SnowFire

I will grant that having at least a passable hit rate is important if you're doing Vantage/Wrath. Enemy phase sweeping is not a playstyle I consider very fun so I don't do it myself, but yeah, needing to roll a hit over repeated enemy attacks, and being at low HP to set it up, exaggerates the impact of Skill. If you're doing player phase strats, then a disastrous miss is just 1/10 of your time crystal charges and move on with your life, no big deal. I agree that "what skill does for you" can be opaque, but I suspect that plays into the hands of people assuming Skill does more! Like, to pick on Three Houses, a well-known example of a game where Skill (Dex) isn't very important, compare Ashe (fantastic Dex) & Hilda (garbage Dex) if they both go Warrior. Let's also assume they're using a Brave Axe+, on the inaccurate side of 70 Hit. This is exactly where Ashe is gonna shine, right? Well, Hilda ends up with 70 (BA+) + 20 (Axe Prowess A) + 18 (Dex) = 108 Hit, while Ashe ends up with 12 more Hit from 30 Dex and thus has 120 Hit. Okay, here we have where Dex is supposed to shine: Hilda hits a 30 Eva enemy 90.54% of the time, while Ashe hits 98.1%. Except we left something out of our calculation... linked attacks. Just a single A support in range gives +10 Hit, meaning Hilda is suddenly hitting 97% of the time. Even more supports and now the advantage becomes even more worthless. But yeah, even if your sole goal is optimizing Hit percent, that doesn't mean "Grab units with the highest dex", it means "grab units with the most number of support partners on your current team." Okay, 3H was an unfair example. But let's take FE6, a pretty dodgy game. It's also one where misses can be sorta disastrous for some characters - like let's say you're trying to build drain-tank Sophia. She really, really needs to hit with her Nosferatus (base hit of 70). But if you're investing in to her (stat boosts are buyable in FE6, after all), buying Secret Books are a mere +4 Hit each. You could spend that money on Angelic Robes and Speedwings instead, and make it so that if an unlucky miss happens, she might survive anyway, or alternatively double attack and get a second try at draining the enemy.

I don't know about "controversial", but there are a few games it might be "objectively wrong". 😉 More seriously... even though SKL isn't ultimately that big of a deal in, say, FE6/FE7/FE8, if you were playing those on a cartridge, there are no battle saves or save states, and though a miss is unlikely, it might be disastrous. So I can respect hyping up Skill then (same for, say, FE10 Hard Mode with no battle saves), despite the minor impact of each individual point of Skill. I think Skill is the most nerfed by Echoes / Three Houses / Engage, just because Turnwheel / Divine Pulse / Time Crystal as a core game mechanic means that unlikely catastrophic misses become "spend 1 Turnwheel charge" rather than "restart entire map". (A similar issue with Awakening / Fates if you're using Battle Saves on Casual mode but resetting on character death, although this is technically a playstyle not directly encouraged.)

Turtle is one of the hardest & most stressful maps in the game, especially the first time. No shame in having trouble there. Light torches and be aware that archers can come mess with you as you move up the center if you stand too far forward. This can actually be acceptable if you have a Sniper that'll win an archery duel (Shamir?). Swordmasters from the fog are terrifying, but can be handled with either a dodgetank (break out Swordbreaker if you have it on some Falcon Knight) or a pure defense tank. I guess Felix or Raphael from your description? But yeah, it's tricky. There's also some fliers that need to be somehow safely baited, but once they are they'll die horribly to arrows/magic. When you take the top right, FAQ the location the swordmaster spawns on the "right" side of the map and place Linhardt there, he can spam Physic from afar or something as long as the cav reinforcements from the bottom right don't gank him. (Or someone more survivable if you don't trust your timing to be fast enough, but block the swordmasters for sure.) For turtle himself, you can spend a little time clearing both the front porch and the right side. It's okay to steer clear of the left side other than the basics since there's another ninja enemy spawning spot there. Anyway, since he deals magic damage, some of your normally frail mages may actually be able to hang with him and not get OHKO'd. He's not actually that fast, so as long as you don't get flat OHKO'd, you should be able to throw damage in safely early. He's a rare time where cooking up an HP boost back at the Monastery has some merit if you have some borderline OHKO'd characters, although I suspect you already saved past that. But the first two lifebars shouldn't be THAT different from most other monsters. The last two lifebars are quite rude though, with Miracle (off super Luck, assume it will activate) & Quick Riposte. Anyway, there are two big ways around Quick Riposte. One is using uncounterable attacks - Gambits most obviously, but also stuff like Windsweep if Byleth (/Yuri) has learned that, or simply overwhelming fatal damage that KOs a life bar. The second is the stun status from breaking all the barriers. He can't counter while stunned. (The third, and far less preferable one, is to have a huge magic tank who can just take two hits, or to have a high-offense unit with a guard adjutant.) My main suggestion would be to go for a two-turn kill once the coast seems clear enough. First turn, weaken most barriers. It's okay to get horribly mauled on counterattacks (as long as you're not standing near the "left" side ninja reinforcements) because you're going to make sure that whoever uses the last Gambit this turn can survive a round of combat, and they'll be the recipient of his wrath on enemy phase. Turn 2, break the final barrier and let all hell break loose. Just dump all your best damage in. If he's still not dead, well, you won't be attacked on enemy phase (although Renewal will trigger), but you'll still need to finish the job on turn 3, and something has probably gone wrong. If you haven't tried it much, since you said you have Shamir, note that Hunter's Volley with a Killer Bow is fantastic for shearing off extreme amounts of monster HP, fast.

Interesting write-up. A cool achievement! I will say... and this is not a big deal... but you come across as rather needlessly defensive on your choice of team? As if phantom people would be harassing you for not running Jean / Yunaka / etc., and they're WRONG? Like, it's cool. Readers understand that every player's own "bottom 10" characters will differ a little. All you really needed to say was "this team doesn't include any standouts other than Alear (for obvious reasons); here are some other units some other people consider weak but I didn't use because [XYZ] and there weren't enough team slots." This may deter people from reading the rest of the writeup from the eye-rolling. EDIT: Reading deeper in... again, not trying to be a hater, it is an interesting challenge. But the tone is just... far too hostile and defensive. I would politely suggest you keep that in mind for any future writeups? Good challenge read-alongs are supposed to be fun things where you get in the mindset of the person doing the challenge and see what works, what doesn't, cool tricks done that normally aren't necessary due to other strategies, etc. A lot of this document comes across as axe-grinding against imaginary Internet people - haha you thought Chloé was good but see, I "barely struggled" without her! I think most people would agree that you can beat the game with any team, but that doesn't mean Chloé is bad, or that there's some cabal of "Chloé is absolutely necessary to win" players that need to be disproven. Similarly, other parts come across as, like, a challenge to the reader that they're expected to do this exact challenge themselves ("have fun training him [Seadall] by punching people!") to show they're not a scrub, when I suspect that is very rare. Again, I mean this constructively - I think write-ups like these can be very cool. I just think you'll get better reception if you have a friendlier slant to it.

I'll just say that I think "returning character because it is a sequel set in the same world" a la FE9->FE10, FE6->FE7 (yes I know it's a prequel, but it's a sequel in real life), or FE1->FE2, is so different from "extradimensional visitor" as to be totally different cases. The first case is always going to be more natural, although you may require some fantasy hand-waving if the time gap is really long (a la Tiki in Awakening). The second one is... I mean, it's fine, but it does inherently bake in some idea of linked universes connected by gods & dimensional travel, and this may not be something you REALLY want to focus on too deeply as it raises questions. In general, I'd say not to do it unless you're going to make multiple dimensions a first class part of the story. Engage sort of does this, but does it rather badly by backloading all of the revelations to extremely extremely late and not having it make tons of sense and seemingly making up a few rules only to break them literally minutes later (twice!). Fates is an awkward spot in that I think that the Awakening trio not being super-loud about it was fine for the base game, but very strange once you play the DLC. And the DLC is good, don't get me wrong, just imply very wacky things happened where Anankos was apparently unable to give even the barest of useful directions and all three of them gave up or something after it being too puzzling to figure out they're looking for Corrin? Oh well, it's Fates, it's somehow still better and more developed than some of Fates' other plot threads. FE Heroes gets a slight pass because we all know it's due to gacha finance reality rather than artistic intent necessarily, but just how long have all these characters been kidnapped and mind-controlled in setting? At some point they need to accept that either they're like Engage Emblems themselves and weird clones stuck in Valhalla, or that they've become mind-controlled Askrans who've abandoned their original realm. But yeah. In general, use with great caution for games that aren't just sequels, and only if you can somehow make dimensional visitors work without cheapening your own setting.

I know that this is a popular plotline to do, but I don't think it fits all that great for the time periods your average Fire Emblem is set in. War profiteers have existed forever, but when medieval merchants got power, it wasn't via shadowy behind the scenes stuff, but rather just... openly taking it and buying a title of nobility, or being appointed to the government of your Renaissance Italy town, or whatever. So it's not like there was a separation between the war merchants and the government; if they had power, they also joined a government. Which is not to say that we don't have plenty of, like, conspiracy theories about how secret (insert despised minority here) are really controlling the government from the medieval era via bribes, but they're, well, conspiracy theories. The kings & their court very much did have the power. Meanwhile the Borgias or the Venetian merchant-asshole types were just very obviously also the government. If we go later into the modern era, the Merlinuses of the world have some power, but... it's still complicated. The East India Company is the world's first megacorporation and it's founded in 1600, but again it's not like them being assholes would have been remotely a plot twist to the people on the receiving end. They were just operating as a pseudo-government quite openly. (And also not really making money, requiring bailouts from their patron government. Whoops!) I'd argue it's not really until the 20th century where you really see this kind of thing with the United Fruit Company doing shady shit in Central America and the like, but that's usually much later than Fire Emblem's mileiu. (And even then... that's not "continent spanning war" type stuff Fire Emblem likes.)

I recommend not stressing over it at all. Seeds won't make or break a Maddening run. While there are rules, I think the intent was for the harvest stars to be essentially random, just "consistently" random if given the same seed set, since good luck as a mere mortal figuring out the rules here. Just plant random stuff every Explore and you're probably fine (well, maybe with an emphasis on the food-giving seeds if you're concerned about not having enough food to feed people at lunch share-a-meal). If you want to really be fancy, you can seek out combinations of seeds that add up to rank multiples of 12 (or 12+1, 12+2, etc.) to make the https://serenesforest.net/three-houses/monastery/greenhouse/ calculations happy. But only do that once, and once you find a set, just keep using it. As Zapp mentioned, if you can get some high-rank seeds early, this can accelerate your Professor XP growth, because the higher rank seeds give more Prof XP. Not really worth stressing on IMO, but it's there. (And the high-rank seeds aren't even necessarily BETTER, just... more XP when you care about that, so C3-C7 or so?).

I think @lenticular largely hit the nail on the head for the more recent-ish games. I don't think FE6 is strongly themed, but I also don't think it's a flaw of the story or anything. For the most part, it's just a story about a fantasy conflict that takes its world-building somewhat more seriously than some of the sloppy later games. That's okay sometimes, but it's also got some parts that are rather clearly, er, protagonist-centered morality or the like? But they need to ship some maps, so fine. If there's an attempt at a deep theme, it's in the endings, but it's not like forgiveness as an imperative (i.e. Roy / Hartmut's choice vs. Jahn who can't let it go) comes up much elsewhere. (Arcadia is non-hostile dragons, so that doesn't count, no.) Agree with others that FE7 is proto-Awakening, being about bonds of friendship and such. I'd slightly angle FE8 to being about how to deal with impossible situations, as well. To which sometimes the answer is "pluck" and "magic artifact weapons" which doesn't always apply to real-life all that great, but so it goes (and neither does forbidden resurrection rituals for Lyon's answer, I suppose). FE9 isn't subtle on its racism aspect. I do think that while FE9 has a better point than most FEs on the classism aspect, it's better in the sense of being worthy of the 1800s rather than the 1500s. Tellius is a world where the royalty Really Are Better Than The Average Joe, but it's also one that explicitly holds out the hope of the commoner joining their ranks, at least, and being acknowledged as just as shiny & special as them, if not more so. Which is a fair sight better than the many many FEs where there's simply no hope of getting Dragon Blood or whatever without being born into it, and if there's a twist, it's Echoes-style where the twist is that the commoner was really a noble the whole time. FE10 is kind of a mess once it starts getting themed. C1 and C2 are good stories but not super-heavily themed. If there was more space in the script. some of the stuff in C3 could have been interesting to explore thematically, but the game bothers to stop and think so little about the implications of a Gallian invasion of Benignon or what preciesly is going on that it kinda ruins any chance for that to mean stuff. C4 is about as deep as a Shin Megami Tensei game where we learn a lesson that extremes are bad, which sure, although using insane goddesses is cheating. Good excuse for Tier 3 classes to show off though I guess. Shadow Dragon... this has to have been either unintentional, or for there to have been a split in the team, but no other game in the series buys more into a war-is-hell, there will be casualties view. The game not only forces you to lose a unit, it forces you to PICK the unit that will die. Along with the whole famous "murder your army to see the new characters" thing. That said, if we go by what was probably intended, I think it's the standard Japanese conservatives who want to abolish Article 9 type - if there's evil in the world, we gotta go fight it. A lot of Marth's chats come down to "why are you fighting for evil, when you could be fighting for good." New Mystery of the Emblem... this is also probably an accidental message, but it's oddly... hopeful? Basically everything bad that happens is due to evil magic, in Medeus / Gharnef getting resurrected for no reason and mind-controlling a shit ton of important people. The message is that everything would have been totally fine if not for evil magic. This is a little different from FE11, where there's some baddies who explicitly are just bad 'cuz they're evil and ambitious a la Michalis. Awakening, our bonds give us strength, etc. It's not subtle, but it works better than a lot of the above! Fates is more a character story. What if one person was so ultimate that whichever side they picked won, I guess. Revelation, in theory, I think may have been intended to have some theme about seeing the truth? Like the other two are artificial conflicts, and Revelation (as the English title suggests... although not the JP title, so don't take it too seriously) is about attacking the literally invisible puppets and puppetmaster ruining everything from the shadows, and trusting in your family / comrades to figure out the truth. I say "intended" because Corrin actually recruits people more by force of personality where everyone decides Corrin is just the goodest person ever, rather than some Phoenix Wright presenting of evidence. Fates Birthright could have been a story about choosing what's right over what you're brought up to believe, but the existence of Conquest kind of negates Birthright's effectiveness, alas. Conquest... gets me angry. Echoes has been over a thousand times before. Same with Three Houses, although for better reasons, thankfully. I'm less certain I agree Engage was actually meant to be about choices over blood. Or, if that was the intent, they really sent some mixed messages in parts. Alear is still an incredibly important focus of everything basically solely by being a dragon. Hell, even before the C20 twist, the Emblems talk about using the miracle on Lumera, because... was she really the bestest person to pick? She's just a long-lived dragon is all. But the plot lets it stand unquestioned. Nah, blood is incredibly important in Engage and clearly DOES define people, just more about "Greatness" or some such nonsense rather than morality. I don't want to read too much into optional support conversations, but Veyle's lines really don't help here. I think the game "likes" innocent Veyle and thinks she's cool, and she makes very clear that what she wants is Alear the sibling, not necessarily Alear the savior. They don't bond over shared morality and how dad is a monster; they bond because they're family. Sombron is a problem because of all the death & destruction, sure, but he's also an asshole because he explicitly seems very blase about his own kids dying. I've mentioned before it'd have been more interesting if Sombron was an evil family values type, a Darth Vader "Join me and we'll rule the galaxy together as father and son", which would allow Alear / Veyle to "prove" they're in it for the morality. As is, eh, it's still a story about how most families are good and wonderful and get along great and Sombron is the only exception and his friends are All Alone and will have to make a big long death speech about being alone.

If any real-life weapon of war deserves the 3H monster treatment, it's elephants. They absolutely took up the space of 4+ soldiers and had a very long time-to-kill; they could take an amazing amount of punishment = lots of HP. Even if you inflicted mortal wounds, the elephant might well still keep going for a full 15-60 minutes. The only way to kill an elephant in an "instantly drops dead" way was to shoot an arrow at point blank range directly into its brain, which, well, good luck with that. They were pretty much the tanks of the ancient battlefield. Really the only problem with them... and it was a huge one... was that directing elephants and making sure that they fought the enemy could be tricky. There's definitely stories of elephants panicking and trampling their own side.

This is the unpopular opinions thread, but... I can't agree here! At least for games that aren't Three Houses or Awakening (as those games are dominated by skill choices instead, and more generally have Large Numbers that dull the impact of +2 to a stat). You don't need to have looked up the growths and memorized them, just look at what the stats are Right Now. If you have a fave unit but with one bad stat, throwing stat boosters in their direction is potent in most FEs. It's both intuitive to casual players ("Hey, RD Haar needs more Speed" or "FE8 Marisa could use some Str") and effective in older FEs, where +2 Defense can be extremely significant. The one area that kinda is a casual trap is games where stat caps are relevant, as then it can be easy to "waste" a stat booster if you don't realize you're already close to the maximum cap and the booster is overkill. But oh well.

Well that's just terrible then (assuming this wasn't the manga just making up stuff). The plot already only barely grapples with WTF was going on with Sombron apparently eating an entire town in Elusia as well as (some/ most?) of the castle attendants, but if there was an Actual Populace, then WTF. Like, FE8 is the classic example of an underexplored setting that was mostly interested in the royals, but it just openly said that yes, Eirika is abandoning her people to their fate, and life sucks with bandits & monster attacks and such afterward. There's zero indication that Alear / Vander / etc. are fleeing and leaving An Actual Population Of Lythos to... an Elusian occupation force? Death from Corrupted? Who knows. And then things get WORSE in C21-C24, which was fine when it was a big empty area (if perhaps an ecological disaster), but that is suddenly way more real. I dunno. To give the writers the barest smidgen of credit, I hope that either some of the writers didn't realize Lythos-ians existed, or saying that they did was some late-breaking addition or retcon. Because wow if they were always intended to exist.

Belated reply to this: Lythos is certainly a storytelling failure and a case of being deeply, deeply underexplained (the main script being short is not an excuse; Vander / Framme / Clanne's supports should have covered this if it wasn't considered important enough to parade in front of you at any point). But... and I could be off on this... I think it's dumb for a different reason. I think there's a throwaway line that Lythos is reserved for the Divine Dragon and their attendants, meaning the place is closer to, like, an Antarctic research lab than an actual country. Or perhaps a fantasy amped-up and larger idea of how the royal family has a palace right in the middle of friggin' Tokyo with a big garden and everything despite the insane land values in the area that you can't go live in or buy property at yourself. So... there wasn't even anyone that the Elusian forces were fighting or that stopped them, it was just a big nature reserve that people respected because their religious leader demigod said so. Now, note that this makes fairly little sense, and if it was really true, would actually be kinda Not Cool to reserve so much apparently fertile and beautiful land for Lumera's personal garden or the like. But I think that was the choice. (If it was intended that Lythos was supposed to have people, then massive fail, yes. And of course, Vander / Framme / Clanne should all be much stranger in the way that isolated people are if they just get supply shipments every week from worshippers but otherwise don't talk much with others, but instead they have such light and nonsensical supports that they talk about who is serving the Divine Dragon the best and making fan clubs and such.) -- On Radiant Dawn Hard Mode: Note that there was a thread on this awhile back: So there is a way to play Hard Mode without the bizarre Quality of Life hatred nonsense in the shipped Hard Mode... for all that it still has the issue that it's just not that different aside from reduced BExp favoring the use of pre-leveled characters over growth characters even more than Radiant Dawn already does.

I think that's just the game not wanting to disrupt Kayfabe and provide "spoilers", sort of, by having Rhea really unleash during White Clouds (same with Catherine & Ashe's Paralogue). Since Rhea is supposed to just be an important official early in the plot (...for all that... some other elements suggest Rhea might have been some eternal Archbishop which would have implied that it'd be common knowledge she wasn't), having her be just a person under threat makes sense. I can think of no less than two other RPGs off the top of my head where you do "escort" missions where the helpless archaeologist / explorer you keep bumping into is actually the final boss slumming around with mere mortals. But so as to avoid spoilers, if they "die", it's still a Game Over, even if they're really a dark god or the like. -- On the general point: Recurring bosses are fine, especially from a gameplay perspective. Some form of interaction with the villains throughout is also helpful for building a rivalry and why do you care - it can be difficult for a villain you've never met before fighting & killing them to have the proper impact, and one way is just to have that villain show up sooner and either taunt the heroes then teleport off, or just fight them then somehow escape. There's a reason that allowing this tool is kind of a default in video game fiction. ...THAT SAID, just because something is a healthy default for understandable reasons doesn't mean it should be done ALL the time. And I'm talking about across fiction here, not within a work or even within a series. Something that made the older FEs stand out was a "mood" of "this is really happening, there are no guarantees, these are not play fights." Lyn can DIE to a random-ass bandit and there is no cheap revival item from a store. When you fight someone, think as if you're doing it in a real RPG - that means you're really fighting them! If you kill Vaida now, she's obviously not going to appear later, because she's dead! Older FEs are pretty good about being disciplined about how many fights turn into "eh, that was just a wound", and often only do it for the likes of Cecilia vs. Zephiel (basically a cutscene that uses the in-game battle engine, so sure). You don't HAVE to do this, but if you set this mood and are consistent with it, it provides a different, realer feel than you'll find in your average Ultimate Anime Battles game where everyone apparently fights with nerf bats and battles never really stop anyone permanently. The reason I'm less fussed with repeat fights in more modern FEs is that they've stepped much closer to the "Ultimate Anime Battles" style than the low fantasy "You are there, no takebacks, no going easy, this is real" style. And if you're already having people facetank giant energy beams that only cause their clothes to get dirty, then whatever, might as well take advantage of all the storytelling advantages of repeated encounters with the same people.

If I was writing Radiant Dawn, I'd agree. I think that implying that magic "knows" what nation people are and nationality is something mysteriously true is some combination of dumb and problematic. Unfortunately, I think it is intended to be a thing, though. The Blood Pact clearly works on citizenry of a specific nation, and there's some lines somewhere in RD about how Ashnard was trying to taunt Goldoa into fighting him by intentionally screwing up Rajaion as a gesture of insult, and if Goldoa had joined the war, then maybe it'd have ended the world on the spot due to all the nations really taking part. So... depending on how exactly the pledge worked, it could maybe be argued that a hyper-isolationist Ludveck-led Crimea could have stalled Ashera's return, although per above I don't really buy it anyway..

I guess. But why would Ludveck know or care about any of that? Thanks to the plot twists of FE10, even the FE9 hero crew were retroactively clueless about what was really going on with Lehran's Medallion and what would have happened if Reyson had sung the Galdr of Release "early" in FE9. The only person who really understands what is going on as of C2-C3 according to FE10 is Micaiah. I kinda doubt that Ludveck would have been swayed one way or the other on this count until it was too late and the world (presumably including him) gets stoned, at least assuming some form of the battle in Chapter 3 Endgame happens anyway and Yune / Ashera wakes up. (If you're about to suggest that the C3-E battle wouldn't include ALL of the nations of the world fighting if Ludveck just sat at home and consolidated power, it seems likely to me that Ike & co. would still count as honorary Crimeans, even if they fought without the aid of Elincia and any subordinates of her that were killed in the hypothetical 2-E-gone-wrong.)