Fire Emblem Catch All

Yeah, the support rite is the way to go for recruiting. All of my receipts except for Lysithea have been through the interrupts. I don't even know what Lysithea needed but after giving her a couple gifts and inviting her to tea she agreed to join me. Maybe it was a charm based check which Byleth has in spades.

Dr.Incurable wrote:
Stele wrote:

Trying to figure out the wacky formula for who can train Byleth in what after Ch 13. Very weird.

Very Simple, if they have skills higher than Byleth, they can train you. If not, they can't. The trainers from chapter 12 and earlier such as Cathrine, Manuela and others can still train you.

Coming back to this because there's still more to it. Not sure if it's class based or character based. But for instance Dorothea can only teach Byleth Reason. Even though she's a gremory with A in both reason and faith, both strengths for her.

Although faith was her hidden talent. So maybe they are limited to teaching their natural strengths only?

I’m a weirdo and haven’t tried to recruit anyone from another house. Was 1 under the full party for battles until someone joined after a story bit and then I also got Cyril so I have one for an adjudicate now.

I am now 35+ hours in, I think on Chapter 10? Still enjoying it a lot, however, I'm a little frustrated by some choices offered to me at the end of the mission in Remire Village:

Spoiler:

So, after it has been revealed that Tomas is named Solon (is that name supposed to have any significance or is it just, "I'm not Tomas!") and looks creepy and is evil, I defeat him, but he and the Death Knight just teleport away. Okay. Then the Flame Emperor shows up and says "Hey, we should work together." I say "what are you talking about, you were working with the Death Knight who's with Solon, so aren't you bad guys?" and he basically says "Yeah, I was working with the Death Knight for reasons, but I never would've been okay with what happened here in Remire, and you and I should team up to prevent Solon from doing more bad stuff like this." It's then put to me whether or not to agree to team up with the Flame Emperor.

This is extremely limited information! Team up against what? Does the Flame Emperor know what Solon is after? What does it mean to team up together? If it means both of us work to stop Solon, why wouldn't we want to do that? It's frustrating that I have basically no information and am forced to either say "Yes" or "No" without any way to understand the consequences of my choices (per my Mass Effect comparison earlier, in ME you would have at least 3 supplemental questions aside from Yes/No to give some more color to the choice). But I had saved, so I decided to say Yes, because absent any statement like "and, to team up with me, you must promise to let me do X Y and Z evil things," it's hard to see an obvious drawback of an enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend situation. I chose Yes.

And then the Flame Emperor responds with something like "Okay, you said Yes, but I can tell you don't really mean it!" WTF? What the hell was the point of that, then?

Then, after, I talk with Edelgard (I'm a Black Eagle, if that matters) and our conversation about Remire goes to something like "Well, do you think we should work with the Flame Emperor?", still with no new information and no way to qualify my answer or figure out the meaning of my choice, so I just said Yes again, but I don't feel great about it! Given references I've seen to there being a certain number of paths to this game, I gather these decisions are about which path I end up on, but in the absence of more information about these choices, it just feels like arbitrary sorting than a result of my choices about the world and the characters and how my Professor would feel about the situation.

I gather there may not be much non-spoiler-y info y'all can provide in response--ultimately I guess this is just a wait and see situation--but I am feeling frustrated that I think I am making some important decisions, but short of digging up a guide, I don't really understand why I would make one decision versus another, and it makes no sense to me that my character would have such binary responses.

I googled that choice and it doesn't really matter. If you choose yes like you did it isn't allowed. If you choose no the story continues the same.

Honestly almost all choices in the game are just for flavor. A lot of the dialogue with teammates gives you support hearts for one answer vs the other but that's it.

The main choices that matter are after the story split. You will fight some people from other houses and if you defeat then with Byleth you may have a choice to kill them or let them live.

And then if you're in Black Eagles there are two main choices to unlock an alternate route. The game pops up extra warning text and graphics telling you this will drastically alter the story.

The only other thing I think matters is the sylvain paralogue story mission. Afterward you can argue with Rhea that you want to keep the weapon from that mission. If you do it will negatively impact your support with her. That may matter depending on which of the 4 routes you do.

Stele wrote:

The only other thing I think matters is the sylvain paralogue. Afterward you can argue with Rhea that you want to keep the weapon from that mission. If you do it will negatively impact your support with her. That may matter depending on which of the 4 routes you do.

If you want to use Sylvain, keep the weapon. With it, he remained my hardest hitting character until chapter 14.

Dyni wrote:
Stele wrote:

The only other thing I think matters is the sylvain paralogue. Afterward you can argue with Rhea that you want to keep the weapon from that mission. If you do it will negatively impact your support with her. That may matter depending on which of the 4 routes you do.

If you want to use Sylvain, keep the weapon. With it, he remained my hardest hitting character until chapter 14.

If you don't keep it then you get it in his paralogue 2 chapters later. So the choice is whether your want to piss off Rhea or not.

Do all the artifact weapons have wild repair costs?

I've got Sylvain and Ingrid's on top of Byleth's, but I've only ever used Byleth's once so far. I'm curious if I'm doing the usual needless JRPG thing of saving the elixirs for later when later you're so powerful or have access to resources that make the conservation pointless.

There's supposed to be something you can do in the monastery that restores them but I for the life of me cannot remember what it was.

It's funny, I recently did that part as well, mrlogical, but being familiar enough with JRPG's I figured the "Yes" option would immediately have my cohort saying "Whaaaat?! No, you say no!" or something. As Stele noted, it's flavor choice, not meaningful choice. Byleth is basically a "defined" character like Lee from Walking Dead, but because Byleth is silent everyone expects them to be a blank slate when they're not.

I chalk it up to cultural differences and expectations.

There's supposed to be something you can do in the monastery that restores them but I for the life of me cannot remember what it was.

I believe if you rest on a day you get some recharge, but who in their right mind would do that?

Yeah the end of week Rest option restores relic weapons or something. I've only done that a couple times when everything else was caught up and I didn't want to waste exploration time.

Thanks, Stele, it's helpful to know that the really big decisions will be highlighted more explicitly. I still find that a bit annoying--why ask me to make these decisions if the game doesn't really care what I choose?--but at least I will be less worried about accidentally stumbling down a path when a choice presented wasn't clear.

Stele wrote:
Dyni wrote:
Stele wrote:

The only other thing I think matters is the sylvain paralogue. Afterward you can argue with Rhea that you want to keep the weapon from that mission. If you do it will negatively impact your support with her. That may matter depending on which of the 4 routes you do.

If you want to use Sylvain, keep the weapon. With it, he remained my hardest hitting character until chapter 14.

If you don't keep it then you get it in his paralogue 2 chapters later. So the choice is whether your want to piss off Rhea or not.

Spoiler:

Well, considering how my Black Eagles run has gone, yes. Yes I do.

zeroKFE wrote:

Do all the artifact weapons have wild repair costs?

I've got Sylvain and Ingrid's on top of Byleth's, but I've only ever used Byleth's once so far. I'm curious if I'm doing the usual needless JRPG thing of saving the elixirs for later when later you're so powerful or have access to resources that make the conservation pointless.

I used Sylvain's pretty regularly. Just resist the urge to use Ruined Sky with it. That's how you kill the durability. You can repair them with Umbral Steel. It's a very limited resource early on, but you'll soon find a paralogue for Soothis where you'll be able to get several of them by breaking monster barriers.

I have around 20 Umbral Steel in Ch. 14, so I can use my relic weapons liberally.

I have around 20 Umbral Steel in Ch. 14, so I can use my relic weapons liberally.

Okay, so it's all Umbral Steel regardless of the artifact. One per repair I assume?

But yeah, I broke the barrier in the tutorial fight, and then again during the monster fight the next month, and I've been buying it from online visitors whenever I have the spare cash, so I suppose I should switch out of conservation mode. Thanks!

zeroKFE wrote:
I have around 20 Umbral Steel in Ch. 14, so I can use my relic weapons liberally.

Okay, so it's all Umbral Steel regardless of the artifact. One per repair I assume?

I think it's 3 per repair. If you used your relic weapon exclusively, that could be an issue, but I typically use mine a few times per fight and have only needed to repair them a couple times each.

Also, minor spoiler for after the jump:

Spoiler:

My relic weapons were fully repaired when the jump occured, so go crazy when you know that's coming up.

I'm scared to do my second house run as Classic since I feel like you can soft lock yourself into not being able to beat the game if you don't have enough characters to win with. Am I correct in thinking this?

I don't have a lot of experience with the previous games, btw.

Vrikk wrote:

I'm scared to do my second house run as Classic since I feel like you can soft lock yourself into not being able to beat the game if you don't have enough characters to win with. Am I correct in thinking this?

I don't have a lot of experience with the previous games, btw.

I'm not sure about that. It's fairly clear that the game is balanced relatively easy. At least as far as I've played.

If, on a second playthrough, you took all the lessons of the Monastery part of the game and truly min/maxed those I believe you'd be able to recruit enough people to get through.

Vrikk wrote:

I'm scared to do my second house run as Classic since I feel like you can soft lock yourself into not being able to beat the game if you don't have enough characters to win with. Am I correct in thinking this?

I don't have a lot of experience with the previous games, btw.

You get the other teachers for free. Recruiting from other houses should be even easier in NG+ with your professor level boosted at the start. I think you'd have to intentionally kill some students to lose.

I hear the final battle is tough, some people might die there, but if you win it's ok.

The Fire Emblem Reddit sub and the Waypoint Discord channel are full of all kinds of fun fan art, but for some reason this one was particularly charming to me:

Edit: Spoiler tagging it because I guess it sort of reveals some appearance changes from later in the game, but probably ones most people are aware of. Still, if you want to be surprised when playing the game, don't open the spoiler.

Spoiler:

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ECVeb2XUIAE9dnG.jpg:large)

Vrikk wrote:

I'm scared to do my second house run as Classic since I feel like you can soft lock yourself into not being able to beat the game if you don't have enough characters to win with. Am I correct in thinking this?

I don't have a lot of experience with the previous games, btw.

Nah.

Classic is kind of bogus anyway - Divine Pulse mostly makes it obsolete. I've only lost one character so far, and that was because I didn't understand how Divine Pulse works at that early point in the game.

Since then, I've had one or two close calls that really weren't that close after I rewinded via Divine Pulse.

Stele wrote:
Vrikk wrote:

I'm scared to do my second house run as Classic since I feel like you can soft lock yourself into not being able to beat the game if you don't have enough characters to win with. Am I correct in thinking this?

I don't have a lot of experience with the previous games, btw.

You get the other teachers for free. Recruiting from other houses should be even easier in NG+ with your professor level boosted at the start. I think you'd have to intentionally kill some students to lose.

I hear the final battle is tough, some people might die there, but if you win it's ok.

Also, if you're playing on normal, I don't think you'll have much to worry about. Even if you have little experience with this series, the game is on the easy side. In fact, here's a rather topical article that just went up: Either I'm a Strategic Genius, or 'Fire Emblem: Three Houses' is Too Easy. I've been playing on Hard/Classic, and it matches my memory of what Awakening/Fates were on Normal difficulty... maybe a little easier.

Even if you do end up losing anyone, the Divine Pulse system ensures that you have multiple retries per battle to save someone that you've lost.

Yeah, I'm in complete agreement with Patrick there -- it's mind boggling why you can't at least change the normal/hard setting at will. Makes a bit more sense about the casual/classic toggle, but still.

Given that it was my first Fire Emblem game there is no way I was going to do anything but the default normal/casual, but even at this point it's clear I should have done at least hard/casual.

Jonman wrote:

Classic is kind of bogus anyway - Divine Pulse mostly makes it obsolete. I've only lost one character so far, and that was because I didn't understand how Divine Pulse works at that early point in the game.

I don't agree with that. Classic still matters because it forces you to use your Divine Pulses to keep people alive. Without Classic on, there are no stakes in battle, even on Hard. The few battles where I need to use all my Pulses to keep someone on my team alive were the most fun I've had with the combat side of the game.

I would be more interested in Classic if I had a sense that character deaths led to interesting things happening beyond just seeing scenes without that character. If a character's death led to persistent and interesting different reactions from the living characters, changes to the plot that provided interesting alternatives, I'd think it would be worth trying. But it sounds like it's just "now that person isn't around so you don't see any more of them in the story," which doesn't sound like a different experience as much as it sounds like a lesser experience. (Incidentally, I have gotten characters killed several times, but never beyond the reach of divine pulse)

Yeah, that's a big part of why I decided to not challenge myself that way the first time though.

Hard/casual was the fun spot for me on Awakenings. Had to pay attention but didn't have to redo entire battles for one slip.

Should have tried the same here, but erred on the side of easy to enjoy the story. May end up hard/classic on NG+ just to keep myself awake.

I did casual for the first time ever on this one for many of the above reasons. Assuming I go through it a second time it will be on Hard/Classic.

I will absolutely be stepping up to hard for a second run. I'm waiting until I see the back half of the game before I make any choices on classic/casual, but as Dyni was saying, I feel like with Divine Pulses classic seems reasonable (particularly since you keep your statue upgrades in New Game+, right?).

Dyni wrote:

[I don't agree with that. Classic still matters because it forces you to use your Divine Pulses to keep people alive. Without Classic on, there are no stakes in battle, even on Hard. The few battles where I need to use all my Pulses to keep someone on my team alive were the most fun I've had with the combat side of the game.

Barely.

You get so many Divine Pulse uses that there's still no stakes to Classic. And stupidly, you get even more Divine Pulse uses that unlock as you upgrade the statues in the Cathedral in the mid-game.

Admittedly, I'm playing on Normal (and I wish I was on Hard, just to make the combat even vaguely challenging).

I’m near the end of my second play through. The first was a Blue Lions, and I agree that Ingrid is great (I made her a Pegasus Knight). Sylvain is powerful, but an ass, and I loved Annette as my primary dark mage with sone healing thrown in.

And now at the end of the Golden Deer play through, sh*t got weird.

Spoiler:

I was weirded out by the middles—not magic middles, just plain old ICBMs. And now the last mission is set in Tron

.

I have played this game for over 80 hours and the above shocked me so much I had to post.