Topaz Light

Honestly, I say just pick any plot-important item that would make at least moderate sense to be called an "Emblem" and to be associated with the element of Fire, and slap the name on it. The "Fire Emblem" itself doesn't need to be any specific thing, I think; it can be implemented in any number of ways. I don't even think they need to use it in any given game, honestly; the title is honestly identified way more with the series itself than with the fictional item within it at this point.

Any concept can be implemented with enough ASM hacking, although some are easier than others. This seems to work with a lot of things that are already present in the game, though, so I'd imagine it wouldn't be too hard to get working. However, from a game design standpoint, I think it... needs some work. Game designers need to be able to compromise when the kind of game that's fun for them to come up with conflicts with the kind of game that's actually fun to play, and I think this is one such time. The notion of a random ally being berserked each chapter is certainly an interesting one, but it wouldn't really be that fun in practice, since the whole game would boil down to being very luck-based, which is simply frustrating rather than enjoyable. My advice would be to tweak it so that the disease... Isn't actually random, but appears to be at first due to its method of spreading being unknown to the player until later on. A very perceptive (or lucky-guessing) player should be able to sort of pick up on it early, but probably not completely figure it out all on their own without extensive experimentation. Is sort of a "normal" ailment or thing that can happen to your characters during gameplay instead of something that's just randomly inflicted at the start of each map. Is gradually explained/learned about over the course of the game, in terms of both its story explanation and how it works in gameplay. Make it so that the player and the expedition team each learn to combat it in unison with each other. Is manually-curable, but not in an immediately-obvious way. It should make sense, of course, but it shouldn't just be a plain ol' "use a Restore staff and presto!" dealio. Making the disease a game mechanic is a very interesting way to have it start working its way into the experience in meaningful ways early on, but a game mechanic that's basically "a random one of your units dies each chapter, have fun!" is frankly just annoying and not really conducive to a fun gameplay experience. The challenge it would create would be the wrong kind of challenge; the kind that's overcome through luck and/or cheesing rather than skill. I don't mean to seem negative, and I'm sorry if I come across that way. I think the concept is neat, but the way of working it into the gameplay that you proposed is something I highly doubt will lead to any sort of positive gameplay experience.

In my personal opinion, nonhuman races should be visibly nonhuman unless it's somehow important to the plot or lore that they aren't, so I voted for B. I honestly wouldn't mind if they went even less human than that, as long as they designed the characters mindfully and kept them aesthetically-pleasing and not lazily-constructed. It's not like the way things are now really bothers me; I just think that what I described would be preferable to me personally.

Personally, my feelings on reclassing are... a little complex. I'd really like to see it work like Shadow Dragon and New Mystery again in terms of the method by which characters are reclassed, but keep the Awakening- and Fates-style character-based class sets, rather than a couple generic reclass sets based on starting class. For me, the most fun thing about reclassing is trying out characters in other classes and just playing around with that, while Awakening and especially Fates are set up in a way that discourages experimentation by placing limits and financial/resource requirements on when and how characters can be reclassed, while carrying over skills from other classes can end up reducing certain classes to nothing but skill providers that aren't really worth actually using on their own merits. One idea I tossed around was, instead of having character-based reclass options, having certain options to change characters' classes to a specific other class, like, say, there's someone who could teach a character magic, allowing a character of your choice to become a Mage, but you could only use that for one character. I say this, but I honestly am not super invested in newer games keeping reclass. If they do, that's alright, and if they don't, that's fine, too. I'd honestly kinda prefer them not to, frankly, but I don't think reclassing is necessarily a net negative or anything. I'm interested in seeing where they take it, at any rate. Branching promotions, on the other hand, I am a fan of. I feel they're a great way to add a little bit of character customization without running into the out-of-character class assignment issue, since by nature, promotion represents a character moving forward with their chosen vocation, rather than sideways, as reclassing represents. To me, it absolutely makes sense that there would be multiple ways to move forward from any given base class in Fire Emblem, so representing that in gameplay and giving the player a little bit of freedom is something I'm very much a fan of.

Personally, I wouldn't be adverse to it, so long as it wasn't to such an extent that it might as well be a different IP entirely that just happens to be called Fire Emblem. I'd love to see more emphasis given to alternative victory conditions and various side objectives, and for a while now I've felt that more or less restricting themselves to just the one basic plotline about some plucky young royal/noble setting out to oppose an evil emperor who got it in his head to conquer the whole continent essentially just because he's evil is an egregious underutilization of Fire Emblem's potential for delivering interesting plots with its gameplay style. It'd be conducive to just about any plot than entails the protagonist having command of a fighting platoon and the battles being largely bigger-scale fights that span about your average Fire Emblem map's worth of space, and yet they've mostly just used the one premise, albeit with frequent variations here and there, but the same basic conflict.

So, like, is everyone just forgetting that there can be more than one "native" race/ethnic group to a continent...? Eurasia is all one continent, and it has tons of different races/ethnic groups. Africa is one continent and it also has plenty. I haven't really looked into it, but I'm sure the Americas had a good amount of ethnic groups, too, even before they started being colonized by various European nations. I get that Fire Emblem continent sizes are generally implicitly not quite that large, but I still don't think it'd be a far cry to say that there's just more than one race native to the continent. In regards to how they got there, I feel it also warrants bringing up that humans, in general, did not originate on a bunch of different continents at once. We arose in Africa, and over many, many years, spread out to other regions and continents. This happened many millennia ago, and if we're going by that, then technically, humans, as a species in general, are not native to any continent but Africa. My point here is that there's also sort of a cutoff point where the time and manner at which X ethnic/racial group arrived in Y geographical location kinda stops being important or relevant for most intents and purposes. ...And also this. Fire Emblem is literally made up, including the worlds it takes place in. Sure, continents and countries may take inspiration from various real-life nations and cultures, but that hardly means they are or are obligated to be perfect 1/1 equivalents. As for Hoshidans being East Asian, it's worth noting that they wear very East Asian style clothes, wield weapons to match—by default, at least—and come from a nation with a very East Asian culture and very East Asian architecture. I don't think them having wacky anime hair colors is really a point against that, considering wacky and improbable hair colors have been all over the Fire Emblem series—and many, many more works, many of which star characters who are explicitly Japanese—since the very beginning. If anything, the problem is that Yusuke Kozaki isn't so great at diversifying the facial features of his characters. At least, not along the axis of race/ethnicity.

By my count, the Fire Emblem series as a whole has just about six hundred cast members in playable characters alone as of this writing, and that's not even getting into antagonists and NPCs. I am absolutely for more racial diversity in Fire Emblem, both because I think there are a lot of people who would be really happy to see people who are like them in that regard represented, and because, with a cumulative cast that huge, Fire Emblem needs every venue for differentiating character designs it can get. Also, in regards to Echoes changing the skin tones of some people from Gaiden, even Gaiden wasn't consistent with the characters' designs. There are two sources of official artwork, and those two plus the in-game sprites would often give at least two takes on a given character's appearance between them, if not three. Not to mention that one of the sources of official art was pretty much Sameface Samehair Double-Bonanza and thus really should not be used as a frame of reference when trying to revamp the cast's designs. I can kinda understand being bugged by inconsistency—this is the third hair color Boey has had, for example—but I honestly find it very hard to see it as a bad thing to change the skin tones of decades-old characters whose designs were only vaguely-defined to begin with. And, just gonna give my two cents on this, but I'm pretty sure neither Boey nor Gray are "tanned"—at least not in the sense that one would "get a tan"; I'm almost certain that's just supposed to be their normal, biological skin tones. As to what real-life ethnicity/race they'd correspond to, though, I couldn't really say. It's largely up to each player how they want to see them, I'd think. I tend to see them as being of darker-skinned Mediterranean or perhaps Latinx heritage, personally, but it's hardly for me to dictate or anything. All things considered, I'm quite fond of most of the redesigns, personally, especially how Hidari differentiated Alm's original three Villager buddies from each other way better than just having them each be slightly-different edits of the same base sprite. Also, in my opinion, Echoes!Boey's probably got one of the raddest designs of any Mage in the series, not gonna lie.

My apologies; I actually haven't played Thracia 776 past the first chapter and a half or so, so I didn't want to make assumptions, but nor did I want to simply parrot the Wiki without having knowledge of my own by which to assess its claims. Thanks for the corrections!

The way I see it, there are a decent amount, albeit some less common than others. I'm trying to exclude archetypes that are purely "the first character you get of X class", because in order for it to truly count as an archetype, it needs to go a bit deeper than that. The CAIN/ABEL, AKA CHRISTMAS KNIGHTS: A pair of two units of the same class, with one having a more hotheaded personality, and the other being more calm, with the differences in their stat balances tailored to match. These units are almost always Cavaliers, although on rare occasions they will be other classes instead, and almost always one of the characters will be given a predominantly-green color scheme, and the other a predominantly-red color scheme. They will almost always be recruited very early in the game, and frequently, although not always, at the same time. Examples: Cain/Abel, Boey/Mae, Luke/Roderick, Noish/Alec, Kane/Alva, Alen/Lance, Kent/Sain, Forde/Kyle, Oscar/Kieran, Sully/Stahl, Kaze/Saizou The CECIL: A bit of a sub-archetype to the Christmas Knights, and the archetype's awkward, less-common little sibling. A third unit of the same class as the Christmas Knights who is more or less equally as viable as they are, and who generally either stands in for them in their absence, is somehow affiliated or friends with them, or both. They tend to have their own third type of stat balance, as well as their own color scheme. Examples: Cecil, Lowen, Franz, Makalov, Frey, Kagero The JAGEN: Some love them, some hate them, everyone knows them. The prepromoted unit who joins the party very early on, if not from the get-go, and are intended serve primarily as a "panic button" unit to help you out of tricky situations. They're usually a class that promotes from Cavalier, but not always. Examples: Jagen, Arran (in FE3/12), Quan, Eyvel, Marcus, Seth, Titania, Sothe (in FE10), Frederick, Gunter The DRAUG: The first Knight recruited into the player's party, and a vassal in service of either the main character or another plot-important ally. They often join very early on. Examples: Draug, Lukas, Arden, Bors, Oswin, Gilliam, Gatrie, Kellam, Effie The GORDIN: The first Archer recruited into the player's party. They often have humble origins, although not always. They often join very early on. Examples: Gordin, Python, Ryan, Midir, Tania, Runan, Wolt, Wil, Rebecca, Neimi, Rolf, Leonardo, Virion, Setsuna The NORNE: A more specific sub-archetype of the Gordin. A plucky young villager who is proficient in archery and joins the protagonists early on, often as a result of being affected by some misfortune that protagonists seek to oppose. They are often tied to another recruitable character via a childhood friendship. Examples: Tania, Wil, Rebecca, Neimi, Norne The BORD/CORD: A pair of two axe Fighters, often with complementary personalities, similar to the Christmas Knights. Much like the Christmas Knights, there is often one more fiery Fighter with a more offense-oriented stat build, and a calmer Fighter with a more balanced or Skill-oriented stat build. Also much like the Christmas Knights, they tend to come at the same time as a pair. Examples: Bord/Cord, Orsin/Halvan, Lot/Wade, Dorcas/Bartre, Garcia/Ross The NAVARRE: Often the first Myrmidon the player recruits, Navarres very often wield Killing Edges, are almost exclusively recruited from the enemy side, and tend to have long hair and rather mysterious, secretive vibes. Examples: Navarre, Samuel, Ayra, Chulainn, Shiva, Rutger, Guy, Joshua, Marisa, Zihark, Lon'qu The LENA: A healer who joins the party early in the game after they are rescued or escape from enemy captors or assailants, and/or they come to the protagonists seeking help. Examples: Lena, Silque, Edain, Elen, Serra, Natasha, Laura, Maribelle The POWER TRIO: A trio of characters of the same class, very often a set of three Pegasus Knight sisters, with a special bond with one another. They can perform a Triangle Attack together when arranged in a certain position around a target enemy. Examples: Palla/Catria/Est, Vampa/Fetra/Eliu, Bleg/Meng/Maybell, Shanna/Thea/Juno, Bors/Gwendolyn/Barthe, Florina/Fiora/Farina, Vanessa/Tana/Syrene, Boyd/Oscar/Rolf, Marcia/Tanith/Elincia(/Sigrun), Barst/Bord/Cord (FE12 only) The EST: A character who joins later in the game, severely underleveled, but with great potential when trained. They are almost always fairly young in age. Examples: Est, Coirpre, Charlot, Miranda, Sara, Sophia, Zeiss, Nino, Ewan, Elincia The ARRAN/SAMSON: A pair of two units around mid-game, of whom the player can either recruit one or the other, but not both. Examples: Arran/Samson, Deen/Sonya, Iuchar/Iucharba, Olwen/Ilios, Saias/Ced, Lalum/Elffin, Echidna/Bartre, Wallace/Geitz, Harken/Karel The GOTOH: A very powerful character, generally elderly who joins the party close to or during the endgame in order to provide the player with a failsafe in case they've lost many strong characters already. Examples: Gotoh, Mycen, Ced (FE5), Karel (FE6), Athos, Tibarn, Naesala, Giffca, Nagi, Basilio, Flavia The GHARNEF: A sinister manipulator with a proficiency in the magical arts. While rarely the true final boss of the game, they are the ultimate driving force behind many of the story's calamities. Examples: Gharnef, Judah, Manfroy, Nergal, Riev, Lyon, Sephiran, Validar, Iago The CAMUS: An enemy commander with a just and noble heart, but convictions that force them to fight the protagonists' party against either group's wishes. Examples: Camus, Eldigan, Ishtar, Reinhardt, Galle, Lloyd, Linus, Selena, Shiharam, Levail, Xander (Birthright) The BANDIT BROTHERS: A more recent archetype, originating in Binding Blade. A pair of bandit siblings who are quite fond of each other, and often have rather flamboyant and somewhat effeminate personalities. Their character designs tend to directly call back to the original pair to a noticeably greater degree than most archetypes. Examples: Maggie/Rose, Paul/Jasmine, Pain/Agony, Vincent/Victor, Lloyd/Llewelyn

Roger's a Lance-user, though, and while he can use Swords in Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, and Bows in Shadow Dragon and New Mystery, he can never use Axes without reclassing. I guess that didn't stop them from giving Sheena axes, though, so anything's possible, hehe~

Honestly, it's never gonna happen unless they either deliberately have a character focus for obscure/overlooked characters or just completely run out of even remotely major plot characters to add, but I'd love to see Roger in the game. He's sort of that one weird oft-overlooked character who I always use, and who never lets me down. I'm not betting on it or anything, but it'd be cool to see him, at least. I'd certainly put him on my team.

Ooooo, I love this sort of topic! POLKA, Heavenly Sharpshooter (Avatar character from Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem ~Heroes of Light and Shadow~) TURKS, Erudite Blade (Avatar character from Fire Emblem Awakening) I ended up putting a lot of time into these, oops.

Go to the My Castle found at address 03704-69497 78588-23755. Recruit literally any character from their team. Give the character you recruited at least one weapon they can use. Bring only your chosen character plus your MU to the chapter. Have your MU hide in Guard Stance behind your chosen character. Enjoy having, on a game-mechanical level, literally no chance of failure as you absolutely destroy everything on the map in a single round of combat apiece.

The way I see it, the attacking staves in Heroes were kind of just there so that healers would have something to go in their weapon slot; they're still really not very good fighters at all. Frankly, the way the game is set up, mechanically, they could absolutely have just had staves be healing/support-only, delegating them to only going in the "Support" skill slot, and making the weapon types of all Staff-using characters some other weapon they were capable of using, which in most cases would be some color of Tomes. I wouldn't necessarily object to the attacking staves being in the main games, but I've never really found healers to be that direly in need of them, frankly. I would absolutely love for the various status and other general non-healing staves to be given more presence and usefulness, though. You are remembering correctly. Staves can't actually be equipped in any of the handheld games; the closest it comes is the 3DS games showing characters holding the highest staff on their inventory list in battle if they get attacked when they don't have a weapon equipped.

I suppose my feelings on this are a little complex. On the one hand, I do think that it's absolutely possible to go too far in making changes, to the point where it kinda stops being the same thing anymore, thus killing the point of the localization to begin with. Ghost Stories is one example of this, in the sense that the dub is essentially an officially-sanctioned, professionally-cast abridged series rather than anything resembling an actual translation/localization of the source thing. Although, in another way, I also kinda consider this a bad example of a badly-done localization, because it's clearly not even trying to be a localization of the original work at all. Something that is trying to be a localization of the original work, but doing a poor job of it, would be a better example, I think. However, it is also absolutely possible to have translations that are so direct and literal as to end up being inaccurate, too. Localizing a work is about a lot more than just translating words; you have to translate not only meanings, but entire concepts and experiences, to a new audience. The example of Ryoma hitting Shiro up there illustrates that pretty well. That scene would likely be interpreted by many Western players as child abuse, and cast Ryoma and Shiro's relationship in a decidedly different light, in Westerners' eyes, than the original creators intended. It is a delicate balancing act, though. Even just within the original language version, the same character could come off a dozen different ways to a dozen different people, who all home in on different aspects of that character and lend different amounts of weight to different facets of their personality and motivations. Making tweaks to preserve the intended audience perception of a character can be necessary for a good localization, but changing them to the point of them being essentially a different character is going a bit too far, I think. I'm really not opposed to localization changes on principle, but I do think that there should at least be some sort of good reason for them.

Probably should've responded to this in my first post, but you could be an Awakening Dread Fighter or an Oni Chieftain. Axes and Tomes, best of both worlds! Or a War Monk/Cleric, if healing is more your thing than offensive magic.

Well, hey, you could also see it as lucky! Despite what the existence of the Gharnef archetype—and tons of other characters in fantasy media in general—would have you believe, Dark isn't always evil, hehe~ Besides, it gives you the unique ability to increase your friends' accuracy, evasion, critical hit chance, and critical hit evasion all at once when you're near them! And, no problem~

Back at it again with hot content nobody cares about, I went and compiled a complete chart of the affinity yields of every possible birth month/blood type combination in FE7. And yeah, there's exactly one combination out of the possible 48 that actually yields Darkness. It's up to you if you actually wanna put this on the site or not, but uh, here it is, if you decide to.

Healers all have really weird growths in FE1. Wrys is really bad in all areas, Elice is really good in all areas (but doesn't exist until the penultimate chapter), and Lena and Maria both have pretty good growths in three or four stats, and then zeroes everywhere else. They're probably perfectly usable as combat units, due to how promotion bonuses work, but since Weapon Level is a single numerical value that's shared across all usable weapon types, there's really no reason to use them over Wendell or Boah or a promoted Merric or Linde.

I actually don't remember how much EXP he gives, but I don't think it was anything all that special; just a normal kill's worth at best, I believe. I wouldn't bother resetting.

This is something I've sorta been pondering for a while. On the one hand, Spear Fighters and Spear Masters, like Tellius Soldiers and Halberdiers, are balanced, Lance-using footsoldiers associated with the militaries of their home countries. However, Spear Fighter also has some skills which are associated with it that the Tellius Soldier line does not have, although skills work very differently in 3DSFE compared to Jugdral/Tellius, so I wouldn't really consider the skills each 3DSFE class learns to be quite equivalent to having them as built-in "class skills" in a Jugdral/Tellius-style setup. Also worth considering is that the option for Spear Fighters to promote into a mixed physical/magical class in Basara would almost certainly not be mirrored in a theoretical second promotion option for Tellius Soldiers. What are everybody's thoughts on this? I'm having trouble coming to a conclusion, myself.

@RedEyedDrake Oh, I know how you were using the word; I just meant that Minerva being the one to wield it is the only thing that really suggests that Hauteclere is associated with Macedon and its royal family in particular. It's definitely very much Archanea's "Legendary Axe" as of the DS remakes, but the degree to which it's associated with Macedon/its royal family specifically is rather dubious.

Could be wrong here, but there's a chance that there's a limit to how many added classes (from Friendship/Partner Seals, DLC class items, etc.) can be stored in a character's reclass set, in which case you could've overwritten Lodestar with the latest class. Again, that's probably wrong, but it is a thought, at least.

Like a week late, but while I kinda agree on the point of changing Minerva's weapon mention to reference her primary weapon type rather than her secondary one, Hauteclere actually isn't any sort of regalia of Macedon or anything like that. A villager in... I think Chapter 8 or 10 or so of Shadow Dragon states that nobody knows where it came from or who made it, but that it's an incredibly powerful weapon. I don't think it's supposed to be associated with Macedon in particular; it's just a super strong axe, and Minerva's currently the one wielding it. Macedon does have a defined regalia item, though, but it's actually Iote's Shield, not Hauteclere.

I adore getting to customize characters, too, hehe... I just wish IS would allow us to actually customize the character somewhat, too; not just the unit.