Byte2222

Oh you guys. I studied aikido for about 2 years but I've been doing archery for longer and have shot in regional and national student competitions. So, archer (and probably higher than level 1). If I had reclass options, myrmidon would probably be one of them, given the aikido background. Guys, a bow designed to kill people will have a draw force of more than 36 pounds (depending on its construction, probably a lot more). There's an old saying about traditional archery: "to make a great longbowman, start with his grandfather". I hope you all appreciate that if you really ended up in the world of FE your chances of survival are pretty slim, even if you were equipped with a bow, because you wouldn't be able to hit anyone with it before they removed your spleen.

If anything, I think of him with his (very) old patch name of Eltosain (which I still think is better), so I hold no particular loyalty to Eltshan and I think that Eldigan is as good an option as any other.

Can I just say: FE2 has a complete (and very good) translation. It's very weird and different when compared to the rest of the series but I'd say well worth playing if you have a little patience, it had some really interesting ideas and mechanics.

I'm very guilty, I rarely use anything above steel: special weapons are reserved for special circumstances but I rarely reaches circumstances I consider special enough to use anything higher than silvers

There's been another translation patch that's amazingly good. Like, I don't think there's a single error or oversight in it. Gaiden is practically begging for a remake, but I think it would need some major changes: take the ideas and premise of Gaiden and rework it into a modern FE. Gaiden had loads of really weird elements which can't really be disentangled but it's also very bare-bones and need to be built upon. Hence, I think it needs gutting and reworking before bringing it to a modern FE-loving audience, especially as Shadow Dragon was pretty faithful and as a result we got decades-old maps, cast and narrative.

Teeta IS playable in Gaiden and is pretty awesome since she's one of only 3 healer/bishop/saint/white mage units in a game with no healing items. They can also, among other things, banish monsters en masse and summon moderate numbers of allied units (including the original 3rd tier dread fighters) when they reach higher levels. Gaiden was weird. Camus, as a character, is quite an interesting case study. He was awesome in FE1 and everyone wanted him on their team/was ad they had to kill him. In response, he became available again as two alter egos in a fairly clumsy and anvilicious way. There were characters like this again but the system became more refined: Camus was essentially the precursor to the units you can use in challenge maps (or spotpass chapters for FE13).

All martial arts have an element of footwork and both martial arts and dancing are about controlled use of your body. I'm not exactly surprised that women who dance on the battlefield choose to learn some swordfighting and I imagine the two disciplines complement each other nicely. Don't confuse spear/pike infantry with spearfighting. It is possible to use a short spear in the same context as a sword; it's potentially more versatile but it's more difficult to learn. Spear fighting is kinda like this: and I'd like to point out that parries that the guy on the right does at 3 seconds and the end of the video. Conversely, a dozen spearmen with long pikes would just form a pointy barrier and poke stuff, which is a lot easier than training them all to use a sword but they're in trouble if their formation is broken.As far as I know, axe techniques died out and are now unknown. What I do know is that battleaxes were lighter than you'd expect, rarely more than a kilogram, because they'd otherwise be just too unwieldy. You also hack with an axe but tend to slice with a sword. Various forms of sword dances have existed through the years so dancers fighting with swords isn't a huge stretch. And anyway, you'd have to be pretty foolish to be on the battlefield without a weapon.

Most of the advice being given here is actually pretty good, I don't really have anything to add. Don't worry about struggling to begin with, FE4 is a pretty weird game compared to the rest of the series. No.3 is probably the best advice in this thread: in my experience loads of people offer specific advice (pairings, items etc.) and try to micromanage you and you're better off without them.

Very good question. Yes it adds more strategy but it also affects the balance of weapon types against each other and weapons within each type, arguably for the worse. Maybe if you had a system where you measured it against strength in a game like Gaiden with low stats all round but this has all the other problems of a low stats system. On balance, I think we're better without it.

Good grief, mine's not original, I've no idea who first came up with it.

Ilyana has an intestinal tapeworm. I'm not sure if I'm serious or not.

Classic/reset, like most of the rest of us. I've not finished the game yet, although I am in the UK (so I've only had it a week) and had a 10500 word project report due last week. I play hugely defensively, mostly because I'm paranoid (rightly) that someone's going to die. Even when there isn't a conventional chokepoint I either use a 2 or 3 unit wide blockade, make a mini wall or retreat to lead the enemy's attack. I'm also getting a feel for pair up (slowly) and also when not to pair up.

Is chapter 5 supposed to be as hard as I'm finding it (quite hard) or do I just suck? I'm on 'Hard' difficulty.

Sounds like yours was similar to mine, with the exception of a 'booth'. Booth!? At the bullring they just gave me a belt with two 3DSXLs on it so I could stand around and poke them in people's faces. I reasoned that it would be best for visitors to just try the first stage (as I don't think many of them had played FE before) rather than trying to do any multiplayer. Apparently the store was sold out of physical copies an hour or so in and had sold lots of digital copies (with artbooks). I think I managed to persuade one guy to buy a 3DS at a later date with Fire Emblem, which I'm pretty pleased with. I only stayed for a few hours but I'm glad I got the chance to push FE. I didn't get many streetpass hits nor did I play any multiplayer (ironically) but I helped give FE some more exposure so I'm glad I went.

As the other guys have said, it's not too hard. Make sure Ike has nihil so the Black Knight doesn't activate eclipse, don't move Ike off his cover tile and pack a healing item and you'll have no problem with Ike; the bigger problem is the army on the other side of the wall and the very shiny and appealing lance in Levail's hands. Ragnell is handy but if you give Ike a hammer you can win the battle in maybe one turn. Like I said, don't worry about Ike, the other army is a much bigger problem.

Ninja'd. Cynically speaking, our current metric (turncount efficiency) highly favours bases, availability and movement. 'Jeigan's always have good bases for their jointime, they almost always excellent availability and they often have good movement so they score highly in the system. That said, there is good reason why this happens. Jeigans rule the earlygame where, metaphorically speaking, the path is narrower and experienced players have fewer options available to them. By endgame, the good choices made by an experienced player will be paying off and the fact that 'Jeigan' units may have poorer performance seems... unimportant... in context.

I say yay. Also, I'm British and we're in a sort of limbo between metric and imperial. Conversions between the two are... interesting.

Name: *would probably use my real one but it's already been taken by a fat bishop* Sex: Male Class: Sniper Joins at Level 4, I do lots of archery IRL and the best FITA 18 I've shot is 499 (I don't shoot FITAs very often) Recruitment: needs rescuing as enemies bear down on him out in the open ('cos of archers' infamous enemy phase). Probably got ambushed by bandits/enemy army or got caught up in the game's fighting and doesn't have much actual combat experience. Starting inventory: silver bow, steel bow, concoction HP: medium Str: good (37-41lbs draw force. Yes, I actually shoot that) Mag: mediocre (for a physical unit) Skill: good (archers tend to have good skill) Speed: mediocre Luck: poor (my archery can be inconsistent, mostly because of my rough mental game) Def: poor (how do you defend while holding a bow? I don't know) Res: mediocre (for a physical unit) Reclass options: Mage, Myrmidon Character: cool, level-headed and slow to judge, good for major decisions and encouraging to those with less experience. Over the course of supports he shows himself as being open and honest when he relaxes around people, and desperately seeks companionship. Combat role: given the stat spread above, hard-hitting but fragile, probably like a physical 2-range only mage (or a precision magic-cannon if reclased to an actual mage). Definitely a support unit, not a front-liner N.B. I've not played FE13 yet (see my 'location'). You'd better believe I'm gonna fix this when the 19th April rolls around.

Hence why I think it would be well suited to being remade. There are indeed some really interesting plot elements and characters that aren't explored at all, what with it being a Famicom-era game.

IMO, FE2 is the game in the series most deserving a remake. It would probably need to be a radical one too: strip out pretty much everything but the world, characters and what little plot there is and try to rebuild it more like the modern FEs while keeping the spirit of Gaiden. I say that like it's easy but I'm not going to pretend that I think it would be. They'd probably need new characters and some of the classes not in FE2 (little things like, y'know, Fighters and Wyvern Riders) but maybe keep the 3-tier class system. They might want to either remove the villager class or give each villager a pre-determined promotion on the first run so new players don't have to worry about something as big as a promotion choice in the first hour of gameplay. I don't think Gaiden needs a new plot but it needs embellishing and improving. It's pretty much broad strokes anyway: Alm becomes a champion fighting off the invading country of Rigel and Celica is trying to find out what happened to Mila. There's a bit of entanglement with dark cults, warlord kings and the like but it really needs developing more than anything else, the basic story is fine and has a couple of neat twists. Like, for instance, you could make a lot more of Dozer's death quote/final words....

I think you can appreciate, though, that the sword is still broken and it's wielder is still probably dead. My point is that if a sword takes the full force of an attack there is a serious risk of it breaking, at which point its user is as good as dead. All the swordsmanship I've learned has told me to deflect, not block, and that's what I'm trying to say here. There are several things I want to dispute here. Firstly, armour wasn't that heavy. Secondly, the sword's main trait as a weapon (to my understanding, anyway) is that it's direct and, quite literally, to-the-point. It's also the lightest and easiest to wield (for a single user) of the weapons in FE. With this in mind, I argue that swords' advantage over axes is that a sword user would be better trained and equipped to deflect the powerful axe blows. Bear in mind that whatever explanation has to stand up for Sword Knight vs. Fighter as well as Myrmidon vs. Fighter. Thirdly: lances, spears, pikes, halberds/poleaxes. You mentioned almost all of these, they might all fall under FE's 'lances' category and they're all different but in FE you only see one regularly and two more occasionally. A lance is large, designed to be used from horseback for your main charge and, when the tip breaks off inside your enemy, you change to another weapon. FE9's Knight Killer and FE10's Horseslayer are these and they're too large and heavy to use in single combat. A pike is exceptionally long, designed as an anti-cavalry weapon to be used by formation infantry: it's far too long to be used by a lone combatant. A halberd is a kind of poleaxe and was fairly popular for its versatility, but was never (to my knowledge) used by single combatants. 'Spear' is a fairly broad term but tends to be used for shorter polearms, occasionally with a blade on the end instead of just a point. The spear is the only one of these I've heard of being used for a single fighter, in fact, I've done some spear training myself. Spears tend to be moderately light but are very hard to use in single combat and are more complicated, multi-faceted weapons. The spear's key point is its reach (as is widely accepted) meaning that any fighter with a shorter reach has to get past the spearman's ideal distance before they can even scratch them but at that point the spearman's nearly dead. A compelling argument for 'lances' having an advantage over swords, if you ask me. Don't forget that this is just an advantage, you can still win when on the wrong side of the weapon triangle. tl;dr version: you're really talking about spears. Spears are light enough for single combat and have a long reach which implies an advantage over swords. For reference, I studied Aikido for 2 years and spent some of that time learning traditional Japanese weapon art with the Katana and Yari (short spear), or at least safer, wooden facsimiles of these weapons. I'm also an expert archer but that's unrelated.

Well, my first thought when I heard that the European bundle was going to be a 3DS XL was "oh, so they decided to target already-3DS-owners with this one?" It kinda makes sense, the bundle is targeted at 'hardcore' fans and these fans are more likely to already own a 3DS and like hell am I buying a second 3DS just because it has Fire Emblem on it. I'm a student and therefore have no money, but it makes more sense to take the opportunity to buy the 'home 3DS', which is basically what it is. Not that I will though, arrows are expensive.

Having thought about this before, I think that a Fire Emblem film could work really well, as long as it wasn't a direct adaptation. I think it'd only really work if they took some Fire Emblem tropes and world elements (like when FE goes to a new world e.g. FE7 to FE8) and wove a new story suitable for telling in ~2 hours. Adapting a game to a movie, you'd either have to tear out vast portions so you could have a reasonable running time or make a movie much longer than 2 hours (after all, games are much longer than 2 hours). Better to try and tell a new story IMO (I mean, look at Prince of Persia).

I'm gonna have to agree with this, I was almost afraid that they'd take the legacy characters out in the English version: it's good that they've got some official recognition. That... I... wow... I'd put it in my sig if I knew how to nest quotes, I haven't laughed so hard since... this morning actually, but that was more of a deranged laugh of frustration.