the end?
I could lie and say this site is the fastest thing I've ever made - I started work on it just over a week from its opening day - but that is, in all, a lie. It's had years to sit and pick away at my brain. Pick A God And Pray was that site - what has always been my blue sky, "I'll never make this but I absolutely should" dedication. Then after a decade or something it decides to whisper in my ear with a format in which I could divide it. Then I made the layout (I always wanted to go with browns), and its presentation became obvious. I grasped that presentation, ran with it, and here we are.Fire Emblem is a series I've been meaning to shrine since Tellius - it was placed on my projects page along with Serah, over and over, yet never got off the ground (or out of the blue sky), because I wasn't really sure what to do with it. After my move to Nevarra, my Fire Emblem tribute plans disappeared entirely - holding on to it was holding me back from making anything else. The problem I persistently had was scope: a plethora of games, and over a decade's worth of memories. There was so much I remembered, so much I had forgotten, so much lost in swathes of locked livejournal entries, and so many characters to talk about - could I even give it the dedication it rightly deserved anymore?
Then I realised: I didn't have to talk about everything.
I have talked about a lot, and the tribute weighs in at a little under twenty thousand words, but it's not all encompassing. This tribute celebrates my journey, my time spent playing and enjoying (and not enjoying) Fire Emblem, and the aspects within it I most wanted to share at the time of writing - that I've most wanted to share with the small community of website makers I've known for years, whether they are newcomers to the series or seasoned veterans like me. This site is me, because there's no other videogame series that I've held onto, with frequent releases where I was there for its start - alright, Blazing Sword was not the start, but for the audience outside of Japan, it was. It might not always be my favourite or produce things I like, but Fire Emblem will always be special.
Pick A God And Pray's presentation, as being a personal reflection, also allowed me to ramble - which I needed, as the start of 2017 has not been kind to me and my personal health. I needed something to keep my mind occupied - some days I couldn't write a word, and some days I wrote like the wind. You can, however, thank the pain meds that provided me with the starting section headers and for how this shape would take shape - I might have been reading certain tributes (Level 20 by Larissa comes to mind) several days before the epiphany finally hit me.
This is a site that is finished, but also one I can build on in the future, only if I want to - and there's always more to add, as long as Heroes continues with the new artwork for my banner rotations, and as long as the series has games. This year has Valentia, which I will purchase, for better or worse: maybe I'll allow the nostalgia to sweep me up with a replay, and maybe one day I'll give Genealogy or Thracia a shot (probably not. But we never know. More echoes, Nintendo?). And if anything would make me buy a switch, it'll be a new home console Fire Emblem game. But only if it's amazing.
Pick A God And Pray's tribute was officially opened on 16th February 2017. Thanks for sticking with me, and a big warm thank you to all my twitter friends for their enthusiasm for my mystery project. I hope you've enjoyed it… and you can probably tell I have a degree in media analysis at this point, haha.
howdy from the future!
Wow, is this thing still on? This is Rems from 2023, and in the process of moving this tribute over to my new domain, figured I might as well check in. You're probably wondering, where's Valentia? (Short answer: I played maybe ten hours of it and stopped.) Where's Three Houses? (Long answer: I played one full route, clocked in almost two hundred hours, and decided I did not like the game, and was so thoroughly burned out by Three Houses I did not play any other game at all for over three months.) I don't plan to add them, or any spin offs or future games, to this site for the foreseeable future; after three games I really did not enjoy in what was one of my favourite series, I've kind of fallen off Fire Emblem as a whole. I still love it at its core, but the shift has really been not for me. Which is unfortunate, and I'd rather not leave things on such a dour note, so we'll see what further installments bring...?In the meantime, I'm still proud of this site, and I do like to read through it from time to time, and I hope you do too! See you again when I see you.
credits
Images used on the layout and throughout the site were largely sourced through Serenes Forest, for the series splash imagery, and the Fire Emblem wiki (and the other one) for specific characters and Heroes artwork used in the headers. The wikis were also used to brush up on the facts that had slipped by mind. Kudos to them. Gifs found via giphy.Patterns used are from so-ghislaine and subttlepatterns.
Fonts used are Montserrat and Oxygen, both sourced directly from Google Fonts. Some imagery uses Lane B, Loved by the King, and Master of Break, all found at dafont.
Pick A God And Pray © Rems 2017-2024.
Fire Emblem © Nintendo and Intelligent Systems. No copyright infringement is intended. Opinions written here are my own, and are not a reflection of either company, as I am not a part of them. No profit is made from the running of this site.
outerrealms - linking back & places to go