Since I’m prepping to clean up the FE: Fates Character Analysis, I reintroduced myself to the game and remembered that I never did any sort of review or analysis of the game itself (after it came out, that is). So, for this week I’m going to right that wrong and shed some light on my final thoughts on the game (in a shorter, less specific manner than I did with Awakening), because the mountain of work I put in creating that analysis would almost certainly lead sane people to conclude that I love the game.
I didn’t even like it; not one of the five playthroughs I
completed (2 on Conquest, 2 on Revelation, 1 on Birthright) was enjoyable.
As my “pre-game” analysis suggests, I went into playing this
game full of optimism that Intelligent Systems acknowledged the mechanical
problems in FE: Awakening, so much so that Fates in its entirety feels like a
direct response to Awakening’s existence. However, simply completing Fates’
prologue made it apparent that IS either payed the most apathetic of lip
service or are just too incompetent to clean up the messes they created. The
amount of potentially game-breaking issues strewn throughout Fates are
unfortunately too numerous to address completely in any reasonable amount of
time. So, rather than bore you to death with specific borderline nit-picky
arguments, I’m just going to discuss the areas that I think pose the biggest existential
threats and leave a collection of short notes at the end regarding its other
failings. And for the inevitable batch of lazy people that just want a set of
headlines, I will title each section with the general conclusions I reach.
----------
Map Design & Objectives: Better than Awakening, worse
than everything else
The top two critiques I had of Awakening were its simplistic
map design and singular gameplay objective. Those two problems worked together
to make every map play identically, and the entirety of the game feel
excruciatingly repetitive. FE Fates acknowledges the diversity problem, but
does so with one of the bluntest, and most resource intensive instruments
available to a developer – making map-specific gimmicks.
One of the new core mechanics introduced in Fates is Dragon
Veins. Dragon Veins are special tiles on the map that once activated alter the
terrain of the map in some fundamental way – freezing over lakes,
spawning/removing obstacles, reversing air currents, etc. Dragon Veins can only
be activated by characters with Royal Blood (unless you payed for DLC which
lets anyone use them), thereby forcing players to aggressively use either their
Avatar (hereby referred to as Corrin) or their campaign’s Royal. The idea of
Dragon Veins, though expensive for the developer, was good because they ensure
that no two maps will ever play out identically, and players will always have
at least one powerful unit on the field should they get into trouble.
Unfortunately, their implementation is so horrifically bad that all three
campaigns end up with their own uniquely terrible issues.
As I mentioned before, almost every map in FE Fates has a specific
gimmick that dictates how you play through it. On Conquest, every gimmick
actively hinders your progress, generally resulting in a more difficult map. On
Birthright, every gimmick confers some sort of advantage for you, generally
resulting in an easier map. And, on Revelations the gimmicks can do either
depending on the map, resulting in a mode with no semblance of consistency. The
general application of dragon veins across every campaign is to affect the map’s
gimmick in some consequential way, though not in the way you might be thinking.
Dragon Veins on Conquest and Revelations, can help or hinder you based on when
you use them by removing the gimmick or altering it into a neutral one, while
Dragon Veins on Birthright will always benefit you regardless of your timing by
activating the gimmick, strengthening it, and or complimenting it. The most
obvious result of Dragon Veins’ usage is three campaigns with no difficulty
curve – one’s difficulty is firmly placed up in the Himalayas (Conquest),
another is buried so low it runs through a subterranean civilization
(Birthright), and the third just has a squiggle randomly running every which
way (Revelations). *I could provide examples, but again, this is supposed to be
as brief as possible.
The second and arguably more serious issue, is that none of
the campaigns build mastery of the game’s core mechanics. By granting Dragon
Veins such an extensive influence on the entirety of the map, players only ever
need to recognize when to apply them to complete a chapter. And, since the
effects of Dragon Veins are map-specific, knowledge gained on one map does not
transfer to future ones. In plain English, the game does not expect you to
learn its basic mechanics and will not reward you for doing so. Proper implementation would have involved limiting
Dragon Veins to small localized effects (creating a few obstacles, removing
advantageous terrain, etc.). Consequently, the best maps across the three
campaigns are the ones that use Dragon Veins sparingly or throw them out
entirely (this is most clearly exemplified by Conquest Chapter 10 which is
hands-down one of the best maps in the entire series). On these maps, Dragon
Veins perform similar to environmental tools from past Fire Emblems – Ballistae,
locked gates, tile switches, etc. – granting opportunities for small,
faction-neutral benefits while complimenting the core gameplay through added
variance.
Anyway, even in being vague, this section is already longer
than I’d intended, so let’s briefly go over the map objectives problem before
switching gears. In Awakening, every map had the same objective: kill the boss,
despite every new Fire Emblem game since FE5 for the SNES (excluding FE6) using
variable objectives that change with each map. This combined with the godawful
map design led to a stale & repetitive game. FE Fates rectified this…by
giving us two objectives: kill the boss and rout all enemies. A handful of maps
across all three campaigns have unique objectives (again, the aforementioned
Conquest Chapter 10 has its own objective), but the overwhelming majority are
just rout in one name or another. It is slightly
better than Awakening, because the maps don’t all involve moving in a
straight line, but it still feels...basic in a tedium-inspiring way and is a
distressing far cry from the diversity we had during the GBA-Wii era.
Weapons & Forging: Worse than Awakening & FAR worse
than the Tellius games in all ways
The most immediately apparent problem with Fire
Emblem: Fates is its combat. Just like Awakening before it, units spend most of
the game being borderline unkillable gods as a result of simply using the core
mechanics properly, thereby necessitating the inclusion of enemies with
excessively high stats to create a challenge. However, unlike in Awakening
where the blame could be laid squarely at the feet of Pair Up, the culprit in
FE Fates oscillates according to the player’s progress through the game (and
yes, it is the same in both versions).
During the early game, the dual system single-handedly makes
or breaks every engagement through insane stat swings and bonus attacks. In the
mid-game, weapon choice becomes the new kingmaker due to effectiveness pointers
invalidating the need for multiple attacks. And, by the end of the game the
pendulum swings back, making a combo of the dual and skill systems the final
arbiters of life and death. Don’t be fooled by the badass phrasing; this is not
a good thing. The games essentially have no neutral encounters – either enemies
are pathetically easy to kill or horrendously difficult.
The dual system and skills discussions will be tabled for another
time, but as for the weapons I think the best way to address them is to first
look at what I said back in 2015:
“…Because there are
many rare specialized weapons highly effective against specific enemies, the
finite weapon usage encourages players to equip their weapons carefully.”
This was most of the argument for having finite weapon uses,
and it makes sense given that without weapon limitations, players would always
just leave their strongest weapons equipped thereby forcing the game to power
creep to remain challenging. Fates however has infinite weapon uses, and with
it the power creep problem, which is why I’ve deemed it more damaging than the Dual
System. Even with the stat penalties on strong weapons, they still led to massive
balance issues. That said, there was a fair argument to be made for infinite
use weapons. Continuing from what I said in 2015:
“In the context of the
enemy phase’s importance…[strong weapons penalizing the user’s accuracy and
damage each time they are used] is a good thing. A common occurrence in Fire
Emblem games was that one (or several) characters would eventually become so
powerful that they can easily handle anyone that attacks them during the enemy
phase, regardless of which weapon they are holding. While this is great from a
consistency perspective, it makes it difficult for these games to retain their
challenge. The pseudo-fatigue system addresses this issue by limiting the
number of times a unit can effectively fight during an enemy phase with lasting
implications for the remainder of the map…While it’s true that granting all
weapons infinite durability removes the meta-strategy of saving weapons for
later encounters, an individual unit can only equip one weapon at a time and
carry a handful of weapons on their person. Players still have to be judicious
with their weapon choices even though they don’t have to worry about them
breaking anymore.”
With respect to special weapons, the meta-argument for infinite-use
weapons turned out to be entirely correct: the single weapon equip limitation was
sufficient for ensuring that players consistently varied their weapon choices.
The problem that I did not foresee is that the campaign barely incentivizes the
use of specialized weapons due to the combination of scarcity, stat penalties, and
the forge system - of which I knew nothing about. Weapons with effectiveness
pointers (triple damage against specific targets) are rare, as they are in most
other FEs. However, using one comes with a severe penalty to accuracy and damage,
which - at least in my opinion - is much nastier than simply losing weapon uses
because it could cascade into an un-survivable situation during the enemy phase.
What’s more, because the forge system now requires you to fuse multiple copies
of a single weapon together, it is highly unlikely that you’ll be able to
upgrade a single specialty weapon more than once. So, throughout the game you
are almost always better off just using one of the more common and easily
upgradable weapons…and this is where my pre-game assessment was flat out wrong.
The forge system is culpable for more than just the diminution
of specialty weapons; it also made Iron weapons even more centralizing than ever
before. I won’t go into all of the nuances of the forge system here; you canread up on it at your leisure. All you need to know is that forging improves
all of a weapon’s statistics according to a set rate, and requires gems and copies
of a weapon to forge weapons. Most gems can only be acquired by getting lucky
at the arena in between missions (of which Conquest has a finite number of them,
making forging inherently finite in that version), and weapon shops only stock
infinite copies of the four basic weapon types – Bronze, Iron, Steel, and
Silver. Realistically, you’ll only be able to forge a few weapons over the
course of the game, and those weapons will almost invariably primarily consist
of the aforementioned four weapon types. If those four weapon types were
properly balanced with the stat gains from the forge system, this would be
almost acceptable. However, they’re only balanced for un-forged weapons. Every
weapon other than Iron comes with a stat-penalty of some type that makes a
character cumbersome (Steel and Silver), or just weak (Bronze). The stat
penalties from using Silver weapons are so severe, that if a unit gets attacked
multiple times within a single turn, they are essentially out of combat for the
rest of the fight. However, Silver is not THAT much stronger than Iron. An Iron
Sword +3 has identical power to a Silver weapon, with better accuracy, and no
stat penalty, and comes in at the low low price of 2 Silver Swords (or simply
using the Salvage Blow skill). Making forge stat gains universal, inadvertently
shrunk the gap between strong weapons and weak ones, making the stat penalty associated
with strong weapons not merely superfluous, but actively harmful to the
campaign that needs them, as well as the subject we have yet to broach: “post-game.”
…But, before I continue I should at least contextualize the
significance of forging across the three versions. In Conquest, enemies have incredibly
high stats either directly competing or as the game progresses outright
surpassing anything the player can muster without online assistance. They do NOT,
however, possess enhanced weapons. So, Weapon Forging in conquest is one of the
few means you have of establishing parity with or gaining an advantage over the
enemies. In contrast, the forging system in Birthright is completely
unnecessary. Enemies are not only weaker than the player at almost all times,
but more poorly placed, making the use of forged weapons nothing short of
overkill. Revelations is the only campaign where forged weapons are mostly
acceptable, partially because you have access to twice as many gems as either of
the other campaigns, but also because the enemies are slightly harder than on
Birthright. With all of this mind, you should also be aware that you cannot grind
for money or resources on Conquest – the only campaign where forging would be a
massive aid – but can grind for them on Birthright and Revelations – modes
where they aren’t essential.
Grinding & Endgame: Worse than Awakening in all ways
Normally, I would just look at the forge system and say:
“boy, that is one unnecessary gameplay system.” But, because this is a game
with competitive online functionality, the existence of the forge system means
that it is possible for some people (read: hackers) to create impossibly
powerful teams and make the experience outright unfun for any normal player.
Now, as an elitist snob who faithfully subscribes to the (hopefully) ironic
“git gud” mentality of Dark Souls players, I have no problem with hackers using
stat-capped teams with insane weapon & skill combinations; they only force
legitimate players like myself to achieve those higher echelons of power and
beat them into the ground with the experience that can only come from actually grinding
like it’s a ratchet nightclub playing the game properly. Unfortunately,
grinding in this game is handled more poorly than in any other game in this series,
and is the thing that ultimately killed the entire experience for me personally.
In brief, the problems with grinding in this game are
five-fold: It is boring, time-consuming, difficult, expensive, and worst of all
unsatisfying. In Birthright and Revelations you can gain experience outside
of the story by fighting small-scale skirmishes with enemies from defeated
maps. These fights spawn randomly on their own periodically or you can pay gold
to force enemies to spawn on a specific map. The enemies are always easier than
the ones that originally inhabited the chapter (at least on Hard & Lunatic
difficulty settings), pay laughably small sums of gold, and are not worth as
much experience either. Also, unlike in Awakening
where characters could reset themselves to level 1 in a pre-promoted class via
an Item, in Fates characters can only
change classes. This means that it’s much easier to learn skills, because it
only takes the character 2-4 levels to learn everything in a class. But this
also makes it monumentally more difficult for high level characters to gain
experience. That difficulty is exacerbated by the Eternal Seal which must be
used every time a character hits the level cap to extend the cap by 5 more
levels. It also costs 10,000 gold per seal, so good luck saving up.
Both the Gold and Experience DLCs are all but required for
those who want to cap character stats in a somewhat reasonable amount of time,
and even those maps are not nearly as swift, or effective or fun as the pair
of DLCs in Awakening. Additionally, if (for some reason) you’re fine with grinding
out each character to max and want more stats to grind out, the game also has
statues – obstacles which can populate your castle – that will increase the stat
cap of a specific stat (based on the character) by 1 for all units in your army.
Getting a single fully upgraded statue, however requires you to use a character
in combat 100 times, and pay 12 DVP (12 fights) per statue. No matter which
area you’re prioritizing, grinding in this game is a MASSIVE chore that only
rewards you with the tiniest piecemeal payoff while you’re doing it.
And what are you grinding for? Apotheosis? Nope, the game
doesn’t have an equivalent. All that’s there is the online play and E-peen, the
former of which is both a fool’s errand because hackers and pointless because
flat battles. It’s nothing short of insulting that IS would even bother to give
all of these systems such impossibly high stat ceilings for no reason
whatsoever, other than creating the opportunity to eliminate the challenge of
the single player game mode (freely downloadable god characters) and the fun of
online competitive play (hackers running amok). It's awful.
Conclusion: Intelligent Systems Needs to Fix its Foundation
All of the faults in Fates are the same faults in SoV: IS
feels compelled to continually build on existing systems without questioning
the validity of the foundation each of those systems is built on. It has a
marriage and inheritance system, but no narrative or mechanical justification
for them; A pair up system that actively harms the core gameplay loop because
they never bothered to question whether two units acting simultaneously would harm
the 1v1 combat dynamic; A skill system that rebalances FE Awakening’s system, but
doesn’t even look at the universality problem at its core; And a weapon forging
which is fundamentally broken in Conquest for being based off of the grind
heavy approach of the DS Fire Emblem’s instead of the campaign oriented FEs
that invented the system in the first place, and completely unnecessary on Birthright
because everything in the game is heavily weighted in your favor.
No matter how much polish IS could have put into this game, as
long as they continue to ignore the basic problems sitting at the heart of their
gameplay systems, they will always create a subpar game, or in the case of FE
Fates, three. One campaign tries to kneecap you at every opportunity, while the
other gives you carts full of crutches for an Olympic relay team. A
middle-ground was necessary, and all we got was the trash that is Revelations.
As a result, I cannot recommend this game to a new player or fan of the series,
past or present. It’s…………...sad, just…sad.
On the bright side, I can comfortably say that I am done
playing new games in this series. Shadows
of Valentia was a deeply enjoyable game, and I am glad I didn’t listen to
the Internet cynics and purchased the game new on release. That is the best send-off
I could have hoped for. I sincerely wish the fans of this series luck in
enjoying whatever IS has to offer you, because I am gone…
...or I will be when I finish the FE Fates analysis, which
reminds me: You’re probably wondering why I am breaking my brain holding myself
accountable to finishing that write-up. Partially because I started it, and it
kills a little piece of my soul when I leave something undone (this blog has
basically hollowed out what remained of it), partially because my viewer
statistics and comments say thousands of you want this done, and partially
because the two parts I didn’t finish – the Hoshidan character analyses, and
Revelations character builds – would
make it clear as day how fundamentally flawed the game’s character dynamics
are. Those are the only reasons I’ve got. And with that, we’re done talking about
this travesty, at least until July.
Other Noteworthy Issues:
Dual System - Better than Pair Up, but a bad idea all the
same
Character Generational balance - better than before, but
more worthless and unrelated as well
No grinding whatsoever on Conquest = extremely limited time to interact with the marriage system and almost no incentive to reap its rewards
Classes - Slightly worse than before (Three redundant classes in Awakening – Swordmaster, Gryphon Rider, & Berserker – vs 5 in Fates – Onmyoji, Merchant, Oni Chieftain, Blacksmith, Priestess)
Classes - Slightly worse than before (Three redundant classes in Awakening – Swordmaster, Gryphon Rider, & Berserker – vs 5 in Fates – Onmyoji, Merchant, Oni Chieftain, Blacksmith, Priestess)
Characters – many of the worst the series has to offer and the
embodiment of all the worst parts of waifuism
Story - three of the worst in the entire series
Online Assistance is BROKEN AF
To be fair to SOV, it is a remake. Which brings issues cause Gaiden is so different, but yeah.
ReplyDelete