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.

Thracia 776 Map Design Review: Ch. 20 - Endgame

Chapter 20

Another defense chapter. Oh boy. According to Ronaldo you can beat this chapter pretty easily by standing behind the doors. There are armor knights on the top right corner that one has to deal with. There are also multiple entrances for enemies to show up in which can make the chapter more difficult. Killing Barat is an extra objective which at least spices the chapter up a little bit but there’s no rush since even if you don’t kill him super quick he’ll eventually come to you. If you manage to kill Barat enemies will flee from you Turn 14 even if they can kill you.

Overall Rating: Below Average

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Chapter 21

This map is different. You have two routes with which to approach the boss and a bunch of ballista to deal with. There’s a church on the right side of the map that Linoan can promote in. Since Linoan is a good unit who’s worth using the player does have an incentive to go over there. Assuming that the player doesn’t use warp, it will be tricky to maneuver over there. In addition to the boss having a ballistic siege tome there will be even more ballista surrounding him and another bishop with a ballistic siege tome. Oh and there’s a sleep staff wielding enemy too. In other words, positioning matters a lot in this chapter.

This chapter has plenty of enemy reinforcements. From turns 2 - 7 enemy soldiers show up on those fortresses near the ballista. Showing up on Turn 2 tends to be a bit too early and can incentivize turtling. The fact that these reinforcements will continue to show up until Chapter 7, in addition to having Dark Mages appear from turns 7 - 10, can either further incentivize turtling or it can cause the player to play faster. There’s also the steady stream of cavalier reinforcements that approach from the far right which can either be a nightmare (if you approach the map from the right) or it can potentially incentivize turtling if you’re on the left side it could incentivize turtling.

I’m still not sure whether I should count the presence of the enemy reinforcements as a positive, or as a negative. At the very least this element could have been handled better, but there’s a part of me that believes that they’re not poorly handled. I guess it’s somewhere in between?

Overall Rating: Decent

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       Chapter 21x

     In my opinion this is the best designed gaiden chapter in the game. You have two methods of approaching the chapter since the player’s army starts from two different directions. This chapter handled enemy reinforcements better than the previous one by extending the length from which reinforcements show up. For example, when enemy soldiers show up at the stairs in the bottom of the map they now show up for 20 turns. If you’re super slow dark mages with rewarp staves will show up and make the player’s life miserable. There are also the addition of mercenaries who show up near the boss. In general, these enemies do a pretty good job at incentivizing faster play on the player’s part.

In this chapter the number of captured allies becomes a side objective and how long this side objective takes depends on how many allies were captured. This reminds me of the side objective in Chapter 4 revolving around the player’s captured weapons and items. This chapter becomes a lot easier for players who plan ahead, but the fact that the gaiden chapter requires long term planning to begin with is a good thing. There’s also the fact that you have bishops with long range ballistic siege tomes who can make approaching the boss more difficult. All in all, this chapter has all the makings of a well designed map.

Overall Rating: Excellent

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Chapter 22

               Ah, the infamous Chapter 22. This is a chapter that begins with both Cyas and the boss using status staves against the player. As I’ve explained in my analysis of chapter 12 and 12x I’m not a fan of the boss with infinite range status staves. The reason being that the only real way of dealing with it is with warp. Since these map design analysis posts operate under the assumption that no warp will be used (due to how incredibly game breaking it is) we’re left to assume that the only real means of dealing with these status staves are with using up a bunch of restore staves.

                               A bigger issue with this map is the intense boost in avoid and accuracy given to enemy mooks. According to fireemblemwod there are a grand total of 19 leadership stars handed out by bosses. Not all of them affect every single enemy. However, they all will be affected at least by a good chunk of them. Most of the boosts come from Cyas’s 10 leadership stars. This can make fighting enemies feel like a bigger RNG fest than necessary which is a bad thing.

                               I used to think the ballista at the bottom of the map encouraged turtling since they’re powerful and accurate, combined with the status staff bombardment from enemy bosses. However, I recently saw a suggestion for a strategy for dealing with ballista that didn’t involve waiting said ballista out and draining them so I’m conceding this point. This means that the presence of the ballista can be a double edged sword. Either you wait them out with a tanky unit or you pull off some cool staff strategies and finish them off.

                      Once the player moves past the red line shown in the map the bridge to the left magically disappears. This is an interesting design choice because it forces the player to move forward although it’s still possible to chokepoint Reinhardt’s troops so it’s a little dubious how much of a turtle disincentive this is. Reinhardt is really strong, which is a major plus and his troops aren’t easy to deal with either. The two routes in this map aren’t significant enough to count since they don’t present a significant enough choice to matter (you’re still going to approach the boss the same way and the only reason to go through the path on the bottom is because of the house. Then you move in the same direction you were going to move anyway).

To bring everything back together, I still think this map has major issues even when I take the bias I had against it during my first playthrough out of the equation. The turtle disincentives are dubious at best due to the concentration of powerful enemies and infinite range status staves. Reinhardt is a challenging boss which is a good thing and the houses at least give the player some legit goodies, but it lacks two meaningful methods of approaching it. I find the negatives to outweigh the positives here.

Overall Rating: Below Average

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   Chapter 23

            This chapter has some odd design choices. The player begins with Cyas and NPC's stranded in enemy territory. As far as I’m aware there’s no benefit to keeping the NPC’s alive which leaves me wondering why the player should care about what happens to them. There’s an army of wyvern knights that appear on Turn 2, but they will only attack under certain circumstances like if Sety kills the boss or when the player gets near to them. If neither circumstance occurs they just leave. At the very least they force the player to be more careful in where they position their units.

    There’s a thief that shows up within moving range of the villages on Turn 3. Two of the three houses provide lackluster goodies (a Vulnerary and Holy Water. Really?) but one of them does provide a physic so there is at least one reason to go over there and try to stop him. Dark Mages pop up all over the map in a wide variety of places. They’re annoying to say the least but they can poison the player’s units. They stop showing on Turn 10, but by that point there’s so many of them that the player will still be encouraged to move forward faster.

                                 The map loses points for only having one method of approach though. The map provides the player with a tradeoff between Cyas and Sety. There’s an interesting debate to be had about which character is more useful but it makes the map more strategic in nature and it plays a role in how the player deals with the boss.

Overall Rating: Decent

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Chapter 24  

 This map has problems. For starters the player’s army is split into 3 routes and none of the routes connect with each other, meaning that unless the player uses Warp or Rescue their army remains permanently divided for the entire map. The side objective requires a male NPC character to unlock a door. Which NPC unit? Who knows? The game never tells the player which one it is. Why does it have to be a boy? Because...reasons. It drags the quality of the map down in my opinion.

The right side contains some annoying dark mages with status staves that can screw the player over unless the player is able to deal with them. To the map’s credit it does make pretty good use of enemy reinforcements and how long they stay. Galzus and his mercenary army can be a pain, but Galzus can be recruited by Mareeta so there’s that. Reiderick is an easy boss to deal with, which is disappointing.

Overall Rating: Meh

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      Chapter 24x

                      Worst designed map in the game. Heck, it’s one of the worst designed maps in the series. The main problem with this map are the warp tiles. The game gives no hints about where they are and if the player lands on a tile their unit is warped to a room with no escape. That unit is locked in without any means of escape next to two dark mages, a level 20 sniper and a level 20 mercenary. Yikes! What’s worse is that this is an escape chapter so if you beat the chapter with that unit still down there that character gets left behind for the final chapter. I should point out that there are ways of dealing with these warp tiles, but the game isn’t going to tell you any of that. This ends up reeking of the Guide Dang It! trope.

                   What also sucks is that these Dark Mages will warp powerful enemies to any spot in the map. The only real way to beat this chapter is with a high amount of staves at your side. There’s only one route to approaching the boss too which doesn’t do this chapter any favors. Oh and did I mention that this map uses Fog of War too? That makes spotting the warp tiles that much more difficult.

In short, either staff cheese this level or you’re in for a real nightmare.

Overall Rating: Fail          

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Final Chapter

             Truth be told, this chapter might just get my vote for “Best Designed Final Chapter in the Series”. It has everything one could want from a good map. The map forces the player in different directions since they have to deal with all of the enemies in each of the separate rooms. There are 6 mini-bosses who are very strong, but fair. They all have powerful weapons and have to be dealt with carefully. The player must have one unit on each of the squares in order to open up the main room and advance. This is a brilliant design choice because it’s an anti-lowmanning measure.

              The chapter dishes out a near endless stream of powerful enemy reinforcements. These guys are annoying and can make the player’s life miserable. In order to get them to stop spawning the player will have to open up the door, which means that they’re going to have to beat the chapter faster. In other words, the enemy reinforcements succeed as turtle disincentives. There are two routes to approaching the throne room which is nice. Veld may be a disappointing final boss, but to be fair most final bosses in Fire Emblem are actually not that strong. Plus the meat of this chapter comes from the effort it takes just to get to this point.

Overall Rating: Excellent

         Final Thoughts: Thracia 776’s map design is pretty darn good. The earlygame is fantastic and every section of the game has at least one great map. Most maps require actual thinking and effort and a lot of care was taken into getting the player to play better.

                  There are unfortunate missteps of course, every Fire Emblem game has them. What separates Thracia from most other games is that the number of decent to great maps is definitely higher than the number of not so good maps. I’ve taken a look a good number of Fire Emblem games and so far Thracia 776 is looking to take the title for “Best Map Design In the Series”.

Let’s tally up the map design totals:

Excellent: 11

Pretty Good: 3

Decent: 7

Meh: 4

Below Average: 4

Fail: 6

21 / 35 maps were decently designed or better.

       Thracia’s Overall Map Design Score: 60 %