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So, apparently, 3H has some of the lower (lowest?) difficulty in all of the FE entries? Your opinions?


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I feel compelled to defend 3H's hard mode because I think many of you are being hyperbolic here and FE gets much easier than that, but eh, who cares really.

All I have to say is, I'm completely fine with the easiest difficulty mode being easy; that's why it's there. I am, however, a bit frustrated when that easiest mode is called "Normal". Partly for dumb reasons admittedly, but mainly because it feels, how should I say... manipulative? Treating the player like an easily satisfied idiot? I think Sakurai said it best(or rather worst) with the introduction of elite smash in Smash Ultimate: "When you reach this level, feel free to pat yourself on the back, you're good, period."

The subtext being that that wasn't true at all(at first anyway), and I'm pretty sure he knew that.


... I guess this isn't an isolated, or even recent issue, though, this case just happens to be directly in your face. We're also talking about a series that almost died in part because it was too hard, so... yeah.

On 1/4/2021 at 11:35 PM, Aethelstan said:

My biggest gripe about the lower difficulties is I don't think Intelligent Systems is good balancing them and that makes a lot of new players think the game is just poorly designed.

... That is very true as well, the easiest modes in FE tend to actually be "Shallow mode" in disguise.

Edited by Cysx
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On 1/4/2021 at 5:01 PM, Samz707 said:

Then why not make it so Maddening is actually a good step up from Hard mode that provides that challenge instead of the absurd difficulty that I hear it is?

A better way to do it would to just have better designed difficulties overall, so people wanting a challenge or not can both be satisfied.

I think that's a subjective question.  I found NG Maddening a little frustrating at first, but otherwise it's manageable.  And NG+ Maddening isn't bad at all.  There are difficulty levels for more casual play already.  Let the people who want significant challenge have their mode too.

In terms of 'better designed difficulties' bear this in mind: Designing difficulty levels takes time and effort,  The initial release of the game was in late July of 2019, and was without Maddening.  The Maddening difficulty update wasn't until mid-September, 1.5-2 months later.  I presume an additional difficulty level, between Hard and Maddening, would take a similar amount of time to develop (and likely would have delayed the release of the DLC), and there comes a point where it is unrealistic to expect a company to keep developing a game.

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20 hours ago, Cysx said:

All I have to say is, I'm completely fine with the easiest difficulty mode being easy; that's why it's there. I am, however, a bit frustrated when that easiest mode is called "Normal". Partly for dumb reasons admittedly, but mainly because it feels, how should I say... manipulative? Treating the player like an easily satisfied idiot? I think Sakurai said it best(or rather worst) with the introduction of elite smash in Smash Ultimate: "When you reach this level, feel free to pat yourself on the back, you're good, period."

Making Normal the lowest difficulty feels like making Medium the smallest size. Like, why can't I order a Small?

10 hours ago, SumG said:

I think that's a subjective question.  I found NG Maddening a little frustrating at first, but otherwise it's manageable.  And NG+ Maddening isn't bad at all.  There are difficulty levels for more casual play already.  Let the people who want significant challenge have their mode too.

Same. My experience with Maddening, using NG+ and limited skirmishes, was "tough, but (largely) fair". Ambush spawns will always be a complaint, but otherwise I liked Maddening. It wore my Pulses thin, but I don't remember ever running out.

Still, I wouldn't turn down a "Harder" difficulty. Say, Hard mode, but with the Maddening lesson gains, and class-linked bonus skills.

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I'm on the boat that Normal as a difficulty is fine but that it probably should have been renamed "Easy" instead.

Hard is not that huge of a jump both stats and difficulty wise compared to Normal, so it would have been best to tweak it a bit so the jump to Maddening doesn't hurt that much.

Lastly, Maddening is also fine for me but I also think they really needed to tweak it a little bit in certain areas, in particular for Chapter 13 of non-CF routes given it can legit softlock your save if you weren't prepared for it.

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Hard mode certainly provided me with enough of a challenge on my first playthrough especially on earlier maps. 

 

Later on once I was more comfortable with this games mechanics I basically snowballed and cruised through most of the latter half of the game but it never felt so easy that I could just completely ungore bad tactics. Especially with beasts and bossrs. It was a pretty good difficulty overall I think. New game plus was a different matter entirely basically slaughtered my second run. 

 

I feel like if you skip a lot of the auxiliary battles and keep your levels close to the recommended level for the chapters it's fairly engaging. I do appreciate the inability to grind forever but again NG+ gives you a huge advantage at the beginning it's less fun. 

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

I do not count the Maddening difficulty because it is, obviously, untested like Lunatic in Awakening.

Yeah Hard mode is basically a Normal mode. The cause is the liberty the game gives you. It is very difficult to balance a game with so much possibilities. It is very easy to optimize your characters, your weapons, you have a lot of joker cards (divine pulse, gambit, skill). 

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Enemies are fairly fast on Hard which is disorienting to me having mostly played enemy phase centric gba titles several times over. But you have so many ways to set up your units to nuke the enemies on player phase that it's not that bad, especially since the game makes attacks that have more than 2 range fairly ubiquitous. Maddening seems unappealing since I don't have much free time to dedicate to optimizing my every tactic. My understanding of the mechanics is that it is uphill against stat bloat in the way that fe6 is if you are doing a fresh play through. But NG+ would probably make it fairly simple if you can reasonably assemble the skill combos this game offers.

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I haven't finished any maddening difficulty routes yet. Ch 1 is way too hard IMO. After that it hasn't been so bad (not counting paralogues which have been crazy hard for me besides Sylvain, Ingrid, and Felix's).

However, I don't know how far I would have made it without chalice of origins on dedue for some of the chapters with lots of archers, guess I'm a scrub.

Hard was fine on the first playthrough but it's pretty easy if you do newgame plus. With enough points and skills/weapon ranks unlocked I guess maddening new game plus is kind of easy too.

Also, the difficulty and map design for the Ashen Wolves DLC on hard was just right, and I thought the map design was better. The plot wasn't so good though.

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Normal is incredibly easy. I did my first run on Normal and it was incredibly easy.

I do think Hard isn't as bad as people say. It offers a handful of real challenges and I have a lot of fun coming up with quick clears in Hard that would be boring on Easy and impossible on Maddening. That said, there is an issue with enemy stats- there's way too many things that can be one-rounded in Hard. 

I think people overinflate Maddening. It's not unplayable by any means, nor does it necessitate taking hours and hours on every map. It's definitely a big step up and there will be occasions when you need to sit down and strategize, but it's not like you need to do any truly terrible micromanaging to win.

I know we'll never get it but something to the tune of Hard+ or Maddening- would be appreciated. Call that Hard, Hard normal, normal easy? I'd love to play something that had the challenge elements of Maddening without restricting the cast quite as harshly; many units in Maddening are never going to one-round anything even with huge favoritism. Honestly, maybe just have the harder Hard be maddening with normal EXP gain. It's not that fun of a difficulty condition to make unit growth incredibly slow, and some characters who could excel given normal (or at least more normal) EXP growth spend all of maddening hiding from enemy range doing gambits/white magic.

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I've never actually touched normal mode because I usually find lower difficulties boring.

Hard mode can offer a decent challenge. It's not crazy level thinking but it can keep you on your toes. The endgame maps get really fun and push you a bit. GD endgame made me pay attention to Battalions. But I did find myself getting bored with 3H as a whole because it didn't offer me much of a challenge. I even stopped playing it until Maddening mode came out.

I am on the fence on the lowered difficulty.
If it were just about me, I don't think there should be lowered difficulty between series. I was expecting Conquest level gameplay or something similar. So I find it really disappointing when 3H doesn't live up to that. But looking beyond just me, it does make it easier for newcomers to get into the game. If a game is too hard some people won't play it since not everyone wants to play a really hard game. Which is one of the reasons why they made both Birthright and Conquest to appease both sides of this.

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Normal mode is pretty easy tbh. As someone who is bad at FE, I had some issues in some places (but getting adjusted to new features played a part) but for the most part it's fairly easy in comparison to other FEs.

Hard mode feels more standard. Again, some points here and there where it does have some difficulty, but overall, it feels fairly fine again.

Maddening is most definitely a big step up from hard. I wouldn't say it's horrible and its definitely not on the level of PoR Maniac/DSFE Hard 5/Awakening Lunatic (+) but it difficult. However, I have been able to get through pretty decently for a first time run which isn't very optimised. So while it is difficult and I have had many more stumps during maddening compared to normal and hard, it's not impossible and is very doable even casually.

Overall, TH has some difficulty, but overall I would rank it pretty low in terms of difficulty in terms of the entire franchise, especially when taking hardest difficulties of games into account

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One way to fix casual mode
Unit that are defeated during battle cannot be used in a future battle until both conditions are meet:
16 full player turns had occurred during battle and player had completed one battle

---

Hard difficulty is fine for new game. Hard does keep players on their toe for certain enemies. Having a harder difficulty than hard was a good idea.

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On 2/20/2021 at 9:53 AM, MiaMain said:

Same problems since awakening. Characters can be buffed so much that even on hardest difficulty the game becomes easy after the first few chapters. I thought cindered shadows was a much better challenge because of how limited builds were. 

I'd say this problem goes back much farther than Awakening. The ability to focus resources (exp, mainly, but also stat boosters) into a limited number of units and turn them into juggernauts breaks pretty much every Fire Emblem. Conquest comes the closest to getting around this because the exp is curved so heavilly (-6 exp/kill per level you are above an enemy... most other FEs use numbers between 1.5 and 3.33) but still falls victim to this to some extent. Part of me would like to see this "fixed", but on the other hand as a player I can get around it by just not doing it myself, and I assume some players find it fun (plus hey, it does enable solo/duo runs if they're your thing).

4 hours ago, AC6 said:

Unit that are defeated during battle cannot be used in a future battle until both conditions are meet:
16 full player turns had occurred during battle and player had completed one battle

The 16 turns thing seems unnecessary, players will just willfully make sure their next fight lasts at least 16 turns by dragging it out.

Injured people needing to sit out a battle is interesting. Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark used the system, except that you also had the option to use the PC in battle while injured, at a 10% penalty to all stats (and if they got injured again while in this state, it'd be a 20% penalty in the next battle, etc.). I thought that was a neat idea.

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On 1/4/2021 at 1:14 PM, Benice said:

As for Maddening, the difficulty is really mercurial as far as I've seen-The first five or so chapters were really hard, chapters 6-11 were fairly easy, it looks like chapter 12 is gonna be tough, and I've heard horror stories about 13.

Yes. My sister and I are working on maddening playthroughs for all 4 routes and we completed AM and your trend was pretty spot-on. The first few chapters are tricky because even with NG+/advanced skills, your characters can still get screwed over. But then it gets drastically easier. Chapter 12/13 are definitely difficult although Chapter 12 was exceptionally difficult at first because of the difference in strategy execution. Normally, I can just leave the fort unguarded and storm through enemies but in Maddening, I actually had to stay to defend the castle until Ladislava and the other fliers are eliminated. Chapter 13 is just...scary. But then the game gets to be a bit easy again--I mean you can still get RNG screwed like when Byleth gets hit by a 17% attack and misses his 95% hit rate. The difficulty ramps up mostly during paralogues (where there are usually special conditions) or during the last few chapters (like in our SS maddening run of the Enbarr chapter--that was rough to switch up the initial strategy but became easier). 

But like other posters have commented: the hardest parts in Maddening are mostly from BS surprises. Like in Mercedes/Caspar's paralogue with the reinforcements or Petra/Bernadetta's paralogue where you straight-up are lied to about the mission objective. If you know what to expect, the battle becomes drastically easier imo.

So all of that being said, I think my final verdict is that the earlier games seemed a lot harder. Radiant Dawn Lunatic mode was brutal. Partially because (a) a lot of the characters suck imo and (b) not as much room for error correction if you get RNG screwed (#RIPOscar). I think there's a balance to be found where modes can be difficult but fair. Like there should be room for correction but also a reward for good strategy. Chapter 13 in AM/SS is just mean because of the isolated units, the literal flood of units targeting Byleth and Dimitri/Seteth and so forth. Again--if you know what you're walking into, the chapter becomes easier but still not a lot of fun. The other chapter that gave me some grief was the final chapter of AM. I kinda liked the difficulty of it but I felt like I had to resort to cheap shots to beat it. Like normally, I like splitting my characters and routing most of the enemies. But in Maddening, it just...was too much to do and I ended up focusing only on one side of the stage so I dealt with like half the enemies and it was drastically easier. 

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On 2/20/2021 at 11:53 AM, MiaMain said:

Same problems since awakening. Characters can be buffed so much that even on hardest difficulty the game becomes easy after the first few chapters. I thought cindered shadows was a much better challenge because of how limited builds were. 

That's something that indeed goes much farther back than Awakening. And I'd imagine this game would be one of the harder games  to trivialize on the hardest difficulty.

Edited by Shadow Mir
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Time needed for character to be available for battle if character is defeated in battle (casual):

defeating 48 standard enemy units will take ~ 16 player turns if player can bring 9 units for battle.

 

Cindered shadows (Fire emblem: three houses) hard mode was a perfect difficulty level.

Edited by AC6
Making the condition more clear.
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  • 3 weeks later...

I've played most of the Fire Emblem games (all of the GBA and after), and I must admit that 3H Hard/classic is a bit of a let down. I love the game, I've finished it on every route, but once you understand the mechanics (and the content on Serenes Forest allowed you to do that even before the game was released), it's just a matter of advance/nuke/repeat, and using the gambits and divine pulse feels irrelevent. The difficulty level I found most interesting was my Hard Classic CF Noble/Commoner run, where none of my units promoted. They all had 4 move and no access to class skills. This was challenging and fun at the cost of greater character variety (no poney, flying, scaly or otherwise...).

I'm currently doing an NG Maddening run with the GD, and even though the first four chapters were really tough, I'm having a ton of fun. Chapter 13 really stretches all your resources (but I was lucky enough to have an Assassin Byleth with 37 speed and swordbreaker) to get through that first cluster of enemies, but once you've survived (and Immortal corps is a serious help there), the rest is pretty straight forward.

If I was to compare VW NG Maddening to Radiant Dawn Hard mode, I'd say Radiant Dawn is harder because of the lack of Divine pulse and the length of the maps. If you get RNG spammed towards the end of the desert map in part IV, that's two and a half hours of battle you have to go through again, trudging through sand 2 squares at a time.

I do agree though that the DLC hard mode was balanced just right and I had a great time gameplay-wise (story-wise not so much...)

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