Third path/IK map issues (Minimal spoilers)

[Ayra]

Disclaimer: Everything below is my opinion only.

After finishing the Hoshido and Nohr paths, I felt that Fire Emblem Fates was by far the best Fire Emblem game ever from a gameplay perspective. Great mechanics that worked surprisingly well, interesting maps that required different strategies, good enemy placements that lead to challenging but fun situations.

And then I played the third path and it all crumbled. I have a distinct feeling that they ran out of time making the third path stages. The marketing said that the third path was middle of the road in difficulty, that's incorrect. Why? Well, it can all be resumed to one thing:

The enemy does absolutely nothing on the third path and it waits for your inevitable victory.

If you want to have more details, here goes:

- Both Hoshido and Nohr have some enemies in Dual Guard stance. Some are static, some are mobile (which require some thought on how to handle especially when mixed with other types). Even on Hoshido, you can sometime find a static hefty dual guard unit that's guarding mages shooting you with turrets. On the IK path? There's zero enemy in dual guard stance throughout the entire game. ZERO.

- Nohr has some timed maps. Hoshido has some "thief getting treasures and running away" maps. Third path has none of those: you are never forced to hurry in any stage, except for one where you have to talk to Saizo on turn 2.

- Both Hoshido and Nohr have situations where you'll be charged with enemy groups. There might be "waves" (Like some groups start moving on turn x), some according to other triggers. Sometime it's going to be very nasty reinforcement groups. Third path? There's one where you have to defend ships which is really challenging and fun, the problem is once you survive the first few turns, nothing happens for the rest of the 30 minutes remaining on the map and enemies are waiting for you to pull them one by one (see below). Reinforcements are a few units that changes absolutely nothing to the map's progress.

- Both Hoshido and Nohr have situations where if you pull one unit, you pull an entire group (sometime with . Third path? You always just pull one single unit, two if they match up for a dual attack. You never pull entire groups, just one or two units at once that you can easily dispatch.

- Third path has probably the worst map in Fire Emblem history, and a second map that's nearly as bad. One map has you traversing a cave with a few units. It has a "reveal enemy units when entering the door" mechanism. Kamui is the only unit able to survive triggering those, so the map is a slow brainless slog. The worst map however has you destroying blocks of ice in your path (95% of the map is ice). When you destroy a block, it sometime reveals 2-3 enemy units. Most of your units die in 2 hits, so you have to take the map super slow by destroying two blocks at most per turn (you want to have as many units with their turn available to take care of the enemies). Since a lot of enemies have really good drops on that map, you want to clear the entire map of ice. Both maps offer 0 challenge, yet are extremely long.

- Nohr in particular has some "kill zones". Situations where many different units overlap a threat range, where units with Defense Seal or ninjas will weaken first, or switching your unit's place before swarming them with other units. Hoshido has a small handful of those type of situations too. IK? Nope.

- IK maps tend to be long but dull. You often have busywork like having to activate 8 seals on the map before proceeding. The thing is, each seal is protected by 3-4 units with no cohesion between them (You can pull them 1 by 1). It's not challenging, just time consuming.

- Upon recruitment, every character is directly usable in both Nohr and Hoshido (except Mozume for obvious reasons). Not so for the third path. Some characters comes very underlevelled and underpowered, and it feels like they intend the player to simply grind them up. Those characters are unfortunately usually the weaker ones so unless you like them, there's little payoff for doing so.

The third path does not use any timed units (except for maybe a few token enemies in the first 2-3 turns or a single pegasus here and there), does not use dual guard, does not put enemies in groups and never puts any pressure on the player (except for the beginning of one map, and the end of another). It feels very incomplete compared to the two other paths from a gameplay perspective, as if they ran out of time or put little attention in creating good enemy patterns for the third path.

Edit: Deployment slots. In both Nohr and Hoshido, your available deployment slots slowly grow as you progress through the game. 10 early on, goes up to 12, then up to 13, ect up to 16. That allows you to comfortably grow your team and leave no one behind (and the auto-leveling the children have is perfect to fill out a new slot). IK recruitment slots varies considerably from chapter to chapter, but is generally a fair bit lower than Nohr and Hoshido, which is silly considering how many more characters you have.

Edited August 1, 2015 by Ayra

[Othin]

My thoughts exactly. I love Fates as a whole, but the Invisible Kingdom route is a disaster.

[astrophys]

That's unfortunate to hear.

Nonetheless, by your own words:

After finishing the Hoshido and Nohr paths, I felt that Fire Emblem Fates was by far the best Fire Emblem game ever from a gameplay perspective. Great mechanics that worked surprisingly well, interesting maps that required different strategies, good enemy placements that lead to challenging but fun situations.

So it would still seem that its very good news to here about the Hoshido and Nohr paths on their own. It doesn't excuse the issues and potential issues with Invisible Kingdom (although I'll make my own judgments later on), but its not like the existence of Invisible Kingdom makes Hoshido and Nohr magically worse in gameplay.

So basically, we have two excellent installments and one of questionable quality.

[Ryo]

I haven't played the game myself, but my personal impression is that the third path relies too heavily on map gimmicks instead of actual enemy positioning and set-up. Some of the gimmicks don't even look fun *cough* ice of war *cough*. So I can definitely understand if someone feels let down especially after playing Nohr. That said, judging from what I've seen so far, I don't think it's too worse than Hoshido, though all of the Hoshido and IK playthroughs I've watched are on Normal, so...

Edited August 1, 2015 by Ryo

[Ayra]

That's unfortunate to hear.

Nonetheless, by your own words:

So it would still seem that its very good news to here about the Hoshido and Nohr paths on their own. It doesn't excuse the issues and potential issues with Invisible Kingdom (although I'll make my own judgments later on), but its not like the existence of Invisible Kingdom makes Hoshido and Nohr magically worse in gameplay.

So basically, we have two excellent installments and one of questionable quality.

I definitively agree to that. Fire Emblem Fates is an awesome game, and I'm extremely happy with my purchase. It's literally the only game I've played since the day it has been released. It's just that it feels like such a shame that the third path is so poor (in my opinion) compared to the other two.

I felt that Hoshido was more fun to play than what a video playthrough would indicate. It looks basic at first glance, but I found myself scratching my head quite a few times wondering how the **** I can manage to clear certain spots without having anyone die or how to get myself out of trouble.

Edited August 1, 2015 by Ayra

[Othin]

I haven't played the game myself, but my personal impression is that the third path relies too heavily on map gimmicks instead of actual enemy positioning and set-up. Some of the gimmicks don't even look fun *cough* ice of war *cough*. So I can definitely understand if someone feels let down especially after playing Nohr. That said, judging from what I've seen so far, I don't think it's too worse than Hoshido, though all of the Hoshido and IK playthroughs I've watched are on Normal, so...

Yeah it's very much about map gimmicks that are usually just annoying and disruptive. I much prefer the simpler Hoshido, although Nohr is still my favorite of the three to play.

[charlesbarkley]

The official pitch is that IK is in between Hoshido and Nohr in difficulty, and that its maps have more gimmicks. The former isn't true, it's the easiest due to the AI behaviour as mentioned. The latter is true, the first thing you'll notice is that IK maps take much longer turn-wise, but I don't think that necessarily makes them bad. At least, I prefer the IK maps to Hoshido, which devolve into Awakening-style open rooms/fields later in the game. There are some interesting ideas there as well, like the floors that switch enemies between unpromoted/promoted classes and the metal gear solid stealth map.

On the IK path? There's zero enemy in dual guard stance throughout the entire game. ZERO.

Are you sure about that? It's been a while since I finished IK so I can't recall any specific instances, but that seems wrong. What difficulty were you playing on? (the enemy placement changes with difficulty, including some enemies being doubled up where they weren't in lower difficulties)

[Thane]

It's mindboggling to me that you have all the characters in the game except for three yet the game only allows you to use like 12 at a time at most. And like you said, some of these characters will be left in the dust because the game seems to be against you using them; Odin is by far the worst offender, joining at chapter 17 at level 12, where he is easily doubled and dies to two physical hits.

Some map gimmicks work better than others. I honestly think that the maps with moving platforms are worse than the ice map - the latter forces you to think about which unit you want to use to break the ice (protip don't use Sakura for that *ba dum TS!*), the former is just time-consuming.

[Othin]

Hoshido definitely has a lot of resemblances to Awakening with all the issues that entails, but I didn't mind it too much and personally find it preferable to Invisible Kingdom. But that can definitely come down to individual tastes.

I didn't notice a lack of Guard Stance enemies while playing Invisible Kingdom, but seeing it brought up here, it sounds accurate. After completing all three routes on Hard, I remember plenty in Hoshido and Nohr but absolutely none in Invisible Kingdom.

And yeah the character limits were another thing that really bothered me while playing it. There's a chapter after you've gotten every single one of the regular characters where you can only bring like eight characters, and while the map's gimmick provides a reason for low deployment, it's not enough of one. It would've been better as the earlygame chapter during the time when the devs decided for some reason that it would be a good idea to keep the Corrin Solo section running past the route split.

Edited August 1, 2015 by Othin

[CyborgZeta]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt this way.

IK was just boring to play.

- It's unbalanced. Hoshido characters join earlier, Nohr units are basically Ests, and the Royals overshadow everyone.

- The map design is not very fun, with lots of gimmicks used.

- As mentioned, enemy units generally don't use Guard Stance, and no skills either.

And even on Hard, it's not particularly challenging.

It's too bad, because I like its plot the best despite some faults. I had more fun with Nohr, which happens to have the worst of the three plots. It gives me very mixed feelings on Fates.

Edited August 1, 2015 by CyborgZeta

[SageOfAnys]

This, this is all really disappointing to hear. I was hoping for IK to be unique and challenging in it's own way but apparently it's the exact opposite.

To those who played the game already, is there ANYTHING good about the IK gameplay wise that you would say is better than the Nohr and Hoshido routes? Also is it true that the chapter before the final map allows 16 characters but the final map only allows 14?

[CyborgZeta]

Oh, sure. IK gives you all the units, barring a few like Yukimura and Crimson. If you want eugenics, IK is the route to play.

But! The most important part of IK is My Castle. My Castle in IK gives you everything, everything from the Hoshido and Nohr castles. There's basically no reason to play online in the other two routes.

It's almost like pay2win.

I also forgot to add in my last post, but I think part of the problem with IK is that they didn't have a clear design in mind with it, so to speak. Hoshido was supposed to be more like Awakening, with grinding, and Nohr was supposed to be like older games (with no grinding). Both of those routes are designed with those in mind; maps, units, growths, everything. IK is kind of weird fusion of the two in that regard.

Edited August 1, 2015 by CyborgZeta

[Othin]

Yeah, the gameplay appeal is all about the options for character selection and My Castle. Plus Fuuga is cool.

From what I remember, all routes let you deploy 16 characters from Chapter 26 on.

Now that I've completed Invisible Kingdom on Hard, I personally plan to give it a rest for the time being unless I decide to do more with my existing endgame file. It's the only route I think I'll hold off on my Lunatic replay until English version, then use that as my 100% file. I'll probably eventually revisit it on English via Normal mode for supports but otherwise I don't see myself giving it much attention.

[Book of Ereshkigal]

I hate that snow chapter so much

I was.... amused at first.

But I hate] it.

[astrophys]

But! The most important part of IK is My Castle. My Castle in IK gives you everything, everything from the Hoshido and Nohr castles. There's basically no reason to play online in the other two routes.

It's almost like pay2win.

Fortunately for me, I don't care one iota for online competitiveness or PvP.

[JupiterKnight]

Is it true Hydra doesn't get any new skills on the harder difficulties? Because that would be disappointing. I like the idea of a dragon boss where you have to beat some of its limbs before beating it.

[Water Mage]

In the IK route, the majority of the enemies you face are Faceless, Golems and those phantom verisions of the normal classes, right? (What are they called? You know, those evil versions of the normal classes that become transparent and seem to be on fire. Do they even have a name?)

Of the videos that I saw that involved those type of enemies, they never seem use Guard Stance or Attack Stance(I've seem them use Attack Stance, but it didn't seem to be intentional, they don't seem to plan for it)

Maybe that's the reason why there's no Guard Stance on the IK maps.

Of course that doesn't excuse the fact that the Hoshido and Nohr enemies you face in this route also don't use Guard Stance.

By the way, is enemies with Guard Stance something of a lategame thing? Or do they appear in early maps as well?

It could be why the Hoshido and Nohr enemies don't use Guard Stance.

Edited August 1, 2015 by Water Mage

[SageOfAnys]

In the IK route, the majority of the enemies you face are Faceless, Golems and those phantom verisions of the normal classes, right? (What are they called? You know, those evil versions of the normal classes that become transparent and seem to be on fire. Do they even have a name?)

Of the videos that I saw that involved those type of enemies, they never seem use Guard Stance or Attack Stance(I've seem them use Attack Stance, but it didn't seem to be intentional, they don't seem to plan for it)

Maybe that's the reason why there's no Guard Stance on the IK maps.

Of course that doesn't excuse the fact that the Hoshido and Nohr enemies you face in this route also don't use Guard Stance.

By the way, is enemies with Guard Stance something of a lategame thing? Or do they appear in early maps as well?

It could be why the Hoshido and Nohr enemies don't use Guard Stance.

I remember watching Nohr Ch. 7 on the Treehouse stream and it featured a pair of Faceless in Guard Stance, so IK really has no reason to not use it.

[CyborgZeta]

In the IK route, the majority of the enemies you face are Faceless, Golems and those phantom verisions of the normal classes, right? (What are they called? You know, those evil versions of the normal classes that become transparent and seem to be on fire. Do they even have a name?)

I didn't come across any golems in IK, and Faceless aren't very common in it.

Largely Hoshidan and Nohrian troops early on, then it shifts to only Invisible troops after Chapter 17.

[Othin]

Is it true Hydra doesn't get any new skills on the harder difficulties? Because that would be disappointing. I like the idea of a dragon boss where you have to beat some of its limbs before beating it.

On Hard, all it has is Dragonskin and Status Resistance, the same as the boss before it.

In the IK route, the majority of the enemies you face are Faceless, Golems and those phantom verisions of the normal classes, right? (What are they called? You know, those evil versions of the normal classes that become transparent and seem to be on fire. Do they even have a name?)

Of the videos that I saw that involved those type of enemies, they never seem use Guard Stance or Attack Stance(I've seem them use Attack Stance, but it didn't seem to be intentional, they don't seem to plan for it)

Maybe that's the reason why there's no Guard Stance on the IK maps.

Of course that doesn't excuse the fact that the Hoshido and Nohr enemies you face in this route also don't use Guard Stance.

By the way, is enemies with Guard Stance something of a lategame thing? Or do they appear in early maps as well?

It could be why the Hoshido and Nohr enemies don't use Guard Stance.

I believe Invisible Kingdom main story has exactly one Faceless and no Golems. But yes, it has a lot of Invisible enemies.

Guard Stance enemies start appearing as soon as you get the option in Chapter 3, and there's actually a pair of Invisible enemies in Guard Stance in Chapter 5. So I don't see any rationale there.

[Water Mage]

I didn't come across any golems in IK, and Faceless aren't very common in it.

Largely Hoshidan and Nohrian troops early on, then it shifts to only Invisible troops after Chapter 17.

I didn't come across any golems in IK, and Faceless aren't very common in it.

Largely Hoshidan and Nohrian troops early on, then it shifts to only Invisible troops after Chapter 17.

On Hard, all it has is Dragonskin and Status Resistance, the same as the boss before it.

I believe Invisible Kingdom main story has exactly one Faceless and no Golems. But yes, it has a lot of Invisible enemies.

Guard Stance enemies start appearing as soon as you get the option in Chapter 3, and there's actually a pair of Invisible enemies in Guard Stance in Chapter 5. So I don't see any rationale there.

I see, sorry for the misunderstanding, I assumed that the Faceless had a connection to the IK, but I guess I was wrong.

Again, sorry for the misunderstanding.

But back on topic,

How did fog-o-war map worked in Fates?

In previous Fire Emblems, the game would give you tools to help such as torches and thieves, does the IK give any sort of tool to help deal with fog? Do they give you torches? And does units like Ninjas and Outlaws have better vision?

[Othin]

I think Faceless and Golems are generally a Nohr thing, while Puppets are a Hoshido thing.

Fates has no fog of war maps, and my current replay of Sacred Stones is making me wonder why the feature stayed in FE as long as it did.

[Thane]

I think Faceless and Golems are generally a Nohr thing, while Puppets are a Hoshido thing.

Fates has no fog of war maps, and my current replay of Sacred Stones is making me wonder why the feature stayed in FE as long as it did.

It has two psuedo fog of war maps though, with the dark "labyrinth" for the lack of a better word in chapter seven, and the ice map.

I'm playing through the third path again and I'm at chapter 13. It's not a very fun map either, since it's a lot of narrow corridors and you get 14 characters - like, what? Why? Later, in bigger and more open maps there are fewer characters available. Oh well, at least you can fight Xander and Ryouma if you want to.

Spoilers, you most likely won't want to.

[B.Leu]

Just hearing about it, I already dislike those maps. And to think I just finished the second version of If so I could fully enjoy IK... :p

Bah, I'll play the damn thing and see for myself.

[FEF]

I hate for my first post here to be a negative one, but this topic struck a chord with me and I want to chime in.

I've beaten Hoshido three times, eagerly looking forward to my Lunatic run. Map designs can be surprisingly challenging, but tend to focus on fun and interesting ideas over adding challenge in any way possible. A few late-game maps are disappointingly basic, though.

I'm on my third Nohr run, and map-wise it's easily my favorite game in the whole series. There are new ideas thrown at you in almost every chapter, and each of them feels even more cleverly sadistic than the last.

IK was a struggle to complete even once. The maps are really a disaster, for all of the reasons you mentioned. There's no real variety – no paired up enemies, one faceless, no golems. Never since FE7's weather obsession have I seen a FE game so determined to slow you down. That cave map is actually worse than you mentioned – if you pick the wrong tunnel in the cave, you reveal a warp tile that shoots you right into the middle of a nearby room, with all those enemies in it. One of two things happen here – either you die, because you're surrounded by powerful enemies you'd have dealt with one at a time if you picked the correct tunnel. Or you don't die, maybe because you've grinded or are on an easy difficulty, at which point you realize this entire map is pointless since not even 4-5 enemies ganging up on you can kill you, and all you have to do is slog your way through. Either way, there's no strategy involved, just variable amounts of luck and a metric ton of patience.

I'd like to point out that this is the first unique map in the route, and it's unfortunately an omen of what's to come. They said IK was the “gimmick” route, but the gimmicks really all serve the same purpose. Maybe it's breaking ice, or maybe it's stairs/warp panels, or bridges you build with dragon's vein, or walls of fire that appear and disappear, or one of several varieties of moving platforms. Either way, the gimmicks serve only to take obnoxiously-large maps and segment them into tiny, isolated pieces. Even when a map is separated into tiny, floating islands that your flying units can get to, they're swarming with bow units to ensure that there won't be any of that.

But even worse, the maps that IK recycles from other routes are done so in lazy, thoughtless ways. Norh and Hoshido share some maps, sure, but change up the objectives, enemies, and starting locations to make maps fun and fresh on either route.

Take, for example, the one map that appears in all 3 routes. Have you ever played Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire? Remember Norman's Gym, with trainers having different stat-based gimmicks? That's basically this map. Divided into rooms by stairs (which, for lack of a better comparison, work like warp pipes in Mario), in Hoshido each enemy here has silly stats. Maybe in one room they've got impenetrable defense but 0 resistance, or vice versa. Or deadly attack and speed, but only 15 HP. Nohr's version of this map plays out mostly the same, but focuses on giving each enemy tricky abilities as opposed to stats. Archers with counter, Ninjas that swap places with you after battle, causing you to get shuffled around wildly at the end of each turn, Etc. So what's the gimmick for the third route? How do they make this map, which you've probably played twice now, fresh? Well you see, the enemies in each room in the IK route... exist? I guess? They have no notable abilities or stats or positions or anything. It's just flat-out a worse, less-creative version of the map you've already played twice.

And then there are are maps that call back to ideas found in other maps, but implement those same ideas in less-clever ways. Hoshido has a volcano map where the idea is you have to select the correct dragon's vein to continue. The wrong vein will hurt you. You can figure out which one is the right path by looking at the positioning of nearby statues. OK, so it's not the most clever idea ever, but this is Fire Emblem, not Zelda. This map also introduces Golem enemies (or at least is the first time you see lots of them at once, I can't recall), and the boss is a Golem who will at some point, depending on difficulty, set the floor around him on fire, adding extra tension to the situation.

IK has a similar map that feels like an early alpha concept that was scrapped for Hoshido's better implementation. You have three corridors, separated by two doors each. One door is blue, the other is red. The idea here is that you always pick the blue door. The red door will hurt your army. No, really, that's it. You're nearing the endgame at this point, and the game is challenging your ability to differentiate a calming shade of blue from a vibrant, bloody shade of red. There are no other interesting things like the Hoshido map had, no Golems, no floors becoming fire, so once you've grasped the idea, there's nothing more to it. And the game even tells you at the beginning to always choose the blue doors no matter what. The “joke” I suppose is that towards the end the boss tries to trick you into picking the red door, but it's done in such a blatantly obvious way that I only just now remembered that it ever happened.

There's more, but I think I've more than exhausted anybody reading this by now, as well as myself.

Ending on a positive note - For what it's worth, the final boss is pretty great. I could be cynical and call it 4 boring final bosses glued together into 1 fight, but it does encourage you to split up your units, and taking out the enemy spawns is actually a vital part of the fight, unlike say, Awakening where your goal is to march right up to the boss ASAP and bash their face in.

Anyway, hi everyone. I promise only most of my posts are usually this long and rant-shaped.