Ayra

- They do use the "smiling, hurt, ect" faces, and not just in battle. For example, while promoting my Rod Knight she had a sinister smirk on her portrait. Their expression changes depending on their level up gains. Their quotes is all "...!" "!!", ect, as expected. - The only data I have so far for class change is a Revenant Knight being able to reclass to a Wyvern Lord, and Maid being able to reclass to Strategist. I wish I had a larger sample to give, but most of my generics are not promoted yet. - None of them had any skills to start with, but they gain 1 class skill per level (just like a regular character that got class changed). - No ideas about their growths: I didn't actually use any extensively yet, but they usually had 4-5 stats level up which is pretty darn good but the data sample is just way too small to reach a conclusion. Their base stats weren't half bad either actually. - You can actually put accessories on the characters just like regular characters. You can use them on your castle defense team (you could actually make your defense team be 100% generics). - The biggest advantage (arguably) of the Fate generics compared to the Awakening Einherjar is that they look as if they belong in the game. Their portrait is in the exact same style as the main characters, there's no ugly border, no blue glow around them when they fight. Besides their lack of quotes (and not being able to man your castle buildings), they really are full-fledged characters.

I can only speak of Hoshido Hard mode until chapter 19, but here's my impressions so far regarding chapter design and objectives. Contrary to expectations, there's actually a bit variety in the objectives. So far, I've seen one "survive 13 turns" chapter, one "escape" chapter and one "catch the fleeing boss before they reach the map's edge by opening new paths with Dragon Vein". Overall maps are better than Awakening's. Big wide open fields are rare (though there's a few). You often have the option to open up the map via Dragon Vein, sometime turning some close-quarter maps into wide open maps; however, since I'm using the Hoshido's ability to grind VERY sparsely and that the enemies are actually pretty strong comparatively, opening up the maps too much is generally suicidal. Even my +Defense General Kamui cannot tank swarm of enemies safely. Enemy positioning is generally good. The usual "send one unit to lure one enemy" strategy is less reliable overall. You often get the whole group instead (or multiple groups sometime), which normally pose a threat (especially since your units are so fragile). Also, most enemies (besides the ones that are actually fixed in place) eventually move sometime. If you take forever and play too safe, you'll end up swarmed. There's the series standards like units burning villages and rushing for chests (bow thieves in both cases). There's also things like damage floors, magic ballistas (first seen in chapter 17 I think), activatable tornadoes to slow flying units, ect. Overall, I'm very impressed and having a ton of fun. Yes, I'm sure some people will completely obliterate Hoshido when the game is better known, but for a first playthrough it's probably the most enjoyable Fire Emblem experience from a gameplay perspective I've had so far. No, I'm definitively not a Lunatic player doing things optimally (I always level up too many characters for starter), but I did do things like FE4, Hector Hard Mode, Shadow Dragon at Hard** mostly blind so I'm not entirely helpless in Fire Emblem. Having things like all the stats debuffs (like Rinkah setting up kills for Orochi or ninjas) and actually having to use them for success is a great feeling, as is having punishing going ultra slow while still not forcing you to maximize all your turns. It's not mind-numbing hard, it's just "enjoyably challenging" and just perfect for me. I can't say anything regarding Lunatic.

Here's some answers regarding generics based on my current playthrough: - You can promote a generic character: they have the regular two options of their class. If you promote them, they keep their original portrait and do not get the generic portrait for the new class. - You cannot class change a non-promoted generic. You can class change a promoted generic only to the other class from the class tree. For example, I have a generic Revenant Knight, and I can class change him to Wyvern Lord only. - You can only capture regular humans. This means no monster, and no phantom or "glowy purple eyes" units. - You cannot capture generic garous. I assume the same applies for the foxes.

I think Effie's model has actual pants (Can't confirm though, I don't have Nohr yet) and there's no generic female generals so if you don't make your Kamui a general (or reclass one of your other female units) you won't ever see that. Still, if you do what you do get is really more akin to a battle thong instead of battle panties, complete with a much more detailed behind. It's far worse than anything you had in Awakening in any class. It's a real shame for Rinkah: I feel that character-wise she's the best thing that ever happened in Fire Emblem, but gameplay wise she's so unspectacular. One plus I forgot to mention about her is that she's your only source of axes/clubs for a long, long time in Hoshido. I did go look at the Growth's topic for Rinkah's stats, my Rinkah growths actually are as bad for strength and hp as I feared, so it wasn't just bad luck on my side. More characters! Crimson: For a level 1 promoted, her starting stats are amazing and is one of the few axe user on Hoshido. She's at least as good as my best 20/1 characters. I'm unsure of her growths though (I literally just got her), and she has only Kamui for support. Yuugiri: Like Crimson, but with worse stats. While Crimson starting stats are amazing, Yuugiri's are "not that bad". Her class is good, but there's a ton of units that can get that class on Hoshido (Four Pegasus Riders and two archers) so she's nothing special. Azura: Defensively, she's the standard dancer. No hit points, no defense. However, her offensive is extremely impressive. Her speed is really good, and surprisingly enough, her Strength growth seems to be very high. She's not your standard dancer. Asama: Amazing. He unfortunately starts as a priest, but his growths are excellent. He's my highest HP unit (???) with really good stats across the board. I forsee a great future for him as a Mountain Monk (spear + staff) unit due to his higher-than-Rinkah strength BEFORE promotion. Setsuna: She's a traditional FE archer. Not terribly impressive bases, low joining level comparatively and poor growth. I got good use of her for some time and her speed and skill growth is sky-high, but everything else barely ever get a point. She's really starting to drag behind at this point despite some good weapons. Mitama (Asama-Setsuna): Not bad, but Asama is better in every aspect at this point (I think I got very lucky with Asama). On the positive side, she makes for a better miko than Sakura (who makes a great exorcist) due to her decent strength even has a priestess.

I'm currently playing as Hard/Casual instead of my usual Hard/Classic, mostly because my Japanese is not good enough to understand everything (like some skills or weapons). I usually still reset if I feel that a unit died because I messed up instead of because I didn't understand an important weapon trait. Since I don't want to spoil anything of substance, I'll just say that if you don't power-level any of your units, Hoshido Hard is actually not a cakewalk.The maps are often more complex than Awakening maps even on Hoshido, and I feel it's at least as hard as Awakening hard. So don't feel bad if you pick casual on Hoshido :)

Thanks for the deck lineup! My own deck design idea was a bit along those lines (though less effective); I'm glad that this won and not a "all Lucinas and Marths cards" or other similar one-minded decks. I also enjoy that most of his deck actually consists of common or uncommon cards at first glance: it's not a "rare-fest", so it sounds like "cheap" decks will be viable at least for the moment. Anyway, yes I do think that "swarm and kill" variations will be the basic format until we get more cards. We only have 100-something cards out at the moment. There's not too many "finesse" cards out at the moment, or not enough different ones. For example, like all the Tharja cards have interesting mechanics regarding opponent discards, but no other cards do and you can't have multiple Tharjas out so you can't base your deck on that mechanics. "Stalling the game" sounds like it would be benefit some scaling cards heavily, but I'm not seeing cards that actually let you stall. You might think that defensive cards like Kellam could do the job, but that's really not the case.

I'm not sure of the reason for the comment? The only place I mentionned Kaze is in the Kagerou entry briefly?

Well, what you wrote matches my understanding of the game perfectly, except for one thing. Regarding those two statements: 1) **You may promote on an already promoted unit, as long as the promotion goes from a lower costed unit to a higher costed one. All other restrictions and benefits still occur. 2) **You may "upgrade" a unit. This consists of playing a higher costed unpromoted unit on top of a lower costed unpromoted unit of the same character. This is not a promotion and the former unit goes to the retreat area. You pay the cost for an upgrade by paying the deploy cost. You may upgrade your MC and the new unit is now your MC. This part I'm not sure is correct. My understanding is that the only time you can Promote a unit is if you go from unpromoted to promoted (where you pay for the promotion cost, draw a new card and get CSS bonus). You can upgrade a unit from unpromoted to unpromoted, and promoted to promoted. However, you have to pay full price, you don't draw a card, and you don't get CSS bonuses unless your unit actually went through a promotion before. In other words, you just replace the "top" card of the stack when you upgrade so the "was the unit promoted?" trigger stays. Example: I have a 1 cost Chrom in play. I play a 4/3 Chrom, so I pay 3 and get promotion bonuses. Later, I play a 5/4 Chrom. Since my the character is already promoted, I put the 4/3 Chrom in the discard pile and replace it with the 5/4 Chrom, I have to "pay" 5 bonds and I don't draw a card. However, since the 1 Chrom is still at the bottom of the stack, the CSS effects would still trigger.

I was just about to ask that :) I've "finished" Sully's page, thank you for the help! The support skill really doesn't look obvious at first glance and the "empty" ability slots look a bit strange, but it's pretty acceptable in my opinion. I should have a bit of time in the upcoming week, so I'll be adding a few cards at least. I'll be concentrating on the Awakening cards.

This is not an attempt at a tier list or anything scientific: It's just my feelings of the characters on how they are turning up so far and I'd love to hear other players opinions from their own playthrough. Please keep the spoilers at at minimum! I'm currently at chapter 14 on Hoshido route on Hard, with a little bit of grinding which is mostly irrelevant since I'm using way too many units and I'm pretty sure I'm not overleved (I routinely face class-changed units, and most of mine are not, my highest level character being level 2 promoted). Here's a few to get things rolling! -Female Kamui, +Def -Mag: Class changed to Knight at level 10, currently a General. Very solid unit, especially considering Hoshido's general lack of defense. Sky-high strength, good hit points, high defense (though not enough to fully negate enemy attacks) and enough speed not to be doubled. Do note that Female Kamui General design is extremely strange: If you disliked seeing female Robin's behind as a wyvern rider (or similar) in every cutscene, don't go female general Kamui because it's way, way worse. - Rinkah: Extremely disapointing but still of some use on Hoshido. Contrary to her appearance, her strength is mediocre, her max hit points is lower than most other units and her speed is just acceptable. However, she has very high defense for Hoshido, and her class skill that removes 6 Magic Resist from enemies is quite useful, especially since she can have an A+ support with Orochi. However, at least in my game, Oboro has better stats than her in every single stats at similar levels. I feel that Rinkah has some use on Hoshido, but if she was on Nohr she'd be basically useless. - Orochi: Middling. Think Micaiah but without the healing (at least before class-change). She has super high magic, but absolutely no speed (8 at level 15) and low durability. She has basically no durability, cannot double, but her one hit is very damaging. She's your one source of Capture, so if you want to grab some generics, she cannot be replaced. - Oboro: Excellent, think Nephenee. All her stats are very good, and she's useful in every situation. She can deal good damage, can tank both physical and magic decently and has useful skills. - Cyrus: Oboro on an horse. He's a godsent for Hoshido, and he was extremely solid for me. - Sophie (Cyrus-Sakura): Worse than Cyrus in every way at similar level, except for magic, but she's still usable overall. Sakura's probably not a good paring. She destroys enemy units clothes entirely on most hits (literally strips them to their underwear) so she's at least useful for some laughs. - Subaki: He's ok. He's really slow for a pegasus knight (which does not matter as much considering the bonus speed on attack), so his personal skill is not as good as it sounds. Hinoka was far superior to him overall. - Hinoka: Amazing. She has amazing resist and speed as expected, but her strength and defense is actually very high for a pegasus knight. I'm biased toward Pegasus Knights overall, but I feel she's the best one in the serie. - Matoi (Subaki-Hinoka): Basically identical to Hinoka. There's maybe a total of 3 points stat difference between the two. Glad she took from her mother and not her father. - Kagerou: Very solid overall. She comes with excellent stats overall and has high strength and speed. She doesn't have Kaze's amazing resist so she can't tank mages as well as him, but she's faring very well in dealing with most enemies no matter their class. - (Kaza)Hana: Nearly unusable. She's the cause of most of my resets so far. She dies in one single hit from most enemy units. Her speed isn't that good, and even with her additional evasion on the player phase, she still has 20% to get insta-killed by generic axe enemies. She has really good strength for a myrmidon/samurai, but she can't even double a lot of enemies. She's literally a liability in my team right now.

Generally I'm fine with fanservice and I usually don't mind strange outfit. However, I went Knight -> General for my Kamui with +def (I'm on Hoshido so I figured heavy tanking was a good idea). The thing is... The female General costume (at least for Kamui) is really heavy armor, except that her ass is completely uncovered except for a tiny thong. I wouldn't really mind the thong if it fit the costume, but it's all super-heavy armor otherwise. When you add that female Kamui as general has a weird "stick out her butt victory pose", and that you often see her from the back in in-game cutscenes... Well, its a bit unsettling for me.

I've just fought Benoit on my Hoshido campaign so I didn't get too much of a look at him, but I'm pretty sure his in-game character model had a noticeable stomach bulge. Anyway, Kagerou gets my vote overall. She manages to pull off both amazingly cool and incredibly pretty at the same time. She's pretty good as a unit too, which always help. Orochi gets second place just for the lottery. When you "lose" at the lottery, most characters are crestfallen and sorry. Orochi laughs at you hilariously instead; I found that pretty amusing.

I tried making a Sully page but I'm having some problems. How do you setup the Support skill? Also, regarding images is there a specific source that's being used for the images so that they look consistent, or "grab from wherever"..?

Is Soleil male or female?

Thanks! I literally was just about to ask regarding that. The last I had seen regarding that was way back from Dengeki report from the first stream and it was my own translation, which I don't trust very much.... Glad to see it's confirmed :) And thank you again for all the report! I definitively would love seeing the stream too.

Thanks for the translations as always! That Lucina image is definitively not the right one though :) Reading the promoted Owain card, my first reaction was "What's the point of his first skill? You can just do a crit instead", but the second explained it. Definitively going for a Flyer deck (... if I'm lucky enough to get the cards for it). That Gaius sure got a whole lot better suddenly though! That Japanese blog is awesome! So many previously unseen cards! Anna's the weakest unit (fighting-wise) in the game by far for her cost (3/2 unit, 20 power, 10 support). And I see some units with only 2 cost having 70 attack power...?

In the My Castle video, there was a section when it showed the placement of units for defence battles (so guidance for the AI when attacked in Streetpass). It was possible to group up some units together, both for attack and for guard stance, so I'm sure that AI for maps in general are setup in the same way.

I did. I originally chose Nohr because I prefer nurture to nature (still do) and vastly prefers the Nohr royal family to the Hoshido ones (Hinoka >= Camilla, but I prefer the Nohr counterparts in all other situations). However, I'm heavily disliking the support characters on Nohr. The majority of them are ruthless killers: Zero tortures people, Leon sounds very unforgiving, Charlotte is murderous and manipulative, Pieri is a slaughter machine half the time, Camilla orders entire nations to die, Berka sounds just fine with the killing orders... And if expand that further, Severa isn't the nicest of person either and we have an Owain that's having problem containing actual dark power... That's just too much evil/darkness/negativity for me, Zero in particular. Benoit and Elise sounds like the only two decent persons in that kingdom (Besides the characters that are both Hoshido and Nohr, who are nice on the whole). On the other side, I love the Hoshido character. Linca looks like to be the best thing to ever happen in Fire Emblem, Orochi sounds fun, foot lancers, tons of ninjas... Everything's pretty and beautiful and is much more like what I love. I'll definitively be playing all routes, and my reasoning for prefering Nohr still stands (Plus varied win condition and relatively limited resources = good), it's just that everything else that came afterward makes me lean toward Hoshido at least for a story/character/setting perspective.

I'm pretty sure that ninjas will be the ones opening doors for Hoshido. Ninjas were mostly spies and infiltrator: unlocking doors goes right along with that. I think horse archers will be on the Hoshido side. I know that all horses so far were on Nohr, but horse archers are really eastern: There's no such thing as a western horse archer anywhere in history (javelin cavalry at best). Even the attack animation for the Awakening horse archer was in the traditional Japanese horse archery.

Personally, I'm mostly interested in knowing if we'll get real supports and not the Radiant Dawn support. That's literally my last worry about this game and the only thing I really want to know at this point. I mean, there's tons of stuff and characters I'd like to know about still, but at this point I've seen so much that interests me that it'd just serve to increase my already way too high hype meter.

At first, I really liked Camilla. "Finally, a seductive character that's NOT evil! Awesome!" She obviously cared for Kamui, has amazing hair, is very pretty and has a cute ear headband. After some time, we get her description. "She's willing to kill for Kamui's sake." Okay, that's a bit evil, but... That sounds more like very devoted to her family instead of completely evil so that was ok. And then we see Belka saying that Camilla has ordered "Kill all Hoshido". So yeah. Camilla's evil, so there goes the "non-evil seductress" I was hoping for. She's still pretty, but her apparent evilness cuts my interest substancially. I'll see after release though: my opinion might change again of course.

Thank you so much for the report! It's extremely useful information Yeah, I'm not surprised that the game revolved around Marth and Chrom from the starter decks: They really are a big cut over the non-super rares we've seen. I can see a few other characters being lord-worthy (like Minerva or Lon Qu for example), but in general most regular characters sounds like a very bad idea to pick as lord. If you don't mind, I have a few more questions regarding the rules: 1) Can you have two of the same character in play at the same time? For example, two Chrom? 2) Can you upgrade a character? For example, change your 3/2 Chrom for a 4/3 Chrom? 3) You mention that you can "easily play 5 units in one turn"; what's the requirements to play units? Do you have to "spend" your bonds (but not flip them) or can you basically throw down anything you want as soon as you have enough bonds of the table? 4) To perform critical hits with Chrom, do you need to have the exact same Chrom card (Like if you have the 4/3 Chrom in play you have to play the 4/3 Chrom to crit), or does any Chrom card work? I'm not too worried about the "unlimited amount of units in play". 4 units each row made sense based on the play mat, but unlimited can work since I expect the game to be extremely "bloody". Since there's no point in NOT attacking (if your attack fails you lose nothing), I expect the battlefield to be mostly clean most of the time.

Oh, the art is certainly amazing. I hope there's a Cynthia card somewhere in there (not looking good though; maybe in a year!) I briefly checked on youtube and niconico for videos of the Cipher demo event, but nothing popped out yet unfortunately.

Personally I'm fine with the way you phrase your translations. I personally prefer long and clear instead of short and you have to spend hours arguing with the other players as to what the card actually does :) I don't think so. At this point, we know most of the cards for this first release and there's there's doesn't seem to have enough "space" for promoted/non promoted versions of all the characters we've seen so far. So for example, I don't think Camus, Frederic or Jeigan have non-promoted cards, and I don't think the three axe dudes have promoted cards for example. So why would someone like Frederic have only a 3/2 promoted card if there's no base card? I can see two reasons. 1) The unit starts already promoted in his game so its not too jarring theme-wise. 2) They might add a non-promoted Frederick in a future expansion, which could promote into this already existing one. ... That's just my guess, of course.

Rules are the most important thing in my opinion. You could also showcase some of the more interesting cards (ability or visually) too to drum some interest. A huge thank you again to aubergine for the absolutely amazing translations! I've said it multiple times before, but it warrants being said again! I've looked at #3 of the video DifferentFight linked. They follow what we thought the rules were to the letter: the only things I was a bit surprised was the "units can attack the turn they come in play" (I can definitively see an argument for it though) and that "horizontal" placement doesn't matter at all. To be entirely honest, after all the news and new cards we've seen lately, I'm a bit disappointed. The fact that there's only 100 main cards in the set is very low, and we've seen a substantial amount of the cards already. There's going to be a lot of characters missing (and I would not be surprised if many that are present don't have a class-changed version), but that's not what bothers me. It's that on the whole there's few interesting deck-building opportunities and it seems that it'll center mostly on a few rare power cards. For example, all flyers have the exact same stats (Even wyverns have the same as pegasi), and there's an heavy overlap in their skills. Want a flying deck? You need the 4/3 Minerva; there's absolutely no other compromises. Then there's all the characters with cool skills, but not really much to synergise with. Like the two Tharja cards have interesting links with discard and enemy hand size, but no other cards do. There's the mini combos (like the three axes dudes which are cool but you can't really base a deck on) and some useful cards on the Shadow Dragon side (like Tiki's that can fuel any bond-heavy or flip-heavy deck), but... It seems like it will mostly revolve around a few mega-powerful cards like the "boost everyone by 30" Marth, or the units that grow very big very quickly. The base gameplay looks fun actually, it's just the initial card offering with the base that feels too limited deckbuilding-wise... But hopefully I'm wrong.