Or did you mean that lots of previous FE fans and other core gamers skipped the Wii entirely because most of its games had gimmicks and they didn't want to get it just for RD?
That was my point. Its exactly where I was. I wasn't going to buy a console I hated the very idea of on the off chance that rogue developers ignored the entire purpose of the console.
But to build off that point, both RD and the previous game PoR were put on consoles they had no reason to be on, tanked because many of the draws of the franchise (beautiful spritework replaced by generic 3d models, portability factor lost, things like Biorhythm and Titania breaking the difficulty more than usual for PoR) were lost, and then the blame was put on the IPs, nearly ending them, rather than the extremely poor decision to put them on the console.
I'm not sure I'd say the Radiant games had no reason to be on the GC/Wii
They had no reason to be with the miniscule improvement to the games. A console is immensely more powerful than a handheld, especially a, at the time, next gen console. So you'd expect it to be a much more developed game (this is still a problem, see the recent Pokemon Sword/Shield controversy).
At the time it was incredibly noticeable how much slower the game played. Between the small, but adding up, loading screen on each attack and the just straight slowness of all the characters (because now it wasn't a sprite sliding it was full motion of a 3d model) it felt more like a downgrade.
It didn't look bad, but it didn't look good enough to justify everything else. And the graphics was the only change whatsoever to the game so it was the only factor to judge. They still had 2d images talking over text for most of it, and I think 5 cutscenes in the whole game.
However, I think I recall looking at some of the Radiant maps on higher difficulties, and they looked pretty insane, so the difficulty was still there, even if the base level of difficulty was lower.
Yeah I'm told RD is incredibly difficult, I don't have much experience with it to judge. I was only getting at PoR being broken in difficulty. Which was worse because it came right after Sacred Stones which is a legendary joke of an easy game without Seth even factoring in.
Actually, since I mentioned the DS games already - I read that they performed poorly, too, and I'm curious why you think that might be.
There was only one DS game that I know of, Shadow Dragon. The other one (New Mystery of the Emblem) was never released outside Japan so we can't compare it to the rest.
But Shadow Dragon was just a fucking terrible game, that lacked nearly anything people liked about the franchise. Outside Japan no one had nostalgia for it (since they didn't start bringing games over until FE7), so it was 15 years of improvements and QoL lost and all the special things that made it popular once outdated.
One thing I remember personally from my time with it that really killed it was you get an absurd number of characters. The game expects you to lose a lot of them so you get like 3-4 copes of the same unit at a time and then are expected to throw them into death. This is because you only get certain extra chapters if XX amount of units are dead, and these gaiden chapters have units you want to recruit, more exp and items. A complete antithesis to the games we were used to where characters were precious. Made worse by the fact that nearly all of these characters got an introduction (if that) and then had zero lines ever again, making them forgettable blank slates among a sea of generic copies.
It also came out years after RD, with next to no marketing or fanfare that I remember. Those who bought it had nothing nice to say so it was just left to obscurity as the franchise was already dying since PoR.
This is a franchise I have a lot of autism for as you can see, and I have a lot of resentment of what it has become with the Awakening babbies.
Does PoR have a settings menu where you can make units move faster
I believe there was an instant zoom setting. RD in the video you saw probably already had it enabled. And you can turn off battles just the same as any game. But both further reduce it using the hardware its on and make it even more static and underwhelming.
I actually enjoyed many of the battle scenes in the GBA games, because the sprites were beautiful and they had interesting animations. As such, I would never turn them off. So having to turn them off to improve the game is a huge step back.
I guess even its harder maps are still easy?
Its not that its entirely easy per say, but its just not a good difficulty curve. Biorhythm adds a huge layer of RNG to an already RNG heavy game. Same with Laguz units who are useless half the time and cannot even promote, yet you get quite a few.
Many units are downright broken either in the super sense (Jill, Titania) or unusable (Mist, Rolf). The game seems to expect you to abuse "bonus exp" (which you have to turn on being able to see how to get, its not on by default) to keep certain units viable. Which is worthless because you could just use it on better units.
They also renamed the Japanese Difficulties of Normal, Hard and Maniac to Easy, Normal, and Hard when porting it over. Which means nearly everyone started on Hard mode, which you can imagine wasn't exactly a fair choice. Especially because after beating the game you unlock "Bands" which is a very important part of overcoming the games difficulty. They are equipable items that boost certain stat growths unique to each item that you can use to properly raise a character. Not to mention the Fixed mode you unlock which makes all characters gain stats statically by assigned each specific stat an exp bar that grows with them, instead of the standard random chance (this one isn't as necessary but for some unlucky people it could be a lifesaver). They also just gave all the crit heavy classes (Sniper, Berserker etc) 15% more crit chance for no reason on the localization.
They also completely fucked up the Magic system. They reverted it back from the Anima>Light>Dark simple tree of the GBA games (where each was basically assigned to a class) to having Wind, Fire, Thunder, Light as all seperate entire trees with multiple levels of each Tome. Meaning you needed your mages to carry many more weapons just to compensate for when you needed them as each had significant advantages over certain units. This is more a personal thing, but it really made mages feel significantly more useless, on top of removing Dark Magic entirely for PoR.
What are your opinions on the 3DS games and Three Houses?
Awakening wasn't bad, but I found the children system underwhelming and boring. If you didn't stop to grind them out, you'd never actually get to use them and because you got them via support between two units it took away the idea of "late game units are replacements for dead units" from the game prior.
Honestly it just wasn't for me, nothing from it really stuck out as worth a replay (other than Tharja's ass), and I truly don't see it as anything above average for the series. I think a lot of the popularity was literally it being the first game most played out of sheer luck, and most people would have done the same if FE7 was their first like the rest of it.
Fates was awful. There are essays written about why by many people, so I'll spare you that.
Valentia was written incredibly well and had many neat ideas, but the outdated and straight boring map design pulled the game down hard. I think that's where most people stand on it, but it gives me hope for future remakes because most games after that had solid maps as well.
Do you think Three Houses took the series in a better direction?
Three Houses did a lot right in the Gameplay area. Maps are fun and quick, lots of units to play with, classes are "set" per unit but you can wiggle around it with proper teaching to get what you want (undoing the problem of reclassing killing a unit's identity), and many specific characters are written and voiced quite well (Bernie pre-censorship had some very unnerving stuff for an anime video game).
Unfortunately the main plot is bogged down by some dumb stuff, like Crimson Flower being easily missed and forcing you into Silver Snow. Rhea being incredibly suspicious yet we are supposed to just not notice unless we pick the "evil" path where she becomes frothing at the mouth evil herself. Crimson Flower in general was admitted to be rushed and misses a lot of necessary story beats.
Also the Monastery was a great idea but it slows the game to a damn halt. Its fun enough on your first playthrough and there is lots of beneficial stuff to do in it that you don't notice, but on replays you realize how much time you spend in it. Necessary time if you are playing on top difficulties too. It could be 20 minutes to an hour between maps spent there, every time. So I hope they find a way to streamline it.
It was also pathetically easy. I started on Hard mode by recommendation and still rolled over the game without a setback. I'm told Maddening is much harder, but to the opposite extreme where it becomes unfun and requires specific minmaxing to have a chance. I find Hector mode from FE7 to be the sweet spot of "harder but not unfairly so" with Hector Hard Mode becoming the unfair part.
All in all, an alright game and a huge improvement over Fates, and for me the best since Sacred Stones. As the guy who bought FE7 on release and considers it still the favorite (beaten it 22 times and counting).
That was my point. Its exactly where I was. I wasn't going to buy a console I hated the very idea of on the off chance that rogue developers ignored the entire purpose of the console.
But to build off that point, both RD and the previous game PoR were put on consoles they had no reason to be on, tanked because many of the draws of the franchise (beautiful spritework replaced by generic 3d models, portability factor lost, things like Biorhythm and Titania breaking the difficulty more than usual for PoR) were lost, and then the blame was put on the IPs, nearly ending them, rather than the extremely poor decision to put them on the console.
They had no reason to be with the miniscule improvement to the games. A console is immensely more powerful than a handheld, especially a, at the time, next gen console. So you'd expect it to be a much more developed game (this is still a problem, see the recent Pokemon Sword/Shield controversy).
At the time it was incredibly noticeable how much slower the game played. Between the small, but adding up, loading screen on each attack and the just straight slowness of all the characters (because now it wasn't a sprite sliding it was full motion of a 3d model) it felt more like a downgrade.
It didn't look bad, but it didn't look good enough to justify everything else. And the graphics was the only change whatsoever to the game so it was the only factor to judge. They still had 2d images talking over text for most of it, and I think 5 cutscenes in the whole game.
Yeah I'm told RD is incredibly difficult, I don't have much experience with it to judge. I was only getting at PoR being broken in difficulty. Which was worse because it came right after Sacred Stones which is a legendary joke of an easy game without Seth even factoring in.
There was only one DS game that I know of, Shadow Dragon. The other one (New Mystery of the Emblem) was never released outside Japan so we can't compare it to the rest.
But Shadow Dragon was just a fucking terrible game, that lacked nearly anything people liked about the franchise. Outside Japan no one had nostalgia for it (since they didn't start bringing games over until FE7), so it was 15 years of improvements and QoL lost and all the special things that made it popular once outdated.
One thing I remember personally from my time with it that really killed it was you get an absurd number of characters. The game expects you to lose a lot of them so you get like 3-4 copes of the same unit at a time and then are expected to throw them into death. This is because you only get certain extra chapters if XX amount of units are dead, and these gaiden chapters have units you want to recruit, more exp and items. A complete antithesis to the games we were used to where characters were precious. Made worse by the fact that nearly all of these characters got an introduction (if that) and then had zero lines ever again, making them forgettable blank slates among a sea of generic copies.
It also came out years after RD, with next to no marketing or fanfare that I remember. Those who bought it had nothing nice to say so it was just left to obscurity as the franchise was already dying since PoR.
This is a franchise I have a lot of autism for as you can see, and I have a lot of resentment of what it has become with the Awakening babbies.
I believe there was an instant zoom setting. RD in the video you saw probably already had it enabled. And you can turn off battles just the same as any game. But both further reduce it using the hardware its on and make it even more static and underwhelming.
I actually enjoyed many of the battle scenes in the GBA games, because the sprites were beautiful and they had interesting animations. As such, I would never turn them off. So having to turn them off to improve the game is a huge step back.
Its not that its entirely easy per say, but its just not a good difficulty curve. Biorhythm adds a huge layer of RNG to an already RNG heavy game. Same with Laguz units who are useless half the time and cannot even promote, yet you get quite a few.
Many units are downright broken either in the super sense (Jill, Titania) or unusable (Mist, Rolf). The game seems to expect you to abuse "bonus exp" (which you have to turn on being able to see how to get, its not on by default) to keep certain units viable. Which is worthless because you could just use it on better units.
They also renamed the Japanese Difficulties of Normal, Hard and Maniac to Easy, Normal, and Hard when porting it over. Which means nearly everyone started on Hard mode, which you can imagine wasn't exactly a fair choice. Especially because after beating the game you unlock "Bands" which is a very important part of overcoming the games difficulty. They are equipable items that boost certain stat growths unique to each item that you can use to properly raise a character. Not to mention the Fixed mode you unlock which makes all characters gain stats statically by assigned each specific stat an exp bar that grows with them, instead of the standard random chance (this one isn't as necessary but for some unlucky people it could be a lifesaver). They also just gave all the crit heavy classes (Sniper, Berserker etc) 15% more crit chance for no reason on the localization.
They also completely fucked up the Magic system. They reverted it back from the Anima>Light>Dark simple tree of the GBA games (where each was basically assigned to a class) to having Wind, Fire, Thunder, Light as all seperate entire trees with multiple levels of each Tome. Meaning you needed your mages to carry many more weapons just to compensate for when you needed them as each had significant advantages over certain units. This is more a personal thing, but it really made mages feel significantly more useless, on top of removing Dark Magic entirely for PoR.
Awakening wasn't bad, but I found the children system underwhelming and boring. If you didn't stop to grind them out, you'd never actually get to use them and because you got them via support between two units it took away the idea of "late game units are replacements for dead units" from the game prior.
Honestly it just wasn't for me, nothing from it really stuck out as worth a replay (other than Tharja's ass), and I truly don't see it as anything above average for the series. I think a lot of the popularity was literally it being the first game most played out of sheer luck, and most people would have done the same if FE7 was their first like the rest of it.
Fates was awful. There are essays written about why by many people, so I'll spare you that.
Valentia was written incredibly well and had many neat ideas, but the outdated and straight boring map design pulled the game down hard. I think that's where most people stand on it, but it gives me hope for future remakes because most games after that had solid maps as well.
Three Houses did a lot right in the Gameplay area. Maps are fun and quick, lots of units to play with, classes are "set" per unit but you can wiggle around it with proper teaching to get what you want (undoing the problem of reclassing killing a unit's identity), and many specific characters are written and voiced quite well (Bernie pre-censorship had some very unnerving stuff for an anime video game).
Unfortunately the main plot is bogged down by some dumb stuff, like Crimson Flower being easily missed and forcing you into Silver Snow. Rhea being incredibly suspicious yet we are supposed to just not notice unless we pick the "evil" path where she becomes frothing at the mouth evil herself. Crimson Flower in general was admitted to be rushed and misses a lot of necessary story beats.
Also the Monastery was a great idea but it slows the game to a damn halt. Its fun enough on your first playthrough and there is lots of beneficial stuff to do in it that you don't notice, but on replays you realize how much time you spend in it. Necessary time if you are playing on top difficulties too. It could be 20 minutes to an hour between maps spent there, every time. So I hope they find a way to streamline it.
It was also pathetically easy. I started on Hard mode by recommendation and still rolled over the game without a setback. I'm told Maddening is much harder, but to the opposite extreme where it becomes unfun and requires specific minmaxing to have a chance. I find Hector mode from FE7 to be the sweet spot of "harder but not unfairly so" with Hector Hard Mode becoming the unfair part.
All in all, an alright game and a huge improvement over Fates, and for me the best since Sacred Stones. As the guy who bought FE7 on release and considers it still the favorite (beaten it 22 times and counting).