The Most Busted Mechanic in Fire Emblem: Infinite Range Warp

 

Out of curiosity, is anyone surprised that warp is # 1 on this list? Yeah, me neither. If you've been reading this list, you'll notice that one theme of busted mechanics boils down to: "This mechanic makes it easier to get from Point A to Point B". In that regard, nothing makes it easier to get from Point A to Point B than the Warp Staff. 

Any run that uses the warp staff is usually called a "warp skip" run. That tells you everything you need to know about how stupidly powerful the warp staff is: It lets you skip entire chapters because you can bring someone straight to the boss, or the throne. All those enemies on the map between the player and the boss / throne are pointless since warp lets the player effortlessly beat the map without needing to deal with them.

Like Awakening's Pair Up, the warp staff instantly dominates the game's design. Any character who can use warp is high tier at least, and the best unit in the game under other circumstance. In order to make warp not broken, the game has to be designed in such a way that getting from Point A to Point B isn't the main objective. Most of the time, a given map objective in Fire Emblem will require that, which means that warp will break it in half. 

 I'll finish this post with something that a Fire Emblem reddit user said 6 years ago:

"The only way warp can "work" is if you deliberately design maps that force the player to use warp in certain spots and take the warp staff out of the player's hands in other areas that would otherwise break the game. 

Can warp be designed well? Yes, but it requires a shitton of playtesting and being aware that any oversight whatsoever can break your game in half. Or, you nerf warp to the ground to the point where it's a stupid gimmick. And what benefit does it bring you? Warp in its inherent nature basically lets you skip vast swathes of a given chapter, which basically goes against the entire point of designing chapters, terrain, enemy layouts, etc. to begin with."

(Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/fireemblem/comments/9c099v/comment/e57lqbm/) 

Top 10 Most Busted Mechanics in Fire Emblem # 2: Ferrying Mechanics (Awakening Pair-Up & The Rescue Mechanic)

 

Awakening Pair-Up

      If there's one mechanic that's absurdly overpowered, it's Pair Up from Awakening. Pair Up's power comes from how massive and gargantuan the stat boosts are. If that wasn't enough, Pair-Up also provides two additional bonuses that are both really powerful: The first is Dual Strike wherein the backup character can also attack, making it significantly easier to kill enemies. The second is Dual Guard, where the backup unit has the ability to completely block an attack, thereby negating enemy damage.

      So why is Awakening's Pair Up mechanic this high on the list? Well....

It makes juggernauting extremely easy: Pair-Up grants massive stat bonuses to the point where a character can become powerful enough to steamroll the game by themselves. This is what leads to the Robin solos. 

In addition to that, being able to attack again or potentially block all damage from an enemy attack makes Pair-Up that much more powerful as a mechanic. It can help your lead unit kill faster, and it can keep them alive longer. It can do pretty much everything.

It Dominates the Game's Design

Pair Up is so powerful that the entire game has to be designed around it. If the game isn't, then there's no challenge. However, by designing the entire game around it, the player is essentially forced to use it. Though to be fair, Pair Up is so beneficial that there's no reason not to use it so the game designers might as well assume that it will be used. After all, there's no drawback to using Pair Up, which reinforces just how dominant the mechanic is.

But what about Fates? 

That game did Pair Up right, didn't it? Not really. Even if the Fates version of Pair Up is more balanced and better designed than Awakening's, it's still way too powerful. Dual Guard still makes juggernauting relatively easy since the stat boosts that can come from that can still be huge. Slow characters can become fast, characters that deal low damage can kill things, and thanks to the shields becoming consistent, a character with Dual Guard has better survivability. 

Recap: Even when it's better balanced, Pair Up makes juggernauting far too easy. It's a mechanic that's so powerful that it always dominates the game's design. There's no drawback to using it, and because the game designs itself with the use of this mechanic in mind, not using it can put the player at a disadvantage.

The Rescue Mechanic

And here we have the more balanced, but still broken, older sibling of Pair Up: Rescue. The rescue mechanic could be best defined as: 

"Rescuing allows playable units to pick up allied units – using the Rescue command – who are smaller than them, in order to protect them from harm or to carry them around the battlefield."

(Source: https://fireemblemwiki.org/wiki/Rescue_%28command%29)

Why is the mechanic this high up the list? In the hands of the right player, the rescue mechanic can do a lot! It allows players to move longer distances in shorter periods of time. Remember the # 5 spot on this list?  The spot about fliers and mounted units? This mechanic gives them an even bigger advantage over infantry units because this is valuable utility they can use, and take advantage of, that infantry units can't. Fliers can even rescue infantry units across terrain like water tiles and mountains, making fliers even better than before.

Scylla did a great job pointing out another reason why rescue is busted: "Rescue also allows you to be far more aggressive with your positioning because you can just pull a unit out of a bad spot;"

What makes the mechanic even more powerful is when players start implementing rescue chains, where multiple mounted and flying units take a rescued character and ferry them across the map. It's pretty common among faster playthroughs, and this ultimately results in the player being able to beat entire maps in quicker periods of time. It also results in the player being incentivized to use mostly mounted and flying units, which is bad for the purpose of balancing.

Quick Recap: Rescuing is busted because it allows the player to move from A to B in far faster periods of time, erases the negatives of bad positioning, and makes mounted and flying units even better by giving them additional, powerful utility. 

Moral of the Story: Ferrying mechanics are super busted, and Fire Emblem as a franchise would do well to remove them from future titles.

Top 10 Most Busted Mechanics: Movement Refreshing Shenanigans (# 3)

 

# 3 - Movement Refreshing Shenanigans

Want to make your game easier to beat? Create a way for the player to make one or more units be able to move again. Dancers first debuted in Fire Emblem 3 Book 2, and ever since then they've made a huge impact on their respective games. If you want to beat the game quickly, you're going to make effective use of them. 

Then Holy War came around and gave dancers the ability to refresh the movement of up to four different units at once. The amount of strategies that opens up is insane! 

That being said, dancers aren't really enough to make it this high up the list. That's why this entry is titled "Movement Refreshing Shenanigans". This entry encompasses all the other additional ways in which one or more units can move again. This includes stuff like:

Galeforce - A skill where a Dark Flier in Awakening will be able to move again after killing an enemy. Keep in mind, Dark Fliers are an eight movement flier class that have access to tomes. They can easily kill enemies, which means that they can move a very long distance and kill two enemies per turn. Keep in mind that this skill exists in a game where dancers also exist. 

Dance of the Goddess / Goddess Dance: A gambit / emblem where you can refresh 4 adjacent units. Keep in mind that this exists in a game where there's also a dancer. Scylla pointed out that one unit can "move 4 times in one turn". Super busted.

Raging Storm (Three Houses): "Effective against Dragon foes; If attack lands, user can move again." 

Unlike Galeforce, Edelgard doesn't even have to land a kill and she'll still get to move again. Make Edelgard a Wyvern and she'll be able to break the game efficiently. It's also possible to use this up to 5 times. It's true that this reduces the use out of Amyr, but weapons can be repaired in Three Houses, so the reduction in uses doesn't really hold Edelgard back.

The Anew Staff (Fire Emblem 3 Book 2): This version of the Anew staff refreshes the movement of all allies on the battlefield. You read that right: ALL ALLIES ON THE MAP! Sure, it has 3 uses and can't be repaired by the Hammerene, but.....there's still a lot of crazy stuff you can do when you're capable of refreshing everybody on the map, including the dancer. That's more units getting refreshed than all the other options!  There's a reason why FE 12 and Echoes had to nerf this. 

In conclusion, there are a lot of broken tools and abilities to refresh movement in this series! In the hands of the right player, they can utterly trivialize entire chapters.

Top 10 Most Busted Mechanics in Fire Emblem # 4 - Time Rewind Mechanics

 

# 4 - Time Rewind Mechanics

The next major busted mechanic on this list are "time rewind mechanics". Like bonus experience in Path of Radiance, time rewind mechanics like Mila's Turnwheel are supposed to be there to act as a safety net for the player. We've all had stories where the enemy had a super low chance to land a critical hit, or a super low chance to hit our character, and for some reason the RNG gives us a middle finger and the next thing we know, our character dies. Insert Mila's Turnwheel, a convenient way for the player to go back in time and redo the level without having to completely start from the beginning.

It's easy to see the appeal of a mechanic like this: It makes restarting less painful and time-consuming. If you're like me, you probably use this mechanic for this purpose. However, like bonus experience in Path of Radiance, there is a way for a more experienced player to use this in a way that completely breaks the game. 

Scylla pointed out the problem with time rewind mechanics like these: "this is also ridiculous for a similar reason to Rescue; you can take crazy risks and get away with it, because you can just undo undesirable outcomes. The three games that have had this mechanic have been undeniably shaped by them, not as a tool to provide a safety to beginners but instead a 'probability enhancer' to the more experienced." 

So yeah. This game essentially lets you fish for critical hits, and makes it easy to accomplish. Another issue is that Maddening mode of Three Houses seemed explicitly designed with this mechanic in mind. This led to the game implementing same turn ambush spawns, which is bad design. The next point about time rewinding is that it makes games easier, since resetting is less punitive and that so far the games where it's implemented have been really generous with how many charges the player gets. The obvious solution would be to give the player fewer rewinds on higher difficulties, but so far that hasn't happened.

Just to recap, the problems with this mechanic are:

a) Players can rush forward without any consequences.

b) This mechanic works as a way to force the probability to do what the player wants it to do.  

c) It can be used to justify bad map design. 

This is a mechanic so powerful that it will inevitably shape how the game plays, which is why it deserves to be so high up on this list.