Iridium

The closest thing Clive has to a niche is his ability to reach 20/20/20. He can thus get more levels than any other natural Cavalier in the game, which is especially important with Starsphere steroids. He's probably not competing with any Villagers, either. Unfortunately, he had the bad luck of being in the game where it's not generally worthwhile to reach level 20, and the payoff for grinding him is still not very great compared to other characters with the same effort. And thus he sucks.

The thing about Silque and Faye is that they both combine to become worth more than they would be otherwise -- which says a lot, as they're both individually quite good. There is no overlap in their spell sets besides Recovery and offense. Between the two, you get: Warp: Nerfed from Gaiden, but still an incredibly potent spell. Enhance a lagging unit's movement! Assassinate a particular foe from afar! Bypass hideous terrain and labyrinthine walls! Shave off a few excess turns that would otherwise be spent waiting for that one faraway enemy to be in attack range! There's not a whole lot you can't do with Warp. Rescue: Let's just reiterate here: you have two units, one with Warp and one with Rescue, who can both use their respective spell on the same turn. This is incredible. Warp a unit toward an annoying boss anywhere in range, attack them, and then Rescue them with impunity. Rescue a unit from anywhere nearby, have Silque Warp them elsewhere, and then let them move on top of that for hilarious mobility. Movement becomes surprisingly irrelevant because these two units can act as a movement battery for any unit on your army. Physic: A delightful alternative to Rescue for Warp shenanigans. Warp someone into the heat of battle and then heal them up from halfway across the map! Good for culling masses of weaker enemies. It can also naturally be used without Warp, letting Faye heal someone from a safe position -- or just letting her refill Silque or Tatiana's health in spite of awkward positioning. Recover: On both. It's a little thing, but having two units with basic Recovery means that they can heal each other and effectively have infinite healing as long as they do so. This also means that they can heal each other for experience on turns where they have nothing better to do. Of course, they can also heal other units too. Invoke: Filler units are always nice, and Silque's are neat in that they are able to fight back. They're not necessarily better than Genny's or Tatiana's, who are more likely to distract opponents, but there's always merit to a recyclable meat shield that can take a hit. Expel: Not an amazing spell on Alm's route, but still a decent utility to have when going through dungeons and you're tired of fighting. It won't save your life, but it might reduce tedium a bit. Seraphim: On both. This means you can murder two Great Terrors per turn for free. Rare in standard battles, but like Expel, useful in dungeons. Unlike Expel it might actually be important. Nosferatu. On both, but Faye in particular has an easy accuracy bonus and bulk. You can do hilarious things with that if Faye gets a bit of luck. Anew: The most hyped up aspect of Faye's arsenal, and ironically probably the weakest between its availability and its cost. If she ends up learning it, though, it's not too hard to find creative ways to use it. Faye's bulk means that even in spite of the HP cost she can potentially survive being in enemy range, or you can just use it on a nearby unit and then have Silque and/or Tatiana warp them elsewhere. Both units are absolutely amazing and contribute quite a bit, and having both of them at once multiplies their utility instead of creating redundancy. It's frankly incredible that these lovely ladies are allowed to exist in a world where they get such beautiful availability together. I'd consider Faye the marginally better unit because she's a bit less of a one-trick pony, but I can think of no circumstance where you would not want to use both for the vast majority of the game -- only when Tatiana shows up do either cease to be inarguable top-tier units, but even then you'd still probably want to use at least one or the other (with both having merits to justify themselves over the other, and all three being an entirely feasible option because Clerics are just that good.)

I've been working under the assumption that Celica's revival was just an in-universe application of Mila's turnwheel, except done directly by the source instead of through the artifact itself.

If there's one thing that Trails has taught me, it's that expressive portraits are better than average-or-worse-quality models any day of the week.

I mean, even if he could, he's a Gold Knight and they can't use swords. Pitchfork was probably added after he was removed anyhow. It would be neat to have an enemy with the same class as the hero, though.

Yeah, the whole 'just Archanea, Awakening, and Fates' thing doesn't surprise me at all. I've been trying to tell people this would be the case for like a year, but naturally nobody wanted to hear it. In a vacuum, I don't even really mind; partly because I have no serious love for Elibe and Tellius relative to other continuities (and I'm used to Jugdral and Magvel getting ignored) but mostly because I understand that this was something of an inevitability to get an actually interesting group of characters instead of just the 2-3 protagonists from each game with maybe a couple of standouts like Tharja and Tiki. To that end I even sympathize with the "too many sword users" claim. But that all kinda falls apart when all of the OCs they've shown off so far wield swords. Like, Christ, that's the main benefit to even introducing an OC and they don't even go along with it. They could easily have introduced someone from an underrepresented weapon type like Light Magic (basically just Linde) or Daggers/Shuriken (Kaze or Felicia, I'd imagine), but nope, we need to flood the ocean with more swords. Even I'm a little disappointed now. I think we can pretty much assume that Linde, Merric, Tharja, and Robin are locks as the strongest playable representatives of their respective elements (light, wind, darkness, and thunder), unless Linde's magic gets handed off to a cleric (probably Lena, Wrys, or Elise since Sakura and Lissa have other weapons) for some reason. Technically Gharnef and Validar would be stronger than Tharja, I guess, but you know she's getting in anyway.

I appreciate that this poll assumes nobody here was lucky enough to pull more than one of these weapons.

It's a shame that they needed the experience rates of the Secret Shrine and Lost Treescape. Gotta sell DLC somehow, I guess.

Both appear in 1, 2, 3, 11, 12, 13, 15, and Heroes. Camus appears in more BSFE episodes (1, 3, 4) than the Whitewings (only 2) do, but all four appear in at least one, and all except Palla are playable in exactly one (4 for Camus, 2 for Catria/Est; Palla only appears in 2's dialogue). If we're going by appearances, I'm pretty sure it's a tie unless you count BSFE as four games for some reason (it doesn't even deserve being counted as one honestly). If we're only talking about playability, Catria and Est win with 9 playable appearances (while Camus has 7 and Palla has 8.) ...I think. I'm probably forgetting something. Did any of them appear in Fersona? That could tip the scales here.

Although Clerics are also apparently capable of being inflicted with temporary amnesia and forgetting their spells for a little while, too. Overclasses are just a mess all around. Conqueror and Rigain are okay-ish (but why Aura of all things), although Alm doesn't really need the buff to begin with. But I'm not sure what they were smoking with the rest of the classes. Some of them barely change, one of them even gets nerfed a little bit to counteract a relatively small upgrade, and then you've got insane crap like Lemegeton. I'm probably not going to invest in them anytime soon.

Branching promotions are a generally more interesting idea. Third tiers are pretty cool, but they only really work on very specific environments -- such as Gaiden's promotion-heavy meta, or as a slight flavor change to account for Radiant Dawn's status as a direct sequel. To function with the standard level curve, they would need to be in a very very long game. Branching promotions, meanwhile, are a relatively minor alteration to the standard system that allows for quite a bit more player choice in how to approach the development of particular characters. The only real weakness to branching promotions is the tendency for one choice to be optimal the vast majority of the time, but even this can still be at least a partial plus if it allows for characters to escape 'bad' classes. I can only imagine how much the Echoes Baron Brigade would have appreciated the ability to slide into Great Knight.

Celica's last outfit kinda reminds me of her original design actually.

Surprised nobody's mentioned this yet. According to the shop descriptions: Geirolul - Skogul Spartan - Spartan Mach - Harrier Morgana - Enchantress Titania - Exemplar Yaksha - Yasha Elephant - Oliphantier Solomon - Guru Maeve - Rigain Overlord - Conqueror get out those thesauri

I'm not totally following the design philosophy here. "Priestess and Falcon Knight are holy classes, let's give them super strong evil variants." "Let's give Super Barons more flexible armor, but don't you dare give them extra move." "What's the biggest problem with Celica right now? That's right -- she lacks arguably the least useful spell in the game!" "You know, we probably should've put these Saint spells in the base game. Ah well, people will pay five bucks for it!" At least it's coming out at a relatively reasonable time in the English version.

If I could make a guess, might they be the Barrier and Invoke Revenant spells previously speculated to be attached to Cipher characters?

Generic Man is kinda cute tbh

Tobin and Leon are amazing for me, and probably the most reliable cornerstones of their armies, but Python is absolute garbage in my experience.

damn, machias is still alive Is it just me or did Elliot get even more feminine, too.

I think it's a bit too powerful as it is, but the idea behind it is fantastic. I think it's an even better solution than casual mode, because it still requires you to puzzle your way out of a situation but can potentially save hours of replays lost to runs of extreme luckscrew. It's the best of both worlds.

I don't really care about the Elibe games, so stick me in the "would rather see Jugdral because it needs it more" camp. Especially as both Elibe games are entirely playable and not particularly alienating in their current form, and whatever presentation upgrade we'd get would be hurt by the inevitable loss of the GBA battle sprites. Kinda reminds me of a certain other series's recent remakes, actually... Still, Binding Blade's alright and it makes a lot of sense to do something with that for the international audience. They've been stuck in a bad situation with Roy for proportionately longer than the average FE6 player is. A remake might also allow them to better integrate FE7 into the world instead of having it as a weird tacked-on prologue that, within twenty years, gets more thoroughly erased than a dictator's critic. I'm just glad they specified "Binding Blade" on its own, because the "hey let's merge fe6 and fe7 into a super genealogy" is the worst idea this fanbase still spouts.

He may disappear after beating Grieth, if you did not collect him before then. That's why he joins you in the first place, after all.

my little conqueror can't possibly be this cute

http://fireemblemechoes.nintendo.com/dlc/#cipher-companions The maps themselves aren't new, so it's still a little lazy, but they do at least have one.

It seems like the English game has been datamined now, so... did Shizas get a localized name in whatever unused field he was buried in in the Japanese version?

Faye gets some unique spells and you can never have too many Clerics in a game where every Cleric is unique. The other four are pretty much widely agreed upon: Merc Gray, Mage Kliff, Archer Tobin, and Bench/Merc Atlas. You can conceivably get away with Mage Tobin since he gets Excalibur early and Physic a bit after promotion, but his spell list is otherwise extremely shallow so it's really only worth doing if you want to try something different. (Faye, similarly, can become a Mage for practically-exclusive Freeze access, but her offensive spells aren't great and she gets some handy tools as Cleric too.)