So I had a FE Fates revelation of my own! I‘m now at Chapter 22 of Birthright and I realized it’s no so much easy as it is these map forces you to bunch up a lot and play the game slowly around choke points. Like, the maps seem varied at a glance but they lack encouragement to split up into different groups to accomplish different tasks. Something like Chapter 21 could have been a lot more fun if the game didn't make you just sorta wait around to unlock more lava bridges. There are many maps like this.
Take a look at [Awakening Chapter 5](https://64.media.tumblr.com/263220bf39d1c4221ac85378e10781df/tumblr_inline_p7gaa2Fh2x1r44ffy_500.jpg) vs [Birthright Chapter 21](https://www.gamerguides.com/assets/media/17/110/131737-1460329200.jpg). The earlygame Awakening chapter has you defend two fronts or choose to take two paths. Meanwhile midgame Birthright lets you just focus on clearing each lane before moving on. It's far less challenging. I guess they hoped to balance it by letting enemies attack from longer distances... but they're kinda weak. Doing this doesn't make it a _strategic_ challenge. You also get high movement in this game, so bunching doesn't punish you at all when you can spread out quickly in a single round. One of the best things FE Engage did was lower the amount of movement to make bunching a little less viable, and it would have worked here too.
I think the public turned on this game in Chapter 14 when Corrin accidentally scared a dog and then kills 30 innocent dogs and immediately gets over it. You kill a lot of named characters in Fates, since you can't recruit them in one route or the other. It makes sense when you play the games together but in isolation it throws me off because I keep expecting to be able to talk and recruit someone, but I don't think there are any red unit recruits in this game? Which is weird. There's not any in Shadows of Valentia or Three Houses but there were reasons for that. This is just one more thing that makes Fates feel a little incomplete.
FE6 and FE7 are on the Nintendo Switch online! FE6 is japan only naturally, but you can download it if you‘re in the west. The UI is totally readable if you don’t know japanese. FE7 is in english on the english gba online.
I hate they dropped this at the same time as FFXVI, but I hope to be coming back to it later this year for some Hector Hard Mode 😈
Honestly if anyone is Fire Emblem curious and wants somewhere to start, FE7 aka "Fire Emblem" has a great learning curve on Normal and a great challenge on hard.
I was listening to an old pod and was made aware of an important historical document:
This issue of Nintendo Power is how I first heard about Fire Emblem. I absolutely pored over these pages and must‘ve read the article a few dozen times. I can’t say that I understood everything at the time, but I loved the artwork and loved reading about the different classes. After reading, I tried to keep my eye out for a copy of PoR whenever I went to the store, only to never find one. I wouldn‘t make the same mistake with Radiant Dawn, however. I made sure to get a copy of RD, and when I booted it up it absolutely met whatever expectations I had set. I played Radiant Dawn over and over again as a kid and it really expanded my narrow idea of what a video game could be like. RD has remained my favorite FE even as I’ve gone through many of the other games.
I did eventually pick up a copy of PoR by the way - about 13+ years later. It's great! I do still prefer Radiant Dawn, which I love for its weirdness and unconventional choices that set it apart from other FE games, but I love the entire Tellius Saga
I also wanted to share my experience with Engage. Over the past few years, I‘ve started to accumulate a few clears on various FE games’s hardest difficulties - 3H‘s Maddening and RD’s Maniac - and so going into Engage I felt pretty decent about my FE skills and wanted to give Maddening a try, no DLC, no online features.
What I ended up experiencing was some sort of psychic, transcendent experience. I don‘t mean this necessarily as a compliment about the game’s quality - the combat mechanics are excellent, but, as others have mentioned, the story leaves a lot to be desired - rather, I mean that this game teased out a level of obsession in me that I didn‘t know was even possible. I was playing this game for 6+ hours every day and after each session I would look at the google spreadsheets online containing lists of growth rates and emblem skills and I’d plan out what I‘d want to do the next session. When I wasn’t playing, I was thinking about the game, and when I slept, I dreamt of moving pieces around on a checked board. I kinda fear what the game did to me, but I also left the game feeling really good. After getting past the brutal Ch 10 - Ch 17 section of the game, I felt as though I unlocked something in myself. In the back half of the game, I was playing out of my mind well - 20+ maps of hours-long gauntlets, and not a single rewind was used! After clearing the final map I had a pretty intense migraine. The cumulative exhaustion got to me that night and I slept for 16 hours. I posted a little about my run on serenes - got some good feedback from others on what else I could‘ve done, handed out some advice to people who were still working their way through the game - but my interest in Engage seemed to evaporate pretty quickly. I haven’t gone back to mess around with any of the DLC and months later I still don‘t have all that much interest in the Xenologues. Even as FE7 has come out - a game I haven’t played and was looking forward to - the thought of more FE right now just isn‘t appealing.
Engage’s Maddening is perhaps my favorite difficulty setting I've ever played through in any RPG - it seems to get things just right: maintains a high level of challenge throughout, feels distinct from the lower difficulties, feels fair and rewarding. Even as I was playing well, I never felt as though I was (or could possibly) steamroll the game - part of what felt so great about it was that I genuinely felt as though I was rising to a challenge rather than breaking a game in half
This isn't really a FE-specific question but I wanted to ask if anyone else has ever had this level of affinity with a game before - a sort of maintained flow state over the course of days or even weeks like this. I'm not sure that it's a feeling I want to seek out, because it feels a little gross, but wow did everything feel right in the moment
I was gonna post this is the guidebook thread but I’ll give you FE truthers the primer. The recently released Fire Emblem Engage Kanzen Kōryakubon (Complete Strategy Guide), which this time patiently waited for all DLCs to come out in order to not be totally obsolete after a few months, is one hella THICK boy.
I‘m playing FE6 and Lilina has been a monster for me, but I didn’t really pay attention to her stat line until Chapter 10B when I noticed she still had her base speed of 4 and base defense of 2. I gave her the speedwings (+2 spd) thinking surely she just needed a little push….
Welp... a few chapters later and she's still at that base speed and defense but has managed to get a magic growth every single level. I'm about to promote her but I'm kinda having fun strategizing around this juggernaut who can get doubled by a light breeze.
Unbalanced units can be so much more fun than balanced ones.
"Unbalanced" sums up my whole experience with FE6 though. The maps are too big, the enemy stats are too high, the hit rates are way too low, the 3x weapon triangle effectiveness is too much, and of course.... ambush spawns are way too unfair. But at the same time the extra bullshit kind of makes it more interesting. Some of it is annoying or tedious, but I'm enjoying my current run more now than any other time I've picked it up.
My late game Lilina was so powerful I avoided using her in boss fights—it was really anticlimactic to have her one-shot ||Murdoch||, for example (and maybe also ||Zephyr/Zephiel??? I don't know if that's even possible||. On the other hand, getting her across the gigantic ch. 21 map without carrying her with a flyer was something of its own challenge, as I recall.
Seeing the screenshots you've posted makes me think I'll buy one of those English-patched carts on eBay
haha I mean... for the most part they do a pretty good job of adding optional objectives and forcing you to split up your party, but there are a few of them that really encourage you to move everyone as a group slowly together while hitting waves of reinforcements. Could also be that I just beat the desert map which always feels twice as slow.
I still gotta play Geneaology and Thracia so I'm sure I haven't yet seen how big these bad boys can get... but I kinda like the FE7 / Gaiden / SoV / Engage sized maps more.
@“Tradegood”#p144823 Just messing around, I meant to say I agree with you! Especially in some of those later chapters (21 and 22 in particular—I haven‘t played the game in more than ten years, but I remember those chapters). I’d like to go back to Genealogy after Tactics Ogre—its huge maps are really a thing to behold, though I do wonder if they can support an entire game
@“captain”#p144838 chapters (21 and 22 in particular
Yes - I just beat FE6 last night and agree these chapters really stand out! Much more then the subsequent chapters that are only available in the 'good ending'.
They actually remade Chapter 21 as a paralogue in Fire Emblem Engage, but got rid half of the tiles and the reinforcement spam and it really felt different! Controlling 18 units in one battle makes it feel like a gigantic war. When I saw the map I thought I'd play it like I did in engage, splitting into 3 groups, archers and cavaliers to the top, mages and tanky units to the south, and fliers to grab the village... but that actually just triggered twice as many reinforcements lol and took forever to meet in the middle. I lost poor sweet innocent Gonzalez and Fae so I restarted. Turns out a better strategy is is to turtle it, and once reinforcements come, leave Rutger alone to draw the reinforcements and dodge them on a forest tile while everyone else goes to fight Murdock on the other side of the map. I also happened to leave best girl Igrene in the middle of the map so she was able to one-shot Galle when he shows up (sorry for killing Melady's boyfriend).
Chapter 22 wasn't so bad, but I incorrectly assumed I could use the tile that unlocks the door to warp to the other side of the map... so I ended up stranding Percival, Astolfo, and Cecilia in the upper left corner while the rest of the gang went into the final chamber and was dodging the sleep and berserk status effects. Status effects in Fire Emblem are annoying to begin with but at a certain point this game demands you to have 2 people with the restore staves next to each other or else 1-2 units per turn is going to go to sleep or berserk (often the person holding the staves). So having Cecilia and Clarine on opposite sides of the map was really risky but didn't end up being as punishing as it could have!
Even though FE6‘s conflict isn’t really about economics, I appreciate how much of your team wants to eat the rich. Roy, Lilina, and Elffin are class traitors.
@“Tradegood”#p145554 They actually remade Chapter 21 as a paralogue in Fire Emblem Engage
Huh, I'll have to check that out. I always thought it was cool that in FE7 you go to the Shrine of Seals (or whatever, 封印の神殿) but approach from the southeast—Engage could've gone crazy and combined both maps + invented northeast and southwest quadrants for it.
My first time through FE6 I was very young and didn't understand how to make a well rounded party, so Ch 22 was a nightmare—my overpowered Roy and Dieck would get berserked and destroy the rest of my party, none of whom had any hope of dodging berserk or sleep staves. To make matters worse I wasn't using a guide and played in Japanese which I couldn't read, which is to say when I finally beat the map (down to dumb luck) I locked myself into the bad ending. !!!
How does it stack up against the other GBA titles (or the whole series)? Don't want to demand you review the whole game right here for my amusement but if I'm not mistaken they're pretty close behind in your rearview mirror (along with FE1, 2, etc), so curious for your perspective
>
remade Chapter 21 as a paralogue in Fire Emblem Engage
pleased to see they remixed that particular map music
It was a journey, but I made it to the end of FE Echoes.
>!
I had a kind of snow day/sick day a couple days ago where I could really hunker down to finish the game. It took the whole day and night to find my way through the final dungeon, fight Berkut, and make it through the Alm solo-gauntlet. That all went relatively smooth, but then I attempted the final encounter. I trudged through that battle for 2 hours and failed miserably. They really throw everything at you at the end: poison swamps, enemies that multiply, enemies that spawn more units, witches that can teleport behind you, enemies with long range attacks, tight corridors. I reached a stalemate where I couldn‘t do anything without somebody dying, so I just gave up. I almost didn’t try again, I was this close to putting the game away for good. But I gave myself a day to think about it and try to come up with a strategy and I tried again. I benched my barons and brought out all of my units with range and mobility. The saints with the invoke ability were the MVPs since those ghost units could rush forward and tease out the trickier units as well as act as easy targets for the big dragon instead of my actual units. Delthea and Mae with mage rings came in clutch in concert with Jesse and Saber equipped with brave swords to have almost guaranteed critical chances. And of course my archers put in the real work with their crazy range. I can‘t believe I almost gave up, but coming back from that was ultimately extremely satisfying. I love to read the little summaries of how all the characters lived their lives after I worked so hard to keep them alive for 80 hours. I’m not going to bother with the post game, firstly because the ending felt complete and secondly because I‘ve reached my limit for tactics. I’ve fired my last emblem for a while, but I‘ll be back someday. Like I said up top, it’s been a journey from buying the game on clearance, to letting it sit on my shelf for 5 years, to now having played one of the best of the series.
Now here's my question for the group: I love Awakening and Echoes, Three Houses is pretty good, I'm lukewarm on Blazing Blade and Shadow Dragon, and I didn't like Fates at all. Based on these, what other FE's do you think I'm gonna like? No pressure. The only other one I have sitting on my shelf unplayed is Sacred Stones.
I haven't seen everything you've written about Echoes, but what can you say you look for/get out of the games you like, and what did the ones you didn't like fail to offer?
If Sacred Stones is on the shelf I say give it a shot, but it is most similar to FE7 in my estimation, so you may not like it if that wasn't your cup of tea.
@“kyleprocrastinations”#p149985 What did you like about Awakening and Echoes that you did not in the others? I am a bit confused at what characteristics unite the episodes you like and those you don’t. Do you find yourself caring about the stories? Maps? Characters? Min/maxing? Challenge? On what difficulty setting do you like to play? (Was permadeath on the GBA game a big no-no?)
You should maybe try Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, it conveys really well some aspects of modern FE into an action game.
@“captain”#p150356 So the things I like are spending time with a cast of colorful characters that I can grow into better versions of themselves and preferably matchmake romantic pairs. What I didn‘t like so much about FE7 was what I’ve been calling being “clocked in” most of the time. Like how you have to do your shopping in battles etc. I like the Awakening style of world map that I can have a respite in between main story battles and do some grinding if I want. The abbey in Three Houses was pretty good for chilling, but the calendar put a sort of time pressure on me that soured it a little.
@“kyleprocrastinations”#p150360 Sacred Stones does have a world map (and arenas), so the pace of that game might be more to your liking than the other GBA episodes. It is, however, much more shallow than modern FE in its character relationship mechanics since (as you probably figured out) most of the modern simulation aspects come from Awakening.
If you have only played one half of FE Fates (especially if it’s Birthright), you could also try the other half (I find Conquest a more interesting game).
Alternatively, [Shining Force II.](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/2844-oct-23-monthly-game-club-shining-force-ii/1)
@“◉◉maru”#p150358 Having good characters is one of the stronger draws for me. Story on the macro scale I‘m a little indifferent to, but on the micro scale, like in support conversations, that’s my jam. I play on normal difficulty with permadeath on. I approach the battles like chess puzzles where a character dying is a failure state and I‘ll restart the encounter. I don’t think I'm really into min/maxing, more like, “I think this character would upgrade to (insert class) because they have (insert personality).” So more of a role playing angle? Hopefully that clarifies a bit.
I hadn't considered the Warriors games at all, but I could be persuaded to look at them.
