Slumber

I re-watched that clip of the touchdown and I still can't believe it.

That's gonna be one of the top plays of the year.

I'm never giving the Viking the benefit of the doubt ever again. OH MY GOD WHY DO I HAVE TO EAT MY WORDS

COMPLETE A PASS KEENUM JESUS CHRIST oh hey field goal

AGHHHHHHHHHHHHH VIKINGS THINGS ARE HAPPENING

I don't think people would agree prior to Echoes with that, either. FE2 had a lot of big sins that were tied to its game design. Bad hit rates, the way magic worked, the map design, the way Arcanists and Witches work, desert and swamp maps, the limited classes and imbalance within the classes. All things they kept 95% in tact, yet still weren't major detractions from the game for a lot of people.

As much as this is true, people ALSO said the same thing about Echoes and FE2. FE2 was considered the black sheep of the FE franchise for way longer than FE4 has. Yet Echoes seems to have struck a chord with a lot of people in a way that going back to FE2 never would have, and a lot of it has to do with a lot of the quality of life changes made to the game, rather than intrinsic changes to the gameplay.

SSSSSSSSHHHH The moment the Vikings become the favorite is always the moment it falls apart. Like right now.

Probably Orsin from Thracia 776. It's so rare for a unit to dominate the game from beginning to end, barring the few chapters he leaves.

Literally like half of their team is injured. They probably don't have many options. The Vikings are starting to be the Vikings we all know and try to ignore moving into the 4th quarter.

But that's giving him a reason that'd be one thing, but the jump from "My world is destroyed" to "Humanity must be exterminated" is HUGE. FE6 portrays Zephiel as definitely dangerous and a bit unhinged, but never full-blown insane. The links from FE7 do very little to show us how the man in FE6 turned into who he is.

Vikings off to a strong start. Keep it up, you glorious bastards.

She stays with Hausen for a few months, and the epilogue of Lyn mode has her standing atop a hill, looking back towards Sacea, with the text straight up saying she longed to go back to the plains. And by the time of her adventures with Eliwood and Hector, is expressing a desire to go back to the plains to all of her potential love interests except for Hector. COuld she choose a love one over the plains? Sure. But even your example of her staying with her grandfather in Caelin castle shows that she'd rather be in the plains. Your sister may have moved out to the old country, but was "Man I love living in the city" an intrinsic part of her personality, or did she simply enjoy the convenience of city life(Assuming she grew up in the city if Bavaria was a massive change of pace for her)? Plus, the one thing that separates your sister from Lyn is that your sister is a real person. Real people aren't as static as fictional characters. What we see is what we get with a lot of fictional characters, and part of Lyn's character, shown in both her own mode and in Hector and Eliwood's modes through most of her supports, is that she really likes the plains of Sacea. To the point where it is an intrinsic part of her character. It comes up in nearly all of her supports and her own campaign is capped off with her wanting to go back. I agree. Unless they go the route I want and they remake FE7 before FE6, in which case I can see them adding a bit of dialogue like they did with PoR supports adding dialogue to RD. I don't think they'll make any pairings "canon", outside of maybe side ones like Nino and Jaffar or stuff like that. I'm going to disagree heavily here. You absolutely need a reason to want to genocide your own race. There are people who want to watch the world burn, but most of them are psychopaths who usually don't get anywhere. People like the Joker can only exist in comics because it's a HUUUUUUGE stretch that anybody like him would last very long. The closest we've probably gotten in modern times is Charles Manson, and his cult managed to kill a handful of people, not something bordering on genocide. Zephiel not having a solid reason for his actions is incredibly unbelievable for a person like him, even as somebody who inherited vast power. Especially if they want to go with the route that they were starting to go with in FE7. In FE7, he had the support of his mother, the whole country, his sister, and Murdock. As bad as abuse can warp peoples' minds, it's really far-fetched to have somebody who basically had the entire world to support him, except for his father who tried to unsuccessfully assassinate him to suddenly hate ALL of humanity to the point where he wants to exterminate it. Fire Emblem has tried to do crazy, illogical, completely unhinged antagonists before. They NEVER turn out well compared to the understandable villains with believable backstories.

2/3 on upsets in the playoffs proper. For the love of God, Vikings, please don't choke.

The thing that confused me was that you used one conversation that showed that Lyn felt sad for Hector over the death of Uther, a trait she shows multiple times over the course of the game, as a blanket conversation that covers ALL of her post-Uther interactions with Hector and said "I think it's pretty clear what it's implying". I disagreed. This follow up did a much better job at showing what you were getting at, which I still don't really agree with, however. Sacae is about as far from both Ostia and Pharae as you can get in Elibe, and it's blocked off from Lycia by a giant mountain range. You have to go through Bern to get to it, which during Zephiel's rise to power, I don't think much needs to be said about how impractical Lyn being to "get away" to the plains. It's not like Bern during Lyndis' life, where she could go to Caelin to see her grandfather before he dies, and the mountains of Bern were only bandits. Her life as a nomadic Sacean ends with marriage to either Eliwood and Hector. You can make assumptions that maybe she did... SOMETHING in whatever castle she ties down to to keep her tied to her Sacaen heritage, but short of living in a yurt on the castle grounds, I have no idea what that would be. The only really explicit ways in which we KNOW that she embraces her heritage, which is something you really, really have to work for her to not do, is when she goes back to the plains of Sacea in the other 3 of her endings. Maybe saying it's a "Betrayal" to her character is a bit strong, but if in 4 of the 5 paths to her endings she mentions strongly longing to go back to the plains of Sacea, what sounds truer to her character? The 3 endings that do lead to her going back, the 1 ending that has her marrying into royalty despite mentioning that she wants to go back, or the 1 ending that has her marrying into royalty and not mentioning that she wants to go back? And in EVERY SINGLE one of Lyn's endings, Caelin folds into Ostia, because Caelin is a part of Ostia in FE6. That's just how it works. She never carries her grandfather's legacy, she either lives as Eliwood's wife and has no more ties to Caelin, she lives as Hector's wife and isn't explicitly said to have any power beyond being support for Hector(She gets the same generic ending as Hector's other partners), or goes back to the plains with Kent or Rath, or on her own. What about Lilina? Who's to say Florina or Farina don't do the exact same thing? Florina ultimately has the same adventure Lyn has, and Farina's a globe-trotting mercenary. The many stories Lilina hears from her mother don't really equate to "Oh, that could only be Lyn" in my eyes. There are a lot of gaps you could fill, and I think part of why Zephiel feels so half-baked is that I don't think he was really the focal point of the developer's thoughts when they decided to make a prequel to FE6. For FE6, they probably thought "Oh, let's have a generic ruler who wants to do generic bad guy stuff like Raydrik or something.", and then they tacked on the Gary Stu personality and the laughably underdeveloped assassination attempts by his father. As he is now, it almost hurts his character to that we know as much as we do, because it feels like the developers didn't really care to develop his path to being a dragon supremacist. His mother being abusive/manipulative could help, since now you don't have one doting parent and one abusive one, with him arbitrarily deciding all of humanity is like the abusive parent. It'd help draw a clearer picture that he didn't feel like he had anyone to turn to besides his sister Guinivere, and his stoic, supportive knight Murdock.

Howdy Raz. Hope ya have a good time.

Titans off to an early lead is encouraging, but it goes without saying that you should never count the Patriots out until the game is over.

Damn you Falcons. Now the Vikings have to play on the road, supposing they beat the Saints tomorrow. I still favor them over the Eagles, but you guys threw that game away.

Yeah, I think there's room to make Zephiel being a good villain. Most villains don't get two games of build-up. Building him up from FE7 and giving him more scenes to show him discovering things that could make him break would make him a bit more understandable in FE6. And potentially not having him be quite as extreme as he is in FE6. Turn him from an irredeemable bad guy to somebody clearly trying to right some wrongs, or something that seems a bit more in-line with his characterization of being a nice kid. But as he is... I really don't like how he's written.

I have no idea what you mean by "It seems pretty obvious what Lyn wants to do". The ending of that conversation has her questioning when Hector learned that her friend, his brother, and plot-relevant character Uther, died. I assume you mean she wants to be with Hector, but that's not exclusive to Hector on either path, either. She wants to go with Matthew as he buries Leila, and she wants to be with Eliwood longer while he's(Seemingly) still grieving over his father, and she doesn't want him fighting in chapter 20/21. It's just who Lyn is, she often likes to play emotional support and be a shoulder to lean on. I don't see her wanting to be there for Hector as he's grieving. If you're implying that that one conversation is what leads to her settling down with Hector, then I really, really don't see it. I can't see that extending "Lyn wants to give up the Sacean heritage she's proud of and the Nomad life she took over ruling Caelin for to be with Hector because she's sad his brother died." Look, I get Zephiel has daddy issues. It's a common theme for villains. But Zephiel's turn from "Loved by literally everybody in his kingdom besides his father" to "Humanity is shit because my daddy didn't love me" is very, very poor character development for him. He's portrayed as being this perfect angel of a character with no flaws who everyone in Bern adored in FE7, and because of a few assassination attempts by his clearly unhinged and deranged father causes him to go on a one-man conquest... It feels like some bad fanfiction level writing for when somebody needs to introduce a villain and has no idea how to. Compared to Seriphan living for hundreds and thousands of years, only to see all of his good deeds go undone and all of his good will be abused by humanity, only for it to finally crack when he sees his entire race nearly go extinct at the hands of humanity. It's a much more believable path to becoming a villain than "My daddy tried to kill me, so everyone must die, long live dragons." It's absolutely something I would want re-written in a hypothetical Binding/Blazing Blade remake. Maybe focus more on him emphathizing with dragons and being upset with humanity BEFORE he goes nuts. Or maybe show him growing cold over the constant in-fighting between houses in Elibe. Don't focus 95% on one guy trying to kill him driving him to try to genocide his own race.

I'm struggling to think of many beyond Ninian and Eliwood, and even that one's still not technically canon. Alm and Celica have a total of two scenes together that aren't a flashback before the end of the game. Gray and Claire get maybe one or two scenes that aren't supports together. Sigurd and Deirdre have about 4 lines of dialogue together before they get married, which up to that point, isn't much more than what Sigurd gets with Edain. Mareeta gets arguably more screentime than Nanna in FE5, yet, Leif marries Nanna. Bartre and Karla get a single scene together. Calill and Largo get NO scenes together as far as I recall. Micaiah and Sothe might be the one case where there's really substantial time between canon love interests.

There are ultimately 2 pairings for Lyn that actually make sense for her character for me. Both of them are the two that allow her to stay in the plains. Any other ending where Lyn goes off to live in a castle seems like a total betrayal to her character, and Lyn has way more interactions with Eliwood and Hector than Rath and Kent, and the former 2 have her go off to live in a castle, while the latter 2 are the ones that let her be where she wants to be. So I think there's an argument against saying she only makes sense marrying people she interacts with a bunch. As for the Binding remake... Fix the maps. Fix the balance. Add objectives that aren't just "Seize". And for God's sake, don't just remake Binding Blade for the sake of it. As much as it makes sense to bring out ASAP because it's never made it outside of Japan and people like Roy from Smash, it makes more sense to remake FE7 first. With the way the games play off each other, I feel like an FE6 remake would benefit a lot more from being a proper follow-up to FE7, as opposed to FE7 being a prequel.

When he says "Detective Pikachu, Bolt of Brilliance!", you can really tell. That's an Owain line, and it's delivered like one.

Glad VIII is coming to the Switch. I've been meaning to get around to it, but I've been waiting for the new translation to really jump in. It also seems to have brought way more attention to VIII than the original release did, which is nice for a franchise that has constantly gone overlooked by a workhorse developer that deserves more credit. Damn if Falcom hasn't made some damn good games that have their own identities. Back to Ys specifically, this has inspired me to go back and go through the games again. I started with Oath of Felghana, really liked it, and never played anything else for whatever reason. Any standouts I should check out next?

The long and short of it is that Dragon Quest is putting together a lot of ideas, putting it in a neat package, and putting it somewhere people could widely access it. It shaped how JRPGs were and still are made, but ultimately even Dragon Quest is not a wholly original idea in the gamesphere. It just managed to put the pieces together in a way people could wrap their heads around.