Augestein

It is helpful. Let's use say... Mordecai and Gatrie for instance. A Mordecai + Gatrie : Would be + 5 defense for instance. That's not a little deal. She's also incidentally, get + 1 attack from being supported with Mordecai. Soren with Ike would give him... + 1 attack at best because PoR rounds down rather than up. Aside from the evasion boost-- which means playing dodge or die, + 5 defense / res is not something that can just be shrugged off as "you get 2-3HKOed." Especially if you're willing to depart with a Seraph Robe on her.

It's primarily because Soren's early game isn't bad enough to really warrant caring too much. He's "bad" for a time in the game where you really don't have much choice, and by the time there is a choice, he's okay. Plus, if you promote Soren at 15, he can be a decent staff user for longer and doesn't suck completely at combat like Rhys and Mist. That means that you can remove Mist/Rhys and instead use Soren. I'd honestly say that it's pretty fair for him to be higher than Calill because of that. In terms of combat though? Calill is slightly worse than Soren if you leveled him to 20, and if you didn't, he has staves and slightly inferior combat to compete against her. It's enough for me to say that he should always be slightly better than her honestly. As for Ilyana, they are almost identical outside of Ilyana being slower and having slightly less magic power. However, it should be noted that Ilyana with a heavier tome is slowed down less. Which is a plus, not a huge one, but it's there. I disagree on Soren having better supports though. He has 2, and Stefan is heaven, which doesn't help Soren at all. The only reason Soren would take it is because it's literally his only other choice. Ilyana's supports are definitely better. She always gets defense for her support, and she can support people that can give her more defense or attack or even evade. Her concrete durability will be better than Soren's because of it.

He meant that he never had anyone to teach him how to talk. It's implied that he learned to talk as he needed to learn to speak to people.

Yeah, essentially. If it did a bunch of little things, it'd be a stat you want, but don't necessarily need.

Fly allows you go go over obstacles that you can't jump on like trees and the like. It's just flat out better than Ignore Elevation. But definitely NOT worth that cost.

Yeah, the translation of the original had some problems, but it wasn't "soft, speak sweet nothings of I don't actually understand what truly I'm saying" PSP version.

Man I am blown away by how bad the dialogue is in the PSP version. I mean the original version was kinda rough, but at least it wasn't... Stupid.

It's good. I watched it-- it didn't miss a beat so far, I was surprised. These are kinda nostalgic for me even though I don't remember a darn thing about the older ones. I might give the older ones a whirl when I have more time.

You can't have "bad taste" unless your taste is at the expense of others. Sometimes things just tickle your fancy and that's just how it is. A lot of people don't like Robin in Awakening for instance, but I'd say that Robin is a fine character IMO. I like Final Fantasy X-2, I have a liking towards Tekken 4 despite its flaws... And I ... Don't particularly like the Zelda series. People are different. Sometimes that happens. No big deal. That's just how you are.

Luck isn't useless, but it's the least useful stat of them all. I wouldn't like luck to effect growths, but rather it could effect more things if it's going to be the "all around stat." IE, people that are lucky might win contest more often, or run into randomly good events more often-- item drops, finding items, shop sales etc. I think luck could be good if it just had more out of combat effects as well as what it does now.

Welcome, welcome...

Sakura is just a really solid unit. She can do whatever she wants.

That's pretty neat, but I'm not going to read them.

Except that's not entirely true. The localizations may be different at moments, but most of the changes aren't to make things easier, they are because they weren't well received in Japan, and sometimes it's meant to be things that were there in the first place but not added. Blazing Sword and Sacred Stones for instance uses 2x damage for might bonus instead of 3, which doesn't actually make the game easier-- in many instances, it makes the games more difficult. How does "Lyndis getting a unique animation in the localization" make the game easier? I guess if Lyndis' sweet animation is better to look at, it does make it easier to stomach watching her attacks. And hilariously enough, the localized change ends up being used in Path of Radiance. Which would lead me to believe that they wanted to see how the audience would receive the global changes. And some games like Streets of Rage 3 are infamous for being harder than their Japanese counterparts. Bare Knuckle 3 is an incredibly easy game, with 5 difficulties. Streets of Rage 3 on the other hand, is easily the most difficult one in the franchise and added about 3 new ways to not "win" the game perfectly. It also removed difficulties from the game-- the two of which it chose were the easiest difficulties, gave damage boosts to enemies as well as movement speeds, removed 1ups from the Japanese version, and made "Easy" mode (the closest gauge to the difficulty being Normal), doesn't even allow you to finish the game and instead mocks you for being a wuss and playing easy mode. Contra games also are objectively harder in the US over Japan as well. I'm of the mindset that the games that are more difficult in Japan are more difficult due to a lack of playtesting and shoving the game out the door, not because they are of the mindset that Americans are stupid. If that was the case, they wouldn't make their action games-- which give far less time for thinking ,or pattern recognition intentionally more difficult. And realistically, it's generally taught in writing to not have people have the same names, let alone have the same letters for names if you can help it. IE, Anna, Bob, Cathy, Dan, so the localizations changing this up may not be because people are "stupid" but because the localization team though that the original translations made a poor decision.

I see Horse Emblem: Sigurdology of the Holy Weapons

In a way. Yes, which makes it a not so great generalized mechanic in that regard. Even with the range bonus and penalties, it still doesn't work out very well. Archers would rarely get the benefit, as the situation where an archer follows up on an enemy is less frequent than when a melee follows up on after an archer. So this is almost an indirect nerf to archers in this regard. And it's not 5 flanks. It's actually e eee eepee eee e 10 -- 12 (depending on how it works). Whatever unit is in that is dead as hell. It'd also be an indirect nerf to knights unless they got some sort of flanking bonus against them. The whole point of knights is to be caught in situations like this and live, and here we are making it even more of a bad thing. So they can't even be good in the situation that they should be good in. I agree that the penalty is too extreme was my beef primarily. I believe someone toyed with the idea of a class that could flank, and I wasn't opposed to that idea based on the ideas he had. These are just too much here. I think his thing is that simply put, being flanked falls into "don't let enemies gang up on one guy." Which is as easily remembered as WTA and WTD.

Not really. It doesn't depend on the player's strategy here. Flanking in Fire Emblem would literally be a mechanic that would more often than not simply help the enemy. "Oh check this out! There's this new mechanic that doesn't really do anything to help you!" Fun. What you just described sounds very sluggish and boring. Baiting one unit at a time? That sounds absolutely horrendous. LTCing has nothing to do with why I think it says like a bad idea. Overall, it would encourage the player to move even slower. It's not even a "don't bite off more than you can chew," it's a "create artificial choke points with your units" a strategy that's already constantly deployed anyways. Status staves -- a feature in Fire Emblem do a much better job of stopping people from playing hyper aggressively. Because that's not hard. It's tedious. That's why most people are saying "no," because it's a mechanic that doesn't really work well with the way Fire Emblem is currently setup. And I'll be honest: the "what's wrong with it being hard?" Is quite possibly the weakest defense a person can muster towards criticism. Difficulty is relative, so suggesting that something would make a game "hard" is already a bad sign. No it wouldn't. It'd make enemy hits go from say... 50 to 80 within the same turn, which would mean that a person that gets flanked would need more evasion to dodge... Making it more useful than before. You'd need multiple units to boost hit, which is something you'd honestly want to avoid, meaning that powerhouses that have low hit would now have a way to circumvent that (it's still lousy as needing multiple units to boost their hit still kinda blows in this sense). And all stats makes it literally just a boost towards enemies almost every single time. In many instances in Fire Emblem, you aren't going to be dogpiling one enemy unit because most of the time the enemy units are just flat out weaker than the player units. So quite literally, it's a mechanic that serves no real purpose outside of hurting the player-- mechanics like that are bad in a game. It's some of the reason you already have criticism of attack stance in this: because it more often than not favors the enemy more than the player. However, at least with attack stance, the player can happily make use of it to kill more enemies as well. Flanking is just one of those things that wouldn't work as a general mechanic. A skill? Sure. But as a "everyone has this skill?" Just annoying.

No. Flanking is one of those ideas that would be an enemy boost more often than not. Especially as a generalized mechanic.

Honestly I don't mind things being cut in remakes anyways... I mean who actually liked Zombie Leon? That... Was really obscure...

Does it? It's been awhile since I've used gamble, in that case, the skill sucks.

If you are in Wrath range and have Heaven affinity it can be pretty solid. A swordmaster has 10 critical innately, and with a killer weapon, that'd be +30 critical, so they'd have 40 critical and with Gamble, they can rock 80 critical. With Wrath range, all they have to do is hit at that point to score a critical. Swordmasters generally have overkill hit anyways, so you suddenly have so-so hit and amazing critical. If you're not guaranteed to kill an enemy, it's a nice little setup. That said, I'd say the best balance in the series is honestly probably Gaiden... As most have said, Pegsus are really the only ones that are "outstanding" in a way.

I love it.

Here's how I feel about Birthright. On hard, Birthright is definitely at its sweet spot, and is the best you can get from it. Lunatic is basically like Awakening Lunatic light-- IE, having all of the shortcomings of Awakening's harder modes, but doesn't have the enemies constantly rushing-- the difference? The game essentially dogpiles you and has hellish amounts of reinforcements making maps drag on far worse than Awakening's ever could. I honestly found Awakening Lunatic more enjoyable. It felt like less of a chore. Which says something because I hate Lunatic Awakening. The maps in birthright range from "okay," to simply awful with most of the bad maps being towards the later half of the game. I got it through the Special Edition, but I can say that if I didn't, I might have been a bit upset about buying it... Fortunately, Special is the same cost as regular so... I guess it's not so bad. After Lunatic, I didn't want to play Birthright again though.

That could work in the sense of having a lord that has brothers and sisters that are in line to inherit the throne before them, so they enjoy being a noble but never actually had to have a ton of responsibility because their siblings took care of everything. But imagine if the siblings were killed-- or instead started fighting themselves and that left the wimp lord to either 1) Do nothing and let the siblings sort out the problem themselves 2) Stand and fight in a way that causes all sides to stand down. A wimp lord could actually work out pretty well if the story wasn't completely stupid. Which makes it out that Roy is in fact, not dead weight. He can help at moments. And besides, everyone knows that FE6 HM is harder for the first 7 chapters anyways. So having a usefulness at any point in these chapters means quite a bit.

Normal globally is Hard in Japan. There is no easy mode in Radiant Dawn technically. That said, Normal Mode isn't that bad so long as you don't actively try to use everyone in the game Easy (normal) mode is about as hard as PoR Normal mode to be honest. People level up crazy fast there, and it's more than enough to offset the lousy and rocky starts that some people have.