#in azure gleam i really liked felix's character arc (HIS AND DIMITRIS A SUPPORT IS EVERYTHING) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

airlock · 2 years

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a few days ago, I finished the Azure Gleam route on FE Warriors: Three Hopes! so here’s me, back at it with all the opinions and takes and criticism and whatnot

and first of all: again, there is ostensibly a bit of a route split depending on if you spare Byleth or not, and again, I have ended up down the route where you just kill them. my approach this time around was to kind of play it by ear, try to bring Byleth in but not try too hard -- and still I seem to have ended up in a state of the Hevring map where you simply can’t progress without slaying the Ashen Demon, so as far as playing by ear goes, I figured that meant it was time to pass the buck once again. (on Scarlet Blaze now, though, I’m not kidding around; I’m genuinely not going to stop until I pull it off.)

but hey, back to the ones with less warm hands I guess:

annette is SO CUTE in this game I cannot withstand it and it cannot possibly be legal. every cutscene she happened to be in, I was paying more attention to her than anything else. a fair amount of it is just iterating on what was already an absolutely darling design in Three Houses (both pre- and post-timeskip), but it’s also really never been done better than here. I think I especially appreciate the seamless combination of the pretty dress and the heavy ass-kickin’ gauntlets, but of course, the braided loopies also absolutely stand out and must be mentioned if nothing else as a runner-up there. plus, design aside, she’s just as delightful of a character as usual, too -- you see, I’ve been through the desert on a horse with a face--

OH right, though, there was some other character who’s the protagonist of this route or something, and I was probably supposed to lead off talking about that (just as I did with Claude in GW), even though he’s not remotely as adorable, right. fine, fine, let’s move on to that

the thing is, though, if GW was finally Claude’s time to shine after being thorougly shafted by Three Houses... AG appears to be the first-ever route where Dimitri is boring. like, he still has a few outstanding character moments here and there and even a little bit of a character arc, if not one that was paced particularly well (that seems to be a consistent problem with this game, huh), but the long and narrow of it is that he just sort of gets everything he wants in this route without much trepidation, which denies us those intense lows and highs that were crucial to making the character as captivating as he is to a lot of people in the first place, even if I’m sure that a lot of these selfsame people must have been far less opposed than I to a storyline where Dimitri has a good time for once-

least I can say about this route, though, is that even if it’s doing staggeringly little with its protagonist (and, as I’ll complain about later, its antagonist as well), it does do a great amount of good by its remaining cast. where Three Hopes was happy to write off if not outright kill Dedue just to finesse Dimitri’s spiral, here we’re instead treated to Dedue as the center of one of the most beautifully indulgent cutscenes ever. Felix, as well, is forced to mature faster as a result of old man rodrigueroo’s switcheroo, which means he gets more time to show off the less unpleasant sides of character. Ashe gets his clash with Lonato redone with very few differences here, which mostly feels lazy, but it’s a surprisingly huge improvement to be taking that moment on with an Ashe who’s there because that’s where he chose to be, rather than because the church sent him there. even Shez seemed to have gotten a lot more room to grapple with their mysteries and anxieties here than in GW. in a way, I guess you could say that we don’t get no full-boar Dimitri on this route because it put the emphasis on what happens when his support network is actually working-

on the flipside though, it is a bit strange how much of their usual characterization a lot of the Lions seem to cast off as just past teenage cringe in this game. like, I do appreciate that Ingrid isn’t providing any further fuel for the “huhuhuhu CEO of racism” crowd even if she’s not really going to win ‘em over no matter what -- but come on, Sylvain growing out of being a philanderer? five years of war didn’t beat that out of him in Three Houses at all, so what gives?

but speaking of Shez, this time around I played as the female version (whom I’ve named Shez/her, resulting in my brother doing a spit-take when he saw it), and it’s kind of interesting how she comes across as a somewhat different character despite having nearly all of the same lines, because the voice delivery is just THAT different across the goose and the gander. I’m really not sure if I should consider that a feature or a bug frankly

anyway, I’ve made a note to whing about the antagonist, and this is as good as part as any to move onto that, so let’s have a look. you see... say what you will about Edelgard as a character and as an antagonist -- and by Seiros, people have absolutely the fuck done so for the past three years and are still at it right about now, myself included- -- but one of the better points she’d always had going for her was the sheer sense of agency. so you can imagine how pleased I wasn’t by the fact that half the plotline on this thing here hinges on completely removing that. I would frankly rather Edelgard had died (by Dimitri’s hand or Thales’s), or been locked away, than been kept around just to be mind-controlled. that does absolutely nothing for her character, and doesn’t even really enchance the storyline either.

not helping matters much is that, once Edelgard is out of her position as the route’s main antagonist, no one steps up to replace her competently in that capacity. Ludwig and Thales try their hands at it, but notwithstanding the initial disadvantage there that Thales is one of THE most uninteresting villains in this entire franchise (and I do not say that lightly), they don’t even terribly much bother to make the pecking order between those two crystal clear. and I mean that less in terms of de facto rank than just in terms of story weight, like... you know the thing where the Empire’s movements in war become laced with pointless cruelty after the switch there? there’s a reason why this would happen because of Ludwig (he’s cruel, selfish, and not bright enough to conduct things less destructively anyway), and there’s a reason why this would happen because of Thales (he approaches the Geneva Conventions as a drinking game). but there are also subtle distinctions in how plunder and misery under either of them would look, and the game just doesn’t care to stick to either possible look very consistently. is the Empire doing all that obvious stupid villainy out of callous incompetence, or because wreaking havoc and destruction is actually the goal? you get a different answer at different times -- so, who’s actually flying this eagle, again?

all this put together, I have to say, the latter half of this route is a freaking slog. like, it’s the opposite of whatever people must be experiencing when they complain that GW was over too soon; I felt like we were done with this storyline before the halfway point of it, and everything thereafter was essentially a pallid excuse to keep the game going. every mystery that was going to get solved, gets solved before then. Thales’s intervention in Arianrhod is the dead last plot beat that isn’t completely trite and predictable, outside of a few of Claude’s later stunts which don’t really get all that much attention from the story anyway. and whatever old men Hevring and Bergliez were supposed to be doing around here as Camus types, it’s not panning out, plain and simple.

and while I’m dragging things -- man alive, I feel like I’ve gone so high and then so low in terms of the base camp song. I like the idea of each route having a distinct one in theory, but in practice I just missed the GW camp song the entire time I was playing AG- and I don’t think it was just sheer saudosism either, because I’m in SR now and I actually like the camp song again, even if I don’t love it as much as GW’s.

there’s a bit less for me to say overall in this sojourn -- not because the route was that much lesser per se, but also because I’m fresh out of first-impression comments to make. like, the worldbuilding is still great, nothing to report there; the gameplay is still enjoyable whenever it’s not a pain in the ass (although at least now I know how to check S-rank requirements and whether I’m currently meeting them in the middle of a battle, which is a vast improvement-). and unlike GW’s Holst and SR’s Monica, here we do not have a heretofore unbuilt character making their debut; Rodrigue more or less takes up the analogous position (at least until he gets killed in a cheap and uninteresting manner that does a disservice to his great death scene in Azure Moon), but he was already a major character previously, so, little change.

(far as gameplay goes, I suppose one thing I can say is that goddamn, just like some of the Lions were among the most busted units in Three Houses, here some of them have the absolute best personal skills around. the only regrets I have wrt running Sylvain’s Gordian Stroke on sword classes are that, one, he kept leveling up way ahead of the rest of the crew, and two, my brain will now never release me from the jokes about Sylvain’s sword getting longer. ... I guess that would’ve been even worse if I’d gone with his default lance-wielding class line.)

still, in the end, I have to say I found Azure Gleam to be noticeably inferior to Golden Wildfire as a route -- and I don’t just say that out of sheer Claude bias, not when I definitely would not say that of the analogous Azure Moon vs Verdant Wind comparison. but oh well, it’s not as if it was a bad time, per se; if nothing else, I can’t overstate how good it is to see Dedue being treated properly as a character this time.

either way, we’ll have more to discuss once I’m back down from the eagle’s nest -- but I think I’m far enough in already to offer up a few things! y’know, just things like “monica good”, “caspar sounds like he just somehow hit reverse puberty”, and “nothing but the utmost awe for Billy Kametz’s absolutely unimpeachable final performance”. oh, and of course, GATEKEEPER REAL.

#my stupid text posts #Fire Emblem is tagged in this post #Fódlan FE is tagged in this post #long story short: I am ready for the dimitri stans to come here and publically execute me. the beasts intend to slay me

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spec-tralarts · 2 years

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finished Azure Gleam, heres my thoughts . tldr it was fine (spoilers ahead obviously)

anyways. azure gleam started off really strong then became a slog that was briefly broken up by engaging story tension before it inevitably returned to being a slog.

it went like

dimitri kills his fucking uncle and starts a war! > theres a rebellion in the kingdom but mostly nothing happens > oh shit we gotta go fight the empire!! > nevermind we need to go fight more faceless goons > DIMITRI IS KIDNAPPED BY CORNELIA AND HAS A TOUCHING REUNION WITH DEDUE AND FELIX (shez is there but might as well be a lamp) > back to business doing fuck all

the entire subplot about the western kingdom rebelling was really only intriguing during the chapter where dimitri was kidnapped. but honestly i really didnt care about all the npc characters it made us fight and even cornelia failed to hold my interest after the aforementioned kidnap chapter.

it kicks up at the end but really only if you go the extra mile of unlocking the extra chapters. which, sure, extra content, why not, and something of a resolution to shez’ character arc, but nothing about your experience would change much if you dont bother recruiting byleth. which is very shocking for a game that sold itself entirely on being about shez and byleth and whatever drama they had going on. like the game couldn’t be less concerned with that whole plot after a certain point. its nothing. its whatever. this isnt about them. its about dimitri actively searching for as many opportunities to mention how badly he wants to kill himself as possible.

i didnt think it would be but actually the gameplay was the highlight of the whole experience. its fun button mashing and affords you the same freedom of slapping characters in weird and creative classes just for the abilities that houses gave you.

i liked the way that hopes greatly expanded upon the lore that houses gave us, and i really enjoyed the supports (dont talk to me about the dimivain support thats the one thing i didnt like)

overall the plot was very eh. i can appreciate that hopes wanted to try something different but it still felt like a worse rehash of houses in terms of character arcs

also i’m gonna really quickly point out bc i’m still bitter about that whole disastrous plot point;;

before the endgame chapter, an NPC tells shez they would have never been knighted if not for shez and ashe paving the way as two commoners who rose to prominence within the kingdom. no mention of miklan contributing to that. the one chance they had to vindicate dimitris decision to employ a woman-abducting village terrorizing abusive monster and they just dont. miklan was brought in purely to traumatize sylvain a little and then die. what dimitri wanted to achieve with him was achieved with a mercenary and a former orphan thief. he threw his friend under the bus to badly cope with his abusive uncles death and has nothing to show for it.

anyways 6/10 i liked giving mercedes her tathlum bow and watching her destroy enemies with it + her special

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ac-liveblogs · 2 years

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Fe 3Hopes: Scarlet Blaze

So I knocked over this route in about 2 days. Shocking myself more than anyone else, I think I enjoyed it more than Azure Gleam - both because Scarlet Blaze tells its story much more coherently than Crimson Flower does, aaaand due to Azure Gleam’s loss of momentum right there in the middle.

At this stage, I’m not sure whether my favourite depiction of Edelgard is Azure Moon or Scarlet Blaze. I think they’re pretty complementary at the end of the day - Edelgard on a victory march vs Edelgard with her back against the wall... though I did like how savage she could get in CF, while she gets to keep her hands pretty clean in SB. SB’s Edelgard doesn’t get distracted by her Miracle Romance with Byleth at all though, which allows the route to properly address her goals with her character intact - which, as it turns out, is a lot of fun.

Scarlet Blaze is a lot less coy about Edelgard being a villain - while that her progressive-sounding goals and lack of remorse/genuine belief that she’s doing the right thing convinced her army (and some players) that her goals are moral and heroic, Edelgard is unabashedly straightforward about her disdain for the Kingdom and Alliance and her plans for both. I particularly enjoyed her telling Dimitri to his face that it wasn’t too late, just surrender the Central Church, you’ll be fine... after a full game of her quite clearly telling you she plans to unify Fodlan. And afterwards she can say straight-faced she’d prefer if the Kingdom didn’t exist.

Though it is quite fun that while Edelgard is convinced only she holds the key to a better Fodlan, it’s repeatedly brought up within the route (most obviously during her support with Ferdinand) that, just like CF, she hasn’t actually thought through how her meritocracy is going to work once she puts it in place. It was really funny when Dorothea tried to spin that Edelgard still hadn’t worked out how they were going to replace the functions of the nobility optimistically. “Edie and the others still haven’t worked it out yet!”

Step 1, get rid of the nobles. Step 2, conquer your neighbours. Step 3, reform the continent though ???? means. Step 4, profit - but trust us, it’ll be good.

Hahaha... Fodlan is so screwed.

I still like that Shez thinks Edelgard hiring them into such a high station and speaking so highly of them was indicative of her support of the commonfolk. Shez, no... it’s because you have superpowers...

There are a lot of fun parallels between AG and SB - Dimitri and Edelgard’s conflicting views on the morality of their respective invasions for one, or the Insurrectionists vs Tragedy Conspirators and Miklan vs Count Aegir situations for another. Or Edelgard and Dimitri’s regard for commoners, that’s a fun one. It’s just a shame that AG really lost it’s steam, and that despite the opportunity even less time was dedicated to developing Edelgard’s enmity with Dimitri - or literally anyone else, Christ, especially Rhea.

Speaking of Count Aegir, while I was pretty lukewarm on Felix’ arc from 3 Houses functionally being scrapped, I really enjoyed Ferdinand’s subplot. Where Dimitri was side-eyed for trying to give Miklan a second chance, all of Ferdinand’s suggestions that his father be tried justly, that it would be nice to give him a second chance, that a sudden execution would be wrong... were met with Edelgard and Hubert’s disapproval, resulting in Ferdinand eventually conceding that yes, they were right, they should have just executed Count Aegir before he got a) a fair trial and b) before they actually proved he did half the things Edelgard accused him of.

Terrifying precedent for the Empire’s legal system, but the Ferdibert corruption arc was definitely fun. I loved Hubert wanting Ferdinand to kill his father, just like Hubert did, their excess dialogue about it and standing over Ferdinand’s shoulder, killing everyone except Duke Aegir, so Ferdinand could do the killing blow. I was kinda lukewarm on Ferdibert before now, but I’m really digging it at the moment. I gotta wonder how Hubert comforted him in his grief after all of that - the route is not quiet about shipping them.

Scarlet Blaze is really let down by it’s finale. Despite the opportunity, again - like AG, SB spends a lot of time dealing with internal threats or traversing the map instead of building up the confrontations with Rhea and Thales.... who knock each other out and fall off a bridge, which is a wonderful, bloodless win for the Empire. Edelgard getting to keep her hands clean at the end was... very odd for this route - like in AG, all 3 Lords survive to the end of the route. It’s super weird, and definitely brings the game’s momentum grinding to a halt when Edelgard’s conquest gets a To Be Continued. It’s like in CF, when Edelgard doesn’t deal with the Agarthans... except here, she doesn’t even accomplish her repeatedly stated goal of unification. Seriously...

I think the Agarthans actually got less focus here than in AG - Myson popping in to mutter dark nothings at Shez was absent. And the Church... I mean, you can’t really spend an extended amount of time with Cyril, Flayn and Seteth as enemies without pushing Edelgard into Absolute Monster territory (what we already got was bad enough), and Rhea... I mean, Edelgard barely had a leg to stand on before. I’m still shocked Edelgard didn’t want to kill Rhea, given how brutally she executes her and Dimitri in Crimson Flower. It comes off as extremely out of character given her attitude towards Duke Aegir - like she’s being defanged at the last minute.

Really kind of transparent that the Central Church is just a stepping stone, not a real threat. I would’ve liked the route to go harder on it. Seems like this isn’t even the worst Rhea will be getting; Golden Wildfire is next, and apparently that’s where the real stupid anti-Church rhetoric is hiding... can’t wait.

I have to assume Gleam, Blaze and Wildfire refer to how much of a trash fire Fodlan is once Dimitri, Edelgard and Claude have their ways with it.

Like Azure Gleam, the route ends rather suddenly and feels pretty unfinished, so I have to assume DLC is coming in the future. Seriously, 3 Houses and 3 Hopes feel like two halves of one incomplete game at this point...

6.5/10 an enjoyable enough evil romp, but could have been eviler. Still felt like Edelgard was being held back - in the route where she’s more direct about her goals, she’s less brutal on-screen. Gotta keep her marketable though, I guess. Unlike AG's alternate path, this one really did just kinda feel like damage control on Crimson Flower overall..... Dimitri's mysterious survival and whatever's going on with Claude aside.

#ac plays fe 3hopes

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ac-liveblogs · 2 years

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Despite the strong start, 3 Hopes - or Azure Gleam, at the very least - is a very unimaginative game that retreads Azure Moon in the least interesting way possible.

I suspect the overall theme of 3 Hopes is that while each Lord gets a “happy ending”, their personal development is stunted due to Byleth not being around. For Dimitri, that results in him never losing sight of his revenge and instead carrying it until the final chapter - he also remains suicidal throughout the route. However, while that’s not great, it also doesn’t read as that bad an ending for him - his bonds with the Blue Lions are incredibly strong in this game since he, unlike Byleth, becomes the center of their group, so there’s hope he’ll move past this with the help of his friends. However, it results in a very static, bland character arc for Dimitri, who starts and ends the game in roughly the same spot. It’s not that he’s in a much worse place than Azure Moon’s Dimitri, he’s just less interesting. That said, he’s still very in character - it just feels like he never grew past his mentality in early White Clouds.

This game has some wonderful Blue Lions supports, but at the cost of removing a lot of the inter-house drama present in 3 Houses. In that sense, the supports in this game are only good in the context of 3 Houses - without that as background noise, I think I’d find them less interesting overall. Felix, Sylvain and Ingrid are all more mature than their Houses counterparts, which is nice to see, but it would be more satisfying if it was actually linked up with their Houses characterisation.

Dimidue good. Dimidue peak romance. If you haven’t accepted Dimitri and Dedue are in love by the end of this, I really do not know what to tell you.

The storyline in Hopes... it starts strong, but it really starts to dip a few chapters in. While I initially enjoyed it actually addressing Kingdom politics and the Tragedy of Duscar, by the end it spent far too much time on them. we spent most of the route jumping across the Kingdom putting down rebellions or hunting Cornelia or what have you - it honestly feels like padding without much happening with the main cast, which is a real shame given how well Azure Moon progressed its story in much less time. I was tired of Kingdom politics by the time we’d rescued Dimitri in the capital. I couldn’t believe we were getting dragged out of the fight with the Empire to go do more.

As a result of the extended focus on inter-Kingdom conflict, the Empire takes a serious backseat to... literally everything. A lot of time is spent establishing the Agarthans as a mysterious threat, and despite all the time spent hemming and hawing over them we don’t learn much we didn’t already know, and the Empire and Alliance become background noise. Edelgard is a much less impressive and personal opponent this time as a result, and I feel that would’ve been the case even if she hadn’t been turned into a literal amnesiac puppet.

On that note, Edelgard and Claude in this route are a bad joke. Edelgard in particular gets screwed, demoted from an imposing antagonist into a childlike meatshield for all the adult men in her life. Are all the people that claimed Edelgard was brainwashed by Agartha or had no real agency of her own happy now? Claude... well, I didn’t have much to say about him until I unlocked the true ending, but where Dimitri never moved past revenge/suicidal urges, Claude apparently never moved past his initial distrust of the Church and apparently decided to take Edelgard at her word and swallow some truly breathtakingly stupid anti-Crest rhetoric. I was hoping he’d at least be a fun character in GW even if he was less altruistic, but now I just think he’ll be a frustratingly stupid one.

Overall, I think the ideal Blue Lions route is a grab bag of aspects from Azure Gleam and Moon. I’ve sorted of mentally stitched bits and pieces together in my head.

Speaking of the true ending - it sucks! I hate it! It pops in out of nowhere, accomplishes nothing except killing Arval, and Shez and Arval’s relationship is weakened for it! I found myself preferring the dead Byleth route. That said, Shez and Arval’s relationship IS a lot better than their Houses counterparts Byleth and Sothis, but their rivalry against those two and relationships with Agartha are seriously underbaked, so either way the final fight with Byleth/Epimenides is pretty weak. It’s disappointing, because Shez and Arval are very interesting concepts - just utterly wasted here.

Also, it’s a real shame that the Agarthans are just generically, hilariously evil. I know people like to say 3 Houses is morally grey - it’s really not, or at least not in the way fandom thinks it is - but the Agarthan vs Human conflict actually is kind of grey. Or would be, at least, if the Agarthans weren’t Saturday morning cartoon villains. And people said Garon was bad - at least he was controlled by an insane dragon! I was hoping Arval might provide a sympathetic look into the Agarthans, who in a narrative actually interested in using them might really be a tragic race, but, lol. Nope.

On that note, I’m really not impressed by the game trying to make any equivalences between Dimitri’s defense of his Kingdom, or him trying to end the war by killing Edelgard/Thales and needing to invade the Empire to do so with Edelgard’s war of conquest to Make Adrestia Great Again. Dimitri might believe he’s in the wrong for doing it, but the game reinforcing this is very annoying. These are not equivalent situations, and frankly, I don’t feel bad for the Empire getting a taste of their own medicine - especially not by the time a lot of soldiers and nobles are blindly following Thales’ destructive orders. Am I supposed to be impressed by their loyalty? I’m more disgusted they didn’t defect or - if that wasn’t possible - try to minimize the harm caused in any way they could.

This game feels very rushed, very padded and very unfinished. It has a lot of good in it, but it’s dealt a lot of blows by the bad and underwhelming. And I fear Azure Gleam is the good route, so uh. Lol. Unlike Houses, I’m really not looking forward to playing GW or SB. It's... not even a bad route? Besides some strong early moments, it's just bland.

The Yuri content is all good though. 10/10 Yuri LeClerc content. I’m satisfied on that front at least. He really is far too interesting a character to be a DLC/side character, it’s a real shame. I kinda wish they’d saved him for a different game, he and the rest of the Wolves are kinda wasted on Houses.

#fe3hopes spoilers #ac plays fe 3hopes

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