Interdimensional Observer

Macbeth and Iago alike would have been fine if the diabolical masked staff savant did the whole "prime minister who betrays his liege" thing. He either seeks to kill Garon and seize Nohr for himself, or discredit Corrin and Garon's other children so as to become the sole advisor and thus manipulator of the king. And it isn't like IS hasn't done this thing before- Lekain (there's two actually in RD), Leptor, and I haven't started Gaiden yet, but isn't there another one of these in that game? Also, would it be fair to call Conquest Corrin Hamlet? Procrastinates on doing the right thing (killing Claudius/Garon) until the very end and moans about it all the way, with the end results of this procrastination being the total destruction of Hoshido, and every major character dying. Don't get me wrong, I love Hamlet, for the very reason he is so talented, so aware of his terrible procrastination, so wanting to overcome it, and yet falls into it again and again. Much like myself.

I get these criticisms. Around Sword Valley things do start feeling more linear, although the Fallen Arm and Agniratha do mitigate this feeling somewhat. And I admit that the Ether Mines and Galahad Fortress are both on the mediocre side. And there are filler issues, namely Satorl Marsh and the Central Factory, where almost nothing of value happens (Satorl is mostly a rest after the epic events of Bionis's Leg/Ether Mines/Colony 6, with a slight introduction to the High Entia, the Central Factory isn't even this nor as pretty as Satorl). On the characters side, Sharla (and that other person) are weak. Reyn is just your usual bro pal for the male protag- nothing more. Riki is a mascot character (albeit better than Tatsu- I didn't need him blabbing with Lin right in the middle of the final chapter). Seven, well their mere existence is itself arguably a bad thing. Shulk, I can see some clear grounds for not liking him- the Ether Mines stuff and the Sword Valley thing are the biggest criticisms I can see. Dunban establishes himself as a complete badass early on, and then transitions fairly well to veteran warrior, only Sword Valley blights him. Melia though I have a harder time seeing someone not like her, or at least pity due to everything that happens to her over the course of the game. And I too am looking forward to a potential XCX2 later down the line. The ending cliffhangers must simply be resolved! And then we have the unaddressed issue of the "Ghost" xenoforms- the enigmatic non-Ganglion aliens who also attacked the Earth and then attacked the White Whale crashing it into Mira. For some reason the Ghosts are conspicuously absent, despite their apparent desire to destroy humanity. Are the Ghosts agents of the mysterious planet Mira (or whoever is using Mira), or is the inability of the Ganglion to escape Mira due to an inexplicable force a byproduct of some form of protection which Mira is exerting to protect humanity and its xenoform allies from the Ghosts?

I'm mixed on this point. I generally approve of redesigns for remakes and sequels featuring the same characters (like the Legend of Zelda), even if I don't like all the redesigns (and in the case of Deep Strange Journey- I don't like any of them so far). However, things like Cipher and Heroes I frown on, despite not having had such a bitter attitude towards the Awakening DLC redesigns (probably because I haven't played Cipher or Heroes, if I did I wouldn't mind so much).

Any chance that ridiculous Bride class with its perpetually swaying side-to-side dress will return?

Has a Deirdre badge (not a bad choice- she seems like a devoted mother and wife, if not the best fighter).

Ask if they're familiar with the Luminous Arc witches, because they remind me of them.

By orchestrated, do you mean rock-free at all? Xenoblade Chronicles should not disappoint either way. Rock away with Mechanical Rhythm and other battle themes (if you don't mind the rock). Once We Part Ways, Gaur Plains, On The Fallen Arm and Night Before the Decisive Battle are some of the more peaceful rock-less highlights, but you can't go wrong with most of the soundtrack. Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean and its prequel BK: Origins are the pinnacle of Motoi Sakuraba's work (particularly the former). The True Mirror is a masterpiece for a normal battle theme, and although I used to prefer the boss battle electric guitar version, I've grown to like the original more. Ruler of the Nine Skies, Temple of the Celestial Flowers and Bellflower to name a few are good. (Note the Japanese names for some of the pieces are different from the English ones- Ruler of the Nine Skies is Ruler of the Nine Heavens). Le Ali Del Principio and the Valedictory Elegy are standouts from the prequel. Eternal Sonata is somewhere between a Tales and a Baten Kaitos in terms of soundtrack, and is again one of Sakuraba's better ones. A few pieces included were Chopin works by the way. Etrian Odyssey has fairly small soundtracks, but EOIV's is orchestrated and EOU and EOU2 have both synthesized originals and orchestral arrangements. EOIV's might be the best, on the grounds it was originally made for orchestra unlike the other two. You mind find Bravely Default okay, That Person's Name Is is about 40% wispy violin to 60% rockin guitar. Though it isn't an RPG, scan Super Mario Galaxy and the sequel for a few good numbers if you haven't already. And of course, do peruse Fire Emblem, Awakening, Fates, and Radiant Dawn to be precise. Radiant Dawn's Bearer of Hope is a favorite of mine, as is its The Task At Hand. For Final Fantasy, do look to see if they did orchestrated version of old pieces, like Terra's Theme or Man with the Machine Gun (techno converted to classical works in its own way).

Third tiers have been scarcely more than a glorified and glided power creep in (or in RD's case, a way to get around the fact most of the PCs are already promoted being veterans of war), so branching promotions.

Proc skills generally have such low activation rates that you can't count on them and thus plan with them activating at all in mind. I can much more plan with a 70-80% hit rate in mind than I can with a 20% Luna activation. And rarely do I plan with criticals in mind, they're just the universal proc skill that isn't a skill. Not even with a 50% crit on an accurate and doubling unit do I make life or death strategy decisions around crits (and character death is of course the ultimate arbiter of decision making in non-Casual FE). RNG is fine in FE, but RNG isn't always lovable/acceptable- Mario Party: Island Tour is all RNG done badly.

Banned for not explaining how a slice of chocolate cake could fight back outside of counter damage due to indigestion/allergies.

To quote Shakespeare: "Oh I am slain!"

Respond to their look of astonishment by turning myself into these: https://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/megamitensei/images/1/19/Alcor_forms.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20131027045549

I want to be cultured and truly appreciate poetry with all my being, but I can't get myself into the state of mind necessary for that. I still find it beautiful though.

I'm not overly concerned with household aesthetics (unless I want to be), so as long as I can make things that aren't just in one bold, bright primary color, some utilitarian furniture items like small tables wouldn't be bad. An abstract sculpture or two wouldn't be bad either. I'd imagine an artist working with 3D Printers could upload their designs onto the internet for anyone to download (maybe at a price so said artist could make a living).

I think that's more a problem of Gaiden having 4 tiers. With just 2 you wouldn't be complaining so much. And furthermore, it would still be possible to have different characters in the same unpromoted class have different promoted classes. Asbel and Miranda are both Mages in Thracia 776, but one promotes to Sage, and the other Mage Knight.

I'll agree with the "sometimes yes, sometimes no" sentiment. Keeping it in every game would be too much, but abolishing it in all future games would also be too much. Keep it up in the air IS, 'tis better that way.

I get this. You have much more freedom in building your avatar character in XCX than you do in building anyone in plain old Xenoblade Chronicles, but it takes much time to unlock that customization, and even more time getting your mind wrapped around and learning the nuances of the gameplay. Not to say Xenoblade Chronicles isn't deep, but it is definitely friendlier to the player. I've just reached the postgame with plans to 100% the Mira survey. And while I do want to make Attribute/Elemental Boost builds for my MC and everyone else, the grind looks to be too extreme. I'm not even sure if I can bother with getting the super Skell, much less beat all the superbosses, as I'm finding collecting the materials for my first Arts: TP Gain XX augment tedious enough.

I know this is jumping the gun (more like ICBM at this point) but do you think they'll do a Fire Emblem Warriors Empires? FE has a load of continents, each with its own unique geography and set of characters, so there is a lot of potential for an Empires game. Archanea has pretty small polities, with a huge track of the northern lands being uncivilized wilderness as far as I can tell. Lots of water to traverse to get through the southern, populated half of the world too, so shipbuilding would be pretty important here. Jugdral and Elibe have very distinct countries in terms of geography and culture and are larger and more populated than Archanea. A Manster+Thracia map, Valentia, and Nohr-Hoshido could be more downsized conquests. Tellius has the Laguz Kingdoms, enough said. Ylisse + Valm could be Empires on an enormous logistical scale with two entire continents to conquer. I was thinking they could give each continent special gimmicks you could turn on or off before you began your conquest. For instance, Jugdral would feature a marriage mechanic which would let you make political alliances via marriages (just hope the couples have some synergy- otherwise matrimonial disharmony might interfere with you grand plans). Another would be "Generations of Empire" wherein after a certain amount of time has passed, the game jumps ahead like two dozen years with a new generation in charge of your empire (maybe there would be room for two generation skips). Randomized events reshape the geopolitical landscape during the time skip, however, you do get a degree of control over what happens during the timeskip via your actions in the First Generation. Obviously you'll fare better in the 2nd Generation if you build a large empire in the first, but if you're too expansive and don't internally develop your empire well enough or fail at diplomacy, you'll likely lose a good chunk of it. But you don't want to expand too slowly either and risk being a little guy surrounded by bigger players. For Elibe, I was thinking in reference to the Black Fang, the ability to play not as a country, but as a vigilante group/assassin's guild. Tellius could have fun in the political realm with Laguz-Beorc relations- you could try to perilously balance them to maximize your potential allies/troops, or you could guarantee support from one of the two races by declaring "bleed the half-breeds/humans!". An "Order and Chaos" mechanic could be more fun. Fighting battles or building lots of arenas and military infrastructure raises Chaos levels and lowers Order levels. While making treaties war, avoiding war, and building civil institutions like temples and universities increases Order and lowers Chaos levels. When Chaos and Order are roughly balanced in a given province (the sum total of the Order and Chaos levels of all the provinces under your control equals your national levels of Order and Chaos, all polities combined equals the world Order and Chaos levels), then things are perfectly normal in that province. If one of Chaos or Order gets too high, then your troops/people may "feel refreshed by the clean, tranquil air" or "feel enlivened by the chaotic charge in the air" and get a boost of some sort. However, the line between getting a boost and getting suffering a penalty- "your troops have grown decadent and neglect their training" or "the people have become fatigued weary due to the influence of war and agricultural productivity has declined", is thin and hence playing with an Order-Chaos imbalance is risky. If things get way too out of balance in the world, then expect "Ashera woke as a result of great chaos and unleashed her judgement, half your population has been been petrified with no hopes of returning to normal" or "Yune cried out for a breath of freedom, her cry drove many berserk and now mutinies and uprisings cover the continent". And with the global Order and Chaos levels, you may have to take into consideration one of the other empires being too peaceful or too chaotic.

I played it to the end (plus I recently beat XCX). I admit to falling into the Sharla trap. And I should've tackled the final boss before doing the 5th skill trees which require grinding to the point where the final boss will be cake (Reyn, Melia, Riki, and Seven, with Reyn's being the easiest of the bunch, Seven's being the hardest). Being overleveled destroyed the epicness and difficulty of the final battle. I never got around to the level 100+ superbosses, though I made plenty of top tier gems. The game was wonderful. A creatively designed world, a top tier soundtrack (Once We Part Ways is underrated), decent characters, very solid gameplay. And it's fair to call it the one game where Tetsuya Takahashi reined in his "Lucasian ambitions" and settled with a less ambitious plot. I also liked that all the characters were distinct and very usable. In particular I loved Melia: the Element Summon/Discharge mechanic made her both an awesome supporter and a deadly powerful mage at the same time. I wish Sharla had been handled like Melia a bit more, as is she is a little too monolithically a healer. One thing I liked was the evolution of the perceived villain. I wish the game got an HD port, with the glaring level scaling issue fixed. Upgrading to HDMI made the game much uglier (long after I beat it in beautiful SD though). And I'd like playable Vanea too- she was going to be playable with a whip it seems originally. Plus and an explorable Bionis Left Shoulder- why oh why did it have to be left in tantalizingly unfinished? Link to a video of the Left Shoulder in case you haven't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l86GCaqZuxY

Never did thoughts of "how will we interconnect Medeus with Zephiel and Hoshido" enter the minds of the writers of FE1 when they were putting the game together. Neither did Miyamoto ever say to himself "hmmm... will I put this first Legend of Zelda game on the Child, Adult, or Downfall timelines- or will it precede them all?" Unless the developers wrote out a grand scheme in advance, treat every game as an island. Gaiden was never connected to Walhart or Grima until sometime in 2016 when IS decided it'd be so. If you want to appreciate Gaiden as connected to Walhart, or Archanea as the land where Jugdral's troubles originated, you can do so, I won't stop you, enjoy the games as you will. But don't treat the connection as going back any further than it actually does.

Haven't played SoV yet (I'm in no rush, I have other things I can work through first), but it partly depends on the base game- age and at least the most glaring of flaws should be addressed. Gaiden insofar as I can tell had a plot as thick as wet tissue paper originally, so going back and adding more to it was fine. Arts were probably a good idea too, seeing how magic originally had all the variety in Gaiden, physical units seem fairly bland in comparison. There is such a thing as a "reimagining", basically a remake taken to an extreme. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals (a game someone beat to me to punch on) are examples of this more radical approach to taking an old game and changing it to its core. Then we have things like Super Mario 64 DS, a game which is a faithful remake in many ways, but in others go towards being a reimagining. More Power Stars to collect was great, as were the prettier graphics and frivolous minigames. The addition of the new three playable characters was good, but there were issues with it. Wario was fairly unfun and I never used him except when absolutely necessary, Yoshi faded to the sideline after Mario came in. And Luigi could be just plain broken the way he shattered some old levels with his backwards somersault. I heard the Resident Evil 1 remake and Persona 3 FES both had similar issues arising from them not adjusting the gameplay for the changeup of controls/control over non-MC characters. Being too faithful isn't the best thing either. Shadow Dragon made a lot of changes and improvements over the original, but they didn't bother rebalancing most of the characters to account for the increase in stat caps. Midia for instance might have been okay in FE1 or even 3, but she is abhorrent in SD with such crap bases. If I had to name some good remakes Ocarina of Time 3D leans a little on the conservative side, but is pretty outstanding. LoZ: MM3D on the other hand move a bit more the liberally remade but not reimagined, and also gets high remarks. SM64DS was handled well enough to despite the aforementioned flaws. Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town was a nice GBA take on a PS1 classic (which dare I say is potentially better than the highly praised HM64). Odin Sphere: Leifthrasir didn't touch the plot of the original one bit, but made everything look better and overhauled the gameplay, while also leaving the highly criticized original gameplay in at the same time as a Classic Mode. Etrian Odyssey Untold and Untold 2 were pretty good as well with their updating of things. Though more of an enhanced port, I felt Devil Survivor: Overclocked's gameplay touchups were great (Compendium- yay!), but the writing of the 8th days was disconnected and subpar, beyond the rather unusual "be a tyrannical bastard and be the enemy of humanity as well as God" version of Naoya's & Kaido's 8th.

Command skills with turn count cooldowns would be the most reliable and accessible of skill systems. Though throwing procs and HP costing skills into the mix would be fine too, no reason they can't coexist. We could also try skills that consume additional weapon durability, or skills that can only be used before moving.

If you've got a guy with low/average Speed on any route and are willing to play favorites, give them both Dark Falcon and Lodestar. In just two levels they can have both Spd+2 and Dancing Blade for a whopping +5 Speed at the cost of two skill slots (and skill slots aren't that contested for a good chunk of the game). There is no shortage of men who would wrestle with each other over such a significant speed boost.

From the one time I completed Future Past (which was without having paired anyone save ChromxRobin- only FP1 was a challenge), I don't recall any definitive answer on what happened to Morgan. I think we have to assume death actually. I don't believe they thought too hard about Morgan/went about it in an awkward way when it came to Future Past. They wanted to include both male and female versions simultaneously and without regards for Robin's sex for some reason, but they couldn't come up for a good reason as to why two Morgans existed when the player only gets one. Twins? But that wouldn't explain why the Robin of Chrom's world only had one kid, nor why FP Robin would give both twins the same name. Morgan had to die so they would not have to explain this conundrum so much. Though if they really wanted to, they could've had Lucina stumble on the amnesiac Morgans or something after Grima's defeat. It reminds me a little of Rune Factory 2. In the 2nd Generation opening movie for that game, both Aaron and Aria feature, even though only one of them is born in a given playthrough. Both are canonical, like both Morgans, but the developers for some reason didn't think playable twins could work for the 2nd Gen.

First, double posting is a no unless it's a glitch (there's been a problem with that recently). Although I do understand that you did it probably because you can't add a new quoting to an edit. The DB crew individually varies vs. the Greil Mercenaries and whatnot. Mia, Edward, and Zihark all end up being pretty similar (and awesome) in the long run. Nolan is faster than Boyd, though not as strong. Leonardo is inferior to Shinon and Rolf, but his personal bow Lughnasdh gives a valuable Speed boost that compensates for one of his weaknesses. Fiona takes an investment the size of China's GDP, but she can compete with Oscar and Titania with it. Jill can outdo Haar at the very end of the game with her speed lead. Generally, anyone in this game can turn out well. BEXP levelups always rewarding 3 stat ups means if someone caps a stat or two that they generally gain a lot in, you can then use BEXP to get them points in stats they don't generally get much of. Some characters need more babying/resources than others, and the DB is particularly needy. But if you want to use them for endgame, just pick 2-4 units you like/that turn out well during Part 1 (you can use more on Easy), and then try to feed them as much experience as you can during Daein's trio of Part 3 chapters (use Beastfoe and Paragon to help). After that, they have two choices for prepping for Part 4 Final- Ike's Team, or Tibarn's and Elincia's. If they're kinda strong, but not quite at the power level you desire, Ike's second Part 4 chapter can be a smorgasbord of experience for them. If they're still on the weaker side though, send them to Tibarn's army and let Izuka spam Laguz reinforcements and feed your DB members them- Beastfoe, Birdfoe (buyable for 1000G in the shop that chapter), Dragonfoe, and Paragon can all help. They should be capable and ready for endgame after this.