Happy weekend everybody. I finished a playthrough of XCOM 2 and now have started a new playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3, as "The Dark Urge". Hope everyone's summer has been going well
Happy weekend everybody. I finished a playthrough of XCOM 2 and now have started a new playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3, as "The Dark Urge". Hope everyone's summer has been going well
Just beat Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. I started after FE: Blazing Blade decided to have a level that seems to be luck-based in order to beat. It quickly became the only game I was playing, and I finally beat it today. It was a really great game, and it felt really fresh and different compared to many of the other FE games. Would highly recommend if you like tactics RPGs or Fire Emblem in general, it was quite the experience. In terms of story, it was better than I expected. It seems like a pretty standard plot, but it becomes a little more as the game goes on. If I had to give one criticism to the game, it would be some of the main antagonists. One of them is done very well, and the other is more of what I was expecting. Also some of the minor antagonists are really annoying, and you'll know them when you see them.
Shadows of Valentia spoilers
There's a twist that gets hinted towards throughout the game, and in higher frequencies towards the end, and it was pretty obvious. There is, however, a twist within the twist that I did not see coming at all, added a surprising amount of depth to the story that really had me thinking about Valentia's geopolitics, considering Alm and Celica go through most of the game pretty ignorant of Valentia's political intricacies.
The gameplay of SoV makes it hard to play other FE games afterwards imo. I really appreciate how refined it is: minimal inventory, few classes, small roster, no eugenics, no battle gimmicks.
Even though other games in the franchise are more complex, echoes feels the most tactical to me. Because more often than not, the optimal way to play other entries is to spam the strongest class with the best characters - chess if your pawns were queens and your knights were queens and your rooks were queens, etc.
Also this might be just me but I HATE the inventory management aspect of FE. I'm not playing these games to rifle through menus and go grocery shopping!