SnowFire

I will grant that having at least a passable hit rate is important if you're doing Vantage/Wrath. Enemy phase sweeping is not a playstyle I consider very fun so I don't do it myself, but yeah, needing to roll a hit over repeated enemy attacks, and being at low HP to set it up, exaggerates the impact of Skill. If you're doing player phase strats, then a disastrous miss is just 1/10 of your time crystal charges and move on with your life, no big deal. I agree that "what skill does for you" can be opaque, but I suspect that plays into the hands of people assuming Skill does more! Like, to pick on Three Houses, a well-known example of a game where Skill (Dex) isn't very important, compare Ashe (fantastic Dex) & Hilda (garbage Dex) if they both go Warrior. Let's also assume they're using a Brave Axe+, on the inaccurate side of 70 Hit. This is exactly where Ashe is gonna shine, right? Well, Hilda ends up with 70 (BA+) + 20 (Axe Prowess A) + 18 (Dex) = 108 Hit, while Ashe ends up with 12 more Hit from 30 Dex and thus has 120 Hit. Okay, here we have where Dex is supposed to shine: Hilda hits a 30 Eva enemy 90.54% of the time, while Ashe hits 98.1%. Except we left something out of our calculation... linked attacks. Just a single A support in range gives +10 Hit, meaning Hilda is suddenly hitting 97% of the time. Even more supports and now the advantage becomes even more worthless. But yeah, even if your sole goal is optimizing Hit percent, that doesn't mean "Grab units with the highest dex", it means "grab units with the most number of support partners on your current team." Okay, 3H was an unfair example. But let's take FE6, a pretty dodgy game. It's also one where misses can be sorta disastrous for some characters - like let's say you're trying to build drain-tank Sophia. She really, really needs to hit with her Nosferatus (base hit of 70). But if you're investing in to her (stat boosts are buyable in FE6, after all), buying Secret Books are a mere +4 Hit each. You could spend that money on Angelic Robes and Speedwings instead, and make it so that if an unlucky miss happens, she might survive anyway, or alternatively double attack and get a second try at draining the enemy.

I don't know about "controversial", but there are a few games it might be "objectively wrong". 😉 More seriously... even though SKL isn't ultimately that big of a deal in, say, FE6/FE7/FE8, if you were playing those on a cartridge, there are no battle saves or save states, and though a miss is unlikely, it might be disastrous. So I can respect hyping up Skill then (same for, say, FE10 Hard Mode with no battle saves), despite the minor impact of each individual point of Skill. I think Skill is the most nerfed by Echoes / Three Houses / Engage, just because Turnwheel / Divine Pulse / Time Crystal as a core game mechanic means that unlikely catastrophic misses become "spend 1 Turnwheel charge" rather than "restart entire map". (A similar issue with Awakening / Fates if you're using Battle Saves on Casual mode but resetting on character death, although this is technically a playstyle not directly encouraged.)

Turtle is one of the hardest & most stressful maps in the game, especially the first time. No shame in having trouble there. Light torches and be aware that archers can come mess with you as you move up the center if you stand too far forward. This can actually be acceptable if you have a Sniper that'll win an archery duel (Shamir?). Swordmasters from the fog are terrifying, but can be handled with either a dodgetank (break out Swordbreaker if you have it on some Falcon Knight) or a pure defense tank. I guess Felix or Raphael from your description? But yeah, it's tricky. There's also some fliers that need to be somehow safely baited, but once they are they'll die horribly to arrows/magic. When you take the top right, FAQ the location the swordmaster spawns on the "right" side of the map and place Linhardt there, he can spam Physic from afar or something as long as the cav reinforcements from the bottom right don't gank him. (Or someone more survivable if you don't trust your timing to be fast enough, but block the swordmasters for sure.) For turtle himself, you can spend a little time clearing both the front porch and the right side. It's okay to steer clear of the left side other than the basics since there's another ninja enemy spawning spot there. Anyway, since he deals magic damage, some of your normally frail mages may actually be able to hang with him and not get OHKO'd. He's not actually that fast, so as long as you don't get flat OHKO'd, you should be able to throw damage in safely early. He's a rare time where cooking up an HP boost back at the Monastery has some merit if you have some borderline OHKO'd characters, although I suspect you already saved past that. But the first two lifebars shouldn't be THAT different from most other monsters. The last two lifebars are quite rude though, with Miracle (off super Luck, assume it will activate) & Quick Riposte. Anyway, there are two big ways around Quick Riposte. One is using uncounterable attacks - Gambits most obviously, but also stuff like Windsweep if Byleth (/Yuri) has learned that, or simply overwhelming fatal damage that KOs a life bar. The second is the stun status from breaking all the barriers. He can't counter while stunned. (The third, and far less preferable one, is to have a huge magic tank who can just take two hits, or to have a high-offense unit with a guard adjutant.) My main suggestion would be to go for a two-turn kill once the coast seems clear enough. First turn, weaken most barriers. It's okay to get horribly mauled on counterattacks (as long as you're not standing near the "left" side ninja reinforcements) because you're going to make sure that whoever uses the last Gambit this turn can survive a round of combat, and they'll be the recipient of his wrath on enemy phase. Turn 2, break the final barrier and let all hell break loose. Just dump all your best damage in. If he's still not dead, well, you won't be attacked on enemy phase (although Renewal will trigger), but you'll still need to finish the job on turn 3, and something has probably gone wrong. If you haven't tried it much, since you said you have Shamir, note that Hunter's Volley with a Killer Bow is fantastic for shearing off extreme amounts of monster HP, fast.

Interesting write-up. A cool achievement! I will say... and this is not a big deal... but you come across as rather needlessly defensive on your choice of team? As if phantom people would be harassing you for not running Jean / Yunaka / etc., and they're WRONG? Like, it's cool. Readers understand that every player's own "bottom 10" characters will differ a little. All you really needed to say was "this team doesn't include any standouts other than Alear (for obvious reasons); here are some other units some other people consider weak but I didn't use because [XYZ] and there weren't enough team slots." This may deter people from reading the rest of the writeup from the eye-rolling. EDIT: Reading deeper in... again, not trying to be a hater, it is an interesting challenge. But the tone is just... far too hostile and defensive. I would politely suggest you keep that in mind for any future writeups? Good challenge read-alongs are supposed to be fun things where you get in the mindset of the person doing the challenge and see what works, what doesn't, cool tricks done that normally aren't necessary due to other strategies, etc. A lot of this document comes across as axe-grinding against imaginary Internet people - haha you thought Chloé was good but see, I "barely struggled" without her! I think most people would agree that you can beat the game with any team, but that doesn't mean Chloé is bad, or that there's some cabal of "Chloé is absolutely necessary to win" players that need to be disproven. Similarly, other parts come across as, like, a challenge to the reader that they're expected to do this exact challenge themselves ("have fun training him [Seadall] by punching people!") to show they're not a scrub, when I suspect that is very rare. Again, I mean this constructively - I think write-ups like these can be very cool. I just think you'll get better reception if you have a friendlier slant to it.

I'll just say that I think "returning character because it is a sequel set in the same world" a la FE9->FE10, FE6->FE7 (yes I know it's a prequel, but it's a sequel in real life), or FE1->FE2, is so different from "extradimensional visitor" as to be totally different cases. The first case is always going to be more natural, although you may require some fantasy hand-waving if the time gap is really long (a la Tiki in Awakening). The second one is... I mean, it's fine, but it does inherently bake in some idea of linked universes connected by gods & dimensional travel, and this may not be something you REALLY want to focus on too deeply as it raises questions. In general, I'd say not to do it unless you're going to make multiple dimensions a first class part of the story. Engage sort of does this, but does it rather badly by backloading all of the revelations to extremely extremely late and not having it make tons of sense and seemingly making up a few rules only to break them literally minutes later (twice!). Fates is an awkward spot in that I think that the Awakening trio not being super-loud about it was fine for the base game, but very strange once you play the DLC. And the DLC is good, don't get me wrong, just imply very wacky things happened where Anankos was apparently unable to give even the barest of useful directions and all three of them gave up or something after it being too puzzling to figure out they're looking for Corrin? Oh well, it's Fates, it's somehow still better and more developed than some of Fates' other plot threads. FE Heroes gets a slight pass because we all know it's due to gacha finance reality rather than artistic intent necessarily, but just how long have all these characters been kidnapped and mind-controlled in setting? At some point they need to accept that either they're like Engage Emblems themselves and weird clones stuck in Valhalla, or that they've become mind-controlled Askrans who've abandoned their original realm. But yeah. In general, use with great caution for games that aren't just sequels, and only if you can somehow make dimensional visitors work without cheapening your own setting.

I know that this is a popular plotline to do, but I don't think it fits all that great for the time periods your average Fire Emblem is set in. War profiteers have existed forever, but when medieval merchants got power, it wasn't via shadowy behind the scenes stuff, but rather just... openly taking it and buying a title of nobility, or being appointed to the government of your Renaissance Italy town, or whatever. So it's not like there was a separation between the war merchants and the government; if they had power, they also joined a government. Which is not to say that we don't have plenty of, like, conspiracy theories about how secret (insert despised minority here) are really controlling the government from the medieval era via bribes, but they're, well, conspiracy theories. The kings & their court very much did have the power. Meanwhile the Borgias or the Venetian merchant-asshole types were just very obviously also the government. If we go later into the modern era, the Merlinuses of the world have some power, but... it's still complicated. The East India Company is the world's first megacorporation and it's founded in 1600, but again it's not like them being assholes would have been remotely a plot twist to the people on the receiving end. They were just operating as a pseudo-government quite openly. (And also not really making money, requiring bailouts from their patron government. Whoops!) I'd argue it's not really until the 20th century where you really see this kind of thing with the United Fruit Company doing shady shit in Central America and the like, but that's usually much later than Fire Emblem's mileiu. (And even then... that's not "continent spanning war" type stuff Fire Emblem likes.)

I recommend not stressing over it at all. Seeds won't make or break a Maddening run. While there are rules, I think the intent was for the harvest stars to be essentially random, just "consistently" random if given the same seed set, since good luck as a mere mortal figuring out the rules here. Just plant random stuff every Explore and you're probably fine (well, maybe with an emphasis on the food-giving seeds if you're concerned about not having enough food to feed people at lunch share-a-meal). If you want to really be fancy, you can seek out combinations of seeds that add up to rank multiples of 12 (or 12+1, 12+2, etc.) to make the https://serenesforest.net/three-houses/monastery/greenhouse/ calculations happy. But only do that once, and once you find a set, just keep using it. As Zapp mentioned, if you can get some high-rank seeds early, this can accelerate your Professor XP growth, because the higher rank seeds give more Prof XP. Not really worth stressing on IMO, but it's there. (And the high-rank seeds aren't even necessarily BETTER, just... more XP when you care about that, so C3-C7 or so?).

I think @lenticular largely hit the nail on the head for the more recent-ish games. I don't think FE6 is strongly themed, but I also don't think it's a flaw of the story or anything. For the most part, it's just a story about a fantasy conflict that takes its world-building somewhat more seriously than some of the sloppy later games. That's okay sometimes, but it's also got some parts that are rather clearly, er, protagonist-centered morality or the like? But they need to ship some maps, so fine. If there's an attempt at a deep theme, it's in the endings, but it's not like forgiveness as an imperative (i.e. Roy / Hartmut's choice vs. Jahn who can't let it go) comes up much elsewhere. (Arcadia is non-hostile dragons, so that doesn't count, no.) Agree with others that FE7 is proto-Awakening, being about bonds of friendship and such. I'd slightly angle FE8 to being about how to deal with impossible situations, as well. To which sometimes the answer is "pluck" and "magic artifact weapons" which doesn't always apply to real-life all that great, but so it goes (and neither does forbidden resurrection rituals for Lyon's answer, I suppose). FE9 isn't subtle on its racism aspect. I do think that while FE9 has a better point than most FEs on the classism aspect, it's better in the sense of being worthy of the 1800s rather than the 1500s. Tellius is a world where the royalty Really Are Better Than The Average Joe, but it's also one that explicitly holds out the hope of the commoner joining their ranks, at least, and being acknowledged as just as shiny & special as them, if not more so. Which is a fair sight better than the many many FEs where there's simply no hope of getting Dragon Blood or whatever without being born into it, and if there's a twist, it's Echoes-style where the twist is that the commoner was really a noble the whole time. FE10 is kind of a mess once it starts getting themed. C1 and C2 are good stories but not super-heavily themed. If there was more space in the script. some of the stuff in C3 could have been interesting to explore thematically, but the game bothers to stop and think so little about the implications of a Gallian invasion of Benignon or what preciesly is going on that it kinda ruins any chance for that to mean stuff. C4 is about as deep as a Shin Megami Tensei game where we learn a lesson that extremes are bad, which sure, although using insane goddesses is cheating. Good excuse for Tier 3 classes to show off though I guess. Shadow Dragon... this has to have been either unintentional, or for there to have been a split in the team, but no other game in the series buys more into a war-is-hell, there will be casualties view. The game not only forces you to lose a unit, it forces you to PICK the unit that will die. Along with the whole famous "murder your army to see the new characters" thing. That said, if we go by what was probably intended, I think it's the standard Japanese conservatives who want to abolish Article 9 type - if there's evil in the world, we gotta go fight it. A lot of Marth's chats come down to "why are you fighting for evil, when you could be fighting for good." New Mystery of the Emblem... this is also probably an accidental message, but it's oddly... hopeful? Basically everything bad that happens is due to evil magic, in Medeus / Gharnef getting resurrected for no reason and mind-controlling a shit ton of important people. The message is that everything would have been totally fine if not for evil magic. This is a little different from FE11, where there's some baddies who explicitly are just bad 'cuz they're evil and ambitious a la Michalis. Awakening, our bonds give us strength, etc. It's not subtle, but it works better than a lot of the above! Fates is more a character story. What if one person was so ultimate that whichever side they picked won, I guess. Revelation, in theory, I think may have been intended to have some theme about seeing the truth? Like the other two are artificial conflicts, and Revelation (as the English title suggests... although not the JP title, so don't take it too seriously) is about attacking the literally invisible puppets and puppetmaster ruining everything from the shadows, and trusting in your family / comrades to figure out the truth. I say "intended" because Corrin actually recruits people more by force of personality where everyone decides Corrin is just the goodest person ever, rather than some Phoenix Wright presenting of evidence. Fates Birthright could have been a story about choosing what's right over what you're brought up to believe, but the existence of Conquest kind of negates Birthright's effectiveness, alas. Conquest... gets me angry. Echoes has been over a thousand times before. Same with Three Houses, although for better reasons, thankfully. I'm less certain I agree Engage was actually meant to be about choices over blood. Or, if that was the intent, they really sent some mixed messages in parts. Alear is still an incredibly important focus of everything basically solely by being a dragon. Hell, even before the C20 twist, the Emblems talk about using the miracle on Lumera, because... was she really the bestest person to pick? She's just a long-lived dragon is all. But the plot lets it stand unquestioned. Nah, blood is incredibly important in Engage and clearly DOES define people, just more about "Greatness" or some such nonsense rather than morality. I don't want to read too much into optional support conversations, but Veyle's lines really don't help here. I think the game "likes" innocent Veyle and thinks she's cool, and she makes very clear that what she wants is Alear the sibling, not necessarily Alear the savior. They don't bond over shared morality and how dad is a monster; they bond because they're family. Sombron is a problem because of all the death & destruction, sure, but he's also an asshole because he explicitly seems very blase about his own kids dying. I've mentioned before it'd have been more interesting if Sombron was an evil family values type, a Darth Vader "Join me and we'll rule the galaxy together as father and son", which would allow Alear / Veyle to "prove" they're in it for the morality. As is, eh, it's still a story about how most families are good and wonderful and get along great and Sombron is the only exception and his friends are All Alone and will have to make a big long death speech about being alone.

If any real-life weapon of war deserves the 3H monster treatment, it's elephants. They absolutely took up the space of 4+ soldiers and had a very long time-to-kill; they could take an amazing amount of punishment = lots of HP. Even if you inflicted mortal wounds, the elephant might well still keep going for a full 15-60 minutes. The only way to kill an elephant in an "instantly drops dead" way was to shoot an arrow at point blank range directly into its brain, which, well, good luck with that. They were pretty much the tanks of the ancient battlefield. Really the only problem with them... and it was a huge one... was that directing elephants and making sure that they fought the enemy could be tricky. There's definitely stories of elephants panicking and trampling their own side.

This is the unpopular opinions thread, but... I can't agree here! At least for games that aren't Three Houses or Awakening (as those games are dominated by skill choices instead, and more generally have Large Numbers that dull the impact of +2 to a stat). You don't need to have looked up the growths and memorized them, just look at what the stats are Right Now. If you have a fave unit but with one bad stat, throwing stat boosters in their direction is potent in most FEs. It's both intuitive to casual players ("Hey, RD Haar needs more Speed" or "FE8 Marisa could use some Str") and effective in older FEs, where +2 Defense can be extremely significant. The one area that kinda is a casual trap is games where stat caps are relevant, as then it can be easy to "waste" a stat booster if you don't realize you're already close to the maximum cap and the booster is overkill. But oh well.

Well that's just terrible then (assuming this wasn't the manga just making up stuff). The plot already only barely grapples with WTF was going on with Sombron apparently eating an entire town in Elusia as well as (some/ most?) of the castle attendants, but if there was an Actual Populace, then WTF. Like, FE8 is the classic example of an underexplored setting that was mostly interested in the royals, but it just openly said that yes, Eirika is abandoning her people to their fate, and life sucks with bandits & monster attacks and such afterward. There's zero indication that Alear / Vander / etc. are fleeing and leaving An Actual Population Of Lythos to... an Elusian occupation force? Death from Corrupted? Who knows. And then things get WORSE in C21-C24, which was fine when it was a big empty area (if perhaps an ecological disaster), but that is suddenly way more real. I dunno. To give the writers the barest smidgen of credit, I hope that either some of the writers didn't realize Lythos-ians existed, or saying that they did was some late-breaking addition or retcon. Because wow if they were always intended to exist.

Belated reply to this: Lythos is certainly a storytelling failure and a case of being deeply, deeply underexplained (the main script being short is not an excuse; Vander / Framme / Clanne's supports should have covered this if it wasn't considered important enough to parade in front of you at any point). But... and I could be off on this... I think it's dumb for a different reason. I think there's a throwaway line that Lythos is reserved for the Divine Dragon and their attendants, meaning the place is closer to, like, an Antarctic research lab than an actual country. Or perhaps a fantasy amped-up and larger idea of how the royal family has a palace right in the middle of friggin' Tokyo with a big garden and everything despite the insane land values in the area that you can't go live in or buy property at yourself. So... there wasn't even anyone that the Elusian forces were fighting or that stopped them, it was just a big nature reserve that people respected because their religious leader demigod said so. Now, note that this makes fairly little sense, and if it was really true, would actually be kinda Not Cool to reserve so much apparently fertile and beautiful land for Lumera's personal garden or the like. But I think that was the choice. (If it was intended that Lythos was supposed to have people, then massive fail, yes. And of course, Vander / Framme / Clanne should all be much stranger in the way that isolated people are if they just get supply shipments every week from worshippers but otherwise don't talk much with others, but instead they have such light and nonsensical supports that they talk about who is serving the Divine Dragon the best and making fan clubs and such.) -- On Radiant Dawn Hard Mode: Note that there was a thread on this awhile back: So there is a way to play Hard Mode without the bizarre Quality of Life hatred nonsense in the shipped Hard Mode... for all that it still has the issue that it's just not that different aside from reduced BExp favoring the use of pre-leveled characters over growth characters even more than Radiant Dawn already does.

I think that's just the game not wanting to disrupt Kayfabe and provide "spoilers", sort of, by having Rhea really unleash during White Clouds (same with Catherine & Ashe's Paralogue). Since Rhea is supposed to just be an important official early in the plot (...for all that... some other elements suggest Rhea might have been some eternal Archbishop which would have implied that it'd be common knowledge she wasn't), having her be just a person under threat makes sense. I can think of no less than two other RPGs off the top of my head where you do "escort" missions where the helpless archaeologist / explorer you keep bumping into is actually the final boss slumming around with mere mortals. But so as to avoid spoilers, if they "die", it's still a Game Over, even if they're really a dark god or the like. -- On the general point: Recurring bosses are fine, especially from a gameplay perspective. Some form of interaction with the villains throughout is also helpful for building a rivalry and why do you care - it can be difficult for a villain you've never met before fighting & killing them to have the proper impact, and one way is just to have that villain show up sooner and either taunt the heroes then teleport off, or just fight them then somehow escape. There's a reason that allowing this tool is kind of a default in video game fiction. ...THAT SAID, just because something is a healthy default for understandable reasons doesn't mean it should be done ALL the time. And I'm talking about across fiction here, not within a work or even within a series. Something that made the older FEs stand out was a "mood" of "this is really happening, there are no guarantees, these are not play fights." Lyn can DIE to a random-ass bandit and there is no cheap revival item from a store. When you fight someone, think as if you're doing it in a real RPG - that means you're really fighting them! If you kill Vaida now, she's obviously not going to appear later, because she's dead! Older FEs are pretty good about being disciplined about how many fights turn into "eh, that was just a wound", and often only do it for the likes of Cecilia vs. Zephiel (basically a cutscene that uses the in-game battle engine, so sure). You don't HAVE to do this, but if you set this mood and are consistent with it, it provides a different, realer feel than you'll find in your average Ultimate Anime Battles game where everyone apparently fights with nerf bats and battles never really stop anyone permanently. The reason I'm less fussed with repeat fights in more modern FEs is that they've stepped much closer to the "Ultimate Anime Battles" style than the low fantasy "You are there, no takebacks, no going easy, this is real" style. And if you're already having people facetank giant energy beams that only cause their clothes to get dirty, then whatever, might as well take advantage of all the storytelling advantages of repeated encounters with the same people.

If I was writing Radiant Dawn, I'd agree. I think that implying that magic "knows" what nation people are and nationality is something mysteriously true is some combination of dumb and problematic. Unfortunately, I think it is intended to be a thing, though. The Blood Pact clearly works on citizenry of a specific nation, and there's some lines somewhere in RD about how Ashnard was trying to taunt Goldoa into fighting him by intentionally screwing up Rajaion as a gesture of insult, and if Goldoa had joined the war, then maybe it'd have ended the world on the spot due to all the nations really taking part. So... depending on how exactly the pledge worked, it could maybe be argued that a hyper-isolationist Ludveck-led Crimea could have stalled Ashera's return, although per above I don't really buy it anyway..

I guess. But why would Ludveck know or care about any of that? Thanks to the plot twists of FE10, even the FE9 hero crew were retroactively clueless about what was really going on with Lehran's Medallion and what would have happened if Reyson had sung the Galdr of Release "early" in FE9. The only person who really understands what is going on as of C2-C3 according to FE10 is Micaiah. I kinda doubt that Ludveck would have been swayed one way or the other on this count until it was too late and the world (presumably including him) gets stoned, at least assuming some form of the battle in Chapter 3 Endgame happens anyway and Yune / Ashera wakes up. (If you're about to suggest that the C3-E battle wouldn't include ALL of the nations of the world fighting if Ludveck just sat at home and consolidated power, it seems likely to me that Ike & co. would still count as honorary Crimeans, even if they fought without the aid of Elincia and any subordinates of her that were killed in the hypothetical 2-E-gone-wrong.)

I will solely say that the jump from Hard to Maddening in Engage wasn't that big. I found a first-time playthrough on Hard quite gripping and challenging (I also did the "no promoting early" rule that required hitting L20 first, which I think is actually good if the GOAL is to make the midgame more challenging and exciting). In my replay on Maddening, it was just a total snoozefest because I was winning too easily, with only the new DLC maps being challenging, and I got bored and stopped. Knowing what you're doing is a huge, huge benefit to Engage and more than makes up for the mild stat creep. (The Maddening stat boost isn't nearly as stark as Three Houses, where Maddening enemies are notably more badass than Hard enemies.)

I think Ludveck is a pretty great villain and agree with the slant that we need some "grounded" villains too. That said, for what what if scenario... uh... whatever the writers want to happen? "But Snowfire", you say. "It's fiction. Of course it's susceptible to the whims of the writers. What would make sense? That's what's really being asked." And here I stand by my original answer: whatever the hell you want. A civil war and a new ruler is a reason for *anything* to happen afterward, fiction or no. It's like drawing from the deck of many things or rolling a 100-sided die. What happens after a rebellion can be just about anything, and it doesn't have to "make sense", historically. William the Conqueror won one battle and put his bloodline on the English throne for centuries and added a lot more Norman French influence into upper-class English. Richard III took office during a time of strife, faced a rebellion, won a battle, reigned for a little more, faced another rebellion, lost that battle, then died. Some rebels have done exactly what they said they'd do, others executed their closest allies and barely abided by their original claimed ideology. If you're writing a time travel story, these times are the really fragile "from here, possibilities explode" nexii. So yeah. You pretty much have an excuse to write whatever you like - a continuing civil war against Elincia's friends and allies (notably including one Ike, who like it or not is established as the local supreme badass in the world)? An internal purge of laguz? An unsteady peace as King Ludveck desperately tries not to rock the boat, and possibly a desperate search for allies (probably the Benignon Senate, since uh who else is there?)? Ludveck himself getting promptly offed by Volke or something? A foolish invasion of Daien or Gallia? I could potentially buy ANY of them. (Realistically, not gonna happen dramatically of course - I could see a plotline where Elincia gets captured or something, but killing off characters like that in sequels is tough and will make fans unhappy. If you want a character to die in a story like this, you gotta set it up in the first story or just do it then - given Elincia's role in FE9, it would be a real GRRM-style kick in the teeth to kill her in FE10.)

On 3H, re Zapp: I feel a lot weighs on authorial "mood" here. I guess you felt the school side was still a major part of the narrative, but while that's clearly true for White Clouds, I don't think it's accurate for the War Phase, where the school mechanics are basically vestigal and they didn't want to enforce an entire new mechanic. I think the mood is very clearly a war-is-hell deal where you're supposed to be fearful for your chances (in fact, even when this doesn't make any sense - there's some parts in late Verdant Wind that imply that despite the fact we're conquering the Empire, we're still outnumbered and in big trouble, which is a little weird given how much we've won). I also think that you can only take so much from the timing. Did you play Trails of Cold Steel II? Cold Steel I -> II does a similar-to-3H deal of the prestigious military high school to civil war pipeline. Minor spoiler here, but for whatever dumb reason, the writers absolutely did not want the characters to age very much, or to have CS2 be its own new year, so the civil war part takes place over an extremely, extremely accelerated period. Like, maybe a month or two, with the calendar showing that a week passes in-between acts. You might think that this must mean Our Heroes are being run ragged and exhausted, but nothing can be farther from the truth - they're laying back and enjoying social activities and doing help a guy out sidequests (literally over the course of a MORNING! Canonically! It's like "oh yeah, be ready for the battle at noon, here's an airship to fly around for hours doing sidequests first"). Writers be like that sometimes. So even if you think that a month is still too short, I think the mood that's being set should probably control here. Not really? The general point is that you can make any plan look unimpressive by saying "if you take away the most effective thing the other team did, then they aren't so tough." Well, yeah, but that's not the situation. More generally, this is still presented as a threat in loop 2; there's the whole "Submit to Grima" stuff, so Robin defecting and turning evil is still a possibility at least in iteration 2, before the Power of Friendship defeats it. Which is corny, sure, but apparently it's also difficult, given what happened in Iteration 1.

On Fates: Fates is not exactly a tightly-written setting, but... for whatever reason, using the pocket dimension for shenanigans only really happens once, the initial time with Corrin plummeting and Lilith saving them. Which weirdly enough, from what we later know, might not have even be fatal given that Gunter survived the same fall in one route (despite the whole fancy timing maybe not lining up perfectly that Revelation talks about? who knows). It doesn't really happen again, even in situations where it really should (e.g. Corrin getting inexplicably stranded and Lilith dying to a random Faceless in CQ). This makes me inclined to say that it can't be used that way, and the part where Corrin was saved was just loose writing to spice things up with drama. (The alternative is that Corrin is even more of an idiot, which I don't think is intended.) It's kinda like how in The Last Jedi, a ship goes to Lightspeed as an attack on a fleet - despite the fact that if this "worked" it should have been being done all the time before, so sometimes you just shrug and say "bad writers, but since everything everywhere else ignores this, either that didn't happen or there was some unique circumstance that allowed it to work". On 3H, re @Zapp Branniglenn: I don't think one battle a month qualifies as leisurely! Some very intense, hellish campaigns in history have taken place over the 6-8 month period the War Phase of 3H goes through with around a battle a month. In theory, the player might be doing Paralogues & Skirmish maps, and it sounds like you're taking as canonical that Our Heroes really do head back to Garreg Mach each time which would reduce time even further. I wouldn't call the Sauna exactly some height of luxury, either - reminder goes here that traditional Japanese inns are built around some sort of sauna / springs, so the cultural connotations are less fancy. If you said that the GBA FE crews stopped at some random inexplicably Japanese inns along the way in some cross-cultural blend, I wouldn't really consider that as making life any different on th em. On Awakening, re @Jotari: I feel that saying "Sure, they lost, but it was just because of the betrayal" is like saying after an American football game "Sure, we lost, but it was only because of the turnover." Well... maybe... but it's not like those fumbles / interceptions / trick plays don't "count". This is especially true when both Robin and Evil Robin are portrayed as a sneaky tactician, someone who'd plan their backstabs carefully - if it wasn't one thing, it'd be something else. And we do know of at least one other event in the "bad" timeline that went poorly for our heroes - the assassination attempt on Chrom (that "Marth" interrupts in our timeline), although apparently it didn't actually kill Chrom, but was bad enough for Lucina to consider it worthwhile to intervene at. Even if taken strictly for "our" timeline, it seems that there are various loss condition landmines laying around in the setup of Awakening that Our Heroes cannily avoid.

Of the ones I played, FE7 wins easiest, simply because there wasn't an ongoing war. Having a war is inherently more dangerous than fighting assassins in the dark, for all that what exactly is going on in FE7 gets a bit misty sometimes. In the realm of spinoffs and games I didn't finish, I guess Tokyo Mirage Sessions also doesn't have a war, so it can compete with FE7? And an oddball answer for easiest is FE Heroes. Now, FE Heroes does not take its own plot seriously, so far be it from me to take it seriously, but if we foolishly take it even half-seriously for a moment... on one hand Askr fights multi-dimensional goddesses of death who've already devoured entire dimensions and absorbed the power of the princess of life a zillion times over and other OP-on-paper foes. But Askr has a collection of literal gods, demigods, dragons, heroes, etc. all mind-controlled to fight for a bland player-standin, and all of them seem totally immune to death & aging while out-of-world too. And Askr does clearly keep winning these conflicts with basically no casualties, and even when someone dies, the summoner grabs an alternate dimension version of them wearing a silly costume as a replacement. In other words, it might still be the easiest in the sense of sure, the enemy's power level is one trillion, but our powerlevel is one ultrazilliongillion, like a story written by a 13-year old shonen fan. My cheaty nomination for hardest of those I've played (no Thracia here, so can't say on that one) is Awakening, simply by the brute fact that Our Heroes canonically lose, and only get a second shot thanks to divine time travel shenanigans.

It varies, but I think this form is actually the less common one? Plenty of stories that do the reverse, where the hero from modern Earth is exactly what the setting needs to save the day. Granted, some of this is just standard wish-fulfillment where of course the reader / player stand-in is gonna save the day, but it's reasonably common for stories to justify this as specifically due to modern era mindset and knowledge. In particular, see the lightning-benders above - an engineer with access to wire and the capability to build crude batteries has some interesting tasks for lightning mages to do. But there's a deeper issue here, and it goes back to what I said about settings not necessarily making sense as-is. In many / most FE settings, being a mage doesn't appear to be a ticket to almighty power. Erk is a random guy stuck doing bodyguard work he doesn't enjoy to win a noble's favor. Lute is a prodigy, but a sheltered and backwater one who doesn't appear to have any particular importance. And all of the poor random red enemy mages are usually just random hirelings. Sure, there do exist mages in positions of power (your Pents & Izanas), but the only really major clear mage-ocracy I can think of in FE is Benignon, where all of its rulers indeed seem to be mages who also flash their power around a lot and use it to stay in command. But, like, if Chrom & Miriel had a falling-out for some reason, it seems pretty clear Chrom is the one with the power. If magic was really so overwhelming, then you'd expect constant mage-ocracies, and in countries with typical medieval royalty, there'd be power-behind-the-throne chief wizards who are either propping up the rule of those they trust or else being the power behind the throne themselves. In general (yeah yeah Gharnef, or the aforementioned Benignon) that doesn't really appear to be the case. Therefore I guess magic isn't that big a deal, and if in-setting FE normals have no problem handling it, the contemporary country's normals won't either. (And in settings where magic can be taught, assuming that language barriers are non-existent like they seem to be, then the contemporary country is going to catch up fast on magic anyway.) It is fairly stable, yes. Their neighbor next door, Congo, is not stable, and is also sitting on a lot of natural resources. It's also where the defeated pro-genocide fled after their defeat in the Civil War. So it's not even totally irrational to have forces over there, but point is, Rwanda is ready to fight (if we presume their army across the border gets teleported along with, at least). And even with their in-country forces, they presumably still have plenty of veterans of the Civil War around.

You are in luck! You can play the game Braid, which is basically this. It's only three dollars right now, even: https://store.steampowered.com/app/26800/Braid/

I feel like this question is underspecified as is. Which modern day earth country? Which Fire Emblem world? Are we trying to "make sense" and have "realism", or are we just looking for a dramatically appropriate tale? Because there's some pretty big differences here between, like, isekai'ing a small country without many natural resources like Portugal vs. a large country with tons of resources like Russia; a mostly unarmed country like Iceland vs. a country armed for war and already doing some war like Rwanda; and of course a small population country like the Dominican Republic vs. a large population one like the United States. Meanwhile, on the Fire Emblem side, there's a bunch of settings that don't really make a ton of sense as is before the isekai'd country even shows up. Do they just keep on doing what they're doing and don't think about it too hard, or are we assuming that they have to play by realism rules and if that causes a few speedy government collapses, oh well? I'll note that the idea of a random town / country being teleported elsewhere (time travel? to another planet?) has been explored before, and "autarky", aka true self-sufficiency, is pretty hard to achieve without a drastic reduction in living conditions. One fun example: the economics of making microchips mean that tons of microchips get made from a very small number of plants. These fabricators ("fabs") are so few there's a Wikipedia article listing all 492 of them, and building a new one to modern specs is expensive and slow and requires a whole supply chain. While a talented engineer with a book can probably create a 1920s radio with some time & tinkering, even 1970s-level microchips is just out of reach without a lot of infrastructure that may not exist. Basically... if you're a small country without a fab, you better dang well preserve all your existing cell phones and computers very, very carefully for a long while, because you aren't getting new ones any time soon. I'll throw out two random thought experiments: * Most FE worlds don't seem to have had an Industrial Revolution (possible exception: the deep prehistory of Fodlan, as the Agarthans seem to have had a technological society). Notably, Archanea has barely changed at all in culture, standard of living, and methods of warfare between Marth's time and Chrom's time. Additionally, our Earth is... probably weird? As in there are some things true about Earth that it doesn't seem "have" to have been true for any random Earth-sized planet. Notably, 90% of underground coal and oil all come from one very specific 60-million year long period, the Carboniferous Period, where there were giant piles of dead trees lying around for millions of years without wood-decay fungus to eat them. I don't recall Naga saying anything about "oh by the way there were hundreds of millions of years before humanity, and some of that time we didn't evolve wood-eating fungi yet". What I'm getting at is... is there even any coal or oil to find? That could well explain the lack of an Industrial Revolution. And if it's true that there simply are no coal seams to mine or oil deposits to drill, then the isekai'd Earth nation better hope it has good oil reserves brought over with it, or there's gonna be trouble real shortly once the oil runs out. (At least there'll still be hydroelectric power & geothermal... probably...) * Mind control is one of those things where if it exists and it's real, it probably should be a major part of the setting. Oddly enough, the denizens of FE-world are probably better off if mind control doesn't exist. If it does exist, then FE-countries can hope Gharnef runs around and mind controls the leaders of the Earth country, but if that strategy doesn't work, hoo boy. A world where mind control is real and where this is known is a world of extreme paranoia and violence where diplomacy is essentially impossible, as your diplomats might get mind controlled and hand over government secrets or sign dumb "we surrender" treaties, so you're just shooting foreigners who might be evil magicians on sight. And you're not even totally wrong to do so, since the fate of being forced to betray everything you love and stand for is surely worse than death. And any leader calling for peace might be interested in higher morality, or they might be a mind-controlled patsy of the bad guys, so you can't even trust that. Basically, if you want a world convulsed by war that bans magic and executes people accused of it without trial, then make sure mind control exists.

Not much to say here. Good: Fates Average: FE10 Meh: FE9 Very situational: Engage DNR, Trainee: FE8, Three Houses Spear Master is a stat stick in Fates. Boring, but a stat stick is sometimes what you need, given that "cheating" the stats is hard and you sometimes need just max stats to survive a tough enemy phase or tangle with a boss safely. Neph is... okay in FE9, has the famous goofy Wrath build and all. But that's not really her class, and it's famously horse emblem for competition, so everyone not-horsied, not-Iked is looking kinda obsolete. Devdan is not good. In FE10, I actually took Aran to the tower, and he's actually got kinda okay Defense for the Dawn Brigade if babied. But... FE10 balance is all over the place, and Neph is competing against units like Gatrie later. Danved is pretty disappointing, too. Comes out to averageish, I guess. In theory, Engage's Halberdier is useful for slow-but-strong units if you can set up their passive, like Louis or Amber. But setting up their passive is hard, and also usually overkill if you do set it up (especially with how monsters have multiple life bars rather than tons of HP). Great Knight, Griffin Knight, and Wyvern Knight all have much better mobility and can also have lances. Hero has better chain attacks if you're just looking to avoid a flying / cavalry weakness. That said, if you build a Halberdier anyway, Final Sombron is both unusually easy to surround AND have a bucket of HP, so goofy Brave Lance quads are certainly one way to carve a hole in his life total fast. And if you have to pick one area to be good, picking the final boss isn't a bad pick. Uh, Reposition is a really great Combat Art in 3H! And you don't have to stay in Amelia's Trainee class for long, at least - it feels against the spirit to assume you're doing the silly super-trainee thing from NG+s.

I think both FE12 and AAI2 could have been released in North America, even if a little "late" for the DS... but... frankly, they weren't that good. And even if you disagree, their reputation was certainly mixed at best, and both sold quite poorly compared to series expectations in Japan. So you're talking about "may lose money to localize, may reduce the value of the brand long-term if word spreads about it being bad." (Side note: As someone who's played every mainline Ace Attorney game (i.e. excluding stuff like the Professor Layton crossover), I feel like I can pretty safely rank AAI2 as the worst of the series. Which is still not a bad game overall because it's a good series, and it has its moments, but... yeah.) I get the impression the Ace Attorney series is actually more popular worldwide than it is in Japan, but that wasn't really true of FE in 2010. FE12 is interesting for the kind of super-fans who post on FE websites about games released 13 years ago because of replayability from its large cast and some high difficulty modes to show off on, but if played casually on Normal, just isn't that special. Plus, by video game standards, FE12 would have been an expensive localization due to more text than a random other game, and AAI2 would have been an EXTREMELY expensive localization from a novel's worth of text, some minor voice acting, etc. I can see passing on localizing them even if the games had come out a year earlier, and the late release date is just the cherry on top.