Hrothgar777

Find a playthrough on YouTube. Streamers literally make videos of themselves playing video games from start to finish, divided into many bite-sized parts. It probably shouldn't take you more than 2 hours to get to chapter 7 (assuming the guy isn't talkative), upon which you'll have an understanding of the initial premise. Watch up until the point where you don't have the motivation to watch anymore. Then look up the rest on a wiki.

You could probably ease up on the names. Make a few of the key characters have Vedic names but for 100% of the cast it'd come across as too alien to most non-Indian players. I don't know much about the Mahhabharata. I've only read through 6 chapters from the Bhagavad Gita and a summary of the events in the story leading up to it. And if that's the case for me, the average Westerner or Japanese certainly doesn't know diddly squat. As this is the case, I'd suggest using it only for the loosest inspiration instead of getting too bogged down in details that the average player won't have a clue about.

I recruited Mozu and I have a feeling that she's going to be like crazy powerful if I develop her. Am I right? If so, what's the ideal method for going about this?

To be fair, they've pretty much been sucked into a 24/7 job (fighting a war) for 5 years, which is a job that in some capacity they also worked pre-timeskip. They haven't had an abundance of free time to work on developing or changing themselves. It's telling that the one guy who has changed did nothing but sit amidst lonely ruins and mumble to himself for 5 years.

A few more thoughts: I got up to Chapter 8 last night. And it's only after you get to castle mode that the game's appeal starts to shine through. The physical cartridge that I own is 6 years old, but the game still runs super fast and super well. You can do everything at a lightning pace if you want, including level-grinding. If you're a gamer who doesn't have a lot of patience with what you're playing, and you just want things to come quickly, here it is. Fire Emblem Fates. -Some of the battle maps are breathtakingly beautiful too. -I wish you could have support conversations with goldfish-chan. On a related note, the supports themselves are coming in pretty fast. Again, at this same point (time sunk-wise) in Three Houses you'd be lucky to have a single support with anyone. And again I can see the appeal of this. Though, the supports are often a bit short for my taste. -I picked Birthright, as I didn't have the heart to make Corrin turn on his lost family with an evil grin after everything that happened. But on that note, how exactly DOES Corrin choose Nohr? Like, by this point it's established beyond any doubt that Garon is evil and not worth obeying. You just lost your biological mother because of him. What could Corrin possibly stand to gain from going down this route? -How do you start a castle battle?

I saw three files on there. I had one and my little bros took up the other two. So, yeah. Assuming I couldn't have just scrolled down to find more, I had to delete one.

(I didn't really want to make an entire thread on this, but it didn't seem there was anywhere else for this to go.) So I've picked up my old 3DS for the first time in probably a couple of years and I started a new file on Fates. Five chapters in, here's my initial impression: -Holy cow does this game move fast. For the time it took me to get to Chapter 5, I'd likely still be on Chapter 1 in Three Houses. I'm assuming it slows down some after I hit castle mode and whatnot, but still. -Coincidentally, I'm re-borrowing this 3DS and the game from my little bros who I guess own it now. With that in mind, I'm only a few chapters in but this game gives me...anime sibling vibes, if you catch my drift. It really is a weird game and I'm not sure if it's the most appropriate thing for them to be playing. Honestly, what was Nintendo thinking with this? -Quality wise, I've somewhat overestimated the quality gap between this and Three Houses. In part it's because I remembered so little about this game, seeing as how I only played through it once as a VERY casual gamer with low retention of the material in question. So when looking back in hindsight, my mind must've filled in the blanks and assumed that there was less to this game than there actually was. -Before I deleted my old save file, I checked my party on the last chapter. And dang, I must've done zero level grinding there. Everyone was so weak. I don't know how I beat this the first time. Granted, it was Birthright, but still. -Between this and all of the other Fire Emblem titles that I've been learning more about recently, I am realizing just how many of the concepts in my own FE game idea have been used before. -There were some neat classes and weapon types in this that completely got the ax in Three Houses. Not sure why; maid Lindhardt throwing daggers would've been totally lit. Anyways, I don't know how far I'll get into this. Maybe I won't pick it up again after today. Maybe I will. Who knows. It feels like my life's never been busier than it is now, but anyhow it was cool having the chance to do this again years later, however brief or long this might've lasted.

In general, Japanese media have an aversion to having an entire setting not based either on East Asia or the West. At most, you could have something that was mainly "Medieval Europe" as all Fire Emblem are but with a few elements taken from an underrepresented culture. For example, Majora's Mask did in small part evoke the aesthetic of an African jungle culture but otherwise was culturally indistinguishable from the setting of Ocarina of Time. With that in mind, you're not going to get a Fire Emblem where the whole cast are like desert Bedouins. But I think Iran could be an interesting pick; it has a diverse, non-stereotypical geography along with great historical diversity in terms of its culture, religion, architecture, etc. It has the "hotness" of the Islamic world but the pre-7th century Zoroastrians used a network of sacred flames to light homes during the cold season. It was a hotbed of poetry and religious mysticism, and located at something of a crossroad between the Orient and the Ummah. Illuminated manuscripts from that part of the world can be quite beautiful, and the Nastaliq script lends itself well for this purpose. I mean, just look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Divān_of_Hafez#/media/File:DivanofHafez3.jpg Meanwhile, it has buildings whose interiors look like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasir-ol-Molk_Mosque#/media/File:Nasir-ol-Molk_Mosque_(inside).jpg

None of the Agarthan stuff really made sense. Like, how they're all apparently human but can live for a thousand years. But Epimenides more or less does have an in-universe explanation: Recall that Sothis (amnesiac child form who hangs out inside Byleth's brain) was created by implanting a magic stone into an infant. If that technology/magic works for Manaketes, it might work for humans too.

Libraries. They were still a big thing in society and there was a rich culture of children's books that you could borrow from libraries, including many contemporary classics from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s that've largely been forgotten today. Presidents and First Ladies would hold events where they visited libraries and read to children. There was more of a sense that positive values existed and ought to be promoted. This was politically moderate but perhaps with a slight liberal bent. On the other hand, this period was a golden age for the Evangelical Right; there a flourishing of Christian literature of all kinds and more people genuinely believed in the religious values that informed their politics. Today, of course, libraries still exist but they're increasingly obsolescent and people rarely visit them. The smart phone did not exist. People listened to music either on CDs (on a CD player or at a computer) or on an MP3 player or an iPod, which was small and portable but looked different from what you're familiar with today. Headphones existed but they didn't look exactly the same as they did today. MP3 players did not have touch screens. You pushed little plastic buttons. As was the case for all cell phones. Cell phones didn't have enough buttons to include a keyboard, so you punched in numbers to produce letters. Of course, a lot of homes still had landline phones that were plugged in. Most computers were desktops. They sat at a desk and were on all of the time. Colorful designs called "screensavers" kept the same image from being burnt into the screen when the computer was on and otherwise would've displayed an image but was not in use. Laptops existed but I never saw one until I was older. The primary mode of entertainment was the TV. Homes still had antennas (though richer homes had "cable") that captured a signal and coverage was often spotty. The image on screen could look truly awful if there was interference. Children watched a lot of programming from the channel "PBS" in its morning slot; after a certain time it would switch over to adult content. A lot of households still used VCRs surprisingly late. A VCR plays VHS Tapes, which are large plastic blocks that have magnetic tape inside. At most, a VHS tape might've held a 2 hour movie. You bought or rented VHS tapes at a store. If you watched the early Pokemon, for example, you might rented a VHS tape from Blockbuster that had 2 or 3 episodes. This technology was from the '90s but again, its use continued for a while and you could buy VHS Tapes for movies like Monsters, Inc. Of course, by the 2000s the dominant medium was the CD/DVD. You would recognize them, but nonetheless they're not used very much today. In fact, most computers today cannot play CDs or DVDs. Your best bet is to find an old XBox 360. All handheld gaming before the Nintendo DS (which came out in 2004) was almost exclusively single player. At best, if you bought a link cable then you could connect two GBAs and play a multiplayer match, but it had to be with somebody you knew personally. The DS, in contrast, allowed for the use of true Wi-Fi in some games (e.g. Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, Megaman Star Force, etc) and you could also do wireless local multiplayer with a feature called "DS Download Play", which only required one person to own the game in question. It was pretty neat. Before the Nintendo Switch, there was a clear distinction between handheld and console gaming. You might be old enough to have owned a 3DS, so I guess this isn't anything new to you. The internet was a thing, but it was still dependent on landlines that made telephones possible. The quality was spotting and it could take a long time to load a simple webpage. Overall, the internet was a pitiful fraction of what it's capable of today, and the dominant mode of entertainment was still television. TVs were still big boxes. The bigger your box TV, the more luxurious it was perceived as being. Internet forums like this one were more popular back in the day. So were fanfiction websites like FFN. Gaming fandom websites were popular and fans logged on to learn all the latest tips and rumors about games. TV was a lot more local back in the day. Anime existed in the West and a few franchises had become smash hits (e.g. Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon, Yu Yu Hakusho, Pokemon, Fruit Basket, possibly Ranma, etc.) but you didn't have as many options. 99.99% of anime up to that point had simply never aired or been translated here, and there wasn't a website where you could watch subbed episodes of anything you wanted (and again, download speeds would've been too crappy even if such an option was available). In public settings, you did not hear people say words like "fvck". People were still very reluctant to curse publicly. Anyone who was gay or lesbian kept quiet about it, as it was still something you were extremely reluctant to disclose at the time. Prepubescent girls had a fashion sense that was somewhat boyish or gender neutral. You didn't see children wearing short shorts except of a particular baggy kind that was a bit longer and also gender-neutral. People still listened to the radio when driving in cars. The two main options were "FM" and "AM" radio. Stuff that broadcast from far away had poorer audio quality than stuff that came from radio towers in your local area. On the musical scene "emo", "punk", "rock", "goth" were all the rage. You had young men who looked like heartthrobs and dressed flamboyantly. My sister was very much into a band called "My Chemical Romance", which IIRC actually still exists today. For adults, the "ideal man" was a mild-mannered white collar worker. The culture of idealized masculinity that I see in the South today didn't exist among white collar types. This is something that I can't really describe.

Alrighty. For a name, I could suggest "Synigma". "Syn" in used in cool-sounding words like "synergy" and "synchronous". A very similar sounding word, "sine", is a mathematical and scientific term. For example, "sine wave". This, of course, does not mesh as well if the theme of the game is more fantasy-based. For rules, I could suggest some kind of chess-like format where it's a large grid and cards are face-down until used on the board. Cards would be used to kill each other in various ways, of course, such as based on stats or abilities or where they're attacking/defending from relative to the position of the other card. This combines the dynamic gameplay of chess with the deception of Yu-Gi-Oh. If this prompt interests you, I could elaborate further. And if all else fails, it might help to read up on the rules of real-world card games like Blackjack, Poker (for example, Texas Hold 'Em), Bridge, Old Maid, Gin Rummy, etc. For plot, you could expand upon the "addiction" that you mentioned and write an allegory about gambling addiction. For example, make it a partially magic game where you can place wagers and whatever you bet magically changes owners depending on the outcome. Might be some kid who, say, got so engrossed in "winning big" but ended up digging himself deeper into a hole; eventually he gambles away an organ that he needs to live, and he'll be dead within a couple weeks without it. So now he's gambling furiously to win back a replacement organ and save his life before he runs out of time. This fits better if the game's theme is decidedly "dark", such as related to tarot cards. Not so much if the cards are emblazoned with the images of orcs, goblins, and wood elves. (Alternately, if the MC's obsession with card games is a quirky personality trait that's largely inconsequential to the main story, you may well just mention the game in passing without bothering to come up with rules. Heck, you could just give it a name like "You-Gee-Oh" and leave it at that.)

It might be helpful to hear a few more details. Do the cards have magic power? Do they summon beings? Or is it just a normal person in the normal world who has an interest in a Yu-Gi-Oh style card game franchise?

Pandora Hearts. One of those few "the music is so good there's no point reading the manga instead" animes.

2010s. Awakening, Fates, Shadows of Valentia, 3H, and Heroes. Enough said. But frankly, if Three Houses was the only single FE game to be released in that decade, I would still make this assertion. All FE before 3H was, frankly speaking, "hollow". You had these heroic and attractive anime-style characters who go onto battlefields and fight. But you saw virtually much nothing of their existences outside of this. The games always tried to put up a facade of depth that was never actually present. And then, the summer of 2019. Now you had a cast who were like real people. You got to see every angle of them in war and peace. An enormous cast of people who lived their lives every day. There is no possible comparison between what came before and what came after. What separated Fates and 3H was a measly three years yet an eternity at the same time. Of course, that's just my perspective. But from Nintendo's? They would give much the same answer. In terms of sales, 3H alone sold as well as all Fire Emblem titles from Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light to Blazing Blade combined. Fates and Awakening both did very well too, and if you look at the numbers it's obvious why Fire Emblem was on the verge of cancellation prior to Awakening and why Awakening singlehandedly saved it. It literally sold 5x as well as the Wii's big budget production. In the last 9-10 years, Fire Emblem absolutely exploded in popularity and went from a relatively obscure franchise, most famous for its Smash characters (the Ice Climbers are in Smash too, just saying), to the company's latest cash cow. At this point, Engage could flop and I would still rest 100% confident that Nintendo will eventually try again with another title.

Alright. I bought this thing, and it was $40 more than preordering just the normal game. What all should I expect?

It's getting more and more difficult for the average Russian to ignore the consequences of autocratic leaders who aren't held accountable for their actions. At the start of the year 2000 the Russians aspired to become a peaceful and eventually prosperous 21st century country. And nothing was stopping them either. But now, 22 years later, they're being drafted to go die in an absolutely pointless conflict that their own leaders started for no reason. People who think the difference between democracy and dictatorship is inconsequential are deluding themselves.

I mean, sure. I wasn't trying to make any statement or inference about the real-world Roman Catholic Church. Medieval Europe existed in a time when most of modern science was simply undiscovered. I personally think that long-term structure is the most important factor in determining whether civilizations get around to discovering stuff, and I personally think that the church provided that exactly that structure in a number of ways. But Rhea, in contrast, was deliberately preventing Fodlan from modernizing. Technologies that had already existed in the past were not redeveloped because Rhea presumably forbade it from happening. In a video game setting it's easy to see how this is value-neutral. But in reality, it means half your infants dying only a couple of weeks or months after they were born. It means mass malnutrition, infection by parasites that stunt growth and even the proper development of the brain, half of the local village dying from a random plague every 15 years, widespread illiteracy, extremely few life prospects for girls and women, and so on. And the closest thing we get to an explanation for Rhea's behavior is "The Agarthans had technology and they were bad so technology must therefore be bad."

They have that in Fates too? How? From what I remember there was no timeskip or future people traveling to the past.

This is definitely a stretch. Most Fire Emblem are "value neutral" in terms of setting. Or that is, Marth and whoever can fight their war. No matter who wins it'll still be a fantasy Medieval-like world a thousand years later. And the same with Chrom and Sigurd and all them. But this is the first game that actually shows us what the world could be like, if not for something or someone holding it back. I've read enough scholarly and polemic literature to understand just how much worse life was for the average before the Industrial Revolution. By every single metric the quality of life has improved dramatically. Even North Korea is arguably better off than the average country from 400 years ago. Today the world looks at North Korea and wishes that the people would just rise up against Kim Jong Un and end the local dystopian experiment. And it has lasted about 75-80 years. Rhea, in contrast, has kept Fodlan in its even more crude state for almost 1,200 years. In the context of that reality, Edelgard is liberalism and modernity embodied in a person. She is "this world-soul, astride a horse, who reaches out over the world and masters it", or so the philosopher Hegel once said of Napoleon on horseback in the streets of Jena. I'm not interested in jumping into this current flame war about mascots but honestly the Nintendo development team didn't think this through when they aimed to make 4 morally equivalent routes but made everyone except Edelgard into 14th century reactionaries.

Wait, what?

Thank you both. I understand more about this now than I did before.

Hi, I'm asking for a general rundown of how the "children" mechanic works in FE4 and Awakening. For example, suppose that Awakening has such a unit and his name is Bob. Does he have to be the son of a specific two units? Or just one? Or none? How do children inherit stats and abilities from their parents, if at all? And finally, how does this mechanic differ between FE4 and Awakening?

Monica. She was done dirty in the mainline games. Obviously she isn't a top priority though. If they just throw her into a DLC or something I'd be happy.

A complete overhaul of the blacksmithing mechanics. Make it complicated, but also hypothetically possible to produce an uberpowered weapon through forging alone. Customized results if you know what you're doing, in terms of how the weapon is balanced.

I think that, if they want to celebrate the franchise as a whole but have a limited number of units that they're going to squeeze into this metaphorical box, then frankly it's too soon to put anybody from Three Houses in there, much less all three house leaders. And it wouldn't make sense to put in just Edelgard and not the rest. If they wanted some representation from the game, for example if there's somebody from every title, then Byleth was the safe choice.