Ranking fire emblem by difficulty and fairness, a follow up
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- Опубликовано: 10 сен 2024
- In this video I try to explain a little more of my reasoning behind choices made in my ranking fire emblem games by difficulty and fairness video which can be found here • Ranking fire emblem ga...
#fireemblem
Speedwing must have quite a few speed over me if he’s following up this quickly.
He used a brave weapon!!
Its gaiden/echoes only need 1 spd to double
He also has the pursuit skill
Alacrity
A third axis I would really like is blind run vs non-blind (ie. the player knows every mechanic and things to do in each chapter). For some games it doesnt change much, for others it changes everything.
and yeah fun too, but then 4D graph aaaaaaaaaaaaa xD
or just a PCA of those 4 criteria (and if we go with that, we could even add other criteria)
I think this isn't too much different from fairness though. Part of what makes things unfair is the assumption that you are playing blind/for the first time and not losing cause you're playing poorly but because the game is treating the player poorly.
Engage I think is a major one that needs that, on the first run or two, even on Hard, Engage can be brutal, but once you understand the mechanics hard drops dramatically.
Even if I don't agree with some of the placements I'm just happy at the idea of dividing difficulty with fairness
Would this help clarify the rankings? I normalized the X, Y axis and put them in order:
#16. Sacred Stones: Difficulty 2, Unfairness 6, Final Score: 8/72
#15. Birthright: Difficulty 16, Unfairness 8, Final Score: 24/72
#14. Fire Emblem(7/Blazing Blade): Difficulty 9, Unfairness 18, Final Score: 27/72
#13. Engage: Difficulty 27, Unfairness 4, Final Score: 31/72
#12. Genealogy: Difficulty 9, Unfairness 22, Final Score: 31/72
#11. Echoes: Difficulty 7, Unfairness 27, Final Score: 34
#10. Revelations: Difficulty 23, Unfairness 13, Final Score: 36/72
#9. Conquest: Difficulty 34, Unfairness 2, Final Score: 36/72 (It's harder than Path of Radiance)
#8. Path of Radiance: Difficulty 12, Unfairness 25, Final Score: 37/72
#7. Thracia 776: Difficulty 5, Unfairness 32, Final Score: 37/72 (Hmmmm. Possibly Accurate bc warp and etc.)
#6. New Mystery of the Emblem: Difficulty 27, Unfairness 10, Final Score: 37/72 (Almost Middle of the pack, time investment to finish not applicable to difficulty I guess)
#5. Radiant Dawn: Difficulty 16, Unfairness 23, Final Score: 39/72
#4. Binding Blade: Difficulty 23, Unfairness 18, Final Score: 41/72
#3. Shadow Dragon: Difficulty 18, Unfairness 28, Final Score: 46/72
#2. Awakening: Difficulty 21, Unfairness 33, Final Score: 54/72
#1. Three Houses: Difficulty 28, Unfairness 32, Final Score: 60/72
@@ravenstires1747 You could argue you should swap your points giving more points for fairness less for unfairness to get better games. A fair Difficult game should out rank an unfair easy game. Basically based on how Speedwing talked about the games Conquest should be 1st on your list.
@kwbhockey OH I wasn't ranking for quality. Far from it. That would require a very, very subjective "fun" category. I'm enjoying Lunatic(-) on Awakening rn as I unlock Lunatic(+) but not everyone enjoys that kinda thing. I'm laughing my ass off getting crit by 3% Elthunders and taking too many attacks because of dual attack lmao.
To explain fairness and difficulty.
Conquest is Fair
There's a lot of tough enemy you encounter with crazy stat and crazy skill. But the game actually give you tool to deal with them and you can check your opponent skill before you even start the map. So you can't blame the game if your unit somehow die to counter for example.
Thracia is unfair because
Oh my god I can't even see the map!!!
If Kaga made conquest you probably would run into units with hidden skills lmao.
@@LP-zn8sc He might make a map where they have multiple enemies with Hexing Rod hiding in a fog!!!!
basically the further from the bottom right it is the more difficult it is.
just whether they difficulty comes from things that are "fair" to the player or not
Damn, we got doubled. The Speed stat is too high.
Imagine if you were in the gun to head scenario of lunatic+ vs conquest lunatic and you load into chapter 5 with every enemy on the map having counter
lmaoooo
Well that’s impossible but it is a funny concept
At this point we just gotta accept that having a pure objective rating is basically impossible.
This is the real answer honestly
@@SpeedwinghereI could’ve said a lot more, but I know rating difficulty usually ends up like this, admirable for trying tho
About the first point; the way I thought about 'difficulty vs fairness' was more along the lines of 'strategic challenge' vs 'artificial difficulty'.
I think that using more specific and descriptive terms like those helps to clarify that the two axes are two different types of difficulty, which it sounds like some people misunderstood.
I personally felt that it was clear enough as-is, but I can definitely understand why someone would question the meaning of your words.
people always say artificial difficulty but will never talk about natural difficulty
I think a good way to view this is how punishing the games are and if the game allows you to rectify mistakes in a reasonable way. I hate to be that guy but it's why I enjoy Dark Souls 1. It will punish you for being careless but always offers a chance to correct your mistake. And most of the difficulty is based on the level design so it can be as simple as taking a section at a slower pace a second time through. I feel like the FE games that offer this type of balance are what you would call fair even if they're difficult.
I've yet to play Conquest but I imagine it allows you to screw up and will punish you by say killing one of your better units, but it's never so brutal that you just can't complete the game so long as you take your time and build your units up.
I would agree, but that game has curse. An instant death status that halves your health when you respawn and tells you to go to a mid to late game area to fix it. I would also say Lautrec killing the maiden and thus removing the firelink shrine bonfire useless is also a bit excessive, but only because of how long it takes to fix that mistake if you let him do the deed he pretty explicitly tells you he will do.
I think the only way to put a 3rd axis on this graph would be to remove the graph and scale each game somewhere between -10 and 10 on ‘Fairness’, ‘Difficulty’ and ‘Fun’
New Mystery of the Emblem is fair?? lmao it's one of the few games in the series where it's actually possible to softlock yourself on the final chapters, but unlike, say, Conquest or even Thracia which still gives you multiple viable builds and party setups even if you go off-meta (you don't NEED staves to beat the final chapters of FE5, they just make your life incalculably easier) FE12 only allows a tiny handful of viable builds in the endgame. And if you don't met the stat benchmarks of these narrow builds, sorry, but you gotta reset.
Rest of the graph is pretty accurate IMO, even if I think you're being a little too harsh to Shadow Dragon and Three Houses.
Prob is a case of "played so much that it became a second nature" which is common problem to this type of list
but you can softlock shadow dragon too, and frankly its really hard too unless you totally ignore the story
@@coldeed I've only played FE3, not FE12, so I don't know if it applies to both, but at least in FE3, you can softlock yourself out of the good ending really quickly. Even before the game tells you about the star shards, it's completely possible to miss or lose some of them.
(I say this since I forgot to open one of the chests in like chapter 6 and only realized I had missed the star shard because I was looking at a guide. Luckily, I only had to reload a save state I had made.)
Nah, he is not harsh enough on Shadow Dragon, that game has STRs with forged weapons, including balistae in the endgame. Not to mention the early game fiasco of the first 3 bosses, some characters suiciding through recruiting and the 1+% crit rates on important units like Jaigen...
@@thestylemage2092 the 3ds games have the easiest resource management in the series and literal infinite improvement in many forms. Tonics, free units etc. I'm in disagree with them being "really hard" when they are honestly pretty comparable to 776 having busted tools to handle slightly greater challenge.
On top of people would point at shadow dragon and bring up say wolf and sedgar as if nearly every character in awakening isn't busted to that degree and easier to grow. It's a game where everyone grows easier than them and is more stacked to be op than barst imo, and that makes it really trivial, with an easier start and finish that basic shadow dragon, but the bars not super high in any fe game for difficulty. The games by design should be pretty stacked to be idiot proofed.
I think the colored bar graph where the green bar is fair difficulty and the red bar is unfair difficulty is a more useful comparison than the 2 dimensional grid where games are placed on it.
I do think the other video was great though, just that the bar graph shown in this video is a more helpful visualization.
Also, tbf, I don't think something being heavily biased is an inherit flaw. When I talk about things, I like to highlight my biases so that it's clear where the perspective is coming from. That just seems more helpful than trying to eliminate bias since the lines between objective and subjective is somewhat subjective.
I understand the reason behind having Reverse Lunatic be fair, because you are going into it for the sake of playing it and you know exactly what is happening. In context of New Mystery, calling it fair is fine. That said I do disagree just because the list is each game in the context of the whole series, not against itself. I feel like you could make the same argument for Awakening. In context of Awakening, you know that Lunatic+ will have a bunch of crazy skills for each map so if you play it, you are playing it to fight against those. Feels like the same argument to me.
I am curious though, how would normal FE12 Lunatic be placed?
You're probably right the awakening thing to an extent, although the only real gameplay change is the randomised skills which you can't really plan for too much unlike with lunatic reverse where you can plan every move for the entire map ahead. In terms of just lunatic I would probably lower its fairness a bit which I know sounds weird but without the uniqueness of lunatic reverse it sort of has the same issues as some of the other entries
@@Speedwinghere giving every enemy Vantage+ makes it more fair?
You right, that does sound crazy lol but I kinda see where you are coming from. I think the need for foreknowledge on a game should be factored in, because you cannot solve the FE12 reverse lunatic puzzle without very detailed knowledge of each map. We all have access to FE12 on Wars of Dragons but I still think it is clearly the most difficult for a new player with no foreknowledge.
As a diehard Thracia player I thought your points in the last video were absolutely more than fair, once the unfairness is mitigated, there's not near as much room for error
I like this method for ranking "difficulty" in games, it just makes sense
If we aren’t at minimum breaking into the 5th dimension with our fire emblem rankings, then we as a fanbase will stagnate and die.
People think it is the characters or story or gameplay or world-building that keeps our fanbase alive, but that’s incorrect. It is our incessant need to argue with strangers we’ll never meet personally over arbitrary things.
The real fire emblem all along was the arguments we had along the way
TRUE
I would think the third axis would be cheesability. For example Awakening lets you easily hire maxed out characters from that lunatic playthrough you had to do in order to play lunatic+ making it very cheesable, Thracia gives full dodge exp results in moderately cheesy strats. Of course adding a third subjective axis would make it hilarious complicated especially since cheesability subtracts from difficulty.
It’d be funny. Might try it someday, I have some little knowledge about 3D graphs.
The problem here is that you don't really define what is 'difficulty' or what is 'fairness'. You put Thracia down as really unfair because (from what I understand) a)there's a lot of hax/luck based stuff and b)there's a lot of stuff you just have to 'know' that the game doesn't tell you. Yet in New Mystery Reverse having to know literally *everything* ahead means it's difficult and not unfair. Meanwhile something like FE7 where enemies are made of paper and you can just end turn with Marcus with a Hand Axe to victory is somehow more difficult than Thracia. Or FE4, which is basically a cakewalk outside of very few very specific sections/enemies (I really don't know WTF 'difficulty' is if FE4 has more of it than both FE5 and FE7 Hector Hard Mode)
I don't think adding fun is the answer. Even in the original video I thought replacing fairnesss with fun would be the way to go. Unfairness is generally hated while fairness is loved. In that graph, awakening would be at the far end of difficult but also be at the bottom in terms of fun. While something like conquest would be at the far end of difficult while still being at the top in terms of fun. So both games that are in the same range in difficulty will be at the same place on the x axis, while on opposite sides of the y axis, perfectly visualizing that one is hated and the other is loved despite being in the same category of difficulty.
In terms of difficulty fairness, you had it right in this video with the vertical graph separating fairness and difficulty. I feel like a 2 axis graph makes it so hard to visualize, while this is great. A 2 axis graph would fit better with difficulty/fun imo.
Funnily with normalized X, Y axis it's actually 3 Houses at the top of the list. My other comment has them all ranked.
I personally still disagree with 12. If you have to define a different set of parameters for playing the game vs literally every other entry, then in the context of a series it's not a fair game.
I would agree if lunatic reverse was even similar in how it plays to the rest of the series. I honestly should have probably left it out and just used lunatic
It's sorta strange to say that New Mystery gets to be considered more "fair" because the elements that make it difficult are things that you sign up for when you load the game, which is true, but then not apply that logic to all of the games if you think about it.
When I load up Awakening Lunatic+ I do so because I want a game that I can't just used a prerehersed strategy to beat, and Awakening is basically the only game that provides that due to the randomized nature of enemy skills, that's exactly what I'm signing up for when I boot up the game. I think the main issue is the label of "fair" here. The word itself means something that is impartial and balanced, but that's not actually what's being rated. If it was actually how "fair" the game is, well Conquest is incredibly unbalanced, the player team gets a Camilla and the enemies don't get anything close to that, but "fairness" by it's actual definition isn't something you can really apply to a singleplayer game. I think what you're actually rating would be better described as which elements of difficulty are you partial to and enjoy, though it's hard to sum that up in a single word but "fair" is not that word.
I cannot believe the disrespect being shown right now towards Nichol, Nichol's very late Wyvern Lord reinforcement boyfriend, and the Wyvern Lord boyfriend's even more late 2nd Wyvern Lord reinforcement twin brother
I mean I'm totally talking about fairness to the player. I don't really understand what you mean by conquest being unfair because it gives you a very strong unit to play with. Unfair to the AI enemy perhaps? Although camilla can die in lunatic pretty easily so I'm not too sure what you mean by this.
@@Speedwinghere If something is fair to the player, who is the other side here to compare to
Because it’s clearly not the enemy
The player units have better bases and growths, the pool of player only skills is way stronger than the pool of enemy only skills, and the player has incredibly strong mechanics like supports and tonics and meals and forging that in CQ the enemies just can’t use.
To us, as the advantaged side, this looks “fair”
After all the AI enemy doesn’t have access to any unique tools that are more powerful than our unique tools
But this is the exact opposite of fair, literally by definition. A necessity for a single player game, every FE game the player usually gets better tools than the enemy because the player is expected to win. Fair is just not a good descriptor of non-multiplayer games, because when someone says a single player game is fair, they mean that the player side has the clear advantage. That no tools the enemy has can allow them to win without getting a chance for the player to respond without foreknowledge, but the player tools are strong enough to cause the enemy to lose with no room for a response. This is well designed, players don’t want to lose and the AI doesn’t care about losing, but it’s clearly not fair. Quality of Game Design is what you’re actually judging, something subjective to be sure, but still an interesting metric to look at.
@@Scepti that's a very interesting take on the definition of fair and I do sort of see where you're coming from with it. I suppose that's always going to be a bit of an issue with this topic is it sort of comes down to peoples own take on what overreaching terms like that actually mean
agreed, Thracia is more tedious than difficult. Kaga gives players plenty of tools that makes a unit go from 0 to op hero through scroll stacking and plenty of xp.
things like staff misses, forest tiles teleporting you at start of the map, and waiting out balistae isnt hard just time consuming.
4:22 But if you apply that same standard to idk Radiant Dawn it suddenly becomes way les unfair too. If you plan out everything, most games become very predictable, outside of games with dangerous STRs. And Radiant Dawn is by no means a fair game. By your logic deciding to play Hard means that you WANT to count enemy movement.
(Also Shadow Dragon is to high up, that game has STRs with forged weapons including Balistas)
Yeah I can say the follow up is good to expand on your ideas. Conquest while hard you can get some bonus exp or things that make you able to help your runs like azura dance spam and capturing haitaka for that rally which comes in handy
I'd say older Fe games are more on the unfairness due to how they can be unbalanced at times
Add a fourth dimension. Translucency of each point for the degree of objectivity of those points.
You can add a Z-axis just by increasing and decreasing the picture
Fe 5 fog of war is literally only used for gaidens specifically abels chapter has given me nightmares do to fog of war warp tiles
I literally just got done watching the first vid and a sequel comes out immediately lol
Edit: Sorta see where you coming from and while I don't fully agree, I see why you would say it.
After normalizing the X,Y axis the results seemed more or less about right to me.
#16. Sacred Stones: Difficulty 2, Unfairness 6, Final Score: 8/72
#15. Birthright: Difficulty 16, Unfairness 8, Final Score: 24/72
#14. Fire Emblem(7/Blazing Blade): Difficulty 9, Unfairness 18, Final Score: 27/72
#13. Engage: Difficulty 27, Unfairness 4, Final Score: 31/72
#12. Genealogy: Difficulty 9, Unfairness 22, Final Score: 31/72
#11. Echoes: Difficulty 7, Unfairness 27, Final Score: 34
#10. Revelations: Difficulty 23, Unfairness 13, Final Score: 36/72
#9. Conquest: Difficulty 34, Unfairness 2, Final Score: 36/72 (It's harder than Path of Radiance)
#8. Path of Radiance: Difficulty 12, Unfairness 25, Final Score: 37/72
#7. Thracia 776: Difficulty 5, Unfairness 32, Final Score: 37/72 (Hmmmm. Possibly Accurate bc warp and etc.)
#6. New Mystery of the Emblem: Difficulty 27, Unfairness 10, Final Score: 37/72 (Almost Middle of the pack, time investment to finish not applicable to difficulty I guess)
#5. Radiant Dawn: Difficulty 16, Unfairness 23, Final Score: 39/72
#4. Binding Blade: Difficulty 23, Unfairness 18, Final Score: 41/72
#3. Shadow Dragon: Difficulty 18, Unfairness 28, Final Score: 46/72
#2. Awakening: Difficulty 21, Unfairness 33, Final Score: 54/72
#1. Three Houses: Difficulty 28, Unfairness 32, Final Score: 60/72
Dont agree with all of them but it's nice to see the split in fairness/difficulty
Most interesting ones I want to comment on specifically:
- Fe16 should be on a fairer ranking I feel. Sure you can't go sandbox everything you want for everyone without making them bad, but that's all. Most of the runs are fairly easy it's just tedious final maps mostly. though there's some things you can do in preparations that'll make things tougher if you weren't aware.
FE6 should be much easier I feel. FE7 gets a lot of flack for being "easy", but 6 honestly isn't that much more difficult, if at all. After C7 (the hardest one in GBA emblem by far, I'll give you) most of the game gets fairly easy. And apart from the absolute final stretch it doesn't really get much worse.
With that being said, I also think people are often too harsh on FE7. It's not a top pick for difficulty, but it still has some challenging (one of them very unfair) maps in the late game that I feel get completely forgotten because 7, for a lot of people, is their first game and they get to a point where they're so used to the game they forgot some time ago it actually had them think a little more than they need to rn
Ultimately I think labelling one axis as difficulty will alway make the discussion a bit muddy or confusing.
I feel difficulty encompasses any factor between the start and end of a game, which also includes perceived unfairness, in that sense it seems a bit contradictory to let unfairness be a seperate factor from difficulty.
What I feel can be used as additional axis next to fairness are things like tactics (for example I feel FE6 would be quite high in tactics because the high randomness in hitrates forces you to reconsider turn by turn strategy), planning (FE3H, general unit building importance), how much prior knowledge helps and what degree of prior knowledge.
Finally to be complately honest I think a fun axis would make everything more muddy. Simple example is the Dawn Brigade imo, I see as much people saying they like playing a bunch of ragtag with overall weak units as much a I see people saying they'd prefer a stronger cast to train throughout the whole game. Another example is that some people will directly oppose unfairness to fun, whereas personally I think unfairness often participates in creating highly memorable gameplay situations, etc....
Overall the discussion around how to qualify difficulty seems much more fun than just debating which games are difficult lol.
Fun only really works as long as its a clear cut personally graph as opposed to someone making a objective overall one. But yeah I think you're right the best part is just discussing how to do it lmao
tracia is deeply unfair because kempf isnt playable
Here's the ranking if I normalize the X and Y axis:
#16. Sacred Stones: Difficulty 2, Unfairness 6, Final Score: 8/72
#15. Birthright: Difficulty 16, Unfairness 8, Final Score: 24/72
#14. Fire Emblem(7/Blazing Blade): Difficulty 9, Unfairness 18, Final Score: 27/72
#13. Engage: Difficulty 27, Unfairness 4, Final Score: 31/72
#12. Genealogy: Difficulty 9, Unfairness 22, Final Score: 31/72
#11. Echoes: Difficulty 7, Unfairness 27, Final Score: 34
#10. Revelations: Difficulty 23, Unfairness 13, Final Score: 36/72
#9. Conquest: Difficulty 34, Unfairness 2, Final Score: 36/72 (It's harder than Path of Radiance)
#8. Path of Radiance: Difficulty 12, Unfairness 25, Final Score: 37/72
#7. Thracia 776: Difficulty 5, Unfairness 32, Final Score: 37/72 (Hmmmm. Possibly Accurate bc warp and etc.)
#6. New Mystery of the Emblem: Difficulty 27, Unfairness 10, Final Score: 37/72 (Almost Middle of the pack, time investment to finish not applicable to difficulty I guess)
#5. Radiant Dawn: Difficulty 16, Unfairness 23, Final Score: 39/72
#4. Binding Blade: Difficulty 23, Unfairness 18, Final Score: 41/72
#3. Shadow Dragon: Difficulty 18, Unfairness 28, Final Score: 46/72
#2. Awakening: Difficulty 21, Unfairness 33, Final Score: 54/72
#1. Three Houses: Difficulty 28, Unfairness 32, Final Score: 60/72
Some interesting placements, always cool to see how other people would place
oh wait I'm stupid I just realized what you actually did, huh that's actually pretty cool to see it in numbers
@@Speedwinghere I did a bit of color commenteary on my own "perceived placements" and even gave Awakening a 33 when 32 is the highest allowed by the graph due to your commentary in the first video: "I'd put it off the screen if I could." haha. You can consider it a bit of a mix of both with only minor adjustments made by me. The vast majority of the series falling into that central arc of ~30 to ~40 seems very genuine. It's funny to see 3 Houses take "the lead" and also to see it and Awakening being the 2 outliers. Well...I suppose Sacred Stones is also a kind of outlier. :p
objectivity is a myth there's only clarity of criteria
I personally feel the bar graph would go over better, that two-vectors graph just, most people don't understand Algebra-style graphs and they tend to be seen as less legitimate to people, but a bar graph or pie-graph the breaks down a games difficulty between:
A comprehensive list of what is deemed "FULLY UNFAIR" and each item of the list gives a +1 to the game's unfairness.
Account for, what I'd say are "meme tiers" of difficult. Assess it on both the hardest and second hardest difficulty (a second bar for Lunatic Reverse if it breaks rules that the previous difficulty established, and show that difficulty separate or as a third component to the bar, using the next highest difficulty to assess how it scales to the hardest, this mostly applies to non-3-standard difficulty mode games, like the DS FE games)
Lay out a list of what is the pure difficulty of the games, unit quality a player has access to vs the computer, level differences when played "AS INTENDED." Things such as those make the core difficulty of the game.
Add in another component of "specific-to-that-game." Things specific to the game and that being how much it differs from the core tenants of Fire Emblem when taken in A BROAD perspective, what differentiates say something like FE1 and FE11. I know what those are, I've seen what people talk about when saying "I basically beat FE1," being told "no, you beat the remake, not FE1, same with FE2/SoV, FE3/FE12" stuff like that that cause people to say those things. The things that are outside the scope of unfairness and fairness, and just have it there as a "it deviates this much from the "FE Holy Bible" because of X" and add that as a separate bar, that doesn't apply to difficulty, but something like, mmm... I'd say Valentia and 3 Houses are pretty far out from the core FE Bible, in this case, the first, because of how spellcasting and leveling up, damage can't be 0, it's ALWAYS 1... etc. in the case of 3H, well, literally just how the game works, the hub and how it works, how the unit recruitments work, how the branching paths of growth, etc. I'd honestly say 3H deviates from the core aspects of FE than any other title in the series, obviously discounting a phone gacha game. So if you imagine 3H having near-full-depararture from the series, it'd probably have that as a "CORE FE IDENTITY DEVIATION"
With those variables, I feel, with community or commity-sourced definitions for everything, that's about how close you could show people with an easy to understand graph. DO that R/G Bar and then a Grey one to the side showing the deviation from what you must layout as the "FE Holy Bible" tenants and traits the vast majority of games have, whether buried/hidden/unexplained or not. And then explain how that changes the difficulty overall, which is the "SUBJECTIVE" impact on difficulty, explain that on each game's page of what causes that Red bar aspect, the green bar aspect and what the specific traits that make it different from CORE FE gameplay, aka "FE Holy Bible," and then you can bring in the both objectivity and SUBJECTIVITY to the coversation of each game.
These are my generalized thoughts overall as to how you can do it better.
Also grid-graphs aren't a great info tool, so either bar graphs when comparing games directly using a point system to create the bar graphs and a pie graph element that use the point system alongside the deviation to truly show how much a game is different from, what I'd say most people would call "FE GBA games" in which I feel you will find, between them, FE 4/5 and FE 9 and FE 11 should spell out what the well-known, most common denominators of most games, the little green part would be "FE Holy Bible" aspects, red would be the "unfair aspects" and then that little deviation from "core aspects" that most games share. So most games will deviate from a core identity a bit, but something like 3H nearly throws out the bible for a completely different experience that can't be found elsewhere in any other game in the series thus far.
I find it interesting/commendable to rate the games like this, but it doesn't really help a first time player that (in my case) is crazy enough to do a blind Ironman on the default difficulty setting blind.
I was good enough to beat Zephiel in FE6 like this (no true ending), but for one reason or another didn't for the other games I played (FE7 I used resets being my first game in the series, FE8 I cheated by leveling up in the tower, and Awakening I tried a blind Ironman on Hard but lost and retried on Normal).
I would like to see a tier list considering normal difficulty or hard difficulty
I liked the format! You can compare better with more variables (and it's more fun hehe). And it was a good video :-)
I would maybe more clear as to what the zero means in both axis. From what I understood 0 in difficulty means something along the line of "normal focus". Positive Inf being super focus and Negative Inf no focus. And in fairness means "all mechanics somewhat explained and no breaking luck needed"
And maybe change Fairness o Unfairness so that positive numbers mean "harder" in both axis.
Honestly I found it pretty fun to see another opinion on fair/difficulty. Would you be down to make a list just based on fun/difficult at some point?
I'd have to give it some thought but sure
Puzzle emblem
where the fewest amount of solutions is unfun, a dumptruck amount of solutions is boring, but a moderate amount of solutions is just right
Thanks for the clarification
Honestly, I'd like to see a version comparing the games' default
ormal difficulties. Like, if someone started the series with X game, and still read the manual and stuff to understand the systems, how well would it go for them?
I would rate this speedwing vid 69 fairness and 420 difficulty!
I rate this comment 776/1000
So what makes a game unfair? Are there common mechanics shared by the games on the left half of the graph, e.g., ambush spawns, and which ones have the most impact? It'd be great to have your list of "unfair" mechanics and "difficult" mechanics, not just for the sake of trying to be objective but also to understand what you like and dislike in FE as a player. Everyone has their own list, and while some mechanics would make everyone's list, others might be more varied between players. Maybe I like Thracia fog (I don't, but what if I did?)
At the risk of all your videos becoming the same thing, I think you should try some of these other rankings that are popping up in the comments section Speedwing.
Fun/unfun, Blind/not blind, consistency/inconsistency, flexible/not flexible, and more. I think it would be interesting to look at the fire emblem franchise through different lenses and see how rankings shift.
Like for instance I haven’t played the entire franchise but I still maintain that Radiant Dawn is one of the most horribly inconsistent games in the series (mechanically speaking anyway).
If someone plays luna reverse awakening on the fly. Its safe to assume they gave had many trial and error days
The Radiant Dawn penalty for game over conditions was no good. The objectives screen won't hide the information. A veteran high difficulty type of player wouldn't even need to check everytime. I'm surprised you didn’t remove a mark for the hidden items though. In many many maps with no clues, super unfair, although possibly superfluous.
I fully agree with people who say unfair isn't a usable metric in this scenario. Too subjective, but sub qualities of impartiality may be our dimensional solution. Like transparency.(communicatating to the player)
Also conquest is unfair because my button to switch pairup attack partner broke :p
3d fun graph would be amazing
Now do a graph for skills
Yoooo. A follow up video is actually so goated.
i love your opinion conquest goated.
subjectivity is the draw! the video was good bc it presents a veteran's perspective, and opinion is part of that
random question: would you recommend Conquest to someone who mostly likes GBA-era FE and doesn't quite get on with the Switch ones?
Fates in general does play a little differently to the gba titles. There's quite a bit more to think about with things like what skills to get on which characters and the combat involves making pretty effective use of attack stance defence stance, a mechanic only found in fates. I personally adore conquest but if you're looking for a fates game that plays more similarly to the gba titles you'd probably be better off with birthright. Birthright being mostly enemy phase actions and conquest being mostly player phase actions.
If you wanted to add "fun" you could just add a number or letter grade on top/next to the game. Or maybe add a color border (including a legend on what those colors mean in terms of fun).
Why aren't you talking about Divine Pulse/Turnwheel? It's a pretty important part of how Three Houses Maddening in particular is designed, and I think it should push up their fairness amounts because the game is built around you using it. It's not just BS for BS sake, it's BS to eat your charges. Even someone like me who is only decent at these games can beat Maddening 3H because Divine Pulse evens the playing field, especially when upgraded.
I suppose its more intended in three houses than other titles. It depends how you see the turn wheel, I personally just see it as a quality of life to make resetting quicker for the player
FE4 is incredibly unfair, it's so boring it defeated me instead of my units, I cannot play like this
Lmao
I love ALL Speedwinghere videos!!!! ❤
I'd love a more concrete definition of difficulty vs. fairness. A kind of see where you're coming from, but I'm under the impression that your definition doesn't quite match up with mine.
Which is perfectly fine. We don't have to use the same definition. But it also makes it difficult for me to see where our differences in assessment come from.
Off the top of my head though, when I think of difficulty vs. fairness, I might define difficulty as the level of challenge for beating the game in a manner that is reasonable to the specific game by a player that has extensive knowledge and experience with the mechanics and layouts of the game.
Unfairness I think is easier to define than fairness. It's just the gap in challenge between the difficulty of the game, and the challenge the same game presents to a player that has a strong general understanding of FE mechanics and tactics, but has no prior knowledge of the specific game, and will approach the game in a manner that is "reasonable" in a more general sense, but may get punished because this approach is not reasonable for the specific game.
The definition has some holes. It's difficult to evaluate how things like expectations of making a boss break his weapons should be counted. But I think it makes a pretty good starting point for a casual definition. The "reasonable" definition I think was pretty wonky. But one of the things I was trying to get at is that things like forcing enemies to break their weapons is something that the pure "difficulty" player would be willing to do if really necessary, while the "fairness" player would use this as a last resort only after a lot of trial and error.
Thats a pretty good way of looking at it for sure
this was a great video that made me think a lot. i agree generally on your difficulty rankings but the concept of fairness is not really well defined. for me, fairness should be evaluated based mostly on the experience of blind players because if you have total game knowledge then every game becomes more or less fair. the biggest factor by far that will make a game unfair for a newbie is ambush spawns, so i think there should be a delineation between games that have them and games that dont.
I don't think it was that unclear in the first place. Did a great job with that video and this one
Oh sorry man, was Not supposed to Sound angry in my Last comment. Anyway keep this Up. IT was very interesting
I think the x-axis should instead be unfairness, cuz with those graphs you showed we see that how "hard" a game is is a sum of actual difficulty and unfairness.
Lets say we made this change and add numerical values to these axis.(1-10)
-Conquest would now be at the top left corner, it would have like 11 - 12 points, 9-10 from actual difficulty and 1 - 2 from unfairness.
-Awakening would be on the right side above the x - axis, this would give it around 16 - 17 points, 10 of those from unfairness but only like 6 - 7 from difficulty.
This way we could se that lunatic+ is the "harder" experience but observe that it is mainly for how unfair it is
True that would probably make it look a lot clearer
I mean there were bound to be some very different opinions, this is Fire Emblem we're talking about XD
(Also I have no idea who gifted me that membership, I was listening to a stream in the background and never saw the notification pop, but thank you whomever gifted subs that day!)
Another banger milord
3 isn't enough dimensions
Add artstyle so we can have 4 dimensions.
Also so echoes can be a the top of 1 of them
It's tiring to have to explain people what a point of view and a opinion is 😭
REV IS IN THE GOOD SQUARE LETS FUCKING GO REV BROS
REV BROS
Ain´t no way in hell he sees Conquest as the most fair game, with their amount of status staffs and s rank weapons that are useless for you but usefull for them and the long ass maps where you can easily get crit. Nah no way.
Easily get crit?
In Conquest?
Conquest literally gives you the most tools of Any non thracia Fe to prevent crits (unless your name is Arthur). If you are getting crit in CQ it's your fault and not the games fault, hence why it's fair.