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So I decided to do another run to try the Sacae route. I don't know if I'm getting past Chapter 7 this time.

The main problem that I have with Seize in particular is that it limits what your Lord unit can do. You have to keep moving towards the throne so you can't have him fight reinforcements or complete side-objectives. I liked the idea behind Arrive in X Turns objective, although I don't think it was ever done particularly well. I think it could be a great way of scaling difficulty by changing X across difficulties.

There's a problem with adding more options like this that I think tends to get overlooked. More options isn't always better depending on how the options are presented. I think most people understand the difference between an official difficulty mode and a self-imposed challenge. For the former, the developer is taking responsibility for the experience, but for the latter it's your fault if you make it too hard. In an official difficulty mode, there's a contract between the player and the game that the challenge is valid way to play the game. In a self-imposed challenge, you can wonder if you've made things too hard or frustrating on yourself. You can lose confidence in the efficacy of the difficulty easier when the game doesn't legitimize it. This is why classic exists as an option. Technically, classic isn't needed as an option at all. You could just not deploy a unit for the remainder of the game if it dies as a self-imposed challenge. If you do that and ignore any future dialogue/epilogue with that character, you've recreated classic mode. But it's not the same because by putting in an actual classic mode, the game gives that otherwise self-imposed challenge legitimacy. It tells the player that permanent death is the way the game is meant to be played. So what does that have to do with dynamic difficulty modes? Well, depending on the way it's presented, it could communicate to the player that the developers weren't confident in the efficacy of the difficulty so they let you figure out what the difficulty should be instead. In many games with dynamic difficulties, the game doesn't really care what difficulty you play at. It doesn't acknowledge you for completing the whole game on hard because it lets you cheat and switch back to easy whenever the going gets tough. Granted this is a pretty easy fix, you could just select an option at the beginning of the game about whether you want to play with static or dynamic difficulties and/or the game would only unlock stuff when you complete things when using static difficulties or when you keep the same difficulty the whole way through. But sometimes these subtleties get overlooked when trying to provide lots of options. I think the reason that many developers don't include lots of options is because they spend a lot of time trying to balance things for the ideal user experience. Part of the developers' job is to curate your interaction with the basic systems of the game. As an experienced player, you may think you know better than the developers how the game should be and you might be right. But for most people, having more options would lead to them disrupting any of the fine-tuning that the developers tried to do. The real shame is that with these console games there's no modding support. Mods are a really good solution to this problem when people think they know how to fine-tune the game better than the developers and provides way more options than you ever see in a game.

Well Lugh seems like he's better than Lilina but not as good as Saul. Lugh seems frailer than Saul but not as bad as Lilina. He's got less HP and Speed than Saul but better Luck so I'm not sure how that balances out in practice. Clarine also seems like she would be better than Lugh with great speed and luck in addition to movement. She's still frail but Lilina's problem was that she was frail and slow so she always died. Also, for some reason Druids have the highest speed cap of all magic units.

For what it's worth, I don't think that the personalities and motivations of the legendary heroes are all that important to FE6's world. Hartmut's motivations explain the MacGuffin in that game, but otherwise they exist more as setting than characters. I'd also say the Dragon's Gate stands pretty well on its own. It doesn't provide additional context that was lacking in FE6. It fits better with Nergal's motivations and quintessence.

Well hey that doesn't work as a tradeoff if you're supposed to defiantly refuse to choose one of the options on principle. Idk man, FE already does a lot to encourage low manning. Forcing you to forfeit a lot of money if you want more breadth on your team seems excessive.

How much better is Lugh vs Lilina? I really tried to make Lilina work but she was just too frail. In my run, Saul capped speed really early so I found him very useful for combat magic.

I think you've got it backwards. Circa FE6, there is no Elibe that exists outside of the way that FE6 portrays it. It's fine if you like FE7's portrayal of Elibe, but it doesn't derive a whole lot from FE6's portrayal Elibe. And that's what's kind of weird when looking at the two together.

To the extent that FE7 blames Lycia's disunity on the Black Fang, one would expect their removal to help. It also suggests that the alliance fundamentally works without the Black Fang's meddling.

It's a tradeoff but I'm not sure if it's a good tradeoff. Usually the optimal play is to only promote your best units and sell the rest which I find to be a boring outcome.

The Black Fang is what kicks off the Laus subplot though. Playing FE7, you'd think that after dealing with the Black Fang that Lycia would be more united. FE6 suggests Lycia's downfall was long in the making and that they only needed Bern to show up before they all started betraying each other. From that perspective, I wouldn't say that FE7's Laus subplot has much to do with FE6's Lycia.

Yeah well that's the thing though. FE7 doesn't actually explore the world of FE6. Hector and Eliwood weren't really important characters in FE6, and their adventures across Elibe in FE7 aren't don't have anything to do with their roles in FE6. The Bern succession subplot is there, but it's thrown in at the end and it feels kind of tacked on. But really, how do you get from FE6 prequel to the Black Fang? I can't imagine someone thought Elibe was ripe for exploring and decided the way to do that was to expand upon the league of assassins after quintessence, except neither of those existed in FE6. And that's like the whole plot of FE7.

My biggest problem with promotion items is that there seems to be a huge opportunity cost to using them because they're worth so much money sold. I'd like to feel like I'm not throwing away a lot of money by promoting an underwhelming unit just to see if it turns out any good.

I actually think a game about the Scouring would be relatively boring. The Scouring represents a high point for humanity where they're all united and working together toward a common goal. The events leading directly up to FE6 are supposed to be a low point for humanity where people are squabbling and harming each other. At least that's what Zephiel's motivation is supposed to be and they kind of try to show it with Etruria. I think there are hints of things like racism and nationalism as justification for cruelty in FE6, but it's not really explored. A prequel could have really dug into that potential, I think. I don't see how the FE7's planned international release explains why it's a not-quite-really prequel to FE6. It seems like it would have been easier to just not have it be related to FE6 at all. Also, I don't buy that Elibe was supposed to be peaceful after the Scouring and leading up to FE6. The game says there was peace but the world suggests anything but. Bern's trademark is its strong military which is pointless if there aren't frequent wars. And Illa supposedly supports itself on mercenary contracts. The only countries that suggest having been at peace for a long time are Lycia and Arcadia.

So I just recently beat FE6 again and it got me wondering, why is FE7 a prequel to FE6? FE7's main plot has like nothing to do with Elibe. The Black Fang? Dragon's Gate? Quintessence? None of it builds off of the foundation from FE6. Yeah there's that whole Bern succession subplot at the end of the game but it feels really tacked on. It's funny because I was thinking that FE6 might have been a game that could benefit from a prequel. There's a lot of history suggested by the game that I think would be interesting to explore: how far back goes the conflict between Sacae and Bern, how did Etruria come to colonize the Western Isles, how do the Illans maintain dignity as a people when working for other nations. I'm not a writer so maybe it wouldn't have been that great anyway, but still. I don't resent FE7 for not being my personal fanfiction, but it's like, why is this a prequel? It feels like they had Black Fang plot done first and then rewrote it to try to be a FE6 prequel. Why? Was FE6 that popular that the next game had to be related to it? I don't think it really fits. I'm not even saying FE7's story is bad (although I don't really like it). I just don't know what they were thinking. Any thoughts? Would you have preferred a real prequel to FE6? What would you have wanted it to be about?