What Games Are You Playing 2013?

[Otter]

Because I remember Elmonster's Journal, I'm expecting some Yattaf fanfic in between the fight recaps.

SR4: finished, with 93% completion.  I have some gripes over stuff that's gone missing since SR3 (what happened to quickswitching among weapons? where did grenades go? why'd they ditch the fun Genki minigame and keep insurance fraud?) but some of the other changes are great (instant vehicle delivery, hacking stores instead of paying for them, that Audiosurf-esque minigame).  After SR3 I felt like there was no reason to go back to SR2; not exactly sure I feel the same way this time, but regardless it's pretty great.  I do wish you could replay old missions from a holodeck on your ship or something.

LFT Innovation: finally beat Zalera and then churned through Dyce and the Murond sequence.  In UBS4 I had to rely on a turn-1 Invite of Nitori the Auto-Haste Archer because he kept one-shotting the ladies.  Rofel and Kletian were both easier than the Nitori fight, going down on the first try each, but Balk held me up for a while; it turned out I just wasn't able to get a Holy or a summon off and I had to get my mediator and archer the turns they needed instead.  Faith-boosting my mediator was a good precaution.  I gave Hashy one attempt and got wrecked by damage split; will come back at him with some Threaten I think.

[Meeplelard]

Pokemon Black: Replaying this because reasons.  Just beat Cold Storage.

FE10: 1-E, here we go!

[Shale]

FE9: Trying to avoid casualties on Hard leads to a loooooooot of resets. I did stealth on the jailbreak mission, which was a giant pain in the ass because of how brutal the boss is one-on-one, and then C11 just had a lot of moving parts to keep in order. C12, the first one on the boat, was simple once I figured out that crows can't attack through the walls of a ship. C13 is shaping up to be another pain. Especially when the enemies crit the NPC on guard duty and win turn one.

[SnowFire]

Shale: Yeah, that's a problem.  The best way around it is to recruit Astrid on turn 1.  It will probably involve using Lethe and SHOVE hype (yes, you can shove people around to get those crucial extra squares to move in range right away.)

[Shale]

Yeah, I've been doing that the last couple of runs. It's a bit painstaking...I should probably consider swapping in Moredecai for SMITE HYPE.

[Grefter]

Man sometimes I think Shale may be the most well rounded human being in the DL and then stuff like this happens.

Who is it going to be and how many strange things does Jim have to do before the runnings are between Meeple and OK?

[Anthony Edward Stark]

SR4: finished, with 93% completion.  I have some gripes over stuff that's gone missing since SR3 (what happened to quickswitching among weapons? where did grenades go? why'd they ditch the fun Genki minigame and keep insurance fraud?) but some of the other changes are great (instant vehicle delivery, hacking stores instead of paying for them, that Audiosurf-esque minigame).  After SR3 I felt like there was no reason to go back to SR2; not exactly sure I feel the same way this time, but regardless it's pretty great.  I do wish you could replay old missions from a holodeck on your ship or something.

The modding team who did Gentleman of the Row and Gentlemen of Steelport are actually working on that right now.  They successfully modded it into SR2 and 3 but there's a few more complications (more global triggers tied to story progress in SR4, I think?) that are making it take longer.  So hang in there.  Unless you're playing it on console in which case you need to realize you are inferior to the PC Master Race.

[DjinnAndTonic]

FE13: just got Henry. Holy crap Dark Mages in this game rock face. I would pair him up with Tharja, but she is already married to Robin because Tharja is awesome and balanced. Tal made a comment before: Dark Mages are making up for 12 games of being boring as hell.

I think they are doing an excellent job.

[Fenrir]

Because I remember Elmonster's Journal, I'm expecting some Yattaf fanfic in between the fight recaps.

Jesus I should have written it from the start, because I've already forgotten most of it already. (Nice link by the way)


Basically Yattaf is strong, smart, independant. She doesn't need anyone's help. She wants to be everything at once to handle any situation: She's a fighter and mage and kleptomaniac, basically anything but dumb priest or dumb bard.
She won't admit it but she just didn't care at all about her old man getting killed by Sarevok in the intro (Let's face it, Gorion has always been a relic to her, she doubts anybody has ever cared about him), but she seeks revenge purely because she felt personaly humiliated. To this end, she's willing to do mercenary work for all the wrong people for more money.

Yattaf grew up with Imoen, and always found her kind of... gross? She sometimes hung out with her because she was seen as the hotter girl of the two, but that was basically it. Imoen always tried to stick with her and never really understood Yattaf's numerous messages. As soon as Yattaf found a way to get rid of her without getting her hands dirty, Imoen was gone from this world.

Yattaf's reputation in the Sword Coast has been pretty terrible lately, and if you ask her it's mostly because she's terribly honest. This one guy called Minsc asked her about rescuing his girlfriend and she just couldn't give any fuck about it. Minsc attacked her and met a swift death.
Similarly, a drunkard and a bunch of druids probably expected more politeness than they should have from Yattaf. They're all dead. Yattaf is very touchy about her freedom to go wherever she wants and I sincerely doubt she's ever going to apologize to anyone.

Yattaf always had the option to have a faithful familiar with her, but she's too cheap to feed him.

At one point one guy asked her a riddle :
"It has neither mouth nor teeth yet it eats its food steadily.
It has neither village, nor home, nor hands, nor feet; yet it wanders everywhere
It has neither country, nor means, nor office, nor pen yet its ready to fight - always
By day by night there is wailing about it.
It has no breath yet to all it appears."
Yattaf gave the obvious answer: A bear. Yet the guy still attacked her. Oh well, she killed him and collected the bounty on his head: Happy ending.

In battle, Yattaf uses everything in her arsenal. Against an average enemy, Yattaf hides in shadows to hit her first target's weakpoint with her bow. She then unleashes any status effect (Sleep, Charm, Hold) while still showering the enemy with arrows. If all else fails and the enemy's at close range, Yattaf confuses it with Mirror Image, attacks with her Spider Bane and drowns him with various attack spells like Magic Missle or Agannazar's Scorcher.

[Fenrir]

BTW I've been hit by a terrible bug that shows the polymorphing animation around Yattaf every 3 seconds. It's horrible.
When I realized this I had saved all over my old saves. I hope it's going away with BG2.

[Meeplelard]

FE13: just got Henry. Holy crap Dark Mages in this game rock face. I would pair him up with Tharja, but she is already married to Robin because Tharja is awesome and balanced. Tal made a comment before: Dark Mages are making up for 12 games of being boring as hell.

I think they are doing an excellent job.

Hey, Ray's totally fine in FE6!  Won't really defend them in any other game though (well, Pelleas is ok, I guess, but replay Only is totally lame.)

Also they didn't exist in every game either, if you want to be technical, just FE4 (enemy only), FE5-8, FE10 and FE13 off hand?

...yes, I'm being super technical, what about it?

[Dark Holy Elf]

Re FE9, yeah, can't recommend this enough: turn 1 have Mordecai use smite and someone else use shove and get Astrid turn 1. I used to think that C13 was the hardest map in the game, but that strategy (plus the knowledge that most of the crows don't actually attack, though you do have to defend the base square from them) makes it not too bad.

[Meeplelard]

Also Astrid, despite all first impressions, is actually very much worth raising.

[Fenrir]

Astrid isn't really spectacular enough to be worth it I found. There are other better units that don't eat exp like crazy. Also bows suck and she'll only have an E in other weapons when promoting.
I don't think any FE Nino-like is worth it though.

BTW

[DjinnAndTonic]

Wait there weren't any Dark Mages in FE9? I could have sworn there was something close at least?

And FE11-12 had a few Dark Mage alikes too. They were mostly just Sages with dark clothes though I suppose.

[Grefter]

Try clearing your Temp folder Fen, it might clear up the bug with animations (I doubt it, but that fixes things normally related to map change errors and crashes upon changing area.  Worth a try though!)

Elmonster's Journal is great times, recommend reading through to killing Demogorgon at least.

[Dark Holy Elf]

No dark mages in FE9, no. FE11-12 has them but yeah they didn't have any special dark magic to use.

Nosferatu, which is probably the iconic dark tome of GBA and 3DS FE, spent FE9-12 as a light tome, so you might be thinking of light mages from FE9/etc. instead.

Astrid's on the borderline of "definitely worth using" to me. She doesn't need crazy amounts of exp to be good (give her the same exp you give anyone else and she'll still catch up and surpass others within a few maps because Paragon), but she is crappy for 2-3 maps. There are many better mounted units in that game but few better who are unmounted!

[Meeplelard]

Interestingly, Nosferatu, sometimes called Resire, originally was a Light Tome in older FE games too.  I think it's only Dark in the GBA games and FE13.  Nosferatu was also the attack move Clerics got in FE2, aka the only way the could actually gain EXP!

Branching from that, I think FE13 is exceptional in that it is the only FE game to have Dark Magic, but not Light Magic.  I don't really have a point here, nor trying to imply anything, just something I noticed since there have been several FE games with Light magic and no Dark Magic (FE9, FE11-12), but nothing pre-FE13 that had it the other way around.

For Astrid, yeah, the EXP gains, combined with how she joins with an equip that compliments them perfectly (+30% Speed Growth, whee!), are why I think Astrid is worth using.  It's worth putting up with the few maps she's mediocre in (ok, not worth using on the desert I suppose) as once she catches up, she's quite effective.  The "E Rank in her 2nd weapon class" doesn't bother me too much because she can pick Axes for that weapon, and a Forged Steel Axe is good enough as a Melee weapon to last her, if you need her to counter Melee.

Now, FE10 Astrid...yeah, there's really no defending her.  They pretty much nerfed her growths to compensate for Paragon's awesomeness, but forgot to give her good bases to compensate, on top of how Paragon can now be taken off her and given to any PC (the only perk of keeping it on her is it's free, whoo?), making her in running for Worst PC in the game.  The only real gimmick she has is being the only mounted Double Bow user in the game, which I guess is something, but it's not nearly enough to make up for all the problems she has before then, and really, the Greil Marksmen are just so much better at using it anyway (1-3 Range on a weapon that strong? SIGN ME UP!)

[Fenrir]

Well there are many kinda bad, mostly unmounted character types in FE9 (Mages, thieves, non-humans in general, prepromoted in general, swordmasters) and she's probably better sure. But compared to other immediately usable paladins she just feels worthless, like those lategame paladins in Shining Force no one ever uses.
Nobody ever cares about Makalov but he might actually be more worth using for example.

Nice try but this didn't work Gref. I can't see how this would not go away with BG2 though, even with all the Tutu thing I added. Right? Right???

[DjinnAndTonic]

Interestingly, Nosferatu, sometimes called Resire, originally was a Light Tome in older FE games too.  I think it's only Dark in the GBA games and FE13.  Nosferatu was also the attack move Clerics got in FE2, aka the only way the could actually gain EXP!

Branching from that, I think FE13 is exceptional in that it is the only FE game to have Dark Magic, but not Light Magic.  I don't really have a point here, nor trying to imply anything, just something I noticed since there have been several FE games with Light magic and no Dark Magic (FE9, FE11-12), but nothing pre-FE13 that had it the other way around.

I think you could make the argument that Staves are already "Light Magic", so it makes more sense the FE13 way.

[Grefter]

It will probably go away if you did Tutu, it will stick around if you did Trilogy because it is the whole thing in one game (I don't like Trilogy).

[DjinnAndTonic]

FE13: Cherche and Kellam are surprisingly adorable. Libra has far more amusing supports than I would have imagined given how bland and one-note he seemed at first glance.

Henry is apparently the RNG's favorite person. He's gained like 3 perfect levels in the 5 he's gotten since he joined. Has the best battle quotes, too.

Because I'm playing along with the LP, I got inspired and fed all my stat boosting items to Vaike. Pairing him up with War Cleric Lissa for the axe-smashing-est good times.

Current team:

Chrom/Maribelle
Cherche/Kellam
Robin/Tharja
Vaike/Lissa
Libra/Virion/Henry/rotation slot

Yeah... I'm not optimizing at all, but I'm having fun!

[Grefter]

Suboptimal play means you are scum.

[Niu]

Interestingly, Nosferatu, sometimes called Resire, originally was a Light Tome in older FE games too.  I think it's only Dark in the GBA games and FE13.  Nosferatu was also the attack move Clerics got in FE2, aka the only way the could actually gain EXP!

Branching from that, I think FE13 is exceptional in that it is the only FE game to have Dark Magic, but not Light Magic.  I don't really have a point here, nor trying to imply anything, just something I noticed since there have been several FE games with Light magic and no Dark Magic (FE9, FE11-12), but nothing pre-FE13 that had it the other way around.

I think you could make the argument that Staves are already "Light Magic", so it makes more sense the FE13 way.

Time for me to spit at the translation.
The hp drain spell is always called Resire, it was light magic in FE4-FE5/FE9-FE10. The magic classification was different before FE3.
It got switched to dark magic from FE6.
Nosferatu is a level A damage dark spell that appeared since FE6. But for some reason, some translated game slap that name onto Resire.

[Fenrir]

It will probably go away if you did Tutu, it will stick around if you did Trilogy because it is the whole thing in one game (I don't like Trilogy).

Why?
(I can just import the character in BG2 as usual anyway)

I just beat one guy I was never actually able to kill. Nice.
It was Kahrk, the crazy ogre mage from the jar near the bridge.
Dispel Magic, potion of magic immunity, Arrows+2