Favourite child system

[Enaluxeme]

With Fates out, we now have three different games with a pairing system and children characters. What do you think it's the best?

I'm gonna stick to FE4, at least until I actually try Fates. For what I understand, it's fairly similar to Awakening's, except for all that personal skills thing.

I like how in Genealogy you have holy blood that affects weapon ranks and inventory inheritance, not only skills and growths to care about. Ah, and regarding growth rates: having all caps except HP being base stat + fixed amount makes almost any possible growth matter, regardless of class (except only strenght on Sety and Corple and magic on Lenster and Faval).

[Magical Glace]

FE4 for having the best in-story justification for them being there.

FE13's justification was okay but caused time travel plotholes

FE14's was so forced it's pathetic.

[NinjaMonkey]

Awakening's for sure.

[Alastor15243]

FE4 for having the best in-story justification for them being there.

FE13's justification was okay but caused time travel plotholes

FE14's was so forced it's pathetic.

Yeah, the Fates justification makes no sense whatsoever, to the point that I felt the need to tweak it to something more logical (and funny) in Dakota's War Journal.

However, from a gameplay standpoint, I'd rank them the opposite. I consider Fates' to be the best, as the children don't vastly outclass the parents like they did in the previous games, while still being awesome. The child system of 4 was ridiculously broken and rigid due to the whole everyone needs pursuit" thing and most of the coolest skills inexplicably being locked to sword-wielding footsoldiers. Awakening's was almost as bad, but thankfully that game's "one skill to rule them all" was more widely spread and available so there were generally more viable options for each character in most cases.

[Emblem Blade]

I can agree that Awakening's Child System was rather horrid in the way where you could make a child unit too broken in the chapter you get them in by having them get the right skills, especially since the Growth Rate system for them was also very broken as they tended to have great to absurdly high growths in just about every stat. Some of the children though required time to level up and promote under normal conditions (aka Brady) or would end up broken one way or another due to game purposes (Lucina and possibly Morgan). Then some children units where flat out broken even with little effort (Severa and Gerome). Then you had the amount of times you could reclass said child using the Second Seal to reclass them to as many classes that their parents (and the child themselves) had.

Fates' Children System is 'ok' at most. Some of their Growths are rather low but that is ok, the loss of multiple classes is somewhat remedied by Partner, Heart and Friendship Seals.

[MCProductions]

Fates Mechanically, FE4 storywise.

As gameplay>story, Fates overall

[kantoorfarina]

FE4's is the best.

[Shadow Mir]

I'd say Fates' since the children don't completely outclass the parents there, and I don't give a damn about story for the most part.

[General Banzai]

FE4 is headache garbage tier. Fates best because it lets you actually use kids beyond Lucina/Morgan/Kjelle/Laurent

[Etrurian emperor]

Fe4 because there it really are parents and children. Celice and Co are the children of Sigurd and his army. Some decades after Sigurd's tale these children have grown into adults to go on a journey in their own right. Kids and teenagers who fought besides Sigurds are now adults and mentor characters for the new generation.

Awakenings child system was okay but the set up that young adult have teenage children is really something you can only do once before you run out of explanations which would cause it to become pathetic. The conversations between parents and children was a nice touch that FE4 obviously lacked.

Which leads us to Fates. The feature was only there because IS wanted it to be, not because it had any place in the story and the explanation for having young adult have teenage children(Or one teen at best having a young adult daughter) fails to convince.

Edited March 7, 2016 by Etrurian emperor

[Sasori]

I think fe4 is my favourite implementation, but all 3 pairing systems had their own shares of problems.

Fe4 made it work very well as a story element. The first generation failed and it is up to their kids to set things right. The pairing itself however is tedious to do and you can easily mess up your pairings if you don't pay attention. I often found myself with a pairing I did't even try to make.

Another issue I have is that some of the kids themselves are kind of boring. Gen 1 made great use of the limited text available. You immediately knew what characters like Lex, Azel and Ayra where all about. I can't say the same for gen 2 characters like Delmud and Lester for example.

Awakenings kids wheren't very relevant to the story, thanks to them being sidestory characters, but fortunately future past made it work for me. My main problem with the fates kids is that I just did't like many of them. Gerome, Nah, Yarne, Kjelle, Severa and Noire are all characters I don't care for. Laurent, Inigo, Lucina and the Morgans are the only ones of the bunch I actually like.

Fates has the opposite problem. I like most of the kids characters, but their inclusion was just embarrassingly bad. It did't fit in the story at all and it just reeked of desperation.

[Paper Jam]

I like FE7 and 6's best: The children are the same regardless of the parents' identity or stats.

Edited March 7, 2016 by Paper Jam

[Ein]

I like FE7 and 6's best: The children are the same regardless of the parents' identity or stats.

Damn it. I was gonna post something like this.

[NekoKnight]

Fates Mechanically, FE4 storywise.

This. I do like that the children in Fates are not automatically better than the parents, and that the level of the children scales with your progress in the story so you can do them at your leisure.

[Nobody]

Mechanically:

FE4>FE14>>>>>>>>>>FE13

Story wise:

FE4>>>>>>>>>FE13>FE14

Fates is my favorite game between the three of them, but it didn't need children at all. They're just there... Still, better than Awakening's system gameplay wise, since the children's levels scaling is pretty neat.

[arvilino]

In my opinion Fates is the best incarnation of the child system gameplay-wise, the level scaling, flexibility of when you can recruit them and method of building supports and the way skills and classes are inhereted make in excellent improvement on Awakenings. Awakening's was ...iffy the difficulty of the chapters flucuated wildly and the children starting at level 10 and based on parents stats made them vary from incredibly powerful for their level to near unusable(at the point you recruit them). Genealogy's has a decent justification of story-wise but the implementation an enigma if you don't know the plot-point is coming it ruins the mechanic and you wouldn't get a good shot at using it unless you replay it, if you don't know what class the children will be you can screw yourself over and if you do know it's coming you spoil a big part of the story for yourself and I think the method of building the marriages wasn't that good at all.

Personally I like the fact that they could actually refine the mechanic immediately after Awakening for Fates without having to wait for a story specifically about the children. In comparison the 16 years between Genealogy and Awakening the core gameplay and support system changed so much that Awakening couldn't even really build on what Genealogy did so pretty much had to start from scratch with the new support system, waiting so long for another story to justify the mechanic only stymied potential improvements.

[Azz]

Fates IMO.

While FE4 will always have a place in my heart, I never liked the kids all that much but Sety and that;s about it. In fact, I much prefer the first gen units in FE4 and nowadays, I actually stop playing FE4 once I get to the end of Gen 1.

In FEA, the kids are just broken. They make all first genners useless except MU, Chrom and Olivia, and even then Chrom is only useful since he is forced in every in game chapter, Olivia is the only dancer and even then, she is not needed. MU is really the only standout gen 1 with kids involved.

In FEF, while the reason why kids are there is absolute shit, I have become desensitized to Fates shit plot, so I could care less. But the main reason it is my favourite is because they don't make the first gen useless and for the most part, I like them all despite the fact most of them are just characters with one gimmick personalities.