I know right? What a great oxidizing agent 
I’m sorry organic chem does this thing to you where you can’t unsee any reagent acronyms where they appear elsewhere
I FeAr ON Au 1 TlP 4 CoMcSg OAuTb
SrY TiYPo
I would be very tempted to say ambush reinforcements, becuase when playing FE6 I want to save villages, and then bandits suddenly appear and move on the same turn. Seriously, screw that.
However I don’t mind them when I know they are coming, and they are at least a little distant from me. I find that in those cases it accelerates the time quite a bit for me. So there are some exceptions for that.
Anyway, I don’t know if this can be called a mechanic, however I’m really not a fan of instances when games like FE7 and FE9 keep throwing mostly first-tier enemies at you, while your own units have been promoted for a while now. You barely get any experience, and the enemies are even easier to kill than normal, and that’s just not fun for me.
Class changing. I mean branching promotions is fun but let’s stop at that. I do not want my units to be amorphous blobs that I get to decide what to do woth, nor do I want to figure out what class is best to change to, and so on and so forth. I want units that are strictly one class, and then I can choose to use them or not.
Maps that are solved like puzzles rather than with tactics.
Grinding. Ugh.
And lastly, I don’t like shapeshifting characters, but that’s on me for not thinking they are cool, their mechanics are often interesting.
3 Likes
enemy luck, I hate having heart attacks over a 1% crit
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Ambush spawns, especially the zone based variant. Generally stuff that boils down to ‘Guide dang it difficulty’
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Tactics are the worst FE mechanic
genealogy of the holy war, everything about it
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Ooh ive got a nitpick. Radiant Dawn is my fav game in the series, but why the hell is turning combat animations off locked to a cleared playthrough. Also why is Soren backstory and Sephiran back story and 2 playable characters locked to a second playthrough? Never understood that, as well as how obscure a couple of those conditions are.
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Yeah, seriously. Like wasting a unit slot to deploy the Black Knight during the Endgame of Part 1. No thank you.
Get ready for the hottest of takes.
I hate support conversations.
I don’t dislike the conversations themselves. I despise the entire support system. If you don’t participate in it, your units become actively weaker. A non-supported unit is worse than a supported one, period. The difference isn’t slight either, +10 avo or hitrate is quite decent, and +4.5 damage can give you a big boost in power. Don’t even mention crit buffs and whatnot.
Worse, the support system actively cuts you out of literally 90% of FE6/7/8’s ingame character relations. You know who the most boring characters are in FE8’s story? Almost all of them. Joshua has a cool line here or there, Ephraim has a few good moments, but outside of niche cases, FE8’s story is bland and not one I care about.
But guess what? Use a cheat code to 100% unlock all support conversations, and BOOM! FE8’s characters become way more interesting! Too bad you’ll only get to see a minuscule fraction of those conversations each playthrough. If you don’t cheat, you can only see five ‘points’ worth of conversations per character, per run.
And that’s not even the worst part. You ALSO have to grind turns mindlessly to unlock these goddamned things. You have to move characters right next to each other and have them stand still for fifty turns just to unlock basic C-rank convos, often.
Sure, I can see how support conversations have their upsides.
For one, it gives you a lot of replay value. Each time you play, you can unlock new aspects of the story. That’s neat.
For min-maxers, you have new ways to optimize your character’s stats via supports.
The supports themselves can also be considered ‘secrets’ for more hardcore fans.
But that last point is exactly the problem! I don’t want characters to be ‘secret’ at the cost of watering the story down. I want to get to know each of them well, understand who they are, and optionally read all the dialogue about them as possible in one sitting.
This is why I strongly advocate for gaiden side-chapters where you can move around and talk to characters. No stat boosts, no benefits, just lots of character dialogue. Throw out the support system, or make it purely for stat-boosting purposes, and put all that badass cross-character stuff somewhere the player can more easily access it.
I actually like that FE13 gave every character unlimited support points. Only the S-ranks were limited, and you could cheese them to read them via save-abuse. Not hard at all, and very easy to pull off. FE13 is not my favorite FE game, but in terms of allowing me to interact and bond with the characters, I think it’s waaaaaay up there. I actually like its implementation more than the Base convos in FE9/10, since those also still had limited support conversations.
Another option: LOTS of optional talk events during chapters. These should either not cost any actions, or if they do cost an action, give the units a lil something. Maybe a bit of exp, something so talking to your units is encouraged.
But hey, maybe that’s just me. Maybe I’m the only person who mostly despises the support system. Hottest of takes.
14 Likes
You are not alone, I also find the vanilla support system horrible, that’s why Snak is my hero with his support rework
2 Likes
YOU HERETIC
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Very interesting take.
I, for one, don’t mind the vanilla support system in the GBA games all that much, however I have to agree about how tedious it can be. One of the many things I love about the hack “Fire Emblem The Road to Ruin” and “Fire Emblem Vision Quest” is how it allows the units to have some conversations mid-battle that are not related to supports.
Also, back in the day MageKnight404 had a hack, “Fire Emblem A Sacred Dawn”. It was my favorite for a while in terms of writing. I did not mind all the characters interactions at all, though I saw that many did. I loved the quantity of dialogue, and I think that it’s a shame that it only stopped at Chapter 6. I was fond of every single character, and I was really curious to see where it would go from there.
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Hot take indeed. While I don’t agree with ALL of it, I think you make a lot of good points. I personally wouldn’t throw out the support system, but definitely tweak it a lot to alleviate a lot of the problems you mention. For instance, having them give smaller buffs and making them much less grindy to unlock. And I agree about the limits. They feel arbitrary to me, from a story perspective.
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I agree with most of your points. Supports are indeed very grindy, but you can sort of prevent this by using the patch that increases support ranges. You can make the ranges big enough that you only have to deploy units together to unlock supports.
I hope that one day a patch will be released that removes the limited amount of support partners as I don’t like that aspect of GBA supports either.
Also not happy about the fact that most of the backstory of characters is hidden in their supports. The most bland characters have some good character and I only find out about that, when watching videos about said characters.
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Hmm, I know it’s your opinion.
if it’s say, from Eirika’s side of the story then YES.
BUUUUT! FROM EPHRAIM’S side, it work’s out waaaay better!
so, yeah, but I can see why you’d think it’s bland.