capriciouscorvid said

I’m trying to drag myself through Blitzkrieg, seeing as it’s the only award I don’t have yet, but it’s so… limited and kinda boring??

That’s the nature of LTC play, though the 500 turn limit for this one is very generous so there’s still room for error and experimentation. I never play like that normally; I’ll watch videos of people doing so from time to time, but actually doing it myself never feels fun. I got through this one by speedrunning it in real time as well, skipping all that well-presented storyline and rushing from one mandatory objective to the next every time I played. Streamlining to that extent you miss out on so much of the game…but I suppose some people are really into that approach.

Abandoned the Awakening playthrough out of boredom and entirely too much grinding and decided instead to go after the Blitzkrieg medal in Shadows of Valentia to finish my achievement collection for that game. Playing Casual mode and letting people “die” was a new experience (previously I’d only ever picked Casual in any of the games for battle saving) as was the reckless, semi-LTC playstyle that doesn’t suit how I like to play FE at all. I finished with more than 150 turns to spare which I read isn’t all that impressive, but at least I never have to play FE15 that way again.

muchinmanaketes said

Just think of all the lore changes you don’t want to resist the urge

But the problem there is that even though I recognize there are numerous lore inconsistencies in Warcraft lore none of them has yet to actively piss me off, certainly not enough to stop playing WoW entirely. The closest it’s come to that was probably Koltira’s imprisonment by Sylvanas in Cata, but all’s well that ends well there (not that I’ve played a death knight far enough to experience his and Thassarian’s Legion storyline myself, but still). For all that I like to look critically at the media I consume I’m actually fairly lenient when it comes to how much I’m willing to put up with before I completely avoid something.

Besides, WoW’s lore is constantly evolving by its very nature, and just like I wouldn’t want the gameplay to remain static* I also fully expect the stories being told to develop in ways that both do and don’t interest me.

*And yes, this means Classic servers will be little more than a curiosity for me, though my few memories of playing WoW pre-BC were not all that entertaining. The main draw will be getting to revisit the zones that have since had their storylines updated. 

Gotta know, who are you pairing up this Awakening run?

With the support log full and no emotional attachment whatsoever to any of the pairings I go strictly for gameplay optimization. The ones I’ve plotted out are fairly standard:

Chrom/Sumia – all-around best pick for both Lucina and Cynthia, with the two of them operating very similarly except that Lucina has Dual Strike+ instead of a Faire

Lissa/Ricken – Owain gets a great MAG mod and Luna because his twitching sword hand is ironically inferior most of the time

Sully/Donnel and Tharja/Gaius – generally agreed-upon best way to fix Kjelle and Noire, with Kjelle able to take Donnel’s bad mods and lack of anything worthwhile other than pegasus knight and Noire getting both Galeforce and a proc stack

Miriel/Gregor – though I’ve never tried it comes highly recommended for Laurent, presumably because of flexible mods and the potential for a Vantage+Vengeance+Wrath crit build

Maribelle/Libra – better mod dads are needed more elsewhere but since that’s all Brady cares about he can get by with Libra’s mediocrity

Panne/Virion – amazing mods everywhere that matters and Hit+20 to fix the one issue with berserker

Cordelia/Lon’qu – good mods again as well as Lancefaire wyvern lord, which just barely outweighs Frederick (or Kellam) giving her Luna so I don’t have to worry about setting up Vengeance

Vaike/Nowi – Axefaire general hard support Nah, which is one of the best things you can do with her without Robin

Olivia/Stahl – Luna and better mods than the two remaining options

Cherche/Henry – the only non-Robin father who gives Gerome both things he needs to be a standard male physical support (berserker and Hit-boosting skills), which matters because…

F!Robin/Gerome – alright, I am playing favorites here. 3rd gen Morgan also alleviates the awkward problem of having one child too many and needing to drop one (usually Gerome or Nah depending on Morgan’s gender)

Feel free to imagine Frederick and Kellam consoling each other in their loneliness with a double-ended dildo, because we all know neither of them could top worth a damn.

I’ve reached the halfway point of Awakening and have stopped to grind for babies because they were just asking for that double entendre. Everyone loves to harp on the Valm arc for being pointless and the time travel for being unexplored and the ending and Spotpass recruitments for ripping the teeth out of the narrative, but I’ve remembered an entirely different story-based grievance, one that I don’t see talked about nearly as much: the pacing between the end of Chapter 11 through Chapter 13 is ridiculously off-kilter.

After “killing” Gangrel the staging shifts to that of a standard FE epilogue with the downfall of the evil nation and a wedding and swelling triumphant music…and then there’s a two-year time skip for Lucina to happen and suddenly you’re back on the world map as if no time has passed at all. Two chapters later adult Lucina makes her big reveal and you can start getting paralogues for the other children just in time for the voyage to Valm and Robin’s infamous war crime. This period is effectively the halfway point of FE13 at least in a gameplay sense, though the narrative feels absurdly stretched between two major events with the climax of the first of three big story arcs and Lucina’s reveal as disconnected as they are. I really cannot understate how awkward that time skip in particular is; the closest comparison I can make in another game is FE4′s Gen 1 and its several leaps forward during and immediately after the Agustria campaign. In both games part of the explanation is to give time for the birth of the lord’s child – along with a sizable period during which we might assume the other eugenics babies get born, with only a few exceptions like Coirpre, Gerome, and anyone Henry fathers – but in Genealogy the time skips occur during an ongoing campaign wherein the playable cast is kept together by immediate circumstances. From the way FE13′s Chapter 11 ends one might imagine that everyone just goes home afterward and then…all come back together again without being contacted because Valm is just that threatening. Actually, what was Virion even doing in Ylisse for the first eleven chapters other than perving on Sully et al?

Gah. Even with FE15 for context this game is just riddled with plot holes.

*looks at Finn’s Heroes artwork pose*

So…gay Finn for the remakes? Seems logical, since he’s the only character who’s actively penalized for being paired in FE4 and his relationships with his potential male love interests go south in true Jugdral fashion.