Druplesnubb

Are there similar recruits on the other routes?

What's the reward then?

Mercedes is a Blue Lion.

So does Sylvain's paralogue never show up if you take the lance immediately?

I mean, some of them apparently require very specific cross-house recruits.

So what happens if you just take the Lance of Ruin immediately? Are you locked out of Sylvain's paralogue then?

You don't get it. I'm wondering what level you need Byleth to be in order to recruit them.

So at what level do the faculty members join? Do they all join at the same level or is there different requirements for each? Or is it a scaling thing where the level requirement increases with each new recruit? If you don't recruit them during the school phase, can you still recruit them during the war phase?

You can recruit everyone except Edelgard, Hubert, Dimitri and Claude. The only exception to this is that

Is it possible to turn Cyril into a Dancer?

There was some guy with an early copy on reddit that teased that you could recruit enemies after the timeskip. Anything more on that?

Speaking of which, would it be possible to datamine all the paralogues and their requirements?

SoV is less radical than it looks at first glance because so much of it is directly based on Gaiden. I'd say the biggest chnages are Combat Arts, Mila's Turnwheel and the expanded dungeons, the latter of which alone is admittedly enough to make SoV one of the more radical Fire Emblem games.

Why are people suddenly claiming that Fates is more radical than Three Houses? Fates' gameplay is almost a carbon copy of Awakening. I have a hard time thinking of a single feature besides minor things like My Castle and Dragon Veins that make it stand out. They added daggers, but Three Houses has fists so no difference there. The weapon triangle is somewhat different, but there has been a lot of diffrent kinds of weapon triangles throughout the series, like the weird magic-focused ones. Three Houses by comparison changes how you build your units, how you're introduced to your units, the number of units (compared to the length of the game), how magic works, how unlocking classes work, lets every class use most weapon types, adds battalions, adds a new skill system, and oh yeah, completely changes the gameplay flow of the entire game by tying it to the monastery and the calendar system (My castle in comparison was more like Awakening's barracks except you couldd walk around in it).

What about Monk?

I'm honestly having a hard time picking someone whose design I like less after the timeskip. Probably Caspar, who lost that plucky underdog charm. Maybe Mercedes too? Though in her case it's less a downgrade and more a complete switch in aesthetics. Byleth definitely looks worse but that actually happens before the timeskip. As for most improved, I would say Dimitri, Leonie, Dorothea, Lorenz, Ferdinand, Sylvain, Ingrid, Hubert and Ignatz, with special mention to Petra for that outfit change (man that was a long list). Claude looks amazing too of course but he was already amazing before so it's not that much of a change. Holy shit the character design in this game is great.

Correction: the split actually happens in the chapter just before the timeskip, not after.

You don't need the book to understand that though. Edelgard has the crest of Seiros, crests are passed on genetically, this isn't very hard to figure out.

Pre-Lorenz is more memeable.

Isn't that exactly what I said? The Noble outifts and the unique class outfits look really similar. Just look at Dimitri. I expect Edelgard's Armoured Lord outfit to look basically the same as her Noble outfit but with somewhat thicker armour. This is explicitly not the case. Look how Byleth's Enlightened One outfit doesn't look anything like how he appears in cutscenes and Garreg Mach.

The cape is part of her new Noble outfit, you can see it in one image of the Black Eagle meeting.

I'm fairly certain the outfit you see in the cutscenes is his new Noble outfit.

Well as far as I know Saint isn't an actual class in the game so I have no idea what Armchair General is talking about, but there are two ways to learn spells in the game. Leveling up your Reason/Faith and getting them from your class. The former should be available in all magic classes while the latter should only be for when you are in that specific class. A character can get a spell from a class that they can't get (or haven't unlocked yet) from Faith/Reason alone, and would then lose that spell if they switched classes.