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Definitely not. I can't think of any way you could softlock yourself in RD. It might be possible, but I can't think of any way. One of the things that it's actually very good at is giving you a steady stream of new battle-ready units. Look at the bases, or look at the level, or just see how they perform in battle. If they're lower level than the rest of your army and are only doing 3 damage on every hit against even the weakest enemies, then they're bad.

If you like going into games knowing nothing about them, then it's absolutely 100% viable to do so in Radiant Dawn. There certainly are a few things that you can optimise if you know about them in advance, but they're mostly fairly minor. You aren't going to make the game ridiculously hard for yourself or miss a big ending just by not knowing stuff. But at the same time, if you prefer to know about stuff in advance, I also don't think you're going to ruin the game for yourself either in terms of story or in terms of challenge. So, ultimately, it's up to you. Play the way you prefer to play. If you do want to look stuff up, here are a few basic details that are probably relevant.

If IS/Nintendo have FE projects in Unity that are completed or close to completion (eg, the rumpured GotHW remake) then they'll just go ahead and finish and release them anyway. The Unity license changes might make the game less profitable, but it won't be as much of a loss as just shelving the game. Beyond that, it depends. Hard to say at this point exactly how much of what Unity is trying to do will stick. Retroactively changing licensing agreements seems all kinds of shady to me, and I would not be at all surprised to see legal challenges against that. There's also the possibility that enough developers make noises about switching to other engines that Unity get spooked and walk back the whole thing. And the possibility that Nintendo are big enough to have their own unique bespoke license with Unity and not have to worry about any of this anyway. Basically, there are way too many unknowns to be able to make predictions for the future. Ultimately, though, it doesn't really matter that much. At least, not from the perspective of those of us who are buying and playing the games. Choice of engine typically doesn't have all that much impact on the overall quality of the final games, except in cases where there's a vast amount of institutional knowledge to the workings of one engine, or the engine is particularly well- or ill-suited to the type of game beign made. And I don't see that either of those are the case here. I think the worst realistic case scenario for us is that the development cycle for whatever future game gets extended a while as they refactor code and learn the foibles of a new engine

Every unit has multiple possible pathways that they can potentially ask for training in. If you want to go with the most canon options (if there's an actual term for this, I don't know it) then the best bet is probably to go with the classes that the characters show up as if you face them as enemies when playing other routes. For Ashe, he is indeed a Sniper in this case. I don't know of anywhere that has a full list of these, but: Ashe: Sniper Ingrid: Falcon Knight Sylvain: Paladin Felix: Swordmaster Dedue: Fortress Knight Annette: Warlock Mercedes: Bishop Note that these aren't all optimal choices or what I'd recommend. They're just the classes the characters use when you face them as enemies. For instructing, I don't know of any reason not to use up all the unit's motivation. It's possible that there's some hidden mechanic that I'm not aware of, but I doubt it. They learn better if they're at high motivation when you start instructing them (higher chance of great and perfect instruction, lower chance of bad instruction) but this is set for the whole session based on their starting motivation. I guess that if you have trouble restoring motivation between instruction then maybe there's an argument for not using all the character's motivation, but I've never had a problem with that. (No clue about soft reset since that's not something I use, so someone else can answer that for you.)

Yeah, pretty easy 10/10 here, let's not bury the lede. Dancers are pretty much always great, and Seadall is one of the better dancers in the series. Being able to move after dancing with Canter makes it easier to keep him safe. Special dance is pretty standard now but is an advantage over pre-Awakening dancers. You can combine him with a Goddess Dance from Byleth to give your player phase juggernaut 4 actions on a turn. He has the ability to Chain Guard as well as Dance, which only coms up once in a blue moon, but is still pure upside. He's basically the only unit in the game who operates just as well without an Emblem Ring, so he doesn't compete for that important resource. He's just good.

This articulates the thoughts I'd had about this better than I'd been able to do for myself. My first thought was that maybe Jill and Ivy might have some interesting commonality, but then I thought about it some more and wasn't sure what they'd actually be able to say within the very limited confines of a bond conversation. Similarly for Lorenz (Fódlan version, not Archanea version) with Céline. In theory, it could be an interesting conversation about the concept of noblesse oblige; in practice, it would probably look more like "I like tea!" "I also like tea!" So in the spirit of going for a goofy and comedic pairing, I'm going to suggest Amber with Emblem Skrimir.

I tend to enjoy maps the most when they have a unit limit of around 8-10. Up to about 12 is fine too. More than 12 and I start to feel that it's a slog to move everyone, and that not everyone is really serving a unique purpose. Fewer than 8 feels too limiting in terms of what I can do tactically. But with that said, there are some memorable maps across the series with only four (or fewer) units, mostly at the starts of games. Journey Begins, Winds of Rebellion, An Inevitable Encounter. I'd be interested in playing a game that leaned into that sort of map design, but had them suitably scaled up for the increased abilities of higher level units. It would play very differently from a standard Fire Emblem, but I could see it being pretty fun. Class design would have to be changed pretty radically, though. Consider that there are 6 basic FE weapon types (sword, axe, lance, bow, tome, staff), and that's before you even start to consider potential beast units, daggers, brawling, and dark magic. And then also different movement types on top of that. With fewer unit slots, class design would probably have to prioritise versatility over the ability to do a single job but do it well. Which could be fun in and of itself. Hybrid attacks might finally have a chance to shine. I don't really want to go too deep into this, since we're starting to drift further and further off topic, but I'll just say that I completely reject the idea that a gay male character is a better example of a queer character than a bisexual female character.

I'd definitely be up for that. Class skills as the basis of the skill system feels played out at this point. Anyone who has played through Awakening, Fates, and Three Houses has a good feeling for how the system works and how to min-max it, and a lot of it just feels like hoop-jumping at this point. It also puts a massive distance between an unspoilt first-time player and a repeat playthrough with guides open in front of you. Knowing which class you need to go to for all the best skills creates a big power-level imbalance which can do weird things to the game's difficulty. With Tellius-style skills, that's far less of an issue. Honestly, I think it would still be perfectly fine to have staves like Aum or Nodus. If you only get them very late in the game when there's only two or three maps left then having a very powerful staff that you can use once per map for those final maps seems fine to me. Esepcially since the maps could be balanced around them. Dorothea is canonically, openly, and unambiguously bisexual. Edelgard is too, I think, although far less obviously. And while I haven't played enough Engage to have seen all of his supports, I think that it's fair to say that Rosado is at the very least gender non-conforming, which I would include in the queer spectrum (I am very much a lumper rather than a splitter). So it's not as if there haven't been any queer characters; it's just that I want more. (I will also point out, for the record, that I didn't play Three Hopes, so I have no opinion of Monica's portrayal there.) Smaller cast is a weird one. On the one hand, I like the idea that fewer characters means that the ones that are there could be more fleshed out. On the other hand, one of the thigns I like about Fire emblem is that if I don't like a character, I can easily just not use them. Having a big cast means that there can -- at least in principle -- be a very varied cast. We often end up with pretty milquetoast main protgaonists;. If someone is forced to be on everyone's team then it's arguably more important that nobody hates them than that anyone loves them. But for secondary characters, it's often the opposite. There's a clear advantage to having characters that will be loved by some players even if that means that other players hate them. And I would hate to lose the design space that a large cast offers. Ultimately, if they announced a new FE with a small cast, I'd at least be willing to give it a try and see if the benefits outweighed the detriments. Agree with this. FE has grown better in its last few entries about making archers feel distinct from other martial characters, but magic hasn't really evolved much and feels pretty boring a lot of the time. Three Houses and Engage both have a bunch of cool magic style effects, but they're limited to battalions and emblems. I'd like to see some of those effects brought into the framework of tomes and staves (or their equivalent). Let me have a Stride staff, and Impregnable Wall staff, a Warp Ragnarok tome, a Torrential Roar tome, and so on. I'd disagree with that. A lot of the interactions with Alear were what gave me my initial poor impression of Engage's writing. I'm thinking of stuff like Clanne and Framme's fan club, Chloé watching them sleep, and Merrin treating them like a zoological specimen. These interactions didn't work for me at all, and I'd definitely describe them as at least pushing towards the deranged side of things. It's a different type of deranged to someone like Tharja -- and let us give thanks for small mercies there -- but they're not exactly well-adjusted.

One possibility that could be interesting would be to have different classes that get their magic from different sources. For anyone familiar with D&D, think of the difference between wizards and sorcerers. So there could be a class where you just use the character's innate magic and get their preset spell list, which might give you earlier access to certain spells than you'd otherwise have but wouldn't allow you the flexibility to assemble your own list. Then there'd be another option where you would need tomes or staves for all your magic which would be harder to gather together but would have a higher ceiling. I don't know how well a system like this would work in FE in practice, but I'd be interested to see it tried.

Tellius is a world without any sort of mass media. No Internet, no TV, no newspapers. From memory, I don't even think they have the printing press. Portrait painting probably exists, but I can't imagine that Ike is the sort to want to sit around for hours and get painted. So how many people would actually know what Ike looked like? Basically only people who have actually met him in person, which is not that many. Other random soldiers probably saw him a little, but probably not enough to really remember his appearance in detail. So I think it's entirely plausible for him to be able to just disappear into obscurity if that's what he wants to do. As for whether it was actually a satisfying ending for him... eh. I don't think it was terrible? I'm also not really a big fan of the little text epilogues that FE has for all its characters, so I mostly just ignore them and headcanon my own instead. I don't think Ike's is notably worse than others, though. He probably wouldn't want to stick around and play politics afterwards. The problem, if anything, is just the shift in perspective. The epilogues are from the perspective of history. It's what gets recorded in scholarly books years after the fact. Whereas for the game up to that point, we've had a more intimate perspective, from the PoV of Micaiah, Elincia and Ike. So I can see how that shift could be jarring, but it isn't something I personally cared about. If anything, I like that it's open-ended so I can head anon whatever I want without being contradicted.

A reclassing system where it's easy to reclass to a similar class (eg Swordmaster to Hero, Sniper to Bow Knight, Bishop to Sage) and hard to reclass to a completely different class (eg Wyvern Lord to Sage). I'm imagining a system where it's theoretically possible to reclass anyone to anything, but that most possibilities would require so much daisy-chaining through different classes as to be impractical to pull off for more than one or two units in a run. More of a strategic and/or operational level. Fire Emblem has toyed with things like resource management in the past, but never really committed to it. I'd like to see a Fire Emblem that goes deeper into this side of things to complement the core tactical gameplay. It wouldn't need to be super deep or anything, but maybe something of a comparable level to what XCOM has. Magic that is a hybrid between the Three Houses system and the more normal Fire Emblem system. Basically, magic comes from tomes and staves, each tome/stave has a given number of uses, but those uses are per battle and will regenerate to full after every battle. So if I get a Rescue staff or a Bolting tome, I can give it to whoever I want, and then they get (eg) 2 uses per battle as opposed to 5 uses ever. (A similar system could also be used for physical weapons as a way to balance powerful regalia, and to apply some limits on weapon usage without having to have the tedium of weapon repair.) Height. I thought that ledges were great in Radiant Dawn, and would be interested to see them return and be expanded on. More and better-realised queer characters. That's not a surprise to anyone that I'd want that, right? A smaller scale story. Would be nice to have something that wasn't a continent-spanning war for once. Maybe a civil war in a single country could work well. Something like Radiant Dawn part 2 but expanded into a full game. Agree with this entirely. This doesn't need to be a narrative element, and unless they're really going to commit to making time travel a core part of the story, having it there but not really explored just causes way more problems than it solves.

Any character who canonically has the ability to rewind time in their home game. I'll say Max Caulfield from Life Is Strange as the peak "how could they ever implement this?" but it could equally well be Braid, Prince of Persia, or even Alear. But, basically, put time rewind into Smash. If I take a big hit, let me rewind to before it happened and play it out differently. I have no idea how that could be made to work in a way that would be both fun to use and fun to play against. Slightly less wacky but still pretty out there, I want to be able to play the Prince from Katamari Damacy, push a katamari around everywhere, and be able to roll up both my opponents and the stages I'm on.

No rating for me here, since I've not used her enough to feel I have a solid handle on how good she is, but I will ramble a bit about what experience I have had with her anyway. I haven't been particularly impressde with her. She wasn't bad, but she didn't stand out either. She seems great on paper. Staves are strong in Engage and she has a personal skill and a unique class that are dedicated to making staves even better. But my experience was that she didn't really do that much. First, flight isn't as big a boon for a support unit as it is for an attacking one. It's still better to be able to fly than not, but it's not as big a difference. And of course, unlike Ivy's unique access to the tomes/flight combo, staves/flight is also available to Griffin Knights as well as any flying unit with Micaiah. Then there's her personal skill and her class skill. +1 range on staves is kinda nice, I guess, but was something that didn't seem to come up all that often. It's the ultimate break point, I guess. If the unit you want to target is exactly one square further away then you can (safely) reach, then +1 range is an absolutely huge difference-maker. If they're any closer or any further than that, though, then +1 range is completely meaningless. Preserving staff charges also sounds nice in theory, but in practice, most staves fall into one of two categories: I have enough charges that I don't really care about preserving them, or so few charges that you can't rely on having the skill proc at all. So, a nice bonus, for sure, but not something that would have much impact on the way I play. I can easily imagine Hortensia being great for someone who uses staves more than I do, especially someone who likes to warp skip a lot, but I am not that player, so I found her fairly underwhelming.

I'd disagree with that. I think there are just too many different variables involved and that once you really start looking at things with a magnifying glass then the idea breaks down. For instance, you say side objectives of note, but who's to decide what counts as being "of note". Recruitments probably count, as do any specific goals the game sets like "don't let the enemy escape with any crest stones". But what about visits? Or chests? Or killing enemies that drop items? Does it matter whether the item they drop is a brave axe or a vulnerary? What about just killing enemies for xp? Would a 16 turn full clear not be better than a 15 turn strat that only killed the boss and then seized? Or what if someone decides to ignore a side objective? Is it more efficient to complete a map like Prisoner Rescue or The Feral Frontier in 60 turns with all side objectives, or in 10 turns just by killing everything? And I'd also say that not all turns are created equal. If I kill all enemies in 8 turns and then spend 8 turns just moving Marth, hitting end turn, and listening to Victory Is Near, is that more or less efficient than if I finish clearing the map on turn 15 and then immediately seize? I think that, ultimately, my big problem with the idea that a lower turn count means more efficient play is that across all the Fire Emblem games I have played over all the years that I have played them, I don't think I've ever once tried to optimise for turn count. I'm usually optimising for some sort of combination of fun, reliability, and time, with anything on top of that typically being part of a challenge run. Which isn't to say that I think there's anything wrong with caring about turns taken, be it for LTC, ranked runs, or whatever else. People should play the way they want to play. It's just not my thing. And it seems weird to me to prioritise this one metric over all other metrics.

When I see someone mention "efficiency", I mostly interpret it along the lines of "if you play the same way that I play". It feels like it's supposed to represent a goldilocks zone with not too much grinding but also not too much optimisation, but that place in the middle that's juuuust riiiight. You know, just playing the game normally. Like how I do. Except that everyone plays at least a little bit differently, so what's normal for one person is borderline perverse for another, so everyone's idea of efficient play similarly ends up being different. Personally, I think that we would collectively be better off if we were more willing to embrace subjectivity. Trying to determine objective truth about the quality of a Fire Emblem unit seems a little bit silly and extremely futile. If we're doing something like rate the unit and Timerra ends up with ratings everywhere from a 3 to a 7 then that's a feature not a bug. That says "the quality/value of this unit varies depending on how you play the game". That's more useful for me to know than any attempt to get a single pseudo-objective rating score that applies only to an ill-defined play style that I probably don't share.

Thinking about Three Houses specifically, what it really needed was Kezhda. I mean, not actual literal Kezhda, obviously, but comparable substitute bosses. The selection of bosses in Part 2 is fine if you don't bother to recruit anyone, but awful if you do. If the replacements at least had names and a single line of dialogue then that would have really helped, I think. For bonus points, it would have been fun if they gave specific interactions between the recruited unit and their replacement. So, let's say I recruit Petra then her replacement assassin might also be from Brigid and if I have them fight each other then they'd have a bit of dialogue about how they are both doing what they thought best for their country. And so on. Agreed. I'm quite happy to agree to disagree; I just wanted to state my case and then be done.

Depends on what you like. If you just want a good and challenging turn-based tactics game and don't care if the story and the RPG elements of the game are terrible, then you should play Engage. If you want a good story and don't care that the game is a little on the easy side, then you should play Path of Radiance.

Out of curiosity, I decided to try taking a sample of bosses from across the series. My totally-not-scientific methodology was to pick chapter 11 (which was a completely arbittrary choice, with the only reasoning behind it being "not too close to the beginning or the end") and looked up the boss in chapter 11 of each game. Except for Genealogy and Gaiden/SoV since they don't have a chapter 11. For games with multiple routes, I chose only one of them: 11A for BiBl, Eliwood route for BlaBl, Eirika route for SS, and Birthright for Fates. And for Radiant Dawn, I chose Part 3 Chapter 11. I've never played any of the Japan-only games, so won't comment on them, but according to the wiki (New) Mystery gets Wyvern, Thracia 776 has Kempf, and Binding Blade has Orlo. For the rest: Two don't have any named bosses at all, only generics. These are Sacred Stones and Birthright. The wiki claims the bosses are "Monster" and "Wyvern Lord", but given that both of them are rout maps, I think it's probably better to claim that they don't have a boss. Two have a major boss only: Gangrel in Awakening and Veyle in Engage. Two have both a major boss and a minor boss. Path of Radiance has Black Knight and Three Houses has the Flame Emperor. Three have a minor boss only, those being Shadow Dragon, Radiant Dawn, and Blazing Blade. Those five minor bosses are: Goran, Groznyi, Khozen, Mackoya, and Metodey. And honestly, how many of those do you even remember? Can you match them to their games without looking them up? Maybe I'm just bad at remembering bosses, but I'd have known one of them by name without looking it up, and there's a second one who I vaguely remember after looking up, and then the other three I have no recollection of at all. So my not-at-all-scientific conclusion based on this would be that FE minor bosses have never been particularly interesting to begin with. Yeah, there have been some great and memorable ones, but I think they're the exception rather than the rule. Given that the only thing that was unique about the bandit twins was the worst kind of queer-coded villains, then I'm super glad that was removed. As a result, Tetchie and Totchie are probably my favourite bandit twins in the series.

Knife sages are notorious for being terrible and basically just a trap option on promotion. And to some extent, that might be deliberate, to give a reward for leveling up Soren, Ilyana or Tormod rather than just using Calill or Bastian, but for the purpose of this discussion, let's assume that picking knives is supposed to be a viable choice that people might actually want to make. Let's imagine that IS were making a remake of PoR and wanted knife sages to finally have their day in teh sun. In that case, what would it take to make knives an actually competitive choice with staves? 1-2 range knives? Poison effects on knives like in Fates or Engage? A knife that does magic damage like the Flame Shuriken or Misericorde? A mage with decent strength stat? Getting rid of the 17 chapter recruitment drought for staff users? All of the above? Even more than that?

Is that unpopular? Disliking all cutscenes probably is, but I always got the impression that "win in the game, lose in the cutscene" has pretty widespread disdain. Kai Leng in Mass Effect 3 is the one that always comes to mind for me as a particularly bad example.

I'm not sure there's much to say about Merrin. She's good. Very good, even. She has good stats. She has a good starting class. Her personal is... well, calling it "good" would be pushing it, but it's one of the better ones in Engage. She even supports with a strong set of other units. She doesn't have any Corrupted Hate This One Weird Trick style ways to break the game wide open. She's just generally strong. 8/10.

There were something like 4000 years between the Twelve Crusaders and Awakening. If we assume that a generation averages out to about 25 years, that means that there's a gap of around about 160 generation from one to the other. Given that we have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, and so on, someone in Awakening timeframe should have 2^160 ancestors from the time of the Twelve Crusaders. Which is around 1.4x10^48, or over a trillion trillion trillion trillion. Obviously, there were not that many people on the planet at any point, and the real solution is that family trees get very tangled and messy if you go back far enough, with the same people appearing in many many of those different positions. And, to cut a long story short, if any of the Awakening cast are descended from Baldr, then it is overwhelmingly likely that the entirety of the Awakening cast are. Because population statistics are weird and unintuitive like that. So even if you have Kana daughter of Selena daughter of Donnel then it still works out.

Sweet. Always love to see the individual game Directs. If it's a game I'm interested in (this one is) then I like getting a deep dive into what to expect. And if it's a game that I'm not interested in, then it's nice to have it segregated off somewhere I know not to watch.

Rating primarily based on hard difficulty since I used her in my hard run but not my maddening run. I actually found Timerra to be a very solid unit when kept in her unique Picket class. One of things with Timerra is that a lot of her stats come from the class so she's really going to suffer if you change her into another class. Picket comes with a base def of 10 (better than anything that isn't armor, general, or great knight), but unlike traditional hight def classes also has excellent base speed of 9 (bettered only by the speedy classes swordmaster, wolf knight, thief and griffin knight). Add in a very competitive 9 for base strength and you have probably the class with the best raw stats in the game. This is not as good for her as it seems, though, since those stats are baked into her stats -- which are not remarkable for her join time -- which effectively leaves you choosing between staying in Picket or ending up with pretty bad stats. So if we're asking whether Timerra is any good, we're effectively asking if Picket is any good. Which is effectively asking if Sandstorm is any good, since that's really the only unique thing the class is offering other than its stats. And I'd say that it can be. When it triggers, it hits like a truck. For Timerra in Picket, 150% of her def is equivalent to a strength of 24+75%. Which is great. And is made even better by the ready availability of and low competition for ways to boost defense. The problem, of course, is that it isn't triggering all the time, nor anywhere close to it. When I ran her, I ended up combining Sandstorm with a crit build, and got her to be pretty reliable at being able to trigger one or the other. I forget the actual numbers that I had, but if it was 50% chance to crit and 30% chance to proc Sandstorm, and if she's doubling then that's only about 1/8 chance that she makes both hits without getting a crit or a sandstorm proc on either one of them. Which is pretty good already, and it's obviously possible to get better numbers than this if you invest in her. And on hard, she was hitting hard enough that she only needed either a single crit or a single Sandstorm to get the kill. Using a brave lance is another way to increase reliability if you only need to hit 1 proc out of 4. I'm waffling between a rating of 6 and 7 for hard, and I'll round down since my intuition is that she's almost certainly worse on maddening. She's just as likely to get procs on maddening, of course, but more likely to run into enemies where getting one proc just isn't enough. So that's an overall rating from me of 6/10.

Oh, nice. I didn't know that was a thing. I played and liked Risk of Rain, even though I was completely terrible at it. Then there was Risk of Rain 2, which might be a great game but I'd never know because it's not something I can even watch for more than about two minutes at a time without horrific nausea. This isn't Hopoo's fault, mind. It's hardly something that's unique to their game. I get pretty awful motion sickness and sim sickness, so a lot of 3D games are off-limits for me, even ones that have absolutely no right to make me sick. Like, I've had to give up on games like What Remains of Edith Finch and Dear Esther, and am probably the only human being ever born who has complained that Dear Esther needed to slow down. But even though it isn't the game's fault, I still always got a little melancholy thinking about the series. So it's exciting for me that they're going back into 2D and I'll actually be able to play again. Maybe I'll be marginally less terrible at the remake.