I'm adding this fresh post because I don't believe I've done Thracia 776 justice. Sure, in my Previous review I pointed out a lot of its quirks and flaws through its mechanics, but I wanted to talk about everything else about the game because it actually is quite a gem when I think back upon it, and it's kind of tragic that it has to be hidden behind such obtuse gameplay.
The story is quite simple, as far as Fire Emblem games are concerned. You start in a small town, fighting bandits, the usual, but then suddenly - you're captured! Yes, there's an entire jail/dungeon arc at the very beginning of the game, spanning 4-5 chapters (depending on if you hit bonus chapters, of which there are many). During this arc, you meet the final bosses of the game, only to never hear from them again for another 20 or so chapters. And this is fine - they are staying put, and you are running around and eventually working your way back to them, on your own terms.
Leif is a charming lord as far as FE lords are concerned. Sure he's no fan-favorite like Hector, but he's also not weak or naive, like Marth or Corrin. He's fifteen (or so), and sometimes has bad ideas, but his advisor(s) are counseling him, like good advisors should, yet still letting him make the calls, as he is technically the one in authority.
Throughout the game, Leif goes through very human emotions, constantly criticizing himself for not being better, not being able to save everyone, taking so long to do what others have miraculously done in so little time. He compares himself to Seliph and Shanan constantly, and struggles to see the bigger picture. Eventually, his advisor August tells him something I think everyone needs to hear at some point or another - "Heroes aren't born; they're made."
This game is about the MAKING of a hero, not just the life of someone who's always been a hero. And even when Leif meets Seliph, someone he's idolized and always looked up to, Seliph is the one praising Leif! He couldn't have done any of what he did had Leif not been holding off the brunt of Manster and Thracia's armies, and he knows this. It's a great story - or at the very least a great continuation of one.
This is another brilliant yet problematic design decision - you need to have played Genealogy first in order to truly appreciate what's going on. Thracia 776 fills in many of the gaps left by Genealogy, taking place in the time starting just before Genealogy chapter 6 and leading up to Genealogy chapter 8. Leif is clearly an important character, yet in Genealogy we barely got any of his story, so it's cool to see things work out this way.
You also get to see the fate of several other characters from Genealogy revealed. I won't spoil their stories here, but you actually meet one or two characters whose fates were unclear at best - or death at worst - from the parent generation of Genealogy, opening the doors for nearly all the other unexplained parent generation characters to still possibly be alive somewhere.
Another issue with the story of Thracia is that its ending assumes the end of Genealogy, not just of this game. All the character epilogues talk about "after the war," referencing not just the end of Thraica, but the end of Genealogy. It doesn't necessarily spoil the ending of Genealogy, but without knowing what goes on there would be a bit of possible confusion.
Beyond the story, though, the rest of the presentation of this game is quite good. The music in particular is spectacular. There may not be as many tracks as the massive OST Genealogy had, or even most other Fire Emblem games, but the tracks they do have are pretty solid. They mix up the chapter songs enough that not only did I not mind that there were only five or six, but I was excited for the theme from early chapters to make a comeback later on in the game.
Apparently the game even has a "near defeat" theme, which plays whenever you fail certain bonus objectives, lose certain units, or the like. It's a neat idea, but kind of weird since a lot of players will never hear that track if they're obsessed with having a perfect run, like I was.
A minor issue I had with the music is that the "approaching victory" theme played whenever the enemy had five or fewer units left - whether you could see them or not. This kind of spoiled some otherwise-tense moments in fog of war maps, but also led to some weird situations where I honestly felt I wasn't anywhere close to victory when the theme started, and then it kept changing back and forth as more enemy reinforcements would show up and/or get killed.
Weird as it is, I feel the story and music of Thracia are honestly some of the most simple, straightforward and yet still very moving and powerful that Fire Emblem as a whole has ever had. It's only a shame that such a clear and simple story is hidden beneath a cavalcade of obscure and frustrating mechanics and design choices.
Monday, October 30, 2017
Friday, October 27, 2017
Thracia 776 - Ambitious yet Troublesome.
The blood has yet to dry on the Sword of Blaggi as I write this review. Thracia 776, deemed one of the most difficult and obscure Fire Emblem games ever made, is finished. A perfect Thracian campaign, no less, recruiting every possible character my choices allowed, keeping everyone alive, and reaching every single bonus chapter. And I must say - it was worth the experience of playing it, but I'm unsure if I would go to such lengths again were I to play this game a second time.
Thracia 776 is fairly infamous as one of the most brutal Fire Emblem games ever created. The troublesome points of Thracia in my mind can be sorted out into three types.
1. Mechanics reinforcing realism and the difficulty of a small-scale rebellion.
2. Mechanics flooding the game with randomness and luck-based situations.
3. Brutally difficult side-quests, often involving NPC civilians.
--REALISM--
Thracia 776 is the story of Leif, fifteen year old heir to House Leonster, who begins his war to free Northern Thracia from the Loptyr Empire starting from a small coastal village. As such, your troops are few, your weapons are limited, and your war funds are effectively zero. Thracia reinforces these points well, requiring you to Capture enemies, strip them of their equipment, then let them go (or in rare occasions, hold a captured boss to the end of a chapter in order to recruit them and/or access a bonus chapter). I don't mind this system inherently, but in implementing this they remove any and all item drops from enemies, instead REQUIRING you to steal from them or capture them to have any hope of getting their items.
The idea of being a poor army is kind of cut short the first time you can access an arena, around the end of Chapter 7, because then you'll be fighting so much just to level up that money becomes a non-issue. The issue then comes in shops being few and far between, with not much selection either. Still, if you can stock up on stamina drinks, torches and door keys (you need like fifty keys in this game I'm not even joking), you make the game a whole lot easier.
I appreciated being able to get extra equipment by going a little out of my way, but the method of capturing enemies left you fighting at half stats, and without the option to prefer capturing over lethal attacks when defending, oftentimes the enemies you wanted to capture ended up getting killed because they attacked you first. More on this in later sections.
Another mechanic made to introduce realism is the Fatigue mechanic. Now, personally I didn't have much of an issue with this - they give you a huge roster of characters that you'll only ever touch half of more than once or twice, so this is an interesting idea to get you to use more of them. Now, it was never more than an annoyance because Stamina Drinks, while not plentiful, were common enough that if I ever desperately needed one particular person (usually a staff wielder) I could just give them a drink and send them out. I never had a shortage of drinks because of the arena grinding I did, and deliberate stocking up I did whenever they were available.
Overall the realism aspects were interesting at best and annoying at worst. Capturing was an interesting mechanic but I'm not particularly sad that it's never come back (at least in the same way), and while Fatigue made it into Echoes it's a minor annoyance at most.
---RANDOMNESS---
One of the gravest sins Thracia commits is the OVERWHELMING amount of randomness this game throws at you. People who complain that newer Fire Emblem games are "too random" are living life on a feather pillow, because Thracia is as random as it gets.
First and foremost, it is impossible to have a 100% hit chance or a 0% hit chance. At most you will get 99%, which is effective most of the time, but thanks to the single-roll RNG that Thracia uses (the last game in the series to use single-roll for hit calcualtions), that 1% can rear its ugly head often enough to have you throwing your controller down in anguish. Plus, the game uses the 99% cap to hide the fact that certain units literally have plot armor - They can fight you, you can damage them, but any lethal attack is GUARANTEED TO MISS. Luckily only a few units have this plot armor - Fred and Olwen in chapter 10, and Eyvel (an allied unit) for the first few chapters of the game.
Now that lack of guaranteed hits/misses is incredibly minor, especially since in this game you're unlikely to ever get consistent 99% hit chances until near the end of the game after you've maxed skill, speed and luck. This brings back up the point of capturing making you fight at half stats, meaning a high percentage of attacks you make (and attacks made against you) will be around 50%. Basically coin flips. The entire campaign depends on this randomness going in your favor, otherwise you're going to miss that key attack, eat an unlucky crit, or what have you.
Oh, critical hits, that reminds me of ANOTHER mechanic that the game doesn't even mention exists! PCC, or Pursuit Critical Coefficients, are unique hidden modifiers on every unit in the game. It's a number that is multiplied to your critical hit chance on the second set of attacks in any given combat, and ONLY the second set of attacks. If you have a brave weapon, it's the second set of two swings. So you already have to be attacking twice in order to access these multipliers. And while for some units the multipliers are as high as x3 or x4, some units have a PCC of 0. Meaning that even if they DO get a second attack, even if they are using a killer weapon or something, it's physically impossible for them to crit on their second attack.
Want more randomness? No? Well too bad! Because stat growths in this game are ALL OVER THE PLACE! You have Crusader Scrolls to patch up growths and make them somewhat consistent, but you'd better hit up a wiki because the game ain't telling you nothin' about what the scrolls do.
In speaking of random growths, did you know that Thracia is the only Fire Emblem game to have a growth rate for movement? Yep, every unit has a *VERY* slight chance to increase their movement rate when they level up. I only realized this when I looked and saw my Pegasus Knight had 11 movement. Because my translation was gimped so that all I ever saw was a glitchy text saying something like Animnuirau stacked on top of itself. But this extra movement is SO IMPORTANT! Movement has always been the most important stat in fire emblem, so to give units a 1% to 10% growth rate in movement is an insane decision, making units wildly more or less useful over their entire lifetime based on a handful of random rolls.
But that's not the only random element related to movement! Every unit has between 0 and 5 "Movement Stars," which are permanent features of the unit and cannot be moved. Some enemies have them, and many (but not all) of your allied units have them. For every movement star a unit has, they have a 5% chance of getting another turn after their first action. To my knowledge this can never chain more than once, but getting a second turn at a key moment can literally swing an entire chapter, and such a low percent chance of this happening across the board is mind-bendingly infuriating.
---SIDE QUESTS AND CIVILIANS---
But perhaps the most frustrating part of Thracia 776 is its insistence on putting unarmed civilians - usually children - not just in the line of fire, but VITAL to several side-quests throughout the game. They are helpless, being captured immediately or sometimes just killed by a stray javelin out of nowhere, uncontrollable, unpredictable in movement order, and also completely necessary in order to complete certain side-quests. Now, for many of them you can just carry them on your units' shoulders to their houses or the exit of the map, but in some situations the civilians need to do specific tasks.
Enter Xavier, a fairly mediocre unit all things considered, but one with perhaps the most frustrating recruitment requirement I have ever seen. To avoid explaining in detail, I will link you to my video on the topic: https://youtu.be/FA-5Zw2lotw
Simply put, eight civilians need to talk to eight armor knights. Each one is linked to a specific one, with no indication of who is linked to whom, and all eight of them need to survive the transit across the map - through hallways only 2 squares wide at best - and meet each of their matches. If the front people don't match correctly, then the joke's on you, they'll just stand there blocking each other. Absolutely infuriating.
There are other quests involving civilians too, and usually the rewards are good enough that you'd be hard-pressed not to at least try to complete these secondary objectives, but the game goes out of its way to make it infuriating. Child hunts or no, I could care less about these children who are in every single dungeon of every two-bit castle in the country.
---Final Thoughts and Overview---
So is Thracia 776 a bad game? To some people it might be, but I actually enjoyed it. Now, bear in mind that I DID play it on an emulator, and heavily abused save-scumming and RNG manipulation, but with the incredibly random and cruel nature of the game a part of me felt justified in doing so.
Whatever the case may be, this game would be a nightmare to play blind. I only used a wiki to make sure I didn't miss any recruitments or bonus chapters, but the level of difficulty this game creates is mostly amplified because of its sheer randomness and the frustrating nature of some of its bonus objectives. Take those two away, and the game becomes actually quite enjoyable and not particularly difficult.
Thracia 776 may never be my favorite FE game, but I'm certainly glad I got to enjoy it the way I did. Even if the translation was bare-bones, the game was still a Fire Emblem experience through and through. Take the legends of its difficulty with a grain of salt, as it's more frustrating and random than truly difficult, but it still stands as an excellent learning tool for what to do - and what NOT to do - when designing enjoyable and fun difficulty in a strategy game.
If you want to hear more about what I think about the NON-mechanical elements of Thracia, head over to This post. I find the rest of the game surprisingly simple and powerful, which adds all the more frustrating that the mechanics are this obtuse and complicated.
Now if you'll excuse me, there's only one Fire Emblem game I have yet to play, and it's just waiting on my desktop for me to boot up.
Thracia 776 is fairly infamous as one of the most brutal Fire Emblem games ever created. The troublesome points of Thracia in my mind can be sorted out into three types.
1. Mechanics reinforcing realism and the difficulty of a small-scale rebellion.
2. Mechanics flooding the game with randomness and luck-based situations.
3. Brutally difficult side-quests, often involving NPC civilians.
--REALISM--
Thracia 776 is the story of Leif, fifteen year old heir to House Leonster, who begins his war to free Northern Thracia from the Loptyr Empire starting from a small coastal village. As such, your troops are few, your weapons are limited, and your war funds are effectively zero. Thracia reinforces these points well, requiring you to Capture enemies, strip them of their equipment, then let them go (or in rare occasions, hold a captured boss to the end of a chapter in order to recruit them and/or access a bonus chapter). I don't mind this system inherently, but in implementing this they remove any and all item drops from enemies, instead REQUIRING you to steal from them or capture them to have any hope of getting their items.
The idea of being a poor army is kind of cut short the first time you can access an arena, around the end of Chapter 7, because then you'll be fighting so much just to level up that money becomes a non-issue. The issue then comes in shops being few and far between, with not much selection either. Still, if you can stock up on stamina drinks, torches and door keys (you need like fifty keys in this game I'm not even joking), you make the game a whole lot easier.
I appreciated being able to get extra equipment by going a little out of my way, but the method of capturing enemies left you fighting at half stats, and without the option to prefer capturing over lethal attacks when defending, oftentimes the enemies you wanted to capture ended up getting killed because they attacked you first. More on this in later sections.
Another mechanic made to introduce realism is the Fatigue mechanic. Now, personally I didn't have much of an issue with this - they give you a huge roster of characters that you'll only ever touch half of more than once or twice, so this is an interesting idea to get you to use more of them. Now, it was never more than an annoyance because Stamina Drinks, while not plentiful, were common enough that if I ever desperately needed one particular person (usually a staff wielder) I could just give them a drink and send them out. I never had a shortage of drinks because of the arena grinding I did, and deliberate stocking up I did whenever they were available.
Overall the realism aspects were interesting at best and annoying at worst. Capturing was an interesting mechanic but I'm not particularly sad that it's never come back (at least in the same way), and while Fatigue made it into Echoes it's a minor annoyance at most.
---RANDOMNESS---
One of the gravest sins Thracia commits is the OVERWHELMING amount of randomness this game throws at you. People who complain that newer Fire Emblem games are "too random" are living life on a feather pillow, because Thracia is as random as it gets.
First and foremost, it is impossible to have a 100% hit chance or a 0% hit chance. At most you will get 99%, which is effective most of the time, but thanks to the single-roll RNG that Thracia uses (the last game in the series to use single-roll for hit calcualtions), that 1% can rear its ugly head often enough to have you throwing your controller down in anguish. Plus, the game uses the 99% cap to hide the fact that certain units literally have plot armor - They can fight you, you can damage them, but any lethal attack is GUARANTEED TO MISS. Luckily only a few units have this plot armor - Fred and Olwen in chapter 10, and Eyvel (an allied unit) for the first few chapters of the game.
Now that lack of guaranteed hits/misses is incredibly minor, especially since in this game you're unlikely to ever get consistent 99% hit chances until near the end of the game after you've maxed skill, speed and luck. This brings back up the point of capturing making you fight at half stats, meaning a high percentage of attacks you make (and attacks made against you) will be around 50%. Basically coin flips. The entire campaign depends on this randomness going in your favor, otherwise you're going to miss that key attack, eat an unlucky crit, or what have you.
Oh, critical hits, that reminds me of ANOTHER mechanic that the game doesn't even mention exists! PCC, or Pursuit Critical Coefficients, are unique hidden modifiers on every unit in the game. It's a number that is multiplied to your critical hit chance on the second set of attacks in any given combat, and ONLY the second set of attacks. If you have a brave weapon, it's the second set of two swings. So you already have to be attacking twice in order to access these multipliers. And while for some units the multipliers are as high as x3 or x4, some units have a PCC of 0. Meaning that even if they DO get a second attack, even if they are using a killer weapon or something, it's physically impossible for them to crit on their second attack.
Want more randomness? No? Well too bad! Because stat growths in this game are ALL OVER THE PLACE! You have Crusader Scrolls to patch up growths and make them somewhat consistent, but you'd better hit up a wiki because the game ain't telling you nothin' about what the scrolls do.
In speaking of random growths, did you know that Thracia is the only Fire Emblem game to have a growth rate for movement? Yep, every unit has a *VERY* slight chance to increase their movement rate when they level up. I only realized this when I looked and saw my Pegasus Knight had 11 movement. Because my translation was gimped so that all I ever saw was a glitchy text saying something like Animnuirau stacked on top of itself. But this extra movement is SO IMPORTANT! Movement has always been the most important stat in fire emblem, so to give units a 1% to 10% growth rate in movement is an insane decision, making units wildly more or less useful over their entire lifetime based on a handful of random rolls.
But that's not the only random element related to movement! Every unit has between 0 and 5 "Movement Stars," which are permanent features of the unit and cannot be moved. Some enemies have them, and many (but not all) of your allied units have them. For every movement star a unit has, they have a 5% chance of getting another turn after their first action. To my knowledge this can never chain more than once, but getting a second turn at a key moment can literally swing an entire chapter, and such a low percent chance of this happening across the board is mind-bendingly infuriating.
---SIDE QUESTS AND CIVILIANS---
But perhaps the most frustrating part of Thracia 776 is its insistence on putting unarmed civilians - usually children - not just in the line of fire, but VITAL to several side-quests throughout the game. They are helpless, being captured immediately or sometimes just killed by a stray javelin out of nowhere, uncontrollable, unpredictable in movement order, and also completely necessary in order to complete certain side-quests. Now, for many of them you can just carry them on your units' shoulders to their houses or the exit of the map, but in some situations the civilians need to do specific tasks.
Enter Xavier, a fairly mediocre unit all things considered, but one with perhaps the most frustrating recruitment requirement I have ever seen. To avoid explaining in detail, I will link you to my video on the topic: https://youtu.be/FA-5Zw2lotw
Simply put, eight civilians need to talk to eight armor knights. Each one is linked to a specific one, with no indication of who is linked to whom, and all eight of them need to survive the transit across the map - through hallways only 2 squares wide at best - and meet each of their matches. If the front people don't match correctly, then the joke's on you, they'll just stand there blocking each other. Absolutely infuriating.
There are other quests involving civilians too, and usually the rewards are good enough that you'd be hard-pressed not to at least try to complete these secondary objectives, but the game goes out of its way to make it infuriating. Child hunts or no, I could care less about these children who are in every single dungeon of every two-bit castle in the country.
---Final Thoughts and Overview---
So is Thracia 776 a bad game? To some people it might be, but I actually enjoyed it. Now, bear in mind that I DID play it on an emulator, and heavily abused save-scumming and RNG manipulation, but with the incredibly random and cruel nature of the game a part of me felt justified in doing so.
Whatever the case may be, this game would be a nightmare to play blind. I only used a wiki to make sure I didn't miss any recruitments or bonus chapters, but the level of difficulty this game creates is mostly amplified because of its sheer randomness and the frustrating nature of some of its bonus objectives. Take those two away, and the game becomes actually quite enjoyable and not particularly difficult.
Thracia 776 may never be my favorite FE game, but I'm certainly glad I got to enjoy it the way I did. Even if the translation was bare-bones, the game was still a Fire Emblem experience through and through. Take the legends of its difficulty with a grain of salt, as it's more frustrating and random than truly difficult, but it still stands as an excellent learning tool for what to do - and what NOT to do - when designing enjoyable and fun difficulty in a strategy game.
If you want to hear more about what I think about the NON-mechanical elements of Thracia, head over to This post. I find the rest of the game surprisingly simple and powerful, which adds all the more frustrating that the mechanics are this obtuse and complicated.
Now if you'll excuse me, there's only one Fire Emblem game I have yet to play, and it's just waiting on my desktop for me to boot up.
Saturday, June 3, 2017
Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows over Valentia - A Remastered Masterpiece.
In my previous blog post, I reviewed Fire Emblem Gaiden, and stated that I would love it if they remade it with modern technology. I also recently recorded a full play-through of Gaiden on youtube. Fire Emblem Echoes is the remake I wanted, but it's more than a simple port. This game represents the tactical nature of Fire Emblem in its purest essence, right there alongside the classic plot of epic war and a quirky array of characters.
One big improvement from Gaiden is the characters themselves. Not only are the playable characters given personality, but several villains are made into recurring characters as well. Plot elements such as nobility vs commoners and even a slow descent into madness are emphasized by being able to both see and fight several of the same enemies multiple times.
A few characters have been created fresh for this game, including Faye, the somewhat annoying village girl whose only purpose is to obsess over Alm, Fernand, a prideful noble who helped start the Deliverance but doesn't care about anyone who isn't of noble blood themselves, and Berkut, the nephew of Emperor Rudolph who is obsessed with becoming emperor over all Valentia, but gets snubbed time and again when Alm beats him. While Faye doesn't really add much to the game outside of a playable female character and an extra unit for the first few maps, Fernand and Berkut are heavy influences on the plot of the game from the moment they are introduced.
The game also gives a lot more explanation and motivation for the characters to do what they're doing. In Gaiden, if you never saved Zeke, you might never know that Alm carried the Brand on his hand, but in Echoes it's told to you from moment one. Mila and Duma are also explained a bit more, not just being mysterious gods who created Valentia, but actual ancient divine dragons, who still live on Valentia to this day.
But that's enough about characters. Let's get onto my favorite part, and the most unique parts of Echoes - gameplay.
At a basic level, the game plays just like Gaiden. You have villagers, mercenaries, soldiers, archers, cavaliers, mages, pegasus riders and clerics, weapons that attack off base stats, no weapon triangle, spells that cost HP and are learned as you level up, etc. Classing up also gives you minimum base stats for that given class, meaning you won't have to grind up to 20/20/20 to still be relevant, at least for the main story of the game. Random stat increases will tend to determine who gets brought with you into the post-game and who gets shelved.
Tier 3 unit classes are all made unique in more ways, except the Gold Knight. FalconKnights are no longer insanely overpowered, but they still get +10 damage vs terrors. Barons only take half damage from bows, making them insanely good at safely drawing out enemies. Dread Fighters get an insanely good passive in Apotrope, making them take half damage from ALL magic, as well as being able to class-loop into Villager after hitting level 10. Archers get more range with every class change, making the change from sniper to bow knight less impactful, but still very good given the increased movement rate. Some mages actually learn extra spells after leveling far enough into their upper classes, such as Sonya learning Rewarp and Entrap, making them incredibly versatile.
Support conversations are much like older games such as Blazing Blade and Sacred Stones - if two support-viable units are within two squares and one of them fights, or if one of them heals the other even with a physic staff cross-map, they will gain progress toward a support conversation. Once you reach a certain level, you can have the units talk to each other on the combat map, increasing their support level. The difference is that there's no arbitrary limit of 5 conversations per character, meaning you can unlock every single conversation in a single run of the game. Some conversations are locked until certain chapters, usually A-rank conversations, but you will never be blocked from one conversation because you decided to have a different one.
So if there are no "dating sim" elements, what good is support? Well, just like in older games, if you are within 3 spaces of a unit you have support with, you get bonuses in combat! Some units provide extra hit% or crit%, others give you higher Avoid and Dodge. You can notice these bonuses by the little gold extension of your hit and crit bars on the combat forecast, as well as the greyed-out hit and crit bars on the opponent's forecast. What's more, you can stack support bonuses from as many units you have support levels with, meaning a character like Alm or the Whitewings can have some serious bonuses when working together.
The weapon arts system is both wonderful and frustrating at the same time. So instead of weapon experience, a unit will unlock weapon arts as they use each weapon more in battle. These arts are exclusive to their weapons, though a unit won't ever lose an art they've learned - they just can't use it with an incompatible weapon. Some of these are fantastic, like the longbow's Enclosure or the Regal Sword's Double Lion - let's be honest, even if the brave sword in other games cost 6 HP to attack twice in a row, you'd still use it. However others are of questionable usefulness, like the Levin Sword's Fuoydrant, because they cost HP and limit you to a single blow.
The blacksmithing is something I have a love-hate relationship with. Sure, it's a great way to customize your army and the limit on marks means you don't just always have the best weapons, but the weapon tree is needlessly confusing, and with no ability to revert weapons or reliable way to buy lower quality ones, you can end up wasting all your precious gold marks to create weapons that you'll never end up using.
Some notable weapon upgrades are the golden dagger upgrading to Beloved Zofia, Celica's unique weapon, the Blessed weapons upgrading to the Three Regalia of Shadow Dragon / Mystery of the Emblem fame (Parthia, Gradivus and Mercurius), and a silver-mark-only chain of Iron to Steel to Silver to Brave swords.
Shields and Rings are also in the game, though rings in particular have been nerfed HARD from Gaiden. Notably, the Angel Ring only gives +20 luck and doesn't double your stat increases, losing its "best item in the game" tag by a country mile. The Speed Ring doesn't max your speed and give you +5 move, instead it only gives +10 speed and +1 move. The Hexing Shield doesn't reduce magic accuracy to 10%, but it does make all magic damage half of what it would be, making the Medusa spell basically never able to kill you without other enemies nearby.
A brief note on the set-piece fights in the game. Since so many dungeon fights are the same, and so many fights are either in open plains or on boats, it's important that the game mixes it up a bit. In the times it does, the maps are incredibly interesting. The gate approach to Duma's Tower, for instance, is the same map layout used in Olivia's child-recruitment map in Awakening. The border before Rigel Castle is an intense map with several lanes of bow-knight and arcanists, topped off with Barons, making it a perfect death trap for a team with no good archers. My favorite has to be Nuibaba's Manor, however. The climb up the cliff toward a powerful sorcerer with Medusa magic? Possibly one of the most iconic maps in the entire game, so much so that it became a map in Fire Emblem Heroes!
A brief note on the set-piece fights in the game. Since so many dungeon fights are the same, and so many fights are either in open plains or on boats, it's important that the game mixes it up a bit. In the times it does, the maps are incredibly interesting. The gate approach to Duma's Tower, for instance, is the same map layout used in Olivia's child-recruitment map in Awakening. The border before Rigel Castle is an intense map with several lanes of bow-knight and arcanists, topped off with Barons, making it a perfect death trap for a team with no good archers. My favorite has to be Nuibaba's Manor, however. The climb up the cliff toward a powerful sorcerer with Medusa magic? Possibly one of the most iconic maps in the entire game, so much so that it became a map in Fire Emblem Heroes!
Side-quests are another feature that I both love and dislike. Sometimes they're straightforward, like kill 20 enemies from a certain area, or kill this special boss and bring back its treasure. Other times they're cruel, asking you to farm for a fairly rare drop, or use all your merchants (yes you still have a limited number of them) to send vital quest items from one team to another. Some items you won't find for several chapters after the quest is introduced, notably the Gossamer Hair you need to make Ethereal Fishing Line to catch a Dagon. This quest chain is introduced to Celica's team near the end of chapter 2, but the gossamer hair cannot be obtained until Chapter 4, on Alm's side, under Fear Mountain. Plus, the back-tracking to turn in side quests gives the enemy more time to rally reinforcements and send them on you, which means more time spent grinding just to get back to the main story.
The worst side quest has got to be the merchant who wants steel lances. Five of them, and he'll only pay 50 silver marks each. And he's on Celica's side, in the middle of the desert. Alm gets a lot of steel lances from the keeps he visits, but Celica sure doesn't! Plus you'll probably need the lances yourself, or at least be upgrading them to keep the pegasus sisters well equipped. And by the time you hit the post-game and can bring Alm's convoy of steel lances back to him? He doesn't want them anymore, and up and leaves in a huff! But if you use all of Alm's merchants to ship over enough steel lances to barely finish the side-quest, you won't be able to ship over the gossamer hair or other vital items for other side-quests!
Perhaps the best new addition to Echoes is Mila's Turnwheel. With this handy device, you can rewind time back to ANY TURN in the entire combat, changing the RNG rolls as you go. This is perfect for when you need to save a unit that got killed because of a poor decision, but you don't want to replay the entire 30-minute level all over again. Just go back to where you made the mistake, and try something else! Or, sometimes you can just rewind to the exact same spot and the AI will do something else. The only downside is that you can't rewind after Alm or Celica get killed, as the game instantly sends you to a Game Over screen with no chance to hit the rewind button. This can be particularly frustrating on later levels, where you spend an hour getting set up for the final boss fight, and a single lucky miss or crit means you're doing the whole level all over again. That said, the Turnwheel certainly mitigates that frustration, and makes the game feel a lot more enjoyable to play on Classic mode.
As I was talking about earlier though, AI confusion is a big thing in this game. A lot of times, especially when teleporting enemies get introduced, the AI will randomly decide to kill a specific unit, or they might randomly decide to spread their attacks around and not kill anyone. Introducing allied illusions into the mix confuses the AI further, as most of the time they will prefer a guaranteed kill on an illusion than a guaranteed kill on a real unit, though sometimes they will just kill the normal unit instead. This unpredictability is something I'm not a huge fan of, as someone who just finished a Lunatic Classic run of Conquest and thrived off of knowing exactly what the AI would do every single turn.
Finally, but CERTAINLY not least, is the dungeon exploration. This is where fire emblem meets the Legend of Zelda. Third-person camera angle, smashing pots and cutting grass for money and supplies, breaking cracked walls to access secret areas, it really is a zelda-like experience. You can influence the combats you have, too - either by attacking to start further forward and damage the enemies at the start, letting them hit you from behind to make them have the first turn (not recommended), or even just sneaking past them and avoiding fights altogether.
The fatigue system in the dungeon is another thing to consider - if a unit takes too much damage or does the brunt of the work in a single fight, they will become fatigued quicker, meaning you start consuming food or else they have half HP and potentially other stat reductions.
In most missions through the main campaign, you can take every single unit you recruit into the battle, meaning every unit is worth giving some exp. And since every unit that participates in the fight gets bonus EXP, with more given to units who got more last-hits, it's easy to keep your entire team at a fairly even level.
However, in dungeons, you are limited to 10 units, and their positioning is fixed in fights based on their order in the roster. So you can only really grind-train up to 10 units at a time, and one of them is required to be Alm or Celica (just Alm for the post-game even though you have both). For the end-game and post-game in particular, this means that you need to leave about half your army behind, making the best squad of ten you can get.
The post-game is basically a wrap-up of side-quests, plus a chance to take on the final dungeon, Thabes Labyrinth, with a squad from both Alm and Celica's teams. You can also play the DLC dungeons with a full squad from here as well, if you want. Additional enemies sometimes spawn in earlier dungeons, too, such as Dagons in the opening area of the Seaside Cave. Gold marks are still incredibly rare, however, so crafting perfect end-game equipment is going to be incredibly time-consuming.
Fire Emblem Echoes is a fantastic game, and a masterwork port from the old Fire Emblem Gaiden. It's not perfect, but just like Gaiden it tries a lot of unique things, such as the armory upgrade system, which I expect might be implemented in some fashion into future entries in the series.
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Fire Emblem Gaiden - Different Done Well.
If I had to pick one game series to call my favorite, it would probably have to be Fire Emblem. The depth and difficulty, the controlled-random elements, and the characters themselves are excellent in pretty much every game.
In going back through some ROM-translations of older games, however, there is one game that is different in many ways; a game that first created many innovations that show up sporadically in other fire emblem games.
Fire Emblem: Gaiden.
The first big change, a MASSIVE change, is the way items and weapons work. You can only ever have one item or weapon at a time, and instead of having durability, the equipped weapon simply change's a unit's stats and/or capabilities. If you don't have any weapons, you will just attack with a "basic" weapon, at your basic stats. There are also no consumable items like vulneraries or elixirs, meaning the only healing you get is from clerics, healing squares, or equipment which heals you over time.
>>> This is the change that truly makes Gaiden different from any other Fire Emblem for me. While it takes out much of the depth of carrying multiple items and conservatively using your best equipment, it also makes every item choice carry more weight, and allows additional item types to be experimented with, such as rings and shields.
Because of the change to weapons, spells have also been drastically changed. Instead of being based around an equipped item, spells use up HP to cast, and each magic-using character learns new spells after they've leveled up a certain number of times.
>>> This is a change I surprisingly liked a lot, after I got used to it. Sure, mages are less durable, but there's always inexpensive healing, be it through recover spells or health-regenerating items, and by the end of the game you get at least a half dozen rings to heal yourself with. Plus, it allowed tactical use of every spell for every given situation. Things like Warp, which I almost never used in other FE games due to the 5-only limit on the staff, became a staple in my strategies in Gaiden. My only complaint is that the "weight" and power of the spells themselves aren't listed, meaning you have to figure it out on your own how much damage a spell does, and how much it slows down your attack speed.
Instead of the usual, linear mission path, it features only five chapters, each of which open up a new part of the overworld, with new battles and enemies. Some caves and graveyards have respawning enemies, meaning you can grind for experience endlessly. Some enemy forts or other locations occasionally spawn enemies which aggressively roam the overworld - If you attack an enemy with these reinforcements, they will be added in a separate group to the fight. If they roam into your party, they will attack you on that map - you will be placed where the enemies were when you first won the fight, and the roaming attackers will get the first turn.
>>> I like some aspects of this, and dislike others. On one hand, I like having the ability to do things in different orders - an open overworld provides branching paths - and it helps give a lot more shape to the world, where sometimes the mission-to-mission gameplay makes it harder to tell. On the other hand, having an open overworld encourages grinding, meaning certain battles will either be far too easy or nearly impossible, depending on how much grinding of side-missions or optional battles is done.
Having talked about items and grinding, I now have my number one complaint about Gaiden - some of the best items in the game (the Sol, Luna and Astra lances), as well as extra Angel rings and Dragon shields, can ONLY be obtained by grinding enemies for an OBSCENELY LOW drop rate. Sure, the game is beat-able without them, but it requires more level-grinding. Basically, it's grind until you get to a good level, and possibly get a lucky break on nabbing an item, though I killed hundreds of thieves, zombie dragons and gargoyles and never once found any of these items.
Speaking of awful rates, the RNG is the most cruel random number generator I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with. Instead of the system used in FE6 and onward (i.e. all worldwide-released games) where it rolls two numbers from 1 to 100 and averages them, it rolls only once. Why is this bad? Because without good item stats, support, or ANY unit with high skill. it's almost impossible to get to a 100% hit chance, and if you don't have that 100%, you're going to be missing a LOT of crucial attacks. The good news is the enemy misses a lot as well, but this makes the game feel much more random than newer FE games.
While we're on the subject of bad RNG, though, unit level-ups are terrible. In most FE games, something like a 40% growth is pretty poor. In Gaiden, 20% is the average, so 40% is a godsend. On the bright side, I think the game is rigged to always give you at least one stat increase (at least, I've never had a completely blank level-up), but with rates like this, all but the best units will average out to one, MAYBE two points up per level, and it will usually end up being just +1 HP.
That said, though, this brings us to two of my favorite things about Gaiden - the 3-tier (usually) progression system, and the two-party split. Both reappeared in Radiant Dawn, and are why that game still competes for my #1 spot despite not having real Support conversations.
First up, the two-party split. Both Alm and Celica's parties are entirely separate from one another, only being allowed to trade a small number of items at set points in the game via traders in villages. Not only does this allow a focus on two very different parties, but it works GREAT with the overworld map system, since you need to carefully manage the positions of both parties - after all, the enemy forts can still mass and send armies against the party you aren't using at the time! This is probably my favorite bit of Gaiden, and though it was done to a small extent in Radiant Dawn, I really wish they combined it with an overworld map again.
As for the 3-tier progression, every unit, except spellcasters, Alm and Celica, or pegasus knights, has three "tiers" - a basic tier, an advanced, and then their ultimate tier. Unlike in Radiant Dawn, however, the enemies start showing up in higher tiers from very early on, and by the end you are only fighting monsters and tier 3 units.
While I like the tier system, the advancement is a bit weird. Instead of using seals, or automatically advancing after hitting level 20, you go to an Angel Statue and class-up from there, getting certain stat bonuses to put you to the "minimum" for that class (so class-up bonuses can be somewhat gamed, though you're almost always better trying to level up as much as possible before classing up, just like always).
The classes themselves are:
Pegasus Knight -> FalcoKnight
Soldier -> Knight (armor) -> Baron
Mercenary -> Myrmidon -> Dread Fighter -> Villager*
Cavalier -> Paladin -> Gold Knight
Archer -> Sniper -> Bow Knight
Mage -> Sage
Sister -> Saint
Every class has, arguably, their own special abilities. FalcoKnights automatically deal max damage against monsters, and are probably the strongest class of any because of that - though they, along with Sisters and the main character classes, are a class unreachable to Villagers. Barons don't really have anything notable, but their massive defense and power make up for that and their limited movement. Gold Knights have 9 movement and above-average stats. Bow Knights can attack up to 5 spaces away even without equipment. Dread Fighters have surprisingly high movement, and can re-class back into Villager, keeping their stats and allowing them to change to a mage, archer, cavalier, soldier or back to mercenary, for potentially endless leveling! (though it's almost entirely unnecessary to do so, as the game is fairly short)
Finally playing this game to completion, there are things I certainly both love and hate about it. However, most of what I dislike is due simply to the archaic limitations of the NES. If they were to remake Gaiden for a newer platform (or at least take even more elements wholesale from it), I would certainly appreciate it.
In going back through some ROM-translations of older games, however, there is one game that is different in many ways; a game that first created many innovations that show up sporadically in other fire emblem games.
Fire Emblem: Gaiden.
The first big change, a MASSIVE change, is the way items and weapons work. You can only ever have one item or weapon at a time, and instead of having durability, the equipped weapon simply change's a unit's stats and/or capabilities. If you don't have any weapons, you will just attack with a "basic" weapon, at your basic stats. There are also no consumable items like vulneraries or elixirs, meaning the only healing you get is from clerics, healing squares, or equipment which heals you over time.
>>> This is the change that truly makes Gaiden different from any other Fire Emblem for me. While it takes out much of the depth of carrying multiple items and conservatively using your best equipment, it also makes every item choice carry more weight, and allows additional item types to be experimented with, such as rings and shields.
Because of the change to weapons, spells have also been drastically changed. Instead of being based around an equipped item, spells use up HP to cast, and each magic-using character learns new spells after they've leveled up a certain number of times.
>>> This is a change I surprisingly liked a lot, after I got used to it. Sure, mages are less durable, but there's always inexpensive healing, be it through recover spells or health-regenerating items, and by the end of the game you get at least a half dozen rings to heal yourself with. Plus, it allowed tactical use of every spell for every given situation. Things like Warp, which I almost never used in other FE games due to the 5-only limit on the staff, became a staple in my strategies in Gaiden. My only complaint is that the "weight" and power of the spells themselves aren't listed, meaning you have to figure it out on your own how much damage a spell does, and how much it slows down your attack speed.
Instead of the usual, linear mission path, it features only five chapters, each of which open up a new part of the overworld, with new battles and enemies. Some caves and graveyards have respawning enemies, meaning you can grind for experience endlessly. Some enemy forts or other locations occasionally spawn enemies which aggressively roam the overworld - If you attack an enemy with these reinforcements, they will be added in a separate group to the fight. If they roam into your party, they will attack you on that map - you will be placed where the enemies were when you first won the fight, and the roaming attackers will get the first turn.
>>> I like some aspects of this, and dislike others. On one hand, I like having the ability to do things in different orders - an open overworld provides branching paths - and it helps give a lot more shape to the world, where sometimes the mission-to-mission gameplay makes it harder to tell. On the other hand, having an open overworld encourages grinding, meaning certain battles will either be far too easy or nearly impossible, depending on how much grinding of side-missions or optional battles is done.
Having talked about items and grinding, I now have my number one complaint about Gaiden - some of the best items in the game (the Sol, Luna and Astra lances), as well as extra Angel rings and Dragon shields, can ONLY be obtained by grinding enemies for an OBSCENELY LOW drop rate. Sure, the game is beat-able without them, but it requires more level-grinding. Basically, it's grind until you get to a good level, and possibly get a lucky break on nabbing an item, though I killed hundreds of thieves, zombie dragons and gargoyles and never once found any of these items.
Speaking of awful rates, the RNG is the most cruel random number generator I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with. Instead of the system used in FE6 and onward (i.e. all worldwide-released games) where it rolls two numbers from 1 to 100 and averages them, it rolls only once. Why is this bad? Because without good item stats, support, or ANY unit with high skill. it's almost impossible to get to a 100% hit chance, and if you don't have that 100%, you're going to be missing a LOT of crucial attacks. The good news is the enemy misses a lot as well, but this makes the game feel much more random than newer FE games.
While we're on the subject of bad RNG, though, unit level-ups are terrible. In most FE games, something like a 40% growth is pretty poor. In Gaiden, 20% is the average, so 40% is a godsend. On the bright side, I think the game is rigged to always give you at least one stat increase (at least, I've never had a completely blank level-up), but with rates like this, all but the best units will average out to one, MAYBE two points up per level, and it will usually end up being just +1 HP.
That said, though, this brings us to two of my favorite things about Gaiden - the 3-tier (usually) progression system, and the two-party split. Both reappeared in Radiant Dawn, and are why that game still competes for my #1 spot despite not having real Support conversations.
First up, the two-party split. Both Alm and Celica's parties are entirely separate from one another, only being allowed to trade a small number of items at set points in the game via traders in villages. Not only does this allow a focus on two very different parties, but it works GREAT with the overworld map system, since you need to carefully manage the positions of both parties - after all, the enemy forts can still mass and send armies against the party you aren't using at the time! This is probably my favorite bit of Gaiden, and though it was done to a small extent in Radiant Dawn, I really wish they combined it with an overworld map again.
As for the 3-tier progression, every unit, except spellcasters, Alm and Celica, or pegasus knights, has three "tiers" - a basic tier, an advanced, and then their ultimate tier. Unlike in Radiant Dawn, however, the enemies start showing up in higher tiers from very early on, and by the end you are only fighting monsters and tier 3 units.
While I like the tier system, the advancement is a bit weird. Instead of using seals, or automatically advancing after hitting level 20, you go to an Angel Statue and class-up from there, getting certain stat bonuses to put you to the "minimum" for that class (so class-up bonuses can be somewhat gamed, though you're almost always better trying to level up as much as possible before classing up, just like always).
The classes themselves are:
Pegasus Knight -> FalcoKnight
Soldier -> Knight (armor) -> Baron
Mercenary -> Myrmidon -> Dread Fighter -> Villager*
Cavalier -> Paladin -> Gold Knight
Archer -> Sniper -> Bow Knight
Mage -> Sage
Sister -> Saint
Every class has, arguably, their own special abilities. FalcoKnights automatically deal max damage against monsters, and are probably the strongest class of any because of that - though they, along with Sisters and the main character classes, are a class unreachable to Villagers. Barons don't really have anything notable, but their massive defense and power make up for that and their limited movement. Gold Knights have 9 movement and above-average stats. Bow Knights can attack up to 5 spaces away even without equipment. Dread Fighters have surprisingly high movement, and can re-class back into Villager, keeping their stats and allowing them to change to a mage, archer, cavalier, soldier or back to mercenary, for potentially endless leveling! (though it's almost entirely unnecessary to do so, as the game is fairly short)
Finally playing this game to completion, there are things I certainly both love and hate about it. However, most of what I dislike is due simply to the archaic limitations of the NES. If they were to remake Gaiden for a newer platform (or at least take even more elements wholesale from it), I would certainly appreciate it.
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