I watched a
recent Jimquisition and it reminded me so much of this thread and of Fire Emblem I felt I had to revisit it, because my feelings about this game are something I've been consciously exploring for a little while now, and while I stand by my previous argument 100% still, I want to add that I feel a lot of the features are poorly integrated into the 'core' of the game experience.
Now, my reservations about disliking so many features and purposefully abstaining from them is NOT that I dislike those features, in fact I WANT to enjoy the DLC and the multiplayer and the crystal ball and whatever the hell might be hiding inside the challenges and scouting, I just feel that if I do then I'll be accepting, even if in only some small part, an unfair advantage against the core storyline missions, which is the metric I'm judging the game's difficulty overall with. Plus, and this is just my own biases here, but I just feel guilty, like I'm a cheater, and that just ruins the experience for me. I was made to stop and think though, when I noticed a hypocrisy in my actions, in that I disliked the DLC and Grinding missions for offering the free handouts of EXP, but I LOVED the random gifts from characters and the Lottery, and that's what gave me the idea of some elements of the game simply being more poorly integrated into the core experience than others.
What I mean by that is, the small gifts contribute feel like they belong in the game more than the DLC or Rando-missions do. The random gifts are very unique, and so often feel very sentimental and precious, and inform you a little bit more about the characters since some are named expressly after some. In rando-missions you're just beating up strangers for their sweet exp nectar at the active detriment to the game's core challenge, as even playing on hard classic my first time through each route, the game is honestly still kinda easy and I feel the game gives you ample experience and items just through main story missions without having to engage in any of this side-shenanigans. Some features just feel like the game wasn't designed with them in mind, they were just tacked on.
I want to use Dark Souls 2 as an example, where calling in random people to come help you is without a doubt subtracting from the game's difficulty, which is the draw of the series, but I never felt guilty about using that feature, because it was so tightly and closely integrated with the game and designed around it. Calling in strangers not just helped with the difficulty, it served so many other social functions it honestly felt like a shame to NOT use it. Calling in and offering my own help became my favorite part of that game, even though you'd never guess that if you just looked at my opinions about Fire Emblem.
So in summary, it's not that I didn't want these features (DLC, Grinding, Castle Visitations, Crystal Ball Rewards) in the game to not exist, it's that I wanted them to be even more tightly woven into the game's design, so that using them would actually feel natural rather than as actively cheating myself out of my own fun. Earlier in the thread, I feel I left you guys with an unsatisfying answer when I wouldn't shut up about this topic, so I wanted to return to the topic after I'd explored the idea inside myself some more, and I hope this was more satisfying.
Poll
2 (16.7%)
Author
Topic: Fire Emblem: Watch the Fire Emblem Direct for old game annoucements! (Read 102355 times)