Fire Emblem

Are the non-Corinne and Jakob characters I'm getting now supposed to be so... weak? Hana and Kaze in particular can barely do anything.

You're just getting a taste of Revelation's superb balancing.

Just wait until you get the Nohr brothers' retainers.

So Rev basically expects you to do grinding challenges and such, I take it?

Kinda. They expect you to fix their snafus through grinding, yes. I don't think Revelation was explicitly designed around grinding so much as they just took whatever stats each character had in their Birthright/Conquest routes and shoved them into Revelation, resulting in some characters who are virtually worthless out of the box and powerful pre-promotes showing up inappropriately early.

Hana is a really weird case in that, for whatever reason, they decided they did need to rebalance her—by giving her less Str. As a Samurai. What the crap, IS?

More like it expects you to use the royals to the exclusion of everyone else.

Well, that's gonna be kinda hard to get all the kids then. Any tips?

If you want all the kids in Rev, support grinding like hell is your only option.

Just grind low-level My Castles. If you want the kids to be worthwhile, recruit them near the middle of the game to ensure they get scaled up to near promotion (try not to go too far into promotion range, though, as then the kids will be a pain in the ass to protect if they participate in their recruitment map).

Grind challenge maps if you want to use pretty much any units besides the royal siblings, Shura, and your starting house servant.

That's the only real way to fix Revelations' piss-poor unit balance.

Some units like Silas got a lot better in Revelation, but they're exceptions.

I honestly never had problems with any characters in Revelations. Maybe I'm just the kind of person who likes to grind in Fire Emblem anyways, but I have no complaints about any of the characters, and they all turned out fine (except Gunther, but that's because I rarely ever used him).

Speaking of Fates, I only just found out that when you accept someone's card when visiting their Castle, you can see all the S-ranks they have. In my defense, I rarely ever accept cards to begin with, so I never really paid too much attention to the card board other than just looking at how other people designed their Avatars.

Edited by dragonfire5000 on Jul 16th 2018 at 12:08:36 PM

Odin-tier is a thing of beauty.

You can make just about anyone aside from a few of the latecomers, but you're not going to be able to use most characters without grinding. And don't even think about going for all the kids without grinding.

Still don't get why Rev has the smallest deployment slots when it has the biggest cast.

I hope that D.C. Douglas voices someone in Three Houses. I really liked his Gunther voice, and he's been in the last couple of games I've been playing (Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse, Fire Emblem Warriors, and Etrian Odyssey V). Hopefully he'll voice a playable character or a very, very hammy bad guy.

Edited by dragonfire5000 on Jul 16th 2018 at 11:41:08 AM

x3 Endgame is only a small portion of the game, so "fine by endgame" speaks volumes about a character's balancing. Also, grinding trivializes any Fire Emblem (not even Lunatic+ can hold out against EXPonential spam), so it's not surprisingly at all that the characters ended up working out.

I worded that poorly. I should've said that I never really had problems with any of the characters after I recruited them at any point in the game. And I will admit that as someone who grinds, I'm obviously not going to have the same problems as those who don't grind as much or at all.

Edited by dragonfire5000 on Jul 16th 2018 at 12:13:30 PM

turning out fine at the endgame is a thing. In a game where grinding is allowed, that's pretty much a given.

Being dead weights throughout most of the road to said endgame which is where the difficulty spikes are is another. But again, in a game where grinding is allowed, you can at least patch it up yourself -although it strictly doesn't change the fact that it's easily spotted bad game design that promotes a hefty deal of Gameplay and Story Segregation. - Being able to fix it yourself simply makes it go from aggressively bad to just dumb.

Being so made of paper that you can't afford to take a hit from aything during the very chapter you're introduced is also another thing, and one that goes back to aggressively bad. (and we're talking about royal's retainers, so the first one i see making a comparison to wrys can forget it). Because we all love some fake difficulty slapped on what is already a marathon chapter.

I also got every single unit in revelations up to level at the chapter 18 mark for the kids and sure, they probably would have turned out viable had I bothered keeping that up throughout the rest of the game. This changes absolutely nothing to the fact I shouldn't have had to do half what I did had the development team slightly cared about balancing revelations.

"balancing is hard" is something I can believe, but I don't think it should have taken more than five straight minute to realize something was VERY off with the levels of the retainers, or, y'know, nyx/shura's levels (same chapter, 20 levels apart) and change that.

edit : oooooh crap, i got double ninja'd

Edited by Yumil on Jul 16th 2018 at 9:18:11 PM

Honestly, in a game that allows for grinding, my reaction to an underleveled character is pretty much just "Whelp, time to get to work and build them up." Grinding in Awakening and Fates never felt tedious to me, so I personally didn't mind having to work a little more to help some of the characters catch up.

I can get behind that. I already have a pretty decent tolerance to griding myself.

But while griding doesn't bother too much me per se, I'd love it even more if the units I'm getting didn't needed that mandatory griding phase before I can use them properly. It certainly wouldn't make the game worse for anyone, and it would make it actively better for those who have a problem with grinding.

(Of course, not talking about characters where being underlevelled is, you know, the point, à la nino or donnel. But I don't believe revelations's intent was to make anyone without royal blood an Est).

Again, since griding is allowed, it's at least not an unfixable flaw, unlike, I dunno, A poorly coded-AI that never attacks you. (unless we're on pc and talking about modding, but that's waaaaaaaaaaaay beside the point) Doesn't change the fact whoever in the design team was in charge of balancing the game didn't do their job properly because it's still a dumb design decision.

Edited by Yumil on Jul 16th 2018 at 9:22:28 PM

Fates and Awakening give you ample time and opportunity to grind up weak characters, so that's something of a non-issue. At that point it's standard JRPG fare. That said, I do agree something was amiss during Relevations.

It's when you have limited time and resources that it gets a little annoying.

Edited by erazor0707 on Jul 16th 2018 at 12:31:33 PM

Griding? Is that like drawing grids on the battle map or something?

...Etrian Odyssey x Fire Emblem when?

On another subject, do you think we'll get a postgame boss or some sort of Bonus Boss in Three Houses? I really liked the Thabes Labyrinth in Echoes and the boss you find down there, so I'm hoping Three Houses will have something similar.

Edited by dragonfire5000 on Jul 16th 2018 at 12:35:43 PM

Fire emblem Q : shadow of the spinoff ?

Or am I mixing up Etrian odyssey and disgaea ?

I'm fairly certain you're thinking of Etrian Odyssey. Disgaea, as far as I know, doesn't require you to draw maps, but it does require you to grind a ridiculous amount.

Speaking of Etrian Odyssey, I do hope that if we ever do get a crossover, we can fight the three elemental dragons. I almost want them to be manaketes in such a crossover, if only to see how the developers design a humanoid form for the Blizzard King (for those who've never played Etrian Odyssey, the Blizzard King has three heads).

Edited by dragonfire5000 on Jul 16th 2018 at 12:49:38 PM

x4 It is an issue for people who don't want to grind. That something as standard JRPG doesn't make it good and I think that really shows with JRPGs becoming more and more niche within the video game market (compared to the 90s, where they were a dominating force).

That said, Awakening mostly doesn't have that issue, since all the first generation characters at least join scaled to their chapter. Things can get iffy for some of the late-joining kids, but they'll usually be able to go straight into battle if both parents have been used and they get a Master Seal ASAP, so problems there would be the player's own fault.

I think Revelation seems especially bad because the other routes have proper balancing. Birthright has everyone join at relevant stats. Conquest has everyone join at relevant stats. Revelation has a lot of crap that doesn't make sense and it's a super stark contrast when Birthright and Conquest are right there for comparison.

JRPGs in general are generally balanced to not need any grinding these days. FE in particular should stay true to its legacy by not needing it. I'm glad it's in for less experienced players, building supports, novelty projects, etc., but they can't expect you to do it.

I really don't why base stats are so bad in Rev. Basic play testing should've shown that, and I don't think raising levels/stats for the likes of Nyx and Odin would be particularly difficult.