Sand55

Class: Thief A tall, dark man in his thirties with a closely trimmed beard and dark, slightly unkempt hair. Often seen concealed under a hoodless blue cloak.

Dionysus isn’t the most typical dark mage. He’s going to to get a lot of skill growths to counteract that bad hit rate on dark tomes, but he isn’t going to get a lot of con, so he’ll hit reliably, but won’t be doubling a lot of things. He’s a total tank at with high bases in def and res, and high growths in res, but with low growths in def and hp, he’ll quickly become just a res tank, not a def tank. So maybe he is a typical dark mage. Frankly, I don’t use dark mages all that often, so I don’t know what’s normal for that class. As for his background, he and Conner know one another. Dionysus is a nature person, but unlike Conner, he’s pretty worldly. One gets the sense that he enjoys nature for the pleasures it can produce (wine is, of course, his favorite product of nature), and Dionysus likes to be around people, but only if he can dominate the conversation. He enjoys bragging and partying, he has a cynical sense of humor, and a serious drinking problem. Conner doesn’t like him all that much, thinks that he exploits nature for his own gain, and Dionysus flippantly joins your army under the pretense of proving Conner wrong, to somehow convert Conner to Dionysus’ own life philosophy. Yet underneath that nonchalant exterior, there’s a seriousness and great age that sometimes leaks through, despite his young appearance. At very serious times he even appears sober, and a hidden steel glints in the look of his eyes or the set of his shoulders. Perhaps he joined your army for reason other than to pester Conner....

Conner has a very high resistance growth, with good speed but a mage’s typical poor defense. He’s a great anti-flier unit because he wields wind magic and has the movement of a flier, so they can’t really outrun him. Personality: Conner is somewhat absentminded, often paying more attention to nature than the people and plot events around him. He’s a very kind-hearted and attentive soul, and when you can get him to pay attention to you he’s a great person to talke to problems about. The nature of his wind magic is mysterious—no other known mage is able levitate themselves in the air, and no one quite knows how Conner does it. He lives out on his own in nature and is very rarely seen by only a few rural villages that border a great forest. If one goes to the outskirts of the village, they might see him distantly near the tree line of the forest, or sitting or walking in the fields outside. Some villagers believe he is a god of nature, and all agree that he is unusual and somehow otherworldly. He joins when your army drives the bad guy army from his forest that he is trying to protect. The bad guys have come into the forest and started leveling trees in a search for some talisman or other magical object rumored to be in the forest. Conner travels with the lords’ army to stop the evil empire/general bad guys from destroying/defiling more nature.

Red hair, sharp nose, white robes, prepromote Bishop/Priestess

All hail Lolihart the Conquerer

Name: Galfir

Team Mystic all the way. But for real, Blue Lions

Whhaaaaaaaaat!!?? I didn’t even know that. That’s flippin’ cool. I got two different routes over two playthroughs but didn’t know what was happening differently to choose one over the other. On that subject, I neglected to mention that I still think there are some cool things about FE6. I think the snowy map with all the rivers that freeze over partway through is cool, and I like how there’s a ton of plot events that often happen right in the middle of certain levels; it makes it feel like there are more things happening than just your army fighting the enemy army.

So, I have to be honest here, I played Sacred Stones, loved it, played FE7, loved it, played FE6–did not love it. I found myself pretty frustrated while playing it, and a huge part of that came in the form of those darn ambush spawns. I got frequently annihilated by unannounced reinforcements. I just saw the thread in general Fire Emblem asking when people think a level has gone from hard to unfair, and the reinforcements in FE6 were my first thought. That prompted me to come on here and ask what you all think of FE6. Is it a good game? Does its difficulty make it better or worse? Or do you see it as difficult at all?

I definitely lean more toward the writing side of things, but a unit’s performance still colors my opinion. I find it tends to work on my opinion more when performance and personality match up, if that makes any sense. Like, going back to the Python example, I noticed he had really low accuracy and speed, and started to associate that with his lazy personality. So pretty soon, despite his humorous sass, I began to be dissatisfied with Python. I began to attribute his poor performance to his laziness, and started to think of him as being a detriment to the team because he didn’t pull his own weight in battle, not because he couldn’t, but because he decided to be lazy and not try very hard. In Sacred Stones I respected Seth more because he was so effective in battle. It expanded his character from “loyal” to “loyal and efficient”. If he’d been a sucker in battle, I might have viewed him as a pretty incompetent general, but as someone who is really efficient in battle, it seems like he has the skill and knowledge to back up his rank, and it makes me respect him, and like him, more. Y’know, at the beginning of this I said I judged more based on writing, but while writing this I convinced myself otherwise. I think the writing and performance both reflect significantly on who the characters are, so I guess I kind of judge both equally.

Preach. I lost Lance to Rutger’s critical when he came out of the SIDE of the castle instead of... y’know, the gate. He moved the same turn, and once Lance died an archer moved right into the available space and killed Thany. FE6 was good times all around

I've never played Thracia 776, but that sounds pretty cool. I actually think the other Fire Emblem games are pretty disconnected between narrative and gameplay. In most of the games you're leading a small band of rebels and then end up barging through empires of soldiers. Which is fine, the games are still darn fun, but now I want to play Thracia! Seems like it'd be fun to actually feel like a small band of rebels. I will say that the narratives and gameplay aren't always disconnected. In Shadows of Valentia I thought you had enough units that you could feel like an actual army--even if, y'know, there were way more soldiers in the cutscenes. In Binding Blade/Sword of Seals, it made sense to be so small because you were the allied army of a small nation consisting of several crippled fiefdoms. But how do you invade Bern with such a small force--alone? At least in both that game and Sacred Stones you have help from larger nations--Bern is in a war with Etruria during your invasion during Sword of Seals, and Grado expended many of its armies hunting the sacred stones and battling Frelia. All in all, I think they go back and forth between united narrative and gameplay, and, y'know--the Shepherds destroying Valm practically on their own in Awakening.

I like heroes the most, but I also feel like they're the most boring to use. I think Fire Emblem often has a huge amount of units with high speed and skill, and those units dominate the battlefield all the time. I can't help but feel like it would ultimately be more interesting to promote to warrior or berserker.

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