Now that’s surprising. I thought Ike had a really good strength growth rate (with a criminally low cap).
But I guess that’s RNG for you.
Well, yeah. Growth rates are really more like growth suggestions with Fire Emblem RNG.
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No kidding. Ike gained a point in magic before he gained a point in strength. And by coincidence/the worst luck, Soren got a point of strength before a point of magic. His magic is 60% and his strength is 5%. I’m having some weird luck this time around.
[details=Seriously what the heck]
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“I don’t have any creative urge or desire to interact with my interactive medium” is what I’m seeing here.
Edit: Although really, I can’t honestly say that’s the wrong way to play these games. I should be more accepting.
I recently restarted my Fire Emblem Fates Birthright campaign. I started it like last summer, but I ended up crippling myself with some rookie mistakes because the last Fire Emblem I played before that was Blazing Sword on the GBA.
Basically, I promoted a bunch of people at level 10 instead of waiting to cap out, and it stagnated my party’s growth to the point that I simply could not beat Chapter 11. I played through again and didn’t promote anybody, and managed to win that battle on my first try, haha.
Anyway, I’m shipping all the people who hate each other because I’m a cruel god. I’ve got Orochi hanging out with Sylas, Jakob pairing with Hana, and Kaze running with Rinkah.
“I don’t have any creative urge or desire to interact with my interactive medium” is what I’m seeing here.
I get my interactivity in a Fire Emblem game from the actual, y’know. Gameplay. The battles and strategy. And I grow attached to characters through that.
I’ve got more attachment to Raven / Dart / Lucius in FE7, or Mia / Nephenee in PoR / RD, than I do any of the characters in Awakening - despite the added “interactivity” of more supports, choosing who to pair up with,and all those little snippets of ‘conversation’ or ‘character moments’ in the base between battles. I don’t like any of those little things, they feel hollow and filler-like. Especially when you start seeing them repeated. (And I did specifically pick guys that have no impact on the story of those other games. (except Neph in RD for that mini chapter 2))
The character building I get from supports is, in that way, kind of a nice reward for the people I like to use. I get to learn more about them. Which in turn makes me like them more.
Don’t mean to come off as harsh or snippy, I see your edit. Just responding with my perspective. :3
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I actually paired Jakob and Hana at one point as well. Dude’s a jerk to pretty much everyone, (except Corrin and Mozu,) so it’s hard not to get him in an antagonistic relationship.
I don’t know if Kaze can be in one of those relations, though. He’s the game’s niceboy.
He’s the niceboy, but I have him paired with Rinkah who is not emotinally prepared to have a ninja discover that she has a carefully hidden fondness for sweets.
Wow. I thought Ike and Soren were largely RNG proof but you appear to be proving me wrong. I’ve always gotten a decent Ike and Soren* no matter what compared to never once getting a good Micaiah or Sothe, Micaiah is barely serviceable by endgame and fielding Sothe is some kind of player-inflicted punishment.
*Soren often doesn’t get enough strength for heavier tomes but that’s never really stunted me.
I checked out Heather’s support conversations with fan favorite and confirmed Best Girl Nephenee and… they almost seem to be flirting with each other. Does anyone else see this or feel this way? I might be stretching and over interpreting because I have a gay agenda.
My first summon in Heroes was a 5-star Tiki, ask me anything.
fake edit: 12th summon was a 5-star Camilla 
I know that in the original Japanese Heather is explicitly gay, and that a few of Nephenee’s lady supports in both games come off as flirty, but in this case I think it’s just how the generic supports are written; both seem to have fairly flirty-sounding supports just from how the lists read. It’s not like Soren’s RD Ike supports which are straight up “I WILL DIE FOR YOU” vs the generic “ok please don’t die :|”.
…Reading RD’s supports just makes me mad at what could have been, I should probably stop.
Would it only cause more anger to vent about what you think could have been and the wasted potential? Because I’m quite curious about what you have to say if you’re willing to share but I don’t want to cause distress for the sake of my curiosity.
For one, there’s what I know was cut and still remains in the code: certain pairs having special conversations when they reach A rank. The actual conversations don’t exist, and I’m not sure if they ever did in a finished form considering that we only have the pairs that would get those expanded supports on the disc, but even that would have gone a long way toward making RD’s supports less awful and bland.
But honestly, most of it is that I do feel like PoR hit the sweet spot when it came to supports, from how you got them (the chapter system let them account for plot stuff in the supports! Plot stuff! You actually have to wait to get to the point the Ike/Soren A support makes sense to the player before you learn that my windy son is Branded!) to the way the conversations played out (no more awkward implied battle boning, FE8!), and that they discarded all of that for the sequel is agonizing. They basically decided to throw out any chance of characterization for the new characters in favor of a few generic sentences with an ad libs system for the names, and maybe, if a character was lucky, a unique line for a specific support partner. It’s… Honestly, it’s the start of a major regression in how supports were handled by the games, as I see it. I don’t think the series’ supports have really recovered, although FE12 tried to salvage it from what I recall.
Yes, I’m saying Awakening and Fates have bad supports. Just not as bad as RD’s, mostly because they actually exist as proper supports.
The method of allowing everyone to support with everyone is ambitious and offers up a ton of options on how you want to play the game, but it’s not sustainable from a writing standpoint, since by Fates you can tell that the people behind the writing were running out of feasible ideas. I think the system worked much better for Awakening since by and large the cast knew each other quite well prior to the game starting.
I think that Awakening’s supports sorta suffer occasionally from the same thing Fates’ do, but there are a few really interesting and endearing plots that are there if you pay attention (Inigo becoming such a flirt because of advice that Olivia gave to him that she originally got from Maribelle is one example etc.)
Hopefully the series eventually returns to the FE9 system in part. Maybe don’t limit support conversations, since that would be a hard sell to return to, but limiting partners would make everything more manageable. I’m also hoping they ditch the marriage and kids thing in future titles because every opposite gender support chain feels so samey after a certain point.
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The same sex supports in Awakening were usually pretty good, it’s the opposite sex ones that had issues because they somehow had to work in a marriage confession.
Man I can’t agree more. I want to see more people hanging out being friends!
Let us take a moment to call out Chrom and Female Robin’s supports in particular. I may be misremembering it, but their A and B supports are just them walking in on each other naked and awkwardly joking that there aren’t any secrets between them anymore. Then, boom, marriage!
Actually, for that matter, I want to call out Fates for Male Corrin and Rinkah’s supports, too. I totally would have married them, but their supports are just her telling him to back the fuck off until he finally convinces her to chill out for a second in the A-rank. How am I supposed to have them marry when she only begrudgingly tolerates his presence?
On the other hand, though, I liked the parent-child supports. In Awakening, it was sweet and endearing because here are all these kids who lost their parents and now they get to see them. Then, in Fates, the kids were brats because their parents were absent for most of their lives and that was great in its own way, too.
I’m looking at you, Saizo and Asugi.
Oh boy Robin and Chrom’s support. I was all set to ship them until I read that support. Then I promptly began shipping Morgan/Lucina in response.
Also, I do wish that unique father/child conversations stuff wasn’t DLC locked (and I guess mother/child stuff for Fates but we still haven’t gotten that DLC) but I guess that’s the nature of the beast.
It’s a shame that the Robin/Chrom support chain is lackluster because I think the main plot is much stronger if they’re married.
Also, the children in Fates are so clearly a byproduct of the success of Awakening. They feel superfluous and largely uninteresting, and it mostly made me think less of the main cast for being such irresponsible parents. 
I think the one time I found the kids anything approaching interesting was the Selena/Caeldori support chain during my Revelations run; again, that’s probably because they’re both Awakening characters.
Thank you for sharing. I had heard on Serenes Forest that not only was there was a ton of cut dialog and support dialog but that they had discovered dialog in the games that was either impossible, almost impossible, or completely suicidal to see. (Dialog for attacking the Black Knight for certain characters comes to mind.) Some of it is just a nice, funny, reward for having that kind of madness within you (example: attacking the Black Knight with Mist in PoR) but some of it? Well, I still remember the antics Fedule had to pull to trigger the conversations between Soren and Micaiah. I didn’t even know those conversations existed before Fedule showed them to me! (Because I am not insane enough to charge my gay mage son into melee so I can siege tome my wax paper trash lord with him, but not kill her, so they can talk about being biracial.) And that is much more substantive and I can’t believe you have to do such zany stuff to see conversations that are, in my opinion, imperative to those characters’ characterization and their storylines. And that’s just shit the Serenes folks found actually present on the discs, who even knows what IntSys cut! (I didn’t look at what was presumed cut because I didn’t want to be disheartened and disappointed. I already assume an actual love confession between Ike/Soren was cut and that Soren’s implied paired ending was an actual paired ending with Ike before someone lost their shit and panic coded it off Ike. Though, I admit, that’s definitely conspiracy theory talk.) I too really felt the whiplash on how the supports were handled in RD. If they had built on that and doubled down just imagine how awesome it could have been! It still amazes me that, in defiance of RD’s shitty supports, Nolan and Zihark still became diehard battle brothers in my playthroughs. I like to imagine they got matching tattoos like the whole cast of Peter Jackson’s LotR movies (except John Rhys-Davies) did. Or at least T-Shirts with arrows pointing off them, like the “I’m with stupid” ones except instead of “I’m with stupid” it says something like, “Pretty damn sure I helped kill a deity with this guy.” Oh and Mist and Jill’s fucking “No, we’re sisters now” bond still sells even with garbage supports. (See? I’m not just about the gay stuff! The platonic tight bonds of friendship and non-romantic love is also totally my shit. I want that shit in any Gayest Fire Emblem I take part in. Speaking of which, @Fefnir and @KingCarnival if it can be done following RoR’s chapter system or finding some other way to link supports to plot would be a wise way to go for Flaming Emblem.) I don’t know why IntSys backed off on the good thing they had going with PoR supports. Probably because of the bigger cast of characters and the amount of work it would’ve taken to write some real in depth shit for all of them. But bah! It sucks because you can see they got lazy on the writing even beyond the copy and paste support conversations because even dialog and relationships you knew were canon and that they themselves wanted were fucking phoned in. (Sothe/Micaiah, I’m looking at you.)
I’m mad about it too, Rudje. I grew up with terrified purse-clutching moral guardians scalpeling all the gay and gender non-conformity out of my animes. So I just assumed that IntSys were as explicit as they could possibly get away with with Ike/Soren and Heather (and others, but they stand out.) I assumed the same 4Kids levels of executive meddling at play in these games and maybe there was. But in 2017, they can be so much gayer… and they’re not. I’m always gonna love PoR and RD because they were very good, I needed them, they came out and dared to be overtly gay during a very difficult time in my youth. But yes, they could have been so much more and we were robbed.
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