lenticular

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.

For the most part, my opinion of Three Houses characters has only gone up over time. As I've played more, had a chance to use everyone, seen more support conversations, heard other people's perspectives, and so on, I've managed to find more things to like about almost everyone. Whether it's a likable personality, an important role in the plot, an interesting character arc, good character design, good voice acting, being a strong unit in combat... or anything else, I'm mostly able to focus on the things I like about a character and ignore some of their more negative traits. I've especially found that characters who I had a strong negative initial reaction to like Lorenz, Sylvain, and Raphael have definitely grown on me a whole lot after I gave them a chance. I think there are three characters where this isn't true. First is Anna, who I was fairly indifferent to when she was an NPC, but now holds the dubious distinction as being my least favourite recruitable unit by a long way. Playable units are held to an entirely different standard, and she completely fails to meet those standards. And it's not as if I can grow to like her more as I get to know her, because there's basically nothing there to get to know. The other two are Byleth and Edelgard, who have some commonalities. More than anyone else, these two have maor character revelations part-way through the game that fundamentally altered how I saw them. For Edelgard, it's not so much that my opinion of her went down as that it shifted sideways. Before the revelation, I found her fairly likeable and moderately interesting. Afterwards -- and with Crimson Flower as my first route -- I didn't find her at all likeable, but did find her to be an extremely compelling character. I'm also extremely impressed with everyone involved in creating the character -- writers, translators, actor, director, artists, everyone. They've clearly created a character who is sufficiently deep, nuanced and interesting that she can mean many different things to different people and be interpreted in many different ways. Byleth, on the other hand, started pretty low and only went lower. I'm not a fan of avatar style characters or silent protagonists to begin with, but I was willing to give them a chance and try to keep an open mind. Sadly, all the things I dislike about avatars and silent protagonists ended up being there. The super-duper specialness, the being beloved by everyone for no apparent reason, the inclusion in central points in the plot and inability to provide any sort of emotional reaction to them. Everything is there. Byleth just doesn't work for me at all. To finish on a more positive note again, the three characters who have raised the most in my evaluation are Flayn, Mercedes and Seteth. All three of them, I started out not liking at all, but have grown to be be among my favourites. Flayn manages to straddle the line bevween wisdom and naivete wonderfully well, is a delight in doing so, and has some wonderfully funny moments. Mercedes has a sugary-sweet exterior, but is actually tough as nails and has a surprisingly sharp and insightful wit. Seteth is strong, wise, supportive, fiercely loyal to his allies, and has consistently great supports. I love all three of them.

A few more: Lugh (who you mention) is likely the name origin for Loog, the founder of the Kingdom of Faerghus. Teutates was a Celtic god in the real world and is a lake in Three Houses. Ailell, the Valley of Torment, is probably named for Ailill, an Irish name shared by several legendary figures. Seteth's name is probably derived from Setet, another character from Egyptian mythology who is also linked with Sopdet/Sothis/Sirius. Rhea was a titan in Greek mythology, as well as mother of the gods. Nemesis was also from Greek myth. Aegis was a shield belonging to Zeus before it was a shield belonging to House Fraldarius. Galatea is a great house in the game and is also the name of several figures from Greek myth, most notably a statue who came to life. Shambhala (the Slitherer city) is named for a mythical city from Tibetan Buddhism.

In terms of real-world comparisons, I think that Ancient Egyptian religion is probably even more apt, given that that's where much of the real-world inspiration for Sothis comes from. Ancient Egypt had gods who could die (e.g. Osiris) as well as humans who became gods (e.g. Imhotep).

Ironically, he quesion of wheher Sothis is actually a goddess or not is probably only one that it even makes sense to ask in a monotheistic faith like the Church of Seiros. With polytheistic or animistic religions, the line between a god and a powerful spirit or a hero of legend is much more blurry and less significant. After Byleth's transformation, Petra likens them to such a figure from Brigid myths and legends, and I've no doubt that Sothis would also be considered as such on Brigid, and quite possibly Almyra as well. When a being is only one member of a pantheon, it doesn't matter so much if they fulfil every possible requirement for godhood. But with a monotheistic faith, a god or goddess must be above all others in every respect. In that tradition, Sothis might only be considered divine because she is believed to be the Beginning, the Progenitor God, etc. and if those parts of the tales about her were not true, then she might not be considered a god after all. On further reflection, and considering everything we learn from Claude and Petra about the religions of their respective regions, I do think it's reasonable to assume that spirits do exist. It's plausible that their religions believe that spirits exist but they are completely wrong, btu that does seem like a bit of a stretch. In a world where time travel, magic, dragons, and the like are all definitely real, it would be very odd for religions to form up around something that doesn't exist. The question then is what role they play (if any) in magic? Can they grant magical abilities similar to the white magic of Fódlan? Is it possible that the only reason mages in Fódlan need to study reason and formulae is that they have lost touch with the spirits (due to the monotheistic nature of the Church of Seiros) and so aren't able to draw on their power as easily? I can't immediately think of any points in teh game that support or refute any of those possibilities.

Claude does put forward more of an animistic world-view in some of his supports. I want to say it's in his supports with Leonie and Petra, but I don't remember exactly so I might be wrong there. But even then, it's presented more as the beliefs of one individual rather than a definitive "this is how the world is" sort of thing. I generally tend towards thinking that different Fire Emblem settings are completely different worlds with entirely unrelated lore and entirely unrelated metaphysics and natural laws. I mean, there's nothing I can point to that says that you're wrong to think of it the way you do, and I wouldn't ever want to try to convince you otherwise, but arguments based on how things are in other games in the series don't hold weight with me personally.

There probably isn't enough in the game to actually draw any sort of definite conclusion, but it's still fun to speculate about even so. I don't really give much credence to comparisons with older games in the series. This is a completely different setting with no links in terms of lore and story, and is also worked on by different people. I just don't see any reason to suppose that things should work the same way. For me, the first place I look when trying to figure out magic in Fódlan is the split between reason and faith magic. Faith magic does seem to draw on the power of the goddess and the connection of the caster to the goddess. If you look at the characters who have a weakness in faith, they're foreigners (Claude, Petra, Dedue, Cyril, Shamir), those who are bitter and resentful towards the goddess (Edelgard, Hubert, Dorothea, Jeritza) and -- for some reason unknown to me -- Hilda. So while it is clear that there is some sort of divine connection to white magic, it isn't clear to me if that connection is all that there is to white magic or only a component. The Agarthans do field white magic users but that could easily be that they are using their technology to mirror the same sort of effects through an entirely different means. I was trying to think if there are any examples of cultures outside of Fódlan who use white magic, and I can't think of any. The Almyran forces present in Dividing the World (Hilda and Cyril's paralogue) don't have any white magic users with them, but it's hard to say whether that's because they aren't capable of white magic, their warrior culture disdains magic in general, or just that there weren't any present in that particular deployment. What is clear is that an individual who has no natural aptitude for analytic reasoning and no training in it can still cast faith magic at a high level (Manuela, for instance). To me, that indicates that anything that faith and reason spells have in common, such as fancy glyphs and glowy animations, cannot be something unique to the reason magic process. Instead, it seems to be something inherent to the raw stuff of magic itself, whatever that may be. If I had to speculate, I would say that there is some basic underlying stuff of magic, and that faith and reason are different ways of drawing upon that power. The way I'm imagining things is that it's relatively easy for someone with strong magical ability (in game terms, a high magic stat) to create very small effects, like a tiny spark, or a gentle puff of air, or changing the colour of a small object, or something like that. The challenge with magic is to build that small effect up into something bigger, which is where all the complex reasoning and formulae come in. I base that on the idea of the various resonant magic gambits, where a full battalion are pooling their magic efforts to create a single large effect, by creating a resonance. Essentially, the individual members of the battalion are trained not to channel their magic into a spell output like "fire" or "heal" but to keep it in a more primal form that feeds the resonance that then unleashes the single gambit, which is effectively a spell on a larger scale than any individual can achieve. I am imagining that an individual casting black magic spells is essentially doing the same thing on a smaller scale, using formulae and resonances to construct the fine strands of primal magic into a specific manifestation. On the other hand, I would imagine that for white magic, the user still has to summon the raw threads of magic, but that it is the goddess (or some manifestation of the divine) who then shapes those threads into a spell. Is all of this entirely backed up by what we see in the game? Not really, no. I think it's consistent with the game, and there are bits of it that are supported in part, but it is largely just my person interpretation of things that aren't ever well explained.

I dislike the season pass model. Partly because I don't like being expected to pay upfront for things that don't exist yet, but partly because I think it makes for a worse product overall. If everything had been released all at once, then they'd have been better able to integrate everything together. Maybe we could have had supports for Anna if it had been released after all the voice actors were back in the studio recording their lines for Cindered Shadows, maybe the extra auxillary battles could have included locations from Abyss, maybe the acquisition of outfits orsat boosters could have been worked into the story some how. Things like that. As it is, everythin felt a little too disconnected and tacked on. As for the content itself, I'd say that Cindered Shadows exceded my expectation, Anna came in way below my expectation, and the rest was about what I expected it to be. I wasn't expecting to be blown away by things like the outfits, the sauna, the auxillary battles, etc. and I wasn't. They're there, I use some of them sometimes, they aren't bad, but they weren't the things I bought the DLC for. Anna was pretty awful. A character with no supports, hardly any dialogue, and close to zero integration into the story is hardly a character at all. Looking at her purely in terms of her stats and abilities as a unit, she also doesn't have anything particularly exciting. She's not a bad unit, per se, but there's really nothing that makes me ever want to use her. Cindered Shadows was the pleasant surprise for me. Having a game mode without extensive unit customisation felt fresh to me. I am glad that Three Houses as a whole wasn't like that, but I enjoyed the change of pace. I generally liked the maps, although some of them dragged on a bit too long for my tastes. The only one I really didn't care for was the final boss, which felt as if it lasted forever without ever feeling at all challenging or as if any of my units were in danger. I very much like the new classes, and specifically, I like how they're balanced against the old classes. All of the new classes are strong enough for me to want to use them, but none of them are completely busted to the point where they obviously outshine everything else. "Do I want to go Valkyrie for canto and +1 range or Gremory for doubled castings?" is a genuine question and one that will have different answers from unit to unit and playthrough to playthrough, and that's exactly what I wanted. Mostly what I like about the Cindered Shadows wave is simply that it adds more game. There are more characters, more story, more lore, more faciliies, more monastery NPCs (shoutout to the Abysskeeper), more classes, more everything. The game just feels bigger afterwards than it did before. Overall, I'd say I feel slightly positive about the pack as a whole, but only slightly. There was a a lot that I liked, but also a good chunk that I'd didn't care for that brought it down as a whole.

Yuri is the ovious choice, but I'm also fond of Manuela as a Trickster. She has strength in Swords and Faith, learns Hexblade, and has Silence and Warp (and since the halved uses round up, she only loses one casting of Silence and none of Warp).

My favourite character is Ingrid, and I entirely expect her to be either the least or second least popular of the Blue Lions overall, and I don't have a problem with that. We're not trying to determine some objective truth about how good the characters are. No result in a poll is going to affect my enjoyment of my favourite characters at all. I'm not going to feel bad jsut because I like an unpopular character, or feel good because I like a popular one. If anything, it's interesting to me to see how different people see things differently. Maybe they don't see the characters the same way I do, maybe their opinions are shaped by their own lived experiences, and so on. Maybe they'll say things about why they like their favourite characters that will make me appreiate them more. Trying to "win" holds no interest to me; trying to learn from the discussions and to see things in a different light does. And for completeness's sake, here's why I like Ingrid. Partly, it's because I really enjoy using her as a unit. She's probably the most versatile unit in the game (possibly second most, behind Byleth), since she has no skill weaknesses, acceptable growths in both strength and magic, a halfway decent spell list (with both Thoron and Physic), and a few decent combat arts (Frozen Lance and Hexblade). There's not much that she's the absolute best at, but it's really hard to build a bad Ingrid. She'll be at least decent in any class you put her in. This sort of versatility really suits my playstyle, since I prefer to play around and experiment with builds rather than trying to optimise. Beyond that, I also like Ingrid as a character. I like how, over the course of the game, she manages to change her opinions about the system of nobility within Faerghus and her role within it. To start with, she fully believes that it will be her duty to be married off to someone she likely doesn't even know for the sake of her house, but by the end she's come to realise that she can have her own will and her own ambitions and that putting her house before herself really won't do anyone any good. This is a nice mirror for a lot of the themes within the game, and especially within the Blue Lions. I appreciate her loyalty as a friend to Felix and Sylvain (even at times when they don't necessarily deserve it). I appreciate her willingness to listen to, learn from and take advice from people with more life experience than she has, in her supports with Catherine and Seteth. I empathise with her discomfort with fussing over her appearance. In short, I find her an interesting and nuanced character with a thematically relevant arc. Ingrid is great. Or at least, I think Ingrid is great. But if other people don't like her, then that's fine too. Won't make me like her any less.

I'd dropped him from regular use long before I got to his paralogue in my first Golden Deer run, so I didn't get to experience those joys. He's perfectly usable when you build him right, and it was entirely my fault for not giving him a fair shake to start with, but bad first impressions can be a hell of a thing to overcome.

The problem I had with Lorenz was largely due to the very bad first impression he gave -- pompous, full of himself, zero self-awareness, and yes, terrible hair -- combined with a weak combat performance that didn't give me any incentive to keep on using him to get past those first impressions. For some characters, their weak combat performance doesn't matter because I liked them. For others, their strong combat performance made me want to keep using them long enough to get past the bad first impressions. For Lorenz, I just didn't feel any motivaion to keep using him. It's a bad combination for a character to have. I did eventually use him enough to see more of his supports and I kinda like the guy now, but he was the last Three Houses character I warmed up to.

Pre-timeskip. And a question of my own: was Fallen Star (Failnaught's combat art) nerfed, or am I losing my mind? If so when was it nerfed? As part of the Cindered Shadows patch?

Some quick, brief analysis/speculation: Is anyone else seeing other stuff that I missed?

Putting aside any edtails of this one specific pairing, I think it's worth noting that most pairings don't receive a whole lot of attention from fandom, simply because there are so many characters in a game like Three Houses. There are 40 different playable characters (not counting male and female Byleth as separate), which equates to 780 different pairings that can be made just from playable characters. If you add in just 10 of the most prominent NPCs, that gives 1225 possible pairings. But OK, you might be saying that a lot of those pairings wouldn't make a whole lot of sense and aren't supported by canon. Let's instead limit ourselves only to pairings where the two people involved have a support with each other. By my count there are 256 different pairings with supports (again, not counting male and female Byleth separately). While a few of these would be difficult to interpret romantically, it still works as a ballpark figure. We have somewhere around 250 potential pairings that people could be latching onto, but mostly aren't. Instead, we have maybe two dozen pairings maximum that have gained any sort of traction within fandom, and that shouldn't surprise anyone. Partly that's just because some are more likely to interest people than others, for whatever reason, but it's also partly because pairings and ideas can gather momentum within fandom, leading to a reinforcing feedback loop. If someone wants to write fan fiction or draw fan art, then they're probably going to want toher people to read or view it. And the best way to do that is to pick a pairing or topic that you know other people are interested in. If people want to talk about their favourite pairing, they're more likely to speak up if they know there are other people interested. It isn't really particularly meaningful to ask why any one particular pairing isn't popular: not being popular is the default state for the vast majority of pairings. You may as well ask why Ignatz/Mercedes isn't popular, or Leonie/Seteth, or any number of possible other pairings. Instead, I suspect it would be more useful to look at the few pairings that are popular and try to figure out what it is that makes them popular (even if there might be no answer deeper than "the random whims of fandom").

Not for me. Monsters in Three Houses are pretty much designed to be overpowered (you're supposed to use multiple of your own units to take one down) and that would only grow worse if they were player-controlled since players will be smarter in how they use any given unit. There are ways to balance around that, but I generally don't care for any of them. Having a limit on transformations so that the unit is very weak half the time and very strong the other half can work in terms of balance, but I don't find that sort of unit fun to play with. Having it limited to a very small number of characters could also work, but that would risk having "must use" characters and reducing the number of viable team compositions. And so on.

Would I use the battalion? Yes. Can I imagine a circumstance where, having taken the battalion, I would want to use the gambit? Yes. Would I ever choose to take the battalion over a different one with comparable stats but a different gambit? No. Definitely not.

Are any of the support conversations for the DLC characters restricted to part 1, or can they all be started after the timeskip?

No, except maybe, though probably no. Spending time in Lord means training up sword skill -- and missing out on extra training for some other weapon -- on a character who probably isn't going to want to use swords longterm. It also means not spending time in another class at intermediate tier, which is definitely the tier with most competition for desirable mastery skills. And after all that, the payoffs just aren't worth it. Res+2 is very meh. Subdue is good at what it does, but what it does isn't all that necessary or useful; I've never had any problems feeding xp to a unit and any unit that was so far behind as to really need to hit 1hp enemies is probably better being levelled up as an adjutant for a while. Charm is nice, but there are a bunch of other adjacency-based skills (Byleth, Flayn, Hilda, etc.) and trying to set up more than one of them at once is usually impractical. It's all perfectly servicable, but not worth the opportunity cost of what I'd be losing out on. I could see myself taking it if I ever wanted to run one of the house leaders with a build that relies on authority (batallion wrath/batallion vantage Dimitri) or swords (assassin Claude sounds like it could be fun, maybe?) but I've never run such a build so I've never waned to use lord.

I chose "no", for three reasons: 1. The existing stats and skills ground the character within the world and the story. Take away things like the strength in swords and the budding talent in faith and there's too much risk that they just end up feeling less like a character and more like a block of stats. 2. Having Byleth being able to fill any niche makes every other character in the game less interesting. In a first playthrough, it's exciting to figure out that a character that you have fills your favourite archetype. In subsequent runs, it's interesting to figure out your recruitment strategy to make your perfect team and fill in any gaps that you might have. Both of these become much less interesting if you can just have Byleth be great at anything you choose. 3. Increasing customisation makes balance more difficult. If you increase the number of choices then you're more or less inevitably going to end up with some choices being stronger than others. If you have the strongest choices be roughly equivalent in strength to current-Byleth, then you run the risk of casual and first-time players making bad choices and hamstringing themselves for the rest of the game. If you make the weakest choices be equivalent to current-Byleth, then you risk having the strong choices being overpowered to the point that they make the game boring. And while all of these problems can be mitigated to some extent, doing so would have taken a whole lot of time and effort. If they'd had the extra time to do something like this and actually do it well, then there are other areas of the game that I'd have prefered them to focus on instead.