My Mechanics List Part 1

10 Mechanics I’d Like to See in Future Games List

Honorable Mention: 3rd Tiers

                     

  No matter how many times I play Fire Emblem promotion never stops being cool. So naturally the more promotions available the better. It’s a great feeling to see all your hard work pay off at the end of the game after spending time training your units to be these awe-inspiring killing machines. It also helps when the artwork for the class designs look great like they did in Radiant Dawn  

                             That being said, in order to do this well you have to:

1. Make sure the game gives everyone enough time to level up. This means that you’ll have to have enough experience to go around.

2. Your game has to be long enough to justify a return to third tiers

3. Don’t give them 1 Hit KO Mastery Skills like Radiant Dawn did

4. Make sure that generic enemies can be third tiers too

                    I’m sure there’s more, but those are the main ones I’ve come across. As a side note I like some of the names too like Baron or Trueblade. Third tiers are on this list as an honorable mention because if a new Fire Emblem game wouldn’t have it I wouldn’t be disappointed if they weren’t there. This is more of a “if this shows up again I’ll be happy, but if not then oh well” kind of deal. Still doesn’t change the fact that I’d like to see more third tiers in the future.

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10 Mechanics That Should Be Gone in Future Games List

Dishonorable Mention: Money

                            As crazy as this might sound, I’m all for getting rid of money in Fire Emblem games. For starters, every Fire Emblem game that gives the player money, hands out way too much. During my last playthrough of Path of Radiance I was able to get up to 90,000 gold and possibly could have attained more than that. During my last Binding Blade playthrough I had over 100,000 gold. In both instances that’s way too much!

                             One problem is that weapon durability gets undermined since it ultimately doesn’t matter if one weapon breaks, you can just replace that javelin with 50 more. If a game has a secret shop you can buy an obscene number of promotion items or stat boosters which can trivialize a game. In essence, too much money makes a game significantly easier.

I can already hear someone rushing to their keyboard going “but wait, the answer is simple. Just lower the amount of money that the game gives to the player. Problem solved!” The problem, however, is not solved. Restrict money too much and the game becomes less fun because the player lacks the freedom to acquire what they want. When I first played Conquest I felt super restricted by the amount of money I had and it was less fun to pass up cool looking weapons because I had already spent my limited supply of money on other things. While this problem did not exist in my subsequent playthroughs (to the point where I felt like I had all the money in the world by my Lunatic run) that experience still left a bad taste in my mouth. I’ve also been told that the harder difficulties of Fire Emblem 12 (ie Lunatic and Reverse Lunatic) do this too, although I could be wrong there.

                             The ideal here is to replace money with a mechanic that still provides the player the freedom to acquire what they want, but still make them earn whatever weapons and items they want so that they still have to be smart and strategic. Fortunately I already have a solution for a replacement to money in mind that comes in the form of a preexisting mechanic. If you don’t already know, you’ll just have to wait and see what I’m talking about.

Top 5 Worst Lords List

# 5 - Eliwood

Why He’s Here:

• Poor Bases & Growths: Eliwood’s base stats are not impressive. 18 HP, 5 str, 7 spd & 5 def translate into him having issues double attacking, inconsistently killing (at best) and not having the greatest durability. In fact, some people will tell you that 18 HP and 5 defense puts Eliwood in the same ballpark as Matthew, Rebecca & Nils. His growths aren’t anything to write home about either. 45 % strength, 40 % speed and 30 % defense means that his level-ups at best are a coin flip which doesn’t do him any favors meaning that Eliwood is doomed to be mediocre for the entire game.

• Poor Weapon Choices: For most of the game Eliwood is locked to swords. This creates two problems for him. The first is that he’ll be lacking 1 - 2 range (and it’s not like we’re going to give him the Runesword or Light Brand either) and that he’ll have weapon triangle disadvantage against the vast majority of enemies in the game.

                       He at least gets a rapier, which is pretty weak in comparison to Wolf Beil and Mani Katti. On its own its still okay though. At the end of the game he gets Durandal which reduces his Attack Speed by a whopping 7 which is enough to get him double attacked in situations where he probably wouldn’t. The only way to offset that is with Body Rings but there are better candidates to give that to.

• Late Promotion Time: Pretty self-explanatory. All GBA Lords promote really late in their games. It means that there will be a long stretch of the game where Eliwood will be held back.

                        To Eliwood’s credit he at least gets better promotion gains than Hector and Lyn. Getting a horse means that he’ll have higher movement which lets him go from Point A to Point B quicker. Granted, this doesn’t mean as much since his combat still isn’t good and having 7 move means that he has 1 less move than every other promoted mounted unit but hey it’s something. He’s also capable of rescuing every playable character in the cast sans Merlinus. Eliwood will also get lances so his 1 - 2 range problems go away.

# 4 - Marth (Shadow Dragon)

One of the most understated ironies in the franchise stems from the fact that the only time a game that Marth starred in that got an international release featured the weakest version of Marth to date.

                     Marth is on this list due to his poor base stats. A lot of people have noted that he tends to rely on the prologue which doesn’t exist on the hardest difficulty of Shadow Dragon (which is what his performance is being rated off of). Marth will have difficulty double attacking and his damage output will have issues. Marth also has similar issues to Eliwood and Lyn meaning that he’s sword locked in a game full of enemies who use lances and he won’t have much 1 - 2 range if any at all.  

Fortunately Marth does have a few good things going for him. He has exclusive access to the rapier, which can be forged. He also will always have at least 7 movement and will most likely get boots too. He’s also the only one who can visit villages which means that he alone can net you a lot of stuff. The Falchion that he gets at the end is also helpful.

# 3 - Lyn (Blazing Sword)

Why She’s Here:

• Poor Weapon Choices: Like Eliwood Lyn is sword locked in a game full of lance wielding enemies. This means that she’s going to suffer a lot of weapon triangle disadvantage. Unlike Eliwood though, Lyn gets lolsy bows after promotion which means that she won’t get 1 - 2 range like he will.

                       So basically she’s going to have issues with range. If she uses swords she can’t attack things from a distance which means that she’ll have to take a counterattack from an enemy unit (see below for why that’s especially bad in her case) and she won’t be able to respond to enemy attacks from a distance. If she uses bows she won’t be able to counterattack close range attacks during the enemy phase. At the end of the game she’ll get the Sol Katti, which has more weight than might. Unlike Eliwood, Lyn’s speed will be high enough to offset the attack speed loss but that 12 might is pitiful. A Silver Sword has more might than that.

• Horrible Defense: “16 HP, 2 def are arguably the worst physically defensive bases in the entire game, and 70% HP, 20% def growths do not compensate in the long run. It would have been forgivable had Lyn been able to attack on player phases without risk of counter, as units like Erk and Lucius have similarly atrocious physically defensive bases but also the option to attack safely at 2 range, but Lyn is locked to swords and thus requires healing after most attempted attacks barring a miss or an OHKO.”  (Source: dondon151 https://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?/topic/23766-fe7-character-ratings/&page=3)

                            You know you’re doing something wrong when freaking Nils has more defense than you.

• Late Promotion: She’s a GBA Lord so her promotion time sucks.

                         The only reason why Lyn isn’t further down this list is because she can double attack everything, has a great prf rank weapon (the Mani Katti) and has Lyn mode to get level-ups in. Outside of that, she’s a garbage unit.          

# 2 - Micaiah (Radiant Dawn)

Why She’s Here

• Horrific Durability: Micaiah somehow manages to have even worse durability than Lyn. Most non-magic enemies will kill her in a single hit. This means that she won’t have an enemy phase which reduces the amount of experience that she’s going to get. Her HP is also not very good either.

• Terrible Speed: In addition to having the worst durability I’ve seen from a Fire Emblem lord her speed is also pretty terrible too. Micaiah took dodging lessons from Gohan and also fails to double attack anything.

                      Your next line is “but Micaiah can Thani nuke everything. That makes her better than some of the other lords on this list.” Until recently I would have agreed with this line of thinking, but then dondon151 changed my mind with this little blurb:

 “Part 1 does not have a whole lot of units that are weak to Thani, and often when there is a unit weak to Thani, Micaiah is both not the best option to deal with them nor is she logistically able to handle them without assistance.

For example, in chapter 1-3 there is literally 1 armor knight that you need to kill, and he's backed up by an Iron Longbow archer that can OHKO Micaiah at any tile from which she can attack the armor knight with Thani. In chapter 1-6-1, the armor knights come in groups and the weakest ones OHKO her until L13 on average. In chapter 1-6-2, the cavaliers come in groups and have canto, so they can easily gang up on Micaiah.

Thani's power is also insufficient without huge investment. HM has a flat -5 combat EXP cut and this severely hurts the potential of any growth units, Micaiah included. She needs +3 atk on base to OHKO 1-3 armors, +7 atk on base to OHKO 1-6-1 armors, and +12 atk on base to OHKO 1-E armors. Supposedly this is easy with an 80% mag growth, but the problem is that Micaiah has no enemy phase and is very often pitching in chip damage, which is not earning her the big bucks EXP-wise.

Better alternatives for armor killing exist at every turn. Sothe doesn't have the durability of wet tissue paper and 4HKOs the 1-3 armor with his Kard. He also has +2 mov and no movement penalty through thickets relative to Micaiah. Tauroneo and Zihark reliably kill armors in 1-6-1. Tauroneo and transfers Jill take care the boss in 1-6-2. Muarim obliterates the boss is 1-7 (who, by the way, has a Storm Sword that will blick Micaiah until 20/1). Nailah, BK, Muarim, and Tormod all exist for the romp that is 1-E.

Second, staves. Some players like to justify training Micaiah so that she becomes a better staff user in part 3. This really isn't necessary. A 5-range Physic that heals ~20 HP is pathetic, but it suffices for even the most efficient part 3 strategies. Mend staves are available if you need to heal more than that, which is about as much as you need anyway on any unit that's not Volug. In this capacity, Micaiah functions like Mist, except there's no Rhys to steal her thunder.”

(Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/fireemblem/comments/2w3021/character_discussion_fe910_micaiah/)

                         Sacrifice is a cool skill, but it’s ultimately undermined by her terrible HP in addition to being situationally useful. She has an auto A rank support with Sothe...which doesn’t come anywhere close to compensating for her massive flaws. In the end, it’s much more trouble than it’s worth using Micaiah. Too bad you can’t bench her, because I certainly would if I could.

# 1 - Roy (Binding Blade)

                

 Is anybody surprised by Roy being # 1 on here? No? Well neither am I. It’s a well known fact that Roy is the worst lord in the series from a unit perspective. The main reason of course has to do with his notorious promotion time. Roy has the worst promotion time which means that he’s going to go through a huge stretch without gaining any experience. By the time he does promote it’s too little too late.

                           Another element of the game that screws Roy over is that he’s a low movement lord in a game where every map (sans the last one) is a Seize map. This means that if you want to beat the game quickly you’re going to have to get Roy to the seize spot fast. How do you that? By rescuing him of course! This makes Roy an active burden on the player because whoever rescues him will suffer a stat penalty.

                            The only possible redeeming points for him come from the early game axe users that he can pick apart and the Binding Blade. Oh and he has a rapier, which sometimes can be useful? Anyway, Roy is the worst lord because he not only doesn’t contribute much of value, but also becomes an active burden on the player. Moral of the story: If you want to be good then don’t be like Roy.

Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia Part 3 - The Gameplay and the Finale

Gameplay:                                                           D -  / F

                     If I had to pick an element of the game that I thought was the weakest it would most certainly be the gameplay. Shadows of Valentia made the foolish mistake of bringing back many of the more frustrating elements of the original game. Before I get into the negatives I thought it would be nice to first go over some of the positives.

Mila’s Turnwheel: This has to be my favorite addition to the game. It’s a reasonable compromise between the awfulness of Phoenix Mode and having to restart due to getting RNG screwed (and trust me I will definitely talk more about the RNG screwing later on). It’s also limited so you can’t abuse it all game long which means that you still have to play intelligently. It saved me a lot of frustration and I am totally all for bringing this back in future installments.

Combat Arts: When I first heard about this mechanic I thought it was going to be totally unnecessary and while I can see some people not being too fond of it, I personally enjoyed this new addition. I ended up using them a lot more than I thought I was originally going for. The idea of getting a different type of attack that was more accurate, dealt more damage and in some cases had an additional effect was a neat feature to the overall game. While it may need some polishing if it comes back I was an overall fan of this feature, much to my surprise.

                              Another positive came from all the improvements in the mechanics that this game had over the original which were:

• Superior growths combined with better experience gains: In the original Gaiden I always hated the abysmal growth rates. Any growth rate that was 30 % or above was considered exceptional while 20 % was generally the norm. Also, none of the characters had any resistance growths either. Shadows of Valentia thankfully improved this making 40 & 50 % growths the norm for most stat growths. Leveling up doesn’t feel like pulling teeth out like it did with its predecessor which makes the game more fun and gives it a natural progression.

• The ability to see movement ranges, attack ranges and combat windows: Another element of Gaiden (and Fire Emblem 1) that I strongly disliked was the inability to see movement ranges, attack ranges and combat windows. While this may seem trivial to the average player those three things end up making a huge difference in a player's ability to strategize. Not having access to these things was annoying at best and fatal at worst. Thankfully Shadows of Valentia improved all of this.

Now that we’ve got all that out of the way let’s get to the negatives.

• Awful Map Design: Gaiden has arguably the worst map design in the history of the series. If it’s not the worst it should definitely be in the Top 3. The maps are way larger than they need to be, they’re often full of empty space and there’s little to no thought about how terrain is implemented or how the enemies are placed. This hurts the level of thought and strategy required to put into the game. What’s even worse is that virtually all the map objectives are the same: Rout enemy. This makes the maps repetitive and somewhat tedious. Imagine if you killed the enemy boss and yet there’s that one random mook off in the corner that you have to chase down. Not my idea of fun. It was foolish for Shadows of Valentia to not improve this. It’s sad that Conquest is the only 3DS Fire Emblem whose map design wasn’t 100 % atrocious.

• Atrocious RNG: Over 90 % of my frustration with this game came through my abysmal luck. This was another element that seemed to be carried over from the original. I counted 15 instances of an enemy landing a critical hit on me when their chances of doing so were in the single digits. Roughly half of those were 1 % too. That pissed me off to an absurd degree. What’s even worse was what this game did with accuracies. I stopped keeping track of how many times a 70 - 90 % accuracy missed. It was that bad. It was also infuriating when a sub 50 % hit from an enemy unit hit me. Most battles felt like coin flips after a while almost to the point where it simply didn’t matter how high or low the accuracies were. I understand that these things can happen and I can tolerate relatively small dosages of RNG bullcrap, but when this becomes the norm I think there’s a problem.

• Witches that can teleport to any part of the map: Another frustrating element of the original game. This mechanic undermines the value of unit positioning. Why bother meticulously placing units when they can still be attacked at any point in time? There’s practically nothing the player can do except just deal with it and hope the AI is stupid, which imo the AI in this game is rather sub par. I don’t see the strategic merit in it.

• Enemies being able to start skirmishes: I always hated this part of the original game too. Enemies that can attack without giving the player time to prepare seems counterproductive and not very strategic, especially when you’re forced to bring out your characters that you left on the bench.

• Stupidly high terrain bonuses: Here’s small a list of terrain bonuses from this game:

• Supplies / Fort / Oranges: 40 %
• Graves: 60 %
• Forest, Woods: 40 %
• Thicket, Pillar, Coral: 30 %
• Bulwark / Mountain: 30 %

Source: https://serenesforest.net/fire-emblem-echoes-shadows-valentia/classes/terrain-data/

                           Most of the bonus giving terrain in this game averages an extra boost of 30 % avoid or higher. That’s ridiculous! Especially the 60 % avoid on graves. 30 % is at the super high point for what I’d consider acceptable but 40 - 60 % is high enough to practically determine the outcome of a battle. It reminds me of the elevation bonus in Radiant Dawn. Thankfully magic users can ignore these things but that doesn’t change the fact that these boosts are too high and too battle defining for their own good.  

• The Dungeon Crawling: Yeah, I’m not the biggest fan of exploration in most of the games I play. Exceptions exist for stuff like Xenoblade Chronicles but the general rule is that I much rather prefer to get from Point A to Point B in as little time as possible. I’m not the best at directions or finding things so I when do exploring like that it usually takes me longer than I’d like to find stuff. This means that long portions of the game are spent for me trying to find where Mila’s Shrine is or where the important parts of Duma’s Temple / Tower are. What’s worse are the continuously respawning monsters you have to fight whenever you enter one of these dungeons. The maps for monster fights in the dungeon are repetitive, tedious and a slog to get through. Toward the end of the game I actively went out of my way to avoid them at all costs because I didn’t want to sit through another tedious fight.

Just as I predicted the “fatigue” system in this game was way too nerfed and watered down. It only applied to dungeons and it never impacted how I played the game. Characters didn’t start getting fatigued until the end of the game and by that point you’ve already acquired so much food and other stuff that you can easily cure it. Heck, you can cure fatigue at every Mila’s Shrine you come across which pretty much neuters any potential consequences that come about from this game. Thracia 776 is the only game that’s done fatigue or capturing correctly.

• More Difficult to 1 Round KO: Is it just me or is it harder to 1 Round KO enemies in this game than in other games? This was something that the original game was notorious for. Enemies seem to have higher HP and Defense values which means that you may need 2 or more characters to kill the same enemy (depending on which enemy and which unit you’re talking about) which makes the fighting at times more tedious than it has to be. Combine that with my awful RNG rolls and now you’re taking longer to kill than I should be.

                           Overall: I wish that Shadows of Valentia did more to improve upon the mechanics of the original. There are just too many frustrating moments to consider this aspect of the game to be good. It may seem harsh to some people, but I do consider Shadows of Valentia to have mechanics that range from subpar to downright awful. My dislike of the gameplay here was enough to turn my enjoyment of it down a notch.

                      Final Thoughts: Shadows of Valentia does everything great except for gameplay. The characters, soundtrack, story and art are among some of the best this series has to offer. It’s a major step up from Awakening and Fates and it’s enough to convince me that the Fire Emblem series hasn’t gone to crap. It’s about time we got a high caliber game like this. I was starting to worry that all future installments would go down the route of Awakening and Fates. Now that there’s an Echoes series I have faith that Intelligent Systems won’t leave its veterans behind in the dust. I hope they remake the other older games as well (although I am nervous as crap about a potential Holy War and Thracia 776 remake). However, this game is living proof that Intelligent Systems can make great Fire Emblem games.  #TheyMadeFireEmblemGreatAgain

                          It’s too soon to tell for me where specifically this ranks in terms of overall enjoyment. Right now I’m thinking that Shadows of Valentia is somewhere between # 4 - 7 in terms of overall enjoyment for me. I don’t think it ranks as high as Path of Radiance or the Jugdral games, but outside of those three this game’s ranking is free game. There’s a really good chance this game will end up in my Top 5 Favorite Fire Emblem games.

                           It’s good to see that my initial skepticism of this game turned out to be mostly wrong. Shadows of Valentia is a great game and I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t played it yet. I’m glad it’s getting praise from the fanbase because it deserves every bit that it gets.