lenticular

If you go back and reread what I wrote, I'm pretty sure you'll be able to figure that one out for yourself. I believe in you.

That doesn't really sound like it's a problem with supports in particular. It's more just the conflict of permadeath with narrative and characterisation. Even if we got rid of supports and did character storytelling in a different way -- maybe Tellius style base conversations, maybe something like walking around the monastery in Three Houses -- then we're still going to run into the same problem. Fundamentally, if we give characters a lot of dialogue then at some point it's going to make sense for them to talk about other people, and that's hard if we don't know whether said people are alive.

I'm a little surprised that people are so consistently putting Path of Radiance as their number one choice. Which isn't to say that I don't think that Pegasus Knights are excellent there, because they clearly are. But they're excellent in a way that mostly feels fair. If I were tasked with making a balance patch for PoR, I wouldn't immediately be thinking that I had to nerf the Pegasus class line because they broke the game. Which I absolutely am doing in otyher games. For Three Houses, Falcon Knights are the second thing I'd nerf, immediatly after Wyvern Lords. I'm not super familiar with Shadow Dragon (DS) but from my memory of it, the Wing Spear is right up there on the list of things that need to be nerfed. And then there's Awakening, and while I'm not sure if Dark Flier should count for this thread, but if it does count then it (well, Galeforce) is absolutely a prime candidate for a severe nerf. Marcia and Tanith are both great units, but I don't think either of them are egregiously above the overall power curve of their game.

Nah, I meant Citrinne but I was being a bit sloppy in my wording. By 10/20/2 (which is ilevel 29), on fixed mode, Jean has a magic of 31.5 while Citrinne is at 31.4. So in one sense, yeah, Jean is ahead of Citrinne at this point. But in another sense -- and probably the more useful one at that -- he doesn't actually pass her for actual integer value magic until 10/20/7 (ilevel 34) when he's at 35 (35.5) and she's at 34 (34.9). But regardless, the base point is still that Sage Jean will spend most of the game with better speed but worse magic than Sage Citrinne, but take a lot more work to reach that point. I do like the idea of sending him down multiple class lines to get a bespoke statline. I'm not sure that I really believe in it, in my heart of hearts, but I'm definitely interested in playing with the numbers a bit or seeing anything that anyone else comes up with.

I find Jean endlessly frustrating. I think that Expertise is the best skill of its type that we've seen to date, being much more interesting than either Blossom or Aptitude. Doubling class growth rates means that you can -- at least in theory -- specialise him into any class and have the amazing rgowths that that class needs. Berserker Jean has higher strength growth than Pannette; General Jean has higher defense growth than Louis; Griffin Knight Jean has higher speed growth than Chloé. So far so good. The problem, though, is the way that the class and leveling system works in Engage. It's almost universally advantageous to get to level 10 and then immediately promote. Given that you can always just loop back to level 1 after hitting 20 in your promoted class, there's really no reason to delay promotion outside of not having enough master seals. Reclassing before level 10 is also typically a mistake, since it resets your level to 1, meaning you're that much further from being able to promote and the power increase that that entails. For illustrative purposes, let's consider Jean as a General and compare his defense stat with Louis's, using various different promotion strategies. In all cases, we'll promote Louis to General at level 10 and then loop him back around when he hits level 20. Strategy 1: Immediate class change Here, we're going to use a second seal to switch Jean to being a Lance Armor right from level 1. We're then going to promote him to General when he reaches level 10, and then second seal him back into General when he hits max level. In this scenario, Jean already has a def advantage on Louis by the time he reaches Louis's starting ilevel. At level 6/ilevel 5, Jean has 17.5 def compared to Louis's 16.5. Jean also has a higher growth rate (by 0.05) so he not only maintains this lead but gradually increases it. Louis will only catch up at ilevel 51 thanks to his higher def cap, at which point the game is already long over. This is the platonic ideal of how Expertise is supposed to work. We pick a lane, we stick with it, and we reap the benefits. It's also pretty much impossible to make it work. We have access to Jean's paralogue after chapter 5, but we don't get our first second seal until chapter 9. Jean is already underleveled when we get him, and if we wait before we change his class then he'll be cataclysmically underleveled. A level 1 unpromoted unit in level 10? No thanks. Strategy 2: Stick with Martial Monk until level 10 So let's remedy that. Instead of changing class immediately, we just stick with Martial Monk until level 10, then we promote into General, and then loop back through General whenever we hit level 20. This makes leveling him up less painful, but it also means that we miss out on 9 levels worth of Lance Armor growths. After promoting at ilevel 9, our defense is 3.6 points lower than it was in Strategy 1. This puts us resolutely behind Louis at this point, and while we do slowly gain ground due to our better growths, we don't actually catch up until ilevel 48, at which point we maintain parity until ilevel 52, at which point Louis goes back ahead of us due to his higher caps. Needless to say, this is pretty much useless. Strategy 3: Class change at level 5 So how about we try to split the difference. We can't wait around to start using Jean until after we reclass him, but we also can't just keep him in his starting class until he promotes. So how about instead, we start using him as soon as we get him, but then change class to Lance Armor at level 5, and then promote at level 10? In this case, we match Louis's defense as soon as we promote at ilevel 13, and we surpass him at ilevel 23. In some ways, this is the most promising option so far. You aren't completely killing his early performance and you do end up with somewhat better def than Louis. But on the other hand, any advantage he has over Louis is small and very late to come online, and to get to it, you need to suffer through multiple levels with unpromoted Jean, past the point where everyone else is promoted. I can't say this is a good choice either. The promise of a growth unit like Jean is that they take a little bit of time to get rolling, but once they do, they give you enough return on investment to be worth it. But at least in the case of General Jean, that just isn't the case for him. The growing pains are too great, and the final rewards are too small. I haven't done the same level of analysis for other stats, but I suspect that things would play out similarly: you can get amazing growths, but if you don't change class immediately, you're falling too far behind to ever really see the benefit of those growths. So instead, let's try: Strategy 4: Aim for magic growth instead If we can't take advantages of good growths unless we get them right from the start and we can't realistically change classes from the start, then let's see if we can use the good magic growth that the Martial Monk class gives us. If you do that, going through Martial Master and then promoting to Sage at 10, then he's at least competitive. He falls somewhere in between Citrinne and Pandreo, with a speed better than hers but worse than his and magic that's better than his but worse than hers (though he does eventually surpass her magic at ilevel 29). And maybe that's OK? Being a competitive unit isn't bad, and maybe we prefer his stat spread over either of theirs for some particular purpose. Except that we've had to do an awful lot of work in leveling him up to reach that point of broadly comparable. And that's ignoring the fact that the game also gives us a seond magic growth unit in the shape of Anna. Anna can do most of the same things that magical boy Jean can. They have identical magic growths in Sage, for instance. Except that Anna maintains her excellent magic growths in other classes too (eg 60 vs 40 in Griffin Knight) which means she's more flexible than he is. And she also doesn't have as hard a time getting up to speed as he does, since she arrives with a relative headstart of 4 levels. I want to like Jean, I really do. I like using growth units, and I conceptually like how Expertise works. But I just can't find the build that really makes him sing. If anyone else has any other suggestions for stuff that I've missed, then I genuinely want to hear them, but for now, we will move onto: Strategy 5: The bench I just don't think he's worth using for anything beyond the sake of using him (which I don't discount; as said, I like growth units). He can give a little bit of staff support early on when you don't have many other options, and he will at least become good if you are willing to put the effort into him, but even with that I'm hard pushed to give him more than a 4/10 and even that might be over-selling him, due to my wanting him to work.

As far as I'm concerned, Rhea in the War of Heroes is broadly comparable to Edelgard in the present day. Deeply traumatised, well-meaning, but messed up. Nemesis and the Agarthans were also the people who tried to genocide an entire sapient species. That's pretty high up there on the "are we that baddies?" tier list.

I thought about mentioning Pokémon, but I wasn't sure who to give it to. On the one hand, pretty much anyone else would feel like an improvement at this point, but on the other hand so many of the problems with Pokémon-the-game-series are systemic and down to the release schedules forced upon the developers by Pokémon-the-media-franchise, and I don't know if anyone else could really do all that much better in the circumstanes. So, are we hypothetically just giving away the entire media franchise? Is any game developer really equiped to handle that? Maybe "Sony" if you would count that. And the other thing with Pokémon is that the general formula is pretty stale at some point and almost wants to be completely reimagined from the ground up. So you could, in theory, give the license to just about anyone and tell them to just go wild with it. A Pokémon game made by Supergiant would be very different from a Pokémon game made by Firaxis (for instance) but either one would excite me more than the idea of whatever the next mainline game is going to be.

Yep. I did start a Maddening play through after finishing with Hard, but I got bored with it a fair while before getting to Veyle, so I don't have any experience with her on Maddening.

I'm always a little bit sceptical of this kind of thread, mainly because I just don't see that much value in most IPs. Like, for sure I would like to see a Fallout game that's better than 4 or 76, but is it important to me that it's actually called "Fallout"? Would I not be equally as satisfied by some brand new IP that was also an RPG in a kitsch retrofuturist atompunk post-apocalyptic setting? Because that basic idea is already available to anyone who wants it. They couldn't have the specifics of the Fallout world like super mutants, deathclaws, the Brotherhood of Steel, and Nuka-Cola, but I can't say that I particularly care. And if nobody is making this game, then there's a reason for that. And yeah, it might be "we wouldn't have the marketing or name recognition to reach a big enough audience" but it also might just be that nobody else is inspired to make that sort of thing or think they have any good ideas or that they could pull it off. ...but I'm not going to let that stop me from giving it a go anyway. Assassins Creed, Larian. OK, hear me out here. What this basically boils down to is that I want Larian to make a game with a historic setting rather than a high fantasy one. Lean into the setting and the storytelling because they were the only parts of AC that I ever cared about, and get rid of all the Ubicrap that is piled on top of it. Plants vs Zombies, Subset Games. Really, I just want a sequel to the original PvZ that isn't a mobile game microtransaction hellscape. Not sure why my brain jumped to Subset (the folks behind FTL and Into the Breach) for this, but it did. The golden age of Star Wars games was exactly 2007, because that was when Lego Star Wars: the Complete Saga was released. All other Star Wars games before and since have been pale shadows compared to this one shining moment. (My own experience with deeply mediocre Star Wars games has included Galactic Battlegrounds, Super Star Wars, and -- the one that nobody remembers -- Yoda Stories.) It was a perfectly good game and I will die on that molehill. Very obviously not going to be everyone's cup of tea, and it was a baffling decision to create the game they did based on those licenses, but in and of itself, I don't think there was much wrong with it.

We do still have Anna and Jean left to rate, since we skipped them initially. Pretty sure I'm going to be an outlier here, but here goes. I have the same issues with Veyle that I have with Mauvier. With my play style, by the time you actually recruit them, the difficulty curve of the game has become so irrevocably broken that they aree complete afterthoughts. Compared to Mauvier, Veyle does have access to the dragon unit type and a better personal skill, but she also has way worse bulk, doesn't have staff access, and arrives a chapter later. I'd say that's probably about a wash overall. Sure, you can completely ignore her combat stats and just use her as a vehicle for Byleth, but the game is so broken by that point (for me, YMMV) that even the Rally Spectrum effect just isn't particularly impactful. (And doing so also means taking Byleth away from a combat unit, with the loss in performance that that entails.) I can easily see that she could be a better unit if you play the game in a way that means it isn't completely broken by the time you get her, but I can only judge based off my own experiences, so I give her 3/10.

Most of what I would have to say has already been said and there's not much point in repeating it. So instead, just a few random extra comments. I'm surprised that nobody else has brought up availability yet. Since you're only getting one Dancer per game, availability is both important and easy to measure. Is Reyson a better unit than Azura? Almost certainly. But if I'm playing Birthright then I get Azura in Chapter 5, whereas Reyson doesn't show up in Path of Radiance until chapter 18. So a hypothetical "Birthright without Azura" run probably feels more negatively speaking than a "PoR without Reyson" run. Seadall is also a fairly late recruitment, coming in at Chapter 15. Both Reyson and Seadall are exceptionally good units once you get them, but availability is probably at least a bit of a knock against them. Awakening is the only Fire Emblem game where I've ever permanently benched my Dancer (outside of stuff like challenge runs). I just got too frustrated at seeing Olivia getting killed by ambush reinforcements. What she contributed just wasn't worth how much of a liability her fragility was. I definitely agree with everyone who has said this is the lowest point for Dancers in teh series. Three Houses Dancers also have some of the same advantages that Seadall has in Engage. For one, there are battalions and gambits. Just as it's powerful to have Seadall dance for someone with an engaged Emblem, it can be powerful to dance for someone with a strong gambit. There are very few predicaments you can get yourself into which can't be solved by "what if I just use Ashes and Dust twice?" Second, there's the Dance of the Goddess gambit that can dance for your dancer and allow for your best unit to get 4 actions on a single player phase. I have a truly marvellous proof for why the Renewal scroll is objectively better that this margin is too narrow to contain.

This sort of approach is typically powerful in FE, yes (although probably less so in Engage than most other games in the series since fewer units means fewer Emblems). I'm not clear on why you think that adds value to Mauvier, though. Typically, if someone is looking to build a juggernaut then it's best to do so with early-game units. This gives them plenty of time to really snowball, and also just means that you have your overpowered units for as great a percentage of the game as possible. For that sort of play through, isn't Mauvier just going to be even more outclassed than usual by the time he's recruited?

Meanwhile, Ticket to Ride has announced that they're doing basically the same thing which has earned them at least three angry reviews on Steam. The same shit happens regardless of what scale you're looking at. (Though Ticket to Ride is Asmodee which is part of the Embracer Group now, so they probably deserve whatever shit they're getting.)

The game really wants you to use Mauvier and Veyle. The deployment limit has been capped at 12 for a while, and then it gets bumped up to 13 when Mauvier comes along and then 14 when you get Veyle too. And unless you've been deliberately training more characters than you have unit slots, they're pretty much going to outclass any other benchwarmers who might potentially take their slots. This means that they are both likely to see deployment. Personally, though, I find that about 10 characters is the sweet spot for deployment in Fire Emblem, with up to 12 being OK and then more than that starting to feel like a drag. I don't find myself thinking "ooh, yay, now I get to deploy 13 units"; rather I think "ugh, now I need to deploy 13 units". My 13th (or later 14th) best unit just isn't going to contribute very much when I've already built a well-rounded team of 12 who are plenty capable of filling all niches that I feel I need or want. And when I got him, Mauvier was absolutely my 13th best unit. He was better than my bench warmers, but considerably behind the units I'd been using. I don't know if this is a playstyle thing but for me, by that point, I was overleveled considerably past both the enemy units and past Mauvier. The end game level curve was just completely broken for me. (This is on Hard, after doing all paralogues, not doing skirmish battles, and generally having a "kill every last one of them" approach to most maps.) So Mauvier's role was, essentially "the least worst filler available for a deployment slot I didn't actually want". And he was OK in that role, I guess? Staff utility never hurts, and he has sufficient bulk to not feel like a liability. But he also didn't actually really do anything. He was more useful than keeping an empty deployment slot, but not by much. I give him 3/10.

My first reaction to you saying this was "nah, most of them were fine". But then I thought. And I remembered. Most of the ones that I did were fine. Many of the ones that I refused to touch with a bargepole were utterly deranged. I did pretty much all the ones that were "complete all of these different things": Cartographer, Sklill Hunter, Guardian, Vanquisher. Those ones. They were fine. But then there were the ones that were "do this one same task a ridiculous number of times" which I didn't touch with a bargepole. Stuff like "have your character spend 10,000 minutes drunk". But the absolute most ridiculous one of the whole lot was "Legendary Defender of Ascalon". Since you played, you might remember this one, but if not, and for anyone else playing along at home, settle down because this one is a wild ride. The tutorial area in Guild Wars was also, essentially, the prologue to the story. There was this lovely idyllic bucolic setting with mostly easy and low-stakes quests. "Oh no, the bull got loose!" That sort of thing. You play through that, learn the game, and then at the end of the prologue enemies invade, rocks fall from the sky, lots of people die, the land is scarred and blighted. You then cut forward in time a few years and the game proper begins. And since the tutorial area was a different time rather than a different place, once you leave you can never go back. Every player character in the tutorial area has never been outside of it. One of the consequences of this is that there was an absolute hard limit on how much xp you could earn while you were there, and so what level you could potentially reach. These numbers are all pulled out of my arse because I can't actually remember them, but they're illustrative. See, the amount of xp you get for killing an enemy scales based on your relative levels. Once you get to be 4 levels higher than the enemy, it stops giving you any xp at all. Now, most of the enemies in the tutorial area are no higher than about level 3, so you aren't leveling too high from them. But there's a small group of enemies in one specific place that you aren't really meant to fight, and they go up to level 8. So if you grind out killing them over and over you could potentially get up to level 12 and then there was nothing else that you could kill for more xp. But if you save all quests until after you've done this, then you could turn in all the quests for the quest reward xp to reach a theoretical maximum hard limit of level 13. But that was it. Going higher wasn't possible. The Legendary Defender of Ascalon title required you to reach level 20 (max level) without leaving the tutorial area. Which I just told you was impossible. Well, I lied to you. It's only impossible if you are a sane and rational human being. But. Well. Gamers. See, when your whole party died in Guild Wars, you would respawn at the nearest resurection shrine. So some bright spark figured out that if you carefully kited enemies over to a resurection shrine and let them kill you, then you could get into an endless loop where they kill you, you respawn, they kill you again, and so on. And due to a weird quirk in the way the game was coded, when enemies kill you, they gain xp. Not very much xp, but if you leave them endlessly killing you at a resurection shrine then eventually they would get enough xp to level up. At which point, you could then kill them and be able to gain a few xp from them again. You can see where this is going. If you wanted the title, you would lead a handful enemies to the resurection shrine last thing at night before you go to bed, leave your computer on over night hoping that your internet connection didn't crap itself, wake up in the morning and kill them for a paltry sum of xp. Then you'd do the set up again and leave the game idling for hours again while you went off to work or college or whatever else you were doing. And if you were diligent about always doing this twice a day, this tiny trickle of xp would eventually be enough for you to hit max level after... I don't know? About a year? Maybe more than that? The first person to do this did so before the title existed. Just because they could. Then the devs added in the title as a way of marking this achievement. And then the existence of the title just made other people want to try to do it as well. Eventually, the devs just caved and added a separate way of getting to max level that was within the scope of intended mechanics and which could conceivably be actually fun to do. Yeah, THK was an absolute killer. Since it needed you to split the party and be at least slightly coordinated. And since the computer controlled henchmen were pretty terrible. It ended up being pretty simple to solo once they'd added in Heros with custom builds and the ability to flag the computer controlled characters to tell them where to go. But at launch, it was somewhere between nightmarish and impossible to solo it. Aurora Glade was the other big one that sucked to solo, but that one wasn't so much of a big deal because you could just run around it and skip to the next mission if you wanted to. But completing THK was the only way you could possibly get to the Fire Islands, so you had to do it if you wanted to go further. Yeah. This is why I love stuff like Radiant Dawn part 2 and XCOM Chimera Squad. Actually showing what happens next and the struggles of trying to win the peace after you've won the war. I find that stuff so much more compelling than yet another war of resistance against the evil empire.

Yeah. I have a lot of sympathy for the people who write TRPGs. How the hell do you actually make a compelling plot when you're forced to fit it around the basic skeleton of "army has a couple dozen pitched battles and wins all of them"? A shit narrative is pretty much to be expected here, and games that manage to attain the heights of "vaguely competent" should be celebrated. So I'm willing to cut the writers a whole lot of slack. ...but not that much slack. Yikes. Great. I'd somehow managed to have never heard of Maddox until now, and my curiosity made me just have to go and look him up, didn't it? Thanks a lot for that one. That aside, I have nothing to say about Counter Strike, so I will instead meander super off-topic and share my own story of weird online gaming from the noughts. My game of choice back then was Guild Wars. I have a frankly embarrassing number of hours in that, which I am mercifully spared from being reminded of due to it being a standalone client and not through Steam. It was also the cause of the single naffest interpersonal drama that I have ever been a part of. There was an achievement (or technically a "title") in the game called Survivor. To get this to its max level you had to created a new character, and then play without ever dying until you got 1,337,500xp (for comparison, getting a character to max level required 140,600xp). This had all the usual challenges of requiring you be both good and consistent at the game, but also the expected stuff like "what if my internet drops?", "what if my teammates are idiots?" and "what if I die during a cutscene but it still counts?" I honestly didn't find it that difficult to do, but I had a decent net connection and the experience of multiple thousands of hours in the game. I dunno how hard it was without those things, but it had a Reputation. Someone in my alliance (read: a group of guilds that form together to form a super-guild) had been going for it for ages, and then finally picked it up after multiple failed attempts. My response was something along the lines of "Congrats. Dying is for nubs." (And yes, I definitely said "nubs" and not "newbs" or "noobs". It was, as you say, a strange time.) This made several people go absolutely ballistic. Just full on frothing rage. And on the one hand, sure, I will readily admit that mid-twenties lenticular was not as diplomatic as early-forties lenticular and that I would have been well served by being more careful with my wording. But on the other hand, I am still absolutely baffled that I managed to attract such vitriol for it. Apparently they thought that I was mocking them for finding the achievement difficult or something? I don't know. Next thing we know, my guild leader is getting PMs demanding that she kick me from the guild over this most heinous crime. Which, if memory serves, she didn't even know what they were talking about and was just trying to pootle about in game doing her own thing at the time. Poor sod. Long story short: lots of people got very angry, lots of words were said, lots of tears were shed, and in the end, my guild just ended up leaving the alliance, because wtf? I'm actually still friends with a bunch of the people from the guild. We have our own little Discord server these days, where we chill and talk shit. Today's topics of conversation have included Astarion from BG3 and how weird it is that Fran Drescher is a union leader these days. Shitty internet drama forms lasting bonds, you know?

As regards Cavaliers in Three Houses: while Intermediate classes are typically the ones with good masteries, it's still absolutely viable to use a class for it's power level in the moment rather than for what it can do for you long-term. One of the things that really helps out here is the existence of adjutants, which opens up two possible plays. One is to have a throwaway unit be your Cavalier and use an adjutant slot to make sure that none of your main units are falling behind. Then once you get up to Advanced tier, you can easily drop your Cavalier in favour of all the fully trained units you have with all their completed class masteries. Or, my personal preference, is to have your Cavalier backfill their Intermediate masteries later on by adjutanting. It doesn't matter if you're still in Brigand at level 20 if all you're doing is adjutanting, and you can pick up class masteries extremely fast if you have the statue bonus and a knowledge gem and then adjutant your unit onto an enemy phase unit. Going from 0 to mastery in a single map is eminently attainable. Which overall means that the cost of having one or two units spend time in Cavalier is very low.

For me, that's what I want. It's a feature, not a bug. Having all the Lords failing is what feels (for me) like the correct outcome of Three Houses. Possibly I just have a bleaker outlook on the Three Houses storyline than most people, but I do very much see a lot of it as a tragedy. The happily ever after style endings felt very out of place for me. From what discussion I've read, I think that I also see Edelgard as a reflection of Rhea to a greater extent than most people do. All the usual stuff about there not being a single correct way to interpret art certainly apply, but that was something that came across to me very strongly and obviously. Rhea had this horrific childhood trauma, went to war over it, won power, had good intentions, but then ultimately was corrupted by the power. So then we see Edelgard have this horrific childhood trauma, go to war over it, win power, and have good intentions... so my assumption is that she's going to be corrupted by the power and ultimately fail to achieve her goals. But my basic idea is that history has repeated itself, and a core theme of my hypothetical sequel would be about trying to break out of that cycle. Let's have another sympathetic character who has this trauma and is going to war to prevent it from ever happening again, except that we can't let them. If that would be unsatisfying for a lot of people and feel as if it invalidates the ending of Three Houses, then another possibility would be to put it in a future of a timeline different from any of the Three Houses routes. For instance, it could be a timeline in which Edelgard was pushed back and nearly defeated, undertook the Hegemon Husk transformation in desperation, and that was enough to see her victorious, but with her humanity shattered. Or maybe a timeline in which Byleth was lost after the Battle of Garreg Mach and never returned, meaning that nobody ever got a decisive advantage in the war which then lasted for decades, descending into a worse and worse quagmire where there were no winners. But with all that said, I do think it's an interesting thought exercise to imagine what a Fire Emblem game would look like if it did have a setting with a tech level based anywhere after the 14th century (or thereabouts; FE tech isn't supposed to mirror real world tech very well, but rather have a general medieval vibe, sometimes brushing into early modern). I do agree with you that it's unlikely that they ever will do this, but it is interesting to think about what it would look like. Personally, I don't think I'd want to see firearms (or at least not many of them) because I don't think that they could really be implemented in a way that feels satisfying but doesn't alter core FE mechanics too much. What I think could be an interesting direction, though, would be to really push into the direction of magitech. There's already a decent amount of this in Three Houses, with stuff like the Titanus, so I think the setting is ripe for completing a full on magepunk future with automata, ornithopters, magic laser swords, and so on. I'd be down for that sequel as well, even if it would be very different from my original idea.

I am primarily a PC gamer, with PC having been my main system going back to the '90s when I switched over from older proprietary 8-bit home computers (the Amstrad CPC in my case). I've always had consoles too, but they've always been suplemental for me. So that does definitely shape my perspective. I've been playing indie games pretty consistently since the 1980s. But with that said, even if you're only looking at consoles, I still don't think that indie games are particularly a new thing. Direct digital distribution on consoles is around 15-20 years old now. XBLA launched in 2004, WiiWare in 2008. Thinking back to some of the successful indies of that era, there's the likes of Braid, Castle Crashers, and World of Goo, which all released in 2008. And do remember as well that the concept of the "AAA" game is not all that much older than that, only dating back to the late 90s. Prior to that, relatively small budgets and small dev teams were the norm. While the stuff that got published on consoles in the 8- and 16-bit eras typically wasn't what we'd recognise as indie by today's standards, it also wasn't anything close to a modern AAA game. The industry was sufficiently different then -- in both creative and business aspects -- that modern terms just don't fit all that well. So even on consoles there was only a period of maybe a decade or so after AAA games appeared and before direct digital distribution allowed indies to proliferate. And even then, it's not like indies didn't exist at all; Shantae may have been held down by the cost of publishing, but it was still there. Oh, and since I'm talking up the history of indie games, I will just point out that two of the most successful and influential video games in history are indies: Tetris (1985) and Minecraft (2009). Anyway, this is getting increasingly off topic and I've said my piece, so I will bow out now.

If you move onto Let's Go with the fairy type, you can then have: Which has absolutely no overlap with the obligatory Gen 1 team.

I wouldn't really say that we've reached that point, more that it has always been the case. Through the entire history of video games to date, there has always been a continuum of game creators from hobbyists through indies to mid sized and then to the biggest companies. The big corporations with their enormous marketing budgets want us to believe otherwise, but they have never had the monopoly on games that they want. It's good that there's a growing awareness of indie games, but they aren't anything new.

Dammit. Thinking about this further:

They're not really games that are designed around 8 players, though. (At least, Smash Bros isn't; I'm not super familiar with Mario Strikers, but I assume it isn't either.) Rather, they're games where more players can be accomodated without sacrificing how well the game plays with fewer players. Yes, you can play Smash Bros with 8 people, but you can also play it with 4 (or any other number up to 8 ) and you never feel as if the experience is watered down at all. With Mario Party many mini games are designed around having a specific number of people and don't really work properly (or at all) with fewer.

I have to imagine that at some point over the history of the development of Mario Party, someone in the development team has come up with the idea of "what if we allow for more players?" Conceptually, it's not a particularly big creative leap to make. So the fact that they've never done it probably means that they decided it wouldn't work very well for whatever reason. And I think that First Mate has hit on the two biggest reasons why it wouldn't work well so I'll largely just echo him, but I will add another couple of potential concerns: 8 players would mean you'd need 8 controllers, which a lot of people don't have. I sure don't. And also, there's the issues of how many people you can happily fit around a Switch. My living room certainly can't fit 8 people and have most of them be anything close to comfortable, and I imagine that's true for a lot of people as well.

I came up with these lists before looking at yours: Gen I: Gen II: Gen III: Gen IV: Now comparing those lists with yours, we have literally identical (except for order) lists for gen I, but substantially different lists for subsequent generations. Which isn't entirely surprising. Gen I did tend to reuse a lot of its type combinations (grass/poison and ground/rock especially), so it's not surprising that there just weren't as many possibilities to choose from.