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| Topic | Gauging interest in a Fire Emblem ranking topic |
| Panthera 04/17/20 12:10:18 AM #480: | 4. New Mystery I think I've already pointed out that Fire Emblem New Mystery of the Emblem Heroes of Light and Shadow is a very long title somewhere, but hey, here it is again. After all, this game does retread a lot of ground already covered in this topic. We once again return to Archanea, a world with free reclassing, forged effective weapons and no avoid, to follow Marth (again) on his journey to liberate his homeland (again) and defeat Gharnef (again) and Medeus (also again). We've already seen the original Mystery of the Emblem and Shadow Dragon on this list so this is starting to be well tread ground. Hell, just last write up I talked briefly about the whole "avatar" character concept and what do you know, here we are with the game that actually started the concept (unless you count Mark in FE7). And once again I'll start off with the story. The Archanean games have never really stood out in this regard, being very generic "good guy reclaims homeland and defeats evil" tales. They don't hurt your brain like Fates or anything, and I am very grateful for that, but their story isn't a positive either, it's just kind of there. (New) Mystery mostly retreads the ground of the original game, with the new additions being a bit of backstory that isn't particularly interesting and that loses a lot of its impact because it's meant to add a bit of depth to Medeus, but his behavior in each of his appearances doesn't really resemble a guy who was once relatively noble. Whenever we see him he's just rambling about how evil he is, especially in this game. The big twist is, of course, that New Mystery adds a couple new elements to the mix here, with the new assassin sub plot and of course, our "avatar" character Kris. The former can get a bit melodramatic at times and occasionally raises the question of how they just so happen to be in the places they are at the right times (their ability to follow you out to the ice dragon temple for 13x is bewildering), but it does have a few decently emotional scenes thrown in here and there. The final villain of it suffers from a crippling case of the same Moving on from the story now, I know I've mentioned a few games as having very good music, but New Mystery might just be my favourite soundtrack in the series. Aside from the actually pretty bad final map theme, every player phase theme is great, with Endless Battle and that killer remix of the Thracia fog of war music that plays in 13x standing out in particular. The story scenes have some great stuff that plays for them, with Off to War and Theme of Love being the highlights. And there's some great boss themes here. Tearing Shadows, the theme for the assassin bosses, is very good, Medeus makes up for his lackluster effort last time around with the much more fitting Reign of Despair, and of course, the best boss theme in all of Fire Emblem is here in the form of the sadly spoilerrific Onto gameplay, and it's nice that having already discussed Shadow Dragon means I can be brief on the mechanics here, because they're pretty much the same. Reclassing is almost too free for its own good, forging is super strong (though much greater enemy variety makes effective weapons less dominant, albeit still very valuable) and you can't really dodge much of anything so relying on the RNG to bail you out is pretty much out. Unit balance is pretty sketchy though. You have a pretty big pool of units who are at least decent to choose from, but you also have a pretty big pool of units that make you wonder why they're even here to warm your bench. On the lower difficulties it's not always noticeable, but when you play on Lunatic and a ton of units can't even survive a round of combat from most or all of the enemies on their join maps, well... And that segues nicely into the biggest strength of New Mystery - it is arguably the hardest game in the entire series, and it achieves its difficulty in a very straight forward way. Aside from the pervasive scourge of ambush spawn reinforcements that so many games in the series suffer from, it doesn't throw anything that could be construed as unfair at you (unless you count the linked AI on chapter 3 dracoknights being very unintuitive, maybe), unlike something like, say, Conquest where enemies just readily spam stat-bypassing tricks at you. The map design is generally very good, with the prologue in particular standing out for being a nice simple tutorial on lower difficulties but a very quick way to teach you how to approach the game on Lunatic, in the sense that if you don't make the right decision on every move you die. A big thing that I sometimes hear criticism of in New Mystery is the games linked AI mechanics, which will make certain groups of enemies not move even if you're in their range until a certain condition is met, usually that you either are in range of multiple members of the group or that you're in range of one specific enemy, generally one behind the others. Or if you engage in combat with one of them, of course. I've heard people say it's unfair to expect the player to know how the AI will behave, but I reject this argument on the grounds that it doesn't really make sense. It's a mechanic that results in enemies *not* moving in situations where their movement might have been a problem, after all. Sure, it's not always obvious what will get them moving, but there's no harm in experimenting so long as you always position yourself safely. If you don't trigger them, cool, nothing happened. If you do, then you're still fine as long as you were careful enough about making sure no unit could face enough attacks to die. I actually quite like this mechanic, even if it does make me pull my hair out at times when it turns things like the start of chapter 14 into nightmarish death traps. --- Meow! ... Copied to Clipboard! |
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