Zapp Branniglenn

I like the underdog feel of the group too. The Protect Micaiah chapter is definitely there to communicate to us that the Dawn Brigade are not the big players of Tellius. Even a level 20 Michaiah will just die if you don't hide. I can only assume it was intentional story integration just as the Act 3 maps aren't Seize or Rout, but rather "just kill enough of them and/or Defend this Point" But I guess if you're super dialed in to the gameplay all you can really think about is how unfair the game is being in Act 3. How you must have done something wrong in Act 1 if the Dawn Brigade is that much weaker than Ike's crew who you just got done steam rolling maps with. It's a demoralizing situation that leaves little way for the developers to say "no, this is normal, just stick with it" One approach they could have taken is just reduce enemy density. Design the enemies to be even tougher, but make it so the player can dogpile them a few at a time. I think you can still get the underdog angle across that way. But the immediate issue with that is the less combat exp means the Dawn Brigade falls even further behind. You could pump more bonus exp into the player to compensate, but there's always that type of player that compulsively saves every finite resource handed to them - a blind player wouldn't know this is the hardest part of the game and that this is the time to spend. The next issue is that the victory conditions of these specific chapters is Defeat X amount of enemies, so that number would need to be adjusted accordingly.

I'm trying my best to answer the OP. That part of the post was directed at that (not you, if it needs to be said). I'm sorry if it sounds like I'm dodging the question, I'm just coming at it from a perceived developer point of view. If you were working on the next fire emblem and asked your Twenty Years Your Senior Japanese Supervisor if we could remove permadeath, what do you figure his response would be? Would he even even offer a reason while saying No? No I didn't. Because I'm not just talking to you. It's an open forum. The topic's question is asking "what does this mean to you". A lead developer could pop in to give his two cents, and it still wouldn't be the definitive answer. I only addressed your response to my post. And you were free to respond to me in the first place. But you're acting pretty hostile considering we're not really in disagreement about anything as far as I can tell? What do I have to say other than I'm sorry my post drew such a visceral reaction. Was not the intent.

Okay lemme try again at the core of the question. Permadeath may very well still be in Fire Emblem "Because it was there in every previous game". We'd have to ask the developers for confirmation how they feel about it. But I'll counter the question with: Isn't that reason enough? Franchises carry things over all the time without interrogating every single thing. Especially gosh darned Nintendo games with their bedrock branding. When Mario stomps a Koopa, it makes that "No-Ko" sound. Sure it could make a different noise, but what is the pressing issue that makes us want to change it? That's how I feel whenever someone makes a thread trying to argue why permadeath "isn't necessary" in Fire Emblem. It's the exact same thing as me saying Casual Mode isn't necessary. I'm more receptive to ideas that replace, rather than exclude. What needs to be overhauled? I know some games have done more than the binary "HP reaches 0 = dead forever", but even if Fire Emblem adopted more mechanics, would it really be such a huge departure? Huger than the advent of Casual Mode, or Battle Saves, or Mila's Turnwheel? Fire Emblem is still here in 2023, I'm thinking it's pretty malleable at this point. Sorry, a FE11 Lunatic run is still fresh in my mind, so maybe I did phrase that a touch too sociopathic. A good third bullet point would have been limited exp - because the amount of enemies you face is finite, usually. But yes, I spend lives. I don't go into a battle pre-empting to do so, but there's a resource outside the video game that I also value: Time. I don't like to reset unless it's the first turn and I forgot to do something in battle preps. If I find myself staring down the next enemy phase where somebody is about to die, and I can offer up a less valuable unit to body block, I'm going to consider that as the last resort. Sure it hurts to lose a good unit, but I'm finding the game gets more interesting when I can't rely on old standby units. I've played enough fire emblem to know that the average loss is not especially large on the grand scale of the playthrough.

Fire Emblem is all about resources. Gold, weapon uses, human life. It's how we choose to spend those resources that defines our playthroughs. Each one is unique to another players' and each one is unique to our previous run. Fear of permanent consequences gets the player thinking harder about their decisions than they would otherwise. During the Ending unit scroll we take note of how far our units have come. What their endings might say if they weren't dead. That's only some of the ways Fire Emblem engages you in ways that it could not if permadeath weren't there. Just because permadeath hasn't been incorporated into narrative since Echoes doesn't mean that it couldn't in the future. You can't point to all this untread ground and say "we've tried everything, time to hang it up". I recently played a game that has a special funeral scene for the first unit death. And character specific flashbacks that also play to hammer home that loss. Might be more that I haven't experienced, I didn't finish the game. These are just ideas that I and other have thought about idly over the years, imagine what someone paid to make games could cook up if they had also believed in the potential for permadeath as a concept?

I'm all for more options and modes of play, even when it's an option I will never select. But I think a lot about how three of my close personal friends got their start on casual mode Awakening. None of them picked up any fire emblem game since. Yet the one friend that got his start borrowing my copy of Path of Radiance - and Radiant Dawn after he finished? He gave Three Houses a shot and stuck it out to the end. Wants to try out FE7 on the Switch once he has time. Just wants to re-experience that magic of that first playthrough. And every buddy I let try out Sacred Stones/FE7 back in middle school was obsessed and repeatedly asking to loan it for the years that I still knew them. I think Classic mode just leaves a stronger impression and understanding of Fire Emblem as a strategy game more than "Just another rpg". And since a lot of those friends that lapsed after Awakening still play and love Xcom, permadeath might actually be the difference. So on that note I think Awakening was the right time (Well, FE12, but for anybody reading this, Awakening). The series was at its lowest point of the twenty first century. A shakeup needed to happen. And as far as shots in the dark go, this one was pretty smart and (relatively) harmless. If Awakening only featured Classic mode it would still be the most casual, sandboxy entry in the series. Casual mode is just extremely marketable too. Because it sounds like a problem has been fixed for players that hate the idea of permadeath, whether they've taken a chance on it or not.

FE3 Book 1 will get you missing Wrys. No healing staves until you get the mend staff off of Chapter 3's boss.

I feel like options 3 and 4 have a cause/effect relationship. Nobody out here is saying give me games as they are and also "don't you dare make new ones with all these development resources we just freed up". Even when my favorite games are remade I usually have no plans to buy it. Just Resident Evil and Metroid have my full faith because those are entirely new games that don't try to overwrite the original. When something is ruined, it's heartbreaking to think that this will be someone else's first experience. When someone plays Link's Awakening and says "meh, that was alright", well yeah you paid sixty dollars to play on a system whose controllers don't work. A top down adventure game with no D-Pad support. And you could have downloaded it to your crusty 3DS for four dollars and had a much better time with the original developers' vision

I'd rather not think of a universe in which my favorite and least favorite games get freaky friday'd. Incidentally I do think both games had less than a year development cycles. But the decision to remake FE1 on FE6's engine sounds bizarre considering FE6 is itself kind of a reimagining of FE1. Probably wouldn't have gone over well among Japanese fans. FE8 has my favorite cast of characters. To think of them, support-less and in a graphics engine on par with cell phone games of the same era. An aspect ratio wide enough to see only within 4-6 tiles of your cursor's current position. Learning ten years later about Marisa, Knoll, and Syrene as your replacement units if you kill 80% of the cast - and they're still not good units. L'aRachel's childlike smirk replaced with a far meeker smile in her portrait. The Trainee units would probably be un-reclassable dorks with a level cap of 30 and no promotion.

There's a line early in FE12 that absolutely floored me. In the Prologue when Elice takes Kris aside to tell him "Actually, Marth is baby gamer that can't stand the thought of his comrades dying. That's why he resets over every death and why we invented Casual Mode last week and brought Frey back to life despite his death being supposedly canonical". I'm paraphrasing of course, but would you lay off, Sis? Excuse Marth for losing sleep some nights like any normal person does. Every leader feels guilt over their mistakes, whether they're justified feelings of guilt or not. She could have skipped ahead to the "Please Protect his Ideals" part of the pep talk. Anyway, back to Shadow Dragon, what they really could have used was a conversation between Marth and Jiol (Chapter 14 boss). In the FE11 cannon, the prologue shows us that it was that man and his troops, specifically, hunting Marth. But more importantly we know he's responsible for Marth's Dad's death. Possibly Mom too, we never get any context on how or when she died. And yet Marth makes no comment on Jiol's death. He also doesn't seem particularly conflicted about making a big detour into the Desert when his homeland is right there waiting to be liberated. What a massive vacuum of missed characterization opportunities, all in one chapter.

Hey I'm ready to dunk on fire emblem crossovers as much as the next guy, but let's not leave the sequels, prequels, and remakes off the hook. They've got some stuff to answer for. Karel is a big missed opportunity in FE7. In FE6 they make a big deal about Karel the Sword Saint, and how he's troubled by that name. Rutger says everyone that wields a sword knows his name, but in FE7 he wants to duel every sword user to the death, that doesn't leave a lot of people to sing his praises or call him a Saint. FE7 is a chance to for them to write a story about how a man so influential got that name, and they blew it. I know it's hard writing prequel stories to Mentor-Type characters, because almost anything can seem unsatisfying or Not Enough. Karel is not a major character in FE7 but like, he could have been if they wanted. My suggestion in that thread was to replace Jaffar with him. Have him be a highly skilled member of the Black Fang that leaves due to his conscience and spends the rest of his life atoning, starting with Nino. That's what makes a Saint instead of just any old legend. And it's more believable than a psychopathic murderer deciding one day on his own that killing isn't right. Smol illiterate child could be his turning point like it was for Jaffar. The Karel we did end up getting is less than one-dimensional. And him being an assassin back then hammers home that change in character - he literally class changed between games to a swordmaster. In an era when reclassing was not a thing!

Sakurai once admitted he really wanted Marth to be in the original Smash, but was cut for time. His reasons beyond that never sat right with me though. The four bonus characters were decided based on the potential to reuse model assets and animations (most easily seen with Jigglypuff looking and attacking like Kirby). But Link was right there. Marth could have been derived off of that, just with a new set of (probably boring) special moves. I really don't know why Sakurai omitted the Fire Emblem from his Melee design. Then the FE11 developers, with no admiration of the original game, decided that Melee depiction should be their basis for Marth's animations. The Ret Con lives on to this day. I do think giving him the shield can be an attractive detail. Marth's not a crowd pleasing character, so he needs some shakeup to generate hype. As for what Marth should do with his shield, I suppose the cleanest idea is just him assuming a defensive stance for his existing Down B Counter. I wouldn't be opposed to him stealing Hero's two part F-tilt where the first hit is a shield bash. A paralyzing light blast is a fun idea though. A mid range threat that inflicts a stun if charged up. Could be a good replacement for neutral B. Especially since shieldbreaker's appeal is setting up that potential stun for a tipper kill. And you just know Sakurai's picture of the day is him using the Emblem against Corrin. Or any other character associated with dragons. Kiryu Kazama. Fun detail about FE3. Chapter 1-5? No shield. Then he gets the Fire Emblem, and that's where it shows up on his battle sprite. They pull the same thing in Book 2. FE1 Marth has the shield the whole game for the record.

By my count it's Awakening DLC (and I guess spotpass Marth too. I wouldn't double count in a single game, because with Heroes that's an unfair rabbit hole) Fates Amiibo (yes I agree that Fates is three separate games, but the Marth business here is the same in all three, so doesn't feel fair) Echoes Amiibo Heroes TMS Warriors (was there some business about these not being the real characters or forgetting their time here once they leave? Whatever, ghost or no ghost, Marth's inclusion there is as interesting as a man wearing a bed sheet Engage Smash Bros I give a pass because IS doesn't make that, or commission some other developer to make that (but yeah Smash Ultimate features Spirit Marth in its campaign mode, what an annoying coincidence). My point with this dumb exercise is that nobody cares about more crossovers. All of these came out in the last ten years, the idea was done to death several times over before Engage was announced. Make a new game and have the courage not to have 'Marth From Smash Bros' appear in it.

Fire Emblem tbh. FE6 and Awakening are already reboots in my eyes. and it's been another ten years so the timing feels right. Though to prove those were Reboots, we'd have to interrogate the definition of the word "reboot" that was born on the internet rather than from the mouth of any game developer tasked with making "a new _____ game". I just want a game about dragging and dropping units. Pixel art over 3D graphics. Strategic army building instead of between-chapter-minigame chores. If you want to honor the legacy of Fire Emblem, do so with a really polished strategy rpg rather than a trend chasing life sim game that lets us fight alongside Ghost Marth. We don't need Game #8 of Summoning Fake Marth (seriously, count them up. And I only counted Fates as one game instead of three).

Let's say that they did incorporate the RT time limit and scoring system for those maps. I do wonder if we would be sitting in that alternate reality saying "I wish they did the BS maps like normal trial maps instead". The grass is always greener, but I expect I'd err on the side of "at least they took the opportunity to give us something unique in a side mode you never have to play" FE12 didn't release on the Satellaview or on the arcades. There was no real time element to the platform they had to design for. When FE12 makes cuts to it's mechanics, there's usually a logic to it. Take for example Chapter 1, they expanded the size of the valley and removed the mountain tiles. In FE3, that's an organic Dismount tutorial. Meant to show the player that your cavs can't cross mountains, but Marth has no problem. So the player that probably never selected the Dismount command will say to themselves "oh, that's why that's there". And now they know without Sothis having to pause the action to break out a five minute primer on how Monsters work. Why did FE12 remove dismounting in the first place? Nobody could say. It'd be like removing Canto from an FE4 remake. Senseless debauchery of game design.

Oh and let's not forget the biggest offender Normal types are immune to Ghost: I can't speculate on what it's like to be hit with a shadow ball, but I do know that regular people are susceptible to a good spook. A battle with fear is a battle that comes within. There is no natural defense against it other than telling yourself that ghosts aren't real. But in the pokemon universe, ghosts and ghoulies are real. This is a good one, though I do think it's possible that they were thinking of body decomposition with this relationship. A spirit that has left the body may not care what happens to their corpse. But then again, all the myths surrounding hauntings suggest that spirits can be very petty about what the living does to them and their former possessions. But But But, when have you ever heard of ghosts haunting animals that don't know any better - specifically the lowly maggot? But But But But every pokemon is presumably possession of conscious thought and awareness to the point of accepting commands from humans. I realize now that what I should have written in bold is Electric is neutral to Water, since that's what I'm taking issue with in my writeup. Still you ought to have read beyond the bolded part. I think you have this backwards. I'm guessing their justification was simply plants feed off the very ground they sit in. But a Ground type is not a clump of dirt. It's a creature that also thrives off the very earth they live in. And farming crops is just as much about warding off these varmints than its is warding off bugs who will eat the top parts of the plant. It's not so much volume of ice, but quickness of the temperature change. An ice type using moves like Ice Beam is flash freezing their opponent solid. This doesn't exist in nature, just like flame throwers don't exist in nature. Temperature change is gradual, and that's what makes the top layer of a body of water freeze over and not the rest of it. The ice sheet is a barrier to the rest of the cold. Steel should not have resisted half of the moves it resists, but it's as you claim. They were thinking of game balance. And they've only patched out two resistances: Dark and Ghost. Psychic is definitely in that same ball park of warranting justification. Could be that pyschic powers are often depicted in their most basic form as telekenesis. Throwing objects at a dense steel type wouldn't be effective and neither would throwing them against a surface that's less dense than themselves. But if you asked me what it's like to be hit by "a psychic blast" I wouldn't know what to tell you. Sounds like something that would give you a headache, and no external armor would defend against that unless steel types don't have an organic brain. It's hard to pin down what they may have been going for with Ice other than it being a counterpoint to a steel type's weakness to fire. But I can see arguments for Steel being weak to water and especially electricity before fire in the first place. Metals are not flammable, but every metal rusts and conducts electricity. It can bend when it's hot, but that requires hours of exposure to flame. And open flames (like a flamethrower) would have an even harder time getting the job done. I tend to contextualize steel types as being organisms that are part machine. Not in a strict computer sense, but in a "not relying so much on what organics need to survive" sense. Like how rock types are living rock golem creatures, steel types are that but more "functional". Prosthetic limbs, fashioned tools, inner magnetic field that can serve the functions of a skeleton and muscles. There's less of their body that's vulnerable to conventional threats. If it is pollution, then plants are no more susceptible than another other creature that lives in that ecosystem. Plants actually prefer environments with greater air pollution (they eat carbon dioxide), while other organic life does not. Anyway here's a list of poison type moves. And I can't find a single one that's depicted as an herbicidal spray. Most of them unambiguously involve some sort of venom, which is obviously no threat to a plant that lacks blood vessels.

Spreadsheet should definitely include Raphael's Rally Strength. It's at least as important as Ignatz' rally speed - it can even save you a rally speed if the 1 point of weapon weight mitigation was all you needed to avoid the double. I suppose another data point is Blue Lions chapter 1, though there's no fast way of summarizing it. Blue Lions Chapter 1 might be in the top 5 hardest maps of three houses for experienced players. Certainly among Main Missions. The problem is that Manuela and Hanneman are swapped. Once you kill the left Teacher enemy, the right house is aggroed toward you all at once. With Manuela on the left, you can bait her out and have her exhaust her six nosferatu charges (a weak spell she won't be doubling with and can't crit you). Then leave her alive as you bait the right house's units one at a time, safely. You can even stop and use her Heal Tile, or keep her on her heal tile to train weapon ranks. Black Eagles and Golden Deer have these strats, making Chapter 1 consistently beatable in any run that's not an LTC. The only game over possibility is one of those first three students landing a Crit on Byleth, and if it happens you just start over no problem. It's the first turn. Blue Lions meanwhile can't afford to leave Hanneman alive, tanking those deadly Wind spells, so they have to beat him and fight Edelgard's crew all at once. May the RNG allow all your attacks to land and keep them from dog piling Dimitri/Byleth.

Far be it from me to nitpick the logic of a childrens' video game, but some things you can never really get out of your mind twenty five years later. Pokemon Type matchups. Some make sense, some don't. Let's talk about the ones that bug us the most. Poison beats Grass: Buddy, plants don't have a circulatory system. How would venom threaten them? If anything that's a justification for Resistance, not weakness. And it would be consistent with Ghost types resisting poison. The only way I could see this making sense is if we contextualize Poison as a "Chemical type" and said chemical is an herbicide. But why would snakes need a way to harm the very terrain that conceals their ability to hunt? Rock and Steel are weak to Fighting: ...what? Try punching a rock and see where that gets you. Electric beats Water: Shouldn't this go both ways? Throw any electric appliance into the tub and it will be inoperable. I'd expect any living creature with an internal electric current to do the same when made wet or submersed in water. Grass types resist Ground: If I was a plant, the idea of my opponent burrowing underground to attack my exposed roots is terrifying. This should be the other way around 100% Water Resists Ice: The vast majority of fish species cannot survive in arctic waters. Certainly not as well as us warm blooded mammals that can retain our own body heat. Water being weak to ice makes more sense to me. Furthermore, Ice types should resist water. Turning water into Ice is easier than turning thin air into ice. Splashing them with water just gives them more ammo/armor to work with. Bonus Round: Which Type Matchup low key makes tons of sense? Bugs resist Fighting: So in the pokemon universe, Bugs are large, sometimes person-sized creatures, and that tips the scales in the other direction. Most bugs wear a dense exoskeleton, so the idea of battling a person sized ant sounds like punching a rock. Think about it: Ever planted your finger down on an ant and noticed it's still crawling just fine? They didn't feel a thing. But an ant sized person would be squished immediately - we're made of soft skin and water. We don't do so well getting crushed, punched, or slammed. Also many bugs can push or carry several times their body weight, so good luck wrestling that into submission.

Well yeah the question of Hardest Route has certainly come up at least twice to my recollection. (Nobody has specified Maddening here yet but I'm just gonna assume) I actually think Black Eagles have the toughest early game (chapters 1-5). Certainly the toughest Chapter 2 which I think is the biggest hurdle of any non-blind playthrough outside of SS endgame. I don't think Hubert and Dorothea can get Heal by Chapter 2, and if they can it probably involves resetting for good RNG (Hubert should push for Mire instead). Byleth, Petra, and Edelgard are your only units that can withstand more than one round with enemy Thieves - and even then they usually require a sword in their hand to avoid the double. The access to Rallies is piss poor. Nobody has relevant personal skills except for Bernie and Caspar. And finally you don't have access to Catherine for help on Chapter 5. And if you're playing SS specifically, you don't want to rely too long on Edelgard (or Hubert, but really Edelgard) as a crutch since she'll leave eventually. Compare that to Golden Deer which is a much more cohesive unit for the early game. None of those kids are amazing in a vacuum, but they complement each other very well. Hilda's personal skill. Ignatz and Raphael's rallies come online before Chapter 2 to boost whoever you want - namely Leonie who can activate her passive from either of them. Three natural Curve Shot users. Two Healers. Marianne's early access to Physic. Lorenz' versatile combo of Fire Magic chip damage and Tempest Lance nuking. That's a lot to work with out of the gate. Anyway, My answer is Silver Snow >>> Blue Lions > Golden Deer. I didn't play CF on Maddening so I don't feel qualified to rank it compared to the other two houses. If I had to guess though, CF is probably very comparable overall to AM and VW. Only SS is worthy of being a tier above the rest. Hardest at every stage of the game, pre and post time skip. Not only do you lack a Lord, you lack that Lord's deployment slot on any post time skip main mission. They also removed Chapter 17 - the entire month just gets skipped on your calendar with no explanation or warning. In SS, Enbarr and Shambala are barely warmups before that endgame map. It's the hardest Fire Emblem map I've ever played, while all three of the other endgame maps allow you to ignore half the enemies and/or play at your own pace up to the end. SS Final Boss isn't even reasonably vulnerable until you've knocked out every White Beast, and it's a brutal ten turn onslaught against the toughest enemies in Three Houses where everybody is aggroed to your position from the moment you shut off the reinforcements. Imagine VW's final map if all the enemies, even the Elites walked toward you all at once, and Nemesis is replaced with a harder version of Rhea. That's pretty much it.

Could be worse. They could be open field route maps like FE12. It does not feel right ending a map in any way other than parking Marth on the throne. The theoretical purpose of Gaidens, given their unlock condition, is to give you great new units to carry you but honestly none of them are spectacular except for Nagi. A third ballistician would have been game changing - the trade chain with Captain Xane chugs along toward our next victim. And if quantity of units in your army is the problem, FE11 will give you filler units whose level goes up based on the average level of your remaining party. These guys are doing more to prevent a softlock than Etzel is. That idiot can't even Warp at base - and unlike Merric has no Bishop option to reclass to. Norne is a joke. Horace might prove useful - in the same way that any promoted unit that doesn't cost a master seal in mid game is useful. The very next map is Wooden Cavalry, and Generals are king there. But your other units will overtake him eventually. As far as a narrative is concerned, the only one that had me paying attention is 12x. I like Horace as a character, and the ending where he lives is a good scene. His recruitment is also more complicated than just blasting through his troops and having Marth talk to him. You really do have to avoid him entirely. If you had me in charge of some remake or adaptation of Shadow Dragon, this chapter would be in. Because I can't think of any other moment that humanizes the enemy. Depicts a battle in which neither side wants to fight. It's too bad 99.99% of first playthroughs missed it. Because Chapter 12 feeds you Five new characters and expects you to have 15 or less by the end of it. It's the least likely Gaiden you'd encounter organically.

I've thought about Echoes as being the reason why they skipped Gaiden on Switch, but that didn't stop them from throwing up Metroid 2 on the Game Boy catalogue. And that game's 3DS remake was announced and released in 2017 making it a very comparable case. You've also got Link's Awakening DX encroaching on the sixty dollar switch remake. I'm not convinced Nintendo gives these ROM releases that much consideration to begin with.

pair up...tactically...that is a tough one. Well Awakening is very sandbox-ey in the sense that there aren't really bad plays regarding this mechanic. Pair up units you really want to support, Pair Up units that have already supported, Pair Up units that really need the bonuses to gain exp, Pair Up units that are already good and can steam roll the map even better. Just pair up everyone. I remember wanting my healers and dancers paired up with high mov units to swap to and increase the range that they can support. Promote that bad unit backpack and they can get you even more stats.

I have vague memories of skimming through the FE6 prequel thing on the night I first heard of its existence. I think I'd be more interested in any supplementary materials for the Kaga games though. Did Echoes have anything? Could have been a way of introducing the mysterious paladin Conrad without giving away his identity. Dude needed more context.

Rabbid Peach Gooigi Echo fighter Oatchi Astral Chain Guy (Not sure what name they'd go with here) Travis Touchdown and Viola are definitely still stuck on the switch let them come too

I'd prefer just a menu. Shopping, forging, customize units, supports, base convos. No chores between maps.

Characters reacting to your choices, and character recruitments being cut off due to your decisions is definitely what I'd be going for. But I don't like that specific example. There's nothing to be gained from killing poor Maria. I would want to keep Minerva's quirk of coming after you if you did kill her since it's true to the original, but I would not turn that into a legitimate story path. Having the ability to play an Evil Marth raises a lot of concerns if we're having these decisions ripple all the way into Book 2. Why would Gharnef corrupt Hardin when Evil Marth is right there? Each player choice should have an obvious justification from the point of view of a blind player, as well as some gameplay alterations to sweeten the deal for repeat playthroughs. We're using the Starsphere/Starlight dilemma of the original game as our basis. Here's how I'd approach chapter 10: Marth hears Minerva's request from Catria at the end of chapter 9, having the option of saying "No, I have no reason to trust you" to which Catria responds "I understand, let me prove my mistress' commitment by fighting alongside you". And now you're playing chapter 10B against wherever Palla and Est are stationed. Use Catria to recruit her sisters. Throw in Warren who otherwise doesn't appear in Book 1. In this version of the story, Minerva never talks to you, never defects like she wants to because Maria is still captured, remaining at Michalis' side all the way up to Knight Filled Sky. In this other path you end up recruiting the whitewings sooner than usual, to make up for the lack of Maria/Minerva and the Mercurius sword that Est usually brings you. Second time around. However annoying this is for us, for Japanese fans a fourth attempt at Shadow Dragon probably looks even more ridiculous. Agreed on all of this. Characterization was the biggest misfire of FE11. As for supports, I turn my nose up at FE11/12 throwing in modern FE mechanics with no regard for how they change the original game's design and balance. Something like the weapon triangle has no business being here. But supports do. FE3 invented support bonuses as a concept, that's all the excuse I need to throw support conversations into the mix. Personally I wouldn't go writing in as many as a modern FE, but certainly writing as many supports and base convos as Echoes had for each character. Yes, and you don't win back your wager despite permadeath still being in play. Some 'training grounds'. Our instructor kills one of our units and says "them's the brakes, who's next?" The only thing it adds to a playthrough is the FE9 Bonus exp exploit. Save the game, have somebody with 80 or more current exp fight in the arena, reload if the level up doesn't give you everything you want. But with money and deployment slots being so tight in FE12 I wouldn't advise doing it often.