just checking out the apple tr-

incredible whiplash playing the new fire emblem after three houses. Like if 3h's biggest flaw was that the scope of the writing was too ambitious, Engage is just "there's a dragon, it's evil, fuck you, collect twelve magic gems. everyone has the worst haircut you've ever seen"

I didn't follow the dev news at all; was this just made by a completely unrelated team? Apart from the combat this feels like it inherits nothing whatsoever from 3H. Everything from art direction to writing to music to even rendering just feels like totally different studio

*smashing half the doors in my apartment every time I go to the bathroom* ugh I wish I was good at Theft so I didn't have to do this

I spent like an hour and a half on one mission last night; they weren't kidding about Hard mode being HARD this time

I dunno if it's doing the JRPG thing where there's an early difficulty spike before all the character-growth systems really kick in, or if it's just gonna be "any character who ends a turn on a purple tile is Fucking Dead" for the whole game lol

love a cute world map

all games are improved by the addition of a cute world map

Cute World Maps are interesting bc like, originally they were the domain stuff like FF7 or Xenogears where the devs were trying to BLOW YOUR MIND, but then the studios with Blow Your Mind budgets moved to open-world designs and the Cute World Map became a mid/low-budget thing

so much of contemporary gamedev history is: 90s/00s studio creates Cool Thing in an effort to suggest massive scale -> budgets get huge, now those studios can just actually DO massive scale -> the rest of us revisit the 90s/00s thing because it was actually cool in its own right

like running through the xenosaga 3 maps I'm like... I want to *make* this. I don't actually WANT to make a fully explorable open-world proc-gen city, that's a different kind of thing. I want to make sick-ass little space dioramas dude

this is one of the most "gacha character only intended to look good from the front"-core character designs I've seen in a while

not sure what the point of a poison-based class is, given that if you attack an enemy and don't kill them in the same turn, they are 100% guaranteed to annihilate one of your characters

My review of Fire Emblem Engage is that most of my time has been spent thinking "man, Three Houses was really good huh"

like I've described 3H as a "sum greater than its parts" thing before (pretty okay tactics, pretty okay writing, really strong together), but Engage is providing an incredibly stark example of just HOW MUCH the writing in 3H was adding to the mechanics

like by any measure Engage has WAY better tactics gameplay than 3H did. Combat is really tense and interesting without feeling unfair. It's a Good tactics game

but the characters are boring and the narrative framing is basically nonexistent so I'm not getting attached to them :(

I mean there's plenty to criticize in 3H's writing (characters are pretty one-note, arcs feel predictable, etc) but seeing a Bad version is really revealing how well it works

Like, you could not write this joke about Engage lol:

[minor Fire Emblem: Engage spoilers]

EVASION TANK GF

please direct your attention towards the AVO stat at the bottom of that image

This also answers my earlier question re: what is the purpose of poison attacks

it turns out the purpose of poison attacks is to nerf *this character, specifically*, because she's effectively immortal and letting her do normal damage would be too overpowered lol

lookin at that classic Modern Videogame Blue Sheen on these distant rocks and once again feeling like we REALLY need to augment PBR with some kind of "macrofacet" model

like The Sheen is normally very important to making stuff look realistic but it only makes sense on stuff where the microfacet model itself makes sense

I think the reason it looks weird on things like distant rocks is because the scale of the Facets isn't really Micro

like IRL you're still seeing an integration of details that are too small to resolve individually, but A Mountain isn't shiny the way A Single Rock is shiny

I think it's literally just that, if you actually *did* that integration, it'd come out very different from lambert/ggx

it's the same problem with distant grass in, like, every videogame since Far Cry 3 (most notably BotW). Use the terrain normals to shade the grass so it looks soft and can be LoD'd away smoothly, but then every time you crest a hill it all turns a weird desaturated silvery gray

you can recruit all your favorite fire emblem heroes, such as Estelle from Tales of Vesperia

WHO THE FUCK IS THIS GUY

WHERE IS EDELGARD'S WIFE

okay hard mode just legitimately never gets easier lmao

you can outlevel the main story missions but skirmishes and paralogues are like... increasing enemy strength much faster than my characters are growing lol

just got to a paralogue boss who:
- has 102 HP across two health bars
- can one-shot anyone in my party
- has enough DEF/RES to nullify everyone except my 2 strongest casters, who he instantly kills with counterattacks
- ALSO HE CAN MOVE THROUGH WALLS