Anouleth

Not really. Riev is an evil person, and all he does ties into him being evil: just as Eliwood is a good person, and all his qualities support that. But he still has qualities, which seperate him from the evil of Valter or Caellach. Riev prefers to have his subordinates cause destruction and takes vicarious pleasure in it. Valter has no such interest, and takes pleasure in personally fighting. Caellach does not really take pleasure in either, he fights as a means to an end. Just as people who are good for the sake of goodness can still have personalities beyond that, people who are evil for the sake of evil can still have depth. Ok, I didn't see that line. That's... clearly not true since there are plenty of evil Sacaeans.

Please, you can spin out anything into a lot of words, just as it's usually also possible to compress it into one or two. Consider: Riev is cruel and sadistic. He is slow to forget grudges, causing him to nurture a long standing resentment towards Rausten for throwing him out. When, in Grado, he was raised to a rank of power and standing, he revelled in his new position and took pleasure in bossing around subordinates. He was eager to deal revenge to his enemies. Unlike the apolitical Valter and Caellach, he is devoted to the worship of the Demon King. He takes great pleasure in the chaos and destruction that his subordinates cause, but prefers to order people around rather than actually gets his hands dirty. And how do we know that Uhai was once an idealist? Or that he's world-weary? Or that he once had a strong will? Which of his seven lines gives you that impression? For all we know, he could be a devoted servant of Nergal, awed by his power. Perhaps his "final gift" is a trap. By sending his enemies and Ninian straight to Nergal (who he believes is invincible), he expedites Nergal's evil plan.

Actually, it seems appropriate, so I guess I'll mention one thing that always really bothered me about FE8: Eirika and Ephraim never mention their father. Ever. It's so weird! Especially since in the script, Ephraim is never directly told about the death of his father. Uhai and Reed have almost no screen time. Desmond gets more iirc. Lloyd and Linus don't really get much either. A much better representative for the Black Fang is Legault, if anyone. Except there is more to Nergal and Lyon. For example, Lyon is devoted to his father. He sees his father serving his country, and in doing so emulates that devotion to Grado. What more is there to Uhai? What's his relationship to Brendan Reed? Or anyone?

What about Darin, then? Or Sonia? I can't really think of many other villains that are "major", if apparently Lundgren isn't. And they're pretty absurdly evil too. Perhaps then, your problem is the writing, rather than the actual characterisation. Perhaps a better comparison for Ephidel is Tirado or someone, but that's rather a stretch. Lloyd and Linus are hardly "well-developed". Or Uhai, for that matter. I might as well call Aias or Hafedd well-developed. Uhai gets all of one chapter, and all we gathered is that he's a dime a dozen honourable Sacaean. Perhaps Elbert, but I don't remember Uther or Fargus having much of anything interesting to say. Still, beating out Hayden and Mansel is hardly an achievement...

Let's consider the main antagonists of FE7: First ten chapters is Lundgren. He is evil. So, so evil. He kidnaps children, poisons his brother (why he didn't just stab the fucker is up for debate since he was perfectly open about giving him poison), is generally unpleasant and incompetent and unpopular. Then, we have Ephidel for the next ten or so chapters. He's somewhat of a blank slate. He doesn't seem to take any pleasure in his evil work, but at the same time he doesn't mind killing and lying either. Then, we have Nergal. Nergal is obsessed with power and has no qualms about killing people. He doesn't care even when Eliwood kills Ninian. He's disgusted by weak people and considers them to be nothing more than sources of quintessence. However, he was led to this path by the traumatic death of his wife. I can't really say that these three main antagonists are qualitatively more evil than, say, Riev, Vigarde and Lyon. Riev is completely evil, but so is Lundgren. Vigarde is more like Ephidel: an ambivalent puppet for a greater villain. Lyon is cruel and has no compunctions about killing, or abusing the trust of Eirika, but like Nergal, he was motivated by the traumatic death of his father.

You know, that was kind of the point of the entire reclass system in the first place. That if someone like Wrys died, you could still have staff users or whatever. And in practical terms, there is absolutely no reason to train Luke in staves. Except the choices in FE12 really do matter. If they didn't you could choose anything. Maybe that's true on lower difficulties, but not on higher ones. Pretty sure you could get through FE8 with Sniper!Neimi too, but that doesn't mean it isn't a bad choice. Yes, you could. It adds an extra dimension of strategy because in each chapter, you have to pick whether Luke will go with Dracoknight and Paladin (although realistically the choice is more between Paladin and Swordmaster and Hero since Luke will likely work on his sword rank) Games don't exist to impress you, hard as that might be to believe. Also, you're wrong when you say that classes are limited "only" by WEXP and physical/magical preferences. Why don't you try out Pirate!Draug and see how well he does (hint: Barbarians in prologue will OHKO him). Or Cavalier!Palla.

Every game encourages early promotion, if you didn't notice. Well, except FE9, but that's a bit of a special case.

tl;dr

I can't tell you how much your money is worth.

And the practical ingame use in FE12 isn't constrained? Rody can reclass to Dark Mage and Mercenary if you're grinding or being cute or whatever, and that doesn't infringe on the niches of units such as Luke who have viable sword rank. It's true that it's less constrained than FE13, Well, I'm convinced. And in terms of practical use, Arran is not really a viable SM in many chapters because you need his Silver Lance and 10 move, while Luke cannot be a Dracoknight. How are Luke and Arran qualitatively different to Sol and Frederick? I don't think that anyone is denying that FE13 has more diversity among characters. However, FE12 still does have diversity, and from a practical point of view, reclassing is not unlimited. You mean that you want to argue against the person that hasn't actually played FE12 and doesn't particularly like the class change system in it either. I think that having to start again from level 1 is also a constraining factor since it delays promotion. I haven't played FE13, so I couldn't say for sure, but I was led to believe that change proofs were fairly common.

The reclass system expands this usefulness by giving him access to Dracoknight. FE12 is even better, giving Arran the options of General or even SM. Yeah, we get it. Characters in this game have an extra couple of bytes besides their name. However, in practice, characters in FE12 did not have unlimited reclass. Perhaps I should make my position clear: I think that the different class change systems have positives and negatives. And clearly this system is more popular so I can't really say it's a bad direction to go in. Even if half your classes are useful and half are useless, if you have 12 classes to pick from to begin with you still have a lot of potential for interesting choices. An eternal and immutable constant in Fire Emblem. You always have the choice to shoot yourself in the foot and use shitty characters. Bors and Wendy suck even in a game where all the Generals suck. And Lance and Alan are great even in a game where you have an abundance of Paladins.

If one out of 12 classes are unviable, it doesn't matter so much since you still have 11 more. But if you're Richt or someone and your choices are Mage/Cavalier/Archer, wtf are you supposed to do?

Except that unless you have her use tomes 100% of the time, she will be horrible. Tiamo has some of the lowest magic in the game and neither Dark Pegasus or Dark Knight even have particularly good magic stats to back that up. Or, to put it another way, Tiamo has a choice between being, what, a 10/15/1 Falcon Knight with 21STR/27SPD and probably A Lances, or being a 10/15/1 Dark Knight with 11MAG/21SPD and maybe C Tomes or whatever (and E Swords lol). So it's a good thing that certain reclass paths are completely unviable for anything other than grinding? The biggest problem is how permanent it is. You can't really pick and choose classes like in FE12 to suit the situation. This means that niche, situational classes (like Sniper) are no longer useful. Not really. Jeigan is the only character that can access Dracoknight and Paladin early on. That's something special to him. It's just that it's a product of his stats and promoted status and weapon rank rather than declared by fiat by Intelligent Systems that other characters can't be Dracoknight or Paladin.

Australia is PAL region, so you should have a European copy with the problem fixed. One "test" is to check Muarim's Glossary data in FE10. The NTSC version has Mist's bio there instead mistakenly, but it's fixed in the European version.

Sure, you can do all that. But if reclass is only useful when you grind your way to hell and back, it is a badly designed mechanic from the point of view of dondon who doesn't grind at all. Or to put it another way, this mechanic seems designed more to appeal to grindy players who want to have characters with really high capped stats and lots of cool skills after going through every class in the game.

Westbrick and Othin haven't played FE12 Lunatic Reverse to the best of my knowledge. I highly doubt that with the exception of reclassing MU and Miriel into Dark Mages, there are any reclasses that make the game significantly easier. Oh, woohoo, Frederick gets er, Defender and Holy Shield. That's really going to make sooooo much difference.

Therein lies the rub of the issue. Few, in fact, I would go so far as to say none of the unpromoted classes seem to have skills that are worth reclassing for. Class changing not only means you often are stuck with a class with bad weapon ranks (except Cavalier but most characters don't have that as an option), but it delays that all important promotion boost. Perhaps it's more worthwhile in promoted classes, where the skills are stronger and there's generally much greater flexibility (for example you can make Soiree into a Dracomaster and keep her Lance rank, but you couldn't do that before promotion).

Uh, why the hell should Nintendo care about making digital distribution the norm? I personally like having cartridges and manuals and packaging. I like how the manual for Civilisation IV is as big as the box the disc came in. You know the game has a lot of content when the manual is that thick! And no doubt if retailers could get rid of developers they would probably do the same. Capitalism! Except, wait, Nintendo /aren't/ taking the opportunity to undercut physical retailers. So I guess you're wrong.

It has a couple of mistakes, if you didn't notice.

Link to the Past has already gotten remakes. Majora's Mask hasn't. Then again, Link to the Past would probably sell better, providing they don't put goofy 3D shit in it. I would love to see Majora's Mask with updated graphics, but ideally I'd want it on something more powerful than the 3DS so it can be super pretty.

Posted in wrong thread, sorry.

When you say "aesthetically pleasing", do you mean whether I find the character attractive or cool-looking?

Mass Effect has characters with pretty fixed sexual preferences. Only a few males and females will enter into homosexual relationships. But I agree that having every character with no sexual or romantic preference is hardly much of an improvement over having all characters be straight (which is at least a realistic approximation of a medieval society).

where do u get thse stories from

Ah, that's true. That's also true. I spoke without thinking. Another problem I had with FE11 was a lacking emphasis on worldbuilding. Frequently in FE11, I was confused about which countries were where on the world map, where Marth was now, or how the different countries fit together. In comparison, FE4-FE10 have pretty world maps with the countries laid out and much more complex world building. And they did some work with making the countries seem different and unique. So the characters of Begnion, Daein, and Crimea are quite different.