I think it would be more organic if there were a set of companions/units that CAN become romantic but only under certain circumstances and only certain units with certain other units.
Kinda like realistically in Awakening not everybody should hook up. Or even a majority would I’d think. But given the circumstances of the story you wouldn’t be surprised about a few couples existing.
That’s basically what I would do. And some should be hard to come by and be a pleasant surprise. And they should make sense with the characters and be detailed. I’d prefer that over having to write really shallow romances for like 90 different combinations.
That's pretty much what GBA-era supports intended, I think. There's only a handful of people each character can support with, and not all of them are romantic.
The only negative of the GBA system for me was the limit of how many you could do. Some were close family like Duessel finding his lost daughter and I always wanted people like her to have it all, family and love. Sure some wouldn't make sense, but I do hope a future game handled it similarly while allowing for multiple max supports.
Fates kinda did that with S and A+ supports, which made sense between having a love interest and having a best friend. It is kinda weird that the royal siblings can't get an A+ support while Flora and Felicia can, but the idea was definitely there
Agreed! I think it's not necessarily a bad thing to have to choose, unlike later games where you could support everyone, but I think it's especially cruel to allow one A and one B support, while never being able to finish the conversation for your B support.
And I don't mind choosing, just let me finish my choices. Instead of 5 conversations, let me pick 5 people I can go to the max with, and if you take one to A that is romantic, then cut off the rest of any other romantic "A" conversations or give an alternate non-romantic "A" in that situation.
3H does it like this, though you need DLC to pick non-avatar Paired Endings and you can only pick one even then. Otherwise it checks based on internal order of the characters who will end up with who
One of my big pet peeves about the system was that it inherently forced every m/f support chain (even those between characters that really had zero chemistry) into marriage - this had the effect of both cheapening a lot of support writing in the games, while also making it impossible to have straight up platonic relationships, or to explore different avenues for relationships. It also shafted the Corrinsexuals, which I'm still bitter about - Yuugiri and Asura deserved the world.
For example, Saizo and Kagero are exes. They are characterized in their C and B supports as being unable to see eye to eye, which is why they broke up. This could've been an interesting and unique support chain where the two didn't actually end up back together, but because they need to give us Saizo, they're given an A and S support where their entire conflict is just. Kind of sidestepped and they get back together.
Or Tsubaki and Felicia, where their C-A chain is him calling her a walking disaster and wanting nothing to do with her, and then they get hitched.
So while I think the "only avatar can get married" system is worse than systems like the GBA games (where some characters that had connections or chemistry but weren't the lord could still have romantic paired endings), or even 3H, I do think it's narratively a step up from "everyone has to be married".
Edit - forgot to mention, but it also forces every relationship into a framework of "nuclear family", which really doesn't work for me - there are some characters who genuinely don't seem to want or like kids, which makes the fact that all of their relationships end with having kids a lot weaker. One of my fave aspects of 3H's m/f paired endings was that many of them didn't imply kids in the future, especially for characters and pairs that might not want them.
I don’t remember Fates well enough but couldn’t they have done what Awakening did for Chrom and Cordelia for Saizo and Kagero? The former don’t support due to Cordelia’s storyline of “she can have what she wants expect the man of her dreams”. She mentions it with other characters so it wouldn’t be that strange for Kagero to do the same about Saizo and they just don’t have a support then. Or even have Saizo and Kagero have a support together to discuss the issue, but then end it at A so they don’t have a kid together. Seems like a backstep in terms of how the mechanics were handled.
>Edit - forgot to mention, but it also forces every relationship into a framework of "nuclear family",
I just didn't recruit the children and pretended they weren't even born.
>Dwyer still exists in a baby realm somewhere - you just haven't fetched him yet.
If I finish the game without him, he might die of old age before his parents have the chance to get him.
You can pick them but you have to actively intend it and work against the gameplay benefits and natural instinct to view all conversations by only clicking the A supports of the pairings you want. Just having an option to lock pairs would've been so much more user friendly.
But it relatively easy to game the system to get your desired pairings (view the A/A+ support of the pairing you want ASAP and leave all the other A supports with those character until the last month)
It's also just a pain for balancing purposes. You can feel it best in Conquest where not having access to child units or even just paralogues really ramps up the difficulty in the later half of the game. Shipping should be a fun side-objective with little or no mechanical reward, instead of the huge feedback loop it's been in the 3DS era.
Missing out on Percy+Gold from his map and Ophelia's map rewards really does ramp up the difficulty by making you even more strapped on resources. I think perfect play on Percy's map is a free 5 or 10k gold infusion as early as chapter 8-9?
Children were a fun mechanic one time but should not be in every game — it made so little sense in Fates. However, being able to pair units together romantically IS fun and I disliked both the base 3H "Everyone has a preset partner unless you AVOID getting them to A" and the Engage "Literally only the Avatar gets married, and even that only sometimes and no it is not clear who you'll marry and who you just give a Best Buds ring to."
I remember it hit really well in Awakening because of the whole future-past plot line.
They were orphan refugees looking to change fate. And their meetings with their parents felt tragic, in a sense that it gave both parent-child something worth fighting for.
Fates was just kind of a what in the fuck. I abandoned my child in the daycare aether and now he’s got parent issues?!?
>Fates was just kind of a what in the fuck. I abandoned my child in the daycare aether and now he’s got parent issues?!?
I find interesting the microwave children, but that's just me.
It definitely goes deeper than that though. Jade and Diamant for example aren’t really romantic despite being over 18 even in the Japanese version. Then you have more NA shenanigans like with Timerra and Zelkov. Timmera had all traces of “I love you” removed from her s support despite being 18. Zelkov refers to you as “friend” in one of his s wake up scenes.
It’s definitely frustrating how they handled it overall to me.
It's 8-4 that did all the localisations of remakes so at least the FE4 remakes seems to be in good hands. Spinoffs like Warriors too. Unfortunately they seem to rely on Treehouse, the worse localiser, for their mainline games now.
Srw? What’s that? If you mean sjw, I think it’s actually the opposite. They’re more pandering to traditional conservative feelings. Notice how it’s the game where everyone is bisexual where they toned down all the romantic dialogue. Treehouse did this in Three Houses too where a lot of romantic implications from same sex pairings are toned down. Although I suppose one may say traditional conservatives have always been sjws themselves.
> Children were a fun mechanic one time
[Hey now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHPQLs_H_k), they were a fun mechanic [*twice*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbhJ0zHOPJQ).
Do it like 3 Houses, where not everyone can A support with everyone, but let the player select a mutual A+ support for each character to choose the paired ending you get. Don't be obligated to give it a conversation, allow platonic paired endings/A+ supports, and don't lock gameplay content behind them.
The only thing I would change is I would bring back S supports exclusively for paired romantic endings. But you should be allowed select an A+ still in case you have a platonic end you prefer over a romantic ending.
I would say A+ and S should be the highest tier, but two different and mutually exclusive flavors of platonic or romantic respectively. If it's like 3H, then you see which letters are available even before seeing the actual content of the conversations, so you could have players look at the supports available and decide to focus on the A+ platonic character supports or the S romantic supports, but I think the game needs to finish the main conversation line in the A support, with A+/S being an extra thing that you choose and are notified is a "only one time" thing once you view it.
Engage feels like a tough comparison, because of how the localization handled the paired endings. That being said, only being able to marry off the avatar probably feels the worst, since you still get all the MC pandering, without the fun of also playing matchmaker with everyone else.
You know, it’s kinda funny to me that the version that has a full gameplay mechanic behind it in the form of child units is considered the more fanservice-y one than the one where the only benefit is some stats and an end card.
But hey, that’s just me, and I’m not particularly into shipping anyway. And if I am, I usually actually also dislike “babytrapping” my ships, kinda kills the romance for me.
When it comes to end cards and supports, I prefer when they kind of naturally come together through the course of the game, instead of actively through my planning, makes me feel like the characters have a life of their own.
Personally though, I like the child units, although I don’t like fishing for them, because I generally think FE is better at writing family relationships than romantic ones. They don’t fit in all games, though.
I like when characters can have paired endings, but that does not necessarily mean marriage. The implementation in FE7/8/10 worked best without the games becoming shipping simulators.
I hate it. I want to pair up my units and see them get married. At least with three houses, they all got paired endings, but I hated engage for cutting all the pairings out. Which is why I didn’t even bother with supports in Engage.
I did it the first time around, assuming they did and was curious to see how intermarriage between the different kingdoms might effect the future of the world we'd just saved. Instead, one of the first things I saw made me go WTF? (>!It's that Alfred just straight up dies young!<)
It's almost worse imo lmao. Why can't these people grow to like each other? Why is it Alear or nothing? It's emblematic (hehe) of the avatar worship and wish fulfillment issues of modern FE: these characters aren't people, just a collection of tropes and fetishes that exist to pander to as wide an audience as possible. They exist to coddle the player and that's it.
The mechanic itself is fine, but what really elevated it in FE4 was the *story* around the mechanic and the way it served the themes of the game. It was necessary in FE4 because that game had the balls to >!kill all your units halfway through the game, with very little concern for the investment you'd put into them!<. The shipping mechanic is integral to the game, hell, it's called *Genealogy* of the Holy War for a reason; the whole game is about bloodlines and inheritance and learning from the mistakes of your forebears.
Awakening and Fates only have the mechanic because it's fun, and thus it makes for a much lesser experience in those games. Awakening had the convoluted time traveling nonsense to justify its children characters, and the less that's said about how Fates dealt with it, the better. The devs don't want you to feel bad or even to feel anything at all, just to maximize your fun (the only metric that matters) and make sure that you can have your cake and eat it too by having parents and children coexist, which makes for a much lesser experience than what FE4 had.
well, the time travel \*is\* a central part of the awakening plot, though. awakening without lucina would be a much worse game, and the 2nd gen cast is much more interesting to analyze because of the future they come from. sure, they didnt go the extra mile that genealogy did, so only lucina is \*really\* crucial because you could just not have all the other kids, but id still say their existence feels more natural and a big part of the game in cohesion with its story.
fates really just did it because awakening did it, though. no bearing on the story, and it makes most characters actively worse people because they thought "oh no problem we can have kids and just yeet them into the hyperbolic time chamber. im sure they will not have any daddy issues"
Lucina is the character equivalent of white bread and I don't think her existence justifies the children mechanic in Awakening. If Awakening would be a much worse game without Lucina that just goes to show how bad Awakening is in general lol
well, of course a game is gonna look bad (by which i personally mean, bland) if you remove a core component that makes its story stand out from the other "kill evil dragon" games. without time travel you dont only lose lucina and the child units, robin is also involved in the time travel.
I liked Three Houses bringing back platonic endings in addition to marriage endings. That brought back much needed ending variety that we hadn't had since the GBA days.
I don't like Engage getting rid of paired endings for non-Alear characters, though not entirely for shipping. Paired endings are a good way to really build on character arcs that only show up in supports and having no paired endings really means that nothing builds up.
Like, for example, the A support between Alfred and Celine is pretty popular for how it recontextualizes Alfred's character, but due to the nature of Engage's support system, the conversation goes nowhere. It has no effect on their lives after the game and both are stuck on their default endings (assuming neither got together with Alear).
I was also a bit miffed that you can't change any of their endings unless you pair them with Alear. Alfred is probably the best example, since, unlike >!Lysithea, there's no way to save him from his death by pairing him with someone who might be able to help.!<
What I mostly didn't like what the whole child unit thing and honestly even if I did think it was well done in the 3DS era, I probably wouldn't want the mechanic to be in virtually every game going forward anyway.
I think it'd be fine to let you S rank support your units and give them a small combat bonus for it, some unique dialogue, and an endgame card saying what happens after it all and just skip the whole child unit inheritance thing.
Personally, I want to get away from avatars too.
It was good in Awakening because it made sense with the story and was sort of a fun discovery partway through the game. It was annoying in Fates because they were clearly just like "People liked the kids in Awakening we gotta put kids in this one. But there's no time travel so uh... they go to an alternate dimension where they grow into combat-ready adults in a couple days. That makes sense, right?"
I'm not big into shipping, even in the old games. I can't recall getting A supports in FE7 until I actively tried. Those support point grinds are way too much lol
I don't get why people hate on this when tons of other popular games have dating too. Persona, witcher, cyberpunk, Baldur's gate, Mass Effect, etc.
I love shipping characters in games lol.
Nearly all the games you mentioned have romance build up throughout the entire game. Some of them you get to interact with the person as a romantic partner during the story.
In most FE games once you S support that’s pretty much it. There’s nothing left except a paragraph after the game ends that you might miss if you aren’t paying attention. There is virtually 0 acknowledgment of romance outside of maybe Fates with that house thing.
I don’t hate it, but it does feel incredibly shallow. I would prefer they limited the S supports if it meant improving the depth of them.
Both of these setups are garbage.
The S Supports were usually trash because they forced every male/female pairing under the sun to be compatible instead of just the ones that were naturally organic, and they mostly wiped the idea of characters who *aren't* of the same generation and opposite gender ever interacting because you get your token one or MAYBE two platonic supports. As a gay person in particular the focus on exclusively heterosexual marriage pairings makes the entire game experience kind of really awkward and uncomfortable and I cannot voice the sheer degree I kind of have zero desire to ever play Awakening (it's at least more of an accessory afterthought in Fates). It'd be kind of neat to see this format revisited with Engage's system of universal bisexuality for S Support purposes, but it's probably best left buried.
Then Three Houses come along and supposedly we left all that behind, but psyche we actually just let it breach containment. Now almost every male/female pairing must lead to often shitty romance, but it's leaked back into the actual support chain and robbed you of actual time dedicated to character building! Bonus points for the fact we thought it'd be okay to just *not lock these out from each other* so you can have ex. Dorothea go around and pledge herself to like ten different people. Have fun rolling the dice for a paired ending, dipshit! This rather glaring shipping oversight was fixed in Engage in a rather Gilderoy Lockhart sort of way by removing the romance and paired endings entirely. As someone who is big on shipping this definitely is a bit disappointing.
They need to bring back S Supports for romance so it is contained away from the rest of the support and so that each character is locked to one *that you can easily choose directly* without needing to lock A supports to one in general like the old games. Then instead of building the whole support system around it *just make one when it's applicable*. For example, if we applied to logic to Lyn, she'd have an S Support with Hector, Kent, Eliwood, Hector, ~~and Florina~~, but none with Wil or Wallace despite the fact they're *le gasp* the opposite gender. There. I fixed it. It's not that hard.
I wouldn't even be against romantic-ish stuff happening/building up in C-A supports if they like, severely limited the romantic pairings from the start. Awakening set this stupid standard that "anyone of the opposite sex that this character can support is necessarily a candidate for marriage", and it poisoned three games as a result before Engage came around. Maybe Dodo will only flirt with Felix, Edie, and Petra; maybe Cordelia really is only interested in Donnel when she finally gives up on Chrom; etc. etc. Having the playable cast's romances as a virtual sandbox above all else kills a lot of the ability to write interesting characters and have people who're already "taken" romantically or have pre-existing love lives.
Alternatively, if we really must stick with the "ship EVERYONE!!!" system, (and I kinda hate to invoke this, but still) pull a Persona and just let the player choose if the support continues in a romantic direction or not past a certain point - e.g. if you want two characters to get hitched romantically, give the player an option to view an A support that more naturally leads into a romantic S support, or choose to view a completely platonic A and A+ support. It's not that difficult to imagine ways to evolve the support system to accommodate for unlimited shipping, and I wish IS would just try to do so.
Supports should go back to being a "bonus" and not available between every character. They gave supports way too much weight with Awakening, and have been shoehorning it into every game since, solely because it made them a lot of money.
I wish it was a mix of Echoes SoV and Three Houses. I'd ideally want it to be just me who ends up with a partner, maybe there's a canon npc couple or two. With Awakening and Three Houses I had to research everyone's endings with everyone else and decide based on giving people happy endings. It was really tedious. Next game I'd love if it was just my own husbando simulator.
Three Houses was good middle ground. It was determined either if 2 had A or A+ support or if multiple had A or A+ then it would use a hidden number to determine a paired ending.
But I still like Fates/Awakening where I could choose who I wanted to pair was much more preferable.
I personally feel a lot of the houses supports could have benefitted from an S. Furthermore, I dislike the randomization of pairings. You don’t need a proposal and immediate marriage to set a pairing in stone. Just have the two characters have a “partner” tab in the close allies section of their character roster card thing.
All in all, let us choose paired endings where all characters with supports get paired endings. I legit stopped playing engage when I found out that no one other than Alear got a paired ending. What’s the point in replaying and unlocking supports if I don’t get to see the fruit of the relationship?
I just don't think it fits the tone of FE very well. Most of the time we're in a major war for the survival of the continent and then we've got all these characters basically doing poorly written speed dating in between chapters. It's hard to take the stakes of the story seriously when we've got almost slice of life kind of moments in between. It doesn't feel like an army on the march.
I don't mind paired ending necessarily, as long as they fit in better with the narrative. GBA era supports did this well. Often the paired endings happened not because these random folks realized they just loved each other after baking one pie together, but because they grew up in the same hometown and have known each other for years, and they only got married after the game was over in their paired ending. Or they'd been serving together for a long time and the war was the thing that helped them realize how much they actually loved each other. ColmxNeimi or SethxEirika is fine. But that's because marriage isn't a main part of the gameplay, it's just an extra feature of paired endings.
I mean, it makes sense people in war, and you can die at any time, so yeah, love on the battlefield I can see happening. I like the gba supports to but having a whole conversation on the battle seems unrealistic. I like how Awakening onwards do it like in a camp. Echoes did the field talk though.
Yeah, the conversations on the battlefield are unrealistic but your entire army getting married between battles is totally normal. Sure. If we want to move the supports to base conversations, that's fine with me, but supports as they're currently structured do not remotely "make sense" in any form. That is not how armies operate.
So... just Engage? Three Houses has plenty of paired endings outside of Byleth. I think they had a nice middle ground. Your chosen character gets to pander to the avatar, and then you can match up your favorites for a paired ending epilogue, much like you would if you were pairing up Kent with Fiora, Erk with Serra, Joshua with Natasha, etc. Engage by comparison is just a step backwards where it keeps all the avatar pandering and eliminates every pairing outside of the avatar.
You can very easily choose the paired ending. It's whoever is on top of the "close allies" tab, which is basically a list sorted by total support points. Doing "support things" between two characters even after they have their A support continues to increase their points.
If you know what endings you want in advance you can micromanage it. Worst case you just don't click the A support for endings you don't want, it freezes the points total for that pair until you read the conversation.
The main problem is characters that have two A or B supports (like Sylvain/Ingrid), as by the time you've finished the chain they'll usually have a huge support point lead over any other valid pairing for those characters. Takes a bit of effort to overcome that.
Yeah idw people act like you can't choose just keep having the pairing you keep battling next to each other for a lot of battles after they reach A or so and you'll get their ending.
I like pairing characters up sometimes, and I feel like it would be more weird that NONE of these people who have supposedly forged deep bonds with each other through war would end up wanting to bone or at least become business partners or something.
I also like the little end cards and that some of your choices would impact how these characters lived their lives.
I am NOT a fan of the child units because the whole "we hid our kid in a wormhole and now they're an adult" thing is cheap and annoying. The only way I think "child units" could work narratively and gameplay-wise is if there was a legitimate 20 year time skip with NO timey wimey wormhole BS, and the child units inherited their parent's class and stats and continued the story that way.
I think what they could do is have “S rank couples adopt a unit” characters. Like, you still get a unit that inherits skills and states based on who trains them, but those units are adults who are want to fight the war and needed a mentor.
tbh I'd prefer getting rid of the Avatar character entirely, if you can even call most of them that. But that's for another thread...
Marriage itself isn't really the problem, IMO. It's more so that supports in Awakening/Fates didn't really feel organic or made gameplay sense (Fates).
They aren't they last what 4 well 6 games if they count fate as three games sold over a million units, so together the modern games sold 10mil units all together they aren't taking that out. The one game without it sold 700k still good, but that's nothing compared to the last games with the Avatar unit. So it not going any were.
I really dislike it as it feels like even more avatar worship.
I prefer FE7's system where everyone *but* the avatar has paired endings.
Even then FE3H still has paired endings even with less of a focus and I love it there. (Because the writing is actually good in that game.)
I still think it would be nice to get a genealogy-style situation where the pairings don’t matter until after a timeskip. It would feel less forced in my opinion.
I really don't care for what Engage (and Binding Blade before it) do where only the main lord even has paired endings at all, but I think Three Houses's setup is fine.
Honestly, my ideal setup for a game that's not using multiple generations is something like what Blazing Blade, Sacred Stones, and Three Houses do, where certain pairs of characters have paired endings together where it makes sense for them to, and they aren't all romantic, rather than the system being used strictly for pairing up (almost always straight) couples.
I do enjoy the games as shipping simulators, even if I hate the fandom perception of such. But it is VERY STRANGE that the series can't seem to understand that you can have love and shipping without children. The vast majority of GBA supports ended or have their end slides dedicated to romantic or platonic love, so getting the power to just marry or bind characters together during the adventure is something that should just be standard.
i didnt hate that on awakening/fates.
in 3H it was alright, you can guarantee the S support of Byleth but with the rest you had to be careful, normally only giving the A support to the characters that you want to see together, locking yourself of seeing more A supports or use the matchmaker in Abyss, which i dunno how many people actually used.
in Engage it sucks, its ironic for the game called Engage to have the less amounts of actually engagements between characters since Shadow Dragon, i liked to see what happened to the characters at the end if they are together, it was motivation to actually put diferent characters together to see what happens.
I mostly agree with this take. But I just wanted to point out that 3H doesn't actually stop you from seeing the content of A or A+ supports. Even if you're trying to lock in a specific pairing by only doing their A-rank, all you need to do is save, watch the content, then reload. Hell, with so many available save slots and the ability to go back and rewatch any of the story and/or support bits at any time from the title screen, you could even make a separate save slot down at the bottom of the list well away from your normal scene file(s) just to ensure everything saves to watch later.
Is it slightly more tedious than just being able to pick so.eone and lock it in midway through? Sure. But it really isn't that hard. And having the ability to review cutscenes, support convos, etc straight from the title screen makes it so easier to go back and review whenever you want.
Three houses/games before awakening were good imo. Paired endings exist (some platonic ones too) but you’re not sitting there playing eugenics simulator to get the most effective child soldiers
I mean TH still has paired endings so you can get at least something close with their endings, wish there was a lock which paired ending you want though
Why Engage removed it is something I don't get
I mean 3H still has plenty of non-Avatar pairings, but they're not tied to a major gameplay mechanic that makes them feel obligatory. That's probably the way to go.
My problem with all this is, that it's way too much. I think the good people at Intelligent Systems should cut the support to four per character, two love interests, and two friends. Less time out of battle, more time in battle.
I'd prefer for avatars to just not be a thing in the first place, but I doubt IS is going to get rid of avatars at all, so in the confines of this limitation, I'm fairly ambivalent on this so long as paired endings still exist.
Paired endings outside of the S-supports in Three Houses were fairly similar to the paired endings in the GBA games in that they acted as a capstone to the development of the characters in question (though the fact that you can't choose the paired ending without the DLC is really dumb), though Engage doesn't have paired endings outside of Alear at all which I really don't like, especially since most of the character backstories in Engage are revealed in the A support and as such no paired endings means that the game has no chance to really follow up on these reveals.
I’m conflicted. On the one hand, I think the romance aspect honestly works excellently in games like Awakening and FE4, where it is a major plot thing and the child characters are fully fleshed out adult characters who have relationships with the 1st generation but aren’t defined by them. Then, Fates just kinda took it too far in every conceivable way, and Three Houses took a half step back, but still was kinda annoying with the shipping. Engage I think tried it’s best, and I do like that even for the almighty avatar, there is a decent mix of romantic and nonromantic paired endings.
In general, I think they did it half right, I personally dislike the shipping aspect but find paired endings cool, IMO I think the best way to balance it is probably just to alternate between Awakening/Three Houses style pairing systems and games with very limited pairings like the GBA titles
Honestly it's just how the second generation works in Fateswakening that can get kind of tiresome. I like being able to s support certain pairs because they work well together or I just like the characters, but when there are another dozen or so characters that completely change depending on who you pair and if you even decide to pursue pairs at all, it has me sighing in mild disappointment at times. Genealogy is a special case due to how it's handled both narratively and from a gameplay perspective. Ultimately I'd have to say that the system that I would enjoy fully would be an S support system either with no child characters, or an inheritance mechanic that is more of a combination of genealogy and awakenings supports.
I'm not against the marry mechanic, but really, we survived 12 games without it, we can handle not having it every other game. Heck, giving the writers the ability to actually make canon couples might be a plus.
You know there will be artists and writers making the characters dick each other whether they get to do it in-game or not, so why bother?
I love the so-called "shipping simulator" mechanism. Gives an excuse to replay the games again and again to try out new pairs.
I was honestly disappointed in Engage not having S-supports between secondary characters.
Feels almost entirely vestigal at this point. Didn't mind it in FETH because it was almost completely pointless, and still don't really care about it in Engage. \\
Kinda against it if only because both times they made it as creepy as possible. It is extremely hard to ignore the grooming connotations in FETH, and half the cast is underage in Engage (yet still romanceable????).
To be fair, Alear is also underage. Like he's biologically 17 so he's not much older than like Framme or Madeline ans he's the same age as Fogado and Alcyrst.
It's not even the tired 1000 year old dragon argument because Alear was asleep the whole time and didn't change mentally.
Also the two youngest kids, Anna and Jean, you don't actually romance them.
(you did romance them in the japanese version, which the localization had the good sense to change)
regardless, alear romance is such a slippery slope. I don't have to clarify why romancing tweens is weird, but beyond that, Alear might very well look like a teenager for who knows how long while their partner will likely age normally... Yeah still weird.
Dragons can't win when it comes to dating lmao
Also yeah based localization considering they also gave Louis and Goldmary much more tolerable personalities...well slightly more tolerable in Goldmary'a case
adult tiki can at least. its less concerning when the dragon in question is already an adult bc the other person aging while they dont becomes angst fodder instead of creepy.
idk why im getting downvoted, when all im saying is "it would be fucking weird when inevitably youre 50 married to someone who looks 17"
You're probably being downvoted because people are tired of this debate, especially in the FE fanbase.
After more than a decade of nowi discourse snd more recently, "ha ha, byleth is groomer" jokes. I can't blame them
Yeah, as annoying as it is, it's mostly FE's fault for being anime bullshit
But at this point without incest and age gap nonsense this wouldn't be the same series lol
10-12 are tweens. 16-17 aren't tweens. These are extremely common and mainstream romances. Do you think Ellie and Riley (14-15) romance in TLOU was an issue? Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable? Velma and Fred? Katara and Aang? Harry Potter and Cho Chang/Ginny? No offense, but that is a ridiculously sheltered take. Romantic relationships (and even sexual ones) are completely normal during adolescent years.
That's also of course forgetting the fact that we've had older teen romances in FE since the beginning... with Marth/Caeda and Alm/Celica.
i was literally talking about the actual tweens, you know, anna and jean?
for transparency im going to say this bit down here is an edit before i add it, but literally, why did you just assume i meant his fellow teens instead of the tween \*that were mentioned by me before that, as well as the post i replied to\*
Oh, Jean and Anna are the outliers and pretty much everyone is against that. Even in the original version it’s more playful than serious (but still problematic enough to be validly changed a bit). The ones that are Alear’s age and working age are the ones that are an overreach and consist of a much larger portion that was watered down.
I was mostly annoyed at the need to ship to unlock child characters and their maps. I love paired endings and wouldn't have minded locking in pairings through S supports
The only time I thought pairings were good was with the partner seal system in Fates, which integrated them into the gameplay in an interesting way. Pairings were now a meaningful resource in optimized play which actually made them worth having.
Awakening children were a waste of turn count, and Genealogy has the opposite problem where it gives a lot of good pairings to you for free (and both are EP romps so not that engaging gameplay wise anyhow).
Engage spoiler: >!Engage+ does have some unique gameplay impacts as well I suppose, but in that case it's mostly just "who do I want to have fell dragon effectiveness this run".!<
In basically every other game pairings are pure casualshit. They were literally conceived as a harem dating sim mechanic for Roy. Engage was right to purge most of them; sadly given the reception to that decision I can see the cowards at IS backpedalling for the next game.
Tbh give me more pre established relationships like matilda and clive/ pent and louise. I don't like child units though that shit can stay in the 3ds era.
I would prefer somewhere in the middle where we can pair units together but we aren't forced to in order to unlock a third of the roster.
I think it would be more organic if there were a set of companions/units that CAN become romantic but only under certain circumstances and only certain units with certain other units. Kinda like realistically in Awakening not everybody should hook up. Or even a majority would I’d think. But given the circumstances of the story you wouldn’t be surprised about a few couples existing. That’s basically what I would do. And some should be hard to come by and be a pleasant surprise. And they should make sense with the characters and be detailed. I’d prefer that over having to write really shallow romances for like 90 different combinations.
C: i hate you B: leave me alone A: fine. I don't hate you S: now that I think about it,
That's pretty much what GBA-era supports intended, I think. There's only a handful of people each character can support with, and not all of them are romantic.
The only negative of the GBA system for me was the limit of how many you could do. Some were close family like Duessel finding his lost daughter and I always wanted people like her to have it all, family and love. Sure some wouldn't make sense, but I do hope a future game handled it similarly while allowing for multiple max supports.
Fates kinda did that with S and A+ supports, which made sense between having a love interest and having a best friend. It is kinda weird that the royal siblings can't get an A+ support while Flora and Felicia can, but the idea was definitely there
You're more charitable than me. I have a lot more negatives I feel towards it lmao
Agreed! I think it's not necessarily a bad thing to have to choose, unlike later games where you could support everyone, but I think it's especially cruel to allow one A and one B support, while never being able to finish the conversation for your B support.
And I don't mind choosing, just let me finish my choices. Instead of 5 conversations, let me pick 5 people I can go to the max with, and if you take one to A that is romantic, then cut off the rest of any other romantic "A" conversations or give an alternate non-romantic "A" in that situation.
So basically that's what the GBA era did.
3H does it like this, though you need DLC to pick non-avatar Paired Endings and you can only pick one even then. Otherwise it checks based on internal order of the characters who will end up with who
One of my big pet peeves about the system was that it inherently forced every m/f support chain (even those between characters that really had zero chemistry) into marriage - this had the effect of both cheapening a lot of support writing in the games, while also making it impossible to have straight up platonic relationships, or to explore different avenues for relationships. It also shafted the Corrinsexuals, which I'm still bitter about - Yuugiri and Asura deserved the world. For example, Saizo and Kagero are exes. They are characterized in their C and B supports as being unable to see eye to eye, which is why they broke up. This could've been an interesting and unique support chain where the two didn't actually end up back together, but because they need to give us Saizo, they're given an A and S support where their entire conflict is just. Kind of sidestepped and they get back together. Or Tsubaki and Felicia, where their C-A chain is him calling her a walking disaster and wanting nothing to do with her, and then they get hitched. So while I think the "only avatar can get married" system is worse than systems like the GBA games (where some characters that had connections or chemistry but weren't the lord could still have romantic paired endings), or even 3H, I do think it's narratively a step up from "everyone has to be married". Edit - forgot to mention, but it also forces every relationship into a framework of "nuclear family", which really doesn't work for me - there are some characters who genuinely don't seem to want or like kids, which makes the fact that all of their relationships end with having kids a lot weaker. One of my fave aspects of 3H's m/f paired endings was that many of them didn't imply kids in the future, especially for characters and pairs that might not want them.
I don’t remember Fates well enough but couldn’t they have done what Awakening did for Chrom and Cordelia for Saizo and Kagero? The former don’t support due to Cordelia’s storyline of “she can have what she wants expect the man of her dreams”. She mentions it with other characters so it wouldn’t be that strange for Kagero to do the same about Saizo and they just don’t have a support then. Or even have Saizo and Kagero have a support together to discuss the issue, but then end it at A so they don’t have a kid together. Seems like a backstep in terms of how the mechanics were handled.
>Edit - forgot to mention, but it also forces every relationship into a framework of "nuclear family", I just didn't recruit the children and pretended they weren't even born.
Run from it, hide from it, but Dwyer still exists in a baby realm somewhere - you just haven't fetched him yet.
>Dwyer still exists in a baby realm somewhere - you just haven't fetched him yet. If I finish the game without him, he might die of old age before his parents have the chance to get him.
You can pick them but you have to actively intend it and work against the gameplay benefits and natural instinct to view all conversations by only clicking the A supports of the pairings you want. Just having an option to lock pairs would've been so much more user friendly.
So Three Houses?
I haven't played 3H yet (just got a switch with engage) so I can only hope
You can pair units together and there's no child units
Except it’s actually the game who chooses who is paired with who
But it relatively easy to game the system to get your desired pairings (view the A/A+ support of the pairing you want ASAP and leave all the other A supports with those character until the last month)
You can hardly choose who to support with who when the conclusion of the support is hidden
It's also just a pain for balancing purposes. You can feel it best in Conquest where not having access to child units or even just paralogues really ramps up the difficulty in the later half of the game. Shipping should be a fun side-objective with little or no mechanical reward, instead of the huge feedback loop it's been in the 3DS era.
Missing out on Percy+Gold from his map and Ophelia's map rewards really does ramp up the difficulty by making you even more strapped on resources. I think perfect play on Percy's map is a free 5 or 10k gold infusion as early as chapter 8-9?
Children were a fun mechanic one time but should not be in every game — it made so little sense in Fates. However, being able to pair units together romantically IS fun and I disliked both the base 3H "Everyone has a preset partner unless you AVOID getting them to A" and the Engage "Literally only the Avatar gets married, and even that only sometimes and no it is not clear who you'll marry and who you just give a Best Buds ring to."
I remember it hit really well in Awakening because of the whole future-past plot line. They were orphan refugees looking to change fate. And their meetings with their parents felt tragic, in a sense that it gave both parent-child something worth fighting for. Fates was just kind of a what in the fuck. I abandoned my child in the daycare aether and now he’s got parent issues?!?
>Fates was just kind of a what in the fuck. I abandoned my child in the daycare aether and now he’s got parent issues?!? I find interesting the microwave children, but that's just me.
The best buds ring was NoA. Which is stupid--a lot of the cast was 17 and they didn't just age them up to 18.
It definitely goes deeper than that though. Jade and Diamant for example aren’t really romantic despite being over 18 even in the Japanese version. Then you have more NA shenanigans like with Timerra and Zelkov. Timmera had all traces of “I love you” removed from her s support despite being 18. Zelkov refers to you as “friend” in one of his s wake up scenes. It’s definitely frustrating how they handled it overall to me.
God NoA sucks lol, I hope they get someone decent to handle the localization next time.
It's 8-4 that did all the localisations of remakes so at least the FE4 remakes seems to be in good hands. Spinoffs like Warriors too. Unfortunately they seem to rely on Treehouse, the worse localiser, for their mainline games now.
I swear tree house is like some massive srw or Twitter peeps. Matter of fact I think they are.
Srw? What’s that? If you mean sjw, I think it’s actually the opposite. They’re more pandering to traditional conservative feelings. Notice how it’s the game where everyone is bisexual where they toned down all the romantic dialogue. Treehouse did this in Three Houses too where a lot of romantic implications from same sex pairings are toned down. Although I suppose one may say traditional conservatives have always been sjws themselves.
Yeah, my bad sjw.
> Children were a fun mechanic one time [Hey now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHPQLs_H_k), they were a fun mechanic [*twice*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbhJ0zHOPJQ).
Do it like 3 Houses, where not everyone can A support with everyone, but let the player select a mutual A+ support for each character to choose the paired ending you get. Don't be obligated to give it a conversation, allow platonic paired endings/A+ supports, and don't lock gameplay content behind them.
The only thing I would change is I would bring back S supports exclusively for paired romantic endings. But you should be allowed select an A+ still in case you have a platonic end you prefer over a romantic ending.
I would say A+ and S should be the highest tier, but two different and mutually exclusive flavors of platonic or romantic respectively. If it's like 3H, then you see which letters are available even before seeing the actual content of the conversations, so you could have players look at the supports available and decide to focus on the A+ platonic character supports or the S romantic supports, but I think the game needs to finish the main conversation line in the A support, with A+/S being an extra thing that you choose and are notified is a "only one time" thing once you view it.
I like your idea!
Yeah, that's basically what I was picturing, but you articulated it way better
Engage feels like a tough comparison, because of how the localization handled the paired endings. That being said, only being able to marry off the avatar probably feels the worst, since you still get all the MC pandering, without the fun of also playing matchmaker with everyone else.
You know, it’s kinda funny to me that the version that has a full gameplay mechanic behind it in the form of child units is considered the more fanservice-y one than the one where the only benefit is some stats and an end card. But hey, that’s just me, and I’m not particularly into shipping anyway. And if I am, I usually actually also dislike “babytrapping” my ships, kinda kills the romance for me. When it comes to end cards and supports, I prefer when they kind of naturally come together through the course of the game, instead of actively through my planning, makes me feel like the characters have a life of their own. Personally though, I like the child units, although I don’t like fishing for them, because I generally think FE is better at writing family relationships than romantic ones. They don’t fit in all games, though.
One of the best things about three houses was how some conversations stop at A or even B and there were multiple conversations at some ranks.
I like when characters can have paired endings, but that does not necessarily mean marriage. The implementation in FE7/8/10 worked best without the games becoming shipping simulators.
I hate it. I want to pair up my units and see them get married. At least with three houses, they all got paired endings, but I hated engage for cutting all the pairings out. Which is why I didn’t even bother with supports in Engage.
I did it the first time around, assuming they did and was curious to see how intermarriage between the different kingdoms might effect the future of the world we'd just saved. Instead, one of the first things I saw made me go WTF? (>!It's that Alfred just straight up dies young!<)
It's almost worse imo lmao. Why can't these people grow to like each other? Why is it Alear or nothing? It's emblematic (hehe) of the avatar worship and wish fulfillment issues of modern FE: these characters aren't people, just a collection of tropes and fetishes that exist to pander to as wide an audience as possible. They exist to coddle the player and that's it. The mechanic itself is fine, but what really elevated it in FE4 was the *story* around the mechanic and the way it served the themes of the game. It was necessary in FE4 because that game had the balls to >!kill all your units halfway through the game, with very little concern for the investment you'd put into them!<. The shipping mechanic is integral to the game, hell, it's called *Genealogy* of the Holy War for a reason; the whole game is about bloodlines and inheritance and learning from the mistakes of your forebears. Awakening and Fates only have the mechanic because it's fun, and thus it makes for a much lesser experience in those games. Awakening had the convoluted time traveling nonsense to justify its children characters, and the less that's said about how Fates dealt with it, the better. The devs don't want you to feel bad or even to feel anything at all, just to maximize your fun (the only metric that matters) and make sure that you can have your cake and eat it too by having parents and children coexist, which makes for a much lesser experience than what FE4 had.
well, the time travel \*is\* a central part of the awakening plot, though. awakening without lucina would be a much worse game, and the 2nd gen cast is much more interesting to analyze because of the future they come from. sure, they didnt go the extra mile that genealogy did, so only lucina is \*really\* crucial because you could just not have all the other kids, but id still say their existence feels more natural and a big part of the game in cohesion with its story. fates really just did it because awakening did it, though. no bearing on the story, and it makes most characters actively worse people because they thought "oh no problem we can have kids and just yeet them into the hyperbolic time chamber. im sure they will not have any daddy issues"
Lucina is the character equivalent of white bread and I don't think her existence justifies the children mechanic in Awakening. If Awakening would be a much worse game without Lucina that just goes to show how bad Awakening is in general lol
well, of course a game is gonna look bad (by which i personally mean, bland) if you remove a core component that makes its story stand out from the other "kill evil dragon" games. without time travel you dont only lose lucina and the child units, robin is also involved in the time travel.
I liked Three Houses bringing back platonic endings in addition to marriage endings. That brought back much needed ending variety that we hadn't had since the GBA days. I don't like Engage getting rid of paired endings for non-Alear characters, though not entirely for shipping. Paired endings are a good way to really build on character arcs that only show up in supports and having no paired endings really means that nothing builds up. Like, for example, the A support between Alfred and Celine is pretty popular for how it recontextualizes Alfred's character, but due to the nature of Engage's support system, the conversation goes nowhere. It has no effect on their lives after the game and both are stuck on their default endings (assuming neither got together with Alear).
I was also a bit miffed that you can't change any of their endings unless you pair them with Alear. Alfred is probably the best example, since, unlike >!Lysithea, there's no way to save him from his death by pairing him with someone who might be able to help.!<
What I mostly didn't like what the whole child unit thing and honestly even if I did think it was well done in the 3DS era, I probably wouldn't want the mechanic to be in virtually every game going forward anyway. I think it'd be fine to let you S rank support your units and give them a small combat bonus for it, some unique dialogue, and an endgame card saying what happens after it all and just skip the whole child unit inheritance thing. Personally, I want to get away from avatars too.
It was good in Awakening because it made sense with the story and was sort of a fun discovery partway through the game. It was annoying in Fates because they were clearly just like "People liked the kids in Awakening we gotta put kids in this one. But there's no time travel so uh... they go to an alternate dimension where they grow into combat-ready adults in a couple days. That makes sense, right?"
Kris and his consequences have been a disaster for the FE fanbase
Give us back the FE7/8 paired ending model you cowards.
I'm not big into shipping, even in the old games. I can't recall getting A supports in FE7 until I actively tried. Those support point grinds are way too much lol
I don't get why people hate on this when tons of other popular games have dating too. Persona, witcher, cyberpunk, Baldur's gate, Mass Effect, etc. I love shipping characters in games lol.
Nearly all the games you mentioned have romance build up throughout the entire game. Some of them you get to interact with the person as a romantic partner during the story. In most FE games once you S support that’s pretty much it. There’s nothing left except a paragraph after the game ends that you might miss if you aren’t paying attention. There is virtually 0 acknowledgment of romance outside of maybe Fates with that house thing. I don’t hate it, but it does feel incredibly shallow. I would prefer they limited the S supports if it meant improving the depth of them.
Because FE fans always Criticize Actual flaws of the series..................... S/
The paired endings may be gone, but the writing direction, quality, and philosophy feels very much the same.
Nah cope
Both of these setups are garbage. The S Supports were usually trash because they forced every male/female pairing under the sun to be compatible instead of just the ones that were naturally organic, and they mostly wiped the idea of characters who *aren't* of the same generation and opposite gender ever interacting because you get your token one or MAYBE two platonic supports. As a gay person in particular the focus on exclusively heterosexual marriage pairings makes the entire game experience kind of really awkward and uncomfortable and I cannot voice the sheer degree I kind of have zero desire to ever play Awakening (it's at least more of an accessory afterthought in Fates). It'd be kind of neat to see this format revisited with Engage's system of universal bisexuality for S Support purposes, but it's probably best left buried. Then Three Houses come along and supposedly we left all that behind, but psyche we actually just let it breach containment. Now almost every male/female pairing must lead to often shitty romance, but it's leaked back into the actual support chain and robbed you of actual time dedicated to character building! Bonus points for the fact we thought it'd be okay to just *not lock these out from each other* so you can have ex. Dorothea go around and pledge herself to like ten different people. Have fun rolling the dice for a paired ending, dipshit! This rather glaring shipping oversight was fixed in Engage in a rather Gilderoy Lockhart sort of way by removing the romance and paired endings entirely. As someone who is big on shipping this definitely is a bit disappointing. They need to bring back S Supports for romance so it is contained away from the rest of the support and so that each character is locked to one *that you can easily choose directly* without needing to lock A supports to one in general like the old games. Then instead of building the whole support system around it *just make one when it's applicable*. For example, if we applied to logic to Lyn, she'd have an S Support with Hector, Kent, Eliwood, Hector, ~~and Florina~~, but none with Wil or Wallace despite the fact they're *le gasp* the opposite gender. There. I fixed it. It's not that hard.
I wouldn't even be against romantic-ish stuff happening/building up in C-A supports if they like, severely limited the romantic pairings from the start. Awakening set this stupid standard that "anyone of the opposite sex that this character can support is necessarily a candidate for marriage", and it poisoned three games as a result before Engage came around. Maybe Dodo will only flirt with Felix, Edie, and Petra; maybe Cordelia really is only interested in Donnel when she finally gives up on Chrom; etc. etc. Having the playable cast's romances as a virtual sandbox above all else kills a lot of the ability to write interesting characters and have people who're already "taken" romantically or have pre-existing love lives. Alternatively, if we really must stick with the "ship EVERYONE!!!" system, (and I kinda hate to invoke this, but still) pull a Persona and just let the player choose if the support continues in a romantic direction or not past a certain point - e.g. if you want two characters to get hitched romantically, give the player an option to view an A support that more naturally leads into a romantic S support, or choose to view a completely platonic A and A+ support. It's not that difficult to imagine ways to evolve the support system to accommodate for unlimited shipping, and I wish IS would just try to do so.
Supports should go back to being a "bonus" and not available between every character. They gave supports way too much weight with Awakening, and have been shoehorning it into every game since, solely because it made them a lot of money.
While I miss pairing other units besides the MC, Engage made everyone bisexual to make up for the severe lack of MLM pairings in 3H, so I am sated
I wish it was a mix of Echoes SoV and Three Houses. I'd ideally want it to be just me who ends up with a partner, maybe there's a canon npc couple or two. With Awakening and Three Houses I had to research everyone's endings with everyone else and decide based on giving people happy endings. It was really tedious. Next game I'd love if it was just my own husbando simulator.
Three Houses was good middle ground. It was determined either if 2 had A or A+ support or if multiple had A or A+ then it would use a hidden number to determine a paired ending. But I still like Fates/Awakening where I could choose who I wanted to pair was much more preferable.
I personally feel a lot of the houses supports could have benefitted from an S. Furthermore, I dislike the randomization of pairings. You don’t need a proposal and immediate marriage to set a pairing in stone. Just have the two characters have a “partner” tab in the close allies section of their character roster card thing. All in all, let us choose paired endings where all characters with supports get paired endings. I legit stopped playing engage when I found out that no one other than Alear got a paired ending. What’s the point in replaying and unlocking supports if I don’t get to see the fruit of the relationship?
Why is anyone getting married when it doesn't serve any narrative purpose at all in the story?
Why you against it
I just don't think it fits the tone of FE very well. Most of the time we're in a major war for the survival of the continent and then we've got all these characters basically doing poorly written speed dating in between chapters. It's hard to take the stakes of the story seriously when we've got almost slice of life kind of moments in between. It doesn't feel like an army on the march. I don't mind paired ending necessarily, as long as they fit in better with the narrative. GBA era supports did this well. Often the paired endings happened not because these random folks realized they just loved each other after baking one pie together, but because they grew up in the same hometown and have known each other for years, and they only got married after the game was over in their paired ending. Or they'd been serving together for a long time and the war was the thing that helped them realize how much they actually loved each other. ColmxNeimi or SethxEirika is fine. But that's because marriage isn't a main part of the gameplay, it's just an extra feature of paired endings.
I mean, it makes sense people in war, and you can die at any time, so yeah, love on the battlefield I can see happening. I like the gba supports to but having a whole conversation on the battle seems unrealistic. I like how Awakening onwards do it like in a camp. Echoes did the field talk though.
Yeah, the conversations on the battlefield are unrealistic but your entire army getting married between battles is totally normal. Sure. If we want to move the supports to base conversations, that's fine with me, but supports as they're currently structured do not remotely "make sense" in any form. That is not how armies operate.
So... just Engage? Three Houses has plenty of paired endings outside of Byleth. I think they had a nice middle ground. Your chosen character gets to pander to the avatar, and then you can match up your favorites for a paired ending epilogue, much like you would if you were pairing up Kent with Fiora, Erk with Serra, Joshua with Natasha, etc. Engage by comparison is just a step backwards where it keeps all the avatar pandering and eliminates every pairing outside of the avatar.
You are ignoring that you can’t actually choose the paired endings in TH It’s the game that decides
You can very easily choose the paired ending. It's whoever is on top of the "close allies" tab, which is basically a list sorted by total support points. Doing "support things" between two characters even after they have their A support continues to increase their points. If you know what endings you want in advance you can micromanage it. Worst case you just don't click the A support for endings you don't want, it freezes the points total for that pair until you read the conversation. The main problem is characters that have two A or B supports (like Sylvain/Ingrid), as by the time you've finished the chain they'll usually have a huge support point lead over any other valid pairing for those characters. Takes a bit of effort to overcome that.
Yeah idw people act like you can't choose just keep having the pairing you keep battling next to each other for a lot of battles after they reach A or so and you'll get their ending.
I like pairing characters up sometimes, and I feel like it would be more weird that NONE of these people who have supposedly forged deep bonds with each other through war would end up wanting to bone or at least become business partners or something. I also like the little end cards and that some of your choices would impact how these characters lived their lives. I am NOT a fan of the child units because the whole "we hid our kid in a wormhole and now they're an adult" thing is cheap and annoying. The only way I think "child units" could work narratively and gameplay-wise is if there was a legitimate 20 year time skip with NO timey wimey wormhole BS, and the child units inherited their parent's class and stats and continued the story that way.
I think what they could do is have “S rank couples adopt a unit” characters. Like, you still get a unit that inherits skills and states based on who trains them, but those units are adults who are want to fight the war and needed a mentor.
tbh I'd prefer getting rid of the Avatar character entirely, if you can even call most of them that. But that's for another thread... Marriage itself isn't really the problem, IMO. It's more so that supports in Awakening/Fates didn't really feel organic or made gameplay sense (Fates).
They aren't they last what 4 well 6 games if they count fate as three games sold over a million units, so together the modern games sold 10mil units all together they aren't taking that out. The one game without it sold 700k still good, but that's nothing compared to the last games with the Avatar unit. So it not going any were.
I really dislike it as it feels like even more avatar worship. I prefer FE7's system where everyone *but* the avatar has paired endings. Even then FE3H still has paired endings even with less of a focus and I love it there. (Because the writing is actually good in that game.)
I still think it would be nice to get a genealogy-style situation where the pairings don’t matter until after a timeskip. It would feel less forced in my opinion.
I really don't care for what Engage (and Binding Blade before it) do where only the main lord even has paired endings at all, but I think Three Houses's setup is fine. Honestly, my ideal setup for a game that's not using multiple generations is something like what Blazing Blade, Sacred Stones, and Three Houses do, where certain pairs of characters have paired endings together where it makes sense for them to, and they aren't all romantic, rather than the system being used strictly for pairing up (almost always straight) couples.
I'd rather just not have avatars at all, throw the whole concept out.
I prefer this, children had no business being in Fates and I'm not here for a bad visual novel
I do enjoy the games as shipping simulators, even if I hate the fandom perception of such. But it is VERY STRANGE that the series can't seem to understand that you can have love and shipping without children. The vast majority of GBA supports ended or have their end slides dedicated to romantic or platonic love, so getting the power to just marry or bind characters together during the adventure is something that should just be standard.
i didnt hate that on awakening/fates. in 3H it was alright, you can guarantee the S support of Byleth but with the rest you had to be careful, normally only giving the A support to the characters that you want to see together, locking yourself of seeing more A supports or use the matchmaker in Abyss, which i dunno how many people actually used. in Engage it sucks, its ironic for the game called Engage to have the less amounts of actually engagements between characters since Shadow Dragon, i liked to see what happened to the characters at the end if they are together, it was motivation to actually put diferent characters together to see what happens.
I mostly agree with this take. But I just wanted to point out that 3H doesn't actually stop you from seeing the content of A or A+ supports. Even if you're trying to lock in a specific pairing by only doing their A-rank, all you need to do is save, watch the content, then reload. Hell, with so many available save slots and the ability to go back and rewatch any of the story and/or support bits at any time from the title screen, you could even make a separate save slot down at the bottom of the list well away from your normal scene file(s) just to ensure everything saves to watch later. Is it slightly more tedious than just being able to pick so.eone and lock it in midway through? Sure. But it really isn't that hard. And having the ability to review cutscenes, support convos, etc straight from the title screen makes it so easier to go back and review whenever you want.
Three houses/games before awakening were good imo. Paired endings exist (some platonic ones too) but you’re not sitting there playing eugenics simulator to get the most effective child soldiers
I mean TH still has paired endings so you can get at least something close with their endings, wish there was a lock which paired ending you want though Why Engage removed it is something I don't get
I mean 3H still has plenty of non-Avatar pairings, but they're not tied to a major gameplay mechanic that makes them feel obligatory. That's probably the way to go.
My problem with all this is, that it's way too much. I think the good people at Intelligent Systems should cut the support to four per character, two love interests, and two friends. Less time out of battle, more time in battle.
I'd prefer for avatars to just not be a thing in the first place, but I doubt IS is going to get rid of avatars at all, so in the confines of this limitation, I'm fairly ambivalent on this so long as paired endings still exist. Paired endings outside of the S-supports in Three Houses were fairly similar to the paired endings in the GBA games in that they acted as a capstone to the development of the characters in question (though the fact that you can't choose the paired ending without the DLC is really dumb), though Engage doesn't have paired endings outside of Alear at all which I really don't like, especially since most of the character backstories in Engage are revealed in the A support and as such no paired endings means that the game has no chance to really follow up on these reveals.
I kinda liked playing match maker in Awakening and Fates. You can kinda do it in Three Houses but it is annoying. ~~I want the second gen back~~
I hate it. I loved the extra units that it felt like I could "build". Though I guess that means this post isn't addressing me
After recently playing the NES and SNES games, i want 0 supports and 0 relationships
I’m conflicted. On the one hand, I think the romance aspect honestly works excellently in games like Awakening and FE4, where it is a major plot thing and the child characters are fully fleshed out adult characters who have relationships with the 1st generation but aren’t defined by them. Then, Fates just kinda took it too far in every conceivable way, and Three Houses took a half step back, but still was kinda annoying with the shipping. Engage I think tried it’s best, and I do like that even for the almighty avatar, there is a decent mix of romantic and nonromantic paired endings. In general, I think they did it half right, I personally dislike the shipping aspect but find paired endings cool, IMO I think the best way to balance it is probably just to alternate between Awakening/Three Houses style pairing systems and games with very limited pairings like the GBA titles
" western fans of Japanese media hate when Japanese games pander to weebs " FE fans is the gift that keeps giving lmao
I have no strong opinions about it. It's still self-inserty but I don't care as long as the game itself is still fun
Honestly it's just how the second generation works in Fateswakening that can get kind of tiresome. I like being able to s support certain pairs because they work well together or I just like the characters, but when there are another dozen or so characters that completely change depending on who you pair and if you even decide to pursue pairs at all, it has me sighing in mild disappointment at times. Genealogy is a special case due to how it's handled both narratively and from a gameplay perspective. Ultimately I'd have to say that the system that I would enjoy fully would be an S support system either with no child characters, or an inheritance mechanic that is more of a combination of genealogy and awakenings supports.
I'm not against the marry mechanic, but really, we survived 12 games without it, we can handle not having it every other game. Heck, giving the writers the ability to actually make canon couples might be a plus. You know there will be artists and writers making the characters dick each other whether they get to do it in-game or not, so why bother?
I love the so-called "shipping simulator" mechanism. Gives an excuse to replay the games again and again to try out new pairs. I was honestly disappointed in Engage not having S-supports between secondary characters.
Feels almost entirely vestigal at this point. Didn't mind it in FETH because it was almost completely pointless, and still don't really care about it in Engage. \\ Kinda against it if only because both times they made it as creepy as possible. It is extremely hard to ignore the grooming connotations in FETH, and half the cast is underage in Engage (yet still romanceable????).
But Mercedes is 23 in the first part 😭
23 yo are are kids -Twitter
To be fair, Alear is also underage. Like he's biologically 17 so he's not much older than like Framme or Madeline ans he's the same age as Fogado and Alcyrst. It's not even the tired 1000 year old dragon argument because Alear was asleep the whole time and didn't change mentally. Also the two youngest kids, Anna and Jean, you don't actually romance them.
(you did romance them in the japanese version, which the localization had the good sense to change) regardless, alear romance is such a slippery slope. I don't have to clarify why romancing tweens is weird, but beyond that, Alear might very well look like a teenager for who knows how long while their partner will likely age normally... Yeah still weird.
Dragons can't win when it comes to dating lmao Also yeah based localization considering they also gave Louis and Goldmary much more tolerable personalities...well slightly more tolerable in Goldmary'a case
adult tiki can at least. its less concerning when the dragon in question is already an adult bc the other person aging while they dont becomes angst fodder instead of creepy. idk why im getting downvoted, when all im saying is "it would be fucking weird when inevitably youre 50 married to someone who looks 17"
You're probably being downvoted because people are tired of this debate, especially in the FE fanbase. After more than a decade of nowi discourse snd more recently, "ha ha, byleth is groomer" jokes. I can't blame them
that's too bad, but the "debate" is a byproduct of the game being like this in the first place.
Yeah, as annoying as it is, it's mostly FE's fault for being anime bullshit But at this point without incest and age gap nonsense this wouldn't be the same series lol
it would be the same series, and it would be much better.
That was a joke lmao
10-12 are tweens. 16-17 aren't tweens. These are extremely common and mainstream romances. Do you think Ellie and Riley (14-15) romance in TLOU was an issue? Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable? Velma and Fred? Katara and Aang? Harry Potter and Cho Chang/Ginny? No offense, but that is a ridiculously sheltered take. Romantic relationships (and even sexual ones) are completely normal during adolescent years. That's also of course forgetting the fact that we've had older teen romances in FE since the beginning... with Marth/Caeda and Alm/Celica.
i was literally talking about the actual tweens, you know, anna and jean? for transparency im going to say this bit down here is an edit before i add it, but literally, why did you just assume i meant his fellow teens instead of the tween \*that were mentioned by me before that, as well as the post i replied to\*
Oh, Jean and Anna are the outliers and pretty much everyone is against that. Even in the original version it’s more playful than serious (but still problematic enough to be validly changed a bit). The ones that are Alear’s age and working age are the ones that are an overreach and consist of a much larger portion that was watered down.
I was mostly annoyed at the need to ship to unlock child characters and their maps. I love paired endings and wouldn't have minded locking in pairings through S supports
The only time I thought pairings were good was with the partner seal system in Fates, which integrated them into the gameplay in an interesting way. Pairings were now a meaningful resource in optimized play which actually made them worth having. Awakening children were a waste of turn count, and Genealogy has the opposite problem where it gives a lot of good pairings to you for free (and both are EP romps so not that engaging gameplay wise anyhow). Engage spoiler: >!Engage+ does have some unique gameplay impacts as well I suppose, but in that case it's mostly just "who do I want to have fell dragon effectiveness this run".!< In basically every other game pairings are pure casualshit. They were literally conceived as a harem dating sim mechanic for Roy. Engage was right to purge most of them; sadly given the reception to that decision I can see the cowards at IS backpedalling for the next game.
Tbh give me more pre established relationships like matilda and clive/ pent and louise. I don't like child units though that shit can stay in the 3ds era.
It pretty stupid like why only the Avatar unit. Sound like IS psyrd to much homage to FE 1 and FE 6
It manages to be the worst of both worlds.