Did the localisation actually change that much of Fates tbh?
I thought they mainly adjusted some characters but the story overall remained the same.
(As if you could make the plot make less sense xd)
Funnily enough this isn’t even this first time that Me, Ghost and Godwin have gone at it.
Godwin has another thread asking for critique on his attempt to redesign the weapon triangle that really overcomplicates things to a heavy degree. (Weapon advantage auto-crits, bows ignoring defense unless the target has a shield, all kinds of stuff.) It’s honestly kind of a mess.
I don’t intend this to sound like I’m attacking godwin with this, but I know it will anyway.
I’m not entirely sure godwin fully understands some of what he’s saying when it comes to his idea’s and how they work/would-work and how messy changes this big would actually completely fuck up a game and/or its story.
Like, since I can’t directly quote him on this since his first post is bloated to hell, the whole babyrealms thing shows him completely missing the point of the fact that every single paralogue showed the cast actively not wanting their children fighting in the war.
With each child then either getting attacked by bandits/anon-soldiers then afterwards convincing corrin to let them join the fight since they’d be safer with the main army.
Trying to look at it as an “infinite child soldier farm” is horrid conceptually since now you have essentially implied you want the good guys to become forced breeding stock on a level that is inhumane.
I can’t really elaborate how disgustingly tone deaf that particular trail of thought is without this already long post being twice as long though, so I’ll just stop here.
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TBH it’s an interesting worldbuilding idea but not what Fates was going for.
Not exactly sure how that makes good world building.
I mean any country that actively forces its people into mass child breeding solely to fill its ranks with soldiers would either:
- Be a race that breeds like roaches and ages like flies.(or be advanced enough for mass cloning to be possible)
- Have so many people having so much sex around the clock its troubling/ ( or collecting enough genenetic material of enough people to prevent cellular degeneration in the clone batches)
- Be able to process enough raw materials to outfit soldiers at this pace.
- somehow not look insane for having reached this conclusion for building their military.
- And finally, be able to actually write a story with this just doesn’t come off as insanely fucked up.
like this is some extreme eugenics level tactic stuff.
I mean really think about it, hundreds of women being forced to have children just to fill a platoon, or one guy named Jeff being copied 100 times to make the Jeff Brigade. Either way the side that does that would likely be seen as the villans.
I’m sorry you feel like someone is saying “Fuck you in particular and I refuse to be argued with” when they argue that writing in a video game’s story could have been better. Have you had bad experiences in these sort of discussions before? I’ve received death threats over Edelgard/Dimitri opinions before, but I don’t hold that against random strangers on the internet talking about video games.
Fates was founded on bad answers to the questions raised during development. If these questions had better answers earlier on, everything surrounding them could have worked better.
How do you make a game focused around choice? I know, let’s take choice away from the player during gameplay so the only choice that matters is what version of the game you bought in the store and whether you kill Shura for his Boots or not.
How do you make a good versus evil story? I know, fake moral greyness we don’t feel like committing to!
How do you write a morally grey story where things aren’t so black and white? I know, let’s guilt-trip the player a little for joining Good Japan and a lot for joining Evil Europe whose king goes mwahaha!
How do you write a good Villain Route? Lack the stones to commit to it, of course! Fallout New Vegas has the stones to let you side with the baddies and get bad endings for the game world, the people in the places you visited, and all the friends you made along the way. You can be Caesar’s greatest or worst agent. Even put Lanius on the throne. Could you imagine a version of Conquest where, due to your own choices, you let Garon die or kill him yourself and put Iago on the throne instead of Xander, getting different endings and paired endings for each character? And that’s just one of the game’s other three routes (NCR, Wild Card, House). Even optional routes where you side with Elijah or the Think Tank. Cleverly the main game chooses not to diverge the story routes until you’ve played through enough of the game to understand every side and make an informed choice about what you want to commit to for the game’s second and third acts, and it doesn’t make the first act a slog because these acts have interesting choices to make and much of it is skippable with the smart play of someone who’s done repeat playthroughs. Now comes the part where someone plugs their ears and talks past me by saying “You cannot compare these things because they are different”, right? I’m not asking for guns in FE, I’m asking people to recognize this clever way to work smarter, not harder. Byleth should have had at least one mission for each of the Three Houses before committing to one, a perfect chance to show off each character and gameplay function in more detail, and make choices during gameplay and during cutscenes that influence who Byleth is and isn’t and how your chosen house views him/her.
How do you write a good mother figure? I dunno man kill her instantly with a nuke lmao.
How do you write a good father figure? Couldn’t tell you if I had a gun to my head. Hey that Ganondorf is kinda cool. I’ma copy his homework and misspell two thirds of the words. Sure a morally grey Machiavellian guy would be more respectable and interesting, Corrin could decide whether to take the easy road like him and force people to ally with him with force or the honourable road and impress people and gain alliances that way and eventually overthrow the throne using the rebellions and captured Hoshidans and allied countries Corrin was sent to oppress, it could be more fun than watching a big bad evil guy twirl his moustache and go mwa ha ha, Corrin might even say something meaningful about what being a good ruler is and isn’t, but… nah. I don’t feel like saying anything adult about monarchy, I want a supervillain straight out of a children’s cartoon. Who cares if it harms Corrin as a character for him and his world and his father to be written this way?
How do you make playable babies happen? Well boss said we can’t do time travel again, so let’s do parallel universes where time flows differently! Surely this is the best possible excuse for playable kids! Honestly at this rate I’m amazed Three Houses didn’t have an artificial accelerated alien womb device somewhere. Probably because so many people memed on the babyrealms and the devs misheard it and said “Well, clearly people have stopped liking second generations”.
How do you do fanservice? Face petting, feeding a fakemon who dies for you, hot tub twitch funny moments, Cowmoola, rehashing Awakening content even without a “good” reason, and babyrealms, of course!
You know what? I changed my mind! Clearly Fates is a perfect example of what Fire Emblem should be forever, just like the Avatar: The Last Airbender movie is perfect and what all movie adaptions should strive to be. Clearly critics of both are everything you said about critics.
In all honesty, I don’t hold this against you, I know how emotional video game arguments can get on the internet. Fates has problems piled atop problems and if you fixed the most obvious ones here and there you’d have to fix others to go along with it. By the end of it you’d probably Ship Of Theseus this into something else entirely. I think Fates would be more interesting if Garon was a cynical Machiavellian schemer instead of a cackling supervillain with cackling supervillains for underlings. His underlings are already cackling villains, it’s redundant. Just one scene where Garon gets mad at Hans or Iago for being more evil than is necessary(the rebellion village slaughter where people unaffiliated with the rebellion springs to mind), driving more people to join the rebellion and view life under Garon and surrender as an impossible option, would do a lot to redeem his character as a respectably smart villain who isn’t just “bad for the lulz”. Tyrants tend to view their actions as necessary to hold onto power. And perhaps they are necessary to keep a tyrant in power, but that is not what’s best for the realm.
Conquest is already full of scenes where Corrin goes around nonlethally slaughtering groups to the last man because he was sent to suppress rebellions. If he allied with these rebellions for the sake of a plan he and his siblings are steadily building towards where Garon’s keys to power are eliminated and you or Xander gets the throne, that would be a better long-term plan than “Let’s put Garon on Hoshido’s throne in a literal sense and hope he sits on a chair and hope enough people see it and hope the ancient bad dragon man knows nothing of this magic chair’s magic properties”. Just imagine if choices made during cutscenes could make the game easier or harder for you based on how moral you are, and optional paralogues could win you the loyalty of factions that want Garon gone but can’t agree on who should rule or how.
Weapon advantage means a 1.5x power bonus, armored units take less damage from bows, shields boost defense and prevent two-handed weapon equips, two-handers hit harder, units have 5 stats and there is no RNG, and my own take on Emblems/Battalions is there. Can’t really critique a mechanic in isolation from how other systems support it unless it’s a Parasitic Mechanic that supports nothing as seen in too many MMOs/Cash Shop games/Mobile games. I removed redundancy and bloat in some areas to add complexity and interesting choices in other areas.
You’re missing the point I made and I won’t hold that against you.
I know the babyrealms are used by the characters because the characters don’t want their kids fighting in the war. In-universe justifications are post-hoc arguments.
The babyrealms shouldn’t exist because they are dumb, and they wouldn’t be memed on if people couldn’t tell this is a clumsy and artificial and intrinsically silly way to solve the “how do we give this army child units without a timeskip because a timeskip would make all our characters too old?” question.
But if they do exist in universe in their present state, the characters look like morons for not realizing how else they could be used. There is no Babyrealm Travel Agency where you send your units on training trips to Hyperbolic Time Chamber realms where they can do a year of training in a day from our perspective and come back with better stats and with their supports unlocked. But there should be, if the multiverse is going to be canonized with this “outrealms” business. And that’s just one way the babyrealms could be exploited. Resource gathering, for example. A village sent to mine copper for ten years in a babyrealm would come out of it much richer. And of course, the babyrealms can be used for producing many kids like in Pokemon Breeding or Crusader Kings II.
Have you ever played Crusader Kings II? People who play that game aren’t “disgustingly done deaf”, they’re having fun. Being the bad guy in games can be fun. Doing morally grey things in games out of necessity can be fun. Taking on the final boss with the best of Azura’s 60 kids would be funny.
There is way too much for me to unpack in that wall and I personally don’t even remember how I felt when I made that post back in may so I’ll do my best to try to explain myself.
To start, a little bit more about me I suppose.
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I never have, nor plan to, played conquest. So it’s story is unknown to me.
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I have actually have some experience with stories trying to do stuff with mass soldier breeding in various forma of media.
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I am well aware playing the villain can be fun, but that there are also limits to everything.
Now for some more specific things.
While they are dumb their existence should still be included due to how your own home base exists in one to bloody begin with.
Their timescales being varied also makes sense due to an actuall belief in multiversal theories that time is relative to the individual perception IE time may move faster in other realities.
Finally, to actually breed soldiers on this scale would actually remove every female playable unit from the board due to how multiple pregnancies will begin destroying the female casts combat abilities alongside their bodies.
Which is why many games that involve doing such for the players forces have them being exclusively a non-human race to get around the whole 9 month gestation period on top on not giving each individual a name/face to prevent attachment since they aren’t characters and are just “resources”. Or don’t actually take these details into account and just do mass conscription.
This. This is how you so completely miss a point that it’s hilarious.
What does CK2 have to do with Fire Emblem. What does an RTS format conqueror game have to do with the turnbased strategy and map based gameplay of Fire Emblem?
I mean it, while I’ve never played it personally I have watched a few videos on, it bares no gameplay likeness to Fire Emblem I could reasonably notice.
However I do know that while you can breed a child to lead your army, you cannot breed every single soldier in that army to build it. which is my whole godsforsaken point.
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don’t got much to really say for the topic itself but just chiming in to say this post could really of made do with having like 90% of the text nyxed. sayin this as someone who mainly agrees with the point i think you’re trying to make here
cause as is the tangeants don’t build up to anything/make a stronger point but just bury the actual points between alotta pointless fluff that makes it harder to get what you’re sayin across.
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Yeah, I don’t even know what his point is any more to be honest. Especially after coming back to this after two freaking months with a massive wall of text that looks like it’s ment to reply to 4 different people.
On a final side note @JasonGodwin7 you can’t really do “war is hell” stories in Fire Emblem in the same way other media does it. I’m not saying it hasn’t been or can be done, it’s just a lot harder due to the nature of making the whole of your enemies sympathetic makes them actually being the antagonists a lot more difficult to justify.
I’d honestly say though that 3-H writting is worse for a whole slew of different reasons comparitively to both fates and engage but that’s mostly an opinion thing to begin with.
Either way I’ll just say if you want a real good look at how a “war is hell” story is written go watch Mobile Suit Gundam followed by Zeta Gundam.
Baby Wars 2: the 2 month sequel!! watch now in movie theaters near you!!
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