Fire Emblem Fates Has the Moments of All Time

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@ivanbluecool Жыл бұрын

Garon:even death didn't keep me from raising my kids. Unlike you sumeragi Sumeragi:you killed me so I couldn't be there for my kids Garon:thanks for agreeing with me Anakos:I have a weird obsession with old people

@cyncynshop Жыл бұрын

Dilf hunter Anakos

@TheAxeLordOfFire Жыл бұрын

*[SPOILERS FOR FATES]* I'm one of the few who genuinely liked Fates' story in spite of its... many quirks. I really loved how Fates humanized both sides and how both Hoshido and Nohr was full of good people, on top of taking the twist of being a "good kingdom vs. evil empire" story and showing how much such a scenario would be _horrific._ Garon (to me) is a lot more interesting as a puppet to Anankos than a character, given he's been warped into a parody of his older self and hired two equally psychotic retainers to do his bidding *after* a civil war, and a war that no matter what choice you make, innocent people *will* be hurt. The crux of the story is Corrin doing what's logically "correct" (side with Hoshido to dethrone Garon), do what's emotionally "right" (try to save his foster family from the horrible situation they were in), or choose neither side and try to work out the best solution. Because Fates as a story is extremely empathetic, and that ties a massive amount into the story it seeks to tell in general. The problem as to why this didn't fully manifest into a story people can be satisfied with is twofold; first of which, the writer Shin Kibayashi got so invested that he overwrote, which combined with him not really having experience with writing a game story, led to a massive amount of the story being trimmed down to fit onto being a game, leading to (presumably) a lot of the infamous stop-gaps used to explain in place of character development, which combined with the compressing made context *extremely* unobvious and made the whole thing feel bad to read if you weren't taking your time acting out scenes in your head. It's because of this Fates has the reputation it does, which is a shame because what's _there_ is pure gold once you dig a little, but I don't fault anyone for feeling the whole thing was rushed. And secondly, all of the above was especially exasperated when considering: 1) Each route is a game in itself, originally had to buy them individually 2) Only Conquest and Birthright have physical copies 3) Revelation is DLC 4) Lore is scattered through small asides and supports (this would be one of those games where having a Codex a la Mass Effect would've been a godsend) 5) Supports vary depending on which game you get and which characters you support 6) Players can only unlock supports if they use characters together in battle (ergo viability in battle can play a BIG part in that; not even something that takes a lot of effort to fix either, you can make Seeds of Trust buyable in any level of Rod/Staff shops for dirt cheap to easily grind supports) 7) There's no ready indication which have lore or which are mostly humor or character skits 8) The stories layers become wayyy more apparent reading through all the routes and seeing how things interconnect - that is discouraged with the whole release plan 9) The English localization changed context quite a bit or cut out a lot of details that were in the original Japanese release making it even _more_ disjointed Combine that with all of the other issues, and you have what most would be disappointed with as a story, and... I don't blame them. However, I really loved how Conquest handled the theme of guilt of trying to do the right thing and failing, especially when CQ!Corrin took responsibility for their actions and clearly corrected course to do what they could to save the people they can, even if half of the continent hated them as a result of it. It really was poignant to younger me, especially given I was used to this kind of obtuseness. Fates really is the kind of thing that requires hindsight or a guide to enjoy, honestly not unlike Xenogears. I adored the story when I played it in 2016 when I was 18, though I chalk that up due to me being somebody who enjoys chronically overthinking story depths in general, haha. So you can imagine me being shocked to learn that most people hated it. But in time, I've begun to understand why, I just think it's a shame because a lot of what's there is a lot better than people think.

@samkeiser9776 Жыл бұрын

Imo the problem with Fates’s story is that it forces the player to do the legwork for the story to be interesting. Like yeah, conceptually it’s great, it’s just, the story is horrible at telling itself. Ironically because it tells way too much, it just feels like reading the script of a play written without real nuance, and as a result the whole story feels really surface level, the characters don’t show emotional depth, they just act out the motions a character might do in a better story. It all comes at the cost of the characters and bad characters can’t carry a good story. So while personally I don’t consider Fates a good story as much as a good idea for a story executed horribly. Although there’s still silly things going on, like the crystal ball in conquest, and all the times conquest Corrin kills their own allies. No shade on you for liking it though.

@TheAxeLordOfFire Жыл бұрын

@@samkeiser9776 Yeah, definitely not faulting you for that. I'm just the type who genuinely thinks "if the legwork CAN exist that makes this story interesting with no needed input from myself or other people, then it's clearly got something going for it". I'm *very* peculiar about my words, and I've seen "good idea, bad execution" used to describe a lot of works in general... but it doesn't change how much *joy* it brought to me and others (warts and all), and to discuss it in such a light that I feel as passionately as I do about it. I'm very much a stickler against Death of the Author as I want to understand the point of a work inwards and out, so Fates really connected to me as an Autistic male. To me, it really feels like a tragedy of having such a good concept and arguably good story but it just being a colossal disaster in presentation of what it's saying. And I get it, a story for many people is a story told _well,_ not if it's core identity is solid or not. As a writer, that's a rule that I'm pretty painfully aware of, one that Fates breaks a LOT. But to me, I've grown so cynical on the idea of "execution" being done to ignore downright awful concepts in a story with harmful messages that between having a story with good ideas that explains itself poorly and bad ideas but explains itself well, I'd choose the former any day because I can at least engage with what it's trying to say in good faith. After seeing Rising of Shield Hero make slavery/domestic abuse apologia and Ultra Despair Girls make fun of a CSA victim while fetishizing said little girl, and then to have both be lauded as good stories because "well, it executes it well!", it's made me sick of "good ideas, bad execution" as a concept and think it as a framework doesn't properly capture what ways there are to grasp at a story. But that rant aside, I'm glad you shared how you feel! Thanks for listening to what I have to say. ^^

@samkeiser9776 Жыл бұрын

@@TheAxeLordOfFire yeah, I think stuff like this reminds me of a thing a youtuber (“sideways” is the channel name) said about music, knowing what to expect from a work and having the right mentality about it is just as important to enjoying something as the quality is, pop music and classical music aren’t enjoyable for the same reasons, and knowing what each are trying to do is important to enjoying them. I’ve noticed that there’s things in fates left pretty unexplored that I’ve noticed people love to actually explore, I personally have done a lot of speculation on “what could’ve been” with fates. Because it is a good concept. Personally I’ve always seen death of the author as a suggestion, rather than the correct way to engage with media, if a person wanted to interpret a message out of a story the author didn’t intend, that is something they’d be free to do and there’s no such thing as an incorrect interpretation, but also a person totally *can* care about the author and their vision anyway. And sometimes the author turns out to be a shitty person and no matter what it is they made, it’s something a person might not be able to separate from the creator. Though yeah, imo stories that have bullshit messages are just bad stories, there’s no way to advocate horrible shit like slavery that’s “well executed”

@TheAxeLordOfFire Жыл бұрын

@@samkeiser9776 Sorry for the late reply, was dealing with a lot of stuff on my end! > "yeah, I think stuff like this reminds me of a thing a youtuber (“sideways” is the channel name) said about music, knowing what to expect from a work and having the right mentality about it is just as important to enjoying something as the quality is, pop music and classical music aren’t enjoyable for the same reasons, and knowing what each are trying to do is important to enjoying them." Absolutely this. It's why people like or even love works that other people simply wouldn't. I adore Fates because it jives very well with what I expected it to be, and in many cases outright *exceeded* my expectations, but I'm not gonna act like the game wasn't divisive as all hell. lmfao. But I really do think the game's story is better than people say, I just really think it's the kind of thing that deserves cracking open to really get to the good stuff beyond the bad. > "I’ve noticed that there’s things in fates left pretty unexplored that I’ve noticed people love to actually explore, I personally have done a lot of speculation on “what could’ve been” with fates. Because it is a good concept." I think it's very fun to explore because it's evident the *devs themselves* wanted to explore it, but didn't have the time for it. Combine that with a genuinely likable cast of characters, and FE Fates has the third-biggest FE fandom and the third most fanfics on AO3 because of it. There's genuinely something worth cracking open, which when compared to Engage's extremely muted and forgotten response in terms of fandom, I think says a lot. Which again, is why people love it so much; there's genuinely a lot of good to the games, it just requires the right mindset. > "Personally I’ve always seen death of the author as a suggestion, rather than the correct way to engage with media, if a person wanted to interpret a message out of a story the author didn’t intend, that is something they’d be free to do and there’s no such thing as an incorrect interpretation, but also a person totally can care about the author and their vision anyway. And sometimes the author turns out to be a shitty person and no matter what it is they made, it’s something a person might not be able to separate from the creator. " 100% agreed. There's very clearly nuance to this. I just tend to default the rule to "respect the original creator's vision, unless they're not worth respecting at all". I try to be as canon-adjacent to the feel and idea of a work as possible, and tend to be pretty annoyed in some cases of people disregarding canon context (like Naoto being a girl in Persona 4; that's as objectively the case as is Bridget in Guilty Gear Strive being a girl, and the writing -- while highly culturally-sensitive -- still makes the landing), but there's other cases where it's entirely justified (I don't object on the contrary to trans!Chihiro headcanons in DR, because they were handled so abysmally that it really *couldn't* be worse in most cases). Again, I think it's worth respecting the idea of what a work is, unless it's so inherently broken or toxic that it's not worth keeping altogether, but if that's the case, it's rare to see those fandoms actually form around such works. > "Though yeah, imo stories that have bullshit messages are just bad stories, there’s no way to advocate horrible shit like slavery that’s “well executed”" Worst part is? People have tried arguing for that in cases of "well, this is different" because they were so persuaded by what the writer had to say that they didn't use critical thinking skills. Many people in the West lack critical thinking skills in this digital age, leading to stuff like the Edelgard vs. Rhea flame wars when the point of 3H was that _every_ lord was kind of a terrible person when you remove the protagonist POV, so it's why I've come to believe "execution" is just shorthand for "presentation". They often don't think about what the story means to say, just if it's presented in a way that's convincing to its audience. Which is, again, the core of writing, to be persuasive; it's why I'm all in favor of works that try to have a good concept behind it but doesn't frame it as well as it could, than something that's excellently written but have fundamental problems in what it's saying. But that's me. xD What do you think?

@samkeiser9776 Жыл бұрын

@@TheAxeLordOfFire the funny thing about FE3H is that imo the story is presented in a very similar way to fates, and yet it’s critically acclaimed as one of the better modern FE stories, both have a central protagonist that the entire war swings on, and that the characters allied to them admire, and imo the writing was pretty similar as in it was very “I’m going to straight up tell you what’s happening, what I’m feeling, and what you should take away from this.” Instead of characters conveying those kinds of things in other ways. But FE3H definitely invited that kind of “fill in the blanks of this premise.” Mentality and discussion, because really there are tons of blanks that FE3H doesn’t give us. Hence why people felt so much like debating “Edelgard VS everyone else.” Imo I can’t wrap my head around why Edelgard needed to start a war instead of just settling for just reforming Adrestia. And what Rhea actually believes is still a mystery to me. If anything this discussion is just making me start to think Fates’s story is actually better than FE3H’s which isn’t something I thought I’d ever believe, but Fates’s story isn’t unfinished, even if the writing is stiff, I am a Claude fan and I can’t stand that VW is just a copy of SS, the golden deer is my favorite of the classes, and yet they have a route that has so little to do with their own characters, Lysethia matters more in CF than she does in VW Hubert post-death matters more than any of the GD students in VW. And no route in FE3H actually is very conclusive, we don’t get a proper epilogue in any of them which imo is just super odd, CF basically ends with super important loose ends too. We never get to see the results of any house leader’s victory except on a mural we get to look at for 2 minutes. I think that there’s a uncomfortable amount of people that are so willing to buy into shitty concepts, it’s really not a question of execution it’s a question of what the audience is willing to let slide, or is willing to take away from a story, and on a pretty real basis, it deeply concerns me. I’ve been critical of comments on KZbin videos made by clear “Nowi-fans” and people come out of the woodworks to defend “Nowi-fans” it’s honestly sickening. That aside, Engage is in a weird spot where I think people like the cast enough, but the story just isn’t super interesting because it doesn’t feel like a story that bit off more than it could chew, it’s a story that was pretty basic, there’s some complexities, Brodia’s conflict with Elusia. But it’s a past conflict, in the events of the game, it’s basically ending. The main theme of the story is about family and there’s characters that you can read that theme from, but even treating it the same way as Fates, it just doesn’t carry a multi-national conflict, especially when none of the countries actually have conflict ongoing between each other, because the theme is about a very personal conflict rather than a large scale one. I appreciate Engage’s story for a few reasons, but it’s not supper interesting to speculate about because it just makes basic statements of the value of family and what makes a family a good family. Alear has to realize that being blood related to Sombron doesn’t change that Lumera is their actual parent, despite the lack of a blood tie, Lumera’s support literally changed Alear. Sombron is evil because he uses his children as tools, Lumera is good because she’s loving and supportive, Veyle can’t hate sombron but can realize he deserves to be deafeated. Marnie is evil because her family made her incredibly insecure so she gets really attached to people who compliment her. Zephia wants a family and fails to realize that she doesn’t need blood ties to have a loving supportive people in her life (which imo is kind of unbelievable she’s lived a thousand years lol.) Griss is the family Zephia (somehow) never realized she could have. There’s a potential depth to be explored in the characters of engage. Marnie especially, because what happened to her has some parallels to how predators lure vulnerable people who are insecure in. But talking about those characters kind of is ignoring the entire world of Elyos. Engage imo also has some pretty good supports and good character interactions in them, and its cast is surprisingly humanized, but supports mostly serve to establish characters and character dynamics. It’s actual conflict is between the good guys and sombron’s fan club, and Sombron’s fan club is plainly evil. But yeah, I’ve enjoyed discussing and thinking about this stuff.