Difficulty Tier List

[Life]

Couple of other bones I'd like to pick with this list.

FE5 Elite: Brighton/Felgus can get a 15/1 promotion by the end of Chapter 6. If you do that, you can basically curbstomp most of the earlygame with the exception of Chapter 8 (but you get Othin and Halvan back so this chapter is easy anyways). The only tricky thing is recruiting Shiva (fuck having to fly Karin across half the map and then back) but aside from that, the first 10 or so chapters are pretty easy (Brighton has a lot of HP too so it takes a while for him to go into Fatigue Mode). I say drop it to the bottom of Hard.

FE4 First Gen: I find I have more problems with this than FE10 NM. While the enemy AI is pretty dumb, you get a lot tossed at you at one time (like Voltz's Free Knights or Eltshan's Cross Knights) and most of your army isn't amazing (Sigurd and Levin w/ Pursuit Ring can 1RKO reliably but that's about it). I also find the general enemies scarier in FE4 First Gen than FE10 NM.

[Tables]

Life, have you completed 3-6, 3-12 and 3-13 yet?

They're part of the reason I'd say FE10 NM/HM is actually hard, along with 1-E and the frustratingly luck based early part 1 (Oh, nice going NPC Jill, you suicided into a fire mage. Again.), but like a lot of FE10 once you know what you're doing you can beat them relatively easily.

Even once you do know what you're doing on them, I'd put them slightly above FE4 Gen 1. Almost any time you have to fight a reasonably large group of enemies at once, the enemies end up being pathetic (hello Voltz mercenaries, Cross Knights aren't much better, and they're one of the hardest things in Gen 1). FE10 still has the above mentioned chapters which are all fairly tough, plus 3-1 which is moderately challenging, and... well, lots of filler chapters?

FE4 Gen 1, when playing for ranks however, is easily one of the hardest, since you need to get crazy high EXP gains without sacrificing too many turns, and all the while not having anyone die over the entire chapter (bar 1-2 if you want). Perhaps the latter's more annoying than anything though.