Alastor15243

While this wouldn't work as much with the Fates or Awakening incarnations of the child system, since every mother had two children in FE4, maybe they could've had it so that the male characters could each had one of them, so every male character was like Robin or Chrom? Like Erinys would have Fee and Lewyn would have Ced, and Ced would have a completely different sibling depending on who Lewyn married?

I disagree. Fates is the only game where I've looked at a character in a situation with high-crit enemies and actually gone "thank god he has high luck". Devaluing luck actually ironically made having a really good luck stat more valuable because before, pretty much anyone could be immune to crits from anyone without a killer weapon, whereas now lower-luck units may actually be in trouble without some help.

I wanted to get the general opinion on this issue. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, originally FE games cut to is own battle music whenever you entered battle, while in the modern 3DS titles (save for Echoes), it instead just ramps up the intensity of the normal map music. I am personally of the opinion that this is basically a vast all-around improvement. It keeps the battle music from getting really stale, and prevents a jarring tone interruption during the darker, sadder or more dramatic map themes. I frankly wish they would have done that for SoV and I hope they will do it for future remakes, turning the original battle music into one of the game's many boss themes. Quite frankly, having this beautiful work of art constantly get interrupted by "DAnana DAnana DUN! DUN!" every few seconds was irritating as all hell and ruined the emotional impact of the music. Having ten seconds of the exact same song playing constantly throughout a battle can get old real fast, and it gets even worse when the music doesn't line up with the tone of the map theme. But I understand that some people like the old system, and I'm interested in hearing your reasons why.

Making them all player phase skill commands like lunge or the like would be an interesting thing I'd like to see in action, it would definitely help prevent enemy phase from becoming so heavily emphasized as long as they didn't make most of them worthless by disabling doubling for nearly all of them like in gaiden. But skill obviously needs to have SOME kind of secondary effect like speed does or it's just objectively worse than it. And I don't think crit rate quite cuts it there. One other idea I was throwing around once or twice was that skill had some impact on how many skills you were allowed to equip, like for every 10 points you have in your skill stat you can equip one extra skill. And each individual point of skill has an almost negligible impact on that. You need to be doing a ridiculous amount of damage or have a really low hit rate before a single point in skill is going to have as high of an impact on your damage output as a single point in strength does. It's not that you don't need skill. It's just that numerically, each point of skill is objectively worth less than each individual point in strength or defense or speed.

I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say that skill is the worst primary stat in the game, in the sense that a point of skill is pretty uncontroversially less valuable than a point in anything else besides HP, and that the benefits of small increases in skill are almost entirely unnoticeable. Rally skill, for example, only grants you a 4% increase in skill activation rates, +2% critical chance, and +6% hit rate. Every other rally grants a more tangible benefit, even luck as of Fates with crit evade being harder to come by. So I think it's pretty clear skill needs a buff. But how would you go about that, if you were in charge? Personally, I'd first change up the formula to be a mix of 4-10 era and 3DS era, with hit and evade being skill x2 + luck and Speed x2 + luck respectively, but using the new crit and crit evade formulas of the 3DS era of (skill-4) divided by 2 and luck divided by 2 respectively. But furthermore, I'd mix up how the skill activation rates go. The way procs currently work has three problems in my mind: 1: They are not consistently useful, growing slowly in effectiveness from when you get them until the endgame 2: Even in the endgame, they are completely unreliable unless stacked like crazy 3: There's currently no way to resist them, which can make them extremely annoying on enemies. I would fix this by making proc skills have a formula somewhere along the lines of (user's skill - defender's luck), and then given some multiplier from there, so like with other stats like strength vs defense and speed vs speed, the benefits of having more skill than your enemy has luck are solid and noticeable even in the early game, but don't become ridiculous in the endgame. Of course under this system you'd probably only be able to have one proc on your character. What would you do?

Thank you! Hope you'll enjoy the rest of it!

Alright, now that Dakota's War Journal's future has been secured, I'm considering starting this back up again. That is if anyone's still interested.

Granted, the use of a three tiered class system both fixed the annoying "why did my heroes lose all of their power in between games" narrative issue and let them still grow, but I'm saying this in the context of people I've heard say they want third-tier classes to come back, and to that I say hell no. That money and development time would be way better spent expanding the class list rather than lengthening the progression of the classes we already have.

I don't want 3rd tier promotions to come back. Ever. It's nothing but a spectacle gimmick and a waste of resources. Just make the 2nd tier promotions look as cool as the third tier designs you have planned and use all those model, sprite and animation resources that would've gone into making the middle tier to make a wider range of different classes to use.

The thing is, a lot of Echoes' stuff was interesting, but also horribly outdated and broken in many ways. The fact that you couldn't control what spells your mages used on the counter-attack does serious damage to their enemy-phase effectiveness even if they have good defense. The art system and hp cost for spells and skills was heavily undermined by the game's huge supply of regeneration rings and long-range healers, and nearly every single art except for Double Lion was useless for anyone against an enemy that didn't utterly dwarf them in speed and/or defense. The village and world map system, while expending the world and characters, really slowed down gameplay and made repeated playthroughs annoying, especially in the beginning. And worst of all, the class system was so atrociously broken it's almost offensive and I'm even tempted to take back my statement that FE4 was the worst balanced game in the entire franchise; this and gaiden give it serious competition. I mean seriously, a class system that actively punishes not promoting early and makes it an objectively superior option? And worse still, allowing one, and only one class the option to go back to villager and basically become an unstoppable super-juggernaut in any class they want as they gain levels at warp speed against late-game enemies with their same same end-game stats? And make that class for males only? What in the hell were the designers thinking? Atlas, Atlas, became one of my best units by the end because the mercenary class line got rid of most of his weaknesses and his strength, his only good stat, wound up getting into the lower 40s by the end of the game after I reclassed him into a hyper-fast cavalier and gave him the javelin. And mind, this is all without going out of my way to grind with him. All of Gaiden's myriad elements together were an interesting change of pace, but almost none of its elements would do anything to benefit the modern FE formula. The only thing I really liked and think should be incorporated in the main games was the additional dialogue with characters, which could easily be incorporated into bases for "My castles" in the future, and the ability to gain support points with units within 2 spaces, which I think would be a huge boon if they ever got rid of pair-up and went back to the old support system with aura bonuses (which I would very much like).

I for one mourn the free and reasonably convenient way to get screenshots from the 3DS to a computer that miiverse offered. I just barely managed to get all of the pictures for my LP in time, and I'm sad I won't easily be able to do another.

Yeah, the RNG, both in stats and hit rates, is one of those things where the benefits are profound and subtle while the downsides are minor and obvious. It prevents you from being able to do the exact same strategy every single time by forcing you to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. It's definitely worth keeping in the mainline games, though Heroes is well-suited by not having it.

How about... an actual emblem... associated with actual fire? For once? In all seriousness though, I would like that. A badge that gives the user fire powers, or protects them from fire, or at the absolute most distant stretch (and probably the one that would work best in the context of the story), gives the wearer the ability to control dragons. It seems like even with the first game, the term "Fire Emblem" was just kind of imposed onto objects that never really seemed to fit the label, and I'd love to see one that actually fits.

Yeah, but they should be sword users. Fates really made me notice the stark lack of any flying class that can use swords. And to round off the malig and kinshi using tomes and bows, they should have a side promotion that uses swords and daggers. Say... “Sky Pirate”? I like the sound of that.

Ha! Well, my current plan is to read through the entire backlog of Dakota's War Journal to refresh my memory and see if there are any lingering plot threads I may have forgotten about over the extremely long run of this story. See what I can and should tie up, though there's some stuff in Birthright that may have to just be ignored for the sake of the rest of the story being coherent. Also, I'm planning on doing a 2-generation run of Conquest where I use nothing but the avatar and the child units from chapter 17 onward.

Aaaaaand DONE! YES! I cut it a bit close there, but yes, I have all of the screenshots necessary to complete Dakota's War Journal both on my computer and on imgur. Dakota's War Journal will difinitively survive the death of miiverse, everyone! WHOO! As for the final battle... Well my team became kinda ridiculous at the end due to my thorough rally training and the amount of money the game gave me letting me bring every one of my frontliners to level 25, but I have the feeling that even if I had a more reasonable team, the final battle would've been really disappointing. Both chapters 27 and endgame were pretty underwhelming. But it's not like I had been getting my hopes up after everything else I experienced with Revelation. Shame the "true" ending of Fates is so lame both in gameplay and story. But what can you do? Looks like I have a lot of stuff to work with, and while I'm going to be taking a break since getting all of this done has taken so much of my free time, I'll get back to writing entries soon, so stay tuned!

Hahaha, I'm flattered Ren, but just a fair warning: It didn't start off that way. It was originally intended to be a comedic "abridged series" style Let's Play until about 1/3 of the way into Conquest when I realized I couldn't keep using the canon story and had to fix it. Just so you know what you're getting into.

Aaaand I have a long weekend day to do the 27th and 28th maps! I’ll let you know as soon as I’m done!

I wouldn't consider a decrease in both player and enemy level to be inherently a drop in difficulty depending on how it was implemented. If anything depending on the skill system used it could be an increase in difficulty because your're landed with a group of units you haven't thoroughly customized yet. But also, aren't there plenty of points in the series where the difficulty gets a bit easier after a plot climax, especially during a perspective shift? Like from Lyn mode to Eliwood mode, or Dawn Brigade to Elincia, or from Awakening chapter 11 to chapter 12 (on any difficulty lower than lunatic)?

Well technically the Tellius games had those too, except they were Valkyries and it was just Mist. But really those games are old enough that the classes featured in them probably still qualify as being eligible for "coming back" now.

But why would your unmodified bases matter in determining that unless you were already debuffed? And surely that's not such a common scenario that having to tap the screen for it was a frequent event?

That information would be crucial. At least knowing how much damage they're going to be doing and what skills they have. I think that could easily be put into a header over the unit, at least if they just use icons for skills, which would be fine, those will get memorized quickly enough.

Yeah, but there's also the issue that they'll be tempted to add back in new mechanics and such, like they did the last time it switched from handheld to console. Mostly I'm just hoping it's not annoying. Plus, I'm going to miss that corner-of-the-eye chance to notice something dangerous on the enemy's skill list during what would otherwise have been a costly lapse of judgement. Especially if they're going to have skills play an important role on enemies like in Conquest, which I'm sincerely hoping for. I just think adding a button press to something you ideally should be checking with every enemy isn't exactly something to be excited about.

Well the main issue is that the non-dual-screen games just can’t keep all the info on one screen. Particularly in the advance games, when comparing enemy attack to my defense I have to switch pages constantly due to total attack power being on a different page from stats.

It just occurred to me after playing FE7 shortly after playing Fates that the two screen setup the last 5 games have enjoyed has been a major boon and convenience when it comes to calculating how dangerous the enemy is and what your next move should be, and I think I’m actually dreading the idea of going back to a single screen system and having to go through menu screens again for each and every enemy unit. Of course there is the possibility they’ll come up with some new method, but the odds that it’ll be as good as the two screen method are pretty slim. What do you guys think? Are you going to miss being able to tell enemy stats at a simple glance? Do you think reducing the screen size would be worth the convenience afforded by, say, implementing a split-screen display?