[Light Magic Disapperance?]

now, this is a subject i really like. fortunately i have a thing i wrote elsewhere a few months ago so i can just paste that in instead

i've been wanting to ramble about this for a while so i figured i might as well get it over with now

when it comes to fire emblem, there are two universal truths

• one, the different schools of magic are, from a narrative perspective, a nice touch in terms of worldbuilding, and i really appreciate how it explores, both implictly and explictly, how different magics come from different sources (have i mentioned how much i love canas and pent talking about that in fe7, and knoll and natasha doing the same in fe8? even yoder and niime did a bit of it in fe6 and that was neat too)
• two, in terms of gameplay, magic splits have always been fucking stupid

having to juggle multiple weapon ranks divided up on an arguably fairly arbitrary basis, between weapons which most of the time have no practical difference from each other, is something that's left a sour taste in many a fe fan. at first i never really understood these complaints, but i've grown to reconsider the matter and realise that yeah, it's a clumsy hindrance. unsurprisingly, fe9 is what made me realise there was a bit of a problem; as far as i'm concerned, two fe games in particular stand out as handling magic "types" particularly badly:

• fe9 is a fucking mess. so the full set of magic types is just the three anima schools and light... but basic mages have equal access to all three, no other class outside the mage/sage family can use them, and no real attempt is actually made to contrast them. it just seems unbelievably dumb
• fe13 has the opposite problem. on some level i can kinda appreciate how it included all these magic types... but being lumped in a single weapon type renders a huge chunk of them completely pointless. seriously, is there any point using anything other than fire magic* for everybody who can't nosferatu?

*note: i don't know if fire magic is actually the HOT MAGIC EVERYONE CARES ABOUT as far as fe13 is concerned. i don't keep up with that argument and it's been a long-ass time since i actually touched that damn game

the other side of this argument is, of course, generic weapon types. i mean on paper it makes the most sense, but idk... i've always felt a bit uncomfortable about it. in the case of both archanea's single tome rank and even how the gba era treats anima, it's always felt really haphazard and cluttered, with no real rhyme or reason to it. probably because i'm used to the idea of magic splits and distinctions raised between the schools

so we've got a maximum of five weapon types that mostly do the same thing. what do we do if we're going to keep them? (i mean clearly we aren't if the post-fe10 world is anything to go by, but bear with me) i was chatting wtih this with a friend a few months ago and i'd like to think we actually had some decent ideas on how to make them decidedly not the same thing. we figured that since magic is, well, magic, it sort of justifies having a variety of modes of attack that aren't otherwise present. we kicked the idea around a bit and this is what we ended up with

• thunder magic kinda becomes an entire class of siege tomes, inspired by fe2's thunder spell and its improved range. these would have decent power (nothing too fancy) and would have pretty impressive range (some only working in 3-4 range, others going the full siege tome), but conversely the accuracy would be... well, about where it is now. as a further counterbalance, they remain heavy as shit (note that this discussion assumes that weapon weight returns, because it really fucking should). these would be useful to have and pretty terrifying in enemy hands, but not the sort of thing you want to consistently rely on as the be-all and end-all of magical combat
• fire magic takes a leaf from the onager and ashera's judge attacks and starts specialising in spread damage. each cast would have you select a primary target as usual, but would also inflict slightly reduced damage on nearby tiles in a pre-set pattern depending on the individual tome; for instance, a basic elfire would cast in a v shape, bolganone would erupt in a + shape, and screw it, arcfire takes a hint from fe13 and is a goddamn flamethrower that pierces straight ahead. i mean, spreading out is kind of what fire does. it makes sense for fire magic to do that as well
• dark magic, imo, has always been on the right track by offering special effects you sure as hell won't see in other magic types. perhaps it might be worth emphasising those special effects more as the big draw, mostly ditching the huge power they're currently known for. nosferatu is the obvious flagship in this regard, but there's got to be some sort of compelling competition from other dark tomes so you're not just relying on it
• when it comes to wind and light magic, we came to the conclusion that one should stay pretty much the same as the bog-standard offensive magic we currently know, and the other should become weaker but have flawless accuracy and be always guaranteed to hit. then fe14 launched, and i have to say, i like how it made the basic lightning a brave weapon. perhaps wind takes the accuracy thing while light magic becomes an entire class of weak brave weapons? idk

this is probably complete horseshit because my grasp of fe gameplay has never been the best, but there it is

[Please tell me this isn't true... (Saizo/Beruka C Support)]

everyone in this thread is missing the real problem here: only four iterations of "..."? come on, treehouse! if you're going to joke around like this, you've got to commit to it properly! give us at least as many lines of silence as there are lines of dialogue in the original support. make the silence feel long and meaty!

[Cipher Series 4 Discussion - Apr 14: Guidebook Cover + Itsuki Promo]

Next, they can print a griffon rider Minerva!

you say that as a joke but i would be so very okay with that. after all, ridiculous reclass cards are probably the best part of the tcg! christ, i love reclass cards

Booster Series - Kirameki Gensou (poorly translated as - "Sparkle Illusion"?)

might as well clarify this one. basically, it's a pun. it's pronounced the exact same way as 幻想 gensou, meaning "illusion" or "fantasy", but it replaces the second kanji with 奏, which refers to the performance of music. the best way to translate the pun is something like "shining illusong" or "shining fantasong", which both sound like shit but you get the idea

[Is it just me or..]

sure, if you ignore everything else about them

[[Spoilers/Theory] Robin's true father?]

For this theory, I'll use default Robin's(the one in Smash 4) as reference, since that's the "deafultest" look possible.

there's your problem. the entire point of avatars is design customisation and the game pays exactly zero heed to their default appearance beyond the creation screen. there's a reason 13 and 14 go to such lengths to keep their avatars' heads hidden in any scene that can't be easily generated with portraits or battle models, after all. when you're designing a character who's the father of a customisable avatar, you know going in that no matter how much you push a default build that might match the father's hair colour, there's going to be a fuckton of people who choose every other hair colour so your attempts to carefully match are boned no matter what you do, so the odds are very good that they did not give the slightest shit about validar's hair needing to match avatar colours for this reason. after all, kids have different hair colours from their parents all the time

the decision was almost certainly more practically minded rather than being intended to cast doubt on the parentage thing, and it's certainly not a basis to question information that the game explicitly feeds you about the avatar and validar. fe13 is many things, but being tricky and deceptive with these revelations really isn't one of them

[Do you prefer Wyvern Riders starting off with lances or axes?]

axes, both for diversity from pegasi and for better suiting their stat build. i know fe is no stranger to weapon redundancy (hello, myrms and mercs) but i figure in this case that it was nothing but a benefit to make the change, and it better justifies wyverns being their own thing rather than an archanea-style peg promotion

[What's the best SMT game.]

I also love Kaneko as a designer. Sure he does come up with mouth head (Gale), mouth breasts (Argilla) and mouth crotch demons (Bat), but

how is this a negative that requires a but? this sort of thing is half the fun of kaneko's work :P

[JP version narration?]

wikia is just plain wrong, as usual. i can't entirely blame them for falling for it; it's one of those things that sounds like it could be true, and when you don't have a jp copy of the game on hand yourself, you can't exactly disprove this sort of thing. come to think of it, i recall hearing this myself from a non-wikia source back in the day, so perhaps it was a relatively common rumour at some point, like all those dumb rumours about how eirika and ephraim totally boned once they hit a-support in japanese!fe8

for what it's worth, i have the unaltered iso's extracted contents right here and, surprise surprise, it has zero audio files for voice-acting (not counting the movie clips for obvious reasons)

[aaa...why do i have haar on my party?!]

the idea of an exp code doing something like this is pretty baffling, but what the hell, we've no better theories

i'm a bit curious to see if this might actually straighten itself out once you encounter the real haar in chapter 23. a while back i was playing around with chapter select codes and went back to chapter 24 while already having bastian and lucia in my part. i inadvertently deployed them and found that when the cutscene that recruited them was triggered, the instances i already had were taken from their current location and used in that cutscene, preventing multiples. it's possible that the same thing might happen with your haar. on the other hand it's likely that the cutscene haar is treated as a different character instance than the real haar, kind of like how there are a lot of spare black knights for cutscenes, so they won't "merge". in conclusion, ????????????????????????

[aaa...why do i have haar on my party?!]

any chance that you've been playing around with ar codes which let you control unit affiliations? something like that is my first thought as to what happened here: if you had one active during the last chapter, where haar appears on the map in a cutscene, then he might have been carried over from there. on the other hand, if that were the case, generic enemies from that chapter would probably have been dragged in as well, so i suppose that shoots down that theory

incidentally, his army affiliation (未設定) just says "not configured". this is what a lot of unit instances who show up only in cutscenes and are never meant to be seen in actual gameplay have as their army affiliation because, well, that data is not set up for them (i first ran into this in the first three parts of chapter 17, with the ulki, janaff and reyson instances seen in those cutscenes). at the very least, this confirms that the cutscene is where this haar came from, but that doesn't really explain how he got here

[Something that I found a bit dissapointing about DLC...]

i have only one question for sakurai: where is pantsless marth

[Vandalism at its Finest]

wait, how could i forget the actual reigning grand champion of fe wikia vandalism? this thing's been there for months an entire year and nobody's looked at it and so much as thought "hm this is a little suspicious"

[Vandalism at its Finest]

0/10 the fe wikia has seen much better vandalism before

[Does Nintendo hate Chrom?]

> monster hunter costume

> smtxfe

> project x zone

> anniversary shirt dedicated to him

> even if he's not playable in ssb4, between the mii costume, final smash and palutena's guidance, he's still got a hell of a lot more presence in it than 99% of fire emblem

how the hell can anyone in their right mind think that nintendo hates chrom or fe13? seriously, just because he's not playable in ssb4 hasn't stopped him from being everywhere else

[Chapter 5 Cutscene + 15 Minutes gameplay footage in English]

...niles?

niles?!

NILES

i can't believe this actually happened and i can't stop laughing this is the best christmas present ever thank you so, SO much noa

[Should Toshiyuki Kusakihara stay as the art director in future installments of the franchise?]

absolutely not. not only is he chiefly responsible for shitty fanservice hell and hideous armour designs, but his own illustrations indicate he has a poor grasp of how to art and anatomy, get kusakihara as far away from fire emblem as possible, please and thank you

[Midgar comes with only two songs.]

this is more legitimately surprising than anything. it's not like smash to skip out on a game's One Really Famous Song. so far they've nailed all the really obvious song picks from just about every game featured that it's just unbelievable that solely on that basis they didn't add one-winged angel

[Corrin amiibo in Fates?]

i'm reminded of an event greninja that was distributed with its ssb4 moveset. they could just whip up something like that on the cheap: a default avatar with the default name who has new skills adapted from their ssb4 specials?

[Corrin/Kamui in Smash]

oh my god this is what i always wanted! a compelling character with an amazing movepool that's faithful to the games!

...what's this? corrin? no, i meant bayonetta! how does any of what i just said remind anyone of corrin?

seriously, wtf is with that movepool. like on one hand at least it's trying to not just be marth or robin again, but where the hell are the moves that constitute actual skills or abilities from fe14?

[Where can I buy an translated version of Mystery of The Emblem (with boxart)?]

the nintendo-ain't-profiting-anymore point is a decent justification for the free distribution of fan translations, but when it comes to repro makers actually making $$$$$$$$ off nintendo's ip, not so much. the argument is that a free distribution of a game that nintendo is not selling in a region is not actively taking funds which should rightfully go to nintendo, and therefore nintendo has no particular reason to care or throw legal hammers at the translation, but when funds are being actively taken by somebody who is not nintendo, there's kind of a problem there

to say nothing of how these repro makers are piggybacking off the months or even years of work by the fan translators who, 99% of the time, have not consented to having their work used like this and will see exactly zero dollars from the sale of the repro. there's a very good reason why a lot of animu fansubs and older game translations insert messages insisting that the work is not for sale like this

it's convenient for you, sure. but it makes fan translators feel like shit. if you need convenience, get a multicart/flashcard/whatever separately, load the game onto the device, and use that instead. all the convenience with none of the shit-feeling translators

[Is ryoma's haircut possible?]

anything is possible hair-ways with enough determination, patience and crustacean body parts

[Dolphin Bug 3-0]

iirc it's a product of there being so many laguz transformation flashes blaring on-screen at once. just skip the cutscene

[The mystery of the Helswath]

problem is, there's really nothing of interest in helswath's design that tells us anything about it, let alone solves a mystery. there's a hell of a lot of fe axes with the same two-bladed shape as helswath, most of them ordinary as hell, so it's pretty hard to take something about its shape as insightful information on specific mythological inspirations

i mean at this point i'm happy to concede that neither name is the most meaningful thing in the world (would love to be proven wrong as i was with tinni) but chasing its shape is kind of futile

[What are the specific differences between Normal and Hard AI in Genealogy?]

i don't think i've ever seen it documented in full. hell, i think i've only ever seen one guy talk about it, and even then that was mostly in the form of sharing specific examples from it in the context of a ranked run. maybe he can shed some light on the subject if he sees this, but for now, these observations he posted months ago will have to do

Anyways though, make sure Fin has a Steel Lance, and intentionally get him hurt in the Arena in a way that allows him to drop in Uber Prayer Mode when attacked by one of Elliot's Lance or Axe Knights. That will help make it so that Elliot's men suicide themselves on Fin's lance rather than killing Lachesis's bodyguards (in fact, if you're playing on Hard A.I., Elliot's men are GUARANTEED to do that!).is'll definitely improve.

I don't know what Normal A.I. does in response to this, but Hard Mode A.I. will cause it's Armor Knights to move in a way that allows Sigurd to pass on through far enough so that Zyne isn't able to reach him. And then Lex aggroes everyone he can safely aggro for the sake of experience.

probably not the most useful information without a broader sample size, but what the hell, it's something

[Our FE:Fates Christmas Wishlist!]

• redesign charlotte's outfit into something that actually makes sense for her character (demure and flirtatious =/= tits out)
• censor the fuck out of camilla
• cut the ability to marry the hoshido/nohr siblings and keep this incest fetish horseshit 14326236326 feet away at all times
• cut waifu-fondling

basically, maximum censorship. the game fucking needs it