Cysx

The story... isn't bad. If I'm being honest it's mostly carried by its presentation, though there definitely are some great moments that stick with you. I'd have quite a lot to say about this game, but I wouldn't want to spoil things. It's definitely pretty good, hope you have fun. As for the gameplay, enemy fire is a bit less scary than it seems at first I'd say, so it's generally not a huge deal if you take a few seconds to adjust or correct a missed input. Just, the moment you drop under 20% health, you need to aim to save yourself, and make do with what you get.

Not that this makes an immense amount of sense either, to be honest. They've already found a new solution anyway, remember? Whipswords. Yes I'm extrapolating.

To be fair, hybrids typically suffer from sacrificing their main attack stat for a largely useless amount of the secondary attack stat; Chieftain doesn't really do that, since it has the better strength of the two. Instead it sacrifices skill(-7 base and -15% growth). Doesn't lose out on caps or max weapon ranks either. If you just wanted the damage and survivability you'd still go Chieftain.

They're not exceedingly different, and BR doesn't really give you the tools to easily have a strong Oni savage around(because Rinkah is limited and reclassing Hayato/Hinata is a bore), so it doesn't matter much. Chieftain can reasonably get access to Horse Spirit as a 1-2 range tanking weapon, and can make good use of the Bolt axe, with accuracy issues. It gets a better -/5 skill and gives slightly better pair up bonuses. Blacksmith is more well rounded, although E sword doesn't really help it much. Think of it as a Sol-less axe Hero, because that's exactly what it is. Edit: It does give Ryoma access to lancebreaker, which gets rid of his only weakness, so in his case it's pretty good; not so much for the actual Oni savages though I'd say Chieftain is a bit better, but that's arguable.

You can't exactly send your whole crew to the ledges in 1-E, though, and the first set is not that big of a time save anyway. As for 3-6, it is a very defensive chapter where going off on your own is typically suicide anyway, so again, it's not that big a deal. Her being in a class that can go up ledges and walk in swamps would unfortunately only make a marginal difference; one might even argue that canto is more valuable in 3-6.

Dang, I forgot just how early the game gave you the leg ring, admittedly. ... my points still stand though(except Karin, I mean she's still a good candidate because of ferrying, but she can outrange regular ballistae by promoting, and 15 range ones are out of her reach regardless, I was thinking of something else), largely because Marty just isn't that good a choice. Leif doesn't see much combat precisely because he's not very mobile. He's a support battery for many characters, seizes, and typically runs around with the King Sword once obtained, making his combat and support great. He also doesn't get fatigued, so overall, he's a really solid choice. The character becoming a dancer 6 chapters later is already around at that point, and it's not like she cannot take advantage of +2 move. But really pretty much anyone with canto or superior combat compared to Marty can make better use of it, that's kind of just how it is. I never said you did. He's decent but then, hammers. Also your approach of optimizing deployment is interesting but you can't exactly train everyone(and most untrained units do fall off still), and deployment slots are generous enough that you don't have to drop characters too often. Marty and Dashin are also pretty fatigue resilient, and can always justify their presence by being capable of reliably tanking crowds of enemies. So chances are, they'll be around more often than not.

Eh, they've pulled it off a few times. Some supports even have it as a consistent theme, it's not that rare. Just... when it comes to their plots in recent memory, they kept things morally straightforward, for some reason.

Meg, definitely, few characters wouldn't be better out of armor knight anyway. Fiona would lose out on canto though(unless she was a flier), and her joining with awful bases and only being playable in 1-7 and 1-E wouldn't change, so no, she'd still be terrible. I'd honestly do more than give her levels, I'd make her tier 2 at join time. It's not like she'd break the balance considering late part 1 showers you with broken units anyway.

I see this more as a Mekkah commodity thing than anything else. Asvel has a 70% speed growth and an insane promotion, the Sety scroll makes but a very small difference on him, and for a very short time. Other units tend not to have any trouble doubling/not really fight that much, so I definitely wouldn't say the scroll is in high demand. It is actually fairly commonly known that Thracia has it out for Dashin, who is indeed a pretty decent unit especially for an armor knight, but has to face hordes of armor slaying weapons even though he's your only unit for almost the entire game to take effective damage from them. It's a pretty baffling design decision. Also it is true that favoritism makes miracles happen in Thracia, but I'll insist that Marty really doesn't need that much, compared to other rocky start units. The Hero Axe might seem like it'd be in high demand, but Halvan and especially Dagda don't actually need it that much to kill stuff, and even capturing is plenty doable without it. As for Othin... yeah. He does have HP to compensate for his low magic at least, but still, that's a pretty big weakness of his. Leg ring is probably the most contested item in the entire game, and when your lord has movement issues, you have a dancer, and it can push a flier into outranging ballistae(which is very useful in dealing with them), it's really difficult to justify giving it to Marty imo. For mountains, I'm relying on Serenes here because I frankly don't know, but apparently Marty doesn't move any faster than other foot units in them, despite his class' name.

Warp is typically used to defeat the boss, and then seize in a timely fashion. Marty isn't notable as a boss killer(he's okay, there are just better people for it), and he cannot seize. He can also die to magic pretty fast, and strong magic users start being pretty common towards the end of the game, not to mention those that reduce HP to 1 and poison, whom he cannot really kill easily and is just as vulnerable to as everyone else. Him being rescued isn't about protection, it's to improve his mobility by being ferried across mountains or problematic terrain in general, something every unit can take advantage of, but him. Pure waters are a pretty precious resource and even with it, he struggles to reach 10 Magic, which iirc, still leaves him vulnerable to a bunch of stuff. It also takes him a turn to use one. True, status isn't in every chapter, but it's frequent enough later on that it's a pretty significant problem for Marty. Sety scroll makes his magic growth 15, that's not gonna make a miraculous difference. It's not that 1 PCC, no MS, Leadership or Skills make him worthless, these are just significant advantages others have over him. You said he could be one of the best, so he has to compare to everyone else, and many simply bring more to the... party, than he does.

Sure, let's do this! Marty suffers from not being able to be transported as a result of capping Con pretty early. He will also have middling mobility because his promotion, while great otherwise, provides no mov. He has 1 pcc, no movement stars, no skills, and no leadership. He obviously has no staff utility and his very low magic is difficult to fix, making him prone to status staves of all kinds. Finally, his one support being Dagdar, an unit with a niche very similar to his doesn't do him any favor. On the flipside, he grows into the most physically durable unit in the game and his extremely high HP means fatigue isn't much of a problem for him. He's also very good at stats few units excel at(HP, Def, Bld), and bad at ones that are the easiest to fix through early scrolls(Skl, Spd), giving him a pretty impressive spread if trained correctly, indeed. As said above, his promo bonuses are also fantastic (+3 Str&Def, +5 Skl, +6 Spd). Overall no, he has too many shortcomings to be among the best, he just doesn't really have that potential. He is violently underrated by many, though, as simply giving him the Hero Axe early on completely fixes his combat, and once his stats catch up/he promotes, he becomes a perfectly serviceable unit that will rarely fail you.

I mean, chests or villages are only an incentive to go fast if they're in danger; granted, you don't know in advance that they're not, but considering that the loss from a stolen chest or a destroyed village is already more psychological than something that will actually stop you from winning the game, listing the fear of a psychological loss as an incentive to not turtle is a bit questionable. It's not necessarily wrong, but that could also not be what the devs were going for at all. Rankings tend to be really obscure and easily ignored, and the issue with turncount bexp is that it tends to result in you leaving kills, and thus exp, behind; typically, you'll still get way more by taking your time, so it balances things out more than it incentivizes one playstyle over the other. Very late tough reinforcements are extremely rare and almost never actually dangerous to the player. Especially not a turtling player. Let me just bring up Valkyria Chronicles for a bit. In that game, you're ranked for every chapter individually, and at least in 1, it's exclusively based on your turncount; just getting a B rank cuts your reward - aka your main source of income - by 25%, and a C rank cuts it in half; the requirements are pretty tight, too, encouraging you to abuse units that go fast. You can also see your current rank at all times during a mission. That's what actually punishing turtling can look like, and that's not what Fire Emblem does(and neither should it be, just so we're clear). Depends of what your definition of the best strategy is, but if it's one that gets the closest to guaranteeing victory... well it's quite the opposite, turtling is the safest way to win in a majority of cases I'd say. It's almost never necessary, granted, but it's always there if you don't want to think, and when in doubt, many of us just turtle for a bit instead of risking a death, because it works. An argument to be made is also that the games, in many other ways, do incentivize turtling. First with permadeath being a thing and thus mistakes costing the player a lot of time regardless(assuming they reset of course), but also, supports in GBA can only be timely obtained by playing at a snail's pace and turn-based supports(by far the most common kind) are self-explanatory in general, healers and dancers have access to essentially infinite amounts of exp, arenas(FE4 aside) reward halting progression with massive monetary and experience gains, grinding out bosses that recover HP on thrones is a classic, same for grinding reinforcements...

Would you say it happening every three chapters or so is enough for you to not turtle at the very least through the chapters where they're not here?:3 But really I was just asking if they were thinking of something I wasn't.

I did mention those, they're really not relevant enough to justify saying turtling is as discouraged as can be on their own.

I don't think there's any need to get that specific; turtling can completely trivialize the game's challenge in many cases, so you'd need one new tier list per degree of turtling. Alright but, what did you mean by saying the games discourage it enough as it is, then? Well yeah, I was just addressing a suggestion. Though I don't think people enjoy glass cannon emblem typically, so that's another bag of worms. Defense is really difficult to balance in general it feels like.

I kinda don't think it is, outside of the odd side objective. I feel there's a reason almost every tier list discussion out there has a "no turtling" policy upfront. Plus that's not really what I'm asking for here per se, I'd just say it's pretty clear how giving you invincible units that move slower than everyone else would encourage it.

The issue is, doing that exacerbates a problem the series already has; you can typically turtle your way to victory with very little thought involved, which makes the game boring twice over.

Conquest ch10 is not the best example of what I'm talking about, for sure(though it largely works the way it does because you're given Camilla in it, take her out and it's suddenly much more scary to go out of your comfort zone). That being said, maps like RD ch 3-13 show how you can also be entertaining without encouraging proactivity too much. Plus there are solutions, such as randomizing spawning positions to an extent, giving enemies the Pass skill/sending in fliers, altering chokepoints as the turns go on, encouraging strategies that involve placing units on damaging tiles, spawn enemies behind your walls(a real time strategy classic), throwing enemies you cannot deal with and have to bail in front of at you, etc... that could make these more than "just wall in and reach stats benchmarks", without lower movement being too debilitating. I really think it could work. Also I do remember armors being the meta early on very distinctly, but I'd better let people who know better than I do the talking.

That's pretty good. The voice actor has officially grown on me, too.

That's all there is to it, Heroes is about killing and absolutely not dying. There's also no dodging, accuracy or crits involved, none of which knights are typically good at/against. By that metric, generals were also a pretty solid choice in the gba link arena, it's just that nobody cared. Point being, there's no real lesson to be taken from Heroes on that front, except making the class' bases/caps better, which already tends to be the case. Careful though, because making them invincible is not the way to make things interesting. I think they stroke an interesting balance with Effie, even though that didn't really help other armors(or incite you to make her a general) because most of the good about her was from the character herself. Just give knights +4 base strength or something, make them hurt a lot in one hit. And yeah, not necessarily a drastic change in game design, just something more inclusive, with objectives to reach and ones to defend on the same map, for example. Shortcut/warp tiles for units that aren't mounted. Things like that. Edit: Also, something I brought up a while ago: Include endurance objectives on certain maps. As-in, legitimate rewards for surviving longer before completing the chapter; and do make them difficult. Probably best for the enemies involved to give no exp, by the way(and maybe same for healing/dancing until the objective's completed), so that the rest of the game remains relatively balanced whether you clear these or not.

Hm... we'll see. I'm just glad she's back as a character with a (maybe) relatively big role, though. She was a highlight of 1 for me. As said above, the issue is that 1's gameplay is really basic by today's standards, from what I remember anyway. Apparently the series actually became a good t-rpg franchise from 3 onwards, but I can't tell you to what extent since I still need to play it. So it 'd either be 1, 3 or 5(since 2 and 4 are more direct sequels), depending on what you're looking for. Crazy, we did the same thing. But either way, Gamefaqs still has the complete translated scripts for all but 4(that or 4 is really short).

Wow, I'm... really looking forward to seeing that, actually.

Ok, the trailer didn't do that much for me(except the kyobou action, they're still called that right?), but this is still pretty nice. Hopefully this at least gets a pc release; and it's a ways off, anyway. Almost surprisingly so, considering the trailer does not really look early. This is confirmed to be a new protagonist, right? The dual katanas, song and title made this look like a reboot for a moment.

The two pre-battle screens don't make the STR route very likely, though. But either of the other two are possible. Or something else.

I'm not denying a similarity in terms of themes, visuals, or even gameplay; I'm just saying that at the end of the day, the games don't play the same and thus ASG doesn't qualify as a spiritual successor to me. This is no way a commentary about the game's quality or anything, I think 1 and especially 2 are very solid games overall. Eh, I don't know about that. I think they wanted to create an IP distinct from what they were known from before, to mark a new beginning of sorts, and the result was Gunvolt. The double charged shot in ZX, as you know, is unusable for 99% of the game until you unlock it again, and I did already mention the homing shots from model A. I just don't think that's similar to what Gunvolt does at all. As for Giga crush, it's a screen nuke, and a bad one at that, so I wouldn't say it matters a lot. I'd actually say Gunvolt is a considerably more skill-based game if you're going for score, though it's almost effortless if you're not. Zero was less about avoiding everything and more about disposing of stuff before it could hurt you, and the fact that Zero had a buster doesn't make his gameplay similar to the tag then lightning then recharge system of Gunvolt. You flew through stages while precisely cutting everything in your path in Zero. In Gunvolt you have to optimize your tags on each group of enemies, then electrify them, then recharge, all of which require you to halt your forward momentum. That's nice and all but those are some very broad metrics. Copen's gameplay is about managing to stay in the air for extended periods of time while bumping from enemy to enemy, it's a far cry from anything X or Zero have ever done(afaik), even model H isn't the same at all. He's still super fun to play as though, it makes a lot of sense that he's getting his own game. I guess you could say that, as their past works helped shape it in a major way for sure; but at the same time, they went to lengths to make it its own thing I feel, and succeeded, for better and for worst. For sure, but I guess people just didn't really like those games. The series' situation is very comparable to Megaman Legend's, yet you never really see people asking about ZX3. And for their defense, the first two were very flawed games for sure.