Jhedin

It comes and goes, and is often feast or famine. I've had really good luck on the CYL banners and usually one of each three Legendary banners; I don't do many non-Legendary banner pulls anymore. I'd say I get a 5* from a freebie pull one in every 10-12 banners, which would be well above expectation. As I mention in the pulls thread, I've had a run of luck on Legendary banners lately where I end up pulling the same two or three 5* units over and over. Sometimes this is good (the unit is a good merge or good fodder) and sometimes it's not. But it's been a weird trend over the summer. But that's kinda the nature of the beast, I guess.

Honestly, I'm stoked to get to Revelation - based on what they did with the whole choice thing (which I think is great), having a neutral option sounds amazing and that just seems like the exact kind of thing I'd expect IS to go all out on. So really, I'm playing Birthright and Conquest in order to fully inform my playing of Revelation, which is really the entree that brought me to the table. I've gone down a grinding rabbit hole in my Hoshido run so far, but I'm on Chapter 10. I figure I won't be able to grind out the Nohr run quite the same, so I might as well kick back and do it this go-round so I know what I'm getting into with Conquest and later Revelation.

So I should have used the kids after all hahaha - well, that's what next time is for :)

Tellius veteran here; just finished Awakening for the first time, now moving onto Fates. I just started - plowed through to "the choice" last night. Given that it's my first playthrough, I'm starting with Birthright, but I plan to do all three stories. Coming from Awakening, I can clearly see the increased production value - not just the movies, but there's just a larger scale feel and vibrancy to the game. This game feels big, and it throws you into some deep stuff right away. Whereas Awakening's story never really grabbed me by the throat and yanked on my attention, Fates has already achieved that - Chapter 5 is one of the most intense story chapters I've seen in any Fire Emblem, and ending it with basically having to choose between Hoshido and Nohr is brutal, even if the game is pushing you hard to Hoshido - while Nohr may seem "bad", your siblings don't, and that difference is well-crafted - Xander et al seem to genuinely care about the avatar, regardless of Garon's intentions. Also, and I apologize if this counts as a spoiler, but seeing Gunter get thrown off a bridge in Chapter 2 and that being it for our typical Jagen/Titania/Frederick character was a swerve I did not see coming. The castle thing seems neat, too, but I'm pretty interested in how this story is going to go.

Finished. Overall, enjoyed it. The support system modifications - dual strike/guard - were definitely my enhancement of choice. It feels good to actually "see" supports in action, as opposed to in the Tellius games where while you enjoy the benefits, they're just passive gains, and you don't have that same feeling of cooperation. It mean something to me that I had spouses constantly paired up fighting side-by-side. I ignored random map battles, and while doing so sped up my playthrough, if I play again I'll probably abuse them like crazy to build supports. The only children I recruited were Cynthia, Noire, Gerome, Nah, and Kjelle. I'd like to do more in the future, but there just wasn't enough time/maps left by the time I got to the end. Similarly, I feel like getting the parental supports done earlier will actually encourage me to use the children later. But I got them so late that there was no point in building up someone from level 10. I also liked the Second Seal concept more than I expected - reclassing was more fun than grinding intentionally good level ups (something I do in PoR/RD), and let you have some level of customization on your characters' skillsets. Giving Robin Astra was rather fun! Plus it seemed to build out their stats - I reclassed both Chrom and Robin a couple times and both had super beefy stats by the end because of it. Otherwise, the story didn't feel like anything too special. It was good, but didn't blow me away. This was one game where I wanted to the story to go faster so I could get back to the gameplay. Not a bad thing, just different. The final battle was pretty wild, though, and the meeting where Lucina reveals herself to Chrom is just perfect. I had Robin do the final blow, as well, and I rather liked that ending - nothing crazy over the top, just nice and low-key subtle. While I mentioned the story not being super special, it hits all the right notes, and does so with a certain grace - it's not smacking you in the face when it could be, and just lets moments be moments.

Really depends how I level my team, but I can echo the others in that... Silver Army = best fliers Greil Army = other heavy hitters Hawk Army = one super-pairing (I usually throw Neph and Brom here) + whoever else Endgame varies, but characters I tend to gravitate towards building include Neph, Brom, Edward, Nolan, Astrid, Soren The key to endgame, in my opinion, is being able to spread out SS weapons for Yune to bless. Much to my surprise, the Edward/Nolan-specific weapons they get in Part 3 hold up really well if you bring another sword and axe user to take Vague Katti and Urvan, respectively. Well, that or bringing a ton of laguz kings.

I'm a Lions fan - so far the team is meeting my expectations on the year.

Marriage is just a little odd to me because it's odd to me to think that there aren't canonical parents (at least both of them) for the children. I'm not sure why that bothers me, or what that says about me, but it just strikes me odd. I do love the support retoolings though, otherwise. Support always felt more... passive... in RD, and in PoR I always felt limited and like I had to be highly critical of who supported who due to limits; whereas in Awakening, I can let everyone become friends and really see them get support points and see significant boosts when side-by-side with the dual strikes/guard. I pushed Chrom and Sumia since I planned to marry them, and I noticed their higher support really pushed them past the other characters by a mile. I hadn't actually noticed that elevation didn't affect battle, but I had a hunch that was the case from the Ch13 battle. I did like how PoR/RD did that. What is killing me is that cavalry/flyers don't get to move again after battling. That's been really hard to get used to. As for overall engagement, I feel like I can't judge that fairly - I know the basics of what happens from playing Heroes, so I can't speak to how engaged I'd be if I didn't. I'm intrigued to see where things go, and I like seeing who these characters getting love in Heroes are. It's also fun to see systems change/evolve from game to game. I'm planning on Fates next, since I haven't gotten a copy of Echoes yet.

So I finally am branching out from Path of Radiance/Radiant Dawn to check out the other Fire Emblems I can get my hands on; this is partially spurred by my steady playing of FE Heroes, and therefore being interested in the additional cast. I got a copy of Awakening, so I'm starting there, which was my hope anyway. Some initial thoughts - I'm just starting Chapter 14... - The cutscene with Chrom and Lucina in Chapter 13 is 100% on point. Despite already knowing who she is due to FE Heroes, the CS definitely hit home. It's a good example of how to achieve emotion with minimal effort; Chrom's initial apology is on-character, and I think any person can empathize with Lucina getting to finally reveal herself to him. - I love the changes they made with supports. The "dual strike/guard" is a great addition, and seeing when actions encourage support (the little heart bubble) is nice. I also like that there seems to be an unlimited number of supports (besides spouses, of course). - On that note, marrying my characters weirds me out for some reason. I have no rational reason for this, it's just very foreign and messes with my sense of trying to have "canon" runs. At any rate, I married Chrom to Sumia and they've become my team's backbone except when I forget there's an archer over there. - Pair Up is a huge improvement over being penalized for using Rescue, but I still don't fully grasp how to best implement this strategically. - Second Seals are really nice. I have a tendency to grind RD and abuse Battle Save to get good level ups - with Second Seals, I can grind more "productively" by re-classing and then using the random battle maps. It's still grinding, but it feels more fruitful and fun than spending a ton of time Battle Saving and reloading. - Not classing up automatically at 20 weirds me out, but that's fine. - I really like the avatar and the hero being separate characters, and the avatar being optional on most maps. It gives the player a different perspective on the game compared to PoR/RD where the hero and avatar are basically the same character. Anyway, having fun with it so far. Mostly familiar with the overall story due to FE Heroes, so playing more to understand/appreciate the characters. So far so good!

Bwahahahahahahahahaha this is perfection.

Oh yeah, I can't go easy since that wouldn't work for RD transfers.

How? I've never really managed more than 10 on a normal difficulty. Maybe I'm not managing my kills/xp closely enough, but still never have come close to 20 regardless.

I find that Soren takes care of himself quite fine, and I pretty much barely use Calill, even in the Crimea missions. I've always found Ilyana becomes a Part 1 beast with some transfers. I rarely use Zihark or Volug, honestly - by the time Zihark isn't stealing xp from others, Edward is far superior and I have Mia waiting on the Greil Mercs side. Zihark always ends up the odd man out. And I just don't use many laguz, generally... that said, their support does help in that all-laguz Part 3 DB battle that everyone's underleveled for.

Being Tellius-biased... I'd rather see Kurth than Dheginsea, personally. A Sephiran/Lehran GHB hero would be cool, too. Similarly, a Greil/Gawain or Ashnard GHB would be pretty awesome, especially if they make Ashnard a flying sword unit. I wouldn't be against a Petrine GHB, either. A lot of the knights/infantry feel repetitive, otherwise I'd stump for Brom, Boyd, Jill, Rolf, and Geoffrey, but I'm not sure how they wouldn't immediately fade into the deep pool of similar units; PoR Brom would be preferred since we're already awash in armored green axes (sup Hector). I'm pretty happy we got a Micaiah alt. Pelleas would be an interesting addition potentially as a colorless (dark) mage. Laguz would be cool, but Heroes isn't really built to do that yet, and I'm not versed enough in the series to know if there's a similar mechanic in other games that would justify it, but I suppose they would essentially work like dragons, but I still question where/how they'd separate from the deep pool of units. I'd love to see a new PoR banner this winter that includes Brom (blue armor spear), Geoffrey (blue cavalry spear), Boyd (green axe), and Volke (colorless dagger) with a companion GHB for Ashnard (red flying sword). A follow-up RD banner that would be fun would be Jill (green flying axe), Rolf (colorless bow), Tormod (red mage), and Kurth (colorless dragon) with a companion GHB for Sephiran/Lehran (colorless mage). Greil could be added as a Tempest Trials character at the same time. Yeah, that sounds good.

I've had odd luck on the legendary banners lately - I tend to get runs of a different 5* hero. This month, it was red Reinhardt, of whom I got 3. I also got 2 Fjorm, 1 F!Robin (female), and 1 Gunnthra. Not awesome, but not bad. I didn't have red Reinhardt yet, although I don't see him cracking my frequent use team, since I already run B!Roy, Xander, and Exalt Chrom as my primary red horses. I had a similar thing happen last month with L!Lucina when I got 3 Exalt Chroms (I didn't have him yet, so score) and 3 V!Lilina (whom I also didn't have yet). I haven't scored an actual new L! unit in at least 4 months, and I burn about 200-300 orbs per L! banner depending on how deep the banner is. I cheaped out on this one a bit since I got lucky on first-pull 5* units and I have most of the other non-L! units already. That said, both CYL banners were kind to me - last year I took B!Ike as my free hero, but drew both B!Roy and B!Lyn without a ton of effort (I was pretty new to the game then), and this year I managed to get B!Hector and B!Ephraim before choosing B!Celica as my freebie. Has anyone else had oddly good luck with the CYL banners, or am I just that fortunate? Small sample size aside, they haven't felt like other 3%/3% rate banners to me.

Feel free to throw an add my way! Jhedin (1984570646) - my lead is PA!Azura.

So I picked up PoR and RD again lately and have been binging both. After my initial new PoR playthrough heading into RD, I decided to do another PoR run focusing on useful A-supports to transfer as bonds, as well as the best possible stat transfers. I also did something I always wanted to but never did before - I experimented a ton with Mist. I finished with these lv 20s + stat caps: Ike - HP/STR/SKL/SPD/DEF/RES Mist - STR/MAG/SPD/RES Ilyana - MAG/SKL/SPD/RES Marcia - STR/SKL/SPD/DEF Kieran - STR/SKL/SPD/DEF Makalov - STR/SKL/SPD/DEF Jill - STR/SKL/SPD Nephenee - STR/SKL/SPD/DEF Brom - HP/STR/SKL/SPD/DEF Astrid - STR/SKL/SPD As an aside, I got this many 20s by doing some serious manipulation of Bryce in the endgame and just slow-poking him to death and letting the healer with a Physic blow through the entire Physic to keep him standing. Mist got to 20 largely by good fortune - I loaded up my endgame characters that weren't fighting with all of my staves and let her blow through a couple Physics, a Ward, a Hammerne, a Rescue, and a Fortify to get her from lv8 to lv20. On my initial playthrough, I focused largely on Daein characters to help with the Dawn Brigade - but in playing, I realized I tend to favor the non-transfer DB characters, so I focused this time on the Crimean knights instead, since I find those chapters drag the most due to lack of quantity and therefore lack of easy leveling. Marcia and Makalov are almost always useless to me, so I made sure to get them set up for success this round. In this spirit, I also linked in Kieran-Marcia and Astrid-Makalov for A-supports. I also had Ike-Soren, Jill-Haar, Mist-Rolf, Zihark-Ilyana, and Nephenee-Brom at A. I tried to get Zihark to 20, as well, but ran out of units - in fact, I had no units at 20 going into the endgame, with all of the above in the 16-19 range (including Zihark), so I had to pay attention a bit to manage it. I'm a little annoyed that Jill didn't cap her DEF, either (she was one off). I'm interested to see if my efforts pay off in the Crimea chapters of RD or not. I'm also curious how other people get more than 10 20s - I had to really pay attention this playthrough to get this many; do people just abuse bosses on renewal tiles? Knowing I missed my ideal goal (which would have included Zihark at 20) by about 3 levels, I can see where I might abuse Ena in the future. Similarly, I made a mistake thinking Haar would make it to 20 and lost some overall team exp to him while I was getting his A-support with Jill. As an aside - does anyone know if your entire support archive from PoR transfers to RD bonds? I know the clear data in PoR stacks and keeps all of your historical supports, so that they transfer into the RD library - but do they all activate as bonds in that case, or only the active supports from the most recent playthrough?

I haven't had any issues with PoR on Dolphin on my desktop rig (GeForce GTX 1070, but I did have some minor issues with Dolphin in general on my laptop (Intel default HD graphics card). What graphics card are you running?

I often shoot for good Radiant Dawn transfers, so I tend to favor the Crimean (Astrid, Makalov, Kieran, Marcia, Brom, Nephenee) and Daein (Jill, Zihark, Ilyana) characters. That said, Astrid, Brom, and Nephenee are personal favorites.

Interesting! I suppose the proliferation of gacha mobile games is indicative of this, but I haven't really looked closely at the market research. It'll be interesting to see how Three Houses does on the Switch. RD's biggest issue, in my opinion, is just the poor pacing at times - Part 1 has a nice even pace, and then Part 2 almost feels like a sidequest that's hard to get involved in because it's too short, and then Part 3 really gets going until you get shunted back to the DB, and then of course Part 4 moves nicely. I've seen some folks here suggest that RD could have been two games - one featuring the DB, and then a third installment in the trilogy that returns us to Ike. I feel like this would have worked well, as "RD Part 1" could have covered the Dawn Brigade in full, even their battles against Ike in Part 3. I'm not sure how to end it satisfactorily, but it's a neat idea. Then "RD Part 2" could have been a longer installment than Part 1, reintroducing us first to Crimea and fleshing out the Crimean civil war, before Ike rides in and we go full bore with the Greil Mercs. An interesting idea, but I have few qualms with RD as it is, so I can't complain much. Pelleas being less of a wet noodle of a character would have been satisfying, too; his character arc isn't difficult to guess at fairly early on. It would have been more fun to show more of him and his internal conflict so we understood him better. Endless Ocean was terrible to playtest, but sort of a neat game. One thing about playtesting; at least back in 2008, if you were playtesting anything with wifi, you were playtesting in a 12-man Farraday cage. You can imagine how hot it gets in a copper box when you have 12 human beings + 12 consoles/TVs/computers/etc. Not awesome. EO was one of my nightmares... MillionHeir was easily the worst, though, if only because it kept breaking and then it'd go back to the third party, and you knew it was coming back, and you couldn't help but wonder how a find-it-on-a-jpg game could be so hard to put together. Animal Crossing was actually another game I tested that ended up being a major bore - most of it was grinding to unlock rare text, and I swear we were on that game for close to 6 months. Oddly, the random WiiWare games we tested were some of the best projects. Puzzle games have more replayability than most, and those projects tended to run short - 3 or 4 weeks - so it never felt like it dragged on too badly. Once you cross that 4-week threshold, anything can start to become a bear. Radiant Dawn being my one exception, naturally.

The wife and I play on Midgardsormr. You can find me there - Jhedin Lanthor - although we haven't been super active lately with an infant running our lives! The current 4.3 content is in a lull anyway, especially since they doubled-down on making Eureka horrible, so we'll likely be back more frequently in 4.4.

Goodness, enjoy yourself. FF6 is my all-time favorite game, I think, having played it when it came out and no other game at the time being so big and so epic. It's the bar all other RPGs have measured themselves against since. It's an icon, a legend. As others have mentioned, the difficulty overall is fairly low, although it bumps up here and there. The second half of the game is surprisingly open-world, so be prepared for that - losing the linear structure is a bit of a shock and the game is not super obvious about where you should be going next. Also, for future reference, you can manipulate character levels a fair bit by grinding Terra a bunch before she meets Locke - at that point in the game, each character you gain will be +1 level from your highest level character. I usually grind Terra until the levels where she has 136 or 160 HP, and all of your subsequent characters will get those gains for free. This matters, since xp is divided in a full party (i.e. Terra gets 42 xp for 2 vaporites, but Terra + Locke would get 21 xp). This technique ends up lowering the difficulty even more since the gains you get will continue to pay forward through the first half of the game. But really, just enjoy yourself. It's an amazing game, with tons and tons of story, and lots of minor character bits that are off the beaten path. For example, when you get into the second half of the game (you'll know), you can learn more about a certain masked character's background through his dreams by sleeping at every inn with him in your group. I'm really hoping I get my kids to love older games like FF6 and appreciate them :)

I always always always put Edward + Nolan together as a support. They get a modest def/hit/avd boost that really gets them going, and they generally carry me through. You need to baby Edward a bit early on, but as he gets rolling, he gets very strong and very hard to hit. The only real issue there is if you get "lucky" with too many early STR gains, and he'll start killing everything and get himself killed as a result. No matter how hard I try otherwise, Edward almost always ends up my best myrmidon in the game. I keep him tied to Nolan and they both end up doing very well all the way to endgame. Abuse Micaiah's Sacrifice so that even if only one character needs healing, both Micaiah and Laura can get xp. Aran is solidly OK. Meg does okay if you baby her along awhile, but really, my core group is always Edward/Nolan/Leonardo/Aran, and then Jill once I get her. Sothe and Zihark can help fill gaps if needed, and you can throw Paragon on one of them later to help mitigate their low exp gains. If you played Path of Radiance and have a save to transfer, it goes a long way to have some stat transfers on Ilyana. She's otherwise solid like Aran, but like Aran, you're unlikely to use her later in the game. Same is true (on stat transfers) on any Part 1 or Part 2 character, really.

Thanks for the warm welcome, folks. Believe it or not - game testing is not as awesome as you'd think, although it's definitely not an experience I regret. That said, the gaming industry suffers greatly from overuse of temporary contractors, which suppresses stability + wages. That said, it was a good "in-between jobs" job as a younger person, and I made friends there that I've kept to this day. I was luckier than most, getting to test a handful of games I genuinely enjoy (such as RD), but the majority of games are games you haven't heard of or don't want to play for 8 hours a day for 2-3 months (among less desirables I tested were Endless Ocean and Millionheir). Fun testing story, though - playing the same game for 8 hours a day (or more) for weeks/months on end kinda gets into some loopy humor, so we made the "Ike Song" in a bored moment, which largely was just repeating "Ike Ike Ike Ike" over and over. In honor of it being a sequel, though, we decided it was more fitting for it to go "Ike Ike this is the remix Ike Ike Ike"... good times. @grinus I have tinkered with the English translation of Bahamut Lagoon; I would have probably enjoyed it more when it was a more "current" game; it's hard to play retro stuff nowadays, but I try sometimes. I agree that the "parts" of RD are a bit... well, it sometimes staggers the story some in a negative way. That said, I do like how it makes the narrative function. In PoR, you beat Daein - then you begin RD sort of in the aftermath of that, fighting for Daein, which is a nice inversion. Part 2 is the most bleh to me - like a throw-in to reintroduce the Crimeans, but really not enough missions to really do much with them. I wish they could have fleshed that bit out again; the lack of exposure makes it very hard to actually use the Crimeans in Part 4 without babying some of them up. Part 3 annoys me in that it jumps between all three groups, but from a narrative standpoint, I love that it actually pits you against your other teams. That's really uncommon. The downside is just that the Daein missions in Part 3 are largely "catch-up leveling" missions and not super engaging, and it's hard to go back to a barely-promoted team after rolling the Greil Mercenaries for awhile. I actually rather like Part 1 overall. It's interesting to hear people say the Tellius series is highly polished - I'd always heard in places that the Tellius series is a bit of a series stepchild because it didn't perform well in Japan, but maybe I'm mistaken. I do remember reading that the series was almost shuttered due to low sales until Awakening did really well, so I'm inclined to try that one out, but of course, I'll have to find them first and finish up my current PoR/RD playthrough. Working on an "ideal" PoR transfer file - beefing up and getting A-supports for Part 1/Part 2 characters to help round those chapters out.

Sothe. Micaiah's easy enough to level with Sacrifices + some timely Thani barrages in Part I. Sothe has an uphill climb, though, and doubling his exp from Stealing (of which there is a ton in Part I you can do) pays off nicely. I figure I'm stuck with him for so long and the Daein chapters in Part 3 are such a pain, I might as well make him useful.