Today, we take a long, hard look at hard modes in Fire Emblem. Surprisingly(!), there is almost no balance in many of the most ridiculous modes! I am very shock.
Video credits:
“FE11 H5 0% growths chapter 3 (with commentary)” -dondon151
“Part 60: Let’s Play Fire Emblem Path of Radiance, Maniac Mode, Chapter 26
- ‘Sanity Breaks, Part 2’” - Mangs
“Fire Emblem: Awakening - Lunatic+ Guide: Prologue to Chapter 2” -
shadowofchaos725
“FE6 HM 0% growths chapter 8x (with commentary)” - dondon151
"[DS] Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon ♦ Chapter 2: The Pirates of Galder" -
MasterEnex
"HBD 5 Turn Skip With Base Seteth" - Rengor1997
"Fire Emblem: Awakening - Lunatic+: Chapter 6" - shadowofchaos725
"Fire Emblem Three Houses: Blue Lions Maddening Mode Chapter 14 - The
Delusional Prince" - laprayprey
"FE12 H4 0% Growth rAAAnk Prologue 8" - Reploids
"FE12 H4 0% Growth rAAAnk Chapter 1" - Reploids
I play my games on maddening mode. I live my life on saddening mode.
Legend
@@selfmade3510 Thank you.
The only way to play and live.
@@naheemquattlebaum2267 wrong. there's more to life, and video games. Other modes.
Ah yes, the three difficulty options in three houses: Power fantasy, challenging, and stupid.
Power fantasy, power fantasy lite, and stupid
I call them too easy, easy, and fuck my life. Did an NG+ maddening run. Endless Wyvern spawns are not fun, and ambush spawns are Divine Pulse Tax. I think I can live without that different menu. For my last playthrough, I think I'll go with "hard" mode bronze man (i.e. iron man, but I will rewind for mission fails. And bullshit crit deaths. How a game that relies on permadeath for minor story characters ended up with a tripple-damage crit system, I will never understand.)
@@bificommander maddening isn't too hard when you know what skills and class to tutor for, and which gambits are effective and not effective. As for the crit system, it's something that is intended to reward careful players who are capable of playing around it. Sometimes it's inevitable, but that fact that it is there is usually more beneficial than harmful and adds an extra layer of precaution.
@@phoenixgemini42 I won't claim to be a FE master who understands all the ins and outs. But having played 3H and after that Awakening which lacks a rewind mechanic, I despise the crit system. After experiencing 3H's difficulty, I started Awakening on hard. I lost three units in the first two missions, two to crits, at which point I restarted on normal. And guess what: Awakening normal was too easy most of the time too. But with this crit system in place, it needed to be. The only way not to get killed by a crit is if the unit that is hit has such amazing defenses that a normal hit does basically no damage. If you don't want every attack to have a few percent chance of a KO followed by a restart, you need the opposition to be too weak the other +-95% of the time. And as for beneficial effects: Unless you either base your build around crit chances, they are too unreliable to plan around. They're a nice to have when they trigger, but with the exception of Dedue with brave knuckles for 4 attacks with a 70% crit chance on each, I never could base my plans around them. And if you're not playing to specifically take advantage of them, you still can't escape them being inflicted on you. Add to that the strange decision to not use the double-roll system that's used for hit-roles, and you have a combat mechanic that you can't rely on helping you even at 90%, while you can't trust it not to ruin your day even at a 1% chance. In a way, Maddening mode and the crit system tick me off in the same manner: They enforce a playstyle that I find not fun, one where you cannot allow your units to get attacked at all except in extremely favourable circumstances (i.e. putting your dodge-tank in a forest). I could plod through dealing with either, but I'm not having much fun doing it.
I play the three most recent fire emblem games and the critics were never a problem
3H Maddening was designed to sell the animal feeding DLC.
This 👆
Why? I never feed the animals you use up like 3 or 4 food items on an animal to get like 1 Umbral Steel. That’s not really worth it to me
@@pearsemolloy9656 It would be better if specific food gave specific ore, like stat boosters from the Greenhouse(when it decides to give you one)
@@AkameGaKillfan777 yeah that would definitely make it more viable especially since the only specific ore that I ever seem to be short of is Wootz steel so it would be handy to grind that specifically.
@@pearsemolloy9656 It comes from the Wolves
It's why i weirdly enough like what fates did. Unlike awakening, you can't just pair up your units and pair up your units to get huge stat boosts and get a % chance of a follow up. instead, you have to choose between getting an ally follow up 100% of the time by having them be adjacent or only have stat boosts from pairing up. I think this change made it so that fates's higher difficulties made the game more like a puzzle, specifically early game Conquest Lunatic where relying on the core mechanics are your only option.
I like that too, because more predictability is a good thing in my mind. And Conquest is just fun
You: My family held a surprise party for me! Me, an intellectual: I was ambush spawned by my family and got tons of EXP for it!
Remember to leave one of them alive so you can kill the police reinforcements later on, can't afford to miss that bonus EXP.
Mission: Route the enemy
Honestly Lunatic Reverse actually does feel playtested, especially in the prologue but even afterwards. It's the one time it actually FEELS like they playtested the game and it's probably because at it's core the maps were already made, so all they needed to do is make some small alterations and changing up enemy positioning. Rainbow potion was also free DLC so there's that. Now why it's free on-cart DLC I have no clue. also ayy lmao
I had no idea that the DLC in New Mystery was free. I do admittedly conflate imbalance with cruelty to new players. FE12 is so relentlessly cruel to new players that it seems unbalanced, even though it’s one of the better balanced games when you know what’s coming. It’s honestly hilarious though how viscous that game is to blind players
You make a good point. I never bothered using the rainbow potion because it felt like cheating to me. Also FE12's high growth rates in comparison to other previous FEs.
@Road Runner What about Old Mystery? Does that one have a high learning curve?
@Road Runner thracia is not an easy game sure, but the game also doesn't have any higher difficulties meaning there's a limit to how hard it can, especialy after second or third tries. I love both the jugdral games to death, but I just don't agree with the sentiment that its the hardest fe game. It will give a lot of trouble to a newer player sure, but thats pretty much the peak of its difficulty. Fe 5 gives a lot of tools, and the common enemies compared to yours are very weak
rengor is everywhere I go
Bold of you to assume I would ever want to play Maddening Mode after doing an All-Healer run
Dude does this mean you only used faith magic or you only used the healers like linhardt and Mercedes
@@techinalmachine im assuming he turned everyone into a healer
@@lonelymascot Funniest shit I've seen
Oh my god after that I don’t think I would ever be able to watch that animation ever again
Why y'all want to suffer so bad??? 😭😭😭😭
It's a bit unrealated but honestly one of the thing fire emblem fails at imo is incentivising you to accept your losses on the battlefield. Like, the game is designed around the idea of you losing characters or even sacrificing them as a tactical move to win the war, which is a neat idea. But also characters are precious ressources that you really don't want to lose, especially if you invest xp into them. But also from a story standpoint losing characters reduce the number of interaction you have with them (cause... you know, they are dead?) which makes the story also less enjoyable. I've always thought that for a permadeath system to work, you should have at least some incentive to not reset when a character dies, of course you also need incentive to keep characters alive but losing a character should feel like it opens new routes for how your story progress rather than just make your experience less enjoyable from now on. I don't have a perfect solution but like, imagine some supports growing stronger when one of your developped character dies because those character talking about how one of the war's hero dying affect them would bring them closer. Or maybe a character that had a support with the dead character will learn one of the skill of his fallen comrade that he'll train as a way to remember them. I don't know, some sort of gameplay and character growth, any form of growth happening from those losses, that'd be enough to make me want to keep playing to witness them.
Thats hard to take into account. Even if Fates, in conquest losing anyone is the equivalent of getting a arm chopped off or losing a demigod. Its painful, but that’s from a gameplay point of view. It does need work storywise.
@@kyshowman6847 I mean, it needs work from both point of view imo. From a gameplay point of view it feels like too much of a loss to not reset especially when going blind and you don't know how much loss you can take before the game becomes incredibly hard or even softlock it. I'm aware the game are usually doable while losing a bunch of units or with zero growth, but especially for a new player experience, losing a unit feels like you might just get stuck later on and unless you read about the game a lot beforehand you have no way to know how much of a hit you can take before you basically get to reset everything. And like, yeah people usually play those games multiple times, but they are actually rather long game and quite story heavy, so it's not like a rogue like where losing a run is just part of the gameplay loop. And I already touched on the story aspect but I think generally using story to convey gameplay ideas like "it's ok to keep playing if a unit dies" is going to improve the blind experience of the game a lot. (that's also true for things like reinforcement, having a clear story indicator of where and what kind of reinforcement you should expect goes a long way towards making it feel a lot less like a bullshit middle finger).
@@Laezar1 That type of idea is difficult but I think FE:Shadows of Valencia does do something like this in small ways.(Different cutscenes based on key battle results). I feel like the foundation to improve the effects of permadeath are there. IS needs to apply it in gameplay .
You know, this is probably why I always play Fire Emblem with Permadeath turned off in the games where that's an option. I really like the idea of permadeath on paper, but in practice, it's always more frustrating and more often than not it's led me into soft locks where because too many of my characters died, I don't have the resources needed to finish the next fight. And needing to go back and redo the last 20 fights just so I can have access to what I need to beat a fight, especially if there was a lot of story up to this point. I'd much rather just turn of Permadeath and only lose characters for a single fight. Or in the older games, just reset if I lose a character.
As someone who's not hardcore into SRPGs, I think Vandal Hearts handles this whole thing well - but in exchange for not having a permadeath system. Instead, party members who die in battle stay in your party, but are unavailable for the rest of that battle. At the end of the battle, the amount of money you earn is increased by the number of enemies you killed, but also (and much more so) decreased by the number of party members that you lost. As a result, there's an incentive to keep your party members alive, but you're not punished too much for losing a couple of characters.
The real disappointment with Awakening’s lunatic+ is that recruitable enemies don’t get the crazy lunatic+ skills. Yes I know that giving them those skills could basically make Gaius, Tharja, and Cynthia top tier, Idc.
Ambush spawns is why I haven't finished Awakening on Hard. It made me wish the was a difficulty between normal and hard, because the beginning in hard is fun, but as soon as you get to the Mila tree it throws SO much bullcrap at you.
The trick to the Mila tree is to undeploy everyone except Chrom and Tharja and nosferatu tank with Tharja to destroy that whole map. It's bad, and that's basically the entire second half of Awakening.
@@ProfessorBopper I did get past the Mila tree by using Rescue strats to one round the boss with Cherche, but trying to play the map normally is a nightmare. I had to reset a lot before giving up doing it the normal way.
I am at the Mila tree on my first hard mode run with 3 characters basically outstats average enemies by 60 point. The rest of the team screaming of a chance to level up which is basically impossible with how Risen is balanced around your strongest unit. It's near impossible to train them in classic mode. At this rate I will beat the game with just like 2-3 characters at maxed out stats.
Hard is easy as hell, Lunatic, however, is where things get a little tricky
@@sharifbrown3567 Don't tell me Hard is easy when it has ambush spawns and hordes of enemies with stats close to your units.
While maddening in 3H was obviously not tested at all, it does give you all the tools you need to beat it easily. The problem is that to get them at all you first have to turtle your way through the first 2 chapters with nothing but a bunch of rookies. A Jagen would have done wonders.
Yeah I feel the same way. I wanted to try out maddening mode for my second play through and the mock battle was just a really frustrating slog. It really gives a bad first impression. That map wasn't exactly a walk in the park on Hard mode either, now that I think about it. I really wish they would just let us change difficulty at will though instead of letting you rank down but not up. If they really want to stroke peoples' egos for beating the game on the hardest difficulty the whole way through, just put a mark on the save file or something.
@@yoso378 Yeah, the mock battle was pretty brutal compared to most of the game. Especially if you have to deal with the Blue Lions with both Dimitri and Dedue rushing towards you.
It's no Jagen but I made a video on Ignatz that goes over how absurdly strong he is with the devil axe in ch2. kzhead.info/sun/mNNwe8OwoKRrhJs/bejne.html
@@yoso378 Maddening mode is extremely tough until the Miklan chapter, after that your characters should be strong enough to carry you through the game as easily as in hard mode
Three Houses maddening changed my default tactics in general. I got so used to turtling that when trying Conquest hard mode, I was genuinely stumped for strategies. 3H maddening also encourages cheese strats (I abused stride and divine pulse so well on CF chapter 12 that I'm genuinely proud).
what do you mean? FE12 Lunatic Reverse is totally balanced bro :^). These videos are great, keep it up.
Thanks! I dunno, based on what you said about playing lunatic FE12, it sounds very fun
If you like archees and mages
@@ProfessorBopper so you made clickbait vids before even doing your homework?
@@powerfulberry237 sarcasm
Right now, I am in the middle of Conquest Lunatic (chapter 21. With a 4 paralogues beaten). After playing through CQ 5 times in Hard mode, for I loved it so much, I was absolutely amazed at how different the game plays on Lunatic. Of course, it is harder. Chapter 10 took three tries for me. But it is so creatively hard. New enemies being placed and skills being added to pre-existing drastically change the play-style of the chapters in a better way. Enemies aren't the only things altered. Some miscellaneous map aspects were changed from hard mode. Such as the dragon vein in chapter 12 (the pots with poison/tonics one) being moved further into enemy range, drastically changing strategies. Or Soleil's paralogue reducing the available rubble down to two. Little changes like these are all throughout the game, and it is a joy to find them. In addition to all of these big changes, there are also some small mechanics' changes that do signal that the map designer knows what he is doing, and playtests the maps. Such as making level-ups set in stone; if you have a speed-screwed Nyx/RNG-blessed Kaze for example, you cannot RNG-abuse the level-ups to change the fate. You also cannot boss abuse; after a certain point, bosses stop giving EXP and weapon EXP. Not only do these changes affect the game in a meaningful way, but it is also just adorable to know that the map designer KNOWS of the tricks players pull, and have him/her patch them up to surprise us. Combined with Fates' excellent UI and mechanics, CQ lunatic has my vote for the best designed hardest difficulty.
Agree... Except for Chapters 26 to Endgame. I've played Conquest Lunatic once, it can be fun until Iago starts spamming Enfeeble, Freeze AND Hexing Rod on you. Particularly painful once you reach Hans, as he could One-Shot Xander and Effie (my strongest units) without any effort.
@@sebastianescalante5618 I consider myself to have beaten conquest on lunatic 5 times, but that's only because I respect myself enough to not even bother with cq endgame on any difficulty above normal phoenix, lmao
10000% agree. Conquest lunatic was the most fun I've had in fire emblem probably ever lol
Oh my God you're narrative and the way you fill in words with standard Fire Emblem terms kills me you are an instant subscribe
Not to mention how you talk about DonDon. He is literally the god I pray to at night. To one day play FE without a console, but a piece or paper or Excel sheet that he must use. But then again he is a god, maybe he writes all the info in his head. All hail DD151
Right 3 houses and it's 3 difficulty: Kinder garden Easy Bullshit Not saying I don't want insane difficulty, it's just that there is something missing with what we got, a true hard mode.
I love three houses as it was my first fe (also the only one because with so many games and so little money I couldnt quite manage to play another one.) But goddamn its difficulty is just dumb hard just feels to easy sometimes. I finally got over my anxiety about classic mode abd that kind of really helped my latest playthrough. Tho even then divine pulse kinda of made that a fluke too in some cases.
agreed. love the sweet spot where you dont have to be uber carful and boring, but you still need to respect strategy and good play to succeed. where you can try some interesting stuff that might work instead of instantly being punished for not being optimal. idky, but in my head I always call this sweet spot “heroic” from halo. challenging enough that you cant go all willy nilly, but not so challenging that you only run around with plasma pistol and headshot weapon.
@@midshipman8654 I get what you mean, I really like Conquest hard mode, it's really challenging, rewarding and you can still try new stuff every run.
Yeah just going back to conquest lunatic for the true hard mode lol. 3 houses maddening/lunatic in japanese still sort of not that hard
I don't think that Hard is too easy, but I'd like to see a difficulty between Hard and Maddening's level of difficulty.
One problem I have with some of the recent fire emblem is how extreme the difficulties can be. For example awakening and three houses hard I find too easy and not different form normal, While there maddening and lunatic are huge jumps in difficulty. I wished there was a difficult between hard and maddening because I’m someone that wants something hard but not ridiculous(i.e shadow dragon and mystery of the emblem difficult that between normal to lunatic)
Outside of the Miracle bosses, I do find Maddening very fair. You have enough divine pulses and a good idea how to tackle the game in an optimal way after roughly two hard playtroughs(fresh saves). While Awakening just manages to be utterly unfun and boring, providing no sense of archievement once you manage to giga break the game, 3 Houses instead gives you fifty million ways to tackle problems and let´s you run wild problemsolving, which makes it imo the best hardest difficulty in any Fire Emblem.
FE12’s Maniac mode strikes the best balance between those, I wish the games after it kept that
@@Realag666 I agree, I think the biggest issue is the early game, where you don't have access to a lot of shit, and you don't get a jagen like you do in other games. and another big issue is the maps that have ridiculous amount of reinforcements who are also ambush spawns which is not fun to play against.
Personally I find that hard mode in awakening is just.....why. Why did they think it would be a good idea to put same turn reinforcements in hard mode. The actual difficulty of hard mode itself is fine, but same turn reinforcements are just unfair. I tried playing on normal mode, but it just feels too easy now
Sonja A. Martin plus with the flat maps and what not, yea its not fun
Moral of the story: Make your own fun. I just did a Shadow Dragon H2 run...but only with bad units. Vyland was my paladin, Macellen all the way, Thomas over Gordin and Gordin was already bad. It was good stuff. The quality of the FE game too, is how well you can make that fun. I do not like LTC, or crazy fast strategies, but most titles allow for my style and this guy's.
Using Thomas is genuinely crazy and I'm impressed you managed to do a bad unit run in Shadow Drago! So many characters get off to such rough starts in that game
I don’t mind there being an unfair difficulty for people who are into that sort of thing, I just wish there was a difficulty between hard and lunatic. In most Fire Emblems hard mode comes out the gates swinging and tapers off pretty quickly once your units levels get into the mid teens. I’d like an experience that can stay hard without making the first few chapters unbeatable if you don’t get lucky.
The greatest example of a hard mode that actually makes you think and strategies differently without artificial difficulty is Hector Hard Mode in FE7. Even the slight differences between normal and hard modes in both Eliwood and Hector modes have unique changes such as different enemy layouts, less or more deployment slots, different weapon access, units with hard mode bonuses to accommodate the difficulty, etc. Hector Hard Mode even has more chapters than Eliwood Mode, and even an extra chapter compared to Hector Normal. It's well thought out and fun difficulty, and I wish Fire Emblem games went back to interesting difficulty changes that make me want to think more, rather than make me want to grind more.
HHM is also helped by having a good variety of mission objectives. Other than Battle Before Dawn, HHM is really, really fun and I agree with what you say here
I'm with you on everything except the limited deployment slots, those always felt like a super artificial way of raising difficulty, and it takes away from the fun of using a variety of characters. I would've preferred if they gave the average enemies slightly better stats
@@cobaltobject1855 Yeah midgame enemies in HHM bar Cog of Destiny Valkyries are trivialized pretty easily, which incentivizes just spamming paladins and fliers, with Heath, Marcus, and Sain coming to mind especially. Raven's insane offense is undermined by the fact that the things he's capable of are nothing unique. Oswin's durability is meaningless when the enemies do no meaningful damage to bulky mounted units. There's no reason to train these two characters and it's likely that you lack the deployment slots to even justify fielding them.
@@ametaslave7314 Raven is pretty damn overrated on anything but 0% growths. He's good but unless you promote him to get hand axes he's gonna fall behind your mounted units (which often don't even have bad stats, e.g. even without Lyn Mode it's not all that hard to train Florina to be a decent combat/rescuebot as a Falcoknight, or Marcus who is just broken) which means his good stats go to waste on big maps. Guy is in the same boat on HHM but I actually get more use out of him because he has maps early on which are small and have a lot of enemies he is practically designed to kill (slow axe users like 13x).
HHM doesn't have an extra chapter compared to HNM, not sure what you're thinking of there. Otherwise, though, yeah I agree.
The difference between Awakening's Lunatic+ (or normal Lunatic for that matter) and Three Houses's Maddening is very large. Maddening in 3H barely provides a challenge to the experienced player due to how extremely prevalent stat-boosting consumables and gold is. The death knight fights can be skipped at little detriment and the only reset-inducing fights are probably Hunting by Daybreak and the final bosses. Not to mention the non-depletable nature of magic that gives you access to multiple uses of silence, resque, and fortify when earlier games gave you those resources sparingly. Lysithea with caduceus staff then becomes a supposedly-glass-cannon unit that is actually a cruise missile that can be used at 0 risk. Send it in, 4-range ohko on anything, and then use resque to bail her out from halfway across the map. Lunatic+ on the other hand is so artificially made to be bullshit that you have to reset dozens of times just to get the RNG stars to align in such a way that there is even a statistically significant chance of beating the level. Unless you grind with DLC, this mode constantly has you starved for resources and you *need* the new-game-plus-esque renown items to just survive past arena ferox.
Death knight fights are easy to figure it out. And this is my first maddening 3houses run... lol Lysithea is god
It’s honestly surreal Fates has Conquest attached to the same titles as Rev and Br which have just mindless stat increases
@Daniel Paul Nohrian Trust was pretty broken but so was Quixotic, Death Blow, Certain Blow etc.
Conquest lunatic is the only S rank difficulty one that even remotely comes close to being balanced personally.
Yeah, it’s isn’t the game’s fault Camilla and a Charolette supported Xander can make a good chunk of the game easy, and even then it’s a hard, but THEORETICALLY POSSIBLE FOR MORTALS, challenge. Meanwhile Lunatic+ is an abomination that should’ve never existed. I love Awakening to death, but the fact that your ability to win is literally based on how lucky you are with the enemy only skills is complete bs. Normal Lunatic was still a bit much, but it at least wasn’t literally an RNG wheel.
Conquest Lunatic is very enjoyable. Awakening Lunatic and Lunatic+ looks painful to play.
@@justanotherweirdo11 isn't the meta to do Spd+, Mag- F!MU to get the Royal Family of Snipers?
@@tasanokiranoko881 I wouldn't know since I'm not apart of the meta and didn't go Sniper.
I'd disagree there, but that's mainly because I think Conquest itself is a bad game and one of the worst FEs.
I thought the intro was gonna end with "... and that was still more fun than playing Fire Emblem games on the highest difficulty."
Same
Huh... I find the Fire Emblem community's fascination with one turning chapters to be... kinda weird, because I don't get motivation to do that at all. All the more power to the people who love doing it, I just personally love hunting down all the enemies on a chapter, trying to figure out ways to maximize experience, make sure everyone is useful, and have a large, balanced party that turtles while the enemy is being aggressive. Basically, 3H maddening is the most fun I've ever had in a Fire Emblem game, because I felt like each turn I had decisions to make, had to figure out the perfect place to put my units, while also still having a lot of control and freedom over how I trained them. Some of your points I'll agree with, I'm not a fan of ridiculously statted nonmoving bosses that you can isolate and take your time killing. However, I think pegasus knight reinforcements or incredibly powerful enemies swarming you is a totally viable tactic. Basically, I'm good with turtling as long as its active turtling, enemies coming at you constantly and forcing you to reposition in defense. If there were no divine pulse, I think I would have hated 3H maddening, but there was, so I found it... really not too bad at all, honestly, and super fun.
I feel exactly the same my guy. The obsession with "this strat is the only strat" in a series where you're encouraged to have your own strat and use the units that work for your style. It's just something confusing af.
Completing a map in the first turn means you don’t have to deal with an Enemy Phase. In games where EP is not skippable, watching excessive Enemy Phases is pouring time down the drain that you could be spending actually playing the game. And, if the enemies are strong or excessive in number, it’s generally easier to end the map quickly rather than attempting to withstand the onslaught. Ironically, an LTC strategy often requires less thinking than attempting to routing the enemy in a map where the objective isn’t rout-based, because you’re spending less time on the map. Instead of thinking about the best way to kill every enemy, you’re only thinking about the easiest way to get to the chapter boss (and maybe seize). It’s easier to just think about killing one enemy than killing everyone. This is why I and other casual players sometimes borrow strategies from LTCers- it makes the game easier, no matter your playstyle. It’s not the only way to play maps, of course, but it certainly helps, and in my personal experience it does make the game more fun.
I think though that most of the time FE is still bad a pressuring a player in a way that makes turtling fun. Personally I have the most fun when I’m in a tight position and I somehow weasel my way out of it. Or when I manage to pull off a crazy and long winded strategy that one turns a chapter. But in both situations, it’s just when I actually have to use my brain to figure out how to make things work out.
I just like the warp staff ok
Honestly Three Houses Maddening with Pulse to me felt like the best designed Fire Emblem I've played. I self imposed some restrictions like limited recruiting and no greenhouse, and it was insanely fun trying to survive the ridiculous tactical challenges that a lot of the maps were. I really don't like the monastery aspects, but it's a necessary price to pay for how fun I found it.
Ambush Spawns are the brainchild of Loptous himself. Any mode with ambush spawns are an automatic 'no' for me.
Yeah like seriously? Especially in higher difficulties, FE units can be really frail, being blindsided by units that you had no indication to the existence of and then having those enemies kill your units is terrible. It makes awakening in particular so much harder than the game really is.
Me coming into the video thinking I’ll get a general understanding of Three Houses difficulty, but getting the most “holy shit” intro story ever: 👁👄👁
What I enjoy in these modes is the ability to basically abuse the game’s mechanics without becoming overpowered.
Something that Fire Emblem Gaiden did all those years ago, that actually worked as a balanced difficulty increase, was matching your units one-to-one, both in terms of stats and army size (in Alm's campaign at least, Celica's was a bit different). If you had around 10 units, the enemy would have around 10 units as well, with stats similar to what you were likely to have at that point, so every fight felt difficult but fair and an even match. Even the fact that promotions set your units at a baseline of stats was accounted for, and meant that each encounter, moving past the places where you could reasonably promote at, was balanced around the promoted units too.
Awakening Lunatic+ (and to some extension even just Lunatic) is so unbalanced, it should be illegal. The prologue is already difficult and requires a lot of Soft Resetting. And you have to make sure to have Robin gobble up every bit of exp you can get. Chapter one isn't all too different, just that you have to protect more units now and hope the Boss moves in a way where that's even possible (obviously also have to soft reset for good skills). Chapter 2 is an absolute nightmare: If your Robin isn't strong enough, forget it. Freddy can't carry you through this alone, and nobody else even stands a chance other than a trained Robin. (Even with a Robin that killed pretty much every single enemy in the previous 2 chapters, this Chapter took me a combined 8 hours to beat, 7 hours were spent soft resetting). Chapter 3 is basically Chapter 2 on steroids: From this point onwards, enemies also come equipped with Pavise+/Aegis+ and Counter (Because Pass, Vantage+, Luna+ and Hawkeye weren't enough i guess). This chapter is why you want a +Def Robin. Without it, you have to essentially soft reset until you get a 1 in a million godluck run where there's only Pass, Hawkeye and Vantage+. Makes my strategy game feel more like gambling tbh. (Btw i went for a +Skl Robin because that's what i always go with and oh boy was it not fun. Beating this chapter took at least 3 times as long as Chapter 2). Chapter 4's only real hurdle is the Boss, Masked Marth. They are much much stronger than any of your units (of which you can only bring 6 this time btw), can move much further than any other enemy unit on the map and can heal an infinite amount of times (for 20 Hp each) cuz of their Weapon. ). If it weren't for a lucky Anna-spawn with a Master Seal, this would've taken a couple of hours as well for me.) Having to restrict your IV options on character creation just to be able to "consistently" beat the first few chapters is just ridiculous. Oh, and good luck progressing further if you don't have the grind DLCs. Without them, leveling up your units between chapters is nigh impossible. Awakening doesn't give you any units that are even close to the strength of the enemies, and the last units to join you (aside from children) are Henry, who joins you about half way through the game in Chapter 13, Say'ri, who joins you 2 Chapters after Henry in chapter 15, and Flavia/Basilio, who join you in Chapter *23*. You have to level your units between chapters, but leveling units without DLCs is basically impossible. tl:dr Awakening on Lunatic+ is pay to win. Thanks for coming to my TED-Talk.
Actually some of the best content I've seen recently. Keep on Bopping
I never want to disappoint the Bopp Squad
I did a Bernadetta maddening solo run, and quite a few of the maps required me to abuse things like Pass, high movement, Encloser, and Deadeye to weave around enemies and snipe the boss before the enemies murdered Byleth or Edelgard (who were at extremely low levels). Quite a fun silly experience overall.
Those strats are what I live for
Well done. I hadn't given the topic much thought before, I enjoyed your thoughts and delivery.
Thanks!
Put bluntly, recent fire emblem games's hardest difficulties tend to be more in the 'slot machine' range than in the 'tactics game' one. I remember taking one look at how lunatic+ worked in awakening and just LAUGHING and wondering what kind of masochist it took to actually enjoy that. I did end up doing it. But that was a ChromFRobin pair up with MorganFlucina pair up added in later on, where ALL the xp went to them, and Morgan and Frobin spent basically the entire run, from the moment it was available, with nosferatu spam. Even with that, even with basically the best stats available and effectively the cheesiest tactic in existence, I still had to restart chapters to re-seed the enemy skill distribution on a bunch of chapters. I remember explaining it to my father as 'what if you had chess, but the other side rolled a die everytime they moved a piece, that could let it move as if it were any other piece on the board, and move twice for each of your turns'. He got the most offended look I've ever seen him have. Recent fire emblem games' harder difficulties, rather than relying on constructing a puzzle, or a scenario that forces one to use more complex tactics to secure victory, have been just stacking the stats against the player to an absurd degree and throwing a dice roll on top. That's not fun. That's not fair. It's not a challenge, it's forcing the player to rely VERY heavily on RNG (or grinding out inflated as heck stats), something that turn-based tactics games are supposed to avoid. The goal with their balance, is to have bad players fail in general, average players crossing their fingers every now and then, and good players never having the result determined by RNG. Even Disgaea, for all it's grindy glory, NEVER forces the player to rely solely on RNG or stat inflation grind to succeed. Even in their optional superboss content, a good strategy is more important than whether you have max stats.
As an avid lover of a challenge, I've found far greater enjoyment out creating my own self imposed challenge then going beyond hard in most games I've played lately. Not using the 3 Houses Unique weapons because "They are evil", Not using healing items, or limiting my accessible options while the game has its own hard settings just makes things more fun. Its life trying to hit me with its unfairness, while also giving me something I personally want to achieve and strive for in addition to just clearing the game. Im glad I'm not the only one who sees game challenge as an analogy for life and your own personal ability to overcome it. First time viewer, but love the content so far. Keep it up!
Ah yes, "LTC is the only way to play Fire Emblem" forgot about that being a law in the FE community.
This is something I could have been more clear on, but the point isn't that LTC is the only way to play (it's not and it's not what everyone wants to do). It's that many hard modes become easier if you play faster (not LTC fast, just faster than you normally would) and the games don't do a great job at teaching players how to go fast (again, not LTC fast, just getting a bit of a move on).
What does LTC mean?
@@serezelveydawn Low Turn Count
@@serezelveydawn Low turn count. It’s a type of playthrough where you try to be beat the game in the fewest number of turns possible
Oh, does this include ending the chapter in like, one or two turns using the warp staff? Or is that considered liked an illegal move.
Just found your channel and loving it! You have another new subscriber, my friend!
Your videos just popped up in my recommended. Top quality content =)
I honestly really needed to hear that metaphor you recited in the beginning.. I have been experiencing trouble accepting that sometimes things won’t work the way I want it to. :)
Some interesting thoughts. I actually do think that lategame Azure Moon Maddening encourages fast play with all the kill boss objectives, combined with super threatening generic enemies (which is exactly what you suggested). But I also have my doubts about whether that was an explicit design choice. The thing that's done the most to get me to play fast is playing 0% growths, though. I set out to low-turn my 0% growths runs from the start, but even if that wasn't an explicit objective, it's sort of built in to the incentive structure. You spend a lot more time not wanting to waste resources (like strong weapons) and not wanting to engage scary enemies, and a lot less time worried about getting all the EXP you can, relative to playing normally. Totally agree that games should ship with the mode built-in.
Considering Hunting by Daybreak, I doubt there was much balancing or a clear vision about how maddening mode was meant to be played. I do agree that 0% growths are a great way to learn faster play because I find that slow play comes from three places (generally): playing blind, excessively min-maxing experience, and memeing with shit units. That second one is a habit that the games should try to break players out of, and 0% growths does a great job of that
@@ProfessorBopper That point about min maxing experience is a good one and the main gripe I have about how the game scores your play at the end of FE7. If it was exactly the same but didn't have an experience rating, playing for score would be a lot more fun.
@@Regdren It's like Mekkah says: ranked runs make you play badly.
Imma be honest, I love the lack of balance buteven more I'd love to one-up your suggestion - screw built-in 0% growths option, make built in 0% option as well as add built-in randomizer. One would think IS would notice we randomize FE for over a decade and add randomizer dlc so they get cash and we can randomize without hacking the console or waiting for functional emulator.
even still people would want control over the variance of the randomizer, options to control +/-X for movement +/-X% on stat growths etc, as such I doubt IS would get it all right on the first go and fans will still want to put in updated randomizer patchs
I just finished Maddening Blue Lions 3H, and I’ve beaten Lunatic Conquest, Path of Radiance hard mode, Shadow Dragon 5 stars, and have gotten to chapter 18 in classic Lunatic+ Awakening with no dlc grinding... Fire Emblem is great at making its game difficult in different ways and in new ways. 3 Houses removed the Jagen character entirely and made each character more flexible. Conquest maximized the weapon triangle and skill builds with different classes. Shadow Dragon makes you optimize boss and arena abuse. Awakening forces you to use use Frederick only the minimum amount so he doesn’t become a liability in the late game. Adding casual mode also makes things less stressful while still playing higher difficulties. They make you break the game mechanics or find the weaknesses, but there’s always an element of luck which is what makes it fun.
Subscribed Not only is there fire emblem, but he also dropped pathologic as well, that’s my boy...
It would be dope if you could unlock a mode that allows you to create a run with these parameters whenever you want to. Like, I can choose to have every map have Fog of War, and have no weapon triangle, but not 0% growths. It also could doesn't have to be only for difficulty, like that's how they could introduce randomized runs or reverse recruitment.
I enjoyed maddening, but I only realized it after I had beaten it.
It be like that
I am on the final map of Azure Moon maddening. Each run takes me an hour it feels like and im trying to do it and i have even allowed myself to accept a few deaths. I almost killed Edelgard once. I got so fucking close
@@music79075 You can do bro. Its there. I spent 21 tries on that map. Only even got to her 3 times. Youll get it.
@@legionofAlexander its just so crushing when you finslly get to her and you just need the one 37 percent chance to hit to miss and then she hits then reinforcements come from the stairs and finish off both of your healers
Great vid. I've had a hard time understanding why I've been having such a hard time enjoying the newer games in the series gameplay and felt the difficulty had been gone. This helped explain it that I'm being just too patient for them now.
In place of (or addition to) the Maddening type modes, having "Alternative" or "Challenge" modes would be cool. Like a menu with toggles for things like, turn on/off the Weapon Triangle, or 0% growths, or one of my favorites, one I call "Enforced Growths" where the units grow exactly as their averages say. A 40% growth becomes a gain of 0.4 per level, which means since the game rounds down it would be 0/0/+1/0/+1 repeat. Then at max level it rolls normally based on accumulated totals. So if you hit level 20 on a Mage, it stays enforced. But hitting level 20 as Sage, if you have say an accumulated 0.8 Magic stat, it will roll with an 80% success rate. Or quite possibly the worst possible challenge: Seth Died to Valter in the opening cutscene challenge.
Great video. Also, its really nice knowing other teachers play Fire Emblem, lol.
Turtling isn't that bad if the map is explicitly designed for it, I like the Radiant siege maps where you're vastly outnumbered and have to leverage an advantageous position to win(and there's usually a boss hanging out in the back with some kind of goodies so you're incentivized to break out eventually)
Fire Emblem Engage waiting room. You make really good videos and they are fun to revist
The problem with Maddening for me was that I didn't really want to optimize all characters to the degree of making half my army wyvern riders. I kind of like that roleplay aspect where every character has their niche and such. Of course, not abusing the broken mechanics is just asking for trouble in a mode designed to crush you if you don't do so(or buy DLC). So yeah, I kind of gave up at the Battle of Garrag Mach and changed back to Hard Mode.
What an interesting Fire Emblem channel to come across, and part of the way though, I'm sitting here like, Idk why I'm listening to the guy getting hit by a car or his kidney stone, in a weird way I don't even want to imagine. However. I'm a sucker for Fire Emblem, You get a subscription.
Lunatic+ IS balanced as long as you get max stats and ALL the class skills for ALL the characters including the children, then you'll only have to worry about losing half if your army due to a single unit that has Vantage+, Luna+, Counter and Pavise+/Aegis+ (maybe throw in a Hit+ or something just to pour acid into the wound) with a hand axe or something and only being killed by literally throwing your units into the meat grinder until someone crits or their weapon breaks upon the fallen and broken bodies of your cold and lifeless corpses you once called comrades. Or you grind a dark mage (or Sage with Shadowgift for the highest magic cap possible) with Sol/Aether to stack health absorbed with Aversa's Night and Armsthrift and a 50+ Luck stat so it never breaks just so your unit can hold out against it until it crits you in 3 turns. Side note: my lunatic+ file I'm currently grinding is over 300hr+...kill me
Normal mode gang rise up
Yay you mentioned Radiant Dawn! I didn't know better at the time and just thought that Fire Emblem just did that with it's harder modes and was pleasantly surprised to find that's not the case. I felt that much of the strategy of the game was choosing which units would do well fighting in certain areas and removing the weapon triangle took away what made units and weapons different. I remember seeing a late Sacred Stones map with four mercs with swords surrounding an ax toting hero, all across a river. Yeah I could send a pegasus knight with a lance but can they handle the four easy battles and one tough one with disadvantage? If they are promoted, and have swords then can they stand to lose advantage against the swords to gain it on the tougher ax user? Would a berserker with a sword reaver be better? I like when making a game harder makes me have to think more, not less. I see recommendations for challenges of beating games with only one character, no skills, starting weapon, blah blah blah. That's impressive sure but then it sounds dull and unfun to do just to say you did it. I am doing a Sora no-attack run of Kingdom Hearts 2, where I can't select the attack command as Sora. It is far more interesting to me as, while I am limiting myself, I still have a lot of options to think about. Only thing is this time, they all have a cost and/or they are context sensitive.
It just goes to show how well designed Lunatic difficulty was in Conquest. Enemy stats between Hard and Lunatic are identical, what was changed were skills, subtle enemy placements and maybe even a new enemy or 2. And the difficulty shift is actually natural in the sense that what you learn while playing Hard can then be applied to Lunatic unlike in 3Hs Maddening where I had to forget everything I thought I knew about the game.
I started the video listening about the guy who hit him with a truck. I went in the other room for a second and came back and he was talking about fire emblem awakening. I wonder how that transition happened, but I do not know.
11:29 to add to that idea: FE should also give you more options on how to knock enemies off those platforms, cause the added Def/Avo or Heal is even more frustrating on top of the hard as nails difficulty.
6:00 I'm not disagreeing, but to me the biggest issue with fire emblem power creep is 1/4 of the cast are designed to be overpowered, and you can easily outscale everything by phasing out using multiple characters. They try to make things balanced around using potent characters, but it really doesn't account for streamlining them to all of your exp, because from basic class structure to character bases things are highly imbalanced, and some people conflate that as good without any reason because it was fun for them.
Honestly, it never occured to me that turtling *wasn't* supposed to be encouraged. All of the characters have friendships to grow with each other! I thought the challenge was figuring out how to position my allies so they could both attack, and still maximize the number of friends within handholding reach
IMO the series changed why you should do turtling in Awakening for me. Prior to Awakening, it was usually just game little combat boosts when standing next to a friend with a higher support level. Of course there were the support convos but Awakening took it a step further with pair-ups and such, plus it had the bonus incentive of leveling supports between certain characters for kids. I grinded out every support between every character across multiple play throughs (all kid and parent pairings too), and it was the first time I was turtling for the story convos instead of that I needed to heal a character again or reposition a unit that didn’t get far enough. As much as I liked the kids I wouldn’t be terribly upset if they never happened again, or if we could assign their parents without getting them to S lmao.
I watched this video as i'm currently switching between lunatic/classic CQ and maddening/classic new game blue lions. I'm much more willing nowadays to play fire emblem on the harder difficulties compared to a couple years back when i'd get my enjoyment from playing normal casual mindlessly. Despite a few of the maps, i'm currently having a ton of fun with conquest (although i'm a bit stuck on fuga's wild ride right now) and even though i'm on my second attempt of maddening and its a bit easier, the difficulty feels cheap and having to reset is infinitely more spirit breaking than it ever is in conquest because it doesn't feel like its meant to be fun. If i fail playing conquest it feels like my own fault, but oftentimes in maddening it doesn't feel like i lost because I fucked up. Conquest having actual enjoyable difficulty most of the time is a reason why i unironically like it more than three houses lol...
Tbh i'd say that difficulty modes like FE12 Lunatic Reverse and Conquest Lunatic are pretty balanced in the player's favor, it's just that the skill floor required to play through both of them is a bit higher than usual FE games. For as strong as the enemies are in H3/4 of FE12 their retain their defensive stats from H1 and sometimes even their normal mode counterparts range higher defense. The argument can be made that this cut and dry formula for enemy design is uninspired but I rather enjoy the type of gameplay that comes from enemies that hit hard but die hard. I sorta agree with the common opinion that the reason people don't like Fuga's map or Kotaro's map in Conquest is because it requires you to make smart plays and adapt over hunkering down and turtling, because the actual design of both maps are pretty robust. Also reminder that Conquest Lunatic and FE12 Lunatic Reverse enemies share the same stats with their hard mode and normal lunatic counterparts respectively, so I believe both were consciously designed and balanced around.
I’ve come around more on FE12 as I’ve read comments like this (your comment is particularly insightful), so it does have me thinking about why I considered CQ lunatic better designed than FE12 lunatic, and I think the reason (feel free to disagree) is because FE12 requires more in-game knowledge (like knowing enemy movement order) that isn’t easily available to the player (toggling through enemies to see movement order, for example, isn’t exactly something you’re going to figure out on your own) and that the thresholds to survive are so razor thin in the early chapters of the main game. I think FE12 would have a much better feel (and a much less trial and error feel) if the rainbow potion was given to the player automatically (not as DLC) and treated like a tonic in fates
I think part of it also is that FE12 doesn’t really have a difficulty curve per se and is consistently difficult throughout with 1-2 breather maps mixed in with a few difficulty spikes, whereas CQ Luna is pretty easy and slow early and but ramps up the difficulty from around C16 onwards. Honestly I do think it’s fair to expect the player to have a working knowledge of things like how enemies prioritize attacking player units since most FE fans probably won’t be playing the higher difficulties as their introduction to the game. There’s also prologue which while I rather dislike for being forced is functional as a sort of AI tutorial to me. That said I do understand the rationale behind someone saying CQ Luna is a better designed difficulty than H3/4, even if I do give the slight nod to FE12 for being a lot more difficult to break than CQ.
@@ziggymcdougal Now I really want to play FE12 H3 again and try to really break it down, especially since I know more about the game now than when I last played it
Personally, I hated the Kotaro map in Conquest because it was a giant slogfest of struggling like hell to get your units to actually end up anywhere. And the Fuga map in Revelations can officially suck my balls witynthe fucking wind mechanic that was ultimately only ever a hinderance to you because enemy placements are such that using the Dragon Veins for yourself rarely deals any meaningful position changes to the enemy since they lack fliers.
Beautifully put
You mentioned something about clever mode in fire emblem 4, has anyone documented the difference with the normal mode? Haven't found anything on KZhead. Great video btw
Matías Castillo I’m not the most knowledgeable on FE4, but as far as I know, clever mode makes it so that enemies are more likely to dogpile single units, or avoid attacking if they can’t deal damage or have a 0% chance to hit. It’s mostly minor stuff as far as I know, and I can’t find a good resource that documents all of the changes
@@ProfessorBopper so basically nothing lol Another thing about your video you didn't mention Lunatic Conquest, I think it's one of the most challenging games and makes changes to skills, enemy placement and even mechanics inside of maps. It gets a little unfair to the end but it's still very well done
Units don’t attack in Genealogy if 0% hit or 0 damage in normal mode... But the AI is bad in normal mode as oftentimes there are units that would normally die if attacked again but the AI decides to attack another unit
*sees (it doesn't) in the title* Me: "Yeah, I was about to say..."
I just picked up 3 Houses after a long time of groaning about the easy difficulty and visual novel elements, so I enjoyed this video a lot. A very good analysis. Though I would have appreciated a spoiler warning about the later stages of Dimitri's route which I'm currently on :(
A good way to do it would make a new sort of 'type' of unit, commanders. Units that give stat boosts and such but only while they're alive. This would mean strategically taking them out to make it easier on you would be for the best, or to have it be the enemy boss so that you have to deal with at least some boosted stats/skills.
I'm designing a FE-like game, and I'm finding great joy in advice like this. Please keep it up.
Thank you! I’m actually working on another video that will dig in depth on how first levels in Fire Emblem work, that is designed partly to help designers and rom hackers that I hop will be useful to people
@@ProfessorBopper I'm looking forward to it!
I actually unironically followed Shadowofchaos' Lunatic+ guide to the exact detail, but at some point the enemies missed Robin so many times that a specific enemy supposed to move towards Robin instead moved to the unusuable forced units and I had to improvise. Just because of bad (good) luck.
Yes take that man's truck in court
I wouldn't use shadowofhchaos' lunatic+ guide as a fair view of the mode. It's really old and basically calls the mode "unbeatable" under certain conditions which is completely untrue. There has even been a guy do deathless, resetless versions of lunatic+ on multiple occasions. I'm not saying it's an achievement I can even come close to myself, but the notion than lunatic+ is entirely RNG based is a ridiculous assertion with almost no grounding. Some maps do get harder depending on what enemies have what skills the enemies have, and you might have to change your strategy to deal with that. But saying "success isn't defined by your strategy/preparation" is completely untrue. Imagine a situation where the enemy has a 1/3 chance to spawn with a sword, 1/3 with an axe and 1/3 with a lance. Imagine if someone decided that they were only ever going to attack that enemy with a sword and when they died 1/3 of the time said "success isn't defined by your strategy/preperation". Like, yeah, if you had gone against an axe enemy, it would have been easier, but you could have also just prepared better for the fight. I'll fully admit lunatic+ has had some moments of serious, serious BS and there are some moments that feel incredibly unfun. Whoever though counter and pass were well designed skill for generic enemies to have is an idiot. I personally really dislike the mode, but there's a difference between saying "I don't like this" and "This mode requires no skill! You have to be really lucky or use DLC to make it work". I know this is going to come off as a criticism of this video in particular, but its more a problem that awakening has had for a while. People are constantly believing the old guides that unironically say you need DLC to beat lunatic+, or that just vanilla lunatic is impossible, or that galeforce is super OP on Sumia. It's just really frustrating to constantly hear this repeated over and over again. Also unrelated you mentioned something about a mode where hits are always 100%. It sounds like a good idea in theory, but it would massively warp unit balance in the games. The myrmidon/swordmaster style classes that focus on dodging are already incredibly weak
Wait, I didnt finish my comment. Oops. Anyway, the myrmidon/swordmaster class is already very weak and I think that further reducing it's bulk by deleting the ability to dodge would hurt them further. Isn't it enough that they are locked to the weakest weapon type at 1 range with poor stats apart from speed?
This is some interesting stuff on Awakening because I do admit that I’ve been greatly influenced by a lot of the early discourse on Awakening L+ and I haven’t seen much of that discourse evolve. I still would argue that variable skills of such power like pass is a problem, but probably not the game breaking problem that’s it’s often been framed as. I do think the “all attacks hit” idea would also work in reverse. It would make mymirdons worse, but would improve some other classes like axe bros because their HP would stand out and their accuracy problems would vanish.
I would say lunatic + requires a lot of skill (no pun intended) to beat, but the fact that skill distribution is random feels like a BIG mistake. The same map can be either relatively easy or nearly impossible to beat depending on which enemy has what skill, especially early game when your options are limited. And that does not feel fun at all. This leans into the argument that this mode was not really playtested, otherwise the devs could have chosen to manually assign skills to specific units to craft a difficult yet carefully balanced experience.
@@jierdareisa4313 Which is ironically what they did, but only for a few select bosses(By which I mean validar and the final boss)
@@ProfessorBopper Oh yeah I agree that the random skills can make the game vary in difficulty at times which can be annoying. Like, if none of the middle enemies in ch6 spawn with pass, the entire maps becomes incredibly easy as all you have to do is have a bulky unit sit on the choke point and get healed every turn. Perhaps the most frustrating thing is that most people play fire emblem in a very "trial and error" way, where they keep throwing themselves at a chapter, analysing their mistakes and incorporating them into their next strategy. The problem with random skills is that they stop players from being able to do that. Something you tried 3 attempts ago mightn't work this attempt because a random enemy spawned with pavise+ and now won't die when you attack with a certain unit. I reckon that frustration probably gets translated into the "this mode is impossible" rhetoric that was circulated back then. I don' think all attacks hit would buff axe bros. Axe bros are rarely bad because of their accuracy. I mean, it's certainly a weakness they have, but it isn't their main weakness. The biggest problem they tend to have is having low speed in some capacity. GBA fighters have poor speed bases/growths and get very little on promotion which is why they are so bad. Like, do you really think lot and wade would be much better if they had better accuracy? Is Bartre really going to get much better with his 3 base speed if he can always hit his hand axes? What axe bros need is Defence and Speed comparable to the rest of the army. That's why when a unit like Vaike shows up with decent speed/def he has some of the best combat in the game. Myrmidons are already so, so bad. Let's not bully them even more.
How to beat Fire Emblem Awakening Lunatic +: Pray for Frederick to Dodge Pray for Frederick to gain Speed Reset until he does.
First, I wanna say that this was a good video, and my only real complaint about it was that it wasn't longer to give more examples of how lame the map design is on higher difficulties. Second, I'm going to make the argument that P-8 is a good map. The criticisms I see levied against it here and elsewhere (you're not the first person I've seen that dislikes this map) is that it's bad because you are forced to turtle at the start, and I think this mindset comes from how the Fire Emblem community (at least the English speaking one, I don't know about the others) puts such an emphasis on turn count and blazing forward... But the turtling in this map doesn't work like turtling in other maps where it makes the map boring. Turtling is boring because you kill a few enemies and makes you play overly safe, then are under no pressure and just heal up and take the next few enemies. But in this map, you are under almost constant pressure in this map (other than one turn because the reinforcements start a turn later than they should), because this map is secretly a Defend map, not kill boss. This map introduces a lot of concepts that are relevant in FE12, such as that enemies won't always attack you if you're in range because they are linked in a group (the Levin Sword Thieves only attack if they can kill the unit or if you're in range of a Silver Sword Thief as well). Would I want every map to be like this? No, but it's the only map in the game where you are forced to do this and one of the few good defend style maps in the series, and having this change of pace is good. I think something that isn't given much appreciation in the is that sometimes it's fun to just slog through a horde of enemies and optimizing movements to fight wave after wave, which happens in chapters like 19 and 20 if you aren't LTCing them. It provides a different challenge from optimizing movement around a map, and is something I don't think the community really appreciates as much. Third, I completely agree that most maps fail to encourage the player to move at a brisk pace. It's been a while since I've played through any Fire Emblem games, but in the Tellius games, I think most of my "move quickly" is just because my units are generally strong enough that there's no reason to take it slow. Awakening, on the other hand, would sometimes punish you for going slowly by throwing hordes of reinforcements at you, but the map design in that game was generally boring otherwise, being a bunch of stat inflated enemies fighting your equally inflated units. And Lunatic+ is probably just the worst designed mode in the whole series. Conquest, as mentioned, had some maps that were pretty bad, but it also had a lot of maps that encouraged you to go quickly to get objectives (optional or otherwise) and was generally pretty well designed. Speaking of map design, I disagree that these difficulties weren't playtested, particularly for New Mystery (this is probably the same for Conquest but I haven't actually played that on a difficulty below Lunatic). If you check WOD for example, the way enemies are distributed or the where/what/when of reinforcements spawning is often changed, and it pretty much always feels thoughtful and deliberate to pressure the player at certain points. What really stands out to me in the design of FE12 though is that enemy Def/Res stats are almost never inflated. In fact, the number of enemies with an increased Def/Res stat over Normal difficulty can be counted on one hand: Hardin, Gharnef, Medeus. That's it. This alone makes it a huge improvement over the Hard Modes before it, because in those games a common issue was the early game balance between units was completely thrown out of whack, as low attack units (often archers and sword users) would become nearly unusable as they would go from dealing 5-6 damage to an enemy to 3-4, if not less. It also makes boss killing way less dumb because your units actually do real damage to them. I think this is a great change and am surprised they didn't keep it going forward. Conquest is similar here in that some maps encourage you to move quickly (like Eternal Stairway), but the big problem here is that stat reduction effects (Seal skills or Enfeeble) often encourage you to just dawdle around after clearing the immediate threat, and a lot of the time aren't surrounded by an immediate urgent threat. So we're actively encouraged to just spend a few turns healing up and waiting for our stats to recover, which is not great I also want to say that I think Warp ruins the difficulty of a lot of games it's in. While Warpskipping bosses in Shadow Dragon or 3H is entertaining for the novelty, it plays into the idea that Intelligent Systems doesn't really care about the balance of their game that much. They obviously know it's broken, because it's straight up removed in New Mystery's Lunatic mode and didn't exist in Awakening or Fates (although Awakening has several other terrible decisions, and Falcoknight Rescue chains do a good imitation of it). I think it's no coincidence that New Mystery and Conquest are the games with the most care put into their higher difficulty settings and neither of them have Warp. Compared to something like Three Houses where I've seen videos of people one turning the final chapter of Azure Moon, which is just silly since it's moving multiple units across ~35(?) tiles to then break through all four of the final boss's health bars. I think the fact that 0% runs are so popular is endemic of how broken the tools are in Fire Emblem, and I don't think they should be used as any sort of reference to how the games should be designed unless the series received a massive overhaul in how unit/character progression worked (which I wouldn't be against but I don't expect it out of IS). It completely removes a mechanic from the game and the runs shift RNG from levelups into landing low hit rate attacks and even rigging crits. It's a gameplay style that only pleases a very small portion of the playerbase as something to actually play and they'd have to ensure the game is actually beatable, which would in turn probably lessen the experience for the people who enjoy it because let's be real: people who play 0% are probably better at the game than anyone that's actually making it. I think I just wrote up an essay of stuff I disagree with you about here, but the truth is I still agree that a lot of FE difficulties are pretty poorly designed and not all that fun and I agree with a lot of your points (especially the one about bosses, I'm glad that shit has been toned down)
TomatoBisque the more I’ve read about FE12 the more complicated and interesting that game becomes. If you know which enemies are linked together and what enemy movement order is, then the game is intense and well-balanced. However, I think it opens up the problem of whether or not AI manipulation is a good design decision and how good it is to trial and error for discovering enemy movement order (such as having to identify which enemy moves first and then toggling through them) or trying to figure out which enemies are linked and what triggers them. I think those are two design decisions that are excessively punishing to blind Lunatic players but very rewarding if you know which enemies are linked/are look at WOD. I have definitely been convinced that P8 is well-designer with its problem coming from a mislabeled map objective. You’re point about the bosses reminds me of one thing I forgot to mention in the video. One thing I really like about FE 11 and 12 is that hit rates are not part of the difficulty. Hit rates are always really good so you never feel like gambling is a part of the difficulty (like with the awful hit rates in FE6 hard mode or Three Houses maddening) Of course, I don’t mind reading an essay. After all, I made a video essay and I didn’t make it for every one to agree, but rather to start some discussion about an under-appreciated aspect of the series
I think there's a reason there are multiple modes-the hard modes are not meant for casual players; they are only meant for people who find it fun or satisfying to face and defeat an arbitrary challenge. That said, I do like it whenever they do something in addition to just jacking up enemy levels, stats, and weapons to make it more difficult, like changing victory conditions, adding/decreasing a turn limit, or adding extra reinforcements on non-rout maps to incentivize completing the objective as quickly as possible. I think it's okay that they're not balanced, since that's part of what makes some people (myself included) enjoy them, as long as there is another, more balanced mode available for more casual players, which there usually is.
LOL'd at the Hyman puns
Nice video 👍🏼 i subscribed
I played 3 houses on Easy Casual on and I'm very happy about that. My first run still took me 114 hours and I had a lot of fun
Subbed on the e40 reference. Staying around because this FE content is world class
I feel like a large part of the hardest modes, such as Lunatic + in awakening, is just to give the crazy people who like a challenge... well, that. Just giving them a way to suffer and an excuse for spending countless hours playing the game
Trying to do Awakening Lunatic+ right after my Lunatic run. Which is fine, I didn't like having fun anyways.
Lmao
*PTSD in Radiant Dawn Hard mode*
I just wish that the xp system was different. Getting xp for each battle/enemy killed encourages me to try and kill every single enemy for that 1 extra level up. Maybe like units getting a fixed amount of exp after completing a map. Or like the Bexp you could get in Radiant dawn, but it would be the only exp you get.
"Maybe like units get a fixed amount of exp after completing a map" So something similar to what Echoes did.
Honestly i always enjoy grinding all of the dawn Brigade to tier 2 on the final Boss by breaking bis weapon and waiting out until the Throne heals him. I do this every play through for atleast an hour to get the dawn Brigade into a play able state and i like it.
Shoutout to people who play Fire Emblem 0% growths Easily one of my favourite genders
FE9 Maniac mode wasn't released internationally for a reason. FE9 and FE8 hard modes feel interchangeable with their normal modes tbh. I don't play the games much, but I can't tell the difference in the difficulties. Hector Hard Mode has subtle differences, but they find ways besides a drugged power creep to add difficulty. I'd argue that HHM would actually benefit from stronger enemies, though, because the game incentivizes spamming Paladins and Fliers as much as FE8 and FE9. FE10 Hard Mode is just annoying from a QoL perspective. Not checking enemy ranges is just dumb. I feel like a lack of weapon triangle is fine. It makes axes overpowered, but they already were to begin with. It actually helps some characters' performance (like Mia). FE6 Hard Mode is actually a lot more balanced than people give it credit for. Some bosses are dumb, but I feel like Gel is the only one that I really draw the line on. The Sacae route in general is a bit suspect, but it's also avoidable in favor of the simpler Ilia route. Henning is annoying as fuck, but Swordmaster Rutger does exist. FE6 Hard Mode in terms of map design does do a good job of incentivizing fast play with its reinforcements. Sure, they're ambush spawns, but they're in places that you could expect them to appear from. I'd say a big boon of FE6 is its cast. Sure, some of them are total hot garbage. Mainly the Ostian squad, the Archers, Sophia, and Ward. Early-joining characters tend to have their uses even if they fall off in the long run, though. I'd say no character in FE6 is a definite answer throughout the game. That's probably because of a balanced Jagen and the first Peg not being as OP as others are. Take FE8: Seth wipes his ass with a slip of paper that has "balance" written on it, and Vanessa is better than basically every other character because of her flight and availability being coupled with sufficient stats for the entire game assuming proper leveling. FE9 Titania and Marcia are similar. Marcus is amazing early on, but he falls off soon enough. Shanna can stay useful for much longer, but she's eventually outclassed by Melady (who is by far the best unit when you have her but you only have her for half the game). Also, there are plenty of characters that aren't amazing but are perfectly usable without Nino-levels of investment and give you some reason to use them (like Zeiss or Fir). Also, from a class balance perspective, note that FE6 is like the one game where being a Swordmaster is actually a good thing. It's also a game besides Three Houses where bows aren't a liability.
"I feel like Gel is the only one that I really draw the line on" He's not that bad if you have a magic user with good magic, accuracy supports in range and only attack from 2 range. Magic triangle, no chance to get crit'd and no res bonus from the gate he's standing on go a long way to make him actually tolerable.
Been recently replaying FE6 and I thought my shanna was gonna fall off early on. Then she just started getting a bunch of strength out of nowhere and she's now sitting at like 16 strength as a level 20/6 falcoknight. Her and Milady are absolutely sweeping every single map and I'm loving it.
FE6 absolutely is underrated in terms of unit viability. Even in casual playthroughs where I have no incentive to field scrubs, I find myself using some of the more average units like Treck/Noah, Ogier, hell I even used Barth and got lucky with speed levels. I even managed to get mileage out of a blessed Dorothy on my last ironman of FE6 hard mode. I’ll admit it’s partly due to the higher amount of deployment slots, but it’s also because FE6 has a huger cast and fewer outright dominant units like FE8 Seth, almost all of FE7’s prepromotes and FE9’s mounted units. FE6 is also designed so that you can’t just grab one paladin with a hand axe and throw them at the sea of buffed up enemies the game has. It ensures that you won’t just stick to the usual top tier units and give a chance to some more mediocre ones.
I managed to beat the Hunting by Daybreak Map by having everyone leveled up as much as they can and have a few units equipped with Swordbreaker as well as gambits that can stagger them. And yes I even did it on maddening for Golden Deer and Blue Lions on my first try. I had Retribution on some of my attackers too. But it is still bullshit that they will throw you right into a battle without preparing leaving you potentially soft locked. I had to look up the enemy formation and ally spawn spits ahead of time so I would know what to do. It is very challenging even if you're well prepped. In the case of the Blue Lions I am guilty of abusing Battalion Vantage + Battalion Wrath. It just works.
YOO PATHOLOGIC NAMEDROP IN MY FIRE EMBLEM VIDEO? SUBBED
Since you mentioned Pathologic…I’m not too well versed in the earlier games, but one thing to make things even more challenging would be having to make sure the units in your army eat. Combat performance fluctuates on whether or not your best unit got a full meal within the last 6 or so hours before combat.
They really should focus on a better way of making the gameplay interesting that doesn't promote incredibly long sessions of gameplay (at least not without option to save every few turns). While I'd personally say 3H's pacing is what made it less replayable for me, the difficulty also wasn't so great, but it also wasn't awakening lunatic which I just stopped after the first chapter. I can understand wanting to promote dlc, but people who don't care as much for it should also be given the option to play a reasonably challenging experience without massive enemy stat inflation. Ultimately, I'd rather they either add in four/five difficulties where only the last one is about bs mechanic abuse, or they implement sliders to let players choose how they want the game to play out. Having options similar to Draconic Mode from DQ11 would be nice too.
On Three Houses you can play on Easiest, Easy, or Ungodly Difficult. But in all honesty Maddening is really fun if you know a lot about the game, I've beaten every route on it and thoroughly enjoyed myself.
Meanwhile there’s me on hard mode classic, “man, time to send Edelgard and Byleth into the heart of battle with no reinforcements and 20 enemies in attack range...oh look they’re all dead. This was fun”
You described exactly what I'd like to see in a future difficult mode in Fire emblem. I don't want enemies that instantly one round my units unless I grind or rig rng. I want the gameplay to provide a unique experience that make me play differently to how I played in my playthroughs on lower difficulties. The 3Hs dlc kinda scratched that itch on about half the maps. I know many people who hated chapter 3 of cindered shadows but I honestly find it to be one of my favorite maps in the series. It encourages you to go fast or else you'll be surrounded by the reinforcements. It encourages you to save your divine pulses for the switches so you can reset if you activate the wrong one, and it makes sure you can't just turtle real slowly or else you'll be hit by reinforcements on both sides. It was this Really tense, struggle of trying to rush to the end to avoid being surrounded but also forcing you to think carefully about how you approach the large number of dolls that appear
On awakening lunatic mode, I focused all of my experience onto chrom and Robin. It was working fine until I kinda soft locked myself by reclassing both into flying units at the same time right before a chapter with an unholy amount of archers and wind mages. Before that, they were cutting down enemies like swiss cheese. I was able to grind out of the soft lock btw. Not entirely sure how this strat would work on lunatic+.
I played FE 12 Lunatic mode(the highest difficulty so far) and I just made it to chapter 2 with almost all units, but still, I must say, that it was HELL itself to do it. I feel playing more of a puzzle-based game than a strategic game. And also, I want to say that the Chapter 6x FE 12 is hard af(only if you want to recruit Caesar and Radd) and even in the normal mode it feels hard because you must do the right movement so neither Caesar or Radd die or kills one of unit of yours.
You know, you make a good point with how the game doesn't push you to try crazier strats. In fact now that you mention it why I loved the GBA games was thst exact reason. After I beat a map once I could do it differently the second time 3H feels like every map has to be approached the same. I remember in SS promoting Joshua the chapter after getting him because I realized I could have him take on the entire map by funneling him and Natasha into a choke point.
Lunatic Awakening. Please don't make me remember that nightmare
ShadowofChaos725, eh? Good to see Rey still getting some shout outs here and there.
If you're reading this, I'm still whinging from the 4 foot kidney string part
Honestly, Hector Mode, Conquest and Golden Deer really carry their games gameplay-wise
Blitzkrieg in Echoes is the best highest difficulty level in the series.
Nice video