Extrasolar

About the Lucina pronunciation, I remember the Japanese announcer for Smash pronounces it "Loo-CHEE-nuh," if I'm not mistaken, whereas the English one goes for "Loo-SEE-nuh," meaning that in Japan at least it's probably meant to be pronounced with a pseudo-Italian inflection. But yeah, that video's pretty funny.

Hey, I have a few questions. With my 5* Karel (+Atk, -HP), running Wo Dao+, Reprisal, Fury 2, Desperation 3 and Threaten Defense 3, would it be better to replace Desperation with Vantage to give him anything of an EP? Second, my 4* Eirika (+Atk, -Spd) is recently max level, but she hasn't got anything inherited on her except Hone Speed. Speaking of which, how crippling is -Spd for Eirika? She's currently got 30 Spd for a 4*, and that strikes me as a little low, but... Third. I've finally decided to turn my attention to my 4* Kagero (+Spd, -Def), and she has nothing on her but Reprisal and 700 SP. Suggestions for good builds for her?

Ricken from FE13 is a great unit, and the best mage in the game hands down. I was shocked to find out that he's generally considered trash, considering mine far outshone Miriel (who I think is just decent) with both higher magic and higher speed, so he was doubling everything, critting more often than not Laurent in FE13 is usable as something other than a staffbot. I always pair Miriel and Ricken, so my Laurent's have astronomical magic stats. I'm completely fine with using him as an offensive mage, and he works pretty well for me. Introducing Casual mode was a good thing for the series, and a good business decision by IS. Don't get me wrong, I like the permadeath, and I'll always play on Classic, but it was a barrier to entry for a lot of newer players. Phoenix mode, though...yeah, I'd rather not have a "win the game" mode. Shadows of Valentia's story and characters make up for its bland maps. Sure, the gameplay of SoV isn't exactly stellar, but I didn't care because I cared about where the characters were going and the plot. The between-chapter writing is great, some of the best the series has to offer. The RNG should stick around 100%, and there shouldn't be fixed-stat level ups. These two may not be entirely unpopular, but I've seen lots of FE fans on the forums and stuff I frequent saying that future main series games should be more like Heroes as far as a lack of RNG and fixed-stat level ups. Couldn't disagree more, since the RNG is what makes battles fresh and interesting, and I can't stand hard counters in FE. Zelgius from FE10 is one of the best antagonists in the series. He had a personal connection to the hero's father, acted as a sort of mentor for the hero, had sympathetic and understandable reasoning for his actions, and is generally an intimidating and cool bad guy (yeah, yeah, cheese hammer strats, I know). Some...strange inconsistencies in his writing between FE9 and 10 notwithstanding. He's at his best in FE10, of course. Ilyana is the worst-written character in the entire series, and the worst in the Tellius series by far. Yes, even Peri, Tharja and Camilla are better written than her. Even they have more character than her. And yet she's inexplicably popular because she's "moe." Goddamn it, people. This is why we can't have nice things. Faye is a well-written character, well, from a meta standpoint. This is the "obsessively pining for hero's affections" character done RIGHT. Take notes, Tharja and especially Camilla. She's not a great character by any means, but she is sweet, earnest, and inoffensive. So much less grating than the "3edgy5me yanderes." Tellius has the best character designs in the series, hands down. Their women are wearing just as many clothes as the men! What a concept! Shadows of Valentia is pretty good on this aspect. Corrin receives way more hate than they should. Don't get me wrong, Fates has a lot of writing problems and Corrin isn't exactly well-written, but they're not exactly the horrible spawn of hell that a lot of people build them up to be. No, that honor belongs to Peri and Camilla. Also Ilyana. Male Kana's voice is cute, not grating. I mean, come on people, he's a very young boy. He's going to have a high-pitched voice.... Reclassing isn't a good thing for the series. Not only did it make discussing characters' stats and general viability way more annoying than it should be, but it breaks believability and story immersion. I was completely fine with mages being mages, paladins being paladins, and so on and so forth. Now it tends to become an excercise in "how to break the game the fastest." (Unless we're talking Awakening Lunatic+ where you absolutely have to cheese the game because it's cheesing the hell out of you.) Female Robin should be the default Robin on merchandise and in media, because I got way more character out of her than male Robin during my playthroughs of Awakening. Chrom is the least interesting lord in the series. He's so incredibly bland and underwritten. I can't really name a single significant character trait of his. I never understood exactly why he was so popular. Is it because he's handsome and is a generally inoffensive husbando? People rag on Ike for being bland (and in RD I wouldn't argue with that), but he at least had more character in PoR, and his personal journey is far more interesting than Chrom's. Then again, it didn't help that Chrom got shoved into the background by his own daughter and Robin post Chapter 13... The Dawn Brigade are interesting characters. The fact that they only got a fraction of a game to themselves helps nothing; supplementary material expanding on their characters makes them interesting, especially Leonardo losing his brothers to the Mad King's War and such. Archer!Kliff is the best Kliff path. Mage!Kliff being nearly completely helpless at the outset and not learning all of his powerful spells until relatively late, while Archer!Kliff has his enormous range, good skill meaning his hit rate is one of the highest in the game, not to mention his great critical rate. Eliwood is a better-written and more interesting character than either Lyn or Hector. People like to call him a generic lord or Marth ripoff, but he's got a lot of nuance, and his personal arc is what I consider the core of FE7. Not saying Hector's arc isn't good and somewhat underappreciated, but I see far more people loving Hector than Eliwood. Pegasus Knights aren't a great class. While there are good Pegasus Knights, more often than not they end up strength-screwed and ineffective, and are a huge pain to train up with their inability to kill things. Sure, their huge movement range is good, but other than that, meeeeehhh. Unless we're talking the badass Elincia of FE10. Sure, you can double a guy, but when you're dealing 5 damage each hit. Bow weakness and wind magic weakness doesn't help. Everyone supports with everyone supports should be gotten rid of. Writing quality and believably tends to plummet when you have to force people who have zero chemistry and logically should not get along into talking and then proposing undying love for one another. That's about all I can think of for now. I'll pop in with more if I come across them.

Echoing the whole "more female villains" thing, and no pulling a Maleficent in that the female villain is only evil because of being scorned or misled by a man or something like that. I like Hilda being a power-hungry asshole who only wants to advance her own station just because she's like that, no sad backstory or anything needed. I don't mind dragons as villains, but the ones we get tend to get cut from the same cloth -- dragons who hate humanity because of mistreatment in the past so they want to exterminate them. Just once, I'd love to see a dragon with a (at least on the surface) good relationship with humanity as the villain. SoV...sort of did this with Duma being a a social Darwinist type guy, but he's not the villain of SoV. I wrote something up somewhere a while back, but give me an arrogant Divine Dragon with a god complex, who seems benevolent on the surface, but turns out crueler and self-serving underneath it all. The opposite of Naga's whole "Don't call me a god" thing. They "care" about humanity only as far as they can serve them, and when that wears off, it gets ugly. They believe that they have the right to treat humanity and the world anyway they want, simply because they're them. This could be a bias, but I love stories where humanity overcomes what calls itself undefeatable, which is why I do really enjoy SoV's theme of "humans gotta human, gods need to step off" so much. I loved Sephiran as an antagonist, and I do like the idea of someone who was a decent person at first, maybe even benevolent, but is just so tired of humanity, life, and everything after countless years of being beat down that they just want to end it all and wipe the slate clean so to speak, or that they give in to their darker feelings and impulses. That's what I wish we could have seen out of Garon that would have made him far more interesting as a villain, rather than the Saturday morning cartoon villain we actually got. (No, it doesn't matter how much you tell me he used to be a great guy, if I don't see it in game, it's irrelevant.) A third thing. Give me a more personal villain. Someone who used to be the hero's best friend, one of the hero's close siblings, or even a former lover of the hero. Someone who adored the hero at first, but became somehow disillusioned with them or their cause and switched sides. Something like that can bring out far more emotion and heartbreak than most anything else. Ashnard as the final villain of PoR kinda fell flat, since he and Ike have nothing to do with each other, and meet for the first time in that final chapter. So a breakdown: 1. Make our villains human (in the sense of well-rounded and believably written, not necessarily human in species). Even bad people who commit heinous actions have at least a few redeeming qualities, and motivations for what they do. Give our villain good traits, so that while the audience wants to see him/her get taken down, they're not some sort of hate sink. Like, Berkut is an extreme social Darwinist like all of Rigel because he was raised that way, and takes his duty very seriously, and for redeeming qualities, he's got his love for Rinea and his general integrity to his beliefs and country. In general, I love villains that actually have good points and can present the heroes with something of a moral dilemma. Some of the most interesting villains I've come across are villains where you can stop and really think about their worldview and opinions on things. That's why Medeus is so interesting to me -- he's got some good points about how shitty the dragons were treated by the humans, to the point that I'd say he's rightfully angry about it. Does it excuse his actions? No, of course not, but he seems much more like an actual person acting in an extreme way upon a legitimate grievance. 2. Avoid the "evil for the sake of evil" and "asshole just for the sake of being an asshole" characterization, complete with random evil cackling and gushing about how much they want people to suffer. Give them understandable/relatable motivations. Nobody thinks of themselves as a villain, as as far as they're concerned, what they're doing is completely justified (and sometimes, even heroic). This is why someone like Arvis is effective as a villain, since he believed himself to be doing what was right for Grannvale until he realized the mistakes he'd made decades later, while Ashnard was something of a disappointment, seeing as he seemed to be an interesting and nuanced guy in that he tore down rigid Daein social structures to make a might-makes-right sort of philosophy...but then he fell back into the power-hungry asshole does asshole things just to be an asshole trap.

wow that escalated quickly And this entire time, I knew that "Advanced Growth" was a euphemism for something....

Well, it's everyone's goal to get everything they want on one account anyway, isn't it? Some people don't want to grind out one account and create multiple accounts just so they can get stuff they don't want to wait for on one account. I say if people are willing to invest the energy in all of that, let them. At the end of the day, you just can't stop multiple account creation. Lots of companies have taken steps to limit multiple account abuse, but it's never going to go away entirely. Clever people will get what they want regardless, no matter how long it takes. I think I brought up a few good points on how hero trading wound be balanced out: But eh, that's just what I think. I would like a balanced hero trading system, which with the fact that it had to be used sparingly, means you couldn't really abuse it under normal circumstances.

Sure, but grinding for orbs and things, and all the stamina usage and waiting that implies, would be part of the hero trading process, considering you have to pull the hero to be able to trade it. And depending on the resource used, the trading resource could be even more scarce than orbs already are. Or if they go with something like a limited amount of trades per [x] time, likely monthly like the quests and stuff, then it would balance out imo. People thought SI would break the game, but it's balanced out. I see no reason why Hero Trading would break the game or undermine their business model. One free pull is only 5 units, and none of them are guaranteed to be the unit that you really want.

Agreed on this, I can vouch for Brave Axe Frederick being a terror. I have a 4* +Def one, and physical units scratch him at the most. He's a lot like my 4* Brave Axe Cherche, though doesn't die immediately to anything but mages. Cherche is pure glass cannon offensive, Frederick can at least tank and bait physical units. Maybe it's no monetary cost, but it's a time and energy cost. I mean, people who roll multiple accounts are going to get what they want regardless, even if takes a lot of patience. Really, you could get any character and nature you're looking for without spending a dime, so provided that you're willing to grind out summons, wait for free orbs, do quests that give you orbs, etc., and have the time to spend.

Yeah, you're probably right...unless they limited it somehow, like maybe you can only hero trade x times a month, or it costs some sort of resource to do it. People would still have to pull to get good units if they ran out of trades to use. I think it would be cool to take away a little of the reliance on luck, but not all of it. They've given us little quality of life things like that before which don't undermine their business model too much - like the increase in stamina, for one.

Waiting eagerly for that day when hero trading becomes a thing.... wishful thinking, sure, but....

I don't have one. Funny, on the first SoV banner I pulled Alm, Faye, and Clair, but no Lukas. Still don't have one to this day.

True, that's the big problem with games with tier lists and how people talk about them. "Awful" sometimes gets stretched to mean "anything other than the godly units," rather than saying that he's passable, mediocre, okay, or that there are better options out there, which is true for 99% of units in the game. Tobin has the disadvantage of being harder to earn than a lot of units, and unable to be merged effectively working against him. Skill Inheritence bridged a lot of the gap between high tier and low tier units, but stats are stats at the end the day. Yeah, I haven't been lucky enough to pull an Elise or Genny (though I tried several times on her banner to get Wrathful Staff), but right now the healers I'm getting the most use out of for defensive maps is Azama with his great bulk (he works as a bait for physical units) and free 10 damage pain staff, and Mist with her heals basically being an automatic full health bar. Defensive healers for the win, lol.

Speed is kinda everything though (in that regard it's pretty accurate to the main series, lol), since the majority of high-tier units have good speed as well as high damage, with the one notable exception being Effie who has Wary Fighter to prevent herself from being doubled by anything, or the Brave weapon users who get a free double attack anyway. Even if their damage is on the mediocre to even slightly low side, being able to double ensures a 0HKO in a game where if you're not 0hKO'ing, prepare to get 0HKO'd in return. But aren't all four of them low tier because of those same problems? I had to slap a Brave Sword on my 5* Seliph and 4* Chrom to get them to be able to do their jobs properly. (Granted, I never tried out the Falchion on Chrom, but I doubt it would make him better at killing non-dragon stuff in a single round with his low speed, even in return for the higher might).

Poor Tobin. That guy just can't catch a break, lol. They had to have made him awful intentionally. True, I get that part. It's just always struck me as silly that a horse treats a forest like it's lava or something. Sure, forests are kind of a hindrance in the main series for horses, but they can at least stand on them and move through them. Now, it's the sand that really screws them over. I'm surprised they didn't just make their mobility limited to one on sand or something. That would make more sense imo. And it still makes no sense that fliers are slower than horses...

So in the first of the recent SoV banners I tried and failed to pull for Gray, because I adore Gray, even if he's not statistically godly or anything. I did get a Mathilda though, so that's pretty cool, especially because I have a dire lance shortage in comparison to my 500 good red swords. (Effie, Subaki, and sort of Abel, I guess? Though I'm not crazy about Abel's cardboard defenses. Better than paper, but...not quite what I need. Though I really should train up Camus...) But I finally did get that Reinhardt that I pined for a few days back while pulling on that banner. Granted, he's at 4*, but he's (the RNGod smiled upon me that day) +Atk, and I couldn't be happier. Granted... I have to grind SP to get Dire Thunder and all that stuff, but I don't even care at this point, because Reinhardt. Rein. Hardt. I should really get around to making that Horse Emblem team to support him...but every time I see a goddamn tree when I'm running horses I cringe, lol. Seriously, what is the logic behind horses having more movement range than fliers, but forests being their kryptonite? Horses can run through forests just fine...

I'm, eh, okay with the idea of character creation in FE16...so long as we're a Robin and not a Corrin. Even Robin being crucial to Awakening's third arc is a little too much for me. I get it, they're a self-insert and IS wants to involve the player directly, but I prefer FE being about characters other than the player, and I feel like the writing is a lot stronger when they don't have to stop and think, "Is the player special enough? Are we giving them enough plot-relevance and attention?" A lot of the more pandery, blatant player-targeted fanservice stuff they did in Awakening/Fates (Tharja and Camilla's entire existences, basically) was pretty cringeworthy on the whole, and Shadows of Valentia without a self-insert worked very well for me. I still got invested in the story and characters (even moreso, considering the tone was a lot more consistent and the plot/character writing stronger than either of the previous two games imo). If we absolutely have to be in the game, make us a normal person. Sure, we can form bonds with other characters and be friends with the lord, but please, IS, you don't need to cater to us and make us a special snowflake or the entire center of the world. That sort of thing works better with WRPGs, since the whole point of those for the most part is making a godly/special "chosen" character that everyone else is in awe of. JRPGs, for the most part, follow established characters with their own stories, in a world that doesn't revolve around them. I'd honestly prefer no avatar system, since it's been done badly more than it's been done well (the Kris fiasco, for one...as a side note, I don't really count the FE7 tactician as an avatar, since Mark is pretty much a non-entity other than characters sort of awkwardly turning to look and talk into the screen). And kids...gonna say no on that one, unless we're going straight Genealogy style with two generations (I wouldn't mind a return of that mechanic). The Deeprealms became a meme for how badly-done and nonsensical it was. Even if Awakening handled the kids well for the most part, you can't exactly do a second time travel scenario/apocalyptic future scenario and make it feel fresh. I was never one of those people that decried FE13/14 as a "dating sim/waifu emblem" the way a lot of people did, but some of the mechanics were a little harmful to the quality of the writing as a whole, imo. I'm fine with S supports between non-avatar characters resulting in marriage and paired endings.

Like a lot of people, I think SoV did great with its character writing, since everyone here is at least passable if not likable for one reason or another, which I can't really say for more recent FE games (Tellius series has Ilyana, Awakening has Tharja, Fates has goddamn Peri and Camilla, etc.) One strength of the character writing in this game is that they managed to do an "obsessed with main character's affections" character and not have it be painful and pandering, since I found Faye pretty inoffensive for the most part, even if she's not exactly a strong or well-written character. Favorites though: Gonna definitely have to say that Gray and Boey are my favorite characters. Gray just because of his sheer wit, making me laugh, and how well they did the foil humor between him and Tobin, without having to dip down into any cartoonish/wacky antics like FE13 and FE14 often did. Boey was fun as a middle-of-the-road cautious straight man to Mae. Alm is a good one for me, just because he strikes me as just so relatable and sweet. He's an average young man in terms of background, relaxed and kind enough to be sweet, earnest and well-meaning, but not passive enough not to stand up for what he thinks is right, like calling out Clive for his casual classism. A nice middle ground in comparison to Marth and Eirika being a little bit bleeding heart with their naivete, and Ike being so ridiculously stoic that he kind of loses all character in RD. To throw everyone a curveball, I really like Berkut and Fernand. Berkut struck me with his calm, collected but forceful and intelligent personality during his first appearance, which I find refreshing, since a lot of FE villains are either one-note assholes for the sake of being assholes, joke villains that are completely ineffective, or over the top in terms of behavior for comedy. His love for Rinea is great too, and I love it when villains are given redeeming qualities. He has integrity and dimension. The fact that we get a fair amount of character development out of him doesn't hurt, and despite thinking his plot was well done, I wish we could have had him playable like he was likely intended to be, even if for my own selfish reasons, lol. Fernand I like for what I call the Shinon effect -- a character on the good guys' side (at least initially for Fernand) that doesn't automatically fall to worshiping the main character just because they're the main character. Fernand is well-written in that I can believe him -- he's clasisst as hell, and a little bit arrogant, but he's not evil or anything. He has standards, and his close relationship with Clive and Clair did flesh him out a fair amount. He's a dick, but he's a believable and well-written one.

I absolutely adore Radiant Dawn, partially because it was the very first game in the series I played and turned me on to the rest of FE. I haven't played it in a while (after playing it through three times within a few months of having it), and I am thinking about going back and playing through it again. My favorite part about RD is the scope, to the point that no other FE game comes close to matching it. I had never even heard of Tellius before I played RD, and I was sucked in, caring about these characters I had never seen before. We were introduced to Tellius in PoR (of course, it was the opposite for me, since I went back and played it later), but it was RD that truly fleshed it out and turned it into a huge and expansive world. The plot of RD is also a high point for me, in that we only slowly learn the significance of Lehran's Medallion and about Ashera, and looking back it deconstructs a whole bunch of stuff that PoR and FE tends to do as a whole (What's this, the evil country from the first game actually isn't completely evil, and being occupied by Begnion is causing them to suffer?) The map design was very interesting imo, too, with the different elevations, and the battle animations and skill activations are absolutely stunning, to the point that I think they're still the best in the series. (Shadows of Valentia would be second.) A lot of side characters got the chance to shine in RD in comparison to PoR, which I always thought was cool (seriously, Sothe is one of the main characters in this? Talk about the character people would least expect, lol.) But...looking back on it, the game has a lot of problems. Like people brought up, it's unbalanced as hell. Haar, Shinon, Ike, and the Greil Mercenaries (also the Laguz royals) are good, and anyone who's not them is...eh to godawful, with a few contested people like Micaiah smattered in there somewhere. Unit availability can be very questionable, to the point that it screws lots of units (poor, poor Tormod and Fiona). Early hard mode Dawn Brigade is a complete nightmare, and I was one of the people who chose "Normal" mode thinking it was, well, normal mode. Thanks, localizers. :l The supports are generic and lame. And I was never a fan of the "you have to beat the game first to unlock cool thing [x]" with Pelleas and Sephiran's recruitment, doubled with the fact that they're two of my favorite characters in the game. Not to mention to unlock a lot of the plot-ending conversations in endgame, you have to jump through a lot of hoops. Data transferring... I couldn't do that, so I had to read that final Ike and Soren conversation online. >.> I've always been pretty bummed that the Tellius series wasn't financially successful, and that it isn't very popular in comparison either here or in Japan, since I see a lot of great in those games. But I can definitely acknowledge their flaws. I try not to get blinded by nostalgia.

You do have a point in that FE settings are heavily romanticized in comparison to our world, but I still think that they have the classic high-fantasy atmosphere. Something like LOTR is heavily romanticized in comparison to our world (and that's supposed to take place in the past of our world), but Tolkien went that extra mile and gave everyone those classic old speech patterns that crop up in really old medieval and pre-medieval literature to help set the tone. FE as a whole never struck me in any way as modern, so I prefer the older style speech. It's like you're reading from an older novel, with everyone speaking in a more formal way. Since FE as a whole seems to have something of a framing device as historical stories being told long after the fact (why there are character endings talking about "x was recorded in the pages of history," etc), I think it makes more sense. While a lot of their beliefs definitely don't mirror the exact attitudes people in our medieval world had, they do have a fair amount of outdated social beliefs in their own worlds -- for instance, like the rampant classism that we see in Tellius and especially Shadows of Valentia, with commoners being looked down upon or blocked from important offices. We get racism and prejudice in Elibe (against the Sacaens), Tellius (against the laguz), and even in Jugdral people look down upon Verdane as barbaric. People are much more concerned with stuff like regicide and politics than the plight of normal people. People are more willing to use violence as a means to an end, and while we of course get characters that protest and want to change the world for the better (Alm vs. the classism, and the like) a lot of characters are coldly pragmatic about it if they mention it at all, in a "that's just the way the world works" sort of way. Sexism is missing for the most part. But of course, having anyone but one-off villains like that guy in Mia's backstory being sexist and, for example, keeping women out of armies completely, would alienate half of the games' player base.

Part 1: People learn that, in fact, one country forcibly occupying another means that said occupied country suffers. And then the third most godly guy on Tellius pops in and wins the rebellion. Part 2: A rebellion gets raised against the good queen, except never mind they give up like instantly. Next part! Part 3: Animal people and people people don't like each other, so it's time to fight each other a lot, until everyone realizes that the end of the world is nigh and they'll all be dead if they don't do anything to stop it. So they team up and go to that one location on the previous game's box art that is now important. Part 4: Since everyone's totally cool with each other now they climb endless amounts of stairs through a tower of zombie ghosts wearing shiny gold armor for some reason and force the now-evil creation goddess through the power of being slapped with a glowy blue sword to combine with her adorable girl half and become not-evil except like 1000 years from now. Ambiguous end to foreshadow a possible sequel that probably won't be made~!

I think that, when talking about humor in the series, one has to strike a delicate balance. After all, this series is about things like war, death, rigid social order, politics, tyrannical rulers, racism/prejudice, etc. Of course, it never gets so exaggerated that it goes straight-up grimdark (this isn't quite ASOIAF...though Jugdral starts to lean that way) with any of this stuff and it's pretty light on it, all things considered, but in general, the themes it deals with are serious, mature themes. A little comic relief from all of that is good, but...sometimes I feel like some of the newer games get just a little carried away with trying to make the audience laugh at the expense of atmosphere and immersion. Awakening is a story involving an apocalyptic future having been destroyed by a dark entity and an evil cult, and a traumatized young woman coming back to prevent everyone she knows and loves from dying horribly, or worse. But some of the lol!wacky antics we get in that game sort of push the whole "fighting for everyone's future against an evil apocalypse dragon and cult" to the background to focus on a wacky, sometimes cartoonish style of humor. Ehh...it just...doesn't mesh very well in my opinion, and a lot of those moments reek of "trying too hard." (And I do like Awakening a lot, as a disclaimer. The comedy is just...eh, imo.) I think I said this before somewhere, but there were times when I felt like Awakening (and to a lesser extent, Fates) was more of a parody of a fantasy rather than a straight fantasy story. Shadows of Valentia had a few of those moments, but in my opinion the writing quality of the serious moments still held it together better. Like a lot of people, I think that Shadows of Valentia had what I consider the best balance between humor and seriousness. Gray and Tobin and Mae and Boey were pretty great with their commentary on things, and never was I pulled out of the stakes, nor was I ever taken out of the plot because someone had to have a wacky moment talking about putting up posters of their liege naked. (Seriously, what the hell, Frederick? o.o) I think this sort of thing was due to the writing style, which was a lot less casual and more...what's the word? They seemed to be going for a more old-world fantasy-ish style, rather than the much more relaxed style of, say, Awakening and Fates. For the most part characters' diction was more formal/noble, what have you. Even the more casual characters never got our modern-world level casual. Now, of course, whether you prefer either style is up to you. Honestly, it does jar me a bit when someone who's supposed to be living in a medieval-type fantasy world starts dropping modern sayings and jokes. (Of course, I'm someone who flinches a bit when a fantasy character (in a non-parody) goes, "I'm not going to lie...") Kinda...takes me out of the experience. I find the earlier games diction' a bit more believable in a lot of ways, even if it could be called somewhat stiff. Yup, this is pretty much my feelings on the matter. I don't mind gimmick characters, so much as they're something outside of their gimmick. Which is why I'll always appreciate Haar and Kieran, but despise Ilyana and dislike Setsuna. I dislike Peri as a character intensely, but I like what she shows us: How to fail at making a darkly comedic character. Peri, I think, is a horribly failed attempt at shock humor or black humor, whereas Henry nails black humor spectacularly. Henry works because he's much more playful and ambiguous in his execution - he's "out there" and doesn't know proper social graces, he talks about body horror and has all the signs that point to him possibly being unstable, but a lot of the time it seems like he's joking. We only get vague references to so-called heinous acts he's done (punishing the people who hurt his wolf, and in that case, you could argue that it was, if not justified, understandable). Not to mention, he doesn't go out and target innocent people, so he stays funny in a "Uh... What the hell is this guy?" sort of way. Peri is the exact opposite...she tries to put up a playful act, with her childish speech, but it falls flat, because with we have repeated confirmation that she actually is dangerous. Peri isn't joking. She's 100% serious about murdering innocent people and does so over the course of the story, so it stops being funny and just gets disturbing. (And another thing, innocent people; the people she murders have done nothing to her whatsoever. Innocents getting brutally murdered is not funny, unless it's completely over the top and ridiculous. A serial killer isn't over the top and ridiculous.) Not to mention the sheer amount of character derailment the people she supports with go through, but I digress... p.s. i totally wasn't gone for a long time or anything, let me just return stealthily, no one noticed my absence

Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about that mechanic. That would definitely help...but only for indoor maps, which are fairly rare in comparison to outdoor maps. But a combination of forced dismount and more hazard maps would definitely be a step in the right direction. We have things like mountains and stuff that only flying units and bandits can take advantage of, or water tiles that only pirates can stand on, for instance, but I think we should see more elevation changes like we saw in RD, where horses can't hope to go.

Beat Lunatic GHB. Team: 5* Klein, 5* Fae, 4* Effie, 4* Merric. First turn. Merric with Triangle Adept and Gronnraven SI, baited in both the blue mage and archer, chunked the mage and nearly one-round killed the archer, likely with help from Effie's Hone Spd 3 which let him double him. Merric left with 8 HP. Klein moves up to the tile below the mountain in the north, axe pegasus baited to the edge of the mountains, pegasus gets one-round killed by Klein. Merric retreats to safety. Klein out of range of everyone else. Effie gets Drawn Back out of range by Fae. Everyone moves back, enemies close in. We're at the bottom few tiles of the map now, can't let the Lunge bullshit start though. Lloyd at the front of the pack and only one in range because of horse archer's low HP, moves to attack Effie, gets majorly chunked. Effie tanks hit from horse archer behind him. Klein kills dangerous horse lance from behind Effie. Merric deals a bit of AOE with Rising Wind and his attack is enough to kill horse archer. Lloyd attacks Effie again, suicides to her. Remaining blue mage moves in to attack Effie, leaving her with 4 HP. Effie finishes him off for to finish the map. Whew. My heart. Of course, it took about 10 tries to get the positioning and stuff perfect, since the AI always wouldn't bait in the way I needed it to. But I'm pretty proud of that. Never expected this team to work as well as it did.

I've been "around" since Blazing Blade. Sure, there are always people that complain at everything, no matter what. There were people that complained that Sacred Stones was "dumbing down the series" because it was easier than Blazing Blade. Not to mention, with the release of the 3DS titles, those people multiplied. I'm talking about the non-elitists, here. You know, the average FE fan that most people here on SF are. People that didn't feel threatened by an optional mode that just makes the series more accessible to non-veterans.

Oh, well, excuse me. My mistake, but you could've pointed it out in a less douchey way. Just saying. Yeah, my mistake.