LogFAQs > #934668059

What's more fun than really good chapters? Really bad chapters! Wait...no, that's not quite right. That's the opposite of right. But it's what's coming up next. This stuff wasn't quite bottom ten material, but that doesn't mean I'm about to let it off the hook...

(Dis)honourable Mentions: The Bad

Thracia 776 Chapter 12 - The Thieves of Dakia

A map consisting almost entirely of movement reducing forest tiles, mixed with Thracia fog of war which prevents you from seeing the actual terrain? Already a recipe for tedium. A recruitable boss who will use his Sleep staff on you...or not...based entirely on random chance instead of any sort of, I don't know, conscious pattern? Cool, no need to bother with map design, it's not important, just randomize it. We'll get that Sleep staff at full uses or broken based on RNG, it's fine. But the real problem is that the seize point is on the other side of a broken bridge that requires you to either bring a thief with a lockpick or steal/capture the bridge key from a single enemy on the map. On a fog of war map where you can't see this until you get close enough to it. Where enemies can run out of the fog and suicide. Like the guy with the key. Miss the key and didn't bring a thief? Warp or your pegasus knight are the only ways to complete the map. Didn't bring them? Tough luck. This map is literally intentionally designed to bait you into a soft lock. How fun!

Three Houses - Foreign Land and Sky

Breaking my usual "Game Chapter - Title" format with its cruel lack of a number, we have the paralogue unlocked by having both Petra and Bernadetta in your army post-timeskip. This map generally seems pretty good at first, a little on the simple side maybe but certainly not a problem. The problem is that when you come close to your objective of getting Petra to the bottom right corner of the map, a whole army of enemies (including some rather strong characters, depending on the route) will show up in various places and the objective completely changes. Meaning if Petra was the last unit you moved that turn, you get hit with one of the nastiest reinforcement ambush spawn gimmicks in the series. Not cool, game. Not cool. You're not going to get me to praise a game for lying to the player in this manner very often, if you ever will. It's a shame because this map is otherwise fairly fun besides the inevitable crawl through forests to kill the last few enemies.

Fire Emblem Fates Conquest Chapter 19 - Kitsune Lair

Another map that's almost good, Kitsune Lair instead ruins itself with one of the worst gimmicks in Fates, and Fates does not lack for bad gimmicks. That being, of course, that on any given turn some of the kitsunes become immune to being attacked on player phase but are still free to move on enemy phase. I don't know if there's a pattern to it or not, I assume there probably is but I've never cared to figure it out. Just the concept annoys me too much to want to think about. It's such horribly lazy map design. Anything can be "hard" when you just have the enemies be arbitrarily invincible. To top it off the kitsunes have massive avoid, to the point that you're relying on some of the sketchiest hit rates you've ever been forced to deal with against non-boss enemies in the series. I'm glad you agree with me that Binding Blade is a good game there Conquest, but just because it was No Hit Emblem doesn't mean you need to be too.

Path of Radiance Chapter 23 - The Great Bridge/Radiant Dawn 3-11 - Just Cause

A two for one deal on today! For the low, low price of reading this topic, you too can fall in invisible holes everywhere you step! Who doesn't want to be punished for not using a guide to know where not to step? Sure, some of the traps on Pitfall Bridge are obvious once you're aware of the gimmick, but others are just kind of randomly strewn about. It's even worse in Radiant Dawn where falling in a hole paralyzes you until the next player phase, leaving you defenseless for enemy phase. Path of Radiance didn't pull that kind of shit, but it did come up with this whole concept in the first place and that's just as bad. This isn't the last time we'll be seeing multiple related maps thrown into one entry in this topic, fyi. In fact, it might not even be the last time we see invisible tiles that make sad times happen when you step on them...

Awakening Chapter 23 - Invisible Ties

This entry is on one chapter, but it's really a summary of a lot of the worst maps in Awakening. A big, boring empty room where you fight a bunch of dudes who run at you periodically, with nothing to set it apart. I know, I know, they probably want it to be carried by the story of your fight with Validar or something, but not only do chapters need to stand on their own in gameplay, but the story is...well, I liked Validar more when he was Manfroy, and Manfroy was like, the worst major villain of his own story. In the end, this is just a bland map with nothing interesting about it, kind of like a lot of Awakening maps. The game has some good maps to be sure, and we may very well see it appear on the Good List at some point, but an awful lot of the time it just has big open spaces where there's no strategy beyond "move invincible unit forward, end turn".

And with that, the almosts have left the building and we're going to be ready to get to the real lists soon! I'm thinking I'll do number 20 on the good list first, then number 10 on the bad list, then do two good, one bad, alternating until the end. That should end up with the number 1 spot on both lists coming up back to back.

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Meow!