cat denied

i will, eventually, write up a full breakdown on my thoughts on fire emblem: genealogy of the holy war, aka fire emblem: the fourth one, aka fire emblem: we made it weird (again) (again) (again), because i finally finished my second playthrough (!) after One Full Year, meaning i have now seen every character. i wanted to do this. i chose this life.

but for now all ill say is that the gameplay of this game fucking rules, because "game balance" is not real 90% of the time and its cool and fun to have super-powerful units as long as they have super-powerful foes. which they do. so kudos on that. it's buckets of fun.

shame about Every Line Of Dialogue And Writing In This Game.

this game tries so hard to be, like. a big dramatic emotional narrative! and, in about two cases over its entire length, it succeeds! but mostly it is

• dull
• weirdly preachy and both-sidesy
• in classic fire emblem fashion, completely unaware or unwilling to interrogate "oh no, the evil bad guys took over the whole world! time to defeat them, and then continue having taken over the whole world, but it's okay because We're The Good Guys and we've also established a hereditary monarchy"
• boringly misogynist
• ranging from "accidentally" to "almost undeniably" pro-incest, depending on player choice

and like. man. jesus christ.

but the gameplay's so good.

stay winning folks

probably gonna make an actual big write-up review-style post in the same lens as that one i did for awakening a couple days ago, but i'm not nearly far enough in the game yet for that so it'll be awhile.

is there any fire emblem game that isn't weird? maybe the GBA ones? on a replay, though, i'm really extremely charmed by genealogy's specific brand of mechanics-based weirdness - stuff like the weapon triangle giving fully 20% avoid and hit benefits, or the way weapon weight is so taken to extremes, or the forced personalization of items via the way there is effectively no trading system, so whatever someone picks up they'll likely keep for the rest of the game. even stuff that everyone seems to get mad about online, like locking pursuit (follow-up attacks) and critical hits to specific skills - i like that stuff! i think on the whole i'm glad that it didn't become series-regular fare, but it helps to make each and every character feel so distinct that i can't help but appreciate it. making one of your series-regular red and green clone cavaliers have the pursuit skill and the other one have critical makes me so much more aware of who they are and what they can do than giving one a slightly higher rank in swords or whatever.

i dunno, genealogy is just so unashamed of what it is. sometimes that's a bad thing (we'll get to that when i finally make the Big Post about this game) but often it's kind of great, like with all the mechanics where it just goes "yeah, 50% of your cast can't do the thing everyone can do in every other fire emblem game" and expects you to pick up the pieces. because with that comes "yeah, your tiny thief dew can dodge tank an entire platoon of axe soldiers and get three levels easy" and wild skills and unit divergence and all this fascinating stuff. it sort of makes up for how the story is sigurd tripping and stumbling into invasions of several sovereign nations for very little reason. but i'll save the story discussion of this game for later. i gotta, or we'll be here all day!

i'm replaying this time to get all replacement units (since last time i got none) so we'll see where that goes, but i'm fascinated by that whole thing too. anyway. i do really enjoy this game. i think i'd forgotten how much.