Pins and Flames

Published: Wed, 08/28/19

Hey !

So work has been a tad slow the last week. You see, I got bored over the weekend and decided to get the new Fire Emblem game for my Switch. I've played some previous Fire Emblem games and have really enjoyed them because of their challenging tactical combat and their tight economy of character advancement.

You see, in each battle, there is a limited number of enemies providing a limited amount of experience for attacking and defeating them. Once the battle is over, you have no choice but to move onto the next battle, which will assuredly be harder. Experience is very much a valuable resource that you must figure out how to allocate properly or you will run into trouble down the line.

The new Fire Emblem game adds to these tensions by introducing a giant out-of-battle system as well, where you must decide how to best use your limited downtime in between combats to best train your army, build friendships with them, and also work on recruiting new members to the team. This is all very engaging, but I ran into a problem...

I found myself enjoying the out-of-battle aspects of the game, but the actual combat was not challenging at all. You see, I made the mistake of setting the difficulty to "normal". I'm not sure why, but it was a complete mistake. I found myself just steamrolling every battle I encountered without much effort, and the whole time management economy felt very loose. The boring combat even started to detract from the other elements of the game because there was no tension. Why does it matter how effectively I use my time outside of combat, if I'll be able to win no matter what?

The lack of difficulty just completely ruined the game for me. So much so that, after playing for 20 hours, I decided to start over with a new game on "hard". And, oh my gosh, it feels so much better. Now all the elements of the game feel perfectly balanced against each other, and I am so much happier.

I guess the moral of the story is that if you are going to play Fire Emblem: Three Houses, set the difficulty to "hard". Or, I don't know, maybe the moral is broader than that. I am bad at summing up. Either way, Black Eagles for life!

All these jokers have really grown on me.

All right, sorry for that whole treatise on a game you may or may not care about. It's just been at the forefront of my mind the past few days. What else am I thinking about?

PAX! I am actually leaving tonight to head out to Seattle for PAX West. We were able to pick up a booth at the last minute, and so added it to our convention schedule. We'll be there demoing Gloomhaven as usual, but we'll also have an area set up to demo the digital Gloomhaven game as well, which will hopefully draw more of the video game crowd to the booth.

You remember digital Gloomhaven, right? Came out last month and is awesome? Yeah, you should try it out.

We will also have pins to sell, and they are also awesome. Even Tom Vasel thinks so. You see, we had a bit of a mishap at Gen Con, and our pins didn't quite make it to the booth in time, which was very disappointing for everyone involved. But we definitely have them now and will have them at every show going forward. They aren't official Pinny Arcade pins or anything, but, well, we are also working on a super-cool Pinny Arcade pin for PAXU in December, so that's exciting, too.

We'll also have the super-cuddly and adorable Vermling Mindthief at the booth. She even has her own Twitter account and seems strangely obsessed with Robb from Blue Peg Pink Peg. Weird!

After PAX, I'll be resuming my normal con schedule and heading to SHUX at the start of October. I am organizing some sort of Gloomhaven QA/discussion with Matt from Shut Up and Sit Down at that convention, so that will be fun. I may even let slip some new details about what is coming up in the next year for Gloomhaven. Still working on a specific time for that to happen, but they'll record it, so all of my endless wisdom will be available on their channel afterward.

That was sarcasm by the way. There will be no wisdom.

Anyway, thanks for humoring me through another newsletter. Hopefully I'll catch you at a convention in the near future, but if not, and you are still interested in picking up some pins, we will be announcing the opening of a web store very soon. Until then!