Fire Emblem

Thoughts on the support system over the years, and would you like to see anything changed?

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is good and cutting it out of echoes was a mistake

I like em alot! I love the characters in awakening/fates (dwyer, kaden and xander bets fates boys) i wish they had voice overs i guess and please give the "corrin sexual" units more supports

lads any advice for Revelations?

It would be nice to see interactions between married couples. Just like there is a support ranking, make it a "love ranking", with potential for post-game. The amount of dialogue to be written would increase a bit with this I reckon.

They would just need to find good writers to do that.

personally I like the 5 support cap in standard games, but when unlimited grinding and postgame are in the mix, then awakening/fates systems work fine

Were pretty good
Awakening went downhill
Fates is half good, half bad and incoherent with the story (Xander)
Echoes is almost pure shit, not even Alm/Celica

>voiced supports
Even if it's just stock voice clips like in Awakening, it's fine. Fates supports are so fucking quiet, I don't enjoy them nearly as much.
>more non-romantic supports between opposite sexes
>more gay/lesbian supports

excellent in concept and well executed in a number of titles. supports are fundamental in making your army's units seem like living people within the game world.

i don't really have any changes to suggest to the system. i think how it's used mechanically in battle is perfect in fates and doesn't need modification. if anything, i'd like the quality of the average support to be about as good if not better than path of radiance, which i thought had great characterization.

>More lgbt
To get something as forced as Leon again, no thanks

would prefer if they just went down to people only having 5-7 options, having everyone support almost everyone else just leads to too many garbage and bland supports. Also if your going to do romantic supports actually try and build them up slightly a good half of the fates/awakening ones come out of no where.

As a side point i wouldn't mind if they brought back a reworked affinity system where you have different types of support boost making them more interesting from a gameplay perspective

Pretty much this. If relationships are going to be a major focus then fine, just don't half-ass it.
>One character pesters another and the other is annoyed but later reflects that she's a good person. This means they fucked offscreen I guess, because they suddenly have a kid.

I just want less than Awakening/Fates had but more than Echoes had.

Is there a game that has a relationship/marriage system like FE but lewder?
HGames acceptable.

Fire Emblem's narrative structure is a fucking mess and the way it relies on Supports means it will never, ever tell a character focused/driven story competently without a revamp.
There are two main problems for classic FE:
>Most characters can die at any point
>Supports are used to flesh out relationships

Incidental and secondary characters are often completely irrelevant after the chapter in which they are introduced and have - at best - brief, sporadic appearances in the main plot afterwards where they maybe chime in with one or two sentences at a time. IS don't want to spend time working on multiple iterations of scenes and lines that hinge on who lives and who dies, so a small central cast drive the plot, select side characters get somewhat prominent roles that end once they become recruitable, and everyone else gets one intro chapter and then fucks off to Supports for the rest of the game with only a handful of exceptions.

The second means that in classic FE pretty much no character arcs EVER receive focus in the main story besides those involving at least one Lord. Everything revolves around the Lords (or MU) and secondary characters barely ever interact with eachother because the Supports are where we get to see them talk and bond and that's it. Their arcs? Their growth? It's all in the Supports, which are often short as hell and unevenly paced with the main plot to boot.

Combined, this means FE has a history of having very shallow side-casts whose only notable interactions are with the MC and whose chemistry together often take up about 10-15 minutes of screentime in Supports, and who rarely appear outside a single chapter. For such massive rosters of units, you can usually count the important ones with both hands and the ones who'll actually be well rounded with just one.

>continued in next post...

Modern FE makes the problem even worse with the marriage system, because now a majority of nearly every secondary character's supports are just shitty romances that do barely anything to develop them because the devs can't think of anything to do with most potential pairings in the games. Just look at the absurd number of Awakening supports that are about two characters cooking and then suddenly being in love as an example of this. The child system also is hurt by the huge number of potential parents because they always only have two support templates for them - one for the guarenteed parent that feels unique, and a generic one for the variable parent where said parent has maybe two or three unique lines per rank so all the different options can fit into it snugly without it showing anything unique about them.

Plus the way the child units have been included so far is often pretty bad, with them never really appearing in the main story at all outside the ending and never speaking to their variable parent full stop outside Supports - even in their recruitment missions, we only see them meet the guarenteed parent because apparently doing a generic template for the rest like the supports did was too much of a fucking bother for IS.

So FE's problem of shallow secondary characters is now worse than ever in order to service a fucking romance system that is totally half-assed narratively. Fuck, it took until the 'fanservice' DLC for Fates/Awakening for us to even see most of the same gender interactions we have for their respective casts because supports for dudes with dudes and women with women were rare as gold-dust unless the MC was involved - and they STILL do nothing to show groups of characters interacting.

So yeah. FE fucking sucks for character writing.

I wish interactions didn't stop after marriage. I had them marry because I wanted to see them be lovey dovey, dumb game!

Elise is cute.
CUTE!

Don't do it like in Fates where characters just fuck, go through pregnancy, and have a kid on the spot somewhere between the scenes after three conversations. Awakening was better at this because it implied they would continue to further their relationship into the future and eventually have a kid.

But Echoes had supports.
Do meme builds and pairings (especially Berserker Azura if possible, though that requires marrying her...) so you’re mildly entertained

>Awakening was better at this
Not really because they still proposed after only having three conversations. Supports should never lead into proposal unless the characters have already known each other for a while like Mae and Boey. At most, they should just admit they like each other.

Raising the points for it is fine now and should stay, but I think limiting them more again would help. You can tell in Fates that some supports had more effort put into writing them than others, more than other games in the franchise. That's not to say every game doesn't have good and bad supports though, unlike what oldfags want to think.

Echoes had supports and most of them were pretty mediocre.

...

I'd rather less romantic ones. Stop with the marriage and kids shit.

I agree with most of this. FE9/10 were a step in the right direction with the Base conversation system, which was underutilized a bit but alleviated a few of these issues since you got to see the entire cast reacting to the events as they unfolded and led to some pretty good development for chunks of the side cast (notably Jill, arguably the most developed side character in the series as a whole). The Tellius games also actually updated dialogue when people died, meaning side characters didn't always just have to be written out of the story entirely.

It's a shame RD's support system had to be cut due to development time though.

Actually, you're right. I should have mentioned those as examples of steps in the right direction that IS sorta stumbled on and then failed to develop. If the newer games had those, reduced the number of romances, and maybe changed from "S rank means marriage" to "S rank means dating" it'd do a lot to help alleviate their problems.

Especially stuff like Echoes locking supports before certain points in the story. That does a lot to help the pacing and making them mesh with the story better.

>Up to Shadow Dragon, FE had localizations that had the characters talk in an almost old-english style formality, suitable for its fantasy/medieval setting
>Awakening begins to swing away from this and makes many characters speak like they in a modern-day anime, but some of the old-style writing is retained
>Fates goes full retard and everyone speaks in various flavors of crazy high school students
I hate this fucking game so much. Echoes was such a breath of fresh air even if the writing style sometimes resembled Awakening's.

You forget how most Shadow Dragon characters spoke and acted exactly the same and had little personality at all. I bet you loved Celica too.

Awakening was so awkward. Sometimes they'd speak like it's a medieval setting and then suddenly the tone would shift completely and they'd talk like they're in some Slice of Life anime.

>i think how it's used mechanically in battle is perfect in fates and doesn't need modification
I agree on this. Tying it into attack/guard stance fits so perfectly FE16 is going to feel like a downgrade if they don't do something similar as well.

PoR system is and always will be the best unless they go back and make another game that's geared more towards narrative than towards grinding/ matchmaking/ """RPG""" elements
>gating conversations behind certain chapters allow them to occur at specific times within a characters' arc of development
>support convos are often plot relevant and change depending on when the player triggers them
>no need to spam End Turn or play suboptimally or grind in order to raise support level - just play normally while using the characters that you want to gain support
literally the perfect system but it takes too much work and isn't compatible with grindan / eugenic planning mode of the new games.

Nope. In fact, I found Alm and Celica's humorous remarks to themselves while examining things to be out of place. Best moments from Echoes were with Mycen, Fernand, Berkut and Rudolph.

Love my wife Charlotte

What are you even talking about. I mean its good they aren't like boring robots for once in a FE game nor speak like high school students outside of special cases like Pieri

>Especially stuff like Echoes locking supports before certain points in the story.
see that's exactly what I liked so much about PoR's system. the fact that you need to play a certain number of chapters effectively means that convos are locked behind story progression. Ike and Ranulf's A support can only happen when you're about to beat the game, so Ranulf talks about how laguz can sense all sorts of weird auras coming off of the medallion as they get closer to Ashnard. This even applies to less important side characters -
Mist and Titania's C support changes on whether or not the party has joined the Crimean Liberation Army yet - if you trigger it after chapter 18, Mist mentions how her chores are slightly different now that they're part of an entire army instead of just being independent mercenaries, and she mentions that Ike's been made into its general. That might not sound like much but little details like this add to the impression that the characters are connected to the world that they live in.

Compare that to, say, Awakening. Chrom and Robin are without a doubt the most important characters in the game. But all of their supports, C- S, can be achieved as early as the second chapter, which is basically immediately after they meet each other, or as late as the final battle with Gangrel. a lot of stuff happens in between those points in time, Emmeryn dies for fuck's sake, but the support has to be written such that it makes sense for it to occur at either of those points in time. same goes for every support in Awakening, they need to make sense immediately after meeting and also immediately before fighting Grima. that's why they're all these weird,casual jokesy vignettes that are totally disconnected from the plot.

of course I'm apparently in the minority because from what I can tell most people who play Fire Emblem now really enjoy the tone and style of the Awakening and Fates supports. but still, I mourn for the missed potential.

Your wife's a whore lmao

I don't like the fateswakening system either.

Uncalled for

Limit them, 90% of Fateswakening supports are useless fluff. There's no reason to have everyone romanceable with everyone either. Shipping autists should be restricted.

Leon was fine, the reason for his gay crush was justified, and even though he's flamboyant, it never comes across as a negative or annoying trait. He just needed a few more supports talking about something other than his gayness.

you don't have to localize a character's dialogue into modern vernacular English in order to make them have an interesting personality. Hector, Serra, and Bartre were rather silly characters who managed to never break the style. Sain and Merlinus were entertaining and they were even more flowery than the average character, and that's just from one game.

>Berkut
Disgusting.

On topic though, I have to agree with anyone saying PoR's system was the best in the series.

Hector wasn't silly though. He just had an actual personality unlike most lords. Also Sain was easily more 'gimmicky' than, say, Laslow. Also his best friend was one of the robots user mentioned.

Completely agreed on all points.

My favourite instance of Awakening's handling of supports is how you get Basilio and Flavia literally right as Grima rises and they still make no reference to it happening or how you're rushing to perform the ritual and then confront him. They might as well have joined you during the campaigns against Walhart or Gangrel since they're entirely written as if you're just involved in a regular war. It fucking sucks, bith because we never get to see them seriously address the looming threat and because it means their character building feels out of place.

Nevermind how fucking weird Morgan's paralogue and supports are if either of them are the parent and there's still no references to Grima made.

>talking shit about Berkut

I enjoy supports, but I'd be in favor of less supports for each unit IF that meant they were more relevant to the unit's personal story or to the story as a whole. Quality over quantity.

I would've really liked the support system if the dialogue was any good, but ever since FE came about the waifus the writing tanked. Really missed the supports from PoR

>cuck ass manchild that sacrificed the only person who gave a shit about him at that point for some power only to get his ass handed to him by his superior cousin yet again
Do you self-insert as him? He's like Narcian but unfunny, a real pathetic piece of garbage.

Hey at least narcian was meant to be a joke. Berkut is just shit.

True, a pretty harsh comparison for Narcian but I felt it had to be said. I'd take goofballs like him over Berkut anyday.

FE has been about waifus since 6 though, except for 10 and Fates where it was more about fujos/husbandos.

Needs more incest

Make the supports MC only in exchange for them being 3D rendered in the world

>voiced supports
No no no
Constantly adding voices guts rpgs because when people do, they usually supplement the rising cost by gutting dialogue length. Look at Fallout 1,2, and NV to 4, for example.

Keep it up and you'll be the one saying 'Uncle!', kid.

I love Seliph!

Look man, you haven't played a single game before Awakening besides 7 and that's OK, but there's no need to spout shit just to try to force a narrative.

This is the edgiest thing I've ever read

>Hector wasn't silly though.
I actually forgot that I had started that sentence with Hector before finishing it lol.
>Also Sain was easily more 'gimmicky' than, say, Laslow.
the point being disputed wasn't about whether or not characters are 'gimmicky', though. the point was the localization style shifting from the pseudo-Victorian era English of 7-10 ("Damn! Blast! Scoundrel!") towards modern vernacular English (Elise: You mean it, Avatar?! Thank you, thank you, thank you! You're the best! I love you THE MOST!!

>unzips Dread Fighter Clive
>he teleports behind Berkuck and dispatches him with an instant crit
>let Tobin have his way with Rinea
Psh, nothing personnel kid.

Narcian a cute desu

>6 has a harem protag who can marry an assortment of girls, including his teacher
>7 has the first 'self-insert' and Lyn
Sounds like you're the one who hasn't played any.

>FE has been about waifus since 6
4 definitely has more shipping / waifus than 6 so I don't understand why you would draw the line there.

>harem
>only gets with one girl
Not how it works buddy.

Echoes' voice acting actually made the anime-speak more obvious for me. Clive voice makes him sound like a surfer dude reciting Shakespeare, and Mae and Est pretty much speak like valley girls, with a bunch of "likes" and "duhs" in their dialogue.

>people seriously try to equate games with a createable player character that can marry ANY other playable character, grandpas, little kids, you name it to any game before Awakening
Can someone explain this meme to me?

>7 has the first 'self-insert'
yeah a self insert that can't even talk to or support with anyone outside of some token "gee thanks" or "man this battle is going to be tough" between chapters.

fast forward to the 3DS games and you have this: youtube.com/watch?v=qE0f0Hq0Voo it's not even comparable

>harem protag
It is in most anime.

The support system is great and one of the primary reasons I like the series.
>Any changes you'd like to see
The whole "get supports with everyone" has gone too far. Going back to the old "can only max one support" would be alright, but maybe going too far.
While I am NOT advocating for more marriage bullshit and the trash that is S supports, I'd like a system that has you max one support with different gender characters, making them a couple. Again, marriage and children bullshit is not necessary. In fact the only actual mention of them being a couple being their unique unified ending would be enough. Another support with a same gender character should be possible as well, allowing for a "best buddy" bond to develop parallel with pairing bonds.

Drop it completely and do what Genealogy did where each chapter has an assortment of character conversations with various benefits. PoR and RD's base conversations also works.

Support conversations and ranks feel like they don't even have a proper place anymore and are just there for the sake of being there.

the comparison is made so as to dispute whether or not the tradeoffs involved with including that feature - being able to marry any character, at the expense of the structure and sometimes quality of the conversations + character development - is worth it. I think it's a valid comparison.

It's great and I'm glad Binding Blade added it in. Another reason it's a great game.

Now I wish they'd scale them back and work on making them good again.

No, it isn't worth it. Argument over.

By that same logic, you compare it to a self-insert who is entirely automated aside from example who they support with. No dialogue options and no influencing their personality or choices aside from one instance that even seems out of character.

By that logic they could let you customize items for Roy to wear, change his name and call him a self-insert and he'd be the same as Corrin.

>Another support with a same gender character should be possible as well, allowing for a "best buddy" bond to develop parallel with pairing bonds.
this exact feature is always something I wished was in the GBA games. take for instance Sain and Kent. Sain and Kent's A support is Sain giving Kent advice on how to get with Lyn, but... by virtue of accessing Sain and Kent's A support you lock Kent out of being able to get with Lyn. it seems contradictory.

I wish all support system were as good and simple as PoR.
All you have to do is deploy 2 characters on the map and that's it you are fucking done, no need to stick both units together for the whole god damn map.
And since you can't grind and get max support in 3/4 maps, they can write better dialogue that make sense for the current events in the story.

>Echoes was such a breath of fresh air
This is the most wrong thing I've ever read. As someone who loves the original Gaiden for its simplistic story, slower gameplay and lower movement for most characters, Echoes bugged me to no end. Celica's character is the third worst out of the entire series to me, as every decision she made was beyond autistic and unwarranted. The only good thing about it was Alm's character, everything else was horrible.

The things she do, she does in Gaiden as well. Except Echoes gives the reason why, and some more too.

>opinion
>wrong
>calls Celica autistic
Funny

Same thing happens with one of Lilina's supports in FE6, I think with Marcus. In the A support, Lilina resolves to confess her feelings to Roy or something before he finds another girl, but since Lilina just spent her A support on realizing that, she can no longer ever marry Roy.

>By that logic they could let you customize items for Roy to wear, change his name and call him a self-insert and he'd be the same as Corrin.
if you did that, and then threw in 1st person confession scenes and Private Quarters, then... yeah kind of. much of Fates and Awakening directed so as to place the player directly into the MU's shoes. all of the cutscenes are in first-person perspective. just look at the image, they are all looking at YOU, because you are so important to all of them.

Yes, she does do them in Gaiden, but name one (1) person that plays Gaiden for the story. If someone is playing it, it's for the gameplay most likely, and giving something reasoning is only a good argument if those reasons make sense

The psuedo-victorian english returns in Echoes though, as all the supposedly noble characters speak that way.

...

At least I'm not alone in this.

Something strange happened to me in PoR though. I deployed Soren and Stefan in all maps, but I wasn't allowed to get their A support. Made me kinda upset, even if it isn't canon.

But it's entirely superficial because they are still their own character. If you did that to Roy, it wouldn't change anything about his personality or role in the story, so acting like the 'self-inserts' in Awakening and Fates is the source of all 'waifus' in the franchise is stupid.

Your post in contradictory if you can enjoy Gaiden for its gameplay and ignore the story, but can't enjoy Echoes for it's similar gameplay and ignore its story as well.
If you ignore story then graphics are the greatest difference, and I much prefer the new one's.

and yet I would argue that the writing of the character is restricted so as to avoid breaking the illusion of the self-insert. they're weak characters, BECAUSE they're desinged as self-inserts. for instance Awakening's Japanese version has an option to remove all of the MU's dialogue, and the plot still works... mostly youtube.com/watch?v=ZsGQyTiN2GE

You couldn't conceivably do that with Ike, or Sigurd, or Micaiah. you could do it with Roy but it would require some work.The MU is intentionally conceived so as to be passive and a possible recipient for the player to project themselves onto. In Awakening it's not that much of a problem because Chrom is there to make decisions and carry the plot. In Fates it's more jarring, especially in Conquest, because Corrin just acts like a namby pamby the entire game.

>tfw will never play fight with Elise

But Roy and Eliwood are very passive as well. Ephraim is a bit less so but otherwise not exactly brimming with personality, same as with Alm in Echoes. Celica and Eirika are female versions of this.

A common thing is for the MC to be fairly bland and nondescript, in part to be inoffensive and part to be easy for people to relate to or even self-insert as. A character doesn't have to have a "this is a self-insert" tag on them to function as one. Otherwise there probably wouldn't be far more Camilla/Takumi doujins than Camilla/Mamui ones.

It's worth noting fates tried experimenting by making a large percentage of the cast 'retreat' instead of die so they can still take part in the story but the game is still basically the Corrin show

You realise the mute option alters the script right

>But Roy and Eliwood are very passive as well.
well that's why I didn't use them as examples of strong characters. like I said you could turn FE6 into a Fateswakening style game pretty easily, same for 7 - you could just adapt Mark into an actual unit.

But was a good idea? Was was the result of the experiment?

What is your favorite game and why is it anything but Fateswakening

Probably PoR, but I can't really point at one specific game. Most of the games are good in their own way. Even Awakening and Fates.

Which is why I mentioned Roy as an example. I also fully expect that Mark will be turned into an actual unit with supports if there's an FE7 remake.

Anyway I just think people get too hung up over muh self-insert as an easy scapegoat that makes previous games immune to criticisms used for 'waifus' and such.

They didn't do anything with it as most characters besides Corrin or Azura do anything relevant. What's especially dumb is that most the siblings (especially Hinoka and Leo) actually get more characterisation in the rout where you don't use them which just seems off

PoR because it was the first I played.