I genuinely believe that zaffre deserves more subs than what he currently has, you genuinely put a lot of effort into your videos, keep up the fantastic job, now to enjoy the review
I’ve always viewed level grinding as being over prepared. I never went into a boxing match, wanting to be challenged. The challenge is in the day to day grind and preparation. I also study so damn much for class so that I completely crush a test. I understand seeking out challenges but it gets annoying when I hear people shame level grinding, so... there you go.
You made a mistake about the grinding in tower of Valni you bring up skipping dialogue cutscene and turning off music but those fall under the you problem category the tower is optional just like Fe7 arenas which hey like the fe8 optional grinding you can lose characters but arenas in linear fire emblem games are more broken because you gain money and experience which means you can buy more weapons and items to have your healer heal and get them a heal Staff and then grind your units or leave the arena to heal immediately aka you get im a position where before you have a large army you have juggernauts and before you say they balance the arenas just exit if you don't get a result you like until it is
OMG I relate to the bit about Innes so much. My last playthrough of the game, I was determined to get as many A supports as possible so I had Innes and Eirika A Support, and the whole time it was just like “No no no no no no no! This is WRONG!”
Sacred Stones was actually my first Fire Emblem game. I knew what it was thanks to Melee, but for some reason it didn’t draw me in until a Nintendo Power Magazine article about it. It was talking about the class system, and the idea of getting to decide if a character becomes a Fighter or a Pirate just sounded so cool to me. I think I agree with you on the point of secondary seals from later games; I never use them, because the idea that any character can basically become any class kind of dissolves their characterization for me. Like Marisa as a mage wouldn’t really be Marisa to me anymore. But I think Sacred Stones’ approach finds this happy balance where you get to make impactful choices, but the characters still feel fairly defined.
This is easily one of my favorite Fire Emblem games (only beaten by Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn), and by far the one I have replayed the most. The story is engaging, the cast is fantastic, the music is solid, and graphics-wise this still stands as the best looking game in the series in my opinion. EDIT: Lol, we clearly don't agree I see.
Absolutely great work as always. I loved this game when i was younger haven't played it in a while so this video puts a smile on my face. Keep up the greatness.
Something I wanted to mention is that Sacred Stones has a second 'dungeon' that functions like the Tower of Valni that only becomes available during the "Creature Campaign" (aka FE8's post-game) known as the Lagdou Ruins. This dungeon has 10 floors instead of 8 and features only the stronger monsters (and promoted versions of weaker ones) including Gorgons, Cyclopses and even multiple Draco Zombies on the later floors. What is your reward for doing it? Just like how the Tower of Valni rewards you with unlockable characters (mainly bosses and NPC characters) after completing various objectives during Creature Campaign, the same is true for the Lagdou Ruins. I won't list the exact charactersyu'd get here (as that would contain some spoilers), but I recommend looking the list up if you're curious.
This game holds the same spot in my heart as tales of symphonia, sonic AB2, Ruby or even the GC animal crossing. They were the first games I experienced in that genre and were my gateway. Are they the best in the series? Debatable. But they did set the bar for future games and helped their respective games pick up more in the west. To this day FE:SS is still the one I go back to and play again. It's dated, not nearly as pretty as it's later releases, and the story and gameplay was simple...but it's charming? I find I just continue to have fun with it , more than I do those later games. It didn't hold your hand, you didn't have to mess about with a bunch of stats or dating to get top tier characters. You kept your team alive and based their power on the class changes. It's hard to explain my feelings for the series, but it was my first grid based jrpg and opened my eyes to many other good games and series.
Small other thing, but I really love this game’s use of monsters. There are so many extra sprites and animations for things like skeletons and giant spiders, and I’m here for it. I wish more Fire Emblem games did this. Like I really liked the giant monsters in Three Houses.
I do feel that specific plot points with Eirika are blown out of proportion. As the player we know that what she is doing is a bad thing, but taking into account who she is as a person and what she specifically sees in her route, it makes sense why she would make these choices. All the more satisfying in the end when she doesn't fall into the same trap.
Great video and great review. Not my favorite FE game and not even my favorite GBA FE game but its still very enjoyable game and still holds up. Good stuff man! One of the most underrated youtubers on this platform, don't stop with the videos.
The playable cast isn't strong but the villains are some of the best in the series especially Valter is just loves being an arsehole villain. I did find the game pretty easy on Normal mode even without the grinding. If I play SS again it would be on hard mode.
SS does feel like a small side game. A bit of trivia but the other devs besides Intelligent Systems were Flagship known for Minish Cap & Kirby & the Amazing Mirror and are also Capcom devs.
@@tanookiplayer i think i remember seeing something like that, so it makes sense. you're right though the villains were pretty great, with my favorite being valter as well. i love the super compelling antagonists but sometimes it's just great seeing someone relish in being the most malicious piece of shit possible
Coming in late to this one. Of course I COULD have watched it early as part of the many advantages I enjoy as a Patreon member... but I was busy. Totally worth the wait though. Great vid!
As a player that finds it difficult *not* to use grinding tools when they are provided, the open FE format definitely takes something away from my enjoyment of a Fire Emblem game. I'm sure part of it is just first game bias, but I love the Blazing Blade cast and am pretty indifferent to the Sacred Stones cast. I wonder if a potential remake of Sacred Stones would benefit from dividing your army and playing both sides of the route split in one playthrough.
There is a point I find really interesting to talk about in this review. I dunno much about Fire Emblem, but I can really relate to your statement about incentivizing the player to put in the work to do things the hard way. I’m surprised to hear this about such an old game because I feel like it’s quite a prevalent issue in modern games too. So many games emphasize rewards that are based on your performance ratings and those rewards tend to heavily stress perfection over challenge. To use a couple of examples, one place I felt this disparity was in PSO2’s story mode rewards. The game has a few rewards for completion on any difficulty and the only other rewards are getting star gems for completing a combat chapter on Hardcore with an S rank, which primarily means minimizing damage and fairly quick completion. If you want to go about getting most of these rewards efficiently, your honest best bet is just play as a high level Etoile. Nobody will be able to scratch you and you’ll be guaranteed S ranks on basically every mission up to the last episode. I had an issue with this because it felt like there was no incentive to ever go back and do any of the missions in a format that would have presented more of a challenge. Your only reward for putting yourself through a harder trial would be a worse ranking. Another example was my journey through Tales of Zestiria, which encouraged me to build my characters into overpowered gods when using the Armatus and obliterate bosses with mystic arte chains, giving me thousands of grade. The same could likely be said of many Tales games and their grade systems, where your rewards will be better if you just power up and stomp a boss than if you won it the hard way. While some do give you more rewards for fighting on a higher difficulty, you still only get them if you also have a high performance rating. People complain often about how challenge is lacking in games, mainly in regard to there being little chance of actual failure in a lot of cases, and it feels like if you DO choose to do something the hard way, you’re not given positive feedback for it. You’re getting positive feedback for doing things efficiently, and that often rewards doing things in a way that’s easy. Becoming overpowered gets you rewards and does it faster whereas making mistakes and getting your ass kicked is frowned upon, leading people to shy away from difficulty. In the age of the internet, the pressure to succeed is bigger than ever due to all the ‘hardcore’ players out there touting how ‘easy’ everything is supposed to be. At this point, actually failing a mission or battle just feels totally unacceptable in many games. With all this, you’re not really being encouraged to engage with the gameplay in a way that will get you learning. You’re much more heavily incentivized to bypass that somehow and ‘succeed’ at all costs. By contrast, thinking back to my time with Ninja Gaiden, all I ever knew about that game while playing it was that people found it extremely tough. Knowing that, I played it on my own and got very good at it because I was perfectly fine with failure. I was expecting to die. I even enjoyed it sometimes because of all the kickass moves enemies can throw at you in that game. If you go into a game expecting to fail a lot, you’ll often do very well, whereas with a lot of games these days, you go in expecting to succeed at a bare minimum and excelling is largely expected too. That’s what the feedback is telling you. “It’s not okay to fail.” Going back to Fie Emblem itself, I’ve often thought about how the ‘permadeath’ mechanic has a bit of an issue when it comes to the game because it feels to me like nobody’s ever going to leave a character dead. If someone dies, you reset. I can’t think of any reason why someone would continue the game with a dead character, knowing the only reward for that is missing out on endings and some sad story notes to make you feel bad, and I always felt like it was missing an opportunity with that. I’d like to see them make some new opportunities available in the wake of a character’s death, almost like how Starfox 64 alters your path based on the success or failure of certain objectives? But I also know that with so many players vying for 100% completion, they might get mad at a game requiring so many different checks to see 100% of the content. It’s just a suggestion anyway, but I found this comment of yours extremely relevant and interesting. :)
i really like your fire emblem ideas, and honestly as of late i think there's a lot of incentive to actually keep units dead depending on the situation, especially because these games are balanced with the expectation that you're not gonna have everyone live. but i get what you mean, because so many people just reset out of habit, but lately i've been finding myself just keeping some units dead every now and then. but your ideas would be super cool - i honestly want the next fire emblem to take a step back in terms of scope since three houses was *so big* and focus on a short, replayable game, taking like you said, the star fox 64 route which is exactly how i'd describe it. but as i've been noticing and you as well due to what you've said, replay value has somewhat become a lost art and that's a shame. but yeah it's interesting thinking of these things with the review and i'm glad i was able to get you discussing stuff like this. i love these types of thoughtful comments
@@ZaffreRevolution : Looking at it from the outside, I feel like the decision being weighed on avoiding an inconvenience isn't quite enough, and what would change that is having some benefit too, like if you had limited slots for your party and an opening would allow recruitment of someone you wouldn't be able to get normally. Of course, this does force people to choose death for a character if they want another, which they wouldn't normally ever want to do, so what could help is having a sort of 'sacrifice ploy' option? Say you click that option and your character can do something powerful enough to make a big difference in battle, like taking out or severely weakening a powerful optional target, or getting through a bunch of soldiers at once at the cost of losing them. That way people wouldn't have to just mess up on purpose to get a slot open. Meeting tough optional objectives would be a good incentive to actually use them and having some early game powerful unit introduce the mechanic as their brave sacrifice early in the game would sure hit people hard. They could honestly make a whole game around that at first, and then later just kind of keep most of the mechanics around. :)
Hey did you delete videos? I remember seeing one where you ranked all the Tales games. I remember symphonia being 4 and Vesperia being 1 (obviously). I think you had also done a video about where to start the series? I'm just wondering if I'm remembering wrong because I remember those videos being really good and I want to watch them again because I'm planning on getting into the series soon.
@@ZaffreRevolution oh nice. Thanks. I can see why you'd want that based on a creative mindset. I was just confused and worried because I really liked those.
Love the review but i do have a question it seems everyone gives Sacred Stones a hard time for its grinding but they give Awakening a pass even though it has grinding as well your thoughts?
Hey Zaffre, Are planning to do a review on Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE i would love to hear your thoughts on that game! I remember you were struggling to get through it! Great Review and that voice of yours is just awesome! You got it man! Ever consider voice acting?!
i tried making a review but i think i'm just gonna do a shorter video on it because the end of the game filled me with emptiness lmao. i really didn't like it hahaha
Dood i dont care what the plot was about, the moment i got my hand on the dragon i used alllllll her attacks on the stage u get her. Saved. Only to then learn u cant buy her attacks. Omg i dropped the game just base on that. Im a simple man.
I genuinely believe that zaffre deserves more subs than what he currently has, you genuinely put a lot of effort into your videos, keep up the fantastic job, now to enjoy the review
The sacred stones is my favorite fire emblem game of all time.
It has in my opinion one of the best casts in the series and extremely fun.
I’ve always viewed level grinding as being over prepared. I never went into a boxing match, wanting to be challenged. The challenge is in the day to day grind and preparation. I also study so damn much for class so that I completely crush a test. I understand seeking out challenges but it gets annoying when I hear people shame level grinding, so... there you go.
A new Zaffre video. Happy day. Beating Hearts R might have been a signal.
still need to power through that one myself haha
You made a mistake about the grinding in tower of Valni you bring up skipping dialogue cutscene and turning off music but those fall under the you problem category the tower is optional just like Fe7 arenas which hey like the fe8 optional grinding you can lose characters but arenas in linear fire emblem games are more broken because you gain money and experience which means you can buy more weapons and items to have your healer heal and get them a heal Staff and then grind your units or leave the arena to heal immediately aka you get im a position where before you have a large army you have juggernauts and before you say they balance the arenas just exit if you don't get a result you like until it is
OMG I relate to the bit about Innes so much. My last playthrough of the game, I was determined to get as many A supports as possible so I had Innes and Eirika A Support, and the whole time it was just like “No no no no no no no! This is WRONG!”
Sacred Stones was actually my first Fire Emblem game. I knew what it was thanks to Melee, but for some reason it didn’t draw me in until a Nintendo Power Magazine article about it. It was talking about the class system, and the idea of getting to decide if a character becomes a Fighter or a Pirate just sounded so cool to me. I think I agree with you on the point of secondary seals from later games; I never use them, because the idea that any character can basically become any class kind of dissolves their characterization for me. Like Marisa as a mage wouldn’t really be Marisa to me anymore. But I think Sacred Stones’ approach finds this happy balance where you get to make impactful choices, but the characters still feel fairly defined.
Zaffe is literally a niche channel, going to detail and explain the game from his experience, it's why I picked up xilla and planning to get xilla 2.
This is easily one of my favorite Fire Emblem games (only beaten by Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn), and by far the one I have replayed the most. The story is engaging, the cast is fantastic, the music is solid, and graphics-wise this still stands as the best looking game in the series in my opinion.
EDIT: Lol, we clearly don't agree I see.
lmao not at all but it's all good! i'm glad you enjoyed the game
Yay I'm so glad you're going through the Fire Emblem games! Please keep it up, I love these!
Absolutely great work as always. I loved this game when i was younger haven't played it in a while so this video puts a smile on my face. Keep up the greatness.
Something I wanted to mention is that Sacred Stones has a second 'dungeon' that functions like the Tower of Valni that only becomes available during the "Creature Campaign" (aka FE8's post-game) known as the Lagdou Ruins. This dungeon has 10 floors instead of 8 and features only the stronger monsters (and promoted versions of weaker ones) including Gorgons, Cyclopses and even multiple Draco Zombies on the later floors.
What is your reward for doing it? Just like how the Tower of Valni rewards you with unlockable characters (mainly bosses and NPC characters) after completing various objectives during Creature Campaign, the same is true for the Lagdou Ruins. I won't list the exact charactersyu'd get here (as that would contain some spoilers), but I recommend looking the list up if you're curious.
Great vid, Zaffre! P.s. I'll be back on the patreon train soon Zaffre.
This game holds the same spot in my heart as tales of symphonia, sonic AB2, Ruby or even the GC animal crossing. They were the first games I experienced in that genre and were my gateway. Are they the best in the series? Debatable. But they did set the bar for future games and helped their respective games pick up more in the west. To this day FE:SS is still the one I go back to and play again. It's dated, not nearly as pretty as it's later releases, and the story and gameplay was simple...but it's charming? I find I just continue to have fun with it , more than I do those later games. It didn't hold your hand, you didn't have to mess about with a bunch of stats or dating to get top tier characters. You kept your team alive and based their power on the class changes. It's hard to explain my feelings for the series, but it was my first grid based jrpg and opened my eyes to many other good games and series.
Small other thing, but I really love this game’s use of monsters. There are so many extra sprites and animations for things like skeletons and giant spiders, and I’m here for it. I wish more Fire Emblem games did this. Like I really liked the giant monsters in Three Houses.
I do feel that specific plot points with Eirika are blown out of proportion. As the player we know that what she is doing is a bad thing, but taking into account who she is as a person and what she specifically sees in her route, it makes sense why she would make these choices. All the more satisfying in the end when she doesn't fall into the same trap.
I love Tana too. And Larachel.
Happy belated birthday.
It's interesting to hear about this game
-So I'm excited to see how thing go for the wii and 3ds games-
Ah yes the game with L'Arachel, Joshua and Cormag, fun times.
Good video my guy!
Great video and great review. Not my favorite FE game and not even my favorite GBA FE game but its still very enjoyable game and still holds up. Good stuff man! One of the most underrated youtubers on this platform, don't stop with the videos.
The playable cast isn't strong but the villains are some of the best in the series especially Valter is just loves being an arsehole villain. I did find the game pretty easy on Normal mode even without the grinding. If I play SS again it would be on hard mode.
SS does feel like a small side game. A bit of trivia but the other devs besides Intelligent Systems were Flagship known for Minish Cap & Kirby & the Amazing Mirror and are also Capcom devs.
@@tanookiplayer i think i remember seeing something like that, so it makes sense. you're right though the villains were pretty great, with my favorite being valter as well. i love the super compelling antagonists but sometimes it's just great seeing someone relish in being the most malicious piece of shit possible
I really gotta play this one. It’s been years since I played 6 and 7 but I never fully picked this one up
i never actually finished 6, i didn't like it too much. but i'll get to it eventually
Coming in late to this one. Of course I COULD have watched it early as part of the many advantages I enjoy as a Patreon member... but I was busy. Totally worth the wait though. Great vid!
tsk tsk tsk hey better late than never haha. glad you enjoyed the video!
As a player that finds it difficult *not* to use grinding tools when they are provided, the open FE format definitely takes something away from my enjoyment of a Fire Emblem game.
I'm sure part of it is just first game bias, but I love the Blazing Blade cast and am pretty indifferent to the Sacred Stones cast.
I wonder if a potential remake of Sacred Stones would benefit from dividing your army and playing both sides of the route split in one playthrough.
Hype
There is a point I find really interesting to talk about in this review. I dunno much about Fire Emblem, but I can really relate to your statement about incentivizing the player to put in the work to do things the hard way. I’m surprised to hear this about such an old game because I feel like it’s quite a prevalent issue in modern games too. So many games emphasize rewards that are based on your performance ratings and those rewards tend to heavily stress perfection over challenge.
To use a couple of examples, one place I felt this disparity was in PSO2’s story mode rewards. The game has a few rewards for completion on any difficulty and the only other rewards are getting star gems for completing a combat chapter on Hardcore with an S rank, which primarily means minimizing damage and fairly quick completion. If you want to go about getting most of these rewards efficiently, your honest best bet is just play as a high level Etoile. Nobody will be able to scratch you and you’ll be guaranteed S ranks on basically every mission up to the last episode. I had an issue with this because it felt like there was no incentive to ever go back and do any of the missions in a format that would have presented more of a challenge. Your only reward for putting yourself through a harder trial would be a worse ranking. Another example was my journey through Tales of Zestiria, which encouraged me to build my characters into overpowered gods when using the Armatus and obliterate bosses with mystic arte chains, giving me thousands of grade. The same could likely be said of many Tales games and their grade systems, where your rewards will be better if you just power up and stomp a boss than if you won it the hard way. While some do give you more rewards for fighting on a higher difficulty, you still only get them if you also have a high performance rating.
People complain often about how challenge is lacking in games, mainly in regard to there being little chance of actual failure in a lot of cases, and it feels like if you DO choose to do something the hard way, you’re not given positive feedback for it. You’re getting positive feedback for doing things efficiently, and that often rewards doing things in a way that’s easy. Becoming overpowered gets you rewards and does it faster whereas making mistakes and getting your ass kicked is frowned upon, leading people to shy away from difficulty. In the age of the internet, the pressure to succeed is bigger than ever due to all the ‘hardcore’ players out there touting how ‘easy’ everything is supposed to be. At this point, actually failing a mission or battle just feels totally unacceptable in many games.
With all this, you’re not really being encouraged to engage with the gameplay in a way that will get you learning. You’re much more heavily incentivized to bypass that somehow and ‘succeed’ at all costs. By contrast, thinking back to my time with Ninja Gaiden, all I ever knew about that game while playing it was that people found it extremely tough. Knowing that, I played it on my own and got very good at it because I was perfectly fine with failure. I was expecting to die. I even enjoyed it sometimes because of all the kickass moves enemies can throw at you in that game. If you go into a game expecting to fail a lot, you’ll often do very well, whereas with a lot of games these days, you go in expecting to succeed at a bare minimum and excelling is largely expected too. That’s what the feedback is telling you. “It’s not okay to fail.”
Going back to Fie Emblem itself, I’ve often thought about how the ‘permadeath’ mechanic has a bit of an issue when it comes to the game because it feels to me like nobody’s ever going to leave a character dead. If someone dies, you reset. I can’t think of any reason why someone would continue the game with a dead character, knowing the only reward for that is missing out on endings and some sad story notes to make you feel bad, and I always felt like it was missing an opportunity with that. I’d like to see them make some new opportunities available in the wake of a character’s death, almost like how Starfox 64 alters your path based on the success or failure of certain objectives? But I also know that with so many players vying for 100% completion, they might get mad at a game requiring so many different checks to see 100% of the content. It’s just a suggestion anyway, but I found this comment of yours extremely relevant and interesting. :)
i really like your fire emblem ideas, and honestly as of late i think there's a lot of incentive to actually keep units dead depending on the situation, especially because these games are balanced with the expectation that you're not gonna have everyone live. but i get what you mean, because so many people just reset out of habit, but lately i've been finding myself just keeping some units dead every now and then. but your ideas would be super cool - i honestly want the next fire emblem to take a step back in terms of scope since three houses was *so big* and focus on a short, replayable game, taking like you said, the star fox 64 route which is exactly how i'd describe it. but as i've been noticing and you as well due to what you've said, replay value has somewhat become a lost art and that's a shame. but yeah it's interesting thinking of these things with the review and i'm glad i was able to get you discussing stuff like this. i love these types of thoughtful comments
@@ZaffreRevolution : Looking at it from the outside, I feel like the decision being weighed on avoiding an inconvenience isn't quite enough, and what would change that is having some benefit too, like if you had limited slots for your party and an opening would allow recruitment of someone you wouldn't be able to get normally. Of course, this does force people to choose death for a character if they want another, which they wouldn't normally ever want to do, so what could help is having a sort of 'sacrifice ploy' option?
Say you click that option and your character can do something powerful enough to make a big difference in battle, like taking out or severely weakening a powerful optional target, or getting through a bunch of soldiers at once at the cost of losing them. That way people wouldn't have to just mess up on purpose to get a slot open. Meeting tough optional objectives would be a good incentive to actually use them and having some early game powerful unit introduce the mechanic as their brave sacrifice early in the game would sure hit people hard. They could honestly make a whole game around that at first, and then later just kind of keep most of the mechanics around. :)
This is one of my favorite f. E. Games
Never forget 2% milk.
Hey did you delete videos? I remember seeing one where you ranked all the Tales games. I remember symphonia being 4 and Vesperia being 1 (obviously). I think you had also done a video about where to start the series? I'm just wondering if I'm remembering wrong because I remember those videos being really good and I want to watch them again because I'm planning on getting into the series soon.
i put them in a playlist with my other unlisted videos. i'm not proud of them anymore but if you want to watch them they're in there
@@ZaffreRevolution oh nice. Thanks. I can see why you'd want that based on a creative mindset. I was just confused and worried because I really liked those.
Love the review but i do have a question it seems everyone gives Sacred Stones a hard time for its grinding but they give Awakening a pass even though it has grinding as well your thoughts?
Never really got into FE series yet. I heard this was the 1st game in the series that allowed grinding.
the first one was actually gaiden on the nes, but that didn't get localized until echoes shadows of valentia on the 3ds so... yes and no haha
@@ZaffreRevolution never knew that
@@ZaffreRevolution I didn't realize it went that far back!
Good review~!
I like FE, tales and soulsborne series
I wonder about your view on Darksouls & Bloodborne
Hahaha the Rita spells.
That was some good placement.
No one has these old consoles anymore and there are no remakes soooooooo...............
time to sail the seven seas matey
Amazing!! Review Hades please!! Your awesome!
Ah, the game named after one of Owain's signature moves. XD
Hey Zaffre,
Are planning to do a review on Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE i would love to hear your thoughts on that game! I remember you were struggling to get through it! Great Review and that voice of yours is just awesome! You got it man! Ever consider voice acting?!
i tried making a review but i think i'm just gonna do a shorter video on it because the end of the game filled me with emptiness lmao. i really didn't like it hahaha
CROSSCODE DLC IS OUT MAN DROP THE SWITCH
still waiting for it to hit the switch T_T i'm in the process of building a pc tho
I can imagine a bit considering this more as a escort title.
I really hope you grill Awakening hard when you get to it
Dood i dont care what the plot was about, the moment i got my hand on the dragon i used alllllll her attacks on the stage u get her. Saved. Only to then learn u cant buy her attacks. Omg i dropped the game just base on that. Im a simple man.
This makes me miss my Game boy Advance! Definitely was not the best Fire Emblem in the series but it was my first and that Nostalgic is hitting hard!