Anouleth

Ah, they have a head start on me, then! They sure are vigilant about protecting your Freedom, eh? The US was not intended to be a nazi dictatorship, either. How can you justify letting the Nazis take over the US? Whose side are you really on? I'm sure that the government can be trusted 100% to probably use this kind of power in a responsible manner.

Actually, I think that if more paths are added, the developers can probably get away with making the story a lot worse.

Let me raise a hypothetical: would it be morally acceptable to let Neo-Nazis run for public office, if the election was carefully rigged to prevent any possibility of them winning (their votes will be thrown away), and the government added the identities of people voting for them to a watchlist to be forwarded to the NSA? I think this is a compromise solution that everyone can be happy with, except Neo-Nazis, obviously, but we just won't tell them.

Vi's passive scales equally off of HP and resistances, as do all % health shields (like Mordekaiser's or Malphite's) and all % health regen.

Really boring maps. The maps are bland, you feel like you're always in the same grey-green field, the level design is blah, with small numbers of enemies spread over way too big a map. Many of the classes are completely useless and you'd never want to reclass to them (like Archer or Dark Mage). 99% of the enemies you fight are cavaliers, archers and knights. Most of the levels, you can just warpskip, and none of them are actually interesting enough to stick around and play through, so I find myself warpskipping... just because I wanted the game to end. This all applies to FE11, btw.

If two route splits are good, twelve must be even better, no?

What action? Can you be more specific? Right, I forgot, it's totally obvious which political parties should be banned to enlightened people such as yourself, but for slow, uneducated fools like myself, would you mind sharing?

Please don't put words in my mouth. I'm asking important, relevant questions. If we accept that we can forbid certain political parties in the name of Freedom, it begs the question: which political parties? Maybe we ban the Nazi Party. Do we ban the far-right nationalist party? Or the slightly less far right nationalist party? Do we ban the Communist Party? Where do you draw the line? Do we need to go further? Except, that these people believe that people being different does hurt people. That's kind of the whole point. They don't hate gay people just for shits and giggles, they think that gay people are actually contributing to the collapse of society.

The presence of prejudice doesn't even hurt people's feelings. It's only when prejudice is expressed that it's hurtful. So, are you saying that we should forbid certain political parties, or people who hold certain political beliefs and ideologies should be forbidden from holding public office? How would you decide which political beliefs are acceptable and which ones are "dangerous"? Who would decide?

Anything less would be half-assing it.

I would only be in favour of multiple paths if there are least twelve. And twelve FULL paths, not like FE6 or FE7 where you just have two different chapters. At least half the chapters in any given route have to be route-exclusive. And the routes are non-linear so you can switch between them.

I liked the final boss in FE10, I guess she counts as a "puzzle boss". It was nice to see a final chapter where you don't just use one unit. FE5's last level probably counts as a "puzzle" too, by that count.

At the same time, enemies that don't attack your units isn't really going to make the series harder (which is the point of this topic). It would only make the game easier, if more tedious and time-consuming.

except that mages also have super mediocre base stats

I'm not doing this for "nostalgia". How could I when so few games have actually had the balls to implement a hardcore mode? Aside from Diablo and XCOM, I can't actually think of any games that do it. There is a need. The temptation to reset is too great. Unit deaths do have value. However, currently, they have value because "welp better restart the chapter", not because the unit is gone. This is, in it's own way, even more frustrating than the unit being permanently dead because you have to completely replay the chapter. Why would that be productive? A mode like that removes the ability of the player to choose what units they use. The mode I'm talking about removes the ability of the player to refuse to let units die. The choices are very different ones. "the older days"? Tell me, what Fire Emblem did this in "the older days"? What does this have to do with LTC playthroughs (which always involve resets so you can build a perfect strategy)? Getting the lord killed is pretty idiotic. Maybe the lord can have a certain number of "lives", like in a Mario game or something, so they can die twice without consequence, but on the third death it's game over.

I don't think that's really true. Take a map like Chapter 3-3 in FE10 or Chapter 18 in FE8. They're extremely non-linear with multiple objectives spread out, and mounted units are still just as strong.

Well, duh. That's the whole point of death: sometimes it happens to people you like, and there's nothing you can do about it. If you don't like it, play casual mode. However, I want a REAL permadeath mode, rather than classic mode which is a wishy-washy in-betweeny mode. In GBAFE, even if the GBA died for any reason, the game constantly kept an up-to-date save file so you could always pick up where you left off.

Content rewards for characters dying would be the sort of thing that it's impossible for the player to know about without stumbling onto it by accident. Like, even if you actually knew that one of the characters dying would lead to new content, how would you know which one it was, aside from going through the game multiple times with different characters dead each time? Or, if the content had other requirements, you might need to do even more. It's easy to assume that because we all cheat and look things up on Serenes, these kinds of things are obvious, but they're not. And yet, players avoid it. You don't need to give them an electric shock or something, people are intelligent enough to understand that units permanently dying = bad, without having the game put on a little song and dance about it. Since players go out of their way to keep everyone alive even without being given a doggie snack at the end of it, I don't think a reward is necessary. I'd rather not have Fire Emblem turn into one of those patronising Xbox games where you get "achievements" for everything, because they think you're too stupid to figure out how to have fun with your own game. The "solution" to making permadeath more significant has been around for a long time. Just stop letting the player reload old saves and savescum. That would be really interesting. We don't need content or achievements or whatever to make permadeath significant, we just need units to actually stay dead rather than just a reset away. And then let me sell my soul to the devil to revive characters. Or sacrifice characters in order to get dark evil powers. Or both. I think I'd like Sumia better if she was an undead abomination. Wouldn't you?

Karel is just rusty from not fighting from a long time, I think, which is why his level up is so strong.

3-8 has a movement penalty, I don't think 2-E has one. 2-2 is indoors so it would presumably have movement penalties, but you don't get any mounted units in that chapter anyway.

It's true that Meg and Fiona were strongest in roles in which they didn't have to actually fight anything or do anything other than stand around picking their noses, but I think when most people say that Meg and Fiona need to be stronger, they usually mean that they should be able to get within five feet of an enemy without instantly evaporating, not that they should have more opportunities to stand around reminding you of how absolutely useless they are as anything but a doorstop. Mobility has always been a strong asset in strategy games, the problem is that mounted units have just as good stats as everyone else, except for move which is much higher. Or, in the case of Haar and Elincia in 2-E, they actually have better stats than everyone else. Marcia is just as mobile, but nobody is going to try to 1-turn using her. And even if Brom sprouted wings, he'd be incapable of killing Ludveck. So movement definitely isn't the "end-all be-all".

You'd just need to have it in more chapters. Very few of the GM chapters involve a movement restriction; after the end of Part 1, there are only four indoor maps left in the game, one of which doesn't even have any mounted units.

I too, found myself falling unconscious at the start of Chapter 2. You're not the only one.

Leona is actually very strong in Bronze league. You don't really require a good ADC; even below-average ADCs can usually figure out to attack some when you're sat on top of them, bursting them and stunning them. And given that Leona has something like a 25% pick rate, Lulu's not so bad either since she's quite good at zoning and peeling Leona. Soraka only has a 9% pick rate, and Sona's is 18%, so you're barely more likely to see Sona/Soraka than you are to see Leona.

Having height differences give range wouldn't affect anything, since more than half the time, you're fighting uphill rather than downhill. I can't imagine towers to be that useful, either. Flexibility of positioning is one of the most important things in Fire Emblem; it's why Canto and movement and dancers are so powerful. Towers force archers to give that up, and would probably make no difference at all to them, even assuming that the player had frequent access to them. Nothing, in other words, that we haven't seen before with Ballistae.