Lynsanity

Hard to know what your friend is doing wrong so early without seeing him play. My guess would be it's something simple like not utilizing magic + range enough against high defense, or having the wrong weapons equipped. Some of your lower strength units with no magic probably need to rely a bit more on gambits and combat arts early on, but I don't think those are even in play by Chapter 2. Maybe he's expecting all his units to 1v1 enemies well without baiting them and then ganging up. I guess the first chapter where you control only the house leaders could lead you to that impression.

I’m only at B with them but I love Claude and Leonie together. Just out in the woods being blasphemous.

I’ve also wondered what the state of plumbing technology is in this fantasy setting. Is there running water? Showers? Where would the monastery draw water from? I want a water tower with rumours swirling around it that students make out or died up there.

One of my favourite little writing touches in the game so far is how even the tutorials are given characterization, because it’s usually a house leader or Sothis explaining things to you. And after a bunch of info screens with her breaking down Demonic Beast mechanics, there’s a tutorial heading that’s just “How do you know all this, anyway?” And she responds with something like “What?? Focus on the task at hand!” A nice little crossover of game UI and characters.

How much investment do the hidden talents require? Is it true that only tutoring affects unlocking them, not battle experience etc?

Has it been confirmed that literally only tutoring supplies the points needed for budding talents? I.e. weekly tasks, monastery activities and battle experience don’t build towards them?

I only on-accident spoiled myself for one of the route endings. I was clicking spoiler tags on reddit without paying much attention to the messages before them, because I forgot the game's cutscenes had just been ripped so of course people were discussing the endings. I blame spoiler blocks for feeling too natural to click. Reading a thread becomes like a clicker game and then I fall into the rhythm of it I guess.

I don't even care about Linhardt but he got the best CG, imo. It's so chill and true to his character. It would honestly make a good desktop background.

This honestly sounds like a blast. Kind of like a Nuzlocke run for Fire Emblem. Protip if you don't own d4s, you can just roll a d6 to pick your house, with 2 numbers assigned to each house. And for a d8 you could... flip a coin 3 times... and assign a master class... to each discrete sequence of flips... or just use random.org lol

Another totally non-stat related takeaway from this is several confirmed growth spurts - as in growth in height. Including Caspar and Ashe, but not Ignatz. Although I'm disappointed to see

Is a story spoiler? Or do those numbers only appear in this datamine?

I don’t think it’s all a sameface problem, like Ingrid and Mercedes do have distinct eye shapes that they retain post-timeskip. My only real issue is it looks like they stretched out Annette’s features and scaled back her eyes to end up looking closer to the other two, at least from the weird angle in her portrait. Not everyone loses babyface in their 20s!

Maybe there’s still hope that one of the girls with longer hair will go more butch after the time skip. Mercedes?

I can’t believe Ferdinand goes full Party in the Back. I like Leonie’s new look but RIP my dreams of her sporting a Jeralt undercut post-timeskip

Alright, I'm ok with this.