boy this post got a lot of good discussion going
for this kind of thing i put "for the sake of the story" first but also worth noting that the period of time between the end of the medieval period and and the industrial revolution is really short compared to the length of the medieval period itself. it depends on how you define it but you could easily make an estimate of about a thousand years, and then adding on like the classical period, it's a pretty substantial amount of time
another thing worth noting is that on the scale of like european history (or at least how it's framed) 2000 years seemingly unbroken is a massively long time but it for example egypt and china have very long histories
GOING ON A TANGENT ABOUT THIS but i think saying very little changed and marth would manage just fine is maybe an understatement, because the tech ostensibly is not very different but the culture and geopolitics? undeniably is. actually i'd be really interested in exploring marth and the awakening characters discussing that!
please go on the tangents I love it
I absolutely agree that, technology aside, Marth probably would be suffering from massive culture shock if they dropped him into Ylisse. Ylisse is nothing like Altea, and considering how humble the man seems, knowing that he's enshrined as the Hero-King in Ylissean lore would probably throw him for a loop. That honestly would be fascinating to see.
Also: you're exactly right about Euro-centric history having a very particular framing, a constant push toward industrialization that muddies a lot of discussion -- because there are other cultures with incredible histories that stretch back thousands of years. In the case of Egypt, they were building pyramids like the Giza complex 2,500+ years before Cleopatra. Their histories are incredibly rich and complex, and they're technically pre-Medieval. Even if it does borrow trappings of Medieval Europe, I think it's entirely reasonable to say that their cultural history has been continuing and progressing along the course of other ancient cultures.
(To be fair, though: "for the sake of the story" is a totally legitimate and valid answer, and one that I embrace wholeheartedly. Again, I don't want to play Fire Emblem: Industrial Revolution. That sounds like a shit time.)
Hang on but there IS a substantial difference between Altea and Ylisse's development
Magic!
In the older games Magic was very simple. There wasn't that many tome types and none of them had meaningful secondary effects(because of hardware limits but shush) meanwhile in Awakening magic has progressed well enough that Wind Fire and Thunder magic all have their own branches instead of "Merrics tome" and "the others" and powerful spells that were at one point legendary aAre reproduced and can be purchased at your local Anna, Merric's boyfriend's whole deal in 12 is he took over Khadain because he was mad that Merric was chosen for Excalibur and he got the number 2 tome Thoron. Come Awakening and Thoron isn't just Robin's signature spell for Chrom killing but also something any mage with the gall to study a bit can pick up and use freely
That's not even mentioning the weird crap that Plegia has been making the entire time
In conclusion while you could totally drop Marth in Ylisse and he'd be fine, if you gingerly placed Merric in Ylisse or Plegia he'd have his mind blown
Okay so let me start by saying that I do take issue with calling magic in Plegia "weird crap." I think it's reasonable to say that Plegia has come farther with magic than Ylisse has, given that they have three separate canonical branches of magic: staves, tomes -- split between anima and dark, the latter of which Ylisse doesn't deal in -- and hexcraft. If we posit that magic is a better signifier of advancement than industrial-level technology, that would place Plegia head and shoulders above Ylisse as the most developed nation on the Archanean continent.
In fact, I've talked about this before, along with the general concept that there was a magic revolution rather than an industrial one.
