This is such an interesting topic! I remember thinking about these concepts when I found out that the Fire Emblem Community largely did NOT get a ton of use out of Diamont in Engage when he was often times, my saving grace.
I'm working with a friend to create a "master" FE tier list encompassing all the games we've played. It generates a lot of fun discussions, and, aesthetically, it looks very impressive. But a lot of questions relevant to the video are brought up, because there's a lot of extra challenges that come up when ranking units across games. (The metric is "If I didn't make use of this unit, how much more difficult would the game become for me?") F Tier is one of the more well-defined tiers, consisting of units that make the game harder to play when to make use of them. The "XP thieves," if you will. It contains FE7 Rebecca - an Archer with downright bad stats in an enemy-phase focused game where experience is competitive and bow effectiviness is 2x instead of 3x. The thing about her is that, like many early-game Archers, she's good for dealing chip damage before she hits the bench. Even if her hit rates are unreliable, Rebecca generally isn't facing a counter, so you may as well go for it. If she's setting up kills instead of taking them, she's milking extra XP out of enemies, not denying it to allies. Also in F tier is a radically different unit in a radically different situatuon: Jade from engage. As an Armor Knight with a useless personal skill and unimpressive stats, Jade (we believe) joins too late to be a good investment. Like FE7, experience is fairly competitive in Engage - and to make Jade function as a mainstay on your team, she'll require other important resources that better units can make better use of. With favoritism and investment, Rebecca is still a very flawed unit, lacking the ability to Enemy Phase and bringing nothing special to the table. But with favoritism and investment, Engage is more than flexible enough to shape Jade into a genuinely strong combat carry, or just great support. In this sense, Jade has much stronger viability than Rebecca. I don't really know where I'm going with this. I suppose that, bottom line, it's all about opportunity cost - which can be rather invisible. But then, how do you apply the same scale to every game? FE7 Marcus is cracked out of his mind, as is Engage's Kagetsu - but given the differences in casts, is it justfiable to place an Engage unit anywhere above B or below C? Marcus is certainly a cut above Kagetsu, but is Lowen????? That doesn't feel right! Advice is optional, but I am receptive to it.
Honestly i don't think having S-to-F ranking in every game is a good idea. I feel it should be aknowledges rhat some games achieve a far better balance, and a better tought out challenge, than other games. They clearly put a lot of effort in making every character in conquest be able to achieve something, whike they clearly where on drugs when balancing revelation. Why those games should be treated as the same just because tier lists start at S and end at F. I feel we should strive for a consistent ranking system, such as S-tier being strictly for units that break the game they are in or F tier being for units that are basically unsalvageble no matter how much you do invest into them. A tier that has both Lyre and Timerra basically tell me nothing useful because they are not even close to be equally bad.
@@noukan42 You raise a lot of good points. (Thanks!) If I followed your advice to the letter, though, I think it'd end up kind of boring - a massively bloated C tier filled with units from games with balanced casts, with F and S being reserved for wildly unbalanced units. That said, if I keep going on vibes and try to rank units across games relative to one another, direct comparison becomes impossible, and I'll make dreadfully inconsistent judgements. Good metrics are what I'm after. And keep in mind, this isn't some sweeping assessment of how "we, as a community, ought to be ranking units." I'm mostly doing it for fun. And claiming Lyre
Two things : Literally every game in the series has XP competition because duh, if you're using different units they will have to compete for XP anyway, that's not exclusive to engage or FE7 lol Effectiveness in FE7 being 2x doesn't matter because FE7 enemies are super weak even Base Rebecca can literally one round some pegasus knights in ch18 HHM, or hector still dealing over half of the cavaliers HP with his prf, etc
I love this video! The big thing that I find frustrating about unit analysis and "good units" in FE is that FE isn't a series about individual units - it's a series about building a team of ~14 units that all perform different roles. No unit in this game exists in a vacuum, and like you say, everyone can be viable and good. For me the point of those out-of-the-box great units like Camilla, Kagetsu, Pent, etc is that they give you the space to invest more into those earlier units that need a bit more time to get going. Fire Emblem is meant to be about coming up with your own strategy to overcome the challenges you face, and that's different every time based on the units you use, how they've grown, what classes they are. If we all just used the numerically "best" strategies/units every time, FE would be a pretty boring series imo. Really the best units are the ones that you enjoy using the most, and the best strategies are the ones that you have the most fun using!
This nicely coincides with a run I’m doing of engage where I only use units that are considered low tier or overly high investment. It’s been really fun to see units I only heard negative opinions of (Timerra and Alfred) perform exceedingly well on Maddening. It’s also nice that this video comes from a channel that often showcases unorthodox play still being extremely strong and effective.
Great vid as always! I don't think it's really wrong from a language perspective to use good or bad in a somewhat comparative way. Good is a relative term that requires a context. Like in the example in the video of "good unit" meaning a unit who is contributing to an easy playthrough, the unspoken comparative context is the challenges put forward by the game. E.g. a unit is "good" if they contribute towards easily overcoming those challenges (and bad/not good if they don't). And of course, everyone will set their own benchmark for how much/how well a unit must contribute vs those challenges or how much easier they make those challenges before they become "good", or even "very good" (this is also why binaries are pretty bad for unit discussion imo, no room for nuance). For a non FE example, if I say an NBA player is good, people will (correctly) assume the context I'm using is the level of play in the NBA, but if I say the guy that dunks on me at the park is good, people will assume the context is the level of play at the park. IMO there are basically two baseline assumptions people make about the context when they hear/say a unit is good. Either good relative to the challenges in the game, or good relative to the other units in the game. But both are comparative on some level. To me the issue is less the word good and more a lack of clarity about the context in which units are being discussed at times. In the basketball example, everyone knows what I'm talking about, but in an FE context where I just say "Lyn is good" it's less obvious what I mean.
Well as always, I think we agree, but in a roundabout way haha. "Good" is definitely just a word, and words can be given any meaning, because language is made up. The expectation of language, then, is that we establish common meanings for words so we can actually communicate with them (from my understanding). Because the common meaning for "good" is also ambiguous (hence the question, "good at what"), there's even more room to use it in a variety of contexts. So yes, "good" can certainly be thought to mean "good at being better". But at that point, I ask whether we could just be using "better" in the first place, so other players can skip a few steps in an already difficult to navigate conversation. This is why I pointed out the "crossed wires" at 3:30. If we've established some context (making the game easy), then I suppose you could say we're comparing a unit to the game's difficulty. But I don't think that gives us free reigns to also compare how a unit relates to a game's difficulty in comparison to another unit. Or at least, while still upholding the common understanding of good as a positive adjective. So in that regard, then yes, it all comes down to defining context, and what we're saying something is "good" at. I think if we have the means to be more clear in the matter, we absolutely should, and our use of language is part of that. And then yes, I "straightforward agree" that binaries aren't great for unit discussion. As I showed with the viability check for the 3H cast/Sophia, you can pretty much just say "yep!" or "nope!" once you have a clear understanding of your standards (at which point, the challenging part is again on defining contexts). Not that we can't still have interesting discussion in a positive adjective context, as asking "how" good a unit is still asks us to make a lot of evaluations in how they relate to their game/game's difficulty. But comparisons are indeed another solid way to keep discussions engaging.
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I think also how someone plays and experiences tend to influence on who is good or not. like for me Dancers are dead weight. like yeah a unit that's allow another unit to move again can be useful. but I never like babysitting units more then i need to. especially when I get closer to end game. and to top it off more times then not I end up in a position were I don't end up getting enough use out of them to justify the slot in they in. also the fact a dancer caused one of my worse map lose put the fear of jesus in me.
Outside of lunatic or higher difficulties in later games, just about any unit can be used in any game. FE3 book 2 and FE5 in particular probably have the most viable casts in the series due to star shards and scrolls. I think comparative analysis is the best way to determine how good a unit is in a particular game, since even though you can use any unit, you probably don't want a full team of like, Matthis, Roshea, Vyland, Sedgar, Wolf, and Caesar in FE1, but it's easy enough to pick one or two of them that you want to train up and use stat boosters on.
I think the terms of being good and bad are fine, the context is nearly always in comparison to other units in the game which makes the comparison work. I agree it can be ambiguous with just that statement though and should be followed up with something more to distinguish what is being talked about though. For example I would say Anna is bad in comparison to other units in engage, she’s not unusable but Citrinne joins at effectively the same time and does her job better with far better stats when she joins and Anna doesn’t outclass her either even when trained . Anna is by no means as bad as Sofia but in the context of the game she is in she would be considered bad to other alternatives. I think the comparisons work anyway, it’s just helpful to make less ambiguous statements and be more clear instead of just a simple good/bad and make sure to follow up with the context.
I've said for years that calling Units "bad" is an extremely poor choice of words given that well over 90% of the entire series's cast is at least usable. So no complaints about being a stickler for language here. In fact, continue being a vocabulary nazi, please!
Thanks! I find FE sprites are pretty well documented, either on some wiki or SpritersResource. I have come across issues with sprite quality when transforming them during the editing process, so I just upscale them in a separate image editing program first. www.spriters-resource.com/game_boy_advance/fireemblemtheblazingblade/
I think i agree but tbh other than "good/bad are too vague, clarify your definitions when using simple terms in discussion" im not sure i understood the whole point
GBA's support system would make this whole discussion a lot more interesting if it wasn't extremely implausible to get past, say, Eliwood + Hector B in a normal playthrough. Oftentimes a unit is kind of ass by themselves but with some specific support arrangements can be pretty fun with other units. Rebecca sucks and Lowen is the definition of mid, but with supports and maybe someone giving 3x effectiveness back to FE7U + slightly higher speed thresholds, those two can wreak havoc, I'd think. A huge amount of the discussion is dumb as hell anyway, like people act like it's unintelligent to use "bad" units when their arguments for utilizing the "meta" strategy are more or less "I don't have to think as much or put in as much effort." Buddy, that is the definition of what an easy mode is supposed to do. You are going "haha I am so good at this game" by playing hard mode but making it easy mode.
Great video! Love your vibe and insights! I'm gonna throw my opinion in and say that SOME games (not all of them and definitely way less than what most players believe) do have an opportunity cost in using a specific unit, vs depriving another unit of that resource. And for that manner, I do think that argument needs to be looked at when comparing units performances. I speak a lot about "ease of activation" in my own videos and the same logic applies to me for most analysis. Does a unit require a promotion item? Who is it competing against for it? These things matter in terms of "making the game easier" simply by the virtue of having more stats/second weapon/movement to be able to perform actions. Two examples that immediately come to mind are: Fe 7 - Knight crest users. Most players tend to argue that, out of the knight crest users, it comes down to invest in either one of the early game cavs, or in Oswin for a promotion. Given the second knight crest comes a LOT later, whichever unit you do NOT choose, will have to suffer from not being to promote and obtain the promotional gains and stats from it. Because of this, there is an actual opportunity cost presented. Do we promote one over the other and each playthrough has to basically learn how to answer this question with regard to the investment decisions they made. On one hand, Oswin has fantastic stats, is already at lvl 10 and is widely regarded as one of the better combat units of the game. On another hand, the horses have more utility and mobility. What's preferable? That needs to be weighed in by the player's values obviously, which makes it subjective. FE 6- The hero crest user. This one is a little more clear cut in terms of the "usual" choice being Rutger due to his incredible stats and swordmaster being a solid class. But Dieck IS also a very viable option that has been around for early game... and there are quite a few other units that can compete for this too, wade, lot, oujay.. Ultimately, it does indeed become an opportunity cost option for this as well, since the resource is limited: Who is the best choice for this 1 item that can make significant strides in a units performance. Basically, all of this is to say, albeit playstyles are different and allow for different considerations between which units are "good", there is still an objective comparison being made between units that share similar resources due to the scarcity/applications of such.
I feel like another thing that makes these comparisons reductive is difficulties. Fe6 being the easiest example. Marcus & miledy are S tier to a lot of ppl but that just paints a wrong impression for first time players. They are told “u need Marcus & wyvern girl has busted stats” then they play on the only difficulty available and Marcus isn’t THAT helpful & that wyvern riders only got a ten in everything, the same that “mediocre pirate” has with worse promotion gains. It’s why when I make a list for friends or discussion I explicitly put them & deke in a tier expressing that they are significantly more impactful on specific difficulties. Because that way when I say “dekes not the best unit” they’ll get “oh on hard mode he’s not nearly as good at juggernauting”.
The funny thing is tier lists are absolutely horrible for new players, yer new players are the ones who likely want info about units Like new players aren't going to give a flying **** that Artur in Fe 8 is good because he has good magic stat/growth and gains C staves on promo so he can get warp faster then other higher magic units. Like wise they are not going to care that they can clear a chapter two turns faster if they run more cavs
If you do enough comparative analyses on enough units of a game you can sort them into low tiers, middle tiers, and high tiers. There's really nothing wrong with considering anything lower than the middle tiers to be "bad". Simple because they're obviously worse than par by a decent margin You're not gonna hurt a dev's feelings and anyone who uses those units also shouldn't have their feelings hurt by saying so. Doesn't matter that you can complete the game on insane with them. Because that's not the question. If you sorted the units and hypothetically put these X guys in the lowest 30%, then they're bad by your own methodology. From sorting them to show they're worse than the remaining 70% This aversion to using a simple verbal categorization is bizarre to me. "Bad" doesn't have to mean "can't cleanly finish the game". It could simply mean "super obviously lacking compared to the majority".
I know this isn't exactly what this video was about, but I think the way the fandom has used tier lists in the past ~10 years really hasn't help the way we look at units. I don't think tier lists are inherently bad or that we shouldn't have any at all, but tier lists that try to order units by general "viability/strength" aren't really that useful and kind of counter productive to understanding the qualities of units in a broad sense. They can be useful, but only when the context of what's being ranked is narrow and clearly understandable, otherwise you run into problems I feel. Firstly tier lists force you to order units from best to worst in a very absolute way. And yes, as the author you can note that two units are actually as good as the other, but because of the nature of tier lists you still have to place one unit above the other and people will draw their conclusion off of that alone. If you're making a "general" tier list units have many qualities you have to consider that can vary greatly, which are not only hard to compare one to one (How good is being able to use staves compared to starting with B Axes, etc.), but also interact with the other qualities the unit and other units might have. It's really hard to holistically evaluate a unit and all of it's qualities, while at the same time dealing with absolute statements like "X is better than Y." A lot of these tier lists don't rank units in any even somewhat measurable way whatsoever (like how much they contribute to clearing the game in as few turns as possible), but instead rank them based on general "goodness" as a whole, a concept that's so nebulous, it makes it basically impossible to actually tell why a unit is ranked above another without lots of additional context for the placement of each unit, so why even bother with the tier list, when you could just talk about units in general, since you have to do that anyway. Because of the environment of the game that's taking place around the units and how it's being played, "universal" tier lists, almost inevitably, end up needing a buch of extra discussion before you can draw any meaning from them. FE8 is a great example for this. In optimized runs the generally accepted "best" strategy is to have Seth kill everything and use other units to facilitate him. You could actually make a decent tier list for this specific context, because the criteria of A) is this unit Seth and B) how much does this unit help Seth, are much narrower and easier to measure than general "goodness". Because this is such a widely accepted strategy though, this way of comparing units bleeds into broader unit discussion, which is fine, but this now requires that every unit be measured in this specific context. And there's multiple cases like this in every game, meaning any tier list placement, in a "general" list, now needs a bunch of asterisks for every single unit, at which point why even make a tier list and not just a discussion. tldr I'd much rather people discuss why they think one unit is better than the other by actually discussing units, rather than trying to convey incredibly complex information like that in tier lists.
I appreciate this a lot, I've felt very similarly about everything you described. I think the example of "is staff access better than starting with B axes" demonstrates the issue very well. I actually was planning on discussing how while "better" is difficult to pinpoint, "better" is at least somewhat tangible. Because yeah, we then at least have a specific goal/playthrough to use as the context. I did somewhat reference that in my efficiency video, but I realized it was a little out of scope/off topic for this video in particular. I would like to address it separately someday, though that may take a bit more time.
This "bad unit" talk sits especially bad with Advance Wars players that happen to jump into Fire Emblem occasionally. The gameplay is almost equal, though the units in that game are tanks, anti-airs, helicopters, etc. There's no exp so none of them can get progressively better so there's no availability problems. So if you made an Advance Wars unit tier list, you'd be a fool. Most units have a place, even if some of them can be extremely situational (Missiles and Piperunners). There are times where cheap basic Recons that can only combat infantry are the best unit you can buy, since they clear out fog of war among other things, making them a sort of a Thief equivalent. While not excellent at fighting, Thieves and Recons have their place, and people flagging someone like Cath from FE6 as bad in a game where you want two thieves in the Douglas chapter for example, and the game where Chad is a prime bait for a multitude of ballistae, siege tomes and simply getting deaths from that one nearby cavalier you missed is very dubious. You only realize that worse isn't bad when you run out of betters. Then again, if you're expecting to fight bosses with Cath, then she's not a bad unit, you're just a horrible tactician. Every unit has a place and FE6 probably teaches you that better than others. Treck is kind of a silly guy, but if you lost Alance, then he's exactly there for that reason. _Don't spam Neotanks in fog of war if you have no vision; they can't use torches._ - Sun Tsu
Whenever people talk about a unit being “bad,” I interpret that as sub-optimal. My counterpoint is that when are the overwhelming majority of players playing “optimally”? It’s your own playthrough of a video game, and while there are better and worse choices, there’s not a hard line most of the time. Putting a 1hp unit who’s a game over condition into the range of enemies is considered bad. Using Kent when Sain and Oswin exist in FE7 is also considered bad, but you don’t interpret those uses of that word the same way, it’s sloppy to do so and yet people think there’s just a hard line for the latter as there is for the former. I always use Mia in PoR. Is Zihark better? Probably in more situations than he isn’t. Do I need to stop using Mia over that fact for Zihark, or not use any of them and dedicate 6 slots of my army to cavs, one to a cav cleric, five to fliers, and one to Ike? No, that’s dumb, even in the game where cavs are that good it’s still my game and my choice on what to vibe with.
I have revisited tier lists to play older games in higher difficulties and learn some strats and the lack of clarity is what messes me up. There is no real criteria to what is optimal, how is this unit helping you be optimal and what can they provide. I found FE12 Tier lists that work IF you have the full reclass tree, or for a newer player, how you explain that draug is A tier. Or in a kind of blind Echoes playthrough how is Silque S tier? I feel in trying to be elititst LTC there should be more focus on other types of playthroughs and challenges. It is also insanely tiring to watch a tier list to see: “this unit is meh but is a horse, A tier” (I see you Lowen). More criteria is necessary if we want to throw the good and the bad, because lesser units than most are top tier when a proper criteria is introduced
I've never understood why people value availability on unit performance. If what we are doing is analyzing which units do the most in the game, sure, a unit needs to exist to do stuff, thus availability matters. But I've almost never seen this kind of discussion because what people talk about is how good a unit is, where, availability almost always does nothing much unlike a draft race, for example. It just surmounts to a couple of supports in most games. A unit like Xander has nothing to envy from Effie or Beruka, in fact, Xander is just about to get better thanks to supports while the others might as well already gotten all what they can get and still underperform against him. When units compete for a deployment slot, something I value, all the maps I had with them mean nothing. I could have biases and want someone over another, that doesn't mean thier availability mattered. For casual play and plenty of "high" levels of play, availability really is nothing and weirds me out in tier lists and such.
I thought the same and still to a certain extent, but I started to understand the availability argument a lot better recently. For me it matters more in newer games as they have much more customization, so the ability to set up and level up things is a huge deal (imagine playing Echoes and having to gain weapon exp for weapon arts that you could already be using) and to a decent extent the fact that your team might not be to the strongest until they appear and by then someone probably has overcome them with proper investment. Yet it irks me because then you see some units appear way later in games that are complete S tiers everywhere and it is very puzzling. TLDR: Availability matters in opportunity of use concepts (I give Arthur Holsety 2.5 chapters before I get Ced so Arthur > Ced for the run) but terrible excuse to overrate early game and not penalize some S tiers
Availability allows more contributions so if a unit is the best but is only around for 2 chapters well they are not contributing much in comparison to the solid unit you had from stage 1. Especially if you can still beat those two chapters easy without them. Like Ced is a must use in Fe5 but he also comes in when like the game is over and your army most likely super good really he exists to salvage disastrous runs so he won't rate high on a list. Availability is definitely useful in a game like FE Edit: Likewise if Marcus in Fe7 came in around the same time as Isadora he would drop immensely on tier lists as the first half is when he is dominating and can do anything but second half especially without those few extra level ups he is a lot worse as while he is still a decent 8 move cav he is not so stand out in combat. Availability does matter in context though Like Gordon in Fe1 and Fe3 book 1 exists at start of game but is often considered way worse then Toma because Gordon suuuuuucks still promotion and needs 9 levels till he can promote halfway while Toma just needs two and you get hia promo item like a chapter after that is easy to get his two levels making him way better then Gordon despite way worse a availability.
I feel like most of these comparisons usually lack the context so it devolves into a fight of favoritism. Take the Lyn and Hector example of "Lyn is faster than Hector" but add "however enemies are very slow in their game". Now Hector's higher strenght is far more valuable than Lyns high speed, because her speed is overkill and Hector can realistcally get into doubling speed.
It's kind of funny, i usually end up with the viable/good strats filled with bad units since im older and play a lot of rpgs. it adds challenege and lets you really experience the game mechanics because you usually have use them all to get to a good place. Somewhere along the line, it became my default first run habit.
Ditto. Got into the community around Radiant Dawn and was annoyed how many units I found great and fun to use (growth early units) were being called BAD (Nephenee in POR was my first major introduction to a proper "Villager" without grinding like what was in Sacred Stones with the Trainees, so I really disliked the "trashing she was getting) I get YOUR opinion, but it's very annoying when they act like asses about it and act like their opinion is accepted among everyone (even had a shithead compare subscribers as to why he was right and I was wrong like that meant anything, imagine a reply to your comment having your screen name and subscriber count before being talked down to! My berserk button is when people devolve conversations like that because they don't have a point and all they want to do is WIN instead of making a point so they pull stuff like that!) Around Fates I just gave up and decided to play and say as I like, not like the jerkasses aren't just "going with the flow" (especially with Engage, I saw people who were willing to DIE on the hill of a character sucking just cause some big fire emblem youtuber like Mangs said something and their hiding behind them to be assholes, just to THEN change their mind if that same RUclips has a change of heart and act like they ALWAYS supported that idea! Even funnier if those like MANGS have a windfall of their reputation suddenly they had a revelation 😅. It's why I just don't bother! Time wasted arguing is time not playing my games and having fun! Plus at least the youtubers insert "their opinion" which the jerkasses ignore when using them as a shield! But I guess no community is free of toxic dump that can't STAND not being a dumpster wanting to poison everyone in the victinity😂)
What I learned from this video is that I wish everything were taught in terms of my favorite video games.
This is such an interesting topic! I remember thinking about these concepts when I found out that the Fire Emblem Community largely did NOT get a ton of use out of Diamont in Engage when he was often times, my saving grace.
Lowenough.
I'm working with a friend to create a "master" FE tier list encompassing all the games we've played. It generates a lot of fun discussions, and, aesthetically, it looks very impressive.
But a lot of questions relevant to the video are brought up, because there's a lot of extra challenges that come up when ranking units across games.
(The metric is "If I didn't make use of this unit, how much more difficult would the game become for me?")
F Tier is one of the more well-defined tiers, consisting of units that make the game harder to play when to make use of them. The "XP thieves," if you will. It contains FE7 Rebecca - an Archer with downright bad stats in an enemy-phase focused game where experience is competitive and bow effectiviness is 2x instead of 3x.
The thing about her is that, like many early-game Archers, she's good for dealing chip damage before she hits the bench. Even if her hit rates are unreliable, Rebecca generally isn't facing a counter, so you may as well go for it. If she's setting up kills instead of taking them, she's milking extra XP out of enemies, not denying it to allies.
Also in F tier is a radically different unit in a radically different situatuon: Jade from engage. As an Armor Knight with a useless personal skill and unimpressive stats, Jade (we believe) joins too late to be a good investment. Like FE7, experience is fairly competitive in Engage - and to make Jade function as a mainstay on your team, she'll require other important resources that better units can make better use of.
With favoritism and investment, Rebecca is still a very flawed unit, lacking the ability to Enemy Phase and bringing nothing special to the table. But with favoritism and investment, Engage is more than flexible enough to shape Jade into a genuinely strong combat carry, or just great support. In this sense, Jade has much stronger viability than Rebecca.
I don't really know where I'm going with this. I suppose that, bottom line, it's all about opportunity cost - which can be rather invisible. But then, how do you apply the same scale to every game? FE7 Marcus is cracked out of his mind, as is Engage's Kagetsu - but given the differences in casts, is it justfiable to place an Engage unit anywhere above B or below C? Marcus is certainly a cut above Kagetsu, but is Lowen????? That doesn't feel right!
Advice is optional, but I am receptive to it.
Do you have any half tiers, like C+ or B- for units that fit a niche well, but not as well as others? And maybr an S+ for The Vaike?
@@elivcdxv1852 Only to break up C into C+ and C-. We also have an E tier, which is often excluded.
Honestly i don't think having S-to-F ranking in every game is a good idea. I feel it should be aknowledges rhat some games achieve a far better balance, and a better tought out challenge, than other games.
They clearly put a lot of effort in making every character in conquest be able to achieve something, whike they clearly where on drugs when balancing revelation. Why those games should be treated as the same just because tier lists start at S and end at F.
I feel we should strive for a consistent ranking system, such as S-tier being strictly for units that break the game they are in or F tier being for units that are basically unsalvageble no matter how much you do invest into them. A tier that has both Lyre and Timerra basically tell me nothing useful because they are not even close to be equally bad.
@@noukan42 You raise a lot of good points. (Thanks!) If I followed your advice to the letter, though, I think it'd end up kind of boring - a massively bloated C tier filled with units from games with balanced casts, with F and S being reserved for wildly unbalanced units.
That said, if I keep going on vibes and try to rank units across games relative to one another, direct comparison becomes impossible, and I'll make dreadfully inconsistent judgements. Good metrics are what I'm after.
And keep in mind, this isn't some sweeping assessment of how "we, as a community, ought to be ranking units." I'm mostly doing it for fun. And claiming Lyre
Two things :
Literally every game in the series has XP competition because duh, if you're using different units they will have to compete for XP anyway, that's not exclusive to engage or FE7 lol
Effectiveness in FE7 being 2x doesn't matter because FE7 enemies are super weak even Base Rebecca can literally one round some pegasus knights in ch18 HHM, or hector still dealing over half of the cavaliers HP with his prf, etc
I love this video! The big thing that I find frustrating about unit analysis and "good units" in FE is that FE isn't a series about individual units - it's a series about building a team of ~14 units that all perform different roles. No unit in this game exists in a vacuum, and like you say, everyone can be viable and good. For me the point of those out-of-the-box great units like Camilla, Kagetsu, Pent, etc is that they give you the space to invest more into those earlier units that need a bit more time to get going.
Fire Emblem is meant to be about coming up with your own strategy to overcome the challenges you face, and that's different every time based on the units you use, how they've grown, what classes they are. If we all just used the numerically "best" strategies/units every time, FE would be a pretty boring series imo.
Really the best units are the ones that you enjoy using the most, and the best strategies are the ones that you have the most fun using!
4:12. wtf is that fates list? Saizo in bad???
This nicely coincides with a run I’m doing of engage where I only use units that are considered low tier or overly high investment. It’s been really fun to see units I only heard negative opinions of (Timerra and Alfred) perform exceedingly well on Maddening. It’s also nice that this video comes from a channel that often showcases unorthodox play still being extremely strong and effective.
Great vid as always!
I don't think it's really wrong from a language perspective to use good or bad in a somewhat comparative way. Good is a relative term that requires a context. Like in the example in the video of "good unit" meaning a unit who is contributing to an easy playthrough, the unspoken comparative context is the challenges put forward by the game. E.g. a unit is "good" if they contribute towards easily overcoming those challenges (and bad/not good if they don't). And of course, everyone will set their own benchmark for how much/how well a unit must contribute vs those challenges or how much easier they make those challenges before they become "good", or even "very good" (this is also why binaries are pretty bad for unit discussion imo, no room for nuance).
For a non FE example, if I say an NBA player is good, people will (correctly) assume the context I'm using is the level of play in the NBA, but if I say the guy that dunks on me at the park is good, people will assume the context is the level of play at the park.
IMO there are basically two baseline assumptions people make about the context when they hear/say a unit is good. Either good relative to the challenges in the game, or good relative to the other units in the game. But both are comparative on some level.
To me the issue is less the word good and more a lack of clarity about the context in which units are being discussed at times. In the basketball example, everyone knows what I'm talking about, but in an FE context where I just say "Lyn is good" it's less obvious what I mean.
Well as always, I think we agree, but in a roundabout way haha.
"Good" is definitely just a word, and words can be given any meaning, because language is made up. The expectation of language, then, is that we establish common meanings for words so we can actually communicate with them (from my understanding). Because the common meaning for "good" is also ambiguous (hence the question, "good at what"), there's even more room to use it in a variety of contexts. So yes, "good" can certainly be thought to mean "good at being better". But at that point, I ask whether we could just be using "better" in the first place, so other players can skip a few steps in an already difficult to navigate conversation.
This is why I pointed out the "crossed wires" at 3:30. If we've established some context (making the game easy), then I suppose you could say we're comparing a unit to the game's difficulty. But I don't think that gives us free reigns to also compare how a unit relates to a game's difficulty in comparison to another unit. Or at least, while still upholding the common understanding of good as a positive adjective.
So in that regard, then yes, it all comes down to defining context, and what we're saying something is "good" at. I think if we have the means to be more clear in the matter, we absolutely should, and our use of language is part of that.
And then yes, I "straightforward agree" that binaries aren't great for unit discussion. As I showed with the viability check for the 3H cast/Sophia, you can pretty much just say "yep!" or "nope!" once you have a clear understanding of your standards (at which point, the challenging part is again on defining contexts). Not that we can't still have interesting discussion in a positive adjective context, as asking "how" good a unit is still asks us to make a lot of evaluations in how they relate to their game/game's difficulty. But comparisons are indeed another solid way to keep discussions engaging.
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I think also how someone plays and experiences tend to influence on who is good or not. like for me Dancers are dead weight. like yeah a unit that's allow another unit to move again can be useful. but I never like babysitting units more then i need to. especially when I get closer to end game. and to top it off more times then not I end up in a position were I don't end up getting enough use out of them to justify the slot in they in. also the fact a dancer caused one of my worse map lose put the fear of jesus in me.
Outside of lunatic or higher difficulties in later games, just about any unit can be used in any game. FE3 book 2 and FE5 in particular probably have the most viable casts in the series due to star shards and scrolls.
I think comparative analysis is the best way to determine how good a unit is in a particular game, since even though you can use any unit, you probably don't want a full team of like, Matthis, Roshea, Vyland, Sedgar, Wolf, and Caesar in FE1, but it's easy enough to pick one or two of them that you want to train up and use stat boosters on.
I think the terms of being good and bad are fine, the context is nearly always in comparison to other units in the game which makes the comparison work. I agree it can be ambiguous with just that statement though and should be followed up with something more to distinguish what is being talked about though.
For example I would say Anna is bad in comparison to other units in engage, she’s not unusable but Citrinne joins at effectively the same time and does her job better with far better stats when she joins and Anna doesn’t outclass her either even when trained . Anna is by no means as bad as Sofia but in the context of the game she is in she would be considered bad to other alternatives.
I think the comparisons work anyway, it’s just helpful to make less ambiguous statements and be more clear instead of just a simple good/bad and make sure to follow up with the context.
I've said for years that calling Units "bad" is an extremely poor choice of words given that well over 90% of the entire series's cast is at least usable. So no complaints about being a stickler for language here. In fact, continue being a vocabulary nazi, please!
Yeah, like for example: Roy is usable because he's force-deployed and required to seize.
Uh, that's about it.
With enough time, even Wendy can be a beast.
Good, is the unit that looks the best while wrecking everything aka "General Top 3 class!!!!"
Really good video! I'm curious how you managed to get such high quality sprites for the Sophia and the FE7 lords segments.
Thanks!
I find FE sprites are pretty well documented, either on some wiki or SpritersResource. I have come across issues with sprite quality when transforming them during the editing process, so I just upscale them in a separate image editing program first.
www.spriters-resource.com/game_boy_advance/fireemblemtheblazingblade/
I think i agree but tbh other than "good/bad are too vague, clarify your definitions when using simple terms in discussion" im not sure i understood the whole point
In the end, good != viable. I think we are, sometimes too worried about how to justify our personal playstiles choices. Both words are subjective
But I agree, the discussion seems to be more about semantics
GBA's support system would make this whole discussion a lot more interesting if it wasn't extremely implausible to get past, say, Eliwood + Hector B in a normal playthrough. Oftentimes a unit is kind of ass by themselves but with some specific support arrangements can be pretty fun with other units. Rebecca sucks and Lowen is the definition of mid, but with supports and maybe someone giving 3x effectiveness back to FE7U + slightly higher speed thresholds, those two can wreak havoc, I'd think.
A huge amount of the discussion is dumb as hell anyway, like people act like it's unintelligent to use "bad" units when their arguments for utilizing the "meta" strategy are more or less "I don't have to think as much or put in as much effort."
Buddy, that is the definition of what an easy mode is supposed to do. You are going "haha I am so good at this game" by playing hard mode but making it easy mode.
Great video! Love your vibe and insights!
I'm gonna throw my opinion in and say that SOME games (not all of them and definitely way less than what most players believe) do have an opportunity cost in using a specific unit, vs depriving another unit of that resource. And for that manner, I do think that argument needs to be looked at when comparing units performances. I speak a lot about "ease of activation" in my own videos and the same logic applies to me for most analysis. Does a unit require a promotion item? Who is it competing against for it? These things matter in terms of "making the game easier" simply by the virtue of having more stats/second weapon/movement to be able to perform actions.
Two examples that immediately come to mind are:
Fe 7 - Knight crest users.
Most players tend to argue that, out of the knight crest users, it comes down to invest in either one of the early game cavs, or in Oswin for a promotion. Given the second knight crest comes a LOT later, whichever unit you do NOT choose, will have to suffer from not being to promote and obtain the promotional gains and stats from it. Because of this, there is an actual opportunity cost presented. Do we promote one over the other and each playthrough has to basically learn how to answer this question with regard to the investment decisions they made. On one hand, Oswin has fantastic stats, is already at lvl 10 and is widely regarded as one of the better combat units of the game. On another hand, the horses have more utility and mobility. What's preferable? That needs to be weighed in by the player's values obviously, which makes it subjective.
FE 6- The hero crest user.
This one is a little more clear cut in terms of the "usual" choice being Rutger due to his incredible stats and swordmaster being a solid class. But Dieck IS also a very viable option that has been around for early game... and there are quite a few other units that can compete for this too, wade, lot, oujay.. Ultimately, it does indeed become an opportunity cost option for this as well, since the resource is limited: Who is the best choice for this 1 item that can make significant strides in a units performance.
Basically, all of this is to say, albeit playstyles are different and allow for different considerations between which units are "good", there is still an objective comparison being made between units that share similar resources due to the scarcity/applications of such.
A small correction: a silver axe weighs 12, not 15, you mixed it up with the steel axe
Engage made investment so comprehendible that the community has had to come to terms with unit elitism across the entire series. Its incredible.
This is why I like the more modern FE games. You can turn a horrible unit into a god by changing their class to something completely different.
Sophia gets like +2 extra not horrible points because she gives a promotion item in 6 where they don't exist
you forgot to put anna in unviable
I wish the fire emblem fandom learns one thing, not be stuck up a##### about "what is good".
I feel like another thing that makes these comparisons reductive is difficulties. Fe6 being the easiest example. Marcus & miledy are S tier to a lot of ppl but that just paints a wrong impression for first time players. They are told “u need Marcus & wyvern girl has busted stats” then they play on the only difficulty available and Marcus isn’t THAT helpful & that wyvern riders only got a ten in everything, the same that “mediocre pirate” has with worse promotion gains. It’s why when I make a list for friends or discussion I explicitly put them & deke in a tier expressing that they are significantly more impactful on specific difficulties. Because that way when I say “dekes not the best unit” they’ll get “oh on hard mode he’s not nearly as good at juggernauting”.
The funny thing is tier lists are absolutely horrible for new players, yer new players are the ones who likely want info about units
Like new players aren't going to give a flying **** that Artur in Fe 8 is good because he has good magic stat/growth and gains C staves on promo so he can get warp faster then other higher magic units.
Like wise they are not going to care that they can clear a chapter two turns faster if they run more cavs
If you do enough comparative analyses on enough units of a game you can sort them into low tiers, middle tiers, and high tiers. There's really nothing wrong with considering anything lower than the middle tiers to be "bad". Simple because they're obviously worse than par by a decent margin
You're not gonna hurt a dev's feelings and anyone who uses those units also shouldn't have their feelings hurt by saying so. Doesn't matter that you can complete the game on insane with them. Because that's not the question. If you sorted the units and hypothetically put these X guys in the lowest 30%, then they're bad by your own methodology. From sorting them to show they're worse than the remaining 70%
This aversion to using a simple verbal categorization is bizarre to me. "Bad" doesn't have to mean "can't cleanly finish the game". It could simply mean "super obviously lacking compared to the majority".
I know this isn't exactly what this video was about, but I think the way the fandom has used tier lists in the past ~10 years really hasn't help the way we look at units. I don't think tier lists are inherently bad or that we shouldn't have any at all, but tier lists that try to order units by general "viability/strength" aren't really that useful and kind of counter productive to understanding the qualities of units in a broad sense. They can be useful, but only when the context of what's being ranked is narrow and clearly understandable, otherwise you run into problems I feel.
Firstly tier lists force you to order units from best to worst in a very absolute way. And yes, as the author you can note that two units are actually as good as the other, but because of the nature of tier lists you still have to place one unit above the other and people will draw their conclusion off of that alone. If you're making a "general" tier list units have many qualities you have to consider that can vary greatly, which are not only hard to compare one to one (How good is being able to use staves compared to starting with B Axes, etc.), but also interact with the other qualities the unit and other units might have. It's really hard to holistically evaluate a unit and all of it's qualities, while at the same time dealing with absolute statements like "X is better than Y."
A lot of these tier lists don't rank units in any even somewhat measurable way whatsoever (like how much they contribute to clearing the game in as few turns as possible), but instead rank them based on general "goodness" as a whole, a concept that's so nebulous, it makes it basically impossible to actually tell why a unit is ranked above another without lots of additional context for the placement of each unit, so why even bother with the tier list, when you could just talk about units in general, since you have to do that anyway.
Because of the environment of the game that's taking place around the units and how it's being played, "universal" tier lists, almost inevitably, end up needing a buch of extra discussion before you can draw any meaning from them. FE8 is a great example for this. In optimized runs the generally accepted "best" strategy is to have Seth kill everything and use other units to facilitate him. You could actually make a decent tier list for this specific context, because the criteria of A) is this unit Seth and B) how much does this unit help Seth, are much narrower and easier to measure than general "goodness". Because this is such a widely accepted strategy though, this way of comparing units bleeds into broader unit discussion, which is fine, but this now requires that every unit be measured in this specific context. And there's multiple cases like this in every game, meaning any tier list placement, in a "general" list, now needs a bunch of asterisks for every single unit, at which point why even make a tier list and not just a discussion.
tldr I'd much rather people discuss why they think one unit is better than the other by actually discussing units, rather than trying to convey incredibly complex information like that in tier lists.
I appreciate this a lot, I've felt very similarly about everything you described. I think the example of "is staff access better than starting with B axes" demonstrates the issue very well. I actually was planning on discussing how while "better" is difficult to pinpoint, "better" is at least somewhat tangible. Because yeah, we then at least have a specific goal/playthrough to use as the context. I did somewhat reference that in my efficiency video, but I realized it was a little out of scope/off topic for this video in particular. I would like to address it separately someday, though that may take a bit more time.
The best units are ones you didn't use in your previous playthrough. A good player can make any unit work
This "bad unit" talk sits especially bad with Advance Wars players that happen to jump into Fire Emblem occasionally. The gameplay is almost equal, though the units in that game are tanks, anti-airs, helicopters, etc. There's no exp so none of them can get progressively better so there's no availability problems. So if you made an Advance Wars unit tier list, you'd be a fool. Most units have a place, even if some of them can be extremely situational (Missiles and Piperunners). There are times where cheap basic Recons that can only combat infantry are the best unit you can buy, since they clear out fog of war among other things, making them a sort of a Thief equivalent.
While not excellent at fighting, Thieves and Recons have their place, and people flagging someone like Cath from FE6 as bad in a game where you want two thieves in the Douglas chapter for example, and the game where Chad is a prime bait for a multitude of ballistae, siege tomes and simply getting deaths from that one nearby cavalier you missed is very dubious. You only realize that worse isn't bad when you run out of betters. Then again, if you're expecting to fight bosses with Cath, then she's not a bad unit, you're just a horrible tactician. Every unit has a place and FE6 probably teaches you that better than others. Treck is kind of a silly guy, but if you lost Alance, then he's exactly there for that reason.
_Don't spam Neotanks in fog of war if you have no vision; they can't use torches._
- Sun Tsu
why are you swedish?
Whenever people talk about a unit being “bad,” I interpret that as sub-optimal. My counterpoint is that when are the overwhelming majority of players playing “optimally”? It’s your own playthrough of a video game, and while there are better and worse choices, there’s not a hard line most of the time.
Putting a 1hp unit who’s a game over condition into the range of enemies is considered bad. Using Kent when Sain and Oswin exist in FE7 is also considered bad, but you don’t interpret those uses of that word the same way, it’s sloppy to do so and yet people think there’s just a hard line for the latter as there is for the former.
I always use Mia in PoR. Is Zihark better? Probably in more situations than he isn’t. Do I need to stop using Mia over that fact for Zihark, or not use any of them and dedicate 6 slots of my army to cavs, one to a cav cleric, five to fliers, and one to Ike? No, that’s dumb, even in the game where cavs are that good it’s still my game and my choice on what to vibe with.
I have revisited tier lists to play older games in higher difficulties and learn some strats and the lack of clarity is what messes me up. There is no real criteria to what is optimal, how is this unit helping you be optimal and what can they provide. I found FE12 Tier lists that work IF you have the full reclass tree, or for a newer player, how you explain that draug is A tier. Or in a kind of blind Echoes playthrough how is Silque S tier? I feel in trying to be elititst LTC there should be more focus on other types of playthroughs and challenges. It is also insanely tiring to watch a tier list to see: “this unit is meh but is a horse, A tier” (I see you Lowen). More criteria is necessary if we want to throw the good and the bad, because lesser units than most are top tier when a proper criteria is introduced
I've never understood why people value availability on unit performance.
If what we are doing is analyzing which units do the most in the game, sure, a unit needs to exist to do stuff, thus availability matters. But I've almost never seen this kind of discussion because what people talk about is how good a unit is, where, availability almost always does nothing much unlike a draft race, for example.
It just surmounts to a couple of supports in most games. A unit like Xander has nothing to envy from Effie or Beruka, in fact, Xander is just about to get better thanks to supports while the others might as well already gotten all what they can get and still underperform against him.
When units compete for a deployment slot, something I value, all the maps I had with them mean nothing. I could have biases and want someone over another, that doesn't mean thier availability mattered. For casual play and plenty of "high" levels of play, availability really is nothing and weirds me out in tier lists and such.
I thought the same and still to a certain extent, but I started to understand the availability argument a lot better recently. For me it matters more in newer games as they have much more customization, so the ability to set up and level up things is a huge deal (imagine playing Echoes and having to gain weapon exp for weapon arts that you could already be using) and to a decent extent the fact that your team might not be to the strongest until they appear and by then someone probably has overcome them with proper investment. Yet it irks me because then you see some units appear way later in games that are complete S tiers everywhere and it is very puzzling.
TLDR: Availability matters in opportunity of use concepts (I give Arthur Holsety 2.5 chapters before I get Ced so Arthur > Ced for the run) but terrible excuse to overrate early game and not penalize some S tiers
Availability allows more contributions so if a unit is the best but is only around for 2 chapters well they are not contributing much in comparison to the solid unit you had from stage 1. Especially if you can still beat those two chapters easy without them.
Like Ced is a must use in Fe5 but he also comes in when like the game is over and your army most likely super good really he exists to salvage disastrous runs so he won't rate high on a list.
Availability is definitely useful in a game like FE
Edit: Likewise if Marcus in Fe7 came in around the same time as Isadora he would drop immensely on tier lists as the first half is when he is dominating and can do anything but second half especially without those few extra level ups he is a lot worse as while he is still a decent 8 move cav he is not so stand out in combat.
Availability does matter in context though
Like Gordon in Fe1 and Fe3 book 1 exists at start of game but is often considered way worse then Toma because Gordon suuuuuucks still promotion and needs 9 levels till he can promote halfway while Toma just needs two and you get hia promo item like a chapter after that is easy to get his two levels making him way better then Gordon despite way worse a availability.
I feel like most of these comparisons usually lack the context so it devolves into a fight of favoritism. Take the Lyn and Hector example of "Lyn is faster than Hector" but add "however enemies are very slow in their game". Now Hector's higher strenght is far more valuable than Lyns high speed, because her speed is overkill and Hector can realistcally get into doubling speed.
It's kind of funny, i usually end up with the viable/good strats filled with bad units since im older and play a lot of rpgs. it adds challenege and lets you really experience the game mechanics because you usually have use them all to get to a good place. Somewhere along the line, it became my default first run habit.
Ditto. Got into the community around Radiant Dawn and was annoyed how many units I found great and fun to use (growth early units) were being called BAD (Nephenee in POR was my first major introduction to a proper "Villager" without grinding like what was in Sacred Stones with the Trainees, so I really disliked the "trashing she was getting)
I get YOUR opinion, but it's very annoying when they act like asses about it and act like their opinion is accepted among everyone (even had a shithead compare subscribers as to why he was right and I was wrong like that meant anything, imagine a reply to your comment having your screen name and subscriber count before being talked down to! My berserk button is when people devolve conversations like that because they don't have a point and all they want to do is WIN instead of making a point so they pull stuff like that!)
Around Fates I just gave up and decided to play and say as I like, not like the jerkasses aren't just "going with the flow" (especially with Engage, I saw people who were willing to DIE on the hill of a character sucking just cause some big fire emblem youtuber like Mangs said something and their hiding behind them to be assholes, just to THEN change their mind if that same RUclips has a change of heart and act like they ALWAYS supported that idea! Even funnier if those like MANGS have a windfall of their reputation suddenly they had a revelation 😅. It's why I just don't bother! Time wasted arguing is time not playing my games and having fun! Plus at least the youtubers insert "their opinion" which the jerkasses ignore when using them as a shield! But I guess no community is free of toxic dump that can't STAND not being a dumpster wanting to poison everyone in the victinity😂)