Iridium

I don't care about Luthier at all. Favorites are the clerics, Sonya, and Zeke.

Celica's party is more enjoyable, and I find her maps more interesting than repeated grasslands for days.

Can Palla (or others) still Triangle Attack if class changed?

In terms of first-week sales, I believe the lowest is Thracia 776 with a soul-rending 30k, and Radiant Dawn is in second with around 75k. Echoes's first-week sales are roughly on par with Binding Blade's, which is reasonable but may be disappointing coming off of other post-Tellius games. For lifetime sales, Path of Radiance is actually the worst at 156k, with Thracia being within a realistic margin of error at 159k. Radiant Dawn is the only other entry below 180k, and every game besides those three sold at least 240k (with quite a few entries straddling the 250k line.)

In Gaiden you would definitely promote immediately, but in Echoes you can theoretically get away with holding off for a little while. Just be careful not to wait so long that you're stuck levelling through the second tier when the game starts throwing third-tier units at you.

Pretty sure Gaiden is just a move to strengthen the IP by replacing an entry that they can't really do anything with for Heroes/Cipher/Warriors/etc. with something that they can actually reference. Nothing more and nothing less. As for the name, "Echoes" is probably there to continue the recent trend of one word titles, and "Shadows of Valentia" is probably there to tie it to Gaiden since nothing about Echoes directly does. The Japanese name achieves a similar effect. Echoes being a line of remakes ultimately feels like wishful thinking, because there are substantial groups of people who want the Jugdral games brought into relevance or otherwise believe that the Elibe games could benefit from more Lyn/Avatar pandering or something. I have my suspicions that there may indeed be something odd going on with Genealogy; that is, however, irrelevant to the Echoes name.

"Echoes: Shadows of Valentia" isn't a weirder subtitle than "New Mystery of the Emblem ~ Heroes of Light and Shadow ~", incidentally.

I want a game where the Pegasus Trio is just the three shades of Clair.

The weird thing about Kyza is that Heather is in the same game and isn't exactly a much more positive stereotype.

Provided we are indeed talking about the original game, just promote immediately. There are really only three instances where you'd want to bother getting a character to level 20 before promotion. Their name is Alm or Celica, and thus they have actually decent growths and have less flexibility regarding when they can promote They are a female Mage who cannot promote until level 20 anyway You are at the end of the game and have found the Entombed spawn for each army as well as their respective Angel Ring, and don't mind wasting a little bit of time for those sick double gainz

This is an interesting remark from someone who lists their favorite game in the series as the one that practically plays itself. Pretty much every good aspect of Path of Radiance (its artwork, its music, its script, etc.) is something you've just declared to be worthless because it can be obtained online. You claim that Echoes has failed at the aspect that separates games from movies, but at least it actually has that aspect; a solid Path of Radiance playthrough can be performed by simply moving your starting unit of choice across a field and watching in awe as they invulnerably move toward the goal. If Gaiden is a standard RPG, then Path of Radiance is a feature film. I can totally understand not being on board with Gaiden's gameplay, and if that had been all I would sympathize with you and in many respects agree, but what I cannot understand is the dissonance between the logic you use to denounce Gaiden and whatever logic your mind was employing upon deciding that Path of Radiance was the pinnacle of the series. If you're judging the games purely on a gameplay basis, with nothing else having value, then why is your favorite game arguably the only game in the series that does a better job of the non-gameplay aspects than the gameplay ones? I apologize for making a rather below-the-belt strike here, since I ordinarily try to avoid judging people based upon their game of preference (as that sort of generalization is in rather poor taste), but in this particular case I just can't put everything together in a way that makes sense. It would be like me denouncing JRPGs for their swathes of long and unnecessary dialogue, and all the while choosing to represent myself with an avatar featuring two lecherous drunkards from Trails in the Sky.

Until given additional reason to believe otherwise I'm inclined to assume someone simply got lazy with debug tools and this doesn't actually reflect sweeping changes to the class system in the International release. I don't believe Nuibaba or Judah were actually participants of the Heroes ballot. I assume Judah's name was changed to avoid conflating a fairly common biblical name/term with a sadistic blue warlock attempting to bring back a dark god through mass murder.

Yo, is "Great Conqueror" literally Conqueror, or is it just being translated from Overlord? Similarly, is Elephant the same as the ballista known as Pachyderm? Might change a few things.

If you mean in the localization, I'd guess something like I honestly can't think of a way to make Lance Knight sound cool Colossus Crane Knight Dark Priestess Enchantress Warlord War Elephant if it's a literal elephant, Ballista Knight otherwise Can't think of anything that isn't just ripping off Archsage Queen Conqueror I kinda feel like the Japanese names will stay what we know.

I'm actually kind of glad that Bow Knight serves a bit more of a purpose for once, since lately it's really fallen pray to "that class that isn't Sniper/Hero" disease. Sniper wasn't hot in Awakening either, but it was pretty great in Fates. And yeah, since this class allegedly promotes from Bow Knight, it would be weirder for it to not be mounted. If this were alternate third promotions, then a non-mounted option might be sensible, but we seem to be assuming that isn't the case.

I'm glad to see that, from the looks of it, they didn't take the low-hanging fruit and make DLC chapters where you visit Marth/Chrobin/Corrin. Class DLC has historically always been the coolest, but fourth-tier classes are a pretty bizarre design choice even for Gaiden; I'm still looking forward to actually seeing them though. Starsphere Shards are interesting but I wish they weren't DLC I'm hoping to see the Cipher characters release internationally as well. It wouldn't be the most elegant thing, but I don't see why they couldn't in theory strip away the "oh we're heroes from the Faia Emberumu Saifa Card Game Available Exclusively In Glorious Japan" dialogue and pretend that they're just random world travelers or legendary warriors or something. I reckon that most people in the west would just be happy to get new characters regardless of the change, and it's one of the few localization changes that would be pretty justified if the alternative is not getting them at all. Or they could just leave them as is, since it's not like Japanese exclusivity has stopped them from dangling FE6 in our face for 15 years.

The logical and easy thing would be Lodestar, Vanguard, Great Lord, Grandmaster, and whatever the corns are. Maybe toss in Witch and Arcanist or whatever too. Don't really want or need anything else.

It's almost like four of them (including one who cannot become one period) join at the same time as honorary villager Lukas, and the fifth is plagued by critical issues that Soldier does not resolve.

Yeah Swordmaster would probably be the absolute worst class they could add. Just about anything else would add more to the game; Swordmasters are just Dread Fighters with less Res. Even something like General could have another weapon.

Trails in the Sky really needs to be played on PC. The third game (aptly, the 3rd) is completely exclusive to it, but even if it wasn't, it's just so much better. The translation is much much more consistent with later games (the PSP version of FC being particularly bad about this), the portraits are much better looking, and there are even a few gameplay improvements like the ability to skip S-Crafts. The upside is that the games run perfectly on basically any PC made after 2000, are available through DRM-free sources, and were designed around PC in the first place (it's the original version). Cold Steel can be played on whatever though. The PC version is probably going to be better, but it isn't out yet, and the games were originally designed around Vita and PS3 anyway so there's no real harm in doing those versions.

oh boy more hilariously overpriced maps with no worth beyond trivializing the game, my favorite i wonder if we'll even get all of it this time after what happened with fates I'm interested in seeing how the Cipher crossover works, and naturally whether or not it gets localized. I'm also interested in what the story maps might add. I'm just hoping the rest of Set 3 isn't "recruit all of these dead people who survived their incredibly gruesome fates" like Awakening's spotpass maps (except even worse since those were at least free), and that we might at least get a couple neat DLC classes out of it, since historically those have been pretty neat. I'm also lowkey hoping for Shizas.

I'd describe Song of the Ocean as less "smack in the middle of the series" and more as "the end of a different but possibly related series". I'd agree it's not exactly a good game to start on, and not just because it's my least favorite Gagharv game, though. Tear of Vermilion was cash-money though, I went into that expecting nothing and I honestly liked it more than several actual Trails games. With the bad translation handicapping it! My boyfriend makes fun of me and says I only like it because of Avin x Mile though. He doesn't know the Mile x Shannon struggle. - Funnily enough, I started playing Trails in the Sky due to Fire Emblem and Professor Layton. Which I understand is an extremely weird combination. I started playing Fire Emblem with Shadow Dragon, but I didn't really like it very much, and fell into Professor Layton soon afterward. As I was following Level-5, I found out that they'd made a game called Jeanne d'Arc, which was a much easier strategy game that I ended up using to ease myself into the Fire Emblem series. After I finished and enjoyed Jeanne d'Arc, I decided to go out and look for more PSP games to play since I'd never really paid the system much mind before (I basically stole it from my younger brother since he only ever used it for licensed games and had stopped playing with it several years prior.) I came across Trails in the Sky in the bargain bin, and I thought that it had a really interesting name and cover, so I bought it. I ended up really liking it and then dedicated my life for the next few years toward the possibility of SC being localized. During this period of time I developed a saintly level of patience that no MMO grinding could ever have readied me for. Once FC released on Steam, I did everything I could to get the word out, and eventually we got a bunch of other games too. I baited the bae into playing it with Tales of Zestiria as a gift late last year and now he's as addicted as I am (and he never finished Zestiria lmao). I'm now sitting here gushing about the series at two in the morning, immediately after getting off a phone call where I spent over half an hour discussing the potential ramifications of Vampires within the Trails canon. Truly I am living the dream.

Well that was a lot sooner than I expected. Which... is kind of a sad statement to make about a game that came out almost exactly ten years ago, but it's true. I still can't believe we've had five-sevenths* of the series localized after the eternal summer. This is easily my most hyped game of the year. *nayuta is great and honestly i liked it a lot but we all know it doesn't count

It's not too inconsistent when you really look at it. Villager promotes at level 3. Classes that promote twice (Mercenary, Soldier, Archer, and Cavalier) promote at level 7 the first time and 10 thereafter. Classes that only promote once (Male Mage, Pegasus Knight, and Cleric) promote at level 12. The Female Mage class is a special exception, promoting a bit later than the Male Mage class (at 14) to balance out the fact that they get access to swords. Alm and Celica promote as part of the game's plot. Here's a potentially useful chart I made eight seconds ago.

Regarding name changes, keep in mind that we've mostly been using English names all along. Luthier is straight from Awakening; his Japanese name is Ryuto. It's not impossible that they could pull a Lachesis, but it's pretty doubtful given how otherwise loyal they've been to the poll website and Awakening. The only characters likely to receive further name changes are new ones and bosses that weren't already on the website, like Wolf or Saizo. Speaking of Saizo, his name is not the same, technically.