You could do kid units in Fire Emblem again, they'd just have to be related to you first

Everyone loved making kids in Fire Emblem Awakening.

But in Fates, it was… you know, something from Fates. That dead horse has been beaten enough already, you already know the story justification for the kids (hyperbolic time chamber babyrealm) feels like such an absurd contrivance, it only serves to remind you you’re playing a video game while painting the characters involved as terrible people (and dumb for not scheduling training trips in these deeprealms so younger units can come back older post-timeskip with a power boost! Some of these deeprealms have resources you should be exploiting, not your kid!). If they had to choose between something this dumb, and just doing “Our kids from the future came back in time after we failed to save their world from disaster” again, they should have gone with the latter. Fire Emblem has reused ideas before like evil cults and strength-obsessed conquerors and playable avatars. Terminator 2 is famous for its reuse and recontextualization of ideas from the previous film. Besides, you could put a unique spin on it by making the kids come from different interesting places in a dystopian corrupt country conquered by an evil third party after Nohr and Hoshido’s warring weakened each other. Chrom’s kid Lucina loves her father, who failed to save her. There’s drama there. Emotion. But Xander’s kid could despise him for putting victory in war over the wellbeing of his nation. There’s so much potential there for storytelling! Each kid could be a different Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come for each parent. Something interesting could be said about the cultures of Nohr and Hoshido and the places in Fateslandia if they just tried, man. What a waste.

In Awakening, the kids existed and were shaped by traumas their parents couldn’t stop. In Fates, the kids shaped by traumas are this way because the parents aged them like alcohol aged by Timefall. It was a conscious choice adult humans made to do this to their kids in the name of giving their army more power, and frustratingly, the story refused to honestly engage with the idea that people in this setting seriously are desperate enough and warped by war enough to think this isn’t just necessary, it’s good for their kids. You can see someone under Patriot control in the Metal Gear Solid setting sending their kids off to Boot Camp. But… instant timewarp boot camp? Robbing your child of the ability to form meaningful connections in his or her youth with people alive in this world, like the child’s own parents?

People just fundamentally love making kids. There doesn’t have to be a lore reason for it. People only hated the lore reason for it in Fates because it felt even goofier than paying real world money to go to the cabbage-stealing Risen dimension to infinitely grind for resources safely.

It’s interesting to make kids in Awakening and maximize their power and get them good classes. It’s interesting to make kids in Fates and wonder if it’s worth going with certain pairs to benefit the kid, or different pairs to benefit the parents.

It’s interesting to see what characters say and do when confronted with a child who can say something tragic like “Chrom, in my timeline you sacrificed yourself ensuring your loved ones escaped from an oncoming horde of pure evil zombies, you died a hero and I love you” or something that prompts introspection and growth like “Xander, in my timeline your refusal to be seen going against daddy got your nation conquered by an alliance of all your father’s former victims and assorted other countries terrified they’d be next, because the world was convinced you’d turn out exactly like Garon in time. When your family and homeland needed you the most, you were busy in Hoshido and ended up in an unmarked mass grave, and if I knew where it was I would spit on it”.

In Fire Emblem 3 Houses and Engage, there is no time travel. Engage doesn’t even have cutscenes, I don’t know what people are memeing about when they talk about Engage’s story but I thought programming fake cutscenes that autoskip was a bold refreshing creative decision. Sure, 3H has a timeskip, and that bit where Infinite sends you to Null Space and you break out with a Double Boost with Midna’s help could have been another timeskip. But they could have totally done kid units in those games, they’d just have to be related to you first.

Imagine it. You pair up Byleth with Lysithea. They S-Support. And then, a new paralogue is unlocked where Lysithea’s cousin Lysander was on his way to the Monastery, but he was attacked by bandits, so you save him. Also, a new paralogue is unlocked where Byleth’s cousin Ayleth went to a library that got taken over by bandits to attack it with her rookie squad of doomed mercenaries, so you save her and get a bonus reward for saving her crappy squad which will proceed to fire her anyway so she has to join you. Beat these Paralogues and the units join your army. Ayleth and Lysander are child units for gameplay purposes. Their growths and skills were influenced by who their parents just married and it’s never explained in-universe. These aren’t child soldiers freshly aged in the hyperbolic time chamber. These are relatives who existed when they were offscreen and just didn’t come up until now. It’s entirely possible these are relatives the characters didn’t even know about, maybe even illegitimate offspring? Imagine a Paralogue where bandits attack a village and you were in the area, but the village was protected by some nobody who turns out to have a Crest, and someone in your army experiences all sorts of emotions talking to the relative he or she never knew about until now. They can even be older relatives in some cases, maybe even parents, it doesn’t have to make sense that a certain character’s newly-recruited father just happened to be a slightly better mage when recruited in the timeline where his in-law just happened to be Dorothea.

Anyway… Everyone’s happy. Powergamers can optimize the best kids, challenge runners can optimize the worst kids, other people play however they want, and nobody complains about the series doing time-travelling kids again or babyrealms again.

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please just put your topics/rants in the proper category. (this one)

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Sometimes, a good quote appears among the long rant, is like digging for trasure.

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FE should be brave enough to make all units in the next game child units.

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dont you only get the chance to s support in fe3h like five actual minutes before the final boss

Ideally something like that belongs halfway through the story like when Chrom married someone in Awakening. S-Ranking wouldn’t be locked to it, but it would be the moment you’re forced to pick someone from a menu if Chrom wasn’t already married.

Yep. That happened.

I wouldn’t have cried if they just removed S-ranks wholesale tbh.

Fire Emblem:Three Clubhouses

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What if we had apprentice units, and the tutors pass down trinkets? Let’s say Myrtlebeth the overprotective older sister Trobairitz has a feather in her hair and Tzipula the takes-no-shit Barbarian has a tooth necklace, they hook up and their apprentice gets both.

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