He's still being dragged down into an incredibly deep hole with the new Fire Emblem, enough to wonder how some of the math could possibly math in this way. He sounds like me when I got heavily - heavily - into Dynasty Tactics, which I was horrified to learn is twenty-four years old. Fire Emblem is about type-matching and abilities, which is already drugs; Dynasty Tactics is largely about creating a favorable battlefield by positioning your units so that, like striking a match, you attack once and it triggers additional attacks from the rest of your army. I don't know that I've ever had to think that hard in a game since. They made a second one, but I didn't like it as well. That could be due to the fact that it wasn't as good, maybe, but who knows. It's also possible that the exertions of arranging and then triggering ten discrete units on a two-dimensional plane so that they all perform in a harmonious sequence is only something you can feel once.
I literally had to lie down after. The last thing he told me about Fire Emblem was the thing that might finally push me over the edge; he says that maps have an opponent but they also have a difficult third faction - I believe he said they were undead - that you can optionally choose to engage in tough fights with for bonus resources. Third faction shit is my obsession. It's amazing in wargaming, and I suspect it's amazing here. There was an old competitive mode in one of the Splinter Cells where obviously it was you versus some other Fifth Echelon style spider monkey but the majority of the points to be scored were from NPC mooks in the level. Ubisoft used to do all kinds of weird, cool shit. Arguably "creeps" in MOBA style games offer that same rewarding distraction from the martial paragons or angels or Big Frogs or whatever the fuck is happening there.
I was gonna grab Fire Emblem before but then I got into this real mean pinball game called Fallosophy. I've only played the demo, which you can grab on Steam. It's good weird. Similar to the foul and hostile Getting Over It with Bennet Foddy, and sharing that sense of an "aware game" with The Stanley Parable, plus, uh… a metaphor for and a treatise on Western thought, it's also a vicious platformer cloaked in pinball mechanics. I managed not to twist and flex my controller until it was destroyed but it was a near thing.
(CW)TB out.
