Leda Poisoning

Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weaveactive

I'm still very much liking Leda's game although I do think it's going to end up feeling quite schizophrenic. The problem is in the structure of the game and the game's unwillingness to bend for her.

Right now the supports feel like a very different character from the mainline plot for her and that's a necessity because:

1. The game needs her to be happy and cute and fluffy and sweet. It's afraid to let her just be a very dark person.
2. The game can't really control when you see them either.
3. There are just not enough of them.

What Leda needs is like six supports with her core cast to show some level of arc, so you can see her baseline, then her succumbing to the darkness after she makes that pact with the Viuela, and then coming out of it (I assume, I hope, at some point on the other end). Three supports is just not enough to build that.

One is just a core structural problem. I think people won't like her if she is dark and a little evil, which maybe they need this to be someone that people are happy to fall in love with and slap on a shirt or merch.

Two is a problem where every character has the same treatment and so they're not willing to gate her support dialogues specifically. They all have to feel ephemeral and timeless because you could see them at any point. They can restrict you from viewing them too early but they can't ensure that you'll view them before it's too late in a lot of these cases, given the amount of tailoring that would need to be done.

They can't have a really dark part in C before that's happened in the story. Nor can they have it be sensible to be really light and fluffy if you're going to see it deep into her arc. The problem is they kind of do a little bit of both anyways but it suffers from that timing issue.

For 3 I think they could cut half of the recruitable cast and double the supports with the existing people and that would do the game a big service. That's so tough to do, though, because every character is going to be someone's favorite, so who do you decide to cut, right, especially after the fact when players have fallen in love with them? For me personally I could see some that's like, "This person is pointless. I don't need this person," but again someone's going to like that.

I think Leda is the character who suffers the most from the scope and ambition of this game. It's hard to invest so much more into her when this game is so big, and how many players are even going to play through her route at all? I think as the star of a standalone game she would really knock it out of the park.