Fire Emblem 4 represents what I think a "cinematic experience" should represent in a narrative-heavy game. I was filtered by the fuckhuge maps for a while, but it really helps eliminate the disconnect between narrative and gameplay; you *see* the massive armies, the bandits burning villages to the ground, etc. It makes everything compelling and epic, it's like I'm playing Ben-Hur or some shit. I cannot fucking wait to watch how Sigurd's BBQ plays out, I'm actually legitimately excited about a video game for the first time in years.

that looks like shit
did you intentionally buy the worst crt you could find for some kind of "retro gamer" street cred

>>11846118

It's a pretty solid Sony consumer set if i do say so myself, it looks like shit because I took a quick picture of the game I'm playing at 4 in the morning instead of some generic picture of the game I downloaded off of google, care to contribute to the topic at hand or are you just going to be a massive faggot for no reason

>>11846104 (OP)
Sounds cool. I will probably never play one of these games but they seem like they are probably pretty good

>>11846125
NTA but it does look like shit. Are you using composhit or is your CRT dying?

The deaths of Sigurd and Quan in the middle of the game is very "cinematic" too.

>>11846118
>>11846267
do you twinks even own a CRT? They're difficult to take accurate pictures of.

>>11846272

Nice try but reread the OP, I know about the cookout to come. I'm in it for the journey, not the destination

>>11846104 (OP)
I'm more in love with the themes FE4 was going for than the actual gameplay itself but there's a lot of good stuff in there. the generational concept was clumsy but very novel, like a slight refinement of what Phantasy Star III was going for.
I hope you played around with all that unit pairing stuff, or maybe not because the default "substitute" units you get saddled with for not participating in that system really ramps up the difficulty big time. which is perhaps something you might actually want in an SRPG, who knows

>>11846379

This image is literally what motivated me to actually play this game lmfao. Every time I see a clip of Bibi the Loptyr theme plays in my head

Doing a decent job with pairings so far(beowulf/lachesis, azel/taillte, ayra/dew) but I let Aideen pair with Lex which is a bummer. Lewyn is 400+ with both Erin and Silvia so it'll take a little finessing in Ch 5 to get Lewyn/Erin and Claude/Silvia but I should manage to get it done. I'll be sure to see who's best for inheriting specific items before I finish up to. I've got no beef with abusing mechanics I arena abuse all the time in the GBA games

So what separate FE from other SRPGs, other than the Nintendo™ Seal of Quality?

>>11846402

A pretty unforgiving permadeath mechanic that makes gameplay a much more high stakes affair than games like FFT and especially Disgaea where difficulty is non-existant unless you hamstring yourself on purpose.

>>11846379
>for all intensive purposes

>>11846426
>A pretty unforgiving permadeath mechanic
Counterbalanced in most older games by replacement characters being handed out constantly. FE4 was the first of the series to discourage sacrificing your units because of the parent-child mechanics.

>>11846402
the later ones get pretty snappy and well-paced (even the slow FE4 relatively speaking) if that makes any sense with a solid sense of unit balance, like the super robot wars games or advance wars. you'll often get some seemingly OP units in FE or SRW at times but the scenarios and map objectives are varied enough to trip them up. someone can interpret this as basic babby gameplay but it works

I remember it feeling like a genuine tragedy when the "civil war" in Silesse occurred while you're struggling across snow and mountain tiles to help.

>>11846379
FE4 is not so difficult that it requires having your nose stuck in a guide to make absolutely sure you get the most optimal units possible.

>>11846104 (OP)
You see the big armies but you never get to control them...
For that reason alone I'll stick with Langrisser

>>11846670
I like that they don't try to model little individual soldiers in the armies like langrisser or the army battles in suikoden. I would feel like I'm getting "people" killed even when I win, which would make the whole game kind of dour. Instead there are no peons but there is permadeath, so I can feel sorry when someone important dies without it being "well war is hell anon, you just knew that guy's face" grim and a lossless win just feels good

Although I think in langrisser you often heal units and all the peons come back to life anyway so they just feel like healthbars but it's been a while

>>11846426
I hate the way permadeath is handled in FE because it offers no generic units that you'd be willing to sacrifice and it has no "death counters" or anything similar.
Meaning that if you lose a unit, you'll likely restart because it was most probably one of your strongest or favourites, combine it with %-based chance to hit and crit and you've got a recipe for a disaster

>>11846687
Most FE games positions your "army" as a small resistance group, an elite strike team, or a local militia to justify why you don't see hundreds of troops fighting. I think on the rare occasion that you do control an army of that size, the vast majority are implied to be holding a perimeter outside the visible map while your commander and individual troops are fighting the actual battle.

>>11846693
You were originally expected not to get attached, but to replace dead units with new recruits as you went. It's why the earliest games give most units little-to-no dialogue or personality beyond their initial recruitment, as they weren't expected to last.

>>11846687
I guess it's just too unrealistic for me to believe that a ragtag team of literally whos can kill whole armies, generals and gods while suffering minimal/no losses.
I'm pretty sure one of the later FE games had faceless grunts show up during each unit's attack which already made it feel more logical as to why they just don't die.
>>11846702
I haven't played the earliest ones but I'd probably still reset unless I had a backup of the same type and some of these games can give you as little as 2 or 3 of certain unit types.

>>11846702
>You were originally expected not to get attached, but to replace dead units with new recruits as you went.
The problem is the RPG mechanics. The fact that you level up your guys and the enemies also level up and get harder as you go means that you have to stick with a certain set of guys so they can level up and keep pace with the rising difficulty through the game, which also means the other guys get neglected, and finally all of that means if you lose a couple of those high level guys and have to sub in low level guys you're just fucked because the low level guys will get instantly slaughtered.

If so much of a character's strength didn't come from leveling up the games would be much better. I think one way to improve things would be for a character's strength to primarily come from equipment that you have to keep replacing to keep up with the rising difficulty. Fire Emblem already does this, but they should lean on it more so that if you have to replace someone you can just buy them better equipment so they can stand toe to toe with the harder enemies. Character levels should either be non-existent or be more of an "overpower" mechanic, where the game is balanced around low level characters with high level equipment so getting a character to survive and level up a lot rewards you with a particularly strong unit rather than punishing you severely any time you have to bring in a lower leveled character.

>>11846750
>if you lose a couple of those high level guys and have to sub in low level guys you're just fucked because the low level guys will get instantly slaughtered.
The post you were replying to was talking about the first game. You seem to be under the impression that the new recruits that show up practically every chapter start at Level 1, which isn't the case at all.

>>11846782
I'm talking about the later games, which still seem to be designed around that original idea that you should suffer through losses and keep playing, except the RPG mechanics fuck you over for all the reasons I mentioned.

>>11846104 (OP)
What I hated in this game is, that bad guys make a line just trying to kill one dude(only if they had a small chance of killing one dude); that happened to my Finn and he's now my favorite character.

>>11846920
Every FE is like this. The AI just beelines at whoever is closest and/or easiest to kill and the best strategy is just to bioball everywhere. The enemies are braindead and require equally braindead tactics to compete.

>>11846750
>other guys get neglected
>you lose a couple of those high level guys and have to sub in low level guys you're just fucked
Bonus EXP in FE9 was a good solution to these.

Man chapter 5 already sucks. They really lay it on thick that awful things are about to happen and there's not a fucking thing you can do about it.

>>11847059

And this right here is why I won't ever play any of these games. I've tried enough potentially cool war strategy games of all sorts to know that approximately 100% of them have abysmally bad AI, so if I also know that a game isn't doing anything really interesting or special in any other way, I can't justify spending my time on it. Mere JRPG-style polish and charm and audiovisual excellence aren't quite enough. I'll occasionally play a Final Fantasy-type game for the sake of those, but not a Fire Emblem-type game. It's just too much of a slog to manage those big, super-easy battles for the sake of what amounts to yet another JRPG, when you could get the same stuff (except more colorfully) from a conventional JRPG without the giant, slow battles.

Same goes for Advance Wars.

It'll be amazing when somebody finally gets around to applying fancy new AI technology to turn-based war games and actually makes them difficult in single-player mode (WITHOUT allowing the enemies to heavily cheat) for possibly the first time ever.

>>11848089
>fancy new AI technology to turn-based war games and actually makes them difficult in single-player mode
Try chess and come back with tail between your legs

>>11846258
Being an elitist judgemental retard over someone else's crt doesn't make you cool

>>11846118
That's just how aperture grilles look, and they are inferior to slot masks for nearly everything.

>>11846267
you might as well emulate and spare the eyestrain if you're playing an entirely turn-based game without composite

>>11848193
Composite is awful. You might as well emulate if you aren't using s-video or RGB

>>11848330
Lol, no

>>11848336
Composhit coping. Sorry you don't have anything better.

>>11848396
I use RGB for 6th gen and composite for everything lower
It just looks better on my CRT

>>11848402
You're wrong and evil for having the tastes you have, anon. Hope that cleared up things a bit.

>>11846750
The new recruits in each chapter are usually roughly the same level as the enemies, so they can hold their own for at least the chapter they join on. And it's FE tradition to get one superpowered unit near the very end to help compensate for any heavy losses you might have sustained.

Yes, losing a unit you invested in hurts, but the intent was for you to keep pushing forward through the loss regardless. War has no reset button.

>>11848536

I really need to do an ironman run on one of the GBA games one of these days, to add a little extra challenge to it