Anyway I'm playing Fire Emblem Three Houses again. Might tweet about it. Does anyone still care about spoilers at this point

this is still a foremost concern but I'm gonna have to just suffer through it

at least golden deer starts with Lysithea in the party, and she's pretty much tied with Edelgard for Best Character

lysithea gets her first kill in actual combat and says this lol

exemplary lack of chill

meanwhile hilda's just like "wow, killing is fun! ❤ ❤"

but what if it instead demonstrated how much that would kick ass

love too engage with Systems

this feels like a nearly-unavoidable pitfall of RPGs that use calendar systems: strengthening your units requires finding ways to stall for time, which is inevitably super boring

the urgency of a calendar is fundamentally at odds with the time=power numbers-go-up RPG thing

this is generally intentional, since it forces the player to make real decisions about their priorities. In practice tho it usually just stresses me out or forces stalling exploits lol

tired: they/them when gender is unknown or irrelevant

wired: ｔｈｅ ｕｎｉｔ

i love her

everyone at Warcrimes Hogwarts: engaged in elaborate posturing and backstabbing schemes in a classroom proxy of geopolitical maneuvering

lysithea: everybody shut the fuck up im trying to kill the pope with my mind

I will do so at once

incredible character portrait

literally never seen this dude before and I'm instantly like "this dude needs to be incinerated"

𝐁𝐄𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐄

bernadetta rules because her whole character arc is about dealing with crippling anxiety and self-hatred and then her role in combat is A Gun

practicing self-care by hiding in her room and landing crits from seven tiles away

i love her

lysithea going "I don't have time for this" and then nuking a boss is extremely good but the best crit line is still bernie yelling WHY IS THIS HAPPENING

I'm not lying! your cause owns! look it's not MY fault I'm playing golden deer okay

I played black eagles originally and that still feels like the "canon" version of the story to me so it honestly feels pretty weird trying a different route lol

I don't know where the golden deer plot goes, but I appreciate that Claude is immediately like "hey so this church thing is REALLY suspicious" as soon as he starts trusting Byleth lol

None of These Items Are For Ingrid ASMR

the dance cutscene positively Ascends once you realize this was clearly a partnered dance animation and they're just playing one half of it

i mean one of yall could've cast Heal on him but sure

A very funny detail of this game is that the writing consistently treats "mercenary" as "ambiguously cool fightguy" and not "person who does murders for money"

Hey remember how Normal difficulty in FE3H was like "most of your units are immune to damage" and then Hard was like "a fairly easy tactics game"

I'm playing the DLC missions and uhhhhhh Hard now means "every enemy hits four times per turn and your attacks have a 22% hit chance"

I don't know if anyone's on the fence about this in 2021 but you should not buy the DLC for Fire Emblem: Three Houses lmao

Every mission so far is ENTIRELY dependent on just teleporting new enemies into the middle of the map, often on top of your units

so like rather than actually letting you plan moves and play a tactics game, it just kills you with impossible-to-predict bullshit, so then you have to play every mission 3+ times to memorize all the script triggers

it sucks lol

Question for Fire Emblem fans: Are any of the other games better than Three Houses at tactical-RPG combat design stuff?

3H is like... an okayish VN and an okayish TRPG, but the sum is greater than its parts so the game's pretty good overall

are any of them like... *good* TRPGs?

lmao

(the dlc is mostly bad but it has some very good bits)

I haven't hit the timeskip yet but golden deer route seems like it's actually digging into the whole "wtf did rhea do to byleth" thing

which is fun, because I played black eagles originally, and black eagles STARTS to get into it and then edelgard's like hey do you want to help me ｏｂｌｉｔｅｒａｔｅ ｃａｔｈｏｌｉｃｉｓｍ and byleth's just like hell yeah also let's get gay married afterwards

Extremely cool character/lore detail: Everyone's mostly just weirded out when byleth goes super saiyan, but lysithea's immediate response is "oh FUCK your hair changed color are you okay?!"

Notably this is *before* any of the stuff about lysithea or edelgard's pasts has actually appeared in the story. But lysithea's normally a smug asshole to everyone and then all of a sudden she reacts to the hair thing with genuine worry/concern

it rules

every time Ashe speaks I can't think of anything except how much he sounds like Malachi from Making Fiends

I realize absolutely zero people who read this tweet will understand it but I just had to get it out there

extremely funny that this is just a marker on the calendar

getting a starts-in-10-minutes gcal notification on your phone for Imperial Invasion

ALL EDELGARD WANTS IS TO CLOBBER THE POPE WITH A LABRYS AND YOU JERKS WON'T HELP HER

oh no claude grew a bad chinstrap

I finally have context for all the hilda/marianne ship art

it's good

extremely cool Lore:

the dlc has a library containing books banned by the church. One of them is a list of forbidden inventions:

*guy tapping forehead meme except it's been photoshopped to depict Pope Leo X*

can't have a protestant reformation if you eradicate the printing press

Googling game mechanics has me coming across forum threads from August 2019 where people kept referring to edelgard's Crimson Flower stuff as "the secret fourth route"

as though anyone playing black eagles and then picking the church's side wouldn't be a complete psychopath lmao

I can only assume that framing came from people who were in the middle of playing deer/lions, assumed edelgard was evil, and thus concluded that crimson flower was some kind of far-cry-ass "side with the villain" subversive easter egg and not, like, the point of black eagles lol

the DLC has an accessory that allows counterattacks at any range so here's Hilda killing seven people in one turn

bern of detta

lmaoo I completely forgot that Ingrid's support with Dorothea stops at B because Dorothea starts coming on to her and she's just like "no, absolutely not" and then they never have another conversation

man even with NG+ buffs and not really playing for completionism, this game is WAY too long

like it's a good game but also it could be One House instead of Three Houses and that house could be 40 hours instead of 80 hours and it would a better game

Hilda suddenly realizes she lives in a JRPG

lots of NPC convos suggest the merchants are all super hyped for Claude to win the war because the alliance has way fewer laws governing trade

anyway love to replace a mercantilist aristocracy with laissez-faire capitalism; surely that won't cause all of the exact same problems

yes i am overthinking this

dorothea consistently has the most Correct takes in this game lmao

Finally got around to finishing this golden deer run

Game's still good, but hilariously I think playing both eagles and deers ends up making both plots worse lmao

Like, claude and edelgard both have the exact same goals? But they end up fighting each other more or less arbitrarily, and instead of the plot confronting "two people with similar ideals inexorably drawn into conflict" it just kinda makes them a boss fight and moves on lol

Edelgard understands that A World Free of Oppression requires mass-murdering all the people currently in power, which makes sense in eagles' route

Claude achieves his goal and gets to be the good guy, because edelgard does all the murdering FIRST and then he just defeats her lol

Also extremely funny that the whole Nemesis arc in deer route is basically a paragraph in the epilogue for eagles lol

Edelgard's whole deal is that to beat Nemesis' crew she has to first destroy the church AND the aristocracy AND the empire to destroy the tools of oppression

but in deergame claude wrecks that, so hubert just drops him an email like "hey uh could you kill the final boss for us"

...which implies EITHER hubert and edelgard could've just killed nemesis from the get-go and skipped the bloody revolution thing, OR claude's new European Union is doomed because he only removed some creepy mages and the church+nobles will just continue fucking with peoples blood

ALSO nobody in golden deer is gay?????