I like the small cast of characters we have so far

[Lewyn]

1 hour ago, Dinar87 said:

Quality over quantity I say.

Definitely.  60 bland forgettable characters or 20 well designed fully developed characters the latter is just infinitely better.  If they can have more characters without detracting from the quality of the storyline or the development of the cast in general fine, but just like in life better to do a few things well than do many poorly.  

[SpiceMan]

17 minutes ago, Sentinel07 said:

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.

Well because you have the possibility of recruiting them to your side they probably will not do anything. Of course I expect them to be relevant when you choose Black Eagles but because on a BL or GD playthrough they could be on your team, they can't do anything with them storywise in other routes which is why I personally hate the recruit feature. Only like 2 or 3 students from each house will be truly important, when they could have made a game where all of the students were important and interesting characters on their on that took part in the story instead of sitting on the sidelines like in every other fe game.

[Shadow Mir]

47 minutes ago, fOrEiGn sOUl said:

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.

 

 

 

Likewise, a smaller cast does not guarantee that they'll be well written. It only means the bad is bound to stick out that much more due to a lack of characters to distract me from the bad ones.

[Stroud]

At the beginning I was a bit worried about the students because not one of them was a kind of character for me I would really like at first sight. I think and hope they will get character growth accordingly. I could like some of them really more then my first impression. 

Please don't mess up characters like Leonie. She really has got potential for me, same with Petra...

 

[Sentinel07]

23 minutes ago, SpiceMan said:

Well because you have the possibility of recruiting them to your side they probably will not do anything. Of course I expect them to be relevant when you choose Black Eagles but because on a BL or GD playthrough they could be on your team, they can't do anything with them storywise in other routes which is why I personally hate the recruit feature. Only like 2 or 3 students from each house will be truly important, when they could have made a game where all of the students were important and interesting characters on their on that took part in the story instead of sitting on the sidelines like in every other fe game.

Yeah that question was more or less geared towards their importance in a Black Eagles run.

I certainly do not expect recruited students to play much of a role if any in the house they don't start in.

Edited June 25, 2019 by Sentinel07

[Xandest]

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.

[Ayra]

The amount of deployment slots is more important for me than the overall size of the cast. Fire Emblem generally having high deployment count compared to other SRPGs is one of the key reason why it is my favorite franchise. If you give me 16 deployment slots, I'll use 16 units. If there's pair-up in the game, I'll use it as little as possible since I prefer having many units over a few stronger ones.

In the pre-war phase, we have only 8 students + Byleth guaranteed. If we recruit other students, can you deploy all of them in battle at the same time? Or are you stuck with just 9 deployment slots for the entirety of it?

 

Regarding the main question, I tend to favor larger casts personally. If there's characters I don't like, I can bench them and still have enough units to fill all the deployment slots with. With that said, I think that there's going to be "enough" in Three Houses. Assuming that you can recruit all/most of the teachers and other miscellaneous characters like Flayn, that should be enough for me. The bonus compared to other FE games is that you'll already be very familiar with all those "late joiners" since you'll have already interacted multiple times before in the pre-war phase. I think it's going to make them more interesting than the majority of late joiners in previous games.

[Owain Dark]

I'm curious about the actual size of the playable cast. 24 students + Byleth. Hope there'll be traditional character recruitments, so the cast is 30-35 in total

[HappyHawlucha.]

I would rather have a smaller cast with a lot more character development tbh; I could see them taking yet another leaf out of Echoes' book and have every unit you have under your belt be deployable at once; to make each unit feel like more of an advantage by having more units on the battlefield. Sure for smaller scale battles you should limit the number of deployable units but for the big battles where it's every soldier for themselves it makes a lot more sense to let every unit in your arsenal fight; rather than keep half in reserve. 

[Cysx]

I think this image we got a while ago is pretty interesting because of the size of the scrolling bar. We can see that this is very early in the game, since Byleth is only Lv4, so it's extremely unlikely this only shows the recruited characters. Instead, chances are just like Awakening and Fates, this is Byleth's full list of supports here.
Now why this is interesting is because we can measure things. The whole scrolling bar is roughly 140 pixels tall, and the smaller, moving part about 37 pixels.
140 pixels/37 pixels = ~3.78
... or in other words, if the scrolling bar is the size of a page in this list relative to the whole list, there are ~3.78 pages of 8 characters here.

8 characters per page x 3.78 pages = ~30.24 characters.

Now this doesn't definitely prove anything for multiple reasons. Just food for thought.

Edited June 26, 2019 by Cysx

[Owain Dark]

2 minutes ago, Cysx said:

I think this image we got a while ago is pretty interesting because of the size of the scrolling bar. We can see that this is very early in the game, since Byleth is only Lv4, so it's extremely unlikely this only shows the recruited characters. Instead, chances are just like Awakening and Fates, this is Byleth's full list of supports here.
Now why this is interesting is because we can measure things. The whole scrolling bar is roughly 140 pixels tall, and the smaller, moving part about 37 pixels.
140 pixels/37 pixels = ~3.78
... or in other words, if the scrolling bar is the size of a page in this list relative to the whole list, there are ~3.78 pages of 8 characters here.

8 characters per page x 3.78 pages = ~30.24 characters.

Now this doesn't definitely prove anything for multiple reasons. Just food for thought.

I think that picture is from the very beginning, even before Byleth chose his house, so it could be just the 24 students all together in that image

[Cysx]

6 minutes ago, Owain Dark said:

I think that picture is from the very beginning, even before Byleth chose his house, so it could be just the 24 students all together in that image

He has the blue lions alongside him, and this seems to be the Lonato rebellion map, so I kinda doubt it. Plus, it would be weird for Dimitri, not Edelgard to be at the very top if it was just listing the students.

Edited June 26, 2019 by Cysx

[HappyHawlucha.]

It's been shown that you can gain support points that you don't necessarily use yet; so my idea is that that shows all supportable units even if they're not necessarily playable in the map shown.

[Cysx]

Just now, HappyHawlucha. said:

It's been shown that you can gain support points that you don't necessarily use yet; so my idea is that that shows all supportable units even if they're not necessarily playable in the map shown.

That's my conclusion too. The question then being, can Byleth, just like every avatar before him(to my knowledge), support every character in the game?

[VincentASM]

3 minutes ago, HappyHawlucha. said:

It's been shown that you can gain support points that you don't necessarily use yet; so my idea is that that shows all supportable units even if they're not necessarily playable in the map shown.

Yeah, plus according to the leaks... Very minor spoilers(?)

You can gain supports with NPCs. So the support list might not be indicative of the playable cast.

[HappyHawlucha.]

1 minute ago, Cysx said:

That's my conclusion too. The question then being, can Byleth, just like every avatar before him(to my knowledge), support every character in the game?

Probably; but I do hope it doesn't mean that supports are less varied and a lot more generic.

[Cysx]

6 minutes ago, HappyHawlucha. said:

Probably; but I do hope it doesn't mean that supports are less varied and a lot more generic.

Actually I feel like I might have misunderstood you. If your point was that at level 4 Byleth has gained some support points with at least a majority of the students and other teachers available, and they're the only one this list is made off, then... eh? It's possible, seems like a lot of people though, even when support points can be gained relatively easily from what we've seen.

8 minutes ago, VincentASM said:

Yeah, plus according to the leaks...

True, I guess there's that too.

Edited June 26, 2019 by Cysx

[Disclaimer]

It's completely possible that support list is simply comprised of pre-skip Monastery units with whom the avatar can gain support points — including NPCs — and isn't indicative of the playable cast, especially post-skip, at all. 

[Cysx]

18 minutes ago, Disclaimer said:

It's completely possible that support list is simply comprised of pre-skip Monastery units with whom the avatar can gain support points — including NPCs — and isn't indicative of the playable cast, especially post-skip, at all. 

Speaking of which, haven't we heard that there would be two sets of supports, one for each time period? Seeing S-ranks on display here kind of contradicts that idea.

Edit: Just to precise, this wasn't a part of the leak.

Edited June 26, 2019 by Cysx

[Disclaimer]

5 minutes ago, Cysx said:

Speaking of which, haven't we heard that there would be two sets of supports, one for each time period? Seeing S-ranks on display here kind of contradicts that idea.

Edit: Just to precise, this wasn't a part of the leak.

Yes, someone on an IGN podcast mentioned they had been told that in a private demo session (presumably by a Nintendo rep). It's possible they were mistaken, or mechanically they take some separate form.

That said, it makes complete sense to me that there would be separate support sets for pre- and post-skip, considering the wildly different circumstances. Who knows how that would work mechanically, or how it would explain visible S-supports here, but I can't imagine support conversations designed to work contextually as teenage students and as twenty-something soldiers hardened by war. Picking up a support chain midway through 5 years later would be... awkward. 

[Cysx]

1 minute ago, Disclaimer said:

Yes, someone on an IGN podcast mentioned they had been told that in a private demo session (presumably by a Nintendo rep). It's possible they were mistaken, or mechanically they take some separate form.

That said, it makes complete sense to me that there would be separate support sets for pre- and post-skip, considering the wildly different circumstances. Who knows how that would work mechanically, or how it would explain visible S-supports here, but I can't imagine support conversations designed to work contextually as teenage students and as twenty-something soldiers hardened by war. Picking up a support chain midway through 5 years later would be... awkward. 

I agree that it would make more sense, although I'm concerned they'd be putting themselves through writing overload even harder than they did for Fates and Awakening.

If there's only one continuous support, my assumption was that for example, C through B would be pre timeskip, while A and S would be during the war phase. That poses its own slew of problems, though, such as potentially locking you out of building up supports with anyone you haven't reached the right rank with, since school phase supports probably wouldn't make sense post-timeskip, as you said.

[Marros]

3 hours ago, Cysx said:

I agree that it would make more sense, although I'm concerned they'd be putting themselves through writing overload even harder than they did for Fates and Awakening.

If there's only one continuous support, my assumption was that for example, C through B would be pre timeskip, while A and S would be during the war phase. That poses its own slew of problems, though, such as potentially locking you out of building up supports with anyone you haven't reached the right rank with, since school phase supports probably wouldn't make sense post-timeskip, as you said.

They could unlock the conversations automatically after the time skip. Like if, for example, I got Caspar and Linhardt to Rank B pre-skip the supports are available to read right away post-skip. Possibly even with some minor edits to show they had the rank before.

[Druplesnubb]

On 6/26/2019 at 3:38 PM, VincentASM said:

Yeah, plus according to the leaks... Very minor spoilers(?)

 

  Hide contents

You can gain supports with NPCs. So the support list might not be indicative of the playable cast.

 

Actually the leak said that probably wasn't in the fina version of the game anymore.

Edited June 28, 2019 by Druplesnubb

[zuibangde]

With all the gameplay videos out recently, I feel like we've seen everyone that we can interact with at the monastery (the only 'unannounced' characters left are Shamir, Rodrigue, Gilbert, Tomas, Cyril and Flayn). Unless the demos were specifically made to hide characters from the public, I'm not sure if the people we see at the monastery during the pre-war phase will be everyone we get to recruit because that would probably be the smallest cast out of all FE games (keeping in mind that you only get 8 students from your house and then recruit others but they made it pretty clear that it's very hard/near impossible to recruit everyone from the other houses).

I'm not sure if I like small casts because I always play ironman runs in the highest difficulty and having all the units on 'reserve' was great. With such a small cast, I hate the idea that I have to use the Turnwheel mechanic just so I don't eventually run out of units.

Edited June 27, 2019 by zuibangde