Xandest

I thought you didn’t go into any memo, just hit the L button. Are you sure you’re hitting L and not ZL? I get those confused all the time.

Byleth seems like mid-twenties to me. I think Jeralt’s in his late forties if he’s already no longer a knight of Seiros despite being a legendary figure. Male Byleth seems older than Female Byleth too, which is a bit tough to square.

GoT spoilers

Just came up with a potentially interesting connection between Marianne's name and Edelgard. The 4th Famitsu article shows that Marianne and Edelgard have the same crest (see link). https://serenesforest.net/2019/06/19/three-houses-4th-famitsu-article-nightcrawlers-tea-parties-offerings-saints/ Spoiler for King Lear below:

Between the insane amount of customization and the likelihood that the story changes depending on the house you pick, I’m not too worried about repeatability. im excited for a small cast. I tend to use few characters anyways to save exp and because I usually reset on permadeath.

So I know this is a bit of a reach bump-wise, but I thought people might be interested in a summary of what people's thoughts were as of a few weeks ago. For this summary, I included my own rankings of the characters and any rankings that were posted here that I thought would easily be averaged. For this summary, I just used the raw order people listed the characters in. I excluded anyone who either (1) excluded multiple characters (2) left an "everyone else" ranking, or (3) sorted within tiers by house or alphabetical order (didn't want any pro-Black Eagles, anti-Golden Deer bias or Annette and Ashe appearing too high on lists). I included rankings that excluded or forgot a single character -- at the time, not much was known about Marianne. I listed excluded characters as 13th out of 24 so they wouldn't be huge outliers in the full list. All in all, I averaged 21 rankings. Here they are below: S Tier: Average rank between 6 and 7: Claude, Ashe, Felix A Tier: Average rank between 7 and 9: Edelgard, Dimitri, Sylvain, Mercedes B Tier: Average rank between 9 and 13: Ingrid, Petra, Lysithea, Dorothea, Dedue, Ferdinand, Marianne C tier: Average rank between 14 and 16: Bernadetta, Hubert, Leonie, Annette D Tier: Average rank between 16 and 18: Caspar, Hilda, Linhardt E Tier: Average rank between 20 and 21: Raphael, Lorenz F Tier: Average rank of 22.8: Ignace Most Controversial Characters: Bernadetta, Caspar, Petra Least Controversial Characters: Ignace (lol), Raphael, Sylvain

I like this one too! I'm worried I might not like both of them -- Lorenz's personality probably won't be something I like, and bratty characters tend to get on my nerves. I'm hoping that their support focuses less on Lorenz "getting the girl" and more on him teaching her about his understanding of the importance of nobility, which I think is the far more interesting side of his personality. Caspar x Edelgard is one I'm surprised I haven't seen yet. I have high hopes for their support-- Caspar's sunny dedication to justice should play off Edelgard's "unreasonable ideas of justice" pretty well, I'm hoping. I think Hubert x Marianne would also work out well. I really think Hubert will shine in supports with people outside the Black Eagles house, and I think Marianne's general wholesomeness should contrast nicely with Hubert's cynicism. I also think both are solidly introverted without being Bernadetta-level shut-ins. I probably would only do it in a Golden Deer run, but I also think Raphael x Ingrid would be a fun one to try at one point. I think Ingrid marrying a commoner would probably be better for her from a narrative perspective given the proposal in her mission with Dorothea. Their bios so far are also kind of oddly similar? They're both blond, they both incredibly serious about their training to become a knight, and I guess for both of them "likes food" is a major character trait. He's probably more carefree and less intelligent than she is, but other than that... But OTP is in my profile pic.

--I think it's unlikely to happen, but I think it would be cool if the condition for unlocking the "second generation characters" was still supports, but not a marriage + kids route. Say we could gain access to Dimitri's sister if he gets an A support with Mercedes, Annette, or Ash, because those supports involve him realizing that a character flaw of his drove him and his sister apart. Or Raphael's been looking for his retainer for years and is able to find her due to information uncovered in his supports with Leonie and/or Claude. --A small cast, probably with fewer supports. Personally, I try to keep the number of characters I use pretty small and I try to tear through as many of their supports as I can in a single playthrough. I feel wasteful leaving so many units on the bench other than their recruitment chapters. Plus it would allow the team to focus more on things I prioritize, like story, gameplay, and supports. --I want the choice of house to matter beyond just the units you start with. Since it's not being marketed as three games at this point, I think the difference will be less in scope than Fates' choice was, but I'm optimistic the choice will matter somewhat. I bet we get some overlapping maps, and that makes sense, but I'd like to see different things each time I play through the game.

I think that’s actually something they said about Faerghus in one of the trailers. I’ve definitely been picturing it as snowy.

I think it’s possible she gets usurped, or someone kills her entire family while she’s at the Academy. An evil relative killing her parents and claiming the empire while she’s away would make for a powerful big bad, and explain why she might have to leave the Avatar to go into hiding. She mentions having to leave in the first trailer. Regarding Leicester, I think there’s a solid chance they were formed a few generations back in order to better check an Adrestian Empire that was gobbling up independent houses. I’ve mentioned this in a different thread, but the locations in the Leicester Alliance have some heavy King Lear theming, which I think fits this backstory.

I think what's going to happen is that you'll have to choose a path because the crests will fuel some evil power causing a unique problem in each of the lords' countries, and they'll have to leave Garreg Mach in order to fix the issues plaguing their countries. I think eventually you will collect most, if not all the students after you fix the problems most relevant to your lord. The Leicester Alliance has a pretty strong connection with the play King Lear, which makes me think that the story will either mirror King Lear or at the very least there will be some lore that justifies how many references there are to King Lear. There are regions called Edmund, Goneril, Riegan, Gloucester, and Ordelia, each of which has a pretty clear counterpart in the play. Also somewhat interestingly, Dimitri's last name (Bladud) is also the name of King Lear's father. More on him/Faerghus later. Anyways, I think there are a few ways they could go with Leicester being tied to King Lear. It's been a while since I had to read this for school, so maybe someone more familiar with the play could correct me where my memory isn't great. The first thing that came to mind was that the events of the game might mirror the events of King Lear. King Lear fails to properly secure his succession by prioritizing his manipulative daughters Regan and Goneril over the more pure-hearted Cordelia, who is unwilling to play his games in order to win a bigger inheritance. Regan and Goneril end up fighting over the inheritances they do get, and the country is tossed into war. It's interesting that Claude's family, in this situation, would be associated with one of the evil sisters rather than the "good' one of the play. This would be difficult to pull off given that there's a Leicester route, though given that you're probably teaching many of the potential rebels' children. I think what's more likely, though, is that the King Lear references aren't trying to hint at the plot of the current game, but rather how the Leicester Alliance was formed. This is where my memory of King Lear is somewhat fuzzy, but my recollection is that, after suffering heavy losses, the warring factions in Lear put aside their differences in order to fight a war against a much larger French force which has come to England in order to fight on behalf of Cordelia. I think she marries the French king or something? I'm not sure. Using King Lear as lore also feeds in to another one of my theories, which is that there used to be a fourth kingdom that the Adrestian Empire conquered, and the remnants of that fourth kingdom will have turned toward dark magic in an attempt to resurrect their kingdom and inflict punishment on the kingdoms which allowed for its destruction to happen. First off, the Japanese title of the game seems to evoke the four seasons, rather than three houses. Another thread discusses this in greater detail but basically there very well might have been a fourth house which would have a wind & summer theme. Look at these neat maps. The borders between the three houses tend to be designed around natural features -- there are rivers making up the Leicester/Adrestian and Faerghus/Adrestian borders, and also there are mountain ranges making up the Faerghus/Leicester, Faerghus/other continent, and Leicester/other continent borders. There's a big old mountain range going right through the middle of the Adrestian Empire, which seems like a pretty good place to divide up a kingdom. That is, until the fire nation Adrestian Empire attacked. Maybe this is just me, but I tend to think of empires as having colonies, or generally conquering other territories. Kingdoms and Alliances seem a lot less warlike than empires, and I think that's reflected in the Adrestian Empire having such a large portion of the map. I see a thousand-year dynasty not standing pat but instead expanding their borders where possible. I think this fourth kingdom was weak and maybe had something of value to the Adrestian Empire. I'm not sure what this means for the plot of the Adrestian Empire's route, but I'm getting the feeling it could be a situation where a relative of Edelgard's tries to steal the throne in a sort of Hamlet situation, and that new person may be manipulated by the power of the crests. This kind of leaves out the Kingdom of Faerghus. King Lear's father was a man by the name of Bladud, which is a nice coincidence because that's also Dimitri's last name. Bladud contracted leprosy, and a major part of his legacy is "learning to cure it" by watching pigs wallow in mud. We do see a sort of plague-doctor looking guy in one of the trailers, so maybe the Faerghus route involves preventing some sort of plague from spreading across Seiros. I'm guessing that the challenge Dimitri has to face revolve around curing some disease spread by the big bad. I see it playing out where the people who seem to have a cure to the disease are actually the ones causing it and using the disease as a way to rise in social status. This would cause them to gain followers in regions most heavily impacted by the disease.

There's an Eastern Church on the map of Fodlan, located east-northeast of Leicester. I agree that the clothes she's wearing look pretty similar to the knights of Seiros, so I think it's possible that she's a relative of Claude's who now holds an important position in the Eastern Church who you might interact more with if you choose his route.