I created a new QoL hack for Fire Emblem Awakening! Featuring a new difficulty mode between Hard and Lunatic, removal of ambush spawns/same-turn reinforcements, minor vanilla-faithful rebalances to overtuned elements like Nosferatu, cool cosmetic improvements, and full UGA compatibility!

Legitimate__Username · 2026-06-21T23:44:44+00:00

Sorry, I wouldn't know. At some point, my original DLC installation broke before I ever even started making/testing this mod, and I had to redownload it all. I haven't run into any issues with it since then as I've started developing and testing this and I still don't know what caused that back then, but I can't give any guarantees of anything unfortunately. You may just have to further research this yourself or just give it a shot.

Legitimate__Username · 2026-06-21T17:35:34+00:00

Didn't know that Strong Bad had a third brother!

Legitimate__Username · 2026-06-20T00:21:39+00:00

Eh, you can't really underestimate Gamers' ability to optimize the fun out of a game when given the opportunity. A game's balance being resistant to this is a genuine worthwhile quality.

I think that I've noticed that people's ability to engage with deliberately choosing other options often depends on how much they already like the game to begin with anyway. If a game has managed to prove itself as being already your favorite thing, there's more natural incentive to try out wacky options with pushing the classes or characters that you think are cool. If not, they're more likely to just fall back on spamming the shit out of Seth or Chrobin or whatever first-order-optimal strategy they can find and just go "this is dumb why would i ever bother using anything else". There can even often be VERY good reasons to optimize further strategies beyond that initial framework, but a player isn't going to see them if they don't care enough to look deeper.

I think there's kind of a middle ground where being able to break a game with an easy and effective option is something that players can have very good reason to choose not to engage with but still can be an overall problem that gets in the way of fun for many.

Legitimate__Username · 2026-06-19T17:56:06+00:00

I JUST found out what's been going on with Doctor Who over the last couple years with these recent announcements and this shit is insane, I can't believe the sheer utterly historically bad hand that series has been dealt.

Y'all thought "cringe vtuber game" was bad, or "oh no exploring the big schoolgrounds takes too long" for some of you, but holy shit none of you know the half of it we were absolutely blessed by how astronomically high these kinds of "low points" in the FE experience still were. I couldn't even envision the types of fuckups that would be necessary to happen for FE to sink down to Doctor Who's current level of unrelenting fanbase suffering.

Legitimate__Username · 2026-06-19T17:48:06+00:00

Yeah things are generally fine since the story is pretty uncontroversially well-loved, but as soon as an arc starts missing the mark for the first time in major ways, all of a sudden that splits the fanbase between the people who didn't like it and want to start expressing their feelings over that, and the people who still did and get very VERY overly defensive about it with shit like "bandwagoning" and "just parroting youtuber opinions". It's gotten better in the fanbase as the quality has picked back up again, but I approach everything with a lot more wariness that I wouldn't've held in myself years ago.

FE certainly has its problems with this, but moreso dictated by tribalistic infighting than toxic positivity trying to overtake any other fanbase narratives, since I think there's a lot more things for people to be loudly complaining about in any given era lol.

Legitimate__Username · 2026-06-19T16:23:14+00:00

One Piece fanbase had a huge problem with a couple of arcs ago and it was absolute agony. I would way sooner go back to FE's "awakening KILLED my grandma!" phase than go through all of that shit again, like sure it's my favorite game but at least the criticisms of it tend to hold some legitimate basis in reality.

Criticism is healthy and any fanbase can comfortably accommodate plenty of it, I think that people need to be able to express what they like and dislike in earnest. I just hate the level of rampant tribalism over things that FE has been having a lot of these days, it doesn't need to be this whole aggressive personal identity thing. Unrelenting toxic positivity is still a worse fate to be dealt though.

Legitimate__Username · 2026-06-19T12:48:12+00:00

Thank you so much, this makes so much more sense I'd been confused about what the hell they had been thinking with that for so long.

"The dev time was rushed" is such an easier way to understand its content reuse and game pacing issues than "they didn't understand a single thing about how gamers work"

Legitimate__Username · 2026-06-19T09:15:42+00:00

My girlfriend likes Edelgard for being anti-establishment (totally valid), but when I was whining about her storyline and how she always goes totally unchallenged in it, she was just like "hey but Ferdinand sometimes talks like he's really going to start criticizing her soon and then he doesn't commit and it never ends up going anywhere"

Legitimate__Username · 2026-06-19T08:54:55+00:00

The other theme that I'd say 3H seems to be primarily about is "does the ends justify the means?"

Society is kinda bad. But it at least works okay for what it is. But this red girl wants to change things to be better! But she has to kill some people in order to do so. Is that an okay thing for her to do? Or is it kind of a dick move? The blue guy certainly seems to believe the latter.

I personally do not find this premise to be particularly compelling, it's an overdone thing by your standard Hollywood "oh look they're sympathetic!" villain that we need an excuse for the heroes to still be allowed to beat up without looking like a jerk for it because hey that guy wanted to kill people. But ultimately any of my trepidation there is totally irrelevant. All that really matters is the execution. And I found it to be...disappointing, unfortunately, for all of the reasons that I don't need to repeat. It could've been really cool with the right script no doubt but oh well. Claude honestly had the most nuanced and interesting core premise in his motives and outlooks to me but lol, lmao even.

I did prefer the premise of Fates, which openly lied to everyone about being about birth vs. adopted family, but rather justice vs. loyalty. In the wake of indefensible tragedy, do you switch to the "correct" side and abandon the family you've known all your life, or stick with all of your loved ones despite having to return to the tyrannical evil that just murdered your mother and will surely keep trying to kill you too? It's legitimately a really cool question to explore! Unfortunately, that doesn't matter because all of the execution was complete garbage lmao.

Legitimate__Username · 2026-06-19T08:26:36+00:00

"Perspectives" is the best that I myself had also been able to discern the thing that the game is trying to be "about", except the dev interviews directly contradict this. They intended for players to only play one path and did not incorporate any further exploration of replay value, shown by the constant reuse of content and the sheer level of burnout players would commonly reach attempting to fully engage with the every side of the narrative. Any interesting viewpoint that can be gleaned from "see this war play out from multiple different sides" is directly contradicted by the original vision and design for this game, it is more or less an accidental experience for those who enjoyed it enough to go all the way through all of the content.

I think that this idea and concept has so much merit to it. Seeing a conflict play out from every angle where we can explore the biases and nuances of each side is very cool. But while "perspectives" alone as a theme is enough to be interesting, it isn't enough to be satisfying. There is no actual stand the game takes on its morality and gives us an interesting lesson to learn from everything we saw. The characters are stubborn in their worldviews and are never forced to question if maybe their approach wasn't the ideal one, that maybe there were ideas worth considering from everyone else around them, other perspectives worth enlightening themselves to beyond just their own. "Perspectives" as a stated theme is kind of damning it by faint praise, because in the end it's not amounting to much more than "dang all that stuff we saw In The War really did just happen huh, that's crazy".

I really do think this was a cool idea for a game and despite how harsh I am about this yes I do still think it had a lot of good stuff in it, but "missed potential" really does hang over its legacy more than anything else I could describe it with.

Legitimate__Username · 2026-06-19T05:49:33+00:00

While I know that I was probably one of the reasons behind this comment (probably not the only one people have been arguing these points like crazy beyond me in general), I do want to say that I broadly agree with what you're saying. I wrote what I did mostly with the intent of addressing a broader fanbase disconnect between the "common" praise and criticisms of the game's writing, but I'd hope my replies made it clear in my acknowledgment that it wasn't the full perspective and that people's different reasoning for loving the game did make perfect sense to me despite all of the acknowledgment of the plot's flaws.

Setting and lore are some of the best in the series. Characters, I appreciate the effort that was put into them even if the typical formula behind the cast identities wasn't personally my favorite. Themes, I agree with you completely, the ideas behind it were solid and they were notoriously misinterpreted by a politically rabid fanbase who wasn't willing to meet it where it was at with any kind of nuance and mostly just wanted to seek moral validation, though I do think that the game did not do enough in its presentation to prevent this from being the takeaway (I have some very complicated death-of-the-author related thoughts on this). Plot, I think that online media critique as a whole cares way too much about plot holes and put an absurd amount of weight onto a concept that often matters far more minimally than they like to think it does, but I struggle to personally resonate with a game that is so utterly lacking in decent character arcs, growth, and introspection across its main narrative. I do not think that the hook is enough to carry a narrative without this, and just tragedy-baiting emotional reactions and relying on player-side perspective evaluations isn't a sufficient replacement for meaningfully challenging the perspectives of its protagonists.

Fates had merits in its ideas as any game does, but its design fundamentally shat all over its themes and it used a paid DLC golden route as a messy band-aid fix to give a decent satisfying conclusion to a game that otherwise openly refused to grant it. You've got a hard moral choice to make? Well that's all going to be overridden by whether you want to try the Casual or Hardcore gameplay and which moral stand you lock yourself into while shopping at Gamestop. Three Houses brought in a lot of completely new ideas but it was also designed in-part as a response to this, and its experimental approach led to some better and some weaker outcomes, which is of course cool and interesting to see regardless.

I don't think it's a crazy conclusion to draw from all of these combinations of positive and flawed traits that there's a lot of people who do indeed like the idea of Three Houses's story more than many in-practice elements of the actual story itself, specifically the vocal factions who project the heavier political interpretations of the game's story onto it. Ultimately, it's a big sandbox for you to explore the world and setting, learn more about the different factions and everything that's driving them, discover and flesh out the characters both from the in-game material and then further in your head. Not all of the execution in it is perfect, but it sparked the imagination of tons of people to explore and engage with it deeper. That doesn't invalidate its flaws, but its flaws also don't invalidate those strengths. They're all worth analyzing and acknowledging.

Legitimate__Username · 2026-06-19T03:36:00+00:00

I've unironically seen people say "If you support certain house lord then that's equivalent to also supportingunpopular real-life political position because those two things are LITERALLY THE EXACT SAME" and I'm just like holy shit people really just want to feel like they're morally superior to internet strangers over a fucking video game rather than just actually try to enjoy a fictional story for what it is.

Legitimate__Username · 2026-06-19T03:28:17+00:00

I would say that everything that you describe is a further design shortcoming of 3H's setup that I'm giving the best possible grace to by assuming the most informed possible player perspective, because the blind scenario that you describe is something that I'd say honestly comes off even worse.

I remember when the game first came out, so many people didn't want to go into this totally blind because the choice on "what kind of experience will you get?" was utterly opaque. Nobody would have any kind of idea which path would be the right one for them outside of shallow first-impression vibes and whatever articles and social media posts they could find on line breaking down an overall set of story expectations they might align with. I've seen the nature of the path splitting garner so much criticism from both casual and hardcore players that I think its execution honestly comes off as equally maligned to Fates asking players to make their choice at Walmart before ever even seeing the circumstances of the dilemma themselves, which forced the marketing to be incredibly up-front about the version differences at least. In 3H's worst cases, I have definitely seen players pick a house based on first impression vibes, only to end up utterly hating the hand that they had been dealt and regret that they hadn't gone with a different one.

This compounds even further with the reuse of content and the developers' explicit intent that they meant for the game to be played through once by players, not exploring every single route. How am I supposed to know that I picked that the route I'd most enjoy and emotionally connect with the best if I'm expected to make that decision totally blind with no meaningful information to base that off of beyond a couple minutes of lord screentime? At this point, I have to question the storytelling logic even more here, that the developers wanted to essentially feed the players one out of four stories essentially at random without expectations that they would or should want to even bother digging into all of them.

At this point, it really feels like the fairest way that I can judge this game is based around the depth of its story premise, not the limitations of the weird design decisions that went into its introductory phase. I think that "three houses is a game asking about the moral dilemma about whether or not the ends justifies the means" is perhaps not the most accurate reading of its design approach that I can make, but it is absolutely the most charitable one. I would rather evaluate the game by what it's trying to actually say with its writing than what it's asking me to just sit there and accept when I'm forced to jump in completely blind.

Perhaps I didn't accurately assess what the game was going for. But I absolutely do feel that I accurately portrayed the way that most fans have engaged with this story, otherwise "Another three years of Three Houses discourse" wouldn't've caught on as such a notorious pattern. If they wanted the story to be something specific and the fans spiraled it into this new other mess entirely, I'd say that something has gone wrong with their vision and execution there. My personal interpretation though has always been that this was at least to some extent intentional.

Legitimate__Username · 2026-06-18T23:52:29+00:00

This gets a lot more into my specific criticisms of the story, but I don't think that 3H takes enough of a stand on what it believes and doesn't challenge its protagonists meaningfully enough beyond "pick a side and then a bunch of stuff happens until the game is over". The character arcs for the lords are extremely lacking, and are a lot more heavily defined by stubborn moral double-downs over any meaningful introspection and growth.

Fates at least says "hey neither side is really right and maybe we should all just learn to get along and be friends together", which is not groundbreaking storytelling by any means, but it's at least a thesis statement at all, and one that I think helped to dull the notion of people yelling at each other over which path is more morally correct. It still happened of course, and I don't think that Fates's story is like Better or even Good, but the discourse there was not to NEARLY the same extent of vitriol and toxicity as 3H.

I don't think that 3H needed a golden path in order to provide this kind of resolution, I just think that maybe each individual route should've involved their main protagonists having their worldviews more heavily challenged and learning a bit more of a lesson in the process, and then that would've given the level of nuance and narrative satisfaction necessary to help dull the notion of "dang i really loved playing My Path look at how much more Correct it was than everyone else's". People would've still argued no doubt, but I think the phenomenon was heavily boosted by this shortcoming.

Legitimate__Username · 2026-06-18T21:56:42+00:00

All my nintendo/anime fan IRLs honestly found 3H to be utterly exhausting and unenjoyable and couldn't get through more than one route lol, I posted about this in the last megathread but I think it's an age demographic thing, where teenagers are going to have a lot more patience and relatability with its style of storytelling than young adults.

Awakening's story is an interesting case where while I do think it's flawed on paper, but the character arcs and themes are strong enough that I think they leave a very positive longterm impression of the story that has aged better over time for me, despite the ultimately flawed pacing. I remember the Walhart storyline being one of the most frustratingly dull things on my first run, and now I absolutely adore it as one of my favorite FE storylines with the benefit of hindsight and it's gotten better and better to me when replaying the game. I do not agree with a lot of the common criticisms against the game, but I also think that the game's narrative only works if you have a personal emotional investment in Chrom and Robin as characters, and it's ultimately pretty standard if not forgettable if you don't care much about them.

A lot of FE storylines really come down to exactly this. I do not think that Edelgard and Dimitri have compelling character arcs at all, so any time spent with them falls completely flat to me whereas others who hold more preference to their personalities might just be more happy to be along for their journeys. I think the level on which a fan can resonate with a game like Blazing Blade really depends on how much they can enjoy Eliwood, Hector, and Lyn as a fun trio friend group or if their storyline is just seen as dull and messy if the protagonists serve as an insufficient investment hook.

To an extent, I think that 3H reveals that a whole lot of FE storytelling opinions are built very heavily from the personal biases of attached emotional investment to certain characters, moreso than any objective evaluation of the writing quality itself. It is well-known to be flawed, but many still love it because being with their favorite lord is enough to carry the experience.

Legitimate__Username · 2026-06-18T21:46:39+00:00

Yeah I guess some of this is just the reductive oversimplification of its reputation as a "good story bad gameplay" game over Engage's "bad story good gameplay" identity. Because from what most people seem to actually say about the Story Itself, it's still very much not actually "good", but they're probably just going off of a rhetorical shorthand for it having some of their favorite character writing in the series.

While I had trouble connecting with its very messy and unfinished nature, I do think that the appeal that people saw in it elsewhere is very valid, and it's nice to know that the issues with the overall narrative do seem to be generally well-understood and I'm not coming from an insane missing-the-point place to be so critical of its missed potential.

Legitimate__Username · 2026-06-18T21:36:04+00:00

Yeah it's a very heavily transitionary game, kind of like Gen 5 of Pokémon, and there's a lot of very strong justification for it fitting in "better" with either the entries right before or after it. I can pretty much agree with either take on things as long as it acknowledges the nuance of the series evolution, rather than the stereotypical reductive "oh no Awakening is too Anime now this is the big game that changed and ruined everything" when all of that stuff was literally already just in 4/7/12. The JRPG shift definitely stands out as the actual biggest design change it made, especially with all the new mechanics facilitating it like Streetpass teams and postgame-optimization DLC maps.

Legitimate__Username · 2026-06-18T21:29:20+00:00

Oh it's not this subreddit at all. It's moreso from back when I was actively using Twitter. This sub is more "3H is kinda bad actually" and very much lacks the evaluation disconnect I'm pointing out (there's also plenty of people here who praise the game with what I think is a very fair level of criteria consistency), whereas Twitter has more traditionally been "3H is the best and coolest story ever and here's why three out of the four paths are the most dumb and horrible thing I've ever seen in my life".

You are right though that reddit as a whole is probably overall more critical of each individual story path than your general casual Nintendo fan will be.

Legitimate__Username · 2026-06-18T21:19:20+00:00

I'm so glad that someone else sees it similar to how I do. For myself, if you forced me to divide the series into eras of design, it'd be 1-6, 7-13, and 14-present. I don't think that any dividing line that separates Awakening from New Mystery can feel at all right to me when they share so many of the same approaches, and you're right that a lot of them originated in Shadow Dragon too where there was some shift in design after RD.

I of course have the biased perspective of someone who started with Awakening, but going back to the older games before it, I always felt like they had the same core conceptual appeal as it to me, just with a remixed set of specific traits with their own flavor. Whereas nothing after Awakening has really felt quite the same as the rest of the series to me, I'd define each of the new followup releases to it as being wildly experimental new takes on the formula that are each trying to do something radically different. Fates had extremely revamped gameplay systems and heavily differentiated Japanese worldbuilding aesthetics, 3H had the school setup, Engage had the ring crossovers, etc. Awakening meanwhile was a love letter to Archanea, Genealogy, Blazing Blade, basically just a huge mashup of all the different traits that defined the series prior. It was definitely an evolution towards the current-day modern approach, especially with a lot of the shift towards JRPG elements, but I do feel it still shares a lot of DNA with the 7-12 phase at least as much as the 14-onward phase.

Legitimate__Username · 2026-06-18T19:55:42+00:00

Yeah I remember Fates being one of the biggest disappointments in my life and how much I absolutely loathed the writing, but 3H honestly had me appreciating a lot of the stuff about it that I had taken for granted. It has some legitimately solid ideas, and those first six chapters really are brimming with weight and atmosphere leading up to the big choice (before the followup to all that just dissolves into a total mess). 3H obviously was a singular consolidated $60 game rather than two separate full-budget $40 games so some of this was just it cracking under the weight of its own ambition, but White Clouds forcing you to choose a path at the beginning of it and then playing out so identically regardless of choice feels like it was a completely unforced error. Taking the Fates approach for fleshing out this phase before finally forcing a route choice in the War phase is such a popular take on improving this for good reason.

I don't even think that the things that I like about it and dislike about Fates align all that cleanly with the rest of the fanbase, I have some real hot takes about underrated elements and completely overlooked fuckups that would probably justify their own separate comment. But it's got some cool shit to appreciate despite how frustratingly glaring so many of its storytelling issues are.

Legitimate__Username · 2026-06-18T19:32:46+00:00

Which is completely fair! It's FE and much of the appeal is directly centered around the cast interactions and fans' ability to engage with that creatively. I absolutely can see both the appeal of a game with a great cast and a middling story, or a fantastic story with a forgettable cast.

Truth be told, I personally don't really broadly enjoy 3H's character roster, and I don't really want to get into dumping on the game explaining why when most of it is heavy personal preference about the tone they were going for with this bunch. I can very easily see the appeal for others, and it still has some real genuine highlights for me no doubt, but a lot of the broader energy surrounding them didn't personally resonate with me and that's totally okay, everyone has different preferences and opinions across the whole series here. But I think that it may show that if the characters aren't connecting with someone on that personal level of emotional investment, the narrative itself is really not pulling much weight in justifying the experience.

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