#and how their fighting styles work in battle and complement different aspects of each character

[freakadr0id]

I have a really strong urge to classify and analyze the roles of each turtle (and April) in a fight, but I have a feeling it's already been done and it would just be redundant. Idk I just noticed some interesting things about how each character fights, particularly in how their fighting styles complement one another in team battles. I thought it might be fun to go more in-depth into it, but I don't want to do it if it's already been done.

Update: I decided to go for it and Part 1 is up

[kuuderepunkin]

Match up

A match up for @obsessedwithgems​ <3 <3 <3 

Due to technical difficulties I will not be including her description of herself (but if you want I can add it, love) 

Hazbin Hotel matchup: Sir Pentious 

Man it was a hard draw to decide who to pair you with in Hazbin Hotel but I think the thing that pushed me towards Sir Pentious is your love for snakes, not just cause he’s a lovable snake boy, but it helped me choose between him and Angel Dust. But I think he’d be a better fit just because his little Egg minions would also be a part of your relationship, either to run errands for you or to keep you entertained and happy. Angel Dust is super shippable with people so I was trying to balance where your needs would fall in a relationship (his sexuality slightly worked against him, too) and I do think that having the little crowd of Egg boys would bring a little more joy to your world, while Angel dust himself may drain your overly giving personality. But as I always say! I’m an advocate for loving who you love! So if you like another character? Go for it, my matchups are just based on my opinion of how you and a fictional character meld well- but any couple can work to be a loving relationship <3 . Also a lot of the characters from Hazbin can be jerks but he’s less of a jerk and more of a show off I think, he’d never do you wrong. 

He’s confident enough to break through your shy exterior, he’s loud and bold and will just pull you into a conversation so you don’t have to worry about starting it. 

100% with you on being outgoing and being a bit reckless, he gets so excited he loses his common sense. But he’s more likely to get hurt than you would be. 

He loves being adventurous with you, but he’s a chaotic entity so I can only imagine the laughs you get out of your adventures but it’s therapeutic. 

If you start crying for any reason he stops his ridiculous antics to slither to your side and comfort you. No moment wasted. 

Pentious wraps his tail around you and gently holds you gently caressing your back and running his hand through your hair and gently speaking trying to calm you down. 

If you don’t want him to see you crying he’ll slither away and come back with one of the egg minions and some water. He doesn’t want you to be alone but knows it might be embarrassing to you for him to see you so upset. But it’s important to stay hydrated especially when you’ve cried. He will do everything he can to make it as painless as possible, it’s okay to cry and having feelings is natural and nothing you should feel ashamed about. 

There are so many egg boys that you will not forget to care about yourself, and Sir Pentious will not allow you to not care and maintain your own well being! Your helpful nature is appreciated but you have to care for yourself, and he makes that a rule for you because it’s Hell and he doesn’t want just anybody taking advantage of you. 

The egg boys will treat you like their mother, which is endearing and frustrating? But you do well with children so it shouldn’t be too much different. It’s sweet though, they bring you gifts and draw stuff for you. And they give you lots of love. 

If you’re ever crying they run up to you and ask what’s wrong and they hug you, it’s very cute, you’re never alone with these bubbly dorks. And for your touch related trauma- the good thing is you can tell it’s one of the eggs hugging you, they’re small and oval- it’s easy to tell that it’s them. But they’re not familiar enough for you sir Pentious will scold them and tell them to stay away! No sneaking up on their momma queen! 

When sleeping at night it can either be you and Pentious alone cuddling, his large tail making a little dam around you, keeping your warmth in and making you feel secure.

But all the same, if you’re alright with a couple of the eggs joining you they’re like teddy bears, they scatter around the bed and almost sleep like pets by your legs or hugging Pentious’ tail. 

Pentious’ long arms will be wrapped around your body, keeping you close to his chest with his head on yours. 

And while you may be tougher than you look, you are regarded as his queen! He cannot allow his lover to be in the front line of battle, and not fighting with the riff raf in Hell. He knows all too well you can take care of yourself- you probably beat him up once because he thought you were so cute saying you could handle yourself- but even so he doesn’t like the idea of letting you out alone. It’s not in an obsessive way- it’s just hell is dangerous and he’s a kind of big part in the territory wars so you may have a big target on your back. 

So he’ll send one of his minions with you if you leave without him, but that’s so he knows where to find you, the eggs aren’t great at combat in the first place and he respects your skills. It’s just a safety net. 

Pentious will ask you to sing to him, looking like a begging puppy because he really wants to hear your beautiful voice. Even if you don’t think it’s amazing he will disagree with you on that aspect. “A butterfly can’t see their own vibrant colors! You’re the butterfly in this analogy…. and your singing is your wings-“ he’s only explaining because he realized the analogy might be about beauty and not talent and he confused himself. But he’s so proud that I will not admit that he’s wrong! 

He will let you hold the end of his tail and play with it idly as the two of you talk, or he’s busy doing a villainous monologue. Or if you would prefer you can carry an egg around like it would be a teddy bear. 

One last thing- he loves to put his top hat on you and watch it slide down your forehead because it’s too big. It makes him giggle. 

Steven Universe match up: Sour Cream 

Alright another hard debate but this time because there’s so many good options. Sour cream could really align with some of your interests and he’s a great significant other but I feel like he may have a different emotional expression? From the way he reacted to Steven’s problems kind of makes me think he will struggle with deep emotional struggles you may have- but also that doesn’t mean he can’t be a good lover. And then Pink Pearl would line up with your interests as well, she loves to learn new things, just like her diamond she loved nature and the likes. And she could make you happy- the two of you could work together to take care of each other and help each other heal and grow. She will help you learn the value of taking care of yourself even when helping others. She would love to have fun with you, too. Signing, dancing, doing art, teaching and learning piano with you, it all seems like so much fun to her! And to get to spend time with you! Those all make her so happy. But I ran myself into a circle again! Idk who would fit with you better in a match up. That last push towards Sour Cream was your love of horror and your aesthetic, I feel like he would better understand them. Pearl would love to dress up with you and mimic your style but I don’t know if she would understand how it would fit into self expression, and I feel like horror might scare her a little too much. All the while Sour Cream loves the macabre and mysterious! 

Sour Cream himself is pretty quiet despite how sociable he is, so it’s easy to approach him or have him come to chat with you. He loves talking to people, but he likes the underdogs so if he sees you shying away he would love to approach you. 

When he approaches you he probably complements your glasses and hair, and how it really vibes with your style! Honestly it probably inspires him to make some new music more attuned to the cas emo vibes. 

He is ecstatic when you finally open up and become adventurous because he’s ready to have fun and party with you! 

And the party doesn’t have to be with tons of people, just the two of you going on some wacky adventures or going exploring and just having some fun! 

He would love to go to abandoned places with you, making some fun youtube videos or tiktoks. Going exploring in forests and having fun in nature sounds like a ball to him. He may be a techy guy but he loves doing new and exciting things with you. 

Sour Cream is no stranger to crying, he’s had these feelings of hopelessness when it came to his family and then his career- so I think he understands how best to help you. 

When you need to be alone and let it out he will just slide you some snacks and water and kiss your forehead and whisper he’s there for you when you’re ready to talk. 

If you wouldn’t mind his company he’s there rubbing the back of your hand and back. Water and snacks all in toe, he probably stores them in his massive pockets ngl. 

While you’re easy to fluster, he thinks it’s pretty cute! He will try to make you blush but not to the point of making you dizzy, he just thinks you're so adorable! 

Heck yeah powerful women! He’s so hype for you kicking butt and he has no doubt that you can be cute, hardcore, and kick ass. Sour Cream is your hype man, and biggest fan, he’ll ask you to show him some moves! If you were okay with it! 

Showing him some of your self defense moves can lead to a cuddle pile or a light tickle fight because it’s just the two of you having fun, he thinks your skills are cool and not something he wants to challenge you at- he’s just curious. 

Sour Cream totally gets the insecurity, he has it but has slowly learned how to deal with it. But when he first got into DJing and with the doubt of his step dad, it really weighed on him. So he knows how to help you face those negative feelings. 

Everyone is different on how they handle being insecure but he is always there to be your hype man, and he just lets you know you may not think greatly of yourself but it doesn’t mean you’re not doing spectacular things! 

He loves your singing and asks if you wouldn’t mind him adding some of your vocal tracks into his DJ stuff. 

Sour Cream doesn’t touch without consent, like even holding your hand he asks- though as the relationship grows the way he asks may be more non verbal, like him bumping your hands with his to show he’d like to hold your hand and let you make the first move. But he always makes sure he’s not crossing any boundaries. 

He’s a big cuddle bug, he’s tall and loves to be the big spoon and hug you and curl up. But if you wanted to be the big spoon he’s like “!” He never thought of all those possibilities; it opens new cuddling doors! He’s so excited and 10/10 loves any affection. 

Making you laugh is one of his favorite things to do, he loves to see you happy and full of life, so when you start feeling detached and down he will notice and will move to supportive boyfriend mode. 

He knows you drain yourself by helping others, and helping him at times, so he tries to be the best help for you. 

As your relationship grows he picks up how you help him and will translate it to help you when you need a pick me up. 

Will do his best to give you tips when learning guitar, he knows a few friends who play so he’ll ask them for pointers that he can then give to you. Or if you’re cool meeting his friends and practicing with them he will have a small get together, but there’s no pressure and if you get too anxious he will make an excuse for you so you don’t feel bad about anything. 

He loves horror and honestly he loves a lot of things, this dude is full of admiration and childish awe but it’s all pure. Horror is fun and exciting, it gives him that adrenaline rush. Mystery gets him thinking and discussing different theories with you. Romance makes him mushy and he hugs into you and sometimes he will be extra chessy if you watch a romance flick because it makes him think you want more affection and he really loves to give it. 

Undertale match up: Muffet 

I hope you’re not afraid of spiders, Muffet is such a cute girlfriend and you two would mesh so well in my opinion. I do think monster spiders are a bit different from real spiders, I mean they’re cute in the game so I can just picture them like the Totoro dust sprites. So rather than hairy and spiny legs think soft and cuddly. I can’t say it enough Muffet needs more love, she’s super cute and full of love to give. 

She’s got so many hands to hold, she will let you point at one to hold (I’ve seen this in a comic and I can’t get it out of my head, it’s so cute) and they could be switched out if your arm gets too tired she can wrap her arms around you. 

Loves to comb through and brush your hair, if you’ll let her she’ll try different hairstyles on you. For your goth/emo style she’ll even try to make it fit your aesthetic, maybe doing some macabre braiding with some fun fabric intertwined. 

Heck if you’ll let her she’ll do your makeup, match it with whatever you want, you want it not to be heavy but to give you the intense emo look. Or if you want to look like a goth rock icon she’ll do that! With as many hands as she has it’s easy to get it done, she gently rests her palm on your chin and delicately tilts your head to do your makeup. 

Muffet would adore if you would sing with her, she won’t make you sing for her on your own until you get more comfortable with her because it puts you on the spot. But once you get accustomed to her she would love if you sang to her, she might not be able to help herself and join in. It’s like singing along to your favorite song. 

If you ever express your opinion about your singing being bad she will lightly argue with you, it’s a disagreement and she will explain it as people having a different opinion on music. While you may think your singing is your most hated genre to her is operatic and beautiful! And she will present the fact you’ve gotten awards, so people agree that you have a beautiful voice and are a work of art. She doesn’t push it like it’s a fact, but more so that you may not see your strengths but that others do. 

Loves to hang your art, if you don’t like your stuff hanging around the house you two may share, she will put it in her room or keep it with her while she works. 

You’re never alone when you’re with Muffet, even if she’s not there with you if you seem to be down one of her spiders will give her a heads up and she’ll come to your side to comfort you. 

She loves to cuddle and while you two lay down together she likes to play with your hair and look at your hands, just taking them in her own and comparing them. You’re so interesting to her, Muffet isn’t used to seeing many humans and to be quite frank she doesn’t care too much to meet too many. 

She likes you because of your disposition, your aesthetic, and your interests. Being a human is just another fascinating fact. Your gothic/emo look kind of aligns with her own so she’s excited to discuss fashion with you! Muffet and her spiders will likely create you some fun fashionable gothic clothing based on what you tell her you’re interested in. Or she’ll pick up on the minuscule things that are similar within your favorite outfits. 

Being a spider means she loves the outdoors, broken down, and abandoned locations so going on hikes with you is super refreshing and fun for her. 

She’s so good at comforting you, she’s soft and gentle when speaking, she caresses you gently and knows what to say in tough moments. Gently combing her hands in your hair, and gently scratching your scalp and wiping away your tears. 

She is a wonderful listener and will let you tell her anything, never making you feel ashamed of your emotions- they’re natural after all. And she wants you to know how much she values you and that you haven’t got to feel bad for being who you are. She loves you. 

When you’re blushing she loves to take your face and cup it into her hands and gently squish your cheeks because it’s so cute! 

Don’t you worry about talking to strangers, she can have her spiders handle that for you, any errands you need, they’re very helpful. 

If you want to play with something idly her hand is a good option, it’s romantic and it’s more fun than just playing with your own hand. If you want you can play with two hands, or three!! Honestly as many hands as you would like. 

[littlepurinsesu]

V Watches MagiReco - Episode 4 Review

*Spoilers for Magia Record Anime Episode 4*

Tsuruno is finally here!!!!! (♥ω♥) MagiReco just doesn’t feel like MagiReco without the mightiest magical girl, so her appearance this week was definitely a long awaited one! (๑>ᴗ<๑)

This episode felt significantly slower than the previous one, with a lot more “downtime” and much less action. I did feel a tiny bit bored during some parts, but I do think this was a much-needed breath of air after the fast-paced episode last week :) And anyway, Tsuruno’s mere presence brings plenty of energy already, so perhaps a relatively more “calm” episode would have complemented her introduction the best way!

In short: I loved Tsuruno’s debut. Changing her debut to being at Banbanzai instead of the train station was a very good decision, in my opinion: it allows her to be introduced with the restaurant that makes up such a large part of her character. She’s exactly as I imagined in the game: overflowing with energy, filled with sunshine, and just so, so, so cute!!! The way she literally twirls around all over the place and leans in so close to Iroha with her leg kicking behind her so that she’s almost falling onto the table... it’s like she legitimately cannot stay still even for just one second xD And they even had her say a few of her “battle lines” from the game, which was a really nice touch!

Also, just that gigantic bowl of ramen is already terrifying enough. That PLUS all the other stuff she served Iroha? Did Iroha really manage to finish all of that? O___O And the 50-points joke made a very early and timely debut haha it’s even more hilarious to see in action, and Tsuruno’s reaction was priceless as expected xD

I also appreciate the nice little detail that Mitama really is like a bridge between magical girls in Kamihama. She knows everyone and is happy to introduce magical girls to other magical girls that can help them out. Her signature on the Banbanzai flyer is so cute, too! And it’s nice to see Team Momoko still hanging around Iroha and being a part of the picture even if they’re no longer the focus (unlike whatever the heck happened to Kuroe LOL). Kaede first offering Rena some food and then putting food into her mouth to shut her up was also adorable. Really goes to show how much of a good grip she has on Rena despite being the more meek and timid one in personality heh heh.

By the way, Mitama, tomato sauce does NOT go on cake like that!!! A tiny detail I missed at first, but another good clue as to just how terrible of a cook Mitama is xD (I think this is a really good example of how the MagiReco anime has so many tiny details that seem unimportant but speak a lot about the characters, whether it’s interesting quirks or unusual habits and mannerisms etc.)

Tsuruno’s meeting with Yachiyo was perfect. I mean, just this face alone pretty much sealed the deal for me lmao:

They do a really good job at highlighting the contrast between these two characters, both in regards to how they treat Iroha and how they associate with each other. You can see how happy Tsuruno is at being with Yachiyo again and how hard she’s trying to reignite their old friendship, while Yachiyo reacts coldly and distantly (ouch). I can’t really remember if they included this in the game, but it’s a nice way to foreshadow the reveal that they used to be on a team before Yachiyo broke them all up, so I’m really looking forward to that revelation later on.

The cameo of Ria and Manaka seemed... random? xD I guess they really are going through with the pattern of having at least one cameo of a minor character each episode, but this particular one just didn’t make much sense to me ^^;; I don’t really know what Ria was getting all worked up about? Were she and Manaka also doing the stamp game and were therefore getting competitive? Or was it just because of her competitive spirit whenever she bumps into Yachiyo? It’s most likely the latter, but in that case, that really would make it an “inside joke” that only game players who know about this running gag will understand. Which I... personally don’t think is a very wise thing to do, honestly? >_< They’re nice little easter eggs for players, but they need to make sense to people who are going into the anime blind as well. The Ren and Mayu cameos worked perfectly well and made sense even for non-gamers. But this week’s one? Not so much. But yeah, I’m rambling for a whole paragraph about literally just a few seconds of footage, so maybe it really isn’t that big of a deal haha. Also, I don’t wanna be one of those people who nitpick and complain at every tiny difference, but I really do think Ria looks prettier with the slightly more orange-tinged blonde rather than the straw yellow shade they chose for the anime ^^;;

That legend about the princess and her lover was animated very nicely. The style is almost reminiscent of Kyoko’s backstory, and there’s so much symbolism in every frame and shot (which I won’t even attempt to dissect; I’m sure someone else will do it better than me! ;D). I also really liked that dark twist at the end of the story, too, and the way the mysterious characters surround Iroha and Yachiyo as they walked together adds a nice touch of that “what is reality” vibe that PMMM does so well.

As for the witch fight, I think this is probably the most critical I’m going to sound ever since I started writing these anime episode reviews. Too fast, too easy, too insignificant. To be honest, I didn’t even think that battle was necessary, apart from allowing them to show Tsuruno in her magical girl form. Almost all the witches so far haven’t put up much of a fight, and have been one-shotted really quickly: Zenobia by Yachiyo in Episode 1, Rebecca by Momoko in Episode 2, and now Candy by Tsuruno in Episode 4. They go on about how strong the witches in Kamihama are, but apart from the first episode, I’m not really feeling it with the last two fights. Yes, I get that the magical girls are also stronger because of Mitama’s adjusting, but even then the fights are just over way too quickly. It was like this with the Friendship Ending Staircase last week as well. While I could let it slide with these minor and unimportant witch battles, I hope this trend won’t keep extending to future battles with Rumours as well, since those are such a huge part of MagiReco and a new introduction to the PMMM world that non-players are meeting for the first time.

And this isn’t so much of a complaint as it is a personal preference thing, but I also miss seeing the characters enter the labyrinth layer by layer and really feeling the dangerous, foreboding atmosphere of doom before they finally encounter the witch. The battles so far have all just dumped the girls right into the centre of the labyrinth, with the witches appearing immediately. It does present a nice forceful and alarming feel--which is not necessarily bad, just different--but I do miss the haunting and mysterious atmosphere of the witch labyrinths before the witches themselves emerged.

But onto some positive aspects of the battle scene: I really like the way they presented Iroha. How she mindlessly just dashes forward to attack, almost like a desperate attempt to prove herself to Yachiyo. Obviously that doesn’t work, and the way she meekly asks to Connect but only to get instantly turned down... poor Iroha >_< And again, it was nice to see how they juxtaposed Tsuruno’s and Yachiyo’s responses to Iroha’s weakness: Yachiyo pushes her away and tells her to get back, while Tsuruno welcomes her attempts and brushes it off with a smile when it doesn’t go according to plan. (But last episode implied that Iroha was already adjusted? She can Connect now, so I’m guessing she did? Why is she still so much weaker, though? Is it just inexperience? I really wish they made these things much more explicitly clear...)

As for finally finding the Rumour, I’m really hoping that we’ll finally learn something about Yachiyo’s past next week! I liked how this episode told us more about Iroha’s lack of friends and her dependence on Ui to define her existence, so hopefully we’ll get something about Yachiyo soon, too. They already had some nice foreshadowing this week with some of the things that Tsuruno said and the way she acted around Yachiyo, so getting at least some answers in the next episode would be a nice follow-up. That and the obvious fact that I’m super excited to finally meet Mifuyu! Iroha’s Soul Gem is also darkening, so maybe we’ll even get to see our first animated Doppel next week!

But yeah. A much slower episode this week that, while not perfect, still had plenty of positive aspects! Tsuruno got an awesome introduction, which is basically the most important part of the episode, and they’ve done a nice job at paving the way for plenty of action and revelation in the next episode! (* >ω<)

[biscuitreviews]

Biscuit Reviews Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep

I remember unlocking the secret ending for Kingdom Hearts II back in 2006 with this intriguing cutscene of three people in armor getting ready for what appeared to be a big fight. At that time, I thought that we were getting a glimpse at Kingdom Hearts III and there would be a time skip that would have Sora, Riku, and Kairi as adults. When more information was revealed, we learned that what we were looking at was actually the past and not the future. At that same moment, we also learned that it was not Kingdom Hearts III, but rather Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep and it would be released for the PSP.

To me I saw this as something that the Kingdom Hearts series desperately needed, a backstory to explain how things in its universe works. To some degree, it accomplished this, while leaving myself and many fans even more curious about the Keyblade and its villain, Xehanort. Now, as this is a prequel game, you technically don’t have to play the previous entries to understand Birth By Sleep’s story. However, I would recommend at least playing Kingdom Hearts I, II, and Chain of Memories to have a deeper appreciation and understanding of the story.

For this review, I will be reviewing the Final Mix version of the game, available on the 1.5 and 2.5 collection for PS4.

The story follows three different characters, Terra, Ventus, and Aqua. These three are Keyblade wielders and will be traveling to various Disney worlds for different reasons. Terra is looking for Xehanort while also searching for a way to control the darkness within him. Ventus, is looking for Terra as well hoping to recover his lost memories. Aqua, just like Terra, is also looking for Xehanort and is hoping to bring Ventus back to their home as their master, Eraqus, believes that Ventus is not ready to travel through the various worlds.

You will be selecting which of these characters to play as and you will experience the story in their perspective. Each character has their own unique fighting style. Terra is slow and favors heavy attacks and has high defense, Ventus is agile and has adequate attack and magic stats, and Aqua while also agile like Ventus, is more magic focused and has a slightly lower defense. Now, you could technically play any character in any order, there is a recommended order to understand Birth By Sleep’s story in most cohesive manner, which is as follows: Terra-Ventus-Aqua. My only complaint with this is if the story has a specified order, then why not have your players stay locked in that order and then pick and choose which character you want to play after the initial playthrough. This could have taken away the initial stress of which character the player should play as first.

One thing I would like to complement Birth By Sleep on is how it handled the Disney Worlds. In previous entries, they were merely episodic and didn’t really contribute anything to the main plot at all. In Birth By Sleep, each world actually contributes to the main plot in some way and even helps the characters grow more. Having these worlds contribute to the story makes the struggle that all these worlds face have much more weight to the story to where you feel more invested in these individuals worlds, rather than just making a stop to your favorite Disney World because it’s Disney.

Birth By Sleep’s combat is Kingdom Hearts at the core, but it does have its unique take on the formula just like the other non-numbered sequels. Each character has a set of commands that you’re able to scroll through. These commands will allow them to unleash special attacks and cast spells. Depending on which commands you use, you’ll be able to enter in a “Surge” which will allow your character to perform stronger attacks. This makes combat fun and adds a little bit of strategy to fights. This even allows you to turn a boss battle around if you’re having a tough time fighting a boss.

While you’re exploring the worlds, I noticed that the zones were a mixture of giant rooms with plenty of room to fight and the small cramped spaced similar to Kingdom Hearts I. These small cramped rooms can make the camera uncooperative at times due to the limited space of maneuverability. There’s not a whole lot of these types of zones, but there was enough to make note of it.

There’s not many zones that each character will go through, making the worlds themselves feel smaller than previous entries. This is an aspect I am willing to look past as each character will go through different areas of these worlds with some overlap here and there. Also, Birth By Sleep was originally a portable title for the PSP so going through these worlds in smaller bursts is forgivable as Square Enix was following the design of a portable game.

I will say from personal experience, this is the best way to experience Birth By Sleep as playing this game on a PSP was not very friendly and made some boss fights infuriating because of how the PSP was designed. I couldn’t tell you how many games I just gave up on because of that. For me, Birth By Sleep almost become one of those titles, but I persevered knowing how crucial this game would be to the overall story. Now, navigating the game on a controller with tighter camera control and a comfortable layout, made my experience with Birth By Sleep more enjoyable than it was in the past.

There is another factor that surprised me with Birth By Sleep and that was the inclusion of Mark Hamill as Eraqus and the late Leonard Nimoy as Xehanort. To me, this blew my mind and was a great surprise as I am a fan of Star Trek and Star Wars and a proud member of the George Takei’s Star Alliance. Having these two included in the cast just gave Eraqus and Xehanort more depth and really made them stand out characters. My only complaint is the direction Nimoy was given with Xehanort. Don’t get me wrong, he did a fantastic job as the Seeker of Darkness, but there was a few areas that you can tell he was told to pick up the pace a little bit to match up with Xehanort’s animations, which in turn threw off Nimoy’s delivery in those spots.

I did like the inclusion of post-game content in this one as clearing all three stories and collecting all of Xehanort’s Reports grants you access to the Final Episode which unlocks the true final boss of Birth By Sleep. Now in the Final Mix version, 100% all three characters reports or clear all the stories on Proud Mode, and you’ll unlock the Secret Episode, which follows Aqua’s first moments in the Realm of Darkness.

Overall, Birth By Sleep is a really good title. It has a couple of sore spots, but other than that it’s a fantastic Kingdom Hearts title and created the template on for the additional hand held Kingdom Hearts titles moving forward.

Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep receives a 4 out of 5

[minaminokyoko]

The Incredibles II (A Spoilertastic Review)

Oh, there’s just something special about the feeling you get when you wait an extremely long time for something and it’s completely worth it. It’s rare, especially in films. Most of the time an ultra-late sequel is a cheap cash-in that gets rid of all the original movie’s charming aspects and just regurgitates nostalgia all over your face in the hopes that you’ll mistake it for quality. However, one thing I appreciate about Disney/Pixar’s collaborative films is that for the most part, they give a damn. They don’t always (*side eyes the Cars franchise*) but when they give a damn, they give a good goddamn.

I’m in the camp with many people who would argue The Incredibles is Disney/Pixar’s best film. Granted, I also waffle back and forth between Incredibles and Toy Story 3, but I’d be happy to say either film wins the title as their Best in Show. Thus, the bar is set extremely high for the sequel, and I can see why D/P would be hesitant to follow up what is not only their best film, but a film so well written and executed that it stands toe to toe with some of the best superhero stories period, like Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Avengers, or The Dark Knight. 14 years is a long damn time (almost reaching the infamous Syndrome line of “15 years too late”) but I can happily say they weren’t just sitting on their hands. They actually knocked it out of the park and made a worthy sequel, leaving the ending open enough for a third film if they so desire to go after it.

Overall Grade: A-

Pros:

-Well, any of you who know me know what’s got to go here first: Helen fucking Parr. She was already a bomb ass bitch in the first movie when she infiltrated the facility to rescue Bob, and then throughout the rest of the movie busting heads protecting her family. They take Helen Parr’s general badassery from a 10 and crank it up to 10,000. Helen is ridiculously talented, sharp, acrobatic, intelligent, and amazingly adaptable. It was an absolute joy to watch her on missions. She wowed me over and over again with how she handled the emergencies that came about because of the Screenslaver. Helen is a force to be reckoned with. I love her genuine enthusiasm and confidence. I love that she knew something felt off about the missions even though she was just a little too trusting to stop our villain before she got to her. I’m really excited to know that little girls are going to grow up with this three dimensional badass mom out there breaking glass ceilings and subverting expectations. Helen Parr is the best of the best and no one can touch her. That’s the biggest takeaway I had for this movie. I appreciate her in a whole new way after seeing what she’s capable of just on her own.

-Married to Helen’s badassery is the action sequences. Wow, wow, wow. From Jack-Jack fighting a freaking raccoon in a death battle to the final Avengers-style climax, Incredibles II rocks it with some truly inspired fight scenes and chase scenes. I loved it. I wish I wasn’t broke right now so I could go right back in and see it again. It’s some fantastic action from start to finish, and each piece is well thought out and well staged. It’s never too close and it doesn’t cut away. You’re in the front seat for all of it and it’s incredibly engrossing, to use an inevitable pun.

-The return of Edna Mode. I was worried that since she was somewhat of an Ensemble Darkhorse in the first movie that they wouldn’t be able to make her as funny and charming as her first appearance, but I fell right back in love with Edna in this film. She’s just fantastic. I was in tears when Bob came back for Jack-Jack and the baby was actually mirroring Edna, and Edna loved him so much that she gave the baby clearance to her design lab. It was just the cherry on top of an already wonderful sundae. God bless Edna and Jack-Jack’s interactions. It was just too funny.

-Bob learning to be a stay-at-home dad, while cliché, was amusing and ultimately (mostly) heartwarming. The exhaustion was just so realistic and I know there were some hearty guffaws from the parents in the audience of my theater last night seeing his antics with the kids. I really did feel for him when he collapsed on the couch next to Violet and admitted he just wanted to be a good dad. It hit me right in the heartstrings, as I’ve spent many a late night on the couch with my exhausted father in the past. Bob also got a bit of development in terms of setting an example for the kids and not letting his impulsive nature get the best of him, i.e. with the car.

-The heroes that were gathered together for the climax. I really enjoyed seeing their different powers. None of them were anything I’d never seen before, but I just appreciate how each of them were used and presented a damn credible threat. I also like the smaller touches of their designs, like how I’m pretty sure the little belcher guy was an homage to Ernest Borgnine (who sadly passed away in 2012) and the crusher guy I think was an homage to Mike Tyson (but don’t quote me on that, he looked like him to me). I loved Void and I have a prediction from my time on Tumblr that she’ll be the new fan favorite aside from the villain Evelyn. They were colorful and competent and interesting, and I’d love to see them in the next movie if there is one.

-Violet was both more and less annoying here than in her first appearance. I don’t know if I can put it into words, but I’ll try. In the first movie, she was weak and whiny, and while she ended up becoming competent, I was still sort of just irritated by her. She’s still whiny here, but at least she’s not weak. She had a reason to be upset and it’s good that she stepped up to the plate when it was time to go to work. My suggestion is that they go ahead and do a time skip if they choose to make a third movie so she can outgrow her irritating preteen qualities and be a full blown early adult to resolve those lingering things about her that annoy me. Just let her grow up already and I think she’ll be a fine character on her own.

-Jack-Jack in general was handled brilliantly. I didn’t get tired of the slapstick. He was genuinely surprising the entire time and it almost makes me wonder how they’re going to proceed with him in the future because once he grows up, he might be the most powerful Super we’ve ever seen at all. I mean, someone’s going to do a count of how many abilities he has, but seriously, it would be good fuel for a sequel for Jack-Jack to get older and people want to take advantage of all the things he can do. Though if I were writing it, I’d write that he can only do these amazing things one at a time only for a limited amount of time a-piece, so like he can do them for less than 60 seconds. That would at least help resolve the overpowered problem he could create. But I digress.

-Is it weird that I just really think the Screenslaver is like the most clever villain name and schtick ever?

-I liked the monologue that the Screenslaver gave while Helen was tracking him. It did bring up an excellent point about consumerism and hero worship. I for one know I’m guilty of the latter to a ridiculous extent, but I also have some pretty deep emotional and psychological problems that cause me to fixate on fictional heroes so it’s probably why Screenslaver’s rant hooked me. It’s intentionally ironic and brilliant commentary from the writers.

-I loved the small touch of including Helen, Bob, and Lucius’ theme songs at the end credits. So cute.

-The short film before the movie was also very creative. (Though another reason I think humanity is destined to die out by self-destruction is the whole audience laughing when the mother ate the dumpling baby. I sat there stunned thinking, “What the actual fuck, guys. I don’t think that’s the emotion that they were going for. I think it was supposed to be upsetting, not funny.” It was awkward as hell and I think humanity is doomed even more than I usually do.)

Cons:

-Bob Parr’s aborted character arc. This wasn’t a fully aborted arc, but it was definitely a partially aborted arc. I think that the biggest criticism anyone could throw at this movie is Hero Decay for Bob Parr. He’s broken down pretty badly and he only gets to do hero work twice in a two hour film. The rest of the time he spends as the comedic Butt Monkey stay-at-home dad, and while that’s fine, it rubs me the wrong way that the film sort of picks up a big central issue with him and then drops it entirely. First, I was irked at Bob’s implications when the Deavors wanted Helen. She gives him a dirty look, but I don’t like that the film doesn’t have Helen confront Bob about almost insulting her in front of their potential employers and implying that she’s not as good as he is or not as right as he is for the job, and I further don’t like it that he’s so selfish and egocentric when she does a great job that he doesn’t really congratulate her and actually mean it. Helen pretty much did the impossible. When the movie shows us what she’s able to stop, there’s no way in hell Bob could have done what she did. Yeah, strength is great, but it’s not everything. That’s what the first movie showed us, that Bob has great uses, but he needs to be complemented by other heroes to be effective. Helen is fully capable on her own and doesn’t need help. So it irks me that Bob’s so dismissive of what she’s able to accomplish. Second, it felt a lot like Bob just assumed he’d temporarily be doing the stay-at-home dad thing until Helen opens the gateway for him to do what he really wants to be doing. It didn’t feel like he was ready to make the sacrifice for hero work to raise his kids. It didn’t feel right to me. I thought the film would offer a choice where Winston said he could join her in hero work and Bob says no, he’d rather take care of the kids and let her do her thing because she’s great. I think that was the biggest missed opportunity in the film. I don’t feel as if Bob learned anything. He cares about the kids and Helen, but it still felt like he just wanted self-gratification in the end. He wants to be a hero because it’s all he knows how to be, and the conflict just sort of vanishes once the third act kicks in. I’ll see if anyone else notices this or if it’s just me, but I found myself disappointed in him this time around.

-Evelyn was way, way too obvious as the villain. Granted, it’s not like the first Incredibles was subtle. We were thrown right in with Syndrome and he was a Card Carrying Villain with zero regrets. I just didn’t think it would be so obvious that it was her, but nope, it was her. As soon as Winston told us the backstory, it was like there was a huge blinking sign over her head that it was going to be her. There was an off chance it was Winston, but after a certain point I figured he really was just a big excitable kid who wanted heroes legal again, so by default it was Evelyn. It was too transparent, so the whole movie I was just checking my watch for her to turn evil, and she finally did. There was no attempt to make her seem like she wanted anything other than to see the heroes fail based on that rotten attitude of hers, so maybe it was just a rare spot of laziness from the writers not to hide her very clear intentions.

-Frozone felt a bit underused. Once he put Helen and Bob in contact with the Deavors, I thought maybe we’d see more of him, but he just disappears until the third act. Odd. Not a dealbreaker, just odd.

-I actually though the bodycam thing would be used in a different way than to eventually tip Helen off that something was wrong. I thought that Evelyn was going to manipulate the footage to make it seem like Helen attacked the ambassador and went rogue so she’d be hunted down or something. It just ended up falling short of my expectations, I suppose.

-Although it’s accurate to our actual society, the cops yelling at Bob and Helen for not catching the Underminer really ticked me off. Are you telling me there were zero casualties when he blew the bank through the ground? I find that hard to believe. And it also sounded like they were just mad they didn’t catch him, not that they were mad about them violating the law. Look, fuck off. Cops can’t even handle simple burglaries sometimes, and you want to give these heroes lip about trying to stop someone who drove a drill the size of a building up through the ground and then blasted a whole-ass bank? Whatever. Y’all sippin’ the same Kool-Aid as the people who came up with the Accords in Captain America: Civil War. Your argument is dumb. Go sit down somewhere.  

Honestly, I’m really looking forward to seeing this film again and to finding out if they intend to follow through with a third film to make it a trilogy. After all, if anyone can make three phenomenal movies instead of two good ones and a dud of a third like the status quo, it’s Disney/Pixar. I suggest you run right out to see Incredibles II, because it was well worth the wait.

[2-jarz]

Best Anime Available on Netflix 2019

8. Kill La Kill (2013)

1 season, 25 episodes | IMDb: 8/10

If I had to sum up Kill la Kill in two words, they’d be “fashion battle.” Broadly speaking, its story is pretty much beat for beat what you’d expect from a series about a magical teen — developing powers, last-minute turns of the tide — but the specifics are just bonkers enough to keep that from being a weakness Which are some of the best anime on Netflix. At Honnouji Academy, clothes bestow supernatural abilities on their wearer, turning the usual high school hierarchies into a battleground. At the center of it all is transfer student Ryuko Matoi, who’s come to Honnouji in search of her father’s killer. Her sidekick, a sentient sailor outfit, puts her on the level of the school’s student council, allowing her to tussle with them in her quest for the truth. More modest viewers be warned: the series’ focus on clothing also lends itself to a significant amount of fanservice. As the series progresses, the outfits get skimpier and skimpier until there’s barely anything there at all.

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UFOTABLE

7. Fate/Zero (2011)

2 seasons, 28 episodes | IMDb: 8.3/10

For those looking for darker fare, Fate/Zero should hit the spot. As may be obvious from the fact that the driving event behind the whole series is called “the Fourth Holy Grail War,” it’s heavy stuff. The war is a contest between a select group of mages and their attendant spirits. (The spirits, in one of the series’ strangest gambits, range from Alexander the Great to King Arthur.) They compete for the power of the Grail, which will grant a wish to each of the winning pair. The resulting assortment of competitors doubles as a mix of ideals and morals, and the shifting balance is one of the best aspects of the show. Though there’s a fair amount of comedy mixed in, it’s quite a bleak series, with a death count to rival Game of Thrones and eldritch horrors to contend with, to boot.

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NETFLIX

6. Castlevania (2017)

1 season, 5 episodes | IMDb: 8/10

Even those unfamiliar with anime are likely to have heard of Castlevania, as the franchise is one of the jewels in Konami’s crown. The anime series is produced by Netflix, and boasts a voice cast including Graham McTavish as Count Dracula, who vows revenge against Wallachia after the death of his wife, and Richard Armitage as Trevor Belmont, the last of a clan of monster hunters, who leads the fight against him. (Matt Frewer also features in the cast, which should be a treat for any fellow Max Headroom enthusiasts.) There’s blood a-plenty, and a nice balance between monster and man as per most gothic horror stories — as well as a somewhat romantic aspect, as Dracula is portrayed as a sympathetic villain. The series is also just gorgeously animated, and with a first season of only four episodes, well worth your time.

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ANIPLEX OF AMERICA

5. Fullmetal Alchemist (2003)

1 season, 51 episodes | IMDb: 8.6/10

Fullmetal fans and newbies alike are somewhat spoiled for choice when it comes to Netflix’s offerings: Fullmetal Alchemist and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood are both available on the streaming service, alongside the recent live-action film. But we’re here for anime, so we’ll just discuss the first two. For the purposes of this list, we’re counting both series as one entity, as Fullmetal Alchemist is a seminal property, but not to fear, I’m not about to leave you in the dark. Both Fullmetal Alchemist and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood are adaptations of the original manga, which tells the story of two brothers, Edward and Alphonse Elric, as they search for the Philosopher’s Stone. In an attempt to bring their mother back to life through alchemy, they’ve been transformed. Edward has lost his leg, and sacrifices his arm as well in order to save Alphonse’s soul, binding it to a suit of armor. The Stone is their ticket to restoration. The more recent Brotherhood hews much more closely to the manga, whereas Fullmetal Alchemist essentially turns into an original series about halfway through. In the end, they complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses, but if you have to pick just one, I’d go for Brotherhood as the “canon” experience.

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ANIPLEX OF AMERICA

4. Rurouni Kenshin (1996)

3 seasons, 95 episodes | IMDb: 8.5/10

Like most other entries on this list, Rurouni Kenshin was adapted from a manga series (which appeared in the legendary Shōnen Jump magazine). The title refers to its protagonist, Himura Kenshin, a former killing machine who is now committed to helping others to try to atone for his sins. Of course, his love of peace is challenged when it becomes apparent that someone else has assumed his former mantle as an assassin and plans to throw the Meiji Government into chaos. The characters are all well-defined and well-developed, with the biggest hook being the contrast between Kenshin’s apparent happy-go-lucky attitude and vow never to kill again, and what we know him to be capable of due to his reputation. He’s also a walking example of the way the series focuses on period to tell a story rather than using it simply as set dressing: the show takes place during a transition period in Japanese history, and Kenshin is just as much in flux.

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VIZ MEDIA

3. Inuyasha (2000)

2 seasons, 167 episodes | IMDb: 7.9/10

Inuyasha is the rare franchise that manages to strike a balance between cute and horrifying. To liken it to a current pop culture phenomenon, it’s similar to Outlander, in that its basic plot sounds like something out of a romance novel: a young woman, Kagome, is sent back in time, and must then contend with forces beyond her reckoning, all while getting to know a rambunctious man (well, in this case, half dog-demon), Inuyasha, to whom she seems to be mysteriously bound. There’s plenty of time-travel fluff to go around, but in Inuyasha’s case, it’s augmented by nightmare fuel in the form of a host of demons searching for the magic jewel in Kagome’s possession. The centipede monster in the first episode sets the bar for how unsettling these monsters look, as well as the show’s overall structure as a sort of monster-of-the-week affair. To that end, the show can get a little repetitive, but the cast is uniformly great (including Inuyasha’s antihero brother Sesshomaru, who I think I can confidently say is “the hot one”), and the balance between fun and horror is a rare find.

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FUNIMATION

2. Attack on Titan (2013)

1 season, 51 episodes | IMDb: 8.8/10

Since the manga began in 2009, Attack on Titan has become something of a cultural sensation. At present, only the first season of the anime, which was produced in 2013, is available on Netflix, but it works on its own. (It’s also notably a series that benefits from being available to binge rather than view doled out in segments, as seeing it all in one fell swoop — or a few swoops — makes its repeated cliffhangers less obvious and thereby more tolerable.) Broadly speaking, it’s almost a mecha series, as the driving force of the plot involves fighting giant creatures (the Titans of the title), an enterprise that only starts to become truly tenable when it transpires that one of the human characters, Eren, is a Titan, himself. The difference is aesthetic: the Titans are awful to look at, as they are basically giant humans with their skin stripped away, and their muscles contorted to look as terrifying as possible. As for why it all works, it ultimately comes down to the focus on the coming-of-age stories and how each character’s arc dials into the anxieties that are part and parcel of growing up and dealing with loss. The series is also fairly brutal when it comes to reflecting the realities of living in what is effectively a war zone, as every character is fair game when it comes to Titan fodder. Equal parts steampunk romp and war story, Attack on Titan is one of the best anime series in the game.

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VIZ MEDIA

1. Bleach (2004)

3 seasons, 366 episodes | IMDb: 8.2/10 Bleach has it all. It’s stylish as hell, it’s incredibly well-acted, it’s genre-fluid, and on top of that, it’s well-written. Though it starts out fairly simply, it builds and builds, transforming into an epic that more than earns its place in the pantheon of great anime. The story begins when Ichigo Kurasaki, a high schooler capable of seeing ghosts, takes on the duties of a Soul Reaper in order to protect his family.  It’s a transition that the show handles beautifully, and does again and again as it progresses. The world of Bleach (and the mythology involved) just keeps getting bigger, without ever falling short, or falling flat. The series is also impossible to peg as one genre or another, as there are elements of almost everything baked in. It’s an epic, and unmissable as such. Creator Tite Kubo’s style is just the cherry on top of the cake.

[kihocrystal]

Fall 2016 - Final Impressions

It’s a little after New Year’s, but here’s what I thought of the animes that I finished this past anime season! There’s 12 reviews here, which you can find under the cut! All of them are listed in alphabetical order for your convenience~

Ajin Season 2 - 8.5 / 10 (B+) YMMV on whether this season was weaker than S1, but this is still a very good continuation (& conclusion???) to this series~

animation: Yup, this show is still CGI animated (by Polygon Pictures), which is the thing that tends to drive people away from this show the most. I still don’t mind it, because it’s actually really good for anime CGI! Character expressions and models are still good, and the action (despite the low frame rate) also isn’t bad either! There’s good use of dark lighting and muted colors as well.

characters: The cast (on both sides of the conflict) are good this season as well. Kei and Tosaki team up this season, which allowed for interesting character interactions and situations. Satou is still crazy as ever and doing crazy shit (even when his goonies start defecting from him), making him one of the best (if not *the* best) anime villain in 2016. His attitude of treating countless killing like a game makes him very fun to watch. Poor Kaito got ignored for most of the season again, but at least he swoops in to save Kei in ep. 11(?). Izumi and Tosaki got some development this season (mostly for their relationship + Izumi’s backstory), including a mini-arc in the middle of the season. Even though said arc was debatably filler-ish story-wise, it did jumpstart a change in their relationship, which was good to see.

story: This season picked up where the last season left off, and quickly leads into Tosaki and Kei’s teams working together to put a stop to Satou’s schemes. The initial episodes had a lot of training segments for the new team, but outside of that, the plot progressed like a good thriller should. There were several tense moments (even when the hero team would watch things unfold on their TV) that were entertaining to watch unfold (especially when the hero team finally put their plan into action and *still* weren’t a match for Satou). By the end, though, it was good to see them finally take him down (along w/ Satou being unfazed even when his own men leave him). The finale has a good sense of conclusion to it, but is a bit more open-ended than I was expecting (which probably wasn’t a good idea, since this ending is anime original to begin with) :/  

This season was a good conclusion to a really good series, that’s one of 2016’s many highlights. If you like a good thriller (and can accept the CGI animation), you shouldn’t miss this one!

Bungou Stray Dogs S2 - 8.5 / 10 (B+)

I enjoyed this season more than season one! It’s a really fun & well-animated action spectacle!

animation: BONES did a great job with the visuals again this season (which is par for the course for them)! The realism-leaning art-style works well here again (along with its muted / darker color palette), and it still makes good use of comedic animation and deformed expressions (which utilizes thicker outlines as well). The animation itself is also very good, as action scenes have (for the most part) very good fluidity and special effects! The action and fights deliver quite well, and is one of this show’s strongest aspects.

characters: The main cast is still fun to watch, and all show off their badass qualities in one way or another! While not every character got much development this season, there were some notables that did, including Dazai, Atsushi, and even Akutagawa (to an extent)! The first four episodes gave a spotlight on Dazai’s past with the Port Mafia, plus had its own cool lead (Oda) that had a complete arc of his own. The other episodes gave the supporting cast some time to shine and show off their badassery too (from all three factions). Seeing all the different superpowers that come into play (including the new ones from the Western author-inspired Guild) was cool to see as well!

story: The first four episodes feature a prequel arc involving Dazai and two new characters (Oda and Ango), then the last eight episodes pick up where season one left off. The prequel had a notably darker feel to it, and also had a lot of dramatic weight to it. It definitely has a case towards being the best segment of the entire series! The remainder of the season is no slouch either; it may not be as heavy or dramatic (even though it does have its darker moments), but it has great action and shows off its large cast well. The final two episodes had a great climax too, as Atsushi and Akutagawa teamed up to beat the Guild’s leader (Fitzgerald) in an explosive fight, and even saw Kyouka FINALLY get her happiness in the end!

I had a really good time with this season, which was a notable improvement over its first! If you like action anime or are interested in its literature-inspired themes / characters, you should check this one out!

Flip Flappers - 8.5 / 10 (B+)

this is a really fun and crazy action magical-girl-esque show! Think magical girls meets FLCL :D

animation: Studio 3Hz is a relatively new studio, but they did a great job with the visuals! Everything looks bright and colorful, and they brought a lot of crazy worlds to life within Pure Illusion (snow world, horror film-esque boarding school, Mad Max-esque world, you name it!). The character’s large eyes and jagged-looking hair takes a little getting used to, but it comes out looking great anyway thanks to the awesome animation! Which, yeah, the animation is pretty great! Not every episode is a fluid masterpiece, but the action scenes overall have very fluid movements and smears! However, there were some fanservice-y moments that got kinda uncomfortable at times (I’m looking at you, robot episode…). Other than that, this show definitely had the most flashy and crazy visuals and animation out of any show this season~

characters: The main cast was very quirky, to put it simply! Cocona was the “straight-face” during all the chaotic adventures, and Papika was full of optimism and enjoyed the whole ride! I liked their relationship and how it grew over time, even though it was queerbait-y at times. I also liked Yayaka, and how she stayed by Cocona, even when she was working for the enemy. The other members of both factions didn’t really get much screen time (outside of the two twins Yayaka worked with), and the later-revealed Nyunyu, despite being touted as the Third Child, didn’t do much either. Dr. Salt (and Mimi later on) get some good backstory though, and play big roles in the climax. The final arc in general gives more depth to several characters (including the main duo), turning what we knew about them on its head!

story: The main premise starts out as the main duo going from world to world within the mysterious Pure Illusion dimension, in order to collect amorphous fragments. The first half of the show is mostly episodic, as each episode features a different creative setting that they must travel to (and most likely fight against Yayaka & the enemy faction). These episodes range from action spectacles to more grounded & atmospheric (it’s kinda like Alice in Wonderland!) The show’s second half takes a notably different approach (at least partially explained by a change in lead writer), as it becomes more story-driven with a big focus on exploring several main character’s backstories (& them coming to a head in the climax). Cocona’s mother reappears and acts as the villain in this final act, so the conflict feels more personal to them. I really liked seeing all the secrets being revealed, and watching the final battle play out! The final episode had some callbacks to the first episode, and helped brings things full circle, which was nice!

This was definitely one’s of the season’s best action and visually-impressive shows! If you like magical girl shows, or like “trippy” anime like FLCL or Space Dandy, you should check this out!

Fune wo Amu - 8.5 - 9.0 / 10 (A-)

A really good laid-back slice-of-life drama about making a dictionary! The premise *sounds* boring, but it made for one of the season’s best shows~

animation: ZEXCS hasn’t been around much lately, but they did a nice job here with the visuals! The art-style leans more towards realism, but leaves out enough details to keep that “anime” look. The backgrounds look nice as well, and the color palette as a whole makes good use of muted colors (it definitely gets the show’s overall feeling of realism across!). The animation is fine as well, though it’ll break out a nice & fluid walking sequence at times too (even if it’s a little clunky). The mid-episode sections involving the dictionary mascots were bright and colorful, and used thick lines (making it very distinct from the main show). The visual style overall is a nice complement to what’s happening in the story (and helps it be beautiful at times too).

characters: The main cast is not that large, but they’re all fun and laid-back; not to mention they’re ADULTS, which is great to see in anime. Majime is a good lead, as he starts out kinda socially-awkward but his passion for words breaks through (& he becomes more confldent over time too!). My favorite character was definitely Nishioka; I really liked his outgoing & suave personality who helped get things done in his own way (+ didn’t take shit from third party contributors either!). His VA performance by Hiroshi Kamiya also was a big contributing factor. The other co-workers were enjoyable as well (to the point where Matsumoto’s eventual death was an emotional moment ;~; ), and had a good group dynamic. Even though the main two significant others (Kaguya and Miyoshi) didn’t have tons of screentime, their personalities & how well they bounced off of their partners made up for it. Even the later addition of Midori to the team was good, as she learned to appreciate dictionary-making as well.  

story: The premise of following a group of people making a dictionary sounds kinda boring on paper (heh heh), but the execution more than makes up for it. The atmosphere and story-progression are very down-to-earth, and it does a good job showing how interesting words and definitions can be. The character arcs also add intrigue to the show, including Majime falling in love with Kaguya and Nishioka being transferred out of the dictionary department (that particular arc added a lot of depth to Nishioka’s character & was a great watch!). The mid-episode chibi-dictionary segments have little trivia bits about dictionaries, but they’re not that memorable otherwise. There’s a big time skip slightly later than halfway through the series; it takes a little time for the viewer to adjust, but it goes back to business as usual in no time. The final episodes show the last steps of finishing the titular dictionary, ending w/ a finale episode that wraps up everything really well in a poetic (& even kinda emotional) way.

This show is definitely underrated, and is one of the season’s best shows for sure! If you like laid-back slice-of-life shows (even if it’s about an unusual subject matter), then check this one out for sure!

Haikyuu: Karasuno vs Shiratorizawa - 9 / 10 (A)

(Note: this review is written in a different style from the others; I was initially gonna use this style for all my reviews like in past seasons, but I lost my notes for three reviews I wrote afterwards due to computer issues. I ended up switching to a different style when rewriting them, and it just kinda stuck for the others...)

Really good third season! it focused on just one match, but it was a big one!

animation:

Production I.G. hits it out of the park, as always

INCREDIBLY FLUID & DYNAMIC movements (spikes, quick movements, jumps, etc.)

gotta love those action lines & varying thicknesses of the outlines :D

not to mention the 3D camera in the final spike of the match!

just… an incredible action spectacle! a feast for the eyes~

characters:

this whole season is just seeing the team come together & show off their skills!

each character had their own moment of badassery along the way :’)

the star of the season (or… MVP, if you will :P) was *definitely* Tsukishima!

he finally got emotionally involved in his volleyball! (that fist pump ;~; )

plus he was a great strategist & was a huge asset to helping Karasuno win!

we also got introduced to Shiratorizawa’s players in detail!

each guy got a decent amount of backstory… just not a lot

the one who got the most focus (besides Ushijima) was definitely Tendou!

he was very much a “joker” character; always wanting to mess w/ his opponents

shout-out to coach Ukai, whose seiyuu passed away before the show started airing ;~;7

his old seiyuu’s final line was a great line to go off on ;A;

story:

the entire season was dedicated to just one final match!

it created good suspense too, just like a real sporting match!

especially since it came down to a deuce in the final set (out of FIVE)!

there was a lot of back-and-forth action too (i.e. quick changes in momentum)

while the story was simple, it had great execution and attention to detail!

the final moment when Karasuno won the match was great as well!

it has an open ending as well (since they still gotta go to nationals! plus Kageyama got a training camp invite!)

overall, this was a great continuation that kept up what this show is so good at delivering~

Hibike Euphonium 2 - 9 / 10 (A) a great conclusion to a really good show about a high school band!

animation: Kyoto Animation does a stellar job yet again! Muted color palette, shiny highlights & lighting (like they’re glowing!), great fluidity in the animation (like w/ walking, running, concert scenes), effective character animation (i.e. small movements). Character art-style is a good mix of moe and realistic characteristics. Just a great looking show all around!

characters: The group dynamic of the cast (i.e. the band itself) remains strong, but there were some characters that got good development this season! The first half had an arc involving Mizore and Nozomi, whom we didn’t really know previously! The second half was more centered around Asuka, who had a great character arc! Even Kumiko had good development in this half of the show (since she was dealing w/ the situation involving her sister Mamiko as well)! It was great seeing her take action after seeing her in an observer role for most of the show prior. We also got some insight into Taki-sensei’s past, which led to a small character arc for Reina as well (even though it still involves a relationship w/ a massive age difference :T).

story: This season covers the rest of the school year right from where S1 left off. Most of the plot is related to the previously mentioned character arcs, which were all executed wonderfully. Even though the drama isn’t focused as much on the band’s competition progression / preparation this time around, we do still get to see them compete on the big stage and even reach their goal of the Nationals! The finale also brings the show to a fitting conclusion, as the third-years graduate and the band starts anew. It’s nice to see a definitive ending in an anime~

I probably enjoyed this season even more than the last one, and it’s definitely one of the best shows of this season. If you like character dramas (and/or shows about orchestral bands), you should definitely check this out!

Magical Girl Raising Project - 7.0 / 10 ( C ) unfortunately, this was one of this season’s lowlights… it’s basically a bad madoka derivative :/

animation: This is one aspect of the show that I liked (done by Studio Lerche). The art-style is very rounded and cutesy (which is fitting for a magical girl show). What is *not* fitting is how much they try to pull off “sexy” character design elements, like skimpy outfits and big boobs / clevage; it just really clashes w/ the “moe” art-style. The character designs themselves have a mix of different tropes (witch / cowgirl / dog / goth lolita / etc.) too. Animation-wise, it was a mostly standard effort (not bad, but not good either). The fight scenes could’ve used more fluidity as well. Shout-out to the ending theme by Nano, whose one of my fav anisong artists!

characters: Just like the character designs, the group of personalities here is also a mix of different tropes that are played mostly straight. There were characters I really liked personality-wise (like Top Speed, La Pucelle, and Hardgore Alice), but there were also characters I really hated (I DISLIKED THE ANGELS FROM THE MOMENT THEY FIRST SHOWED UP; THEY’RE SO MEAN-SPIRITED!!!). Mostly though, I felt indifferent about a lot of them, which made their death scenes have little to no impact on me. Their backstories mostly tend to be shown in the same episode that they kicked the bucket, which also didn’t help matters. Said backstories in question also seemed to use every tragic backstory trope in the book, which just kinda made things ridiculous. Also, both Calamity Mary and Cranberry were built up as legitimate threats over the show’s run, but were defeated rather anti-climatically (especially the latter), which was kinda lame.

story: The premise is basically Battle Royale meets magical girls, as the cast is forced to kill each other to survive. At least, that’s how it starts, but then certain characters (like Swim Swim and Calamity Mary) start killing others just for kicks. I actually didn’t mind the first four episodes too much (outside of the mean-spirited antics of Ruler’s gang): the setup wasn’t bad and the death scenes of Ruler and Nemurin were executed (*ba dum tsh*) in a somewhat-interesting way. However, after that point the gore and EDGE goes into full force, as fight scenes and deaths are shown in such a dark (& even quick) manner that they don’t have the impact that they should have. (The lone exception to this is Hardgore Alice’s death scene, and not by much. Heck, I even fist-pumped when the two angels died...) They even tack on some purely-for-shock-value stuff at the end of some of these deaths (like Sister Nana’s piss trail after her hanging, or the reveal that Top Speed was pregnant after her death.) Lastly, the final episode makes the whole ordeal feel not worth it in the end, since Fav gets what he wants out of the killing game in the end (even though he himself gets killed), and it feels like the survivors are just worse off in the end.

This show joins Daybreak Illusion in the dubious “bad madoka ripoff club.” It’s hard to say which one of the two I dislike more, since they both are bad in different ways. Either way, this show is one that I would probably advise that you skip.

Occultic;Nine - 7.5 / 10 (C+)

An interesting story that is ultimately weighed down by its ridiculously fast pacing…

animation: A-1 Pictures made this show look quite good (and interesting)! The art-style makes good used of painted background, muted colors, dynamic lighting + shadows, and fuzzy / jagged outlines on characters! Certain characters (like the murdering minor) are drawn more realistically at times too. The visual direction had some interesting angles from time to time (but also made some scenes rotated for no real reason). Also, WHY ARE RYO-TAS’s BOOBS SO BIG??? THEY’RE IMPOSSIBLE BOOBS

characters: The main cast has a good mix of personalities; I liked seeing the characters bounce off each other. Shun in particular had a fun personality (which owes a lot to his VA’s performance), and I liked Asuna’s later introduction (since she was an alive detective who could talk with the dead to an extent). Gamon (and a couple others, like Sarai) could get kinda annoying at times, since he tends to say a lot without much pause. However, they don’t get a ton of development. Gamon at least gets some backstory involving his dad, and Aria has backstory involving his dead brother (said story is kinda messed up too). I also liked how Ryo-tas was revealed to have Aveline possessing her from time to time (which made her suspicious leading up to it).

story: There’s a lot going on in this supernatural sci-fi mystery; a bunch of mysterious events (including murders and a mass drowning) lead a group of teens to uncover a big conspiracy and put a stop to it. The story is definitely hard to follow at times, since they throw lots of info at you (not to mention a lot of technobabble). It gets more interesting once the twist at the end of episode 6 occurs (as most of the main cast is revealed to be dead / ghosts), along with more reveals. There’s a lot of interesting ideas here (not to mention the story has a definitive ending), but it’s really held back by how *fast* the pacing is. Episode 1 is infamous in how fast it goes (seemingly sped-up dialogue, little pauses in-between dialogue & other scenes, etc.), but even though it gets better after that, it’s still a big issue. I actually started adjusting the playback speed to 0.9x after seeing someone else suggest that on r/anime. The final episode is kinda bittersweet, as the organization is defeated and Gamon gets to see his dad again, but Gamon seems to still be stuck in the spirit realm (and the epilogue I felt was too short).

As a fan of the Sci;Adv series, I had a good time with this one, even though it’s far from the best show this season. If you’re a fan of other shows in that series (like Steins;Gate or Robotics;Notes), you’ll find something to like here. Just remember to adjust the playback to 0.9x speed for a better time :P

Show By Rock!! # - 7.5 / 10 (C+)

Not *as* good as season 1, but I still had a good time with it!

animation: BONES did good visuals this season too, as it has the same quality and style as season one. It’s very bright and colorful (and shiny!). Animation fluidity was mostly fine, with better fluidity during most performance sequences. The CGI returns (and is of the same quality as in season one, which is a good thing), but doesn’t show up as much.

characters: The main cast is fun to watch, just like in season one (and honestly, the cast is the biggest draw to this show)! Plasmagica got a few focus episodes that helped develop them slightly more (Retoree & Cyan). ShinganCrimsonZ definitely got more focus this season, as they played a role in the Arcareafact and Bud Virgin Logic arcs, along with learning more about Rom + Shuzo’s past, along with Aion’s past! The new villain Victorious was a simple evil villain, but I didn’t think she needed a dark backstory to justify her being evil (what’s wrong with her just simply being an deity of darkness?)

story: Plot progression was very simple this season, as most episodes revolved around character arcs (or focus episodes). There was an overarching plot introduced in episode one, but it didn’t have much relevance again until the last third of the season. I enjoyed the character-based episodes, as they either showed us more fun hijinks with the crazy fun cast, or helped flesh them out a bit more. The final episode particularly saw a decline in visual quality (ex: the big collab performance that was built up over the past two episodes was shown in sub-par 2D animation) and just had weird execution overall.

If you enjoyed season one, you’ll probably enjoy this one as well! Check this series out if you like fun characters and music performances~

Shuumatsu no Izetta (aka Izetta the Last Witch) - 8.0 / 10 (B)

This was a fun & enjoyable historical fantasy fiction show! Nothing mind-blowing, but I had a good time with it~

animation: This show had good visuals overall! The art-style for the characters is very similar to what I call the “A-1 Pictures” art style (as seen in shows like SAO). I liked the painterly backgrounds and muted color palette, which presented the historical WWII setting well. Animation-wise, the fluidity is really good, especially in the early episodes. The action looks great to start, but diminishes in quality over time (even though it’s still fine by the end). However, I did like how creative the action could be at times (like using trains and spears as aerial weapons!). Bonus mention to the great opening theme song by AKINO with bless4!

characters: The cast was fine overall, but the stars of the show were definitely Finé and Izetta. Finé is a strong leading lady who doesn’t flinch in the face of terror (which is fitting for royalty like her!), and Izetta is a good fighter in her own right w/ her magic! I also liked seeing their relationship play out, even though it has some queerbait-y moments. The side characters had fun personalities, but none of them were super-standout either (though some on both Elystadt and Germania sides got a little bit of focus / screentime. A good example of this was Muller, who at least had his character arc come full circle).  

story: The premise is based in an AU World War II, where a small country gains the help of a young witch to help fight off the looming superpower threat. The first few episodes started out relatively strong, with several good action scenes showcasing the two female leads and Elystadt’s main cast. The overall quality kind of dipped after that, but there were still some good moments there. I wish Sophie being a major player was foreshadowed a bit better, and the quick love(?) arc involving Ricelt could’ve been done better (or tied into the main story more). The finale didn’t quite go back to the early-episodes quality, but it still had fun story & action beats, and wrapped things up in a conclusive way.

Even though the rest of the show didn’t *quite* live up to those first few episodes, it’s still an enjoyable, action filled time. If you enjoy fantastical historical fiction shows, you’ll find something to like here.

Udon no Kuni no Kimiro Kemari (aka Poco’s Udon World) - 8.5 / 10 (B+)

This was a really sweet show about the themes of family! It’s easy to compare it with shows like Barakamon and Sweetness & Lightning, but it forges its own identity by the end~

animation: LIDENFILMS doesn’t have a *ton* of prior work, but they did a nice job with the visuals! The art-style is quite distinct; it has pretty watercolor backgrounds and a bright color palette (it looks kinda like a storybook in a way!). The characters have rounder-than-usual eyes (especially with the kid characters) and all have long, white highlights on their hair and bodies! The animation itself isn’t anything special, but it gets the job done for a cute slice-of-life show like this one.

characters: The main cast was very down-to-earth and enjoyable to watch! The main lead Souta got some great character development over the course of the show; I enjoyed seeing him re-discover his love for his hometown and for his family (including his deceased dad). Poco was also a really cute kid; him being a tanuki allowed for some good supernatural stuff towards the end of the show. The side characters were also really good! They all had fun personalities and had good interactions with Souta and Poco (Hiroshi falling in love with Rinko comes to mind); Rinko in particular got some good development towards the end (as she had uncertainties about being a mom, and Poco helped give her confidence!). I don’t have any comments about the Gaogao-chan segments & its characters, because I skipped them every episode ^^;

story: This show follows the daily life of Souta, who just returned to his hometown after time away, and Poco, a tanuki who meets South and starts spending time with him. A lot of the story progression involves small events with the main duo, like hanging out with Mai and her kids, or spending time with Nakajima or Rinko. The story’s main core though is learning about Souta’s situation (his falling out w/ his parents + hometown, him moving to Tokyo, his leg injury, etc.) and seeing how Poco changes his perception of all of these aspects over time (with the power of cuteness, family bonding, and even some supernatural flashbacks!). The show as a whole is really adorable to watch; not to mention quite heartfelt and emotional at times! It really gets the feeling of “family” down, especially with an atypical family like this one. The final episode definitely tugs on the heartstrings, as Poco shows Souta how much his father truly loved him, and the two have to go their separate ways ;~;  

This show was definitely the most pleasant surprise of the season for me, along with being one of the season’s most underrated shows (alongside Fune wo Amu)! If you like slice-of-life shows, or enjoyed Barakamon and/or Sweetness & Lightning, you should check this one out!

Yuri!! On Ice - 8.5 / 10 (B+)

A very enjoyable sports anime about ice skating, that also features one of the best examples of an LGBT couple in all of anime!

animation: MAPPA did a really nice job with the visuals! The art-style leans a bit more towards realism, but also makes good use of cartoon-y expressions + comedic animation. (I also get a kick out of how similar Yuri K. looks to Parasyte’s Shinichi, since both shows have the same character designer :P). Animation-wise, the fluidity is definitely above-average and the figure skating routines look great as well, especially considering it’s done in all 2D animation! (There are some routines later in the show by supporting characters that sacrifice staying on-model for consistent fluidity, though).

characters: The cast as a whole is fun to watch, and has a good mix of personalities. The standout characters for me were definitely Yuri K. and Victor; I liked how both had goofy and serious sides to their personalities. Seeing their relationship develop over time (and how it helped both characters learn and grow) was one of my favorite aspects of the show, as it never failed to put a smile on my face! (It also helps that it’s one of the best-portrayed LGBT couples in anime, period!) Yurio was also a good rival, who really showed growth in his character (and his respect for Yuri and his grandpa) over time! The other supporting characters (mainly the other skaters) were also enjoyable, even though they didn’t get much focus development-wise (besides JJ, kinda). They still had fun interactions with each other and the main cast (especially in episode 10), so I still definitely liked having them around.

story: The story follows Yuri who, after reaching a low point in his career, gets his idol Victor to coach him through the next ice skating season, in order to win gold! The main story progression takes Yuri through each of the competitions leading up to the Grand Prix Finals, just like most sports anime. While the drama and suspense coming from the competitions themselves isn’t as strong (in comparison to other sports anime like Haikyuu, anyway), the routines are still really good and the feeling of competition still gets across. (Besides, the most effective serious and triumphant moments for me came from the ups and downs of Yuri and Victor’s relationship, anyways :P). The episodes also kinda felt fast-paced at times (not nearly as bad as Occultic;Nine, though); perhaps a nitpick, but it was noticable. The final episode ended things on an open-ended but good note, as Yuri falls just short of Gold (and Yurio wins!) but is determined to win next time (plus Victor decides to un-retire and the two of them do a pair skate at the end!!! Yay!!!)

This was definitely one of the season’s best shows that will surely put a smile on your face! If you like sports anime or romance shows, you should go watch this for sure!

[entergamingxp]

Trials of Mana is Shaping Up to Be a Fantastic Re-imagining of a Classic

March 22, 2020 9:00 AM EST

Trials of Mana, a full 3D rebuilding of the original Seiken Densetsu 3, is shaping up to be a more than worthy remake of the classic JRPG.

Seiken Densetsu 3 was originally the third entry in the Seiken Densetsu franchise released in 1995 for the Super Famicom. The game never saw an English release until now, under a new title Trials of Mana.

This version is special, however, as it’s not a simple port of the original 16-bit version but a complete 3D remake of the game built from the ground up — which is an impressive feat. But does it successfully make the transition from 2D to 3D well? My answer is a resounding yes.

Just starting the game, players will already encounter one of the most interesting features of Trials of Mana: its character select system. This allows players to first select a main character and then two companions for a total of three out of six possible characters with different weapons, strengths, stats, starting points, goals, and specialties. Even better is that once you choose your main character and companions, the plot alters to accommodate, resulting in key plotline differences based on how you mix and match characters.

Once you’ve chosen your three characters the game then moves on to the main characters prologue and once you learn more about this setting backstory personality and later on what motivation drives them to Journey. The prologue also introduces the player to combat and allows you to adjust both to basic controls and to the character’s unique skill set.

After that, you begin the game proper and follow that protagonist on their journey, whether epic or personal. For instance, I chose Riesz — a princess and guard captain– in which her journey’s purpose is to both save her younger brother Elliot kidnapped by evil forces and to restore her ruined kingdom. As your chosen hero travels, they’ll eventually encounter both companions and other playable characters. If the former, you then have the option of playing through their prologue for their backstory and to brush up on their battle style. And if you choose to skip it altogether, the game doesn’t penalize you.

Interestingly enough, if you encounter characters that aren’t part of your party, they’ll end up not joining you and their dialogue will alter depending on whether they’re meant to join you at that point. During my playthrough the party encountered a little girl named Charlotte, one of the six main characters. If you already didn’t choose her at the start, Riesz will refuse Charlotte’s proposal to join the group, and she will end up staying in her town instead. I would assume if she was one of your picks this is the point where she would officially join. It’s fascinating to see how the game adjusts depending on what characters you choose and when they come into your party.

Enemies are on the world map and as soon as you enter an area they occupy battle immediately starts. You can either choose at this point to fight them or attempt to escape by running from the area long enough until the escape gauge fills. However, some battles such as bosses are inescapable (which is indicated by a red line), unlike the yellow line of normal encounters.

Combat is action based as players can use a variety of tasks such as weak attacks, strong attacks, evasions, jumps, aerial attacks, and special attacks. You can also hold down the button used for strong attacks to charge it. It’s simple yet surprisingly flexible with a good variety of possible strikes. Special attacks are called Clash Strikes and they’re denoted by a special double gauge with a percentage next to it at the bottom of the screen called the CS gauge. This denotes how much energy you have charged for Class Strikes, which requires 100 percent or more.

There’s also great attention to detail that I appreciate, such as the fact that ground-based attacks can’t hit aerial enemies; instead you actually have to jump to reach them. Then only when they’re knocked down can the party fight them normally. Most action games don’t even bother to incorporate something as simple as that, and it made me realize the amount of care put into Trials of Mana.

Each enemy type has a special attack and its range is denoted by an area-of-effect marking, giving you and your companions ample time to dodge as long as you pay attention. Dodging is not an easily ignored window dressing but a vital mechanic that prevents party members from taking heavy damage. Combat has one major downside, however, which is a lack of a proper targeting system. This means you’re often stuck rotating the camera constantly to keep facing the enemy. Luckily the game doesn’t punish you for not having your enemy in perfect sights at all times. However, players are still expected to carefully consider what moves to use during battle.

The other companions are AI controlled while players directly control the main hero. Good thing the AI itself isn’t horrendously stupid. They’ll dodge normal and area-of-effect moves, thereby avoiding needless damage, and instead follow the player’s lead in how and when they attack. This means instead of babysitting teammates, players can solely focus on how they’re using their own main character to the best of their abilities. To sweeten the deal, players have the option to customize AI behavior in the strategy menu, allowing you to tailor their behavior based on their combat roles.

As the party defeats enemies and levels up, they earn training points, which are used to learn new abilities and moves unique to that character. By meeting certain requirements during battle, such as taking no damage or completing a sortie in a certain amount of time, you can earn bonus experience. This also serves as a great incentive to learn the system better and become more adept at combat.

Each character has five stats: stamina, strength, intelligence, luck, and spirit and each character specializes in certain stats so it’s wise to choose abilities that complement their strengths. Once you choose a stat to augment, there’s a list of abilities or moves that correspond with that stat and you can spend training points to learn it.

The skill system is simple and yet has some nice flexibility and complexity, which allows you to customize your characters as you see fit. Though it’s best to put your training points into stats that complement your character stat strengths, there is a valid strategy in buffing up their weakest stats to prevent enemies from exploiting them.

The intertwining of character stories and arcs with each other is the game’s own unique system that’s well executed. Each character’s individual stories are what you’d expect from a fantasy JRPG. Not to say that this is bad by any means — it’s refreshing to play a JRPG in which character motivations are clear, easily defined, and without being too convoluted. In fact, I would say that the presentation and plot of this game is extremely reminiscent of early 2000s JRPGs, which is oddly endearing as I rather miss that style of earlier 3D JRPGs.

Graphics have been completely overhauled from the original sprite art from 1995’s Seiken Densetsu 3. This means that every single aspect of this game is rendered in full 3D, including the character models, environments, and combat. I’m sure for old school fans of this game it must be quite the treat to see this 2D classic reimagined in full 3D. And while Trials of Mana is not the most graphically impressive JRPG on the market, the visuals are still colorful and vibrant, bringing the world to life.

Meanwhile the OST is brimming with fantastic remixes of classic soundtracks from the original Trials of Mana. It’s particularly noteworthy when the game’s boss theme makes its triumphant debut in the battle against the first boss Full Metal Hugger. The composer clearly put a lot of love and care into creating a soundtrack that both works as a tribute to the original music and also remasters it into an OST that better suits the remake’s visuals.

However, as much as I appreciate the call back to early 2000s JRPGs, there are a few drawbacks to this sort of delivery. To name a few: the pointless backtracking, the inconsistent English voice acting, and the constant barrage of cutscenes. Depending on your tolerance level, they can either be a minor annoyance or have a major impact on your enjoyment of the game.

I personally fell into the former camp as I enjoyed my experience with Trials of Mana. It’s a fun and deceptively simple action JRPG with a good sense of depth and complexity underneath its colorful and saccharine visuals. Combat and the skill system are easily my favorite parts of this game but there’s sure to be something that attracts most fans of JRPGs. For both old fans of the original Seiken Densetsu 3 and for newcomers unfamiliar with either the series, the game, or both, Trials of Mana is an easy and solid recommendation.

March 22, 2020 9:00 AM EST

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/03/trials-of-mana-is-shaping-up-to-be-a-fantastic-re-imagining-of-a-classic/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=trials-of-mana-is-shaping-up-to-be-a-fantastic-re-imagining-of-a-classic

[gamerszone2019-blog]

Fire Emblem: Three Houses Review - War And Peace

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/fire-emblem-three-houses-review-war-and-peace/

Fire Emblem: Three Houses Review - War And Peace

Fire Emblem: Three Houses asks a lot of you. Every piece, from battle to friendships to training your units, must be managed both individually and as part of a whole. It can be intimidating, but when it all clicks together, it really clicks. Mastering the art of thoughtful lesson planning as a professor improves your performance on the battlefield, where success relies on calculated teamwork and deft execution. Cultivating relationships during battle in turn draws you closer to each of the characters, who you then want to invest even more time into in the classroom. Every piece feeds into the next in a rewarding, engrossing loop where you get lost in the whole experience, not just in the minutiae.

Three Houses casts you as a mercenary who, while out on a mission with their father, runs into a group of teens under attack. After a brief introduction and battle tutorial–which you shouldn’t need, since you’re apparently already an established mercenary, but we’ll go with it–you learn that they are students at Garreg Mach monastery. Each of them leads one of the school’s three houses: Black Eagles, Blue Lions, or Golden Deer. At the behest of the church’s archbishop, who definitely gives off nefarious vibes but is also a gentle mom figure, you end up becoming a professor and must choose which of the houses to lead. There is a lot of mystery to the setup, with consistent hints that something is not quite right, and it’s easy to get absorbed in trying to figure out what the archbishop and various other shady figures are up to.

Your main role as professor is to instruct your students in matters of combat and prepare them for story battles at the end of each month. Battles in Three Houses feature the same turn-based, tactical combat at the heart of the series, albeit with some changes. The classic weapon triangle is downplayed quite a bit in favor of Combat Arts, which have been altered somewhat from their introduction in Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. Combat Arts are attacks tied to a weapon type and can boost a unit’s attack power at the expense of weapon durability; some are effective against specific enemy types, like armored units. You can also unlock skills outside of Combat Arts that grant you better stats with certain weapons, like a heftier boost for using an axe against a lance user, similar to the old weapon triangle. It’s the same complexity the series is known for but less abstracted, making it a bit easier to strategize without sacrificing depth.

One of the big combat additions is battalions, mini armies you can equip that provide various benefits to a unit during battle. They also give you a new type of attack called a Gambit, which varies based on the type of battalion–magic-focused, brute force, and so on–and stuns the enemies it hits. Gambits are limited-use and can be incredibly powerful against the right enemies. You can increase a Gambit’s effectiveness even further if one or more of your other units are within attack range of the target, a tried-and-true Fire Emblem concept that applies to all kinds of attacks. There’s also an anime-style splash screen as you attack that shows each character involved in the Gambit looking fierce, which adds a nice bit of drama.

How much you use Combat Arts and Gambits depends on what difficulty you’re on. On Normal difficulty, well-trained units will likely be able to dispatch most enemies in one or two hits without the help of Combat Arts or Gambits. On Hard, however, enemies hit harder and withstand your attacks better. You have to think much more carefully about unit placement, the best time to use a Gambit and take advantage of its stun effect, and how many Combat Arts you can fire off before your weapon breaks. This is where things get exciting; after a few turns of cautious setup, you (hopefully) get to knock out tons of enemies as your plans fall into place.

Some of the early-game and optional battle maps are open spaces that don’t require you to think too hard, especially on Normal. But the story battles throughout feature a variety of map layouts–from pirate ships to what appears to be a lava-filled cavern–that challenge you to consider where your units need to be, both in the next turn and several turns down the line. Many of them have different routes, enemies coming at you from multiple angles, optional treasure to chase, and other quirks that require you to split your party up or change their equipped classes to suit the situation. Thieves, for instance, can open chests and doors without a key, while flying units don’t take damage from ground that’s on fire.

The depth of strategy in these elements really shines on Hard difficulty, but especially so when coupled with Divine Pulse, another limited-use ability. Divine Pulse allows you to rewind time in order to redo all or part of the battle, usually if one of your units dies. Rewinding with Divine Pulse shows just how important unit placement and attack choice can be, as even a slight change can make or break the encounter. It’s also just a nice quality-of-life feature if you play on Classic mode, in which units who die in battle are lost forever and can’t fight or train anymore. You might still soft reset from time to time, but it’s great to be able to rectify a mistake right away and get a shot of instant gratification for a job well re-done.

Battling, of course, is only one part of life at the monastery. The backbone of Three Houses is the monthly school calendar, and if you like organizing things, planning ahead, or school in general, this can be the most engrossing part. On Sundays, you have free time you can spend in one of four ways: exploring the monastery, participating in side battles, holding a seminar to improve your students’ skills, or simply taking the day off. Mondays are for instruction, which consists of selecting students from a list and choosing a few of their skills to boost. The rest of the week goes by automatically, with a sprite of the professor running along the calendar and stopping occasionally for random events or story cutscenes. It sounds a bit hands-off, but there’s a lot to think about as it is, and the week-by-week rather than day-by-day structure keeps things moving and ensures you never have to wait too long to progress in any area.

The predictable structure of each month–and the fact that you can see the full month’s schedule with events listed ahead of time–gives you the foundation to make effective plans. All that time management can definitely be overwhelming, at least at first. You have to keep tabs on your students’ skills and study goals, your own skills, everyone’s inventory, and various other meters and menus while planning for the lessons and battles to come. But you’re treated to a near-constant stream of positive reinforcement as those meters fill up week by week and your students improve their skills. You’re always moving toward the next thing: the next level up, the next skill you need to develop, the next month and what may unfold.

To complement this, your activities when exploring the monastery (as well as how many battles you can participate in, if you choose to battle on your day off) are limited by activity points. You get more as your “professor level” increases, which means you have to balance activities that boost your professor level with ones that help your students grow. Activity points also ensure that the month continues at a healthy pace, preventing you from lingering on any one Sunday for too long. Seminars and rest days just eat up the whole day without consideration for activity points, which can break up the more involved weeks and provide their own benefits.

How you choose to spend your time also comes down to how motivated your students are to learn. Each of your students has a motivation gauge that’s drained when you instruct them, and they can’t be instructed again until you interact with them and get their motivation back up. You can do this most effectively when exploring the monastery–where you get to talk to different characters, give them gifts, and share bonding time with them–whereas battle only rarely increases motivation levels. While you can skip a lot of the school life bits and even automate instruction, you won’t get the best results. You’re directly at a disadvantage in combat if you don’t make time for your students, which is by design.

Like all recent Fire Emblem games, keeping you invested in your units and their relationships is the glue that binds the whole experience together. It’s incredibly effective in Three Houses, where your direct involvement in nearly all aspects of a unit’s growth trajectory gives you a special stake in their success. After spending time and effort to help a character achieve their full potential, you’re not just satisfied when they win a fight–you’re proud. And the more you invest in someone–both emotionally and through months of lesson plans and instruction–the more cautious you’ll be about putting them in harm’s way, and the more you’ll work to come up with a solid battle strategy.

Considering you’re a teacher, it’s good rather than disappointing that there’s almost no romance to speak of. Some students are flirty, but mainly, you’re fostering camaraderie rather than playing matchmaker or romancing them yourself. As you unlock new support levels with different characters–both by interacting with them at the monastery and by using teamwork in battles–you get cutscenes that flesh them out more. Some are charming, lighthearted conversations between two friends, while many of them give you insight into more serious matters–a father forcing his daughter into marriage, discrimination within the monastery, the dark reason behind someone’s lofty ambitions. For the most part, each support conversation is just a piece of who a character is, and as you slowly build support levels over time, you begin to uncover the full picture of each person. As a result, learning more about each of the characters and their place in the monastery is as much a reward for progress as the level bars that tick forever upward as you go.

Every NPC is fully voiced in both English and Japanese, which brings a lot of life to the brief support conversations. Disappointingly, though, the professor is silent. They do have a voice–they’ll occasionally say a line when leveling up or improving a skill–but in cutscenes and when talking to students and faculty, they just nod or shake their head flatly. There are brief dialogue options during conversations, but where they could give way to a full, subtitled sentence or two from the professor, you’re just left with the other character’s reaction. Characters do, however, refer to the professor’s personality and how they come across throughout the game, which is odd considering they mostly nod at things. This puts distance between you and the characters you’re bonding with, and it’s a missed opportunity in a game where the protagonist has an otherwise set look, personality, and backstory.

It’s not hard to like a lot of the characters, though. They draw you in with anime archetypes–the ladies’ man, the bratty prince, the clumsy but well-meaning girl–and surprise you with much more nuance under the surface. Some of the funniest scenes early on involve Bernadetta, a shut-in with extreme reactions to normal social situations, but her inner life is a lot darker and more complicated than those early conversations let on. You might discover a character you thought was a jerk is actually one of your favorites or slowly stop using a less-than-favorite character in battle. You also have the option of having tea with someone, during which you have to choose conversation topics according to what you know about them, dating sim-style. Knowing what topics they’ll like is actually a lot harder than it sounds, and successfully talking to a favorite character–even if the tea setup can be a little awkward in practice–is a small victory.

Each house’s campaign feels distinct but not so different that one seems way better than the other. Every house has a mix of personalities and skills, and they all have their own advantages and disadvantages. Students from different houses can form friendships with each other, too, and you can eventually recruit students from other houses to join yours. Rather than being repetitive, on a second playthrough, recruiting gives you access to different relationship combinations; you can see a different side to a character through a different set of support conversations. And while the overall setup of the game is largely the same across the three houses, each has its own web of B plots, and the second half of the game will look very different depending on who you’re with and the choices you’ve made.

The first half concerns the church, its secrets, and the fact that the professor knows very little about their own identity. As the basic loop of each month pulls you forward, so too does the promise of learning the truth about something, whether it’s why the archbishop wanted you to be a teacher in the first place or who a suspicious masked individual is. These threads remain pretty open, though, at least after one and a quarter playthroughs. You get different details in each route, and so far it’s been a long process to piece everything together.

Learning more about each of the characters and their place in the monastery is as much a reward for progress as the level bars that tick forever upward as you go.

After a five-year time skip, you enter the “war phase” of the game. While the structure of the game is the same–you even instruct your units, since you still need to train for battle–the focus shifts to the house-specific stories. They involve a lot of hard decisions, with old friends becoming enemies, people you wish you didn’t have to kill, and students who’ve changed either in spite or because of your guidance. Late-game battles are especially challenging, with higher stakes and multi-lane layouts that require a lot of forethought. Success in these battles is incredibly rewarding, as you’re seeing dozens of hours of investment in your students reach a crescendo, but they’re bittersweet in context.

When all was said and done, all I could think about was starting another playthrough. I was curious about the mysteries left unsolved, of course, but I also hoped to undo my mistakes. There were characters I didn’t talk to enough, students I didn’t recruit, and far more effective ways to train my units. A second playthrough treads familiar ground in the beginning, but after learning and growing so much in the first, it feels fresh, too. That speaks to Three Houses’ mechanical complexity and depth as well as the connections it fosters with its characters–and whether you’re managing inventories or battlefields, it’s the kind of game that’s hard to put down, even when it’s over.

Source : Gamesport

[entergamingxp]

Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl

March 10, 2020 4:00 PM EST

Snack World combines a tongue-in-cheek story with dungeon crawling, a loot system, and roguelike mechanics to make one surprisingly fun package.

Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl – Gold is the enhanced Nintendo Switch port of the original title Snack World: Trejarers, which was released in Japan in 2017 for 3DS and in 2018 for the Switch. This version includes all the DLC and expansion packs from the original version.

Immediately upon starting Snack World, you’ll notice the subversive, fourth-wall-breaking style of humor. It’s on similar levels to a game like Half Minute Hero. The game’s extremely meta introduction begins in which King Papaya points out all the issues that would realistically come with taking in some random adventurer passed out on the road outside his Kingdom and how doing so would put his people in danger. This, of course, is then thrown completely out the window once his incredibly spoiled daughter, Princess Melonia, decides that she needs a little excitement in her life and that this mysterious and amnesic adventurer, your customizable player character, is her ticket to alleviating her boredom.

However, once you’re all settled and medically treated, Melonia proceeds to completely forget about your existence as she goes on about a gem that she wants. The caveat is that this gem is located in an extremely dangerous area in which the normal kings’ guard cannot traverse. So, since your character clearly has nothing better to do at this point, they are tasked with retrieving this gem.

“It’s refreshing to delve into an RPG that doesn’t overly concern itself with some super epic, complex tale of world conflict.”

This entire ridiculous scenario reflects the overall plot of the game — if you can even call it a plot. To be fair, there is an actual story to Snack World, as the player and their party are eventually tasked with taking down the evil Sultan Vinegar as he attempts to resurrect the Deodragon, Smörg Åsbord. Yet, there’s such an intentional lack of urgency in actually achieving this goal that it becomes an almost running joke itself.

To be honest it’s refreshing to delve into an RPG that doesn’t overly concern itself with some super epic, complex tale of world conflict, an oppressive religion or government, or one that spends hours navel gazing about the duality of man. It’s a simple tale about an adventurer going on adventures because the princess wants things and then sometimes you fight a bad guy.

Joining you on your quest is Chup, the actual main character of the media franchise, and his party comprised of an inelegant witch, Mayonna; a muscular warrior, Béarnaise; a goblin-like creature, Gobsan; and a female pig-nosed dragon, Pigsy. Naturally, they’re as fun and dysfunctional as you’d imagine. That applies to the NPCs populating the world as well, as they often have witty, fun, and humorous dialogue that’s a blast to watch unfold as they interact with each other and your protagonist.

Snack World combines the genres and mechanics of action RPGs, dungeon crawlers, loot games, and roguelikes. So not only is the exploration and battling the main focus of gameplay, but there are also other systems that have a huge influence on how you play.

Because it’s a roguelike, dungeons are procedurally generated, which requires you to adapt to a brand new map and adjust your exploration accordingly. This gives the dungeon crawling a sense of tension and exhilaration and also pairs well with the loot system.

The loot system the title implements is one where item drops are randomized, which encourages repeated visits back into those randomly shifting dungeons in the first place, especially if you’re aiming to complete your collection or to optimize your equipment. The complementary nature of these two mechanics working in tandem creates this synergy that makes for very addictive gameplay all around.

Combat is action-based, normally implying fast-paced, no turn-based frills that allows players to dive right into the fray. However, you’ll find that before you can even begin to learn the fighting system, you need to adjust to the game’s clunky and cluttered UI. Players first have to overcome the obstacle of learning how to read and parse through the information that the UI displays on the screen, and then you realize that the gameplay system is actually pretty simple, making its presentation that much more frustrating.

Then there’s adjusting to the combat itself, as the controls — both attacks and the targeting system — can be a little slippery. But once you get past that hurdle, the actual combat system offers some great strategic depth. You’re allowed to carry six types of weapons, called jaras, on you at all times, along with two kinds of items. And you’ll find you’ll be needing to switch out jaras frequently thanks to the main mechanic: JP.

JP is measured in a gauge that goes down with every attack. It does recharge on its own but very slowly. Once you use up the JP for that jara, your wielding becomes compromised; your blows are much slower and much weaker to the point of being nearly completely worthless. Each jara has a type and foes are strong and weak to different types. For example, some enemies may be weak to swords but strong against hammers, or vice versa. This means that you have to constantly switch out jaras depending on enemy weaknesses as well.

These are simple mechanics but brilliant ones that prevent Snack World from being a mindless hack-and-slash. You have to think about what weapons you’re using and how often you’re using it, forcing you to pay attention to the information presented on the screen as you’re fighting. And if you choose to ignore this and dive headfirst, enemies, and especially bosses with their excellent AI, will absolutely punish you for it as early on as the tutorial levels.

The “Snack” mechanic, which is what the franchise is named after in the first place, allows you to summon whimsical creatures to aid you in battle. You can even trade these snacks with other real-life players. And though it’s a cute mechanic, I feel that it could have been more thoroughly utilized in battle, as it’s not difficult to ignore. Though you can make a case for these mechanics being easy to avoid, since it lets players fully customize the kind of experience they want to have. As a side note, Snack World also has online multiplayer and local four-player co-op for those who prefer to battle alongside friends instead.

Your character uses two types of equipment, which ties right back to the loot system. The first equipment type is the normal armor that denotes your offensive and defensive stats. The second type is your casual wear, which has a unique purpose. Located in the main menu is a tracker that informs players of the current daily fashion trends in the Kingdom, such as the most popular name, brand, or color. If you’re invested in collecting items, it’s imperative to pay attention to these trends because by properly outfitting your character with what’s most chic, you get a free percentage bonus on rare item drops.

And if you’re not that keen on the whole gear optimization because you simply enjoy the combat and exploration — a more than viable path as the game doesn’t punish taking the more conventional route — you’re free to almost completely ignore the more complex aspects. But if you decide that you want to collect rare and valuable items or equipment, these easy to obtain extra boosts are always available to you. Also, I find it a nice extra bit of world-building as it gives you a glimpse into the Tutti-Frutti Kingdom’s daily functions and routine.

“Overall, Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl – Gold is a fun title. It’s exactly what it sets out to be and it does so surprisingly well.”

The art style and graphics are, for lack of a better term, adorable. The use of a bright and vibrant color palette reflects the playful nature of the world well. Not to mention, the simplicity of the designs complement and enhance the simplicity of the plot as well as the style of humor. The variation in each dungeon’s designs, as well as the general environments, stand well on their own, too.

Snack World has a solid soundtrack, with each piece well suited for the setting, mood, characters, and scenery. While there’s no single track that’s worth writing home about, that’s no demerit. As an example, until Dragon Quest XI came by, the franchise had been using simplistic and retro-sounding tracks that never detracted from the overall experience. Although Snack World has higher quality music, it’s a similar scenario in the sense that the music is composed solely to compliment the game and not to be grand pieces that will be heralded as classics for years to come.

Overall, Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl – Gold is a fun title. It’s exactly what it sets out to be and it does so surprisingly well. While it’s not particularly complex in terms of either gameplay or story, there are surprisingly layered mechanics worth delving into if you enjoy light dungeon crawlers, roguelike games, or loot-based systems. Because of its jack-of-all-trades nature, each individual component isn’t as fleshed out as it would be in games devoted solely to one mechanic. However, when these components are combined, Snack World creates a unique system more than capable of scratching that itch for fans of those genres. In other words, it’s a game that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

March 10, 2020 4:00 PM EST

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/03/snack-world-the-dungeon-crawl/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=snack-world-the-dungeon-crawl

[gamerszone2019-blog]

Fire Emblem: Three Houses Review - Teacher's Pet

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/fire-emblem-three-houses-review-teachers-pet/

Fire Emblem: Three Houses Review - Teacher's Pet

Fire Emblem: Three Houses asks a lot of you. Every piece, from battle to friendships to training your units, must be managed both individually and as part of a whole. It can be intimidating, but when it all clicks together, it really clicks. Mastering the art of thoughtful lesson planning as a professor improves your performance on the battlefield, where success relies on calculated teamwork and deft execution. Cultivating relationships during battle in turn draws you closer to each of the characters, who you then want to invest even more time into in the classroom. Every piece feeds into the next in a rewarding, engrossing loop where you get lost in the whole experience, not just in the minutiae.

Three Houses casts you as a mercenary who, while out on a mission with their father, runs into a group of teens under attack. After a brief introduction and battle tutorial–which you shouldn’t need, since you’re apparently already an established mercenary, but we’ll go with it–you learn that they are students at Garreg Mach monastery. Each of them leads one of the school’s three houses: Black Eagles, Blue Lions, or Golden Deer. At the behest of the church’s archbishop, who definitely gives off nefarious vibes but is also a gentle mom figure, you end up becoming a professor and must choose which of the houses to lead. There is a lot of mystery to the setup, with consistent hints that something is not quite right, and it’s easy to get absorbed in trying to figure out what the archbishop and various other shady figures are up to.

Your main role as professor is to instruct your students in matters of combat and prepare them for story battles at the end of each month. Battles in Three Houses feature the same turn-based, tactical combat at the heart of the series, albeit with some changes. The classic weapon triangle is downplayed quite a bit in favor of Combat Arts, which have been altered somewhat from their introduction in Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. Combat Arts are attacks tied to a weapon type and can boost a unit’s attack power at the expense of weapon durability; some are effective against specific enemy types, like armored units. You can also unlock skills outside of Combat Arts that grant you better stats with certain weapons, like a heftier boost for using an axe against a lance user, similar to the old weapon triangle. It’s the same complexity the series is known for but less abstracted, making it a bit easier to strategize without sacrificing depth.

One of the big combat additions is battalions, mini armies you can equip that provide various benefits to a unit during battle. They also give you a new type of attack called a Gambit, which varies based on the type of battalion–magic-focused, brute force, and so on–and stuns the enemies it hits. Gambits are limited-use and can be incredibly powerful against the right enemies. You can increase a Gambit’s effectiveness even further if one or more of your other units are within attack range of the target, a tried-and-true Fire Emblem concept that applies to all kinds of attacks. There’s also an anime-style splash screen as you attack that shows each character involved in the Gambit looking fierce, which adds a nice bit of drama.

How much you use Combat Arts and Gambits depends on what difficulty you’re on. On Normal difficulty, well-trained units will likely be able to dispatch most enemies in one or two hits without the help of Combat Arts or Gambits. On Hard, however, enemies hit harder and withstand your attacks better. You have to think much more carefully about unit placement, the best time to use a Gambit and take advantage of its stun effect, and how many Combat Arts you can fire off before your weapon breaks. This is where things get exciting; after a few turns of cautious setup, you (hopefully) get to knock out tons of enemies as your plans fall into place.

Some of the early-game and optional battle maps are open spaces that don’t require you to think too hard, especially on Normal. But the story battles throughout feature a variety of map layouts–from pirate ships to what appears to be a lava-filled cavern–that challenge you to consider where your units need to be, both in the next turn and several turns down the line. Many of them have different routes, enemies coming at you from multiple angles, optional treasure to chase, and other quirks that require you to split your party up or change their equipped classes to suit the situation. Thieves, for instance, can open chests and doors without a key, while flying units don’t take damage from ground that’s on fire.

The depth of strategy in these elements really shines on Hard difficulty, but especially so when coupled with Divine Pulse, another limited-use ability. Divine Pulse allows you to rewind time in order to redo all or part of the battle, usually if one of your units dies. Rewinding with Divine Pulse shows just how important unit placement and attack choice can be, as even a slight change can make or break the encounter. It’s also just a nice quality-of-life feature if you play on Classic mode, in which units who die in battle are lost forever and can’t fight or train anymore. You might still soft reset from time to time, but it’s great to be able to rectify a mistake right away and get a shot of instant gratification for a job well re-done.

Battling, of course, is only one part of life at the monastery. The backbone of Three Houses is the monthly school calendar, and if you like organizing things, planning ahead, or school in general, this can be the most engrossing part. On Sundays, you have free time you can spend in one of four ways: exploring the monastery, participating in side battles, holding a seminar to improve your students’ skills, or simply taking the day off. Mondays are for instruction, which consists of selecting students from a list and choosing a few of their skills to boost. The rest of the week goes by automatically, with a sprite of the professor running along the calendar and stopping occasionally for random events or story cutscenes. It sounds a bit hands-off, but there’s a lot to think about as it is, and the week-by-week rather than day-by-day structure keeps things moving and ensures you never have to wait too long to progress in any area.

The predictable structure of each month–and the fact that you can see the full month’s schedule with events listed ahead of time–gives you the foundation to make effective plans. All that time management can definitely be overwhelming, at least at first. You have to keep tabs on your students’ skills and study goals, your own skills, everyone’s inventory, and various other meters and menus while planning for the lessons and battles to come. But you’re treated to a near-constant stream of positive reinforcement as those meters fill up week by week and your students improve their skills. You’re always moving toward the next thing: the next level up, the next skill you need to develop, the next month and what may unfold.

To complement this, your activities when exploring the monastery (as well as how many battles you can participate in, if you choose to battle on your day off) are limited by activity points. You get more as your “professor level” increases, which means you have to balance activities that boost your professor level with ones that help your students grow. Activity points also ensure that the month continues at a healthy pace, preventing you from lingering on any one Sunday for too long. Seminars and rest days just eat up the whole day without consideration for activity points, which can break up the more involved weeks and provide their own benefits.

How you choose to spend your time also comes down to how motivated your students are to learn. Each of your students has a motivation gauge that’s drained when you instruct them, and they can’t be instructed again until you interact with them and get their motivation back up. You can do this most effectively when exploring the monastery–where you get to talk to different characters, give them gifts, and share bonding time with them–whereas battle only rarely increases motivation levels. While you can skip a lot of the school life bits and even automate instruction, you won’t get the best results. You’re directly at a disadvantage in combat if you don’t make time for your students, which is by design.

Like all recent Fire Emblem games, keeping you invested in your units and their relationships is the glue that binds the whole experience together. It’s incredibly effective in Three Houses, where your direct involvement in nearly all aspects of a unit’s growth trajectory gives you a special stake in their success. After spending time and effort to help a character achieve their full potential, you’re not just satisfied when they win a fight–you’re proud. And the more you invest in someone–both emotionally and through months of lesson plans and instruction–the more cautious you’ll be about putting them in harm’s way, and the more you’ll work to come up with a solid battle strategy.

Considering you’re a teacher, it’s good rather than disappointing that there’s almost no romance to speak of. Some students are flirty, but mainly, you’re fostering camaraderie rather than playing matchmaker or romancing them yourself. As you unlock new support levels with different characters–both by interacting with them at the monastery and by using teamwork in battles–you get cutscenes that flesh them out more. Some are charming, lighthearted conversations between two friends, while many of them give you insight into more serious matters–a father forcing his daughter into marriage, discrimination within the monastery, the dark reason behind someone’s lofty ambitions. For the most part, each support conversation is just a piece of who a character is, and as you slowly build support levels over time, you begin to uncover the full picture of each person. As a result, learning more about each of the characters and their place in the monastery is as much a reward for progress as the level bars that tick forever upward as you go.

Every NPC is fully voiced in both English and Japanese, which brings a lot of life to the brief support conversations. Disappointingly, though, the professor is silent. They do have a voice–they’ll occasionally say a line when leveling up or improving a skill–but in cutscenes and when talking to students and faculty, they just nod or shake their head flatly. There are brief dialogue options during conversations, but where they could give way to a full, subtitled sentence or two from the professor, you’re just left with the other character’s reaction. Characters do, however, refer to the professor’s personality and how they come across throughout the game, which is odd considering they mostly nod at things. This puts distance between you and the characters you’re bonding with, and it’s a missed opportunity in a game where the protagonist has an otherwise set look, personality, and backstory.

It’s not hard to like a lot of the characters, though. They draw you in with anime archetypes–the ladies’ man, the bratty prince, the clumsy but well-meaning girl–and surprise you with much more nuance under the surface. Some of the funniest scenes early on involve Bernadetta, a shut-in with extreme reactions to normal social situations, but her inner life is a lot darker and more complicated than those early conversations let on. You might discover a character you thought was a jerk is actually one of your favorites or slowly stop using a less-than-favorite character in battle. You also have the option of having tea with someone, during which you have to choose conversation topics according to what you know about them, dating sim-style. Knowing what topics they’ll like is actually a lot harder than it sounds, and successfully talking to a favorite character–even if the tea setup can be a little awkward in practice–is a small victory.

Each house’s campaign feels distinct but not so different that one seems way better than the other. Every house has a mix of personalities and skills, and they all have their own advantages and disadvantages. Students from different houses can form friendships with each other, too, and you can eventually recruit students from other houses to join yours. Rather than being repetitive, on a second playthrough, recruiting gives you access to different relationship combinations; you can see a different side to a character through a different set of support conversations. And while the overall setup of the game is largely the same across the three houses, each has its own web of B plots, and the second half of the game will look very different depending on who you’re with and the choices you’ve made.

The first half concerns the church, its secrets, and the fact that the professor knows very little about their own identity. As the basic loop of each month pulls you forward, so too does the promise of learning the truth about something, whether it’s why the archbishop wanted you to be a teacher in the first place or who a suspicious masked individual is. These threads remain pretty open, though, at least after one and a quarter playthroughs. You get different details in each route, and so far it’s been a long process to piece everything together.

Learning more about each of the characters and their place in the monastery is as much a reward for progress as the level bars that tick forever upward as you go.

After a five-year time skip, you enter the “war phase” of the game. While the structure of the game is the same–you even instruct your units, since you still need to train for battle–the focus shifts to the house-specific stories. They involve a lot of hard decisions, with old friends becoming enemies, people you wish you didn’t have to kill, and students who’ve changed either in spite or because of your guidance. Late-game battles are especially challenging, with higher stakes and multi-lane layouts that require a lot of forethought. Success in these battles is incredibly rewarding, as you’re seeing dozens of hours of investment in your students reach a crescendo, but they’re bittersweet in context.

When all was said and done, all I could think about was starting another playthrough. I was curious about the mysteries left unsolved, of course, but I also hoped to undo my mistakes. There were characters I didn’t talk to enough, students I didn’t recruit, and far more effective ways to train my units. A second playthrough treads familiar ground in the beginning, but after learning and growing so much in the first, it feels fresh, too. That speaks to Three Houses’ mechanical complexity and depth as well as the connections it fosters with its characters–and whether you’re managing inventories or battlefields, it’s the kind of game that’s hard to put down, even when it’s over.

Source : Gamesport

[gamerszone2019-blog]

Fire Emblem: Three Houses Review - Fight For Your Friends

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/fire-emblem-three-houses-review-fight-for-your-friends/

Fire Emblem: Three Houses Review - Fight For Your Friends

Fire Emblem: Three Houses asks a lot of you. Every piece, from battle to friendships to training your units, must be managed both individually and as part of a whole. It can be intimidating, but when it all clicks together, it really clicks. Mastering the art of thoughtful lesson planning as a professor improves your performance on the battlefield, where success relies on calculated teamwork and deft execution. Cultivating relationships during battle in turn draws you closer to each of the characters, who you then want to invest even more time into in the classroom. Every piece feeds into the next in a rewarding, engrossing loop where you get lost in the whole experience, not just in the minutiae.

Three Houses casts you as a mercenary who, while out on a mission with their father, runs into a group of teens under attack. After a brief introduction and battle tutorial–which you shouldn’t need, since you’re apparently already an established mercenary, but we’ll go with it–you learn that they are students at Garreg Mach monastery. Each of them leads one of the school’s three houses: Black Eagles, Blue Lions, or Golden Deer. At the behest of the church’s archbishop, who definitely gives off nefarious vibes but is also a gentle mom figure, you end up becoming a professor and must choose which of the houses to lead. There is a lot of mystery to the setup, with consistent hints that something is not quite right, and it’s easy to get absorbed in trying to figure out what the archbishop and various other shady figures are up to.

Your main role as professor is to instruct your students in matters of combat and prepare them for story battles at the end of each month. Battles in Three Houses feature the same turn-based, tactical combat at the heart of the series, albeit with some changes. The classic weapon triangle is downplayed quite a bit in favor of Combat Arts, which have been altered somewhat from their introduction in Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. Combat Arts are attacks tied to a weapon type and can boost a unit’s attack power at the expense of weapon durability; some are effective against specific enemy types, like armored units. You can also unlock skills outside of Combat Arts that grant you better stats with certain weapons, like a heftier boost for using an axe against a lance user, similar to the old weapon triangle. It’s the same complexity the series is known for but less abstracted, making it a bit easier to strategize without sacrificing depth.

One of the big combat additions is battalions, mini armies you can equip that provide various benefits to a unit during battle. They also give you a new type of attack called a Gambit, which varies based on the type of battalion–magic-focused, brute force, and so on–and stuns the enemies it hits. Gambits are limited-use and can be incredibly powerful against the right enemies. You can increase a Gambit’s effectiveness even further if one or more of your other units are within attack range of the target, a tried-and-true Fire Emblem concept that applies to all kinds of attacks. There’s also an anime-style splash screen as you attack that shows each character involved in the Gambit looking fierce, which adds a nice bit of drama.

How much you use Combat Arts and Gambits depends on what difficulty you’re on. On Normal difficulty, well-trained units will likely be able to dispatch most enemies in one or two hits without the help of Combat Arts or Gambits. On Hard, however, enemies hit harder and withstand your attacks better. You have to think much more carefully about unit placement, the best time to use a Gambit and take advantage of its stun effect, and how many Combat Arts you can fire off before your weapon breaks. This is where things get exciting; after a few turns of cautious setup, you (hopefully) get to knock out tons of enemies as your plans fall into place.

Some of the early-game and optional battle maps are open spaces that don’t require you to think too hard, especially on Normal. But the story battles throughout feature a variety of map layouts–from pirate ships to what appears to be a lava-filled cavern–that challenge you to consider where your units need to be, both in the next turn and several turns down the line. Many of them have different routes, enemies coming at you from multiple angles, optional treasure to chase, and other quirks that require you to split your party up or change their equipped classes to suit the situation. Thieves, for instance, can open chests and doors without a key, while flying units don’t take damage from ground that’s on fire.

The depth of strategy in these elements really shines on Hard difficulty, but especially so when coupled with Divine Pulse, another limited-use ability. Divine Pulse allows you to rewind time in order to redo all or part of the battle, usually if one of your units dies. Rewinding with Divine Pulse shows just how important unit placement and attack choice can be, as even a slight change can make or break the encounter. It’s also just a nice quality-of-life feature if you play on Classic mode, in which units who die in battle are lost forever and can’t fight or train anymore. You might still soft reset from time to time, but it’s great to be able to rectify a mistake right away and get a shot of instant gratification for a job well re-done.

Battling, of course, is only one part of life at the monastery. The backbone of Three Houses is the monthly school calendar, and if you like organizing things, planning ahead, or school in general, this can be the most engrossing part. On Sundays, you have free time you can spend in one of four ways: exploring the monastery, participating in side battles, holding a seminar to improve your students’ skills, or simply taking the day off. Mondays are for instruction, which consists of selecting students from a list and choosing a few of their skills to boost. The rest of the week goes by automatically, with a sprite of the professor running along the calendar and stopping occasionally for random events or story cutscenes. It sounds a bit hands-off, but there’s a lot to think about as it is, and the week-by-week rather than day-by-day structure keeps things moving and ensures you never have to wait too long to progress in any area.

The predictable structure of each month–and the fact that you can see the full month’s schedule with events listed ahead of time–gives you the foundation to make effective plans. All that time management can definitely be overwhelming, at least at first. You have to keep tabs on your students’ skills and study goals, your own skills, everyone’s inventory, and various other meters and menus while planning for the lessons and battles to come. But you’re treated to a near-constant stream of positive reinforcement as those meters fill up week by week and your students improve their skills. You’re always moving toward the next thing: the next level up, the next skill you need to develop, the next month and what may unfold.

To complement this, your activities when exploring the monastery (as well as how many battles you can participate in, if you choose to battle on your day off) are limited by activity points. You get more as your “professor level” increases, which means you have to balance activities that boost your professor level with ones that help your students grow. Activity points also ensure that the month continues at a healthy pace, preventing you from lingering on any one Sunday for too long. Seminars and rest days just eat up the whole day without consideration for activity points, which can break up the more involved weeks and provide their own benefits.

How you choose to spend your time also comes down to how motivated your students are to learn. Each of your students has a motivation gauge that’s drained when you instruct them, and they can’t be instructed again until you interact with them and get their motivation back up. You can do this most effectively when exploring the monastery–where you get to talk to different characters, give them gifts, and share bonding time with them–whereas battle only rarely increases motivation levels. While you can skip a lot of the school life bits and even automate instruction, you won’t get the best results. You’re directly at a disadvantage in combat if you don’t make time for your students, which is by design.

Like all recent Fire Emblem games, keeping you invested in your units and their relationships is the glue that binds the whole experience together. It’s incredibly effective in Three Houses, where your direct involvement in nearly all aspects of a unit’s growth trajectory gives you a special stake in their success. After spending time and effort to help a character achieve their full potential, you’re not just satisfied when they win a fight–you’re proud. And the more you invest in someone–both emotionally and through months of lesson plans and instruction–the more cautious you’ll be about putting them in harm’s way, and the more you’ll work to come up with a solid battle strategy.

Considering you’re a teacher, it’s good rather than disappointing that there’s almost no romance to speak of. Some students are flirty, but mainly, you’re fostering camaraderie rather than playing matchmaker or romancing them yourself. As you unlock new support levels with different characters–both by interacting with them at the monastery and by using teamwork in battles–you get cutscenes that flesh them out more. Some are charming, lighthearted conversations between two friends, while many of them give you insight into more serious matters–a father forcing his daughter into marriage, discrimination within the monastery, the dark reason behind someone’s lofty ambitions. For the most part, each support conversation is just a piece of who a character is, and as you slowly build support levels over time, you begin to uncover the full picture of each person. As a result, learning more about each of the characters and their place in the monastery is as much a reward for progress as the level bars that tick forever upward as you go.

Every NPC is fully voiced in both English and Japanese, which brings a lot of life to the brief support conversations. Disappointingly, though, the professor is silent. They do have a voice–they’ll occasionally say a line when leveling up or improving a skill–but in cutscenes and when talking to students and faculty, they just nod or shake their head flatly. There are brief dialogue options during conversations, but where they could give way to a full, subtitled sentence or two from the professor, you’re just left with the other character’s reaction. Characters do, however, refer to the professor’s personality and how they come across throughout the game, which is odd considering they mostly nod at things. This puts distance between you and the characters you’re bonding with, and it’s a missed opportunity in a game where the protagonist has an otherwise set look, personality, and backstory.

It’s not hard to like a lot of the characters, though. They draw you in with anime archetypes–the ladies’ man, the bratty prince, the clumsy but well-meaning girl–and surprise you with much more nuance under the surface. Some of the funniest scenes early on involve Bernadetta, a shut-in with extreme reactions to normal social situations, but her inner life is a lot darker and more complicated than those early conversations let on. You might discover a character you thought was a jerk is actually one of your favorites or slowly stop using a less-than-favorite character in battle. You also have the option of having tea with someone, during which you have to choose conversation topics according to what you know about them, dating sim-style. Knowing what topics they’ll like is actually a lot harder than it sounds, and successfully talking to a favorite character–even if the tea setup can be a little awkward in practice–is a small victory.

Each house’s campaign feels distinct but not so different that one seems way better than the other. Every house has a mix of personalities and skills, and they all have their own advantages and disadvantages. Students from different houses can form friendships with each other, too, and you can eventually recruit students from other houses to join yours. Rather than being repetitive, on a second playthrough, recruiting gives you access to different relationship combinations; you can see a different side to a character through a different set of support conversations. And while the overall setup of the game is largely the same across the three houses, each has its own web of B plots, and the second half of the game will look very different depending on who you’re with and the choices you’ve made.

The first half concerns the church, its secrets, and the fact that the professor knows very little about their own identity. As the basic loop of each month pulls you forward, so too does the promise of learning the truth about something, whether it’s why the archbishop wanted you to be a teacher in the first place or who a suspicious masked individual is. These threads remain pretty open, though, at least after one and a quarter playthroughs. You get different details in each route, and so far it’s been a long process to piece everything together.

Learning more about each of the characters and their place in the monastery is as much a reward for progress as the level bars that tick forever upward as you go.

After a five-year time skip, you enter the “war phase” of the game. While the structure of the game is the same–you even instruct your units, since you still need to train for battle–the focus shifts to the house-specific stories. They involve a lot of hard decisions, with old friends becoming enemies, people you wish you didn’t have to kill, and students who’ve changed either in spite or because of your guidance. Late-game battles are especially challenging, with higher stakes and multi-lane layouts that require a lot of forethought. Success in these battles is incredibly rewarding, as you’re seeing dozens of hours of investment in your students reach a crescendo, but they’re bittersweet in context.

When all was said and done, all I could think about was starting another playthrough. I was curious about the mysteries left unsolved, of course, but I also hoped to undo my mistakes. There were characters I didn’t talk to enough, students I didn’t recruit, and far more effective ways to train my units. A second playthrough treads familiar ground in the beginning, but after learning and growing so much in the first, it feels fresh, too. That speaks to Three Houses’ mechanical complexity and depth as well as the connections it fosters with its characters–and whether you’re managing inventories or battlefields, it’s the kind of game that’s hard to put down, even when it’s over.

Source : Gamesport

[gamerszone2019-blog]

Fire Emblem: Three Houses Review - I Fight For My Friends

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/fire-emblem-three-houses-review-i-fight-for-my-friends/

Fire Emblem: Three Houses Review - I Fight For My Friends

Fire Emblem: Three Houses asks a lot of you. Every piece, from battle to friendships to training your units, must be managed both individually and as part of a whole. It can be intimidating, but when it all clicks together, it really clicks. Mastering the art of thoughtful lesson planning as a professor improves your performance on the battlefield, where success relies on calculated teamwork and deft execution. Cultivating relationships during battle in turn draws you closer to each of the characters, who you then want to invest even more time into in the classroom. Every piece feeds into the next in a rewarding, engrossing loop where you get lost in the whole experience, not just in the minutiae.

Three Houses casts you as a mercenary who, while out on a mission with their father, runs into a group of teens under attack. After a brief introduction and battle tutorial–which you shouldn’t need, since you’re apparently already an established mercenary, but we’ll go with it–you learn that they are students at Garreg Mach monastery. Each of them leads one of the school’s three houses: Black Eagles, Blue Lions, or Golden Deer. At the behest of the church’s archbishop, who definitely gives off nefarious vibes but is also a gentle mom figure, you end up becoming a professor and must choose which of the houses to lead. There is a lot of mystery to the setup, with consistent hints that something is not quite right, and it’s easy to get absorbed in trying to figure out what the archbishop and various other shady figures are up to.

Your main role as professor is to instruct your students in matters of combat and prepare them for story battles at the end of each month. Battles in Three Houses feature the same turn-based, tactical combat at the heart of the series, albeit with some changes. The classic weapon triangle is downplayed quite a bit in favor of Combat Arts, which have been altered somewhat from their introduction in Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. Combat Arts are attacks tied to a weapon type and can boost a unit’s attack power at the expense of weapon durability; some are effective against specific enemy types, like armored units. You can also unlock skills outside of Combat Arts that grant you better stats with certain weapons, like a heftier boost for using an axe against a lance user, similar to the old weapon triangle. It’s the same complexity the series is known for but less abstracted, making it a bit easier to strategize without sacrificing depth.

One of the big combat additions is battalions, mini armies you can equip that provide various benefits to a unit during battle. They also give you a new type of attack called a Gambit, which varies based on the type of battalion–magic-focused, brute force, and so on–and stuns the enemies it hits. Gambits are limited-use and can be incredibly powerful against the right enemies. You can increase a Gambit’s effectiveness even further if one or more of your other units are within attack range of the target, a tried-and-true Fire Emblem concept that applies to all kinds of attacks. There’s also an anime-style splash screen as you attack that shows each character involved in the Gambit looking fierce, which adds a nice bit of drama.

How much you use Combat Arts and Gambits depends on what difficulty you’re on. On Normal difficulty, well-trained units will likely be able to dispatch most enemies in one or two hits without the help of Combat Arts or Gambits. On Hard, however, enemies hit harder and withstand your attacks better. You have to think much more carefully about unit placement, the best time to use a Gambit and take advantage of its stun effect, and how many Combat Arts you can fire off before your weapon breaks. This is where things get exciting; after a few turns of cautious setup, you (hopefully) get to knock out tons of enemies as your plans fall into place.

Some of the early-game and optional battle maps are open spaces that don’t require you to think too hard, especially on Normal. But the story battles throughout feature a variety of map layouts–from pirate ships to what appears to be a lava-filled cavern–that challenge you to consider where your units need to be, both in the next turn and several turns down the line. Many of them have different routes, enemies coming at you from multiple angles, optional treasure to chase, and other quirks that require you to split your party up or change their equipped classes to suit the situation. Thieves, for instance, can open chests and doors without a key, while flying units don’t take damage from ground that’s on fire.

The depth of strategy in these elements really shines on Hard difficulty, but especially so when coupled with Divine Pulse, another limited-use ability. Divine Pulse allows you to rewind time in order to redo all or part of the battle, usually if one of your units dies. Rewinding with Divine Pulse shows just how important unit placement and attack choice can be, as even a slight change can make or break the encounter. It’s also just a nice quality-of-life feature if you play on Classic mode, in which units who die in battle are lost forever and can’t fight or train anymore. You might still soft reset from time to time, but it’s great to be able to rectify a mistake right away and get a shot of instant gratification for a job well re-done.

Battling, of course, is only one part of life at the monastery. The backbone of Three Houses is the monthly school calendar, and if you like organizing things, planning ahead, or school in general, this can be the most engrossing part. On Sundays, you have free time you can spend in one of four ways: exploring the monastery, participating in side battles, holding a seminar to improve your students’ skills, or simply taking the day off. Mondays are for instruction, which consists of selecting students from a list and choosing a few of their skills to boost. The rest of the week goes by automatically, with a sprite of the professor running along the calendar and stopping occasionally for random events or story cutscenes. It sounds a bit hands-off, but there’s a lot to think about as it is, and the week-by-week rather than day-by-day structure keeps things moving and ensures you never have to wait too long to progress in any area.

The predictable structure of each month–and the fact that you can see the full month’s schedule with events listed ahead of time–gives you the foundation to make effective plans. All that time management can definitely be overwhelming, at least at first. You have to keep tabs on your students’ skills and study goals, your own skills, everyone’s inventory, and various other meters and menus while planning for the lessons and battles to come. But you’re treated to a near-constant stream of positive reinforcement as those meters fill up week by week and your students improve their skills. You’re always moving toward the next thing: the next level up, the next skill you need to develop, the next month and what may unfold.

To complement this, your activities when exploring the monastery (as well as how many battles you can participate in, if you choose to battle on your day off) are limited by activity points. You get more as your “professor level” increases, which means you have to balance activities that boost your professor level with ones that help your students grow. Activity points also ensure that the month continues at a healthy pace, preventing you from lingering on any one Sunday for too long. Seminars and rest days just eat up the whole day without consideration for activity points, which can break up the more involved weeks and provide their own benefits.

How you choose to spend your time also comes down to how motivated your students are to learn. Each of your students has a motivation gauge that’s drained when you instruct them, and they can’t be instructed again until you interact with them and get their motivation back up. You can do this most effectively when exploring the monastery–where you get to talk to different characters, give them gifts, and share bonding time with them–whereas battle only rarely increases motivation levels. While you can skip a lot of the school life bits and even automate instruction, you won’t get the best results. You’re directly at a disadvantage in combat if you don’t make time for your students, which is by design.

Like all recent Fire Emblem games, keeping you invested in your units and their relationships is the glue that binds the whole experience together. It’s incredibly effective in Three Houses, where your direct involvement in nearly all aspects of a unit’s growth trajectory gives you a special stake in their success. After spending time and effort to help a character achieve their full potential, you’re not just satisfied when they win a fight–you’re proud. And the more you invest in someone–both emotionally and through months of lesson plans and instruction–the more cautious you’ll be about putting them in harm’s way, and the more you’ll work to come up with a solid battle strategy.

Considering you’re a teacher, it’s good rather than disappointing that there’s almost no romance to speak of. Some students are flirty, but mainly, you’re fostering camaraderie rather than playing matchmaker or romancing them yourself. As you unlock new support levels with different characters–both by interacting with them at the monastery and by using teamwork in battles–you get cutscenes that flesh them out more. Some are charming, lighthearted conversations between two friends, while many of them give you insight into more serious matters–a father forcing his daughter into marriage, discrimination within the monastery, the dark reason behind someone’s lofty ambitions. For the most part, each support conversation is just a piece of who a character is, and as you slowly build support levels over time, you begin to uncover the full picture of each person. As a result, learning more about each of the characters and their place in the monastery is as much a reward for progress as the level bars that tick forever upward as you go.

Every NPC is fully voiced in both English and Japanese, which brings a lot of life to the brief support conversations. Disappointingly, though, the professor is silent. They do have a voice–they’ll occasionally say a line when leveling up or improving a skill–but in cutscenes and when talking to students and faculty, they just nod or shake their head flatly. There are brief dialogue options during conversations, but where they could give way to a full, subtitled sentence or two from the professor, you’re just left with the other character’s reaction. Characters do, however, refer to the professor’s personality and how they come across throughout the game, which is odd considering they mostly nod at things. This puts distance between you and the characters you’re bonding with, and it’s a missed opportunity in a game where the protagonist has an otherwise set look, personality, and backstory.

It’s not hard to like a lot of the characters, though. They draw you in with anime archetypes–the ladies’ man, the bratty prince, the clumsy but well-meaning girl–and surprise you with much more nuance under the surface. Some of the funniest scenes early on involve Bernadetta, a shut-in with extreme reactions to normal social situations, but her inner life is a lot darker and more complicated than those early conversations let on. You might discover a character you thought was a jerk is actually one of your favorites or slowly stop using a less-than-favorite character in battle. You also have the option of having tea with someone, during which you have to choose conversation topics according to what you know about them, dating sim-style. Knowing what topics they’ll like is actually a lot harder than it sounds, and successfully talking to a favorite character–even if the tea setup can be a little awkward in practice–is a small victory.

Each house’s campaign feels distinct but not so different that one seems way better than the other. Every house has a mix of personalities and skills, and they all have their own advantages and disadvantages. Students from different houses can form friendships with each other, too, and you can eventually recruit students from other houses to join yours. Rather than being repetitive, on a second playthrough, recruiting gives you access to different relationship combinations; you can see a different side to a character through a different set of support conversations. And while the overall setup of the game is largely the same across the three houses, each has its own web of B plots, and the second half of the game will look very different depending on who you’re with and the choices you’ve made.

The first half concerns the church, its secrets, and the fact that the professor knows very little about their own identity. As the basic loop of each month pulls you forward, so too does the promise of learning the truth about something, whether it’s why the archbishop wanted you to be a teacher in the first place or who a suspicious masked individual is. These threads remain pretty open, though, at least after one and a quarter playthroughs. You get different details in each route, and so far it’s been a long process to piece everything together.

Learning more about each of the characters and their place in the monastery is as much a reward for progress as the level bars that tick forever upward as you go.

After a five-year time skip, you enter the “war phase” of the game. While the structure of the game is the same–you even instruct your units, since you still need to train for battle–the focus shifts to the house-specific stories. They involve a lot of hard decisions, with old friends becoming enemies, people you wish you didn’t have to kill, and students who’ve changed either in spite or because of your guidance. Late-game battles are especially challenging, with higher stakes and multi-lane layouts that require a lot of forethought. Success in these battles is incredibly rewarding, as you’re seeing dozens of hours of investment in your students reach a crescendo, but they’re bittersweet in context.

When all was said and done, all I could think about was starting another playthrough. I was curious about the mysteries left unsolved, of course, but I also hoped to undo my mistakes. There were characters I didn’t talk to enough, students I didn’t recruit, and far more effective ways to train my units. A second playthrough treads familiar ground in the beginning, but after learning and growing so much in the first, it feels fresh, too. That speaks to Three Houses’ mechanical complexity and depth as well as the connections it fosters with its characters–and whether you’re managing inventories or battlefields, it’s the kind of game that’s hard to put down, even when it’s over.

Source : Gamesport

[gamerszone2019-blog]

Fire Emblem: Three Houses Review - Radiant

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/fire-emblem-three-houses-review-radiant/

Fire Emblem: Three Houses Review - Radiant

Fire Emblem: Three Houses asks a lot of you. Every piece, from battle to friendships to training your units, must be managed both individually and as part of a whole. It can be intimidating, but when it all clicks together, it really clicks. Mastering the art of thoughtful lesson planning as a professor improves your performance on the battlefield, where success relies on calculated teamwork and deft execution. Cultivating relationships during battle in turn draws you closer to each of the characters, who you then want to invest even more time into in the classroom. Every piece feeds into the next in a rewarding, engrossing loop where you get lost in the whole experience, not just in the minutiae.

Three Houses casts you as a mercenary who, while out on a mission with their father, runs into a group of teens under attack. After a brief introduction and battle tutorial–which you shouldn’t need, since you’re apparently already an established mercenary, but we’ll go with it–you learn that they are students at Garreg Mach monastery. Each of them leads one of the school’s three houses: Black Eagles, Blue Lions, or Golden Deer. At the behest of the church’s archbishop, who definitely gives off nefarious vibes but is also a gentle mom figure, you end up becoming a professor and must choose which of the houses to lead. There is a lot of mystery to the setup, with consistent hints that something is not quite right, and it’s easy to get absorbed in trying to figure out what the archbishop and various other shady figures are up to.

Your main role as professor is to instruct your students in matters of combat and prepare them for story battles at the end of each month. Battles in Three Houses feature the same turn-based, tactical combat at the heart of the series, albeit with some changes. The classic weapon triangle is downplayed quite a bit in favor of Combat Arts, which have been altered somewhat from their introduction in Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. Combat Arts are attacks tied to a weapon type and can boost a unit’s attack power at the expense of weapon durability; some are effective against specific enemy types, like armored units. You can also unlock skills outside of Combat Arts that grant you better stats with certain weapons, like a heftier boost for using an axe against a lance user, similar to the old weapon triangle. It’s the same complexity the series is known for but less abstracted, making it a bit easier to strategize without sacrificing depth.

One of the big combat additions is battalions, mini armies you can equip that provide various benefits to a unit during battle. They also give you a new type of attack called a Gambit, which varies based on the type of battalion–magic-focused, brute force, and so on–and stuns the enemies it hits. Gambits are limited-use and can be incredibly powerful against the right enemies. You can increase a Gambit’s effectiveness even further if one or more of your other units are within attack range of the target, a tried-and-true Fire Emblem concept that applies to all kinds of attacks. There’s also an anime-style splash screen as you attack that shows each character involved in the Gambit looking fierce, which adds a nice bit of drama.

How much you use Combat Arts and Gambits depends on what difficulty you’re on. On Normal difficulty, well-trained units will likely be able to dispatch most enemies in one or two hits without the help of Combat Arts or Gambits. On Hard, however, enemies hit harder and withstand your attacks better. You have to think much more carefully about unit placement, the best time to use a Gambit and take advantage of its stun effect, and how many Combat Arts you can fire off before your weapon breaks. This is where things get exciting; after a few turns of cautious setup, you (hopefully) get to knock out tons of enemies as your plans fall into place.

Some of the early-game and optional battle maps are open spaces that don’t require you to think too hard, especially on Normal. But the story battles throughout feature a variety of map layouts–from pirate ships to what appears to be a lava-filled cavern–that challenge you to consider where your units need to be, both in the next turn and several turns down the line. Many of them have different routes, enemies coming at you from multiple angles, optional treasure to chase, and other quirks that require you to split your party up or change their equipped classes to suit the situation. Thieves, for instance, can open chests and doors without a key, while flying units don’t take damage from ground that’s on fire.

The depth of strategy in these elements really shines on Hard difficulty, but especially so when coupled with Divine Pulse, another limited-use ability. Divine Pulse allows you to rewind time in order to redo all or part of the battle, usually if one of your units dies. Rewinding with Divine Pulse shows just how important unit placement and attack choice can be, as even a slight change can make or break the encounter. It’s also just a nice quality-of-life feature if you play on Classic mode, in which units who die in battle are lost forever and can’t fight or train anymore. You might still soft reset from time to time, but it’s great to be able to rectify a mistake right away and get a shot of instant gratification for a job well re-done.

Battling, of course, is only one part of life at the monastery. The backbone of Three Houses is the monthly school calendar, and if you like organizing things, planning ahead, or school in general, this can be the most engrossing part. On Sundays, you have free time you can spend in one of four ways: exploring the monastery, participating in side battles, holding a seminar to improve your students’ skills, or simply taking the day off. Mondays are for instruction, which consists of selecting students from a list and choosing a few of their skills to boost. The rest of the week goes by automatically, with a sprite of the professor running along the calendar and stopping occasionally for random events or story cutscenes. It sounds a bit hands-off, but there’s a lot to think about as it is, and the week-by-week rather than day-by-day structure keeps things moving and ensures you never have to wait too long to progress in any area.

The predictable structure of each month–and the fact that you can see the full month’s schedule with events listed ahead of time–gives you the foundation to make effective plans. All that time management can definitely be overwhelming, at least at first. You have to keep tabs on your students’ skills and study goals, your own skills, everyone’s inventory, and various other meters and menus while planning for the lessons and battles to come. But you’re treated to a near-constant stream of positive reinforcement as those meters fill up week by week and your students improve their skills. You’re always moving toward the next thing: the next level up, the next skill you need to develop, the next month and what may unfold.

To complement this, your activities when exploring the monastery (as well as how many battles you can participate in, if you choose to battle on your day off) are limited by activity points. You get more as your “professor level” increases, which means you have to balance activities that boost your professor level with ones that help your students grow. Activity points also ensure that the month continues at a healthy pace, preventing you from lingering on any one Sunday for too long. Seminars and rest days just eat up the whole day without consideration for activity points, which can break up the more involved weeks and provide their own benefits.

How you choose to spend your time also comes down to how motivated your students are to learn. Each of your students has a motivation gauge that’s drained when you instruct them, and they can’t be instructed again until you interact with them and get their motivation back up. You can do this most effectively when exploring the monastery–where you get to talk to different characters, give them gifts, and share bonding time with them–whereas battle only rarely increases motivation levels. While you can skip a lot of the school life bits and even automate instruction, you won’t get the best results. You’re directly at a disadvantage in combat if you don’t make time for your students, which is by design.

Like all recent Fire Emblem games, keeping you invested in your units and their relationships is the glue that binds the whole experience together. It’s incredibly effective in Three Houses, where your direct involvement in nearly all aspects of a unit’s growth trajectory gives you a special stake in their success. After spending time and effort to help a character achieve their full potential, you’re not just satisfied when they win a fight–you’re proud. And the more you invest in someone–both emotionally and through months of lesson plans and instruction–the more cautious you’ll be about putting them in harm’s way, and the more you’ll work to come up with a solid battle strategy.

Considering you’re a teacher, it’s good rather than disappointing that there’s almost no romance to speak of. Some students are flirty, but mainly, you’re fostering camaraderie rather than playing matchmaker or romancing them yourself. As you unlock new support levels with different characters–both by interacting with them at the monastery and by using teamwork in battles–you get cutscenes that flesh them out more. Some are charming, lighthearted conversations between two friends, while many of them give you insight into more serious matters–a father forcing his daughter into marriage, discrimination within the monastery, the dark reason behind someone’s lofty ambitions. For the most part, each support conversation is just a piece of who a character is, and as you slowly build support levels over time, you begin to uncover the full picture of each person. As a result, learning more about each of the characters and their place in the monastery is as much a reward for progress as the level bars that tick forever upward as you go.

Every NPC is fully voiced in both English and Japanese, which brings a lot of life to the brief support conversations. Disappointingly, though, the professor is silent. They do have a voice–they’ll occasionally say a line when leveling up or improving a skill–but in cutscenes and when talking to students and faculty, they just nod or shake their head flatly. There are brief dialogue options during conversations, but where they could give way to a full, subtitled sentence or two from the professor, you’re just left with the other character’s reaction. Characters do, however, refer to the professor’s personality and how they come across throughout the game, which is odd considering they mostly nod at things. This puts distance between you and the characters you’re bonding with, and it’s a missed opportunity in a game where the protagonist has an otherwise set look, personality, and backstory.

It’s not hard to like a lot of the characters, though. They draw you in with anime archetypes–the ladies’ man, the bratty prince, the clumsy but well-meaning girl–and surprise you with much more nuance under the surface. Some of the funniest scenes early on involve Bernadetta, a shut-in with extreme reactions to normal social situations, but her inner life is a lot darker and more complicated than those early conversations let on. You might discover a character you thought was a jerk is actually one of your favorites or slowly stop using a less-than-favorite character in battle. You also have the option of having tea with someone, during which you have to choose conversation topics according to what you know about them, dating sim-style. Knowing what topics they’ll like is actually a lot harder than it sounds, and successfully talking to a favorite character–even if the tea setup can be a little awkward in practice–is a small victory.

Each house’s campaign feels distinct but not so different that one seems way better than the other. Every house has a mix of personalities and skills, and they all have their own advantages and disadvantages. Students from different houses can form friendships with each other, too, and you can eventually recruit students from other houses to join yours. Rather than being repetitive, on a second playthrough, recruiting gives you access to different relationship combinations; you can see a different side to a character through a different set of support conversations. And while the overall setup of the game is largely the same across the three houses, each has its own web of B plots, and the second half of the game will look very different depending on who you’re with and the choices you’ve made.

The first half concerns the church, its secrets, and the fact that the professor knows very little about their own identity. As the basic loop of each month pulls you forward, so too does the promise of learning the truth about something, whether it’s why the archbishop wanted you to be a teacher in the first place or who a suspicious masked individual is. These threads remain pretty open, though, at least after one and a quarter playthroughs. You get different details in each route, and so far it’s been a long process to piece everything together.

Learning more about each of the characters and their place in the monastery is as much a reward for progress as the level bars that tick forever upward as you go.

After a five-year time skip, you enter the “war phase” of the game. While the structure of the game is the same–you even instruct your units, since you still need to train for battle–the focus shifts to the house-specific stories. They involve a lot of hard decisions, with old friends becoming enemies, people you wish you didn’t have to kill, and students who’ve changed either in spite or because of your guidance. Late-game battles are especially challenging, with higher stakes and multi-lane layouts that require a lot of forethought. Success in these battles is incredibly rewarding, as you’re seeing dozens of hours of investment in your students reach a crescendo, but they’re bittersweet in context.

When all was said and done, all I could think about was starting another playthrough. I was curious about the mysteries left unsolved, of course, but I also hoped to undo my mistakes. There were characters I didn’t talk to enough, students I didn’t recruit, and far more effective ways to train my units. A second playthrough treads familiar ground in the beginning, but after learning and growing so much in the first, it feels fresh, too. That speaks to Three Houses’ mechanical complexity and depth as well as the connections it fosters with its characters–and whether you’re managing inventories or battlefields, it’s the kind of game that’s hard to put down, even when it’s over.

Source : Gamesport

[gamerszone2019-blog]

Fire Emblem: Three Houses Review - Study Hall

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/fire-emblem-three-houses-review-study-hall/

Fire Emblem: Three Houses Review - Study Hall

Fire Emblem: Three Houses asks a lot of you. Every piece, from battle to friendships to training your units, must be managed both individually and as part of a whole. It can be intimidating, but when it all clicks together, it really clicks. Mastering the art of thoughtful lesson planning as a professor improves your performance on the battlefield, where success relies on calculated teamwork and deft execution. Cultivating relationships during battle in turn draws you closer to each of the characters, who you then want to invest even more time into in the classroom. Every piece feeds into the next in a rewarding, engrossing loop where you get lost in the whole experience, not just in the minutiae.

Three Houses casts you as a mercenary who, while out on a mission with their father, runs into a group of teens under attack. After a brief introduction and battle tutorial–which you shouldn’t need, since you’re apparently already an established mercenary, but we’ll go with it–you learn that they are students at Garreg Mach monastery. Each of them leads one of the school’s three houses: Black Eagles, Blue Lions, or Golden Deer. At the behest of the church’s archbishop, who definitely gives off nefarious vibes but is also a gentle mom figure, you end up becoming a professor and must choose which of the houses to lead. There is a lot of mystery to the setup, with consistent hints that something is not quite right, and it’s easy to get absorbed in trying to figure out what the archbishop and various other shady figures are up to.

Your main role as professor is to instruct your students in matters of combat and prepare them for story battles at the end of each month. Battles in Three Houses feature the same turn-based, tactical combat at the heart of the series, albeit with some changes. The classic weapon triangle is downplayed quite a bit in favor of Combat Arts, which have been altered somewhat from their introduction in Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. Combat Arts are attacks tied to a weapon type and can boost a unit’s attack power at the expense of weapon durability; some are effective against specific enemy types, like armored units. You can also unlock skills outside of Combat Arts that grant you better stats with certain weapons, like a heftier boost for using an axe against a lance user, similar to the old weapon triangle. It’s the same complexity the series is known for but less abstracted, making it a bit easier to strategize without sacrificing depth.

One of the big combat additions is battalions, mini armies you can equip that provide various benefits to a unit during battle. They also give you a new type of attack called a Gambit, which varies based on the type of battalion–magic-focused, brute force, and so on–and stuns the enemies it hits. Gambits are limited-use and can be incredibly powerful against the right enemies. You can increase a Gambit’s effectiveness even further if one or more of your other units are within attack range of the target, a tried-and-true Fire Emblem concept that applies to all kinds of attacks. There’s also an anime-style splash screen as you attack that shows each character involved in the Gambit looking fierce, which adds a nice bit of drama.

How much you use Combat Arts and Gambits depends on what difficulty you’re on. On Normal difficulty, well-trained units will likely be able to dispatch most enemies in one or two hits without the help of Combat Arts or Gambits. On Hard, however, enemies hit harder and withstand your attacks better. You have to think much more carefully about unit placement, the best time to use a Gambit and take advantage of its stun effect, and how many Combat Arts you can fire off before your weapon breaks. This is where things get exciting; after a few turns of cautious setup, you (hopefully) get to knock out tons of enemies as your plans fall into place.

Some of the early-game and optional battle maps are open spaces that don’t require you to think too hard, especially on Normal. But the story battles throughout feature a variety of map layouts–from pirate ships to what appears to be a lava-filled cavern–that challenge you to consider where your units need to be, both in the next turn and several turns down the line. Many of them have different routes, enemies coming at you from multiple angles, optional treasure to chase, and other quirks that require you to split your party up or change their equipped classes to suit the situation. Thieves, for instance, can open chests and doors without a key, while flying units don’t take damage from ground that’s on fire.

The depth of strategy in these elements really shines on Hard difficulty, but especially so when coupled with Divine Pulse, another limited-use ability. Divine Pulse allows you to rewind time in order to redo all or part of the battle, usually if one of your units dies. Rewinding with Divine Pulse shows just how important unit placement and attack choice can be, as even a slight change can make or break the encounter. It’s also just a nice quality-of-life feature if you play on Classic mode, in which units who die in battle are lost forever and can’t fight or train anymore. You might still soft reset from time to time, but it’s great to be able to rectify a mistake right away and get a shot of instant gratification for a job well re-done.

Battling, of course, is only one part of life at the monastery. The backbone of Three Houses is the monthly school calendar, and if you like organizing things, planning ahead, or school in general, this can be the most engrossing part. On Sundays, you have free time you can spend in one of four ways: exploring the monastery, participating in side battles, holding a seminar to improve your students’ skills, or simply taking the day off. Mondays are for instruction, which consists of selecting students from a list and choosing a few of their skills to boost. The rest of the week goes by automatically, with a sprite of the professor running along the calendar and stopping occasionally for random events or story cutscenes. It sounds a bit hands-off, but there’s a lot to think about as it is, and the week-by-week rather than day-by-day structure keeps things moving and ensures you never have to wait too long to progress in any area.

The predictable structure of each month–and the fact that you can see the full month’s schedule with events listed ahead of time–gives you the foundation to make effective plans. All that time management can definitely be overwhelming, at least at first. You have to keep tabs on your students’ skills and study goals, your own skills, everyone’s inventory, and various other meters and menus while planning for the lessons and battles to come. But you’re treated to a near-constant stream of positive reinforcement as those meters fill up week by week and your students improve their skills. You’re always moving toward the next thing: the next level up, the next skill you need to develop, the next month and what may unfold.

To complement this, your activities when exploring the monastery (as well as how many battles you can participate in, if you choose to battle on your day off) are limited by activity points. You get more as your “professor level” increases, which means you have to balance activities that boost your professor level with ones that help your students grow. Activity points also ensure that the month continues at a healthy pace, preventing you from lingering on any one Sunday for too long. Seminars and rest days just eat up the whole day without consideration for activity points, which can break up the more involved weeks and provide their own benefits.

How you choose to spend your time also comes down to how motivated your students are to learn. Each of your students has a motivation gauge that’s drained when you instruct them, and they can’t be instructed again until you interact with them and get their motivation back up. You can do this most effectively when exploring the monastery–where you get to talk to different characters, give them gifts, and share bonding time with them–whereas battle only rarely increases motivation levels. While you can skip a lot of the school life bits and even automate instruction, you won’t get the best results. You’re directly at a disadvantage in combat if you don’t make time for your students, which is by design.

Like all recent Fire Emblem games, keeping you invested in your units and their relationships is the glue that binds the whole experience together. It’s incredibly effective in Three Houses, where your direct involvement in nearly all aspects of a unit’s growth trajectory gives you a special stake in their success. After spending time and effort to help a character achieve their full potential, you’re not just satisfied when they win a fight–you’re proud. And the more you invest in someone–both emotionally and through months of lesson plans and instruction–the more cautious you’ll be about putting them in harm’s way, and the more you’ll work to come up with a solid battle strategy.

Considering you’re a teacher, it’s good rather than disappointing that there’s almost no romance to speak of. Some students are flirty, but mainly, you’re fostering camaraderie rather than playing matchmaker or romancing them yourself. As you unlock new support levels with different characters–both by interacting with them at the monastery and by using teamwork in battles–you get cutscenes that flesh them out more. Some are charming, lighthearted conversations between two friends, while many of them give you insight into more serious matters–a father forcing his daughter into marriage, discrimination within the monastery, the dark reason behind someone’s lofty ambitions. For the most part, each support conversation is just a piece of who a character is, and as you slowly build support levels over time, you begin to uncover the full picture of each person. As a result, learning more about each of the characters and their place in the monastery is as much a reward for progress as the level bars that tick forever upward as you go.

Every NPC is fully voiced in both English and Japanese, which brings a lot of life to the brief support conversations. Disappointingly, though, the professor is silent. They do have a voice–they’ll occasionally say a line when leveling up or improving a skill–but in cutscenes and when talking to students and faculty, they just nod or shake their head flatly. There are brief dialogue options during conversations, but where they could give way to a full, subtitled sentence or two from the professor, you’re just left with the other character’s reaction. Characters do, however, refer to the professor’s personality and how they come across throughout the game, which is odd considering they mostly nod at things. This puts distance between you and the characters you’re bonding with, and it’s a missed opportunity in a game where the protagonist has an otherwise set look, personality, and backstory.

It’s not hard to like a lot of the characters, though. They draw you in with anime archetypes–the ladies’ man, the bratty prince, the clumsy but well-meaning girl–and surprise you with much more nuance under the surface. Some of the funniest scenes early on involve Bernadetta, a shut-in with extreme reactions to normal social situations, but her inner life is a lot darker and more complicated than those early conversations let on. You might discover a character you thought was a jerk is actually one of your favorites or slowly stop using a less-than-favorite character in battle. You also have the option of having tea with someone, during which you have to choose conversation topics according to what you know about them, dating sim-style. Knowing what topics they’ll like is actually a lot harder than it sounds, and successfully talking to a favorite character–even if the tea setup can be a little awkward in practice–is a small victory.

Each house’s campaign feels distinct but not so different that one seems way better than the other. Every house has a mix of personalities and skills, and they all have their own advantages and disadvantages. Students from different houses can form friendships with each other, too, and you can eventually recruit students from other houses to join yours. Rather than being repetitive, on a second playthrough, recruiting gives you access to different relationship combinations; you can see a different side to a character through a different set of support conversations. And while the overall setup of the game is largely the same across the three houses, each has its own web of B plots, and the second half of the game will look very different depending on who you’re with and the choices you’ve made.

The first half concerns the church, its secrets, and the fact that the professor knows very little about their own identity. As the basic loop of each month pulls you forward, so too does the promise of learning the truth about something, whether it’s why the archbishop wanted you to be a teacher in the first place or who a suspicious masked individual is. These threads remain pretty open, though, at least after one and a quarter playthroughs. You get different details in each route, and so far it’s been a long process to piece everything together.

Learning more about each of the characters and their place in the monastery is as much a reward for progress as the level bars that tick forever upward as you go.

After a five-year time skip, you enter the “war phase” of the game. While the structure of the game is the same–you even instruct your units, since you still need to train for battle–the focus shifts to the house-specific stories. They involve a lot of hard decisions, with old friends becoming enemies, people you wish you didn’t have to kill, and students who’ve changed either in spite or because of your guidance. Late-game battles are especially challenging, with higher stakes and multi-lane layouts that require a lot of forethought. Success in these battles is incredibly rewarding, as you’re seeing dozens of hours of investment in your students reach a crescendo, but they’re bittersweet in context.

When all was said and done, all I could think about was starting another playthrough. I was curious about the mysteries left unsolved, of course, but I also hoped to undo my mistakes. There were characters I didn’t talk to enough, students I didn’t recruit, and far more effective ways to train my units. A second playthrough treads familiar ground in the beginning, but after learning and growing so much in the first, it feels fresh, too. That speaks to Three Houses’ mechanical complexity and depth as well as the connections it fosters with its characters–and whether you’re managing inventories or battlefields, it’s the kind of game that’s hard to put down, even when it’s over.

Source : Gamesport

[gamerszone2019-blog]

Fire Emblem: Three Houses Review - The Good Fight

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/fire-emblem-three-houses-review-the-good-fight/

Fire Emblem: Three Houses Review - The Good Fight

Fire Emblem: Three Houses asks a lot of you. Every piece, from battle to friendships to training your units, must be managed both individually and as part of a whole. It can be intimidating, but when it all clicks together, it really clicks. Mastering the art of thoughtful lesson planning as a professor improves your performance on the battlefield, where success relies on calculated teamwork and deft execution. Cultivating relationships during battle in turn draws you closer to each of the characters, who you then want to invest even more time into in the classroom. Every piece feeds into the next in a rewarding, engrossing loop where you get lost in the whole experience, not just in the minutiae.

Three Houses casts you as a mercenary who, while out on a mission with their father, runs into a group of teens under attack. After a brief introduction and battle tutorial–which you shouldn’t need, since you’re apparently already an established mercenary, but we’ll go with it–you learn that they are students at Garreg Mach monastery. Each of them leads one of the school’s three houses: Black Eagles, Blue Lions, or Golden Deer. At the behest of the church’s archbishop, who definitely gives off nefarious vibes but is also a gentle mom figure, you end up becoming a professor and must choose which of the houses to lead. There is a lot of mystery to the setup, with consistent hints that something is not quite right, and it’s easy to get absorbed in trying to figure out what the archbishop and various other shady figures are up to.

Your main role as professor is to instruct your students in matters of combat and prepare them for story battles at the end of each month. Battles in Three Houses feature the same turn-based, tactical combat at the heart of the series, albeit with some changes. The classic weapon triangle is downplayed quite a bit in favor of Combat Arts, which have been altered somewhat from their introduction in Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. Combat Arts are attacks tied to a weapon type and can boost a unit’s attack power at the expense of weapon durability; some are effective against specific enemy types, like armored units. You can also unlock skills outside of Combat Arts that grant you better stats with certain weapons, like a heftier boost for using an axe against a lance user, similar to the old weapon triangle. It’s the same complexity the series is known for but less abstracted, making it a bit easier to strategize without sacrificing depth.

One of the big combat additions is battalions, mini armies you can equip that provide various benefits to a unit during battle. They also give you a new type of attack called a Gambit, which varies based on the type of battalion–magic-focused, brute force, and so on–and stuns the enemies it hits. Gambits are limited-use and can be incredibly powerful against the right enemies. You can increase a Gambit’s effectiveness even further if one or more of your other units are within attack range of the target, a tried-and-true Fire Emblem concept that applies to all kinds of attacks. There’s also an anime-style splash screen as you attack that shows each character involved in the Gambit looking fierce, which adds a nice bit of drama.

How much you use Combat Arts and Gambits depends on what difficulty you’re on. On Normal difficulty, well-trained units will likely be able to dispatch most enemies in one or two hits without the help of Combat Arts or Gambits. On Hard, however, enemies hit harder and withstand your attacks better. You have to think much more carefully about unit placement, the best time to use a Gambit and take advantage of its stun effect, and how many Combat Arts you can fire off before your weapon breaks. This is where things get exciting; after a few turns of cautious setup, you (hopefully) get to knock out tons of enemies as your plans fall into place.

Some of the early-game and optional battle maps are open spaces that don’t require you to think too hard, especially on Normal. But the story battles throughout feature a variety of map layouts–from pirate ships to what appears to be a lava-filled cavern–that challenge you to consider where your units need to be, both in the next turn and several turns down the line. Many of them have different routes, enemies coming at you from multiple angles, optional treasure to chase, and other quirks that require you to split your party up or change their equipped classes to suit the situation. Thieves, for instance, can open chests and doors without a key, while flying units don’t take damage from ground that’s on fire.

The depth of strategy in these elements really shines on Hard difficulty, but especially so when coupled with Divine Pulse, another limited-use ability. Divine Pulse allows you to rewind time in order to redo all or part of the battle, usually if one of your units dies. Rewinding with Divine Pulse shows just how important unit placement and attack choice can be, as even a slight change can make or break the encounter. It’s also just a nice quality-of-life feature if you play on Classic mode, in which units who die in battle are lost forever and can’t fight or train anymore. You might still soft reset from time to time, but it’s great to be able to rectify a mistake right away and get a shot of instant gratification for a job well re-done.

Battling, of course, is only one part of life at the monastery. The backbone of Three Houses is the monthly school calendar, and if you like organizing things, planning ahead, or school in general, this can be the most engrossing part. On Sundays, you have free time you can spend in one of four ways: exploring the monastery, participating in side battles, holding a seminar to improve your students’ skills, or simply taking the day off. Mondays are for instruction, which consists of selecting students from a list and choosing a few of their skills to boost. The rest of the week goes by automatically, with a sprite of the professor running along the calendar and stopping occasionally for random events or story cutscenes. It sounds a bit hands-off, but there’s a lot to think about as it is, and the week-by-week rather than day-by-day structure keeps things moving and ensures you never have to wait too long to progress in any area.

The predictable structure of each month–and the fact that you can see the full month’s schedule with events listed ahead of time–gives you the foundation to make effective plans. All that time management can definitely be overwhelming, at least at first. You have to keep tabs on your students’ skills and study goals, your own skills, everyone’s inventory, and various other meters and menus while planning for the lessons and battles to come. But you’re treated to a near-constant stream of positive reinforcement as those meters fill up week by week and your students improve their skills. You’re always moving toward the next thing: the next level up, the next skill you need to develop, the next month and what may unfold.

To complement this, your activities when exploring the monastery (as well as how many battles you can participate in, if you choose to battle on your day off) are limited by activity points. You get more as your “professor level” increases, which means you have to balance activities that boost your professor level with ones that help your students grow. Activity points also ensure that the month continues at a healthy pace, preventing you from lingering on any one Sunday for too long. Seminars and rest days just eat up the whole day without consideration for activity points, which can break up the more involved weeks and provide their own benefits.

How you choose to spend your time also comes down to how motivated your students are to learn. Each of your students has a motivation gauge that’s drained when you instruct them, and they can’t be instructed again until you interact with them and get their motivation back up. You can do this most effectively when exploring the monastery–where you get to talk to different characters, give them gifts, and share bonding time with them–whereas battle only rarely increases motivation levels. While you can skip a lot of the school life bits and even automate instruction, you won’t get the best results. You’re directly at a disadvantage in combat if you don’t make time for your students, which is by design.

Like all recent Fire Emblem games, keeping you invested in your units and their relationships is the glue that binds the whole experience together. It’s incredibly effective in Three Houses, where your direct involvement in nearly all aspects of a unit’s growth trajectory gives you a special stake in their success. After spending time and effort to help a character achieve their full potential, you’re not just satisfied when they win a fight–you’re proud. And the more you invest in someone–both emotionally and through months of lesson plans and instruction–the more cautious you’ll be about putting them in harm’s way, and the more you’ll work to come up with a solid battle strategy.

Considering you’re a teacher, it’s good rather than disappointing that there’s almost no romance to speak of. Some students are flirty, but mainly, you’re fostering camaraderie rather than playing matchmaker or romancing them yourself. As you unlock new support levels with different characters–both by interacting with them at the monastery and by using teamwork in battles–you get cutscenes that flesh them out more. Some are charming, lighthearted conversations between two friends, while many of them give you insight into more serious matters–a father forcing his daughter into marriage, discrimination within the monastery, the dark reason behind someone’s lofty ambitions. For the most part, each support conversation is just a piece of who a character is, and as you slowly build support levels over time, you begin to uncover the full picture of each person. As a result, learning more about each of the characters and their place in the monastery is as much a reward for progress as the level bars that tick forever upward as you go.

Every NPC is fully voiced in both English and Japanese, which brings a lot of life to the brief support conversations. Disappointingly, though, the professor is silent. They do have a voice–they’ll occasionally say a line when leveling up or improving a skill–but in cutscenes and when talking to students and faculty, they just nod or shake their head flatly. There are brief dialogue options during conversations, but where they could give way to a full, subtitled sentence or two from the professor, you’re just left with the other character’s reaction. Characters do, however, refer to the professor’s personality and how they come across throughout the game, which is odd considering they mostly nod at things. This puts distance between you and the characters you’re bonding with, and it’s a missed opportunity in a game where the protagonist has an otherwise set look, personality, and backstory.

It’s not hard to like a lot of the characters, though. They draw you in with anime archetypes–the ladies’ man, the bratty prince, the clumsy but well-meaning girl–and surprise you with much more nuance under the surface. Some of the funniest scenes early on involve Bernadetta, a shut-in with extreme reactions to normal social situations, but her inner life is a lot darker and more complicated than those early conversations let on. You might discover a character you thought was a jerk is actually one of your favorites or slowly stop using a less-than-favorite character in battle. You also have the option of having tea with someone, during which you have to choose conversation topics according to what you know about them, dating sim-style. Knowing what topics they’ll like is actually a lot harder than it sounds, and successfully talking to a favorite character–even if the tea setup can be a little awkward in practice–is a small victory.

Each house’s campaign feels distinct but not so different that one seems way better than the other. Every house has a mix of personalities and skills, and they all have their own advantages and disadvantages. Students from different houses can form friendships with each other, too, and you can eventually recruit students from other houses to join yours. Rather than being repetitive, on a second playthrough, recruiting gives you access to different relationship combinations; you can see a different side to a character through a different set of support conversations. And while the overall setup of the game is largely the same across the three houses, each has its own web of B plots, and the second half of the game will look very different depending on who you’re with and the choices you’ve made.

The first half concerns the church, its secrets, and the fact that the professor knows very little about their own identity. As the basic loop of each month pulls you forward, so too does the promise of learning the truth about something, whether it’s why the archbishop wanted you to be a teacher in the first place or who a suspicious masked individual is. These threads remain pretty open, though, at least after one and a quarter playthroughs. You get different details in each route, and so far it’s been a long process to piece everything together.

Learning more about each of the characters and their place in the monastery is as much a reward for progress as the level bars that tick forever upward as you go.

After a five-year time skip, you enter the “war phase” of the game. While the structure of the game is the same–you even instruct your units, since you still need to train for battle–the focus shifts to the house-specific stories. They involve a lot of hard decisions, with old friends becoming enemies, people you wish you didn’t have to kill, and students who’ve changed either in spite or because of your guidance. Late-game battles are especially challenging, with higher stakes and multi-lane layouts that require a lot of forethought. Success in these battles is incredibly rewarding, as you’re seeing dozens of hours of investment in your students reach a crescendo, but they’re bittersweet in context.

When all was said and done, all I could think about was starting another playthrough. I was curious about the mysteries left unsolved, of course, but I also hoped to undo my mistakes. There were characters I didn’t talk to enough, students I didn’t recruit, and far more effective ways to train my units. A second playthrough treads familiar ground in the beginning, but after learning and growing so much in the first, it feels fresh, too. That speaks to Three Houses’ mechanical complexity and depth as well as the connections it fosters with its characters–and whether you’re managing inventories or battlefields, it’s the kind of game that’s hard to put down, even when it’s over.

Source : Gamesport