ping

I would say, so, yes. There's a village in Ch.7 where we're told that she and Ishtore are "fine youths", for example, and later, after Julius warps Ishtar out of Ch.8, Tinni tells Seliph, "Ishtar was like a sister to me. She was one of the few who treated me well..." With what we're given at this point, I think it's a valid interpretation that Ishtar fell in love with Julius without seeing the pedocidal side of him (or maybe they met before Loptyr took Julius over, but I'm pretty sure we don't actually know about that just yet)... and now that Julius is off his rocker, she's too terrified of him to ever do or say anything that might upset him. It wouldn't make her a good person - she's still helping along the child murding machine - but it would make her a tragic villain. "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." - Karl Marx I don't disagree with the overall point, but I don't think Lewyn is much of a Stu. He has special blood and bullshit powers, sure, but not beyond the degree of other characters with major holy blood. And while he's indeed gen 2's "smart guy", I think an important part of Sue/Stu-ness is that the narration assumes that everybody (both in-universe and the reader) loves the Stu, with the exception of the most irredeemable villain. And that's certainly not the case for Lewyn, who is a bad son, a bad husband, a bad father, a bad crown prince, and just an all-around bad person - and all quite deliberately written as such. Can confirm. I was at the market early this morning and said hi to another regular customer. The police immediately appeared and brought us to the closest registry office. Since "late 30s" is basically 70+ in anime age, I suppose I have to rescind my previous statement and say that Hilda looks really young for her age. Jokes aside, those numbers do seem more realistic, but I'd say my point about Hilda being allowed to look middle-aged still stands. Yeah, I like the @Interdimensional Observer's head canon, but I agree that Hilda would make a bigger deal about being brothers with the Emperor unless she doesn't want to direct Ishtar's attention to her and Julius being cousins. Just from her looks, I would've headcanoned Isaachian heritage for her. I'm sure there's black-haired characters explicitly stated to be from somewhere else, but that hair colour is still mostly associated with that country. All very much in line with the standards of European nobility. Gotta keep those bloodlines pure. Thing is, Miletos really is just on the Jugdral map for this one chapter. Outside of it, it appears in the Jugdral timeline (the first instance of child hunts) and as Seliph's shopping location. You could just move the "Sorrow of Miletos" to another location and have Seliph take another angle to flirt with Julia, and you could remove the island from the map without losing anything narratively. And no, we don't know any character from Miletos. Fee stocks at an all-time high. Sylvia tried to teach him how to dance.

Oh, I agree. But just saying "Oh, I agree." is boring. One thing that's remarkable about Hilda is that she looks like she's about 50 years old. I think she's the only woman in the game who is allowed to be and look middle-aged? Rahna is probably 40-50 years old, but has a generic "somewhere between 25 and 40" portrait. Other than that, there's only two of the generic village women - the one with the headscarf looks about as old as Hilda, and then there's the one portrait that's actually old. It wasn't necessary for me to make the obvious joke, but I was quite delighted when this Morrigan even talked in a way that absolutely could've been DA:O!Morrigan. Like, child mass murder is (probably) a step too far even for her, but she'd totally present an unpleasant order with a similar faux-polite schadenfreude.

FE4 Chapter 10: Light and Darkness Perlucos (turn 0) I wasn't sure in which direction to go, so I went with both. That's fair. Dangit, Lewyn's need to be ~special~ cost us an Axe Mage class!

Skatole, or 3-methylindole, is the main contributor to the smell of poop. In low concentrations, it smells of flowers.

re: Holy Blood on John Constipatius - Honestly, I stopped checking for that on semi-generic bosses. But if Lewyn's character is representive for the paternal side of his family, it isn't too surprising to see Forseti blood appear unexpectedly anywhere in Jugdral. Lex!Coirpre will most likely cap his Def at 18, but still and reach 60+ HP. He won't be hurt by such insignificant hits. I almost expected it to work like that, so yeah. Even skimmed through the endgame wiki page before fighting him to see if there's any "if he survived" conditional for Arion's appearance. In the very old Civ games (1 and 2, dunno about 3), you can be forced into a truce if your country is a republic or democracy. If an enemy asks for peace, or you want to declare a war, there' a chance (50% for republic, 100% for democracy) that your parliament overrules your warmongering ways. If you want to be a warmongering democracy, you can build the United Nations world wonder, which will provide your parliament with an excuse to be warmongering 50% of the time... but it also forces any enemy to offer you peace if you contact them, so wars will still end prematurely all the time. Look, you can't expect me to do basic maths when fire embling. Wellll, his wife is stronger (+1), faster (+10), sturdier (+6 HP), more skillful (+13 Skl), more magical (+1), and luckier (+12) than Johalvier. He does have +1 Def and +2 Res over Larcei, at least. Definitely seems like something a modern FE game would do (although I don't know about the differing physical weapons). Maybe it can still be blamed on storage capacity on the SNES cartridges. Julius ex machina. Julius could also make an appearance earlier - maybe when Travant dies, to offer Arion support (the reinforcements coming from the northwest) and tell him how friends are supposed to help each other, and how important mutual trust is for him, and how repugnant he finds the idea of let a friend hang out to dry.

FE4 Chapter 9: For Whose Sake Luthecia --> Grutia --> Thracia Welp, RIP perfect consistency. It's not the biggest deal, but I can't help but be a little disappointed that the ambitious goal to accurately display the world map in the slightly overlapping chapter maps has only almost been reached. So you consider your enjoyment of the game more important than a miniscule mechanical advantage? Fake FE player. This greatly amuses me. I love these little localisation jokes, as long as they're not as heavy handed as they are in America. The greatest twist about that is that you secretly haven't been a beardman all along. OldMan he may be, but good on him for looking no day older than he did almost 20 years ago. I'm basing this on very little actual knowledge of the endgame, of course, but I'm not sure how valuable that additional staff user really is in the endgame. Even without Julia, you still have Lana, Fee, Leaf, Nanna, Tinni (in any ranked run, I'm sure she'll promote with ch.10's arena), and then Coirpre/Sharlow. How important is it really to have six instead of five? Even though not everybody can use all the important staves, I'm not convinced that it's that big a deal.

Interesting perspective. I read Travant as having decided on this last resort at the start of chapter 8 already, with Arion's line about Travant looking more fearful than ever foreshadowing that. If Arion seemingly killing Altena was what pushed him over the edge, that would put quite a different spin on this. Personally, I think I'll still keep a hypothetical code of honour in the back of my mind. Arion must've gotten his ideas about honour from from somewhere, so I kinda expect Thracia to have one. One would expect a lot of Grannvalian meddling in the diplomatic affairs between the Manster realms, no? With Thracia playing more of a role of plundering brigands with less diplomatic finesse, I can buy that they wouldn't have much success in that game, but surely, some Grannvale kings would've tried to play the Manster factions against one another. SEQUEL IDEA: Thracia 1492, in which the seafarer Chris O'Lumbus from the Manster district conducts an naval exploration in the name of the Thracian king and queen. And lo and behold, he actually discovers what will later be known as Valentia! Unfortunately, he turns out to be a complete piece of shit, killing and enslaving the natives, and it's the mission of the player character to expose his evil deeds. An oddity that I'm willing to accept because it is convenient. And a character's parentage isn't important enough in the turn-by-turn business that it would have to be crammed into the stat screen somewhere. (A small detail that is missing and that I would've liked: Characters like Ares and Johalvier could've given an answer from the augury, too. If nothing else, it would allow Jotari to add Finn's parents to his list of named FE characters that never actually make an on-screen appearance)

I'm going to say Sylvia. It's not that she's a promiscuous character, but I really don't need a promiscuous character whose childishness and immaturity is dialed up to 11 in virtually every scene she is in. And even if those traits were removed, it also bothers me that Sylvia's behaviour needed to be given a justification in the form of daddy issues, while characters like Sain or Saul are allowed to be man-sluts just because.

Why didn't Altena just ask a random old guy who her real parents are? Is she stupid? You're right, it is a bit surprising that it's part of Leonster. I haven't really been thinking about the four realms of the Manster district, so that never occurred to me. Directly west of Meath and north of Luthecia would put it here on the map: So we probably just have to assume that Leonster controls like half of the Manster district. Make it "Rodelbahn" and you have the German word for a sled run. A beautiful name for a boy. Lex/Sylvia, let's go. (just theorycrafting - but that actually sounds like the most convenient option if you're going for ranked, no? Coirpre gets Paragon, Lex can pass him the Renewal band to give him a nice 20k to blow on staves, not like Lex would lack the funds, and you don't really care about how useful Coirple's staff botting is. And Lene can do Vantage/Sleep Sword memes to get through the arena, so she'll cap out, too.) Hey, no worries. We're both entitled to our opinions, and it's not as if I wasn't spamming mine all over this thread. We see wyverns fly above peaks (yet close enough to spot the sadness in their eyes), so this seems like a perfectly realistic explanation. It also covers why Erin would ever be attracted to Lewyn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant_(military) As I said, Arion as a person, growing up with a father like Travant, would have my sympathy. Arion as a fictional character is frustrating because first, he's just evil daddy's yesman, and when evil daddy finally showcases a shade of grey, it just goes over his head entirely, with the conclusion that he and his kidn-- adopted sister must stab each other eventually. I was thinking that he maybe could've reached the same goal by just pulling a Siriüh and disappear without a trace and only come back wearing a bitchin' mask when Arion is kidnapped by a somehow revived Manfroy. But you're right, him dying is a clear cut that would fulfil any desires of revenge on the side of Leif specifically. You consider 25-ish XP on a character who already one-rounds bosses with plenty of overkill "no need?" Fake FE player. FE 3-STYLE AGAIN STAFF Can't comment on the T776 involvement that Jotari is talking about, but the geography works out: The cluster is west of Meath across a mountain range and north of Luthecia, so that would actually put the village cluster pretty deep into Leonster territory. Relative to Ch.8's map, it would be further west (if from the southern part of the map), not south. I'm principled not to use any sequel or prequel's badness against an original piece of media (like BlaBla making some BinBla characters look stupid, or terrible FF7 spin-offs), so I agree. Sorry, FE4!Travant, you're just a bad parent.

I fully agree that Lang is great (honestly, Book 2's story becomes weaker almost the moment he's dead), but I'd say he stretches the category "minor villain" a bit. While there's never the illusion that he's the Big Bad of the entire game, he's still the major antagonist for almost a third of the game. Heck, I'd even say that he's the Book 2 villain with the most presence, even compared to the official main villains Gharnef and Medeus.

FE4 Chapter 9: For Whose Sake Meath --> Kapathogia/Luthecia

...which also applies to FE3, of course. Although I believe it's less punishing in that game because there's only one single Weapon Level stat, while (iirc) many Thracia cavs/flyers are limited to Iron Swords when dismounted. I'll say that the Cav line has very bad representation on Celica's side in Gaiden. She can only get one by picking the class for Atlas or by death-warping one of Alm's over... but either is a terrible idea because of all the swamp on her maps. But of course, Alm has some competent (Clive, Mathilda, Zeke) and one very cool cavs on his side of the map, and the Whitewings are incredibly good for Celica. And so that every NES/SNES game gets its explicit mention - I found that FE1 has very strong Cav representation. The Xmas cavs and Hardin all have straight up excellent stats, and even the meme cavs are somewhat salvaged by the Paladin class's bases. Shout-out to my Roshe for getting two or three Spd procs on the map he got his Knight Crest... which brought him exactly to Paladin Spd base, rendering all the procs useless.

I reject the premise that there is "no incentive" to train a bad unit. If your only goal is to beat the game, then sure - but I can offer the following counterpoint: Beating this final boss with the pink armour knight wouldn't have been nearly as satisfying if she hadn't joined as a Lv.1 General, as one of the latest recruits in the game, with godawful base stats. Her base Str is the same as DOGA's, the Knight who joins in the very first chapter. There is one ch.1 unit that doesn't have better Skl than the Pink General - and that's the healer. The only good stat that matters for this fight is her Weapon Level, allowing her to use the legendary Gradivus - but with her base stats, she's four points of Str shy of dealing a single point of damage to the final boss. Her Def is genuinely great, sure, but the final boss just ignores that. That was my incentive to use this awful unit: The challenge to set up the final boss kill for her, and a funny screenshot. PoR just doesn't offer the same thing - Ashnard has his magic plot armour, for starters, but PoR's bad units are all perfectly capable and easily trainable with BEXP (so there's not as big a "look at this cool thing I did" factor for a 20/20 Rolf), while still being "objectively" worse to field than somebody with wings, or at least hooves, and with an axe access, or at least lances.

I mean, probably? Point for point, I'd say it's somewhere in the middle - less valuable than Str/Mag and Def, maybe comparable to HP, and more valuable than Lck and Res. Spd depends heavily on the circumstances - on a character that doubles everything anyway, Skl is probably more valuable, but if not (or if the character can swap to a heavier weapon with an additional point of Spd), a single point of Spd can be insanely impactful.

I'd like to bring up a very minor Genealogy villain in Clement, one of the squabbling nobles in Agustria. The guy has a total of four lines, but still manages to stand out as an enemy that isn't exactly devious, nor this noble Camüh whose loyalty forces him to fight against our hero. He's just an unfortunate guy at the wrong place at the wrong time: He observes a brewing fight between Heirhein (Elliot and his father Marsaille Bordeaux) and Nordion (Eldigan) and prudently decides to see who will have the upper hand before deciding who to support. The problem: Sigurd is present and he won't go until he has seized every castle in a 100-mile radius. Clement thinks there is just a squabble between two neighboring noble families... and the next thing he sees is a foreign invasion literally at his doorstep, he feels forced to defend against it (I mean, understandable), and five minutes later, he has a Silver Sword in his gut. Poor guy. I just think that, in a series full of dastardly curs and noble Camühses, it's beautiful to see a guy who just takes the worst possible moment to be smart and cautious about something.

That's what happens if you challenge a German to a contest of pedantic arseholery. To be fair to him, Trabant is probably not the best parent to learn constructive conflict-solving from. This is probably the thousandth time that he heard that exact same argument, so he just defaults to the "please stop fighting" plea he developed when he was 13. Would explain why he keeps calling Altena a child - he just never figured out a better defense that doesn't involve telling his father that he might possibly hypothetically not be 100% correct in this and only this specific case. I did notice that the Bolt Sword Hero/Forrester was a woman. Interesting that this female version of the class was created just for one substitute character and this one generic enemy. Or maybe the sprite artists had already did the work for completion's sake, so Radney and this enemy were given that class so that the work wouldn't be useless. To be honest, I've lost track of the Dragon Riders, Dragon Knights, Wyvern Riders, Wyvern Lords, Wyvern Knights, Dracoknights and whatever else humans on lizards are called in the FE series. How silly of you to learn history from video games. Now, let me give a brief overview of the political landscape of 1444 Europe, right after the Battle of Varna--

List of Thracians who don't go "Yay, violence!" when Trabant points at Leonster: Hannibal Altena ...yeah. Diligent ping from chapter 5 lives in the past and thus knows that "Lutetia" is the Latin name and Lutèce is just the frenchified version of it. He also knows that the accent on the second syllable is an accent grave, not aigu (which is to say going down, not up). 😛 Whoops and weird, indeed. Luckily, it really seems that editing posts is less luckbased since the last forum update. Really? I genuinely just picked three names that an idiot Lewyn might confuse with Azel. Huh, my second guess would've been a song of three nice decent clean-cut young men from Seattle. The Three Kingdoms is an era that I really should try to learn about. It sounds fascinating, but I never even had it mentioned in my history classes at school. At least I recognised the names, so... yay me? If I had a nickel for every time this exact trope has been used with regards to a wyvern rider unwillingly fighting against the blue-haired pretty boy protagonist... I'd have at least two nickels. (an addition from FE3 B1, actually) That's fair. I'd have sympathy for an actual young adult in Arion's shoes, brought up by a man such as Travant. But as a fictional character, he makes for a rather frustrating yesman. Maybe that'll change, though - I know that it's possible to paint him not blue, but at least green in the endgame. I mentioned before that it seems that writers often have their villain kick a puppy or stab a toddler if they're worried that the villain might come across as too sympathetic. I feel like that's being done to Travant here - first, Finn makes sure to tell Leif and the audence that Altena's adoption contained 0% empathy or kindness, and the scene with Hannibal and staffy boi reinforces the impression that, yes, Travant would stab a toddler if it was to his advantage.

He absolutely is Flower Fridge.

Yes, but I find that PoR still lays all blame squarely at Daein/Ashnard's feet. Not only with Ashy abandoning the country immediately, but it's also the Daeins who deploy Scorched Swamped Earth tactics just to slow the Crimeans down. Only in RD, Daein resentment against Crimea is presented as (somewhat) justified, because they just let Begnion take over and squeeze Daein dry. In PoR, the Daein citizens refusing food from the Crimeans are portrayed as sympathetic, but also clearly misled. The nice part about funny-bad units is that if you don't want to use them, you don't have to. I generally agree that a bad unit with some unique quality is more rewarding to train up than a unit that is just "{other unit}, but bad" - but while I never used, say, Lyre, because I prefer Fiona or Meg as far as underdog units go, her presence in the game doesn't impair my enjoyment whatsoever. So there's another cat laguz warming the bench, what do I care? But for somebody who likes catgirls the challenge, it's great that she is there. @Florete already covered why I wouldn't agree that PoR's roster is more competitive. There is just as little reason to use Rolf or Ulki or (the returning) Shinon as there is to use Fiona or Lyre. But it's far less interesting to bring PoR's scrubs up to speed (just pump BEXP and you're done), and the result is still going to be a combat unit that's just worse than, say, Astrid compared to Rolf/Shinon or any flyer compared to Ulki. No cool unique features whatsoever.

FE4 Chapter 9: For Whose Sake Meath (turns 0-1) Tsk. I'd say "Black Roses" seems more edge-tacky, while calling him "Flower" might indicate that Reptor hated his son. That, or he wanted to overcome gender stereotypes and thought it was worth the cost of his son getting bullied at school.

I don't know how you get from "one broken, two maybe broken if you squint hard enough, seven (*) no" to "more than half lmao" (*) "Every FE7 SM" being Guy, Karel, Karla, and Lyn, all of which are middling at best He did list Leaf as an example, but yeah. All according to the translation on the site anyway. https://serenesforest.net/general/designers-notes/holy-war/playing-guide/ This is a really funny instance of fanservice reducing the quality of the product. Most of the time, it just makes the story worse. (and most of the time, the fanservice is directed at horny male teenagers, of course) I am shamed by this oversight. I suppose he is. I would have assumed that he's more cagey about Altena's real parents in general - the more people know who she is, the more likely that she'll find out eventually. And if he wants her to be in a position of authority (and I mean, she is treated as a princess of Thracia), surely it won't help if her subordinates know that her claim to her position is fake. Extremely unrealistic. Everybody knows that kissing cousins is already fully accepted in Jugdral to begin with. You have to consider that Ruben will judge me harshly if I give all the resources to the main character. I don't have the freedom to just leave the Paragon Ring on Seliph indefinitely. I have been deceived I assumed that, because you were asking, it'll be more than I would think. This is quite funny, too, though. Well, Travant had to ambush them in the desert, with effective weapons on all of his men, and he still had to blackmail Quan into dropping Gáe Bolg. (OK, Quan would've dropped eventually anyway, but Travant still did blackmail him first)

2. Supports One of my (maybe) unpopular opinions is that supports don't add much to the story of any FE game. I'll say that PoR is the best game at averting this, because its chapter-based support growth allows the conversations to be more topical to the main plot - but I think it's still a net negative that important or interesting facets of the story are hidden in support conversations. For example, Soren's identity as a Branded is a very important piece of context for the racism against Laguz that he displays in main story - so should that information be hidden from a player who prefers to ship Ike with the sexy catboy and who didn't find Stefan in the desert? Because of that, I think that the base convos that both Tellius games have are the best spot to develop their characters. Granted, PoR has generally a much higher level of characterisation for its minor characters than RD does, but that seems more like a concious decision to invest less writing time into that area. Which I think is a fine decision, even though I would've hoped for a bit more fluff for some specific characters (Fiona comes to mind). The FE fandom's insistance that every single character must have 100 pages worth of trite anime clichés in dialogue entirely unrelated to the actual story is silly, and I uphold that Shadow Dragon did nothing wrong. 3. Story Deciding between a simple story done well on the one side, or an ambitious story that doesn't stick the landing on the other is always a matter of personal preference. I personally like PoR's story a lot (it's the main reason why I never swapped it out as my favourite FE) - but I think that it is only really completed through the first two parts of Radiant Dawn. The main storyline of PoR - the liberation of Crimea - is very much a Disney fairytale in which good triumphs over evil and everyone is happy in the end and there's ice cream for everybody... Early RD then does two things with this: First, Pelleas and Micaiah are a mirror image of Elincia and Ike, just gender-flipped... and a deliberate set-up by a sinister shadowy figure who recognises the power of that story and tries to create himself a puppet king to excert power through. And second, we see the parts of the fairytale that Disney had left out. We see that, in the wake of the war of liberation, the population of Daein has now become the oppressed and abused, breeding even more resentment. And we see that the story of the princess doesn't just end when she becomes queen. I do agree that the story goes downhill in part 3, though. I don't like the Blood Pact very much, and I think that the big epic god-slaying finale is far less interesting than the smaller-scale politicking that takes place in the firest two parts. 4. Availability / 5. Balance So here's another unpopular opinion (and I think this really is one): Path of Radiance's unit balance sucks. It's boring. Because every single character is, at worst, a competent combattant, you don't have any "funny-bad" characters that are liablilities, and through whom you can disrespect the enemy by killing the final boss with Wendy. Even bottom-tier characters like Lucia and (with a quick BEXP infusion) Rolf aren't bad in the same way that Sheema or Bantu are in New Mystery - they're perfectly competent... but other characters are more competent and have horses and/or axes at their disposal.

FE4 Chapter 8: The Dracoknights of Thracia Connaught --> Manster --> Meath Answers!