Blazing Support Survey: Eliwood, Lowen, Marcus

[Interdimensional Observer]

Welcome to Support Survey: Blazing Bonds Edition!

Motivated by several recent topics, I've decided to do a new tier list of sorts. Rather than quantify pure gameplay goodness, we'll be rating support conversations to figure out exactly how good the overall quality of supports was in the FE 7-9 era (Binding is skipped due to only having been fan translated). SF has all the supports for these games listed, so read them and rate at your leisure. I'll begin with FE7, and once it's done move on to 8, and then 9.

Every ~two days, I'll put 3 new characters up for ranking on a 0-10 scale. After that, I'll average the numbers given and list the averaged value in this post. I will consider ratings given to a given character if they are made after their two days are up, and at the end will recalculate all relevant ratings.

So, how are we supposed to rank everyone? I'm not going to tell you the proper logic, but here are some guidelines:

Your rating will be primarily on a character's support conversations. You can however include into your rating any exposition the character gets in their introduction or in the plot as whole. Character endings can also be taken into consideration.

As for support conversations themselves, again, I will provide no hard logic on how to rate them. You should consider all of a character's support conversations. But I'll leave it to you whether to weigh them strictly equally, or decide that one very good/bad support outweighs everything else. You don't need to rate the character's role in their supports alone, you can say "this is a good support, but in spite of character x (x being the rated character)" or "world-building saves this support".

One thing I do not want to see, is stuff like "69/10 for Rebecca", keep those fantasies out of your ratings!

With all this initial criteria outlined let us start this effort to quantify support quality with three noble souls of Pherae: Eliwood, Lowen, and Marcus.

My Opinions

Eliwood: 

As a lord, he gets seven supports, the most out of any character. Eliwood is gentle, but I dare not say naive. He is educated, and seems rather politically knowledgeable and adept. Not perfect on the battlefield, but I'm fine with having a lord who isn't. None of his supports can be considered bad, they're all at least okay (Harken and Lowen); and Marcus, Ninian and Hector are all amazing.

For the first rating of this topic I'll give Eliwood a 8.5.

Lowen:

A novice knight, zealous to improve, but as he himself admits, pathetic as well. He loves cooking and eating, and all of his supports make some mention of food. His Eliwood and Harken supports offer backstory on Lowen, but they seem to contradict each other- Harken's says Lowen came from a poor distant village, but Eliwood's says Lowen's father was the personal chef of the prior two Marquesses of Pherae. While the chef I'd expect would be poor, I'd expect his family to live in the Castle Pherae/near it with, and that his family would be domestic servants. Also, I cannot tell whether Harken is supposed to be the knight who came to Lowen's village or not.

Lowen's best support I would say is Rebecca's: two bumpkin novices from Pherae falling in love, a hunter and her sorrel knight. The Marcus and the Harken are decent to good from beginning to end. The Eliwood takes until the A support when Lowen's backstory enters to take off, and the Isadora is forgettable, outside of Lowen arranging a picnic on the battlefield.

Attempts at humor are abundant in Lowen's supports, and I partly get them. His rating will be a not so laughable 5.

Marcus:

The old veteran of Pherae. His best support is his amazing Eliwood, it offers good backstory on Marcus (a little of Eliwood) and shows their bond; it even ends on a funny note! Lowen comes in second- we see Marcus believes in very tough love and how aggressive our old man can be on his own allies (imagine how he is on his enemies). There is also a nugget of humor that shows Marcus embarrassed. The Merlinus support I reprimand Marcus for, it's irresponsible for him to leave everything to Eli, Lyn, and Hec (well canonically Mark is probably there); but the support overall is great, even if lacking for action. The Harken is okay at best, and the Isadora is plain forgettable (except for Marcus believing in equal treatment).

Marcus, you'd be top tier for many were this based on gameplay, but don't be too afraid, you're only going to drop to upper mid here: 7.

[bethany81707]

Eliwood: I find his supports rather safe, and I don't think highly of Eliwood's participation in each. For the most part, aside from Hector, he seemed to just be someone who existed for the other character to demonstrate their trait and for Eliwood to talk back to them. In some- namely, the girls and Harken- Eliwood reflects those personalities at the tail end and presents a kind, affable air to comfort their target. Marcus and Lowen, on the other end, continue to overshadow him for their own personality, to Eliwood's clear chagrin. Hector's conversation is special in that the C-rank conversation appears to lead into a developed set, only for B and A to switch tracks to Call Forwards to Binding Blade ("Hey, I had a dream that I will have a daughter and you'll have a son!" "Hey, don't give me any excuses that you're sick while I'm in trouble!").

I'm going to rate Eliwood at 7. He is good when he is given the spotlight, but his supports do not often offer that.

Marcus: Marcus's knightly honour is front and centre this time, and he will emphasise that he is one of Pherae's foremost knights of the realm. Well, when he isn't chilling at the back of the pack with Merlinus. His supports outside of Merlinus are only with Pheraen knights, and it shows. Isadora and Harken felt rather similar to me, actually. His support with Merlinus is very approrpiate for the old guy at the back protecting the supply lines, but the support gets worse at the end for reasons a tad more related to Merlinus himself.

Marcus sits at a 3. His conversations are overall blandly similar.

Lowen: Emergency rations. Lowen will tell you that he has them. Marcus was thankful to encounter them only at the end, and Harken got a heartfelt moment about his origins as a knight in the B support conversation, but apart from that, rations, food, and cooking. Lowen's support set is also identical to Marcus's, with Rebecca in place of Merlinus. I must say that I'm impressed that Lowen does not bring up his emergency rations outside of his supports, at least not that I'm familiar with.

Lown sits at a 2. He has a gimmick, but he does still have a character to shine beyond it.

[Interdimensional Observer]

I know I've still got a whole night and morning before my deadline for the first round expires, but it's pretty clear this topic is dead. Nobody even bothers looking... Guess I'll Fimbulvetr this topic if nobody else responds by tomorrow afternoon. (You'll have to deduct like ~15 from the view count for the number of times I hopped in and out.)

I was looking forward to some good and critical character discussion. I thought people liked tiering/rating things.

Maybe this game is just a little too old/people don't care, or maybe it's topic creation bad timing/naming on my part. Perhaps I'll have more luck with Path of Radiance- can't hurt to try. If that fails, I'll just bench this idea. Can't get hung up whenever a topic you create online fails to take off.

@phineas81707 Thank you at least for participating and even attempting to spread word of this thing. I'll start the Support Survey (which will be renamed Rate the Supports) for PoR tomorrow. 

[bethany81707]

Heh, I was looking forward to having reason to read the FE7 ones... ah well.