Axie

i think roster size on its own is a meaningless number. we need to also know a) how long the game is, b) how many units we are deploying most of the time, c) the context we are getting these units. to me, binding blade is the closest to the ideal roster - gives us all manner of units throughout the game and most of them can be legitimately useful beyond "my previous similar unit died". for example, in my recent run, i decided to drop saul for cecilia when she joined because he was turning out a bit too shoddy and she at least had a horse, and even with her meager stats she was useful and deployed almost every chapter. she even performed surprisingly well in combat! we get a lot of different approaches to both growth units and prepromotes in it and it welcomes a lot of different play styles. contrast to new mystery, a game i like just as much, but in which after a while the new recruits just don't have any meaningful niche because there's so much repetition, much more than in binding blade (without even accounting for reclassing!), because the chapters go by and recruits base stats do not keep up. the wolfguard join with bases that are barely different from the sable knights, who joined six very important chapters ago and are already "in case you lost someone" kind of dudes. and it's not a game with a lot of supports and talks to give a lot of non-gameplay reasons to use them, either. games with smaller rosters run into the obvious problem of giving you less plan B kind of characters, which a game with random stat growths need, and the games with "you can deploy everyone" philosophy end up having less replayability, even if it's less likely we'll run into a problem of not having enough good units. they might have more room for character development, but the gameplay should be the main concern imo.

yuliya and julia have different names in japanese (ユミナ vs ユリア), which makes this choice by heroes all the more weirder because... they also have julia and yumina was a fine name...

favourite game: binding blade chopped chapter: chapter 14. i feel basic by chopping the desert chapter, but the actual worst chapter in the game is 20x in sacae (closely followed by, as pointed by the post above, the other sacae chapters) and the game already allows me to chop it by going to ilia, so...

oh, i definitely feel like any of them except ike could fall in love at basically first sight and birth a kid, assuming gender swaps for the lord girls of course. GBAFE isn't very shipping-heavy in its tone, but it wouldn't be out of character for any of them i feel. marth, alm/celica and micaiah have canon relationships, but there's not really a personality impediment. chrom even has a whirlwind romance special support with olivia if she is his closest support to S lmao he'd 100% have deirdre happen to him if he were there

the thing is, sigurd dies basically just to keep dierdre in check. the two of them falling in love was the actual biggest hurdle to manfroy's plan in gen 1. if they never meet, it doesn't actually matter whether arvis executes sigurd for treason or allows him to clear his name and have house chalphy as their main minion in grannvale. now, probably sigurd would question the loptyrian turn of it all much more than houses dozel and friege ever did, but it's the sigurd/deirdre connection that makes it a no-brainer. so, in a way no other lord would have the same fate Unless they ended up entangled in the major loptous child business, in which case any of them would have the same fate.

niime. i miss unapologetically OLD characters in this franchise, and she is very funny with an interesting backstory. a gameplay godsend with her A rank staves and actually-good nosferatu, too. i do like some of the usual "cute kid" (lilina, delthea, nino) and "fanservice lol" (sonya, tharja) mages though. also i love katarina and her side plot in NM. i do like micaiah but i am more used to grouping her (and celica, who i also like) with the other protagonists don't really see her as part of the archetype.

berkut taking rinea with him down the path of insanity and soul-offering to duma without her explicit consent in echoes sov. undermined, of course, by rinea still being like "my poor meow meow" to berkut post-mortem as if we were ever supposed to feel bad for him, but still, incredibly messed up.

happy birthday! shame about the 2% crit, and i agree the game design isn't at fault for this. if that's any consolation, which it probably isn't.

technically sword-locked characters are also great in gaiden/echoes, but that's to be expected when axes are not playable and the only characters to wield two different types of attack are promoted alm and priestesses. swordmasters are also not bad in fates since it's a game with actual ranged swords (you can get a kodachi in conquest, right?). speaking of midori, it's not really a wrong belief i have/had because i always knew she is kaze's daughter, but whenever i read her name i immediately think "oh, mozu's daughter", and i don't even know why. i didn't even pair kaze and mozu in my first fates playthrough or anything. i only did it in a later playthrough after i realized i kept thinking of midori as mozu's daughter anyway.

i think kris was competently added to the storyline and that marth is a better character for having kris with him in NM. tears? the supports are mostly boring and pointless though.

since that didn't happen, i actually wouldn't mind if they replaced the replacement characters with thracia people (karin over femina, etc). even if they are gameplay bad compared to the kids, it would add a lot of replayability because people would want to check them out eventually.

this thread could have ended on this stellar post also all these attempts at comparing fire emblem to anime all the time are getting old. it's not the same media, you guys.

you didn't play, so it's only logical you don't know, but this game works way differently from fates and awakening to NOT have replacements, though. you eventually lose all of your characters and need the new ones to function, while the children in fates and awakening are entirely optional. you can miss pairings in gen 1, and you need the replacements if you do. also, how would the children even work in gameplay if you are saying they show up even if the mother is unpaired? how would their bases and growths be calculated? i don't see a genealogy remake removing the replacement dynamic, and i don't think they should. you'd just have to live with never having all the available characters, i suppose. speaking of replacements, i wouldn't mind if they were a bit better. not that better that you'd rather have them over pairing the mother, but some replacements are just so lame. i guess removing pursuit as a skill concept fixes a lot of that, though. DOUBLING FOR EVERYONE.

YESSSSSSSS i wouldn't put gaiden here because it honestly tried to be something for a 1990 NES game but YESSSSSS drag fates writing to FILTH. so happy that birthright brought this realization. it's every bit as bad as conquest and revelation. with that said, i think birthright is being a bit undersold on difficulty here. it seems appropriate to rank it with radiant dawn - a game that, in its hard mode, is harder than birthright when it's not GM chapters - but blazing blade is definitely easier when it's not doing fog of war or kishuna shenaningans for example. maybe +2 and -2 tiers for difficulty would be good if you want to value it more, even if you keep birthright at 0 - it seems 0 and -4 are a bit crowded right now.

kris in second even with a "none" option (which i expected to lead)? VICTORY