FE16 loveblog: VW Maddening I, II

[kradeelav]

where’s that meme of a trio of gamers with blank stares and then they’re all fired up on the second panel ‘cause that’s me and the difference between dimitri (and/or all of BL excluding dedue and sylvain) and claude lmao

VW I

• @queenlua you were right :D (he totally fuckin reminds me of a hacker bro). i love. even more endeared with hilde and marianne than i thought i’d be.
• (i’m truly not sure what put me off of dimitri so much - just .. very uneasy with him as a character, and something about his redemption arc?  I hate how some ‘edelgard stans’ act (it’s the kind of attitude that’s put me off of fandom entirely), but i can’t help but gut-reaction feel like she was handled in a slightly more dysfunctionally but fun hammy fashion. and I’m wondering if the sheer stark reaction in fandom is a surprising show of preferring different kinds of stories/archetypes, and not even those two characters specifically.
• also eyes_emoji at the fucked up dynamic that marianne/sylvain is, i love how potentially self-destructive they can be. :3 (they can bitch together how they hate humanity ‘cause of their crests #relateable)
• maddening is finally a challenge (some enemies have pass wtf) but the game gives you enough ways to grind/break the game that it’s still not like … FE10-hard?
  • me @ whiny baby gamer bros complaining:
  • ~*git gud*~
• tbh i’m letting this be my ‘win insanity mode’ run, and then going back to CF after for more hubert / manuela feels as a reward. :v

VW: II 

• slowly working my way through the monastery chapters: Maddening's surprisingly not as difficult as even FE7 hard - tho currently having to restart the death-knight warp-tile chapter for the second time out of a combination of bad starting placements (need Ly to nuke him), and too many time-rewinds. :v 
  
  • I'm not genuinely annoyed unless if I start hitting 5+ restarts every chapter lol
• Claude's route in terms of writing feels the most similar to FE9's tone; I can't put my finger on it, but there's a lightheartedness with a deceptive sincerity in depth that's really appealing - him asking about the Relics and then mysteriously dropping it gives the plot a much needed sense of mystery and foreshadowing.
  
  • ngl, I really wish he had Hubert or an expy (not just for obvious reasons lol) as a foil to Hilda kind of like how Ike had the Titania + Soren bitchy combo. A more well-written Byleth could've totally been it, I wish you had Mass Effect's regenade/paragon options to at least have an option if you wanted to be bitchy or not.
• @queenlua Been thinking more as to why I bounced hard off of Dimitri, and Felix to a lesser extent -
  
  • Dimi - he's cute and he's got A Redemption Arc that's marginally more complex than the vast majority of FE lords, plus a hot dynamic with Dedue - so as I keep saying he should 100% be my type; but there was something to him that made me bristle every time he came up.  Like I-as-the-player was 'supposed' to like him 'cause he was engineered to be that way? Polite at first in a manipulative way, brusque-but-not-too-much when he was zonked out, carefully Apologetic after a very carefully scripted ice-king-melts arc? 
    
    • idk! I just ... Would Not trust him. Ever. Gilbert, absolutely (what a sweetheart); Seteth (even knowing his entire facade of a backstory - he genuinely cares about people if they're not a threat to Flayn); Hubert once when he had determined you were Not An Enemy, fuck yeah.
  • Felix - He's in the upper circle of 'enjoyable characters to read', don't get me wrong - loved how prickly he was against everyone ... buuuut this one's a little more obvious on the surface, as I feel like he didn't have a personality much beyond 'be an ass against Dimi/Sylvain/everyone'. Given that, I should've disliked Shinon, but I feel like there he at least had (a) his respect of Greil hinting at a rich backstory, and Gatrie as a lesser extent (b) super support-meaty fondness of Rolf showing he wasn't an ass to everyone (c) very obvious abandoning-and-recruiting flags showing exactly why he did what he did.
  • Maybe that plays into my main complaint about the newer games including 3H - they're not as fond of using gameplay-as-storytelling such as characters stating they're pissed enough to leave your team, and then immediately doing so (and taking your items lol).
  • One glaring example that irks me is right around that chapter where Sylvain's brother turns into the demon thing; you defeat him, you get one line of 'omg' from ... Byleth, I think - and then the game abruptly throws up that 'chapter end' screen without going deeper. wheras in PoR/RD - you'd defeat him, the screen would transition into those sprite-and-BG cutscenes, and you'd get a juicy conversation about how the characters feel about that, potentially with a bonus writing option of what Sylvain thinks if he's in your team - rather than just a 'oh shit!' line you get in-battle.
  • idek it's in the details?
  • see, Zihark was a fun inversion of 'asshole swordsman' considering he was all nice-nice on the surface and underneath; there was just ... an extremely fucked up middle layer that was really easy to miss unless if you paid attention to some of his lines in RD, particularly with Izuka. (Then again RD made it easy to say 'hint hint this guy has a lot of history with laguz, wouldn't it be fun to use him in battle against laguz allies and/or enemies that also had a really strong history there?). but yeah, uncovering that middle layer [chef kiss]
  • hubert is like the opposite of the fucky-nice-fucky sandwich LOL
• jesus christ Marianne is a god