INSIDE deserves to be played and not talked about, because it's such a simple and powerful story, it needs to be witnessed firsthand and unspoiled.
I just got done with that fan game I was talking about: The Lion Throne. I'm just speechless at such a pure and excellent Fire Emblem homage. Intelligent Systems themselves couldn't put out something this good, and god they've tried. It's a short game, only 11 chapters, which is puny for an FE game, but the FE experience is wonderfully condensed into those 11 chapters. You only get 12 characters, and all of them are likable and useful. 11 chapters isn't enough for a full 40 levels of character growth, so that's condensed down to 10 during pre-promotion, then automatic promotion, then capping at level 10 there for only 20 levels; and stat growth is rapid as you might imagine. I love that, one of the visceral appeals of FE is watching my characters develop, and rapid development is even better. You get a few guaranteed conversations between the party members between the missions, and they're all just little delights of great writing. It's so much better to be able to focus all your love on only 12 characters, instead of the veritable parade of nigh-useless and shallow characters you're bound to find in any real FE.
One thing that made the gameplay very enjoyable was the existence of the 'turnwheel' system, which allows you to freely wind back time a set number of times. My biggest gripe about FE was that I always want to play with permadeath active, but I get stressed out at the smallest mistake costing me a character, and then I feel I have to reload a save, or if I'm playing on an emulator, reload a nearby savestate. With the turnwheel system, you can rewind time all the way up to the previous turn if you made a mistake, or if the Random Number God decides he hates you today and causes all your hits to miss and all the enemies to hit even the most inaccurate attacks, and that winds up costing you a character, you don't have to get stressed out! You can rewind time and plan out a different course of action.
I just really enjoyed it. If I had anything to complain about, it would just be that one of the characters you get has a useless feat pre-decided for him. You see, one of the cool new features of the hack is that as characters level up, they get 'feats', meaning a permanent bonus to a stat of your choosing. This character had HP as his feat, when I would have preferred nigh-anything else, so that used up one of his feats and small disadvantages like that snowball over time, and he wound up being the runt of the litter by the end of the game, barely able to remain viable against the fodder enemies. That was kind of a waste of a cool character IMO.
Another complaint would be that many chapters had enemies spawn in at a rapid pace, which is cool I like that, but the final level has them teleporting in to unpredictable locations, so I had to redo that level after memorizing their placement and being ready for them, which I feel is not strategical at heart, as I'm not using using tactics so much as I'm just huddling everyone together to get ready to gangstomp the enemies the moment they spawn before they have a chance to move. But still, I wound up liking that final level, the boss was cool.
Maybe I'll keep myself immersed in the FE fangame community, they have some good shit floating around.
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Topic: [MILK] There were 12 eggs here what did you do with them? (Happy thread?!) (Read 16322968 times)