My Fire Emblem 12 Review Part 3 - Everything Else

 Miscellaneous Items

•     I find it funny that people who say that high growths make you too OP have never played FE 12. The growth rates in this game are higher than the growths in Path of Radiance or Blazing Sword and yet this game has vastly superior enemy scaling to theirs. The growth rates seem to be higher the Tellius and GBA games, but lower than Awakening or Fates. I could be wrong on this point, but that’s what it seems like to me. 
  
  

                           Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that Fire Emblem 12 is proof that you can have really high growths AND great enemy scaling at the same time. This is what I’d like to see more of in future installments. 

• The Rainbow Potion & Maturity Drop: That item is the FE equivalent of Heisenberg’s blue crystal meth. Everybody’s got to have some. For those of you who don’t know the Rainbow Potion is a Wi-Fi exclusive item that gives a + 2 boost to every stat except HP. It has 77 uses and it lasts for the duration of one chapter. Then there’s the Maturity Drop. The Maturity Drop is an item that boosts a unit’s HP growth by 20 % and the growths of all other stats by 10 %. In a game where growths are high this item just reeks of awesome.

• Reverse Lunatic: The hardest difficulty in Fire Emblem 12 has this feature where enemy units always make the first attack in a combat situation even if the player initiated the attack. I love this concept. It actually affects how the player plays the game. HP matters more now because you have to be able to take a hit from the enemy every time you engage in battle. This in turn makes healing REALLY useful. It also means that being able to attack an enemy that can’t fight back is more useful too than it already was. I like the fact that it forces the player to switch gears a little bit and I’d like to see this concept make a return. 
  
  

  

  Yes I know the picture calls it the "Star Potion" but it does the exact same thing as the Rainbow Potion so it still works".

  
  

• Shadow Dragon 2.0 : This game fixed some of the mistakes in Shadow Dragon’s design. Remember how Caeda’s forged Wing Spear broke Shadow Dragon? Well good luck trying to do that in this game. A forged Wing Spear is still valuable, but it won’t break the game like it did in Shadow Dragon.

                                 Remember how you could Warp skip Shadow Dragon too? Good luck pulling that off in Fire Emblem 12. Lunatic and Reverse Lunatic mode don’t even let you have a Warp staff and even in difficulty modes where it exists you only get one and it doesn’t even show up until a little over the halfway point in this game so yeah you’re not going to break this game with Warp.

                               Remember how stupid those Gaiden requirements were in Shadow Dragon? Well those don’t exist in Fire Emblem 12. In fact the requirements for the Gaiden chapters in 12 are actually reasonable. Hallelujah!

• Drill Grounds: I love the Drill Grounds system in 12. Think of your stereotypical arena system, however you don’t get to heal between fights and you never gain money, you only lose it. That basically means that you cannot abuse this game’s arena even if you’re playing on a ROM. The thing about the GBA arena is that on a ROM I can (and have numerous times) abused the ever living crap out of it. I know that the game was designed to be played on a gameboy, but still the fact that it can be abused is a negative that it has against it. By contrast, you can never abuse the FE 12 Drill Grounds system and it’s AWESOME! 
  
  
  
  
  

• “Screw you RNG!” : This game also gets my vote for “Least RNG Reliant Game in the Series”. Both of how accurate both your units and the enemy units are hitting is guaranteed and rare is the occasion where you see a miss happen. This doesn’t mean that RNG shenanigans can’t happen, it’s just that they’re far more rare here than in any other FE game that I’ve played. I appreciate that. I immensely appreciate that.