1 of My Two Favorite Maps to Play On: Thracia 776 Chapter 4

My Favorite Maps to Play On: Thracia 776 Chapters 4 & 6

Chapter 4



In what I'm sure will come as a surprise to absolutely no one Thracia 776 Chapters 4 & 6 are my absolute favorite maps to play on. Let's start with Chapter 4.

What I love about this map is the absolute curve-ball it throws at the player. It's a curve-ball story wise because our heroes are scattered and in prison. Leif and your thief (Lifis / Rifis) are the only characters from the previous chapters who are still here. Every other character is new. 

It also starts the game with the main character IN JAIL. How often do you see a Fire Emblem game do something like that? The player only has three characters who aren't in jail, and you've got to make them work. The three characters, Brighton, Makua and Lara, aren't super powerful units (though they're not bad either) so busting out the rest of the cast can be a bit of a chore. 

Once you've done that the real fun begins. The characters in jail still don't have their stuff, which means that you're going to have to get it. That's where the treasures on the map come in. Anything that Leif or your thief had prior to this chapter are in these treasure chests. 

This adds A LOT to the chapter. It slows the player down, giving the enemy reinforcements extra time to show up and make your life miserable. It also adds to the map even if you see it coming when playing Thracia 776 again. If you know that Leif and Lifis are going to be the only characters left that forces you to think about which weapons and which items you want to leave behind with those characters. That's the exact mentality I used when I streamed Thracia 776. Speaking of my previous Thracia 776 stream....



This chapter is infamous for creating the Green Brigand meme. For those of who who could not watch my stream there was an amazing story that you had to be there to witness: One of the green NPC's had captured an enemy soldier while I was trying to escape through the top portion of the map. For those of you who haven't played Thracia 776 when you capture an enemy your stats are halved. So this NPC had his stats cut in half, his NPC allies dead and he was surrounded by enemies on all sides. So what does he do? He dodges the vast majority of attacks and proceeds to kill most of the enemies in his wake. It was glorious! I've never seen an NPC unit pull off a feat like that before. Not even the 3-13 archer in Radiant Dawn was THAT epic. It spawned a meme as we all pretended to worship. It's also the name of Guy's YouTube channel (which is where I got the picture from). That meme is one of the biggest reasons why I will always love Chapter 4 of Thracia 776.



And I'm still not done talking about why this map rocks. Chapter 4 also has the added side bonus of the other NPCs. You see, if they all escape it leads to unlocking a Gaiden Chapter. This creates another interesting side objective. It makes the map difficult in the best possible way, because those enemy soldiers will do everything in their power to capture those NPCs. If those soldiers run off with them, gone goes the player's chances of Chapter 4x, the gaiden that nets you the all powerful Asvel. 

Something else I need to bring up is the way this chapter handles turtle disincentives. Like I talked about with Chapter 21x, this game doesn't throw a ton of enemy reinforcements at you all at once. Instead, it only sprinkles enemy reinforcements in little bits at a time. No individual "sprinkle" is lethal on its own, but what defines the pressure here is the gradual build-up over time. It's a creative way of handling turtle disincentives. 




Last, but not least, there's a bottle-neck up at the top. This is the final part of the map where enemy mages and Armor Knights try to slow the player down while enemy soldiers down at the bottom race to the top to try and catch up with the player. So as a result, the player's trapped and has to fight out of that trap even faster if they want to win. There are a couple of mages that can make the player's life miserable. There's also a recruitable Armor Knight called Dalsin (whose name always reminds me of a certain character on Street Fighter). 

Let's not forget that this is an Escape chapter, which means that everybody needs to escape if the player wants to use them in upcoming chapters. This adds an extra layer of strategy on top of the excellent elements this chapter had to offer. Now you have to think about who's going to escape first and who's going to stay behind and fight off the bad guys. 

At the end of the day, Chapter 4 is GENIUS in its design. It just does everything well. In addition to all that it spawned a pretty funny meme. What more could you possibly want?