Slumber

No? Dismounting gives stat debuffs. Pretty much across the board outside of Forrest Knights, who only lose one point of def and 3 movement. In a game where everything caps at 20, Finn losing 1 point of strength, 1 point of skill, 1 point of speed and 2 points of defense is pretty hefty until he caps those stats(At which point, the debuffs stop mattering). But for the early-to-mid game? Even if somebody like Brighton got to keep his axe off his horse, it'd be preferable to use somebody like Halvan or Orsin for indoor maps, since they wouldn't be missing stats they normally have. But more on the movement, it causes mounted units to drag behind when unmounted at the end of the game. Every single mounted unit has 1% movement growth. And while most foot units only have 2-3%, that 2-3% does give a pretty good chance of actually gaining a point or two of movement if you get them to 20/20. Especially with Thracia's RNG. That 1% that mounted units get, however, is even worse than it appears. By the end of the game, your unmounted mounted units will likely still have only 6 movement if you didn't baby any of them with the Dain scroll. While even without the Dain, your normal foot units will probably have at least 7, or even at least 8 movement if their promotion gave them a point of move. TL;DR, mounted units when they dismount get nerfed not just weapon-wise, but also stat-wise. And movement-wise, they fall behind with the armor units, and don't even have as much room to improve in that department as armor knights. It most definitely isn't a "buff", and it wouldn't make them dominant in FE5 if they got to keep their weapon ranks. Case-in-point: Fergus, a unit with solid stats who doesn't lose any weapon rank when dismounting, and is part of the Free/Forrest Knight-line, who suffer the least penalties for dismounting when it comes to stats, is still just a pretty solid unit, but nothing gamebreaking like a normal infantry unit like Orsin.

I think my brain just caved in on itself

Definitely not in the AFC, but I'm sure the Eagles do, just so they can prove that their spot at the top isn't a fluke. Back to that Vikings game, since I'm always happy when they do well, the chemistry of the team continues to impress me. Mostly Thielen. The more and more the line-up changes due to injuries, the more I think Adam Thielen is the heart of the team. Obviously players like Diggs, Cook and Bridgewater(Happy to see him back on the field/bench) are just great natural talents, and Keenum's been another surprise superstar(Seriously, who would have thought a third string would more or less lead a team to 5 straight wins?), Thielen's been consistently getting work done since last season when it was clear that the current Vikings roster was an unpolished gem. He worked well in tandem with Diggs, and he's been a great tool for Keenum to utilize. I don't think the team would be as successful without him. Plus, he's a hometown hero, being one of the few people on the team actually from Minnesota.

Right, but I'm sure using a lance on a horse is a lot more similar to using a lance on foot than using a sword on foot.

I want it back. It's the best attempt at balancing mounted units in the franchise. If it came back, I'd want it done with a moderate stat debuff, but you keep your weapon ranks, more akin to FE3, though not just swordlocked. Am I supposed to believe Finn forgot how to wield a lance and now suddenly knows how to wield a sword because he got off his horse?

This is true, but RD has much, much bigger and longer maps than pretty much anything besides FE4. So even with Awakening's 51 maps, or Fates' 75, nothing will really go over 30 minutes like 3-F, or quite a few other maps from RD can.

If it was 16, it'd be tricky, since 16 is the age of consent in some places in this country(Though I think Alabama is not one of those places). It'd still be super skeevy, but there'd be a gray area. But one of the accusers says she was 14. That's a whole different ball park.

Yo this Vikings/Redskins game is kinda crazy.

I think the better solution wouldn't necessarily to make Ike's group weaker. I actually think it would have made more sense for them to have been stronger, but you play as them less, only showing up at truly major moments, like rescuing the Crimeans or the battle against Daein at the end of part 3. As neat as it was to hunt down Begnion senators, we probably didn't need them to get nearly as many chapters as the DB, especially since they already started as second tiers. Basically have them around just enough to whet the appetites of people who played PoR, but not enough to where they eclipse the Dawn Brigade. This would have given the game more time to let us play as the DB, and there wouldn't be a weird feeling of Ike's Mercenaries feeling weaker than they should have been.

I'm going only off of main game, since the vast majority of people are only going to play through the game once, and "completionist" runs for FE games are insanely hard to determine, since I can almost guarantee those are insanely hard to determine. Those 55 hour completionist times of FE7 sure aren't including getting every support, while who knows why the completionist time for Birthright is a full 20 hours higher than the Conquest and Revelation completionist times, because Birthright sure as hell doesn't magically have 20 hours more content. And going by just main story times, RD is head and shoulders above nearly everything else. At 42 hours and 30 minutes, that's a full 5 and a half hours over FE3 which is in second place(Which I bet includes going through both book 1 and book 2, considering the respective times SD, the NM remake, and how much faster that game moves than the NES SD.), 8 hours longer than the third place SoV, and 9 and a half hours longer than its predecessor. Then it's Awakening, the only other game in the franchise that averages out to over 30 hours, at 11 and a half hours. That's more of a problem of the DB than it is with third tiers. Since they're playing catch-up throughout all of part 3 and 4, aside from maybe 2 or 3 favored units, it feels like you're basically rushing to make them useful. The game, as it's presented, which includes the Merc's inclusion from about the midway point of the game, basically forces a narrative/gameplay reason for third tiers, as I mentioned earlier. Either case where there isn't promotion, but there's focus on the Mercs, wouldn't be very compelling narratively or as far as actual gameplay goes. Yes, they COULD have gone with the route where the DB was the focus, there was still 3 tiers, and then Ike's group shows up as a group of super units in the last act, but that's not what they went with, and it still would have needed third tiers to go along with the fact that RD is like a 45 hour game. Your first solution seems iffy, since the whole idea with Ike and his group is that they're super badasses. They basically shake every country they step in. Having them suddenly be super weak, or at the very least, noticeably weaker than they were in PoR, wouldn't fit the narrative of the game, and it'd be a bit of a let down to anyone who played PoR. Your second solution doesn't make third tiers more fitting, it just makes the DB units more viable. They get the most chapters but they make up a fraction of the cast of the game, the rest of who are basically war-hardened warriors from PoR or even prior to that.

That's not at all why they were in RD. They existed because A) Radiant Dawn was a full 10+ hours longer than pretty much any FE, and to keep the gameplay feeling like it was progressing, characters couldn't just stop at the second tier. They could have if they shifted focus a bit, or if they chopped the game down, but that's clearly not what the developers wanted from RD. They definitely wanted a big, long, epic game. B) From a narrative standpoint, you would either have to reconcile that either Ike's now legendary crew of mercenaries were just as strong as a batch of ragtag orphans and nobodies from Daein fighting for independence, or that they were incapable of getting much stronger throughout the entirety of RD. Either one of these two scenarios isn't compelling. Third tiers only ever exist in FE2/15 outside of this, and that games has a wildly different class structure that isn't really comparable to anything else in the franchise. If you don't like third tiers, cool, but they weren't just thrown into RD for spectacle. It was a huge game, and even with the huge roster, they needed to expand the standard class system for both gameplay and narrative reasons.

If you know what to expect, you'd be hard-pressed to find a SINGLE fight in the series that's a legit challenge(Barring special battles like the battle gauntlets where everything's fixed). As everyone has said, Whitney's a major challenge when you don't prepare for her Miltank. It's beefy, it's fast, and Rollout+Attract can decimate your team, while Milk Drink keeps it topped up. If you don't know these things, you will have a very hard time. But now everybody knows about how notorious Whitney is. Everyone knows about her Rollout Miltank because it's been nearly 20 years.

If I didn't have chronic migraines, I'm willing to bet that politics in this term would be giving me mad headaches. This whole Roy Moore thing is making my head spin. The whole "Well, Jesus' father married a teenage girl." thing. MARY'S WHOLE THING IS THAT JOSEPH DIDN'T HAVE SEX WITH HER. SHE'S THE VIRGIN MARY. HOW DOES A PARTY THAT DOES NOTHING BUT EXPLOIT CHRISTIANS SAY THIS WITH A STRAIGHT FACE? AGH

The Isaach Civil War prior to FE4 that started with Rivough invading Grannvale. I believe that the implication is that this is the Lopto Cult's doing, and kind of the first thing they did to kick off the massive war that devastated Jugdral and allowed them to take control. But we never really get much on it. This seems like it might be too big for a 3-5 minute short, though.

I like FE as mid-fantasy medieval Europe. As long as it's that, the story's taken seriously, and there's more that 5 minutes of thought put into it, I'm happy.

I do agree that Lyn doesn't seem to be nearly as dodge-tanky as she appears on paper.

I feel like with a name like ZeraORA, and an ability called Plasma FISTS, it should have been Electric/Fighting. That design makes it seem even more obvious. But I guess they didn't want two Fighting legendaries in a single gen(Not like that hasn't stopped them before).

I've seen a surprising amount of people saying that magic being all 1 type is for the better, and that it should stay that way. And at that point, bringing back light magic would be for purely aesthetic reasons.

Dark Side is a cakewalk compared to what comes after.

XCOM's kind of a rarity among strategy games in how RNG reliant it is. But you're right, it's a much stricter strategy game than any FE, and you're far more at the mercy of the RNG Gods in XCOM. But a lot of strategy games are a lot less reliant on RNG than even Fire Emblem(Mostly RTS ones, but there are plenty of non-RPG TBS games like Civ that are less RNG), and the ones that are more reliant on RNG happen to be more on the RPG side, too. Generally when I think of getting RNG screwed in games, it's mostly in RPGs.

Lances for Peggies. Peggies aren't strong enough to thrive off of swords. Their(Usually) very high speed offsets the AS loss from lances, though, while getting more of a kick out of their weapons. I like Axes for Wyverns.

Fire Emblem is an RPG first, and a strategy game second. Removing chance removes a LOT of what makes the series appealing to a lot. Also, are you arguing/implying that FEH is more strategic than mainline FE? Because it's really a lot more along the lines of hardcore "Rock, paper, scissors", and it's far more of the meta game(Mostly skills and weapons) determining how well you do. If you have the right composition, you rarely have to worry about failing in FEH. There's no chance that your OP unit won't one-shot its appropriate target. On top of this, part of strategy does involve anticipating and correcting mistakes. There really aren't many mistakes in FEH.

Willkommen. If you've been lurking for almost a year, hopefully you won't be too intimidated to post about stuffs.

It's tough to say, but any of the games that had limited revival. FE1/11 - You get 1 revival through the Aum staff, then it breaks. FE2/15 - You get something like 9 revives, which seems a little overkill(heheh). Mila's Turnwheel was a good way to mitigate resets/deaths, but it should have been more limited than it was. FE3/12 - You get 5 free revivals with the Aum staff, then it breaks. 5 is a lot more reasonable than 1 or 9, so I'd say this has the edge over FE1/11 and 2/15. FE4 - You theoretically have infinite revives, but you'd be hard-pressed to actually utilize the Valkyrie staff more than once or twice due to the steep repair cost. I like Mila's Turnwheel, I like the FE3 Aum, and I like the Valkyrie Staff. My ideal would be a mix of all of them, perhaps, maybe even bringing the Aum down to 2 or 3, and keeping a steep repair cost. Or lower the repair cost of the Valkyrie. Also, Mila should be limited per-battle. Maybe 1 or 2 uses for any given battle, rather than a dozen in between Mila statues. Tough to really pick one.

I can't speak on the differences between the actual translation, but the localization of the Tellius games effectively screwed the difficulties on both games(Though we did get auto-promotions at level "21", which was a Treehouse thing that many people thought was a good idea).