Slumber

They should have definitely added axes and added at least one new classline to utilize them. I don't even know if I'd want the weapon triangle to reflect this, but the game has you picking up axes that you can't use. And units like Atlas seem like a no-brainer as an Axer. Revamping some maps would have been nice.

Throwing Marth under the bus because 50% of the Lords in the franchise are modeled after him seems odd. I also find it funny that you say this when Roy and Leif are basically complete opposites, to the point where I'm starting to wonder if you've played their games or payed attention to their stories. Roy's deal is that he's incredibly well learned, optimistic and he's a great strategist that doesn't want to hurt people, even his enemies. He almost always makes the right decisions and knows the best ways to keep his vastly underpowered army strong against the titan army that is Bern. The few times where he doesn't have the answers, the answers basically come to him. Leif, meanwhile, is angry, emotional, and short-sighted when it comes to fulfilling his goals, which are mostly violent in nature. It leads to him making many critical errors in his game, which result in him being captured and his liberation force disbanding, several territories he liberates being taken again, and the death of one of his strategists. Thracia's an entire game about Leif overcoming his weaknesses and becoming a leader, and virtually nothing else. The game doesn't have some continent-ending conflict at the center, it's just Leif trying to liberated his corner of Thracia and avenge his grandfather. And, depending on if you want to use secondary material, he's also INCREDIBLY insecure that he's Seliph's cousin, since everyone sees Seliph as this messiah figure and Leif is basically just chopped liver. These are both pretty distinct differences from Marth, who yeah, has a pretty standard character and story, but that's because he was the first. I'll give you Seliph, since the only thing he really has going for him is being the son of Sigurd, but the other 3 don't deserve to be tossed under the bus as having nothing going on. There are better choices than those 3, anyway. Eliwood, I can't say, really has anything unique to besides his friendship with Hector. He's just a stock good guy who wants to do good things. Eirika and Ephraim are both pretty flat, IMO, with Eirika being Celica 2.0 and Ephraim being "I'M GREAT!" the character.

It is. That's how the Republicans have been selling Roy Moore. "At least he's not a Democrat."

Dear Miami: I still think we should get rid of Florida, but the Dolphins can stay.

No. Unless it's a FE4 remake, I don't want two generations. Fully flesh out one generation before you add a second for no reason. Until IS proves they can do this, I am going to say no to kids. Also, definitely the wrong place for the topic.

Just going to point out that Intelligent Systems is a Nintendo development studio. Not just a subsidiary like Monolith, an independent partner like GameFreak, or a third party who gets funding like Platinum. Nintendo owns ALL of their stock, meaning Nintendo ultimately gets the last word when it comes to IS decisions. They used to be IN Nintendo's main offices until about 4 years ago, and their "big" move put them right next to another one of Nintendo's main studios. When IS isn't making Fire Emblem, they're typically making Paper Mario and Wario games.

Ew. Ick. I couldn't disagree any more with Deen. Him having the color scheme of Coldsteel the Hedgehog only makes matters worse. He looks like a 40 year old dad trying to be an edgy teenager. I'll do one male I like, and one female I like from each game: FE1/3/11/12: Samson, Minerva FE2/15: Atlas, Celica FE4: Jamke(Specifically his poncho version from the TCG), Tailtyu/Nanna FE5: Homer Galzus, Amalda FE6: Hugh, Echidna FE7: Matthew, Priscilla FE8: Rennac, ... FE9: Ranulf, Lucia FE10: Boyd, Sanaki(If ONLY because of her weird parachute pants and mini-poncho) I think that about covers it. My most favorite should be obvious.

Standouts probably being Largo, Cowen and Gomes. I also like that FE5 portrays the bandits as generally being people pushed to the edge by the Empire(Bucks becomes an honest man if you spare him, Gomes outright saying that banditry was all that he had left to keep himself from starving to death before Dagdar made the Violdrake bandits become farmers), rather than people who pillage and kill for fun. Though Colho still does that.

I partially disagree. It finally gives some sort of explanation to Walhart's philosophy. It finally makes sense that Walhart, being the emperor of Alm's continent 2000 years later, would know about Grima(Or the vague threat he knew about), and was preparing for it. Beyond just explanations of "Oh, some clairvoyant psychic wizard told him." That said, a post-game's implications should a lot bigger than just filling holes in a game that came out 2 entries and 5 years ago.

I would have liked it more than Takumi. Conquest portrays Takumi as this obnoxious cock-rocket who hates Corrin immediately. All throughout the game he basically stalks you and tries to kill you at every opportunity. By the time you get to the final boss, and Takumi stumbles in, the reaction is more "Oh god, this fucker again" than it is any genuine emotion, and as @Sunwoo said, the game makes it completely seem like Corrin putting him in the dirt is a logical, good conclusion. Sakura, meanwhile, is immediately sympathetic. She loves her big bro, regardless of the side he fights for. If there were hints that she was secretly building up resentment or guilt for following Corrin, and it culminated in a finale where Anankos used her pain and repressed negative emotions to fight Corrin, I can guarantee it wouldn't be some celebration. The ending would be a lot more emotionally impactful than beating Takumi for the nth time. Plus, since Sakura is playable, the idea that Corrin potentially marrying and having kids with her would be such a gut punch to some people. It wouldn't be another "Good job Corrin, you beat the bad guy, you're so amazing!" scene, which really never should have been in Conquest. So yeah. I think a final boss against Sakura has way more potential to be interesting.

This has been a bad day for injuries. Bell's the second big name to get injured today. Wentz is going to be out for the whole season, though. Hopefully Bell can recover. Football's always more fun when teams play at their best.

Yeah, it was a legit overturn, but it would have changed the game if the Vikings went into the second half ahead. Instead, they played catch up for the rest of the game, which bit them in the ass in the last 3 minutes and the Panthers managed to take the lead.

As DLC, sure. Why not?

I knew going in that the Panthers was going to be an uphill battle. The decision to overturn Thielen's TD before halftime kinda set the tone for the whole game. Oh well. The one week as the top team in the NFC was nice. I just wish the Browns didn't Brown it up in the second half of that game. Being able to give Cheeseheads endless shit for losing to the Browns would have made up for a Vikings loss. Not that being forced into overtime against the Browns is much better. Literally as close as you can get to losing without losing.

Even as somebody who likes FE4, I would have no problem with a ton of gameplay changes just as long as they kept the story and mostly kept the big maps.

Whoops. Weird time-out stuff.

This is only partly true. The idea that more console units=more sales isn't always true. There is a "peak" that systems reach, and it's more so true with handhelds. Basically, as soon as new hardware is on the horizon, software sales take a big hit. With Echoes' case, it released in the 3DS' SIXTH year on the market, which is exceptionally late in a handheld's life. For comparison, New Mystery released in the sixth year of the DS' life, and Nintendo didn't even bother localizing it because it was so late in the DS' lifespan that they didn't think there'd be foreign interest. For a more extreme comparison, Thracia 776 came out in 1999, when statistically the Super Famicom had more units out there than ever before. It is far and away the lowest selling game in the franchise. To top this off, Echoes released just one month AFTER the Switch. The move from the 3DS was already happening. I don't think Nintendo was expecting anything besides Pokemon to sell well this year.

I'm going to lose my mind if the Packers are the team to break the Browns perfect losing streak. Also DAMMIT, a Vikings TD got overturned.

It came off like I was attributing this more to color palette when I should have attributed this more to detail. I mentioned everything being shiny and clean, which I don't think needs much clarification, but I should probably add that part of the problem for me also comes from how exaggerated his style is. I should also probably mention that Kozaki's style in this regard got considerably more exaggerated in Fates compared to Awakening. With Awakening it's hard to tell if it's just Kozaki's artstyle that clashes with the series, or if it's the hard left that the art direction took. There were still some questionable choices, like Gaius being so obsessed with candy that it's literally stuck to him all over the place, but it was somewhat digestible. Fates was another level entirely. Fates is where it goes from "Does this art direction not fit for the series?" to "Does Kozaki not fit with this series?" Everything from character basic character features like hair stood out way more than previous games. Where most(Not all, but I'd consider it way more rare) of the time, old FE games looked like something people could reasonably have, sans the hair colors. Damn near everyone in Fates has feathered, blown out hair, or very slicked, styled hair. Benny's just about the only Fates dude who doesn't look like he spends 2 hours styling his hair because he's got a short crew cut. Without beating the ridiculous hair drills(Since Awakening's also guilty of dumb hair drills) or Peri into the ground over and over, look at Keaton's skunked mohawk/pompadour/mullet combo and tell me it resembles anything else in the franchise, or Azama's feathered fro, or Shura's skunk hairsplosion. And that's just the hair. On the Nohr side(Which is where armor designs as a whole would be comparable to previous games), armor/clothing is so unreasonably detailed. The simplest design in the Nohr army is again, Benny. Compared to FE10 Gatrie, where even at the time I thought was overdesigned, I can at least kind of tell how Gatrie's armor is put together and what each individual piece does. Benny's got like, a ring of plates around the belly area of his armor, you can clearly see the straps on his armor, yet his pauldrons look like they're screwed to his chest piece and his arm pieces, he had these MASSIVE elbow pads that wrap around to the front of his elbow, his skirt looks like it's in two layers. There's a lot going on, even again, compared to what I consider is probably the previous king of "Too much shit going on" for armor knights. Compare just about any Nohr character to a character of the same class from any previous FE, and there's a pretty stark difference. Anime gets a bad rap for being overly exaggerated with its designs, and I definitely would say Fates(And Awakening to a lesser extent) falls into that trapping more than any previous Fire Emblem. So that's partially what I meant by "Toned down".

I wasn't the biggest fan of Senri Kita either, to be honest. But a big part of why Kozaki's art feels so "anime" is that it's so bright, shiny and clean. There's no grit to anything he drew, and it seemed even worse compared to his work on stuff like No More Heroes, where his art had used a lot of black, and it almost had a comic book feel. Even if Senri Kita or Eiji Kaneda had pretty standard anime style, their artstyles were a lot more toned down. It fit the tone a lot more with what Fire Emblem was before they started doing art. And big eyes aren't the only thing distinct in anime. Western animation makes use of giant eyes, too. What non-anime artstyles typically don't do is... stuff like Peri. Or giant hair drills like Elise and Maribelle.

Game's not complete until Ribrianne gets announced.

I agree with the latter part, but how is it likely that it'll be Kozaki? They typically switch artists every time they move to new tech, and they've NEVER gone back to an old artist after switching. FE is moving to new hardware, and Hidari did Echoes. It'd be incredibly out of character to bring Kozaki back. Plus, Kozaki will likely also be doing art for No More Heroes: Travis Strikes Back during the development of FE Switch. Not that he can't do two games at once, but I don't remember him having anything else lined up while working on Awakening or Fates. I also really don't want him back. Even if the art director was to blame for the awful designs of the 3DS games, Kozaki was too anime. Fire Emblem's plenty anime, but it should never be THAT anime. I like his work on NMH, but for FE he did less than stellar work, IMO. I don't care how technical his art style is, it didn't feel right. Rembrandt is an amazing artist, but he wouldn't have been able to pull of Starry Night, if you get what I'm saying.

Whatever I do, it has to have a horribly tone deaf, moody cover of a pop/rock song from before the 90s. Because all game commercials must have that these days.

The forgery accusation turned out to be false, but she did admit adding to what was there. Doesn't change the fact that Roy Moore signed the yearbook of a high school girl who still has some legitimate claims.

Voting because I have a dog* in this fight. *dawg and it's Homer.