Top 10 Most Busted Mechanics in Fire Emblem # 2: Ferrying Mechanics (Awakening Pair-Up & The Rescue Mechanic)

 

Awakening Pair-Up

      If there's one mechanic that's absurdly overpowered, it's Pair Up from Awakening. Pair Up's power comes from how massive and gargantuan the stat boosts are. If that wasn't enough, Pair-Up also provides two additional bonuses that are both really powerful: The first is Dual Strike wherein the backup character can also attack, making it significantly easier to kill enemies. The second is Dual Guard, where the backup unit has the ability to completely block an attack, thereby negating enemy damage.

      So why is Awakening's Pair Up mechanic this high on the list? Well....

It makes juggernauting extremely easy: Pair-Up grants massive stat bonuses to the point where a character can become powerful enough to steamroll the game by themselves. This is what leads to the Robin solos. 

In addition to that, being able to attack again or potentially block all damage from an enemy attack makes Pair-Up that much more powerful as a mechanic. It can help your lead unit kill faster, and it can keep them alive longer. It can do pretty much everything.

It Dominates the Game's Design

Pair Up is so powerful that the entire game has to be designed around it. If the game isn't, then there's no challenge. However, by designing the entire game around it, the player is essentially forced to use it. Though to be fair, Pair Up is so beneficial that there's no reason not to use it so the game designers might as well assume that it will be used. After all, there's no drawback to using Pair Up, which reinforces just how dominant the mechanic is.

But what about Fates? 

That game did Pair Up right, didn't it? Not really. Even if the Fates version of Pair Up is more balanced and better designed than Awakening's, it's still way too powerful. Dual Guard still makes juggernauting relatively easy since the stat boosts that can come from that can still be huge. Slow characters can become fast, characters that deal low damage can kill things, and thanks to the shields becoming consistent, a character with Dual Guard has better survivability. 

Recap: Even when it's better balanced, Pair Up makes juggernauting far too easy. It's a mechanic that's so powerful that it always dominates the game's design. There's no drawback to using it, and because the game designs itself with the use of this mechanic in mind, not using it can put the player at a disadvantage.

The Rescue Mechanic

And here we have the more balanced, but still broken, older sibling of Pair Up: Rescue. The rescue mechanic could be best defined as: 

"Rescuing allows playable units to pick up allied units – using the Rescue command – who are smaller than them, in order to protect them from harm or to carry them around the battlefield."

(Source: https://fireemblemwiki.org/wiki/Rescue_%28command%29)

Why is the mechanic this high up the list? In the hands of the right player, the rescue mechanic can do a lot! It allows players to move longer distances in shorter periods of time. Remember the # 5 spot on this list?  The spot about fliers and mounted units? This mechanic gives them an even bigger advantage over infantry units because this is valuable utility they can use, and take advantage of, that infantry units can't. Fliers can even rescue infantry units across terrain like water tiles and mountains, making fliers even better than before.

Scylla did a great job pointing out another reason why rescue is busted: "Rescue also allows you to be far more aggressive with your positioning because you can just pull a unit out of a bad spot;"

What makes the mechanic even more powerful is when players start implementing rescue chains, where multiple mounted and flying units take a rescued character and ferry them across the map. It's pretty common among faster playthroughs, and this ultimately results in the player being able to beat entire maps in quicker periods of time. It also results in the player being incentivized to use mostly mounted and flying units, which is bad for the purpose of balancing.

Quick Recap: Rescuing is busted because it allows the player to move from A to B in far faster periods of time, erases the negatives of bad positioning, and makes mounted and flying units even better by giving them additional, powerful utility. 

Moral of the Story: Ferrying mechanics are super busted, and Fire Emblem as a franchise would do well to remove them from future titles.