Topic: Fire Emblem: Fates

Revelations is out and I've yet to even start Conquest. Because of... uh... this... XD

@DreamyViridi How much grinding did you have to do for that? XD

I'm gonna try and get all supports on Revelation, as that has the vast majority of the characters, and then get the few Revelation doesn't have.

@TheXReturns - Yeah, it took a while just because I took breaks in-between to avoid fatigue. I only just today reached Chapter 27 Birthright (which I'm assuming is the finale of Birthright); I love everyone too much, I guess.

At least all of the main Hoshidan S supports (for M Corrin) are done I think, there's also the Deeprealm kids to worry about for both sides but I will do that as aftergame content. I figured it'd be best to get them out of the way now so I don't have to worry about supports as much in Revelations. I will have to do this again for Conquest but oh well, just means more bonding.

@DreamyViridi Yep. That's the finale, more or less. You may want to do multiple runs on Conquest, else MyCastle grinding may send you insane. XD

I'm going through on each of the difficulties first, then I'll do all the support logs. I've virtually done Birthright Hard, and I'm running Revelation Hard. I'm a little scared of Conquest Lunatic. XD

@TheXReturns - Lunatic?! Even on casual mode; good luck with that!
Question about Revelations though; it's meant to be in-between the other two paths difficulty-wise but can you grind experience like in Birthright?

@DreamyViridi Yep. You still get challenges, to buy and normally, but it IS harder, at least comparing the Hard modes. Hard mode on both are still doable. Birthright Hard is actually much better than Normal. It's just at the sweet spot between being too hard and too easy.

@Miss_Dark What difficulty were you playing on? Birthright Hard feels like a better Birthright Normal. Revelations is harder, certainly initially, as you have very limited amounts of units against large numbers of foes. Every move counts. I started Revelation on Casual/Hard, and there have been a few tough fights, but enjoyably so.

It's midway in terms of Map design, with more emphasis on "you fight as many enemies as you choose to." Excluding the questionable idea of silence (you'll see what I mean.), it's certainly had an ok yarn so far. The only problem I have with it so far, is the fate of a particular character, at about a third of the way through, which feels exceptionally forced. If you play it, you'll understand. (I'm only at Chapter 18, so I can't comment on any of the endgame as yet.) Otherwise, it's not too bad.

How broken is the DLC skill "Blank Point"?

I managed to beat Birthright, finally.

Up until the underground tunnel area (the bit where Camilla is flinging fireballs at you non-stop), I was resetting every time a character would die. I managed to beat that level successfully. How naive was I?

From that point onwards, I would steadily lose more and more of my characters. In the big open arena with that bald bloke, I lost Azura (that stung), and I think Hinoka. I chalked them up to bad luck, and continued. I was finding that level extremely difficult, actually. A good tactic was to immediately move down towards the bottom, line up three of my hardiest soldiers (my Great Knight Avatar included), and desperately try to hold them off from my weaker forces. Once the flow had been stemmed, I'd send my Great Knight straight for the boss. Unfortunately, as I said, Azura & Hinoka would get themselves killed.

And so, over the next few levels (the duel between a certain prince being a nice breather - He didn't stand a chance against my beastkiller spear), I would end up losing pretty much all of the characters I'd gotten to know and worked so hard to train. My wife Mozu included...

I sniffed victory, and I've been playing for too long now - I just wanted to get the game over with.

And so I came up against the final boss. I had a chance to kill it with an assist from my avatar (0 + 12 damage at around 75% chance to succeed, but it wasn't to be. And so every last one of my troops (apart from my daughter who was right by my side, because I certainly didn't want her to die as well) was killed. I had my magical enchanted sword, and it could kill the boss, but again, there was only a 75% chance to succeed.
I was on my last 8hp, and surrounded by enemies, I opened my sack and killed the dragon with a brass sword.

The end sequence played, and everyone was happy because the war was over, and it was obviously a good time to party, but I was a bit sad because I lost so many people. Of course, after the credits, I loaded the save file, and it continued from the before I lost so many people, but Mozu and Azura were still 'dead'.

As to what went wrong, I did notice that the enemies were several levels higher than me (although by the end of the game, my avatar had reached level 20 as a Great Knight), but like I said, I was wanting to finish it
In my next game (conquest), I'll pay more attention to levelling up - it's not that I didn't try, more like I was spreading it a bit too wide, and many of my characters were level 1-3 in their advanced classes, when they should have been somewhere around lvl.8.

I'm currently on Chapter 26 in Birthright and will probably end up finishing it tomorrow or on Tuesday; while I've been having fun with all of the endless grinding shenanigans that Birthright has to offer, I'm ready to call it good and move on to Conquest finally.
All I have left to do is to finish up capping my top units, finish skill grinding the all-route characters so I have some skills I can inherit on Conquest/Revelations, and one or two more Ghostly Gold runs so I can forge some good weapons for my units to use in endgame.

Spoiler tagged that last bit there as I wasn't sure if it'd still count as spoilers, lol.

You gotta love when they mistranslate important infos even in such high quality games...

Just discovered the hard way that CounterMagic works also against magic attacks from distance, too bad that in Italian the text said the skill works only if the user is attacked by an enemy NEXT to him/her. Losing a unit like this right at the end of the chapter in Classic mode is painful for say the least T_T;

OK, so I'm finally making proper headway into Conquest.
Now, (without mentioning spoilers just in case) in Birthright; something happens to Kaze if you don't support him enough. Is there anything like that to worry about in Conquest (and Revelations)?

If so, don't spoil what actually happens. The general gist will do.

@DreamyViridi It IS technically possible to kill a recruitable character, but it's a lot fairer than Birthright, (Which gives you no warning). There will be a scene that asks you whether you wish to kill a character. There's no strings attached, it does literally mean 'do you wish to kill this poor guy'... I chose not to, and I've had no reason to regret it.

On an unrelated note, how's your grinding going? I visited your castle a while back, and I'll prolly do it again soon. I'm actually making an effort with my Revelation run to create a challenging castle fight. I've gone with the Nestrian style, which lends itself to a defensive fortress style, with Dusk Dragon to harm, Dawn Dragon to heal, and Puppets and Stoneborn to protect.

@TheXReturns - Pretty good. In terms of supports, Silas and Oboro have been paired, with Kaze and Felicia coming up next. Silas is my childhood bro and Kaze's my newfound retainer, so I ended up treating them real nice. They have a lot of the girls at "A" rank so they had a lot of choice. That same bias will probably appear in my Conquest playthrough... XD

I tweaked the Hoshidan Castle again to make it that little bit harder and changed the equips a bit. How did Azura do as the lead? I figured she'd do better at the throne with better hit rate and avoid than myself; my res is terrible... Will probably have her change classes. If I may ask, what gave you the most trouble in my Castle, if any?

@DreamyViridi I just about squeaked a victory. It's much tougher now, although I will say that your Dawn Dragon is pretty ill-defended from the south. Other than that, it was tough...

How has everyone liked Fates?

Personally I really loved it- the gameplay is finally perfected. But the game really falls short in terms of characters and story. Shame too cause the actual premise is very intriguing. Overall though, one of the best games of this handheld generation. And tons of content, for miles and miles as far as the eye can see.

@JaxonH - I'm having a fantastic time myself. I remember when Awakening was released and I got sucked into it from hours on end; before I stopped playing, I would play the game just to grind skills and supports and I enjoyed doing that. It looks like Fates will be the same. I agree that the gameplay has improved and better balanced for the most part, it's a shame that online PvP mode isn't that great from what I've seen.

I rediscovered the Unit Logbook which I completely forgot about. That's also where your 5 chosen units go when you beat the game. Now I understand the purpose of those "Free Skill" castles that I've been seeing.

@DreamyViridi @JaxonH Considering Revelation (which I virtually have finished), the stories aren't massively bad, if a little clichéd. The one thing I really dislike is (Mild Revelation gameplay spoilers) the amount of time spent in Valla, which gets a little repetitive after five or six chapters. I'd have preferred a little more time at the start, with few allies, focusing on the conflict, but it's still ok. Other than that it's all good. I've grown rather fond of a few characters, and there's not a Vaike/Miriel equivalent from FE:A, who are the only FE characters I have ever hated.

The mechanics are good, and the Dual system is far better than Awakening, being less overpowered, and thus not needing an insane difficulty to neutralise it. Dual Guard still needs a few tweaks, to avoid incredibly overpowered pair-ups but it's virtually there.

I think, instead of the eternal seals, we should instead see a 'Zero Seal', which would reduce your current level down to one in your class, with the caveat of a slightly less expensive pricetag than eternal seals, and only being available 'post' game (well, as close to postgame as FE comes), to remove some of the more annoying grinding.

@JaxonH
Its been nice, the maps and conditions for victory are far better than Awakening, and some gameplay tweaks have been really good (like removing the broken Galeforce, or not making the Avatar game breaking).

On the bad side, they really dropped the ball on the character development and the storyline. Corrin's attitude towards war is annoying - the "they're trying to kill us, but don't kill anyone! - and that everyone looks to Corrin like some kind of saint, even when s/he makes mistakes. When other lords in the series made mistakes, they owned up to it. Micaiah, even though I dislike her, owned to the fact she burned Begnion's pegasus knights. And the "plot twist" in Conquest is terrible.

A personal nitpick for me was the lack of weapon durability. In past games, you saved towards that special weapon, and calculated when you should use it because it could be gone forever. Now, I usually stick with iron or steel weapons because the punishment for silver isn't worth it.

All in all, good game, has its low points.

@JaxonH I beaten the games long time ago but I will say that the games are great in their own right even though to me personally, Conquest is the better game out of them all due to it just doing everything better.

As you already know, I'm not a big fan of the game's music as only a few of them stand out.

Hopefully, future games can only get better from here on and I'm positive that it will be.

@TheXReturns The reason the seals are done with the way they are is because they want it to make it similar to how in other games, you don't get the chance to change the class once you're promoted while at the same time, make it accessible.

I agree that for getting skills, it can be a problem but really....seeing as you have powerful units, you don't need those huge list of skills unless you want to go wild.

I think the grinding is fairly done well here...if not done better. Sure, Mozu will be a nightmare to grind in conquest but for the most part, I never felt being forced to do this and do that in Conquest and Revelations alone. I simply used the chapters themselves to do the overall grinding.