Silver-Haired Maiden

CF (didn't finish) -> AM -> VW -> SS = CF (did finish)

My Love Rigel. .... sorry, I had to.

I know you said "no making everyone wyvern lords" but in my experience Edelgard and Hilda are legitimately better in those classes than if you take them armored. Basically everyone else looks fine, though you may have a focus on too many classes to go through on some of them.

Personally I'd recommend PoR or Awakening. Both are simple enough to sink your teeth into and don't have the slog of maps that SoV has. PoR if you're looking for the better game, Awakening if you're looking for accessibility.

Except she is equal with the other two. The game is 3 Houses, not Edelgard + Two Schmucks. Heck, they originally didn't plan for Crimson Flower to be a thing at all, meaning she wasn't intended to be a main lord at all in the beginning. Just because she's the driving point behind the war doesn't make her the most important character. Otherwise you'd have to claim Sephiran is the most important character in Tellius when he's very much not.

As much as I agree I don't see them adding all 3 to Smash. Not without it being like a Pokemon Trainer type deal where Byleth is commanding and you can switch between the three and they only take one character slot.

Are we talking making Radiant Dawn longer? Because like... All for that. Sign me up. I do think it's pretty fair to say that a lot of RD's problems come from the team being a bit too ambitious in terms of what they wanted to do with it. However I admire them for the effort and feel like they managed to pull the majority of their efforts off very well. Of course I do know several people who already think RD is pushing on being too long so I can only imagine making the game longer would further divide people.

"Incest ruined PoR" is the one I got. I don't think your last one is a hot take lol.

Legitimately this made me giggle. I think the 3DS games have their good parts but I wouldn't call any game since RD as good as RD either. I do find them fun to play through though... so long as I ignore their stories.

Yeah that would've been fine had they intended to go that route. It would be nice to see how Micaiah got such a reputation firsthand. But I still don't feel it would've been necessary if they'd have just added actual support conversations.

I mean that's fine, but I played PoR as recently as a year ago and RD just a week and a half ago and I still hold that opinion. To me it feels appropriately paced, especially since the plot does canonically take place in a rather condensed time frame. I'd like some padding for purely logistical reasons if it gets a remake (mostly to more organically gain levels for the DB) but the plot itself? I don't feel like it needs to be slowed down.

You've mentioned several times feeling that the writing in this game was rushed but in all the many times I've played RD it's never felt that way to me. Perhaps it's because I enjoy a fast paced story and so the speed here is more comfortable to me, but many other FE games (especially PoR) felt very much like they just dragged on and on. I found myself wishing other games would just get to the point already and RD never gave me that feeling. As for the spirit charmer stuff, that's explained in Part 4 if you recruit Pelleas.

I have a legitimate problem with the whole "they're fictional characters so it doesn't matter how I objectify them" mindset. Namely that what is allowed and encouraged in fiction will, over time, leak it's way into being allowed and encouraged in real life because it becomes normalized to people. It's a very fine, slippery line that I think people cross far more often than they should, especially in the JRPG community. Anyway, on topic I'd hardly say I have a "waifu" or a "husbando" but my favorite girl in the series is Micaiah. Second favorite... probably Petra or Mercedes. Favorite guy is Dimitri, Felix and Haar tied for second for different reasons.

Voting Shinon purely because f*** Soren. Also Shinon is both a great unit and hilarious and Ike doesn't need my help!

Glad you're looking forward to Radiant Dawn! I hope you enjoy your time in the Tellius continuation! As my first FE game it remains my favorite. As to your questions: Radiant Dawn is overall much harder than PoR. However the translation was messed up when labeling the difficulties. So in RD Easy = Normal, Normal = Hard, Hard = Lunatic. Honestly it's up to you which one you'd like to try your hand at but know that the early game is notably harder than the later game. I'm no LTCer or big math person but from my experience the stats work similarly to PoR. Someone else can probably give you exact numbers. Of note, you can take skills off units in RD and move them to other units without losing the skill like you do in PoR. You switch armies several times throughout RD. For the most part your convoys are kept separate but there does come a time where the convoy is merged between all the characters. So long as no character dies you do eventually regain access to all of them but there are some that have such low availability overall that they're not worth using. Those units include Tormod, Vika, Muarim, and a few of the Part 2 characters but everyone is able to be worked with if you give them enough babying thanks to BEXP. Sorry no clue, I have a physical copy. I would give you more advice and tips but I find that RD is the most fun to play through when you go into it pretty blind. Others will probably tell you more though. I wish you luck!

That's fair and while I personally would be fine with that I can see the complaints already if they actually did it.

My biggest issue with this is that if everyone's unique, unique stops being important or memorable. Unless you majorly downgrade the number of units the game gives you. With a cast of 20 or more characters though it would become a bit of a slog more than anything unique or memorable.

Yeah but in recent months it has been the Edelgard fans being the worst. And if it seems like I'm not going to support that it's because I'm not. No amount of nastiness your favorite lord receives is a justification for you being nasty in return. They're fictional characters and people need to get over taking criticisms of fictional characters so personally. Reddit definitely had a big effect on it, on all sides of the matter. Unfortunately it seems like Reddit problems refuse to stay on Reddit where they belong and have this nasty habit of leaking onto other forums like here... >.> But the fact remains that the Reddit mindset in general is pretty toxic (a lot of the time, not always) and leaking it other places generally just makes everyone look bad. Ah but anyway, as I mentioned before there are plenty of legitimate reasons to dislike or hate all of the main characters. My personal favorite to bash is actually Claude and that's just because he's the weakest in terms of connection to the story. Still love the guy.

You haven't been around the 3H forums much I take it? This has gotten bad because of Edelgard fans continually bashing other characters in their defense of Edelgard while also making excuses for most if not all of her actions. That makes her fans look bad and reflects badly on her character as well. Edelgard is a well written character that is taking a pretty hard knock because many of her fans refuse to allow people to hold even a somewhat negative opinion of her. They'll claim that it's because people always talk crap about Edelgard but that hasn't been a thing since the first couple months after the game came out and now even legitimate criticism or disagreement with her character and actions are "Edelgard bashing". That's why her fans are catching so much crap. There's plenty of reasons to hate each of the lords, not just the main 3 (including Rhea in this because she's a main character too). Edelgard is stubborn and arrogant with a savior complex, Dimitri goes insane and slaughters people, Claude, Rhea kills dissidents in the church without much of a trial and refuses to talk to those she feels betrays her. Just kidding, though Claude is the least problematic of the 4 he's not everything he's talked up to be and leaves at the end of VW in what is the dumbest ending for a character since Ike in Radiant Dawn.

Hey, so I've been secretly lurking for a while now and finally decided to come out of the woodwork because RD! Just wanted to say I look forward to your playthrough of RD and, though I may not comment much, I am enjoying your playthroughs and rankings. 🙂

We're just going to have to agree to disagree.

I think it is. That's your theory. But if light magic is tied to order (Ashera) then dark magic would logically be tied to chaos (Yune) Check her on Heroes. She's dark aligned there. I know it's not RD but it's the closest we've got to her being playable and no one is arguing Ashera's heaven (light) alignment. Yune, as her opposite, would be dark aligned. Her sister also isn't the apostle. And there's nothing saying it isn't either. Also Micaiah is the only person with such a close connection to Ashera and Yune since Lehran and already has two of the 3 things he's got SS rank in. Just add dark magic. Nothing's saying it has to fit her personality. It sure as hell doesn't fit Pelleas's personality, he's far too meek and timid for the majority of dark mages and yet he uses it and thunder magic. Also for some reason you seem to be falling into the pitfall of dark = evil and light = good and that's obviously not the case in RD. I point you to Ashera. Also in terms of gameplay it would finally give her weapon triangle advantage against the anima mages. Light magic gets disadvantage to anima magic in the game so her having dark magic would make her more adept at fighting off those other mages.

Dark affinity Lack of dark mages (you get two and only on a second playthrough) She's the voice of Yune, the goddess of chaos, and Ashera, the goddess of order, logically granting her access to light and dark magic She ends up becoming the vessel of Yune after having a much more personal connection with Yune. Yune's affinity is, you guessed it, dark She's Lehran's descendant, someone who can canonically use staves, dark, and light magic