Playing through FE11

[writerawakened]

In the middle of chapter 14 at the moment, in fact.  These are my first impressions of the game (yeah, yeah, I just got around to playing it now. I'm a late-adopter, what can I say? :P) So, yes, MASSIVE NOOBAGE AHEAD a durr

So, what do I think?

I think it's pretty good. Gameplay-wise, it reminds me of FE10 (large movement range, large maps, and

Comments

[hooves]

Damn, now I feel like an even bigger slacker. I don't even remember how far along I got in the game before I...got bored or gave up or something. (No wait, I was bedridden with dental pain for a few weeks...so I forgot to pick it back up.) Someday I'll start it over again.

I'm finding myself missing, namely rescuingI wanted to smash things when I realized there was no rescuing

[writerawakened]

LOL! Hey, I left Twilight Princess unfinished for a long time too, and I just beat that recently. XD ANYTHING IS POSSIBLEEEEEEEE!

Lack of rescuing makes me a sad panda :( With the additions of a lot of the new elements of FE, I'm surprised they didn't fit that in (although there isn't really a "constitution" stat to work with)

Nah, nothing serious; just an annual :D

Anyway, I might have to start writing random stuff just to get the ball rolling! The past week I've only written about a thousand words of new stuff and the rest is just tinkering around with stuff I've already written XD (I'll literally sit looking at one paragraph for an hour tweaking a few sentences around trying to get the flow right. FAIL D: And I wonder why I never write in large volumes! lmao)

Funny thing: For different reasons, I've asked about five different people to beta different things. At this rate, I'll be asking every single person in FE fandom to beta :P

[myaru]

I've shipped Marth/Nyna from the beginning. It screamed, begged to be shipped. The first thing I said when I read that Caeda was the love interest was "B-but... he and Nyna had so many ~intimate talks~... o_O"

I found the in-game conversations between related character units (eg. Minerva and the Whitewings) helped with the cardboard feel of the characters, but this is definitely a game where you have to use your imagination. It's true to its roots. Also, the lack of Rescue drove me up the wall.

[writerawakened]

~IMAGINATION!~

Yeah, I get the feeling my headcanon is going to be filling in a lot of the gaps. Hopefully on a second playthrough I'll absorb a little more of the story; usually when I'm playing through a game for the first time I'm so hyperfocused on the gameplay I zone everything else out a little bit.

That's probably also why the first time I played through Xenogears I couldn't store anything of the plot. Well, being 10 might have something to do with it too xD

At the very least I'll know who everyone is in FE11 now. XD

[mark_asphodel]

I DIDN'T THINK THEY'D LUG THE BALLISTAE ALONG!

I <3 Ballisticians. One of my favorite things about the game.

-Is it wrong I kinda want to ship Marth/Nina-- scuse me, Nyna--, now?

Do it. Doooooo it. IS sekritly wants you to, or they wouldn't have tarted her up, given her a lot of conversations with Marth that never existed in the original game, and made pretty pix of them together.

Not that they actually love one another or anything. But dooooo it.

Also, Archanea is the name of the continent...but also a ruling house and its own nation?

Yeah. Confusing as hell. Basically, the kings of Archanea once ruled the whole continent... or tried to... but ceded up land to a bunch of little satellite kingdoms, including Altea, about 100 years before this game starts.

And no, none of this is stated in the game (or its previous iterations). It's in FE3 Book II/FE12. FE12 also comes with a handy relationship chart to make sense of it all.

Then again, I am less than halfway through...Are you unlocking any of the optional

[writerawakened]

Long-range weapons are always fun, and 4 Mov isn't too bad, either. I have a feeling being able to shoot down fliers and snipe mages is going to come in handy, too

Not that they actually love one another or anything. But dooooo it.

LOL "tarted her up" XD. There definitely seems to be some intrigue there, what with the Nyna-Hardin-Camus thing going on and Marth there. (Is NoA ever planning to localize FE12, I wonder?)

Basically, the kings of Archanea once ruled the whole continent... or tried to... but ceded up land to a bunch of little satellite kingdoms, including Altea, about 100 years before this game starts.Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification. I was wondering if I'd just glazed over an important bit of exposition or something XD

[mark_asphodel]

There definitely seems to be some intrigue there, what with the Nyna-Hardin-Camus thing going on and Marth there.

Poor Marth walked into someone else's love triangle and got cast as the Hypotenuse. Bad luck on his part. Well, except for the fact that he does end up with the girl he wants and everyone else gets hosed.

Are there any other secret in-battle convos I'm missing?

Quite a few. All the Whitewings can talk to one another, they all can talk to Minerva, Merric and Linde can talk, Merric and Elice can talk, Astram and Boah can talk... and Marth can have some pretty funny conversations with characters that other people recruit (but only in the chapter they're recruited). My favorite is the one with Astram in Chapter 13, because Astram is basically, "Rawr. You are not the boss of me and I reserve the right to kill you."

Solely in terms of gameplay, how would you rank 11?

Out of 7, 8, and 9, it's the one I reach for when I just want to play to unwind. It's just... streamlined, stripped down, the essentials. It feels good

[r_amythest]

Regarding reclassing and stats -- I don't hang out with the Archanea crowd so I don't know common thought on this, but I have observed that the ideal units for certain classes is often amazingly counter-intuitive aside from the magic classes. Draug? He gets maniacal amounts of speed. Myrmidons and mercenaries? They don't. You have to remember that large portions of stat growths are due to classes (which often put growths in strange places -- off the top of my head archer only has 5% more str than pegasus knight) and so that a character's true base stats are often allocated against their class

[writerawakened]

So, according to SF, Caeda doesn't get ANY extra str growth from Archer. So I lugged her slow archer ass through two missions for NOTHING AAAAAAAAAARGGGGGHHHHHHHH *frothes*

Well, aside from archers (Hunters are where it's at!) most of the class movements are more similar to 9-10, than, say, 7. (moreso, because Dracoknights can move 10 spaces. At any rate, I think I prefer the smaller maps/less mov of 6-7-8. It makes it easy to wall up when you don't have a chokepoint.

Oh, I'm not saying I don't like savepoints/battle saves and the like, I just have tried not to use them whenever possible :P I assume they're disabled in HM?

I'll admit, 4 out of the 5 times I've had to reset so far have been because of mental errors/range miscalculation and not a lucky crit (the other time it was a sniper with a Killer Bow, so i can't complain too much ;P)

Also, ugh what did they do to killer weapons? >_< 10 crit really makes a big difference...

Although, I admit, when I saw you balking about tanking in Normal, I was kind of like "What the hell,

[mark_asphodel]

I assume they're disabled in HM?

No. You will need them to get past Chapter 3 in HM5. Or you are doomed to much frustration.

Caeda's best as a mage... or that was the conventional wisdom last year, anyway.

[r_amythest]

Oh no, you most definitely have map saves in Fe11 hard.

And you'll need them in h5 if you don't want to lose your mind.

[penandpaper71]

I'm happy to hear that you're playing FE11. I hope that you enjoy it. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the game as you progress. ^_

[writerawakened]

Thanks! I'm really enjoying it so far (I'll probably be able to judge it more objectively after I'm finished, and I'm pretty close now!)

I'm so torn on Caeda. On one hand her weapon is really nice and her speed and luck growths are amazing; on the other hand, she really lacks in Str and HP compared to her fellow peg knights/paladins. I think the major deciding factor is how evading is calculated, though. In all the other games, evasion was SpdX2 + Luk, whereas here it's Spd + LuckX1/2. So while in other games anyone with good Speed+Luck could dodge almost anything (Clarine and Rebecca are good examples of this in 6/7 respectively), Caeda still often gets hit, and she has a tough time absorbing the damage. I love her as a character, though. XD

Wolf does make a very good General, but I've found the same problem I had with FE6 and FE10 comes into play here: most of the maps are just too big for slow units like Archers and Knights. (Right now my team basically looks like it did in 6: All Pallys/fliers XD)