Touya

Absolutely not. This is both unethical and illegal. Currently all it would take to the send the CFV wiki crashing down in flames is a single notice to Wikia's copyright office from any of the artists they've stolen from. Uploading artworks downloaded from Pixiv breaks the limited license Pixiv grants you to reproduce the work on your machine; unless you have the artist's direct consent to do so, adding those artworks to the wiki is an act of plagiarism, which would put Serenes' service provider in trouble the moment anyone takes notice. Sites that host these illegally uploaded artworks are time bombs waiting to blow. The only reason infringers like the CFV wikia stay operational is because the predominant attitude of Japanese artists right now is to delete their Pixiv entirely and give up on web exposure, than to try to address legal representatives in a language they don't understand. And this is ultimately a really shitty place to force them into, because Pixiv is where artists get scouted by corporations to do work--without that web portfolio, getting a job becomes much more difficult. Eventually someone's going to get angry rather than afraid, and the moment that person tries to stand up for their copyright, there's going to be a net panic as every website that's stolen art from Pixiv in the last eight years shuts down or tries to clear out its supply of stolen work before that happens. Those artworks were uploaded to Pixiv because the artists intended them to be viewed on Pixiv. If you want to reproduce the artworks on the wiki, you're going to have to e-mail them outlining exactly how you want to reuse the art and asking for permission to reuse it. The artist has total creative control here; if they make demands, you have to comply in order to use the artwork. And if they refuse, there's no arguing with them. ふみ's page even specifically states in English "No reproduction or republication without written permission:" http://www.pixiv.net/member.php?id=2567140

Both Corrins' entire names are localizations. As far as Corrin (F) is concerned, she's not a crown-princess, she's not from Nohr, and her name isn't Corrin. Her literal name is "Princess of Anya Kingdom, Kamui (Female)." But Anya was changed to Nohr in official materials, Kamui became Corrin, and near as I can tell the reason Crown-princess/Crownprincess caught on in fantranslations of Cipher is to avoid conflating the terminology for 王女 with プリンセス. We already have "Princess, Minerva" who uses プリンセス while her cost 1 print "Princess of Macedon, Minerva" uses 王女. This becomes an issue if we ever hit the (completely possible) stumbling block of there being a 白夜王国のプリンセス and all of a sudden there's two cards called "Princess of Nohr, Kamui (Female)" in English with completely different effects and different Japanese names. Crown-princess as a translation prevents that, but it becomes a stumbling block when not all cards that use 王女 are actually crown-princesses in canon.

This question came to me as I was starting up a playthrough of FE4. The game's noted for its huge map sizes and how necessary cavalry are to play the game. Across the whole series, what are the maps that stick with people in Fire Emblem? Both what you'd consider the pinnacle of Fire Emblem's gameplay and design, and the maps that you just remember most strongly. I know of a few people that would say Cog of Destiny is their most memorable, and it's certainly one that jumps to mind for me, but that also made me wonder if Cog of Destiny was specifically designed in response to a strong reception for The Sword of Seals back in FE6. Pirate Ship is another one that stuck in my mind because of the setpiece--you're fighting aboard several moving ships, which was really creative at the time even though it was effectively an indoor map.

I would recommend buying boxes from AmiAmi, but doing so with a group of others that are also buying boxes. That way you can all place the order as one, do combined shipping and split the cost of shipping by however many number of people are in your group. ~$30 EMS shipping can plummet to $7 per person if you have enough people.

The probability of Cipher's localization is approximately equivalent to the level of interest it sustains in the west. It may feel impossible, and I think FE fans are especially accustomed to the disappointment of things not coming over, but we're actually in a very good position for Cipher to get an English-language launch. Nintendo is a large company with a lot of resources, whereas other games like Vanguard are made by very small companies (Bushiroad) that have to actually create their international branches on the fly as they try to get their TCGs in the west. Nintendo of America is in the 1k~5k employees bracket; Bushrioad USA has eight permanent employees. So we know that Cipher definitely can come over, but it's a question of mitigating risk to the point where both Nintendo and NoA feels like it's a smart gamble to translate the game and market it. The company has to have the assurance that sustained interest will keep the product in demand with wholesale distributors, who in turn need to know that they'll have buyers--retailers like Wal-mart and Target won't cut it, they need local businesses and dedicated card shops that deal in both sealed product and single cards. The biggest orders for sealed product come from local distributors that are opening anywhere between two and twelve cases (16 boxes per case) to do mass online and offline sales of single cards at a ~$30 profit per box. Online stores like iDeal808 or Troll and Toad only deal in online and don't have to pay to keep a physical store running, hence they can both order more product and sell to a larger audience, but they alone can't sustain the game either because you need dedicated play spaces for players or interest plummets and you lose buyers. The fact that Nintendo & IntSys did launch the product at all means they know it's not a risky business decision in their home country. Japan has a much better infrastructure to support TCGs than the Americas or the European Union countries. The geography is better adjusted to having a sizable network card shops all supported by a huge urban retail network. The question for the west is: will 670,000 Awakening units sold in the US translate to that many players of Cipher in the US? Will 340,000 Awakening units sold in Europe translate to 340,000 Cipher players in Europe? Trading card games can be more profitable than video games on a large scale because each player has to invest more in their deck across a long period of time than they do in a video game. The single purchase of a video game with the cumulative DLC purchases added on will always be lower than the single purchase of a starter deck with the cumulative booster pack purchases added on. Marketing to the 20+ audience means marketing to an employed, affluent section of the population with leisure money available. That can be advantageous compared to marketing to children, because you're really trying to get the parents to buy in at that point, and they're unlikely to have an understanding of the TCG market or where and how to buy intelligently. But the barrier of entry for Cipher is that only Fire Emblem players are interested in it, and of those only a subsection are interested in TCGs. In order to win the crowd, Nintendo has to take advantage of its clout with the Pokémon TCG, and get tabletop gamers in general to be interested in Cipher. Introducing it at the next Origins Game Fair, or Anime Expo would be a great way to launch the game in the west because you have a huge accumulation of different populations with divergent but overlapping interests in one place. The main obstacle is that the game mechanics aren't very easily understood to someone who doesn't already have a background with Fire Emblem. The quick and easy way to get Cipher localized is to sustain the hype and create demand in the west for a product we don't have. If Nintendo gauges that demand and finds it above a key threshold where the game becomes profitable, they'll invest in localizing it. They've made worse business decisions on far less encouraging data; the collectible New Super Mario Bros. cards come to mind.

If Virion fires an arrow and the target moves closer to him while it's flying, all they did was walk into an arrow More seriously... This is actually specific to Yu-Gi-Oh! In the Pokémon TCG if a Pokémon would be moved out of the active area during battle, it's always specified by effects whether the original Pokémon or the new one is dealt damage, and in Cardfight!! Vanguard if the target moves the battle ends because they are no longer the attacking and defending units, but the unit that attacked is still at rest so you can't start a new battle with it. One thing that could render this issue moot is if support skills are resolved after total attack power is calculated. I seem to have misplaced my copy of the rulebook while I was teaching the game to a group, so I can't actually check this right now. It's kinda dumb that it's not already available as a PDF.

So I knew that there was something more going on with the Super Rare Marth. His illustrator is Hakoda Maki, author of the second FE1 manga! Have any other returning artists been noticed? I suppose Yamada Koutarou will be back for whenever Elibe support rolls around.

I think the most interesting aspect of this is the targeted age range. I've seen girls-only events for Vanguard and other games that aren't age restricted at all (and obviously, aren't in a bar). This indicates that Nintendo is really shooting for the 20+ audience with Cipher. Joshikai's also been translated as "girl talk" elsewhere, which is basically the tone of these types of events, but it has an implication of a protracted gathering. Women's clubs/gatherings have been around for a while now in Japan, and companies like dear ol' Ninty have just coopted them to help promote products, and slap together nice looking powerpoints/event reports like audiotronica said. Girls like them because it's an opportunity to hang out, meet other girls and talk about things they can't in front of boys. If any of you have watched Cardfight!! Vanguard G, IIRC one episode this season showed a girls-only event that was pretty much in line with reality. Hosting a women's club improves Nintendo's portfolio by showing how inclusive they are and all the levels Cipher is taking off on. I'd be more surprised if the company didn't do this. As for the whole trans/genderfluid issue, Nintendo's unlikely to address it directly. The reality for a trans person is pretty similar to a cisgendered person; if they fit the marketing image, they'll probably be included. Gender issues are very hush-hush in Japan (the twist in Banana Yoshimoto's "Kitchen" is still considered shocking almost 30 years later) but this is also the company that lets men wear makeup and dresses in Animal Crossing. Conventionally attractive trans people that hone closer to what an OL is expected to look like are more likely to get the invites to these events than trans persons that don't; it's all about public image.

Wrys is considered Really Funny in the Japanese fandom, sort of in the way that westerners think of Error in Zelda II. His introductory line is very quotable to them, hence the Cipher flavor text on the B01 Wrys is identical to the original while the promo is a humorous spin on it. The idea of Wrys, the feeble old man and humble curate, reclassing as a holy terror of a hero and rampaging through the battlefield breaking skulls, is just inherently funny for longtime FE1/3/11 fans.

Kozaki may not have influence on the business end, but he is familiar with those in charge. Presumably the reason he's confident in giving any kind of answer instead of just labeling it a red question, is because the higher-ups were already talking about this. I'm all for the game coming over, especially since Nintendo's more likely to accommodate mixing Japanese and English cards. You can't do it in Pokémon anymore, but for a long time it was perfectly valid to do so if you had a printed reference for the English text on hand, and for a while a tenth of your deck could still be foreign while they were making the transition. Provided that the game does take off and Nintendo tries bringing it over here, I'll just sell my Japanese collection at its highs to come up with the capital for an English one.

An interesting ruling that's come up: https://twitter.com/kito_part2/status/616530463776116736 It's perfectly valid to have your main character card in a different sleeve from the rest of your deck, or even a top loader. This means that only 49 cards out of your deck need to be in identical sleeves. Presumably this is because your main character never actually leaves the field, unlike in Vanguard and other games with a main character-like mechanic.

Most recent tournament top: http://fireemblemcipher.blogspot.com/2015/06/news-sword-of-light-tops-masters-guild.html I should have just looked up the grammar for that in the first place. orz I do wish we had something like a BYOND client to play around with like in the first two years of Vanguard. It's easier to grasp the concepts behind these decks when you have more experience playing the game. Gameplay videos help, but even those have limits for teaching.

Since the three versions of If come with promos for Cipher, and the starter decks and booster boxes of B01 come with DLC codes for Marth, Lucina, and Minerva, why don't we set up an exchange for the people that bought the Japanese editions of If and want the DLC characters, but don't want the promo cards they got? That way Cipher collectors can get the exclusive cards, and If players can get access to all of the characters. My box and deck should be arriving Monday, and I got a whole lot of people from my local community to import Cipher as well. I'm not sure how far I should take this collection, but I'm mainly just collecting and playing until Elibe rolls around, so I'll be fairly open to trading stuff around.

Transcripts of decklists + summaries: http://fireemblemcipher.blogspot.com/2015/06/news-mulitcolor-inigo-harem-deck-tops.html So. Something I need to think about with regards to the Inigo list; there are an awful lot of units in this game that get +10/+20/etc power but don't specify "until end of turn/until the end of the attack phase." So if you increase your power by +10 and it doesn't specify when the power bonus ends, is that until end of game? Or is it built into the rules that power is wiped at the end of each turn unless a skill specifies otherwise? I wish we had scans of the rulebook. (Did we ever work out what the ST rarity is and why it occurs in booster sets?)

Considering that cards have text on them that identifies if they're promoted or not, and promotion only occurs with units that have a promotion cost separate from their deployment cost, and the units that you would level up with don't have a promotion cost in the first place...I don't think it's particularly confusing. There's multiple indications on each card as to whether or not playing it over an existing unit counts as promoting. It's harder to keep track of how many bonds have been spent for deployment/promotion in a turn than it is that. It's also important to consider that if leveling up causes the card to be discarded, that means you can shuffle that card back into the deck when you run out, and most low-cost units have a support skill. Leveling up cost 1 Tiki to cost 5 in this way and putting cost 1 in the retreat area lets you effectively recycle a trigger unit. I don't remember seeing any rule that says leveling up causes a card to be removed, and I'd like to see where that came from.

The Q&A addresses promotion in a little more detail. Q&A 85: 戦場にいるユニットとまったく同じカードを上に重ねてクラスチェンジすることはできますか？ はい、できます。 Can exactly the same card be stacked on top of a unit in the battlefield to class change? Yes, it can. Q&A 84: すでにクラスチェンジしているユニットをさらにクラスチェンジさせることはできますか？ はい、できます。 Can a unit that has already been class changed be further class changed? Yes, it can. Q&A 83: 出撃コストの低いカードを、そのカードよりも出撃コストの高いユニットの上に重ねてレベルアップ（クラスチェンジ）させることはできますか？ はい、できます。 Can you level up (class change) a low deployment cost card on top of a unit with a high deployment cost? Yes, you can. The thing that throws me off most is that in the Q&A level up is always identified with class change in parentheses. Where are we getting the "leveling up discards the previous unit" rule from? Under the terminology on fecipher.jp it defines level up as: レベルアップ 戦場にいるユニットの上に、同じユニット名のカードを重ねること。 Level up A card is stacked on top of a unit in the battlefield with the same name. Which seems to infer that leveling up leaves the previous card underneath the new one.

I just hate posting from my phone all right. I transcribed the decklist into English and summarized the main points behind it, don't knock whatever translations I used because these were from reading not from referring to the master list: http://fireemblemcipher.blogspot.com/2015/06/news-war-of-darkness-tops-card-kingdom.html I admit this deck familiarized me with some effects that I didn't realize how good they were until I started taking apart this list. The deck feels very...Haymaker-y. Like here's your Hitmonchan, Electabuzz, Scyther, and Aerodactyl, go to town kid.

Bringing over from the translation thread. I prefer giving each card its own page as well, and if everyone else is on board with that then I am too. I'm for Mark of Naga as well, Brand of the Exalt is a mouthful and would look really bad on pages. I tried revising the way I have the page setup to include images of the cards (using official samples right now because auction scans are really low quality) as well as integrating the symbols in place of names. I realized that the rarity is a redundant column when we can just include it in the set number, and officially the rarity is part of the set number according to fecipher.jp's setlist. Should we go with "unpromoted" or "basic"? I will probably not have a ton of time to help out with the wiki, I'm just trying to get things started here, so I do want to know how receptive everybody else is to these ideas.

So I think that we sorely need to make a complete English-language setlist for S01, S02, B01 and promotional cards. I don't know if anyone's been working on this already, but I tried drawing up a basic page on the wiki to brainstorm some options for presenting the information, using the same basic structure as the CFV wiki's set pages but adding additional categories: http://serenesforest.net/wiki/index.php/Booster_Set_1:_Warblade_of_Heroes We could also try tables that look more like what Bulbapedia uses for their setlists: http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Base_Set_%28TCG%29 I think that the Bulbapedia route of including the symbol a card belongs to may work better for Cipher, since there's only going to be a maximum nine or so "clans" in this game for a long time coming. The official website has its own setlist in Japanese that we can go from for set numbers: http://fecipher.jp/cards/BT0001.html Since we're already grouping cards under their character name, it should be a matter of having the card's actual name in the set and then linking over to its Cipher page in the setlist. The downside to how we have it now is that if there's too many cards in a single character's page, all of those PNG files are going to cause slow load times for some users. We should also establish how we're going to call the different colors as well. Do we just say red and blue? What about the Hoshido/Nohr sides where the border is white/black but the interior circles are pink/purple? And what if the game does get villains from the Archanea/Ylisse universes that are red/blue but have different symbols since they're not on Marth's/Chrom's side? The Japanese Cipher wiki was referring to cards from Marth's side as War of Darkness cards and Chrom's as Awakening cards, but made the jump to the official site's terminology after it revamped. The official website calls them Sword of Light (光の剣) and Brand of the Exalt (聖痕 Seikon; stigmata. IIRC this is what the Brand of the Exalt is called in Japanese, but it's been called the Mark of Naga in fantranslations? I didn't follow Awakening's translation progress that closely). However, the internal file names on the official website for the symbols are icon_ankoku_clear.png and icon_kakusei_clear.png, even in the B01 setlist. That lends credence to the War of Darkness and Awakening translations. Whatever we choose, it needs to be consistently applied to avoid confusion and help the game quickly get a foothold with English-speaking fans.

So, run archers. Got it! :P More seriously, I was thinking today that one of the disadvantages to the higher cost characters despite their impressive effects is that their support values are less than 30, which is the exact margin necessary for comparable lords to guarantee they can get an attack through. Both players desire a support value of 30, but trying to optimize your deck around consistently checking that requires running a ton of low cost units, which caters to swarming the field rather than playing single game-swelling cards. I'd sure like to see Tiki pulled off as a viable decktype.

The Q&A has addressed several color-related questions. Q.81 (2015/06/24) ■出撃フェイズで、自分の絆エリアにある裏向きのカードも枚数としてかぞえることはできますか？ A. はい、できます。ただし、裏向きのカードのシンボルを参照することはできません。 Q.81 During the deployment phase, can you count face-down cards in your own bond area towards the number [of bonds in your bond area]? A. Yes, you can. However, you cannot access the symbol of face-down cards. (The Japanese they use is 枚数 "the number of flat things," in this case "the number of flat things in the bond area") Basically face-down bonds still contribute to the bond area, but their symbols don't count for playing a unit of a specific symbol. So i you have 5 face-down bonds you could call five cards...if they were all colorless cards with no symbol, which don't exist :P Then there's this: Q.91 (2015/06/24) ■自分の絆カードが3枚あり、そのうち1枚が光の剣のシンボルを持ち、他の2枚が聖痕のシンボルを持つ場合、自分の出撃フェイズに、出撃コストが1の光の剣のカードを3枚出撃させることはできますか？ はい、できます Q.91 You have 3 cards in your bond area, among them you have 1 Sword of Light symbol, and have 2 other Mark of Naga symbols, in your deployment phase, can you pay the deployment cost to deploy 3 Sword of Light cards? A. Yes, you can.

I think we should reconsider our translation of "Savior of Archanea, Marth." The Japanese text does not mention Archanea; 救国の英雄 マルス Kyuukyoku no Eiyuu Marusu "Hero of National Salvation, Marth" 救国 is a type of patriot that has a messianic role for the nation, like Jeanne d'Arc. I can see why we would use Savior, but given that the text doesn't refer to Archanea by name, it would be more accurate to render this in a way that identifies Marth as a patriotic hero without specifying Archanea. "Hero to His Country, Marth" maybe?

Done! The audio desynchs at several different points in different directions when they show off promos but it's so late in the video most people won't watch and I've spent enough time staring into an abyssal editor. That website I promised is also up, the video is hosted near the center-top of the page, I took the liberty of translating and summarizing several sections: http://fireemblemcipher.blogspot.com/2015/06/news-fire-emblem-cipher-prerelease.html

I want to use Henry's Curse of Death to destroy himself by battle while he's the main character to purposefully draw an orb while also making the opponent discard 2 It's not nearly as good as in CFV because there's only one guard mechanic, but it's still hilarious to purposely throw yourself on the edge of death to add five cards to hand and make the opponent discard 10. If you can live long enough to class change Henry, get five bonds out and have the five allies out necessary to do it while also having enough orbs remaining that it matters, the opponent deserves to feel that kind of despair.

Would it be helpful if I recorded this and reuploaded it to YouTube? I can timeshift the broadcast and record it, it'll just take a couple hours to record, export and upload.