lenticular

That's a fair criticism, but if I had my druthers then all the other authority skills would see a big shake-up as well. Model Leader and Defensive Tactics are both basically trash and I don't think anything of significant value would be lost by getting rid of them entirely. Then there are the Battalion [Whatever] skills which are, frankly, a mess. They mostly fall into either "allows you to break the game" or "completely worthless" depending on how you're using them, without covering much of the in-between ground. I also dislike the fiddly micromanagement of "I want to fully replenish all of my battalions except for the one that Dimitri is using" after every battle. I suspect this will be somewhat controversial, but I'd be in favour of getting rid of the Battalion skills entirely. And while we're at it, can we also add a bit of accuracy with gambits to the "Authority Lv n" skills to make them less terrible?

Yes, and that's exactly the sort of DLC that I'm most interested in as well. But let's be honest, there will always be DLC that is just raw powercreep because that stuff sells. You might not want it and I might not want it, but there are enough people out there who love that sort of stuff and I'm not about to tell them that they're having fun wrong. I would prefer if all of the DLC was stuff that I was interested in, but if I can't have that then I'm fine with DLC that I can easily ignore. Like, imagine that instead of being in a box under your bed, the stat boosters just start off in your inventory. If you wanted to ignore them then you'd have to scroll past them every time you were doing inventory management, you'd have to remember which ones were from the DLC and be careful not to use them. It would suck. It would actively make the game worse. Stat boosters under the bed don't have that problem. They don't improve the game for me, but they don't make the game any worse for me either. And given that they do improve the game for some people, I have no problem with them existing.

One way to get their recruitment pushed back a little later would be to just give them the same sort of recruitment requirements as other units rather than making them free to recruit. In which case, sure, you would be able to grab them (and potentially their relics) very early on if you chose to, but only at a fairly significant opportunity cost. I will say, though, that I actually quite like the Yuri+Constance paralogue, and haven't found it as bad as you have. Duke Gerth is robust enough to survive a hit, even on Maddening, and I've not had any problem getting to him on time if I beeline towards him with two or three fliers. The Balthus+Hapi paralogue, on the other hand, I don't care for at all. It's not so much that I find it especially hard as that it drags on too long and seriously outstays its welcome. I've never paid enough attention to notice this. Does the same restriction to which stat boosters you get apply to Anna's quests to get secrets, or only to the ones that drop directly from the yellow exclamation mark auxiliary battles?

I don't think it would really be a problem if not everyone is useful. After all, Petra (for instance) is pretty terrible as a magic user but that doesn't mean that she shouldn't learn any spells. For practical purposes, the game would be the same if she had empty spell lists, since pretty much nobody is putting her into magic classes, but I like that the option is there if you want it. It's the sort of thing that makes the game richer by existing even if I never actually use it. (Plus, it allows for the occasional surprise like how spellcaster Dedue is actually briefly used on the Azure Moon speedrun.) There are also nine different Rallies in the game and nine units on the starting team for each house. That would potentially allow for everyone to get a unique Rally in the early game, even if some of them would later fall off in utility as other units picked up the same Rally later on. As an example for what I'm thinking, let's consider the Golden Deer. Other units could follow a similar pattern, but this is mostly just intended as a proof of concept. Byleth: Rally Move (D), Rally Defense (C+), Rally Resistance (B+). Claude: Rally Dexterity (D), Rally Charm (C+), Rally Speed (B+). Hilda: Rally Charm (D). Lorenz: Rally Luck (D), Rally Magic (C+). Raphael: Rally Strength (D). Lysithea: Rally Magic (D), Rally Speed (C+), Rally Dexterity (B+). Ignatz: Rally Speed (D), Rally Dexterity (C+), Rally Strength (B+), Rally Spectrum* (S). Leonie: Rally Defense (D), Rally Strength (C+). Marianne: Rally Resistance (D), Rally Luck (C+). * I am imagining Rally Spectrum as replacing all other Rallies rather than stacking with them. I've given three Rallies to everyone with an authority boon, kept Ignatz as the best Rallier in the house by giving him Rally Spectrum at S (which I don't think would be at all overpowered by the time you get to S rank authority and given that it would still only be single target), put Rally Move as a Byleth exclusive (but made it available much sooner), and made sure that the characters who only get one Rally are at least getting one of the good ones.

I think that Three Houses is not too bad when it comes to DLC balance. Not great, but definitely could be worse. There is some random over-powered nonsense that you get at the start of the game for doing absolutely nothing, but it is mercifully segregated from everything else and very easy to just completely ignore if you don't want to break the game. (It is all literally in a box under your bed.) Then there's all the random extra monastery quests that get sprinkled throughout the game, like the one Alastor mentioned. These are power-creep, but I find them too minor to really care about. Most of them just give a few gift items and a bit of renown or something like that, which is definitely stronger than not having them, but is such a small thing that I don't think it's particularly felt either way. There is the one Alastor just did that gives three battalions, but they're all pretty bad and mostly exist for people who miss the trope and aesthetic of maid and butler from Fates. One thing that I do think is pretty broken is the ability to get stat boosters from auxiliary battles. That isn't as in-your-face busted as the stat boosters you find under your bed, but it can really add up over the course of a game. It's still possible to completely ignore it if you choose to, but it does much more to remind you of its existence at every turn. All of which is varying from bad to tolerable, but then there's the last part which is actually good, and is why I'm reasonably upbeat about Three Houses DLC in general. Namely that the units and classes of the DLC (aka, the parts I actually care about) are decently balanced. The units are all good but not great and are fun to use without outshining everyone else. (Except for Anna, who is pretty awful.) The classes are all valid options that have their own specific niche and strengths, but without being so powerful that you have to choose them.

I don't think that it's bad design, just that it's one of the contributing factors to making Rallies less powerful. I think that one interesting thing they could have done would have been to give everyone a Rally list, same as everyone gets a white magic list and a black or dark magic list. Some of the lists could have been terrible, of course, but if everyone had at least one Rally and most units had at least two, then the question wouldn't be "who has Rallies?" but rather "which combination of Rallies do I want?"

I always think of the knowledge gem as being the main reward for that paralogue. The secondary reward is the wootz steel from breaking the wolves' armour. The stuff that the game actually gives you as a reward is also a thing that exists, I guess. This is less than ideal. I do like the paralogue, though. It can be a fun challenge. Especially since there's the constant trade-off of "do I try to strip the armour on everything for ore, or do I want to just unload all my damage into a single tile to kill it as quickly as I possibly can?" It's a neat little risk/reward dynamic.

Can confirm that Broadcast Satellite was what I actually meant in this case. (And yes, I did have to go and look up what the BS in Satellaview games actually stands for.)

A third pretty major nerf is moving them from being class skills to character skills. In Fates and Awakening, if you want a specific combination of rallies on a single character, then you can probably pull it off. I tmight take some convoluted class paths or inheritance options, but it's usually possible. In Three Houses, if you want a specific combination, then tough. You get what you're given. And what you're given is usually not very good.

I didn't mention Rally Def at all and I'm not sure why you're bringing it up? It's only available on two units, Gilbert who has no other rallies and Seteth who only gets a second rally at S rank Authority, so it isn't something you can put on a dedicated rallybot. As for Rally Res, I don't care for it mainly because magical attackers aren't as common as physical attackers so it does a whole lot less than Rally Def does. It also seems completely irrelevent for most dedicated enemy phase builds, since they are largely built around never getting hit in the first place. I guess that if you're facing multiple mages and running some sort of res tank then it might be useful? That seems weird and niche, though. What's more, for the rare cases where it does come up, Ward and Pure Water both exist, both do the job better, and don't take up a skill slot. I'm not saying it's completely useless. Obviously, if I have the choice between 4 points of Res and not having 4 points of Res, then I'll take the 4 points of Res. I just don't find it sufficiently useful to significantly change my opinion of builds that have it.

Of the characters who have Rallies as their personal skills, Annette is the only one I've found at all useful. Hanneman and Alois both join too late to get nearly as much use from theirs as Annette does from hers. Not to mention that Rally Magic and Rally Luck aren't as useful as Rally Strength in the first place. Can't say I've found them important or even particularly useful, even in Maddening early game. I'd usually prefer to do chip damage instead of Rallying. Both can potentially lead to an easy kill for the second unit, but doing chip damage gives experience as well. Yeah there are edge cases like the first Death Knight encounter, but even on Maddening, it's easy to just ignore him and go around him. It's an alternative way to approach the level, for sure, but I don't think it's a better one or an easier one. I'm also not really a fan of stacking multiple Rallies on a single unit, partly because of how much it compromises their combat performance but also because hardly anyone has multiple worthwhile Rallies that they gain at a reasonable Authority level. I think that Annette with Rally Strength and Speed is the only character who does. I just can't get excited about the likes of Rally Dex, Rally Res and Rally Luck, nor about any Rallies that are only available at S Authority.

I kinda see it for BiBl and BlaBl, but "Fates" is literally 5 letters long. It's only one character longer than "FE14". It's a super convenient game to refer to as is.

Over in the thread about the best character for each class, Ignatz and his rallies came up in conversation and I kinda want to talk about that, but I also don't want to go even further off-topic for that thread than it already is, so let's go with a new topic instead. How do you feel about rallies in Three Houses? Personally, I get very little use out of them. I'll use Annette's inate Rally Strength in the very early game, partly because an extra +4 strength matters more early on when enemy HP and Def are that much lower than they get later on but partly also because spell uses run out super fast before hitting level 5 and reclassing to Monk, and rallying can give her something to do. Beyond that, I also value Rally Charm on Dorothea and Manuela and will likely keep that equipped for a long while, especially if I'm running Dorothea as a Dancer, since she doesn't need many skills to be able to dance effectively. Rally Charm can give a huge boost to gambit hit rates, I think potentially up to 40% depending on the attacker and defender relative charm, and being able to reliably hit with gambits can often make a huge difference. I've certainly had situations where Rally Charm has been the difference between completing a level safely and having to Divine Pulse back multiple turns. Outside of those three characters, I don't really get much use out of Rallies. I can certainly imagine situations or playstyles which might use them, especially for strategies where a single unit is especially important like one turn kills or enemy phase builds, but neither of those are my playstyle. If you use Rallies, which ones do you find useful, which characters are you using them on, and how are you using them? Or are you more like me and find them mostly useless?

A staff is still a magical weapon. Or a magical non-weapon. Just because she's using it as if it were a physical weapon doesn't change the fundamental essence of its being. That's pretty cool, though. I didn't realise until looking it up just now that Matrona had such a ridiculous crit rate. Depending on definitions, there's also the Three Houses house leaders, who also get their own plot-relevant weapons but aren't the only ones who can use them. Especially Claude, since you can get his weapon without him.

I still see a lot of people using numbers, honestly. Possiby not as many as used to, mind. I wouldn't know. While I've been a fan of Fire Emblem since Path of Radiance, I've only really been around the fandom since Three Houses. If it used to be even more prevalent then I'm glad that it's at least dialed back somewhat. (I tend to think of Binding Blade and Blazing Blade as BiBl (pron: "bibble") and BlaBl (pron: "blabble"). This may just be because I am silly, however.)

Eirika and Ephraim: I like that they're twins. I think that it's my favourite approach to multiple Lords in a game that Fire Emblem has ever done. I like how it really feels like their story, rather than being two different stories for two different characters that got messily smooshed together. I also like that they somewhat mirror each other in terms of gameplay, for instance by both getting a horse when they promote. Ike: I like that he's a commoner. He's not a prince, or a Lord (except when he briefly is) or the lost descendant of a royal line; he's not secretly a god or a dragon; he's not a chosen one. He's just a guy. His achievements feel earned. Micaiah: A light mage was such a cool class choice for a main character. Is she the only main character in the whole series who exclusively uses magic and can't use physical weapons at all? I think she is, but I might be forgetting someone. It's a cool choice either way and makes her really stand out. Elincia (yeah, I'm including her because I love her): I like that she's always looking for non-violent solutions but without falling into the trap of being a naive idiot. Marth: I like his legend, both in and out-of universe. The way Nintendo and IS treat him and the way that characters in Awakening treat him makes him seem like way more of a big deal than just "the main character in the first game in the series". Chrom: I like his "power of friendship" schtick. Sure, it's cheesy, but it's a trope that I enjoy. Lucina: This is a bit of a weird one, but I like how she's a soft tutorial for how the child mechanic works. It's one of the central mechanics of Awakening, and Lucina's existence really ties into it and explains it to the player far better than a bunch of tutorial text boxes ever could. Robin: I like that they actually work decently as a hybrid unit, which is something that FE has generally struggled to pull off. Corrin: I like that the customisation options for female Corrin include hair accessories. The butterfly one especially is super cute. Alm and Celica: I like their love story. It's very basic, but I found it charming. A character having a single canonical love interest integrated into the story is much more interesting to me than having a whole load of ambiguous potential love interests and the ability to choose one for a couple of lines of text in an epilogue. Byleth: I like that their personal ability and the mastery skill from their personal class are both about buffing other characters rather than being individually overpowered. Claude: Flying and bows on my Lord? Why yes please, I don't mind if I do. Dimitri: I like his character arc where he struggles with but eventually starts to overcome his inner darkness. Edelgard: I like that she's a canonically bisexual female main character. Based on all of this, I apparently want two lords who are commoner twin sisters. One of them should be non-violent, but not to the point of naiveté, while the other should have an inner darkness that she overcomes with the power of friendship. One of them will be a pure magic user, while the other will be a hybrid class who uses bows. Their promotions will mirror each other. Let's say that the non-violent one starts out as an infantry staff wielder but gets light tomes and a pegasus upon promotion, whereas the inner darkness one starts out as an infantry bow class but gets dark tomes and a wyvern on promotion. One (Ms Non-Violence) will have unique abilities that are about buffing allies; the other (Ms. Inner Darkness) will have unique abilities that are strongly tied to their game's unique mechanic. Both of them will be canonically bisexual, and their respective love stories (NOT with each other; I see you there Fire Emblem, don't pretend you weren't thinking about it but you can stop thinking it right now) will each have a single canonical outcome. After the game, they will be treated as a big deal in any sequels. Also, they will have cute hair accessories. Huh. Yeah. That actually sounds pretty good to me. I did not expect that throwing together all the different attributes I like from completely different Lords would work that well.

My unpopular opinion: Nobody should ever refer to Fire Emblem games by numbers. They're not officially numbered by Nintendo or Intelligent Systems, and there isn't really a clear and obvious set of criteria for what should and shouldn't count. Do spin-off games count? If not, where's the border between "spin-off" and "main series"? Is Heroes main series? What about BS Fire Emblem? Or then there's Fates. Should Fates count as one game when it comes to numbering conventions, or should it count as three? Or maybe it should count as two since Revelations was never sold as a stand-alone? How about remakes? Do remakes count as separate games or not? Exactly how much of a game has to be new for it to count as separate? Certainly, it's possible to come up with a coherent numbering scheme based on a specific set of answers to all these questions, but it will never be the one true numbering scheme. I know that if someone in the fandom refers to "FE13" then they probably mean Awakening, but if someone else thought they meant New Mystery (including BS in the numbering) or Three Houses (not including remakes) then I wouldn't blame them. And honestly, if someone thought "What the hell was the thirteenth game? Do you expect me to count them all?" then I wouldn't blame them for that either. Which I think is a bit of a problem because it makes the fandom somewhat exclusionary and impenetrable to outsiders. Calling games by their actual names (or abbreviations like FE:SS and FE:RD if you're too lazy to type out the names in full) is more accessible, clearer and less ambiguous than using numbers.

That's fair, though I will say that whenever I've played around with Trickster, I've really not found much use for Stealth. I'm guessing that it's a play-style thing but it seems to come up very rarely for me. Maybe that's a sign that I'm playing a little bit too conservatively and could stand to stretch myself a little thinner? I don't know. This just made me realise that Trickster and War Monk are actually the highest movement magic classes that male characters have available prior to level 30 and that just made me sad. I've tried Manuela as a Trickster before and I felt that the lack of a -faire skill really hurt her performance. Her middling stats in both Strength and Magic mean that she really wants to be stacking as many damage buffs as she can to keep her damage output respectable. At least, that was my experience. It was quite a while ago, though, and I can't remember it that clearly. It might have been that she just got stat-screwed for me, or something like that.

Speaking of Trickster, can anyone offer up any good uses for it? It's a class that I want to like, but whenever I've tried it, it's been seriously underwhelming. Lucky Seven never seems to give me the boost that I actually need at a specific time, and outside of that it isn't really any more effective at using a sword than any random class. It almost feels that if you want to have a magic+swords class then you're better off just choosing a pure magic class and then using swords anyway. For anyone who has used it successfully, how were you using it? Like a weaker Assassin who could occasionally throw out Recover? As a support character with Stealth? As a stepping stone to Mortal Savant that can get some weapon experience in swords? Has anyone managed to get more use out of Lucky Seven than I have?

From memory, isn't there also Order and Direct? Using Micaiah, you could potentially have Order, Direct, Staff and Sacrifice. You'd lose out on Revert, and only be able to get a maximum of two command skills (from Smite, Gamble, Parity and Flourish), but that could potentially give you seventeen in total. However, that would require a chapter with yellow units and doors and a talk opportunity and it would have to be late enough for her to have two command skills. Unless I'm forgetting something, I don't believe that any such chapter exists. There's also the Arms command for using a siege weapon. The Great Bridge of Myrdin map has a chest adjacent to a ballista which would be a net gain of one command (adding Chest and Arms but losing Door). Is there any talk option for any levels on that map? I don't remember any, but if there are then that could maybe net you one extra.

Again, though, you're talking about things that are specific to Fates, when that isn't the point I'm trying to make. If the system that I'm proposing isn't compatible with Fates-style debuffs then great, don't put it in a game that has Fates-style debuffs. The vast majority of games in the series manage just fine without them. Personally speaking, they were another element of Fates that I didn't enjoy, so I'd be quite happy with them never coming back. I'm not saying that I want a game that's like Fates but with this one thing changed. I'm saying that I want a game that's nothing like Fates but maybe it could borrow one or two ideas that I liked while reworking them into something completely different.

Voice of the Cards and Kirby and the Forgotten Land were the two new announcements that caught my interest. Not super excited for either, but they're interesting enough for me to keep an eye on. I've somehow managaed to get to this point in my life without ever having played a Kirby game, but maybe this will end up being my first. Triangle Strategy is a terrible name. Even worse than Octopath Traveler. I honestly thought that this time the working title was bad enough that it would force them to come up with a proper title rather than just saying "meh, good enough", but nope. The Mario movie has a sad lack of female characters. I know there aren't exactly a ton of female characters to choose from in the source material, but nine characters and actors announced, and only one female character among them? I can maybe see why they wouldn't want to include multiple princesses, but why not Pauline, Toadette, or Birdo, for instance?

CD-i. Let us finally play Hotel Mario, Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon on a Nintendo console. Realistically, though, I'm probably not going to be interested in paying extra for the more expensive Switch Online package unless they really improve either the size of their library or how often they roll out new updates. Just knowing that the game that I'm interested in might or might not appear at some point in the vague and non-specific future doesn't really excite me.

Just top be clear, I'm not saying that Fates would have been better if they'd made this one change but left everything else the same. I'm saying that if they had made different decisions about how fundamental mechanics work then they would have built a different game around it with different balance considerations. I'm saying that if they choose to revisit the idea of different stanes in a future game then I would prefer that they design it differently and then balance around these decisions accordingly. The question I'm interested in answering isn't "would Fates be balanced with these changes?" but "would it be possible, in the future, to create a well-balanced game with these changes?" It's not "no downside". It's "less downside". In your example of having Xander paired up with Camilla, that would still mean that on the following turn you would be able to attack with either Camilla or Xander but not both. That is a considerably weaker player phase than if you hadn't paired them up and were able to attack with both of them. Is this enough of a downside for the specific enemy formations that you encounter in Fates? Probably not. I don't know Fates well enough to really comment. It certainly shouldn't be enough downside, because Fates was balanced around the system as it actually is, not as I'm suggesting. However, I believe that it absolutely is a meaningful and significant downside and one that could be balanced around. Calling that Galeforce 2.0 seems like an exageration. Galeforce (the Awakening incarnation, anyway) had a lot of benefits that this doesn't have. Galeforce was great for movement but also great for pure offense. If you just wanted to kill as many enemies as possible on player phase, then galeforce let you do that. Galeforce was also widely available. At the very least, the class line was available to Lissa, Maribelle, Sumia, Cordelia, Olivia, Say'ri, Cynthia, Severa, and either Robin or Morgan. You can then potentially add even more characters on top of that if you're using spotpass or DLC, or if you make specific decisions for your child units. For your example, you get exactly one singer in the whole game, so you can only ever do this with one unit. Awakening Galeforce also had the option of pairing up two units both of who had Galeforce and then getting triple movement from them. What you're suggesting could be kinda neat, but is nowhere near Galeforce in power level. It's also only three squares further than what you can do anyway just by having the two units be separate and having Azura sing for Camilla. Sure, there are circumstances where an extra three spaces of move makes a difference, but in the pantheon of completely busted Fire Emblem movement tech (Shadow Dragon Warp, Awakening Galeforce, Three Houses Stride, etc.) an extra three squares is pretty low on the list.

I don't have a problem with it from the perspective of balance. My problem was with how fun it was to use. Or at least, how much fun I had with it. I enjoy tactical flexibility much more than I enjoy tactical rigidity. I like being able to adapt to changing circumstances. That is what I would have liked the different stances in Fates to have been, but they aren't. My experience with them was that once I had put two units into defense stance then I wouldn't ever want to take them out of it until the immediate engagement was over and I was able to take a turn or two to reposition, heal up, and so on. Also, the problematic scenario that you outline is only really a problem when you are facing a single isolated small group and are able to effectively control aggro. If you are facing successive waves of enemies on consecutive turns then you can't do it. Or rather, you could, but then you'd be left with nobody in defensive stance for the enemy phase that immediately follows it. I also think that there's plenty of middle ground between "changing stance costs both unit their full turn" and "there's no penalty for shifting stance". For instance, it could have been the case that dropping a paired-up unit causes the dropped unit to end its turn and ends the movement of the dropping unit, but still allows the dropping unit to attack. In that case, there's still a substantial opportunity cost to being in defensive stance on enemy phase. If you hadn't been paired up, you'd have been able to use those two units to make two attacks (and get two dual attacks). Having exited pair up, you'd instead only get one attack (with one dual attack). This is slightly better than the one attack (and no dual attack) that you'd have got if you stayed in defensive stance but considerably worse than if you'd never been in defensive stnace to begin with.