Slumber

Yeah, he's pretty unambiguous.

Stylized 3D, whether it be cel-shading or something similar. Regular 3D would be fine, too. PoR and RD don't look bad by any means, outside of the map sprites being a bit low poly.

I did that for most maps where it was just a game of keep-away. At least on Alm's side. Celica was SOL and had to trek through that shit herself.

The maps are still the weakest part of the game. They're definitely a lot more tolerable now that the game isn't as slow as Gaiden was, but there's still a massive reliance on constant choke points, and in the last few acts, choke points that deliberately exist to keep to from reaching Cantors as a first priority. The sheer randomness of Cantors just turns these maps into wars of attrition that you can't really handle in completely logical or planned-out ways, which isn't great for a strategy game. A map like that would be fine here and there, but that's every single map with a Cantor, which is like, every other map in the late game. And the maps that don't rely on choke points have awful terrain, tons of unused and unnecessary space, are visually uninteresting, or have baffling enemy placement. There are a few good maps in there. I do enjoy the Delthea/Sluice map, even though it is just another choke point map that's also a spiral full of mages and bow units so they can take pot-shots at you as you wind inwards towards the boss.

While I won't say this game completely redeems the franchise after Awakening and Fates, I will say this it has washed away a lot of the doubt I had that IS could capture the FE magic that did make me fall in love with the franchise. It makes me a lot more excited for FE: Switch than I was previously. A lot of the modern bells and whistles that come with modern game design has made the Gaiden-ness of this game a lot easier to swallow. Random map encounters are less of a drag when I can just hit the "charge" tactic, hold the L button, and mash start. These unnecessary encounters that could take upwards of 10 minutes in the old game end up taking only 1 or 2. The writing(For both the characters and the plot) are consistently solid throughout the whole game, and it doesn't have the last arc fatigue that every FE since RD has had. Dungeons are even fun to run around in and explore, and it actually made the idea of a SS remake seem appealing to me, since the idea of running around the Valni Tower or Lagdou Ruins would make those games segments a lot more bearable. I would be totally fine if FES had dungeons like this and expanded. All around a very positive experience with the game. I'm in the post-game, and got to near the end of the dungeon before Alm took some Dragon Breath to the face and I got a game over, which pissed me off. But yeah, game's like a 9/10 for me. It's got a lot of fundamental issues that are just inherent to Gaiden, but they're really mitigated and easy to accept. Only occasionally do I stop and go "Right, this is a Gaiden remake. Of course this aspect sucks." Weird how this year's been. Resident Evil 7, SoV and Breath of the Wild have rekindled my love for three of my favorite franchises, after years and games of disappointment. I now realize I can get excited for new projects in these series again. Mass Effect: Andromeda, however, makes me never want to see Mass Effect ever again, after giving BioWare/EA benefit of the doubt and consistently enjoying the original ME trilogy... Aside from the last 30 minutes.

Shadows of Valentia actually does this. Obviously, a carry-over from Gaiden, but yeah. There are resurrection shrines. You can bring 9 units back from the dead in a playthrough, which really should be more than enough. It makes me wonder, though. FE1 and 3 had the Aum staff, which could bring back 1 unit, FE2 has resurrection shrines, which could bring back 3 units at a time, and FE4 had the Valkyrie staff, which could possibly(Not really practical, though) resurrect everyone. Makes me wonder why after 4 games in a row, IS hasn't put in any way to resurrect dead units in any other games outside of remakes. Seems like it'd be a no brainer for the babbs who want to play classic, but don't want to reset after deaths. It'd be helpful in bridging the gap between Classic and Casual.

I didn't realize I could even recruit them until after I had gotten Est, so I was worried I missed them, too.

Go to Zofia Harbor.

A lot of supports won't progress until late in the game. Like Clair and Gray's final support won't happen until I believe chapter 5. If units suddenly stop gaining support points, then it's likely because you've hit the max support level they can have at that point in the game.

It's probably very likely that Walhart is Alm's descendant. Outside of his resemblance to Rudolf, his class is "Conqueror", which is what Alm's Over Class is.

Uh, no. The "Atlas is bad, is going to be bad, and will be on the bench" started prior to the game coming out, and mostly revolved around the fact that his best option was Mercenary in Celica's route, where there are already potentially 4 Mercenaries. Nobody was complaining about having to do one optional battle and backtrack a few spaces to promote him to Merc. I know because I was part of the "You're probably not going to get much use out of Atlas regardless of what you do with him" crowd.

Grinding isn't really necessary, even. Atlas is ready to promote when you get him, and changing him to a Mercenary fixes his biggest problems. From the get-go he's a pretty competent combat unit who lags behind a bit, but not nearly as much as some units later in the game. Unless you're doing the strictest story run, getting Atlas to a Mila Shrine is really all you need to do ASAP to get him going.

Is that Jon Arbuckle's face on Effie?

It really didn;t take long at all to get Atlas to Myrmidon. I think it only took about 10 minutes of optional battles to get him up to speed, which is REALLY light for "Grinding".

The people saying he's the worst Merc are overrating Speed, and underrating Attack. Jesse, Kamui and Saber are all gonna have problems hurting stuff later in the game. Their base Attack stats aren't great, and they all have lower Atk growth than Atlas. Meanwhile, Atlas won't have to worry about needing the promotion gains in Atk until Dreadfighter, and if Atlas hasn't gotten at least 1 point of Atk in the 20 levels between going from Villager to Dreadfighter, then I'm gonna say you got royally screwed. The Spd and Skl gains he gets from promotions keep him at least competitive in those areas. He's not going to have trouble doubling anything that also isn't a Dreadfighter. I expected him to be trash, but he ended up being probably my strongest unit. The only one who gave him a run for his money was Gray, AKA the other Merc with high Atk and low Spd/Skl.

More or less what I did. He caught up pretty quickly to everyone else.

My Atlas quickly outshone all of my other Celica route Mercs. When I started leveling Jesse, Saber and Kamui up to Myrms, and they all had speed in the upper teens, but all were getting Atk buffs from promotions, I realized that my Merc Atlas with like, 23 Atk would be running wild on them once he caught up in levels. Wasn't really expecting it. They're all Dreadfighters now, and Atlas has like, 30 Atk, and speed/skill that's competitive with the others.

Merc/Fighter Kris is the best Kris.

August says Leif needs help, and that's a big part of Leif's arc, but Leif already gets a shit ton of support, and a good portion of the early game development is the world shitting on Leif. Just as he gets his liberation force off the ground, he gets captured by his grandfather's friend, who turns out to be the person who suggested that Trabant murder Quan and Ethlin, and take Altenna for her ability to use the Gae Bolg. Then, his mother figure gets turned to stone before his very eyes, and he spends several chapters on the run from Manster, Thracia and/or the Lopto Sect, which all leads up to Dorias (The OTHER tactician Leif has that people always forget about) sacrificing himself. It isn't until about a third of the way through the game where Leif gets his footing and starts developing more into the leader he eventually becomes, and this comes from several places that existed independently from Leif, like allies from within Thracia, Lopto defectors, and Manster defectors. As weird as it is now that I think about it, people who Leif has known for his entire life have very little impact on his growth. So at this point, what place would there be for an Avatar in FE5? The only thing that makes any sense, considering this, would be for them to take August's place, which more or less brings us right back to Kris territory. And the smaller scale is precisely why an Avatar wouldn't work. Like. The whole point of the game is Leif becoming the man his father wanted to be. Quan wanted to unite the Thracian peninsula and thrive in peace. Leif's accomplishments in liberating Manster, his father's kingdom, are intrinsically tied to his character. Everything an Avatar could do to take away from his accomplishments would be just as bad, or even worse, than what Kris did in FE12. The things Kris did in FE12 weren't usually personally tied to the characters he took from. You can say he mostly stole the spotlight for most of it. There's nothing you could do like that in FE5 that wouldn't be directly taking away from Leif's growth. Unless you simply wanted the Avatar to take the credit for every victory Leif has over bandits, but at that point, why would you even want a self-insert character if they were just the designated bandit-squasher? Plus, on the meta-level, the events of FE5 lead straight into FE4. Would it not be super weird for Leif to have this super trusted confidant battle-buddy who helped him liberate his country, but then doesn't get represented at all in FE4 when Leif shows up in chapter 7? I mean, that does work to some degree, but it goes back to the whole Robin kind of deal, where your self-insert is a great tactician who is solely responsible and constantly praised for the victories of the main protagonists? And how does this work across gen 1 and gen 2? Is the gen 2 self-insert child ALSO a great strategist who does everything and gets constant praise for all of these brilliant strategies? Plus, Oifey's already a thing and people like him. Don't you think it'd make more sense, be more loyal to the source material, and give the story more integrity if, you... I dunno... expanded his character instead and actually gave him more lines that made him seem like more of a tactician? Instead of introducing a new character that takes away from Oifey's role and invalidates any reason for Oifey to be part of gen 1? I don't see how an Avatar wouldn't be directly taking away from Oifey and his importance to the game, especially in gen 2. A large part of gen 1 is also how Sigurd's impulsive actions actually had dire consequences. It's the one case in the series where a lord's impulsiveness and desire to help his friends actually ends up getting him and most of his friends killed. Sigurd isn't supposed to be a tactician, and Oifey's a young squire who really can only offer suggestions. You'd lose this if the game somehow spun this into an Avatar's responsibility. Instead, it'd now be "Good job player, your Avatar just got Sigurd burnt to a crisp. All of these orphans are on your hands.". Again, why wouldn't you rather just have the roles of Oifey and Shanan expanded, rather than add in another person responsible for making sure Seliph doesn't fuck it all up? Plus, Oifey and Shanan already have a third amigo: Levin. Seliph doesn't need a FOURTH advisor/mentor/tactician. I actually think it's because pairing already exists that might make FE4 Avatar-free. If you look at reviews for SoV, most reviewers seem to begrudge that the game doesn't have pairing and children. I haven't seen one cause a stink about not being able to self-insert. FE4 already having children and pairing probably gives it more room to not include OTHER mechanics that people think Awakening added to the franchise.

The point wasn't necessarily "Oh, it's just a side chapter, you can skip it and not think about it." It's more of a "It's a side chapter, and side chapters are occasionally weird one-offs." thing I added in. It's sloppy in the case of Parne's chapter, since it's a joke chapter in an otherwise completely straight and serious game. But again, I still don't know how the chapter essentially building up to a punchline means that Perne's Robin Hood scthick is an act and he's just as bad as Lifis.

Dastard's been all over the place prior to FE:A. That word was all over Final Fantasy 4/6, and any kid who grew up between the 70s and 90s(Via Cartoon Network) certainly knows about Dick Dastardly from Wacky Races.

No. Awakening and Fates don't have bad writing because the stakes are too high, they have bad writing because the writing's just bad and the pacing is awful. You can make the argument that Radiant Dawn's writing goes to shit once the stakes get raised, but that's mostly because the moment you learn that you're in the middle of a battle between gods is around the same time you learn about the Blood Pact nonsense, which is arguably what really causes RD's quality of writing to dip(That or the constant Ike fanservice. Depends on who you talk to.) Inversely, there's Sacred Stones, where once you scrape away a lot of the secondary plotlines, is ultimately about two siblings trying to save their friend. A lot of people actually do like this story, and it's certainly a bit lower stakes/smaller scope than other stories, but SS also has some of the weakest world building and the secondary stories aren't that good(Outside of maybe Orson). This just makes the Magvel story outside of the Ephraim/Eirika/Lyon story really lame. Point is, I don't really think there's a correlation between scope/stakes and quality of writing.

You obviously have never been to SoCal. There are skateboarding samurai everywhere.

He said it in the post. IS shit in his cereal(FE12).

Yeah, now that FE1-3 have been remade, the era of "Super low FE growth rates" is past. Character growth from FE3 onward feels a lot quicker and more satisfying than FE1 and 2. They probably won't have to make growth rates in future games super different from the originals. The only one that might change would probably be Thracia, since that game does have pretty modest growths, because everything capped at 20. I imagine they'll get rid of the "Every unit has 20 caps in every stat, even unpromoted" deal, so they'll have to adjust growth rates to fit whatever they change the stat caps to.