LogFAQs > #937113139

Alright, let's kick off the ranking of Fire Emblem games! As noted, I will be including every main series game except for FE1 and treating the three parts of Fates as separate entries, which brings us up to a whopping 17 games to talk about. This...could take a while.

Due to the nature of discussing the games as a whole, there will likely be some spoilers here and there. I'll tag the most blatant/explicit ones, but some will end up being referenced regardless. I'll try to remember to discuss story stuff towards the end of each write up and also include a summary as the final paragraph, which should allow anyone who wants to avoid spoilers to scroll past any given entry without risking any being at the very top or bottom of a post. That said, these write ups will try to be relatively accessible to people unfamiliar with each game as well so if you don't care about spoilers, don't worry.

Without further ado, my least favourite game in the series. Buckle up, because this could be a long one...

17. Thracia 776

A ranking that would no doubt be considered heretical in some parts, and not an entirely easy decision to make given my disdain for what will be number 16 on the list, but in the end I can say that Thracia is the game that I have the most passionate distaste for.

One of the defining qualities of Thracia, and one often touted as a great selling point for it, is its variety of mechanics that either work differently in the rest of the series or don't exist at all in other games. Unfortunately, by and large they really don't add much. The big one that always has to be discussed is, of course, fatigue, the mechanic where a unit that gets used too much becomes impossible to deploy unless you sit them out of a chapter to reset their fatigue to zero. In theory, this supposedly discourages over using a few strong units and forces more variety. In practice...well, it doesn't. You have enough "breather" maps like 12x and 15 to give people a rest if you need to, stamina drinks aren't unreasonably hard to come by and most good combat units have enough HP to not get fatigued quickly. Additionally, most maps are surprisingly light on combat if you approach them the right way.

Mainly it just inconveniences staff users, as the higher rank staffs cause large amounts of fatigue and staffbots have very low HP, but even then you have enough maps where you don't need higher end staffs in the early/mid game to give natural points to sit the users out, and by late game you have a ton of high rank staff users, not to mention opportunities to stock up on a bunch of stamina drinks. It's often weird to hear people talk about this mechanic, as I frequently see someone defending it by talking about the variety it forces, but then also responding to someone who feels its too limiting by saying it hardly has any effect, leaving me unclear what even the fans of it think it really adds. Ultimately, this is a mechanic that just serves to punish blind players. You can miss out on recruitable characters or have a boss kill be unreasonably hard because Asbel is tired because you didn't know in advance who would be needed for the next map, but to an experienced player there's no real thought involved because there's always an obvious right or wrong answer on when to sit people out. Punishing new players while offering nothing of interest to the experienced ones is a recurring trend in Thracia.

On a better note, the other major unique mechanic is capturing, which operates entirely differently than what you may have seen in Fates, allowing you to cut your stats in half while attacking an enemy to try to take them prisoner, allowing you to loot their inventory. While capturing can be a bit frustrating at times due to the amount of RNG involved, this is actually a pretty fun concept and definitely one of my favourite aspects of Thracia, although to be fair it creates some pretty significant balance issues, as almost anything the enemy has you can get your hands on (exacerbated by stealing and the Thief Staff), meaning maps full of enemies with nasty tricks like status staffs or the clever ability to use Warp staffs to send other enemies after you can turn into treasure troves of new tools you can use to make a mockery of any supposed challenge the game has. Which, granted, can be fun, though it goes too far at times, like when it lets you bypass even fighting the final boss because they didn't bother to give him Thief Staff and/or capture immunity after having ignored almost his entire map.

Aside from capturing though, a lot of the unique aspects of Thracia are just...bad. Hit rates being capped at 1 and 99, while rarely relevant, nonetheless adds a frustrating possibility of what should be a guaranteed dodge/hit failing with nothing you can do about it, and speaking of frustrating possibilities, staffs can miss. Yes, including healing ones. Their accuracy is 60 + (Skill*4), meaning 10 skill will prevent it from happening, but for everyone who says it's no big deal because it doesn't happen much beyond the early game (or with Tina, whose unreliability doesn't reign in her unique Thief Staff at all), go spend ten minutes failing to warpskip a map because the warp kept missing despite having 8 skill and then get back to me on how much fun it's adding, because trust me, it sucks. The PCC mechanic, where your crit rate on your second attack when doubling is multiplied by a number from 0-5 depending on the unit, makes some units feel pretty strong but it's also not explained in game to the player, and the mechanic where the crit rate of your first attack is capped at 20 regardless means the combat forecast outright lies to you, which is pretty terrible design.

Then there's leadership stars, which give all allied units a small hit/avoid boost. Not bad in theory but in practice its main use is to create maps that just stack enemy leadership to make everything more RNG based, such as the infamous chapter 22. It can make the game "harder", but just having an arbitrarily lowered hit rate isn't really "challenging". You still do very similar stuff, the game just randomly makes it fail more often. Or you just turtle up like mad to minimize risk, which is also dull. Movement stars, a random chance for a unit to act again, can be fun but having them on enemies is beyond idiotic, destroying any concept of reliability whenever they're present (and hell, in chapter 18 the game itself can't even handle it, noticeably glitching when calculating them on the armor knights). Constitution having a random growth rate mainly just makes rescue strategies harder to count on, as a unit can become impossible to rescue without penalty mid-map, and movement having a (small) growth rate...okay this one is fun. Too minor to really matter but I'll take my random +2 move Asbel any day.

Ultimately,