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- I had a bad time with Smile 2 even after having enjoyed the first one in theaters four years ago. Mild spoilers, but I just really had it with the concept that the antagonistic entity could make the protagonist perceive whatever it wanted to, creating what I called in my spoiler-filled Letterboxd review “an epistemological dead-end.”
- Update on Fortune’s Weave: I’ve gotten past the initial hurdle of uncomfortable differences with Three Houses to at least make this a good time-spender. But there’s still some layers of annoyances:
Fortune’s Weave is a game centered on a city hub – all your team recruitment and team building activities happen here. So anything leading up to the city of Daigson is a prologue. As a result, Fortune’s Weave has multiple prologues. There is set-up as your avatar character and then there is set up as whatever Flame Lord you have selected. Once you’ve completed one Flame Lord’s “Part One” and select another, you *actively know you are in a prologue until you get back to the city.*
So it’s a pacing issue, where the game has you go through a lot to get to all the systems, but for a basic completion run, you need to do this four times. And then there’s the question of the systems themselves.
This does form the addictive game loop – finding quests to do, doing “weekly” tasks to improve your characters’ stats, and then completing the quests for rewards. And this easily constitutes more hours than the battle maps themselves; the whole reason you’re playing Fire Emblem in the first place. This is definitely an inherited and magnified trait from Three Houses, but without the conceit of a whole academy where there’s a story reason for training your units up in the first place.
I’ll have more thoughts. I completed Leda’s part one and am currently doing Cai’s. Both characters that I like, but I also am past 40 hours and really should be further along in the main plot than I am.