Mah New Rig

How is it that I've had this new computer for two months now and I still haven't said anything about it on this blog? Well, because I've been too busy playing it, of course!

At long last, though, I'm starting to get pretty burnt out from playing it so much, and tonight especially since I got a pretty bad headache, so I decided to write for a change. I'm thinking of throwing up two posts here: first, this post talking about my new computer and my experience with it and stuff. Then my next post will be a quickie on my thoughts about WoW and Legion and stuff (by the way I am super hyped). But without further digression, let's jump right into my computer.

Before this semester started, I was really looking into putting together a nice computer. I was getting fed up with the performance issues I was having on my laptop, and there were points where I was getting performance that was even pettier than what these "next-gen" consoles offer. So for some reason, my school decided I was worthy of receiving a grant over the summer. This money turned out to be far much more than I needed to even pay off the rest of my tuition, so I was able to split it up and buy an awesome PC with the leftovers. At first, I looked into this by going to TigerDirect and checking out what the top-end stuff would total out to be. My calculations brought me to well over a thousand, which was way out of my budget (I was hoping no more than eight-hundred USD), and thus I went home depressed and thinking maybe it really did cost that much to put together a great computer that would leave consoles in the dust. I knew that, for the same price as a console, I could build a PC that could somewhat outperform consoles, but that's on the same settings as to what games are locked to on those systems. What I wanted was near, if not complete max settings, on 1080p, at sixty frames per second. After spending the day at TigerDirect that day, my dreams seemed shattered... and then, I went on the PCMasterRace subreddit. God bless that place.

On the PCMR sub, I found a build that did exactly what I wanted for a hundred dollars under the budget I had set out. I didn't want to mess around and do my own thing too much, partially for fear of fucking up the computer, but also for fear of not being too savvy with shopping for parts as evidenced by my trip to TigerDirect, but I did switch out some of the things that were listed for a couple of better parts (which were, granted, also suggested on the thing but hey I was bold enough to make changes for myself!). I will upload some pictures soon, but for now here is the list of parts I put together!

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

Type	Item	Price
CPU	Intel Core i5-4460 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor	$172.89 @ OutletPC
Motherboard	Asus Z97-E ATX LGA1150 Motherboard	$86.98 @ Newegg
Memory	Kingston HyperX Fury Blue 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR3-1866 Memory	$38.43 @ SuperBiiz
Storage	Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive	$44.89 @ OutletPC
Video Card	Sapphire Radeon R9 290 4GB Vapor-X Video Card
Case	Fractal Design Core 2300 ATX Mid Tower Case	$55.99 @ SuperBiiz
Power Supply	EVGA 850W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply	$64.99 @ NCIX US
	Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
	Total (before mail-in rebates)	$514.17
	Mail-in rebates	-$50.00
	Total	$464.17
	Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-11-14 06:13 EST-0500

And my goodness, those prices dropped so much in just a few months! Although in actuality, for some reason the video card (which is probably the most critical component for my gaming experience) doesn't have a price listed (it might still be trying to get a price from Newegg, which is the retailer I bought it from, and Newegg might not have that card anymore, I don't know), so the price would probably be another couple hundred dollars. Maybe less, since apparently now the R9 390 is around the same price I got my 290 for. I feel a little bad about it, partially because I've had to really cut down on spending in pretty much all other facets of my life, but also because now, so soon after I bought my computer, there are better parts for about the same price. But I guess that's just the way it's going to always be with computers. I feel like things move just so fast, all I can really do is find what will certainly last and be relevant for a few years before I have to upgrade. And my R9 290 is still quite a damn good card. I think the processor could stand for an upgrade already, but first of all things, I need to get an SSD, an actual mouse, and an actual keyboard (my mouse and keyboard are spare parts I bummed from my dad and my friend). And I could probably stand to get some speakers, although I am fairly certain I have a pair already. Then there are all these games that I want and ugh! Dude, there are like far too many games that I want. There's Metal Gear Solid V, Fallout 4, No Man's Sky, the Legion expansion, to an extent I want Overwatch, I want some of the Hearthstone adventure stuff so that I can put together a good deck, I want Fire Emblem Fates (not PC I know but still), I want Star Wars: Battlefront (but this I can literally wait a year for if need be)... the list goes on and on. So many possibilities are now open with this lovely computer! And that's the thing that really brings me satisfaction with this rig. For too long have I dealt with low performance and the mindset of, "If I can play it, I'll be okay." Ever since my roommate in my sophomore year introduced me to the whole PC Master Race "movement"(?), I've dreamed of one day getting to put together a computer that would render consoles obsolete, and that I can pretty much say I've achieved.

So yeah, that's my build. Not very original but it's still damn good nonetheless. I actually pretty much put it together by myself. My friends helped me just a teeny bit. The rest I figured out for myself, and I was pretty OCD about the whole thing, I'll admit. I used an anti-static mat (I mean come on, my entire apartment is covered with carpet), I was super nervous about forcing things, I was super nervous about pressing the cables into their places (forcing things) and putting them in the wrong places, and to make matters worse my case has a really weird hard-drive bay where it's more like a wall and you hang the hard drives off the side. When I finally put the whole thing together, I was certain I had fucked something up. When I turned on my computer, everything sounded like it was turning on, but I was getting a really strange clicking sound, and there was no video coming up on my monitor (I had used a monitor that only supported a VGA connection for a while).

I panicked and was convinced I had fucked something up. In my frantic breakdown, I called a friend and told him what happened and almost broke down into tears. He then asked me if I put in the video card. I said yes. He asked if I had it connected to an HDMI monitor. I said no. He said, Yeah, go do that. So I plugged it into the HD TV in my apartment's living room, the only HD anything I had in this place, and it worked! Very few times in my life had I felt such an overwhelming sense of relief. So I got my computer set up, eventually managed to save up for an actual HD monitor with HDMI support, and now here I am today, enjoying BioShock Infinite on complete max settings, 1080p, and running at over eighty frames per second (although I only see sixty because my monitor is 60Hz, but it's nice to know my PC can run it an extra twenty frames than what I was aiming for)! The only game I've been weary with has been World of Warcraft. Sometimes, my framerate in certain places would drop to the thirties and forties. The game's recommendations for my settings are on the High preset, but I can set almost everything to max (SSAO needs to be on high and not on the nVidia setting aka Sabotage AMD Card Setting, and the anti-aliasing has to be brought down to MSAA x8 but even that's still pretty damn good).

What a lot of stuff I've read seems to be indicating though is that the CPU is really what's bottlenecking the game for me, not the graphics card. It's a bit of a shame but it's not a huge deal. I rarely have performance issues in raids (in which I have the settings lowered anyway), 99% of the places I've been to in the open world run pretty much over sixty frames per second, and dungeons are pretty much where the glory is (I can keep things max settings and still be well over sixty frames since it's not as straining on my CPU, I guess?). And this is fairly much limited to WoW. Now granted, I haven't really played that many other games on my desktop, but I have played The Talos Principal's demo, and even on the maximum settings, I still get over ninety frames per second in the benchmark, which completely blows my mind.

That's all I've got to really say for now. It's so amazing to be finally living the dream with this computer, and I look forward to playing all these "next-gen" games on it!

The Death of the Grim Patron Warrior (Thank God)

I'm going to try writing more often here, because I feel like my writing overall has suffered from just the lack of doing so regularly. So I figured what better place to kick off again than with the recent announcement that the Warsong Commander is receiving a nerf that essentially destroys the Grim Patron deck?

Basically, Warsong Commander has been nerfed to give minions with charge plus one attack. This effectively makes Warsong Commander a shittier version of Raid Leader, with plus one health and a situational effect. So yeah this is pretty shitty, they made a basic card completely worthless, blah blah.

I think I am going to just throw this out there right now. If you're expecting an intelligent discussion on the meta of Hearthstone and the repercussions this nerf will create, go to the Hearthstone subreddit for that, because I am here to say THANK FUCKING GOD THEY PUT AN END TO THIS LAZY, CHEAP-ASS FUCKING DECK.

My first experience with Grim Patron was online in a match where somebody just one-turn-killed me. I'm not an insanely competitive player with loads of great cards at my disposal, but I like to think that my Warlock deck is fairly decent (it is currently in the process of becoming a wonderful demon deck). Still, when that happened, I wasn't even mad at first. I was in awe that somebody could pull off such a hilarious looking combo. I even wanted to jump on the bandwagon for this deck at first. I played a couple of other Grim Patron Warriors online and managed to curb-stomp them, so I figured, "This deck can't be so bad." But then the reality of how broken it truly was settled in when I lost to three warriors in a row in the same exact fashion of them having the answer to every taunt I would put down, and then proceeding to OTK me with their stupid as fuck combo. Literally every warrior managed to shut down my taunts, get an Emporer Thaurissan out, and then play the magical super combo that had no counters whatsoever. Every time, my taunts got shut down. Then they play Thaurissan, and I can either taunt and attempt to block as much damage as I could and then still lose on my next turn because even if I could block one or two attacks from the bullshit combo, there would still be enough minions plus the Frothing Berserker to just kill me anyway, or I could remove the card, stopping me from getting hit for five damage and also stopping my opponent from lowering the mana cost of any more cards, but then I would have nothing on my board to protect me from being hit. This happened three games against warriors in a row. At that point, I just autoconceded to any warrior I came across. If they want to remove all the fun out of the game from me, I'll do the same for them by not even giving them a match to enjoy their bullshit.

This nerf isn't in effect yet, and I think I heard it comes in next week. Still, I'm glad to know that the end to that bullshit is finally on the damn horizon. Sorry if you played Grim Patron and feel like Blizzard took a massive shit on you, but this was seriously just way too much fucking power that was way too accessible for almost literally anybody who just picked up the goddamn game to use. At the end of the day it really wasn't even the fact that Grim Patron Warrior could OTK me, it was knowing that there was a deck out there that took relatively little effort to put together and even less so to play it at all while my Warlock deck -- which I have been working on for months, still isn't finished, takes some strategy to use correctly, and is very satisfying to win with and actually somewhat viable (when it is finished that'll change to very viable) -- will get crushed by such a cheap, low-effort deck pretty much ninety-nine percent of the time.

I guess the answer then would be to put together a new deck. Unfortunately I do not have enough time and money flowing through my veins to be able to have access to a variety of counters for everything. I've come to accept this as well, really. I've come to accept that a crazy mana-ramp Druid or a Mage with constant removal is going to kick my deck's ass. What sets those apart from Grim Patron is, again, the time it took to make those decks and the level of skill it takes to play them. A lot of people have been claiming that Grim Patron allegedly takes a "lot" of skill to play, but from what I've seen of win ratios and from all these stories I hear of, "I got my friend into Hearthstone and showed him this deck because it's cheap to put together," I cannot see how that is the case when just about anyone who has a simple grasp of how to deal with RNG can win.

So once again, sorry Grim Patron Warriors, but your cheap-ass deck can die in a motherfucking fire. I'll be gladly taking back a place in your playing field with my Voidcaller into Fearsome Doomguards and Defender of Argus combos, thank you very much.

Smash 4 Replays on YouTube

All right, the video I uploaded is indeed pretty crappy. This guy on For Glory was pretty bad. What I should've done was saved this replay of this awesome match against a Mario player (yo Ace if you're out there reading this blog for some reason, you are the man!) because that match was epic, but it was three minutes and eight seconds and I unfortunately forgot that it doesn't seem like the limit on how long your replays can be is exactly always three minutes on the dot. Somebody I know, at least, was able to upload a replay at three minutes and twelve seconds, so who knows.

So yeah, this replay sucks. But that up-b ko that I got was pretty rad. And the rage quit was pretty funny. So here it goes. I wouldn't call these highlights, though... oh wait a minute, my tag for these is simply SM4SH. Ok never mind, I can organize these neatly then. Hopefully there will be better replays to come, or I just get a capture device real soon so that I can actually upload this stuff in 1080p full FPS and without a time limit. I don't get how Nintendo manages to mess up doing the right thing, but whatever.

Cookies Notice

Okay, so for some weird-ass reason, Google is forcing me to throw more bullshit on this blog for all you folks in the European Union. Thankfully it's an automatic little thing up top, so that I didn't have to sit down, read about your laws and about cookies, and take the time to write about it. Unfortunately, though, I cannot remove it or else I could probably get into some trouble, so if it's an inconvenice to you, I am deeply sorry. You can hide it, as far as I know, but I swear to god government these days is just so silly.

My deepest apologies again to anyone who may find this inconvenient. I hope this will not change any pleasure you may find in reading this blog.

Fire Emblem: Awakening

Inori Says:

Axel says that Fire Emblem: Awakening is "Holy shit fucking amazing!" He recommends it to anyone who likes RPGs, even if the word "strategy" terrifies you to the point of projectile-vomitting! Here are Awakening's pros and cons: Pros Great character artwork - simple with still some variety. All around very good artwork that's colorful, detailed, and breathes life into this game. Pretty nice combat animations, especially when skills trigger. Mostly memorable characters. A lot of great support conversations Huge diversity in classes, character stats, and customization with skills and reclassing. Marriage for varieties of possible pair-up bonuses and children. For those who enjoy building up units and stuff (like in Pokemon), making the perfect team of units is very addicting. In spite of making the game very easy, making the perfect children is very addicting, satisfying, and rewarding (I just love my Nah with a stat rating of almost 400). DLC is small and completely optional. "This game has the best video game soundtrack I have heard since Final Fantasy XII." VERY BERRY HIGH REPLAY VALUE. A testimonial from Gregor! "This be true, Gregor now on tenth replay of Awakening. Who will Gregor marry next!" Cons The plot is mediocre at best, the second act is so long and yet so underdeveloped, and the Avatar Ending completely sucks and invalidates the alternative ending. Some characters, like Lucina, are flatter than a plank of wood ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°). Strange lack of cutscenes in the second and third act. The game would probably still be too easy even without the child characters or grinding. Lunatic, according to the fanbase, is unbalanced. First few chapters are not that exciting. Some characters (Virion) are completely useless. No variety to objectives, pretty much either kill all enemies or kill a boss. Didn't experience any real strategy in what was supposed to be a Strategy-RPG.

I didn't want to use fan art at first but come on this is perfect... Well, almost. Why is Anna in such a bad corner?

My review can be summed up with the following words: holy shit this game. Okay all done, hope you enjoyed this review!

Actually in all seriousness if you want to get to the review already you might want to skip the next two paragraphs where I talk crap about my "history" (read: Super Smash Bros.) with this series.

Ah Fire Emblem: Awakening, the game I put off for two and a half years before finally deciding to buy it (then another month before actually playing it). My familiarity with Fire Emblem began with pretty much possibly everyone in the West's familiarity with Fire Emblem: finding Marth and Roy on their copy of Smash Bros. and saying, "Who the fuck are these ladies?" Not only did I put off this game for so long, it also turned out that I have pretty much ignored its existence since its launch, which is kinda weird considering how wildly popular it is. I think my problem was that, after seeing what my mind processed to be "What Fire Emblem could look like" from Ike and the pretty lame Castle Siege stage in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, I was kind of turned off from Fire Emblem. Not to mention it was a Strategy-RPG, and if it's anything I can point to most at my once-ambivalence to the series it was that the most. I was never a fan of strategy games in general. I can't play Civilization V for more than an hour (which if you've played Civ V you know an hour is squat), and I tried Advanced Wars (or was it Advance Wars?), I have tried that Mega Man game with the strategy element to it, and I have played like thirty seconds of Final Fantasy Tactics, and none of them did it for me. So of course when I checked out what Fire Emblem was and saw that it was another in the line of games I probably wouldn't like, I ignored it for a good decade.

The year is 20XX 2013, and I happily bought myself a 3DS. In my initial phase of wondering what game I should get first, a bunch of friends insisted I should get Awakening. I felt unsure, knowing it was a strategy game and all, but then my best friend got it and said it was amazing. Then Blue Highwind wrote a post about it a year later on his blog, and I normally try to avoid having his opinion be the deciding factor in what I check out, but from what he said was in Awakening (and really these are more facts than opinions), I became really excited. There were job classes and crushing your enemies and forcing them to drown in seas of their own blood and you could make yourself a character and you could marry yourself to someone (along with having other characters marry each other) and you could have kids and raise them to be superhuman killing machines and you can have them crush your enemies and force them to drown in seas of blood! I went from, "Strategy RPGs just don't do it for me," to, "WHOA FUCK YEAH I WANT IN ON THIS TRAIN" so fast I doubt I've ever (and will probably never again either) had my opinion swayed so fast before. So after two years of procrastinating and putting off the game I got around to playing it, and boy did that take off.

I'm not going to bother explaining the concept of the game. It's been out for three years now, the series has been around since 1990, most of us who even care about this review probably know by now what's up. If you don't know what a Fire Emblem is, you probably aren't even reading this. So I'm just going to jump right into the aesthetic/graphics of the game, which probably won't mean much coming from my mouth. To a longtime Fire Emblem fan, who the fuck am I to tell them what I think of this game visually when I've never played another Fire Emblem game, am I right? To a serious critic who for some reason is wasting his time reading my blog, who the fuck am I to talk about the visual aspect of game design when I know about as much as absolute zero about that stuff? Well, here's my counterpoint to all you bastards: I have a pair of eyes, and these eyes in coordination with my brain, as with most human beings in this world, see things and form a reaction to these visual images. I'm telling you right now, if Fire Emblem: Awakening looked anything like Shadow Dragon on the DS (that's right! I actually have played some of that game! Joke's on you guys!), I seriously doubt I would've gotten very far. I'm sorry to say something like that when we're in an age today where gamers are arguing that graphics shouldn't matter as long as the visuals make sense and are up to a decent standard, then they should be ignored and instead other aspects should be focused on. I normally claim to be a part of that camp as well. However, there is no way in Grima's hell that I was going to let Shadow Dragon's visuals on a 3DS game pass at all. No way, I am sorry, nope. Notice I say visuals and not graphics (although DS graphics on a 3DS game is also inexcusable if there is no reason for it). Shadow Dragon's graphics are excusable for the matter of being on a DS game (even though their attempt at 3D modeling, or rather the psuedo-3D-spriting-that-should've-died-with-the-SNES "modeling," is aggravating to me and should've just been left with normal sprites), but for a long time everything is just so drab and grey and for fucks sake why do all of my units have the same color palette? There have been games the colors of rainbows on the Nintendo DS, there is no excuse for everything to be so grey for so long on a DS game.

Alright, let's take deep breaths... Whew. Sorry. I made the mistake of going straight to Shadow Dragon after Awakening, I'm going to put that game down and play Fire Emblem 7 first before going any further. Ahem, now, let's actually begin, yeah?

Visuals

I am no Fire Emblem veteran by any means, but it doesn't take very much experience with the franchise at all to already notice the fairly stark changes in the art style since FE10. Funny enough, 11 and 12 had a new artist who in my mind was completely dropped in favor of whoever is the artist for Awakening, and I can see why. How did we go from the colorful GBA games to horribly drab maps, stiff facial expressions on several character portraits, almost complete monotone on most characters, SNES-style 3D battler sprites that made the GBA sprites look like if Michelangelo crafted every individual character himself, and stiff battle animations (probably the biggest drop from the GBA to the DS)? If they dropped whoever did the art from FE6 through FE10 and deliberately picked up the guy for FE11 and FE12, it only makes sense why he was switched out so immediately. Also, Awakening was supposed to be the last Fire Emblem to be ever made, wouldn't it suck if the last game ever in your over twenty-year-old franchise looked like this?

Look at that guy, taking that sword like a man! Not even a flinch! And look at that stock background! And that soulless facial expression! I can't believe what I'm about to say, but Shadow Dragon looks better on the NES.

Aight aight, I'm gonna stop tearing Shadow Dragon a new asshole for its visuals. Sorry everyone I was just trying to save myself some time for the inevitable review of that game nobody's gonna give a shit about, but moving on... So of course, Intelligent Systems is gonna want to go all out with Awakening and hire some big budget artistry (and in a recent interview with Iwata, bless that man's soul, they exactly said that they went "all out" with this game), and it really shows. The character art is on the standard of pretty much what you'd see in current anime design, which will probably set off some people so allow me to elaborate. I don't mean that it runs on current anime visual tropes, I am just saying that the characters you see in Awakening look like they were drawn today and not in the Nineties. So while there's absolutely nothing wrong with that Nineties style (as FE6 through about 8 make me think of), I really honestly did find the artwork in this game fresh and very pretty for the most part, maybe I just don't watch enough current anime to see why people complain about the anime look (which I'll get more into towards the end of this segment).

I don't really have too much to say about this stuff though. Again, I'm not a real visual arts expert or anything, so I can't really give a more detailed opinion about these things. I'll try my best with it though. First off, the battle animations are pretty nice. So are, of course, the CG cutscenes, but I don't feel the need to discuss them other than they are pretty much up to the standard of most prerendered cutscenes. The sort of cell-shading (if it is cell-shading; it looks that way to me but I can't tell) looks very smooth and all, and again there are plenty of colors and good shading done in these. But getting back to the battle animations, I feel like they are done well enough for this game. They are fluid and fun to watch, especially when a character's skills trigger. The models on these battle sequences would very much be right in the camp of generic 3DS modeling, but they were at least able to keep every character's head intact (sounds like a weird statement but then you have Shadow Dragon where nearly all of your units look the same in a battle). Plus, if you're weird enough to keep all of your characters in their starting class paths, they'll each have their own outfits unique to them.

That really brings me into what's probably my main focus with the graphics, which is the character design (visually). A lot of people have complained that the character design has taken a turn for the worse, both in writing and in the artwork. While I'm gonna hold off on talking about the writing, I really don't see what this whole aversion to "anime style" is. You're playing a JRPG, every character is going to be "anime style" in their artwork. Guess what? The older Fire Emblems use "anime style" as well.

Artwork of Fire Emblem Thracia 776

Artwork of Space Runway Ideon (1980-1981). Kind of a weird comparison because of completely different genres of style but the fundamentals of the character design are still the same.

We could go back in time and bitch about Thracia 776 designing its characters like what'd you'd see in an anime as well, because guess what? Fire Emblem has always followed the Japanese style of animated/comic-book character design of its time (shitty sentence basically I mean almost every game has followed the "typical" art style of its time). So if it's anything to bitch about with today's Fire Emblem using "weeaboo visuals," it's not the art style itself but rather the visual archetypes that are incorporated.

One example with Awakening that comes very clearly to mind is the whole loli thing with Nowi. A lot of people hate Nowi for being presented as this sort of sexualized child-character. I can't really say much to argue against her visual design, other than her looking like a child is actually something that was already established way back with the original Shadow Dragon's Tiki, and that the reasoning for her clothes are thinly implied by her backstory of being auctioned off by several men (something that doesn't seem to be mentioned any more than once for some reason), and you find her off in the middle of a desert region.

Still at the same time, they don't really do anything with Nowi beyond the clothes that she wears. I don't even think she is fanserviced in the Summer Scramble DLC (which I haven't played, but I haven't found anything with her in it either). Now on the other hand, in Fire Emblem Fates you have Camilla, the pinnacle archetype of anime-waifu bombshell character design. Now that's something I cannot find any argument against at all. If you support Camilla's character design and was hoping that I'd find a way to speak out for you, sorry buddy but you are on your own. In my mind, no amount of justification can nullify how over-the-top her design is.

So now that we've established that yes, Awakening is a JRPG and so of course it's going to use "anime-style" character artwork, just how good is that artwork? I personally think it is, for the most part, fantastic. A lot of the design in the characters is very simple, yet detailed enough to set them apart from other characters, from Lissa's headdress to Kellam's face being nearly buried in his armor to Gerome's fucking Nightwing mask, to Cynthia's pigtails and so on so forth. Hardly anyone looks fashionably ridiculous unlike far too many characters from other JRPG series (most notably Final Fantasy). Even the ridiculous armor that Knights and Generals wear make sense, as they are tank classes that are meant to be slow and take damage. Meanwhile in Final Fantasy a character wearing something like that would be flying through the air with all this ridiculous over-the-top swordplay and choreography.

I am normally not a guy who dwells on a game's visuals. As a result I'm going to leave my input on all that stuff with what I have written, as I'm afraid if I keep writing I am only going to end up circlejerking what I said two sentences ago. However, with all the commotion and--I can't believe I have to call it this--controversy over the game's visual direction, an expanded commentary on Awakening's visuals felt necessary. Overall it is a visually pleasing game with a lot of colors and sound character artwork that doesn't delve too far into anime visual archetypes, as much as you may want to believe it does. Note that I say visual archetypes!

Writing

Hopefully I can be more specific and sound more intelligent here than in my Visuals section. When it comes to this game, I notice there are really mainly two things to talk about with the story: the plot of the game and the characters. Because I have way much more to say about the characters than I do about the plot, I am going to start off with the plot of the game first.

Oh yeah, and spoilers by the way. I find that I cannot properly write about a game's story without getting into spoiler territory. So if you've somehow still haven't been spoiled yet with this game, be careful from here on until the end of this segment.

To put it bluntly, the plot of this game is meh at best. It starts off well enough, with your created avatar killing Chrom and suddenly you wake up and you see Chrom is alive, but your avatar doesn't actually know who he is and can't remember anything about his past. Okay, this is great, plenty to work with for the beginning of the game. Unfortunately from there, it doesn't get much better. Lucina comes in from the future, but she runs around pretending to be Marth, and I guess if I hadn't known already that she was Lucina, that would have also been a very interesting plot point. Honestly, the first act of the game isn't too bad (well aside from the really boring first few chapters. I especially do not forgive the gateway into Regna Ferox for being pretty ridiculous. "Halt, none shall enter Regna Ferox." "Oh you're Chrom! How didn't I notice when you were slaughtering all of my soldiers? Come on in, buddy!"). But beyond that, it was fairly serviceable, especially in the encounters with King Gangrel. Some parts, still, left me scratching my head. Chapter 7 is completely pointless in having Emmeryn come out all the way to this mountain for safety and nearly getting assassinated in doing so, only then to return back to Ylisse and get captured very much immediately after.

The rest of the first act was fairly serviceable though. It's kinda funny because I almost thought that I finished the game already. Then the second act comes and it's mostly downhill from there. When Validar came back after the characters clearly cut him down in Chapter 6, and nobody recognized him, I let out a deep sigh of disbelief. Come on Chrom, I fucking had you stab the guy with Falchion, how is he just vaguely familiar to you? Then let's not forget the rest of the act being so underwhelming. For some reason nobody seems to listen to Lucina at all, and instead people go on about how they can control destiny and how your bonds with friends will save the day. Meanwhile all the same actions that led up to Lucina running away from Grima destroying the world still occur, and still nobody listens? Then you have how grossly underdeveloped Walhart is. It makes his entire subplot feel purposeless. Like, the whole time I'm running around with no idea who this guy really is, then you kill him and he says he's trying to stop Grima from returning. Even that had little impact whatsoever because that was one line amid hearing endlessly about just how horrible he is and stuff.

The worst thing about the second act is how it's so drawn out it leaves little breathing room for the last act. There are some things I like about it, like the final encounter with Validar (kinda felt epic to me,  besides I had Cynthia finish him off by shouting "Here I cooooommmeeee!" like an eight-year old. That was priceless). I just wish he was harder and that he was better developed as a character. All I got out of him was just some typical evil JRPG asshole. At least he looks a little bit like Jafar so that felt cool, I guess? The worst part of all this though has to be the ending which the avatar kills himself to kill Grima. Maybe the other ending is much better (haven't seen it yet), but honestly the logical decision to make is to kill Grima. I specifically made that choice because why would I pass that chance just to keep the avatar alive? But then after you kill Grima, the feels cut short very abruptly since guess what? Your bonds with your friends brings you back to life! So not only is the emotional impact gone, but now picking the choice where Chrom keeps the avatar alive is utterly pointless and stupid. Also why does every character in the game have to give the same two lines stating "I'm sure Robin will come back to us!" There are like a hundred characters in this game, why do I have to hear that line from every one of them?!

And then to make it even more strange, for some reason all the CG cutscenes just seem to end about after Emmeryn dies. Yeah there are like one or two more toward the end, but it still doesn't make any sense. I'm not saying there should've been more cutscenes, but they should've either spread them out evenly across the game or they should've at least for the love of god given a better cutscene for the avatar ending. What I would've done was have Morgan doing some sort of daily routine when she notices somehow that her dad might still be alive. Then she runs off, alerting Chrom and Lissa and other characters in the game, and it shows them running out to the field where the avatar was sleeping in the beginning of the game. THEN they could've ended it the way they did, because the way it is now just seems to imply that there is some sort of cycle going on, but that theme is hardly present at all in the rest of the game. Unless it's supposed to be some sort of allusion to starting a new save over, but I just doubt that, or I just find that too dumb. Sorry to go off for a while here, I just really hated that avatar ending. The game has its epic moments, hell especially with riding around on Grima's fucking back even though my Morgan rofl-curbstomped Grima in one round, but the avatar ending was a huge letdown.

On the other hand, the characters are really nice in this game. Well, most of them are. Before I go any further, I will acknowledge that yes, the depth on these guys isn't exactly incredible, but most of them are fairly unique from each other and very much likable. Even Tharja with her cringe-worthy creepiness and dialogue wouldn't be half as lively without it. Sadly this means that yes, most of these characters rely perhaps a little too much on a defining trait. But since you hardly ever actually see them in the main cutscenes of the game anyway, I don't mind it. Plus I think it affects their support conversations fairly well. I enjoyed most of the support conversations I have seen so far. I really do get the sense of how two characters would talk to each other with most of these, and that they wouldn't say these same exact lines to someone else (though there are a few exceptions I guess. As much as everybody seems to fall head-over-heels in love with Cordelia, I really don't find her that interesting. Maybe I should look at more of her supports I guess). Some of what my personal favorite characters have to be include Inigo (hands down), female Morgan, Nah, Olivia, Donnel, Henry, and Owain in terms of their conversations and dialogue. Chrom is also a fairly decently made character; not the greatest of protagonists but certainly a lot more interesting and personality than sadly Lucina, who only seems to care about saving the world from Grima. I saw one set of support conversations with Sumia as her mother, where she wants to go in to town to buy a dress... But that's really about as much variation as I got. To be fair, no, I have not seen every support conversation in this game, but I doubt every single one of them is truly that much more unique than the other. So at the end of the day, Lucina is fairly bland as hell, which I guess is part of why it's so funny to see people swapping out her lines with lines Laura Bailey has spoken in other games, notably Saints Row 3.

But anyway, it's funny that I thought I had much more to say about the characters but really I don't think I actually do. They mostly don't really evolve beyond their personality archetypes, but that's okay, there's like a million characters in this game. This isn't like Game of Thrones where you have thousands of pages to expand on hundreds of characters, this is just one self-contained game. Perhaps other Fire Emblems did a better job of fleshing out the characters, which I can't vouch for or against as I've never played them, but I'm certainly going to remember like about at least eighty-five percent of the cast. Many people complain, though, that all of these characters are very reliant on typical anime tropes for personalities, but you know what, I really don't think it's that bad. Yeah, Severa is immensely tsundere, and sure, Anna might not have that much more depth to her than Wario (but really though, how can you not love Anna? Shame on all of you, your waifu is shit!) but honestly I don't think any of these characters are as lifeless as a wooden plank. Well, aside from Lucina, maybe; if Laura Bailey hadn't voiced her I really don't think there would be anything salvageable about Lucina. After being in the writing camp for approximately seven to eight years already, I've seen all manners of characters and trust me, these are far from the very bottom of the barrel. Not the most incredible, memorable characters in the history of video games, but fairly distant from being bad. Now as for how they compare to other characters in the Fire Emblem series, I'm just going to have to go and find that out for myself!

Gameplay

And now for what probably matters most about Fire Emblem: Awakening. After all, I used to be completely uninterested in strategy-RPGs, so it meant quite a bit that I was actually interested in playing this game. However, if it's anything I'm going to give to people who like to tear this game a new asshole, I didn't really experience that much strategy at all.

First of all, I want to start with the beginning of my time with this game: the first few chapters. If I feel like I am getting really tired and would rather put the game away and fall asleep while playing, that is a very dangerous sign. That is exactly how I felt in the very beginning, in the first few chapters of the game. Granted, it's only the beginning of the game, so you're not going to have access to a lot of units or marriage or anything like that. However, I still wouldn't treat that as an excuse for how lackluster the first few chapters are. Even on my second playthrough, or rather I would say especially on my second playthrough, I was having a very hard time trying to get through these chapters because they are so boring and I just wanted to marry Anna already (made the "mistake" of marrying Tharja instead of Anna on my first run. When I first played the game, I'm going to be brutally honest, my mind was immediately set on Tharja. But then, I guess as most marriages go in real life, I grew very annoyed with this spouse, met Anna and saw just how wonderful she was, and regretted my life choices and wanted to escape from this commitment. Well, if it's any consolation, Tharja made two damn-good kids... okay I'm gonna stop now with this weird, failing parody of marriage). I'm not sure what it really is about the first few chapters, but I think it may just be because too many of them feel like very basic tutorials with the same objective of killing all your enemies. Like maybe if they mixed things up with special objectives or something, I wouldn't feel like falling asleep instead of playing the game. Thankfully, this wore off once I really started to run into the Paralogues and gather up a variety of units.

Like any good old JRPG, Awakening offers a great amount of characters and classes to control. I was especially pleased with the ease and fair simplicity in the reclassing system, allowing excellent control over not just what you want your characters to be but also how their stats develop, as well as the further amount of customization you get from skills. Unfortunately, not every character is good, and some classes, to me at least, were utterly useless (looking a you, Archer, as well as your lame-as-hell promotions). And then there are the child characters, who are as far as stats go ruthless, adorable killing machines. Once I started recruiting children I quickly found my first-gen characters getting outclassed and benched. So while I enjoyed having Nah reach nearly a rating of four-hundred and watching the hope drain from the eyes of her enemies, I found it lame that I couldn't use whoever I wanted to use. Anna may be decent, but at the end of the day if you want a wonderful, glorious super team that will slaughter the people you StreetPass with, you are better off using someone else. Still at the same time, character unbalance has been as old to me as Final Fantasy VI, so it wasn't something I found hard to adapt to. Besides, I like Nah, so I didn't mind relying on her nearly all the time to wipe the battlefields clean of my enemies. This starts getting into the whole strategy-lack of strategy thing I alluded to, so let's delve into that.

I want to make it known that I indeed played the game on Normal mode (I also set it to Casual because I'm a filthy-casual who's just not ready to experience the pains of permadeath and resetting just yet). I never tried Hard or Lunatic, and I probably don't intend to. People say Hard isn't really that much of a challenge at all anyway, and Lunatic is pretty much broken because of very bad design choices in the battles. I cannot say anything about those difficulties, but I will say that Normal mode was pretty damn insanely easy. This probably has to do with the fact that I grinded and stat-capped most of my child units, so it makes sense, and as a result, the strategy element pretty much became lost on me since I could just run around obliterating anything. Still, I didn't think this was really a bad thing at all, it was just another way of playing this game. The child characters are OP as hell, yes, but I think the thing with them is that it takes a lot of time to grind their parents up to the skills you want to pass on, grind the children up for the rest of the skills and stat caps, and so on, that rather than feeling like it's cheap that Morgan can completely dismember Validar with a Brave Sword, it feels very satisfying because you put in a lot of time and planning to make her indestructible. However, I would agree with anyone, even without having played any of the older Fire Emblems, that this didn't feel like I was playing a strategy-RPG. I guess if I wanted to do that, I could play on Lunatic, but I don't think that you should have to play on the hardest difficulty setting (especially considering that many find it broken and unfair) just to experience what the game is supposed to be. I don't know if the strategy would've been more present if I hadn't gone off and grinded, but really I don't think the game would've been that hard if I hadn't done that. It also doesn't help that every objective is either kill everyone or kill their leader, aside from the occasional battle where you have to defend an ally as well.

Still, though, I really didn't mind the grinding. It may just be that I enjoy WoW, which is the ultimate pinnacle of grinding and is either one's heaven or one's Hell with that, but the grinding in this game is optional, it's not that ridiculous (can you hear me say Pokemon IV breeding?), and it pays off extremely well. I really enjoyed the marriage feature in this game and being able to pair up your units according to how you want them to be paired up (I may be doing it very wrong but like for example I liked having Inigo as a General paired up with Morgan as a Swordmaster, with Inigo serving to defend and cover for Morgan while Morgan dished out the bloody dismemberment of my foes with a nice smile on her face). I enjoyed the skills and being able to have kids and make them pretty much how you want them to be depending on the fathers you choose. And sure, I even enjoyed completely annihilating my foes with the killing-machine children I spent so much time to put together. So even though I might not have really experienced any real strategy, I did get quite an awesome experience from this game that made it hard for me to put my 3DS down. I wouldn't even say that I'm even finished with this game yet; on the contrary I feel like I am just getting started, and now I want to see what other possibilities will arise from the decisions I make in my next save.

Oh man, I almost forgot something else about this game too, and that's the

Music

This is actually going to be very short, ha. I would normally include this with Visuals and name that section Aesthetics instead, but it felt strange to tack this on to the end of several paragraphs of me complaining about people complaining about the game being Japanese in art style. Fire Emblem Awakening has what has to be hands down one of the most incredible orchestral scores I have ever heard in any video game. As a matter of fact, I rate this game's soundtrack as the best video game soundtrack I have ever heard since Final Fantasy XII, which was fairly a long-ass time ago. There have been plenty of great soundtracks between then and now (or, uh, 2012 rather), but none have ever truly captured what Final Fantasy XII captured for me in an RPG, which is that sense of an epic adventure of the ages. If Fire Emblem Awakening was a straight up RPG like Final Fantasy XII (and with a story that was close to being as good), this soundtrack would've had the same effect on me. Songs like Divine Decree (especially that song), "I mean it! GO!" and hell even Id (Purpose), which I used to really dislike until I heard it in its appropriate context (the last chapter of the game), are going to remain in my head for possibly the rest of my life. I can't really explain in detail why this music is amazing, as I am no real musician, but I mean I don't know, like with Divine Decree the choir is on point with how strong they come out, the trumpets are great and really bring out the heaviness in the song's tempo (really the brass in general makes that song amazing), it has what I think is a really awesome key change toward the end of its loop, and is just all around such a badass song. It must have been really fun to write and play for the recording.

Fire Emblem: Awakening probably has done very little to change my view of strategy-RPGs, but it was still an amazing experience and because of that, it has certainly opened up my interest in the rest of the franchise. I know, certainly, that the rest of the games (aside from Fates once that comes out) are hardly anything like it at all, but I believe that I will enjoy at least most of the ones I intend to play and if the combat retains anything of the basic, core aspects of Awakening's combat, which I'm sure it does after playing Shadow Dragon for a bit, as well as the good characters and all, I will love the franchise just as well. For now I am definitely planning on hitting up Fire Embem 7, Sacred Stones, Shaow Dragon (in spite of how rough that ride seems), possibly FE9, and of course Fates when it comes out, but I am sure I will be interested in the rest of the games as well if I find the time for it. After putting it off for so long and being incredibly doubtful that I would get into this game, I found Awakening to be an excellent game for just about anybody who loves RPGs.

Update: Oh yeah and a word on the DLC for this game. Some people, for some reason, think that Intelligent Systems is EA now for putting DLC in the Fire Emblem series. Look, Awakening is a complete, functional, finished game. I put sixty hours into my first save alone, and this was without any DLC at all. It's the way how DLC should be made: small little bonus extensions to your game for an extra bit of money rather than necessary for a complete experience. If Awakening had, let's say, the rest of the child characters as only obtainable through DLC, or the Paralogues only available as DLC, then that would be a tremendous problem. But that's not the way it is. If you live in the middle of nowhere without an Internet connection of any sort, you can play this game beginning to end, sink hundreds of hours into it, and never know that there was ever a single DLC made for it. That goes to show how inconsequential the DLC is for this game. Call me a scrub who hasn't played any game in the series but I don't even have to look at another Fire Emblem to tell you that DLC did not "ruin" this series with this game. Because Fates has yet to be released, I cannot place judgement on it yet, although I do find it kind of lame that you cannot get the third path as its own game like the Nohr and Hoshido paths. Oh well.

The Prodigious Journey Chapter 3 Preview

Notice: Almost forgot to mention this, THERE ARE NO PLANS TO SELL THIS GAME OR POSSIBLY EVEN DISTRIBUTE IT. I am not a dumbass, I am not going to even try to make a penny off this game when 99.99% of it is made with assets belonging to like thirty different companies and people. This will probably only be played by me and my friends.

I have been very busy with my game lately (The Prodigious Journey is its name, not sure if that was ever established). For a while I've been working on a particular area, the Capitol of the Kurenai Empire, but for some reason, even though I think that place came out mostly great, I just wasn't feeling it. I guess the thing is that beyond that one part there are so many greater moments in the game that I'm really excited to get to as soon as possible that I guess working on the Kurenai segment felt less exciting in comparison to thinking about those other parts. Man that sentence sucks, oh well. I've left off at Kurenai for about a year and didn't work on it due to stuff with school and whatnot, but now that Summer came around I found the time to start working on the place again. And even though it may be lackluster in comparison to everything else I've made so far, I'm still fairly happy with how it came out!

So some background before I start throwing up some screenshots. In my game, there are three evil guys all serving under the main antagonist, Mittens Nomsney, and all of them seek to take over the world and spread out some horrible anti-human-rights crap. One guy runs a female sex slave trafficking network, and another guy runs some genocidal forces against gays and lesbians. So after the party kicks the sex slaver's ass, they head on over to Kurenai to help out a band of gay rebels trying to stop Nomsney and his right-hand homophobe from creating the ultimate super-weapon against the resistance: the "Super Aryan."

I designed Kurenai as a sort of dungeon-city, where the main segments are three particular districts: the Industrial District, the Residential District, and the Agricultural District. Each district has a sort of miniboss you have to defeat, each of them weak to a particular element. Once all three are defeated, the party can storm Kurenai castle and save the day.

So at the Industrial District, once you've opened the way to move to the guardian, a cocky little asshole named Solomon will come out to help you.

The background of the whole story is that Axel (me) stumbled into this world by accidentally leaving the universe Earth is from. And everyone in this world knows about this, as it's a famous prophecy.

"Oh come on, Cheetah/Axel, that's not so bad. He seems fine to me, maybe he just didn't know."

Not convinced he's a douche? Well, how about this. In the game you have a character in your party named Hageshi. She can control the powers of lightning and water, and is one of the very few who can wield Shock Katanas, blades infused with the power of lightning. However, when the party goes to fight a Water Guardian, one of the three minibosses, who is weak to lightning, Solomon steps in and shoves Hageshi aside.

As a display of his douchyness, Solomon one-shots the boss AND is the first to walk away when it's slain! What an asshole!

So yeah, he one-shots the boss in a completely unnecessary display of power. The other girls sort of swoon over him and he casually strolls out of the building. He is such an asshole and I love how he came out. Every now and then later on, he'll appear and sort of help the party out, but the question is: is he really a friend or a foe?

In the Residential District, I set up a pretty neat little "puzzle" in which you have to trade items with different citizens in order to progress to the Frost Guardian.

Just what is going on in the corner up there?!

Here's a look at what happens when you meet up with the Frost Guardian in his own home.

Once you defeat all three guardians, it's time to storm the castle!

Once inside, you regroup with the resistance, and you have to decide whether you want to take the seemingly-convenient one hundred and eighty-eight unguarded stairs straight to the boss, or if you wish to just charge in through the front and deal with a bunch of tough encounters. Either way, you should be at the right level to stop the Super Aryan from being formed.

Climbing up stairs for hours starts to take a psychological toll...

So at last, you've fought through the castle's guards (or climbed that huge stairwell), and you're ready to stop the Super Aryan. But standing between the party and the technology to shut it down is none other than Joseph Goebbel's, Hitler's head of Nazi propaganda, who somehow wound up in this world when he secretly escaped the Allies during World War II. It turns out he oversaw the creation of the Super Aryan, and upon Jules killing him, he released the Super Aryan itself, who turned out to be none other than Hitler himself! Although, something was wrong with the picture...

Will you be able to stop Super Aryan Hitler, infused with the powers of a Super Saiyan from the Dragonball universe (each with a horrible Nazi twist to them)?

Completing this chapter isn't the only thing I managed to do with the past month or so of my time with this. I also created a new party member based off of the character's my friend would make in Dungeons and Dragons: needlessly broken characters that are constantly trying to kill the other party members for no reason.

You might notice that damage is like at least five times the maximum health of the each party member. You'll need a special item to protect you from that bullshit.

Some of you WoW enthusiasts might also be familiar with these spells. That's because I figured if I am going to make a broken character I might as well base the class off of what was once the most broken class in WoW: the Death Knight. This character, Endymion, has some nasty game-breaking tricks up his sleeve, all of which are perfect for the kind of player who likes to take the "cheap" way through. It is entirely optional, with the exception of one minor section of the game, to use Endymion in your party though, so if you prefer to play the game as it should be played and enjoy a challenge, you don't have to have him tarnish your party, But he's still a pretty fun character to play for how hilarious he is in terms of how broken he is. Also I think I held pretty true to the Death Knight class. Necrotic Plague is an ultimate ability that does exponential damage over time. It got to the point where it was literally breaking the game, so I had to limit it to doing no more damage once the enemy is at one hit point. It shouldn't even matter way before then anyway, because Blood Boil, in honor of the way that spell used to be in WoW, does increased damage if the plague is on your enemies. With Necrotic Plague on, it does ten times the normal damage. It will do increased damage for other "diseases" too, although not as ridiculously as much.

Like Death Knight's in WoW, Endymion's trait is his survivability. One ultimate he has allows him to live for five turns even if his hit points are down to zero (Purgatory). Another move, imperative to Death Knights and their survivability in WoW, is Death Strike. In WoW, Death Strike would heal you and its base rate would be affected by how much damage you took in the last ten seconds. Because doing something like that is way too challenging for me, what I did was I had Death Strike in my game take into account the enemy's Attack and Magic Attack stats into its HP Drain formula. So basically, this means that Endymion can heal himself for pretty much all the damage an enemy caused on him, just like in WoW! This also means that, if he can take a hit from a boss that is way higher a level than he is, he can heal himself back to max health.

The unique thing about his class is what I call its "runic system," which is inspired by the runic system for Death Knights in WoW. Basically, Endymion's really powerful attacks that cost a harder resource to build up refunds magic points, and magic points can be used for weaker abilities that generate the resources for the stronger abilities. So playing as Endymion is all about shifting your resources back and forth from abilities of varying strengths. Still, at the end of the day, Endymion is the most broken central character in the game who can ruin the entire challenge, especially if you are able to grab his legendary weapon in the very small window of opportunity that the game gives you way before you even meet him. However, there is no indicator of this opportunity; for that you have to think outside the box.

Another awesome thing that I managed to implement into my game (and fairly easily too in spite of the French/butchered Google-translate instructions) is what's called Mode 7, which turns the world map into a sort of 3D thing when you hop in an airship, like in Final Fantasy 7 (and perhaps FF6 as well)!

And last but not least, I got really into porting a bunch of shit from Fire Emblem into my game, as I have just recently played most of Fire Emblem: Awakening and fell so much in love with it that I had to snag a few things. I took a couple of songs from that game (Divine Decree was a must have), but that wasn't the pinnacle of my achievements with all that. I managed to port Anna's sprites and portraits into my game!

She is seriously the greatest.

But then, not too long after I did this, I saw Anna's character design in Fire Emblem Fates, and I immediately had to use it. Of course, though, there's no access to her sprites from that game as far as I know, so I figured the best thing I could do was make my own sprite of her. This coincided nicely with my recent acquisition of Game Character Hub, which lets you make sprites specifically for RPG Maker, thanks to the amazing Humble Bundle sale I took advantage of (two thousand dollars worth of software and assets!). I was on the fence about making her a playable character, but after I found this and figured I can make a unique sprite/portrait from an NPC variant of her (also her ported sprites would have to be heavily edited for being able to walk around), I decided why not?

Very much placeholder dialogue. Almost none of this will be in the finished game.

Not too long after I did this, I started finding all these funny videos where Lucina is voice-swapped with lines from other games that her voice actor has worked on, namely Saints Row 3. So Lucina in turn goes from being a fairly bland character to hilarious with a the crazy crap she would say (Lucina to her father, "I bet you'd be into some nasty shit if you tried it"). So after I thought about that, I figured it would be funny to put a nasty-mouthed Lucina from the Outrealms into my game just because, and thus a beauty was born.

It's funny because it SPOILER ALERT SPOILERS SPOILER ALERT actually happened once, possibly even twice.

I've been having so much fun with all this, and I really can't wait to see what this will all turn out to look like once it's finished! At this point, I'd say I'm about twenty-five or maybe close to halfway through the game's main plot. It's all been written already, when I was in high school, but there are plenty of additions and changes being made, like there's an entire section where you go to a desert city and help free all those sex slaves I mentioned-- that was never in the original story. So far from playing what I've made, the game is about six hours. So if twenty-five percent is about correct in how far I've come with this game's main plot, the main story should take about twenty-four hours to complete. Then there are all the sidequests and dungeons to do, but I don't expect that to take too long to finish working on after I'm done with the main plot of the game.

As far as other news is concerned, I do have to address a few things. First off, I cancelled the Wolfecraft videos. World of Warcraft right now is in a pretty bad slump. Funny how in 6.1, when there was no actual new content whatsoever, I was in huge denial about it, and expected it to get better in 6.2. In 6.2, I was initially amazed by the new Tanaan Jungle zone, and I still really like it, but none of it is enough. I haven't done the new raid though, and I don't know when I will even though I really want to see what's in there. The problem is now whenever I play, I just never feel like playing it. It's probably because I picked up The Prodigious Journey again, as well as got way into FE Awakening (which is legitimately way more fun to play than WoW is in its current state). Also, end cinematic of this expansion is complete bullshit. I'm not even going to touch that stupidity. Also, the developers don't want people to play Demonology. Why even have the spec if you don't fucking like it and don't want your players to use it? I'm really upset with how Blizzard has been handling a lot of things about Warlords right now. The way I feel about that expansion is this: aside from some exceptions (like Blackrock Foundry being badass and amazingly fun), everything is extremely lackluster after you get over the initial reaction of fangasming over seeing what Outland and all these lore characters were like before all the events of WoW. I can't even imagine how disappointed players who haven't been around during The Burning Crusade must feel.

But in light of not playing WoW, I got tremendously into Fire Emblem Awakening. Holy shit. Sadly I'm not sure if that means I'm going to actually enjoy the other games, but I am looking to give Fire Emblem 7 a try. Of course, I'm getting Fates too, but Fates is carrying on the things that made Awakening so successful, so I wouldn't really count that. But I am going to get more into all this once I actually finish Fire Emblem Awakening, because as you may have guessed I am absolutely going to write about this game.

And what happened with our little Square Enix conference I was going to post about? Well, I decided to drop it. Why? Because there was really nothing to talk about at all with that piece of shit of a conference. In my head all that post was amounting to was some snarky remarks about how awful of a job they did at translating what the Japanese spokesmen were saying, a huge circlejerk over how hilarious that was when the director of Nier came on stage with that moon with a face on his head, how stupid it was of them to put Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy, the games that actually matter, in the middle of their presentation rather than at the beginning or the end, and how stupid it was of them that they, once again, focused on Western-targeted games like Just Cause 3 and Hitman. My remark on that is this: nobody who actually follows Square Enix gives a shit about those games, and nobody who enjoys those games gives a shit about Square Enix, as they either have no idea who they are or could care less about Japanese studios and developers. SE really needs to realize this and get on the fucking ball with marketing their Japanese games, the games that people who actually care about SE actually give a shit about, and forget about these generic as hell Western-targeted games (although Tomb Raider was pretty cool, I'll give them that). The one good thing that truly came out of SE this year was the announcement of the Final Fantasy 7 remake, which I guess at the end of the day is all that matters. The problem is, they already used it in the Sony conference... so yeah, don't have a conference ever again, Square Enix.

I hope to have that Fire Emblem post up real soon because my god do I love Awakening. 

E3 2015: Wild Emotions; Part 3: Disappointment, Bitterness, Acceptance, and (Faint) Hope

A little late with this one, aren't I? Sorry folks, past couple of days have been pretty busy, and on top of that, I felt like I had to watch a lot of the Treehouse stream.

Well anyway, with all the shit that went down so far and with all these crazy anticipated titles being revealed, I figured anything could happen with the Nintendo Direct for E3 this year. In a sense, I was not wrong, but man oh man... Let's just jump right to it. This will be a much longer post because, thanks to Nintendo's Treehouse live streams, much more detail can be garnered from these games than just the five minutes some payed actor uses to play a game at a press conference.

Following the disorder of my previous posts, I am just going to go with the first things that come to mind. What a better way to start than with the first game they showed off, Star Fox Zero. Man, this game looks amazing. I really loved the whole developer commentary they added with Miyamoto reflecting on how he loved this show as a kid that had a similar kind of like space team that we see in Star Fox today. That was sweet. Star Fox Zero, as described, is neither an actual sequel or a remake but rather a re-imagining of the Star Fox games. Still, on a technical level and with practical terminology, this game does seem very much like a remake of Star Fox 64, although there are some twists to the old game and what appears to be some all-new levels as well. Now, the only games I've played are 64, Adventures, and Assault, so take of that what you will, but I think at least two of the courses they've shown are pretty much brand new.

At the Treehouse live stream, they started with Corneria, and one of the new things they showed off is the new Walker transformation. Basically, every vehicle in Star Fox Zero (aside from the Gyro it seems) has a transformation that adds some functionality that the default form wouldn't have. So for the Arwing, you can transform it into a sort of chicken-like mech that you can use to walk around on the ground and get a better aim on ground-based targets. I did not see them use this on the segments that weren't All-Range Mode, so I am not sure if you can use this form outside of that mode. The Landmaster has what I think was called the Gravity Master, where it basically turns into a hovercraft for a period of time, allowing you to fly over things like quicksand and whatnot. The Gyro doesn't seem to have a transformation, but instead allows you to deploy this cute little robot that can solve some ground-based puzzles and switches and such. The Walker can also be used for ground-based progression, as they showed off in the remake of Sector Y. In this level, the twist is that, instead of fighting those Gundam-style mechs that flew around, you enter a starship and navigate to its power core with the Walker. What was pretty cool was that, in turn, this turned the game into a sort of platformer. I'm interested to see how these platforming elements will be incorporated into more complex levels of this game.

Mobile-Suit: Chicken Little

Another new feature for Zero is being able to use the game pad to have a sort of "cockpit view" with the ability to use gyro controls to fine-aim at targets. As cool as that sounds, it seems like it will also be a little disorienting to try and look at that and at what's going on on the television screen. I might just end up playing it straight off the television screen only, since that's just the way I'm used to it with 64 and Assault. As for the levels, as I said, they showed Corneria and Sectory Y (called Sector Alpha in this version), and each stage had a bit of a twist toward the end. Another classic stage they showed was Titania, which also follows a very similar progression to how it played out in 64. Instead of Slippy being lost on the planet, you have to find Peppy, and when you do find him, you end up fighting this huge sandworm (or Scrapworm as it's called) rather than that creepy monster in 64. There were a couple of new levels too, one being Area 3, and another being a complete redesign of Zoness. Area 3 starts off as an All-Range Mode dogfight just outside this huge space colony that bears similarities to the halos from the Halo series. After the dogfight, you go inside and... do shit with the Walker? I don't think the Treehouse played through the entire level, so I can't say what you're supposed to be doing there. As for Zoness, instead of flying through on an Arwing, you are infiltrating a base with the Gyro. Still, the whole concept of avoiding spotlights returns, and Kat even makes an appearance.

All in all, this game looks very good, very much like the original Star Fox 64 game with enough new things to make it a different game. It looks like this will be the first properly better, new Star Fox game since 64. People complain the graphics look on par with the Gamecube, don't listen to them at all.

Hey that looks like... oh, no...

The next game I can properly remember, unfortunately, is Metroid Prime: Federation Force. Oh boy. I said before that after that press conference with Sony, anything could happen, and sure enough, anything happened. A new Metroid game was announced, but it wasn't just any new Metroid game, but rather a game that is so completely far off from what a Metroid game really is that a lot of fans were pissed. Metroid Prime: Federation Force is apparently a four-player coop, mission-based, first-person shooter, where you play as the Galactic Federation troopers in several run-ins with Space Pirates. The aesthetic is completely changed, going from the dark, sci-fi horror influences of the Metroid series into a light-hearted visual design, where everything is cartoony and you play as chibi-mechs. I honestly like the aesthetic, but only for a spinoff, which this game is. The problem, however, is that it's been five years since the last Metroid game-- eight since the last good Metroid game. Why Nintendo thought it would be a great idea to release a spinoff after this long is beyond my understanding of the natural world.

Of course it looks bad, the resolution is upscaled up the ass. Maybe we should wait until we are actually seeing it off our 3DS screens.

I am, of course, still angry that Nintendo did this, but I'm not being completely unreasonable. I will still buy and play this game, hoping that there will still be some things in it that will tie in with Metroid that will promise a new, main-entry game in the near future. Again, I don't think the aesthetic is bad for a spinoff (we got a freaking pinball game for fuck's sake, can't get more ridiculous than that), and honestly, people saying that the graphics are worse than Prime Hunters on the DS are gravely mistaken. There is no way in Hell Federation Force has worse graphics than that damn game. I think this is another case of people confusing aesthetic with graphics. I can't really argue that the aesthetic is better, because yes, obviously the aesthetic of Hunters is significantly better as it actually fits with the themes of Metroid Prime. To say that the graphics are better, though, is just completely wrong. The mech suits have reflective surfaces, the arm cannon is actually a 3D render (there is no way in Hell Samus's arm cannon, from the point-of-view of the heads-up-display, is a 3D render), there is far less aliasing and more polygons in the models. There may even be better texture detailing, but I cannot judge from the videos because video footage of the 3DS will always upscale everything, distorting the resolution of the game. Unless they were to actually show footage in native resolution, but then nobody would be able to clearly see what is going on because then the window streaming the game would be tiny. So I'm reserving complete judgement of the games graphics until I actually play it.

Beyond the graphics, though, the game does look kinda fun. Obviously not a traditional Metroid game, with a very clear lack of actual exploration from what was presented, but it does look like good coop fun, even if Monster Hunter 4 is better. Monster Hunter 4, though, is not a FPS, so there's that. Each player gets to set up a loadout, giving some more depth to it than just running in and shooting things. In one mission, the players had to work together to get these "ice beasts" trapped in some cages, while in another mission, they had to shoot down some blimps carrying missiles. This level with the missiles actually looked pretty nice, too.

All in all, I don't think this game itself will be bad. The Treehouse folks seemed to be enjoying it, even if they are super-casuals who don't know much of what makes a Metroid game. Somebody tried to argue that they were hamming it up and acting like it was fun, to which I disagree. The main guy who was kinda bossing everyone around was clearly not acting it up for the camera, as he behaved exactly the way I've seen people behave in coop games when they are trying to lead new players through it. So either he is actually a professional actor, or he is actually having fun with the game. What sold it to me, though, was when they had Ken Tanabe trying to talk about the game. Notice I said "trying," because the whole time he was talking everyone else was shouting and talking over him. If they were putting on an act and pretending to have fun, they would've stopped to hear what the guy was saying. So I'm not convinced these guys were acting like the game was any fun.

Speaking of Tanabe, the man alone has sparked so much interest over the game that it's to the point where the things he said alone held more attention from fans than the game itself. He said several important things in interviews over the past few days, and here are some of these things. First, he mentioned that Samus and actual Metroids will be in Federation Force, although to what extent is currently unclear. The next major thing he has said, which is very unfortunate, is that he does not believe a true Metroid Prime game will be made until at least when the NX is out, meaning no Metroid Prime game for the Wii U. Or he could be lying and then they reveal a new Metroid Prime game for the Wii U, and Nintendo's been known to do shit like this before, but I am going to take Tanabe at his word. Hopefully, just because there's no Prime game in development doesn't mean that there isn't a new Metroid game at all in the works. I keep hearing people take what he said about Sakamoto (he said that Sakamoto is the one who oversees a 2D game) as meaning there's a 2D Metroid in development, but I thought Sakamoto left the Metroid franchise? Whatever the case, there may be some hope for a new Metroid on the Wii U, or Hell, even for another game on the 3DS in the future,

The most interesting thing to come out of Tanabe's mouth about all this is that he mentioned he wanted to focus on the "relationship between Samus and Sylux" in the future. In doing this, he outright confirmed that SPOILER ALERT

Sylux was the one who chased Samus at the very end of Prime 3. Even though the ship at the end looked unmistakably his, there was still a lot of debate over this, without any real help with Nintendo's silence on the matter and Retro just saying, "I don't know what that ship could be." So for nearly ten years, it's been unclear whether that was Sylux or someone else, and now we got a confirmation from the producer of those games. This is, sadly, the most exciting development in the Metroid franchise, and I just really hope that now that they are giving the series some attention again, even if it's with this bizarre choice of a spinoff, they will finally get off their asses and start work on a new, proper Metroid game again. There is some hope, though, as a recent interview with Reggie confirms that they do want to work on another Samus-based game again (thank God, I can't believe we actually need confirmation of this), but who knows when we will ever see that.

Note: You may have noticed I've made no mention of Blast Ball. I refuse to speak about that horror.

Metroid Prime: Federation Force wasn't the only disappointment to disgrace the Direct. Nintendo also took Animal Crossing fans' hopes of a new Animal Crossing game for the Wii U and dashed them entirely with Animal Crossing: Amiibo Party, turning Animal Crossing into a Mario Party game, but with amiibos. I personally don't really mind it, though. I feel like the Animal Crossing game for the 3DS hasn't had a full lifespan yet, and I don't want people to suddenly put that game down when the Wii U version comes out because I want people to streepass with and stuff! Maybe my fears of people putting down New Leaf in favor of what could've been a Wii U game aren't exactly grounded; I mean, maybe that doesn't mean people will just stop playing New Leaf. Still, there wasn't a new Wii U game really announced, so no big deal.

I LOVE the character artwork ^^

There were several other games announced and shown off at Nintendo's side of E3, but I'm just going to focus back on the ones I found particularly noteworthy, starting with Fire Emblem: Illusory Revelations, known generally as the FE X SMT crossover. During the Direct, they showed off a new trailer with JPop, colors, and flamboyant costumes galore. Once again, though, what any of this said about what the game was supposed to be was completely lost on me. Fortunately, Nintendo had the presence of mind this year to actually show the game at the Treehouse live stream, which is what this game very much needed as until then there was no clue as to what this game was going to be like. So the gist of it is, you are playing as these characters in Tokyo, and one of them, named Tsubasa, dreams of being a famous pop star. Everyone in this world has some energy force inside them called "performa" (obvious reference to Persona is obvious), which draws in these beings from some other dimension called mirages, I think, who are basically the characters of Fire Emblem. So, if what little I know of Persona is correct, this game is in a sense like Persona, in which the demons that you summon (or are linked to your character, or something like that) are really the Fire Emblem characters.

The battle menu, also that's King Gangrel! Also, every battle is on a Jpop stage. I love it.

This game seems to have a lot of Fire Emblem fans upset, including my friend, since right now there doesn't seem to be much in terms of being a Fire Emblem game outside of having the characters and the Weapons Triangle, a sort of Rock-Paper-Scissors triangle in which lances beat swords, swords beat axes, and axes beat lances. The game also uses the elemental weakness found in Shin Megami Tensei, although that can be very much claimed to be borrowed from any RPG. Nintendo and ATLUS rightfully state to view this game as something else entirely from those two franchises. I may not be a Fire Emblem or a Shin Megami fan, but from what I've seen of this game, I am blown away. It seems to be an open-world RPG that is incredibly colorful and very much pushing to see just how over-the-top it can be, and honestly I find nothing wrong with that. So many games these days try their hardest to be so under-the-top ("realistic" as what they want you to believe it's called), that they're just plain fucking boring.

Uh, so yeah, Dual-Attacks in this game.

Dungeons in this game are also based on real-world locations in Japan. They showed off the first dungeon in the game, which is based off some fashion department store, and it uses mechanics tied in with mannequins and a giant maid dress for navigation, which seems interesting. The battle system follows a traditional turn-based, three-party system, where you use the Weapons Triangle and the elemental stuff to fully exploit enemy weaknesses. There is also apparently something where you can summon(?) or call in Fire Emblem characters to assist in a special attack. There was one attack where Tsubasa pairs up with a Fire Emblem character and do this whole dance and a Jpop number to attack a boss (who happens to be King Gangrel in the guise of some sort of jester with a top hat), and one of the developers went so far as to call it a Dual Attack. People in the Fire Emblem subreddit laughed at this and dismissed it as having nothing to do with Dual Attacks, but I mean if you can actually pair-up characters, isn't that what this is but with a more-- uh, flashy animation? They did say it involved something with character relationships, "Sometimes you'll get these throughout the course of the story, for example, when your relationship with a character... they'll unlock this throughout the course of the story as their connection with each other gets better." If the base mechanic is the same, who cares what it looks like? There is also this thing called Succession Attacks, where if the right conditions are lined up (not exactly sure what these are), you can pull off combo attacks with your teammates for what seems to be the same cost as a single turn.

Overall, this game looks brilliant to me. Very beautiful, the turn-based battle system looks fluid and fun, and honestly all the flashiness and ridiculousness doesn't make it feel wrong; it feels like professionally done well and it is very clear the team put a hundred percent love and effort into making this game, creating something unlike anything I've seen before. They even hired Japanese Pop stars to write songs for the game and have the voice actors sing these songs. How that is going to translate well in localization seems pretty terrifying, but hopefully Nintendo of America can keep up with the incredible ambition in this game.

Moving on, a game that will be more pleasing to Fire Emblem fans will be Fire Emblem Fates. This is the newest installment in the franchise, where you can basically choose between two stories that follow two separate kingdoms. If you don't know what I'm talking about, basically, your avatar is this prince of Nohr, ruled by an oppressive king that flashes this Western, gothic look that is actually pretty stylish. Later he finds out that he was actually born a prince of this clan, the Hoshido, who are enemies with Nohr and have a very traditional Eastern look to them, and thus you must choose who you want to remain loyal to, affecting your relationships with every character in the game.

One of the new mechanics in this game that they pointed out is the Dragon Vein, which your Avatar can use to "change the layout of the battlefield." From what they could show, one of these things includes creating a section that heals your units each turn if they are standing in it. I don't know how else this "Dragon Vein" can be used, but the idea of changing the layout of the battlefield with it seems interesting. It is also something enemies can use, so it doesn't seem totally imbalanced. One other thing I noticed immediately, aside from the much prettier user interface than Awakening (which is so awesome that I'm having a hard time wanting to write this post), is that when you transition to the battle animations, the environment is the battlefield around you. Basically, the camera just sorts of zooms in until the characters are 3D, and everything you see in the top-down view becomes their surroundings, as opposed to the different screen they used in Awakening for the battle animations.

Example of the game's use of 3D mode in the My Castle.

This "3D mode" is something that can be used freely in what's called My Castle. Even though they did describe some of its features, they never exactly described what the gist of it is. Basically, I think of it as the Barracks from Awakening, but it has its own map you can walk around in (like a battlefield map), you can customize it, and it interacts with StreetPass functionality and such. In this game, your character gets like a personal maid, who is female if you are a male character or is a male if you are a female character. It seems like you can get the other sexed maid later on, since they are referenced as actually existing. They do something for you in My Castle, not exactly sure what that is, but they also function as units in battles, and they seem to be kinda like the Frederick of this game: apparently very strong initially and has an advanced or unique class.

Getting back to My Castle, you can customize it with buildings you select and stuff, like shops or things that give you items like weapons and such. Another thing I've noticed is that each building, or shop at least, has its own 3D space, where your 3D character walks around in. Overall, they've improved the graphical fidelity of this game, to the point where the character models even make facial expressions during non-prerendered cutscenes.

With StreetPass, you can get stat boosts and stuff from My Castle, and you can battle the teams of people you've StreetPassed with inside that castle. The buildings you put up affect the battle, although they didn't get into detail on how that exactly works. Your opponent can break down these buildings, though. It also seems like you can have practice battles inside My Castle to test out your team(?), although it's unclear to me whether that is an actual feature or if it's just something they just used for the E3 presentation.

Each path in the game has its own uniqueness in gameplay. The Hoshido path is supposed to be a sort of easier storyline, where you can grind for gold, the battles aren't as hard, and the overall story and atmosphere is light-hearted. The Nohr path, though, is the more difficult path, with tougher enemies and no opportunity to grind. I personally hope this excludes DLC, because I'm a super casual with this series and personally like to grind in Awakening. From what I can glean about what's new in battles, enemies can now actually support each other if they are side-by-side. As for Dual Attacks/Dual Guards, they depend on the positioning of your units now, and I think they said that they are now guaranteed as opposed to being up to RNG. So, if I remember correctly, placing your units horizontally next to each other will always trigger a Dual Attack, and putting them vertically will always trigger a Dual Guard. There will also be Amiibo support for this game, where using the Marth, Lucina, or Roy Amiibos will bring them into the game.

So those were the main games of interest to me, with Xenoblade Chronicles and Fatal Frame also being particular to my attention. I don't really have much to say about either game, though; Fatal Frame looks like it will be an actually good horror game, as many horror games fail to be, but Fatal Frame has also been a longstanding franchise. Xenoblade looks more and more interesting to me, especially knowing now that there's more to the world than that Primordia continent of endless seas of green plains and cliffs. There's apparently a continent with a lot of bioluminescent stuff at night, so that sounds really cool.

I don't have any much more to really say about Nintendo's presence though. With the exception of how horribly disappointing the Federation Force reveal was, and perhaps the Animal Crossing: Amiibo Party game, their Direct was overall pretty serviceable with reveals and once again the Treehouse did a great job of showing off and making these games look really exciting, even Federation Force to some extent.

So because I spent a lot of time talking about Nintendo here, I'm just gonna leave off Square Enix's conference into its own post. They deserve it, too, for being so hilariously bad. Oh man.