Dmys

Jeralt doesn't have a conversation with Solon in Chapter 8, just confirmed that last night. Annette and Gilbert both have conversations with Baron Dominic in their paralogue.

Not really sure where to dump this info, but from a Spanish gameplay video we have confirmation that enemies can use Combat Arts in addition to Gambits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HHr39tNErc

Earliest source I can find on the image is 4chan /v/ about 8 hours ago. Seems really early for review copies to be out but without context for the image, who knows. Once we start seeing new off-screen pictures or datamined stuff, I'm going dark and just gonna wait for music to get uploaded.

Supports are outside of battle again like Tellius/Fateswakening, you can see it in the pre-battle menu. As for conversations, if I recall correctly I don't think we had supports (and marriage) confirmed for Fates until 2-3 weeks before its release. I'd be really surprised if they got rid of support conversations with no robust replacement for them, they were a pretty big part of the 3DS games' appeal.

Lorenzbros....

For what it's worth, this article here emphasizes over and over again the story is split into two parts between "Academy" and "War", and that your class selection in the Academy section will determine your path in the War section. https://topics.nintendo.co.jp/c/article/81fb5b76-8b57-11e9-b641-063b7ac45a6d.html I'm going off a very rough translation here, but it also explicitly mentions that the three lords are now the respective leaders of their nations, and that all of the students will be receiving new timeskip designs.

It should be that week, but it's the same week as E3. Famitsu or no Famitsu, we're getting a load of new information on the 11th, even if it's just from watching Treehouse play through part of a very early game map.

It's just showing what classes Claude has unlocked by passing their exams, that's why the other two are missing. Really wondering how quickly weapon proficiencies will go up, and in turn how fast you can unlock other classes. There definitely needs to be a little leeway to switch around and try new weapons/classes, but if it's too undertuned it'd feel a little silly if everyone has 3-4 classes of the same tier unlocked in a few levels. I don't want there to be an unfortunate metagame where there's a blatant optimal way to tackle each map and you're spending 5 minutes switching everyone's class for every map, you don't have to do it but in the back of your head you know you're handicapping yourself to an extent. Just too many unknowns with this game still, bring on E3.

Pretty excited. Battalions and Gambits are exactly what I hoped they'd be when revealed last year, and all the academy mechanics seem like they'll really let you truly make characters your own, it even reminds me of the XCOM reboot a bit. Can't speak for the story yet and that might be the bit I'm the most apprehensive about just from how little we know of it, but what we've seen of the character writing and world-building seems very promising, gives me Tellius vibes in all the right ways. All in all, hard to believe it's just over 2 months out at this point, it still doesn't feel like it's nearly about to release.

It'd be cool to have every type of regular unit represented with the 'canon' classes for Byleth and the 3 lords, Byleth being a regular infantry sword-user and the others being armored, mounted, and flying. On the whole, I'm really happy with this batch of news. Gambits and Battalions are exactly what I hoped they'd be, I'm thrilled to see multi-tile and possibly even terrain-altering abilities being a thing now. IS also seems to be avoiding the problem with Pair Up in Awakening and letting enemies have access to the same tools as the player in the first game they're introduced. The fact you can deploy units solo is also nice; I'm expecting Thieves to not be able to equip Battalions, and maybe there could be some specific anti-Batallion weapons/Gambits that don't deal much unit damage but could 1-shot a Battalion.

I'm not buying it. Feels like the information is too scattershot to be legitimate to me without posting some proof. Some of it coincides with Famitsu today, but the thread started right as the info was coming out anyways. I guess we'll know for sure once we get more names for characters, though IS does love to shuffle names around during development.

Officially, not until Thursday. The scans almost always leak a day or two in advance, though. I'd expect info to be out in the next 24 hours.

For what it's worth, the rating itself isn't listed on the ESRB's website yet. Anyways, their ratings typically aren't very consistent and usually get raised from individual instances rather than averaged across an entire game. Warriors got a Violence rating and cites someone getting stabbed through the stomach, yet Fates having a surprisingly detailed suicide still kept it at Fantasy Violence. If it's the final rating, it should be up on their website sometime soon with more details.

Manuela looks alright to me. I think all of the non-student designs are gonna stick out a bit just by virtue of having different outfits. I'll also echo that it's nice to get more tidbits about the world from these reveals. Since the characters should be traveling around a bunch even while the game's centered at the academy, I'm hoping we get more dialogue from them about the world and regions they're from since they seem to be tied more to them now compared to just "born in X country". If the first week set some sort of pattern, I'm expecting tomorrow's reveal to be someone affiliated with the Knights, or the green-haired dude with Rea. Might be the mustached professor too, but I don't know what affiliation they'd count Manuela as being, the whole school is divided into the Church and the Knights on the website. Incidentally, we actually got a closer reveal of the character Jeralt is talking to from the February trailer on the website. Since the other three characters with them are all the same helmeted knight, this guy is likely unique, however minor he might end up being. Maybe he rejoins the knights with Jeralt?

Hubert looks cool. Fire Emblem gets jabbed a lot for coding a lot of its good/bad guys by attractiveness and demeanor, so it's nice to have a more villainous looking character be on your side. It's also nice to see a non-avatar playable character get a strategist title again, having more group dynamics to bounce off of goes a long way towards making a good cast. I really liked those pre-chapter strategy scenes from Part 3 of RD, hope we get something similar here.

Hard to say how I feel about the silent protagonist. Even around the time of the second trailer, the three house leaders felt more like main characters to me than Byleth. They're much more prominent in the marketing compared to say, Ryoma and Xander, who only really highlighted in the cool cutscene shots and ended up not even joining you until the halfway point of the game. Story-wise, they were more important than the average character, but not much more than the other royal siblings and ultimately the plot still revolved around Corrin's decisions and character. Byleth's clearly going to have more story prominence than someone like Mark, but I'm hoping the three lords all have their own journey and character growth that can be juxtaposed well against a silent protagonist.

Something I find vaguely interesting in the E3 trailer is that around the minute mark, you can see Hilda, Lorenz, Ashe, and the mustached professor all on the enemy team. I'm guessing the other professors being in charge of the other two houses you don't choose is a very safe bet, but I wonder if Ashe was there due to the battle just being put together for trailer purposes or if he was part of the Golden Deer back then.

Still not really decided, though leaning Blue Lions. They have the most appealing character designs of the bunch to me and Dimitri turning out to apparently not just be a grouchy stick in the mud is a plus.

Children got revealed really late for Fates, like a week or two before. I think the evidence has piled up in favor of them getting added pretty late; the Making of FE 25th Anniversary book mentions Hisame was originally Hinata's brother, and in the new art book all the kid's sketches are awkwardly dumped with other units. I'm going to toss my hat in and expect kids to not be a thing in Three Houses. Their primary gameplay appeal was creating your own eugenics monster, and that's been expanded to the entire cast even more in 3H. If they were already hesitating with Fates, I can't see them being a thing now.

It's about time we got more of a hook for the story itself, everything's been focused on the very start of the game so far. Mechanics-wise, I think we're due for an explanation on Gambits and formations, if we're not getting more of that at the Expo I'm expecting the next Famitsu to be about it. Thankfully I think we've about exhausted everything we can learn about stuff we've seen since the original reveal trailer save formations, it's time to move onto more of the unknown.

Yeah, the expo's this coming Saturday. It's just running a single day, so for those of us in the states I'd be expecting info to be out by early Saturday morning. As for news itself, I expect it to be running all the way to release like previous games. The game should be playable at E3 by this point, or Nintendo could hold a press event for their summer releases and Mario Maker 2 that'll get us some preview impressions.