Topaz Light

I don't really mind level progression at all. It's certain worth trying other things out instead of it sometimes and not just accepting it as a given, but I think it's a pretty decent system. One thing I have noted, though, is that it and a basically-linear equipment progression system are essentially redundant with each other, since they're both separate forms of equally-linear stat growth progression, except in rare instances where there are equipment pieces that actually do other things besides give linear stat boosts, and even those are usually eclipsed by the inevitable "best" equip in that area that gives all the bonuses at once. I do think balancing a level curve well is important, though. Ideally, it should be possible, but more difficult, to do things while you're below the recommended level for it, but the game also shouldn't force you to pick between that and grinding... That is to say, grinding should never be basically mandated in order to progress through the game, because all that is is padding, not actual additional content. I do say this, of course, with an understanding of the fact that older, particularly NES, RPGs often end up requiring grinding in today's gaming environment due to walkthroughs and such information being readily available, when they were originally balanced around the idea that the player would gain the necessarily levels just wandering around figuring out what to do on their own. At least, that's my understanding of it. On the topic of Xenoblade, I don't think it's particularly good game design to artificially increase the effects of level disparity in that way, because not only is it redundant with the level difference itself, but it also tries rather heavy-handedly to push the player into playing the game a certain way, and players should not be penalized for, say, trying to take on challenges they're underleveled for.

I find that Roger and Cord are consistently good for me in Shadow Dragon, despite that I never really hear anybody... talk about them at all, really. I also got pretty good results out of Sniper Raiden/Leiden/however you spell his name in New Mystery during my Hard mode playthrough. I vaguely recall having a pretty decent Archer→Sniper Roshea during an early Shadow Dragon playthrough, but that was a while ago. On that note, and a similarly long time ago, I think I ended up with a pretty solid Trec in Binding Blade, albeit not without a little bit of favoritism to get him going. Gonna second Lowen in Blazing Blade, too. He's a really weird high-HP-but-otherwise-mixed-bag-type unit, but he usually ends up decent enough. His one extra point of constitution lets him wield more weapons without speed penalty and his quick, early supports with Rebecca do a lot to help the both of them get going.

I personally consider Athena's hair to be really dark blue, but in-game, she's assigned the brown hair color for her battle sprite, so I don't know what that means for her usability in this particular run. As for reclassing, especially if you're using such a limited set of characters, I'd totally allow it, personally, to make sure you have decent diversity on your team and/or access to certain classes that don't have any blue-haired members.

I tend to like kitsune better, mainly because I find the mythology around them in real life appeals a bit more to me personally, and I tend to prefer softer, "prettier" sorts of appearances. I do like both, though, honestly.

If I feel like wearing shorts, then whatever weather the current day has is shorts weather

Not necessarily, since we don't know who the other parent was. It's very possible Robin just takes very much after their mother, appearance-wise. That sort of thing does happen with the children of real-world interracial couples.

I am all for doing away with species-based morality, as a thing, wherever it may appear, so I'd be down to see either or both of those things. I've always kinda wished that Dragons as a race were delved into more and treated as more human, rather than so often just being used as monsters or deities. Different Dragons of the same subspecies should have different personalities, different views and stances on important matters, different moral compasses, etc. just like humans do! It's not like all Earth Dragons, all Divine Dragons, all Fire Dragons, etc. are each their own respective hive mind or anything; they'd each have their own unique perspective on the world that could lead them down any number of paths, just like it could a human.

He could always, y'know, just be genetically dark-skinned. Like a huge portion of the real world's human population.

Mainly Gheb, Peri, and Corrin are coming to mind. Gheb's just an awful excuse for a human being, Peri would I guess be an okay starting point for a character if she ever evolved beyond that point, which she really doesn't, and Corrin's just a mess with a bland, uninteresting personality.

I think that having an Avatar is a much better idea gameplay-wise than it is story-wise, at least the way they've done it as of this writing. The Avatar is allegedly supposed to be a self-insert character, but they're actually just as much a predefined character as any other for the purposes of the main plot; you just get to customize their build as a unit in gameplay, as well as their gender and some purely-cosmetic visual and audio attributes, which, while admittedly fun, is not the same as them being a truly player-defined character. I'd like for them to introduce things like dialogue options and actual plot choices that have real importance if they are to bring the Avatar back, to let you craft who they are as a character, not just as a unit. I don't actually mind Robin all that much, honestly. Corrin is badly-written, but that's a quality that's far from unique to them within their home game. Mark was totally unobtrusive to me, and I really didn't mind their presence at all. Can't really speak as to Kris's impact on Mystery of the Emblem's writing and story, since I've only played in Japanese (which I can't really read yet), but they might be one of my favorite Avatars gameplay-wise. I appreciated getting to choose their base class, and the optional mid-game bonus appearance traits were a fun touch. I don't really have much of a stake either way in whether or not FESwitch has an Avatar, or kids for that matter. My own hope is honestly just that the story is written with each of those things in mind if it is to be present, so we don't end up with another thing like the absolutely stupid justification Fates tries to give for having child characters in that game. I actually really like kids as a mechanic, I just want actual, functional plot justification for it like in Genealogy of the Holy War or at least Awakening. All that said, I'd totally be cool with not having either of those things. Neither of them are even close to being the crux of my enjoyment of the series, so I'm fine either way, just as long as they commit to the direction they pick to go in and do it well.

I don't mind the change to Tobin at all; the name works just fine. It's just a little silly to me that they just changed one letter, like it's Robin's evil twin Tobin or something. I'm not bothered by it at all, hehe~

Oh, huh. I guess I just always assumed he came with it in his inventory and never actually looked it up. In that case… I have no idea why it's there. That's odd.

Lark was the one that had come to mind for me, but it mostly just stems from my desire to try to retain name meanings and themes and such over than aural/visual similarities when names must be changed in localization, unless it's just a made-up name that happens to be close to an existing regular one. And, I don't really think it has to be a "common" or "accepted" name, as long as it sounds namey enough and not too silly for the character and/or series. All names were originally just made up by humans, after all, and it's not like we've passed some deadline in time that means we have to stop making up new names… although there are some people who really should.

Luthier and Deen are the official localized names, as shown in Fire Emblem Awakening and Fire Emblem Heroes' Choose Your Legends poll. Luthier was originally Ryūto (リュート), while Deen's name is a fairly faithful translation of Dīn (ディーン), albeit a rather odd choice of spelling as opposed to just using the more standard "Dean". Oh, I know. What I mean was, knowing that Gaiden!Robin's name would need to be changed, I would've gone with naming him after a different bird instead of just changing it to Tobin.

Might be kinda interesting if they kept Saizo, honestly, since that could be read by people who liked Fates as a tie-in to that game while being unobtrusive to people who didn't, since that character was named Saizo first. As for the others, it'd be pretty easy to just change them to similar names, i.e. Wolf → Wolfgang, etc. Aside from that, my thoughts on the localized names are that I'm okay with them! For the most part, there's nothing that egregious or anything. Robin → Tobin seems a little silly, although that might just be my bias in favor of using another bird name instead speaking. Leon and Leo just switching names in localization is still really funny to me, honestly. I love that that's a thing that happened.

This is a big plus for me, honestly. I really love when "gods" in fictional settings turn out not to actually be of any sort of divine/supernatural origin or nature after all.

I don't really mind it, personally, as long as it's relegated to postgame content and stays out of the way of the original main story, which thankfully looks to be the case. I'm just glad Grima's finally being given some real backstory, and an explanation for the Risen—although rather unneeded, given how common zombies are as stock monsters—is nice, too. I would say it's a bit of a leap to say that this is the whole reason why Gaiden is being remade, though, considering it's only 1/6th of the game. On top of that, Gaiden is the only one of the original Archanea-Valentia trilogy that had yet to be remade, as well as the game that introduced a number of mechanics that featured prominently in Awakening and Fates. It may also have been partly an answer to frequent fan wishes for it to be remade, although that's a little more of a stretch.

I say "seh-REENS", knowing full well that it's wrong and that "sairinus" is the correct pronunciation.

It's Binding Blade's 15th anniversary, so I would've tied the promotion in with that and had Easter versions of Binding Blade characters. Maybe one of each color? Something like Red Carrot Sword Roy, Blue Egg Lilina, and Colorless Easter Basket-on-a-Stick (Staff) Elffin, in bunny costumes… and Green Dragon Egg Fae in a bunny kigurumi.

If it helps, all-new, 100% custom chapters and events/cutscenes are both very possible with GBAFE ROM hacking. Can't speak as to how easy or hard they are, but they're well-trodden territory at this point, so it should be easy to at least find tutorials and utilities and stuff to help you on your way.

EarthBound Beginnings/MOTHER 1 is one of my favorite JRPGs and video games in general of all time. It's also the game in the trilogy that most people suggest skipping over when starting out or just entirely. I'm sure this is partly because I must've played through it around ten times at this point from start to finish, but I find that, while it is grindy and occasionally frustrating, the game isn't nearly as bad as the nigh-unplayable slog people tend to make it out to be. I love the atmosphere and the story, and the game world is really huge and interesting for a NES game. Also, the GBA port of Tales of Phantasia, while admittedly not super great, isn't that bad if you just turn off the voices. Full honesty; although "Claus" is a teensy bit of a departure from クラース, Cress Albane sounds way better and less silly than Cless Alvein.

Not really sure if they count as gaming personalities, since the channel doesn't really have the same sort of... I guess, "boisterousness", that that descriptor often implies, but I find that Dark Pixel Gaming's content is really good if you're looking for more serious, in-depth reviews, analyses, and general coverage of games. I also find that I like ProJared's stuff quite a bit. PeanutButterGamer and SpaceHamster's videos are both fun, although their respective senses of humor don't always align perfectly with my own. I do rather like PBG as a person, from what I know of him from following his Twitter. AntDude is somewhat lower-key, but I've also enjoyed the stuff he makes. And, of course, credit where credit is due to Chuggaaconroy for helping me get into the MOTHER/EarthBound series with his Let's Play of EarthBound Beginnings. I can sort of enjoy the Game Grumps in their own kind of way, but usually when I'm watching their videos it's not actually to watch a video about the particular game they're playing. I do think that Arin has a tendency to kinda... get caught up in his own personal tastes in things and talk about games as though how much they're to his taste is a valid metric by which to judge their objective merit. I don't know if he means to do that, but I do concede that it's frustrating at times. From what I've seen of him outside of his videos, he seems to be a fairly cool, down-to-earth guy, so I have a rather hard time actually disliking him or anything. I used to enjoy JonTron's videos, but recently my dislike for the kind of person he turned out to be really put me off of them. Some people can separate the creator from the works they create, but I really have a hard time doing that. Besides, in this particular case, it's not like JonTron filled some crucial niche in my YouTube-watching life that nobody else can fill or anything, anyway. I think I tried watching some of Markiplier's videos, but they really weren't to my tastes; I never even tried watching PewDiePie's stuff, and in light of recent events, that certainly ain't gonna change. On a different topic from YouTube personalities, despite having only dipped into the very beginnings of two of his games*, I really admire Hideo Kojima's boldness and, for lack of a better word, whimsy, when it comes to designing games. I kinda wanna try to take after him in terms of, like, the degree to which I just brazenly do what I want with my own creations, although what I make would obviously end up drastically different from his stuff on account of personality differences, hehe~ *The original MSX2 Metal Gear 1 and the demo of the 3DS version of Metal Gear Solid 3, for those curious.

This is actually how it was in the first three games, although it's still not as interesting as having split magic types. Yeah, agreed... I get that they wanted to help give struggling players a leg up, but they could've at least made it so that, like, there was a second set of criteria to unlock the sidequest by doing well, instead of poorly. Maybe you'd also get a tougher version of the chapter or something. Aside from that, My Room/Private Quarters is pretty much the only mechanic I'd really rather have just be outright gone from the series. Maybe My Castle as a whole, honestly; it's a huge pacebreaker and there's absolutely nothing in it that's crucial to the gameplay that other Fire Emblem games haven't made available during maps or between chapters or something. Gonna probably get a lot of hate for this, but I really would not object to Awakening's and Fates' skill system going away. I feel it adds too much of a grinding element, and I found skills to be more interesting when they were rather scarce, and a given unit would only have a handful of them at most.

I feel like, as with any character, it depends on the concept for the character themselves. Their personality plus social standing should serve as the basis for their personal grooming standards and style, while facial features can just go in whatever direction works best, since those are genetic and less influenced by personal presentation.

The issue is probably that you weren't actually making proper regular saves, just using save states. Make sure to use regular saves next time you play through the game; they'll work just fine, and are in fact the intended way of saving your progress. They'll let you avoid stuff like this.