IMO Connector is one of the most fun late game maps. It's not something you can just warp skip, it asks a lot of your army, but unlike Chapter 22 it doesn't take away your tools in order to do so. The phase transition with killing the boss is jank, and the misdirection definitely deserves points deducted, but even so I'd rate it quite highly.
Lucina paralogue is so lacking in anything going on. Which is accurate enough to the source material, and Awakening has a lot of maps of dubious quality, but still. Boring.
I honestly think the devs want you to warp skip Chapter 25, given the quantity of reinforcements (with void curse no less). But even if you don't want to do that, you can use a Micaiah Rescue, Warp, or Rewarp to reunite your army and fight only on one side.
Bond 20 is rarely important. You max out all the stat boosts by 19. The only thing you get from 20 is a tick removed from the Emblem gauge, but filling that is mostly a meme, especially in the late game.
The water mechanic in Chapter 16 is whatever, but the fact that it moves before the start of player phase t1 is so uncalled for. You do your preps in anticipation of being able to make certain moves but then nope fuck you better restart because your planning was useless.
Chapter 15 is a meta-tutorial to teach you that NOTHING IS AS IMPORTANT AS DANCING. Emblems don't matter! Miasma doesn't matter! Just dance! *Lady Gaga starts playing* Unfortunately, this lesson may take multiple playthroughs to learn :P But seriously, this map suffers a great deal from the devs' desire to create Emblem/user pairings that represent something about the Emblems' games, e.g., Micaiah with Yunaka, who is a thief like Sothe. In this case, you have Corrin with Seadall, who is a dancer like Azura, who joins you right at the beginning of Fates and is a super important character in the story. But the pairing makes absolutely no sense mechanically. There is a general problem in Engage with units joining with Emblems and not being able to do much of value with them, especially compared to what they might accomplish on other units already in your army (this includes Seadall/Corrin and Yunaka/Micaiah, but also Diamant/Roy, Timerra/Ike, and Rosado/Eirika). Really the only time they nail this in a context where there would be meaningful other options for the player is with Celine/Celica. In some cases this doesn't matter enough to worry about, but I think that the devs should have considered having some of these units join during preps so that you could move the ring around, and Seadall/Corrin is 100% without question the most egregious case of needing this change. It's not like rescuing Seadall is particularly interesting anyway. Or let whoever talks to him take the ring or something.
(Chapter 14) "The left side is way harder than the right side initially" Just go right lololol I actually think this can be good design, because at a minimum, it rewards paying attention, and the asymmetry means there's potentially an interesting choice to be made regarding whether you want the extra challenge. The problem being that there isn't really any reason to take on that extra challenge. Same number of chests on each side, and the right side chests are waaaaaaay better (Boots and Radiant Bow right, Wyrmslayer and Silver Spirit Art left, not that you'd know that going in anyway). But hey, at least that means that playing efficiently, I can just ignore the left side as irrelevant.
Chapter 12 is D tier for me. Boring and easy map is boring and easy. No side objectives, mostly non-threatening enemies, and it takes two turns to wipe it if you put some thought into it. Even if you don't, you can get close enough that the rest is just clean-up. I know it's supposed to be a breather map after 10/11 but it's such a letdown. Maybe the most brain-dead map in the game to clear efficiently, which is actually pretty insane for a rout map, as in general with efficient FE play, those are normally quite challenging to clear quickly, especially if the game is generally challenging (i.e. if you can't just throw whatever unit into whatever group of enemies and watch them all die on enemy phase).
I had a lot of fun sending Chloe up north to bully the starting area in Chapter 11 once I realized the Corrupted Wyrms will just sit there and not do anything. But there's no reason for the player to think this would be the case (the only reason I tried it was b/c I was just like "lol what if she just dodges a billion times"). The idea of having them there at all is presumably to scare you into running south, but if they aren't actually going to prevent you from killing the Freeze user... I think I'd prefer for the freeze user to be just out of range on turn 1, but then for the top area to actually be as well-defended as it looks, even if it would mean I didn't have the fun of figuring out I could send Chloe up there, because most players are going to find it unfair that they can't escape the freeze range on turn 1.
My problem with Chapter 10 is that there's way too much space between Morion and Hyacinth. I know it's because Hyacinth has Astra Storm and they don't want you to have to worry about him hitting you with that when you're still fighting Hortensia. But all that empty space looks and feels so silly, and it makes the map feel slow when after you've already dealt with two major threats and now you have to spend potentially multiple turns getting into position to even fight Hyacinth if you haven't prepared a pretty specific strategy for how to take him down quickly. To be fair, you can in fact do that (I did). But I think most players will probably approach him carefully/slowly due to the Astra Storm threat (which is not as threatening as it appears due to a combination of rounding and AI quirks) (I also did, on my first playthrough). Aesthetically, I think this could be solved without needing to change too much by just having more enemies in the upper part of the map. But mechanically that's probably the wrong direction to go. IDK. To be clear, I don't think this ruins the map or anything. But it gets points deducted.
Chapter 9 does have reinforcements, though not many. When Kagetsu and Zelkov reach their respective forts, there are some units that come out and join them. I suppose if you don't consider it realistic to stop them from doing that, then you might not really think of them as reinforcements.
@@SharurFoF It’s also just the fact that it’s very telegraphed, Ivy even tells you that there are reinforcements in the fort ahead of time, which I think is one of only two times that you are told about reinforcements ahead of time, the other is Roy but they don’t tell you where they’re coming from
I think in general, Fog of War is not a good mechanic in Fire Emblem. I much prefer the implementation in a couple of other tactics games, specifically Advance Wars and Battle for Wesnoth. Advance Wars has greater variance across unit types in both movement values and fog vision. There are also terrain effects - such as mountains that boost vision, and forests where units can hide from anyone who's not next to them. Also, the AI actually obeys these rules as well. This enables you to manage the fog in more interesting ways than what FE supports. Battle for Wesnoth has a really elegant solution, where your vision range is the same as your attack range (i.e. movement range+1), so you don't have to worry about the "what happens if you move somewhere you can't see" problem, since you can't actually do that. This also causes terrain to affect vision naturally, without requiring any special rules for how it does so. And high movement units naturally become scouts, with units that are particularly good at moving through certain terrain types being particularly good at scouting that type of terrain. In both games, it's possible for the player not merely to mitigate the effects of fog, but to take advantage of them, in a way that's not true in FE. Another important consideration is that both of these games allow you to build units, so the expectation isn't that you're going to keep everyone alive. This enables more interesting play patterns around fog, because you can do things like intentionally sacrifice a unit as a scout, or as bait. FE doesn't really enable that type of thing in practice, even if in theory a player could choose to do it. I mostly think FE should just not do fog, but if it is going to do it, then having stationary torches on the map like Engage does (and Radiant Dawn before it) is at least an improvement on how it works in most FE games.
The revival stones on this map don't represent any character, this is just a really challenging chapter in Shadow Dragon and the revival stones are on some of the particularly strong enemies.
Chapter 3 > Chapter 1. But anyway. Here's why I think Chapter 3 feels clunky: - Engage has low movement in general, and at this point you lack any movement tech (starting in the next chapter, you get Sigurd and Celica, and from that point forward you always have something available to you, whether it's emblems, staves, Seadall, or inherited skills) - There's a big chunk of impassable terrain right near the starting location - The combination of the rout objective and the presence of the fliers in the lower right means you need to decide early whether to send your units to the right or the left side of that impassable terrain, and aside from Vander, once a unit commits to a side, they can't switch sides quickly enough to be able to do anything useful if you picked incorrectly - There's no turnwheel to fix the above, which is another thing that shows up in the very next chapter - You need multiple units to take down enemies in almost all cases (the only exceptions are Etie shooting fliers and Alear using Lodestar Rush), and the amount of damage your units are doing to enemies is highly variable depending on matchup. In combination with low movement restricting your ability to reach multiple squares from which to attack the same enemy, this amplifies the effect of the decision making around which side of the collapsed pillar you send your units to. It's very easy to end up with excess damage here and not enough there, and for the whole thing to feel very slow, messy, and unsatisfying, as you perform mandatory mop-up due to the rout objective. - Hit rates are unfixably shaky, which can compound the above. - Cramped confines return again in a big way at the top of the map, so a lot of this stuff applies all over again. I actually think most of this is fine in terms of creating an against-the-odds/underdog vibe, though of course the story being some combination of stupid and irrelevant means that creating that vibe doesn't hit the same way it does in some other FE games. However, I do think that Engage likely has such low movement due to the presence of absurdly strong movement tech (Sigurd, Micaiah, Byleth, etc.), and that the early game, before you have access to any of those tools, suffers as a consequence of that balancing decision.
I don't agree with Clanne being critical for dealing with Abyme, though obviously he's useful. Alear-boosted Vander does 9x2 to the boss (who has 32 HP) and takes 10 in return (out of 40 HP). So you can one-turn the boss by attacking with Vander and then finishing on enemy phase. EDIT: And actually, Alear-boosted Boucheron does 8x2 and takes 14 in return (out of 29 HP), assuming he hasn't leveled mid-chapter, so at full health he can also one-turn the boss, though he needs to not get attacked by the archer or anything along those lines.
A lot of FE tutorial maps aren't particularly interesting, but there are a couple things I find particularly bad about Engage Ch 1. First, it doesn't play by the game's own rules. Specifically, break doesn't actually work until the game tells you about break. This is just bad design imo. Players should be able to discover a game's mechanics on their own when possible, and this runs in the opposite direction, overtly denying players the ability to interact with a mechanic until they've read the tutorial popup. There's really no excuse for this - it would be easy enough to have the tutorial popup in response to getting a break with Alear on T1, if the designers wanted to do that. Second, the fact that you get teleported between (iirc) turns 3 and 4, which acts as a semi-reset button on the map. I think there's even an enemy that disappears, and any damage you might have done to them is irrelevant. This isn't how anything works for the rest of the game, so it has the potential to set up false expectations. It also reduces player agency - anything the player might have done in response to the situation they saw developing in the first part of the chapter is rendered moot once they hit the jump. Compare this with Chapter 2, where you basically complete two separate sub-chapters. There's no issue here, because there's no expectation of a continuation past the initial defeat of Lumera, and everything gets reset, including HP (in Chapter 1, damage taken is retained across the jump for player units, iirc). Moreover, from a story standpoint, the jump is much better justified, given that it's a set of training exercises, rather than a real battle. In conclusion, Chapter 1 is kinda trash.
I guess my philosophy for playing this for the very first time is that it's fairly obvious what the game wants you to do and where it wants you to go without overwhelming you with mechanics like break. I could definitely understand someone viewing this hand holding as a negative but for me I found it as a positive just because I was new to fire emblem entirely. The whole teleporting map part didn't really bother me too much either because the cutscene explained it to me well enough, but again I understand how that can be a negative for some people.
@@nemoskii961 I don't mean to suggest that there's anything fundamentally incomprehensible about what's going on. I just think that the map leans on tutorial boxes instead of gameplay to communicate to the player, and does a poor job of teaching through design. Terrain is a case where it does do its job, and you could probably cut out the relevant tutorial popups without too big of a loss of understanding. This is relevant because some players aren't going to read tutorial popups, but also because elegance and organic discovery have value unto themselves.
It would be easy enough to avoid encountering break if that was desired - just don't put any breakable enemies in range for T1, or whatever the desired conditions are. Likewise, design the map so that the parts are naturally connected, rather than needing to be artificially joined.
Apparently when Kagetsu says "I could quiz you", he means "I could kiss you". I finally googled it and apparently it comes up in his support with Boucheron. Thought you should know.
The reason only enemies can use Meteor is b/c weapons don't break in Engage. In other games tomes like Meteor have 5 uses, except in Three Houses, where they have (iirc) 2 uses per map.
I too hate the deployment slot in the middle part of the game. I think the music the 3 Houses map used is the theme song for the opening of 3 Houses which I like the music a lot! Also like the choice of map they used for Byleth’s map!
Man that was a terrible well result at the beginning:( Usually it’s recommended to only throw up to three stars because anything higher is not worth it. Same here line I don’t get why the Solm chapters make deployment slots much smaller and I really hate that:( This chapter can be a pain in the ass. Although Buber missed a lot of 50% crits you got lucky with the other crits! Also Marnie she will reach the group but very slowly🤣😂 I gave the boots to Alear, Diamont since he is my favorite, and Bouch Cannoneer since the only get four movement.
Man the Sedall map can be challenging. I hate the last part of the map can be tough. Also having those other tough units coming up to the party is even worse. Worse is skirmishing a battle in that map is very difficult because it splits the party into two and I also hate that. Congrats I think this is the best I have seen someone tackle Lyn’s map as it’s seriously a really tough map to beat. Also you had a good RNG in this run with all those amazing crits:) For some reason I have chosen Alcryst to have the skill Dragonic Hex as a slot since the beginning of my first run and all runs. Idk why I did that but having that with Luna activating makes it more fun:)
It just occurred to me that they have both The Devoted and Echoes of Daybreak in the game (as amiibo unlocks), which are two of the best Radiant Dawn tracks, better than anything in Engage, and they don't even play either one of them on this map 😭😡🤦♀
Well if you make Citrinne a Sage, her outfit sure is ugly, anyway. I have no idea what they were thinking, not letting characters keep their custom outfits in their primary/canon class, at least. The downgrade is so massive.
"Roy is the only fire emblem emblem to having living Parents" Untrue! Lucina's parents are alive unless you get her mother killed during your Awakening playthrough (Chrom has to stay alive since he's a game over condition).
"+4 Mt from just one upgrade? That's crazy" Yup, that's why if you can afford it (both forge cost and weapon rank), the Revanche is the best axe (unless you're Lindon). 24 max Mt, only 10 Wt, and only 5 less crit than max forged Killer Axe.
Thanks to 2RN or Hybrid RN, 90% is a lot closer to 100% than it appears. Which is unfortunate, because it reinforces people's misunderstanding of odds.
