Ranking fire emblem games by difficulty and fairness 

Thracia has it’s rep due to time and obscurity, as well as its oddball mechanics and sometimes punishing design. Kind of like how Sonic CD was praised while in obscurity before being hailed as the worst of the classics.

Just need to use Frederick for a few chapters, then Chrom and Robin can rip the whole game open.

Have you considered that argument about how Vaike is better than Robin? Or rather, its secondary claim that rating Robin as S tier because you do an arbitrary and optional cheese strategy for slowly grinding them levels at the start of the game is dumb?

No because a good portion of what makes Robin good is the veteran skill, not the water trick.

Veteran is good, but his starting stats are not. It takes him a lot of levels to take off and that's exp that could be going to Chrom and Frederick to let Fred double in chapter 2 and other major benchmarks. Vaike hits much harder at base, which balances out the range difference for how easy it is to get him kills outside water trick, for instance. Veteran is extremely strong, but this is Awakening. Anyone can snowball thanks to the exp formula, Veteran just reduces the necessary kill count a bit. It's comparable to Aptitude in that regard, though Robin's starting stats aren't Donnel bad.

Yes! I played dimitris route blind on maddening as the last of the four routes and was praying to dogde and survive. Could easily be softlocked.

And this is why Crimson flower is superior

yea i had that happen to me I never imagined it would be that unbelievably hard but instead of resetting I let Mercedes and Annette die

Though in a sense it means truly difficult games tend to be fair.

These definitions make sense: Enemies having Vantage, Quick Riposte, Pass or Killer weapons are difficult and fair. You have to play around those skills, but the information about them is available. Same turn ambush spawns are difficult and unfair. You pretty much have to reset whenever you run into them and possibly look up the reinforcement triggers to develop a plan.

Yeah basically : - Easy and fair : The path to victory is obvious and taking it works consistently - Easy and unfair : The path of least resistance can't be worked out with logic alone and once learned either works consistently with no effort or is so rigid that even if it involves inherent risk no strategy can work around it (think the black knight fight in path of radiance that's just about praying for skill procs) - Difficult and fair : The various complications are laid out clearly in a way that you can analyze and predict but piecing the information together takes effort, requiring using varied tools and planning ahead. - Difficult and unfair : The path to victory is complex in a way that can't be worked out in advance and cannot be solved through logic alone requiring some risk taking or trial and error.

@@jmagicd9831 *Ambush spawn teleports behind you* "Nothing personal kid".

Thracia isn’t the most fair but it also isn’t super unfair because a lot of stuff is told to the player in dialogue, especially what you need to do to unlock gaiden chapters. The older games also don’t expect you to have every unit survive, especially on a first playthrough which makes the design choices make sense in that context.

Warp reinforcements are arguably more fair than normal ambush reinforcements since they can't attack after warping. Except for like one instance (that chapter!) where I believe one enemy warps another in fog of war. I've also gone through every chapter and I can't think of any actual ambush spawns, like oh no a soldier spawned from the stairs! well duh that's what the tile is for

To be unfair to Thracia, games that expect you to read the manual when most videogame manuals were (and still are) art dumps and "Press A to Jump" tutorials are just not a good idea in the grand scheme of things. Tutorials and Info dumps are much better off being taught in the game, especially when there is no guarantee you still have your game manual because you potentially borrowed the game from someone else, cartridge only.

@@SmugLilBugger That's quite a thing to say when tutorials were hardly common on the SuFami/SNES and still were only just becoming a regular part of any games at the time it came out. That being said, it does at least explain its more esoteric mechanics in-game, like rescue/capture and how escape maps work.

There was GOING to be a help screen in the game, but mysteriously it was cut from the final game, go figure.

thats a fair argument, I agree I've proposed a bit of a double standard there

Also, forgot to mention some of the best ítems aré 100% hidden on a lot of maps (Beast Slayer, DragonSlayer, a lot o Máster Seals for the Dawn Brigade, Gems, etc)

Technically speaking , Radiant Dawn hard mode is only unlock after you clear easy or normal mode , and you would already have knowledge about it If a "experience FE player" decided to play the hardest difficulty of Radiant Dawn blindly on its first playthru , he/she will have the hardest time of its life. Most FE games the "hardest difficulty are usually tackle after you beat the game 1-2 times. And with prior knowledge on story events , you know "what can screw you over" That can also apply to all other FE games if "they are played in Hard Mode blindly".

I would also point out triangle advantage removal in the harder difficulties. Which is announced, but still really fks over a lot of units in that game.

I don't know if radiant dawn is really that unfair. The game loves to give the player plenty of overpowered units throughout the game. The dawn brigade often gets to play with units like part 1 sothe and tauroneo, nailah, and the black knight. All of the part 3 maps give the player a of decent yellow units as well.

That and a lot of the hidden promotion item requirements and ambush spawns they don't announce.

I agree, I did my first run blind and did not know until a group of soldiers appeared and told me they sealed a cave off.

Not to refute your argument, but the chapters leading to gaiden chapters are the palace-like levels. Ostia's palace, Jutes, the Etrurian Castle, then your choice of Ilia / Sacae (also unknown to newer players) lead to the gaiden chapters. Of course, the Bern arc doesn't follow this rule, but the rest feel somewhat telegraphed.

I guess that's another type of unfairness.

Yeah, people forget that it used to be expected that you would read the manual. There's so many games that are considered cryptic or obtuse nowadays entirely because people are playing it without the manual, which is not how they were ever intended to be played.

I was gonna say, a lot of the authors comments about the snes and even gba games seem to completely forget most of their points are addressed by manuals.

Yeah warp tiles are cringe good thing they're only in 2 missable chapters. I like the Full Fog, don't see why it's bad? and the obtuse mechanics I think you're referring to are things like stats being halved when capturing or leveling up movement which don't require explaining like the movement or give you enough time to figure out how it works without really hurting you at all like capture or fatigue. Things like Units being captured if they don't escape before Leif, Linoan's promotion, Reinhardt giving Olwen the Holy Sword, these are all told to the player in the original in-game text. The only things I can think of that they explicitly don't tell you is how to recruit Ilios and Misha, and a certain American Trap but I'm not sure if any of those really need to be told. Also stuff like entering the houses for the Dragonlance tell you to enter with a specific character and for recruiting homer he at least specifies a woman needs to talk to him, and I guess it's at least a little hinted at it being Nanna since she has charm. Edit: Oh yeah and Follow Up Critical Coefficients aren't even mentioned lmao

i feel like a normal mode tierlist would be extremely useful as someone who enjoys these games but isn't exactly the best at strategy stuff.

it's probably also worth noting that it's a bit weird to go with highest difficulties when you're comparing stuff like Lunatic Modes, which are gated behind beating the game at least once, to FE4, which doesn't have a hard mode. FE8's reputation of being incredibly easy partially comes from the fact that its hard mode was designed to be a slightly spicier version of normal mode while NG+5 clearly wasn't designed to be that. So, I think comparing the Normal modes of each game would be an interesting study, if nothing else. It will still get messy with casual mode & the time rewinds to factor in. Like, FE CQ Normal difficulty on Classic Mode is way too brutal, but it's fine on Casual Mode. Compare that to FE8 where its Normal mode difficulty felt best when doing blind ironman. But yeah, comparing the difficulties & fairness of the games on their standard difficulties would be interesting.

​@@snolls105 I'm not sure where each and every one of the games should be on the list, but I would always without a single doubt recommend FE8 as the starting point. Not only does FE8 have generally recurring mechanics such as reclassing, but it's also so comically casual and full of engaging characters that you'll be bound to have a good time even when the gameplay itself comes short in some places. One of the last games on that list for sure has to be from the SNES era, either Geneaology or Thracia. Those games are cryptic as hell, not localized without translated roms and worst of all extremely long to sit through, making chapter resets painful.

@@SmugLilBugger yeah, i've played fe8 and I generally agree with that. The game feels like it was balanced around not resetting on unit deaths. Which made me get really attached to the characters. I like to, at least, attempt a no reset on death run before starting an FE game, which usually dies within the first few hours. But I didn't have to do that in FE8 and it was great.

going off their standard difficulties, I'd probably rank the games that I have played something like this: FE8 - super forgiving, especially if you are resetting on unit deaths. You can typically get away with errors that would be lethal in other games. FE3H - Time rewind massively lowers the difficulty. Alongside that, your lord of choice can typically solo the game. Like, my first playthrough was very sad because it just devolving into Edelgard running into a horde of enemies while everyone else died turn 3 (I was on casual mode). I'm pretty sure Dmitri can also do that. No clue on Claude tho. He has a gun. FE Awakening - Chrom is really fucking strong, even if you're not doing anything fancy with him. Like, with Robin, you have to at least go "huh I wonder if I should give them these specific broken things" while Chrom has it built in. It's been a really long time since I played Awakening, but I do remember the units feeling way stronger than the enemies. FE7 - this and fe8 were the only two I managed to successfully complete a blind ironman of. The reason 3H and Awakening are listed as easier than FE7 are because they were the first two games I played. And my tactics have since evolved from "charge in blindly" to "charge in after briefly checking enemy ranges." Anyways, Eliwood Normal feels mostly fair to do blind. There was, like, exactly one instance where I got bullshitted, and that was in an optional level (rip every mounted unit in my army lmao). I think Eliwood normal doesn't let you rush in guns blazing like 3H and Awakening lets you get away with, but if you have any sense of self-preservation on units, it's more than doable. FE6 - I've decided "fuck you I'm blind ironmanning this" and then I had to reset more than halfway through the game, potentially twice (the people I've been talking to about the run have minimal faith in my army to successfully finish the run). The main source of difficulty in the run does come from the game being unfair. Stuff like effective weaponry on enemies. You can expect to see someone with a horse slayer next to any side objective where a horse would be nice. You tend to have a lot of late game recruits that require specific characters to be alive in order to get them, which is, like, really bad for blind ironman, but I suppose blind casual isn't as bad. But the biggest thing is that your support units are all one-shot by everything, including ballistas. I don't like that the Dancer got one-shot by a ballista. And, clearly someone on the dev team agreed, since Nils/Ninian & Tethys are given much more room to breath (like, Nils & Tethys both survived the entire game in my playthroughs, while the FE6 dancer lasted, like, 2 chapters at best). I think FE6's difficulty isn't the highest per say, and I believe most of my unit deaths would have been preventable if I was more meticulous with checking everything, but the game is very punishing when it comes to its errors. FE4 - I got stuck on the fucking map where you recruit Leif because I split my army in a stupid way and now I can't kill the boss without getting snipe one-shot while Leif and friends have to run in a circle waiting for me to either rig the rng in my favor or walk the assess of my non-horsey girls across the entire fucking map. It's so sad. I think in general, this game requires you to put more thought into your actions than the previously mentioned games because mistakes are more punished. That or my Sigurd just got sad. Idk. But it is the first FE game where the were segments of maps that roadblocked me and required a lot of retries. FE Conquest - I really enjoyed this game, but my attempts to beat it on Classic Normal without resetting on death took me, like, 10 attempts before managing to reach the halfway point. Like, the game feels like it was balanced around casual mode. Which I think works to its benefit. Like, Casual/Normal felt like the game put up a fun challenge that could be reasonably beaten given a few swings at it. But the game definitely doesn't leave much in the way of insurance to prevent you from softlocking yourself on classic mode, and between the large number of mechanics to learn and the complex levels compared to the rest of the series, it's definitely got the hardest Normal Mode difficulty that I've played from the series.

A third axle to turn the coordinate system into a 3D rating chart. Nice

Engage's Level scaling Made my 20/20 all units of the game really, REALLY lengthy, AND any Playtrough really makes any not trained unit borderline useless

Don’t the levels of th enemies only scale with the bonus grinding maps?

@@AshenDust_ bonus maps skirmishes and dlc and specifically for the mc on top of that. It should still be an option to be set levels for the dlc maps pre losing rings map on an easy pre promote level and post the evolved ones.

@@ivanbluecool why should the game give you the ability to make the maps easier? Just turn the difficulty down.

didn't even mention his main artificial difficulty increase: ballistas, ballistas everywhere. The siege tomes are also there. also fun fact: all of the gaidens are fog of war. Only like one mandatory maps is fog of war, but also.... KAGA WE DIDN'T NEED TO MAKE EVERY GAIDEN *SPECIAL* BY MAKING THE PLAYER BLIND!

My only real experience with Kaga's game design is Vestaria Saga, and boy howdy does that have some bullshit. I tried to beat it blind, but it just wasn't meant to be. The fucking route split where all my good units ended up in one group, and all my worst units ended up in the other really fucked me.

Experiencing Thracia fog on a blind playthrough was real torture. Staff accuracy can also screw you pretty hard. Also, no sure hits or misses, operating on true hit% really stuck out here.

True I probably didn't word myself the best when it came to that, I was definitely exaggerating a little. But randomized skills like counter that you have to check for are exactly why I think a distinction between fairness and difficulty are needed

I mean you kind of can nostank like an idiot if you use Sol, and maybe Aversa's Night on top of that.

@@UltimusTerminus It doesn't work very well on Lunatic+, especially not without DLC. The way to play around Counter is to have a unit divebomb the Counter enemy, and then use a Rescue Staff to bring them back to safety. After that, you set up your conventional tank and anchor units to clear out as many enemies as possible while there is no Counter to worry about. You can also use archer classes because they are never in danger of taking damage from Counter and they can body block while slowing down the flow of incoming enemies. You don't want to lowman L+ with only Chrom and Robin, you actually want to field as many units as possible in order to build effective walls, clear as many enemies on player phase as possible, and have as many Rescue uses per turn available as possible.

@@oEllery I'm not insane enough to play Lunatic+ without DLC (Granted I had to make do with Harvest maps), so Robin with Sol, Galeforce, Armsthrift and two skills I forgot, and Sayri in backpack for Luck was enough to overpower enemies even with Counter. Not all the time though, since Sol procs are still RNG, but that happened very few times and not when it mattered.

The build you are describing is useful to have as a member of a Lunatic+ Roster, I just personally find that it's more effective to field more units. Especially archers and rescue staff users. Also the reason I mention DLC is because the video is explicitly ranking the games on fairness and difficult. I do agree Lunatic+ is one of the most unfair games in the history of fire emblem, but this is more because of their decision to make the game almost unplayable without grinding and then charge money for it.

Its actually kinda easy to pass Awakening Lunatic+ if you know the strat even without DLC, its just that the first map got configuration that are straight up impossible to beat. (For exemple the first mage in first map with Luna+ or initiative+, the hammer guy in map2 with initiative+, and many ennemy with initiative and luna+ combo) The strat is to hyper feed Robin, you can get him to lv7 on the first map of the game, lv10-12 after the 4map where you get Kellam and use the spotpass/point item bonus (its not dlc !) to get scolaris + magister and start the skill stacking shenaningans The hardest map of the game is actually the third map where you get the Sheperd. They are all at lv1, they have no stats at all and you face tons of ennemi rushing straight at you

FE6 is the least fair FE I have played

Ambush spawns are a problem, and though they’re the best 4 units in the game, there are many other good units: Allen, Lance, Shanna, Zealot, Dieck, Gonzales, Shin, Fir, Noah, Lugh, Niime, Cecilia, Klein, Igrene, Bartre, Exchidna all have some combo of having good match ups versus common enemy types, being able to reliably chip, provide staff or flying utility etc. Beating the game without those 4 would be more of a chore (especially the early game) but they’re not needed

how much fe6 have you played? I played a normal mode iron man (no true ending) and got to ch 9 of a hard mode iron man. It was difficult

@@seanm.9942 I did a normal mode run getting true ending and even that felt like it was constantly trying to punish me. I swear I’m not awful at FE, I’ve beaten CQ Lunatic, 3H on maddening now no NG+, RD, etc. but damn FE6 just drained out the fun with BS.

@@kingbeerz7978 To each their own

Fair point, even the more silly abilities the enemies have like summoning terrors and warping you have access to in the form of Invoke and Warp.

No you're right. Furthermore, terrain bonuses and penalties almost always benefit the player. They are only really an issue when bosses are stapled to them, like thrones.

Everytime you use Mila's turn wheel or the equivalent on 3H/Engage you are just accepting "your defeat" they only exist to save time, and it's okay. And you got lucky, witches always warp turn one and bang my slow/low res units.

@@juanhurtado7244 There are some cases where people use it to reroll their crit chance and not to survive. It is no less "accepting your defeat" as it is to use other lame tactics.

Yeah I had no idea as I've only ever played on hard

@@Speedwinghere very understandable lmao

Yeah, Sacred Stones goes by the idea of "You know...if people are starting on anything harder than the tutorial difficulty on purpose, then they probably already know the systems."

​@@lpfan4491given that hard is locked behind completing the game once, that's pretty fair. Difficulty and tutorials being separate choices is ideal, but FE8 didn't do it so badly.

@@rekenner It's not tho. FE8 allows you to go into hard right away.

To be fair that's a ptch on a rom, not the original game. If you were to simply translate the language I don't think you'd get all that.

Are you using a fan patch to justify explanations of things in the game that weren't originally there? What kind of logic is that?

@@AwakeTheFall You are ignoring the manual which also explained many of the mechanics that all players of games during the era read because they contained important and useful information. Which is an issue with this video as a whole to be honest, older games were balanced around players who read manuals because that is what people did in that era. Hell MGS famously had a segment where the back of the box was literally required to progress (leaving the game near unbeatable for people who rented it btw). The game's box and its contents were a part of the game in that era, and to not include game manual content in this evaluation inherently disadvantages all the older games.

@sadscientisthououinkyouma1867 I'm not ignoring anything. I asked another person how using a fan translated patch that included explainations that weren't in the game makes any sense, when people might not use said patch? What if you are using one of the other patches that don't do that? Also, who cares if the game manual explains anything? If you aren't (or know) japanese, and you weren't there nearly 25 years ago (and played the lowest selling game in the series till Radiant Dawn), that manual doesn't mean jack shit. The manual point has literally nothing to do with what I commented, but you had to just jump in to correct me. Maybe next time, read the comment.

Yeah skirmishes are pretty rare on maddening and seem to be based more on real time than ingame maps

Yes thank you! I was expecting this game to be towards the bottom of fairness and was in shock when he put it so high. I agree with all your points and then you add in the translation error that caused most new players to start on normal(but really hard) mode and basically get soft locked in the first 5 chapters of the dawn brigade. Also random characters leaving at random times, potentially taking super important skills or weapons. This game is literally the definition of unfair. Still my favorite game in the series though

Conquest îs not fair în chapters like 25 and 26 and 28

@@mihaimercenarul7467 idk the only things that don't really feel "fair" in conquest are things you realistically actually have full control over. just bring freeze staffs and get the silence? or don't turtle? idk

@@xertiio nope, not on chapter 25 and 26. There are moments where în order to survive you need an actual build that you need to prepare before, like actually knowing before hand. For example the right hall way of chapter 25 with the ninja with spy shuriken. You can send any tank or someone with good avoid and you will die. The endgame of conquest îs pretty ubfair at times.

@@mihaimercenarul7467 again, something you have complete control over. you get entrap and freeze staves. i've beaten the map on 0% growths so :/ and chapter 26 is unironically very easy. you literally only need to meet stat thresholds lmao

@@xertiio nope, on lunatic only having meat shields will get you killed în that Hans hall. Also needing specific staffs means you need to prepare before hand with a strategy specific for that chapter 25 with the spy shuriken, which îs impossible to figure out the first time so you have to cheese it. Also by your logic, no fire emblem game is ubfair since every impossible encounters can be cheesed or prepare before hand. So conquest has some ubfair bs near the endgame.

As a newbie to the series, what is ironmanning in FE? I know the term from other games but is it just permadeath and no rewind, or what?

@@ElusiveEllieIron-man is essentially no saving (unless your taking a break to come back later). So it isn’t just no rewind, it’s no resets. Permadeath is on and even if a good unit dies you have to just keep going without them. If you get a game over you restart the entire game.

It's not as unfair as people mythologize it to be. Thracia is built around broken tools that can be used symmetrically by player and enemy. One of the biggest examples of "Thracia bullshit" is status staff effects lasting forever unless restored. While this can lead to unfun situations where the enemy sleeps a crucial unit from across the map, the player themself has access to so many powerful staff units, and with thracia's status staff hit formula being the highest accuracy in the series and status staves handed to the player like candy and often able to be stolen or captured, you can have your mages and clerics 100% accurate silence an enemy bishop before it can 100% accurate sleep one of your physical units. This comes as a direct contrast to certain other games that I would argue are unfair in that the most powerful tools in the game are only worthwhile in enemy hands because they are too unreliable to hit one of whereas a group of six enemies can fish for positive odds (gba status staff hit formula and enemy density come to mind). That's just one example of the player having ample counterplay to "bullshit enemies". The potential to softlock is dramatically overstated by the community, with many softlocks requiring you to do things lose every thief in your party, have broken your hammerne staff, and didn't buy keys when given the opportunity; these are very esoteric and unlikely situations that only get held against thracia when they are also present in other fe games. Thracia's mechanics are actually explained better than people say in the game, and you are given several very low-stakes maps that you can take at your own pace to discover how the core mechanics work on your own; just because they are not linear tiny arenas with forced lines of play doesn't mean that they aren't effective tutorial spaces. Side objectives are mostly intuitive, while the game doesn't explicitly tell you at one point, the civilian hostages talk about wanting to go home and you can put two and two together. The game has ambush spawns but they are far more fairly placed and telegraphed than FE6 or Awakening ambushes. Really, the "Thracia is unfair" stigma comes from a dogshit pre-2019 fan translation and internet tall tales. This isn't me arguing Thracia is the best game by the way, it's not in my top 3 and maybe not in my top 5, but people are extremely uncharitable towards it

​Agreed 100%.

@@harb1ng3r82 I mean yeah a lot of that is true but also Thracia has the tp forest and nothing is more unfair than not being able to play the game (because your character is isolated with their action ended). When ppl talk about Thracia bs they're talking about FoW maps (first one is literally the 3rd map of the game) where you don't even know where to go, not enemy strength or sieges and ballistae

Which game do you mean? (that should be ranked more unfair than Thracia)

​@jaskaranbajwa8443 the first fog of war map isn't too bad (though if you take way too long Shiva WILL attack you and that is unfair lmao)

True chads know that Frederick can never really fall off. With either reclassing or as an excellent pair up bot.

Also considering most of the highest difficulties are designed around or are straight up gated behind a second (or third on FE7's case) playthrough, so they don't really cater to blind players at all. A lot of "unfairness" is just being unable to predict what is coming up/not knowing what to prepare for, which in most cases is greatly mitigated by not going in blind. Edit: Of course, drastic changes in highest difficulties (Lunatic Reverse, Lunatic+) effectively make the experience blind again, so my point is moot for those.

@@BHox01 Ironically, Lunatic+ is not drastically changed or blind at all. It is literally Lunatic again, except the game rolls the dice if the chapter is supposed to be impossible or not.

@@lpfan4491 while I know what you mean, that is a pretty drastic net difference if you're considering how the player experience is modified

Even as a thracia bro, yeah 99% hit maximum and 1% hit minimum is kinda bad, though the game actually isn't that hard at all, once you train up a strong magic unit, you can pretty much sweep the game while training all your staff bots

A very fair response, the Thracia stuff really comes down to personal takes on whether some of its more wild mechanics are part of the challenge or artificial difficulty. That outlook honestly applies to all the games.

I agree with everything here but perma status and stamina are bs. Both can lead to potential soft locks which I personally believe are signs of a poorly designed game. Also, full black fog of war is stupid. Pretty sure most people can see more than just 5 feet in front of them.

Honestly one thing I think people should do for character rankings would be by a point system. F-S Tier has no substance at all. Give Units more points depending on joining time, base stats, utility, class and then see who performs the best. Through that technique units who are "carries" like utility character might come out better then expected

Absolutely, I would love to see a more comprehensive way of rating and comparing units like that. Saying A RANK B RANK means absolutely nothing

⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠@@Paterinothe problem is when you try to “sum up” a character based on their individual stat rankings. A character who is a 5/5 in availability but a 2/5 in base stats but a 4/5 with utility? What does that mean for their final ranking? Are base stats so important that they remain a 2/5 character? Does availability and utility matter that much for them to be a 3 or 4/5 overall unit?

@@Speedwingherethe problem is getting into nuance is long and difficult. Talking about the viability of dancers for example, yea their dancing capabilities are very powerful, but people leave out that that is another unit you are having to baby and watch. Especially since, in FE7 (since it is the one I am most familiar with) Dancers often start out very weak and almost any amount of combat will see them dead. Yes they become dodge tanks with high res but that takes like over a dozen levels to get to. Before then you will constantly have to baby your dancer. And assuming you don’t end-turn spam on a seize map, you can’t force feed them mass amounts of experience at all. They just get 10 EXP per player turn and that’s it. And most maps in FE7 early-mid game aren’t longer than 10-15 turns so your dancer is only getting around a single level a map. If you just deployed another cavalier or fighter or whatever that’s a unit that you don’t have to worry about a disproportionate amount. In some ways they’re like Est characters in that regard. It’s much easier to just say “dancers in FE7 are a 4 or 5/5 because dancing OP and dodge-tanking.”

@@MormonDude Stuff like that would definitely matter in a ranking. It also were more suggestive, but by rating units individual in many fields would give every character the same treatment. Units like Rutger break the game and would likely have a lot of maxxed out points in different fields, in comparsion Nino wouldnt compare that well. For a final ranking you would have a lot more insight how the finalized rating wraps up. A lot more thoughts go through this process too. Basically after rating the units in the specific fields, you would then add the numbers up and get a clear ranking of the whole unit cast of the game.

Fans of the games I like are cool, fans of the games I don't like are lame

Personally I feel like it’s kinda become a “I’m so good at Fire Emblem 776 was easy” type of thing, I feel like people saying it are just that or they’re good at FE/srpgs in general. He did this considering highest difficulty so I wouldn’t put it as the highest, but definitely not near the bottom because that’s cap especially if you count first play throughs.

@@not_brandon5984 This type of thing goes beyond FE or even strategy games. There’s a lot of developed skill and knowledge that Person A may have from playing a genre a lot (or maybe they’re just naturally good at the genre), that Persons B C D are lacking, but A takes for granted and speaks as though it’s the minimum standard. Which makes talking about things like difficulty feel arbitrary at best.

That's a good way of thinking about it, I was mostly running things like stats of enemies in my head but you're probably right. Do you have to do different strategies throughout the game or can you just find one broken thing and do it over and over

Them being low for the enemies makes it more unfair, because statistical outliers hit you harder. There is a reason missing an 80-90 hit followed by dying to a 1% hit, 1% crit is a Fe6 meme...

I agree with your thracia take, chapter 10 for example, you have like 5 or 6 ballistas, owen and the other guy in the middle of the chapter, the siege tomes spam and etc, alot of chapters are pretty hard

I don't know if saying low hit rates affect the enemy as much as the player is true. FE6 has a lot of time pressure maps, and player forces vs enemy forces are very asymmetric. The enemy doesn't have have to care about time pressure or losing units, the player does. Which can make it hard to just evade stack on maps with turn limits and brigands/thieves, etc. I don't think the low hit rates are really a fairness thing, but I do think it does make the game a bit more difficult on the whole.

I had no idea that was the case, I don't think I've ever played on anything but hard

@@Speedwinghere haha yeah that's the case with most people that touched Sacred Stones, but I had to see the tutorial events (I do hackroms) and they were a lot. I think the first 7/8 chapters have tutoriales (I think the last one is the use of Ballista) and, while not great, they teach you the basic concepts like trading rescuing and such

You are the goat

Inevitable end is pretty horrible I do agree, the infinite status is more approachable imo because you kind of deal with by intentionally having units get entrapped to go deal with them

@@Speedwinghere This requires extensive prior knowledge about the staff AI to be reliable, especially considering that the staff AI in fates can be pretty hard to predict without that knowledge.