I definitely have not read any threads today that would influence my opinions on this topic, but unrelated to any posts that may or may not have been made on FEUniverse today, I had a thought.
FE8 is currently the most supported game for hacking as far as I am aware. If we look at FE8’s class composition, we can see there are six classes with the word ‘Knight’:
In contrast, there is only one (1) class with the word ‘Soldier’ in it:
Soldier (bruh)
Consider this random stackexchange thread on the proportions of knights to soldiers. It proposes a ratio of 5-1 soldiers to knights as historically appropriate. Clearly this single stackexchange thread is correct on all counts.
Here are my proposed class name solutions which would rectify this issue and be objectively superior and forever put to rest the problem of too many classes named ‘Knight’:
Knight -> Heavy Soldier
Great Knight -> Heavy Cavalier
Pegasus Knight -> Pegasus Soldier
Falcon Knight -> Falcon Soldier
Wyvern Knight -> Wyvern Soldier
Mage Knight -> Mage Cavalier
This presents a problem wherein there are now five classes with ‘Soldier’ and none with ‘Knight’, which swings too far the other way. Therefore, we simply do this:
Paladin -> Knight
Voila, 5-1 ratio. Please, hold your applause. I can’t hear it until mp3 embeds are enabled anyway.
Synonyms and Antonyms for knight is Gallant, Banneret, Cavalier, Champion, Chevalier, Paladin, and Partisan. I thought it would be a interesting fact to note
If we get rid of ‘knight’ the complainers will only latch on to something else to complain about! We must stan ‘knight’, with all our heart; if not for ourselves, but for those who don the title of ‘Knight’ and everything they stand for!
I assert that only the most foolish of fools would claim that ordinary foot soldiers are not memorable. The point is that Death or Glory is the gold standard for hack protagonists and all hail Ragnar.
I have never met a memorable fire emblem character in my life. However I have also never met a fire emblem character in my life, so take that with a grain of salt.
I didn’t actually state that soldiers can’t be memorable, just suggested that because we want memorable characters, the cast of our army really isn’t comparable with the average historical composition of armies.
Sorry but this post is factually incorrect. Cavalier is supposed to be “Social Knight”. Knight is actually “Armor Knight”. IS is just bad at translating!
tbf most of these aren’t amazing but if I wasn’t concerned with maintaining legacy names for greater ease in remembering what classes are which, then I’d try collapsing things to one word.
Genuinely did not expect that one. Funnily enough, when I hack, I like to improve the movement of rangers over forest tiles, so I feel retroactively vindicated, or something.
I am generally fine with ‘Knight’ being a word that indicates a mounted warrior who pledges their allegiance to a country. Holy Knight is therefore a mounted person in the employ of the church, and so on.
I actually don’t particularly like the naming schema of many FE classes. Many of them are outright dumb or nonsensical, likely because they wanted to keep the names simple for children when FE7 released on the GBA.
Mercenary. A fairly boring name, and one that really shouldn’t be locked to a class, but a type of character. More importantly, why the F does Mercenary promote to Hero? Does that follow at all? A Hero is a protagonist or someone with unique powers… not just a stronger Mercenary. I could see Ike, a Mercenary, promoting to Hero, as he is the hero of the story, but not ordinary Mercs otherwise.
Fighters and Warriors. This one seems really basic and uninspired. Aren’t all characters in a war fighters and warriors? How about Woodsman or Lumberjack, to indicate these characters are often not professional soldiers. Was Bartre a professional? Dorcas? I assumed they were just peasants trying to make ends meet. Maybe Woodsman can promote to Sapper? Maybe Lumberjack could promote to Barbarian?
@BigMood I’m glad you reposted a revised version of your first topic. For the record, the problem everyone had with it was two things:
You used the words “You all need to stop this.” which implied everyone was committing a sin by not changing the existing class names.
Your topic implied you were a big brain genius for figuring this out while everyone else was the big stupid for not. Yeti has made this an issue since as far back as 2008 and has renamed a few dozen classes in FE7x to remove ‘knight’ from their names. Great Knight became Cataphract, for example.
Nobody actually disagrees there are too many knights. It’s just not clear what we should change all the class names to, and there’s no consensus.
Plus, if we’re being honest, most of us are a bit lazy about the class names and would rather focus on the more fun stuff in game design rather than changing staple elements of the series
