Excal: Yeah, that balance doesn't really work. And don't worry, it'll get worse.
The good news is that Garon's motivations will be adequately explained, and it will make sense why he isn't in any remotely rational way acting in the interests of Nohr, and ordering Iago just to screw over Corrin. The bad news is that it still makes no freaking sense how everyone else reacts to him. Don't get me wrong, there have been plenty of horrific and murderous rulers in actual history, but they generally had something approaching an ideology - kill the rebels, kill the anti-communists, kill the communists, kill {other race here}, etc. And their administration was staffed by loyalists. The idea that you can have someone who is definitely acting more like a crazy serial killer go around while important members of the leadership explicitly don't agree with this course... and things just continue forward anyway... yeah no. I've said before, but if they want the player to know who's good & who's bad, just make it so Garon acts crazy *only* when Corrin is around, and acts like a stately king the rest of the time. OR make the Nohr side more jerkish and own that plot point rather than have them all be warm & fuzzy good guy assassins or whatever.
Of course this isn't really news in how FE breaks suspension of disbelief. I remember how Radiant Dawn has Pelleas just casually ordering the army to go help Benignon fight for explicitly no reason. Kings can start wars, yes, but a king who wakes up one day and says "Hey, let's ally with our hated enemy and send an army abroad, no I don't have a reason for this" will be assumed to be possessed or sick or something.
Anyway, that reminds me, I should make an update myself...
Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright
Interesting. The PC cast is not QUITE as direly bland as I feared, but I did like Conquest's cast better. The map design is similar; it's not as blandly classic-FE as it could be, but it's definitely a lot nicer to the player than Conquest was, having more things like named enemies starting equipped with a 1-range weapon rather than a cheatyface 1-2 range weapon (even if they have a 1-2 range weapon in their inventory).
Also, while all FEs get a lot easier once you understand WTF is going on, the difficulty drop from Conquest Hard to Birthright Hard is dramatic. (Both on Casual w/ reset-on-death.) FE is a system that usually tends to reward being overleveled; in Conquest, due to grinding requiring DLC, I generally tried to run a very focused party. When I recruited kids from Paralogues, they were usually 1-3 levels behind my main team. And Conquest kicked my ass. In Birthright, I've been using an extremely broad party and doing tons of rotations, such that kids from Paralogues are usually 3-5 levels AHEAD of their parents. And... the battles have been noticeably easier. Okay, in fairness, using a broad party (especially on Birthright) isn't exactly a "challenge mode" or anything as there's a number of maps where being able to use a bunch of the right kind of unit is genuinely helpful, but STILL.
Side note: This is why the harshly ramped XP in Fates is pretty great. Makes it so running tons of characters is not a big deal, they'll all catch up and they just gain tons of XP this way.
Anyhoo, random comments...
* While I agree with hinode that Hoshido Noble has no particularly interesting skills, merely having both swords & dragonstones & staves all at once is pretty cool. Got an interesting weird way of movement, too, some kind of crouch & slash. That said, I wish I'd known that HN has randomly horrible Resistance & Resistance growth... it makes a -Res flaw on Corrin all the more shocking. I even gave her a Talisman and mages still wreck her.
* Some people in chat were hyping Azama > Sakura since Azama can actually take a hit. "Haha, what nonsense" I thought as I played through early on. Squishy healers shouldn't be getting hit anyway, and Quiet Strength is REALLY GOOD at not getting your extremely squishy team OHKO'd left and right. (Actual resets were due to screwing up placement of Quiet Strength / Gentilhomme early on and watching characters get one shot by attack + pair-up half damage attack, where it's basically -4 damage.) As the game gets later on, I can see Azama hype more, not because he's tanky-for-a-healer, but because he's actually one of the authentic best tanks you get. WTF, I am intentionally sending a "healer" to go frontline with crazy def, decent resistance, and Renewal. This is obviously silly pre-promotion, but sure, Azama eventually pays off in his own interesting way, while Sakura is Just Another Mage. He's the tankiest member of my team! (Although if Scarlet had kept up in levels, I guess she'd win. And Corrin with a Dragonstone or DS+ would win too.)
* I picked up the 3 Awakening kids first, sorta accidentally, but fine by me. Asugi came with higher magic than Strength (!!) and worse Strength than pops despite having like 5 levels on him. Dang it, Orochi. Caeldori is like her mother Hinoka except slightly worse across the board. Only Rhajat is properly living up to the hype, it seems, and she's cheating due to Mozu as a mother giving her Aptitude..
* What is up with both routes deciding that beastpeople randomly wander to opera houses to join up with passing armies?
* Flora's plot in Birthright is really, really dumb. Like, super dumb. Which is not to say it was perfect in Conquest, but there it felt like Felicia was being a tad dumb & naive to tag along with Corrin because hey, he's the main character. It reminds me of Excellus's plot in Awakening, which is not a compliment. Dear FE writers: you can't just have the bad guys threaten some people, then let them off on their own in their own territory and expect this to work. The whole POINT of a rebellion is that yes, the rebels are willing to fight you and not fight for you! If you must do this plotline, then you need conscripted rebels interleaved with "regulars" so that they can't just defect the second nobody is watching, or a friendly army wanders by to *help* them. Just say that Flora & dad decided you needed a really intense training session before they could grant you the power of ice or some crap if they just needed an excuse for a battle. For extra fail, the map is really bad thematically. In the equivalent map in Conquest, you're racing to get to the towns to STOP people from fighting so that you don't inflame tensions. In Birthright, you open the villages and fight people for phat loot? Wut?
* On the above note, I wasn't really expecting to use Felicia in a Corrin-F route, but dang if she doesn't prove her worth. As soon as she joins there's 2 plotty missions involving her, there's tons of Flame Shurikens for everyone, and both maps involve low-Res Generals & Berserkers (countered by Flame Shuriken) as well as Dark Mages / Sorcerers (countered by Tomebreaker). I wonder if that was intentional.
* There's one of the most extreme difficulty swings I've seen around C20 of Birthright. C19 was *funny* at least with the crazy stats on enemies. C20, Fort Dragonfall, aside from making no sense, has L19 faceless with no relevant abilities standing there waiting to get slaughtered and holding Master Seals, and doing like 2 damage if you bother to let them attack. Okay, fine, I guess they don't expect you to be promoted yet, although I generally was. But Caeldori's paralogue, which I did right afterward, had freaking L7 promoted & L17 (!!) promoted enemies that nearly one-shot me. The map design there is at least very friendly to the player, but sheesh. In the same way, the paralogues seem to have way higher enemy levels since. Are the regular enemies scaled to your level, while the Paralogue enemy levels are locked to a point in time or something?! It's strange.
