QUOTE(DashSim @ Oct 4 2012, 12:24 PM)
I would also argue that the entire game of Epic Yarn was based around the absence of death, and that it wouldn't have worked as well if death was a feature. If you took the game as it is and added death, that would make the game worse. Because it was designed around it not being there. Could it work if the game was (rather extensively) redesigned with death in mind? It totally could! But... I'm not convinced that would be a better game. Wario Land is another series that generally excludes any sort of death mechanic, and that series wouldn't work if it did include it.
Having a death mechanic isn't inherently better than not having one, nor vise versa; it all depends on what works for each game, and I hold to the opinion that what works for Epic Yarn and the Wario Land games is not having it.
Eh... the problem with the no-death mechanic in Epic Yarn is, well, like everything else in epic yarn, it's not a kirby mechanic. This is why Kirby fans feel so betrayed by it; Imagine Skyward Sword was a class-based MMO that required organizing 40-man raid parties to get through the story. Even if it were good, it'd leave Zelda fans dissatisfied because that's not what you buy Zelda games
for. It scratches a very different itch, as it were.
And really I don't even think your argument about no death mechanic holds: Epic Yarn DOES have a failure mechanic, and it's whether you get a gold medal for the level or not, and getting hit too many times does screw you over and make that goal impossible, forcing you to restart the level. A much better example of how to make a game without a failure state is Fez.
QUOTE
Consider what makes chess enjoyable. It's carefully planning ahead and anticipating your opponent's moves, made possible by a consistent and reliable set of rules for you both to play by. You can see all your pieces, all the enemy pieces, and there's no uncertainty except for how your opponent will play.
Think about the satisfaction you get from planning ahead many turns, getting your opponent right where you want them through your careful and very specific planning. The thrill of thinking of what you need to do for the next 10 turns, and then succeeding in doing it.
If chess were Sacred Stones, part way through those 10 carefully planned out turns, additional enemy pieces would land on the board at complete random with no absolutely no warning, for which you of course had no chance to account for in your planning. But maybe you'd keep playing, trying to recover from that abrupt change, and you form a new plan that hinges on trying to take out a pawn with your queen. You try that, but by pure, unmitigated chance, your queen misses, and the enemy pawn takes her out on the next turn. Oh, and you'd better restart the game then, because that means your queen will be missing next time you play a game of chess!
Also, between the chess matches you have to suffer a dreadfully boring story with some of the most forgettable characters you've ever seen.
It's not that random chance and unexpected things or a permanent death mechanic are inherently bad, it's that, in their implementation in this game, they doesn't work together and it brings the whole thing down. And that doesn't even go into the issue Giggidy mentioned about new players screwing themselves and having to restart. So I guess there's two ways to play it: Keep going if some of your characters die on a chapter and potentially screw yourself in the later parts of the game, or restart every time a character dies (which is what I do!) and tediously replay chapters over and over until you get through without any deaths.
Nothing about that works.
Despite everything, I still have some interest in trying out other games of the series. I'm definitely going to be a bit more cautious approaching them than I was with this game, though.
To understand Fire Emblem, you need to understand where Fire Emblem originally came from. The original FE was based very much on the style of early roleplaying and tactical skirmish games, namely the original D&D. In OD&D:
- Your characters were
not heroes as in modern RPGs. Death was always only a single saving throw away, often not even that. Charging in and trying to slaughter a group of enemies through the power of just being that badass would get you killed, period. Every dungeoncrawler's M.O. was to be insanely careful and use as many dirty tricks as you possibly can to get ahead.
- You had no control over your stats, they were rolled randomly. You had to make due with whatever it was you got. Sometimes you got great rolls and the game was made much easier, most of the time you didn't. With this, combined with the above extreme random lethality factor, it was customary to not even bother to name characters until they got up to level 4.
- Raise Dead was only available to very high level characters, and it was intended that most groups would never get that far. A character died, you started over with a new one at level 1.
Fire Emblem isn't unique in having started out with these tropes (the heavy inspiration from D&D can be seen in more or less all early non-tabletop RPGs, the Final Fantasy series included), but it is unique in having kept them while other RPG series have abandoned them, for better or worse. You shouldn't go in to Fire Emblem expecting Advance Wars or Final Fantasy Tactics. That's not the kind of game we're dealing with here, and FE's style is definitely very much an acquired taste.
QUOTE("Orin XD")
I bet Giggidy would say exactly the opposite thing. Because these Green Stars are nothing but filler. If you want to include post-game content at a scale like this, then put enough effort to make it interesting. Your exploration argument is pretty weak, because the levels in both SMG games are very linear (and offered little prospect of exploration) and that only a handful of the 120+ Green Stars were well hidden. Super Mario Sunshine was a game that got this right and it wasn't even post-game content. The Blue coins encouraged exploration of the levels, but each level offers lots of opportunity to explore and that they don't amount to an awful lot in the end. They amount to only 24/120 Shine Sprites in the end.
If my name hadn't been specifically mentioned, I probably would have left this topic alone, so I'll just leave my actual opinion here real quick: The green stars is the point of SMG2 where I just said "Eh, I think I've seen enough, I don't really care about the Grandmaster Galaxy." My problem is not so much that the green stars
exist, my problem is the green stars are magically hidden until you get far enough into the game (did you have to get all 120 normal stars? I don't remember), at which point they suddenly reappear and you have to re-go over each area to get them. I had already pretty much thoroughly explored those areas the first time around when I was gathering the normal stars and the thought of going through them again because I have no possible way of knowing where the green stars are without a walkthrough is bullshit.
I wouldn't have minded them nearly as much if, like the blue coins, they're just sitting there in the level and you can get them whenever you happen to find them. I also, in theory, have bigger problems with the similar mechanic in Galaxy 1 where you have to re-play all the levels as Luigi, but in practice I had much less of a problem with that: Going through the normal levels again was actually fun; just dicking around to find these green stars that have magically appeared everywhere was not.
EDIT: Actually, while we're on the subject, the idea of post-game content, where there's content that's sealed off and impossible to even attempt until you've finished the story, has never really made much in the way of sense to me. The best game to do this, IMO, as Super Meat Boy, though in that game more due to narrative reasons than the content itself.
Edited by Giggidy, 05 October 2012 - 04:03 AM.
It does seem like a pointless addition however..
