Slumber

That would work. I am starting to like this idea a bit more. There's rarely ever times where you need to go BACK to places after making progress. It'd just make it much easier for units who have fallen behind to catch up, and it'd help justify keeping the big maps of the Jugdral games. I don't think it'd do too much to minimize the "horse emblem"ness of FE4, but the idea of cavalry rushing to capture a castle, with infantry warping in to provide back up as other armies advance could lead to some neat moments, and it'd certainly help Ardan and Hannibal. Might make the castle defense aspect a little too easy, though.

First time around, it's better to play both separately. Trying to fit 5 in between 4 is probably better for subsequent play throughs.

That seems fairly reasonable, and it's an idea I've had, too. Warp staves are all over Jugdral. Just make a line of dialogue saying something about castles having Warp points that people can attune to. It'd reinforce the villains warping all over the place, too. Though it'd probably be weird with events like Shannan and Patty escaping Yied. Why wouldn't Shannan just warp back to Isaach?

You seem like a swell individual. Including gay people isn't "PC". That's not even remotely what that term means. What Leon being gay is, however, is including a not huge, but still sizeable fraction of the entire earth's population. If there were an army of 30ish soldiers like this, statically, at least one would probably be gay. And if I'm remembering correctly, it'd be true pretty much everywhere on the planet. Now, what might be more PC is Leon being openly gay, since that's a much smaller percentage of people around the world, due to social norms and stuff. And since Japan itself considers itself part of the first world, even if they aren't really the... "best" with handling gay characters, they still realize plenty of gay people buy their products. And especially after Awakening, IS will likely keep including them, and they'll likely be open about it from now on(Fates being them dipping their toes in the water), since an entire army shunning or mocking a character for their sexuality isn't a good way to make the cast likeable.

She died for Saias and didn't act on her relationship with Arvis during however long Saias was around before her death, so I'd guess she genuinely loved Arvis and didn't care about the power, or at the very least, it was secondary.

That's because Barst is, by and large, a good unit, while Cord, and especially Bord, aren't. Barst is basically Ogma(Ogma has better bases, Barst has better growths) with an axe, and he's like Ogma's #2 in the context of the games. Barst has all around fantastic growths, barring his wlv growth. He'll crush Cord and Bord in both games and their remakes. He has better bases, too.

Mage!Kliff always did well for me in the early and mid game, but due to movement issues, fell off compared to Archers and Mercs. On the whole I'd say Mage!Kliff is fine. Not quite as good as he could potentially be as a Merc or Archer, but those two classes are broken in SoV, so no duh.

Disagreed. Fire Emblem doesn't have enough dancing scenes.

I did enjoy having Knights and Cavs work the way PoR/RD did it, but I don't know if that's how I'd balance them. I am still clinging to hope that indoor nerfs come back for Cavs, with dismounting at a stat loss to compensate. Just don't go overboard with it and completely fuck their weapon ranks.

I think there shouldn't be much of a rule, just so long as the supports make sense. Adding supports to meet some magical quota won't do much good, and an upper limit seems silly if there's still plenty to be explored with other characters(Ike with Zihark/Mist or Hector with Raven, for example. All of these likely would have been interesting supports). The Volke example is a tricky one, because how do you support an admitted sociopath who is trying to keep a distance and adamantly doesn't want to change? You can really only support him with people he wants to talk to, and that boils down to Bastion for Volke. I think it all goes back to just having supports that make sense, though I generally do agree that the GBA games found the best balance of this. Having two characters who have no reason to talk to each other and talk about nothing that adds to their characters is what hurts the Fateswakening supports. It comes off as fluff and filler, and only serves to obscure supports that might actually add meaningfully to the characters, using my Donnel breakdown as an example.

You're right. I don't know why I said Stahl and Haar, since it's closer to, Stahl and Ilyana. Either way you cut it, nearly everything about the things Stahl says has been done before. And I wasn't singling all of those characters out as being the most gimmicky gimmicks, I was singling them out for leaning heavily on something characters in the series have already done, and (largely) done better. Donnel and Stahl are exceptions, but that's because there's really... Nothing to Nephenee, and she ALSO shares her gimmick with a character recruited in the same chapter as her, but Brom's more of a hearty, good-natured dad than just one of the simple country folk. And Ilyana's just the worst, to the point where people in the army are worried she'll start prostituting herself for food if they don't keep her fed, while Stahl at least also has the "I'm just a normal dude" shtick going for him. And I argue Donnel doesn't make it clear that he's more than a simple country boy. Do you want me to go support-by-support and make me ask where he makes this clear? Alright. THE GIRLS: ... I said I was going to do everyone, but I'm tired already. The child supports are all very same-y regardless of the dad and the female supports make up the bulk of his gen 1 supports, so I'd think it's a good sample size. The vast majority, not counting S ranks because those are generally out of left field and don't really follow the flow of conversation, are about how much of a simple country boy Donnel is. His Miriel and Olivia chains being the major deviations, with his B support with Maribelle being the one standalone from the rest. This is 20/27 conversations where Donnel sticks completely to his gimmick. So forgive me if you're not happy when I say "No, no the game doesn't make it clear that Donnel is anything but a flabbergasted country boy". Because amounting to 25% of his dialog in these cases, with all but a single random support from Maribelle being tied to specific chains, is not "clear". But moving on from Donnel, the others, and others I haven't mentioned? There are a lot that just stick to their gimmicks, not matter how... Nonsensical they are. And yeah, I'd probably make some shitty supports if I had to write 20+ support chains if at least 3 conversations for 60+ characters, which was exactly my point. If I was relegated to making a small handful of supports that made sense, then I imagine I'd do a much better job. Suppose Donnel ONLY had Maribelle, Olivia and Miriel as his romance options. Donnel would come across as a much more interesting and dynamic character than he does when the rest of his supports offer nothing for his character besides a single line suggesting he might be decent with astrology.

It just goes back to the idea that even if IS does want to focus on gimmick-centric characters, they have a history of doing them well. But they've been more of a problem recently. I think there are 4 problems they're hitting with their gimmick characters: As I mentioned, they're leaning waaaay to much on the gimmicks driving the characters. Rather than it being something they use to explore or explain something about the characters, it has become a trait that just takes over the character and they rarely deviate from. There were examples of this in older FE games(Ilyana is a good example. She stands out in a cast of normal characters and gimmick characters as being one who is far too focused on her gimmick), but they were few and far between. Most of the gimmick characters offered... Something outside of their focus. It's fewer and farther between with this, though Fates was better in this regard... But Fates also had some of the worst gimmicks, so it's hard to cut it slack. There are far too many gimmick characters in the rosters. Again, Fates was a bit better than Awakening when it came to balancing normal characters and characters who had one major trait that they'd just bring into every conversation... But Fates had Peri and Nina, and brought back Tharja and Gaius, so... again, hard to give it slack. Compared to older games, though, both lean much more on the "Hahaha, oh this guy/girl is so goofy. They're doing their thing again!" thing for defining their characters. Touched on, but they're repeating gimmicks and just doing it worse. Oh man, Stahl likes naps. Haven't seen that before. Miriel's a huge nerd who likes books. That sure is original. Sumia likes cooking. Donnel sure is a downhome country boy. Olivia sure is a shy and timid person who's not great when eyes are on her. It goes on and on, and these are just the gimmicks that were repeated from characters in this conversation(Stahl and Haar, Miriel and Canas, Sumia and Lowen, Donnel and Nephenee, Olivia and Florina). Not only are many of these things not original to begin with, Fire Emblem has already done them. What more can many of these characters possibly add that wasn't touched on before? Turns out, not a lot. Especially when they ride their gimmicks so much harder. The overabundance of supports might be the thing driving this all. It's nearly impossible to write 1000+ lines of dialog for 60+ characters, with dialog that has no impact on others, ALL in different contexts, and make it convincing. It's probably why they rely on gimmicks so much for so many characters to provide consistent throughlines from topic to topic. It's probably why these characters struggle so much to add much beyond their gimmicks in 90% of their conversations. It's probably why the gimmicks are repeated. If they scale back the supports, I think that they can fix a lot of their character problems. I think Echoes exemplified this, but I think a lot of people think they probably went too far. Unless you were Alm, Celica, Gray, Tobin, Mae, Bowy or the small handful of other units who stayed relevant to the plot, you didn't get too many lines in general. But they still felt more like real characters on the whole, compared to many of their 3DS peers. Obviously there's the exception with Faye, but I still argue that Faye is supposed to be a deconstruction of the Tharja/Camilla archetype.

I liked my PSP as a portable emulator machine. The Vita's got some solid games, but once again it has mostly been relegated to a portable PS1.

It says a lot about the quality of their project that they've managed to build a legitimate business out of putting silly voices over a dumb anime that we all love.

In the broadest sense, I think a design that's simple(In a more artistic sense, not like "Oh, this character was made only using 7 lines!"), appealing, and, as you said, says what the character is about.

I think the reason the Lopto Sect gave Raydrik so much was because he was dumb. He was super strong, but he was very dumb/simple. He wanted power, but he didn't want overboard power. He wanted Munster, not just Connaucht, but as far as we know, that's it. They probably saw that as something beneficial, as Raydrik would be easier to control. Compared to giving Munster to Travant and having Travant control ALL of Thracia. Travant's a wild card. He wants what's best for his people, and he'll do anything to do it, including plotting against the Grannvale Empire/Lopto Sect. Or somebody else who they don't know. Raydrik's been plotting with the Lopto sect ever since they started creeping across Jugdral. They probably were familiar/comfortable enough with just having Raydrik do what he wanted.

I can't say I like his supports, either. The Maribel one offers nothing substantial about Gaius' actual character beyond just giving a story to tell. "I hurt your father. Sorry, but I was forced to do it and it helped you". Really not a lot of substance for Gaius beyond him being a generic nice guy who happens to be a thief. Again, it comes down to him having the personality of wet bread when candy's not involved. And the candy stuff is even worse. And his recruitment conversation is fine. Once.

Yeah. As much as I'm nostalgic for seeing things like Hero Crests and Knight Crests, there's not really any good reason to split promotion items like this, aside from the game forcing you to diversify your army a bit more.

King of the Hill is great. One of the best satires of the American south without being meanspirited about it. It's clear Mike Judge had a lot to comment on, while also clearly being nostalgic, since the show is based on the area and people he grew up around. It says a lot that people thought it was a genuine beacon of promoting wholesome family values, while generally being the opposite. This is from the dude who made Beavis and Butthead and Office Space, after all. But good satire is often hard to discern from the real deal. That said, I'm not sure how much you'd get out of it if you aren't American. But the show apparently has a decent Fanbase in Japan, and it was a meme factory there a while back.

The one positive I'll give him. Eventual access to Galeforce for somebody else. The rest I won't because his growths can only be as good as his class options, and his class options are ass.

Homer probably actually has an alcohol problem. Also hitting on 15 year old girls and joining an army for them is sketch. Canas is a pussy for letting Vaida trash his books. Also his con sucks.

He has, barring Peri, probably the worst, dumbest gimmick out of all of the Fateswakening gimmick characters. His entire character is based around CANDY. HIS TOPICS OF CHOICE ARE CANDY. And when he's not actively talking about candy, he's cramming as many candy puns as he can into his sentences. Out of every gimmick character, he's the one who is the absolute worst when it comes to not letting you forget about it. It's between him and Niles with Niles' constant innuendos, but at least Niles' character quirk is an actual character quirk, and not an obsession with something external(Figuratively and literally. Should you even try to skip all of Gaius' dialog, just looking at the candy stuck to him will remind you "HEY, REMEMBER THAT THIS GUY IS ALL ABOUT CANDY FOR SOME REASON". If there was to be a fair comparison to Niles, Niles would have to walk around with dildos strapped to his outfit). Outside of his candy, there's absolutely nothing to the guy. He says he doesn't like being violent, but that's a blatant lie. He's dumb. It's the moment I go to when I remember thinking that the writers simply gave up. I can generally see where they were coming from with most other characters, no matter... how misguided they were. But with Gaius, I simply see "They needed a thief character, and they just didn't care." Never mind how fucking annoying he is if you just don't find his gimmick funny. I haven't compared their dialog to compare pun ratio, but I give Asugi more slack because I simply remember waaaay fewer candy puns coming out of him. It might just be that Asugi is further out of the way so that I don't remember him quite as much, but even then, I can list that as a positive for Asugi. You don't even have to see him if you don't want to. Gaius is smack-dab in the middle of a story-heavy main chapter.

Oh, Ephraim is an OP lance lord and has a nice prf weapon.

Yeah, but Thieves suck in Awakening.

On the Raydrik point... He's more of an invading ruler than one that has any sort of right of succession. Remember, he betrayed Leif's grandpa and orchestrated the deaths of Ethlin and Quan. He was making vacancies across Munster so that he could take over the whole thing. Think of it like the vikings conquering England. England had Danish kings for a while. It's not quite the same, but assume the vikings worked with the Turks(Just roll with it) to take over England, with the agreement being that the Turks got to rule England. That's the Raydrik situation. Worked with the Lopto sect to control a larger portion than he would have gotten otherwise.