Maybe I’m miss remembering but didn’t fates also have a few weather conditions that hindered movement? The 2 I recall was one in conquest where you recruit Odin and Nyles and the other where you had to fight through snow that could uncover enemies.

As a die-hard classic mode player, I couldn't get into Three Houses until I embraced Casual Mode and played it more or less like any other RPG. Now it's in my top 10 games of all time. Permadeath is great, but there is so much more to love about Fire Emblem these days.

I'll give a dishonorable mention to Zelestia's skill Soulblade. Makes sword combat nigh useless for her, since when wielding a sword damage is calculated by averaging the foe's defense and resistance stats. Want to kill a high res low def sage with a silver sword? Tough luck. Also levin swords are practically meant for her and she's a straight upgrade from Celine. But nope she has to have this extremely situational and more detrimental class skill.

Not to mention he has the highest strength stat in the game, combined with the War Master class he has 75% strength growth, meaning when he crits he’s almost always guaranteed to 1 shot the enemy

The better magic is in a FE game, the worse are armor slaying weapons.

In terms of Thracia mechanics I have way bigger beef with Vigor Stars than FCC. FCC is one of the few reliable mechanics in Thracia that help promote unit identity and play into the capture mechanic, Vigor on the other hand is a DND dice roll as to whether you get another turn for a unit and can ironically throw a wrench into certain preparations by popping off too early. Units with high amounts of Vigor are at least novel and I can see the appeal, but in an incredibly unstable metagame it feels simultaneously too powerful and yet not powerful enough.

Personally, I like to think on ways to make bad mechanics into good ones for future improvements; one mechanic I personally didn't like are the joke weapons like the giant pine branch and brooms from Fates or the glass weapons from Awakening but I can see how they can work in future projects. For example, let's say that there's a skirmish inside a mansion and you happen to find a cleaning room, you can choose to use a broom as a quick distraction or a throwing spear to temporarily debuff the opponent for a follow up attack, there's even an interesting case for forging weapons in glass to enhance their durability or use as a defense mechanism (such as protecting the user from 2 points of damage if the enemy engages in combat with them). Heck you can even argue that raining weather can improve thunder-based weapons and spells to have a higher hit rate and have ice-based tomes hinder the opponent's speed if used in a snowing weather.

I only wanted one thing and I was robbed if it. Let me save my father dammit!

I quit feh a solid 3 years ago when I realized that the reason I was paying $10 a month for feh pass was for the auto battle option. Aka I’m paying $10 for the game to play itself Deleted it and never looked back

Being able to change difficulties on the fly is good, actually

In fates it felt so bad with the pandering and sucking up to corrin. Takumi felt like the only character who felt that he was realistic to corrins presence and then his supports with corrun completely feel like a different character sometime. Every other character felt like such a kiss ass it was very jarring.

I like the inclusion of the turnwheel system. It is NOT fun to lose a unit to a 1% crit, or a miss on a 97% hit chance, or a misclick. I've been in positions in maddening mode where I run out of divine pulse/time crystal uses and that really ups the tension because that doesn't usually happen until near the end of a map where the threat of losing a unit is highest. I'm more likely to leave a unit dead if they die at the end of the chapter and I have to weigh their life against replaying the whole thing, whereas restarting because someone dies in turn 3-4 is just annoying.

This might be a very shallow nitpick from me but the biggest turnoff for engage with me is not only the characters writing being a bit lackluster but their design conventions are so... Every character looks to be over designed or designed in a way with little to no cohesiveness with the rest of its cast. I know we made the alear joke of toothpaste hair but it could have worked honestly if not for the engage team taking notes from genshin impacts creative team to make all the characters look very bizzare. I know artstyles are subjective as well, but in my OPINION!!! (You can like yhe art style of this game) i hate the xenoblade esque turn this game took with even more styluzed bug eyed anime, fire emblems always been anime yes, but i preferred the awakening fstes and 3 houses artstyles (even if female byleth is..whew..uh yeah) i liked that they had that sort of less cartoony anime look and more of a proper ""realism"" anime look..i guess? It just makes the characters stand out badly much more. Back to my criticism about the character design. Its just so over the top and not in a way thats pleasing to the eye. In awakening plegian units wore gold and and black with accents of purple, ylissian characters armour and outfits were pastels that didnt clash too much with the rest of the design. In fates you could tell which characters where from nohr or hoshido from very pbviously their real life refrences to european and japanese aesthetics. 3 houses had some good and bad timeskip designs but at least they felt cohesive with one anogher, ingrid felix and sylvain look to be of all the same house, edelgard ferdenand and dorothea all compliment eachother. Engage its very hard to tell whats what aside from the monarchs from wach region, their retainers however? No indicators of their region or who theyre meant to be classed with.

I wouldn’t say Beloved Zofia is particularly bad more than it is unoptimal. Beloved Zofia does have useful and usable benefits but none of them are better than a Mage Ring. Sol Katti actively hurts Lyn’s combat, which no other prf Psuedo-legendary weapon in the series does(Fates S rank melee weapons do not count)

Permadeath is dumb, I have zero desire to engage with it. There is now reward nor mechanic that will ever get me to not restart upon a single death.

Anna getting ranomized into a Thiefs body does make sense in a way.

Just floating a thought here, but what if there were a game with an alternative mode to classic that has very strict autosaving, as in, the game autosaves as soon as any action is taken so resetting has no purpose and unit deaths are final?

Music name?

I think it's notable that the three games mentioned most in the "units are irreplaceable" section are the games that have notably smaller playable casts and also have the most voice acting. I wonder if the reason for it is that it is just harder to have extra replacement units when you need to pay a voice actor for that unit, make a full 3D model with a bespoke design and sometimes bespoke animations for that unit, and all the additional things that modern games demand of a character. It was a lot easier to add a unit when that unit could have 5 face sprites and use the same stock map and combat sprites that every unit of that class used with a different color palette. Just something I have thought about as Fire Emblem becomes more "modern". I have never played a Fire Emblem game as an Ironman, because I think it is frustrating to play the game in that way when technically all the information is available but I have to check every enemy's combat stats and do the math on the side to calculate how combat is going to go to play optimally to not lose important units. I just wanna jam my units into the game and use resets or turnwheel or whatever to go back when I didn't quite do the math right. While I understand the philosophy behind it, I think generally the games are just not very well designed for that style of gameplay to be fun. There is too much information the game doesn't make easy enough to use for that to be at all enjoyable without something like save states or a turnwheel mechanic, in my opinion.

Fire Emblem 7 needs a big remaster cause that game was and still is addictive

The issue with it is it reduced movement for ALL units, including enemies. But the map size remained the same. It didn't add any tactical aspect or consideration. It was virtually pointless.

FCM is great, though! I feel like IS should at least bring a version of it back. It doesn't have to be as op as the original.

I only play 3 houses here.. is gender locked class is a thing in the fire emblem series? if so the gender locked class need to stop,, I want my op male magic unit.. what's wrong with man using magic and women throwing hands?

Ghast, please stop the tilted map effect in the videos. Thank you!

Classic Unintelligent $y$tems L moment.

Jearth couldn't even get out of his pyjamas before the Corrupted attacked.

The FE8 2x Effectiveness on legendary weapons doesn't include Gleipnir. Not sure why, but I guess they felt 20 Mt was a bit much to apply effectiveness to. This also means that if you abuse the Stone glitch to give a Bishop access to Dark Magic, Slayer will apply to Gleipnir, resulting in a 60 Mt weapon of mass destruction against monsters

Meh Nintendo lawsuits are mostly bs nowadays so I’m glad they lost one

I hope to see another weather related mechanic again

Seems Rhea grinded for Star Wars characters at the end there

They have sand punishment in engage

If the rain happened on smaller maps, it wouldn't have been that annoying. I am still bothered why they thought about adding it to already gigantic maps where you could spend several turns without a single round of combat

Further proof that early FE had little to no consideration for female characters 😂

Funny how all of them are conquest units

Food devils?

I am really disappointed that modern FE has moved away from permadeath and just made everything focused on turnwheels and casual mode. Not that you can't make a great game without permadeath, plenty of other games do that, but Fire Emblem's permadeath is such a great mechanic and an iron man makes for such an interesting and unique way to play. Not to mention that it's an amazing form of storytelling through gameplay, and it's further enhanced if they add even just a bit of actual story on top like that Clive scene in SOV. If you move away from permadeath you lose all of that greatness and nowadays Fire Emblem hasn't really added anything to make up for it. Other games can have their fun without any permadeath but in FE, I really hope they return to designing games that are more iron man or classic mode friendly.

I'll probably be the oddman here, but I hated the damage recoil magic users had in FE Echoes. It's like why does a simple fireball spell have to cause damage to its caster? by that logic an archer should get hurt from just firing an arrow. But nope not the case

If you pay close attention to Lyn's battle animation, you'll see that she struggles a little bit holding the Sol Katti.

Phoenix mode does NOT just stop you from losing the map because of a unit dying, it literally resurrects ALL of the units that died on enemy phase at the start of every player phase

Dude how do you download these mods?