Slumber

FE1/11 - I like that it... birthed the series? There's probably a lot I could say, but it'd all boil down to fundamental gameplay that persists in the series to this day. FE2/15 - I like that it flows and feels more like a JRPG than a turn-based strategy game. Normally this would piss me off, but I like thinking of it as its own deal, since it's kind of a one-off. FE3/12 - This is the game that started cementing what a "Fire Emblem" game is supposed to be. Still rocky, but it started pulling mechanics together in a distinctly "Fire Emblem" way. I also think, Kris problems aside, FE12 is just a very solid entry in the series, and did a much better job at feeling modern than its predecessor. FE4 - Scale, story, characters and the weapon triangle. Game is kind of a mess, but it's a fun mess that I enjoy. FE5 - IMO, this is the game that finished cementing what a "Fire Emblem" game is. On top of merging the mechanics that would persist from 3 and 4(Except Dismounting), it introduced rescuing, introduced many of the map objective types, fog of war, constitution as a stat+weight based systems related to it, and probably a few more mechanics that I'm forgetting off the top of my head. I also enjoy the story, the gameplay's a lot of fun, and Leif's my favorite lord. FE6 - Snazzy GBA animations. FE7 - It just came together well as a game, helping, uh, "un-simplify" FE6 a bit, while also making it more accessible. HHM might be my favorite FE campaign to replay, and it has probably my second favorite FE cast outside of Tellius. FE8 - ... It gave romhackers a bigger playground than FE7? FE9 - The cast is probably my favorite FE cast, and I love that it brought back the "console-scale" feel that was lacking from the gameplay of the GBA titles. Auto-promoting at level 21 was a great idea. Whoever on the localization team thought of that deserves a medal. I probably would have liked it better if it wasn't so easy, but what're ya gonna do? FE10 - It contains pretty much everything I liked about FE9 and improves on it... except the story. It fails to develop its own cast, but at least PoR's cast is still playable(Sorry, Largo). Also up there with FE5 and 7 in terms of how much I enjoy replaying it, which says a lot, because RD is the biggest game in the franchise by a significant margin. FE13 - I like the tiny quality of life options like speeding up the gameplay and being able to skip enemy phase. It helps immensely after the initial playthroughs. Their eventual inclusion in SoV turned a game I, for the life of me, never, ever expected to say was any good, into a game I thoroughly enjoy, and in retrospect, can appreciate what it originally did. I also like the return to the original FE world from 1-5. FE14 - I like that it turned FE13's gameplay mechanics into a strategy game. Bonus round: Heroes - Gives IS/Nintendo a nearly endless supply of money that they can hopefully use to make real, big-budget entries in the series. Also hopefully keeps the skeevier aspects of the series contained to the phone.

This is mostly true. Some people in Leif's army are people like Hicks, just a simple villager who chose to fight for Leif because Leif saved his son from the Child Hunts. Most of the early game party members, the Fiana Freeblades that make up the early core of Leif's army, are just a tiny militia. Dagdar and Marty specifically used to be common bandits. Leif also recruits the Dandelions, who are just a group of Robin Hood-esque thieves. And then there's Ralph, the dude who's such a normal dude that it's pretty much his defining trait. Besides the ones you mentioned, there are a few Bluebloods in there. Galzus is explicitly one of the princes of Isaac, and Mareeta would be noble by birth. Both have major Od Blood. Their house was destroyed by the main Isaac family. Eyvel is... an interesting one. She's a noble who was lost as a child, then had trauma-based amnesia which caused her to forget about her birth again. Miranda's the princess of Alster. There are a bunch of Knights without notable noble blood in their ranks, as well. The ratio of nobles/knights to commoners is still probably waaaaaaaay lower than most games in the franchise, and you don't really start getting the nobles/knights until about halfway through the game. Then the game kinda starts piling them on.

FE6 Berserkers, on top of some of the classes others have said. FE6's monstrous +30% crit means they WILL one-shot almost everyone in your party in HM if it goes off. And there's no real good way to deal with them if they equip a Hand Axe.

Genealogy and Thracia 776 make interesting partners. Genealogy is all about large-scale, continental warfare. Every castle you take is literally its own kingdom, and you're fighting through each kingdom's army to get to the castle. The chapters are loooooong and massive, and the flavor text in the game implies all the chapters take place from months to years. Entire Fire Emblem stories could have taken place between two chapters of Genealogy's story. Then you get to Thracia, and it's about guerilla warfare. It's the smallest conflict in the series, and Leif's army is all about hit and run tactics and raiding strategic outposts of Freege's army. They're desperate and on the run frequently when Freege just flexes a little bit, which helps drive home how scrappy the army is compared to most others in the franchise. Yet Thracia 776 is the game that set the "modern" FE structure. Every single FE after Thracia(Barring remakes, though even FE12 feels a bit more like this than its original did) feels like Thracia, with their own peculiarities, even though most of their stories are on the scale of Genealogy.

Branching promotions were technically a thing in Gaiden, the game that influenced SS the most. Though they only existed for Villager units. So to be specific, SS introduced branching promotions to the second tier of classes.

I disagree, but that's besides the point. It's the only game that doesn't really offer anything of worth to the franchise as a whole.

I've heard this. Don't know how true it is, but I'm inclined to believe it, due to how small and derivative it is.

Sacred Stones. It's the only game in the series that I can think of that doesn't add a single new feature, or do anything of merit on its own, and feels the most like filler. It's the only one I could see not impacting the rest of the franchise if it was gone.

Picked up VC4 on a whim, since it was 50% off on Steam. It's been like 8 years since I first played VC1, and man I didn't know how much I missed it.

As somebody who didn't have much affection towards Marth's games, I didn't have very strong feelings towards Kris... Until I found out that he moves in on Draug's love interest. That will always be hilarious to me.

But this is really the only indication that this might be how things work. The game makes it seem that Nohr's turn into an evil empire is a new development, due to fake Garon. Prior to that, it seems like their questionable ways were due to Nohr being a desolate wasteland, and they had to turn to less savory means to survive, like Kilvas and Thracia of the past. Xander's whole struggle doesn't really make a whole lot of sense if this is the way Nohr's always been, and Leo and Elise being morally upstanding people doesn't make sense, either. Camilla's really the only person besides Peri that indicates that nobility in Nohr is fucked, but IIRC, there's at least a pretty reasonable explanation for Camilla being the way she is. Peri's literally "She was never taught that MURDER was wrong."

But if you do that, you learn that Peri's whole reason for killing is that she's a spoiled noble... and her parents just didn't bother to teach her that it's bad. If she was a poor Nohr girl who had to kill to get by and then learned that she enjoyed killing, that'd be one thing. But there's not much indication that outside of the sheer desperation that Nohr is such an amoral country that the nobility are as evil is (New)Garon and people like Hans. And that latter thing is a new incident. And most people in the Nohr army are trying to do right by their country and the people within their country. Peri's inclusion in the army, and her blatant disregard for the lives of innocents, makes a huge negative impact on EVERYONE for simply allowing her to be there. Uh... I did that.

There are other franchises that do character development better than Awakening and Fates do. There are sacrifices that need to be made in a lot of them, like with say, the Suikoden games, which has rosters comparable to Fire Emblem, but those games manage to shine a larger spotlight on more characters than FE does, and integrates them into the plot more often. On top of this, it'd be a better argument if Fire Emblem was ALWAYS like Fates and Awakening... but it wasn't. FE7 to FE9 managed to give you plenty of pretty rounded characters without relying on them shouting character quirks at you. The point of the analogy I made it to point out how insane the characters from Fates and Awakening come off when you take a step back. I really don't think FE7, 8 or 9's cast would drive people insane like how Fates' and Awakening's casts would. You might roll your eyes at FE7 Karel, get annoyed by Joshua's constant reliance on sleight of hand to talk to people, and Ilyana's food obsession would probably baffle you, but these are more the exception than the rule in these casts. Going to the grocery store probably wouldn't be a total nightmare in these games. I was definitely being more vocal with Nina's gimmick, but it's very much the center of a lot of her conversations. She's not straight up saying "I dream about gay fanfiction between my comrades", but it's largely what a lot of her support convos and random snippets of dialogue focus on, and it's what the people talking to her tend to take away.

Yes, but think about your real life interactions. Imagine you go to the grocery store. You help a little old lady grab a can of beans from the top shelf, and she says "Thank you, I love killing animals." You'd probably be pretty freaked out. Then you go to the cash register, and the cashier gives you your change, and then says "I like daydreaming about my male co-workers hooking up." Again, you'd probably be pretty freaked out. And then you step out, and a random stranger comes up to you and asks you "Do you know where I can find some fresh blood?" I think most people would go bonkers if they had to live in Awakening or Fates, just because of how upfront and relentless units are with their gimmicks. There are definitely ways to write a colorful cast of characters without characters needing to repeat similar lines of dialogue over, and over, and over again.

This is something I've always tried to acknowledge. Fates has higher highs and lower lowers than Awakening with its cast. Fates does a far better job at turning gimmicks into actual characters, and there's generally far better reasoning behind why each character is the way they are. It's also generally a bit easier to get a grasp on who each character is without having to dig through 50 support chains. But then you have Peri and Camilla, so ya know.

I think you have a point there. I've said it before, but I'll probably look back more kindly on these two games in general if their influence isn't too strong on FE in the future. Because then I can just look back at both as just kind of their own entries. They did their own thing, and maybe that's just fine in the bigger picture. Inversely, with Fates being what it is, and coming right after Awakening, it makes me look back at both through a harsher lens.

This post doesn't actually state why this would be realistic, or why a soldier wearing it is particularly justified. 1.) Sheer was largely a luxury item in ancient Egypt. The link within that post defines it as such, and keeps mentioning them as "upper-class" and "fine". It'd be like every knight on the battle field wearing crowns and jewelry. Not that I'd oppose that, but there'd need to be a precedent for me to accept it. 2.) It is true that slaves would be topless or wear very little clothing, but by the point in history which Fire Emblem vaguely takes place in(A vague age when metal forging and cloth making is at least very prevalent), most developed desert civilizations have reaped the benefits of being able to produce cloth for everyone. And we know that Plegia is capable of this, because Dark Mages also wear thicker cloth capes, which will surely leave them with very goofy sunburns. Desert civilizations across the world all realized something when they had access to such cloth: Wearing layered, loose robes is actually the best way to avoid sunburn and heatstroke in dry environments. By this point, only the desperate and poor would go out into the sun not wearing something that actually protects them from the sun. 3.) Saying it's realistic for them to wear little clothing because they're modeled after Egyptian gods is dumb. That is true, but it's still stupid and not realistic. You'd be killing your own soldiers for the sake of a mythology that doesn't exist in Fire Emblem. But yes. FE's been full of unrealistic designs, so aside from being just really bizarre designs(It's incredibly weird to me that Fire Emblem characters would dress strictly according to Anubis, down to a jackal hat, when Egypt doesn't exist and ancient Egyptian mythology has never been referenced outside of this outfit), I don't really hold too much against the Awakening Dark Mage design in a vacuum. As much as I just typed about that, the Dark Mages in Awakening can't hold a candle to the... complete "wut"ness that are the Fates designs.

The Vikings making it into the playoffs being a huge toss up is worrying me. The Eagles were supposed to lose today!

Welcome. Don't worry too much about posting. Just be yourself and you'll probably have fun here.

I have a bone to pick about calling Awakening's gameplay "Alright". I think it might be the most fundamentally janky FE since Genealogy. It's not balanced in the slightest, and it has probably the worst map design since FE2. Most maps are some variation of a flat plane, and you just need to kill everything on the map. Occasionally they put a wall in your way, but it's not in any thoughtful way that might force you to deal with a different playstyle by bottle necking or anything. Busted skills dominate the game, and the crazy amount of reclassing seemingly just exists to encourage you to steam roll the game with the strongest skills and weapon combos. And then there's one of the biggest focal points of Awakening's gameplay, and boy... Pair-up is clearly not a fleshed out mechanic in Awakening, and just breaks the balance in your favor. Until Lunatic and Lunatic+ where the game just cheats. There's no way around it, the game cheats to give you a challenge, giving enemies skills you can't have and forged weapons you can't forge. And Hard Mode is pretty damn easy, so the jump to Lunatic is straight up unreasonable, where the game is just tossing end-game enemies at you in the third chapter. Points for making me have to actually adjust my playstyle. Points off for breaking the game to do it. It feels like it went through little QA/playtesting. There was definitely a workable foundation with Awakening, which the vast amounts of gameplay refinements Fates had can attest to, but Awakening itself is pretty rough in terms of how the gameplay feels and how the game is paced.

I mean a bait and switch for the tone/style of the game. Go and watch the reveal trailer for Fates. The biggest cause for concern in that trailer is Felicia, and that's not really something you'd put together until after the fact. I got excited for Fates because of that trailer, and I even overlooked the obvious warning signs of subsequent trailers.

Quite frankly, I think both Awakening and Fates as a whole are bad Fire Emblem games(Conquest is great on the gameplay front, however). And I'll be the first... well, I'm too late in this thread to say I'm the first... But I'll willingly admit that a good chunk of my animosity towards the games comes from their popularity. When it comes to franchises like Final Fantasy, I can take some solace in knowing that I hate entries like 2 and 13 because I just think they're awful entries in the series. Downright repulsive a lot of the times. Those were two entries in a franchise that had always been popular, and there isn't much worry in my mind that they'll heavily influence the rest of the series. With Fire Emblem? Awakening saved the franchise, and Fates established it as one of Nintendo's biggest properties. This comes with an awful nagging in the back of my head. The more Fire Emblem gets promoted, the more I worry that it's going to be more like Awakening and Fates. Two games that don't represent what I once loved the series for. And little has been done nothing to quell this worry. Smash Brothers? More than half of the FE roster is represented by Awakening/Fates. Heroes? Almost every seasonal banner is something Awakening/Fates related, and so much of the rosters of those games are fully represented, while games I like/love in the franchise are flatout ignored outside of some key characters. Warriors? It was disappointing to learn that it was just going to be FE1, Awakening and Fates. It was even more disappointing to see that not even FE1 got that much love compared to Awakening and Fates in that game. I can't even get excited for Three Houses, because I'm fully expecting a bait and switch. I'm expecting the next trailer to be full of fanservice and Avatar worship. I'm fully expecting cringey anime tropes to be front and center. I'm expecting them to detail some game mechanic that sends off huge red flags. I can't get excited for the game at all because I'm worried it will wind up like Fates and Awakening, since IS has made it clear that those games are more important to them than any other games in the franchise. Do you know how much it sucks to not be able to get excited for a franchise that used to be one of your favorites? And how much it sucks to not be able to get excited about side projects because you're worried that things you don't like about the franchise will be shoved in your face? All that said, I'm fully in the "Hate the game, not the player" corner. I don't hate anyone for liking Awakening or Fates. People should be free to like what they like. I didn't even really want to post in this thread, since I figured it'd be a dumpster fire.

Does this not sound incredibly suspicious to you? Sigurd has little reason to suspect there's more to the conspiracy than Langobalt and Reptor, but Sigurd also has no reason to assume others aren't involved. Everyone would have had their ear to the ground, considering the continent is in full-fledged war by that point. People aren't just sitting on their asses and going "Whelp, half of the continent's rulers are dead. Who knows what that's about." It doesn't help that Sigurd sees Langobalt and Reptor recruiting people in chapters 3 and 4 to help take down Sigurd, and it continues into chapter 5, though Sigurd wouldn't really know about that in a hypothetical scenario where he stays in Silesia. Having a huge conflict surrounding your actions be settled by somebody else, then that person going "Oh, whoops. You can come back now." is incredibly sketchy. Regardless it still would have been the smarter option. Even if the end result was the same, Sigurd went through more trouble for arguably less payoff because... ??? He just kinda wanted to, which the gen 1 treats as a character flaw of Sigurd's. Also, we don't know how well Arvis would have been able to handle Langobalt and Reptor without Sigurd going south. We have some idea on Reptor, since Aida turns on him and helps, but Langobalt was always both muscle and the schemer of the two. Taken together, we have no idea how Arvis would have handled them both. Word could have gotten out that Arvis was part of the plan if one learned that Arvis betrayed the other. And the "going through the desert" comment isn't supposed to be taken as part of the argument. Just mentioning that to get from Lubeck to Velthomer and Belhalla, Sigurd needed to go through a portion of the desert. We're reading this in two totally different ways. Sigurd asks "What does Arvis think?", Claud says "I don't think he's on your side". Completely divorced from a black and white "with me or against me" mentality, Claud is flat out saying that Sigurd should really only expect Arvis to be neutral at best. We also know Arvis is doing... something, though only Langobalt and Reptor know exactly(Well, not exactly) what this entails. Taken together, Sigurd knows "Arvis is doing something" and "It may or may not be harmful to me", which isn't grounds for Sigurd to trust him by any means. You're right, it's also not grounds to not trust him, but part of what makes Lords and advisers in this franchise good at their jobs is reading a situation. Jugdral is not like any other continent in the franchise. It's harsh, brutal and unforgiving, and Sigurd should know this. From that, it shouldn't be too big of a leap to see Aida pretty emphatically saying "Arvis knew you were innocent all along! Ride along to Belhalla where they'll celebrate your victory!" as a small red flag, made much, much, muuuuuuuch bigger by her also saying that Arvis' personal army will be there and that Arvis badly wants to meet with Sigurd. Nothing about it sounds like it's on the up-and-up. It's at this point that either Sigurd's "Act first, think second" attitude is to blame, or his idealism. Both of which are, again, fatal flaws of his that are part of the deconstruction happening with his character. Even back in elementary school, I would have found it incredibly suspicious if I was caught up in some crazy neighborhood drama, and my best friend, not even a near stranger who somebody told me probably isn't on my side, said "Hey, look. I believe you. Come over to my house, there's a cake for you here. All of my friends are here and we all have slap bracelets and nerf guns." I'm reasonably sure that's an Ed, Edd, n' Eddy(Maybe Hey Arnold or Recess) episode, and the Eds fell for the same shit Sigurd did.

I admit I got Claud's suggestion that Sigurd was an active party wrong, but Langobalt changes his accusations in a following conversation in the same chapter that Sigurd's army was involved directly, and not as conspirator(At least his accusation makes 0 sense if he's implying Sigurd's entire army conspired with Bryon to kill Kurth). I'll write this one off as just reading it differently, but it still would have been more difficult to really accuse Sigurd of too much if he just stayed home. Also, explain Sigurd not having any options when it came to marching south vs. staying in Silesia. It would have been much easier to defend, and he would have avoided the part where he finds himself exactly where Arvis wants him. There's really no upside to marching through the desert instead. It actually would have actively hampered Arvis' plans, since dealing with Reptor was a big part of it, and it wouldn't have left Silesia open for occupation(At least not immediately if Sigurd still falls in Silesia). Sigurd has no way of knowing this, but he's also explicitly warned that going his way is the more dangerous option. He put himself in more danger and ended up helping Arvis's plan in the process. And again, Sigurd really has no reason to trust Arvis, and Claud told him as much. Look at the script you linked. When Sigurd presses Claud about Arvis, Claud basically throws his hands up and says Arvis's not mad at Sigurd, but he's also probably not on Sigurd's side. At best, Sigurd can take this as Arvis as a neutral party who is acting on his own. This still gives Sigurd no reason to think things are cool between him and Arvis when he makes it through Velthomer to Belhalla. Aida just sits on the sidelines and tells him to fuck off until Reptor's dealt with and then she starts going on and on about how Arvis knew Sigurd did nothing wrong as they're already making their way to Belhalla. She then proceeds to say he's got his whole royal guard ready and Arvis will meet him as soon as he gets there. She couldn't make the invitation any more suspicious, and when taken with Claud's initial statement that he's probably not acting in Sigurd's best interests, it just drives it home further that Sigurd isn't making a smart decision by immediately making for Belhalla.

Staying on the defensive would have probably been preferable, really. Sigurd wasn't privy to either Verdane or Augustria's actions beyond the kidnapping of Edain, which is where the escalation starts, and from there, Sigurd's crusade picks up steam. Byron was blamed, but it wasn't just him that got framed. Because Sigurd's been on the move, he was also blamed as an active party in the murder. Both Claude and Langobalt acknowledge this, and it would have been much, much harder to pin the blame on somebody who hasn't been conquering left and right for over a year(I think 2 years pass between the prologue and chapter 3? Maybe a year and a half?). Sigurd's unlucky, but there's much more to it than him being unlucky. It's a deliberate design choice to have Sigurd be headstrong and idealistic, only for it to backfire. He's given warnings, advice, and hints of the bad rumblings in the continent, and he pays for disregarding a lot of it. Even if he goes on his crusade, there were still places in the endgame where he could have turned it around. As I mentioned, Silesia would have probably been a much easier position to hold, which Rahna suggested, and he really had no reason to just walk into Velthomer and just expect everything to be hunky-dory, which Claude warned him about. These are probably the two biggest mistakes he makes in the end game. If Sigurd wasn't Sigurd, gen 1 would have been radically different.