Ranking FE’s Lords

@paragonred asked for this, possibly as a follow-up to this ranking of the games themselves. I’ll use the same tier format so I don’t have to get so specific as to order everyone into a numbered list.

S Tier – interesting, narratively engaging, and (usually) fun to use

Micaiah – see this post.

Eliwood – ends up mediocre more than half the time, but he’s got a strong character arc with plenty of development and good moments even on Hector’s route. I very much like Eliwood/Hector as a traditional romantic friendship that could feasibly grow into something more between games depending on who they marry and what happens to their wives. Incidentally, I don’t have any very strong opinions on any of those ships, other than that Hector/Florina is rather nonsensical.

Celica – see this post

A Tier – fun unit and may have interesting character potential, but I’m less invested in exploring them

Ephraim – mostly up here because I like lances. His arc is similar to Hector’s with more urgency and the homoromanticism coming from different sources, but his contribution to that questionable legacy has largely been swallowed up by twincest. Or something like that anyway.

Hector – speaking of which, he’s a good unit apart from his promotion (both the class itself and the timing of it in his route) and as mentioned I ship him with Eliwood in a sense, but I don’t like the archetype he spawned. He also feels a bit superfluous to FE7′s main story, though not as much as Lyn does.

Lucina – will be incredibly broken unless you don’t pair Chrom or stick him with Sully. Severely under-served by her narrative despite being a uniquely tragic figure in an otherwise aggressively optimistic game, but she got a DLC campaign and a bunch of shilling outside the series proper so that sort of makes up for it?

Sigurd – the most OP lord ever. I like that he’s an idiot and that he faces real consequences for his mistakes, and I like how he looms large over Gen 2 in spite of his flaws. Even more so than with Hector, I don’t like how his fanbase sees his game performance and nothing else about him.

Alm – already a good unit in the original from what I understand, and he benefits considerably from the distinctive presentation elements of FE15. He certainly offers a more nuanced discussion of class than certain other lords. *ahem* It does suck a bit that it feels like some of his character beats have to compromise Celica’s to make them work, but that’s partially Gaiden’s fault too.

Leif – might move up if he’s relatably more of an impoverished aristocrat in the remakes, but then his particular circumstances don’t really speak to me the way that, say, Almedha’s do. I mostly hated using him in FE5 though he had his moments. Probably benefits from being surrounded by interesting people more than anyone else in this tier, but he really benefits there.

B Tier – either overwhelmingly average, or with both strong positive and strong negative aspects that balance each other out

Ike – yeah, you guys probably saw this one coming. On the one hand, he’s very likely gay; on the other, half the fandom still won’t shut up about the possibility that he might not be and/or that IS was wrong to do what they did with him. On the one hand, convention-defying peasant lord shaping his own destiny is interesting; on the other, he has terrible manners and a shameless insensitivity to foreign (beorc) cultures and yet we’re meant to be rooting for him. On the one hand, a strong unit who plays quite differently in his two games and so therefore doesn’t feel stale; on the other, he and his mercenaries edge out the light magic-wielding Micaiah and her army for screentime and EXP and it’s pretty obvious which unit type I prefer there. I can’t even get all that strongly into Ike/Soren for entirely personal reasons, but at least Ike/Ranulf is still there to pick up the slack.

Lyn – even though she’s the first lord with a same-sex paired ending that fact is largely forgotten. Much of her enduring popularity seems to be based on her sex appeal, and she’s irrelevant to Elibe as a whole. Still, her route is a nice little self-contained story that doesn’t feel too similar to anything else in FE, and she’s got a strong camaraderie with her fellow lords.

Corrin – it’s difficult to talk about Corrin as one entry since they develop differently depending on the route, but as with Fates as a whole I feel like the three iterations of the character average out somewhere just slightly below average. Birthright Corrin is a standard FE protagonist, except maybe a little angrier (Leif, Shadow Dragon Marth maybe?) and with entirely too many death scenes thrown at them. Conquest Corrin has the most missed potential, as with most things involving Conquest apart from gameplay, and one practically has to roll with the headcanon that they and the Nohr royals have been conditioned by years of abuse to make their characters sort of work. Revelation Corrin reminds me unpleasantly of Robin (see below) with the power of cross-cultural friendship stuff and the super special ending. I’m not too fond of the character as a unit either, since they take more work to get as flexibly broken as the other Avatars and their manakete form fails to impress except for tanking.

Seliph – saved from C Tier by the general messiness of Jugdral. His father’s legacy is a complicated one, and about 1/3rd of his campaign amounts to a blood feud with the aim of giving his first cousin a throne for somewhat dubious reasons. He takes some time to get as broken as SIgurd, but he’s all sorts of fun when he gets there. Couldn’t tell you if he’s got any interesting romantic prospects, endorsed by the pairing system or otherwise, because he’s still pretty dull in that department.

C Tier – bland, and usually bad as units

Marth – truly the Mario of FE, in that he’s everywhere with a different personality almost every time. His two remakes did surprisingly little to flesh him out in any consistent way, and by that point over half a dozen other protagonists had diverged from his archetypical lord model in almost as many different ways.

Roy – red-haired Marth with a harem and an obscenely late promotion instead of no promotion at all *yawns* I guess he gets points for having a living parent? Not sure why anyone is a particular fan of him unless they mained him in Melee. Maybe a remake will help him out?

Chrom – Marth with biceps and a time-traveling daughter who coincidentally cosplays as Marth. That’s marginally less yawn-worthy if only because of how strange it all is, and he also borrows from the Hector-type lord as well so he ends up as an unexpected fusion of the buff and the bishonen. Overshadowed in story and in gameplay by his daughter and some random amnesiac he found in a field who he may or may not decide to sleep with.

Eirika – only slightly a Marth clone, but as with Celica the story is unevenly stacked against her and in favor of her male counterpart, even on her own route. The fandom doesn’t like her because she’s naïve, but that could also be said of several other lords. Not really into her as a unit or any of her ships, so…yeah.

Kris – …do they even count as a lord? Eh, whatever.

D Tier – OP unit, terrible character

Robin – would have been so much more tolerable if endgame didn’t abruptly swerve to becoming entirely about them, at the expense of Chrom and Lucina and everyone else. Somehow the special secret origin type of Avatar grates more than one whose importance to everyone and everything in the story is laid out right at the beginning. I can more or less buy everyone in Fates obsessing over Corrin because of who they are and what they represent for the various players, but not so much Robin whom everyone rallies around apparently for the sole reason that they’re a really friendly tactical genius. Compound that with the fact that they’re meant to be a self-insert in a game with enormous levels of explicit homoerotic denial and it should be easy to see why they’re at the bottom of this list.