Tearring Saga Chapters 1 - 5: Initial Thoughts

                           After struggling to get the save states loading (no really, I spent several hours yesterday bashing my head against a brick wall trying to figure this all out. CURSE YOU PS1 EMULATOR!) I finally was able to progress from Chapter 1 to Chapter 5 and here are some of my initial thoughts playing this game:

Pros

• Unit Balance: So far nobody seems useless. Everyone can be used and can be expected to do something well. Training up certain units doesn’t seem too difficult which is good. I’ve been told that there are no Seth equivalent characters in this game which really got me hyped.

• Neat items: One idea that I had for my project, “The Dark Crusade”, was to add in shields. Well I was pleasantly surprised to see shields being used here in Tearring Saga. Granted these shields operate differently than what I was planning but at least they’re there and I like the idea of an item that increases defense, but has limited durability and reduces 1 use for each and every attack. That is awesome! 
  
  

                              Another neat item so far is the Charm. An item that can negate an attack that would otherwise kill you is also awesome! Granted, I’ve never been in a situation where I’ve had to use them yet, but having them around just in case is pretty cool. 

• Area of effect magic: Another idea that I’m implementing into my project is area of effect magic. I was pleasantly surprised to see this being wielded by an enemy boss in Chapter 5 here and I’ve never been so happy to get hit by an enemy before. This game is proof that area of effect magic is a good idea.

• Actual Recruitment Requirements: It’s nice seeing a game where recruitment requires more effort from the player than merely talking to them with your main character. This isn’t to say that this game doesn’t have it, it’s just that there are characters that either require a different character to recruit or there’s more that the player has to do. The reason why I bring this up is because Fates and Awakening don’t have this and it waters down the strategy a little bit.

Cons

• Clunky hit rates: Way too much missing going on for my enjoyment. Reminds me of Fates. I wish the weapon triangle were here.

• Bland plot, bland dialogue: I’ve been skipping over a lot of the dialogue because the bits that I have read are dull. I will gladly settle for “dull” after the atrocity that Fates produced both in terms of script and in story.

Low growths: Not a fan of all these + 1’s and + 2’s. Makes leveling up less enjoyable. Personally I’ll always be a fan of higher growths.



                   Overall:  So far Tearring Saga is enjoyable. This doesn't quite hook me in the way that the Tellius or the Jugdral games did but this beats Fates by a long shot. I'm looking forward to seeing what else the game has in store for me.

A Final Look at Conquest's Gameplay

                  

                              So there are a couple of other things I wanted to bring up before finishing my review of Conquest’s gameplay. For starters, I’d like to thank Chao and Jason for helping me with my confusion surrounding effective attack speed. It sounds more complicated than it needs to be from what I’ve gathered and I think my knee-jerk response is that “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” when it comes to attack speed.

                         I forgot to bring up Hidden Weapons and Inevitable End in my last post so I guess I better do it here before I forget again. I like Hidden Weapons as a concept. The idea of Shurikens flying around and debuffing enemies is a neat idea. However, what I don’t like is that the entire weapon type has 1 - 2 range without significant penalties. It contradicts the entire design philosophy of Fates to have Hand Axes and Javelins get penalties but then have almost every Hidden Weapon be able to have 1 - 2 range without them. A simple solution in my opinion is to vary their ranges. Have some be only 1 range, have some be 2 - 3 range, etc. By doing this it makes the weapon type more diverse and it prevents them all from having 1 - 2 range. As far as Inevitable End goes, I tend to think of it like Phoenix Mode. It’s so stupid it should never see the light of day again but at least its stupidity is mitigated by the fact that you don’t have to engage with it. Inevitable End only shows up in Chapter 25 (maybe it shows up in later levels? Can someone confirm or deny this please?) and all you have to do to beat that level is wreck the Lobster which is pretty easy to do. So yeah, Inevitable End is stupid but it could have been so much worse. I’m glad that Lunatic mode in Conquest only had Inevitable End in 1 level, as opposed to giving it to Ninjas every single time they show up.

                                     Other things I’d like to talk about:

• My Castle:  After multiple playthroughs of Conquest and Birthright I still don’t like it. A lot of the stuff in My Castle comes across as superfluous unless you’re playing on Multiplayer. Plus it just doesn’t feel like Fire Emblem to me to be gathering resources like milk or topaz. At least when Awakening brought up the “waifu” stuff I could at least say there was a precedent for it (Holy War had the marriage system) but where’s the precedent for gathering resources like this?

                

                                  I don’t know how I feel about the Dining Hall. On the one hand it was cool to have something that actually made a difference in the normal campaign, but on the other hand it is 100 % random whether you get the stat boosts or not. Getting random boosts doesn’t add much to the strategy to the game because there’s nothing you can do to decrease the randomness and if they wind up “burning the dish” then you lost resources and there’s nothing you can do to bring it back.

                                  How about the Face Rubbing Treehouse? I won’t delve into the face-rubbing aspect of it since I still remember the controversy behind it and I would rather stay away from it. I only want to focus on the gameplay aspect of it. It’s nice to be able to speed up support bonuses and I do remember getting my supports an extra level from the Treehouse. On the other hand, is it necessary? I don’t think so. Pair-Up already makes supports easy enough to achieve. 

                                     I could keep going but I think you get the point. I’d rather return to the Tellius style base system than go back to the silly gimmicks of My Castle.

• The Seals: Not going to lie, I’ve never been a fan of how Fates handled its Seals at all. For starters, I’m not the biggest fan of needing items to promote in the first place as it has the potential to cause problems (like how much do you give out and when) so there’s that. The problem I have is that there are WAY too many different kinds of seals in Fates.

                               There are currently 6 different kinds of Seals in Fates: The Master Seal, the Heart Seal, the Partner Seal, the Friendship Seal, the Offspring Seal and the Eternal Seal. The Master Seal is the same here as it is in other games meaning that it’s the seal that lets you promote. I have no problem with this one and it’s obvious that you need it. The Heart Seal here is the same as Awakening’s Second Seal. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is entirely up to whoever is reading this. 

                               That leaves us with 4 new seals. I’m not a fan of the Partner and Friendship Seals since they have the potential let anyone become virtually any class the player wants them to be, which is basically what Awakening let you do. Plus why did we need a Seal for each type of relationship? Couldn’t you just combine these two into one Seal? To add insult to injury I saw one player boast about how reclassing Azura into a Berserker was one of the best choices they ever made. I still don’t get how they did it and quite frankly I don’t want to know. Any game that lets your dancer become a Berserker is doing something wrong.

                           The Eternal Seal gives you 5 extra levels when you’re at maximum level. Why do we need this again? What’s the point here? Then there’s the Offspring Seal, which is cool, but kind of makes me wonder if there wasn’t a better way to go about this. Overall, I find the Fates system of Seals to be too convoluted and even worse, it encourages the same kind of “reclass and grind to get the perfect set of skills” mentality that Awakening had. The only difference is that Fates goes about it in a roundabout sort of way so you don’t see it immediately. I guess the fact that you don’t reset levels is nice, but it’s only marginally better than what Awakening did.

• Stat - Boosting / Resources: I remember being shocked when Ronaldo came out and said that Conquest gives the player far more resources than it lets on. After playing Lunatic I have to admit that I agree with him 100 %: Conquest gives you A LOT of gold. Here’s what he said about how much gold Conquest gives you:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Regarding resources, here are the cash dumps obtained throughout the game:

• Start: 3000 G
• Chapter 8: 10000 G
• Chapter 10: 10000 G
• Chapter 16: 9700 G
• Chapter 17: 5000 G
• Chapter 18: 10000 G
• Chapter 22: 5000 G
• Chapter 26: 5000 G (selling Excalibur)
• Total: 57700 G. 62700 G possible with the cash dump in Chapter 13.
• Throughout the game by selling items + Lottery + Lilith: 20000-30000 G?

                                 That’s an insane amount of gold! Also you could sell all the treasures that you get in Chapter 26 in addition to Excalibur (ie the Venge Naginata) or you could get Percy’s Paralogue and get even MORE gold from that you start to realize that money is pretty easy to obtain. To be fair a good number of those cash dumps require skill to pull off like Chapters 8 & 16. Also I should point out that most players will probably not get THAT much money in Chapter 16 although I manage to pull off just below 9,000 which is still a lot of money. The point though is that for a game that hypes itself up to be the hardcore limited resources route it sure doesn’t seem to live up to its name.   

                  To be fair the only Fire Emblem game I can think of that actually does give you limited funds is Fire Emblem 12 on Lunatic mode or above. Outside of that pretty much every game in the series dumps a sea of gold upon the player Scrooge McDuck style. This has led me to the conclusion that I would rather have future installments get rid of money and instead replace it with the Thracia Capturing system. Here’s what I’ve observed are the problems that come with money: Too much money means that you have virtually unlimited resources while giving the player too few resources feels restrictive and unfun. 

                    

                               The capturing system lets you earn your weapons and resources so there’s a sense of satisfaction, but at the same time the player ultimately left with the decision of how much they want to capture. It also can act as an anti-turtling incentive because if an enemy has fancy weapons and items you the player will want to hurry up and capture said enemy so that you can attain your stuff with the highest possible amount of uses left on said stuff.

                           But I digress. We’re here to talk about Conquest, not Thracia. In addition to being able to accumulate huge hoards of money, the game gives you an unlimited supply of super cheap tonics. It’s amazing to see how much of an impact a + 2 can have on that game. That has often meant the difference between double attacking and not double attacking or 1 Hit Kills vs. 2 Hit Kills, etc. Tonics should have come in limited supply and they should have been at least 1,000 more gold. 150 Gold is so ludicrously cheap that I was buying huge hoards of them. The effect on the game blew my mind.

• Pair-Up: Something else that I don’t like about Fates is the Pair-Up system. On the one hand, I LOVE the fact that enemies can use the Dual Guard / Dual Strike system I also think that both Pair-Up systems have a disproportionate impact on the game. Dual Strike makes it a little too easy to kill things. I mean take a look at my first post  about Conquest’s gameplay where I bring up all the times where Dual Strike helped me trivialize a certain level. That’s not a good sign. Granted, the positive here is that Dual Strike does wonders in encouraging good unit positioning, but that still doesn’t change the fact that killing becomes too easy and as a result it does seem a little too OP.
  
  
  
  
  

                                      As for Dual Guard, it pretty much encourages stat-stacking the way that Awakening’s did. While it’s obviously nowhere near as bad it’s still in that same realm of “boost my stats higher and let me go ham on the enemy”. Here’s another question to consider: Is there a time when you don’t want to use either of these Pair-Up options? I can’t think of a time. I’m sure it exists, but the number of times are probably few and far between in comparison to the number of times where you either want to Dual Strike or Dual Guard. For my money’s worth, I’d rather scrap Pair-Up altogether and leave it in the dust.

                            Final Thoughts: I guess my final point regarding Conquest’s gameplay is that I don’t consider it the Jennifer Lawrence of Fire Emblem gameplay like most people do (that’s Thracia 776).  Lolsy jokes aside, I do think that Conquest’s gameplay is more flawed than people hyped it up to be. Does it have great ideas? Sure. Is it more challenging than most other games in the series? Again sure, but unlike FE 12 or Thracia 776 I don’t feel satisfaction from getting better at Conquest. Everytime I figured out how to trivialize a certain map I kept getting the feeling of “oh, that’s all I had to do this entire time? Lame.” 

                      It gives you lots of resources and it encourages stat boosting to an extreme degree that other games don’t. I’d be a full blown hypocrite if I said that stat boosting should be eliminated altogether from future installments in the series, but my point here is that it shouldn’t be as easy to pull off as it is in Conquest. While the game has it’s pros, it also has its cons and I personally don’t consider its gameplay to be good enough to outweigh its atrocious story and subpar characterization.

                         If I had to use one phrase to describe both Conquest and Fates as a whole it would be “wasted potential”. These games could have dethroned Holy War as my favorite Fire Emblem game, but they didn’t. Conquest’s gameplay is good enough to prevent it from being full blown garbage like Revelations or just being 100 % boring like Birthright, but only gets a 5 / 10 from me. As it stands I think that Conquest’s gameplay is overrated and Fates has made it apparent to me that if I want a Fire Emblem game made the way I want to be, I’m going to have to make one myself.

A Further Look Into Conquest's Gameplay Part 2

                                     If you’re feeling bored while reading this feel free to start a drinking game and here is the rule: Take a shot whenever you read something along the lines of “I like the idea but the execution is off” or some kind of variation of that. It’ll come up a lot and for good reason. Okay, let’s get started then.

                       Skills: Conquest has a great skill system. I would argue that the Fates skill system is the best in the series. Why? Well for starters Conquest gives enemies skills and not only that, but also powerful / threatening skills. Why is this important? Well one of the problems in previous games that implemented the skill system is that the player’s units always got really good skills while enemies generally speaking wouldn’t get any, or if they did their skills would be pretty weak by comparison. For all the problems that Awakening had they at least tried to give generic enemies powerful skills. Granted, Awakening went overboard in Lunatic + but it still felt like a step in the right direction to me. Then along comes Conquest and suddenly the skills are fair again (well most of them. I’ll cover the ones that aren’t fair or just aren’t good in a minute) but still threatening. I also LOVE some of the new skills that Fates introduced or tweaked. Here are a few examples:

• Wary Fighter:  This should be the default skill for Armor Knights. Being able to prevent enemies from double attacking is a FANTASTIC idea that goes a long way toward reducing an enemy’s damage output. Slow, tanky enemies with Wary Fighter are harder to deal with because you can’t just stomp them into the ground by double attacking them. Moreover, this is a fair skill too because it doesn’t screw the player over either. This skill should definitely stay.

• Live To Serve: Again, I’m a really big fan of the idea of the healer being able to heal themselves. It always seemed tedious to heal a healer that took damage so this skill is right up my ally. I would like to see this become the default skill for healer classes.
  
  
  

• Counter: I never really liked the Awakening version of Counter. It more or less punished the player for counter attacking which there was nothing you could really do about it outside of attack them first from a distance or hope you killed the enemies first. Fates ended up fixing Counter so that it only worked when the player initiates an attack and only when the player initiates an attack up close. There are so many different ways to deal with the Fates version of Counter, but the skill is still powerful enough to force the player to pay attention which is what Counter is designed to do. Fates made Counter fair and I’m okay with this version of Counter sticking around.

• Personal Skills: This is another fantastic idea that Fates introduced that I think should also become a staple of the series. Personal skills give each individual unit their own unique flavor and normally they can be taken advantage of tactically. While there are some that seem situational (IE Selena’s personal skill) they do at least cause the player to sit back and think which I consider a good thing. Future games should work on personal skills that are more consistent and tactical, but at least it’s a really good step in the right direction.

The Negatives

                          I wish I could say that all the skills in Fates were awesome but unfortunately that is not the case. While most skills do a fantastic job at adding to the gameplay there are some skills that detract from the experience.

• Staff Savant: Staff Savant is one of those skills. The main problem with Staff Savant is that it gives enemies unlimited uses of certain staves that really should not have unlimited uses. Have you ever dealt with an enemy that had access to unlimited Freeze staves? That crap is annoying and tedious. How about infinite uses of Entrap? Or even worse….infinite uses of the Hexing Rod? Yeah this does not lend itself to good gameplay. It makes powerful staves too powerful and eliminates the balance put on them.

• Lunge, Entrap, Pass:  So why did I put these two skills and one staff here together? Well they all have something in common: They screw over player unit positioning which is bad for the game. Lunge helps the enemy out far more than it does the player since it’s most effective when large groups of units with this skill use it. Furthermore the only real solution to Lunge is either killing them first before they get a chance to use the skill or killing the Lunge user on the counterattack. In order to achieve either result in an optimal manner you have to boost your stats. In other words, Lunge promotes stats over positioning and that’s not a good thing. 
  
  
  
  
  

                           The Entrap staff is even worse since it can be used at a distance with no consequences of the user should the Entrap staff miss. Once again the optimal solutions here are either:

1. Boost your stats so that you can take a hit from the enemy hoard and kill them (For example in Chapter 26 I let my paired up Xander get in range of an Entrap maid because his stats were so high that I could kill the two sorcerers and the maid)

2. Get out of range and then kill them on your turn

3. Use the Silence staff: This is more of a temporary solution since Silence only works for one turn which means that this isn’t as reliable as the previous two solutions. Plus what happens when Silence misses?

                   So yeah, I think you get the point. The Entrap staff doesn’t do much to encourage strategy outside of “stay out of their range or kill them”. I consider Entrap to be worse than the Hexing Rod since the Entrap staff could not be solved with a Restore staff while the Hexing Rod could, plus the Entrap staff is a little too punitive.

                   The Pass skill lets enemies ignore player unit positioning which forces the player to box in weaker units or forces the weaker units to run away. It’s the least bad of these three but I still don’t think the game benefits from its existence. 

                   Overall: I really like what Fates did to the skill system. It added personal skills (which is great), it made up some new skills which added to the tactics of the game and it found a way to make enemies stronger. Now unfortunately there are still some glaring weaknesses but I do think that the positives outweigh the negatives here.

                     Debuffing: Of the three Fates installments Conquest has the highest number of enemies with the power to debuff player units. Debuffing is a fantastic idea since its job is to keep your best units from steamrolling the game. This raises the question of how we deal with his. Unfortunately, the answer here is “boost your stats so high that even if you take a debuff it won’t matter”. This is something that really surprised me during my run of Conquest Lunatic mode. For most of my playthrough I just didn’t care about whether or not my units got debuffed because overall it generally didn’t affect me as much. I think this is because I started taking advantage of all the resources at my disposal which really made a difference here. Take for example this picture of my Xander.

                                That Xander has + 14 Speed in addition to being fed 3 Speedwings prior that particular level. That’s insane! I had absolutely zero problem with Xander getting a speed debuff because he’d still be fast enough to double attack virtually every enemy on the map. When I initially uploaded this picture onto my Facebook profile people were pointing out that there were still other things I could do to boost Xander’s speed which further proves my point at how ridiculously easy it is in Fates to boost one’s stats.

                              

                                Once you figure out how to properly boost your character’s stats debuffing loses most of it’s bite. In other words, instead of debuffing preventing stat-stacking it encourages it because the game provides no other alternatives to dealing with it. I would still prefer to keep debuffing in future installments, but it’s in serious need of some polishing.

• The first thing I would do is give debuffs the power to instantly nullify stat boosts. Going back to the example of my Xander, if he gets hit by a Seal skill or any Hidden Weapon his + 14 speed, along with all his other stats boosts, should vanish and instead be replaced with whatever the debuff was supposed to be. This would do a better job of “juggernaut prevention” since boosting your best character’s stats would no longer be a guarantee to victory.

• The second thing I would do is make the debuffs effect last for a shorter period of time. Maybe instead of recovering by 1 per turn you could recover by 2 per turn. Another idea would be to make them only last for one phase. This would still make their effect sting, but it wouldn’t screw you over forever.

• The last thing I would do is provide skills and items that undid the effects of debuffs. Giving some units access to skills that make them immune to debuffs give them a niche since debuffing would be something you’d rather avoid. How about a staff that undoes the effects of debuffing? That would encourage the player to continue moving forward.
  
  
  
  
  

                             Overall: Debuffs are a cool idea that have a lot of potential, but their current execution in Fates leaves room to be desired. With a few tweaks and some extra polish I think that debuffing could live up to its full potential.

                            Weapons: The last thing I wanted to bring up here is the weapon system. Fates made some bold changes to the weapon system and I think it’s worth talking about to see if these changes helped or hurt the game. First, the positives:

1. Hand Axes & Javelins got nerfed: Hand Axes and Javelins have had this coming for a long time now. 1 - 2 range weapons are really good. They can dish out free damage without fear of a counterattack and they also let the player defend themselves during the Enemy Phase. Fates came along and gave the player a sufficient reason to NOT use these weapons. It’s about time.
2. Bows don’t suck: Another problem with having 1 - 2 range weaponry is that they  trivialized bows since they had the same range as bows without the drawback of them. Well now javelins and hand axes have HUGE drawbacks that bows don’t have. For starters you can actually double attack with bows. It’s a really nice change of pace

3. Weapon effects: The biggest change to the Fates system of handling weapons is that the usefulness of a weapon is determined by what kind of effect it has. This forces the player to put in more thought and effort outside of “should I use a weapon now or wait until later to use it”? It opens the door to a lot of new possibilities and I think it’s a great idea.

                                                                              

          

The Negatives:

1. Lack of an incentive to use a higher rank weapon: One particular habit that I have across all three Fates installments is that I rarely use a weapon whose rank is higher than a C rank. Why? Well most weapons with higher ranks come with severe drawbacks. Here’s a small list of examples:

• Silver weapon debuffs stack continuously and it takes a while for the player to recover.

• Some A or S rank weapons literally halve your strength / magic which means that your usage of these weapons is extremely limited. The strengths that they offer usually don’t counterbalance this.

• Wakizashi / Spear / Tomahawk: 2 range, can’t double attack and they make it easier for the enemy to double attack you. Why should I use them again?

• Excalibur / Pursuer: Both of these weapons come with the “follow up attack speed +5, enemy’s follow up attack speed +5”. What exactly is the point of that? It doesn’t help you double attack since the enemy gains the exact same advantage that you do. In fact, I still don’t understand why Fates chose to change the way double attacks are done. Was there something wrong with the old way of doing things? If there is I’m not seeing it.

                   I could keep on listing examples here but I won’t. Needless to say some weapons go overboard in providing disadvantages to the wielder. Sadly some of them are C rank or lower. 

• Lack of a disincentive to use Iron, Killer and Prf Rank Weapons: Iron and Killer weapons have no debuffs. This means that you can keep on using them however many times that you want and there’s no drawback. I know which weapons I’m using. Not only that but Killer weapons come with the added bonus of dealing x 4 damage when a crit activates. That’s insane! X 3 is already powerful enough, but x 4 more or less ensures that whatever you’re trying to kill will die. Then we have Prf rank weapons which boost stats AND provide 1 - 2 range without any penalties. This basically means that these units almost never have a reason to use any other weapon. Fortunately theseI s are pretty few and far in-between but still.

• Forging exists in a game where weapon durability does not: I know that the game tries to balance this out by making the forging system convoluted but it still bugs me that I can forge an Iron weapon or a Killer Weapon and that weapon will pretty much laugh at over 90 % of all the other weapons that Fates offers to you. Not going to lie, I’m not a fan of the forging system in any of the games where they exist since forging just lets your powerful units become all the more powerful. What’s worse is that in games like Shadow Dragon or Awakening you can forge Brave Weapons and weapons that deal effective damage (like the Wing Spear) and then you get to watch your units cheese entire maps because of it. 
  
  
  
  
  

                                        Overall: I like weapon effects, but the execution here needs polishing. I think John Barkmeyer’s idea of making different weapons perform different functions and be good at different tasks is a better way to accomplish this. I also think that debuffs should never be powerful enough to completely disincentivize a weapon from being used.

                                    Something I’d like to point out is that the successful elements of the Fates weapon system have more to do with weapon effects than the lack of weapon durability. Theoretically speaking you can have weapon durability and weapon effects going on at the same time. I wonder what a hybrid system would look like.