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The pact ring prologue, a real endurance test. This must have been the most enemy units I've ever seen in a map. Possibly beaten by Sigurd's paralogue, but that's a gimmick map, here the objective is to rout everything.
The hard way:
It takes a true 5D strategist to see the tactical potential in getting ass rammed from all sides.
The correct way:
Bum rush north, clear as many enemies as possible before reinforcements, watch them come to you in a nice and tidy fashion.
Engage Maddening Lunatic continues at a steady pace, I think I'll finish it for good soon rather than dropping it for a month again. Going through the remaining paralogues after which there a few story maps left and that'll be it.
Marth's: a joke map. Split in two with some far off treasure chests and the boss room right next to the starting point. Those chests have practically nothing of value in them and if you take that detour you'll get constant reinforcements along with a moving boss. So just don't, rush the boss for an easy win.
Celica's: a gimmick map. Start on a boat, long stretch of beach, boss at the other end. Three summoners midway through who constantly bring in reinforcements. The gimmick is Celica will use ragnarok warp to close the gap once one of those summoners goes down, so I went in with 3H trio/Soren for some lucky long range hits. Boss warps in, dead by turn three. Considering these were DLC emblems, I can only imagine this map being much more of a Normandy experience for those with just vanilla emblems.
Roy's: lmao, wyvern knights. I counted 31 of them out at the same time. Good thing I was very well equipped so it was all very manageable. Once you get to the boss there's not much he can do but stall. Veronica's book of worlds passive goes through that in fact, since it seems to deal the damage after combat. Least useful trivia.
The xenologue... goes to the very bottom of the "Nintendo DLC I may finish one day" pile, thanks to horrendous first impressions. You have to protect a dragon femboy faggot dead weight from really annoying enemies that debuff with every attack. And this seems to be a recurring theme for the expansion based on what I've read, babysitting a unit I'd normally get into a workplace accident. Those extra recruits know who to blame for never making it to my team.
Some musings on the last few story maps before I get to overall impressions.
Map 23:
Well, it's a lava map. More annoying than difficult, you will get rooted to hell until you deal with those mages. The cutscene at the end is actually pretty good. Sure took me by surprise.
Map 24:
Oh god, this map. A million unforeseen ways for units to die. Party split across three lanes, boss at the end of the middle one, occasional blizzards that push back anyone not between lanes or in front of a rock. So you take everyone to the middle, but then it gets congested, you scramble to find a safe spot for everyone, and an archer or mage always finds a way to sneak in for a kill.
Map 25:
The highlight of the game. Excellent music, constant pressure from reinforcements, heavy story tie in. All around a very good map.
Map 26:
It's alright. Main challenge comes from splitting the party right to deal with each mini boss in a timely manner. Some real close calls. If you manage to dish out 400 total damage in a round it becomes much less drawn out. Time to start making use of that effective: fell dragon passive.
+ really fun build variety, with caveats. Emblems bring lots of consideration to the table and finding unit combinations that work is satisfying. Of course once you've found one it's easy to stick with it rather than experimenting further...
+ great maps for the most part. Very few go the way you'd expect. Thr DLC maps and paralogues offer the most challenge, story maps are a bit less even in difficulty but do throw curve balls and double maps at you to really test you.
+ great soundtrack, I'm a sucker for layered battle themes. They didn't skimp out on this front.
- beating a dead horse, but yes, the story, writing and characters are puerile trash for the most part. I never watched a single support conversation and only watched cutscenes for context; acquired lost IQ instead. There are some glimpses of what could have been in the later cutscenes and I saw a comment point out the in battle dialogue had the better bits which I agree with. Get the delocalization patch at least.
- boring class system. I know 3H was more of an exception but the class system in that was infinitely more interesting. In this game, 90% of characters have a clear "career" if a two-step program can be considered as such.
Now, a more detailed breakdown of the balance/difficulty, on Maddening:
Overall, I was happy with the level of challenge and I did not doubt the choice of difficulty once during my 200 hours. This is definitely the way the game is meant to be played.
DLC maps and paralogues were consistently difficult in particular and a notch above most story maps in that regard.
DLC emblems provide incredibly important utility and strenghten the game's strongest aspect of build variety considerably. The reward for clearing a long and difficult map is an Emblem that's a notch above most of the story ones. Things are as they should be.
The sheer amount of unit + Emblem combos means I can't possibly give an accurate assessment of all of them, but there are definite diffences in viability. Lucina's bonded shield made all the difference on several maps and allowed for aggressive play; Micaiah had a map wide party heal; later largely replaced by Veronica's ease of use + debuff removal. Sigurd on a thief allowed for unprecedented movement. Byleth has dance, I don't need to elaborate. Ike made Panette a very versatile tank or enemy phase sweeper. 3H trio could handle just about any situation on a lone wolf unit.
Unit falloff is absolutely brutal. For the last third of the game my team had shrunk down to 13 good units. The last few story maps had you deploy with 14 slots; I had to dig out a reject and slap Eirika on him to make him mildly useful. Tiki may have worked better in hindsight. Some units are hard replaced by later ones. Vander, the game's Jaegen, falls off a cliff. Some units really need attention if you want to make them useful. Goldmary never quite truly shined, but she had her moments, even if largely carried by Hector.
Some resources come at an acceptable rate, others are way, way too rare. Bond fragments (Emblem leveling) and upgrade materials are fine; getting silver was always satisfying and you'd always have a use for it. Gold was WAY too stingy, particularly towards the end. It got to the point where I could not afford to upgrade the S rank weapons despite having the materials. I fought a total of five skirmishes during the entire game, not all of which even awarded gold. SP, used for inheriting skills, was stupidly difficult to get. Forget about buying anything costing over 2000 and you'd better know exactly what you want on each unit and be willing to wait a long while to get it. Just revamp this system entirely.
Trials were absolutely not worth doing for the Emblem weapon upgrades. Just multiply the rewards by 5x at least.
I used nothing but cosmetic mods - I think getting a rebalance mod, particularly on Maddening, may be worth it even on a first playthrough. There should be one for SP, nothing to lose by fixing that system. There are some unit rebalances and they are less clear cut of a choice, but if it helps more units stay viable for longer, that's good.
The DLC is absolutely worth it and a large chunk of the game's best content is there. Did not do the expansion.
Felt starved for a game and bought Engage. Started on hard. Felt pleasantly surprised by the difficulty on the first few maps, felt appropriately challenging. Very different from Three Houses given how piss easy it was, I was already done with it before they patched in lunatic difficulty.
The pseudo-gacha mechanics irritate me to no end. I know you could just ignore all the time wasting shit in the base like cooking and pushups and petting the dog, but I'm autistic enough to not want to ignore anything that gives permanent bonuses or resources. Character designs feel way too modern, but at least the facial features have some variation and all the adult women have giant bazongas.
Also the game gives too many noble units. I'm only at the chapter where you got Roy and Leif rings, but given that all the nobles get a unique class that at glance seem better than the regular variants. I think I'll bench some of them just out of spite. The engage mechanic seems like a mixed bag. I like some of the tactical options like the ragnarok strike teleport and having a different weapon set available for finite time. But I don't like them giving passive bonuses, now you just feel gimped if you don't bring all your emblem rings on a fight.
Combat feels pretty good. I like the break mechanic, makes the weapon triangle actually feel relevant to an extend. And the class passives are a good addition too, cavalry units having better mobility in the older games felt like a straight upgrade, but in this one it's situational. Staff users having some limited combat utility is good too. And fliers feel more common than in most games, so archers have their use.
Liking it so far, but the game really does make me feel like skipping all the dialogue. Do they really have the make the protagonist super special and have every single NPC encounter start by remarking how awed they are by his presence?
Finally making ways into Echoes. This game does a lot of unique stuff that might throw you for a loop. Stat gains are low so a +3 is already really good, while multiple +1s in a row isn't unlikely. Units have exactly one item slot shared between healing items and equipment and I haven't found a way to switch between the base weapon and whatever may be in that slot without putting it in the convoy, so I guess the game considers such weapons to always be superior. At least food in the convoy can be eaten directly, which does mean the MC has a reliable source of healing.
The balance on hard-classic is good, forcing me to make good use of my resources, though there are funky elements. Archers for one have never been this busted, at least early on. They have 1-3 range by default, meaning they can always shoot back. Add to this the +1 from anything but the basic bow and you have 4 range units in the early game, hard stalling your pegasus riders. There is only one attack stat which may have funny implications for hybrids later on if this game has those, but so far it means whoever gets the levin sword (read: Alm) becomes a god dealing twice as much damage as anyone else.
Using weapons grants extra skills such as swap, but I didn't get to check what the logic behind keeping those skills is - whether they're tied to having that specific weapon on that specific character, etc. Such skills as well as spells use HP which doesn't matter much when it's 1 HP for a single spell, but when you get to doubling with Thunder costing 2x2HP on a squishy mage, you need to account for it. Speaking of which, 1:1 healing on Nosferatu, lol, lmao. Genny the cleric on Celica's route also learns a decoy spell almost immediately which allows for some delicious cheese. After Engage it's nice to go back to basics in a sense but at the same time this game keeps me guessing.
Did exactly what I did after playing through Engage, went right back to my favorite entry in the franchise. Echoes has its issues, maps being chief among them, but is such a great experience.
It's hard for me to be too angry about the maps in SoV, as they just tried to be as faithful as they could to Gaiden's extremely boring maps. It doesn't make 'em any more fun, but I can respect trying to stay true in a remake.
Excellent Fire Emblem game in terms of map design and mechanics. But writing is dogshit and it's very on the nose with player dicksucking, but that applies to every FE since Awakening.
Echoes can get nasty sometimes. If both you and the enemy team are about to move to the same spot on the overworld, you will go first, meaning the enemy will ambush you and mapping the order of units in the menu to what they'll be on the map in such a scenario is anyone's guess. So be prepared for your fliers to get shot down before you have a chance to react. Though as I was writing this I did remember I didn't try moving the other army instead to see if the enemy would move regardless on the other side. In any case, having both armies out in the field is just asking to get ambushed. I don't know how other people handle it, but I've just been playing one army for several maps at a time while keeping the other one parked. Grieth's map was the first one where after several failed attempts I just backtracked to town and switched over to Alm for the time being. I'll have to get a few levels and try a different approach next time.
I do appreciate curveballs - having predetermined deployment, double maps etc forces you to think on your toes and tests your skill. Come to think of it, I don't think Three Houses had any maps that deviated from the norm in that regard. Missed opportunity.
I'm staying as blind as possible but based on the class trees I've seen, Echoes is shaping out to be longer than I initially thought. An entire new class tier in the DLC along with lots of new maps suggests I won't get out of this with less than 100 hours under my belt. Then again, after Engage every strategy game might as well feel like a brief skirmish...
Be careful with the DLC, some of the maps give endless items/XP and will make the main campaign far less interesting.
I'm not sure Echoes really needed another tier of classes; Gaiden already had third tier promotions and a decent amount of flexibility for a low budget NES game made in 1991-92.
For whatever it's worth: Engage is the only game I've ever played that I dropped because of the shitty writing. I knew it will be bad before getting the game, sort-of prepared myself, but this was worse than I ever anticipated. I know that 'skip' button exists, and planning to come back some day, but it left such a bad taste in my mouth it will be a while before I do it. Gameplay was fun though.
PSA on Engage busywork: I have played minmax maddening runs of various stripes and you can absolutely comfortably ignore:
*All food ingredient gathering bullshit. Cooking is at least semirandom. Just cook the people you want to cook.
*All minigames.
*Bond ring gacha. Completely unnecessary unless you want to savescum for Dire Thunder, which is nice to have but you must scum for it.
*Every single dialogue line.
*Remember you can level up all the relationships in the menu instead of walking around.
So, after every battle, you simply pick up the loot in the battle map => cook => upgrade equipment => arena fights => done. Everything else can be entirely ignored.
3H can also be played with most monastery ignored, but it's faster to do so in Engage.
Sacred Echoes is a total conversion of Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, a game which is widely considered a spiritual successor to Fire Emblem’s black-sheep second game Fire Emblem Gaiden, into a demake of its modern re-release Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. More than a simple 1:1 port of a 3DS game onto a handheld system two generations earlier, Sacred Echoes attempts to present what a full GBA-era release of Shadows of Valentia might have been by uniting the source game with the best-loved aspects of GBA-era Fire Emblem’s visuals and gameplay. It additionally addresses some commonly-cited detractions from the experience of the original Shadows of Valentia.
Reached the point in Echoes where it's throwing some real tricky maps at me.
Alm vs Baba Yaga:
Fort on a hill, can't reach it from the side you start on. Have to go around while dodging archers and gargoyles on the sides. Your own archers (bow knights with 5 range, lol) will be the MVPs here, since they can take pots shots at mages and such inside the building, and the boss will waste its own HP on fortify at every opportunity. She has Medusa with 7(!) range which reduces anything to 1 HP. So you have to clear the majority of enemies before entering and then fish for a lucky crit or one shot otherwise. By now dread fighters are commonplace and they're here to stall you.
Celica vs Dracula's Fun Swamp:
Here's that Normandy experience. Start off by crossing a swamp that halves movement and deals 5 damage a turn. So just have non-mages hug Genny like their lives depend on it (they do) and crawl to the other side, where you'll be greeted by a dread fighter, several mages, a couple archers and two cantors far away that both summon gargoyles. Expel is once again OP when it doesn't whiff, but that doesn't help against all the possible ways your worn down team can get wrecked. I put Valbar out front with the intention of protecting the casters, only to find out any of the mages could one round him, and space was at a premium. Didn't help that less than half of my team was on their third promotions.
I've read that thracia776 apparently has the best maps of the series. So that might be something to consider, if you like tactical JRPGs. I'm currently doing a FE marathon where I play all maps of all games in release order, currently just on map 5 of the first game (of 25 maps in that game).
It's something else. Thracia does things most rpgs never even do. All your gear comes from capturing enemies and shaking them for loot. Tieves can disable mages stealing their magic tomes. Level design reminds me of some baby wizardy, together with fog of war and even teleporting tiles in level or two.
Most mechanically interesting game in the series imo.
