Azure Sen

My mains are Takumi (especially him, he's 10-20 levels above the others), Lyn, Oboro and Leo. Before the Fates DLC Lucina was in Oboro's spot.

Oh, I guess I've never posted in this thread despite playing pretty regularly. My User ID is 327,166,643, username of Sen if anyone wants to add me. My support line-up is mostly mediocre for anything but grinding at current, but it's still a work in progress. Currently I'm just saving up SQ/Tickets for the Valentine's Day rate ups and just waiting for the Valentine's Event in general because I need Octuplet Crystals and Forbidden Pages.

Top: Ramza Beovule, Final Fantasy Tactics | Aeris Gainsborough, Final Fantasy VII | Bartz Klauser, Final Fantasy V Middle: Hope Estheim, Final Fantasy XIII | Lightning Ferron, Final Fantasy XIII | Prompto Argentum, Final Fantasy XV Bottom: Squall Leonhart, Final Fantasy VIII | Rinoa Heartilly, Final Fantasy VIII | Ashe B'nargin Dalmasca, Final Fantasy XII

So even if it's not an FE Direct, we're getting info on FE Switch at some point this month.

That TWEWY port is great news, if only so even more people can play it. Plus the new control scheme looks fun, and it'll be nice to have both characters on the same screen. As for FE, theprinceofiris on twitter has been hinting that FE's getting its own separate Direct next week, so that might be a thing to keep an eye out for.

First, catch-up from last week: And this week's: Top: Ren Amamiya and Anne Takamaki, Persona 5 | Yu Narukami and Yukiko Amagi, Persona 4 | Joshua Bright and Estelle Bright, The Legend of Heroes Middle: Squall Leonhart and Rinoa Heartilly, Final Fantasy VIII | Female Proagonist and Akihiko Sanada, Persona 3 | Alm and Celica, Fire Emblem Echoes Bottom: Makoto Naegi and Kyoko Kirigiri, Danganronpa | Hajime Hinata and Chiaki Nanami, Super Danganronpa 2 | Robin and Stahl, Fire Emblem Awakening

Excellent. All I'm hoping for at this point is confirmation of Taki and/or Cassandra being back, so hopefully they show up in whatever's playable at EVO Japan.

Choosing your starting weapon/class would be nice if they do bring an avatar back, but in the case that they don't I'd prefer axes/magic in either order.

While she's far from being a candidate for my least favorite character in the series, I don't like Nowi. What few glimpses of maturity or depth she gets are drowned out in a flood of childish behavior, and honestly even those rare moments aren't that great outside of her support with Tharja, not helped by the writing around her being inconsistent as to how childish and naive she actually is on a support-to-support basis.

The problem is, in every kingdom's later years the number of truly notable characters we have available can be counted on one hand. Zhuge Ke and Lu Kang's basically it for Wu, unless we want to reach deep and start adding no-name later Wu officers who basically were incompetent and then died. The sad irony is, out of all of Jiang Wei's officers, the only one who's actually entirely historical and date of death we don't know is Xiahou Ba, aka the one who's actually playable. Yeah I don't get it either, especially since his former YT buddy/local fanfic character Zhou Cang was just added. Plus he'd flesh out Shu's later roster some more, given how long he lived.

In terms of games that came out this year, Persona 5 is the clear winner. It's quickly become my second-favorite Persona after Innocent Sin, having one of my favorite casts in the series, an excellent plot, refined gameplay that's actually challenging at times, and a shift back to the thematic style of older games. It's not without it's rough spots, but it's still pretty high on my list of favorite games ever regardless. Honorable Mentions to: Pokemon Ultra Moon, Metroid: Samus Returns, .hack//G.U. Last Recode, Echoes In terms of games that didn't come out this year but I beat this year, Furi. Furi is the rare game that actually, tangibly rewards you for learning its mechanics and boss patterns thoroughly. Outside of one boss, every fight in the game is challenging, but not BS, and even that one boss was due to a shift in control style that the player should have been given more opportunity to learn. Honorable Mentions to: Rune Factory 4, Dishonored

The problem with trying to connect every Fire Emblem is the same problem I have with trying to establish a coherent timeline between all the individual Gundam timelines so please stop trying to Tomino it makes zero sense; it involves cramming together several timelines that were clearly never meant to connect while ignoring the myriad inconsistencies, logical, lore-based or otherwise, that arise with such an idea. Not to mention it requires taking all the little meta shout-outs in Awakening super-seriously, even though it makes no logical sense for Chrom to know as much as he does even with a cohesive timeline. The name of the great calamity during the Scouring was the "Ending Winter," not the "Endless Winter," and it wasn't a literal winter. Instead it drained the magical energy out of Elibe, leaving dragons unable to maintain their true forms and instead forcing them to become manaketes, and caused a bunch of unnatural phenomenon like snow in winter or stars showing in the sky during daytime. It also didn't end the Scouring, which didn't happen until humanity stormed and sealed away the Dragon Temple. Aside from the Ending Winter not working that way, this completely contradicts Tellius's lore. Ashunera was already worshiped as a goddess (because she is an actual straight-up goddess) before she went mad and flooded the world, and we have at least four eyewitnesses (Sephiran, Dheginsea, and the two halves of the goddess) to her going mad and trying to flood the world.

20 characters seems fine for the kind of soft reboot feel they're going for. I'd imagine most of the cast for this game will come from Soul Edge and Soul Calibur 1, plus Talim and Raphael. I'd love it if Hilde was also in the starting lineup but I'm not going to hold my breath. The only characters I'm not sure on are some of the characters who replace others/were replaced by others in later games, like Li Long vs. Maxi or Song-Gyeong vs. Yun-seong. Similarly I don't expect we'll see Cassandra in the base roster, although nothing should be ruled out for DLC.

A New Years' banner featuring the Hoshidan royals would be fantastic, and I really hope that's what they're planning. Sakura'll probably be out since she was just on the Halloween banner, so m!Corrin, Ryoma, Takumi and Hinoka will be their most obvious choices.

In how they're made, yes. In how they companies that publish/produce them treat them as products? Not really. A product that does not do well in its home market is treated as a flop regardless of any money it made in foreign markets, unless special circumstances apply. None of which really disproves my point? A lot of the companies, games and franchises you mentioned are popular in the West, but popularity in the West doesn't mean they appeal specifically to the West, which has to do with more than just sales, or that their continued existence is dependent on Western sales. Platinum is about the only accurate example you've listed of a company who appeals primarily to a Western audience, and Zelda is the same for series. Nor does that disprove the idea that Japanese companies care more about their home markets than overseas markets. And of course that's not taking into account that the Japanese game industry is bigger than the examples you've listed, population disparity, etc. etc. To use a specific counter-point: If Western sales meant anything, then Okami would have never been considered one of the worst flops in gaming. To use a specific to FE counter-example, if Western sales mattered, than the series would have never would have nearly gotten the axe at all. This has turned into such a tangent. Weren't we talking about Fire Emblem at some point? VGCharts by their own admission makes up a lot of their sales data. As for my data, sales on the Japanese side come from Famitsu and thus are very easy to find with a simple internet search. Of the games we're discussing only Shadow Dragon has had sales data for its Western sales released by Nintendo, with them giving a number of approximately 250,000 Western sales.

Foreign markets rarely matter to companies as much as the home market does. To use a more familiar example, many big-budget Hollywood movies are considered flops despite making back their budgets and marketing costs overseas, sometimes bringing in triple or more the amount it cost to make the movie in the first place. We have no evidence that Radiant Dawn did anything better or worse than serviceable in the West, because we have no reliable sales numbers. I have no idea why people assume it did.

Talking about how the game wasn't marketed in the West is pointless, because sales in the West wouldn't have and probably didn't save it from being considered a flop. On top of that, we have no reliable sales data for Radiant Dawn in the West, so it's impossible to tell how true the statement of "it failed because they didn't market it" is.

Can we let go of the "Radiant Dawn wasn't marketed well" myth too, at least when it comes to Japanese sales? It's patently untrue, and Radiant Dawn was a Japanese launch title for the Wii specifically meant to move units (source: this Nintendo Dream interview hosted on Serenes). Radiant Dawn simply did not appeal to Japanese tastes. Aside from Ike's recent popularity over there due to Smash, Tellius is still one of the least popular worlds among Japanese fans.

This is patently untrue. New Mystery and arguably Shadow Dragon set the sales benchmark for the rest of the series post-Tellius bombing in Japan, and they certainly weren't considered flops or the series would have been cancelled before Awakening was even a thing. People tend to forget that both these games sold at least 250,000 copies, which is why that was the number put forth as the goal Awakening needed to hit to keep the series going. Hence why I take every claim that Awakening "saved the series" with a grain of salt.

Red: Charmander Gold: Cyndaquil Ruby: Kung-fu Chicken Torchic Sapphire: Mudkip Black: Tepig X: Fennekin Y: Chespin Omega Ruby: Treecko Alpha Sapphire: Mudkip Sun: Litten Ultra Moon: Rowlet Not counting all the unsusal runs I've done where my starter is Sneasel or something.

Honorable mentions to Parasite Eve 2, Bayonetta 2, No More Heroes 2, and the rest of the Silent Hill games. Since samples were suggested:

Excellent. My Wii U's not going anywhere unless TMS and The Wonderful 101 get ported to Switch so I won't be re-buying 1 + 2, but Bayonetta 3 is worth celebrating. My only real wish is that Jeanne get a proper mode of her own a la Vergil's mode in Devil May Cry 3 or the stories in the Devil May Cry 4 special edition, but otherwise I'm excited to see where Platinum takes the series. I'd imagine the Switch's good reputation will avert all but the most hardcore whiners this time around, yes.

Gameplay wise, they're pretty good outside of the original and its Final Mix, although even those have just aged badly rather than being outright bad. II in particular has aged fantastically and is still as fun now as it was when I first played it over a decade ago. Story-wise...honestly, they're a hot mess. The first game was a nice, self-contained story with few loose ends and a clear narrative, but every subsequent entry has just added more and more unnecessary plot elements and characters, because Nomura as usual goes overboard if no one's around to tell him no. Even watching a few seconds of that has overloaded me to the point where "darkness" doesn't look like a real word anymore.

Aya Brea (Parasite Eve), Maya Amano (Persona 2: Eternal Punishment), Roy (Fire Emblem: Binding Blade) Makoto Naegi (Danganronpa), Bayonetta (Bayonetta), Ramza Beovule (Final Fantasy Tactics) Rean Schwarzer (The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel), Nero (Devil May Cry 4), Heather Mason (Silent Hill 3) If it is who I'm thinking of, I was going to put that character too but decided against it.

Ah, I misunderstood the question, then. For some reason my brain parsed it as "who you get as a tactician," and not the infinitely more obvious "who you get as playable refresher."