Saint Rubenio

Yeah, and American applies to like 30 countries lmao

Say, now that you bring this up... My current endeavor has gotten me to look into Sacred Stones's most obscure background characters. While we talked about Hayden's wife in the other thread and discussed why she doesn't count, I can't help but notice you're also missing three other background characters - or, at least, they don't show up when I ctrl+F in the first sheet of the file. They are as follows: - Saaga, Rausten's court troubadour. Mentioned once at the end of Hamill Canyon. They (I'm inclined to believe "she" because troubadours are female in GBAFE) are established to be the cause of L'Arachel's journey, as their words "inflamed" her. I always liked to interpret this as the court troubadour antagonizing her in some way and provoking her into going on a "journey of righteousness" to prove herself. It's the kind of tantrum that L'Arachel would throw lol - Melina, Amelia's mother. Mentioned in her support with Duessel. She was kidnapped by bandits and then saved by Duessel, but her memories had been lost from the trauma. She managed to recall having had a daughter shortly before the game's events. Duessel looked for her before realizing he'd ran into her by chance in the Frelian army during their support, and sees them reunited in their paired ending. - Zabba, old friend of Gerik. Mentioned in his support with Saleh. Saleh killed him during a job, but later he saved Gerik's life and they became good friends in spite of the incident. ...... Shit I didn't even realize... (I mean honestly I'd call Lindon the better character, and the similarities are honestly kind of superficial but still, that's such a funny thing)

It feels a bit weird to bring up a character from the latest FE game into this discussion. You'd think by default they'd all be at least somewhat well known. But considering like half of Engage's playerbase didn't even realize he was playable, I'd say Lindon fits the spirit of the thread. Seriously, he's the most obvious recruitable enemy in the history of the world and an insane amount of people still missed him. It blows my mind. From his design (generic old guy priest in a sea of hyper anime fantasy designs) to his introductory and recruitment dialogue, he seems like your average wise old magic man that acts as a mentor figure to others. And he is that, he has a few supports where he acts mentorly and wise to be sure, but he's also a man full of sorrow over losing his beloved wife, growing distant from his grandchildren and the burden of his past as a soldier of a country constantly at war with its neighbor. A lot of his supports do a good job of showing a person at the twilight of his life who sometimes just can't see why he still goes on. He copes with all this by keeping his inner child alive and feeding his curiosity. IE he's a mad scientist. A really funny one, too. Dude wants to invent popcorn by having another guy throw corn into the air so he can blast it with thoron. When the guy refuses, he tries to guilt trip him into helping using his dead wife. That's just, incredible. Also, he explodes the avatar multiple times. His supports juggle tragedy and humor in really interesting ways. In particular, his support with Saphir (another super good character that's pretty underrated by the way) is by far the best in the game, as far as I'm concerned. You wouldn't expect Engage's writing to get so dead serious as it does in that support chain. Great stuff. ...And then on top of all that, he's also a really fun unit. Most personal skills in Engage are crap, and reclassing and emblems leads to units blending together sometimes. However, Lindon has one of the most impactful personals in the game - if his enemy's weapon is a higher rank than his (and when he joins most enemies are using silvers), he gains 20 crit. This turns him into a magical berserker that can easily reach ridiculous critrates. Not the best unit in the game, certainly, but I'd call him one of the most fun. He also gets to be the only sage that can be a sage without wearing the worst sage outfit known to the series And even then. Even then. Novala, for instance, can leave somewhat of an impression with his sheer glee at committing war crimes, not to mention the war crime itself is quite memorable. I mean, who the heck feeds children to a giant spider? Aside from him, Tirado has multiple appearances and an interesting little implication of being duplicitous towards his superiors, and Bazba has the interesting distinction of being the one brigand boss that actually feels like a brigand boss. While most brigand bosses are just "obligatory bad guy with a face in the earlygame bandit map", Bazba shows up, sends his henchmen to perform a raid for him and... retires to his hideout. Which he defends from you when you get there with even more henchmen. It's a tiny little "arc" that makes him stand out a bit despite being just a generic brigand boss man, I hope I explained myself properly. ...And Bone is called Bone. C'mon. To be fair, I kind of just realized it just then lol. I've also been writing about this gang of characters for over two months now so I've become rather familiar with their subtleties haha. Well, considering half the thread didn't realize who I was talking about, maybe that fell a little flat. ...I really should've mentioned the wife. Then there would've been zero room for doubt. Is like, how you say, flatulence? Laughed for a solid three minutes the first time I read that. What a wonderful guy.

Isn't the only other country that currently exists with United States in the name Mexico, and they already call it... well, Mexico? Least arrogant Statesian:

...True enough. Maybe Kaga just hated Bloom lmao

We can't help which piece of land we are born in.

In fairness, Thracia isn't the story of "kind of important" people, it's the story of nobodies fighting their own fight in a corner of the continent while the heroes and villains are somewhere far away. Bloom making only a single appearance in Leif's lowest point is pretty poignant in that way. Even he is too far off for Thracia's small scope.

I suppose the difference is Bloom's kind of important while Coulter is a Zyne. Still, it would've been nice if they adapted the proper portrait. Heck, use it another seven times, for old times sake! It's attained meme status from the sheer number of reuses, but I'm inclined to agree. He looks a lot less overtly evil than other generic bossman portraits. I honestly don't think he'd look too out of place as a playable character. Also I think John Constipation is my new favorite name for him

Canada is in America. I am technically correct!

I can't believe Ping was the final boss of Hong Kong 97 all along. The funny competition cannot be blamed on anything, so already that's an issue. Hey, that's true. Neat bit of contrast there. The father loyally serving a godawful king to the end, versus the son immediately betraying his adoptive father because he's on a dickwad's side. Ah, thank you for your insight. I always figured Karla more likely moved out of Sacae with Bartre than the other way around. Imagine ironmanning this game, losing the dancer, and then you accidentally have him dismount and lose the run right there. Yikes... FE8 does have Aias sort of breaking the 4th wall to praise the player if they are able to kill him. "Very...impressive. You've pierced the battle formations I'd perfected... No one's ever done that. Renais's tactician has earned my highest regard." Of course, it's a much more subdued bit of player praise and it's actually earned by accomplishing something in the gameplay. Not that killing Aias is super difficult but that's a different topic of conversation. You said "I think half the cast of Sacae is overrated", and I followed with "honestly more than half is overrated lol." Maybe the broken thing is your reading comprehension lmao gottem Girls can like the same things as boys. Usually what keeps boys from doing girly things or girls from doing boyish things is bullying and societal pressure, not any kind of innate gendered preferences. And I suppose there's not as much chance to be bullied out of a hobby when said hobby entails sitting in a room away from civilization looking at a screen.

He probably had already begun to starve himself in the time between Ephraim's battle at Renvall and Eirika's arrival. Some time definitely passes, he probably had a good couple of weeks to sit in a room with Monica. I agree that the portrait change should've happened after Renvall, though. Would've been more impactful to see him fall so low after all that time.

Rural Spain is not doing well. Not to worry, I expected nothing good out of... Madrid, anyways. Ew. Possibly El Escorial. There's a number of dormitory cities surrounding Madrid. Probably because living there is impossible with the average Madrid wage. Don't underestimate the insidiousness of American exports. They allowed the anime fester within our lands. We used to have an inquisition, you know. How the mighty have fallen.

Actually, his portrait already changes when he meets Eirika in Renvall. Still, the dialogue between his two guards, and later the report from Seth does very much imply he's done nothing but sit in his room with his "wife" since the last time he was seen. In fact, it's even implied he would've probably died on his own if the twins had taken longer to reach Renais, as the guy's straight up not taking meals. ...You know, this is kind of a tangent, but I take issue with Ephraim going "Orson was mad, but I think he was happy" at the end. Guy was wallowing in a despair so fierce it drove him to throw away everything, including his own life (again, he stopped eating), just to be reunited with his loved one, which in truth was only a rotting corpse repeating the word "darling" over and over. That's not happiness, Ephy, that's a suffering greater than anything you ever went through lol Yeah, exactly. That's the clunky part I mentioned - when they are right at the doorstep of Renais Ephraim starts going "gee all things considered Orson was acting pretty weirdly wasn't he." I feel like that's a conversation they should've had earlier. A couple more mentions in the interim would've been nice just to keep the guy in the player's mind, even if he's not seen again. And, all things considered, what would he have done if he made another physical appearance? All he does at that point, as you say, is sit in Renais being insane. But he probably should've been brought up a couple times. That's pretty good, actually. Would've made for a killer battle convo and the character would've been a nice vehicle to get more insights on Orson's past.

You know, maybe my mistake was not mentioning the wife. Yeah, Caellach is a really good villain. Ambition personified. And then he dies in the same sandy cesspool he loathed so. I don't know who got the most beautiful death - him with this bit of irony, or Valter spending the entire game talking the big talk and then dying with a simple terrified shriek. I aim to please. You do make fair points. I'll admit when I was writing that I kind of considered saying "except Glen maybe lol." All things considered, screentime be damned he has a much more tightly written role than a few of the generals. I would've liked a couple more appearances in between (Ephraim talking about him right before chapter 16 felt clunky) but still, good stuff. Then again, when I said he's a minor villain I didn't mean it as a knock on him. He is my second favorite villain in the FE game with my favorite villains, beat only by Lyon. Thank you! Gregor is my favorite character in Awakening. He's the only character from that game for whom I read all his supports. He's such a ray of sunshine.

I was comparing him to his own game's villains. Sure, Gharnef has like three scenes, but that's the case for every book 1 villain because book 1 has very little story in general. Compared to the villains in his own game, Orson has less screentime and does less things in the plot than the gemstone generals (Glen is arguable) and Vigarde, so I'm more tempted to call them the secondary villains and place him in a different box. But well, we're getting lost in semantics here. Secondary, minor, I suppose it doesn't matter. He's just a good villain. Ahahaha. Oh, well, we cleared it up now.

Like I said, most people talk about him as if he did more than he really does. But his entire involvement in the game boils down to: Chapter 5x: He's just there until he isn't. Chapter 8: He encounters Eirika and tells her some lies. Chapter 9: He tries to get Eirika's bracelet, but the clap of the blade concealed within his doublet kept alerting Seth. Chapter 16: He goes into a room, says ominous things, talks to Riev/Lyon, has the best battle convos in the game, dies. He does have more screentime than the likes of Breguet or O'Neill but his impact in the overall plot is very small, and he's less relevant than the gemstone generals. It's just that he makes a big impact with the time he does have, thanks to how good his concept and its execution are. Ehh. Just felt like being a little dramatic, is all. I really thought it was obvious lol

The boss of Ruled by Madness.

On the villainous side, there's FE8's finest minor villain in a cast full of great minor and major villains. It's funny because the way people talk about him it feels like he's a major villain, but he only appears three times and has a total of four scenes in the game, one of which he does basically nothing in. And yet, the concept with him is so disturbing and at the same time, so pitiable, and so well-executed. He stays with you and makes you think he's a bigger villain than he was, because what little time he had, he used better than villains with four times his screentime in the series. You can probably guess who I'm talking about. If not, go play FE8. The Fates bossmen are funny because I find them all to have just plain better designs than the playable cast of Fates. Same for the generics. Then among the playables, the Corrinsexuals have better designs than the non-Corrinsexuals, who in turn tend to have better designs than the royals. It's like the more important you are in Fates, the worse you look lol Anyway, all this to say, yeah, Candace is really cool. Again, we need more unconventional designs, body types, imperfect people. Variety is the spice of life, dammit! The parent of a villain would be an insanely cool concept for a playable character, but that'd require IntSys to be creative enough to want to do anything interesting with parents. Which they just don't seem inclined to do, so uh... eh. I'm still hoping for a game where the idealistic young teen main character dies and the parent (or parents) turns out to be the main character instead. So far I've only seen that be done in one (1) videogame in my entire life playing videogames, and even there you could also get the dad killed instead depending on your choices. Thankfully (as morbid as that is to say in this situation), though, I got the child killed and got to enjoy the more interesting storyline. And the heartache. Shameless self promo but you might enjoy this. Definitely agreed with this. Hicks is such a wonderful literal who. I feel like most of Binding Blade's cast is generally underrated. Understandably so, I'll admit, because their characterizations are all tucked away in FE6's horrendous support system. But when you actually get around to reading those supports, it's a surprisingly varied and interesting roster. For the most part.

As a minor character enjoyer, I tend to gravitate towards nobodies, and this includes perhaps the biggest nobody of them all - Frost, from BSFE, later reintroduced in FE12 in such an asinine way that he went on to become one of the most, if not the most unpopular character in FE. This is not just me saying it, it's also CyL saying it, as he was the third character to end up dead last. I think the most votes he ever got was like, 50 or 60? And that was the time I voted for him three times from three different computers every day. Let me just link the full-on essay I wrote about Frost some time back. I mean, I cared enough to put make her a portrait and put her in my bad guys hack lol Just to be pedantic, there's a third flavor of old FE guy - the old magic man. I'd say Dorothy from FE6 fits a similar pattern as Brom, even if not in the exact same ways (she's much younger, for one). If it's uncommon for male characters in FE to look plain, female characters being anything other than perfect supermodels is just about unheard of. Dorothy stands out as one of the very, very few women in FE with a genuinely different design that isn't conventionally attractive to a T. Heck, if you remove the really old women (all three of them) from the equation, it's basically just her, Brom's daughter and maybe Vaida sharing this distinction! However, unlike Meg, who's more "stylized," so to speak, with her cartoonish mouth and eyes (though her design is still pretty neat don't get me wrong), Dorothy's just a regular girl. She has freckles, a slightly weird face and a rather dreadful haircut. And that makes her stand out among the sea of perfect-looking girls, much like it does Brom. She looks like someone you might've gone to school with, and I think that's really awesome and we should get a few more of those.

Let's see... Who is "broken" in sacae? Rutger, yeah. Shin? He's very good. Not sure if "broken", but let's say sure. Fir... Was Fir even Sacaen? Bartre wasn't, but I don't know where he and Karla settled down and raised Fir. Might've been Sacae, yeah, so let's say she counts, and uh... She's not as good as Rutger, but she is rather good and comes in the perfect chapter to be trained, so uh... Yeah, sure. Stretching a bit. Sue, no. I like her, but no. Dayan, he's neat, but no. Rath, no. Every swordmaster in FE7? lol Honestly, more than half lmao Yeah, I'm inclined to agree. Heck, he's just an interesting character that deserved it. Jabarro may've been an asshole but he did genuinely care for and raise this kid. I'd like to hear more about what his life was like there. But, I suppose permadeath. Honestly? Good. I'd take that over Seliph. Oh yeah, look at the one traversable tile at the very edge. Huh. As I recall, Kaga went on record saying that the point of this was for players who want to keep Seliph's dismounted animations. ...Yeah, apparently that's it. That's why this feature exists. Yeah, it's a nice touch. I mean, look at their hair. For how much of the game revolves around the pairings, they really just assumed you'd be getting a few key marriages that Kaga really liked more than others. Just some heavy-handed metaphor for how the two halves of Thracia were once siblings. Or something.

Actually, I took his FE5 beard lol True enough.

...Wait, is it? I didn't delete it at all! Look, there it is! Musta been Serenes/Discord (where I uploaded it) acting up. Well, for curiosity's sake, here's my version. Honestly, don't sell yourself short, I like yours too. The full-ass Hannibal beard is funny but yours suits him better. Like, I could actually believe that being his actual design if I didn't know better. That'd been a fun idea. Separating the subs from the actual characters without feeling like it "overrides" anything, so to speak. Only problem is that I'd be sad about having to kill Asaello and get the generic anime teen archer instead. But then, I wouldn't have that problem, because I'd have had meteorites murder Bridget. I agree with this, pretty much.

People come and go. That's as true online as it is in real life, I suppose. There's other welcoming communities out there. You'd need to seek them out, though, and take the always scary first step of making yourself known. ...And you'd probably need a discord. Forums like this in general have been on a steady decline for a long time. Discord servers are all the rage now, and unfortunately they're not as visible as places like this. If it comes to that, though, try finding discord servers for games/franchises/whatnot that you like. You have a baseline that most everyone in there's already going to have a shared interest.

Interestingly enough, he's squinty in both his official artwork and his unused FE5 portrait, but in FE4 he's not squinty. He's doing more of a side-eye. Reminds me of a friend telling me all about how the Legion of Fallout New Vegas were his favorite faction, interesting and effective for one reason or another. Then I met them and five minutes later I had enough of their shit and performed sequence-breaking so I wouldn't have to help them whatsoever. Yeah, I agree, it'd been way cooler if Travant sent his recolored cronies and Altena after Connaught when Blume was still kicking and you had to beat them to the punch or they take Connaught from you and you lose. Interestingly enough, there's a moment in Thracia 776 where they... sort of do this? Except it's not as cool as it'd been if they did it here. Oh well.

I do prefer his face. Instead of generic-ass anime teen, he's a squinty boy, which is slightly less generic-ass. Yeah, I didn't get any of these. Arthur because I warped him home to sell his Paragon band, and the other two probably would've been one-shot by Mjölnir if I had tried. (Leif should not acknowledge Blume as "king", imo) I find it funnier that these people have quotes with Blume in the chapter where Blume can't die. So much for revenge. People still love Travant. Which, I mean, can't really blame 'em for it. Travant's miles ahead of basically every other gen 2 villain by having a semblance of a personality and a few grey undertones.