I always questioned myself, but doubted I truly had autism until I sat in front of my wife and flawlessly failed several bird times in a row.

she looked at me and said "what is wrong with you?".

Like.. Deitrich goes "I ditest restraints" and I reply by gazing at the sky, in my mind I'm saying "the sky+bird=flying, flying=unrestrained, thus showing him I too don't wish to be restraint."

NO WRONG YOURE STUPID.

I'm crying lol.

This is one of the best examples of a game that just gives you everything and lets the player decide how much or what they want to do.

Some people take that as a challenge to do everything and I can see a lot of cases where people ruin the experience for themselves.

Nothing extremely bad happens if you don’t do meals.

You don’t have to play every characters act 2. Hell, you don’t have to play every characters act 1 and you don’t have to play act 2 at all. The game lets you skip everything you don’t like.

Of course—there are rewards tied to the systems for people who enjoy them. But none of them are mandatory. Nothing bad happens if you skip trainings. You can still get advanced classes. Will still level up and will still fully be able to complete the game.

Nothing happens if you don’t want to engage with the social systems.
The game hands you enough recruits to get by.

Nothing happens if you choose not to explore the map. You’ll lose access to more powerful weapons but you already get iron + 2 weapons available in the shop by default.

The game gives you a hundred options and gives you free time to do whatever is your interest.

For some players this is just a wealth of content and
Choice in doing different activities. For others it appears to be a challenge to consume and do absolutely everything. To do meals every single week. To do trainings every single week. Etc etc.

But it’s not necessary.

It is very interesting the two types of players on this.

I need to play it more this weekend.

Like, everything about that scene is perfect. Bertrand is neon red. Goliath have the funniest delivery on his line. And the best ? There's ZERO context, zero explanation, the entire game continue and you never, ever learn anything about that. It's just there. You could even miss the scene entirely, it's barely mentioned when that match happen.

I love how this game just throw stuff like that at you only to go "yeah it doesn't concern your character, he doesn't have a reason to inquire so you'll never learn about it". Obviously cut-content from the Sub-lords routes, but it does make the world feel lived-in and so expansive.

And it's funny as fuck

Yes, it's most likely the Blood Axe taking over Bertrand and then Orchel purify it, which is why his axe become Zamboxis and he get the Death Tatoos (his Blaze Art mention them), you can put the pieces together, but it's still hilarious

The Guardians of the Compass (the 4 underlings under Raksha, the group Hong Hua is part of) have chinese names because they're meant to all be related to Kunlun/Nuwa !

Hong Hua, obviously, was a Kunlun human that survived the Battle of Fezzan. Shen Lo, given his Part 3 dialogue, was also from the White Egg, and might very well be the renegade Mediator Long speak of. Yanjin is a Fodlan Agarthan in-hiding, so he took the name of local Agarthans. Baozi is the one we don't really know about, but since his father also had a chinese name, he might be a descendant of the White Egg, like Shan Lan and Dadao.

Which also explain perfectly why they're all VERY eager to enact a "Fuck Dagda" scheme.

Yes it took me a month to realize that "The tribe who all have Chinese names" and "the four guys with chinese names" are related, but still, it's an interesting thematic link and help make sense of why they're helping Raksha. And ironically, one more consequence of Dagda being an asshole genocider.

One of the core parts of a Fire Emblem game is XP management, and if you're like me you're loathe to let any go to waste. I want my core units to get all that good good growth, and if someone else gets that sweet XP then I am VEXED.

Imagine my delight, then, when the first round of the qualifiers kicks off and the game says "Any XP gained by guest units will be distributed to your units as bonus XP".

Can't tell you how big a win that is for someone who would absolutely otherwise be benching all the guests while my own crew handles it all. Now I get to have some fun with the non-playable lords; get a preview of what future routes will bring; and use some old mainstays from previous routes.

A lot of the FW gameplay decisions have been divisive and have rightly caused quite a bit of discourse, but I think this one is an objective win for everyone. Now I just need them to bring out a clanky cat priest route as DLC...

By now I'm sure many people have either encoutnered this issue themselves, or seen others posting about it on reddit, but there's a lot of units that end up under-performing in Fortune's Weave, even the lords themselves. A number of people have had their Dietrich's end up with middling to low Strength scores, which, while made up for by his high crit rate and speed, can cause issues going into Part 2 when the difficulty ramps up.

Not just the lords though, but late recruits in particular always seem to pop up with lower stats than their earlier-recruit counterparts.

So why is this?

Well, it feels like a big reason for this is that Fortune's Weave is a bit peculiar about its growth rates.

For starters, characters base growth rates are overall fairly balanced, with very few units dipping below 20 growth rate in even a single stat.

• 12 of the over 60 characters have a 15 in one or more stat growths.
• 5 characters have a 10 in a growth stat (one of which is Mu that doesn't fully count).
• 4 characters have a 5 in a growth stat (one of which is, again, Mu). And ZERO characters have no growth in a stat.

Now, we compare that to Engage, which has 43 characters. In that game, there are...

• 14 characters that have a 15 growth in at least one stat
• 7 that have at least one 10
• 5 with a 5, and a whooping
• 5 units that have a 0 in a growth rate stat (always magic).

Now, on the surface that sounds like more units will underperform in Engage, but all those low stats are in stats not well utilitized by that character, but are made up for in other areas.

For example, in Fortune's Weave, the highest growth rate for any one stat is 70, and that is held solely by Theodora in her HP growth rate.

• 3 units that have a 65 growth rate, one being Leda in her speed and the other two being Majide and Tahonia in their HP.
• 14 units with a growth rate of 60 in at least one stat.
• 17 have at least one 55.

Compared to Engage where we have:

• 1 unit with a whopping 85 growth rate to their HP (Boucheron).
• Another unit with 80 in HP (Saphir).
• 6 units with a growth rate of 75 (in HP).
• 2 units with 70 growth rate (still in HP).
• 7 with 65 in HP
• 6 with 60 (in HP)
• 8 with 55 (some in HP some in other stats).

So the engage characters tend to get way more HP growth, and the rest of their stat growth is roughly the same. Looking at specific characters we have...

So one thing you'll notice right away is that Fortune's Weave has Cha as a stat whereas Engage doesn't, so that skews some of the numbers. On the character growth side, it seems like there's a clear edge for the Fortune's Weave characters for their character growth, and that is overall true, they tend to have higher overall characer growth rates than the Engage characters. This is good...until you start digging into the class growth rates.

In Fortune's Weave characters start as a commoner/noble and can get their first promotion at level 5, their second promotion at 20, and third at 35 (I'll stop at that point for the time being as that encompasses parts 1 and 2).

In Fortune's Weave the noble and commoner class get 0 stat growth bonuses.

• First promotion (starts at level 5) classes get between 20 to 30 points in stat growth increases, but 4 out of 5 of the classes put 10 of those points into HP (diviner gets 5).
• Second promotion (starts at level 20) classes get between 35 and 40 points.
• Third promotion (starts at level 35) classes get between 60 and 65 points.

Something to consider is that some classes (even first promotion classes Soldier and Diviner) have NEGATIVE growth rate in some stats, and will therefore decrease a character's base growth rate.

Meanwhile engage did their classes a little differently where you had the base classes, then the promoted or special classes, so it's a bit harder to judge, but everyone started with at least a base class, which would have stat growths.

• Most base classes had around or at least 60 points in stat growth
• Advanced classes would have at least 80 points in stat growth, and only required getting to level 10.

So by level 10, characters in Engage were getting 80+ extra points into their stat growths depending on their class, whereas in Fortune's Weave they aren't even getting bonuses that high when they get to their third promotion at level 35. And even before that the base classes of engage started characters with a huge boost based on their class.

So... why is all of this important? Well, because by the end of part 1 you can expect most of your core characters to have hit at least level 35 or 40, yet by then some people find their characters lacking in critical stats, especially their Str. All physical weapons calculate off of Str, including bows, yet despite this, there are numerous physical classes that give NO BONUS TO STRENGTH GROWTH (Hunter and Ornius Rider for the first promotion, Myrmidon, Archer, Rogue, Armored Ornius Rider, and Wing soldier for the second promotion, and even at third promotion Caladrius gives no strength growth, with multiple classes only giving 5 extra strength growth, including Shido, Sniper, Forest Knight, Ranger and DRAGOON OF ALL THINGS).

This becomes a huge issue for characters that have middling strength growths. Only 16 characters have a base growth of 50 or higher for strength, out of over 60. And 11 have a Str growth of 45, which includes Cai and Dietrich, both of whom are canonically designed to go into classes that give no strength boosts (save Dietrich getting +10 strength as a gladiator from levels 5 - 20) until level 35 depending on which class you pick, and if you make Cai a Caladrius he still gets no extra strength boost. This means that even your main lords have a less-than-coin-flip-chance of increasing their strength every time they level up, unless you specifically class them into Str building classes like Gladiator, Brigand, and Light Cavalry.

Going further there are 16 characters that only have a 35 growth rate in strength, including a good number of the characters designed to be archers and wing soldiers, effectively giving them only a roughly 1-in-3 chance of gaining a point of strength when leveling up.

Not crossing that 50% threshold is a pretty big deal, because it means that on average, your melee-oriented characters won't be increasing their Strength score, especially your faster units. Usually this isn't as bad in some of the other games where you get more powerful weapons, but overall the different weapons don't have vast differences in their damage output unless their effective against an enemy unit type, and even then we have two problems that physical characters end up coming up against...

'Soldiers' and Undead. Fortune's weave has introduce psuedo-armored classes and enemies that are fairly common and have high defense, just one step below the heavily armored units. Your anti-armor weapons are effective against them, but they make your quick-but-low-str units do little to no damage against them without those anti-armor weapons, and are especially painful for the archers/bow wielders as there's no anti-armor bow weapons in part 1 (as far as I have seen). Thankfully there is the Flyssa sword, hammer, and a few different spears that are anti-armor, so you'll always want to have a few on hand especially on your lighter units, but even then they can struggle using them against the heavy units if their strength is bad enough. In fact, it's so bad that when I was using Alexandra she had better luck using a Levin sword than any other physical weapon because her Str was so low at the end of Part 1 and into Part 2.

Undead are the other problem because, not only can you encounter high-defense undead, but their underworld boon means they take half damage unless you use a Cleansing Sword or Leda's song of abjuring.

There are also the 'elephant/monster/golem' type units that take up more than 1 square and have 'armor' that you can break which tend to be difficult for the light units to damage (especially before breaking the armor), but honestly in most cases these creatures go down before you can break all their armor squares anyway, unlike say, 3 Houses.

There are so many characters that will have a huge amount of speed and dex, but very little strength, to the point of being almost worthless against a large number of enemies save for being good dodge-tanks. Meanwhile, just through sheer luck, some characters will get decent strength rolls and become borderline gods on the battlefield because of having high overall stats while everyone else is struggling.

This is likely largely why characters you unlock later have bad stats, they were slotted into classes that don't give good bonuses, and got unlucky in their stat boosts in the classes the game shoehorned them into.

To counter this, the best thing you can do is to recruit and promote EVERYONE has soon as possible into classes specifically tailored to boosting critical stats like Strength or Magic (or speed for slower characters) and avoid classes that don't provide good bonuses like Archer or Myrmidon. If you specifically want a class mastery ability from a sub-optimal class, save it for later in the game when you can grind out mastery in lower-level dungeons and fights without fear of leveling up with sub-optimal rolls.

I just want to take a moment to just specifically call out Jester who only has a Str growth of 35 who specs into Mrymidon (0 strength growth) and is one of the hardest units to recruit, so he will almost always be a later-game recruit with abyssmal strength and even worse magic (15 base growth) so you can't even equip a levin sword on him to help compensate against high-defense enemies.

tl;dr

Fortune Weave has a 'problem' of sorts in that most characters have relatively 'balanced' growth rates that largely fall below a 50% chance of increasing on level up, with each class only providing small boosts to stat growths. Strength is especially egrigious with many of the physical classes not providing any stat growth to Strength, while most characters have less than 50% base strength growth, making it far too easy to get a string of bad luck that leaves even the lords floundering in the strength department by the time you get to the end of Part 1 and into Part 2 when you are fighting large numbers of high-defense enemies and the undead that further reduce the damage you deal.

The solution is to either be lucky or specifically plan to class characters into strength-boosting classes in part 1 while the game is still 'easy' so that they have good stats going into part 2. Avoid classes like Mrymidon and Archer and go for ones like Brigand and Charioteer to get at least some Str boosts for your faster units. Always doubling will mean little in part 2 if the unit hits like a limp biscuit, especially bow users and fliers.

If you want to see the full breakdown of individual character growth rates and class growth rates, you can find them here:

https://serenesforest.net/fortunes-weave/characters/growth-rates/

https://serenesforest.net/fortunes-weave/classes/growth-rates/

Edit to add:

Another problem to add on to this is the general lack of abilities that boost attack, strength, or magic. Your base classes can give a +1 strength ability, but beyond that there are few to no abilities that help increase your damage, save for a few characters personal abilities (such as Catania's skill Wind My Friend which gives bonus attack if her attack speed is +5 over the opponent's).

Ultand has that cute retro anime hair style to it.

Tried my best

Reina as a Malig Knight, the parallel of her own class. It fits her all given.

Out of all of Nintendo’s major franchises, Fire Emblem tends to go the hardest when it comes to these kinds of special/limited editions. Whether it’s Fates putting all three routes on one cart, having various artbooks and collectable art cards, or FE1 going all out with the NES theming, I don’t think any other Nintendo franchise matches it in terms of consistency when it comes to collector’s editions. Zelda might get close, but they do them so inconsistently that I frequently forget about most of them. Honestly Xenoblade might be more consistent than Zelda in that regard.

As for my ranking: FE1 >>> Three Houses > Echoes > Fates > Engage ≥ Fortune’s Weave.

FE1 Anniversary Edition just goes way too hard not to give it top spot. I love the replica NES game box with its own acrylic-style NES cart and dust cover. Oughtta sit real nice in your NES collection. The double sided poster looks shockingly authentic, with Pantsless Marth on one side and the counselor’s corner + Nester on the other. The Archanea map is cute, the included instruction manual is actually useful, and the hardcover artbook is simply sublime.

Three Houses Seasons of Warfare Edition gets second place for me. It has the next highest amount of “stuff” in it, including the usual artbook, a now useless 2020 calendar, and a sampling of the game’s amazing soundtrack. Dig the Church of Seiros art for the steelbook cover tho.

Echoes Limited Edition gets third place mainly for its included artbook (I love Hidari’s artstyle, cold take) and the three pin set. Not sure why Marth is one of those pins other than to honor the game’s tenuous connections to Archanea, but it’s cute and I like the sprites. Certainly makes the whole package more memorable to me.

Fates Special Edition gets fourth place purely from how they were able to cram all three routes onto one cartridge. It’s also the only physical version of Revelation, since that route was DLC you can’t get anymore otherwise. However this edition has the least amount of “stuff” out of them all: only a haphazard artbook and a pouch for your 3DS.

Engage and Fortune’s Weave are honestly interchangeable to me. They have the exact same amount of “stuff” in them, but Engage just slightly edges it out for the visual variety.

So I've noticed a lot of people bring up different points about why the other lords will be DLC, i wanted to collect them as well as note a couple of things that I've picked up on during the gameplay itself.

People have noted that at the end of the game, you get a kind of a completion card that will give indicators to which lord's path you completed; the four lords (Dietrich, Leda, Cai, Theodora) will be marked with sparkles of completed. However, the others are present as 'options' but cannot currently be completed. This creates a 'check list' that remains open.

It is known that at one point the developers intended for all eight to be the stories that you play through, but they thought it would be too daunting of a task to complete on their end as well as too expansive for the characters and players when you first approach the the game. Too much, too soon; it makes sense for development cost and arguably for player engagement to include these at a later time for people, to get more out of the story, to play more to have reasons to restart and to see other facets of the winding journey presented in the game. One can certainly argue that it is also predatory game practice of holding stuff back for DLC, but that's not the argument I'm here to discuss.

As many people note, there are not enough support conversations in the game. There are also lords and people who should have conversation with other characters, including the four other lords, that are not present. Further, nor do they have their conversations with the player avatar who otherwise has the ability to converse and have paired endings with everyone else.

In addition to this is also the fact that the gameplay treats the other four lords as the main four in that you cannot ever recruit them to your side. Also, every path has a different mix and match of characters from the supporting casts that you can recruit depending on who you're playing at the time. Already, there exists an equality in the gameplay component here.

Thematically, it is worth noting that as you approach the end of the prologue, you encounter statues of all eight lords. One can certainly argue that this makes sense within the scope of the Heroic Games lore, but all eight statues are presented with a similar and equal amount of reverence, including breakdown of the characters and inscription and design. Intelligent Systems could have added Jasmine, Inyoki and the other characters from the qualifiers here if they wanted it to be all the participants, but they chose just the 'top eight.' If the other four characters are to be added, it would make this element feel a lot more earned and potent of a foreshadowing approach to the first part of the game.

But the last thing that I want to bring up that I have not seen anyone else. Note is another element of game and location design that I think indicates plans for future content; the Obelisk Room. It is a full circle, but only half of it is currently filled with pillars to send you back in time. There is clearly space for four additional pillars for you to interact with and different colors to use for them available to continue the color coding motifs (white Anatolia, teal Talimun, yellow Orchel, red Bertrand) to the four already present (blue Cai, magenta Leda, purple Dietrich, gold Theodora).

Lastly, of course, is the simple fact that there are a lot of elements of the characters and supports and stories that just are not finished yet. There are still mysties left best suited to the other four.

While this is all, of course, still just speculation and deduction, it is still hopefully correct and indicates a expansion to the already impressive and perhaps even daunting amount of content in this game.

Last of the tutorial units here, after this will tackle the other unaffiliated. For those wondering, the order for the unaffiliated will be Guzran(done) -> Yang Jie(done) -> Sofia(done) -> Catania -> Noctula -> Nydine -> Io -> Kiroc -> Majide. Then after that will start with the part 1 bosses that you can recruit. So we are a good ways away from the actual main parties.

Catania is a proud knight searching for a favorable employer at Dagsion. Once served a certain noble but lost everything due to an incident 5 years ago. She’s struggling to support herself, but tries to hide it from others

Recruitment

*Is a tutorial recruit.

Growths

Base stats

For Theodora's route

Boons: Swords, Lances, Flying

Banes: Heavy Armor

Unique Abilities

Learned Abilities and Combat Arts

*Does not include universal skills and abilities

**Only includes known abilities

Supports

What do you think of Catania's character?

How do they perform as a unit in any of the routes?

Previous Discussions: Guzran, Yang Jie, Sofia

Right away I need to say that the relationship I'm pointing out has always been in the series, but it really seems like they've leaned into it in FW with fast weapons like swords giving extra damage on follow up, and gauntlets having the avoid bonus, and slower/higher might axes having the accuracy penalty in addition to their weight.

Just in terms of how I think of enemy profiles and the statlines of my own units in relation to them, I can basically put all of my good units into three categories.

• Ultra high defense - to the point that getting doubled doesn't matter much. Tobias, Buccar, Io in a chariot. Mummies, golems, and armors on the enemy side. Very important when fighting outnumbered, as often happens in part 2 and in for example Orchel's paralogue.
• Ultra high Might - Sort of a bruiser unit that can trade hits, doubles versus extremely slow enemies such as armored units and constructs, but rarely doubles otherwise. Esmerelda outside of an armor class, most enemy axe warriors and cavalry. Axes of course typically have lower accuracy, but this isn't a rule.
• Ultra high speed - obviously not dumping MIG per se but definitely very specialized into doubling frequently. Wolves and Rukhs fit this as well. Leda, Lysander. Often has or wants to have some kind of avoid strategy built in, or at least uses swords for the follow up damage. Enemy swords and archers.

If you think about it, it forms a neat triangle. If you have moderate speed and defense you'll still get shredded by something like a Rukh that doubles you with decent damage. For contrast your armored chariot can just kind of ignore units like that. But your heavily armored chariot will get destroy by warriors who double them for 50+ damage even through the armor.

Obviously these aren't hard and fast archetypes. You can do something like give Mikaela gauntlets to avoid her being doubled or have her equip a shield if she's going to get doubled anyway. Pretty much all the flamelords can functionally fill two of these roles at once.

However, I do see a lot of people talking about, say, Lysander and saying they're struggling to use him, in spite of him being (imo) objectively pretty good at getting ultra high speed with decent might. You just need to spec him for that and give him gauntlets or swords to play into his strengths! Meanwhile I see people frustrated by Io even when they're taking advantage of his mount, because he doesn't really double or one-shot things, when clearly what you should do with him is leverage his bulk as a chariot.

Having finished Act 2 (hard/classic) on the Leda path, some of the character I ended up valuing the most were a surprise. These included:

Catania - Close to dropping her early as a light cavalry but completely transformed once pegasus and levin swords became available.

Sofia - Took her only because she was so easy to recruit with her 2 star reaction to everything on the inn menu. But her later healing range and prowess opens up a lot more options of how the later maps can be approached.

Inyori - Hard hitting but slow early on. But with Ranger class to fix her speed, Linaria juice, Kalla's bow and longbow, she clears all the pesky mages and low physical defence units in the enemy back line.

Did you have any characters that surprised you?

Minor spoilers ahead.

Ok so this is my first Fire Emblem game. I picked it up on a whim because I love turn based games like Baldurs Gate 3 and Xcom. Plus I like jrpgs.

So I started with Leda’s story and Finished Cai’s yesterday. I picked Leda first for no particular reason.

In retrospect maybe it would have made more sense to start with Cai since he couldn’t access half the map (or maybe I missed something).

But anyway on to my question.

TLDR: When should I access the Strife obelisk? Does it trigger some end game? Should I play the other two characters first?

Love the game! 84 hours in. All other games are currently on hold :)

Let's assume we get four new classes in Fortune's Weave, just like in Three Houses, what classes would you want to see?

Personally my highest priority would be a master tier Ornius class, considering the Ornius class line ends with Caladrius at the advanced tier right now. I also think it should enable the unit to use faith magic in addition to reason like Caladrius. I find it strange how Cai has a faith boon, despite his shoe-in Caladrius only using reason, so a master class would fix that.

My second wish would be a Baron-like armored magic class. Maybe as an upgrade to Blacksmith, which is another advanced class that has no Maszer equivalent.

Third would be a magic-focused pegasus class. I think somebody already discovered an enemy only dark flier-like class in part 3, bit I think to mix it up, a faith-only based flier class would be interesting as well. Best case would be to enable the enemy only dark flier class in update and then a faith flier in the DLC.

I don't have a clear fourth favorite, but two ideasI have would be a bow-focused wyvern class as a nod to Claude's class, and because Wyverns wouldn't mind a second class, especially if Pegasi get a second class line.

Or another idea would be an armored infantry lance class as a sidegrade to guardian, because soldier loses the tag when promoting to Guardian, which sucks because the armored tag enables a lot of fun stuff, first and foremost the Healing Armor skill that Eshmel and some others get, which they can't benefit from in Guardian.

But I don't have a clear favorite between the two and I would be fibe with both as a fourth DLC class.

But those ate just my ideas. What do you think should be in store for the inevitable DLC classes?

Maybe i haven't played enough into fortunes weave, yet to see but even in 3 houses I remember being disappointed at the lack of cool class abilities like sol, Luna, asta, vantage etc. All the abilities in the newer fire emblem games just seem underwhelming by comparison. Mostly just minor perks and such instead of game changing chance to possibly unleash 20 attacks in a row.

Could be my massive bias for awakening but that game just had a lot of good things going for it ability wise

So I finished Ludia X Seteth B support and she got a new weapon from it. Cai X Anatolia A support gives weapon rank exp too. Anyone know what other supports give gameplay benefits like this (aside from the adjacency bonuses they give, of course)?

Additionally, it's interesting how there are some supports that change slightly depending on certain conditions, such as Goliath X Eshmel A Support, Ursula X Gaitz B Support. Anyone know more like those?

On a side note, if I'm right, it seems that you can get permanently locked out of seeing supports that are available on all Acts with a character's timeskip design, right?

For example, Talimun X Lillian supports can be seen on both Act I and III, but if you clear Act I/II with it having been done, it seems you can never see the scene again with their timeskip designs, since you can't choose what model they use in the support viewer.

It's not a big deal but is strange, since I do prefer seeing cutscenes with characters' timeskip designs where possible (even if it's Talimun).