Category: Turn-based Tactics

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Game Ramblings #92 – Fire Emblem: Three Houses

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Tactical RPG
  • Platform: Switch

I’ve got a bit of a history with the Fire Emblem series. Ya I’ve played a bunch of them, and ya I’ve been playing the more recent entries in the series. However, the bigger problem for me is that I was on the QA team for Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon on the DS. QA at Nintendo was one of my first jobs in the game industry while I was in college, and getting a summer assignment like Fire Emblem sounded great until it was 40 hours a week, finishing the game every day on repeat. The outcome of all that is that I got really fucking good at Fire Emblem games, and I really hate permanent death.

It’s not that I have anything particularly against permadeath; it just doesn’t feel like it pushes the gameplay in a good direction. My strategies start to revolve around slow pushes, exploiting weapon and terrain strengths, and really playing overly cautious. It’s slow, it’s boring, and it’s not a good experience. Because of my gameplay push, I miss the consequence of death and probably to some extent miss out on the stress that it causes as well. So give me Fire Emblem games without it like the past few? Hell ya I’m down for that.

Three Houses continues the push in the last few to really modernize the series. Permadeath is optional, which is nice, but it’s not the only thing that really feels fresh. This game comes with a lot more to do in between combat, giving a lot more depth to characters, the world, and the relationships you build. The weapon advantage triangle also felt a lot less present, which on the surface sounds weird, but ends up giving me a lot more flexibility in battle. While it’s taken a lot of years, this is the one that finally feels like it’s pushed me back over the edge from casual enjoyment to really wanting to see every piece of this series.

I think it’s important to start outside of combat, because it becomes important to the way I play the game. The super high level of the game is that you are a professor in a military school, you pick a house of students to teach, and you are in charge of their growth. You can basically make any character any class in a much more flexible way than normal for FE. Want to hybridize your mages to also provide healing? There’s classes for that. Want to make a dual spec archer swordsman? By all means. Want to concentrate purely on axe work to become some axe wielding badass? Have a ball. The freedom to steer your party basically meant two things to me – I could pick the characters I liked for my interactions with them instead of what their combat use was, and I could steer their growth in a way that fit how I wanted combat to play out.

The school aspects are also where you become attached to characters. In between story combat, you interact with the entire school and start to learn about all the characters, whether it’s the people they’ve got conflicts with, the potential love interests they share, what their likes and dislikes and in some cases some fears are. It provides a ton of depth to the characters in a way that doesn’t feel forced.

On the surface, the combat of FETH is going to look familiar. It’s still a TRPG grid, the weapon advantage triangle is still in place, basic magic and movement types of past games are still there, but this kind of feels like FE+. However, the flexibility of my party build throws a lot of this on its head. If I’ve got a dual-spec archer/swordsman, lance flyers are no longer a big worry for me. Having some magic skills scattered around means armored enemies are less of a danger. Adding some healing abilities to a few characters allows me to play more aggressively, instead of having to carry extra dedicated healers.

Not having to play with permadeath also really pushes this. In past FE games I would never go into a skirmish unless I had a near 100% certainty of being able to kill the group of enemies I was going after. Now? Let’s go after it. Does it make me play like a moron at times? Hell ya it does, and I’d have it no other way.

This game also brings in a bunch of much tougher 2×2 and 3×3 grid space enemies with some interesting mechanics. The player characters have Gambit attacks, which are effectively mini group attacks. Against smaller enemies, they’re just kinda convenient to use at times in the event they have some secondary effect. Against the larger enemies though? They provide both built-in stuns and aggro draws. Against enemies that may take 6-8 people to kill, these add a ton of flexibility to my toolbox in action. I can draw aggro to people I know won’t die. I can stun the enemy, then go in for high damage with low defense characters, since they will now not take return damage.

Overall, all of these things provided a lot of new depth to the series combat. It all fits into a state of feeling familiar, but deeper, and I suspect it hits a really good mark for both new and old players.

Game with cats. 11/10 GOTY.

If there’s one thing that really surprised me coming out of all this, it’s that I really cared about the characters I met along the way. Ya it’s natural to become somewhat attached to the squad you create, but there’s a level of attachment that I got to people I didn’t recruit that really made the second half of the game memorable. The mix of Persona-style interaction and traditional Fire Emblem combat has been done so well that I can’t believe it’s taken them this long to go full in. The 3DS titles started moving in this direction, particularly with the relationships, but Three Houses has brought it to a spectacularly higher new level.

There’s not much else I can really say here other than go play it. It’s taken me a long time to get back to a point where I could beat a Fire Emblem game – I definitely played some of Awakening and Fates, but never finished them – but I’m glad it’s finally happened. It says a lot about the game that I can not wait to see where the story goes when the season pass story content comes out some time next year. This series really has pushed into a new era with both story and gameplay refinements that leave this game in a place of being familiar but refreshed, and I can’t think of any TRPG that I would recommend over this one in the past few years.

Also it has fishing. 11/10 GOTY again.

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Game Ramblings #49 – Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle

More Info from Ubisoft

  • Genre: Turn-based Tactics
  • Platform: Switch

I hope you’ll pardon my pun here, but Ubisoft has managed to pull a Rabbid out of a hat.  This game seamlessly blends the Mario and Rabbid IPs into a single game, throws it into a turn-based game with some fantastic use of the Mario universe for its move set, and popped out a game that is one of the best I’ve played this year.  While there’s a few things that I’d have liked to see improved in the overall mission structure, the end result is still a fine example of what developers can do with the Switch, and an interesting example of a team making a Nintendo quality experience, without being Nintendo themselves.

The visuals would be at home in any of the recent 3D Mario series titles.

The biggest surprise to me is that this feels like a Mario title through and through.  While the gameplay is obviously different, the little details are all there.  It’s the sound of a coin when you pick it up.  It’s the vibrant and varied environments across four main worlds (and the Peach’s castle hub).  It’s the inclusion of red and blue coin challenges scattered throughout hidden areas.  It’s Mario’s jump attack straight out of the Mario series RPG titles.  Everywhere you look, there’s little details that make this feel extremely familiar, despite the huge differences in gameplay.

The nice thing about all of that is that it’s worth exploring every corner.  Scattered throughout the environment are series of small challenges, puzzles, and hidden crates.  While most of them contain little bonus art or music pieces, a number of the crates also contain weapons or power orbs.  Make no mistake, the underlying systems of this game are very traditional to the tactics genre.  Weapon upgrades for primary and secondary weapons are here, giving you obvious damage upgrades, but also adding secondary hit effects, bonus damage to specific enemies, and more.  While there’s no direct XP for killing enemies, the power orbs you earn in battle or find throughout the environment act as a functional replacement, being used to purchase upgrades in character-specific skill trees.  These skill trees act as a way to build out each character’s skill set, as well as provide more obvious passive bonuses like increased health and damage.

The facial animations in cutscenes are universally good, and usually play up the more slapstick comedy aspect of both series.

All of the skill upgrades compound into what ends up being a fantastic battle system.  The basics that are there are all solid, and work in a very XCOM-like fashion.  During your turn, you can run around and hide behind various pieces of the environment.  In a very Mario way, you can warp to different platforms via pipes, or hide behind blocks.  Also of note, brick-based blocks can be destroyed via friendly or enemy fire, and fans of the Mario series will know where not to hide if this is a concern.  However, where the battle system really shows its greatest potential is in its exploitation of movement mechanics, both as an offensive helper, and a defensive measure to keep enemies away.

On the weapon side, the two main mechanics I ended up leaning heavily on were bounce and push.  Bounce does just that; when you hit an enemy, it causes them to bounce in the air, taking additional damage, and also giving them the potential to get thrown off the level for further damage.  Push on the other hand causes the enemy hit to ball up and start rolling around the level.  They can then rebound off walls, blocks, and other enemies to cause a chain reaction of bouncing chaos.  In both of these cases, I could take advantage of the damage increase, but more often than not I was using these mechanics to push the enemies backwards, and control the flow of their movement beyond them just moving towards me.  I could also use things like the rebound on push to cause enemies to be knocked out of cover, offering more opportunities for large damage.

There were also some other traversal-based mechanics that were handy to use.  Each character could dash through enemies, causing damage.  However, each ally also had a special move for traversal.  Mario could also jump off an ally, and jump stomp enemies, giving both additional damage and travel distance on the hop.  Rabbid Luigi could dash and drop Vampire on an enemy, causing an HP siphon to be applied.  Peach could jump off an ally, and heal anyone within range of her landing location.  This all added up to each turn not just being about weapon damage, but in seeing how many things you could chain in one turn for maximum potential.

Even the ghost town still feels very Mario, with Boos replacing the normal lamps above houses.

Given all that, the only real criticisms I had were involved in the occasional parts of the mission structure.  There were a handful of escort missions that work about as poorly here as in every other game that uses them.  The escorted units had no attack, and typically moved slower than the rest of the party, as well as spawned enemies.  These missions usually just devolved into running forward to wipe enemies, then running everyone back to act as a damage sponge for reinforcements flanking from behind.  The other main problem was in the mission chaining within each chapter.  Rather than allowing healing between missions, you could only heal at the end of each chapter, and had to fight with the HP pool you had through multiple battles.  There was healing to alleviate the problem, but I felt like they could have played up to higher difficulty within a single mission if they’d gone with a more typical heal in between battle setup.  As it is, quite a few of the missions in place were simply too easy due to the chaining being in place.

You can never go wrong with an opera boss.

It speaks volumes to the skill of Ubisoft’s developers that they pulled this off.  They managed to seamlessly blend two franchises that have next to nothing in common, beyond a love of occasional slapstick comedy.  They put them into a genre that hadn’t been done for the two series, and yet made it feel like it belonged.  They turned what many gamers assumed was a joke, and made it one of the best games that has come out this year.  It also speaks volumes to Nintendo’s ongoing willingness to let external development teams have the keys to the kingdom, in a manner of speaking.  We’ve seen this with Metroid for years, Zelda with Hyrule Warriors, and a ton of great platformers out of the team at Good-Feel.  Is this worth buying a Switch for? I dunno, I’d save that for Breath of the Wild, but it certainly makes a good case for the console.