Samias

People are often down on Palla's refine because she retains having a TA weapon, but honestly there's so many threatening, tanky greens running around and the brave effect on initiation without a speed dump makes her an extremely valuable part of my flier team comp. She can run Fury and a multitude of B skills (currently I have Escape Route), your pick of flier buff, and I stuck a Brazen Atk/Def seal in her seal slot, making her a potent threat once Fury wittles her health down while she enjoys +6 to str/speed/def/res in combat when parked near other fliers, on top of a ward, goad, fortify and/or hone. She was a key part of my strategy for clearing Abyssal Michalis and Abyssal Narcian. If I'm not running Flier Emblem, I have other red fliers who are more flexible like Summer Tana, Laegjarn or Elincia, but Palla's Whitewing Blade has put a smile on my face thus far. Cecilia is also a great budget unit to invest in for Aether Raids. She has solid counterpick potential in running TA Gronnraven against some of the more common blues and colourless ranged units. Young Azura as others have said is one of the most reliable dancers in the game. Her res and speed when parked with an ally is actually solid. Probably one of the best free units IS has given out. Any healer who runs Dazzling Pain+ or Gravity+ and double savage blow is a great asset. I honestly believe everyone should build at least one. Azama may have one of the worst attack stats in the game but he can run the standard healer harrassment build.

I managed to clear the Infernal with some no-merge, mostly accessible units (my Veronica was pulled for and therefore not neutral IVs). Cavalry are awesome. 5* Ares: -Atk +Res (lol), Dark Mystletainn, Reposition, Draconic Aura, Brazen Atk/Def 3, Vantage 3, Hone Cavalry, Quickened Pulse seal (S rank Cecilia) 5* Cecilia: +Spd -Def, Gronnraven+, Shove, Iceberg, Triangle Adept 3, Bowbreaker 3, Ward Cavalry, Spd/Def 1 seal (S rank Ares) 5* Veronica: +Spd -HP, Prf weapon, Recover+, Windfire Balm+, Atk/Res 1, Wrathful Staff 3, Ward Cavalry, Live to Serve 1 seal 5* Young Azura: Neutral, Book of Shadows, Sing, Glacies, Spd/Res Bond 3, Wings of Mercy 2, Drive Spd 2, Drive Spd 1 seal The general idea was to get Cecilia to deal with all the colourless and lance units with her powerful TA Gronnraven set (Klein especially is demolished by this), while reds and greens were dealt with by Veronica and Ares. If I had Goad cavalry to use, it would have been better on Ares than Hone, and honestly I don't think Vantage did much for me either. Veronica dealt exceptional chip damage while buffing everyone, Ares tanked enough damage with his physical bulk while hitting back hard with constant special triggers, and with Wings of Mercy, Azura could eventually follow around to refresh, and at the end she actually dealt with the final red armor with her pretty strong damage of her own. Veronica also did just enough healing to keep herself healthy too as she tanks a couple hits to keep Cecilia safe. TA Gronnraven Cecilia was a really good investment.

There was always something about the way she did her traditional inks that was really eye catching. Her line weight and posing was always so spot on for these. Honestly, Thracia is such a huge turning point for the series' look and the first time I think Fire Emblem had some seriously good art. Very sad that Kaga wasn't able to collaborate with her again after their time with Tirnanog, nor did IS seem to ever want her to come back for anything.

Late reply here. Yeah, things are definitely tougher. I've so far managed to clear Suzaku EX, and Omega 9 and 10 and progging 11 now, but I don't think our 10 clear was that consistent. I also did some of the new Shifting Canals of Uznair which is a LOT of fun! Crazy RNG fun times were had.

I was feeling this after all the chapters 1s, as they are all pretty slow paced. It got better from there. Ophilia's a decent character to have locked to your team, as I too wasn't aware you couldn't swap them out til you were done with all 4 of their chapters. Once you pick up subjobs, the scholar one in particular, she'll be able to take on a good offensive presence beyond healing.

PAX Aus isn't until late October and Soul Calibur 6 will be out by then, it's more likely that a trailer is going to drop at PAX West (Seattle) sometime this weekend.

My big goal for the raid tier, complete. I've been working with mostly the same roster of people over the course of a month to get the clear. This is the first time I've finished a whole raid wing while the gear was still relevant. Ever since the 4.2 trailer dropped, I wanted to do this so badly and I'm glad I scrounged up the time and the bravery to join up with a random crew.

That is what I mean. If they announced Tira after the rest of the roster, after launch with other characters, there wouldn't be as many complaints. It would have come across as "this game has support into the future" rather than "content is being withheld from me right now". It's not as if the game is as unfinished as SFV, as table shaking as SC5, or as niche as the many anime fighters out there. If only Namco had more faith in their own product like they did with DBFZ.

Oh, I know fighting games are one of the harder genres to turn a profit in. Sustaining interest by churning out DLC content is something important to them, especially since doing updated rereleases has never been the norm for Namco, whereas Capcom and ArcSys are way more likely to put "Old game +1" out on the market to recapture costs. However no one ever put a gun to their head and said they have to have super high-end physics (Street Fighter and Injustice sure don't, and Smash Bros, DBFZ and Guilty Gear are stylized out the wazoo) and go as high poly as they have. Obviously the market responded poorly to Marvel vs Capcom Infinite being so poor quality and low on characters, but we already know SC6 will not be that bad. SC5 was their own misstep by deciding to redo nearly the entire cast WHILE rushing the game out the door, instead of doing iterative work with old characters. Tira being DLC is totally fine. She's a more recent character and doesn't quite slot in to the time period this game is set in. Just I doubt her, or Eliza for Tekken, makes such a huge difference in driving day 1 sales vs the game itself being good. Tekken 7 already had built its rep in Japanese arcades and the US market was thirsty for the series to return, just like fans are thirsty for SC now. They could have teased her closer to the game launch with the full roster reveal, and say "She's part of the season pass with x characters, coming on y day!" and you'd still have people clamouring for the season pass (never mind that season passes are also scummy but it's basically the DLC preorder service minus transparency). I actually think the KI model is very interesting where you pay only for the characters you want to play. It's a very well made game and it's a shame it isn't more popular. If it hadn't been XBox exclusive for such a long time, it possibly could have done better, but we'll never know. Still, we know from BlazBlue that it's very hard to spin "a large portion of the cast will be DLC" before launch in a positive way. People just think you're cheating them out of content. SC6 isn't anywhere near that bad, being entirely new content, but sitting on announcements could have been in Namco's favour.

Game sales are also higher than ever and games don't have to cost more to produce. If a game has to include Day 1 DLC to make a profit, they've allocated their funds poorly. Most of the games that have made the most money in the past year have either limited/no DLC (God of War, Mario Odyssey, Monster Hunter World), or are low barrier to entry/free-to-play with microtransactions (PUBG, Fortnite, League of Legends, mobile gaming) I'm in the animation industry. You allocate your budget from the start. DLC is just a strategy to make more profit, it isn't what is going to be the difference maker between profitable and non-profitable. DLC is not bad, and in fact can add a lot of mileage to a game, but day 1 DLC is pure preorder marketing, something this game arguably didn't need considering how much goodwill they were already getting from bringing back fan favourite characters, plus the guest character. Look at how well Dragon Ball FighterZ did without any day 1 DLC. They had preorder-based early unlocks for the SSGSS characters, and the game is far and away the best selling fighting game of the current console gen because quality speaks for itself.

I think the climate of people's attitudes towards day 1 DLC in fighting games has gotten significantly worse since Street Fighter x Tekken had DLC literally on-disc. And then in the past couple years you had the extremely half baked starting roster for Street Fighter V and extremely large numbers of DLC characters in a thin starting roster for BlazBlue Tag Battle, including the initial reveal that the RWBY characters were all going to be locked behind DLC (initially paid, eventually turned free). Also we haven't even seen the whole starting roster for SC6 yet so it's just bad taste to already be advertising DLC when you haven't even seen the whole base product yet. Remember for people who want to lab match-ups for tourney purposes, this basically makes these purchases mandatory, bumping up an already-full-price game even higher. Especially so if that character is your main from a previous game, locked behind a paywall. BBTag is one of the few games not at normal AAA price, but it's also the game with the most reused assets of all current gen fighting games. I think SC6 still looks really good compared to 5, especially with the return of the original characters instead of their idea of trying to replace everyone all at once. I don't think the DLC thing is going to impact the game's sales. Just I don't blame people for whining at bad practices. Just because every company does it doesn't mean it's good.

Not having an Ivy alt makes me feel super bummed. I've always liked her alts way better than her standard outfit considering they were usually actually clothes.

The gacha crystals are definitely the worst part, but pity pulls do mean you'll get a few. Plus one of the non-RNG freebies you get in the early mid-game is one of the best of the bunch too. I wouldn't worry too much about it. The game really sinks its hooks in once you get past a little clumsy map design early on. Don't be ashamed if you feel lost. I think everyone did.

I'm looking forward to the upcoming skeleton army, to be honest.

Sinnoh's surf speed is absolutely indefensible. Same with the slowly depleting HP bars and rising exp bars. Gen 4 had a terrible game engine even though the world design is interesting in concept. Other than gen 1 being a cluster of terrible game mechanics and glitches, gen 4 is probably the least playable gen at this point, as much as I love the games.

Too much water is definitely a meme, but I still think the reviewer in question had some good points, for one major reason: It's too faithful to the original RS with extremely bland Pokemon all over the place. This was a problem with games all the way up to gen 5, but the water represents the terrible repetition present throughout the entire game. 1. A water rich region's wild encounters is overwhelmingly represented by Wingull and Tentacool. Even though wailmer and luvdisc are common with a rod, and could have easily been used to spice up the encounters. As it stands, there's no way you don't just repel over the oceans. Because Wingull can't even be contained by water alone, Wingull's line appears in 31 areas, though some of them are ponds in cities that you generally wouldn't check. 2. On land, you're basically seeing zigzagoon and linoone line in the majority of grass patches. The Zigzagoon line is present on 8 land routes. 3. Gen 1 staples like the Abra line, Geodude line, Machop line, and Zubat line also appear a lot. This is a problem in every game but in a game with a particularly limited pre-National dex Pokedex like ORAS, it pushes a lot of the new guys out of the way. 4. Finding Sootopolis isn't so bad, but the signposting to find the Team Aqua base is rather poor. It's been made better, but in RS this was one of the easiest places to get lost, leaving you sweeping the ocean trenches for a sign of where to go. Cue more wasted repels or excessive amounts of samey encounters. 5. The Elite 4 reuses Pokemon of the same line multiple times. In RS, Glacia still had Sealeos! Now she just has... double glalies and double froslass and a walrein. Yay. Phoebe has two banettes, a dusclops, and a dusknoir. These teams are just yikes. There's just a lot of design decisions here that the devs consciously chose to not change. Which is a shame because there's a lot of good QOL changes like the Dexnav and additions of mega evolutions and split evos from gen 4, but they didn't even decide to take some of the Emerald changes to spice up the Pokedex even a little bit. The game definitely gets better in its post-game with the addition of Mirage spots and Delta episode, but it isn't the huge upgrade to RSE than FRLG is to gen 1, or HGSS is to gen 2 games either. Something about the changes made is very underwhelming, knowing what resources are available to them now.

I'm actually a big fan of the limited interaction. It's so easy for a story to go too far; Just look at Golden Sun: Dark Dawn where all 8 characters seemingly had to chime in about everything, plus any side NPCs around. The other characters had little to contribute to the overall story and it just became a bunch of "kids react" moments. Obviously a game can be better written than that, but I think it's a huge problem of the jRPG genre (and anime and manga as well) where you just write dialogue to explain every little thing and have a reaction shot just to tell the audience how they should feel. I liked the travel banter and I especially liked the post game ones that started to occur outside the stories, but I'm glad the game stayed focused on one character for each path. Alfyn and Olberic were especially stand-outs to me, with Alfyn having a purpose but no direction, and Olberic almost being his opposite.

All Path Spoilers, tying stories together - BIG SPOILERS

I'm so bad at Rathalos EX... I'm usually relegated as healer and I get hit once and I'm pretty much dead. Boy does he hurt if you aren't on top of things. Not helping is all my friends eating a loooot of damage in phase one. Big oofs. There's a team of four dragoons who managed to down the thing so maybe one of these days we will get good... maybe. https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/50d73607cbd2e026586c2ddd7bd6a163d1e3120e Also hey one of my designs made the shortlist for this. Cool.

Scrutinize's biggest advantage is that it's not level dependent, and some NPCs have extremely high requirements before you can Inquire. Generally speaking NPCs with low rates tend to have some kind of bonus but I do kinda hate how binary it is versus the other Path actions.

Two entries for FFXIV's armor design contest. The first one was accepted into the finalist shortlist! Which is kinda funny because I was away on vacation for nearly the whole contest, spent the majority of my time on the rejected one, and then rushed the accepted one in a hazy jetlagged all-nighter just before the deadline. Just goes to show a memorable design =/= time spent rendering or colouring.

Astaroth looks absolutely brutal. What a beast. Seong Mi-na getting an overhaul to make her different from Kilik also looks like a good choice. Even though she's the OG over him it always sucked that she was stuck with the moniker of "Kilik but worse" for so long. I guess as far as reveals go I'm mostly hoping for Cervantes, Raphael and Setsuka the most at this point. I also wouldn't mind Cassandra but at the same time Sophitia is already there. I know a lot of people are also hoping for Hwang and Hilde. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw at least one more newcomer though.

After beating all 8 stories, postgame spoilers