TRIANGLE STRATEGY

Scratches my Fire Emblem itch

I'm personally not a fan of the "meaningful choices" genre, since I usually end up feeling like it dilutes the quality of the writing, and forces me into rather _meaningless_ dilemmas. That said, I do appreciate that this game fleshes out the "non-heroic" kinds of choices. In movies and games, we take it for granted that we can basically make suicidal decisions for righteous glory. That's what makes the compromises in this game feel so uncomfortable. But out of curiosity, I'm half forcing myself to make the ugly choices, and it's been interesting to see how it plays out. From a writing/trope point of view, that is definitely a rare thing in games. This way it's more likely that I might actually play the game more than once. So I can redeem myself from all the cowardly and cynical choices I made. I'm playing on hard, and it's definitely very hard. Even though I've managed to win on the second or third try, the victories don't feel quite like victories. It takes like 5 turns to kill a single enemy while they can kill an ally in 2 turns. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ brutal. But I think that playing on hard from the start is probably the best choice. Because if you were accustomed to normal, I imagine that hard must feel totally unfair. While now, I can only imagine what normal must be like. It's probably more fun, all things considered. Half of the choices in terms of character progression are basically a no-go, because a lot of strategies are not viable if your characters can't survive more than a couple of attacks. The way experience accrues even if you lose is a very good system. It makes it so that your attempt at doing something that might be too hard for you, will at least not feel like a total waste of time when you fail. The art is very good, perhaps too good. Just by looking at the character portraits in the opening act, I immediately knew what all the characters were about and what to expect from them. Basically, the character art is so good that it spoils the story a bit. Not sure how you should take that, but there.