Othin

If a married character is defeated, they retreat permanently but survive, like other important characters in past games such as Soren and Titania in the Tellius games.

1) There's no simple answer. Swordmaster is great ingame, but once you've learned the skills and are hitting the caps, it's inferior to Assassin as a postgame class. Griffin Knight is a similar story, having the fantastic Carrier skill, but Dragonmaster has better stats, caps, and weapon access, so once you've learned Carrier, there's little reason to stick with Griffin Knight as opposed to becoming a Dragonmaster. As for the best class, it's generally Sorcerer for how destructive it is with Nosferatu, but for the few characters with the Dark Blessing skill, they can use dark magic in other classes as well, with their own advantages, making Sorcerer largely obsolete. Strategist/Grandmaster is also notable as one of the best class series to start in due to access to War Experience and Rainbow Cry, but as with Swordmaster and Griffin Knight, there are better classes to switch into after learning those skills. 2) Hammerne staffs are rare, but you can get them randomly through skirmishes or through buying them from merchants. You can only buy one for each merchant that shows up, though. And ultimately, you can get just about anything else in unlimited quantities as well, so from a postgame perspective, they're not so special.

Chapter 17, in one of the chests in the upper left. Good luck reaching it on the higher difficulties, though. As the first map with entirely promoted enemies, it can be really tough to survive long enough to even reach the chest rather than cutting straight to the boss to end the map as fast as possible.

It's a temporary niche, but as it stands, at high levels, you can hold onto the skill in other classes. They're a transitional class, not a lasting one. They have plenty of use, especially ingame when you stick with those transitional classes for most of the game, but it still seems like less than they're capable of.

Actually, even mine was about twice as long.

The DLC so far costs another 6100 yen at full price, with another ~650 for the remaining OWR and UT maps and who knows how much for FoD. Well worth it, but not cheap. On another note, Raven brought up the interface. I want to emphasize a couple of specific aspects: the way the improved direct target-select system makes it n easy and fast matter to implement complex strategies without even needing to bother with the menu and the way the enemy attack range viewer allows you to highlight the whole enemy range while still keeping individually selected ranges distinctly visible through using different colors for the two. Both are huge conveniences.

In FE13, they really don't do much to grab their own niche, but I still think it's better for them to try to keep working with that than make them just another flying class, resulting in way too many.

You can go back and play any "regular" sidequests you missed regardless of how long you wait, but you can only play each of them once. This includes the six sidequests distributed through SpotPass for the secret characters. For the past-game SpotPass characters, yeah, you can summon any characters you've downloaded at any time and as many times each as you want; they appear somewhere on the world map and you can fight them and their subordinates in a skirmish. Not sure what you mean by "free" DLC, but yes, you can replay any DLC you've unlocked unlimited times per file.

FE4 came out in 96. Red and Green also came out in Japan in 96, two and a half years before Red and Blue came to America, but breeding wasn't added until Gold and Silver in 99.

That's technically true. FE breeding came before Pokemon breeding.

Got Petrine. Turns how her unique skill is actually Lance Expert, answering the last big question. Her team isn't as strange as Oliver's, but it has its own oddities. Her six Great Knights have specifically Cavalier, Knight, and Great Knight skills, but they have five different weapons between them. And the three Dragonmasters all have identical stats, but one has a Brave Axe as opposed to the others' Silver Lances and adds Early Initiative and Astra on top of the other two's three standard skills. Shame the Brave Axe glitch still means it drops to Silver on higher difficulty levels, but at least it's better than affecting half the team as with Ephraim and Oliver.

You summon SpotPass characters at will, so they appear however much you want. But DLC is the main focus, as are any endgame sidequests you didn't finish - particularly Valhart's and Paris's, which are substantially harder than the final chapter.

We've all got Vaida/Wallace on the mind, I see.

Is that a surprise? They exclusively appear in Tellius; there's no reason why they'd appear outside of FE9/10 unless we had another game set there.

Hmm hmm hmm. Rewatching the video, right after it shows the insane enemies, it shows UT4. Several enemy squads appear, with odd classes, but then the last, massive wave shows up: the boss for that wave is a Hero, flanked by a lone Dark Pegasus and Battle Monk, with a bunch of generic Battle Clerics. Shortly afterward, still in the UT section, it shows Krom fighting a Hero in a map that looks exactly like UT4's, and the Hero activates Great Shield+. It looks like you're right, Vincent. The Hero is one of the map's bosses, and the Dark Pegasus is another important enemy in that chapter, while the Battle Cleric is one of the generics. And it closes down the actual content shown in the video to what it seems like otherwise: Harvest of Bonds and the four UT maps, the first five maps set to be released in Series 2. So it looks like those enemies really are the denizens of UT4, although most of the enemies are the weakest of the three. This really sets it apart from the other three, and would justify the apparent delay, although I'm still not sure why it's happening. As for FoD, I guess it's just something completely different.

Ah, but the main story didn't involve passing through the Other-World Gate. All DLC does. Also explains why the enemies have Evil Dragon Scale, Gimle's special skill, and the enemy strength explains why they got such a thorough grip on that world. After all, this is a world that's been taken to the point of being seemingly hopeless, where the other playable characters are largely dead. Makes sense that taking it back would require fighting the strongest foes possible.

I like most things, particularly the Double system and the extreme enemy strength to make it matter, as well as the class/skill system. Also the huge amount of bonus content in sidequests, expanded by SpotPass and DLC. Overall it manages to have enormous continued play value per file and replay value to result in a ridiculously long-lasting game as a result. As for dislikes, the first one that stands out is having only three files. With how long each file lasts combined with how much else there is to do on new files, three slots just isn't enough. Also some art issues with absurd fanservice; Serge is the worst offender, although I like the character designs as a whole. Similarly, while I like the battle models otherwise, the TINY FEET really screw them up. The characters don't appear to have the substance to match up with their numbers of supports, except for the ones that don't have enough supports at all, which is frustrating. And as arvilino said, while the game makes some effort, it really doesn't do as much as it should have to protect the integrity of the highest difficulty levels throughout the main story, even if it only did more for Lunatic+. But most of this is just a matter of already things I already like not being quite as great as they could have been. Compared with the other FE games, I have virtually no complaints about FE13, and I'd call it my overall favorite game right now.

Excellent, as it deserves. I don't think it's much of a stretch to hope that Nintendo will catch on to the value of this fantastic business model as a standard for the future.

Not quite. The three enemies we saw with Lunatic+ skills and utter disrespect for stat caps were all Other-Worlders, while the enemies in UT have all been Corpse Soldiers. With little doubt, those are FoD enemies, not UT, so we'll be waiting a few weeks to see them and their demonic buddies. What we do know is that UT4 involves surviving against five waves of enemies. We've seen a few seconds of it in the video announcing the new DLC, showing a huge storm of enemies appearing at once for one wave, along with what looks like several bosses, one for each wave. So no matter what, we know some things about how the map will go. Unless by some chance it gets announced tonight, it'll be announced next week for two weeks from now.

Oh shit. That's not a good sign. Maybe tomorrow, like they've done sometimes? Although I don't see why they'd wait. What does the game call it? Others?

Odd that we haven't seen the new DLC announcement yet...

We already know their unique skills from LvD, for the most part. Camus: Luna or Lightning Speed Trabant: Renewal Ishtar: Astra Narshen: Vengeance Lloyd: Pass Linus: Counter Ursula: Magic Expert Selena: Resistance Cry Petrine: Lance Expert or Magnificent Flame Oliver: Luna Camus and Petrine are the odd cases because as Paladins, they only have two class skills they could have as enemies, plus their unique skill, plus a Slayer skill, so they still need one more filler skill to get the maximum of five skills like the others in LvD. But it seems like the filler skills would be the more generic Luna and Lance Expert, leaving Lightning Speed and Magnificent Flame as the skills they keep as SpotPass characters. Although we can't be certain. Again, certain skills just don't show up on enemies, so it's possible that some of them have those skills and just ended up with one or more filler skills as a result.

Villains team is out! Got Oliver, and he's about the same as he was in LvD. His team is just weird, and it seems like the pattern is for these guys to all show up at LV20 promoted, which is fun. Battle Monks (x5): Strength +2, Curse, Crimson Curse, Magnificent Flame Valkyries (x4): Resistance +2, Speed +2, Astra I guess they really don't care about their original classes. And Oliver has as much Str as the Battle Monks do. Hah.

Redundant features aren't necessarily a net negative. But more to the point, they aren't as much of a positive as they could be. Skills add variety, unless they get completely bungled like in FE10: having some redundant skills isn't a concern as long as the important effects aren't all the same. In the same vein, dondon, your suggestion isn't bad, but it just doesn't add as much as alternatives might. That's all I'm saying.

Ninian is also just half-dragon.