GonzoMD1993

The thing with Shinon is that he DOES have the stats to help with 0 training before he leaves. When you get him back he's crap, sure, and if you've been using Rolf at all he's definitely going to be better than Shinon at that point. But the fact still remains that Shinon is a perfectly good combat unit in chapters 3 through 7 that has no trouble killing stuff with no investment, and in fact, you would have to go out of your way to make him not contribute to combat on certain maps such as map 7. But Rolf has none of that; you need to either spoon feed him a bunch of kills or dump a bunch of BEXP on him for Rolf to start meaningfully contributing to combat. BEXP, generous as it is, is still a limited resource no different from stat boosters. And the thing is that resources are almost always better spent on making good units even better than trying to fix a bad unit only to result into a barely usable, mediocre unit. That doesn't mean that you can't use Rolf or that he can't turn out good, but making him good means dumping a ton of resources on him that were better spent elsewhere and even then he's still going to be held back by his crappy class that's locked to 2 range and whose whole shtick is doing effective damage to flyers in a game where effective damage is only x2. Shinon is obviously also stuck being a Sniper, but he's good at base for the early game chapters that you have him and there's no opportunity cost to using him there. Welp, that's a big yikes. I knew she was bad but I had forgotten exactly how bad she was xd

Does she actually get one rounded by Archers? Please tell me that's in HM at least xd It'd be beyond pathetic for an Armor Knight to get one rounded by an Archer in NM (although it's still plenty pathetic that they one round her in HM).

Lmao, that's hilarious xd I knew she was bad, but to think that she would have to go through multiple uses of Olivi Grass to kill even a single enemy and in fact cannot even damage some others at all. She might just be one of the worst FE units ever (although admittedly I can't really speak for bad units outside of the games that I've played myself).

I know right? I also thought at first of the early game archers, but the fact that they can contribute something at all (however little that contribution may be) puts them above Karla for me, since she honestly can't do anything for you at the point that you get her with the stats that she has. Her recruitment conditions are the cherry on top xd

I've only played FE6 through FE12, and some of them I've only played once or twice (like FE12), but here's what I think: FE6: Sophia. I love Sophia as a character but as a unit she's damn near unusable. She has horrible base stats for her joining chapter and even feeding her kills by leaving enemies at 1 HP is hard because of her atrocious hit rates. The fact that she only gains E Staves on promotion in a game with really broken staves and also a painfully slow WEXP system is just adding insult to injury. FE7: Karla. You just get her way too late and she can barely do anything of use in the 2 remaining maps. Her stats are also incomprehensible to me: you get her several maps later than Karel and she's way harder to recruit, but she also has significantly worse bases and even her growths are worse (not like growths matter when you only have 2 maps left and you're at a point where you don't want to train anyone else). Even the crappy early game archers can contribute more; with Karla, I can't even justify deploying her. FE8: Marisa. This is one of the games that I've played the least so I can't say much other than the fact that I don't find her very good. Then again, with infinite grinding available and considering that overall this game isn't that hard anyways I think there isn't as big of a gap between her and the good units as there is between the bad and the good units in other games. FE9: Rolf. It's too hard to train him and there isn't much of a payout for it. This game is so enemy phase heavy too that it just doesn't feel worth it to invest on a lvl1 archer that joins kind of late. FE10: Lyre. She's so bad, that I honestly think even Meg and Fiona are more useful. You could at least justify deploying those two for minor things such as rescue/dropping or shoving. If you wanted to train them, while it would be a grueling task they would at least get somewhere with a lot of dedication. Lyre will never get anywhere no matter what you do. Even if you were crazy enough to train her and lucky enough for her to get decent stats, she will still always be limited by the terrible Cat gauge. FE11: Bantu. He recruits Tiki and that's about the only useful thing he does. His combat is really bad, and being a Manakete he can't reclass. I was honestly tempted to say Mathis, but even he can use a forged Ridersbane and OHKO stuff (he has base D rank lances, but he's not that far). Bantu just can't contribute anything meaningful beyond recruiting Tiki. FE12: Bantu. Can't say for sure because there's way too many characters and I've only ever played this game once and I did so in normal mode, but I feel like Bantu is just as bad for the same reasons as in FE11. At least other crappy units can abuse busted forged weapons, Bantu can't even do that.

Someone else can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly certain that as long as you're playing on a clear file it doesn't matter what difficulty you choose; the extra content should be available (i.e. you get the choice to spare Pelleas and you get Lehran if you deploy the BK in 1-F and you make Ike and the BK have a round of combat at 3-7). There shouldn't be any problems with you playing in Easy Mode. I'm not sure if you're interested, but I could offer some advice, or at least tell you how I usually deal with 2-2. EDIT: I wrote what's below with 2-2 in mind, but now that I think about it, you mentioned Heather "killing herself" rather than just dying. Maybe the chapter you're having trouble with isn't 2-2, but 2-1 where Heather is a green unit? If so, and if you're interested in hearing some advice let me know. It should be a lot easier to recruit her before she gets herself killed in Easy Mode, but I can probably give you a couple of pointers if you want. I find feeding kills to units in part 2 to be too tedious to be worth it even if you want to, say, train Nephenee. So I just let the busted units that either don't grow much or don't rejoin until much later do all the work. What I do here is just rush through the bottom path and let Lucia take most of the kills. Lethe and Mordecai usually can't one round anything in HM (the former lacks the STR while the latter lacks the SPD), but they can both chunk pretty hard and are basically unkillable while transformed, and in any case they may actually be able to one round stuff in EM or NM. Nephenee can contribute to combat but she's more frail so you can't expose her to 4-5 attacks per turn like you could with Lucia or the transformed Laguz. I let Brom block the chokepoint on the top left corner on his own and never move him from there. Unless he gets critted by a mage reinforcement he doesn't die so long as you pop a vulnerary every now and then. On the first turn I make Mordecai pop 2 Olivi Grass (with a refresh from Leanne) so that he can transform right away on turn 2 player phase. There's no point in hoarding the Grass so you can make Lethe pop 1 too, but with how fast the cat gauge charges I don't find it that necessary. As you advance right just make sure that you're blocking chokepoints with Lucia, Mordecai and Lethe and use Grass to keep their gauge up so that they don't untransform on enemy phase. Don't expose Heather to combat if you don't have to; she barely does any damage anyways. Keep her near the front to make use of her extended fog sight, but make sure that she at worst faces 1 enemy per turn. I don't think she's frail enough to die in 2 hits, but if she's dying every single time you must be exposing her quite a lot. Don't feel bad about letting Lucia get a bunch of kills. It's really not worth it it funneling exp into Nephenee (or Brom, if you like using him) now when you get them back at 3-2 anyways and the GM chapters are way, way easier. Even in HM it's perfectly feasible to start training a base level Nephenee in chapter 3-2. Make Lucia take the boss kill even if you have to. Also, I'm not sure if this has anything to do with your Heather dying but don't feel compelled to make her steal the boss' Secret Book. I honestly think it's the most useless stat booster in this game. Even Ashera Icons have a niche in making units that are only a few points away from hitting the 0 crit threshold crit inmune (personally, I like giving both of the Icons you have by 3-2 to Haar which makes him have the exact amount of LCK he needs to face 0 crit from Thunder Sages), but +2 SKL just feels useless. There's no SKL threshold that you ever have to meet, and most of the strong units in this game have really good base SKL anyway. The money you get out of selling it is nice, but this game is pretty generous with money.

In the end I couldn't help my curiosity and I went to test if Jerme could proc Silencer xd I used the Mine glitch in the final chapter to make Jerme discard the Runesword and instead take the Regal Sword and the Brave Sword from the Reed brothers, and then let him use Oswin like a practice dummy. As it turns out, Jerme CAN proc Silencer when he's holding a weapon that doesn't negate his crit like the Runesword. I was using the emulator speed up while fishing for crits so the video isn't super smooth, but I did slow it down to normal when I saw the Silencer proc. I find it weird that I've never seen Jerme proc Silencer in Pale Flower of Darkness since the Light Brand can crit, but it's possible that his SKL is just too low to crit most of your units. Wouldn't be surprised, seeing how the Jerme in Light barely has 11 crit on my 3 LCK Oswin and considering that the Pale Flower of Darkness Jerme has like 10 less SKL and also doesn't have the S Rank crit bonus. EDIT: Alright, since I spent this much time on this already I decided to go all the way and see what was the deal with Jerme in Pale Flower of Darkness. And in short, yes, Jerme CAN proc Silencer with the Light Brand. Meaning that in any regular playthrough, without hacks or cheats or anything, if you're unlucky enough Jerme could instakill one of your units. There's a few caveats, however. The main one being that the Light Brand sets your crit to 0 at 2 range, but only at 2 range. I found this out testing, but it was actually written in the Serenes Forest Page (here, to be precise: https://serenesforest.net/blazing-sword/miscellaneous/calculations/; "Note 1: Critical rate is 0 if user attacks with a Light Brand (indirect), Runesword or Wind Sword (indirect)"), which is different from the Runesword which negates your crit at both 1 and 2 range. When you couple this with the fact that Jerme will ALWAYS attack you at 2 range if you're holding a 1 range weapon and the fact that even at 1 range he only has like 10 crit (so any unit with 10+ luck has a 0% chance of getting crit), chances are that you will never, ever see Jerme proc Silencer even though he's actually capable of proccing it. Jerme Light Brand Silencer:

Out of curiosity I went ahead and checked it. I couldn't be bothered to play all the way up to Cog of Destiny to check, so I used cheats to get a Fell Contract and a bunch of stat boosters super early. I can confirm that Matthew can proc Silencer; it's not a Link Arena only thing. Can't say if enemy Assassins have Silencer or not though. I'd have to find some kind of cheat that lets me give Jerme a regular sword.

Ah, I see. Yeah that would allow Athos to double the Fire Dragon. Interesting, I actually had no idea. I always thought that the entire point of giving Jerme magic swords was so that he couldn't proc Silencer on your units, so I never considered that he just didn't have Silencer at all.

While a Speedwing isn't necessarily a "waste" on Athos, it's extremely unlikely you still have a spare one at this point of the game. This game is stupidly stingy with the Speedwings. In normal mode you get a single early Speedwings from Zoldam but you have to steal it, while in hard mode you don't get a single one until Pale Flower of Darkness and that's only if you go to the Kenneth map. The only other one is in Night of Farewells. HHM taunts you with a stealable Speedwings in The Berserker that you can't realistically get because you only have 1 free deployment slot that you're definitely not spending on a thief. So the chances that you still have a Speedwings by the time you reach Light are very slim. The Body Ring though is totally worth giving to Athos. You get the last one at a point where no one else can really make use of it. I don't know if it's enough to double the Fire Dragon but I do remember that you can hit a few doubling thresholds that he misses out on otherwise. Jerme cannot crit you at 2 range with the Runesword. Jerme will also always prioritize attacking at 2 range so he will never proc Silencer on your units.

Like @Shadow Mir said, that's what you have Athos for. He has 40 HP, so the Dragon will never OHKO him in ENM. In HHM it can roll more STR and do 40 damage, but that's not the case in ENM (which is what I assume you're playing on). All you have to do is have Athos wait in front of the Dragon with Luna or one of the legendary tomes equipped and heal him to full every turn. Just put everyone else out of the Dragon's range and you're gucci.

Alright, I went and recorded a little something. The TL;DR is that I did the final map with just Athos, Pent, Hawkeye and Nils, all of them at base level, to show how easy this is when you just let Athos destroy everything. I don't consider this to be particularly impressive, but it gives you a good idea of what you can do in this map when you put your best resources to work. I wanted to note a couple of things about this, so I'll copy/paste it from the description I put on Youtube: Some things to note: > I didn't feel like playing FE7 all over from the beginning just to show this, so I grabbed a random save file I had lying around where I was at Cog of Destiny in HHM. The OP of the thread was probably asking for ENM, but IIRC the bosses of this map are mostly the same. > To accelerate the process of getting to the final map I used some cheats to give Hector capped MOV. Lyn and Eliwood also have +3 MOV. However, this doesn't impact this map because I never make them move more than 5 tiles in a turn (which would be their normal MOV). I also had some super haxed Paladins with everything capped and Uber Spears to get to the final map faster, but I don't deploy them on this map for obvious reasons. > I wanted to show the Fire Dragon kill, but unfortunately this is HHM and I got unlucky with the STR roll. The Dragon got the maximum possible STR, so he OHKO's Athos and thus killing it is impossible with the units that I deployed. I do want to note, however, that this is very unlucky and it can't happen in ENM anyways. Resources that I used: Characters: Athos Pent Hawkeye Nils I should note that both Pent and Hawkeye are at base level, meaning that all 3 of the combat units I'm using require exactly 0 investment. I can't undeploy the lords obviously, so I just keep them out of the way. Notable Items: Luna Brave Axe Ninis' Grace Warp Staff Physics Staff Restore Staff 1 Elixir 1 Pure Water I had a few other items but nothing as key as these. The Iron Rune is important, but there's no way you miss out on it. Athos has to use Forblaze to kill generic Druids to conserve Luna uses, but again, you can't miss out on getting Forblaze. The tome that Pent uses doesn't matter too much. I also had a Rescue staff ready but I end up not needing it.

Multiposting because I got ninja'd and I don't think I can quote when editing, but: I would go a step beyond that and instead say: "Abuse Athos for all you can. If the game is going to give you an absolutely busted unit but only for 1 map, might as well squeeze all the use you can out of it" xd

Just have Athos go to town on the Morphs with Luna, it's the simplest way to clear the map. I remember that the very first time I played this map I got my ass kicked, similar to you, but after playing it several times and becoming more experienced with FE in general this map ended up being pretty easy. Although, how easy the map will be will depend a bit on what resources you have left. For combat it's honestly ok to let Athos do like 90% of the work. For some of the bosses he needs Nini's Grace to comfortably survive, but so long as you didn't kill Nils you probably still have at least a few uses of the ring at this point. Using Pure Waters or the Barrier staff when taking on the room with the magic enemies also does the trick. If you still have uses on either the Sleep or Berserk staff left taking on the Reed brothers is almost a joke. The Berserk staff will make them kill each other, while the Sleep staff will let you take them on one at a time. Either option allows you to negate their A support. Athos has a massive 30 Magic, so he has a pretty reasonable hit rate on them from up close with status staves. I believe that there's a Swordslayer axe somewhere in the lategame in ENM, probably in Sands of Time but I haven't checked. If you have that thing, it makes short work of Lloyd. Harken makes the best use of it, but I suppose that Hawkeye would do the trick too. He gets doubled and probably killed, but with Nini's Grace he should survive ez pz. I know that I'm repeating myself, but Athos with Luna can 1 or 2 round most of the Morphs. His other tomes are ok too if you somehow lost both of the Luna tomes, but Luna is Athos' best tome by far. If you still have uses in the Warp and Rescue staves they're really nice in this map to quickly reposition your units. You can have Athos murdering everyone in one room but then send him all the way across the map in 1 turn with these staves. The game doesn't really give you many chances to do Warp skips, so you probably still have at least 1 or 2 uses left by now. Maybe you even have the Hammerne staff left to recover some uses. There are some Berserk staves near Nergal, so have Pent carry a Restore staff just in case. You can probably kill Nergal in 1 turn, but it doesn't hurt to have the extra safety. The Fire Dragon is an absolute joke for Athos. With a bit of luck he can straight up OHKO it, although in most scenarios it takes 2 turns. It doesn't even matter if your Hector and Eliwood are crap. EDIT: Do you have the actual save file? Your link just takes me to the emulator with an empty file. It'd be easier to show you something specific if I had an actual file, or at least knew what your units and items are. EDIT 2: If you still have the Body Ring from Sands of Time, giving it to Athos is a good idea. This far into the game there aren't any other good candidates for it anyway, and IIRC the +2 CON lets him hit some doubling thresholds with Luna that he would otherwise miss, but I'm not 100% certain on that one.

Do you like stuff by JAM Project? My absolute favorite song from them is Roar to the Future (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQsLv2_rVWg&ab_channel=CHMusicChannel), although that could have a lot to do with the fact that I love Muv-Luv Alternative. MLA has a really great soundtrack in general, but the intro is still my favorite one.

I think that the GBA games have really good soundtracks honestly. Even though the Tellius games have my favorite OST out of all the FE games I've played, I still find myself going back to the FE6 and FE7 music from time to time. I think I've only ever played FE8 once so I don't remember much from it, sadly (be it music or anything else really, although there IS a track from FE8 that I do remember). From FE6 my favorite soundtrack has to be Shaman in the Dark (Idunn's theme). Kinda sucks she dies in 1 round even to a mediocre Roy because you don't get to listen to her theme for all that long while playing, but anyway this one is my favorite soundtrack from FE6 and possibly all of the GBA games. Other than this one though, I think FE6 has some other really memorable tracks too. My second favorite from this game is The Path to Greatness (map 24 player phase theme), but there's a bunch of others that I really like Zephiel's theme and Jahn's battle theme. From FE7 my favorite one is Unshakable Faith (the one that plays right before the final map starts). I actually really like Softly with Grace too (the Black Fang battle theme), although it's a bit jarring to listen to it due to its odd time signature. The one and only track I can remember from FE8 is The Final Battle, which is actually fairly similar to Unshakable Faith and even plays in pretty much the same situation. I guess I just really like this sort of track.

My god, that's an omega cursed Florina xd She has a 0.36% chance of gaining 0 STR in 11 level ups. That has to be an achievement of some sort. Oh well. When a unit turns out THAT bad, at least you always have the choice of just benching her.

As I understood it, the point of the thread was to discuss whether you should play FE6 before FE7 or the other way around, not if you should play FE6 or FE7 as your first FE game ever. At the very least, I've been posting under that assumption. Just to be clear, I wouldn't personally recommend a totally new player to skip Lyn Mode altogether. Like I said in that post, I do NOT think that Lyn Mode is bad and I also think it functions well enough as a tutorial despite some of its obvious flaws. I would only recommend someone who has already played other FE games to skip LNM. Even then, I might encourage them to try out LHM at least once. My point was just that if OP thinks that Lyn Mode is so bad that she thinks it would make people not want to play the game at all, it's reasonable for her to recommend others to skip it (which, again, for practical purposes is perfectly doable. It takes minimal effort and less than 30 seconds of your time).

For the most part Florina is a really good peg knight, but she kind of doesn't hold up too well in HMM with no Lyn Mode. The enemy quality isn't all that high in FE7, but even then Florina's base stats are just too low for HHM without Lyn Mode, to the point where it's a pain to train her. Fiora joins like 3 maps later with significantly better base stats, so it doesn't feel that great to use Florina. Outside of HHM though, and specially if you trained her in Lyn Mode (and even more so if you gave her one or both of the stat boosters), Florina is really, really good. Speaking of Fiora, she's always a good peg knight to use. She's still a bit frail but not so much that she can't take a hit, and has good enough combat at base to get rolling. Farina joins a bit late, but she's also good. The recruitment cost honestly doesn't matter that much outside of ranked runs, because the game gives you a ton of money anyways.

I think it's fair to assume most people will reset over a major death. Heck, resetting over ANY death is fairly common, but even for people who are willing to let go of a few units they didn't care that much about anyway I can't imagine too many of them who would be willing to keep going after losing the unit they've spent the last 15 maps or so training when simply restarting the map is an option. This goes doubly so if the player in question has even the slightest of suspicions that they might be softlocking themselves if they keep going. Outside of an ironman, I can't see a whole lot of people not resetting if someone like Rutger or Miledy dies. Plus, there is some truth to what @MuteMousou is saying. FE games are generally designed around the expectation that you'll lose some characters along the way and that you can keep going with the new recruits you get, even if the replacement units aren't as good as the ones you trained. An experienced player could probably get by with a very minimal amount of units even while playing on HM. Of course the same won't necessarily apply to a total beginner, but then again, there's a good chance an actual beginner will not attempt an ironman on their very first go so it's basically impossible for them to reach a softlock due to losing too many units. I still hold the opinion that FE7 is a better entry point for the GBA games (which, again, isn't to say I think FE6 is a bad entry point, because I don't) for reasons I described earlier, but I don't think softlocking is ever a concern going into FE6. Regarding the tutorial (LNM), I honestly don't think is that bad. The hand holding may be a little too egregious, and if you already know how to play FE it's definitely a little tedious, but for someone who is completely new I think it does a fairly good job of teaching the basics. The only thing about it that I find questionable is the very first map where it forces you to "risk" a game over while banking on a crit or a doge. As we know Lyn gets a rigged crit and never game overs, but since this IS supposed to be a tutorial it would probably have been better to make the player wait in front of the boss and use a vulnerary until is was safe to land the finishing blow instead of teaching them to take needless risks. Other than that though, I can't think of another instance where the game teaches the player bad habits, and the information it gives is generally useful to someone who is still learning the ropes. Although if you do believe that LNM is so bad that it could be a serious turn-off for a new player, you could always just recommend that they skip it. There's a good chance that a player that simply stumbled into FE7 on their own wouldn't think to do this as it requires downloading a save file or patching, but as I understand it this thread is about RECOMMENDING other people starting with FE6 vs FE7 (or the other way around). Put into that context, nothing stops you from recommending that they start with ENM, or even a higher difficulty if you find ENM to be too easy even for a beginner. Yes, it would be nice if the game itself gave you that option by default. But lets be real, it takes less than 30 seconds to do a google search, find a save file that has all modes unlocked, download it and start the game from whichever mode and difficulty you desire. You could even flat out give them a link to a save file and some simple instructions on how to use it, saving them the google search. So, for practical purposes, I think it's fair to consider the tutorial as skippable.

I don't know about that one either. Some of the Part 1 maps are extremely unforgiving (although I'm mostly thinking of HM here), but it's not a trend (the difficulty of Part 1 maps isn't consistent from map to map), and it's definitely not the first few maps that make Part 1 hard. 1-P is extremely easy even in HM, 1-1 puts the pressure on you with the turn limit but for the most part Nolan can hold chokepoints and advance without much risk and without the need to ever expose Micaiah which is the only one of your units that gets OHKO'd by everything (and even that might not be true on EM or NM), and then 1-2 gives you Sothe which basically puts you into full easy mode until 1-5 which is where the difficulty really picks up (at which point the only game over conditions are Sothe, Volug and Micaiah). I guess that 1-2, 1-3 and 1-4 could be challenging if you absolutely refuse to let Sothe carry you, but why would you? I think it's also worth noting that most people reset over any death at all even if their death doesn't cause a game over. Unless you're playing an ironman, for most people it doesn't make a difference that in maps 1-P through 1-3 you get a game over for losing any member of the DB.

I don't know. I completely agree that if a game is devoid of challenge then it just stops being fun to play, so just making things easier and easier won't necessarily make for a better new player experience. In fact, even though I'd personally recommend playing FE7 before FE6 to a total beginner it's definitely not because because I think FE7 has nothing that could lead to a negative experience. A lot of the mid to late game maps could prove to be a point of frustration for many new players even in ENM, the most egregious one being BBD but there's more of them too. This game doesn't have ambush spawns but it has a good amount of Fog maps (including BBD), and it's fairly easy to lose units to random enemies hidden in the fog if you have no prior knowledge of the game. New players might also find maps such as CoD and VoD to be kind of overwhelming, and bosses in Light usually destroy people who don't know what to do (and you could also be forced to restart if you didn't think to bring a Restore staff and you get surprised Berserk'd after finally killing all of the bosses). I don't think that the desired goal or ideal is to completely remove anything that could lead to a negative experience. If a game is so easy that it's impossible to ever fail at anything (and thus you can never have a negative experience) then it just becomes boring and not worth playing. However, I cannot think of a single FE that could really fall into this category unless you go out of your way to trivialize the difficulty (with stuff like boss or arena abusing) and FE7 is not an exception. The reason why I recommend playing FE7 first before FE6 is because from a gameplay perspective it makes more sense to me personally. Playing the easier of the 2 games first makes the difficulty progression feel more natural. While there is some value in playing the harder of the 2 games first and then just taking the other one as a breather or an opportunity to relax, I think it just feels better to start with a moderately easy difficulty and then slowly dial it up.

I think that this is a big part of the reason why the English speaking community mostly suggests playing FE7 before FE6, and I think that's pretty natural. It's fairly normal for people to suggest others to do what they had an experience with, and likewise, it's also normal for most of the community to have come across FE7 before FE6. Back in the day FE7 was the only translated FE game, so people would only start searching for FE6 fan translations after playing FE7 and developing an interest in the franchise. Even then, I would assume that back then finding a good, completed translation of the game might not have been as easy as it is today where literally anyone can do a google search and have the game fully translated, downloaded and ready to play 1 minute later. That, I'm not sure if I agree with. For someone who has experience with the series but just hasn't played the GBA games I think it's perfectly fine. FE6 is harder than FE7, but FE6 NM isn't so hard that someone who has played FE games before can't manage it. But for someone who is completely new to the series FE7 is definitely a better entry point and it was even designed as such (probably because it was the franchise's worldwide debut). The tutorial isn't unnecessary in my opinion; for a totally new player it offers a lot of useful information. I know that for someone who knows how to play FE already it can be tedious, but you at least have the option to skip it if you want to. It doesn't take that much time to mash text and play the tutorial chapters as fast as possible, and if you really want to avoid it altogether, you can play on an emulator (not like a lot of people play on original hardware anymore these days xd), download a clear save file from somewhere and start from whatever mode you want. Tutorial aside, the game itself is way more noob friendly than FE6. That's not to say that you can't start with FE6 if you're new to FE, but Binding Blade is a lot less forgiving than Blazing Blade even if we were to strictly compare NM vs LNM+ENM. To mention a few things, there's much less of a gap between the strength of your own units and the enemy units, ambush spawns can leave you feeling that you died for reasons that were beyond your control (also true for experienced FE players who are going into FE6 blind, but it's more frustrating if you're still learning the ropes) and going to Sacae by accident because you didn't know any better sucks (speaking from experience here xd). Also, depending on how much you care about the story, you have to consider that someone playing FE for the first time going into FE6 blind and no help of guides is almost certainly not going to get the true ending; there's too many things that could go wrong (meeting the requirements for all of the gaiden chapters isn't so bad if you know what you're doing, but not quite so if you don't. You also wouldn't know that breaking or losing a legendary weapon locks you out of the true ending). I would actually agree with this for the most part. For how infamous RD seems to be for its difficulty, easy mode feels like a cakewalk to me. Maybe I've played RD too many times already to really be able to empathize with what the new player experience is like, but the one time I played it on EM just to test what it was like it felt pretty easy. Although do take that with a grain of salt; I knew exactly what I was doing, so abusing the crap out of the most busted units and BEXP'ing them to infinity with the seemingly endless amount of BEXP EM gives you just completely trivialized the game. HM is brutal though xd Part 1 is very unforgiving, and the Part 3 DB chapters had me sweating bullets the whole time when I completed my HM ironman some weeks ago.

Don't think I can add anything that hasn't been said already, but if I had to to rate them in general I'd say that STR and SPD are better than everything else. Magic can be up there with STR but depends a lot on the game, whereas STR is always good. In a game like RD I'd probably rate magic even below LCK since there's only a few magic users compared to the majority physical cast, the few magic users you have are mostly pretty crap, and even staff utility isn't that great. At least LCK helps all of your units prevent crits. After that it's probably the defensive stats. DEF and HP are probably about the same level of usefulness, RES depends a lot on the game. In games with a lot of siege tomes and status staves having good RES can make a pretty big difference. SKL and LCK are the worst by comparison, but I still think they're useful in their own right. A little bit more or less of SKL never matters, compared to STR, SPD, Magic, HP, DEF and RES where you could often find yourself in situations where a single point of difference produces a completely different result. Still, if your overall SKL is too low and you use a weapon type with moderate to low Hit rates then you won't be hitting worth a shit, so SKL is definitely isn't a useless stat. The funny thing about LCK is that even though it feels like a useless stat most of the time, it also feels super bad when your LCK is actually so bad that you face crit from everything. With a unit like Jeigan from FE11, you pretty much expect him to die to a random crit somewhere. The extra Hit and Avoid LCK grants to most units is negligible, but dropping your chance of being critted from 1-5% down to 0% is actually very, very significant. While it's not the standard way of playing FE, in ironmans it feels specially significant because it sucks losing units to a roll of the dice and being unable to do anything about it.

It's been years since I last played FE6, but I don't remember something specific about the Survival rank being bugged. I do seem to recall there's a bug with ranks, however. If I'm remembering correctly, two of the ranks are switched around. This could mean that your "Survival" rank is actually the rank for something else and that you're getting 5 stars or something where you did not actually meet the criteria for 5 stars. I'd have to look it up or play again to be certain though. Incidentally, you don't need full recruitment for 5 stars in Survival. Recruitable units that die while green or red don't count. IIRC Merlinus doesn't count either. So, as long as none of your units die while blue (sans Merlinus) you're good.