Othin

YES YES YES YES YES YES YES I don't know anything about hacking itself, but if there's anything else you need help with figuring out such as sorting through the game's mechanics or working out what translations to use, I will get that information to you without hesitation. I've been working with a friend for a while on menu and other core translations for this game; we never had an implementation method due to not knowing how to hack, but we should be able to offer you a lot to work with on the other stages of development. Just consider me your loyal servant forever, alright?

Tauroneo is not an example of balance.

I'd rather be able to start at Ch1 with the characters at appropriate levels. A bit of auto-leveling like if you skip Lyn's Mode in FE7 could easily make that happen.

I'd probably love FE12 if it had an option to skip the damn Prologue. I get bored with it too fast to make it to the actual game.

dondon's ideas both sound great. Both doubling and Pair Up are incredibly powerful mechanics, and restricting access to one or both could go a long way towards meaningfully balancing classes. An alternative is to just keep working with dismounting. Lock mounts out of indoor maps and spike up the penalties for other terrain, then give them still-increased penalties over foot units even when dismounted. With enough terrain-heavy maps, mounted units and foot units could end up splitting the game about 50/50 in terms of which would have more mobility, even taking into account the mounted units' ability to dismount. Bringing in terrain skills from TRS could also contribute to this. With that kind of even split, as long as the mounted units are otherwise about even with foot units rather than having better stats or weapons, they should be balanced.

SRW tends to have storylines with what, 100-120 maps counting splits? Even if FE could get to that much (Awakening had 75 counting all DLC), it wouldn't be enough for splits coming anywhere close to 12-way for extended periods of time. It'd be really cool to bring back splits and expand on them to take some of them up to 3-4 way, but anything more than that would be ridiculous.

Yeah, it's limited in that doubling requires having a special weapon or skill, but it's not like FE4's "must have Pursuit or Adept or a Brave weapon or you're fucked". There are a bunch of methods, but they all have limits, whether they're rare, high-level weapons or unique personal weapons or skills that require special conditions or trade-offs to trigger or are just plain hard to get. So unless you have a character powerful enough to OHKO weak enemies, you have to use teamwork or get creative or use limited resources to quickly eliminate foes. And of course they have their own ways to fight back. You can't really make enemy attacks "tink" unless you've got a good shield, and those are rare and expensive and get used up if you try to use them too much, and even that's only when you successfully block with them. And you can only reliably dodge when you're fighting really weak enemies and even then when they've got a really shitty weapon (typically axes), unless you've got a special skill to trump a certain weapon type and those are really rare. So what it boils down to is, victory will NEVER be simple.

Varies dramatically. Basic enemies are weaker, but often a few are stronger, and not just bosses, either. But even for the weaker ones, you really can't just sweep them aside with one or two powerful allies like you can in FE. They tend to put up a fight, whether through basic abilities or through special weapons and skills.

It can really depend on how much of a feel you get for the mechanics. What's more concrete is that the game offers permanent saves every five turns. The maps tend to be quite long, lasting a number of turns and with those turns themselves potentially taking a while to play, but you're not overly punished in having to go back to the start. Overall, what I'd say about the difficulty is that it puts up a satisfying resistance, but is fair enough not to be offputting at any skill level. You do have to know how to actually work with the unique playstyle, but the early chapters give you a good chance to get a feel for it without having too much pressure until you can be ready for it.

I had a lot of fun with it, but the AI was awful and made it way too easy at times. A sequel fixing the AI and expanding the game's scope with more Pokemon and more varied missions would be wonderful.

I know about the stages, but was the lack of version-exclusive characters confirmed? It seems plausible, but not certain.

That logic doesn't make any sense. Cutscenes got leaked, so they decided not to bother with them? You could apply that train of thought to any game. And it's not even like they removed just the cutscenes, but also all the gameplay associated with them.

Terrain skills are fucking awesome and belong in every game, no matter the other aspects of the skill system. Even if the game doesn't have a legit skill system at all and it's just innate class abilities like in FE7. But looking at games designed for more complex skills, you can also get things like my favorite skill ever, Pulverize. It's activated by command when you're willing to give up movement for the turn, and doubles your first attack's Mt in exchange for reducing your Def to 0 for the battle. And there are so many other great options. Berwick Saga's version of Astra works by command, but needs to charge passively for seven turns between uses. Then there's Aim, which lets bows get an enormous accuracy boost if the user doesn't move before attacking. And these are all locked to a small number of specific characters, making them distinct from one another. Ceddy, a Thief, has the unique skill Evasion, requiring five turns to charge, but when used, it gives him +50 Avo as long as he remains still. Not moving is also the requirement for using Provoke, another one of his skills, which lets him pick an enemy within range and force them to obsessively follow and try to attack him until it wears off, as long as there's some viable path towards him. It's a fantastic combo for distracting particularly troublesome enemies, of which there are many, and he's the only character who can pull it off. With a lot of character-locked, tactically valuable skills, it's easy to create worthwhile niches for each character, and Berwick Saga does it for almost its entire cast.

Played FE7 first, not too big on it compared to the others. Favorite FE is FE13, with FE5 and FE8 following not particularly close. Although I've taken to preferring the Saga games anyway.

Being directly punishing isn't always necessary if you can instead offer useful rewards. Like the sidequests for pairing up parents.

Technically speaking, Awakening does have scrolls; they're just restricted to the DLC skills. And it's kinda hard to imagine scrolls for random class skills.

The key is guaranteed payoff: some way that you will get something substantial and concrete from them that you wouldn't get without them. Traditional growth characters rely on gaining stats a bit faster while also having a way harder time fighting to hope that they'll somehow gain enough levels to eventually catch up and match the other characters at their own game. That's a recipe for disappointments. It takes something special to pull them out of the "always catching up" rut. Special classes and abilities can do that. Few people complained like this about Lachesis or Leaf in FE4: training them may not be effective for all playstyles, but rather than seeming pointless, they had a clear point to training them when feasible. Now, you can't just toss Master Knights into every game. But some special class, weapon, or skill doesn't seem like too much to ask for characters like these.

Very low growth rates and Exp gain in general are probably the biggest parts, yes.

I don't think so, because Berwick Saga, using that system, had Ward, the least binary Jagen in existence. He's unlikely to ever grow from base, yet those bases simultaneously avoid breaking the earlygame and remain enough to assist as a very subpar but still usable unit all the way to the final chapter. Granted, a lot of factors go into this. But it certainly wouldn't be possible if enemies had to keep up with uncontrollably-growing player characters.

Ranged weapons are meant to be difficult to counter. Is it surprising that some characters and classes might need some work to optimally handle them? And if 1-2 range is such a big deal, who needs any other benefit to gaining weapon ranks?

how horrible that you'd have to train a less dominant skill in order to learn to do something useful

Wait, how so?

The important thing is that it acts as a leash. If pre-promotes can low-man the entire game at base, or just by keeping pace with enemy levels once they catch up, of course you've already got a problem, so that needs a fix. The benefit is that you only have to worry about that more obvious case, not what happens if your characters get way ahead in levels, because they can't get way ahead. They can start way ahead if you set them to start ahead, like a Jagen, but they can't stay ahead because they can't grow until enemies start catching up.

Yeah, now that you mention it, it makes it harder for characters to become overleveled, but it doesn't do much specifically against the ones that are already overleveled, instead slowing down the faster-Exp-gaining characters trying to catch up. With that in mind, I want to reiterate the option of sharply cutting Exp gains for being overleveled. In FE4, you could get Exp gains down to 0 when fighting a foe 10 levels lower or killing a foe 15 levels lower, but that mainly showed up for characters with Paragon who had no trouble getting excessive levels anyway. The penalties could be made harsher to be more relevant like in Berwick Saga. Say, make no Exp from fighting a foe 5 levels lower or killing one 10 levels lower? In a game with levels going up to 20/20 or higher, that'd be noticeable, especially since it'd be preceded by a sharp drop. Of course, the key is to also copy the part about making penalties from being at a higher level lower than the gains from being at a lower level, so you can implement that without being behind by that many levels award double the base Exp gain.

In games like FE5, the difficulty of gaining WExp makes starting WExp more of a differentiating factor between characters, which I think is nice to have. I don't think there's much of a need to take away regular WExp gain completely as long as it's made difficult enough to raise. Characters also could have variable WExp growths so some can master certain weapon types faster than others, or end up unable to train at all past a certain point. This could be especially interesting in games offering characters more control over their classes, like FE13, but it'd be cool regardless. And of course more restricted weapons on either a class or character basis is another great solution, irrespective of this. I liked how FE13 locked certain weapons to Dark Mages, Archers, Myrmidons, and Lords, but it really could've taken it further; most of it was just setting aside a magic classification that was known for being set aside anyway.