#when i was a kid i was very much not a fan of big tanky characters

[pikkish]

it is once again rangerposting hours

[absolutepx]

So I've been playing Death Stranding lately. Wait, that's not what this post is about. Well, it kind of is. Hang on. What is Death Stranding about?

A: Norman Reedus getting bare ass naked B. Sneaking around ghosts with the help of your sidekick, an actual baby C: Carrying 50 Amazon packages up a hill while trying to not topple over D: Waking up in the morning and drinking 5 Monster Energy™ for breakfast

For those following along at home, the answer is actually none of the above. Despite the set dressing being bizarre to the point of near absurdity, what the game is actually about, like thematically, is actually really simple.

See, the development of Death Stranding was actually quite a trip. Hideo Kojima is the video game world's equivalent of an auteur director. He has a very recognizable personal style. It's thoroughly horny – he caught a bunch of shit for the design of Quiet in MGSV, but like, a lot of Kojima characters are just -like that-, including the dudes. Also, this is going to possibly be important later.

Anyway, so Kojima was going to do a rebootmakequel of Silent Hill, and the demo actually made it to the PS store and I could actually write a whole side essay about why P.T. (it was called P.T. for some reason btw) was brilliant game design for how it used the same hallway over and over and it was somehow beneficial to the overall feeling of horror. So Konami it turns out kinda sucks nowadays and they like, fired Kojima (they were huge dicks about it behind closed doors, too) and scrapped the project and kicked him out on the street and kept the Metal Gear series which was his baby (literally the baby in the sink in P.T., he snuck a bunch of messaging about the Konami situation into the demo like a breakup album) and Kojima would go on to form his own studio and poach some of the people who worked with him to boot. So the thing about Kojima is this: he's got a reputation for already putting some wild shit in his games, like a ladder that takes like 10 real time minutes to climb in MGS3 for dramatic effect, and a boss in MGS3 that summons the ghosts of all the people you were too lazy to stealth past and killed, or a sniper battle with a really old guy that he wanted to have last two weeks or some shit until he died of old age but he was "told that "this was impossible and not recommended." That is a real quote I just looked up. So he's coming off the heels of making this hugely successful game with MGSV and the hype of the P.T. Demo and he fucking, he like took all the people that were going to be working on P.T. Along like Guillermo Del Toro was going to co-write it and Norman Reedus was going to star in it, and he's like, I'm going to make this game called Death Stranding. And the first trailer comes out for it and it's completely nuts. Norman Reedus wakes up naked on a beach crying with a baby and there are floating people in the sky? So we're all like hooooooly shit, there's no one to tell him "this is impossible and not recommended" anymore. What's he going to make now!?

So the whole time the game is in development I keep seeing these tweets where it'll be like, Kojima and one of his homies smiling with some saccharine message about being spiritual warriors and changing the world. And not just Del Toro and Reedus, there was Mads Mikkelsen (another guy Kojima puts in the game just because he apparently loves him), and the band Chvches, and also like, Keanu Reeves at one point? You know how everyone has just kind of accepted that Keanu is a being of light? Here he was endorsing Kojima. The hype was pretty confused and frantic.

The game eventually comes out. A lot of game journos hate it because I think there was this expectation it was going to be, you know, less weird and have more of the conventional structure of a video game. That's not to say the average gamer wasn't also dismissive of it, but I think on the ground level there was more of an understanding that like, yeah, Kojima just be like that sometimes.

Because the game was a timed console exclusive and your homie don't play like that, I spent the first year or so cautiously viewing Death Stranding from a distance. I wasn't sure I was going to like it – except for being really impressed with P.T., I wasn't actually a big fan of Kojima's games as games – but I -was- sure that I was going to buy it, because of the way Konami fucked him over, just out of support. And the shit I was hearing was really out there. The primary mode of gameplay is just delivery packages. You collect Norman Reedus' bathwater and pee and use it as grenades. You get a motorcycle that looks like the one from AMC's The Ride with Norman Reedus, and when you sit on it, his character in the game says "Wow, this thing is like the one from AMC's The Ride with Norman Reedus!"

But I didn't really want to know that much about it. Something has that much fucking crazy person energy, you want to go in mostly blind, right? So maybe people just weren't talking about this, or maybe I wasn't seeing it, but then I watched Girlfriend Reviews' video about it and they came right out and said it (link provided if you want to hear Shelby say it more articulately than me):

Death Stranding is basically about the exact opposite of Twitter. It's about remembering how to be kind to each other, how to reconnect in a world where people are so often hostile to each other by default. Prophetically, it's about a world where people are afraid to go outside or touch other people and how damaging that is. It's not a game about carrying packages, it's a game about helping people by being brave enough to walk through a wasteland carrying their burdens because they can't. It's about rebuilding the lost connections between people, about restoring roads and giving people hope. I bet, for Kojima and the people close to him, it's about how to answer hostility with compassion. You can't kill people in Death Stranding. You can and are absolutely encouraged to fucking throw hands with people sometimes, but all the tools and weapons are nonlethal. So I think Kojima took all the Twitter heat he got over the Quiet nontroversy, and all the feelings of isolation he had from Konami separating him from his team during the end of the development of MGSV, and all the support and encouragement he got from his bros Del Toro and Mads and the rest, and decided to channel that into making a game that was a statement about all of it. And sure, it's a little heavy handed, and sure, it's a little saccharine, and sure, the gameplay sometimes borders on miserable in service of creating emotional payoffs. For me, especially in 2020, this message is a huge success. Social media should be an opportunity for all of us to feel more connected to each other, yet primarily it feels like one of the main forces driving people apart. Why is that? Why is the internet of today such a hostile place? I'm old enough to remember web 1.0: I can haz cheezburger memes; YTMND; the early wild west days of Youtube... What happened to us? I've thrown the blame at Twitter in the past, and I think the architecture of the user experience on Twitter is absolutely a big piece of the puzzle, because it fosters negative interactions. But in terms of the behavior, people have observed that 2018 Twitter was actually almost exactly like 2014 Tumblr. (For the record, Tumblr is now one of the chillest places left on the internet, because so few fucks are left to give.)

I think part of it is the anonymity. The dehumanizing disconnection of the separation of screens and miles. Louis CK, before he was cancelled, had a great point about cyberbullying, and why it's so much more savage than kids are IRL. When you pick on someone in person and you are confronted with seeing the pain you caused them, for most sane people it causes negative feedback and you become disgusted with your actions and eventually learn to stop being a shithead. Online, at best you can "break the wrist, walk away".

At worst, you can become addicted to "clout chasing" and the psychological thrill of being cheered on by your social ingroup. It's even worse if you feel like it's not bullying and your actions are justified because whoever you've targeted is a bad person so you don't have to feel bad about what you do to them. This is where reductive, unhelpful catchphrases like "punch a nazi" come in. For every argument, one or both sides have convinced themselves that the other side is subhuman because their beliefs are so disgusting. And sometimes it's even true! A lot of times, especially these days, people really are acting like animals or worse online. Entire disinformation engines are roaring day and night, churning out garbage and cluttering the social consciousness. (Kojima talked about this bit, too, way back in MGS2. As if I wasn't already in danger of losing my thread through this.)

The human brain was not built to live like this. You can't wake up every morning, roll over and open your phone, and be immediately faced with a tidal wave of anger and indignity. It wasn't built to be aware of fully how horrible the world is at any moment ALL AT ONCE, ALL THE TIME. And you will be. Because of another way that our brain works – the way we are more likely to share negative opinions. And because of the cottage industry built on farming outrage clicks, and because of constant performative activism.

It's not that I don't agree that being informed is important.

It's not that I don't agree that the causes people get riled up about are important.

They are. They absolutely are.

But we can't keep living like this. The constant, unending flood of tragedy, arguments, and hot takes. How much of the negativity we associate with online culture is the product of this feedback loop? What if the rise of doomer culture has been, if not entirely created by, has been nourished and exacerbated by our hostile attitudes toward each other?  Incels and TERFs, white supremacists, radfems, tankies and Trumpers – it seems like on every side of every issue, there are people simultaneously getting it wrong in multiple directions at once and there are more being radicalized every day. They are the toxic waste left behind by the state of discourse. And any hill is a hill worth dying on.

So what am I actually advocating? I don't know. There are a lot of fights going on right now that are important and we can't just climb into bunkers and ignore our problems hoping that Norman Reedus and his fine ass are going to leave the shit we need on our doorsteps. We need to find the strength to carry those hypothetical packages for ourselves sometimes - and hopefully, for others as well. Humans are social creatures. We need interaction and enrichment.

We need love.

So just try to remember the connections between humanity. Try to put more good stuff into the world when you can. Share more shitposts and memes. Tell your friends and family that you love them. Share good news when you hear it. Go on a weird fucking tangent about Death Stranding. Find a way to "be excellent to each other, and party on, dudes."

[bill-beauxquais]

Blogging my Bravely Default II Playthrough - Chapter 2

Here we are for a new chapter!

As usual, spoilers for up to chapter 3′s title card below the cut (so all of chapter 2, none of chapter 3), you have been warned.

Overall opinion: The game is still fun to play and while I sometimes laments being so slow, I like that I can play a lot without feeling like I’m goind too fast. On a story standpoint, I’m a bit bummed that this chapter didn’t really make any real progress in its main thematics, but on a gameplay level, it was fun.

Gameplay: I talked about there being more strategy in battle already, but I realise I didn’t mention why. Compared to previous games, it seems like enemies use brave and default a lot more, and they actually go into negative. It happened in previous game, but if my memory serve, it was only certain enemies who had this quirk baked into them. Also, nearly all of them have counters and immunity, preventing you from just braving 4 times and calling it a day (albeit it still works reasonably often).

However, I did notice a flaw as well in the balancing. Some sidequests (most notably, the mushrooms sidequest) only opened to me after I finished the chapter’s story, but they took place in a dungeon where every enemy was WAY underpowered. I’m still getting underdog bonuses in the story, so I’m not overleveled. I don’t know what exactly unlocked the sidequest, but I checked everytime I set food in Wisward. On the other hand, the sidequest boss actually took me some planning, while I basically Yolo’d all the asterisks of the chapter. Weird. In the end, the whole dungeon was simply a long corridor (every enemy fleeing from me), with one tough boss at the end. Jarring.

Speaking of dungeon, this chapter really made them a lot longer than anything the serie had until now. On one hand, they can get a little boring and frustrating after a while, but on the other, I do like that they allow you to really train your new asterisks by putting more time between each of them, so overall I’d say it’s a positive.

Speaking of which, I finally looked into what you get from the boat, and I need to mention the inclusion of JP orbs, to give you JP experience on the go. It makes it easier to level up jobs without having to grind with ill matched teams, which is a good idea, since ill matched teams are sometimes really unforgiving because of the immunities and counters mentioned earlier. You still end up having to train jobs the old fashioned way, but any shortcut is good.

Speaking of grinding, I was surprised that I didn’t need to grind even once, for now. I wouldn’t qualify the asterisk battles of underwhelming, they took me half an hour on average and demanded strategy and quick thinking or risk taking, but I went into most of them with in-training teams full of ill matched underleveled and redundant jobs and still won. For me, that’s just the right difficulty to be interesting without getting frustrating.

My favorite asterisk of this chapter probably was the Shieldbearer for more Gloria Tankness (I also noticed it pairs well with White mage for a tanky healer)  , but Ranger is good as well (but I’m biaised from the previous games. Always liked hunter). I appreciate that they changed red mage to be less of a watered down mix of Black and White, but I’m not sure I’m using it very efficiently. It just doesn’t seems to deal a lot of damage, and I prefered the old one’s design. This one looks a lot more boring. As for Artist, I’m not really using it very well for now either. I feel like there’s already tons of debuffing skills in other classes.

I didn’t really get the point of Wayward Wood, since you know where the correct exit is, there’s not much point in making a looping/”lost wood” kinda dungeon, because it’s not like you will get lost (unless you’re doing it willingly the first time just to see what happens). Maybe it’ll open other paths later, who knows.

Writing: Still good, albeit I think i prefered Savalon. I suppose I expected to see more of Elvis’s backstory and family, why did he come study magic, how did Lady Emma pass away... But nothing of the sort. I don’t think like it really helped see Elvis any more in depth, sure he is a good friend, but that’s something we already could infer. I would’ve liked to see his character broken down more.

I’m always happy to see dead kids stories (don’t get me wrong, I love kids, but I also roll my eyes quite a lot when writers chicken out on having anything bad happen to a kid in their stories) but I don’t know if this was strong enough to be the focus of the entire chapter. I don’t think it had any connection to Musa’s downfall or the crystals. But I could see Wiswald coming back later in the story to tie back into these themes, and maybe that was just the Wiswald introduction chapter.

With the dead kids, crazy people, greenery, hunter & red mage asterisks, and those darn Mushrooms and flower enemies, it’s also hard to shake the feeling of this being Florem.02, and Florem will always be extra special to me.

Writing - Theories: Definitely called it for Edna’s veiled ass, although introducing that silver haired lady just before almost threw me for a loop. I’m assuming she’s the traveler handing out asterisks like candies, and Adelle probably knows (or at least she knows her sister is related to asterisks in some way)

I don’t know if I mentioned it, but I had a theory back when playing Default for the first time, that asterisk made people crazy or at least, more extreme, and that’s why they all made the perfect little mascot for theirs each time. And also why Ringabel *and* Artemia in the anthology lost their memories when they lost their asterisk: it plays into their brain and personalities. So, nice to see theory confirmed by the sequel.

As expected of its unredeemable bosses, Folie kicked the bucket, which begs the question: I fully expect them to have another gauntlet like the previous games. So is a timeloop/universe hopping all but confirmed at this point, or will this be something else? Will the characters’ deaths be retconed or explained away? I feel like some of these characters could be redeemed in a timeloop, and stopped an saved before they do much damage. The asterisk are pretty much the ones to blame in nearly every case for the sudden change of heart of their holders.

I’ve got that flimsy theory that Shirley is Emma’s kid, based on a similar hairstyle, the fact the gambler asterisk pairs well with black mage, and that Shirley mentioned her mother leaving her father. Who knows. I liked Shirley.

Adelle is definitely crushing hard on Elvis, but I think he’s pretty much ace. Interesting to see how this develops.

Graphics: Gonna hand it to them, i was impressed that they actually made a unique model for Mona, all to use it for one cutscene. Long gone are the days in which they just reused Yew and Magnolia’s models for Altair and Vega, two majors characters. This is the kind of attention to detail we like to see here. No cutting corners. They even made a model for the paintings, too.

The fog effect was pretty rad as well, and definitely got me running a few laps like a giddy kid. You like to see it.

Elvis’ head looked pretty big compared to his friends, noticeably so. But I suppose Bravely Default 1 and second weren’t that much better, and even worse. The main 4 were DEFINITELY chibised compared to other characters (which made Alternis look like a baby in the Eternian team)

Performance: I noticed a bit less lag, but I also made the battle speed slower, this is probably related. Else, it’s the same things.

Music: Elvis’ theme is pretty good. I remember listening to the first drafts that were datamined from the first demo back in the day, and it was already my favorite.

However, I wasn’t a fan of Wiswald’s overworld theme, and the city’s was forgettable.

[thathomestar]

Yakuza 6 beaten! This game is mechanically rough but the story is good. An interesting sendoff for Kiryu’s final adventure, to say the least.

Putting this under a read more because it got kinda long sorry

I’ve already talked at length about the combat mechanics and how I’m not a fan, but I’ll sum up my thoughts here a little more succinctly. Kiryu’s old Dragon of Dojima style he’s had for like 6 games now is replaced with this weirdo clunky fighting style that’s really slow. It gets better when you get the speed upgrades, but Yakuza 0 has this game beat by a long shot. The enemies, at least on Hard difficulty, love to swarm you all at once and all attack at once, making large group fights a real pain. The combat is at it’s best when you’re one-on-one with a boss, but previous games have done it better.

The introduction of Extreme Heat Mode is an interesting decision, but ultimately I feel it’s a misstep. A large amount of heat actions being locked behind a limited-duration ability is odd, and you can’t do your standard combos while in Extreme Heat Mode either, as your standard rush combo becomes essentially a Dempsy Roll. Not to mention, activating Extreme Heat takes a solid 2 seconds, which means setting up for specific heat actions is much more difficult. You’re still susceptible to flinch from enemy attacks while in Extreme Heat Mode, so wailing on your opponents isn’t feasible. The best method for crowd control is to grab and throw, or use Finishing Holds.

How you level up is also completely new. Gone are the Mind, Body, and Technique categories, gone are the sphere grids and multiple styles. There are now five aspects that you can earn XP points for: Strength, Agility, Spirit, Knowledge, and Charm. Just about everything gives you XP now. Fighting, eating, going to the RIZAP gym in Kamurocho, completing substories, filling out the completion menu, etc. Earn enough of these, and you can either level up your core abilities (health, attack, defense, evasion, heat) or choose to purchase skills, whether it’s new attack moves or augmenting your heat.

I don’t mind this new system, except for one thing: knowledge. There is no good way to get XP for knowledge outside of eating food (you don’t earn it from fights, and typically don’t get much of it as a reward for side activities), so you will be stuffing Kiryu full to the brim every single chance you get just to scrape together some knowledge XP. However, Kiryu now has a stomach capacity meter now. Eat too much, and you can’t earn XP from the food you eat. Being full or hungry doesn’t affect Kiryu outside of this though, thankfully, but it’s rather annoying. You quickly find out which restaurants are worth eating at for knowledge XP and ignore the rest.

Enough about the gameplay then. The story is pretty damn good. It’s like if Yakuza 5 was actually cohesive and paced well, lots of new characters and good drama. The stakes are probably the highest they’ve been for a Yakuza game, which I know sounds ridiculous considering the kinds of things Kiryu ends up getting sucked into, but it’s the truth. There’s a few older characters like Daigo, Majima, and Saejima that make what amount to cameo appearances, and they are quickly shuffled out of frame to make way for the new cast. I love all the new characters. The Hiroshima newcomers take some warming up to but they come into their own by the time the story concludes.

Side stuff this time is a mixed bag. New engine, new minigames. The railgun spearfishing game where you genocide fish was my favorite, the baseball management game not so much. Karaoke has finally gotten a much needed overhaul, making rhythms not a guessing game. All of the classic Sega arcade games from Yakuza 0 are brought over, as well as Puyo Puyo and a full arcade-perfect port of Virtua Fighter 5. I am fucking awful at Puyo Puyo. The batting cage game is a bit different now too, it’s more like how Shinada’s batting minigame was from Yakuza 5. Darts and Mahjong have also returned. Woo. I ignored hostess clubs as I always do.

The camgirl game is amusing on your first go but it’s be boring to play it over and over just to view all the different branching scenes, unless you’re into that sort of thing I guess. Substories are now all fully voice acted, to my surprise. There’s 52 in total, which is less than usual, but given how each one has a lot more time and effort spent on it makes up for it a bit. Unfortunately, some of them are tied behind stuff like the baseball management game, like the ability to be a regular at a hole-in-the-wall pub. Also, I don’t know if there’s anything else to the Cat Cafe thing if you actually find all the cats, because I didn’t bother.

The Clan Creator is the big new side activity for Yakuza 6, and it’s... kinda boring. The little story thread is that this bigass gang (led by New Japan Pro Wrestling members for some reason) is causing a lot of trouble, so Kiryu and some kids he meets up with form the Kiryu Clan to stop them. You recruit leaders to your ranks and slot them into a hierarchy, then set off on missions. It plays like a bare-bones RTS game where you send out troops, up to 6 of your leaders and your pick of generic gang members who specialize in different things (some are tanky brutes who can soak up damage but are slow, some stay back and shoot guns, some chuck grenades, etc). You send your gang up or down a street and have them duke it out with the enemy gang, occasionally using your leaders’ abilities to help turn the tide in your favor.

Unfortunately, it’s not exactly that difficult or that fun. I did use a code or two to unlock OP leaders (like Daigo with his ability to refresh your reinforcement pool), so maybe that’s why, but it was always a steamroll until the very last battle. Hell, I didn’t even have Daigo for a while and I was still cruising through it. But you’re encouraged to find and use codes, so I dunno. The little storyline was kinda boring outside of the goofy wrestling personas doing their goofy things.

I guess I oughta wrap this up. Overall, I still enjoyed Yakuza 6. But literally every time I was in combat, I was thinking about how much more fun Yakuza 0 or even Yakuza 5 was. The story is great, I loved the characters, but it’s brought down by the rough mechanics of this new engine and fighting style. I hope for Shin RGG they really polish its mechanics. I would not recommend this as a first Yakuza experience, but I think I would recommend it for people who have beaten 0 and Kiwami.

God I wish they port the PS3 games to PS4 WELL HEY

[cawfulopinions]

Fire Emblem Fates: Just Shove Your Children into the Puberty Void

           I really wanted to like Fire Emblem Fates. I really, really did.

           But there’s only just so much anime I can take, you guys.

           Fire Emblem Fates is the fourteenth entry in the long running Fire Emblem series of fantasy, turn-based strategy games. The series has always made itself distinct from other games in the same genre with its strong sense of fantasy aesthetic, its character writing, and smooth, smooth animation, but has always failed to get traction in the West due to its difficulty and occasional iffy mechanics choices. Fates’ predecessor, Awakening, sold very well, however, and proved that there was a place for Fire Emblem in the states, but sacrificed a lot of franchise difficulty, so Fates promised to give an experience that both fans of Awakening and fans of previous Fire Emblems could enjoy.

           It… certainly tried. I don’t think it quite got there, but it tried. But there was a lot going on along the way that makes me question what the hell they were thinking.

           Fates, ultimately, feels like it’s torn between being a Fire Emblem entry and being a cool light novel that all of the kids will like. There’s a lot that feels like it was cribbed from the latest cheap anime on the airwaves, just for the sake of appealing to people who’re into that. It’s a very weird atmosphere and it doesn’t really fit for what Fire Emblem has previously been. There’s some serious war drama, but there’s also some creepy incest stuff involving your non-blood related siblings and a lot of fanservice. There’s this soap opera stuff involving whether you should be loyal to your birth family or your adoptive family, but also a dimension crossing dragon man’s evil army that wants to destroy the world. There’s DLC gating. There’s a lot of DLC gating.

           It’s not a bad game, persay, but… well, there’s a lot to talk about. Let’s dive in.

           Disclaimer: All images in this long pile of salt are either pulled from official Nintendo press releases or official art, from Miiverse posts, or from other sources. Every image is a legitimate image from the localization, at least as far as I can tell. There’s exactly one image I ‘capped myself, and it’s because I wanted a good shot of a booty. Otherwise, I didn’t screencap them. Please excuse my laziness.

            So before we get into my gripes with the writing, let’s talk mechanics. Fates is split into two versions, Birthright and Conquest, with a third route titled Revelations available as DLC. Each of the versions sports a different plotline, with different units and different maps. However, rather than each game being their own separate thing, the three routes actually branch from a single choice point a couple chapters into the game, after which point you’re locked into one version’s storyline.

The three versions offer different gameplay experiences – Birthright has you supporting Hoshido and is most similar to Fates’ predecessor, with access to skirmishes to level your units and a generally easier experience; Conquest has you supporting Nohr and is a fairly traditional Fire Emblem experience, so resource management is the name of the game; and Revelations has you rejecting both countries and running off with the intended blue-haired waifu, and features several unique map mechanics and access to almost all units from both games, opening up strategies and marriage options that aren’t available in the other two versions.

This is basically foreplay for these two.

           These are all pretty ambitious ideas, so it’s a shame that they all just… don’t really work. For starters, unit types are largely divided by kingdom, which creates some weird balance issues. The majority of the units you get while playing with Hoshido are samurai, ninjas, and mages – speedy foot units with low defense –while the majority of your mounted units are Pegasus knights – low defense, low HP flying units who are vulnerable to archers, which Nohr has in spades. Which is a problem, because the majority of the Nohr units… are slower, hard-hitting mounted units who can tank hits way better than you can. When playing on Birthright, you have to work for your mounted and tanky units, as for a long time the only non-flier mounted unit is Silas, a defector from Nohr who brings along the precious Cavalier class, which can reclass into the tankier Great Knight class. It’s a helpful move, but it’s just not enough a lot of the time.

           In a move that’s clearly meant to balance them, Nohr’s units tend to have low resistance, making them more vulnerable to magic. This makes Conquest an exercise in frustration all on its own because the enemy AI on Conquest can afford to throw endless mages and ninjas at you to carve through your resistance and lower your stats with their throwing knives. And, of course, there’s the occasional Spear Fighter with a Beast Killer spear there specifically to fuck up all of your mounted units’ days,

           Only on Revelations do you have access to units to both types, since you get every recruitable unit between both games, save for a few specific plot units who you could only support off with the Avatar anyways. Besides the absolute pile of warm bodies you’re suddenly given, it opens up a larger experience with the game and better strategies you can now put into place… so it’s a damn shame that the route’s only available as paid DLC, and not as the base game.

           Unfortunately, all three routes (but especially Birthright and Conquest) have a particularly damning, unfun issue: their map design sucks. It’s awful. The maps are almost entirely designed around the quality of “how can we make it easy for everyone ever to get swarmed by everything” and it makes everything an exercise in frustration. There’s one particular map in Birthright where you’re storming a fort, and the lead up to the fort is a large, open field, and the moment you move into one enemy’s range, you’ve basically moved into every enemy’s range, and whoever you send up there is about to get swarmed by everything. Which is an issue, because your tankier units are in short supply, and there’s only so much that Pair Up can do to fix everyone’s defensive issues.

This map’s probably the most extreme case, but it’s far from the only one; several of the maps can more or less be described in qualities of either “big open rectangles” or “awful mazes of corridors”. There’s also a surprising dearth of interesting terrain – I think I can count the number of maps with actual forest tiles on one hand, and since the final chapters on both Birthright and Conquest are all indoors, the terrain’s even more limited.

           Making things a bit more interesting is the Dragon Vein mechanic – every map has special tiles that can be activated by any members of royalty you have in your team due to their draconic heritage, causing different effects depending on the map you’re on. These can be used against you or to your benefit, since there are more than a few maps involving you fighting the opposite kingdom’s royalty too. Honestly, it’s probably the shining feature of the game, aside from the rebalanced Pair Up mechanics, and I’d like to see something like it return in later games.

           It’s fairly obvious from how the routes were designed and the various balance issues that appear that the decision to split the game into three full games worth of content meant nothing was really properly balanced. Admittedly, difficulty is subjective, but for me, Birthright, when played on Normal, was disgustingly easy. When played on Hard, it was a ball-raking experience in frustration and bullshit deaths. Conquest remains frustrating for the entire experience, especially if you’re playing on Classic, but it never feels frustrating in a fun way – it always feels like you’re clawing against the game, desperately trying to find a foothold while you’re being relentlessly carved apart by a million ninjas. And for all of their difficulty, Fire Emblem games do generally feel fair about it. It never feels unwinnable unless you’re on, like, Lunatic or some shit. But god, there were legitimately moments in Fates where I felt like snapping my 3DS in half because it felt flat out unfair.

You can change the difficulty mid-game, but you can only turn it down – Hard to Normal to Easy, Classic to Casual to Phoenix, where units, upon dying, come back the next turn. There’s basically no middle ground when it comes to difficulty – either you’re coasting through with absolutely no challenge whatsoever, or the game actually has your testicles in a vicegrip. Doesn’t help that the game gives you a few really good units in the form of your royal siblings, some of which come pre-promoted, and others with their own unique weapons. In fact, Ryoma’s weapons and stats are so good that people have actually soloed Birthright with him.

Beware the lobster man, for his lust for destruction is endless.

           On the subject of weapons, Fates does away with something that’s been a series standard for decades – weapon durability. Instead, the game gives you several weapons with several differing effects – for example, the Sunrise Katana gives the wielder an insane dodge rate, but has a lower strength. Extra weapons can be forged into one another, letting you steadily improve their stats and, over time, make a weapon far superior to the one you started with. This is a pretty contentious subject in the fandom, but honestly? I don’t have any problems with it. Healing staves still have durability, and it means I don’t feel afraid to use my cool weapons like I always do in other Fire Emblems.

           It also carries over the Pair Up mechanic Awakening introduced, with some new balancing to it – now, units can only aid in attacks if they’re standing to the side of the units in question, and only defend if they’re paired up with (on the same space as) another unit. Enemy units can also pair up, which leads to a lot of frustrating moments when you’ve got two heavily defensive units bottlenecking an area and you’ve got to get past them to make progress. Still, it’s an improvement, and I’d like to see it come back in a game with more unit variety, so I could fully take advantage of it.

           Another thing Fates introduces is unique skills for every character – some get bonuses depending on the type of terrain they’re on, or the characters they’re around. Others have conditional bonuses or abilities, like Orochi and Niles being able to “capture” units that can be convinced to join your army, or Sophie being able to strip enemy units every now and then. This is actually a pretty cool thing overall and it really makes me think more about who to use beyond just stats and if I like them or not.

           There’s also been several changes to how supports work, specifically through the addition of the A+ rank and the new class change seals that have been added. While S-rank is still exclusive to units of different sexes (symbolizing them getting married), A+ notes a “best friend” unit of the same sex, and like S-rank, every unit can only A+ rank once. The new Marriage and Friend seals allow a unit access to classes of their maxed out ranks, giving greater variety in the skills and classes they can earn. It’s a nice change. Master Seals are still in, as are a new variant that allows a child unit to upgrade to a promoted class immediately after recruitment if they’re recruited after a certain point in the game.

…but we’ll get to that later.

           There’s also the My Castle, which is an expansion of Awakening’s barracks, and is honestly such a weird part of the game that it barely garners mentioning. It’s where your shops are, and over time you can add more facilities, gather materials to use to upgrade your items and make stat boosting food with, and participate in some faux-multiplayer matches to get points for other upgrades. It’s interesting, but its existence is… odd, especially since the plot explanation for it has to deal with Fates’ weird flirtation with alternate universe bullshit.

…but we’ll get to that later.

           Overall, the mechanical changes are for the better, it’s just they’re marred by a lot of other dumb shit. Like the map design, the terrible balancing, and Jesus Christ, can I just have a knight, please, so I can stop getting punched in the face???

           This is all without getting into the story, writing, and aesthetic, which is some of the most contentious in the franchise for a good reason. It’s, to be frank, kind of bad. It’s weird and anime in ways that Fire Emblem hasn’t really been in the past, and it feels more like I’m playing a not-so-great light novel adaptation than a fantasy war simulator. And it’s not like Fire Emblem isn’t tropey – for how much people love it, Sacred Stones’ plot sure wasn’t winning too many writing awards, and a good chunk of Awakening’s characters are better described by what anime tropes they adhere to – but Fates really goes all in, complete with some of my least favorite tropes: people being prideful about dumb shit, and sibling fetishism, because no light novel style plot is complete without siblings who want to bang the protagonist.

Some, more blatantly than others.

           So here’s the basic outline of the start of the plot: the player Avatar (default name Corrin) is one of Nohr’s princes/princesses, and have been raised in seclusion in a castle distant from Nohr’s capital. Your siblings, who are also children of the king, Garon, have visited you over the years to keep you company and have grown very close to you. After a series of events, Corrin is captured by Hoshido, the neighboring kingdom, it’s revealed that the protagonist was actually born a prince/princess of Hoshido and was kidnapped by Garon in a previous war. In retaliation, Hoshido kidnapped a Nohrian princess, Azura, and raised her among their royalty. A rapid series of events take place following these reveals, with the Hoshidan queen being assassinated through a curse on your sword and the sudden attack of half-invisible soldiers, Corrin suddenly turning into a dragon, and Nohr invading Hoshido, all leading up to the moral choice that marks the version split: do you stay with Hoshido, the family you were born with; do you return to Nohr, the family you were raised by; or do you seek a third path?

           So let’s talk about something that becomes very, very obvious when you start off: Nohr is evil. Nohr is hilariously evil. One of the literal first things that happen after you meet Garon is him ordering you to execute a pair of prisoners who were captured in a recent skirmish. When you don’t execute them, and your brother Leo pretends to execute them for you so you can let them go later, you find out that your siblings have to do this shit all the time and spend a lot of time only really following the letter of the order under ol’ Dad. One of the next things that happens is you walking in on Garon literally praying to an evil dragon skull. Basically every Nohrian army executive you meet who isn’t one of your siblings or their retainers is also some degree of evil and/or stupidly bloodthirsty. When you get to Hoshido, you find out that Nohrian mages have been sending literal animated corpses over to Hoshido to fuck shit up and just letting them do whatever they want, because Hoshido has a magic barrier keeping Nohr from directly invading it around it (in fact, this is why the queen had to be assassinated in such a roundabout way).

           So when the route choice is presented, it’s supposed to be less “I want to be with this family” and more “I want to stop Nohr” and “I want to change Nohr from within”. Or at least that’s the intent. And while much ado has been made about Treehouse’s various translation changes (which I will not be getting into here, because that’s a can of worms I ain’t touchin’), the changes made at the route split were absolutely for the better. In Japan, when you choose to go with your Hoshidan family, it’s explicitly because they’re your birth family. In the NA version, it’s because you can’t reconcile your own morals with what Nohr’s done.

           The weird part is, it really would not have been that hard to present Nohr in a sympathetic light – it’s stated that due to their perpetual night and poor weather, they have always had poor crop yields and had to invade other countries to support themselves, and ultimately it’s Garon’s dickishness that’s perpetuating the war. Previous Fire Emblems have also had antagonistic, but sympathetic enemy armies, including the Plegians from Awakening, who go to war in the first place because their mad tyrant wants revenge for the previous slights of Ylisse. So Nohr’s levels of cartoonish evil aren’t because it’s not a thing the franchise does… it’s because they just didn’t want to put the effort in to make it actually nuanced.

           From the choice point onward, the plots follow three different paths. Birthright’s path is a fairly standard trudge through a Fire Emblem plot. I’ve heard it called the best “plot” out of the two starting routes, but I think that’s more because its plot is actually paced out well and doesn’t spend the first 15 chapters fucking around making you do Garon’s dirty work and complaining about it ad nauseum. What makes Birthright annoying is in the individual plot beats. There’s two distinct instances of characters killing themselves for no goddamn reason that occur during the story, and while the writers clearly want you to feel something during them, the actual reasons and circumstances are so contrived it’s hard to feel anything about it.

*muffled Rihanna plays in the background*

Furthermore, the further you get into Birthright, the more contrived the reasons for your Nohrian siblings to not ally with you get – Elise is blatantly on your side (and gets a storyline death for it), Camilla is clearly considering defecting before some contrived plot bullshit happens to make her want your friends dead again, and Xander and Leo just keep fighting you for reasons. Reasons that are never adequately explained beyond “Me Nohr, you Hoshido, you traitor, blaaaaaaugh”.

           “Contrivance” is the name of the game with Conquest, too, which sounds like it’s going to have a sneaky storyline about you trying to pull a coup on Garon and change Nohr that way, but is actually about you putting down rebellions for him and fucking up Hoshido because you found out that he’s secretly a monster, and the only way to convince your siblings that he’s a monster is to sit him on Hoshido’s magic throne, because the plot device that Azura pulled out of her ass to reveal this to you with was a one-time use. And your character complains about this a lot. A lot. Half of the dialogue between them and any members of the Nohrian army boils down to “BUT WHY—“ and then your siblings rushing in and saying that yes, you’ll do the evil thing, don’t worry about a thing, and then your character resuming complaints. By the end of the game, you succeed on putting Garon on the throne, revealing that he’s a gross monster, kill said gross monster, and then have a surprise boss fight with a possessed Takumi, who had previously appeared to kill himself for inadequately explained reasons.

           No matter which route you finish first (because let’s be real, you have to pay extra for Revelations, so you’re definitely not playing it first), you’re going to be left with a lot of unanswered questions, first and foremost being “Who were those semi-invisible enemies I fought all the time? What was up with that alternate dimension I fell into with Azura that one time in Conquest? Why were Takumi and Garon possessed by weird gross monsters? Why did Azura just suddenly die at the end for no real reason?” Good news: these are all explained if you buy Revelations. Bad news: You have to buy Revelations to even get so much of a semblance of an explanation, because otherwise these plot things are all left completely unexplained. The plot for Revelations barely has anything to do with the plot for the other two versions, too – while Birthright and Conquest are about the war between the two countries, Revelations is about a dragon that went mad, an alternate dimension kingdom, and how basically every problem in the game was because of these two things.

           All routes manage to hit on one of my bigger pet peeves about Fates, though, and that’s that for all the plot tries to be about this moral quandary of the war, it ends up being more of a soap opera about how much it’s tearing you apart to have to fight your siblings, with a lot of very anime bullshit along the way, and by the time you get to Revelations, it’s gone so full anime that it’s not even pretending to be about a war anymore. The weirdest bits of the writing are in the alternate universe stuff, which you’re first introduced to early in the game when they introduce the My Castle, a pocket dimension only the Avatar can access where time doesn’t pass and the army can just hang around and chill. This alternate universe stuff then proceeds to go wholly unreferenced until a brief visit to Valm that takes place in Conquest, and Revelations, where it’s suddenly the crux the plot spins around.

           Or unless you have a kid.

…but we’ll get to that later.

           There’s a myriad number of other things that make the plot feel weirdly anime and amateurish for such a huge production. Azura is pretty much just “Plot Device: The Character”, with the song she sings through the game basically just being “Plot Device: The Song” with how many different things it gets used for (its actual effects, naturally, are unexplained unless you play Revelations). Azura being a songstress in the first place is a very tropey move – singers and divas are frequently very important characters in Japanese media, and having their songs have magical effects is one of those very common tropes that always feels contrived when it shows up. She’s extremely obtuse with her intentions, which turns out to be because of a literal curse that keeps people from talking about Valm (the alternate universe kingdom) without being in Valm (so again, you want explanations for stuff, better buy  Revelations).

           Similarly, Corrin tends to basically stumble onto new powers and weapons as the plot demands, giving the feeling that they’re meant to be a self-insert wish fulfilment character of some sort. In order, Corrin is a member of all three courts of royalty (yes, including Valm’s), is part-dragon, can turn into a dragon, suddenly has a magic weapon reveal itself to them that’s actually the key to saving the world, and spends a large portion of the plot seeking out a massive power boost so they can go fight Garon on his terms. And while there’s definitely something to be said about a character you can customize being meant to be something of a self-insert, since Corrin’s appearance is fully customizable, and since they can support with everyone, have the most versatility class-wise out of anyone, there’s an amount of wish fulfilment fantasy I can take, and we crossed it a while ago here.

           Oh, and while we’re on the subject of Revelations and things that come out there, one of the big plot points is that your birth parents actually aren’t the same as your Hoshidan siblings’ birth parents, and your dad’s actually a dragon. This is something that’s also told to you when you S-rank one of your Hoshidan siblings, in the form of a secret letter your mom left for them, but up until that point on Birthright? You just think you’re partaking in some incest of the highest degree. So if you want to get that explanation without thinking you’re banging your biological siblings? Better buy Revelations.

           Not that any of this makes any of the sibling fetishism in Fates any less creepy. Since the Avatar, like in Fates’ predecessor, Awakening, can marry any character in the game, all of your Hoshidan and Nohrian siblings are fully marriageable. However, a few things are made immediately obvious when you’re interacting with these characters. The first is that both families consider you to be their family, which raises a ton of awful, creepy questions about power dynamics and the morality of fucking the people who raised you. The second is that the developers absolutely wanted you to fuck your siblings anyways, because Elise and Camilla exist.

From left to right: Three potential routes in the mythical bisexual anime dating sim that only exists in my dreams.

           All of the Nohrian and Hoshidan royalty characters are written around specific anime tropes and honestly feel like they could have been plucked from an otome game, or at the very least, a passably written light novel, but Camilla and Elise specifically play into a particular incesty trope-set that’s very common in Japanese media: the sister who wants a more-than-sisterly relationship with the protagonist. Half of Camilla’s dialogue is basically just throwing innuendo at you while simultaneously implying she wants to mother you, leading to a frankly disconcerting combo of MILF-femme fatale-big sister tropes. And just in case you hadn’t gotten the memo yet, Camilla gets an entire CG scene dedicated to showing off her tits and ass on Birthright, while on Conquest, a large part of the ending CG scene is dedicated to the protagonist running headlong into her titties. Subtle.

Elise, on the other hand, is a cute little gothic Lolita little sister who’s always cheering you on and calling you “Big brother!” or “Big sister!” – grating, but standard enough little sister tropes in Japanese media. The problem is that she’s marriageable, and unlike Awakening, where it was implied that the debatably legal characters all had their kids at least a few years into the future from when the game takes place, the children in Fates are all born not too long after characters get married. So either Elise is supposed to be a legal loli (which is creepy), or you’re banging your underage adoptive sister (EVEN CREEPIER).

All of the siblings in Fates have these problems, but Elise and Camilla really get it the worst, because they’re so overt about it. They’re characters whose entire identities are wrapped up in being your sibling, and you can fuck them. Even with them not being your blood sibling, there was a conscious decision to write them in this faux-incesty manner that adds a real creepy sheen to the whole thing. All of the other members of the royalty? They’re dating sim tropes. Ryoma and Xander are dependable, kind of dorky older guys, Leo and Takumi are supposed to be the standoffish, full of themselves ones, Sakura’s the cute, shy one; and Hinoka’s the hot blooded genki girl. And then there’s Elise and Camilla, who fall into two varieties of incest trope, with a double dose of lolicon on Elise’s end.

But hey, while we’re talking marriage options, let’s talk about the other characters in Fates. So a big thing about Fates is that since it’s technically two separate campaigns, both Birthright and Conquest have complete casts and full armies to take with you, with the characters you get determined by which route you’re on. This isn’t inherently a problem (at least until you get to Revelations and you get both casts, minus a few pre-promotes, giving you a massive pile of units you’ll probably never use), but something about the cast feels very incomplete. There’s a lot of character tropes that are reused from Awakening – for example, Subaki is a Pegasus riding retainer for the crown who’s well known for being absolutely perfect at everything, much like Awakening’s Cordelia; while Hayato is a child-like mage who wants to be taken seriously and has been trying to prove himself, much like Awakening’s Ricken.

It doesn’t stop with just tropes though – a few of the characters are wholesale lifted from Awakening, too. Did you like Cordelia, Tharja, and Gaius? Well, I hope you did, because they’re child units on Birthright. This is actually one point where Conquest has a definite leg up on Birthright, because Conquest’s Awakening cameos, Odin, Laslow, and Selena (Owain, Inigo, and Severa, respectively) actually came to Fates’ world using an actual plot mechanic from Awakening, and get a set of DLC dedicated to explaining their presence in the world in more detail. So that’s another paywall on massive plot material, because that’s the name of the game with Fates, but at least the effort’s been put in.

And something that doesn’t really help is a lot of characters seem to be written very differently depending on route and whether you’re in the main story or the supports. For example, Takumi, if you’ve only played Conquest, is a raging asshole. There is nothing good about him, definitely nothing that seems to suggest the popularity he apparently has in the fandom. If you play Birthright, he’s cold and standoffish and jealous, but there’s depth there. But then there’re his supports, and he’s awkward and prideful and somewhat endearing about it. It literally feels like three different characters.

Top: Takumi in Conquest. Bottom: Takumi in Birthright and his supports.

Overwhelmingly, the various Support chains feel better written than the majority of the game. Even with how tropey a lot of the characters are and how sick I grew of them in the main story, I still enjoyed the support chains a lot. Anything involving Mozu pretty much immediately became a feel good, good time, even with the less personable characters. Raging asshole Takumi became likeable through his supports. It legitimately felt like I was reading a completely different story when I got to the supports, and I genuinely wonder if they were written by a completely different writing team.

Fates also does something no other Fire Emblem has allowed before: there’s gay marriage options. There was much ado made about how stupid it is that they’re version locked, as well as the tropes that go into them, but I’ll give Intelligent Designs credit for trying. However, I won’t give them credit for the fact that the options suck ass. The gay marriage options are Niles, an innuendo spouting Nohrian thief with a thing for bondage and enough angsty backstory and hidden darkness to make him a stereotypical yaoi “top” character; and Rhajat, who is literally just Awakening’s Tharja, a creepy Dark Mage with a penchant for curses and is the Avatar’s stalker. These characters weren’t written to actually make them appealing to gay people – they’re written to fit yaoi and yuri archetypes to make them appealing to straight people.

Go away.

And it’s not like I didn’t give them a chance on my own playthroughs – both my Birthright and Conquest avatars were actually genders that matched the gay options for those routes – but as I got through their support chains, I found out pretty quickly that I didn’t want anything to do with either of them. I’m not interested in marrying someone whose only interesting character traits are his love for innuendo and his angsty backstory, or a creeper who wants my vagina because she’s convinced that I’m her fated lover, and is willing to curse everyone to make it happen.

Legitimately, there’s other characters that would have made more interesting gay options, like Silas, the Avatar’s childhood friend who’s dedicated enough to them to defect to Hoshido; and Soleil, Laslow’s daughter who loves girls so much that her personal skill is all about powering her up when she’s around other girls. Why she’s not the gay option, and Discount Tharja is, is beyond me.

There’s something that’s really jarringly apparent about the Fates cast the further you get into it, though. The game really wanted no business with any party members who weren’t conventionally pretty and young. And nowhere is this more exemplified than with certain pre-promotes you can get, the character of Nyx, and the non-recruitable boss character, Zola.

           So in Fates and Awakening, pre-promoted units (units who come to you already as an upgraded class) generally can’t be supported with any party members besides the Avatar. Both games have exceptions (specifically, Frederick and Anna in Awakening and the royal family members in Fates can all be supported with other units besides the Avatar), but that’s generally the rule. It was odd in Awakening, because in previous Fire Emblems pre-promotes usually could still support with other party members.

But something Fates does that Awakening didn’t is that all of the pre-promoted units who can only support with the Avatar are also old. From Reina, a Kishin Knight with visible wrinkles and a lust for murder; to Shura, a vagrant from a Hoshidan border nation who defected to Nohr; to Gunter, an old man who is one of the Avatar’s retainers. It seems like anyone over the age of 20-something is shoved into the “Avatar-only” category of supportable characters, regardless of their apparent depth of character. Some of these characters are also among the few who don’t come back for Revelations – Scarlet, a Wyvern Lord Resistance leader who joins you in Birthright, gets a particularly undignified death when you first go to Valm to justify her lack of involvement.

It’s the kind of thing that really feeds into Fates’ weird, creepy light novel feeling, because that’s not something other Fire Emblems really have done. Awakening had a good amount of visibly older characters who were still fully supportable (Frederick and Gregor come to mind), and previous Fire Emblems had multiple older characters per game and never really called attention to them the way Fates does. But here, every character (save, say, Benny on Conquest) has to be in the age of conventional attractability and look appropriately, and god forbid they don’t, especially if they’re a woman.

The most egregious instance of this is quite possibly Nyx, a child-like Nohrian mage who’s actually old enough to be an old woman. She falls into a long-standing Fire Emblem tradition of “characters who look like little girls but are actually super old”, which are usually among the various Manakete characters of Fire Emblem. These generally range from “wise despite their appearance” (Myrrh from Sacred Stones) to “uncomfortably childlike” (Nowi from Awakening).

Nyx is a rare exception in that she’s fully human, and looks the way she does because of a curse… and she’s also a Dark Mage, so she wears a bikini everywhere. It really does feel like they wanted an excuse to put a kid in a bikini, and used the “she’s really like a hundred years old!” excuse to justify it (which they also did in Awakening, and it was just as uncomfortable there). And yes, you can marry her as a male Avatar, and yes, she will give you a kid. Have fun with that mental image.

And then there’s Zola.

Who wouldn’t want to give this little creeper a hug?

Zola is a character with… very contentious writing, and another character where, in order to get any perspective on him, you have to play Birthright first. In all three routes, Zola is a minor boss who impersonates the Duke of Izumo, a neutral kingdom in the war, and uses this as a chance to try and execute the Hoshidan royal family before getting killed by Leo for his dishonorable behavior. It’s pretty standard Fire Emblem boss fare, and he’s pretty forgettable there.

But on Birthright, Zola lives past that chapter as a prisoner of the Hoshidan army, and this allows him to gain more depth as a character, revealing that despite his cowardly nature, he does have loyalty toward the Avatar and there’s something sympathetic about him. In any other Fire Emblem game, it’s entirely possible he would be recruitable. In fact, he factors into the Hoshidan army’s plans to fight Garon during the theater episode in Chapter 12.

However, by this point, keen-eyed Fire Emblem players have probably already noticed that Zola did not join the army after his “recruitment”, and the plot summarily executes him after taking three chapters to humanize him, and he’s completely forgotten from that point on. The thing is, more morally ambiguous characters are recruited to the Avatar’s team in Fates alone (cough cough Niles cough Rhajat cough), and they’re allowed to stick around. But Zola is executed despite the game clearly showing he’s loyal to the Avatar (he even pleads to Garon to spare the Avatar after he betrays the party) and him having a fully fleshed out character.

As far as I can tell, the only reason Zola is not recruitable is because he is not pretty. He’s a coward whose looks match his personality, and so he was always intended to be cannon fodder. It creates some legitimate questions about the equating of beauty and goodness in Fates, because there’s legitimately no reason why that plot development needed to occur in Birthright considering how that event is handled in Conquest and Revelations. It would have been easier to leave it all out.

So that’s three distinct cases of characters who are over the hump as far as “acceptable age” and appearance goes, and how they’re treated. It’s another thing that feeds back into Fates’ “big budget light novel” feel – you’re not going to see a ton of those with main characters who aren’t conventionally attractive young people, and the characters are generally designed in a way that they’re appealing to younger players and their aesthetics.

And boy oh boy, does this show in Fates’ character design.

While Fates borrows a lot from Awakening, one thing it does not borrow are Awakening’s class designs. Awakening’s designs were generally fairly simplistic, and aside from a few specific things (flying classes’ baffling lack of armor, those… shoulder things on knights, cavaliers wearing toilet seats for neckpieces), they were fairly reasonable fantasy armor. In fact, most female characters, including the prissy aristocrat troubadour Maribelle, wore pants. The downside there was that a lot of classes were gender-locked; Pegasus knights and troubadours were female only, but even so, they didn’t have particularly egregious designs.

Fates removes gender locking for all classes, but the female only designs are often… egregious. By which I mean, everyone wears panties. Everyone wears panties into battle.

Can you please put on some goddamn pants before you chafe your thighs into oblivion?

Hoshido classes, thankfully, generally wear loincloths over their panties, but the egregious lack of pants tends to be really blatant. But Nohr classes tend to be more than willing to let it all hang out there, even if (or especially if) they’re a horse-riding class. Nothing was worse than upgrading my daughter to a Great Knight, only to find out that she was now riding her horse into battle pantsless. I may have explicitly decided to go with a male Avatar for my Conquest run because I found out that the upgraded Nohr noble class just bares her panties everywhere for female Avatars.

Fates has a lot of really weird fanservice in it. The explicit focus on Camilla’s everything, the panty-baring female class designs, the access to a hot spring that doesn’t seem to have any real purpose beyond being there, and being able to strip enemy units with certain weapons all just gives it a really weird atmosphere for a game that’s supposed to be a serious war drama. It’s the same incongruity I get from a lot of recent anime, such as Re:ZERO, which is apparently a serious story, but also gives its generic main character a harem of pretty anime girls who all want to get with him.

A lot of Fates feels like it’s trying to appeal to the most common denominator by emulating what other games and anime are doing, like the dynamics between characters and the related character design, as well as things they felt were the most popular elements of its predecessor, which was the best-selling Fire Emblem game in a long, long time and possibly saved the franchise. So it gives you a massive cast of characters and a dynamic world-saving plot makes pairing them all up a major mechanic, and even includes previous games’ characters as a throwback to people who liked Awakening. And, most bafflingly, it includes Awakening’s child mechanic.

IT’S TIME.

           When two characters of opposite sex reach an S-rank support with each other, they get married, and their child can then join your army after completing a side mission. Awakening reconciled the fact that the parents and children could fight alongside one another through the use of a time travel plot – no one actually has any children over the course of Awakening’s story (besides Chrom, which is part of the set-up for this element); rather, their future children travel through time to help prevent the horrible future that happened in their own world. It’s a major part of Awakening’s plot, and while none of the child characters have major plot relevance outside of Lucina, the fact that they go out of the way to weave the explanation for why they exist into the plot helps ground them, and several of the children’s Supports involve them trying to connect with their younger, past parents now that they’re in a world where their parents are alive again.

           Fates, however, doesn’t use this explanation. Instead, after your first marriage scene, you’re treated to a cutscene explaining that the parents didn’t waste any time getting knocked up, and after the child was born, it was determined it was too dangerous for any kids to be kept around with the war going on, and so the children were sent off to their own alternate pocket universes (or “Deeprealms”) to grow up safely. Because time passes differently there, the children almost instantly grow to adulthood from the people in the army’s perspective, and by the time they’re recruited they’re fully trained, fully capable soldiers ready to go stab the shit out of some enemy soldiers.

Just shove ‘em riiiiight in. Don’t worry about any consequences, it’s fiiiiiiine.

           There’re a lot of stupid holes and questions that pop up as a result of this, first and foremost being the very obvious question of “When did anyone have time to have children?” All of the female characters in Fates are also combatants, so unless they’re all badasses on the same tier as Metal Gear Solid’s the Boss, they probably weren’t fighting at the same time they were pregnant. Also, Fates isn’t very clear about the time frame the game takes place during, but since no one ages significantly, it can’t be more than a couple of years. Since time doesn’t pass while the characters are in their My Castle, theoretically they could have stayed there for the duration of their pregnancy, but unless the gestational period in Fates’ world is significantly shorter than real life human gestational time, that would mean individual characters having to stay in My Castle for periods approaching upon months, at which point they would have their children, and then shove them in the puberty void to keep them safe while the parents go right back to fighting in a war.

           Which brings it around to the next unsettling implication -- the neglect in the children’s upbringing. Fates’ children only aged quickly from the perspective of their parents outside the pocket dimension – inside their Deeprealm, time moved for them at a normal rate, and the occasional visits the parents gave (as indicated in their Supports with their children) were separated by periods of years. Fates does not shy away from showing how this kind of upbringing affected their children – many of them have major gripes with their parents for essentially abandoning them for their own good, and a few of them have developed some odd quirks and delinquent behavior as a result. Several of their recruitment events are about guilting their parents into bringing them along for the war, and it’s a constant subject in their Supports, as well. No one is particularly happy with how the situation worked out in-story.

           The constant statements that it was done for the children’s own good in their Supports and recruitment events really pushes to the forefront how baffling the explanation is, because the game makes it more than clear that it was this distant upbringing that messed the children up so badly. It goes into absurdity if you’re playing Conquest, which features three returning child characters from Awakening as potential parents, who should know what it’s like to grow up with no parents (all of Awakening’s parent units are dead by the time their children travel back to the past) and would probably not want to subject their children to the same upbringing.

           It’s the inclusion of the child mechanic that pushes Fates from a passable, if flawed, game, right into “basically unplayable”. It’s blatantly obvious that Fates was not written with a child mechanic in mind, and that it was added because Awakening’s shipping mechanics went over very well, and they wanted to capitalize upon that. And it’s not like any of the child characters are bad characters--

           Well, most of them aren’t, anyways.

You are not my children. You are a disgrace.

           But ultimately, all they do is serve to give you more units in a game that’s already swimming with units, and end up being a massive distracting bit of bad writing in a game whose writing is already only passable at best. They literally could have been left out of the game entirely, and nothing of real importance would have been lost.

           (Also, it would have forced them to make a lesbian option that wasn’t just “Discount Tharja”. Or at least tried to make it less obvious that they were recycling everyone’s favorite stalker waifu.)

           Fire Emblem Fates is, ultimately, not a bad game. For all of my griping about the map design and unit distribution, there was clearly a lot of thought put into the new mechanics. Forging weapons to make them stronger feels more rewarding than the old durability system, which always ended up boiling down to “Iron swords for everyone!” so you didn’t waste your cool super weapon. And if you can look past the writing, you’ll definitely have a good time with it, or at least end up frustrated in the kind of fun way only Fire Emblem players do. But the obvious DLC gating, the poor writing, and the nonsensical puberty void bullshit make it a very hard game for me to like, and I don’t think I’ll ever get around to playing the third route as a result.