Games you're playing: The 2009 edition.

[Captain K.]

Reminder to Pokemon players in the US:  This week you can download Arceus onto Diamond, Pearl, or Platinum at Toys R Us stores.  This is also the last week to download Oak's Letter (unlocks wild Shaymin) over wi-fi (Platinum only).

[Yoshiken]

FE8: Complete! Happy to have beaten this. Short game, but has a lot of replayability, it seems, what with the split-path and the fact that I didn't finish one bonus area and didn't even enter the other.
294 total turns. Kill counts are a little off, since I'm using the ones in the ending credits, but close enough.
(Battles/Wins/"Deaths" (before resetting))
5. Eirika - 161/97/5
4. Neimi - 166/106/0
3. Lute - 146/112/1
2. Ephraim - 199/149/0
1. Cormag - 212/155/2

Eirika's deaths all came from the desert stage. Garcia died 6 times, apparently! Final team was Ephraim/Eirika/Cormag/Tana/Tethys/L'Arachel/Luuuuuuute~/Artur/Garcia/Knoll/Myrrh/Neimi. (And Colm/Franz/Forde/Joshua/Dozla/Innes on stages that required more characters). Dozla is the definition of glass cannon. Lute is STILL awesome. L'Arachel and Joachim should totally be part of a Bonus Match. They fight for JUSTICE and HONOUR and TRUTH! Knoll still sucked at the end, although the Summon ability is AWESME fun. If only for sending 1 HP Phantoms up against the Demon King. The stats show how good Cormag was. Tana was close, but strength/defences > evasion/speed (at least when the former already has the speed to double). The last few stages were hilariously easy since I'd barely used the Sacred Twins 'til then, so just went through slaughtering with Eph/Eirika/Cormag/Lute, mostly.
Anyways, fun game! Definitely prefer this to either FE9 or 10, although I should probably replay FE10 at some point soon. Hrm. So. Games are on hold for a bit now (apparently!) while I catch up on college work/NaNo. (At least, they're on hold 'til I get annoyed/bored with writing and go back to playing Advance Wars. Whee~)

[DjinnAndTonic]

L'Arachel and Joachim should totally be part of a Bonus Match. They fight for JUSTICE and HONOUR and TRUTH!

Meeple beat you to it.

[Meeplelard]

Well, if you want to be technical?

Joachim is part of the Super Equity Friends
L'Arachel is part of the Equity Friends South

Granted, to get to the latter, L'Arachel had to do auditions for the former, just they all deemed everyone equal, and decided they should make their own branch off (aka the "everyone wins" option won <.<)

...I need to write more of those bonus matches on that note...

[DjinnAndTonic]

Shining Force 2: Got to the Desktop Kingdom. Really cool idea. Makes this comment seem more than a little ironic to me now...

Shining Force 2: It's a lot more like chess when there's not a lot of variety in the moves you can make, which I guess is good, but I still prefer the NIS method of SRPGs.

>.>;;

[Taishyr]

I didn't want to say anything. >_>

Idly, did you have any issues with that fight?

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Use more Gerik. Gerik is a buzzsaw that you feed things in to and they leave in beefy chunks. If you are not using Gerik you are at best a high-functioning retard.

[DjinnAndTonic]

I didn't want to say anything. >_>

Idly, did you have any issues with that fight?

There was a difficulty spike, but since I had a lot more flat space to work with than the Kraken fight, it was pretty easy to bait-and-munch those uppity game pieces for the yummy EXPs~

[AndrewRogue]

I have joined the legion of folks who got to the free roaming part of DA. Digging this so far.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Try to ride the tricycle. Just saying.

[Yoshiken]

...I need to write more of those bonus matches on that note...

You do. D: I remember seeing... one with Joachim, maybe? And I've been here for a fair while now.

And Gerik... Iunno, Gerik's probably a good fighter, but the character is so dull...
I'm one of those people who only plays as the characters I like. Makes the game more fuuun~

*has only just made the crazy connection between Lute and the crazed girl in Firefly* Oh dear god. o.o

[Ultradude]

I do the same Yoshi. I never have an optimal team in games with really large casts because I'll always bring along some people who are just there for coolness, like Seth. Fortunately FE8 doesn't exactly demand a particularly well-structured team. Or, uh, much of a team period. Colm and Neimi can pretty much beat the entire game themselves.

[OblivionKnight]

I do the same Yoshi. I never have an optimal team in games with really large casts because I'll always bring along some people who are just there for coolness, like Seth. Fortunately FE8 doesn't exactly demand a particularly well-structured team. Or, uh, much of a team period. Anyone can pretty much beat the entire game themselves.

Corrected.

[Taishyr]

Tethys.

[Yakumo]

Would take the game apart if it let you give her a weapon. <_<

[Bardiche]

Someone hacked the game so she had swords, iirc, and it let him solo the game with her.

Actually, I think it was near-solo... at least had to play until he got her and I think she had trouble somewhere but I can't recall where... Huh. (the point is that even Tethys can do it!)

[OblivionKnight]

Fire Emblems can usually be solo'd!!~

Usually ~

[Luther Lansfeld]

FE8 is not even the easiest FE, so I laugh at people mocking it specifically for difficulty.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Someone hacked the game so she had swords, iirc, and it let him solo the game with her.

I'm skeptical. They'd have to RNG abuse her to get her Strength to have a chance in hell of pulling that off, otherwise the risk of running out of weapons on maps like Darkling Woods is too high.

Gerik's pretty good but he's hardly the most broken character in FE8. Since it's FE8, this isn't really a surprising comment, though.

[Bardiche]

You can get more weapons from Eirika/Ephraim's storage, yannoe.

I can't for the life of me find the YouTube videos again, though.

[Dark Holy Elf]

If you're using Ephraim/Eirika for that it's no longer a solo, though!

[OblivionKnight]

FE8 is not even the easiest FE, so I laugh at people mocking it specifically for difficulty.

It's...pretty much the easiest, I found.  Which one would you say is the easiest? 

[Luther Lansfeld]

FE9. There is no desert map, no Pablo, no FoW Chapter 19. The hardest map in FE9 is uhh rocks fall or maybe even Chapter 8, which is the three-fronted map in FE9. No map compares to the desert really. FE9 is pathetic.

Unless you grind, but if you grind in FE8 maybe you need to do something else with your time like watch paint dry.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Yeah as someone who has done crazy challenges in both games, FE9 is the easiest game in the series. Bonus Exp breaks FE9 in half. FE9 can be defeated in one's sleep by soloing with Titania until you get BExp, then using that to raise up Ike and one or two others, and smashing from there. In other FEs you at least have to raise units. You can Seth-solo FE8, but not only is that harder than Titania-solo, you can't decide to get Ephraim/Eirika up to speed instantly at no cost if you feel you need help with lategame maps.

[hinode]

You can actually get dark magic levels on Tethys via glitching, but IIRC the game freezes any time she would double an enemy. I can't remember if turning animations off fixed that.

Regardless, the fact that she can't promote would make that extremely difficult, if not impossible; her caps are low and even if you hack in weapon levels, you can't hit S rank for a legendary.