Lain

Also playing Shadow Dragon for the first time, and I'm curious... Would enabling a cheat that made all stats increase upon level up be too OP?

I sacrificed Frey because for some reason, he just felt like the right choice. Wait... it's canon, you say? Spooky.

Loving the art on these cards... puts stuff like YGO and Weiss Schwarz to shame. Probably not gonna pick up a box since I'd rather put that money to a game I actually play, like MTG or FoW, but I'll probably pick up a few packs when I return to Japan.

I'd say yes, so long as the battle mechanics are left in tact. I'm bored of the typical black & white approach to good and evil in FE, I'd gladly accept an entry that shook up the notion that the side you're on is the very definition of saintly. But it doesn't look like that'll happen anytime real soon, so I'm gonna take matters into my own hands.

Only on the New 3DS, though.

shin megami tensei X fire emblem X etrian odyssey X advance wars X persona X professor layton X ace attorney X silent hill X pokemon X magic: the gathering X checkers X go fish X uno X tic-tac-toe X battleship

Nah, I like the earlygame the best, for pretty much all the same reasons other people have mentioned here for why they like it. As an aside... WHAT THE FRICKING FRICK, THRACIA?! Those douchebags at Intelligent Systems need to quit timetraveling to steal all the best ideas I've got for my FE fangame. First it was the fatigue system, now it's my prison break sequence?! Goddammit! Guess it's back to the drawing board for that... lol

Though I'm currently still leaning towards gridless, as there are secondary reasons I'm interested in it... namely it's a lot simpler to implement, which means faster development. But I'll tinker around with some prototypes before settling on an idea, and if gridless doesn't seem like it'll pan out, I have no qualms abandoning it in favor of something a little more tried and true. Or taking a stab at something like a hexa-grid.

Is a fatigue system not sufficient? The more active (AKA dominating) a deployed unit is, the more fatigued they get... and overly fatigued units cannot be deployed until they've had sufficient rest (which could be anywhere from 1 to 3 maps per my intended implementation). So they can deploy their Jeigan and dominate with him, and then potentially have to deal with the next 3 chapters without him entirely... or they can try to minimize his usage (deploying him on a sporadic basis and/or distancing him from the action except when necessary) so that they'll have him available when they really need him.

That is highly assumptive of how the ranking system is designed. And even in the worst-case scenario (a ranking system that just goes off raw performance rather than going off a unit's performance relative to their capabilities), you still end up with a situation that's better than traditional FE. If you were to dominate a chapter with a select few units in an actual FE game, only those guys would get any EXP and everybody else would get 0... or at best, what little they can manage to scrap up by delivering finishing blows to nearly-dead enemy units. In the system I proposed, as long as a unit survives the battle, they automatically get at least a D rank... with a x0.40 multiplier, that's 40 experience. And if all your units at least see a little bit of use, then they're pretty much guaranteed to make C rank and get the accompanying 80 experience... whereas a cleric that saw "a little" use in an actual FE battle would maybe get somewhere between 10-30 EXP that round. Not too shabby IMHO and certainly not kneecapping the losing team, at least relative to how EXP works in actual FE games.

Yeah, the overwhelming number of classes in FE alone pretty much kill this idea. I could see it maybe working, and also addressing people's concerns about character individuality, if they condensed the classes down into broader archetypes then allowed characters to have dual classes to counter the reduced single-class diversity. A character's level would then be the average of their two classes' levels. I wouldn't mind seeing that in a FE game, but for my fangame, I think I'm gonna go with a different idea. All characters who participate in a battle get a rank at the end of the battle (F, D, C, B, A or S), and they all get a taste of that delicious EXP pie... but the size of the slice they get is determined by their ranking. For example, the base EXP of a story chapter could be 100, then there could be different multipliers for the rankings. A character who gets a rank of F (AKA defeated in battle), might get a x0 multiplier applied to their EXP earnings. The character who gets an S rank (AKA the MVP of the battle), might get a x2 multiplier. And all the ranks in between would have appropriate multipliers as well.

On normal difficulty (the lowest) and casual mode, it's pretty much a piece of cake. I was able to mop up the last third of the game (chapter 17 onward) using only a single character (well technically two since Chrom is mandatory for story chapters, and I did have him lend his strength to Donnel in the form of Pair Up...) I'd say it's probably too easy (coming from a guy who kinda sucks at these games), and I wish I had played it on Normal/Classic or Hard/Casual... but alas, I cannot rewind time, nor do I wish to do another playthrough of Awakening any time soon.

I haven't played Star Fox Command or Phantom Brave, so I don't know the finer details of how their mechanics work... but as far as choke points and stuff like that goes, I think these things can be implemented effectively in a non-gridbased format. To provide 360 degree protection for a given unit (at least from non-ranged attacks) with FE's grid-based movement, you need to surround them with 4 units (only 3 if they're up against a wall and 2 if they're in a corner). I think that this could rather easily be implemented in a non-grid system, and the same goes for creating choke points.

How would you guys feel about a Fire Emblem game if it were to ditch the grid? Everything else would play the same... move units one at a time during your phase, each with a certain movement range and attack range, then enemy units do the same during their phase. The only difference would be that the world isn't divided up into distinct grid positions, instead going with a more gradational approach. Effectively it could still technically be considered grid-based, with each pixel constituting a grid position... and units and other elements taking up several grid positions rather than an individual one. I personally wouldn't like handheld/console FE games to take this approach, as grid-based is much quicker with button-based controls. However, I'm considering ditching the traditional grid system in my fangame for the idea I just proposed, since I feel it would be significantly more compatible with mouse-based controls. But what do you guys think?

Interesting idea. I probably wouldn't mind it, as it's a little annoying having to micromanage what units get what EXP. Personally though, I'm toying with the idea of ditching EXP for my fangame in favor of something I've dubbed "BX" (battle experience)... basically all units who participate in a battle get an equal amount of BX, and BX is what levels up your units. So essentially, shared EXP earning across all units in a given battle, but they can level up independantly of one another depending on which units you use throughout the game.