Interdimensional Observer

So that's how Gooron came to be! The real Garon decided Nohr was a cesspit and took the kingship of Plegia instead since he thought Grima's litterbox was better off. I find Ricken to be worse than Miriel since besides joining later, he has low Speed, a vital state for a fragile offense-oriented unit like a mage to do their job. His Str and Def leads don't make up for it, and he has no magical alternate classes for the no-grind ingame, whereas Miriel has nothing but magical classes. I also dislike him as being a poor Merric in general. I like the archetype, and Soren, Asbel, and Merric himself (as well as lesser emanations of the archetype if such exist) are just way better than him and Hayato. Two other things: Ricken has no support with Chrom, despite the two appearing to be friends; and given gameplay numbers, the idea that Aversa was fazed by Ricken's Elwind casting is a laugh. I vaguely recall his Henry support as being good though, that I will say. I don't think the Gregor support was so good though. Is it fair to say that same-sex supports (barring Robin/Corrin) in 13 & 14 are significantly better written on the whole than opposite sex ones?

She never really became Lyn's bodyguard. She just tagged along for her own protection and liking after coincidentally meeting in the mountains when Lyn and the Cavs were en route to Caelin. Florina just stuck around afterwards since she's Lyn's friend and found a job working for Caelin defending her. In the character endings, Florina leaves Lyn for Ilia if unpaired, and she does this even if the two are paired. I just checked the English script here on SF, never was there dialogue saying anything like "I'll be your bodyguard". In other words, they made up something to talk about. Perhaps it's because Fates has 16+ retainers, all of whom are sworn to protect their lieges, so that's why the comparison was made. But Florina is never like Sain or Kent an official soldier in service of Lyn, she's always her friend first and never quite her retainer. And friendship > being a retainer. The latter is a servant who is obliged by duty to work for you, the latter is an equal who owes you nothing out of duty and vice versa, your relationship is free, informal, and more emotional. At least, that is what it seemed like to me from a little snippet I read on Tokugawa Japan.

I'm getting a sense of "conflict of wants" here. On the one hand, it sounds like I just can't solo the map with one character. Nor can I, like in Samurai Warriors Chronicles, use 4 of whoever I want willy nilly and just field Nobunaga, Masamune, Nene and Kotaro all the time (although if you're going for the 4th Weapons there, you are kinda locked into using a handful of characters like for the sake of ease). I have to be very attentive in who I use and when. This is bad, because I in Musou, I want to be able to mow down everyone with just the characters I want to use. If I like Fire Emblem for its characters, this is bad. On the other hand, being forced to use multiple characters strategically, including characters I may not personally like if I don't want to put additional difficulty on myself, is very much in line with Fire Emblem. In other words, this is a Fire Emblem: Musou, and not Musou: Fire Emblem, if you get what I mean. As someone fond of Fire Emblem gameplay, I should like this. This game is too much of one part of FE, and too little of another at the same time. Then again, Normal and Easy exist for character fetishers, and who plays Lunatic using only their favs without excessive grinding? I'd wager playing on Easy should make arrows and Falchions sting next to nothing, so that is there for character lovers who find the gameplay secondary. Lunatic and Hard are there for people who are really into the gameplay itself, that sounds fine to me. History Mode doesn't have difficulties though right? That's a bummer for the "character casuals". I've never played them, but perhaps FEW leans a bit towards being Bladestorm or Kessen by virtue of the FE element, even if it is more much Musou than either of them?

Since you really praised Elise and Leo, are mages (and maybe Tiki and archers?) by virtue of being out of the WT superior to others? Or at least allow you to be less attentive to enemy placement with acceptable costs?

I've heard some people suggest otherwise. That they were in the process of being added, but then Lyn and Celica came up and thus Navarre and Owain got canned for them. However this hypothesis doesn't explain Niles and Oboro getting dropped (Cordelia though I've also heard here on SF was a late addition, maybe Anna was another?).

I think in the case of this game, the absence of distinction among the magic types reflects, besides Robin's Smash influences, two things: The fact this game is the first FEW. They didn't have the time and resources (or want to put them in) to include that many unique pure mage movesets, hence we got Leo (Elise is clone-ish right?) and Robin, with everyone else having magical touches as per the norm for many Musou chars. To mitigate complaints of leaving a particular FE Magic type unrepresented, they threw them all into the movesets they did include. Later, I'll be expecting them to have particular mages focus on a single magic type, it'd be odd if Micaiah used Wind and not purely Light. Likewise, I'd expect, and want, Lewyn (or Merric) to be so overloaded with Wind Magic up the wazoo that you'd be able to see wind gusts passing into one digestive tract orifice of an enemy and out the other. But that is novelty they couldn't afford to do with this first game. Secondly, the three games focused on for FEW are SD, Awakening, and Fates. None of these games have a hard and fast categorial distinction between magic types. GBA, Jugdral, and Tellius do, but in SD and Fates, magic of all the kinds are lumped into one Tome category, and Awakening's Sorcerers can use Dark, Anima, and even Naga equally well.

And I meant to offer my sympathies since I can see your points. The Master Quest and Termina maps were particularly bad on the item situation. Since the Sacred Realm alone knows what spaces you're supposed to use the Recorders on MQ without using a Compass first. There was also the need for two Rafts, but the one square that offers them is a Gdorf locked "All Attacks Are Devastating!" which is nerve wracking. As for Termina, you need Goron Masks to get anywhere you'll discover, and that forces you to head north to Snowhead to grind and pick a few up since the rest are locked behind things. Furthermore I didn't really mean the first line at all. I shouldn't have included it. I'll concur with your remarks here.

If you have the save data remaining, compare to her averages available here. Then you'll be able to see if you got screwed with her again and again.

I might want to defend HW as superior to this piece of roster trash, but I'm far too rational to do that. You're certainly right that giant bosses were something of hindrance in HW, since they were slow, predictable, and easy. Except when King Dodongo refuses to inhale- the RNG for that was problematic. Do you think the Dark variants were in principle at good idea? Since it slashed away their super defenses and made them more normal. Perhaps mid-sized foes akin to Dark Giant Bosses would be a worthy addition to HW2, although Giant Bosses themselves are a big nod to the typical Zelda formula (perhaps the two series don't really belong together- the Adventure Mode comment you made falls here too). I'd add that HW had a problem with officers. Namely your attacks were just too weak against them without a Weak Point Smash, there was almost no point in not waiting for a WPS unless you were overleveled and or had an elemental advantage. I think the game overemphasized them and next time should treat them as a bonus vs. normal officers, and necessary only against the really tough ones.

Yeah I didn't mean to force it in nor demand it or anything. That was a side thought I really should have left out since It understandably hijacks the conversation. And again, IS hasn't gone overboard with it yet or anything, so I don't think they would with FE4 remakes.

Well no, not necessarily, the physical infantry being bad thing just morphed out of control, I was just giving the origin of the madness.

I tried doing some of my own analyses, they might be a little off and I haven't updated it for SoV (and I forget where I had the averages listed), but here is the stuff for 1-10: And here is SD: New Mystery: Awakening: And Fates was the last game I did: (You can ignore the errata at the end)

I've had a rather random though derived from the comments of physical infantry being useless: Pogo-stick!Oboro. Which then led to me thinking of making melee infantry more relevant by giving them alternative forms of transportation, like Segway!Anna, and Hoverboard!Arthur. Which then led to a more productive, if still very lighthearted thought: Sports Banners! Imagine: Lyn and Florina vs. Hinoka and Oboro in International Football/American Soccer! Donnel playing Baseball in the outfield trying to catch the ball slammed by Roy! American Football- RD!Ike vs. Fates!Arthur. Men's Tennis Singles- Gray vs. Tobin. Women's Tennis Doubles- Celica and Serra vs. Tana and Lilina. Basketball- Ephraim takes on Ryoma. Minerva takes on Cherche. Cycling: PoR!Ike vs. Alm on the mens side approaching the finish line. For the women's time trials, it's Fir trying to best Marita's record time, but Larcei says she'll be the one to do it. Takumi likes Archery sure, but he gets tired of crushing Gordin and Wolt day in and day out (don't worry Kiragi cheers them up when Takumi is done). Shinon, Innes and Python make good competition, but Takumi wants to do other things too, so that's why he joins Hinata in skateboarding and hockey! Sakura golfs, she gets lessons from Jagen. Judo: Skrimir vs. Barst. Echidna vs. Rinkah. (See all of them again later in Weightlifting.) Xander, Berkut, Sigurd, Camus and Reinhardt in the Game of Kings (and really rich people in general)- Polo! Clive and Roderick on the other hand become jockeys in Horse Racing. Eliwood settles for the elegant, gentle sport of Equestrian, and I guess Leo can join him, since his health issues hold him back in other sports (in my headcanon I like to make him anemic, and Takumi seizure-prone). Figure Skating- Inigo and Leon compete on the mens side, while Flora, Setsuna and Ninian do so on the women's. For Ice Dancing, Azura and Shigure team up in an unbeatable mother-son duet to music they themselves composed just for that particular occasion. Jakob prefers Skiing, as does Kaze, and Hugh is surprisingly good too. Merric is the champ at frisbee golf- yes, he's a nerd. Ricken on the other hand prefers grabbing a broomstick and jumping through the Outrealms until he reaches the right Literaryrealm. Competitive Eating is not a sport, mostly because Ilyana makes it noncompetitive. Annas provide serve as the referees and judges for every sport, while Alphonse and Sharena just sit back and watch the Games of Heroes which they have orchestrated. Veronica and Loki are in the shadows tempting envious competitors with performance enhancing drugs that brainwash them. I don't know where to fit Lucina into this, but will someone tell me why we have two Marths currently fencing off against each other? And this is just scratching the surface! We may never run out of Sports ideas! We could have Soccer!Lucina, Cycling!Lucina, Fencing!Lucina, Basketball!Lucina, Surfing!Lucina, Blitzball!Lucina. And we're not talking just Lucina in this case, everyone can have multiples- you could make an entire team of just the sports variants of one character real easy. We'd have enough variants to make actual Heroes sports minimodes out of!

I confess to being an agent of chaos on this board, and never truly a force for law and order or meaningful contribution (I never get into talk of game mechanics). I deserve some of the blame. I try to keep myself somewhat in check (I can't think of a witty comment to the Ditto line so I won't bother), but I am still guilty nonetheless.

I don't think my guess that it's a corruption of the Latin "Redire" is totally off, since Redire means "to return", and what does it do? It returns HP to you! Are you neutered? And yes, your name is localized in the style used back when English character limits were the norm in Japanese RPGs. Nowadays you'd be localized as "Vermillion Maximillian", but like Ultros and "You Spoony Bard!" your name is in no risk of being changed, ever.

Kyle’s Sister from Tellius? In Forde and Kyle’s B Support (in The Sacred Stones), Forde mentions that Kyle has a sister called Mia. In this game, there is a female swordfighter called Mia. Could the two have any connection? Nope, since the The Sacred Stones Mia was actually called Maia and this game’s Mia was called Wayu. Double name changing clash~

On names, I once heard that names which swap sexes in English tend to start masculine and then become feminine, and rarely the other way around. And just because I took I a look at L' arachel's Japanese name, while I already had once noted SS's glorious but sadly changed Japanese names like Asseray (Artur) and Heanius (Innes). I never brought up Tellius's changes, so why not do that now? Tiamat (Titania) is well known, and Stella (Astrid), Chap (Brom), and Soanevalcke (Stefan) are kinda known. But then we have other things not so known, like Wayu (MIa) "Mia is my Wayu anyone?" and Topack (Tormod). There are also: Kevin (Kieran), Senerio (Soren), Lofa (Rolf), Bole (Boyd), Kilroy (Rhys), Elaice (Ilyana), Dalahowe (Devdan), and Lay (Ranulf) I to be Lay'ed!. Ulysses became Bastian (the Japanese works since he's clever), Luchino became Lucia (good because Luchino sounds masculine), and Rieusion and Learne got proper English lessons and became Reyson and Leanne, as did Tanis (Tanith) and Vulci (Ulki). Oltina also became Altina (because Oltina looks old), and Elena and Lehran maintained the semblance of their possible beta Tellius connections found in their Japanese names Erna and Erlan. On the RD front, Noyce to Nolan was fine, Frieda to Fiona was unnecessary but fine, Orugh became much sexier once he was Volug (same name phonetically, just spelt better), the same for Nike/Nailah because both are just as sweet. Brad to Aran was unneeded, and is now complicated by an Arran, Vize to Vika was a good move though, as was Jeld to Jarod and Wuhalada to Danved. I'm fine with Amrita or Almedha. I am disappointed by Valtelome becoming Valtome, since Mr. "I leave the game running for an hour when Zelgius lifts you off the ground with your legs kicking", since the Senatorial robber of Kefka's laugh deserves the pompousness.

The Japanese is Larchel. No second a or divine, majestic and refined beyond all mortal comprehension ' !

Well last time I checked, Creiddylad looks like explosive holy water to me. So I guess water burning and light life draining are both realities in FE. By that I mean Lyndis, aka "Lyn". The first playable character in the first FE to leave Japan goes by a nickname. I did not mean Nintendo Power's awful blurb on Descent of Jihad and it's lord Zigludo!

The Japanese for Nosferatu is Resire (from the Latin Redire- "to return" I believe). Japan does have a Nosferatu in the GBA games, but in English we call it Fenrir. This said, the NA use of Nosferatu worked in the short-term with the GBA games, it's Tellius where the name became an oddity with the HP drain spell being Light again. Redire sounds perfectly fine as a tome for me, since Latin is all fancy and elegant and in the context of Light magic has a whole religious element it can take advantage of. Latin also works decently for occult of a gothic kind too regarding Dark, so I wouldn't have minded if NoA had gone with Redire back in the day instead. There is a little irony here in that the first character ever to be translated out of Japan goes by a nickname everywhere.

Has any weapon had a Special built into though? That would create headaches I feel since then the game would have two cooldowns to monitor. Offensively that might be too good too. Although it might make the defensive Specials more useful if the weapon already packs a nuke. It's the product of FE's caste system. In FE6 she was born into near total uselessness and abject unworthiness of being raised, and the stigma of her atrociousness has not left her even in a world where her FE6 origins don't matter at all. It's a sad thing, be merciful and convert her soul to Feathers so that she may become part of some high caste character's arsenal. Either they're looking for ways to prolong the lifespan of this game, or they're taking their time designing new battles. Probably a combination of both. The first few months of Heroes were intentionally very Grand Heroic to lure people in. Now that they have you by the orbs, you're here to stay and they can take it slow. Dare I say one could make that argument with practically every Heroes char? Maybe not all by the same person at once, but methinks none of the artwork is totally above criticism.

Any boss in EO2U on Expert, that I bested Scylla and Harpuia was pure luck, and I think I'm gonna have to grind for Juggernaut or turn down things from Expert. My team is admittedly a very much less than ideal Axelandy, War Magus, Beast, Survivalist, and Sovereign, but gosh things are rough! The final boss of EOU was also very nasty since I used a Ronin and a Troubadour without access to Medic skills, the boss's ability to dispel the buffs essential to my healing and randomly KO units was brutal. I decided to raise some backup units for Storm Emperor to just overcome its buff dispelling and make my ultimate superboss battle easier. I once got stuck on the Imperial Trio in Baten Kaitos, I fell for the Red Flower save trap! The one time I cleared BKEWatLO, I did overgrind for levels and magnus and that made the fight too easy and short, as it did the rematch later (which is also very annoying if you don't overgrind since you have to repeat it twice in a row, albeit with a full heal between). I also had to turn down the difficulty a lot on the battle with Malik's friend in Tales of Graces, that fight was really really bad. Gangrel in TMS and Aimee Matchlock in Bravely Second are both cases of early-midbosses who are just too powerful and who you can't really work around with what options you have still being limited. The squid boss in DQ8 is yet another case of this. Any Colossi in Shadow of the Colossus who refuses to behave routinely and do the thing that lets me get into position to stab them! The randomness turned me off from doing the speed challenges for this game. And yet Japan eats him up I've heard and ignores Ieyasu. Well maybe "ignores Ieyasu" is inappropriate since he did shape the next two and half centuries of Japanese history, but I know he polls pretty low in SW popularity.

On Voting Gauntlets, the last two featured the characters who starred in two new Banners (Summer Sexy Fight) and one new Banner (CYL- Cooked Your Lyn) respectively. So would the next VG feature the Performing Arts troupe? Don't know who would make the other half (another fancy new Seasonal?), but if the PA showstoppers made up one side of the VG, who would you support of them?

There is worse, and remember, it's perfectly okay to take a break from SF if you feel its consuming too much of your life. We don't need you here, you don't need to contribute. Things can go on without you, or me, or anyone else who doesn't manage the site. I don't want to debate here, but it's Yune + shoving four stories into one game that hurt Micaiah. Ike does steal the attention as part of this I admit, but to be fair, PoR did not end his story. Strangely, the script here on SF cuts short in PoR's Epilogue, skip to 27:06 here and it is stated clearly that Ike's journeys were not over. Plus the mystery of just who the Black Knight was had not been totally resolved. Ike was destined to return for better and or for worse, although they didn't have to give him such a heroic limelight-stealing opening in RD or make the Tower his climb. Of course, your points on Ike and the BK are well founded, Ike is too perfect and the nobility issue is badly handled. The BK became one of those "Villains you're supposed to sympathize with, but you don't" at the end of RD, and did detract from Ashy in PoR.

Which Anna? The Board of Directors, Stockholders, COO, CEO, President, Vice President, PR Manager, Head of R&D, Artist and VA Directors, and all other positions are staffed by Annas (well maybe not janitor, I think I found Castor at that job, but my eyes could have been playing tricks on me).