Hey! Since when does Chrom have feet?!
When I played Fire Emblem Awakening
After finishing Tokyo Majin I felt like an SRPG (I always feel like an SRPG) and borrowed FEA again to test my theory, but! It was too late for this experiment. Between the time of my first playthrough and this game, I had already discovered the joys of playing Fire Emblem in Casual Mode. I can’t go back. I won’t go back!
The problem is that Fire Emblem is designed around users playing Classic permadeath mode. Once you take away that fear of death, the enemies are revealed for the wimps that they are and each battle just becomes a matter of bulldozing and steamrolling everything in your path.
If Intelligent Systems had wanted to keep things the same, they would have removed world map Risen battles from Casual mode, thus making it important to keep your characters alive as long as possible so they can gain EXP. As it is I don’t even blink when any character bites the dust and I don’t make any effort to keep healers and squishy mages out of harm’s way. I think Sumia has died on virtually every map I have fielded her on, but it’s all good because Casual Mode. This rocks!
So, several easy deaths and easy resurrections later, I’ve made it up to the Endgame. For most of the game I still didn’t pair anyone up and I only reclassed Lon’qu and Sully because they were terrible. I used more Silver and other powerful weapons because to their credit the enemies have more HP and DEF now but that’s about it for all the difference Hard makes. Oh yeah, and either Support rates grow more slowly on Hard or I’m doing it wrong, because apart from Chrom’s forced marriage, no one else has reached S support with anyone else. Which is kinda good because I like keeping my options open and don’t particularly need any kids.
Now, I said I’d “made it to the Endgame,” but it would be more accurate to say I’ve deliberately been loitering there for the past 10 days or so. I have the 3DS at my disposal but no other games to play, so why rush to finish things? That’s why I’ve made it my ambition to see how long I can stretch FEA out before I get tired of it. My objectives now are to:
Everyone except Say’ri, because she got killed like all Resistance leaders do.
– Give everyone at least C support with everyone else on the roster
– Watch as many support conversations as possible
– Build an army of crazy powerhouses. I’m starting by trying to get useless pre-promotes like Frederick, Libra and Anna to level 5 so they learn a skill before reclassing them back to level 1 unpromoted. They’re still going to suck and grow slowly, but at least it’s better than leaving them as it… I think. Anyway it’ll be fun.
I suppose I could kill Grima first and reload, but the instant the credits roll, everything will become ‘post-game content’ to me, and I don’t do postgame content so it’s now or never.
This means I’ll probably be playing Awakening for the rest of the year since the game only spawns 2 or 3 random battles a day. I hear I could do it faster by buying DLC (out of the question) or otherwise taking the game online (which I have been asked very kindly not to do), but it’s not like I have anything else to play on the 3DS, so there’s no rush.
Of course if I wanted to I could buy some 3Ds games. As I said the 3DS is entirely at my disposal this time round. Sadly enough the owner was actually considering selling the poor thing and would have done it if the new Fire Emblem hadn’t been announced, so I basically have it to myself until either the FE or something similarly interesting comes out.
Problem is, I’m not that interested in the 3DS either. If I get anything it will most probably be Rune Factory 4, but since I just played Tides of Destiny recently I’ll wait a few more months first. I wouldn’t mind either the first Harvest Moon or the new Story of Seasons, but I haven’t played any of the Wii Harvest Moons yet. With the Wii now defunct they’re both at a good price now, so this is a good time to get those instead. Fantasy Life looks good from trailers, but I’ve also heard things about grindiness, a boring story and long, unskippable cutscenes, so it bears a little more research before buying. Will probably get it after RF4, though.
On the negative side, Bravely Default and its sequel are both do not want. Same with all the Etrian Odysseys. Same with all the Persona/SMT games. I wasn’t even excited when the Persona 5 trailer came out recently. I think Atlus made me wait too long. The first Conception didn’t blow me away and from all indications Conception II isn’t much of an improvement, so not getting that either. Tomodachi Life seems like a non-cute Fantasy Life… btw, have I ever mentioned that Miis creep me out? They totally do.
tl;dr since there’s no hurry for me to finish FE: Awakening I’m just going to take my sweet time and do a few battles every day until kingdom come. I won’t bore you with updates though, so if you don’t hear about it again, just assume I met all my objectives and everyone lived happily ever after.
Update: Talked the owner into letting me go online just once to get all the bonus teams and other stuff via wireless. Now thanks to SpotPass, I have access to an endless stream of bonus battles, no need to rely on luck. And I get at least 120 more battles to fight! Hands up everyone who thinks I’m going to do every single one. Ah, you know me too well.
If you had a lot of money to dump, you could buy Reeking Boxes and use them to spawn Randoms instead of waiting for dailies I guess.
But Hard Mode change means it’s hard to earn a profit from it to keep it running (the item costs a lot less on Normal Mode)
I remember Reeking Boxes being super cheap on Normal, but on Hard they cost 4800 gold a pop. All my money is going into Master Seals, Second Seals and basic weapons for my reclassed troops, so I don’t have any to spare. Not that I’m complaining, mind you. Cheap boxes would ruin all the fun.
Well, you have a point there. The 3ds library is pretty much a wasteland, with a pitifully tiny number of RPGs and way too many ports and remakes from the last generation. I’ve bought every single 3ds game that piqued my interest, even remotely; and yet, my 3ds collection represents hardly a quarter of my DS collection. And since the 3ds is approaching the end of its lifetime slowly but surely, I’d wager that it won’t get any better. On the other hand, I still find interesting DS games to this day… Oh, well. Not every game system can become a classic, I suppose.
On the other hand, I would definitely recommend “Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity” on the 3ds. 🙂
Thanks. The older Pokemon Dungeon games will have to come first, though.
So, revisiting the “will Awakening be the future of FE from now on?” topic…
Looks like the new Fire Emblem game will be out in Japan soon.
Obviously, those people who don’t want marriage and children in the series aren’t going to be happy still (how are they going to write children into the story THIS time? Can they top time paradox traveling children in dumbness?), and what are the chances they’ll actually have some better mission design this time?
Oh, and the silly two versions thing. Supposedly the black version is more similar to the older games while white is more Awakening, but that might just be empty talk.
This will probably be the turning point for series fans.
Yeahhh… the more I read about the games the less I liked them, so I stopped following the game news a while ago. I’m fine with all this waifu stuff in moderation as long as it doesn’t affect core gameplay, but when the whole thing becomes about pandering to otaku a la Idea Factory then it’s hard for me to get excited any more.
That said, my 3DS-owning FE-loving buddy is almost certainly going to get at least one of the games at launch, so I just have to wait and see if it lives up to my low expectations.