Ayra

For one I'm never going to say no to information, especially when you translate everything instead of the bare minimum! :) I got to say that Chrom's a really logical pick for lord in an awakening deck... That's an utterly amazing ability, and he's going to stay awesome even if you don't draw an upgraded Chrom. The neat thing about his ability is that from the sound of it, this also affects his stats on the opponent's turn... So Chrom + 7 class-changed unit = 110 power Lord... Ouch! Let's just say that he's faring quite a bit better than poor Vaike!

There is a Shining Force on the 3DS?? Nice! I didn't know that until I read your post! I actually haven't played that one yet, but I'll definitively be giving it a spin. Shining Force 1 was good, and Shining Force 2 was simply amazing. It's a bit on the simplistic side (even more than FE) but it was a ton of fun. This Gamegear one doesn't exactly look as good, but..... At least good enough to give it a try and hopefully be pleasantly surprised! Regarding RNG, I think Shining Force 2 actually had a fair amount of RNG. If I remember well, the levels still had some random (For example, this character gets from 5 up to 7 attack power in a level), but I might be wrong. Double attacks and counterattacks were all random based on the character class (Monk Sarah might have 12.5% to double attack and 10% to counter-attack as a non-factual example) and I think dodge was the same. As were all status effects, of course.

Thanks for the Tiki translation! I had the first ability right (yay!) but I had no clue about the second one... Vincent, if it's not too much trouble, could you do Chrom's (the basic 1 cost one) first ability too? I can't understand that one either and he's kind of the main character so it'd be a useful one to have! The SF wiki would be a pretty good fit in my opinion: This is already by far the most complete English site for Fire Emblem so it'd make sense to have the card game information here too. If allowed, I'd certainly be interested in contributing for it. sofuttopai: I'm also buying the Japanese black version, sorry. I kind of bought a Japanese 3DS mostly for Langrisser Reincarnation (don't think it'll ever get localized), and I figured that since I was already wasting a lot of money, I might as well order one of the FEIF version while I was as it and waste even more (Especially since I'll be getting the NA version too...) I sort of badly justify all that wasted money by saying that there's only an handful of games that interests me coming out in the remainder of 2015 so I won't be spending more than usual on games this year. Possibly wishful thinking but it's the intention that counts..? eclipse: We've seen Catria and Est too (Three giant cards sitting next to each other). Their abilities are the same (except for the names of course) so we do have three more cards taken care of. Yay! Guess I was wrong about Vanguard cards, sorry! I think I got unlucky: The demo video had robots and both players had those in the match I watched. The wiki front page also has them on the side bars and the picture of the newest set is also robots. I admit I hadn't looked further than that...

Oh please no! I got as far as the tiles that teleports you to deathtraps without an escape beside a Warp staff... And those tiles are completely unmarked. I'm not interested in having to replay the same stage a ton of times to mark the trap spaces. I've played a lot of strategy games, but I don't recall having seen anything worse than those invisible teleport squares ever.

Here's Palla's green/always ability: このコニットが「Catria」か「Est]に支援されている塚合、このコニットの戦闘力な＋１０される。 When Palla is supported by Catria or Est (ie. They are used as support to Palla), Patria gets +10 until the end of the turn. In other words, not a terribly significant ability. Yes, I know it's less fun than having the absolutely epic Lucina card translated, but at least it completes the Palla card. I can't translate that Lucina card: The image quality is not good enough to read the more complex kanjis. I can tell that the beginning is saying something about taking 1 card from the discard pile (It's the same as Maribelle's ability) but I can't understand what comes afterward. Vanguard looks pretty fun from a gameplay standpoint, but I'm not a fan of giant robots at all or the art in general so I'm not exactly converted!

Tiki's actually in the gallery. Even with that though, there's a few kanjis I can't read in her Support ability and I have no clue what that ability actually is :( Pretty sure you are correct about Ricken... Unfortunately! I love Pegasus Knights (and the Cherche card looks absolutely epic), so odds are I'll be using quite a few flyers in my deck. Ricken is one of the very few FE characters I really don't like, and now he stands in the way of my glorious Pegasus Knight army. *shakes fist angrily* Edit: By the way, I just watched a 20 minutes "Cardfight Vanguard" instruction video. I see what you mean now when you guys mentioned that Fire Emblem is really similar to that! Fire Emblem sounds pretty much like Cardfight light (which is probably a good thing considering how much we are struggling in translating it :))

Well, at first glance with the better quality screenshot, I was wrong about Kellam's ability being the same as Vaike but flipped (Vaike gets +20 attack when attacking, and +20 support when used as support during an attack). It seems that Kellam's ability is that he gets +20 unless he's attacked by a mage (book weapon type), so that makes it the very first instance of the weapon type that we see. His defensive ability looks to be Vaike's but flipped (+20 when used as a defensive support).

I hadn't noticed the rarity thing either: I was wondering about that! That Cardfight template would mostly work, I think. It looks nice at least! Regarding card images for your imgur list, there's a few really good quality shots in the Japanese video you posted. There's a super-clear Kellam at the least that I recall. There's a few other that might be good enough to translate (Upgraded Abel, possibly upgraded Lissa). Palla's green ability hasn't been translated yet so it maybe should be added (It's a +10 attack related to Est and Catria, but unsure if it triggers twice if both are there or just once. Haven't had the chance to fully translate it to know if its during your turn only or all the time either). While going through your imgur list, I've noticed that none of the class-changed characters have support abilities. Probably intentional on the design side so that players actually use the base characters and not just decks full of class-changed one. I might be wrong, but I think that a big 3 little 2 card (Like Gaius) means that if you class/change your unit you need 2 bonds. If you play it directly, you need 3 bonds. Not 3 for upgrade, 3+2 to play directly.

That could be fun! Although my plan for this game is: 1) Buy the two starter packs 2) Make little bits of paper to put tape on card sleeves so that people can see the skills in English. 3) Try some matches with the people I play card games with. Pray hard that they find the game interesting enough. 4) If step 3 is successful, get people to buy their own cards and split up a booster box. If step 3 is not successful, "cry" in disappointment. So I'm not sure I'll actually end up with more than the two starters... we'll see! Regarding the translated card library, I'd be up for it. The only thing I'm kind of scared of is how receptive people are about "approximative" translations like we are doing. None of us are professional translators. For example, I'm extremely confident with Vaike's card translations. Olivia and Tharja's sounds very good. aubergine translation looks great. But other cases I wouldn't be betting my salary on. Linde's activated ability I'm very confident of; her support ability maybe 75%. Maribelle's active and support abilities I'm basically certain of; however her green skill that gives her +20 attack during your turn when Lissa is on the table I'm less certain of the specifics. Chrom I have no clue what his skill are (though aubergine got his support when doing Lucina). Tiki's constant/green ability I'm 75% certain, her support ability I have honestly no clue. So in short, I don't mind if my translations are put up on a Wiki as long as there's a disclaimer that it's not official :) Thanks for Palla's FS ability! It's certainly a good implementation of the Triangle Attack! It's also pretty effective from a gameplay term: +50 attack is immense! Pegasus Knights are my favorite class in general, and this is strong incentive to go with the Red deck (even though I loved Awakening way more than Marth's games). Did you manage to translate their green skill too? At first glance I think it's +10 attack if Est and/or Catria are on the table? No problems for the "good quality card folder". I'll be taking screencaps of the better shots from the Japanese video DifferentFight posted and adding them to the folder. I'll post the folder once done. It'll probably be a few days though: My vacation ends today so I won't have as much time to dedicate to this. Hopefully should be done by Sunday though! Edit: I'm pretty sure they mentionned foil cards during the stream. More edit: One thing I'm curious about is the Weapon Triangle... We've seen absolutely nothing regarding that yet. However, all units have a "weapon" icon, and we haven't seen have a single ability that uses the weapon type. Did we miss something in the rules regarding those..?

In order for me: 1) Ablaze version. It just flows better I find and is less jarring. 2) Continual battle music (Radiant Dawn). You get to hear the full battle song after a few fights. 3) Battle music that always restarts (GBA games). I turned the animation off faster in those games mostly due to this.

Thank you for the video DifferentFight! Glad to see that someone with actual videomaking skills is making English videos for this game :) Welcome aubergine! Glad to have you around! I mostly joined this forum due to the card game actually just as you did actually. Thank you so much for the translations! That's one nasty support ability that Chrom/Lucina/Marth have! There's quite a few cards with a cost of more than 3: Actually, in my "translatable cards" folder alone, there's three units of cost 4 and one of cost 5. Regarding Gaius ability, is it possible the interpretation would be: "Flip over top card of enemy deck. If its cost is 3 or higher, you can flip over 2 bonds and the opponent's card goes to the discard area. If you have promoted Gaius, you can draw a card after the assassination." ? Basically, tap Gaius and you can see the top card of the opponent's deck. That would already be super useful by itself: Even if you don't assassinate the card, you get to know what they will flip next for support card or draw next turn. If you do decide to assassinate the card, you have to flip two of your own bonds (pay a cost). This makes it so the opponent loses a useful card, and you draw a card yourself. If you actually flipped the opponent's bonds instead of your own, you'd basically destroy their ability to play anything in a few short turns (since they'd have no face-up cards left, and no colors up = no casting units), as well as destroying enemy units and drawing cards all at once. That'd be utterly insane for a 3 cost unit (I'd play it with even 6 casting cost). The CCS thing makes a whole lot of sense! Thank you for explaining that to us! The other "strange" tag I see on a card is the FS tag, like on the pegasus sisters card. We have Palla on the gallery: If it's not asking too much, could you try translating Palla's card too? That'd give us some translations of all the "major" ability types we've seen in the game so far. Again, thank you!

Oh, oh! Gameplay video! Niiiice! Thank you DifferentFight! I had actually searched on Nico for gameplay videos and had no results... I should have checked Youtube! Okay, so what's new? Well, I'm honestly getting an heck of an hard time understanding what they were saying... Well, I guess my slow translation pile just got a whole lot bigger. At least they were arguing about Chrom's ability too so I guess I'm not the only one having problems with it! :) On top of what DifferentFight mentioned already, here's the more obvious things that could be seen: - Your Lord unit is identified by placing a special card under it. I suppose you could use a coin or something if you don't have that card though - You can pick any basic (first class) character as your Lord. - There's multiple versions of the same characters. For example, on the Serenes Forest card list we have a basic 1-cost Lucina card. In this video, we also see a basic (non-class changed) 2-cost Lucina card. We've seen two different class-changed Marth's too from various sources. - You actually tap your card to attack, which makes a whole lot of sense. Not confirmed: - Player that goes first cannot attack on the first turn? - The Lucina gets tapped on the turn it comes into play with no facing enemy unit, and she has no tap ability that I can see. Why? Part of Chrom's ability? - A lot of the class-changed cards have CCS for their ability. Something that triggers on class change..? - For some reasons I find it hilarious that Lissa from all people have 60 attack power and 10 support as a War Cleric. Before this video, I was expecting to shuffle your support pile to your library (since you'd deck out very quickly with the support each fight), but I didn't think you'd put your supports into the discard pile. That works too (although killing an enemy unit doesn't have that much impact beyond board presence then). Not yet unfortunately. Is there a number (or even better a list) of all of the cards coming out with the first release? I'm so incredibly hype for this! Good question! The japanese text for this specific code was copy-pasted from Dengeki (since I can't type kanji). For all my translations, I paste all the kanjis one by one from a dictionary in a notepad file (set to unicode) and I type out the hiragana and the katakana in it, then paste the phrases here. Maybe the forums here don't like Unicode?

Thanks for the tumblr link! There' s unfortunately no "new" cards that are high-quality enough for me to be able to translate them, except maybe the Inigo card barely. It does have a link to the stream video on Youtube though for people without a Niconico account! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jdo7ZwAAia8 I tried to also translate Linde, Chrom and Tiki's cards to questionable success at best for Chrom and Tiki. You can find the cards in question on the Serenes Forest gallery http://serenesforest.net/gallery/trading-card-game/cipher-1/ Linde: Red (activated) skill. １ターンに１（Card logo)：　ターン終了まで、このコニットの戦闘かは＋１０される。 You can only use this ability once per turn. Flip 1 card, get +10 attack until end of turn (Works on both offense and defense) Offensive support: ターンを１攻引く。自分の手札を１攻び、退避エエリアに？く。 One kanji I could not identify. When used as support, draw one card then discard one card. Tiki: Green (always) skill: 自分の絆カードの攻？が４攻以上ある塚合、このコニットの戦闘力は＋３０される。 If you have 4 or more cards in your Bond area, Tiki has +30 attack. Offensive:　攻撃コニットが　（FE1　Symbol)　の塚合、自分の了札を１攻選ぶ。　そのカードを絆エリアに？いてもよい。 Missing one kanji. It only activates on FE1 characters (well, those who have the red symbol in the top left). I'm not sure what it does exactly however: It has to do with choosing a card in the bond area, but... My best guess is that you can select the support power of a card in the bond area instead of Tiki's.... But that's honestly just an extremely rough guess. Chrom: Green (always) skill: クラスチェンジしている他の味方１休につき、このコニットの。 Hum...... I think Chrom can get a free move when an ally gets tapped for any reason..? Offensive support: 攻撃コニットが　（FE13 symbol)　の塚合、戦闘終了まで、その味方のが？？するオ-ブは２つになる。 Two kanji I can't identify. I honestly have no clue... Lucina, Chrom and Marth have the exact same support skill (except for the game symbol for Marth). Anyway, that's all the time I have for for now...Here's the list with the ones I know with good quality pics: Athena. Eclipse did her activated ability. I can probably do her purple ability (though I can't read the purple kanji itself). Gaius: I can't read the katakana over the CCS thing. The lack of white outline borders make the kanji harder to read, and his abilities look complex. Lucina lv1: Eclipse got this one mostly done. +20 versus dragons, and she counts as Marth. Same support skill as Chrom though :( Marth lv1: Activated ability likely translatable. Support same as Chrom :( Navarre lv 4: Mostly same as Gaius. Hard to read kanji, complex abilities. Curious about the blue skill with a cost and the activitated ability with no obvious cost. Palla: Can't read the katakana over the FS. Blue skill is the triangle attack and I see Catria and Est names on there and the +50 attack... Probably will be giving a try to this one next. The green skill looks to be translateable. All three pegasus sister have the same skill I believe. Olivia: Already done. Tharja: Already done. I might have time to do Palla tomorrow, but I think it's the only one I'll have time to do for a few days. I'm not confident with Gaius, Navarre or Lucina unfortunately.

Breaking news! Maribelle can resurrect people! Well, sort of... See below for some card translations. But before regarding DifferentFight's question: as far as I know, it's for every battle. In the battle explanation, they did state something along the line of: "Each side flips the top card of the library and add the support value to the attack value and compared them." EDIT: Most of the text I posted below has been removed/changed since I managed to figure out the characters I could not identify and it changed some definition. Using Vaike and Maribelle's cards (they are simpler and have good quality imagery), I have translated the following things: Red skill symbol: 起 (Activated skill) Green skill symbol: 常 (Always? active) Yellow skill symbol: 支　(support) So here's Maribelle's skills: Red (activated): 自分の退避エリアから「マリアベル」以外のカードを１枚選び、手札に加える。 In other words: Tap Maribelle, flip two bond cards. Select one discarded (ie. killed) card of your choice and return it to your hand. Green (Always): 自分のターン中、味方の「リズ」の戦闘かな＋２０されるを On your turn, get +20 attack if Lissa is on the table (Not 100% confident of the specific of this one). Yellow (Defensive support): 戦闘終了まで,攻撃コニットは必殺撃できない。 When used as a support, opponent cannot use Critical Hits (ie. Play a copy of the card to get double damage). Here's Vaike's skills: Green (Always): 自分のターン中、このコニットの戦闘かな＋２０ When attacking, Vaike gets +20 attack. Yellow (Offensive support): 戦闘終了まで、自分の攻撃コニットの戦闘＋２０きれる。 When used to support an attacking unit, add an additional +20 attack. Based on that, I'd say that things look very good for the game! For example, Vaike's stats are 1 cost, 30 attack, 10 support. That's poor, but on the attack he's essentially 50 attack 30 support, which is darn good for 1 cost from what we can see. Based on the bad image quality pictures from Dengeki, Kellam seems to have the exact same skills, but the other way around (so +20 on defense, +20 on defensive support). Also, some units can share some skills. For example, base Lissa and Maria seems to both have the same Heal/Live skill as Maribelle (The card recovery skill).

Is it possible that Tharja's ability is actually "Opponent discard a card of their choice from their hands?" The Tharja card seems to refers to the 退避エリア (evacuation area) and not the 支援エリア (support area). It'd feel a more Tharja-y ability too (cursing the opponent instead of helping with supports).

The bond setup you explain would certainly work too. I'd be happy with it! The penalities for playing a multicolor deck would be even smaller (unless you use like 4 colors), but I don't think that's a problem. I think in most games the amount of cards in the bond zone is going to be relatively small. You only need "enough" bond to play your cards. Putting more in the Bond area than your highest cost card is basically throwing your cards away (You could be putting the unit in or using it as a crit instead), unless you need to add some cards to flip over or you want to be able to put multiple high costs units in one turn. I might be wrong of course, and the players that were playing were obviously new to the game too. I knew the first two were not rules (That's why I had mentioned the third one especially). The first one I understood completely wrong (sorry for the wasted time!). The second, I had understood it as basically "Are you going to rebuild Marth's or Chrom army? Are you going to make an army that only consists of cute girls? The choice is yours!" As in, if you can make a deck with all cute girls, those cute girls can logically be lords too. The third one I had understood as "Make a deck of 50 cards and pick one of them to be your lord at game start". Regarding Tharja... Hmm... So what's your best guess of the ability? It basically allows one of your character to have 2 supports during one battle instead of only the regular "flip from top of deck"? Thank you very much for the translations and discussions!

I also consider the spotpass characters joining to be "non-canon". I just see them as an opportunity for fans of those characters to use them, ala FE8, and offer new maps for people to have fun with once they are done with the game. Regarding the actual topic's question... I'm not sure. It might be. The setup definitively has potential to be extremely dark, and Ryouma's scene in the latest trailer (where he is on his knees surrounded by fire while he blames Kamui) seems to indicate it won't be sunshine and rainbows. But Awakening's setup is also extremely dark. Hopeless future and end of the human race... But the majority of the writing is actually very light-hearted and comedic. That's mainly due to the support conversations which makes for a huge amount of the total script. The main reason Awakening is my favorite FE game is due to all the humorous supports, and I think it was an aspect that helped Awakening's success. My guess is that IF will have the following: - Main storyline of Nohr and Hoshido will be really dark. - Supports will be mostly light-hearted. - Third storyline is going to be less dark. So people that are sad that they had to kill some of the characters they like in the other two paths will buy the new happy path.

sofutoppai: Possibly. I'll definitively be getting the two starter packs. I unfortunately don't have any videotaking equipment, and my cellphone isn't what you'd call impressive even for pictures. I tend to also have a "all over the place" style of instruction. So I'd much prefer to let someone else do a training video but if I find out that there's nothing out there (and that my own understanding of the rules is more than theory-crafting) I'll strongly consider doing one. Tapping: I've just given a quick-look over at the stream. It depicts Olivia becoming tapped when she moves, but it does not show the attacking units as becoming tapped (???). I've attached a screencap of the particular point. For information sake, the preceding images shows Olivia being in the top row untapped. The following shows the "forced march" mechanism (the two remaining red units automatically moving to the front row). I think you can actually pick any card in your deck to be your commander (Basically, "pick a card from your deck, put it face down and wait until your opponent is ready. Reveal the card at the same time, this will be your lord for the game"). For example, in the Famitsu article, I think it states that the author's opponent picked Draug for his Lord. The "cover" cards for the starter decks (Class changed Chrom and Marth) don't seem to look any different from other class-changed cards. I've attached three screen caps that are sort of relevant to the question, the third one in particular. I think anyway: I have a bit of spoken Japanese understanding (university class that was centered on speech and grammar mostly), but nothing about kanji beside knowing how to painstalkingly recognize stroke count and radicals (So taking forever to translate one single line with a dictionary and with the result being maybe 70% accuracy at best...) Regarding the "multiple instances of one card on the battlefield", in Magic the Gathering you can also have multiple copies of the same card in play, unless it is a "Legendary creature". In other words, that it refers to one person in particular. So for example, you can have multiple "Archer captain", but you can have only one "Bob, Archer captain" in play. It makes more sense than having multiple Virion in play, but... From a gameplay standpoint I can see why that'd be the case here. 100% of cards are "named cards" are all so I guess it'd be pretty unplayable without allowing copies. Thank you very much for the Tharja and Olivia translations! I wonder if Tharja's "support area" refers to Bonds area or the actual "support" card being played in battle for the bonus attack power. I'm still iffy about the permanent flip, but even I have to admit that both interpretation of Tharja's ability would be overpowering quick if they could be used every turn... An idea just struck me while typing this, so theory-crafting time regarding bonds (Yet again... Sorry!) There were some mentions that if you had both "Red bond" and "Blue bond" in play for multicolor decks, you could not play anything, but that you could "flip cards over to pay the cost but you can not play something else" or something along those lines. What if the only thing you need to have to play units is have enough Bonds and the color did not matter as long as you have enough bonds in play? This would result in the following things: 1) If you have 4 bonds (no matter if they are flipped or not), you can play 4 points worth of units in the turn. 2) If you use a "flip move" ability (Like Olivia), you have to permanently flip those bond cards so they cannot be used again to play abilities. So usage of the flip abilities would be heavily restricted, just like in Cardfight. However, due to point #1, it does not destroy your mana/resource base: You aren't setting yourself back two entire cards and two turns just to play a single ability. Which would also match Cardfight (Since you aren't losing your main casting ability when you flip your damage cards in that game). 3) If you have both Red and Blue bonds (playing a multicolor deck) in play, you can't play anything. However, you can intentionally decide to flip over your bond cards of a certain color so that you have only 1 color of bonds showing up (so that you can cast again). This would effectively give you the drawback that you will have fewer cards leftover to flip for skill usage, but would still leave multicolor deck as playable. Multicolor decks are obviously meant to be playable, else things like Lucina's "Count as Marth" ability would be completely pointless. That'd make a lot of sense! It'd keep a strict control over the flip abilities without completely crippling a player that decides to use one and solves the questions we have regarding multi-colored decks...... Just have to hope that this theory is actually correct, though.

Nah, it's not so bad as far as card games go. The problem is that we don't have an official ruleset yet, just bits and pieces from various user reports, so it sounds more complicated than it actually is. I've noticed in the Famitsu screenshots that there's some with the playfield having both an promoted and unpromoted female Robin as separate units. That sounds strange, but I guess it does match the "two level 1 Virions" that were shown in the stream during the "attack-range" explanation. I wonder if you can put a second copy of the character you are using as your lord..? I wonder how you identify which one it is? Or actually, if there's some kind of token or whatever you put on your commander to identify easily during matches.

Langrisser is my favorite strategy-rpg game serie and it has minimal RNG. There's a very slight variance in battle damage and some random in the status effects land rate but that's it. When selecting your class change, you know ahead of time that you'll get like +8 attack damage, +4 unit damage, ect during your next 10 levels so your level ups are fixed. The replay value comes from: 1) Each character has their own class tree where you pick between two classes, and there's 3 promotion levels which gives you (So you have 4 different ending classes for each character). The path you used to reach the class affects your stats, skills and unit selection too (So say a unit is at second promotion Sea Captain, your unit will have different stats if you went Fighter->Sea Captain than Gladiator-> Sea Captain for example). On top of that, a class can be slightly different for one character than the other. So sending your characters on different class paths can lead to an extremely different playthroughs strategy-wise. 2) Some Langrisser games offers extremely different story paths. For example, in Der Langrisser, you can branch out to go on the Light path, the Empire path, the Chaos path (you side with monsters) or the Independent path... And there's even some path selection inside each path. This means that even though there's nearly no RNG in the game, it's extremely replayable. Fire Emblem is all about pushing the odds in your favor. It's kind of like poker or those playable card games: You are never free from the influence of luck, but you can stack the odds in your favor by playing or preparing well. It's pretty fun and entertaining (I adore Fire Emblem), but if I was forced to pick the Fire Emblem rng-based setup or the Langrisser no-rng setup, I'd take the Langrisser one... But fortunately I don't have to pick just one so I can just enjoy both styles :)

A smartphone/tablet game doesn't necessarily need to be "nickle and dime" if you pay for the game up front. I've played the following strategy-rpg games from googleplay/amazon app store: - Legend of Ixtona - Time of Heroes - Tactics Maiden - Kingturn serie - Partia 2 - Sword Requiem The last four have zero apps purchase. Time of Heroes offer an "item store" that offers a few equipment items (and is not required). Legend of Ixtona, which I'm currently going through, has a "You can buy points to use in the premium store" approach. The thing is, you A) get a lot of points going through the storyline and B) all you can you use your points on are basically some items or crafting materials that I never seem to have a problem enough. I'm playing on Hard and the points I gathered go unused since I have absolutely no use for them. So the shop is really there as a "If you aren't good at strategy games you can pay or do an optional stage or two to progress" and the game was obviously designed as not requiring a shop. All those sprg games are decently enjoyable. It's not Fire Emblem quality for sure, but they were worth the price and time to play. Sword Requiem in particular has major issues (Awful bugs though you can learn to avoid most of them, extremely bad translation, non-scalable interface so only play on a phone, horrible ending), but is actually a very entertaining game with a lot of good ideas and skills I would love being featured in Fire Emblem. I was playing this game basically at the same time as Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, and Sword Requiem was the more interesting of the two. If Nintendo decides to make Fire Emblem games (or gameplay inspired) with a buy-to-play model on smartphones and still continues to make great Fire Emblem games for consoles or portable systems, I'd be all for it personally. I'd gladly pay 5$ anytime for a short Fire Emblem-like on my phone even if it has no cutscenes and does not take 100 hours to go through.

Glad you see it this way! :) It could definitively have been seen as "You argue without even knowing anything". Not necessarily. Even if you got your bonds back each turn, if you have 4 bonds and you have 5 units on the board, you wouldn't have enough to pay for all their abilities. Losing a bond permanently (making you lose a card effectively), setting you back one turn (since you can play 1 bond per turn max) for a single turn of 1-2 range (at -10 attack) seems to be incredibly expensive and not worth it in the vast majority of cases. I suppose that the card still looks good besides that (60 attack power looks like a heck of a lot for only 2 cost), so maybe it's meant as a tiny bit bonus for the card. Can anyone translate either Tharja or Olivia from the same Dengeki article to any degree of certainty? They both have pretty bad combat stats for their cost (Olivia especially), and Olivia in particular has only one single ability that requires you to flip over 2 cards. If bonds are turned over "permanently", that sounds incredibly prohibitive. Unless the "unflip" abilities are relatively common or accessible (For example, you could make a deck with many characters using flip abilities work if you pair them with characters that can unflip). So for example, you would not use Tharja or Olivia in a deck without cards to unflips the bonds. I could see that working... Thanks for the Cardfight Vanguard explanation! I have never played any card game with rules like those (Mostly Magic the Gathering over here), so that's useful to know! Famitsu news! So what can we gather from that? 1) It seems to confirm that you only lose after you are damaged while you have no orbs card left. In other words, you need to take damage 6 times to lose, and not 5 as I was thinking. 2) Your hero seems to be on the board from the start (my theory was stupid anyway) and you have 4 spaces for units on both the front row and back row. What I was missing is that since moving costs you your unit's turn (so you can't move and attack same turn with a unit), if at the game start your opponent hero is stronger than yours, you can simply keep moving your hero away, which solves one of the biggest problem/question I had with the game balancing. 3) There's a lot of tapped units in these screenshots. My best guess is that you simply tap to indicate that this units turn is over (since you can play your units turn in the order you like you have to know which one's turn is over). So if you move, attack or use an ability (with tap cost), you tap your unit. So I guess we are a tiny bit further along than we used to be! We can also see a few new cards, like the three axemen from the original games and Cordelia's basic form.

I'm not worried about that personally. While it looks like we'll be getting more of them than in Awakening (which is good considering how amazing they look), I'd be very surprised if there's a huge amount of them. And I think we're safe from those 10+ minutes cutscenes you see in other game.

Definitively! You are right that we can't do more than theorize at this point without any more factual information (sorry about having been such a pest!) The stream and presentation so far unfortunately were more about how pretty the cards are (which they most definitively are) instead of how to play the game itself. I'm sure we'll at least get paper instructions with the starter packs at least. A full stream of a match would be really nice to confirm everything. I'm not sure we'll get an official one, but I'm sure we can assume that there's going to be at least a few player videos posted on NicoNico after release. I'm not too optimistic about the chances of my friends playing this card game for very long. The "random" supports probably won't go over too well with them and is probably going to be the killing point. Plus, they won't get all the neat thematic stuff like Lucina disguising as Marth, the bonus between Lissa and Maribelle, or the reason for the +50 attack for the pegasus triangle attack for example. The game isn't that deep at first glance either (Though in my opinion it still looks to be plenty fun). We'll see once we get the full rules! I'm sure we'll get a few good games in with the two starter packs at the very least, and at worst I'll be left with a small collection of really good looking cards about a serie I love. It could be worse!

Well, since we now have a proper rules topic (thanks Dan!), I figure I might as well ask about the art in this one! 1) Is it possible that the new Dark Mage art represents what dark mages will look like in IF? I know this is an original character for the card game, but if you look at the icon for the new dark mage on the Nohr side, it looks to be pretty much a match clothing-wise. If they are going to put the card characters as einherjar-like characters in IF at some point (Probably once the IF sets launches in Cypher), it'd make a lot of sense that the original characters are going to be based on the generic class models. So the same would probably apply for the generic pegasus too. 2) In the first post, there's some "split art". For example, the Camilla-Hinoka art. Are those going to be the art for those characters? For example, the left side will be a Camilla card art and the right side will be an Hinoka card art as is? "Yes" sounds like the sensible answer, but I'm "concerned" regarding the Marx-Ryouma one. All the other cards would look decent in their split form. For example, you can see part of Hinoka's naginata on Camilla's card and part of the axe on Hinoka's cart, but it doesn't detract much from the cards at all. The "purply bits" creeping on Archer Boy's card looks a bit strange, but they don't take too much place on the art. But look at Ryouma's card. You have a huge purple beam covering a large portion of him. You basically see more of Marx's sword in Ryouma's artwork than Ryouma himself. Cover the Marx side and just look at the Ryouma side: Would this actually make for acceptable art for a card, especially for an important character like him?