lenticular

I agree with this. It would probably be possible to make a list based on which are best for inheritance instead, but that feels like a separate thing that shouldn't be mixed in with how good the Emblems are to equip. My list looks something like this (with a shaky attempt to internally rank each tier from best to worst). This is based on my experience of one full playthrough on Hard, and then the start of a second playthrough on Maddening (finished chapter 10 so far). S tier: Lyn, Corrin A tier: Micaiah, Byleth B tier: Ike, Sigurd, Eirika, Celica C tier: Marth, Lucina, Roy D tier: Leif. Lyn & Corrin: Pretty much everyone agrees that these two are fantastic, so no need for me to repeat the same reasons as everyone else. Micaiah: Augment is nutty. Giving AoE and range to all staves lets you do some ridiculous things. Even if you're just using it for healing, it can still turn a humble Mend staff into something of a cross between Physic and Fortify. And that's before looking at what it can do with the likes of Rewarp, Freeze, Obstruct, etc. Giving staff access to someone who doesn't already have it is also relevant. It's especially strong in the early game in the early game when you don't have many staff units, but even in the late game, it can still find some use. In my current run, I'm planning to piar Micaiah with Alear to really take advantage of convoy access for access to all staves at once. Byleth: Four-person refresh is still as powerful as it's been in past incarnations. Thyrsus is a very nice bonus too, and the Rally Spectrum effect also seems nice, though I've not used that one yet since there's much more competition for Emblems for Alear than Emblems for mages. Ike: Can make someone pretty much unkillable for a turn with Great Aether, and very durable outside of that. Being able to patch up magic weakness on a General is very handy. Sigurd: Mobility is good. Especially when you first get him and don't have any other mobility tech. But by late game, you do have Warp and Dance and other fun toys, so the ability to get from here to there in a hurry is no longer unique. And while Canter as a sync skill is nice, it's also easily inherited, so getting it through syncing isn't as valuable as some of the other top-tier skills. Eirika: Honestly, I don't feel like I have a handle yet on how good Eirika is, and I wouldn't be surprised if I'm way off with this ranking. Partly that's her low availability, partly that's her more complicated kit, and partly that's just that I had her on one of my weaker units. The general impression I had from her is that she adds extra stuff that is always nice to have but seldom unit-defining or map-defining. Celica: Better early on than in the late game, but never bad. Even if the Warp part of Warp Ragnarok drops off, the Ragnarok part stays about as damaging as other Engage attacks, and Resonance is a bit of extra damage for free. Marth: Yeah, he's OK. Lucina: Another one where I'm not confident of my ranking. Bonded shield seems like it might be good, but I pretty much never found myself using it because 80% activation doesn't seem reliable enough for a defensive ability. I know there are ways to improve that based on party composition and unit types, but none of them were relevant for my party. Extra damage from Dual Assist is nice to have, but even fully upgraded, it's still only somewhere around a 63% chance to work (70% to activate and c90% to hit). Extra damage is extra damage, but reliable extra damage is better than unreliable extra damage. Roy: Yeah, he's OK too. Just not quite as OK as Marth. Leif: Might be better if Adaptable were smarter, but as is, I've seen this switch away from weapons I wanted to use into inferior choices (eg, switching away from a weapon with a +avoid engraving and otno something which let the unit get hit, or switching from a more powerful weapon to a less powerful one with triangle advantage). His sync skills aren't bad, but he's in bottom tier for making me actively want to avoid Engaging with him.

In terms of intentional direct reference, would we count Yune and Yunaka? It's never confirmed in game that there's a connection between their names, but given that Yunaka appears in the fan-service/nostalgia game and has an association with Micaiah, I can't imagine it's purely coincidental either. Same could be said for Céline and Celica, though that one doesn't feel quite as much of a sure thing to me.

The SF main site has a good page about the mechanics of supports, including how many support points you get from which activities and how many points you need for each level of support for each different pairing. I assume that most of it was datamined, so it should be pretty accurate. It mostly agrees with your findings, but with a few discrepancies and some more detail in places. For farming supports, I've only done so casually during story progression, but my approach has been to always send Alear into the arena. Whoever the opponent is, Alear is always going to support with them, so there's no need for the time and thought of saving and reloading. Plus, since Alear has the most supports, and they take the longest, it's not a bad thing to focus arena support gains onto them. It might be worth changing this up once you already have a lot of their A supports unlocked, but it's a decent mindless strat up until that point.

In my hard/classic run, one thing that I found with Timerra was that if I gave her a killer lance, I often found myself in situations where I needed either one of a crit or a sandstorm proc to get a kill with her, which got up to some pretty good levels of reliability. Even at relatively modest values like 50% crit and 30% sandstorm, that gives a 65% chance of hitting at least one of them. Or an 88% of getting one of the four possible procs if she's doubling. And of course, you can get those odds even better if you're willing to invest. Not sure how well this would hold up in maddening though and I'm not planning on using her in my ongoing maddening run.

If we're including mounts, there's also Cherche's wyvern, Minerva, who is pretty clearly named after the Shadow Dragon character.

Nice strawman you've got there. Have fun arguing with it. Again, I really don't want to go into too much detail here because of how off topic it is, but the summary version is that I consider -- and this is my preference only and not something I hold as an objective truth -- a moderate amount of arithemtic to be an overall neutral (eg, doing a quick calculation of attack - defense and then multiplying by two to account for a follow up attack) but consider more extensive arithmetic (eg, having to manually add together contributions from multiple different weapons, skills and effects) to be an overall negative. And that's the last that I'm going to say on this subject in this thread. If anyone wants to continue the discussion, I'd suggest starting a new topic for it.

Glen the Grado general, and Glenn the dead fiancé and brother. Lugh the Lycian mage, and Loog the first king of Faerghus. Wolt the archer from Pherae, and Valter the Grado general. Lucius the monk from Elibe, and Lucia friend of Elincia. Jeanne the Genealogy character I know nothing about, and Jean the would-be doctor from Elyos. Anna and Anna and Anna and Anna and... And if the datamines from Engage are accurate, we'll also have:

One thing that I don't see mentioned often in tier list discussions is how much weight is or should be given to ease of use. Which is better, a unit who's incredibly strong in one specific niche build or a unit who can't reach the same height but is still going to be pretty great no matter what you do with them? And if a unit is only good in one build, should it matter whether or not it's their default build? I'll use Three Houses as an example because I don't know Engage well enough yet. How good is Edelgard? Well, if you turn her into a wyvern lord, she's incredibly strong and one of the best units in the whole franchise. If you leave her in her unique Emperor class then she's fairly mediocre. So, where does she belong on a tier list? If I'm talking to a friend, then I'm telling them that they should definitely use Edelgard but they really should put her on a wyvern. But on a bare tier list, there isn't the space for that sort of "yes, if..." type of judgement. We just get a single letter grade. So any sort of tier list or other advice as to which are the best units to use needs to consider how much game knowledge the hypothetical reader is expected to have. If someone is presenting a lengthy unit analysis with discussions of various build options, I think it's reasonable to assume that the reader will be playing that unit to its full potential. But if it's just a bare list that says "these are the best 12 units that you should use", then if that's to have any use at all then they need to be units that work well out of the box and are hard to mess up. And I would not be surprised if this turned out to be more of an issue in Engage than in other games in the series, because there isn't really a default way to build most characters. Some get handed a specific emblem by default, but most don't. And if you're actually using a character longterm, then you're probably giving one to them.

On the one hand, yeah, it's nice having someone who can use brawling/arts/whatever they call it going forward. But on the other hand, Engage managed to use Micaiah and Leif to represent knives, and I don't think that was terrible, so I probably wouldn't have minded if they'd just decided that (for instance) Edelgard and Ike were Arts users now.

I don't want to go into this too much since it's getting pretty off topic. Put very briefly, appraising the situation is an important part of strategy and tactics games, but doing basic arithmetic to figure out whether unit A can kill unit B is not. Many, many games manage to have deep strategy and tactics with no arithmetic required at all. I have much less fun figuring out exactly which of my units the boss can kill in a single round than I do in figuring out exactly how I position my units so that the boss is bodyblocked from reaching those units it can kill. And yes, I know that some abilities do need to be exclusive to player phase for balance reasons. I'm not saying they should go away entirely, just that I would prefer for them to be used only when they're strictly necessary. I tend to think of Celica as being somewhere in the middle, probably lower middle. I'd definitely rate her above Leif and Roy and roughly equal to the likes of Marth and Lucina. She's been in the "always nice but seldom gamechanging" tier for me. Warp Ragnarok is exceptional early on, but not as useful in the late game. By the late game, you have other ways to effect the battlefield at a distance (eg, Astra Storm from Lyn) or move long distances (eg Warp and Dance) so it feels less special. More dangerous enemies also means that more audacious warps are more likely to end up being suicidal. Echo is theoretically nice for situations where you just need to do a little bit of chip to two different enemies to finish them off, but I've found that it comes up less often than I would expect it to. Seraphim can be nice against corrupted, but you aren't always fighting corrupted. The Recover staff is nice in theory for the ability to give emergency healing to someone who doesn't otherwise have access to it, but most magically-inclined Advanced classes already have staff access and don't get that much out of it. Somewhat ironically given this thread, Resonance is probably the part of her kit that I've got the most use out of. Having +2/3 damage on all tome attacks is always going to be good, and has been relevant and useful for me more often than Echo has. One part of her kit that I haven't experimented with is Favourite Food, mostly because re-adding a packed lunch to someone's inventory after every single battle sounds like a lot of faff. Being able to get an extra free engage per battle does seem like it might be potentially powerful, though, even if it does cost an inventory slot. Has anyone played around much with this?

My experience with effective weapons is that they are pretty decent in the early game, but fall off heavily. As an example, consider a poleaxe. That has 8 base might, which means an effective 24 might against cavalry. Your best regular weapon at that point might be a steel axe, with a might of 13. The poleaxe is giving you an extra 11 points of might. That's pretty good. But then as the game progresses, you upgrade steel to silver, you forge your weapons, you engrave them. A silver axe +3 with a Marth engraving (for instance) has a might of 21. You're only getting +3 might from using the poleaxe, which is much less enticing. And in return the silver axe has 25 more hit, 10 more crit, 5 more avoid, and 5 more dodge. And it's far better against non-cavalry units in the subsequent enemy phase. And it doesn't cost an inventory slot. And sure, it is possible to upgrade the poleaxe as well but it's never felt worth it to me. The highest might possible would be to upgrade it to +5 and give it an Ike engraving, which would bring it to 16 might, which is 48 effective might against cavalry. And that's pretty great. Except that I really don't want to be spending all of those resources on a weapon that's only going to be good against a fairly small subset of enemies. Which means that most of my effective weapons aren't improving from when I first get them, whereas my other weapons are and so are the enemy units I'm fighting.

One thing that isn't clear to me is what the licensing agreement is likely to be between Nintendo and Sega, or Nintendo and third party publishers on Switch Online. For the Virtual Console, it seems like it would be relatively simple: for every unit that a game sold, some portion would go to Nintendo and some portion would go to the rights holders. But for NSO, since nobody is actually buying any of these games, it isn't that simple. Are Nintendo paying Sega (etc.) a flat fee for having their games on the service, or is it a more complicated system with payments depending on how many people are actually playing the games in question? Because, ultimately, for a game or a system to appear on Switch Online, two things need to be true: the rights holders have to think that they make more money licensing to Nintendo than they would if they just sold a rereleased version themselves, and Nintendo have to think that they will make more money in attracting/retaining subscribers to Switch Online than they are paying in license fees. And I'm not really sure that both those criteria are going to be met for any other third party consoles. I just don't think that there's any other (realistic) console that has the same level of wide appeal that the Mega Drive/Genesis has. Some consoles have had very strong regional success (like the PC Engine in Japan, or the Master System in Brazil), but none have had as wide an adoption as the Mega Drive. So if I'm Nintendo, I'm thinking that I'm not wanting to pay as much to license those systems, whereas if I own the systems, I'm thinking maybe I could so better for myself with more targeted releases. (The only console that has global sales figures comparable to the Mega Drive and that wasn't made by Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft is the Atari 2700, and while I would nerd out over the chance to play Adventure or Breakout on my Switch, I just can't see many people getting excited about games of that era. And that's even putting aside how much of a nightmare the licensing would probably be given the messed-up corporate history of the Atari brand.) So, overall, my guess is that we probably won't see any other systems from non-Nintendo developers on Switch Online. I think the one that would surprise me the least would probably be the Master System, but I'm still not expecting it. As for Nintendo's own consoles, they're running out of options that could easily be implemented. The Virtual Boy, Wii, Wii U, DS and 3DS all have hardware gimmicks that make emulation awkward. Not impossible, but awkward. For instance, I'm sure it's possible to emulate a DS on the Switch, but it isn't going to be a seamless experience. After all, the Switch only has one screen. And needing a touch screen means it would only work in handheld mode, not docked mode. So if they're going to go with any of their systems, the Gamecube is the one that makes the most sense to me. Except that it feels as if Nintendo have been pretty protective of Gamecube titles, wanting to keep them in reserve for potential remakes and rereleases. (I'm thinking things like Zelda: Windwaker and Mario Sunshine here.) So are they really likely to have emulated Gamecube games for the first time on a system that is well into the second half of its life cycle? Maybe, but I would guess probably not. They have a history of being stingy with that sort of thing. Instead, I guess that they'll keep it in reserve for whatever their next console is, and have Gamecube games as one of the selling points for whatever their next iteration of Switch Online is called.

I honestly wish they'd just picked a lane and stuck to it. I think I would have liked the game more if it had just gone full-on cheesy nonsense the whole time (I mean, I unironically enjoyed TMS#FE after all). And I also would definitely have enjoyed a more serious story. But what we ended up with fell incredibly flat for me precisely because it was neither one thing nor the other. A lot of the more serious moments (especially some of the later ones that I won't go into) felt so ridiculously unearned that I found myself literally facepalming, whereas they could have been quite touching if they had been in a different story.

My favourite villain in the franchise is Ludveck. He's a nasty piece of work and a complete slimeball, but he's not just mustache-twirlingly evil for the sake of being evil. There's a logic and a consistency to his position, and sometimes it seems like he almost actually has a point. And then his actions actually mesh with his philosophy. He says that Elincia is too weak-willed to be an effective queen, and he's actually smart in trying to exploit that perceived weakness. He relies on the fact that the heroes have to be heroic as a way of manoeuvring for position. And I really want to beat him, not just because he's awful, but because if he wins then that will be vindication for his dreadful worldview.

This is only theorycraft and I've never actually tried it, so standard caveats and disclaimers apply. But would it be possible to use the Mercy skill from the S rank Elincia bond ring? That would let you consistently get enemy units down to 1hp, at which point even the lowest level unit can happily take them out (with the help of chain attacks if necessary). This could be done alongside the Micaiah/Great Sacrifice idea, and I would guess it would speed things up somewhat.

That's not a bad solution, and I can see why people would like it, but it's not one that I'm personally a fan of. I generally dislike player-phase only abilities and owuld like to see them kept to a minimum because I have a habit of -- where possible -- previewing a combat on player phase to see how it will pan out on enemy phase. It's a lot quicker and easier than checking and comparing stats between units. The more player-phase only abilities there are, the less that works out. Which means a. more probability of me being caught out by a gotcha moment when the combat didn't behave like I expected, and b. more time spent looking up stats and less time (as a percentage of the whole) thinking about tactics and strategy.

I'm not just talking about Berserker though, and I'm not sure why you think I am. My main point is this: just comparing the growth rates of end-game classes is misleading, because you spend so little time in those classes, in Three Houses. Yes, you are correct that there is only a 5% difference in the strength growth between Wyvern Lord (Three Houses) and Wyvern Knight (Engage), but in Three Houses you are only actually getting those growths for a quarter of the game, maybe a third. Meanwhile, in Engage, a unit is spending upwards of half the game in its final class, usually over three quarters, and in many cases its entire existence. Three Houses class growths are brought down significantly by the low or non-existent growths on their beginner and intermediate classes. Let's do a couple of like-for-like comparisons. First, Louis and Raphael. For Louis, he's recruited at level 6 as a Lance Armour. Let's then promote him to General at level 15. This is later than I'd like to promote, but maybe you didn't have enough Master Seals to promote him earlier. We'll then take him all the way to level 20, second seal him, and raise him again to level 5. He levels up 9 times as a Lance Armour and 23 times as a General. In total, he expects to gain 9*(0.40+0.15)+23*(0.40+0.20)=18.75 points of strength over those 32 level ups, for an average of 0.59 strength per level. For Raphael, let's assume that we recruit him at level 1, then we promote him to Fighter at level 5, Armor Knight at level 10, and finally Fortress Knight at level 20. We then carry on until he hits level 40. (You could turn him into a Great Knight at level 30 if you wanted to, though it would make no difference to this calculation since Great Knight and Fortress Knight have the same strength growth.) Under these circumstances, he expects to get 4*(0.50+0)+5*(0.50+0.05)+10*(0.50+0)+20*(0.50+0.10)=21.8 points of strength spread over 39 level ups, for an average of 0.56 strength per level. Next, let's compare Chloé and Petra. For Chloé, we'll recruit and promote at the same levels of Louis, starting her as a Lance Flier and promoting to Wyvern Knight. She expects to gain 9*(0.25+0.10)+23*(0.25+0.20)=13.5 points of strength over 32 levels, for 0.42 per level. For Petra, her class progression will be Commoner to Fighter to Pegasus Knight to Wyvern Rider to Wyvern Lord. This gives her an expected 4*(0.40+0)+5*(0.40+0.05)+10*(0.40+0)+10*(0.40+0.10)+10*(0.40+0.15)=18.4 points of strength over 39 levels, for 0.47 per level. So, overall, Louis can expect slightly better strength growths than Raphael, but Petra can expect slightly better strength growths than Chloé. Which is hardly surprising. Louis is a better unit than Raphael is, and while Chloé and Petra are both good units, Chloé feels like she's the somewhat more likely of the two to struggle with her strength and need help. But in both cases, the difference is small, coming in at less than 5% effective growth rate over the course of the game. While there are differences between the two games in how important weapon might is, it isn't due to growth rates.

I'm not sure that there's any way it could have been designed that wouldn't have had some sort of weirdness to it. For any way of designing it, there's going to be some sort of weird edge case where the design that's chosen is exactly what you don't want it to do. Like, take your suggestion: Imagine that an enemy is doubling you and each attack has a 1% chance to hit and a 1% chance to crit. And the only way that you die is if the enemy lands a crit. At the same time, you exactly get the kill if you have the extra damage from Resonance, but just miss out if it doesn't activate. And then there's some circumstance where failing to get the kill would actually be relevant (let's say it body blocks you, stopping you from ending the map on the next player phase, which means you lose a unit). It'd be pretty frustrating if the game chose not to activate it because of the 0.01% chance it would get you killed, but that would be the logical consequence. Or if it worked the way it does in Shadows of Valentia, it could still get you killed on any enemy phase where the opponent doubles you. As is, I can't think of any implementation that doesn't either overcomplicate the UI or have a chance for this sort of frustration. I think the biggest problem here is probably that the way that the mechanic worked was not the same as how you thought it worked. Which isn't a fun experience and is something that designers typically strive to eliminate, but is also not something that can be completely eliminated. From what you've said, it sounds like you were expecting it ot work the same way that it did in SoV and were caught out when it didn't. which is fair! But at the same time, I'd be shocked if there aren't some people out there who found the SoV implementation confusing but find the Engage implementation intuitive and easy to understand. Pleasing all of the people all of the time remains an inexact science, and what have you. For myself, I found the SoV system easy and intuitive, but I also find the Engage system easy and intuitive. I actually had a situation last night where the 1hp from resoance made a pretty significant difference to my strategy (I had to stall out a boss for several turns when I could have killed him quickly otherwise). It was a little bit frustratring, but not something that I had any problem understanding or predicting. So, TLDR: it sucks to lose a unit like that in an ironman, and I would absolutely be salty as well if it happened to me, but I don't particularly think that it's bad design.

Class growth rates for strength are considerably higher in Engage than they were in Three Houses. Three Houses tops out at a 15% class growth rate, and that's only for three classes (warrior, war master, and wyvern lord). You're not getting it until level 20 at the earliest, and if you aren't looking to spend time in the much-maligned warrior class, then you aren't getting it until level 30. Assuming a class progression of noble -> fighter -> brigand -> wyvern rider -> wyvern lord that finishes at level 40, that's 5 levels with no class growth, 5 at 5%, 20 at 10%, and 10 at 15%, which would be an average class growth rate of 9.8%. Meanwhile, Engage tops out at a 30% class growth rate (for berserker), and has a lot of classes give 20%, some of which are at basic tier. Even in a hypothetical case of a character leveling up from 1-20 in a basic tier and then 1-20 in an advanced tier, they're still going to end up with a substantially higher average growth. Lord (20) -> Successeur (20) averages to 20. Axe fighter (20) -> Berserker (30) averages to 25. Lance Armour (15) -> General (20) avergaes to 17.5. However, in reality, most characters are promoting out of base classes at or soon after level 10, and most of them aren't joining at level 1 base class anyway. So, for instance, Louis arrives as a level 6 Lance Armour. If you get him to internal level of 40, that's potentially 4 level-ups as a lance armour and then 30 as a general (average class growth rate of 19.4). Or take Pannette, who starts off as a berserker. If you leave her in her base class, every single level up that she has will have the berserker class bonus of 30. Overall, in these circumstances Pannette spends the entire game with an effective strength growth rate of 75 (45 peronsal + 30 class), whereas Dimitri has an average growth rate across the whole game of 69.8 (60 personal + 9.8 average from class) and only manages to top out at a 75% growth for his final ten levels. So no, I don't think that strength growth rates are significantly lower in Engage than in Three Houses. That said, though, I do think that weapon might does matter more in Engage than it did in Three Houses. In Three Houses, there were a lot of ways of stacking extra might onto an attack. Weaponfaire + death blow + battalion bonus would typically come to around about +18 bonus to damage at minimal effort, which is bigger and more significant than the differences due to growth rates or the differences due to weapon type. While Engage does have other ways to make your attacks better, it doesn't have the raw damage stacking that Three Houses did. That's fairly normal for the series, though. It's not so much that Engage is doing something strange and unusual here, more that it's stopped doing the strange and unusual thing that Three Houses did and returned to the more tried and true way of doing things. (NB For some of the calculations here, I've assumed leveling up from level 0 rather than the reality of level 1, just because it makes the numbers much easier to work with. This will mean that my final numbers are slightly off, but not enough to make a substantive difference to my point.)

Not that there's any point in pretending if you've seen a spoiler already, but just to point out that FE has given personal skills to non-recruitable characters before, in the form of Jeralt and Rhea. So I don't think we can say that a personal skill guarantees recruitability, just that it makes it highly likely.

It depends. For instance, are they representing the game to people who have already played it, or to people who they hope might pick it up in the future? If the former, there's an incentive to go with the most popular characters that will trigger good nostalgia feelings (eg Lucina), but if the latter then it might be better to emphasises characters who appear prominently early on in the game (eg Robin). It also matters whether the game is being presented on its own or as part of the series as a whole. For instance, if we were just picking out a Radiant Dawn character in a vacuum, then Ike would be a pretty reasonable pick, but if we were picking two characters, one for Path of Radiance and one for Radiant Dawn then hardly anyone would have Ike as the PoR representative. This is especially important when there isn't that much of a difference between different characters. Either Alm or Celica work well as a rep for Gaiden/Echoes, so which one gets picked should definitely come down to surrounding circumstances.

I think it depends on what you're trying to get out of the ironman in the first place, which is going to vary from player to player. If you want to have an emergent narative as you cope with units dying: save scumming for rings is fine. If you're trying to challenge yourself to a harder way of playing the game: save scumming for rings would go against that. If you want to deal with whatever RNG the game throws at you, deal with the good and the bad, and roll with the punches: no, you shouldn't be save scumming. If you're mostly after a way to make yourself concentrate during battles and try to make yourself always play optimally: it probably doesn't hurt at all. If you're wanting to compare your experience or compete against others: it doesn't really matter which you choose, so long as you're doing the same as they are.

This game is really good at having character gimmicks and then just never mentioning them at all. Why is Rosado a crossdresser? Why does Zelkov always *put* emphasis on really strange *words*? Why does Merrin have a tail? I have no idea, and the game hasn't been in a rush to tell me. And yeah, I do agree that it's endearing, in its own way, to think that everyone is just super accepting of everyone as they are and don't even bat an eyelash at any of this. But on the other hand, while I hope that that's deliberate, I'm not sure I really believe that it is. I'd prefer not. I found that the difficulty curve is already a bit of a mess, and I'd prefer to see your take on that in its base form without having all the DLC stuff potentially either fixing it (which seems unlikely) or messing it up even further (which seems more likely). I like that approach, but also think that Shadows of Valentia was the worst game to put it in. Having map encounters that really discourage you from backtracking in the same game as all the sidequests that really want you to backtrack seemed like such an odd decision to me. When I've played, I've always just skipped all the sidequest, because I wanted to avoid the map encounters. My first reaction to the Somniel was... let's go with "extremely negative", shall we? Just didn't like it at all. My first thought was, basically "oh, they've kept all the things about Garreg Mach that people hated, but got rid of all the things about it that (mostly a different set of) people liked". And while I did warm up to it a little bit as I played, I do still kinda think that. It feels a little like all the social sim aspects are gone as are all the more character and world-building sort of stuff. Which, yeah, I know you didn't care for any of that stuff, but I've found that for people who did like the monastery, that's what they liked about it. Whereas at the same time, it feels as if it's left behind a lot of the tedium and the busywork. As I ran around the Somniel picking (literal) crap up off the floor, I actually thought, oh shit, I get it now. I understand why a lot of people hate the monastery. I guess that, ultimately, I'm just not sure who the somniel is supposed to be for. It doesn't seem likely to satisfy the sort of people who liked the storytelling/characterisation/world-building potential of the monastery. But it also doesn't seem likely to be for the sort of people who like the quick and easy no-fuss approach of My Castle. I'm sure that there are some people for whom this is exactly the sweet spot, but I'm not sure who they are. Like I said, though, I did warm to it a little bit, but that was mostly in the form of figuring out what stuff I could safely skip, and how to get through the rest of everything as fast as I could. Once I stopped actually interacting with a lot of it, I found it a whole lot less annoying.

Finally finished my first playthrough, so here's my thoughts. This was on hard/classic. Easily my best unit was Chloé (griffin knight). I showed her a little bit of favouritism at the start, but once she got going she really took off. And then once I paired her with Lyn, she went through the stratosphere. Flight is always good, she was dodgy enough that very little could even touch her and even when an enemy did manage to get a lucky hit in, her HP was high enough that she never felt in any real danger. She was able to one-round most enemies, and given that she had the mobility advantage, was normally able to strike first and take out anything that could potentially have been dangerous to her. And on top of that, she had staff utility and all of Lyn's fantastic emblem abilities. Basically the only maps where she wasn't MVP were because I was deliberately holding her back to let everyone else get xp. Other great units were Louis (completely shrugged off physical damage the whole game, and stopped caring about magic damage once I paired him with Ike), Alear (I kept her in her default class and built for avoid, which made her completely immortal, albeit her damage output wasn't great especially without any good 1-2 range options), Merrin and Yunaka (both kept to their default classes; daggers and high speed are both good in this game). My worst unit who I actually kept in my team through to the end of the game was Céline. She was always adequate, never bad, but she never really stood out either. Pretty much everyone else that I usd had a time when they really shone, but Céline just didn't. Units who I tried seriously using for a while but ended up benching because they just weren't getting the job done: Jean, Boucheron, Alfred, Jade. Not sure if I did something wrong with these, if they got bad level ups, or if they're just bad units, but they all fell into the cycle where they were underperforming which meant they weren't getting the xp they needed which meant they fell further behind until I replace dhtem with someone else.

Elincia, Emblem of Mercy (Bracelet of the Resolute Queen) Paralogue map: Fort Alpea, from Elincia's Gambit (RD: Part 2, endgame) Stat boosts: Lck, Dex, and Spd. Engage Weapons: Tempest Blade (1-2 range physical sword) (lvl 1), Physic (like regular physic but better range) (lvl 10), Amiti (low weight sword with brave effect) (lvl 20). [I was tempted to include a sleep staff somewhere in here as well, but figured the three I settled on were probably better.] Engage Skill: Battlefield healer. After attacking, may use a staff that targets an ally as part of the same turn (if not proficient in staves, may still use up to D rank staves to do so). Engage Attack: Stun (hits for triple damage and automatically breaks the opponent) (Dragon: also freezes the opponent). [I kinda wanted to give this a better name since "stun" is pretty uninspiring, but I couldn't think of anything else that sounds better while keeping the same flavour.] Proficiency Unlocks: Staff and Sword. Sync Skills: Graceful flight (unit moves as if it were a flying unit, ignoring terrain) (Flying: Nullifies Effective: Flying) (not inheritable). Mercy (adds an option when attacking to leave the enemy at 1hp rather than killing them) (inheritable). Renewal (restores 10% of the unit's HP at the start of every player phase) (inheritable). Inheritable Skill: Healing mastery (scales to give healing staves +20 healing and +2 range at max level).