The Protagonist

Did your decision to finish the hack by the end of the year result in you shortening the hack to 16 chaps?

Geez, those things look terrifying. I hope they'll only ever be used sparingly, not in groups, or else I'm dead lol.

Don't we all?

Really, 14 felt slightly under-staffed, but 15 and 16 felt downright punishing. The problem is, you have two parties with converging groups of units you invested exp in, so having only about 10 slots for characters forces you to throw away some units you were planning on focusing on. In 16, I'm even considering spawning 1 or 2 units with codebreaker because I'm a filthy cheater I feel so cramped.

I'm up to Chapter 16 now, and my only real complaint is the low number of units allowed per map. To think that there was a complete hack out there that so few people had access to. How long did this take you to make?

Here's an important component of a good fire emblem: the map and chapter objective have substantial impact on how you play the chapter. Many chapters have alternate objectives but play as rout chapters anyway, with the savvy player simply seizing, escaping, or boss-killing at the end. Make it hard, but not impossible, to play every chapter as a rout.

Never heard of that challenge, but I'm so OCD about never overusing jeigans that I have yet to level up Hellios in any of my two-and-change playthroughs.

Question for Alfred: will there be route-exclusive characters or characters made drastically better by choosing one route (a la Gonzales)?

It's one of the reasons FE8 is so broken. You can get easy infinite money by sniping droppable spears and runeswords on floor 1 of Valni, then auto-retreat.

I actually thought of the idea of suggesting dreadlord-like units, too. Kinda funny, right? A lot to ask, though.

Chapter 8 Spoilers ahead:

Chapter 8 Spoilers Ahead (Sorry, Alfred. I learned how to spoiler.):

I think that good chapter design to discourage low-manning is an integral piece of a good FE game.

I like weight because it adds character and weapon diversity, things that were irritatingly absent from FE13. GBA weight generally worked out pretty well, being relevant but not TOO relevant, but sometimes it just really failed with Tomes. Tellius weight suffers from decreasing relevance at a rate that's much too high, with weight being pointless for almost any physical character after part 2 of RD. Tellius weight also totally screws over casters, perhaps worse than before. SNES weight was pretty awful. Swords and Wind magic are grossly overpowered in FE4, and axes are borderline useless. If not for Lex being almost perfectly-suited to the first half of the game and having a Brave Axe, he'd probably have been awful, too. No weight doesn't really introduce any problems, but it eliminates one aspect of the game and just dumbs down character-weapon selection.

To tell the truth, I rarely find myself needing to resupply mid-chapter, since I usually prepare characters with the necessary items at the prep screen, and few chapters can wear out any weapons that are either replaceable or durable. Convoy space running out always seemed really pointless and frustrating, personally. I think mid-chapter convoy access will continue to be largely as relevant as it usually is, namely, only used in case of emergency, unless FE14 has a great level of divergence from Awakening-style maps. I do like the idea of a convoy unit, at least conceptually, although, in anything barring a defense chapter, a character like tent!Merlinus is, if anything, a handicap. Convoy units taking up a party space a la FE6 is just dumb, also. I have to say, I just don't really care very much about the convoy beyond having one.