I finally got around to the latest Fire Emblem game since they sort of put it on sale on the digital store. This isn’t anime per se, but I figured there was only so many times you could deal with me talking about watching a show with somebody. So. Did you know it’s possible to get people married in Fire Emblem? (Oh, and I should probably mention this will spoil stuff in Awakening)
Did you? Well, you’re doing better than I was. I did not know that was a feature of the relationship system. If you haven’t played the game, FE as a series is a grid-based tactics game, with a rock-paper-scissors melee weapon system, several kinds of magic that works at range and in close, and archery that only works at range. Typically FE games are hard — not impossible, but unforgiving. If a character is taken out of a fight they die, so you can never use them again, and their development goes away. You know, because they’re dead.
That is, in fact, not the reason why I never finished any of those I played before (the first GBA game and the GCN’s Path of Radiance). It was actually the shopping. You see, shops in those FE games only exist in combat, which means if a character’s item is about to break, you have to get someone to a shop, usually on the other side of the map, without getting them killed. You have to do it before a bad guy decides to wander over and attack the shopkeep, making him or her shut their doors. And then you need to be able to afford it, obviously — and buying it takes a turn! In Path of Radiance I was doing fine, my characters were leveled nicely, but they all had weapons with less than 5 HP left (1 attack = 1 HP) and I couldn’t get to the shop in my current level. SOooo I never finished that game.
Awakening is “easy mode” in that there’s an easier difficulty, there are shops between levels, there’s grinding, and you can even turn off character death. I did all those things in this run. Yell about how much of a nebbish I am in the comments later.
For now, what matters is that you can also have the characters interact with each other on the battlefield. Usually they block attacks, add to hit ratios, that kind of good stuff. If you do that often enough, they’ll rank up how well they work together (C through A, and sometimes up to S). If you’re like me, you won’t notice that characters can only S rank with people of the opposite gender (yes yes; the game puts it that way, not me).
So imagine my surprise when I got Chrom (the lord of Fantasy Kingdom 1) and Robin (player analog) up to S rank — and they got married! Uuuuhh. Yeah. None of the dialogs I had gotten so far really indicated romance was a thing that was happening. Theirs did, a bit, but it was funny and not really obvious their feelings were changing, only that they kept accidentally seeing each other naked.
So naturally I have to grind affection for everybody, because when I did the research online I learned you get new characters from marriages, because, you know, they have kids. And you can recruit those kids because somehow they’re falling backwards in time.
So this moment is just one that’s funny: I accidentally got two characters married.
Oh, I also made a spreadsheet so I could see who had interacted with whom. I had a hell of a time figuring out who could match Libra, the taciturn priest ax-man, until I noticed Olivia hadn’t worked with him and apparently they both dance. That’s good enough for me! I’m sick of grinding, my characters will be overleveled…
G Conley: Magic Arts 