This Old Neon Forum

Welcome to the #BGE2020 Elimination Round Lower Bracket!

Each game in the lower bracket is still seeded based on its performance in the two opening rounds of pools! Every game in the lower bracket has already been defeated by another game in a 1-on-1 poll to get to this point. This is their chance to claw their way back into the main event... but the stakes are high. The games that lose in these polls are out of the tournament for good! The games that survive will face the next crop of upper bracket losers in the next round.

Polls are updated weekly, typically on Saturday... or Sunday or Monday. Check back throughout the week to make sure you don't miss a vote!

HOW TO VOTE

This is easy. You only get one vote per poll. The game with the most votes wins. In the event of a tie, the higher seed advances, so don't get complacent!

These are both games I liked for very different reasons...
I never did get very far into Radiant Dawn, but Path of Radiance I've started a few times and beaten once - it's the only FE I've played more than a few hours of, and it's a great game with a more serious tone than the others I've tried. I appreciated both the inability to grind and the party-exp feature - it felt like a good way to balance things without requiring absurd things like hitting your own party and healing them, or delaying so that specific low-level characters can move and gain experience. Character development is really good, too.

999 was really fun but I didn't like the other entries as much, as it seems they became more and more self-indulgent and ridiculous with each entry. While the premise in this one is ridiculous, the characters feel more human and less psychotic (and maybe because this was the first one, the twists hit harder). The puzzles are tricky without being obtuse, and the occasional divergences into whatever weird philosophical, mathematical or occult topics are a bit more tolerable. The gimmicks/twists are fun, but I may actually like the penultimate ending better than the "true" one.

I think I'd give a nod to POR over 999 here.

I really loved PoR - it was the first FE game I played and I remember being stunned that character death was permanent. It put me through my tactical paces to make it through to the end w/o losing anyone. That said (and this must be a familiar refrain by now in many of my comments...) it's the sequel, Radiant Dawn, that I remember most fondly. Perhaps it was the return of old characters or the great story, but whatever it was, I liked it better than its antecedent.

999 is also a first, though in this case the first of an entire series, and although I think I like the final game most - the semi-happy ending combined with better visuals and even more twisted events/characters - like with FE:PoR, I did like 999 a lot, too. Hard to choose between two initial offerings I liked less than their successors, but I'm going to go with 999 because it's tthe more original and twisted of the two. Yeah, there's a love story, but it's a very strange one. And it manages to fuse visual novels (which, however compelling, I have no time for because they are not games and I have lots of real novels to read) with genuine puzzle elements (and not just "put key in lock" or dumb fetch quests) the likes of which would not be out of place in Grim Fandango or Myst.

I actually prefer PoR to RD, but both are required reading for the full development of Ike's character from brash teen mercenary to reluctant general to confident leader. PoR IMO is structured a little bit better, with RD's swapping between protagonists a little bit jarring. And the most important thing I preferred about PoR is that the main antagonist is just a guy. It's much too common in these kinds of games where the big bad boss is a demon, dragon, demon dragon, or god, but Ashnard is a great villain.