So one thing to note is that I love what Forging Bond has done for character development in Fire Emblem: Heroes. It gives us the opportunity to see characters that we love speak to characters they normally interact with as well as characters from other games to create conversations that were otherwise impossible without the mobile game. I have enjoyed every single Forging Bond I’ve participated in but this one in particular just really stood out to me. I will note that I plan to talk about this in great detail so there will be plenty of spoilers if you haven’t unlocked all the supports for this yet.

First I want to bring up both Female and M Morgan. Female Morgan was clearly the comic relief of the four conversations as the latest version of Female Morgan was the dark version featured in the DLC of Fire Emblem: Awakening which was a character used by Grima to take over the world. For her conversations, she sees the good version of female Morgan that we see in the original game. The banter is humorous as the good version keeps trying to understand the dark version while the dark version keeps resisting all her efforts. Eventually the two bond and find some common ground and it’s rather interesting to watch and provides another funny interaction between two versions of the same character. What I liked most about this is that it took female Morgans from both the canon story of Fire Emblem: Awakening and the alternate future story that is included in the DLC and brought them together.

The next one I want to bring up is the dark version of Male Morgan. His is much more tied to the events of Fire Emblem: Awakening as he converses with Lucina who goes back in time in Awakening to prevent the dark future that he helped to create. Because of a rule in the summoning contract used to bring the characters of Fire Emblem together, they are unable to kill each other. As a result, it forces both Lucina and Morgan to talk and find some sort of common ground. At first, it seemed like a futile effort until both of them acknowledged that they cannot fully work with each other because the aspirations of their fathers are different and neither of them was willing to deviate from the goals their fathers wanted. So I loved the irony here of how the one common ground they have was the fundamental reason as to why the two of them stand no chance of ever fully working together.

The conversations with Edelgard is one that really makes you think. Edelgard is a character that absolutely hates the existence of gods because in Fire Emblem: Three Houses she condemns the church’s glorification of the crests in the name of the goddess Seiros. However, in Heroes Seiros is far from the only character seen as a god and she confronts the deity Mila from Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. It’s really interesting to see how the conversation with Edelgard makes Mila think back on her mistakes with her people as she gave them too much and individuals started to hoard the bounties provided by her. Edelgard doesn’t hesitate to condemn Mila for this but she really offers an amazing counterpoint of all the people she helped that weren’t able to help themselves as Edelgard boasts only of relying on one’s own strength. This provided an interesting debate that has an endless amount of application which is when is it ok to rely on the help of others versus taking advantage of that help at the expense of others. Neither of them was able to come up with a solid answer but stuck to their respective believes and I think in the end these two found a mutual respect for one another for it. It was very interesting to see both of them come face to face with the darkest parts of themselves such as Edelgard’s loneliness which fueled her desire to rely only on herself and Mila’s regret for all the people hurt by those who took advantage of her kindness.

And finally, we have Dimitri. Now it’s no secret that out of all the paths in Fire Emblem: Three Houses I favor the Blue Lions route. Not only does my banner include Dimitri and the Blue Lions emblem but I also ranked it number one in my blog post about the Fire Emblem: Three Houses paths. What is almost as well known is the fact that Lif is my favorite character exclusive to Fire Emblem: Heroes. So when I saw that Forging Bond brought these two characters together I was super excited about it. What I didn’t realize was how much both of them could relate to each other. They were both hopeful and optimistic in their youth as pre timeskip Dimitri and Alfonze until they were wrapped by tragedy to become virtually unrecognizable from who they used to be. This revelation of how alike these two characters are really surprised me. Seeing it now it’s very clear that they are very much cut from the same cloth; however, I just for some reason never noticed it till the Forging Bond. I also found it amusing that Hel the boss of Lif tried to lure Dimitri into a contract with her using the fact that he feels he is a walking corpse only to have him throw the offer in her face with his sheer determination for revenge. I really like how it shows a different side of the most aggressive part of Dimitri. It’s easy to see him as a mindless animal by his words and his actions and in many ways, he is similar to one; however, this really shows that he still feels like he has some sort of purpose that brings out the little bit of sanity that he had at the time and was able to rationalize how pointless his own death was until his goal is fulfilled regardless of if he feels he is actually alive or not from a psychological perspective. These conversations were so amusing that I wish there was a way to keep a log of them to go back and see them but I would imagine that would make the app way too big and would take up too much space on my tablet. For context, my wife got me a tablet as a gift for my birthday last year because the one I was using didn’t have the space for Fire Emblem: Heroes and Dragolia Lost. Fire Emblem: Heroes alone made it about impossible to keep a lot of stuff stored on it (yes its internal memory was pretty low even with as much of the data as possible stored on an external memory card).

Now I want to talk a bit about Orson in Grand Hero Battle. I am super excited that Orson is now in Fire Emblem: Heroes. Orson was originally in Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones and he was my first introduction to a playable Fire Emblem character betraying the cast so he easily became one of my most memorable characters. I honestly enjoyed it when he finally reappeared and the main characters were able to confront him about his actions. Now at the time, I didn’t have a means of understanding him as his reason for betraying them was to join the side that was able to bring his dead wife back to life. Back then I was very much a loner and didn’t have anyone that I had that kind of deep emotional connection with. However, now I have a wife of my own that I absolutely adore so seeing Orson as the newest playable character really made me think back to how I’ve changed since then. Now Orson is so much more relatable as I would be devastated if I didn’t have my wife in my life. So seeing Orson again really made me think of how much I’ve changed since I first started playing Fire Emblem and honestly it was a fascinating experience that I might go into more detail about on a later episode of my podcast.