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The Fire Emblem Thread

Sothis shows up, and she's a time goddess, so really, the sky's the limit in terms of what kind of -quel this might be.
 
JBear said:
Let's GOOOOOOOOOO!

I am here for battle emus, and it looks like the little accompanying squads mechanic from 3H is back?

It also looks like we have 4 protags? Alucard, Dancer lady, Bone Helm Edelgard, and plucky upstart. Unclear if we make some kind of choice or the story just swaps between them.

At first blush, this definitely looks like more of a sequel to 3H than Engage, which isn't surprising, since speculation at the time was that Engage was well into development before they realized how popular 3H was. I played *quite a lot* of 3H, so I'm here for it.

ETA: Thinking on it, if this is looking to be a direct 3H analog, then maybe plucky upstart is our MC and he's choosing one of the other 3 to ally with. Perhaps he becomes the hero of the arena and they're all watching the games and hoping to recruit champions from the winners' pool.
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If we are doing the 'MC chooses one to ally with' version, surely we're not losing the gender selection for such a protagonist we've had since FE12, right?
 
Path of Radiance is so damn good. Even the slow unskippable animations can't bring it down.

Its implementation of the support system and the way it handles battle prep are the best in the series, the gameplay balance is just right and never gets derailed, it's full of iconic maps, and it is confident enough in its writing to have a unit who's an openly racist total fucking asshole who hates the main character's guts and doesn't repent or soften up or anything. A game with a cast of this size needs that kind of variety, you see.
 
I went from the GBA games to Path of Radiance, and the animations were so bad compared to the beautiful 2D sprite work, I swiftly abandoned the game and gave it away at a used games store. More fool I, as the scarcity of the disc would have made it quite a valuable item later on if I'd kept it.
 
I still have my copies of both PoR and RD and I'm more than happy to see the value drop, because I want more people to experience my favourite* Fire Emblem game.

*- May or may not be supplanted by 3 Houses depending on when you ask me.
 
So it's confirmed that we're picking one of 4 protagonists, so who is everyone feeling for a starter Pokemon? Right now I think I'm leaning towards the Bard lady, and not-Alucard looks pretty boring, but I'm sure I'll stress over the choice until the last possible moment. I was(am) an Edelgard stan in 3 Houses, but this new Axe Queen feels like she's bringing a different energy. I'm really curious to see how the story and character pool will be structured around the choice, as 4 separate narratives would be quite a lot, especially given how some of the branches in 3 Houses kind of phoned it in at the end.
 
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My guess is that each side starts with a couple of their own unique units, and then the wider character pool consists of unaffiliated characters (unlike 3H, where you basically steal characters from other houses) who can be recruited by any party. Maybe a few recruitable units are limited to a particular side.

I expect that, like 3H, most of the maps will be reused between sides since that would be a lot of extra work to make all unique maps, and this isn't a game they are selling multiple versions of, like with Fates.

EDIT: Also, a thing I'm realizing is that they are not trying to promote the game with the same emphasis on "CHOOSE YOUR SIDE" like they did with Three Houses, so perhaps the emphasis on the differences is supposed to be less prominent than even in 3H.
 
The narrative focus on some sort of tournament would certainly lend itself to each protagonist having a similar set of maps, but I also worry about the potential for a story that spends too much time within those confines to be interesting.
 

Yo, is that a strategy map? Nonlinear progression? Dare I hope, an opportunity cost to faffing about between battles?
 
Hmm, I have my own wild guess about the story progression. I'm thinking you start with a protagonist of your choice and their squad and have a few rounds of the tournament to meet / fight against the other protagonists' teams. Things go south, the player's 'avatar' character comes in, and you band together with one other protagonist's team for the remainder of the game. This would result in a hybrid of protagonist-centered story elements with common overarching plot elements. And you could see all of the content in two runs with more differences than how Three Houses handled its own branches, especially with each of them having the first half be pretty much the same on each one.

I'm almost certainly wrong about most of this, but hey, why not put that idea out there and look good if it's correct?
EDIT: Actually, no -- you'd still have somewhat unique prologues or act 1s from each protagonist even if there are combined forces part of the way through the game. So you'd still need to go through the game at least four times to get each protagonist's full perspective. Additionally, since there are six ways to pick two teams out of four, that's even more combinations that you would theoretically need to go through. That'd definitely be more of a hassle for completionists than just four straightforward tracks.
 
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I fell off Three Houses pretty hard. Barely got started, in fact. Too many talky-talky parts when I wanted to just get to the action. Fortune's Weave definitely looks cool, though. I'll be leaning on this forum for takes before I decide to give FE another try. I'd really like to give the series one more go before deciding it isn't for me.
 
I've only played Three Houses. As far as I can tell, I'd have to sail the seas to play the other ones. (Well, the Internet tells me I have access to "Fire Emblem" on GBA and Path of Radiance on GCN, through the NSO stuff.)
 
There's also Fire Emblem Engage, also on the Switch and The Sacred Stones, also on GBA via NSO.

There's also the two Fire Emblem Warriors games, but they're a different genre
 
Three Houses is not a super representative sample of the series. Fortune's Weave is likely to be more similar to 3H than others, though.
 
4-So said:
I fell off Three Houses pretty hard. Barely got started, in fact. Too many talky-talky parts when I wanted to just get to the action.
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Yeah Three House is just Like That, pretty much all the other games are fairly light on the dialogue and text front.
 
Bongo said:
Dare I hope, an opportunity cost to faffing about between battles?
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Circling back to rewatching this trailer, and yes, there seems to be a "motivation" cost that presumably limits activities between battles and also a turn count???

More, importantly, though, I happened to full screen the splash image on that trailer and it features very prominently centered what looks to be the recently FE standard choice of gendered alternatives to some sort of chosen one character, so maybe this is closer to a 3H analogue than it looked at first blush after all? I'm confident it's not just the Professor returning, since it doesn't seem to look much like them.
 
Based on this image of the art book in the collector's edition, that character in white is named Eshmel:

fire-emblem-fortunes-weave-collectors-edition.jpg


You'll note he's not on the big box, and there's only one of him on the game case. All the video of walking around in cities or dungeons has had one of the four chooseable protagonists Cai, Theodora, Dietrich, or Leda as the character being controlled. Plus also when they've had an avatar character in the past, they always considered it a selling point to mention when explaining the game's concept, not a twist to hide.

I think it's clear that Eshmel is going to be an important character given his prominent position in the artwork, but I don't think this game has a customizable avatar.
 
Bongo said:
I think it's clear that Eshmel is going to be an important character given his prominent position in the artwork, but I don't think this game has a customizable avatar.
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So... what then? You think the female version is a distinct character?

ETA: Also, not sure what you mean by "there's only one of him on the game case"? That picture of the case you linked above clearly shows two differently gendered, similarly garbed and armed characters in the centre.
 
Additionally, on Nintendo Today and Japanese social media, they've been posting profiles of various cast members, with a grouping based on which (if any) of the four main choices they're affiliated with. You can learn all about:
  • Cai
    • Tialla
    • Peter
    • Ultand
  • Dietrich
    • Fabio
    • Esmeralda
    • Mikaela
  • Theodora
    • Bonaventure
    • Tobias
    • Lysander
    • Lilian
  • Leda
    • Buccar
    • Sirocco
    • Mu
    • Olympia
And more!
 
Not gonna lie: I'm a bit disappointed that they were so front and centre with what seem like major spoilers. Granted, humans were likely to spoil this framing device for me anyway, but I'd still have far preferred to go in blind.

Anyway, random thoughts on the direct, spoiled in case anyone but me cares about such things:
    • "Dagsion"? No, sorry, try again. That's not an acceptable city name.
    • Cai is the most JRPG protag a FE character has ever been. Everyone else has a retinue of badasses and he's rolling up in the magic school bus.
    • Fire Emblem has guns now.
    • These are a lot of wild and wacky class names, but I'll forgive a lot for a war elephant.
    • Class changing seems pretty similar to 3H.
    • Suddenly sci-fi, with pipes and robots. I guess this will be less of a revelation here than in 3H, or this direct is just going whole hog on spoiling as much as possible.
    • I hope this timeskip gives all of the kids new haircuts like 3H did.
    • So it seems like the choice of PC doesn't matter and the game wants you to play all 4? A lot of unanswered questions here, foremost among them being how characters shared between factions work.
    • Still not a peep on how this is related to 3 Houses, other than "Sothis is here" and not-Alucard having one of the weapons from it.
    • New theory: the setup is that your MC can pluck heroes from time. This world is 3H world. DLC to have him pluck 3H characters from the timestream?
 
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