Should the final chapter focus more on the boss or the map?

[Topaz Light]

The boss should be the focus - you spend most of the game working through maps with various strategies, the final boss should be a test of if you've been able to train and use your units effectively.

Radiant Dawn's version is really good though, a series of maps that culminates in the final boss made it feel even more epic.

I would argue that a well-designed and challenging map would be a better test of how well you've trained and learned to use your units, but I can see the perspective of wanting it to focus on the boss.

To be more specific, I suppose I feel that the boss should be a major part of the map design, but having it be just a simple showdown with all your units against just the final boss isn't good final chapter design, in my opinion, since it boils down to just having high enough stats to damage the boss and survive their attacks, and having enough basic knowledge of how the game works to not do something careless and get someone killed. Final bosses in the series have, in my opinion, historically been very easy to take down, and almost boil down to being more about the "holy shit" factor of their massive stats and oftentimes physical form than about any real difficulty.

Make the boss a major part of the map and consistently the biggest threat throughout it, but due to the very nature of how Fire Emblem's gameplay is set up, it's extremely difficult to make one single unit, by themself, constitute both a challenging and fair obstacle on their own.

Edited November 20, 2016 by Topaz Light