Alistair

So, timeskip day is upon on us. Today marks the five year anniversary of the release of Three Houses. It's weird to think that 2019 was five years ago, but it'I guess that's how time works. Given both the Switch's rapidly approaching end of lifespan and the release of a new mainline game in Engage, I think it's an interesting time to think about Three Houses and what's meant since its release. It's the most commercially successful game in the series, but it also drew a lot of (perfectly valid) criticism related to its level design, social sim elements, and unit homogenization. Nevertheless, it has some of the most popular characters in the entire series (at least judging by CYL results), and I'd be surprised if it ever leaves Fire Emblem fan discussion. What do y'all think of the game now that it's been a half decade since its release?

Let's imagine that all the lords of the series meet up to engage in a poker tournament (they are all taught the rules beforehand). Which is the best? Who walks away with the most money? I haven't played Archanea, Jugdral, Tellius, and Fates: Birthright, and it's been years since I've played Awakening, so I'll refrain from talking about those lords. Of the remaining, here are my thoughts: Gaiden/Shadows of Valentia: Both Alm and Celica are decent but not spectacular. Neither strike me as great at either the mind games or the actual strategy of knowing when to stay in or when to fold. Binding Blade: Roy is probably the worst of these. Kid's a little too easily rattled and would probably psych himself out playing against some of the harder to read characters and the other Elibean lords. Blazing Blade: Of the three of them, Hector's the best, Lyn is in the middle, and Eliwood is the worst. Hector is deceptively good at mind games, and probably can read the other players fairly easier. Lyn is similar to Alm and Celica in being decent, and for similar reasons. Eliwood is better than his son but not by much, and he also would be prone to psyching himself out. Sacred Stones: Eirika is comparable to Alm, Celica, and Lyn. Ephraim would constantly push his advantage but might falter at the end, especially some against some of the better players like Hector. Fates: This is slightly weird, in that Rev!Corrin and Conquest!Corrin are technically the same person but their differing experiences would make them play poker slightly differently. Rev!Corrin would be a lot more self-consicous about their tells and try not to give too much away, while Conquest!Corrin is much less in their own head and more trying to read the other players and execute their own game plan. They're comparable, of course, and neither are among the best of the best. Three Houses: Byleth has the killer instinct and obviously hard to read, but by the same token they may not be able to read other players very well. The others are a lot more debatable, especially when you consider how they turn out in the others' routes; for simplicity's sake I'll just mention the lords from their own routes. CF!Edelgard is like Ephraim in that she constantly pushes her advantage, but I think she can be surprisingly susceptible to mind games. AM!Dimitri is decent but again is very susceptible to mind games. VW!Claude has a ton of strategies, some more obvious then the others that can help him against most of the other lords, but against the best of the best I don't know how he stacks up. Engage: Alear is just not very good at the game, probably only slightly better than Eliwood and Roy; they just don't have either the psychological knowledge or the strategic ability to work their way through all of their hands. Of these, I think it's a three way race between Hector, Byleth, and Claude. All three, to my mind, have the ability to either bluff or think their way through the rest of the competition, but I think they're all easily matched. Byleth and Claude may be able to throw each other off given thier shared history, but I doubt it's much of an advantage on either side.

Since Fates, Fire Emblem has had something of a tradition of each individual mainline game having its own theme song separate from the general Fire Emblem theme that plays during the opening and/or end credits. Fates itself has "Lost in Thoughts All Alone", Echoes "Heritors of Arcadia", Three Houses "The Edge of Dawn," and Engage "Fiery Bonds". I wondered what people thought of all of them. I think my favorite one is probably Heritors of Arcadia. It's got some great lyrics and it being from Mila's POV is really interesting (though it would have been more interesting if it was a duet with Duma). It's not as plot critical like "Lost" but it provides a good emotional capstone to the game.

Mechanically, it's one of the high points of the series, especially Conquest. Basically every system that helped made Awakening so successful is here, and most are straight-up improvements -- reclassing especially is a lot more interesting here than it was in Awakening imo. It also introduced other ideas like Dragon Veins and the debuff versions of shuriken/daggers that I hope stick around in some way going forward. What makes the story more interesting in hindsight is the Three Houses comparison. Both lean into route splits much more than any of the previous games and yet they go about it in vastly different ways: Fates has multiple versions that you have to buy separately, while Three Houses has them all in one cartridge; the choices of Fates are imo much less compelling than Three Houses (particularly with the Silver Snow/Crimson Flower split) but the actual act of making the choice is better contextualized, etc. If IS wants to keep making FE route splits -- not something I necessarily think would be good but that's besides the point -- they'd do well to figure out what worked and didn't work about both approaches.

Yeah, that was why I didn't include Bramimond in the list, since there's a lot up for interpretation and argument that there isn't with other characters like, say, Limstella.

I guess? The official Heroes site uses he/him pronouns even post-dark magic but Athos does use gender-neutral pronouns in FE7, so I think it may be up to interpretation. And in any case you could argue that Bramimond being genderless wouldn't be the best rep since it frames the loss of cisgender-ness as a negative consequence of using dark magic rather than an inherent part of the character. I'm personally inclined to include them. It's not as if every character in Three Houses, for example, can be S-Supported regardless of Byleth's gender, so for me characters like Lindhart and Jeritza are bi even if their only same-sex S-Supports are with Male!Byleth. I guess those factors would exclude those two from romantic same-sex S-Supports, provided polyamory isn't an option. But I think the bigger question is why they were written to be such in the first place, rather than the in-universe justification. For example, there's nothing that mandates Alois be a character with a wife (especially as IIRC we don't see her in person in the game) but the developers still made the decision to write them as platonic S-Supports when every other S-Support in the game is explicitly romantic.

Since we're in the middle of Pride month (and with Limstella making their debut in Heroes, coincidentally) I thought it could be worthwhile to talk about LGBT+ rep in Fire Emblem. I've made a list of characters who are, to my knowledge, explicitly LGBT+ characters in the games so far: Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about any of these or have forgotten someone; I haven't played all the games in question. In general, Fire Emblem's rep is bisexual, with some gay and non-binary characters, and both of the non-binary characters were made so in Heroes. Additionally, the number of LGBT characters increased dramatically between Fates and Three Houses. Additionally, Fates locked certain characters behind different routes that you had to pay for, and Soleil is unable to S-Support any women despite preferring women over men. Three Houses, meanwhile, has Gilbert and Alois who are S-Supportable for both Byleths but non-romantic. Overall, Fire Emblem doesn't have the best LGBT representation in all of video games, but it's a made a lot of progress, especially between Fates' initial release and now.

Yeah, SMT V's player character is a guy with long blue hair who doesn't have a canon name but whose title is more or less Nahobino. Here are some screenshots for reference. Personally, thought the UI and environment don't look like anything from SMT V, so if it is an edit it's a very involved one.

I don't know, there's a reason giving the player a good (combat) unit in the early game is a good idea. Early games are IMO usually the most difficult parts of Fire Emblems because it's when you have the least resources and you're the weakest relative to the enemy troops. Even if you're not doing a challenge run or playing on higher difficulties, prepromotes are great for helping first time players getting the hang of the game. And in any case I think it's good to have a variety of playstyles on the table for RPGs, and getting rid of prepromotes as a rule would limit and not expand player choice.

Another DLC-related change: Hapi's budding talent in axes gets her Exhaustive Strike, when that runs of her worse strength stat. I would have swapped it out for Lightning Axe, the magic axe combat art.

Maybe it's because I've been using her for my current SS Maddening run, but I think Anna needs either a personal skill or supports. As it is, she's incredibly mediocre, especially with respect to her Reason bane negating her getting Bolting. Personally, I think that she should have had either her Fates personal (getting a luck% chance of getting a random amount of gold upon killing an enemy) or Spendthrift (a Merchant class skill in Fates that consumed a billion to increase damage).

As I understand it, Nevada and Georgia will have updates at 9 pm est, so there may not be much in the way of substantial updates until then.

Rest in power. I'm pretty sure court packing would be politically unfeasible, depending on how popular it would be with the public I'm also unsure about Trump stealing the election. I think Gorusch at least would join the liberals and Robert's wants to uphold the idea that the court is non partisan (which lol but whatever).

A new whistleblower complaint alleges that a privately run ICE detention center has carried out mass hysterectomies . Now, as far as I know, this is one complaint against a specific center and perhaps not an agency-wide policy, but it's disgusting all the same. Mass hysterectomies amount to forced sterilization which makes ICE even more concentration camp-y than they previously were.

Trump tells supporters in North Carolina (which I believe is a swing state) to vote twice in the election. Which is illegal.