Arvis4Prez

Genuinely it's due to his thief utility and being able to open chests. Bastian's lowish speed means he won't double anyone, Lucia's got awful bases, Rolf, and then Tormod is someone who, in all my playthroughs, has never turned out very good. I've tried several times to train him up, but he's never been stellar, especially when compared to Soren and Ilyana, who you get earlier. I could see Bastian moving up a tier, and maybe the same with Lucia, but also just the fact that these two come so late, and are just so middling, that I put them in F tier.

I would, but there wasn't a berserk Ashnard icon.

Behold, the only accurate Path of Radiance tier list. (Units are not ordered within the tiers) My Reasoning for Tier List placements

Arvis would beat both Lyndon B Johnson and Richard Nixon and so the US Government would become good (also would stop the Kennedy assassination) Source:

I'm one of those, but I think Mark is the best way to do an Avatar story in Fire Emblem (and honestly is probably the only true self-insert character out there). Mark doesn't fight, so you don't have to worry about game balance, he's a tactician, which is essentially what the player is, and best of all, he doesn't take away from Lyn, Eliwood, or Hector's stories. The reason I think a lot of avatars suffer is because the whole idea behind an avatar character is to put yourself in their shoes. To think that you are in control. When that connection between the player and the avatar is damaged, it's irreparable. For example, let's look at Fates and assume you pick Conquest. Now, we have a lot of evidence that shows that Garon is bad given to us before we make an official choice. So, in my mind, the best thing to say to the Hoshido crowd is something like "hey I'm sorry, but there's something wrong in Nohr, and since I was raised there, and these Nohrians are my family now, I need to go stop it. I don't want us to be enemies so please don't attack us." Like I'd want to give an explanation for why I'm turning my back on Hoshido. But there's no such option. Corrin won't say anything. Hoshido thinks we've been brainwashed, and so Conquest is spent killing people who never needed to die. Even if Ryoma and the others ignored Corrin and still said that they've been brainwashed, fine. But at least Corrin actually spoke up. Instead, we get nothing, and it's so lame. Also lol at Mark having tied both best and worst avatar haha

I'm sorry, but I think Sylvia's kids are inferior to the substitutes. Charlot and Laylea are pretty neat. At least Laylea has Charm, so if you have her, Lachesis's kids, and Seliph all close to each other, that's a 50(?)% boost to hit and avoid. Pretty swanky stuff imo.

If the question is "How does permadeath define Fire Emblem", I would say it's either a punishment for the player for over-extending a unit into a situation where they would die, or sometimes it's just bad luck. A lot of folks, especially those who've played the older games, have had that "Missed a 97 and died to a 5" moment. But I think it's a mechanic, and like all mechanics, it's dependent on how the player chooses to interact with it. In this, we have three main groups: ironmanners, those who don't reset EVER if a unit dies, resetters, those who do, and not-involved, people who pick Casual Mode. There's also a potential fourth group, those who use Mila's Turnwheel/Divine Pulse/Draconic Time Crystal (<- from Engage), but I don't know if that counts as a separate group or not. Ironmanners are those who feel the full effects of permadeath. If a unit dies, they're gone forever, and that effect is either minimal (you just recruited Nino in FE7 and she died a turn later) or enormous (a promoted trained carry unit died). I personally tend to ironman my first run of a FE game, so I know the pain of a unit dying, but in most games, you get a fairly large roster (I assume it's a bit different now with 3H/Engage because of the fully voiced cast, so you're not going to get a Radiant Dawn cast size in a modern FE game solely because it would be ludicrously expensive, even if you had the VAs take on two characters, that's still about 35 VAs to pay haha), and newer recruits, while not as good as what your dead unit was or could've been, are typically good enough that they can hold their own in the next couple chapters after their recruitment. Some of these newer recruits, typically between mid-game and late-game, are really good (FE6 Miledy/Perceval, FE7 Pent, FE8 Duessel/Saleh, FE9 Tanith, FE10 Laguz royals, etc). Not resetting when a unit dies is a fine enough way to play, and even if you aren't the type to commit fully to iron-manning a run, there are some other losses you may incur depending on how far into the chapter you've progressed. For instance, if I'm playing Path of Radiance, and I'm wanting to train up Boyd, but he dies in Chapter 12 (the boat map with the ravens), I may reset if I'm only a couple turns into the map. But if I'm close to the end of the chapter, I have to think about whether or not it's worth giving up all that progress just for Boyd's sake. What if four of my units got extremely good levels? What if I got all the items? Maybe throw in some lucky crits/dodges? If I reset for Boyd after all that, I'm not only sacrificing time, but all of those gains and RNG-dependent outcomes. So there's more to consider when resetting for a unit's death than just how much real time is lost due to resetting a chapter. Resetters are the opposite of ironmanners, and are probably the majority of FE players. In that, when a unit dies, no matter what, they'll reset. This could be for a number of reasons: attachment to the unit in question, time and resources invested into this now dead unit, items in their inventory (like scrolls, staves, Elite Sword, etc in FE5 for instance), or a personal goal to beat a FE game without any units dying. As stated earlier, when a unit dies, it's either due to the player's mistake, or because of bad luck/lack of knowledge of the map (and while I'm here I want to say that ambush spawns are a tumor and should never have been implemented ever, especially if they're same-turn reinforcements. That's just horseshit). And while technically speaking, permadeath doesn't affect resetters because, well, they reset, it still is a mechanic that SHOULD punish the player for a bad decision (same-turn ambush reinforcements notwithstanding). And like I brought up in the last paragraph, if you gained so much, and still reset for a unit's death, then it's still affecting you, even if you're not allowing a unit to stay dead. It's a choice the player makes. And then the last main group: Casual Mode players. While I personally don't and probably never will pick Casual Mode when playing through a Fire Emblem game, I will say that I do appreciate its inclusion. And I do think it does its best to strike a balance between punishing a player for poor play, while not being too punishing to the point where the player feels like they're softlocked (have fun taking out those FE6 bosses without Rutger to crit them down. Hope you like sub-50 hit rates). And while technically these players aren't interacting with permadeath (because it's been essentially turned off), I do think that if you were to ask people who played the games where the option to pick either Classic Mode or Casual Mode is a thing which one they went with, it could provide some meaningful data on how those players view permadeath. Ultimately, permadeath is a mechanic. It comes down to player choice. What is more valuable to you? The potential of a unit, so you'll reset if they die, the character of a unit and that attachment to them, so you'll reset because you're endeared to them? Or will you keep a unit dead to maintain all of the other gains made in a chapter? In my opinion, when talking about permadeath in Fire Emblem, it has to be taken on a case-by-case basis. What led to the unit in question dying? What do you stand to lose by either resetting or leaving them dead? Which one is more important to the player? You can't really answer those questions with generalized statements. I do think that permadeath's biggest flaw is the lack of impact it tends to have on the narrative. If you get two characters to S-rank, and one of those characters die, you don't see the reaction from the other person. You could headcanon it as funerals for units occur between chapters when we don't see them, but it still would be nice to get more on-screen reactions to unit death.

Mm, it's hard to say for sure. I personally believe that Casual Mode is fine (Phoenix Mode is too much), but at the same time, I don't think it's essential to Fire Emblem. I think most players get too hung up on losing units, and while sometimes you get unlucky and an enemy lands a 22% hit and 2% crit and kills your Lucia (it's happened to me haha), most other times it comes down to the player being punished for over-extending. But even still, in older titles, you can only bring about less than 20 units or so in the final chapters, and you have rosters that number much higher than that. I think that even if you're the type who doesn't want anyone to die, and will reset for a single unit even if it's the last turn of the final map, that is a choice that you, the player, make. And like all choices, resetting has consequences, and I think it's a bit silly to complain about the consequences of resetting. And I'm the guy who played through Radiant Dawn when I was about 9 years old. I lost a lot of units, sure, and it took me a long time to beat, but I did it, and that was before I knew anything about Fire Emblem! I also feel that unit death can add to a sense of emergent storytelling. For example, in my first ever run of Sacred Stones, Garcia and Ross had an A support and had been used for the entire game. Until I get to the chapter where you fight Riev at Rausten, where Ross and Garcia were my frontline defenders, and Garcia died next to Ross. It was absolutely crushing, and I kept playing (because I don't reset in my first ever run of a Fire Emblem game) and carried on. Same with Path of Radiance, when Boyd got slept on the endgame map and killed after being attacked by about seven or so units. And I could go on and on and list off every moment a unit I liked died (I'm not good at these games haha). But at the same time, while it's upsetting and depressing to lose units you've bonded with and care about and love (or even units you've invested time and resources into), I find that units dying adds to the gravitas of the game's story. Things start to feel more real because no, not everyone is going to make it home when this is all said and done, and you're no longer fighting to just save the world from whatever big bad is threatening it, but you're also fighting to win so that the units who fell didn't die in vain. Casual Mode doesn't let that happen, and I find it's more so a disservice to the games and its characters because the tension that would come from an enemy phase is just not there anymore, because the permanence of your units dying is lessened severely.

That'd be cool to have a battlefield shift drastically like that, but it would also raise a few questions. Ike and the rest of his army aren't superhumans (at least, not until RD Rebirth when Yune blesses their weapons and not them but that's neither here nor there). If Ashnard touching the medallion sent out a shockwave that destroyed the environment, it would stand to reason that Ike and co. would get hurt from that shockwave, with Ike feeling most of the blast since he'd be the one closest to Ashnard. Maybe they could've pushed your units all the way back to the starting tiles, but I feel like that would be a bit strange. I don't mind the outdoor arena you fight Ashnard and his troops. Something I'd have been happy with is changing the sky color during animations fighting Ashnard's second phase, like to a blood red or something. I don't think that would be entirely difficult to achieve (add a filter to the sky) as opposed to having to remodel the map and load it in (which to be fair could be done since there's a brief cutscene with the medallion, so that could be used to hide the load time and switch to the new, "destroyed garden" map). All of that said, I do think there should be more impact to the surrounding area where you fight the final boss, since most of the time it's a dragon, or a god, or a vessel for some demonic entity, etc. Having dynamic environments would be cool to see as opposed to (you broke the wall! you knocked down a tree stump!).

I don't know. I suppose you could call it a character flaw of Micaiah, but I feel like it's either misused or just a dumb character flaw. Izuka makes it clear several times throughout part 1 that he's basically controlling Pelleas's strings. If she trusts Pelleas, but not Izuka, then there should be some effort made, I would think, to make sure that orders are coming from Pelleas, and not from Izuka. Someone else pointed out in this thread that Micaiah didn't want to go against Pelleas because she didn't want to undermine him like she had been doing in part 1, which is a fair look at it. But I'm confused by you saying that she's not technically wrong to trust Pelleas because she continues fighting after he dies. I assume this is in reference to Pelleas mentioning the blood pact in 3-12, and how if he doesn't comply with the Senate's orders, then the blood pact will destroy Daein. I'm fine with that part, but I'm referring to her actions in 3-6 and onwards up until Pelleas tells her what's happened. Because in game, she has no idea that there's an active blood pact on Daein. Sure, she was right to trust in Pelleas and follow his orders because if she didn't, Daein citizens would die, but she doesn't know that will happen. It might just be me, but I figure that in a game with a lot of treason, betrayal, and duplicity, Micaiah would be smart enough to not blindly follow orders. And maybe it would have been fine if she had more development in part 3 to really explore how she feels about it (I personally wouldn't mind more Dawn Brigade maps). But to me, it feels like the writers wanted to have the "friends are fighting friends for no apparent reason this is the true cost of war" moment (which is perfectly suited for Fire Emblem I'd argue), but they didn't or couldn't put as much work into it and so conjured up a blood pact to just... make it happen. And that's really sad to have in the Tellius games, which I would say have the second best narrative in the series, just below FE4.

Oh really? I haven't finished Gaiden (got past the first chapter) and I didn't get the true ending in FE6. And now that I think about it, I think I saw the Demon King move on my first Sacred Stones run (because every run since I was like "I gotta kill him quick he moves/attacks at some point"). All that said, I still think Ashnard moving is still one of the most terrifying things I've seen in a Fire Emblem final boss. Probably because his model is HUGE (you can't miss him lol) and he's the only flier enemy on the endgame map, so while the other enemies have to go around the fountains, or down the stairs, or have reduced movement in the bushes, Ashnard can just fly over all of it and make a beeline for you. It's honestly great. I wish they kept that for normal mode. Like, I get it, him moving around and having a second phase is harder, sure, but I believe his stats are different based on the difficulty, and for normal you could still call in a laguz royal on turn 2.

I love the stories in Fire Emblem. The narratives and the characters are the main pull to keep me playing, and in the story department, Radiant Dawn was doing so well for itself. Until you reach the blood pact. So, according to the game, after Pelleas's coronation, Lekain had him sign a blood pact, where Pelleas must follow Lekain's orders, or else Daein citizens will die until Pelleas does. Now, Pelleas learns that Izuka betrayed him here because Izuka had looked over the blood pact and said it was fine for Pelleas to sign. It's because of the blood pact that Daein enters the war between Begnion and the Laguz Alliance. Now, what's wrong with this? While I'm not against blood pacts existing in the world of Tellius (it's a fantasy land with shapeshifting folks and magic, so suspension of disbelief is required), the problem is the blood pact really screws over the characterization of Pelleas and Micaiah (and the rest of the Dawn Brigade by extension). In 3-6, when Micaiah is talking to Sothe about being called into action, Sothe asks why they're even taking orders from Begnion, and is appalled when Micaiah seems to casually tell him that the soldiers get a bounty for each laguz they kill ("Listen to yourself! Laguz huting?! That's just great. We've gone from being freedom fighters to bigots in the blink of an eye.") Micaiah says she doesn't want to fight, but that as general of the Daein Army, she can't refuse. In fairness to Micaiah, that's true, but she also has been shown to refuse Izuka in Part 1, when Izuka was as powerful (but really more powerful) than Pelleas. Not to mention that generals have been shown to advise leaders of a country, so it would have been nice if Micaiah had a scene where she was objecting to the idea of fighting the Laguz Alliance before relenting. Instead, Pelleas tells her to take up arms against the Laguz Alliance, and then the next scene is between Micaiah and Sothe. It feels like a betrayal of Micaiah's character from Part 1, especially when you consider how angry she got with Izuka for drugging Muarim and attempting to transform him into a Feral One. That said, I don't hate the idea of Daein siding with Begnion in the war against the Laguz Alliance. I just wish they had gone about it a different way. For instance, perhaps Izuka stays in Daein, and effectively becomes king through Pelleas. You could even have Izuka blackmail Pelleas by telling him that he's not Ashnard's son, and if that got out, Pelleas would be attacked, maybe even killed, for betraying the people of Daein. Micaiah hears of Pelleas's authorization to mobilize against the Laguz Alliance and wants to advise him to not follow through on it. Izuka pops in and reveals that he knows she's a Branded, and if she tries to stop Pelleas, she'll be outed. This would cause Micaiah to freeze up (she had previously stated she's terrified about what would happen if people found out she's Branded) and go along with it. That way, you're keeping with their established characterizations, and Izuka can be abducted sometime during part 4. I don't know, what are your thoughts on the blood pact?

I personally find Ashnard to be the best final boss, in terms of story, character, and gameplay. He's so fully committed to his principles, and takes said principles so far, that he's willing to fight Ike and the Crimean Army because, hey, if they're stronger and he dies, then they kept to his worldview. How Ashnard ties into Radiant Dawn is also great, with the Mad King's War leading to the rise of the Dawn Brigade and civil turmoil in Crimea. He's a bit one-note compared to other final bosses, but I see Ashnard as the game's final boss. The Black Knight is Ike's final boss. Not to mention that, up to that point, he's the only final boss to actually move from his spot in hard mode. That moment alone is enough to make the endgame scarier because now you have this 10 move behemoth that only Ike and your dragon can damage! He's fun to watch and satisfying to bring down. As for final maps, I would have to put The Final Holy War from FE4 on there because of the story and *slight gameplay integration. It's your army versus all of Grannvale (Jungby Castle isn't on the map, but Scipio shows up partway through). Being able to bring an end to Hilda is always great (RIP Tailtiu), the death of Ishtar is a bit ambiguous in my opinion (she serves Julius and loves him, but also detests the child hunts and does everything in her power to keep them safe). Destroying Manfroy, the author of all the suffering in Grannvale, is perfect. Restoring Julia and using her to defeat Julius is both fitting, tragic, and a perfect way to close it out. I get that it's a long endgame, filled with Hel tomes and Sleep staves, but personally, I don't mind the length, and Hel and Sleep aren't super difficult to deal with (though I would agree it gets tedious sending Fee up to the cliffs to bonk the dark priests littered throughout the map). After everything that's happened in FE4, The Final Holy War is just the perfect climax to the game, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

As the title suggests, what are your favorite pairings in FE4? It could be based on either gameplay, story, or personal preference.