LogFAQs > #935255866

Might as well do one more before I get some sleep. Hmm, red haired paladin with stupid bases and great growths, didn't I do this already...?

2. Seth (Sacred Stones)

I'm not sure there has ever been a Fire Emblem character who felt more intentionally overpowered than Seth. Other names on this list feel like they may have been intended to suffer more from their weaknesses or not expected to be able to abuse the game mechanics as hard as they ended up being able to. Even Titania you could argue was designed to get you through the early game Maniac Mode hell and would fall off later. Seth, though? I can't imagine anyone ever even considering that this guy wasn't absurd.

Showing up in the prologue with amazing base stats that on their own are enough to carry him for a good half the game as your best unit and a ways beyond that as a pretty good one, Seth also brings fantastic growth rates to the table, arguably the best in the entire game for some reason. His HP, strength, defense and resistance growths are among the best, and even his speed is still an above average 45%. And when your weakest stat (besides luck, which he has enough of at base to avoid random crit chances anyway) is speed in a game with slow enemies that you double anyway...well, it makes you wonder what they were thinking. And as usual for these kinds of units, he's a paladin with great weapon ranks. No axes because paladins don't get those in this game, but he has A in swords and lances and can take his pick of which to S rank. All the usual paladin mobility advantages apply, of course. I'm almost surprised they didn't let him fly while they were at it.

Seth's effect on Sacred Stones is dramatic, to say the least. When people make tier lists for Fire Emblem games, it's common for titles like Shadow Dragon or Thracia to have separate lists made, one for "Warpskip" and one for not. With Sacred Stones, I've seen people use this same distinction for "normal" play as opposed to "Sethskip". He obliterates the early game with the greatest of ease to the point that even Franz, a cavalier with good bases and great growths who is by all normal standards a great unit, can legitimately struggle to gain experience without you slowing down for him. I don't know that even Marcus or Titania distort the balance of their games quite this hard.

And while I've argued that both Marcus and Titania remain strong for almost their entire games, I've noted that they do both fall down to Earth and fall behind their competition eventually. Seth...doesn't. Not really at least. Sure he stops ORKOing everything and starts being able to die without deliberate effort (or a run in with that chapter 6 fighter and his halberd, Magvel's greatest hero and the only man in the first 9 maps that can hope to make the god bleed...unless you just sit on the fort with a sword) but he never actually stops being the best, or at least tied for it. Even at equal levels his stats remain competitive with other units, and given how dominant he is to start and how he'll get all the early game boss kills, no one will ever be at an equal level with him, especially as many others need to promote early to keep up, sacrificing some extra levels they would need to match Seth's growth advantages. Oh sure there are maps here and there where he's not THE best because flight or warp is king, but in general he's still your most consistently good unit all the way to the very end.

I can maybe kind of see what they were going for with Seth. They figured if they gave him good growth rates, his average stats at max level would be roughly on par with other units and thus people wouldn't feel the need to drop him like they dropped so many other Jagens over the years, ensuring that if he was your favourite character you wouldn't feel screwed by him not being viable in the long term. But if that's the case...they overdid it. Big time. It's not just that Seth is ridiculously strong, it's the fact that he is good to the point that he doesn't even require you to pay attention for the first half of the game to keep him alive (barring that one fighter in chapter 6, may he rest in peace), and even after continues to just annihilate enemies with ease. If Sacred Stones was a harder game and he was "only" ORKOing some enemies while being highly durable, it would feel a lot less overkill than having him ORKO almost everything in existence while being functionally immortal. Units like Haar and Titania and Marcus kind of show this off - they're not *that* much worse than he is, really, but they all run into situations that make them feel mortal more often, whether it's failing to kill an enemy or facing an actual chance of death.

A final note on the difficulty of Sacred Stones. I've heard it argued that a unit being in a hard game makes them better than one in a good game, often used to claim FE6 Marcus is better than FE7 Marcus. I disagree with this argument pretty strongly. From the standpoint of difficulty mitigation, this would lead to things like, say, FE6 Klein being a better unit than Birthright Ryoma, because Birthright is too easy for Ryoma to make that big of a difference, while Binding Blade is harder and Klein reduces the difficulty of maps like 12 and 13 noticeably...even though Ryoma clearly stands out relative to the cast of Birthright waaaaaaayyyyy more than a solid but unspectacular unit like Klein does within his own game. I'm only bringing up the difficulty point to note how it just makes Seth "feel" even more absurd than he otherwise would. There's just a different sensation when your best unit can actually die or fails to kill things, even if in the context of their game they're just as good. Sacred Stones may be one of the easier games in the series, but that doesn't change the degree to which Seth stands tall above everyone else in it.

Up next: The best unit in the series, naturally! Doubt there's going to be much suspense on this one...

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Meow!