Slumber

Did anybody play the Kingdom Under Fire games on the OG Xbox? I want that. I want a FE-version of that. For anybody who doesn't know, it was basically a mishmash of a bunch of genres. On a surface level, it looked like a medieval-fantasy RTS with heavy RPG elements. You could upgrade, level up, and equip your armies with a ton of gear and options, and like any good RTS, every unit type had their uses and were effective against certain unit types(IE Archers good against flying units). When you got into the actual gameplay, it turned into basically a Musou/action game, where you take direct control of the hero you chose to lead these armies and wreck havoc on the opposing army's generics, until you ran across the general/leader, where it'd turn into a much more traditional action game. Now that I think about it, with FEW coming out, it seems like a natural route for the series to go, if it were to ever try another action-type game again.

Being a massive FF fanboy when I was a wee-lad back in 2002, I jumped at the first opportunity I could to get portable FF. At the time, that was FFTA(Not counting Mystic Quest). FFTA came with a pamphlet in the back that had advertisements for all of these GBA RPGs/Action Adventure games. ALttP, Sword of Mana, and also 420 Blaze It Sword. This piqued my interest, due to me loving all of those games that kept appearing in that pamphlet, and Marth+Roy in SSB, who were complete enigmas. I pretty much got FE7 as soon as I saw it at Target. It was pretty much love at first sight for me. I even went around the Twin Cities trying to find a GameStop/EB Games(Back when EB and GameStop were separate companies) that carried the strategy guide shortly after, which I now have a story of my dad jumping out of the truck and nearly pulling a guy out of his car for nearly hitting me in the parking lot. Also, as I found out much later, I actually had a copy of the original FE1 when a family member picked up a Famicom at a flea market in the late 90s. But even after loving the series for 14 years, I struggle to play FE1 with an English patch, so 12 year old me, fresh young face to the FE franchise, didn't really want anything to do with the Japanese version.

Psh, nobody dies in Awakening. At least nobody outside of the DLC.

I disagree completely. The weird mesh body suit over underwear+Cape looks AWFUL. For both sexes. The bulky, tattered robes of classical Dark Mages/Shamans looks 100x better, and again, make way more sense now that Awakening/Fates decided that Dark Mages should have high physical defense for whatever reason. It especially makes little sense in Awakening/Fates where Dark Mages continue the trend of being seclusive/reclusive people. Tharja/Rhajat has a general phobia/distaste of people, but hey, she's got rocking tits, so who gives a shit about designing an outfit she'd actually wear? Henry might actually wear something like that, but there's no contextual reason given for why he actually is. It's just "Oh, this guy with his underwear visible wants to join... uh... alright." Ludonarrative dissonance is a thing, and it can seriously get in the way of peoples' ability to suspend their disbelief, which is never a good thing for fictional worlds. Fates/Awakening(Especially Awakening) seem to go out of the way to make you wonder why anyone is wearing what they wear. I don't think it'd be smart to continue this.

MMO-combat and collection/fetch quests quests(Looking at you, Xenoblade and Dragon Age Inquisition).

FE4 isn't grimdark Game of Thrones or anything, but it's far darker than anything Nintendo's ever brought to the west.

It's actually Eisenhower.

As much as I love Thracia, I do think it's a game that could benefit from a remake with refinements quite a lot to deal with a lot of these issues. But I think it has one of the most solid bases of the whole series. Some of the best map design and map utilization, varied objectives(Escape maps come hard and fast, but it's the only game in the franchise that I know of that layers up objectives that effectively have you basically accomplishing two or more objectives at once), a great roster of characters that would be nice to get some expanded characterization, and Leif's story is one of the most compelling lord stories(If not THE most) in the franchise. In a lot of ways, it feels like the first "modern" FE, and the things it does well, it does really, really well. I feel like the pitfalls that SD and SoV fall into wouldn't be as big of an issue with Thracia. And so long as they don't add an avatar, it likely wouldn't have the pitfalls of NM. IS mainly tweaks gameplay balance in their remakes, and I think FE5 is the one where everything else stands on as it is. (Also, I agree, fuck 24x)

Yeah, well go fuc- Wait, love? Oh. Yeah, you're pretty cool, too.

I don't know. I've only ever been a part of two FE communities. The first one was the general FE board on IGN all those years back. Though at the time, it was really only FE7-10 that the community really knew/cared about. For the most part, we mostly only mocked a handful of users who were trolls(Who happened to like SS a bunch), so this turned into a circle of users there(Myself included) constantly taking shots at SS. I wouldn't say we were toxic, but we had some asshole-y tendencies due to constant fuckery by trolls(Back in my day, it was called flamebait). We were even getting a fangame going that fell apart, and we were pretty open to everybody being a part of it. Then I pretty much distanced myself from the FE community at large. In between the release of Shadow Dragon and the announcement of Shadows of Valentia/FE: Switch, I was pretty much completely dark on the fandom. Apparently this was when the FE community started being considered "toxic". Then, joining here, everything seems pretty fine. Some debates get a little heated, but really nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently the GameFAQs and Reddit communities suck, but, I mean... what do you expect?

I play Fire Emblem because I like the strategy elements. Fire Emblem is at its strongest, strategically, in Thracia. Yeah, it's brutally difficult, but to anybody who hasn't played it, I'm guessing most people assume it's because enemies are just ridiculously broken, since the standard for "hard" FE nowadays is Lunatic Mode, where enemies just have insane stats and skills. But this isn't how it is. Sure, there are tough enemies, and by about the halfway point you'll start facing some truly beefy bosses, but Thracia's difficult because it is the most... "experimental" in terms of messing with your expectations of strategy. There are very few maps outside of the opening chapters that are just "seize" or "route". Thracia puts a fire under your ass on a regular basis. The enemy placements are incredibly clever and often need careful consideration just to take out basic units. Chapter 14 is just... It's just the best thing ever. It just all comes together in a game with a ton of variety in its moment-to-moment gameplay, and smart enough game design to make it compelling throughout the whole game. And I disagree when people say only a handful of units are "viable". You get arguably the best unit in the game in the first chapter, but his counterpart, Halvan, is a damn good unit in his own right. If you play the game like any other FE where you just focus on the most powerful units, you'll probably just spam Orsin every opportunity and get pissed when he gets tired and can't be used in the next chapter. This is where I think a lot of people hit this wall where they go "Fuck this game, only 3 units are usable." But if you level Halvan up alongside him, you get two very good units in the first chapter. And just a few chapters later, Machyua, another alternative to Halvan and Orsin, shows up, and she is also very good. This is true of most units. By the mid-point, the game is TOSSING incredibly strong units at you, but they start at lowish levels. You basically get 5 Ninos/Ests(Homer, Linoan, Miranda/Sara, Sleuf) in the span of 3 chapters in the mid-game. If you put work into any of them(Homer gets Paragon, so he's probably the easiest to work with), they're all end-game worth units. And this goes for even units that I don't think anybody ever thinks of using. Why use Trewd when you have Shiva? Well, because Trewd has very solid growths, solid bases, and shows up at a reasonable level. He ends up beefier than Shiva, and is very usable. The only cases I can think of where units are not viable in the slightest are Ronan(Who's supposed to be a mage killer, but he's bad at it), Armor units(Do to their innately lover movement stats and defense caps as high as everyone else) and horse units that can't use swords when mounted(Finn is an exception). Everyone else can get moments to shine. And that's not even bringing up the scrolls, which I think are probably the best way the series has ever handled "RNG-proofing" your characters.

Axe classes for villagers.

I don't think

Depends on what time of the year it comes out in Japan. I do believe that Nintendo's really trying to push FE as one of their big franchises now, so the release dates will probably be a lot closer than they've been in the past. That said, if this is a big game(Which it probably will be), it might take a month or more. So if it releases November/December, we may see an early 2019 release in the NA/EU.

I feel like a hard T is where FE should be. These are games about wars, and mostly involve some base level politics, with a bunch of border conflicts, and there's usually some genocide tossed in. These should get more focus than they do, so I feel like FE taking itself a bit more seriously is where the games can go. I don't want "And Robin was saved thanks to Pikachu's tears friendship." again. Ever. These don't need to be Game of Thrones, though. These games benefit from a hefty dose of levity and dour attitudes don't suit them super well. Genealogy and Thracia were probably the best balance between anime tropes and actual stories with real consequences, and that's about where I think the FE games should be.

I always try to summon Satan once per game purely because of the Giant Bomb P4 Endurance Run.

I also don't like gen 3 or Charizard.

There was a bit of weird balance, since usually you'd just use physical units to deal with magic, negating the purpose of the triangle for magic. I think adopting a Heroes style of doing it could help. Have dark magic be able to work against lances, light work against axes, anima against swords. Or maybe lowering res and raising defense for magic users to actually make using magic against magic users a bit more viable, and making it more difficult to just toss melee against magic.

More or less how it is now. I like that it's something you get better with as you level, and it mitigates the weapon triangle disadvantages. It makes sense from an RPG perspective. You get better with everything else as you progress through these games, and even your relationships advance, so why not the combat prowess of your units increase beyond just how hard they swing their weapons? Makes sense that an axe wielder who has spent the better part of the last few months/years(Depending on the game) would eventually get better at hitting those pesky swordies. And I think the weapon triangle is something FE should include as it has in the past, not so much how Fates went about it. The secondary weapon triangle for ranged weapons was a lot less compelling than the traditional magic triangle+Bows. I also think every game should do Nature/Anima magic+Light+Dark magic, just because there's so much more variety there without it feeling contrived. I like the idea of Light/Dark magic being these rare magics that only holy men or magic students willing to dabble in dark magics can wield.

As a part of the Souls fandom, that one actually deserves to be high up on lists like this. Definitely higher than FE. If you even hint that you got some enjoyment out of Dark Souls 2, you'll get about 8 different people jumping down your throat, saying the game was always trash and irredeemable. And anyone who doesn't like the games at all, or doesn't want to even try them out because of the difficulty will just be told to "get gud" a billion times before somebody actually stops and breaks down what's good about the franchise beyond just the difficulty. Kingdom Hearts and Sonic also should be up there, just because while those fandoms aren't hostile and toxic(Most of the time)... their "weirdness" and rabidness oozes out into so many corners of the internet.

Yeah, but isn't GameFAQs pretty much the bottom of the barrel of every fandom?