Slumber

I'd like it if, whenever FE7 gets remade, Nergal is far more unhinged to explain his lapses in judgement. He seems too put together for a guy whose mind and soul are completely eroded, and for a guy who only decided to finish his plans AFTER the two most important people to his plan ran away.

I'll agree with Lyon being better than Nergal pre-possession, but afterward? With Nergal, we at least we know that ancient magic, and tampering with it DEEPLY like Nergal does, does permanent damage to a person's soul and psyche in Elibe. Nergal's initially noble/sympathetic goals eventually end up getting corrupted to just "I want to break the barrier between the human and dragon worlds and wreck havoc". He got corrupted by the only method he knew to accomplish what he wanted. But Fomortiis just sucks. Lyon literally gets possessed by Satan. There's no real explanation to this. Grado just makes the Dark Stone and boom, Satan. And Fomortiis is the Sataniest Satan that ever Sataned. He's evil, he's haughty, he thinks he's unstoppable. He's every evil Dragon in the series without the backstory. And FE8 does absolutely nothing with the revelations that fucking demons exist in that world besides this. It's the only game in the whole series with demons, and it's just a detail that's glanced over. "Oh, Lyon is possessed by the Demon King. Yeah, that doesn't raise any questions within the context of this series." It's emblematic of what frustrates me about FE8's writing as a whole. Ideas and concepts get tossed out there, and rarely ever get fleshed out. And as a Fire Emblem game, my expectations are really low in this regard. Nergal's dumb as all hell, though. Really no excuse to not just obliterate the heroes whenever they meet beyond plot contrivances. Lyon's definitely much better at that, since he only fully loses himself to Fomortiis after the heroes have powered up enough to oppose the Demon King.

The actual best? Probably PT or the Resident Evil 7 demo. Two very specific demos crafted to tease a game without giving anything away. They were also just big mysteries that did a great job at generating interest for their respective games(Even though one never came out). My favorite? I'm in the PS1 demo disc camp. I don't remember which one specifically, but I remember playing the ones with Einhander and MediEvil on it a lot.

Chris Matthews said Bernie would have communist death squads executing people like him in Time Square like, a week and a half ago. The guy is absolutely losing his marbles. Even my parents, who almost exclusively watch MSNBC for news, are fucking scared of how insane he comes off when he talks about Sanders. Also, in case anyone doesn't remember, he said Hillary Clinton and John Kasich was his dream ticket in 2016. Not as in, like, Hillary vs. Kasich for the White House. He meant that he wanted to see those two run together. He's always passed himself off as the "sensible moderate", and he's probably starting to see how a large portion of the democratic base is rejecting the stances moderates take.

Three Houses definitely has one of the better attempts at weapon balance, in my opinion. A lot of weapons are generally worth using. Even when some units are at the point where using Steel or Silver is the best option, an Iron weapon is worth keeping around for weapon arts that can bridge the gap without wasting the durability of your better/more expensive weapons. And when it comes to the Fist weapons, lighter weapons like Training and Iron are usually better due to the type of units who specialize in Gauntlets.

If they're going to continue with silent Avatars, I'd be fine if Fire Emblem implemented a "Personality" stat like Dragon Quest 3 did. Basically at the start of Dragon Quest 3, you're given a few questions and a trial to determine your personality. You personality determined your stat growths, so somebody who had a "Tough" personality had a lot of Strength and Vitality, good for a Warrior-type. A "Quick" personality had high speed and a high crit rate, good for Fighters/Monks. If you weren't happy, there were a number of books characters could read that would change their personality. In regards to Byleth/Three Houses, personality could also dictate proficiency.

Well, Three Houses took a lot from FE4 in terms of tone, basic premise and the So clearly IS is looking to older FEs(4 in particular) for ideas. Plus, the weirder stuff in FE4 isn't portrayed as a good thing, and a lot of the other stuff can be written around. Also, just a weird observation that's likely completely coincidental, but the retro FE that got a big remix in SSB4 was Gaiden, a few years before Echoes was announced. The FE that got a big song remix in Ultimate is Genealogy.

Definitely not Tellius. If that gets anything, I'd expect a remaster. Either FE4, cuz it's next in line, or FE6, cuz it's what Nakanishi said he wanted to do.

I feel like the next game will be a remake like Echoes.

Because they're taking on human forms. When they're full dragons, they're reptiles, when they're manaketes, they're effectively biologically mammals.

I've wrestled with this one for years, but Final Fantasy 8's twist

??? Those supports don't really do anything like this. They mostly showcase that Henry's just a nutjob(Which is already showcased in all of Henry's other dialogue in the game) and much more proficient in Dark Magic than Tharja is. They don't show us that Dark Mages in Plegia using curses/hexes on each other is common. The practice of actually casting hexes on others is brought up twice in the support. Once, when Tharja thinks Henry's a threat to Robin(Because of course) and casts a truth curse on him, and again when Tharja mentions she has a death curse from an unknown assailant. Which with all likelihood, and the suddenness with which she brings it up, is because she got it after joining Chrom and started fighting other Dark Mages, and not because one of her colleagues thought it'd be funny to put a death hex on her. There's also no real implication that there's a profession dedicated to just scheming and cursing. It really just seems like it's something Dark Mages do as part of being Dark Mages. If you're basing this off of Tharja suspecting Henry to be a spy, that's really a stretch. However, what is shown is that Dark Mages frequently use hexes to solve their every day problems, which I guess could mean they are casting hexes and curses on each other some times? And that could be world-building, but it really seems like that's a Tharja thing, since she casts hexes/curses on EVERYONE, and Henry doesn't. On the implication of a "code of conduct" based on fear, Tharja just says that the profession of Dark Mages is based on an ancient history of spreading death and disease... which of course it is, it's a magic that in-gameplay, is designed to inflict illness and drain life, so Henry shouldn't be ALWAYS smiling and giggling while doing it. If you really want to stretch it, you could extrapolate this to mean that there's a certain attitude a Dark Mage is expected to have. But I'd argue this really isn't much different than a code of chivalry or honor that upstanding knight characters in the series follow, which is almost never used to show that this is how ALL knights act, just how the one espousing chivalry acts. What you're saying is shown in this support chain isn't really shown in this support chain. And if it is, it's very loose implications, and still very much different than how things are in other games. Here's the support chain:

Oh boy, that's my wheelhouse.

Giving me an open invitation to post anything rock related? Well, I usually describe what I'm posting, but I'll leave it a surprise for these ones. I'll just say that it's more recent stuff.

He does indeed talk about some of the Plegian soldiers you've killed to Ricken. But it's half of one support in a single chain of a single character.

I swear you people are being purposely dense. I never said that it's "better writing", I just said that it's the typical way FE does supports, and Fates and Awakening do something different that draws peoples' attentions to different aspects of the world/characters. There's still a ton of fluff in Three Houses supports, no FE has world building in EVERY support, but the chances that you learn something about Fodlan in any given support is pretty high.

Throughout these last few posts, I've made one argument about the actual quality of the writing in those two game, and that's about how I think it's pretty bad/frustrating that you have to dig so deep through supports to find out most of what a character's about outside of their surface tropes. I've made it very clear that I'm not a fan of how characters are written in these two games, but outside of that one comment, I've made no arguments about the quality of the writing, and anything you're taking away from this from me attacking these games is on you. The comparison of Miriel and Canas? It's to showcase how different the support chains of each character are, despite them being built off the same trope. This WHOLE TIME I've been arguing that the execution and focus of how characters were written in Awakening and Fates is very different from the rest of the series. Picking a bad character to showcase this may have given the wrong impression, but the point wasn't to say "Canas was good and Miriel was bad, therefor anime bad and Awakening/Fates bad", or whatever you've been reading it as. I've explicitly said this three times now, and it's getting really fucking frustrating to talk to you because of how badly you're just blindsiding this for the sake of... defending something I'm not even really attacking. Go back to the comment I made about Henry and Tharja. Was there a single thing in there saying it was good or bad? No? Wow, how fucking crazy, it's almost like, oh I don't know, maybe I've been saying something like Or maybe It's so weird that I didn't say these things up until now. I'm really sorry for only saying this stuff up just now, and not in various ways throughout the last few posts I've made in this thread. Really, really sorry that I didn't make these pretty obvious statements until now. Look. I jumped in when you made this comment: You deliberately downplay that there's anything different about the tone of Awakening and Fates, as those are the two games @Wraith singled out. Those are the two games I've singled out. You've just chalked it up as silly(Or just straight up called @Wraith delusional) that anybody would suggest that there was something different about those two games. You've acknowledged that yes, the execution of these games are different, with Fates and Awakening pushing character quirks/traits more than previous games. You've also acknowledged that yes, the focus of the character writing is different. Yet you're still getting angry/upset at the idea that there might be people who don't like this direction, or... you don't like that people are pointing it out? I don't even really know what you're getting angry at. And again, I've made one comment about what I feel is objectively bad about the writing, and the rest has been either you inferring stuff, or just straight up injecting things I'm not arguing for into my arguments. I'm going to stop arguing with you now, because I don't know if I can continue this without saying stuff that would get me banned.

Fair point.

Lyn would have had to have had Rutger before the start of FE7 for this to be possible.

Alright, glad you finally got the point I was making, and didn't end up going on a huge rant because you skimmed and misinterpreted my argument again. Really saves me the trouble of having to reiterate my point for a third time. Like I said, my problem with a lot of the Awakening and Fates supports is a real lack of any sense of progression, or any sense of the world outside of the characters talking. Like take Tharja or Henry when talking about world building. Usually, when a unit from an enemy army defects and joins the player's army, it's used as a way to explain something about their country in general, whether it be why they are the way they are, or explain the culture/mentality of that country. Usually it's the Wyvern Riders like Jill who get this role, and they usually get to illuminate the militarism of their countries(Bern by the start of FE7 valued strength and honor, but was corrupted and started attacking its own people, while Daein more naturally has a social Darwinist society that Ashnard was able to climb to the top). With Tharja and Henry, there's absolutely no talk of Plegia in their supports beyond it just being a place where people live. They don't even talk about Plegia in their supports with each other. All we learn is that Henry is a legend in Plegia, and that he doesn't care about who he fights for as long as he can torch bad guys. The supports and conversations in Awakening and Fates have very different purposes than supports in other games.

This makes sense, given that Camus is a pretty notable Char clone. Though I will say, if Kaga games are big on mecha tropes(But without the mecha), then his games would have been a bit behind the time, since mecha, especially the old school ones that come to mind now that you mention it, were more of a product of the late 70s and 80s. By the 90s when Fire Emblem rolled around, mecha was kinda starting to trend on a decline. And a lot of what was coming out was very different from the grand scale war-centric stories of the 80s where the Kaga and GBA games seemed to pull from the most. Gundam had moved on to full on pretty-boy super soldiers and shonen battle tournament series in the 90s, and Evangelion came out smack dab in the middle of the 90s and was a pretty massive deconstruction that completely derailed the genre. I feel like the modern Fire Emblem games have their fingers more on the pulse of what's big in anime, which probably makes it a lot more apparent. EDIT: Also I'd really only say it's Ike, Mia and probably Boyd who feel like they come from big 3 battle shounen. Ike's obvious, Boyd's the friend character who can't catch up, and even though Samurai Champloo's not really a shounen, Mia's straight up just Fuu and Mugen fused into one character. Most of the other characters still feel like the Kaga/GBA era FE characters.

Exactly what it sounds like. Development of the world the characters inhabit. Going back to Canas, his supports with Renault cover that Morphs are actually a very old concept, and it's revealed that Renault is Nergal's former assistant who helped create Nergal's Morphs in order to bring back a friend(Which I believe was implied to be Kishuna). Or his supports with Pent, where they go into the natures of each magic, and we learn that Dark Magic seeps into your soul and desperately tries to eat away at you, and it turned Canas's brothers into living husks. Also we learn that Canas's mother is Niime, and that she's a VERY respected mage in Elibe that even turns Pent into a fanboy. FE7 is also the only game in the series that's a prequel(Sorta), so Canas's supports even explain why his son is an Anima Mage instead of a Dark Mage like the rest of his family. In Three Houses, they actually make it really tough to find a support that doesn't involve exposition of how the politics of Fodlan work, whether it be noble kids talking about their families and their relation to the leaders of the houses or their history, or how certain groups of people are treated within Fodlan(Dedue's supports being about the Duscur or Petra and Brigid for example), or just conversations involving key people in the story, like Ashe and his history with Lonato. Sometimes they even go the extra mile and talk about the Crests themselves and how that leaves them feeling in the society of Fodlan, like with Sylvain. All of these supports generally help paint a picture and make the world seem much grander outside of the conversations the characters are having.

Yeah, I definitely got some support fatigue in Three Houses. Finishing a chapter and seeing a dozen supports pop up filled me with dread more than anything, even though I like the cast of that game.

I think you took the wrong message from my post. My argument wasn't "Hey, these tropes are in anime, and that's bad". My argument was "These tropes are big in anime right now, and tend to exist in these series that heavily pander to a certain demographic", hence the whole "You can really pin-point these tropes" bit. Like @Flere210 said, there are some common tropes in the older games, too, like the girly-girl Serra or the vengeful edgelord like Raven(Though admittedly, that's not his real name and one he chose to go by because he's a big 'ol edgelord), but I can't really pin-point a genre that encompasses both of those kinds of characters... whereas the typical harem characters and hyper exaggerated characters? It feels very isekai-y(Or in Fates' case, like some ecchi otaku-bait high school comedy... that's for some reason set in a super grimdark world). The "That's bad" bit comes in how IS decided to bury significant character details in random supports, which most people won't see. Hell, I used two characters that relied on virtually the exact same character trope and were written a decade apart to showcase my point. So even though that's pretty subjective for me to say, I still feel like it's obvious that my argument was more rooted in execution, rather than things just being bad because they're just inherently bad. I don't even know how you could infer that I was going in that direction, since going even further, I compare the execution in Awakening and Fates to Three Houses, which also leans heavily on anime tropes and character quirks. But again, Three Houses tends to use these character quirks to build the world or advance a character arc(Which then gets reinforced by the story structure of Three Houses so you can actually see characters develop and continue their relationships over the course of years). I don't even mind Bernie, even though I feel like she's one of the most egregious and over-reliant of her gimmick characters in FETH, purely because it's easy to generally see what the purpose of most of her conversations are supposed to be. If I were to sum it up, without just completely knocking Awakening and Fates for execution, I feel like the goals of the character writing in those two games specifically was pretty different from the rest of the series. It seems like the purpose of the conversations in Awakening and Fates is 80-90% to give you more exposure to a character and just build towards the end of a relationship between characters(Probably because of the marriage and children mechanics), with 10-20% going to actual development or world building. And because of this, I guess the, uh, anime-y-ness really gets hammered home because of the exposure, and to people who aren't used to this or expect this, it hits a place that makes you go "Anime bad".

This is something that FE has always struggled with. I actually really liked the inclusion of height in Radiant Dawn a lot because you could make a Defense style map(Like 3-13) where it truly felt like you were at truly a huge disadvantage with army strength, but due to having leverage and height advantage, things were much more equal. Don't know exactly how the opposite would be handled. I guess chapter 14 of FE5 kind of works that way. Just a massive city siege where you can make all kinds of bottle necks in the streets, while the two enemy armies just throw themselves at you to try to break through. Also, I hate this argument. I don't think anybody would ever argue that Fire Emblem wasn't Japanese/anime. But Awakening got a LOT more pandery/tropey. The weird dragon loli(That for the first time in the series was a ROMANCE OPTION), the creepy yandere, the clumsy love interest who can't express her feelings, the tomboy love interest who obviously can't get the guy she likes, the kid genius who hates getting treated like a kid, the loud, confident brute who is too stupid to reasonably ever survive in such a world... These are pretty indicative of some very modern anime tropes that are much easier to pin-point than characters tended to be before. And to make things worse, it's been mentioned many many times(By people who aren't me) just how hard you have to work to find any nuggets of character that break the surface of what you get with these characters. I'll bring up the comparison all the time because it always is relevant to the argument, but the writing of Canas vs. the writing of Miriel encapsulates the difference in how FE used to handle characters vs. how Awakening and Fates handled characters. In FE7, unless you were a poor, unlucky fool who happened to only support Canas with Vaida, you got to see many different sides of Canas that weren't just him talking about books, or character development and serious world building that coincided with him being a nerd. His nerdiness actually helped contextualize himself and the world, and he'd break from his schtick to move these conversations along. With Miriel, she almost exclusively just talks about books and experiments. In almost any given convo, she just talks about how she finds her support's character quirk interesting and that she must study it. There is no contextualizing or development in these supports. It's just her being a nerd. I'd say Echoes manages to distill more characters traits down into more palatable conversations due to how small the cast was, and how small the support pools were. Even if a character only had two support chains, you could at least be sure those chains were very different and showcased different sides of the characters. Three Houses went back to being more anime trope-y, but the characters(IMO) bounced off each other way better, and most of those supports had some extreme world-building in them. The timeskip and gap in supports also gives them fairly reasonable character development.