Part 1: Character Creation & Prologue

Time to start things off. These first few chapters are mostly just tutorials. I could skip them, but they should pad out the unit analyses a little so I'm not immediately dumping walls and walls of text on you.

The Conquest route itself won't start until Chapter 7, but don't think all these introductory chapters will be easy! Some of them can be a big pain on higher difficulties, at least if you haven't played through them like 50 times before. I'm having fun, I promise.



Gameplaywise, exactly one thing matters here: I made my Corrin a girl. Unlike past FE games, there's no gender essentialism like girls having lower strength but higher speed, and without DLC there's (almost!) no gender locked classes. The one pair of classes that is gender locked does not appear in Conquest.

What does matter here is Corrin's access to supports. Fates is unique in that any unit can use a special item to change their class to match a character they have reached either S or A+ support rank with. With two exceptions, S rank supports are limited to m/f couples, while A+ supports can happen between any two units of the same gender, so long as they can support each other at all. Normally these supports are one per character, but Corrin can make as many A+ supports as they like. A male Corrin can take the class of any boy in the army, while a female Corrin can take the class of any girl. This is actually quite important!



It is Pokemon tradition to name your player character after the game they're in. This game is a bit like Pokemon... maybe. I'd name her Fire Emblem: Conquest if it fit!



Here's the real meat of character creation. Birthday is 31/12, shorthand for "I don't care but 1/1 is not cool enough for me". I'll be using none of the rewards that playing on your birthday can give you, so it doesn't matter.

For my boon I've picked magic, and for bane I've picked res. These are both fairly safe options - if you're being a tryhard, you'll want to make Corrin as effective in combat as possible. Strength and magic increase their killing power, defense helps them not die, and speed does a little of both. Corrin's magic is normally somewhat on the shaky side, but a magic boon provides a massive increase of 20%! Normally I prefer to go all in with a physical attacking Corrin, but this way I can show off their ability to attack with both stats.

Resistance is also a safe choice for a bane. Usually you'll want to go with either skill, luck, res, or maybe one of the attacking stats you don't plan on using. In this case I've gone res, because almost all of its drawbacks are cancelled out by a magic boon - despite what you might think, each boon/bane increases and decreases more than one stat. Clever greatly increases magic while slightly increasing speed and res. Excitable decreases res, and slightly decreases mag and speed. These cancel out to create a Corrin with good magic and slightly bad resistance, with neutral everything else. I'll post a full unit analysis of this Corrin in Chapter 1, where their stats will actually mean something. But for now you can treat this as a "neutral" Corrin, at least until she starts facing magic users and gets a way of attacking with magic herself.

Lastly, I've gone with the Samurai talent. The samurai class tree provides you with many good skills, and is completely inaccessible for Corrin in this route if they don't pick it as their talent! It's not their best available class - cavalier, wyvern rider, dark mage & ninja can all potentially be better, but most of those can also be accessed through A+ or S supports. I want to maximise Corrin's class access for maximum tryhard potential, after all.



Now it's time to force our little mutant homunculus upon the world. I'll try to burn through these beginning few chapters as quickly as possible unless I've got something especially interesting to say!





As such. Did you know it's possible to complete this chapter by doing (almost) literally nothing? Hit end turn on both turns and the map will solve itself. The first enemy will attack you and defeat themselves on enemy phase, and the map will straight up end with zero fanfare if you leave the second two alive. The only consequences are A: Hinoka will complain a little and B: you will deprive yourself of free EXP for literally no reason. Although I'm not sure how you're earning EXP from a dream...



Don't worry, I killed all the dream dudes. In this brural, irrational world, there are no heroes. Good and evil are merely an illusion in Fire Emblem: Conquest!!!


Next time: I get into the actual meat of the game and write some unit analyses.