The Fire Emblem Thread

[Doktor Best]

I recently played Echoes a bit and i was dissapointed. They got rid of the weapon triangle and atleast as far as i played it didnt implement another system that made up for it. Also, even on hardcore mode, the game kind of shoves its time travel mechanic in your face so you never really have to deal with character deaths unless you get out of your way to avoid the mechanic completely. The thing is, the game actually relies on you using time travel as fights are way more rng-heavy.

The plot is also, well... . Typical young farmer boy joins a mercenary band of goodymcgoodfags and is promoted to the fucking leader position after 3 missions. Also, hes deeply in love with his childhood girlfriend, the second protagonist, who actually is some princess in disguise with a birthmark or some shit. Ah and they got seperated and are now very emotional about it.

So yeah. Its shit. But i consider every single Fire Emblem plotline shit, so nothing of value is lost.

 

[Siveon]

recently played Echoes a bit and i was dissapointed. They got rid of the weapon triangle and atleast as far as i played it didnt implement another system that made up for it.

It's less than "got rid of" and more like "they directly lifted the systems of the second Fire Emblem game on the NES". It's an incredibly faithful remake as far as I can tell.

 

[Doktor Best]

recently played Echoes a bit and i was dissapointed. They got rid of the weapon triangle and atleast as far as i played it didnt implement another system that made up for it.

It's less than "got rid of" and more like "they directly lifted the systems of the second Fire Emblem game on the NES". It's an incredibly faithful remake as far as I can tell.

Yeah i know that, but ever since the weapon triangle got introduced it was a staple of the series and i dont see a reason why it shouldnt have been introduced to the remake. And isnt the time travel mechanic also new?

 

[TigerKnee]

The original Gaiden had zero player-unit Axe users and weren't that common on the enemy side either, so it would take a lot of rebalancing to put in the Weapon Triangle.

 

[Tigranes]

I assume you're playing on Classic with permadeaths, because this is the only way to play FE.

Story/dialogue. Instaskip. Every. Single. Cutscene. And. Dialogue. It is the worst shit I have ever seen. It's not even because it's weeaboo (though seriously brain-damaged weeaboo characters like Elise don't help), everything about it reads like a 9 year old who just saw their first Disney movie & Naruto. It is fucking worse than Bioware romance writing and you will miss nothing by skipping it all. You are playing for the combat simulator.

Pairing up/Support: As an old FE user I initially ignored all the Support mechanics because fuck this retarded dialogue and love mechanics, but pairing up is actually really important. Sometimes you might want singles to take advantage of adjacency (e.g. Silas attacking X enemy with Mozu on a tile behind, will also have Mozu attack together), or to swarm enemies with multiple attacks, but more often, you are going to need a few supertanks to block chokepoints or go in first and attract damage. And what this also does is make your units powerful enough to one-hit kill enemies, which can be critical to avoiding getting killed.

For good pairs, think about two things: first, synergy between stats. Pairing with cav/flying units can often give a Mov+1 (you can check by hovering a pair up command what stats are added), for example. Second, what long-term support relationship do you want to build? Some obvious ones include Effie carrying around Arthur the entire game, because that adds a lot of attack power to Effie who is one of your best early tanks. When you pair units together, as well as other actions like healing each other, they will grow Support levels (check Support menu when at Castle) - and that can increase bonuses (Jakob gives mainchar special bonuses at higher support levels I think).

Sometimes there are specific useful ways to ferry people across; e.g. pairing people with flying units to get them across terrain, or having Effie run 4 squares, pair up with someone, then have that someone move 6 squares, and then separate to end turn, giving Effie something like 12 square move. Some units (Silas as cavalier, etc) get SHelter ability, which means if your unit has already moved & is in trouble, you can run up to them and tuck them into a pairing to protect them (e.g. Azura runs up to front lines to Sing for someone, then you go and shelter her because she dies in one hit). You can even do a thing where, let's say, Elise carries Effie into the front lines then ends turn, takes some hits from mages using her high RES, and then next turn, you switch positions into Effie who hits them dead, and now has high DEF for the melee units coming up.

The last part of support relationships is that you can control what kind of kids you get later by building support - e.g. pairing two opposing sex units every battle to quickly get them to S support, at which point they 'get married and have kids' (WTF) and you get a special mission to recruit the kid, whose available classes and stats are determined by inheriting from both parents. It's fiddly and I don't really like bothering with it, and you can probably ignore this bit and still do fine on Hard.

Private quarters shit: You can ignore it.

 

[eric__s]

I just don't get it. How significant are some of the stat bonuses? Some of my characters have C and B supports and they get at most 3-4 in certain stats. The increase in damage and defense is not very significant. When I have two characters standing next to each other, they can follow up attack for significantly more damage. Why would I want to pair up two units and deal an additional 4 damage, when I can have them stand next to each other and have them deal maybe 10 followup damage? And am I doing it wrong, but usually the second paired person does not gain experience.

 

[Tigranes]

3-4 is huge. The difference between, say, an unsupported Effie who does 20 damage, and 24, can often be the difference in one-hit killing enemies - which is so important because across the board that might mean the difference between killing 3 enemy units in your turn and killing 6, or Effie surviving a contested chokepoint vs Effie dying = restart. And it can be a way to bolster, say, Effie's traditionally low RES so she can tank both magic and nonmagical enemies, or to ensure that your slower units can get that crucial extra move.

When you are facing weaker enemies in open terrain with an advantage, running a horde of singles can have obvious advantages. But soon you will find that enemies get strong and numerous enough, and you realise, I cannot leave most of my characters in range of an enemy attack at the end of my turn because one of them will die and/or I need somebody to stand in this chokepoint and take 4 hits this turn and survive, so that the enemy doesn't swarm into the room. Obviously, keep using singles as much as it works for you, but just keep in mind pairing is a clever option. I often like running highly mobile and high attack characters, like Mozu reclassed to Archer, as a single, to maximise their damage, and then have paired Effies and the like to stand in the right places to absorb all the hits.

One obvious place is when you start running into 'boss' enemies - enemies that might have ridiculously high power, highly threatening abilities (e.g. all damage you do melee is reflected back onto you, all magic damage is reflected, etc), and are sometimes themselves doubled to become even more beefy. In that case, unless your first singles attack is going to kill the enemy immediately, you are going to need paired units to chip away at him without dying to the counterattack.

The second person only gains XP in select situations (e.g. when they counterattack), but you are ultimately going to be focusing on around 12-18 characters that you develop and pour XP into, whereas, depending on how your units survive permadeath, your children, etc., you could have between 20 and 40 playable guys later on. Don't try to share XP to everybody and level them up. Try characters out briefly, look at their starting stats and what you think your A team is going to need, and then bench the people that you don't need.

Reclassing is a massive part of the game, by the way, though I didn't bother with it until I was very familiar with the game systems. But essentially, if you ever find yourself looking at a dude and thinking its stats would be so much better as X other unit...

 

[TigerKnee]

Pair-up bonuses aren't universally good (hello Odin), but then you have things like Berserker Charlotte giving +8 Str and +5 Spd as the supporting unit which will allow silly things like killing Generals through physical attacks.

 

[deuxhero]

Played Road to Ruin hack. Was pretty good for the most part, and the flaws were relatively minor. Aside from some RNG-screw prone growth rates (I left a deployment slot open toward the end due to a character from a relatively fast class failing to hit 13 speed by 20/5), it's fairly balanced and map design is never bad, it only ever got "exceptional" once with the first escape map (escape is a sadly underused object in the franchise that official releases only ever used in the game in debuted in. All future releases that use it might as well be seize.). Beware that generic units effect survival and that you'll temporarily lose a survival star when a character leaves for plot reasons (you get it back when he returns), but the records screen doesn't even unlock after game clear so there's no real point in rankings anyways. Story was decent, though it felt like some of the continent was just filler nations with no real involvement in the plot. If you play it, be warned the map design has fixation with maps with forking paths that force splitting your units, so pick two healers ect. (though this happens before you ever get a chance to choose which units you'll deploy) and this kinda makes obvious some unit imbalances (1-3 units on one side, 9-7 on the other is effect). Also you only ever get one flying unit, so use the starting peg knight.

Any other recommended rom hacks

 

[eric__s]

You can have children with your blood siblings in this game.

 

[80Maxwell08]

You can have children with your blood siblings in this game.

Birthright? Funny story, if you get an S rank with any of your half-siblings, by the way they are half siblings, they will pull out a note from your mother saying you came from a different father too so you aren't actually directly related. I guess they saved the note for an "in case of incest" emergency.

 

[eric__s]

I've been attacking peoples' castles in order to train up my guys, but I'm not completely sure how it works. I'm not ruining their games, am I?

I'm also trying to use every single character. I've got nobody below level 17 at the moment. I like training up the characters to see which ones are good and which ones I like, and I also think they get support children. I'm not sure how exactly it works because I haven't had any kids yet, but it's a cool idea. I wonder how they justify the fact that some of these characters are children, or that you can presumably pair extremely old characters with extremely young characters. Or actual fucking blood-related siblings.

 

[Latro]

you could always breed out blood-related siblings irl, you just never tried

 

[eric__s]

Also if any of you want to invade me, my castle's name is Hohenzollern. I haven't set up my guys yet, so I'm probably an easy kill. Is there a way we can actually fight each other, or is it just AIs fighting?

 

[TigerKnee]

It's only AI. The only game that has actual PvP are the DS ones.

Are you playing non-Conquest? You don't get EXP from Castle battles in Conquest.

You're not ruining anyone's game by visiting them. In fact you're helping them earn points for multiplayer visit rewards. Since you get rewards for beating castles, a lot of players will ironically put in very weak teams/castle set-ups so you can just run over and seize the thrones in order to farm more visit points since most players will attempt bad castles and not strong ones.

 

[Tigranes]

Levelling up every character is going to become highly inefficient, but grinding with the DLC/castles probably mitigates that if you're enjoying it.

I don't use any of that stuff, but I did visit other castles at one point to buy extra Heart seals early.

 

[eric__s]

Are you playing non-Conquest? You don't get EXP from Castle battles in Conquest.

Yeah, I went Revelations. I'll go back to Conquest eventually, but I hated the butler character you get from being a female. I hated him so much that I just can't ever make another female character. I've never had such a visceral dislike for a character before, but I cannot stand that fucking butler guy.

Also I just got Percy, and it looks like he can have children. They sort of explained away Hayato by saying he was just short and had a baby face, and Elise when one of her siblings said, "you're technically an adult." But I have no idea how they're going to explain how Percy can have children when he not only looks like an 8 year old and has temper tantrums, but was just born.

 

[deuxhero]

Stop playing the shitty official translation and get the fan patch.

 

[CyberWhale]

Stop playing other games and get back to finishing Barkley 2.

/fixed

 

[Tigranes]

Stop playing the shitty official translation and get the fan patch.

Why? It is retardoshit you should never read no matter how well translated. Skip it all.

 

[deuxhero]

You don't seem to understand how horrifically bad the official "translation" is. It goes from merely "banal" and becomes "internet jokes that would have been old 5 years before it released" level bad. They also fucked with the gameplay as well.

 

[Tigranes]

There is no translation in the world that would make any of that shit worth 5 seconds of anyone's time. I can well imagine the dialogue was butchered, but the plot and character design from the ground up is the worst of the weeaboos galore.

More relevantly, how does the fan patch 'unfuck' the gameplay?

 

[eric__s]

It looks like the fan translation isn't even complete. Why would I want to play that?

Also, what's wrong with the gameplay?

 

[deuxhero]

It's not a 1.0 because there are minor formatting bugs and some of the DLC isn't done. That's it.

 

[Great Deceiver]

I had only played the GBA games (I like FE and Sacred Stones a lot, they're simple fun) but haven't played FE in like 15 years. Then I tried to play one of the newer 3DS ones and what the fuck is up with all this romance/relationship shit? Is it just me or have they actually managed to downgrade the sprite art?