I want to post a retrospective, in that I've been tongue-bathing FE 4 for forever now, but in reality it is a game that I haven't started up in nearly a decade, so I thought I'd do that just to get some perspective in how it measures up to my *current* tastes and attitudes. So in all fairness, I want to post some things that are just wrong with it:
Alot of things are really pointlessly slow: I always played the game on an emulator, so I had the miracle of having a button that just doubles the emulation speed on the ready at all times, but when I attempted to deliberately ignore it, I was getting antsy and impatient all the time. Text just moves slow, even when you're spamming the button to speed it up it'll slow back down if you don't keep spamming. Just little transitionary things like going into and out of battle. The AI's 'thinking' phase can be just a solid couple of seconds of literally nothing happening. It was probably just a limitation of the hardware at the time, but it can't be ignored.
Nearly No Convenience Features: I completely forgot this one, but starting it up I realized "Hey, there's no button to press to check where the enemy can move or attack, I have to manually check every enemy again..." which gets old fast and slows down gameplay unnecessarily. There's also the fact that unlike in the future games, there's no quick way to tell if you can double attack an enemy. IIRC the formula for it is easy, the character just needs to have the pursuit skill and 50% more
modified speed than the enemy. What is the modified speed? O' just speed minus weapon weight, but the only way to check is to go into your and the enemy character's stat pages and do the math yourself. Fortunately, the game gives you some of the fastest characters, but during those exceptional moments when you're not 50% faster, it can take you by surprise. One of the reasons I liked the FE series so much is that the stats are simple enough that you can do the necessary calculations in your head on the fly, whereas in most RPG's the stats have no special meaning but to look at them go up and trust that bigger numbers = better, but here the game I feel is asking too much mental calculation the players' part.
Speaking of modified speed...
The Weapon Triangle system is Stupidly Unbalanced: I'm sure any FE fan has this RPS relationship memorized: Sword > Axe > Spear > Sword. In FE4, there's an extra RPS system for magic where it goes Fire > Wind > Lightning > Fire, with an extra tidbit where light and dark magic beat all of them, in addition to beating eachother simultaneously. All that kinda sounds like it'd make for some deep strategic gameplay, but you can forget all of it because the reality is that Swords and Wind magic beat everything. Why? Because they're the lightest, while only being slightly weaker. In a game with
permadeath, having defensive stats is everything, and the best defense is just not getting hit at all, which is helped enormously by a high speed stat, which is best when it is not being dragged down by the extremely heavy weight of your weapon. Take into account the difference between your iron sword and your iron axe, both on the same level as far as weapon tiers go, but the sword has 3 weight, while the axe has 12. Now, while the axe does have a higher attack power, it's not
four times more powerful. Spears are similarly heavy, so while spears do *technically* beats words in the triangle, they're still outclassed because they're so heavy in relation to swords. The same is true for wind magic, even the thing that counters it, fire magic, is still beaten by it because wind magic is so fast in comparison. What this translates into is that everything that is not sword or wind magic based winds up being the most used and most highly leveled because they can engage the enemy without having to worry about them eating hits and dying unceremoniously. While, throughout the course of the game, you do get the fortune of getting the best sword and wind magic users in the game on your side, it makes the system feel more stale than it needs to be.
Armors are nigh-useless: While I mentioned that defensive stats beat everything, you'd think that armors would be highly useful then? Well, you'd be right! The low speed they're plagued with is not a big deal since you need special skills in order to double on an enemy, and that nearly never comes into play since most enemies don't have skills. HOWEVER... This game has huge maps, and not only that, it frequently puts you on a time limit since you need to race across the map in order to save a town that is being slowly destroyed. What this translates into is that Horse-mounted units are the best because they have the highest movement, and FE4 mounted units are actually the strongest in the entire series due to being able to Move, Attack, and then move again with remaining movement points. Training up your *one* armored unit to where he is relevant is extremely difficult, and even his designated job of defending the castle nearly never comes up cause there is *I Think* only two or three points in the game where the AI will try to score a victory through a castle takeover, and even then there are better units for the job.
Cavalry is overpowered: In fact, any unit on foot is very easy to forget, because horse mounted units can get to the fight faster and finish up before the foot mounted units even arrive. Movement can get boosted with a ring, but that's a pretty late game item. Moreover, when the tables are turned and you're being chased down by horse mounted units, the maliciousness of the AI is thrown into high gear as they're all able to single out the weakest unit of yours in range and guarantee that they die.
There are dumb, obtuse secrets: Some of the best items in the game are hidden in just random spots. In order to get the Brave Axe, you need to get your one axe using character and have him stand in a really awkward out of the way spot. To get the pursuit ring, same thing with your armour. Just so many great items that are not hinted at in any way that you would need a guide to find, and my rule is that if it needs a guide, it's a flaw of the game.
Oh yeah, and you're being graded: One of the flaws of the series is that the permanency of every mistake encourages an extremely slow, methodical, cautious playstyle. At the very end of the game, you're being graded on how fast you completed the game, in turns. There's actually a subsystem in the game wherein how well you're doing according to this grading scale affects the "Leader Stars" your commander unit has, which in turn gives units within a certain radius of that leader character a small bonus to evasion. This subsystem is never explained, it had to be deduced through trial and error. This one is not that big of a deal, but it gets under my skin whenever a game is secretly judging me and punishing me for what I feel is correct and proper play...
These last three complaints apply to FE4, but they apply equally to all FE games:
Permadeath encourages slow play: From the previous complaint, permadeath just encourages extremely slow play. That any mistake is punished forever gets the blood pumping, but it also makes the game kinda boring since optimal play is inching your units forward, singling out enemies, and never taking any chances because the RNG at any time could decide to be utterly cruel and malicious...
the heavy emphasis on RNG in a strategy game is stupid: In FE, there is no such thing as a perfect plan. Anything and everything you do can be spoiled by the RNG. 90% hit chance on four attacks? You can still miss every single one and your character dies because of it. 10% evasion chance? Enemy can still hit every attack and your character dies because of it. Everything go according to plan and your character levels up? Haha no stat increases at all... For a person like me that views all games as big, complicated puzzles that should have 'solutions', the presence of unpredictable elements that can't be planned for no matter how much mental effort you pour into the game is infuriating.
Leveling Systems lock you into a strategy and reduce your choices: While there are spots in the game you can grind for exp, they're all extremely slow, boring, and monotonous. If you ignore them however, you're quickly forced with the choice of which characters you want to level up and which ones you should shun completely. Characters need to be leveled up in order to remain relevant as the game progresses, and some need intense leveling just to not be useless at all, and that is troubled by the fact that there is finite Exp in the game. So you have to make your choices, and then some characters are just going to be cheerleaders: Sitting on the sidelines and not doing anything while the small handful of characters that were chosen get to do everything, and in fact they HAVE to do everything because by that point you can't renege on your choice. And those chosen few characters is going to include your main character, who in fact can solo the two levels in which he gets his best weapon, so those levels the best choice is just have that one character do everything, and shun everyone else... and that frustrates me because watching your characters grow and become good, useful characters is one of the primary joys of playing Fire Emblem for me, and it pains me that the best choice is to ignore them...
So there, now I feel like I'm no longer afflicted with that dreaded disease: "fanboyism"
In other news I just discovered
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMdNL0K6TxoHmmm, a FE mod with everything randomized. Consider me extremely interested.
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Topic: Fire Emblem: Watch the Fire Emblem Direct for old game annoucements! (Read 102186 times)