FE16 loveblog: BE: Empire Path (1), BL Path (2)

[kradeelav]

….guess which bitch accidentally played 10 straight hours of FE yesterday.  :’D  

holy shit this game is fun

• somebody needs to make a “three houses for FE veterans” primer, ‘cause man this game is complex even to someone who’s literally played every one from 3-13. (abilities/budding talents are basically skills, had to google that you can’t RNG-grind levels with Sothis’ time rewind unless you save the level at the very end of a battle, etc, THEY CHANGED THE NAME OF SPEEDWING NAMES HOW DARE lol, then again I’m a min-maxer, etc). 
  • that being said, it reminds me a ton of radiant dawn in so many nostalgic ways; the different factions, complexity that builds the storytelling in ways most games *wish* they had (actually teaching the kiddos is … adorable, and is going to be one hell of a gutpunch when you shank them). the anime aesthetic also looks so much better in-game than it does in screenshots; they’ve figured out how to do motions.
  • tl;dr - if you swore this series off after RD, this is a pretty good chance to jump back in.
• I’m legitimately impressed at how … not trope-y ? certain plot beats are?  like for example the opening cutscene, you got the good goddess chick vs hot villain with chain whip sword, they fight, blah blah, SHE MOTHERFUCKING STABS HIM REPEATEDLY, then you’re like wat - another instance is the first goddamn thing Felix tells you is “don’t trust Dimitri, he’s nothing but an animal underneath”
  • and dude
  • DUDE
  • okay first of all you have balls but SECONDLY
    
  • dimitri’s like classic FE lord incarnate so i cannot WAIT to see what [ spoiler scene ] looks like with him now  :D
  • basically 3H’s darker and grittier but not in a … unpleasant way? not in a way that takes the color out of the world - it just gives a little shine to the teeth, basically. 
• not interacting with anyone outside of my immediate house/team to save juicy info for replay sessions, but damn these three may be my favorite lords of the series.  refreshing, got a few splutter-laughs out of me already, and dimitri is way more tempting as a main than I thought he’d be.
  • that being said i have apparently found myself in team edelgard/byleth/hubert OT3. :B
  • there will be …. skanky draws……………….
  • also catherine is hawt
    
• holy SHIT ch5’s climax - @queenlua you aren’t kidding when this started rolling into the krad vibes. :D  If this goes the way i think it’s gonna go, this may be my favorite way of the series dealing with dragons.
  • that being said DAMN this game was a cakewalk all the way up to that and it even proved a serious piece of trouble for my overpowered mage!byleth/edelgard/huburt/petra quartet. 
  • (doreatha was booted for stat screwage but i think i’ll be getting Felix and then Ly really soon, like, this chapter.  ACCEPT MY GIFTS DAMMIT)
• my two very minor complaints is they need to make a text size option for those playing on the switch 'cause goddamn if I didn’t have FE mechanics memorized, my eyes would be bleeding from trying to constantly read the text in portable version. 
• the other WAS going to be magic’s PATHETIC amount of usages so you couldn’t go on game-breaking nosferatsu spree but actually that may be… the point….. to that…. 
• (overall actually this game does a really good job at pruning the min-maxing tendencies and making them into “natural” interactions; your spells recharge out of battle, instead of turn-grinding for supports you give gifts and eat with people like sane goddamn people do, etc. I’m impressed.)

• mages are still hella broken but in even BETTER ways.  3-range attack? recharging nosferatsu on ALL OF YOUR UNITS?
  • fuq yea
• personally find the whole Edelgard controversy amusing/silly considering I l o v e hypocrites in fiction and tbh the brilliance of her path is how her supposed ideals are the flimsiest excuse to act out her abandonment/control issues (hello! that’s real life!!!!) (the concept of subtweeting offends me on a personal level but this whole bullet point is definitely one :’D). This whole story is an interactive exercise in utterly breaking FE macro story tropes and the routes acting as messy what-if AU foils to each other.  what if the villain won and she got to write history? what if the church was the conspiracy all along and the oh-so-pure saint-stand-in wanted to fuck your protagonist with the fuckiest lesbian-mental threesome with the god within too? what if the FE lord had the actual on-battlefield breakdown that’s more realistic given the trauma they usually end up seeing and you actually got to see the aftermath? etc
  • basically if this becomes a thing in the next games, I’m all for it; I love that it’s messy as fuck but also you’ve got real stakes attached to every chapter again. even when it becomes somewhat tropey like the whole “Fell Star” scene it’s still undeniably cool and refreshingly campy enough to pull it off.
  • also ditto with my feelings towards Rhea - god, she’s fucked in a genuinely terrifying way that actually gives me bad do-not-interact-with vibes IRL but I’ll take that any day over feeling nothing towards 99% of fictional characters as usual.
• I think what makes this game work so well is they take so much effort to get you emotionally involved with the kiddos like they’re your pets in the first half - you raise them as students/units, you feed them (literally), you praise them, etc.  And even if you don’t give a shit about Byleth as the avatar stand-in, that plus the story beats keeps you enough on your toes that the twists catch you way off guard when they start landing hard. If you’re the uwu player, you care about the kiddos (valid), and if you’re the villain-route fanatic like i am, you’ll appreciate it going off the chain starting with the Crests / zombie-villagers bit.
• hubert is definitely a service-oriented sub, i’m just….. leaving … that there………………

 

THINGS JUST GOT REAL OHOOOO.

• okay, i’m gonna say it, Eddy’s pre-battle speech was h e l l a fashy, goddamn.
• clapping myself on the back for calling it out as the hypocrisy bullshit it was even before really hearing it unmasked!  whoo. nintendo went there. It’s the pretty standard fantasy flavor, but it ticks every box - centralizing authority, ‘us vs them’ absolutes, inciting rheortic and using scapegoats, nationalized violence, fuckin’ MANIFESTOS, you could go down the entire fuckin’ list and it’s all there.
  • (i’m personally playing this as the unvarnished villain route that it is so while I have issues with FE’s marketing treating it as less-blatantly-a-villain-route-than-what-it-is (ALSO SIDE EYES EVERY MICAIAH STAN HARDCORE FROM MY GRAVE, YOOOOO.) (sorry lol) (it’s… a pet peeve), it’s a nuanced issue considering the Church route was technically the de-facto Black Eagles route, and this is technically the easter egg route as clearly seen by how missable it was.)
  • tl;dr i appreciate nintendo went there considering how watered down villains usually are these days for fear of the “you made them therefore you must support them” absolute garbage of a mindset that’s infected some folks these days
• i did find it a little weird that when Eddy was speaking to Byleth in private that she was all “you were the only one that was there for meeeeeee” and all that bs when technically hubert…… was there….. ?
  • babe, 0/10 for sublety
• interrogation waifu definitely killed his father goddam
  • i’m not gonna say he’s the FE Vau, but -
• ngl one of the reasons why I love the eddy/byleth/hubert OT3 is how you’ve got the worlds most potent mix of power dynamics all in one toolbox (and then you set the toolbox on fire) - you’ve got the teacher/student kink, you’ve got the princess/bodyguard kink, you’ve got the shady ass villain-slash-traitor shtick for all of them, eddy and hubert being some flavor of gay as fuck and it’s just …… delicious…….
• on a more lighthearted note, hubert/shamir’s C support is the BESSSST catfight i’ve ever seen, literally whistled there a few times :D  i’m so glad i recruited shamir - merc bab of my heart.
• THAT BEING SAID i had Eddy kill Solon way back in Ch9? i think? for the funsies and nearly fell off my chair at this line:
• “it was over the moment you failed to kill the professor.”
  • what prof-
  • …. EDDY MEANS BYLETH???
  • OH SHIT
  • THIS THREESOME IS SO fUCKIN TWISTED

• Not FE6 or FE9!JP-insanity difficult, but enough where you have to re-position even wyvern masters carefully or they’ll get three-rounded, and that’s after grinding with a small team.
  • (also just realized you could dismount wyvern riders for instant carnage against archers lmao. part of the difficulty is probably me still all ??? at battalion/gambit mechanics. I still don’t know what Adjuncts do.) (Don’t tell me, I’ll figure it out eventually - it saves  more fun game-play easter eggs for the other routes.)
• Story-wise, starting to kill off the students; felt less at Claude’s death than expected given I liked practically every one of his lines pre-timeskip. I did find it amusing that the “wyvern country” was decidedly not Edelgard’s empire, as what’s normal for the designated FE villain.  I don’t know how I feel about that, actually; in some ways my only lingering critique is I missed the FE archetypes (it resulted in some kickass character designs and inherent symbolisim), but like… what more could you do with those?
• Hubert’s paralouge was kiiiinda of a letdown, I was expecting more characterization meat about his daddy-o or even like, raiding one of the TWSITD experiment bunkers so you could come face to face with what Edelgard’s endorsing..
  • (that would’ve been so cool - think like Grimea Tower, except you’re the ones funding Izuka. I have no problem playing as a giant oblivious hypocrite of a villain but like, at least let us see the results, man.)
  • this is actually what I would’ve done to fix all of the weird inconsistencies with the death knight / TWSITD; right after that bit where you lock into the true BE route and travel with Eddy for the coronation, that’s when she and Hubert spills most of the beans with her two crests, why they’re so pissed at that, how the Death Knight ties into that, etc. Add a chapter before she steals the crests/betrays Rhea; y'all have to visit one of those experiment bunkers where you have to hunt down critters that got loose. ( puts the blood quite squarely on your hands at that point, and really skews the game tonally into actual villain route.) 
  • ‘krad nintendo’s never gonna go there’ ‘LOL THEY DID WITH DAEIN’
• Felix is an actual god of a mortal savant - I think this is the only game where my swordsie is less fragile than the wyvern lords, and that’s including the exp-feeding I always gave zihark LOL. Love the bluntness (”[felix asks for advice”] [i give him advice] ”I’m asking the wrong person” me: EXCUSE YOU), and having one character from the BL, and one from the GD (Ly, who’s also a monster) - makes for a neat window of possibility in what you see with the other houses - it’s an echo of not-quite grief that’s really nice tonally. 

 

... started BL (up to eddie-invades-the-monestary-chapter), and forgot to liveblog, lol  

• last bit of BE was mmmmm …. almost but not quite satisfying; kinda on that razor edge of ‘you aaaalmost had something legendary there but needed a few more editors to shake out the cobwebs and make the emotional threads simpler’
• what I loved: ending custcene where f!Byleth, Eddie, and Rhea were facing off; really cool to see the three main characters in a AAA title have a beatdown to the death all be ladies.
  • also: hubert S rank: the image made me simultaneously die of a giggle and an ‘aww’ attack  ;D
• end of BE made me roll my eyes (thankfully expected this) going with my byleth-is-in-a-time-loop crack-plot to make any amount of sense with this.

BL thoughts so far:

• slightly disconcerting to realize the two i’ve immediately felt an instant sense of kinship with is hubert and ……… sylvain.
  • (the fuck does that say about me LMAO)
  • (holy shit tho i love sylvain, he’s a wank, but a remarkably sincere one when his walls go down but then his lines make you do a hiss-in of breath at how entirely FUCKED UP he is.)
• having to walk by hubert is fucking physically painful sob sob i miss my 4-range shanklord warlock waifu ;a; only getting him on one path is torture, man
• immediately getting a sense that the BL path was meant as the “main” one considering that 3(?) out of your brats already had some sense of kinship with the rebels that you’re putting down
• mildly controversial opinion: I …. don’t like dimitri? he’s fake-ily polite in a way that gives me weird personal red flags, and like - i was expecting to love him given the 180 demented psychopath angle near the timeskip, so i knew there was wild shit under there - but i just feel uneasily cold at every cutscene with him now? like ‘haaang on a sec i know you hate this chika but maybe think before you work out your freudian issues on a global political stage like every other politician does’
  • ‘eddie feels like a weirdly more honest character than dimitri even tho motive-wise she needs to be mercy killed’ feels like a statement perfectly engineered to get every single 3H fan to butcher me lmao
• (anyway f!byleth was going to marry him but i’m rapidly leaning towards seteth or maybe i’ll do felix this run. :v idk, not feeling emotionally attached to anyone this run, probably shoud’ve done GD for plot insights.)
• which sounds like i hate this game lmao, i don’t - the mechanics are definitely fun enough to carry it like a classic FE game so it’s being played off and on - gearing up for lunatic mode next ‘cause hard is barely giving me much of a work out, wop wop.
• recruited marianne in the nick of time ‘cause i heard she has a bomb-ass prolouge. :v
• later: current mood: [ UNHOLY SHRIEKING AT MARIANNE’S PROLOGUE ]

 

okay but in all seriousness, i really like hubert, and it’s odd.

what’s odd is i don’t even have a concrete reason why i dig the fucker as a character other than just a random “~aesthetics~” - i like him almost as much as mmm, jill, maybe? or titania? someone who I don’t necessarily draw oodles of fanart of, but all have their own concrete reasons (jill: has a sincere touching change-of-heart, clearly struggles with divided loyalties from a “bad” country, badass, has several rad dynamics that’s more complicated than your FE usual tropes given jill/haar’s pretty fucky as a mentor/protege sort of thing) - you know, shit you could cobble together in a though-tpiece essay that doesn’t take a genius to see the personal connections.

have a few posts queue’d about the cool facets he has - but it’s not an immediate “this is why “I” emotionally resonate with him to a weird/surprising degree considering i go to sleep at every game made later than 2005”

i mean - okay, let’s take a shot:

• gleefully evil protagonist fucker - i mean yeah part of it aesthetics with that laugh, but FE games actually don’t usually go into the nakedly obvious villain tropes for the playable units, or either that, they’re turncoats at the last minute (Lehran, Naesala)
• there’s something weirdly endearing about a college/hogwarts!AU with a villain-in-training and both of you bitching about homework and shit and having this weird normie-throwing-term-papers-in-the-trash camaraderie at the same time you know he’s up to murder!plots but it doesn’t really matter, yet. and by the time it matters, you’ve already thrown your loyalties with edel’s gang already.
  • i feel like that’s actually something about 3H’s overall popularity that doesn’t get talked about a lot- sometimes FE games can get to be Too Much with the world-spanning gods-and-goddesses conflicts that it misses the stupid slily antics if the first third of the game - PoR pulled this off fabulously?
  • and then when you’re Sad at the latter half of the game (or maybe i was just too griefed the fuck out the first run through lmao), it’s just nice having that reasonably reliable jerk-derp to still stay a jerk and remind you of the good terms?
• fucking kickass/heartwarming dynamic with edelgard; as fucked up as she is, i think there’s an understated amount of like, abandonment issues he has given she was taken away there for a while and was having to track her down across the whole goddamn country, let alone the … severity of the loyalty afterwards? that’s not just ‘knightly/courtly’ loyalty, that’s like …  needs her / someone emotionally to fill that vulnerable need for purpose, almost more than she needs him. which is saying. something.
  • something something living weapon trope on a metaphorical level mumbles at the above
• surprisingly interesting dynamic with byleth that’s something other than ‘worships at their feet’ garbage - for fucks sake, he has the balls to threaten you as the professor to stay away from plots and shit, and-
  • everyone: krad that’s exactly why you like him lmao
  • me:….
  • me: OKAY FIRST OF ALL -
  • ‘he’s a hot kinky villain protagonist with ‘i need to be used’ issues krad you’re not that complicated’
• :l