Conquest Map Design Review - The Shared Chapters

The First Two Shared Chapters: The Ties That Bind & Nohr

I’m grouping the first two chapters together because they suffer from the same issues. Both of these chapters are designed to introduce the player to Fates and its mechanics. I’m all for introducing mechanics to players and helping them out, but not like this. There should be a way to introduce players to game mechanics while respecting their intelligence.

                     Take the first map, Ties That Bind, for example. This map doesn’t even require the player to move any characters. It’s basically just “press the A Button to win”. Speaking of pressing the A button here’s something I came across on FE Wiki:

                     “Although the objective of the chapter is stated to be a rout, it will actually end automatically after Player Phase on Turn 2, regardless of whether you have defeated the lancer.” (Source: http://fireemblem.wikia.com/wiki/Ties_That_Bind)

                       It seems like more work and effort is required to get a Game Over in this chapter than to actually beat it. That’s a massive design flaw. To be fair, a lot of prologues / first chapters in Fire Emblem are poorly designed but at least they require the player to move the characters from Point A to Point B. This chapter doesn’t even do that.

Then we have “Nohr”. This chapter requires the player to make Corrin move over to Xander, and teaches about Dragon Veins but it doesn’t do much else. There isn’t much strategy to beating this chapter and what little strategy exists is painfully obvious.

Overall Rating for Both Maps: FAIL!

Chapter 2: Gift of Ganglari

         This should have been the first map in Fates. It could have taught the player everything the previous two chapters were supposed to teach while having more enemies and allies and having more strategies to boot.

     This map plays differently between Hard Mode and Lunatic. On Hard Mode the Dragon Vein works so the player can successfully block enemies off. On Lunatic Mode the enemies have exclusive 1 - 2 range weapons which makes the Dragon Vein pointless. This usually results in being really aggressive or running around the map trying to pick off certain enemies one by one. Outside of that, there isn’t much else to this map.

Overall Rating: Below Average

Chapter 3: Journey Begins

If I had to pick one map in the Fates Prologue that I thought was the best designed, I’d pick this one. For starters the player gets three routes to approach the map with. Two of these routes are only made available via Dragon Vein. The Dragon Vein here is one of the best executions of Dragon Vein of the three Fates games. It adds strategic options and is valuable enough to be worth using.

                        

                            There are two nitpicks that I have. The first is that it is possible for Hans to survive and if he does he can seize an enemy fort and make the chapter impossible to beat as witnessed in the video. The second is that the boss’s avoid on Lunatic is a bit too high. Yes I know he’s a Ninja, which is a class known for being speedy but if an enemy has too much avoid it means that fighting them will be more luck based than it needs to be. Like I mentioned before, these are nitpicks and the good tends to outweigh the bad by far.

EDIT: This chapter lacks a turtle disincentive. The Pegasus Knights spawn when the player gets near the boss as opposed to a turn limit which hurts the map.

Number of Conquest Bosses With Ridiculous Avoid: 1

Overall Rating: Decent

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Chapter 4: Hoshido

This map is an example of a good idea being poorly executed. The point of this chapter is to teach the player about side objectives that require faster play to accomplish. This is a great thing to teach players, but the execution prevents this lesson from being accomplished.

For starters, Sakura and Hinoka don’t die if their HP reaches 0. They merely “retreat” which means that failure to save them has zero consequences. Even if the player manages to talk to Hinoka the only reward is a silly Concoction. The village in this chapter is also given to the player for free and it is not in danger of being destroyed by an enemy. Another major problem is that Ryoma is plenty capable of destroying every enemy on the map by himself which means that the player doesn’t even have to play the map in order to beat it since Ryoma will do that for them.

Overall Rating: Fail

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Chapter 5: Mother

Now this chapter is actually pretty good. We have enemies with effective weaponry that can kill Corrin in 2 hits along with enemy mages that can attack from afar. This is a good design decision on the part of the designers because it forces the player to actually think about where to place Corrin since death is a real possibility. As a tutorial map it also introduces several new things to the player: Dancing, effective weaponry, tonics and magic.

       I do have some issues with it though. The enemy reinforcements in this chapter don’t serve as effective turtle disincentives since the player is forced to kill them due to the route objective being at play. The Ryoma fight is unnecessary set piecing unless he manages to kill the boss (has that ever happened to anyone?). Still, this is a pretty good tutorial map that is more challenging than most prologue maps in the series.

Overall Rating: Pretty Good

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Chapter 6: Embrace the Dark

Eh….This map is fairly middle of the road. There’s no turtle disincentive, interesting terrain or multiple routes to approach the chapter with. To its credit the player does get to use the Nohrian siblings, which make the map a little more interesting. Fighting Ryoma is more RNG reliant than it should be, but definitely not impossible. It’s also fairly easy to completely run away from him too which means that Ryoma could very well be a non-factor in this map.

Having Takumi and Hinoka in a Dual Guard is actually a good design decision. It forces the player to kill them quickly if they want to avoid having an attack blocked off and if one of the siblings dies the player still has to deal with the other one. Plus it makes both siblings harder to kill since Dual Strike doesn’t work. I will point out that it does become a lot easier once Hinoka’s beaten since the player can surround Takumi, take advantage of his lack of 1 range and destroy him.

Number of Conquest Bosses With Ridiculous Avoid: 2

Overall Rating: Meh

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          Thoughts on the Prologue: Like most prologue / tutorial chapters in Fire Emblem, the Fates prologue is poorly designed. Most of the maps are so simple that they don’t require much effort to play through which is made even worse on repeat playthroughs.

What’s worse is that these chapters are not effective at teaching the player how to play the game. With a little more thought and effort this could have been really fun and worthwhile. At the very least there are a couple of maps that are pretty good, even if you have to play a slew of poorly designed ones to get to it.