Slumber

After the loss of Wentz and the Eagles struggling to pull out a win for the second week in a row against a mediocre/bad team, it seems like a lot of places are putting Vikings at the top of the NFC. Which means they're about to blow it, as inevitably happens any time the Vikings get noticed. GG guys, it was good while it lasted. Home field advantage at the Super Bowl would have been nice.

If the game is supposed to come out in 2018, I expect at least a minute and a half. I think Fates got like, a 2 minute reveal, and that was about 6 months before its Japanese release? Probably something similar here.

I was comparing Soliel to Rhajat and Niles to show that there are gay/bisexual members of the army that the writers didn't feel the need to draw attention to for their sexuality. Rhajat's a creepy stalker and Niles is a horndog who can't go two sentences without making an innuendo like some dumb teenager, but neither of these traits feel like they're attributed to their sexualities. It's unfortunate that they're basically sexual deviants, but it feels like coincidence rather than something deliberate. Soliel's sexuality, meanwhile, is intrinsic to her character, and the writers decided to make it SO BAD that Soliel needed to be "converted" in the Japanese version(The western version isn't much better). Soliel is simply too attracted to women to even fight properly. Fucking Gatrie wasn't so weak to women that this was a problem, and half of Gatrie's character was about how voracious of a flirt he was. But the GIRL who was attracted to girls in Fates? Nah, there's gotta be something wrong with her. And we gotta drug her to fix her. Just a lot of... REALLY bad implications with Soliel. Even eclipsing the other bad implications of the other two gay/bisexual characters in Fates. And yeah, there are different writers working on the games, but you'd think after getting the concept of gay people down simply with Heather(IE there's nothing wrong with them, they are just attracted to the same sex) nearly a decade earlier in Radiant Dawn, they wouldn't fuck up THAT badly with a gay character, no matter who was writing it. *coughcough* Honestly you don't need a microscope to see how dumb Sacred Stones' writing is. There's my potshot at SS for the day.

Looks like we've found the Jags' cryptonite. It's... Wait, the 49ers? What in the fuck?

It was really weird to have Soliel in the same game as Niles and Rhajat. Yeah, Soliel's relationships with men is a problem, but Niles and Rhajat are fine? I don't know why the writers decided to go the direction they did with that. Plus, it's not like Radiant Dawn didn't have Heather, an open lesbian, who addresses misconceptions about her feelings by just saying "I'm just attracted to women." So I don't know why writing for gay/lesbian/bisexual characters was such a goddamn hurdle for Fates.

Best: Blazing Blade, Path of Radiance and Shadows of Valentia. Blazing Blade and Path of Radiance managed to make large casts very likeable. It amuses me to no end to compare characters like Canas to later book worms like Miriel and note the stark difference in the writing quality. Path of Radiance loses out a bit, thanks to Ilyana(AKA the Awakening/Fates character trapped in a Tellius game), but the writing quality is overall on par with Blazing. Shadows of Valentia reaches potentially a higher quality with a smaller cast, and the actual quality of the VA probably elevated the characters to me. The fact that nobody really felt like they were putting on an "anime voice" like with Fates and Awakening helped a lot. Mid tier: FE3/12, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10 FE4 did a lot with its first gen. The second gen felt very lazy and copy-paste by comparison. It's a mixed bag. FE3/12 and 5 do an admirable level of characterization with the amount of actual character dialog they put in the game. You can generally get a feel for unique characters by the handfuls of dialogue they get, but the lack of supports and character moments stops the characters from being fleshed out. I'm sure of these games had supports there'd be quite a few great characters in there, as opposed to the small handful who get fleshed out through the stories. FE5 gets some extra points for the weird, out of character for the franchise focus it gives the villains. FE5 takes a lot of time to flesh out one-off villains for some reason. FE6 is a bland cast. But you have supports, so you can at least find out WHY they're so bland. 8's is a solid, if a bit unremarkable, cast. Of all the trash I'll talk about SS, characters aren't what I'll trash talk. They did a decent job here, they're just not my favorite. 10 is basically just PoR again, but dragged down by the nothings that are the Dawn Brigade. Dishonorable mention: Fates Don't know why everyone seems to say that Fates is just a more obnoxious Awakening cast. I found the Fates cast far more down to earth and rounded than the Awakening cast, and I found that they tried to do more interesting things with their characters. But there are some insanely bad low points to the casts. IE Birthright Xander, Peri, the whole Soliel debacle, Conquest Takumi being a goddamn cockroach, and then the straight up Awakening characters/reincarnations that had no reason to be there. And the less said about the story villains, the better. Absolute worst: FE1/11 and Awakening Shadow Dragon has Marth. That's about it for solidly defined characters in the cast. It honestly makes the games incredibly hard to play with how stilted and sterile the characters feel. FE11's character art doesn't help, where every character looks like a homonculous that spent a little too much time in the vat of goo they spawned from. Awakening is gimmick hell. One thing I've absolutely come to hate in character writing is the way that shounen anime series handle secondary comic relief characters. 90% OF THE CAST FEELS LIKE SECONDARY COMIC RELIEF FROM SHOUNEN ANIME. And there's a reason these types are usually only shown sparingly and shown interacting with the actual main characters that have some dimensions to them: If you were to ever see these secondary comic relief characters talk to each other, you'd get dumb bullshit like "Hehe, carrots." "But candy tho." Which is EXACTLY what Gaius and Panne's supports boil down to for 4 goddamn conversations. I can't go over how much I hate Gaius... Or Tharja... Or Kellam... Oh God Kellam. His entire existence in the army makes me think less of everyone in the army. His character is a flatout joke. And not only is it a bad joke, it's a joke that makes no goddamn sense. Kellam is a hometown hero. So obviously people outside of the Shepherds acknowledge his existence. So why the fuck does nobody in the army realize he's there most of the time? It makes the whole army come across as a group of assholes who don't bother to acknowledge their friend/comrade. All for the sake of a stupid joke that runs itself into the ground by the second time it happens. Let alone the 50th. There are some decent characters in there. I like Lissa, Severa's a decent kid-type, and Henry is just Peri's gimmick, but handled by somebody self-aware enough to stop just before making Henry a downright murderer... But damn near everything else, man. Jesus Christ.

You know you can skip voiced lines, right? I really liked SoV's full VA, and I'd want to see it again, but I would be surprised to see a new FE manage to do it. SoV got away with it because of the game's smallish cast and VERY limited support system. A more modern Fire Emblem seems like it'd be a goddamn nightmare to VA.

Oh right, the Ravens shut them out, too. I guess purple just isn't Green Bay's color.

Howdy. Hope you have fun here.

If anyone is going to shut out the Packers, it has to be the Vikings. It's too poetic.

Well, this place is all about Fire Emblem, so you came to the right place. Welcome.

I probably wouldn't mind this. But I'd like, if there were no kids, they stuck with the A+ mechanic from Fates, and you could only get one A+ or one S rank, so that all character endings weren't just "These two fell in love and lived happily ever after". There have been interesting platonic endings in the franchise that have disappeared because of S ranks.

Whoops, misread. Yeah, Fire Emblem lacks the kind of Iron Manning where it gets its namesake from because of lord deaths. But this is true for many SRPGs. Langrisser was game-over if main characters died, Final Fantasy Tactics was game-over if Ramza crystalized, Vandal Hearts was a game over if Ash dies... And I don't think permadeath feels "out of place" in any of those. Maybe because they're all influenced by FE, but they all disregard reckless play that betray the "strategy" part of "strategy RPG". Random unlucky crits are going to be a thing that will probably always exist in FE, but it's another part of cautious play. Don't run up to the Killer Sword wielding Swordmaster with a unit who could easily die to an unlucky crit. I want permadeath to stay a main focus of the franchise, though. If the games start coming up with alternative solutions for permadeath, like Mila's Turnwheel, I think it'd be for the best. As much as the Swordmasters with Killer Swords with 50% crit are something you plan on tackling cautiously, there's not much you can do to the random Bandit who gets the 1% proc off. That kind of stuff is where something like Mila's is acceptable.

You are correct. But as mentioned, supports didn't actually have any impact on character endings.

The only games that allow multiple A ranks are also the only games with S ranks. I guess I should clarify that by eliminating S ranks, you'd go back to a single A rank, but I figured it went without saying.

Festivus for the rest of us.

I'm a permadeath guy. I like Mila's Turnwheel. I think they could nerf it a bit, but it definitely helps undoing unlucky crits that yeah, usually cause a reset from me if I don't decide on a hard Iron Man run. As opposed to Casual/Phoenix mode, I think higher tiers of difficulty should limit Mila's(Or whatever they replace it with for context) more, while lower difficulties let you use it more liberally.

That was the one I was iffy on. I could have sworn some of the ninja chapters in Conquest did, but I couldn't remember for sure. I probably should have checked with the remakes, too, but I couldn't remember if they had rescue. I thought 12 might, simply because it did adopt a lot of the later FE mechanics, but stayed true in some weird ways. I also knew FE12 didn't have anything other than seize, so I don't know why I put that in there.

FE6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 12 all have Fog of War. FE6-10 all have rescue, Awakening and Fates have Pair-up FE6 goes back to only defeat boss/seize, but FE7, 8, 9, 10, and Fates all have at least one of the Escape/Defend/Survive objectives. Most I can think of have at least Defend and Survive, and Path of Radiance brought back Escape and introduced the Arrive variant(Which is really just "Seize" without the throne/gate and without needing the Lord). And no? Gaiden doesn't have support bonuses. Bond/support bonuses were introduced in FE3.

Mystery did a lot to define the class balance as it still exists today, but Thracia's introduction of rescue(Eventually pair-up), support bonuses, fog of war and varied mission objectives, as well as the implementation of the weapon triangle and skills from Genealogy make Thracia feel a lot more in-line with modern FE than Mystery, which lacks these things. lol forgot support bonuses were introduced IN Mystery. The rest stands.

Say what you will about Thracia as a whole, but I'd argue that it IS one of the more important entries in the franchise. It's arguably the first time we got a Fire Emblem that resembles Fire Emblem that still exists today, and many gameplay conventions that it introduced and normalized are still around today.

Persona 5. It just did everything I wanted a Persona game to do. It advanced and polished the changes that Persona 3 made to the franchise, and it brought back some elements from before 3 that made the series' connection to the mainline SMT franchise apparent. I enjoyed the main storyline, and it probably has my favorite Persona cast. As much as I liked Persona 4's main cast and Persona 3's side characters, Persona 5 found a better balance(Biggest black spot being Ryuji). I liked that it had a clearer message and carried through with it for the whole game. And it probably has one of my favorite OSTs from the last few years, which can elevate games like crazy to me. It just does so much right for me. It was the fastest I have ever gone from first play through to second play through for an SMT game. Second place is close, and it's Breath of the Wild. As good as Breath of the Wild is, there were a lot of points where I thought "Man, if they just did this, it'd be so much better". It had some rough edges, which keep it from taking the number 1 spot. But it's probably the closest Nintendo's ever gotten to reinventing the Zelda formula in a way that OoT did 20 years ago, and it's probably the best "adventure" game I've ever played, because it feels like a damn adventure. Then it's a bit of a jump down to Mario Odyssey at #3. Persona 5 and Zelda felt like full course meals, Mario felt like a top-tier snack. I was satisfied with the time I spent with it, but in hindsight it's probably not an experience that will stick with me nearly as much. #4 is Nioh. Tightest/most compelling action game I've played in a long time. But it's got some rough spots that aren't salvaged by the experience like Zelda was. #5 would be Echoes, Resident Evil 7 or Nier. Flawed games that do things in unique ways that made them memorable and enjoyable. So yeah. Persona 5 is my number 1, but I wanted to comment on my top 5.

Yeah, the abruptness of the jump from friendship to marriage and the homogeneous dialogue across all S ranks is what I was getting at when I said S ranks in Fates and Awakening were lazy. Hell, there were some S ranks that don't even jump from "friendship" to marriage. Nearly all of Beruka's S ranks involve her having 3 conversations with some guys about how her inability/reluctance to connect with people makes her good at her job. But by the 4th conversation she can fall in love with damn near every dude in the Nohr army. Like. What? And half of Maribelle's A ranks end in very similar ways to get her to go from "High-class bitch who bosses people around" to "proper lady who is just trying to better these men and being friendly to them out of nowhere" JUST so the S ranks don't feel like they literally come out of nowhere. Limiting S ranks to pairings that make sense would help a lot, but I think just doing what they used to do and just end at A, typically before any declaration of love and saving love revelations until AFTER the conflict of the game is over, would work better. Either way, continuing with how they are now doesn't do anything to help most of these characters feel fleshed out, which is supposed to be the whole point of support conversations.

Beyond the way S rank supports have been so lazy in Awakening and Fates, this is another reason I like that so many supports in the past ended on platonic notes. Even further than Florina/Lyn, look at Ike. It's far from a niche theory that he's gay. I'd argue that IS never intended this, and wanted to go with "the wandering hero" archetype with him, which is why he never has a set-in-stone romance. But his close relationships with men, especially Soren and Ranulf, and their ambiguous dialogues and endings, lead to the theory that Ike is gay. Which is neat for a group of people who had gotten spotty representation before. I mean, there was Heather? And that was it for gay characters in Fire Emblem up until that point? But with Ike, gay players were able to latch on to a character who wasn't some random dude. They were able to relate to the main character, who stops conflicts with his presence and beat a Goddess. If Radiant Dawn/PoR had S ranks, I can almost guarantee that Ike would have only had straight romance options. No more ambiguity that allows players to reasonably imagine Ike as a strong character that represents a small, but still significant and underrepresented group of people. Instead it would have been "And then Ike boned Elincia/Mia/Titania/some random chick he met that wasn't important enough to model or give a name to and lived happily ever after", which we already have a million endings of for lords. So yeah, I think just not doing S ranks would help a lot.

You're correct. Silque is Alm's route, Genny is Celica's. Ma bad. Also, not sure this is the best option. At least I don't see it as being much better than "Nobody is gay". As much as I think sexuality is a spectrum, people do tend to swing one way nearly 100% of the time. Even self-proclaimed bi-sexuals tend to prefer one sex over the other, and making everyone equally bi-sexual can have some bad implications with it. The idea of everyone being bi could run the risk of it feeling like "sexuality is a choice", which obviously isn't going to sit well if the idea of making everyone bi is to ensure gay and bi people get represented properly. Even the more sexually progressive western developers have a problem with this. BioWare caught flak for Dragon Age 2 for how easily the main character just latches onto any romantic moves from NPCs regardless of sex, and Mass Effect 3 suddenly introduced gay romance options for MaleShep a character who previously had none(Though of course this was probably to address the equally problematic fact that FemShep had gay romances going all the way back ME1). I think the better option is to make a small handful of characters are strictly gay(Or bi) for both genders, and simply write them as if they were any of the straight ones. No Niles, no Rajhat, NO Soliel scenarios. Just good, non-hetero characters.