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Radiant Dawn loveblog : hashtag meg rights (unironic)
i got a little tipsy and played through a hilariously small part of the radiant dawn liveblog and ended up liveblogging to some friends (hiiiiiii) in discord instead of here LOL. here's the copypaste, lightly edited for clarity/amusement/etc:
- auuuugh P1 endgame is such a fun level since it's probably the one time your dawn brigade crew is reasonably well leveled with the enemy), of course i could be saying this because it felt like zihark had a 50% crit rate instead of the 15% shown on screen :P
- finished the elincia/haar/marcia/leanne/nealuchi against the dracoknights one too and that honestly needs to be talked about more as a really cool gameplay chapter, ur playing CHESS IN THE SKY.... IT'S BADASS...
- (me, while playing through that nephenee/brom chapter, getting noticably tipsy:) ANYWAY how perfect it would have been if meg had started her chapters "here" with her dad brom and had a really neat instance of father/daughter having to be on the batltlefield together. like, it's unexpected, both of them are caught off guard at crimea's coup/uprising, and there's just a hell of a lot of familial meat going on there and meg gets a chance to bond with like, lucia, etc the others briefly and get a sense of her character there.
- she has SOME kind of agency as far as slowly realizing what war/fighting's all about.
- if they really wanted the "meg goes after her supposed fiance" thing, they could have her wandering off after P2 into P3 and have her almost a little arrogant and finding herself in the middle of an even worse war with daein that's not "just" a farmland coup, you know?
- like if they absolutely had to keep going with that plot line, that gives her a hell of a lot more sympathy where she's all 'geez y'all have to deal with this all the time? re: battle shock. it makes her so much more sympathetic rather than being the butt of a joke. i could at that point, genuinely see a convo with zihark being framed more as 'war as hell' rather than what it was in RD.
- (anyway tula this is inspired by your awesome take on meg in that stripper story. :P )
- MEG RIGHTS the mini essay lol
- ..... omfg krad do NOT do the 'rewrite meg and zihark's terrible ass convo' as another fic lshlshshshh im getting fic brainworms with the above thoughts
- (man brom is actually a badass in the level conversation here with the boss when they're like kids moaning and bitching about some temporary wounds and he's all 'yeah, yeah this is what war's like, and we've been through it before, u all are just kids' GODDAMN
- (getting tipsy to the point that strategy is not the uh, primary focus:) okay FUCK that chapter where you're in the cave with lucia digging up for blackmail
- just had to restart like twice in a quick succession for the first time in this playthrough lmao
- THIRD RESTART AUGHHH
- ok fuck it i'm sending brom on a rampage through this taint sucking chapter
- (5-10 minutes later: ok ok brom imma write a fic giving your daughter justice u saved my bacon there my dude)
- doot doot doot over to ludveck n shit, eyyy
- u kno it's pretty explicit especially when he's been perving on lucia low key since even before that fuckin cave level. oh god. oh god. i have another terrible fic idea. (cw it's slightly gross) ludvek totally jacking it off to thoughts of lucia when he's going to sleep and preparing for his little revolution
- (this is rapidly approaching the point where i can't keep time quite together:) some other really quick/cool characterization things that have COMPLETELY FUCKING MISSED MY RADAR:
- when muarim/tormodvika are leaving, micaiah didn't seem at all shy about not hiding her brand to that specific group because she shows it to muarim and the game doesn't really seem to hint that they're too far apart from the rest of them? interesting, she trusts them all.
- also micaiah is doing some interesting 'not quite telling the truth' when tormod tells her that the daein soldiers have been giving the laguz dirty looks n such because she can read their mind right? (seasalt i'm thinking of your glorious fic to lua here) - and micaiah goes 'omg i didn't realize that i'm so sorry TaT' - which, like, ok, she could have been distracted by much larger events but i get the sneaky feeling she had been willfully overlooking that.
- also tula wrote vika recently and oh MAN vika has this line responding to micaiah promising her that she'll visit in the desert - 'ok, but i'm not waiting on you, i'm tired of people who never come'.... like WHAT IS UP WITH THAT. i smell backstory :D :D :D
- also i didn't even know that nailah/rafiel went from daein to gallia??? so there might have been a period of time when they were like, the hottest new thing in gallia before the laguz alliance became a thing. imagine a fic of her and skrimir sparring or something. or giffica oh my god.
- so makalov's drunk the night before you do the geoffery's charge mission right and calil says this line about slapping some sense in him free fic idea: she totally slaps some sense in him but it's mommydom her spanking him
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but also, ah, how impossible it is to retain the ability to understand probability while playing fire emblem (and the alcohol probably wasn't helping-). a 50% chance to dodge is pretty good, but if you get attacked twice, you're more likely than not to get hit at least once -- and a 15% chance to crit isn't all that much, but if you happen to be fighting the entire map and doubling everything in it, well, there's going to be some crits
(then again, you're a programmer and I'm a history major, so. I wonder if the choir thinks my voice is cute--)
likewise samed on what a cool fucking idea a mid-sky battle is -- especially because there's a very easy to bungle the execution on an idea like that (the sky is generally a place with not many stuff in it), but rather than that happenning, 2-1 instead takes the opportunity to throw in an absolutely unique map obstacle, with the drifting clouds. and they even have the objective set up so you have to dance with the clouds to win, pretty much!
(also, I don't feel like making a second post to reply to the discussion above this, but, an idea: what if Skrimir was actually a little less generally hot-headed prior to the events of the game... but then Nailah just happened to him at the worst possible time for that-- like "king caineghis sir I think we're gonna have to start a war about this" "oh fuck off! can't that shit wait until a more harmless Teachable Moment lines up here?")
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You are so right with the 2-1 map with the cloud battle and how it's clever that the clouds *move* (has any map in FE history had elements that move over time other than perhaps FE7's dissapearing pathways in some of the final chapters? idunno, but it's cool.) Probably it's also helped by having a playable team half as small as what you usually end up with, so it isn't an overwhelming amount of folks to keep track of.
Haven't played Engage yet but I wonder if it would be neat to speed through a let's play to see if they were creative on any map elements like that. :o (Are you planning on/have played Engage?)
I also LOVE your idea of Skrimir actually being more chill than usual, just in the excitment of war (and possibly with the flames of chaos in general being waved), he's lacked the emotional maturity to be mindful there. That's a cool thought, that it's somewhat influenced with age and vice versa.
One of your first comments is really cute - I'm actually not a programmer, believe it or not; just a design manager. ;) It's amusing because it's been at least the fourth time I've been mistaken for somebody in IT, haha.
Take care!
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depends on what exactly we're counting as "moving over time", I suppose; if the shifting pathways in FE7 count, though, then FE6 has a handful of map gimmicks that definitely do as well. and while I'm not remembering anything like it right off the top of my head, FE5 usually turns out to be the predecessor when it comes to map design gimmicks in Fire Emblem (with the most salient example being fucking fog of war--)
(oh, and come to think of it, both FE7 and FE8 have naval maps where an additional ship appears and boards the party during the fight; would that count?)
I'm actually on my second playthrough of Engage right now! and I have at least one Engage text post in the oven that will be making its way here to Dreamwidth, too, ahah. anyway, Engage has pretty good map design overall, and there's a particular bit in the lategame where they really get creative with it; at that part of the story, you're fighting the bad people for control of some Big Power Crystals, and while the bad people have control of them, they use them to fuck with you in the battle. one of them takes your Obligatory Fiery Hellscape Map and peppers it with huge boulders to make all the paths really thin -- except the Big Power Crystal fires off at the start of enemy phase to blow the boulders up, so they ultimately hinder your progress AND don't always help you take defensive formations either. and then the next one is on a snowy mountaintop, and you're on a turn limit, but the Big Power Crystal summons blizzards that blow your units back, and you have to be careful about positioning to mitigate that effect if you want to actually get across the map in time -- while also still having to be careful about positioning because of all the enemies around.
(and then there are the Emblem paralogues, but this reply is probably going to be long enough without me getting myself started on all of that just yet--)
now I'm picturing Caineghis and Ranulf talking about it like -- "sir ranulf, please forgive my nephew, he's not usually this... hotheaded, it's just that he's young and the chaos of war must have gotten to him and--" "actually, your majesty, I think this is 100% that wolf lady's fault"
ah, I could have sworn-- but I guess so could've the other three people, huh? well, even then, your field's probably still got more math to it than mine, although not by nearly as much of a margin. ... that, and individual traits may still apply; I do take a little more easily to math than a lot of people I know. and not just the other history majors, even--
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oh my GOD can you imagine the TABLOIDS. they've got like, what, decades of Reyson/Tibarn being the only heron royal pairing in town, and then suddenly Rafiel rolls in unannounced like hi lol i'm alive here's my hot ferocious wife? (did they, uh. i can't remember canon. does reyson know rafiel came back before they run into each other in later chapters. do you know how pissed i'd be if my long-lost brother spent time flouncing around in Daein doing an insurgency and then hung out in Gallia doing Gallia things without sending me a fucking postcard letting me know he's alive. oh my god i would kill him. bro what if naesala found out first and decided he had to tell reyson first so then reyson would murder him instead of rafiel if it came to that. i'm not sure if this makes sense it's 2am but i'm VIBRATING lol)
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sounds like a magnificent fic idea what with nae nae and him thriving in the perfect opportunity for a little harmless chaos with yankin' reyson's chain like that ;)