vanguard333

Oh, I don't think it was necessarily feasible either. I'm just saying that it would've been the ideal way to have Three Houses representation in Smash Bros. The Micaiah in Smash Bros. ship never sailed; sailing would imply it ever had a moment in the harbour. Brawl was before adding anything from Radiant Dawn would've been feasible, and 4 was after Awakening. Micaiah never had a chance. What did you think of the problems I pointed out with the idea of Alear as a fighter in Smash Bros.?

Personally, I think the best option would've been something sort-of like Pokémon Trainer: Byleth is in the background giving instructions while Edelgard, Claude and Dimitri are rotated. The rotation could be contextualized as being done using a divine pulse. Edelgard would be a small, heavy fighter that hits hard with axes and magic, Dimitri would be a large fighter that uses lances, and Claude would be a fast archer with tricks up his sleeve. I think it's safe to say that the next FE character in Smash Bros. will probably be Alear, which is a shame: they are yet another fairly basic swordfighter with their unique quirk being that they have allies who are echoes of characters from past FE games... some of whom are fighters in Smash Bros. They don't even have a dragon form that could provide interesting gameplay despite Engage reflexively insisting on calling Alear a dragon, and, even if they did, Corrin's abilities in Smash Bros. revolve around their dragon form, so Alear would still struggle to carve out their own niche. As for who I would actually like to see as a fighter in Smash Bros., that would be Micaiah. Light magic, staves and potentially having Sothe assist would be pretty cool.

Oh, that's what you were referring to. I was meaning "never brought up as a plot point", not "never brought up by the other characters". Anyway, to bring this back to Alear, what are your thoughts on Alear not even having a dragon form unless you count the Tiki DLC Emblem?

…I'm not sure I fully understand this sentence; could you please clarify? Yeah, I am aware; I mentioned that in the first paragraph. I was more meaning in general rather than with Fates specifically.

In the case of Awakening, it was going to be the last game in the series if it didn't sell enough copies, so it was made to be a celebration and culmination of the series; essentially a 'Fire Emblem Greatest Hits'. Even Engage was very likely supposed to be an anniversary celebration that got delayed, so I don't really see IS leaning heavily on old characters outside of special cases like these two games and Heroes.

Yeah, and let's not forget that it was story-relevant for all of one chapter and then just never brought up again, even though you'd think that Corrin's dragon form not resembling the dawn dragon's statue at all would present a really big mystery for all the characters that think that Corrin was born to Hoshido and raised by Nohr (though that part can be explained by the script for all three versions of Fates being painfully obviously a first draft). I just don't get it; I'm willing to bet almost any writer would say that dragons are cool and that, if you're going to include dragons in a story, you should use the fact that they're dragons. Even George R. R. Martin: an author who deliberately avoids putting too much overt magic/fantasy elements in his fantasy novels, put dragons in his A Song of Ice and Fire series (his original plan was to have the Targaryens use pyrotechnics to fake having dragon powers, but he ultimately decided to write living dragons instead).

I see. It's still a real shame. As far as I can tell, IS is the only company in the world that thinks, "If we say the protagonist is a dragon, the audience will clearly want them to be a sword-wielding human the whole time, and not, you know, a dragon." Does IS think dragons are boring?

If they make a Bleach game with Fire Emblem gameplay, the Emblems could be Zanpakuto Spirits For a more serious suggestion, I have yet to play Engage, but one way they could keep the emblem mechanics in a game that isn't meant to be a crossover/celebration would be to have the emblems be ancient kings/heroes who have left behind their wisdom and/or a fragment of their powers or something along those lines. Or, they could be like the zanpakuto spirits in Bleach: reflections of different aspects of the person that's using them, rather than a separate individual. All they have to do to change the flavour of the rings to work in a new context is to change who the emblem is.

I see. I was more meaning in terms of stuff like gameplay, but thanks. I remember that Tiki in Shadow Dragon and its sequel could use the dragonstones of other types of dragons for gameplay purposes; if Alear's dragon form really would give away a big spoiler, I don't see why they couldn't write a way for Alear to have a different, non-spoiler dragon form before the twist.

If only Alear was of a species that could have some really cool natural weaponry, like claws or magic breath, but I guess Alear is only human after all... …Oh, wait; no they're not; they're a dragon! How many times is IS going to promise a dragon protagonist only for the "dragon" part to basically be completely irrelevant? This is twice now that they've done this. At least Corrin actually had a dragon form.

I certainly wouldn't count that; the dragon form is coming from someone else and it's DLC. That's a shame to hear; I was looking forward to finally having the protagonist be a divine dragon. Why make the protagonist a dragon if they're going to spend the whole game as a humanoid? At that point, why make them a dragon at all? Alear may as well be a human that got adopted by the divine dragon Lumera; would there be any real difference? Yeah, it's ridiculous, especially since Tiki and the House Leaders are day 1 DLC; I remember the day 1 DLC for Three Houses being just a bunch of outfits; stuff that was purely cosmetic and that some animators could make in a day, and not substantial stuff like more characters (hence my suspicion that Tiki and the House Leaders were originally going to be in the base game).

I have yet to play Engage, and I probably won't be playing it for some time due to various reasons (university, monster hunter rise, etc.). When Engage was announced and it was made clear that the protagonist, Alear, is a divine dragon, my one hope was that this game would better utilize the protagonist being a dragon than Fates did with Corrin, where Corrin being a dragon was relevant for all of one story chapter and the dragon transformation was fairly barebones in terms of gameplay. Without any spoilers other than the answer to the question, I simply ask: does Alear have a dragon form in Engage? If so, is it part of the gameplay?

I agree with your overall point; I just don't think these are examples of minor villains, but secondary villains/arc villains if that makes sense. When I hear "minor villain", I don't think of characters like Petrine, Berkut, Jarod, or Tarkin; I think of villains whose roles in the story and game are minor, hence minor villain. But yeah; there haven't really been good examples of effective secondary/arc villains ever since Radiant Dawn. Oh; okay, someone brought this up already. Never mind. I don't know what the umbrella term for all these villains would be, but I can think of a few terms TV Tropes uses that does fit some of them: Arc Villain: a villain who is the main antagonist of a specific story arc, but not the overarching narrative. This would fit Petrine and Jarod, but not Berkut since he appeared sporadically and never as the main villain. Disc-One Final Boss: a character who is built up as the main villain, and indeed they are... for the first chunk of the story. This would fit Jarod and Desaix, but not Petrine or Berkut. Interim Villain: the villain in between the first main villain and the next one. This would fit characters like Ludveck, but not Petrine, Jarod, etc. The Heavy: the villain who does the heavy lifting while the primary villain is acting behind-the-scenes. This would fit Berkut, Jarod and Petrine, but it would also fit The Black Knight among others. So, yeah; not even TV Tropes has a name that would perfectly fit all these characters.

I've been playing Monster Hunter Rise, and I just beat the Narwa the Allmother fight. It's been a lot of fun. I'm not a fan of games that depend on a cycle of beat enemies -> obtain loot with higher numbers -> beat enemies, as it generally means that combat comes down to numbers rather than actually engaging gameplay, and the game is destined to end anticlimactically when the player has acquired the best loot and has nothing to use said loot against. Where Monster Hunter Rise differs is that, while it has a loot cycle, it doesn't depend on it; fighting the monsters is fun in and of itself and the real main point of the game, and hunting for good materials for armour and weapons is really for making the build that fits the player's playstyle or for making gear that helps against a particular monster that the may be struggling against. Once I fight a few other monsters and get a high enough hunter rank to fight the remaining high rank monster: Crimson Glow Valstrax, I will move on to the Sunbreak content. EDIT: I will just say that I really don't like the Narwa the Allmother fight. It has cool moments like Narwa consuming Ibushi to absorb his power and either Magnamalo or an Elder Dragon appearing to try to fight Narwa the Allmother, but that's about all it has to be honest. The arena where Narwa is fought doesn't have nearly as much space as the Narwa the Thunder Serpent fight had, making the arena feel cramped. Some of Narwa's attacks are basically 'get hit once and the player will be stun-locked to death', which is always unfair in a game. Finally, the Thunder Serpent Narwa fight had a lot of options for approach thanks to things like levitating platforms hunting installations appearing frequently; Narwa the Allmother doesn't have nearly as much variety. Overall, it is a bit of a letdown after the Ibushi rampage and the Thunder Serpent Narwa fight were honestly pretty good fights, and it also means that, when I play it, I either win easily without taking much damage or I run out of HP three times and fail the quest without anything in-between and with almost no change in how I approach the boss. It's not very fun. I would mostly agree about FF7R; mostly. The presentation, music, gameplay, characters, etc., are all fantastic. There is just one thing about the game that brings it down for me: despite the subtitle being "remake", it's not actually a remake, but an alternate-timeline plot. I had never played a Final Fantasy game before, and I bought FF7R because I thought a modern remake of the most famous Final Fantasy game would be a perfect starting point. But then all the stuff with those plot-ghost-things happen, the game turns out to be an alternate timeline, and the story basically becomes impossible to follow for anyone who, like me, has never played the original FF7. This game started the recent trend of alternate-timeline games that pretend to be something else, and it's a trend I really don't like and that I hope ends soon.

See above; @Perkilator said the same thing as you did, and I gave a response where I tried to be more specific and gave some examples of things in the game that were very disjointed and seemed at odds with one another.

Having Edelgard be rated "I don't know" was a blatant attempt to avoid being criticized by those who like/dislike Edelgard For a more serious opinion, I don't recognize some of the characters shown; I'm guessing that the ones I didn't recognize are Heroes characters who were created after I stopped playing Heroes, but I could be wrong.

It's not a popular opinion, but it is one I have expressed pretty much ever since I played Shadows of Valentia. I would give a list of examples in detail, but it's been a long time since I played it and it would involve going through a lot of my old statements on the topic. I will just give a few quick examples without too much detail; please don't take these as the complete arguments:

I'm looking forward to Tears of the Kingdom, Final Fantasy XVI and the Mega Man Battle Network legacy collection. I was originally also looking forward to Fire Emblem Engage, but then Nintendo killed my hype for the game by announcing fairly substantial day-1 DLC. My Hopes: 1. FE4 Remake is announced, and it is clear from the announcement that the whole team is on the same page in terms of what kind of remake they want to make. One thing that really bothered me when playing Shadows of Valentia was that the game felt very disjointed, as if the dev team couldn't fully agree on what to change and what to keep the same. I felt something similar while going through FF7 Remake's story (along with disappointment that the game wasn't actually a remake but an alternate-timeline game) and, sure enough, the director and the producer for that game couldn't agree on the game's story: the director: Tetsuya Nomura, wanted the game to be an actual remake, while the producer: Yoshinori Kitase, pushed for the game to have an all-new story. 2. Tears of the Kingdom has Zelda accompany Link throughout the game. This one is extremely unlikely, as the trailers we have so far show Link adventuring solo so far, but I really hope it happens. Breath of the Wild ended on Link and Zelda finally reuniting and setting out together; I feel it would be a real disservice if the sequel went, "Oh? You thought that we would actually follow up on that? Sike! They're immediately separated again and won't reunite until the end of the game again!" And I'm not alone in thinking that; Phantom Hourglass sidelined Tetra after Wind Waker ended on her and Link setting out together, and that was probably the thing people hated most about Phantom Hourglass (and just think about what a high bar that is). 3. Tears of the Kingdom reveals that this Link is actually left-handed, but was trained to fight right-handed by the overly traditionalist Hyrule. This is a very small thing that would go a long way towards recognizing that Link is the left-handed hero and putting disappointed fans at ease, and it would fit the Hyrule we saw in flashbacks in Breath of the Wild. I don't want to make any bets or predictions for this year. I don't really have enough of an idea of what's going on this year to make any good guesses. That said, I will go over the hopes I listed in 2022:

I wouldn't know; I really disliked the final boss fight (the arena is too big and too full of enemies that make it tedious; I think VC1 had the right idea in reducing the number of enemy units in boss fight missions), so both times, I just used the trick of having a grenadier destroy all four exhaust vents at once to end the battle in a single phase. Yeah; I honestly don't even understand why the true ending even required playing the final mission twice; why not just have that bonus chapter be available before the postgame and have whether the player watched it or not determine whether the player gets the true ending? That would make more sense than forcing the player to watch bout 95% of the same ending twice.

@joevar Yeah; Valkyria Chronicles 4 was great. There are one or two things I preferred in VC1 (and VC4 was the first one I played), but, overall, VC4 was definitely an improvement. By the way, have you gotten the true ending for VC4?

I don't know if this is unpopular or not, but I really dislike when primarily single-player games with incorporated optional multiplayer elements uses that optional online multiplayer as an excuse to deny the player the ability to pause the game. I was reminded of this recently while I was playing Monster Hunter Rise. I play the game offline and single player, and the game is designed with that being feasible; you could play the whole game by yourself and not miss any content at all. And yet, I cannot pause the game. It's getting harder to remember (mainly because I was just a kid when online multiplayer became a thing), but I remember a time when even multiplayer games could be paused. I remember playing Smash Bros. Melee with my siblings and being able to pause when we needed to. I can completely understand a purely online multiplayer not allowing the player to pause the game. But these single player games with optional online multiplayer have a thing called playing offline; Monster Hunter Rise, the Souls games, etc., have toggles for selecting to either play offline or online. For these games, they really should make it that, when playing offline, the player can pause the game.

Oh; I guess I'll add one more: Finish Monster Hunter Rise and the Sunbreak expansion. I recently resumed my playthrough of Rise, and I intend to finish it.

I decided to revisit Monster Hunter Rise. I had to stop playing it around a year ago because my left joy-con began suffering immense joy-con drift to the point of making it impossible to play the game. Now that I have a replacement joy-con, I can revisit it. Naturally, this meant 30 minutes of updates since Capcom has added a lot to Monster Hunter Rise since I've been gone. I also decided to buy the Sunbreak expansion because I'd like to play it and because I feel Capcom has actually earned it: where most companies these days release a butchered, unfinished game and charge extra for the bits they removed before release, Monster Hunter Rise was finished when it released, Capcom gradually added more to it for free, and then released an expansion, from what I've seen of it, is easily a substantial enough expansion to be worth the price.

Yeah, I'm inclined to think that this is the case; rather than having literally died and been reanimated, Pelleas and Lekain are referring to Lekain having been turned to stone and then turned back to normal by Ashera. It's worth remembering that, before the heroes enter the Tower of Guidance, Ashera is shown reanimating corpses of soldiers the heroes killed earlier in Part 4, and these reanimated corpses are heavily implied to be mindless as result; Yune refers to them in the NA localization as, "reborn in flesh but not in spirit".

That's what I was referring to; by "transformation final smash", I was specifically referring to "character transforms and player controls the transformed version of the character" final smashes; they were all reworked into the character unleashing a powerful attack like the other final smashes. Bass doesn't have a powerful attack to go along with the Super Bass form as far as I know (he certainly didn't have one in Mega Man and Bass), so Super Bass wouldn't really work as a final smash. I like the idea of it being a temporary transformation instead.