At first when I read this I thought it said “top FE3 characters” for some reason and I was really stuck racking my brain over a game I’ve only experienced through its remake. On that note, though….

3. Michalis (+ Minerva) – Michalis’s survival is I believe one of FE12′s biggest outright changes to the original plot, and while at first glance it’s a dramatically unsatisfying change that foreshadows Awakening retconning half of its story deaths for the sake of Spotpass recruitments I…actually don’t mind it that much? The tragic and morally ambiguous/conflicted wyvern rider antagonist has been done so many other times that between Travant, Galle, Glen, Shiharam, and Birthright Camilla it’s been fairly run into the ground, so I can get behind changing Michalis into an unrepentant asshole who survives even though he doesn’t deserve redemption and goes on to continue being an asshole. Even within his own setting there’s Hardin and in his own way Medeus for the corrupted fallen king type.

FE12 didn’t commit enough to the change, however. Minerva is in desperate need of an ending that doesn’t pack her off to a convent and reviving Michalis did nothing to help that. Archanea has a recurring problem with women abdicating their right to rule for basically no reason – I can understand Nyna doing it after everything she’s been through, but she’s the only one – so have Michalis inspire Minerva to take the throne after all. Not directly of course, but by reminding her that he could be the alternative and just why they had to “kill” him in the first place. Secondly, Michalis leaving the continent to go conquer something else ought to be tied into something. Someone’s probably already come up with this theory, but the most logical choice is that he has something to do with Rosanne, the Valmese territory in FE13 associated with wyverns even though it’s on the continent that before Awakening had no wyvern riders. Besides, this would shift Michalis’s dramatic comeuppance without axing it entirely; instead of death, the land he founds is doomed to relative ignominy and weakness, conquered by the remnants of Alm’s kingdom and needing to be bailed out of its predicament by the descendants of Marth. So much for all that blood of warriors stuff.

2. Garon – There’s a lot about Fates that needs a second pass. I thought about putting Azura here instead, but most of the serious problems with her character are more symptoms of the game’s major plot contrivances *cough*Valla curse*cough* than anything to do with her specifically. Garon on the other hand – be less obviously evil please. They were going to have a hard time selling a man whose design and name evoke Ganon from over in The Legend of Zelda as sympathetic at any point but, hey, The Wind Waker managed to do that and right before the final boss of all places. Garon almost never behaves in a way that I can believe any of his children still want to support him unless you headcanon that they’ve been through such severe trauma that they’re all suffering from serious learned helplessness. That’s not something we want to get behind as a driving force for the Conquest route and it’s not a particularly noble flaw for the Nohrian royals to be dying over on Birthright. There’s also a chance that it could lead to Garon have some kind of presence on Revelation, because with all the heartfelt reunions and goodbyes Azura and the Hoshidans get late in that route it’s bizarre that he shows up only at the very end to be devoured without comment by Anankos

Xander especially would have really benefited from a less outwardly psychotic Garon; the final confrontation with him would have more heft if we could believe that he’s protecting a father who appears to still love him and he’s just cloaking it in the usual my-country-right-or-wrong Camus act because Xander is insecure like that. This could also play into the siblings’ different perspectives on Garon, with Elise being the only one who really picks up that something is off about him because she was the one who knew the real Garon least. Cue accidental and meaningless sacrifice.

And it’s not like Nohr is lacking for flat mustache-twirling villains either, so if they still wanted that kind of straightforward evil they could have just with Iago and Hans doing their usual thing. More motivation would have been nice, but like I said Fates needs a lot of rewrites.

1. Pretty much all the non-Avatar female lords – Kind of a cop-out, but it’s impossible to pick just one of them.

• Celica got a rewrite and it was mostly good until Act 4, when she gets slapped by her brother and railroaded into trusting the blatantly evil Jedah. I guess they felt they had to take her down a notch so she could play the damsel in distress in Act 5 (which she also did in the original Gaiden by the way, just less dramatically)? It sucks regardless; get her to Duma Tower without the explicit invitation from Jedah, and stick to innocent bonding moments and/or incest subtext with Conrad because that and some headcanon-y queer stuff is about all he’s good for as a character.
• Lyn is solid in the vacuum of her own story, but then she starts falling off. She gets very few strong character moments in Eliwood’s and Hector’s story outside of her recruitment and UST with Hector, and then she’s irrelevant to FE6. A remake of Binding Blade could absolutely fix the latter, and it probably will considering how popular Lyn is. It’s just bound to be awkward since she can potentially be the mother of any of three characters in that game and I seriously doubt IS will make any of those pairings hard canon. She would have benefited from a larger role in the story of FE7 – even if it’s mostly as a support character, since that’s really what Hector is even in his own story – and from some well-positioned ambiguity in an FE6 remake.
• Apparently there’s a hack of FE8 out there that pulls this off, but Eirika needs more parity with her brother and less plot-mandated stupidity excused because she’s just that naïve or tender-hearted. I’m no expert on Magvel or the state of its meta, but I feel like that by itself would go a long way.
• Micaiah is the only exception here, since I think the only thing that could have helped her more as a character is fittingly what would have helped her and the rest of the Dawn Brigade as units: more screen time.
• And finally Lucina, who’s remarkably useless despite being the crux of a grandiose time travel plot. She and the other Gen 2 characters get their time to shine in Future Past, but she really needed to be a bigger participant in the main story. Timing is also a factor for her, because introducing her and her conflict right before the tangential Valm arc does her no favors. If they really wanted to pull a midgame Gaiden homage they should have saved the reveal of Lucina for after Walhart was dealt with. It would have been really late to add in such a major character, but on the flip side she’d be directly relevant to the plot from then until the end of the game. Well, until Robin hijacks the plot anyway, and I’m not sure that could have been as cleanly written around since they’ve got their own big plot-defining reveal.