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2goldensnitches · 9 months

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There’s a lot to be said about how bad feh has gotten storywise—it was never a masterpiece, but book 7 really seems to be the nadir so far—and i sure have a lot to add to the many that complained before me, but atm im just thinking about how lazy it’s become in terms of mechanics and general qol.

One thing i can commend feh for is that it’s relatively easy to farm for materials and exp, stacking up crystals, feathers, and even orbs with relatively little effort compared to other gacha (fgo is particularly bad in this regard, langrisser too, hi3’s crystal rate is glacial)—but even this comes with a catch. The catch is in fact the biggest reason for why gameplay is so ass and at least half of the reason for players quitting the game: the powercreep.

Feh’s powercreep is legitimately the worst i have seen of any top gacha game, hands down. It’s become a meme at this point even among non-players and completely wrecked the game’s initial ethos of being able to build your faves through merges, skill inheritance, and weapon swaps no matter their rarity. Does the previous still work? Kind of. it’s not nearly as effective as it used to be and intsys itself no longer prioritises it when their business model as a gacha is pushing shinier newer waifus out each month. Gacha is prime waifubait pushing territory but feh is notorious for ignoring most characters (especially men, and especially from thracia rip) or locking some behind seasonal alt hell while lyn, edelgard, fjorm, and camilla (im so sorry my queen but it’s true) get their tenth overpowered alt with egregiously bullshit special skills exclusive to them that make it borderline impossible to complete stages.

Want three extra orbs for beating seasonal chapters? Good luck fulfilling the requirements for passing with a whole surviving team with no revives on hand to help despite not having ANYTHING to counter infuriating nonsense like godswords and over 80% damage reduction. Bonus points for those extra stage rewards being time locked!

Want to advance in the coliseum for extra materials? Better make sure you have a full team of new seasonals because not only do they sweep the competition away, they also give you additional arena points to climb the rankings, as lower tiers give you less rewards, and so does losing matches, with even a single loss breaking a rewards streak and forcing you to start aaaalll over again for those rewards.

Want to survive those bs no-kill survival boss stages in each book? Better make sure you have an effective counter for their shiny new skills and insane mobility (canto 5!), and if you don’t, then you’re shit out of luck!

Literally what is the point of investing in a unit, using up feathers and orbs to level and merge them, and search for the most optimal skills for them if a new banner introduces another unit that not only decimates them, but completely blows your entire team comp out of the water? The answer is that there is no point! It simultaneously forces players to catch up through constant summoning (and hopefully for intsys, turn into whales) yet stagnates gameplay because the only challenges and mode of play is basically trying to not get left behind. Houses was mocked for making the weapons triangle obsolete but feh spits on the weapon triangle entirely. You can plow through any type of team, no matter how balanced and well-built, as long as its comp is older than three months and you have the newest shiny jpeg with skills that require the length of a yugioh card to fit its explanation text because it’s just stacks upon stacks of buffs/debuffs, cooldowns, damage reduction, and nullifications. Surtr used to be game breaking and now he’s passable if he can barely survive the bullshit summer duo eir/Ymir throw at anyone unlucky enough to cross their path.

“But every game introduces new unit mechanics and skills! You’re just being a hater!” Every other game also makes sure to introduce counters to those new mechanics and skills instead of rendering the state of meta completely poisonous. Adding in those counters at a later date is not just bad game design, but so greedy because it exposes just how blatantly p2w the entire model of powercreep is. Fallen!Edelgard was so toxic for the game that legendary byleth’s entire toolkit was based specifically on nuking her (which pleases me thematically but that’s another story). Now the latest cyl units make f!edel look like a dog’s chew toy and we’ve restarted the trimonthly cycle of a new banner completely dominating the meta and making those units basically indispensable to pass stages.

And speaking of cyl units, they introduced new skills so groundbreaking that they loop right back to basic bitch territory: area of effect/terrain effect attacks. Which is hilarious because not only do they make the elemental line specials kind of obsolete, but mainline fire emblem games have had those attacks for years now; setting the map on fire would make celica yawn. Yes, good for you, griege sniddie lady, for filling the terrain with spikes. That is something we’ve seen before but good for you and intsys for finally catching up to your own main games. The bs doesn’t stop at unit attacks though, because even the maps have not progressed past seven whole damn years of existence: they are still the game grid-based top-down view with a few obstacles preventing movement. No healing tiles, no mud pits or sand slowing down units, no plant material to hide units in and increase their evasion, no lava or evil swamps that can burn or poison your characters and thus force the player to really strategise on their placements like in the main games. It’s just a few rocks, trees, and water that Cavs and infantry can’t pass. That’s it. Fliers just go anywhere.

Other gacha games not backed by a powerhouse like Nintendo achieve far more on a smaller budget. Arknights for example has new challenges in every chapter/banner event: different terrain types that force you to think carefully about where you can place who (as units are also restricted to terrain types), environmental hazards that can either aid or harm your team like fields, healing tiles, flooding shorelines, and even weather damage from events like sandstorms. Enemies/traps can freeze you, burn you, shoot you and paralyse you, and there’s nothing you can do about it except plan around those dangers to beat stages.

Hell, even enemy types are more varied. Feh still just does generics in every single book chapter and legendary clears, with the same infantry, mage, fliers, and cavalry enemy units present in all of them with the same attacks and effects, and all of them dressed as Emblian soldiers to boot. It doesn’t matter if the OfH goes to realms literally inaccessible to mortals like dreamland, the land of light, or even HEL, we’ll still find the same stable of emblian mooks to fight with the same movesets and movement types. It was almost revolutionary when intsys introduced manakete enemies and gave the book 7 mooks snake masks to wear over their generic costumes. Meanwhile, in fgo, if we go to Rome, we fight centurions; if we go to frozen Viking-era Scandinavia, we fight frost giants, and in the 17th century Atlantic, pirates, and so on and so forth and all of them present different attacks, harmful effects, and damage dealt that need different strategies to beat them better.

Even just having a single op new unit on your team in feh can instantly mean enemy defeat, which is especially heinous in the worst, most rigid mode of all, summoner duels. That shit basically forces you to have a new banner unit plus at least one duo/harmonic on your team. The limited amount of turns to defeat an opposing side in battle isn’t as bad in flying fortresses because at least ff has hazard tiles and restrictions allowing only one duo/harmonic, plus far more freedom of movement and team building. FF doesn’t have the bullshit seasonals requirement the arena has and so you can even run older (!) units provided you’ve built them well enough and placed them in a team that has good synergy within its comp. But sd? Nahhh fuck that. Five turns compared to ff’s 7, and a goddamn limited amount of space to move in because the mode punishes you if you don’t move your characters into the designated grid fast enough, plus opposing teams being awarded extra turn movement if they use dancers, and with duos/harmonics basically being built to stall and give extra moves and award/demote extra skills to everyone on the entire goddamn map. Is sd a mandatory mode to play in? No, thank gd. Are there fun modes in feh at all? Yes, seer’s snare, which not only gives extra goodies, but also provides rest points for a team and bonus skills to keep up with the harder levels; Loki’s chess also forces opposing teams to powerscale as long as they merge and position themselves correctly. But seer’s snare isn’t available all the time while sd is far more ubiquitous, and those cycle out anyways while we’re still stuck with the crap thrown at us in the arena and story stages.

I think the biggest issue so far is that feh is ultimately built around pvp, which is never a good idea for any gacha game, period. Gacha is literally gambling! And though other games are far more famous for having worse drop rates and requiring extensive grinding (fgo, honkai, genshin, nikke, counterside, granblue fantasy), they at least do the bare minimum of not having pvp. Loot crates in overwatch and other games were banned in some countries for that reason: pvp is a huge incentiviser for gambling when it promises the latest new gear to make sure you can stay on top of the meta.

Fgo has atrocious rates but at least teams and craft essences have deployment costs that restrict you from being able to run a full five star team with all 5 star ces, plus forcing players to save their main third slot for a friend’s servant; honkai impact has strong units like the herrschers, but in a game whose play is mostly frantic button mashing, any non-story locked (which means the game provides fully levelled valkyries for you that you cannot swap out) stage can be cleared with any character you like as long as you know how to use them, plus you can also ask friends for help; Arknights also has deployment costs at a capped rate that severely limits which types of operators you can use, forcing you to have a mixed bag, and you can also ask friends for help with their own operators. Arknights, like fgo, also has non-inheritable weapons and skills for their characters and just means you have to build them instead of foddering high rarity units to them (with the exception of grinding for materials).

In fact, a distinct lack of co-op sets feh apart from the competition in a very bad way. I can understand not being able to count on co-op/help in the direct PvP modes like the arena, but for story/reward stages to not allow help is quite telling, as is the absence of deployment restrictions except in flying fortresses. Even fgo, where everyone agrees most 1-2 star servants are garbage, still forces you to have at least one on your team to progress, if not a 3 star, and quite a few low-rarity characters like Arash (my beloved) can perform just as well as any 5 star with the right investments and team build.

Mihoyo is an especially greedy company but their games at least allow co-op (with the exception of ToT but that’s another post) and being able to play with your faves instead of having a nakedly tiered system of good units vs bad units who mostly exist to sweep instead of providing synergy to a comp.

Perhaps feh wouldn’t have become so stagnant if they made it into a warriors-type game that does focus less on strategy and more on skills and crit executions (instead of the garbage we got with Nopes)—because whatever feh’s selling stopped prioritising strategy a long time ago. I’m certain I’m not the only one with these complaints; I’m sure I’ve missed a few mechanics issues here too. But I am a player, and as a player I’m baffled over the state of play and why intsys (Nintendo, but mostly intsys) is so lazy with introducing any type of qol improvements or at least address any issue at all that isn’t a “sorry we made the meta toxic” apology unit released months later that you still have to pull for to make the game playable at all.

#fe heroes

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harostar · 5 years

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Titans and their limitations

So this chapter has given us one hell of an emotional rollercoaster, including the sacrifice of Saltiest Boi Porco Galliard and the birth of Jaws Titan #4.

The reason for this sacrifice is because he claims to have “used up all his power” trying to heal. Realizing that his injuries are fatal and he won’t survive much longer, Galliard makes peace with Reiner and then allows Titan!Falco to inherit the Jaws Titan by eating him.

Some people have mentioned feeling like this came out of nowhere, and is an excuse simply to off Galliard. But looking back through the series, we’ve had numerous indications that the Nine Titans have limitations on their stamina and healing abilities.

Our earliest clues probably come from the beginning of the series, when the Rogue Titan eventually runs out of energy and collapses. This firmly establishes that their powers are Finite, and that eventually they will use up their strength. Eren repeatedly goes through experiences that demonstrate the limitations of his power, from bleeding when he overtaxes his powers to the trick of capturing a Shifter by removing their limbs.

During the Clash of Titan arc, the whole bunch end up hanging in the forest to rest because their powers are running on empty. Ymir and Eren are helpless because their bodies must focus on healing their wounds, and Reiner and Bertolt don’t have the strength to continue their journey. Notably, Bertolt only transforms once during the entire arc and is rendered dependent on Reiner’s protection for the rest of the arc. It’s possible that the Colossal Titan uses so much stamina, that its host can only use it once per day or so.

Eren once again overtaxes his powers during training, transforming three times before lapsing into a coma until he recovers.

Reiner, Bertolt, and Zeke are completely defeated through battles of attrition. The Armored Titan is repeatedly worn down until Reiner barely has the strength to keep going. The Colossal Titan’s own powers consume its body as fuel, and Bertolt is rendered unconscious by being removed from his Titan. Zeke is too badly injured to continue the battle, and flees in fear of his life. Pieck doesn’t even directly fight, and is primarily a support unit.

During the Marleyan chapters, the concept of each Titan having a set level of stamina and healing is established. We’re told that the Armored Titan (and likely the Attack) has incredible healing powers, allowing Reiner to survive the horrific injuries he suffers while using himself as a shield for others. We are also told that while the Cart can remain transformed for months if need be, but has very weak healing abilities.

Pieck is very nearly killed during the battle in Liberio, because her human body is damaged. She manages to survive, but her comrades are genuinely worried her wounds will be too much for her to heal.

We’re also told that Eren transforming three times in a row is an INCREDIBLE demonstration of stamina. However, that’s his hard limit and he’s forced to retreat soon afterwards because he’s used up his power.

Zeke is blown in half, killing him in the process. This is seemingly close to what happened to Reiner with the artillery rounds, demonstrating a harsh contrast between their healing powers.

Based on what we’ve seen, I would argue that the Armor and the Attack are the top-tier in terms of what the host can survive. In comparison, the two smallest Titans -- the Cart and the Jaws -- appear to have the weakest healing abilities of the Nine Titans. Their smaller bodies mean greater risk of any damage to their Titan reaching their human body as well.

Which is exactly what happened to Galliard. Notably, Zeke’s rock throws actually knock him unconscious and seem to injure his human body in the process. But the final blow comes this chapter, when Galliard tries to slow Eren down by gnawing on his leg. Eren doesn’t just attack the Jaws Titan -- he CRUSHES the nape with multiple focused blows. He directly goes for the host body, trying to kill Galliard by crushing him to a pulp.

Galliard manages to survive through the attack, but he’s reached the limit where a Shifter’s power has to choose between “Generate Titan” and “Heal Body”. He could no longer maintain his Titan, and has to exit the relative safety it presented in a war zone.

So we’re back to the beginning of the whole thing. Galliard has exhausted his powers during the course of the battle, and is now dealing with fatal injuries. He’s able to remain conscious and on his feet, with damage that would have already killed a normal human. But one entire side of his skull is caved in, crushed by Eren’s fist. He’s past the point that his powers can save him, because he’s ALREADY been pushing himself throughout the battle. His Titan has been stabbed, mangled, crushed, and pelted with stones over and over again. We know that sort of thing takes a toll on a Shifter’s abilities to continue fighting, but then Eren brings in fatal injuries to the host body on top of what he’s already used to heal his Titan.

It’s a shocking and horrifying remainder that the power of the Nine Titans is limited. For as godlike as they often appear, they have real limitations on what each of them can do.

(Ironically, the one who wants to die the most has been blessed/cursed with a Titan that specializes in having the highest HP and mad Regeneration.)

#snk #aot

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