Quiver

...but surely Corrin would side with no one, and track down the Invisible Kingdom the real enemy and make everyone friends again, right? ... but no, seriously, only Emblem Games I played were Awakening and Fates, so I can't begin to cover this list. I just wanted to be the one to make the inevitable Revelations joke.

I understand the point of wyrmslayer weapons from a gameplay perspective; they offer a particular threat to Avatar and Kanna, and make the player re-consider strategies and planning. Okay. But how do they work in a narrative sense? (Insert joke about Fate's narrative here) So, Wyrmslayer weapons first appear when Avatar has transformed into a dragon and is rampaging following Mikoto's death. And Azura's warns "Hey, Protag, watch out! Those weapons will be especially dangerous against you!" I can overlook how Nohr can obtain weapons which are especially dangerous to dragons; given Garon's position, I can imagine him ordering them commissioned and distributed, even if it's a little difficult to understand how he justified that to his army considering they are only super effective against one enemy in the known world who, at the time of their commission, didn't exist as a force yet... but hey. Whims of a mad king, and they seem to function as normal weapons anyway. The fact they first get used against dragon!Avatar seems to suggest to me that they are designed specifically to counter dragons; that is, that they hook into scales and pull them out, or they shred a dragons wings and cause more damage to them that way. Of course, they also cause a lot of damage if Avatar and Kanna are using their swords rather than their dragon stones... but let's just chalk that up to Schrodinger's Dragon; they could be using the dragonstone, therefore the game assumes they are for reasons of balance. Okay. Except... Except, you can reclass into classes that don't have dragon stones. I have an Avatar who is a swordmaster; they can't use the dragonstone at all. They are fighting exclusively with the Grim Yato. And the wyrmslayers are still super effective against them. Which would suggest that the wyrmslayers are effective against dragon!humans, rather than being designed to fight dragons specifically. So... my question is, what is it about wyrmslayers -otherwise normal looking weapons- that turns them into the bane of an Avatar's existence? Is there a solid, in-game narrative excuse for it, even if the excuse is something along the lines of "Magic"? Or is it the kind of situation where you have to accept gameplayer/story disambiguation and just roll with it?

So... I know there is a topic asking which route is canon; that's not what I'm asking. What I'm wondering is, do we know what is supposed to be canon for each individual route? Based off of the box art, I think m!Corrin is supposed to be the canonical choice for Birthright, while f!Corrin is the canon for Conquest. I rather suspect that, storywise, Revelations is "supposed" to feature a m!Corrin paired with Azura... But outside of that, do we know if any choices are held as the proper, canon choices for each route? Are he kids "supposed" to be collected in the game, and if so, do we know how their parents are meant to be (considering we know what their default hair colour is). Is Kaze meant to live or die in Birthright? Ae Conquest/Revelations players meant to pick up Flora? Etc. What, exactly, does a canon Birthright, Conquest or Revelations playthrough look like?

I don't think I've ever found a more relevant use of Professor Oak than right now. Anyhow, I'm curious. When you play Fates, which avatar do you use? Is there anything that motivates that choice, or is it just kind of "whatever"?

First: I do hope Jack gets a costume at some point. I'm sort of assuming that by the time he faces down Aku for the final time, he'll have a new set of robes like he used to wear. Second... yeah, I LOVED this episode. The dark and gritty stuff has bee great, certainly, but comedy is also an important part of Jack's appeal; Scaramouch (...? I have no idea how to spell it) was entertaining, but seeing the old!Jack was a delight. And the fact that the show actually is examining the morality of his "They made their choice," moment is cool.

So... random question out of curiosity: what criteria do you guys use when trying to decide who should pair up with who? Do you judge based upon what stats would be most benefical for the child characters? Do you go by "this is a pairing that makes sense for the story and their supports are nice"? Do you go the route of "These two happened to accidently earn a bunch of supports, so whatevs, they're a couple now"? Or do you disregard the children all together?

From the perspective of someone whose only experience of Fire Emblem has been Awakenings and Fates... I'd say pick-up Fates. Which Fates you go for might depend on what kind of experience you're looking for; Conquest has amazing gameplay, while Revelations -from what I've heard- offers a more *conclusively* storyline... though whether that plot is any good or not is another matter. I'll just add; I have had more fun playing Fire Emblem Conquest than I have had playing any games in years. It's challenging as all hell (the fact I suck at strategy probably helps in that regard though)... but damn. When you clear a map, it is so dang satisfying. Plus... considering you can't grind, if you're the type of person who really wants to see all the character supports, get all the kids, retry it for other options... well, there's probably going to be plenty of replayability for you. So... biased opinion, pick-up Conquest. Haven't played Revelations, so now opinions on that, but I LOVE Conquests game.

I can't say that I do, I'm afraid; the closest I come to stuff like that is just customising my avatar, had cannoning their personality and the like, and I don't want to start doing that with Corrin/Kamui until I actually complete the games a bit more. I do recall seeing a self-insert thread a few pages back though, if that might be what you're looking for? (You have piqued my curiosity as to what your 'Fatesona' is, though )

I'm sure I got lucky, but on my first Birthright run, Sakura quickly became the MVP. I turned her into a Priestess, so her healing was good... But damn. My attack rolls must have been spectacularly lucky, because she was effective as a bow-user, disproportionate to what she should have bee, I likened her to a healbot with a sniper rifle attached to her head, and I must have used the bow at least as much as the staff.

It might not count as a fanwork... but I've been considering doing a Let's Play/Analysis of my (first, semi-blind) Revelations run. Finishing Conquest first though.

Ooh. Enitrely unrelated, I've been trying to research fashion for a fantasy novel. Mind if I PM you some time for pointers and information? Other than that, welcome! I;m not familiar with the older games of the series, I'm afraid, so...

Howdy! Welcome to the... Evergreen Forest Zone? Was that a zone? Been years since I played Sonic.

Has two fake eeveelutions. Which I must admit has piqued my interest, since Eevee is Best Pokémon.

Considering it. I won't have photos or anything, so it would be more like... well, as I say, a campaign journal? An in-character thing, maybe more like fanfiction or RP than straight up LP. Want to try and finish Fates before I do anything else though. Unless I decide to LP my first run of Revelations, and do a mix of in-character stuff and me, analysing the game and the story and stuff. But I kind of worry that Revelations has been ragged on enough by the community that I might not be able to bring anything new to the table

I never finished the main route, but the game was fun enough, in a surreal kind of way. As Chen says, each route is pretty short, so you could give it a try and see what you think. I'm kind of considering trying to do a campaign-journal style LP of Fire Emblem Awakening. Would anyone be interested in reading something like that?

I have a book and I'm not afraid to use it!

Is doing an Awakening LP. (Which is awesome! I like Awakening! I've been debating whether or not doing a campaign journal, in-character style LP of it myself, so... I'm probably gonna read yours for some pointers :p)

The moment with Elise, and the conflict in Izumo, was kind of what soured me on Rymona a little bit, to be honest. I mean... backing up; again, I will apologise and explain away things in media that I like. "Maybe Ryoma is being a hypocrite, but he's a human being, with complex thoughts, feelings, emotions and internal conflicts. So we're seeing a different side of his character because we're approaching him from a different angle." I'd actually consider that good storytelling, and a good use of the alternate route premises. It's just that the concept isn't written strongly enough for me to think it's intentional. I guess... what this topic is, for me, is "When does the suspension of disbelief break". When do things get to the point where the audience isn't prepared to trust that the author has a greater plan at work, or that what seems like contradictions are just facets of a larger, more complicated world. What is the moment when the plot isn't just strained, it crosses over into "I don't care about any of these people anymore" territory. (Which I think is different enough from the various rewrite and plot holes threads that it's a line of thought worth pursuing. I do think there are lots of little design decisions that impact the story, but that's a whole other problem)

Honestly, I LOVED the shot of the splash of blood across Young Jack's face. It makes me look at the title card -the one with Jack's eyes and a red filter - a little differently.

Am I the only one disappointed we didn't have a #CellGames with SAO Abridged!Kirito? (Just to try and focus on something less depressing that copyright infringement)

Not having played the GBA games, I don't feel able to comment on that. That being said... actually, a bigger problem with the support system in Fates and how it delivers the plot: having played through Birthright, I never got any information regarding Corrin's origins. I've read general plot spoilers, so I'm already aware that Corrin isn't related to the rest of the Hoshidans by blood; and even if I didn't know that, the fact you could S-rank support with Sakura and Hinoka should have suggested there was something up. But still. Because I didn't go for the S-ranking with one of Corrin's sisters, I never got the letter from Ryoma saying "Be tee dubs, we aren't blood relations." Maybe that ISN'T a big plot detail; it certainly sounds like a loophole to enable players to S-rank with family members without worrying about whether Kana is going to come out with six toes. Still, it seems like a major thing to leave out. By the end of my Birthright run, my Corrin still didn't know that he wasn't related to the Hoshidans, and I can't help but think that that is a MAJOR missing plot point. The game encourages the incest pairing, to provide the player with information refuting the pairing as incest. Again, it seems... like a counter-intuitive way to go about providing character info. (I mean, you can say it doesn't matter that they arne't blood relatives, because the rest of the Hoshidans had already accepted Corrin as family by the time they were kidnapped... except the Nohrian nobles felt the exact same way. Given certain scenes in the Conquest route, I'm left wondering whether Ryoma is supposed to come across as a hypocrite.)

This reminds me of nothing more than a weird, punk-style Metal Gear parody.

On the topic of marriage... Maybe it's just me, but I am having a really hard time getting supports done in Conquest. And the reason I say that's a problem is because I feel like I'm "supposed" to be using the supports to fill in the characterisation (and yes, set up marriages)... but the lack of being able to grind means I'm not really supporting very many characters. My Kamui is probably going to end up with Arthur, Silas or Leo for the sole reason of "I've happened to amass some supports with these guys". Which I don't think is the way it should have gone. (I fully acknowledge this as my problem rather than the games though; I basically played things wrong. Still, locking characterisation behind a support system and limiting the ability to support doesn't sound like a good idea in this case, since Fates dilemma should be a character based one. It's a character-based story, where you have to work to get any sort of characterisation from the characters involved, which feels... misguided.)

...Am I the only one who has never played a Persona game?

I'm something of an apologist for media. I'd prefer games to have GOOD stories, of course, but when I'm playing a game I like, or watching a show I enjoy, I will have a tendancy to fill in the blanks in my head; "Oh, this makes sense because the writer is doing X"; "Character Y isn't acting out of character, hypocrisy is a human flaw"; "Z is meant symbolically". I give that preamble to drive the fact that I was not engaged with Fates plotline home. The only route I've played to completion thus far as been Birthright, which was... fine. I guess. Nothing about it really hooked or engaged me, frankly; I didn't feel like the Royal Family really had that much depth or personality to them, particularly in the case of Ryoma. The maps where Corrin faced off against the Nohrian Royals at least showed some signs of internal conflict on both sides. Meanwhile, the lack of a map like the one in Awakenings meant... I really couldn't judge where we were or how far our rebellion had gone from Hoshido. I felt sort of aimless, just going from map to map without any sense of where it fit into the big picture. It's not that nothing about Birthright interested me; as I say, I had interesting scenes with the Nohrian nobles. But I found myself enjoying that story more for the head canons I was making from it. I liked Takumi's possession storyline and the connection he had with Azura, so I supported them as a pairing; that then made the sequence towards the end of the game where Takumi is fully possessed more dynamic for me. Similarly, I liked pairing Oboro with Silas, since that made for an interesting story regarding prejudice. I liked Hinoka's background as a sky knight, even though it never came up in the main plot line. But... that was all me doing stuff outside the main story; grinding out supports, making supposition about characters feelings and intentions. For the main story itself, I just... didn't really care. It was a serviceable plot line, but there was nothing that really hooked or engaged me, no interesting conflicts or dynamics among the cast themselves. As I say, the most interesting part of the game came from certain support plotlines, and from Corrin's interaction with the Nohr nobles, rather than with his "real" family members. I kept playing through the plot of Birthright, waiting for the shoe to drop and for some major revelation to occur and... it never did. We just went on a straight path from point A to point B and finished the game. So characterization never really gripped me. In terms of plot mechanics and direction, however... it was probably the detour to the Rainbow Sage. While I was willing to roll with things until that point, that particularly side-step was so sudden, so out of the way of what we had previously been doing, it shot any suspension of disbelief I had left to bits. I'm currently making my way through Conquest, so I don't really want to weigh in on that one just yet.