Reality

I'm pretty sure I've literally killed off character's over personality before, but for the life of me I can't remember which ones. Least liked are - Conquest Corrin, Azama, Bernadetta, and Gaius.

I'm trying Banner Saga. I've heard that the choice and consequences is better than the combat which supposedly becomes repetitive. Not very far... but it seems to encourage keeping enemies at low health to force them to waste turns when they could be cycling to their healthy guys. It's kinda prevents snowballying, but creates problems that are equally as bad. I will keep going and see how it pans out when the game gets harder and more abilities are involved.

I play my own switch mostly for MP party games so I've got all kinds of stuff. Overcooked 2- 100% I'm so addicted to it I bought the inferior Overcooked 1 as a "level expansion" Super Mario Party - really depends on how many old Nintendo consoles you still own. I think it's about 4th best in the series, minigame rotation can sometimes let you down though. Snipperclips Plus - I think my family members like this more than I do, but they won't let me forget that they think it's better than most of my switch favorites... Worms WMD - Worms games always age well, kind of like bomberman (I think playing on a crafting disabled, basic weapons ruleset is best though) Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime - Very silly game that is kind of a turret defense, BUT, 1 player has to get out of the turrets to steer. Super Bomberman R - Bomberman always delivers - Battle mode should be 90% percent of your time, but the story mode does have 2 player max co-op. Splatoon 2 - Reasonably fun, even for family members who don't like First person shooting games. Cel Damage - This is a "Twisted Metal" clone with the mechanics and physics simplified and using cartoon graphics instead of the usual "dark realism" aesthetic. Very fun to fight with cars. Astro Bears - more of a mini-game than anything else, but it's basically a 3D version of the classic "snake" game where you don't want to run over your own trail. The 4P kicks it up in a fun way with 4 different trails and a jumping option - warning only 1 music track that plays endlessly - play on MUTE! Crawl - it's like Gauntlent except you fight each other instead of being co-operative- the Lovecraft thing might be a turnoff. Astro Bear (indie) - more of a mini-game than a full game, but it does the job. Screen Cheat (indie) - Very Goofy First Person shooter based entirely around PS1 / N64 era splitscreen (it has no blood. I think the charathers are beanies made out of thread?) The gimmick is that charathers are invisible at all times and you can only find people by looking on their screen. The maps are designed to hel p this (mostly with pastel color coating and landmarks) Puyo Puyo Tetris - I'm personally a Puyo Puyo addict, so I run into your curbstomp problem when I actually play it as against the family. We mostly only play the Big Bang mode to make sure everyone has a good time and we avoid the 8 chain every 30 seconds thing. The lack of a lot of family-bonus modes makes me prefer this to (Puyo Puyo chamipions) Wild Guns Reloaded - this is a "cabal" style rail shooter- that is a sub-genre where you shoot into the background while having a charather in the foreground who must dodge bullets. It's pretty fast and hectic... some people will prefer games like Sin and Punishment or Star Succesor- but those work better as single player score attack games than as Party games - Wild Guns keeps things kind of easy enough to be fun, hard enough to get them to try it more than once - Their are a couple of 2P max games I could offer as well, but they don't sound like what you need.

FE1 3/10 NES RPGs are Nintendo Hard and force grinding,.. except ironically, the one that actually advertises itself as having permadeath. FE2 2/10 FE3 3/10 This game is not hardware optimized and enemy phase takes as long as FE4 despite smaller unit counts due to intense lag - not a big problem for emulator playthroughs with a speed slider... granted- Like the addition of the star shards, book 1 and book 2 maps that share a location have some disappointment to them though. Has a few high stat enemies (dragons) relative to your units later on and in better numbers than many other FE games, but nothing doing. FE4 1/10 FE5 6/10 Your enemy phase unit's are a touch strong in this game considering it's reputation. Lot of systems go unused for practical purposes. I treat all the growth scrolls as "iron runes" for crit immunity too eliminate the busywork of trading them. Best of Kaga-GBA ERA. FE6 4/10 I played this game to check it off a list, it's supposedly worse than the other two not in a way that stuck out to me besides the comfort of gba buttons vs keyboard if I'm honest. FE7 5/10 FE8 5/10 FE9 4/10 FE9 Hard is easier than FE8 hard mode. The incomplete-disable battle animations is a turn off. FE10 5/10 Part 1 and Part 2 are the highlight, kind of wears on into "victory lap" terriorty with some of the Greil Mercenary maps. FE11 8/10 FE12 8/10 FE13 7/10 I like Awakening Lunatic + as a "setup" challenge as opposed to a "tacitical" challenge, but the latter is MISSING in classic era FE anyway so it's no loss. FE14 7/10 Lunatic Rev/BR is still better than all GBA stuff, even though Conquest is the only one people should own. Has some drawbacks, but eh. FE15 2/10 The best thing about it is the touching story of the one developer who played it with his dad. FE16 5/10 Three Houses Hard = Awakening, but slower because of monastery. Maddening is 5 chapters of curved shot and then it just turns into hard after mikalan. Warriors 7/10 - It's fluctuates between my 3rd-4th favorite Warriors game and is MUCH better than Hyrule Warriors. Tokyo Mirage Sessions 8/10 - I'm not a superfan of press-turn and stuff but after Octopath…. fresh reminder that yeah I would prefer it to the current crop of turn based RPGs and to replaying MOST SNES/PS1 games. Heroes : 10/10 - doesn't waste time trying to be an RPG and makes fully embraces being the puzzle-tactics games FE should have been.

A female yak is a nak.

GBA Priest and Troubadours belong on the bench because you can use 100% vulneary healing up to the point of getting your first guiding ring and then just have your mage be your first staff user in chapter 11.

Seth from FE 8 becauase POWER - I liked Saleh, Dozla, Duessel, too even in my first game it was all pre-promote all the time

I don't want to slog through VG charts, but I remember articles that, XCOM 2 sold 800K in its first year with a fall release, and it's first week sales were double that of Awakening --- the combined sales of Julain Grop's Original XCOM, console ports, the first reboot (enemy unknown) and Firaxis/2K NuXCOM are pretty extreme, . (with the bulk of sales being from NuXCOM games and expansions) // And these bigger sales are also generally at a higher price per unit than FE games. not to mention that more western tactics games developed post Xcom had roots in their mechanics rather than sourcing straight from tabletop wargames ---whereas original Fire Emblem took strategy roots from Famicom Wars, which itself used an interface close to japan home computer ports of Wizard's Crown and Pool of Radiance - and rather than becoming a monolith - most of the succeeding JP TRPGs took made up their own mechanics fairly independently. - Also Rebelstar was made before Fire Emblem 1 (although it's fair not to include it in the XCOM franchise) and XCOM 's 1994 is the same year as Mystery of the Emblem, only 4 years after Shadow Dragon -

XCOM is bigger than Fire Emblem (although if you fully count Heroes it isn't), but people sometimes genre-police hard enough to say that it's own genre rather than an SRPG. Disgaea is the 2nd largest TRPG for normal all intents and purposes - with Valkyria Chronicles being a 3rd. Langrisser, Sakura Force, and Shining Force are historical competeiors to fire emblem but are likely doomed to remain niche games. Square Enix's TRPGs are often considered spin offs, but a Square Enix spinoff can outsell same gen "full" RPGs from other companies(Look at FFT / Ogre Battle influence vs the entire Grandia or Breath of Fire Franchsies) - Front Mission essentially died after its 2 PS2 games, but it's impossible to claim that TRPGs outside of the big 3 or other "retired" TRPGs have a bigger footprint (in terms of mechanics homaged by later games by smaller developers) or unit sales history than FM/FFT/Ogre. Atlus had the Digitital Devil Saga (DDS) spin offs of SMT, but with main SMT being dwarfed by Persona, it's might be a bit late for it. Super Robot Wars is an extra niche game, due to the giant robo thing - but should stay small despite actually getting new releases - it is too reliant on the brand, and outside of Japan markets translations have to rely on a portion of the audience not being genre fans and thus inevitably review bombing (because it is kinda dicey) If we're going to talk about the other Western games - the size of their playerbase and influence is generally small (only XCOM is a serious exception), but people who play Battle Brothers or Blackguards, within their niche, are unlikely to be fans of most of the before-mentioned Japanese TRPGs due to the lack of intensive mechanics- and then of course their are the games that are much more tactics games than TRPG hybirds - Jagged Alliance, Silent Storm, and their modern clones - their popularity Is enough to sometimes push out a modern game with their mechanics, but their communities don't seem to grow much or attract developers so much as modders.

I agree they need more, because it does seem like the game is trying to push the idea that even though you are the professor of your chosen house you still teach some classes to students from all three houses (like the other profs) do, even if in actual gameplay there is a disconnect (and you probbabbly don't even talk to most of non-house students during explore).

I could copy paste the thing I always bring up, but just Wikipedia the developer From Software. You'll see Dark Souls, Demon's Souls, Bloodborne, and other games that are widely considered hard. But this one. This one scares me.

Rogue Sqaudron N64 Rogue Squadron 2 GCN Tie Fighter DoS Lego Star Wars 2 GCN Star Wars Battlefront 2 PS2 Things that don't make the cut for me that I still remember playing through fully. Bounty Hunter, Star Wars Demolition(the twisted metal clone), Episode 1 Podracer, Star Wars Bombad Racing, Star Wars 1 PS2, The Clone Wars (GCN), Shadows of the Empire, Battle for Naboo, Star Wars Rogue Squadron 3. I like the idea of a podracing game but I think E 1 Podracer's big engine ships have too much of an advantage over the small engine ships, it's a much more drastic effect than the A rated Top speed versus C rated top speed in F-zero or the differences between vehicles in Wipeout. Battlefront 1 maps are just horribly exposed and NPC ally not counting toward kills. Their are a handful of interesting ones I would port to Battlefront 2, but overall it's hard to play it - Little known fact - the recon drone has an airstrike instead of the self destruct it has in B2.. Battle for Naboo is a game I'm thinking about giving a revisit - It should really be a good game but I unfairly compare it to the (mostly hovertank) campaign of GCN's Clone Wars, and the times you do get to fly are a little too heavy on air-to-surface - I'm fine with "bombing" missions to diversify gameplay, but they feel like what I'm doingthe actual majority of the time and it leaves me unsatisfied.

Non Twisted Metal "car combat games" - but especially Cel Damage, Vigilante 8, and Interstate 76 - I' ve had hundreds of hours of fun with some of these, and my own nostalgia factor rates them higher even than Black - Cel Damage is …. a bit off-genre and more arcade than than normal, especially the One hit kill gamecube version (as opposed to Xbox or modern port versions that use Xbox base) - Vigilante 8 is a series that takes the "fighting game combo" bonus element in some Twisted Metal games up to 11 - instead of having the freeze and the jump, every weapon in the game has 3 alternate firing mode combos (4 in 2nd Offense) - Including some that are amusing because they deform the physics. Finally Interstate 76, despite being ANCIENT, is half appealing because it's the ultimate Singleplayer story car-combat game, and half appealing because it's made to be modabble and has accumulated an impressive amount of content over the years. 8 Degree of Freedom Games - Descent, Freespace, and might as well mention Colony Wars and G-Police Descent is most commonly seem as a footnote along other early FPS games in the wake of Doom and while most articles admit that it is almost a subgenre of Doomclone onto itself due to the Spaceship, the overall impression left is that is impressive than the others and people shouldn't seek it out until they've already made the pilgrimage of BLood/Shadow of Triad/Duke Nukem, etc.... I find this nonsense - it's still good today. Descent and Descent 2 even stands out a lot from the games that would copy it's engine, due to the game taking place entirely in caves as opposed to Space (or low atmosphere) - and Like Doom, it is paradoxically a LOT faster than most "real" space games of the flightsim type, and it's really exhilarating. - Freespace 1 and 2, are very cinematic in their way, and you will occasionally see some very strong cult support, but imo I think their distant 4th behind (Tie FIghter + Wing Commander 4 + Freelancer) is given too much of a gap - 8DD in space on its own is a great dogfighting experience, and they Freespace 1 and 2 have an amazing cinematic feel to them storywise themselves. Colony Wars 1, Vengeance, and Red Sun are a neat PS1 trilogy, which I adore to death, and their use of 8DD is great, their story is interesting and unconventional insofar as you play each game presents the last game's story through the propaganda of the losing faction, the game has some of my favorite sound effects in ANY game, and the length of the game is satisfying between it's branching paths and (kind of high ) difficulty. These games use a shield/hull system instead of the "powerup" esque gameplay of classic Descent though... G-Police was made by the same developers as Colony Wars and is weaker in most areas. but is nevertheless pretty solid. It's a whole other topic but - puzzle game master race games either don't get recognition and the ones that are too big to ignore (at least for historical importance if nothing else) aren't given ENOUGH respect as things that are still fun today - I"ll never call Lemmings, Solomon's Key, and Lode Runner underrated, but games like Boulderdash, Bombastic, Head Over Heels, Lumilines,, Adventures of Lolo, XI Jumbo, Kurushi Final, ChuChuRocket, Mr Driller - This doesn't even include the "block" and drop down puzzlers which are seen as only their own niche and not stone cold classics in their own right (except tetris) - The differences between Puyo Puyo, Magical Drop, and Bust a Move should be appreciated by more people. More than anything else, people should engage with Puzzle games instead of resorting to padding out their idea of what a puzzle game is with puzzle platformers and adventure/puzzle hybrids: things like Braid or The Witness are great GAMES but are they really special in the context of the puzzle world? Random One off things Steambot Chronicles - underated but admittedly it's pretty heavily flawed game - The steambot itself has tank controls, a unco-ooperative lock on system, and can cause extreme amounts of slowdown and lag in common situations (eg explosions of any kind)-- But everything OTHER than the combat is really great, it's not an extremely large sandbox, but I do find it as engrossing as GTA / Saint's Row at times when just checking wandering around the city's, doing the music stuff. The game's cel-shaded with faded "early Victorian" aesthetic is great, and is a lot more grounded than the superpowers of say, Vaklyria chronicles - it even is thematic throughout the game (eg villian motivations, multiple player sidequests (expanding a railroad, changing the textile industry). I'm not going to deny enjoying the Rockstar formula, but I can't think of EVER enjoying the on-foot parts of any sandbox quite as much as in SC. Creatures 1 and 2 - This is arguably the most the most successful A-Life game ever released if you genre-police hard enough to keep the Sims out of the genre - but today it is mostly forgotten and the entire idea of artificial life in video games is split between indies who never go beyond being "quirky" and stuff that is a little TOO dry academic - Creatures 1 is a happy accident that is both complex, but still a GAME (Steve Grand would go DEEP into academic A-Life after he left) - I think the most impressive thing about it is in the language instruction - if you leave them to babytalk instead of teaching them yourself, the Norns can actually try to make those sounds into a language itself and come to mutally accepted definitions for food and other objects, making their own language out of the sounds. *Creatures 2 and 3 kind of need modding to enjoy, unlike C1, but the original 2000s community made easy to use injectors and large mods for all three games. Majesty 1 - Very unlikely to appear in a search unless you are in a Dungeon Keeper forum and are looking for "similar games" - Maj 1 isn't really that close to DK (except by comparison to "normal" RTS games) - It's a very special game due to the indirect unit control being combined with extensive decision tree AI that gives all the charathers "personalities" and the game has enough randomness in it that you can't quite get to the point of predicting things - sometimes a Rogue WILL be brave, or a Paladin WILL run away, a Monk will develop an unhealthly fixation with your Inns, a Ranger will survive a fight with a Minotaur that would have killed 9/10 other rangers, you'll get a non wizard hero ACTUALLY use the library, and all sorts of little "make up your own story to explain it" things that the game just DOES, all the time. Honestly, I think the real best comparison is not DK but actually things like Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld - you just set this game loose and magic happens - *Keep in mind that the actual mechanical parts of Majesty are very basic and not simulationist like in those games though.

Go depending on taste or go for a 1 of each "subgroup" Party based job system - no incentive to reclass - 3 Set party members with preset class archetypes - 2, 4, and 5 (2 not recommend) Accesible games with a more Final Fantasy like "skill" system instead of a "job" system. Fixed charathers. Dragon Quest 8 and 11 Party based job system, heavy incentive to reclass, extensive postgame/or superboss - Dragon Quest 6-7 kind of DQ 9. Other mentions - DQ 1 is a single charather game with spells and some monster attacks acting as set damage. I personally recommend a playthrough of 3 and 8. I would say that the fans of 6-7 are very vocal, and cultlike- - but it's a game that's a little TOO much and 2 hours before fighting the first slime is NOT an exaggeration. My preference 3 > 8 > 11 > 1 > 4 > 5 > 7 > 6 -///////////// 9 isn't really emulatable, but would rate between 4 and 5 I guess, the postgame isn't really that satisfying since you have to level up the superbosses by fighting them, and beating them down 60 times (most of them are a joke before they learn wave of ice, etc) feels unnatural before you get to the point where they finally are interesting and force you to really damage race them. (the main game is on easy side and doesn't have any of the "one off difficulty spike" that something like DQ 8 does).

I think that crazy enemy stats in Shadow Dragon and New Mystery is the most interesting implementation of a player phase oriented SRPG in the FE franchise. Unless we count FEH on it's chain challenge and Infernal difficulty battles Echoes and Three Houses are "player phase" oriented mostly more due to Arts/gambits being unavailable on enemy phase than because of good design. My take on Awakening;s Lunatic difficulty is that it's more like Heroes of Might and Magic, on single scenario mode against the 180% AI …. Frederick is the Barbarian/Archer unit sayou use to crawl out of earlygame, Robin/Lucina/Morgan are your Black Dragons / Titans -and despite all their power, you STILL need to let them get up to 2-3 to cope, extending Barbarian use before the game enters "single stack" territory. It's not really a creative or tactical/positioning bassed challenge, but it does scratch some kind of itch, as despite needing to railroad your choices to get out of an earlygame, it's still a fun experience to budget for effiencny and stretch resources to the limit while under that earlygame pressure. I think the better perspective on PP vs EP is looking at non FE SRPGs and Turn Based Strategy games - I think by far the most interesting implementation is something like Front Mission, where you can link units to counterattack and still need to save partial AP for the enemy phase -Then there is the more nuanced system of something like D&D type Attacks of opportunity which have built in counterplay in the forms of 5 foot steps(as shown in Temple of Elemental Evil or Knights of the Chalice) And then there is XCOM type "overwatch" which even though I'm not a fan of, is still a lot better than FE counterattacking, because Overwatching …. assumes a frailer team is interrupting the enemy's action as opposed to letting the enemy do their full murderous action and then counter attacking - the takeaway is that in most FE games... you could make a "no counterattack" romhack because the current system assumes the enemies are non lethal to begin with.