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I'd use the word "effective."

You could say the same about Fire Emblem, too. Bottom line is that for most people and judged against most games, SMT and Fire Emblem are brutal.

Good link. So we can add Kirby Super Star, Trace Memory, TTYD, Donkey Konga 3, Daigasso!, Glory of Heracles, and Metal Combat to the list of cameo-related games. Any others? Even the link itself says that these are just "some" of the cameos FE has made in the past.

...what games would be included? Off the top of my head, we've got: -the 11 original games in the main series -two DS remakes -two TearRing games, which are spiritual successors -BS Fire Emblem -Melee, Brawl, and presumably Smash U, which all include playable FE characters -the upcoming SMTxFE spinoff Is this list exhaustive? I'd be sort of surprised if Fire Emblem didn't show up in some other games that I haven't mentioned. Anything from a music track to a character cameo counts.

You rang? Either way, "RPG" is ambiguous (although I certainly wouldn't mind a jRPG). Part of me suspects that the gameplay will be like Devil Survivor, i.e. a hybrid of strategy RPGs and traditional RPGs. But we'll see. Thank God it's not a fighting game

All of these poll options are terrible. I vote for "Both Awakening and SMTxFE sell very well, in no small part because their respective consoles are short on quality software, but there isn't another spinoff game for a long while because this was always supposed to be a fun one-time thing and sales wouldn't have changed that either way." EDIT: Also, anyone saying things like "This will kill the FE series" or "This will inevitably lead FE to become a series of nothing but crossovers" might be mentally deficient.

Seeing as SMT is all about fighting demonic evil, now's the perfect time to bring back this bad boy:

What a terrible poster you are.

YESSSSSSSSS Hopefully this ends up being a Strategy RPG a la NamcoxCapcom, but then again... part of me wouldn't mind seeing Fire Emblem characters in a traditional JRPG. Either way sounds fantastic to me, just so long as it's not something stupid like a fighting game.

I actually saw that and was tempted to correct it, but decided not to. Figured there were enough condescending asses in this topic as-was.

I'd question this. In terms of vanilla Hard Modes difficulties, 6 > 7 > 8 is spot-on, but we also have to consider rankings. FE6's are far too flexible. 7R > 6R > 6 > 7 > 8 would be my ordering.

This is very well-said and the bottom line.

I'll just edit them into my opening post as I write them down. Hopefully they'll be useful to some. I encourage others with some free time to help!

Read the edit. I don't disagree with much of this. (Well, saying the humans always had the upper hand and were "kicking ass" is sort of a baseless inference, but that definitely is nitpicking!) Humans definitely started the war, and humans definitely won the war. The text makes this explicit. The bold is true. Jahn is an antagonist. He represents the opposite end of the spectrum: a genuine speciesist who refuses to believe dragons and humans can live in harmony and who would rather see humanity wiped clean from Elibe. That isn't a sympathetic position and the game rightfully doesn't frame it this way. But as for the species? Ninian. Nils. A glimpse into the civilization beyond the Dragon's Gate. Eliwood's apology. Fire Emblem 7 does quite a bit to show that dragons, like humans, aren't all self-absorbed. Not every dragon is a Jahn. So why claim that " if [FE7] wanted to retcon something, they wasted their opportunity here"? Read this line from "Victory or Death" and tell me the game's narrative hates dragons and condones their genocide: Nils: …… OK, I'll tell you. I want you all to know about me and Ninian. A millenium ago… Man chased dragonkind from the land, exiled us. We had no place to go… not on this world. So we used the Dragon's Gate to flee into another world. When we passed through this chasm in space and time, many of us were lost. Still, we endured the journey. We found humans there, too, but they were few in number. We had a few skirmishes, but at last, we found a home. We were stable there, happy, even. That's clearly sympathetic. As I already stated, we don't know the exact details of the original conflict. Humans could have been wronged, or (as I suspect) humans allowed their greed and bloodlust to get the better of them. Either way, once the war began, both species' survival was on the line. The Generals fought and won for man's survival. Is that not a hero's thing to do? At the very least, would that not be remembered- by men- as a hero's tale?

This is silly. We don't know what motivated the start of the Scouring. Ancient history tends to be ambiguous. But we do know that humans spurred the conflict, probably for admittedly selfish reasons, and then were themselves nearly exterminated. Even if we all agree that genocide is bad, we can also agree that fighting to preserve our species is good. Athos himself loves dragons and lived with them for centuries; when he praises the heroes of the Scouring, he's clearly referring to those who fought for man rather than those who kicked off the war for personal gain. The Elibe games don't condone xenophobia. They tell the tale of a devastating conflict between two species, both very intelligent and with a right to their own survival, where one succeeds and the other is nearly wiped out and forced into exile. Nowhere is this glorified in any way. Eliwood and company oppose Nergal not because they're raging xenophobes and hate dragons; they oppose him because they don't want to see the return of dragons as tools to wipe out civilization. Why is the opening post so long? And why are there so many long responses? This seems simple to me. EDIT: I think I've found the problem. I rewatched the opening scroll, and it doesn't mention that humans were on the verge of extinction at some point during the war. I'm pretty sure this is the case, but I may have my Fire Emblems mixed up; someone who's played FE7 more recently, feel free to correct me. Even if this isn't the case, the answer is still very simple: There was a war between humans and dragons. Humans started the war, but whichever species lost the war would be wiped out / exiled. The heroes of the Scouring are those who led the final push against the dragons and defeated them, ensuring the continued survival of the human race. Either way, many were lost on both sides and it was a bloody, tragic conflict. The key point here is that the heroes of the Scouring are heroes because they secured a future for man, not because dragons are horrible and deserve death. The Elibe games go out of their way to make the dragon race sympathetic, and (as mentioned in the OP) Eliwood even apologizes to Ninian about his ancestor's actions. This "glorification" of genocide is illusory. Nowhere is the initial attack on dragons treated as justified, but once things broke loose, both species were in danger of extinction. The heroes made sure the extinct species wasn't humanity. Seems reasonable to call them "heroes" to me. EDIT 2: At the risk of being a complete hypocrite, I'm going to make this post even longer. Ignore this if you're here for the talk about genocide. I'm just rather puzzled and need to respond to... This is desperate. You're criticizing FE7 when this topic is about the Elibe games in general, and no one is even talking about Sacred Stones; why bring it up? Better yet, why bring up the other games in the series, EarthBound, and Final Fantasy VII? Why are you trying to downplay the importance of FE7 when this topic clearly isn't about that? Why push this strange agenda instead of staying tangentially on-topic? The point the OP is making is a simple one: that the Elibe games condone or even glorify genocide. They don't. If you want to argue that many Fire Emblem games have simple storylines (and everyone will agree), that's something for another topic. And not to be rude, but this post is poorly written. One of the worst I've ever come across, actually. You really should work on your overwriting.

I just noticed that neither script section for FE7 / FE8 has the village conversations written down. Which is too bad, because many of them are rather interesting (even if most are simple tips). I assume it'd be easy to pull these parts of the script from the game data, but a cursory Google search didn't pull up anything elsewhere. Is there a reason these haven't been added? If not, I wouldn't mind playing through FE7/8 again and writing them down myself. "Living Legend"

Here's what I see as the most likely scenario: This game is going to perform well above expectations in the West. Not only is it one of the best games in the series according to most everyone who's played it, but it's also chock-full of content and is on a budding system with a relatively sparse software library at the moment. It's not going to be Pokemon, but it'll sell very, very well. This means that a new game in the Awakening arc, perhaps starring Paris, will begin production. New games, however, take time. So to fill the gap, I see Intelligent Systems remaking an earlier game in the series. FE4/5 is a possibility, but a remake of the Elibe games (with lots of added content -- generation system, etc.) would make sense after spending so much time on Akaenia. If I were a gambling man, I'd put my money on a remake being next, with a new entry not far behind.

I'm in the use-on-dancer group. Though it might not be optional on breakneck-speed, total-efficiency LTC runs, for the most part it's extremely helpful and opens up a lot of options.

Even if this might make things messy, I agree with this in principle. We can draw the line for UU inclusion at staff users who begin the main campaign with a D-rank or higher, which weeds out reclassed junk units. This will probably boil comparisons down to join time, starting staff level, and access to any unique staves, but tiering the staff users more precisely seems possible. On the flip side, I'm not sure how feasible it would be, or what good it would do, to compare units like thieves and MU with staff users. But I don't see why staff users, who have pretty strictly-defined roles, couldn't be arranged in terms of usefulness within UU.

A very underrated reason to own a physical copy is resale. I digitally downloaded New Super Mario Bros. 2 and exhausted the game within a few days. It's been sitting pointlessly on my 3DS menu screen ever since. Would be nice to Craigslist the game for 25-30 bucks or so.

I assume that by "Hard Mode" you're referring to standard hard and not Maniac/Lunatic/Reverse, which isn't a particularly difficult mode to begin with -- worrying about team minutia isn't all that necessary. That said, one observation is that you might be spreading your experience too thin. I don't recall actively training anywhere near fifteen units in any of my runs, and there's little reason to keep Norne / Cord anyway. You've already got three other magic users (two of which can contribute to staff utility), and the benefits of fielding two archers at once are highly situational. If you're still hankering for a replacement, a reclassed Sirius, even this late in the game, could do the trick thanks to his superb starting weapon ranks and decent bases. I wouldn't really recommend Tiki, as she comes too late and is too vulnerable to contribute much. Xane, on the other hand, is a great unit. He's essentially another My Unit who just needs a heal staff and takes a turn off from time to time. Certainly worth using.

(First post, so go easy on me.) This is a small point, but why is Wrys up in Unique Utility tier? He starts with an E staff rank and doesn't have access to any unique staves. I understand UU is largely a pick-and-choose when it comes to staff wielders, but Wrys' bases are so utterly average that just about any unit can reclass to Curate and be equally effective. Admittedly, he's your only healer for the final five chapters of the Prologue, so he'll get some experience and might raise his staff level, but then he's absent again until 3x. I'm sure there's a simple explanation for his placement, and I understand not wanting to lump every otherwise-useless unit into UU for "potential staff utility," but there seems to be a bit of a grey area here.