Difficulty in Fire Emblem and Community Impressions

[whase]

11 minutes ago, Jotari said:

I'm not sure the difficulty mode really helps the case for Meg. I mean sure she's useable, but she's still going to be relatively less usable than any other character in the game who's not a commoner laguz or Fiona. Being useable doesn't mean she's good since these things are based in comparisons with other units.

Sorry if it didn't come across, but that's pretty much my point. Even one of the worst units in the game is usable on easy mode. Never said that makes her good, just usable, and a fun challenge.

There are people who enjoy making up the best possible strategies, for those people there's hard mode, maddening mode and H5.

And then there's people like me, who enjoy making up unusual and probably bad strategies to see how they work, and use bad characters to spice things up. Good thing I have easy and normal mode.

[𝐅𝐞𝐧𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐥]

On 6/13/2020 at 9:20 PM, PeaceRibbon said:

What difficulty setting do you think is the "normal" setting for the series? Does the answer depend somewhat on the entry you are playing? What difficulty have you perceived as standard based on community interactions, and how important do you think playing the same difficulty is to discussing the series? Are there different appeals to different difficulty levels that could potentially make one's opinion of Fire Emblem more well-rounded?

each single game from the NES to the Switch era has different difficulty settings, different gameplay mechanics, and different difficulty scaling. it's hard to define what can be considered "standard/normal" in terms of overall difficulty when you have so many different titles.

there's people that consider the games from the SNES/GBA era to have a "standard" set of difficulty, while others claim that the titles from/past the 3DS era are more oriented towards casual players, therefore they're considered easier.

then, there's always been many ways to play these games.

there's people that do iron man runs just to have fun with strategy and rankings, those who play for story, lore and supports, those who play for the sake of completion by collecting every item and recruiting every unit, etc. each player will always have different goals and approach the game in their own way.

 

now, in terms of overall difficulty, and by personal experience, i can tell you this:

» the NES era started with a "generic" difficulty scaling in its first games, however there were some situations in Gaiden that made the gameplay way too tedious due to terrible map designs and broken enemy units(witches) randomly teleporting all over the map.

what could be considered a fun and memorable experience with FE1, would eventually turn out to be one hell of a playthrough past Gaiden's mid-game(to be more specific, after getting to the desert map on Celica's side). although, there's still some people that liked it for the kind of game it was back at the time.

» the SNES era was pretty much a reenact of what happened in the previous era.

FE1 was remade into FE3 to be a better balanced game, while adding a new story too. while the difficulty was more linear in the first part of the game, difficulty spikes started to appear early on in the second part, making it quite challenging during some specific chapters. in the end, FE3 became pretty much the basic formula for almost all future games that followed.

FE4 took a different approach to gameplay mechanics, while introducing new unique features as well. later, it became one of the most beloved titles in the franchise due to how vast the game is under its many aspects. however, there's people that may not appreciate it due to having to move and split a whole army around huge maps, especially when only half of that army is on a horse.

FE5 went back to its roots, adding once again new features to the gameplay. thing is, while some of those features improved the game in terms of strategy, some of them were not well received due to partially taking away the freedom of choice from the player in terms of units deployment. adding to that, some specific items like warp staves gave plenty of chances to break the game, and by introducing teleporting traps in some chapters past mid-game, the whole mid-to-late-game experience was ultimately compromised. that led Thracia 776 to be seen once again as a tedious experience by many players as much as Gaiden had been before. some like it, some don't. there's really no middle ground, it's all about different points of view.

 

after that, from the GBA era onward, there's been titles that not only kept building upon the basics of FE3, but also added new features/modes to provide veterans and new players alike with a better and overall more enjoyable experience.

i'd say, considering difficulty modes from a single game is not what will give you a general idea about how the franchise and its gameplay has changed/evolved through the years.

it's playing most of the titles(if not all of them, but that depends if you're really willing to dig deep in order to discover the behaviour of the older, most archaic games), either in chronological order or not, that will give you a better idea of what could be considered a "standard" difficulty.

then again, usually harder difficulties in Fire Emblem games means bigger numbers to deal with, be it stats or enemy amounts.

even if you're not playing on the hardest difficulty available, you can still get a glimpse at what could be eventually considered "hard," and then judge by yourself.

[Hawkwing]

It is pretty tricky to nail down the overall difficulty of Fire Emblem games. If someone knows what they are doing, they can run circles around even the hardest games, while the easier ones still have moments that can give a player a good challenge (even if said challenge can range in how intentional it was). It gets even more complicated when taking into consideration aspects such as permadeath, the leap between difficulty settings, how well the game informs the player about the mechanics and the capabilities of the opposition, and so on.

Personally speaking, I tend to play on Hard Classic, and I prefer to do ironman runs, though not for every game. While having to deal with permadeath can be nerve-wracking, it does also get me to pay attention and think out my options far more often, not having to reset all the time significantly speeds up the pace, and it is encouragement to try out new characters, classes, and combinations that I may have previously overlooked. Hard tends to find a good sweet spot as the "middle-of-the-road" difficulty, though obviously it ranges between games how well it serves this purpose. So far Awakening is the only game in the series I do challenge runs for, as while I will criticize the wonky difficulty balancing, I will praise the amount of freedom the player is given to do what they want and either exploit or ignore the overpowered mechanics, or heck just ignore certain mechanics in general.

 

I wouldn't say that Awakening's Lunatic and Three Houses Maddening modes are inherently bad difficulty modes, as there is a certain appeal to testing ones knowledge of the games mechanics and exploiting the broken aspects in order to simple survive. The problem being that that this appeal isn't universal. Having this kind of mode alongside a difficulty harder than hard without requiring the use of overpowered mechanics would be a nice compromise, but I understand that it is not always practical from a development perspective.

[𝐅𝐞𝐧𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐥]

On 6/23/2020 at 3:07 AM, Hawkwing said:

I wouldn't say that Awakening's Lunatic and Three Houses Maddening modes are inherently bad difficulty modes, as there is a certain appeal to testing ones knowledge of the games mechanics and exploiting the broken aspects in order to simple survive. The problem being that that this appeal isn't universal. Having this kind of mode alongside a difficulty harder than hard without requiring the use of overpowered mechanics would be a nice compromise, but I understand that it is not always practical from a development perspective.

in Awakening's case, the issue that may rise with Lunatic and similar modes is that they tend to become more of a puzzle game, rather than real strategy.

that's because they usually force you into playing in some very specific ways in order to progress through the game, and you can't really do otherwise.

Hard difficulties can manage to provide some good challenges once in a while, while still giving plenty of freedom to the player in terms of units deployment and tactics.

then again, every title has always its own pros and cons.