I can agree with you about the villians, they took a little bit of inspiration from a few different characters. I wonder if they just don't feel confident with having one single villian to carry the entire story since both this game and Radiant Dawn switch between villians to segment the story. Perhaps they think there's not enough story with one villian to last a full 30-40 chapters.Jordan wrote:One problem I had with the game is that the villains felt weak and at times purposeless. Gangrel was an expy of Ashnard and even got the "Mad King" epithet. While he was entertaining comic relief, however, Gangrel never really felt like a serious threat to me. Walhart was an expy of Zephiel from FE6 but felt like he had no real importance in the overall plot. The chapters with him felt like filler even though the character and his subordinates were decent otherwise. The final boss was similar to Nergal and other FE games with AN ANCIENT EVIL subplot. Everything kind of felt like "been there, done that" to me. Many aspects of the plot felt undeveloped as well. For example, the kids of the main characters, although great as gameplay units, had practically no screentime or significance in the story. This was especially egregious for Morgan.
Since this game took a lot of inspiration from FE4, I hope that Intelligent Systems plans to remake that game and localize it. I think they can do a lot with it.
Your problem with the children is sort of just a problem with Fire Emblem in general. They give you optional characters to aquire that can also die forever making them very hard to fit in the story. Morgan could work, but including other children into the main story would have to involve keeping the parents and children alive, whose appearences and fathers alternate depending on the players choices. Fire Emlbem's answer to this has always been Support Conversations, which in this game's case they did a very good job of excluding a few late game adult characters.