lenticular

No rating for me here, since I've not used her enough to feel I have a solid handle on how good she is, but I will ramble a bit about what experience I have had with her anyway. I haven't been particularly impressde with her. She wasn't bad, but she didn't stand out either. She seems great on paper. Staves are strong in Engage and she has a personal skill and a unique class that are dedicated to making staves even better. But my experience was that she didn't really do that much. First, flight isn't as big a boon for a support unit as it is for an attacking one. It's still better to be able to fly than not, but it's not as big a difference. And of course, unlike Ivy's unique access to the tomes/flight combo, staves/flight is also available to Griffin Knights as well as any flying unit with Micaiah. Then there's her personal skill and her class skill. +1 range on staves is kinda nice, I guess, but was something that didn't seem to come up all that often. It's the ultimate break point, I guess. If the unit you want to target is exactly one square further away then you can (safely) reach, then +1 range is an absolutely huge difference-maker. If they're any closer or any further than that, though, then +1 range is completely meaningless. Preserving staff charges also sounds nice in theory, but in practice, most staves fall into one of two categories: I have enough charges that I don't really care about preserving them, or so few charges that you can't rely on having the skill proc at all. So, a nice bonus, for sure, but not something that would have much impact on the way I play. I can easily imagine Hortensia being great for someone who uses staves more than I do, especially someone who likes to warp skip a lot, but I am not that player, so I found her fairly underwhelming.

I'd disagree with that. I think there are just too many different variables involved and that once you really start looking at things with a magnifying glass then the idea breaks down. For instance, you say side objectives of note, but who's to decide what counts as being "of note". Recruitments probably count, as do any specific goals the game sets like "don't let the enemy escape with any crest stones". But what about visits? Or chests? Or killing enemies that drop items? Does it matter whether the item they drop is a brave axe or a vulnerary? What about just killing enemies for xp? Would a 16 turn full clear not be better than a 15 turn strat that only killed the boss and then seized? Or what if someone decides to ignore a side objective? Is it more efficient to complete a map like Prisoner Rescue or The Feral Frontier in 60 turns with all side objectives, or in 10 turns just by killing everything? And I'd also say that not all turns are created equal. If I kill all enemies in 8 turns and then spend 8 turns just moving Marth, hitting end turn, and listening to Victory Is Near, is that more or less efficient than if I finish clearing the map on turn 15 and then immediately seize? I think that, ultimately, my big problem with the idea that a lower turn count means more efficient play is that across all the Fire Emblem games I have played over all the years that I have played them, I don't think I've ever once tried to optimise for turn count. I'm usually optimising for some sort of combination of fun, reliability, and time, with anything on top of that typically being part of a challenge run. Which isn't to say that I think there's anything wrong with caring about turns taken, be it for LTC, ranked runs, or whatever else. People should play the way they want to play. It's just not my thing. And it seems weird to me to prioritise this one metric over all other metrics.

When I see someone mention "efficiency", I mostly interpret it along the lines of "if you play the same way that I play". It feels like it's supposed to represent a goldilocks zone with not too much grinding but also not too much optimisation, but that place in the middle that's juuuust riiiight. You know, just playing the game normally. Like how I do. Except that everyone plays at least a little bit differently, so what's normal for one person is borderline perverse for another, so everyone's idea of efficient play similarly ends up being different. Personally, I think that we would collectively be better off if we were more willing to embrace subjectivity. Trying to determine objective truth about the quality of a Fire Emblem unit seems a little bit silly and extremely futile. If we're doing something like rate the unit and Timerra ends up with ratings everywhere from a 3 to a 7 then that's a feature not a bug. That says "the quality/value of this unit varies depending on how you play the game". That's more useful for me to know than any attempt to get a single pseudo-objective rating score that applies only to an ill-defined play style that I probably don't share.

Thinking about Three Houses specifically, what it really needed was Kezhda. I mean, not actual literal Kezhda, obviously, but comparable substitute bosses. The selection of bosses in Part 2 is fine if you don't bother to recruit anyone, but awful if you do. If the replacements at least had names and a single line of dialogue then that would have really helped, I think. For bonus points, it would have been fun if they gave specific interactions between the recruited unit and their replacement. So, let's say I recruit Petra then her replacement assassin might also be from Brigid and if I have them fight each other then they'd have a bit of dialogue about how they are both doing what they thought best for their country. And so on. Agreed. I'm quite happy to agree to disagree; I just wanted to state my case and then be done.

Depends on what you like. If you just want a good and challenging turn-based tactics game and don't care if the story and the RPG elements of the game are terrible, then you should play Engage. If you want a good story and don't care that the game is a little on the easy side, then you should play Path of Radiance.

Out of curiosity, I decided to try taking a sample of bosses from across the series. My totally-not-scientific methodology was to pick chapter 11 (which was a completely arbittrary choice, with the only reasoning behind it being "not too close to the beginning or the end") and looked up the boss in chapter 11 of each game. Except for Genealogy and Gaiden/SoV since they don't have a chapter 11. For games with multiple routes, I chose only one of them: 11A for BiBl, Eliwood route for BlaBl, Eirika route for SS, and Birthright for Fates. And for Radiant Dawn, I chose Part 3 Chapter 11. I've never played any of the Japan-only games, so won't comment on them, but according to the wiki (New) Mystery gets Wyvern, Thracia 776 has Kempf, and Binding Blade has Orlo. For the rest: Two don't have any named bosses at all, only generics. These are Sacred Stones and Birthright. The wiki claims the bosses are "Monster" and "Wyvern Lord", but given that both of them are rout maps, I think it's probably better to claim that they don't have a boss. Two have a major boss only: Gangrel in Awakening and Veyle in Engage. Two have both a major boss and a minor boss. Path of Radiance has Black Knight and Three Houses has the Flame Emperor. Three have a minor boss only, those being Shadow Dragon, Radiant Dawn, and Blazing Blade. Those five minor bosses are: Goran, Groznyi, Khozen, Mackoya, and Metodey. And honestly, how many of those do you even remember? Can you match them to their games without looking them up? Maybe I'm just bad at remembering bosses, but I'd have known one of them by name without looking it up, and there's a second one who I vaguely remember after looking up, and then the other three I have no recollection of at all. So my not-at-all-scientific conclusion based on this would be that FE minor bosses have never been particularly interesting to begin with. Yeah, there have been some great and memorable ones, but I think they're the exception rather than the rule. Given that the only thing that was unique about the bandit twins was the worst kind of queer-coded villains, then I'm super glad that was removed. As a result, Tetchie and Totchie are probably my favourite bandit twins in the series.

Knife sages are notorious for being terrible and basically just a trap option on promotion. And to some extent, that might be deliberate, to give a reward for leveling up Soren, Ilyana or Tormod rather than just using Calill or Bastian, but for the purpose of this discussion, let's assume that picking knives is supposed to be a viable choice that people might actually want to make. Let's imagine that IS were making a remake of PoR and wanted knife sages to finally have their day in teh sun. In that case, what would it take to make knives an actually competitive choice with staves? 1-2 range knives? Poison effects on knives like in Fates or Engage? A knife that does magic damage like the Flame Shuriken or Misericorde? A mage with decent strength stat? Getting rid of the 17 chapter recruitment drought for staff users? All of the above? Even more than that?

Is that unpopular? Disliking all cutscenes probably is, but I always got the impression that "win in the game, lose in the cutscene" has pretty widespread disdain. Kai Leng in Mass Effect 3 is the one that always comes to mind for me as a particularly bad example.

I'm not sure there's much to say about Merrin. She's good. Very good, even. She has good stats. She has a good starting class. Her personal is... well, calling it "good" would be pushing it, but it's one of the better ones in Engage. She even supports with a strong set of other units. She doesn't have any Corrupted Hate This One Weird Trick style ways to break the game wide open. She's just generally strong. 8/10.

There were something like 4000 years between the Twelve Crusaders and Awakening. If we assume that a generation averages out to about 25 years, that means that there's a gap of around about 160 generation from one to the other. Given that we have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, and so on, someone in Awakening timeframe should have 2^160 ancestors from the time of the Twelve Crusaders. Which is around 1.4x10^48, or over a trillion trillion trillion trillion. Obviously, there were not that many people on the planet at any point, and the real solution is that family trees get very tangled and messy if you go back far enough, with the same people appearing in many many of those different positions. And, to cut a long story short, if any of the Awakening cast are descended from Baldr, then it is overwhelmingly likely that the entirety of the Awakening cast are. Because population statistics are weird and unintuitive like that. So even if you have Kana daughter of Selena daughter of Donnel then it still works out.

Sweet. Always love to see the individual game Directs. If it's a game I'm interested in (this one is) then I like getting a deep dive into what to expect. And if it's a game that I'm not interested in, then it's nice to have it segregated off somewhere I know not to watch.

Rating primarily based on hard difficulty since I used her in my hard run but not my maddening run. I actually found Timerra to be a very solid unit when kept in her unique Picket class. One of things with Timerra is that a lot of her stats come from the class so she's really going to suffer if you change her into another class. Picket comes with a base def of 10 (better than anything that isn't armor, general, or great knight), but unlike traditional hight def classes also has excellent base speed of 9 (bettered only by the speedy classes swordmaster, wolf knight, thief and griffin knight). Add in a very competitive 9 for base strength and you have probably the class with the best raw stats in the game. This is not as good for her as it seems, though, since those stats are baked into her stats -- which are not remarkable for her join time -- which effectively leaves you choosing between staying in Picket or ending up with pretty bad stats. So if we're asking whether Timerra is any good, we're effectively asking if Picket is any good. Which is effectively asking if Sandstorm is any good, since that's really the only unique thing the class is offering other than its stats. And I'd say that it can be. When it triggers, it hits like a truck. For Timerra in Picket, 150% of her def is equivalent to a strength of 24+75%. Which is great. And is made even better by the ready availability of and low competition for ways to boost defense. The problem, of course, is that it isn't triggering all the time, nor anywhere close to it. When I ran her, I ended up combining Sandstorm with a crit build, and got her to be pretty reliable at being able to trigger one or the other. I forget the actual numbers that I had, but if it was 50% chance to crit and 30% chance to proc Sandstorm, and if she's doubling then that's only about 1/8 chance that she makes both hits without getting a crit or a sandstorm proc on either one of them. Which is pretty good already, and it's obviously possible to get better numbers than this if you invest in her. And on hard, she was hitting hard enough that she only needed either a single crit or a single Sandstorm to get the kill. Using a brave lance is another way to increase reliability if you only need to hit 1 proc out of 4. I'm waffling between a rating of 6 and 7 for hard, and I'll round down since my intuition is that she's almost certainly worse on maddening. She's just as likely to get procs on maddening, of course, but more likely to run into enemies where getting one proc just isn't enough. So that's an overall rating from me of 6/10.

Oh, nice. I didn't know that was a thing. I played and liked Risk of Rain, even though I was completely terrible at it. Then there was Risk of Rain 2, which might be a great game but I'd never know because it's not something I can even watch for more than about two minutes at a time without horrific nausea. This isn't Hopoo's fault, mind. It's hardly something that's unique to their game. I get pretty awful motion sickness and sim sickness, so a lot of 3D games are off-limits for me, even ones that have absolutely no right to make me sick. Like, I've had to give up on games like What Remains of Edith Finch and Dear Esther, and am probably the only human being ever born who has complained that Dear Esther needed to slow down. But even though it isn't the game's fault, I still always got a little melancholy thinking about the series. So it's exciting for me that they're going back into 2D and I'll actually be able to play again. Maybe I'll be marginally less terrible at the remake.

The "don't consider obviously suboptimal builds" part of the guidelines is going to be tricky here, because using Bunet is pretty obviously suboptimal. Let's compare him to Jade. I gave Jade a score of 3 and she got an average community rating of 3.7. Jade is, I think it's fair to say, not a good unit. If we take our base level Jade and immediately promote her to Great Knight, her stats are very comparable to Bunet's. They have equal strength, speed and res, with magic, dex and def differing only by 1. Bunet's big advantages over Jade are significantly better HP and Luck and the fact that you save yourself a master seal since you don't need to promote him. Meanwhile Jade's big advantage over Bunet is that she arrives 3 levels earlier and 4 ilevels lower. Which means that, should you choose to use her, you've almost certainly leveled her up several times by the time you get Bunet and she gets to inherit from early-game emblems, and she just has better availability. I think she's pretty clearly the superior choice between the two of them. And this is Jade that we're talking about. Once we start comparing him to actually good units, he's even more hopelessly outclassed. So, with that out of the way, let's see if we can find some sort of silver lining. First, it is worth saying that no matter how bad he is, he's still usable. If you love the guy or if you're forced to use him by a disastrous ironman, then he is absolutely salvagable. Being worse than other units doesn't mean unusable. Beyond that, though, we're clutching at straws a bit. He's a free deploy in his recruitment chapter, and can contribute a little bit there. He does well in the kitchen in the Somniel if you ever get him assigned there (or are willing to scum for it, I guess?). His personal ability theoretically has good synergy with Favorite Food, but actually getting good use of that seems like a lot of effort for not particularly great results. He's pretty bad. 2/10.

They could, sure. At least possibly. Nintendo still has the rights to the Mario characters, so IS can only make Mario games that Nintendo approves. But even assuming that they could, I don't really see why they would. They aren't going to spend vast amounts of time, energy and money just because they can. There has to be some underlying reason for it, either artistic or commercial. And I don't really see them having any such compelling reason.

I think something like this can be fine as something that's only hinted at and is left as something for the alert player to figure out on their own. Like, if Athame had a crest-cancelling effect and then in dialogue someone points out that the wound was more deadly than it should have been and maybe there was something going on with the knife, then I think that we'd have managed to figure out pretty easily what must have happened. Yeah, I might have missed it on a first time playthrough and casual players likely wouldn't pick up on it at all, but I think that's fine. I like storytelling that rewards me for paying attention. Though you're right that it absolutely could also have worked as a way to expand on the relationship between Byleth and Jeralt, and that could have been great too.

I want an Awakening-style sequel to Three Houses. By which I mean, a sequel set in the far future of the world after all the characters and events of the original game have faded into myth. Now, admitedly, it's not as if Awakening sets a good example here. For all the things that that game did well, respect for the source canon definitely wasn't one of them. But I think that Three Houses is a much better target for that sort of sequel than Shadow Dragon, Mystery of the Emblem, and Gaiden ever were. For starters, the world building of Three Houses is a lot more extensive, which makes it a lot easier to adapt without having to resort to making up a whole lot of nonsense. Beyond that, though, I also think that a far-future sequel would work pretty well with the themes and ideas that Three Houses already has. There are all of the ways that Edelgard is a mirror of Rhea. There's Rhea's actions being motivated by her ancient trauma/ There's Rhea being named for one of the Greek titans, the generation that preceeded and were replaced by the Olympians. There's the contrast of Indech and Macuil deliberately retreating from the world and fading into myth compared to Rhea, Seteth and Flayn trying to be an active part in it. There's the way that, at least on Crimson Flower and Verdant Wind, we're actively fighting to try to create a new world order rather than just to maintain the status quo. There's even the way that the NG+ crest item for the Crest of Goneril is called the Kalpa Dragon Sign. The basic idea of repeating patterns in history is baked into the world already. I don't know exactly what I'd want the plot to look like, since that would require a lot of work to even outline properly, but my basic thought is that Crimson Flower is canon, Edelgard won, she ended up becoming a religious figure as the leader of the gods who overthrew the previous generation of titans (despite not wanting to be) and the Church of Edelgard has now become greedy, corrupt, and nepotistic. Yeah, it's not exactly a super original plot, but I think it could be a cool way to further explore and reifnorce some of the themese of the original game.

It could have been interesting if they'd said that there was fancy Agarthan tech that specifically targeted people with crests/Nabatean blood. They could give it an in-game effect where being hit by these weapons disables your crest for a round or three, and then also explained that Jeralt's old body, bereft of the healing effects of his Crest of Seiros and going into shock as a result, just wasn't able to survive his wound. Whereas Manuela, who was young and healthy and didn't have any Crest to begin with, was no worse off than a wound with a regular weapon. But they didn't.

My first instinct is to say that this probably shouldn't ever be a thing. The series are very different from each other, and I'm not sure that a crossover would really do either one of them any favours. But that said, if it were a done deal that this crossover absolutely was going to happen and I was put in charge with figuring out how to make it work, this is what I'd do. I'd basically build it as a Paper Mario game, except with Fire Emblem combat. Paper Mario has changed up its combat so many times at this point that nobody would be surprised if it gets changed up again and oh hey, suddenly it has Fire Emblem combat now? Sure! Why not? It's not like it's any more weird and out there than lining things up on a turning wheel puzzle. The maps would be far smaller than traditional Fire Emblem maps, though. Probably comparable in size to a Heroes map. The aim would be to be able to duck in and out of them quickly so they never distract for too long from the Paper Mario style story/exploration/character interaction stuff. For the story, I'd just go with something basic. Some random evil villain has created a rift between dimensions that is threatening to destroy all worlds, and now some of the heros of those worlds have fallen through into this world and are here to help Mario out as partner characters. Say hello to Paper Marth, Paper Ike, Paper Lucina, and Paper Edelgard. (Or whoever.) These would be very cartoony and light-hearted versions of the characters who would fit into the Paper Mario mood and aesthetic, because I think it would be easier to create silly and lighthearted versions of Fire Emblem characters than to have Paper Mario suddenly pivot to being about the horrors of war. Yeah, this is a super basic and uninspiring plot, but when you're already trying to mash together two things that don't particularly belong, overcomplicating things is just a recipe for disaster. Deliberately simple has a better chance of working out here, I think.

If they ever do a more technically advanced magepunk-ish faction again (like the Agarthans in Three Houses), then I want ornithopters and autogyros. You can't tell me they're any more out of place to the setting than the giant mechas that we got.

The game is not good at all about thinking about the storyline implications of Divine Pulse actually existing. This isn't the only time that it doesn't really make sense when you think about it, with the game generally either making a ague contrived handwave or just ignoring it entirely. It isn't something that's personally bothered me all that much, but I can understand why it can be jarring for some people. I agree with the fairly common sentiment of hoping that, for future games, IS gives up on trying to come up with some sort of storyline justification for time rewind and just presents it as part of the gameplay UI. Time travel in fiction is hard to do well, and generally won't make much sense unless it's a focal part of the story that the writer has really focused on getting right. Which absolutely wasn't the case in either Three Houses or Engage.

Pandreo is a lot like Fogado in that he has a very high floor and a ceiling that is decent but not spectacular, though I do think that he comes out ahead of Fogado on both fronts. Even if you do absolutely nothing with Pandreo, he's still going to be a decent performer as a High Priest with whatever equipment and Emblem/Bond Ring you have sitting around not doing anything else. That was pretty much how I used him in my first time through the game on Hard difficulty. I didn't really care for him as a charcter so I threw him into my party as filler to eventually be replaced by someone better when they came along. Nobody better came along. He just kept performing well despite getting no investment. He has a few decent class choices. Sage is a slight upgrade on High Priest, since its stats are a bit better. This is the choice if you want to retain both tome and staff access, or if you want to stay in the Mystic group (eg, for access to Thyrsus through Byleth), but has the drawback of limited mobility. If you want a higher move stat, you can either give up staves and go with Mage Knight or give up tomes (in favour of a levin sword) and go with Griffin Knight. I've only run him in High Priest, but he seems like someone who has reasonable flexibility in how he can be built. I give him 8/10 overall.

Don't overthink it. Post if you have anything to say, don't post if you don't. Treat each game on its own merits rather than trying to come up with a single hard and fast rule.

I don't really have a lot to add here other than to say that I agree with the general consensus. 7/10. To make this post slightly less devoid of content, I'll add that when I used Fogado I gave him Lucina and a longbow, for maximum dual strike coverage. Was this optimal? Not remotely. Did I have a whole lot of fun with it? Absolutely. Oh, and I'll also add that his personal is absolutely terrible, and it's hard to come up with any plausible circumstances where it would actually be useful. It's probably one of the worst in the game, which is an impressive feat given the low overall power levels of personals here. Still, going from a 1/10 down to a 0/10 rated personal does little to his overall viability as a unit.

I had never heard of this until you posted. I now have 100% achievements for Cats Hidden In Paris. I can't say it was the single most fun that I have ever had with a game, but it was absolutely worth the princely sum of 0GBP (that's roughly equivalent to 0USD or 0EUR) that I paid for it. The speedrun achievement was surprisingly tough, though. Turns out that I can either go fast or go without missing any, but not do both at once. I ended up having to take written notes for how many cats there were in each area, otherwise I'm not sure I could have managed. In the end, It took me 6 tries, with the whole thing taking me 75 minutes. I'm terrible at this game. I can only find one cat here. Maybe I'm missing the other 99 because I'm too distracted by the cuteness of the one I can see?