@@jmsgridiron5628 Because Joshua is strictly better, and you have not many deployment slots. You get him much earlier and je straight up maxes out, or gets extremely close to, maxing out every stat. And I mean EVERY stat.
My favorite support (outside the classic Dorcas X Vaida ofc) is the one where Amelia and Neimi discuss their love for michew berries while fighting hordes of undead on a Ghost Ship. That kind of amazing moments are somewhat lost with base conversations. Sure, it makes more sense, but I miss the inherent madness of two relative strangers baring their heart in the middle of a bloody battlefield.
negative supports seem like they have a fairly obvious solution by taking inspiration from the faye-alm support: keep the support bonuses overall beneficial ( or at least, beneficial for certain strategies and character builds ), but slide in some support _penalties_ to contextualize their distaste for each other. two peeps that have an antagonistic rivalry, for example, could get bonuses to might and crit while suffering from penalties to hit and avoid, to represent them trying too hard to do better than the other. combine that with asymmetric supports, and you could have something like a mentor-student archer relationship where the stressed and overworked student gets significant bonuses to hit, but also loses avoid and crit avoid due too concentrating too much on their aim. this sort of thing wouldn't work for _all_ negative relationships, and most cases would probably just end up being offensive bonuses in exchange for poorer defenses, but ... i mean, if you're stuck fighting in an unpleasant situation, it's just kinda expected that you'd focus on winning as fast as possible at the cost of your own safety another way i saw someone mention was to combine it with pre-established supports by having actual _negative_ support ranks, allowing the support to provide nothing but penalties without forcing the player to _choose_ to make their units anti-synergistic. i mean, if two units naturally butt heads in a way that makes them outright worse at fighting, that clash probably isn't gonna wait for them to spend one or two whole maps fighting together and then bump into each other when they get back home. it's something that could also be used to add an interesting aspect to intentionally good units; you're obviously gonna wanna make the most use out 'em on a normal playthrough, but if you need them at full strength? you're gonna have to send them to separate parts of the map, or else they'll sabotage each other. in the same vein, though, if you ever want to patch up their relationship and fix that weakness they share? well, better bite that bullet when you aren't relying on their strength to carry you through a tough situation and, hell, both of those can be combined. relationships are complicated things and the arcs they take can be _wild._ subsequently, progressing through a support should probably always improve it as a whole, but that doesn't mean you can't end up with a support bonus that starts simple, before suddenly twisting itself into one with both bonuses and penalty, then finally ends off with an entirely ( or almost entirely ) positive stat spread that may nonetheless not remotely resemble the one it started with
I actually thought about adding something similar to that if I were to make a Fe hack at some point. The "solution" that I came to was that these negative supports would double the effects of the positive gains to balance the debuff they inflict. This one gives less avoid and def/res but increases damage and speed more than a normal support would. This one reduces crit avoid but increases hit and crit by a lot. Completely negative effects never crossed my mind tho, it does sound interesting but I don't think it would be a good idea gameplay wise.
I’m surprised he got through Awakening and Fates without mentioning child characters and the potential eugenics that comes with them. Or fates multiple reclass options that are based on a characters A+ and S supports. But I guess this video covers support bonuses and activations only. So will there be a “How fire emblem balanced child characters/reclassing” in the future?
I don't actually remember a support grind for the supports of most of my main units in Sacred Stones. That's, uh, probably because I do remember being quite committed to conquering the Tower of Valni whenever a floor opened up. Spending turns hunting for treasure in the desert map probably also had an influence. Grinding supports for benched units because I wanted to give them certain endings was quite a slog, though.
Supports in Sacred Stones felt incredibly natural because usually I was trying to do things like you said: treasure hunting, tower grinding, monster skirmishes, and then the story followed. It was nice to see lots of units have high supports, unlike grinding them in the earlier games.
I can kind of get why marcus supports with merlinus. The idea is Marcus is there to deal with ambush spawns that will go for merlinus because the devs didn’t realize how stupid good marcus was so they figured this would let him see use while letting you build the weaker units.
This video made me think... How could future Fire Emblem games improve on the support system? I think the answer could be found in the indie game Wildermyth that came out recently. Not to get into a long post but there are two main points I'd like to point out. Two problems where Fire Emblem Supports have issues and what Wildermyth could help inspire to fix them. One of the points was highlighted in this video where characters tend to like each other less but still get bonuses. In Wildermyth there are three types of relationships that can form between party members based on random events and the characters personalities/player choices. You have your standard "friendship" relationship and "lover" relationship but you also have the "Rivalry" relationship. Rivalry relationships are interesting because they are a map-wide effect where if one of the characters lands a crit, The other character has an increased chance to crit until it happens. It makes sense as both characters would be trying to one-up/do better than the other one. I doubt it would be balanced as a map-wide effect in Fire Emblem and crits would make things a bit too insane but having a close-range effect of where if one character does an action then the rival support does the action better in the same turn. The other big complaint Fire Emblem supports have in three of the four latest installments are the avatar supports. Wildermyth has a feature when creating your characters that you scale 11 personality traits on a scale of 1/100 and your top 2 usually influences how the character talks/reacts in any given event. This system really allows for multiple avatar characters to naturally build supports/relationships given the event system in the game but in a game like Fire Emblem it could definitely decide how each character is treated and treats the avatar. The issue with this one is now that everything is fully voice acted... It'd be a lot more work/budget than Nintendo probably wants to put in the game. Great video!
This was a really nice and comprehensive look at supports, and makes me want to play the Tellius games even more now that I know that they actually tried with supports!
I can’t believe Erk and Serra telling each other that they’re both going to die alone causes them to not only get stronger around each other but get married after the war
@@josephmitchell6512 I'm ErkxPriscilla because the girl deserves a happy ending and Erk is literally her only Support option who can marry her, thanks to his social standing from Pent.
After playing FE7 and FE3H I can say that more accessible supports (not locked behind hours of grinding) is essential to this series. When I played FE7 characters not from Lyn mode or named Eliwood/Hector felt really bland. Compare that to FE3H where characters feel a lot more fleshed out by their support conversations. Sylvain is probably the best example of this going from stereotypical lazy good for nothing to a character who has clear motivations and reasons which tie into the overarching narrative and themes of FE3H. Sure the system only gives hit and avoid for the most part but on Maddening I need every point of those stats I can get so I'm okay with it. The only other major gripe is that I think characters should have S supports available during the main story to avoid having certain characters, like Ignatz, who promises to spend their life with everyone. However I think that the larger issues with the support system that hampers the writing of Fire Emblem is that it is always one to one. The best way to put this problem into perspective is that in FE3H Dimitri, Felix, Sylvain and Ingrid are childhood friends and yet we never get to see a scene of just the four of them. Despite this group dynamic likely having a large impact on all four characters we never get to see it. We get to see how characters interact as part of a larger group in the major story cutscenes but these scenes tend to focus on the main lord and plot and have very little if any character development for other characters. This is where I would like to see the support system improve, more small group cutscenes, similar to events in Stardew Valley and Harvest Moon.
3H definitely felt odd with only the protagonist having S-level supports and how multiple A-supports have so many characters dedicating themselves to one-another and then that not being mentioned at all in the "what happened after the war" descriptions. I did really enjoy playing matchmaker in Awakening. And the stat bonuses have never really mattered to me conceptually. I just want to have a game with these social sim elements while tied to game genres other than Candy Crush-style games. So then that way I can enjoy a fun story & characters but take breaks with gameplay.
@@haruhirogrimgar6047 FE3H definetly has what for the sake breivity I'm going to coin the "Ignatz effect", where characters promise themselves to everyone due to the lack of S supports. One neat bonus of this that I didn't notice until I started Birthright (Not done yet no spoilers please) was that S-Supports go from platonic to marriage in a scene which is a bit sudden in terms of pacing. The Ignatz effect solves this problem by allowing characters to setup their paired endings in their A supports. Now both approaches have problems. Birthright's approach struggles with pacing while the FE3H struggles with the Ignatz effect. My proposed solution is to simply make the commitment happen at the A support but don't marry until the S support. Gives a more natural relationship progression.
The way I would balance games with a large number of supports is to only allow a character to have 1 support active at any one time ( these supports of course being GBA levels of strong )
I like the idea of negative supports. Think of the challenge runs, math emblemers, y'all have something to gain, too, ha! But seriously, I would rather have as many kinds of relationships as possible, both positive and negative and maybe even somewhere in between, than appease the people who carry on ad nauseum about argument c supports. Like, I'm sorry, with most supports you go from c to b to a, how is a writer not supposed to go with set-up, conflict, resolution sometimes? Bah, I digress. I don't want it to sound like I'm mad at Bopper for doing it though! The professor has a unique and off-kilter suave delivery which wins me over to his side every time. Keep rockin' it, good fellows!
You know you have played too much Fire Emblem Blazing Sword when you hear 60 turns and find it to be short. I could have Wallace Solo an entire map in less turns that I have him build a single support rank.
this good vid I think it's interesting that you skipped FE10 support building altogether because it's basically the granddaddy of the 3DS system, building supports pretty naturally through things you're already doing during normal gameplay, but also for starting turns adjacent like GBA. Speaking from a pure mechanical standpoint, I quite like the way it builds. But 1 per person and the lack of any real convos is of course the real bummer.
Yeah. I hardly pay attention to the benefit of supports while playing, but still grind Awakening 99 hours just to unlock all support conversations, including S-rank and hidden ones from DLC content.
With regards to support conversations being a vehicle of character arcs: one limitation of the system is that because characters can have support conversations with multiple characters in most FE games, characters can't actually grow in ways that could possibly affect other supports. If a character grows in a support, it has to be on a trait that is only referenced in that one support. This really hurts some supports -- Sain's are a good example of this. It really feels like Rebecca-Sain is meant to be building up to character growth for Sain for him to stop womanizing, but the game can't actually commit to that because Sain hitting on girls is the premise of most of his other supports. Peri is another example of this, where I feel she could have been a much more interesting character if her supports involved her changing, but they can't because being a murderous lunatic is the core of most of her conversations. Basically, this means that supports work well for fleshing out what a character is, but aren't great at showing character change. And hypothetically, games with fewer support options can show character change better than games with a million support options for characters.
You could still have the character development in games with lots of characters, just block off some supports after a certain amount of progress in others. Taking Rebecca-Sain as an example you could block off (or even cancel if you don't want any order-optimisation) Sain's womanizing supports once he hits a certain point in his Rebecca support but throw in some fat bonuses to compensate. I feel like that wouldn't take much effort. If you want to go slightly higher effort with it, lock some supports behind progress within a different support. Eg: Character X can only support with character Y if they have at least a B support with character Z first. Could even throw other prerequisites on it, like: supports locked behind class (eg: Amelia only supports with Seth if she goes Cavalier or Gilliam if she goes Knight because they're training her); supports locked behind weapon rank; supports locked behind other characters being alive/dead; etc.
I think the games have been taking measures to fix these problems Echoes started this trend of you can only unlock a support after the story has progressed to a certain point. (Path of Radiance kind of did this due to supports being built on number of chapters deployed together but the conversations didn't fully take advantage of it) Then in Three Houses if you've made it to a certain point in the story and haven't unlocked a conversation there's a chance you'll never be able to get that conversation. So that hopefully the character won't act out of character for their growth at the time. So once again it's measures that are being taken but with the amount of characters and conversations that Three Houses has a lot slip through the cracks of the system they made.
Fe6 did a good job of this because most everyone connects for a specific part of their character with no real overlap. Bartre supports with Cath and fir because he’s a natural father figure, but with fir it’s because he feels like he’s failed as a father with all that happens and with cath it’s because he sympathizes with someone in her situation and these supports despite having the same base idea that starts them, go in basically polar opposite directions.
@@aurtosebaelheim5942 Or you could change the text of some supports after you've completed certain others. For example, maybe the Rebecca+Sain support would change Sain's future supports to be less womanizing. That'd require quite a bit of extra writing, though.
29:50 but honestly I want to see a support chain where the 2 characters just want to beat the other so they get like +15 crit when near eachother since they keep trying to show off how much better they are than the other (but like -15 avoid since showing off is also known as being an idiot)
@@Noahs_Chair This allows a perfect transition to a previous videos, the one about Jeigans. But seriously, Merlinus supports are a joke. The third option is Vaida, and wether it's more ridiculous than Marcus is up to debate.
Both fates and awakening have proximity supports, and those bonuses are shown. Adjacent or paired up characters give a boost to hit, avoid, crit and crit avoid when one of them enters combat, the greater the support rank and number of adjacent units there are, the bigger the boost.
gosh I can't believe you made a whole graph just to illustrate how silly the gba supports are, I love that for you lol I was dying laughing at the part about how we need a sports fire emblem game. YOU ARE CORRECT!!! we as a society need this in order to heal. Loved your video as always
I wonder if it'd work. We'd prolly end up with a "Dead or Alive - Extreme" Game with Camilla and Lyn being on spot number 1. Personally I'd like to get another Wii Sports Game with the Miitopia Mii Maker.
Imagine if Felix got negative bonuses next to Dimitri. That would play into his character being a lone wolf and make the player have to think before using two of the best units in Blue Lions. That would be such a cool way to limit the player in a way that makes perfect sense. Side note, Mario baseball games have support bonuses and it's a real good way to discourage players from just stacking the best characters on one team.
"It's possible to go through the entirety of Three Houses without ever noticing support bonuses." Sure, if you ignore how the game explicitly tells you the combat benefits of supports in the support menu, the character portraits in the combat forecast with letters next to them indicating their support level, and the fact that blue numbers in 3H indicate that a value is being increased. It seems inconsistent to level that criticism at 3H but not earlier FE entries, where figuring out what support bonuses actually do (or figuring out they exist at all) requires doing math and/or outside information. Regardless, I like the idea of more pre-existing supports, so long as it doesn't prevent exploration of other supports. Radiant Dawn does this with its initial Sothe/Micaiah A-support, and they don't lack for story moments that illuminate their relation ship in place of support conversations. I know, it's RD, they're not missing out on much in context, but I'm saying it's different from Pent/Louise, essentially.
Honestly I never noticed differences in gameplay until I was told by someone else how it works in most cases. Radiant Dawn + Awakening/Fates are the only games transparent about what supports give you. I still don't understand how adjutant bonuses work aside from what's explicitly written. GBA is definitely the worst, I don't know what any of the symbols do and it's rare that you get supports in the first place
@@cartooncritic7045 honestly wouldn't be surprised if most people just don't notice it, I think I noticed it once but then completely forgot, cuz when I go into the 3H support menu it's just to quickly activate new supports and then immediately leave.
I'm fine with both ways Awakening and 3H made supports work, especially since they SHOW you that you're building support. I think invisible mechanics are the worst because (without the internet) they make tracking down what the hell is happening a nightmare. I will say i don't like uncapped supports though because sometimes i boot up the game and i don't want to sit through reading a bunch of new supports, and anything that makes me mash start to not watch your game is probably not ideal
I was only able to play through Three Houses once due to how much down time there is between Chapters. The what felt like 10+ minutes of watching support cut scenes between chapters sure did stack up.
I think GBA were the worst because not only is it not obvious what you get it depends on affinity which I always found to be a confusing and arbitrary system for what give each bonus what ? It's basically double invisible
Adding on to youur idea for negative supports for people who dislike each other: what if the final support was really good for them to incentivize players to go through the weakening supports?
interesting analysis of supports. I for one would be interested in "negative" supports where you want to keep characters away from each other for a gimmicky gameplay mechanic. Not sure how it would be implemented but I think it would add a new flavor to character lore in these types of games.
There's unit in TRS that has an ability that let's him take weapons from defeated enemies in exchange of giving allies in a 2 range area - 10 hit and avoid.
Shinon having negative support with Ike could have been fun. Building on that dynamic, I can see two ways how it could play out : A) two characters that hate each others, starting with negative supports towards each other, and gradually getting to 0 support bonus, showing they may never be friends but can at least tolerate each other. B) A character that is really good but nearly everyone hates, so they have to be mostly used solo, or they would weaken your team but don't have the bulk to survive (kinda like the fact Shinon has Provoke despite having virtually no ennemy phase, showing his aggravating attitude). Or if we copy Thracia's star system, it could be an ineffective general with negative star, making your entire team worse.
@@shytendeakatamanoir9740 Yeah it can play very tasteful role lore and gameplay wise. I like the example of the duo characters so your encouraged to take them else where and at least they have each other. Also negative stars is fucking mean(not that I'm against it) but like have a character that yells and distracts people or someone that always needs "protecting" causing others to more likely get hit and targeted.
honestly, id like more FE7 supports that piece together lore (renault's canas', nino's etc.) and also FE7's enemy supports (Paul & jasmine and Lloyd & Linus), they make for terrifying bosses that you basically have to carefully slit up in order to not get murdered by them. the biggest issue with enemy supports is that they are for named enemies, and having more than one named enemy that cant be recruited is extremely rare (basically just the map's boss, as (IIRC) almost every other named enemy in most (western at least) games are recruitable.
The Faye Alm support can be contextualized as Faye trying to get closer to Alm despite being rejected (avoiding Alm even less). Echoes is also cool since Berkut gets support bonuses (iirc the only enemy in the series so far that gets any).
There are a handful of enemies that get support bonuses. Paul and Jasmine from FE7 have an A support, same with Lloyd and Linus, and both pairs are fairly likely to actually be within three spaces to get the benefits. Also in Thracia (iirc), some enemies can even get support bonuses from your units, like Reinhardt being supported by Olwen. In Radiant Dawn, I think enemies can benefit from a bond support, although they cannot attack characters that they have a bond support with.
TIL of the chaotic support bonus between Faye and Alm and how mad I am that nothing similar has ever been reimplemented. As a bunch of other people have already said, it would have been really interesting to have downsides to certain stats but also more noticeable bonuses so that units having support with each other can lead to more diverse playstyles or character builds. It would maybe encourage units like Felix to be a lone wolf in more ways than one that suffers from being around people until he has a strong support between them, or someone like Byleth that can be even more helpful than he is now when being around allies.
I really like RD supports mechanically, but I think that there needs to be conversations and the option to equip a support from all the supports you have built for it to be perfect.
Say what you want about Three Houses having a gigantic support pool with subpar bonuses. At least 3H has supports that have some soul to them. Fates has absolutely way too many supports and almost ZERO of them are worth reading. Most are boring and inane chatter, and not in the funny way some of the older games that came before it managed. Effectively, you have a fire emblem with functional gameplay supports but no real character building because they stretched it so thin between them. Not fun.
you know what dumb idea a support where when the 2 are close their movment increases to get the fuck away from each other as fast as possible sounds fun
Oh boppy, you made some mistakes in this one. Not only did you reveal your hand and say your intent to purposefully make mistakes in order to trigger the comment section, but you insulted my boi Tomas(the cutest archanea boi). I may have a problem with my tastes.
Hi! I quite enjoyed this video, and I wanted to watch the Midnight Cowboy video on how FE pranks the player with mechanics that you reference, but am having difficulty finding it. Would you happen to have a link?
I'd argue Faye's support is a perfect example of a character becoming worse through supports - in one way. A character getting completely debuffed by supports obviously isn't a good idea, but risk/reward design has been a thing in games forever. A character becoming more reckless to impress someone (or in anger) could easily be (+Crit -Avoid). A character who wants to protect someone (like Sothe for Micaiah) could be (-1 damage +1 damage reduction). Something like that. This does debuff a character in one way, but benefits them in another and in my opinion, it makes sense too, since most real emotional states also come with tradeoffs. The weirdness of characters growing closer via conflict is something I never even questioned, because it seems like such a prevalent trope in anime and manga. Kinda like the proverb "teasing is a sign of affection" but widened on all kinds of confrontation. The "gaining respect for your opponent" trope is adjacent and I also usually see it in japanese media.
I've been saying this for years, but I really want to see an FE where they really embrace the randomness of games like XCOM and Rimworld and see what emergent stories can be crafted from such a formula.
Having an XCOM-esque Fire Emblem game where you would have some storyline-related missions (including the final one) and all the others being randomly generated would be cool.
One problem I have with Three Houses supports is that's it's possible to lock yourself out of getting Paired endings if you get too many A supports. I get why, since multiple of them can lead to marriage or something, but it just feels annoying. I do like C-B supports though.
The best part about GBA supports is that the games really don't want you to even know about them, much less actually get them. I'm not sure if it's even clear that you are getting stat bonuses unless you are really good at noticing.
23:40 Faye doesn't only get hit from the support. +20 hit in Shadows of Valentia is huge, essentially for someone who may have Nosferatu. I would consider the Bonuses Faye gets from Alm to probably be an overwhelming net positive. -15 avoid is rough, but it is nowhere near the death sentence it is in GBA fire emblem, or any game with true hit for that matter. SOV uses hybrid RNG so relying on dodging gets a little dicey and imperfect hit rates are also shakier than for true hit. I hate to be peddling gimic builds, but if you made Faye into a cleric and she gets some good stats, (Faye actually has a pretty good attack and defense growth iirc), the bonuses from Alm can make her quite reliable at Nosferatu tanking.
21:49 I've actually been chipping away at Fire Emblem: Awakening's supports for like 3 years now and I'm almost done. I really only have the child characters left. I have all of Male Robin's, Chrom's, Lucina's, Morgan's, and the late joiners supports finished. I've been doing it so long that I legitimately obtained 99,999 renown a while back.
I think to solve the confrontational supports you were talking about, some of those support conversations start pretty antagonistic but get better, so like the A could be a negative stat payout, B either back to neutral or just a little bad, and then when they make up and actually get along at A it’s stronger than OTHER A supports? (Y’know to mechanically incentivize going through the rough period)
I'll have you know that the 1997 Ford Aspire is a properly badass vehicle. You will see powerful ramifications for this blatant defamation of an automotive icon. Also I enjoyed the video it was quite nice.
It would be very interesting to see character development through supports that start with negative bonuses, but end up with substantial bonuses at A-Support. An example of this is Shinon-Janaff, which starts off by Shinon being absolutely disgusted by "half-breeds"; thus having negative bonuses would make sense. During the A support, Shinon actually seems to turn around and be very interested in Janaff's life and wants to learn more about him; this could be reflected through substantial support bonuses. Gameplay-wise, I don't feel like this would be a negative thing as people like zero-to-hero archetypes like Ross anyway; this time living through the support bonuses as well.
It would be interesting if hostile supports were initially giving penalties (or +/- like Faye/Alm), but once characters come to terms with each other those penalties turn into bonuses.
Fire emblem supports like many things with fe evolve and change over time but are never perfected but except for fe 11 and kinda 12 since fe 3 have been a important part of the franchise. Personally I think a combination of 3h and echoes support systems I enjoy how they are applied and add strategy to the game even tho they only really matter on maddening and bond supports are just a system I enjoy the only real problem I have with it is they grow so fast wail time limits are put in place it does not really stop the problem of their are long portions of the game were you have 0 supports. But echoes givening variable stats like gba and telious is fun without being completely broken and negative bonuses is funny and adds to characters but with a full cast and the expectation of everyone supports everyone individualized supports combined with 3hs seems vary unlikely
Of the few FE games I've played, I've only really actively used supports in combat for my current revisit to Awakening (I have a tendency to not finish games). And even then, I think it's only really cause I've not allowed myself to use pair-ups and Dark Fliers I didn't pay attention to them in FE7, and in 3H I only really cared about the lore and recruiting
There... aren't supports in FE1. The proto-support between Alm and Celica is the first similar mechanic in the series, and bond supports proper don't appear until FE3. Also, I'm fairly sure that BSFE shares support bonus pairs with FE3, but it's hard to tell because of the enforced lack of animations and the fact that support bonuses don't show on the status screen in either game. EDIT: Oh, I see what you mean. But the Triangle Attack feels more like a prototype skill, not a support.
I like Vestaria Saga's support system. Some units have support bonuses with people they knew before joining the army, and there are conversations that can trigger on certain maps that can add supports. However, some supports are one way. For example there is one character who has a crush on the lead yet he has no interest. So after the conversation on the map she joins she gets a support bonus near him but he does not. I like this because the support system tells you more about the characters, but doesn't let you smash them into unnatural pairings. Each support bonus is a result of their character, not because you put them next to each other for a certain number of turns, or because we need to be able to ship everyone with everybody else.
To be honest, it's clear that these games are 100% balanced around supports, and I believe that they should have double down on them from RD-- which clearly has the best support system (before you roll your eyes, hear me out). The games are clearly balanced around supports. Look at someone like say, Ike, I'm 100% certain that they considered his earth affinity supports for him as part of his effectiveness as a unit. With supports, no matter his partner, he's guaranteed to get enough evasion to effectively mitigate his avoid , attack and defense penalty. IE, doing something like Ike x Soren B and then Titania x A results in him having 0 penalty for evasion and he's definitely going to ignore the +1 penalty for damage and the - penalty when attacking (optimization aside for a minute here). Without it, Ike is getting hit by considerably more things over the course of the game (starting with +12 evasion by C Soren /C Titania alone is pretty nice if he's fighting Axe users for instance when they actually appear and makes him not take an evasion penalty). But it also reveals some of the problem with them in games where you can't basically support everyone with each other. Certain characters are dictated as more "useful" in some regards because of it. IE, Oscar is basically a shoe-in as a unit because he makes the forced unit you have better, and so it's only natural that since you're using Oscar you'd try to chain a support to him. Instead, RD opted to allow customization of the team fully to allow for such situations to never happen. Since people didn't chain with each other, it was about the bonds you made each of the two pair up with for effectiveness. Everything was about gameplay first and foremost; this makes for much better subsequent playthroughs and never makes a person feel that they are ever locked to a unit that they may not care for. My proposition for making a system would simply be having a "preferred partner" system where people that support each other that are preferred get the standard support conversations that people have come to know and love, but generic supports would still be a thing to allow full customization of a team. If it's not done in the first playthrough, at least allow it for NG+ bonuses. Then combine a hard limit for people on the number of supports, and you can ensure that no one has a massive stat boosts that are too crazy if they stat stack, and it also solves the "character development" problem that people happens too often in supports where characters will "learn the same lesson" over and over in supports.
I do think that characters having confrontational supports doesn't NECESSARILY render them giving each other buffs nonsensical, though certain contexts are required for it to make sense. The simplest example would be a pair of characters who are not-so-friendly rivals, who don't like each other but who also motivate each other to show the other up in battle. I know that's not all or even like, most of the actual instances of such supports, though.
You can argue that fe4 jealousy system is a case of negative supports and supports are essential in that game, for making babies and for doing stuff that other game is normal.
I prefer the supports in the tellius games. I dont like supports in the newer games tough. Its just becomes a "click support and press start button" if youre bombarded with 5 free supports after any map, and I dont mind the basic flat hit avoid up in jugdral and shadow dragon. And I also think arks and stories are automatically made anyway through normal gameplay
Not sure if you're aware of this or not, but the Mario Baseball series of games is actually a sports game series with the same idea of supports! The chemistry system gives characters who like each other buffs when playing together, throwing the ball to each other, etc, while doing the opposite for characters who hate each other! Currently the closest we have to a FE sports game, at least until the inevitable Arachnea Beach Volleyball.
Speaking of mocking the player with its mechanics, NM Bantu has supports. As in, one of the most useless characters that happens to have several 0% growths as well as terrible bases that don't get that much better when transformed using a limited weapon type and requires stat boosters to be a below average unit at best.
"Renow" lmao you sir, join the club I watch that seems to mostly consist of poketubers that try to annoy people as much as possible by pronouncing things however they want.
Can you elaborate on "Midnight Cowboy made a video talking about how fire emblem uses its mechanics to play jokes on the player"? Using that information, I can't find any evidence of that video or that channel.
Marisa can replace Joshua's gameplay contributions, but she can't replace his hat.
so true
Sprite Editors: Hold my beer.
Why not use both?
@@jmsgridiron5628 Because Joshua is strictly better, and you have not many deployment slots. You get him much earlier and je straight up maxes out, or gets extremely close to, maxing out every stat.
And I mean EVERY stat.
@@KuroiRenge Imagine worrying about who you use in Sacred stones, one of the easiest games in the history of FE.
My favorite support (outside the classic Dorcas X Vaida ofc) is the one where Amelia and Neimi discuss their love for michew berries while fighting hordes of undead on a Ghost Ship.
That kind of amazing moments are somewhat lost with base conversations. Sure, it makes more sense, but I miss the inherent madness of two relative strangers baring their heart in the middle of a bloody battlefield.
negative supports seem like they have a fairly obvious solution by taking inspiration from the faye-alm support: keep the support bonuses overall beneficial ( or at least, beneficial for certain strategies and character builds ), but slide in some support _penalties_ to contextualize their distaste for each other. two peeps that have an antagonistic rivalry, for example, could get bonuses to might and crit while suffering from penalties to hit and avoid, to represent them trying too hard to do better than the other. combine that with asymmetric supports, and you could have something like a mentor-student archer relationship where the stressed and overworked student gets significant bonuses to hit, but also loses avoid and crit avoid due too concentrating too much on their aim. this sort of thing wouldn't work for _all_ negative relationships, and most cases would probably just end up being offensive bonuses in exchange for poorer defenses, but ... i mean, if you're stuck fighting in an unpleasant situation, it's just kinda expected that you'd focus on winning as fast as possible at the cost of your own safety
another way i saw someone mention was to combine it with pre-established supports by having actual _negative_ support ranks, allowing the support to provide nothing but penalties without forcing the player to _choose_ to make their units anti-synergistic. i mean, if two units naturally butt heads in a way that makes them outright worse at fighting, that clash probably isn't gonna wait for them to spend one or two whole maps fighting together and then bump into each other when they get back home. it's something that could also be used to add an interesting aspect to intentionally good units; you're obviously gonna wanna make the most use out 'em on a normal playthrough, but if you need them at full strength? you're gonna have to send them to separate parts of the map, or else they'll sabotage each other. in the same vein, though, if you ever want to patch up their relationship and fix that weakness they share? well, better bite that bullet when you aren't relying on their strength to carry you through a tough situation
and, hell, both of those can be combined. relationships are complicated things and the arcs they take can be _wild._ subsequently, progressing through a support should probably always improve it as a whole, but that doesn't mean you can't end up with a support bonus that starts simple, before suddenly twisting itself into one with both bonuses and penalty, then finally ends off with an entirely ( or almost entirely ) positive stat spread that may nonetheless not remotely resemble the one it started with
I actually thought about adding something similar to that if I were to make a Fe hack at some point. The "solution" that I came to was that these negative supports would double the effects of the positive gains to balance the debuff they inflict.
This one gives less avoid and def/res but increases damage and speed more than a normal support would. This one reduces crit avoid but increases hit and crit by a lot.
Completely negative effects never crossed my mind tho, it does sound interesting but I don't think it would be a good idea gameplay wise.
I’m surprised he got through Awakening and Fates without mentioning child characters and the potential eugenics that comes with them.
Or fates multiple reclass options that are based on a characters A+ and S supports.
But I guess this video covers support bonuses and activations only.
So will there be a “How fire emblem balanced child characters/reclassing” in the future?
I don't actually remember a support grind for the supports of most of my main units in Sacred Stones. That's, uh, probably because I do remember being quite committed to conquering the Tower of Valni whenever a floor opened up. Spending turns hunting for treasure in the desert map probably also had an influence. Grinding supports for benched units because I wanted to give them certain endings was quite a slog, though.
Supports in Sacred Stones felt incredibly natural because usually I was trying to do things like you said: treasure hunting, tower grinding, monster skirmishes, and then the story followed. It was nice to see lots of units have high supports, unlike grinding them in the earlier games.
I can kind of get why marcus supports with merlinus. The idea is Marcus is there to deal with ambush spawns that will go for merlinus because the devs didn’t realize how stupid good marcus was so they figured this would let him see use while letting you build the weaker units.
Thats what I do
This video made me think... How could future Fire Emblem games improve on the support system? I think the answer could be found in the indie game Wildermyth that came out recently. Not to get into a long post but there are two main points I'd like to point out. Two problems where Fire Emblem Supports have issues and what Wildermyth could help inspire to fix them.
One of the points was highlighted in this video where characters tend to like each other less but still get bonuses. In Wildermyth there are three types of relationships that can form between party members based on random events and the characters personalities/player choices. You have your standard "friendship" relationship and "lover" relationship but you also have the "Rivalry" relationship. Rivalry relationships are interesting because they are a map-wide effect where if one of the characters lands a crit, The other character has an increased chance to crit until it happens. It makes sense as both characters would be trying to one-up/do better than the other one. I doubt it would be balanced as a map-wide effect in Fire Emblem and crits would make things a bit too insane but having a close-range effect of where if one character does an action then the rival support does the action better in the same turn.
The other big complaint Fire Emblem supports have in three of the four latest installments are the avatar supports. Wildermyth has a feature when creating your characters that you scale 11 personality traits on a scale of 1/100 and your top 2 usually influences how the character talks/reacts in any given event. This system really allows for multiple avatar characters to naturally build supports/relationships given the event system in the game but in a game like Fire Emblem it could definitely decide how each character is treated and treats the avatar. The issue with this one is now that everything is fully voice acted... It'd be a lot more work/budget than Nintendo probably wants to put in the game.
Great video!
This was a really nice and comprehensive look at supports, and makes me want to play the Tellius games even more now that I know that they actually tried with supports!
I think it's funny that Serra has a ×1 support point multiplier with everybody, supposedly because she's so annoying.
I can’t believe Erk and Serra telling each other that they’re both going to die alone causes them to not only get stronger around each other but get married after the war
Serra with Sain or Lucius is x2 tho
@@josephmitchell6512is that not the essence of marriage tho???
@@sanae99.9.9 the name of your youtube account is a clickbait and my day is ruined
@@josephmitchell6512 I'm ErkxPriscilla because the girl deserves a happy ending and Erk is literally her only Support option who can marry her, thanks to his social standing from Pent.
After playing FE7 and FE3H I can say that more accessible supports (not locked behind hours of grinding) is essential to this series. When I played FE7 characters not from Lyn mode or named Eliwood/Hector felt really bland. Compare that to FE3H where characters feel a lot more fleshed out by their support conversations. Sylvain is probably the best example of this going from stereotypical lazy good for nothing to a character who has clear motivations and reasons which tie into the overarching narrative and themes of FE3H. Sure the system only gives hit and avoid for the most part but on Maddening I need every point of those stats I can get so I'm okay with it. The only other major gripe is that I think characters should have S supports available during the main story to avoid having certain characters, like Ignatz, who promises to spend their life with everyone.
However I think that the larger issues with the support system that hampers the writing of Fire Emblem is that it is always one to one. The best way to put this problem into perspective is that in FE3H Dimitri, Felix, Sylvain and Ingrid are childhood friends and yet we never get to see a scene of just the four of them. Despite this group dynamic likely having a large impact on all four characters we never get to see it. We get to see how characters interact as part of a larger group in the major story cutscenes but these scenes tend to focus on the main lord and plot and have very little if any character development for other characters. This is where I would like to see the support system improve, more small group cutscenes, similar to events in Stardew Valley and Harvest Moon.
3H definitely felt odd with only the protagonist having S-level supports and how multiple A-supports have so many characters dedicating themselves to one-another and then that not being mentioned at all in the "what happened after the war" descriptions.
I did really enjoy playing matchmaker in Awakening. And the stat bonuses have never really mattered to me conceptually. I just want to have a game with these social sim elements while tied to game genres other than Candy Crush-style games. So then that way I can enjoy a fun story & characters but take breaks with gameplay.
@@haruhirogrimgar6047 FE3H definetly has what for the sake breivity I'm going to coin the "Ignatz effect", where characters promise themselves to everyone due to the lack of S supports. One neat bonus of this that I didn't notice until I started Birthright (Not done yet no spoilers please) was that S-Supports go from platonic to marriage in a scene which is a bit sudden in terms of pacing. The Ignatz effect solves this problem by allowing characters to setup their paired endings in their A supports. Now both approaches have problems. Birthright's approach struggles with pacing while the FE3H struggles with the Ignatz effect. My proposed solution is to simply make the commitment happen at the A support but don't marry until the S support. Gives a more natural relationship progression.
The way I would balance games with a large number of supports is to only allow a character to have 1 support active at any one time ( these supports of course being GBA levels of strong )
I like the idea of negative supports. Think of the challenge runs, math emblemers, y'all have something to gain, too, ha!
But seriously, I would rather have as many kinds of relationships as possible, both positive and negative and maybe even somewhere in between, than appease the people who carry on ad nauseum about argument c supports. Like, I'm sorry, with most supports you go from c to b to a, how is a writer not supposed to go with set-up, conflict, resolution sometimes? Bah, I digress. I don't want it to sound like I'm mad at Bopper for doing it though! The professor has a unique and off-kilter suave delivery which wins me over to his side every time. Keep rockin' it, good fellows!
Mmmm. Baked puddings... But to partake of these in the midst of battle...
I wish they made those "small bonuses" transparent.
I did not expect Tearring Saga in this video. We are one step closer to Berwick, I can feel it.
You know you have played too much Fire Emblem Blazing Sword when you hear 60 turns and find it to be short.
I could have Wallace Solo an entire map in less turns that I have him build a single support rank.
Nobody's ever paid Tomas enough attention to show him such disrespect before
I can't believe this started as a joke on stream, I was there
What about renia and berkuts enemy support
Professor Bopper
Does anybody have a link to the video about how fire emblem uses its mechanics to play jokes on the player? I can’t find it.
ua-cam.com/video/OReHe8wUib4/v-deo.html
Great video!
12:00 How tf does wade have 100 hit against anything in binding blade?
The FE6 footage is from Project Ember which greatly increased hit rates
commenting for the algorithm
MERRIC SUPPORT BETTER BE IN
W
No
I like this video
Thank you, Mr. President
this good vid
I think it's interesting that you skipped FE10 support building altogether because it's basically the granddaddy of the 3DS system, building supports pretty naturally through things you're already doing during normal gameplay, but also for starting turns adjacent like GBA. Speaking from a pure mechanical standpoint, I quite like the way it builds. But 1 per person and the lack of any real convos is of course the real bummer.
Yeah. I hardly pay attention to the benefit of supports while playing, but still grind Awakening 99 hours just to unlock all support conversations, including S-rank and hidden ones from DLC content.
4:17 “makes most of the games characters feel generic and replaceable”
Marth: “that’s the point”
Marth: Excellent, my plan is working
POV: Marth needs to access a mediocre gaiden chapter
With regards to support conversations being a vehicle of character arcs: one limitation of the system is that because characters can have support conversations with multiple characters in most FE games, characters can't actually grow in ways that could possibly affect other supports. If a character grows in a support, it has to be on a trait that is only referenced in that one support. This really hurts some supports -- Sain's are a good example of this. It really feels like Rebecca-Sain is meant to be building up to character growth for Sain for him to stop womanizing, but the game can't actually commit to that because Sain hitting on girls is the premise of most of his other supports. Peri is another example of this, where I feel she could have been a much more interesting character if her supports involved her changing, but they can't because being a murderous lunatic is the core of most of her conversations.
Basically, this means that supports work well for fleshing out what a character is, but aren't great at showing character change. And hypothetically, games with fewer support options can show character change better than games with a million support options for characters.
You could still have the character development in games with lots of characters, just block off some supports after a certain amount of progress in others.
Taking Rebecca-Sain as an example you could block off (or even cancel if you don't want any order-optimisation) Sain's womanizing supports once he hits a certain point in his Rebecca support but throw in some fat bonuses to compensate. I feel like that wouldn't take much effort.
If you want to go slightly higher effort with it, lock some supports behind progress within a different support. Eg: Character X can only support with character Y if they have at least a B support with character Z first.
Could even throw other prerequisites on it, like: supports locked behind class (eg: Amelia only supports with Seth if she goes Cavalier or Gilliam if she goes Knight because they're training her); supports locked behind weapon rank; supports locked behind other characters being alive/dead; etc.
I think the games have been taking measures to fix these problems
Echoes started this trend of you can only unlock a support after the story has progressed to a certain point. (Path of Radiance kind of did this due to supports being built on number of chapters deployed together but the conversations didn't fully take advantage of it)
Then in Three Houses if you've made it to a certain point in the story and haven't unlocked a conversation there's a chance you'll never be able to get that conversation. So that hopefully the character won't act out of character for their growth at the time.
So once again it's measures that are being taken but with the amount of characters and conversations that Three Houses has a lot slip through the cracks of the system they made.
Fe6 did a good job of this because most everyone connects for a specific part of their character with no real overlap. Bartre supports with Cath and fir because he’s a natural father figure, but with fir it’s because he feels like he’s failed as a father with all that happens and with cath it’s because he sympathizes with someone in her situation and these supports despite having the same base idea that starts them, go in basically polar opposite directions.
@@aurtosebaelheim5942 Or you could change the text of some supports after you've completed certain others. For example, maybe the Rebecca+Sain support would change Sain's future supports to be less womanizing. That'd require quite a bit of extra writing, though.
@@aurtosebaelheim5942 I don't think blocking support would be fun though
I like how one of Merlinus's other supports is Nino because the game knows she should be placed on the bench
29:50 but honestly I want to see a support chain where the 2 characters just want to beat the other so they get like +15 crit when near eachother since they keep trying to show off how much better they are than the other (but like -15 avoid since showing off is also known as being an idiot)
Marcus is there too because this bench is all inclusive
@@shytendeakatamanoir9740 The idea is that as a Jagen Marcus will eventualy fall off. They were wrong.
@@Noahs_Chair This allows a perfect transition to a previous videos, the one about Jeigans.
But seriously, Merlinus supports are a joke.
The third option is Vaida, and wether it's more ridiculous than Marcus is up to debate.
Both fates and awakening have proximity supports, and those bonuses are shown. Adjacent or paired up characters give a boost to hit, avoid, crit and crit avoid when one of them enters combat, the greater the support rank and number of adjacent units there are, the bigger the boost.
gosh I can't believe you made a whole graph just to illustrate how silly the gba supports are, I love that for you lol
I was dying laughing at the part about how we need a sports fire emblem game. YOU ARE CORRECT!!! we as a society need this in order to heal.
Loved your video as always
I wonder if it'd work. We'd prolly end up with a "Dead or Alive - Extreme" Game with Camilla and Lyn being on spot number 1.
Personally I'd like to get another Wii Sports Game with the Miitopia Mii Maker.
@@bladerdj3503 nah I just wanna play volleyball with chrobin
Imagine if Felix got negative bonuses next to Dimitri. That would play into his character being a lone wolf and make the player have to think before using two of the best units in Blue Lions. That would be such a cool way to limit the player in a way that makes perfect sense.
Side note, Mario baseball games have support bonuses and it's a real good way to discourage players from just stacking the best characters on one team.
Reminds me of SD Gundam G generations, where you get stat debuff when certain characters are placed together, like Amuro and Char
"It's possible to go through the entirety of Three Houses without ever noticing support bonuses."
Sure, if you ignore how the game explicitly tells you the combat benefits of supports in the support menu, the character portraits in the combat forecast with letters next to them indicating their support level, and the fact that blue numbers in 3H indicate that a value is being increased.
It seems inconsistent to level that criticism at 3H but not earlier FE entries, where figuring out what support bonuses actually do (or figuring out they exist at all) requires doing math and/or outside information.
Regardless, I like the idea of more pre-existing supports, so long as it doesn't prevent exploration of other supports. Radiant Dawn does this with its initial Sothe/Micaiah A-support, and they don't lack for story moments that illuminate their relation ship in place of support conversations. I know, it's RD, they're not missing out on much in context, but I'm saying it's different from Pent/Louise, essentially.
Honestly I never noticed differences in gameplay until I was told by someone else how it works in most cases. Radiant Dawn + Awakening/Fates are the only games transparent about what supports give you. I still don't understand how adjutant bonuses work aside from what's explicitly written.
GBA is definitely the worst, I don't know what any of the symbols do and it's rare that you get supports in the first place
@@CarbonMalite Doesn't 3H just outright tell you what support bonuses you get with a character in the support menu?
@@cartooncritic7045 honestly wouldn't be surprised if most people just don't notice it, I think I noticed it once but then completely forgot, cuz when I go into the 3H support menu it's just to quickly activate new supports and then immediately leave.
I started grinding the Dart-Getiz support in Blazing Sword a few years ago, I'll let you know what they say to each other once I hit rank C.
...Are you done yet?
@@balsamon69clearly not.
I think he’s struggling to login
The video has not even started and I already feel the Fe6 bashing.
I wonder how many people notice you used Project Ember more often than Binding Blade.
Also yay, TRS was mentioned.
I'm fine with both ways Awakening and 3H made supports work, especially since they SHOW you that you're building support. I think invisible mechanics are the worst because (without the internet) they make tracking down what the hell is happening a nightmare. I will say i don't like uncapped supports though because sometimes i boot up the game and i don't want to sit through reading a bunch of new supports, and anything that makes me mash start to not watch your game is probably not ideal
I was only able to play through Three Houses once due to how much down time there is between Chapters. The what felt like 10+ minutes of watching support cut scenes between chapters sure did stack up.
I think GBA were the worst because not only is it not obvious what you get it depends on affinity which I always found to be a confusing and arbitrary system for what give each bonus what ? It's basically double invisible
Adding on to youur idea for negative supports for people who dislike each other: what if the final support was really good for them to incentivize players to go through the weakening supports?
Another banger of a video. Also, I can’t be the only one who has no idea how to read the first fe6 supports graph you showed.
interesting analysis of supports. I for one would be interested in "negative" supports where you want to keep characters away from each other for a gimmicky gameplay mechanic. Not sure how it would be implemented but I think it would add a new flavor to character lore in these types of games.
There's unit in TRS that has an ability that let's him take weapons from defeated enemies in exchange of giving allies in a 2 range area - 10 hit and avoid.
@@marcoasturias8520Pff no one likes a thief apparently. That's exactly what I mean it's a novel idea that can definitely be expanded upon.
Shinon having negative support with Ike could have been fun.
Building on that dynamic, I can see two ways how it could play out : A) two characters that hate each others, starting with negative supports towards each other, and gradually getting to 0 support bonus, showing they may never be friends but can at least tolerate each other.
B) A character that is really good but nearly everyone hates, so they have to be mostly used solo, or they would weaken your team but don't have the bulk to survive (kinda like the fact Shinon has Provoke despite having virtually no ennemy phase, showing his aggravating attitude). Or if we copy Thracia's star system, it could be an ineffective general with negative star, making your entire team worse.
@@shytendeakatamanoir9740 Yeah it can play very tasteful role lore and gameplay wise. I like the example of the duo characters so your encouraged to take them else where and at least they have each other. Also negative stars is fucking mean(not that I'm against it) but like have a character that yells and distracts people or someone that always needs "protecting" causing others to more likely get hit and targeted.
honestly, id like more FE7 supports that piece together lore (renault's canas', nino's etc.) and also FE7's enemy supports (Paul & jasmine and Lloyd & Linus), they make for terrifying bosses that you basically have to carefully slit up in order to not get murdered by them. the biggest issue with enemy supports is that they are for named enemies, and having more than one named enemy that cant be recruited is extremely rare (basically just the map's boss, as (IIRC) almost every other named enemy in most (western at least) games are recruitable.
I'm really happy that Professor Bopper it's receiving a lot of *support* through his patreon, i really want this guy to keep uploading vids
The Faye Alm support can be contextualized as Faye trying to get closer to Alm despite being rejected (avoiding Alm even less). Echoes is also cool since Berkut gets support bonuses (iirc the only enemy in the series so far that gets any).
There are a handful of enemies that get support bonuses. Paul and Jasmine from FE7 have an A support, same with Lloyd and Linus, and both pairs are fairly likely to actually be within three spaces to get the benefits. Also in Thracia (iirc), some enemies can even get support bonuses from your units, like Reinhardt being supported by Olwen. In Radiant Dawn, I think enemies can benefit from a bond support, although they cannot attack characters that they have a bond support with.
TIL of the chaotic support bonus between Faye and Alm and how mad I am that nothing similar has ever been reimplemented. As a bunch of other people have already said, it would have been really interesting to have downsides to certain stats but also more noticeable bonuses so that units having support with each other can lead to more diverse playstyles or character builds. It would maybe encourage units like Felix to be a lone wolf in more ways than one that suffers from being around people until he has a strong support between them, or someone like Byleth that can be even more helpful than he is now when being around allies.
I really like RD supports mechanically, but I think that there needs to be conversations and the option to equip a support from all the supports you have built for it to be perfect.
Say what you want about Three Houses having a gigantic support pool with subpar bonuses. At least 3H has supports that have some soul to them. Fates has absolutely way too many supports and almost ZERO of them are worth reading. Most are boring and inane chatter, and not in the funny way some of the older games that came before it managed. Effectively, you have a fire emblem with functional gameplay supports but no real character building because they stretched it so thin between them. Not fun.
Days of Ruin original soundtrack, you truly are a man of culture.
Maybe I should have put in even more
@@easy_nin Never too much of a good thing.
you know what dumb idea a support where when the 2 are close their movment increases to get the fuck away from each other as fast as possible sounds fun
I do like how echoes and 3 houses limit support activation based on story progress
Oh boppy, you made some mistakes in this one. Not only did you reveal your hand and say your intent to purposefully make mistakes in order to trigger the comment section, but you insulted my boi Tomas(the cutest archanea boi). I may have a problem with my tastes.
Who else would you put there? His squad should have had their own extra map in New Mystery, that would have been interesting
Hi! I quite enjoyed this video, and I wanted to watch the Midnight Cowboy video on how FE pranks the player with mechanics that you reference, but am having difficulty finding it. Would you happen to have a link?
28:25 I believe that's called "being friends".
I'd argue Faye's support is a perfect example of a character becoming worse through supports - in one way. A character getting completely debuffed by supports obviously isn't a good idea, but risk/reward design has been a thing in games forever. A character becoming more reckless to impress someone (or in anger) could easily be (+Crit -Avoid). A character who wants to protect someone (like Sothe for Micaiah) could be (-1 damage +1 damage reduction). Something like that. This does debuff a character in one way, but benefits them in another and in my opinion, it makes sense too, since most real emotional states also come with tradeoffs.
The weirdness of characters growing closer via conflict is something I never even questioned, because it seems like such a prevalent trope in anime and manga. Kinda like the proverb "teasing is a sign of affection" but widened on all kinds of confrontation. The "gaining respect for your opponent" trope is adjacent and I also usually see it in japanese media.
Starting the vid off with Waylon's theme is a fucking power play
I've been saying this for years, but I really want to see an FE where they really embrace the randomness of games like XCOM and Rimworld and see what emergent stories can be crafted from such a formula.
Having an XCOM-esque Fire Emblem game where you would have some storyline-related missions (including the final one) and all the others being randomly generated would be cool.
One problem I have with Three Houses supports is that's it's possible to lock yourself out of getting Paired endings if you get too many A supports. I get why, since multiple of them can lead to marriage or something, but it just feels annoying.
I do like C-B supports though.
The best part about GBA supports is that the games really don't want you to even know about them, much less actually get them.
I'm not sure if it's even clear that you are getting stat bonuses unless you are really good at noticing.
How does fire emblem balanced something
They don't
That's it that is all
23:40 Faye doesn't only get hit from the support. +20 hit in Shadows of Valentia is huge, essentially for someone who may have Nosferatu. I would consider the Bonuses Faye gets from Alm to probably be an overwhelming net positive. -15 avoid is rough, but it is nowhere near the death sentence it is in GBA fire emblem, or any game with true hit for that matter. SOV uses hybrid RNG so relying on dodging gets a little dicey and imperfect hit rates are also shakier than for true hit.
I hate to be peddling gimic builds, but if you made Faye into a cleric and she gets some good stats, (Faye actually has a pretty good attack and defense growth iirc), the bonuses from Alm can make her quite reliable at Nosferatu tanking.
21:49 I've actually been chipping away at Fire Emblem: Awakening's supports for like 3 years now and I'm almost done. I really only have the child characters left. I have all of Male Robin's, Chrom's, Lucina's, Morgan's, and the late joiners supports finished. I've been doing it so long that I legitimately obtained 99,999 renown a while back.
This is where the fun begins
I think to solve the confrontational supports you were talking about, some of those support conversations start pretty antagonistic but get better, so like the A could be a negative stat payout, B either back to neutral or just a little bad, and then when they make up and actually get along at A it’s stronger than OTHER A supports? (Y’know to mechanically incentivize going through the rough period)
Today I learned there's a Marcus/Merlinus support conversation. Among many other things. lol
I'll have you know that the 1997 Ford Aspire is a properly badass vehicle. You will see powerful ramifications for this blatant defamation of an automotive icon. Also I enjoyed the video it was quite nice.
It would be very interesting to see character development through supports that start with negative bonuses, but end up with substantial bonuses at A-Support. An example of this is Shinon-Janaff, which starts off by Shinon being absolutely disgusted by "half-breeds"; thus having negative bonuses would make sense. During the A support, Shinon actually seems to turn around and be very interested in Janaff's life and wants to learn more about him; this could be reflected through substantial support bonuses.
Gameplay-wise, I don't feel like this would be a negative thing as people like zero-to-hero archetypes like Ross anyway; this time living through the support bonuses as well.
l have grown much personality after leaving twitter. specifically more chaotic, like how the first letter of this comment is actually a lower case L.
It would be interesting if hostile supports were initially giving penalties (or +/- like Faye/Alm), but once characters come to terms with each other those penalties turn into bonuses.
Fire emblem supports like many things with fe evolve and change over time but are never perfected but except for fe 11 and kinda 12 since fe 3 have been a important part of the franchise. Personally I think a combination of 3h and echoes support systems I enjoy how they are applied and add strategy to the game even tho they only really matter on maddening and bond supports are just a system I enjoy the only real problem I have with it is they grow so fast wail time limits are put in place it does not really stop the problem of their are long portions of the game were you have 0 supports. But echoes givening variable stats like gba and telious is fun without being completely broken and negative bonuses is funny and adds to characters but with a full cast and the expectation of everyone supports everyone individualized supports combined with 3hs seems vary unlikely
Of the few FE games I've played, I've only really actively used supports in combat for my current revisit to Awakening (I have a tendency to not finish games). And even then, I think it's only really cause I've not allowed myself to use pair-ups and Dark Fliers
I didn't pay attention to them in FE7, and in 3H I only really cared about the lore and recruiting
There... aren't supports in FE1. The proto-support between Alm and Celica is the first similar mechanic in the series, and bond supports proper don't appear until FE3. Also, I'm fairly sure that BSFE shares support bonus pairs with FE3, but it's hard to tell because of the enforced lack of animations and the fact that support bonuses don't show on the status screen in either game.
EDIT: Oh, I see what you mean. But the Triangle Attack feels more like a prototype skill, not a support.
Dorcas is great because all his lore is "Mah Wife" and all his supports are "Mah Wiiiiiife"
Im glad most people agree that shadow dragon looks like it was colored by a depressed painter.
I like Vestaria Saga's support system. Some units have support bonuses with people they knew before joining the army, and there are conversations that can trigger on certain maps that can add supports. However, some supports are one way. For example there is one character who has a crush on the lead yet he has no interest. So after the conversation on the map she joins she gets a support bonus near him but he does not. I like this because the support system tells you more about the characters, but doesn't let you smash them into unnatural pairings. Each support bonus is a result of their character, not because you put them next to each other for a certain number of turns, or because we need to be able to ship everyone with everybody else.
And then I saw you did already talk about his other saga....
Funny that you bring up Jeanne D'Arc and put Liane there.
Why does your gba footage look different thsn usual
Echoes has both bond supports and one-way supports
I like Three Houses supports the most.
Okay, I've gotta ask, it looks like you've got footage of a FE6 with improved sprites/colors patch, and I gotta know where it came from
To be honest, it's clear that these games are 100% balanced around supports, and I believe that they should have double down on them from RD-- which clearly has the best support system (before you roll your eyes, hear me out).
The games are clearly balanced around supports. Look at someone like say, Ike, I'm 100% certain that they considered his earth affinity supports for him as part of his effectiveness as a unit. With supports, no matter his partner, he's guaranteed to get enough evasion to effectively mitigate his avoid , attack and defense penalty. IE, doing something like Ike x Soren B and then Titania x A results in him having 0 penalty for evasion and he's definitely going to ignore the +1 penalty for damage and the - penalty when attacking (optimization aside for a minute here). Without it, Ike is getting hit by considerably more things over the course of the game (starting with +12 evasion by C Soren /C Titania alone is pretty nice if he's fighting Axe users for instance when they actually appear and makes him not take an evasion penalty). But it also reveals some of the problem with them in games where you can't basically support everyone with each other. Certain characters are dictated as more "useful" in some regards because of it. IE, Oscar is basically a shoe-in as a unit because he makes the forced unit you have better, and so it's only natural that since you're using Oscar you'd try to chain a support to him.
Instead, RD opted to allow customization of the team fully to allow for such situations to never happen. Since people didn't chain with each other, it was about the bonds you made each of the two pair up with for effectiveness. Everything was about gameplay first and foremost; this makes for much better subsequent playthroughs and never makes a person feel that they are ever locked to a unit that they may not care for.
My proposition for making a system would simply be having a "preferred partner" system where people that support each other that are preferred get the standard support conversations that people have come to know and love, but generic supports would still be a thing to allow full customization of a team. If it's not done in the first playthrough, at least allow it for NG+ bonuses. Then combine a hard limit for people on the number of supports, and you can ensure that no one has a massive stat boosts that are too crazy if they stat stack, and it also solves the "character development" problem that people happens too often in supports where characters will "learn the same lesson" over and over in supports.
Hey bopper, are you a Marxist?
I do think that characters having confrontational supports doesn't NECESSARILY render them giving each other buffs nonsensical, though certain contexts are required for it to make sense. The simplest example would be a pair of characters who are not-so-friendly rivals, who don't like each other but who also motivate each other to show the other up in battle.
I know that's not all or even like, most of the actual instances of such supports, though.
LOL the background at 4:31
You can argue that fe4 jealousy system is a case of negative supports and supports are essential in that game, for making babies and for doing stuff that other game is normal.
i appreciate the flight of the coward pick
I prefer the supports in the tellius games. I dont like supports in the newer games tough. Its just becomes a "click support and press start button" if youre bombarded with 5 free supports after any map, and I dont mind the basic flat hit avoid up in jugdral and shadow dragon.
And I also think arks and stories are automatically made anyway through normal gameplay
Indeed, TRS did supps the best
Not sure if you're aware of this or not, but the Mario Baseball series of games is actually a sports game series with the same idea of supports! The chemistry system gives characters who like each other buffs when playing together, throwing the ball to each other, etc, while doing the opposite for characters who hate each other! Currently the closest we have to a FE sports game, at least until the inevitable Arachnea Beach Volleyball.
This was very interesting
Speaking of mocking the player with its mechanics, NM Bantu has supports. As in, one of the most useless characters that happens to have several 0% growths as well as terrible bases that don't get that much better when transformed using a limited weapon type and requires stat boosters to be a below average unit at best.
Is the binding blade footage some kind of hack??? I don't remember fe6 looking like that...
"Renow" lmao you sir, join the club I watch that seems to mostly consist of poketubers that try to annoy people as much as possible by pronouncing things however they want.
After watching this, I have the odd urge to buy some pink thigh high socks and do the ahegao face...
TLDR: IS needs to make Out of the Park Baseball X Fire Emblem
Can you elaborate on "Midnight Cowboy made a video talking about how fire emblem uses its mechanics to play jokes on the player"? Using that information, I can't find any evidence of that video or that channel.
ua-cam.com/video/OReHe8wUib4/v-deo.html
Waylon
Finn
how fire emblem heroes balances supports: paywall
how fire emblem balances name pronounciations when
Id be sad too if hilda died. It is a very sad thing to happen
Shout out Jon Bois and chart party! Love that shis