First Impressions of Mistover

 Technically I started this game yesterday but the only thing I did today was stream Iron Tank and SMT V so I'm taking a chance to talk about my first few dungeons in this game I got for free on PSN.

The first and most obvious thing about it is that the moment the game starts you realize that you're just playing Darkest Dungeon again.  The dungeons play out a bit more like a Mystery Dungeon type deal, sure but the overall vibe of the game just screams Darkest Dungeon clone.  I'm not really saying this as a bad thing either since I loved Darkest Dungeon and more of that with a twist is always a good thing.  The game is also anime as hell with a lot of the characters being moe blob anime girls with large lances and stuff like that.

It may look and feel like a Darkest Dungeon clone but it seems to have ripped its plot, however, right out of Demons Souls.  There's a big pillar of fog that's been wreaking havoc, adventureres go in the fog to try and stop it and those that go in don't usually come back out.  A bog standard reason to have an adventure but we're more here for party management and fighting with RNG more than anything else.

You have a town where you manage your team of anime people and kit them out with stuff as well as prepare for your travels into the mist.  There are all sorts of shops and upgrade places that all get thrown at you at once and right now it feels all a bit overwhelming.  It's not so much that the systems are hard to understand, so once you spend a little time with it, it all falls into place but the game just backs up a big dump truck of stuff at you and leaves you to work it out.  I'm almost sure this is intentional to make you feel like an out of place adventurer whos in over your head but from an actual game play perspective its just annoying to have to sit there and sift through all this shit before I can really get going.

Once you're ready, you grab a quest from the anime girl in town and head into a dungeon.  Dungeons are randomly generated affairs filled with monsters, obstacles, traps and loot.  Each of your characters has a unique skill to help traverse the place and while you're exploring you have to manage hunger and your light source.  I think if your characters fall while you're doing these dungeons they are gone for good but I've not lost anyone yet so I'm not entirely sure if the game has perma-death.

The most interesting feature though is the Doomsday Clock.  When you finish a dungeon, depending on how much of it you explored and how well you did finding chests and such, a big old clock will tick up towards midnight.  If you get everything in the dungeon then it doesn't move and if you leave with a bunch of shit undone then it progresses.  If it gets to midnight then the games over and you lose.  I've heard it can also tick backwards if you do REALLY well but I found everything there was to find in a small dungeon and it didn't happen so I guess I have to do the bigger levels for that. 

Either way, I think I'm going to have a good time with Mistover, only time will tell if the RNG makes me rip my hair out or not but for a game I got for free on PSN, so far I'm impressed

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light

I would be willing to bet a few hundred of my Yen that when Super Smash Bros Melee came out on the Game Cube and people saw Marth in this roster, they had NO idea where he was from.  Melee came out in 2001 and Shadow Dragon, the DS remake of this game, didn't come out until 2008 so I bet for a long time Marth's origin outside of "that dude from that FE game" was a mystery to a lot of people.  Hell, I even saw people who looked at Hector in FE7 on the GBA and was like "is that Marth?" when his name and weapon are clearly different.

Silly comments about Smash aside, I recently finished Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light on NES.  The game follows Marth doing some stuff against some bad dudes, I actually have no idea what the story is because the entire game is in Hiragana and if you think I'm going to read long textboxes of only that, you have another thing coming.

If you're unfamiliar with Fire Emblem then it is a series of strategy RPGs where the main feature is permadeath.  Over the course of your 25 level adventure with Marth, you'll meet and recruit a number of people of various classes and skills that will level up as they fight stuff on each map.  However, if one of your allies falls in battle they are dead forever, no coming back, end of the line.  This of course means that MOST people who play these games will have a save before each map and will instantly restart as soon as one character goes down.  I tried to avoid this on stream to make it more interesting but I did have a selection of 5 or 6 core team members who, if killed, would trigger a restart. 

Fire Emblem 1 isn't actually all that dissimilar from its sequels but there are a couple of features missing from this game that make it grueling compared to the others.  For example, this game lacks the weapon triangle from the later games and instead has weapons just having certain qualities.  For example swords are accurate but don't do all that much damage while axes are inaccurate and will cleave a guy in half like its Mortal Kombat.  In later games, you have a sort of "swords beat axes" type thing so if you take advantage of that the guy with the axe is a lot more likely to miss.  FE1 doesn't have that so occasionally a raider will just walk up to one of your mercs or even Marth himself and just send him to the shadow realm in a single hit and there's nothing you can do but curl up into a ball and cry.

Crits also seem significantly more abundant in this game for both sides.  I got out of many stick situations with a lucky critical but also I lost a fair deal of good, well leveled and geared units over the course of the game to some guy who usually does 10 damage, suddenly doing 30 damage to my guy with 27HP max. There's a lot of frustration with these games but that's what makes them all the more satisfying when you eventually beat them.

I wouldn't recommend Fire Emblem 1 on NES to someone new to the series, I don't even know if I could recommend it to a fan either.  It's not a bad game but its sort of obtuse, slow and seemingly unfair at times.  If you're new then I'd say go and play Three Houses on the Switch because I heard you can turn off the permadeath in that game so if THATS the feature that's turning you off, you can test the waters with a game that doesn't do that.  If you don't mind the permadeath though, go dig out your GBA and play Fire Emblem (7) instead although I'm only saying that because, despite owning Three Houses since December, I haven't actually played it yet.

I personally never want to play THIS installment ever again although I was digging through my old NES carts on Sunday and I found the sequel, Fire Emblem Gaiden so despite everything I just said about this game being obtuse and unfair, I'm probably going to start that very soon.