I would like to make a mild retraction on my awakening section. I didn't mean to say robin can solo it because that very much isn't the case, but rather that eventually robin gets strong enough from snowballing so hard that you can ignore many of the difficult mechanics the game throws at you. Obviously you still have to pay attention to the randomized skills, but a lot of lunatic + does becomes routing a path through that minimizes your contact with those enemies, or straight up resetting the chapters for better RNG.
Thracia has it’s rep due to time and obscurity, as well as its oddball mechanics and sometimes punishing design. Kind of like how Sonic CD was praised while in obscurity before being hailed as the worst of the classics.
Have you considered that argument about how Vaike is better than Robin? Or rather, its secondary claim that rating Robin as S tier because you do an arbitrary and optional cheese strategy for slowly grinding them levels at the start of the game is dumb?
Veteran is good, but his starting stats are not. It takes him a lot of levels to take off and that's exp that could be going to Chrom and Frederick to let Fred double in chapter 2 and other major benchmarks. Vaike hits much harder at base, which balances out the range difference for how easy it is to get him kills outside water trick, for instance. Veteran is extremely strong, but this is Awakening. Anyone can snowball thanks to the exp formula, Veteran just reduces the necessary kill count a bit. It's comparable to Aptitude in that regard, though Robin's starting stats aren't Donnel bad.
@@kellamyoshikage286 Robin's starting stats are fine. If Robin's starting stats aren't fine, then Chrom's absolutely aren't fine either. Robin is a mage with 6 or 8 base defense and 19 hp. Chrom is a 1 range unit with 20 hp and 7 defense. Neither one of those are having my blessings for base stats for defense. But between the two you have one that can attack from 1 - 2 range and has more flexibility and gains levels faster or the one that has 1 extra physical might but instead has 1 range, and can potentially swap to rapiers against cavs (which is useful). At worse they are even, with Robin pulling ahead because you get more payback for the same amount of investment. Realistically you should use both as Chrom is forced, and Robin makes a good partner for Chrom-- honestly, all of Chrom's partners are pretty useful for him. The difference between Chrom's stat growths and Robin's are negligible tbh. The only real highlight one is magic, and Chrom doesn't use magic. Chrom isn't exactly impressive in Lunatic either. Vaike and Robin's accuracy is about the same, and you trade initial concrete durability for additional flexibility with Robin. Vaike "hits harder" in the sense that he has higher strength and base might for his weapon, but that is entirely dependent on your Robin. If your Robin has magic as his boon stat, then The difference is 1 str / mag (which Robin probably already closed from Prologue and Chapter 1), which means that Vaike is banking off of his initial iron axe to pull its weight for doing more damage than Robin-- which he won't in this case because enemy resistance is much worse than defense for most of the game. With it starting out at a 2-3 def to res difference, which means that they are doing the same damage or Vaike is doing 1 more damage. You can counter act this by giving Vaike pair up with Stahl or Fred, but someone can give Robin the same style of bonus by having him Pair Up with Lissa. If you go Defense, then Vaike just loses in defense. The initial concrete durability is closed even faster on the account that Robin starts with 8 defense and with a Stahl or Fred will have 10 defense (11 with Fred at base), and we're talking Robin taking 14 (3 from enemy strength + 11) damage on the hardest hitting enemies versus Vaike taking (7 from enemy strength + 11) 18 damage from enemies. Worse yet, is that both of them are 2HKOed. Both need help. The difference? Robin can take a hit, and then step behind someone as a strat and keep attacking. Vaike cannot. And both can realistically be doubled by enemies in this scenario. If you have a Speed Robin, then it's a bit more equal, as Robin's base speed isn't actually doing enough for Robin to be fast enough to double anything (however, he's no longer being doubled by anything which is kinda nice I guess), but Speed Robin is indeed doing less damage and is less durable overall than Vaike (even if Robin isn't going to be doubled by anything which is really significant, I'd argue that Vaike's durability lead matters). So I'd argue if you decided to do something like Speed, Skill, or Luck Robin (Maybe strength as well because we're talking swords versus axes and Ch.2 has a large variety of enemies, and I'd argue that the soldiers there are the most annoying ones) Vaike could be argued to be better by the time Vaike joins, but it's still balanced out by Robin having 1-2 range, already having built a C support, Veteran, being able to create a child with Chrom, or Fred (which can net you a pretty strong early child that can snag Luna really fast if you're female, or 3 veteran units, or if male, you can make Laurent a veteran child as an option, even Anna as a mom isn't too bad) isn't a bad deal either. The take away from that argument should have been "Vaike isn't as bad as people say he was" or that he's underrated. But now, people are really pushing to overrate Vaike in the same way that people did Odin in Fates when they realized that he wasn't junk.
To be fair with regards to Thracia 776, it was released at a time when players were expected to read the manual, and manuals tend not to be part of fan translations. Though it should also be noted that the official strategy guide was released the same day as the game…
To be unfair to Thracia, games that expect you to read the manual when most videogame manuals were (and still are) art dumps and "Press A to Jump" tutorials are just not a good idea in the grand scheme of things. Tutorials and Info dumps are much better off being taught in the game, especially when there is no guarantee you still have your game manual because you potentially borrowed the game from someone else, cartridge only.
@@SmugLilBugger That's quite a thing to say when tutorials were hardly common on the SuFami/SNES and still were only just becoming a regular part of any games at the time it came out. That being said, it does at least explain its more esoteric mechanics in-game, like rescue/capture and how escape maps work.
@@SmugLilBuggerIt released into a period of time where the physical 'feelies' a game came with were seen as important parts of the experience. It released when there were still manual-based copy protection schemes running around. I have my Radiant Dawn manual and it's pretty crap... Meanwhile, it has an extensive in-game tip system. If I remember correctly, it had a gallery? My Wii isn't hooked up so I can't check... anyway, the manual wasn't seen as important to the experience so no attention was paid to it. The art, help, and copy protection were done in game. That very much was not the case when Thracia released.
@@SmugLilBuggerYou're talking about a SNES game. You know how much valuable data a tutorial would waste on the cartridge? Let alone the fact that in-game tutorials for complex strategy RPGs were unheard of at the time.
My favorite fire emblem moment was having to restart my entire 3H playthrough because I didn't know how absolute bullshit chapter 13 was in a blind maddening run
I refused to lose and had a miracle in that run...this was when it happened but legit I had to keep rolling dice and use a different heal equipped byleth to dodge bullshit out of the softlock with his new class. It was almost 48 hours of failure but once I got Sylvain and let Annette die...I had gotten past that with peefect crucial dodges. Realize this was almost pure Pure blue lions and the only other student I recruited was Lysithea and without any big exploit gambits or flying besides Ingrid
Interesting way to look at the games indeed. If I were to define fairness in this context: "The ability for a blind player to solve the maps presented to them, by making use of all the various tools offered by the game, without having to rely on luck." Meaning no "Oh it's just about discarding 90% of your tools to just use [insert name of low-thinking strategy that requires prior knowledge of the game / require relying on luck until it succeeds]." If I were to define difficulty: "The level of thinking it takes to figure out solution, based on the information provided by the game."
These definitions make sense: Enemies having Vantage, Quick Riposte, Pass or Killer weapons are difficult and fair. You have to play around those skills, but the information about them is available. Same turn ambush spawns are difficult and unfair. You pretty much have to reset whenever you run into them and possibly look up the reinforcement triggers to develop a plan.
Yeah basically : - Easy and fair : The path to victory is obvious and taking it works consistently - Easy and unfair : The path of least resistance can't be worked out with logic alone and once learned either works consistently with no effort or is so rigid that even if it involves inherent risk no strategy can work around it (think the black knight fight in path of radiance that's just about praying for skill procs) - Difficult and fair : The various complications are laid out clearly in a way that you can analyze and predict but piecing the information together takes effort, requiring using varied tools and planning ahead. - Difficult and unfair : The path to victory is complex in a way that can't be worked out in advance and cannot be solved through logic alone requiring some risk taking or trial and error.
Note on thracia the fairness heavly depends on how your playing it, as alot of the obtuse mecanics are explained in the game manual that came with it. Although the full fog and warp tiles are still bullshit
Yeah, people forget that it used to be expected that you would read the manual. There's so many games that are considered cryptic or obtuse nowadays entirely because people are playing it without the manual, which is not how they were ever intended to be played.
I was gonna say, a lot of the authors comments about the snes and even gba games seem to completely forget most of their points are addressed by manuals.
Yeah warp tiles are cringe good thing they're only in 2 missable chapters. I like the Full Fog, don't see why it's bad? and the obtuse mechanics I think you're referring to are things like stats being halved when capturing or leveling up movement which don't require explaining like the movement or give you enough time to figure out how it works without really hurting you at all like capture or fatigue. Things like Units being captured if they don't escape before Leif, Linoan's promotion, Reinhardt giving Olwen the Holy Sword, these are all told to the player in the original in-game text. The only things I can think of that they explicitly don't tell you is how to recruit Ilios and Misha, and a certain American Trap but I'm not sure if any of those really need to be told. Also stuff like entering the houses for the Dragonlance tell you to enter with a specific character and for recruiting homer he at least specifies a woman needs to talk to him, and I guess it's at least a little hinted at it being Nanna since she has charm. Edit: Oh yeah and Follow Up Critical Coefficients aren't even mentioned lmao
I would say radiant dawn is unfair for the many ways the player can screw over the dawn brigade due to lacking meta knowledge. Investing in Ilyana gets you nothing since she leaves to go to the Greil mercenaries that don't need her. A knowing player can take advantage of this, but a blind player can have valuable items vanish. The game throws POR veterans at the dawn brigade with no hint that some of them will be permanent, and some will vanish. Tormod, Muarim, and Tauroneo will take their skills, inventory, and invested exp with no warning. The player can further sabotage the Dawn Brigade by having the Greil mercenaries talk to Jill and Zihark. We are also talking about the highest difficulty where the game decides to arbitrarily hide enemy movement range from you, so you have to count squares. If Thracia is so punishing for playing without a guide and rated as unfair, there is no reason for Radiant Dawn not to get the same treatment.
Also, forgot to mention some of the best ítems aré 100% hidden on a lot of maps (Beast Slayer, DragonSlayer, a lot o Máster Seals for the Dawn Brigade, Gems, etc)
Technically speaking , Radiant Dawn hard mode is only unlock after you clear easy or normal mode , and you would already have knowledge about it If a "experience FE player" decided to play the hardest difficulty of Radiant Dawn blindly on its first playthru , he/she will have the hardest time of its life. Most FE games the "hardest difficulty are usually tackle after you beat the game 1-2 times. And with prior knowledge on story events , you know "what can screw you over" That can also apply to all other FE games if "they are played in Hard Mode blindly".
I would also point out triangle advantage removal in the harder difficulties. Which is announced, but still really fks over a lot of units in that game.
I don't know if radiant dawn is really that unfair. The game loves to give the player plenty of overpowered units throughout the game. The dawn brigade often gets to play with units like part 1 sothe and tauroneo, nailah, and the black knight. All of the part 3 maps give the player a of decent yellow units as well.
If Lunatic+ didn't have Counter it would've been fine honestly. As it stands, it literally forces you to buy Einherjars to complete some chapters because Robin can't be everywhere at once
hard agree, Counter felt like a cheap way to make things more dificult, the game just outright punishes you for playing to it's rules and to make it worse it is always on Warriors wich are the most HP heavy class, so unless Chrome/Robin crits it is more than asure they will get counter for their own damage leading to a game over. Thank god ISys realized counter was a stupid ability and i hope it never makes a come back.
Thracia isn’t the most fair but it also isn’t super unfair because a lot of stuff is told to the player in dialogue, especially what you need to do to unlock gaiden chapters. The older games also don’t expect you to have every unit survive, especially on a first playthrough which makes the design choices make sense in that context.
Warp reinforcements are arguably more fair than normal ambush reinforcements since they can't attack after warping. Except for like one instance (that chapter!) where I believe one enemy warps another in fog of war. I've also gone through every chapter and I can't think of any actual ambush spawns, like oh no a soldier spawned from the stairs! well duh that's what the tile is for
@@arzfan29 well the designers figured that out yeah. It makes more sense from a purely story telling perspective to have some units die as it is constant fighting but people like to make sure everyone survives that can.
Conquest Lunatic is what i want more from difficulty options. Stats aren't stupidly inflated, and the difficulty comes from better enemy positioning and item/skill combinations. If the worst thing people criticize is having to check skills for counter archers twice throughout the whole game, it tells me this mode is very well put. together
I've always wondered what a difficulty tier list would look like for Normal difficulty, no dlc, no grinding. It might be too specific to be useful, but to me, that's the "first time player" experience. It's how I play most of them first time through. The reason I thought of this was because of how people rank the difficulty of Awakening. They usually say it's unreasonably hard, but soloing with Robin + Chrom makes it way too easy. I played my normal way without knowing about Galeforce, and it wasn't too difficult, especially since Normal doesn't have ambush spawns.
it's probably also worth noting that it's a bit weird to go with highest difficulties when you're comparing stuff like Lunatic Modes, which are gated behind beating the game at least once, to FE4, which doesn't have a hard mode. FE8's reputation of being incredibly easy partially comes from the fact that its hard mode was designed to be a slightly spicier version of normal mode while NG+5 clearly wasn't designed to be that. So, I think comparing the Normal modes of each game would be an interesting study, if nothing else. It will still get messy with casual mode & the time rewinds to factor in. Like, FE CQ Normal difficulty on Classic Mode is way too brutal, but it's fine on Casual Mode. Compare that to FE8 where its Normal mode difficulty felt best when doing blind ironman. But yeah, comparing the difficulties & fairness of the games on their standard difficulties would be interesting.
@@snolls105 I'm not sure where each and every one of the games should be on the list, but I would always without a single doubt recommend FE8 as the starting point. Not only does FE8 have generally recurring mechanics such as reclassing, but it's also so comically casual and full of engaging characters that you'll be bound to have a good time even when the gameplay itself comes short in some places. One of the last games on that list for sure has to be from the SNES era, either Geneaology or Thracia. Those games are cryptic as hell, not localized without translated roms and worst of all extremely long to sit through, making chapter resets painful.
@@SmugLilBugger yeah, i've played fe8 and I generally agree with that. The game feels like it was balanced around not resetting on unit deaths. Which made me get really attached to the characters. I like to, at least, attempt a no reset on death run before starting an FE game, which usually dies within the first few hours. But I didn't have to do that in FE8 and it was great.
going off their standard difficulties, I'd probably rank the games that I have played something like this: FE8 - super forgiving, especially if you are resetting on unit deaths. You can typically get away with errors that would be lethal in other games. FE3H - Time rewind massively lowers the difficulty. Alongside that, your lord of choice can typically solo the game. Like, my first playthrough was very sad because it just devolving into Edelgard running into a horde of enemies while everyone else died turn 3 (I was on casual mode). I'm pretty sure Dmitri can also do that. No clue on Claude tho. He has a gun. FE Awakening - Chrom is really fucking strong, even if you're not doing anything fancy with him. Like, with Robin, you have to at least go "huh I wonder if I should give them these specific broken things" while Chrom has it built in. It's been a really long time since I played Awakening, but I do remember the units feeling way stronger than the enemies. FE7 - this and fe8 were the only two I managed to successfully complete a blind ironman of. The reason 3H and Awakening are listed as easier than FE7 are because they were the first two games I played. And my tactics have since evolved from "charge in blindly" to "charge in after briefly checking enemy ranges." Anyways, Eliwood Normal feels mostly fair to do blind. There was, like, exactly one instance where I got bullshitted, and that was in an optional level (rip every mounted unit in my army lmao). I think Eliwood normal doesn't let you rush in guns blazing like 3H and Awakening lets you get away with, but if you have any sense of self-preservation on units, it's more than doable. FE6 - I've decided "fuck you I'm blind ironmanning this" and then I had to reset more than halfway through the game, potentially twice (the people I've been talking to about the run have minimal faith in my army to successfully finish the run). The main source of difficulty in the run does come from the game being unfair. Stuff like effective weaponry on enemies. You can expect to see someone with a horse slayer next to any side objective where a horse would be nice. You tend to have a lot of late game recruits that require specific characters to be alive in order to get them, which is, like, really bad for blind ironman, but I suppose blind casual isn't as bad. But the biggest thing is that your support units are all one-shot by everything, including ballistas. I don't like that the Dancer got one-shot by a ballista. And, clearly someone on the dev team agreed, since Nils/Ninian & Tethys are given much more room to breath (like, Nils & Tethys both survived the entire game in my playthroughs, while the FE6 dancer lasted, like, 2 chapters at best). I think FE6's difficulty isn't the highest per say, and I believe most of my unit deaths would have been preventable if I was more meticulous with checking everything, but the game is very punishing when it comes to its errors. FE4 - I got stuck on the fucking map where you recruit Leif because I split my army in a stupid way and now I can't kill the boss without getting snipe one-shot while Leif and friends have to run in a circle waiting for me to either rig the rng in my favor or walk the assess of my non-horsey girls across the entire fucking map. It's so sad. I think in general, this game requires you to put more thought into your actions than the previously mentioned games because mistakes are more punished. That or my Sigurd just got sad. Idk. But it is the first FE game where the were segments of maps that roadblocked me and required a lot of retries. FE Conquest - I really enjoyed this game, but my attempts to beat it on Classic Normal without resetting on death took me, like, 10 attempts before managing to reach the halfway point. Like, the game feels like it was balanced around casual mode. Which I think works to its benefit. Like, Casual/Normal felt like the game put up a fun challenge that could be reasonably beaten given a few swings at it. But the game definitely doesn't leave much in the way of insurance to prevent you from softlocking yourself on classic mode, and between the large number of mechanics to learn and the complex levels compared to the rest of the series, it's definitely got the hardest Normal Mode difficulty that I've played from the series.
Not to refute your argument, but the chapters leading to gaiden chapters are the palace-like levels. Ostia's palace, Jutes, the Etrurian Castle, then your choice of Ilia / Sacae (also unknown to newer players) lead to the gaiden chapters. Of course, the Bern arc doesn't follow this rule, but the rest feel somewhat telegraphed.
I always used to consider Binding Blade one of the more unfair games when I first played. Replaying it with decades of experience with the series and less of a comparison to FE7 (which it's radically different from despite sharing a world) I enjoy its design more, but I'd still place it higher on the difficulty scale than you. A lot of what makes the game easier isn't intuitive to a new player, especially one who grew up in the 2000's era of the fandom. Using pre-promotes, early promotion, ignoring weapon triangle in favour of high Hit weapons, not juggernauting with 1-2 range, treating your Lord as more a football you have to escort to the goal than as a combat unit, etc. I don't mind the low hit rates as much as I used to, as I realized they give the high accuracy of Swords a legitimate niche, which is something they severely lack in most FEs. Also it has ambush spawns. Any game with ambush spawns is inherently less fair than one without.
True I probably didn't word myself the best when it came to that, I was definitely exaggerating a little. But randomized skills like counter that you have to check for are exactly why I think a distinction between fairness and difficulty are needed
@@UltimusTerminus It doesn't work very well on Lunatic+, especially not without DLC. The way to play around Counter is to have a unit divebomb the Counter enemy, and then use a Rescue Staff to bring them back to safety. After that, you set up your conventional tank and anchor units to clear out as many enemies as possible while there is no Counter to worry about. You can also use archer classes because they are never in danger of taking damage from Counter and they can body block while slowing down the flow of incoming enemies. You don't want to lowman L+ with only Chrom and Robin, you actually want to field as many units as possible in order to build effective walls, clear as many enemies on player phase as possible, and have as many Rescue uses per turn available as possible.
@@oEllery I'm not insane enough to play Lunatic+ without DLC (Granted I had to make do with Harvest maps), so Robin with Sol, Galeforce, Armsthrift and two skills I forgot, and Sayri in backpack for Luck was enough to overpower enemies even with Counter. Not all the time though, since Sol procs are still RNG, but that happened very few times and not when it mattered.
The build you are describing is useful to have as a member of a Lunatic+ Roster, I just personally find that it's more effective to field more units. Especially archers and rescue staff users. Also the reason I mention DLC is because the video is explicitly ranking the games on fairness and difficult. I do agree Lunatic+ is one of the most unfair games in the history of fire emblem, but this is more because of their decision to make the game almost unplayable without grinding and then charge money for it.
didn't even mention his main artificial difficulty increase: ballistas, ballistas everywhere. The siege tomes are also there. also fun fact: all of the gaidens are fog of war. Only like one mandatory maps is fog of war, but also.... KAGA WE DIDN'T NEED TO MAKE EVERY GAIDEN *SPECIAL* BY MAKING THE PLAYER BLIND!
My only real experience with Kaga's game design is Vestaria Saga, and boy howdy does that have some bullshit. I tried to beat it blind, but it just wasn't meant to be. The fucking route split where all my good units ended up in one group, and all my worst units ended up in the other really fucked me.
Experiencing Thracia fog on a blind playthrough was real torture. Staff accuracy can also screw you pretty hard. Also, no sure hits or misses, operating on true hit% really stuck out here.
Artificial difficulty? I'd say that's stat increases in enemies. Skyrim's whole difficulty setting is a way better example of artificial difficulty. Is that to say the ambush spawns and Thracia fog is fair? Not really.
I’d definitely put FE6 higher on unfairness. Ambush spawns from unexplained places, shaky hit rates, easily missable gaiden chapters that are essential to unlock endgame, Roy’s late promotion and the vast quantity of units who are just useless makes the game feel very much like a case of “do this one specific thing according to the guide or lose.” There’s no creativity allowed, no problem solving, it’s just use Marcus/Rutger/Milady/Perceval or die.
Ambush spawns are a problem, and though they’re the best 4 units in the game, there are many other good units: Allen, Lance, Shanna, Zealot, Dieck, Gonzales, Shin, Fir, Noah, Lugh, Niime, Cecilia, Klein, Igrene, Bartre, Exchidna all have some combo of having good match ups versus common enemy types, being able to reliably chip, provide staff or flying utility etc. Beating the game without those 4 would be more of a chore (especially the early game) but they’re not needed
@@seanm.9942 I did a normal mode run getting true ending and even that felt like it was constantly trying to punish me. I swear I’m not awful at FE, I’ve beaten CQ Lunatic, 3H on maddening now no NG+, RD, etc. but damn FE6 just drained out the fun with BS.
Sacred Stones does actually explain supports if you play on a lower difficulty that has the info windows, using Colm and Neimi as an example. It also tells you that other characters like Seth and Eirika can support too.
Yeah, Sacred Stones goes by the idea of "You know...if people are starting on anything harder than the tutorial difficulty on purpose, then they probably already know the systems."
@@lpfan4491given that hard is locked behind completing the game once, that's pretty fair. Difficulty and tutorials being separate choices is ideal, but FE8 didn't do it so badly.
Engage's Level scaling Made my 20/20 all units of the game really, REALLY lengthy, AND any Playtrough really makes any not trained unit borderline useless
@@AshenDust_ bonus maps skirmishes and dlc and specifically for the mc on top of that. It should still be an option to be set levels for the dlc maps pre losing rings map on an easy pre promote level and post the evolved ones.
I'm a far ways from even attempting every game on Lunatic+ (where applicable), but I still very much enjoyed your insight on the various games. Awakening, my beloved, made me realize I am not -that- much of a masochist. I wanna enjoy the game, not throw my 3DS in frustration. But kudos to people who stick through it XD
Its actually kinda easy to pass Awakening Lunatic+ if you know the strat even without DLC, its just that the first map got configuration that are straight up impossible to beat. (For exemple the first mage in first map with Luna+ or initiative+, the hammer guy in map2 with initiative+, and many ennemy with initiative and luna+ combo) The strat is to hyper feed Robin, you can get him to lv7 on the first map of the game, lv10-12 after the 4map where you get Kellam and use the spotpass/point item bonus (its not dlc !) to get scolaris + magister and start the skill stacking shenaningans The hardest map of the game is actually the third map where you get the Sheperd. They are all at lv1, they have no stats at all and you face tons of ennemi rushing straight at you
Engage was one of the only FE games i actually played on the highest difficulty (no dlc) and I thought it felt extremely fair, I was very surprised at how good the map design is. Imo its a much more interesting type of difficulty than old-school FE. The difficulty isn't in making every move count, its in figuring out the ideal strategy through the trial and error of the time crystal which I really enjoyed.
Almost feel like "Fairness" is pulling double duty as an axis, measuring both the difficulty added by playing blind, and the difficulty added by things completely out of the players control (Basically just RNG). Maybe having three axes (blind difficulty, researched difficulty, RNG) would make the graph a bit more well-defined? Though the RNG is an inherent part of the difficulty of FE, so maybe it isn't that easy to separate them. Idk, I just find metrics like this interesting
These rankings are entirely false and misrepresentative. However, having only played one or two Fire Emblem games, I cannot tell you why or how. Great work!
I played Engage on Maddening without DLC, and my biggest problem with the fairness was that the whole kingdom donation system doesn't explain that skirmishes are pretty much non-existent on maddening (maybe that got updated, at least I didn't run into a single one when I played it at launch). This meant I pretty much wasted all my gold early on kingdoms I had already completed every map for, with very little to show for it. I wish that had been more clear up-front
I'd put Radiant Dawn lower on fairness because of part 4 alone. Points of no return should die in a fire, and part 4 has two of them with you spreading your units around in the three armies without knowing what stages are coming up (have fun with heavy armor in the desert...), as well as the tower forcing you to pick 10 people with no way to access shops and spanning 5 whole chapters. Then there's all those rout missions that throw reinforcements at you every other turn or so, Ike solo against BK who starts on a cover tile when terrain effects are so ignorable in the entire game before the tower, the spirits with their infinite warp range when nothing in the game up until this point does that, Ashera's bullshit with her powerful single target AND AoE attacks that switch between physical and magical, and the auras also having a perfect counter. And this isn't counting all the potential pitfalls you could fall into leading up to this point. The game is so much easier the 2nd time around, but a blind playthrough is god awful, especially for someone newer to the series.
Yes thank you! I was expecting this game to be towards the bottom of fairness and was in shock when he put it so high. I agree with all your points and then you add in the translation error that caused most new players to start on normal(but really hard) mode and basically get soft locked in the first 5 chapters of the dawn brigade. Also random characters leaving at random times, potentially taking super important skills or weapons. This game is literally the definition of unfair. Still my favorite game in the series though
And you didn't even mention the fog of war. The game has such great hits as: * Micaiah and black knight only, with indirect attackers who can one round her if her levels were unlucky. You know, with her famously bad HP, def, and spd. * Birds running blind into bowguns * Underleveled dawn brigade vs cats and tigers you can only hope won't one round you I guess at least one of them is a chapter that Ike mostly solo, so there's that. And yeah, Illyana, Tormod&Company, and potentially Jill/Zihark being recruited off (granted, you should know about this on hard runs) can be really shitty to deal with.
Okay! I've never played Thracia, but what the ACTUAL HELL is it doing to be less fair than a game that has one chapter where an enemy can, on their first turn, teleport to your main character and instakill them!?
It's not as unfair as people mythologize it to be. Thracia is built around broken tools that can be used symmetrically by player and enemy. One of the biggest examples of "Thracia bullshit" is status staff effects lasting forever unless restored. While this can lead to unfun situations where the enemy sleeps a crucial unit from across the map, the player themself has access to so many powerful staff units, and with thracia's status staff hit formula being the highest accuracy in the series and status staves handed to the player like candy and often able to be stolen or captured, you can have your mages and clerics 100% accurate silence an enemy bishop before it can 100% accurate sleep one of your physical units. This comes as a direct contrast to certain other games that I would argue are unfair in that the most powerful tools in the game are only worthwhile in enemy hands because they are too unreliable to hit one of whereas a group of six enemies can fish for positive odds (gba status staff hit formula and enemy density come to mind). That's just one example of the player having ample counterplay to "bullshit enemies". The potential to softlock is dramatically overstated by the community, with many softlocks requiring you to do things lose every thief in your party, have broken your hammerne staff, and didn't buy keys when given the opportunity; these are very esoteric and unlikely situations that only get held against thracia when they are also present in other fe games. Thracia's mechanics are actually explained better than people say in the game, and you are given several very low-stakes maps that you can take at your own pace to discover how the core mechanics work on your own; just because they are not linear tiny arenas with forced lines of play doesn't mean that they aren't effective tutorial spaces. Side objectives are mostly intuitive, while the game doesn't explicitly tell you at one point, the civilian hostages talk about wanting to go home and you can put two and two together. The game has ambush spawns but they are far more fairly placed and telegraphed than FE6 or Awakening ambushes. Really, the "Thracia is unfair" stigma comes from a dogshit pre-2019 fan translation and internet tall tales. This isn't me arguing Thracia is the best game by the way, it's not in my top 3 and maybe not in my top 5, but people are extremely uncharitable towards it
@@harb1ng3r82 I mean yeah a lot of that is true but also Thracia has the tp forest and nothing is more unfair than not being able to play the game (because your character is isolated with their action ended). When ppl talk about Thracia bs they're talking about FoW maps (first one is literally the 3rd map of the game) where you don't even know where to go, not enemy strength or sieges and ballistae
Your placements of Three Houses and Engage basically sum up my feelings on the two games - I really like playing Engage, and I really WANT to like playing Three Houses. Fairness really is incredibly important to the experience of playing these games.
Three Houses is definitely better on Normal and Hard. Sure, those modes are easy to get through, but they don’t put in stupid BS. It’s a game you play for the story and characters, not the combat.
3H is perfectly fine on hard. Enemies largely aren't going to be an immediate threat any time they're allowed to act, so if some reinforcing peg knights pop up somewhere you don't want, there's a good chance you'll be fine. Maddening feels like it'd be fine if the enemies were just stat balls like they are and same turn reinforcements didn't often include mobile and fast units, but some of the abilities they give them are just ridiculous. I just got done with maddening silver snow, and I have never seen so many miracle procs in one place. How the hell am I supposed to plan a turn when an enemy just has a 1/3 chance of surviving an attack that should kill them? Also, NPC gambit spam just feels awful to deal with. It ruins the pacing of the game and is so feast or famine that it either does nothing or completely kills a unit if the first unit to move happens to land their gambit. Also, reinforcing peg knights are horrible no matter the map, as so few units are really capable of dealing with them. But also, the amount of tedious bullshit you have to do to keep your units leveled up and usable in maddening is just awful. So much management.
I was really surprised when I first played Awakening, I played on normal difficulty and I was impressed with my units as they all (except the healers) were able to mop the floor with the enemy when they were promoted. Chrom, Lon'qu, Lucina, Robin, Tharja, Vaike, Donnel and Cordelia were really the heavy hitters on my team. Unfortunately Frederick is the same as Emmeryn, his stats fall off quickly in the middle of the story so I had to use Stahl to replace him 🗿
The biggest thing about RD that would make me put it more over in the "Unfair" axis is the removal of enemy range in Hard Mode, which forces you to manually count squares and keep track of enemy range. It's one of the biggest examples of artificial difficulty I can think of in a game and the main reason I've never bothered to beat RD on Hard.
@@mihaimercenarul7467 idk the only things that don't really feel "fair" in conquest are things you realistically actually have full control over. just bring freeze staffs and get the silence? or don't turtle? idk
@@xertiio nope, not on chapter 25 and 26. There are moments where în order to survive you need an actual build that you need to prepare before, like actually knowing before hand. For example the right hall way of chapter 25 with the ninja with spy shuriken. You can send any tank or someone with good avoid and you will die. The endgame of conquest îs pretty ubfair at times.
@@mihaimercenarul7467 again, something you have complete control over. you get entrap and freeze staves. i've beaten the map on 0% growths so :/ and chapter 26 is unironically very easy. you literally only need to meet stat thresholds lmao
@@xertiio nope, on lunatic only having meat shields will get you killed în that Hans hall. Also needing specific staffs means you need to prepare before hand with a strategy specific for that chapter 25 with the spy shuriken, which îs impossible to figure out the first time so you have to cheese it. Also by your logic, no fire emblem game is ubfair since every impossible encounters can be cheesed or prepare before hand. So conquest has some ubfair bs near the endgame.
While this does broden the discussion somewhat, i think there is an inherent problem with ranking by difficulty and fairness using highest difficulties, when the highest difficulty in many of the modern games is frankly completely unbalanced, unfair or unfun. Thats what the chart will correctly show, but it stramrolls the nuance that some of the games have fun and fair difficulty a tier or two down that is actually well designed.
Also considering most of the highest difficulties are designed around or are straight up gated behind a second (or third on FE7's case) playthrough, so they don't really cater to blind players at all. A lot of "unfairness" is just being unable to predict what is coming up/not knowing what to prepare for, which in most cases is greatly mitigated by not going in blind. Edit: Of course, drastic changes in highest difficulties (Lunatic Reverse, Lunatic+) effectively make the experience blind again, so my point is moot for those.
@@BHox01 Ironically, Lunatic+ is not drastically changed or blind at all. It is literally Lunatic again, except the game rolls the dice if the chapter is supposed to be impossible or not.
Surprisingly agreed with almost everything. My only complaint would be to put Shadow Dragon to about Three houses Level of unfairness. (Maybe a little better) but Shadow Dragon was still fun to play on the highest difficulty... With 3H I did 1 Maddening run with the blue lions and didn't even want to play the others on maddening. And I love to see more people acknowledging Conquest. As the kind of Freak that did multiple Royal-only "Challenge runs" in Conquest lunatic I love to see it's fairness acknowledged. ( Sadly so far the only way I found to clear chapter 10 like that was with DLC-Taker-Skills, and counting the use of the "first blood" as "Odin you're a royal, now become a grandmaster with yet another DLC Item"
If I were to do something like this, I might try adding a third axis for “breakability”. Like you mentioned, Awakening L+ is incredibly challenging… as long as you don’t nos tank. That does add another level of subjectivity though. Like, for Sacred Stones, I didn’t think it was too easy, but I also didn’t use Seth. But obviously just using one of the units the game gives you shouldn’t count as breaking the game.
Yup, I agree with this list to be honest. Most FE titles have their fair of difficulty but fairness is a whole lot of different in terms of enemies placement, stats inflation, and how well the player “bounced” back in-game!
I feel like Genealogy should have an asterisk next to it or something. Apparently, it came with the strategy guide, and was designed around the player knowing about secret events in the guide. The chapter 1 Brave Axe and the Pursuit Ring are the two most egregious things you'd just miss without the guide.
I'm playing Thracia for my first time currently and it's a bit bizarre seeing people downplay how difficult it is. The games loves to punish you for overextending even the slightest amount. I've barely been able to do any capturing in the midgame because of this. Ballistas also do painfully high amounts of damage for how common they are. Unfairness is totally a Factor in it too though, I've lost several runs due to bad RNG. Critical misses, crits on the one unit you couldn't give a scroll, skills proccing at a bad time. I might just be bad, but Thracia is rough.
Personally I feel like it’s kinda become a “I’m so good at Fire Emblem 776 was easy” type of thing, I feel like people saying it are just that or they’re good at FE/srpgs in general. He did this considering highest difficulty so I wouldn’t put it as the highest, but definitely not near the bottom because that’s cap especially if you count first play throughs.
@@not_brandon5984 This type of thing goes beyond FE or even strategy games. There’s a lot of developed skill and knowledge that Person A may have from playing a genre a lot (or maybe they’re just naturally good at the genre), that Persons B C D are lacking, but A takes for granted and speaks as though it’s the minimum standard. Which makes talking about things like difficulty feel arbitrary at best.
As someone whose first game was conquest, I can confirm that the game’s balance is impeccable. On my first playthrough I lost Odin, Silas and Arthur and got super pissed, not because I lost them per se, but because I could have saved them. They were necessary casualties for me to understand that, even though I felt challenged on every single chapter, I also had the tools to work around these challenges.
i like how everyone is like thracia explains nothing, meanwhile the lil manster patch staring you in the face telling you to escape with leif last, capture enemies when you can to take their things, and let people rest before they're forced to rest. And some more niche things like there are gonna be warp tiles in this map.
@@AwakeTheFall You are ignoring the manual which also explained many of the mechanics that all players of games during the era read because they contained important and useful information. Which is an issue with this video as a whole to be honest, older games were balanced around players who read manuals because that is what people did in that era. Hell MGS famously had a segment where the back of the box was literally required to progress (leaving the game near unbeatable for people who rented it btw). The game's box and its contents were a part of the game in that era, and to not include game manual content in this evaluation inherently disadvantages all the older games.
@sadscientisthououinkyouma1867 I'm not ignoring anything. I asked another person how using a fan translated patch that included explainations that weren't in the game makes any sense, when people might not use said patch? What if you are using one of the other patches that don't do that? Also, who cares if the game manual explains anything? If you aren't (or know) japanese, and you weren't there nearly 25 years ago (and played the lowest selling game in the series till Radiant Dawn), that manual doesn't mean jack shit. The manual point has literally nothing to do with what I commented, but you had to just jump in to correct me. Maybe next time, read the comment.
Ive only played a couple of games, so i came here looking for what game is jard and fair. Was not expecting 2 of them to be so close. Now i know what games to play next
Honestly one thing I think people should do for character rankings would be by a point system. F-S Tier has no substance at all. Give Units more points depending on joining time, base stats, utility, class and then see who performs the best. Through that technique units who are "carries" like utility character might come out better then expected
@@Paterinothe problem is when you try to “sum up” a character based on their individual stat rankings. A character who is a 5/5 in availability but a 2/5 in base stats but a 4/5 with utility? What does that mean for their final ranking? Are base stats so important that they remain a 2/5 character? Does availability and utility matter that much for them to be a 3 or 4/5 overall unit?
@@Speedwingherethe problem is getting into nuance is long and difficult. Talking about the viability of dancers for example, yea their dancing capabilities are very powerful, but people leave out that that is another unit you are having to baby and watch. Especially since, in FE7 (since it is the one I am most familiar with) Dancers often start out very weak and almost any amount of combat will see them dead. Yes they become dodge tanks with high res but that takes like over a dozen levels to get to. Before then you will constantly have to baby your dancer. And assuming you don’t end-turn spam on a seize map, you can’t force feed them mass amounts of experience at all. They just get 10 EXP per player turn and that’s it. And most maps in FE7 early-mid game aren’t longer than 10-15 turns so your dancer is only getting around a single level a map. If you just deployed another cavalier or fighter or whatever that’s a unit that you don’t have to worry about a disproportionate amount. In some ways they’re like Est characters in that regard. It’s much easier to just say “dancers in FE7 are a 4 or 5/5 because dancing OP and dodge-tanking.”
@@MormonDude Stuff like that would definitely matter in a ranking. It also were more suggestive, but by rating units individual in many fields would give every character the same treatment. Units like Rutger break the game and would likely have a lot of maxxed out points in different fields, in comparsion Nino wouldnt compare that well. For a final ranking you would have a lot more insight how the finalized rating wraps up. A lot more thoughts go through this process too. Basically after rating the units in the specific fields, you would then add the numbers up and get a clear ranking of the whole unit cast of the game.
First of all, good list overall. Only position I take issue with is, predictably, Thracia. It’s obviously super unfair, but certain aspects of the game also increase the overall difficulty imo. Such as minimal weapon triangle, capture being essential to keep up economically, hit rate caps, fog of war, permanent statuses, stamina. All of these can also be considered unfair but you have to interface with them whether you know how they work or not. So I’d say that a simple game like Fe6 is way easier in the sense that there each chapter plays similarly to every other chapter but that’s just me.
A very fair response, the Thracia stuff really comes down to personal takes on whether some of its more wild mechanics are part of the challenge or artificial difficulty. That outlook honestly applies to all the games.
I agree with everything here but perma status and stamina are bs. Both can lead to potential soft locks which I personally believe are signs of a poorly designed game. Also, full black fog of war is stupid. Pretty sure most people can see more than just 5 feet in front of them.
Hmm... a lot of things that were brought up as unfair, things like how thracia has a lot of unique mechanics is doesnt explain properly, only affect blind casual players, not a hardcore player who is playing at the highest difficulty. So it feels weird to judge dificulty based on the highest one (to the point of insisting that the player would be playing a japanese rom of por, when a first time casual player wouldnt even know maniac exists) but then judge fairness based on the experience of somebody playing blind without a walkthrough.
Great video. Just one little nitpick: maybe you should have considered that Echoes, Three Houses and Engage allow you to rewind maps, thus mitigating the potential unfairness of the games.
I realize most of the difficulty comes from the beginning of each game, after you get your army rolling the game becomes more manageable And I agree, difficulty mostly comes from unfairness
Personal opinion, feel free to dismiss. I didn’t think echoes was particularly unfair as you are given most of the tools and resources that the enemy has too. Plus you have Mila’s turn wheel with a pretty generous amount of uses. As for the terrain again, the enemy gets hampered down as much as if not more than you do as you have access to flying units on both sides. And you get gambits from weapons that the enemy doesn’t have access to. For warping enemies I only ever found that one or two enemies ever use it on a map so I never really had much of a problem with them. Idk maybe I just got lucky and already knew how to play it from playing normal first
No you're right. Furthermore, terrain bonuses and penalties almost always benefit the player. They are only really an issue when bosses are stapled to them, like thrones.
Everytime you use Mila's turn wheel or the equivalent on 3H/Engage you are just accepting "your defeat" they only exist to save time, and it's okay. And you got lucky, witches always warp turn one and bang my slow/low res units.
@@juanhurtado7244 There are some cases where people use it to reroll their crit chance and not to survive. It is no less "accepting your defeat" as it is to use other lame tactics.
Although I do think conquest lunatic is fair overall, the endgame having many maids that spam infinite stat debuffs was incredibly frustrating. Now that I know about it I rescue skip it, but on my first lunatic playthrough I spent hours watching everyone die. Probably the most frustrated I've been playing fire emblem, mostly because the rest of the game is balanced very well
3H maddening takes some getting used to but I have a ton of fun playing it. The only issue I have is the ambush spawns but besides that, it is one of the few FE games I consistently come back to along with Engage. On top of that I'm one of the few insane people who ironmans 3H and let me tell you it is probably the hardest FE game to ironman especially starting from part 2
@@ElusiveEllieIron-man is essentially no saving (unless your taking a break to come back later). So it isn’t just no rewind, it’s no resets. Permadeath is on and even if a good unit dies you have to just keep going without them. If you get a game over you restart the entire game.
I’ve been going about doing an Ironman run on maddening and there are runs where I beat hunting by daybreak without casualties and then lose on Leonie’s paralogue to a misplacement, twice. As fun as three houses can be ironmanning can be a frustrating process.
Finishing FE 3 Houses maddening using only Blue Lions units 0 death alllowed was quite an adventure. To pass chapter 13 my main strategy was to put Dimitri and Byleth with Sword of the Creator in bushes praying for multiple crits in a row. I finished the last map thanks to a miraculous crit from Dimitri after 15+ restarts, each restart costing me 2h30 hours.
I definitely see why the enemy spam in PoR is considered unfair but not difficult. Especially because all it takes is one or two powerhouse units to be able to survive the horde and suddenly you have even stronger powerhouse units
1:45 Weird example since being jelly is most likely a bug. It's like complaining about Zelda OOT never telling you about Power Crouch Stab. 4:41 Ironically, considering my previous note, FE6 is a bit scuffed interms of fairness because of developer oopsies. In what is presumably a beta-leftover, enemies in the first few chapters get double the HMBs they are supposed to have(Unfair against you), but then you start steamrolling because playable units also get HMBs accidentially(Unfair for you). It's a bit of a mess, lol. 5:14 FE7 has the absolutely weird phenomenon where it is pretty fair in basically every difficulty except the hardest. There is a lot of unfairness with the early game trash mob-spam that wear you down, the low deployment slots and the late game luna enemies. And this reflects itself really badly in the already poorly designed chapters, because those suddenly become a nightmare. HHM is just kinda missing the mark for real. 7:31 I'd argue maniac, since several games on this list are already JP-exclusive and still count. One could argue that this means we have to rate FE7, 8 and 10 by their japanese versions too because they were made a bit easier...but that does not matter, because they were only made slightly easier on their hardest difficulty anyways. Place them a few pixels higher(And I guess FE10 a few pixels to the left because of some dumb nonsense like the forge system) I guess, lol. 11:50 I never even got out of the tutorial because I decided to be le funny and download a save with Lunatic Reverse already unlocked for my first playthrough. Yeah, I definitly should try the game again without the memes. Heck, I even realized while playing that Lunatic has to be fairly ok-ish at least early on because several times I was in a situration where "I actually would have won if the enemies didn't always attack first." I'll still probably start from normal next time, because I actually wish to beat it in my lifetime. 24:45 No Cindered Shadows rating? Aww. I mean, sure, this says "No DLC", but most people got Rev through download and it is here. I wanted to talk about the unused CS Maddening difficulty. D: xD Also, I honestly think FE Echoes is easier on average than Sacred Stones is, both if one counts grinding and if one does not count grinding. It just always felt like it tried less to give you a run for your money. The late game-Necrodragons with their bootleg of FE7's final boss weapon are singlehandedly more threatening than literally anything in the Echoes mainstory. Postgame may be a diffrent story, I never really looked into that.
I played Conquest on lunatic the first time I played it. I hadn't played Birthright or Revelation before either. I actually think there are quite a few things that are 'unfair', and I'd put it pretty far to the left (not all the way, maybe halfway between the center and the left. Note: unfair does not necessarily mean bad. Conquest is my favorite FE game tied with Tracia. I often like figuring out how to deal with really wacked out shit. But what I found 'unfair' in conquest is: -Having paralogues that aren't practically completable at certain points in the game or are just annoying because they didn't manually balance them and have auto-leveling of enemies and automatically assigned skill. -Inevitable end -No saving before the final battle with Takumi -The final battle with Takumi having such a huge difficulty spike combined with the above.
One thing to note about Lyn Hard mode is that you can kind of modify your Lyn-mode units beforehand to adjust the fairness of the game. If you have a Lyn or Florina with boosted stats I think that FE7 becomes a lot more fair, at least in the early-mid game. Lyn is an infantry killing unit that can also use bows later on, making her arguably a better version of a warrior. Florina becomes a rescuing and transportation powerhouse and a mage killer that can rush in and kill those bolting mages or the status staff users with very little risk to herself because she can go over mountains unimpeded. Nevermind that you can use the knight crest to give yourself a better Marcus for the mid-game with Paladin Sain or Kent. Or have two paladins at once.
To be fair, I don't think is wild to say that Thracia probably has the hardest "easiest" difficulty of the game, because pretty much the other games have modes that essentially beat themselves if you don't get your good units killed. And Thracia expect a lot of you (many of weird details are explained in the manual); with every other game you could realistically beat it blind without even using the game's manual.
The only unfair thing about Conquest Lunatic is Endgame. If you don’t specifically build one of three units to rock the final boss you’re pretty much guaranteed to lose a big chunk of your army right at the end.
One of many reasons i hate 3H is because of the difficulty: normal and hard are sleep inducing easy and maddening is extremelly unfair the first half of the game only to circle back to sleep inducing the later half.
Thracia was one of the most miserable times I've ever had playing Fire Emblem. A large part of that was the fact I played it before the fan translation patch was a thing cause I was a hardcore nintendo fangirl at the time and I wanted my street cred.
One thing not talked about is the turn/time travel back turn mechanic. I think it makes three house lunatic a lot easier as you can adjust to the reinforcement bs.
so i played awakening lunatic+ .... for exactly 3 maps and then never touched it ever again. i would get if way back in the line when random growth can screw you up but who in their right mind made a difficulty where the literal 3rd map of the game is halve or maybe even more of the time unwinnable regardless of what you did up until then. and i did not give fredy a sword and you bet i wont be replaying the first 2 maps to get back there because i didn't know that you basically need to give fredy a sword to have a chance in winning of about 40 attempts i got 1 singular attempt that maybe could have been won as i was able to clear out the beginning
The reason why I think its far worse in awakening is the map design. Awakenings map designs often lead to the STR being in very uncomfortable spots to deal with, an example off the top of my head being the wyverns in Tharjas chapter while you're slowed in the sand. However more of my reasoning for awakening lunatic + being unfair is really tied to the randomized skills honestly and you can then combine those same turn reinforcements with some of the far nastier randomized skills like Luna + and there's nothing you can really do about it
You're actually right about Thracia I feel now having played it multiple times. You have more control of how you approach the game. I believe FE6 has to go to further left to unfair. Rutger can face crit early in the game and if he dies your run is basically over. Too many ambush spawns and luck in general plays a big part in that game. The low hit rates make it more interesting for me and more fun to be fair and that's why I love Berwick Saga as well.
It's interesting to see how the relationship between fairness and difficulty for Fire Emblem games interact with each other. One would think that fairness and difficulty would be correlated by demonstrating a negative relationship between the two. But the positive regression line demonstrated in these rankings is likely a testament to the quality of these games. Even when the games are unfair in comparison, their difficulty isn't anything insane and vice versa, and most of the unfair games are the older more archaic ones anyways when Kaga was still a part of Fire Emblem. Not that Kaga's design philosophy is necessarily bad but it's definitely more hardcore. Even for post-Kaga FE games, the ones that are regarded with being more unfair are mostly the remakes since IS keeps most of their remakes relatively faithful and whatever new mechanics they introduce sometimes aren't very well optimized for the original experience. Of course there's also exceptions to these rankings like 3H and Awakening, but they can be ignored anyways due to their outlying behavior and high residuals. Also this is probably a generalization but it seems to me that many of the FEtubers and active people in the community started with games that were very beginner-friendly like FE7 and 8. Obviously this is also probably because those were the first 2 FE games introduced to the west, but I think IS and Nintendo took that into account when designing the games, which would further support the fact as to why these games are so beginner-friendly, especially FE8 since it's an outlier, and a unique one too. I've heard of more people being continuously active in the community that started with FE7/8 than people that started with let's say FE13/14, even when those games did much bigger selling numbers. But of course this isn't taking other factors like story and accessibility into account, as well as the influence of the internet and social media, variables that probably helped other games (3H specifically) retain fans.
I think this was a pretty good assessment and I really like the chart in theory. The problem is (and this counts for any charts/tierlists/rankings) the games individually have certain sections that define whether or not it's hard. Ex: Fe3h has a really difficult first few chapters but once you're really going in the monastery it's not too bad. Then all of a sudden the time skip happens and the game is suddenly very hard again but for that one chapter and the rest snowballs from there. All of the gakes have these moments and ranking the games as a whole is already a flawed approach in terms of objective analysis. That being said, great video and I think you did a great job elaborating on what your thought processes were for each game.
Man i still need to play these other fire emblem games. I've played only about half of them but i still want to get to Genealogy, Thracia and the Radiant series.
The difference between lunatic and lunatic+ is insane. Frankly it's just not fun to play because you can play perfectly and still lose because the enemy landed a 1% crit. 3 houses isn't too bad except ambush spawns are extremely annoying when you don't know they're coming and a unit you thought was safe gets one shot. Agree Chapter 13 on maddening can soft lock a run. It usually comes down to if your Byleth can solo the chapter if you're not focusing on students from your house.
Church route gotta be one of the most frustrating things on maddening cause your only really busted unit is byleth and it turns maps that Dimitri and Claude make a cake walk into some of the most frustrating things ever
Super disagree that Thracia is low difficulty. I played it with a guide, knowing how the game works in general and having played a lot of FE before and I still had a hard time until the last batch of chapters where you can basically warpskip everything and Ced destroys anything you have to kill. Idk if I would consider FE12 Lunatic Reverse that fair considering people have had to reset their games early on because they didn’t get the right stat levelups and having ambush spawns automatically makes it impossible to rank as very fair (even if mid battle saves exist to mitigate the issue somewhat). But I haven’t played that one myself.
I did play Thracia blind, and honestly I'm with you on being puzzled by its reputation. However, I feel it's fairer than you give it credit for. The critical mechanics are fed to you (capture in 2x for example, especially with the very ham-fisted new translation). In 2x I didn't really know there was a capture mechanic until I got up to Lifis, saw the option and went for it. Apart from that I don't see many mechanics being a surprise that can completely destroy you, but give you scares to keep on your toes. Every game can have softlocks depending on how you play but Thracia having things such as the locked doors in the final map just stands out because its not in the way of "oh my army is in ruins", like if you haven't built your units right for Conquest Lunatic's endgame, which otherwise would be a very fair game (and the most fair Lunatic difficulty). It's hard to say whether Thracia is fair or unfair, as the game punishes you with some crazy stuff, but also leaves the door open to let the player take advantage of it in a way no other fire emblem does.
Radiant Dawn is weird bc while it can be unfair to someone who hasn’t played it before like Thracia, the fact that new players have to play normal to unlock hard means you have to play it atleast once with Battle Saves, which can allieviate the difficulty and unfairness.
I think a lot of it is that gameplay/design quality is as hit or miss with this series as the writing. Awakening? Fairly well written, horribly balanced. Same for 3 houses. Engage and fates? Opposite problem. I can't really speak to pre-PoR era, but it seems like we get one or the other, but basically never both. PoR itself is probably the last game I can think of that isn't absolutely riddled with run ending bullshit that's well written.
Playing awakening(my first ever fire emblem) and I was having a lot of fun until I believe I’m on chapter 17 and all the sudden half my units don’t do enough damage, and I can’t find a way to level my unused units because they just die. I’ve stopped having fun which sucks. If anybody has beginner tips without any spoilers that would be appreciated it
Great video! Overall I really agree with a lot of the points you made, especially new mystery. The one gripe I have is that you used the same argument for why rev can be unfair because you need a lot of prior knowledge in order to play lunatic, which is true, but it's the same thing for thracia, so I don't see why those two are as far apart as they are in terms of fairness. Even if rev just mentions them slightly more, it's still a very stark contrast in where they are in terms of fairness. I definitely agree on the difficulty of both games however.
Doesn't FE8 explain supports in chapter 3? Like, if you play normal/easy mode (the ine where you get tutorials), it makes you support Colm and Neimi. I don't know how well they explain it, but there was an attempt
@@Speedwinghere haha yeah that's the case with most people that touched Sacred Stones, but I had to see the tutorial events (I do hackroms) and they were a lot. I think the first 7/8 chapters have tutoriales (I think the last one is the use of Ballista) and, while not great, they teach you the basic concepts like trading rescuing and such
Idk if fates does that good of a job explaining everything. I tried it blind and felt very overwhelmed by the games reclassing and limited resources. I do think its great but I really find the 3 seperate reclass seals, etc. Very very confusing and hard to plan around without knowing the meta.
This was my experience too. I played Conquest blind and I hadn't done Birthright or Rev beforehand. While I am of the belief the tools are there, they're not as easy to get the hang of in other games. Things like the pairing system don't feel very intuitive. Some maps are overwhelming with too much variability. And you get punished really hard for messing up even on Normal. Add that to limited resources and units becoming obsolete very fast. Does building stuff in your castle even help? I'd give the game more credit if it had a better storyline and writing too, haha.
I'm playing an Engage ironman on maddening with no DLC now (my first time playing maddening), and while it is quite tough, it's nowhere remotely close to other hard ones like 3H maddening
I have a Hard time Imagining Engage is actually that far up on the difficulty spectrum because as of Typing this it is the First and only FE game I have ever beaten on the highest difficulty, and no DLC was needed to do so. I give full credit for that to how good some of the emblem inherited skills are, at the end of the game I had 5 units with Draconic Hex one of which was Vayle with Celica Ring and Thoron Echoing 2 enemys from outside of range and applying that insane debuf to both of them, then I could dance her forward and defuff 2 more, I also had Goldmary sitting at the back with Duel assist smacking every Enemy for 20% of their health for fun. Enemy phase essentially didn't exist for me by the final chapters because I would just Swarm any Enemies dumb enough to get in range and clear them all out without any issues. Maybe that's why I had so much easier of a time with this game since it made doing maths about what the enemy can do so much less important and rewarded me for a more SMORC playstyle.
I don't think the FE6 hitrates are really unfair, they're just as bad for the enemy, so it's just a different vibe. Which leads to easy avoid tanking with some avoid stacking, so maybe even more in the players favor if they know how to play around it (GBA my behated). And I would disagree with Thracia being THAT easy, yeah it's definitely easier than its reputation, but still you get a lot of tools and have to use them correctly in each situation or map and it's more varied in that regard than most games in the franchise. Aside from "numerical" difficulty where it can just be hard to deal with enemy stats my main criteria for difficulty would basically be: Does the game offer challenges I have to think about or can I just keep doing the same thing over and over?
That's a good way of thinking about it, I was mostly running things like stats of enemies in my head but you're probably right. Do you have to do different strategies throughout the game or can you just find one broken thing and do it over and over
Them being low for the enemies makes it more unfair, because statistical outliers hit you harder. There is a reason missing an 80-90 hit followed by dying to a 1% hit, 1% crit is a Fe6 meme...
I agree with your thracia take, chapter 10 for example, you have like 5 or 6 ballistas, owen and the other guy in the middle of the chapter, the siege tomes spam and etc, alot of chapters are pretty hard
I don't know if saying low hit rates affect the enemy as much as the player is true. FE6 has a lot of time pressure maps, and player forces vs enemy forces are very asymmetric. The enemy doesn't have have to care about time pressure or losing units, the player does. Which can make it hard to just evade stack on maps with turn limits and brigands/thieves, etc. I don't think the low hit rates are really a fairness thing, but I do think it does make the game a bit more difficult on the whole.
Hit rates and overdose of strange skills in fates i think made conquest and birthright for me very unfair games to play. Cant say the same about awakening... its just really strange.
Engage is one of the most fun I’ve had with an fe game to date. (Purely based on gameplay, tuned out the story completely). It will never be my favourite but it’s so much fun. It’s really challenging but becomes kinda annoying chapter 24 and onward. If you aren’t using the best units in the game you will have a hard time. Like really hard. And if you’re using dlc you’re having the same amount of fun but without any challenge.
25:00 and lets not forget the Well update. i went all the way to ch 25 w/o the well update on Maddening and it was HELL. if i had the Well update when i began Maddening things woulda been SO MUCH EASIER!!! i did beat Maddening with no DLC AND NO ONLINE (which means no free items to sell and no free EXP) and it was indeed challenging. im so glad i didnt invest a single coin to any kingdom cuz i needed every last cent! Tempest Trials was completely useless, might as well not exist until post game.
I would like to make a mild retraction on my awakening section. I didn't mean to say robin can solo it because that very much isn't the case, but rather that eventually robin gets strong enough from snowballing so hard that you can ignore many of the difficult mechanics the game throws at you. Obviously you still have to pay attention to the randomized skills, but a lot of lunatic + does becomes routing a path through that minimizes your contact with those enemies, or straight up resetting the chapters for better RNG.
Thracia has it’s rep due to time and obscurity, as well as its oddball mechanics and sometimes punishing design. Kind of like how Sonic CD was praised while in obscurity before being hailed as the worst of the classics.
Have you considered that argument about how Vaike is better than Robin? Or rather, its secondary claim that rating Robin as S tier because you do an arbitrary and optional cheese strategy for slowly grinding them levels at the start of the game is dumb?
No because a good portion of what makes Robin good is the veteran skill, not the water trick.
Veteran is good, but his starting stats are not. It takes him a lot of levels to take off and that's exp that could be going to Chrom and Frederick to let Fred double in chapter 2 and other major benchmarks. Vaike hits much harder at base, which balances out the range difference for how easy it is to get him kills outside water trick, for instance.
Veteran is extremely strong, but this is Awakening. Anyone can snowball thanks to the exp formula, Veteran just reduces the necessary kill count a bit. It's comparable to Aptitude in that regard, though Robin's starting stats aren't Donnel bad.
@@kellamyoshikage286 Robin's starting stats are fine. If Robin's starting stats aren't fine, then Chrom's absolutely aren't fine either.
Robin is a mage with 6 or 8 base defense and 19 hp. Chrom is a 1 range unit with 20 hp and 7 defense. Neither one of those are having my blessings for base stats for defense. But between the two you have one that can attack from 1 - 2 range and has more flexibility and gains levels faster or the one that has 1 extra physical might but instead has 1 range, and can potentially swap to rapiers against cavs (which is useful). At worse they are even, with Robin pulling ahead because you get more payback for the same amount of investment. Realistically you should use both as Chrom is forced, and Robin makes a good partner for Chrom-- honestly, all of Chrom's partners are pretty useful for him.
The difference between Chrom's stat growths and Robin's are negligible tbh. The only real highlight one is magic, and Chrom doesn't use magic. Chrom isn't exactly impressive in Lunatic either.
Vaike and Robin's accuracy is about the same, and you trade initial concrete durability for additional flexibility with Robin. Vaike "hits harder" in the sense that he has higher strength and base might for his weapon, but that is entirely dependent on your Robin. If your Robin has magic as his boon stat, then The difference is 1 str / mag (which Robin probably already closed from Prologue and Chapter 1), which means that Vaike is banking off of his initial iron axe to pull its weight for doing more damage than Robin-- which he won't in this case because enemy resistance is much worse than defense for most of the game. With it starting out at a 2-3 def to res difference, which means that they are doing the same damage or Vaike is doing 1 more damage. You can counter act this by giving Vaike pair up with Stahl or Fred, but someone can give Robin the same style of bonus by having him Pair Up with Lissa.
If you go Defense, then Vaike just loses in defense. The initial concrete durability is closed even faster on the account that Robin starts with 8 defense and with a Stahl or Fred will have 10 defense (11 with Fred at base), and we're talking Robin taking 14 (3 from enemy strength + 11) damage on the hardest hitting enemies versus Vaike taking (7 from enemy strength + 11) 18 damage from enemies. Worse yet, is that both of them are 2HKOed. Both need help. The difference? Robin can take a hit, and then step behind someone as a strat and keep attacking. Vaike cannot. And both can realistically be doubled by enemies in this scenario.
If you have a Speed Robin, then it's a bit more equal, as Robin's base speed isn't actually doing enough for Robin to be fast enough to double anything (however, he's no longer being doubled by anything which is kinda nice I guess), but Speed Robin is indeed doing less damage and is less durable overall than Vaike (even if Robin isn't going to be doubled by anything which is really significant, I'd argue that Vaike's durability lead matters).
So I'd argue if you decided to do something like Speed, Skill, or Luck Robin (Maybe strength as well because we're talking swords versus axes and Ch.2 has a large variety of enemies, and I'd argue that the soldiers there are the most annoying ones) Vaike could be argued to be better by the time Vaike joins, but it's still balanced out by Robin having 1-2 range, already having built a C support, Veteran, being able to create a child with Chrom, or Fred (which can net you a pretty strong early child that can snag Luna really fast if you're female, or 3 veteran units, or if male, you can make Laurent a veteran child as an option, even Anna as a mom isn't too bad) isn't a bad deal either.
The take away from that argument should have been "Vaike isn't as bad as people say he was" or that he's underrated. But now, people are really pushing to overrate Vaike in the same way that people did Odin in Fates when they realized that he wasn't junk.
To be fair with regards to Thracia 776, it was released at a time when players were expected to read the manual, and manuals tend not to be part of fan translations. Though it should also be noted that the official strategy guide was released the same day as the game…
To be unfair to Thracia, games that expect you to read the manual when most videogame manuals were (and still are) art dumps and "Press A to Jump" tutorials are just not a good idea in the grand scheme of things. Tutorials and Info dumps are much better off being taught in the game, especially when there is no guarantee you still have your game manual because you potentially borrowed the game from someone else, cartridge only.
@@SmugLilBugger That's quite a thing to say when tutorials were hardly common on the SuFami/SNES and still were only just becoming a regular part of any games at the time it came out.
That being said, it does at least explain its more esoteric mechanics in-game, like rescue/capture and how escape maps work.
There was GOING to be a help screen in the game, but mysteriously it was cut from the final game, go figure.
@@SmugLilBuggerIt released into a period of time where the physical 'feelies' a game came with were seen as important parts of the experience. It released when there were still manual-based copy protection schemes running around. I have my Radiant Dawn manual and it's pretty crap... Meanwhile, it has an extensive in-game tip system. If I remember correctly, it had a gallery? My Wii isn't hooked up so I can't check... anyway, the manual wasn't seen as important to the experience so no attention was paid to it. The art, help, and copy protection were done in game. That very much was not the case when Thracia released.
@@SmugLilBuggerYou're talking about a SNES game. You know how much valuable data a tutorial would waste on the cartridge? Let alone the fact that in-game tutorials for complex strategy RPGs were unheard of at the time.
My favorite fire emblem moment was having to restart my entire 3H playthrough because I didn't know how absolute bullshit chapter 13 was in a blind maddening run
Yes! I played dimitris route blind on maddening as the last of the four routes and was praying to dogde and survive. Could easily be softlocked.
And this is why Crimson flower is superior
yea i had that happen to me I never imagined it would be that unbelievably hard but instead of resetting I let Mercedes and Annette die
I refused to lose and had a miracle in that run...this was when it happened but legit I had to keep rolling dice and use a different heal equipped byleth to dodge bullshit out of the softlock with his new class. It was almost 48 hours of failure but once I got Sylvain and let Annette die...I had gotten past that with peefect crucial dodges. Realize this was almost pure Pure blue lions and the only other student I recruited was Lysithea and without any big exploit gambits or flying besides Ingrid
@@lornduff6877Except that's the least canon route where you play as the villains, that you can only unlock through finding secrets.
Interesting way to look at the games indeed.
If I were to define fairness in this context: "The ability for a blind player to solve the maps presented to them, by making use of all the various tools offered by the game, without having to rely on luck."
Meaning no "Oh it's just about discarding 90% of your tools to just use [insert name of low-thinking strategy that requires prior knowledge of the game / require relying on luck until it succeeds]."
If I were to define difficulty: "The level of thinking it takes to figure out solution, based on the information provided by the game."
Though in a sense it means truly difficult games tend to be fair.
These definitions make sense:
Enemies having Vantage, Quick Riposte, Pass or Killer weapons are difficult and fair. You have to play around those skills, but the information about them is available.
Same turn ambush spawns are difficult and unfair. You pretty much have to reset whenever you run into them and possibly look up the reinforcement triggers to develop a plan.
Yeah basically :
- Easy and fair : The path to victory is obvious and taking it works consistently
- Easy and unfair : The path of least resistance can't be worked out with logic alone and once learned either works consistently with no effort or is so rigid that even if it involves inherent risk no strategy can work around it (think the black knight fight in path of radiance that's just about praying for skill procs)
- Difficult and fair : The various complications are laid out clearly in a way that you can analyze and predict but piecing the information together takes effort, requiring using varied tools and planning ahead.
- Difficult and unfair : The path to victory is complex in a way that can't be worked out in advance and cannot be solved through logic alone requiring some risk taking or trial and error.
@@jmagicd9831 *Ambush spawn teleports behind you* "Nothing personal kid".
Note on thracia the fairness heavly depends on how your playing it, as alot of the obtuse mecanics are explained in the game manual that came with it. Although the full fog and warp tiles are still bullshit
Yeah, people forget that it used to be expected that you would read the manual. There's so many games that are considered cryptic or obtuse nowadays entirely because people are playing it without the manual, which is not how they were ever intended to be played.
I was gonna say, a lot of the authors comments about the snes and even gba games seem to completely forget most of their points are addressed by manuals.
Yeah warp tiles are cringe good thing they're only in 2 missable chapters. I like the Full Fog, don't see why it's bad? and the obtuse mechanics I think you're referring to are things like stats being halved when capturing or leveling up movement which don't require explaining like the movement or give you enough time to figure out how it works without really hurting you at all like capture or fatigue. Things like Units being captured if they don't escape before Leif, Linoan's promotion, Reinhardt giving Olwen the Holy Sword, these are all told to the player in the original in-game text. The only things I can think of that they explicitly don't tell you is how to recruit Ilios and Misha, and a certain American Trap but I'm not sure if any of those really need to be told. Also stuff like entering the houses for the Dragonlance tell you to enter with a specific character and for recruiting homer he at least specifies a woman needs to talk to him, and I guess it's at least a little hinted at it being Nanna since she has charm.
Edit: Oh yeah and Follow Up Critical Coefficients aren't even mentioned lmao
I would say radiant dawn is unfair for the many ways the player can screw over the dawn brigade due to lacking meta knowledge. Investing in Ilyana gets you nothing since she leaves to go to the Greil mercenaries that don't need her. A knowing player can take advantage of this, but a blind player can have valuable items vanish. The game throws POR veterans at the dawn brigade with no hint that some of them will be permanent, and some will vanish. Tormod, Muarim, and Tauroneo will take their skills, inventory, and invested exp with no warning. The player can further sabotage the Dawn Brigade by having the Greil mercenaries talk to Jill and Zihark. We are also talking about the highest difficulty where the game decides to arbitrarily hide enemy movement range from you, so you have to count squares. If Thracia is so punishing for playing without a guide and rated as unfair, there is no reason for Radiant Dawn not to get the same treatment.
thats a fair argument, I agree I've proposed a bit of a double standard there
Also, forgot to mention some of the best ítems aré 100% hidden on a lot of maps (Beast Slayer, DragonSlayer, a lot o Máster Seals for the Dawn Brigade, Gems, etc)
Technically speaking , Radiant Dawn hard mode is only unlock after you clear easy or normal mode , and you would already have knowledge about it
If a "experience FE player" decided to play the hardest difficulty of Radiant Dawn blindly on its first playthru , he/she will have the hardest time of its life.
Most FE games the "hardest difficulty are usually tackle after you beat the game 1-2 times. And with prior knowledge on story events , you know "what can screw you over"
That can also apply to all other FE games if "they are played in Hard Mode blindly".
I would also point out triangle advantage removal in the harder difficulties. Which is announced, but still really fks over a lot of units in that game.
I don't know if radiant dawn is really that unfair. The game loves to give the player plenty of overpowered units throughout the game. The dawn brigade often gets to play with units like part 1 sothe and tauroneo, nailah, and the black knight. All of the part 3 maps give the player a of decent yellow units as well.
If Lunatic+ didn't have Counter it would've been fine honestly. As it stands, it literally forces you to buy Einherjars to complete some chapters because Robin can't be everywhere at once
hard agree, Counter felt like a cheap way to make things more dificult, the game just outright punishes you for playing to it's rules and to make it worse it is always on Warriors wich are the most HP heavy class, so unless Chrome/Robin crits it is more than asure they will get counter for their own damage leading to a game over.
Thank god ISys realized counter was a stupid ability and i hope it never makes a come back.
Thracia unfairness is absolutely hilarious. Being jumpscared by ambush warp reinforcements is peak kaga
Thracia isn’t the most fair but it also isn’t super unfair because a lot of stuff is told to the player in dialogue, especially what you need to do to unlock gaiden chapters. The older games also don’t expect you to have every unit survive, especially on a first playthrough which makes the design choices make sense in that context.
Warp reinforcements are arguably more fair than normal ambush reinforcements since they can't attack after warping. Except for like one instance (that chapter!) where I believe one enemy warps another in fog of war.
I've also gone through every chapter and I can't think of any actual ambush spawns, like oh no a soldier spawned from the stairs! well duh that's what the tile is for
@@itzgladgatorgonegladitzmad9701 but you want them to all survive anyway, most players even of the old games reset chapters constantly
@@arzfan29 well the designers figured that out yeah. It makes more sense from a purely story telling perspective to have some units die as it is constant fighting but people like to make sure everyone survives that can.
Conquest Lunatic is what i want more from difficulty options. Stats aren't stupidly inflated, and the difficulty comes from better enemy positioning and item/skill combinations. If the worst thing people criticize is having to check skills for counter archers twice throughout the whole game, it tells me this mode is very well put. together
I've always wondered what a difficulty tier list would look like for Normal difficulty, no dlc, no grinding. It might be too specific to be useful, but to me, that's the "first time player" experience. It's how I play most of them first time through.
The reason I thought of this was because of how people rank the difficulty of Awakening. They usually say it's unreasonably hard, but soloing with Robin + Chrom makes it way too easy. I played my normal way without knowing about Galeforce, and it wasn't too difficult, especially since Normal doesn't have ambush spawns.
i feel like a normal mode tierlist would be extremely useful as someone who enjoys these games but isn't exactly the best at strategy stuff.
it's probably also worth noting that it's a bit weird to go with highest difficulties when you're comparing stuff like Lunatic Modes, which are gated behind beating the game at least once, to FE4, which doesn't have a hard mode. FE8's reputation of being incredibly easy partially comes from the fact that its hard mode was designed to be a slightly spicier version of normal mode while NG+5 clearly wasn't designed to be that. So, I think comparing the Normal modes of each game would be an interesting study, if nothing else. It will still get messy with casual mode & the time rewinds to factor in. Like, FE CQ Normal difficulty on Classic Mode is way too brutal, but it's fine on Casual Mode. Compare that to FE8 where its Normal mode difficulty felt best when doing blind ironman. But yeah, comparing the difficulties & fairness of the games on their standard difficulties would be interesting.
@@snolls105 I'm not sure where each and every one of the games should be on the list, but I would always without a single doubt recommend FE8 as the starting point.
Not only does FE8 have generally recurring mechanics such as reclassing, but it's also so comically casual and full of engaging characters that you'll be bound to have a good time even when the gameplay itself comes short in some places.
One of the last games on that list for sure has to be from the SNES era, either Geneaology or Thracia. Those games are cryptic as hell, not localized without translated roms and worst of all extremely long to sit through, making chapter resets painful.
@@SmugLilBugger yeah, i've played fe8 and I generally agree with that. The game feels like it was balanced around not resetting on unit deaths. Which made me get really attached to the characters. I like to, at least, attempt a no reset on death run before starting an FE game, which usually dies within the first few hours. But I didn't have to do that in FE8 and it was great.
going off their standard difficulties, I'd probably rank the games that I have played something like this:
FE8 - super forgiving, especially if you are resetting on unit deaths. You can typically get away with errors that would be lethal in other games.
FE3H - Time rewind massively lowers the difficulty. Alongside that, your lord of choice can typically solo the game. Like, my first playthrough was very sad because it just devolving into Edelgard running into a horde of enemies while everyone else died turn 3 (I was on casual mode). I'm pretty sure Dmitri can also do that. No clue on Claude tho. He has a gun.
FE Awakening - Chrom is really fucking strong, even if you're not doing anything fancy with him. Like, with Robin, you have to at least go "huh I wonder if I should give them these specific broken things" while Chrom has it built in. It's been a really long time since I played Awakening, but I do remember the units feeling way stronger than the enemies.
FE7 - this and fe8 were the only two I managed to successfully complete a blind ironman of. The reason 3H and Awakening are listed as easier than FE7 are because they were the first two games I played. And my tactics have since evolved from "charge in blindly" to "charge in after briefly checking enemy ranges." Anyways, Eliwood Normal feels mostly fair to do blind. There was, like, exactly one instance where I got bullshitted, and that was in an optional level (rip every mounted unit in my army lmao). I think Eliwood normal doesn't let you rush in guns blazing like 3H and Awakening lets you get away with, but if you have any sense of self-preservation on units, it's more than doable.
FE6 - I've decided "fuck you I'm blind ironmanning this" and then I had to reset more than halfway through the game, potentially twice (the people I've been talking to about the run have minimal faith in my army to successfully finish the run). The main source of difficulty in the run does come from the game being unfair. Stuff like effective weaponry on enemies. You can expect to see someone with a horse slayer next to any side objective where a horse would be nice. You tend to have a lot of late game recruits that require specific characters to be alive in order to get them, which is, like, really bad for blind ironman, but I suppose blind casual isn't as bad. But the biggest thing is that your support units are all one-shot by everything, including ballistas. I don't like that the Dancer got one-shot by a ballista. And, clearly someone on the dev team agreed, since Nils/Ninian & Tethys are given much more room to breath (like, Nils & Tethys both survived the entire game in my playthroughs, while the FE6 dancer lasted, like, 2 chapters at best). I think FE6's difficulty isn't the highest per say, and I believe most of my unit deaths would have been preventable if I was more meticulous with checking everything, but the game is very punishing when it comes to its errors.
FE4 - I got stuck on the fucking map where you recruit Leif because I split my army in a stupid way and now I can't kill the boss without getting snipe one-shot while Leif and friends have to run in a circle waiting for me to either rig the rng in my favor or walk the assess of my non-horsey girls across the entire fucking map. It's so sad. I think in general, this game requires you to put more thought into your actions than the previously mentioned games because mistakes are more punished. That or my Sigurd just got sad. Idk. But it is the first FE game where the were segments of maps that roadblocked me and required a lot of retries.
FE Conquest - I really enjoyed this game, but my attempts to beat it on Classic Normal without resetting on death took me, like, 10 attempts before managing to reach the halfway point. Like, the game feels like it was balanced around casual mode. Which I think works to its benefit. Like, Casual/Normal felt like the game put up a fun challenge that could be reasonably beaten given a few swings at it. But the game definitely doesn't leave much in the way of insurance to prevent you from softlocking yourself on classic mode, and between the large number of mechanics to learn and the complex levels compared to the rest of the series, it's definitely got the hardest Normal Mode difficulty that I've played from the series.
Binding blade should be more unfair just because of all the conditions to miss the true end that the game doesn't explain or even tell you about
That and a lot of the hidden promotion item requirements and ambush spawns they don't announce.
I agree, I did my first run blind and did not know until a group of soldiers appeared and told me they sealed a cave off.
Not to refute your argument, but the chapters leading to gaiden chapters are the palace-like levels. Ostia's palace, Jutes, the Etrurian Castle, then your choice of Ilia / Sacae (also unknown to newer players) lead to the gaiden chapters. Of course, the Bern arc doesn't follow this rule, but the rest feel somewhat telegraphed.
I guess that's another type of unfairness.
@@nathanw8936 Arcadia is a desert. Idk, this feels like cope
I hope you remember FE 6 has same-turn-move ambush spawns. I'm commenting before the video finishes!
You are really handsome...
I always used to consider Binding Blade one of the more unfair games when I first played. Replaying it with decades of experience with the series and less of a comparison to FE7 (which it's radically different from despite sharing a world) I enjoy its design more, but I'd still place it higher on the difficulty scale than you. A lot of what makes the game easier isn't intuitive to a new player, especially one who grew up in the 2000's era of the fandom. Using pre-promotes, early promotion, ignoring weapon triangle in favour of high Hit weapons, not juggernauting with 1-2 range, treating your Lord as more a football you have to escort to the goal than as a combat unit, etc. I don't mind the low hit rates as much as I used to, as I realized they give the high accuracy of Swords a legitimate niche, which is something they severely lack in most FEs.
Also it has ambush spawns. Any game with ambush spawns is inherently less fair than one without.
Lunatic+ section sounded more like Lunatic talk. You can't actually nostank like an idiot reliably when counter fucking kills you
True I probably didn't word myself the best when it came to that, I was definitely exaggerating a little. But randomized skills like counter that you have to check for are exactly why I think a distinction between fairness and difficulty are needed
I mean you kind of can nostank like an idiot if you use Sol, and maybe Aversa's Night on top of that.
@@UltimusTerminus It doesn't work very well on Lunatic+, especially not without DLC. The way to play around Counter is to have a unit divebomb the Counter enemy, and then use a Rescue Staff to bring them back to safety. After that, you set up your conventional tank and anchor units to clear out as many enemies as possible while there is no Counter to worry about. You can also use archer classes because they are never in danger of taking damage from Counter and they can body block while slowing down the flow of incoming enemies. You don't want to lowman L+ with only Chrom and Robin, you actually want to field as many units as possible in order to build effective walls, clear as many enemies on player phase as possible, and have as many Rescue uses per turn available as possible.
@@oEllery I'm not insane enough to play Lunatic+ without DLC (Granted I had to make do with Harvest maps), so Robin with Sol, Galeforce, Armsthrift and two skills I forgot, and Sayri in backpack for Luck was enough to overpower enemies even with Counter. Not all the time though, since Sol procs are still RNG, but that happened very few times and not when it mattered.
The build you are describing is useful to have as a member of a Lunatic+ Roster, I just personally find that it's more effective to field more units. Especially archers and rescue staff users.
Also the reason I mention DLC is because the video is explicitly ranking the games on fairness and difficult. I do agree Lunatic+ is one of the most unfair games in the history of fire emblem, but this is more because of their decision to make the game almost unplayable without grinding and then charge money for it.
Fe5 is the peak of kaga design it has fog of war warp tiles ambush spawns really the kaga special of artificial difficulty increase
didn't even mention his main artificial difficulty increase: ballistas, ballistas everywhere. The siege tomes are also there.
also fun fact: all of the gaidens are fog of war. Only like one mandatory maps is fog of war, but also.... KAGA WE DIDN'T NEED TO MAKE EVERY GAIDEN *SPECIAL* BY MAKING THE PLAYER BLIND!
My only real experience with Kaga's game design is Vestaria Saga, and boy howdy does that have some bullshit.
I tried to beat it blind, but it just wasn't meant to be. The fucking route split where all my good units ended up in one group, and all my worst units ended up in the other really fucked me.
Experiencing Thracia fog on a blind playthrough was real torture. Staff accuracy can also screw you pretty hard. Also, no sure hits or misses, operating on true hit% really stuck out here.
Artificial difficulty? I'd say that's stat increases in enemies. Skyrim's whole difficulty setting is a way better example of artificial difficulty.
Is that to say the ambush spawns and Thracia fog is fair? Not really.
I’d definitely put FE6 higher on unfairness. Ambush spawns from unexplained places, shaky hit rates, easily missable gaiden chapters that are essential to unlock endgame, Roy’s late promotion and the vast quantity of units who are just useless makes the game feel very much like a case of “do this one specific thing according to the guide or lose.” There’s no creativity allowed, no problem solving, it’s just use Marcus/Rutger/Milady/Perceval or die.
FE6 is the least fair FE I have played
Ambush spawns are a problem, and though they’re the best 4 units in the game, there are many other good units: Allen, Lance, Shanna, Zealot, Dieck, Gonzales, Shin, Fir, Noah, Lugh, Niime, Cecilia, Klein, Igrene, Bartre, Exchidna all have some combo of having good match ups versus common enemy types, being able to reliably chip, provide staff or flying utility etc.
Beating the game without those 4 would be more of a chore (especially the early game) but they’re not needed
how much fe6 have you played? I played a normal mode iron man (no true ending) and got to ch 9 of a hard mode iron man. It was difficult
@@seanm.9942 I did a normal mode run getting true ending and even that felt like it was constantly trying to punish me. I swear I’m not awful at FE, I’ve beaten CQ Lunatic, 3H on maddening now no NG+, RD, etc. but damn FE6 just drained out the fun with BS.
@@kingbeerz7978 To each their own
I feel like even 2 axis struggle to represent this which really shows how difficult it is to talk about difficulty between games in the series.
Sacred Stones does actually explain supports if you play on a lower difficulty that has the info windows, using Colm and Neimi as an example. It also tells you that other characters like Seth and Eirika can support too.
Yeah I had no idea as I've only ever played on hard
@@Speedwinghere very understandable lmao
Yeah, Sacred Stones goes by the idea of "You know...if people are starting on anything harder than the tutorial difficulty on purpose, then they probably already know the systems."
@@lpfan4491given that hard is locked behind completing the game once, that's pretty fair.
Difficulty and tutorials being separate choices is ideal, but FE8 didn't do it so badly.
@@rekenner It's not tho. FE8 allows you to go into hard right away.
Now do the same thing but add fun as a z-axis
You forgot "unfun" where the game can take a hammer and hit you with removing fun like engage level scalers
A third axle to turn the coordinate system into a 3D rating chart. Nice
Engage's Level scaling Made my 20/20 all units of the game really, REALLY lengthy, AND any Playtrough really makes any not trained unit borderline useless
Don’t the levels of th enemies only scale with the bonus grinding maps?
@@AshenDust_ bonus maps skirmishes and dlc and specifically for the mc on top of that. It should still be an option to be set levels for the dlc maps pre losing rings map on an easy pre promote level and post the evolved ones.
@@ivanbluecool why should the game give you the ability to make the maps easier? Just turn the difficulty down.
I'm a far ways from even attempting every game on Lunatic+ (where applicable), but I still very much enjoyed your insight on the various games. Awakening, my beloved, made me realize I am not -that- much of a masochist. I wanna enjoy the game, not throw my 3DS in frustration. But kudos to people who stick through it XD
Its actually kinda easy to pass Awakening Lunatic+ if you know the strat even without DLC, its just that the first map got configuration that are straight up impossible to beat. (For exemple the first mage in first map with Luna+ or initiative+, the hammer guy in map2 with initiative+, and many ennemy with initiative and luna+ combo)
The strat is to hyper feed Robin, you can get him to lv7 on the first map of the game, lv10-12 after the 4map where you get Kellam and use the spotpass/point item bonus (its not dlc !) to get scolaris + magister and start the skill stacking shenaningans
The hardest map of the game is actually the third map where you get the Sheperd. They are all at lv1, they have no stats at all and you face tons of ennemi rushing straight at you
Engage was one of the only FE games i actually played on the highest difficulty (no dlc) and I thought it felt extremely fair, I was very surprised at how good the map design is. Imo its a much more interesting type of difficulty than old-school FE. The difficulty isn't in making every move count, its in figuring out the ideal strategy through the trial and error of the time crystal which I really enjoyed.
Almost feel like "Fairness" is pulling double duty as an axis, measuring both the difficulty added by playing blind, and the difficulty added by things completely out of the players control (Basically just RNG). Maybe having three axes (blind difficulty, researched difficulty, RNG) would make the graph a bit more well-defined? Though the RNG is an inherent part of the difficulty of FE, so maybe it isn't that easy to separate them. Idk, I just find metrics like this interesting
An extra dimension, let's go!
Ya know, ranking multiple aspects is like making a multidimensional chart!
6:43 "You have the tools" more like singular tool, and that tool is Seth.
These rankings are entirely false and misrepresentative. However, having only played one or two Fire Emblem games, I cannot tell you why or how. Great work!
I played Engage on Maddening without DLC, and my biggest problem with the fairness was that the whole kingdom donation system doesn't explain that skirmishes are pretty much non-existent on maddening (maybe that got updated, at least I didn't run into a single one when I played it at launch). This meant I pretty much wasted all my gold early on kingdoms I had already completed every map for, with very little to show for it. I wish that had been more clear up-front
Yeah skirmishes are pretty rare on maddening and seem to be based more on real time than ingame maps
@@Speedwinghere they are fixed per playthrough, limited resources and all.
I'd put Radiant Dawn lower on fairness because of part 4 alone. Points of no return should die in a fire, and part 4 has two of them with you spreading your units around in the three armies without knowing what stages are coming up (have fun with heavy armor in the desert...), as well as the tower forcing you to pick 10 people with no way to access shops and spanning 5 whole chapters. Then there's all those rout missions that throw reinforcements at you every other turn or so, Ike solo against BK who starts on a cover tile when terrain effects are so ignorable in the entire game before the tower, the spirits with their infinite warp range when nothing in the game up until this point does that, Ashera's bullshit with her powerful single target AND AoE attacks that switch between physical and magical, and the auras also having a perfect counter. And this isn't counting all the potential pitfalls you could fall into leading up to this point. The game is so much easier the 2nd time around, but a blind playthrough is god awful, especially for someone newer to the series.
Yes thank you! I was expecting this game to be towards the bottom of fairness and was in shock when he put it so high. I agree with all your points and then you add in the translation error that caused most new players to start on normal(but really hard) mode and basically get soft locked in the first 5 chapters of the dawn brigade. Also random characters leaving at random times, potentially taking super important skills or weapons. This game is literally the definition of unfair. Still my favorite game in the series though
And you didn't even mention the fog of war. The game has such great hits as:
* Micaiah and black knight only, with indirect attackers who can one round her if her levels were unlucky. You know, with her famously bad HP, def, and spd.
* Birds running blind into bowguns
* Underleveled dawn brigade vs cats and tigers you can only hope won't one round you
I guess at least one of them is a chapter that Ike mostly solo, so there's that.
And yeah, Illyana, Tormod&Company, and potentially Jill/Zihark being recruited off (granted, you should know about this on hard runs) can be really shitty to deal with.
“Awakening Lunatic+ is just impossible!”
Frederick: Hold my pebble..
Okay! I've never played Thracia, but what the ACTUAL HELL is it doing to be less fair than a game that has one chapter where an enemy can, on their first turn, teleport to your main character and instakill them!?
It's not as unfair as people mythologize it to be. Thracia is built around broken tools that can be used symmetrically by player and enemy. One of the biggest examples of "Thracia bullshit" is status staff effects lasting forever unless restored. While this can lead to unfun situations where the enemy sleeps a crucial unit from across the map, the player themself has access to so many powerful staff units, and with thracia's status staff hit formula being the highest accuracy in the series and status staves handed to the player like candy and often able to be stolen or captured, you can have your mages and clerics 100% accurate silence an enemy bishop before it can 100% accurate sleep one of your physical units. This comes as a direct contrast to certain other games that I would argue are unfair in that the most powerful tools in the game are only worthwhile in enemy hands because they are too unreliable to hit one of whereas a group of six enemies can fish for positive odds (gba status staff hit formula and enemy density come to mind). That's just one example of the player having ample counterplay to "bullshit enemies". The potential to softlock is dramatically overstated by the community, with many softlocks requiring you to do things lose every thief in your party, have broken your hammerne staff, and didn't buy keys when given the opportunity; these are very esoteric and unlikely situations that only get held against thracia when they are also present in other fe games. Thracia's mechanics are actually explained better than people say in the game, and you are given several very low-stakes maps that you can take at your own pace to discover how the core mechanics work on your own; just because they are not linear tiny arenas with forced lines of play doesn't mean that they aren't effective tutorial spaces. Side objectives are mostly intuitive, while the game doesn't explicitly tell you at one point, the civilian hostages talk about wanting to go home and you can put two and two together. The game has ambush spawns but they are far more fairly placed and telegraphed than FE6 or Awakening ambushes. Really, the "Thracia is unfair" stigma comes from a dogshit pre-2019 fan translation and internet tall tales. This isn't me arguing Thracia is the best game by the way, it's not in my top 3 and maybe not in my top 5, but people are extremely uncharitable towards it
Agreed 100%.
@@harb1ng3r82 I mean yeah a lot of that is true but also Thracia has the tp forest and nothing is more unfair than not being able to play the game (because your character is isolated with their action ended). When ppl talk about Thracia bs they're talking about FoW maps (first one is literally the 3rd map of the game) where you don't even know where to go, not enemy strength or sieges and ballistae
Which game do you mean? (that should be ranked more unfair than Thracia)
@jaskaranbajwa8443 the first fog of war map isn't too bad (though if you take way too long Shiva WILL attack you and that is unfair lmao)
Your placements of Three Houses and Engage basically sum up my feelings on the two games - I really like playing Engage, and I really WANT to like playing Three Houses. Fairness really is incredibly important to the experience of playing these games.
Three Houses is definitely better on Normal and Hard. Sure, those modes are easy to get through, but they don’t put in stupid BS. It’s a game you play for the story and characters, not the combat.
3H is perfectly fine on hard. Enemies largely aren't going to be an immediate threat any time they're allowed to act, so if some reinforcing peg knights pop up somewhere you don't want, there's a good chance you'll be fine.
Maddening feels like it'd be fine if the enemies were just stat balls like they are and same turn reinforcements didn't often include mobile and fast units, but some of the abilities they give them are just ridiculous. I just got done with maddening silver snow, and I have never seen so many miracle procs in one place. How the hell am I supposed to plan a turn when an enemy just has a 1/3 chance of surviving an attack that should kill them? Also, NPC gambit spam just feels awful to deal with. It ruins the pacing of the game and is so feast or famine that it either does nothing or completely kills a unit if the first unit to move happens to land their gambit. Also, reinforcing peg knights are horrible no matter the map, as so few units are really capable of dealing with them.
But also, the amount of tedious bullshit you have to do to keep your units leveled up and usable in maddening is just awful. So much management.
I read fairness as fanbases, Sad it wasn't I was so ready for the drama
Fans of the games I like are cool, fans of the games I don't like are lame
I was really surprised when I first played Awakening, I played on normal difficulty and I was impressed with my units as they all (except the healers) were able to mop the floor with the enemy when they were promoted. Chrom, Lon'qu, Lucina, Robin, Tharja, Vaike, Donnel and Cordelia were really the heavy hitters on my team. Unfortunately Frederick is the same as Emmeryn, his stats fall off quickly in the middle of the story so I had to use Stahl to replace him 🗿
True chads know that Frederick can never really fall off. With either reclassing or as an excellent pair up bot.
The biggest thing about RD that would make me put it more over in the "Unfair" axis is the removal of enemy range in Hard Mode, which forces you to manually count squares and keep track of enemy range. It's one of the biggest examples of artificial difficulty I can think of in a game and the main reason I've never bothered to beat RD on Hard.
is it hard? yes, is it fair? yes, is it fun? yes, truly an engage and conquest moment
Conquest îs not fair în chapters like 25 and 26 and 28
@@mihaimercenarul7467 idk the only things that don't really feel "fair" in conquest are things you realistically actually have full control over. just bring freeze staffs and get the silence? or don't turtle? idk
@@xertiio nope, not on chapter 25 and 26. There are moments where în order to survive you need an actual build that you need to prepare before, like actually knowing before hand. For example the right hall way of chapter 25 with the ninja with spy shuriken. You can send any tank or someone with good avoid and you will die. The endgame of conquest îs pretty ubfair at times.
@@mihaimercenarul7467 again, something you have complete control over. you get entrap and freeze staves. i've beaten the map on 0% growths so :/
and chapter 26 is unironically very easy. you literally only need to meet stat thresholds lmao
@@xertiio nope, on lunatic only having meat shields will get you killed în that Hans hall. Also needing specific staffs means you need to prepare before hand with a strategy specific for that chapter 25 with the spy shuriken, which îs impossible to figure out the first time so you have to cheese it. Also by your logic, no fire emblem game is ubfair since every impossible encounters can be cheesed or prepare before hand. So conquest has some ubfair bs near the endgame.
While this does broden the discussion somewhat, i think there is an inherent problem with ranking by difficulty and fairness using highest difficulties, when the highest difficulty in many of the modern games is frankly completely unbalanced, unfair or unfun. Thats what the chart will correctly show, but it stramrolls the nuance that some of the games have fun and fair difficulty a tier or two down that is actually well designed.
Also considering most of the highest difficulties are designed around or are straight up gated behind a second (or third on FE7's case) playthrough, so they don't really cater to blind players at all. A lot of "unfairness" is just being unable to predict what is coming up/not knowing what to prepare for, which in most cases is greatly mitigated by not going in blind.
Edit: Of course, drastic changes in highest difficulties (Lunatic Reverse, Lunatic+) effectively make the experience blind again, so my point is moot for those.
@@BHox01 Ironically, Lunatic+ is not drastically changed or blind at all. It is literally Lunatic again, except the game rolls the dice if the chapter is supposed to be impossible or not.
@@lpfan4491 while I know what you mean, that is a pretty drastic net difference if you're considering how the player experience is modified
absolutely mesmerized by the gesticulating using revelations before actually placing it
10:22 He said car not Sedgar.
Surprisingly agreed with almost everything. My only complaint would be to put Shadow Dragon to about Three houses Level of unfairness. (Maybe a little better) but Shadow Dragon was still fun to play on the highest difficulty... With 3H I did 1 Maddening run with the blue lions and didn't even want to play the others on maddening. And I love to see more people acknowledging Conquest. As the kind of Freak that did multiple Royal-only "Challenge runs" in Conquest lunatic I love to see it's fairness acknowledged.
( Sadly so far the only way I found to clear chapter 10 like that was with DLC-Taker-Skills, and counting the use of the "first blood" as "Odin you're a royal, now become a grandmaster with yet another DLC Item"
If I were to do something like this, I might try adding a third axis for “breakability”. Like you mentioned, Awakening L+ is incredibly challenging… as long as you don’t nos tank.
That does add another level of subjectivity though. Like, for Sacred Stones, I didn’t think it was too easy, but I also didn’t use Seth. But obviously just using one of the units the game gives you shouldn’t count as breaking the game.
Yup, I agree with this list to be honest. Most FE titles have their fair of difficulty but fairness is a whole lot of different in terms of enemies placement, stats inflation, and how well the player “bounced” back in-game!
I feel like Genealogy should have an asterisk next to it or something. Apparently, it came with the strategy guide, and was designed around the player knowing about secret events in the guide. The chapter 1 Brave Axe and the Pursuit Ring are the two most egregious things you'd just miss without the guide.
I'm playing Thracia for my first time currently and it's a bit bizarre seeing people downplay how difficult it is. The games loves to punish you for overextending even the slightest amount. I've barely been able to do any capturing in the midgame because of this. Ballistas also do painfully high amounts of damage for how common they are.
Unfairness is totally a Factor in it too though, I've lost several runs due to bad RNG. Critical misses, crits on the one unit you couldn't give a scroll, skills proccing at a bad time. I might just be bad, but Thracia is rough.
Personally I feel like it’s kinda become a “I’m so good at Fire Emblem 776 was easy” type of thing, I feel like people saying it are just that or they’re good at FE/srpgs in general. He did this considering highest difficulty so I wouldn’t put it as the highest, but definitely not near the bottom because that’s cap especially if you count first play throughs.
@@not_brandon5984 This type of thing goes beyond FE or even strategy games. There’s a lot of developed skill and knowledge that Person A may have from playing a genre a lot (or maybe they’re just naturally good at the genre), that Persons B C D are lacking, but A takes for granted and speaks as though it’s the minimum standard. Which makes talking about things like difficulty feel arbitrary at best.
As someone whose first game was conquest, I can confirm that the game’s balance is impeccable. On my first playthrough I lost Odin, Silas and Arthur and got super pissed, not because I lost them per se, but because I could have saved them. They were necessary casualties for me to understand that, even though I felt challenged on every single chapter, I also had the tools to work around these challenges.
i like how everyone is like thracia explains nothing, meanwhile the lil manster patch staring you in the face telling you to escape with leif last, capture enemies when you can to take their things, and let people rest before they're forced to rest. And some more niche things like there are gonna be warp tiles in this map.
To be fair that's a ptch on a rom, not the original game. If you were to simply translate the language I don't think you'd get all that.
Are you using a fan patch to justify explanations of things in the game that weren't originally there? What kind of logic is that?
@@AwakeTheFall You are ignoring the manual which also explained many of the mechanics that all players of games during the era read because they contained important and useful information. Which is an issue with this video as a whole to be honest, older games were balanced around players who read manuals because that is what people did in that era. Hell MGS famously had a segment where the back of the box was literally required to progress (leaving the game near unbeatable for people who rented it btw).
The game's box and its contents were a part of the game in that era, and to not include game manual content in this evaluation inherently disadvantages all the older games.
@sadscientisthououinkyouma1867 I'm not ignoring anything. I asked another person how using a fan translated patch that included explainations that weren't in the game makes any sense, when people might not use said patch? What if you are using one of the other patches that don't do that?
Also, who cares if the game manual explains anything? If you aren't (or know) japanese, and you weren't there nearly 25 years ago (and played the lowest selling game in the series till Radiant Dawn), that manual doesn't mean jack shit. The manual point has literally nothing to do with what I commented, but you had to just jump in to correct me. Maybe next time, read the comment.
What if you had ultra strong chrobin but the enemy said counter, vantage+, forged silver bow, stacked stats, is ambush reinforcement.
Watched this video while playing Awakening Chapter 16 Hard Classic Blind.
Got Lucina and Robin killed on the same turn by STR Horse Archers....
Ive only played a couple of games, so i came here looking for what game is jard and fair. Was not expecting 2 of them to be so close. Now i know what games to play next
Banger Video my lord sneedwing!
Honestly one thing I think people should do for character rankings would be by a point system.
F-S Tier has no substance at all.
Give Units more points depending on joining time, base stats, utility, class and then see who performs the best.
Through that technique units who are "carries" like utility character might come out better then expected
Absolutely, I would love to see a more comprehensive way of rating and comparing units like that. Saying A RANK B RANK means absolutely nothing
@@Paterinothe problem is when you try to “sum up” a character based on their individual stat rankings. A character who is a 5/5 in availability but a 2/5 in base stats but a 4/5 with utility? What does that mean for their final ranking? Are base stats so important that they remain a 2/5 character? Does availability and utility matter that much for them to be a 3 or 4/5 overall unit?
@@Speedwingherethe problem is getting into nuance is long and difficult.
Talking about the viability of dancers for example, yea their dancing capabilities are very powerful, but people leave out that that is another unit you are having to baby and watch. Especially since, in FE7 (since it is the one I am most familiar with) Dancers often start out very weak and almost any amount of combat will see them dead. Yes they become dodge tanks with high res but that takes like over a dozen levels to get to. Before then you will constantly have to baby your dancer. And assuming you don’t end-turn spam on a seize map, you can’t force feed them mass amounts of experience at all. They just get 10 EXP per player turn and that’s it. And most maps in FE7 early-mid game aren’t longer than 10-15 turns so your dancer is only getting around a single level a map.
If you just deployed another cavalier or fighter or whatever that’s a unit that you don’t have to worry about a disproportionate amount. In some ways they’re like Est characters in that regard.
It’s much easier to just say “dancers in FE7 are a 4 or 5/5 because dancing OP and dodge-tanking.”
@@MormonDude Stuff like that would definitely matter in a ranking. It also were more suggestive, but by rating units individual in many fields would give every character the same treatment. Units like Rutger break the game and would likely have a lot of maxxed out points in different fields, in comparsion Nino wouldnt compare that well.
For a final ranking you would have a lot more insight how the finalized rating wraps up. A lot more thoughts go through this process too.
Basically after rating the units in the specific fields, you would then add the numbers up and get a clear ranking of the whole unit cast of the game.
First of all, good list overall. Only position I take issue with is, predictably, Thracia. It’s obviously super unfair, but certain aspects of the game also increase the overall difficulty imo. Such as minimal weapon triangle, capture being essential to keep up economically, hit rate caps, fog of war, permanent statuses, stamina. All of these can also be considered unfair but you have to interface with them whether you know how they work or not. So I’d say that a simple game like Fe6 is way easier in the sense that there each chapter plays similarly to every other chapter but that’s just me.
A very fair response, the Thracia stuff really comes down to personal takes on whether some of its more wild mechanics are part of the challenge or artificial difficulty. That outlook honestly applies to all the games.
I agree with everything here but perma status and stamina are bs. Both can lead to potential soft locks which I personally believe are signs of a poorly designed game.
Also, full black fog of war is stupid. Pretty sure most people can see more than just 5 feet in front of them.
Hmm... a lot of things that were brought up as unfair, things like how thracia has a lot of unique mechanics is doesnt explain properly, only affect blind casual players, not a hardcore player who is playing at the highest difficulty. So it feels weird to judge dificulty based on the highest one (to the point of insisting that the player would be playing a japanese rom of por, when a first time casual player wouldnt even know maniac exists) but then judge fairness based on the experience of somebody playing blind without a walkthrough.
Great video. Just one little nitpick: maybe you should have considered that Echoes, Three Houses and Engage allow you to rewind maps, thus mitigating the potential unfairness of the games.
I realize most of the difficulty comes from the beginning of each game, after you get your army rolling the game becomes more manageable
And I agree, difficulty mostly comes from unfairness
Personal opinion, feel free to dismiss. I didn’t think echoes was particularly unfair as you are given most of the tools and resources that the enemy has too. Plus you have Mila’s turn wheel with a pretty generous amount of uses. As for the terrain again, the enemy gets hampered down as much as if not more than you do as you have access to flying units on both sides. And you get gambits from weapons that the enemy doesn’t have access to.
For warping enemies I only ever found that one or two enemies ever use it on a map so I never really had much of a problem with them. Idk maybe I just got lucky and already knew how to play it from playing normal first
Fair point, even the more silly abilities the enemies have like summoning terrors and warping you have access to in the form of Invoke and Warp.
No you're right. Furthermore, terrain bonuses and penalties almost always benefit the player. They are only really an issue when bosses are stapled to them, like thrones.
Everytime you use Mila's turn wheel or the equivalent on 3H/Engage you are just accepting "your defeat" they only exist to save time, and it's okay. And you got lucky, witches always warp turn one and bang my slow/low res units.
@@juanhurtado7244 There are some cases where people use it to reroll their crit chance and not to survive. It is no less "accepting your defeat" as it is to use other lame tactics.
The PTSD when he started talking about binding blade hit rates, 80%+ misses and getting hit with 15 % and losing a character.
Although I do think conquest lunatic is fair overall, the endgame having many maids that spam infinite stat debuffs was incredibly frustrating. Now that I know about it I rescue skip it, but on my first lunatic playthrough I spent hours watching everyone die. Probably the most frustrated I've been playing fire emblem, mostly because the rest of the game is balanced very well
3H maddening takes some getting used to but I have a ton of fun playing it. The only issue I have is the ambush spawns but besides that, it is one of the few FE games I consistently come back to along with Engage. On top of that I'm one of the few insane people who ironmans 3H and let me tell you it is probably the hardest FE game to ironman especially starting from part 2
As a newbie to the series, what is ironmanning in FE? I know the term from other games but is it just permadeath and no rewind, or what?
@@ElusiveEllieIron-man is essentially no saving (unless your taking a break to come back later). So it isn’t just no rewind, it’s no resets. Permadeath is on and even if a good unit dies you have to just keep going without them. If you get a game over you restart the entire game.
I’ve been going about doing an Ironman run on maddening and there are runs where I beat hunting by daybreak without casualties and then lose on Leonie’s paralogue to a misplacement, twice. As fun as three houses can be ironmanning can be a frustrating process.
Speedwing: Conquest Lunatic is almost perfectly fair
Takumi: **BETRAYAL**
I liked the video, you did a good job explaining your point of view! Now, to watch the foolow-up !
Finishing FE 3 Houses maddening using only Blue Lions units 0 death alllowed was quite an adventure. To pass chapter 13 my main strategy was to put Dimitri and Byleth with Sword of the Creator in bushes praying for multiple crits in a row. I finished the last map thanks to a miraculous crit from Dimitri after 15+ restarts, each restart costing me 2h30 hours.
I definitely see why the enemy spam in PoR is considered unfair but not difficult. Especially because all it takes is one or two powerhouse units to be able to survive the horde and suddenly you have even stronger powerhouse units
1:45 Weird example since being jelly is most likely a bug. It's like complaining about Zelda OOT never telling you about Power Crouch Stab.
4:41 Ironically, considering my previous note, FE6 is a bit scuffed interms of fairness because of developer oopsies. In what is presumably a beta-leftover, enemies in the first few chapters get double the HMBs they are supposed to have(Unfair against you), but then you start steamrolling because playable units also get HMBs accidentially(Unfair for you). It's a bit of a mess, lol.
5:14 FE7 has the absolutely weird phenomenon where it is pretty fair in basically every difficulty except the hardest. There is a lot of unfairness with the early game trash mob-spam that wear you down, the low deployment slots and the late game luna enemies. And this reflects itself really badly in the already poorly designed chapters, because those suddenly become a nightmare. HHM is just kinda missing the mark for real.
7:31 I'd argue maniac, since several games on this list are already JP-exclusive and still count. One could argue that this means we have to rate FE7, 8 and 10 by their japanese versions too because they were made a bit easier...but that does not matter, because they were only made slightly easier on their hardest difficulty anyways. Place them a few pixels higher(And I guess FE10 a few pixels to the left because of some dumb nonsense like the forge system) I guess, lol.
11:50 I never even got out of the tutorial because I decided to be le funny and download a save with Lunatic Reverse already unlocked for my first playthrough. Yeah, I definitly should try the game again without the memes. Heck, I even realized while playing that Lunatic has to be fairly ok-ish at least early on because several times I was in a situration where "I actually would have won if the enemies didn't always attack first." I'll still probably start from normal next time, because I actually wish to beat it in my lifetime.
24:45 No Cindered Shadows rating? Aww. I mean, sure, this says "No DLC", but most people got Rev through download and it is here. I wanted to talk about the unused CS Maddening difficulty. D: xD
Also, I honestly think FE Echoes is easier on average than Sacred Stones is, both if one counts grinding and if one does not count grinding. It just always felt like it tried less to give you a run for your money. The late game-Necrodragons with their bootleg of FE7's final boss weapon are singlehandedly more threatening than literally anything in the Echoes mainstory. Postgame may be a diffrent story, I never really looked into that.
I played Conquest on lunatic the first time I played it. I hadn't played Birthright or Revelation before either. I actually think there are quite a few things that are 'unfair', and I'd put it pretty far to the left (not all the way, maybe halfway between the center and the left.
Note: unfair does not necessarily mean bad. Conquest is my favorite FE game tied with Tracia. I often like figuring out how to deal with really wacked out shit.
But what I found 'unfair' in conquest is:
-Having paralogues that aren't practically completable at certain points in the game or are just annoying because they didn't manually balance them and have auto-leveling of enemies and automatically assigned skill.
-Inevitable end
-No saving before the final battle with Takumi
-The final battle with Takumi having such a huge difficulty spike combined with the above.
Wolf and Sedger are the best. The boys that can walk through armys. So fun.
One thing to note about Lyn Hard mode is that you can kind of modify your Lyn-mode units beforehand to adjust the fairness of the game.
If you have a Lyn or Florina with boosted stats I think that FE7 becomes a lot more fair, at least in the early-mid game. Lyn is an infantry killing unit that can also use bows later on, making her arguably a better version of a warrior. Florina becomes a rescuing and transportation powerhouse and a mage killer that can rush in and kill those bolting mages or the status staff users with very little risk to herself because she can go over mountains unimpeded.
Nevermind that you can use the knight crest to give yourself a better Marcus for the mid-game with Paladin Sain or Kent. Or have two paladins at once.
To be fair, I don't think is wild to say that Thracia probably has the hardest "easiest" difficulty of the game, because pretty much the other games have modes that essentially beat themselves if you don't get your good units killed.
And Thracia expect a lot of you (many of weird details are explained in the manual); with every other game you could realistically beat it blind without even using the game's manual.
The only unfair thing about Conquest Lunatic is Endgame. If you don’t specifically build one of three units to rock the final boss you’re pretty much guaranteed to lose a big chunk of your army right at the end.
Conquest end games maps definitely left a sour taste
One of many reasons i hate 3H is because of the difficulty: normal and hard are sleep inducing easy and maddening is extremelly unfair the first half of the game only to circle back to sleep inducing the later half.
Every game is very difficult tbh when you’re ocd like me and usually restart a level upon losing someone
Thracia was one of the most miserable times I've ever had playing Fire Emblem.
A large part of that was the fact I played it before the fan translation patch was a thing cause I was a hardcore nintendo fangirl at the time and I wanted my street cred.
My one change to this list would be increase the distance between FE6 and FE7's fairness. If only for the fact that FE6 has same turn reinforcements.
One thing not talked about is the turn/time travel back turn mechanic. I think it makes three house lunatic a lot easier as you can adjust to the reinforcement bs.
so i played awakening lunatic+ .... for exactly 3 maps and then never touched it ever again. i would get if way back in the line when random growth can screw you up but who in their right mind made a difficulty where the literal 3rd map of the game is halve or maybe even more of the time unwinnable regardless of what you did up until then. and i did not give fredy a sword and you bet i wont be replaying the first 2 maps to get back there because i didn't know that you basically need to give fredy a sword to have a chance in winning of about 40 attempts i got 1 singular attempt that maybe could have been won as i was able to clear out the beginning
1:00 He said Gayten not Gaiden.
13:54 Same turn reinforcement spam is bad, huh? What about the previous 2 games, especially the one that is supposedly fair?
The reason why I think its far worse in awakening is the map design. Awakenings map designs often lead to the STR being in very uncomfortable spots to deal with, an example off the top of my head being the wyverns in Tharjas chapter while you're slowed in the sand. However more of my reasoning for awakening lunatic + being unfair is really tied to the randomized skills honestly and you can then combine those same turn reinforcements with some of the far nastier randomized skills like Luna + and there's nothing you can really do about it
Dang. Seeing you all talk about this stuff and I'm like...I struggle on normal mode. I guess I don't do enough research. lol
You're actually right about Thracia I feel now having played it multiple times. You have more control of how you approach the game. I believe FE6 has to go to further left to unfair. Rutger can face crit early in the game and if he dies your run is basically over. Too many ambush spawns and luck in general plays a big part in that game. The low hit rates make it more interesting for me and more fun to be fair and that's why I love Berwick Saga as well.
It's interesting to see how the relationship between fairness and difficulty for Fire Emblem games interact with each other. One would think that fairness and difficulty would be correlated by demonstrating a negative relationship between the two. But the positive regression line demonstrated in these rankings is likely a testament to the quality of these games. Even when the games are unfair in comparison, their difficulty isn't anything insane and vice versa, and most of the unfair games are the older more archaic ones anyways when Kaga was still a part of Fire Emblem. Not that Kaga's design philosophy is necessarily bad but it's definitely more hardcore. Even for post-Kaga FE games, the ones that are regarded with being more unfair are mostly the remakes since IS keeps most of their remakes relatively faithful and whatever new mechanics they introduce sometimes aren't very well optimized for the original experience. Of course there's also exceptions to these rankings like 3H and Awakening, but they can be ignored anyways due to their outlying behavior and high residuals.
Also this is probably a generalization but it seems to me that many of the FEtubers and active people in the community started with games that were very beginner-friendly like FE7 and 8. Obviously this is also probably because those were the first 2 FE games introduced to the west, but I think IS and Nintendo took that into account when designing the games, which would further support the fact as to why these games are so beginner-friendly, especially FE8 since it's an outlier, and a unique one too. I've heard of more people being continuously active in the community that started with FE7/8 than people that started with let's say FE13/14, even when those games did much bigger selling numbers. But of course this isn't taking other factors like story and accessibility into account, as well as the influence of the internet and social media, variables that probably helped other games (3H specifically) retain fans.
I think this was a pretty good assessment and I really like the chart in theory. The problem is (and this counts for any charts/tierlists/rankings) the games individually have certain sections that define whether or not it's hard. Ex: Fe3h has a really difficult first few chapters but once you're really going in the monastery it's not too bad. Then all of a sudden the time skip happens and the game is suddenly very hard again but for that one chapter and the rest snowballs from there. All of the gakes have these moments and ranking the games as a whole is already a flawed approach in terms of objective analysis. That being said, great video and I think you did a great job elaborating on what your thought processes were for each game.
Man i still need to play these other fire emblem games.
I've played only about half of them but i still want to get to Genealogy, Thracia and the Radiant series.
The difference between lunatic and lunatic+ is insane. Frankly it's just not fun to play because you can play perfectly and still lose because the enemy landed a 1% crit.
3 houses isn't too bad except ambush spawns are extremely annoying when you don't know they're coming and a unit you thought was safe gets one shot.
Agree Chapter 13 on maddening can soft lock a run. It usually comes down to if your Byleth can solo the chapter if you're not focusing on students from your house.
Church route gotta be one of the most frustrating things on maddening cause your only really busted unit is byleth and it turns maps that Dimitri and Claude make a cake walk into some of the most frustrating things ever
Super disagree that Thracia is low difficulty. I played it with a guide, knowing how the game works in general and having played a lot of FE before and I still had a hard time until the last batch of chapters where you can basically warpskip everything and Ced destroys anything you have to kill.
Idk if I would consider FE12 Lunatic Reverse that fair considering people have had to reset their games early on because they didn’t get the right stat levelups and having ambush spawns automatically makes it impossible to rank as very fair (even if mid battle saves exist to mitigate the issue somewhat). But I haven’t played that one myself.
I did play Thracia blind, and honestly I'm with you on being puzzled by its reputation. However, I feel it's fairer than you give it credit for. The critical mechanics are fed to you (capture in 2x for example, especially with the very ham-fisted new translation). In 2x I didn't really know there was a capture mechanic until I got up to Lifis, saw the option and went for it. Apart from that I don't see many mechanics being a surprise that can completely destroy you, but give you scares to keep on your toes. Every game can have softlocks depending on how you play but Thracia having things such as the locked doors in the final map just stands out because its not in the way of "oh my army is in ruins", like if you haven't built your units right for Conquest Lunatic's endgame, which otherwise would be a very fair game (and the most fair Lunatic difficulty). It's hard to say whether Thracia is fair or unfair, as the game punishes you with some crazy stuff, but also leaves the door open to let the player take advantage of it in a way no other fire emblem does.
Radiant Dawn is weird bc while it can be unfair to someone who hasn’t played it before like Thracia, the fact that new players have to play normal to unlock hard means you have to play it atleast once with Battle Saves, which can allieviate the difficulty and unfairness.
Pretty strong correlation between fairness and difficulty here - with 3 exceptions
Curious how all the games the "community" praises are unfair and all the disliked ones are considered more fair. FE community masochism
I think a lot of it is that gameplay/design quality is as hit or miss with this series as the writing. Awakening? Fairly well written, horribly balanced. Same for 3 houses. Engage and fates? Opposite problem. I can't really speak to pre-PoR era, but it seems like we get one or the other, but basically never both. PoR itself is probably the last game I can think of that isn't absolutely riddled with run ending bullshit that's well written.
Playing awakening(my first ever fire emblem) and I was having a lot of fun until I believe I’m on chapter 17 and all the sudden half my units don’t do enough damage, and I can’t find a way to level my unused units because they just die. I’ve stopped having fun which sucks. If anybody has beginner tips without any spoilers that would be appreciated it
When Awakening came up I was expecting you to break youtube and somehow place it on my second monitor in terms of fairness
Great video! Overall I really agree with a lot of the points you made, especially new mystery. The one gripe I have is that you used the same argument for why rev can be unfair because you need a lot of prior knowledge in order to play lunatic, which is true, but it's the same thing for thracia, so I don't see why those two are as far apart as they are in terms of fairness. Even if rev just mentions them slightly more, it's still a very stark contrast in where they are in terms of fairness. I definitely agree on the difficulty of both games however.
Doesn't FE8 explain supports in chapter 3? Like, if you play normal/easy mode (the ine where you get tutorials), it makes you support Colm and Neimi. I don't know how well they explain it, but there was an attempt
I had no idea that was the case, I don't think I've ever played on anything but hard
@@Speedwinghere haha yeah that's the case with most people that touched Sacred Stones, but I had to see the tutorial events (I do hackroms) and they were a lot. I think the first 7/8 chapters have tutoriales (I think the last one is the use of Ballista) and, while not great, they teach you the basic concepts like trading rescuing and such
The only two games I have beaten on their hardest difficulty without it being a character solo are Awakening and 3 Houses...
Idk if fates does that good of a job explaining everything. I tried it blind and felt very overwhelmed by the games reclassing and limited resources. I do think its great but I really find the 3 seperate reclass seals, etc. Very very confusing and hard to plan around without knowing the meta.
This was my experience too. I played Conquest blind and I hadn't done Birthright or Rev beforehand.
While I am of the belief the tools are there, they're not as easy to get the hang of in other games. Things like the pairing system don't feel very intuitive. Some maps are overwhelming with too much variability. And you get punished really hard for messing up even on Normal. Add that to limited resources and units becoming obsolete very fast. Does building stuff in your castle even help?
I'd give the game more credit if it had a better storyline and writing too, haha.
I'm playing an Engage ironman on maddening with no DLC now (my first time playing maddening), and while it is quite tough, it's nowhere remotely close to other hard ones like 3H maddening
I have a Hard time Imagining Engage is actually that far up on the difficulty spectrum because as of Typing this it is the First and only FE game I have ever beaten on the highest difficulty, and no DLC was needed to do so.
I give full credit for that to how good some of the emblem inherited skills are, at the end of the game I had 5 units with Draconic Hex one of which was Vayle with Celica Ring and Thoron Echoing 2 enemys from outside of range and applying that insane debuf to both of them, then I could dance her forward and defuff 2 more, I also had Goldmary sitting at the back with Duel assist smacking every Enemy for 20% of their health for fun.
Enemy phase essentially didn't exist for me by the final chapters because I would just Swarm any Enemies dumb enough to get in range and clear them all out without any issues.
Maybe that's why I had so much easier of a time with this game since it made doing maths about what the enemy can do so much less important and rewarded me for a more SMORC playstyle.
I don't think the FE6 hitrates are really unfair, they're just as bad for the enemy, so it's just a different vibe. Which leads to easy avoid tanking with some avoid stacking, so maybe even more in the players favor if they know how to play around it (GBA my behated). And I would disagree with Thracia being THAT easy, yeah it's definitely easier than its reputation, but still you get a lot of tools and have to use them correctly in each situation or map and it's more varied in that regard than most games in the franchise. Aside from "numerical" difficulty where it can just be hard to deal with enemy stats my main criteria for difficulty would basically be: Does the game offer challenges I have to think about or can I just keep doing the same thing over and over?
That's a good way of thinking about it, I was mostly running things like stats of enemies in my head but you're probably right. Do you have to do different strategies throughout the game or can you just find one broken thing and do it over and over
Them being low for the enemies makes it more unfair, because statistical outliers hit you harder. There is a reason missing an 80-90 hit followed by dying to a 1% hit, 1% crit is a Fe6 meme...
I agree with your thracia take, chapter 10 for example, you have like 5 or 6 ballistas, owen and the other guy in the middle of the chapter, the siege tomes spam and etc, alot of chapters are pretty hard
I don't know if saying low hit rates affect the enemy as much as the player is true. FE6 has a lot of time pressure maps, and player forces vs enemy forces are very asymmetric. The enemy doesn't have have to care about time pressure or losing units, the player does. Which can make it hard to just evade stack on maps with turn limits and brigands/thieves, etc.
I don't think the low hit rates are really a fairness thing, but I do think it does make the game a bit more difficult on the whole.
Hit rates and overdose of strange skills in fates i think made conquest and birthright for me very unfair games to play. Cant say the same about awakening... its just really strange.
Engage is one of the most fun I’ve had with an fe game to date. (Purely based on gameplay, tuned out the story completely). It will never be my favourite but it’s so much fun. It’s really challenging but becomes kinda annoying chapter 24 and onward. If you aren’t using the best units in the game you will have a hard time. Like really hard.
And if you’re using dlc you’re having the same amount of fun but without any challenge.
25:00
and lets not forget the Well update. i went all the way to ch 25 w/o the well update on Maddening and it was HELL. if i had the Well update when i began Maddening things woulda been SO MUCH EASIER!!!
i did beat Maddening with no DLC AND NO ONLINE (which means no free items to sell and no free EXP) and it was indeed challenging. im so glad i didnt invest a single coin to any kingdom cuz i needed every last cent!
Tempest Trials was completely useless, might as well not exist until post game.