As promised in the previous post,
here's a fresh batch of letters pertaining to the newest game in the
Fire Emblem series, Fire Emblem: Waifu Edition. Read on to learn what
that means!
Before I get too much into the
nitty-gritty of this game, let me first say that it is great. I
haven't finished it yet, (I'd hazard a guess that I'm somewhere
around halfway through) but so far I wouldn't hesitate to say that
it's my favorite Fire Emblem, and not just because it has the highest
Metacritic score. If you have a 3DS, and even a passing interest in
tactical RPGs, then I urge you to buy it as soon as you can. In fact,
that's an order. Internet court-martial awaits anyone reading this
who doesn't buy it. The internet police is on standby. I should also
note that, while a good chunk of this post was indeed written before
I finished the game, I unsurprisingly got a little carried away, and
now indeed have finished. So expect this to take on a rather
schizophrenic tone, just in case you did not have the foresight to
expect it coming in.
However, before you buy it, you should
be warned: This game is hard. On Moh's hardness scale, this game goes
all they way up to 11. This game is so hard, I could make an outdated
pop culture reference about certain unsavory people wanting to find
it. This shit is pretty cray. When they first announced that there
would be a “casual mode”, I thought it ridiculous. A mainstay of
the Fire Emblem series is that if one of your units falls in battle,
they're gone forever, which effectively means that all battles must
be won without any casualties. Casual mode disgraced this tradition,
allowing players to let their units die willy-nilly, and have them
ready for action for the next battle. Now that I've actually played
the game, I can see why this option was included. Even with the
ability to let a unit fall without crying and restarting, this game
could be quite difficult. Perhaps it's my fault for choosing to play
in hard mode, but in my defense, the “hard” difficulty is the
middle of the three difficulties, making it as much a hard mode as a
tall drink from Starbucks is a large drink. If just one person
understands where I was going with that comparison, then I'll
consider it worth it.
At heart, this game is all about
teamwork and companionship. At least, the mechanics are. I haven't
finished the story, so it could be about moon monkeys, for all I
know. Except I now have finished, and unsurprisingly enough, the
power of friendship is quite important. As for the relevance of lunar
simians... spoilers. How can mechanics be about teamwork and
companionship? Well, the game basically plays like an apology for
Radiant Dawn's terrible support system, which did away with support
conversations entirely. In Fire Emblem, most characterization for
non-vital characters comes from support conversations, which is why
all the new characters in Radiant Dawn sucked. Awakening says “Screw
that noise”, and makes it so that EVERYONE CAN SUPPORT EVERYONE.
This isn't literally true, but it seems that most units are capable
of supporting a whole bunch of other units. Marriage is also handled
differently in Awakening. As most Fire Emblem vets (experienced
players, rather than animal doctors) know, maxed-out supports between
units will occasionally manifest as a joined destiny in the part of
the credits where it says what happens to each person after the story
is done. For opposite gender units, this occasionally results in
marriage. In Awakening, any
maxed-out support between heterosexual units will culminate in a
proposal (barring siblings, as
well as cousins, much to the embarrassment
of Operation: Incest). As
stated before, the number of possible supports is huge, especially in
the case of the Avatar, (the player character) who can support any
playable unit in the game. And, because the Avatar's gender can be
chosen, this means that s/he can marry any of the 30+ units in the
game. According
to my calculations, The Avatar may have upwards of 300 possible
support conversations, a figure so impressive
that they made a movie about it.
This is made all the more
impressive by...
The
fact that I am writing a whole two paragraphs about arranging
fictional marriages. But the actual reason is the quality of the
writing. I've only puppeteered 5 marriages so far, so
I don't really have enough data to make generalizations, but all of
them were... good? They all had a little story to them, and the
proposals were singularly... I'm trying to think of a word that isn't
“adorable”, but my extensive knowledge of synonyms is failing me.
So, at the risk of having my Y chromosome stricken by the sacred
fires of manhood, I will now describe a proposal as “adorable”.
Havoc's proposal to Lissa was adorable (Havoc is the name of my
Avatar). The only downside to
this is the meticulous consideration of gender when deciding which
troops to accept or reject, and the fact that I'll likely never have
a same-gender support. But I feel that's a small price to pay for the
sick glee that comes with holding the love lives of your soldiers in
your hands. And now, with the
wisdom of age, future-me can clarify that all units can build as much
support as they want, as long as they only have one significant
other, which means that same-sex support is a-go. I'm sure you're
quite relieved.
Further
augmenting the support system is the ability to “pair up” units.
Essentially, this allows two units to join together to act as one
unit. When asked how it
works, the most succinct explanation I could come up with was “It's
like rescuing, except instead of taking a stat penalty, you get a
stat boost.” If that sounds overpowered, then, well, refer to the
third paragraph. You need every advantage you can get. When two units
are paired up, the primary unit fights as normal, except with some
stat boosts, depending on the stats of the supporting unit, and the
support level between them. In addition, the supporting unit will
occasionally get in a bonus attack during combat, or block incoming
attacks. This can lead to amusing circumstances, like your cleric
heroically jumping in to defend your general from an incoming arrow.
This can also happen when units are just adjacent to each other, but
it's probably more likely if they're paired up. This
leads to a number of interesting strategic implications, and is also
just pretty neat in general.
It's
hard to make a judgment on the story, as
I haven't finished it,
but it seems pretty good so far. Perhaps the best of any Fire Emblem.
I'm not sure if Zero Escape has just destroyed my ability to play
games without drawing comparisons to it, (it sure has destroyed my
ability to play real life without drawing comparisons to it) but the
story seems to share some elements that I cannot specify, at the risk
of spoilers. But I mentioned it anyway, because screw you. Yeah, you.
Not the rest of the readers: just you. You know what you did.
In
some ways, Awakening represents Intelligent Systems' attempt to
gather all of the good ideas over the history of Fire Emblem into one
place. It borrows the overworld and branching evolution system of
Sacred Stones, the Skill system of the Radiant Console games, the
universe of Shadow Dragon, the breeding system of some Fire Emblem
that no one's ever played, the general goodness of Blazing Sword, and
the difficulty of every other Fire Emblem combined.
The overworld allows players
an opportunity to train their weaker units, while discouraging the
rampant grinding that inevitably occurred in Sacred Stones.
The overworld map also lets the player complete “paralogues”,
which are like sidequests, except with a ridiculous word that sounds
exactly like something I'd make up. Not even spell-check believes in
it. The
skill system is complicated, and not very well explained, so
I will graciously attempt to make both heads and tails of it here, so
that my readers may have an edge over their jealous peers when
playing this game. You're welcome. As your
units are trained, certain
classes gain certain skills at certain levels. Quite certainly. By
using a “Second Seal” to reclass units, one can customize their
units to possess whatever skills one desires. I think? The game takes
place
in the same universe that Marth once inhabited, although far enough
in the future that everyone from that era is dead and forgotten.
Which is a shame, because I'm sure you were all looking forward to a
continuation of Shadow Dragon's deep and engaging story. Breeding
is an interesting concept that seems rather well-done, but is
off-putting for several reasons, not least of which is that I
continue to insist on referring to it as “breeding”. When
some characters marry, they have children. This leads to the
unfortunate implication that your units have resorted to profane and
forbidden magicks that they might create life. Or perhaps something
even more unclean.
In
Path of Radiance, Intelligent Systems made the dubious decision to
separate magic and strength into two different stats that each unit
had, while in previous games, a magic unit would have a magic stat,
and a lesser unit would have a strength stat. This served to
completely ruin magic swords, which now used the pathetic magic stat
of most swordsmen, and ruin the ability of some mages to hit twice,
as the strength stat replaced constitution in determining a unit's
capacity to wield heavy tomes.
I guess the strength stat
also came in handy if you chose for your sage to wield knives, rather
than staves, but I'm kind of hoping that the game just blanked your
save if you were stupid enough to do that. But in Awakening, this
splitting of offensive stats comes in handy, as there are units
capable of using both real weapons and real magic.
It also removed the weight of weapons, letting you use steel weapons
without fear of missing the opportunity for a double hit. This
is as awesome as it is dreadfully impractical.
I'm
sorry for interrupting this riveting paragraph, but all my posts are
written stream-of-consciousness, so it can't be helped. I just
learned something so surprising, so amazing, so wonderfully stupid,
that I have to type it RIGHT NOW, and I refuse to put it somewhere
that makes more sense. Dark Fliers cannot use dark magic. Dark
knights cannot use dark magic. Both can use magic, and both have
“dark” in their name. Dark
knights are a possible evolution of dark mages, yet they can't use
dark magic, meaning, as far as I can tell, that your dark mage will
immediately forget the forbidden arts as soon as s/he becomes a DARK
knight. I have a dark magic tome that is named after a dark flier.
But apparently dark fliers can only use dark magic if they're bad
guys. To try to comprehend how stupid this is, imagine if Flareon
didn't learn Flare Blitz. I think we can all agree that would be
unforgivably wrong.
Actually, that kind
of turned out to be relevant, as dark knights and dark fliers are the
two classes (along with tactician and its evolution) that can use
weapons and offensive magic. The problem is that Dark Fliers evolve
from Pegasus knights, who are incapable of using magic, and thus have
terrible magic stats. The reverse goes for dark knights, who evolve
from mages or dark mages, (but not knights, curiously enough) and
thus have so little strength that there is no reason to use a sword.
The tactician has stats that are pretty well balanced, but that just
means that you should use magic, because magic is mo' better. The
only way to produce a good mixed sweeper is by breeding one from
scratch, but the mechanics involved are even more confusing than
those in Pokemon. Are my general and cleric in the same egg group? If
I give the mother an everstone, will the offspring retain her nature?
What really happens in day-care? All these questions go woefully
unanswered.
If you have played
Fire Emblem before, and you still aren't convinced that you need to
pick up this game, I have 5 words that will fix that problem right
up: Anna is a playable unit. That is all.
Because I am too
oblivious to realize how sad it is that I apologize all the time, I
would like to say I'm sorry that this was more of a
review/explanation of Fire Emblem than a post of substantive humor,
as is expected of this blog. My excitement over this game has
demolished my talents of writing, to be sure, but take heart, for it
has marred my other skills as well, and made a lesser man out of me.
Indeed, this game has condemned me to a life of poverty, as the
damage it has dealt to my scholastic pursuits prove insurmountable,
and I will be forced to get one of those jobs that you have to get if
you don't have a piece of paper that says good things about you.
Probably one outside of the lucrative field of “Having strong
opinions about Turn Based Strategy RPGs”.
Oh, and because a
gentleman never goes back on his word, I guess I should explain what
a “waifu” is. It's a not-actually-Japanese word that means
“wife”. It is used by the kind of people who have a real passion
for animated women.
