Slumber

So basically, which is worse, Awakening or Fates. The answer here is Fates, a million times Fates. As boring and cookie cutter as Awakening's story is, I don't have to sit here and waste brain space trying to comprehend what the fuck the writers were thinking and wonder "what could have been?" like I do nearly every time I think about Fates. I'd rather eat a bland-ass meal than a potentially delicious one that gives me food poisoning. I give no shits about reading/writing fanfiction, so seeing the potential for somebody to fix something like Fates does absolutely nothing for me.

I would like to say that I'm at least good, but that's probably not true.

I can barely imagine that kid not being yelled at for eating his boogers and putting his hands down his pants in public.

Japanese writers pay homage to the English localizations often enough that I can still hope against hope that Shanty Pete will make an appearance in an FE game. I can't even begin to list the ways Square STILL references goofy lines(And the Japanese teams, not just the English localizations referencing older ones) from before FF8 when they started handling translations in-house. Transdimensional Uber-Pirate makes me think of Atomsk from FLCL. Granted he was just galactic, but still.

The Saizo/Beruka thing DESERVES overfocus. One thing that gets a lot of complaints with the Fateswakening style of supports is that there's really very little that brings most of these characters together. So then you get Saizo and Beruka, two assassins with different feelings on their professions, and you expect they'd have plenty of common ground to spark up a conversation. Which actually happens in the Japanese version, where they discuss their professions to one another, which is a good foundation for their supports. The western release doesn't do this. They straight up nix it and replace it with ellipses as a joke, and then the next support just starts with "SO ABOUT KILLIN' PEOPLE". Not only do we lose the foundation that their supports should be built on, the next support chain just happens as if they talked about that stuff off-screen, anyway. Literally the only one who loses out on the change is us, the players, for a joke. And it exemplifies two things. The first being the problems some people have had with the handling of supports, which now goes through another process of wondering "Are these characters bad or is the localization bad?", the second being... well, it's emblematic of a lot of the localization problems people have had with the series as a whole(I'm not trying to say Awakening and Fates are the only FEs with localization issues), but have really come to a head with Awakening and Fates, where the line between "Was this a genuine attempt at comedy from the writers, or is this something the localizers thought would be funny?" becomes more and more blurred. Saizo/Beruka is such an easy picking point, because it's one of the times when it's blatantly clear that the localizers are changing shit for no reason to our detriment. If you feel like you have to doubt the localizers for almost every step of the way, maybe there's something wrong with the localization.

It's not so much bro-science. A bench press will involve and activate your upper arms and shoulders as you try to balance the bar, keep it parallel to your chest, and keep it from falling. A smith machine does most of the job your arms and shoulders do for you. I think your triceps still are actively engaged, but your biceps, deltoids and I think even little bit of work your lats do will be compensated for with a smith machine. As an aside, my high school used to make people in sports and doing weight training do KO bar bench, which are basically just curling bars, and the idea is that you'd also get a killer fore-arm workout simply trying to keep the bar level, adding something else to work out as you bench. I think one too many injuries(The KO bar living up to its name) got my school to get rid of the bars, and they just focused on normal barbells for benching, with forearm curls if people needed to specifically focus forearms for whatever reason. You might be right that it's a solid idea for a beginner, but I also think it might not be super great. I've also heard that people have learned improper form using a smith machine, since again, it compensates for quite a few things that are generally important to proper bench form. If you get super buff on a smith machine and try to move to a normal bench, I don't think your delts will be strong enough to keep up with your usual routine.

There, I think, will always be some exceptions. Turning Effie from a demure knight who doesn't know her own strength to a single minded body builder, I don't think, is a very fun change, and one I don't think really adds anything. Neither is really all that fantastic, but Effie's clearly played for jokes either way, and there's something funny to me about a typical shrinking violet-type character who is actually insanely strong, while a generic dude-bro who happens to be a girl isn't funny to me. They're two different things, an one just doesn't quite work as well. Henry's isn't so much a complete change of character, as it is simply giving Henry a morbid sense of humor about his situation. At the base of things, Henry doesn't change too much from Japan to the west, contextually. Both cases are of an emotionally stunted and damaged individual who try to be decent people, cope with their lives, and fit in with the "good guys". West Henry does it through jokes, Japanese Henry does it through smiling. Both of which they do at inappropriate times. The way they convey this is different, but I don't see the core of the character changing much. I probably would have been fine with either version of Henry, maybe liking West Henry a bit more, simply because a genuinely damaged character dealing it with jokes fits the tone of Awakening more than a genuinely damaged character who knows that they're damaged and knows how to not come off as damaged, but is too damaged to do it convincingly... that's a bit more depressing than "whacky", even if West Henry under a microscope comes off as more tragic.

The only thing that bothers me more than the Fates' localization is the people who actively defend it. I get it. Some stuff does need to be changed, but come the fuck on. Whole characters didn't need to be changed and whole conversations that are meant to be character development shouldn't didn't need to be removed. My head damn near exploded when I found out that a bunch of those people also launched that site that ripped apart the Persona 5 localization.

If we went game-by-game, then Master Knights would run away with this thread for FE4. It's a mounted unit with fantastic promotion gains, class caps, it has Pursuit and can wield 9 weapons.

I've always said that the current state of IS is a big red flag when KOEI FUCKING TECMO AND TEAM NINJA are treating some of these characters with more care than IS does. Camilla's a big one when it comes to that. Even though it's still there, KT doesn't focus on it constantly. Same with Tharja. Both of these characters still suck, but I don't feel gross for playing as them. Mostly.

I'm old fashioned, so I liked doing full routines every day, with variations. Monday/Friday, I'd do flat bench and squats, Wednesday would be incline bench and lunges, with less intense lifts in between. Stuff like that. Usually I'd give my non-"glamour" muscles more love on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The thing is, it all varies. I'm sure plenty of people will give advice that will work. If you feel splitting upper/lower body days like a lot of people do nowadays, then that works for you. One thing you should decide early is if you want to go to get strong, or if you want to go to get big. And yes, these are two different things. There's a lot of dumb bro-science around this, but there's some truth to it. I did 5x5 when I wanted to gain strength, and I saw more positive results than I did when I did 3x10 or progressive routines, which were routines that worked better for when I wanted to maintain and focus more on overall physical health(IE incorporating more cardio) and cutting weight. Oh, and a word of advice, avoid assisted lifting machines like Smith machines. Part of what makes the Bench Press or Squats so appealing is that they're MASSIVE compound movements. Not only are you moving heavy objects off the ground, you have tons of tiny muscles and muscle groups that exist to make sure your whole body is moving properly and keeping these heavy weights balanced, on top of the big muscles that actually move the weights. Assisted lifting machines kind of diminishes this. They take away from those muscles that are working to keep your body balanced as you lift. They isolate your compound lifts, in a way. Unless somebody can convince me otherwise, I always saw them more as stations for people who NEEDED assistance for strength training, like somebody going through physical therapy, or lifters who have injured themselves. I don't really see them as something able-bodied people who want to get into strength training and fitness should ever really go to.

He was one of those guys who I just thought would always be around. He'll be missed.

Turning her into fanservice severely undercuts whatever actual decent character traits and backstory she has. The game presents her as this violent yandere who absolutely loves Corrin, and is willing to pretty much kill anyone else for no reason. It's only if you manage to care enough that you learn that there ARE(Albeit very poor) reasons for this, but Fates couldn't give two shits about showing you this if this gross fanservice character doesn't interest you.

I'd say that Hannity's credibility is completely gone over this, and nobody should listen to him... but this was true yesterday, before this came out, and people still didn't seem to care.

The only time off the top of my head where rape has been a huge part of a backstory that hasn't made me go "Oh, really?!" was Berserk.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA HANNITY IS COHEN'S THIRD CLIENT OH MY GOD EVERYTHING SUDDENLY MAKES SO MUCH SENSE At this point I am going to assume everyone who still supports this administration has some personal stake in it.

It's usually lazy, boring and done in poor taste. Tragic backstories need a lot of nuance, and not every writer is good enough to give those stories the attention they deserve. ESPECIALLY the tragic backstories that involve rape. Those like, need a whole different level of nuance to make them work. Yet it's a backstory that attracts many, many people who want a "dark" story.

Depends on the game. Absolutely it's been the Wyvern classline as of late, but they weren't super exceptional until FE10 in my eyes.

Does Idoun really even count? She was pretty much an empty shell by the time she gets fought, with Jahn, a male dragon, being the one behind everything and having an active role in the events of the game. Idoun doesn't really feel like a proper villain, and more of a tragic(As you said) plot device that gets Jahn and Zephiel working together.

I do, too. It really gives them an actual, prominent role that plays pretty consistently through the game(Depending on the game again). Ones that can just steal items or gold... It's nice and still helpful, but 90% of the time they'd still get benched if there wasn't an item of interest to steal or you didn't need more gold.

Thieves, as utility units, get graded on a curve. They usually suck in combat, but depending on the game, Thieves can be amazing utility units. Being able to steal items and weapons off of an enemy is something no other class can do. Yes, modern Thieves suck, since they've been downgraded to just being living door and chest keys, but in quite a few games they're pretty damn good.

Zelda definitely wins on music, but Twilight Princess is one of the few Zeldas I have absolutely no strong feelings for, and I don't even really remember what its hidden village is.

Is it weird that I've loved Xenogears for close to 20 years now and have never thought about what the follow up would be?

Uh, do you have proof that they didn't have dev kits by this point? Even if they didn't, so long as they had very simple outlines of what they wanted the specs and architecture to be, they could have begun development before even getting full on dev kits. Again, they don't need the actual hardware to begin development, supposing that it's actually true that they didn't get dev kits until late 2015 or even 2016. R&D takes a very long time, and by the time Fates was out, they probably at the very least knew the specs of what the NX would be and where they should start with development. Breath of the Wild didn't begin development once Switch dev kits were out. They reworked a game that already was probably 80% finished to run on the console. Even if a Fire Emblem game was 20% through development and they had no idea what the Switch was, when IS got dev kits, it probably wouldn't have taken much time or effort at all to simply make the game run on the exact specs of the Switch. Do you think they finished Fates and just told everyone aside from the much smaller Echoes team to go home until Nintendo sent dev kits? "Sorry guys, we don't know what Nintendo HQ is doing, we can't make games anymore until then."

How could you be so mean to Wrys? He just wants to share his bald way of life. He never meant to hurt anyone.