Fire Emblem's new anime direction (RANT)

[nuckles87]

As someone who loved Awakening, I have to say....I can't relate to this at all.

I mean, I enjoy anime, sure. But in the end it's a medium with plenty of variety, and though I realize there are certain tropes inherent to the medium, I either don't experience enough of it or watch the right shows to really get bothered by an overabundance of it. There are loads of great stories and characters in anime (especially great action stories, adventure stories, and war stories of all sorts), and I don't think there's anything wrong with something reflecting that medium. I mean, yes, I've heard some bad things about certain genres and shows, but that doesn't damn an entire country's medium of entertainment as far as I'm concerned.

Going to the points you make specifically, most of them are so vague I don't really know what to make of them.

"Tired story elements"? Now, I still haven't quite beaten the game, but there are some damn good twists in this game's plot, and some surprisingly depressing and heartfelt moments. At times the game did certain things that I simply didn't expect, did things I'm not used to JRPGs doing (being purposefully vague to avoid spoiling some events), and overall its an adventure I've enjoyed. Sure, the game's plotline is derivative in some fashion, but its execution is damn good.

I also have no idea what you mean by "deep plot device". In the plot devices themselves, nothing really sticks out to me as particularly "bad". I felt the story flowed rather naturally from one event to the next, and things never really felt forced or unnatural. When the story needs the characters to do something, it gives them a very good reason (rescuing someone very important, waging a war on a foreign continent to prevent a war on your own soil) without coming up with any weird BS for instigating it.

And this third point I....guess I understand, but couldn't disagree with more. Sure, maybe not all the support conversations were gold, but the vast majority were either heartfelt or hilarious. They weren't just in-character, they ENRICHED the characters, and let them be more than just one-note tropes (well, a lot of the time anyway. The characters in this game could be rather trope-ish). One of my biggest disappointments with the game was that it was limited on this front. I couldn't have certain characters I thought might have interesting chemistry interact with one another. I really don't know we're your getting this "harem" and "waifu" stuff...there isn't really a lot of will they/won't they between one dude and a bunch of potential partners. The romance doesn't typically come into play in many of these conversations until towards the end of their character arcs. And you have to actively be trying to get them together by pairing them up in battle to get to that point.

If your complaint is that the characters are just "unrealistic"...I mean, I guess. By my experience, most fictional characters are "unrealistic" in some fashion, and not just in anime but in most mediums. Even dark and severely flawed characters, I wouldn't really call "realistic". I've not played the other Fire Emblems, and you make no attempt to explain them in your argument, so I guess I just can't really relate here.

The pair-up mechanic is solid. Characters with better relationships make better partners. Characters with an A rank are practically inseparable on the battlefield because they make such a strong unit. Married couples are a forced to be RECKONED with. This mechanic works just as I'd expect it to in an RPG, which tends to leave things up to chance to a certain degree (for instance, no attack in any JRPG is 100% guaranteed to land except in very special cases). I mean, again, I don't know how it was in the other Fire Emblems, but it works pretty great here.

I also don't really understand your complaints over the art style. I mean, every single Fire Emblem game I've seen come west has had anime-ish aesthetics:

http://fireemblem.gameboy.com/gba/launch/_img/wallpapers/fe_wp6_800.jpg

This looks like it came right out of a manga cover. The hair, the way the faces are drawn, the scrawny male lead...this looks like anime concept art. And the in-game portraits for this all have very typical anime faces. So I don't really understand why being anime inspired is an issue now, when as near as I can tell this series has been anime inspired for awhile. I mean, the main character of the first game had BLUE HAIR, which is a pretty typical anime design trope established because many manga characters didn't have established hair color XD (or so I'm told).

And for the record....I didn't buy this game "for the waifus". Nor did I buy it because I'm an otaku (whether or not I am, I don't much care). I bought Awakening because it looked fun. It got great reviews. Perma-death was made optional. That last point is especially important, because I am neurotic about keeping people alive in my games (I have gone out of my way to get every marine in every Halo game to the end of every mission alive when possible, which is a hair pulling experience).

And hey, you know what? I had fun. And I'm coming back for more. It's a shame you don't care for it anymore, but from what I've heard, pretty much the only big and controversial change between this game and previous ones is how perma-death works...