Axie

i don't play the higher difficulties where this would apply but sounds like frederick is the best jagen in terms of "you absolutely need his help to get your other units off the ground in the beginning". in absolute terms of course seth is the best because you can solo SS with him but you can also not touch seth once and still be absolutely fine even in HM. SS is just not very hard lol. my experience with older FEs is getting increasingly lost to the sands of the time as the remakes hold a bigger grip in my memory but surely original fe1/book 1 jagen still holds up as the worst? at least fe11 jagen can reclass or whatever and anyone else would have some sort of more modern utility.

this is where the actual word "objectification" comes in. lyn was obviously designed to be good looking and appeal to straight male fans, but it's also not intrusive to the storyline nor entirely defines her character. i am fine with it. meanwhile, camilla's introduction in fates birthright literally starts with a close-up of her breasts before we see her face. that's what's camilla is supposed to be to us. sex object first, nohrian royal who should matter second.

yes, exactly! both camilla and hinoka are on paper second in line in their kingdoms, and hinoka is far and away the least developed and memorable of all ten royals in fates. would it have killed them to give her the takumi treatment and then have the younger brother be something else? girl!takumi would do numbers in the fandom, so it's not about how the fans would take it, either. the writers just aren't quite there with giving spotlight to wonen. camilla got some characterization and a manner of explanation as to why leo has the spotlight over her, but also her entire character is a fetishistic catastrophe, so.

the inherent sexism of how female characters are still written in fire emblem needs little further look than fates and how camilla/hinoka were portrayed relative to their younger brothers leo/takumi in the storyline. gender is absolutely put above age in their characterization as families.

as opposed to robin, corrin and byleth? lol kris has downright tame characterisation in comparison and a bigger deal is made mostly because it's a remake and we know exactly how things were without them and whose lines they are stealing, but exactly the fact they are ultimately disposable makes them much more palatable to me. after kris, avatars have been getting progressively worse. i shudder to think what will come post-byleth.

well, i haven't been on the board in a while and camilla was top 10 overall in CYL. it's not exactly a popular opinion either lol. tharja being disliked in awakening was not much more than a vocal minority either. also i have grown to be fine with avatars in some gameplay reasons, but the dating sim part has got to go, because it ruins the writing of supports. robin was actually the least terrible one. all the corrin ones twisting the backstory like a pretzel to justify him marrying a hoshidan royal without it being incest are the woooooorst. byleth being a progessor automatically makes everything kind of creepy, god magic or no god magic. don't date your teachers, you guys. if you must have an avatar, go back to FE6-12 supports. i reiterate kris was a perfectly serviceable avatar.

not sure how unpopular it is but camilla suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks. fanservice for fanservice, i really liked tharja in awakening and i thought she was more nuanced and engaging than people give it credit for, even if she ended up popular just because of the fanservice, but camilla is just boringly written on top of her painfully silly fanservicey design. even that was done better by tharja tbh. worst character in fates for me and one of the worst in the whole franchise.

if revelations absolutely had to happen (for why?), it could still be possible to redeem the nohrians there while... not trying that in BOTH birthright and conquest. don't even get me started on the ice tribe chapter in birthright. not that its story is even good in conquest, but good lord. i think that's exactly when things go from "mostly fine, if unimaginative" to "why are you like this???" for good in birthright.

awakening is the ultimate chill FE experience. it CAN be very challenging, of course, but you can also make it piss easy and just enjoy the funny characters and broken mechanics and fundamentally weird as fuck storyline. lots of fun.

i agree that the storyline of fates falls short almost entirely on attempting to make nohr sympathetic because it mostly doesn't make sense. garon actually works as a villain. fates would have just worked better if conquest was like "what if you just were the villain this time?" and birthright didn't attempt to redeem anyone from nohr ever. (and revelation didn't exist?)

WOLT ALWAYS AND FOREVER kind of love that just my vote might carry him to the next round for now

actually stop pretending the skill/dexterity stat as it stands is worth the same the other stats are; either greatly reduce weapon accuracy and greatly increase the impact of skill in the accuracy formula OR get rid of the stat. or even come up with something else for skill! i like, for example, having excess accuracy add to the critical hit rate, specially if we reduce how much damage a critical hit deals, which should happen regardless. 1RN for accuracy would also validate skill a bit more, and that also won't happen again. i am shocked fates kind of sort of allegedly did it to begin with. (i am fine with luck being a minor stat though. like, it's NAMED luck. you aren't supposed to count on luck lol. i wouldn't mind if it was buffed though, like if it had a very minor effect on the attack and defense formulas.)

i think it would be better simply if it could still proc even if you already are at 1 HP? if you get a, um, miracle of it proccing twice in a row then good for you 100% once per map is fine too - it could be more like (1 + luck/12) times per map rounded down to reward having high luck

i think the one class i have come up with that i think hasn't really happened even in 3H's method of "everyone can do anything a little bit it's fine" (CMIIW?) is my version of the ranger class - using bows and magic worldbuilding and flavour wise, it's a promoted class achieved by being in deep touch with yourself and the world around you, the nature and the bigger forces, all that jazz. if nomadic troopers weren't boring, pretty much. gameplay wise, i always thought it would be the most interesting concept to have a bow/magic class. it is rare the game that can actually make a bow/second weapon class work. you don't have compatible player phase+enemy phase options, unless it's a bow/lance or bow/axe class and it's a game where javelins and hand axes rule, then you have almost no incentive to use bows ever, specially if you didn't promote from bows. (no wonder unpromoted archers always got swords for a long time!) with magic you get an option that will grant you a good enemy phase (1-2 range, will even deal better damage than your bow on some enemies), but you have to be smart with your player phase about it. if it's a game where bows matter for the player, it might even benefit an unpromoted mage to go ranger (the mount is also appealing of course). in my mind this is a game where the trinity of game is back and fully integrated with the weapon triangle as fates taught us it's possible, so the ranger could pick one of anima/light/dark upon promotion (or inherit from its unpromoted mage class if the branch is there, or if this is a game with personal promotion options like jugdral), though of course the class still works in a single magic school game as well. stat-wise i am not that worried about though i always thought speed should be their showcase stat rather than skill.

more often than not, not flying and not being weak to bows is still worse than flying and being weak to bows. and for horse mounts, if you lose your mount and also stats there is literally no benefit to dismounting and you'd only do it if the game forced you ala T776. (i am trying to wean myself off numbering games since nobody does it anymore now. thank god T776 has that name) rescue was iconic - i am replaying BinBla [yes i said that] right now and shanna delivers from her veey first turn in chapter 2 - but that only makes mounts even more useful to the detriment of footies. their work rescuing is irreplaceable, the unit being rescued can be anyone and it basically never is a knight.

if anything, dismounting should be a net stat increase. a mount is a benefit; you should gain something if you don't have it. not to sound like a swordgirl fan in a tier list thread in 2011 but fire emblem still hasn't quite figured out that higher movement will probably be worth whatever downsides they give to the classes, specially if there is also flight. they could stand to nerf them in various ways instead of just making them better. these are pre-3H concerns, but the only unpromoted class with more than one weapon is mounted? the highest defense class other than the useless armor knights flies? they gave the gamebreaking galeforce in awakening to the (female only but still) mixed flier i was going to use anyway? movement alone makes fliers and mounts useful even if you stack the rest of the mechanics against them. i think, for starters, their double attack threshold should be higher than for footies. if footies need 4 AS more, mounts should need 5 more. (i don't think this is all that unpopular lol but i got carried away)

selena could have been really good in delivering the contrast of "grado was a great country" and "grado is evil now", and they just needed to give her more time. the reason doesn't even need to be that different, just more examples of grado goodness would work. eldigan is one of the better written parts of fe4 imo. he is the sympathetic backstory lol. he hesitates, he goes back and forth a bit, he ultimately is executed, he sets up things for gen 2. he doesn't really need a sympathetic backstory of his own, not more than "sigurd and i go way back #bffs" anyway. galle was probably meant to change his mind and live, and it's apparent in the fact he stops attacking you if melady and zeiss talk to him in chapter 21 (even though the conversations have no mind-changing content), but then story-dies if you let him live regardless (or just isn't mentioned anymore? which is the same for this purpose). they removed his hesitation, which left us with not much. at least he is good looking!

i hate committing gameplay to some remnant of realism in a game that isn't realistic. it's why we were stuck with constitution/weight for 4 games in a row. if it fits the gameplay design, a dorcas can have lyn stats and it's fine, though it is easier to just design characters around their stats i guess. that's more of an old school worry, however.

who's even talking about preventing resetting by force? the point is simple: kaga didn't want people to worry about deaths so much, but the very design of it (likeable characters) makes us worry far more than he intended us to. (and therefore it makes the games harder than intended! kaga indeed didn't intend to punish people! why are we talking about preventing resets? we don't need to trip over other people's words just to defend kaga)

oh character gameplay changes that are not a product of its time: - sophia does make sense as a unpromoted level 1 join, but then she needs to be an actual est-type character. there needs to be some sort of upside to her and her nightmare start. give her some absurd awakening-esque growths or something. - some other underleveled joins should just not be underleveled or have bad bases. why are gwendolyn and lilina level 1 with bad bases? why are so many prepromotes lame? i assume growths would increase for everyone by the tune of 60% total per character (fe15 did more but fe2's growths were dumb low lol), but bad bases make that moot, and fe15 kept bases mostly the same. a fe6 remake can't do that. - niime and yoder don't need to be level 18/20. the bases are fine but like let the elders level up a bit too lol. maybe karel too but he has his whole weird concept of one single big level up. - any base weapon rank for a promoted class being E (except for staves) is stupid. not a fe6 specific complaint, but it's worse here since it's a game without constant reclassing or grinding. make them Ds so they are worth using. ain't nobody got time to be stuck with irons or a stupid fire tome. - supports can't be as slow as they are in this game. i'd rather have a fe9 system since the roster is so big. i like how support bonuses worked in gba though.

yes, that's why i said he wasn't the smartest lol. his intentions are entirely at odds with how it was executed, and the series benefitted in popularity when IS acknowledged it (a gazillion years later). and yeah, i don't count DLC as actual characters since awakening, so even without accounting for the fact you never get all of them, it's still closer to 30 than to 40 in fe16

total party wipe as the only way to game over in casual mode sounds a bit excessive and too much coddling, but whatever. i'm not playing it anyway. just keep classic mode in every future game and you can make casual mode a permanent fe7 lyn normal mode for all i care. let people have their fun, as i have mine. my fun is in fear and loathing as i reset for a 15th time. 😌

it would be so funny if they skipped jugdral entirely to release binding blade again. knife in the front for all the old school fans. i'd be here for it, because they are a bit too faithful in their remakes and if there's a game that actually deserves to change almost beyond recognition in a remake, it's fe4. so many mechanics that we don't need to see again. also roy ownage.

yes, exactly. their personalities and backgrounds add emotional weight if they die, which is why it doesn't work for kaga to say "you are meant to let some of them die, that's why we keep throwing new people at you lol". you just made me like them, you silly. i'm not just gonna lose them like this. i will reset and you can't stop me, sir. and once we start doing it for a few people, it becomes a habit to do it every time, because when anyone dies, we feel like a failure. kaga didn't really think this through, ended up with the absolute opposite outcome of what he intended, and that's the reason we have casual mode now, and probably the smaller rosters have something to do with that (and marriage) too. i think fe16 has like ~30 playable characters total? i miss huge rosters even if i never used like half of them ever.

i have never touched casual mode because i am a good old masochist like the rest of us, but as i understand it, the lord dying is still a game over, no? people just don't like permanent death (and i mean, me included - i always reset when someone dies even if it's someone i don't ever plan on using lol). kaga wasn't the absolute smartest when he came up with the concept of "look at these characters with their own faces, backgrounds and personalities... if some of them die it's fine you are not supposed to feel anything about it ignore their sad death quote LALALA"