Othin

Hard to make any guesses; it does seem a bit more niche than Conqueror. If anyone, I'd expect it to be someone on the Villains team like Ishtar or Ursula.

Sigurd is already available through SpotPass. They're going for the characters that aren't already available - a much better choice. --- Looking at the numbers for the enemies in the Harvest level, these guys are scary. They've all got Miracle and one of Renewal, Counter, Vantage, and Vengeance. On the higher difficulty levels, the generics pick up Pass and a Slayer skill. Now, this doesn't seem too special until we recall that they've all got 50 Luck. With Miracle, that gives them a 50% chance of surviving any fatal hit - and with those skills, that can be a big problem. The fact that their HP scales so much with the difficulty levels completely changes the level of the chapter: on Normal, the generic Revenants have 22 HP, but on Lunatic, they've got 47. That means, if one of the ones with Counter attacks one of your characters in melee, and they counterattack, then even if your character would OHKO, you've got a 50% chance of being smashed back for 46 damage while the enemy survives. The ones with Vengeance have huge Skl stats, so if they survive an assault, they're going to be hitting back with a booster hit as soon as they can. The boss is the scariest, having all five of the main skills - Renewal, Vengeance, Vantage, Counter, and Miracle. Plus 80 HP, and on Lunatic, he's got 46 Skl and 65 Luck. In short - two times out of three, he'll survive a fatal hit, then 11 times out of 12, smash back as soon as he can for +39 damage. And meanwhile you're using ranged attacks to not get killed by Counter, and if he makes it to his next turn, he'll regain more HP to bounce back at you. Really impressive how much the enemies can do with nonexistent stats outside of HP, Skl, and Luck. On Normal, it might be manageable a few chapters in if you're careful, but on Lunatic, HP increases alone are enough to turn it into a minefield completely off-limits to weak teams. --- On Lunatic, the Border enemies try a similar stunt with Vengeance. None of them have the skill on Normal, and I don't know what happens on Hard, but on Lunatic, about half the enemies have the skill, turning them into lethal kamikaze attackers at 1 HP. It's not easy fighting off enemies that can 2HKO even the sturdiest player characters, particularly the impossible-to-dodge Assassins and the few Sorcerers that attack from a distance with Slime. And of course that's just when you've healed your own characters rather than leaving them at 1 HP. This, this is what difficulty levels are supposed to do.

Odd that we haven't seen an announcement for the next map(s) yet. I'd expect them to be going back to a once-per-week schedule, as they seem to have just seven weeks remaining and at least eight maps left. Perhaps it's another one of those times where it won't update until tonight?

There's also the matter of her not having dialogue, unlike the past redesigned ones. And she's being advertised now. She's even the icon for the map, which is visible before you buy it to get you curious.

Not necessarily easy, but the ranged attacks let you get around both skills. Thrown weapons like Javelins and Hand Axes also get the job done without being so rare, though. Stun Lances won't work, though: they only hit in melee, so they won't get around Counter.

Oh, hey. Looking at the Soldier, its battle model is completely different. I think it's one of the ones we saw in the video, the weird white-skinned guy with arrows sticking out of him and skull masks everywhere.

I didn't notice anything else. But if we look at the cost, it's 250 yen. Looking at the past maps with the reward of just a redesigned character, Roy's cost was 250, Marth's was 300, and the rest were all 350. And with the map itself being arguably the best of them (certainly better than Marth's and Roy's), that's a damn good deal.

Tied with Catria, yeah. Six games, counting the remakes, although they still have the most even if we ignore the remakes. Ike uses Ragnell as an enemy, although SpotPass characters don't join with their items. His bonus skill is Aether, which shouldn't be any surprise.

I think she was chosen as a joke, being a LV5 unpromoted unit joining after a map that you couldn't imagine beating until well into postgame. She doesn't have any lines, no. As for the resort maps, there was no new character for the festival, so I doubt we'll see new characters for the other two, either.

Interesting. Not likely. Catria and Est had no connection in how they showed up, and all three appear as generics in Minerva's SpotPass, anyway. It's not clear how many more characters we'll see, but it may be as low as three. And there would be far better choices to fill those slots than Palla.

Ah, that makes sense. By "boss", do you mean the real boss, Algol, or the Soldier that hangs around him? I'd assume Algol, normally, but the Soldier seems odd just because of how pointless it appears despite having a special scene where it shows up.

Ah, I see. So you're saying it's based on time taken to kill the boss rather than time taken to complete the map entirely? That's not quite as difficult.

Having an entire team of Limit Breaker users, several with the higher caps maxed out, this wasn't so difficult on Normal. Mark and Olivia destroyed the lower half, reaching and killing the bosses in two turns with their double Lightning Speed. Two Life Absorb activations per turn also completely erased the spike damage, although they left the dangerous area pretty fast. The enemies themselves were no match for them. Othin only needed his one action and Life Absorb to survive, with Paris as backup. Being at 1 HP wasn't even an issue for matchups when the enemies did no damage anyway, although I suspect this wouldn't fly on the harder modes. What honestly became more of an issue was controlling the map. It's a Rout map, yet reinforcements appear every turn from inconvenient locations. This could easily cause issues with the 10 turn completion for a less-prepared team, and makes it a requirement to have a substantial group of competent fighters to even complete the map at all. Even if you have a few characters that never die, you'll never win if the reinforcements really are infinite, as I suspect they are. The enemy strength is still the most notable thing so far, I think. This was another 5-star map, and certainly earns the title more than LvD F did. Yet in that promotional video, we saw enemies of three distinctly different strengths. Even on Lunatic, the enemies in this map don't come close to the level of the weakest of those enemies. Those were not enemies from 5-star maps. Those were enemies from 6-star, 7-star, 8-star maps, at minimum. I don't think those were Ultimate Training enemies. My first thought was that those limit-breaking Lunatic+ enemies were from the Future maps, getting even stronger in raw stats. But wait - wouldn't it be Corpse Soldiers in those maps? But those were Other-Worlders, yet this map has Corpse Soldiers. Unless the Future maps really do have Other-Worlders? They do seem like they'd fit in, all having Evil Dragon Scale. And it would certainly give those maps something special. But this is really odd. --- Interesting that Est really did get a redesign. And is fulfilling her namesake role even better than ever - a LV5 Pegasus Knight joining after a hellish 5-star map like this? Not practical, but certainly funny. Remnant Sage, were you saying you didn't get Est when you took over 10 turns to complete the map your first time?

On Lunatic, that Entombed boss caps his Luck... at 65. And all the enemy Revenants cap their Luck stats at 50 and have four skills instead of two. What the fuck? The five-star enemies seem to be respecting their stat caps a bit more and don't have Lunatic+ skills yet, or forged weapons for that matter. The Soldier sub-boss ignores those, though; he caps just about everything at 50 on Lunatic. And fuck yeah Algol's back as the main boss. And more bonus talismans? Fun. --- Had Paris roll through the festival, but I didn't get anything in particular. Didn't really check around for events and stuff, but the secret characters don't seem to have conversations from what I saw, which is a shame.

Gah I'm taking forever to load the DLC shop. I got Ike first. Why am I always getting the designated main characters first? And I know I'm going to get Ashnard tomorrow, too.

FE9 SpotPass is out! I'm going to check if the new DLC is available as well, and I'll purchase it as soon as it is.

Yeah, weapon triangle counts. They're also all affected by Great Shield rather than Holy Shield.

Nono describes herself as about 1000, as well. Ninian was born around the same time as the Scouring, so she's also about 1000, but she's half-dragon instead of full.

This is what I'm hoping for, as well. Once the characters are released, they stay released, so there's nothing to loop. But it would really be great to get anything beyond what we currently know.

IS announced three map sets in the current DLC series. The third and probably largest set focuses on the kids, but they haven't started releasing that set yet. The first two sets focus on FE13's cast in general and on extreme added challenges. We'll get the first map of each of those two sets tonight, in about eight hours. I plan to buy both immediately and will bring as much information as I can.

Those sorts of conversations already exist in the first series of DLC. The second series is focusing specifically on FE13 rather than past games and will almost certainly not have more.

In terms of pairings as they're seen in FE4, the one it actually indicates is Beowulf x Lachesis. It also indicates that Fin and Lachesis got together, but at a later time following the Battle of Barhara.

You mean figuring out buying the DLC? Just set up an internet connection with your 3DS, then go to the Other-World Gate and select the second option to get to the shop. From there, of the three options at the bottom of the screen, the left adds points, the middle lets you purchase the map you selected, and the right exits the shop. It's worth it. The game goes beyond any expectations for completeness even without the DLC, but the DLC is just as amazing and makes the already fantastic game even better.

The movie that plays from the title screen. Not sure where to find a video of it online. It's not one of the twelve movies in the Movie Viewer, although it has some scenes from them. Tiamo doesn't have a restriction. Lacking a Krom support is the standard. Males: Frederick, Viole, Sol, Vake, Callum, Donny, Ronku, Richt, Gaia, Grego, Libera, Henry Females: Liz, Soiree, Miriel, Mariabel, Velvet, Tiamo, Nono, Sarya, Olivia, Serge Those are the "standard" groups, where any of the males can pair with any of the females. Anything beyond that is a bonus. Krom and Sumia, however, do not fit into those groups, only being able to pair with each other, MU, or three other characters each.

Krom's potential wives don't actually have a priority system. It's because Sumia appears as Krom's wife in the opening movie, and because she has restricted pairings, like Krom. Other characters in the regular "Gen 1" group can pair with any of each other of the opposite gender.