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.
"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."
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