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Why Romance Writers Shouldn’t Play Fire Emblem

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I mentioned here that romance writers shouldn’t be gamers.

That wasn’t correct.

Really, what I should have said, was romance writers shouldn’t play Fire Emblem games.

I try to mitigate any spoilers ahead, but fair warning, I do talk about some later game stuff.

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Yes, these.

I struggled with my playthrough of Fire Emblem Fates Birthright when the game killed two of the main characters and I could do nothing to save them. In the Fire Emblem franchise, characters can die. Permanently. However, you can usually avoid this by having an appropriate “rank” with them. Or not getting them killed in battle. This was different.

Then Fire Emblem Fates Conquest killed a different two characters. Both games sit unfinished because I just can’t…I have Revelation, which my husband says I should just play as it’s the “canon” version and no one has to die, but I haven’t yet.

Then I bought Fire Emblem Three Houses that just came out.

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This one.

A strategy game with a complicated admin system, more lovable crazy characters, and a female House lead?!? YES, please!

As I played through the intro, I discovered you must pick one path, and one of the three paths you can pick is leading knights.

You wanna talk about my catnip!

CatNip

Sorry Edelgard, there are knights over here.

Except, I should have known better. Remember the other games? Remember the issue with basic writing even in a sandbox world?

I am over half-way through the playthrough, even with all of the min-maxing I have been doing. Why do so many games have a fishing component?!?

But I digress.

At this point, I want to slap the main character I am supposed to be helping.

Dracor help me, but if he doesn’t stop whining, pick himself up, and be the savior king so many people have sacrificed so much for, be the king his people desperately need, the king he promised he’d be…

If I were allowed to go off the gaming rails, my character would first try to help him. I know, novel thought, right? Why isn’t that an option?!? Her charisma is through the roof.

Anyway, if kindness didn’t work, she would slap him. Hard. Her strength is through the roof, too. And she’d make him get a haircut. At least look like a king. Seriously. My character would be kind enough to have a super mutant follower, but she is not going to tolerate abusive and self-harming ways. Kingdom harming ways.

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Suck it up and be a knight.

I am not certain the writers can save the knight who is supposed to become king in my eyes. I guess we’ll see, but given previous game writing, I am skeptical. When you have made a character fall so far, become so unlikable, the plot crucible it takes to bring them back is that much greater.

I understand that he is probably suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome and crushing depression. I get it. But I still need him to be redeemable instead of a homicidal maniac I wouldn’t put in charge of a boy scout troop much less an entire kingdom.

This game has become a family affair as I have been playing it on the big screen in the living room, and my family will not let me put it down half way.

But I want my happy ending. I want my happily ever after. I want the characters to have earned it.

Yes, I already know this series isn’t known for that. And I figured out character recruiting late…

I want the same cathartic release I get when I finish a book, but on a grander scale as I have put so many more hours into this game.

I should have picked Edelgard.

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Yes, you should have.

Why Romance Writers Shouldn’t Be Gamers

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As you may or may not know, in addition to writing, I enjoy playing video games.

We played World of Warcraft back when it was vanilla. I remember when Burning Crusades was released…yeah, I just aged myself. We decided online games were not for us. We explored other games, and fell in love with many fan favorites: Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed etc.

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Not even going to confess how many hours we spent on this game.

My disappointment that many of these games abandoned decent writing in a desperate attempt to create a MMO (looking at you Mass Effect) aside, you will note that many of these are open worlds. Giant sandboxes to play in with little or no plot. Why? Because as Assassin’s Creed taught me when they killed the main protagonist (Desmond Miles, not Ezio or the various other past lives you jump into), the concept of story is not something most gaming companies do well.

So give me Fallout where I roam the wastes to find my father and basically get to explore, find cool stuff, and the like. Which, incidentally, is another game where their story-telling was SO bad they had to patch the ending. The game is so old I won’t consider this a spoiler, but literally most of your companions could complete the ending quest of walking into the radioactive room without being harmed (robots) or actually being healed (super mutant – which yes, I was such a goody-two-shoes I had one as my companion), but nope, you had to do it and die…for reasons… Yeah, they had to patch that. Not even their core gamer population was swallowing that.

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And you know I have every one of these.

 

Fallout is not kid friendly. Especially not the way we play with the one shot, one kill mentality. Yes, we like to play snipers in our house. As we play through Skyrim and find ourselves already able to sneak without penalty in our full daedric armor before ever find the Nightingale quest line…

But we have not yet figured out a way to turn off the graphic violence of a head shot in these games, and the heads on pikes in Fallout are not for children. So kids has meant we turned to many old favorites that are family friendly, like the Legend of Zelda and Mario Kart.

As part of this, we bought Super Smash Brothers mostly to get a chance to play the characters from a whole slew of different games.

Because my daughter desperately wanted to play Zelda.

Sad that Zelda was not even a favorite in the game…But there was this whole slew of characters I had never seen before that intrigued me. So, I started checking into their games, figuring they would be more games I could share with my kids as they were all Nintendo…

 

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Fire Emblem Fates

Ummm, yeah. I got sucked into the Fire Emblem series in 2019 through Super Smash Brothers as so many got sucked into it over two decades ago when Smash Brother came out on the Nintendo 64. The only reason Nintendo even brought Fire Emblem to the US was how many people wanted it after playing Smash Brothers back then.

Fire Emblem. A strategy game, with crazy characters that I build relationships with so I can marry them off then recruit their kids to my team?!? This exists? And no one told me?

I discovered my ultimate gamer catnip.

CatNip

Or so I thought.

Then I learned the hard way. The Fire Emblem series doesn’t believe in happily ever after.

 

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

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Game: Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild

Rated: E for Everyone

Status: Worth Playing

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You can see more about it here.

Overview

Zelda’s been around since I was a kid, so it was fun to share it with my almost-kindergartner. She loves the game.

I’ve heard it called Skyrim for Zelda, and that’s not an inaccurate description.

 

Pros

  • It’s E for everyone, so the violence is cartoon in nature (think Road Runner or Bugs Bunny).

 

  • Bad Guys – Anything Link kills looks like a monster. These monsters come back alive at the next Blood Moon, so they don’t truly stay dead.

 

  • Not Scary – My daughter can be scared by My Little Pony. There was nothing in this game that truly scared her until we got to Gannon at the end. She would occasionally get frustrated with the puzzles in the game, but that’s okay.

 

  • Puzzles – The puzzles are challenging and thoughtful. Not something DD1 could solve on her own, but it challenged her to come up with ideas as even DH and I weren’t able to solve all of them easily.

 

  • Memories – We all enjoyed collecting “memories” (Link has lost his) and seeing what happened that led up to the post-apocalyptic world you start in. It let us get to see the way Zelda and Link went from an adversarial relationship, to friends, to something much deeper.

 

  • Environment – Environment becomes a factor to consider rather than just a backdrop: skeleton monsters come out of the ground at night, rain makes climbing more difficult, the sun rises and sets, the moon rises and sets, there are phases of the moon, etc. Many of these things actually feature in the gameplay, such as being properly equipped for the freezing mountain temperatures.

 

  • Load Screens– The load screens reasonable in length. Bethesda could learn a few things about this.

 

  • Armor Sets – DD1 loved the fact that Link could change his clothes, and she was very mindful that he didn’t overheat or freeze. These outfits were all upgradable, and really needed to be upgraded as you faced tougher monsters.

 

  • Rewards Worth the Challenge – Some things were always a challenge. Lynells and guardians, for example, are never a cake walk even at end game. You are rewarded for the effort with amazing weapons.

 

Cons

  • Gender Roles – It reinforces traditional gender roles. Zelda is the one who can’t master her power. Zelda is the one who falls crying to the ground. Zelda is the one yelled at by her father. Link is the one that has to save her. Blah. I almost didn’t buy the game because of this. Little girls get enough of this garbage without stuff like this reinforcing it. The game was originally going to feature the ability to choose whether you played Zelda or Link as the hero. I hope they release DLC that allows this. It wouldn’t be that difficult of a change. Not really. And it would let little girls see a girl kicking Bokoblin butt. I’ve tried to convince DD1 to think of Link as a girl, but she’s having none of it. Already. This is why not giving girls the option to play a girl is so awful.

 

  • Graphics – Enough said.
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Frankly, the graphics from 2006 Twilight Princess were better.
  • Ending – I won’t spoil the ending, but we were disappointed. Not with the game play, per se, but I wanted the traditional cathartic release you expect at the end of a game. Especially a game this long. I didn’t get it, and I didn’t get to keep playing to finish up all those armor upgrades. Once you defeat Gannon, the whole thing is over even if you haven’t finished exploring. Hoping for a DLC on this where you can have Zelda as a companion and keep investigating the world. Seems wrong to leave the princess in the tower holding Gannon at bay while I explore the expansive world.

 

  • Controls – Unlike Mario Kart that my almost-kindergartener can not only play by herself, but give her father a run for first place, the controls for BOTW (Breath of the Wild) are complex. Even my husband had some issues at times. This was not a game DD1 could play on her own.

 

  • Tedious Upgrades – Some of the clothing upgrades grew tedious. How many times do I really need to camp the dragons to shoot some part of them?

 

  • No Real Story – There main story is pretty sparse, though the memories help. It’s really just: defeat Big Bad or else he will unleash total devastation. No explanation as to why, no character development, not even for Link or Zelda. And there’s clearly a huge opportunity with this with all Zelda has to do to unlock her power. Not even any really good side stories for Link to get involved in as he tries to regain enough strength to defeat Gannon. I suppose this is par for video games, which is really sad. They have the opportunity to do so much more.

 

All in, if you aren’t worried about the gender stereotypes, it’s well worth a play through.

Best Game Purchase of 2015/2016

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When Fallout 4 came out, DH bought it the day it was released.

I rolled my eyes when he brought it home. We have 2 small children, and the only time he could play it is on the weekends when the kids are napping or at night, after they go to bed. But he really wanted to play it.

He’s been a fan of the series since it first came out back in ye olde 90s, and he introduced it to me with Fallout 3 and later New Vegas. He played them on the PS3 that was attached to the big screen in our living room. I didn’t get his attraction to the game at first. The plot was flimsy, the characters shallow and uninteresting, and the world irredeemable.

But the longer he played, the more I got into it. It’s like your own mini-dystopia to play in. Whether you’re snooping around Cthuluesque Dunwich building, listening to holotapes of the corruption of the pre-bomb world, exploring Zetan spaceships, or kicking the tar out of the enclave, you’re free to roam and explore. And Bethesda has purposely put interesting things in all sorts of random places to get you to explore.

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Fallout 4 is much the same, and has lured us in just as Fallout 3 and New Vegas did.

The story stinks and I convinced DH not to finish it so that “we” can stay friends with the Institute, Railroad, Minutemen, and Brotherhood. Bethesda won’t give us a “perfect” ending and is trying to show how the world never gets better. People never learn. Blah, blah , blah. Or, they’re just trying to keep their franchise around . . .

Whatever. They all need me to be their rain maker, so they can all suck it and not kill each other on my watch.

There are few living plants and no trees, which DH is quick to point out is ridiculous after 200 years. Just look at Chernobyl, Nagasaki, or Hiroshima. And it hasn’t been anywhere near 200 years. Much of the science is altogether bogus, and few of the characters are more than mildly interesting.

And, of course, there are other things that keep our interest . . .

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Just freakin’ remember to take out the fusion cores before you leave.

Still, we were both super excited for the Nuka World release a couple of weeks ago. So much to do. So much to explore. Better than Far Harbor, in my opinion. And so many raiders to figure out how to back-stab while trying to do as many quests as possible before “we” turn on them. Ahhh, Fallout 4 at its best! Interesting things to see, do, and explore, but no real depth to any of them.

Getting back and forth to the Commonwealth to defend your settlements can be a bit of a pain, and you would think the settlements could protect themselves, especially after equipping all the settlers with full combat armor, grenades, energy weapons, and a boatload of turrets.

But they can’t, so back we go.

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Perhaps the most fun is making up your own characters and situations.

DH is also a writer, so we create characters in the world that are just our own. Filling them in with backstories and other interesting bits. Perhaps the Sole Survivor comes across them, perhaps not, but the world of Fallout is rich and gives a fertile playground for the imagination.

It’s also fun because we both have favorite factions, and they’re not the same. I am torn between the Brotherhood I want them to be (like under Lyons) and the Institute with my much more ethical Sole Survivor in charge. (Shaun, what happened to you?!?)

Whereas DH swings hard towards he Minutemen and to a lesser extent, the Railroad.

So while the game is less than perfect, it is a fun playground for our imaginations. That, alone, is worth what we spent on the game and the DLC pass.

 

How about you? Have you played any of the Fallout Games? Did you like them? Hate them? Play any other fabulous games lately? What did you like about those?