lenticular

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.)

In the original trilogy, he was a minor character who took a comedy pratfall to his death after losing control of his jetpack in a fight with a blind man. I think it has always been more of a product than an art. Or at the very least, being a product has been a core part of what Star Wars is ever since its inception. It might be that the product to art ratio has shifted even further in favour of product, but it's only reinforcing what was already there. I'm thinking of all the Star Wars action figures that I had as a kid growing up in the 80s, for instance.

I wouldn'ty say it was either over- or under-tutorialised. Rather, I think it was badly tutorialised. It's not that I didn't understand the mechanics. It's that I couldn't remember everything that I was being told. It would pop up with some mechanic or other, and then before I'd had a proper chance to get used to it or sometimes even to try it out at all, it would give me another tutorial message about something else. and then another one. It was very enthusiastic about barfing out its tutorial messages, but didn't actually give any time or space to learn the game.

I played for maybe an hour to an hour and a half and the most prominent thought and feeling that I have after that time is that this game has absolutely no interest in teaching me how to play it. I've very little experience with Musou/Warriors games before. I played a tiny bit of Hyrule Warriors but bounced off it pretty damn quickly. So I was only really here for the Fire Emblem, but was plenty happy to give the gameplay a try. But eesh. The game just flashed up tutorial message after tutorial message introducing me to new feature after new feature and new button combination after new button combination, and there is no way in hell that I'm remembering all of that. Do they just assume that everyone already knows how the gameplay works and so there's no need to teach it and ease people in gently? Or do they just assume that new players will just play on easy mode (which I did) and not actually need to use half of the different features? Or am I just terrible at remembering instructions?

It could be a combination of both, honestly. It's hardly the only part of Three Houses that was underdeveloped, bordering on unfinished, so it might be that they were rushing to put something in, but wanted to err on the side of underpowered and oversimplified. After all, an underpowered mechanic is just useless, whereas an overpowered one can break a game. Who knows, though? This is all just speculation. Interesting thought, though I think ti would also have a lot of potential to mess with game balance and difficulty. Without a unit cap, there wouldn't be the inherent trade-off that pair up had in Awakening and Fates. In those games, having units paired up makes meaningfully fewer units deployed on the field. In SoV, it would technically mean fewer deployed units, but if those units weren't doing anything anyway, then it's basically free power at no cost. And given that SoV is already one of the easier games in the series, I'm not sure I'd really want something that made it even easier. Still a neat idea though, especially if it could be combined with a hypothetical harder difficulty setting.

I can easily imagine that they might have decided that they wanted something along the lines of Pair Up but that it had to be less powerful than in Awakening and also less complicated than in Fates. And if that was the design spec, then I can also imagine how they might have ended up with the Adjutant system of Three Houses. Which is underpowered and oversimplified. So, not what I would consider a particularly good design decision, but one I can understand.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that he needs anything else, but there are certainly other things he could make good use of. Hit +20 is one, as you mention, and I would definitely want to spend the time to master Soldier for Reposition (and Def +2 while we're at it). And yes, Cichol Wyverns are great, but they're great on pretty much everyone and giving them to Seteth means not giving them to someone else. But yes, I do take your point that Seteth is one of the best of the late joiners. Decent stats, starting off in the best class line in the game, Swift Strikes and the Major Crest of Cichol are all very nice to have. These numerous advantages combined with the disadvantage of joining late make for a unit who is solid but not remarkable. Now, compare that to Judith, who shows up 3 chapters later, as an infantry sword class. Without some sort of special treatment, she'd end up possibly worse than Gilbert.

On the one hand, sure, it would be nice to have more playable characters. I don't think many people would argue against that. But on the other hand, I'm not sure how useful they'd end up being. Judith only starts showing up in Chapter 15 and Nader not until Chapter 18, and the skill system in Three Houses is typically not kind to late-joining units. Gilbert's late arrival isn't the only reason that he's widely thought of as one of the game's worst units, but it's definitely a big contributing factor. And Judith and Nader would both be coming in even later than he does. Another option would have been to do what they did with Jeritza and give them completely busted skills, but I'm not sure that I like that either. I don't really enjoy playing with overpowered abilities like Counterattack, due to how they distort the game around them. Or maybe they could have made it so that late joiners came with some class masteries already unlocked. Which I wish that they did for Gilbert, Alois, Seteth, etc. already. But then there's another problem: what builds do you give them? For Judith, a class progression that would fit her character would be to give her mastery in Noble, Mymidon, Lord and maybe Mercenary. Which would be better than nothing, but would still elave her weak. A more optimised build might be something more like masteries in Noble, Soldier, Pegasus Knight and Brigand, but that ends up feeling too gamey for my tastes. Which isn't to say that these are insurmountable problems. I'm sure that there are ways that late-joining characters could be made to work in Three Houses. But it isn't a trivial issue.

A few comments. First, I think that when talking about any sort of challenge run, it's always worth taking the time to spell out exactly what restrictions you're using. From what you've said, I'm assuming that you're specifying no resets and no Divine Pulse, but are allowing everything else? Honestly, if I just heard "ironman" without any qualifiers, I'd probably assume no NG+ and no grinding was included, but that might just be me. My point isn't that any specific ruleset or set of restrictions is better or worse than any other, just that it's good to make sure that everyone is on the same page before starting the discussion. I don't think I've ever seen anyone claiming that an ironman of Three Houses wouldn't be doable. I don't doubt that some people have said as much, but most of the discussion I've seen on the subject has agreed that it would be possible but not very fun. After all, the plays we make after a Divine Pulse were always avaialble to us, and there's nothing inherently stopping anyone from playing mistake-free the first time around. Fun is, of course, subjective, so I don't think it's particularly useful to present things as "this is fun" or "this is not fun", but rather to frame things as "here are some of the potential difficulties and potential solutions; do they sound fun to you?" For instance, for killer reinforcements, you have a few options. You can memorise them all, you can read up on each level before you play it, or you can just accept that you will suffer losses that are not your fault. None of these sound like fun to me, so I don't play that way. But if they do sound fun to anyone else, then great! The one thing that I would say is that I would actively recommend against anyone trying an ironman run for their first time through Three Houses unless they were willing to read or watch a whole lot of spoilers beforehand. Even for a veteran Fire emblem player, there are a lot of pitfalls with a sight-unseen ironman of Three Houses that just don't exist in other games in the series. I know I did an ironman-style run (with slightly different rules but the same spirit) for my first playthrough of both Shadow Dragon (DS) and Fates: Birthright, and while I have niggles about both of them, they eached worked fairly well. Trying to do that for Three Houses sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, though. So I guess that overall, my feelings would be this: don't try an ironman until you've played the game enough to know what you're getting into, btu then once you have done, make your mind up as to whether it sounds fun for you. That is my experience as well. I don't think I've ever had Chapter 2 go badly for me, whereas I have definitely had runs that had trouble with both Chapters 1 and 3.

A visual novel starring Birdo focusing on her transition. Which will never happen because Nintendo don't even like to acknoweldge that Birdo was originally transgender any more, let alone making a full game about it. Marginally less unlikely: an F-Zero rhythm game. Make it be something kinda like Audiosurf. You have a car going very fast, and then have to weave in and out of other cars in time with the music. This will never happen, because Nintendo doesn't even want to make main-series F-Zero games any more, let alone spin-offs. Or how about a deck builder in the spirit of Dominion, but based on Animal Crossing? Each player's deck represents their island/town/whatever which they have to build up to attract villagers, build facilities, etc. Which will never happen because the second that anyone mentions an Animal Crossing card game, people will have flashbacks to Amiibo Festival and go catatonic. It's a fun idea, but I don't think it could ever work. Mario levels stand alone much better than Fire Emblem maps do. Fire Emblem maps are typically anchored by thier place in the story, by the characters in your army, and so on. Yeah, trial maps do exist, but I generally find them a whole lot less compelling than a map that is actually a part of a full game. Mario levels, on the other hand, work much better in a vacuum. You can just pick up a random Mario level and have it be fun and make sense without any surrounding context. Mario levels are also typically a whole lot faster than Fire Emblem maps. If I play Mario Maker and get a terrible level, then I can probably be done with it in less than five minutes. Either I'll beat it and move on, or I'll very quickly realise that it's terrible and skip it. I can't see that working so well in a Fire Emblem Maker. Bad maps (and there would be a lot of bad maps) would be an absolute chore to play. I mean, I'd still buy it immediately if they ever did make it, and I'm sure that some people would use it to create some really cool things, but I fear the oceans of garbage that we'd have to swim through to find the good maps.

It would also need to have a banging soundtrack. Non negotiable. Whenever I get nostalgic for F-Zero, the music is always one of the first things that comes to mind for me.

I am really tempted to load up Final Fantasy VII for a couple of minutes, purely for the sake of the pun.

How does Star Fox make it in under those criteria? Has it had a Switch release that I've managed to sleep through? And for that matter, how does Pikmin make it in? Not that I'm disputing the quality of either series, but they don't seem to meet your requirements. Although, I will dispute the non-inclusion of Donkey Kong. If anything, Mario is a spinoff from Donkey Kong, not the other way around. I think I'd say that I'm the other way around. A Link to the Past has a strong claim to be my single favourite video game, but it doesn't have as many other games that has really held my interest as Fire Emblem does. That said, my favourites tend to fluctuate a lot over time. Ask me today and I'll say Fire Emblem and A Link to the Past, but if you ask me agin in 6 months, you might get a completely different answer.

Haven't played at all: Anything that was only released in Japan; the Switch rerelease of the Famicom original of Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light; Fates: Revelation; Warriors. Have played and liked: Blazing Blade, Sacred Stones, Path of Radiance, Radiant Dawn, Shadow Dragon (DS), Awakening, Shadows of Valentia, Three Houses, TMS#FE. The intensity of the liking varies from "amongst my favourite games ever" to "yeah, that was decent enough", but my overall feelings on all of them is positive. Dislike, but respect at least some of what it was trying to do, even if it's not for me: Fates: Birthright and Conquest. Dislike without reservations: Heroes.

Reyson and Leanne can both do this in Radiant Dawn, if I'm remembering right. As for the original question, I'm not sure that I'd want to further buff dancers, since they're already very strong. If anything, though, I'd want some way to make their skills actually be relevant. In modern FE, dancers (and Azura) don't really interact that much with the skill system as a whole. They have their own special dancer skills off in their own corner, but they don't care about most skills because they're too busy dancing to ever use them. Maybe dancing could share the benefits of (one of?) (a weaker version of?) their skills with the refreshed unit? That would probably be too good, but it would at least make me care more about dancer skills.

Requesting pronunciation guides for Lúin and Areadbhar, please!

That's fair. I am, I think, generally less willing to take certification exams at low pass rates than most people. (This due to a combination of never save scumming for them, not liking to "waste" resources, and finding repeatedly trying to be quite tedious.) For people who are more willing to deal with it than I am, I can see that C swords isn't a huge investment. Also fair enough. I don't typically have any shortage of units who are capable of baiting in a small number of enemies by that point, but if that is a role that you're struggling for, then I can definitely see that the Vantage/B. Wrath build would be able to do so just fine. I wonder if this is related to what we discussed earlier with how I like for my player phase units to be able to take a hit, whereas you don't care about that? Regardless, it does sound like a playstyle issue.

Which units are you doing this with? Late-joining units with Battalion Wrath are, what? Alois, Gilbert and Seteth? Am I missing any? But as far as I'm aware, don't Gilbert and Alois both start at E rank swords? Getting them certified into Hero to begin with sounds like it would take more effort than mastering Brigand for Death Blow. Since you probably have the Cethleann statue upgrade and a knowledge gem by this point, the mastery only takes 25 combats as an adjutant, which can be accomplished in a single weekend of paralogues/quest battles/auxiliary battles. Seteth does have an easier time getting into Hero, but he also has a much better default class, which makes the switch less appealing. I also have to say, I'd be very wary of using an enemy phase build like Vantage/B. Wrath just as a stopgap. That sort of build tends to steal xp from everyone else, which is fine if you're building a juggernaught who's going to solo the rest of the game, but is something I'd be nervous of if I was just going to use to for a couple of chapters and then hope that everyone else hadn't fallen to far behind. I've never tried doing things the way you're suggesting here, so I may be completely wrong, but it's definitely something I'd be nervous of. As an aside, though, I agree with you about Fortress Knight. I think it's a decent class which has a lot of use cases.

Out of the games I've played, for normal/classic in particular, I'd say that the two easiest are Shadows of Valentia and Three Houses, specifically because of the Turnwheel/Divine Pulse mechanic. Playing mistake-free is one of the bigger challenges of Fire Emblem on lower difficulties, and getting rid of that makes a big difference. If we're not allowing time rewind (and probably let's also ban battle saves while we're at it), then the answer would be "anything that allows for infinite grinding", so Sacred Stones, Awakening, Birthright, Revelation (I think; I've not played it), Shadows of Valentia, Three Houses. If we're also banning grinding, then maybe Sacred Stones and Path of Radiance. As for hardest, probably Radiant Dawn and Conquest. Though part of that depends on whether we're talking about Japanese normal mode (which was called easy mode internationally) or international normal mode (which was called hard mode in Japan). If we're talking international normal mode, then definitely Radiant Dawn and it isn't even close. If we're talking Japanese normal mode, then I think I'd put Radiant Dawn and Conquest in the same difficulty tier.

For me, part of the problem is that the build has its flaws, and while they can all be addressed through one means or another, addressing them stops it from being a such a low investment build. Maybe you're spending a turn or two setting up at the start of each battle, you're using either a guard adjutant or the Blessing gambit in the process, you're also using a Retribution gambit to make it work, then you've got to watch out for enemy gambits, monsters, siege weapons, high def and high avo units, and you've got to make sure that you aren't taking too much xp away from other units to stall their growth. All of these problems are very solvable, of course. I'm not saying that they aren't. But they all make the build either more complicated or more resource-expensive to run. So it just doesn't work for me as a quick and easy low-investment build. Sure, +8 strength is great, but the cost for it is: one ability slot, (at least) three quarters of your health, the turns that you take setting up at the start of every battle, and having to master Hero to get it. To me, that just isn't worth it. "Just don't get hit" is fine, but consider as well that HP is a resource. Being able to take a hit gives tactical flexibility that you don't otherwise have. If Defiant Strength was just a straight up tradeoff between HP and Strength, then I think it would be an interesting choice. Personally, I would still probably favour having x4hp over +8str most of the time due to my playstyle, but I can see it going either way. But when you add in the other costs (the ability slot, the setup time, the class mastery), I can't say I find it appealing. You can make it work, sure, and +8str is good enough that it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, but I don't find the benefit to be worth the costs.