no August book post

[queenlua]

since last time, i started but did not finish:

* The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedua. it wasn't a bad book, but it was a bit dull/slow in the hundred or so pages i read, and then the library started nagging me to return it and i decided i didn't care about it enough to deal with the overdue fines

* Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Geiman. the bits with the angel and the demon were great, and The Tumblr Dot Com would lead you to believe that's the entirety of the book. unfortunately they are a bunch of other bits and i found them interminably dull and overly cute / impressed-with-itself

all the rest of the time i would've spent reading instead went to playing Final Fantasy XII, Elsinore, and Fire Emblem: Three Houses. (two of those are 60hr whoppers, you do the math)

oh also basically every weekend has been booked so

yeah!

expect more fun book posts soonish; my weekends are calming down soon & i'm in the middle of My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferante, which is very good so far

Comments

[queenlua]

YES wrt liveblogging, i'm planning to throw some shit up on here/tumblr/dw/somewhere??? now that i'm off planes for a bit (got into seattle at like, 2am last night, fml), but here's some top-of-my-head tl;dr thoughts:

* i finished the Edelgard route first (the one where you fight the church because hell yeah), and i'm now halfway into the Blue Lions route

* i have mixed feelings about the gameplay—on the one hand, it's a little on the easy side, and it's definitely a bit Stardew Valley-esque / Menu Emblem-esque in that it somehow makes small repetitive stuff wildly addictive and fun, which is not bad per se but does make the game feel a bit longer than it needs to be, feels slightly exploitative, etc...

...on the other hand i had six cross-country plane flights so honest-to-god having some dumb addictive gameplay mixed in with the Fire Emblem-ness was absolutely golden

* the adjutant system is great. i'm a little shaky on battalions as i'm not wild about the extra board complexity they add—but once you get used to them, boy they are a blast. biggest boon of the classroom is "i can beef up my students' levels in shit they aren't good at yet", e.g. dump some energy into lances even though your student's already A-level in swords and you don't want them to stop using the best weapons, etc.

* it's so oddly satisfying to force students you recruit to murder their former allies (e.g. make Ashe kill his dad, make Felix kill Ingrid, etc)

* i'm wildly fond of Felix and Sylvain and fic will probably come from me eventually; i also like Ingrid, Petra, Ferdinand, Dimitri a fair bit. intrigued by Claude, but haven't done his route yet so don't know a ton about him. Edelgard and Rhea facing each other down is delicious; they're both absurdly intense and mildly batshit in such different ways. i had a blast with the BE route but think they suffer a bit from some "meh" characters; a lot of the people in Blue Lions have known each other since childhood and click together really well, whereas Caspar, Bernadetta, Linhardt, etc just don't do much.

* i have a friend who managed to recruit every single fucking recruitable unit to his house. on his first playthrough. he said it made the second mock battle against the other houses extremely silly :P

* there's a bunch of meta that's kind of oddly delivered (e.g. only get it piecemeal on certain routes) but that i'm super-curious to dig into, in time. on the Blue Lions route you here a lot more about tensions between various noble houses in the kingdoms; Black Eagles gave me insight into Edelgard's motivations, but apparently Claude's route is "alliance politics are every CRAZIER than all the other places" and the church route is where you get details on wtf rhea / seteth's deal is, etc

* tl;dr i wish the game were a little less bloated, but overall this is a super-fun entry and i'm really pleased to see FE pushing some of their older themes again, after Awakening/Conquest/etc, which felt like missteps to me