lenticular

Welp, I've been doing my utmost to keep far, far away from this cursed trainwreck of a thread, but I guess I've failed my wisdom save versus leaving well the fuck alone on this one. So, hi. Queer woman here. Speaking only for myself, of course, because queer women are not a monolithic group and we have many varying and different opinions. For myself, though, when I see female characters -- be they in video games or other media -- I typically relate to them in two different ways.The first is external: is she an interesting character who drives the narative? Is she someone I would get along with if I met in real life? Do I find her physically attractive and enjoy looking at her? The second way is empathetic: can I imagine myself in her shoes? Is she having experiences similar to what I have had? Do I want to be her? In cases of blatantly sexual objectification, the latter almost invariably wins out. I don't feel horny because, hey, hot woman, I feel creeped out because I see objectification and find it gross and creepy. And then I feel even further creeped out when I realise that it is something that is ostensibly being done for my benefit, as the player/viewer. The game (or whatever) is making me complicit in the objectification, and I am not OK with that. This is especially the case when it comes to skeevy camera direction that unduly focuses on butt and boobs. If a woman is being presented as being comfortable with her sexuality then I can get behind that. At least in theory. Sometimes not, because it's handled attrociously, but if it's done well then I'm all for it. But when it's all about the camera lingering on boobs and butt, then that isn't something that the character is doing; that's something that is being done to the character. The focus is not on the character but on the person watching. Even for characters I otherwise like (eg, Manuela from Three Houses or Miranda Lawson from Mass Effect 2) that sort of treatment will sour me on the character. I can't think about either of those two characters without feeling just a little bit skeevy and gross. For characters that I am otherwise indifferent to (eg, Camilla from Fates), it means that the creepy objectification is the dominant memory and emtion I have when I think of them.

Yeah, avoiding overthinking is probably for the best. If you think it's kinda cool and I think it's kinda silly then we can probably just safely file it away under "works for some people but not others" and be done with it. I think the bigger issue would be if we were hypothetically allowing for some class masteries to grant permanent access to spells. If someone had mastered Priest, Mage and Dark Mage, then gone into Warlock and mastered that too, then that would potentially mean four extra spells to fit in somewhere, which would be more of a pain than just one.

It still seems out of place to me. Like, why do the individual spells carry the letters that they do? Is Death Γ the third iteration of the Death spell? Or is the spell normally just called Γ by the Agarthans and the Death part is just the Fódlan name? Neither one of them really feels believable to me, but I can't think of any other way they'd end up with that naming scheme. There is normally a difference in representation in any given font (or any individual person's handwriting), but the variance within each letter is greater than the variance between the letters. If I see a single glyph and am told that it's either a T or a Τ but am not told what the font is or given other reference text to check it against, I really have no way of knowing which is which. Stealing it can be tricky to make work because of the requirement to be faster than the target you're stealing from. The Death Knight has speed of 19 (Maddening) or 17 (Normal and Hard) when you fight him in Chapter 4. It's certainly possible to make work (and I have done so), but it's not trivial. I generally think it's easier just to kill him, honestly.

I'd had that thought as well. I think that just following the leads of mastery combat arts would make the sense. With those, the arts from beginner and intermediate classes are learned permanently (all the repositional arts, Triangle Attack and I'm pretty sure Subdue works that way too though I'd be lying if I said I'd ever used it) whereas the arts from mastering advanced, special and master classes are all tied to their class. UI might be an issue, since I'm not sure where all these extra known spells would fit, but this is fantasy game design so we can handwave it away and say that it's the fantasy UI designer's problem now. Another advantage of using unique spells for masteries would be that it wouldn't step on the toes of existing spell lists. For instance, if everyone could pick up Physic and Fortify from mastering Priest and Bishop respectively, then that would make Mercedes a terrible choice for a Bishop and Manuela a great one. Mercedes would still have a niche as "the character who can learn Physic and Fortify even if you put her in an offensive class", but that doesn't really fit the story and character. Agreed. I can understand that they would want a name for the combination of what used to be light tomes and what used to be staves, and calling that white magic is reasonable. And, in fact, they are properly unified, with White Magic Avoid working just as well with Heal as with Nosferatu. But then Black and Dark are kept separate, even though the names are so similar? I know that I've had conversations about the game with friends where they've said Black Magic when they meant Dark Magic or vice versa, and I've had to stop them to clarify exactly which one they meant. Which is never a good thing. And speaking about gripes with dark magic naming, what is with the Greek letters in the names of dak magic spells? What actually are they supposed to represent? What's gained by having them? Are they supposed to make the spells seem more mysterious and other? And if so, then why did they have several of them use letters that share a glyph with a letter of the Latin alphabet? Also, while I'm being petty about this, "Luna Lambda" sounds way too similar to "Lunar lander" in my non-rhotic accent and I'm entirely unable to take the spell seriously because of this.

But if that's the case, then how come there's the scandalised expression about Tomas actually being a secret dark mage? I looked up the part I was thinking of. After the mission where Tomas is revealed to be Solon, Rhea says "More importantly, I was shocked to hear that our own Tomas was actually a dark mage. I must reflect on our blindness." Which definitely seems to indicate that Rhea knows what dark magic is and doesn't like it.

I can see that it might not be something that's officially taught, that seems reasonable. But even then, it seems like something that Rhea et al are at least vaguely aware of. Not only in the sense of "how incompetent would you have to be not to keep track of what your new teacher is up to?" but also in that you can have a Dark Mage on your team directly in front of Rhea (in the Ashe & Catherine paralogue) or Seteth (in the Seteth & Flayn paralogue) and neither of them seem to care. It could definitely be something a little off the books ("Why are you teaching them about the Yuan Dynasty? That's not part of the syllabus!") but I don't think it's anything scandalous ("Why are you teaching them Satanic rites? That's really not part of the syllabus!")

Personally, I don't have a problem with a story leaving unanswered questions. If anything, I quite like it. It makes the world seem bigger and more alive if I feel that I don't know everything about it. When there's an answer to every question, that makes everything feel just a little bit too neat to me, a reminder that this is all just a story. Real life is never that neat. So for stuff like Rhea's Golems, I don't really feel that I need to know where they came from. I'm happy for that to be a mystery, with a few clues that I can try to piece together to make an educated guess. For dark magic, though, I think I agree with you. It's not just that it's left unexplained; some of the things we do see about it seem to be contradictory. I forget the exact wording used, but after Tomas reveals himself to actually be Solon, there's a line about how shocking it is that Tomas actually turned out to be a dark mage. Which makes it seem like it is something scandalous. Except that, as you say, it's something that we can have our students learn, which seems to imply that it isn't. It's a bit of a mess.

Oh, damn, I really love that idea and can't believe I'd never thought of the possibility of mastery spells before. Possibilities for what each class could have, if we're sticking to existing spells: Some of these might step on the toes of characters with strong spell lists, but since we're well into the realms of fantasy game design here, we can do whatever we want without any consequences. As for completely new and unique spells: And I'm now getting ridiculously far into the realm of fantasy game design (and away from the actual topic of this thread, which is what I always end up doing when I make a new thread to stop going off topic) so I will stop now. i like the idea though, and I think it could have worked well.

I had Marianne as Mortal Savant and Byleth as Holy Knight. For Marianne, I honestly think that MS is as good a choice as any. It gives her Swordfaire to use with either Soulblade or a Levin Sword+, but lets her keep her full spell list as well, which means she can switch to Blizzard when she can double with it and is also able to throw out Physic and Silence as needed. It's just a solid build. Holy Knight Byleth isn't anywhere close to optimal, but I felt like messing around, and it was still good enough to contribute meaningfully. Byleth is one of thew units where "just go Dark Knight instead" doesn't really apply, largely due to them having a harder time than anyone else gaining weapon ranks. They also get more use out of White Tomefaire than most since they get to combine it with White Magic Avoid. It's definitely not great, but it was a reason to use the class to do something that no other class can.

I like the idea of this, but I worry that it would end up with a situation where there'd be a small number of optimised builds or skills that you use on everyone. "Have everyone learn Death Blow and then put them on a Wyvern" was one of the aspects of Three Houses that I found least enjoyable, so I wouldn't want to see that repeated. So I'm going to suggest something that combines this idea with the skill capcity system from Tellius and the weapon strengths and weaknesses system from three Houses. First, instead of adding a new skill or ability as you level up, you instead add skill capacity as you level up. This could be 1 extra point of capacity every level, 5 poitns every 5 levels, or whatever other numbers work, but should be fairly regular. This capacity will be used not just for skills but also for weapon ranks, movement type, etc. Each skill (etc.) will have a base capacity cost, but the actual cost for a given unit to equip it will vary from unit to unit based on their personal strengths and weaknesses. So, for instance, the Steal skill might use 5 capacity by default, but only use 3 capacity for units who have a proficiency in thief skills and 7 points for units with a weakness in thief skills. there could also be some characters with a double weakness who would have it use 10 capacity, or some could have it as a personal skill and have it not take any capacity. This would allow for a few different benefits. Characters would mostly be encouraged to keep within their strengths (since they'll get more skills that way), but there's still plenty of space to take a quick dip into other skills when they have strong synnergy with what you're otherwise doing. It would also allow for units to still feel very different from each other by giving them a different set of strengths and weaknesses. Finally, while most skills could be freely learned by anybody, there could also be powerful skills that are tied to limited resources. So, you can only teach people the wyvern movement type if you have a spare wyvern, you can only teach them the meteor spell if you have a meteor tome, only teach them Aether if you have an occult scroll. And so on and so forth. Any thoughts? The overall idea here is to keep a lot of flexibility in how you build characters while also ensuring that units keep their personal identities and to allow for powerful abilities or combinations to exist without having them obligatory for every unit.

I've used Lifetaker! Admitedly, only while messing about on NG+ Hard, but I have used it. With the power of NG+, it's pretty fun to use on something like a Fortress Knight or a Wyvern Lord. Stick it on a Wyvern Lord and it can happily function completely autonomously, healing itself up from any chip damage it takes. Obviously, this wouldn't be even a little bit viable on NG Maddening. As for Heartseeker and Poison Strike, here's a wild idea. In the interest of seeing just how far we could push things before they break, what would happen if Dark Mage had both Poison Strike and Heartseeker as class skills and then also had both of those as mastery skills as well? Would that be overpowered? I'm thinking probably not. A class with two mastery skills would be unusual, but their are plenty of classes that have a skill and a combat art for mastery, so I don't think that it's too out there. Lamine and Lysithea are both at least Slitherer-adjacent, though. I mean, Hubert isn't a Slitherer either, and he gets the Dark Mage and Dark Bishop classes when you face him as an enemy. I do see your point, though, and you may well be right. Still, when it comes to speculation about design processes and developer intent, it's likely that we'll never know for certain. It could be that Gremory equally started off as a variant of Warlock, but then evolved from there, whereas Dark Bishop started out in the same place but didn't evolve as much. Who knows, honestly. I think that's an exaggeration. I think that most of the magic classes have a niche and are entirely usable, even in late game Maddening. (The most recent run I did was NG Maddening and had both a Holy Knight and a Mortal Savant in my endgame team, and both were putting in work.) If we're talking only about what's absolutely best then, sure, probably it's those three classes, but that's always the way. Unless the game balance is absolutely perfect (the game balance is never absolutely perfect) then there are always going to be a few options that stand a little way above the others. So I do think it's more useful to think in terms of viability than optimality. This might be a play-style thing, but I find that I seldom run out of spells like Ragnarok and Excalibur, even when I don't have Black Magic Uses x2. I don't often run into many situations where those spells can secure a kill but other spells cannot. They do come up occasionally, but not so often that I feel that I'm hurting for uses. I do agree with Thoron and Meteor, but as First Mate pointed out, for male characters, that largely just means Hanneman. Speaking of Hanneman, it's a shame that he's the male character who benefits most from double black magic uses, because in some ways, he's also the perfect choice for Dark Bishop. His later join time makes it harder for him to master Intermediate classes, so it's much more likely that he won't have Fiendish Blow already.

Sure. My point isn't that Dark Mage with Poison Strike is better than Mage without Fiendish Blow. My point is that Dark Mage without Poison Strike is better than Mage without Fiendish Blow. I don't think it's that unlikely. Remember that a lot of novice and casual players are going to be playing on Normal/Casual, which makes him a whole lot simpler to kill. I know that a friend of mine killed him in the first encounter just by throwing bodies at him and not caring that he killed several of them, because that's just a thing that you can do in Casual mode. This is a good point. It's not as terrible on Dark Mage, since almost everyone has bad movement in intermediate tier (although most aren't quite as bad as the magic classes), but it's definitely a problem with Dark Bishop. It might actually be one of those situations where they could have had the same skill as both the class skill and the mastery skill, as they do with Steal and Unarmed Combat. Interesting thought. If that is the case, I wonder if Gremory is the same way. That's also a class that I associate with TWSITD, due to it's real world inspirations and its associations with Cornelia, so that might have been a late addition too. Though, if it is, I wonder why they didn't make it require a Dark Seal. Because that would probably feel equally or more justified than requiring one for Dark Mage.

[Brought over from another thread to avoid derailing.] It's a fairly commonly-held view that Dark Mages and Dark Bishops in Three Houses are awful. I don't really disagree with this view, but I still want to defend them at least a little bit. First off, let's compare Mage and Dark Mage. They have identical base stats and almost identical growth rates (with Mage being marginally better thanks to an extra 5% growth in Charm). In terms of their class stat boosts, they are very similar, with Dark Mage having 1 more point of magic but Mage having one more point of res. Overall, this is pretty close, but I'd say that Dark Mage has the advantage. 1 point of magic is worth more to me than 1 point of res and a 5% higher charm growth. Now let's look at their class skills. Mage gets an extra ten castings of Fire whereas Dark Mage gets an extra ten castings of Miasma Δ. I consider these to be roughly equivalent. Sometimes the lower weight and increased accuracy of Fire is better; sometimes the extra might of Miasma Δ is better. The better choice mostly depends on an individual unit's inate spell list. For a unit like Linhardt who has both Fire and Wind already, I'd definitely favour Miasma Δ; for Hubert who already has Miasma Δ, I'd probably prefer Fire. Either way, it's a fairly marginal difference. However, Dark Mage also gets a second skill, whereas Mage does not. That skill, Heartseeker, offers some pretty neat utility. It's not something that comes up all the time, but can be relevant from time to time and is definitely better than nothing. Again, it's pretty close but Dark Mage is better. If all you care about is "what class gives my unit the best performance right now this second?" then you will generally be better choosing Dark Mage in most cases. Of course, this ignores one of the big reasons why people take the Mage class to begin with: its class mastery skill. Fiendish Blow is just a good skill. And what's more, Intermediate tier is usually one of the easier stretches of the game so you typically have plenty of space to focus on building for later rather than on what is good in the moment. (This is similar to why most people tend to recommend sending units through Brigand and not Cavalier, despite Cavalier having +2 move and Canto.) I don't dispute this. However, even considering this, I still think there are circumstances where Dark Mage is a reasonable choice. First is for any unit that isn't built to ORKO. For chip damage, Poison Strike (the mastery on Dark Mage) can often do as much or more than Fiendish Blow. Consider, for instance, Linhardt built for healing and support, but who contributes occasional chip damage when there's nobody for him to heal. Poison Strike is maybe a better choice for him than Fiendish Blow. Or consider Ignatz built for debuffing with Seal Strength and Break Shot. He'll typically do better with Poison Strike than with Death Blow. The second situation where Fiendish Blow isn't useful is when you don't actually get it. It's often taken for granted that any unit who spends time in Mage is going to master it, but that's probably not true for a lot of players. Not everyone knows that the meta is to use intermediate tier to pick up important mastery skills. Not everyone knows what classes give what skills. Not everyone knows to pick up the bonus to class xp from the Cethleann statue the second that the Saint statues unlock. I know that the first time I played, I didn't pick up very many class mastery skills because I didn't know what I was doing. I suspect that is true for a lot of players. Then that brings us onto Dark Bishop and comparing it to Warlock. Again, the stats are very similar. Dark Bishop has +1 to magic and dexterity; Warlock has +1 to speed and res and an extra 5% charm growth. The big difference between the two classes is their skills. In theory, both classes have a skill to boost their damage, with Warlocks getting Black Tomefaire and Dark Bishops picking up Fiendish Blow. However, one of the big reasons why Dark Bishop is rarely recommended is that Fiendish Blow doesn't stack. And of course, you already picked up Fiendish Blow by mastering Mage, right? Except that, as I already mentioned, not everyone who plays the game is going to have mastered Mage. And if you haven't mastered Mage then the two skills are fairly comparable, with Fiendish Blow typically being slightly better (+1 damage per hit and works with all magical attacks, not just black tomes, but does nothing on enemy phase. In terms of other skills, double Black Magic uses is nice but doesn't come up all that often for most units (getting a second use of Meteor for Hanneman is the only case where I'd consider it a major selling point), Miasma Δ is fairly irrelevant by this point, and Heartseeker remains neat but fairly niche. Overall, for units that haven't mastered Mage, Dark Bishop is at the very least competitive against Warlock. The sum total of all of this is that for casual or inexperienced players, Dark Mage/Dark Bishop is a solid and fool-proof option, whereas for players who know the game inside and out it still retains a few occasional niche uses. This is... not terrible. Not good, but not terrible. And not, I think, as bad as a lot of people make out. (Of course, this fails to touch on the other complaints about the entirely unnnecessary gender lock and the way that the classes aren't worth the effort of obtaining dark seals. I have no defence for these things.)

Dark mages in Three Houses are bad, but they're not that bad. If all you care about is power level now, then Dark Mage is just a straight up better class than regular Mage. Regular Mage is generally prefered because of its better mastery skill, but prior to mastery, Dark Mage is stronger. Similarly, Dark Bishop is a pretty good choice if you haven't already picked up Fiendish Blow from mastering Mage. Not just straight up better than Warlock, but certainly competitive. The problem with Dark Mage and Dark Bishop is only really apparent once you know the meta of picking up class masteries in Intermediate tier, and know exactly how to grab Fiendish Blow. For players who don't know that, then they're perfectly reasonable classes (though never great). (I also quite like some of the stuff that you can do with Poison Strike and Lifetaker in NG+, though admitedly that's moving more towards the "strictly for fun" side of things than the "actually good" side of things.) As to the main topic of the thread, I'd say that Ike's fight against The Black Knight in Path of Radiance fits the bill as something that is only really worth doing for story reasons and/or bragging rights. Getting to upgrade from Ena to Nasir really isn't much of a reward at all, since neither of them are particularly fantastic. Especially given that one of their primary benefits, the ability to damage Ashnard, is pretty much guaranteed not to be needed if you have an Ike strong enough to beat The Black Knight.

For Close Counter on Claude, I'd say it depends on whether you're allowing him to use hit-and-run kiting tactics with his high move and super canto. Building Claude without Close Counter only really makes sense if you're planning on using his mobility to stop him from ever seeing enemy phase combat.

I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm stating an opinion. Do I really need to preface every sentence with "this is what I personally think and it's OK if you disagree"? Because, well, what I said was what I personally think and it's OK if you disagree. The only part of what I said that I can reasonably see as being an assertion of fact rather than opinion was: "Losing your strongest unit/favourite character/whatever to something that isn't your fault isn't something that many people are going to find fun." So, OK, let me reword that: "Based on my observations of both my friends and people within Fire Emblem fandom, the impression that I get is that there are not very many people who find it fun to lose units in a way that don't feel like their fault." If you think that the impression that I have is wrong, then please tell me why. If you personally love having your units die to ambush spawns when you're doing ironman runs, then please tell me why. If you don't understand the point I'm making and would like me to elaborate, then please ask me to. Just saying that you disagree without any context or elaboration adds nothing to the conversation.

Not a prediction, but in terms of my preference, I think I'd like to see character building be more about choosing what build you want to use and less about changing up the way you fight in order to reach said build. That is, in each map, I would largely prefer to focus on just beating the map and maybe picking up a secondary objective rather than having to worry about mastering a class to pick up a skill, having two units glued together to pick up a support, grinding weapon ranks, feeding kills to a weak units, etc. I want to keep all the interesting build flexibility of modern Fire Emblem but not hav to go through all the work to get to it. Too often, that sort of thing just feels like busywork and jumping through hoops rather than anything that's actually fun or challenging.

Ambush spawns are a good example of the tension between what is good for an individual map and what is good for the game as a whole. For an individual map, it's often good to shake things up and throw unexpected problems at the player. It's fun to be put in a hole and then have to try to figure your way out of it. So you lost two units to ambush spawns? Great! You were supposed to. Your original plan has completely fallen apart and now you have to come up with a new plan. Every turn, you're scrambling, reacting. For something like a standalone trial map this would absolutely be a valid way of designing the level. Maybe not to everyone's taste, but I can imagine it being a lot of fun. However, in the context of the full game, that sort of thing just doesn't fly. In a game with permadeath, the consequences of losing someone are much higher. Rolling with the punches for a single level is one thing. Doing so for the entire rest of the game is something else. Losing your strongest unit/favourite character/whatever to something that isn't your fault isn't something that many people are going to find fun. For as long as they want to keep permadeath a thing, the game has to be fair and feel fair. Unfairness and permadeath just aren't a good combination.

Partly, it depends on the balance of different unit types. As you say, armour units are generally not very strong, so there's no need to have more hammers around to counter them. On the other hand, fliers typically are very strong, which is part of the reason that it's OK that bows are so common. Having both a big benefit (being able to fly) and a pretty glaring weakness (vulnerability to a very common weapon type) goes someway towards keeping fliers somewhat balanced. Relatedly, this is why I hope that Three Houses style dismounting never comes back, because having a "get out of weaknesses free" button is one of the reasons why fliers are kinda broken in that game. Cavalry tends to have more variability from game to game, being great in some games but mediocre in others. Throwing in poleaxes and ridersbanes would make sense in games where cavalry is otherwise great, but less sense in games that have pretty mediocre cavalry. One of the problems that I have with effective weaponry is that too often it doesn't make for interesting or compelling gameplay. If a map is filled mostly with enemies with regular weapons but then there's one guy with a ridersbane, then I'll just make sure I attack that one guy with someone who isn't on a horse. Provided that you actually notice that the weapon is there, it's a trivially easy problem to solve. Maybe for people who have literally never played a turn-based tactics game before, it might take them a moment to figure out how to deal with it, but this is tutorial level stuff. The bigger challenge is in actually noticing that the weapon is there to begin with. It's only really interesting if the effective weaponry is smartly positioned. So as a fairly simple example, there's a secondary objective that is easy to get to with a flier but much more difficult to get to on foot, except that it's guarded by a couple of enemy archers. That's potentially interesting, since it gives you an actual decision to make. Can I manage to kill the archers before they kill my fliers, or do I need to go the long way around? If I can do it with fliers, how many of my fliers do I need to send? And so on. The same sort of thing could potentially be done with effective damage against cavalry and armour units, except it's generally harder to make it work because, unlike fliers, there often isn't so clear a distinction between cavalry, infantry, and armour. In most games, they do pretty much the same sort of thing, except that some of them are better at it than others. The existence of Canto -- especially the version that can be used after attacking -- can sometimes give cavalry something of a niche, admitedly. But at the other end of the scale, you get something like Shadows of Valentia where Gold Knight really don't have anything to offer that Dread Fighters don't. Basically, I want for all different unit types to have their inherent strengths, weaknesses and well-defined roles, and then think that the existence andf prevalence of effective weaponry should then naturally derive from that.

That's certainly one option. I agree that it would fit better in an old-style "everyone has a specific class" type of game than a new-style "reclassing for all!" type of game. You make a fair point about Wyverns. Radiant Dawn Haar (as an obvious example) is a great unit, but there's only one of him. Plus, thinking about it some more, even in a game with completely free reclassing, it would still be possible to add an overpowered class to be a lord's personal class. Why, hello there, Edelgard, how nice to see you here.

I'm not sure how I would feel about that. I agree that armoured mages are cool, but I don't think they'd be particularly fun to use. Having pegasus knights be a hard counter to magic units is fine because only a minority of units in Fire Emblem use magic. Having a unit type that is effectively a hard counter to physical damage units seems like it would trivialise a whole lot of situations, and lead to more situations of "just send in your armoured mage and then watch everyone suicide on enemy phase" which the series has been trying to move away from. It would certainly be possible to balance them, either by lowering their stats or by making enemy mages and hammerers more common, but I'm not sure it would be possible to balance them in a way that left them still feeling fun and useful and didn't also have negative aspects on other aspects of game balance. But it would be nice if they could, because I do like the concept.

Reintroducing the trinity of magic in the same game that they got rid of the weapon triangle would have been a strange decision. I can see the arguments for having both of them, neither of them, or just the weapon triangle; having just the trinity of magic seems much harder to justify. It also wouldn't really have worked with -breaker style skills that Three Houses uses as its weapon triangle replacement, since they'd have been far too niche and overspecific. Nobody is going to waste a skill slot equipping "White Tomebreaker" or the like. Personally, I'm not really against having a trinity of magic, but I've never found it particularly interesting or impactful. Mage versus mage combatis generally fairly ineffectual, since mages generally have high res. Turning a 70% chance to hit for 5 damage into a 95% chance to hit for 6 damage (or whatever) doesn't matter often enough for me to care about it. If they do want to bring back the trinity of magic, maybe they could go down a similar route to what they did in Fates, and just incorporate it into the main triangle. So, for example, it could be swords and light beat axes and dark beat lances and anima. That would let it actually come up in play a lot more often than the old system did.

I'd largely agree with it. If the only real differences between spells are the exact balance of their numbers and their battle animations, then it would be neat if they really let their imaginations go wild and came up with some wild spell designs. "Here's a gust of air. Here's a slightly bigger gust of air. This is an even bigger gust of air." isn't really going to excite anyone. I'm thinking about how many different spells there are in D&D and how many different moves there are in Pokémon. There's a ton of potential for more interesting-looking spells (even if they don't actually do anything more itneresting than damage).

I don't really see a need for so many distinct elements unless they're really going to be made properly distinct from each other. As is, there's really not a whole lot of difference between a mage who learns Wind and Cutting Gale and a mage who learns Fire and Bolganone. Sure, the numbers are slightly different, and occasionally that's going to translate into a difference in combat, but for the most part, the two units are going to feel very similar. It's mostly just going to be a difference in what animation plays when you attack. I'd like to either see them cut back on the number of different types of black/anima magic or really work hard to give every element its own distinct flavour and identity. Ideally, I want to be incentivised to use different builds for different types of elemental magic. So, for instance, maybe I'd want to do a full crit build with a frost mage. That's sort of possible in Three Houses, but the crit bonus that ice spells give isn't really big enough and none of the characters who can learn Black Magic Crit +10 learn ice spells so it's hard to stack crit, so it just ends up not being worth it. Another important change will be to make white/light magic not be terrible. I don't think that it really works having it tied to the same skill as healing and utility magic, especially since characters are limited to a maximum of 5 learned White Magic spells and 2 of them are always Heal and Nosferatu. Characters that have have good healing and utility lists just don't have space to have good offensive white magic on top, even if those spells actually existed. There's a few different ways that this could be fixed or changed, but I do think that change is needed. Dark magic in Three Houses is in a weird place. The spells are all pretty great. They're flavourful, powerful without being overpowered, and have interesting secondary effects. I'm really happy with the dark magic spell selection. But then there's the way they are integrated into the class system, which is... considerably less good. Dark Mage and Dark Bishop don't offer any bonuses to dark magic; they only give a single dark magic spell and it's the generic one that has no interesting secondary effects; some characters just use dark magic as standard anyway even in black magic classes and it mostly just means they don't get a -faire skill if you make them a Warlock. The whole system is just a mess. My off-the-top-of-my-head probably-needs-a-lot-of-work idea for how to solve things is to give every character three different Reason magic spell lists, one each for dark, light and black magic. Which spell list they have access to then depends on what class they're in. If they're in a dark magic class, then they have access to their dark magic list; if they're in a holy class (Priest, Bishop, Holy Knight, War Ascetic) then they have their light magic list; if they're in any other class then they get their black magic list. Actually, there were two, Blizzard and Fimbulvetr, but neither of them were very useful so your point still stands.

I don't think I'd call it "lying", since that's an emotive word that often implies some sort of malicious intent that I don't believe was there. I think that the system can give the wrong impression, though, and certainly has the potential to mislead the player. Even in games that don't outright state that hit is a percentage chance, that is -- at the very least -- an impression that the player could easily have and which the game does nothign to discourage. From personal experience, when I got back into Fire Emblem a few years ago after some time away from the franchise, I assumed that the displayed figures for hit were a percentage chance, then after a while of playing I thought I was getting really lucky, then after even more playing I realised that what I was experiencing was beyond luck and that the numbers must be fudged, and then only after that did I remember, "oh right, Fire Emblem does the thing with two random numbers for generating hit chances". It's nothing new that video games use smoke and mirrors to try to create a more entertaining experience for the player, though. Off the top of my head, I've heard of racing games that display different stats for different vehicles even though they all handle the same, story-driven games which imply that pretend to have consequences for a lot of actions but are actually mostly linear, platform games that let you jump even after you've run off the edge of a platform, and action games that make the player's last health bar last twice (or more) as long as it should. And many more that I'm not immediately thinking of. This sort of thing is endemic to the medium and has been for decades. For the most part, I think that this sort of thing is pretty harmless. The only time I think it really hurts is when it means that nothing that the player does really matters. It's hard to enjoy anything by Telltale Games as much once you know that you'll be railroaded back onto the main story path no matter what choices you take; it's hard to enjoy NBA Jam as much once you realise that it has such extreme rubberbanding that every game against the computer is going to be close. 2RN in Fire Emblem isn't like that. Once you know that it's there you can work around it and make some more informed decisions, but it doesn't make the entire game pointless. It's also a bit odd in that the people who are most likely to benefit from it are casual players who don't have a strong intuitive grasp on probabilities, but these are also the players who are least likely to realise that it exists. People who realise what's going on probably either play a whole lot of Fire Emblem, hang about in Fire Emblem fandom or otherwise read or talk a whole lot about Fire Emblem, or have a strong intuitive feel for probabilities. These people are not the target audience for the fudged hit chance that the 2RN system provides. It's there to make the game fun for a more casual player who will get frustrated and disheartened when they miss a 90% attack, even if it is the tenth one that they've done in that map.