Ike is a mix of Eliwood and Hector really. Honestly, I prefer him over them. He has a better story around him, and he's more of an "all around guy". Hector is really more of an imbalanced and unreal person (just to compare). Ike is the best lord in any FE (and Leaf is the crappiest). I kinda like Micaiah as well (a second lord in FE10).

Essentially, almost all characters in FE9 & 10 are better (story wise) than the FE7 & 8 ones.

Frankly, that's the biggest improvement in the series to me - the plot and the characters.

One thing about FE9 & 10... When your mounted units attacks, they can move away after it.

I like Ike. He's principled, without being naive. Simple, without being foolish. His heroism comes across as being more down-to-earth, rather than fueled by melodrama. A pretty impressive feat given the rather cliche motivation they give him in PoR (dancing around potential spoilers, here).

So I am hearing that Ike is third-tier, that Ike is tops, and that Ike is generally likable. All righty!

I just beat FE7 again. Good game! Good game. Canas hit the dragon with Eclipse on his first attempt, cutting its HP down to 60. Then I used Filia's might on Hector, who proceeded to hit the dragon as hard as the dragon hit him.

It was dead in less than one turn. It was awesome.

I consider likable to be pretty high praise for a JRPG protagonist. Most of them fall into the category of mute, drama queen, or shallow caricature. Some of them even go for the hat trick. There aren't many I can actually empathize with.

Nice job on smacking down that dragon. I had to take two turns, so he ate somebody. Omlettes, eggs.

I concur.

Then again, Fire Emblem isn't a jRPG.  It falls into the even more niche sRPG category and sRPGs generally crush jRPGs into the ground when it comes to character design and development.

Nah, I see lots of offenders in SRPGs, too. Even in Fire Emblem games. Guess I just have high standards.

 Well, most Fire Emblem characters are "one sided" and thus shallow as hell. But when you have 40 characters, it's kinda hard to have them switch sides and such. Seth being the exception when he kills Eirika in that glitch though.

Anyone specificly dull (of the main characters)?

You just wanna make me piss some people off, don't you? What the heck...

Yeah, obviously not everybody can have a ton of depth to them when there are dozens of characters, and supporting characters often have to fill a particular role which doesn't leave them a lot of room for personality. I can forgive a predictable bigot character like Jill or a joke character like Ilyana.

I'm a little reluctant to finger particular characters, just because I haven't played these games as exhaustively as some. There are a lot of support conversations I've never seen. Eliwood and Eirika would be my picks for least interesting main characters so far.

I like Jaffar and Nino. I don't know why I have a soft spot for relationships like that.

Hell, taken on the whole, I thought the writing for FE7's cast was very well-done. If it's generally considered a ground floor for the quality of writing in the games that followed it, this is a damn good series for character development.

man Ilyana is cool and all but rolf beats all, in the GC one I had a 25% chance for deadeye without the killer bow, but with the killer bow, hehehehehohoho