LogFAQs > #934704165

The Bad

9. (New) Mystery of the Emblem Chapter 3 - Abducted Princess

https://ibb.co/jrt1g02

Before there was the spirit forest, there was the endless, eternal march around a mountain, undertaken by Marth and anyone that felt like following him. This map starts off reasonably fun, with some dracoknights to the north you need to clear out, and the overpowered Palla showing up near the top of the map to fight some random cavalier reinforcements and a thief that wants to destroy the village where you recruit Julian. There's also the dracoknights on the mountain and their very peculiar linked AI to deal with. Unfortunately, after you take care of that, you probably still have like eight more turns of Marth walking around.

If you haven't played Marths games or their remakes, you might not know this, but Marth is actually a huge drama queen and he gets mad when people other than him visit villages, so everyone coddles him by refusing to do it. Well, he's the only unit who can visit villages in these games. The explanation is purely conjecture on my part. And you need to get up to the top right to recruit Julian, your first thief. Doesn't look so bad, right? After all the first village at the start has a bridge key you can use to just cut through the middle with no issue. And sometimes that is indeed the case...but not if you want full recruitment. Because the always useless and awful Matthis is hanging out in the middle and he will inevitably suicide into you if you let him, and the only way to recruit him is, of course, to talk to him with Julian. So if you want full recruitment, you have to walk alllllll the way around.

And while you, you get to...do nothing. Seriously. Even those dracoknights on the mountain won't actually bother you unless you go out of your way to fight them due to their AI only going aggressive when you get close enough or visit the armory near the boss. You do want to fight them of course because one drops a Master Seal, but that won't take very long, especially not in the original (in the remake on Lunatic difficulty it's a bit more of an undertaking, much like everything on Lunatic). So hooray, you get one or two turns where one or two units get to fight, and then it's back to Marth just marching along all along the outskirts of the map.

This is unbelievably tedious, and the fact that they included the bridge at all just makes it worse. It's like they knew how idiotic this map was, gave you the tools to skip it, then punished you for doing it by denying you full recruitment (even though Matthis has a Javelin he'll randomly attack at 1 range sometimes and get himself killed. This moron just can't do anything right). It doesn't even have the excuse Genealogy has that lets it partially escape criticism on this front of trying to make it feel like you're traveling huge distances across entire countries. You're just walking around a lake in a game where maps usually don't feel particularly "huge" in scope. I have a hard time believing this chapter was even intended to be a worthwhile experience.

Up next: Back to good times with a map that can be finished in an instant, or one of the most brutal challenges in the entire series

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Meow!