Lord Raven's Game of the Week 3: Fire Emblem: Awakening

[Liam]

When The Last Of Us came out a lot of my friends at college were pretty excited to go and get it because all of the hype that was surrounding it. From that point, I've mostly heard good things from it (people staying at home to play it lol), in line with the things that were outlined in this review. The solid gameplay, plot, etc. I don't have a PS3 myself but I've ought to try it, even though I hadn't really given it much of a second thought. Personally, I didn't know about the forging and skills aspects and thought this was more or less just shooting zombies. I have been enlightened.

As for the topic, I really would like to read reviews of more cult or niche games. I think you were banging on about Shadow hearts to me at like 4am a couple of years ago, and I still haven't gotten round to checking it out. I'm terrible.

Keep it up, dude.

[Lord Raven]

So I just updated the review/column/whatever you wanna call it and expanded it to two posts.  Much of it is the same but I added a few paragraphs and leaked it over to the second post.  Also added a video to showcase the storytelling and gameplay (gives a good impression of the first two hours of the game) and cited a reference point to get a feel for whatever I want to describe.

My question for you guys is:  Is there anything specifically you like to see?  I'm here writing this not only for my satisfaction but to entertain people and get some discussion going and such.  I personally do not wish to keep on writing articles that everyone's gonna nod their head to.  Bear in mind, I'm not a writer, I'm a guy who wants to become a physicist when he's done with school, so I know my writing isn't polished and probably won't sell video games (especially since I am attempting a more neutral tone, and sometimes my biases do slip through) but that's not my purpose.  My purpose is just to broaden someone's scope, maybe talk about a game no one's really played before, and whatever else.  (Also, to promote discussion on pkmn.net)  I don't mind anything so long as your critique doesn't come off as standoffish (I am an adult and yet I absolutely despise that attitude).

I also thank you all for the compliments but I prefer just hearing about what you guys want me to do more and such.

Also, another thing is:  are there any games you'd like to see?  Feel free to suggest anything - if I've played it then I can do it at some point.  If I haven't, then I could try my best or, hell, I could allow you to write a Game of the Week in this thread and put you in the OP!  This is meant to cater to a community and not me personally.

[Ledyba]

Good Post for the Last of Us!  (though you made a tiny mistake, Joel's from Texas, not California, shhhhh) but besides that.  Great! Really good read.

Oh. Oh.  It's a fair way away, but when GTA V comes out that'd be cool to see your Game of the week Take on it!

[Lord Raven]

Yeah I preordered that game too. 

Joel's from Texas, right, but I thought they lived in California when Sarah was killed?  I think we can all agree that Joel's from Texas and that they started the game in Boston.

[Ledyba]

It was Texas, at Tommy's Dam when Tommy hands Joel the photograpth he says he 'went back home, to Texas' where he got the photograph.

[Lord Raven]

I hit ctrl+f on the wiki and got nothing under California.  Will change that now.  What in the hell was I thinking of?

[Bloatedfish]

I'd suggest playing a campaign on some grand strategy game (eg Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis). You could develop your own narrative and run us through your decision making process.

[Ledyba]

The only real compliant I have about the TLOU is that sometimes stealth feels a bit unrefined, it's fun, but it's not on the same level as say Metal Gear Solid 4's, and it doesn't feel as polished, but it's serviceable and competent enough to be fun.

What I really love about Gameplay is the survivor part of it, looking for supplies and building from that is very fun, and the combat is enjoyable within that context.

Also the Bloater encounters were just so fun.  Terrifying, but enjoyable encounters, and I felt they were used just enough without becoming tedious,  something I felt the Clickers suffered a little bit with.

[Lord Raven]

I had a swear filled rant about the clickers in another thread/forum, and frankly they are the single most disturbing thing I have ever seen in a video game.  And I have played through 2 and a half shadow hearts games and seen a Koudelka LP and everything.  It's the fact that it's so human yet not human at all and just click click click click click out of nowhere (though thinking of Boomhauer when I say click repeatedly helps quite a bit because I had a slight amount of legit PTSD when I saw a clicker in a video today).

Clickers were good simply because only a few times have I ever had to play through a clicker segment without going stealth.  If there were times where I'd aggro clickers then it'd be when there's a jillion other enemies anyway, so I just throw bombs and unload shotgun rounds on all of those guys.  They were fun to get around because I'd just throw bottles and bricks away from where I was going to get rid of them.

However I don't think the stealth was meant to be particularly refined which actually adds to the game.  MGS' stealth is the way it is simply because that's the nature of the MGS games.  MGS games have you as a spy-soldier, whereas TLOU you're just a guy who has to improvise to survive.  Which is generally what the stealth is about.  I personally played stealth in the sense that I would lure people out to take them on one at a time and such.  Kinda like Batman except it's Troy Baker.  But yes, that is something I forgot to mention - the pure survival horror nature of it.

Bloatedfish has a great idea, but sadly I don't own any of those.  Maybe when I get more time and less of a backlog (on top of a million other games I'm looking forward to this coming year).

[Lord Raven]

Sorry it took so long; feedback where possible please.  I'll be getting another one this Thursday-Saturday too.



Developer:  Namco Tales Studio
Publisher:  Namco Bandai
Platform:  PS3
Release date:  September 8, 2011 (JP); August 6, 2013 (US); August 9, 2013 (EU/AUS)
Rating:  T (ESRP)
Genre:  Action-JRPG

Where do I begin with the Tales series?  Let me start with the fact that I have a general distaste for the series at times.  I have only seen a single game with a good plot since Symphonia, and that would be Tales of Legendia.  Tales of the Abyss had a decent sense of chemistry between the characters, but every other game had too much...  variance between characters (will expound on this in a moment) that leads to the game just being really awkward.  The story telling is generally monotonous and too syntax filled, and personally I feel in a modern RPG the cutscenes shouldn't focus on infodumps so much as the storytelling.

Look at FF13; say what you will about the plot itself (I personally believe it was amazing but it's confusing if you don't have a supplemental source to aid you with it) but the storytelling was phenomenal.  The datalog explained nuances and concepts, the characters interacted on the field in a very fluid way, and the models didn't seem so stiff all the time.  Stuff like that is my problem with the Tales series.  They have improved in the sense that they use motion capture for certain cutscenes, but when characters are walking around and interacting in certain cutscenes, they look like dolls or something because they just look so stiff.  It's grating at times and I feel like a huge PS3 game like this can do much bettter.

The story is quite simple and, as per usual Tales fare, can get unnecessary complicated at times.  From the start you can choose to have either Jude Mathis or Milla Maxwell as your main character.  The story, afaik, is slightly different for each but follows the same general concepts (I've always been told Jude's story is much better but Milla has better music - compare Jude's battle theme to Milla.  Milla's is much more soothing to me which I prefer).



Jude is the guy with black hair, Elize is on the bottom with blondish hair, Milla is on the bottom right, Alvin is the brown haired guy at the top left, Rowan is the old man, and Leia is the girl with the orangish hair in the middle.

Jude Mathis is a 15-year-old medical student studying at Fennmont when he's called to a research facility to observe his professor receiving a prize for his research.  The guards tell him that his professor is not there and Jude gets super skeptical because of the invitation in his hand.  Then he meets Milla Maxwell near the sewer entrance to the research facility and he follows her around, only to observe that his professor is being experimented on to power a weapon.  Milla is revealed to be Maxwell, the lord of all summon spirits (Tales of Symphonia folk - you guys remember him right?  And no, not Origin) and she is there to stop that weapon, known as the Lance of Kresnik.  In trying to disable it, she takes away its spyrix (a magical device you'll learn about as you progress) and fights against some weird crazy lady.  As a result of doing all of this, she ends up losing her power to channel and summon summon spirits and effectively weakens to near human levels.  Your purpose throughout the game is to stop any latent wars, get Milla's powers back, and stop the Lance of Kresnik from being activated.  Throughout the game you are basically trying to get back to Fennmont, which is proving very difficult to do because war is imminent.  Along the way, you meet some new characters.

Jude's fighting style is not unlike Senel's from Tales of Legendia.  He's a pure martial artist with group healing spells, and fights with effectively knuckle attachments.  Milla is a mage-fighter type character, where she's balanced between magic and physical attacks.  She specializes in aerial artes and a lot of her skills are air-based.

Alvin is a mercenary that nobody knows very much about, but seems to know almost everything about everything.  He's also flirtatious and the jokes involve how much he checks out or hits on girls.  Think Kratos and Zelos fused together and that's who Alvin is - he even has their moveset mixed with Lloyd's.

Then you have Elize Lutus, who is a young girl found by a village and continually told that she doesn't belong there.  She's effectively locked in a wine cellar to prevent these interactions by their mayor.  She is also the white mage in the sense that she creates area healing spells (as well as some...  dark magic spells) and can't fight effectively.  Elize's partner is Teepo who I don't know what the hell he is, he just has the filter of a 5-6 year old and talks like someone from Sesame Street.  Damn helpful in battle though because he recovers your TP.

Rowan is an old man who is talented and knowledgeable of everything - he is a butler for a royal family that opposes the dealing behind the Lance of Kresnik.  He is generally a mage-type character.  If you've played Tales of Graces f, his physical attack style isn't too different from Cheria.  He's kind of a smartass old man type charcter you see in anime, who can get away with most jokes with a straight face.

Our final character is Leia Rolando, who is one of Jude's childhood best friends.  She joins him because of some spoileriffic stuff that happens leading Jude back to his hometown, and they help each other fulfill the goal they need.  She's a generally energetic young girl, around 15 like Jude, and surprisingly doesn't succumb to that stereotypical childhood-friend-with-crush stereotype that girls like these tend to follow.  She fights with a pole and uses martial arts, just like Jude, to fight.  She is also a healer, but her healing style is more focused on a single person than Elize or Jude.  In fact, she's the sixth recruitable character yet the first to use First Aid as an arte; back in Symphonia we had at least 2 users by the time we finished the first dungeon.

But who cares about the storytelling for now?  Gameplay!  Another thing I don't like about the Tales series is that their battle system has like 10 words in it.  Maybe not exactly 10 but it's still long:  Dual Raid Linear Motion Battle System.  Does that mean anything to you?  Let me start with the basics and dissect it.

You explore towns, dungeons, and the overworld (btw there is no world map in this game - games these days are going for density as opposed to a wide-open world, which is nice, more on that later).  The overworld is effectively a road between areas, dungeons are where you'll spend a decent amount of time, and towns are towns.  Typical RPG stuff more or less, nothing groundbreaking.  Monsters are on the field and you can approach them from the back for an advantage (they lose half of their HP and enter a stagger state where they're immobilized for a few seconds), the side where they lose around 10% of their HP, or the front where the battle starts like normal.  Or they can approach you from the back where you're surrounding.  Again, nothing particularly unheard of in an RPG.

In battle, like regular Tales fare, you're in a 3D plane but when you are targeting something, you are in effectively in linear motion relative to that enemy.  So your approach towards them doesn't take any twists or turns, it's more or less straight to them.  And it's just like a fighting game; you have your regular attacks, HP, and some other techniques (formerly known as Techs if you've played Symphonia but later known as Artes) to use and combo together.  A few things you'll notice; a TP bar.  Using artes costs TP, so it's basically the word for MP in this game except it's not just magic.  And something else called the AC, the Assault Counter.  This dictates how many more techs/hits/actions you can chain together before you have to rest for a split second while they recover (they recover quickly and automatically when you're idle).  If you have played Tales of Graces f, then it is exactly like CC (Chain Capacity) except every arte takes away 1 AC at a time.  The more you use an arte, the more features you can unlock with it.  For instance, using Demon Fist 200 times will make the projectile travel a longer time, whereas using it 400 times will not only make it travel long but it will allow it to go through enemies.  There's at least 20-30 artes per character that have this growing effect; there are guides to this too, but a lot of artes have their uses and they do get easier to make combos with as you use them more.

So that effectively covers the Linear Motion portion of the title.  Quite a mouthful so far.  So what is this Dual Raid thing?

[Lord Raven]

Well, you can have four people in battle at a time right?  Well, that means two groups of two.  Basically, what I'm getting at is you can pair two characters together in this game and have them do many things.  First of all, they will always be around one another and attacking the same person; often times, you will get an instance where one character sets up an attack for another person to respond to.  Other times, the other character has an ability that allows them to do various things to their partner.  For instance, Elize has the ability to restore the TP of her partner, whereas Alvin can break the guard of the person his partner is targeting.  These actions all significantly build up a unison gauge of sorts (think the unison attack bar back in Symphonia).  When this bar reaches a new level, then you can activate a combination arte of sorts; this arte takes the elements of two artes used by both of the linked characters and attacks the enemy with it.  For instance, if Jude uses Demon Fist then presses R2 when the unison gauge is at a certain point, and if he is paired with Alvin, then they will both use Demonic Chaos combining both of their Demon Fang attacks together.

Pretty spiffy because it's basically a free attack.  Now, as you get more and more of these going (they can only activate when your unison gauge hits a certain point) and your unison gauge is full, you can activate them once and get a chain going.  All you have to do with a chain is activate the arte shortcut of an arte you haven't previously used in the chain and you will continue to fire combination arte after combination arte until your unison gauge expires.  If you don't manage to get another chain in time, then you can take advantage of the gauge by attacking as much as you want; your AC does not go down at all while the unison gauge is whittling down.  Eventually, you run out and your unison gauge is empty.  Then you have to restart the process, which is not very painful at all surprisingly.  Here's a good example of what I'm talking about except the text is in Japanese.  One thing you'll notice is that at his first chain, he'll use an arte, then have a circle with two cross-swords inside of it; at this point you press a button to activate a chain.  It's very simple and its use is situational.  Remember, it's a fighting game.

(One thing about the video - if you notice a glowing color background around a character's HP/TP bar at the bottom, then if they are the same color between characters that means that the two characters are paired/linked.  It's a simple press of the D-Pad to link them together; the bars are strategically placed so that the D-Pad directions correspond to where you're linking them).

Remember in FFX when you could switch out your party members for another character in the game just in case your current party members were inadequate for the battle at hand?  Well, Xillia has taken the next step in this regard and given you the ability to do exactly that!  If you press R3 in the middle of battle and hit the D-pad in any direction (it becomes obvious) then you can switch out a character in favor of another one just in case.  It's really nice especially if your characters in your current party are running low and you need to switch in a healer or something.  Of course, like FFX, you can't switch out someone who is KO'd.  And yeah this game has multiplayer; your friend can hook their controller into one of the four slots on your PS3 and control another character.  Because the AI is kinda wonky at times (they take too long between combos) it's always nice to have one, that way you can stagger your combos (so your partner can start their combo during the tail end of yours and vice-versa).  They should fix the AI or something so they can respond to those situations accordingly because it's annoying to see some enemy get a good combo on you when you're really just setting up your partner for another combo -_-

This game is also long; for reference, I am 25 hours in and I am at roughly the halfway point of the game.  I've been doing sidequests too, but supposedly there is cool postgame stuff.  You can either start a New Game+, where you can transfer many bonuses depending on your Grade, or continue from the final save point and access all the New Game+ features without having to restart the game.  Pretty nifty huh?

If you've played other Tales games or not, it doesn't matter, because Grade functions much differently in this game than any other.  You gain Grade through Titles.  Unlike previous Tales games, each character doesn't have their own titles; instead, they're more like achievements which reward you with grade.  Many titles give you actual PSN trophies, too.  If you haven't played other Tales games, it's basically achievements but putting a Tales throwback term into the mix.

You don't really need replayability if you have access to a ton of post-game stuff, and the only replayability this game has is New Game+ and revisiting old sidequests you've forgotten.  There are around 100 sidequests and many of them lock you out after a certain point.  Many are short too and have no reason to really lock you out between points aside form becoming irrelevant.  Luckily there's a GameFAQs guide for this.  You can also replay the game to view the other character's version of events and/or music if you want to, as well, which I do recommend because it's a fun game.

Overall I wasn't impressed by this game but I was not disappointed.  I didn't have high expections of this game, because in gameplay I prefer Abyss and Graces f but in terms of plot I prefer Symphonia and Legendia.  So it's definitely not a Top-5 Tales game but it's not the worst one either.  I recommend waiting for a price drop before getting this though, I think it was long enough that it was worth the money but it requires a lot of commitment to get through.  I wouldn't say the atmosphere is the best, either, but games like this strive to get you the plot in a most deadpan manner and they tend to give a rather neutral mood to the plot itself.  The battles are infinitely more exciting than the cutscenes, though.  I felt like I was too lost in the background details at times to really understand or care about what was going on in the plot.

There's a supposedly much better sequel slated for 2014 localization.  It's released in Japan as of 2012, though.  Tales games are pretty bad about western release, but lately it's been Namdai's only international profit so be on a lookout for the series!

[Del]

Tales is one of those series that I really wanna try but I just never get around to it. I think I played the Vesperia demo on the 360 a few years ago and it seemed fun. Then I watched someone stream Graces F and it looked pretty great, but I didn't watch enough of it to really get a feel for the plot.

It sucks that Xillia seems to have a pretty mediocre plot because plots are a big thing for me in JRPGs, but then you say the plots are usually always pretty pants so I dunno. Being able to pick your main character and having subtle story changes is cool though.

The gameplay from the Vesperia demo was pretty fun, so I imagine this is the same, and the Dual Raid mechanic sounds pretty cool, and being able to switch out characters mid-battle (one of the best features about FFX) is definitely really cool, being able to tag people in and out depending on what you need for a certain battle adds a cool extra layer of strategy (or so I'd imagine).

Sounds like there's a ton of stuff in the game content-wise too, which is nice. Good value for money and all that. I don't know if I'd pick it up though, since you mention Graces F had more preferable (better?) gameplay, and I imagine that'd probably be a bit cheaper than Xillia by now.

Really nice review though Muhed, I'm definitely more interested in the Tales series now. You barely touched on the music though (it's a JRPG, you gotta let me know if the soundtrack is good or not man!), but otherwise solid review.

[Webby]

I'm really enjoying these reviews, they're both games I've been looking to buy recently which gives me a well judged opinion on them

Do you think that this Tales game is a good place for someone to start exploring the series? I've never really seen copies of any of the Tales games before so I've never played them - would you suggest starting with this one and moving onto earlier releases, or start off on an earlier game?

[Lord Raven]

Yeah it's very similar to Vesperia in a lot of ways.  My problem when I played Vesperia was that there wasn't much in terms of frontline units (it was mainly just like...  Yuri) so it got really annoying to deal with certain things sometimes.  But Vesperia's not particularly bad; I didnt like its plot either but people generally enjoyed Vesperia.

The music I felt was average-ish at best.  Motoi Sakuraba's OSTs are very hit or miss.  The town themes give a very Asian feel at times whereas the battle themes are either like Jude's or like Milla's; fast paced or orchestral.  It depends on whose path you took, to be honest.

The thing about Graces f's gameplay is that the game itself is fairly easy until the future arc, where it amps up the difficulty a little bit.  The gameplay is fun because you can have long combo chains because of the way its battle system works.  No need to deal with TP like other Tales games.  And magic users have reduced casting time if the magic is used towards the latter end of a combo.  It makes it much easier to lock onto a combo and it makes your combos varied quite a bit as well.  Also a set of 16 or so artes are mapped onto one button whereas you can map 4 onto another button (and 4 on the joystick) giving you, effectively, 24 Artes at your disposal from the get-go.  This allows you to vary your combos considerably giving it a dynamic feel.  You can assign up to 16 artes in Xillia, but you have to hold a button to access the other 8 (which makes it inconvenient because those buttons do a lot of other things).

Webby - I would say no if only because then the older games would seem like kind of a drag to play.  My personal favorite out of all of them was Symphonia, though.  Legendia had a great plot, great characters, and a beautiful soundtrack but its gameplay was a drag and was probably comparable to PSX Tales games (ie pretty bad).  Problem with Symphonia is that it was out in like the early 2000s for the Gamecube so idk if you have the resources to play it.  It's fairly rare to find.  Another good starting point is Abyss (PS2) because it has a lot of modern Tales elements to it while still having a classic Tales feel.  You may not know what this means but Tales used to be a very traditional game before the newer released kinda destroyed whatever tradition it once had.

Overall though I would just look for the cheapest console Tales game if you can.  Xillia's 60 dollars atm which is too expensive, and I'm not sure how much the other games are these days.

[Lord Raven]

Developer:  Intelligent Systems
Publisher:  Nintendo
Platform:  3DS
Release date: 
Rating:  T (ESRP)
Genre:  Strategy-JRPG

"Two sleepings dragons - one a sacred ally of mankind, the other its sworn destroyer.  Two heroes marked with the symbols of the dragons.  Their meeting heralds the dragon's awakening, and the word's ending."

The newest entry to the Fire Emblem series and the one that did enough and more to keep the series alive and popular.  This FE game was remarkably popular considering lots of people I've talked to have heard of it and liked it.  Nintendo did a decent job advertising it considering how much it made, and it outsold every game in the entire series individually in its first few weeks.  After being released a few weeks in the US it outsold the other games international sales greatly.  This is a great sign of revival of the series, and it comes in a very fresh and interesting way.  These are games that have thrived on their simplicity (for reference, calculating damage is as easy as this:  Str + Weapon Attack - Enemy Defense +/- weapon triangle bonus) and somehow managed to be innovative and fun all the same.  The basic stats still exist - Str/Def dictating physical attacks, Mag/Res for magic attacks, Luck doing whatever it wants, HP being what HP has been in every video game ever, Skl to determine accuracy, and Spd to determine evasion and whether or not you attack twice.  Attack, Evasion, Hit rate, Dodge (which is ability to avoid critical hits) and Critical hit ratio (critical hits triple your damage output) are determined from these stats and they're very simple formulas that are easy to look up.

I was not too fond of the plot or anything, I don't care for any of the characters except like Stahl and Cherche, so I will leave Lottie to post that on the next post.  But the gameplay I was incredibly fond of and despite being easily taken advantage of, it is a step in the right direction and opens up an incredible number of methods to play this game.

So previous Fire Emblem games have kept the same formula for gameplay with a few tweaks here and there.  You take turns with the enemy, and on your turn you can survey the field, select a unit, have them move, and then have them do one of many things.  They can end their turn, use a staff, attack with an equipped weapon, use an item, trade items with another unit, and rescue/drop/transfer other units.  Of course, if you don't feel you moved to the right place, so long as you didn't input a command, you can reset your movement.  But this is getting to the general stuff, since there are character and class specific options that everyone has, and I'm not going to get into that because there's just a lot of those throughout the history of the game.

This game got rid of the whole rescuing shtick and included pairing up.  A unit can move and land on top of another unit, and they become paired up.  Upon pairing up you can do quite a lot of things.  The most obvious thing is that you can drop the person you're paired with, switch them with someone else's paired up partner or transfer them to someone else.  In other games, this was more or less the rescue mechanic, however in those games Rescuing would slice your skill and speed in half (in Thracia 776, it cut everything but HP, Luck, and Bld in half).  Now, you gain statups depending on the unit's stats.

The units in a pair up have a "main" unit and a "paired" unit.  The main unit is the one you control on the map, and his movement and stats are used as a base.  When you attack or trade, you are trading his inventory and attacking using him.  The paired unit?  Gives boosts based on his class, skills, and stats.  The paired unit also has a certain chance (in %s that are listed when you engage in battle with another unit) to attack alongside the main unit (Dual Attack) or take a hit for the main unit (Dual Guard).  If you have two units adjacent and neither of them are paired, then instead of the paired unit we have a secondary unit (the unit that does not issue a command).  That unit has a chance of doing all of the above and not any more than that (but since they're not paired you don't receive the same stat-ups as you do with two paired units).  The main unit and the paired unit can switch their statuses as main and paired units just in case; so if your HP goes down

As you can see there's a lot of strategic depth which results from this.  It also retains the features of all of the previous games as well while taking away some of the more annoying and broken ones.  One of the most annoying features from previous games were status staves; they do not exist any more, which is good because Poison, Silence, Sleep, and etc were actually very annoying.  (They lasted 5 turns and most maps get done in like 8-9 at most in older games).  Magic, instead of existing as a trinity (Light/Anima/Dark or Wind/Fire/Thunder) exists as one weapon type with several vastly different weapons.  This was annoying in older games because while there was a trade off for every weapon type you only ever were able to level up one weapon type.  The others were a pain in the ass to level up.  Finally, no constitution stat or some similar system; no weapons decrease your attack speed no matter what, whereas it used to be that if the weapon weight were above a certian threshold (either your Strength stat or a Con/Bld stat), you would lose speed based on the difference between that threshold and the weapon weight.

Some of the more broken removed features were the Warp staff (can warp you anywhere either in a certain range or anywhere on the map depending on the game) and Bonus Experience (which was free EXP you could use from a base menu to level up your units).  Another broken feature of previous games were E-ranked Steel Axes, which allowed any user that promoted and gained Axes to start with an incredibly powerful Axe from the get go and never look back.  Fire Emblem uses weapon ranking to dictate when you can use more powerful weapons, requiring you to level up proficiency in that weapon.  Not always more powerful weapons, sometimes unique ones too, like you need a C in axes for an Axe that boosts your critical hit rate by 30%.  But instead, we have the following system; all units tend to start with E- or D-rank in certain weapons.  E-rank weapon users use pathetic Bronze weapons, whereas D-rank goes up to Iron, C-rank to Steel and Killer, B rank to Silver, and A rank gives you access to Brave weapons (allow you to strike 2 or 4 times instead of 1 or 2 times).