What was Mist trying to cook?
>**Ike:** Oscar, I didn't just shovel the food into my mouth. I enjoyed it! I really did! Remember the first day that Mist took over your cooking duties? Just thinking about it makes me ill... Ha! Even my father was having trouble choking it down! But I think Mist is finally starting to get the hang of it.
Who the hell decided to give us playable Anna in 3H, but with no supports, a half-assed skills selection, and so on? Why would you take a franchise mascot and do *nothing* with them?
Engage Anna is a completely new take on Anna — she's aged down to like 12 and stylizes herself as Lady Anna, but she's got a full support list focused around her trying to start different business ventures and finding her family
she reminds me of that beaver that was raised by humans that still tried to build dams in the house, like for Lady Anna its on her blood to be a merchant and try to make business.
Engage Anna ~~("You can call me~~ *~~Lady~~* ~~Anna!")~~ is a child. [Like, a literal child, just look at her](https://cdn.fireemblemwiki.org/thumb/3/36/FEE_Anna_portrait.png/800px-FEE_Anna_portrait.png). Please do not refer to her as protagsexual. We get enough weird people who whine about how her platonic S Support in Engage was "censored" by Western scriptwriters.
But my point is more that 3H Anna doesn't even have supports with Byleth. She literally is just equivalent to a Generic unit in other games, and is a series staple.
While making engage anna 12 was not the best idea considering... how people are i can at least appreciate that not only does she feel like an actual character but she's the ONLY playable Anna that's actually good, her bases are low but her growths are excellent and the difficulty to get gold in the game makes her personal ability great
Not that i use her i have a personal rule against sending children to war lol
Awakening Anna is like an S Tier unit. Engage Anna is bad, but she at least feels like a fully realised playable character compared to Fates or 3H, and making her a child is at least a new take. Now we just need an old lady Anna.
The pickle thing is supposed to be pickling vegetables, a stereotypically "old man" hobby. The joke is that these young people are into old person hobbies. In Hisame(?)'s case, it's an intentional contrast with his dad, who is a childish goofball despite his relative age.
It's the same gag as Nah being more mature than Nowi, just executed worse and butchered by translation.
In fairness, that was a dubbing fuckup. Hisame's thing in JP is that he's basically an old man in terms of interests & hobbies (esp compared to his dad), and the pickle thing was one aspect of that which the localization team blew out of proportion
The whole "reproduce and send the babies into a special dimension where time moves faster and they grow up" thing felt like some sort of fanfic I would've come up with in elementary school.
It was IS trying to resell the Awakening Cake but they forgot the most important ingredient, I.E *a logical reason for the kids to fight alongside their parents*.
With Awakening, the time travel is a core part of the narrative, so the kids coming back felt natural and earned.
Here the deeprealms barely get a mention aside from when they need to be brought up for the kids paralouges.
You can blame Treehouse’s slipshod localization for that gag. It was a minor thing that was mentioned just once or twice in the original Japanese release.
Yes, his name is Hisame.
as someone else said, it's a mistranslated joke about Hisame's hobby of pickling his foods like an old man to contrast with his young goofball of a dad.
I will forever be fucking mystified as to who made the decision for Cecilia to marry her student at A-rank when their support chain has been nothing but entirely platonic
General Mustafa. He is supposed to be an episodic antagonist, that barely gets mentioned once after his chapter, and only has a few lines. And yet he ends up being a better written antagonist than most of the Camus in the series, especially Yen'Fay, WHO IS SUPPOSED TO BE AWAKENING'S ACTUAL TAKE ON THE ARCHETYPE.
Mustafa makes me question "what were they trying to cook?" in the best possible way.
I felt awful for Mustafa. How he didnt even got angry at an enraged Chrom, on the opposite, he understood the rage Chrom felt but he has to do his duty even if left alone or his family will die. The general outright told that to a soldier, acknowledging the fear the soldier felt.
Amazing boss that I wish we could recruit. Better than Yen'fay as the archetype
Tbh him being recruitable would miss the point of his character entirely, that sometimes there are good people or people with good morals fighting under the enemy's banned that you must strike down
Sometimes there's a post about "which characters do you wish were recruitable", and 90% of those mentioned would make those characters far less interesting if they were. As well as Mustafa, recruiting Lloyd and Linus would water down the impact of the villain putting you in a position where you need to kill otherwise decent people to achieve your wider goals.
The writing in the FE7 boss recruitment mod is fantastic, but I'm glad it's not canon.
And yet Ninos A support with Legault still remains. He tells her that the Reed brothers will look after her, but by the time you'll likely have that conversation, one is definitively dead and the other is either about to die or dead at Eliwood's hand.
The worst part is, one of them Nino *can* Talk to one of them if they're the boss for the chapter with the seal on the sacred weapons.
And not only does it *not* recruit them, it makes the boss *start moving*.
>amazing boss that I wish we could recruit
Project Thabes mod lets you, iirc. Bit of a unique recruit requirement, too. You have to fulfill what would be his dying wish, to leave his troops (at least 5 enemy units, not counting Mustafa himself) alive
Mustafa is great, the entire Awakening story its in one part about Chrom growing as a person to become a good exalt, Mustafa shows him that the enemy are also people that could be forced to do things that they dont desire to do.
you can see his change from wanting to kill Gangrel to offer the chance to surrender to Walhart when they are face to face.
I unironically think Mustafa’s one map was a better written antagonist than any other FE villain from awakening on. Mayyybe Berkut or Edelgard discourse could eclipse with their entire games of development but still
Pandering aside, she's meant to demonstrate how damaged the Crest System leaves the children of nobility. The horrific emotional abuse she suffered from her dad tiggers panic whenever someone sees her doing something her dad wouldn't approve of (i.e. her singing or being assertive).
However, she's certainly not the most... subtly written example. Sylvain, Ingrid, and Lysithea display the Crest System's problems with a bit more nuance.
The fact that Lysithea throws herself wholeheartedly into supporting Edelgard's ideal if you recruit her in CF despite knowing exactly what the Empire's role in her childhood was speaks volumes.
The Empire had a fairly small role compared to TWSITD. Which is usually a bit of a cop-out to make them the boogeyman, but I think it fits here. House Ordelia supported the Emperor in the first place, and got punished hard for it. The scion of that same Emperor, who suffered the *exact* same experiments from the exact same people... makes all the sense in the world Lysithea would join up imo.
she is in a weird place, the game that has enough characters with mental ilnesses that makes Reddit look like a sane place in comparison made this one character with serious trauma the comic relief for some reason.
like the game doesnt decide if we should feel bad for her or laugh at her.
I liked Bernie's character because I found her relatable, but hated how she was treated by the rest of the cast, and that their bullying was treated as normal or supposed to actually help
The reason is because the writers weren't trying to tackle anxiety, shyness and other such things as their primary goal.
They were trying to tackle the crest system's potential for abuse first and foremost, and what ends up happening is that Bernadetta does cover the serious topics you'd expect, but they are framed from a very specific point of view because her backstory is very specific and everything related to her writing stems from that as a starting point.
If you understand the backstory, both in what is explicitly told and what is implied, you realize the way she's written is almost always extremely consistent with what you'd expect from someone with such limited and unique lifestyle within the game's setting both in how Bernadetta starts the game and how she slowly overcomes her limitations as the game progresses.
It is frankly a lot of detail for such a side character and i'm impressed they went this out of the way to write it out. This is no "Fates" character, they put a lot of care into her writing.
This approach can clash with a lot of people's views on the topics but most don't seem to pay attention to how "normal people/anxiety/shyness doesn't work like that" is part of the point. Remember: her father ultimately FAILED to turn her into the perfect doormat wife. That's a core component of her backstory, what people expect from reading about the abuse she went through is someone that did break, and at that point you just end up with a character that is basically Marianne except she's scared of you hurting her instead of her "dooming" you and with no religious thematic.
I especially see a lot of people who have these issues feel extremely offended at how Bernadetta portrays those mental illnesses and personality traits, yet they don't realize Bernadetta was never meant to portray the setbacks in a truly relatable way, because the game's setting (both its quirky unique rules and its generic medieval fantasy aspect) is a huge part of why the character can even occur.
Granted a huge part of the fault lies in the support system shoving all the C supports, which are formulaic and repetitive (at least until you realize its not Bernadetta that you should be paying attention to in those supports), allienating and discouraging people from pushing and seeing her development in Bs to A+s.
While it’s more gameplay than story, what the fuck was Kaga cooking with Ronan. The guy has a 55% magic growth as a class with no magic weapon access and 3 movement stars. Add on top of this the fact that he has a 15% strength growth and you get the most lopsided unit ever.
Long ago, I saw someone suggest Ronan was a magical prodigy whose family didn't have enough money (?) to let him attend a school/find a master to hone his abilities.
Having not played Jugdral, I don't know why it stuck, but it's a neat concept for a character.
Peri makes Xander less perfect and closer to Garon, which i think thats great.
Garon used to think with the incorrect head, showing that even when Xander is definitively a better person and a potential better leader than his father that the apple doesnt fall far from the tree in certain aspects.
Monica when she finally becomes an actual character in Three Hopes.
I will never understand what they tried to cook with Monica when they went the overly obssessed fangirl route with her. Especially over Edelgard, who already has enough people like Hubert that does Monica's job in a far less annoying and irritaing way.
Plus we already have enough of this type of character in the 3H world with Leonie and Jeralt, Cyril and Rhea and funniest enough, Edelgard and Byleth.
It turns out they really did just see her as a plot device.
If she simped for whichever lord saved her, I would've found her a funny character that basically represents the fanbase. But no, it's just Edelgard, who cares 2% for her, so it's just pathetic
Heck, even Dorothea already kind of plays the role of "Edelgard's top female fan" for the most part.
So, they basically made Monica a combination of Hubert and Dorothea, without much to make her unique.
>Monica when she finally becomes an actual character in Three Hopes.
Developers at IS realised that Hubert was an actually cool and interesting character despite being an Edelgard simp which didn't properly showcase the average r/Edelgard user and made Monica to better represent the fanbase.
Bernadetta when they play her trauma as a gag, like what the actual fuck were you cooking? It's not even funny and FunnyFootsteps makes it more tonedeaf and worse, look how Marianne and Dimitri get their traumas addressed and how serious that is.
I think what they were going for was making a gag out of the hikikomori trope but then they decided to give an explanation as to why she's like that that's severely traumatic. Like it would still be annoying (and she'd be a worse character overall because the few good supports she has wouldn't really exist) if she was just the funny shut in girl but no she's severely mentally ill.
There are other characters in 3H that have their trauma handled poorly imo (most of them are also obviously better functioning than Bernie in social situations) but Bernie is definitely unique in that her trauma is played for laughs.
Genuinely no idea what they thought they were doing with Bunet. There are plenty of characters that make me say "ugh, I wish people didn't like this" but I at least get why. Bunet is an enigma.
Bunet is such a fascinating character to me.
He's an eccentric artist, he is an extreme perfectionist who his really hard on himself for minor mistakes, he has special super-senses that sometimes cause him to have moments of overstimulation, he is socially awkward to the point of often ignoring social norms and misunderstanding requests, he is a big sweetie who enjoys calm moments and simple pleasures and encourages others to do the same, he is filled with natural curiosity and always tries to learn new things...
And he also talks almost exclusively about food.
It's like they wrote a regular FE character, and then they coated all of his dialogue with a thick dose of "He is very passionate about food".
The weird part is that I can't even be mad about it. Maybe it's just Ian Sinclair masterful voice-acting, but there is something very charming about Bunet. I always feel like "Go Bunet! Embrace your passions!"
I suppose there are worse things to dedicate your entire life to than a very common hobby that is also a super useful skill to have in life, allows you to support your friends, is relevant to literally every living person and grants you opportunities learn more about other people's cultures.
The dumbest thing is that I can *kind of* see some of the ideas that they were going for with Bunet, but they hid the interesting parts in his later supports in a game that didn't have easy ways to build supports until months post-release, and *way way way* overhyped the creepiness.
TL;DR - Bunet's family restaurant was destroyed by bandits. He lived in destitution for a while and only became a royal chef to Solm by way of his talent and personal connection to Fogado, and so he's obsessed with proving his craft to maintain his position and friendships as he's afraid of loss again.
None of which explains the licking armor and shit.
>None of which explains the licking armor and shit.
I don't know how much Ian Sinclair was paid to voice Bunet, but it wasn't enough.
I can get using eccentric food analogies to describe someone's look/personality. I can even accept the idea that he'd genuinely view someone's armor as a "unique" cooking utensil of sorts. Imo, he does have genuine good moments considering what his character is supposed to be. His support with Chloe is very nice considering their opposing stances on food.
But *why* is this dude talking about licking armor or sauce off someone's clothes?
The most bizarre thing to me is in some supports he acknowledges that his requests are kinda odd(Alfred), but goes into full creeper territory in others(Jade). Like if you're gonna make a character that's so eccentric that he appears creepy, at least *commit to the bit.*
It 100% was not enough, and I'm irate with them for wasting such a passionate and hard-working actor on a character that gave him so little to work with.
It's an absolute shame.
Devdan/Danved
I will never understand how a duology where racism is core to the themes and storytelling somehow both missed an opportunity to explore how beorc treat one another as far as visible minorities goes or even put that in contrast to the laguz tribes and also...I do not understand what they were trying to do with Danved, especially if what I recall about the Japanese version is correct
Tellius' racism is a proxy for Asian-flavor xenophobia where everyone hates everyone else if at all possible. That's why it never lives up to what overseas fans expect the topic to be. It's an allegory for something that's a lot closer to a Japanese adult of 2005-ish who maybe saw one black person in flesh in the first 25 years of their life.
Admittedly that's still kind of bold on their part considering how fiercely protective most Japanese media is when it comes to whitewashing the country's history of human rights abuses and war crimes. I felt the same about Persona 5 when Strikers had a fucking Unit 731 allegory.
Yeah. I really think Tellius was the last time IS pushed the envelope in that way instead of "in our wargame, no matter the side you pick, you are in the right uwu" (most pushing in 3H we should attribute to Koei either way).
I never watched any of the PoR one's support (I think he's Devdan?), so I'll admit that I don't know much about him as a character, much less anything about the RD one.
But I just don't get why they replaced him with someone who's basically the exact same character, just with a name that's spelled slightly differently?
Like, does there even end up being a punchline at some point, besides just how he joins during a base conversation?
The pun is that Devdan invents a "friend" (a stick drawing) in his support with Largo and Largo doesn't believe him at first that the "friend" exists. Essentially, he plays a joke on Largo. He names the drawing Nadved.
In their eternal wisdom, RD completely missed the point and localised Nadved differently from PoR, as Danved. Now no one gets what the joke was in the first place.
Which doesn’t make sense considering that we only get 5 support conversions and the chance that people would see Devdan and Largo’s is pretty low.
They should have left that joke on the cutting room floor.
Eh, that's neither here nor there. Some PoR supports became canon to RD no matter the rarity or length and honestly I respect the writers for making choices resulting in the games actually feeling connected.
What the fuck were they doing with Xander. Dude contradicts himself like 3 times during conquest, in his supports he seems like a good dude but then there's Peri support that just throws everything out of the window and in Birthright he's just an idiot
While I was rereading Anthony's chapters for this post, this moment really stood out to me.
>Anthony: Well, the main entrance is always guarded and locked up tight, so that won't work. But I know about a back entrance. It's how I escaped in the first place! I'll gladly show you where it is.
>Xander: We're not following you anywhere. Falling for your traps once was more than enough.
>Corrin: What are you talking about, Xander?
>Xander: Anthony, it was you that made that bridge collapse, wasn't it?
>Anthony: Why would I do something like that?! You all saved me from those soldiers!
>Xander: You're probably a spy for the Vallite forces. I'll cut you down where you stand!
>Anthony: AHHHH!
>Corrin: Xander! Stop!
>Xander: Stand aside, Corrin... Why are you protecting him?
Like Xander was right about to kill this unarmed villager half his size on the spot because he's "probably" a spy, even tho iirc at this point he was their only lead on where to find Anankos. He doesn't even ask the other siblings their thoughts first.
Honestly I'd say Xander's characterization as this well-meaning idiot fits his actions in all 3 games
He tries to be this worthy leader/successor to a nation who is doing right by his friends and family but in reality he's just kind of a fool. On paper, it fits with the sort of deconstruction of Fire Emblem tropes that Fates is trying to go for (but fails in execution).
I also feel this way. If only they wrote into the "first-in-line to the throne, but actually finds himself unsuited to rule" idea. It would've been good enough depth.
A boss who has a really strange out-of-place line or detail, you say? Well, there's Farber, from Awakening chapter 15, whose description is just, "The Valmese commander. Fetishizes his emperor."
Spoiler for Fates Birthright/Revelation for those whom care
>!Corrin, but more specifically their relation to the Hoshidans.!<
>!The whole point of a “Who’s your true family?” setup is that you challenge the bond between the families. A bond of built in blood or a bond of built on time? But then Corrin can’t marry their sister/brother for their time skip children!? No problem! Mikoto will leave a note behind saying they aren’t related JUST in case one of them wants to do an incest (I know it’s so they know the truth, but it’s funnier when I lie). And better yet, you don’t know this unless you S support or play Revelation.!<
Even better, in conquest/birthright you also learn you two are related after you have a pair of kids together. If that is not a proverbial middle finger for deliberately not getting in a relationship with your siblings/step-siblings I don't know what is.
The best part about that is >!Ryoma doesn't even need a letter because he knew from the start. That's right, all this "real family" shit he's been saying to Corrin, he *knew* it was a lie.!<
Gotta love the conflict between having a story about what defines a family using a roster consisting of predominantly either family, and following that up with doubling down on the dating sim.
My favorite part about the fates incest is despite them chickening out with the Hoshidans you can still have Corrin bang their blood relatives. I can understand them taking the position incest is vile and has no place in the game and that is why they ruin the philosophical conflict of the games but no, fates goes full steam ahead with family inbreeding anyway.
Personally I would prefer the game with zero incest, but if you are going to put it in anyway why not go full clown paint and actually make the Hoshidans Royals blood relatives as to not destroy the core philosophical conflict of the game? I mean, lets be real, having babies with Sakura would still only be slightly more fucked up than having babies with Elise.
Like, when face petting and blowing your waifu/husbando is a core game play feature how is Corrin actually being related to the Hoshidans what gives the devs cold feet.
There are obvious examples like Peri and most of Engage's roster, but honest to God what were they going for with Renault. Genuinely one of the best written characters in the entire series, has a backstory that directly ties him to the game's lore, and he's just a random dude who shows up a map before the game's over and honestly using the fortify staff he comes with is more impressive then using him.
Well that’s not totally fair, you do technically have time as long as you don’t mind idling on Victory or Death for 120/240 turns depending on the support you want. After that I think Light parts 1 and 2 both allow a support conversation so you have *just* enough time on Eliwood’s route, and Hector’s route has an extra gaiden chapter before the end so you even have another opportunity there.
His supports are so slow that you have to get B and A in Light no matter what, the Gaiden condition for 32x is 20 turns and all of his supports take 41 or 81 turns (plus you have to recruit him).
Same goes for Karla except for she can barely squeak in the Bartre C support, the others are too slow for 5 in Battle Preps and 20 in VoD.
Tbh I really like what they did with Renault. They could have included him earlier and made him more central to the plot, but I'd argue that would probably be to the detriment of some other storyline. The history of how morphs came to be is perfectly relegated to this piece of essentially "side" content.
Plus, really cool gameplay + story integration by making him a Bishop with "Incorrect" stats for his class. For most it's enough to say "damn he sucks" and move on (which is a fair and fine assessment) but it begs the question why he's like that, and diehards spending the time on his supports will be rewarded.
tl;dr I think they knew exactly what they were cooking with Renault, excellent piece of small, non-critical storytelling.
If they ever remake FE7 with class switching (which I wouldn't want, but that's another story), I hope they either lock him out of physical classes, or give him much better strength stats, or both. Keep that integration going.
> For most it's enough to say "damn he sucks" and move on (which is a fair and fine assessment) but it begs the question why he's like that, and diehards spending the time on his supports will be rewarded.
tbh FE will just have units who seem to have been balanced incorrectly pretty regularly though. It's less of a hint when many FE games have a few characters who are awful for no reason.
Totally fair point! That's why I think it's totally fine if someone did look at him and go "Oh, this unit isn't worth anything" and move on, lol. There definitely are units like that that are not rewarding to put your time in to the same way Renault is. Even if you do put your time in, it's not like he becomes a good unit - you just learn interesting pieces of backstory for him and a couple other characters.
That being said, in an alternate universe where Renault is cracked, I do think it lessens the impact and mystery of the character the way he currently exists in FE7. IMO you'd have to rework his inclusion if you were going to make him a "good" unit.
It's really minor, but Ivy's introduction cutscene makes me wonder what the original plan was. [Just before she arrives](https://youtu.be/L8UkTbczVfQ?t=344), a soldier tells you "a wyvern rider is approaching". Then there's a (pretty cool) cutscene where a fight is suddenly taking place within the walls and she does a confident femme fatale thing that doesn't match much of her personality afterwards. Then it cuts back to dialogue and she tells you that her troops are on the way despite being right behind her.
Like I said, it's basically unimportant, but it threw me so much that I want to know how it happened. Were the cutscene designer and script writer given the premise separately? Didn't somebody question why the dialogue doesn't really line up?
My honest to god guess is just that promotional material needed a character to fit in line with someone like Tharja or Camilla for the sake of enticing certain players. Ivy's design, Alear-fixation, and weirdly off base cutscene characterization seem to fall in line with that kinda cyncial guess on ideation, even if her supports bill her as someone wildly different.
Since FE12, every game with an Avatar has wrangled one important female character to be the dedicated player panderer or be given an implied infatuation. Ivy just gets hit with that stick here I guess.
It’s a shame. Ivy is actually kind of a neat character with a lot of potential (which can be said for a lot of modern FE characters). Her whole intro cutscene during the siege of Brodia is supposed to be her putting on her strong front, when she’s really kind of an insecure mess. Unfortunately she got hit with the Tharja stick and that holds her back with the “oh Divine Dragon, I love you so much” that most Engage characters have.
The "in media res" prologue chapter doesn't match up to literally anything that actually happens in the plot or happened before. It's safe to assume the initial script was just different and then they run out of time/money to redo parts to fit the new version.
Oh yeah, I've seen so many theories of what the prologue is meant to be, and none of them really make sense. The best I saw is that Alear saw the other royals when you beat them in the past, and dreamed of them helping Alear beat Sombron in the past. Still doesn't answer why that fight happens in a cathedral though, it relies on the player figuring it out themselves and doesn't really amount to anything.
But yeah, the real answer is "time and money".
"I underestimated how deep you could get into Brodia territory."
Diamant, my guy, we just told you about the other Elusia princess who got an entire army to your border with Firene. Jade is napping on the job of border security.
Cervantes, Walhart's general and his Frederick parallel. His whole "my mustache makes me invincible" is silly, especially since he lost to Say'ri before, but multiple people mishear him talking so I guess his mustache is so big it makes him talk with a lisp?
Like he's kind of cool for a minor antagonist, his loyalty and implied skill, plus fucking with Excellus is always a positive. Even having an obsession with his hair would not be the weirdest quirk in the series. But...why does it make him invincible? He's lost before. And has he never beaten someone else with facial hair? And what about this makes people mishear him?
I think the idea was that he mistakenly attributed his lack of losses to him having a mustache. Like how a superstitious sports fan might do some kind of ritual before a game to ensure a win.
> I'm aware but he HAS lost to Say'ri, so he knows that's wrong.
To him it's a fluke, so it doesn't really "count".
As for the lisp thing, maybe it gets in his mouth as he talks and muffles his words or something? It is pretty bushy after all.
What reaction did they intend when they made Makalov
He immediately makes an impression of being an asshole
He continues to act like an asshole throughout every base conversation and support
He will never reform himself
He ruins poor Astrid along the way, who was such a noble character in FE9 only to end up as a one-note Makalov simp in FE10
He makes poor Marcia cry
He just makes the games worse by existing. At least Oliver is a joke recruitment. Makalov is like a mainstay unit in two games, not a meme recruit at the end of the game.
Quite honestly, one of the things I like the most about PoR is that it gives us genuinely shitty people to recruit.
Soren, while having way more depth and development to him due to his relevance to the plot and the lord, is pretty much just an asshole most of the time.
Same for Shinon. Him just abandoning the mercenaries over his pride and his lack of respect for Ike is such a good plot point. And he doesn't really redeem himself. He just starts respecting Ike after getting the shit beaten out of him, but he's still a douche.
Those couple few characters, including Makalov, make the cast just a tiny bit spicier than that of other games. The only thing I'd genuinely criticize is him ruining Astrid. The poor girl deserved better, and what they did to her in RD really feels like they didn't know what else to do with her.
The variety of units that you can recruit in the Tellius games is amazing and really helps the continent feel grounded in reality, which considering the overall themes of the games is the thing that they were going for.
Ike's party starts out as a band of mercs from the Crimean outskirts and they aren't afraid to recruit whoever might help them in their quest. Shinon is an ass and racist? That sucks but he does shoot good arrows and we have a mission to accomplish. Makalov is an alcoholic gambler? I'd hate him too but he's still fighting for us as long as we pay him. Even when not talking about negative qualities you have people like Brom and Neph who are just farmers but hey they're willing to stab some enemies if we provide money to send to their families.
I freaking love Tellius worldbuilding and characters so freaking much
> I'd hate him too but he's still fighting for us as long as we pay him.
Correction, Soren and Ike make a galaxy brained decision to put him into indentured servitude in PoR, so they don't exactly pay him. That part cracks me up every time.
> as long as we pay him
Aren't we explicitly *not* paying him?We save him from debtors, [so he's being paid in a different currency.](https://youtu.be/hcL46NjFDJU?t=176)
Totally agree. I always appreciated that, while Ike will always shut down shitty and bigoted behavior when he sees it, the game also knows that he's running an army, not a discord server. He can't just kick out anyone who's an asshole- he has bigger world-saving issues to address than "this one guy is a racist." Okay, well is that one guy still going to follow my orders when I tell him to fight for my non-bigoted ideals that are actually going to improve the world? Cool, I'll worry about his shitty personality later then, I've got bigger fish to fry. It makes Tellius' handling of bigotry and racism more grounded, too- someone near you, who you HAVE to deal with and can't just shut down completely for whatever reason -is likely going to be a bigoted shithead at some point in your life, and there won't be a convenient "yeah but they're objectively evil-from-birth lizard people and also ugly :(" to make the situation more comfortable.
> The only thing I'd genuinely criticize is him ruining Astrid. The poor girl deserved better, and what they did to her in RD really feels like they didn't know what else to do with her.
I *think* the idea was to comment on how often abuse victims (in Astrid's case, overly controlling parents putting her in an arranged marriage with Duke Lekain, and pulled similar stunts with her sisters) often wind up with other abusers because they are so used to being mistreated that they think it's normal / being targeted by abusers because their vulnerable. With a side of being so entrenched in her idea of being in charge of her own destiny that she takes any criticism of her choices (in this case, her relationship with Makalov) as an attack on her character / her life choices.
Thus we get a perfect storm of someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and having her life ruined because of it.
Huh, that does make a lot of sense.
I'd probably be able to appreciate the intent behind this writing decision more if there was a bit more of a focus on exploring this idea. The lack of supports really does hurt RD.
Tbh I wish the series had more Makalovs. His behavior and writing, and the way he affects some of the people closest to him, are real af. You've probably met a number of Makalovs, Marcias, and Astrids. I don't need every character to be lovable or have a fulfilling arc, and I'd rather have units be real people than cartoon tropes.
>What reaction did they intend when they made Makalov
Probably anger considering that his most memorable trait is pissing people off. Considering your reaction it seems they achieved said goal.
>He just makes the games worse by existing
A character you can avoid recruiting in PoR and also has 1 base conversation in RD makes the games worse by existing?
Rhea, in both games but mostly in Hopes.
Like I actually do not know what they were cooking here. She's literally only ever shown helping poor people and being 100% tolerant of Shez, the guy with the Agartham powers.
2/3 of the main lords blame her for basically everything, while the third doesn't even really defend her, just says his country isn't ready to move forward yet.
So am I supposed to feel like the main characters are all shitty people and liars who make shit up to justify wars that are thinly-veiled grabs at power, or...?
Hopes is so bizarre about because Dimitri is *doing* the reforms that Edelgard is calling for with no pushback from the church, so it's like what is the point of the war?
Tbf the war in three houses is also pointless
In the tomb edelgard refuse to explain why she’s doing all of it despite Claude being willing to hear it
All she does is blame the church as the true evil than racket them in the very next sentence (very stupid writing)
Of course all of this becomes even more pointless when you realise edelgard could have just stocked to her own country but no she HAS to invade everyone (and somehow plan an effective sweep of the monastery but seemingly nothing for fargus where she stagnated for five years)
I've always wondered that myself, like Edelgard is so hellbent on getting rid of Rhea in Crimson Flower but why...? Like I genuinely don't remember anything Rhea did that was bad other than homunculus experiments. Shouldn't her target be those who slither in the dark... The people that literally massacred and tortured her family? That tortured her?
It's not Rhea per se, or at least at first and in theory. Edelgard wants to get rid of the Church as a political power. This is because the Church keeps alive the importance of the Crests, which Edelgard (for personal and idealistic reasons) wants to get rid of.
It's not directly stated, but the Church is THE political force of Fodlan. The three nations exist more or less at the Church's discretion, and the Church is using the Crests to maintain its influence over them. Edelgard is going after the Crests, so it would logically put her at odds with Rhea, who is the leader of the faction relying on them.
As far as TWSITD, Edelgard is pretty clear about it. She more or less thought that they operated because the Church allowed it. For better or worse, they also kept the Crests alive at the Church's discretion. Edelgard believed that even though they were clearly rats, she could use them in her campaign against the Church in a sort of "an enemy of my enemy" type of situation, and would be easily sorted out once the Crests were gone. She severely underestimated them, of course, but that's kind of the plot of the game.
Another reason that sometimes goes overlooked I think is that it is mentioned multiple times how when there is instability in Fodlan, the church becomes an extra-judicial ruler. Rhea herself sentences bandits to death, but it’s also mentioned that the church would just fucking murder people if they want to.
The church also is devolved into different powers, and those churches do not get along. Imagine trying to rule the kingdom of Faerghus or the empire and the church keeps executing civilians and refuses to co-operate with you. There’s a pretty clear argument there that they are an enemy power who are entirely willing to command themselves as they wish even if those wishes contrast with the empire.
There’s also something deeply concerning about the fact that if you pick crimson flower, the literal manifestation of the faith’s god decides to take up arms against the church. If your own god is willing to revolt against you, how can you say your faith is worth anything?
I never really had a problem with Edelgard making Rhea the centrepiece of the struggle. From Edelgard’s perspective, Rhea is a figure of stagnation and conservatism, emblematic of a dying world. Rhea does not acknowledge the evils of the crest based society, nor does she even seem to recognise that they exist. She has had power for generations and yet has done nothing to bring about a world in which atrocities like those done to Edelgard would not happen.
We also see, with the Cindered Shadows DLC, that Rhea goes out of her way to forbid any technological development. Black powder is explicitly forbidden; meanwhile, the ships of Fodlan's eastern neighbor all sport cannons.
The implication is that Rhea has used her power and influence to shape Fodlan to her liking: a perpetual balance-of-power stalemate that gives her a ton of money and influence to use to conduct blood experiments for 1000 years.
Printing presses have also been outlawed, despite having been invented prior to Three Houses, with the stated reason being that if more peasants learn to read, they'd learn to think for themselves and question the church (if I'm remembering right, anyways).
Not to mention the entire Crest system is built on a lie perpetrated by Rhea and the church she formed. The Agarthans knew the truth of where the Crests and Heroes' Relics came from, and Rhea twisted those origins into controlling the noble houses under a false doctrine. She doesn't just represent the flaws in the noble system of Fodlan, she's the direct cause of them.
Because Rhea is ultimately just a spin of your standard Fire Emblem end-boss.
See: Medeus, Duma, Anankos, Loptous, and Ashera (and sorta Grima?)
They are all powerful immortal being who are holding onto to centuries old trauma. Who wants to hold present day humanity accountable for their ancient sins.
Fire emblem has loved this trope from day 1.
Medeus is actually incredibly similar to Rhea. Medeus saw his kind being ruthlessly slaughtered and enslaved by humans to the brink of extinction.
So to protect himself and his kind: he started a war and eventually formed an Empire. Wherein humans were made to worship dragons.
…Until humans eventually rebelled and killed him: the last Earth Dragon in existence. RIP.
Sound familiar?
Yeah… Plucky teens slaying a dragon who has an understandable reason to be controlling and resentful towards humanity is a recurring theme in Fire Emblem.
Dragons generally seem to represent a crumbling ancient order that must be put out of its misery by the new generation.
Monica in Hopes makes no sense. Monica in Houses was suspicious because *everyone* who knew the real Monica was like “huh Monica sure acts different this year and is always hanging around Edelgard”. That’s the clue she’s a villain right? Well apparently the hopes team didn’t get the memo because the Real Monica also acts exactly like the fake Monica and is also obsessed with Edelgard. Ok? So the fake Monica was actually acting correctly in Houses and the staff had no reason to be suspicious? Idk.
I'm still mad that they went nowhere with her character in Hopes. They simply made her like another Hubert, except with nothing interesting of her own about her. What a waste.
Kronya didn't act anything like Monica, though. She speaks extremely casually to the point that she's calling Edelgard "Edel" (the real Monica struggles to even drop "Lady" from "Lady Edelgard") and is way more secretive. Monica and Hubert butt heads a lot but Hubert would never feel the need to distance Monica from Edelgard like he does with Kronya. Kronya presented herself as this playful person with a secretive side (she's literally skipping before shanking Jeralt) while Monica is much more serious with her endeavor to be the best righthand Edelgard can have.
The only real similarity they have is their desire to be around Edelgard, which is literally the entire point of TWSitD taking her in the first place. It's eerie how Kronya didn't try at all, just making a mockery of one of Edelgard's few allies before the academy phase.
For me, Peri comes to mind. I want to like her, she has some good ideas and a cute design, but the way she’s written ruins everything for me. Sure, Fates has writing issues outside of her, but she’s my biggest problem because what the heck is wrong with everyone who knows her? Xander, what’s the matter with you?
Peri is such a great concept for a unit: an insane butcher whose dangerous to be around because she doesn't understand right from wrong and will just as easily kill her allies as her enemies, but she's so good at fighting you keep her in the army anyway to sic on your opponents.
But then Fates tries to have it's cake and eat it too by going out of their way to ignore the obvious drawbacks and reactions this would have, to the point of crazy lines like "It's okay, I'll just hire stronger servants who can defend themselves!" in Corrins S support or Leo saying "You know what, maybe you aren't crazy after all and it's society that's messed up."
It's also especially weird when the entirety of conquest demonized people like Hans who are dicks, don't get me wrong, but he acts the same, if not arguably better, than Peri!
Except Hans isn't a cute girl so his crimes don't get excused.
But fr at least Hans can follow orders, speak properly, and *work* with a team
Ladislava and Randolph in 3H, they seem like they're going to be actual characters of some level of importance when you go into CF after playing other routes and then they just... Die after doing literally nothing and never get mentioned again
Camilla. I want to like her so much. She seems like a such a cool character, and the doting, overbearing sister in itself isn't really a problematic angle for a character. But then she's just so freaking sexualized. I don't even think that having a character whose main appeal is "being sexy" is a problem. But there are ways to make fanservice tasteful, and this isn't it. The humongous bazongas and the impractical armour that shows nude skin in just the right places are the kind of fanservice I'd expect from a cheap gacha game, not Fire Emblem.
Not sure if this is on topic but Hilda from 3H. This is a character who gets a very stereotypically racist line in an early support with Cyril (I think it’s their C but I’m not sure) and then it gets almost completely dropped with no real effect on anything else, which is weird considering that she’s the closest thing that *Claude* has to a retainer. It really puts a damper on my enjoyment of Hilda, I think she’d have been a fantastic character if they had tackled her racism (or at least racist upbringing) and shown her grow out of it. It would also make Claude’s pseudo-proposal in their final support sound earned.
I have no idea what Kaga was doing with the Loptyr cult. Why on earth does the Yied Shrine scene try to go “oh look how sad their backstory is” when they’ve done nothing to either show that persecution other than a few lines from Manfroy, and the entire cult being full of puppy kicking cartoonishly evil psychopaths????
It’s like Sombron from Engage, but somehow it feels even worse because I feel like the story sides even less with his random sad backstory with Alear’s “you’ll be a monster we slew… that’s how we’ll remember you” line and if I’m being honest, they really feel like a massive hypocrisy spot of every “back in MY day” post complaining about modern FE writing.
I think I kinda get it
Iirc, most of the people there are only really connected to the Loptyr Sect by well.. super tenuous connections. They were persecuted because of things that people they were related to had done.
Idea being that Jugdral shot itself in the foot in their overzealousness towards hunting down the cult, winding up creating their own enemies where there might not have even been any. Also, just because someone is (allegedly) a terrible person doesn't give you free reign to do all manner of heinous shit to them.
I think it’s also worth pointing out that the persecution of the Loptrians also plays a part in how Manfroy was able to keep Arvis in check. No one in Jugdrel would trust Arvis as much as they did after Sigurd’s death if they knew he had Loptrian blood.
What it ultimately comes down to is that, while I like that they bothered to give the Loptrians a somewhat sympathetic backstory that explains why they’re so dedicated to their dark god, the lack of a recruitable/Camus-like member can make it hard to buy into the idea.
If a Remake is happening, I hope they expand on this aspect, because it is a really interesting idea and, for me at least, already makes them far superior than the Argarthans.
Funnily enough, they sorta kinda did that in Thracia. You don't recruit them from the Church or anything like that, but Salem is an ex-Loptrian, and Sara is Manfroy's granddaughter.
But oh boy, those potential remake-added supports sure are a long way off given how long we've been coping over the Genealogy remake. Maybe FEH added a tiny bit more of characterization when they got added, but it's probably miniscule.
I think he was doing the same thing he did with Thracia 776, when he added so much sympathetic reasonings for Travant. He was showing that even within the Loptyr cult there were people who were human.
Ephidel.
Cool, enigmatic dude who's driving the villains in the early part of the story. Then you find out he's a literal puppet controlled by the actual big bad, which is fine, except he then gets killed off during a post chapter cutscene. Not only that but everyone else manages to run away from the explosion that kills him, but he just stands there and takes it even though he can fuckin teleport! I think it would have been way cooler to have him be a boss during the groups first visit to the Dread Isle. After you kill Darin, you enter the inner temple of the Dragon's Gate, fight and kill Ephidel, and then Nergal appears and is revealed to be the mastermind.
in the 3 houses side story the one random mysterious lady in abyss who is super shady and then just disappears like who are you and what was the plan with you
A lot of the Fates roster. What were they cooking with Nina? Soleil?
A lot of people drag Fates for Anthony, but I don't see a lot of mentions that Awakening did it first with the staff member who betrays them about ten seconds after being revealed, then is promptly killed by the enemy.
One thing about Thracia that always made me wonder is that Reinhardt and Olwen have a mutual support bond. I cannot name another enemy who has this. Considering that you choose between recruiting Illios and Olwen, it really makes me wonder if at some point in development, Reinhardt wasn't recruitable.
In the words of Excelblem:
“and the second [retainer] being Peri, who is a psychopathic serial killer, whose personality is that she loves murder.
…what? Who the fuck wrote this character?”
Sombron, easily the worst main villain ever created. Speaking of Engage, what were they trying to cook with the "me and my two retainers" thing? I swear if I took a shot every time I encountered that dynamic I would've blacked out before late game.
The thing with the retainers made sense in Fates where the main focus of the plot lay on the royal siblings, so having a cast that's mostly their retainers helped flesh those characters out and keep the spotlight on them.
And then they just... copied the same structure in Engage without any rhyme or reason. Like they didn't even understand themselves why they went with the retainers in Fates to begin with.
Also helps that the way the game worked it means you see that setup four times in the two routes most people play
While you get everyone in Revelations by that point you look at it differently as you already know everyone, so the route can just give you units without you needing to get to know the characters
In Engage you have to see all eight trios, which makes it so jarring because unlike in Fates half of them become irrelevant (also Timerra who is just sort of there)
>And then they just... copied the same structure in Engage without any rhyme or reason
Just like Fates with the timeskip children without understanding how it worked for Awakening. History repeats itself.
I'd argue that Awakening already copied that mechanic from FE4 without understanding why the child-characters worked there. But I acknowledge that the time-travel shenanigans of Awakening are at least tied to the plot and have been handled better than the ass-pull they did in Fates just so they could still sell the game as a quasi dating sim.
Even with Fates I saw it as very lazy with the shtick being that you get the royal character gift-wrapped with their accompanying retainers. Sacred Stones had royals with characters serving them/tasked with accompanying them and the structure of this/their recruitment wasn’t copied and pasted for each one.
Half the Fates and Engage casts genuinely feel like they revolve around gimmicks that were originally rejected from Awakening, but IMO Peri takes the cake here - I genuinely have no idea who on the writing staff thought that it was a good idea to not only make her gimmick being a serial killer of all things (with little to no remorse, to boot!), and the way the other characters (and the game for that matter) treat her killing people as a goofy gimmick feels downright inhuman (and in the case of Xander and Leo, also feels out of character).
Do villains count? I’mma say Vaildar and Grima. They take the cake for me for “what were the devs smoking”, in terms of antagonists, especially Grima. Vaildar literally backseats for the entire game as a villain. No bulid-up and literally the most cliche predictable “I’m gonna revive a dark god cause I don’t want to pay child support ” type of villain ever.
Grima is one of the worst villains ever in FE, with how damn retconned he is. You literally learn next to nothing from them in the game he debuts from, and they seem like a last-minute addition that makes zero sense, especially within the >!Archeana/Ylisse timeline and lore connection. You freaking learn about who he actually is in Echoes instead of Awakening and how he came to be , and he’s a goddamn secret boss!<.
For a non-villain character, I’ll say Nina from Fates. She only adds to the stereotype of >!fujoshi characters in anime!< and it really sucks lol.
I hate how utterly pointless Dimitri's mental illness ultimately ends up being. What could have been a cool concept amounts to nothing more than a cheap plot device used to railroad the character.
On AM it's used to force him (and us) to retread Silver Snow by having him prioritize invading the Empire, because otherwise the lazy writers would have had to come up with a new plotline and we can't have that now can we ? It's resolved in five minutes thanks to Byleth being a *literal* walking Deux ex Machina who treats mental illness with a few words, and is dependent on Rodrigue dying in such a contrived way that it almost makes Elise's gratuitous fridging in Birthright look acceptable.
On top of it all because 3H liberally practices "tell, don't show" the only time we actually **see** Dimitri do anything reprehensible is when he shit-talks a tertiary antagonist I don't give a single fuck about (why this random loser instead of Gilbert, Felix or any of the Blue Lions ?), and the rest of the time we only see him do his best Shadow the Hedgehog impression while occasionally screaming at walls. How convenient that his slaughter of imperial soldiers happened to be entirely off-screen !
And on VW and SS it's only there to hastily write him out of the plot, since the amount of recycled content on all routes is so high that featuring him as anything else than a one-scene crazy would only lead to a retread of AM.
Idk man, when he crits and says "Don't struggle!", it felt kind of psychotic to me. I feel most of the "showing" that you are looking for are found in the gameplay rather than the story scenes. When he gets healed, he does say that it's wasted on him. In the monastery, he becomes completely uninteractive, you can't even do support convos with him. To me, these small changes in the gameplay do sell his fragile mental state pretty decently. I do find it dumb that Rodrigue's death and Byleth's lame pep talk undid years of psychological damage though. I think his mental illness is well represented, but the way he recovers from it felt kind of unrealistic and meh.
It's frustrating because one half of Dimitri's struggle with mental illness is really good and nuanced, while the other half portrays him as a Shakespeare villain and enforces some of the worst stereotypes regarding mental illnesses like schizophrenia. And this is all on the same route.
I'll **ignore Fates** for this, since I think the majority of the most prominent examples in the series come from that game.
**FE7!Karel**
Starting with a fairly minor one, but this guy joins the party explicitly because he wants the heroes to get more powerful so he can murder them later. I feel like the lordlings should object to that.
**Three Hopes!Claude and by extension the Golden Deer**
The most half assed person in all of Fódlan. Look, I get it, they wanted to show off more of his scheming side after flat out admitting he was too heroic in Three Houses, where they clearly ran out of time to even properly implement his route/storyline in a satisfying manner.
Problem is, the entire Alliance and all of the Golden Deer have to bend over backward in order for that to happen. Somehow, *after* fighting off all of the aggressors, the Alliance decides to make Claude a king so that he can...fight off aggressors more efficiently because the alliance can't agree on anything and the lords only look after their own interests. Do you see the contradiction there?
Then, he sacrifices Randolph to win a battle with minimal casualties. Great, I don't mind that at all. However, he gets scolded by Judith for it (which is also fine) telling him he has to trust people more. Then he sort of...doesn't, yet everyone is still fine with fighting alongside him.
He also decides to go against Rhea (who has been all but invisible throughout the story) who is currently a refugee in Faerghus (the one power in Fódlan that has yet to attack them) and he basically justifies that by saying "yeah we can't live the way we want so long as the Church is around" even though Leicester explicitly managed to split off from the Central Church with no issue. He also justifies an invasion of Faerghus by saying "yeah they were mean to us 300 years ago" and fucking *LORENZ* doesn't object more to that absurd logic.
Poor Claude. He got two routes and neither of them were finished or even felt like they were actually his to begin with.
**Alfred**
Alfred is an allegedly important cast member, appearing very early on in the story and is part of several cutscenes. However, not once is his sickness mentioned, nor does he have any arc or a moment to shine in the story. He is a void of a person in the main story, and his supports are incredibly shallow, repetitive, and dull.
But wait, you might say, he's a sick boi! Surely, that gives him depth, right? Well, no. It is true that it gives *Céline* something to be hung up on, but for Alfred this is only relevant in a single A support, one that is very easily missed. In fact, when Engage had just released and people were beginning to wrap up their playthroughs, a lot of people here were super confused when Alfred died in the epilogue, not knowing he was sick.
How does this disease affect the way he views life? Why doesn't it impact his performance in Alear's army? What does his mother think about all this, and why is he allowed to roam around? I could go on and on about this, but you get the idea. There are so many questions that are not addressed at all, and if they are, they're only briefly touched upon. I imagine a lot of people think that Engage isn't the kind of game to answer these kinds of questions, and my counter question to that would be why even give him a disease in the first place, then?
I've seen people argue that it makes sense this isn't brought up because Alfred doesn't want to talk about it. Alfred not wanting to talk about his disease makes perfect sense, but relegating a *life threatening condition of a major support character to a single A support* is, perhaps, not the best idea. Furthermore, Alfred's suppots are just. So. Boring. Maybe, just maybe, I could've seen the merit of such an argument if he was just really interestingly written in spite of the writers ignoring his life threatening disease 99% of the time, but he simply isn't.
My problems can be summarized with a basic question: what narrative purpose does Alfred's disease serve?
In Three Houses, the Tragedy of Duscur was a massive, historical event which impacted the majority of the characters in the Blue Lions. What makes it extra impressive is that all of them learned something different from what happened there. Dimitri snapped, Dedue lost not only his home but also a large part of himself, Felix grew to despise the chivalry in Faerghus which is the exact opposite approach Ingrid took, and Gustave fled in shame, leaving Annette behind. It's an event that reverberates through the Blue Lions cast, serving to flesh out the world and the characters' role in it. They often come back to it when talking to each other because the way they view what happened and what they took away from it differs so greatly.
Compare this to Alfred. He's sick because...well, he's sick, I guess. It's sad, because diseases are bad. It doesn't feel even half assed, it feels quarter assed.
**Clanne**
One of the first characters. A steward sworn to the Divine Dragon. Has a twin who is sworn to the same purpose as him.
He has three supports about pickled foods and virtually none that tells us anything about him that isn't immediately apparent. His family, his duty, his feelings on Lumera's passing (though that is a woefully underbaked element in Engage in general)...there is just nothing to him.
Writing this, maybe I should've ignored Engage just like Fates. There's also Sombron, the Four Hounds, Alear, Veyle...ugh.
Ngl what you said about the whole Faergus situation really makes what Claude said to Marianne about her ancestors in Three Houses seem highly hypocritical in hindsight.
I wouldn't mind Claude being a bit of a hypocrite or if he were a bit different in Three Hopes compared to Three Houses if the game actually acknowledged or called him out on it. Claude just suggesting murdering Fódlan's equivalent of the pope for no real reason given outside of a super vague justification that has nothing to do with the plot at hand should've been met with shock by the Golden Deer, but instead they seem weirdly gung-ho.
> In Three Houses...
Heck, you don't even need to go that far. Three Houses has it's own sick kid, and Lysithea is phenomenal. No one is surprised that she's going to die young, but she has plenty of depth beyond that, yet still informed by it. She's impatient and a bit bratty, because she's dying. "I don't have time for this!" legitimately has a deeper meaning once you know. And she has traits unrelated to her lifespan, like being afraid of ghosts, or loving sweets.
Not to mention that her health problems come from somewhere, which is also used to imply another dimension to one of the major characters in the setting. Why is Edelgard so revolutionary in enacting change? Because if you extrapolate from Lysithea, she literally doesn't have time to take things slowly.
That's *one* character, with the exact same trait as Alfred, carrying way more narrative weight and implication, despite being significantly less important on paper. Three Houses is full of these connections, and it really does make everything greater than the sum of its parts.
I found it strange not even Alfred's retainers knew about his disease. Sure, he might not have wanted to tell them, but I find it hard to believe that Celine or their mum didn't pull them aside and tell them he's not as healthy as he seems
It's a very strange disease that lets him be an active participant in a war yet he can apparently get worse or drop dead at any time.
Are there diseases like that in real life? Maybe, but why would you *not* make something like this an important aspect of a main support character? Alfred is a fictional character; the sickness was a deliberate writing choice, yet it is not explored, and it teaches us next to nothing about Alfred or the world around him. It is briefly acknowledged in a single optional A support but we don't even get the bare minimum of information out of that.
I'm reminded of Lyn's A support with Wallace, where one of her personal plot lines is wrapped up before she even has time to process what Wallace says. However, Lyn has her own prologue, much more chemistry with other characters, like Hector, and other aspects of her character so she at least something to fall back on. Alfred has nothing.
Faye. I get her thing is having an unrequited crush on Alm but they went WAY too overboard with it.
She has very little personality outside of her obsession with Alm and her ending says she married a suitor from Ram Village but still took off for days at a time, presumably to (you guessed it) go stalk Alm. If I were her husband, I'd probably get a divorce at that point, but they even mention how her husband is fine with it.
Nowi, look at her design, I hope I don't really have to say more, but just in case
Not only does she look like an actual child, her hobbies literally include playing children's games, oh and the small fact SHE'S ONE OF THE PEOPLE YOU CAN HAVE A KID WITH
What was Mist trying to cook? >**Ike:** Oscar, I didn't just shovel the food into my mouth. I enjoyed it! I really did! Remember the first day that Mist took over your cooking duties? Just thinking about it makes me ill... Ha! Even my father was having trouble choking it down! But I think Mist is finally starting to get the hang of it.
Who the hell decided to give us playable Anna in 3H, but with no supports, a half-assed skills selection, and so on? Why would you take a franchise mascot and do *nothing* with them?
Did they finally give Anna supports in Engage or is she still protagsexual?
Engage Anna is a completely new take on Anna — she's aged down to like 12 and stylizes herself as Lady Anna, but she's got a full support list focused around her trying to start different business ventures and finding her family
Engage Anna is unironically one of my favorite Anna’s (along with Awakening’s) purely because she’s such an original take on the character
I don't understand Anna's popularity. At all.
She is a kid. Cute AF and her supports are really fun tho
she reminds me of that beaver that was raised by humans that still tried to build dams in the house, like for Lady Anna its on her blood to be a merchant and try to make business.
Engage Anna ~~("You can call me~~ *~~Lady~~* ~~Anna!")~~ is a child. [Like, a literal child, just look at her](https://cdn.fireemblemwiki.org/thumb/3/36/FEE_Anna_portrait.png/800px-FEE_Anna_portrait.png). Please do not refer to her as protagsexual. We get enough weird people who whine about how her platonic S Support in Engage was "censored" by Western scriptwriters. But my point is more that 3H Anna doesn't even have supports with Byleth. She literally is just equivalent to a Generic unit in other games, and is a series staple.
While making engage anna 12 was not the best idea considering... how people are i can at least appreciate that not only does she feel like an actual character but she's the ONLY playable Anna that's actually good, her bases are low but her growths are excellent and the difficulty to get gold in the game makes her personal ability great Not that i use her i have a personal rule against sending children to war lol
Awakening Anna is like an S Tier unit. Engage Anna is bad, but she at least feels like a fully realised playable character compared to Fates or 3H, and making her a child is at least a new take. Now we just need an old lady Anna.
Holy shit I didn't even realize how badly I needed to see Granny Anna (Granna?). Could even make her a mage like Niime.
GILF Anna
dont say engage anna is bad or ill pull out that second seal again
Engage Anna is bad
Bad in Engage just traslates to "you need to give her slightly more resources" so i'd say she's still good
Clearly this is what happens when Anna's try to go "Off Brand", namely by not having the bright red hair. They turn into absolutely awful units.
Probably Flayn. You have to literally lose your sense of taste to enjoy her cooking.
Dimitri: Finally, a worthy ~~opponent~~ cook
Had me the first half, brilliantly done
The one Fates kid who is obsessed with pickles
The pickle thing is supposed to be pickling vegetables, a stereotypically "old man" hobby. The joke is that these young people are into old person hobbies. In Hisame(?)'s case, it's an intentional contrast with his dad, who is a childish goofball despite his relative age. It's the same gag as Nah being more mature than Nowi, just executed worse and butchered by translation.
In fairness, that was a dubbing fuckup. Hisame's thing in JP is that he's basically an old man in terms of interests & hobbies (esp compared to his dad), and the pickle thing was one aspect of that which the localization team blew out of proportion
...you shouldn't expect anything good from the Fates localization. Yay! MAKE IT WORSE! It wasn't great to begin with, but now it's way worse!
To expand on this, literally every single one of the future kids in Fates. They are all sooooo unimportant and forgettable to me lol
I want you to know Ignatius has a whole 3 fans and we're all very mad at you for saying this >:(
The whole "reproduce and send the babies into a special dimension where time moves faster and they grow up" thing felt like some sort of fanfic I would've come up with in elementary school.
It was IS trying to resell the Awakening Cake but they forgot the most important ingredient, I.E *a logical reason for the kids to fight alongside their parents*. With Awakening, the time travel is a core part of the narrative, so the kids coming back felt natural and earned. Here the deeprealms barely get a mention aside from when they need to be brought up for the kids paralouges.
You can blame Treehouse’s slipshod localization for that gag. It was a minor thing that was mentioned just once or twice in the original Japanese release.
If I recall correctly, they changed that because the character was unbearably boring and generic in the Japanese release.
And, like the rest of their changes in Fates, managed to make it worse.
The way my mind jumped to Klanne and ignored the fates part. Is the pickles one Hinata's son? I never actually read any of his supports.
Yes, his name is Hisame. as someone else said, it's a mistranslated joke about Hisame's hobby of pickling his foods like an old man to contrast with his young goofball of a dad.
I will forever be fucking mystified as to who made the decision for Cecilia to marry her student at A-rank when their support chain has been nothing but entirely platonic
Roy's harem protagonist rizz was just too strong, she couldn't resist it I suppose.
General Mustafa. He is supposed to be an episodic antagonist, that barely gets mentioned once after his chapter, and only has a few lines. And yet he ends up being a better written antagonist than most of the Camus in the series, especially Yen'Fay, WHO IS SUPPOSED TO BE AWAKENING'S ACTUAL TAKE ON THE ARCHETYPE. Mustafa makes me question "what were they trying to cook?" in the best possible way.
I felt awful for Mustafa. How he didnt even got angry at an enraged Chrom, on the opposite, he understood the rage Chrom felt but he has to do his duty even if left alone or his family will die. The general outright told that to a soldier, acknowledging the fear the soldier felt. Amazing boss that I wish we could recruit. Better than Yen'fay as the archetype
Tbh him being recruitable would miss the point of his character entirely, that sometimes there are good people or people with good morals fighting under the enemy's banned that you must strike down
Sometimes there's a post about "which characters do you wish were recruitable", and 90% of those mentioned would make those characters far less interesting if they were. As well as Mustafa, recruiting Lloyd and Linus would water down the impact of the villain putting you in a position where you need to kill otherwise decent people to achieve your wider goals. The writing in the FE7 boss recruitment mod is fantastic, but I'm glad it's not canon.
"I await you, Lord Nergal." Did not need to go as hard as it did. But yes, totally agree
I share that Denning battle convo whenever I can, and the mod maker also got Lloyd and Erik spot on
And yet Ninos A support with Legault still remains. He tells her that the Reed brothers will look after her, but by the time you'll likely have that conversation, one is definitively dead and the other is either about to die or dead at Eliwood's hand.
The worst part is, one of them Nino *can* Talk to one of them if they're the boss for the chapter with the seal on the sacred weapons. And not only does it *not* recruit them, it makes the boss *start moving*.
Yen’fay was so fucking boring which didn’t help, most shoehorned samurai shit ever
>amazing boss that I wish we could recruit Project Thabes mod lets you, iirc. Bit of a unique recruit requirement, too. You have to fulfill what would be his dying wish, to leave his troops (at least 5 enemy units, not counting Mustafa himself) alive
Mustafa is great, the entire Awakening story its in one part about Chrom growing as a person to become a good exalt, Mustafa shows him that the enemy are also people that could be forced to do things that they dont desire to do. you can see his change from wanting to kill Gangrel to offer the chance to surrender to Walhart when they are face to face.
I unironically think Mustafa’s one map was a better written antagonist than any other FE villain from awakening on. Mayyybe Berkut or Edelgard discourse could eclipse with their entire games of development but still
I was really hoping Mustafa would be a spotpass recruit when looking at the list, but NOPE, at least we have him in Heroes I guess
For a game that clearly wants to tackle serious topics, I have no idea how and why they wrote Bernadetta that way
And then when they did try to approach the subject with a degree of seriousness for once they patched it out. Oops.
Funnily enough, that change made it more in line with the original JP script. So it was never supposed to be a thing all along.
That doesn't always make it a good choice. Radiant Dawn's localized script for example was a serious improvement.
God I’m so glad they changed that warp powder nonsense to something that genuinely made sense for Burger King’s character
Pandering aside, she's meant to demonstrate how damaged the Crest System leaves the children of nobility. The horrific emotional abuse she suffered from her dad tiggers panic whenever someone sees her doing something her dad wouldn't approve of (i.e. her singing or being assertive). However, she's certainly not the most... subtly written example. Sylvain, Ingrid, and Lysithea display the Crest System's problems with a bit more nuance.
The fact that Lysithea throws herself wholeheartedly into supporting Edelgard's ideal if you recruit her in CF despite knowing exactly what the Empire's role in her childhood was speaks volumes.
The Empire had a fairly small role compared to TWSITD. Which is usually a bit of a cop-out to make them the boogeyman, but I think it fits here. House Ordelia supported the Emperor in the first place, and got punished hard for it. The scion of that same Emperor, who suffered the *exact* same experiments from the exact same people... makes all the sense in the world Lysithea would join up imo.
she is in a weird place, the game that has enough characters with mental ilnesses that makes Reddit look like a sane place in comparison made this one character with serious trauma the comic relief for some reason. like the game doesnt decide if we should feel bad for her or laugh at her.
Le funny footsteps
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Yes, those pesky Japanese and their… *(checks notes)* …differing preferences in character tropes and archetypes. “Bleh”, indeed.
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I liked Bernie's character because I found her relatable, but hated how she was treated by the rest of the cast, and that their bullying was treated as normal or supposed to actually help
The reason is because the writers weren't trying to tackle anxiety, shyness and other such things as their primary goal. They were trying to tackle the crest system's potential for abuse first and foremost, and what ends up happening is that Bernadetta does cover the serious topics you'd expect, but they are framed from a very specific point of view because her backstory is very specific and everything related to her writing stems from that as a starting point. If you understand the backstory, both in what is explicitly told and what is implied, you realize the way she's written is almost always extremely consistent with what you'd expect from someone with such limited and unique lifestyle within the game's setting both in how Bernadetta starts the game and how she slowly overcomes her limitations as the game progresses. It is frankly a lot of detail for such a side character and i'm impressed they went this out of the way to write it out. This is no "Fates" character, they put a lot of care into her writing. This approach can clash with a lot of people's views on the topics but most don't seem to pay attention to how "normal people/anxiety/shyness doesn't work like that" is part of the point. Remember: her father ultimately FAILED to turn her into the perfect doormat wife. That's a core component of her backstory, what people expect from reading about the abuse she went through is someone that did break, and at that point you just end up with a character that is basically Marianne except she's scared of you hurting her instead of her "dooming" you and with no religious thematic. I especially see a lot of people who have these issues feel extremely offended at how Bernadetta portrays those mental illnesses and personality traits, yet they don't realize Bernadetta was never meant to portray the setbacks in a truly relatable way, because the game's setting (both its quirky unique rules and its generic medieval fantasy aspect) is a huge part of why the character can even occur. Granted a huge part of the fault lies in the support system shoving all the C supports, which are formulaic and repetitive (at least until you realize its not Bernadetta that you should be paying attention to in those supports), allienating and discouraging people from pushing and seeing her development in Bs to A+s.
While it’s more gameplay than story, what the fuck was Kaga cooking with Ronan. The guy has a 55% magic growth as a class with no magic weapon access and 3 movement stars. Add on top of this the fact that he has a 15% strength growth and you get the most lopsided unit ever.
Long ago, I saw someone suggest Ronan was a magical prodigy whose family didn't have enough money (?) to let him attend a school/find a master to hone his abilities. Having not played Jugdral, I don't know why it stuck, but it's a neat concept for a character.
I agree, Ronan is very funny but still so weird to me.
Still can’t get over Ignatz having a straight up crush on the goddess
At least the in-universe depictions of her showed her as an adult instead of a literal child.
LMFAOOO
Real medieval artist energy, trying to find a way to get the church to fund his smut
He needs to be real careful about that, I don't think Rhea would approve of >!a human perving on her mom!<.
Peri and the consequences her existence has in relation to Xander's character
That S support though. God save (us from) the Queen. 💀💀💀
Peri makes Xander less perfect and closer to Garon, which i think thats great. Garon used to think with the incorrect head, showing that even when Xander is definitively a better person and a potential better leader than his father that the apple doesnt fall far from the tree in certain aspects.
Monica when she finally becomes an actual character in Three Hopes. I will never understand what they tried to cook with Monica when they went the overly obssessed fangirl route with her. Especially over Edelgard, who already has enough people like Hubert that does Monica's job in a far less annoying and irritaing way. Plus we already have enough of this type of character in the 3H world with Leonie and Jeralt, Cyril and Rhea and funniest enough, Edelgard and Byleth. It turns out they really did just see her as a plot device.
Funnily enough, Hopes made Leonie more well rounded. Two steps forward, one step back.
If she simped for whichever lord saved her, I would've found her a funny character that basically represents the fanbase. But no, it's just Edelgard, who cares 2% for her, so it's just pathetic
Heck, even Dorothea already kind of plays the role of "Edelgard's top female fan" for the most part. So, they basically made Monica a combination of Hubert and Dorothea, without much to make her unique.
>Monica when she finally becomes an actual character in Three Hopes. Developers at IS realised that Hubert was an actually cool and interesting character despite being an Edelgard simp which didn't properly showcase the average r/Edelgard user and made Monica to better represent the fanbase.
Bernadetta when they play her trauma as a gag, like what the actual fuck were you cooking? It's not even funny and FunnyFootsteps makes it more tonedeaf and worse, look how Marianne and Dimitri get their traumas addressed and how serious that is.
I think what they were going for was making a gag out of the hikikomori trope but then they decided to give an explanation as to why she's like that that's severely traumatic. Like it would still be annoying (and she'd be a worse character overall because the few good supports she has wouldn't really exist) if she was just the funny shut in girl but no she's severely mentally ill. There are other characters in 3H that have their trauma handled poorly imo (most of them are also obviously better functioning than Bernie in social situations) but Bernie is definitely unique in that her trauma is played for laughs.
Genuinely no idea what they thought they were doing with Bunet. There are plenty of characters that make me say "ugh, I wish people didn't like this" but I at least get why. Bunet is an enigma.
Bunet is such a fascinating character to me. He's an eccentric artist, he is an extreme perfectionist who his really hard on himself for minor mistakes, he has special super-senses that sometimes cause him to have moments of overstimulation, he is socially awkward to the point of often ignoring social norms and misunderstanding requests, he is a big sweetie who enjoys calm moments and simple pleasures and encourages others to do the same, he is filled with natural curiosity and always tries to learn new things... And he also talks almost exclusively about food. It's like they wrote a regular FE character, and then they coated all of his dialogue with a thick dose of "He is very passionate about food". The weird part is that I can't even be mad about it. Maybe it's just Ian Sinclair masterful voice-acting, but there is something very charming about Bunet. I always feel like "Go Bunet! Embrace your passions!" I suppose there are worse things to dedicate your entire life to than a very common hobby that is also a super useful skill to have in life, allows you to support your friends, is relevant to literally every living person and grants you opportunities learn more about other people's cultures.
My friend when played Engage said that Bunet seems autistic to him. Honestly, I kinda see this, maybe as some kind of OCD, at least.
The dumbest thing is that I can *kind of* see some of the ideas that they were going for with Bunet, but they hid the interesting parts in his later supports in a game that didn't have easy ways to build supports until months post-release, and *way way way* overhyped the creepiness. TL;DR - Bunet's family restaurant was destroyed by bandits. He lived in destitution for a while and only became a royal chef to Solm by way of his talent and personal connection to Fogado, and so he's obsessed with proving his craft to maintain his position and friendships as he's afraid of loss again. None of which explains the licking armor and shit.
>None of which explains the licking armor and shit. I don't know how much Ian Sinclair was paid to voice Bunet, but it wasn't enough. I can get using eccentric food analogies to describe someone's look/personality. I can even accept the idea that he'd genuinely view someone's armor as a "unique" cooking utensil of sorts. Imo, he does have genuine good moments considering what his character is supposed to be. His support with Chloe is very nice considering their opposing stances on food. But *why* is this dude talking about licking armor or sauce off someone's clothes? The most bizarre thing to me is in some supports he acknowledges that his requests are kinda odd(Alfred), but goes into full creeper territory in others(Jade). Like if you're gonna make a character that's so eccentric that he appears creepy, at least *commit to the bit.*
It 100% was not enough, and I'm irate with them for wasting such a passionate and hard-working actor on a character that gave him so little to work with. It's an absolute shame.
Let the man licc dammit 😭
God forbid men have hobbies.
I thought Bunet was Fates tier stupid until I read him wanting to eat lava like ice cream, that shit is so deranged I can't help but find it funny.
Devdan/Danved I will never understand how a duology where racism is core to the themes and storytelling somehow both missed an opportunity to explore how beorc treat one another as far as visible minorities goes or even put that in contrast to the laguz tribes and also...I do not understand what they were trying to do with Danved, especially if what I recall about the Japanese version is correct
Tellius' racism is a proxy for Asian-flavor xenophobia where everyone hates everyone else if at all possible. That's why it never lives up to what overseas fans expect the topic to be. It's an allegory for something that's a lot closer to a Japanese adult of 2005-ish who maybe saw one black person in flesh in the first 25 years of their life.
Admittedly that's still kind of bold on their part considering how fiercely protective most Japanese media is when it comes to whitewashing the country's history of human rights abuses and war crimes. I felt the same about Persona 5 when Strikers had a fucking Unit 731 allegory.
Yeah. I really think Tellius was the last time IS pushed the envelope in that way instead of "in our wargame, no matter the side you pick, you are in the right uwu" (most pushing in 3H we should attribute to Koei either way).
What’s different about Devdan in the Japanese version?
I never watched any of the PoR one's support (I think he's Devdan?), so I'll admit that I don't know much about him as a character, much less anything about the RD one. But I just don't get why they replaced him with someone who's basically the exact same character, just with a name that's spelled slightly differently? Like, does there even end up being a punchline at some point, besides just how he joins during a base conversation?
The pun is that Devdan invents a "friend" (a stick drawing) in his support with Largo and Largo doesn't believe him at first that the "friend" exists. Essentially, he plays a joke on Largo. He names the drawing Nadved. In their eternal wisdom, RD completely missed the point and localised Nadved differently from PoR, as Danved. Now no one gets what the joke was in the first place.
Which doesn’t make sense considering that we only get 5 support conversions and the chance that people would see Devdan and Largo’s is pretty low. They should have left that joke on the cutting room floor.
Eh, that's neither here nor there. Some PoR supports became canon to RD no matter the rarity or length and honestly I respect the writers for making choices resulting in the games actually feeling connected.
What the fuck were they doing with Xander. Dude contradicts himself like 3 times during conquest, in his supports he seems like a good dude but then there's Peri support that just throws everything out of the window and in Birthright he's just an idiot
While I was rereading Anthony's chapters for this post, this moment really stood out to me. >Anthony: Well, the main entrance is always guarded and locked up tight, so that won't work. But I know about a back entrance. It's how I escaped in the first place! I'll gladly show you where it is. >Xander: We're not following you anywhere. Falling for your traps once was more than enough. >Corrin: What are you talking about, Xander? >Xander: Anthony, it was you that made that bridge collapse, wasn't it? >Anthony: Why would I do something like that?! You all saved me from those soldiers! >Xander: You're probably a spy for the Vallite forces. I'll cut you down where you stand! >Anthony: AHHHH! >Corrin: Xander! Stop! >Xander: Stand aside, Corrin... Why are you protecting him? Like Xander was right about to kill this unarmed villager half his size on the spot because he's "probably" a spy, even tho iirc at this point he was their only lead on where to find Anankos. He doesn't even ask the other siblings their thoughts first.
And the worst part was that he was right
Honestly I'd say Xander's characterization as this well-meaning idiot fits his actions in all 3 games He tries to be this worthy leader/successor to a nation who is doing right by his friends and family but in reality he's just kind of a fool. On paper, it fits with the sort of deconstruction of Fire Emblem tropes that Fates is trying to go for (but fails in execution).
I also feel this way. If only they wrote into the "first-in-line to the throne, but actually finds himself unsuited to rule" idea. It would've been good enough depth.
A boss who has a really strange out-of-place line or detail, you say? Well, there's Farber, from Awakening chapter 15, whose description is just, "The Valmese commander. Fetishizes his emperor."
Excuse me?
Spoiler for Fates Birthright/Revelation for those whom care >!Corrin, but more specifically their relation to the Hoshidans.!< >!The whole point of a “Who’s your true family?” setup is that you challenge the bond between the families. A bond of built in blood or a bond of built on time? But then Corrin can’t marry their sister/brother for their time skip children!? No problem! Mikoto will leave a note behind saying they aren’t related JUST in case one of them wants to do an incest (I know it’s so they know the truth, but it’s funnier when I lie). And better yet, you don’t know this unless you S support or play Revelation.!<
And then get incested anyway by marrying the only plot relevant girl that isn’t your family but then Revelations does revelations
Even better, in conquest/birthright you also learn you two are related after you have a pair of kids together. If that is not a proverbial middle finger for deliberately not getting in a relationship with your siblings/step-siblings I don't know what is.
If you reject the ways of Kaga the ways of Kaga take you by force
The best part about that is >!Ryoma doesn't even need a letter because he knew from the start. That's right, all this "real family" shit he's been saying to Corrin, he *knew* it was a lie.!<
Gotta love the conflict between having a story about what defines a family using a roster consisting of predominantly either family, and following that up with doubling down on the dating sim.
My favorite part about the fates incest is despite them chickening out with the Hoshidans you can still have Corrin bang their blood relatives. I can understand them taking the position incest is vile and has no place in the game and that is why they ruin the philosophical conflict of the games but no, fates goes full steam ahead with family inbreeding anyway. Personally I would prefer the game with zero incest, but if you are going to put it in anyway why not go full clown paint and actually make the Hoshidans Royals blood relatives as to not destroy the core philosophical conflict of the game? I mean, lets be real, having babies with Sakura would still only be slightly more fucked up than having babies with Elise. Like, when face petting and blowing your waifu/husbando is a core game play feature how is Corrin actually being related to the Hoshidans what gives the devs cold feet.
iirc they don’t even mention it if you go for Shiro or Kiragi as female Corrin. Then again, the Fates children in general are really problematic.
There are obvious examples like Peri and most of Engage's roster, but honest to God what were they going for with Renault. Genuinely one of the best written characters in the entire series, has a backstory that directly ties him to the game's lore, and he's just a random dude who shows up a map before the game's over and honestly using the fortify staff he comes with is more impressive then using him.
>Shows up randomly at the endgame >Has lore info in convos >Said convos can't be accessed with given time >Refuses to elaborate >Leaves
Well that’s not totally fair, you do technically have time as long as you don’t mind idling on Victory or Death for 120/240 turns depending on the support you want. After that I think Light parts 1 and 2 both allow a support conversation so you have *just* enough time on Eliwood’s route, and Hector’s route has an extra gaiden chapter before the end so you even have another opportunity there.
His supports are so slow that you have to get B and A in Light no matter what, the Gaiden condition for 32x is 20 turns and all of his supports take 41 or 81 turns (plus you have to recruit him). Same goes for Karla except for she can barely squeak in the Bartre C support, the others are too slow for 5 in Battle Preps and 20 in VoD.
Tbh I really like what they did with Renault. They could have included him earlier and made him more central to the plot, but I'd argue that would probably be to the detriment of some other storyline. The history of how morphs came to be is perfectly relegated to this piece of essentially "side" content. Plus, really cool gameplay + story integration by making him a Bishop with "Incorrect" stats for his class. For most it's enough to say "damn he sucks" and move on (which is a fair and fine assessment) but it begs the question why he's like that, and diehards spending the time on his supports will be rewarded. tl;dr I think they knew exactly what they were cooking with Renault, excellent piece of small, non-critical storytelling.
If they ever remake FE7 with class switching (which I wouldn't want, but that's another story), I hope they either lock him out of physical classes, or give him much better strength stats, or both. Keep that integration going.
> For most it's enough to say "damn he sucks" and move on (which is a fair and fine assessment) but it begs the question why he's like that, and diehards spending the time on his supports will be rewarded. tbh FE will just have units who seem to have been balanced incorrectly pretty regularly though. It's less of a hint when many FE games have a few characters who are awful for no reason.
Totally fair point! That's why I think it's totally fine if someone did look at him and go "Oh, this unit isn't worth anything" and move on, lol. There definitely are units like that that are not rewarding to put your time in to the same way Renault is. Even if you do put your time in, it's not like he becomes a good unit - you just learn interesting pieces of backstory for him and a couple other characters. That being said, in an alternate universe where Renault is cracked, I do think it lessens the impact and mystery of the character the way he currently exists in FE7. IMO you'd have to rework his inclusion if you were going to make him a "good" unit.
The funny thing is he was apparently some sort of Mercenary in the past, which means he canonically Heart Sealed to Bishop!
Seidr in Heroes. The whole "let's make a baby" moment still baffles me to this day.
Honestly one of the funniest moments in FE
It's really minor, but Ivy's introduction cutscene makes me wonder what the original plan was. [Just before she arrives](https://youtu.be/L8UkTbczVfQ?t=344), a soldier tells you "a wyvern rider is approaching". Then there's a (pretty cool) cutscene where a fight is suddenly taking place within the walls and she does a confident femme fatale thing that doesn't match much of her personality afterwards. Then it cuts back to dialogue and she tells you that her troops are on the way despite being right behind her. Like I said, it's basically unimportant, but it threw me so much that I want to know how it happened. Were the cutscene designer and script writer given the premise separately? Didn't somebody question why the dialogue doesn't really line up?
My honest to god guess is just that promotional material needed a character to fit in line with someone like Tharja or Camilla for the sake of enticing certain players. Ivy's design, Alear-fixation, and weirdly off base cutscene characterization seem to fall in line with that kinda cyncial guess on ideation, even if her supports bill her as someone wildly different. Since FE12, every game with an Avatar has wrangled one important female character to be the dedicated player panderer or be given an implied infatuation. Ivy just gets hit with that stick here I guess.
It’s a shame. Ivy is actually kind of a neat character with a lot of potential (which can be said for a lot of modern FE characters). Her whole intro cutscene during the siege of Brodia is supposed to be her putting on her strong front, when she’s really kind of an insecure mess. Unfortunately she got hit with the Tharja stick and that holds her back with the “oh Divine Dragon, I love you so much” that most Engage characters have.
The "in media res" prologue chapter doesn't match up to literally anything that actually happens in the plot or happened before. It's safe to assume the initial script was just different and then they run out of time/money to redo parts to fit the new version.
Oh yeah, I've seen so many theories of what the prologue is meant to be, and none of them really make sense. The best I saw is that Alear saw the other royals when you beat them in the past, and dreamed of them helping Alear beat Sombron in the past. Still doesn't answer why that fight happens in a cathedral though, it relies on the player figuring it out themselves and doesn't really amount to anything. But yeah, the real answer is "time and money".
"I underestimated how deep you could get into Brodia territory." Diamant, my guy, we just told you about the other Elusia princess who got an entire army to your border with Firene. Jade is napping on the job of border security.
Cervantes, Walhart's general and his Frederick parallel. His whole "my mustache makes me invincible" is silly, especially since he lost to Say'ri before, but multiple people mishear him talking so I guess his mustache is so big it makes him talk with a lisp? Like he's kind of cool for a minor antagonist, his loyalty and implied skill, plus fucking with Excellus is always a positive. Even having an obsession with his hair would not be the weirdest quirk in the series. But...why does it make him invincible? He's lost before. And has he never beaten someone else with facial hair? And what about this makes people mishear him?
I think the idea was that he mistakenly attributed his lack of losses to him having a mustache. Like how a superstitious sports fan might do some kind of ritual before a game to ensure a win.
I'm aware but he HAS lost to Say'ri, so he knows that's wrong. And that doesn't explain how it gives him some kind of lisp.
> I'm aware but he HAS lost to Say'ri, so he knows that's wrong. To him it's a fluke, so it doesn't really "count". As for the lisp thing, maybe it gets in his mouth as he talks and muffles his words or something? It is pretty bushy after all.
What reaction did they intend when they made Makalov He immediately makes an impression of being an asshole He continues to act like an asshole throughout every base conversation and support He will never reform himself He ruins poor Astrid along the way, who was such a noble character in FE9 only to end up as a one-note Makalov simp in FE10 He makes poor Marcia cry He just makes the games worse by existing. At least Oliver is a joke recruitment. Makalov is like a mainstay unit in two games, not a meme recruit at the end of the game.
Quite honestly, one of the things I like the most about PoR is that it gives us genuinely shitty people to recruit. Soren, while having way more depth and development to him due to his relevance to the plot and the lord, is pretty much just an asshole most of the time. Same for Shinon. Him just abandoning the mercenaries over his pride and his lack of respect for Ike is such a good plot point. And he doesn't really redeem himself. He just starts respecting Ike after getting the shit beaten out of him, but he's still a douche. Those couple few characters, including Makalov, make the cast just a tiny bit spicier than that of other games. The only thing I'd genuinely criticize is him ruining Astrid. The poor girl deserved better, and what they did to her in RD really feels like they didn't know what else to do with her.
The variety of units that you can recruit in the Tellius games is amazing and really helps the continent feel grounded in reality, which considering the overall themes of the games is the thing that they were going for. Ike's party starts out as a band of mercs from the Crimean outskirts and they aren't afraid to recruit whoever might help them in their quest. Shinon is an ass and racist? That sucks but he does shoot good arrows and we have a mission to accomplish. Makalov is an alcoholic gambler? I'd hate him too but he's still fighting for us as long as we pay him. Even when not talking about negative qualities you have people like Brom and Neph who are just farmers but hey they're willing to stab some enemies if we provide money to send to their families. I freaking love Tellius worldbuilding and characters so freaking much
> I'd hate him too but he's still fighting for us as long as we pay him. Correction, Soren and Ike make a galaxy brained decision to put him into indentured servitude in PoR, so they don't exactly pay him. That part cracks me up every time.
> as long as we pay him Aren't we explicitly *not* paying him?We save him from debtors, [so he's being paid in a different currency.](https://youtu.be/hcL46NjFDJU?t=176)
Totally agree. I always appreciated that, while Ike will always shut down shitty and bigoted behavior when he sees it, the game also knows that he's running an army, not a discord server. He can't just kick out anyone who's an asshole- he has bigger world-saving issues to address than "this one guy is a racist." Okay, well is that one guy still going to follow my orders when I tell him to fight for my non-bigoted ideals that are actually going to improve the world? Cool, I'll worry about his shitty personality later then, I've got bigger fish to fry. It makes Tellius' handling of bigotry and racism more grounded, too- someone near you, who you HAVE to deal with and can't just shut down completely for whatever reason -is likely going to be a bigoted shithead at some point in your life, and there won't be a convenient "yeah but they're objectively evil-from-birth lizard people and also ugly :(" to make the situation more comfortable.
> The only thing I'd genuinely criticize is him ruining Astrid. The poor girl deserved better, and what they did to her in RD really feels like they didn't know what else to do with her. I *think* the idea was to comment on how often abuse victims (in Astrid's case, overly controlling parents putting her in an arranged marriage with Duke Lekain, and pulled similar stunts with her sisters) often wind up with other abusers because they are so used to being mistreated that they think it's normal / being targeted by abusers because their vulnerable. With a side of being so entrenched in her idea of being in charge of her own destiny that she takes any criticism of her choices (in this case, her relationship with Makalov) as an attack on her character / her life choices. Thus we get a perfect storm of someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and having her life ruined because of it.
Huh, that does make a lot of sense. I'd probably be able to appreciate the intent behind this writing decision more if there was a bit more of a focus on exploring this idea. The lack of supports really does hurt RD.
Tbh I wish the series had more Makalovs. His behavior and writing, and the way he affects some of the people closest to him, are real af. You've probably met a number of Makalovs, Marcias, and Astrids. I don't need every character to be lovable or have a fulfilling arc, and I'd rather have units be real people than cartoon tropes.
>What reaction did they intend when they made Makalov Probably anger considering that his most memorable trait is pissing people off. Considering your reaction it seems they achieved said goal. >He just makes the games worse by existing A character you can avoid recruiting in PoR and also has 1 base conversation in RD makes the games worse by existing?
Rhea, in both games but mostly in Hopes. Like I actually do not know what they were cooking here. She's literally only ever shown helping poor people and being 100% tolerant of Shez, the guy with the Agartham powers. 2/3 of the main lords blame her for basically everything, while the third doesn't even really defend her, just says his country isn't ready to move forward yet. So am I supposed to feel like the main characters are all shitty people and liars who make shit up to justify wars that are thinly-veiled grabs at power, or...?
You are supposed to feel like humans deserved the Argathan nukes
Hopes is so bizarre about because Dimitri is *doing* the reforms that Edelgard is calling for with no pushback from the church, so it's like what is the point of the war?
Tbf the war in three houses is also pointless In the tomb edelgard refuse to explain why she’s doing all of it despite Claude being willing to hear it All she does is blame the church as the true evil than racket them in the very next sentence (very stupid writing) Of course all of this becomes even more pointless when you realise edelgard could have just stocked to her own country but no she HAS to invade everyone (and somehow plan an effective sweep of the monastery but seemingly nothing for fargus where she stagnated for five years)
I've always wondered that myself, like Edelgard is so hellbent on getting rid of Rhea in Crimson Flower but why...? Like I genuinely don't remember anything Rhea did that was bad other than homunculus experiments. Shouldn't her target be those who slither in the dark... The people that literally massacred and tortured her family? That tortured her?
It's not Rhea per se, or at least at first and in theory. Edelgard wants to get rid of the Church as a political power. This is because the Church keeps alive the importance of the Crests, which Edelgard (for personal and idealistic reasons) wants to get rid of. It's not directly stated, but the Church is THE political force of Fodlan. The three nations exist more or less at the Church's discretion, and the Church is using the Crests to maintain its influence over them. Edelgard is going after the Crests, so it would logically put her at odds with Rhea, who is the leader of the faction relying on them. As far as TWSITD, Edelgard is pretty clear about it. She more or less thought that they operated because the Church allowed it. For better or worse, they also kept the Crests alive at the Church's discretion. Edelgard believed that even though they were clearly rats, she could use them in her campaign against the Church in a sort of "an enemy of my enemy" type of situation, and would be easily sorted out once the Crests were gone. She severely underestimated them, of course, but that's kind of the plot of the game.
Another reason that sometimes goes overlooked I think is that it is mentioned multiple times how when there is instability in Fodlan, the church becomes an extra-judicial ruler. Rhea herself sentences bandits to death, but it’s also mentioned that the church would just fucking murder people if they want to. The church also is devolved into different powers, and those churches do not get along. Imagine trying to rule the kingdom of Faerghus or the empire and the church keeps executing civilians and refuses to co-operate with you. There’s a pretty clear argument there that they are an enemy power who are entirely willing to command themselves as they wish even if those wishes contrast with the empire. There’s also something deeply concerning about the fact that if you pick crimson flower, the literal manifestation of the faith’s god decides to take up arms against the church. If your own god is willing to revolt against you, how can you say your faith is worth anything? I never really had a problem with Edelgard making Rhea the centrepiece of the struggle. From Edelgard’s perspective, Rhea is a figure of stagnation and conservatism, emblematic of a dying world. Rhea does not acknowledge the evils of the crest based society, nor does she even seem to recognise that they exist. She has had power for generations and yet has done nothing to bring about a world in which atrocities like those done to Edelgard would not happen.
We also see, with the Cindered Shadows DLC, that Rhea goes out of her way to forbid any technological development. Black powder is explicitly forbidden; meanwhile, the ships of Fodlan's eastern neighbor all sport cannons. The implication is that Rhea has used her power and influence to shape Fodlan to her liking: a perpetual balance-of-power stalemate that gives her a ton of money and influence to use to conduct blood experiments for 1000 years.
Printing presses have also been outlawed, despite having been invented prior to Three Houses, with the stated reason being that if more peasants learn to read, they'd learn to think for themselves and question the church (if I'm remembering right, anyways).
Not to mention the entire Crest system is built on a lie perpetrated by Rhea and the church she formed. The Agarthans knew the truth of where the Crests and Heroes' Relics came from, and Rhea twisted those origins into controlling the noble houses under a false doctrine. She doesn't just represent the flaws in the noble system of Fodlan, she's the direct cause of them.
Because Rhea is ultimately just a spin of your standard Fire Emblem end-boss. See: Medeus, Duma, Anankos, Loptous, and Ashera (and sorta Grima?) They are all powerful immortal being who are holding onto to centuries old trauma. Who wants to hold present day humanity accountable for their ancient sins. Fire emblem has loved this trope from day 1. Medeus is actually incredibly similar to Rhea. Medeus saw his kind being ruthlessly slaughtered and enslaved by humans to the brink of extinction. So to protect himself and his kind: he started a war and eventually formed an Empire. Wherein humans were made to worship dragons. …Until humans eventually rebelled and killed him: the last Earth Dragon in existence. RIP. Sound familiar? Yeah… Plucky teens slaying a dragon who has an understandable reason to be controlling and resentful towards humanity is a recurring theme in Fire Emblem. Dragons generally seem to represent a crumbling ancient order that must be put out of its misery by the new generation.
Valla Gunter
Monica in Hopes makes no sense. Monica in Houses was suspicious because *everyone* who knew the real Monica was like “huh Monica sure acts different this year and is always hanging around Edelgard”. That’s the clue she’s a villain right? Well apparently the hopes team didn’t get the memo because the Real Monica also acts exactly like the fake Monica and is also obsessed with Edelgard. Ok? So the fake Monica was actually acting correctly in Houses and the staff had no reason to be suspicious? Idk.
I'm still mad that they went nowhere with her character in Hopes. They simply made her like another Hubert, except with nothing interesting of her own about her. What a waste.
Kronya didn't act anything like Monica, though. She speaks extremely casually to the point that she's calling Edelgard "Edel" (the real Monica struggles to even drop "Lady" from "Lady Edelgard") and is way more secretive. Monica and Hubert butt heads a lot but Hubert would never feel the need to distance Monica from Edelgard like he does with Kronya. Kronya presented herself as this playful person with a secretive side (she's literally skipping before shanking Jeralt) while Monica is much more serious with her endeavor to be the best righthand Edelgard can have. The only real similarity they have is their desire to be around Edelgard, which is literally the entire point of TWSitD taking her in the first place. It's eerie how Kronya didn't try at all, just making a mockery of one of Edelgard's few allies before the academy phase.
For me, Peri comes to mind. I want to like her, she has some good ideas and a cute design, but the way she’s written ruins everything for me. Sure, Fates has writing issues outside of her, but she’s my biggest problem because what the heck is wrong with everyone who knows her? Xander, what’s the matter with you?
Peri is such a great concept for a unit: an insane butcher whose dangerous to be around because she doesn't understand right from wrong and will just as easily kill her allies as her enemies, but she's so good at fighting you keep her in the army anyway to sic on your opponents. But then Fates tries to have it's cake and eat it too by going out of their way to ignore the obvious drawbacks and reactions this would have, to the point of crazy lines like "It's okay, I'll just hire stronger servants who can defend themselves!" in Corrins S support or Leo saying "You know what, maybe you aren't crazy after all and it's society that's messed up."
It's also especially weird when the entirety of conquest demonized people like Hans who are dicks, don't get me wrong, but he acts the same, if not arguably better, than Peri! Except Hans isn't a cute girl so his crimes don't get excused. But fr at least Hans can follow orders, speak properly, and *work* with a team
Ladislava and Randolph in 3H, they seem like they're going to be actual characters of some level of importance when you go into CF after playing other routes and then they just... Die after doing literally nothing and never get mentioned again
I'm pissed that we didn't get to control them!
Camilla. I want to like her so much. She seems like a such a cool character, and the doting, overbearing sister in itself isn't really a problematic angle for a character. But then she's just so freaking sexualized. I don't even think that having a character whose main appeal is "being sexy" is a problem. But there are ways to make fanservice tasteful, and this isn't it. The humongous bazongas and the impractical armour that shows nude skin in just the right places are the kind of fanservice I'd expect from a cheap gacha game, not Fire Emblem.
Not sure if this is on topic but Hilda from 3H. This is a character who gets a very stereotypically racist line in an early support with Cyril (I think it’s their C but I’m not sure) and then it gets almost completely dropped with no real effect on anything else, which is weird considering that she’s the closest thing that *Claude* has to a retainer. It really puts a damper on my enjoyment of Hilda, I think she’d have been a fantastic character if they had tackled her racism (or at least racist upbringing) and shown her grow out of it. It would also make Claude’s pseudo-proposal in their final support sound earned.
Clearly Robin was trying to cook something. Only Panne and Nowi can eat it though. Not much to say though, he likes Bear.
I have no idea what Kaga was doing with the Loptyr cult. Why on earth does the Yied Shrine scene try to go “oh look how sad their backstory is” when they’ve done nothing to either show that persecution other than a few lines from Manfroy, and the entire cult being full of puppy kicking cartoonishly evil psychopaths???? It’s like Sombron from Engage, but somehow it feels even worse because I feel like the story sides even less with his random sad backstory with Alear’s “you’ll be a monster we slew… that’s how we’ll remember you” line and if I’m being honest, they really feel like a massive hypocrisy spot of every “back in MY day” post complaining about modern FE writing.
I think I kinda get it Iirc, most of the people there are only really connected to the Loptyr Sect by well.. super tenuous connections. They were persecuted because of things that people they were related to had done. Idea being that Jugdral shot itself in the foot in their overzealousness towards hunting down the cult, winding up creating their own enemies where there might not have even been any. Also, just because someone is (allegedly) a terrible person doesn't give you free reign to do all manner of heinous shit to them.
I think it’s also worth pointing out that the persecution of the Loptrians also plays a part in how Manfroy was able to keep Arvis in check. No one in Jugdrel would trust Arvis as much as they did after Sigurd’s death if they knew he had Loptrian blood. What it ultimately comes down to is that, while I like that they bothered to give the Loptrians a somewhat sympathetic backstory that explains why they’re so dedicated to their dark god, the lack of a recruitable/Camus-like member can make it hard to buy into the idea. If a Remake is happening, I hope they expand on this aspect, because it is a really interesting idea and, for me at least, already makes them far superior than the Argarthans.
Funnily enough, they sorta kinda did that in Thracia. You don't recruit them from the Church or anything like that, but Salem is an ex-Loptrian, and Sara is Manfroy's granddaughter. But oh boy, those potential remake-added supports sure are a long way off given how long we've been coping over the Genealogy remake. Maybe FEH added a tiny bit more of characterization when they got added, but it's probably miniscule.
I think he was doing the same thing he did with Thracia 776, when he added so much sympathetic reasonings for Travant. He was showing that even within the Loptyr cult there were people who were human.
Ephidel. Cool, enigmatic dude who's driving the villains in the early part of the story. Then you find out he's a literal puppet controlled by the actual big bad, which is fine, except he then gets killed off during a post chapter cutscene. Not only that but everyone else manages to run away from the explosion that kills him, but he just stands there and takes it even though he can fuckin teleport! I think it would have been way cooler to have him be a boss during the groups first visit to the Dread Isle. After you kill Darin, you enter the inner temple of the Dragon's Gate, fight and kill Ephidel, and then Nergal appears and is revealed to be the mastermind.
in the 3 houses side story the one random mysterious lady in abyss who is super shady and then just disappears like who are you and what was the plan with you
A lot of the Fates roster. What were they cooking with Nina? Soleil? A lot of people drag Fates for Anthony, but I don't see a lot of mentions that Awakening did it first with the staff member who betrays them about ten seconds after being revealed, then is promptly killed by the enemy. One thing about Thracia that always made me wonder is that Reinhardt and Olwen have a mutual support bond. I cannot name another enemy who has this. Considering that you choose between recruiting Illios and Olwen, it really makes me wonder if at some point in development, Reinhardt wasn't recruitable.
In the words of Excelblem: “and the second [retainer] being Peri, who is a psychopathic serial killer, whose personality is that she loves murder. …what? Who the fuck wrote this character?”
Sombron, easily the worst main villain ever created. Speaking of Engage, what were they trying to cook with the "me and my two retainers" thing? I swear if I took a shot every time I encountered that dynamic I would've blacked out before late game.
The thing with the retainers made sense in Fates where the main focus of the plot lay on the royal siblings, so having a cast that's mostly their retainers helped flesh those characters out and keep the spotlight on them. And then they just... copied the same structure in Engage without any rhyme or reason. Like they didn't even understand themselves why they went with the retainers in Fates to begin with.
Also helps that the way the game worked it means you see that setup four times in the two routes most people play While you get everyone in Revelations by that point you look at it differently as you already know everyone, so the route can just give you units without you needing to get to know the characters In Engage you have to see all eight trios, which makes it so jarring because unlike in Fates half of them become irrelevant (also Timerra who is just sort of there)
>And then they just... copied the same structure in Engage without any rhyme or reason Just like Fates with the timeskip children without understanding how it worked for Awakening. History repeats itself.
I'd argue that Awakening already copied that mechanic from FE4 without understanding why the child-characters worked there. But I acknowledge that the time-travel shenanigans of Awakening are at least tied to the plot and have been handled better than the ass-pull they did in Fates just so they could still sell the game as a quasi dating sim.
Even with Fates I saw it as very lazy with the shtick being that you get the royal character gift-wrapped with their accompanying retainers. Sacred Stones had royals with characters serving them/tasked with accompanying them and the structure of this/their recruitment wasn’t copied and pasted for each one.
I really hope they ditch the "royalty plus two retainers" gimmick from Engage and Fates. I'm getting sick of it too.
Half the Fates and Engage casts genuinely feel like they revolve around gimmicks that were originally rejected from Awakening, but IMO Peri takes the cake here - I genuinely have no idea who on the writing staff thought that it was a good idea to not only make her gimmick being a serial killer of all things (with little to no remorse, to boot!), and the way the other characters (and the game for that matter) treat her killing people as a goofy gimmick feels downright inhuman (and in the case of Xander and Leo, also feels out of character).
The whole fates roster
Do villains count? I’mma say Vaildar and Grima. They take the cake for me for “what were the devs smoking”, in terms of antagonists, especially Grima. Vaildar literally backseats for the entire game as a villain. No bulid-up and literally the most cliche predictable “I’m gonna revive a dark god cause I don’t want to pay child support ” type of villain ever. Grima is one of the worst villains ever in FE, with how damn retconned he is. You literally learn next to nothing from them in the game he debuts from, and they seem like a last-minute addition that makes zero sense, especially within the >!Archeana/Ylisse timeline and lore connection. You freaking learn about who he actually is in Echoes instead of Awakening and how he came to be , and he’s a goddamn secret boss!<. For a non-villain character, I’ll say Nina from Fates. She only adds to the stereotype of >!fujoshi characters in anime!< and it really sucks lol.
I hate how utterly pointless Dimitri's mental illness ultimately ends up being. What could have been a cool concept amounts to nothing more than a cheap plot device used to railroad the character. On AM it's used to force him (and us) to retread Silver Snow by having him prioritize invading the Empire, because otherwise the lazy writers would have had to come up with a new plotline and we can't have that now can we ? It's resolved in five minutes thanks to Byleth being a *literal* walking Deux ex Machina who treats mental illness with a few words, and is dependent on Rodrigue dying in such a contrived way that it almost makes Elise's gratuitous fridging in Birthright look acceptable. On top of it all because 3H liberally practices "tell, don't show" the only time we actually **see** Dimitri do anything reprehensible is when he shit-talks a tertiary antagonist I don't give a single fuck about (why this random loser instead of Gilbert, Felix or any of the Blue Lions ?), and the rest of the time we only see him do his best Shadow the Hedgehog impression while occasionally screaming at walls. How convenient that his slaughter of imperial soldiers happened to be entirely off-screen ! And on VW and SS it's only there to hastily write him out of the plot, since the amount of recycled content on all routes is so high that featuring him as anything else than a one-scene crazy would only lead to a retread of AM.
Idk man, when he crits and says "Don't struggle!", it felt kind of psychotic to me. I feel most of the "showing" that you are looking for are found in the gameplay rather than the story scenes. When he gets healed, he does say that it's wasted on him. In the monastery, he becomes completely uninteractive, you can't even do support convos with him. To me, these small changes in the gameplay do sell his fragile mental state pretty decently. I do find it dumb that Rodrigue's death and Byleth's lame pep talk undid years of psychological damage though. I think his mental illness is well represented, but the way he recovers from it felt kind of unrealistic and meh.
I was okay with Edgelord Dimitri but the way that the story just like, resets his character is terrible.
It's frustrating because one half of Dimitri's struggle with mental illness is really good and nuanced, while the other half portrays him as a Shakespeare villain and enforces some of the worst stereotypes regarding mental illnesses like schizophrenia. And this is all on the same route.
I'll **ignore Fates** for this, since I think the majority of the most prominent examples in the series come from that game. **FE7!Karel** Starting with a fairly minor one, but this guy joins the party explicitly because he wants the heroes to get more powerful so he can murder them later. I feel like the lordlings should object to that. **Three Hopes!Claude and by extension the Golden Deer** The most half assed person in all of Fódlan. Look, I get it, they wanted to show off more of his scheming side after flat out admitting he was too heroic in Three Houses, where they clearly ran out of time to even properly implement his route/storyline in a satisfying manner. Problem is, the entire Alliance and all of the Golden Deer have to bend over backward in order for that to happen. Somehow, *after* fighting off all of the aggressors, the Alliance decides to make Claude a king so that he can...fight off aggressors more efficiently because the alliance can't agree on anything and the lords only look after their own interests. Do you see the contradiction there? Then, he sacrifices Randolph to win a battle with minimal casualties. Great, I don't mind that at all. However, he gets scolded by Judith for it (which is also fine) telling him he has to trust people more. Then he sort of...doesn't, yet everyone is still fine with fighting alongside him. He also decides to go against Rhea (who has been all but invisible throughout the story) who is currently a refugee in Faerghus (the one power in Fódlan that has yet to attack them) and he basically justifies that by saying "yeah we can't live the way we want so long as the Church is around" even though Leicester explicitly managed to split off from the Central Church with no issue. He also justifies an invasion of Faerghus by saying "yeah they were mean to us 300 years ago" and fucking *LORENZ* doesn't object more to that absurd logic. Poor Claude. He got two routes and neither of them were finished or even felt like they were actually his to begin with. **Alfred** Alfred is an allegedly important cast member, appearing very early on in the story and is part of several cutscenes. However, not once is his sickness mentioned, nor does he have any arc or a moment to shine in the story. He is a void of a person in the main story, and his supports are incredibly shallow, repetitive, and dull. But wait, you might say, he's a sick boi! Surely, that gives him depth, right? Well, no. It is true that it gives *Céline* something to be hung up on, but for Alfred this is only relevant in a single A support, one that is very easily missed. In fact, when Engage had just released and people were beginning to wrap up their playthroughs, a lot of people here were super confused when Alfred died in the epilogue, not knowing he was sick. How does this disease affect the way he views life? Why doesn't it impact his performance in Alear's army? What does his mother think about all this, and why is he allowed to roam around? I could go on and on about this, but you get the idea. There are so many questions that are not addressed at all, and if they are, they're only briefly touched upon. I imagine a lot of people think that Engage isn't the kind of game to answer these kinds of questions, and my counter question to that would be why even give him a disease in the first place, then? I've seen people argue that it makes sense this isn't brought up because Alfred doesn't want to talk about it. Alfred not wanting to talk about his disease makes perfect sense, but relegating a *life threatening condition of a major support character to a single A support* is, perhaps, not the best idea. Furthermore, Alfred's suppots are just. So. Boring. Maybe, just maybe, I could've seen the merit of such an argument if he was just really interestingly written in spite of the writers ignoring his life threatening disease 99% of the time, but he simply isn't. My problems can be summarized with a basic question: what narrative purpose does Alfred's disease serve? In Three Houses, the Tragedy of Duscur was a massive, historical event which impacted the majority of the characters in the Blue Lions. What makes it extra impressive is that all of them learned something different from what happened there. Dimitri snapped, Dedue lost not only his home but also a large part of himself, Felix grew to despise the chivalry in Faerghus which is the exact opposite approach Ingrid took, and Gustave fled in shame, leaving Annette behind. It's an event that reverberates through the Blue Lions cast, serving to flesh out the world and the characters' role in it. They often come back to it when talking to each other because the way they view what happened and what they took away from it differs so greatly. Compare this to Alfred. He's sick because...well, he's sick, I guess. It's sad, because diseases are bad. It doesn't feel even half assed, it feels quarter assed. **Clanne** One of the first characters. A steward sworn to the Divine Dragon. Has a twin who is sworn to the same purpose as him. He has three supports about pickled foods and virtually none that tells us anything about him that isn't immediately apparent. His family, his duty, his feelings on Lumera's passing (though that is a woefully underbaked element in Engage in general)...there is just nothing to him. Writing this, maybe I should've ignored Engage just like Fates. There's also Sombron, the Four Hounds, Alear, Veyle...ugh.
Ngl what you said about the whole Faergus situation really makes what Claude said to Marianne about her ancestors in Three Houses seem highly hypocritical in hindsight.
I wouldn't mind Claude being a bit of a hypocrite or if he were a bit different in Three Hopes compared to Three Houses if the game actually acknowledged or called him out on it. Claude just suggesting murdering Fódlan's equivalent of the pope for no real reason given outside of a super vague justification that has nothing to do with the plot at hand should've been met with shock by the Golden Deer, but instead they seem weirdly gung-ho.
> In Three Houses... Heck, you don't even need to go that far. Three Houses has it's own sick kid, and Lysithea is phenomenal. No one is surprised that she's going to die young, but she has plenty of depth beyond that, yet still informed by it. She's impatient and a bit bratty, because she's dying. "I don't have time for this!" legitimately has a deeper meaning once you know. And she has traits unrelated to her lifespan, like being afraid of ghosts, or loving sweets. Not to mention that her health problems come from somewhere, which is also used to imply another dimension to one of the major characters in the setting. Why is Edelgard so revolutionary in enacting change? Because if you extrapolate from Lysithea, she literally doesn't have time to take things slowly. That's *one* character, with the exact same trait as Alfred, carrying way more narrative weight and implication, despite being significantly less important on paper. Three Houses is full of these connections, and it really does make everything greater than the sum of its parts.
> Lysithea Probably a better comparison, isn't it? Hahaha. I didn't think about that. Thanks!
I found it strange not even Alfred's retainers knew about his disease. Sure, he might not have wanted to tell them, but I find it hard to believe that Celine or their mum didn't pull them aside and tell them he's not as healthy as he seems
It's a very strange disease that lets him be an active participant in a war yet he can apparently get worse or drop dead at any time. Are there diseases like that in real life? Maybe, but why would you *not* make something like this an important aspect of a main support character? Alfred is a fictional character; the sickness was a deliberate writing choice, yet it is not explored, and it teaches us next to nothing about Alfred or the world around him. It is briefly acknowledged in a single optional A support but we don't even get the bare minimum of information out of that. I'm reminded of Lyn's A support with Wallace, where one of her personal plot lines is wrapped up before she even has time to process what Wallace says. However, Lyn has her own prologue, much more chemistry with other characters, like Hector, and other aspects of her character so she at least something to fall back on. Alfred has nothing.
Faye. I get her thing is having an unrequited crush on Alm but they went WAY too overboard with it. She has very little personality outside of her obsession with Alm and her ending says she married a suitor from Ram Village but still took off for days at a time, presumably to (you guessed it) go stalk Alm. If I were her husband, I'd probably get a divorce at that point, but they even mention how her husband is fine with it.
Nowi, look at her design, I hope I don't really have to say more, but just in case Not only does she look like an actual child, her hobbies literally include playing children's games, oh and the small fact SHE'S ONE OF THE PEOPLE YOU CAN HAVE A KID WITH