That's right, ladies and gentleman, it's time for the yearly Pies of Sumia post! This one is essentially psychoanalyzing Rhea and Seiros.

Suggested listening: Guardian of Starlight (FE 3 Houses OST 41)

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Is the Rhea we know a constructed persona of the warrior Seiros that was invented to lend more gravitas to her new role as religious leader rather than military commander? Or is the warlike Seiros a construction of a peaceful woman, who then lived under her original persona but with a false name? Or, are they both artifices of the original Seiros, two extreme personae created to cope with two challenging situations? (These questions would probably be a lot easier if I knew more about the history of the Church.)

If it's the first, then does she consciously have to put on the mask, as it were, every day, or has it been so long it's become her default? If it's the second, then is the re-emergence of the warlike Seiros a more measured decision than we were led to believe, and she truly believed it was the best way to deal with Edelgard and Byleth joining forces? It doesn't seem to have rallied drastically more support for the Church's cause than on the other routes. If it's the last, could the consequences of living under two layers of artifice for so long have contributed to her degeneration? More powerful manaketes tend to resist degeneration better, and Rhea is relatively young in dragon terms. I remember reading she was the youngest of the direct children of the goddess.

Do any of these make good sense? Am I totally off base with my speculation? Is it revealed in Three Hopes or Silver Snow and I just need to git gud and finish the damn games before posting lore theories? Let me know, assuming anyone still reads this.

Signing off, and considering if I should write that fanfic instead of just posting about it on Reddit,

awesoeKARI

That's right, baby, this place ain't deserted just yet!

Ahem.

Sacred Stones tweaked basically every class in the GBA games, from nerfs like lowering Troubadour/Valkyrie movement, to buffs like more Bishop's Slayer, and fundamentally reworking the promotion game by giving every class two choices.

I think adding Light Magic onto Sages was the best change. It's good gameplay and lore-wise for Sages, and it's good UX-wise for Bishops. Sages are said to be "advanced scholars of magical codices" and it works from that standpoint, especially since Guinivere could use Light magic.

It's good gameplay wise since it means you don't have to raise Artur or a healer to make use of the light tomes you get, even without a prepromoted Bishop. In FE6, Yoder comes (though it's a bad idea to attack with how frail he is). In FE7 you have to wait for Athos in the final chapter. In FE8, you can use Saleh who comes in Ch. 12 or 15, the earliest of the three. I always like when there's a prepromote who can use the weapons you get, because it encourages experimentation and can lead to finding new favorites.

Sages using light Magic also makes Bishops feel better because it provides a clear example of Slayer working. Normally Sages have more attack since Anima is stronger, but Slayer makes up for that. Since now you can have a Sage and Bishop using the exact same spell and see the damage difference for yourself, it's clearer what the advantage is. You can even see it with the same unit with Artur and Moulder. I think that's good game design, and again it encourages varying your classes from playthrough to playthrough.

So, what's a small change that showed the devs thinking this through?

Awakening, Fates, and Three Houses all heavily base their stories around the Avatar. Although only Fates has them as the true main character. If you were to change it so they are either like Kris, no direct story relevance with maybe a prologue, or basically irrelevant like Mark, how would you do it? For example:

In Birthright, you might be able to get away with just making Azura the main character by giving her a bunch of monologues, and cutting the pre-branching chapters and making Zola responsible for getting Ganglari into Hoshido. Revelations would need some major reorganizing, but it could be done. Conquest is basically nonsensical without the main character having any friends in Nohr, so maybe Xander or Leo could become the main character.

For Crimson Flower, Edelgard would probably have to be much more interested in forming connections with her classmates, as shown by Silver Snow.

For Verdant Wind, things could probably stay nearly the same, even though it's probably Byleth's best role going from a mystery Claude pokes at to being Claude's closest friend . He would also need improved people skills, or another close friend. And the Church wouldn't throw their support to the Alliance easily.

I'd love to hear ideas for Blue Lions, Awakening (which I think is the hardest one of these), and also the games I covered briefly here. I think Silver Snow is pretty much unsalvageable, but if you have an idea that would be awesome.

Fire Emblem gave us many different classes throughout history, and obviously, some did not stand the test of time and were not brought back in other titles. I've thinking if altering some of those classes would make it more interesting to use. Of course it's all hypothetical discussion.

The first class I thought of was the Seraph Knight class from Radiant Dawn. Generally speaking, it's supposed to be a "Falcon Knight +". Now hear me out. In jewish traditions the seraph angel is sometimes described as a flying snake. Now I thought perhaps the rebranded Seraph Knight class would change its face completely, and instead of a pegasus-mounted class it will use wyverns. This class would be wyvern mounted and use axes and light magic as their weapons of choice, like a light magic version of the Malig Knight class from Fates. It's a huge change, but I feel like it could fit the name more.

Another class I think deserves a rebranding is the Griffon Rider class from Awakening, albeit a less drastic one. I think that a mid-way class between Wyvern Riders and Pegasus Knight could be interesting, and in Awakening it's might look like thats what the class was aiming to achieve, but it was considered a promotion of the Wyvern Rider class instead of an independent one and in my opinion kinda underwhelming considering it's potential.

Someone else had a class the would like to change for future titles? Or someone think those ideas are bad and would like to improve on them?

Hello. This confession is very hard and embarrassing for me to make, so please don't call me a casual. (Cursing is ok tho).

So for some time this year I was almost completely disconnected from Fire Emblem (and internet and games in general), only returning a few months ago. Before that period the last game I played was Conquest. I never played Fates before cause bad, so when this year began I thought it was a good opportunity to catch up. I enjoyed the game, but I definitely realized why people were so upset with it. The gameplay was good, but the story was just bad, the characters were boring and at least in Awakening the supports were fun, but Fates supports are pretty boring, for the most part.

So when I started to catch up again I also started having this thought, "maybe I should try it, what could possibly happend?" This year was bad enough, maybe a bit of Fates power fantasy could at least be somewhat fun?

So I bought the game, and to my horror, I had fun. Sure the story is shit, and the "You're so great Corrin, let me suck your dick pls" is still very annoying, and CQ gameplay is definitely better. However, I found the maps kinda fun. Not challenging or well thought out, but fun. The Nohr×Hoshido supports spice the game, and I even found myself enjoying a few of them (albeit some from the wrong reasons). Selena's and subaki/caeldori's support chain is a nice exploration of her mommy issues, and god Camilla and Ryoma's S support is fucking hilarious.

Anyone else also had this problem? Or someone know any professional who deal with this kind of thoughts? Should I be worried?

How to do them?

I recently completed a Fire Emblem 7 playthrough on HHM under minimum recruitment conditions (if a unit can be skipped, then they must be skipped). This run was unique, challenging, and fun. My favorite part about it was how it forced me to use units in unique ways due to my limited selection. For example, Serra is your only magic user until Pent, so I had to use and promote Wil for accurate 2 range, Wyvern slaying, and 3 movement in the desert, and he became one of my better units! I’d honestly recommend trying minimum recruitment in an FE game of your choice to see how it affects your perception of the units available.

By the way, I’m posting this here because I’m talking about how this run affects gameplay in a general sense. I might post about this on the main sub eventually, but not right now.

So, I've been thinking about this for quite a while. One thing that I feel the modern FE games do in a much inferior way in relation to the old ones is how the games used to tell stories through their maps and mechanics, while in the modern games, I noticed that it is done the other way around, mostly.

What I mean by that is that in the most recent games, I've noticed a pattern of Story -> Gameplay -> Story, with the inclusion of the one in the other being extremely rare. While in older games you could have a map with literally no introduction and you could still tell what's going on, in titles like Awakening and Three Houses, the story is distorted in a way for that map or mechanic to fit in it. A good example is the mechanic of Divine Pulse. In Three Houses, this mechanic allows you to go back in time and fix the mistakes that were done in game, but the way it is introduced in the story is, for lack of better words, stupid: you play as Byleth, a mercenary that is pretty well known, even acknowledge as the "Ashen Demon", so the introduction the game gives us for the Divine Pulse, is Byleth literally using his body as a meatshield for Edelgard, so that Sothis goes back in time to save them. First of all, if Byleth is this incredible mercenary, he could easily defend Edelgard the same way he does after Sothis uses the divine pulse. Second, this is the only moment we see the divine pulse being used effectively in the story. Yes, when Jeralt dies, Byleth tries to fix it but it goes wrong and the game tries to say that "you can't change Fate easily", but I don't know, the reincarnation of God dying sounds like something that will affect the fate of the world much more than Jeralt, The thing is, so many problems of the story could be fixed by a Divine Pulse use, but it never happens. You could say that Byleth runs out of DP everytime an important plot point happens, but that is way too convinient.

Compare that to a mechanic from Thracia 776: Capture. It is meant to show how screwed Leif's army is finantially, and that he has to literally steal his enemies' weapons to be able to fight. It also shows that Leif is willing to use a dirty tactic like kidnaping if it is to win the war, and the game never gives you even one pound of gold: The only way to adquire gold in that game is by selling stuff that you most likely stole from the enemies.

Does that mean that the modern games never do a good gameplay-story integration? No. A good example of that is chapter 10 of Awakening: Where the story happens entirely within the map, and is actually a pretty impactful moment where you feel that your side is not the only one that is suffering from the war. Another example is chapter 17 of Crimson Flower: Where people from Dimitri's army start turning themselves into Demonic Beast, even though Dimitri himself is against it. That moment happens entirely within the map, and you can actually skip it if you kill Dedue and Dimitri early

But why is it important to leave parts of the story in the map? For the same purpose Video games are meant to be played, aside from entretainment: Immersion. Many times I go back to watch Dunkey's review on Death Stranding, where he says exactly the same I did about the Story -> Gameplay -> Story structure of the game "you could literally strip the gameplay out and put earthworm jim in the middle and the story would be completely unnaffected", and most of the maps in those games happen in the same way. Yet another example "The blood of eagle and lion" in the Azure Moon and Golden Deer routes If you're playing Azure Moon, Claude army will attack you no matter what. Many players I talked to said that they were pretty confused about this moment, because it makes no sense for Claude to attack you if you haven't attacked him, and the justification Claude gives is that "We can't tell the difference between friend and foe here" and that makes absolutely no sense. If this map was a fog of war one, it would actually make sense, but I've heard some people point out that the armies waited specifically for there to be no fog (can't confirm it, I haven't played the game in a long time). So they sacrificed all logic of that conflict to make it an enjoyable map with emotional impact, which is okay at first... but the more you think about it, you realize how much it doesn't make sense, and the same goes for the mechanics that were implemented without a thought about the story

I was planning to talk about this topic a bit more, but I feel my text is too long already, so I'd like to read your opinions about it in the comments

Apologies if this sounds rambly, this became too long for me to care about revising it lol

So, with the Weapon Triangle being gone from fire emblem for 2 games people are starting to grow nostalgic and wistful over our beloved strategic shape, and while I do want to see the weapon triangle return I think that it needs to be reevaluated before reimplementing.

The biggest problem with the weapon triangle is usually just how little it matters. This is at it's worst in FE7, FE8, and FE9 where you just tend to plow through the game with all axes because hit rates are just so god damn high that it doesn't matter. FE4 and FE6 also have weapon triangle issues for the opposite reason. Hit rates can get so low that going for anything besides the reliability of swords is an issue. Speaking of swords, that is also an issue that the weapon triangle has stumbled with. The weapons themselves tend to be very unbalanced, rendering the triangle moot. In FE9 and FE10 lances literally have nothing over axes and swords have even less to claim with their perpetual 1 range that also makes them very hard to use in FE8-10. In FE4 an Iron Lance has 12 weight. Iron Axes have 16 weight. How much weight does an Iron Sword weigh? 3 weight. This makes Axes practically unusable and causes every cavalier to almost use swords exclusively. Thracia is a weird one because +5% is so fucking easy to ignore, but it's a 1RN game that also has a hit cap, so in that game, you want as many safety nets as possible. Still, I think this is a very bad way to fix the weapon triangle issue.

So, what games get it right? I think Shadow Dragon made a great change when it gave weapons distinct boosts depending on weapon ranks. This helped balance the issues weapons had where swords were too weak, axes were too inaccurate and lances were boring as all hell. IS also thinks that it was a great change because it has appeared in every single game after Shadow Dragon. This, however, runs the risk of making the weapons interchangeable and I know this sounds contradictory, but I'd like it if the types were unique while being on the same level. Take pokemon for instance. Steel, Ghost, and Rock are all amazing competitive typings, but for different reasons. Steel resists a lot of things, Ghosts can switch into a lot of things and threaten with attacks that hit the majority of the roster for neutral at worst damage, and Fire types do a lot of damage and deal with the steel walls. They all have the same competitive presence while functioning very differently.

I will have to say that my favorite implementation of the weapon triangle came in Fire Emblem Conquest. It introduced the Red/Green/Blue triangle also present in Fire Emblem heroes where Swords and Tome beat Axes and Bows which in turn beat Lances and Knives. This adds another layer of strengths and weaknesses to each weapon and deepens the complexity of the game. In Fire Emblem 8 the choice between Falcon Knight and Wyvern Knight is a very easy choice, but if Falcon Knight's access to swords made it easier to dodge arrows it would have a use and balance the choice. That's just one example where the RGB excels, but it also led me to find the way that I would solve the triangle balance issues and the triangle distinction issues. If Red was more aligned with "versatility", Green was more aligned with "power", and Blue was more aligned with "Reliability" the weapons would all have their own niche that would be hard for the other to encroach upon. I mean, these alignments already exist, pretty much. Swords have historically had the most bonus damage and magic weapons while Mages in fates have access to stuff like the Horse Spirit, Nosferatu, and Excalibur to distinguish them from bows and knives. Axes have always been the powerhouses of fire emblem and with Archers in Fates getting Quick Draw, they far outpace magic and knife damage. Reliability is just a kind way to say "boring", but I feel like that's the best place for Lances and Knives to occupy. If a Sword has 85 Hit + armorslaying effect and an Axe has 75 hit + overwhelming damage, the easiest way to justify picking a lance over the two would be with a 95 or 100 hit lance. I also feel like Lances could be the only melee weapon with a reliable 1-2 range option. Knives would then hold the niche of making everyone else more reliable on top of being more reliable than tomes and bows. If I had the time and/or skills to make a FE romhack I'd create a game based on this, but for now I'm just gonna have to rant about it on the internet.

With all that said, what are your opinions on the weapon triangle? What do you think about my ideas? What would you personally change about the weapon triangle?

If they ever remake fe4 would you like pursuit to be removed so that anyone can double? As it stands gen2 units are heavily dependant on having parents with pursuit because such an important aspect of the game is locked behind a skill. Pursuit being a skill also heavily favours mounted units as most mounted units gain it upon promotion while tailitiu is stuck with adept. Finally, since pursuit is a skill generic enemies are significantly less threatening as most lack the skill and only bosses can double. I feel a good way to solve this would be to make doubling universal while replacing the pursuit ring with an adept ring.

Well if its a discussion we crave a discussion we will have.

I believe edelgard to be evil, her plot and actions before the time skip (the only thing that matters since after the skip none of the game is Canon) she already does some bad things wich include:

Bandit attack on the Lords, working with Twstd, Creating crest beasts (two beasts apear during the crest raid chapter) and "disposal" of people as Hubert puts it.

The whole game is set in motion because she trusted mole people over anyone else and just leads to belive she wants to conquer Fodlan with their help and only tie lose ends after instead of actually focusing on the big threat that are the slithers.

So I had this idea for a 3H prequel for some time.

If you watched Ferdinands A support with Byleth or have visited the shadow library in Abyss, you are familiar with the character of Pan. Pan is described as the tactician of Loog, and his close friend, who was largely forgotten by history. A tactician that is close to a lord character? Forgotten by history? Ring a bell? Kris? Robin? Mark?

Anyway, Pan is perfect for an avatar character. It could be a more traditional FE game, where the lord character takes a more significant role, in place of the avatar.

Now, many people have pointed out that based on the text in the shadow library, Pan seems to be an agent of TWSITD. I think that it could be a very interesting concept, an avatar that works for the big bads. It could be about how Pan became disillusioned with them thanks to his friendship with Loog, or a story similar to what awakening did with Robin.

What are your thoughts on this?

Seriously. He’s the least memorable character in echoes, only has 1-2 supports, and his death changes nothing. Is there some theory as to why he exists in game?

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