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    Home Unlabelled Fire Emblem OC My painting of Kagero from Fates (2018)

    Fire Emblem OC My painting of Kagero from Fates (2018)

    June 14, 2020

    Fire Emblem OC My painting of Kagero from Fates (2018)

    OC My painting of Kagero from Fates (2018)

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 07:28 AM PDT

    Empress Edelgard fanart by me

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 06:58 AM PDT

    My Dimitri cosplay with glowing Areadhbar

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 11:15 AM PDT

    Corrin (Fire Emblem Fates) [OC]

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 11:02 AM PDT

    I drew Anna dressed as Kasumi

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 01:28 PM PDT

    “I have been dead, more or less.”

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 01:43 PM PDT

    tried drawing this battle pose

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 06:31 AM PDT

    Fanart of leif and veld <3

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 12:48 AM PDT

    Delthea doodle [by Crescentia Fortuna]

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 11:28 AM PDT

    ill never forget you, unnamed archer from fire emblem awakening concept art

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 03:19 PM PDT

    Framed Cutout of Female Robin, signed by Lauren Landa, the English Voice Actress for SSBU Robin

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 06:03 PM PDT

    King of Delusion [cw: blood]

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 07:39 PM PDT

    (OC) An Edelgard painting I did last year, before the game was released

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 06:32 PM PDT

    [Original Art] Sword of the Moon & Stars, Mareeta

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 08:27 AM PDT

    Dorogrid sketch!

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 02:39 PM PDT

    Dire Emblem: Awakening - Chapter 13.3

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 08:15 AM PDT

    I’ve been drawing my top games of the 2010s. #13 is Fire Emblem: Three Houses, so here’s some black eagles. (I started at like 70, before you kill me)

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 01:16 PM PDT

    Awakening 0% growths LTC completed in 76 turns (Endgame: Grima 1-turn video)

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 10:46 AM PDT

    Three Houses as Dwarf Fortress Bug Reports

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 04:55 PM PDT

    deirdre (wip)

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 06:52 AM PDT

    "You really should be more careful during fights, Catherine."

    Posted: 13 Jun 2020 09:12 PM PDT

    Leif and Vled fanart (Dark ver.)

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 01:05 AM PDT

    Fire Emblem series survey - 2020: Results and analysis

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 08:22 AM PDT

    So, about a week and a half ago, I held a survey to determine the community's opinions on each game in the series, and to determine whether there have been any major changes in a particular game's reception since late 2019.

    641 responses later, here are the results:

    The three blocs of the Fire Emblem community:

    In the previous poll, I brought up the idea of the Fire Emblem community being split up into three blocs:

    • The Kaga bloc (those who have played one of Kaga's games(FE1, 2, 3, 4 or 5))
    • The post-Kaga bloc (those who have played a FE game released after Kaga left (FE6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12), but not one of Kaga's games)
    • The post-Awakening bloc (people who've only played FE games after Awakening (FE13, 14, 15 and 16)).

    Out of the 641 responses, 309 fall into the Kaga bloc, 244 fall into the post-Kaga bloc, and 88 fall into the post-Awakening bloc. Something to note is that while the proportion of the community that are in the post-Awakening bloc has remained constant, the proportion of the FE community that are in the Kaga and the post-Kaga blocs has flipped from the last poll, which has certain implications as to how each Fire Emblem game is seen.

    Similarly to the last poll, the Kaga bloc rated games, especially the post-Awakening games, more harshly than the post-Kaga bloc, who, in turn, generally were harsher than the post-Awakening bloc. In particular, the views of Awakening, Blazing Sword, Birthright and Revelation between the Kaga bloc and the other blocs is particularly polarized, even more so than in the last poll. Similarly, there is a degree of polarisation between blocs with regards to Sacred Stones', Path of Radiance's, Echoes' and Three Houses' reception, albeit to a lesser extent.

    The only exceptions to this rule (discounting the remakes) would be Binding Blade, Shadow Dragon, New Mystery of the Emblem, and Conquest.

    Question 1: Which mainline Fire Emblem games have you played?

    Link to results: https://imgur.com/a/ljBdpeX

    Interestingly, fewer people have played Three Houses and Awakening from the last poll. The same also applied to Echoes, Birthright and Conquest.

    On the contrary, whilst fewer people have played the modern Fire Emblem games, a greater proportion of the sample have played the older Fire Emblem games. This effect was particularly pronounced with Genealogy, with its playrate going from 32% to 44% - though Three Houses being partially inspired by it may have helped in this regard.

    A concern that some people pointed out is how many people have only played Three Houses, and its effect on several later questions on the poll (as if you've only played Three Houses, or instance, then it, by default, has to be your favourite game in the series). In truth, only 9 people (less than 1.5% of the sample) have only played Three Houses, and as such, the effect that it would have had on the results is minimal. At most, it would have contributed to Three Houses beating out Thracia 776 for best gameplay. That being said, it is a slight increase over the previous poll, where 6 people (slightly over 1% of the sample) had only played Three Houses.

    Far more noticeable than the proportion of people who've only played Three Houses is the proportion of people who've only played a game from Awakening onwards, as this comprises a significant proportion of the sample (~14%), and they've almost universally put Three Houses as their favourite game in every metric (around a ~70% support rate).

    Question 2: Out of 10, how would you rate ___?

    Link to results: https://imgur.com/a/mLJIuvb

    The overall scores:

    Before going on to this question, as stated in the original survey thread (link: https://www.reddit.com/r/fireemblem/comments/dmz4ae/fire_emblem_postthree_houses_survey/), there lies an issue where people have rated games which they haven't played. As such, the ratings for each of the games have been filtered to only include those who have played through the game.

    As I predicted in the last poll, even though Three Houses still has the highest user rating of any game in the series, now that Three Houses' honeymoon period is over, and people have had time to go over what worked and what didn't in depth, its score has normalised a bit, going from around an 8.9/10 to around an 8.5/10.

    In particular, using Welch's T-test, with a null hypothesis that Three Houses' score has not changed from the last poll, we can conclude that there is strong evidence the community's opinions of Three Houses has cooled somewhat from before (p-value<0.001) – though this could, to a small extent, also have to do with the fact that the Kaga bloc comprised of a greater proportion of this survey's respondents, who tended to rank Three Houses more harshly then others.

    That being said, given how Three Houses' honeymoon period is now over, I would expect its score to remain relatively constant until we get a new game to focus on.

    Interestingly, the only other games with a statistically significant difference in their ratings between polls, and by extension, the only games where there is strong evidence that the community's opinions have changed from before, are Shadow Dragon and Gaiden.

    Just like before, Radiant Dawn, has the distinction of being the only Fire Emblem game to have a higher rating in this poll (8.3/10) than its Metacritic score (7.8/10), though Echoes, Path of Radiance and Three Houses come fairly close. Radiant Dawn also has the distinction of being the only game in the series to be rated higher than Three Houses in a particular bloc (it barely beats out Three Houses with regards to the Kaga bloc).

    Genealogy of the Holy War and Thracia 776 both managed to scrape an 8/10 – and even Thracia just made it.

    Something of note is that the Kaga bloc tended to rate the top 4 games in the series very close together – with the difference between the top rated game and the 4th best game being less than 0.1 for them.

    The post-Kaga and post-Awakening blocs, though, had a clearer idea of what the best game in the series was, with the difference between Three Houses and Path of Radiance for the post-Kaga bloc being more than 4 times larger than the aforementioned difference with regards to the Kaga bloc. The difference between Three Houses and Awakening for the post-Awakening bloc is even more pronounced.

    The five aforementioned games seem to make up a "top tier" of sorts, in which there is a significant gap between Thracia 776 and Echoes, which is the next game on the rankings, at a 7.7/10. Sacred Stones rounds out the games that get "green Metacritic scores" at a 7.5/10.

    To my surprise, Awakening still remains an above-average game from the last poll. Even more surprising is the fact that Blazing Blade is now in the bottom half of the series, being barely beaten by New Mystery. That being said, the Kaga bloc did rate Blazing Blade as better than Awakening, with the opposite occurring for the other two blocs.

    Fates' reception still shows no sign of improving despite the fact that one could reasonably expect that since Three Houses' honeymoon period is over, people would appreciate what it did well more. This is true even in the instance of Conquest, whose strength (its map design) is generally considered to be Three Houses' most notable weakness.

    The trimmed score (https://imgur.com/3u6BycS):

    Something that must be noted (thanks to u/Odovakar for pointing this out) is the potential for troll votes, or highly emotional votes, to dramatically skew the results. Ideally, a 1/10 should be given to a game that fails spectacularly (i.e. Fates' writing) on every aspect of the game, and a 5/10 should be given to a game that one didn't enjoy, but recognises that there were parts of it that succeeded. Given how interchangeable low video game ratings can be, this is often not the case.

    Since there is no way to determine which ratings were and weren't made with a degree of thought, I've decided to introduce additional "trimmed score", in which the top and bottom 5% of a game's ratings are ignored when calculating the mean. This applies to every game where more than 100 people played it (as there otherwise would have been too little data), and is based on the assumption that the vast majority of respondents will give some degree of thought when rating a particular game.

    As what would be expected, the games that did well in the overall rating (the Jugdral games, the Tellius games, Echoes and Three Houses) benefitted more from the trimmed score, as a greater proportion of their lower ratings would have been outliers.

    Polarisation between blocs (https://imgur.com/JX64WLT):

    In general, the Kaga bloc rated games, especially the post-Awakening games, much more harshly than the post-Kaga bloc, who, in turn, generally had higher standards than the post-Awakening bloc. The only exceptions to this rule (if you don't count the remakes) would be Binding Blade and Conquest.

    To determine whether a certain bloc (usually the Kaga bloc) judged a particular game more harshly, a hypothesis test was used:

    • H0 (Null hypothesis): A game's overall rating has does not change between blocs.
    • H1 (Alternative hypothesis): A game's overall rating changes between blocs.

    As before, in order to test this hypothesis, Welch's T-test (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welch%27s_t-test) is used, with a significance level of 0.05.

    The only statistically significant difference between the post-Kaga bloc's appraisal of a particular game, and that of the post-Awakening bloc, incidentally, was of Awakening (p-value=0.022). None of the other modern FE games have any significant evidence that a divide exists between the post-Kaga bloc, and the post-Awakening bloc.

    Conversely, there is a statistically significant difference with the ratings given by the Kaga bloc, and the post-Kaga bloc, for every modern game but Conquest. Similarly, there is also a significant difference between the reception for 4 out of the 6 modern Fire Emblem games between the Kaga bloc, and the post-Awakening bloc.

    This divide between the Kaga bloc, and the post-Kaga bloc also seems to affect Blazing Sword and Sacred Stones in a very noticeable fashion (p-value<0.001) – which incidentally, are the two games prior to the series' change in direction with Awakening that are heavily character-focused rather than plot-focused (like with Genealogy or the Tellius games) or gameplay-focused (like with Conquest)

    All of the above results, in turn, strongly seem to indicate that the Kaga bloc considers the supports and overall character writing as a lesser priority for the series, and by extension, disapproves of the character-focused direction that Fire Emblem has taken since Awakening.

    Question 3: Which mainline Fire Emblem game is your favourite?

    Link to results: https://imgur.com/a/XzxODWl

    In ranking games by how many people regard it as their favourite, there will naturally be a bias towards games that have been played by more people. As such, in order to fairly rank each game by such a measure, and through similar measures in the next few questions, I've calculated the results by filtering each game by their playrate (i.e. only people who've played Thracia 776 are counted in Thracia 776's ranking). This is similar to the measure used by u/Determination7's survey (link: https://www.reddit.com/r/fireemblem/comments/7u51u2/fire_emblem_reddit_series_survey_results/)

    Similarly to the overall ratings, Three Houses' reception seems to have normalised a bit, with 29% of its playerbase picking it as their favourite – though this decline hasn't been equally distributed between blocs, with the decline being strongest with the Kaga bloc, where Genealogy was picked over it as their favourite.

    Interestingly, the proportion of the post-Kaga bloc that picked Three Houses as their favourite declined noticeably (from ~50% to around ~30%, where it just beat out Radiant Dawn), but this decline was almost non-existent with the post-Awakening bloc (where ~70% picked Three Houses as its favourite, compared to ~75% before) – despite the overall rating of the game between those two blocs having no statistically significant difference between them.

    In general, some of Three Houses' initial popularity seemed to flow towards Genealogy, Radiant Dawn, and Echoes to a lesser extent.

    Speaking of Radiant Dawn, the Tellius games still did very well in this regard, though Path of Radiance still has the same quirk with Three Houses and the post-Kaga bloc where despite having a high overall rating, this doesn't seem to translate to people picking it as their favourite game. I'm very curious as to why this has been a trend, as many people who have played Radiant Dawn have also played Path of Radiance.

    Likewise, both Jugdral games also got more votes than Path of Radiance, indicating that the people who like these games must really like them.

    Awakening did much better than in the last survey, going from ~9% in the last poll to ~12% in this poll. This can be explained by the fact that some of the votes that may have went to Three Houses in the last poll have now re-evaluated the game, and ended up preferring Awakening instead. It even beat out Path of Radiance (outside of the Kaga bloc)!

    Blazing Sword didn't do much better than in the last poll, though something to note is that its reception between the Kaga bloc and the post-Kaga bloc differed significantly (~4% for the Kaga bloc who played Blazing Sword considered it as their favourite, compared to over 10% of the post-Kaga bloc).

    Similarly to the previous survey, Conquest is the only Fates route to have any significant polling power in this category, and similarly to the previous question, Conquest's reception (or those out of any of the Fates games) has changed very little.

    A grand total of 3 people voted for one of the NES games (shockingly, someone actually voted for Dark Dragon!).

    Question 4: Which mainline Fire Emblem game is your least favourite?

    Link to results: https://imgur.com/a/1KwV49e

    The fact that Three Houses' share of the vote in this question hasn't changed by much (from ~1.5% to around 3%), coupled with the results of the previous questions, seems to indicate that Three Houses' reception has largely normalised, rather than outright turning negative. This is doubly true considering that 4 people who've only played Three Houses voted for it as their least favourite, compare to no one in this same category in the last poll (strangely, they all voted for Fire Emblem games that they've never played, and the same number of people in this category did the same here). If you discount them in this question, then Three Houses' result drops from ~3% to slightly above 2%.

    No other game in the series had more than 1 respondent play it as their sole Fire Emblem game – which does seem to have skewed Three Houses' results in this question upwards.

    Something interesting to note is that Genealogy seems to be the community's least hated game (even after discounting the respondents who've only played Three Houses) – which is particularly surprising given the general consensus seemed to be that Genealogy has very noticeable strengths (its storytelling) and weaknesses (its balancing, its map design) – which would make for a game that is more widely hated by the community. This is especially pertinent as both Radiant Dawn and Three Houses, despite having similarly noticeable strengths and weaknesses and being better received than Genealogy overall, received more hate from the community.

    As I'm sure has been drilled down into you all in previous questions, Conquest and Revelation is just as hated now as it was nearly a year ago – although Birthright is slightly less hated nowadays.

    Notably, hate for Conquest was highly polarized – with ~6% of the Kaga bloc rating it as their least favourite, compared to compared with over 20% of the post-Awakening bloc who played it doing the same.

    The fact that the proportion of the community who put Shadow Dragon as their least favourite game almost halved (from ~24% to ~14), coupled with the results of the last two questions, does seem to provide strong evidence that a reappraisal of its quality has recently taken place within the Fire Emblem community – which begs the question of what exactly caused this reappraisal.

    On a different note, almost Shadow Dragon's spot as the third-most reviled game in the series has now been taken by Gaiden, with almost 20% of the vote. This is somewhat strange, given how at the time of the last poll, Echoes had long since released, which was what should have caused a reappraisal of Gaiden's legacy.

    Interestingly, despite the love Thracia 776 received, being in the top 5 both in the overall rating and for the community's favourite game, it also got significantly more hate (around ~6% of the sample rating it as their least favourite) than the other top-tier games in the series.

    People are slightly less angry at Binding Blade as they were 9 months ago, with it falling from ~10% to 7% in the least favourite poll.

    Concerning Questions 2, 3 and 4: Which game is the most divisive?

    Link to results: https://imgur.com/8ZEB0Js

    Note: Due to a lack of data, the NES games are not counted here.

    To determine which game in the series was the most divisive, two metrics were used:

    • The first metric used (Score Division) was to look at the ratings given to a game, and to subtract the proportion of very low scores (any score that was a 5 or below), from the proportion of very high scores (any score that was a 9 or above). This is because of the fact that score levied towards each game in the series roughly follow a normal distribution.
    • The second metric used (Favourites Division) was to subtract the proportion of a certain game's playerbase voting a game as their least favourite game from the proportion voting it as their favourite game. This value can then be multiplied by 2.5 for scaling purposes.
    • Games are first ranked on the basis of the absolute value of their Score Division. If the absolute value of several games' Score Division is close to each other, then these specific games are then ranked on the basis of the absolute value of their Favourites Division.

    As a general rule, positive values for both metrics indicate that a game was more well-received, and vice versa for negative values. Highly divisive games should have a score close to zero.

    The most divisive games in the series seemed to be Binding Blade and Conquest. Conquest, in particular, had the closest Score Division value to zero, but had a Favourites Division value that was pretty far from zero(further from zero than Blazing Blade and New Mystery). Binding Blade, on the other hand, had a Score Division value that was very close to zero, but a Score Division further from zero than that of Conquest's.

    Strangely, Blazing Blade, of all games, ended up being the third-most divisive game in the series. This is particularly surprising, given that many people in the fanbase presumably would have grown up with Blazing Blade, being the first Fire Emblem game to be released outside of Japan (I expected nostalgia to play a far greater part than it did), and it doesn't seem to have any extremely glaring weaknesses that would make it highly divisive (as in the case of Conquest). I'm curious to know why this is the case.

    On a similar note, Awakening in this poll ended up far less divisive, with both metrics taken into account, than I had expected given that it was the game that caused a huge amount of infighting within the fanbase. I'm also curious as to why this is the case.

    The results for the rest of the games were roughly what I had expected going into this – mostly praise for the Jugdral games, the Tellius games, Echoes, Three Houses, and Sacred Stones to a lesser extent, and mostly hate for Birthright, Revelations and Shadow Dragon.

    TL;DR for questions 2, 3 and 4: Games tier list:

    • Tier 1: Three Houses, Path of Radiance, Radiant Dawn, Genealogy of the Holy War, Thracia 776
    • Tier 2: Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, Sacred Stones, Awakening
    • Tier 3: New Mystery of the Emblem, The Blazing Blade, Mystery of the Emblem, The Binding Blade, Fates: Conquest
    • Tier 4: Shadow Dragon, Fates: Birthright
    • Tier 5: Dark Dragon, Fates; Revelation

    Question 5: Which mainline Fire Emblem game has your favourite story?

    Link to results: https://imgur.com/a/XFRNje7

    In general, the stories were roughly ordered within 4 tiers:

    • Tier 1: Genealogy
    • Tier 2: Three Houses, Radiant Dawn, Path of Radiance
    • Tier 3: Echoes, Thracia 776, Awakening
    • Tier 4: Blazing Blade, Binding Blade, all Archanea games, Fates (all routes)

    There is a massive gap between Tiers 1 and 2, and an even bigger one between Tiers 2 and 3 (if the post-Awakening bloc's results are any indication).

    Genealogy took this one home by far. It took literally half of the votes from its playerbase (no other game cracked a third), with nothing else even coming close. Even more notably, within the Kaga bloc, it got over triple the proportion of votes from its playerbase compared to the next two games, which both barely cracked 15% of the votes from those who played them.

    Three Houses' story was hugely polarised between blocs. Whilst its story still ended up in the second tier for the Kaga bloc with the Tellius games at ~15% of its playerbase, in the post-Kaga bloc with Genealogy taken out of the picture, this figure more than doubles, to nearly 40%. If you take out the Tellius games out of the equation as well and focus on the post-Awakening bloc, then the support for Three Houses' plot becomes near-unanimous, at around 70% of the post-Awakening playerbase voting for it.

    Radiant Dawn's story was even more polarised, going from barely cracking 10% support for the Kaga-bloc, to flat-out tripling to over 35% for the post-Kaga playerbase.

    Interestingly, though, this division does not seem to affect Path of Radiance's story (~16% for the Kaga bloc, compared with ~22% for the post-Kaga bloc) much. This is particularly interesting as Radiant Dawn's and Three Houses' stories are commonly cited as having incredible highs, but are also much messier in their execution (Radiant Dawn especially so) compared to the consistently good but unexceptional story of Path of Radiance.

    This may indicate that the Kaga bloc overall prefers consistency over ambition in Fire Emblem stories, and vice versa for the other two blocs.

    Another particularly interesting division between blocs is each bloc's approach towards the style of plots they prefer, with the character-focused narratives of Awakening and Echoes doing poorly with the Kaga bloc (Awakening was inexplicably beaten out by Revelation, of all things, in the Kaga bloc), but fairly well with the post-Awakening bloc (at around ~20% support for both) – which may indicate that the Kaga bloc prefers plot-focused narratives such as Genealogy, rather than character-focused ones such as Three Houses.

    Question 6: Which mainline Fire Emblem game has your favourite cast of characters?

    Link to results: https://imgur.com/a/qa6uJMg

    In the interest of fairness, I've decided to combine the votes for the Tellius games, as well as all three Fates routes, due to the heavy character overlap between each set of games.

    Even after its honeymoon period has ended, Three Houses' character writing is considered to be by far its strongest point, with over 40% of its playerbase voting for it as their favourite cast – slightly less than last poll (at over half), but still far above any other cast in the series. Interestingly, the polarisation between blocs that affected Three Houses' overarching narrative didn't affect its characters much, with over 35% support in this aspect from even the Kaga bloc's playerbase.

    Similarly to the previous poll, Three Houses' story garnered more support from the post-Awakening playerbase than its characters, despite the latter being the game's most notable strength – which is evident of the character-focused direction that the series has taken since Awakening.

    The combined Tellius cast came in a clear second place, whereas Genealogy, Awakening, Sacred Stones and Echoes followed them as a third tier of sorts.

    Interestingly, Awakening's and Blazing Sword's cast was highly polarised between the Kaga bloc, and the other two blocs – which is strange, given their completely different approaches to character writing.

    Despite how well Genealogy's story did in this poll, its characters fared much worse, failing to even get 10% of its playerbase's votes. Hence, fleshing out the Jugdral cast would be a pretty good justification for a remake.

    Fates didn't do much better from the last poll, receiving only 5% of its playerbase's votes, though the Archanea games did do a bit better than last poll – which is another point into the idea that Shadow Dragon's reputation has improved with time.

    Ironically, Binding Blade, despite it being the originator of the concept of Support conversations, did the worst out of any cast in the series – even worse than that of the Archanea games.

    Question 7: Which mainline Fire Emblem game has your favourite Support conversations?

    Link to results: https://imgur.com/a/DeXijpE

    The results for this question roughly echoed the results for the last question. Three Houses' reception in this aspect normalised a bit from the last poll (~70% support), though it still ended up being the strongest single aspect out of any Fire Emblem game, with over 55% of its playerbase, and no other game even cracking 20% support in this aspect.

    Awakening's and Path of Radiance's Supports were highly polarised between the Kaga bloc, and the other blocs – but in opposite directions, with the Kaga bloc showing a significant degree of support to Path of Radiance that didn't exist as much with the other blocs, and vice versa for Awakening.

    This seems to indicate a divide between each bloc with regards to how Supports should be handled in the series, though I am curious as to what exactly with Awakening's and Path of Radiance's Supports is causing this divide, considering that Three Houses' Supports did extremely well with all three blocs.

    The GBA games did substantially better in this aspect than in the previous poll, with Blazing Sword almost doubling its share of the vote from 4.5% to 8.6%.

    Fates' supports did even worse than in the last poll, with its three routes taking all three bottom spots for this question. Even if you combined all three routes as one, it would only beat Binding Blade and New Mystery.

    Question 8: Which mainline Fire Emblem game has your favourite gameplay?

    Link to results: https://imgur.com/a/p8U3fKR

    Four games did very well in regards to gameplay: Thracia 776, Radiant Dawn, Conquest and Three Houses.

    While Three Houses (barely) won in this regard, it must be noted that 9 respondents in this poll have only played Three Houses, and thus voted for it as their favourite. If these nine respondents are taken out of the sample, then Thracia 776 would win in this aspect, albeit by less than one-tenth of a percent (26.92% compared with 26.86%).

    Just as in the last poll, out of the four major pillars of Fire Emblem (story, characters, supports and gameplay), the gameplay was considered to be Three Houses' weakest, with it being the only pillar that didn't get 30% or more of its playerbase voting for it as their favourite. The same also applied to Echoes.

    On the other hand, the gameplay was considered to be by far Conquest's, New Mystery's (which was the only other game to crack 10%) and Thracia 776's strongest aspects, with neither of these three games receiving much praise for their stories, characters, or in the case of Conquest, its Supports.

    Awakening held onto its position of sixth, though Genealogy and Echoes fared quite a bit worse at 11th and 12th respectively.

    12(!) people managed to somehow enjoy Revelation's gimmicks.

    I would presume that these results would be reflective of the gameplay priorities of members within the Fire Emblem community. For instance, Three Houses probably did very well for those who value unit flexibility, and Conquest probably did similarly well for those who value tight map design.

    These differing gameplay priorities also seemed to extend between blocs, with Three Houses getting over half of the votes for the post-Awakening bloc (with no particularly drastic increase in Conquest's support) - which seems to indicate a divide between the blocs with respect to how much unit flexibility and RPG elements a Fire Emblem game should have.

    Question 9: Who is your favourite Lord?

    Link to results: https://imgur.com/a/KG79rSC

    For the second time, we have a lord that is more well-received than Ike – only this time, it's Leif who won, instead of Dimitri (at 22.5% of the Thracia playerbase's vote).

    The tier below Leif comprised of Ike, Dimitri and Edelgard, in that order, with all three getting around 15% of their playerbase's vote. All three of them were quite polarised between blocs, with Dimitri beating out Ike within the Kaga bloc despite getting a smaller proportion of his playerbase's vote overall.

    Similarly to before, Dimitri did very well with the Genealogy playerbase, with 13.5% voting for him – significantly higher than the playerbases of the other Kaga games. This is despite the fact that Ike and Edelgard did far worse (at around 10% support) despite getting a similar proportion of votes for their game's overall playerbase. I'm quite curious to know why this is the case.

    It must be noted that people have pointed out that Elincia wasn't considered a lord in this survey (when the status of her as a lord is debated) – which I believe may have skewed votes in Ike's and/or Micaiah's favour, given that they share the same games.

    It must be noted that 13 respondents on the survey came from the Edelgard subreddit – though even if you took them out of the sample, she would still beat Claude (who came in fifth) by a noticeable margin.

    After Edelgard comes a third tier, comprised of Claude, Sigurd, Hector and Micaiah – which all got between 6 and 9% on a by-percent basis.

    Whilst Eirika did fairly well, coming in the middle of the pack at 12th, it must be stated that similarly to the case of Edelgard, 9 people who voted for her came from her subreddit – and unlike with Edelgard, removing them from the sample would make her do significantly worse, with her coming in 16th instead of 12th (at ~2.5% instead of the ~4% she got in this poll).

    It's been 2 surveys (3 if you u/Determination7's survey), and still nobody likes Kris.

    Something to speculate on is how would these results change if a question asking for someone's least favourite lord was added to the survey. In particular, I would expect Corrin to come dead last (instead of 4th last here), and the results for Edelgard and Micaiah to be significantly worse, given how both of them were intentionally written to be divisive.

    TL;DR: Lords tier list:

    • Tier 1: Leif
    • Tier 2 (can be combined with Tier 1): Ike, Dimitri, Edelgard
    • Tier 3: Claude, Sigurd, Hector, Micaiah
    • Tier 4: Lucina, Marth, Seliph, Eirika, Eliwood
    • Tier 5: Chrom, Lyn, Ephraim
    • Tier 6: Celica, Alm, Robin, Corrin, Roy, Byleth, Kris

    Question 10: Who is your favourite antagonist in the series?

    Link to results: https://imgur.com/NqP4wPs

    As someone pointed out in the last survey, stating that Edelgard and Rhea in the question could have skewed the answers in their favor, as evidenced by how Edelgard got the most votes (even on a by-percent basis) then. In this survey, I did not mention Edelgard or Rhea in the question – and I do believe that the answers may have been skewed in the opposite direction, given the nature of Three Houses' storytelling and the debates about whether Edelgard or Rhea can even be counted as villains. In particular, there were a few responses that went along the lines of "Lyon, if Edelgard doesn't count" or "I don't really consider Edelgard as a villain".

    Regardless of the question's phrasing, given the results, I doubt that including Edelgard in the question's phrasing would have made her beat Arvis, who got over 30% of the Genealogy playerbase's votes (compared to slightly below 20% for Edelgard and the Three Houses playerbase).

    Interestingly, despite 13 respondents coming from the Edelgard subreddit and how close Edelgard and Lyon were in this question (with a difference of less than 1% when the results were filtered by playerbase), removing said respondents from the sample would have changed nothing, as no one in the Edelgard subreddit voted for her as a villain (despite all 13 of them voting for her as their favourite lord). In fact, there were more people in the Edelgard subreddit who voted for Lyon as their favourite villain (albeit at only one).

    The top ten antagonists were consistent from the last poll, although some of the placements changed (Arvis and Edelgard swapped places, Sephiran and Ashnard also did so.).

    6 "evil dragon" villains got votes: Rhea, who came in sixth (and whose status in this archetype is highly debatable given her characterisation), Grima, who came in seventh, Ashera, who got 4 votes, Formortiis, who got 2 votes, and Idunn and Nemesis, who both got 1 vote. This, coupled with the above results, indicates that the fanbase tends to disapprove of this villain archetype, especially when compared against morally grey antagonists. Grima, though, did uncharacteristically well for a character in this archetype, and I'm curious to know why, as there doesn't seem to be anything separating him from the other villains of this archetype.

    Shoutouts to the one person who voted IS as their favourite antagonist, again.

    5 people voted for a Fates villain – 3 for Anankos, and 2 for Garon.

    I presume the one person who voted "that one bitch with the tits" (yes, they actually put this as a response, I am not making this up) was referring to Edelgard, as no other female antagonist got more than 4 votes?

    (Note: For the final three questions, results will not be filtered by playrate.)

    Question 11: Which mainline Fire Emblem game has your favourite music?

    Link to results: https://imgur.com/a/BGMhS47

    Unlike the previous questions, the results for favourite music and artstyle will not be filtered to include people who've only played a certain game.

    The reason why this is the case, and not in the case of the story or character writing is that the storytelling and characterisation in a Fire Emblem game is in every game, integrated with the gameplay to some extent – whereas evaluating the music or artstyle of a game without having played it is much easier. As an example, you don't need to have played Xenoblade 2 to know that its female character designs are almost universally awful.

    The results of this question were very similar to the last poll, with over half of the sample voting for Echoes or Three Houses, and with Fates, Radiant Dawn, Awakening, and strangely Genealogy being the only other games that got a significant amount of support.

    Question 12: Which mainline Fire Emblem game has your favourite artstyle?

    Link to results: https://imgur.com/a/M2ENJ48

    Artstyle is to Echoes as characterisation is to Three Houses and storytelling is to Genealogy, with Echoes' artstyle being the only other aspect of a Fire Emblem game to gain over 40% of the vote.

    The Warriors engine really did not help Three Houses, as this was by far its worst showing in the poll, with it getting half the support as its next worst aspect (~14%, compared to ~28% for gameplay).

    As a general rule, the newer the game, the better it did in this question, with all of the modern games making it into the top 5. The big exception to this would be the DS games, which got 6 votes between them in total.

    Question 13: Outside of the lords, who is your favourite character in the series?

    Link to results: https://imgur.com/TotBOG4

    In general, Three Houses, Awakening and the Tellius games did very well here, with each game having a representative in the top 10, and with everyone in the top 4 (Dorothea, Soren, Felix and Jill) being either from the Tellius games or Three Houses.

    The only other game that managed to get into the top 10 was Genealogy with Lewyn and Finn (which I'm curious as to know why, as neither of them stood out when I played Genealogy).

    Similarly to before, characters with a tragic backstory (i.e. Soren, Lysithea), notable character development (i.e. Jill, Marianne, Dorothea), or characters that get memed a lot (i.e. L'Arachel, Ferdinand) were the ones that tended to do well here.

    General observations:

    All of the above results leads to some potentially interesting insights into the (relatively hardcore) Fire Emblem community:

    It seems that with it being nearly a year since Three Houses' release, its reception among the fanbase has normalised a bit, from being near-unanimously considered the best Fire Emblem game in the weeks after its release to being considered one of a top tier of Fire Emblem games.

    Far more interesting than the change in Three Houses' reception, however, is the evidence that the priorities of the Kaga bloc, and the other two blocs of the Fire Emblem community, are at odds with one another.

    From this poll, and the previous poll, the main division in the Fire Emblem community doesn't seem to be with newcomers introduced to the series with Awakening (or a later game) and veterans, but rather, between people who have played Kaga's Fire Emblem games and people who haven't.

    In particular, these results, coupled with the results of the previous poll (and previous polls made by other members of the subreddit), seem to heavily indicate that the Kaga bloc greatly prefers plot-driven games, such as Genealogy, over the character-focused games, such as Awakening or Three Houses, that the other blocs (especially with the post-Awakening bloc) prefer.

    Similarly, from the results of question relating to gameplay, there seems to be a second division in the fanbase, between people who prefer a more tightly scripted, experience, which largely comprises the Kaga bloc and those who prefer increased unit flexibility and RPG elements, which is an opinion that seems to be more common with series newcomers.

    Both of these differing priorities, coupled with the series' change in direction, can explain why Awakening and Fates were so divisive on their releases.

    More grimly, however, I believe that due to the differing preferences between each bloc in respect to the series' direction, any new game that isn't considered to be one of the best in the series will end being highly divisive, similar to how Awakening and Fates were – either you anger veterans, especially the Kaga bloc, and satisfy newcomers, or you anger newcomers and satisfy veterans.

    But who knows? Maybe I'm completely wrong.

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