Fire Emblem

Ah you meant website with full support lists? Then yeah, no. You can view them in game, but nobody has had time to write them all down yet especially since there are variants based on how far story has progressed and on the route

I don't need prescriptions of the actual supports, I just wanna know who can support with who.

Also, what are the phase 2 recruitments for each route? I know that re-recruitment is a thing with Ashe and Lorenz, but I'm talking about characters you didn't recruit in phase 1.

Edited by Druplesnubb on Aug 19th 2019 at 11:08:42 AM

I think it depends on route, some characters can't be recruited post time skip if you didn't recruit them before it. I could be wrong though, there is bit of debate on exact mechanics.

Anyway, I think Serenes Forest might have list of available supports? You can see it from extra menu in game though even though you have to leave to main title to see it

I recruited everyone pre-timeskip on Crimson Flower, and everyone stayed with me. You should prioritize grabbing Lysithea on pretty much any route, though - she's a laser cannon, especially if you also have Lorenz and steal his Relic from his smarmy hands.

Serenes seems to have lists of each character's supports on their individual pages, but not the degrees (unless noting whether they can S-support with a certain Byleth). I'm making up a chart myself, but it's nowhere near complete.

Edited by RedSavant on Aug 19th 2019 at 6:05:52 AM

Hoo boy. Woah. No way. That's who the Flame Emperor really is? That's got to be a tricky thing to pull off in Edelgard's route, unless the Flame Emperor is a Schrodinger's Cat and their identity depends on which house you choose.

And now the Empire has fully become The Empire? Good grief this is crazy. That's a whole lot of nationalist and imperialist rhetoric, though Manuela did have a similar observation about the geography and history. Hmm. She also has opinions about the church which I'm sure Claude would agree with if they could just talk them out. Rhea has gone full "BURN THE APOSTATES!" but is still the caring and nurturing pope she was first presented as, and it turns out she's also a dragon. Complexity! Yay!

Wait, when did I recruit Seteth? Did I just forget about that, or does he join automatically? Gilbert, alas, seems to be unrecruitable.

Byleth's buddha outfit is even more hideous than her mercenary outfit. If there ever is a cartoon, please let her dress more senisbly. It does make her somewhat resemble Rhea, which is a nice touch.

My girl Leonie is awesome, able to take down the Death Knight almost single-handedly (albeit using a Horseslayer and a gambit, plus she was right next to Raphael and Lorenz, with whom she has Bu supports).

Oh, hey, Claude has a wyvern now. Cool. Aww, everybody remembered to come back. Woah, the enemies have jumped in power. Ooh, and Leonie grew her hair long! So did Ferdinand! Oh Hilda you scamp... but I guess she's decent at organising people. Bit of mood whiplash when, in the middle of all this crazy drama, I have a fun tea party for Ingrid's birthday.

So, yeah, finally got to the timeskip (and just barely got my professor level up to A before then), and it's a roller coaster. Crimson Flower is all about being the Teal'c to Edelgard's Apophis, isn't it?

Seteth does in fact join automatically in most paths.

Gilbert can only be recruited by the Blue Lions, for some reason.

On the Black Eagles route, there's no mask fall-off scene, so Edelgard just flat-out tells everybody that she's the Flame Emperor.

The portrayals of the different characters differ pretty drastically between routes, I'm told. Having only played Crimson Flower (Edelgard's route), I don't have the point of comparison from Azure Moon or anything. I will say that on Crimson Flower, Edelgard (light spoilers) is a genuinely well-intentioned and even-handed ruler, who (spoilers all the way through) shows mercy to her enemies, cries for Dimitri, and ends the war as soon as she can once Rhea is dead. Her route definitely involves the least delving into the history of Fodlan, the Crests and Relics, and so on, but everything she does she does for the people of the continent, and it all works out in the end. So if you're looking forward to playing the bad guys, you won't be.

Its kinda interesting how there are lot of people who played crimson flower first and still recognized it as Evil Empire trope. Like you get lot of varied interpretation even from people who played same path first

I wouldn't say the Adrestian Empire fits really any of those tropes, aside from being an Empire. Admittedly White Clouds-Crimson Flower doesn't touch on what happened in Dagda pretty much at all unless you talk to Shamir, but there isn't really anything evil about the CF Empire unless you consider opposing Rhea automatically evil. Hegemonic Empire maybe since they have Brigid as a vassal state/implied vassal state, but aside from that, the "Empire" is an empire in name only, and not really much different from the Kingdom in construction. If anything, it's the "expansionist monarchy" mentioned as specifically not being what Evil Empire is on that trope page.

Plus Dagda and Brigid tried to invade before, so the Empire wasn't even the agressor in that case. Anything they did was self-defense and to stop it from happening again.

^^Its less about perception than whether Adrestian Empire fits the trope. Like I said, I find it interesting that some of the players who played Crimson Flower first and were sympathetic to Edelgard still thought they were on the bad guy's side. I don't think that was because they were sympathetic to opposite side, it is probably because they see expansionism as evil. But I digress, my point was that I just find it fascinating that even in single route you can get tons of different interpretations of the story from different players regardless of what was their first route.

Admittedly, Edelgard's worst acts don't happen in the Crimson Flower route, such as the whole business with Dimitri and Cornelia's coup, but even she admits thanks to Byleth, she's able to stay moral in contrast to Dimitri and Rhea's descent into madness. The common arguments i hear against her is keeping the Slytherin's around despite their vast VAST crimes, starting the war without attempting to negotiate, ETC. It's kinda tricky to argue which lord is the most moral when they change in each route. But I agree with Edelgard's vision.

It's kind of mentioned in passing, but Edelgard does talk about releasing a manifesto of her vision and why she's starting the war. It's true that there's no mention of her sending a messenger to attempt to parley with Dimitri, but at that point he's consumed with personal bloodlust, and he has Rhea with him, who would likely just execute the messenger as an apostate. Basically, it's hard to tell in Crimson Flower because the Kingdom is in a holding pattern, but there is strong animosity there that is directed more toward who Edelgard and Byleth are as people than what they're doing.

Even then, there are defectors to the Empire that say they left the Church because of what it's become. Even Seteth and Flayn are willing to leave if given the chance.

^True, though sadly they won't join you. I think in their case it's more that Seteth is afraid of Rhea's growing instability and may not really like her chances of winning; either way, he prioritizes Flayn's safety over Rhea's objective. Speaking of which, I can't be the only one who gets the sense that (Crimson Flower) Rhea intends to hunt down Seteth and Flayn as traitors after they leave.

A big difference on Crimson Flower is that she's not supplying Slytherin with Crest Stones so they can continue turning people into monsters to bolster her army (which immediately removes any idea she's not complicit in their crimes when she'll help them the moment it benefits her). Which was even part of her assault on the Holy Tomb to snatch more stones to use.

Edited by OmegaRadiance on Aug 19th 2019 at 7:36:56 AM

Its not below Rhea to do that given her sanity. I honestly do wonder what the Church and the Kingdom were doing during those 5 years. I mean even CF Hubert seems to regard Dimitri with dread.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Aug 19th 2019 at 7:36:40 AM

Speaking off, we aren't sure just how powerful the Slytherins are in the empire. I get the sense Hubert and Edelgard could only conduct their nobility purge with their support.

@Omega: Yeah, that's a big difference. Heck, in Crimson Flower it's the Kingdom, or rather Dedue, who's doing that. Which is kind of why I want to do Azure Moon soon; I want to know just what the hell happened to Dimitri to make him hate Edelgard so much, because they really don't give you much detail.

(Relatedly, about that scene, Edelgard's line is kind of mistranslated. She says "The part of me that cries died years ago" or something in English, right? In Japanese it's closer to "the part of me that cried was my younger self". So not "I've grown out of crying", it's "I'm crying because I remember who he was".

Uhh, risking the doublepost instead of editing here. About TWS and the purge: It's hard to say, really. We see later on with Arianrhod that TWS have very limited patience for insubordination, so the strike on the nobles who enacted the Insurrection of Seven was clearly sanctioned by them. I'm guessing that they deemed some losses acceptable to get Edelgard into power and moving against Rhea. I would imagine that not all of the nobles who acted were Those Who Slither; I doubt Lord Vestra was one of them, since Hanneman implies that he was coerced, possibly by a threat on Hubert's life.

Edited by RedSavant on Aug 19th 2019 at 10:45:59 AM

And people really tend to underestimate how little power Edelgard actually has against the Slytherins, like one wrong move and the Imperial capital get's blown to hell. I always imagine that part of the alliance between the two is Edelgard keeping them close to assess them as a threat and figure out where all their bases are.

Well, people also kinda glorify Edelgard's actions because of her goal Like, no matter what, she always intended to conquer whole Fodlan regardless of whether Rhea and Church was taken down or not

Especially given that on two routes she does manage to capture Rhea, but pretends that she hasn't so she can still go around conquering.

I mean that's still pretty justifiable since if she considers the culture of Fodlan inherently bad due to the worship of Crest taking over the entire continent is the best way to change that culture.

^That seems like a distinction without a difference, though. She wants to unify Fodlan to dismantle the system of nobility and Crests that makes people like Sylvain, Dimitri, Lysithea, and herself suffer; she was mistaken in assuming, as most people were, that the Crests came from the Goddess side of things, but her goals did have a lot of overlap. The Crest system and nobility system couldn't be removed with Rhea in place - it would be too disruptive to the order of things with the Church placed comfortably on the top in its seat of soft power, and people would assume it was an assault on the Church or at least on divine favor. Likewise, as Crimson Flower showed, she couldn't remove Rhea or even curtail her power without an immediate start to hostilities.