Jotari

What I like about Musar is that he actually has holy blood. Minor Forseti. This is almost certainly so he has the weapon rank to wield his Tornado tome, but it's fun to think of the story implications. Is he from Silesse? Is he a bastard brother of Lewyn? We know for sure he's not Lewyn's cousin, at least of the same generation, as neither of Lewyn's uncles have holy blood. Unless there was an unmentioned sister or something that got shipped off to be married in Grannvale. We later see some falcon knights with minor Forseti blood too, for less clear reasons, probably to give them more speed or something. EDIT: I see two other people have already commented on Musar's blood purity before me. But I'll have you know I actually had my full comment about him written out before either of you guys posted. I just had to cycle to the train station immediately before I could finish writing about Arion. Arion can certainly be a pain to deal with. One solution is to actually just not fight him and seize his castle from beneath him. And if I were on charge of things I would have made that the suggested goal, with him only surviving to reach the final chapter if you don't kill him here. Because I agree that the Julius rescue is a bit nonsensical.

Well, none of the villages in any of the chapters are marked on the intro map, only the castles are (at least in Genealogy, we get some more names in 776). And they are the ones that don't have accurate placement in relation to coastlines, or even each other.

Yeah, while it's really cool that you can put the Genealogy maps together and they make the recognizeable shape of the Jugdral continent....much less care was taken to ensure any of the castle positions reflect where they actually are in the gameplay maps. Because the spot you marked on that map corresponds to here in Chapter 7 Which...yeah, those clumps of villages are definitely not. Hell Melgen and Ulster are practically on the same line of latitude yet on the intro chapter map Ulster is quite a bit to the north. I wonder if Kaga came up with his world map first and then tried to design the chapters around that map and had to make compromises for the sake of gameplay, or if it was all gameplay first and someone just really half assed their job of designing the intro map. Funny enough, that would place you directly in the middle of a 200 year period where Valentia was dealing with a mysterious pirate nation that resulted in the dual monarchies getting the blond bond with Mila and Duma. Though I think the official Valentian timeline says the pirate nation was related to the predecessors of the Macedonians. I would absolutely love if they went to the bother of naming the parents of everyone in the first gen purely for the Augary. So many Holy Blood Nobles with only theoretically existing wives. Oh god, Hannibal must have had parents. TELL ME WHO THEY ARE MAGIC MAN!

Yeah, and if my suggestion of a parent-child money transfer idea is to be in effect, then Sharlow would naturally be entitled to get that too. Especially if they use my other idea which is to make Sharlow Hannibal's actual son. What? You really think I was going to talk about another sub and not shill that thread XD

Yeah, I should have said he's better than Hannibal, at the very least. But I think his chip healing and instant warping capabilities puts him at more useful than a lot of the substitute units and eugenics units with substitute levels of pairing quality. I guess, I could say, if one were to do an "all subs except Sylvia" run then he'd be of middling quality of contribution to the remaining two maps. Though Sharlow would still be better as innate paragon and berserk are pretty great for the unit late game healer Est is trying to be.

Hot take. Coirpre is not that bad. In fact, I'd say he's more useful than Hannibal. Sure, he's a level 1 staff bot more than half way through the generation. But really, what are you expecting to do with him? He has A rank staves, he can use any staff you want (except variable Valkyrie), his stats basically don't matter. You don't need another combat unit. He's pure staffbot/10. If you had to grind his weapon ranks then yes, absolutely that would be horrible. But from the moment he's out the gate, he's good to go. Sure, he won't heal as much as Ced or Lana because his magic will probably be a lot lower than theirs, but he'll heal enough to get you out of a tight spot when you need it with physic. And magic is completely irrelevant for Warp and Return. Besides, most of the time you'll be having him use mend from inside the home castle anyway to heal up people who have failed an arena run. That's a function. And if you're going for a rank, even without paragon, having staff at all if much more useful for grinding out levels. Of course, with no Arena potential, he'll run out of money fast abusing Warps and Returns, so what he really needs is a special relationship with Hannibal where there's one way Parent to Child money transfer (and give it to Finn->Leif and Oifey/Shannon->Seliph too, maybe). That would give Hannibal more of a purpose too, as you can have him go through the Arena to raise money for Coirpre.

I think they might have meant that it's closer to Ulster. Leif's city of Leinster is up on the northern coast of North Thracia. While Ulster, the city you first fight Bloom in, is the south western part. And the whole region is called Munster District and not Leinster. So unless the map looked something like this. Which would give way too much territory to Leinster, unless it's pushed up right to the coast. There also doesn't seem to be a way to give the titular Munster much territory, thanks to Thracia getting that east coast that is only accessible from right beside Munster.

It'd be nice if that could lead us in to getting Pig Beast Ganon as a playable character.

Infantry units also tend to more frequently have movement stars and more of them. Which is a kind of fun trade off. A horse can go twice as far but someone on foot can get lucky and do twice as much. Of course movement stars are not classed based so there are some infantry with 0 and a handful of cavalry with 1 (I don't think there are any cavalry with more than 1, though flying man Deen has a few, but see what someone said earlier about fliers always being great).

This is a slight retcon here. That cluster of villages is actually an important area in Thracia 776, and South Thracia only gains control of it during that game. So by "last war" he really means "a conflict that happened last year and has pretty direct continuation with the war that's happening now". Hmm. I wonder who those three mercenaries are that are just chilling in this area. Well, they're no one, of course. But it would have been really cool if Thracia 776 introduced a trio of mercenaries with two guys wielding flame swords and a woman with a bolting sword leading them. Course, as I pointed out, only 1 actual boss with a name from the last chapter was used. They'd hardly use a nameless character like that and expand it into a bigger role...that being said, it is in these villages where you can meet Shannam in Genealogy, who they made a whole playable character out of in Thracia. His niche is bringing the only Berserk staff in the game. Which is a really fun weapon to mess around with, though not super useful with its only 1 durability. Yeah...Arion is...not well written. I made a thread once analyzing every single one of his lines trying to figure out what he wants and why he does anything that he does and it's just kind of nonsense. Chapter 9 has some of the most contrived writing in the game and in a technical literary sense is probably the worst chapter, but I still really like it, because I a simp for dragons. We get to see him being nice and fatherly to her in Thracia 776, which is cool...doesn't exactly help Genealogy as it's own piece of media though. And that line "Second time in as many days" gives us some more weird Genealogy time. So, the capture of Munster was literally yesterday, and Seliph has had enough time to march south and conquer Meath and get a good start on Kathapoca (or whatever it is). I can only conclude that the climactic final chapters of Thracia 776 happen at like 5am and it's now 11pm the following day when Altena returns to Travant. What happens if you don't kill him? Can you make him go green? It's not a terrible explanation, but is it in the game? For that to work you'd need to show Arion as spouting more of the rethoric Travant used and like he actually beleievs any of that stuff. But what we do have is him being almost entirely a yes-man with a dab of incest.

I wouldn't call it gatekeeping to expect someone to have actually experienced the thing they're expressing an opinion about. The gate is wide open in that case, the person is just refusing to walk through because they've already made up their mind. A particularly salient example for us would be the 90s panic about video games being violent and corrupting the minds of the youth, expressed by people who had never played a game in their life. It's like the literal etymology of prejudice.

Well I can say that I hope you're right. I don't want them to give us full alt banners. I would much prefer it be as you say. It's just not at all what I expect. I'd also dispute that adrift is really what I'm claiming. Adrift was its own thing. More like a seasonal on a main heroes banner, not really taking anything from the game outside the vaguest sense. I've already said they can cycle three different outfits for Fodlan characters. For Sacred Stones and Awakening the first tier units have alternate promotion options to make use of. And Shadows of Valentia has Overclasses to make use of.

For Binding Blade I suggest you just play the fangame that has that all done for you already, with some genuinely good writing to boot For the other two GBA Games there's a wonderfully useable program that makes modding as easy as something like rpg maker The creator of the program is pretty active on discord and very helpful with people who go there with problems. The other games don't have as robust a hacking scene, but software is out there for modding them. I don't have the experience to recommend anything specific though.

And might very well be eligible for monthly New Heroes Banners. Oh they might rename it something else like "Renewed Heroes" or "Revisited Heroes" or something, but they really have little to no motivation to stop doing the regular monthly banner thing for games that sell. It's abundantly clear that getting all of the playable characters in the game long term is not their priority. What they want is to sell banners each month, now, for money. Consider this, the game runs for another five years. In that time Valentia, Blazing Blade, Sacred Stones, Awakening, Fates and Fodlan are all finished and Binding Blade only has one banner left. Are they really going to give us a five month rotation of Archanea, Genealogy, Thracia, Tellius and Engage? I'd love it they would, don't get be wrong, but no. They are not going to give us four Jugdral New Heroes banners in one year, ever. But what if they do, fewer games means the banners will reduce faster. Right now a game gets about 8 new characters every three years. If we're down to a six month banner rotation because games are finished then we're at a place where suddenly games are getting the, if not more, in a single year. They go through every game that's present and then a new title is released. Would they give us that singular game every single month for New Heroes? And just deny the new release seasonals or mythics or legendaries entirely because all those slots now have to be filled up to cater to the completed backlog? It's just not feasible. Of course it's unlikely the game will last another ten years, player numbers are dropping and the game will probably shut down within the next five or so. And until then they'll do what they've been doing since the start. They'll shill alts. It's what they've always done. It's why we now have these attuned and rearmed and whatever the flavour of the month gimmick hero is. Nothing about the philosophy of how they've marketed this game suggests they'll do anything other than shill alts the game finally finishes.

Why do you think Caeda was so slow to marry him during the three year time skip between games?

One time in the series I can say Skill was pretty meaningful to me was in Shadows of Valentia. Specifically for the Tigerstance combat art which adds skill to strength for one attack. That resulted in a very powerful attack that, while not as dominant as the likes of Double Lion or Huntersvolley, was still a pretty nifty skill for securing KOs where you wouldn't otherwise. Yet, because it's not quite as good as those skills, there were some enemies whoose HP was high enough that if would only just fail to kill, and a few points of strength or skill more in combination could make the difference.

None of that is from a game literally running out of characters. Even TMS, as relatively small a cast as it is, hasn't stopped getting banners because it's been exhausted. It's stopped getting banners either because of legal issues or because it was only a cash grab tie in with a new release at the time that they never intended to take seriously. We have no titles where the playable and major NPCs cast are all in the game. And if or when we get to that point, I don't see them completely dropping one of their more profitable titles to make room for their less profitable titles. At best we'll see them become slightly rarer (which is what they should have been doing for years now).

I don't see that difference as a meaningful difference. If the growth units turned out bad after training them then sure, there's an argument that there's no reason to invest in Leonardo or Rolf. But the result of investing in them is a genuinely good unit you can feel acomplished turning from a zero to a hero. So where's the issue? Use Shinon if you want. Use Rolf if you want, it'll be a little harder, but if you enjoy doing it then go for it. The game has 70 characters for you to choose that are different in their own unique ways.

Oh boy, oh boy do I have a rant incoming for you. I was even planning on making this a thread myself entitled "My least favourite Fire Embelm character(s)." Because I absolutely hate the existence of Georg and Kaim. To which your reaction is probably "Who?" Well, it's these guys. Not a bad design, huh? Well, why do I dislike them so much? Ya see, I'm a pretty tolerant guy when it comes to fictional characters. Even if a character is poorly written or a bad person in themselves, or even if the narrative is contriving itself to make something work, I can appreciate what the writers are trying to do. But none of that tolerance applies to Georg or Kaim, because they are actively making the story worse with their existence. So who are they? Well you probably recognize them if you open the spoiler tab, these are the bosses of the chapters Valours Roland and The Berserker from Blazing Blade, wherein Eliwood and Hector go looking for the sacred weapons a meet the ghosts of Roland and Durban. Georg and Kaim are also Ghosts, summoned by the spirits of Roland or Durban to fight the heroes. And that's it. That's all they are. Their battle quotes say nothing of value about them and their info screen has nothing of interest about them. You know who they should have been? Actually Roland and Durban themself! It would have been way more memorable to fight the two legendary Heroes. Instead we meet them without fighting them and fight these nobodies instead. But, okay, okay, let's give them some grace. Maybe Roland and Durban are just too epic to have stats and be fought. Sure Athos is another legend who we outright get as a playable, but he's old. Ghosts are, uh, properly stronger than old guys? I don't buy that, but I'll pretend I do to give the idea some credit. Roland and Durban can't be fought because it gives them an air of mystique. Fine. But that doesn't mean We deserve freaking Georg and Kaim. It's take a generic hero and berserker over Georg and Kaim. Because they are less than nothing. They ruin the potential of fighting Durban and Roland, and they ruin the potential of fighting an interesting replacement too. And that's because the two guys look and act identically, which is in a way that exhibits no personality at all. Even the Thracia 776 bosses who have no dialogue and are never alluded to in the story are better than these guys, because at least for them we can extrapolate from context why they're fighting in the battle and where they're from. But these two guys don't even get that. They're just warriors from long ago. If it were one character, then that would be an idea I can get behind. If we only hat Georg or Kaim, fought regardless of which route you take, then it'd be this specific hero from the Scouring. A ninth member of the legends if you will, who never got a Divine Weapon and the recognition of the others, but nonetheless fought alongside them and was so meaningful his soul persisted beyond death in service to them. That's fine. That's cool....but the fact that there's two of them with an identical palette swapped design ruins that for me. And it's not a bad design, but it's one that exudes zero charisma. It's not some specific guy. It's two indistinguishable guys with the same nothing personality. The only way they can possibly salavaged as characters is if they give us a game set during the scouring and these two are revealed to basically be Dolph and Macellan.

Why use them? Because you want to (or the other unit's been killed). It's not like Path of Radiance lacks this either. Why use Lucia when you can use Stefan? He literally joins half a game earlier with every relevant stat being higher. Geoffrey will probably be on par with any paladin you've trained throughout the game. On the opposite side Bastian and Callil will suck compared to mage you've trained throughout the game because they had the genius idea to give Sages knives. Why use any of these unit? The answer is because you want to. Every Fire Emblem game has a disparity between characters and I don't see that as a bad thing. And insofar as this can be considered a problem, it's one where Path of Radiance has it just as bad if not worse than Radiant Dawn (refer back to horses).

Oh contrare, we are all very much generics. 99.9% of people are generics. There's just a fucktonne more people in real life than fiction, so that last 0.01% of people that make it into the historybooks do it in the hundreds of thousands. Well from the literary perspective, that woman putting a rift between him and his adopted father using her dastardly feminine wiles is certainly one of the most memorable and fun parts of the book. Not sure how well Dynsaty Warriors handles that as a plot point though since it's kind of not battle based. It'd all have to be basically intro chapter narration.

Anything they do for a completed game is going to be unprecedented. We won't get to see what they do until they do it (if they get a chance). But what I don't think they'll do is give fewer Awakening banners per cycle.

I say yes, but give us a low capacity skill that extends Weapon Triangle to two range in a Tellius style skill system. That way you can build a specific unit to hit lances with a hand axe via favouritism.

When I read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, I was a bit surprised with how little a role Lu Bu plays in the whole thing. He's basically killed just before the actual Three Kingdoms are properly established. At least as far as I can recall. It was a pretty dense book with far too many names (and that was only the Abridged Version!).

I don't think they'll boot any game from the New Heroes rotation. I personally wouldn't mind if they did, as I'm more inclined to Archanea, Jugdral and Tellius as a fan, but I don't reasonably expect them to abandon the other titles once they're complete, especially since they're some of the more popular titles in the franchise. On that subject, next month will be our Fallen Heroes banner. After that, the games that have gone longest without a banner are Tellius, Sacred Stones and Fodlan, so we can expect one of them with a reasonable degree of certainty. Sacred Stones and Fodlan are sitting at 8 and 12 remaining playable characters each, so it'll be interesting to see what they do with either of them should they show up (Fodlan, at least, has the advantage most other games don't in that they can literally give us the entire playable cast three times over in different costumes).