I admit, as a long-time hater of this title for its bitter, mean-spirited inaccessibility, and who does not see the genuinely brave and experimental storytelling choices you praise as elevating a fundamentally limited and broken game that falls into many of the pitfalls of the pre/interquel, I appreciate this review. It makes the arguments in the game\'s favor fairly eloquently, but also openly discusses some of the things it did wrong without making excuses for it or painting those of use who couldn\'t \"break through that barrier of unfairness\" as spoilt crybabies, idiot losers, shallow \"casuals,\" or otherwise condescend.
I have a few personal bugbears I wish had been addressed head-on, like Fatigue and Escape chapters, but that\'s knitpicking. And I appreciate that with a limited wordcount, you wanted to devote more of it to praising your favorite element of a game you love, where I would probably devote more of it to criticizing a game I hate. My major real disagreement is how important it was to the franchise as a whole or how much of a landmark or quantum leap it was as a seminal title in the series, but that\'s quickly an academic argument I\'m not sure I can win.
But, again, \'s a good review, and even if I disagree it\'s very fair and very well-written and -argued. To that end, hat\'s off to you, and thanks.
...You seem to have stronger opinions on it than I do, honestly. I wrote it in part because I feel people do give up too soon on it, due in part to entering with the wrong mindset, or just dismiss it as a super-hard game while assuming it doesn't have anything else to offer or any way to make the experience smoother. Once you do recognize just how powerful the options at your disposal are, the game really opens up and becomes a great big sandbox of Weird Things To Do and chapters that you can wreak havoc in. And when you do pull it off, there's a sense of completely bamboozling the game that you don't really get elsewhere. I've said that my favorite F Es are the ones that let me make crazy gambits and get rewarded for it, and Thracia is all about that.
With regards to Fatigue: I don't find it that bothersome, honestly. Thracia actually does make it quite easy to rotate untrained units into the army, since the average enemies are fairly weak. I've had a base-level Marty running around in Chapter 16A, getting bumrushed by a pegasus, and surviving for multiple rounds until someone could come rescue him. There's enough basically competent combat units to rotate regularly, or chapters that don't favor specific characters anyway, or chapters you can just skip to give everyone a free refresh. Is it a particularly well-designed system? Not especially, and I agree that its intent could have been managed in another fashion. But it also didn't act as a dealbreaker for me, and I actually enjoyed the experience of rotating in new units or finding surprisingly competent backups lurking in the lower rungs. Cobbling together a force including nerds like Hicks, Fred, Machua, or Selfina was interesting.
Escape was indeed a poor idea, but I'd say it's not for the reason people say. I don't actually mind the "you lose units if you escape without them" conceit, once you know it's a thing, anyway; the problem is more that it tends to turn the last few turns of the chapter into everyone getting into a big ol' conga line and marching their way onto the escape point, which rather harms the pacing. There are some fun escape chapters that use the mechanic well (chapter 6 comes to mind), but most of them suffer in the finale because they tend to kind of just stop.
Hey man, I ain\'t the other guy. I can see you genuinely had fun with something I aggressively hated, and the last thing in the world I wanna do is splash some of my misery onto ya or try to invalidate your happy feelings with my negative ones, since you weren\'t trying to tell me I was wrong for not liking it. Have a good evening.
\"Hey man, I ain\'t the other guy.\"
Love the indirect, but you might want to simply say my name next time.
I already asked you how I was wrong for starting a debate. If he really didn\'t want one he could have said so since the very beginning and I would have simply left, just notice how, even when I did want to reply to his last comment in his other review, I didn\'t because he said he wanted to end things nicely. So could you please stop treating me like if I were a toxic person because I honestly am not.
You ain\'t havin\' no debate. You just startin\' a nit-picky argument. Ain\'t changin\' his mind, and your only objective seems to be forcing him to publically \"recant\" a view you disagree with, since he compromised and removed the thing you didn\'t like.
I am glad you finally decided to be the bigger man. But that doesn\'t mean you weren\'t being pretty toxic before you did.
\"You just startin\' a nit-picky argument.\"
Nit-picky? Maybe, I could see how my arguments could be considered nit-picks. But an argument? Far from it, I just wanted a debate, nothing more. Notice that I never got angry nor insulted him, calling cards of either an argument or a fight. And if he didn\'t want me to debate, well he could have just said it.
\"and your only objective seems to be forcing him to publically \"recant\" a view you disagree with,...\"
Not at all. You are just assuming this (something I thought everybody knew was wrong to do). I just disagree with his review because it is a public review and I am free to do so if I don\'t agree with his opinion. Notice that I never told him to remove this review or to change it in A or B way.
\"since he compromised and removed the thing you didn\'t like.\"
So what? Simply because he modified his review doesn\'t mean that I am forced to either agree with him or stay quiet. I am free to disagree with the new points he brings up if I don\'t agree with them.
\"But that doesn\'t mean you weren\'t being pretty toxic before you did.\"
I still wonder how I was \"toxic\" if all I was doing was having a calm debate.
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A masterpiece, and also a mess
Thracia is, to me, the best FE game. It's the game that epitomizes what FE should be: a well-told story with themes and ideas that are carried into the gameplay, an open structure designed such that no two playthroughs go the same, some of the best art on the SNES, and an intensely memorable feel. Every chapter is distinct, every character has something cool about them, and you could play it for years and still learn things about it.
Unfortunately, it's also a fairly inscrutable game that's struggling under the issues of its time. Fan translations do a lot to help it, but there are a fair number of chapters in the game that just aren't fun, even when you know what you're doing, especially the ones that spam ballistae. And god help you if you're trying to go for full recruitment and survival; Thracia is a game that likes to kill your characters and laugh about it, and that's something you have to either tough through or shrug off with an ironman. Paragon Mode does a lot to patch things up, though.
In terms of what it did for the franchise, though? Thracia did a lot. It's a quantum leap above its closest kin, Mystery of the Emblem, and its DNA runs proudly through both the GBA games and the Tellius duology. And Leif, to be frank, is my favorite Lord. He's a dark reflection of Marth but one done very well; he has a character arc that works wonderfully and it's carried through in the gameplay. He's scrappy, arrogant, and impulsive, but has the capacity to learn and grow. He deals with issues that feel far more "real" than any other FE. And he's surrounded by one of the most motley and dysfunctional armies in any FE game. His story is the story of little guys trying to take their home back, and it's done beautifully. That it's conveyed despite the actual writing being somewhat limited is an achievement that really needs to be seen.
So while it's not the best-crafted game, or the most approachable game, I consider it a game that needs to be experienced. There's an energy to it unlike any other game before or since, a sense of personality and idiosyncrasy. And once you break through that barrier of unfairness, you find a game that begs to be played, again and again.