Jump to content

Alastor plays and ranks the whole series! Mission Complete! ...For now.


Alastor15243
 Share

Recommended Posts

I just find stupid to implement the garrison mechanic whitout using it. The point in theory is that you should leave behind some unit to secure territories, except that this is rarely inportant to do. Arion attack on all your castles at the same times is what i have in mind. 

And i also don't think it has to be Arden slowly beating the enem, it can also be Arden buying time while you send reinforcements.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 9.8k
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

Really, it would be cool if the remake made castles into their own mini maps. There's no tower to stand guard on, you have to defend it from the inside. Trying to plug up the gate by which enemies enter the mini defense map and try to rush the throne would either be impossible or scarily dangerous given the sheer numbers of enemy forces.

...Of course that would be tricky to pull off without massively slowing down the game, a game which already has massive pacing problems...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Alastor15243 said:

Really, it would be cool if the remake made castles into their own mini maps. There's no tower to stand guard on, you have to defend it from the inside. Trying to plug up the gate by which enemies enter the mini defense map and try to rush the throne would either be impossible or scarily dangerous given the sheer numbers of enemy forces.

...Of course that would be tricky to pull off without massively slowing down the game, a game which already has massive pacing problems...

I've considered that too and I don't think it would slow down the game too much. They wouldn't have to be full sized maps, it could be a smaller set up, similar to what we actually see of the inside of the home castle. Aka, just an area to fight the boss. The main difference would be bosses are now harder to deal with as you can crowd enemies and even reinforcements around the boss.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Genealogy Day 32: The End of the End of the End

The beginning of this day of playing the game, the first 30 minutes or so, was just a massive pacing issue, as I tried to get my forces through the forest as quickly as I could, to limited avail. Meanwhile Hilda's forces did literally fuck all but wait there until I arrived and triggered Scorpio's ambush spawn. Unforunately it was in the wrong place. I had this whole thing planned out where Faval would fight his cousin while defending Chalphy, but he didn't spawn near the castle, he spawned near the forest to do a pincer attack against the forces I'm fighting Hilda's massive army of barons with. Clever. But not clever enough.

...Okay, at this point, baron can't actually be an actual royal title here. Not after I've seen them casually fighting for gold in the arena like they need it, or now that I'm seeing an entire fucking army of the fuckers doing Hilda's dirty work. It's just a nickname for a class, and it just happens to be used by people who also happen to be actual barons. Like the opposite of the maid and butler class in fates. Just because you're the maid class doesn't mean you're actually a domestic servant. That would make reclassing Elise into one... super weird.

The barons aren't super tough to survive, but their constant Pavise proccing is making it extremely annoying for Patty and Ulster to enemy phase them cleanly, since they keep surviving and blocking up spaces for the rest to die on.

The Beigenritter, on the other hand, is easily dispatched by Arthur, as it only takes sending one aura to accompany him to let him perfectly dodgetank everyone but Scorpio. Thanks to the forests limiting their movement and bunching them up, Arthur can safely enemy phase nearly all of them with Dermott's support in one turn without Dermott having to get in range of a single one of them.

Scorpio himself looked a little bit scary with his killer bow, until I realized that even if he hits, and even if he crits, Arthur will still have 1 HP left, and he won't be able to use his aura to help the last remaining arch knight hit Arthur to finish him off, because the leader always goes last in the army!

That's... curious. Apparently the priority of the staff option on the menu changes depending on what types of staves you can use. If all you can use are status staves, the ones that would use the “attack” command in Three Houses, then the staff option appears BELOW “wait”, not above it.

You know... I wish I knew more about what kind of person Scorpio was. We see far too little of his dialogue to tell, and what he says about wanting revenge for the death of his father has the potential to be kind of sad. But as it stands, I have to assume he was just like the father he looks identical to: a psychotically patriotic jingoistic meathead, blind to reality, who believed everything the empire told him about Sigurd and Seliph's forces.

I kind of feel bad for these three remaining troubadours though. Unarmed, unarmored, completely helpless, but insisting on rushing straight through my forces to get to a friendly face they can heal up. It's... almost adorable.

...Fuck it, they get to live. Assuming that the “enemies vanish” animation isn't supposed to be them getting an instant heart attack, anyway.

I do wonder though, why they're still troubadours when they're over level 20.

At any rate, I breach through the army of Barons, leaving none left but the ones using Fortify, who are all lined up at a diagonal that puts them all, and Hilda, in the exact same attack range. And I'm gonna plant Tinni right there, aura' up and ready to go.

And in contrast to the last battle, my concern here is that Tinni might kill Hilda in a single round, before Arthur has a chance to fight her too. It's not the most likely outcome, but it's not what I'd call UNLIKELY either.

Thankfully it doesn't happen, but it was VERY close. She critted, but didn't proc Adept, which would have finished Hilda off.

Oh my god. I love it. Hilda mockingly asks if Arthur's here to “seek [her] head for mommy's pathetic demise”, and Arthur's all “Oh, yeah. I figured that Tinni shouldn't dirty her hands this time around.” Does the game know I had Tinni kick her ass last time? Because it sure as hell sounds like it. Jeeeeeeeesus that burn. Reminding her she's already gotten her ass handed to her by a little girl.

So... the castle's seiged, and Seliph is informed that Arvis and Ishtar worked together to protect the children from Julius, hiding them inside Freege under Hilda's nose. That's... really cool, but still makes me really confused about Ishtar. I still just can't make heads or tails of what her personality is. Also, I'm surprised that Seliph didn't have more of a reaction to the realization that Arvis was helping him behind the scenes. This is the guy he always knew as the bastard who burned his father alive and framed him as a traitor, a person he has absolutely no idea regretted what he did to the world, and now Seliph's been given concrete evidence that Arvis tried to do something good before he died, and... just... no response. Just “Alright, wow, at any rate I'm glad the kids are safe. Moving on.”

I've been having Lana steadily move towards the main group in the hopes of talking to Seliph. It's kind of amusing. Her leader, lover, and the person she has an event with are all “Seliph” on her status screen. Just a straight line of Seliph Seliph Seliph.

But anyway... next phase. Belhalla is open.

...Alright. Let's do this. We're finishing this game tonight.

We've got three main obstacles here from the remaining two castles. The first and most pressing is Ishtar's troop, which is almost immediately upon us, and will be taken out with Arthur via aura dodgetanking, as has been the case for almost all major level threats in the late game. Ishtar's got authority stars now, but that's okay, Arthur can still dodgetank her, because while she's gotten herself authority stars, he's gotten himself a wife and a mountain.

...Okay, he can MOSTLY dodgetank her. There's till gonna be roughly a 10% chance she'll hit him, but fuck it, THE CURSE OF MJÖLNIR WILL BE CARVED IN FUCKING STONE.

...If necessary I may have Ced silence her. Because, y'know... he can do that somehow.

The second obstacle is Julia, who's been brainwashed by Manfroy and is now very slowly advancing on my army. If I recall correctly, Seliph can't snap her out of it. Nobody can. The only way to save her is to kill Manfroy and (I think) seize Velthomer. Thankfully, Velthomer has literally no physical guards. Just a bunch of dark mages with Hel. That of course normally pierces resistance and just flat out reduces your HP to one, but Seliph has EXACTLY enough evasion that, with his own three authority stars, he can't be touched by them. If Julius gets too close to anyone dangerous, we'll just silence her and wait for her to come to her senses.

The third obstacle is the deadlords around Belhalla castle, guarding Julius himself. These guys are pretty cool. They've all got a bunch of unique skills, high stats, and powerful weapons like brave swords and nosferatu, which would make them all FASCINATING opponents to devise strategies against... if the solution weren't just “throw an aura'd up Arthur at them”. ...Yeah, Forseti kinda... breaks the game completely.

...No, wait, make that four obstacles. The fourth one is Arion, come to make one last desperate assault on Chalphy for revenge against Seliph. And I think Altena can convince him to at least be neutral. I'll do that once I know for soure he's heading towards Chalphy so I can warp her there. If he goes to another castle, I don't want to figure that out after I've already warped her.

More importantly, Arthur may be in trouble. I screwed up and accidentally put him in Ishtar's range before I was ready, and now he's not on the mountain I was planning on putting him on for dodgetanking, and without one of his five aura bots in range. It's not the most likely outcome, but if three consecutive coin flips come up on heads... Arthur is dead. I can't rescue him because I already had to do some rescue shenanigans to put the remaining falcon knight sister to sleep so she wouldn't be able to reach my aura bots, so...

...I've just gotta hope for the best now. If it's any consolation, if Arthur dies, I can resurrect him, and he's gonna take out basically everyone but Ishtar first, guaranteed.

OH THANK GOODNESS. I don't know what happened, but Ishtar didn't move in to attack. I think one of the bishops accidentally blocked the road that she needed to land on to get to him fast enough. Excellent. Now then, time to kill these fuckers, warp Altena over to Arion, and then get Julia subdued for rescue asap.

Aaaaand I've just recruited Arion. I am extremely concerned he's going to do more harm than good, given he's a green unit. I better silence and surround Julia immediately to make sure the green guys don't kill her.

Nope, thankfully they surround Altena like Lachesis's paladins. Which means now it's time to take out the deadlords, because I accidentally triggered them by putting Seliph in Julius's meteor range in a zealous effort to bum-rush Velthomer a little early.

And in the cleanup of the final remaining deadlords, when Arthur has to run back to repair his nearly-broken Forseti tome, Ulster's Nihil skill comes in handy for the first and last time in the whole game, allowing him to safely kill Equus without risking getting hit by his critical skill.

Okay game. That is an unfathomably, UNBELIEVABLY shitty move. This game lets Seliph talk to Julia, and have him fail to snap her out of it, instantly ending his turn. If you have a talk with an enemy, it is pretty much assumed that that action is going to recruit them, or get them to leave, or SOMETHING. You can't just have it not work and trick the player into completely wasting their move! Imagine if I hadn't silenced her! Imagine if Seliph hadn't had Tyrfing equipped!

Thankfully, both of those things were true, and at least the talk did inform me of what I had to do. But that could have gone really ugly due to supplying the player with bad information. That's pretty much the only black mark this game has against its ironmannability rating, but it's a pretty dickish move.

I also experimented and confirmed that you can silence someone who's already silenced to refresh their silence duration to full. This is going to be important, because I don't ever want to let Julia get un-silenced until Velthomer is taken out.

Speaking of which, Ced goes back to repair his stuff, and annoyingly, you can't tell the difference between broken staves with identical costs and weapon ranks, and since Sleep and Silence cost the same to repair when broken, he winds up having to waste 20K repairing sleep, getting only one charge of Julia neutralization for 30k instead of 3, because I guessed wrong. Thankfully, Patty and Ulster are able to supply him with plenty of gold to keep Julia silenced for a very long time until Seliph can save the day.

...It just occurred to me as Seliph made the dash to Velthomer... he just ran clear through the place where his father died. That spot. That right angle path. Sigurd and all of his friends marched down that path from the opposite end, and many of them met their fiery demise. It's... kind of surreal, even for me, walking past that spot, seeing it without all of the mages that lined it before, but being unable to forget what happened there.

Ohhhhhh! That's curious. So the only reason the circlet is needed to unlock the door to the Book of Naga is because Arvis put the key to it there. On its own it's just a fairly fancy circlet Deirdre used to wear.

But seizing Velthomer doesn't free Julia. Which calls into question how the hell I managed to recruit Julia my first time around, because I can't remember what strategy I used, I wasn't yet good enough at the game to HAVE good strategies, and I know for a fact I didn't use silence on her repeatedly to keep her at bay. I may have had her sell her Nosferatu tome before ending chapter 9 so she couldn't fight until she was recruited and got Naga back. But I'm not sure.

Fun fact: recruiting someone who's under the effect of a status does not cure them of that status. Not that it logically would, but it feels like the sort of thing that might happen in this game.

Fun! Getting Naga gets its own super “item get” jingle distinct from the one used for everything else, even other holy weapons.

Also, apparently, Naga can't be taken into the arena. Curious. Maybe they found that the attack animation glitched in the arena, and they figured they could just make it unusable there and nobody would notice, since it's basically the end of the game?

Aaaaaand... Naga's bonuses are absolutely ridiculous. You basically only get it for one fight, maybe against the deadlords too if you're clever, but HOLY SHIT. Skill, speed, defense and resistance all get a boost of TWENTY. This thing is almost as good as FORSETI at evasion boosting, and it's still got SIXTY MORE STAT BOOSTS TO GO.

With Julia's res now at 45, Julius is basically doomed. What little damage he can do will be healed with physics from Leif and Fee.

Goodbye, Julius, and burn in hell.

Hahaha! I love how Julius is fucking panicking when he sees Julia with Naga, screaming at Manfroy for his terminal (contagiously terminal) case of Bond Villain Stupidity. With an aura boost from Tyrfing-holding Seliph to boost her hit rate to acceptable levels, she OBLITERATES Julius.

That said, I adore his battle theme. It's so simple, but the way they do the chord progressions and beats and stuff around a very simple piece of music is just badass and creepy. I really wish it were attached to a better fight though, one with some kin of middle ground between “trivially easy with Naga” and “obnoxiously, tediously impossible without it”.

Oh wow, that's pretty cool. The second you kill him, there's just silence. Hell, you gain exp before you even see the death quote or animation (though admittedly if she had leveled up that might have killed the moment). And in his last moments, he gets all Grima all-caps, with Loptyr fully coming to the surface and cursing Naga for being his ruin. And then Loptyr rises up, in full dragon form as a massive map sprite, screaming as he dies. Pretty badass, as SNES games go.

Unfortunately, looks like killing Julius means I missed the opportunity to have Lana talk with her husband, Seliph. Shame. But...

...At long last...

...After thirty two days of playing...

...It's over.

...We've won.

Fire Emblem 4: Genealogy of the Holy War... is complete.

Time to seize and see the epilogue.

...Okay, this is nice and all, but for fuck's sake, why the hell does this text have to be a fixed crawl? Just make it like all the rest of the dialogue! I want to be able to read this carefully so I can analyze it! Already I missed the context behind Julia saying she wants to “atone for Sir Sigurd's death”, or what the hell that even means.

Anyway, while so far I don't have much to say about anything anyone's saying here, this is a pretty fun epilogue. The next game in the series that I have vivid memories of doing this “talking to everyone in turn” thing is FE9. It's great to see some more dialogue from these characters in a game where minor character dialogue is so limited, even if the dialogue isn't fantastic or anything.

...Is this a joke? Some random villager guy with brown hair concealing his eyes and a massive mustache, who apparently knows Patty and Lester, is talking to Seliph like I've known him before, and Seliph is calling him SIGURD. THE FUCK!? WHO THE FUCK IS THIS MAN!? And why wasn't Faval talking to Seliph alongside Patty and Lester?

Ohhhh... that's why. Apparently when you give Faval holy blood of some other lineage (Lex's), he goes to Dozel, while Patty inherits Jungby. Pretty bizarre that when both have minor blood, it's the one who inherited Jungby's holy weapon who DOESN'T go back to Jungby. So Jungby just doesn't get Yewfelle anymore. Or major Ulir holy blood. Ever again. For fuck's sake, just have Patty go to Dozel! Since Ulster fucked off to Isaac rather than sticking with her, obviously that whole relationship tragically went sour for reasons they don't bother to explain, so just go to Dozel and fuck Johan's brains out in the name of politics! The Helswath will be back in action in a single fucking generation!

I'm mostly joking here. Obviously that's not how marriages work here, and certainly there could be a nice young lady with Neir blood Faval could marry, and their child would be a master knight capable of wielding both Yewfelle and the Helswath, which is fucking awesome to think about.

Though I am genuinely pissed Ulster and Patty didn't stay with each other. They didn't have any conversations together, but damn it, they fell in love, and they were poetry in motion on the battlefield! I WANT MY HAPPY ENDING FOR THEM!

Was that guy in the conversation before supposed to be Faval, and since I gave Faval Lex as a father, the game glitched out and gave his lines to a walking error message with some villager's portrait and Sigurd's name?

Also, why can't Johan inherit Dozel? He's got the same holy blood as Faval, doesn't he? Then again, maybe it would be better to give it to someone who sided with the good guys for some reason OTHER than trying to get in Larcei's incredibly fragile pants.

All of these conversations feel like they'd be basically identical for anyone who inherited the major holy blood of these guys. I'm feeling like these conversations with Faval, Ced and Arthur could have easily been given word for word to anyone else I had Lex, Claude and Lewyn father, they're just so generic and devoid of what little character these people have.

But now, upon talking to Dermott, Seliph finally talks about the recent revelations about Arvis's character. It feels like he's been thinking about it for a while before eventually coming to the conclusion that he's let go of his hate for the man, but honestly this feels like something that should have been done earlier.

Ooh! That's right! I forgot Oifey has Baldur blood! But really, it's kind of annoying that basically literally all of Seliph's friends are leaving him. Where are all the loyal people who are going to help him carry out his will as king if literally the entire army he assembled to get here completely bails on him, and we aren't introduced to a single named character on his side who remains, aside from Julia?

Waaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiit.

Okay, what the fuck.

So Arthur knows that Lewyn is his father. He knows. As does Tinni. And there's literally no drama from this at all, from all of the horsesit Lewyn abandoned them to put up with!? He's just super special awesomely proud of his father and feels like the luckiest guy around to have him as a dad? THE FUCK?

And then Lewyn's all “Yeah, you go on without me kid, I'm not going back to Silesse”, and this DOESN'T prompt massive drama over history repeating itself!?

...Apparently Lewyn can't go because he's actually the wind dragon, and he implies Arthur already knows this... which makes... this entire fucking conversation between Arthur and Lewyn... utterly bizarre.

Oh that's fucking lame. They don't even program an “and” when they're done listing the people still alive!

...Okay, this may need some explanation. So, I'm looking at the epilogue map view text crawl now, and it starts talking about all the people who assist Leif in ruling a united Thracia. And obviously only the ones still alive are listed (in my case, all of them). But when it's done listing all the ones you let live, it doesn't put an “and” before the last one, making it something like “Leif, together with his wife Nanna, the knight Finn, the general Hannibal, the priest Sharlow, built a new nation for Thracia's people”. Which, obviously, is grammatically incorrect without an and before “the priest Sharlow”. For fucking shame.

...Oh. I don't think this was programming laziness. I think this was just a typo by the translation. Because the next time they do this, there IS an and.

I find it amusing that since Jamka didn't have any children (sorry, Sylvia!), Seliph's journey ends where Sigurd's began: invading Verdane with good intentions. But apparently it's okay, because Verdane loves Dierdre and they're happy to be under the rule of her son.

Scratch what I said before! I think it WAS programming laziness! That previous “and” that they did include was after the chain of optional text, not in the middle of it. And now they're referring to Arthur as “they” for some bizarre reason probably revolving around making sure the sentence still makes sense no matter what words and names are put before it. And then after it it says “together with them was Fee, Arthur's wife, all bearing bright smiles”. At least 3 people would need to be mentioned here in order for “all” to make sense.

Yeah, after seeing some more grammatical oddities, this... this feels like it was either shoddy programming, or what's starting to feel more likely: the translation team had difficulty programming in stuff to allow it to make sense in English rather than Japanese.

I find it amusing that the game says Lewyn had devoted his life to protecting the kingdom of Silesse. No he fucking did not! And the game openly makes that clear!

Aaaaaand looks like whatever causes the Fire Emblem to be mentioned in the epilogue text, I didn't do it, because it didn't appear. Shame. I was looking forward to at least seeing in-game what it was. To this day I still don't know, I've only vaguely heard about how it's mentioned. I suppose I'll have to look it up.

Anyway, time to find out how I did! I'm sure my speed ranking has suffered at least a little, and I could have done better in training the characters of Gen 1, but I should have a perfect score in tactics (or whichever one you ace by getting 3 or fewer losses) and a perfect or near perfect score in survival depending on whether or not I'm allowed one un-resurrected death for Sylvia.

Apparently my total was 821 turns! Apart from Chapters 2 (more than 100), 5 (70 ish), 7 (90) and 8 (80 ish I think), I actually did pretty well on most maps, not going too far beyond 50 turns for each. Sorry I couldn't capture exact turn counts for each, by the time it occurred to me to write it down a lot had passed by.

Character scores were:


 

Gen 1:

Sigurd: 72 wins, 0 losses

Noish: 3 wins, 0 losses

Alec: 3 wins, 0 losses

Arden: 1 win, 0 losses

Finn: 23 wins, 0 losses

Quan: 6 wins, 1 loss

Midir: 10 wins, 0 losses

Lewyn: 35 wins, 0 losses

Holyn: 0 wins, 0 losses

Azel: 124 wins, 0 losses

Jamke: 3 wins, 0 losses

Claude: 1 win, 0 losses

Beowulf: 0 wins, 0 losses

Lex: 48 wins, 0 losses

Dew: 34 wins, 0 losses

Deirdre: 0 wins, 0 losses

Ethlyn: 1 win, 0 losses

Lachesis: 69 wins, 0 losses

Ayra: 31 wins, 0 losses

Erin: 22 wins, 0 losses

Taillte: 4 wins, 0 losses

Sylvia: 0 wins, 1 loss (and she's greyed out, to show she didn't live to see the end)

Aideen: 0 wins, 0 losses

Bridget: 17 wins, 0 losses


 

Gen 2:

Seliph: 43 wins, 0 losses

Shanan: 13 wins, 0 losses

Leif: 49 wins, 0 losses

Johan: 8 wins, 0 losses

Sharlow: 0 wins, 0 losses

Finn: 8 wins, 0 losses

Hannibal: 0 wins, 0 losses

Ares: 23 wins, 0 losses

Oifey: 3 wins, 0 losses

Julia: 22 wins, 0 losses

Altena: 25 wins, 0 losses

Leylia: 0 wins, 0 losses

Ulster: 91 wins, 0 losses

Faval: 7 wins, 0 losses

Ced: 8 wins, 0 losses

Dermott: 37 wins, 0 losses

Lester: 9 wins, 1 loss

Arthur: 131 wins, 0 losses

Patty: 60 wins, 0 losses

Larcei: 24 wins, 0 losses

Lana: 2 wins, 0 losses

Fee: 39 wins, 0 losses

Tinni: 6 wins, 0 losses

Nanna: 8 wins, 0 losses


 


 

And my final score is... looks like Survival needs perfection, so my sloppy effort to get Leylia cost me an A in that, but:


 

Tactics: D

Experience: C

Survival: B

Combat: A

Overall: C

And apparently this game took me 70 hours and 31 minutes to complete. That... that is pretty long. Not quite as long as my 90-hour first-time ironman Black Eagles run of Three Houses, but that's still pretty fucking close. It didn't feel that... okay, there were TIMES it felt that long, but... THREE HOUSES LONG? Wow. In fairness, an indeterminate amount of that time was caused by fast-forwarding through arena stuff and some long magic combat animations, and all in all it could have gone faster if I did some things differently, but... wow. Yeah, that... I guess that feels about right, given the day number we're on now.


 

So...

Here comes the big question...

How did I like the game?

Difficulty: This is a bit... “difficult” to say. FE3 Book 2 had a great beginning and a pretty good end, but a middle that was utterly mindless. I think I remember being more panicked, and more satisfyingly challenged, in the beginning and late game of FE3 Book 2 than I felt at any point in FE4. However, FE4 was more consistent and didn't completely bottom out in the middle or turn into a game of “how can I feed literally this entire map to a single character through simple baiting tactics?”. ...Though in thinking about it more, that's mostly because this game doesn't give you that many opportunities to feed kills to weak units due to the insane numbers of enemy forces they throw at you. Enemy phase combat wins the day here, and the numbers above don't lie on that. Patty, Ulster and especially Arthur utterly carried my team, and they were the enemy phase combat kings. With the exception of my fliers, Everyone else was basically utility in some form. Very useful and versatile utility, but utility nonetheless. Nearly every single combat encounter in this game revolved around aura abuse. But this... this is where categories start to bleed together in an annoying way. How much of this do I take off from difficulty, and how much do I take off from balance?

...No, that's kind of irrelevant. The question is: which game gave me more instances where clever unit placement and player phase tactics were more important than having strong units?

...The answer is still Book 2. But I think Genealogy gets a comfortable second place on the current list. Gaiden was satisfying in the beginning, but got kind of amazingly dumb by the end, and at least in FE4, no unit could really reliably handle things singlehanded. I always had to have SOME care for placement and formation, even with the powerful demigods who carried my army. So:

1: Mystery of the Emblem Book 2

2: Genealogy of the Holy War

3: Gaiden

4: Mystery of the Emblem Book 1

5: Dark Dragon


 

Ironmannability: For the first time in the series, we have a game with a passing grade here. Really, aside from one or two minor hiccups (like that dirty trick with the failed Julia conversation), this game's really, really good and responsible with what it throws at the player, to always give them a fighting chance. Everything has a counter if you have a good enough grasp of the mechanics. Even Ishtar. And while this game does technically have ambush spawns, they're never placed somewhere where the average player is even remotely likely to encounter them once they catch on to the rules of when enemies spawn. Big time, no caveats, no begrudging, Genealogy is our new crown champion of ironmannability.

1: Genealogy of the Holy War

2: Mystery of the Emblem Book 2

3: Mystery of the Emblem Book 1

4: Dark Dragon

5: Gaiden


 

Usability: This game represents a pretty much objective upgrade yet again. Highlighted attack ranges, not just movement ranges, a much more intuitive way to see equipment stats and enemy movement ranges, an actually usable combat window, a generally less sluggish interface all around... overall this game just felt better to use. This is the first game in the series whose interface feels “complete”. Really the only major feature I missed was the inability to highlight enemy attack ranges in purple and red zones like later games do. Yet again, the newest game wins.

1: Genealogy of the Holy War

2: Mystery of the Emblem

3: Gaiden

4: Dark Dragon


 

Depth: Genealogy wins here. While the ways these features were balanced... well I mean I'll get to that in a second, but the fact remains that this game just has more going on in general than previous games in the series. Most importantly, this game has way more ways to be useful. You know how many big time combat units I had in Gen 2? Three. You know how many consistently USEFUL units I had? At the absolute most conservative estimate, only counting the ones I found myself CONSTANTLY using? ELEVEN. And that's largely thanks to the fact that the game's skill system, and to a lesser extent the lack of trading making everyone's possessions more personal, mean that there are way, WAY bigger differences between units than mere raw stats. I can't even argue this point. Genealogy wins, no contest. Everything nice I had to say about Gaiden in this department, but to a greater degree and with fewer “at least” caveats.

1: Genealogy of the Holy War

2: Gaiden

3: Mystery of the Emblem

4: Dark Dragon


 

Balance: ...Yet again I found myself tempted to just laugh in all caps for an entire paragraph here. Granted, I've ultimately come to decide it's not as bad as Dark Dragon, because as I just said, in spite of how outrageously unfair and imbalanced things are, I still found a shockingly large number of ways to make my characters useful, and didn't spend the end of the game cheesing it with just a handful of dudes. But guys. Seriously. This game's balance makes no fucking sense. The holy weapons are insane, weapon weight is completely bizarre and imbalanced, tome weight is like a billion times worse to the point of objective wind superiority, there's just a mountain of tiny little things that would be utterly unthinkable in a modern game, and if you were playing this blind, the odds that your Gen 2 army would be anywhere near as good as the one I had is almost laughable. Hell, odds are half of them wouldn't even be usable! There is sooooooooooooo much that a remake would need to, but sadly very likely won't, address here.

1: Mystery of the Emblem Book 1

2: Gaiden

3: Mystery of the Emblem Book 2

4: Genealogy of the Holy War

5: Dark Dragon


 

Pacing: Yet another area where this game takes a nosedive. If you thought Dark Dragon or Gaiden or Book 2 had pacing issues, HOOOOOOOLY SHIT. This game is just waaaaaaay bigger and longer than the actual combat contained inside it really justifies. There's just so much empty space in between, and the way enemies are placed in these massive clumps just makes it feel even worse. Most turns in this game don't actually involve fighting the enemy. Most of them are just moving around. An entire game of Gaiden with Celica's map design wouldn't have the pacing problems this beautiful monstrosity has, and I'm honestly debating how much of my desire to spare this game from the bottom slot has to do with complaints about Dark Dragon that really should be kept to usability.

...No, if the game is slowed down by usability issues, then it's a problem that affects both usability and pacing. I stand by Dark Dragon's placement on the list below all the others so far. But if we ask whether FE1 or FE4 had worse pacing...

...Fuck it, yes, FE4's is worse. I'd rather play FE4 a million more times before I ever touch FE1 again, but Genealogy took me more time than books 1 and 2 of FE3 combined. It doesn't ruin the game, but yes, it must be acknowledged that the pacing here is a complete and utter trash fire.

1: Mystery of the Emblem Book 1

2: Mystery of the Emblem Book 2

3: Gaiden

4: Dark Dragon

5: Genealogy of the Holy War


 

Writing: And we whiplash back to top of the list. It's no contest. As much shit as I've been giving the finer details of this narrative basically from the moment I started playing this thing, the story itself is amazing. And for that matter, its competition so far is so terrible that the various issues I take with the TELLING of said story are basically irrelevant for the time being. It wasn't a stupid excuse plot like Gaiden, or barebones standard RPG plot number 909 like Dark Dragon, or a mere vehicle to shovel exposition into your mouth like Mystery of the Emblem. No, this is a story where you watch the main character get CUCKED AND SET ON FIRE, and then you LEAD AN ARMY OF HIS AND HIS FRIENDS' ORPHANED CHILDREN ON A QUEST FOR JUSTICE AND REVENGE. Shit HAPPENS in this story. DARK shit. INTERESTING shit. Shit that I care about, which happens to people I care about, in places I care about. And no amount of griping about the nonsense holding it all together can distract me from the fact that it is sooooooooo much better than what else we've seen so far.

1: Genealogy of the Holy War

2: Mystery of the Emblem Book 2

3: Mystery of the Emblem Book 1

4: Dark Dragon

5: Gaiden


 

Music: We have a new winner. Equal if not better musical inspiration than Gaiden, combined with superior technology. This game's soundtrack is just spectacular, and has some of my favorite songs in the series, from Seliph's theme, to Light and Dark, to the allied army theme, to Julius's battle theme, all without really having a single song on the soundtrack I'd call a “dud” or “disappointing”.

1: Genealogy of the Holy War

2: Gaiden

3: Mystery of the Emblem Book 2

4: Dark Dragon

5: Mystery of the Emblem Book 1


 

And now, for the first time ever, time to introduce two more categories that, after much deliberation, I feel are needed:


 

Presentation: This is where I judge the games on visuals, graphics, spectacle, just how pleasant and fun the game is to look at in general. Genealogy tops this list, obviously. While what I'm about to say may just be because my sensibilities with the series are rooted in me starting with the GBA games, this is the first game in the series with a presentation that doesn't feel primitive. Dated by modern standards, sure, but this is the first game that feels “whole”. Nothing in the game's visuals really feels like corners were cut with it. Maybe they were, but the game doesn't give that sense when you play it. Everything feels like they had the resources to do what they wanted to do with the game. Also, the combat animations are easily the best in the series so far, even if individual quality varies wildly. All in all, these are the best, most lively, and badass animations the marathon has seen so far. The spritework is fantastic, and visuals are top notch. After Genealogy, things are pretty much a linear descent through time, though don't worry, that's not going to consistently be the case. I certainly know of some exceptions here.

1: Genealogy of the Holy War

2: Mystery of the Emblem

3: Gaiden

4: Dark Dragon


 

Replayability: Here I'll be ranking games on how much appeal there is in playing a game again. One of the major ways to gain points here is to have lots of stuff you can do differently each playthrough, while a big way you can lose points is to have stuff in it that isn't fun to do more than once. Genealogy wins this, though I'm not fully confident for how long. There's a hell of a lot you can do differently with each replay, but nearly all of that doesn't really bear fruit until, judging by my total playtime, somewhere around a full 24 hours of gameplay in. Still, once you get to that part, it's a hell of a lot more than what the previous games in the series offer. The child system singlehandedly makes the replay value of this game intense. Even when you get rid of all of the shit pairings, there are so many different combinations you can try here, with incredibly entertaining results. As long as your pairings are different, each of your playthroughs is probably going to play significantly differently, with very different strategies. My Fee was making extensive use of warp and physic, two staves she literally could only use because of her father. And that's just one example. Damn near every member of your team is going to play significantly differently depending on who their fathers are and, to a lesser extent, what their parents left for them. And that's a really, really big deal, something that none of the other games so far can offer anything comparable to. Other games may give you a much larger variety in who you train up, but they don't play nearly as differently as these characters can between playthroughs.

After that, we get Gaiden. Mostly due to the villagers. And granted, the majority of that is just in one half of the game, but as said before, the different classes in Gaiden play drastically differently from each other by the end of the game, and that matters a lot for replayability when you can choose different classes to make your characters go into.

After that, it's a difficult to distinguish tie between Dark Dragon and Book 1. Ultimately the differences between these games are virtually nonexistant in this particular department, but I don't like ties, so I'm going to go with my gut and say that Dark Dragon has worse replay value because who the fuck would ever want to play Dark Dragon more than once?

But alas, I have to concede it doesn't bottom out the list. That dishonor goes to Book 2, which seems to go out of its way to ensure that your team composition is almost entirely irrelevant. You certainly could choose to play Book 2 with a completely different set of characters. You could, but it wouldn't matter in the slightest. The uniform stat caps for every character and class, combined with the absurd ease with which you can bring a bunch of your army to cap all of them, means that no matter who you pick, by the end of the game each of your characters is going to function identically to basically any other character of that class would. The star shard system completely kills statistical individuality between characters, and in a game before support conversations, that basically means there IS no difference between characters of the same class, or in some cases even characters of different classes. So why even bother?

1: Genealogy of the Holy War

2: Gaiden

3: Mystery of the Emblem Book 1

4: Dark Dragon

5: Mystery of the Emblem Book 2


 

Now... let's see... where does that leave us?

I think it's pretty clear that Genealogy is the new winner. It just won so many categories, really only significantly suffering in balance and pacing. And even though it suffers a lot in those categories... it just wins so much everywhere else. This is the first game in the marathon that I wasn't relieved to be done with by the end, as I said. And that I feel counts for a lot. After taking into account anything the two new categories might or might not have changed about the listings...

1: Genealogy of the Holy War

2: Mystery of the Emblem Book 2

3: Gaiden

4: Mystery of the Emblem Book 1

5: Dark Dragon


 

...PHEW. Well. That was... that was some journey there. But now, after the weekend... we begin on the big one. The scary one. The one that everyone who's ever played it seems to love or hate, and both for the exact same reasons.

The interquel to the game we just completed.

Thracia 776.

Hold on to your butts, boys and girls. This is gonna get bumpy.

Actually, I still haven't decided if I'm gonna play this game ironman, blind, neither, or both. I need some spoiler-free insight from anyone who's been reading this series and who's played the game to help me formulate my decision. Given my performance with the franchise so far, how much of a chance do you think I stand doing this ironman and blind? And if the answer is that I don't, what would you rather read about me doing?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 12/5/2019 at 4:44 PM, Alastor15243 said:

Okay, so... is it supposed to be a twist that the gods are actually dragons, or dramatic irony? Because they're using the same fucking names as characters we already know are dragons from previous games. If it's supposed to be dramatic irony... they didn't really do anything, like even slightly interesting with it. And now the secret's revealed, and... who the fuck cares? What's really changed in the long run by having it turn out that the gods that gave divine power to the crusaders were actually dragon-shaped gods?

Well, only Naga, the rest do not. And people were asking at the time if Archanea and Jugdral were related, it's not an outlandish idea, see Final Fantasy, all its Ifrits, Shivas, Odins, and Bahamuts aren't the same person.

And you're right from that from a human perspective, the difference between a god-like being and an actual god isn't significant, but I've always seen this kind of reveal as an act of humility on the part of the god-like beings.

 

On 12/5/2019 at 10:09 PM, Jotari said:

Basically I think castle defense would work better if Holy War was more open world.

Open world FE.... I've contemplated the idea, but how to make it work, and without being repetitive? Approach it more from a pure strategy perspective like Romance of the Three Kingdoms/a billion western titles I'm unfamiliar with, than an RPG's idea of open world?

 

1 hour ago, Alastor15243 said:

Actually, I still haven't decided if I'm gonna play this game ironman, blind, neither, or both. I need some spoiler-free insight from anyone who's been reading this series and who's played the game to help me formulate my decision. Given my performance with the franchise so far, how much of a chance do you think I stand doing this ironman and blind? And if the answer is that I don't, what would you rather read about me doing?

I'm not quite sure, but blind and no ironman would be the better approach. Or, at least hold back on ironman until the Manster chapters are done, ya don't want to lose someone there. After Manster, things aren't so tight, but I'm no FE5 expert, so I don't know exactly how feasible it'd be blind and ironman from there on out.

 

Also, if you forgot, consider reading this old interview now.:

https://garmtranslations.wordpress.com/2019/02/13/fire-emblem-genealogy-of-the-holy-war-fan-special-roundtable-discussion/

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Even if Julia wasn't silent, it wouldn't have ended that badly for you when you used the talk command. Tyrfing would mean she stands small chance of killing Seliph and she'd probably attack at a distance and not eat a counter attack as a result. Still a shitty thing to do though, they should have at least let him canto away. Still, I do like the idea of him trying and failing to be able to snap her out of it.

The Fire Emblem referenced in the ending isn't even the Fire Emblem. As in it's something that can be translated as Fire Emblem, but it doesn't use the same Japanese name as all the other instances in the series of a Fire Emblem. So like, imagine the games are filled with Fire Emblems and here they refer to the Burning Sigil or something.

Play Thraica blind, the way it was meant to be played...maybe you won't have fun, but I'll certainly enjoy myself watching you XD

Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 minutes ago, Jotari said:

The Fire Emblem referenced in the ending isn't even the Fire Emblem. As in it's something that can be translated as Fire Emblem, but it doesn't use the same Japanese name as all the other instances in the series of a Fire Emblem. So like, imagine the games are filled with Fire Emblems and here they refer to the Burning Sigil or something.

From what I read, the usual term for Fire Emblem in Japanese is "Faiā Emuburemu", which is written in Katakana:  "ファイアーエムブレム".

The Jugdrali Fire Emblem is "Honoo no Monshou", which is written in Kanji:  "炎の紋章".

-But it's don't cite me on this, I don't know Japanese at all. I've heard another say that "Durandal" has its name written in Katakana, but its title- "the Blazing Blade"- is written in Kanji to make it more understandable to Japanese audiences.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hahaha to playing FE5 on ironman and blind. 

The person who can do it, deserves a gaming noble price (still has to be created though). 

 

Seriously this game is absolutely not made to play blind because so many recruitments, special events within a chapter, sidequests and objects are not obvious to get at all. I will bet that the two special weapons from chapter 1 will be missed unless someone tells which house to visit with whom. 

About ironman since there is no guaranteed hit and miss, I can only imagine it will be quite a lot harder than in other games because there is no real dodgetank aside of miracle users maybe. 

Edited by Zemuria
Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, Zemuria said:

Hahaha to playing FE5 on ironman and blind. 

The person who can do it, deserves a gaming noble price (still has to be created though). 

 

Seriously this game is absolutely not made to play blind because so many recruitments, special events within a chapter, sidequests and objects are not obvious to get at all. I will bet that the two special weapons from chapter 1 will be missed unless someone tells which house to visit with whom. 

About ironman since there is no guaranteed hit and miss, I can only imagine it will be quite a lot harder than in other chapters because there is no guaranteed dodgetank aside of miracle users maybe. 

No revival option either. When they die, they damn well stay dead.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

3 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

...PHEW. Well. That was... that was some journey there. But now, after the weekend... we begin on the big one. The scary one. The one that everyone who's ever played it seems to love or hate, and both for the exact same reasons.

The interquel to the game we just completed.

Thracia 776.

Hold on to your butts, boys and girls. This is gonna get bumpy.

Actually, I still haven't decided if I'm gonna play this game ironman, blind, neither, or both. I need some spoiler-free insight from anyone who's been reading this series and who's played the game to help me formulate my decision. Given my performance with the franchise so far, how much of a chance do you think I stand doing this ironman and blind? And if the answer is that I don't, what would you rather read about me doing?

Nitpick: Thracia's a midquel, not an interquel. "Inter-" means between, so an interquel comes between two separate works, while a midquel comes in the middle of one.

I kinda want to watch you ironman it blind. I feel like this would cause much hilarity. The only trouble would be that there's a genuine risk of you failing to finish.

Man, now I want to play Genealogy. But Pokémon has been distracting me, and I still have most of Book 2 to go. 😕

1 hour ago, Jotari said:

The Fire Emblem referenced in the ending isn't even the Fire Emblem. As in it's something that can be translated as Fire Emblem, but it doesn't use the same Japanese name as all the other instances in the series of a Fire Emblem. So like, imagine the games are filled with Fire Emblems and here they refer to the Burning Sigil or something.

So... this isn't really right? There's no "the" Fire Emblem, for starters. And I don't think your analogy really holds, because it's more like most of the series uses "Fire Emblem", written in katakana, for the name, while Genealogy uses a translation into actual Japanese. There's no real equivalent to that in English.

Besides, synonyms are a thing. Everyone knows that the Fire Emblem of Three Houses is the Crest of Flames, even if it uses different words.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

48 minutes ago, Seafarer said:

 

So... this isn't really right? There's no "the" Fire Emblem, for starters. And I don't think your analogy really holds, because it's more like most of the series uses "Fire Emblem", written in katakana, for the name, while Genealogy uses a translation into actual Japanese. There's no real equivalent to that in English.

The equivalent would be to consistently call it something in a foreign language and then suddenly swap to English for one line in one game.

Edited by Jotari
Link to comment
Share on other sites

31 minutes ago, Jotari said:

The equivalent would be to consistently call it something in a foreign language and then suddenly swap to English for one line in one game.

Not really, because there's no other language that's used in English-speaking countries as fluently as Romaji in Japan.

In any case, this is a pointless debate. I'll stop now.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

 

...Is this a joke? Some random villager guy with brown hair concealing his eyes and a massive mustache, who apparently knows Patty and Lester, is talking to Seliph like I've known him before, and Seliph is calling him SIGURD. THE FUCK!? WHO THE FUCK IS THIS MAN!? And why wasn't Faval talking to Seliph alongside Patty and Lester?

Oh you got that glitch... that's kinda unfortunate. I have heard of this, but unfortunately don't know many details about it.

2 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

 

Scratch what I said before! I think it WAS programming laziness! That previous “and” that they did include was after the chain of optional text, not in the middle of it. And now they're referring to Arthur as “they” for some bizarre reason probably revolving around making sure the sentence still makes sense no matter what words and names are put before it. And then after it it says “together with them was Fee, Arthur's wife, all bearing bright smiles”. At least 3 people would need to be mentioned here in order for “all” to make sense.

This is almost certainly due to linguistic differences between Japanese and English. Japanese doesn't have plurals, and it doesn't have this weird word that is only used between the last two members of lists of things, so there is no real code base to easily work this in without basically breaking and rebuilding the code that created the ending.

2 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

 

Aaaaaand looks like whatever causes the Fire Emblem to be mentioned in the epilogue text, I didn't do it, because it didn't appear. Shame. I was looking forward to at least seeing in-game what it was. To this day I still don't know, I've only vaguely heard about how it's mentioned. I suppose I'll have to look it up.

It should have been part of what the heir to Velthomer says to Seliph, as the Fire Emblem is the Family Crest of house Velthomer, and thus the banner of the Emperor. Here is a version from a let's play with Arthur as the heir.

I case you are curious about how the branching of the ending works here are two older translations that were done on the ending.

http://acenoctali.free.fr/f-fe4/texte_fin_FE4.htm

http://acenoctali.free.fr/f-fe4/ending_map_english.htm

2 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

 

Actually, I still haven't decided if I'm gonna play this game ironman, blind, neither, or both. I need some spoiler-free insight from anyone who's been reading this series and who's played the game to help me formulate my decision. Given my performance with the franchise so far, how much of a chance do you think I stand doing this ironman and blind? And if the answer is that I don't, what would you rather read about me doing?

My advise is pick either blind or Iron Man. There are multiple maps that can be made far easier if you know how they work, and there are a lot of mechanics that are either unique to Thracia, or work in ways that are different from latter games. If you are playing blind you can figure these things out the hard way without crippling your team, and if you have some idea of how things work then playing an ironman run is challenging without necessarily being punishing. 

As another option, I have created a list of how key mechanics work in Thracia without mentioning anything specific within the story, so you at least know how the game works and don't die unfairly due to not knowing the mechanics at least. Some extremely technical things were included because they might be relevant to specific maps, but I don't think it is all that obvious without context. That will be within the spoiler tag below if you are interested in doing so, with some important parts bolded for emphasis. Warning this is not comprehensive.

Spoiler

Miscellaneous:

On escape chapters any unit still on the map when Lief escapes is considered captured and no longer part of your army. If an enemy units capture the space you use to escape you get a game over. Not all AI are programmed to do so, and this is generally only a concern on maps where part of your forces start near the escape point.

GREEN UNITS ARE NOT ALWAYS ALLIES. Green simply indicates a different faction, and whether they are enemies or allies should be determined based on the context.

Magic is also a characters resistance stat. Note items that in other games only increase resistance, like pure water, and the barrier staff, also increase magic.

Units have a con and move growth rate.

Enemies have stat variation, note ENEMIES CAN HAVE INCREASED MOVE DUE TO STAT VARIATION SO DOUBLE CHECK!

Not all ballista are the same, some have 3-10 range, some have 3-15, and some can cause poison.

Check weapon description, multiple weapons have brave effects, grant skills when equipped, grant stat bonuses when equipped, deal effective damage, and/or CAUSE STATUS.

Units with movement stars have a 5% per star chance of moving again as if danced, although movement stars do not activate on extra moves gained by movement stars. Note NAMED ENEMIES CAN HAVE MOVEMENT STARS SO DOUBLE CHECK.

To steal from an enemy you must have the steal skill, you must have higher speed than the enemy, and you must have higher con than the weight of the weapon/item being stolen. Note enemies can have the steal skill, equipped weapons can be stolen, and you can give an enemy an item/weapon using the steal command.

When weapons or staves break they remain in your inventory as broken items, note if the weapon you are equipped with breaks, unless it is a tome it stays equipped with the crippling stats of a broken weapon. A few things to note weapons with 1 use can still double, when a tome breaks the next tome in the item list is automatically equipped, broken weapons can be sold for 100 gold, and can be repaired with the hammerne.

Enemies without weapons can trade with other enemies for spare equipment, or "buy" equipment from armories.

You can trade multiple times per turn.

You need to visit a specific building or use the preparation screen to access the convoy.

Some terrain can greatly increase defense, and some late game terrain can increase magic.

Mounted units must dismount to enter indoor spaces. If the map start indoors mounted units are automatically dismounted. Units do automatically mount on maps that start outdoors. While dismounted units can only use swords (or magic or staves if able to while mounted) even if they are not able to while mounted.

Maps have a minimum and maximum number of deployment slots.

Fog of war is utter blackness that shows neither terrain, nor units. Units have a vision range of 3 unless they use a torch/torch staff in which case vision range increases to 10 and decreases by 1 every turn.

Deployment place is determined by deployment order, and is not easy to change or determine from the prep screen.

Note you can only acquire gold by selling equipment or fighting in the arena.

The arena functions similarly to the GBA. Charm, leadership stars, and predefined "supports" all effect the Arena. Weapon ranks and fatigue increase based on the combat in the arena.

 

Combat Calculations:

Attack Speed is calculated using con to reduce weapon weight, that in turn reduces speed, but Tomes do not have their weight reduced by con

Every leadership star give every unit in their army a +3% hit and avoid. Many named enemies have leadership stars, and killing them makes it easier to hit or dodge enemies.

The doubling threshold is 4 or more AS greater than the opponent.

Hit rate is at maximum 99% (unless Luna or Sol triggers) and at minimum 1% (unless Prayer triggers)

Critical rate is capped at 25% on the first attack a character makes, and multiplied by the Followup Critical Multiplier (FCM) with the attack they get when doubling. Note extra attacks gained via a skill proc, or a brave effect weapon have the same cap/multiplier as the attack that caused this bonus attack.

Critical rate can be reduced by half luck, and predefined "support" bonuses. Non-Wrath crits are ignored while holding a crusader scroll. Note this applies to both enemies and allies.

Character can have units they support, which grants the recipient either +10 or +20 to accuracy, avoid, critical rate, and critical avoid. Supports can be one way.

Effective weapons have their weapon might tripled.

Criticals double attack before reducing net defense.

Magic weapons use Strength/defense in melee and Magic/Magic at range.

Weapon triangle is only +/- 5%.

Note you do not have to hit to gain combat experience.

 

Capture/Rescue:

Characters with greater (not equal to but greater) con than their target can rescue allies or capture enemies. Note mounted units counted as having the 20 con cap for both parts of this calculation while mounted. So mounted units cannot be rescued or captured unless they dismount.

While holding a rescued or captured unit, all of the units stats other than HP, Luck, Con, and possibly Move are halved rounded down, if the unit being held has a con greater than half of the holder's con (counted as 20 for mounted units) than Move is halved as well. Note this means once a unit has 11 con or more anyone holding them has half move.

To capture an enemy you must attack them in melee with the capture command, and either target an enemy that has no weapon (note siege tomes are not counted as weapons for this) or drop them to 0 HP while suffering the half stat penalties you get while holding them.

While an enemy is captured you can trade with them to take their equipment. Note Venim weapons become iron weapons when taken from enemies.

Units that are captured/rescued can be transfer to other units that have the con to carry them by either unit, and can be dropped with your action. Note dropping enemies often counts as killing them.

Enemies can capture your units! Note this means that enemies with high enough con that can attack your unpromoted healer in melee can capture them instantly. When one of your units is captured all items in their inventory that are not crusader scrolls, or prf weapons are instantly added to the enemies inventory, and that inventory can only be recovered by capturing/stealing from the enemy that captured them. Note the enemy gets the half stat penalty while holding a captive, and if they are not killed/captured before leaving the map the unit will be considered captured and no longer be part of your army.

There is a gaiden chapter that lets you rescue units that were removed from your army via capture.

Fatigue:

If a unit's fatigue is greater than their max HP they can not be deployed from the prep screen, unless they have a Stamina drink in their inventory, in which case they are deployed, their fatigue returns to zero, and the stamina drink is consumed.

If a unit does not participate in a chapter their stamina is reset to zero.

Attacking, stealing, dancing, and being attacked all increase fatigue by one, using a staff increases stamina by the rank of the staff (E rank by 1, D rank by 2, etc., prf count as A for this purpose).

 

STAVES & STATUS (VERY VERY IMPORTANT!!!):

Staves can miss its hit rate is 60+4*skill, so staff hit rates cap at 10 skill.

Healing staves can double if they failed to fully heal on the first use. The chance of this is only [Speed+Luck+Skill]/2%

Status effects DO NOT RECOVER OVER TIME. You must use the restore staff to remove them (antitoxins can also remove poison).

Sleep drops units Strength, Magic, Skill, Speed, and Defense to ZERO, and forces them to dismount. Note if you want an enemy to dismount put them to sleep.

Thrones/Gates prevent status.

Units that are asleep or silenced can not talk or be talked to. Exception: Green units can still talk to Red units.

Ranged staff have map wide range.

You can warp/rewarp into the fog of war.

If you want to try to stay somewhat blind while ironmanning this might help. Good Luck!

2 minutes ago, Zemuria said:

I will bet that the two special weapons from chapter 1 will be missed unless someone tells which house to visit with whom. 

If you visit those houses with the wrong person they will tell you who needs to go there and allow them to visit it. Its not quite as bad as you remember, but there are a lot of things that are easy to miss.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

It should have been part of what the heir to Velthomer says to Seliph, as the Fire Emblem is the Family Crest of house Velthomer, and thus the banner of the Emperor. Here is a version from a let's play with Arthur as the heir.

 

Oh! Shoot! I guess I missed it when my computer froze up but my game kept playing in the background for a few seconds.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Alright, good news everyone: they have fixed the PC-only issue since I tried playing it, by showing a browser-based patcher that I successfully used. And I patched it to put the "wait" command exactly where it was in the original game, because if I'm going to have an honest grasp of how much usability should go down for this decision, I'm going to have to feel how garbage it was first hand.

I'm thinking a good idea would be to not play it ironman (at least not initially, until and unless I become confident I can handle it) but to play it blind in the sense of I'll play it knowing everything that would have come in the game's original manual, and nothing else beyond what I've already heard. Has it been translated, or do we at least know what stuff it explains?

I may start tomorrow, but if not, definitely on Monday.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

42 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

but to play it blind in the sense of I'll play it knowing everything that would have come in the game's original manual, and nothing else beyond what I've already heard. Has it been translated, or do we at least know what stuff it explains?

I don't know if the manual has been translated, but there is this VHS tape that came in the Thracia 776 deluxe pack. Minutes 10:30 to about 15:30 give you a quick brushing of gameplay info about the game. The rest is backstory from Genealogy, marketing, yaddayaddayadda.

Here it is with English voiceovers added:

 

...But the actual manual looks like it has a lot more information. Looking at this:

 

Edited by Interdimensional Observer
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 12/5/2019 at 8:18 AM, Interdimensional Observer said:

Same, replaying FE4 for changing up the children sounds great, but having to sit through Gen 1 again is tedious. If only there could be a "Branch of Fate" like Fates, where you can recustomize Corrin but skip Chapters 5 and beforehand. Except now it'd be for retooling pairing and item inheritance.

That would be nice, but the Branch of Fate option had some issues that rendered it impractical - first off, it only carried over levels from your most recent chapter 5 save. This sucks because a file that went to Birthright wouldn't be suited for a Conquest run. It didn't let you change difficulty, either. What's more, if you wanted to change your Corrin's gender for whatever reason, you ended up stuck with a level 1 servant. which really sucks in Conquest and Revelation because the servant is one of the few units you get early on.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

That would be nice, but the Branch of Fate option had some issues that rendered it impractical - first off, it only carried over levels from your most recent chapter 5 save. This sucks because a file that went to Birthright wouldn't be suited for a Conquest run. It didn't let you change difficulty, either. What's more, if you wanted to change your Corrin's gender for whatever reason, you ended up stuck with a level 1 servant. which really sucks in Conquest and Revelation because the servant is one of the few units you get early on.

Yeah, and doing that for FE4 would inevitably have similar issues, honestly. What about weapon inheritance and kill count, and the levels of their parents that affect their stats? Either it just copies what you managed last time, or it doesn't carry over kill count at all when you decide which weapons to give which kid. Also, just letting you skip generation 1... would kind of kill the magic in a sense. Honestly, just making Gen 1 less tedious would probably go a long way to solving this issue.

Edited by Alastor15243
Link to comment
Share on other sites

19 hours ago, Jotari said:

Play Thraica blind, the way it was meant to be played...maybe you won't have fun, but I'll certainly enjoy myself watching you XD

And have to restart the game because you don't have any mean of opening a door later on. Yes it happened to me and giving door keys to certain enemies is the number 1 change i want in Echoes of Thracia, even above healing miss.

Yes it's my fault for not resetting after lara death, but i used to let people die on games i did not know because i was too unskilled and otherwise it took weeks to beat a map whitout resetting.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Flere210 said:

And have to restart the game because you don't have any mean of opening a door later on. Yes it happened to me and giving door keys to certain enemies is the number 1 change i want in Echoes of Thracia, even above healing miss.

Spoiler

The funny thing about the Thracia endgame is that there is a doorkey in each of the sealed rooms, but the only way to get them in Thracia is to capture them, or steal from them, which would require you to be able to open their door (or have saved a thief staff use), so simply adding a mechanic for them dropping it when kill would fix that really easily.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

18 minutes ago, Eltosian Kadath said:
  Hide contents

The funny thing about the Thracia endgame is that there is a doorkey in each of the sealed rooms, but the only way to get them in Thracia is to capture them, or steal from them, which would require you to be able to open their door (or have saved a thief staff use), so simply adding a mechanic for them dropping it when kill would fix that really easily.

 

Spoiler

That's true if you're going into the map with zero keys. But putting the keys in the cells means that if you have at least one key, you can open all the doors as you have no net key loss by using one to open a door (provided you capture the enemy key holder). Warping directly into the cell is also another option.

Useually when people are talking about keys and Thracia however it's Chapter 11 they're referring to, where you're faced with four locked doors and no option of gaining keys in the level. Meaning if you don't have a thief alive or some spare keys knocking around, your playthrough is over. They don't need to change any of the item dropping coding for that however. Just have a sciprted even where the doors open after several turns of being trapped there getting pelted by Ballista. Similarly to how there's a "failure" method of progression available in the Shadow Dragon prologue by automatically opening the door when a certain number of units are killed.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Alright, tomorrow I'll start my Thracia playthrough, using only serenes forest's info and my wits. Not ironman though. Not until I get a sense for how insane an idea that would be.

Incidentally, and somewhat amusingly, the Verdant Wind Three Houses run I was doing periodically finally ended just now. My plan is to slowly, steadily work through Silver Snow next, so that when it finally comes time to play Three Houses for this marathon, I'll only have Azure Moon left. The one I'm told has the best story. That way anything I say about Three Houses in that marathon will be with generally good knowledge of the rest of the story and world.

...This playthrough also took 90 hours, same as my Crimson Flower ironman run. And I don't have any idea how I'd set checkpoints for daily completion like you'd normally do with chapters, meaning it's probably going to be like Gaiden and Genealogy: just do as much as I feel comfortable doing in a day.

...I really, really hope I manage to find things to talk about on the inevitable days where I'm just doing the filler between story missions.

BUT!

That is a long, long, long way off. Happy thoughts, Alastor! We're playing Thracia now!

And yeah, I can't tell you how genuinely excited I am to be playing this game. For all the faults I've heard about, this is the kind of Fire Emblem game I've wanted to play for a long, long time: one where you're a rebel fighter who actually feels like a rebel fighter. It's something I loved about the first few levels of Radiant Dawn, and I hate how quickly it devolved into just being one army against another. Here it sounds like there's going to be a constant sense of having to fight to survive against superior forces, stealing your supplies, sneaking around, on the run... and that sounds like such a fantastically exciting change of pace.

One of my wildest fantasies with the series was that they'd make Awakening's Thracia, where you play as the children in the bad future, running and fighting for your lives, hunting for all the stones before traveling back in time. I know we're almost certainly never going to get that, but now at least I'm gonna get to play the original Thracia experience.

Edited by Alastor15243
Link to comment
Share on other sites

18 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

Alright, tomorrow I'll start my Thracia playthrough, using only serenes forest's info and my wits. Not ironman though. Not until I get a sense for how insane an idea that would be.

If you want a little more blind, then obviously don't look any combination of the: recruitment, growths, item location, and hints and secrets pages. Or others you'd think that tell you too much. Sure you don't have the maps themselves listed, but you still have a good deal of info, restrict yourself if you feel you need to.

Edited by Interdimensional Observer
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...