Fire Emblem

[Bloble]

How can anyone's favourite support be a byleth one when they barely say anything and have the personality of a brick wall

- - - Updated - - -

Like at least other characters are actual characters

[SirGauoftheSquareTable]

What? I like how Dorothea's insecurities are addressed and handled in it. That, and I do consider Byleth more a character than a self-insert.

[Five_X]

Oh so you're saying it's wrong to commit crimes?

It might be wrong to fuck the Pope, but I don't make the rules.

[Snow]

I really wanted to get together with Dorothea and Claude in VW at the same time, that should have been an option.

[Spinach]

That, and I do consider Byleth more a character than a self-insert.

This might be one of the most pants on head opinions I've witnessed, and I've been on BL for over a decade now, so you know I've seen a ton

[SirGauoftheSquareTable]

Whatever bro. What I mean is that they're not a pure/true self insert ala Chrono or any Pokemon protagonist, but have a seeming baseline personality and dialogue options sort of based on that.

[Spinach]

I have played every single Pokemon game except for Sword/Shield and I give you a verified gamer fact that Byleth possesses as much personality as all of the Pokemon protagonists.

[SirGauoftheSquareTable]

So have I, and I vehemently disagree.

[Deathhappens]

Kick my ass and call me a weaboo but I love hearing Constance's constant OOHOHOHO's

[SirGauoftheSquareTable]

I mean, who doesn't? At least to some extent.

[pinetree]

She's the best.

[Deathhappens]

WTF is up with Leonie's B support with Byleth
In terms of timing, I mean, it couldn't be any more tone deaf if they actually tried???

[SirGauoftheSquareTable]

Oh yeah, that. There's a reason you can't unlock it after a specific point. To her credit, she does apologize in the next one.

[Aozaki-desu]

WTF is up with Leonie's B support with Byleth
In terms of timing, I mean, it couldn't be any more tone deaf if they actually tried???

Leonie is an irredeemable cunt

[Snow]

Leonie's messiness gives her nuance and personality, and depth to her dynamic with Byleth. Not that I care if characters are morally upright to like them but unlike Slyvain and Felix Leonie is an actually decent person other wise and pretty much all of her non-Byleth supports are her being kind and supportive to others. But people will have one character say a mean thing to their MC and lose their shit, very funny to me.

[pinetree]

Hard to appreciate the depth her obsession with Jeralt adds to her relantionship with Byleth when it's the reason she's such a one-dimensional character in every other scene outside of supports.

Her B support doesn't even make sense. If it was unlocked before then it'd be fine, but as it is, it goes completely against her reaction when you actually talk to her in the monastery.

[Snow]

Surrounded by all these multidimensional characters who are not all mostly just two to three tropes stuck together, and who are all extremely important in scenes outside of supports, right.

Her support with Byleth is weirdly timed maybe, but her supports are otherwise alright and she's fine for the side character she is. She's neither the only character who looks up to Jeralt as an inspiration and a hero, nor the only character who resents Byleth (at least initially), for having things they don't.

[pinetree]

Her's feels more like a problem than the others. When Lorenz or Raphael or Sylvain go on about their own repetitive traits, it's more tied to the current conversation. Lonie just feels like she's too busy worrying about Jeralt to participate.
I'm not over how in the middle of this turning point in the narrative, with the whole group making a promise to meet up again after 5 years, she asks Byleth to bring his dad too. It's just weird. It's a moment meant to be emotional in every route and the line they chose to write for her just comes off as someone who doesn't really care about this supposedly tight group of friends.

Her supports with Byleth would be great had they not made that one mistake, sure. But I think the placement is so egregious enough that it's easy to understand why there's such a strong reaction.
On my part, I just benched her and recruited Shamir to grind her supports instead.

[Malgos]

About that, would you prefer purely silent protagonist or a protagonist who speaks but not the exact words of the dialogue options?

I prefer not having Avatars and maybe even having the dialogue options in the first place other than that it depends I don't mind silent Protagonists like Link but I also don't mind if they less of an avatar probably because I don't care for Avatars either way and don't insert myself mentally and see them as separate from me despite their intent. Link is and was always Link to me, even before I knew what exactly his name was supposed to be, since they didn't have his name as a preset and my first one was a used copy so I think I just used the name the guy before me used.

Maybe something akin to Mass Effect 2 could be nice where you got the option to use Paragon or Renegade Interrupts. Except for me it'd be like the few times you do those would just in the future auto-pick red, blue and neutral as dialogue options. For the kind of RPG that Mass Effect is it would probably be not well received, but for something else it might be nice for me, but I never played a game like that so maybe it would also bother me to not be in control and picking whether or not I'd like to be more neutral or cash in on those alignment points and choosing blue or red.

Avatars are bad in Fire Emblem. They have detracted from the story in every single instance they have appeared. The least offensive one was Robin (or arguably Mark from FE7) and even that wasn't particularly good.

Agreed, but not only for Fire Emblem I think in general there's few Japanese games that I can recall that do avatars well. For example when I first saw the Xenoverse trailer I just stopped caring about that. Why would I want to play as some dumb avatar than an actual icon character? Sure I get the appeal for some, but it turned me off without even looking into the game much more than that. Xenoblade X also suffered a bit for me with having an avatar character. Sure it was kinda neat gameplay wise, but could've also gotten some more characters out of that. Still that game was more gameplay focused anyways so I suppose it made sense to them to do it like that.

I'd say that Mark was less offensive than Robin, because Mark is entirely optional. It's actually funny when I first saw that Fire Emblem 12 had a "My Unit" feature I thought it might be neat, not exactly because of the avatar or story aspect, but just having one more character of my favorite class. And while Kris was pretty fine in that regard as a "character" that just offers you some nice class choices, I'd have wished he was optional like Mark, without having much story presence aside from some minor optional interactions and characters introducing themselves and what not like with Mark. Funny how despite being optimistic about the first Avatar he just kinda sucked for me, because he was a bland unit I could've done without, but until then I wouldn't have known and if that was his only sin then that might even be fine, since I think you can at least bench him, but I'm not sure. Sadly Kris had to pollute the story, and while I'm not too fond of either of the two DS games, at least 12 was more appealing to me than 11, reclassing, while not necessary on lower difficulties at least, is just not my thing. Also the battle animations took a huge hit and in general I could never quite get over how it felt like a step back even from the GBA games, which weren't even the last ones they released.

Honestly this just reminds me of my actual greatest criticism of modern day fire emblem games.

With everyone needing to be romanceable, we don't get to have """ugly""" characters anymore, like giga old men or Based Chad Gonzalez, because everyone needs to be generally appealing. Actual irreversible damage done to the series.

I will never be able to romance and breed with a Bantu-like in a modern game, and that's really unfortunate.

Alright, so I know Chad and Gonzales, but who is this "Based" again? Bad jokes aside, I do agree that Avatars also ruined that and was the last oldest looking female character Reina? Still a far cry off of Niime, who's an interesting character that isn't forced to just support Roy and an amazing unit as well. Although Niime really is a rare breed in most JRPGs and maybe even RPGs in general.

Another cool thing are Pent and Louise with their instant A support.

Also I miss having characters throughout the game as replacements without either having almost none by midgame to endgame like Shadows of Valentia, or none like in Three Houses. This especially hurts the "Gotohs", I always liked these reliable older characters with insane stats that helped you out if you just lost too many good units near the end. I especially liked Karel and Athos, probably partially because I'm very biased towards Elibe's lore and it being my first Fire Emblem world, but I also just thought getting Fire Emblem's version of Musashi was pretty cool as well as this living legend that fought in the Scouring ages ago in a war humanity started.



Anyways onto the primary topic while I certainly enjoyed Three Houses when it released, after playing through all four Routes, I'm still just burned out even though I kinda wanted to tackle the "new" Maddening difficulty that wasn't implemented when I first finished the game, but I think I'm somehow still burned out and that I just hate "Skill & Reclass Emblem" it just feels so tedious having to master this and that class to get various skills all the while having to look up beforehand what skills you want to get, because the game doesn't tell you that. Not to mention the tedium of the Monastery, needing to know about the Greenhouse and the Fishing Game being the best way to get Professor level all add to that tedium as well.

I think that is why I really like Fire Emblem 6. Sure shopping is harder, since you don't know when you can get what without looking it up, but generally the shops are plentiful enough even the first time through the GBA games and you should usually have enough money to get what you need. Also it's nice too see Swords be relevant compared to most games, since they offer more reliable hit rates and Swordmasters get their class skill +30 crit and I never understood why that needed nerfing in the first place as they're after that never the best and even in other games with 30 crit they would still be not as good, since Axes got better as well as Lances and they always had 1-2 Range as well as weaker enemies than in 6. So them having the boss killer niche at least was very nice.

Also while the GBA games as said did feature skills you could tell the enemy skills at a glance, if you knew the classes by heart, even for Sacred Stones, although it gets a bit muddy there as many classes get some sort of skill, but others get nothing and some get borderline useless skills, since enemies are weaker in general. There was also no reclassing so while it sucks that some characters are just bad, because they're armor knights as well as having bad growths like Wendy people can and are still using them so I think it somehow works out. Although even as someone that doesn't use "Ests" much Sophia is still a very confusing design decision.

So maybe I dislike the busy work of skills, it certainly seems so as checking which skills enemies have in Conquest was also pretty tiresome. So I suppose my hope, that is unlikely to happen, for the next game would be ideally no or maybe as a compromise just minimal reclassing with one side class for each character. To address this maybe the class tree could go back to having 2 choices upon promotion as well as having third tier classes so you would still have quite a few options. Also I don't think I dislike Personal skills yet, since they add flavor although some are just terrible so I hope those characters get compensated in future titles. Also bringing back Rescue would be cool, it just has so many uses even though it makes mounted units even more insanely good than they already are.

A good example of this would probably be Felix, his personal skill is good early, but bad mid game and nonexistent late game, but he makes up for it with his good offensive growths and good crest. While going off of memory Raphael has none of that, I might be remembering it wrong though, but his personal skill sucked as far as I can remember and he wasn't very standout either, but maybe that was just bad classing from me and not having a crest is fine if the character makes up for it in other ways, which mine didn't but might've been a mistake on my part.

[Aozaki-desu]

No, Raphael is just a shit unit. His passive is luck-based heal at the beginning of the turn.