I'm Playing TO: Reborn And I Think It's A Blast. I Have High Hopes For Triangle Strategy As Well.

I'm playing TO: Reborn and I think it's a blast. I have high hopes for Triangle Strategy as well.

I still haven't finished my first playthrough, I'm in the middle of a Chapter 3 Chaos battle (I'm seriously considering letting some of my generics die so I can advance lol) All I really know about the law route is that Vyce can live, as you say... and it got me thinking... is he worth that?

Without taking into account the explanation you've given and the true meaning of the route split, what is Denam thinking in the moment? I'm trying to save people from this concentration camp and it's going less than smoothly, and rather than giving you time to convince this broken of spirit people, you find out almost immediately that your lord deemed them a lost cause and fodder for his real plan. This is insane! You obviously will oppose! Catiua and Vyce will surely side with me! Wait... what is Vyce doing? What...? What is he saying? He's been harboring resentment towards me all this time? A hare? Where is any of this coming from? And then the game unfolds after that, every encounter with Vyce he grows more antagonist and hateful and all Denam wants to do is trying to reconcile, even if the person he's trying to reconcile with took part on a massacre (would it be appropriate to call it a genocide?)

But I understand that this take is ultimately a meta one.

Denam doesn't know what Vyce'll turn into in the chaos route. This is something that only we, as players, especially players who already played one of the routes and want to go for the other, know. This isn't about doing the right thing for Vyce. It's about running counter to whatever Denam chooses because he's grown resentful of him. He either participates in the massacre in Chaos or uses the situation to look like the righteous one in Law.

So it got me thinking... is he worth that? Is he worth soaking my hands with blood of ground beaten people so that he doesn't turn into a monster? Must I be the monster? Why was he becoming a monster in chaos? He just let himself go? Must I soak my hands in blood because this... manchild couldn't get pass his own petty issues?

As I wrote this, it's only now that I'm considering that maybe I just plain don't like the guy, and it all ties back to the circumstance in which he becomes an antagonist, which I'm not sure the Law route will change in a meaningful way, but who knows, I'm yet to play that route... I'm still trying to complete the Chaos one, even though I already know what will become of Vyce in this route.

Still, you're the first person I know who talked about this game, so this was as good time as any to bring my experience so far.

Hope it was worth the read.

I've been looking into Tactics Ogre again. I think... I think people have been misunderstanding the route split and the alignment system.

I was looking through the PS1 manual and there's a little blurb of worldbuilding about the alignments. Law is aligned with Ishtar (I know they use a different spelling officially now, but ignore), goddess of light and war. What she wants is to unify the people under law, and that got me thinking. It's the Law path that makes it so that childhood friend Vyce doesn't dive off the deep end fighting you and can live. There's other characters that would otherwise die if you went the other route, but can be recruited in Law, and it's characters from the Law route that unlock the post-game CODAs. The game is also called Tactics Ogre Let Us Cling Together.

The Law route is not about following orders, it's about prioritizing unifying the people. The false flag operation you allowed to happen was bad, and the game calls it out, but the purpose wasn't wrong.

Chaos is associated with the dark god Asmodeus, who seeks freedom and believes that through freedom chaos will come about. You go down this path by rejecting the orders. You put your own morality above the call for unity, and as a result your character goes on the run. Instead of allowing your countrymen to be killed, you instead kill your countrymen in the name of your own beliefs and ideals.

In a Confucian-influenced society, Chaos is a bad end and the result of people not doing their duties.

The game also has the Chaos Frame mechanic, where if you have a bad relationship with one of the ethnic groups when you become king, usually through killing enough of them, Denam'll be assassinated in the game's ending which would lead to further war and bloodshed. Likewise, if you can keep them on decent terms... your country is invaded after you take the throne. The former is a Chaos ending, while the latter is a more neutral one. But if you let your sister Catiua take her rightful spot as queen, Chaos Frame doesn't matter and the country lasts for a thousand years before being conquered or joining another group (depending on which version of the game). It's the Law ending.

These endings mirror the route split, with a Chapter 2 Law only moving into a Lawful Chapter 3, whereas Chaos Chapter 2 can either remain Chaos or go Neutral. Chaos is presented as the better option, much like how the Chaos endings give Denam the powerful Lord class, but it doesn't appear to be the right option. You won't be able to save Vyce from himself, as mirroring your selfishness he begins to think too highly of himself and uses his backstory as an excuse, and going Chaos at the endings leads to Catiua's death.

The game still tries to call you out on the Chaos routes, and originally the Terror Knight class was locked to that route. Chaos may mean freedom, but it also is tied to darkness. If you put your own morality above the orders, as shitty as those orders are, it will eventually lead to Vyce going nuts and dying simply because of his desire to beat you. But if you do your mission, you'll eventually fight against your boss when it's revealed that he doesn't really care about the people and is just using the war for his own selfish purposes. And this whole war started because when the king disappeared the country broke apart, not wanting to live together or be ruled by another ethnic group. The war happened because unity broke apart, the land fell to chaos.

In the Chaos routes, you're killing people not to win the war but simply to protect your own freedom. You're killing not because you were told to, but because it's your own call. Same thing with regular battles, which end not with killing every enemy but simply killing the commander. It's possible to only kill them, which would in turn keep your Chaos Frame down. Ishtar may be the goddess of war, but killing is tied more to chaos and in the chaos routes you feel a lot more justified in doing so. But that can lead to falling deeper into chaos, more killing because you believe you're the good guy. Yet the Law route calls out killing far more effectively, makes the player feel like shit but also rewards the player the most. And it's the route tied to light.

But this is based on a detail from the game's manual, and game's don't really have manuals nowadays.

In short, please bring back manuals with physical versions of games. I mean, there's still the tabs to hold them so why not give something to keep there?

You have Koei Tecmo to blame for that. From day one, they've interfered with one of the developers vision for the game. Not only are they the reason Crimson Flower exists, taking away resources from the other three routes, they made it super easy to access to it when one of the developers wanted to make it three times harder. Like recruiting Ravness Loxaerion in the Law Route of Tactics Ogre levels of hard. Then Three Hopes comes around and you can see the fruits of their favoritism for edelgard and hatred for Rhea.

Between Claude's va not understanding VW's ending and Petra's va being angrier at the woman who quite literally did nothing to her, instead of the woman who is holding her hostage so her people don't rebel, it's sad that people who were so involved in the story understood it so little.

Sorry for being a bitch but people who think rhea "gets a pass in the fandom" are fucking stupid. Bitch where??? Everywhere I look people dunk on her?? Where is this alternate timeline where Rhea is more popular than Edelgard and how do I get there??

Fodlan goodies: We also offer this sprite set of the characters except Rhea.

Theory time: I think IS is not so subtlety trying to move away from Three Houses.

An artbook with interviews? I'm definitely getting that! I know they announced it for just japan for now, but I'm hoping it won't take long before it gets here!

It sounds exactly like the Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together artwork I have right now!

You can find this artbook in any Books-a-million store, maybe in Barnes and noble stores too, and you can get Tactics Ogre: Reborn (a remaster of Let Us Cling Together) in any console

Unicorn Overlord goodies : an artbook with interviews from the devs, something like Jugdral's Treasure book !

Fodlan goodies : a teaset and a fork

It's just a WIP for now... Rhea is singing 'In time's Flow' to Raphael in their hypothetical support. I also wanted to make a Post Time Skip version.

YOU, 3H ARTIST

SHOW ME HOW YOU DRAW RHEA FIRE EMBLEM

Here's hoping you have fun!

Tatiana was probably one of my most fun recruits, and I do love the take of the cleric being more closely related to diseases rather than curing battle injuries. It made me wish for a class designed specifically to inflict status ailments, but between status ailments being mostly ties to equipment/skills and shamans' existence, it would've probably been redundant.

I'm sure you'll enjoy the witches promoted design, they gain a luxurious fur dress, which makes sense as witches/sorceresses explicitly use ice magic.

And I think this is a first showing of the issues the localization will have later down the line. On top of the flowery dialogue, sometimes they change things here and there that add up over time.

What class do you like the most so far?

Land 1 done!

Without crossing the bridge to get rekt'd by the final boss and trigger a bad ending, of course :p

I know the game puts more emphasis on gameplay than on characters, unlike, say, FE 8x2, but damn if every little situation you recruit random characters makes me think of past FE events in different titles and it just... fits? Somehow?

Like, evil empire has trouble conquering a party of Cornia, but behold! A mysterious plague pops up, that is totally not tied to the shady as fuck necromancer who works with the evil empire and says it'd be annoying if people find a cure.

So we have some guy and his army of cleric wearing plague doctor masks trying to find a cure by, uh, experimenting/working on people who already caught the plague, even accepting to work with the evil empire because curing the plague is more important, right?

Ends justify means yadda yadda... save for the part I earlier mentionned, that it is heavily implied the evil empire is the one who created that plague to begin with!

Now, imagine in a FE game if, in the background, we had to rescue people or hear about people being afflicted by a strange and unknown disease... and if that disease was engineered by people for a further motive...

8x2? Nah.

We also have quests where people are fighting for the evil empire who is occupying their land because they believe as long as they obey their people won't be put to the sword...

(I watched my bro play the final chapter, we know how it ends lol)

Not!Cyril fighting against bandits, finding and helping a witch fend off people who are trying to "catch her" - we even get a flimsy excuse for a bikini attire in the process and an answer to the "why do i use spells to rejuvenate myself in a sexy body? It's because I won't be able to move as fast as I can now if I was a crone" other flimsy excuse, etc etc.

Now it's time to enter the land of fucked up siblings relationship (sure Virginia is Alain's cousin - who looks like his mom - and can end up with him, but this is not the kind of Jugdralian stuff I had in mind) and let me tell you, all those plot bunnies I had in Jugdral about Lester believing he was going to become Lord of Jungby all of his life, only to have his role/throne snatched before his eyes by a bum who's apparently his cousin and can use the legendary shiny bow of legend is... basically Drakengard (Drakenhold in english?), but up to eleven.

Ah, and it wouldn't be a post from me if I don't find a way to rant about the localisation lol

Josef, upon meeting Virginia, basically goes in the audio "it's been a long time since I last saw you". In the english version?

Like what are you implying Josef, she wasn't a princess when you saw her last time or didn't have the "standing" fit for a princess?

Besides, I hope the release of the october book won't blow a hole in the Josef's "you were a teenager when we last met" by releasing character ages, but that's not really that important.

This however

Alain greets his long lost cousin, nothing wrong here right?

Well, in the JP audio, he calls her with the "hime" suffix, showing as much deference as Josef, who is a retainer of the royal family. Virginia doesn't use any suffix because that's her, but in Alain's various support convos, we learn that he had to learn and to behave like a proper noble after escaping from his castle 7 years ago, and all this noble/formal stuff is something he doesn't use with his commoner friends.

Ergo, this minor thing here is important, especially in the Drakengard themes : siblings/relatives used to be close, but reuniting after a long period of time or several life changing events, they are changed and even if they want and try to, cannot be as close as they once were.

Laundry day