Board 8 > Gauging interest in a Fire Emblem ranking topic

(+) Yeah! (+)

It's not, though it is amusing that the big "epic" duel of swordsmanship comes down to bashing the other guy on the head with a hammer

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I remember trying to set up a turn 1 kill on Spoilers and being irritated to find out the spirits would block for him despite not having the skill for it.

I think I settled for a turn 2 kill but even that was a little tricky.

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Enjoying these greatly.

FE10-spoiler is definitely a pretty neat boss fight. One thing you didn't mention is that he has 35 crit which even further cuts down on the number of units who can safely engage him (Nailah is about the only character who is guaranteed to be safe, though you can build others in various ways), and his defence is actually 45, not 35, because of the terrain he stands on, so not THAT much worse than the previous boss. (You can negate terrain with Parity but that also negates your supports and dragon auras so good luck.)

The one thing I don't like about the fight is that sometimes his AI will goof and that he'll teleport... but unlike some previous bosses with this trick, there's no way he's teleporting anywhere actually safe, since the battlefield is pretty small. And then not only did he miss out on a chance to attack (his multitarget attack in particular is nasty), he becomes a sitting duck next turn because he has a staff out instead. The devs definitely shouldn't have given him that gimmick.

I was a bit surprised to see Manfroy, I don't even remember him as anything more than a blip especially compared to dealing with Ishtar + the pegasus trio. Arion's a good choice though.

EDIT: argh I can never remember how to do spoiler-text in HTML here, sorry.

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Oh yeah, I forgot what type of terrain he himself was on. Have definitely seen that AI goof up once, in a LP where he, for reasons that will forever be unknown, decided to teleport right into the middle of the playable army despite having barely had anyone near him.

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And the strangest character in Fire Emblem award goes to...

3. Legion (New Mystery Chapter 10x)

Also called Roro by older translation patches

I'm not entirely sure even the person who wrote this character had the slightest clue what the fuck the deal is with him. Legion is apparently a whole bunch of people who refer to themselves as brothers (but are described by one of their allies as...clones...?) and seem to say there is no real one, except there totally is a "real" one without which the rest can't fight anymore, because...The number one sign that someone doesn't know what's up with Legion is them telling you they know.

In any event, your final showdown with him, or them, or whatever, comes in chapter 10x and his weird army of himself gimmick is in full force, with all 7 enemies on the map being Legion, with reinforcements showing up for as long as anyone has ever bothered to wait starting on turn 2 or 3 (depending on difficulty). The four Legions closest to you will move and are slightly weaker, while the three up at the top are stronger, do not move, and each can potentially be the "real" one, whose defeat ends the chapter. Every time you start the map, the game will randomly pick one of them, so you never know until you kill one if they're the true boss or not.

Legion himself isn't hugely remarkable besides having a high crit rate due to his killer axe and the berserker class giving +10 crit, but with how short this map is there's not much time lost if he nukes you anyway. His weird gimmick is obviously meant to define the map, forcing you to potentially get stuck fighting a bunch of copies of him while you try to kill each of the potential "real" ones...but there's a way to figure that out instantly. See, when you highlight an enemy, you can press L to switch the cursor to another enemy. The game does this by just moving you to the next enemy on its internal unit list, and when you reach the bottom of the list, it starts over from the top. And the enemy at the top of the unit list...is the boss. Meaning if you highlight one of the lower Legions and keep using L to swap between them, you will eventually end up on one of the upper three. Whichever one you end up on first is the real Legion.

Incidentally, this same unit list is used in most situations to determine the order the enemies act in, meaning you can cycle between enemies in this way to figure out which enemy in a certain group will act first, allowing you to plan your positioning around it. There are some exceptions I believe, mainly from siege tomes/ballisticians, but as a general rule it works.

I only learned about this particular trick for figuring out the real Legion quite recently, and I was immediately very entertained by it. It's such a clever way to exploit a minor detail of how the game lists enemies to turn a somewhat annoying random map into something you know the exact workings of in a flash. With this knowledge, if the real Legion is either of the two on the sides, a paladin or dracoknight with dance assistance can reach him on turn 1, potentially ending the map in an instant and sending this bizarre clone army back to Star Wars where it belongs.

Up next: A boss who can be dealt with very fast, but because of it will also catch you very off guard the first time you play this particular version of the map

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"This particular version of the map" makes me think it's either someone from Three Houses or Erik from FE7.
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First thought was someone who has their position/behavior changed on hard mode to be closer/more aggressive. Joke answer is Maxime from Battle Before Dawn.

And yeah Legion is a fun fight. I didn't know about the trick so I just killed him the old fashioned way.

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Kenri posted...

First thought was someone who has their position/behavior changed on hard mode to be closer/more aggressive. Joke answer is Maxime from Battle Before Dawn.

It's not Maxime, but he would be a good entry for a list like this given his wacky unintended buff on HHM making him such a beast

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Panthera posted...

Incidentally, this same unit list is used in most situations to determine the order the enemies act in, meaning you can cycle between enemies in this way to figure out which enemy in a certain group will act first, allowing you to plan your positioning around it. There are some exceptions I believe, mainly from siege tomes/ballisticians, but as a general rule it works.

does this work for all games or just new mystery?

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I think it also works in Shadow Dragon, but I haven't really tested it. I'm pretty sure Path of Radiance (and maybe Radiant Dawn) have a specific order enemies act in that can be checked in some way but I can't recall what it is. And in the GBA games the only specific thing about AI turn order I know of is that 1 range enemies will pretty much always move first

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Hard Mode Ashnard? Between being mobile and his "this isn't even my final form" it can be a very nasty surprise to someone seeing it for the first time. Especially if they previously played it on Normal where that isn't a thing.

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Might be, but I don't know if he qualifies as "can be dealt with really fast".

I'd go with someone from Fates, actually.

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Really good list so far. I'm liking all of your choices for the bosses.

I'm guessing Lloyd 1 from FE7 with the fog of war map. It's always scary seeing just how close Lloyd is to you.

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Oh, yeah. That's a good guess.
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It is a pretty good guess.

2. Lloyd (Blazing Sword Chapter 24)

For the sake of clarity, I'm using the Hector mode numbersand chapter 24 has two different versions, so I'm talking about the version where Lloyd is the boss as opposed to his brother Linus. Which you probably could already tell by the fact that this entry is about Lloyd.

So Lloyd is already noteworthy for just how many different versions of him you can deal with. On Eliwood normal mode, he's located near a castle at the top of the map and he doesn't move or have a ranged weapon. On Eliwood hard mode, he's mostly the same but he actually moves when you get into his range this time. And then on Hector mode, he's located much closer to your starting position, close enough to get right next to the forts you start beneath in fact, and has a Light Brand for some actual 2 range. And not that it's relevant for this particular appearance but if you get the other version of the map you'll instead fight him in chapter 29, and you fight a zombie version in the final chapter as well. Lot of different ways you can end up fighting this guy, huh?

Hector mode is the focus here, though keeping Eliwood mode in mind is important since your expectations from that mode are definitely twisted here if you advance north only to immediately be met with the boss of the map (on a map where your objective is to kill the boss, no less). It's a fog of war map after all, so you don't know about the change until you see it in action. Lloyd proves to be an unsurprisingly strong opponent, very fast at 21 speed and bringing the swordmaster +15 crit bonus to the table to make it very dangerous for almost any unit to face a close range attack from him. His ranged offense isn't that great due to how the Light Brand works, but it's not completely irrelevant. Dude is also quite hard to hit, especially since he has the third highest luck of any boss in the game (behind only the final two bosses) to push his avoid to even higher levels. Of course, the fact that he can move directly next to some forts should probably give you an idea of how to improve your odds of survival against him, and also what to *not* let him have a free turn to step on...

The other neat thing with Lloyd is that it's entirely possible to kill him on turn 2...on a map that has a recruitable character that takes longer than that to even reach. Granted Wallace is utter garbage and arguably the worst unit in the game, not an easy claim to make in a game that features Karla mind you, but still, for completions sake most people will probably want to grab him at least sometimes. There's also villages to visit and some shops to hit up that sell reaver weapons, always nice things to have. So it's entirely possible to bait Lloyd by mistake and then have to frantically retreat and try to remember where he was (fog, remember), or to have to try to bait him when you expect to be able to clear up the side objectives the next turn.

It's pretty common for a Fire Emblem chapter to be all about getting in position to kill the boss, but it's pretty rare to have one where you actually have to play around the boss until you've gotten other things done. Lloyd is a bit of a sucker punch on your first attempt, but luckily he's near the start of the map where such things are far more acceptable. Once you know where he is, he ends up playing a role in the strategy of the map that I can't really think of any other examples of. Combined with being a powerful adversary that you'll want to abuse the forts and possibly a swordreaver against to manage, he proves to be both unique and quite interesting.

Up next: The final entry on the list has a distinct tendency to get discussed more in terms of story than gameplay, which might have something to do with comparisons being drawn to other enemies in the series, including occasionally the guy I just wrote about

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Kishuna the Magic Seal?
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Camus is my guess.

Lloyd is a good choice. Honestly he's even a very good boss fight when you face him later, but yeah, him being right there in C24 is definitely a shock the first time around.

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His final appearance is pretty cool just for how much you don't ever want to let people take a hit from him, and being a prime place to use the so often overlooked berserk staff

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I remember being so disappointed with Lloyd when I first played the game; I thought he looked cool, he seemed like he actually had a head on his shoulders, but then he proceeds to be a ridiculously easy boss (immobile range 1 with like 8 def, wtf) and of course then gets killed by another villain shortly after. It's neat that Hector Mode creates a version of him which lives up to expectations.

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And finally, a guy who has had an awful lot of appearances...

1. Camus (FE1/Mystery of the Emblem Book 1/Shadow Dragon Chapter 20)

For the sake of clarity, the chapter number is different in Mystery of the Emblem Book 1 due to it not including all chapters from the original. And I will ultimately (eventually?) be focusing on Shadow Dragon.

Camus has one hell of a history for a guy who totally, definitely only ever appears briefly in a village and then later on as a boss fight and never anywhere else, certainly not in any other games. An important character in the original Fire Emblem story, he died for sure and guys that look a bit like him and have dialogue that could fit with his story in Gaiden/Echoes and (New) Mystery are clearly just inspired by him and not at all the same person, and that's obviously believable and it's not like everyone already knows the full story on this guy. His name has come to be synonymous in the series with the common archetype of a fairly important antagonist, usually a high ranking general or equivalent in an enemy faction, who is a good person but nonetheless fights the heroes, generally out of a sense of loyalty as is the case for Camus himself. And there is definitely absolutely never any argument about how sympathetic these kinds of characters are. People also argue about how to pronounce his name sometimes.

In terms of gameplay Camus has also had a bit of an odd history. Originally, he was the actual main boss of his chapter, guarding the gate you had to seize and everything, a true pioneer in the art of capitalizing on Paladin mobility by not ever moving, and the recruitable general Lorenz was just off to the side. Then in Shadow Dragon, they decided to mix things up a bit, putting Lorenz on the gate and letting Camus have free reign to roam around...or be skipped altogether if you feel like it. Perhaps they felt like having him be skippable or at least putting him a bit closer to the coast would do more to justify his convenient survival in later games? Whatever the case may be, it creates the amusing scenario where you can avoid ever fighting him by virtue of just recruiting the "boss" in a conversation that covers pretty much the exact ground people wish would get brought up to these Camus-style characters more often and seizing.

The change in position does serve to make Camus a fair bit more threatening though. While there's a fairly easy path to the gate without entering his range, he does still cover some of the area nearby, and you'll have to go through him if you want to use the bridge to bypass the middle of the map. While Camus has always been fairly strong, being able to move will always remain more threatening than being immobile, and of course Shadow Dragon's brand new H5 difficulty amps up his stats to make him far more powerful than he's ever been in the past, though you do have access to forged Ridersbanes and the Wing Spear to help out this time around, though neither can be used to counter on enemy phase due to the 1-2 range properties of the Gradivus.

As a boss fight Camus is certainly less complicated than some of the others on this list, and many not on the list as well, but that's to be expected from a remake of the original game in the series. In a game where most playable units have somewhat questionable stats, his high speed, strength and durability is still quite tough to deal with, at least until you learn the art of forged effective weapons. He's just a strong dude that actually gets up off his ass and moves, and that's not a bad thing. On his own he's a solid boss but not spectacular (particularly since I'm mostly ignoring story here), but it's not hard to leave him off a list like this due to his long and complicated history. With a different position in a remake, appearances in other games and their remakes and an entire character concept nicknamed after him, he's certainly a major figure in the story of Fire Emblem. He's even tied with the Whitewings for appearing in the most different games in the main series!

And that...is the end of the interesting bosses list!

Up next: Thinking about what's next. Probably hard to guess what I myself do not know, huh?

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I guess people really hate Camus!

I'm sort of trying to think of something else to write about, but I'm also a bit distracted right now with a Fire Emblem rom hack that's eating up a lot of my free "think about Fire Emblem" time so idk for sure when/if this goes on

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Which rom hack? Just out of curiosity.

I don't remember much about the Camus fight except that, as you said, he moves so he's immediately more threatening than someone who doesn't move. Like him as a character too.

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One called Justice and Pride. It's pretty good so far barring one chapter's ending story scenes being a nightmarish hellscape of glitches that I ultimately had to look up on youtube to see the text and otherwise just mash start and then click confirm on a black screen a few times to finally get through

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After further consideration, I think the only real thing left that comes to mind is to go ahead and rank the whole series after all, even if a couple places are already probably obvious. Not sure if there's interest in seeing this and it might take me a bit to get started because the middle of my list is kind of all over the place so some thought is needed to iron out the details, but if there is, I will do it

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I'd certainly read it. I haven't commented much on these recent rankings because I just didn't feel like I had much to add, but I've enjoyed them all.

I'll probably be able to contribute more for the games in the series on a macro scale - I'm just not nearly as knowledgeable about all the minutiae that's been the focus lately.

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Alright I'm probably going to start on this soon, just have two parts of the list that I'm not 100% sure on the order of...unfortunately, one of those is exactly which of two titles to put at the very bottom, so that's something I kind of have to settle on before I can get going

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Is Fates going to be counted as three separate games or as one?

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Fates will be counted as three separate games. Gaiden and Mystery of the Emblem (Book 2, to be specific, since I never bothered to play Book 1) will be appearing too but their write ups will be relatively brief due to their remakes existing and being the versions I'm more familiar with. Ultimately there will be 17 entries on the list, with FE1 being the only main series game not included since I haven't played it.

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Panthera posted...

I guess people really hate Camus!

Hate's too strong though I think he's a very uncompelling choice for #1, both in terms of story or gameplay (someone like Zephiel is more interesting in both to me, for instance). I understand the "position in the series" case you make but eh, just not something important to me at all.

Enjoyed the list overall though!

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Zephiel annoys the crap out of me in both story and gameplay, personally. In gameplay he's just yet another Binding Blade boss that sits there with infinity avoid while you repeat your actions over and over again until the game lets you make progress. In story he's just a generic "something bad happened to me NOW I WANNA MURDER MWAHAHA" cliche whose behavior isn't even consistent with his actions (notably, he justifies his hatred of humanity to Roy by saying that Roy has surely seen people being evil on his journey, which is true...because Zephiel put them all up to it, so his logic is basically "I'm evil, I'm human, therefore me being evil means everyone else deserves it anyway" and yet the game seems to think we're supposed to think this guy has a point or something)

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Okay, I think I have the list more or less in order. My tiebreaker between two close competitors for the first entry (we're starting from the bottom and working our way up here) was basically "what would be the most controversial", so let that be a hint on what it will be...and you'll find out either later tonight or sometime tomorrow

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Panthera posted...

Zephiel annoys the crap out of me in both story and gameplay, personally. In gameplay he's just yet another Binding Blade boss that sits there with infinity avoid while you repeat your actions over and over again until the game lets you make progress. In story he's just a generic "something bad happened to me NOW I WANNA MURDER MWAHAHA" cliche whose behavior isn't even consistent with his actions (notably, he justifies his hatred of humanity to Roy by saying that Roy has surely seen people being evil on his journey, which is true...because Zephiel put them all up to it, so his logic is basically "I'm evil, I'm human, therefore me being evil means everyone else deserves it anyway" and yet the game seems to think we're supposed to think this guy has a point or something)

I love this.

And then they have him appear in the prequel and he's super idealistic, and I guess it's meant to try to justify it even more? Honestly, the Elibe duology is just plain weird, because I'm fairly certain they didn't plan it out in its entirety in advance. It would really surprise me to find out that, yes, they'd already planned out both games when they released Binding Blade and just made the decision to release the chronologically later game first. But the future canon really boxed Blazing Blade's writers in.

Well, there's also the fact that it takes about a third of the game just for Binding Blade to materially differentiate itself from Dark Dragon and the Sword of Light. Seriously, look at how similar the early parties are.

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FE6 started as a remake of FE1 I believe so that would explain that.

I'm fairly certain FE7 was not planned in advance; I don't have any real evidence to support this except that it just really seems like it wasn't. I think Hector and Eliwood would have bigger roles (and Lyn would exist) in FE6 if it was.

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Kenri posted...

FE6 started as a remake of FE1 I believe so that would explain that.

Another one? Wow

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Kenri posted...

FE6 started as a remake of FE1 I believe so that would explain that.

I'm fairly certain FE7 was not planned in advance; I don't have any real evidence to support this except that it just really seems like it wasn't. I think Hector and Eliwood would have bigger roles (and Lyn would exist) in FE6 if it was.

Yeah I thought I'd heard that somewhere but I wasn't sure so I didn't say anything.

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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,

Let's get the good stuff out of the way first. The early game, barring 2x with its fog of war (oh right, Thracia fog of war blocks out the terrain too, did I mention that? So you don't know where you're going even), is pretty solid, and the first few turns of 4x are a very nasty little challenge. Chapter 6 is trivial but has a neat gimmick of escaping through the winding city streets and 7 can be a hectic rush if you don't cheese it by blocking the boss and his reinforcement squads. Chapter 13 is oddly fun, with its playable generics and enemy composition that changes based on killing the boss. The final chapter is at least a pretty good concept, with six separate mini-bosses in six separate rooms you need to kill to open the path to Veld, an idea you may have seen reused in FE7, though in practice this map falls victim to how many mindlessly broken tools you have at your disposal.

However...the rest of the game tends to be a mess. Chapter 4 is tedium followed by opening a door into a room you can't see inside that has an ambush that will ruin you with reinforcements coming behind you for 60 turns (another trend in this game). Chapter 5 has a few challenging parts in a sea of walking through empty hallways. Chapters like 8 and 15 might as well not exist with how dull they are. Then there's all the maps built on just throwing a million ballistas everywhere that kill most units in one or two hits, like 10, 16A, 16B, 17B and of course, 21 with its 11 ballistas, which are either tedious (if you stall them out), random (if you count on dodging) or trivial (if you warp skip) but rarely interesting. And speaking of tedium, you have 16B which I already wrote about earlier on my worst chapters list. Then there's all the maps built on your party being split up and needing to put the appropriate units in each group to handle the task in front of them...in a game that does not allow you to control which unit starts where. This includes the final battle, and chapter 24 where dialogue even talks about the importance of picking the right units for each group even though you can't do so in any normal way! And then there's 24x, the worst map in all of Fire Emblem which I already ranted about at length...

A recurring problem with Thracia maps is that they have nasty surprises, often in the form of reinforcements (chapter 20's reinforcement ballistas and siege tomes come to mind), that will fuck you at first but are of little note once you know they're coming. Another is that the enemies tend to actually be pretty shit, barely progressing in stats throughout the game for the most part. This results in a lot of chapters where if you don't know the gimmick in advance you get wrecked by it, but if you do you can just kind of brute force through everything because the enemies can't threaten your strong units. This just...isn't interesting. It's fun to overcome a challenge, it's not fun to not know what you're facing until it has already put you in checkmate, then beating it for free once you've seen it in action before.

Then there's the way this game practically tries to bait you into softlocking chapters or entire playthroughs, but that's enough for now about the gameplay side of things.

I'm not going to as in depth on the story, largely because this has already gone on long enough. Suffice to say, it fails to impress. It has a good concept, as you experience what brought Leif from FE4 to the situation he was in when you met him in that game, but the execution is rather lacking. Leif ends up feeling like a useless puppet who just gets jerked around by an "advisor" the story seems to want us to think is the real hero, and the main villains are...oh boy. You know what, I'm going to put that off for a moment to cheer myself up a bit and say that I do mostly like how the game tries to add extra depth to the conflict between the two halves of the Thracian peninsula, with it giving us the glimpse at the softer side of Travant that we needed in Genealogy to round him out. And I guess Reidrick, despite being almost completely absent for most of the story, isn't really bad? He's just a generic evil nobleman but at least he pulls the cliche off decently, albeit he seems awfully easily foiled in the early game.

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But our actual main villain, Veld, oh my god. Do you like villains that make an impact on the plot? Well, this guy shows up twice and his intro, while meant to make you care about what he does to a likable character, just ends up feeling like a joke when you realize he did that in response to Leif and company being nearby instead of just doing it to them. Do you like villains with deep characterization? Well, Veld has no backstory, his agenda is that he works for Manfroy and his personality can be summed up as "is the bad guy". Do you like villains who shit on the established story? Probably not, but if you do you might like this guy! To make Veld seem credible they have he and Manfroy try to give him credit for the actions of another character in Genealogy, as if the writers realized the final battle was about to happen against a guy no one gave a fuck about and they needed to find a cheap way to prop him up. Trying to give Veld credit for Travant's ambush of Quan is absurd bullshit. Acting like he was needed to pass information along for the attack to work is ridiculous, in Genealogy Quan already said he expected Travant to use his absence from home as an excuse to attack, he just expected the attack would be directed at Lenster rather than at himself. And really, how would you *not* know half the army of your fiercest rival was on the move?

Veld, I like you more when you were Gharnef. And I liked Gharnef more when he was Validar. And I liked Validar more when he was Manfroy. And I didn't even care that much for Manfroy! Imagine being the main villain of a game and being nothing more than a fourth rate knockoff of a mediocre character from your own story. And yes I know the timing doesn't work out for that Gharnef/Validar comparison, deal with it.

On a final note, Thracia at least manages to be alright aesthetically. The Jugdral art style has never been my favourite but this game does at least reign in some of the utterly absurd haircuts Genealogy brought to the table. The soundtrack is not one of my favourites in the series by any means but it's still decent, with the track from most fog of war maps being a standout (that got an even better remix in New Mystery). And I'll always love the Jugdral combat animations the most of any game in the series, even though I play with animations off 99% of the time. So hey, at least it looks and sounds fine. Got to find something to enjoy here and there, right?

Thracia 776 had a very rushed development cycle, and it shows. A lot of its ideas could have been good with a bit more polish, but the end product that we got is just a disaster on a lot of levels. A map like chapter 14 could be a classic with a few tweaks, but instead ends up being a huge disappointment once you realize how trivial it truly is. The game doing a better job of communicating its core mechanics to the player would likewise go a long way. Thracia ends up in this weird place where it gets a reputation for being very hard, but it's actually mostly very easy IF you know what you're getting into. It almost feels like it was intended to make people feel good about themselves for beating the "hard" game but without being hard enough that anyone would struggle if they looked some stuff up, but that's probably just a conspiracy theory. Some interesting ideas exist here, but in the end ideas don't matter if you can't figure out how to make them work.

And that marks the end of this...rather lengthy write up. I don't think most entries will be this long, but I never quite know how much I'll have to say until I start.

Up next: Yes I'm still doing this "up next" thing even though process of elimination will eventually make it pretty meaningless. Ahem. Up next, a game whose placement near the bottom of a list is far less controversial.

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Thracia is one of only two games in the series, the other being Fates, that I just don't have any inclination to ever play. I read the LP Archive playthrough of it a while back and that was plenty for me.

Then there's the way this game practically tries to bait you into softlocking chapters or entire playthroughs

I'd be curious to know what exactly this entails if it wouldn't require too much of your time to go into it at some point.

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Never played Thracia so I can't comment on it, but

Panthera posted...

Up next, a game whose placement near the bottom of a list is far less controversial.

My guess for this is Revelation.

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NBIceman posted...

I'd be curious to know what exactly this entails if it wouldn't require too much of your time to go into it at some point.

There's some points in the game where you need keys to progress, and most of these chapters don't have a key vendor on them. So if you ran out of keys and all your thieves died (and if you're going in blind, you might only have one and she's frail even for a thief), you're softlocked. You might not even know this until you get to the chapter, and by that point, it's too late.

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The most basic example of it is chapter 12.

https://www.fireemblemwod.com/fe5/guia/ENG_cap12.htm

So keep in mind, this is a fog of war map, which in Thracia means you can't even see the terrain. Note the broken bridge. That can only be repaired by a thief with a lockpick, or by using the Bridge Key, which can only be obtained by stealing it from a specific enemy (or capturing him). Because of fog of war, you can't even see that there's a bridge, nor which specific enemy has the key. If you miss out on the key, say because the guy suicides into you on enemy phase and you didn't bring a thief, you can't ever open the bridge. Which means only your pegasus knight or the Warp staff can allow you to cross to the other side. And this is a seize map, so if you don't have the right unit/staff present and you miss out on the key, the chapter is unwinnable, but it may take you a while to figure it out (thankfully the fog of war goes away after enough turns pass or it would be even worse).

Thracia also has an obsession with including more doors than it gives you keys for in the same map. Notably the final chapter has 6 doors that you need to open to be able to get to the final boss (you need to stand on specific squares inside six rooms to unlock the way). Each room does have an enemy with a door key inside it, but if you can't get into at least one of them in the first place with a unit that can steal it (or capture them), you're fucked. There's a few maps that are unwinnable if you don't have a method to either open a door or warp past it completely heading into them. It really shows why later games make sure to have enough droppable door keys to avoid this problem, but Thracia doesn't do droppable items for some reason. Actually I think the Jerme version of Pale Flower of Darkness in FE7 can also be softlocked if you open doors in the wrong order if you didn't bring keys of your own due to how the droppable keys are distributed, but I've never looked into that one, just heard about it.

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Mewtwo59 posted...

So if you ran out of keys and all your thieves died (and if you're going in blind, you might only have one and she's frail even for a thief), you're softlocked.

Worth noting that one of the best ways to keep Lara alive is to just not give her a weapon so that most enemies will just capture her and then you kill them to free her, but if you do that and forget to take her lockpick, enemies will take it when they capture her, which forces you to capture them if you want to get it back, so you can get yourself into a no lockpick situation a bit more easily than you might think.

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Wow, yeah, that's... even worse than I thought.

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Thank you for that writeup. I only played the first few chapters of Thracia and couldn't really get into it, but the more I read about the game after that the more I was like "why would anyone want to play this?" And then I would see fans say stuff like "Oh, it's not that bad to play blind" and "Oh, it's it's so fun if you know what you're doing, it gives you so many tools" and I just don't see the appeal. I mean, I know there are plenty of masochists in the FE community, but still.

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What happens when you set out to make a game based on spitting on the entire concept of two other games and also filling it with tedious gimmicks designed to be unenjoyable? In other words, what happens when you set out to make a bad game?

You succeed.

16. Revelation

The third path of Fates...and right away you can see a problem with this whole premise. You have this weird two games thing built entirely around picking between two sides...and then you add a third path that unites the two, completely going against the entire concept. If the story of Fates as a whole were better I'd probably be really pissed off at Revelation for being designed to make a mockery of it, but thankfully(?) Fates' story is not exactly great. So I'm still annoyed at the idea that they decided a route that just straight up says the whole conflict is meaningless bullshit because these people are totally willing to just cooperate and what you see of them in Birthright/Conquest is wrong, but at least I'm not emotionally invested in it. Unfortunately, the story concept is not the extent of Revelation's sins.

Considering I already dedicated an entry on the worst chapters list to discussing Revelation's fondness for tedious gimmicks that serve only to waste your time, it's probably not necessary to go into too much detail. I don't think it's a controversial statement to say that Revelation map design is largely atrocious, full of maps that just try to occupy you with dull busywork like snow shoveling or riding elevators around. And even when the maps aren't throwing bad gimmicks at you, they're usually not that interesting anyway, mostly consisting of just basic "move through path with lots of enemies" stuff. Not necessarily bad but it's pretty standard stuff, and standard stuff sure as hell doesn't make up for all the garbage you have to sit through everywhere else.

To top it off, Revelation also has some other gameplay issues. While it does benefit from Fates' overall good game mechanics, particularly its far more interesting version of pair up than what Awakening introduced, it also brings some of the most bewildering unit balance in the series to the table, with multiple units that not only struggle to survive on their join maps but actually struggle to even do damage, a problem even true shitstains like Sophia managed to avoid (albeit her accuracy was hot garbage). You get situations like chapter 15 where Shura and Nyx join on the same map, one as a level ten promoted unit, the other level 9 unpromoted, with their respective base stats being about what you'd expect for those levels. Or Odin, whose bases are just worse all around by a long shot than Laslow, who joins at the same time and who isn't even anything special himself, especially compared to Xander and Leo. For a game that supposedly offers the benefit of being able to use everyone from both sides, it sure is determined to make a bunch of units actively unpleasant to ever use. And then for story reasons it doesn't even let you use everyone anyway!

At this point the Revelation fans will bring up that you can grind to fix bad units...well, maybe not because you rarely see Revelation fans outside of youtube comment sections for videos about it, but fans of other games with grinding might take up the torch just for the hell of it. Yes, you can grind. No, that doesn't really matter. Time spent grinding to make bad units functional could also be spent making good units godlike, and the process of having to grind to make a unit feel functional in the first place is simply not a pleasant one for me.

Over on the story side of things, Revelation is...a mess, to say the least. Corrins families make big speeches about opposing him only to be persuaded over to his side later by very little besides "I'm Corrin, trust me" because of this dumb little plot point about a curse that apparently erases people who mention what's going on, which is a great excuse to never have to write a scene where you need to come up with a convincing way to discuss something that sounds like an insane conspiracy theory. You spend the latter half of the game in the "hidden kingdom" of Valla, which looks pretty cool in backgrounds but which also is utterly devoid of backstory, culture, population, really anything to make anyone give a shit about it. And the main villain is a generic evil dragon because of course it is. Anankos apparently has something resembling characterization in DLC, but there's no way in hell I'm paying extra just to learn what the fuck the point of this generic idiot villain was. So as far as I'm concerned he's just a generic evil dragon that destroys shit for the lulz, because that's what Revelation itself actually showed me.

On the plus side, Revelation does have nice music, like most of Fates. The backgrounds tend to be very pretty, as do many of the maps. And cutscenes. Aside from the character designs, Revelation is very aesthetically pleasing. So that's nice. At least you can have nice things to listen to and look at while you suffer.

Revelation is simply...an utter disaster of a game. A bringing together of the Birthright/Conquest casts that undermines the story of those games by virtue of its existence, not helped by the fact that I find the Fates cast in general to be very unlikable. A game that is built on "creative" gimmicks that boil down to wasting your time instead of being fun. A huge cast of characters, many of whom are deliberately terrible in gameplay. Very little about it makes sense and I'm always left wondering who this game was made for. I think the only reason I put it above Thracia is because at least modern Fire Emblem has very quick gameplay, so I can get it over with faster, assuming I ever go back to play it again, which I probably won't because I'm not that much of a masochist.

What I'm trying to say is that Revelation is not good.

Up next: A game I genuinely like to an extent despite it feeling like utter shit by modern standards

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Gaiden?
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Panthera posted...

the whole conflict is meaningless bullshit because these people are totally willing to just cooperate

Honestly this was exactly what I was thinking through the entirety of Birthright and Conquest, so at first Revelation's story seemed like a step in the right direction.

At first.

Panthera posted...

And then for story reasons it doesn't even let you use everyone anyway!

This is legitimately the most baffling decision Revelation makes, and there is heavy competition.

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Kenri posted...

Honestly this was exactly what I was thinking through the entirety of Birthright and Conquest, so at first Revelation's story seemed like a step in the right direction.

Honestly, I felt like it was at least reasonable for the two sides to be opposed, since Hoshido is more or less a normal place and Nohr is run by a particularly uncharismatic cartoon villain. Almost every other part of the story was bad but at least I could buy that there wasn't a happy ending where Corrin got to just magically unite everyone.

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The war happening makes sense, it's just the Nohr siblings that don't. It felt like uniting with them against Garon should have been a slam dunk. Garon more or less just states outright that he doesn't care about Nohr or his children, but we're expected to believe that Camilla picks him over Corrin? That Leo does? There's just no way. At least Elise doesn't really fall for it in any of the routes.

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