Who is a Fire Emblem? Is it you?
I’ve played approximately a 15 year stretch of Fire Emblem games. That qualifies me to explain Fire Emblem. In brief, Fire Emblem revolves around moving a set of 9-12 bright-haired characters around a grid-based battlefield while optimizing how close they are to one another to ensure that the mid-battle banter is lit. The better the banter, the more the characters like each other, and the more fire emblems you can add to your resume.
What is a fire emblem?
When consumed, a Fire Emblem can only be described as an interactive visualization of what it would be like to live in a world where hair color is a defining personality trait.
In the most recent installment, cleverly subtitled “Three Houses” because of the three different hair color schemes (red-ish, blue/green, and rainbow), you play as a green-haired normie who is selected for purely religious reasons to teach advanced military tactics. In this iteration, you dote on your 9-12 characters during their teen years through morally ambiguous professor-student flirting. Things get spicy when a goddess possesses you, causing the player character’s hair to change from deep teal to a washed-out aqua, symbolizing your growing disillusionment with the green-haired ruling class. As a result, you shirk your academic duties and decide to nap for the foreseeable future. When you wake up five very formative years later, all the voice actors are trying their very hardest to do a grown-up version of their characters voice. Importantly, the color of the character’s outfits now match their hair color.
In a world where your values are defined by the color of your hair, it’s important to know where you stand on the visible light spectrum. Fire Emblem is an excellent journey of self-discovery, assuming what you want to discover about yourself is your favorite hair color.
Resident Evil 7 VR Harnesses the Terror of Biology (No Spoilers)
The Resident Evil series is best when it stays true to its name. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard returns to its roots by dropping the protagonist directly into the world’s most haunted house.
Evil doesn’t just live here. It’s paid off the mortgage. It’s built a tire swing in the tree that’s been growing behind the garage for generations. Evil has taken up residence and doesn’t particularly want to give you a tour.
Battlefield 1 recaptures a revisionist perspective
Battlefield 1 has recaptured the magic of the good ol’ days. It’s easier than ever to create magic moments of wartime cooperation and peerless heroism that makes the Battlefield series shine. Better yet, it is the most visually stunning and auditory engaging game of this generation. The developers at DICE, coupled with their mastery of the Frostbite engine, create a WW1 atmosphere, which, while not entirely true to history, is a hell of a lot of fun to experience. Smashing a heavy tank through a quaint Italian stone cottage feels properly satisfying. The simultaneous war cries belted out by my fellow soldiers as we prepare to charge the next entrenched enemy position, while the thud of falling mortar shells engulf us is truly spectacular in a way that I’m 100% positive real combat never is.
The Future of Tactics: VR
Virtual reality is the next frontier for games that have been traditionally hampered by interface. Think Starcraft: the ability to fingerdance across the keyboard is just as vital of a component of a win as picking the right cheese strategy. Think X-COM: an errant mouse-click easily leads to disaster. Think Tropico: wouldn’t it be easier to look through the eyes of a cop loyal to the corporate state than awkwardly float around a mafioso from a bird’s eye view trying to make sure it’s him that your goons execute, rather than his cousin’s milkman?
SCP-3666
Item #: 3666
Object Class: Keter
Special Containment Procedures: SCP-3666 must be stored i n or around the interplanetary system known as the SOL system. While the precise location cannot AND MUST NOT be recorded or transmitted between Foundation personnel, the current orbit of the celestial body containing SCP-3666 is routinely uploaded and downloaded between three Foundation satellites unknowingly manned by by O5 during weekly leadership review. Coordinates are maintained in case of an XK-CLASS end-of-the-world scenario.
Trooper: Do you copy?
We’ve been down here for weeks. Memories disperse like plasma rifle vapor in the hot twin suns. I don’t recognize the troop leader. But I don’t recognize Unit 480 either, and he just keeps insisting there’s rebel garbage in the sulfur pits.
I’ve checked the sulfur pits.
They do occasionally crop up over the ridge yonder, star-side, bumbling like little heat wave Jawas, even lobbing a blaster volley in our direction.
Unit 480 and I haven’t seen the whites of eyes or the reds of wookies in longer than my own armor has seen polish or the white sheen, Emperor be damned.
He barely moves anymore, too, bacta tank sores on his legs spreading every day. Unit 480 doesn’t admit to pain. He’s taken to polishing his armor plates with the mercurous ash floating and eddying around us like it knew sheer effort could make it through our respirators.
We Salute the Herald, in All of His Glory
We spend a lot of time, some of us, in front of these glowing screens, peering in from a great distance, as if attempting to scry some kind of demented future in the frothing sea of nothing that exists in the networks between your brain and mine.
Last night, I gazed into the electronic portal that held captive my very soul, that which would allow me to break free of a cycle that promised only consumption, annihilation of our true-think, a real-time strategy encased in perpetual patch notes.
The time was nigh. I clicked, hardly daring to believe in the Creator’s power to erase the forfeiture of more than a decade of handwringing, endless loss in the face of a great catastrophe, one that would embattle more than ten million bodies in a struggle for their desire to step away from a beast truly impossible to satiate, for it fed on the desire of escapism, endlessly capitulating to just-one-more-day of grinding, farming, maybe raiding – even level-ups lost in time, like dust in the winds of eternity.
A Fading Genre
by Stu
When I imagined the future of gaming some 10 years ago, I was most excited to see what the tactical role playing game (TRPG) would evolve into.
Bored with the traditional turn-based battle screen, the combination of a playing field with positional meaning and the classic level-up, turn-based RPG system was exactly what gamers needed back then. Each map feels like a focused landscape, framed at the perfect angle for tactical command. The “slice of the world” isometric map is a unique and purposeful style—not inherently complex, but with the potential for huge depth.
Isometric RPGs were especially satisfying to me, worlds created with blocks of terrain: river, lava, rooftops, each with values that gave the environment gameplay meaning, as well as a visual stimulation of the imagination.
Standouts in the genre often involved the ground you’re standing on in more than a quantitative way. Final Fantasy Tactics, for example, gave players the ability to become a bender of the elements—geomancers could inflict status effects on their enemies based on the kind of tile they stood on.
The reality is that most modern tactics games are remakes and ports of old classics limited to handheld devices or fast-paced genre hybrids like Valkyria Chronicles that don’t hit the same notes as the classics. Many of these ports, remakes and hybrids are quality games, but I can’t help but want something fresh—the next evolutionary advancement of the tactics game. Instead, the genre has faded into near non-existence.
Nintendo spotted at The Louvre: how casual can you get?
While the PS4 and Xbox One argue over who plays DVDs better, the Wii U looks on from its wallflower corner, probably playing Pikmin 3. This kind of introverted behavior has a lot of fans and industry critics (armchair non-withstanding) calling the Wii U and Nintendo the loser of the coming generation, not up to the task of competing with the two powerhouse consoles. Not that these attitudes or criticisms are anything new, Nintendo was accused of going casual almost as soon as they announced the original Wii.
Even though initial sales are showing strong signs of the Wii U’s health as a console, Nintendo isn’t just winning a sales race.
The company that was laughed at for catering to families and casual gaming has entrenched itself well in global culture.
Check out some photos of Nintendo’s participation in the art galleries of The Louvre.
Kifshaw the Korrupt
We’re pleased to start MyFinalBoss.com off with a high quality piece of content. Burbator (who can be found in Minecraft and on reddit.com with the same name) has built a Minecraft adventure map destined for greatness, and we’re very happy to provide you with the exclusive download.
Our editor has played through the entire thing. For experienced Minecraft players, expect a 4 to 6 hour adventure. It helps to have a working knowledge of up-to-date Minecraft items and mechanics, but we think you shouldn’t have too much trouble.
This map is intended for Minecraft Version 1.6.4.
A few words from Burbator:
Kifshaw the Korrupt is the result of eighteen months of effort focused on using redstone creatively in order to create new, challenging and fun puzzles as opposed to endless jump courses or mob fighting.
Important notes:
The map is singleplayer only, multiplayer will not work.
Read all instructions carefully and do not cheat, the map is densely packed with redstone and cheating is liable to break the entire map.
Play on the highest brightness. Full screen mode is helpful, but not necessary.
The rules are stated in the map but are repeated below as well.
- You may only place blocks that you find in chests.
- Anything in parentheses is a rule and must be followed.
- Do not break blocks, unless you do it by throwing a projectile.
- No spamming buttons.
- No trading with villagers.
Without further ado, here’s the download link.
For comments, questions, concerns, complaints or if you simply get stuck, email Burbator at ilikesk8boarding@yahoo.com.
Enjoy,
The MyFinalBoss.com team.
Check out Burbator's Minecraft adventure map! As seen on Thinknoodles YouTube.
My Final Boss 