Ertrick36

I can't believe I lived to see get an alt in this game. I dropped the game after the first year, but always kept a marginal interest just to see what artwork would come out of it. Now is the time to ヽﾉ raise ヽﾉ my ヽﾉ 'boros.

I think in terms of archers he's actually decently respected. Some say Ryan is better, but that's only if he actually gets good growths - it's always a gamble in earlier FE games to rely on a growth unit. Also, we're talking about Book 2, the game where you can literally just shove a star fragment in someone's pocket to give them better growths. In such a game I think going for the unit that already has decent stats is preferable to the one who has baby stats. Not to mention Gordon's superb Weapon level base and growth rate, so he's very likely gonna be able to use every single bow in the game. I don't really think there's an archer that's better than Gordon in Book 2, but people favor Hunters over archers due to their access to horses. Even with the way the game balances mounted units, people find ways around the limitations. Gordon gets a head start over Kashim (the only good Hunter in Book 2) though, and you do basically need to feed him a Manual to enable him to use Partia. Kashim's main advantage over Gordon and Ryan is his substantially higher Strength growth and decent Strength base stat, and of course the natural benefits of the Hunter class over the Archer class (better base movement and a promotion into a horse-mounted class). Overall Gordon is a decent unit for an archer in Book 2. With Star Shards, one can help him get better, so he might as well be a Ryan with better bases.

Self-reflection is what's needed. You can learn more from a failure than a success, but a success can be a great teaching moment as well if you have the ability to analyze and understand what made your success a success. With that said, people can become complacent or callous when they succeed all the time. Moreover it can grow stale if the successes aren't against increasing odds. I was playing Star Wars: Battlefront 2 (the old one, not EA's) with @Silafante and @Azure loves his Half Elves around May 4th and it was more fun when I actually lost sometimes than when I won by a landslide. What makes success fulfilling, at least partly and in some circumstances, is the idea that you could fail. On the other side of the coin, if all you do is lose, it's very easy to get demotivated and upset. I used to play Call of Duty multiplayer all the time when I was a teenager. While I'm sure I did improve over time, I just kept losing. There was this one time I played a map where there was a bunch of smoke coming from some tankers which I hid inside and got, like, a 30-something killstreak, which was fulfilling but felt kind of like dumb luck more than genuine skill because it was out of the ordinary. At some point I think I just stopped learning because none of what I had learned got me anywhere, and I just stopped playing Call of Duty altogether when I became a legal adult. You really ought to have both in good balance, essentially, but you also need to be able to actually analyze what brings you your failures and successes.

Here's a wacky concept that's sure to gain you exactly zero dollars in revenue, and if not that then negative revenue: A Game That Is Never Advertised It's like a normal game, except you never post about it on any social networking platform, you never pay TV companies or websites to play ads for the game, and you just don't tell a single soul about its existence. Only your cat is allowed to know, and even then, you must keep your cards held close to you, for you never know when the cat might decide to get human vocal chords surgically inserted into its throat, learn how to speak English, and foil your plan by telling the neighborhood dogs about the game, who'll then contact the publishers they work for and start fiendishly placing leaked screenshots of your game onto the cover the New York Times Magazine so that even grandma who speaks Idahoan and reads the news from stone tablets knows about it. This has been my anti-humor post of the day, hope you enjoy.

I have no flippin' clue, I barely play FF games. If it's what it sounds like, and that they're tutorial boxes that appear on screen and pause the game, then I have this to say: And if you can press X to close them, they're semi-skippable, though tbh there should be an option to just disable them altogether. Doesn't mean it's a bad tutorial, it means it's a tutorial with at least one flaw, that flaw being that an element isn't skippable. What I'm talking about, in terms of tutorial level, isn't that. An easy level for helping you to grow accustomed to the mechanics of the game is, by my definition, not a tutorial level, but instead a first level. A proper tutorial level is the most dumbed-down, hand-holding, baby's first video game type of garbage in a tutorial. It's forcing you to listen to some dickhead NPC explain to you that you use the left control stick to move the character (through unskippable dialogue that you're forced to listen to), then making you walk to a simple point on a flat plane to progress the tutorial, and then the same song and dance being repeated for moving the camera, for punching, for shooting, for talking to NPCs, and for every single aspect of the controls... with all of it being a big, unskippable segment. Maybe as a further kick in the nads the devs threw in some Kaepora Gaebora BS where you have to confirm that you understood what the NPC said each time by selecting "Yes" in a prompt that defaults to "No", the latter option of which repeats the explanation. Maybe that's an archaic idea that's been abandoned a while ago - perhaps long enough that people who didn't start their gaming with N64's and Playstation 1's wouldn't know about it. Really ought to be, because it's awful. Maybe it's also that such a tutorial is just bad in general, not just for the reason that it's not skippable. Games from my youth did that a lot - maybe not to such an extreme extent, but there was plenty of "use the control stick to move the character to the objective" type garbage in game tutorials in PS1 and PS2 era games. Also, just to be clear, you do understand that my aversion to this is a matter of concern over a game's replayability, right? And that I'm strictly referring to the element of skippability - that such an element alone doesn't make a tutorial immediately bad, but rather that it's the element itself that's bad? Either way, this will be the hill I die on, I despise unskippable, non-optional tutorials. No matter what game you bring, what tutorial you explain, I'm gonna always say that if the tutorial parts are obtrusive to game flow and non-optional that their flaw is that they're non-optional. There are many ways you can formulate a tutorial, but forcing the player to waste time taking in crap they've already come to understand perfectly (or forcing them to find a way to blow through it all as quickly as possible) is bad design. There is no context I'm aware of where the unskippability is actually a good thing for a tutorial.

Eh.. What I mean by tutorial is, strictly speaking, the game telling you how to use its most basic functions. How to jump, how to pick things up, how to attack, how to use certain items, all that. If I recall correctly, much of the elements of the game actually telling you how to do those things are prompts that either show up when first starting the game or are persistent elements on the UI. I don't think any of the times the old man actually interrupts you he's giving you a tutorial message, but instead is giving you your objective. What I'm thinking of in terms of a "tutorial level" isn't something like the Great Plateau - a beginning area where you can try out some of the game's basic elements if you want to. I'm talking about a tutorial level where the game stops every 30 seconds or so to tell you how to use certain gameplay elements - a tutorial that actively disrupts the flow of gameplay to teach you new things or that makes you do brain-dead things like walk in a straight line to an objective marker. I've played a lot of shovelware on the PS2 with tutorials just like that. Breath of the Wild's Great Plateau segment is nothing like those. Sure, you have Zelda stopping you every, like, 5, 10, or 15 minutes to remind you what you need to do, but you don't have some dipshit stopping you every minute to tell you how to frickin' walk.

A lance/bow/tome (two of the three) cavalry unit that can dismount to wield swords and whose main appeal is a constant, passive rally effect that boosts stats of allies that are within 3 spaces of the unit, as well as some rally skills that can be activated. They wouldn't have any real special powers such as being able to wield powerful weapons, but their ability to bolster the forces they command more than makes up for the lack of special power. And perhaps you could fiddle around a bit with the rally ability so that it adds different bonuses, or maybe even adds penalties so that you can add greater bonuses than normal, sort of like a D&D point-buy system. Whether the unit is actually a good combatant or not would depend on whether it's a game with level design that could easily be solo'd or not. Also, this would also assume either that the game has a Bonus XP system like PoR or that the unit gets XP just from being near allies as they engage in combat. And the bonus rally effect doesn't apply to the unit itself, and it's a skill that you can only have as this class, so changing class would remove it. My idea is somewhat inspired by Mount and Blade, which I've been playing a lot recently. In that game the most common method of play is the horse-mounted commander armed with a lance and bow/crossbow, and you can be an absolute useless sack of shit that just makes your soldiers do all the work for you. But also I wanted to do something different that didn't just discourage a player from playing as the protagonist class - to make something to help the protagonist class actually stand out from the rest.

For one thing, it needs to always be optional. Generally speaking it should not interrupt one's ability to replay the game. An opening tutorial should be a separate thing from every other game mode, tutorial explanations should be skippable, and a tooltip should only elaborate when you actively investigate it (and it should let you close them out, possibly even disable them entirely if you're familiar enough with the game). Next is writing. It's difficult to write tutorials that make sense, at times, as there are a lot of factors at play. You want to provide just enough information so that your players understand how the game works but aren't overburdened by information overload or clutter, and you also want them to be appropriate for the game. In a game where immersion is everything, this is risky territory because you can't make the tutorial feel like a gamey tutorial, which means you can't obtusely explain controls. And lately devs have gotten cheeky about how they write tutorials - and that's an issue that should be mitigated, because you run the risk of annoying your players. If it's a game where tutorials show up in textboxes, then the writing should be as simple and concise as possible while still explaining the mechanics. And lastly, the tutorial should be appropriate for the type of game, as different games will require different kinds of tutorials. A game like Civilization requires a lot more explanation through word while a game like Call of Duty is better off demonstrating things for you. Some still do well to have persistent reminders - tooltips, if you will - explaining mechanics you might easily forget about - that'd be for a game with a lot of different mechanics and intricacies, such as any game after the Sims 1 (assuming a fair bit of expansions have been installed). It's important to keep in mind the type of game you have and build your tutorial around how complicated a game you've made. So to put it all together in an example, lemme explain what I think would be an ideal tutorial for Fire Emblem. There is no "tutorial mission". Maybe the game will start off with more simplistic matchups, like with Lyn's battle with the axe-wielding bandits in Blazing Sword, but nothing like, say, Awakening where you literally just charge a single enemy and kill them. In the options menu there's a setting to disable tutorials. Any time new game mechanics are introduced you will be provided a list of the mechanics and you can look at each of them individually (or choose to not look at them). Alternatively they'll be shown in a similar fashion as they were in the 3DS games, but that's assuming the game is on a platform where that's even possible. UI leaves hints for how to navigate menus by placing button prompts over certain elements. The explanations last no longer than a paragraph per element. They come as textboxes and tooltips. The explanations are also dry reading. They don't need flair to impress anyone or make people chuckle, they're delivered by disembodied textboxes from the void and so it'd be kind of weird if the tutorial textboxes had more character than potentially some actual characters in the game. The explanations can contain as deliberately immersion-breaking explanations as needed. No, I totally didn't just describe the tutorials in FE:TH.

Higher defense, because of the following scenario: You have an enemy with, like, a crazy crit rate and 30 attack. They'll attack an armor knight with a defense stat of 28 and HP stat of 18 as well as a fighter with a defense stat of 10 and an HP stat of 60. The armor knight will receive a measly 2 damage on a normal hit or 6 damage from a crit while the fighter will take 20 damage on a normal hit or be straight up killed on a crit. Now, assuming this is FE:Fates, people would generally agree that the HP and defense stats of each unit are on pretty high extremes - the knight has pretty high defense but very low HP while the fighter has mediocre defense and max HP. That enemy would have to crit the armor knight three times to kill him, meanwhile they only need to crit once to kill the fighter. Of course perhaps the armor knight might get hit multiple times, but we're only looking at just two stats so we should assume the power of a single strike. And to take magic into consideration, well, pure waters do wonders and barely cost much, not to mention a lot of games don't throw too many mages at you. This assumes that by "prefer" you mean which one I think is better at fighting. Actually, when it comes to overall strategy, high HP might be better if you're looking to employ cheesy healbot tactics. But moreover, sometimes it's funner to watch a berserker charge into a battlefield and just yeet everything into oblivion while at constant risk of dying easily to their own hubris (and definitely not my own hubris, because I'm a flawless tactician with no faults whatsoever). Also, to provide a more serious answer, if the consistent winning strategy for beating a strategy game is to just send a massive defense wall at an enemy, then that game fails at being a strategy game. From a gameplay standpoint I generally prefer FE games where having high defense doesn't automatically make you nigh invincible against the vast majority of enemy threats. I actually like that in the original Mystery of the Emblem dragons could just plow right through your units' defenses, and you had to be careful about fighting them.

I mean... I don't think they'd be much more suspect than virtually any of their other soldiers. Like, the characters you can recruit are: Four who straight up come from Hoshido/lived in Hoshido much of their life (Azura, Kaze, Shura, and Mozu) Two sisters from a tribe with a rebellious nature (Felicia and Flora) An eccentric leader of a neutral country (Izana) Three or possibly four criminals/people who've committed atrocities (Niles, Nyx, Peri, and Nina) A hired blade who full on admits she'd turn coat if a higher bidder showed up (Beruka, though she also mentions it as a matter of trust as well) An unsanitary wolf man who's only really in it because he feels like he oughta make it up to you (Keaton) A guy who absolutely hates fighting (Benny) And let's not forget that Corrin is constantly forgiven for their screw-ups. My point is that I think they'll take anyone as long as they're willing to work for Nohr. If every single Hoshidan retainer was willing to turncoat, Garon would happily take them - but they wouldn't because they're all too loyal to do that. Probably the only people they wouldn't take would be the Hoshidan royals themselves. Besides, the trio are already suspect because they don't reveal where they come from, yet will admit they don't come from lands familiar to the Nohrians. I think they already drew attention to themselves as a trio given the way Laslow talks about it with Xander: And bear in mind that Garon forced these retainers on his children, not the other way around. It's why Xander and Leo both gave Laslow and Odin respectively difficult tasks to complete initially. I think if they said "yeah, we were all comrades for a long time", it wouldn't really change much since it's sort of implied by the fact that they showed up at around the same time to try to pursue the Nohrian retinue. They're the only commoners who actively pursued a retainership in the Nohrian royalty - anyone else either was conscripted by the royals or was a noble.

Anime hair and genetics are confusing topics. Like, people assume you have to be blonde to produce blonde offspring, but brown-haired couples are capable of producing blondes (though it's exceedingly rare). Then you throw into that the mix of literally every single color known to man being possible hair colors for your children, and it just becomes a confusing nightmare if you're not scientifically informed or willing to suspend your disbelief within a reasonable margin. That said, my view is that the personality traits they have are more a product of circumstance and rearing, not a genetic defect. Sakura recounts to Corrin her memory of Corrin's kidnapping, and how maids were implying that the kidnappers were allegedly actually after Sakura - it's clear that the memory of Corrin's kidnapping left mental scars for both Hinoka and Sakura, and the supposed fact that the kidnapping was actually meant for Sakura resulted in her blaming herself for her step sibling's kidnapping. And then there's the fact that she knew Corrin was raised by Nohrians all their life, so she justifiably believes it's a very real possibility for her beloved step sibling to leave again. As for Takumi, it's definitely not uncommon for younger brothers to feel an inferiority complex when other siblings seem to be receiving more favor. Not only is he second in line for the throne, but he's not allowed to wield Raijinto or receive the special training that Ryoma received from the Rainbow Sage. He's groomed to be the second fiddle for Ryoma simply because he was the second son born to the Hoshidan royal family. And then all of a sudden some other sibling shows up to further make people overlook you. The only people who really lift him up are his retainers, both of whom are almost fanatically loyal to him. Because he bottles up all his feelings because he doesn't want to seem like a burden, his siblings don't really understand the mental anguish he's going through at all times, having to accept the fact that unless his brother were to somehow die his life would revolve around serving Ryoma as an advisor instead of as a ruler, all because of pure circumstance. While I do like the idea of there being this moral greyness in Sumeragi where he's screwing a concubine away from the prying eyes of his wife or other court members, I don't think that's the kind of royal family IS envisioned with the Hoshidan royal family. They wanted that almost perfect nuclear family, where neither spouse takes other lovers unless the other spouse dies, to reflect the ideals of the "white kingdom". And then there's all the deliberation in IS trying to backwalk/stray from the idea that you could engage in sibling x sibling incest.

You know it'll come at some point. They'll at least try to tide the gap with a spin-off or two - maybe another Echoes-esque remake. I know there've been rumblings about such a thing. And I know the feeling of wanting more folks to talk to about FE. The person who introduced me to the series originally, my sister, is a more casual fan who doesn't really talk much about the series with me, and no one else I've met in-person that I like is much of a fan, either. I did stumble upon a group of people interested in playing D&D on this site, however, and we formed our own Discord group where we talk about D&D and FE a lot, so that was nice. Hope you similarly find a group of people you can ramble on and on about these games with.

Well, I think it started out with the fact that in their A support Hilda calls Marianne "adorable" and "cute". They're meant to be terms of endearment, but a lot of people interpreted those comments as Hilda expressing interest in Marianne. I think it's a combination of that and the popularity of those characters. I know people really connect with Marianne's... attitude, and people probably connect to Hilda's laziness as well.

My point isn't that a setting is the only important thing in a game or that characters aren't relevant at all, my point is that you don't need a character with a long, drawn out story and a character arc to build a world, especially in a game such as a western RPG or any game that lets you explore the far reaches of a world. Though I could say a lot more about my thoughts on how I think we should try innovating more in storytelling in video games and pursue alternate conventions of storytelling, but I'm tired and want to go to bed and I also don't want to waste a full day formulating an argument (as I'm often inclined to do) so I'm just gonna leave my reply to simply this.

I agree, what truly makes a location in fiction appealing often has little to do with having fleshed out characters. You can have both, and fleshed out characters can result from a well developed world or add to it, but you don't build a world just by throwing in fleshed out characters. Fates taught us this lesson - for as great as characters like Leo, Takumi, Oboro, and many others might be, they don't make the world of Fates itself better. Instead, they feel like they exist in a vacuum, and like it's the characters that matter instead of the place they occupy. It's hard to feel bad about Hoshido effectively being nuked in the beginning of the game or either side being completely decimated when they just feel like sandbox battlefields for struggles to take place between appealing characters. Some may be foolish enough to think a world is just a place for people to occupy, but that isn't entirely true. A world has history. It has leaders that rise and falls. It has borders that expand and shrink. It has systems of belief and political struggles. It has a wealth of tales to tell. These tales involve people, yes, but in the framework of the story being told it doesn't serve much good for everyone to be a fleshed out character. Sometimes characters must be one note, one-line characters that add to the world. Fallout and Mass Effect have some of the best worldbuilding in gaming, and much of it is done through interactions with relatively uninteresting characters (and plenty of more interesting characters as well, but that's beside the point). In Fallout: New Vegas, you don't fight for one side or the other because you like Boone or Caesar or Veronica or whoever - you pick a side because the wasteland has people and history that matters and which side you pick has huge implications for that land and perhaps lands beyond the Mojave. You're made to care about the place you occupy because it has history worth caring about, tales worth telling, and beliefs worth fighting for, not because a small collection of people are likable. Yes, characters are used to bring out elements of the worldbuilding, but a character doesn't need to be fleshed out to do so, and a collection of fleshed out characters won't save a poorly developed world. Anyway, I abstain from voting because I haven't played through the entirety of every FE game. I'll definitely say no land in Fates would earn my vote, that's for certain. If I had to pick, it'd probably either be Thracia or Faerghus. Thracia is actually rather brilliantly constructed - the geography of the land actually matters there, because the people of Thracia are unable to farm their land and due to the Curse of the Gáe Bolg they can't negotiate with the Manster District so they're forced to turn to banditry and aggravation along the border between the two nations to get what they need to survive. And I just enjoy how each of the noble families in Faerghus are handled - they all have their own problems to contend with, and those problems wash over onto the students who then have their own problems with those problems (Sylvain taking issue with his own birthright due to what it caused for Miklan and himself, Felix despising chivalry and his father for glorifying his brother's death, Ingrid being torn between marrying another family to acquire wealth or pursuing her dream of becoming a knight in service of the King of Faerghus born of the tales of glory with King Loog and his trusted knights). If there's one thing I'll say, it's that at least the awful worldbuilding of Fates seemed to result in the developers realizing the folly in not giving that element much focus.

I prioritize story as well, and my problem is that 80% of the time I'm playing FE:TH I'm playing just another mindless skirmish instead of an actual story-related mission. Part of it is a me problem because I feel the need to use the broken weapon exploit, but still. It's really my only big complaint. If they took more measures to make the grind feel optional, I think it'd be easier to play through it a second time, even with Part 1 being the same across the board barring some narrative discrepancies and the obvious difference between the transition between the two parts for CF vs. the rest of the paths. @Etheus lists out a few things to help balance this all out in a way I think would make both sides happy without taking away from the overall experience they're trying to deliver. One bit in particular, the bonus EXP thing, is actually similar to how I think Valkyria Chronicles handled this sort of dilemma - you could choose to grind skirmishes if you're a slow player, or you could rush to beat the missions as quickly as possible and still be rewarded for being fast because beating the maps fast earned you a better grade which meant more EXP and money. And I do think the positives outweigh the negatives. FE:TH offers maybe the richest experience a FE game has ever offered. But with any big innovation, work could be done to better fine tune it for a more perfect experience, and I'm just hoping they'll take heed and try to make the experience more streamlined since they're definitely not gonna just revert back to the traditional style of FE games.

I'm excited for what FE will bring in terms of character stories and worldbuilding. The latter in particular because it never was done quite as well as it was in FE:TH, where even these smaller noble families feel important and unique in their own ways instead of just being simple yes men to the bigger figures. And I enjoyed what new mechanics they introduced, though I definitely think some rebalancing should've happened. What I don't like is how 80% of my playthroughs feel like I'm just grinding. Part of it is that the skirmishes feel very "fetch-questy", and by that I mean they're as deep as a puddle. But this wouldn't be an issue if the game didn't make me feel obligated to teach the students. The main issue is the schedule system. It's meant to serve as a compromise between vets who want to just play the main bits of the game and newer players that want to grind, but it's ultimately bad for both. The issue is that it isn't really a compromise as the amount of grinding you can do is limited but the amount of fights you can do is extended well over twofold. Subconsciously, the limitation in time makes one feel obligated to take as much advantage of that time as they can. Obviously not everyone is like this, but a lot of people will find themselves grinding incessantly in this game where they wouldn't in other games. It's problematic because it subconsciously feels mandatory, not optional. I can handle doing a billion playthroughs of Awakening or Fates because it doesn't feel like I'm forced to squeeze as much use out of my grinding as humanly possible. So in the end I might be excited about how much better the stories in FE can get, I'm worried that future entries will make me want to replay them even less. It's been almost a year since FE:TH had released and I'm still struggling just to beat more than the one route I've beaten. Contrast that to FE:Fates, where I had all three paths beaten before the year was out. Yeah, the story in that game sucked something fierce, but the gameplay loop was better.

I can see why you might think that, especially since the mountain ranges in SoV are actually kinda flat. But if you scroll the map cursor over bits of the maps with elevated elements, such as mountains or walls, and if you zoom in and out at a crevice or mountain range, you'll find it is in fact 3D. And of course zooming in at the battle animation level shows them rendered in 3D. It's been like that since Awakening. Also pretty sure it was like that with the Tellius games, too. The only time the graphics had a pseudo 3D style to them where they looked 3D but were actually 2D was in the DS games, both with the sprites and the maps, and that style wasn't all that well received.

First of all, what do you mean by rip? Do you mean an actual 3D model? I think that's a fruitless search unless you want to try ripping the model yourself. In fact, if you do indeed mean 3D model rips, I have to wonder how it is you even found rips of the dungeons, because there's barely a soul alive in this world that's interested in ripping 3D models from this game, let alone the specific kinds of models you're talking about (which I'll say are generally less popular rips because people mostly care about character models for the purposes of using them in posing/animation programs or other software like VR Chat). I think it's just too much trouble to try to find a 3D model rip of the map for what you're trying to do, especially since the models won't actually have grids anyway so you'll just be confused about how big it is by unit squares. I'd personally just seek out imagery of the entire field of battle. The best I could find for you in terms of visualizing the post-game boss map is this video which kinda shows off most if not all of the map (which is already tagged to the time the battle actually starts, but in case it doesn't start then the timestamp is 43:13): I've done my own quick measuring, and the diameter of the circle is about 21 units. There's a bit of an opening at the bottom that's 5/1 units in width/length. There's also plenty of rubble and columns strewn about in a conveniently "gamey" manner, but I'm not about to spend 12 hours trying to explain exactly how they're arrayed so just watch the video. Barring that video, I'd honestly say you should try snapping a pic/some pics yourself. I know they'll be bad quality unless you have special 3DS video capturing hardware, but sometimes you just have to do things yourself.

It's difficult to think of many from Blazing Sword of that nature considering many of the characters that are loved as units are also loved as characters. It's a metric ton easier to think of such characters from the Archanea games since there are a number of solid units that seem to be overlooked as characters, one of the most prominent examples probably being Wolf who's one of the most OP units in the remakes but is barely remembered for his personality. I'd say... maybe Marcus? Like, people talk about him being a great, viable unit in this game that you could bring into endgame, but people don't talk about some of the relationships he has with other characters. I actually liked seeing him form a friendship with Merlinus. It wasn't the most special support chain out there, but I liked it well enough. If this was meant for the more general series of Fire Emblem (in which case, this is the wrong subforum), I'd say a character that'd qualify as such for me would probably be Jesse in the Valentia games. He's not the most amazing unit, sure, but considering he's eligible to become a dread fighter without the aid of villager forks I'd say he's probably one of the better units in the game. But I hear not many talk much about how appealing a character he is - usually they'll talk about Saber or one of the villagers of Ram Village. I like that he basically becomes like Venom Snake and forms his own mercenary nation. Also probably Lex from Genealogy. People definitely think he's a strong unit considering he's got Paragon and holy blood (and also is the best choice for turning Larcei and Ulster into indestructible death bombs), but like a lot of Genealogy characters his personality is sort of forgotten about. Yet as limited a character as he has, I can't help but like this guy. Same goes for Arthur from the same game. And Oifaye, whose character is overlooked in favor of Finn (understandable given Finn also gets an entire other game to really shine in).

Also paragraph breaks or even some goddamn sentence breaks, because holy hell that is one ugly wall of text that you'd have to be insane to want to read. I do think Byleth absolutely could've been done better. And I don't really buy their explanation, either, especially considering how much more they did with this game than others and how Koei Tecmo outright had to push them to allow for more save data in an update because they knew the Switch was capable of allotting more space than the 3DS. If there's anything I'd believe, it's that IS just simply didn't know how to develop for the Switch because they haven't developed for any Nintendo home console for over a decade. But really, they could've done more for customization in terms of both class/unit customization and aesthetic customization. Byleth didn't have to stay stuck with only specific proficiencies. In fact, the proficiency system could've presented an awesome chance to implement a sort of "gain/loss" system where you have a set amount of strengths you can apply which will increase if you give your character weaknesses. And I don't care too much about the aesthetic customization, but having the "avatar" appear fully in cutscenes is not an increase in production value - the loss of customization, however, is. They could've just as well stuck to the form that Awakening set, which was scarcely showing the avatar during fully animated cutscenes, and people wouldn't be crying about a lack of improvement or whatever. I mean... if you're talking about Awakening, I'd say it was in a good way considering there wouldn't even be a Fire Emblem: Three Houses to talk about if it didn't give the series new life. But I already know full well there's a platoon's worth of people who would rather have seen the series die at Awakening or claim it actually did die (seems every damn IP these days has one), and I don't really care to converse with them on that matter anyway.

You missed the part where mommy and daddy are also auntie and uncle and then their weird, creepy friend who's a part of a cult comes to your house to give you the Necronomicon.

I never care about any of those GameFAQs polls. They only serve as pointless confirmations of obvious biases in a toxic community. There isn't even a fun little giveaway or stream or other such event for them, either. Just a "vote for your favorites and sod off, dickhead". At least as far as I know. I'd prefer a poll here of the top FE games of the 2010's. So in other words a poll for the best FE game spanning from New Mystery of the Emblem all the way to Three Houses.

... *Deeply inhales* W e l c o m e t o H o r s e E m b l e m . Yeah, almost 30 years later and they still don't know how to actually balance units with high movement in this series. They came close with Mystery of the Emblem and Thracia, but then they abandoned the notion of balancing them for whatever reason. Pacing's another issue FE has been having, though it's more recent. Like, they mention her at times, but by and large the focus of the story seems to mostly be the war, which doesn't involve Rhea at all (apart from in Crimson Flower) - it's only after the war that you finally locate her, and at that point she's just used for a gigantic exposition dump. There are some issues with Azure Moon that people have, but I think the volume of specially animated scenes in that path and the attention to detail in Dimitri's story prove which story probably had the most effort put into it. Well, I don't think veterans of the series particularly struggle with Maddening, but they think it's kind of a BS difficulty. They're not fans of enemy-turn reinforcements acting on the turn they appear, as one can't predict the reinforcements unless an ally mentions them before they arrive and after one learns about them the surprise factor is utterly ruined, so the strat for dealing with them becomes you actively preparing for their appearance instead of passively staying ready for any situation. Everyone has trouble with that goddamn level. It makes no sense how the random bandit that is Pallardo is a more difficult person to fight than, I dunno, a dragon or the Emperor of Adrestia. But such is the whims of fate, as Owain from Fire Emblem Awakening would say. Yeah, fuck the meta, play by your own rules. It's no fun using purely wyvern lords and dark knights, you gotta challenge yourself at times. Yeah, Professor EXP is completely busted if you know how to exploit the systems in place. There's also an exploit for leveling up characters' skill ranks with broken weapons - the idea being that you go to the highest level skirmish you have available, lead enemies to either heal tiles or heavily forested tiles, and fight them with broken weapons. Using the broken weapon exploit, especially in conjunction with skill EXP-boosting stuff like Lysithea's personal skill (she's hilariously busted, btw, especially in NG+) or the Knowledge Gem, can get your units' skill levels to A pretty early on even without NG+ benefits. This also works with rusted weapons, but not magic. You can grind magic, however, you just need to have the subject of the grind set as an adjutant instead of the lead unit. Sure, there's a chance they'll attack the enemy if they're an offensive mage instead of a healer, but every time they enter combat they'll gain Reason or Faith even if they don't actually attack the enemy. My recommendation for grinding is always to take the system out of the dock and put on something to watch or listen to like a video, a show, or a podcast, as you grind. It's what I did when grinding the Fistfuls of Fish event, and it's what I do whenever I use the broken weapon exploit.

I'm gonna add that the first half for each house is homogenous. Chapters 1-11 for Blue Lions is basically the exact same as Chapters 1-11 for Black Eagles and Chapters 1-11 for Golden Deer. There are some slight differences, mainly in the discourse with the house leaders (Claude will be trying to dig into the history of Fodlan, Dimitri gradually divulges his history with Edelgard and the Tragedy of Duscar, and both Edelgard and Hubert will obviously have some... interesting things to say as well as some special interactions with some of the antagonists), but all the chapter battles are the same except the mock battles which have you fighting against different teams obviously. The real tedium is in repeating those first dozen chapters three or four times. Even if you use NG+, it may still feel tedious - perhaps even moreso, because you'll just have more grinding tools at your disposal. Though it really depends on your playstyle - whether you're the type to grind or not. You may well just decide you want to get the first part over as quickly as possible, in which case NG+ will probably benefit you more than it'll hinder you.