Lategame’s pretty hard to design due to all the options, and that’s the thing I hear most people complain about when it comes to FE games/hacks, that it goes downhill after a certain point/mid game. Are there any games with late games that are enjoyable?
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FE6’s lategame is probably my favorite. 21, 22, and 23 are all maps I like a lot, and 24 is a fun victory lap with all my units coked up on boots (21x exists just to snort that boot dust).
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I like Vision Quest’s lategame a lot since it doesn’t really feel like a lategame which is usually a good thing. Not to say it’s perfect, not a huge fan of the back to back fog maps.
Also, not to partially toot my own horn, Call of the Armor is a consistently good romp. Obviously due to the way it was made it never feels like the dev was getting burnt out and just threw a bunch of enemies on a giant rout map and called it a day.
Looking at vanilla FE, FE4 lategame is just… more FE4, but sometimes harder. And FE5 has the benefit of being able to skip most of the lategame maps, so I rather enjoy both lategames.
It might be a guilty pleasure but I enjoyed the lategames of FE11/12. (Not the endgames though)
Maps in mind are Ch20x, Ch22 (from fe11), and Ch21-23 (from fe12)
three houses lategame was unexpectedly great for me in azure moon, for me I basically went after rare ores in auxiliary battles and used the cash I collected to give my wyvern lord flayn a brave axe and bolt axe+, lategame fe3h is all about optimization for my crazy strats and getting as many supports as I can, it also helps that the game is fully voice acted so it stays entertaining the whole way through.
even though I really dislike fe4 I can say that the late game is great, most likely because the game got essentially a hard reset for part two because of… a barbecue…
Because of the barbecue that sigurd and arvis had together you get a new band of units that get to start off at square one which means that lategame won’t feel as unbalanced because there wasn’t as much variation in party stats as there will be with any other late game team.
Radiant Dawn, Thracia, Vestaria and Berwick endgames are some of my favorites. Honorable mention goes to Conquest’s literal endgame chapter, as in, the final chapter.
Hmm, that’s a good question. I really enjoyed Dark Lord and the Maiden of Light’s lategame, but that was moreso carried by its story than its gameplay.
I don’t know if there’s any lategame that I really enjoyed due to gameplay reasons, but I also can’t say I fully enjoyed a whole earlygame or midgame either. Most of the gameplay chapters I really like are spread more broadly throughout the game rather than being clustered within a specific section of it.
Conquest
Conquest has by far my fav. gameplay in the series, and aside from Ryoma’s map all late game maps are some of my all time favs
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bit of a tough one for me, the game i adore most (fe11) doesn’t have a strong lategame. hammerne makes the rest of the game hilariously cheesable, and even if you forgo using warp 5 times per chapter, many of the lategame maps are…less than spectacular. like the michalis chapter has all the enemies inside the fort because…why??
berwick had its ups and downs but i think its lategame is the strongest stretch of the game. the last 2 maps in particular were actually fun to play through (except trying to kill chaos without vritra) and they also felt very grand (well moreso the 2nd last map than the final), which is what i think lategame maps should ideally be - large and grand, but not a slog to play through in practice, something that can be very tricky with larger maps. shoutouts to kramer being able to chadwalk across the overwatch crossbowmen and ORKO them in retaliation with zweihander.
fe12 had cool lategame maps but holy shit man the critrates.
fe7 has probably my favourite endgame map but the rest of the lategame is…yikes. i know it’s heavily drawn from fe5’s but i never made it that far into fe5 so
also i enjoyed four kings lategame because you have all these crazy tools and roided up (i.e. near capped skill from secret books) units ready to go, but i think i can understand if someone would find it too hard because of brave promoted enemies haha
I love FE7’s late game. All of the maps after the first half are, to me, better than the first half. Gameplay-wise, I always enjoy playing the midgame more than the earlygame, and the endgame even more.
Vanilla FE7 lategame does have the worst lategame map in the form of the Nino/Jaffar recruitment map. Simply not having Warp or Rescue as an option severely worsens this map’s experience.
But in FE7CM, I addressed that issue, making it just as good of a map as all the others. So at that point, it also became one of my favorites.
Looking back, I pretty much always prefer the late-game maps to early game maps in most FE titles. Awakening is a big exception, because while I love having more units and a more customized army, Awakening’s design falls apart once map design stops mattering because you can just throw overleveled stat blobs at the enemy. In the early-game, you actually have some challenge and the maps feel more intuitively thought-out, while those considerations vanish once you can access infinite grinding.
…Come to think of it, I have pretty much the same problem with FE8’s lategame maps, because you can also infinite grind there. Huh!
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Cog of Destiny and Victory or Death from FE7 are some of my favorite maps in Fire Emblem. I’ve also never found Battle Before Dawn to be a bad map. I had to burn two uses of the Sleep Staff to keep Zephiel safe last time I played it, but there was probably never going to be another time when it was as important to disable an enemy at a distance.
I generally like late game in Fire Emblem when each unit doesn’t need quite so much babying. I typically have a late game team full Sages, Bishops, and Druids (with variations depending on what classes a game actually has), so I have an easy time making small teams that can sustain each other with healing and spread out across the map.
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