Get ready for the hottest of takes.
I hate support conversations.
I don’t dislike the conversations themselves. I despise the entire support system. If you don’t participate in it, your units become actively weaker. A non-supported unit is worse than a supported one, period. The difference isn’t slight either, +10 avo or hitrate is quite decent, and +4.5 damage can give you a big boost in power. Don’t even mention crit buffs and whatnot.
Worse, the support system actively cuts you out of literally 90% of FE6/7/8’s ingame character relations. You know who the most boring characters are in FE8’s story? Almost all of them. Joshua has a cool line here or there, Ephraim has a few good moments, but outside of niche cases, FE8’s story is bland and not one I care about.
But guess what? Use a cheat code to 100% unlock all support conversations, and BOOM! FE8’s characters become way more interesting! Too bad you’ll only get to see a minuscule fraction of those conversations each playthrough. If you don’t cheat, you can only see five ‘points’ worth of conversations per character, per run.
And that’s not even the worst part. You ALSO have to grind turns mindlessly to unlock these goddamned things. You have to move characters right next to each other and have them stand still for fifty turns just to unlock basic C-rank convos, often.
Sure, I can see how support conversations have their upsides.
For one, it gives you a lot of replay value. Each time you play, you can unlock new aspects of the story. That’s neat.
For min-maxers, you have new ways to optimize your character’s stats via supports.
The supports themselves can also be considered ‘secrets’ for more hardcore fans.
But that last point is exactly the problem! I don’t want characters to be ‘secret’ at the cost of watering the story down. I want to get to know each of them well, understand who they are, and optionally read all the dialogue about them as possible in one sitting.
This is why I strongly advocate for gaiden side-chapters where you can move around and talk to characters. No stat boosts, no benefits, just lots of character dialogue. Throw out the support system, or make it purely for stat-boosting purposes, and put all that badass cross-character stuff somewhere the player can more easily access it.
I actually like that FE13 gave every character unlimited support points. Only the S-ranks were limited, and you could cheese them to read them via save-abuse. Not hard at all, and very easy to pull off. FE13 is not my favorite FE game, but in terms of allowing me to interact and bond with the characters, I think it’s waaaaaay up there. I actually like its implementation more than the Base convos in FE9/10, since those also still had limited support conversations.
Another option: LOTS of optional talk events during chapters. These should either not cost any actions, or if they do cost an action, give the units a lil something. Maybe a bit of exp, something so talking to your units is encouraged.
But hey, maybe that’s just me. Maybe I’m the only person who mostly despises the support system. Hottest of takes.