| What the hell does Intelligent Systems have against grinding?! |
[Dec. 29th, 2008|11:30 am] |
Well, with my newly acquired free time, I've been able to afford to set aside about and hour or two a night to play some video games. My newest pick: Fire Emblem: Path Of Radiance. Why? Well, because it's been on my shelf for ages, and I've never played a Fire Emblem game before. And besides, I had to reassert my status as the world's last Gamecube fan.
Fire Emblem is a tactical RPG, so if you've ever played Dark Wizard, Final Fantasy Tactics, or Shining Force, you know what you're in for. Enemies are dispersed onto a grid, and you have to plan a strategy of approach. Charging in like gang busters will easily get you surrounded by enemies, and then it'll it's game over. The defensive fighter is rewarded, although sometimes you lose item pick-ups to thieves and looters. in later battles, you'll even have enemy units coming at you from the rear, prodding you along.
So, the first thing I noticed about this game is that the characters can be a bit unbalanced. Ike's a wuss early on in the game, and so I had to rely on Titania to keep him from dying. After the first couple of battles, though, Ike begins turning into a certified badass, and eventually he becomes so strong that hardly anyone can touch him. I've had a couple chapters now where all I've had to do is simply park Ike in a doorway and just let people initiate their own demise by running into him.
Incidentally, there happens to a be a FAQ floating around the internet that basically demonstrates that you can do that for pretty much the entire game. It's called the "Ike Solo".
The only problem is that very quickly, it became so that Ike was the ONLY character who could dispense with villainy without dying (other than Titania, that is). And so, I have all of these other characters who now have no hope of ever leveling up. This isn't like Final Fantasy, where if your character dies, you can just revive them between battles. No, once someone dies in Fire Emblem, they're gone forever. Actually, this is par for the course when it comes to tactical RPGs, but I thought I'd make that clear.
So, the natural thing to do would be the grind to get those weak characters up. But nope, you can't do that!
See, this sort of reminds of Paper Mario, another Intelligent Systems game, in which grinding is pretty much nonexistent. Okay, sure, Paper Mario had the Crazee Dayzees, but you had to really know how to fuck around with those badges to even stand a chance of taking those damn things down.
But the point is that there's no grinding to be had in Fire Emblem. You want to power up wusses like Mist and Rhys? Simple! Stop killing so many people with Titania and Ike. God damn it! And it wouldn't be such an issue if not for the fact that Ike tops out at level 20, so if you're still killing people with him after that, that's wasted experience that nobody will ever have.
Maybe I've been spoiled by Final Fantasy Tactics. I've come to expect the ability to go out randomly onto the playing field and initiate a conflict for which I'm not even required to use my main character. "Hey, we got a new guy! Let's go flog some imps!" Nope! None of that here!
Actually, it's not a bad game. It's kept me suitably entertained. It can be a little frustrating when there are characters I want to keep alive, and so I have to reset whenever someone dies. It can be a little annoying when I'm forced to babysit characters like Mist, who seem to have no talent on the battlefield except to die. I find more often than not that I pretty much use the unstoppable chracters (i.e., Lethe, Ike, Titania, etc.) and just use everyone else as sword caddies. Sometimes I'll let characters like Mia get a free hit if Ike only left two or three hit points on a baddie.
The one thing I HATE about this game is all the text chatter that goes on. On and on! Nobody shuts up, and it's all TEXT! What the fuck, Nintendo?! And what's worse is that the Japanese version had recorded dialogue over most of these conversations. The US release has none of that. God damn it!
I've taken to doing a lot of skimming, and this has contributed to my inability to completely follow the plot. Something about the unknown princess of a defunct kingdom traveling around with a bunch of mercenaries. There are anthropomorphized animal tribes, most of which distrust humans, but some don't. There are three or four warring nations, and it's hard to keep track of who's on whose side or what the motivations are. Granted, it's not as confusing as Final Fantasy Tactics, a game in which I was actually TRYING to follow the story.
I'd give it a mild recommendation to anyone who has a Gamecube or Wii. Actually, there's added incentive to get it if you have Wii. There's a sequel called Radiant Dawn, which, if you have your old Gamecube save state, you can transfer from it into the new game. I love games that do that, and I keep meaning to make a post about my love for games like Arc The Lad, Golden Sun, and Shining Force CD, which enable one to transfer data from one completed game to the next.
This is far from being my favorite RPG, although I can kind of understand now why Fire Emblem has such a devoted following, even if it is kind of a niche series. |
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