Part 37: Special: Boring Essay

For those expecting an update who do not want to read through this: I was too busy this week to actually play the game. Update should be coming sometime next week and the next one during the weekend.

Welcome to "How Not to Play Fire Emblem and Getting Your People Killed"

In order to keep your people alive, you need two things. Some basic maths skills and some common sense. If these two are used together, you can keep your characters alive in almost all situations. Except in Thracia, because Thracia hates you personally.

Maths are used to calculate damage you receive from enemies and their chance of surviving your attack. The more modern games allow you to choose whether you want to kill an enemy or not. Real story time: In Sacred Stones, in the late chapter where you have to hold your position during the night, I moved Eirika to the front lines. She killed more than ten enemies in a row, but in the end, she was overwhelmed. Had I put someone less competent there, the first attacker would have survived and blocked the path for the others. Again, this does not apply in Fire Emblem 4, where cavalry just rides up to you, attacks and then retreats.

This is where common sense comes in to consideration. You have to play carefully and be constantly aware of enemy movement and attack range, so that one of your units is not overly exposed. Shadow Dragon allows you to constantly show the enemy range on display which is the best improvement it offered. On the other hand, the first two games make you count enemy movement range manually. That only really applies to playing Gaiden, since nobody except crazy people would play FE1 when there is FE3 and Shadow Dragon around.

These are the basic points. There are of course exceptions. Keeping Astrid alive in Path of Radiance before she joined is completely a luck based mission where you can't do much to help your chances and this essay also does not factor in critical hits. If the enemy has a critical hit chance over 10%, kill him as quickly as possibly, if it is lower, treat him as a regular enemy is the easiest method to follow.

Before the end, some quick notes on Arena. In most games, do not take wagers higher than 750 gold and be always prepared to forfeit. Some quick calculations in the beginning can tell you how many hits you can take and remember, you can only forfeit during your own attack. Abusing Arena early makes later chapters surprisingly easy, so if you have time to spend pointlessly in order to suck out all challenge from the game, it is a great choice of what to do.

In the end, there are two more techniques that you can use. They are called restarting the chapter and abusing savestates, but no one really uses them.

That is all. I hope these closing words push the essay over the five hundred words mark. They did not, so I'm going to write something more about the fact that they did not. I'm actually enjoying it, it is actually like returning to the time of writing essays in High School where I cold bullshit my way through them. Anyway, school begins again tomorrow, so take this in place of an update and expect a proper update sometime during this week.