hinode

The last Ultimate Training DLC stage has a boss Sorceror with 99 Luck, Miracle, hacked forged Nosferatus, Dragonskin, Vantage, and a bunch more goodies.

Out of curiosity, do you remember if the enemies ever attack the units marked 2 or 4 on that formation? I've tested the AI on Normal/Hard on that mission and found that they will only attack PCs in a straight line to the left, right, or below Tiki's position with a 9 unit human wall around her (didn't bother to reposition her). I had L2 Villager Donnel and L5 Troubadour Maribelle elsewhere on the line and they were completely ignored even though the enemy could trivially OHKO them to smash my formation. Considering the unique AI for that stage I'm not actually expecting it to change on Lunatic, though it's at least theoretically possible. If the AI works the same way you "only" need 3 Pair Up teams who can tank the waves of enemies plus some warm bodies to complete the wall.

Awakening is the Fire Emblem game that most resembles conventional SRPGs in terms of features, with random battles, infinite level-ups, reclassing for skill learning, a return of the marriage system and children, extensive amounts of spotpass and paid DLC content to extend gameplay, etc. If you approach Fire Emblem games like RPGs, you'll find that Awakening has far more content than any other game in the series and tons of room for character growth, both in terms of stats and personality via support conversations. There are also several upcoming DLC stages specifically designed to test even the most optimized teams, so there's more pupose to all the grinding that you can do than just seeing a bunch of shiny stat-capped numbers. Fans coming into the game with this perspective is where a lot of the "almost perfect", "best game in series", etc. hype comes from, I think. This is also the mindset of most professional reviewers, hence the strongly positive reactions that it's gotten from the video game press. When approached as a pure strategy game, FE13 is much more of a mixed bag. An enormous amount of the RPG features and content mentioned above can utterly trivialize the game's challenge and render any need for serious strategy largely moot, so they have to be avoid to make things interesting. The huge variation in effectiveness of a heavily optimized team vs an average one made it impossible for the designers to create stages as intricate as some of FE12's could get on higher difficulties. Difficulty leven on Hard and Lunatic can spike and drop dramatically depending on what sort of team you're using, how many paralogues/skirmishes/etc. you've played, and what order you play things, which better designed FEs have avoided in the past precisely due to their linearity. Awakening still has quite a bit to offer when played this way, but you have to sift through a lot of cruft first and it probably won't feel as polished as some previous games in the series. A good section of the hardcore Fire Emblem fanbase mostly approaches the series from this type of pure strategy perspective, and I suspect that they will have legitimate grievances with the game. Of course it's certainly possible to enjoy playing Fire Emblem games both as harder than average SRPGs and as a pure strategy game, which myself and quite a few of my friends do. These people will almost surely enjoy Awakening a lot, but I'll guess many of them find it more satisfying from the former perspective than the latter in the long run. I have a fair number of friends from other sites like this and they pretty much all rate FE13 highly, but most of them don't consider it the best game in the series.

Was "exalted warriors" capitalized or not in Leif's dialogue? I beat the stage once but didn't write down the contents, so I forget. If it was capitalized, then it was meant to be a title. If not, it's merely a descriptive phrase. We should probably all bear in mind that translated terms from past games that don't directly show up in Awakening may well be tentative ones they came up with on the spur of the moment and aren't necessarily locked in stone forever, especially ones from Spotpass notices that are essentially promotional material. A bunch of FE1 characters who got nameddropped in Super Smash Bros Brawl got retranslated for Shadow Dragon, after all, nor did NoA stick with Serlis from their ancient FE7 site in this game's translation.

Dual Strike+ and Dual Guard+ should not be so close together if availability is being seriously factored in - L1 Lord vs L15 Great Knight is a huge, huge difference in access time. DS+ feels more useful to me on paper even in a vacuum because I count on Dual Strikes for offense a lot more than Dual Guards for defense, but even if you if you think DG+ is better I can't possibly see it being better enough to close that enormous gap in availability.

The earliest plot second seal is on stage 8 I believe, but you can get one Second Seal for hitting 100 Renown. 7 stages + 3 paralogues is just enough to get that right before C8 if you never play a skirmish/spotpass/DLC chapter at all, but with grinding you can get it after C4.

Silesia got renamed as well, so the Awakening translators seem to be removing all the real world names from Jugdral while keeping the mythological references intact.. They're still going to be stuck with Bern in Elibe and Crimea in Tellius, though.

Those are the only ones where the conversation is completely different, I think, but several others will have similar content with some variations on the text. Donnel/AvatarF B support has a couple more lines at the end where he says compliments first Avatar on her looks and then all the female on your team, for instance. And while I haven't actually seen the Virion/AvatarM text yet, I'm 99% sure Virion won't hit on him the way he does on AvatarF in his B and A supports since AvatarM isn't as pretty as Libra.

Does any of the Japanese flavor text for the class say anything about demonic power or the likes, though? Everything I've found indicates that the class description focuses on their high resistance. As far as I can tell Demon Fighter is something that the fan community latched onto because it was the first valid translation of the kanji that they saw and it's a badass-sounding name, but not the meaning that the developers were aiming for.

Paralogue 2 Anna and Paralogue 4 Anna are separate characters, so it doesn't matter.

I'm about 99% convinced "Magic Fighter" is the intended reading of the kanji there, given the high res cap and +10 resistance skill. It's a class built to fight mages, not demons. I'm expecting that the official name of the class to be something along the lines of Mageslayer or Spellbreaker, to make the concept clear.

Wow, as of right now 44/77 female Avatars married Chrom. That makes him the runaway winner on the marriage poll, despite male Avatars nearly doubling their female counterparts overall. Wife choices are a lot more spread out, with Cordelia having a clear lead but Sariya, Lucina, and Lissa also getting significant numbers.

According to this very site, Ichival (or however, you spell it, the fan community's never been totally consistent about this one) was supposed to be an indirect reference to the Norse God Ullr's dwelling of Ydalir, which means yew-dale. Ichii = yew in Japanese is pretty clear cut, but the -val/-bal part is pretty unclear. Using an abbreviated form of the English word valley would be pretty unusual, but I haven't seen any better theories out there after searching the internet for a while. Yew has already been established as the only part of the name that makes clear-cut sense. The best I could find on 'felle' on the internet, is that it's the Norwegian word for trap, which... well, if you squint at it, is sort of reminiscent of a dale. It's about as ambiguous as the -val/-bal part of Ichival in Japanese, which... does make Yewfelle a fitting translation, in a sorta roundabout way.

Where are you getting Rackesis and Vylon from? I haven't seen either of them on the Localized Name Discovery thread or the main site's FE13 section.

Couldn't you equip Mystletainn for an extra +5 skill? That plus a skill potion would raise the skill to 84, to raise the maximum activation rate up to 31%. Then again this all feels pointless, you should be ORKOing just about everything short of Gimle with capped stats, Dual Attack, and all these stat modifiers even before lethality kicks in. Maybe not on Lunatic, but doing all the grinding to pull this off on Lunatic doesn't sound remotely practical, either.

To expand on this this, 'Sword Saint' is a rather literal translation of the term 'Kensei', a real-life title applied to legendary swordsmen like Miyamoto Musashi and Sasaki Kojiro. Renha's title isn't meant to be a reference to any specific previous FE character, it's just a case of IntSys reusing the same honorary title yet again. Incidentally, T.G. Cid's Holy Swordsman class in Final Fantasy Tactics was called 'Kensei' in Japanese. I believe the PSP version retranslated the class as 'Sword Saint' as well.