LogFAQs > #934772791

Let's get negative! This will spoil Path of Radiance (albeit stuff that I'm sure everyone knows, but still, you've been warned)

The Bad

5. Path of Radiance Chapter 27 - Moment of Fate

https://www.fireemblemwod.com/fe9/guia/cap27.htm

Hard to get a good picture for this given it's a two parter where the first part is quite large. I imagine people know it pretty well anyway, especially the part that really counts.

The first part of the map is pretty much irrelevant to be honest, it's just a generic Path of Radiance map. It's fine enough in a vacuum but like everything in Path of Radiance it's dragged down by the horribly slow animations. Even map animations in this game take forever compared to other entries, and there's no way to skip those. So that sucks, but it's not the end of the world and on its own it wouldn't matter. This is hardly the worst example of it anyway.

The important part, of course, is the big, "epic" final showdown between Ike and the Black Knight, which proves to be a treatise on how to not to design a Fire Emblem game. You know how Fire Emblem is usually this kind of strategy game thingy where you look at the situation and try to decide what to do? Well, fuck that. Here's a (mostly) one on one where there's nothing to think about. You and the Burger King just take turns bashing each other, with the only strategic consideration being if you've read online that BK can't activate Luna at 2 range (which is pretty bizarre considering your units can do it if I'm not mistaken). So in other words, without information the game doesn't provide, there's nothing to even think about here. I mean, I guess there's the decision of when to heal or not, but that's simple to the point that it's not really a decision, it's just "will you try to win, or will you kill yourself for lulz?" I suppose you could also argue that what to do with Mist when the enemies go after her is also a decision...which tells you something about how much this falls flat when Ike's big "epic" duel is overshadowed by his little sisters efforts to handle generic dudes.

The biggest issues here are A) that if you lose, you have to replay the entire chapter, and B) the heavy RNG/foreknowledge reliant nature of the fight. The first part is obvious in why it's stupid, and this is where the lengthy PoR animations *do* get very frustrating. Thankfully you can just choose to run away if you want, but if the defense of the Burger King encounter has to be "you can choose to not bother with the thing the story desperately wants you to believe is vitally important to Ike", it's clearly not very well executed.

The second part is that if you don't know to drop one of the incredibly rare and missable Occult Scrolls on Ike (or Wrath, but that has issues of its own, notably that it generally forces you to stay in death range of Luna to use), you're entirely reliant on having pretty much all of your attacks hit while Mist is able to survive and keep Ike healed enough to let him attack every turn. Ike's accuracy will usually be pretty good, sure, but even at level 20 on average it's not perfect, hovering around 90ish, with biorhythm potentially ruining things. This is also dependent on you having trained Mist enough for her to survive the generics and heal Ike enough, so have fun if you were "foolish" enough to not just magically know that this seemingly unimpressive unit would become vitally important to resolving a major plot point via gameplay. With skills involved you're less reliant on Mist, but you still need the RNG to cooperate, and of course if your Ike didn't level up well enough, or if you didn't use him much (not unreasonable at all in a game that, like many, is not friendly to sword locked foot units) you can be unavoidably fucked.

This writeups mostly don't focus on story but since this battle is entirely built around resolving this whole Ike vs Black Knight plot it's unavoidable here. The game has spent all this time hyping up the BK as a big deal that Ike will eventually have to fight to get his revenge, which is why the "just run away bro" options rings hollow when it basically means that in the story, Ike is admitting he sucks and the Burger King is just too cool for him and there's never any resolution.

The problem is...the Black Knight is a terrible, boring villain who is impossible to take seriously. He's either a generic evil dude or just a generic generic dude, depending on the scene. His entire hype falls apart when you realize he's pretty much a chump relying on his invincible armor to carry him. He might seem cool when he beats Greil in a stiff and awkward cutscene where Greil apparently forgets he can move halfway through, but then you realize his mission was to acquire the medallion, and he failed to even do that because he heard Caineghis coming and ran away. Like, as soon as someone that can bypass his armor and actually fight him is on the way, he immediately runs instead of trying to achieve his goal. When he goes after Leanne he waits until Tibarn is out of the way. Hell, if you run from the fight he gets wrecked by Nasir! His presentation kind of works at first, but when you really think about it, this dude is a loser who can't do anything on his own, his biggest achievement being killing a crippled guy while being invincible due to powers not his own (sure he tried to hand Ragnell to Greil, but without the explanation of why it was important the whole thing rings hollow). And when he's such a dull, non-entity of a character, the fact that he can't even fulfill his purpose of seeming like a threat is pretty pathetic.

I think this fight proves one thing above all else - this kind of "epic" one on one (sort of) duel does not work in Fire Emblem. You either end up with furious people patiently waiting twenty turns for their revenge (which is a good chapter, don't get me wrong, but that part deserves to be a much bigger meme than it is), or you end up with this piece of shit.

Up next: Back to the good list as we don't actually defend, sort of

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Meow!