DefyingFates

I know we're a lot better as a whole than we were before, but I feel like the past few years have gotten worse the few before it. The uptick in targeted transphobia for example - even if it's just a bunch of existing transphobes being more publicized, as you say. But now we're going far off-topic. Are there any character archetypes you'd like to see return, either as is or deconstructed?

Oh, I don't think that either, I'm so sorry if I came off that way! I just brought Leon up in the context of a game that would let you romance anyone, since you would be unable to pair him with a female Avatar. Outside of that though, obviously diversity of all kinds is great to have, especially with how openly xenophobic a lot of countries are, especially in recent years.

I forgot about that, thanks! I wouldn't go that far, because of the Bond Conversations are part of a continuous exchange, and not all of them are as generic as "Let's work together" "Okay!" Veyle's a decent example of both actually. Her conversations with Corrin are all about how she gave up her Dragonstone to get out from under her father's thumb and she commiserates with Micaiah about how lonely they both used to be. So I don't think it's a stretch to imagine conversations that can be a bit more serious while still working within the 8 line limit. Of course, you guys are welcome to suggest both funny and straightlaced conversation partners as @lenticular did.

Godspeed, noble hackers. Thank you very much for this write-up, not just the builds! I think I have a spare A!Grima too, so I may be able to make the alternate build you mentioned too if the need arises. And thanks again! I need to save these somewhere!

I didn't consider that, thanks! So it's possible she'll get something similar to an (upgraded?) Sweet Dreams and og!Plumeria will get Sweet Dreams+ later on. Fingers crossed!

Maybe a game could split the difference: have the protagonists be a brother/ sister pair. You pick one to play as per the norm but each sibling ends up with a different story. Imagine if the Corrins were twins and one picked Hoshido and the other Birthright, for example. I'm sure some game has already done this idea though. Deconstruction itself could be a fun theme for the next anniversary game. Engage was a celebration of it; the next one could be all about turning old traditions on their heads or looking deeper into what those archetypes would actually be like... as long as the plot doesn't start writing in plot twists for the sake of having them like GoT S8 did, of course. @Samz707: regarding permadeath with a smaller cast... I think there just wouldn't be any*. You could have some other kind of penalty though, like an injury that costs someone a bunch of stats for the next battle (or entirety of the next chapter). Fell Xenologue already played with this idea: there are only a few people involved in the plot canonically, so the game enforces a casual mode. * so yes, most would probably immediately confine such a game to "only a spin-off" jail, but the idea of a smaller cast and conflict would have likely done that already I think.

My hot take is that I like Engage's story and characters. It's obviously not as intricate as anything from Three Houses and gets cheesy at times, but Engage has a fine enough story with fun characters (and a few genuinely interesting ones) and some scenes I fully enjoyed, either because they got me in the feels or were downright awesome. Obviously it'd be a problem if every Fire Emblem was like this going forward, but I don't mind some simpler plots from time to time. It's also better than Fates' plot and cast.

I'll probably need to reword that title... Anyway, this idea came about when I saw a comment on Twitter's decaying corpse and thought to myself that Veyle and Lyon from FE8 had an awful lot in common*, and that a Bond Conversation between the two could have been really insightful to see as a result. That in turn got me wondering further about any other past characters you think would feel like hand-picked mentors for the Engage cast for whatever reason, like Alcryst and Takumi bonding over their inferiority complexes for example. What do you think, and what do you think makes them so familiar or the Emblem a good confidant for them? * My reasoning goes something like this. Spoilers for both games, obviously: Thanks for reading, I'd love to hear what kinds of pairings you can come up with!

I saw those as being quirky than obsessive or creepy. Obviously some reactions are a bit unhealthy like Framme and Chloe's, but I found most of them funny myself. Of course that could just be because I was relieved there was no new Tharja analogue. I had Dorothea in mind too, but considering S Supports are a thing, I thought Leon was a better example as someone who seems to only like guys. I think Edelgard's situation is a lot more subtle. Outside of her crush/ mild obsession with Byleth I think the only hint of her being bi is playing along when Dorothea flirts with her? Heck, it speaks volumes compared to Ingrid who gets weirded out when she gets flirted with of course! She just talks about Edelgard all the time. Even her Supports with other characters are about how she envies how much Edelgard respects them (e.g. Hubert and Shez), or about how she or her conversation partner should be doing more for Edelgard's sake. I think the only exception is her Support with Dorothea, but that's only because she turns out to be an overbeating fangirl of hers too. (There's a reason Samz called her Faye 2.0 earlier.) Fair enough, but I think games like the Tales or Persona franchises handle this well. They give you 6 - 10 characters to use and limit you to using four at a time, so unless you hate everyone, you'll still be able to build a team of just the characters you like and have all your bases covered (e.g. DPS, support, tank) since they're designed to have overlapping roles.

So the FE8 and FEH HoFs are in the rerun poll. Obviously Three Houses is going to win because it's Three Houses, but on the off-chance that FE8 gets botted to victory or something, I wanted to know what Myrrh's best build would be. Apparently the CYL skills will be in the pool at that point? If so, Counter Roar is on the table and I figured I should opt for pretty much B!Corrin's build, i.e. Spirit Breath +Eff, Counter Roar 4, Armored Beacon and a Def-based Far Save to go along with it, but I'm not sure what I should go for beyond that. P.S. If FEH wins instead, would Laegjarn's best build be Flared Sparrow, S/R Far Trace and a Hold Skill with Ruptured Sky as a Special? Thanks as always everyone!

I'm surprised that Plumeria got the upgrade over Triandra, since the latter was pushed as the "main" Dokkalfar in Book IV: she was Peony's sister, was the one telling Plumeria what to do throughout and survived longer than her. Yet here we are. I guess being popular lets you cheat your way over all of that, huh? I'm not complaining or anything, don't worry, just surprised as I said before. That said, her bio saying she's essentially been "born again" and dressing up as Freyja feels an awful lot like something that would happen to a CYL unit. I think the mashup is cool, but again: surprised! I imagine Ascended Peony will come next month. If past Ascended/ Rearmed Heroes are any indication, she'll get the default Sweet Dreams making it really awkward when og!Plumeria gets a remix two months or so later.

Fair enough, but he at least comes off as a regular human being. Even that Valbar support you mentioned ends with Valbar turning him down and him accepting that. Now compare that to Faye who's implied to go stalking or spying on Alm in her ending even after both get married to different people, or the mess of an A Support Edelgard and Monica have which only serves to "justify" Edelgard knowingly letting her die in Three Houses for her own ends. Again, Leon feels like a real person. Faye and Monica are just... neurotic, obsessive messes in human form, probably written that way because Tharja and Camilla were so popular before them. But to bring this back on topic, if there's something I'd like to see in a future story it'd be a complete lack of the Tharja -> Monica archetype. This is something I liked about Engage (as much as people like bashing its plot and cast). Sure most of the characters are reverent towards Alear, but no one's deranged in how they treat them. Even when Ivy seems to be heading that way, it turns out she just blurted out something weird due to her lack of social skills and once she clears the air about that you find out she's just a normal person like everyone else.

Yeah, he talked about Valbar a lot, but he did more than just talk about Valbar. Compare that to Monica, whose every Support seemed to involved Edelgard in some way, and even her Forging Bonds in Heroes was all about how much she liked her too (she was paired off with Tharja of all people, which really drives that home).

Ooh, I would love something like this! It'd also be a push-back against developers (especially Japanese ones) refusing to have solo female leads in their games! But I think this could work with an Avatar too, we already got something similar in Silver Snow... we'd just need an Avatar with more agency, like Alear, to work off of the Lord-turned-antagonist. Heck, I was just thinking about that fake FE Twilight leak earlier today, about how you would play as characters from both sides of a conflict; that could even be incorporated into a route split idea too (but in that case you'd probably want to turn the two Lords into the two forms of an Avatar, like Astral Chain or Pokemon does). Ooh, this would be really fun! I love this idea very much! It probably means we'd never get a staff like Aum or even Engage's Nodus, but being able to freely trade out tomes and staves between units AND let them be reusable would be really efficient and open up some fun possibilities for experimentation and the like! Yes, please! Heck, I'm still amazed at how well Leon was written and am surprised we haven't gotten anything like that since. The only openly gay character we've had since was Monica I think, and she's too busy being obsessed with Edelgard to be interesting or well-written. I'm glad the smaller cast/ scope idea resonates with you too! I'm surprised by how popular ledges are, but having another type of terrain bonus like that would make positioning fun and add flavor to maps (e.g. when attacking a fort, most people in there would naturally have the high ground over you). So... yeah! If Genealogy really does lend itself to this mechanic, I'm curious to see if it comes back for the remake (I'm not holding my breath though :/)

Every era of FE has done something new with the core gameplay loop and I was curious if there were any ideas you'd like to see, especially with our last two FEs taking drastically different approaches to how classes and weapons work. Here are two versions of weapons and classes I came up with, each named after either 3H or Engage. Three Houses+ Engage+ I really liked Three Houses' approach personally, but I know the freeform nature turned a bunch of people off too, which is why I wrote up the Engage version too. Do those ideas seem good to you? What would you suggest? As for story, while this probably may not be a popular idea, I've been curious for a while what a Fire Emblem with a small cast would be like. Most characters outside of the MCs (or in recent years, the main Lords and the Avatar) fall out of relevance really quickly (even Three Houses only focused on Byleth, the Lord and MAYBE their advisor depending on the route), so... why not have a small group of protagonists who all get a ton of focus each? Permadeath likely wouldn't work here unless we start getting generic soldiers to fill in the gaps, but I'd like to see something like this at least once. Even Fell Xenologue did this, with Alear and the dragon twins being the only ones who could actually die. If balancing is a concern, maybe anyone who's defeated in battle has a debuff in the next so you're still incentivized to keep everyone alive as much as possible. P.S. As for the turnwheel equivalent: I hope it either gets turned into a basic mechanic and not a narrative element, or the time travel part is taken out entirely. For example, the MC gets visions of things that can go wrong like Micaiah, or simply has an overactive imagination for a funnier version, something like that. Thanks for reading this, everyone!

That was a joke tweet; check the replies. True. I know someone earlier mentioned the Somniel made no sense, but it being a base in the sky people could warp to and from to recover made plenty of sense to me. It was a much better justification than the Three Houses cast going back and forth from the Monastery to whatever far-flung territory they'd just captured. It sounds like you might prefer the base camp idea from Hopes though? That certainly is a much more mundane solution, even if each of Hopes' bases looked identical... This and traversing menus, I think. You may be onto something!

If you can find a source for this I'd love to read both of their messages in full! So from that second part I take it FE18's going to pull a Final Fantasy XVI? I agree. I'm glad IS has kept the "explorable base" idea from Three Houses because it's fun to see what everyone does in their off time and talk to them, so I'm going to be controversial and hope the base comes back... BUT it would be so much more enjoyable if you could do all the chores via a menu. Like Three Houses' weekly assignments for example, or Hopes' training. Most of the Somniel stuff you can skip for the most part at least... unless you want to get Bond Levels/ Rings in which case you need to spend ages fishing. Or heck, just copy the assignment system from games like Genshin and Honkai Star Rail and put all the various tasks that need to be done in a single menu. Set someone to fish, another person to cook* and so on at the end of one chapter and claim the benefits at the start of the next. * ...actually, cooking's the one thing I wouldn't mind staying the same just because it's fun to see people react to dishes too. Also this. While I'm sure some people would be mad that "Fire Emblem is meant to be serious", if the mini games were just mini games you could play for fun with no rewards attached I don't think the Somniel (or Garreg Mach for that matter) would be criticized as much. For what it's worth, the manga seems to be taking the premise of Engage and fleshing it out more. For starters, Lumera doesn't die in the CH 3 equivalent and there's no Time Crystal. It's also added a bunch of minor villains along the way. Time will tell how good the adaptation will be by the end, but I'm curious if people will appreciate that version of the story more. I'm personally hoping the villains get their backstory fleshed out earlier than in the game, since they at least have backstories worth mentioning compared to TWSITD whose backstory, motivation and personality began and ended with "we hate living underground". And of course Sombron and the Hounds are better than the various 3DS villains by default. Just to inject some extra positivity here (not to diminish others' points of course), but this is how I felt. It wasn't a masterpiece by any means, but it wasn't terrible either. I had fun with it, and I particularly liked the final act. I wish the rest of the story had been as involved as that, if nothing else. Finally, someone else who sees that! I'd argue Fogado, Alcryst and Ivy were the only ones who actually changed. The other Royals feel the same as ours, just put in far worse circumstances. To use your example, I think our Celine would absolutely do the stuff her FX counterpart does if she went through the same ordeals. --- I said this early on in the thread, but my takeaway was "story is fine, gameplay is amazing". This is the anniversary so I was fine with the plot being a back to basics "beat the evil dragon" affair, and I think it's fine to have a light-hearted plot between Three Houses and the rumored FE4 remake. If anything I hope we get a Hopes-style retelling of Engage's plot, just to see if the world and characters can win people over with a second attempt... but of course that probably isn't going to happen given the sales. As for the mechanics themselves, I too loved how the Emblems worked both in gameplay and in-lore and will be sad to see them go. I liked the flexibility there was in classes despite them being fixed and while I'd like to see a return to 3H's free-for-all, I wouldn't mind keeping the current system if IS was willing to make the classes more malleable (e.g. letting everyone keep their preferred weapon type or staff equippable in any class, albeit at a lower rank. That was an idea I suggested a while back that I'm still fond of).

For now, at least. I wonder if the villains will get a bit more development in the manga too, since their backstories were given to you all at once in Engage itself.

I've seen this happen before. If someone doesn't feel safe going over narrow ledges on their own, someone may carry them like that. --- Chapter 7 is out on Mangadex! Fufufuyu may have moved translations there permanently due to their twitter account getting restricted: https://mangadex.org/chapter/d0f654de-00d3-418e-8bcd-ce0b5093d038 Changes from "canon": ...yeah, I'm quite curious where the mangaka is going to take this. It makes me a bit sad that the manga seems to be sticking to M!Alear throughout, but oh well. The story's still entertaining either way!

I don't know how practical it would be in the long run, but Mystic Boost might be a good choice for B!Seliph to combo with his weapon's miracle effect. og!Seliph may be a good choice if you have his default Tyrfing's refine too.

Thanks! Clash 4 it is then... now to hope for a random B!Seliph to spook me! In the meantime, I just found out Khadein Soren earns as much in Arena as B!Eirika does (unless she has B Duel Cav but that only bumps her up one bin/ 2 points). I know I'm just late to the punch but knowing BST has crept so far is still... something, alright! People still use B!Eirika in Arena, right?

Gotcha, thank you! That's what I expected. Is Clash or Catch better for her, by the way, given the current meta? As I said before, I don't have LM!Robin or use her with Duo!Chrom so I'm not worried about messing with penalties.

I don't have LM!Robin so the penalty nullification isn't an issue for me, but I'm curious about Distant A/S Solo. Is it a good choice for her?

Unfortunately I only have the one Seliph, but I have a second Chrom. I did consider using him to clone Flared Sparrow or some other restricted skill if the need arose though, considering how hard it is to get Clash 4 from just him right now. Thanks for the glowing review for Flared Sparrow by the way, it's really nice to know!

Thanks for the advice! You're not the first to suggest Clash either, so it's fortunate I have a Rearmed Chrom in my barracks if people think that's a good use of him? Do melee units use Flared Sparrow well, or is it better on ranged units who can burn stuff from a distance?