Seafarer

Bold: fair, but you did title the thread "is better than" rather than something like "why I prefer". Softeners matter when trying to invite discussion rather than an argument! For the rest, I think RD's earlygame difficulty is more important than lategame, when you have a bunch of resources available and a concomitant plethora of options to deal with stuff. I don't think PoR Maniac really does much to stop the typical "bulky 1-2 go brrr" strats that work in Hard, and the only real difficulty earlygame is learning to use Titania for like 50% of everything. So I think (and this is something that I have seen many people expressing similar sentiment to, so it's not just me) that RD's steep difficulty in Part 1 alone makes it harder than Maniac PoR.

I just want to point out that there are already hints towards this in PoR base conversations during the Daein arc. The main characters are all somewhat upset about doing to Daein what Ashnard did to Crimea (their goal ends up being to kill Ashnard ASAP explicitly to stop everyone's suffering), and there are uncomfortable conversations involving Jill and Sothe's responses to it (the latter of which foreshadows his role in Part 1 of RD). Also, while I'm being pedantic: @Jotari New Mystery doesn't have support conversations. The ranked base conversations are entirely divorced from the support mechanic; they unlock at different times, and you can get support bonuses without ever reading the base conversations. On to the topic: to me, the OP just reads like a list of personal opinions on the relative value of a range of design choices, so I don't see much value in arguing over it. There are some things in there I don't agree with (Maniac mode harder in PoR than RD? get outta here), but I do like Path of Radiance better overall, so yay?

Wolt's looking good to me. Hopefully that's everything.

Is that the same Japanese name as the Divine Speed skill in Engage? Seems weird that they didn't just use that translation here, too.

I almost thought the Three Houses dominance was over after last year, but nope. Three Houses still holds *nearly half the CYL places since its release, which is insane. EDIT: Whoops, forgot CYL6 only had one TH winner. I think the point still holds, though.

I'm not familiar with the modern Lunatic+ strats, but Awakening is otherwise by far the most Enemy-Phase game in the series. The dominant Lunatic trivialisations are Nos- or Sol-tanking, to the point where Galeforce is more useful for getting into position to EP a bunch of enemies in a rout map than anything else, and even Apotheosis-secret is readily beaten by Vantage-Vengeance strats (that's the Limit Breaker-less strat). *** As for Heroes, I think it's hard to say about the game as a whole. I haven't played the PvP or pseudo-PvP modes in a bit, but I had a mixed-phase build on my Nino right to the end, and she worked fine. Other parts of FEH's history have centred around EP units. Compare that to New Mystery, where there's one single way to reasonably live multiple combat rounds in a single EP, and it's locked to female mages. You just can't send a unit into a pack of enemies in New Mystery and expect them to come out alive (at least on any real difficulty mode), whereas there have been units in FEH where you could very much do exactly that. So I'd say FEH can't really claim the top place, just because it contains multitudes, not all of which are PP-focused. I do think that XRay has the right idea that true PvP modes are always majorly skewed towards PP, because you can't rely on a human opponent to throw units away by attacking into combats they can't win. On the other hand, I find that post-game content tends towards EP strats, because the player's units continue to get stronger, while enemies don't really scale up with them, and EP focus tends to correlate with lower enemy quality compared to player units (the only exception here is Apotheosis, which scales beyond Lunatic+'s Endgame, but that can still be Enemy-Phased).

Nope, not true. Staves stop checking for accuracy completely when you reach 10 Skill; they're not capped at 99 hit like attacks in combat.

For the bold: I assumed she was addressing Gullveig, not Seiðr, since that's who replies to her. Actually, I wonder when Gullveig got all her memories back, because she seems to remember being Kvasir... I did look at the Seer's Snare intro, but I didn't think it was relevant, given that a) it's still Gullveig speaking, so it's subject to the possibility of her memory being incomplete and b) she just calls herself a paradox, which she is: a bootstrap paradox; but a bootstrap paradox can have an origin in the context of multiple timelines; it's only observing a single timeline externally that causes it to be paradoxical. In other words, it's possible for there to be an "original" timeline that did not have the time loop, but in which events transpired to set up the time loop that is all we can observe from our vantage point. The Alfaðör thing was just a bit of wild mass guessing, lol. But it's a possibility that could be confirmed well before the TT story, given that I'm fairly sure Book 8 is going to be Asgard, and I drew the connection because Kvasir also mentions Asgard in her lines (which I forgot to mention in that post... whoops!)

There are three quotes that I think are relevant to this, and I think you're picking one of them and reading too much into it. First, there's her summoning quote, which includes "...I was not created—I simply am." The second one is the one you're leaning hard on: "I was born from a flaw in time. Without it, I would not be." The third one, though, is from her friend greeting: "Where I came from is unknown to me..." And that, I think, provides enough doubt that we can't completely discard theories where she has an origin that she's simply forgotten. Also, there's one line in the book's ending that I find interesting: Kvasir says "But there is one part of my memory I've lost... But I believe you know what's missing." I propose that that may refer to her origin, and is intended to be the hook for the eventual Book 7 TT+ story. This line also casts doubt on some of Gullveig's statements about herself, given that she may not remember all that she claims to; plus she tends to claim she has no beginning in the same breath as she claims she has no end (see 13-1 and 4-2), and we've definitively proven the latter claim to be false. I wonder whether the Japanese is any more explicit? Probably not, but it might be worth a look if someone speaks Japanese. EDIT: Ooh, alternative hypothesis that fits both "Kvasir has an origin she can't remember" and "Njörðr is and always was a patsy": Alfaðör created her as Kvasir with false memories of having already done what he wanted her to do. He's been described as having unlimited power after all, and I believe that Freyja's warning of Alfonse ceasing to exist at his will was a reference to Gullveig's actions at the end of chapter 13, strengthening the link between this book and Book 4.

I think you're over-extrapolating to suit conclusions you've already come to. Kvasir wasn't born or made, but the curse itself is an entity separate from its host, and it is not part of her while she's in the Kvasir phase. So it's still entirely possible (though obviously not certain) that Njörðr had a hand in the curse's origin (and Gullveig's quotes don't shed any time on the matter...).

She manipulated the Njörðr that we see, but it makes no sense for her to have manipulated the original Njörðr, because she didn't have knowledge of how the timeline would play out back then. My theory is that the original timeline involved Njörðr hatching his plan and infecting the original Kvasir with the curse, then, for subsequent timelines, she shows up to tell him that previous-him executed the plan that he's starting to conceive for himself, so he goes along with what she says because she obviously led to his desire for the end of the mortal world in previous timelines. So, by the timeline that we see, Gullveig's the one with the plan, but only because she knows how what was originally Njörðr's plan is meant to go and has the power to make sure it goes that way. Looks like a classic Dragon Ascendant thing, right down to Njörðr outliving his usefulness.

This is something that I brought up to my friend after Chapter 12, too. I assume, since the curse gets powered up each time it infects Seiðr once she's recovered Njörðr's Ár, that it was originally his plan and the curse was made from his power, but that's obviously speculation. I guess they had to leave something unresolved for the eventual Book 7 TT+ storyline, and since Gullveig is available inside Seiðr's mind, she might be able to fill in some of the gaps.

Does anyone know what, if any, personal skills count as Rally Assists for the purposes of weapons like Spy's Shuriken? I'm looking at Gold Serpent in particular, but I'd like to know if there are any others. EDIT: I guess there's also Harsh Command(+) that I'm not certain of.

The point is the chapters are numbered in external time, while we got them in the order of the characters' personal experience.

Don't worry, you're correct. I wonder whether Thracia is going to get a banner soon enough to play back-and-forth with Engage on my "highest percent of playable characters missing from FEH" list, or if Engage has already overtaken it for good. I appreciate a good Isadora, but Thracia needs a banner soon.