Lurker > the_rowan

C_Pain posted...

Change the C stick to tilt attacks. Control stick up for jump is also helpful. Pick one or two characters and play online with them as much as you can. You just need experience.

Control stick up for jump is occasionally useful for certain (often character-specific) techs, but in general having the option on is detrimental because it will cause you to accidentally burn your double jump, and using it exclusively is a HUGE limiter on your ability to quickly use specific aerials immediately after jumping. In general, you never want to be using the control stick to jump unless your right thumb needs to be on the special button or C-stick while you are jumping for a specific reason.

Being good at the game is generally mostly a matter of learning movement and defensive options (especially when to shield--most very new players do not shield NEARLY as much as they should, and intermediate players may shield too much). Learning how to recover safely (almost always from below the ledge, NEVER above unless your opponent commits to low or you have a teleport) is a huge part of the game. Finally, you have to identify which moves each character has as useful tools in neutral for a given situation: which projectiles provide useful pressure or help you approach, which aerials are good for spacing and are safe enough to throw out in neutral, which grounded options are useful out of a run-in (tap down to cancel your dash to be able to use attacks other than dash attack), which moves are good punishes when reading rolls and jump-ins.

One you have that basic understanding, you need to learn how to use movement to bait attacks and whiff punish slower characters, or space attacks against faster characters so you either beat them or trade favorably. You learn how to get combos at low percents and juggles at mid percents so you can convert individual tilts and throws into a lot more damage, keep your opponent pressured at the ledge so they don't have a good way to get back to center stage, and preserve your momentum as long as possible.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

legendarylemur posted...

Oh yeah Metal Face is a pretty early Giant start huh. That one is a pretty great one to start with, and ZEKE you get pretty early on as well I think

Not in WoL. Mumkhar is in the very very last area and ZEKE is Spirit Board only I think? (Unless I'm remembering wrong and it's actually a summon)
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

legendarylemur posted...

The real answer is the Zapfish, which I'm pretty sure you're required to get. Giant is such a broken skill. You just go giant and smash attack over and over

I did mention Zapfish, but I think Petey Pirahna is the earliest spirit you're likely to get with Giant, unless you're lucky enough to grab Mumkhar (2 stars) or Metal Gear ZEKE (1 star) early off the Spirit Board and upgrade them into spirits with Giant + Metal start.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

voldothegr8 posted...

Ore club is all you need to steamroll 90% of WoL, especially with a few skill tree unlocks.

Also right now Olimar is broken in WoL and Spirit Board, any of his air attacks destroys most characters in a few hits and makes bosses a joke. I think all he needs is a primary spirit equipped to make the magic happen.

Olimar has nothing on Giant DK one-shotting all those encounters with 4 opponents trying to swarm you.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

Upgrade Nipper into Petey Piranha and level him to 99. Victini is also quite early and not hard for a legendary. Those two together will get you started breaking into the 4 star fights. Then you can equip Geno, Chun-Li, and James McCloud with Great Zapfish or Ana or whatever other supports you need for the fight.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

At work right now, but would estimate about 25-30 hours.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

Finished WoL 100% last night on Hard. Feel free to ask for tips on any fights. Only thing I have left to do is max out the skill tree (ugh) and beat the final boss without losing a life (dear lord, Soma Cruz + Celebi isn't THAT good...).

Metal Face is stupidly broken for most fights (start giant + metal, just walk up and two-shot with unflinching DK fsmash), but you get him extremely late in WoL. Soma Cruz is just insane, like 13000 power with giant slayer and 3 slots, but is also pretty late. I used Petey Pirahna for much of the game, as he comes pretty early and makes most fights trivial.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

Pitlord_Special posted...

Personally waiting for a hardware revision. 32 GB hard drive and no Bluetooth is kind of a joke

It literally takes SD cards though. You get way more for your dollar buying an SD card than paying for the same amount of internal memory.

Headset support of any sort, a better wifi radio, and performance upgrades are decent reasons to wait, though. And if you don't care about portability since you drive to work, most of the games are cheaper or the same price on PC. There are very few exclusives beyond the big first-party titles.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

25 ping and complaining lmao

Come back when you have over a second of latency when the ISP isn't just giving you a multi-hour outage basically every day 6-11 PM.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

There are advantages to both, though. KB+M can aim much, much more accurately and can actually properly use the guns that fire items that continually home in on the cursor, while on controller these guns are basically worthless (you either are shooting in the wrong direction entirely or not guiding them). Controller can move in more than eight directions, which can be a big deal with the dodge roll not allowing you to change direction mid-roll. I personally found the additional aiming ability largely unnecessary, while the lack of precise movement on KB+M felt absolutely awful.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

The thing is that there are fucking 66 characters to unlock in this game, and people kind of want to play their favorites on launch day/weekend when they go to celebrate the game's release with all their friends that they've been waiting to play with for so long. There's never been such a huge portion of the cast locked off before.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

GiftedACIII posted...

Who gives a fuck about shinies and IVs in a game with such barren mechanics?

Why would you care about IVs when you can just feed pokemon stat boosters (which are, from what I understand, different from EV boosters from other games) until they have +200 in every stat, and no one can tell if you've only used a few? Seems silly.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

soulunison2 posted...

the_rowan posted...

DarkRoast posted...

And surprisingly the actual trainer battles are a lot harder because they're always around your level.

I mean, if you actively go out of your way to make them harder.

You know, instead of using the effectively uncapped stat boosters, x-items, or the starter that gets 90 BP 100% accuracy status moves.

We got the fun police here lol

I'm not policing anyone's fun, but it's outright deceptive to claim the game's battles are harder.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

DarkRoast posted...

And surprisingly the actual trainer battles are a lot harder because they're always around your level.

I mean, if you actively go out of your way to make them harder.

You know, instead of using the effectively uncapped stat boosters, x-items, or the starter that gets 90 BP 100% accuracy status moves.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

I'm a furry and this just seems like irresponsible parenting.

Like it's unlikely that any real harm will come to them, but given hundreds of people in a fringe subculture that tends to be full of internet-dwellers, there's a decent chance that someone's going to do something wildly inappropriate in front of them, and it could be a very bad introduction to sexuality.

IDK what conventions are actually like other than what I've read, though, since I have no interest in that sort of crap.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

Delirious_Beard posted...

i'm not gonna pretend XC1 had some great story or anything, the plot twists and ridiculous shark jumping moments drag it down considerably

but compared to XC2 it's a fucking masterpiece

Xenoblade really stood out for the marriage of story and gameplay, though, especially in the early portions of the game as Shulk is unlocking the Monado's powers in cutscenes to save everyone's lives... and then you immediately have that power to use freely, and it works how it did in the cutscene. Then when the game pulls out the question of "How and why do you have this power, and at what cost?" it actually makes you think, because you've just been taking it for granted that Shulk has it because of Video Game Protagonist Syndrome letting him use a super sword and nothing more.

XC2 centered the gameplay around RNG-based stat sticks and tried to incorporate this into the story, but really failed pretty hard in this regard. I was excited when Mythra talked about Foresight and thought it would be a new battle mechanic, but nope, just an overpowered passive ability that you completely ignore because you're too busy using her broken crit-recharge passive to notice it. There's actually some real disonnance with the narrative about treating Blades as equal citizens when there's an infinite number of randomly generated trash Blades that you're sending out the door by the hundreds, and the majority of your experience with Blades is in the form of menu clutter. Torna made leaps and bounds to fix this by making all Blades into party members and story characters alike, thankfully.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

Um, yes, there are 176188 Pokemon series pics on the rule 34 site and about 75000 using the "explict only" filter on another site that limits pics with this tag to those that contain actual Pokemon rather than just human characters from the series. I can in fact believe that at least one pic of these things exist.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

kirbymuncher posted...

if it's not celeste reviewers have literally negative amounts of taste

Matt probably can't afford to buy a nomination though.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

Just wait until the FF7 remake launches and the voice acting pronounces her name "EE-rith" with the Greek pronunciation of ae.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

soulunison2 posted...

Lmao fym 100 shitty little shrines were a terrible idea

I have no fucking idea what you're trying to say here, but I can assure you it has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

PoopPotato posted...

I enjoyed it, still think the Witcher did almost everything better.

Certainly better quests, story, characters. I don't know if you could make a legitimate argument that Witcher 3 had better puzzles, though, and the challenges that BotW posed to you before you understood every little mechanic and had the ability to skip things with Gale or stamina refills were quite interesting compared to just riding between sites in Witcher 3.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

You absolutely should do this. It's basically a certainty that this wildly unstable market with no tangible value will outpace the 15-20% interest of your credit card.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

WilliamPorygon posted...

Cubone hatches with it's mother's skull already covering its head

I would think the more nonsensical thing about this is that its mother is almost certainly going to still be in your box or the daycare when it hatches, and will likely go on to have more children.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

bird pokemon are my favorite though
there are no surprises here

also, cloacae in general are compatible with phalluses; it's only in most birds that that are not
they also still have a vagina, just the entrance is not external
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

Jesus, I expected Bel-air at the end, not an actual "what should I do, I'm being serious".
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

The enterprise connection issue is pretty much universal for gaming consoles. Colleges generally have alternate network segments specifically for gaming consoles to connect to. You may have to register the system first to use this network. Check what your specific campus does for this.

You could also just bring in a router rather than getting the adapter, but yeah, the lack of an ethernet port on the system or even the dock (though I'm not sure how it would interface with the system) is kind of dumb.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

Error1355 posted...

Looks like the entire damn country could be leveled with a single nuclear weapon. That'd be a bad move on their part to start a nuclear war.

Doesn't that actually mean that they'd be almost immune to being nuked, because any nuclear weapon used against them would likely create fallout in Switzerland and/or Austria? I dunno how that sort of thing actually works in practice.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

I didn't read every post here.

But this literally means that if your Switch breaks, you need to continue paying for online services that you cannot use to retain your save data should you not be able to replace it immediately. No grace period of a couple months.

It's not the biggest deal if you're using the yearly plan (and if you don't use the yearly plan when the months/quarterly plans are 140%/60% more expensive--i.e. you'd literally be better off going into credit card debt to pay the $20 up front than use another plan, the markup is so high--you're nuts.) But it does feel pretty shitty since Nintendo stripped out a basic feature that every other console ever made has had (either by saving to cartridges or to external memory) to sell this to you.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

Mal_Fet posted...

Shouldn't the nature of their job be considered as well?

Citizens are supposed to run away from danger while they are expected to run into it. If you see a crazy guy with a gun and you can get away, then that's what you do. Police however must deal with that person, so obviously there will be more chances of shit going wrong.

Let me address this.

What you are saying here mostly likely has nothing to do with punishment. This line of logic is why police officers have special protections and exemptions that allow them to do certain things that would otherwise be criminal, such as shoot someone who may be trying to draw a weapon in a public place where the other party has a right to be. An ordinary citizen cannot do this without (in most states) first determining with reasonable certainty that their life, or the life of someone else, is in danger (or that certain other acts such as rape are imminent), and attempting to flee if this is a reasonable course of action; an officer may shoot simply because they believe they may be under attack. But that goes into determining whether they have committed a crime. When it comes to sentencing, do they deserve special treatment?

Bear in mind that "you lose your job" or "you can't hold a job of this nature ever again" are not sentences (I suppose they might be at a judge's discretion, but I'm not sure if it's ever done in practice without the law explicitly calling for it), but administrative policies that would be implemented either through laws or police department management.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

nicklebro posted...

fenderbender321 posted...

I thought that there was no transfer of germs directly through the saliva when double-dipping because if you have mouth germs on the chip the only thing they're going to touch is the dip that will be carried with the chip.

Exactly, bunch a dummies turning down perfection for no reason.

There's been actual studies done on this. The thickness of the dip is a factor in how contaminated it becomes for just this reason. But it actually does become contaminated. If someone was sick with a disease that could be spread through trace amounts of saliva--say, from a sneeze, or a surface they've touched with unwashed hands--there's a significant chance that double-dipping would pose a health risk to you. Now, it might not matter to you too much if you're kissing and sharing the same living space, because you're likely to be infected anyway, but there's a reason it's not socially acceptable that isn't a myth.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-double-dipping-a-food-safety-problem-or-just-a-nasty-habit/

QwelzaarKane posted...

There are obviously possible health concerns, but with people you know are clean I never got the big deal about sharing food/drinks

The thing is that you don't know anyone's clean. There are tons and tons of diseases where you're contagious before you start showing concerning (or sometimes even noticeable) symptoms. Again, might not matter to you if it's your girlfriend whom you kiss several days a week and would much more likely make you sick through other means, but it's more than just a social faux pas in a group setting.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

metralo posted...

imagine thinking that trump wont abuse this power

He. Already. Has. The. Power. It has existed since before he entered office. This is just an alternate implementation of it.

Are you really SO UTTERLY BRAINLESS that all it takes for you to believe that a man could hijack the national emergency alert system to send personal non-emergency tweets without consequence is someone posting a stupid, false line in a topic title on the message board? Do you have absolutely no grip on reality? No ability to think rationally or critically whatsoever? Is the very concept of Donald Trump being both legally and socially responsible for his actions as the president too hard to grasp? The fact that his political opponents would gut him for such a thing just impossible to imagine? The fact that there is absolutely ZERO precedent for what you are saying in the entire history of the nation?

Trump can be an idiot on Twitter all he wants, and the consequences of it are that most of the nation (and certainly almost the entirety of the rest of the world) thinks he's an idiot. But he's not actually required to tweet in any particular style. Abusing a national emergency alert system? That could have serious consequences for him. I know people love to pretend that the world is a cartoon and that Trump is infinitely stupid in all ways, but the man knows better than to do such a thing, and has already demonstrated this by not doing it (since again, HE ALREADY CAN DO THIS).
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

Roshon posted...

the_rowan posted...

Can I just say that this article and topic are actually so intentionally misleading, it could actually endanger people? Because statements like "President Donald Trump may soon be communicating with you directly on your phone even if you don't follow him on Twitter" to describe the national emergency alert system could lead to drastic measures to prevent potentially life-saving alerts. This isn't some fucking mass tweet system, this is the system that tells you when we're being bombed. This system is already in place, just it only takes over radio and television at the moment to distribute the warnings rather than going to phone carriers.

And you dont see how he can abuse this?

Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me.

Is "post a misleading topic title" all one has to do to cause this kind of hysteria? This is the system that is used for national emergencies of the highest urgency. If you really, truly are so utterly fucking brainless that you believe this system, which already exists and already allows the President to send alerts to every phone (I was actually wrong about this not being already implemented), is suddenly going to be turned into Donald Trump's Power Hour, with no checks from anyone around him, you are so fucking delusional that you need serious help.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

Can I just say that this article and topic are actually so intentionally misleading, it could actually endanger people? Because statements like "President Donald Trump may soon be communicating with you directly on your phone even if you don't follow him on Twitter" to describe the national emergency alert system could lead to drastic measures to prevent potentially life-saving alerts. This isn't some fucking mass tweet system, this is the system that tells you when we're being bombed. This system is already in place, just it only takes over radio and television at the moment to distribute the warnings rather than going to phone carriers.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

metralo posted...

ah, fascism. but the liberals are the real problem. muh hillary.

fucking idiots.

Fascism? An emergency alert system is fascist? I guess our government has been fascist from the beginning, then. Someone better tell Paul Revere. Our current EAS already allows the President to take over every radio and TV station within ten minutes for national emergencies.

Trump isn't the one staffing the emergency alert system, and our national emergency alert systems have never been used for propaganda or non-emergency, non-test matters as far as I can tell. (There may have been plenty of propaganda in emergency preparedness warnings that were distributed by other means, but the actual alerts have always been just that AFAIK.)
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

Imagine actually trying to represent this as anti-meme legislation instead of the most bullshit, unenforceable nonsense imaginable that will either result in next to nothing or incredible frustration with half the images on the internet being blocked.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

Holy shit.
I've apparently been eating non-virgin penises with my breakfast for most of my life.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

Yeah I missed that one line. Should be fine then. Edited my post as you were posting yours.

The one thing that isn't clear is whether people were nominated for awards that they would be deeply hurt by and thus declined, but the sting of that still remained. It does not say these were self-nominations, so there could be someone out there who was picked for "biggest bitch" but declined it while holding back tears or something like that.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

It depends entirely on whether the recipients of the "awards" decided they wanted to receive them. There's a huge difference between self-roasting for humor and being singled out by your peers to be mocked. Since it's the former here, it seems to be okay, as there are no actual victims from what I can tell?
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

Doe posted...

Normally "shoot" is just when you put your answer out

boy have I been playing it wrong then
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

Hayame Zero posted...

So...I actually just now discovered sprinting by holding B.

...It's kind of pointless. Running is already fast enough, and sprinting in enemy areas increases the encounter rate. So what's the point then?

It doesn't actually increase the encounter rate per distance travelled, only for amount of time/steps spent moving, so it's literally always faster, is the point.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

DoomSwell posted...

The main problem is that 7 has become "average", the scale is lopsided.
While a 5 point system is a step in the right direction, I think we can do even better using not only letters but + & - so there can be a difference between A+, A, and A- while C is obviously still average.

The thing is that 7 is "average" out of the pool of games that had a chance to be any good to begin with. There's a ton of shovelware and primitive indie releases ("My first publishable game" sort of thing, made very quickly with minimal investment for the experience and rent money that month) that major sites often don't even bother reviewing.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

There are some factors I can think of...

First, there is absolutely no room for homophobia if you are a furry at this point. Maybe in the early days, but now that it's mostly an internet culture, it's basically impossible. Not just because you won't find anyone who doesn't attack you over it, but also because avoiding dicks while looking for porn is basically impossible, and avoiding images of same-sex couples while looking for clean art is also basically impossible. It's at the point where many furry porn artists will just regularly include a dickgirl or herm edit of any female character they draw automatically because it's so requested.

Second, all the males are drawn to fantasy standards. They are healthy, they come in every body type you want in abundance, they can be as girly and cute or powerful and toned as you want. There's an abundance of futanari/dickgirl/herm porn to boot. If there's any possibility you could ever like looking at a male organ, you will be bombarded with it a thousand times over.

Third, it's distanced from humans and from reality. It sort of allows one to go in with a mental blank slate as to what they like.

As to how it got this way (since a lot of this is just self-perpetuating), I think it had to do with the origins of furries, back when it was the funny animal fandom. A lot of the early events were used by LGBT groups who didn't really have any interest in furry stuff as a way to hook up. There was bound to be an unusual amount of crossover between the two.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

Tyranthraxus posted...

Around 50% of male furries are gay and nobody has any answers.

There's no way this is true.

Far too many are bi for 50% to be gay.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

DarkChozoGhost posted...

Ah. I can see how experienced with the series you are. You've played enough to know about some of the pitfalls of the game, but you're still an amateur. Prepromoted units usually end up worse at maximum level, they can hog experience, leave your other units too weak, ect. But you've yet to learn how to look at them on an individual level, and you're too dismissive of them. Some prepromotes are junk, others are great for support, and some are genuinely good.

This probably understates the usefulness of prepromotes and overstates the danger of using them. Prepromotes are just units. Some of them will always be miles ahead of most of your other units (see: FE6 Hard Mode Percival). Some of them basically average the same as a non-promoted counterpart but start way ahead and with better weapon ranks (Pent), saving you a ton of investment and a promotion item. Some are utter garbage from the get-go (Dozla). Some don't end up as literally the best unit in your army, but start out godly and remain pretty darn good, allowing you to use them all game (Seth, Titania).

The thing people often forget is that it takes ten levels for a 10% difference in growth rate to average out to one stat point. Bases are hugely important, and a lot of prepromotes have really solid bases. Yeah, they don't get promo gains, but their bases are still solid when you include that.

Heck, look at FE10, where literally every unit that wasn't a prepromote was utter garbage (granted, there were two tiers of promotion in that game, but it's still true). Meg and Edward are the only two that are even salvageable with favoritism.

It is almost always essential to use your strongest early units, usually prepromotes, to survive the early stages of a Hard Mode run in Fire Emblem. Yeah, they can end up taking a few kills, but you'll likely not end up using most of the units you have early on after a certain point anyway, and your lords will get enough exp without much effort (except for Eliwood in HHM, anyway...)
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

TheRealDill2000 posted...

Isn't that a normal portion?

A normal portion is about two slices, though it depends on the size of the slice. Pizza has a pretty disproportionate relation between how filling it is versus how much calories and fat it has, though, and most people would probably say they aren't full until after at least three slices even though that's way more than your body can likely use.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

averagejoel posted...

the_rowan posted...

Maps that force you to split your army up, put time pressure on you, or feature enemies with skills that require you to behave very purposefully and tactically rather than just send in Mister OP Mercenary/Paladin/etc. and watch him take no damage from anything. Enemy designs and skills and map gimmicks were set up with a lot of thought so that you needed to be able to adapt to a variety of situations, have multiple pieces working in your army, and use the game mechanics to your advantage.

this was present in previous games as well Genealogy and Thracia 776 perhaps most notably

It was in Thracia 776, sure, but in a much less clean implementation. It was really easy to screw yourself long-term in Thracia 776 with the limited gold and decent weapons, the stamina system, etc. Healing staves missing was awful design. Fog of war maps where you can't see the outline of the map were just plain unfun.

I don't remember much of it in Genealogy other than "See that corridor with a billion status staves? You're not gonna send anyone through there but the guy with the +20 res sword." Most of the game was just sending the best units to kill stuff and then repairing their broken-ass weapons with arena gold.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

QueenCarly posted...

I'd rather the series die than continue as it is now.

Well, I mean, what Echoes brought in that was new for that game was mostly great. Now, the mechanics and maps from the game it was remake of might have been flawed--weird growth rates, Invoke in general, bizarre map designs--but stuff like having voice acted character building sequences (with actually decent to good voice acting, even!), a clean graphical style, and towns to "explore" (the point-and-click item interaction was a bit annoying, but moving around between vendors and scenes is a really nice touch) were all really awesome touches that brought the game to life. Unfortunately, one of the biggest additions, the 3D dungeon crawling, was a dud, simply because FE battles do not work well at all with generic enemies on generic maps.

Conquest also brought some absolutely stellar map designs in along with all the crap it had. Maps that force you to split your army up, put time pressure on you, or feature enemies with skills that require you to behave very purposefully and tactically rather than just send in Mister OP Mercenary/Paladin/etc. and watch him take no damage from anything. Enemy designs and skills and map gimmicks were set up with a lot of thought so that you needed to be able to adapt to a variety of situations, have multiple pieces working in your army, and use the game mechanics to your advantage.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

I don't care for the fanservice-y designs at all myself, but the sales numbers are important for keeping the franchise alive. What bothers me is that somehow an overwhelmingly large flood of vapid, one-dimensional characters seems to be necessary to include them in Nintendo's mind. Like there are some characters in Fates who individually aren't that bad (neither vapid nor entirely focused on a gimmick trait). But then most of their supports have them interacting with a gimmicky character around their gimmick trait or Corrin the Generic Entity. It's possible to have attractive women who behave like a real person, like Titania.

I honestly think there had to be more going on with the big increase in sales for Awakening, though. It had a lower price point than the console games and was released back when the 3DS had a really strong place in the market. It had more customization and easier gameplay (on the normal difficulty). It was also a completely broken mess after the first few chapters that was basically a power fantasy simulator, which appeals to a lot of people who think that being "good" at a game means maxing everyone's stats and abilities.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia

I don't understand the inclusion of "but" and "just" here.
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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia