Baron the Shining Blade

I know you're not counting different translations, but if you were then we could also include Marks, Xander's Japanese name; and Marc, the Morgans' Japanese name (which if I'm not mistaken, was meant specifically to reference Mark, with Marc being the child of another self-insert tactician and all). I guess most fans knew this already, but if not, enjoy the brain food.

Having just pulled an Ascended Idunn and listened to her status quotes, she does mention Fae by name and it is indeed pronounced with a long "a" like the others.

Along with Fae and Faye we also have Feh, the Order of Heroes' messenger owl.

Personally I don't consider Spotpass to be DLC, as you don't have to go and manually download any of the stuff it offers. But anyways... I want to note that Awakening's first DLC map, Champions of Yore 1, was free for a month after the game launched. Why they didn't just let that one stay free is beyond me.

Glad to see IS finally realized we like Hector. Took 'em long enough. Also this makes Chrom and Tiki the only characters to be both a Mirage and an Emblem. Also the last two to receive FE series amiibo. I've found that the eShop updates at around 6pm PST, the exception being when they rotate the next wave of NSO icon elements which for some they do at 5pm instead.

This was quite a shocker. Two Mythics? It was a Legendary & Mythic before, never two of the same. Are they trying to make room on the calendar for Legend/Mythics from Engage? I wondered if they were ever gonna add Fortortiis. Suddenly Fallen Lyon feels redundant. And both these new Mythics take refined Urvan and Black Eagle Rule to their logical extreme. Being our 3rd colorless armored beast, I think it's time to start giving us some colored ones, yeah? Gotoh got in before Athos (or Nergal)? I mean yeah he started the archetype. And boy, colorless tome infantry are awfully abundant these days.

If you're willing to stretch for Donatello, we do have Donnel, one of his crit quotes being something like "Come on, Donny!". Donatello is also frequently called Don or Donny by his brothers, at least in the 2003 series. For Michaelangelo, maybe there'll be a Michael someday. Closest we've come so far is Michalis, if you want to stretch even further.

Shadow Dragon / (New) Mystery: no preference Shadows of Valentia: Emma (we need the Cipher OC's) Genealogy of the Holy War: no preference Thracia 776: no preference Binding Blade: Jahn (or Yahn or whatever he's called now) Blazing Blade: Nergal (seriously, HOW is he not in the game yet!?) Sacred Stones: no preference, but if I had to go with one......I'd say good ol' Moulder the Boulder Path of Radiance: base Sephiran Radiant Dawn: putting aside a certain...ahem... "interesting maneuver" they could pull, Edward and Levail (also Meg just to see who voices her) Awakening: no preference Fates: Mozu Three Houses / Three Hopes: no preference Engage: Diamant

From what I've seen, the tilde is also used as sort of a secondary hyphen, for instance to categorize music tracks like Leif's Army in Search of Victory ~ Base (in fact all of FE5's soundtrack uses a tilde this way). Makes sense, especially since there's also this math symbol ≈ Two tildes making a tilde equal sign, and as you might expect it means "approximately equal to" or "almost equal to".

If I don't spill it now, I'll forget after Christmas. My potential fave is Diamant. Not because he was the first one shown using Emblem Roy, but that was some nice icing on the cake.

Wrong again. I might need to narrow it down a bit.

Nope. Try again (if you want).

You'll never guess mine. Not a chance. No way. Nope. Try guessing which Engage character I'm leaning towards as my potential fave. If you know me well enough, it'll be quite easy.

Well well... I'd be damned if the left one wasn't BK. Running on the presumption that it is, it'll be nice to finally have a BK alt, and a winter one too, meaning the armor might be red. And hey, being a seasonal alt, maybe he'll use a lance this time. Now if only he took off that blasted helmet...

Pretty interesting stuff for the 7th major version. Primarily... T4 Special Spiral!? +5 damage and ignore non-special based damage reduction!? Zelgius wants that, PRONTO!

I will expand on what Hrothgar mentioned about computers, mainly the Windows side of things; while I know Mac and Linux are also still used today, I grew up with Windows and it's all I've ever used. *Here I'm just gonna call computers "PC's" even though it's not all-encompassing. Before Windows, Microsoft actually started with a simpler system in 1981 called MS-DOS (Disk-Operating System) or just DOS. It's pronounced with a soft "o", by the way, not the Spanish number for "two". If you've ever seen the "command prompt" or "command line" on a PC--you know, the black screen with gray text showing "C:\_" at the bottom-most line--that's entirely what DOS was. But there were still games for it, and by the 90's some impressive 16-bit games were made for DOS, for instance the FPS genre made its big start here with Id Software's Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. Programs came on 5¼" (and later 3½") Floppy Disks, the drive for which was a slot you'd insert them into, very much like SD cards but with less storage despite the bigger physical size. By the early 90s PC's had begun using CD-ROM drives, and as has been stated, most PC's today don't have one (though this Windows 10 laptop from 2016 I'm typing on right now does actually have a CD drive. I don't use it though, and besides any old PC game CD's I still have are buried in the workshop somewhere...) In 1985, Microsoft introduced Windows 1.0. But the system didn't really take off until the release of Windows 3.1 in 1992. I could mention the rest, but if you were to see a video showing the evolution of Windows, I think you can see how it slowly melded into what we have today. To even play old PC games from the 90's other than having an old PC that can run them, you'd have to use an emulator such as DOSBox or PCem. But depending on who you are, that could be its own can o' worms. This was also true for the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color; they also had link cables. If you had the 4-player GBA link cable adapter, you could use it on GB and GBC; a single GBA link cable wouldn't work since the thin "Player 1" cable does not work with them.

They just had to say "The binding weakens" and then follow that up immediately with a closeup of the red-haired side of the protag's face. If they hadn't established the new continent, the recycled Einherjar concept, or a Fell Dragon rather than a Demon Dragon beforehand; they might have had me there. I also realized this is the first mainline game to actually feature both Marth and Roy, and the first localized mainline game to feature Jugdral lords in an official capacity (Get back in your corner, Awakening Einherjar! You do not count, even if you inspired this. Same with amiibo). So......we finally have our FE17, our next mainline game, Fire Emblem Engage. ......Not what I was expecting, to say the least. I avoided all leaks, so the first thing I thought when I saw our new protag was, "Why does he look like Alphonse and Roy fusion danced?" Anyways I did enjoy the FE Persona aspect of TMS, so I may pick this one up. Maybe. I'm starting to hate that my old FE bias is showing. In light of this reveal, I will make a prediction/hope: A bit down the line, between now and the game's release, there will be a Fire Emblem Direct. In no particular order, they will give us the lowdown on Engage, but they will also reveal an Echoes remake slated for say, summer or fall 2023 (I still hold out hope for FE6 remake). If they were able to work on Shadows of Valentia and Three Houses at the same time, then this is very much possible. Yes I know Koei Tecmo co-developed 3H, but that came out two years after SoV. If this direct does not happen before Engage launches... then I suppose I'll have to give up hope on FE6 Echoes for another 3 years...*sigh* just when I thought the stars were perfectly lined up (the set precedent of SoV director's old statement saying he wanted to make it next, the Roy and Lilina scale figures, FE6 turning 20 this year. It was all coming together...). Not much to say about the rest of the direct. But oh man, GameXplain and Arlo are gonna (or already have) go apeshit over Pikmin 4. Definitely gonna check out their reactions.

This is as tough as deciding my favorite game of all time. Hmm... Well, I think I'm gonna go with this. (US version, btw) Probably my favorite of Sonic CD's US soundtrack (which unpopular opinion: I love to death). The best part is at 56 seconds, it's what I'd like to call a "hope/determination motif" as it feels like Sonic is getting evermore determined; he will get those time stones and secure a good future for Little Planet. Even better, the album version used in the 2011 remake put more emphasis on this part. Now if say I were to pick a favorite FE soundtrack it would honestly be a 3-way tie between With Pride in Your Heart, Undiscovered Horizons, and The Course of Gods and Men; all from SoV. The remade soundtrack really did the game wonders.

If I didn't want Binding Blade remade as badly as I do, I would've voted Jugdral simply because it's next numerically. But for how popular Roy is relatively--even if that's mainly thanks to Smash Bros--you'd think there'd be just as much clamor to finally get his game localized via a Remake for the Export. Fix existing problems, add animated cutscenes (which I've run through my head so many times), add an unlockable mode ("Al Mode" or whatever) where you play the Hasha no Tsurugi manga adaptation of the story with additional chapters. Do this and we could have a truly incredible remake. I'm in the Tellius-is-fine-with-just-remasters boat. Of course I'm not at all opposed to seeing those get remade as well. As for the whole "Echoes" moniker and subtitles spiel, well first off, given how many threads discussing potential remakes we've had, I'm surprised it's taken this long to see a discussion about this in particular. Second, personally I hate the stipulation of having a "Shadows of ___" subtitle in every remake. For lack of a better way to put it, doing this just sounds stupid. As Jotari mentioned--and I was gonna bring it up if you didn't, so thank you--SoV's Japanese title is Another Hero-King, and frankly I would not expect Japan to call any of these potential remakes Another Holy War, or Another Young Lion, or Another Radiant Hero. That just doesn't work. It made sense for Gaiden's remake to be Another Hero-King as the game is, and has always been, a side story to the original, taking place on a continent west of Archanea; and as such Alm can be considered a sort of parallel to Marth. Another Hero-King. I feel the intention of having "Shadow" in all the remakes we've had so far is to tell you they either take place on Archanea or in SoV's case are at least tied to Archanea in some way. And I think it should stay that way. In fact, I wouldn't even care if they just called it "Echoes: {original game's subtitle}"; mundane as that would be, it still gets the point across that it's a remake. 'Cause it's the only FE with quintessence, amiright? ............I'll get my coat.

I did forget about Flow Refresh. I also forgot to say "dual-phase", whereas Flow Refresh only heals on PP. I'm just glad that we no longer have just Eir (and less likely, Duo Micaiah) to fodder for this sort of skill. Whether Bulwark will have unit type restrictions remains to be seen, but at least we know infantry (like your boy Brave Alm) can use it. In fact I have my own Brave Alm I'd like to give either Mystic Boost or Bulwark to reduce Scendscale's recoil damage from 7 to 1.

True, but on the bright side, now we finally have another inheritable post-combat healing B Skill besides Mystic Boost.

The eShop typically updates at 6pm Pacific time. That's pretty much the standard update time, which I realized when Smash DLC fighters were coming out, plus the NSO app also says the rotation of icons, wallpapers, and frames (for the current game of the month, anyway) updates every Monday at 6pm.

Alright girls, girls, you're both pretty. Can I go home now? (Please don't take that personally. It's just a quote from Megamind. Say what you will, I liked that movie.) While I absolutely want a proper FEW2 after 3Hopes, at this point I'm not even sure how to go about "balancing" the roster. Mainly I just at the very least want some playable villains (need I even mention BK again? He's tailor-made for Warriors for the same reasons as Ike).

I kinda remember the hate in those days, mainly Mary Sue quarrels. I've never hated Micaiah, though I could somewhat understand the hate. What I don't understand, is the hate for her actions in Part 3. Even now in this very thread. We all know damn well why Micaiah did what she did. So why is she herself being hated for actions which she clearly had no choice? Why not pour that hate onto the Senate for being responsible for essentially forcing her against her will, or onto Pelleas for foolishly signing the blood pact? It was either--as Shrimpolaris put it--follow every order no questions asked, or die. And all of Daein with her. And since she loves her country so, she had to obey the senate and fight the laguz, and I'm sure she hated every second of it. Now I know Celica gets similar hate for the choices she made in SoV, but you have to understand the world they live in and what they go through personally as their respective games progress. We live in a biased modern world, and we take it all for granted. We play this gaming franchise set primarily in medieval times where things happen and foolish decisions are made that we ourselves would never make in the modern world because......we just know better. And for the most part, this is true. But Fire Emblem games (TMS#FE notwithstanding) are not set in the modern world, are they? If any of us actually lived in worlds like Tellius or Valentia, if we actually were in the shoes of someone like Celica or Micaiah (even if we retained our genders and bodies) with none of our modern-worldly knowledge or knowledge of how the games' plots unfold, well... frankly I'd love to see just how any of us would fare. I guarantee you plenty of people would make the same decisions that these two lords made, and then some. With all that said, Micaiah is not my favorite FE character, but you know that by now. I really wasn't planning to defend her, even to a moderate degree. It's just that, if I were in her shoes, there's no guarantee I wouldn't make the same choices. There's no real way to know, though being of similarly squishy stature, I imagine I'd break really easily, both physically and mentally. After all, war is hell.

It usually takes a few different characters for a single recognizable voice to start clicking in my brain, especially so with the LA voicecast, though I have generally become more aware of those voices now in recent years. First time I heard Billy's voice was of course Ferdinand von Aegir, and then the next one that helped make it click was--as I hinted last time--Naofumi Iwatani, titular hero of The Rising of the Shield Hero, currently my favorite anime. Billy really brought Naofumi to life; his delivery made made me really feel the hell the character was going through. And while he was recast for Season 2 (and now likely onwards), I've gotta say even after just five episodes the new actor's been doing a fantastic job. His portrayal is nearly spot on, I almost wouldn't have realized it wasn't Billy. Usually I'm a little bummed when I hear one of these voice actors has died, but with this one I'm rather torn. Billy Kametz, you will be sorely missed. 😔