It’s bonkers to me that Slaying an entire map of its population, leaving no one alive is considered “Ethical” and ridding an area of literal monsters and zombies is considered “unethical.”
You didn't get your hunting license before going after those monsters, You also failed to tag your kills. Therefore the game warden would like to talk to you.
The part where you're killing them and not letting them say "Uh! I've been defeated! But I can't fall here! I must make my retreat!" and then doing absolutely nothing as they slowly walk away
Just look at the names of the techniques deemed unethical - boss “abuse”, dance “spam”, save “scumming” - the inherent bias is clear and affects our opinion of the methods! It’s a conspiracy I tell you 😤
Fire Emblem is like stock market you get what you invested in and sometimes it's not always good. Boss/staff/archer/Arena abuse allows you to invest without worrying about the consequences in future chapters.
This is a poor comparison. A stock market is inherently unethical. I'd say it's more like paid DnD, except some of the players are paying more money for perks.
@@ImFangzBro again just like the stock market. Till this day people find power leveling unethical and how it goes against its original intent. And there's also the fact that characters with good growths are prefer over characters with bad growths.
Lunatic's design in general was just... Odd that time Most units are already well behind the curve, and a lot of the cheese strats that don't work in +, work in Standard Lunatic Which kinda implies to be that the boredom of your tenth straight chapter of Nosferatanking might be intentional
In games that allow infinite skirmishing, I often think "I should do a skirmish to catch up some of my units that have fallen too far behind" and then look up four hours later and realize that I zoned out and ground multiple characters into unstoppable juggernauts. ^^;;
It's totally ethical playing lunatic mode by spamming her level in chapter 4. What's really unethical is all the lunatic modes so it balances out to me
The only route I ever bothered doing it in is lunatic revelations. And oh boy I could make my own power point presentation about how I feel about Revelations
This was another culture shock when I played Disgaea and other NIS games later. In those games, repeating maps is outright mandatory thanks to spikes in enemy stats. This is also reflected in player behaviour as even the most purist fans of the series tend to realize that the endless grinding ruins the pacing of the postgame (or, in the worst case scenarios like 6, the whole game) so they will encourage running meta builds and abusing exploits (to the point that boss abuse and item duplication became mechanics in 4 Complete and 5 respectively) just to get to the new content already.
The big difference is that Disgaea as a game is designed around this, leaning more into RPG gameplay loops as opposed to Fire Emblem’s emphasis on limited resources and managing risk/reward. One is designed around the fact you can grind and the other is designed around the fact that you usually can’t
@aqualord364 Vear in mind that Disgaea is a series that stores a character's class name as a text string purely to make Etna's joke about changing her class to Beauty Queen make sense.
@@aprinnyonbreak1290 ...until Disgaea RPG, because that game couldn't just raise the level cap like other gachas and brought you back to lv1 every time you wanted to gain 100 more levels. And 6, where ads said that auto battle was introduced for the first time to reduce grinding tedium were lying their butt off as it was already in Disgaea RPG and it was "balanced" around the idea that you'd be using it often so it actually took longer! I don't think it applies to D1(Complete) either thanks to the questionnable early maps for the series, including many battles of attrition in the finale.
@@jvts8916 I mean ya got me for the gacha, that's certainly a gacha, and while I've never replayed 6 to say for sure, I've beaten Disgaea 1 with no repeat maps or unnecessary item world before, and with no hospital before, so it's doable. Lamington is tough as nails, tho
What's really unethical is the arena has more money and op units than both the heroes and villains of the game same as the hidden boss in the snes game
Unethical exp: Forcing Ashe to 1v1 his adopted father to the death while his classmates cheer him on and enjoying trust building exercises and calling it a practical lesson in social studies.
For me, I just get a kick out of doing silly stuff. In my recent FE4 playthrough, I boxed in 2 healers with Physic and let my thief beat them up for like, 30 turns so she could catch up. It turns out Holyn!Patty becomes pretty scary when you commit war crimes and let her become a super soldier. That being said, I do kinda wish people would inherently focus more on "just use your favorites" when it comes to these games. Sure, grinding for EXP is tedious, but is it any more healthy to tell someone "Ok, don't use him, or him, or him, or him, oh but you HAVE to use this guy he's so good"? I get why these discussions come up, but I feel sometimes people forget that not everyone wants to play the most optimal, efficient way. The newbie playing FE7 Eliwood Normal probably doesn't need to be told "Don't use Nino she's bad".
in this case its not about telling people to play the game differently, its about establishing a common ground for discussion because the way someone chooses to play will have an inherent change in their experience
@@lolwutman That's not really what I'm getting at though, I'm speaking in general: FE veterans will commonly throw out a bunch of advice that is just simply unnecessary/not asked for, and these discussions usually overtake even casual talk about units, with everything suddenly becoming more about numbers and various other factors instead of just 'what's fun'. I'm not saying the video is bad, far from it, but I'm engaging(hah) with the topic by pointing out that oftentimes this series' fans are way too pushy with a "right" and "wrong" way to play-and again because I feel the need to stress this, I'm explicitly saying I don't think Excelblem is that way-nor is this an attack on his views-(I don't really see how anyone who watches this channel could think that, but I think I'm at the point where I need to make everything perfectly clear now), but a lot of people are. This backseat gaming mentality that a lot of FE fans end up with is pretty toxic, and I feel kills the enjoyment of the game, hell, you can LITERALLY see this right now with Engage, a bunch of people keep saying "Oh, the roster at the start is useless when you get [blank, blank, and blank], Firene units suck, etc". I can't imagine it's fun for many new players who just get told "90% of the units you start with are absolute dogwater, don't bother investing into them" instead of something more constructive like "Clanne/Framme/Arthur/etc are perfectly usable, they're just not the best, use who you like". The meta-discussion isn't the issue, it's when people start pushing that into general discussion where it becomes an actual problem.
@@UfoLoche The Hilarious part to me is always the irony in how many of them present it. "If you don't go full Horse Emblem, you're bad at the game" kinda stuff Like, doesn't the fact I'm using Wendy AND Sophia and still making them work (and I do, they can beyond pull their weight even with just feeding them "ethical experience") or Benching Seth for fun make me the BETTER player than the guy who only uses strictly "Optimal" units?
As lukewarm of a take as it is, it's really down to the person playing the game. I did a Sacred Stones Ironman and I felt that using the Arena Grinding was a cheap way of sucking all the challenge out of the game. Later on I used the Valni Tower for a little bit to get a some units that I had benched from the start of the game to be usable in the last few chapters. I never intended to use Valni Tower since it's a really easy way to grind out units but when a lot of my good units died due to my bad decisions, bad rng, etc, well it was either do some grinding out on really weak units to get them combat ready-ish since there were no more recruitable units or restart the whole thing because there was only 5 useable units left for the last 3 chapters. A friend of mine insisted that Arena Grinding was fine because there's a risk to it (and there is is), but that's my take. I wouldn't look down on his playthough if he uses Arena grinding (he loves trying to get Ross to a Pirate for the first Arena so he can have a level 20 Ross for later). Oh and all the units that I tried leveling all died in the next two maps. Tana was real funny because she immediately got crit and one shot after an hour+ of training.
I think that certain sources of "unethical" EXP are there to appeal to lower-skill players. My first game was Awakening, and I was pretty bad at the game, so I bought a lot of Reeking Boxes and grinded whenever I felt needed to get stronger. Looking back, I realized all that grinding wasn't necessary if I had just strategized better. But if my only recourse for having leveled inefficiently was to restart the game from the beginning, I think that would have left a bad first impression. That's why I think skirmishes are fine, at least on lower difficulties. You can consider other forms of "unethical" EXP such as boss/dance abuse to be unintended exploits, but clearly IS wouldn't have put skirmishes into the game if they didn't plan on having anyone use them.
Wow, I never tought someone could make such a sound and coherent presentation of such a subjetive topic like this one, this video presents a pretty neat essay of it and makes me admire your particular way to construct it. However, at the end of the day Fire Emblem it's just a game! (and a single player one too) So, rather than just taking a radical stance about the topic of EXP abuse maybe we could just try to understand what was the main goal of every person while playing the game, that way we could be able to dissociate the concepts addressed within the third bullet point from your conclusions, as that's what I do identify is one of the ignition points for much of the flame within the community. Thanks a lot for your effort and hope to see more of these dissertations soon! Best regards :D
FE4’s mechanics are so ascended that resetting to get through the arena and other things aren’t abusing the game, but playing exactly as intended (every turn saves, set RNG sees that the player needs to figure out how they want to progress it, etc.)
I don't know why everyone wants an FE4 remake so bad when you know they wouldn't, and with modern design philosophy, probably COULDN'T keep things the same at all?
If the game gives you the tools, it’s fair game. My basic rule of thumb is every option is fine, just don’t assume everyone will take/ignore it. My favorite go too is Trainee/Villager units. Take Anna and Jean from Engage or Amelia and Evan from Sacred Stones. Sure, they’re difficult to use on a minimalist run, but you can also spend 10-20 minutes to catch them up with a couple of skirmishes or the like. You could also argue that you can just grind everyone to 20/20 with skirmishes, but almost no one will actually do that. The “ethical” experience stuff is basically the attitude of the worst part of the Souls fan base and poisons a lot of discussions about units. Heck, even the name is an issue, calling it “ethical” or “unethical”, adding a moral judgement to using what the game provides.
Guess the next video is unethical units like the robin clones you can buy in awakening or how the amiboo in fates are basically walking dlc to get 4 strong units as soon as you start the game Or the best one the fates clones capturing the boss characters and using them as basically hidden secret units you can play with. Or the worst one Anna who you need to pay for directly
@@hisen3.146 Fates Anna has supports at least. 3H Anna does feel about as unfinished as Three Hopes though (which is depressing, it was so close to being truly stellar)
@@theghostcreator776 A lot of named characters can't be captured. The ones that you CAN are pretty random, so I can see them as being considered secret.
@@1stCallipostle if that's considered a secret then I guess recruiting enemy units in shadow dragon and the blade of light is a secret since you're not explicitly told you can
What changed my view on xp was... starting to actually replay the games on higher difficulties lol. I used to play on normal/easy and the games were so easy, I always thought I might as well get everyone the cooler classes/skills/weapons/etc by grinding every unethical xp source, since it didn't really matter whether or not my units two-shot or one-shot the enemy units, I wasn't gonna die regardless. But as you said, this isn't a very fun thing to do on repeat playthroughs, since it takes too much time to do it every run. Today, what xp sources I take or not take is mainly dictated by A) the relation between xp gained and time spent and B) if I think it's funny. For example, me and a friend are playing an FE8 randomized Soul Link inspired by the challenge of the same name in the pokemon games. When we got Knoll, he turned out to be a complete dogshit unit, far worse than his original self which is already bad. But when our Gilliam died on the Rennac map later, we thought it would be funny to grind up Knoll via boss abuse to take up his spot, so we did. And it *was* funny.
For me, it's totally Ethical for Sigurd to Kill 1000 Verdane Barbarians just to get Shiny, Blood-stained Sword that will be traded around like a Joint to his soldiers all to obtain that Sweet, Juicy Arena clears. Same thing applies to the Naga tome, which is in dire need of a buff known as Critical hits!
I derive fun from these games by breaking them in half. I'm currently playing through three houses with half my army set up as crit machines and the other half set up as contingency plans to deal with the handful of enemies that are immune to crits, and let me tell you there is nothing more hilarious and satisfying than dance warping my way across the whole map and deleting the boss from the game with one axe crit first turn. Unethical experience is always morally good lmao
really enjoy this format; feels like a good way to consume Fire Emblem content that doesn't require absolute attentiveness, which is something I think a lot of people appreciate :) The slide counter in the bottom-right is a nice touch, since it helps people keep track of the pacing relative to the video's length and makes particular topics/points easier to reference if needed.
I like how you put this in the context of discussion within the community, because some things are “looked down on” in some contexts but encouraged in others. Like the analysis. This reminds me of how I grinded Byleth not to Level 99 but to S Rank on all weapon types on one playthrough so that when I would NG+ it would make going through replays of the game easier since I could reclass and wouldn’t have to grind him again. In a game with 4 paths and that much repetition I would argue that getting max teaching rank early or S rank weapon rank is also arguably ethical, even tho it does take a lot of time to do; but simultaneously it borders into the ethical because one of people’s biggest issues with Three Houses is how long it is, especially in combination with playing all 4 paths. Thus, people’s chances of doing something similar are higher for that game than say FE11. NG+ in general or recruiting past units like in Awakening and Fates is also an interesting discussion, because most people who play Lunatic/Lunatic+ are just aiming to unlock the Dragon’s Gate so that they can recruit their old busted unit right after lol, but that goes into what you were getting at with difficulty settings and such
To be fair, sparkly tiles are from units that fell in battle on another's run, so it's mainly a risk if you want your unit to suffer the same fate for a weapon or some exp.
@@philiphunt-bull5817 At least that's how it works in Three Houses, possibly Engage since there was a spot of several sparkly tiles during the chapter at the Brodian Bridge.
I always found that all exp is fair depending on how much you are struggling with the game or if you just want to crush it due to various reasons. (I’m looking at YOU FIRE EMBLEM AWAKENING LUNATIC+!) The cost for any experience is your IRL time or the game judging you thru turn counts and tactics rating. The exception is paid DLC but that is a given in newer Fire Emblems where they practically give away experience to your units to the point the games difficulty can’t keep up with you most of the time.
i’ve been playing new game maddening on three houses recently in order to get the gold home screen, and honestly, the moment i realized that every thief in the game was going to have pass and that every archer was going to have poison strike was the moment i swore off honorable methods. my tactics are now cruel, guerilla, and immeasurably tyrannical. i will loop time, let archers shoot my units for minimal class exp, and rewind time as many times as it takes to suck each and every gasp of breath that i can out of any imperial soldier or rough-shod noble i can get my greasy little goblin hands on until that god forsaken turn count hits 99. because, beneath the veil of ethicality, discursive accessibility, and proper play, we are all tacticians deep down; some of us are just a little sillier than others
Sick video really good points. It was funny watching this video and remembering as a kid that I would not clear chapter 5 in sacred stones until I had everyone lvl 20 from the arena. Nowadays the only unethical exp I go for is staff spamming in geneology to have raquesis promoted before ch 3 and even that is still pretty tedious.
Needs more discussion on how your army is supplied with the weapons they gain xp with, and more listed news sources to gain a more accurate picture of the potential total experience gained and lost over the course of the game.
What could be unethical about Framme Gaming to reveal Engage's hidden Jagen? Being able to grind one specific character at that point in the gameplay is an advantage that character has over other characters available at that time.
When you make videos like this I think it'd be neat if you tagged (or added to the description) videos showing the exploits/scenarios/ described as it would make the video a well rounded fun video to watch and a depository of neat things related to it in case the viewers don't know about it in advance or want to find niche references all in one spot. Hope you make more videos like this regardless of this though, good stuff!
When I first saw this video’s title I thought you would be talking about ethical versus unethical EXP gain in the sense of whether some forms of EXP gain would be unethical to do in a real-life situation - fighting in an arena as opposed to killing an enemy that cannot defend themselves, for example. Although this video’s actual content was rather insightful!
i would argue a better term pair for delineating it is "reasonable experience" and "unreasonable experience" or maybe expectable and unexpectable. or maybe just "good exp" and "dumb exp"
Interesting video, I agree with most of your definitions and distinctions, I'd have mentioned Arena exp as something that's more "fair" in a no reset context, but that was pretty much implied I'd say. But this topic is also very interesting and necessary to consider when it comes to balancing, for example romhacks and their intended difficulty curve and freedom in obtaining ethical/unethical exp.
this same concept is why I feel anna's personal skill is overhyped in engage "so much moneeeeee" only if you act in a completely unreasonable way and feed her all kills, and give her tiki from the dlc, and do skirmishes...
You don't need to use her unreasonably, she's already one of the stronger units in the game. Stick Byleth on her and her proc rate exceeds 25%, and that translates to at least 20k money unless you absolutely avoid using her. Using her with bonded shield vs groups of enemies is especially strong.
@@zhoufang996 you do realize that in order to get 20k gold off anna at a 25% proc rate, you would need, on average, 160 kills with her? with ~20 chapters with her if you recruit her immediately, that would be 8 kills per chapter, but you don't get byleth until 14, which means its more like 10 chapters, so feeding anna 16 kills per chapter. sounds normal and reasonable to me
Yeah, I had 250 kills with her in the end. Kills in the game increase due to higher enemy numbers in the second half of the game, and the fact that paralogues unlock later. Most of your better units will do more than 150 kills. Also 25% is a minimum, it increases further from that point. She's one of the best bonded shield enemy phasers like I said, and can rack up kills very fast by this method. And that method is a good way to tackle the masses of enemies Maddening late chapters throws at you.
11:21 *"than" should be ", then" 🤓 ((I like the points you made here and the cohesiveness/professionalism with which you presented them, I'm excited to see more powerpointblem!))
I tend to be looser on my standards than most because I like to challenge run like crazy and a true challenge run is gonna have a couple sources of what is normally superfluous exp. I think the biggest influence for me actually has been challenge running so if an exp source is so good it enables a challenge run and is avoidable it probably isn’t acceptable for normal gameplay.
What's truly ethical and right is what are personally fine and okay with. FE is a single player game and unless you care about the funny little letter or stars you get at the end of the playthrough about what the devs deemed "exceptional play" then it really shouldn't matter what you do or don't do to beat the game regardless of what you do. Just don't be a dick about it; respect how other people want to play the game and don't force your opinions down someone's throat if they're clearly trying to aim for something that is contrary to how you play the game. At the end of the day what truly matters is that we all love Fire Emblem, and that we all decide how we love and enjoy the game in our own way. ... that being said Nino is the best mage in FE7 and if any of you say otherwise I'LL FIGHT ALL OF YOU NINO IS BEST GIRL SHE DESERVES NOTHING BUT LOVE AND HEADPATS AND PROTECTION.
The most important thing in my decision of whether to do a cheesy strategy is the difficulty of the game. Higher difficulty games like FE11, FE12, and Conquest, I'm more likely to grind and cheese, whereas easier games, or games I'm more comfortable with like the GBA titles, I'll choose not to
Never thought I'd see the day where I see FE11 be described as high difficulty Unless you're a Hard 5 man. Now that's not to say design that reeks of 30 years ago can't be mad annoying
Great video king 🤴 But next time let's take that page count in the bottom right corner so the video doesn't look like a high school PowerPoint presentation Keep going,.your content is getting better and better 💪
The source of ethical exp considerations is the common set of rules used for tier lists. If you can grind, the performance of units become more similar, making the tier list irrelevant. So you need some kind of baseline to evaluate unit But that's the thing, if grinding is an intended mechanic from the game, it may be more sendible to accept that the tier list is useless than to invent artificial rules to justify its existence. For instance, Amelia is considered terrible by tier lists. And without grinding, that's absolutely true. But it also only takes 20 minutes with emulator speed up to grind her to 10/10/1 paladin, at which point she's perfectly fine. Tower of Valni is clearly a base mechanic of the game, and the investment needed is low. So, saying Amelia is terrible is kind of misleading : it's only the case if you decide to ban the tower so your own tier list makes sense ! It's kind of a paradox : the very tool that was supposed to give new players unbiased info then ends up being misleading instead. This is not a comment defending Amelia btw, I know she's the worst unit in the game. Please spare me the "but Mekkah made a video", I've seen it and agree with his points. Just some food for thought that the very context of a tier list or unit comparison can be misleading and removed from the actual gameplay experience
In my first Conquest playthrough on Hard, I realized after chapter 16 that I wanted to train everyone but a huge amount of my characters were underleveled and unpromoted. I didn't want this, so for 17 I brought in all the underleveled characters I could get away with, plus Felicia who I brought through Bow Knight for Shurikenbreaker, and boss abused for 17 hours. Everyone I brought in got promoted and got max weapon ranks, many characters gaining 12 levels through this as well. Then on 19 I found that if you hit turn 999 Kaden becomes permanently invincible and you softlock. I didn't even continue to use most of the characters I trained up.
Typically for EXP grinding, I find the boss abuses and mostly skirmishes acceptable when training weaker units (in later games), and especially in FE Awakening and Birthright, where there are paralogs locked behind support rankings, since Paralogs in those games 9/10 times has new units. I think it is ok to do other abuses (not DLC) and if people enjoy that sort of masochism or have saint levels of patience, then they should go ahead and do it.
oh my god a powerpointblem Interesting topic to cover with XP farming ethics in FE. Personally I do feel guilty once I've dragged on the Arena Abuse for awhile. Although I actually impose on myself not to use save states giving it some uncertainty so maaaybe it becomes fair. I've never even considered cheesing the bosses until I did some Hard Ironman runs. I gotta do what I gotta do to keep everyone strong and alive somehow, no matter how unethical it gets. Thank you for this presentation. For me it's so refreshing to see MS Powerpoint being used as intended (I've been using Powerpoint as if it's Adobe Animate). Hope you do more of these Powerpointblems!
My first thought would be to classify unethical experience as the type of experience that requires sacrificing a lot of turns to get. The motivation behind this is that it it doesn't include all type of arena and reinforcement experience. If you have two spare turns before you finish the chapter and decide to visit the arena during those turns, it isn't exactly abusive. The same goes for having your remaining units finish of reinforcements before seizing the throne. But that definition has its problems too, as it could potentially add gaiden chapters to the list of unethical experience. There are also arguments to be made that sending a unit through the tower of valni once could save turns in the upcoming maps, which might make it qualify as ethical.
I love how slaughtering everyone is considered OK, but getting as much experience from a single person isn't. FE players really see the trolley problem and wonder how to maximize the kills.
@@ghosthuntermike2592 the best way to distribute Exp ethically is by reducing the number of units that will benefit it. I'd argue that's why Arena Abuse IS actually ethical, actually. The unit will eventually dues after amassing a large sum of money that will benefits your actual units.
I've honestly never heard these terms before. Thinking about it, I use a lot more "unethical" experience gain strategies than most people do. The reason I end up doing so typically boils down to "other people find these ways of grinding for experience tedious and boring, but I typically have less issues putting myself through them." I often find that I am much more willing to subject myself to tedious, grindy efforts than I'd ever expect most people to use. I guess to that end, I agree with what you said on what makes something unethical; I may be more than willing to put myself through this, but I'd completely understand why others would never even think about it, and I recognize that it typically makes my characters way more powerful than I really need them to be.
I tend to think that some of the “unethical” methods are permitted under some circumstances-like, if I’m ending my turn and there’s nothing more important for my staff user to do, then I might as well let them grind some experience from some unnecessary Obstruct casting, right? If I’m still playing the objective and moving toward the goal, then it wouldn’t seem to delve into “unfairness” if I’m just making use of the resource being given (an otherwise unused unit’s turn).
Unethical Experience exists so that very uninteresting people can finally look down on others and act like the kids who picked on them in middle school.
I don't think this is strictly true. I think for most people it's just a way for them to decide how they want to play and enjoy the game. Like with most things, I think the people who are actually malicious about it are just the loud minority.
All exp imo is fair gain, but the consequences you reap for doing so are your own. Recently someone in the Serenes Forest Discord palyed Thracia for the first time and kept grinding exp because he was unsatisfied with his units stats, and myself and several others kept telling him that stats are not the most important determining factor of a character's usefulness in Thracia, and if he did want to grind units out he should wait until he gets more Crusader Scrolls. He didn't listen, at first, but eventually did, and fully admitted on his second playthrough he enjoyed the game a lot more by playing it at ts own pace. As for myself, I enjoy a good arena grind now and then. Not enough to get a whole army of 20/20 minmaxers but whenever I see one I try to get a few solid levels per character able to use it and pocket the gold earned therein. It makes the chapter take longer than anticipated but it's no 500 turn grind fest either.
Answering the questions: 1-. It depends. Skirmish maps I only play in exact numbers before beggining the next map (on Engage it was 2 Skirmish maps before Chapter 10, and after only or even none). That límited number of the infinite grinding method actually let me use different units before deciding on a squad for a good chunk of the game. The only exception was my playtrough of Revelations where I played like 20 times the EXP DLC, and that was only to have my entire army at level 20/20 2-. Aside from everything presented, I would only add sacking units instead of actually a strategy to advance. Kinda dumb, but I just dont like doing that. 3-. Experience. On my first playtroughs of any Fire Emblem I would Arena Abuse since I was insecure about any of the Mechanics presented. However, the more I played and the more I understand about the games, the less and less I found myself grinding or using unethical exp. Extra Point: Something curious to take a note about is how Lunatic/Lunatic+ actually can made obligatory some unethical ways to obtain EXP. And that's another reason of why I don't like Lunatic difficulty. It makes you play the game on either a dumb linear way ( using the units that are "Meta" ln a frigging strategy game), or on the most Unorthodox way possible (basically, grinding).
