she's neither of those. tricksters promote from thieves, they are fast, pick locks, and have above average magic. puts her in a bit of an awkward spot since levin swords are her best weapon but are quite rare but she's a good healer partially because maribelle and lissa are kinda really awful. libra fits the paladin archetype more, but he's not really a paladin.
she's neither of those. tricksters promote from thieves, they are fast, pick locks, and have above average magic. puts her in a bit of an awkward spot since levin swords are her best weapon but are quite rare but she's a good healer partially because maribelle and lissa are kinda really awful. libra fits the paladin archetype more, but he's not really a paladin.
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PwnanObrienHe's right, life sucks.Registered Userregular
I jumped into the middle of this thread and thought for about half a page that you guys were lionizing
she's neither of those. tricksters promote from thieves, they are fast, pick locks, and have above average magic. puts her in a bit of an awkward spot since levin swords are her best weapon but are quite rare but she's a good healer partially because maribelle and lissa are kinda busy being Dark Flyers and learning Gale Force. libra fits the paladin archetype more, but he's not really a paladin.
It's weird because this idea that the audience is entitled to a customized and personalized experience is something that's more or less exclusive to video games
Like, one of my favorite books is Catch-22. The book's chapters are arranged in achronological order, to draw clearer thematic lines across events that take place at different points in time. If someone released a "mod" of Catch-22 that rearranged all the chapters into chronological order so that people can enjoy it without having to keep track of the criss-crossing timeline, I would think they were some kind of jackass
Or like if someone "modded" Shakespeare to remove all the hard-to-read Elizabethan language, even if they ruined the iambic pentameter in the process
Or "modded" an e. e. cummings poem to get rid of all that stupid incorrect punctuation
about the only "mod" i can think of it when it comes to literature or film is when something is translated or subtitled from another language, where it would be literally impossible to experience the thing without that alteration. And even then in certain cases you would have people vehemently defending the idea that experiencing the work in its original language is a more "pure" experience and as snobbish as that sounds I don't think it's entirely without merrit.
There's a sense with video games that the audience is entitled to a personalized and custom tailored experience, and any time when the developers' creative or artistic vision comes into conflict with the player's right to customization, the player should (always?) win
I'm not even necessarily knocking it really, just noting it
There are a few unique differences that video games have that can explain it to some degree. A lot of games are made purely for entertainment. A lot of multiplayer-focused games are like this. In games like smash bros, it makes a lot of sense to offer lots of customization so that everyone can find a way to play with the toy in the way they think is best. but even that kind of thing has its limits. Mario Kart without the items isn't really Mario Kart, it's just a boring and shallow racing game, so it doens't make much sense to offer the option to turn the items off.
the other thing is that most games wall their experience off based on the player's skill at the game. This a really tricky issue to handle, because ultimately, the difficulty should be an inherent part of the atmosphere and themes of the game. Like, Saint's Row IV should be a really easy game because the whole thing is just sort of a big dumb joke where they overpower you out the ass and let you go crazy. On the other hand, Dark Souls is a game that is predicated on making you feel small, weak, and inconsequential in a hostile world. Dark Souls can't accomplish its goals unless it's extremely punishing and unforgiving. But not all players are created equal. Some people don't think Dark Souls is anywhere near as hard as the hype makes it out to be, and others have found it so frustrating that they've had to resort to mods and hacks to finish the game.
The game ends up with sort of an unsolveable problem. including no difficulty options leads to some players just not being good enough to experience the game. Dark Souls in particular is supposed to be hard, but manageable. It's designed to make you feel strong by making you feel weak at the startoff. But if the difficulty curve doesn't track to the player's skill level, then they'll just get frustrated and quit because relative to them, the game is harder than it's supposed to be for its intended effect. But say Dark Souls had multiple difficulty tiers, or say an easy mode that made it so you never lost your souls when you or something. That's still not a tenable solution, because the player can't reasonably be expected to know what difficulty to set the game at to generate the intended experience. That would require an extremely intimate understanding of both the game and their ability that no real person is going to have, especially if they're coming to the game fresh. Dark Souls isn't about seeing all the content, it's about earning the right to see all the content through skilled play and collaboration with other players. Turning on invincibility, or unplugging the game from the internet, or whatever, is going to be more satisfying than having to give up in frustration, but it's still failing to experience the game as its intended to be experienced. And there's a pretty vocal contingent of people who say that there's nothing wrong with that, and that their personal preferences and desires automatically trump artistic intent.
I don't really think I can go along with that attitude in most cases. Again in stuff like multiplayer party games it's a bit different, but like, the example that jumps to mind for me is The Binding of Isaac. Fans of BoI fuckin' love it. And I can buy that it's a well-constructed game and that the aesthetic is striving for something more than sophomoric potty humor. But I hate the way it looks to the point where any interest I have in playing it is just gone. I don't care about weird naked baby fighting poop monsters, nope no thank you. But I don't want someone to mod all that stuff out, because it's what the guy who made BoI wanted to make. He's making statements with the art in that game and I think preserving that is more valuable than pleasing my own sensibilities. I'd rather miss out on playing a game that I might otherwise like than see him compromise his creative goals.
anyone you second seal is going to be overpowered. second seals are overpowered. lissa/maribelle are weighed down a ton by their sad base stats, and the fact that frail mages are pretty bad in a game with small maps and same turn reinforcements. plus libra is right there.
Lissa easily gets MVP in just about every mission over here.
She held the line along with my avatar in the one with all the armor dudes and knights getting off the boat (I smell Avatar/Lissa babies in my future!)
anyone you second seal is going to be overpowered. second seals are overpowered. lissa/maribelle are weighed down a ton by their sad base stats, and the fact that frail mages are pretty bad in a game with small maps and same turn reinforcements. plus libra is right there.
Libra's just not as good as Maribelle
Worse class selection, worse ability pool, less specialized stat growth
actually libra makes a very durable mage, if you second seal him.
but why is any of this stuff relevant? by the time you get either one of them to a level 15 dark flier the game is over and your characters are invincible. who cares. the game is pretty much over by chapter 14, really. turns into a real slog to be honest.
Books get modified frequently in the form of abridgment, don' they?
I know the 4th and 5th book of a Game of Thrones follows different characters over the same time period, and some people have stitched the two books together into one that tells all the stories in chronological order, and some people swear by it. That is basically a mod.
But there is a pretty big difference between books, a passive media, and games, an active media, so I am not sure how useful direct comparisons are.
Not that it particularly matters, I guess, because everyone in this game is super usable and good and trying to pass off one character as inherently better than another isn't a tenable stance to take
that's going to depend a lot of what difficulty you play on and your skill level. sumia and panne are definitely better than everyone not named "my unit" or "morgan" on hard and above.
(Anna is probably best as all-around support: she has high mobility + healing and lockpicking, better defenses and speed than other dedicated healers so she doesn't crumple as soon as somebody shoots a nasty glance in her direction. The assassin route is viable too, but there's probably better choices)
that's going to depend a lot of what difficulty you play on and your skill level. sumia and panne are definitely better than everyone not named "my unit" or "morgan" on hard and above.
Nah
After playing on Hard I'm all about Cordelia over Sumia, and Panne's beast-weakness comes out too often
I think maybe your view on the usability of characters is narrower than it could be
And pretending that the two of them are better than Donnel on Hard mode just feels really, really weird
there are about two beast killers in the entire game and panne has WTA over them. sumia paired with frederick is unfair. I probably shouldn't even use it, it makes things a little too easy.
that's going to depend a lot of what difficulty you play on and your skill level. sumia and panne are definitely better than everyone not named "my unit" or "morgan" on hard and above.
when you're not allowed to reload donnel is the worst character in the game. I park him on the corner of the map and forget he exists. not like growths matter at all in this game since late game enemies are pathetic.
that's going to depend a lot of what difficulty you play on and your skill level. sumia and panne are definitely better than everyone not named "my unit" or "morgan" on hard and above.
Posts
Mew is under the truck!
My uncle works at nintendo!
Reeeaaaalll good at it though. Probably better than Lon'qu at doing the Lon'qu thing at the point you are!
I thought it wouldn't be unlocked till midnight
Fuuuuuuck
but i want my footballers to be drobots!
Go to jail
CONTEST
I CONTEST you on this point
Much better.
Weird
Mine's going pretty quick, 2mb/sec
I wonder if I can make Noire a valkyrie, since Morgan is too busy being a dark knight
I admit I've never had a good Lissa, though
Like, one of my favorite books is Catch-22. The book's chapters are arranged in achronological order, to draw clearer thematic lines across events that take place at different points in time. If someone released a "mod" of Catch-22 that rearranged all the chapters into chronological order so that people can enjoy it without having to keep track of the criss-crossing timeline, I would think they were some kind of jackass
Or like if someone "modded" Shakespeare to remove all the hard-to-read Elizabethan language, even if they ruined the iambic pentameter in the process
Or "modded" an e. e. cummings poem to get rid of all that stupid incorrect punctuation
about the only "mod" i can think of it when it comes to literature or film is when something is translated or subtitled from another language, where it would be literally impossible to experience the thing without that alteration. And even then in certain cases you would have people vehemently defending the idea that experiencing the work in its original language is a more "pure" experience and as snobbish as that sounds I don't think it's entirely without merrit.
There's a sense with video games that the audience is entitled to a personalized and custom tailored experience, and any time when the developers' creative or artistic vision comes into conflict with the player's right to customization, the player should (always?) win
I'm not even necessarily knocking it really, just noting it
There are a few unique differences that video games have that can explain it to some degree. A lot of games are made purely for entertainment. A lot of multiplayer-focused games are like this. In games like smash bros, it makes a lot of sense to offer lots of customization so that everyone can find a way to play with the toy in the way they think is best. but even that kind of thing has its limits. Mario Kart without the items isn't really Mario Kart, it's just a boring and shallow racing game, so it doens't make much sense to offer the option to turn the items off.
the other thing is that most games wall their experience off based on the player's skill at the game. This a really tricky issue to handle, because ultimately, the difficulty should be an inherent part of the atmosphere and themes of the game. Like, Saint's Row IV should be a really easy game because the whole thing is just sort of a big dumb joke where they overpower you out the ass and let you go crazy. On the other hand, Dark Souls is a game that is predicated on making you feel small, weak, and inconsequential in a hostile world. Dark Souls can't accomplish its goals unless it's extremely punishing and unforgiving. But not all players are created equal. Some people don't think Dark Souls is anywhere near as hard as the hype makes it out to be, and others have found it so frustrating that they've had to resort to mods and hacks to finish the game.
The game ends up with sort of an unsolveable problem. including no difficulty options leads to some players just not being good enough to experience the game. Dark Souls in particular is supposed to be hard, but manageable. It's designed to make you feel strong by making you feel weak at the startoff. But if the difficulty curve doesn't track to the player's skill level, then they'll just get frustrated and quit because relative to them, the game is harder than it's supposed to be for its intended effect. But say Dark Souls had multiple difficulty tiers, or say an easy mode that made it so you never lost your souls when you or something. That's still not a tenable solution, because the player can't reasonably be expected to know what difficulty to set the game at to generate the intended experience. That would require an extremely intimate understanding of both the game and their ability that no real person is going to have, especially if they're coming to the game fresh. Dark Souls isn't about seeing all the content, it's about earning the right to see all the content through skilled play and collaboration with other players. Turning on invincibility, or unplugging the game from the internet, or whatever, is going to be more satisfying than having to give up in frustration, but it's still failing to experience the game as its intended to be experienced. And there's a pretty vocal contingent of people who say that there's nothing wrong with that, and that their personal preferences and desires automatically trump artistic intent.
I don't really think I can go along with that attitude in most cases. Again in stuff like multiplayer party games it's a bit different, but like, the example that jumps to mind for me is The Binding of Isaac. Fans of BoI fuckin' love it. And I can buy that it's a well-constructed game and that the aesthetic is striving for something more than sophomoric potty humor. But I hate the way it looks to the point where any interest I have in playing it is just gone. I don't care about weird naked baby fighting poop monsters, nope no thank you. But I don't want someone to mod all that stuff out, because it's what the guy who made BoI wanted to make. He's making statements with the art in that game and I think preserving that is more valuable than pleasing my own sensibilities. I'd rather miss out on playing a game that I might otherwise like than see him compromise his creative goals.
http://www.audioentropy.com/
I know but I'm looking to my Gen 2 team
She held the line along with my avatar in the one with all the armor dudes and knights getting off the boat (I smell Avatar/Lissa babies in my future!)
Libra's just not as good as Maribelle
Worse class selection, worse ability pool, less specialized stat growth
yeah but that's obviously a parody and is explicitly riffing on the original story
it's not like ryan north came out and said "hey do you hate hamlet well try reading this instead"
http://www.audioentropy.com/
but why is any of this stuff relevant? by the time you get either one of them to a level 15 dark flier the game is over and your characters are invincible. who cares. the game is pretty much over by chapter 14, really. turns into a real slog to be honest.
I know the 4th and 5th book of a Game of Thrones follows different characters over the same time period, and some people have stitched the two books together into one that tells all the stories in chronological order, and some people swear by it. That is basically a mod.
But there is a pretty big difference between books, a passive media, and games, an active media, so I am not sure how useful direct comparisons are.
I also only play ironman. no reloads allowed.
cough cough cough
(Anna is probably best as all-around support: she has high mobility + healing and lockpicking, better defenses and speed than other dedicated healers so she doesn't crumple as soon as somebody shoots a nasty glance in her direction. The assassin route is viable too, but there's probably better choices)
(also haters can get bent)
Nah
After playing on Hard I'm all about Cordelia over Sumia, and Panne's beast-weakness comes out too often
I think maybe your view on the usability of characters is narrower than it could be
And pretending that the two of them are better than Donnel on Hard mode just feels really, really weird
but now he's a griffin rider with a giant axe who one-shots everything, so it all works out
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Yeah Nah's pretty good too
One of the best units, in fact
Like I really don't think ds is somehow lessened because I wasn't invaded
In fact to me it was made greatly better
Is that somehow damaging the developers intent?
Dagnabbit Wyborn
It's no fun if you just agree
e: That's better. Hail Hydra.