the controller himself to find out what this Fire Emblem mania of mine is about.  He managed to kill Boyd in the first chapter.  :)

We played through the second chapter without Boyd and decided not to save, so now I get to go back and play those chapters again.  First reactions?  3D battle is kind of weird and distracting-- the bad dudes in the first two levels looked awfully close to ethnic caricatures.  I'm used to the mooks being dark-skinned, disfigured, and ugly, but these mooks made me pretty uncomfortable.  Also, the way the horses move is just plain ungainly.  As far as characters go, Titania seems pretty cool, and Oscar and Rhys are likable.  Ike is about what I expected based on his overexposure via certain other games, and Boyd-Mist-and-Rolf are irritating as hell.  Seriously, I was half inclined to let Boyd just stay dead.  Looks like I get Shinon and Gatrie next, and I expect that'll be painful.   
 
Ike levels up like crazy, though.  @_@

Comments

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

I guess part of what's bugging me already is that it's making out the whole mercenary business thing to be... no big deal. Ike is all, "Oh, hey, I get to be a real merc tomorrow." Like he's going off to be a truck driver, or a tree-cutter, or something. It's all one big happy family, doin' the family business.

I sure hope that gets subverted down the line.

[myaru.livejournal.com]

Ike isn't the brightest bulb in the fixture, you could say. He's actually kind of anachronistic. But yes, he does start to get it after a while; he's a kid when the game begins, so it's not quite fair to expect common sense out of him, although you'd think with a father like Greil he'd have more of a clue. But then, Greil himself is an idealistic figure instead of a practical, realistic one.

You see a lot of development on this front from Rolf and Mist, actually. I think everyone else that joins has some kind of experience with war and display a bit more sense as a result.

But again, they just do it better in RD. The horrible parts of war have more of an impact in that game. PoR is really... I don't know, playing around? I don't find FE7 very serious in that regard either. When the games focus on tiny groups and tiny conflicts (Nergal seems tiny and shoe-horned in compared to FE6's Zephiel), it seems to err in the direction of cute character development instead of serious themes. Unfortunately, the fandom seems to value silly character supports over serious story.

Oh look, a tangent. My fandom hate is showing.

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

Heh.

Nergal seems tiny and shoe-horned in compared to FE6's Zephiel

In principle, I do appreciate that FE has shown us differing levels of conflict-- I suppose the great macro-war of FE4 versus the micro-war of FE5 represent the greatest disparity. So I do kind of like that Elibe, instead of getting two massive multination dogpiles, gets an "underground" conflict as the prelude to the great nation-toppling dustup of FE6.

On the other hand, your complaints about character development vs theme exploration, and the fandom reception of each, do gel pretty well with what I've seen around the Internets.

On the other other hand, FE8 would be a not-very-successful treatment of massive continental war, IMO. Cute characters? Oh my. Convincing portrayals of the ravages of war? Not to my liking.