(no subject)

[kradeelav]

something i'd love to do one day is to make a four-way chart about how the FE series has this interesting metagame as far as two axis of (damage you and the foe deal) (damage you and the foe can take).

like for a real example - I'm sort of stuck in this 3H VW maddening playthrough (i'll figure it out eventually lol) because classing everyone as snipers with an innate brave bow was the only way i could reliably damage/2HKO foes close to endgame when it really matters. jesus fuck everyone's a tank. in FE:H deleting a foe is not the problem.the problem is bloody surviving the enemy phase against a decked out PvP team that is a sheer wall of nukes.

and even more interesting - in PoR: EN hard i get the feeling your own units are those tanks because it takes a suspiciously long time for the enemy to whittle the health down, even in hard mode - eh fuck it here's the chart



like FE:H has a very different "feel" to PoR even if it's not as easily classified as "harder" or "easier". funny thing too - POR JP maniac was no joke. holy shit zihark was barely usable (even after spoiling him on basically half the statups) because he'd just go bloody 'tink tink tink' against the generals that were suddenly a threat.  Jill/Titania were my two MVP's there because suddenly axes were the one thing that killed stuff.

bonus wannabe chart: (likewise also with the weapons triangle: an easy example would be how RD:Hard literally nullified the weapons triangle, meanwhile FE:H leans *extra* hard into it to the point that you absolutely need to have one of each color on your team in any kind of harder map. I'm actually glad in retrospect that FE:H did that; it gives some units a spotlight to shine as a "green killer""blue hard counter" etc versus just a straight tier list where the top echelon was just broken to any counters.)

Comments

[queenlua]

oooh, it'd be fun to write an article or do some numbers on this kind of paradigm; i'm not quite as familiar with the games involved but def have done the "am i trying to tank or am i trying to snipe" sort of calculations before.

reminds me a bit of this classic MtG strategy article, Who's the Beatdown?, which talks about how, in the majority of MtG games, one player's best strategy is to play aggressively as possible ("shoot your shot" sort of thing), and the other player's best strategy is to play defensively as possible ("stall them out until they run out of firepower")—and people lose games when they get confused about which one they need to be in any particular game. (and it can be hard to tell! if you and your opponent are playing very similar decks, one of you is going to have a very slight edge with one playstyle vs the other, and it can be hard to figure out which it is.)

/gamedesignrambles

[kradeelav]

Yeah! I'd throw in some GBA games or something that you're more familiar with but GBA ones from very distant memory tend to be sort of in the middle if on the bottom half on hard-and-above modes (Canas is the only one i remember being truly tanky with Nosferatsu), and unfortunately only POR:Maniac and FE:H really tend to be the oddballs on the either extreme. Maybe Fates is on that bottom-right?

and ooooh i *love* that MTG article... have not a clue what those cards do but i can sort of grock the macro gameplay and it's really not that far off to how aether raids operate in FEH (you vs a player-created map/team that's computer controlled; and the strats the player operates on *really* hinge on what skills they deck out their favorites and the units. it's neat cracking the code on those if they try to go with nukes, and you have a handy team of true nukes.)