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I like the small cast of characters we have so far


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I've only played the 3DS titles and this is all conjecture from all the information I gathered so far from 3H. However, I noticed this time around we'll be most likely to have much smaller cast than before. Heck even possible smaller than SoV.

Each house gets 8 students and there so far only 11 adults if we include all of them from the monastery/academy. However, I can only see at most half of them at most will be available. So we're looking at a possible of 14-20 units total in our army.

Honestly I like this for a couple of reasons. My biggest two are I'll get more invested in the characters and I'll be less likely to bench them for whatever reason it might be.

With that I just want to hear your opinions of much smaller cast compared to before. I mean doesn't FE have around 30+ characters usually?

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I like it as well as I'd rather have a smaller, but more detailed and fleshed out cast, than having 50+ characters but a lot of them feel quite shallow and possibly even annoying some of them.

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Same, I'm excited to have just a small group of students + other characters. In previous games I always had my favourites and never changed them, so I benched many characters without even caring one second about them. Having a small group makes it so much easier to know everyone and get attached to them.

I'm even considering not recruiting students from other houses, so I really have ONE house and I'll still be excited to play the other houses and discover other characters.

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They need to add some, because permadeath is a thing (a core part for some people), and yes you can probably recruit most students, but it's going to be a lot of work to get the necessary skills to do so in one run (if it's even possible).

That being said I'd also rather have a smaller, more characterized cast, but with most people coming from the academy (and starting on a blanket class) that characterization is not there.

So I'm okay with it in the academy phase, but in the second "act" of the game I sure hope there's going to be people joining our cause here and there. Characters that join mid-war/mid-battle are always the most interesting, because they come with their own reasons and backgrounds (you played Awakening, think Say'ri, Gregor, Olivia, Cherche).

Another important thing (for me at least): when you have basically your whole army from the get go it gets boring down the line, sure you can customize and get to know them better, but - especially if it's a long game - it gets same-y. And benching is not necessarily a bad thing, I'm not going to like every character, so having substitutes is always nice.

But I don't worry too much about it, I'm pretty sure during the war phase we'll get more, my concern is that it's going to be all knights of seiros/teachers/other students, I'd like to see people joining from the territories you go to, again, with their own reasons and backgrounds (and the continent offers a lot of world building, it would be a shame to not use it).

Edited by timon
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22 minutes ago, FoliFF said:

I mean doesn't FE have around 30+ characters usually?

Typically, FE games have casts in the range of somewhere between 40 and 60.

Anyway, I don't like it - permanent death is still a thing, after all, and if Sacred Stones is any indication, it's still possible to screw up characterization wise. On top of that, it is bad for replayability.

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I have mixed feelings on this. From a story telling standpoint, there's definitely some pros to having a small cast because they get more characterization. From a gameplay standing though, having more units means that you're more likely to have a strong army if some of your earlier units are getting screwed by the RNG from level ups. So I am hoping for some other units to join outside of the school, especially if the units are different depending on which house you picked in the war phase. It would provide more reasons to do multiple playthroughs for each house.

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I'm not a fan of having a very small roster. You can say it gives characters more room for development, but you can still fail to give any attention to characters among a small cast. There's an appeal to being able to deploy everyone at once, but having a cast size match deployment and permadeath don't go hand-in-hand. I'm hoping new recruitable characters will show up during the War Phase, especially since children are no longer a thing. I want my mid-lategame prepromotes back >:[

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In theory, you can have deeper characterization but sometimes less is just less (like in the case of SoV) and in terms of gameplay, it can be a tad boring if every play through is essentially the same because you always field the same characters.

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I also have mixed feelings. As has been said, this makes it easier to involve the students in the story and the developers would have had an opportunity to write more lines of conversation for each one of them.

What worries me as a classic player is that it seems as if they built the game around casual. While I typically reset when a character dies, it seems like they haven't thought about permadeath. In the other games you could always find a replacement. What if there's none or they give you some kind of no-name character? Not something I'm happy with.

Also a larger cast has always added a lot of replay value. I know there are three houses now, but with the amount of characters you had before, you could experience the game with different characters more than three times. Also chances are you will recruit your favorite characters from the other houses anyway, only leaving the ones you're less interested in for future playthroughs.

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At this point, I do think we're in for bad surprises when it comes to the final roster. Although I don't mind all that much myself, I was completely okay with Echoes' ~16 characters per path.

Wonder how important characters outside of the House leaders will be to the story, at least that of their own house, because now that we know most of them can be recruited, there's not much of a chance that they'll be chapter bosses or whatnots during the war phase.
So yeah, I do hope they at least play a substantial role within their canon path. That'd also make the choice more significant than "Let me pick the House leader and then recruit every student I like that I wouldn't get normally". As recruits, they'd only be side characters, you'd need to play their house's path to know their own story.

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35 minutes ago, Cysx said:

Wonder how important characters outside of the House leaders will be to the story, at least that of their own house, because now that we know most of them can be recruited, there's not much of a chance that they'll be chapter bosses or whatnots during the war phase.

I've thought about this myself. It's possible they can still be chapter bosses or mini bosses and be replaced by someone more generic if they were recruited though. 

As for playing a role in the story, we know from Famitsu that Ashe will be involved with the Lenato arc, and through Eurogamer Spain we know thst Sylvain's brother is the enemy in another map. (The Blue Lions seem to have a lot of family drama to work through). 

I'm pretty optimistic over the small cast so far. It's possible they'll pull an Echoes and give us insufficient characterization for many of them, but based on their profiles and the story arcs we've seen hinted at, it doesn't seem like that'll be the case for many of them. Obviously, some characters will still probably not offer much in terms of lore (my money is on Raphael and Annette). 

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Didn't they say there will be more character to recruit later on the story? I think during tree house? Either way other than the students and adults we have seen I can see they'll add 5-10 more units or should I say I have hard time seeing we'll have more than 25-30 units. Unless they do something similar to Revelation where you can somehow get all the students during the war phase.

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maybe they learned that the more isn't always the better, and tried to take a different approach compared to fates

Edited by Yexin
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People have been making comparisons to Genealogy and speculating it'll be similar to that game for... reasons I won't discuss.  So allow me to make a comparison to that game in regards to roster.

So the roster we get initially will be like Gen 1 - a slew of characters we'll all come to know and love who will later be faced with great tragedies.  Post time-skip, it'll be Gen 2.  What I mean is, the basis of the cast revolves around "Gen 1".  Think about how the vast majority of units in Gen 2 are the kids of the units from Gen 1 (or otherwise subs).  I feel much in the same way, the majority of units will be the ones we used in the academy phase.  And the faculty?  They're our Oifayes, Shannans, and Finns.  The rest, I would predict, will probably be maybe 5 more characters per path we choose - the Hannibals, essentially.

Genealogy never had more than 24 playable characters at a time (literally this exact number).  It's rather coincidental that the number of students in this game totals 24.  Obviously we won't be able to recruit every student, but I'm just saying that they've done a sub-30 playable roster before.  And the way they build up the idea of teaching all these characters and forming them to be the kinds of units you want them to be, I just feel like they wouldn't all of a sudden introduce a massive slew of other characters that we'll probably not even care for - that'd be like if Fates just threw in, like, 20 Corrinsexuals more than halfway through the game.

If we're to get other characters, I'd figure them to be subs to the students similar to Genealogy's Gen 2.  Basically units that are more-or-less the same, but objectively worse all around except maybe in a few cases.

 

And in my opinion, it's best we have a small roster.  Most people don't give a shit about characters like Dolph, Vyland, Tomas, Macellan, or Radd - I'm sure more than half the people who read this post wouldn't even realize those characters all came from the same game (Shadow Dragon), and that three of them were recruited at the same time (Dolph, Macellan, and Tomas - two of whom are the same damn class, too).  Much in the same way, Fates had characters that people either forgot or hated, such as Orochi, Hayato, Peri, and Effie - not to mention all the Corrinsexuals like Flora and Gunter who serve mostly as wasted potential/waifu bait in the same shameless way they baited you into marrying your goddamn siblings.  And this comes from someone who would still list a few of the characters from the Fates roster as some of my series favorites.

Contrast that to Echoes, Sacred Stones, or Genealogy.  People who've played those games can remember just about every single character, and they can attribute looks and personalities to them as well.  If I mention Hannibal, people who played Genealogy will know I'm talking about the one General from Thracia whose honor had him choose betrayal over blind loyalty, and may even remember his nickname - the "Shield of Thracia", despite the fact that a lot of people probably had him serve mostly as a castle guard for the remainder of the game (which isn't much, 'cuz you recruit him in, like, Chapter 8, in a game with only 12 chapters).  Or if I speak of Luthier, people will probably remember he's the helicopter brother of the young girl, Delthea, that you have to overtly avoid killing to recruit.  Or if I talk about Kyle, people will either confuse him with Forde (I did, anyway; "Forde" always seemed a more appropriate name for Kyle and "Kyle" always seemed a more appropriate name for Forde) or remember him as the super serious guy of the trio of Renais cavaliers.

I understand the fear behind the game being based on classic mode, but it's never stopped them from giving you small playable rosters before.  Granted, those games with small rosters aren't known for their great balance, but the games with massive rosters aren't known for making every single character a cherished and fondly remembered aspect of their respective games, and I feel like the games with small rosters having poor balance is just coincidence anyway (I'd chock it more down to bad level design than anything and poor balance per-unit, rather than the roster's size).

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I'm in the mixed crowd. I don't play on Classic much (Casual and proud of it because I'd rather enjoy the game my way than reset a bunch because of RNG screwups) so the smaller roster won't affect me. However, I hope the characters have good personalities and are fleshed out. If they do that, I'm good. If not, maybe a smaller roster means less effort? I don't know yet.

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30 minutes ago, Ertrick36 said:

People have been making comparisons to Genealogy and speculating it'll be similar to that game for... reasons I won't discuss.  So allow me to make a comparison to that game in regards to roster.

So the roster we get initially will be like Gen 1 - a slew of characters we'll all come to know and love who will later be faced with great tragedies.  Post time-skip, it'll be Gen 2.  What I mean is, the basis of the cast revolves around "Gen 1".  Think about how the vast majority of units in Gen 2 are the kids of the units from Gen 1 (or otherwise subs).  I feel much in the same way, the majority of units will be the ones we used in the academy phase.  And the faculty?  They're our Oifayes, Shannans, and Finns.  The rest, I would predict, will probably be maybe 5 more characters per path we choose - the Hannibals, essentially.

Genealogy never had more than 24 playable characters at a time (literally this exact number).  It's rather coincidental that the number of students in this game totals 24.  Obviously we won't be able to recruit every student, but I'm just saying that they've done a sub-30 playable roster before.  And the way they build up the idea of teaching all these characters and forming them to be the kinds of units you want them to be, I just feel like they wouldn't all of a sudden introduce a massive slew of other characters that we'll probably not even care for - that'd be like if Fates just threw in, like, 20 Corrinsexuals more than halfway through the game.

If we're to get other characters, I'd figure them to be subs to the students similar to Genealogy's Gen 2.  Basically units that are more-or-less the same, but objectively worse all around except maybe in a few cases.

 

And in my opinion, it's best we have a small roster.  Most people don't give a shit about characters like Dolph, Vyland, Tomas, Macellan, or Radd - I'm sure more than half the people who read this post wouldn't even realize those characters all came from the same game (Shadow Dragon), and that three of them were recruited at the same time (Dolph, Macellan, and Tomas - two of whom are the same damn class, too).  Much in the same way, Fates had characters that people either forgot or hated, such as Orochi, Hayato, Peri, and Effie - not to mention all the Corrinsexuals like Flora and Gunter who serve mostly as wasted potential/waifu bait in the same shameless way they baited you into marrying your goddamn siblings.  And this comes from someone who would still list a few of the characters from the Fates roster as some of my series favorites.

Contrast that to Echoes, Sacred Stones, or Genealogy.  People who've played those games can remember just about every single character, and they can attribute looks and personalities to them as well.  If I mention Hannibal, people who played Genealogy will know I'm talking about the one General from Thracia whose honor had him choose betrayal over blind loyalty, and may even remember his nickname - the "Shield of Thracia", despite the fact that a lot of people probably had him serve mostly as a castle guard for the remainder of the game (which isn't much, 'cuz you recruit him in, like, Chapter 8, in a game with only 12 chapters).  Or if I speak of Luthier, people will probably remember he's the helicopter brother of the young girl, Delthea, that you have to overtly avoid killing to recruit.  Or if I talk about Kyle, people will either confuse him with Forde (I did, anyway; "Forde" always seemed a more appropriate name for Kyle and "Kyle" always seemed a more appropriate name for Forde) or remember him as the super serious guy of the trio of Renais cavaliers.

I understand the fear behind the game being based on classic mode, but it's never stopped them from giving you small playable rosters before.  Granted, those games with small rosters aren't known for their great balance, but the games with massive rosters aren't known for making every single character a cherished and fondly remembered aspect of their respective games, and I feel like the games with small rosters having poor balance is just coincidence anyway (I'd chock it more down to bad level design than anything and poor balance per-unit, rather than the roster's size).

I really don't like the fact you brought up Genealogy and Sacred Stones - the former of which is the least replayable game, or at the very least down there (imho), and the latter of which has a pretty unmemorable cast all in all (again, imo,). And replayability is something I'm really concerned about here - a smaller cast is just bad for replayability for various reasons.

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3 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

I really don't like the fact you brought up Genealogy and Sacred Stones - the former of which is the least replayable game, or at the very least down there (imho), and the latter of which has a pretty unmemorable cast all in all (again, imo,). And replayability is something I'm really concerned about here - a smaller cast is just bad for replayability for various reasons.

First: IMO people are being prematurely pessimistic about the cast's size. While the students comprise the total pre-skip recruitable cast, I'm sure we'll see traditional recruits post-skip. 

Second: While a smaller cast (or fully deployable cast) would normally hamper replayability, I don't see that as the case with Three Houses, simply because we can make anyone anything, pursuing wildly different character/team builds each playthrough. Really, virtually every aspect of Three Houses seems tailored to increased replay value. 

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In my opinion, we will have after the skip the students of our house and the recruited ones. Additionally to them, we will get some persons of the army from the chosen house. 
Later in the game we will recruit different people, which have their own reasons to fight for us. 
The cast would be at the end around 35, I guess.

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I think there'll still be more. This is about how many units we were aware of in the weeks leading up to Fates's Japanese release. Then there was a very credible leak a week before release showing Gen 2 and our expectations of a small roster for each path were dashed. If I had to make a guess for this game, in post time skip all students will be recruitable if certain conditions are fulfilled. And that the choosing of one house only applies to pre time skip.

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I like the small roster, because I like the investment it creates. In Awakening, I only had my main 12(?)-ish and that was IT. Even when maps were like, "Up to 15" I didn't always select all the slots, because there weren't THAT many characters I liked.

And I usually hate all late game recruits because I care even LESS about them in context of the story because they're usually not that fleshed out or just not that interesting as the characters that I've been building supports and relationships with since the beginning. Even in Awakening with the kids, I made sure to have everyone married early, so I could recruit the kids as early as they were possibly available, because otherwise I just didn't care about them.

So while I do want maybe 5-ish more war phase characters that join (I'm assuming some professors will be war phase recruits), I don't necessarily want another 10+ people. One of my favorite things about Echoes was the small cast. It was one of the rare times I actually found myself liking almost ALL the cast and really getting invested even in characters I probably wouldn't have liked otherwise (Silque/May/etc). 

And anyways, nobody ever dies in a play through, so it's not like a small cast limits anything.

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I'm a much bigger fan of smaller rosters in general so I'd be quite content if you have Byleth+8 students+the students you recruited+Sothis (more than likely)+a few others, presumably the teachers etc. Based on the fact paralogues will be based on students, all the students have interesting backstories based on their twt bios and we'll actually see them grow (also I believe I saw somewhere that said everyone in a house can support with one another an provided they are written well that would also add a lot if everyone had at least 7 supports with their classmates and 1 with Byleth). Overall I'm very excited by the smaller cast and it may also make the gameplay a bit more challenging which is never a bad thing imo provided it's not hard for the sake of it.

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I like larger character rosters cause it makes more playthroughs fun and worthwhile. discovering new characters each time. I think and hope that the adults will be recruitable post time skip which would really help otherwise could get bland. if they do it right though and these characters have great depth to them then my  opinion could for sure change. i thought SOVs line up was to small and still do so we shall see.

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3 hours ago, Shadow Mir said:

a smaller cast is just bad for replayability for various reasons.

This is just plain wrong on so many levels.

Replayability comes from personal preferences in a game.

If I dislike 80 % the character roster of any entry & value that in a game, chances are pretty high, that I won't touch said game again. Sometimes gameplay, story or writing can motivate for a replay.  A healthy mix of what we value in a game provides replayability.

I managed to replay Gaiden 2 times and yet I still have to finish my Rev playthrough. Just because I had 10 times more fun with Gaiden's gameplay, than forcing myself through whatever Rev tried to accomplish as a game. It just simply failed to attract me. Gaiden has a little cast & little to no characterization, while Rev has 60+ characters and characterization that I for the most part don't care for or find boring. 

A big cast doesn't:

-indicate  a good story or writing

-fun gameplay

-or whatever you value in any FE game on a personal level. If these aspects are not applied to your persenol preferences, a big cast means nothing to you for replay value.

 

 

 

Edited by fOrEiGn sOUl
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5 hours ago, Cysx said:

At this point, I do think we're in for bad surprises when it comes to the final roster. Although I don't mind all that much myself, I was completely okay with Echoes' ~16 characters per path.

Wonder how important characters outside of the House leaders will be to the story, at least that of their own house, because now that we know most of them can be recruited, there's not much of a chance that they'll be chapter bosses or whatnots during the war phase.
So yeah, I do hope they at least play a substantial role within their canon path. That'd also make the choice more significant than "Let me pick the House leader and then recruit every student I like that I wouldn't get normally". As recruits, they'd only be side characters, you'd need to play their house's path to know their own story.

I am curious myself how big a role the non-house leaders will have.

Like for example with Linhardt, Bernadetta, and Ferdinand having crests of the four saints and Adrasteia having close ties to the church, will they actually have significant importance.

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