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Ignatz seems like an ideal choice to me. He has the strength in authority, doesn't have high charm for offensive gambits, and generally doesn't have high damage output so it isn't as if you're ruining a good combat unit by giving him a batallion with bad stats. He also has the ability to offer support when he isn't dancing in the form of rallies, ward arrow and break shot. As for class: anything with a horse. Bow knight seems like it would probably be the ideal choice for Ignatz, but getting him there takes some work. Valkyrie Annette might be another good choice.

For me, chance/luck/RNG is interesting when it leads to contingency planning. I like having to think about what I do when something doesn't go to plan. For instance, if I form a strategy for a turn but it relies on some unit hitting an 80% hit, then I'm going to want to perform that attack first in my turn and have an alternate plan in mind for if it misses. Maybe if it misses I need to pull the unit back with rescue and then turtle up for a turn, rather than advancing as I had been planning, for instance. I enjoy this type of planning and controlled risk taking. On the other hand, enemy crits can often be inherently impossible to recover from. If a unit dies, then they are lost forever (casual mode in newer titles excepted). If a main character dies, then it's game over. There's no contingency plan for this, nothing you can do to mitigate the bad luck if it happens, no interesting decisions. The only available options are to never attack anything that has even a 1% chance of a lethal crit on a unit you're unable or unwilling to lose, or to go ahead and do it anyway and be willing to reset if things go wrong. The former leads to very cautious gameplay that relies on using the same overpowered units or strategies repeaetedly, while the latter just comes down to luck. I find neither option fun or interesting.

Maybe exrapolating from border conflicts? There have been times when small bits of border land have been conquered, so maybe something similar happened in those cases? Or maybe Soren is just a cynical bastard who assumes the worst in every possible scenario. This does bring to mind the part near the beginning when someone mentions Crimea being the closest thing the Greil mercs have to a homeland. Which, given that we now know that Greil was from Daein and Ike and Mist were born in Gallia, yeah, that totally makes sense as a comment and actually works as pretty nice foreshadowing.

Nealuchi refers to himself as an "old crow" at one point. It's in his conversation with Reyson before Feral Frontier.

Obviously, a lot is dependent on individual tastes and preferences (I loved all the down-time and character building and everything, but that's just me). That said, if you strongly dislike all the monastery stuff from the beginning, it doesn't have any sort of fundamental change that's likely to suddenly make you start enjoying it. The battles definitely do get a lot more involved as the game progresses, and end up much more interesting than early tutorial battles. The game is still playable if you skip over a lot of the monastery stuff, though. It's a bit harder that way than if you spend a lot of time min-maxing all the out-of-battle stuff, but definitely playable. Maybe try playing it that way and seeing if it clicks any better for you?

Personally, I think I'm just going to assume that all the maps that we see are pretty bad. It wouldn't really be surprising; in our world, when we were at a comparable tech level to Tellius, our cartography was also fairly rubbish by modern standards. There's also at least some evidence that they don't have great maps. Nasir running the ship aground when being chased by ravens suggests they probably don't have great naval charts. The desert east of Daein was completely unmapped allowing Hatari to remain hidden. Stuff like that. If all the maps that we see are considered as in-universe maps, then all the problems with size and distance can be explained away.

Personally, I consider Lorenz to be decent enough to be perfectly usable, but still within the lower echelons of the game's characters. (I don't consider any of this game's characters to be outright bad. Even the worst ones are at least OK.) Looking at some of your points, though. Thyrsus is a bit weird because its two effects are at odds with each other. +2 range is great for ensuring that your mage isn't on the front line and in harm's way but the pavisse/aegis effect only does anything if you are taking a hit. Lorenz is one of the few units who can benefit from both effects, but I''m not sure that's worth it compared to putting it on some other mage and using the extra range to help never be hit and not need pavisse/aegis. I also don't think it's fair to say that he's the only bulky mage, although he is one of the better units in that particular niche. But if you're looking for a bulky mage, you could also use Manuela, Edelgard, or Sylvain, for instance. All of them have drawbacks, but all of them have advantages that Lorenz doesn't as well. I don't particularly value Ward or Agnea's Arrow either. Ward isn't a very useful effect most of the time, and I only really use it in siuations where I have a turn and nothing else to do and may as well grab a bit of experience. Even in situations where stacking res would be useful, Pure Water and Rally Res both exist as options. Maybe I'm sleeping on it, but I've found it consistently underwhelming. Agnea's Arrow does great damage, of course, but its weight, accuracy, and uses are all downsides. For me, the highlights of his spell list are Ragnarok (only 1 might less than Agnea's Arrow and is otherwise strictly better and he gets it earlier) and Recover (which is mediocre on a lot of units, but works well on a front-liner with high mobility). The big selling points of Gremory are +5 magic and double spell uses. Simply from a damage output perspective, +5 magic isn't as good as +2 magic and tomefaire but it isn't far behind. It also applies to healing (though not as well as the bishop's dedicated bonus), and to spell ranges, which can be important for the likes of warp and rescue. Double spell uses is particulary amazing for single use spells like warp and meteor, bu is good for anyhing which doesn't have many uses. Bolting, rescue, fortify, thoron, dark spikes, luna, etc. I'm sure Lorenz would love an extra three uses of Ragnarok. This is not to say that Gremory is the be all and end all of magic classes, but it's certainly a strong class.

I've always found the concerns about Raphael's speed to be somewhat overblown. Sure, he's slow as a tortoise wading through treacle but in practical terms, there often isn't any difference between terrible speed and mediocre speed. If you're making a fortress knight, it doesn't matter whether your speed growth is 15 (Raphael) or 30 (Balthus), you're still getting doubled by basically everything. If you send both through fighter and armor knight, then certify in warrior for the stat boosts, then spend the rest of the game in fortress knight, then by level 40 you'll expect (on average) Raphael to have a speed of 9 and Balthus to have a speed of 12. That is just not a significant difference at that level. I know a lot of people hate fortress knight and will never use it, and that's fine. I find it completely usable, but to each their own. But for anyone who is looking to build a physical wall, he's one of the best, if not the best. You may not like his niche or ever want to use it, and I totally understand that, but at least he has a niche.

Getting to C in a skill is super easy even without a strength, though. Even characters with axe weakness like Bernadetta aren't going to have much difficulty going into brigand for long enough to pick up death blow. Having a strength in a skill is really nice if you're trying to get it up to A or S, but doesn't offer much when you're only going for C. It will let you get to C slightly quicker, so it is better than nothing, but not by all that much. And besides, it's not like he's the only one with strength in both axes and bows. Cyril and Petra both do as well, as does Claude if you pick up his budding talent, and all three of them have other things going for them as well.

I'm not sure he's the worst, but I consider Ashe the most underwhelming character in the game. Pretty much everyone else has something that sets them apart from the crowd or some sort of unique selling point. Maybe an interesting personal ability, good combat arts, good spell list, amazing growths in at least one stat... something. Caspar isn't great, but I like his personal skill, and there's an extra bonus in his paralogue if you use him to beat the death knight. Raphael has the highest HP growth in the game. Manuela has Warp and Silence, as well as great speed. Lorenz is much more durable than most magic users which lets him sit on the front lines throwing out recovers and frozen lances in a way that will get most mages killed. Annette has amazing rallies. Cyril learns Vengeance and Point Blank Volley. And so on and so forth. With Ashe, I just don't see anything that sets him apart and makes me want to use him. His stats are unremarkable at best, his personal can be entirely replicated by buying chest keys, his spell list is abysmal, and his combat arts aren't much better. He isn't even needed for his paralogue in most routes, and in the one route where you can't get Catherine, you don't actually have to use him at all if you do recruit him for the paralogue. And then on two out of four routes, he also ends up going missing for a couple of months in part two. He can be turned into a perfectly decent end-game character, but there's nothing about him that particularly makes me want to pick him over other characters. Honorable mention for underwhelmingness goes to Anna, who mostly feels like a cross between worse-Bernadetta and worse-Manuela, has an awful personal, and worst of all, has no supports. This not only makes her feel so much shallower as a character, but also hurts her combat performance because of linked attacks and gambit boosts being so much weaker. I've never actually used her, but I'm sure she'd be perfectly usable. But like Ashe, there's nothing about her that makes me want to use her. She at least has pass/rescue and a higher magic kill than Bernadetta, so that is something I guess? But I still feel overwhelmed by meh whenever I think about using her.

I'm not an expert on this by any means, but I have heard that translating song lyrics is particularly difficult. Essentially, different languages have different rhythms, with different patterns of stress being common. If you hear Japanese and English from a distance and can't even make out any of the words, you can still tell that they're very different lamguages because of the different patterns of rhythms that they make. With songs, the music is generally composed specifically to fit the rhythm of the language of its lyrics. With a translated version, you're left trying to conform to a bunch of stress patterns that don't really match your language very well, all while trying to convey the same meaning as the original. It's still frustrating and jarring when it happens, but I don't think it's really born out of laziness.

Just because he doesn't age (or ages very slowly) doesn't mean Jeralt is immortal. It's entirely possible that Rhea saved other people in similar ways but that they subsequently died. Being a Knight of Seiros is a pretty dangerous occupation, after all. Doubly so when you consider that she only saved Jeralt when he risked his own life to save her, and may have done similarly in the past. Being a Knight of Seiros with a habit of putting yourself in harm's way to help others definitely can't have a long life expectancy. I can think of a lot of possible reasons for this. Ultimately, I think that she knows that a lot of what she did with Byleth was morally dubious at best and that she wronged Jeralt in the process, which would make it a lot more likely that she'd forgive him, especially if they'd had decades or centuries of trust built up beforehand. Beyond that, reinstating him is probably the only way she'd get to keep Byleth close. If she'd told him that he wasn't welcome at the monastery but his child had to stay behind, then I can only assume that his response would have been along the lines of "over my dead body". Even if she had managed to force him into it then that would have ruined any chance of getting Byleth to trust her. It's also the best way to keep Jeralt close. Even if she doesn't trust him at all, I can definitely see that she'd want a powerful individual who knows some of her secrets to be somewhere she could keep an eye on him. She also knows that, regardless of Jeralt's feelings towards her personally, he's not the sort of man who risk innocent lives to spite her. She could feel justifiably safe knowing that she could send him on missions like the one to Remire and that he'd give them his best, if not out of loyalty to her then for the people. Finally, there's the fact that Alois was the one to bring him to the monastery. Alois is many things, but discrete is not one of them. He'd probably told half of the knight corps that Jeralt was back within a day of getting back to the monastery, which would have meant there was no way she could have quietly had him disappear again without it raising more questions. It could be a combination of any or all of the above.

I'm not a particularly big fan of Hubert's, but for me, his strongest moment actually comes in Verdant Wind. In a lot of ways, Hubert is Claude's dark mirror. Both are neck deep in plots and schemes and both hide a lot of their personal feelings behind a mask. The difference is that Hubert plays the role of an amoral sociopath, whereas Claude's role is more of a happy-go-lucky prankster. Sure, there's an element of truth to both personas, but neither one of them is the whole truth of who the person is. It's almost a shame that they can never be in the same route, because they could have had some really interesting conversations and supports with each other. On the other hand, having them kept apart keeps the similarities much less explicit and more up for interpretation, and I appreciate that too.

In terms of canon, we don't know all that much, which I suspect is deliberate. The writers probably kept things at least somewhat vague because, ultimately, this is magic that we're talking about here. Having well-defined rules of magic for a setting can certainly help with world building and immersion, having the rules be defined too precisely can also take away some of the mystique from magic itself. There's always a balancing act when writing that sort of thing, but given that one of the themes for Three Houses -- especially in Verdant Wind -- is uncovering the mysteries of the past, I think that erring on the side of preserving the mystique was a good choice.

That's fair. I generally don't like to use weapons that a class doesn't get bonus skill proficiencies in, because it makes training that much more of a pain. In the case of magic-oriented units, most of them are going to want a levin sword, which is only a C requirement and very achievable for anyone in any class. There is still the possibility of soulblade/hexblade with a higher requirement sword, but the repair costs for anything above a silver sword would get old fast. Even so, I do think that the skill proficiency bonus is a relevant concern, albeit not a large one. I don't really see the attraction for most male gauntlet users to spend time mastering War Monk. Brawl Avoid +20 is a decent skill, for sure, but there aren't very many circumstances where I'd prioritise it over Fierce Iron Fist or Quick Riposte, and I wouldn't expect to be able to hit all three without either NG+ or some serious grinding. Unless I'm looking to make use of either pneuma gale or the spell utility, I can only think of niche circumstances where I'd bother. (This is a lie, of course. I run all sorts of weird nonsense, so would definitely run War Monk on all sorts of characters for even the most tenuous reason.) For female characters, War Cleric definitely has much more to offer. It's pretty self-evidently the best class available for any female character looking to run a gauntlets build. I'm almost tempted to say that my rating of the classes is War Cleric > Trickster > War Monk. I don't think I'm quite going to go that far, but I will say this instead: War Monk and Trickster are both pretty bad, and trying to figure out which one is worse is mostly just splitting hairs. War Cleric, on the other hand, is an actually good class.

I think that in a direct comparison, War Monk/Cleric is probably the better of the two, but it comes across as more underwhelming for two reasons. First is the competition with other classes. For gauntlet users who might end up in War Monk/Cleric, the other choices are going to be Grappler and War Master, whcih are great classes. For sword users, Trickster is going to be in competition with Assassin, Swordmaster and Mortal Savant, which are less great. The second reason is that there are way more characters who naturally fit into Trickster than into War Monk/Cleric. Eight different characters have a strength or budding talent in both swords and faith: Byleth, Dorothea, Lysithea, Marianne, Manuela, Yuri, Balthus, and Anna. Then for faith and gauntlets, Balthus and Byleth are the only characters in the game who are good at both. Obviously, you don't need both strengths to make a build work, but there's generally less incentive to try them.

I'd assume that it's probably a complicated mess, and that no single corporation (or person, or any other entity) owns the entirety of Fire Emblem. There will be a whole host of different copyrights of different works, together with a ton of different trademarks, and possibly other aspects of intellectual property like patents or trade secrets. Different elements can be and probably are owned by different companies. Not only are Nintendo and IS involved, but there are also the creators of various spin-offs (not only video games, but also the card game, manga, etc.) all of whom probably have some rights pertaining to the specific works they created. There have definitely been other game series in the past where multiple companies ended up making successor games after legal disputes. There was Championship Manager, where I think the developers got to keep the game engine and database and turned it into Football Manager, but the publishers got to continue using the Championship Manager brand (which subsequently floundered). Or there's Civilization, where there were two competing sequels to Civ II -- Call to Power was published by Activision and Civ III was published by Infogrames. Or then there's Dizzy, which was a British game series of the late 80s and early 90s that probably few if anyone else has heard of, which ended up dying a death after the publishers and developers fell out because one of them held all the copyrights and the other held all the trademarks. My guess would be that Nintendo has the trademark on the name "Fire Emblem" but that IS have at least partial ownership on the copyright of individual characters, stories and settings from the game. So I would assume that in the hypothetical event of an acrimonious split, Nintendo would be able to make games under the Fire Emblem name, but they might not be able to use Marth or Fódlan or whatever else, and they almost certainly wouldn't be able to re-use any code or assets from previous games. This is all just speculation, though. Probably nobody other than lawyers and management at Nintendo and IS know the exact details of who owns what.

Some suff I've run a various times in the past, with varying degrees of seriousness and commitment: Sniper Mercedes: Very strong and fun to use when she actually got going, but was a bit of a slog to get there. On the other hand, I did just put her through fighter -> archer -> sniper since I was mostly messing around on that run, and that's not what I'd do if I was trying to play optimally. Definitely a viable build for her. Fortress Knight Flayn: Surprisingly not terrible. Getting past her weakness in heavy armor is a pain but once you do, you end up with a unit with Fortress Knight level def and Flayn level res, making her a surprisingly competent mixed tank. She can also dish out some impressive damage with a bolt axe. In no way recommended for a serious run, since the result isn't worth the investment, but was very fun to play around with. Sword-using Bishop Caspar: This isn't as bad as you think it is. It's actually worse. Don't do this. It's not strong, it's not interesting, it's not fun. Trickster Manuela: I had a somewhat better impression of this, possibly because I did stick with it until I got warp. I think of it as being like an assassin giving up swordfaire for warp and silence, which I'm happy to do because I like warp and silence. Holy Knight Ingrid: This worked way better for me than it had any right to. I wasn't really paying attention, but I can only assume my Ingrid was severely RNG blessed on that run, because she was wrecking face with both lance and magic. Nothing that has physic, canto and move 7 can ever be bad, though. Dark Flier Ingrid: Was significantly less effective than when I ran her as Holy Knight, so if that run wasn't RNG blessed then this one was RNG cursed. She still did fine. Flying physic users are still great, thoron and frozen lance are both still good, and she's definively usable this way without too much effort, but it wasn't anything more than fine. Holy Knight Bernadetta: I wanted to play around with her good spell list. Pass + Rescue seems great on paper but her bad magic growths meant I wasn't getting enough range on it to be useful. And obviously, she's much worse as a physical attacker in a class that doesn't have lance- or bowfaire. Dark Knight Lorenz: Pretty standard stuff. Frozen lance is good. Having recover on a unit bulky enough to survive a hit and with 7 move is good. He didn't wow me, but I feel this is probably his best build. War Cleric Catherine: Only a mixed build in the most technical sense. Recover will occasionally come in useful and pneuma gale can sometimes give you range on something you couldn't otherwise reach, but obviously the main reason for this was to give her access to fistfaire. And she is good at punching things. Mortal Savant Dorothea: Meh. She's better in a magic class. Mortal Savant Felix: Meh. He's better in a physical class. Bow Knight Linhardt: You can get something vaguely usable out of him eventually, but there's not a whole lot of point to it. Other characters do a much better job of being magical archers. Dark Knight Hilda: Bolting is nice, but so not worth the effort of doing this. Especially since Constance exists now.

For me, the extremes of difficulty level (on both sides) sometimes homogenise units or strategies too much by moving break points too far in one direction or the other. Speed is an obvious example. For any given attack, there are only three possibilities: double attacking, being double attacked, or one attack each. If you're getting doubled, it doesn't matter whether you're at five speed less than your opponent or five million. If all enemies are so fast that everything is doubling all your units, then speed stops being a relevant stat. At the same time, if all enemies are so slow that all your units are doubling them, then speed also stops being a relevant stat. Other stats also have a similar breakpoint: there is no difference between a unit being brought down to 0hp and them being brought down to -20hp, between just barely having enough defence to take no damage and having twice that amount of defence, between having enough strength or magic to just barely kill something and overkilling it horribly. And so on and so forth. I want for differences between units to matter. I want for there to be a noticeable difference between untis with great, good, mediocre, bad, and terrible speed. I don't want to always be doubling or to always be getting doubled. Both extremes bore me.

I think that Sword Avoid +20 would probably be too strong. What is essentially a Falcon Knight with magic is already bordering on too strong, and making her an amazing dodge tank as well would probably be too much. Pass could be cool, though, both in terms of gameplay and theming. I like the idea of her choosing to save or take a life and then going directly to her target, bypassing anyone in the way. I'd originally imagined it as being class-locked, but thinking about it now, I'm not sure it would be too big a problem if it wasn't. Sure, getting a second use of an exceptionally strong spell is very good, but you'd have to give up your dancer to get it. Which is better, two uses of galdr or one use of galdr and infinite uses of dance? For LTC runs where most battles aren't going past a second turn, I can imagine doubling up being better, but for a casual playthrough, I don't think I'd want to give up dance.

Valfreyja Knight (Manuela) Virtuoso (Dorothea) Kalpa Warrior (Hilda)

Mage utility also suffers from being in a game that has gambits, rallies combat arts. Effects like Silence and Mire are good, but Ward Arrow and Break Shot can do much the same thing. That doesn't make the spells bad, but it does mean they don't stand out as much. Rallies and gambits generally don't have directly overlapping effects with spells (except for Rally Res with Ward, I guess), but they both give yet more utility that isn't restricted to mages. If you want a utility unit, you aren't limited to just mages any more; you could easily choose someone like Ignatz instead. It all just erodes the niche and unique identity that magic has.

I mostly like Three Houses magic, especially switching to uses-per-map, but the one big problem I do have with it is that it's way too easy to cross-train in faith and reason. By and large, every black/dark mage will also have some amount of healing, and every healer will have some amount of offensive black/dark magic. I think that a lot of the problems with faith magic in this game are derived from this base issue. Offensive white magic is largely a joke because everyone learning faith magic is learning reason as well. If the different schools of magic were kept apart, then it would be an interesting question: do I want the healer who can also contribute a bit of chip damage, or do I want the one with more utility spells? As is, all healers can contribute chip damage through reason magic, so the attacking white magic options are underwhelming at best. At the same time, because black/dark magic classes also have access to faith magic, that ends up making the faith magic classes mean so much less. There's almost no reason to ever be a Holy Knight when Dark Knight is just as good at healing; there's not much reason to ever be a priest when mage is almost as good at healing. War Cleric and Trickster would both be better if their ability to contribut secondary healing in a pinch wasn't something that literally every magic class was able to do already.

Personally, I completely unappolagetically love Three Houses and its mashup of game styles. A big part of that is because I love all the different genres being mashed together. I play turn-based tactics games, I play RPGs, I even play dating sims, life sims, and what have you. I also don't look to Fire Emblem games purely for the tactical gameplay elements. When I'm in that sort of mood, I play chess instead, which is always going to be a deeper tactical experience. For me, Fire Emblem has always been a combination of gameplay with characters and story. So I was always going to love Three Houses. It's supplanted Path of Radiance as my favourite Fire Emblem, and I've logged something ridiculous like 700 hours in the game. Obviously, I'm hoping for more of the same down the road. That said, I hope that Intelligent Systems can refine their ideas further in future titles. Basically, I'm hoping that Three Houses was where they had all the new ideas, and what comes next is where they get refined. Because much as I love this game, there is a lot about it that could be improved. I'd love to see better difficulty settings. Maybe do what some action RPGs do and have one setting for "I'm only here for the story, give me super easy gameplay" and one for "I'm only here for the gameplay, so show me everything else as a bunch of (skippable) cutscenes with default options". If they have multiple routes again, let's add an option to quickly skip over any dialogue that we've seen before, which is a staple in visual novels. While we're at it, let's also see a bigger focus on interesting map design again. And so on and so forth. Basically, if the next game in the series isn't trying to change as much and do as many new things, then I'm hoping that they'll have more time for polish and fine detail, and be able to make an even better game.