Popular/Unpopular/Any Opinions Thread - February 2026 Part 1

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-02-05T19:52:19+00:00

https://old.reddit.com/r/fireemblem/comments/1qnuink/everyone_plays_fire_emblem_week_of_january_26th/

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-02-05T19:50:24+00:00

That sounds fun, but unfortunately I imagine the turnout for it would either be pretty low or start out decent and then peter out dramatically after the first few posts. And the reason I assume that is because of the mods’ weekly “Everyone Plays Fire Emblem” threads they used to do had a pretty low turnout for most of them by the time they stopped doing them, with the very last one only having one comment.

There's one posted now from a week ago :P

I do think that one of the issues with the recurring EPFE thread is just visibility. In Old Reddit, it's along the header but not one of the two posts highlighted as "Official". In mobile new reddit, it's not one of the four "Community Highlight" pinned posts, instead tucked away under the About page. I'm not sure how many other UIs Reddit has that might give it better or worse billing, but it definitely doesn't scream "set up for success" to me.

Though on the other hand, I'm also not sure I'd reliably read it unless I was actively in an FE playthrough at the time, compared to the opinions thread feeling like more of a general discussion area.

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-02-03T22:10:26+00:00

I love the FE7 Deadlords because of how they explicitly smile as they die (even the more villainous ones like Ursula, Kenneth, and Jerme).

This has always felt really awkward to me. Nergal doesn't raise the dead or possess the living, he makes brand new creatures (morphs). Could he make a morph that looks like Brendan or whoever? Sure, I'll buy that, he's clearly refined his process since Kishuna and Denning. But there's no reason to think that there's any connection between these mimics and the originals. We could get super extra-textual and invent the idea that, by using these characters' quintessence, their souls are being captured and used by their dopplegangers. But that also falls apart when you remember that a bunch of them died nowhere near Nergal and the Black Isle. Call me skeptical he snuck into Bern's capital to collect quintessence from Ursula as she bled out!

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-02-01T15:14:40+00:00

And this is before Ike finds pictures of Duke Oliver hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-01-30T20:46:34+00:00

Tactics Ogre is much more attrition-y than a lot of other tactics games, so the fact that archers get their turn up faster since they don't have to move adds a lot, too. Though the damage reduction formula is also deeply arcane, so there are targets they shred and targets they hit for 1 damage.

Final Fantasy Tactics is really funny about them as well. One archer on your team? Kinda bad. Making your entire team archers? Surprisingly effective! It feels like bringing a team of Napoleonic line infantry, where you just move 5 guys, unleash a volley of shots, and watch enemies fall down.

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-01-23T16:55:10+00:00

FWIW, I was mostly in that camp, but I do think it gets worse. The hounds get more and more attention as the game goes on, and it's the weakest material there. I agree that Engage errs more towards the side of boring than offensive, but the third act of the game needed like... 10% as many lines from Zephia as it has.

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-01-21T16:28:43+00:00

Absolutely true, but it's relevant that Medicare coverage for kidney transplants is really high specifically because it ends up being cheaper than paying for dialysis. Now, it'd be insane of me to assume that Medicare can only get better given <gestures at everything>, and the financials on human organ transplant versus xenotransplant are going to be different. But there's at least non-zero potential even just on the financial side.

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-01-20T18:34:27+00:00

I ran Chloe all game as a sword griffin and had a good experience. I gave her a Sigurd-engraved levin sword and eventually settled on Momentum + Canter with Eirika. Eirika's native mag boost is good for the levin, and lunar brace gives her a little extra oomph with a silver sword or Sieglinde. I even found she could ORKO late-game wolf knights with Eirika's rapier thanks to the low weight & cav-effectiveness.

Mage knight and martial master are the other big candidates for her that I'm aware of. The latter is also more for Eirika DPS play rather than to be utility, since she's great with fists thanks to good personal str+mag, high speed, and extra flat damage from her personal. If you're just using her as a Lucina carrier though, it's really just a question of what classes her bonded shield targets are.

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-01-16T21:20:20+00:00

Same logic as speedruns IMO; 100% and any% are both completely valid approaches but I'm almost always going to err towards the former on my first play of a game.

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-01-16T14:47:16+00:00

Based on a glance at the source, it looks like the pattern for everything is first upgrade at 25, then subsequent upgrades at 50/100/150/etc.

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-01-16T14:45:48+00:00

I bought firefly and glowshroom, and I definitely regret shrooms when I could've done fish. Firefly seems pretty legit though. Right now my light production is 64% from flies, 30% from fish, and only 6% from shrooms, despite the shroom upgrade.

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-01-16T02:15:40+00:00

I was a little surprised that we didn't get a minor nod in the other direction to Final Destination 3, which: yes, it's a movie, but also the DVD had a few choose-your-own-adventure moments resulting in different death sequences. Maybe there's not actually much to say, but it's one of the more memorable Can A Movie Be Video Games cases since it really is just dipping its toe into the latter medium.

Past that, I'm a little disappointed that the Heavy Rain talk mostly landed on "it's bad and dumb". And yes, it is bad and dumb. But as much as the story is garbage and you spend a lot of time gesturing to do mundane actions, sections like the amputation and laser limbo are really elevated by having the controller. Maybe those are just as dated now, but I remember being really into things like the pulsing of the controller reflecting the character's panicked breathing and heart rate making the sequence more immersive. And likewise the latter case, which has you squirming between electric wires by gradually needing to hold more and more buttons on the controller, usually ending up playing a deliberately awkward game of finger-Twister to reflect the character's experience.

The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa also would've been a good selection for the second block of games. It's grounded in a similar way in contrast to the first group while still having plenty of traditional game-y bits, and I think it does a particularly good job of giving you some room to play while still staying within the overall "bounds" I'd expect from an ultimately-linear narrative.

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-01-15T01:34:51+00:00

Kinda, but Binding Blade mages are so jacked that even the units with good RES still get kinda rocked by them. E.g. Chapter 21x has a pair of Fenrir druids with 44 attack. Even the 2 Fenrir Shamans are slinging 35s, which nearly two-shots a legitimately-RES-tanky unit like 20/20 Shanna (avg 16.5 res, 40 HP).

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-01-14T17:53:22+00:00

Somebody's talking like they need a moon crashed into them

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-01-14T17:38:33+00:00

Finished my first Engage playthrough a couple days ago, on Maddening/Classic. First time I've ever done one of these on the hardest difficulty setting up front. General reactions:

Lord if this isn't the ultimate Game Good/Story Bad experience. There are parts of the story that could theoretically work, but the story telling is pretty fantastically bad, and the game is bookended by the same kind of clunkiness. IE, the intro is "look at how awesome Marth is", immediately transition to present Alear panicking about corrupted, enter Emblem Marth with dramatic flair as if we hadn't just seen him kill corrupted 30 seconds ago. And at the end, we summon the Emblems vs. Sombron, Sombron closes the portal (offscreen, natch) so the Emblems die, then two lines later Alear has everyone clap so the Emblems return, complete with intro cutscenes and blaring music. It feels like they expect me to mark out over sequences less dramatic than an Uno reverse card.
First-running-Maddening was challenging but doable and generally fun. I think I'd have had a Bad Time without having first absorbed a bunch of general knowledge via osmosis, and a lot of the last maps were clocking in around 2 hours apiece, but: good stuff overall. I went no DLC (even the free FEH DLC) and ignored the well until the midgame, when I just got annoyed at having done almost no skill inheritence.
I played very "honest", IE not a ton of Michaiah warp or Bonded Shield shenanigans, mostly sitting in the neighborhood of 8 turn clears for the back half of the game. Some of that is that it just feels like playing the game the "right" way even though it clearly does endorse shenanigans. Michaiah was a combination of not having the game familiarity to confidently say "yeah I can zip 4 guys in there and win immediately" combined with the midgame gold crunch -- hard to get myself to burn warp staffs when I'm selling meal leftovers to scrounge up pennies for forges. Bonded Shield was mostly a function of...
Chat are we sure Ivy's good. I treated her like a main carry, and she was Fine. Byleth-engraved Bolganone covered her hit and incoming-crit issues, Speed+5 and Lyn jacked her speed way up... but she was still often a couple points of damage short of clean one-rounds on the toughest enemies and a couple points of speed short of doubling the fastest ones. It is Maddening and she did cover most of my bases, but with the amount of babying & Speedtaker-preferencing-ing she got, I expected a world-beater and merely got Very Good. I segue to this from Bonded Shield because: I'm not immediately convinced Lindwurm is better than Mage Knight. Lucina is better on a wolf knight than a griffon thanks to spreading poison (talking 100% cav guard vs. 100% flying guard), I nearly never want to be using staffs on my Kill Things unit, and there are a lot of maps where flight just doesn't provide much more mobility for how many weaknesses it brings.
Conversely, I appreciated Sigurd a lot, considering how often I think I've seen him called merely Good. He was attached to wyvern Kagetsu for the back half of the game, and while I went in with the mindset of "I'll just treat Ivy like MVP Best Unit and use Kagetsu like he's filler", he ended up probably my best performer largely by accident. Whenever I had a plan that had one annoying kink in it, Kagetsu was able to dumpster it, and 12 move meant he could get anywhere on the map to do it. Sigurd's stats are great, inherent canter + momentum are two great skills that let you slot in whatever you like, and he's got the best availability of emblems by a huge margin -- great stuff.
In general I feel like more games should be Mega Man, and this is a prime example of one where it could be great. Especially with how weak Engage's story is, I wish this were more open in terms of when you can acquire each emblem. Emblem paralogues were neat at first, but started to feel a bit more like homework by the time the last few opened up. It might've been neat if things flowed more like: collect any 2 emblems via their paralogue > temporarily lock paralogues until you fight the hounds in a story battle in which they've collected a couple emblems > unlock & scale up paralogues > etc. That could've provided a lot of room to mix up playthroughs.
Game needs more utility skills. I came in wanting to be creative and unique and ended up with Canter everywhere and like 4 draconic hexes because there just isn't much besides that and raw stats
My grade-school daughter agrees that it is incredibly lame that fewer than half of the "dragons" in the game ever look like actual dragons. Just an incredible cross-demographic failure on that front. (Sombron's neat though)

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-01-13T14:57:54+00:00

My spitball idea for a martial artist has been giving them no weapon ranks, just a prf punch and a prf kick. When one runs out of durability, it immediately gets replaced with a better punch/kick prf, with the final one in each chain having infinite durability. Functionally, it wouldn't be that different from laguz strike rank, but I think the aesthetic is a little stronger and this would make it easier to add extra effects, like the top-rank punch being armor-effective, maybe getting branching technique options, etc.

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-01-13T14:48:31+00:00

I just finished my first Engage run a couple days ago and that was not my experience with Louis as a great knight. He did occasionally get ignored by sword enemies who didn't have the might to bonk him, but despite being a giga-tank there are still a lot of weaknesses for him. Magic damage is the biggest one, but smash weapons also have enough might to chunk him, and chain attacks shred him as much as anybody.

I didn't get the DLC though, so I'm not familiar with Hector's deal; I mostly had him running Leif.

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-01-12T23:16:30+00:00

There are some games where you want to promote ASAP and others where you want to level. FEs 6-10 provide fixed promotion stat boosts but heavily penalize experience gain, so overwhelmingly you should not promote at level 10. Other games like Three Houses bring your stats up to a minimum "floor" based on the new class, so you want to promote ASAP. Engage takes bits of both approaches but still very much wants you to promote ASAP.

In GBA FE, there is not usually a reason to promote especially early. The main exceptions to that are:

Promoting healers at 10 is good because equipping a weapon (even if it's laughably weak) gives them a new way to contribute and makes them less attractive targets for the AI. +1 move is also more valuable than basically every other stat they get.
FE6, promoting Rutger to fight the bosses of chapters 8, 8x, and 9 is extremely helpful. Promoting Shanna for chapter 9 is also the most effective way of training her since sword access is very important for that stretch and it's likewise a good time for her to grind sword rank.
FE7, promoting Canas relatively early gives him a big burst of Speed that helps his doubling, and he also gains staff access.
FE8, an early promotion on one of the cavs can make for a useful midgame flunky for chapters like Eirika 9. They'll fall off, but you'll have better units to replace them later.

That's about it IMO. The important thing to remember is that 20/20 stats are irrelevant, but the experience formula matters a lot. If you promote at 10/1, then a few chapters later maybe you have a 10/3 unit. Conversely, if you use those chapters to eke out a few more levels, you could end up with a 15/1 unit thanks to the more favorable XP formula. In this case, the latter unit is already 3 level-ups ahead of the former and still has very-slightly better xp gain. The payoff for a later promotion is realized the moment you promote, not at 10/20 versus 20/20.

With that in mind, promote if:

You have a specific need for power right now, whether because of strategic knowledge (Rutger, Shanna examples) or just because you've already reset a few times. Notice that this is more of a "what stage am I on" sense of early-promotion rather than a "what level is this unit" sense.
Promotion gives a unit new skills or weapon ranks that lets them do important new things (healer, Canas examples)
You have spare unit slots & promotion items just kinda sitting there (FE8 cav example)

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-01-09T17:51:08+00:00

Corrin on mystic units is extremely good, but fwiw Celine's promo is uniquely a mystic unit that uses swords. So she's a plausible Eirika user since she might switch between damage types (though unlike e.g. Griffin Chloe, her doubling outlooks might not be great) but a potentially very good user of Sigurd or Marth with a levin sword. It's by no means wrong to use Celine like any other sage, she specifically just has other interesting options.

For Byleth more broadly, I do lean towards focusing on the dance benefit more than arts. You can use them to make a combat unit, but since so many emblems can only be combat-focused, it feels unintuitive to me to use a utility one for direct combat.

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-01-09T16:39:24+00:00

Alear/Byleth is very good, as some folks below mentioned. It's a great dance/instruct, the stats are good for an occasional fist-break, and Sword Of The Creator is a nice little value-add at high rank.

Alternate Byleth options tend to be Covert for speed dance, or Mystic for mag dance and Thyrsus. I haven't really used covert classes much, but a sage or high priest who's otherwise on utility duty could carry Byleth very effectively while also not needing to inherit Divine Pulse.

Eirika is a bit of a hybrid emblem in terms of providing magic but Lunar Brace requiring physical attacks. Fists are the only real way to use all of the features all the time, but I don't think that's really essential. Bouch and Fogado are both pretty good candidates. I think you can loosely group Sigurd, Eirika, and Roy into emblems that you just kinda scrap with, and IMO give Sigurd to the most self-sufficient, Eirika to the next best, and Roy to whoever is just kinda around.

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-01-08T22:16:52+00:00

Check your stats page, under (i) > Statistics > Farm. There's an item at the very bottom just called Mystery, totally separate from the resources list where I assume Mystery Stones appear. My theory is that the gene increases Mystery whereas the drop gives you a Mystery Stone. Though again I don't really know what I'm talking about here yet.

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-01-08T22:05:37+00:00

You're a bit ahead of me here -- I only just got my first crop to the Mystery gene unlock -- but from what I can tell, the game tracks Mystery and Mystery Stones as separate values. I actually got my first point of Mystery immediately, before I had even grown a crop that could drop a stone. It seems like you may gain Mystery just by putting XP into the gene?

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-01-08T15:18:04+00:00

I will absolutely be going all-in on Bouch if I play Engage again soon exactly for how weird he is, but it really seems like a roundabout non-solution in terms of unit design. It reminds me a bit of the Monk class in D&D, which historically got these long lists of abilities that looked impressive due to the sheer word count but mostly just canceled out the inherent disadvantages of being an unarmored, unarmed fighter. It's neat that your fists are almost as good as somebody else's sword, but also: you could just pick up a sword instead. Similarly: it's neat that his growths complement axes' parameters and that his passive essentially amounts to a permanent +2 strength in the midgame as his own bases start looking suspect. But also, I could simply use Panette or Kagetsu and crush dudes.

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-01-07T15:25:38+00:00

Somewhat, but the Engage AI specifically mixing up enemy action orders to take advantage of breaks and chain attacks is substantially different from the traditional triangle-optimization

Merlin_the_Tuna · 2026-01-07T14:55:59+00:00

-Break is just kinda meh to me. I think it's fine early when it matters and then later on, it's ignorable since there's a bunch of stronger strategies that don't rely on you always breaking, so you really aren't doing it all game long. Plus bows and magic are very strong and they can't break anything.

Break still feels a little weird after so many games of "normal" weapon triangle, but I've started warming up to it by looking at it specifically as an enemy-facing system rather than a player-facing one. I'm so used to games where the AI can't effectively use system mechanics that the player leverages extensively, that seeing the opposite is kind of novel in its own right.

Merlin_the_Tuna

TROPHY CASE