Planning My Way Through RPGs Since 2006

The idea for this post came to me while I was agonizing over my classes/romances/recruits/whatever in Fire Emblem: Three Houses because I remembered that I had a whole page in my planner for Fire Emblem: Awakening.

I also recently went through all my diaries about a month ago (which I would not recommend as it was a terrible and cringey experience) and I said to someone, “Wow, it’s like literally nothing has changed. I just traded MapleStory for Fire Emblem”. So for this post I went through all of them again (still a terrible experience) to see the evolution of this madness. I chose only one entry from each year so that this post would be of a reasonable length.

(2006 – MapleStory) This one actually isn’t entirely in line with what I was looking for, but it’s the only thing I found from 2006. Mostly I took a picture of this because I appreciated the part where I wrote down my password.

(2008 – Pokemon) What I find really strange from this diary entry is that I don’t even own a copy of Pokemon Platinum, and I don’t think I’ve ever played it…??? I played Pokemon Diamond with a completely different team – and I had Piplup as my starter so I really don’t understand what’s going on here. However, I’m glad that the me of 2008 had the wisdom to get HM slaves. I was that kid that taught HM Flash to my Pikachu in Pokemon Yellow, so it looks like I at least learned something from elementary school to middle school. Honestly, I don’t think this is a bad team.

(2009 – MapleStory) This is one of the two diary entries that inspired this blog post. I’ve been having trouble figuring out what I wrote here. I know that these are all the MapleStory classes from before MapleStory got super complicated. I also remember that my Cleric, Hunter, and Fighter were my three mains in the Mardia (M) server. Other than that, I can’t interpret this at all. What are all these numbers? And I can’t even begin to understand “Mardia fuld-Guardians (and if it’s taken Shadows)” ????

Some other stuff I found wasn’t as thematically fitting for this post (so I did not take a picture of it) is a handful of pages with notes and diagrams for some low level party quests.  Specifically the party quests in Henesys, Kerning City, and Ludibrium – if that even means anything to anyone reading. I’m not really sure how to best explain them, but it was like a series of stages with puzzles and/or enemies that lead to a boss (usually with good drops). I was a healer, so I was high in demand and also legitimately enjoyed doing them, but didn’t want to be seen as a n00b. Thus, I wrote down notes on how to complete each stage.

(2012 – Shin Megami Tensei) I had a really hard time with the final boss in Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2. I clearly remember dying many times to to the final boss and the only way I managed to win was to charge in and ignore all other enemies on the field. Basically a strategy of “I kill you before you kill me”. So I really don’t think he was just “a bit tricky”.

Like most non-Persona SMT games, this game is split into multiple endings. At a certain point in the story, the player has to choose who they would like to side with. In Shin Megami Tensei terms, the story basically splits into law, chaos, neutral, or none of the above. The neutral branch also splits into a good ending and a true ending depending on how good your relationship is with the rest of the party – it’s like social links in Persona or supports in Fire Emblem. The lawful leader was actually the side I liked the least, but I chose him because one of the characters from the chaos side died so I would be one party member short. I also thought that I would go back and do all the endings… except I didn’t. I did get to the branching point in my first New Game+ though, I just never ended up finishing it.

(2015 – Skyrim) You know what really bothered me about Skyrim? There are all these different and interesting story lines, but the game doesn’t mark out which quest belongs to which. I had so many quests that I couldn’t keep track of which ones were important and which were just stand-alone quests, so I wrote down the quests I needed to do next.

(2016 – Fallout) I…think I had trouble finding my way to the Great Khan encampment. In my defense, the map wasn’t very helpful. Is there another way to get there without using that one dirt path near Vault 19? I have no idea.

(2017 – Pokemon) Now this is a Pokemon team for a game that I actually do have. This team is for Pokemon Ultra Sun and I did actually end up using this team. It’s quite a shame really – Pokemon US/UM is by far my least favorite Pokemon game, but this is by far my favorite team. I really loved the Pokemon in the Alola region. The Pokemon not listed here are Decidueye who ended up being my favorite starter ever and Lycanroc who just looks really cool in its dusk form. Other than Ninetales, every member of my team was an Alolan native and even Ninetales had the sweet new Alolan ice form. But alas, I couldn’t get over how ridiculously linear this game was. I did end up beating it eventually, but it was quite the slog.

(2018 – Stuffed Fables) Is Stuffed Fables an RPG? No? Well this is one of the more interesting things I found, so it’s going to be here anyway.

Stuffed Fables is an absolutely adorable board game from Plaid Hat Games in which you play as stuffed animals protecting a young girl from monsters under her bed. It’s extremely endearing. It’s sort of like a cross between a choose your own adventure book and a miniatures RPG. On one page there’s a typical tile grid where all the gameplay happens, and then on the other side of the page is all text. A lot of it is just plot – since the game is supposed to be read like a bedtime story, but it also handles all the events, triggers, and choices. This is definitely a terrible explanation and there’s no way I could do it justice in a paragraph.

Given that it’s a board game with longer campaign-like sessions, we often needed to “save” our game before reaching the end of the episode. I called this page my “save states”. Basically detailing all our stats and items such that we could set up the next day and start back up exactly where we left off. Pretty neat.

(2019 – Fire Emblem) feat. Spider-Man, Smash Bros, and student loan payments.

Finally we reach the second half of my inspiration for this post. This is just a whole bunch of Fire Emblem: Awakening characters and the classes I wanted to re-class into. The only thing here that I didn’t follow is classing Robin into a sorcerer – I classed her into a Dark Flier instead. I’ve only played two Fire Emblem games so I can’t claim to know much, but it seems like flying classes always end up being stupidly overpowered.

I also spent a lot of time trying to figure out what pairings and marriages I wanted. Good ol’ Fire Emblem Awakening where we get married for the sake of good stats.

I still barely remember the [swords->axe->lance] triangle.

(Bonus – Final Fantasy) My teams for the final dungeon of Final Fantasy VI. I swear I’m going to try and finish my blog post on that soon….hopefully.