Glitch/Jealousy

The jealousy system is a bug that appears in Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, affecting the love growth from the love system. It is the system by which love points between a pair of adjacent units are "stolen" for a different pair.

This glitch exists because, in the game's coding, the game gives out love points by having each female unit check every unit if they are within range. If they are, the game then checks if the adjacent unit is female, and if they are not it gives out the appropriate love points. However, due to an oversight, if the adjacent unit is female, the game overwrites the pointer referring to the original female unit with one that points to the adjacent female unit. As a result, all the love points intended to be given by the first female unit are instead given by the second female unit. For example, if Edain is adjacent to Jamke, Silvia, and Claud (after a reset), the game will check for adjacency bonuses in that order (regardless of positioning): Jamke receives adjacency points from Edain, Silvia overwrites the pointer, and then Claud receives adjacency points from Sylvia.^[1]

Mechanics

In Genealogy of the Holy War, when one male unit and one female unit that could fall in love end their turns in adjacent spaces, they gain 5 love points between them. The jealousy system takes effect when another female unit is adjacent to the first; if the second female unit has a higher priority with the male, then that second female will "steal" the 5 adjacency love points from the first female, gaining 5 love points between her and the male unit while the initial female gains no bonus; if the first female has higher priority with the male unit, she will gain points with the male as normal.

If more than one additional female unit is adjacent to the initial one, only the highest-priority female will gain the bonus points with the male unit; the initial female will gain no bonus points and the other female units adjacent to her will gain no bonus, as there are no points left to steal. Additionally, it is possible for a female unit to steal points from more than one unit, potentially gaining up to ten points with one male—more than is normally possible to gain in one turn—by being adjacent to multiple females who are themselves adjacent to at least one male unit the the first female has higher priority with. However, points that are stolen cannot be stolen for someone else; e.g. if Ced is adjacent to Patty and Patty is adjacent to Lana, Lana will take the 5 points from Patty—if Lene were additionally adjacent to Lana, she will not gain the 5 points from Patty despite having a higher priority with Ced than Patty or Lana.

Female units who cannot fall in love with a male unit—such as a sibling, a unit that is already married, or a unit like Altena that cannot fall in love with anyone—can still contribute to jealousy, providing points for units of higher priority than themselves.

Character priority

To determine which characters benefit from the jealousy system, males characters are given priorities to the females ones. Units are listed from left to right in decreasing order of priority.

First Generation

No reset

One reset or more

If the game is reset at least once, the priorities of every characters will change according to the following tables:

Second Generation

References