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The Case for Maniac Mode


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So in the last couple of threads I made, I heard a lot of input from folks who said they never played Maniac Mode, after a couple of playthroughs I want to share why I like the mode and why you should consider trying it if you have the means.

 

1. Resource Management - To me, this is the biggest reason to try it. The individual battles aren't really the whole appeal of maniac mode, as a lot of it does get reduced to using the meta characters, hunkering down in a corner, and letting waves crash upon you until they stop aggroing and you can pull enemies one at a time.

What makes it satisfying is that you prepare your team with the weapons, items, supports, and the stats to handle these waves of enemies. Money normally is not a constraint in other difficulties, but in Maniac Mode, the money you get is actually pretty tight, because you rely heavily on forges to clear certain maps and get all the loot you want. In this difficulty you really have to budget and think ahead because you're preparing for an overwhelming late game difficulty spike.

The game transforms from a tactician's game to a strategist's game. You don't focus so much on the individual battles, but how you prosecute the war as a whole. This is the only difficulty that made me feel like a genuine general in the war against Daein. It doesn't hurt that enemy spawns are so high that you actually feel like you're fighting armies instead of small bands.

2. Optimization - This is a double-edged sword in the sense that you aren't able to use the weaker units you normally would like to use on easier difficulties, yet you also enjoy the satisfaction of really testing what team composition is ideal for clearing maps consistently while also preparing for a formidable late game. It might be boring at first to feel restricted to the units who tend to fall in S/A tier in community tier lists, but you learn a lot more about why they are so good and how to optimize their utility. Who should you give your skills and stat boosters to? Who do you want to forge for to train them up? Who do you need to promote quicker in order to secure critical loot in the mid-game?

You even find yourself getting surprised by units that normally don't make as much of an impact but on Maniac Mode being quite capable when min-maxed. Gatrie for instance doesn't see a lot of use due to his low movement and speed, however, he has the highest defense of any unit in the game. His double light support with Illyana and light-thunder support with Shinon, paired with Knight Ward and Vague Katti can give him a staggering 40 defense, enough that he is nearly impervious to all physical damage. In a difficulty like Maniac Mode, having a unit with that kind of defense that you can throw at a whole army and leave without a scratch is a real asset, and he ended up being a key unit in my first successful Maniac Mode Ironman playthrough.

3. Siege Tomes - A lot of people don't like these because it feels like there isn't much you can do about them. However, I find that they alter the layout of the map and influence your strategy in interesting ways. Do you invest in high-res units that can soak these? Do you spend some of your own siege tomes to snipe them? Do you try to avoid engaging with siege tomes entirely? Another key thing to remember is that more siege tomes means more you can steal for your own use. I really like that I can project magical power against high-defense enemies from a safe distance to take out the really tough units. There is an oddly satisfying meta game in terms of budgeting your siege tomes so you have enough to deal with the biggest threats in the game that you don't want crashing into you on enemy phase.

 

I just enjoy how Maniac Mode takes a game with really solid mechanics, a simple base, a great support system, user-friendly UI, and fixes the main problem with it, which is the difficulty. NA Path of Radiance is a great game that is to me only truly weighed down by the insufficient difficulty. Maniac Mode fixes that.

I should note I played it by getting a Japanese gamecube with a japanese version of the game. I did not emulate. I was able to figure out what I was doing by just comparing the UI to the NA version and taking note of the icons for various items/weapons/skills. Pretty much everything you need to read or look at has a distinct icon so it's actually not that hard to play an untranslated version of the Japanese PoR without knowing japanese.

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Funnily enough, I think most complaints I hear about maniac mode have to do with something that isn't tied to the difficulty, which is the speed of the game. I still need to try maniac mode, but maybe ill do it with animations off and at 150% speed to make sure that those biases don't creep in. I think I can find enjoyment in it, but we will see. I'll give it a shot.

Fun write up!

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3 hours ago, Uscari said:

You even find yourself getting surprised by units that normally don't make as much of an impact but on Maniac Mode being quite capable when min-maxed. Gatrie for instance doesn't see a lot of use due to his low movement and speed, however, he has the highest defense of any unit in the game. His double light support with Illyana and light-thunder support with Shinon, paired with Knight Ward and Vague Katti can give him a staggering 40 defense, enough that he is nearly impervious to all physical damage. In a difficulty like Maniac Mode, having a unit with that kind of defense that you can throw at a whole army and leave without a scratch is a real asset, and he ended up being a key unit in my first successful Maniac Mode Ironman playthrough.

Where would I need that amount of defense? Because that's overkill for most situations. And that's ignoring that this is dependent on using Shinon after you get him back, when his bases are well beyond bad for that part of the game, and this requires a ridiculous amount of setup.

3 hours ago, Uscari said:

Another key thing to remember is that more siege tomes means more you can steal for your own use.

If you can catch the enemy with them unequipped. Else you'll have to force them to use their other tome. If you can.

2 hours ago, Uscari said:

I should note I played it by getting a Japanese gamecube with a japanese version of the game.

And this is where I ask "How much did it cost?" Because I already find gaming to be an expensive hobby...

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29 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

Where would I need that amount of defense? Because that's overkill for most situations. And that's ignoring that this is dependent on using Shinon after you get him back, when his bases are well beyond bad for that part of the game, and this requires a ridiculous amount of setup.

If you can catch the enemy with them unequipped. Else you'll have to force them to use their other tome. If you can.

And this is where I ask "How much did it cost?" Because I already find gaming to be an expensive hobby...

Mainly Clash is where you need that kind of defense. That map will throw literally dozens of paladins and wyvern lords at you, some of them with silver lances, and before long you are totally surrounded by them. They have might up to about 40 so giving Gatrie provoke and sitting in that corner does wonders.

The Gatrie/Shinon setup is actually not very difficult at all. It's a fast support in terms of maps spent together, they get half of them in the early chapters, and you don't have to actually use Shinon to take advantage of the support, just need to deploy him on the same map as Gatrie 4 times after he returns to get to B support (they already were together in Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 7). Although, you probably could get by with 38 defense instead of 40.

I use sleep/silence staves to steal siege tomes, it's surprisingly effective.

Fortunately, the japanese version of the game is cheaper than the American version, closer to $100 than $300 on Ebay. A japanese gamecube is probably in a similar price range as the game. So yeah admittedly $200 to play 1 difficulty mode in 1 game sounds ridiculous, but I'll tell you I had a lot of fun lol.

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1 hour ago, JimmyBeans said:

Funnily enough, I think most complaints I hear about maniac mode have to do with something that isn't tied to the difficulty, which is the speed of the game. I still need to try maniac mode, but maybe ill do it with animations off and at 150% speed to make sure that those biases don't creep in. I think I can find enjoyment in it, but we will see. I'll give it a shot.

Fun write up!

It is very slow, you definitely need to have patience. Admittedly I have a turtle playstyle so I didn't mind. I personally was fine with just fast game speed and animations off without any emulation modifiers, but I should qualify that PoR is the only FE game I have played, so I don't really have a sense of how slow the enemy phase is compared to other FE games.

I have been told that emulators have a tendency to crash if you speed it up too much.

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24 minutes ago, Uscari said:

The Gatrie/Shinon setup is actually not very difficult at all. It's a fast support in terms of maps spent together, they get half of them in the early chapters, and you don't have to actually use Shinon to take advantage of the support, just need to deploy him on the same map as Gatrie 4 times after he returns to get to B support (they already were together in Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 7). Although, you probably could get by with 38 defense instead of 40.

That's not the problem. It's that Shinon is an archer in one of the worst games for archers. And on top of that, by the time you get him back, his bases don't hold up any more. There's still the part where you need to go all the way from E swords to S, too.

Edited by Shadow Mir
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I imagine simply playing the Japanese version of the game would provide more of a meta shake up than Maniac Mode does. That Critical glitch sounds fun. I hear that weapon forges are twice as expensive as in our version. The Renewal Scroll doesn't work. Like, it gives you the Renewal skill, but it's coded to only activate on the units that natively have that skill. Berserkers, Swordmasters, and Snipers don't have their 15% critical bonus, though I suppose that wouldn't drastically change those units' placement on a tier list except for Largo and Stefan. Hey good on IS for identifying the problem and trying to buff them in the western release. It's the thought that counts.

Edited by Zapp Branniglenn
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I would gladly give Maniac Mode a try! ...If they had included it on the English-language release. I'm not above emulating, mind you, but something about playing 3D games on my laptop is just... intimidating. More power to the folks who can do it, though!

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On 5/16/2023 at 8:25 PM, JimmyBeans said:

Funnily enough, I think most complaints I hear about maniac mode have to do with something that isn't tied to the difficulty, which is the speed of the game.

These are my thoughts in a nutshell. I didn't find MM to be difficult as much as it was tedious. It was neat to finish once, but I don't go back to PoR for engaging or difficult gameplay.

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On 5/16/2023 at 10:31 PM, Zapp Branniglenn said:

The Renewal Scroll doesn't work. Like, it gives you the Renewal skill, but it's coded to only activate on the units that natively have that skill.

So it's an even bigger dud than it was in US?

On 5/16/2023 at 8:42 PM, Uscari said:

I use sleep/silence staves to steal siege tomes, it's surprisingly effective.

If you're lucky. I'm in the camp that says status staves are generally useless. Especially Silence.

On 5/16/2023 at 8:42 PM, Uscari said:

Fortunately, the japanese version of the game is cheaper than the American version, closer to $100 than $300 on Ebay. A japanese gamecube is probably in a similar price range as the game. So yeah admittedly $200 to play 1 difficulty mode in 1 game sounds ridiculous, but I'll tell you I had a lot of fun lol.

$200 is a lot of money to spend just for one difficulty mode...

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