LogFAQs > #934753489

With this entry, we're officially halfway through both lists.

The Good

11. Fire Emblem (Blazing Sword) Chapter 17E/18H - Pirate Ship

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A defend map that can be ended early by killing the boss? Haven't talked about one of those for like, a day. And you definitely don't find yourself fighting pirates on this pirate ship. Because they're good guy pirates. Apparently? Actually not that weird, since a pirate is pretty much just anyone who breaks the law out on the sea, so Fargus and co. could easily just be involved in transporting Elibe's equivalent of marijuana around...okay this digression is getting silly.

The first turn or two of this map can be fairly tricky. You need to deal with the pegasus knights from the left (in a way that doesn't kill the one with an Elysian Whip you can steal!) and hopefully deal with the army of dudes that will come up the middle of the boat at you. With a mixture of shamans to hit your physical units hard, archers to poke away at everything and mercenaries/myrmidons to be tough to kill thanks to being hard to double, not to mention more pegasus knights who will show up to be minor nuisances (thank god FE7 pegasus knights are wimps and not the terrors they are in Three Houses...), you have a fair bit to think about, though once you can clear out the center it gets a fair bit easier since you can choke the bridge to the right boat easily enough and the reinforcements don't start coming in large numbers until later on.

Of course, getting the center under control is just the start, since you still need to go kill the boss. Let's be real, you could wait for the 10 or 11 turns or whatever it is, but you're not going to do that, are you? That's boring. It's so much more fun to run down there and nuke that dude...after getting Matthew down there to steal his Guiding Ring, of course. The promotion item to steal makes what would otherwise be very simple (send Marcus, win) into...well it's still not hard or anything but it does require you to pay more attention, and possibly dedicate an extra character or two to keeping the path safe, and on a map that doesn't have a ton of deployment slots it can be a little tricky to spare the manpower. Of course, if you wait too long you'll just have more enemies to deal with making it much more difficult, so you just have to make a point of getting it done nice and early.

Overall a short and simple but fun map. The one thing about it I don't like is that the boss has Luna, because of course he does. Luna is by and large overrated as a tool in the players hands (it's good for the final chapter, otherwise only very rarely of value) but for the enemy it's a real bitch because a crit will kill anyone, and the tome has 20 god damn crit on it for some reason to go along with its 90 hit. Feels weird to end this entry on a negative note but I can't just not point out that Luna having 20 crit is stupid.

Up next: We enter the top ten by entering a major city that seems not to like the idea of being conquered

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Meow!