| RolStoppable said: Ever since support conversations have been introduced to the FE series, the difference in importance of the given characters has only been emphasized because those who are central to the storyline usually had the biggest amount of support options. What Awakening changed is that the lesser characters are now on more equal footing (actually, almost everyone is more important than the main character Chrom) and the big amount of options for everyone mean that the experience can differ a lot for any player of the game. If someone happens to pick some of the least interesting pairings of the bunch, they are going to feel disappointed by the characterisation. Given that the amount of possible supports has multiplied (used to be around 80 pairs in previous games, now several hundred), the likelyhood for throwaway conversations has also increased. It's also hard to avoid cliched characters when the cast encompasses over 40 people, so they've always been present in the series. But back to the issue, characters like Lethe and Mordecai have been mentioned as being much better than anything that is in Awakening. It's something that people will tend to agree with because Lethe and Mordecai get an elaborate introduction in Path of Radiance's story, so there's no need for support conversations to really flesh out their characters (both of them have only three support options anyway); PoR also had base conversations, so that's a lot of dialogue between characters that was easily accessible between chapters and every player would get to see them. Awakening handles things differently in that almost everyone only has a brief introduction and there are no base conversations, so the rest has to be discovered via supports. As a result, a single playthrough of the game will leave a lot of characters bland, unless the player grinds for conversations. If we go back to before the PoR/Radiant Dawn duo, there were no base conversations. Therefore a lot of players would agree that large amounts of the casts in the GBA games are not much more than a character portrait without any sort of personality, especially because triggering support conversations takes so much effort that most people forego doing it. |
Interesting and informative post...I am certainly looking forward to FE:if to see how they improve on the formula from Awakening, as it sounds like a middle ground could be reached to satisfy everyone (or almost everyone).
I wish I could actually play some of the older Fire Emblems though, but they are all so darn expensive!
