Elephant_Parade
18 reviews liked by Elephant_Parade
Seeing the game collapse in on itself before the twinned might of Crobbin, seeing fielding the rest of my army become an active detriment in the later maps, and seeing how jank the lunatic difficulty was kind of blackpilled me on this game supposedly saving the series
This review contains spoilers
Do I have the right to jot my thoughts down on this game? I mean, I only finished half of the Blue Lions route and all of the Crimson Flower route, and I am planning on... well, eventually getting back to do Golden Deer, but I want to believe punching through a route is enough. This game took me like eighty hours as is.
Picked this up around release. Was very Fire-Emblem lapsed. I'd picked up Awakening on release, could not get into the story, dropped it. Picked up Conquest, thought it sucked, dropped it. Three Houses, though, people were talking about. And I'd just gotten a shiny new switch.
Fire Emblem Persona started out pretty nice. Customize your class, learn about the deep world, fight some low-stakes battles. I was getting kind of anxious about going back to the monastery instead of doing a more traditional, linear Fire Emblem campaign, but I was open to it.
Then the shift happens, the time skip the trailer promised. Here we go, I think. We're going on a war campaign (I was with Dmitri of the Blue Lions) and this is going to kick ass. It uh. It sort of did.
See, the issue here is that the gameplay had sort of broken down. I was playing on hard, but no map presented even an iota of challenge. I'm not trying to toot my own horn, here - at the time of playing, I was an absolute shit gamer, a strategy buffoon, a tactical caveman. The gameplay simply did not hold my interest.
Turning to the plot to provide hope, I got to THE map. It was going to be the coolest one, the class reunion. The gang is fighting. What was supposed to be the climax, the emotional peak of the game... just utterly shat the bed for me. I, the player, was fighting against the Golden Deer while the Empire was right there. The Golden Deer explicitly did not want to fight me. One of my former students bum rushes me and some emotional dialogue plays: "Sensei, why are you attacking us?"
It was the worst shit. I dropped it then and there.
A good three years later I get into Fire Emblem again. I boot up Maddening. I stream. The friction is incredible. The first few maps, while terrible on replay, are entertaining in their bizarre challenge. I go with Edelgard this time and the catharthis of fighting my former students, their former friends, family members... it rules. The penultimate map is one of the most exciting strategy challenges coupled with emotional release. It is why I play Fire Emblem.
7/10
Picked this up around release. Was very Fire-Emblem lapsed. I'd picked up Awakening on release, could not get into the story, dropped it. Picked up Conquest, thought it sucked, dropped it. Three Houses, though, people were talking about. And I'd just gotten a shiny new switch.
Fire Emblem Persona started out pretty nice. Customize your class, learn about the deep world, fight some low-stakes battles. I was getting kind of anxious about going back to the monastery instead of doing a more traditional, linear Fire Emblem campaign, but I was open to it.
Then the shift happens, the time skip the trailer promised. Here we go, I think. We're going on a war campaign (I was with Dmitri of the Blue Lions) and this is going to kick ass. It uh. It sort of did.
See, the issue here is that the gameplay had sort of broken down. I was playing on hard, but no map presented even an iota of challenge. I'm not trying to toot my own horn, here - at the time of playing, I was an absolute shit gamer, a strategy buffoon, a tactical caveman. The gameplay simply did not hold my interest.
Turning to the plot to provide hope, I got to THE map. It was going to be the coolest one, the class reunion. The gang is fighting. What was supposed to be the climax, the emotional peak of the game... just utterly shat the bed for me. I, the player, was fighting against the Golden Deer while the Empire was right there. The Golden Deer explicitly did not want to fight me. One of my former students bum rushes me and some emotional dialogue plays: "Sensei, why are you attacking us?"
It was the worst shit. I dropped it then and there.
A good three years later I get into Fire Emblem again. I boot up Maddening. I stream. The friction is incredible. The first few maps, while terrible on replay, are entertaining in their bizarre challenge. I go with Edelgard this time and the catharthis of fighting my former students, their former friends, family members... it rules. The penultimate map is one of the most exciting strategy challenges coupled with emotional release. It is why I play Fire Emblem.
7/10
A beautiful game. Wonderful characters and story, love how everyone can really emote in the Definitive Edition, and the world is a fantastic character in itself. It really grabs that old JRPG feel, that promise, of losing yourself in an immense, vivid world packed with colorful characters, societies, and sights to see. The crazy plot was a lot of fun, and the nonstop hype train ride of the third act was legendary among JRPGs I've played.
I have a few gripes that mar this game from getting the extra half star or so. While the towns were impressive in how vivid they were, I just couldn't get into how drab the NPC dialogue presentation felt. It's a little better with bigger text boxes in XB2, at least. Building on that, the sidequests. On one hand, they were fine as brain-off, I-just-want-to-grind-while-listening-to-three-hour-long-youtube-videos activities, but on the other hand, there were... simply too many of them, and not many had much narrative pleasure to them.
Another gripe is a bigger one - the combat. I found it okay to bad for much of my play. I think it works for the game Xenoblade Chronicles is - the lack of a loud transition to a seperate screen into menu-based turn based combat, opting instead for a seamless, cooldown-based real time system is a boon to the exploration. The game would be much worse off with a system like, say, Final Fantasy 10's-and I think FFX's battle system is fantastic.
Unfortunately, the game's battle system (and that's not even getting into the crazy level scaling, or how I had to grind for a few hours just to beat a miniboss that was incredibly easy but unhittable because I was 5 levels below it) discouraged me from really wanting to bite into the side content of the game. I missed out on a lot of bond talks, a lot of the later bosses, a lot of the post-game areas... but, I was satisfied with my time. So, so satisfied. When the changed title screen came up after the post-credits cutscene, I teared up a bit. I'm tearing up a bit writing this sentence now. What a journey. Just... man.
I have a few gripes that mar this game from getting the extra half star or so. While the towns were impressive in how vivid they were, I just couldn't get into how drab the NPC dialogue presentation felt. It's a little better with bigger text boxes in XB2, at least. Building on that, the sidequests. On one hand, they were fine as brain-off, I-just-want-to-grind-while-listening-to-three-hour-long-youtube-videos activities, but on the other hand, there were... simply too many of them, and not many had much narrative pleasure to them.
Another gripe is a bigger one - the combat. I found it okay to bad for much of my play. I think it works for the game Xenoblade Chronicles is - the lack of a loud transition to a seperate screen into menu-based turn based combat, opting instead for a seamless, cooldown-based real time system is a boon to the exploration. The game would be much worse off with a system like, say, Final Fantasy 10's-and I think FFX's battle system is fantastic.
Unfortunately, the game's battle system (and that's not even getting into the crazy level scaling, or how I had to grind for a few hours just to beat a miniboss that was incredibly easy but unhittable because I was 5 levels below it) discouraged me from really wanting to bite into the side content of the game. I missed out on a lot of bond talks, a lot of the later bosses, a lot of the post-game areas... but, I was satisfied with my time. So, so satisfied. When the changed title screen came up after the post-credits cutscene, I teared up a bit. I'm tearing up a bit writing this sentence now. What a journey. Just... man.
Mmmmmmmmmm, well. First off if you don't like cops you aren't going to like this game. I like fictional cops, I treat them like how I enjoy mythical creatures or super powers, in that they sound kinda neat so I was able to start off on the right foot here. It's much different however when you become the cop so I never used the mystery torture tools and instead relied on my powers of wit and reason to exhaust all dialogue options. I played on normal and never focused on the pseudoscience of pulse readings in the corner, I think they never made sense and not for ludo reasons. If you ever talked to another person you can probably suss out when someone is lying to you in this game. Pure vibes are enough to get through the interrogations which was cool but frustrating when the game wants you to reason out why, like being forced to show my work in school. I think the hardest parts were when you talk to non interrogates, more of a guessing game on if something would be positive or not. I didn't feel the writing was as bad as people say until the very last scenes which I would not say were wrong but definitely silly to see. And I guess its a good exercise on how much you see talking to people as a flowchart.
Stuart Little 2
2002
One of the first games I ever played. I remember playing the game as a little kid in my living room. I didn't know how to use a memory card so I would just replay the first couple of levels until I got bored. The game itself is a decent early 3d platformer but unless you have nostalgia for it I probably wouldn't recommend going back to it.
Fate/Stay Night
2004
If I read this game at 14 I Would have graduated college and been married for 3 years now
less good because theres less battler seething but ange saves the show
what can I say beyond memes here, I love when people shove the situation into someones face and the protag goes "uhh nuh uh no nope yeah not true" . There are lot of jokes and real criticisms about the bloat but to me its really soul pulling when Battler screams at Beatrice for 40 seconds on auto mode over being tricked or bamboozled.
Blue Archive
2021
I followed this for the first year if you count retweeting art of girls as following. And then they came out with track mari and I decided I had to lock in for at least 6 months. I got my spark and my track mari but I also received peak fiction. I think hifumi "I love cliches" speech enjoyers should be giving out less 1 stars and more "hooooooly moly" ratings to games with soul but arent really good. I dont like the gameplay very much but its a gacha and you cant convince me they can be anything but reloads and micromanaging rng (and macromanaging rng by getting good rolls).
Siralim Ultimate
2021
Wildly ambitious and experimentation is a lot of fun for a while with the absurd number of monsters / trait combinations / etc. but I kept hitting exactly the wrong types of brick walls (like a team based on all of my monsters sharing stat gains which worked incredibly well... but made every combat encounter take an absurdly long amount of time). Siralim is all about creating complex and deliberately broken teams to overcome seemingly impossible challenges, but the interface seems to think it's just a regular monster-collecting JRPG, leading to the game containing a ton of mind-numbing waiting for normal battles to end (you can automate but even at maximum speed they can still take a really long time). I think you could take the monsters and overall design of the game and port it into something that feels actually built to control them in a way that isn't hugely time-wasting and you'd have a really great game.
