Slumber

I wish FE would do this more. Outside of the odd bandit like Garret or Gonzales, I don't think any other FE besides Thracia goes into why so many people have resorted to banditry. It's just a bunch of bad people doing bad things. Which is weird, since pirates are more often presented in a decent light. I'm not a fan of Chrom's family being descendants of Marth. A royal dynasty ruling for over three thousand years, with two thousand of them tracing back directly to one guy, is insane. At least with Walhart, it's not made clear if he's a descendant of Alm and Celica.

Bolton SHOULD be behind bars. Unfortunately, the reasons Trump wants him in prison is because he questioned him, which is fascism 101.

A bunch of stuff. They're still doing coin flips and picking names out of hats to determine who gets delegates, and now a lot of their e-reporting(Apparently they have an app) is fucking up, so a bunch of the people running the caucus can't get into their accounts. So the results are taking super long to come out, which ultimately just slows the momentum from the Iowa caucus. Also there's a whole bunch of general nonsense with the delegation process because of some weird rules.

So Iowa is, once again, fucking up massively.

He's like a 5. He's a solid unit, but he's REALLY not worth the trouble. Even if you bother to raise him up, his stats will only be marginally better than Dieck's, and his significantly lower con negates a lot of the speed he gets over Dieck. Additionally, the sheer rarity and value of promotion items makes it really hard to justify Ogier. You have at least Dieck and Rutger who are significantly better than Ogier, and you only get two Hero Crests in the whole game, sooo...

Three Houses>>Echoes>>>Fates>Awakening>Sacred Stones Yeah, it's nice that you can ignore the open parts of Sacred Stones. Unfortunately you still have to play the rest of Sacred Stones.

It works much better in a game like PoR/Radiant Dawn, too. I still like the character writing in Echoes, and still think it gets some aspects of the "Commoners vs. nobles" theme right, since many of the cast still is a bunch of commoners compared to a lot of other FEs, but... Alm and Celica are still ultimately your leads. You can't have a "Commoner vs. noble" theme when the nobles are still largely the ones leading the charge and winning the day. Like, that shouldn't be the major overarching theme of the game by any stretch of the imagination. And Alm certainly shouldn't be the example the game picks to show this. If you have Gray and Tobin in the back going "Commoners can kick a noble's ass just like anyone else", that would have been totally fine. That's a theme that fits those two characters, and a number of other Echoes characters. But not Alm. If anything, overcoming your bloodline would have been a much better theme, given that Alm and Celica come from very dysfunctional bloodlines.

I think it would have made Alm a more interesting foil to Berkut, too. Having him and Berkut be mirrors in that way, instead of the way we got("NOBILITY RULES" vs. "COMMONERS CAN DO ANYTHING NOBLES CAN DO") would have made Berkut waaaay more interesting. Two hot-headed heirs to Rigel. One is the rightful son of the king who wants to destroy and violently overthrow him. The other is a cock, arrogant and aggressive noble who the king doesn't see as the legitimate heir. Once Alm is revealed to be the prince, he strives to be a better person for the sake of himself and the country, while Berkut breaks down and continues down his dark path. You wouldn't even have to rewrite Berkut all that much, and he'd ultimately still come out better because of it.

There were two readings of Alm you could get out of his like, 10 lines of dialogue in Gaiden: A well-intentioned, but violent and angry guy who believes violence IS a solution A goody-two-shoes lord like Marth and Eliwood Awakening took the former route, Echoes went with the latter. It's a shame, because realizing he's the prince of Rigel could have been an eye-opening experience where he starts to realize he's just like his father and cousin, and try to change his ways. It would have possibly made for some interesting c h a r a c t e r d e v e l o p m e n t.

Part of me thinks Mitt's vote was genuine. He's a conservative Mormon in Utah. He's as safe as you can get, and can vote however he feels like. He's one of the few major conservatives that hasn't played with the idea of bending the knee to King Trump. Collins, though, her vote was entirely calculated after knowing for sure that the republicans were gonna win. She's the vulnerable one who has to play politics, and her vote was just that. The republican party is rotten to the core. Nothing is going to fix this beyond a mass purge of them from the house and senate. But the damage will probably never be gone. The pro-fascism, authoritarian right is probably here to stay for the foreseeable future. Good luck getting these degenerates out of places like Kansas or the deep south.

They're fun to look at, but I don't believe they mean anything. The Zodiac traits for each sign are all so broad that people can latch on to one or two things and go "Yeah, that's totally me!" I'm a Sagittarius.

Limited reclassing. A unit's identity is tied to their class, and just being able to freely switch classes removes this entirely. Two tier. This is the least contentious one for me, since I'm also fine with three tier. However, I don't like the three tier where you start out as a class that branches. I like the RD way of doing it where there's one linear path, maybe with some unique promotions along the way. No. Awakening has no game balance because of this.

I'll second this. Aran takes a hit in usability on hard, since he gets doubled by everything right off the bat and will have to get some lucky level ups to reach the usability you can get out of him on lower difficulties. But he has a role, at least, that is valuable for the chapters he's available for. A tank that can dish out the damage he takes. Plus, the way he caprams his main stats makes him a good candidate for BEXP. It doesn't take too much(Though it's more arguable on Hard) to get him rolling. Nephenee is just... a Swordmaster, but slower and with a Lance instead. In a bunch of chapters where you're not going to be short on units like that.

Having now played it, TMS is just a bland, half-assed Persona game with a pretty dumb theme and barely noticeable Fire Emblem elements tossed in. The most FE thing about it is the weapon triangle in combat(Which... has already existed in previous Persona games) and arrows/wind hurting flying units.

Yeah, I don't think Hector kills a guy just doing his job, completely uninvolved with his affairs. He has no reason to, and never does anything like that anywhere else in the story.

I believe Sigurd and Seliph are trained fighters. Sigurd was in a military academy with Quan, Eldigan and Arvis, so it's very likely that he's highly trained. And he's generally considered to be Eldigan's equal, and Eldigan is basically the Camus equivalent of Jugdral. But we don't know if he's an exceptional fighter because of his military training, or because he has innate super powers, but he's definitely a skilled fighter, and considered as such. Seliph was raised to fight the Granvale Empire by Sigurd's squire and strategist. Oifey(And Shannan) is very heavily implied to have been training the kids under his care in between gens 1 and 2. But again, Seliph has even more super powers than his dad did, so it's tough to say how much of his strength comes from the training and how much comes from the literal dragon blood flowing through his veins. That aside, the rest seems accurate. Eirika doesn't have any explicit combat feats and isn't really considered anything crazy, especially compared to her brother.

We can infer that Hector is probably around Eliwood level, with more raw power, since the two meet up to spar for fun pretty regularly. But we also know that, despite not being as good of a fighter as Hector, Eliwood can still keep up with him with his wits. So this probably translates to Eliwood having more skill, or at least is able to think his battles through better than Hector. So Hector's probably more Chrom-like, maybe just less clumsy.

There's not a single other lord who trains non-stop. And the ones who do train regularly, like Chrom, are also said to be not that skilled, but just very strong. There's Eliwood, who's skilled but not that strong and doesn't really consider fighting as a priority, and Lyn, who we never really see reach some kind of zenith as a sword fighter. We see her like, 6 months out after she leaves home. Ike's whole goal, meanwhile, is to straight up surpass the greatest swordsman on his continent. And we see him do that. Dmitri or Ephraim might be the only ones who would rival Ike in terms of combat skill, but Ike has leagues more practical experience than Ephraim and spends all of his days either training, or actually fighting in combat. Dmitri is straight up the only one who would be arguable since he spends years of his life fighting off armies by himself, and even then, after he breaks, he seems to favor pure power over diligence and finesse.

Should we consider that Ike, in the meta sense of Fire Emblem by IS, is often called THE strongest/greatest fighter?

Cyas would be interesting, but I think Sarah going to Genealogy would ultimately make for a more well-rounded game. Arvis is already pretty compelling in Genealogy. Manfroy, the real villain, gets jack-all. Adding in Sarah to give some more depth/development to Manfroy would improve Genealogy more, IMO. Galzus would also be neat with Shannan and Ayra's kids, but there's not much more you need to cover with Isaach in FE4. Febail to FE5. FE5 is light on good archers. Patty would be acceptable, but Lifis and Parn are both good units that do the thieving just fine. Kinda fucks with FE4's story to add Febail, though.

Sigurd's killing bad people to stop bad things form happening. He's morally in the right. He's just short-sighted and doesn't realize that he's creating a MASSIVE power vacuum in Jugdral. Which is an issue no other Lord in the series ever considers, either. Genealogy just decided it'd be fun to play with the idea of a Fire Emblem lord eating shit for being the good guy. Jugdral is a harsher place than the others.

I'd definitely put him on a lighter shade of grey. He doesn't actively try to actively take part in any major atrocities. But if you put an orphanage full of the most lovable, but tragic and sympathetic children AND their adorable puppies between him and Edelgard, it's tough to say what he'd do. His bloodlust for Edelgard is pretty damn insatiable.

I'd say Dmitri is pretty grey. His sole motivation in Crimson Flow and Verdant Wind is to kill Edelgard, and cutting down anyone who gets in his way. This also starts as his sole motivation in Azure Moon, but he eventually is able to set his demons aside and tries to become the old, optimistic Dmitri. It's not a noble goal, and he's not ever shown to be keen on mass, discriminate slaughter like Micaiah and Edelgard, but he is a one man army destroying everything from point A(Himself) to point B(Edelgard). He's a lot like Guts from Berserk, who at his worst, was very grey.

Chrom with literally anybody. I'd replace Chrom with fucking Shanam or Samto, two joke characters. Ideally we'd get like, Hector or something instead, but again... I'd take Wallace over Chrom. Byleth I'd replace with Edelgard.

FE1 and 2 are nearly unplayable with how slow and impregnable they are with some of their design. If you have no attachment to these games before their remakes, there's absolutely no reason to play them. FE2 is especially bad. FE11 still kinda sucks, but is MUCH more playable than the original FE1, and Shadows of Valentia took the steaming mess that was Gaiden and actually turned it into an enjoyable game. As for FE3/12, that's the one that isn't a definitive replacement. The original FE3 is about where the series starts feeling playable, even by modern standards, and handles its story better than FE12 does. I'd still rather play FE12, but that's just personal preference.