Slumber

A good portion of what keeps Leif going after his string of disasters in the early to mid-game is the hope that he can bring Eyvel back. Leif already had a burning bloodlust prior to Eyvel's stoning. So while you can say it's so things wrap up nice and neatly(Things really don't wrap up neatly with Leif even when he liberates Leonster/Manster. Plenty of his allies, like Dorias, are still dead.), it does give Leif some motivation when he really has none in that first chunk of game beyond wanting to rip Raydrik to shreds and free Manster. There's also Mareeta's motivation for joining the war, which is also to bring Eyvel back.

The Little Mermaid

Depends. I'm guessing it'll be all trailers for first party stuff. All the big companies do about 30 minutes of trailers, 30 minutes of gameplay demos(Including third parties), 30 minutes of shit that has nothing to do with games, and 30 minutes of autofellatio. Nintendo will save the gameplay demos and autofellatio for Treehouse.

Each FE game in a vacuum is lower than Lord of the Rings. If you put them all together as one big thing, then you might have an argument, but comparing one world from the FE franchise to Lord of the Rings? No, I'm sorry, but it's just not how it works. The story of Lord of the Rings is a bunch of hobbits, a dwarf, an elf, a normal humans, a wizard, and a half-elf that can summon an army of ghosts all travel across the land to drop a ring that belonged to an all-powerful sorcerer into a volcano. Along the way they meet a bunch of walking trees, fight a troll, fight a tentacle monster, run from a giant fire demon/wizard thing, run from wraiths constantly, kill a giant demon spider, hide from orcs, fight orcs, and two old men fling each other across a room with magic. All while a giant eye watches over everything. And a BUNCH of crazy shit that's too minor to mention compared to walking trees. And don't even get me started on the shit in the Silmarillian. One of the tamer things that happens throughout the books is that Smaug is a thing. Dragons are typically the apex to the crazy shit that happens in Fire Emblem games. In the Hobbit/Lord of the Rings series, Smaug is a minor thing that happens compared to what follows, because it has a much, much higher fantasy setting.

Compared to Lord of the Rings, and other Tolkien-inspired fantasies? Fire Emblem is pretty low.

I'll go with the obvious for me: Homer. His intro is him being a perceptive, laid-back dude, who could obviously see Shanam wasn't Shanan, but pretty much all of his characterization after his intro is him partying and sleeping with a bunch of women. He's largely a Lewyn-lite, so I'd like to see more.

Dragons and magic go back to King Arthur and Beowulf(Probably even further back, I can only think of Greek legends that come before those), over 1000 years ago, written DURING the medieval period. Orcs were a Tolkien invention less than a century ago, and trolls are typically Scandinavian. Not out of the realm of possibility for FE, but they'd have to come in a very Scandinavian-inspired FE. We have Jugdral, but Jugdral doesn't have fantasy monsters outside of dragons. All-in-all, dragons aside, Fire Emblem games are typically more on the low-fantasy side, and the times it strays are usually original creations(IE Laguz). Orcs are generally high-fantasy.

I remember, like, two years ago, Crystal Dynamics was doing surveys to see if people would be excited for a new Gex game. What a weird, weird time we live in.

It's a Bubsy game. Safe answer is on "no".

Same here, and I've been scarred ever since. I had to argue with my friends every time they came over, because they always just wanted to browse the 18+ section on Newgrounds, and I just wanted to watch stupid cartoons. It was a weird period. I eventually stopped hanging out with those friends. Anyway... I remember Newgrounds as basically Ebaumsworld 2.0. Ebaumsworld was kind of like the first organized meme site on the internet(As far as I can remember). Then Newgrounds came along, and people like Oney, Stamper, Neil Cicierega, Egoraptor, Mrweebl, and a bunch of other people started making content there in the early-mid 00s before migrating to YouTube, where a lot of them still do shit. And then there were things like the Numa Numa song, and all of this other shit that went viral that originated on Newgrounds. It's weird to think that I spent so much of my time in middle school on that site. I went back to it like, two years ago to see how it looked, and it looked... exactly the same, and damn it feels like an early-mid 00s website. I don't know how 12-year-old me managed to navigate that site.

Definitely not.

Jesus Christ. I was joking when I said Bubsy 3D deserved a remake/sequel on this site a few months back. I DIDN'T KNOW! I'M SORRY, EVERYBODY!

I was poking fun at Fates. I'm not a huge fan of the Fates cast, but I like them more than I like the Awakening cast, and probably more than some classic FE casts.

I mean, compared to Awakening, where there's a solid 8 chapters that come out of nowhere, don't advance the plot, and don't develop that characters at all? Or Sacred Stones, which more or less also falls guilty to the whole "multiple chapters of just fighting faceless monters", but that takes up a much larger percentage of the game? Even if Echoes has a lot of maps where you're just fighting nameless monsters, they're mostly front loaded and don't take very long. Major events and big plot points still come at a pretty even pace, and there's usually not a long stretch where nothing is happening. Desaix could have been brought up more by Celica, and he could have been mentioned more, but his arc wasn't unimportant by any means. It's the arc that kickstarts Alm's whole side of the story, and it's the main driving point of liberating Zofia. So maybe I shouldn't have said "well-paced", but "well-paced for Fire Emblem".

Yes, that would have been much better. But IS hasn't been on their A-game with story telling recently. Echoes managed to tell a coherent, well-paced story, but that was mostly handled by basically the back-up team at IS. Plus, they already knew how the story had to be paced. I don't even think you'd need to ignore Valm as an entire continent on its own to achieve this.

That would be the one thing that makes axes practical for villagers.

An axe requires a bit of training to use, too. As a weapon, it's weird, since as much as we see axes in fantasy, they really weren't super prevalent as weapons, especially among well-equipped, well-funded armies compared to swords, spears, bows and even maces. But, there's actually a good deal of technique in properly swinging an axe, and you'll figure this out very quickly when you try to chop anything down, and I think it's a part of firefighter training. You have to make sure you're swinging with enough force to do damage, and not enough where you'll be throwing your own footing off or damaging your shoulder, and you need to make sure you're holding the axe right, making sure the blade is lined up with what you want to hit, to ensure you don't get stuck. You can get an axe stuck in plywood if you don't swing right. With spears, outside of crazy wushu shit where there are a dozen twirls in between each actual attack attempt, they are very fairly forward. Not that they lack proper technique or anything, but it's probably the easiest of the 3 to kill with without any practice, and the one that would keep you most out of harm's way. If 3 random peasants picked up a sword, an axe, and a spear, and fought to the death, my money would be on the one with the spear. And obviously bows. Bows probably have a higher proficiency ceiling than swords.

It could lead to some comedy hijinks if there was an Avatar in this game, and Marth and company called you Kris, Chrom and co. you called you Robin, and the gutter trash called you Corrin, and all of them kept getting confused.

I still don't know why so many people like Walhart. I get Gangrel. He's the Joker. People like that kind of character. But Walhart? I get liking the idea behind him, basically a hardcore Darwinist trying to cull the human race to have a better chance at surviving against the upcoming calamities. It's a neat idea that's been done before, and can be pretty compelling when executed well. But that's really ALL there is to him. He doesn't really have much of a character, he's a pretty standard "I'm a powerful emperor" type character, and the Valm empire in general is poorly explored and comes out of nowhere. And correct me if I'm wrong, it's never really explained or questioned why Walhart knows something big's about to happen. You deal with him and then whoop, gotta deal with Grima. And, while Gangrel gets a full backstory when you can recruit and support with him that reveals that he has a sympathetic backstory that actually kind of justifies why he's so angry and wants to see Ylisse burn, Walhart doesn't. Walhart is just more "I'M A CONQUEROR" over and over.

The whole toxic atmosphere thing just really throws me off, since Nils acts like it's common knowledge, and that Ninian was in grave danger staying with Eliwood. And if Eliwood and Ninian is more or less the "canon" pairing(I don't mean to rustle any feathers, but that's generally what's pushed), she dies in less than 20 years after making the choice to stay. This, to me, always suggested that dragons were not native to Elibe, and that sometime waaaay before the Scouring, made it to Elibe through the Dragon's Gate. Then after generations OF the Scouring, left Elibe through the Dragon's Gate, and potentially during the time since the Scouring, dragons lost their ability to survive in Elibe's atmosphere. If it's something else, then fine, but yeah. Plus, the way the dragons work in clans like in Archanea(Including Ice and Fire clans). The Manketes in FE8 aren't clan-based, and the Tellius dragons are sorted by color. It just seems weird to me.

Did the dragons in FE7 originate in Elibe, though? Ninian ends up dying an early death because the atmosphere in Elibe is toxic to dragons. And they never really explain this, if it's an effect of the Scouring, or if it's just something that's always been this way. And it's not a plot point at all in FE6, so...

Dragons are treated as Gods in a lot of ways. Especially in the Archanea-verse. For Medeus and Loptyr, they're both Earth dragons, which were the only dragon clan that was said to rival the Divine dragons(Heaven and Earth, basically. Big concepts in Eastern religions). Earth dragons were also the only clan established to have hated humans and waged war against all of the other dragon clans, with Medeus being the exception, while Loptyr was a major instigator and basically kept the war going on by himself after the other Earth dragons were sealed away. So with Duma and Mila succumbing to degredation(Especially Duma), you now also have Divine dragons going nuts. Then you find out that an alchemist was experimenting on dead dragons, and giving them Divine dragon blood, giving us Grima. And then there's the Elibe games. FE6 was meant to be a throwback to Marth's story, so it ends with a big spooky dragon fight. FE7, then, needed to explain why exactly dragons were actually in Elibe, and you can likely come to the conclusion the dragons from Archanea made contact there(They could be from somewhere else, but the Archanea world is the only we know of that fits pretty well with the dragons that made it to Elibe). And then there's Fates, which just tried to have its fingers in too many pots, and we get Anankos, who is never properly explained, but can move from Fateslandia to Archanea world. So really only in games where dragons aren't the high-power do we deviate from the "Dragons are radical" explanation for end bosses. And this pretty much just amounts to FE8-10, which have actual Gods and demons, and aren't connected to the Archanea world in any ways. FE8-10 have dragons, but they're different from the Archanea dragons. FE5 also doesn't have dragons, but a dragon drives the plot indirectly, and the end boss of that game is a dragon worshipper.

To be fair, 776 has like, 4 or 5 Ests(Homer, Linoan, Sara, Miranda, Sleuf. They all are recruited more than halfway through the game and start low leveled, but have very high growths). However, only Linoan is forced to join, so yeah. Thracia is hard enough on its own, but it probably has the biggest optional-to-forced recruitment ratio in the franchise. And a few of the units who are forced recruits in the first chunk of the game become optional recruits later in the game, so it's extra screwy.

Maybe they intended the "southern continent" to be what comes after the Archanea games, but then changed their ideas and Jugdral turned out to be something way different than they originally intended. That's the only thing I could think of, that the "southern continent" doesn't really exist anymore, so they just didn't include its mention in the remake.

We're told this(We never learn how Grima kills Naga in the future timeline), but it's never shown, and it never makes any sense that this is stated. From what Grima did, and what Anankos did, there's a CHASM between them in terms of abilities. Anankos is basically portrayed as being nigh-omnipotent, while Grima just kind of does what he can, which is a lot more limited than what we see of Anankos.