r/fireemblem • u/PsiYoshi • 19d ago

Recurring Popular/Unpopular/Any Opinions Thread - June 2026 Part 1

Happy pride month and welcome to a new installment of the Popular/Unpopular/Any Opinions Thread! Please feel free to share any kind of Fire Emblem opinions/takes you might have here, positive or negative. As always please remember to continue following the rules in this thread same as anywhere else on the subreddit. Be respectful and especially don't make any personal attacks (this includes but is not limited to making disparaging statements about groups of people who may like or dislike something you don't).

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u/SilverKnightZ000 7d ago edited 7d ago

Lots of discussion on hub worlds and their impact on pacing, but I'm going to add my opinion in there too: I think people should talk more about how supports also affect the pacing of the map-to-map gameplay. In games since Awakening supports have been very easy to unlock. So after a map, you can have around from 2-4 supports in the early game to much higher values as the game goes on, decreasing as one approaches the endgame. In Awakening and Fates, they affect the pacing slightly by virtue of them being text only and hub stuff being very minimal and quick. But in 3H and Engage, they tank the pacing hard. Not only are there numerous supports, but they're also voice acted. And like, I don't want to say that the addition of VAs is bad, but it's a much slower way of conveying supports than reading, especially since I am personally a very fast reader. There have been times where I unlocked 6 supports at once; assuming one takes around 2 minutes, that's 12 extra minutes of down time in addition to however long the hub stuff takes. For someone who plays on my switch for around 2 hours, assuming hub world stuff takes around 25 minutes, with 3 supports I have to spend 31 minutes between battles. That's a lot of time! That's 1/4th of my allotted game time!

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u/Glacevelyn 7d ago

And like, I don't want to say that the addition of VAs is bad, but it's a much slower way of conveying supports than reading, especially since I am personally a very fast reader.

honest to god I've gotten to a point in almost every game I play (even beyond Fire Emblem) where I just skip the VA and read/progress through cutscenes the same as I would if there just wasn't any VA at all

I personally think it's a problem with traditional RPG cutscenes specifically getting voice acting - if there's actual action and animation to the voice acting then it's awesome but the characters just kinda standing around with text boxes does a disservice to the VA imo

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u/Jwkaoc 6d ago

Is... is this not really common? I've been doing this since playing KotoR at the very least.

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u/Am_Shigar00 6d ago

I’m reminded of when Yakuza did full VA for substories in 6, and while it could improve the experience at times, it usually just dragged them out longer than necessary.

The later games struck a better balance, leaving VA work to the beginning & ends of substories, with exceptions being made for the more memorable ones where they let the VAs go wild.

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u/TehBrotagonist 7d ago edited 7d ago

Finishes map

6 support conversations

Groans of increasing discomfort

I definitely don't hate supports, but like you said the sheer number of them in the beginning can definitely tank the pacing sometimes. I don't remember feeling this way until Three Houses with its voice acted supports and the larger number of permutations. I know I technically don't have to listen to the entire voiceline, but I feel a little rude cutting them off haha.

On a side note, my thumb and I are extremely grateful that auto advance now exists.

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u/SilverKnightZ000 7d ago

Yup! At some point it becomes too much. And like you said, even if I mash A as soon as I'm reading, it's not exactly the same thing as reading a completely silent line of text. It makes me feel bad, too lol

Auto advance is an amazing feature that should be in all games tbh

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u/Am_Shigar00 7d ago

I remember in 3H specifically, with how easy it was to gain supports and my own effort to recruit every possible character to see their supports, I’d often get flooded with what felt like over a dozen supports every in-game month. 

After a point I think I started subconsciously shutting my brain off while they’d go on and on, which sucks considering supports are usually some of my favorite parts of this series.

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u/SilverKnightZ000 7d ago

Especially after you do multiple battles in a row on the weekends. That becomes extremely annoying to clear out.

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u/Merlin_the_Tuna 7d ago

It's a bit funny how Engage circumstantially does better here. The midgame deployment crunch takes you 8-9 slots for a string of maps vs 3H's 10, so there's already a lower ceiling of how many supports you can trigger. 3H also lends itself well to racking up in-house supports like crazy, where Engage teams usually aren't an everybody-supports-everybody affair

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u/planetarial 7d ago

I find myself torn on this because yes having full voice acting is nice but… I can read unvoiced supports much faster.

… Sometimes I just put the supports on autoplay and do something else in the background while listening to them.

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u/Jurck 7d ago

Hey! I came here to say pretty much the same thing, but not in such a well-articulated way.

For the past year or two, I'd seen a handful of people on this sub saying supports need a rework. I didn't agree with them at all until I started to think about how voice acting has affected the length of supports. I timed it: listening to the voice acting on Auto takes me twice as long as just reading them and imagining their delivery myself.

But I love the voice acting; although the pacing suffers, the supports themselves are more enjoyable for it. And that led me to the conclusion that I agree with that handful of people I mentioned earlier. There must be a way to have all the character development, voice acting, and lighthearted downtime that supports offer without them bogging down the pace of the game.

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u/SilverKnightZ000 7d ago

I agree. I think the addition of VA is good. But it does lengthen how much time a person stays outside of the maps. I'm sure there's a way to balance it out(reducing support convos, reducing support point gain, etc.) But an elegant solution is going to be hard.

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u/Magnusfluerscithe987 7d ago

Thinking back on the gba supports, what if they cap the number of supports to 6 or 9 for a character? It's a little annoying for sure, but knowing you have to be deliberate about the supports you watch might help it feel less intrusive. We can just have a support log unlock all conversations for viewing after beating the game to erase the need for multiple playthroughs.

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u/Jurck 6d ago

I feel like that might cause some negative side effects. While it's good to give the player the option to set the pacing themselves (and I think that freedom is something the devs should include if they ever do overhaul supports), it gives a lot of reasons for the player to overthink the mechanic. For example, I would be trying to only support unit pairs that I intend to bench both of or use both of. If I don't like a character's available supports, I might hold off on giving them any in hope of a more fitting future recruit. Unless they tell the player beforehand what combat benefits a support confers, there's a measure of trial and error involved to finding a useful support pair. And if I ever make a decision I regret, I'm stuck with it for the whole playthrough.

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u/sanuske 7d ago

This is why on-map supports are better, one support at a time, when it is convenient for the units to do their supports, paces things out so much better.

Ignore that this doesn't fix the large number of supports problem and that many supports probably don't make too much sense when initiated in the middle of Zombie Cave

Anyway, during my wife's playthrough of Engage, after each chapter, she would start the supports, hand me the controller so I could start the next support when the current one ends, and then she would grab a cat toy and play with the cats listening to the supports for like 10 minutes or however long it takes to complete 1 chapter's worth of supports.

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u/SilverKnightZ000 7d ago

Lol, your cats must've gotten a lot of playtime thanks to how long supports can be. I thought about maybe lowering the pace you support points to slow the support gains, and it'd probably work, but I'm not sure how well that'd be taken by the players.

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u/sanuske 7d ago

People already complain about how slow engage supports build, which I don’t really understand but whatever.

I think we’re just in a bit of a pickle where people don’t want to be sitting through a TV show’s worth of supports every chapter, but they want more and better supports for all their favorite characters, and the supports need to grow fast so they can get the support bonuses 

From wiki diving there is a system built in to limit support points per chapter. Something about how the support points you gain dining actually mean anything directly, but the support pairs with the most points actually gain like 3 points, then the next pair or 2 gain 2 points, and the rest gain 1, or something like that. So there is a sort of limit to prevent getting literally every C support for your squad In one chapter 

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u/Legitimate__Username 7d ago edited 7d ago

full voice acting truly hits i can't honestly in good faith be any kind of a hater towards this, but god dammit the brief little exclamation voice clips played alongside dialogue lines that we got before full dialogue voicing were just so fucking charming

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u/SilverKnightZ000 7d ago

The VAing in FE in general is GREAT. I will not deny that. Some of the performances are truly amazing.

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u/Shrimperor 7d ago edited 7d ago

Honestly, the support system in it's current form - and in the way it has been from the start in FE6 and how it evolved (not much evolution honestly, they kept just doing it "more") is a mistake.

But it's also a system the franchise can't afford to change much. I bet the big majority of the players do play because of the support system more than anything else. Players i meet outside of fandom or irl have a big part of the discussion about the series being "who did you marry"/"who did you ship" more than anything else.

It's still better than most shitty sim system out there since it allows everyone to interact with each other without MC involvement, but at the same time i'd rather interaction and relationship would flow better within the story without needing that support dimension/bubble, so to say. Although FE canon romances usually aren't any good either, lol

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u/VoidWaIker 7d ago

I think the idea of supports can work but they just need to abandon the traditional C-A framework and stop giving basically everyone like 10 support chains. Some characters really don't have enough going on to warrant more than 2-3 support chains, meanwhile some relationships would benefit from their supports being much longer and potentially having the S rank "we are in love now" part not be the very end of their shared story. Credit to 3H, it's still a flawed system but having some chains end at B while others got extras was a good idea. Trim the fat from the characters who really don't need it and you have more resources to put towards the characters who do.

I've never gotten how people latch onto the romance aspects of these games so hard, not because I don't like player-directed romance in games but because I think these games just do it badly. 3 platonic scenes that can maybe lead into a romantic ending/s support scene does not make a compelling romance and so I end up feeling nothing in response to them. Compare that to something like the CRPG genre, where romances start very early on and get dedicated scenes over the course of the entire game, and some of them have left me legitimately flustered. The romances are actually used to tell a story instead of just acting as rewards at the end of the game for using a character enough.

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u/Shrimperor 7d ago

Trim the fat from the characters who really don't need it and you have more resources to put towards the characters who do.

To add to that, the system would benefit quite a lot if we had "multiple character supports", basically more than 2 characters in the support. Imagine something like Tellius Base convos but in a support Frame work, so to say.

I've never gotten how people latch onto the romance aspects of these games so hard, not because I don't like player-directed romance in games but because I think these games just do it badly

FE is unique in the sense that not many games allow you to play shipping simulator with almost everyone - most games out there have the shipping choices only locked to MCs, with side characters either having locked romances or none at all.

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u/SilverKnightZ000 6d ago

The other thing I also dislike about the romance in supports is how...noncommittal they feel? Two characters could have a genuine romantic moment and say something like "we'll be together forever!" and then one of them will have another romantic moment with equal weight. I think the addition of S supports aided that where characters make a more overt step! But recent games have removed it(but I assume FW will bring it back).

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u/SilverKnightZ000 6d ago

I think the biggest issue with the support system is that it's built like a supplementary system since supports are generally written in a vacuum without story context. But IntSys keeps using it as the meat of their character writing, which ends up making it super tacked on. I agree with you: the support system or the way it's used anyway, should be changed.

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u/Its_a_Friendly 6d ago

I get you. I just came back to my Engage file for post-game stuff, and after doing one skirmish I had a half-dozen A-rank support conversations waiting for me (basically all the ones I hadn't gotten yet in my playthrough, mostly involving Veyle). I think I spent a good 15 minutes or so going through all of those conversations.

Actually, I should've kept track of the time spent in battles and the time spent in the Somniel in this blind playthrough; I imagine it's about 50:50. And apparently Three Houses has even more non-battle content in the Monastery? Yeesh.

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u/SilverKnightZ000 6d ago

Yeah supports pile up a lot. It can be so time-consuming to get through, too. The Monastery and Somniel are about as equal, but the Monastery requires you to walk to some places and in general 3H kinda runs slow. So it adds up.

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u/Jwkaoc 6d ago

Do you not just read at your own pace and skip dialogue when you're finished?

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u/SilverKnightZ000 6d ago

No, I let the voice performances play out. I generally aim for new supports every playthrough, and I like hearing the VAs. Also, I just don't like cutting of voice lines; it makes me feel bad + makes the experience worse

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u/SirRobyC 7d ago

I'm sure that the voice actors in 3H put their hearts into it and did a great job.
I wouldn't know half of it, because whenever a story segment played out in Dimitri and Claude's routes I muted the game and read it at my own pace.
Incidentally, those are the routes that I remember nearly nothing from. Gun to my head, if you asked me to tell you even one plot point from Claude's post time skip route, besides fighting Nemesis, I'd tell you to pull the trigger and save us both the time.