NekoKnight

To be fair, the whole situation leading up to that conflict was bizarre. Kotaro has captured Kagero to use as a hostage and...Corrin and Co. think that's an unforgivable sin and decide he must be punished for it. For capturing enemy soldiers... Corrin, I'm not sure you get this 'war' thing. But on the topic of Corrin, you have a character that bends over backwards to save Hoshidans in Conquest but he never attempts to use his non-lethal sword when cutting down Nohrians in Birthright. There is also that really weird S support with Peri where he decides the solution to Peri's extreme, unprovoked violence towards the working class is to hire servants who don't die as easily. Poor Felicia.

Was Celica not dumb as bricks before considering time travel issues?

I see. I don't disagree that it creates some sloppy writing in terms of the story, but I choose to look at it as primarily a gameplay element loosely tied into the story. If you want to treat it 100% seriously, then you have to take to task Corrin and Alm/Celica for having super powers that are barely used even thought they're 'canon'. Like, could Alm rewind time to prevent himself from killing Rudolf? Could Corrin have escaped that Faceless ambush in Conquest by using his space/time powers to hop in his pocket dimension? Everything starts to unravel if you take the gameplay powers too seriously. Even if you do want to hold the story 100% accountable for this mechanic, it makes more sense to me to blame the story as a whole for not letting its characters use their super powers at critical moments rather than accuse the characters themselves of being morons.

It's hard to take your Byleth criticisms seriously when they boil down to how well a gameplay mechanic (rewinding time) is married to the narrative. The reason you can rewind time is because it was a gameplay mechanic in echoes. They did try to tie it into the narrative, even having you use it in a cutscene to stop a certain event, but it's really not that consequential to the story otherwise. The problem lies in time travel being waaaay too convenient and it logically being the answer (aka drama destroyer) to every conceivable problem in the story. So it's largely ignored. Is this a bad thing? Well, it's not the cleanest story telling but that's a greater narrative flaw which has nothing to do with Byleth as a character. If you wanted to make a real equivalent with Corrin, you ought to talk about how Corrin has a pocket dimension that they can go to at any time in order to rest, restock or get away from enemy spies (which is certainly relevant in Conquest). This is never brought up again after its introduced, but that also has nothing to do with Corrin. It's just a gameplay element that they lazily justified in story (Alm also has time travel powers that really don't matter as far as the plot is concerned). So you strip away the gameplay/story excuses and what do you have? Corrin makes imbecilic, outrageously immoral decisions in the story and Byleth... well in your list, all you'd have left is that he jumps in front of an axe, and the game immediately points out that was stupid.

Is this exclusively for AR support? It sounds like you're covered on a super tank and galeforce options. If you'd just like to build some interesting units that can do something no other F2P unit can, you might consider Kronya for a unique Vantage/Special Spiral combo (Ares can also do a similar build). There is also Black Knight that can pull off some strong builds with Black Luna (Brave Sword and Bold Fighter or SB + BF + QR seal). Most people don't consider him that good but I also have a soft place in my heart for Camus as the only lance cavalier with inbuilt DC (disregarding F!Berkut who has conditional DC, and he's a 5* exclusive). I use him for a lot of general content and you free up the A slot for something else.

Thanks for the advice. I went with +Res. Every point might count vs Blazing mages.

I pulled another Caineghis to fix my +Res -Atk one, and lo and behold, the second copy was +Atk. Should the +Atk be saved or should I use the +Res one? I used him as my super tank in AR so I'm leaning more towards res to help survive Ophelias but I'm open to other ideas.

I actually found it pretty interesting that while extremely loyal to Edelgard, Hubert will disobey her orders if he thinks she's making a mistake. Dedue, meanwhile is so loyal that he'll even do horrible and out of character things, if it's for Dimitri.

It's mostly his avatar support where he's an asshole to woman and deflects criticism with "Whatever, they were just planning to use me anyway". Normally I would be able to shake off a single bad support if the others were good (Felix x Dedue has the latter claim he'd be a-okay with murdering women and children if Dimitri asked him too. I mean, yikes) but the avatar supports usually drive at the core of the character's personality, which makes me think that his mistreatment of women is something that happens even if he's kinder to the playable named characters. Other supports also seem to validate what we see in the Avatar support such as Dorothea x Sylvain C where she accuses him of being a playboy that actually hates women. What did you find puzzling about the Ingrid ending? From what I recall, it seemed rather sweet in regards to how they both felt about crests.

I hate commoners, they're coarse and rough and they get everywhere.

SoV Spoilers

I think it's remiss to not include Lyon on the list as he's just as much, if not more integral to driving the plot than the Demon King is. Fomortiis corrupted Lyon but it was Lyon that was the core of the emotional narrative. It was his drive to save Grado from a catastrophe that led him to trying and failing to master the dark stone. With this in mind, I would rank Lyon as one of the most moral antagonists, somewhat similar to the "the ends justify the means" villains like Arvis and [redacted] from TH. Granted, the actual villainy was Fomortiis but Lyon got the ball rolling.

I know the reason he is cynical but he's a jerk to people just on the assumption that they're using him. You could use more mundane reasons than crests to display that kind of behavior. Imagine someone had a girlfriend that used them and forever after this guy would cheat on his future girlfriends because "women don't care about my feelings so why should I care about theirs?" Their behavior would have an origin but at some point you need to be a better person and not let bad experiences define how you treat people. Look at that Sylvain x Byleth support. In the C support, he cheats on a girl and then lies to her face about it, all while playing the "bitch just wanted my crest" card. And then in the B support he breaks up with another girl and makes her cry. Sylvain claims he doesn't like seeing women cry, but he's happy enough to string them along, telling Byleth he won't change his ways. A bigger man would recognize that he shouldn't take out his frustrations on others but he's always chasing shirts and never intends to commit. His hatred of crests is well founded but his treatment of women is pretty awful. Wat? Mistreating women because of a cynical worldview?

I found him to be cynical to the point where he's cruel to women. There is definitely more depth to him than your typical playboy character but there is also a lot of disregard for the feelings of others. Zelos at least wasn't a serial cheater.

Oh thank goodness, I was really worried that they had cut hyrbid units. The lack of Malig Knights/Dark Fliers is disappointing but the other master classes are pretty cool. I really like the Mortal Savant. That might be my direction for Byleth. It is a little curious that they decided to make Bow Knights a thing when I had assumed that with less weapon restrictions, they could just roll that into Paladins but it's interesting. I also find it strange how there is no Lance specialist infantry.

I always thought Amiibos were consumer unfriendly. You get a low quality figure and maybe (??) you eventually get your money's worth in extra game content? If they can't even give you something worthwhile in a mainstream Fire Emblem game, then they really don't utilize them well enough. I do feel bad for people who wanted more content, and I'm glad I never bought any myself. Now THIS would be much more consumer friendly. If the content is widely available as DLC (and free if you have the amiibo), then everybody wins. No one gets screwed by limited releases of Amiibo and amiibos owners get actual rewards.

It is a bit problematic, I would agree, and it would probably be better if they lowered the damage output. That said, I do think the danger of critical hits (like enemies equipped with Killer weapons) adds an extra layer of depth to certain engagements, so I don't think critical hits should be removed entirely.

That's my position. In general, disregarding random crits, if my unit was in a position where RNG is the only thing standing between me and resetting the map, I was playing poorly.

I'm going to jump on the 'it was a disaster in Fates so no' bandwagon. I think it would be interesting if there was a route where you got to use all three lords, the Pokemon Yellow to Pokemon Red/Blue, but you would have to be VERY careful that you don't derail the established threats/conflicts in the other stories. Hiding the biggest bad behind DLC and then writing some contrived excuse for why they didn't show up before would hurt every other route in the game. At the very least, the 4th route ought to have equivalent weight to the other routes, such as several characters being unplayable/getting killed. It should be an option, not the clearly superior route to play. I don't think IS could pull it off, personally.

I wonder if these theoretical Master classes would have the same level requirement as Advanced classes but just have additional skill requirements. It sure would be a bummer if you could unlock them but you had to be level 35 or whatever is the near endgame level range. That said, in the meantime, I'll just pray they make it into the game period.

That Black Beast sure looks scary, and it's holding a corpse too. That wolf is humongous.

They might do a Harvey Dent (like in the Dark Knight) thing where he starts as a moral paragon for justice but when the systems in place still make innocents suffer, he decides to tear them all down.

I'm going with 23 before the time skip. A 5 real gap feels appropriate for romancing the students/old enough to be an authority figure to them. What the heck has Byleth been wasting his youth on? Back in my day, you weren't a JRPG protagonist unless you saved the world by the time you were 16.

Lonato, Ashe's adoptive father, seems relevant enough to introduce.

The class system sure is strange. Women can be mercenaries but not heroes, and they can't be any gauntlet class despite having them in other classes. They also can't use dark magic because....reasons. And then you have fliers which have zero male accessible class before advanced and if you want to go from Pegasus Rider > Wyvern Rider you need to switch specialties from lances to axes. I hope they make this work in the game.