Anomalocaris

I'd have no issue with that. Poor guy deserves something after coming dead last. And regarding Agitha, I THINK there was an interview somewhere that said that was the reason for her inclusion, but I can't find it. I wasn't trying to complain about her, just noting that fan popularity isn't the only criteria.

Agitha got in purely because she was the favorite character of one of the developers. So we could see a relatively obscure or unpopular pick here, too. For all we know, the lead developer's favorite character is Glade from Thracia 776.

I'm conflicted on OCs. Hyrule Warriors had some, but it kinda needed them to fill niches in the story it was telling, that it couldn't just fill with existing characters. Fire Emblem doesn't quite have that same issue since it's got such an absurdly huge cast of viable characters, enough to fill pretty much any role. On the other hand, I can see them throwing in some OCs anyway just for the heck of it. As for gender ratio, I wouldn't expect a huge disparity; 60%/40% in either direction at worst. As for Tharja, I hate her with every fiber of my being but I'd be incredibly shocked if she didn't get in (overjoyed, but shocked). She's incredibly popular in the fandom for reasons I can't understand, and KT love busty female characters they can sexualize (which is why Camilla is also pretty much guaranteed).

Give them Lances still, but make them promote into Soldiers or something.

A My Castle feature like Fates had, to check out between chapters. The exact contents of the base can vary (upgradeable armory and item shop, coliseum, mess hall, are all good. Things like private quarters, hot springs, and Einherjar shop can probably be replaced or dropped) No way to artificially boost stat caps. Limit Breaker in Awakening was cheap, and the statues in Fates were incredibly cumbersome. Revised multiplayer; battle on pre-built, neutral maps instead of building your own and thus having to choose between a nice-looking and battle-functional base. Bring back the custom avatar system, but reduce their plot significance. Just have them be a new tactician hired by the main protagonist, who helps out on and off the battlefield but isn't directly tied to the plotline. Also, facial hair option for male avatars. More variable dialogue. By that I mean make minor adjustment to the plot's text to account for deaths, marriages, ect. Awakening had some minor instances of that like, Chrom and Lucina's story dialogue changing at certain points if you were married to one of them. More of that pls. NO CHILDREN; stat boosts and Partner Seals should be enough interspousal benefits. Having optional units in paralogues is fun, though, so keep that. Just make them people other than children. Make S-supports not end in marriage proposal all the time. They can be romantic, sure, but they should just be the start of a relationship, so that there isn't the awkward transition from a platonic A-Support to a marriage S-Support. Like, marriage is what you do after years of being with someone, not a spur-of-the-moment decision you make with someone the moment you express feelings toward them. Rebalancing of Skill system. Make certain powerful Skills like Replicate restricted to the class that learns it, instead of just letting the player stack five OP skills onto an OP class. Revise the forging system. Fates' version sucked. Revise the weapon rank balance system. Fates' version sucked, there was never any reason to use B- or A-rank weapons because they were so bogged down with shitty penalties. More platonic supports, especially for Avatarsexuals, since I'm sure that's not going away. Bring back Barons as magic-using armor units. Maybe as a DLC class. No gender-restricted classes whatsoever. I was happy when Fates made the Fighter, Troubador, and Sky Knight lines gender-neutral, but then they went and made all the DLC classes gender-restricted for no good reason. More incentive to keep playing the save file after clearing it. Awakening had the Spotpass paralogues, some of which were harder than the final boss, plus the challenge DLC. Fates didn't get anything like that at all. A non-shitty story. Awakening's plot was thin and pretty generic, but at least it did it relatively well. Fates' is a hot steaming pile of garbage on all three routes. Bonus Exp for clearing optional objectives. A game mode setting that determines whether you can grind for exp and money. Could be like how Fates does difficulty and death penalty, as an option you can downgrade mid-game but only one way. Infinite levelling is too easy in Awakening, but too hard in Fates. Find a happy medium... and restrict it to post-game. Player choices have impacts. It doesn't have to be huge, route-changing things like the big choice in Fates, just things like determining how many enemies you face in a given chapter, how early or late a unit joins you, the quality of ending you receive... Separate Magic back into its own separate weapon triangle, with different types such as fire, wind, thunder, ice, ect.

Crusader Kings II Crossover, or: How I Learned to Love When an NPC Shares the Player's Name

Most of these revisions are pretty good. Then again, just about anything will look good compared to what we got. XD Anybody else here write any dumb fanfics or make videos?

I don't know, I don't follow Game Grumps. There's more, though.

Sharing fanwork, huh? This is a few months late, but back around Christmas I wrote this nonsensical holiday tale starring everyone's favorite emotionless assassin. ...Mostly just as an excuse to include a Grinch song about King Garon, but I'm nevertheless reasonably proud of it. I'd love some feedback! :P

Sakura tends to come out pretty good. Even if you give her a physical weapon. Edit: Can we not embed images from KYM anymore?

I don't think there's any canon mention of a scar over Camilla's eye. Interestingly, the My Room models actually have their faces under their bangs modeled, it's just the hair is always blocking it. Removing that layer shows that her eye is perfectly normal underneath. Peri's covered eye, however, is interesting; she has heterochromia. I don't think there's any way of knowing that without taking the game apart, either.

I'm that person you see comfortably walking around in a short-sleeve t-shirt in the dead of winter surrounded by mountains of snow, so my temperature range extends downward nigh-infinitely. Howling snowstorms feel like someone's minty-fresh breath to me. That being said, I don't actually wear shorts very often, but when I do it's with absolutely no regard to the temperature outside, so I feel comfortable selecting the coldest option.

There's some very minor differences (such as Henry being Henry), but otherwise yeah, parent and sibling supports are generic.

Fair enough.

Yeah, that's probably a bit powerful. ____faires are probably not a good idea. But in general, I was thinking "generic" skills would be at 5, and "unique" skills would be at 15.

So one contributor to brokenness is how you can stack skills from different classes, so things like Replicate, Rend Heaven, or Vengeance get slapped onto every unit. I was thinking maybe make about half the skills be exclusive to the class that learns it. So maybe something like this: Base classes Level 1 Skill: Generic skill that can be used in any class. Simple skills such as the minor stat boosts. Level 10 Skill: Skill specific to this class and its promotions. Perhaps skills such as Vantage, Shelter, and Lunge. Promoted classes Level 5 Skill: Generic skill that can be used in any class. Rally and ___faire skills, perhaps. Level 15 Skill: Skill specific to this class. Weird things with unique mechanics like Replicate and Galeforce, and proc skills like Luna, Sol, Vengeance, and Rend Heaven. That way there's still benefits to going through a classline, since you can keep some of the simpler skills, but the really crazy shit requires you stay in that class and therefore you can't stack them all on top of each other.

Jeigans are good, and even necessary, though I prefer when they can still keep up into endgame. I'd like more "old veteran" characters who aren't Jeigan archetypes, though, with stat growths on-par with the young'uns. Sometimes you can teach an old dog new tricks. We kinda got that with Basilio and Walhart in Awakening and Yukimura in Fates, being older men, but they join too late for it to really be noticeable, and Walhart's already capped his stats anyway. I want someone who joins earlier and isn't a prepromote.

I've said this before, but in terms of the avatar's involvement in the story, I think Valm-arc Robin is a good standard. They have their moments of importance, like setting boats on fire to appease Frederick's pyromania, but for the most part they're just a background character to what's going on with Chrom and Lucina. A shoulder for the main protagonist(s) to lean on when needed. Someone mentioned the avatar from Xenoblade Chronicles X, and I think that's a good implementation that could work for Fire Emblem, aside from being mute.

Okay, so, there's a chapter set in a castle around early-mid-game where the boss at the end is the main villain's strongest enforcer, facing you on-foot despite normally riding a flying mount. He's pretty powerful, but it's clear he's holding back. After you defeat him, the game forces you into the next chapter, which starts out as seemingly a south-to-north "escape" path through a bunch of enemies. After a couple of turns, though, the boss from the last chapter shows up at the north end, possessing endgame stats WAY out of your current league. And he's now riding his mount, so he's got high Mov and flight. If you just try to just slowly advance your way through the enemies like normal, he'll easily catch up and start swatting your troops like flies. So instead, as you fight, you have to also take advantage of terrain to do things like knock down pillars, lower portcullises, or otherwise create obstacles behind you to keep him from catching up. Not only would it be a fun objective that takes advantage of map features, but when you have your rematch with him near the end of the game you'd finally be able to fight him on equal footing and it'd be so satisfying.

I'd recommend just holding out for that Master Seal. If you use the Second Seal, you'll be stuck in a lower class for a while. Just try not to let Robin fight too many enemies before you get it, to avoid wasting exp.

Everybody's gone into detail already, but I'll give you my take on the DLC: First, there's the "nostalgia" sets. These have you facing armies of characters from previous games. Completing each map gives you a free Einherjar card, which adds a classic character to your army (though they're just relatively simple, voiceless units made using avatar parts). Champions of Yore is the first one. The maps are moderately good for level-grinding mid-game units, and Champions of Yore 3 gives you the All Stats +2 skill, which is moderately useful. Lost Bloodlines is the second one, and is harder. Notably, the Lost Bloodlines 3 pits you against 50 enemies, so once your units reach that point where they can OHKO everything and only gain 2 exp per battle, this is one of the better maps for just grinding levels. Speaking of which, it also gives you Paragon, an extremely powerful skill that doubles your exp gain. Lost Bloodlines 2 is also important, as it's the only way to get Dread Scrolls, letting you reclass male units into Dread Fighters. Dread Fighters wield swords, axes, and tomes, and have high Resistance. Smash Bretheren is the third, and appropriately more difficult. Smash Bretheren 3 also pits you against 50 enemies, so it's good for levelling up units that are already getting close to their stat caps. You also get Iote's Shield as a skill, which negates aerial units' weakness to arrows and wind. Smash Bretheren 2 gives you Bouquets, which allow you to reclass female units into Brides. Brides wield lances, bows, and staves. Rogues & Redeemers is the fourth, and most difficult. If you're looking for a legitimate challenge, Rogues & Redeemers 3 is a good map just for that alone, but more importantly it gives you Limit Breaker, a skill that increases all your stat caps by 10. Once a unit has used Limit Breaker and is getting close to maxxing out all their NEW stat caps, this is also the best map for grinding. However, as Roflolxp54 noted, one of the enemies has Lethality and one has Counter, so just mashing End Turn can be dangerous if you don't account for them. I just mark them and once they enter range manually kill them, then go back to mashing End Turn. ---- Then there's the "grinding" maps. One thing all three of these maps have in common is that your units all have funny pre-battle dialogue, though you can always just look that up. Ostensibly, EXPonential Growth is meant to be the experience-grinding map, and it's good for early-game grinding, but post-game grinding is better done with the above DLC so it's pretty useless after a while. The Golden Gaffe is a good source of money. Buy it if you like to buy lots of items. Infinite Regalia gives you copies of rare weapons, but unlike the other two grinding maps it's actually a real challenge and a very fun map. You also get an item that permanently halves the prices of all shop items if you can clear it, so I highly recommend this one. ---- Next up is the Scramble Maps. These are not challenging at all; the maps just have a few token enemies laying around to give you an actual objective. The real fun is that they give many characters extra dialogue. Besides them all having funny pre-battle dialogue with the enemies, they can interact with each other to initiate special conversations similar to Supports. There's no tangible reward for these maps, so only buy them if you really want to read conversations. Harvest Scramble takes pairs of characters who already have platonic supports (Such as, say, Chrom/Frederick) and gives them additional conversations. Summer Scramble takes pairs of first-generation characters who don't have supports (Such as Sumia and Miriel) and gives them actual conversations. Additionally, there's special "sexy" fanservice pictures of Chrom, Gaius, Tharja, and Cordelia, the four winners of the first-gen popularity contest. And if your Robin happens to be married to one of those four, you get an extra conversation with them. Hot Springs Scramble is the same as Summer Scramble, but instead of first-generation characters it's second-generation characters (And also pairs of "Robinsexuals" who have very few Supports). Lucina, Owain, Severa, and Inigo, the winners of the second-gen popularity contest, get pictures of themselves in yukatas, and if your Robin is married to one of them there's extra conversation with them. ---- The Future Past maps are story. They chronicle a world where Lucina was unable to travel to the past, and she and her allies must make a final desperate stand. There's some challenge here compared to other maps, though nothing overwhelmingly tough. The main draw, besides the surprisingly engaging story, is that all of your first-generation characters have special dialogue with their alternate-universe children. In fact, all the fathers actually have specific dialogue with each of their possible children instead of just using generic supports like in the main game. ---- The Challenge Maps are very tough maps that put you in unusual conditions. The only reward for beating them is more Einherjar, so the main reason to buy these is for the challenge itself. I won't launch into exact details on all three of them, just know that you really need a good strategy to beat them. Apotheosis is basically a fourth Challenge Map, but it's even harder and standalone. It's name is accurate; it's the hardest challenge you'll face in the entire game, and it can get even harder depending on how you play.

We already know this is fake, but if it were real, I guess I'd mostly just sigh in disappointment about Tharja getting in over any of the other infinitely-better Dark Mage characters. But I figure it's only a matter of time before she's revealed anyway, so I'll save my sigh for then. Her insane popularity still baffles me to this day.

Your mistake is watching LPs and expecting to assess the game that way. Most LPers suck hard at video games and make it look too hard, or just spam the same tactics and make it look boring. I only have Hyrule Warriors to my name, but I found that most of the gameplay is about tactics rather than mindless mashing. The actual skill ceiling is pretty low, and it doesn't take very long at all to "master" a moveset and combat. The game eases you in with simple "kill everything" missions, but after combat becomes pretty ingrained and autonomous the gameplay then challenges you with tactics; making decisions about where your army currently needs you most, and which areas you can leave alone for now. As one person once described it, you're basically Superman; nobody can match you in combat but you can't be in more than one place at the same time, and that's where most of the game's challenge comes from. Reaction times and button-pressing don't really factor in all that much except in some of the more challenging scenarios faced in Adventure Mode, which is totally optional to the story. I assume FE Warriors will have something similar. If all else fails, the game will most definitely have multiple difficulty settings, so you can adjust it to better suit your experience. Your best bet is to wait and see once they release more official trailers. Those offer a better sample of the gameplay than some LP. Even better if they release a downloadable demo.

If Robin gets in and has a Levin Sword moveset, then probably them.

Xander is absurdly good, as was already outlined. He's going to be taking 0 damage from a lot of physical attackers even into the endgame. He has trouble with enemy magic users, but he can kill them easily if he gets the first hit. Camilla's basically a goddess. She joins early and has absurdly good stats. Of course, as a flyer, she has to watch out for enemy bows. Elise is a valuable healer early on, but her true power shines once she promotes to Strategist. All of a sudden she'll go from "weaponless healer who can survive a magic hit but is otherwise fragile" to "OHKOs everything with even a weak magic tome, and is completely immune to enemy mages." Leo's probably the worst of the royal siblings, but being the worst of the best is still really good. He's got good bulk and hits pretty hard, and his personal tome is really good, but he's slow, so he won't double very often, and he's just weak enough to miss out on some important OHKOs. Azura is invaluable, perhaps moreso than in the other routes. Your servants Jakob and Felicia vary depending on which gender you choose. Playing as a female Corrin means you start with Jakob, who is really frikkin' good and will be dishing out damage just as well as he heals it. Playing as a male Corrin starts you with Felicia, who is... weak. That is, until you get a magic-based Shuriken, at which point she becomes about as good as Jakob. Whichever servant you DON'T start with joins too late to really be useful. Both are good at tanking magic hits, and are some of the few Shuriken users, which gives them a niche. Mozu is your trainee unit. If you babysit her she becomes really powerful, but it's not always worth the investment in my experience. If you have the Route Bonuses, using a Dread Scroll on her early on can make her a monster, though. Kaze is one of your few Shuriken users, so that alone makes him quite valuable, along with his Locktouch skill. If you decide to use Niles the latter won't mean much, but it never hurts to have two. His low Strength is gonna become pretty noticeable when he's dealing 1-2 damage to enemies later on, but the debuffs are invaluable. Silas is pretty solid, but he's kinda inferior to Xander. There's nothing wrong with having TWO Paladins, of course. Peri, on the other hand, is inferior to both Silas and Xander and is just plain mediocre. I'd recommend avoiding her, personally. Laslow is a mercenary and therefore solid all-around. He prefers to promote to Hero. Selena, on the other hand, prefers Bow Knight. They're both solid mercs, the most notable difference being that Selena joins earlier. Beruka might seem inferior to Camilla, and the fact that they join in the same chapter really does her no favors, but if you stick with her she really grows out of her liege's shadow, unlike Peri. Her solid Defense makes her a good Wyvern Lord tank, and her high Skill leads to some good crits. Odin is somewhat mediocre. His middling stats do him no favor. If you do decide to keep him, giving him the Excalibur tome you acquire in Chapter 26 makes him absurdly powerful for the endgame, but good luck GETTING him to Chapter 26. Niles is really good. He's one of your few bow users, so that gives him a niche by default. He's also got the Capture skill if you want to mess with that (and there's one unit you should definitely consider capturing). He's also a good anti-mage unit thanks to his high Res. His biggest drawback is that he's got low Strength, but like Felicia the moment he acquires a magic weapon he becomes solid and never needs an upgrade. He prefers to promote to Adventurer. Arthur is really useful early on, scoring critical hits and dishing out solid damage while tanking hits. Later on, though, he becomes an enemy crit magnet. If you decide to use him, once you get to lategame he'll probably want to fall back and be more of a support unit or even just a backpack for his wife, whoever that may be. Effie is a goddess. Make her a General to maximize her tankiness. Benny is stuck in Effie's shadow (at least in Conquest; in Revelation it's the other way around). He's got better defenses than her, but lower Strength. The real problem isn't that, though; it's that he joins much later than her. Charlotte is weak when she joins; she won't deal much damage, she'll miss often, and she'll die to a stiff breeze. The moment she promotes to Berserker, though, throw all that shit out; she'll score critical hits left and right. She'll still be a little fragile and inaccurate, but she'll be killing so many things in one hit that it won't matter if she misses here and there. Keaton is pretty good. He's a very defensive unit, but his Beastbane skill makes him a great anti-cavalry unit too. Nyx is bad. Don't use her. Shura is decent, but joins pretty late and by that point Niles is probably everything Shura could ever hope to be. Use him if you forsook Niles, but otherwise don't bother. Flora also joins late, but has pretty solid stats. If you ditched Jakob or Felicia, she can make for a good lategame replacement for them. Izana's a neat mage, but I never used him so I can't really offer a fair assessment. Gunter is interesting. He's got the shittiest growths ever and joins late, but he has high enough starting stats that he won't NEED much level investment to remain useful into the endgame. He's very slow and tends to get doubled, but two times zero is still zero; he's got defenses rivalling Xander and the knights. He doesn't hit as hard as them, though, so his main utility will be using his high movement to get around the battlefield blocking fragile units from getting hit or using the Shelter command to rescue them. Most of the children units are just mini-mes of their father. The only real ones that diverge are Leo's son Forrest, who is more like a second Elise than a second Leo, Kaze's daughter Midori, who is the unusual Apothecary class (not very good, but workable and gives you another bow user), and Arthur's son Percy, who is a Wyvern Rider and thus has to compete with Camilla and Beruka. Anyway, those are all the NORMAL units, but there's one more guy who we can't discuss Conquest without mentioning; my snazzy avatar, Haitaka. The boss of Chapter 9, he can be Captured by Niles and made to join your army. He has no personal skill or supports, but his Rally Defense skill is immediately useful (especially if you can persuade him in time for Chapter 10), and he's a really interesting class. He also has astonishingly good growths for a capturable boss, so he can actually cut a swath through enemy forces once he gets some level-ups under his belt. He singlehandedly carried my last Conquest run and I highly recommend him, and not just for the memetic value; he's better than many of the normal units.