Chapter 16A
Now this is what I’m talking about. There are two routes to approaching this chapter. The first involves dealing with Eyrios’s group. The second involves the lower house where Sleuf joins the player’s group. Eyrios is interesting in that he’ll join your group if Olwen is either dead or was never recruited in the first place. There’s a discussion to be had about who’s better (although the last time I checked most people said it was Eyrios) and what the trade offs are.
Whatever side of that debate you’re on Eyrios’s presence does add an extra element of strategy to the level because the player either needs to recruit him, which makes the map trickier, or needs to kill him due to his high movement and ballistic siege tome. The map has three turtle disincentives in the form of brigands who threaten the villages in the map. If the player moves along the southern route pegasus knights will show up and can ruin the player’s day. If the player’s playing especially slow then Conomore and an army of cavaliers will appear from where the player initially began and will charge at the player. Moral of the story: You better play fast on this map.
Kempf acts as a mini boss on this map and he’s also backed up by a load of ballista which can make approaching the map even more difficult. The boss here is alright. He’s got a ranged brave lance, an armorslayer and a knight killer so you do have to pay attention to what kind of unit you use to deal with him.
Overall Rating: Excellent
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Chapter 17A
Fun fact: I’ve already done a review of this map before. You can read it here:
I still stand by what I said in that review too.
Overall Rating: Excellent
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Chapter 16B
This chapter has some pretty annoying aspects to it. For starters the map throws random, hidden warp tiles at the player that will send the player’s units to random spots on the map. Usually these spots send the player’s unit backwards. Crap like this reeks of the Guide Dang It! trope which always counts as a negative for stuff like this. True you can deal with it by moving on the square and using an item but in order for that strategy to work the player has to already know where the tiles are. To make matters worse there are certain tiles of the map that the player is not allowed to move on.
The good news is that there are positives to this map. The boss may have a berserk staff but this time he’s in a position that the player can reach so unlike previous chapters you don’t have to use warp in order to get to him. There are also a lot of goodies to either steal or capture (an extra Pugi, a Luna manual and a couple of Master weapons for instance). The map gives you three recruitable characters and sadly only one of them is worth recruiting: Sara. Overall, I’d say the negatives outweigh the positives here.
Overall Rating: Below Average
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Chapter 17B
This chapter is odd. The enemy unit density is pretty tame, but there’s also an abundance of ballista. This prevents flier skipping, although the lack of another bridge means that if you want to get to the left side of the map without going the long way around you basically have to ferry your units with a flier. The villages in this chapter seem pointless since you can get the Knight Proof at the end without ever visiting them. Visiting the villages results in NPC allies, but in order to get that same Knight Crest at the end of the map the player has to keep them all alive. It’s way easier to ignore the villages and the payoff is the exact same so why bother visiting the villages?
There are two ways of approaching this map. The first is on the far left. It requires a lot of para dropping but there are far less ballista in that route. Then there’s the route to the far right. It has way more ballista and you can open the gate for a mere 20,000 gold in a game where gold is really hard to come by. Why would we choose that route again? The chapter’s only turtle disincentive arrives once the player is close to the boss. This further incentivizes approaching from the far left since you’ll be farther away from Amalda’s troops and will thus have more time to deal with the boss.
Overall Rating: Meh
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Chapter 18
So this map is interesting in that it can either be extremely frustrating or it’s not that bad. Xavier’s recruitment is what makes the difference. If the player chooses to recruit him, the chapter is going to be pretty frustrating due to the fact that it requires getting random NPC’s over to different enemy generals who will attack them. The game never tells you which NPC goes to which general which adds to the frustration. If I were to make a “Top 10 Characters with the Hardest Difficulty Requirements” Xavier would easily be # 1.
There’s another really difficult item to get called the member card that requires the player to keep all the Lenster soldiers alive. The member card only has one use, which is pretty stupid if you ask me.
The good news however is that both Xavier and the Member Card are optional and neither of these is important to beating the game. I’ve never even bothered to recruit Xavier or get the Member Card and I’ve beaten Thracia 776 4 times. On the other hand I will downgrade the chapter for requiring a huge amount of effort over two things that are definitely not worth it. On the other hand, I don’t think either of these things are enough to warrant a fail or below average rating on their own since they can be skipped and should the player choose to skip both of these then the map plays differently.
Enemy reinforcements in this map are weird in that they arrive all over the place and a good number of them show up too early to count as turtle disincentives. Most reinforcements show up later and do act as turtle disincentives. The treasures marked as 1 or 2 are threatened by thieves, which act as turtle disincentives. The map also splits the player’s units up into 2 groups and provides two means of approaching the map.
I’m going to give this map two ratings because of how big of an impact Xavier’s recruitment is on playing it.
If the player does not try to recruit Xavier: Decent
If the player does try to recruit Xavier: Fail
- Fun fact: This is not the only chapter that will ever get two different ratings. There are two maps in Conquest that get two ratings because of how differently they play out between Hard and Lunatic mode. Fire Emblem 12 will most likely have a lot of different maps with two ratings because there are a good amount of chapters that play differently between Maniac and Lunatic mode.
- For this chapter I’m going to use the higher rating since recruiting Xavier is optional. The change in rating for this map isn’t based on difficulty like the ones in Conquest or Fire Emblem 12 which makes it a special case.
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Chapter 19
This map is pretty stinking cool. A significant percentage of the player’s army starts near the enemy’s army with the enemy consisting of mounted units. Meanwhile the player still has troops at the top of the map right next to the escape tile. You’d think this map would be super easy to trivialize right? Wrong. It’s a Thracia Escape chapter so the player has to get all of their troops to that tile. There are also green NPC units that need rescuing. If they all escape then the player gets a Knight Proof. There are also Brigands that approach from the right who will make a beeline for the villages which make this chapter that much more challenging. There are also even more thieves near the top of the map who will also make a beeline for the villages.
In short, this map will punish the ever living crap out of turtling. What’s even cooler is that the two armies chasing the player are led by recruitable units. The catch here is that the enemy commanders can only be recruited by characters that the player visited during the route split. That means that only one of them can be recruited. However, recruiting is tricky because these units will inevitably be surrounding by other enemies who can kill them pretty easily. That means that the player will actually be required to think about how they’re going to recruit these characters, which makes this map even more strategic. Good luck killing the boss too with all the ballista and powerful enemies by his side. That being said it’s certainly not impossible to achieve.
Overall Rating: Excellent
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Thracia’s Map Rating Score So Far:
Excellent - 9
Pretty Good - 4
Decent - 5
Meh - 2
Below Average - 3
Fail - 5
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