Yay or Nay to child units in Echoes? I personally think a few from select parents (say instead of all males like fates, alm has a child, and celica has one, but not all females have one) could bolster the roster and allow for a few unique convos
Nope nope nope nope nope.
Alm is a child. His canon age is approximately 16. He’s not going to have any child of any meaningful age by the end of Echoes, that’s not how that timeline works. I don’t care about Deeprealms shenanigans – they don’t make sense and they’re a bit too obviously shoehorned. They can stuff it.
You can increase roster size without adding the whole cluster bomb that comes with S-rank child-spawning. Shadow Dragon did it, pulling a handful of characters in by optional side chapters.
It’s not a bad mechanic per se. It’s just contextually inappropriate. It doesn’t add to Gaiden’s world and would retcon some things that probably shouldn’t be. There are better ways to add roster diversity. Exempli gratia:
Gaiden is known for many things, one of which being that it contains villages that are actually explorable and contain NPCs. Gaiden’s villages, however, have almost no value – one recruitable character, one useful item, etc., and then you’re done with it.
If the villages get padded out in Echoes, some (or all) of them could acquire a tavern building. Taverns are hubs common across many RPGs and adventure games as places to recruit new party members. Add a currency of some form, and then put a fixed number of recruitable characters in different taverns throughout the world, that can be hired at a specific cost. Hiring characters is not new (see: Hugh in FE6, Volke in FE9 & 10, among others), and again, you have more cause to check in on villages from time to time.
Alternatively, village NPCs could become recruitable as generics to pad your roster – you’re running a rebellion, after all. If the village character fights and does well, it could improve your relationship with the village; if they die, it could sour.
Or, you could check in the handful of ports from time to time. Valentia is just across the sea from Archanea, so why not send Archanean characters to Valentia in boats on occasion? This would provide a legitimate way of including other popular characters such as Marth, Caeda, etc. Put my boy Wolf in a boat.
tl;dr – there are many many ways to add characters between Gaiden and Echoes, and putting marriage + kids in there is a lazy way to do it compared to the alternatives.
ellievsbear
yousharknotpass
annaxmalina
