lenticular

I'm still somewhat in "I'll believe it when I see it" mode, but even assuming this is real, I wouldn't read too much into the price. It's not that unusual for games in the UK to cost £60. More normally, I'd expect £50 for a big game, but £60 definitely does happen. Looking quickly on Amazon, I can see that they're currently charging £60 for Breath of the Wild and Smash Ultimate, for instance. And yes, £70 is more than £60, but it's not that much more, and it's less than I would typically expect for a collector's edition. If I had to guess, I'd say that the price was more likely to be a dummy price put in because they didn't have an actual price, same as they didn't have an actual release date. As for what I hope for: the ability to play without motion controls. I didn't buy it on the Wii because I didn't want to deal with motion controls, and I won't buy it on Switch if I have to deal with motion controls. I just don't enjoy them. If I can play without them, though, I'd definitely be interested, since it always looked like a pretty cool game otherwise. From what I've heard, the motion controls are pretty heavily baked into the game design, though, so I'm not sure how well they could pull off a version without them. I guess I'd want to wait to see what reviews made of it before making my mind up.

Personally, I like dancers too much to want to give one up to make a sword avoid build. Even if you don't need one for mobility, they're still great to have around for things like refreshing your best attacking unit to let them get another kill, or doing double-warp shenanigans. That said, if you don't feel that you particularly need or want a dancer in this game, then what better time to play with a sword avoid build? Dimitri sounds like a decent choice for that, or you could also go with a flier of some sort and go full dodge tank. Maybe Falcon Knight Ingrid or something? I don't see all that much advantage to putting sword avoid on an assassin since they already have Stealth as a way to avoid damge, but I can't say I've ever actually tried it.

So, it ends up being something of a balance between too replaceable and too irreplaceable? Asking genuinely because I want to better understand your perspective. Like, I know in your ranking the entire series thread, you abandon an Ironman if you lose your last thief or healer, presumably because they serve a role that really can't be replaced or replicated (depending on the game, obviously)? But at the same time, you want there to be some degree of uniqueness and specialisation so that losing units does actually matter? Is that a fair description of your position? This is very much a "different strokes for differnt folks" sort of situation, because that's not what my experience of ironmanning has been like at all. For me, one of two things has happened. If I try to pay close attention to every move of every turn of every map and it ends up turning the game into a slog. Fire Emblem games are too long and I am too old for that amount of sustained concentration to be fun for me. If I don't do that then I end up just not caring about anyone. Some part of my brain stops me from forming any sort of attachment to or investment in characters if I know there's a reasonable chance that they're going to die (from my own stupid mistakes). And if I don't care about anyone or anything in the game, then what's the point? So I end up either exhausted or detached, which are pretty much the opposite of excitement. Now, please don't interpret anything I've said here as trying to put down your experiences or the way that you play. Honestly, the ironman experience that you describe genuinely sounds like a ton of fun, and I wish I could share it. But I can't. That just isn't the way that I experience things at all.

I think that part of the problem I have with this is that when viewed purely in terms of raw game mechanics, losing a unit in Fire Emblem also isn't terribly consequential. At least, that's how it's seemed to me when I've tried doing ironman runs. If you lose one unit, you replace them with another. Lose Oscar? Use Kieran instead. Lose Merric? Use Linde. Your replacements will often be a bit worse, statistically, but it only really changes a few breakpoints, not the fundamental way you approach a map. Even if you lose all units of a given class, let's say all paladins, that still isn't changing things that much. There isn't all that much that you can do with a paladin that can't be replaced by some other class. There are only really two ways I see that losing units actually substantially matters . The first is losing so many units that you can no longer field a full team of decently leveled units. This should pretty much never happen unless you're playing a game like Three Houses that is fundamentally unfriendly to ironmanning, or you're trying to play at a difficulty level that exceeds your skill level. The second is losing units with unique and important abilities like thieves and healers, and that seems like it would be frustrating more than it would be fun. Admitedly, I don't have that much experience with ironman, since it isn't my prefered way to play, but that's how it's seemed to me when I have played that way. If you think there are deeper considerations in terms of game mechanics, then I will happily listen, since I know you have far more experience with them than I do. Where there certainly is a huge consequence for death is in terms of characters and story. And I can definitely see the argument that it's good to have the deeper integration of gameplay and story that permadeath can bring. Making gameplay actions have story consequences can definitely be a good thing. But the problem I have with that is that this is never really leaned into at all. We never (in the FE games I've played, which is admitedly not all of them) see any of the consequences of death, we never see a dead character's friends mourning them, we never have a scene where someone wishes that the dead character was still around because their knowledge or expertise would be perfect for the situation. They're just gone, completely erased from existence, never to be mentioned again. I could see myself liking permadeath more if they really leaned into it and had character death actually make the story richer, but as things stands, I feel that losing a character only impoverishes the storytelling. (That I am aware of, the closest that Fire Emblem comes to doing something like this is with the gaiden chapters of Shadow Dragon. I don't really count them, partly because Shadow Dragon has so little story to begin with, and partly because you pretty much have to be trying to get your army killed if you want to see any of them.) I've never played Final Fantasy Tactics, so I can't meaningfully comment on any comparisons with that series. I would be content with that as a compromise solution. It wouldn't be the absolute ideal solution for a game that was being designed to meet my personal needs and sensibilities, but I'm not so self-centered as to think that should ever be a thing. It would still have some limitations, like limiting the possibilities for cutscenes or for forced deployments, but it would definitely go a long way towards addressing some of the issues I have with permadeath.

You need to also include the probability of a miss. The probability of getting exactly 4 hits out of 5, when each has an 87.75% chance is 0.8775^4 * (1-0.8775)^(5-4) * 5choose4. And the probability of at least 4 hits is 0.8775^4 * (1-0.8775)^(5-4) * 5choose4 + 0.8775^5. Basically, you're including all the different ways of getting the result, but not fully accounting for how unlikely each specific outcome is, which is over-inflating your numbers.

I play on Classic mode but don't prefer permadeath! Casual mode isn't fun for me in terms of gameplay (too easy/mindless for my tastes), but permadeath isn't fun for me in terms of story (since it effectively removes content and makes it impossible for me to see it unless I replay). My prefered way of playing is Classic mode but treating any character death as a failure state and resetting. I've tried Casual mode, and I've tried embracing permadeath and doing an ironman style run, and I don't have as much fun with them. The impression I get is that this is not exactly a rare way to play. If removing permadeath means getting rid of Classic mode, not replacing it with anything else, and only having Casual mode, then I agree with this 100%. That would be terrible. But I don't think that removing permadeath has to mean that because it can be replaced by other things. There absolutely needs to be a consequence for having a unit fall in battle, but that consequence does not have to be permadeath. One option would be to turn any unit death into a game over (which, as a side consequence, would mean that unfair nonsense would probably be cut way down). Another would be to replace death with injuries or other long term consequences. As a for instance, what if a defeated unit: loses a random item from their inventory (plot-vital items excluded), has to miss the next battle, loses two points from all stats (numbers plucked from the air and would probably need changing after a balance pass). Maybe there could be a new mechanic of flaws (think: negative skills) and unit deaths could tie into that. Maybe a system of reputation/renown/glory/whatever where your reputation as a commander decreases if you let your units be severely wounded. And so on and so forth. There are lots of potential ways to incentivise keeping everyone alive.

Interestingly, I look at Fire Emblem pretty much the exact opposite way. I play a lot of strategy and tactics games, turn-based games, and games with ironman modes or similar where you have to live with the consequences of your mistakes (chess, X-Com, Europa Universalis, classic roguelikes, etc.). I already have plenty of other strategy games that are all about the game mechanics, so Fire Emblem's big appeal to me is that it can do story and characters as well. In comparison, I do play a few RPGs here and there, but not as many. From my perspective, I can equally as well say that we already have other games with permadeath and that Fire Emblem is the turn-based tactics game for people who want to prioritise storytelling and characters. Neither perspective is right or wrong; it just depends what direction you're coming from.

In Three Houses, it helped out a ton that Dorothea's English voice actor (Allegra Clark) is a bisexual woman herself. She rocked that performance, and made Dorothea feel more real than I suspect she would have done otherwise.

In theory, absolutely we do. In practice, the question isn't whether a game would be improved by extra work/time/money/resources. No game is perfect and every game can be improved. A more pertinent question is, given that there is a limited to the amount of work/time/money/resources, is this the single best way to spend these resources that will give the most efficient return on investment in terms of overall game quality? I would say, probably not. I'm not saying that it can't be interesting. I'm saying that it is inconsequential to the main story, in that it doesn't change how things ultimately pan out. Although, one possible fundamental difference between us that may be a root of some disagreement is that I only rarely replay games, and when I do, it's normally after long enough has passed that I've forgotten the details of my original playthrough. This means I typically want the single-playthrough experience to be as good as possible and don't care a whole lot about replay value. I can certainly see that people who replay a lot could have different priorities to me.

I also don't consider it likely, no matter how much I would like to see it. But my point was that it's a viable option and that IS are keeping S supports as being primarily opposite-sex romantic relationships because that is their choice, not because of anything inherent to the system that means they can't change it.

I'm imagining that side characters could play a role a bit like recurring characters in a TV series. I wouldn't want equal prominence for every character, because I can't see how that would work. Absolutely there should still be main characters and supporting characters. But within that framework, there is still scope to improve the relevance of supporting characters. For instance, imagine that there are a few main characters who form the war council for your army, but every so often they invite other characters to attend their council meeting because they offer some unique knowledge or expertise (a fighting style, a hometown or location, a history with a character, etc.). The character could then contribute meaningfully to the overall plot, driving the story forward, and making the world feel more connected. It doesn't do that much to the overall plot, but it helps out a lot with characterisation and world building. Instead, what we tend to get from side characters in terms of appearing in the main story is either an occasional irrelevant one-liner that says "remember me? I'm going to say something inconsequential to remind you of my defining character trait" or literally nothing. We only really get anything from side characters in supports and paralogues, and while they can be great, they also too often feel disconnected from the main story and from each other. They happen, and then they are instantly forgotten. Having things be optional and missable also makes them, ultimately, irrelevant. They can be satisfying as their own self-contained bits of story, but they don't actually matter to the larger story of the game. In a game with no permdeath, the writers' hands are considerably less tied and they are more able to weave a coherent whole rather than a bunch of scarcely-connected stories running in parallel.

Working around the possibility of permadeath is certainly possible, but it's also a lot of work. Absolutely it is possible to write five, ten, twenty versions of a scene that vary depending on who is alive at that point, but games have budgets and they have deadlines, and the extra resources spent writing (and coding, translating, voice acting, etc.) all the extra versions are resources that aren't being spent elsewhere. Or consider pre-rendered anime-style cut-scenes. These pretty much inevitably only feature characters who are guaranteed to be alive, because can you imagine how much of a nightmare it would be to make multiple different versions of a cutscene based on who is an isn't alive? If there was no possibility for permadeath then that would open up more options and possibilities for cutscenes. Having a few important characters who can't actually die but instead are maimed and retreat also comes with problems of its own. To start with, it feels very contrived. There's often no particular reason why some characters should live while some die. Are they supposed to be more prudent and know when they are beaten? Are they supposed to be tougher and able to survive? How come a character like Reyson who is both hot-headed and fragile manages to survive a lethal blow? Obviously, its because he still has a role in the story, not for any logical in-world reason. This makes actual for-real death feel arbitrary and unfair. The gameplay impact is the same either way, you can no longer use that unit, but the storyline impact is vastly different. Having a small group of important characters also automatically makes everyone else less important by comparison. If the game says "hey, these are the people you should be caring about, there's no reason to care about these other idiots", then I'm probably not going to care much about the other idiots. If some units get little to no screentime, no time to shine, and hardly any character development, then I'm not going to get invested in them. From the perspective of pure gameplay mechanics, this is fine. I don't need an emotional connection with my pieces to play chess, for instance. But from a storytelling perspective, it's not good. Honestly, I'm torn. I do think that getting rid of permadeath would allow for better storytelling, but I also believe that it would make for worse gameplay. I'm generally a story-first kind of person, but I'm still not sure that it's a trade-off that I'd want to make. Or at least, I wouldn't want them to remove permadeath without replacing it with something else. I'd be interested in seeing a smaller-scale experimental Fire Emblem that played around with new ideas, sort of like Chimera Squad did for X-Com. For anyone who isn't aware: Chimera Squad is a smaller X-com game, considerably shorter than the main series games but at a proportionately lower price point, and it drastically changed up a lot of core mechanics. For instance, it completely removed permadeath, but also changed things so that any character death was a failure state and a game over. I'd definitely be excited to play a Fire Emblem equivalent of something like that. Even if it didn't work out all that well, I think it would be interesting to try.

Anoher option is to move away from the idea that S supports always have to mean romantic relationships. In Three Houses, that's what they did with Alois and Gilbert, two characters who are canonically already married (not to each other). And while the implementation in Three Houses was pretty terrible, since it wasn't made clear beforehand that this was going to happen leading to a lot of players feeling misled by the game, I think that the idea is sound. A close friendship can be deep and meaningful and as worthy of an S support as a romance, and I like the idea of that sort of friendship being celebrated in FE games rather than romance always being placed on a pinnacle. Ultimately: If Intelligent Systems wanted to have more gay characters in the game, they would find a way to do it. It might create a few problems or require changing how a few things work but there is no inherent insurmountable problem that means gay characters are impossible. That we don't have them is because IS don't want to add them.

How is that a cop out? As far as I'm aware, it was never intended to be fully reliable. Did I manage to miss something where they said that and then changed their minds? Honestly, I'm happy that they didn't have the library be full of "this is the actual one true unambiguous history" because that's not how any of the rest of the story worked. Everything else in teh game has been about different sides with different perspectives having their own version of history, with all of them being flawed and biased in some way. I see the fact that people are able to play the game and come away with wildly different interpretations (cf. literally every discussion ever about Edelgard or Rhea) as a strength of the story, not a weakness.

Alternative way to look at the maths: if it's 50% chance to crit, that means that crit and not-crit have the same probability. So, the chance to get 5 crits is the same as the chance to get 5 not-crits, so the same as 0 crits. Similarly, the chance at 4 crits is the same as 1 crit and the chance of 3 crits is the same as 2 crits. Everything is symmetric. So, the chance to get 0, 1, or 2 crits is the same as the chance to get 3, 4, or 5 crits. So, exactly 50% chance of getting 3 or more crits.

Honestly, I feel that Abyss as a concept works well with Fódlan as a setting. One of the big themes throughout the game is how the Church and the system of Crests and nobility can break people. We see what happened to Mercedes, for instance, or Miklan. But then at the same time, we also see the more benevolent side of the Church. In fact, Mercedes is an example of that as well, but there's also Cyril, for example. That duality is a huge part of the setting. And so, we have Abyss, a city beneath a city, inhabited by outcasts and those who have been failed by society, struggling to make ends meet as best they can. And yet, it's not completely disconnected, as some members of the church do take an interest, and do try to do right by Abyss. Which many Abyssians are distrustful of, since they've been mistreated in the past. To me, that's a pretty compelling conept that fits really well within the world and expands upon it. I have some issues with how it actually ended up, but that's mostly a problem of implementation rather than any conceptual flaw.

On the one hand: Having more endgame classes doesn't just need graphics, animations and the like; it also needs more ideas for distinct classes, more ideas for different mastery skills, more balance work to make sure that no single class is too strong or too weak, etc. If the different classes aren't distinc in gameplay as well as appearance, then they don't really ahve much benefit over the three-tier system. On the other hand: This could also have been a cool way to make the Dawn Brigade more interesting. If most/all of the returning characters from PoR were pre-promotes, but the characters originating in RD weren't, then the extra flexibility could have been a really strong incentive to stick with more of the Dawn Brigade for the long term. Doubly so if there were some classes that they could reach that none of your returning units could.

I see your point, but on the other hand, would you prefer it if Cindered Shadows had only had characters who were bland and boring with no potential at all? Obviously, the best case scenario is if they have characters with a self-contained story arc that is still compelling while fitting exactly into the confines of the DLC, but that's a tricky balancing act. And if they're going to err, it's probably better that they err in the direction of leaving bits of story untold than that of not having enough story to fill all the space. I also honestly can't see Intelligent Systems ever making a full game about an underground movement with a Yuri-style main character. Fire Emblem games tend to have very consistent theming and aesthetic; they're mostly about kingdoms and lords and princesses and dragons and nations. Even in a game like Radiant Dawn where you start out as a resistance movement against an enemy occupation has you meeting up with royalty as early as chapter 4. I'm not saying I wouldn't like to see them taking a few more risks with things. I just don't see it happening any time soon.

Welp, I guess that's me told. 😄 And actually, I am glad that people like/liked them. I'd hate to think that I've been suffering through them for no reason.

Huh. That actually kinda backs up my pet theory about her support conversation with Jannaf in PoR (that she is very used to making up excuses to fob off men who hit on her, and that the stuff about needing a chaperone was such a line). Have to say, I honestly wasn't expecting that particular theory to get more canon support. I do like Lucia. It's a shame that she's not actually around much in either game. That sucks. Fog of war maps are the worst. Part of me wonders why they've stuck around for all this time. I very rarely hear anyone talking about how much they love fog of war, but I assume that someone somewhere likes them, otherwise they'd have been dropped by now.

I went CF -> VW -> AM -> SS, but I don't know what the names you've given to the different orders mean or why that is "season" order? I'm guessing it's something that was in the original Japanese version that was dropped from the translation since it relies on Japanese cultural context? My reasoning was super basic. First game, I knew nothing about the routes or characters, so I chose Black Eagles because it was the one with a female lord, then chose Crimson Flower fairly arbitrarily because I didn't particularly like either option at the point where you choose. Next game I played Verdant Wind because I liked what I'd seen of Claude more than what I'd seen of Dimitri up to that point. Then by the time I came to my third game, I'd read up about stuff more and knew that Silver Snow and Verdant Wind had a lot in common, so wanted to do something different, so Azure Moon it was. Then that left Silver Snow.

First of all, this was a great post, with a lot of detail and thought. Thanks for taking the time to make it. Now, for myself, one of the reasons I tend to avoid crit builds is that they increase the complexity of the decision tree I build in my mind as I play, which increases the likelihood that I make mistakes. To be clear, this is very much a personal preference thing and not something that I'm presenting as objectively optimal, but let me explain what I mean. I think we all agree that the ideal situation is to have an attack with a 100% hit rate that is guaranteed to kill an enemy, but that we also agree that there are a lot of circumstances where this isn't possible. In any situation where it isn't possible -- less than 100% hit, needing to get a crit, having a possibility of an enemy skill proc, etc. -- then we generally need to make contingency plans. "I'll make this attack and if it kills the enemy then this will be my next move, but if it doesn't then I'll have to do that instead", that sort of thing. The ideal circumstance for any contingency planning is to have a full decision tree for all possible outcomes, that will make the most of good luck if we get it (eg, by pushing forward further, killing more enemies, claiming secondary objectives, etc.) but that can react to and mitigate bad luck if we get that (eg, not overextending, having backup strategies, keeping units in reserve in case they are needed, etc.). It isn't typically possible to have a full decision tree for every possible outcome for an entire turn, but it is possible to plan for a few different outcomes, and I like to consider as many contingencies as possible before making a move. Crit builds make it more difficult to effectively plan because there are more possible outcomes that need to be accounted for. Instead of having to plan for what to do if I miss and what if I hit, I have to plan for missing, hitting without a crit, and hitting with a crit. If I'm double attacking, then I may need to consider the difference between critting on the first attack and critting on the second attack, since that may be the difference between taking a counterattack and not. It's just more things to keep in mind. I know from past experience that the more variables I am trying to keep track of in my head, the more likely I am to miscalculate or misremember something and make a mistake. I like to keep things simple not because I think it's necessarily best, but to try to play around my own human fallibility.

I remember liking Heather a whole lot when I played Radiant Dawn originally. I strongly suspect that was entirely because of how terrible lesbian representation in video games was at the time, rather than anything to do with good writing or characterisation. It may have been the bare minimum of representation and inclusivity, but that was still a step above other games, and I latched onto it. Largely agreed, except I don't care too much about replay value. I don't really replay many games, and when I do replay, it's usually long enough afterwards that I've forgotten how things played out the first time. For me, the big problem is that without the incentive to train up weaker units for later, there's little reason not to lean heavily on a few units, namely pre-promotes, lords, and other over-powered characters. It's especially annoying when playing blind, if you do put time or resources into training someone only for them to disappear and make all the training just so much wasted effort. "Just do what it takes to get through the chapter and don't worry about later" took a lot away from the game, as far as I'm concerned.

That's fair. It definitely is better than nothing on turns where you can't do anything else. Thanks for explaining, even if there wasn't much to say.

When it comes to Smash specifically, I don't think that it really matters all that much which character was included. I know that there have been a lot of games that have seen some big additional sales from inclusion in Smash, but I think that mostly comes when a franchise is first included, not when it gets its eighth character. For the most part, Smash Players knew about Fire Emblem long before Byleth was added, and had already either played Three Houses or decided they weren't interested. Three Houses sales were about the same in Q1 2020 as they were in Q4 2019 (about 300,000). Maybe you can say there would have been a drop-off if it weren't for Smash, but it's not moving the needle a whole lot. We're certainly far removed from the days when having Roy and Marth in Melee introduced the franchise to the West. Then, for people who had already played Three Houses, has Byleth's inclusion in Smash really changed how they feel about the character? Are we seeing a bunch of people who are saying "well, I used to hate Byleth, but then I mained them in Smash and now I love them"? I know I've not seen anything like that. Most Fire Emblem fans are going to make up their minds on the character based on Three Houses itself. Maybe people who already love the character might love them a little bit more after Smash, but I just don't see it having that big of an impact. The choice of character is important in terms of trying to attract Fire Emblem fans to buy the DLC, and it's important in terms of creating a character who's fun to play in Smash, but in terms of any lasting impact or legacy? I'm not seeing it.