FIRE EMBLEM

yeah edelgard route splits in 2 but confusingly gives you 2 BIG WARNINGS; the last one is pretty clear what's about but the first one less so and very easy to miss (it requires monastery boredom) and missing it immediately locks into one of the story paths

I wish they'd release some of the earlier FE games on switch. guess I'll pick up the NES FE that's coming (to show support for this) but I'm not expecting great things. need those GBA FEs

give us the advance wars games while you're at it, nintendo

I feel like I'm getting the hang of it now, as I'm starting to customize the skills of someone of my students.

I haven't been able to unlock the blacksmith yet, though, so am I stuck buying new weapons of downgrading to training models for my units?

you'll get the blacksmith by Month 5, i think? (at which point you never really need to buy fresh weapons as there's an Forge upgrade path for all of them if you have the materials.) just buy new weapons as you need until it opens

PRO-TIP: I was selling all my Broken weapons for 1G (Lances, Swords, etc.) since once you get past Iron level it doesn't often feel worth forging. WRONG. Some Broken weapons that you get are secretly unique and will upgrade to a different or higher level weapon altogether - the description will tell you if this is true, it'll be separated in the list from the other broken swords/lances/etc.

I'm getting back up to speed. just need to relearn all the classes and battalions stuff

I have my first vacation in a couple years over Thanksgiving--9 days I have to figure out what to do with.

Reading this thread has me thinking trying to get back into Fire Emblem might be the call. I think I'm bad at games that don't have a "right" path, and upping the difficulty could be just what I need. I think I tried playing through on Normal the first time around and no decisions felt consequential.

going by FE veterans, hard mode in this game is on par with normal for older entries and you can (permanently) drop the difficulty setting midgame but not the other way around. no reason not to start on hard

Yeah definitely, Normal/Classic is what I would recommend if you've literally played any other game in this genre.

The thing you can't change midway is Casual vs. Classic, the latter being perma-death. The game feels VERY different with perma-death, if you're like me and want the whole story and all the relationship talks and such and will rewind over and over again to play a "perfect" game so everybody survives. (Though on the final battle, I had one death and just let it go.)

So, I say go with Classic for well, classic feels and disappointment whenever one of your brats kicks the bucket

(That said, second playthrough, I'm doing Casual, since the game only gets easier with NG+ anyway.)

I want to remark how fun it is that you straight up won't get all the answers about your students, even within your house. A lot of the interesting reveals seem to happen when you pair students from different houses or the Monastery instructors. Definitely a lure for completionists - very JRPG, I suppose. At the same time, I can see why many people complain about the story, since on one playthough you never get a full picture.

yeah having Meaningful Choices is definitionally incompatible with being able to see everything in one pass. in this case it's probably descended more from visual novel routes than the CRPG type games that term is associated with though

hah, "meaningful choices" might be overselling it a bit, but yeah, VNs are the more accurate lineage

I just unlocked tournaments which is loads of fun even though all my house is too underleveled to win.

For 1-1 instruction, is the idea to teach students until you've depleted all of their motivation (i.e. grad school)?

yup. you want to only teach the ones with a full motivation bar to maximize your teacher point usage
then refill the bars on monastery days with meals/gifts/activities

Just finished chapter 11(?) and OMG WTF Edie, so furious at you rn, if I had you in fantasy, I'd cut you from my team, I also had another game-related question but I can't remember it now either.

Heh. So what did you choose?

I sided with her thinking maybe that was the de-escalation route, and when creepy Hubert magicked me away, I reset the game immediately. I'll be picking Rhea's side in all likelihood, but I'll keep the save right before the choice is presented.

Yeah, that's what I did. (There is no de-escalation route. FIRE EMBLEM! *jazz hands*) No regrets, though - I bonded with that crew so i was happy to play it out. I'm saving the other choice for my final fourth playthrough, someday.

Part 2 makeovers: Pretty tragic all around. Dorothea at least got rid of that stupid hat, and that gown is nice except for the backlessness. Ferd needs a haircut BADLY. I wish Ferd's voice actor was better; he's so often my MVP that I feel a little bad skipping his dialogue so often. Bernie's haircut IDK what is going on, but I love her all the same (and just recently made her a paladin after letting her toil as an archer all this time, which I think may have been an enormous opportunity cost in pwnage). I didn't think that I'd get much use out of the latecomers, but Seteth and Flayn have been great; I benched Lin in favor of green haired anime girl because her white magic is so much more usable than his, and I get the sense that any flying unit borders on OP.

What class path did you go with Ferdinand? He was garbage all the way through my run, hated him. And yes, the flying units are generally pretty awesome; didn't figure that out until playthrough #2.

Cavalier > Paladin, with the latter being where he really took off. (I'm currently still leveling him into a Great Knight.)

Hitting me hard with the emotions now! RIP Edie, and Ashe and the other students I've now killed because they were all too damned picky about my stats to transfer to my class, and, after the Shambhala mission, maybe Rhea (but I suspect she'll pull through). Speaking of, that mission spikes the difficulty up -- nothing unmanageable, and honestly a welcome change of pace, but clearly it offers much less room for screwing around. I still deliberately delayed finishing off the boss so that I could get my Assassin (Petra) to mop up all the chests -- I'd actually just promoted her to Falcon Knight, but reclassed her down to Assassin again solely for Locktouch. In hindsight, I missed her expanded movement range, and I wish I'd been grooming Ignatz as my backup Assassin instead of letting him languish on the bench, which is where Linhardt deserves to be -- he's too damn squishy to be anything but a healer, and even then, he still has to be in the thick of the action to heal, when someone else like Flayn has Fortify and Dorothea has the adjacent autoheal + much better reason spells.

Having just beaten the game, one of my predictions in the previous post is obviously, hilariously wrong.

I needed a palate cleanser from Bloodborne frustrations and started my NG+ last night. Aside from the interminably slow beginning, I'm looking forward to knowing just what I'm doing in the early stages of the game; I also picked up on a lot of plot details this time around.

So I couldn't get out of the first Garrag Mach mock battle (5v5v5)! The strategy on Normal difficulty of sending Byleth headlong into a bunch of enemies doesn't seem to work anymore. Any suggestions?

creep, overuse the R2 button all the time so you don't move your units within enemy attack range and move your guys slowly. i actually barely used it until my second playthrough...

Three Houses is really addicting isn't it? I sat down to play it last night and suddenly it was 2am. 😬

https://kotaku.com/fire-emblem-engage-nintendo-switch-trailer-direct-1849529563

Feel like there's no way this could reach the euphoric highs of Three Houses/Three Hopes but I'm still in

My first replay of Three Houses really stalled out because I just couldn't summon the energy to deal with the life sim grind, so with that in mind, should I grab Awakening? I thought the tactical side of 3H was good but shallow/easy.

I just couldn't summon the energy to deal with the life sim grind

3H is supposedly toned down, "hard" is old-school FE normal, "normal" is easy.

the monastery is a complete slog, i've never played any of the older games but i hope the unit management is 100% done with menus instead of wasting time walking from place to place and skipping dialogue boxes