Leif

I ordered from Best Buy and I called my local store. They said that I would be able to pick it up Friday morning.

I wish those skills were organized based on class, but I'm not complaining since we finally have all the localized skill names!! :D

Avalanche gave a good summary. My success in Fire Emblem has to be my attention to detail. Read, READ, READ. Battle conversations usually give hints regarding when reinforcements show up and whatnot. Don't separate your forces--stick together. I believe luring out enemies in this game doesn't work as it did in previous entries in the series. If you lure one stationary enemy, prepare for the rest of the enemy gang to follow. Mind your placement and your enemy's. I recommend Normal and Casual mode for you. I know you want to have permadeath on, however, I think you need to get your feet wet first. Do it as a kind of "test-run". Then, when you beat the game, either play the other routes on classic mode.

Well if you pair a male Corrin with Azura, you'll miss out on getting all the children due to an uneven amount of females. This is true for Birthright; not sure about Conquest. You're better off pairing a Male Corrin with a second generation female i.e. Rhajat Caeldori, Mitama, Midori, Sophie, etc. This way you'll get all the children and their respective paralogues. Azura as a variable parent gives amazing offensive stats, but her defensive stats are horrid. She's better off pairing with Silas for Birthright since Sophie's natural defenses won't get hit as hard. Azura is amazing as a Songstress because of "sing". She is NOT really meant for combat (based on her poor defensive stats). She was built to pass down great offensive growths and support other units. If you want to unlock her full potential, give her the support skill, Sun God (localized name not yet known) from the Kinshi Knight class. She learns great skills like Voice of Peace in her base class. She can support other units this way instead of reclassing her and missing out on her singing. She can act as an attack stance partner, but she should never fight on the front lines.

Gamexplain review is now up.

I was being facetious. Not to worry, haha. 9 out of the 15 reviews are in the nineties; so far so good! I think it will end up with a similar score to Awakening.

Wow, it's getting rave reviews aside from Game Revolution (never heard of them) and Game Spot. Game Revolution gave it a 70 when the other sources were in the high 80's and low 90's. Methinks they don't know how to play FE. =/ I am thrilled with it's performance. Can't wait to write my review of the game.

http://opencritic.com The review embargo is up. Thought I'd let you guys know. So far, I can't find any reviews, which makes me sad. EDIT 2: Finally found the reviews. Huge derp on my part.

I was going to say what Thane and Gayserbeam already explained, so I will add some extra info. For pairing units up, that can mean two things: partnering two units in battle, or making two units marry. If you are concerned about the former, you want a unit's battle partner to cover their weakness. Take Orochi and her horrendous speed stat, for instance. She'd love to have the ninja, Kaze, as a Pair Up battle partner because he'll give her more speed. For more info, visit the Serenes front page and hit the Fates tab and look at the pair up bonuses each character and class gives. All the data is there. Pair-up bonuses aren't as broken as they were in Awakening, FYI, so be mindful of that. If you are talking about marriage between units, you'd want to have pairings that compliment a father's strengths. Azama is an interesting case since his growths and maximum stats push him towards a physical unit, despite being a magic-based monk. In Birthright, you'd want to pick a wife with a high strength stat so that Mitama, their child, will have a ridiculous strength growth. Again, you can determine child growth rates and maximum stats by looking at the Fates page on the main site. So far, it's speculated that children growths are [(Child Base Growth + Variable Parent Base Growth) / 2], with base growths referring to the probabilities of characters' stat gains per level up minus the class bonuses. As Thane said, Royals are obviously good. However, I've heard Elise does pull her own weight, despite a horrendous Defense growth, since she is incredibly fast and lucky. If you are on the easiest setting, you can make any unit, despite being average or terrible, good enough to be a powerful unit. This is more possible in Birthright since you have the option to grind for levels. tl;dr: Take a gander at all of our suggestions and do some outside research. This way, you'll learn a ton before you play!

I haven't seen any of the Revelation streams for Fates via Gamexplain, but I wonder if Odin and Nyx got buffed through Treehouse? If I'm not mistaken, some of the units in the Sacred Stones were buffed upon localization. Do you think that'll happen in Revelation?

I had an inkling that that was the reason why, but I wanted to see if others noticed that too. Guess I'm guilty as charged; I'm a nerd. xD

That's badass. I am loving this localization. On a side note, have you guys seen a ton of advertisements for Fates? I am getting a Fates commercial practically every other youtube video I watch. It's kinda satisfying that FE is getting a lot of love now.

Do the beast units, (i.e. Selkie, Velouria, etc.) still have their tails even when they reclass into other units? Like, would Selkie have her fox tail in a sniper class?

What weapons were the Sniper and Master Ninja Kana's using? I know that both were using the Expert shuriken and yumi respectively, but what else were they using? I am merely curious.

Velouria gets Diviner from an A+ support with Selkie, right?

I don't believe in this stuff, but I'll admit that it's fun to play around with. I'm a Virgo, so Percy, Azama, Ophelia, Soleil, and Hayato share my sign. I'm happy that I have 3 magic users in my group (if you count staves as magic). :D

I'm pumped for this game and I really hope we get an English release soon. Thank goodness that I'll have Fates to keep me entertained for a while. I just hope it releases soon. I won't have time to play games if I start grad school next cycle.

Oh, that boss from Awakening. Wow, I forgot all about him. Yeah, now that you mention it, that irks me a tad too. I think it's inevitable that characters will share the same names as previous FE characters, due to the large amount of recruitable characters in the franchise.

That's it! Those are the localized names of all playable characters. I'm very happy with them overall, well, aside from Arthur and Selena since we have two characters in the FE series with those names already. =/ I would have had Arthur keep his "Harold" name and I would have had Selena be re-named to "Selene".

Really? Does this mean that I may be able to pick up my copy early?! I should give my local BB a call.

I thought about doing that, but I'll play it how Nintendo recommends that I play Fates: Birthright -> Conquest -> Revelation. I want to appreciate each campaign for what it is first. I'll be able to make a better analysis that way.

Yeah, my comment overall was a bit sarcastic, haha. Sorry if that wasn't clear. I know it isn't the best designed game, but I love the challenge it brings to the table. I love the graphical style, OP staves, OP magic, awesome map design (for SOME, like the defense map where you protect Tahra; others like 24x, where you save Eyvel, can go to hell). It had amazing features, but also equally bad aspects too. I forgot to mention that fatigue was a bit annoying, but I can appreciate that the system was there to prevent map steam-rolling with one powerful unit. It needs an updated port of sorts where some of the clunky controls, like map deployment, are fixed.

Awesome, now Ignis is the only child left in need of a localized name. I am really confused about Kisaragi's name being left unchanged. I thought it would be shortened to something like "Kisa" or "Kisagi". xD

Huh? I thought Elise had blond hair. It's clearly blonde in the FMV's. O_o

Yeah, I just meant that Shiro makes sense for a western audience. Then again, I have no idea why Onmyoji was chosen as a class name since most people wouldn't know how to pronounce it.