lenticular

But let's say that we were going to include an explanation in the game. We've thought it through, we have a full explanation for what's really going on. It makes sense, it's consistent with everything else in the lore, it's just generally a good explanation. Where do we fit this into the game? Do we have Yune deliver a speech explaining the deep underlying workings of magic in the world? Do we have a base conversation where Soren tells us he's been doing some research and has figured out why laguz parents actually lose their power? I hope not. Either one would be jarring and out of place. But I don't have any better ideas. And ultimately, the fact that it doesn't matter is kind of the point. It was an accident, with no greater meaning behind it.

While recent games have been increasing the effective range of bows, they've also been increasing the effective range of magic. Bows have the advantage in Shadows of Valentia, even though 3-range magic is common, but they're much more even in Three Houses. Getting up to 7-range for non-siege magic isn't particularly hard there (Thoron/Mire/Death + Thyrsus + Valkyrie + S rank Reason), and getting up to about 5 range is something that tends to happen without even trying. I see your point about Pegasus Knights and being able to hit def rather than res, but hitting def is only really an advantage when strength and magic are comparable, which IS doesn't tend to do with their hybrid unit design. Though, in fairness, if they go forward with specific spell lists rather than tomes, not all units are going to have access to wind magic, so there is that. Except, realistically, I'd probably just prefer to have someone else deal with the pegasus and let my bow mage do something else instead. Maybe a flying class would actually be the best choice for a bow mage, since they're most likely to be operating autonomously, not have anyone else to support them, and actually need that effective damage against enemy fliers? For Hanneman specifically, I found he was decent enough as a dedicated mage and decent enough as a dedicated archer, but pretty lousy as a hybrid. As an archer, you really want to get him to B rank in bows so he can use a magic bow which is a non-trivial investment. And you also really want him to pick up Hunter's Volley so he can double, except that you can't have that and magic at the same time. The more that the series moves towards skills and combat arts and different builds being meaningfully different, the more difficulties there are going to be to make hybrids work.

I disagree with that. I think it's a bad idea for a writer to try to justify literally every element of their world. There's always going to be something left over that isn't explained, and if you do try to cover literally everything then you end up with a plodding and pedantic work that reads more like a treatise on the fictional universe's metaphysics than an actual story. (Or like the appendices to Lord of the Rings, which few people actually read.) I mean, I'd love to know how laguz change their weight when they transform and how that doesn't completely break all of physics, but it's not even a little bit necessary for the story. Sometimes you just have to say that it's magic and that's just the way the magic works. You even get things like the taris-like nature of the Tower of Guidance, where we are literally told not to think about it too much. So long as the world building is internally consistent and so long as it supports the narrative and the characters, then that is typically going to be enough. (And yes, there are a few authors like JRR Tolkien or Brandon Sanderson who specialise on elaborate and intricately crafted worlds but they are the exception rather than the rule, and what works in a long novel series isn't necessarily going to work in a video game setting.)

I'm not surprised that bow/agic has never been done. It doesn't seem like a combination that offers a whole lot, either mechanically or thematically. Mechanically, bows and magic tend to serve a similar function: they both typically attack at range, often do chip damage, and usually operate outside of the weapon triangle. So giving a unit the ability to do that with two different weapon types doesn't seem all that meaningful. Sure, it would mean they'd potentially be able to hit against both def and res, which isn't nothing, but that would come with all the normal weaknesses of hybrid classes and all the weakness of training up two different weapon ranks, which probably wouldn't be worth it. Thematically, I'm not sure I can think of any good examples of fighters using bows and magic. Or at least, not bows and the sort of battle magic that Fire Emblem goes for with fireballs and lightning bolts and that sort of things. Most of the examples of bows + magic that I can think of from fiction tend to go for either nature based magic or illusion based magic. Which isn't to say that they couldn'tdesign a class where it made sense, but I don't think that it's a super obvious archetype that feels lacking in its absence. As for what I want to see, more staff + martial weapon combinations. I always find them really fun units to use, and I think there's a whole lot of unexplored territory with them.

I agree with the picks people have already made of Halberdier and Troubadour. To them, I will add: Dread Fighter. Because mage killer is an interesting feature to be able to add on to sword infantry units. Kinshi Knight. I like the visual design here, shooting arrows from a flying mount is always cool, and air superiority is another fun niche. Some sort of healer on a winged horse. Whether that's letting Falcon Knight heal again, a unique class like Elincia's or something else, I don't really care. I just want this combination back in some form. If it were me, I'd probably have a branching promotion for Pegasus Knight, with Falcon Knight being purely offensive and Seraph Knight getting healing access. But any other way of doing it would work too. And while I'm here, two classes that I hope won't come back are Malig Knight and Ninja. Malig Knight is just personal preference, but I have a bit of reasoning when it comes to Ninja. I'm not sure I want to see any weapon types permanently added to the core FE weapon canon (sword, lance, axe, bow, tome, staff) and would rather that extra weapons -- like shuriken and gauntlets -- be a distinctive feature of their individual game. So, no more ninjas, but leave space for some other new weapon if they have good ideas for one.

One thing that is relevant for actors is how much time they have to prepare for the role. Consider accents, as an example. Let's say that we need an accent who can do an Indian English accent. Now, pretty much any talented actor working with a talented dialect coach and given enough time to prepare will be able to learn the accent extremely well. Sure, an expert would probably be able to point out a few slight inaccuracies, but overall, they'd be able to do a damn good job of it. On the other hand if they're just handed a script and told that they start recording the next day so they should spend the evening listening to a few recordings and practicing in front of a mirror, then their accent is going to suck. Exactly how much it sucks will depend on the actor, but it is going to suck. Accurately mimicing accents is hard. Unless, of course, the actor is actually from India and is a native speaker of Indian English. In that case, they wouldn't actually need any time to prepare at all. They could just do it, and do it even more flawlessly than the hypothetical non-Indian actor who had spent the last 6 months preparing. Obviously. The same, I think, can be true for life experience. If an actor is asked to portray something that is far outside their life experience then they need time to prepare. They need to get into the charater's headspace and understand their motivations in order to know what sort of inflections and emotions to deliver their lines with (and yes, obviously some of that comes from the director, but not all). And any talented actor can do that if they have time, but when time is short, being able to draw on personal experience definitely doesn't hurt. Now, I don't know how much time voice actors have to prepare for their roles in Fire Emblem games, but my guess would be "not as much as they'd like". They're typically working on quite a tight time schedule since they have -- to some extent -- to fit around development, writing and localisation and a worldwide release date for the game. Since this is Fire Emblem, these issues don't come up too often. In a fantasy world, it doesn't really matter if accents are a bit off. It doesn't actually matter how good Gregor's Russian accent is, because he doesn't actually have a Russian accent. He has an accent from whatever region of Ferox he's from, which just happen to sound somewhat Russian. And since we're in a high fantasy faux-medieval world, there aren't that many personal experiences that can easily apply. But that doesn't mean that there aren't any. Going back to the original topic of this thread, one of the reasons that I like Dorothea so much as a character is the authenticity that Allegra Clarke was able to bring to the role, since she herself is a bisexual woman. And that isn't to say that straight (or lesbian or asexual) women couldn't have potentially performed the role just as well, but I don't think they could have done so as naturally. What Clarke had an intuitive understanding of, other actors may have needed to work on, and may not have had the time to do so.

I actually did something similar in Birthright. I went into the game completely sight-unseen/no spoilers. I was also playing ironman style (it wasn't technically an ironman, since I did reset for a Corin death early on rather than restart, but I wasn't resetting for other unit deaths). And I generally just didn't bother with supports. I wasn't enjoying the support conversations, I found the game easy enough that I didn't feel the need for any of the mechanical benefits, and I don't really enjoy the gameplay style of keeping two units glued together. So why would I bother? And then, of course, partway through the game, new recruitment just completely dried up. And I gradually started losing units to silly mistakes, and it grew harder and harder to replace them. (And of course, I also lost Kaze. and of course, I didn't get Izuna or Yukimura.) But then, eventually, I did stumble into an S support by accident. Not because I'd been trying for it, but just because it had built up naturally from the way I was playing. It was Ryoma and someone else, though I can't remember who. And then suddenly, there's a paralogue and the game tells me that child characters exist. So, I try to do the paralogue, and naturally, because it's nearly the end of the game by this point, Shiro gets completely slaughtered. So, as far as I could see, yes there were children, but it was too late for them to actually be useful at all, so there was no reason for me to go out of my way to try to pick them up. I did complete the run, but it ended up being a little bit touch-and-go. I remember that for endgame, I was deploying unpromoted Setsuna at something like level 5. She did come in useful tanking a hit for a pair-up partner at one point. Honestly, though. I don't really consider this a gaffe on my part. I think that all of the decisions that I made were reasonable based on the information that I had. Mostly it was just a case of bad luck, with a small side order of the game not adequately explaining or telegraphing one of its important mechanics. But mostly bad luck. It took a confluence of a lot of different unlikely factors to create such an almighty cock-up.

In terms of character: L'Arachel. Nothing more to say about her, I just really enjoy her personality. In terms of mechanics: Sakura. The 1-2 range healing staves in Birthright are possibly my favourite thing about Fates, and Sakura's personal skill combines really well with them. (And on a technicality, I'm also going to say Elincia, since she has a non-promoting unique class, rather than being a pre-promote. She probably doesn't count for what you were looking for, but if she does, then I pick her.)

Yeah, they're pretty similar units. Not just with the same crest, but with similar weapon proficienies and both having access to Swift Strikes. And on the one hand, Seteth having the major crest does help out with its activation rate, but on the other hand, how many enemies are actually surviving being hit with Swift Strikes to the point where you even care about their counterattack? If I wanted to use both of them, I'd probably put Ferdinand into a different class. He's pretty flexible, and can make a lot of different builds work at least reasonably well. Seteth can be put into other classes too, but it generally takes more work due to his late join time, so I'd prefer to stick with him on a wyvern and change up Ferdinand.

Somewhat infuriatingly, Silver Snow isn't really a particularly good choice for really using Church units. Specifically, Cyril and Catherine are both a lot weaker in Silver Snow than they are in Verdant Wind and Azure Moon, since you can't recruit them until chapter 12. For Catherine, that means missing out on her strong early-mid game performance. For Cyril, it means that his auto levelling is done in the Commoner class, which does him no favours. For both of them, it means they miss out on all the customisation and training that you do prior to that point. I wouldn't recommend using either of them on Silver Snow. The two Church units I would be most inclined to recommend would be Seteth and Shamir. Both are strong units, and Seteth is forced deployed in Chapter 13, so is worth showing a little bit of love to even if you don't plan to use him longterm. For students, other than grabbing the ones that you need for paralogues, I'd mostly just say to pick your favourites. Pretty much anyone will work fine. Looking at supports isn't a bad way to go, though. Choosing people who support with Dorothea can be particularly nice, since they can take advantage of linked attack from her Meteor, once she has it. Manuela is a standout on that front, since her linked attack with Dorothea gives +might, or Ingrid could be good for the better rewards for their paralogue. Really though, I wouldn't stress it too much. Just go with the units you like or want to try out and it will be fine.

As someone who disliked both FF7 and BotW (yes, yes, I know, double blasphemy), I wasn't really impacted by either of these two specific examples since I wasn't interested to begin with. I'm fairly sure that both of them would have irritated me greatly if I had been interested, though. I don't think it's the case that alternate timelines are worse than faithful remakes or faithful remakes are worse than reimaginings or anything like that. Tastes vary. No matter what route a game developer takes with their remake, there are going to be some people who are completely into it and some people who really wish they'd gone in a different direction. That's just inevitable. I think that the problem comes when what the game delivers is not what was promised. Since you can't please everyone, what I want is to have an accurate description of what the game is and then I can decide for myself whether I'm part of the target audience or not. If the game isn't going to be what I wanted then I can just skip it and no harm, no foul. And I do get it. For some people, being surprised by the divergence from expectations is part of the appeal. So I can see some justification to being secretive about that sort of thing. But that sort of misdirection is always going to alienate a proportion of the player base. Ultimately, I see it as a "caveat emptor" sort of situation. I never preorder games, I usually wait until at least a week after they're released before buying them, so I can check how they're received, and I do my best to avoid being caught up in hype. That way I'm less likely to end up in the sort of situation where I will feel misled, and can instead just chalk things up as not for me and move on without any hurt feelings or wasted money.

(I'm not really familiar with Heroes, so read all this in that light.) I don't think that it's necessarily important to have hit rates per se, but I do think it's important to have some degree of randomness and some chance for things to go wrong. @Zapp Branniglenn mentioned the importance of risk management, and I'll add to that by also mentioning contingency planning. I like having to plan for what I will do in case something goes wrong. "OK, so I'll attack that unit there, and that's a 90% chance to get the kill and if it works then it will allow me to do this. But I need to do make the attack before using my other units because if it doesn't work then I still have the chance to bail out." That sort of thing. Making the game entirely deterministic wouldn't necessarily make for a bad game but it would make for an extremely different game which would appeal to different people. I'll also note that getting rid of hit rates wouldn't just be for player units but for enemy units too. I don't think that a world in which enemies always hit sounds particularly appealing. It would have a lot of implications for the way that the FE turn structure works (that is, full player phase followed by full enemey phase, as opposed to any interleaving of actions). I haven't fully thought through all the implications of that, but my gut instinct is that it wouldn't do anything good for the game. (And the implications would be different from in Heroes, due to there being so many more units involved.)

I think that, for the most part, Fire Emblem locations aren't supposed to be one-to-one analogues of real-world locations. They certainly draw inspiration from different places and cultures throughout Earth history, but then they mix and match things together and reshape it into something new. So, for instance, I don't think it makes a lot of sense to quibble over whether Nohr is more like Germany or more like Scandinavia. Better to just say that it's a mishmash of medieval Europe, with a vaguely Germanic aesthetic. I'm not really familiar with Blazing Blade, but from the name alone, I'd assume that Nabatea was one inspiratin here. Especially sicne it was reused as an inspiration in Three Houses. I don't really see this one. Yes, Ferox and Sparta both had martial cultures, but so do a whole lot of places. But beyond that, they're extremely different. I guess you could say that they were both diarchies, but the way they worked was so different that I don't really see that as a commonality. What is it about Ferox that specifically makes you see Sparta? Elise is just a name, and predates the piece of music. "Für Elise" is just German for "For Elise". It's a dedication. I wouldn't use that to link Nohr to Germany (or anywhere else). Interesting. I've always thought of Leicester as being a little akin to a later HRE, probably Habsburg era. The loose afiliation of semi-allied states, but with a single family which is hereditary leaders in all but name, and also with a lot of infighting between different duchies. And in that sense, I also see the Almyrans as (very loosely) being the Ottoman Empire, the threatening great power to the south-east of people with darker skin and a different religion (even though Almyra is more Persian than Turkish, in other ways). Though, fighting against the Ottomans is something that would also fit Poland. Though, again, given how often history rhymes, it's not surprising that it's possible to draw parallels to multiple real world states and locations.

If I have problems with it (which I sometimes do, depending on the stats/class of my Byleth), I'll just wait until Byleth has leveled up a bit and try it again. There isn't a whole lot of incentive for trying to rush to do it early. The rewards are OK, but nothing special, and having the quest active doesn't stop you from doing other tournaments, so there's really no rush. I assume that it goes away when you hti the timeskip, but I've never had a problem finishing it before that point. I believe it's DLC, yes. At least, I'm certain that it was only added to the game post-launch, and the FE wiki says it's DLC only.

I definitely wouldn't want to see new weapons added just for the sake of adding new weapons. Making the existing ones be distinct but balanced would be my main priority. That said, I think that both shuriken in Fates and gauntlets in Three Houses were well-designed and interesting, so there definitely is space to add new stuff. If they do keep experimenting with other weapon types, then I'd like to see slings and/or war fans. I've no clue how either would work mechanically, but I like their aesthetics. If they carry on with Three Houses style free reclassing, this could help solve the "oops, all wyverns" problem. It wouldn't be as big a deal that Wyvern Lords are overpowered if wyverns were a limited resource. (cf. RD Haar.) I'm not inherently opposed to guns in Fire Emblem, but having their damage be tied to the Skill stat seems weird to me. A big part of the attraction of early firearms was that they required considerably less skill to use than a bow. Something more along the lines of Radiant Dawn crossbows would make more thematic sense, maybe? But then, I never really found them very fun to use, so maybe that would be a terrible idea. (For anyone who never played Radiant Dawn, crossbows did damage purely based on their own might stat, completely ignoring the stats of their wielder.)

Unit choices are a bit of a weird one, because, ultimately, Fire Emblem already has a ton of unit choices baked into its design. There are always more characters than most people will use in a run, so we're already choosing between units all the time. Having mutually exclusive units only really matters in cases when you would like to be able to use both of them. And sure, it makes sense that you can only choose one out of Claude, Dimitri and Edelgard, or one out of Tibarn, Naesala, and Gifca. They're very strong units, and having all three of them would overshadow everyone else. But when the game asks me if I want Arran or Samson, or whether I want Deen or Sonya, then typically my answer will be "no, not really". If I don't want to use either of them, then the choice isn't meaningful.

I think that the rehabilitation of the prequels is somewhat similar to the rehabilitation of FE: Fates. People who disliked them when they first came out still dislike them now, but they just don't care as much. Time has passed, other movies have come out, they've grown invested in new things. Which means that more of the people who are talking about the prequels these days are the people who like them. And the passage of time also means that people who were kids when the prequels came out -- and are more likely to look at them with the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia -- are now in their twenties and thirties and forming a sizable portion of online discourse. I honestly expect that, in twenty years, you'll be able to find people saying that they're glad that the sequels have seen rehabilitation, but that [trilogy four] is just objectively bad. From memory, the big things that people hated about The Phantom Menace were: JarJar Binks, midi-chlorians, and child Anakin. Which I can largely agree with, although the degree of hatred and vitriol directed towards it was way out of proportion. The hatred and harassment directed at Jake Lloyd (who played young Anakin) was particularly gross and uncalled for, obviously. No movie can ever possibly be bad enough to warrant destroying the life of a ten year old with a concerted harassment campaign. Anyway, my unpopular opinion and lukewarm take is that I enjoyed Attack of the Clones the most out of the three prequel movies. It had the fewest parts that irritated me, and I thought that the arena battle (especially the first part, versus the monsters) was one of the better Star Wars set pieces. My memory of the novels is that anything written by Zahn or Stackpole was pretty great and anything written by anyone else ranged from mediocre to terrible. I definitely wasn't all that high on Roger MacBride Allen's Corellian trilogy; they were far from the worst, but I didn't love them either. Either way, I don't blame Disney for making the old EU non-canon. There was just so much damn stuff that it was all but impossible to keep up with all of it. And I can only imagine how much of a nightmare it must have been to try to write in that continuity and have to make sure that you didn't contradict anything that had gone before. Sometimes, starting over with a clean slate is the best idea.

I think that it depends on the game's durability system. If the effective weapons have limited availability, durability, and can't be repaired, then that is their weakness. I'm not going to use my rapier to enemy-phase a bunch of infantry mooks, because if I do then it will quickly break and I won't have it when I need it. But for games without durability or with durability but with easy repairing, then I like for there to be some sort of drawback so that they aren't just strictly better than basic weapons.

I view it as a positive that some characters are already in established relationships, as opposed to "everyone is young, pretty, and available". I also view it as a positive that other types of relationships are given an equal footing with romantic relationships, that philia is not depicted as lesser than eros. I think that the big misstep was in the presentation. With the way it's presented, I know that a lot of people were expecting a romantic relationship between male Byleth and Alois, and when they didn't get it, they felt like it was a big bait and switch. I think that if it had been clearer to people from the outset what those S supports represent that people would have been more positive about them.

Personally, I tend to differentiate between characters who are canonically LGBTQIA+ regardless of the player's actions and characters who can potentially be LGBTQIA+ if the player chooses to play them that way. So, for instance, I don't think of Byleth and Corrin as being examples of LGBTQIA+ representation. Yes, the player can choose to play them that way, and yes I would definitely much prefer that that choice does exist for avatar characters, but I don't think of it as the same thing as having a character be canonically written as LGBTQIA+. Similarly for "gay for the avatar" style characters, who are a romance option for the avatar, but otherwise show zero evidence of any same-sex attraction. Again, I'd rather that they be included than not included, but I find it hard to think of characters like Rhea and Jeritza as being good LGBTQIA+ representation. Fire Emblem has definitely got a whole lot better in this regard than it used to be (I think that Dorothea is an excellent character, for instance), but it's still not exactly great. As for other characters, I think there's a case to be made for Petra, depending on how you interpret her paired ending with Dorothea. And while I'm not hugely familiar with Fates so someone please correct me if I'm wrong, doesn't Forrest fall somewhere on the transgender spectrum? Or is that another case of "it depends how you interpret the character and/or "it depends how broadly and inclusively you define the LGBTQIA+ spectrum"?

Ahh, yeah. I see now how it would work. Although, I presume that positioning would still be an issue? Since you basically have to make sure that everyone is in range for the gambit, which puts some real limits on what you'd be able to do. Still, especially if you use hihg-range characters (bow knights, a mage with Thyrsus, etc.) then you should be OK. But even still, you're still limited on how many units you can kill per turn, and also limited on how many charges you have on Impregnable Wall, so it still seems like something you'd have to use carefully rather than just being an insta-win. Yeah, it does sound like a cool idea that's worth checking out. I'm definitely not trying to say that it's completely worthless. I'm mostly just pushing back a little against the slight hyperbole in your thread title. But it's a neat trick.

I've been thinking about this some more, and I agree that strong and interesting personal abilities would be the best way to make late joiners relevant. An AoE buffing ability could be neat, but Three Houses seemed to want to tune down all such buffs to be for adjacent units only, so I can't imagine this would happen. Instead, I'm imagining that Judith could get something along the lines of Sword Avoid +20. I think this would give her a niche, and it would be neat to allow a sword dodge tank build without having to sacrifice your dancer. Depending on how powerful you wanted to make her, you could either have (a renamed) Sword Avoid be her personal, or you could have her "learn" it at low rank swords (like how Jeritza gets mastermind) and then give her another personal on top of it. I'm imagining "Hero of Daphnel: unit has +4 strength when counterattacking" as a strong option. For Nader, you've pretty much got to put him on a wyvern to fit his character, which is kind of a problem, given that you're guaranteed to already have Seteth as a lance wyvern and Claude as a bow wyvern. So my solution would be to emphasise his tankiness. "Undefeated: This unit is immune to super-effective damage, critical hits, and follow-up attacks".And yes, that is aggressively tuned to be powerful, since it combines Effect Null, Vital Defense, and (an improved version of) Wary Fighter. It would be easy enough to tune it down by removing one or more of the abilities if it ended up too powerful.

On the Assassin/Impregnable Wall combo: sure, I can see how this can be used very effectively to not die. (Although I assume there would still be problems facing more than a few units at once, since if the wall got fully surrounded, then units who couldn't reach the wall would then start going after the Assassin.) But I'm not really understanding what this actually accomplishes. The Assassin has to use their turn to apply the gambit, and the wall isn't going to be doing any (meaningful) damage while the gambit is applied. So I'm not sure how this is really helping you to get kills or complete objectives, in most cases. I guess you could send the pair off on their own to grab a chest or secondary objective sometimes? But I'd consider that more of a neat trick than being secretly OP. I'm also not sure how effective they could be at drawing aggro. If there's any other friendly unit in range, then they become a potential target instead of the wall. And if there are more than four enemely melee units, then there's the problem of getting surrounded. I'm just not seeing this; how are you using the combo? On Ignatz as being best suited for this role: I don't think I'd agree that Ignatz is the best character for this role. Yes, it is very easy for him to get the require skill ranks, but they're easy to get anyway. At the absolute maximum, you need a B in swords, C in bows, and C in authority to make this work. And that's assuming that you want 100% pass rate for certification, and that you're using the battalion with the highes authority requirement (out of the ones that come with Impregnable Wall). This is incredibly easy to reach by level 20 with little to no investment, even for characters that don't have all three relevant boons. I'd think it would be less important to have all the relevent boons than it would be to have a strong early-game to be able to reach level 20 quickly and easily.

Path of Radiance could have used a few extra characters. First, and most important, I think it would have benefited from a Bishop. There's a huge drought of recruitable staff users between getting (underleveled) Mist in chapter 9 and getting Elincia in chapter 26. Furthermore, Rhys is the only playable unit who can use light magic. Having a playable Bishop would solve both problems. Somewhere around about chapter 17 or 18 would be a natural storyline fit. Second, there should be a playable non-royal Raven, since you don't get one and there's no real reason why you shouldn't. Nealuchi could have been added fiarly easily, or there could have been anew original character, but to me, the obvious choice would have been to have Vika join at the same time as Tormod and Muarim. Finally, I think it would have been nice to have seen a second Fighter or Warrior, since Boyd is the only one, but I don't think that's too big a deal. Radiant Dawn definitely doesn't need more characters. It already has a huge cast. Some tweaks to availability and to class frequency might have been nice, but not more people. If anything, maybe it would have been nice if they could have found a way to bring Largo back, but I can easily live without him.

For sure. I'm not saying that he was exclusively a bumbling idiot in the original trilogy. I'm saying that even in the original trilogy, he wasn't particularly treated with reverence. There was some amount of badassery there, but he was still treated as an expendable character who could have a throwaway nothing of a death. And I'm not even saying that it is right that he be portrayed like this; I'm just saying that it isn't new. No media franchise can survive on old fans alone. There will always and inevitably be a turnover of old fans who lose interest, move onto other things, and so on. They absolutely need to continue to bring in new audiences, and that pretty much inevitably means that they need to change. What was popular in 1977 is not the same as what is popular in 2022. And any change is inevitably going to alienate some old fans who prefered the way that things used to be. That's unavoidable for any long-lived media franchise. And yeah, it can be a little bit heartwrenching when something you used to love changes into something you don't care for any more, but it happens. There's no shortage of franchises that I used to be invested in but that I no longer care about (and yes, Star Wars is one of them) but I'm OK with that. There are other things that I've grown interested in instead. (And none of this should be taken as a defense of Disney as a company. I disagree with a lot of what they do. It's more that I think that the problems that you're identifying as being new are actually ones that have always existed.)