BrightBow

Best: Rolf (PoR) Worst: Nowi Well, I am a big fan of Rolf. I loved how PoR actually dealt with the issue of children on the battlefield for once. About what it means to take someone's life and what could push you that far. I mean, the series had plenty of children on the battlefield but always completely ignored the implications of that. We got characters like Fa. She doesn't even know what death is and people are afraid to tell her. He is like the only character who I can hear saying: "I am not a child" without being a massive pain because he understands the implications of having blood on his hands... and that it isn't something to be proud of. Of course, the very same reasons I like him as a character, are the same reasons that I don't like the deploying him. He might feel like he has no choice but to go out and kill people, but I do. And he is like the worst choice for a unit slot anyway. Nowi, well... Let's just say that I still can't believe that she wears the very same outfit as Strawberry from No More Heroes. She was a deliberate exaggeration in order to parody the otaku subculture. Nowi is missing that context. The prepubescent looking character is the most objectified of the cast... without any hint of the self awareness of No More Heroes. And this is from a franchise who was on of the few to use the same armor for male and females since... always. After all these years, It's just so... humiliating, that IS would assume that their fans would like this sort of thing. Mind you, I do think that she is a good character in concept... when not done by people who think that "Likes sweets" makes a sufficient characterization. Oh yeah, and how are you supposed to fix that 6 base speed with a mere 50% growth by chapter 8 without even having the option to promote?

Well, the XL doesn't scratch his own top screen, it has actual buttons below the touch screen and having a bigger screen makes games look so much nicer. And the 3D actually hugely benefits from the bigger screen. It definitely made me regret having bought the normal 3DS. I wouldn't buy one just because it's some sort of special edition.

Meh, the mechanic is just a massive pain. It's activation rate is never high enough to rely on it and never so low that it can be ruled out. Given the massive emphasis on defensive play in this installment, the latter is particularly annoying. It makes the game uncontrollable.

During chapter 11. Jill appears as an enemy unit over the course of the chapter.

Are DLC maps and differently designed then the ones during the campaign? Because at least in the main game, the maps and enemy placement seems to be entirely random and interchangeable to me.

Yes, I am. It took me ages to get her to level 10 even after promoting her. She was probably not higher then level 3 or 4 when she promoted.

Well, she is the only flier until Cornelia joins... at an level which I would consider to low for her to have any use. She can get anywhere and take on anyone. If she can't beat them herself, she can carry others who can do the job. As a result, she grows at an absurdly fast pace, eventually allowing her to take on a notable chunk of difficult to reach enemies entirely by herself. And of course, she supports others with a heavy and extremely valuable speed boost. Which goes a long way to keep her useful, even when an annoying amount of archers are around. With what little competition she faces for her impressively valuable contributions, I would say that she is definitely the best non-avatar unit in the game. 9/10, with a -1 bias Because her "personality" is even worse then most of what Awakening has to offer in that regard. It's not just shallow, annoying and agonizing but goes all the way to insanely stupid: If the enemies wouldn't kill her first, she would die from dropping off her Pegasus.

Sasha doesn't actually need to delay her promotion in order to get Elite... unless a particularly wired bug of the translation patch allowed her to get it as a Pegasus on my file.

Would it matter if NoE is using the name too? I mean, most of the examples you are stating don't exist in the European versions... from what I remember at least. They seem to care a lot more about consistency. They even kept the Brawl and Melee names.

I don't think that his problem is his role in the narrative. The problem I see is that everything has to resolve around him. So we get scenes like Chrom telling Avatar how close Emmeryn and how kind she is, but we never actually see any of that. If it wasn't for the game bending backwards to keep everything focused on him instead of the other supposed main characters, he wouldn't be much different then other living MacGuffins like Julia or Ninian. Another problem I see with Avatar, is that he is just like your average Lord: Somebody without much characterization, in order to be easily identifiable... except the average Lord still exist in the from of Chrom. They should just make the Lord customizable and leave it at that.

No, the issue is that if you focus on too many characters, you instead end up focusing on no one and the whole thing ends in a cluttered mess. Awakening can't even properly manage to have more then two main characters. Frederick is just handing out reports. Lissa barely gets any line at all and ever since Lucina joined, she had been awfully quiet as well. And as a result, if they do speak up, it feels awfully random. It's really just the MU and Chrom show. I would say that PoR and is pretty much my idea how the issue should be handled. Even the characters who had nothing to do with the main story (which were a lot. For example every single Laguz had something to do with the main plot) would at least have some sort of related sub plot.

Well, seeing someone running around the woods in a Victorian dress while wearing a metal ring with lots of spikes around their waist, probably raises concern about that person's mental capabilities. Edit: Mind you, the dissonance between Olvia's face and her actual lines is hilarious. But stuff like this definitely contributed to me, having trouble reading the game's text. It just keeps sending mixed signals.

Jan had a pendant for Nino that belonged to her family. So the research was for real. Plus, he is rather open about his own cowardice. But yeah, I guess he did research her later on. Anyway, chances are Sonia was simply designed with a female body and an expressive personality specifically for stuff like this. Not sure who could possibly trust her face, though. Nergal would do stuff like that, though. He even made a Morph that existed for he sole purpose of repeating the same line over and over.

No he didn't trust her. Jan says at the end of E26x that Brendan "never trusted her fully" and had spies research her past. But apparently he couldn't wait to marry until that was done. That behavior makes no sense.

I really don't think that any sort of sexual organs factored into his decision. Brendan Reed is the guy who married a person, he didn't even trust. Brendan Reed is the guy who keeps the location of his hideout a secret to one of his family's most trusted friends. (Legault) Brendan Reed is the guy who leads an organization with the mission to kill corrupt nobles, yet actually allowed Pascal, a guy who killed commoners for the lulz into his organization. When that guy kept killing for fun, Brendan Reed merely looked the guy up. ...In an organization that already kills people for merely failing their mission. I therefore conclude that if Brendan Reed would not have married Sonia, he would probably have ended up marrying a stuffed teddy or a teacup or something.

Oh yeah, I got forced into marriage with him, too. I knew there was a priority list for forced marriages but I figured that the Avatar would be excluded from it. I mean, it would be silly for the player to know this intern mechanics after all. And support building for everything but ChromxAvatar takes ages. Oh well, happy birthday, you meanie. Until death does us apart, eh? The Premonition finally makes sense... I only got a Sweet Tincture btw. Not sure what use it could have besides selling it for 38 gold. But then again, it wouldn't be a present if it was practical.

Even if I would reclass, there would be no difference between a +2 skill or having a base that is simply 2 points higher. The skill would only matter if someone hits their absurdly high caps or has to give up a skill slot. But whether it's hitting the caps or getting so many skills that one has to go, it can only by archived by hours of boring and tedious repetition.

I absolutely hate any +2 skill. Sure, they could have just given the units with the skill +2 to their base stats but that would apparently have been to straightforward.

My first game was Fire Emblem 7. By the time I reached Lyn chapter 9, I had quite a few deaths. Florina kicked the bucket on her joining chapter. Dorcas did too. Kent and Sain died somewhere along the line. After everyones death, there was always a cutscene at the end assuring me that the character was merely injured, so I kept going, believing they would have recovered after a few chapters. Dorcas' cutscene on his joining chapter also has him stay with his wife, which I figured was the only way that this scenario could have ended, so I didn't think anything about it. I started to have doubts after Erk's died in 7x because he actually said that he leaves the group. So after Wallace joined in chapter 9, I finally restarted and went through the whole crap again. During the main game, I tried to keep everyones level balanced. I had no idea that I wasn't supposed to do that. Morph Llyod definitely wasn't impressed by my LV 1 Paladin Kent. Fortunately, my first run was on a rom, so I could just save scum my way to victory. The alternative would have been to go all the way back to Lyn mode. ...again. Could someone remind me someone why so many people think that this is a good game for beginners? It's like starting the Mega Man series with Mega Man Zero 1. In both games, it's so easy to get to the end without upgrades and you can't get back to get them unless you go all the way back! All the way! All the way back!!! .....aaaaanyway... ...after this game I had little trouble buying Sacred Stones and PoR. Things went pretty smooth in Sacred Stones. Nobody died. Until the Demon King killed Seth and Innes at least. It was hilariously convenient that the two characters who don't actually die, were the ones to bite the dust. I took Eirika's route. I also didn't bother to restart to recruit the Recruit Amelia at the first opportunity. I wasn't even sure if it was even possible at all. Conveniently she came back later on. I started PoR in easy mode because... again, nobody told me not to do that. Needless to say, nobody died. Imagine my surprise when I found out that this broken mode was actually added during the localization. *sigh*

Well, yeah. She is one of the Four Riders. The most powerful generals in Daein. If you are in such a small but important group, I would say you deserver to be called famous. Though admittedly, unlike Tauroneo, Gawain, Bryce and Fiona Senior, they probably never included her in a song. Anyway, my vote goes to Robin because... well, the fact that everything has to resolve around this gal really hurts the story. Just imagine if we had a few scenes between Emmeryn and Chrom or Chrom and Lissa or whatever. But no, because we can't have a scene without My Unit, so of course we (or rather MU) are merely being told how close they all were and what a void was left by her death. What we actually see, is Emmeryn wanting to do something foolish and Chrom trying to talk her out of it. It doesn't show much of a bond between them. Let alone with Lissa, whose grieve over her sister's death lasts a whole of two lines ("Noooo!" and "*snif* *snif*") before she returns to the status quo. Are there even scenes with main characters which don't involve MU? Well, besides scenes which only feature bad guys, of course.

Vigarde: You would ask Renais to rescue us from... a natural disaster? They would not help us... Grado’s borders would overflow with starving refugees by the thousands. Renais would close her borders to us. It’s only natural... Renais has a duty to protect herself. Personally I think that his logic is perfectly sound.

Well, if IS wanted Emmeryn's death to be sad, I think it shouldn't have been accompanied by randomly teleporting skeleton archers. Anyway, what got me weeping once, was having Lethe kill Jill as an enemy in PoR. I definitely wasn't expecting her death to cause a conversation between the two. Just to emphasize how Lethe just killed the person who would later have developed to be her friend just like any other grunt. *Ouch*. I so regret that move. Another one was when I read the extended script of Radiant Dawn. I got the impression that Yune a way more tormented there, so when I got to read the script of the Japanese version of the final cutscene at the end, well. No idea why this was changed during the localization but this line kinda got to me: Ike: "You were like a mother to all of life-- Your children still require a mother like you. When you watch over us, we don't always do things that make you happy and sometimes we even disappoint you. Still, I think we would like you to continue watching over us. How about it?" Oh yeah, and there was Lyon's death on Ephraim's route. Granted, it did leave me cold the first time but that changed after I once read all the flashbacks back to back. Come to think of it, I am rarely affected that much by sad scenes during the first time I witness them.

Well, the game is insanely easy, so it doesn't matter much. But personally, I absolutely love to give both the Return Ring and the Rescue stuff to Lachesis, so that Nanna can teleport the entire Team Leaf past the invisible barrier to team up with the main army once they run out of enemies on their side. And I always make sure that the Thunder Sword or any other magic sword ends in Patty's hands because it is absurdly very powerful and targets res, despite being a C-Rank weapon. So she can steal stuff without getting her fragile butt into melee range. And it allows her to actually deal some damage in case you want to actually train her. I have no idea about the Pursuit Ring. Kinda looks to me that everyone but Patty will already have Pursuit. Will Lester need it? But what I would like to note is, that it should be inherited by somebody because unlike pretty much any other item or weapon, it will not reappear in the second generation otherwise.

Nobody is as chilling as Valter from FE8. He is a bloodthirsty, sadistic and cruel stalker. And despite being insane, he is highly intelligent and manipulative. He manages to pass as a mere arrogant prick while his victims are completely ignorant about what's after them. His targets, Eirika and Ephraim, have no clue that they are followed by such a psycho. As a result, the player knows that they are completely unprepared for whatever he has in store for them. And he is so unpredictable that he might strike anywhere at any time. On the other end of the spectrum, I would say the FE7 Fire Dragon is the best choie. Because that guy gets screwed over so badly by continuity, I can't help but smirk every time the game pretends that even a single dragon is this big threat towards mankind. I mean, ignoring the fact that dragons are weak enough to be defeated by normal humans and only started loosing because humans reproduced so quickly, there were two Divine Weapons and two of the Divine Generals present. And these individuals brought an entire world war against dragons to a turnaround. And of course, dragons in Elibe can't actually stay transformed because of their rapid energy loss. So he should probably fall into the sea and drown long before he could reach the main land. Let alone destroy all of mankind. Not to mention, that we all knew that Elibe and Eliwood would still have to be around 20 years later. So nothing significant could have happened anyway. And in order to make antagonists more fearsome, I would say that it would be vital to make it possible for them to actually move. Valter is made a lot less intimidating by the fact that he just stands still until the player is ready to bash his face in. That is very unfitting for someone who has been such a wild card for the entire story.

Well, I don't consider any of the options to be particulary appealing at the moment. There are no franchises anymore, that effectively force me to buy a console and the more powerful hardware only means that games are getting more expensive and consoles will get even more power hungry. Of course, if the Xbox One.2 or the PS4 would have had backwards compatibility, that might have been an incentive to try out all these things that I missed in the last decade. But unfortunately Microsoft and Sony seem to be more concerned in increasing development cost and controlling their users. Personally I still figure that if I would be interested in the stuff these two offer, I would be better served with going back to playing PC games. I mean in terms of power, PCs are FAR superior as always. So I guess if anything, it's the Wii U then. Even if just for the sake of seeing a few old friends again.