Do Christmas Cavaliers Matter Anymore?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 มิ.ย. 2024
- This isn't a Unit Design 101. Instead it's a more free-flow ramble on Christmas Cavs, the Christmas Archetype, what these units can teach a player about the games they are in, and why this archetype isn't being played straight anymore.
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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:30 Run-down of Christmas cavs in every main FE
13:00 Why does this archetype exist? - เกม
my favorite archetype of any FE characters are the two queer/eccentric warrior pairs that show up on desert maps. Love them so much
Definitely an interesting archetype, and one that's actually stuck around despite being solely an enemy unit archetype!
It's crazy how they started off as two mini bosses in a widely hated chapter to becoming their own archetype especially since most archetypes tend to be based on things from the first game. Another neat detail is that their designs have remained the same throughout all of their appearances even though that design was reused for multiple berserker bosses in fe6.
@@finleycream1937 Honestly I try not to kill them if I can help it (also because they're fairly threatening). Even the dreaded fandom wiki has an archetype for them, so other people have noticed the gay warriors XD
@@crenando288 I learned that the hard way when I thought having Thea equip a sword which made her face hit rates in the single digit made her safe from them and their crits. It didn't. The worst part was that I had basically finished the chapter and was just fighting them for exp and to raise weapon levels.
My first Christmas cavs were Sain and Kent from FE7. I think one had slightly higher SPD and the other had slightly higher STR, but you're right, it didn't make much of a difference. Seeing this video, my first thought was, "ah, lets teach doubling and OHKO".
1. Red has 2 SPD more than green, and green has 2 STR more than red.
2. On their join map, many enemies are either slow and tanky archers or fast and squishy myrmidons (or some other fast/squishy 1-range unit type).
3a. On easy mode (so for new players), red is fast enough to double and kill both, and green is strong enough to OHKO myrmidons. Red risks retaliation against the myrmidons, green risks enemy phase against the archers.
3b. On normal mode, enemies both gain SPD. Red no longer doubles myrmidons, and green gets doubled by archers.
3c. On hard mode, enemies both gain just enough HP and/or DEF to avoid being 1-rounded by either.
3d. On hard+ mode, enemies gain LCK/SPD so your attacks are less reliable, and ATK/SKL so enemy phases are more punishing.
3e. On the hardest modes, enemies gain +20 crit weapons, can now double red, can now quadruple green, can attack 1-2 range, gain a random skill, and all have linked AI cuz f*ck you, lol.
Now just slap on some notable difference in STR/SPD growth and done! Even if one ends up better than the other, that just teaches how not all stats are made equal.
For Three Houses, I would say that the Christmas Cavs was meant to be Sylvain and Ingrid. They've got the friends butting heads trope with Ingrid as the serious one and Sylvain as the easygoing lady's man. And Ingrid does have a unique character design for when she's in her Cavalier class where she's dressed in green.
I think it was partially dropped during development, like there being evidence that Edelgard originally being designed as a heavy-armor spellcaster, but if you want your Christmas Cavaliers, those two best fit the bill.
You gave me an idea. The Christmas cavaliers could be used to introduce the player to reclassing. After a couple of chapters, the cavaliers express the desire to want to diversify their skills. The player gets two Second Seals and reclasses the cavaliers into one of their secondary classes. This will introduce the class changing mechanic to the player, and encourage them to experiment with each characters' class set.
honestly i could listen to you talk about fe for hours really.
Haha thanks! Well I have hours worth of content backlogged, and maybe someday I'll get back into streaming.
Not sure why my southwestern US accent came out so strong at the start of this video. I must have been watching something where people talked in that accent just before recording, because I tend to subconsciously mimic accents I hear regularly.
it's really funny honestly
Why suppress it? Accents are to be embraced!!
@@schranzcops2906 It's not even an accent I strongly have in most situations. Like, if I don't think about it, it doesn't show up most of the time. I'm just an accent chameleon and picked it up from whatever show I was watching right before recording.
I think the Chrismas Cavs are the way they are isn't for teaching but for preference. It's either risky vs conservative or offensive vs defensive. I think of the Ax duo from FE6. Do you want the safer Lot with 1-2 range and more defensive growths or the more offensive Wade with more pure damage that takes more planning and luck to use long term.
I think as they got to the DS era it became more of a tradition than a gameplay choice as you say but they still try to subvert your expectations by using different classes or relationships or join times.
Awesome discussion though!
I see this in my other favorite franchise, pokemon. Most route 1s have a early game bird that is fast growing, usually a unique type for the early game but has low long term success. As the games have gone on they've kept the route 1 bird but subverted it by giving it a new typing at the final stage or a cool new move or just a cool design. It's still usually not the best but it now rewards players who do stick it out even if the early game Pidgy or Hoothoot was meant mostly as an early game team member only
i dont think that christmas cavs are ever there to teach anything to the player implicitly. when i design fe rom hacks i usually have characters analogous to christmas cavs and its mostly just because its an easy way to give the player some starting units. If you want some starting units, the main lord, jagen, and christmas cavs are all super simple to design and balance bc those archetypes have been reiterated so often and that's four units right there for the player to start with. Plus, if they're the same or similar class then you don't need to balance the first few maps around more unique classes being available to the player. Having two similar units at the start also helps ease in new players to the game and its mechanics since they don't need to account for as many differences in units starting off. Those're their purposes I think.
also oscar and titania are 100% the christmas cavs of rd imo. (also sylvain and ingrid are the christmas cavs for 3h too btw. Slyvain is an annoying brash red-haired guy and Ingrid is the calm considered green-eyed girl. plus they both excel in mounted classes.)
Some fair points. I agree that not everything needs to exist to teach the player, but when it can pull double duty it's an easy win in my book.
Good point about giving the player more units without giving them more complexity via unit types though, that's a concept worth exploring on its own.
I wouldn't remove the green/red siblings because it became a legacy of the series but it's clear that since Fates, they started to abandon the gameplay aspect of the christmas units
Yeah the original Christmas Cavs idea got kinda old because more often than not, the differences between them are small enough that they just feel samey. Saizo and Kaze have that availability gap and that Combat/Support focus they aim for respectively, which helps them feel different enough even though they share the class. Clanne and Framme on the other hand end up taking the dynamic of a Mage/Cleric dichotomy, still managing to feel very much like counterparts despite not even sharing a class and the strong/fast divide being a 5% difference in their personal growths.
@@MinoriGamingif memory serves Path of Radiance is what started the Cain and Abel having a big availibility gap
@@JacobNintendoNerd99 It was Mystery of the Emblem actually.
@@MinoriGaming they had Luke and Roderick together and they're the "new" pair in 3 Book II so not *quite*
Think of it this way, the 2nd cav is basically an insurance plan in the event that you break the first one.
What do you mean people don't kill their fictional soldiers in their imaginary wars anymore?
From what I remember, it really felt like the main difference was the stats between the two, thus asking "do you want to hit hard and fast or take it methodically (which I've always seen as the primary distinction). Path of Radiance felt like it had the biggest "choices" in Kieran and Oscar. Kieran was REALLY polarized to hitting hard and recklessly while Oscar was a lot more reserved and defensive choice.
Personally, I think the most important thing about the Christmas Duo archetype (and a lot of other archetypes) is that they're just FUN for our pattern-seeking human brains. People love finding patterns, and I know at least I personally love seeing various little (or large!) permutations of a given "base idea". It's not really serving that important a practical gameplay purpose so much as just being a fun flavor through line across the series.
That's my take on them, anyway, and I've always felt that if I'm able to get a ROM hack project of my own seriously rolling, I'd definitely want to incorporate what classic Fire Emblem archetypes I feel have a place in what I'm creating and take my own whack at putting fun spins on them.
I feel like Fire Emblem being a strategy RPG naturally attracts a lot of logic- and mathematics-inclined folks to the more gameplay-focused side of its fanbase, but I think not everything in the games really has a super calculated, rigidly-hashed-out PURPOSE beyond just that it's a fun little thing to include in the game. That's not to say that no thought or effort went into balancing a given FE game; that's just obviously false even for the wonkiest installments. I just mean to say that sometimes "hey, wouldn't it be fun/neat/cool if there was this thing in the game we're making?" is the primary operative reasoning for certain things being included.
lol im just goin through a bunch of your older videos arent i sorry i'm adjusting to some new brain meds that are leaving me very uh rambly and your videos are very good at makin me overthink things lmao anyway i think the way you framed it put me a different question into my head: what even constitutes an archetype in the first place? the first instance of an archetype can't be the sole definer because an archetype with only one instance? that's just a character. eg, If you only look at FE 1 and no future games, you don't have _a Jeigan,_ you have Jeigan.
Therefore: You need to have a future iteration on a unit's design for archetypes to occur.
So here's where imo design intent comes into it a lot. It's plenty possible to iterate on prior design broadly without directly mapping things in one game to another-- Final Fantasy 1 to Final Fantasy 3 to Final Fantasy 5's job systems are an easy example where you have both. All games have black mages for example. But 3's viking job doesn't have a direct map to anything in 3 or 5, say. The best you can really do is some kinda-sorta stuff like there's a loose derivation from Guy in 2, it is possible to draw relations from it to fighter/knight/paladin, etc. But you can also create a map from Scholar in 3 to _Blue Mage_ in 5 where what you have is two jobs that don't really serve the same function in a fight but share an overall _concept_ of 'job that learns about/from monsters' _and they share a command,_ ie the enemy scan command. But I wouldn't really call it straight iteration unless you consider 'ok remember scholar? what if that job didn't suck' iteration. Which ehhhhh you _can_ but i don't think it's very useful. What you have is what I would more lean to calling a recurring design motif; an intentional relation exists and they're kinda like each other in some ways.
So circling back to Fire Emblem, and I'm talking about Jeigans on a video about christmas cavs for a reason, let's look at Marcus. I don't think it's too terribly much assumption to say that he's a case of someone specifically taking the idea of what Jeigan was for and adapting it to the games that Marcus was in. Definitely archetyping there!
(hot take: i dont think unit archetypes exist prior to FE6; for FE3 it's a direct sequel it's a lot of the same characters, and for 2, 4, and 5 most mechanical archetype discussion involves notable stretching)
so now, _now_ we can bring christmas cavs back up. If you look at all the pairs of characters you bring up, something interesting clarifies: very little ever directly connects them in any gameplay sense. the GBA games have the clearest distinct cav pairs post FE1/3 but let's be real on this one: they exist because you want two guys on horses early.
Finally we can ask: what defines christmas cavs? If we drill deep enough I think we can derive: _christmas cavs are paired units that fill early map needs._
my friends, that ain't a unit archetype. that's a recurring design motif. Mechanically, christmas cavs _never were a thing in the first place._
Heck yeah rambles that eventually get somewhere! That's how this channel started out, and how my brain has been thinking for YEARS before even making videos like this.
And yeah I would also agree that we should really break down the "archetypes" because while they're *somewhat* useful they are almost always player-driven. You can argue that the Jagen archetype is the only "true" archetype in Fire Emblem and I'm liable to believe you mostly because it's the only role that is straightforward, clearly distinct, and present in some form or another in the majority of FE games.
Christmas Cavs are only an archetype because pattern-seeking monkey brain likes patterns, and the frankly more interesting to discuss archetypes like Minerva or Navarre are a lot more tenuous as to what their core traits even are.
@@MythrilZenith whew glad i'm not bein weird or anything, haha.
and yeah like if you expand archetypes into writing questions like character themes etc etc theres a lot more to discuss but that's wholly irrelevant to to the game of math with graphics and ne'er the twain should meet.
but now that you mention, i think navarre might actually be a _map feature archetype._ the unique recurring element is a character recruited on-map by endangering a vulnerable unit. that's not a feature of the unit, that's a property of the maps they're recruited on...
Would you mind telling me when did we start getting tutorials menu?
Happy holidays to you as well!
Not sure I fully understand the question? Tutorials menu as in optional tutorials you can review at any time within the game? For Fire Emblem I feel like that wasn't s fully established thing until Tellius (FE9), though GBA I THINK had a few things it told you about outside of forced tutorial segments or houses.
@@MythrilZenith Thanks. I was referring a those Anna tutorials kind of thing were they explain you the basis of a game.
I hope you realised you were forcing these archetypes to have a teaching part where they do not need at all. That teaching is more related to NOT have those tutorials, which would explain why Tellius kinda stopped on this archetype for you.
For me, they're only a pick of strong vs fast, swords vs lances, not sure if all 4 combinations were given across the series.
On a side note, even though it's been years, I think Sacred stones would want to teach you about con or atq speed. I THINK you had a killer lance and a steel lance on them.
The most important thing the Christmas cavs usually teach the player is the sole fact that you will get multiple units of the same class who can have different stats and other attributes. In FE1, 4, 6, 7, and 13 you get a second cav before any other repeated class.
In FE2 it’s villagers, FE3 it’s cavs and archers, FE5 it’s fighters, FE8 it’s priests, FE9 and 10 it’s mages, Fates is complicated, 3H has students, and Engage it’s martial monks.
Stahl and Sully also have that Cain and Abel thing where Sully has D rank lances and E rank swords and Stahl vice versa. Probably more important in the DS game though
Christmas Cavs feel pretty misused as archetypes revolving around unit design when it is really more a common character design trope. I like them more as a way to teach mechanics of their respective game better ala Mae and Boey more than just being slightly different stat cavaliers.
I think the cavs in sacred stones (during 5x) actually do teach a lesson: high mov is good! and rescue utility! and that it's okay to have some units just be support, since Ephraim has his personal weapon for effective damage and Orson has cracked stats, there's hardly a reason to use Kyle and Forde except as supports. The Killer Lance you get also supports this, in my view, as it's a less reliable weapon with the potential to 1-shot. anyway that is my whole addition to this
Red Cav Best Cav. Also Lucas and Saizo. Also I just think it is fun. I dont mind if they are different classes or whatever. In GBA them having green and red swords as well was fun to me.
I think fe5 is more likely, when looking at the red/green cavs, Cain/Kain the Abel and Alva the Cain. Don't get me wrong, you have a good point with Halvan and Osian.
Both who are horribly screwed by joining in chapter... 9 or so, at level 2.
Alva has the joy of only having a death/escape quote!
Yeah, Cain/Alva are a lot more literally the Christmas Cavs, though they also are a lot more the Vyland and Roshea in that they are both terrible scrub cavs that are kind of pointless to use unless you love weak units. Their differences also don't really teach you anything about the game or mechanics, though, so at most I would say "Yeah they exist but aren't important."
@@MythrilZenith yeah, you're right that that's all they are really. No skills, no lines, both sole lancers when you've got Finn.
At the beginning of the video when you make reference to different versions of the Christmas cab archetype you cite Boey and Mae as the gaiden example, Boey and Mae are not Christmas cabs archetypes of gaiden that would be Forsyth and Lukas in terms of colour palette and Forsyth and Python in terms of personality
Congratulations I'm officially destroyed by facts and logic
@@MythrilZenith you bet you are, time for a youtube apology video
i like the christmas cavs because theyre silly
Though I don't agree I've seen people say Lorenz and leonie are christmas cavs but yet again I disagree.