Discussion YMMV / TriangleStrategy

Agreed. The game does make getting Frederica's ending an uphill battle unless you know going in you want to stack the deck in favor of getting it, and I've seen plenty of people agree Norzelia is beyond saving. I've heard arguments for both Frederica and Benedict's endings, but Roland's is universally reviled, so at the very least there are people who agree with how Frederica views things.

Until a better argument is put in place, I'm putting the original edit back in. A long post isn't a bad post so long as it's cohesive and keeps to the topic of the trope.

While the Brevity Is Wit rule is there for a reason, removing the entire text seems like a no-no to me. Granted, the text is pretty long, and could be trimmed down a bit.

Hey, if you want to bring it back, then go for it. I think a post that has the length of a small essay needs some heavy cuts, especially since most of it is just hard fanboying for a particular ending, but if you want to leave it up then go for it. I'm not saying it's a badly written post, but I definitely think it belongs more on Reddit than it does here.

As for your question Raxis, if I have to spell out how the takes in the post are questionable, then I can already see it's not worth the effort. Besides, I know from experience that any discussion with you is just a waste of time.

While the topic of cuts can certainly be justified, the post itself fits with the general consensus on Frederica's character, Roland's character, audience reactions to their characters and ending (I myself made a post explaining why Roland is often reviled by the fanbase, and going off the various forums of discussion and the fact he sides with slave owners with rather shallow justification this is the common view of his ending), and the themes of potentially futile idealism present with choosing Frederica's side.

Still, as mentioned previously, brevity is wit. I was not even aware of that administrative post, so I may need to cut down on some of my own longer posts - I've made the mistake before of being long-winded on some other pages. If you would like, it's perfectly acceptable to say where there needs to be some trimming.

@Dr Peace perhaps provide a proposal for an abbreviated version that we can use as a springboard to keep talking about?

Also that's a bit harsh :/ I don't recall what I might have done to upset you, I've never spoken with you here before now.

A Mr. Death also removed the trope without consulting the discussion, too. Rather annoying, that. They also removed Game Breaker, and though they make a good point about none of the characters being downright overpowering, I take issue with the idea Cordelia and Quahag don't break the game in half. Quahag's section especially noted how it's the center of several cheese strategies, and with him you can easily just have infinite TP to spend. I'll probably reinstate the Game Breaker entry unless there's pushback in regards to doing so.

Medina and Quahaug are unabashed game breakers and their sections should not be touched. Anna arguably counts in NG, since she outlevels the rest of your party unless you avoid using her, causing her damage to go pretty wild. Hard and NG++ rein her in quite a bit, but she remains strong.

Trish doesn't count, I don't think the mages count either (both have really weak early games, Frederica needs to snipe a kill, and Corentin gets TP+ on ice later than she gets TP+ on KO), but Cordelia is arguable.

I'll admit I was the one who added Cordelia, Corentin, and Frederica.

While I'll agree in retrospect that Frederica and Corentin are overall just incredibly useful once they're kitted out, I do think Cordelia deserves her entry. Every ability she has is insane. Elude is ultimately up to using it on Groma and getting good luck, but it effectively made Groma unkillable for me. Understandably that wouldn't be game-busting if it were just a really strong combo, but the elephant in the room has to be addressed.

As the person who also made an entry for why Spark is such an aggravating attack to deal with, I can say with confidence, having played the game several times at this point, that cutting out Spark's lethality via Above and Beyond basically makes Flanagan and Erador unassailable, and makes every DPS and nuker character almost impossible to take out. A good half of the maps that rely on enemy units rushing you and wearing you down for big hitters to deal with lose their teeth if you have Cordelia around to make her allies unkillable. Above and Beyond alone wouldn't be game breaking, but the fact Cordelia gets her turns so quickly and regains TP so fast pushes it over the edge, and this is without Medina or Julio support.

I'd argue that if Medina makes the cut, so should Cordelia. TP Physick and Fast-Acting Medication are certainly potent but this just makes Medina a TP battery without Quahaug to synergize with. If there were 'levels' to game-breaking qualities, Quahaug's certainly at the top, but Cordelia basically makes your group unkillable and should be judged as such. The only time, having used her on every map except for Benedict and Frederica Conviction, that Above and Beyond didn't make the cut was Chapter 7, simply because of just how many enemies there were and how quickly the starting zone is swarmed.

I should also add that the structure of the game itself heavily favors Cordelia's playstyle of 'slow and steady,' because with few exceptions most maps heavily incentivize letting the enemy come to you, meaning Cordelia's ability to gain more TP by not repositioning is supported for the majority of maps. You can succeed in most maps by just holding your position exceptionally well.

I still think that the Frederika essay on Unintentionally Sympathetic should be cut in its entirely, because Frederika's plotline is pretty obviously supposed to be sympathetic. That the other characters are hard to convince doesn't mean the game doesn't want you to have sympathy for her, and in fact she's the one it's easiest to sympathize with because the game goes out of its way to show you that she is morally in the right about the treatment of the Roselle.

The trope is about whether the sympathy you feel for the character is intended by the game or not — it's not about whether it's mechanically difficult to do as that character wishes. Hell, the other characters disagreeing with her choice doesn't even mean that they don't sympathize with her, it only means they don't think it's feasible.

And the Game-Breaker section needs to at the very least be cut down, because right now it's listing at least 1/3 of the playable cast, and most of them do not rise to the level of breaking the game that the trope title implies, just being generally useful, if maybe slightly more useful than others.

The issue wasn't the fact that many of the alleged game-breaking character didn't actually break the game; the issue was that it was cut entirely.

Characters have specific niches - I wouldn't have Milo solo an army, but when it comes to disabling enemies for easy removal, I trust her and Flanagan and Lionel with the job. The issue at play is that some of these niches make them so incredibly powerful that they more or less trivialize the difficulty of the game. This isn't to say Anna's going to solo a guard contingent - I actually find her not as game breaking as people say once levels max out, simply because she doesn't have the vitality to take on more than two people by herself. However, her unique traits and stealth abilities can trivialize maps even when her stats fall off simply because she can target key enemies with impunity and turn them off. Before levels max out, she's going to be one of the best characters on NG and the first NG+ run because her level is so far ahead of everyone else's. She's just consistently overpowering.

Quahaug is this taken to extremes, obviously, considering just how broadly useful he is in every category besides directly attacking. When he stops time, it's not really 'stopping time;' he's fueling everyone's TP, and generally speaking the player gets more out of that than enemy forces. Quahaug keeping everyone topped off, teleporting characters to key locations, and working around boss defenses with percentage damage means he just blatantly makes maps that much easier.

And I've already made my case for Cordelia. Since Quahaug requires high conviction ratings and Cordelia is gained at the earliest point near a run's endgame, both are also beneficiaries of how scaling works, since they don't need to work nearly as long to get Above and Beyond, Elude, and Rest and Recover TP for Cordelia and Reverse Space-time, In Due Course, and Turn Back Time for Quahaug as Roland needs to, say, get Four Dragons. They start and end strong.

As for Unintentionally Sympathetic, I think you make a good case, though I'm not sure everyone will agree over it, and even I find it somewhat sketchy given the Golden Ending. By the same logic you're using, this should apply to Roland given the fact most of the table sides against him in the final divergence point, yet he's solidly in the 'Unintentionally Sympathetic' side of things given just how bleak his ending is with the dressing of everyone but the Roselle mostly prospering off the Roselle's slave labor. In all three normal routes, a member of the party gives Serenoa a dressing-down for picking an option they find impossible to deal with, which is the game also not-so-subtly getting on the player's case for drawing people to that side of the table. The game is trying to make you feel bad for having Norzelia erupt into war all on a pretext that many members of the case think is just a ridiculous fiction, but much of the unintentional sympathy from that essay comes from the fact that a lot of players - myself included - already considered Norzelia a cesspool that was so far gone that despite Frederica's ending being portrayed as positive for a small group of people we still found the choice the morally righteous one.

That, and Benedict's full of crap over his fears of Wolffort disappearing, making his criticism towards Serenoa abandoning the house ring a bit more hollow given he had a fallback plan.

I do think you have a point on why Frederica's entry needed to be cut, but by that same token I'd need to hear why Benedict's entry shouldn't be cut for the same reasons being listed as to why Frederica's needs to be cut, considering it follows the same story beats and shows a large population of people - the poor and downtrodden - being left behind due to his ideals, or lack thereof.

Also, I feel I should qualify Quahaug and Cordelia being game-breakers 'despite' being late-game additions by alleging that the game, very obviously, is meant to be played at least twice. Possibly even three times. The conditions for getting the golden ending are so obscure and in two cases seemingly counter-intuitive (you need to act as mules for Sorsley and go see Serenoa's dad despite the kingdom facing unrest and Frederica's plotline regarding the Roselle being at the forefront of the decision where seeing Serenoa's dad is available when every other divergence point favors you being a goody-two-shoes) that anyone not reading a guide is probably going to make a mistake and not see the Golden Ending on their first run - they won't think to not use the fire traps, they'll probably backstab Sorsley, helping Roland out just seems like the right thing to do. It's thus difficult to make the case that Quahaug and Cordelia only make the endgame easy, since it's more or less intended you'll have them for the final run.

I don't think Unintentionally Sympathetic is comparative or dependent on how other tropes treat other characters. I think it's fairly straightforward: Is the audience sympathetic to the character? Yes. Is the game intending this to be the case? Also yes, therefore, the sympathy for Frederika is not unintentional.

As to gamebreaker, I would have to contest Medina — given how stingy the game is with funds, she's only "game breaking" by the time you're on your third playthrough or so and you no longer need to beg and scrape every gold piece for upgrades and upgrade items. I don't think you can call her a Game-Breaker if you need to also have essentially infinite funds to make any use of her.

I've played through the game four times, and it was only really on the fourth that I could buy up enough items to make her useful in every fight.

I'd also argue against Anna because while she does level up faster, the way XP works makes that cap pretty quickly — she's only ever going to be about a level or two above the current "recommended" level because even if she's getting two actions a turn, if she's overleveled she's getting single-digit XP for each of those actions. Plus, her survivability all but depends on her being cloaked, so half of her actions are going to be doing that instead of attacking.

Quahaug you could make an argument for because his abilities are outside the usual box, but even then I mostly found him useful but not game-breakingly so. Honestly I ended up mostly using him as an ersatz healer with his rewind, I basically never found a reason to have him reset the whole battlefield, and the one time I used Time Stop, it led to both the boss enemies getting out of it first because of their high speed and stomping Quahaug into the ground before any of his allies got out of it.

That's what I see in most of the Game-Breaker entries — they list the unit's useful abilities that make them powerful in certain situations, but I don't see any of them as being on the level of, "Put them on your team and you will win" that Game-Breaker typically is.

That might explain why you don't find Quahaug gamebreaking, if the boss was so close to him that they stomped Quahaug into the dirt. I wouldn't consider Stop Time to be his answer to bosses, but typically speaking bosses like to idle in the back of most maps until their forces are depleted. Beating a boss fighting on their own isn't really a challenge given the sheer damage output characters like Frederica and Groma can put out once they have a chance to concentrate on a boss - most of the difficulty, especially on hard mode, comes from having to deal with an army of enemies who have blatantly better statistics than you, to the point some random healer can whack with his staff almost as hard as Maxwell can stab with a fully specced-out spear. Unlike bosses, their speed is on a level with the players, meaning that until the VERY end of a map, when you're expected to be contending with the boss, Stop Time basically just works as a TP engine for the party.

Thinking on it, a case could easily be made that Quahaug and Cordelia working in concert basically make it impossible to lose simply because it means Cordelia is using Above and Beyond every time she gets a turn, but even individually I found those two to eliminate any challenge from a map, with the only exception being 7 if you refuse to use the fire traps, since the starting zone is swarmed rather quickly. Maybe Frederica's Chapter 13 given how quickly her brother cold-cocks you and given you're surrounded, but I didn't have much trouble using either character there, either.

Editing because for some reason I called his Stop Time Reverse Space-Time. Bah.

@Raxis I frankly don't care enough to do that. Keep it up if you want to, but I don't think it has enough nuance to be posted here. Like, the post literally refers to Norzelia as a cesspool not worth saving, and uses that as a justification for why it's okay to just abandon it. It's as biased in favor of Frederica's ending as you can get.

Since you asked, the last time we talked you managed to get us both banned off the Fire Emblem Reddit (plus your friend who referred to the Ukraine war as a "petty problem"). To say it's one of the most annoying discussions I've ever had on Reddit would be an understatement, you both seem like genuinely awful people. Unless you want to give me a proper apology I don't think there's any point in interacting further.

... Wow.

I think it would be better for you both to continue this conversation through private messages (assuming there is even a point), and to avoid importing off-site drama here.

Already reported. Don't worry about this and continue with the discussion at the tropes at play.

You people need to chill. The dude asked why I didn't want to interact with him, so I answered. I don't think either of us is looking to keep the argument going any further.

It might just be more accurate to apply the write-up to Informed Wrongness instead. The golden ending unequivocally portrays Frederica as being wrong in her stubbornness alongside Benedict and Roland, though the localization downplayed it in her specific case.

It's rather difficult to downplay 'You saved the slaves and brought them to the promised land but consigned Norzelia to blood and death.' I'm not aware of what the localization does to soften the blow, but Informed Wrongness might work best, yeah.

In the JP version she apologizes alongside Roland and Benedict and Geela chides her more directly (notice how Frederica bows her head when Geela talks to her just after Serenoa explains his plan)

Fair enough! My dog isn't really in the fight for Frederica, though, personally. I'm not going to veer too hard either way, since I can see points on all sides about the trope, its use, its potential miss-use, and the potential it could be a different trope entirely.

My main focus is on Cordelia remaining a game-breaker. I cannot budge on that. Above and Beyond and her easy method of accumulating TP, in addition to how fast it is to 'get her going,' so to speak, once you get her due to how heavily her join time and by extension scaling aids you, pushes her way over the edge. It wouldn't matter much if it only helped a few characters - Jens, for example, trivializes maps with variable heights, but that doesn't make him a game breaker because that isn't every map. Cordelia makes every character a game breaker - including herself! If she deigns to use Above and Beyond on herself, you suddenly have an unstoppable buffing engine. And just by giving her a Bangle of Vitality, you suddenly have a free source of TP-free healing with Self-Sacrifice, meaning she never needs to waste TP on anything except Elude and, naturally, Above and Beyond.

There is not a single character besides maybe Jens who doesn't benefit from Above and Beyond. I could go down the list if I had to, but it generally makes characters who are frail capable of hitting the front lines and blowing everything up (Frederica, Corentin, Ezana), allows debuffers to turn off dangerous mages without needing to worry about the allies (Milo, Lionel), and makes tanks unstoppable and capable of holding out for far longer than they normally could. (Erador, Flanagan, Benedict) It and everything Quahaug does basically influences the meta. As one of the two primary healers, you're going to bring her into a majority of maps once you get her, too. If you have Geela and Medina / Julio around to act as TP batteries, you've basically won any possible map except for anything that has a small number of deployment slots - and Cordelia still thrives there, too, since those tend to be smaller maps that require her to reposition less.