The Class Design Effortpost Collection

[Parrhesia]

Greetings, citizens of FEU. For far too long, you have suffered through interminable discourse when it comes to this or that way to design a class, why or why not to fix something, what ‘fixing’ even looks like. Sometimes, this discourse comes from people who have not even really thought about design themselves.

Enough. Enough! No more. If a job’s to be done right, then there’s nothing for it but to get the posse together and get to effortpostig.

Over the course of the next week, myself and 25 of my learned colleagues are going to discuss most of the stock classes of GBAFE – assigned by random draw – at length, taking in their experience as designers and as players, not simply coasting off vibes but holding court to discuss these classes based in what has actually been done with them. This theoryposting will give you, good people, ideas, stimulus and, with luck, entertainment. Discuss freely in the comments below. Once the last has been posted, they’ll all be put together in one open document to be perused at your leisure.

The Compilation Will Go Here Once They’re All Posted.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a double-post to make.

[Parrhesia]

SHAMAN

1 – Misfit Toys

There is a certain thrill to using the weapons of the enemy, telegraphed as such. There’s little else that feels so much like turning the tables, particularly if they’ve spent the prior campaign as a thorn in your side. From the alien, spherical Neotanks of Advance Wars, the serpentine Naga in Warcraft 3, the deeply ahistorical Xolotl cavalry in Age of Empires’ Aztec campaign, the hulking, arrogant Trow of Myth II, and the fifth example I remembered when I started writing this sentence but then forgot, this is an itch that a lot of campaigns are eager to scratch. No unit is as alluring as the one that feels like it got lost on the way to the enemy roster.

That is the fantasy that the Shaman taps into. Or at least… it did back in GBAFE. But it all makes sense, right? Dark robes, heavy cowls, powerful magic… how many fourteen year olds tapping away on their semi-transparent plum-purple GameBoy Advances in 2004 actually thought they’d get one of those for themselves? Dark doesn’t have to mean evil, says Canas, and then we walk into Nergal and find it absolutely can, and then meet Bramimond, and find that it can get even worse.

Of course, now we all know these units existed in vanilla, and probably know their growth rates, too, and have strong opinions on snowstorms. Shamans aren’t enough, now, so we scratch that itch with playable monsters, brigands and, worst of all, soldiers. But we all remember when shamans were special, and we all want to hearken back to some kind of feeling, and that, I think, is what the class’ appeal comes back to, the reason so many custom campaigns keep a place by the fire for a class that, come the GameCube, had already vanished without trace.

2 – Vanilla

Before there were shamans, there were dark magi; this is still the flavouring a lot of custom campaigns go for, and the flavouring that FE itself ultimately plumped for in a post-10 world. But between FE1 and its remake, 11, dark mage’s image had been rehabilitated, going from the Bad Guy Class For Bad Men to something you could casually turn Cord into, for the memes, no more or less real a class than cavalier.

The turning point happened mid-Jugdral. In FE4, Dark Magic was, well… Dark Magic. Over the course of the game, Man in Robes Face Half Shadowed would hound your steps; one in Chapter 1 was the first sign of the greater conspiracy (and lesser subplot), and then Manfroy was throwing them at you by the end. They were the pawns – in the sense of a basic playing piece – of the greater evil, the Problem Dragon. But then, a game later, someone called Salem shows up. While Salem is a very capable staff user – indeed, he’s introduced as an enemy hitting you with a Sleep staff – his dark magic use is still key to his character, and you get to unleash it as the player for the first time… sort of.

In FE5, you’re still acutely aware that Salem is a convert from a traditional enemy class. Take the spell Poison, which simply converts into a direct damage spell upon capture. But GBAFE wants to complete the shift, in large part because they have a trinity to fill out, and they have a trinity to fill out because they’ve pulled another – the anima triangle – apart. No longer will dark and light magic simply be stronger than elemental spells, the ‘default’. Now, shaman (itself a more palatable name) is a class like any other, wielding just another one of the four magical types.

The vanilla GBAFE campaigns give you five shamans / druids. Each of them took the class a different path. Raigh was just a kid mage but one who took a darker path; his stats were well-balanced. This was in stark contrast to Sophia, whose mystical, enigmatic vibes were interesting, but not enough to justify a statline that made her one of the worst units in the series. Niime is the obvious star of the show, and the one that really best hits the class fantasy; wildly powerful, extremely fragile. Granted, that power largely manifests through staves, mechanically.

It is largely between Niime and her son, Canas, that Elibe discusses the role of Dark magic. Canas, an amiable, helpful scholar, is adamant that it’s value-neutral… and yet, his brothers are vegetables, and he himself is doomed not to make it to FE6. And FE7’s final showdown sees the ultimate antagonist (if not literal final enemy) Nergal, a Dark Druid, using a dark spell… but he’s ultimately struck down by Athos, a virtuous Archsage, using the supreme dark magic in turn, FE7 Luna. Then there’s Knoll, kind of splitting the difference between Canas and Niime; he’s a pleasant man and a scholar, but he’s also implicated in the Big Plot, one in which darkness is very much the tool of evil, even as it’s sporadically taken up by the forces of good; even the monsters have dark affinity. Knoll’s statline is iconic, which is to say that he’ll die to a stiff breeze, and probably get critted by it. Most of HIS utility comes from being promoted in preps and working on Summoning… but that’s someone else’s write-up to make.

Neutral or not, the class still looks sinister. Their hoods cover their faces, they’re almost formless beneath their robes, and even their basic attack spell is a malignant ooze that seeps through the ground to strike the opponent from beneath. Given FE’s Relationship With Gender™, it doesn’t feel like a coincidence that these elements are significantly softened for Sophia’s animation. She gets a face, her robes don’t loom as much. Actually, I said five earlier… it’s actually six, but I only remembered Ewan existed thinking about his garish bright cyan and red robes.

Dark won’t last as a core weapon type. It gets sidelined in FE9 (along with light, for the most part, which takes Resire back), sort of returns in FE10 but very much the least prominent of the three, doesn’t really exist in 11/12 (though dark mage itself does), and then settles into a role as a subtype of magic only wieldable by specialists. Shaman, really, was a flash in the pan. But that flash coincides with the era of the series we’re all hacking, and the thought of Shaman being squeezed out is unthinkable.

There’s just one problem with this. Was Dark Magic a mistake?

3 – … is a Crowd

GBAFE wanted its two trios within two sets of four, and that’s neat. It’s tidy. But while the melee triangle just about does enough to justify its existence – though I would argue blend together more than they ought – the magic triangle, more rare and with fewer avenues for differentiation, doesn’t wind up so effective in practice. So what place does Dark take in it, and what went wrong?

Ultimately, Dark finds its identity through weirdness. While Anima magic is all about fairly straightforward, functional and efficient attack spells – which makes it feel somewhat flat – Dark magic is gimmicky. It has a strong basic attack tome, Flux, with a good balance of traits, such that it doesn’t really need a midway point to Fenrir, the big daddy of the class that nobody actually uses.

So it uses those points instead to explore other avenues. Conveniently, much ink has been spilled by ArcherBias about the virtues of Luna and Eclipse, and I’m just going to link to those instead of adding to them directly. But there’s also Nosferatu. And it’s Nosferatu, I think, which is particularly central to the identity of the Hackrom Shaman.

The Custom Campaign Consensus, such as it is, tends to arrive at light being the ugly duckling of the three. I’m minded to agree. In vanilla, light gets the distinction of being the weakest of the three magic types, but it makes up for this by also being the heaviest. While it isn’t versatile, it also isn’t inexpensive. But, hey, you get larger and larger amounts of floating crit that aren’t enough to work with. In FE6 (and 9), it’s deliberately the red-headed stepchild, and no space was really left for it to advance. So in FE7 and 8, the heavy lifting is done by its practitioners, instead; the glass cannon Lucius, and the Slayer bishops of Magvel.

4 – Warlocks and Sorcerers

So, I could then boil this down into what the class means to me, but I’ve already sort of done that, over the course of three-and-a-third campaigns. Because there are two axes – tank vs. specialist, scholar vs. cultist – and I’ve strayed up and down them in order to find where I sit.

Let’s talk about the class features and stats proper. In vanilla GBAFE, shaman stats are fucking putrid. But there’s some sense of a slant towards power and away from speed. Honestly, part of this is just communicated through the sprite and the magic animations. Shamans attack slowly and deliberately, devoting almost no attention to the enemy and requiring all their energy just to channel their spells, which take fucking forever to resolve to the point where there’s literally a patch to speed Flux up. Try attributing a skill/speed slant to that.

For these reasons, from the very outset in Drums of War and continuing on into Dream of Five (which iterated on DoW’s class stats), the shaman identity was The Slow, Powerful one. The stat slants hinted at by vanilla GBAFE were exaggerated, which aligns with my approach to class design in general. As I progressed through Homecoming and into Day of Reckoning, I leaned in further to a particular facet of their identity, one with a contradiction in vanilla I was able to remove.

HC and DoR both killed Light as a common weapon type, but preserved Occult/Dark’s advantage over Arcana/Anima. So leaning into the idea of them as an anti-magic mage just fits. They have strong resistance, they have a favourable weapon type, they even have Luna. They have the means to punch through any other mage while pretty much stonewalling them. Their weak points: very poor speed and physical bulk. In DoR, they have the highest resistance of any generic class, and the lowest HP. From Do5 on, the classes were renamed to Warlock, promoting to Sorcerer, and their identity was established.

So to the Drums of War warlock, fanfic favourite Vivica, who arrives late in the prologue. She was originally envisioned as that anti-mage role, though not quite with as stratified a statspread as enemies, but playtesting forced me to add further strings to her bow. See, there just… weren’t all that many mages to kill? And also, she wore them down without one-rounding, so while an impeccable defensive wall against them, she needed more strings to her bow.

Vivica’s biggest buff was not actually to her statline, but to enemies. Because of how I’d sorted out the statlines, armour knights had 2 speed instead of 0. Well, why not give them 0? I gave them 0. Suddenly, Vivica went from one solid hit to doubling and one-rounding, and armours ARE a very common enemy type in DoW, particularly earlygame. And she was now your best answer. The second buff was serendipity; a friend had a very highly-blessed one with like 8 defence, and said how good she felt with high defence. I decided to make that the core experience instead.

So having started out on the specialist end, Vivica became a fairly serviceable tank, though her defence was middling in the greater scheme of things. It’s actually quite common for custom campaign shamans to have genuinely good defence, and we’ll be meeting them later, as well as talking about how this became core to one vision of their identity. For Vivica’s part, she’s a fairly mediocre unit, probably, though one some people swear by. Happily, she winds up finding late OHKO thresholds on powerful enemies with her tomes.

An early midgame boss recruit, Elisenda, is a more straightforward case. While Vivica started a little more well-rounded and ended significantly moreso (as was her arguably more direct competition, the bishop Chasimir from two chapters earlier), Elisenda was from the very beginning designed to be, for want of a better term, ‘early Niime’. In a game with accessible Physic but not many opportunities for status staves, Elisenda winds up being a common fixture of the midgame but relatively rarely goes all the way to the end, a mediocre combatant who will ultimately be fairly easily ORKOed by enemies. I’m pleased with where she ended up.

So into Dream of Five. Gabriel, earlygame warlock – building off a unit present in the 2012 vintage – essentially has a statspread like Vivica, but he’s in a different, bulkier game. Gabriel’s not one-shotting anyone because almost nobody is. Like Vivica, he can eat armours (and has plenty of armours to eat) and absorbs enemy mages pretty trivially, but that isn’t his long-term niche.

No, Gabriel really wants to be your long-term staffer. He has the overkill power for it, and it’s a game that will, in fact, last long enough to let him reach those ranks, to the point where it’s a grind the 0%-growth LTC puts him through (albeit begrudgingly). A trained Gabriel boasts the same ‘skate ramp’ statspread as Vivica, but his role will end up quite different, thanks in large part to the campaign just lasting a whole twelve maps longer.

And – to get into the real sickos shit – the fact that his long-term viability revolves around a Power stat he’s bound to cap ram and that staff-spamming is his major grind creates an incentive to early promote in a campaign otherwise fairly hostile to it, meaning he can serve as a powerspike combatant in Act 2. Did I have all this in mind when designing him? No. He’s actually pretty similar to his 2012 incarnation… on paper, at least. But this is just how he found a niche in this environment. High power magi never really go out of fashion.

Rozelle underwent more of a journey. It started, actually, with her visuals; ‘River’ in 2012 was more or less explicitly ‘Mist but a Shaman’, and even after a recolour her mug could still instantly be clocked. So, she got a facelift, and I had to find a statspread that gave Gabriel room to breathe while still feeling like a shaman. The answer? Ease off a little on magic, nerf her speed and defence into the earth and boost everything else by comparison.

If you look at pure stat total at 20/20, Rozelle actually has the highest in the game (yes, including over Jauger, the actual Est). But this isn’t GameFAQs, and actually, tanking speed and defence does have consequences; physical enemies carve Rozelle up with ease. Further, unlike Gabriel, Rozelle doesn’t have the availability or the overkill magic to be an especially appealing staff-spammer; it’s her magic-tanking (and ONLY magic) and her combat which must carry her.

So, relatively late in development, I decided: fuck it, it’s Christmas somewhere. And I gave her a 1–3 range tome, the Innocuous Book, which would allow her to chip at enemies from a safe distance and marshal her combination of still-quite-good Magic and extremely strong native accuracy. Between that and the Constitution – well, and not caring about speed one iota anyway – she becomes a natural bearer of the heaviest and most unwieldy dark tomes, ones nobody else could really bring to bear. Rozelle’s quite a mediocre unit, in the greater scheme of things. But she found her niche, and she finds her way in plenty of endgame rosters.

Onto Homecoming, where the class line is by a distance the strongest of the completed trio. With Trefor, the idea was to basically min-max, leaning into… well, as it happened, basically Vivica’s original statspread, before her floor was lifted. But this is a different environment, and Trefor thrives. He also gets a Prf tome, as does every magic-user in Homecoming; riffing off vanilla Luna, he gets a 2-3 range Luna with 40-odd crit and +5 Res boon with which he can deal heavy, consistent damage, fish for crits and stonewall enemy mages.

Trefor’s weak points are fairly obvious. He will simply be instagibbed in melee combat. He is not your man to Nosferatank. But ultimately, the difference between truly wretched physical bulk and merely bad bulk is not all that substantial; after all, even if Trefor had +3 defence, you would probably highly prioritise not letting physical foes attack him, right? Trefor also benefits from getting C staves on promotion, so with an early promotion he’ll have a pretty clear run to Physic, Fortify and Sleep, and more than enough magic to be effective with them.

Trefor and Elisenda are the only two of these warlocks to tie into the necromantic aspect of the class, too. Elisenda had a familiar, the mogall Ochulo, who was basically a joke unit (joining terribly underlevelled and with abysmal bulk, benefiting from flight, 6 move and infinite use monster weapons); she could also support the later-acquired skeleton, Deadeye. Trefor, meanwhile, joins with the skeletons Shaker (melee) and Rattler (ranged). They have no luck, and they rely on their mutual B supports to escape the thresholds and to give each other +2 attack bonuses. Trefor can act alone; the skeletons, though, are significantly degraded by it.

Islwyn’s statspread, while still looking basically like a warlock, is far more balanced. Lower ceiling, higher floor. Notably, she only has one Pwr and zero Res on Trefor, arriving significantly later (mid-C11 instead of mid-C5) and at a higher level. Her defence starts okay but won’t grow much; her speed is, at least, enough to double slow classes, and probably . What she doesn’t look like is ‘arguably the best unit in the campaign’. Islwyn is arguably the best unit in the campaign.

If you discount the Est, whose Prf is designed to compensate for her arrival at level 1 about five chapters from the end, Islwyn’s Prf is the best one in Homecoming. Actually, even if you do count the Est, Islwyn’s Prf might still be the best in the game. Certainly it’s the most character-defining. Islwyn’s Bloodmoon Rise comes with 30 uses and has the Hel effect, dropping any unit to 1 HP (or knocking off the final HP). It has full 3-10 siege range. Critically, it only hits (but, if so, always hits) if Islwyn’s current HP is higher than her target’s.

So while Islwyn is a pretty mediocre sorceress in her own right – not an outright bad one, a decent combatant, a good staff unit on promotion – she has the unique utility of blasting people with fucking sky lasers. Being deceptively strong through a gimmick… how Dark Mage can you get? Now, originally, she had notably low HP, I think 24… you will note she now has 36. It turns out Prfs are only really fun if you can actually use them, and fun is more important than balance.

Clarian, meanwhile, leans into the staff sorcerer archetype. And he taught me a similar lesson. Originally, he was far heavier slanted towards Skill and away from Pwer, and also only had a D-rank in staves. That unit sounds terrible. Well, his Prf is a 1-3 range one with 0 attack but +10 Pwr. The idea was that you saw that, pogged, and grinded towards Physic, while also feeling emboldened by how versatile the Prf was and able to put three or even four staves on him… well, the reality was he didn’t really get that far. He joined quite late (mid-C17; the game ends on, effectively, C25). So after a few smaller buffs, I just decided, fuck it… he can be the ultimate staff user. And now he is, slotting into many lategame teams. Maybe don’t always get cute.

Final honourable mention goes to Matzi, in Day of Reckoning. He is, as you’ve no doubt noticed, absurdly min-maxed. But occult magic is extremely powerful in DoR, and has a lot of utility tomes; there’s also a lot of comically slow units, and Matzi will annihilate any of them with ease using basic tomes. He’s the most distilled shaman experience I’ve yet created. Will it be enough? Early signs point towards: maybe.

So… what’s everyone else been up to?

5 – To All the Shamans I’ve Loved Before

Shackled Power had its own take on fulfilling the class fantasy of the shaman, and did so exceptionally well. The first one you find is Demi. Suffice to say her first impression was not the best, and falls somewhat into one of the problems I mentioned earlier…

But she did fit the class fantasy, and, actually, I got a lot of pushback when I said I didn’t care for Demi as a unit. She has a nice, unique design with visuals that play well in SP’s sense of style, and apparently she gets some great battle quotes down the line, too. Those who did click with her got plenty of mileage from her mixed bulk (in a game where resilience is extraordinarily hard to find!) and her ability to strike hard at range (more than you might expect – more on that later).

There’s a later Druid, though, Madari, who I did use through to the end – a very fun character, too, and a nice design. And while Madari doesn’t have the traditional statspread, she still very much feels like she fits the class. A lot of that is down to flavour, bluntly; her story role, her personality, her appearance, her Vibe. But her esoteric magic act is helped a lot by having some esoteric, non-vanilla magic to sling, supplementing the dark spell list.

The main edge Shackled Power gives to its dark mages is dark magic itself, which is expanded on with two spells I can remember. First, Stygia, which is a powerful and accessible 3-range tome; second, Cthylla, a tome which damaged the user but was Brave and gave all-around stat boosts. Do I think shaman generally lends itself to being a slow, powerful class? Yes. Would I trade my quadding princess Madari for the world? No.

Like most units in Vision Quest, Bulan has a relatively balanced statspread, a largely insignificant skill list (I (metaphorically) don’t remember what Demoiselle does; I (literally) don’t remember what Hex does) but her class, slant and availability still give her a very definite role. You can see that her flagrant long-term weakness, her Skill, actually has a decent base, allowing her to reliably inflict damage. And that’s important because she arrives in Act 3, when you have a new team foisted on you; that team is quite heavy on cavalry, and almost entirely inflict physical damage, so she becomes your immediate answer to a lot of problems and has unique utility for a time. Further, that long-term skill issue just means she becomes a natural endpoint for the many, many secret books you can purloin in VQ, The Crime Simulator, while being a staff unit becomes extremely valuable in Act 4, and she rolls in with a C from the get-go. Bulan isn’t flashy, but her strengths and weaknesses create a satisfying, cohesive unit.

Statistically, Hecate is pretty similar to a lot of other shamans, but she doesn’t have the option of pivoting to utility like many of her kindred. Instead, she doubles down on the combat role she already possesses, because Druid has the innate skill of Tomebreaker – massively boosting her hit and dodge against all tomes – solidifying her role as a mage-killer. That’s handy, because Hag is festooned with enemy mages (almost always anima and dark) on most maps, thoughtfully providing a target-rich environment. Oh, well, she can also technically promote to rogue-with-dark. But she won’t.

Now, I was ironmanning, and due to a string of bad bets and worse rolls, the Inquisition dropped a train on her. Not to worry: I had picked up Fazang a few chapters ago, and while he was now underlevelled, and his stats weren’t nearly a match for Hecate’s, he had a niche to slot in, and so my team had a hard-counter for enemy wizards again, that being a vital role to have. Hag is a rarity in that Shaman Combat really is enough to keep up on its own.

My favourite of the titular Seven Siblings, Kristia works on strong, but not overpowering defences, and she’ll need them because she’s going to be doubled by everything, particularly as her almost-not-putrid base speed gives way to absolutely zero growth. The fact she’s getting doubled means that Nosferatu negates one hit, but not the second, so damage will add up on her. And that honestly follows a usual pattern for Shamans, but in a different way; her combat becomes less relevant over time in favour of her support, but instead of it being her attack falling off, it’s her defences, and instead of picking up staves, she transitions to summoning.

Probably the elephant in the room is Four Kings’ Shelby. Now, Shelby’s stats look, at a glance, 1) deeply mediocre and 2) like Krash only knows or acknowledges the numbers that appear in the TRS RN seed, so obviously there’s a catch. And it’s not just Summoning – again, look somewhere else for that. Indeed, my experience of Shelby dragged him through most of the game at level 9 before, finally, being able to drop him like a hot stone, because I didn’t like him much.

Which is why it’s deeply irritating that he’s the best unit in the game, and that this was apparent with minimal training to begin with. Every 4K unit has a Prf that is meant to define them unless they’re Chase, who is defined instead by being Temu Silph (and thus still the best character, ignore that I just said that was Shelby). Shelby’s is pretty straightforward. Munio gives him +10 def / res. That’s enough to stonewall just about everything in the earlygame, and still makes him a very competitive off-tank all the way through to the end of the route split (and thus, no bench), even if you dislike him and sandbag him from kills to the point where he’s level 9 at chapter 20. That’s as a mixed tank, in an environment where tanking even one of the two damage types is rare. For those who continue to use Shelby, his advantage is further cemented by lategame, where physical enemies largely swap to brave weapons… that mean their attack stats will not clear Shelby’s defence. Shelby’s a one-trick pony, but it’s a hell of a trick… and, hey, sometimes he can even use dark magic to attack safely at range with Flux or whatever, which isn’t nothing.

6 – To All the Druids I’ve Left Behind

Now it’s time to talk about custom campaigns I haven’t played. So the following insights are gathered through osmosis. If you disagree with anything, blame someone else.

Shackled Power isn’t the only campaign to allow dark mages to express themselves largely through an expanded spell list. Thoril does have the advantage of being, relatively speaking, fairly close to the fastest party member in his campaign; this is, unfortunately, because his campaign is Doubled or Nothing. His durability is such that he’s easily 2HKOed, and thus, pattern-recognising brain havers will intuit, one-rounded. Except, critically, he has access to the Omen spell, which does nothing for his durability… directly. What Omen does offer is that it’s a powerful brave spell, and trivially capable of destroying most enemies. If an enemy is too dead to administer the critical second attack, your ‘ORKO-able’ unit instead cleanly wins the matchup, and as a result becomes one of the player’s most reliable EP units. Depending on the campaign environment, it may not even require a brave tome to see this effect in play, if a direct one-shot is situationally within reach.

Looking now to Cerulean Crescent, Basil cheats through having two Power stats, at least in melee; there, Strength contributes as well as Magic to damage through his skill, which he pairs up with a solid ability to physical tank. As a result, while he can chip from distance (there is a 1-5 range tome he can prod with, when he can’t keep up with the fight), he’s incentivised to get up close and personal with his enemies, a pivot around which your more dynamic and finicky glass cannons can safely operate. Promotion helps this by giving him a horse, and overall making him an unfussy, reliable unit in a sea of mercurial gimmick pieces while still having a very strong and distinctive core concept.

One must now give the appropriate flowers to the most archetype-defining Druid in the hackrom scene. That is original character Teodor Anunexpectedcaller. To massively simplify, he’s what you get if you put Niime in the prologue, and also make him the devs’ collective favourite unit. In the words of my anonymous source, A. Bias, ‘teodor def used to be a huge telephone devs dont give the jagen fucking everything challenge’ (emphasis mine). For more specifics, refer to Further Reading and Retina’s effortpost.

Courtesy of Krash.

As soon as someone mentioned Lumn Soulsoftheforest, people in the chat immediately started bickering. This is the secret to unit design: you want to foster discourse. Anyway, so the story goes, Lumn was at one stage in SotF’s development cycle by far its strongest unit, a legitimate tank in a hyperoffensive game who could actually stand up to opponents (so… Shelby). In the current build, he’s largely been reined in, and other units have caught up to him. But his reputation remains.

Along similar lines is Kenneth of TMGC. In raw stats, he doesn’t quite resemble a Lumn or a Shelby, sure, but TMGC’s environment is one where a bulky unit who can take on all-comers is valuable. But where TMGC is unique in the scene is as a unit-builder. You get a ton of scope to boost units. And who rewards investment more than your magic-wielding omnitank? With appropriate TLC, Kenneth can become an immovable object.

7 – Final Takeaways

You’ve seen shamans and dark mages. Some of them are scholars, others cultists. While some find their utility in pure power and esoteric offensive magic, others find a new identity as mixed tank units, and in both cases often find niches that other classes don’t neatly fit. In summary, Shaman is a land of contrasts.

The one thing I would caution against is that Shamans are vulnerable to becoming overly balanced for their own good. Canas has a very well-balanced skillset, which means he excels at all things… against the Black Fang, anyway, and their roster of elite assassins consisting of deficient mutants mass-ordered from Wish. If you have stronger enemies, that sort of statspread quickly stops being ‘jack of all trades’ and looks a lot more like ‘master of none’. On the other hand, if they’re overly min-maxed in a way that seems intuitive (at least to me), it might not leave them with room to excel, or else the situations in which they excel might be too niche.

Either way, it leads here. Even more than most classes, you have to pay attention to what units they’re going to counter and in what ways they’re going to counter them. For enemies, being a clean problem that delivers one strong hit is solved by archers (with range) or fighters (with one-shotting) is enough, but if ORKOing is a fair expectation in combat, then the player shamans are going to either have to hit damage numbers high enough to reach that, or they’ll have to be fast enough to double at least something.

Also, depending on your environment, they might wind up more valuable long-term for their staff usage (and / or their summoning, if applicable) than their combat. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either. You can do a lot worse than leaning into that. Niime’s iconic for a reason!

Also, Shamans / Druids don’t have to be the lone standard bearers of dark magic! Sibyls in Do5 and Hexes in HC and DoR both promote from light / anima respectively into dark magic, gain a point of movement to compensate for no staves, and particularly when it comes to Sibyls, have more favourable statlines for Nosferatu tanking in particular and dealing with mixed opponents generally.

As far as enemies go, it is enough to lean hard into that anti-magic mage experience. If you’ve bolstered the Dark roster, they also offer an opportunity to really flex that in the player’s direction, and perhaps foreshadow tomes they’ll get a few chapters early. Eclipse can be a softer alternative to hard siege (though be mindful of the unpredictability of attack order; you can rig this with the Commander number). Just be mindful that there are answers to whatever questions they pose, ideally multiple. If enemies have crit Luna, do you have crit-immune units, or longbows? If they have Nosferatu, are they one-shottable, or largely stonewalled by your own shaman or pegasus knight? Get cute and fancy, but make sure that the solution doesn’t require the player to have read your mind and positioned their resources just so. One other factor with Luna is that, crit or not, you probably don’t want to go crazy with it; while it fits the niche of anti-mage mage, it also means another attack that doesn’t hit resistance, when you most likely need more opportunities for that stat to be relevant, not fewer.

At the end of the day, if you want my opinion – and, this far in, I should hope you do – Shamans feel best when the developer resists the urge to normalise and smooth down their rough edges, and instead leans into their oddball identity. They are the most enigmatic and imposing magic class, both visually and in terms of their weaponry. Dark magic should feel different and special. Help this unit feel like one that the player, really, probably shouldn’t get to have.

8 - Further Reading

Teodor has been further expanded on by Retina for an Effortpost. There’s also an effortpost on DLATMOL’s Chandra, by Bobby Asaka. This is more focused on her story role than her class design, but it would feel incomplete not to mention.

Finally, ArcherBias’ discussion of Luna, most prominently a defence of crit Luna (and FE7’s implementation more broadly). Worth engaging with. He’s also an advocate for Eclipse, which comes up in the comments in that thread.

[luminescentblade]

Myrmidon, Swordmaster, Infantry Monoswords

The Fire Emblem class Myrmidon, also known under names Swordfighter and Samurai, is typically a sword-using class that is characterized by a statline of high speed and skill. Usually, they also have mediocre strength, though Myrmidons with solid strength tends to be more common than Myrmidons with mediocre speed. The monosword class Swordfighter originates from the first Fire Emblem, represented by Navarre and Ogma, and they promote to Hero. In FE4, Ayra became the first Swordmaster, which is the promotion the modern Myrmidon is associated with, while Chulainn, also of the Swordfighter class, promotes to what would eventually become the modern Hero. In FE5, this differentiation brought about the modern Hero, with Mareeta, Shiva, and Trude all promoting to Swordmaster from Swordfighter, but Machuya gains axes instead of movement. In FE6, the unpromoted classes finally split into Myrmidon versus Mercenary, and when FE1 is remade into FE11, Navarre was assigned Myrmidon, while Ogma was assigned Mercenary.

Myrmidons can trace their roots to various swordsmen media, such as the Wuxia and Chanbara fiction genres, which features extraordinarily skilled swordsmen who excel in duels. Characters in this class often are depicted as extremely skilled fighters and duelists, or as someone in the process of training to reach that goal. Visually they tend to have high amounts of flair, with flowing coats and flashy animations. Looking cool doesn’t necessarily mean combat effectiveness, however. As a mono-weapon unit type, they lack the flexibility of multiweapon classes, and as infantry, they have less movement than mounted units. Swords as a weapon type also generally have low might, to compound on the class often having mediocre strength. For a Myrmidon to be worth considering a deployment slot on purely gameplay merits, they need to have things the rest of the army can’t do that make these drawbacks worth the tradeoff. The official titles accomplish this to varying degrees of effectiveness.

In Official Titles

Note: I played most (but not all) titles on highest difficulty so that’ll likely be what I’m most familiar with, and while I played everything FE4 and later, I’m significantly more familiar with some more than others. If I leave something out, it’s probably because I don’t remember enough to be confident about using them in this analysis. I should provide enough examples here to illustrate my points, however.

Rutger is one of the most notable Myrmidons in terms of combat effectiveness. His stats are very high because of hard mode bonuses, which allows him to kill bosses really well. Swords are a good weapon type in FE6, since half of lances and almost all of axes have very unreliable hit rates. Swordmasters gaining +30 crit, while not necessary for them to be good under FE6’s system, is icing on the cake on the fun factor and does make the crits more reliable to get. Fir is a clear training project and does start weak, but hard mode bonuses does actually make her bases quite high for her level, and she does join in a map full of axes. While not as effective as Rutger, and isn’t intended to be, she nevertheless is a fun training project with reasonable payoff with how friendly FE6 is toward Myrmidons.

FE4’s Ayra actually has a similar on-the-surface level setup to Rutger. Her stats are insanely high for her join time, she has the skill Astra, and she will likely win in a 1v1 against the majority of your units, hence many people having trouble with her recruitment. Swords are also the best physical weapon type in FE4 due to unmitigated weight. The issue with FE4 is the maps are just too big. Ayra’s overwhelming offense doesn’t quite make up for the vast advantage having both 3 more mov and canto, and roads giving a percentage increase in movement further compounds a horse’s movement advantage. Gen 1 maps, at least, do have split objectives, so in some maps infantry can still reach the next castle faster than the mounts can get back from the previous castle. Gen 2 is significantly more hostile toward infantry in layout, and in fast play her twins often get left behind despite their high initial stats and strong skill layouts. However, because Shannan having Balmung skews the scale so much further, enough for him to perform well against endgame enemies at base, his combat is still very relevant, but his movement flaws are still very present as a balancer.

FE5 in contrast has smaller maps than FE4 and also fatigue and dismounting. This incentivizes players to use different units for indoor vs outdoor maps: fatigue coupled with FE5’s relatively low enemy stats makes a good environment for team rotation, and mounts suffer strong penalties dismounted between being mostly locked out of their main weapons and having less mov than standard infantry classes. Swordmaster and Hero split in FE5 and the main tradeoff is +1 mov vs Axes. While axes do have some perks like having a more accessible 1-2 that runs off strength and the new Build stat mitigates some of the effects of weight off attack speed, its poor hit in a 1-99 1RN system makes the Swordmasters having 1 more mov a more appealing indoor choice.

Lances and Axes got a hitrate increase in FE7 and 8, and swords are no longer the dominant melee weapon type in those entries. While having sufficient personal stats can still make a unit fairly effective with just swords (e.g. Joshua, Raven before promotion, Jaffar), FE7 and 8 have a number of underwhelming Myrmidons. While Guy has pretty ok bases and does get Hard Mode bonuses, despite having a 70% speed growth, his problem is actually that he’s not fast enough. Guy is held back by poor con that causes him to lose 3 points of speed on Killing Edges, and while he does have a solid showing in specifically 13x, between his bases not quite being high enough to handle being weighed down by the moderate damage swords, and Swordmaster doesn’t gain speed on promo, he loses out doubling thresholds against a good amount of the enemies that warrant super high speed on. This is compounded by Raven joining soon after with better bases in all relevant stats, and 3 higher con on top of that. Hero also has speed on promotion and the improved axes are a better tradeoff here against the +15 crit of Swordmasters. Karel also joins with not enough speed to matter and also loses you a Brave Sword. Karla and Marisa of FE8 are completely understatted, with neither the writing nor the payoff that classify them as ‘intentional training projects’, unlike Fir or Mareeta. In the cases of Guy, Karel, Karla, and Marisa, they cannot hit enough offensive value to even put the tradeoff of raw offense vs flexibility/utility on the table.

FE11 introduces reclass, and in most reclass entries, Myrmidons tend to be unfavorable picks. Most of the time it is because Myrmidon as a class is just fairly underpowered in the entry they’re in. Awakening and Birthright, notably, are heavily enemy-phase focused games that wants 1-2 killing power. While Fates does have ranged swords, like most melee-based ranged weapons, they cannot double and weighs down a Myrmidon’s avoid. Lon’qu has good stats, but you can put Lon’qu into Wyvern and then he’s a good Wyvern and not a Myrm anymore. Hana is frail and ill suited for the enemy phase. Hinata’s actually pretty solid for earlygame, but his speed scales poorly and ends up a better backpack. In FE11 I also tend to put Navarre into Cav whenever I use him. Similarly, Engage’s Kagetsu’s claim to fame is that he can just not be a Swordmaster and go into a stronger class (also like the aforementioned Wyvern Lord) and bring those stats with him there.

However, this is not the case with every reclass entry. FE12 has Swordmaster be a very potent lategame class for a few reasons: FE12 lategame enemies all have capped speed, so being 27 speed or higher means you don’t get doubled by anything, and with SM’s huge speed base and 30 cap, it’s pretty easy to get your team mainstays to hit those thresholds. SM grants automatic C swords, which gives access to Wyrmslayer to deal effective damage for a very big portion of the lategame. SM is the only class that can sometimes dodge anything in FE12. One notable matchup in the lategame I remember off my 12 Lunatic run is getting SM!Palla to face 30 hit from a lategame Berserker. Berserkers hit very hard, and while you should make sure your strat accounts for getting hit anyway, not getting hit means you can spend your heals elsewhere which helps with action economy and pacing momentum.

Speaking of dodgetanking, and also going back to Fates, there is the elephant in the room: Ryoma. Narratively, Ryoma is the strongest warrior in Hoshido and also the crown prince, so he has the stats and equipment appropriate for that role. Gameplaywise, Ryoma bypasses pretty much every flaw inherent to Swordmaster as a class. Raijinto can double and does not drop speed at range, and even gives Ryoma +4 str for free if it’s in inventory at all. It also gives +10 avoid. Dodgetanking on its own isn’t reliable in Fates because of hybrid RN, but Ryoma doesn’t only rely on dodgetanking. His own bulk is good enough to take at least 1 hit, often 2, as a safety net, and because his ranged offense isn’t gimped, he has much better chances to proc Astra in most combats, which in Fates grants a full shield gauge and he can just negate damage that way. While some may argue he’s still better in Paladin, that is at least a path of some resistance, as he joins midway through the game and will have to build an A support for it with a unit the player may not be even using, and Swordmaster Ryoma is plenty effective enough. While Ryoma’s setup can be a bit too far on the unit balance scale for players preferring tighter design, breaking down what makes him, him, is still a useful exercise. Not all sandboxes need the same level of balance–it is a single player game after all, and in single player, being fun is more important than being perfectly balanced.

The Takeaways, from what worked and didn’t work in Vanilla

• The tradeoffs for having swordlock should be appealing.

  • This can be skills or it can just be having enough of more stats. Sometimes more stats is mov.

• Swords themselves ideally should be a competitive weapon type.

  • Ideally, every weapon type should be worth using.
  • The easiest way to accomplish this is to have every weapon type have some options that have unique effects only that weapon type have access to.

• As a pure combat class, their combat needs to be good enough to matter as a tradeoff to other classes having more flexibility and/or utility.

  • It’s fine to just give them sometimes a lot more stats.

• Sometimes it’s fun to have a narratively hyperdominant prepromote, and Swordmaster is a fitting class for it, while the inherent drawbacks of the class can help balance the unit out a bit.

  • Ryoma is so overwhelming because he basically can just ignore every drawback present in Swordmaster as a class. The designer can choose to dial back some of those aspects if that is something they care about. They may not.
  • Shannan is a good example of a powerful-but-flawed unit because his combat is so good but movement is also too dominant in FE4 that it’s unignorable that he doesn’t have a horse, yet Balmung’s contributions cannot be ignored either.

Implementation in Hacks

As creators of Fire Emblem fangames, many of us have our own takes on Myrm characters and how they should play in our works. I’ll go over what I’ve done as a dev, as well as examples that I’ve found notable in other hacks.

In My Hack, Which Is Epic

Some of you probably think I just do art for Dream of Five and Homecoming (and to a much lesser extent, Drums of War). This is false. While it is true that Parrhesia does the vast majority of gameplay design on our three complete hacks as of this point, I do custom code occasionally, playtest with actionable feedback, and I’m fully responsible for the +15avo in addition to crit idea and implementation for Swordmasters in Do5 and HC.

Playing the Percentages

My inspiration was FE12 Lunatic. Palla dodging that Berserker felt really good. Do5 isn’t nearly as extreme as FE12 Lunatic in either enemy quality or avoid reduction through formula, but it does still have fairly strong enemies, and there is a formula change (skl * 2 + luk instead of luk/2 for hit) that makes dodging less reliable. Giving Swordmasters 15 avo for free gives them back some of that reliability with less requirements, and that allows for more reliable matchups against hard-hitting axes and even be a good option to bait Silver Longbow Snipers while on terrain, even if they can’t counter. The same principle is why we gave Rena +15 luck on Gilded Edge.

Generic Myrms hit 20 spd as of C11 and are 19 spd during C10 and 10B. The bulky lances don’t take a lot of damage from these guys, but it does take 2 people to kill before Nikita’s final iteration.

Onduris route has a lot of Myrmidon enemies, given the worldbuilding. Midway into the route, they start hitting 20 speed. Dream of Five enemies tend to be on the bulkier end of reasonable, which does mean generally enemies cannot be oneshot outside of effective damage. Because nobody can double Myrmidons, nobody can oneround them at that point, even using good equipment. I’ve tried earlypromoting Eilene, but earlypromoting full combat units in Do5 gimps their long term hard enough that it would be a poor exp allocation choice to then feed Eilene enough exp to level up twice to hit 24AS, as that requires precious boss kills that early on. On top of that, Eilene gets weighed down by most lances and has low enough str to miss kills while doubling anyway. My usual play involves promoting Kolbane, a bulky lance who fares well against Myrms in general, during C12. C12 is where lv1 promoted units can finally gain a good amount of exp killing normal enemies, and with Kolbane having a reasonable shot to cap speed at lv20 unpromoted, a +3 promo bonus, he has good chances of hitting 24AS by the end of the chapter to then double everything into c13 and 14. However, that’s still only 2 chapters of a 9-chapter route. Myrms hit 20 speed before that point.

Note the 21AS as a boss but 24Speed when you get to use her

The solution to that is simple. The player can recruit a prepromote Swordmaster, Nikita, on 10x/11, by defeating her in chapter 10. Late into development, as a result of my testing, we ended up giving her 24 base speed so she can double myrms for free. To make her boss fight manageable, we then swapped out her Silver Sword for Steel, which weighs her down by 3. This allows her to still be a tricky but doable boss with the tools we’ve given the player up to that point. We’re happy with the results; Nikita through my multiple tests feels the best to use out of any act 2 prepromote and slots comfortably into the lategame.

The unpromoted myrm, vi’Shen is less initially glamorous by comparison. However, his bases still put in work for his join and he scales offensively better, while Nikita’s scaling is more full avoid focused. He also has the option to instantly promote, or to gain a few extra stats while unpromoted before he does. People who have used vi’Shen generally reported positively.

Bases vs insta-promo comparison.

We kept the +15 avoid Swordmaster into Homecoming. Both enemy and average player bulk have been dialed down, but weapon power has been slightly skewed up, so everyone is easier to kill. The weapon triangle has also been dialed up for better counterplay matches. The Myrms in Homecoming recruit each other this time, in a chain of

• Lasse, who made up a few things on his resume but is still a decent sword-arm, just in over his head;
• Gwyngyll, who Studied The Blade™;
• Brychan, an old master, may or may not be cultivating, who knows;
• Dryche, last war’s veteran, the realest deal;

Lasse has slightly above par combat stats compared to most of the party bar Anghara and Ludolf, but not overly so. Gwyn has better combat stats overall than a similarly-levelled Lasse, though worse avoid and res. Brychan goes all-in on res (as well as the standard SM stats of skl and spd) for magic sword synergy. Dryche…will be discussed in a later section.

Homecoming magic weapons (mostly swords) runs off res, taking inspiration from FE5’s mag=res system. This did make Pegasi really offensively powerful, though Pegasi are still quite a bit frailer than Swordmasters. While a few of the Swordmasters do have too low res to really make the best use of Magic Swords, those tend to be the ones with high raw combat stats to use the rest of the swords really well. For Swordmasters who have just enough res, via a combination of boosters and pure water, however, this gives them a defensive edge over Pegasi while using magic swords, between higher raw bulk, avoid bonus, and not dying immediately to bows.

The Intentionally Overstatted Megasword

When the original Dream of Five ended production in 2015, I also took a break from the hacking scene. When I returned to revive Dream of Five in 2023, the first hack I played was Parr’s previous hack, Drums of War. In DoW, Estrelle was a standout both in character presence and in gameplay, with her overwhelming stats. Later, I recommended her for several lategame strats in Toffee’s 100% growths LTC run despite the party being otherwise comprised of units who have, well, been grown with growths set to 100%. All she needed was 2 strength levels for everything she needed to do, or the equivalent of a strength booster. Estrelle does use bows as a secondary, so she’s disqualified for an in-depth analysis here, but she’s the first of the NQR Megaswords.

In 2010, I created Thyra, though under a different name at the time. She used to be an earlygame Myrmidon, shifted to be a midgame Swordmaster due to earlygame sword saturation, and then changed to a custom class as I learned how to do custom animations. Her design evolved with both my art abilities and changes as a person, and as of 2015 her design no longer suited a standard Swordmaster stat profile.

The 15 crit is really just there so the animations will play. I spent a lot of time on those crit anims, you know.

Come 2023, it’s finally time to make chapter 17. Thyra’s combat abilities are heavily inspired by wuxia novels, and convergently comparable to Kiryu Kazuma far before I even played Yakuza. Someone who’s meant to be that powerful of a fighter should have the stats to match, and I took inspiration from Estrelle and Ryoma and Shannan. Dream of Five’s mounts are fairly good, so for an infantry melee unit to not just be viable but to really stand out, we needed to push quite a bit of her stats and it took a few iterations. Tianlong Jian was always meant to be a 1-2 chainsword of sorts, but since Dream of Five is a game designed with a degree of balance in mind, we do want to avoid a straight up Ryoma. I coded Tianlong Jian’s conditional 2 range stat decrease. Narratively it’s because it’s an imperfect design. We also gave her a notable flaw in having 0/5% res backed by lore. This limited her ability to completely juggernaut up the game, but she has the third highest Battle/Win numbers for a unit joining more than halfway through the game in the 0% LTC and is used for the final boss kill, so I’d say we hit the right spot in that unit design.

In our next game, Homecoming, Dryche [Major Spoilers Ahead] is designed to be Asbjorn’s Navarre. She takes inspiration from both Navarre and Ayra, and as a unit continues the trend of the overstatted megasword in our projects. Narratively she fits with “Navarre, 20 years later” fairly closely, but her design is based off a sketch I did of a Gen 2 Ayra, and a lot of her gameplay design elements call back to her as well. Moon and Star is a reference to the FE4 sword skills, both in name and its effects (pierce, +15 spd–which originally was brave until that was found to be a bit too broken), and even has reduced mov for an injured leg.

Honestly she’s basically Shannan.

Dryche’s design thesis, from Parr, was to see if he can get me, specifically. to use a reduced mov unit (as resident big fan of the mov stat) that isn’t spamming staves or have strong 3+ range, and he succeeded. I might have shot myself in the foot by designing her after Ayra, who is my favorite FE character despite what I said about FE4’s infantry issues, but Homecoming also accommodates her well. Chapter 21 is a multi-bosskill that has some close bosses she can gank while the mobile bosskillers take the far ones. Chapter 22 is turnfloored and on a pure gameplay level she carves through the chapter boss like butter whereas several other top tier units do poorly against her, so she has plenty of time to amble down. Chapter 23 is big and on first sight her mobility would hurt her here, but Homecoming’s rescue staff (S rank, received at the end of 19, her join chapter) has 15 uses and 23 is a high deploy map anyway, she can be moved using rescue. She’s mandatory if you want to 1 turn Final. Dryche managed the movement-power tradeoff by being the most powerful tactical nuke.

Myrmido’s and Myrmidon’ts

There is, of course, not one singular correct way to handle Myrmidons, but to hit the right class feel, generally it all comes back to killing more things than other units, or dodging more things than other units, or both, in the end. I’ve enjoyed a good amount of the Myrms and Swordmasters I’ve used in hacks I’ve played, and I do want to highlight some standout examples.

Cerulean Crescent

Since the remaining hacks I’m talking about aren’t mine I only have my endgame saves so you’re getting their endgame stats instead of bases. Rohesia is one of the highest-levelled characters I have this file, which is my first CC run, done on Misery mode. Granny saved me.

Cerulean Crescent’s Rohesia has a skill that gives her 100% crit on initiation, outside of a few weapons that can’t crit. While on Normal mode she’s often overlooked for units with built-in refreshes and higher mobility, on Misery her ability to kill anything ever and not fall off in doing so is incredibly valuable. Because she can crit with everything outside of Rondel Dagger (def pierce), Fancy Stabber (1-2 canto), and magic swords, her selection of what can crit contains weapons with extremely high mt, like Silver Blade, effective weapons (which contains the Da series effectives in the lategame that is effective against anything non-infantry) or things that mitigate enemy counter, like Brave Sword and the swords that do follow-up before counter. Killing with her feels good because you can move her up to any enemy not holding an anticrit item and expect them to be gone with the right weapon choice.

She also doubles as CC’s megasword given her narrative role, high base stats/level, and the ability to remove almost unit you want from the map. Except she joins in chapter 5 and is just good forever. Her drawback is lack of in-built refreshes, which is a reasonable balancing factor. Her movement itself otherwise, however, is actually pretty good, at 7 base movement and is only exceeded by the chickens and people with built in refreshes until units can promote.

Hag in White

He did eat 2 HP boosters for that HP, but one of the HP boosters was dropped on Endgame-2 so it was more or less a vanity use. One HP booster is very good on him, however. I recommend it.

Kairos is my favorite Hag in White character for both writing and combat. He joins very early and kills everything really dead with his flame sword. I thought he’d be pretty flame sword reliant given his higher mag than str statline so that’s why I started hopping on Lopezcoin, but turns out you do actually get a second free one fairly soon and they’re pretty reasonably priced anyway.

Kairos keeps on being extremely dominant in raw damage numbers and his tradeoff is that he is very squishy. While his access to range is less restricted than most Myrms out there, Flame Swords at range do not give sword exp, so you do need to do some melee combat (can still be with Flame Sword) to get his wexp up. While this is a gba bug of sorts, it nevertheless creates a fairly interesting dynamic while using him.

Kairos has the option to go Spellblade (basically Sage but keeps swords too) or Swordmaster, and Spellblade is generally regarded as the stronger option, for good reason. I went Swordmaster myself because I just thought it’d be something Kairos would do, and it’s still fairly potent. A fun strat I use in Swordmaster is pure water into baiting an axe user + the 3 sages behind them, which is made more reliable in Swordmaster because of higher speed, even with the avo reduction formula. For someone who is rather physically frail I actually did a nontrivial amount of calculated enemy phase plays with him, and if you’ve been getting the shrine Kestrel Swords, that allows SM damage to keep up with endgame levels just fine.

Faces of A Stranger

Faces of A Stranger by ArcherBias reworks Myrmidons into Duelists (and Swordmaster into Pitfighter) for vibes and a statline rework. On principle of ‘it’s worse for a slow unit to have poor skill than fast since they only have one shot to hit’, Faces goes for a medium strength/low skill/high speed offensive layout.

It’s very rare I’d use a melee unit with this little bulk. Tarka manages it. This is taken as of end of C16, the most up to date chapter as of time written for Faces.

It works pretty well for the sandbox; Tarka has very high pow/spd and can still get fairly reliable combat by picking the right sword for the matchup. Their bulk is low, but it’s good enough to live 1 hit in most cases, and like Kairos above even with reduced avoid formula they can pull off matchup-based dodgetanking using terrain while facing specific enemies with the right weapon. Most units in Faces have ‘enemies they’re good at killing’ and ‘enemies they’re bad at killing’ and for Tarka, a much bigger proportion is more like ‘enemies which sword is good at killing’. Usually I don’t like melee units that are too squishy, but Tarka’s combat has been absolutely worth it. It helps that as a monoweapon unit under Faces class design principles, Tarka has +1 mov over the 2-weapon infantry, similar to how FE5 has for Swordmaster vs Hero. While the Hero equivalents in Faces are also quite good, Tarka having 7 mov promoted allows them to pull off some fairly aggressive play that is very fun to do.

Four Kings

Vin wasn’t part of my team on the final merge but it’s pretty undeniable how useful he was during the full-deploy party split.

I think it’d be a sin to discuss dodgetanking without mentioning Vin. I didn’t go hard invest into Vin, but given how 4K works with the route split full deploy I might as well have him do what he’s designed for. Main Gauche lets Vin dodge basically anything with the drawback being having fairly low durability compared to some other PRFs so if he’s tanking in melee he’ll have to watch for that, and that it doesn’t have much damage so if you’re looking to train up Vin he’ll have to kill stuff the normal way, which he is pretty ok at before promo. For being fairly low invest and mostly used for Main Gauche and given kills only when opportune, he contributed a lot to clears by being functionally immortal while Main Gauche is equipped.

Wheeeeeeeeeeee
Even with just 13 mag, doubling with any reasonable implementation of Runesword is pretty effective.

Candace is the Swordmaster in 4K I actually used more of but I can’t talk about her in more unbiased lenses given that I fed her 90% of my boosters and turned her into a runesword tank which is probably not her design intent, but hey, worked for me!

Isekai Emblem

Lennart is a strange unit. In terms of story role and intended design, he’s meant to be the Jagen. However, while he’s a good unit and still do occupy the space of being top 1 or 2 earlygame, he’s not quite strong enough to full carry. He does have very high growths, and ends up playing more like Wolf/Sedgar in FE11 than a proper Jagen.

Self Explanatory.

Earlier I mentioned that people who do care about balance should probably not go full Ryoma, but Isekai Emblem isn’t that kind of game, and I do enjoy it for that. Lennart ends up being kind of build your own Ryoma. After having to contend with scaling with high growths but low exp gain, Lennart will promote at a point in the story. Lennart’s promotion is, technically, still a Tier 2 internally to the game instead of Tier 3, so resetting his level allows him to gain exp quickly at that point in the game, and his promo itself is pretty hefty. Lennart’s high speed and luck on default gba formulas already allow him to dodgetank reasonably well on his own, but then Runeswords become buyable a few chapters after his promotion. He does have a good Magic stat, so lategame Lennart is near-invincible. The maps themselves still give plenty to do, so Lennart being that powerful didn’t feel like a problem.

I will, however, give a point off for the other myrm, Lana, who did feel too noodle-armed and didn’t have enough good matchups to feel good using, despite me wanting to give her a chance.

Myrm Emblem

I can’t write a writeup about Myrmidons and the various ways hacks handle them without talking about Myrm Emblem. Myrm Emblem takes every Myrmidon across the series (at the time it was made, so no Engage characters) and a number of the Kaga Saga characters as well. For a project that is made of all Myrmidons, it does a great job differentiating characters. While some characters got options to go into a class that grants another weapon type (ex. Owain and Felix got access to Mortal Savant that gives them tomes and staves, given Owain being Odin and Felix having a secret aptitude in magic on top of 3H mechanics, Fates T1 Samurai can promote to Master of Arms that gives them access to lances and axes, etc), most units remain swordlocked.

Myrm Emblem class distributions tend to be grouped by their origin, though a few titles share classes and a few classes (like Mortal Savant but also Trueblade, which is given to Stefan, Ryoma, and Shannan, again highlighting the Megasword status) are not tied to entries but are just special cases entirely. For example, I used Fir in my run, and her class skills gained eventually allowed her to reach 100+ crit for the true FE6 Swordmaster experience. Judgral Swordfighters that go Forrest/Hero are given access to Hero With Axes, and the female Judgral Swordmasters, or Od SM Gang who is not Shannan, got a mix of FE4 and FE5 Swordmaster attributes with very high caps and also the 7 mov. Many characters got personal weapons based on their FEH appearances to further help differentiate them. Hana, for example, have her armorslaying personal weapon, and while I didn’t keep her long term, I found her earlygame incredibly helpful between Darting Blow and her ability to delete any armored unit.

A small selection of the units I used in Myrm Emblem and a showcase of the various Myrm-related classes based on game of origin or narrative. Of course I put boots on Ayra.

Myrm Emblem is a game designed for players to be able to use their favorite Myrms across the series while doing a good job of giving most units a solid identity. I highly recommend any Myrmidon fan giving the hack a shot.

Conclusion

Myrmidon is a class that have a lot of inherent drawbacks, being locked to a weapon type that traditionally have more limited ranged options (whether through availability and/or cost) than the other melee weapon types, and not being mounted. Some may take the reactionary balance route on swords and give them a javelin/handaxe equivalent, but all that does is flatten out weapon identity and doesn’t necessary actually make the Myrmidon good if they’re still bad at killing stuff. What actually makes them good is just give them an environment where they are better at killing more stuff than units with more utility, and the higher damage actually matters. Being able to dodgetank a number of otherwise threatening high damage units better than normal units via terrain and good weapon choice, while not necessary (it’s actually very hard to dodge in mid-lategame Myrm Emblem, for example), can help make them feel even better to use. And sometimes, you can just give them a ton of stats and that is fine.

[Retina]

BALLISTICIANS (and siege/status because ballistas can’t carry this alone)

Introduction: A Range of Issues

One of the most important elements of FE design is range. We all know that 1-2 range is better than 1 or 2 range, and that more range tends to be better than less range (exceptions like the FE9 Double Bow not withstanding). Thus, it stands to reason that tools that give an army exceptional range such as ballistas, siege magic, and status staves would be extremely centralizing, and they are. …For the enemy. We all have memories of being completely wrecked by an enemy sleeping our combat carry, or by our dancer being fried/skewered by a giga-range attack, but how many times have you played an FE where you never found a use for a rideable map ballista, or where you never thought you had a good chance to use a siege tome? How many times have you ever successfully used a silence staff, period? Pop quiz: where does the player even get a sleep staff in FE8?

In this effortpost, we’ll first take a look at a beloved siege user to get an idea of what a good siege user looks like. We’ll then, as the primary focus, delve into why siege tends to feel so unbalanced and unfun, and how we can possibly rectify that. Sorry in advance for the minimal images, I’m typing this up in LibreOffice and it’s sort of a pain to add them in nicely, but this essay’s largely conceptual anyway so it’ll be fine. Anyway, let’s begin.

Player Ballisticians/Siege: Just Kidding, We’re Talking About Regis

To be frank, there are not very many interesting player ballisticians. A few hacks explore the concept, but largely ballistas boil down to gimmick units. Jake and Beck from FE11 are fun novelties that’re all the same entirely devoid of anything interesting to say (though that in part comes from FE11 somehow being an environment where 3-10 range isn’t all too broken compared to what else the game enables). Siege tomes and status have some more nuance and interest to their users, but in 95% of hacks those users happen to be good for other reasons, and the status/siege tomes are more a bonus on top of an already good unit. Tellius (and specifically FE9) is probably about as interesting as it gets in mainline, and while FE9 mages are actually pretty good and there’s some cool stuff that game’s siege can do, I honestly don’t feel like discussing vanilla units. That said, I will be hanged if I don’t have at least a unit discussion, so we’ll talk about Regis from Four Kings.

Regis joins right before the famous routesplit, in Chapter 10x, and has very clear inspirations from beloved vanilla units such as Saleh and Pent, being a sage with big magic and… Well, that’s the big change from vanilla sages. While Saleh and especially Pent are very good all-rounders, Regis is extremely slanted in his statbuild. While his Skill and Speed aren’t atrocious, they’re definitely pretty middling, and with his growths they’re not getting much better on their own. His bulk’s garbage, especially with how hard 4K enemies hit, and his Speed/Luck spread means he’s not ever dodging through enemy phases like Pent can. His weapon ranks are solid; though he can’t use Physic at base, C staves gives him decent utility, and 4K doesn’t have freely accessible Warp/Rescue, so it’s not the end of the world if he never hits A. Aside from being able to do some meaty chip with tomes and some staff utility, Regis’s big claim to fame is his Prf, the Maelstrom. Every 4K unit has a Prf, and for most units it’s the single most defining element of their playstyle. Maelstrom is a tome with 10 Mt, 90 Hit, 20 Wt, and most importantly 3-15 Rng. For comparison, Bolting is 12 Mt/70 Hit and drops in Ch14, Purge is 10 Mt/80 Hit and is in a Ch16 village, and Eclipse is 14 Mt/60 Hit and comes with Gideon, a Druid who joins in Ch20 (oh yeah 4K Eclipse is also a regular siege tome instead of an HP-halver). All three tomes are also 3-10 Rng/20 Wt/5 Uses and unable to crit.

Maelstrom’s advantages should be immediately obvious. The most subtle is that it has the highest hitrate of any siege in the game, and while 4K does let the player buy Secret Books to offset poor hitrates, it’s still extremely convenient to have an option for siege weaponry that works well without financial investment. 10 durability is more than 5^{[citation needed]}, so it’s easier to feel good about clicking Maelstrom freely (especially since you have 5 Hammerne uses that’re explicitly barred from repairing other staves) compared to a normal siege tome. As for the five extra tiles of range, they are extraordinarily useful for several reasons. For one, 4K is not afraid to throw enemy fleets and status staves at the player, so Regis’s unique ability to outrange them is extremely helpful for playing around them more safely. Perhaps more importantly, many maps in 4K forcibly split your deployment slots up, and so Regis’s range gives him unparalleled flexibility in which side of a split he can contribute towards. One turn he can heal someone on his side of the map, and the next he can chip down another deployment group’s threatening enemy with Maelstrom. Plus, even if Maelstrom breaks, he can (if you got his anima rank up to A) whip out Bolting and perform almost as well.

There’s a lot of other nuance to Regis’s kit that I haven’t touched on here, but purely through the lens of Maelstrom, he’s one of the most versatile units in the game, and even if he’s never a combat superstar, the ability to have that range in his back pocket makes him a worthy deploy all game long.

Siege Warfare: AAAAAAA

Of course, when most FE players think of a Bolting tome or a Berserk staff, they don’t think of using them. They think of Ursula oneshotting one of their units from the fog, or of their best unit getting berserked in Father and Son and forcing a reset. Enemy ballistas are guilty of this too, to a degree, but siege and status staves are especially subject to some of the most raw hatred of FE thing period. Even when the player manages to get their hands on these tools, they often feel like hollow shells of the war crimes that said player endured. Why exactly is this?

The simple truth is that the lives and action economies of player and enemy units are extremely unequal. As my good friend lowres puts it, the enemy has to get lucky once while the player has to get lucky over and over again. This is true within much of FE, and it’s especially relevant when talking about siege and status. You might’ve noticed that I emphasized hitrates back when talking about Regis, and there was good reason for that; vanilla-statted siege is notoriously unreliable hitwise. 4K actually buffed all its hitrates: vanilla Purge has 75 Hit (and a cool 5 Crit, more later on why that sucks), vanilla Bolting has 60 Hit, and vanilla FE8 Eclipse has 30. Obviously you have tools to improve that, like the Skill stat and supports in vanilla GBA, or a plethora of skills in a Skillsys game, but even with those, you’re likely rarely going to be pulling great hit with siege. This gets even worse when you remember that siege typically only has 5 uses, and that, as tomes, uses are spent even on a miss. Now, not only are you hesitant to use siege because it’s highly scarce, but because a lot of the time it has extremely shaky accuracy and’ll very well just be entirely wasted.

These are all issues that the enemy couldn’t care less about. They’re already often facing suboptimal hitrates anyway, and they don’t care if they waste uses: it’s not like they need to save weapons for the next chapter. Plus, they have far more to gain from gambling on siege hitting; a single red unit death is an inevitability, while a single blue unit death is for many players a functional game over. Purge in particular deserves special attention as well, as that 5 crit means that player units will often face displayed crit, and likely a chance of death alongside it. That said, Bolting’s also liable to kill out of nowhere purely by hitting like a truck: GBA promoted magic users have shockingly high Pow, and the general mediocrity of resistance means that unpromoted units are often at risk of being outright oneshot (even mages can’t escape, as their bad HP undermines their decent Res), while promoted units are left easy pickings for anything else in range. This often leads to scenarios where the safest way to deal with siege is to wait at the edge of its range with a unit that can eat a hit and then end turn 5 times, which is obviously not very riveting gameplay.

Status is like siege, except its issues on both sides are even more pronounced thanks to how nonsensical its hit formula is. It changes from game to game, but the baseline FE8 formula that many hacks adopt is Hit = 30 + (userMag – targetRes) * 5 + userSkill – distance * 2. To put it bluntly, this formula is absolute garbage, and most of that comes down to the base hitrate being 30. The average 10/5 Moulder has about 10 Mag and 13 Skill in Bishop. Against an adjacent enemy with say, 8 Res (the approximate average for Res on promoted enemies in Chapter 19), he pulls a cool 30 + (2)*5 + 13 – 2 = 51 Hit, and that only gets worse the farther away he stands. Even worse, using Chapter 19 is a horrible example thanks to how easy that map is to skip. The one lategame map that you can’t easily skip, Chapter 18, has Bigles with ~9 Res and Gorgons with 17-20 Res, and so status is nigh useless. FE8’s also stingy enough with its status staves that you’re never getting them at a time when they could be helpful (fun fact: Berserk and Sleep both require you manipulate enemy inventory orders to drop them, and Silence is a desert item). Meanwhile, Father and Son’s staffers are ~14 Mag 10 Skill Sleep/Silence Bishops and ~20 Mag 11 Skill Berserk Druids. Even with Pure Water boosts, the Bishops pull hit in the 30s-40s and the Druids well above that. Worse, if a Berserk lands and you don’t have a Restore user handy, your run may as well be over. Of course, the easy solution is camping in Berserk range with a nearby Restore user and ending turn until the staff’s broken, but that once again isn’t really a compelling answer.

A quick note on ballistas since they’ve barely come up; they’re typically not as reviled but they’re still not great. It tends to be easier to manage ballista hits due to them being physical damage, but in return many players feel they’re way too oppressive in how they deny fliers from entering an area. Plus, map ballistas are often a readability nightmare (since you can’t check their weapon stats), and anything that hides critical information such as weapon might is automatically pretty suspect. GBA tries to introduce the concept of being able to rush down ballistas so your own archers can use their remaining ammunition, and that’s definitely a fun idea! The main problems here are that GBA archers often suck enough that they’re not worth bringing for ballista-riding and that usually the process of getting to a ballista results in the nearby enemies collapsing on your units, leaving the ballista’s attack range barren of good targets. Still, better than being a Kaga or DS-era ambush spawn ballistician.

The Solutions: Yeah They’re Pretty Obvious In Retrospect

What can we do to make siege and status (and sure ballistas) more compelling both to fight and to use? For player use, the easy pair of answers is making them more available and making them more reliable. You don’t need to drown the player in Bolting tomes, but giving 10-15 uses over a campaign instead of 5 goes a long way towards making a player feel comfortable using them, as does making those uses more reliable. The same goes for status staves; vanilla games are terrified of making them anything resembling available, but that’s one of the only ways to make using them feel truly good.

As for making enemy siege/status feel better, boosting their reliability honestly also helps out. It might sound weird, but a lot of people feel way better strategizing around something guaranteed instead of something they can avoid, even if being guaranteed makes the game objectively harder. If you’re doing this, it’s also a good chance to possibly tone down siege tome might, shifting their dynamic from unreliable but deadly to reliable chip that you need to think about but not necessarily fear on its own. Most importantly, you should give proactive counterplay to enemy status and siege. One issue I didn’t really mention earlier is that while in theory the natural targets for player siege/status are enemy siege/status users (since you can match their range), in practice those tend to be the worst classes to try to kill with magic or shutdown with the abysmal vanilla staff hit formula. That said, there’s ways to address this. Many hacks boost staff hit to a significant degree (often making it flat out guaranteed), which turns staves into the perfect siege counterplay. Even without this, other tools with good range can make for excellent proactive siege counters (think a longbow on a high-movement ranger).

Tooting my own horn a bit, both The Morrow’s Golden Country and my WIP Fourthhack take interesting directions towards making siege and status feel more engaging. TMGC has plentiful player status staves (especially through your thieves being able to steal enemy staves), far higher hitrates on status, more reliable siege tomes, and some special options for siege, such as Morning Star (which has range scaling off of magic in exchange for doing very light damage and making the user always die in one hit while equipped, which helps also make enemy Morning Stars easier to counterplay) and Jormungandr (which is a siege dark tome that does some AoE chip damage). Fourthhack meanwhile has an entirely unique combat art system filled with long-range attacks (to help counter long-range enemies) and status ailment skills that can be far more freely used than vanilla status. Fourthhack status effects are also far more varied (with effects such as Blind, Paralysis, revamps to Sleep/Poison, and various Binds for body parts) and individually less punishing than vanilla effects (on that note, one last jab against the vanilla status lineup: they’re just so boring. Full lockdown, full lockdown for mages, full lockdown but you eat more crits, negligible chip damage, and berserk, what a lineup.). In general, one of my design goals is to make status both more interesting to use and more fair, and I believe I’ve done well on that front.

One more thing: don’t make Bolting 10 Wt like FE6. Please. It can be allowed to double, but make it heavy enough that you’re not trivially doubling with it.

Conclusion: wow i love having three durability on a 51% chance to make one guy snooze when i could’ve onerounded him anyway

Not really much more to say that hasn’t already been said. Make your siege more reliable on both sides, make it less liable to oneshot out of nowhere, and make it more available so it actually feels good to use. If you want to check out some hacks with solid takes on siege, some interesting showcases include the aforementioned Four Kings, Souls of the Forest (which has very fair-feeling infinite use siege on enemies), Lords of the Seas (which has boat combat), and Temple of Ardesia (which is peak fiction).

Postscript: my good friend lowres really wanted me to bring up Kirk from OC Emblem, I present you this.

god i hope this hyperlink works

[YeahNice]

Trainees, or: How to Make a Bad Unit

Trainees as a Class Archetype

Usually when discussing Fire Emblem, we as hackers tend to focus on the tactical part of the tactical role-playing game subgenre. There’s nothing wrong with this obviously, Fire Emblem is just as much about making strategic decisions as it is about making the number go up or making your favorite characters kiss each other. It’s worth mentioning because the topic of this specific write-up is one that fits very well into the mold of the latter while struggling to find a place in the former. It’s the kind of thing that’s difficult to make work in a setting where the goal is efficient play at a steady pace, but if you make it work the payoff makes it almost feel worth it.

You’re likely familiar with a very specific kind of unit. The kind that joins at level 1 or some other low level, usually after the first chapter, with bases poor enough that they’ll struggle to do more than chip damage and are more than likely going to die if left alone. Sometimes they are just bad, but usually they have something to them that tries to make the payoff worthwhile, most often high growth rates. They’ll typically just be in a normal unpromoted class, but sometimes a game will go the extra mile in showcasing their weakness.

Enter the trainee class. Trainees aren’t a class on their own, but you likely know them when you see them. Villagers, Journeymen, Recruits, Pupils, Nobles, Commoners, they’re all classes defined by their weakness compared to their peers. Low stats, sometimes low movement, if you look at one you immediately know that this unit is weak. These classes also, usually, don’t promote to a tier two (T2) class, instead going from what’s sometimes called tier zero (T0) to tier one (T1). There are exceptions, but this is the usual way it works.

Trainees in vanilla are a mixed bag of usefulness, skewing negative. That’s just the way it is; since you’re usually getting a constant stream of units over the course of a game and growth rates are usually random, it’s often more helpful to take into account how a unit can contribute now or in the near-future rather than some hypothetical future scenario where your growth rates proc perfectly and the training project is a guaranteed success. Still, hackers continue to put underleveled units in their hacks as potential training projects. Zero to hero training projects are a staple of the franchise, and there’s a lot of ways to make one worth at least considering.

So that raises the question: Why don’t you see THIS kind of trainee often?

The Trainee Problem

I’ll start by discussing my own experience in balancing trainees, which to be frank is very little. When Spectrum was in its planning stages, you were set to get a Journeyman around chapter 6 or so. I think I even had a palette cooked up for this hypothetical Journeyman. In the current game, you instead get a regular T1 fighter with normal bases and growths. This really just came down to me juggling a few different units around throughout development, the Journeyman got moved to a later chapter and changed to a Mercenary while the unit who was originally set to be their older sister got moved to their old spot.

As for why I juggled them, the exact reason eludes me; this was several years ago and several computers ago, so any old story backups are lost to time. I genuinely believe, however, that I’d done it because I had chosen, at some point, that I didn’t want a trainee class in the hack, or really any trainees outside of the customary Est. It maybe comes from my old obsession with not having any ‘bad’ units, a belief that I no longer hold to as strictly as I used to. The cast is finalized at this point, though thinking it over, I still don’t know if I would incorporate a trainee class into the game if I were to redo it from scratch.

Really, I think the main problem with trainee classes that makes me reluctant to implement them is something else: They’re kind of annoying to use for the average player. The main thing separating a trainee class unit from a normal trainee is that they, usually, need even more investment than a regular trainee to get to a point of usefulness. Due to most (sans Mozu) being T0, they need a few or several extra levels just to get to a basic class anyway. This is meant to make them stronger by the endgame, as the nine or so extra levels they get should make them stronger than their peers once they catch up, but to compensate their bases are even lower than the average trainee. They need more turns to train, more enemies to kill and more experience to catch up.

In other words, while trainee units are infamous for forcing the player to slow down to bring them up to speed, trainee classes are designed to dial this flaw up to eleven.

I’m the kind of player who usually enjoys slowing down for trainees, mind you, but I think it’s worth keeping in mind when analyzing their under-representation compared to other niche class types. Hackers, again, tend to prefer to approach Fire Emblem as a tactics game, and when stripping away the role-playing fantasy of raising a unit from zero to hero there’s not much fun to be had in giving a terrible unit several extra levels that could be going to other, more useful units. It would not surprise me if the reason is simply that a lot of hackers simply do not enjoy using trainee classes, or at least find it less enjoyable than just training a level one T1 unit. It’s more work for marginal long-term gain, and when the focus of hack balance is often built around what you can do now, it’s natural for something like this to be sidelined.

That being said, it’s not like no hacks use trainee classes. There’s still a large subset of the fanbase who will see any goofy young man or woman with 4 MOV, 3 base speed and an E-rank in their only weapon type and see an investment opportunity. Some people just love underdog stories. There’s just something satisfying about seeing the loser go from getting killed in one round to being the one killing people in one round, no matter how absurd the requirements are. It’s why most trainees are kids or young teens, there’s the coming of age angle but they’re also just an endearing presence to root for even if it constitutes a war crime having them around. Besides, three of them are built right into the FE8 ROM, they’re not hard to implement. Just because a unit type isn’t the most fun to use in vanilla doesn’t mean hackers can’t try their hand at making them fun, so how do you accomplish that?

My personal belief is that an ideal trainee needs to focus on being either interesting or memorable beyond their nature as a trainee. It’s fine and dandy if your unit has Paragon or Aptitude, but what do they offer besides that? You’re pretty much never going to get a unit in a trainee class that’s truly great, let alone good, so there needs to be something there beyond just being a ball of stats. Is it something to make training them easier? Are they at all special once they’re trained? Are they just someone you like having around? A lot of questions to answer, so let’s see if we can.

All About Vanilla

I’ll start with a few paragraphs dedicated to vanilla since I mainly wanted to talk about hacks’ approaches to trainees. The villagers in Gaiden and Echoes don’t have much to talk about truly; they’re all fine except for maybe one. Their training arc is very short by default, as they only need to get to level 3 to go into a T1 class, so training’s only an issue for the first couple maps you have them for. Gray is actually good by virtue of not really needing babied, he’s a trainee by formality. Tobin is a little trickier as he does actually need a level to promote, and his stats aren’t super impressive, but he’s fine. Kliff and Faye, the latter being remake-exclusive, are the hardest to use, each needing two levels to promote. If you do, then Kliff has the best Speed growth and spell selection as a Mage, and Faye has some very rare spells in her own spell lists, namely Anew as a Saint and Freeze as a Priestess. Meanwhile, Celica’s route gets access to Atlas, probably the weakest of the trainees; not because he’s hard to train, he can promote immediately, but just because his stats aren’t very good. His only real use is going Archer, equipping a Killer Bow and spamming Hunter’s Volley, though you already have Leon by this point who can do this just fine.

FE8 has three trainees, each in a unique class with their own specialties; this is still unique by series standards, as most games only have one type. Ross gets the only Hatchet in the game, a low-might but highly-accurate Hand Axe variant that makes training him much safer. This plus his early join makes him by far the best of the three trainees, though he still needs babied heavily. Ewan is the latest joiner, but at the very least he has the potential most interesting payoff as the only other playable Summoner in the main campaign besides Knoll (who suffers from middling combat and vulnerability to crits, which a trained Ewan shouldn’t have). Meanwhile, Amelia’s novelty is being a small girl who can wear over-sized armor; it’s not optimal, and some would argue it makes her less fun to use, but it’s enough for her to have a fanbase despite being worse than Ewan in almost every way (sans Movement if you instead make her a Paladin).

Then we get to the post-Awakening era. First you have Donnel in Awakening, a Villager (lance infantry) with bad bases but high growths thanks to Aptitude. He can’t promote on his own, so you need to Second Seal him as soon as possible if you want to get anything out of him; this means that on top of already needing nine extra levels, he needs an extra item that you need to spend money on or find in a level, and even then he’ll still be stuck in a T1 class. Aptitude will make up for the frustration if trained, but it doesn’t make the frustration go away. Mozu in the next game is the only real example of what I call a T1 trainee class; a class that has normal promotion options but is otherwise portrayed as weak, all thanks to Mozu’s poor bases. There’s no much to say about her, she’s just not very strong, to the point where even though she can promote to a normal class some people suggest using a Heart Seal on her to get her into a better class anyway. I’ll also quickly mention Three Houses’s system, where every student (plus Cyril) starts as a Noble or Commoner and can become a Beginner class at level 5. The early game being basically Trainee Emblem fits well with the school theme, and the actual class and leveling system means that none of these units are really worse off for it. It feels weird to mention them here since they feel so different from any other trainee implementation, but they count regardless.

Vanilla trainees are a mixed bag, usually relying on the allure of investing now to cash in later. It’s why they have such a rough overall reputation but dedicated cult following, the nothing-to-something arc requiring so much investment is only going to regularly appeal to certain people. How do hacks handle trainees though? Everyone has their own ideas about how to balance classes and the characters that are stuck in them, and while not always better it’s nevertheless interesting to see just how fans approach the trainee problem.

Examples From Hacks

I’ll start with a brief mention of a trainee from a hack I haven’t finished. Tricia from Dream of Five is a rare Mozu-esque trainee variant, a unit in a T1 trainee class. She’s a Henchwoman, one of at least five different T1 mono-sword infantry classes in the game, though at the very least there’s more to distinguish her from the others. Her stats are still terrible, but she has convoy access, an extra point of Movement to put her on par with your recently-obtained Pegasus Rider, and the Swap movement skill. It’s meant to be a more supportive infantry class, a way for her to stand out so the player isn’t left wondering why they wouldn’t use literally anyone else for sword combat. It also ties into her writing well, as a more supportive class fits her in-story role as what’s basically an errand girl. This utility-based approach is probably the best way you can try to make a Mozu-esque trainee work; otherwise, they really are just an existing class but strictly worse.

Now for what you’re here for. Call of the Armor is a game designed around FE8’s mechanics, making very few changes from the game it’s based on outside of changes that most hacks already do (elimination of the world map and grinding, viewable growths, etc.). It’s no surprise that it would also attempt to implement trainees of its own for players to use. Daisy, Geirhart and Abdul join in Chapters 2, I-1 (which comes between chapters 4 and 5) and 8 respectively, meaning they already have better availability than FE8’s trainees. The main thing that’s used to try and make them compelling, however, has little to do with their actual stats, but rather their equipment.

Each unit comes with a rare or even exclusive weapon that’s designed to help them catch up to the rest of your team, akin to the Hatchet Ross comes with in vanilla FE8. Daisy, a Recruit, has Tam’s Harpoon, a throwable lance with low might that can’t attack at melee range, but has a very high hit rate of 90 to compensate. This allows her to chip safely while hiding behind your other party members, making grinding surprisingly safe. She also eventually gets the exclusive Croissant, a lance with a passive Defense and Resistance boost that helps make her probably the best Paladin in the game if you actually put in the work to train her. Abdul has his personal tome Rosalta’s Chill, a buffed-up Thunder tome with better accuracy and 20 crit, meaning that while his Magic stat is bad he’ll still be able to get kills fairly easily. Said low Magic stat also just makes him a very interesting unit to use, a rare trainee with a clearly defined statline instead of just being generically decent at everything. He can be a very speedy Mage Knight, or a replacement for Taika if you chose not to recruit her. Him being an old man also makes him unique compared to the teenagers that usually occupy this class type (including the aforementioned Daisy), immediately providing something unique for the player to latch on to.

Sadly, Geirhart doesn’t really live up to the other two. As a unit he’s the least interesting since he just comes with the Hatchet, and he’s only really notable because he’s an optional recruit on an interlude map. He’s easily the most ignorable of the trio, and since you don’t even have to recruit him he seems to exist just to say the game has a Journeyman in it. I’ve used him before, he tends to come out strong, but if you’re not already a fan of this archetype there’s no real reason to give him a chance. He’s like if Ross joined a bit later, and that’s pretty boring. Oh well, hopefully another hack does something interesting with a Journeyman.

Well thank goodness. Embers Entwined has two trainees in its second half: the Journeyman Gruyère and the Recruit Jenna. Both join automatically, and naturally their late join times make their use difficult to justify. The game does try at least, and the results, at least for me, lead to some of the more fun units to use in a game where a lot of units otherwise blend together. Instead of relying on equipment, their approach is a bit more varied than CotA’s.

We’ll start with Gruyère first since he joins earlier, in Chapter 13. Gruyère joins at level 5, meaning he only needs five levels to get to T1 instead of the usual nine, a small but helpful gesture to ease the burden of using him. He also comes with a B-rank in axes, letting him use the Brave Axe he comes with. This combined with his Hatchet makes it surprisingly easy to get him to level 10 before the map’s over, and the Master Seal he comes with makes it all the easier to justify giving him a chance by making it feel less like you’re wasting an asset on him. His promotions are also unique too, as he can either go Axe Mercenary into Hero or Axe Soldier into Halberdier (which has axe access in addition to the usual lances in this hack), so while he’ll never be a Warrior to the very end like his inspiration Ross, the options he has are also mostly different from what Ross usually goes for.

Jenna, joining in Chapter 17, doubles as this game’s Est; trainee Ests are surprisingly rare given the natural archetype overlap, so she already has a bit of novelty going for her. Like Gruyère she joins at level 5 (albeit with only D-rank lances instead of B-rank), though instead of a Brave Axe she gets the exclusive Sweeping Lance, a more accurate Short Spear with the passive counter-disabling effect found in siege tomes. She automatically deploys near a pair of low-level sword infantry enemies that should be enough to get her an easy level or two to help speed up the process too. Also like Gruyère, her promotion options differ from her vanilla counterpart, as instead of Cavalier or Knight she can choose between going Soldier > Halberdier (for axe access) or the unique and likely intended Pikesman > Lancer classline (a reskinned Ephraim Lord > Great Lord, though Lancer now has 8 movement instead of 7). Granted, much like Amelia there is a clear better option but just having the option is bound to make her more memorable.

These plus the Call of the Armor trainees are pretty simple re-implementations of already existing FE classes without much change. Many get personal weapons to make the training easier, and there’s some kinda unique classes in there, but the end result is the same: Small stats + EXP = Big stats. Maybe there doesn’t need to be more though, maybe this is enough. To someone who uses trainees regularly it probably is; to someone who doesn’t, it maybe shifts their mentality from “Eww, no” to “Maybe on the next playthrough.” It’s really the little details I mentioned that help push them ahead of the likes of Amelia or Ewan, the free items and the like. Otherwise they’d just be generically bad units, and that is usually not the approach you want for a unit that’s already in what’s basically a novelty class.

I’ll go into one more trainee that tries to make them compelling in a gameplay sense before the end. Thankfully, he just so happens to be my personal favorite trainee. He comes from Queen’s Sword, a hack most people haven’t played because the only available English version is machine-translated and fairly obscure. Hopefully this serves as at least a fun advertisement.

Max joins at level 3 in Chapter 5, the end of the game’s first arc. He’s a Journeyman with the customary Hatchet (plus a Venin Axe, because poison’s been buffed), and he joins with possibly the worst version of Wrath ever devised, 50% crit if at exactly one HP. He’ll need to learn Miracle somehow to get any kind of use out of it. He also has a 0% HP growth, so you need Angelic Robes and promotions to bump up his HP. He is, by all accounts, pretty bad. So why do I like him?

Among other things, it’s because he has a 0% HP Growth.

Queen’s Sword is a game with a lot of quirky statlines and unit builds. Your Lord has a bad Skill growth, your Paladin Jagen has a perfect HP growth and doubles as a mounted staffer, you have an Avatar with four different stat builds and barely any relevance to the story. Max is maybe the quirkiest in the entire game. He’s built like Shuckle; his lack of HP is offset by very high Defense and Resistance growths, 70% apiece, meaning that training him makes him your single best midgame tank. This also grants some actual strategy in determining what to promote him into. Do you pick the class with the highest Defense and Resistance caps (Fighter or Pirate into Hero) or do you try to maximize his HP gains when promoting so he doesn’t need Angelic Robes as badly (Pirate or Brigand into Berserker)? Maybe you want to give him bows so he’s in less danger when his HP starts to catch up to him (anything into Warrior), or maybe you just want to put him on a horse (Brigand into Great Knight). Yes, classes have three promotion options here instead of two, and Max is a rare example of a unit whose options feel genuinely balanced.

Of course, Max is kinda hellish to actually level up. Enemies in Queen’s Sword are not weak, there is poison around even on his join map and it is very scary. At the end of the day he’s only really a novelty, a bizarre bad unit with a very fun application if you put in the effort to train him. But I did say the ideal trainee should be interesting and memorable, and he is both to an absurd degree.

So there’s my favorite gameplay trainee. But there is one more way to try and make your little unit that could stand out amidst the crowd. It’s one that fully leans into Fire Emblem’s status as an RPG, in fact: Really good writing. Of course, right? Here, let me elaborate.

Here’s Pheme, probably the most famous example of a ROM hack trainee. Pheme is a rare trainee with a completely unique class, the Nimrod. She joins in the second chapter and, ironically, has pretty poor availability. She is, by most metrics, one of the worst units in the game. And yet she’s still one of the most popular. Why is that?

Pheme’s class, Nimrod, is a weaker version of an Archer, which is especially notable given the game’s lord, Kyra, is basically just a reskinned Archer anyway. She’s one of only a handful of units with a personal skill, in her case being Aptitude, Intelligent Systems’ go-to solution for telling you that a unit is a trainee. This means that, if nothing else, her level-ups should be good more often than not, though her bases mean she’s probably just going to eat shit from enemies until you get her to T1. Hell, there are even multiple early-game chapters where you can’t even use her, meaning you have fewer chapters to train her, and you can optionally recruit another training project Archer, Vasiliki, if you want a version of Pheme that’s easier to train anyway. Pheme is, to put it plainly, a very bad unit.

And yet she’s still popular.

The Hag in White is probably the best-written hack I’ve ever played, and even minor characters have chances to be utterly memorable. Pheme is not what I would call a minor character. She’s described as a ‘busybody’ and it shows. In gameplay, whenever she joins she’s shown butting in to fight when she isn’t wanted. When she isn’t fighting, she’s snooping on people’s conversations either because she wants to be useful or just because she feels like it. It’s a fun quirk for a younger character like herself, and it combined with her general weakness make her a very charming kind of character; someone who wants to be involved when she really, absolutely should not be. It’s probably the best example of gameplay-story integration the game has, if I had to choose anything. It even gives you a minor incentive to train her, in essence trying to prove to the people around her that she really does deserve to be here. People really wanna prove the game wrong by making this goofy kid into something powerful, including me occasionally.

Major Spoilers

So all is fine, right? Pheme starts weak and underestimated but can grow strong if trained, and everything about her emphasizes this better than just about any other trainee I can think of. Not much else to say, right?

Unfortunately, anyone who has played The Hag in White would know that Kyra is ultimately right that Pheme shouldn’t be here. In Chapter 10, Pheme offers to stay behind to do some of her signature snooping. Come the end of what was before this a comic relief map, the group finds Pheme murdered outside the castle the map took place in. She was spying on a suspected traitor, and the traitor caught her. There’s a lot of genuinely shocking moments but Pheme’s death is the one that sticks in most players’ minds.

Pheme’s real purpose becomes apparent here; she’s less a unit you’re meant to actually use and more of a narrative device. She’s a living tragedy, a kid out of her depth that pays the price for her own recklessness for the sake of confirming the traitor as irredeemable. You eventually kill said traitor and avenge her, but it doesn’t change that she’s still dead, the only recruit besides said traitor to permanently leave your party. She’s the logical conclusion of how a trainee would probably do in an actual war: If you don’t have the means to train her, either leave her on the sidelines or she’s getting killed. It’s an effective and tragic arc and it’s no wonder she’s one of the game’s most popular characters despite being one of its weakest units.

Of course, there’s always New Game+. If you fulfill certain requirements (which I’ll avoid giving away) on a second playthrough she’ll rejoin late-game in the class you left her at. She loses her Aptitude growth bonus due to in-story trauma and is left as just another member of your army, complete with a new portrait to match her loss of innocence. You finally have a chance to make things right, to let Pheme get revenge on the person who killed her in another life and finally get that pay-off to that early-game investment. It’s very satisfying watching her walk up to the traitor near the end of the game, tell them to shut up and just blow them up on the spot. It’s best like this, though, as a second playthrough bonus. Pheme’s story, including her optional revenge, wouldn’t hit as hard if she were just a normal trainee you never had to lose.

In Summary

After reading all this, you may think that everything I said was a no-brainer. Of course, units should be interesting, what a grand revelation. The point of this was more to show why this is especially important for units that aren’t already good and can’t rely on stats to justify their presence. It’s also helped me narrow down what exactly it is I like about trainees: The novelty. A class that’s designed to be bad on purpose is just extremely novel, and it’s fun for me to try and subvert that weakness with whatever tools the game gives me. It also explains a lot about why my approach to trainees is more about being interesting than being good, now that I think about it.

For any aspiring hackers reading this thinking about putting in a Villager or a Recruit or something along those lines, I’ll put the advice I have here:

Earlier on I talked about how ideal trainees shouldn’t focus on just being really strong. Because that’s just not going to happen if you’re a T0 unit, that level deficit is a big hurdle if they’re not joining at the beginning of the game. Your growths should be good obviously, otherwise why bother, but AmeliaFan1996 is going to use someone like Abdul or Jenna regardless of how good those growths actually are. The point of this is more about encouraging trainee-neutrals to give your unit a try. Besides, even if you make the most unique and interesting unit in the world, there’s gonna be people who just don’t wanna use them because of the investment required. There’s no point in trying to convert them by giving your Journeyman a 255% Strength growth because any unit can get blessed with high stat gains if they’re lucky enough. Instead, just keep the general structure so preexisting trainee fans are happy and focus on making that unit sthat stands out enough to turn the heads of anyone else.

And if you can’t, that’s fine. You still have AmeliaFan1996 in your corner.

[lowres]

Clerics

"I’m a cork on the ocean

Floating over the raging sea

How deep is the ocean?

How deep is the ocean?"

-'Til I Die, The Beach Boys

More than any other class in this list, the unpromoted healer (Cleric/Priest/Curate, I’m just gonna call them Clerics) is pretty powerless to influence how good they feel as individual units compared to the wider needs of the game. For example, if you have a Myrmidon who feels underpowered, it’s pretty easy to just wiggle some stats around or invent a new Killing Edge+ to add to the game or something and bam, your Myrmidon now feels way better. But if a Cleric feels underwhelming, most hackers are hesitant to say, just add more Warp. In addition, changing the stats of a cleric just isn’t as impactful as changing the stats of any other class. Clerics care about their magic, their staff rank… and honestly that’s kind of it for them. While most hackers see clerics as just a conduit for the staves they want to give the player, which is fine, but there are some that go further beyond.

Build Arounds

I really like Storge as a jumping off point for unit discussion, the setup for that game is so conducive to very extreme unit designs that may be difficult to pull off in longer hacks. The setup for Storge, for those not aware, is you are a merchant who has 60k gold to hire a squad of mercenaries and purchase enough equipment to safely get through a 5 chapter long journey.

A standard band of mercenaries in this game has around 8-10 members, but as you can see, hiring Kersi is a pretty big investment, costing you at least 1/6th of your total funds, plus any additional staves you might want to give her. Compare this to Sievert, the other mono healer you can choose, who costs 4k gold and is usually accompanied by “Fuck, I forgot to hire a healer, hold on”. With this much up front cost, if you’re picking Kersi, you’re probably planning on making her one of the main stars of the show.

This is one way to make your Cleric stand out, forcibly centralize your campaign around them. The most obvious example of this technique is Apate from The Hag in White. Apate is the only healer in the game, as healing is considered witchcraft in the game’s story.

She might be important to whoever the Hag in White is

I really do appreciate the stripped back approach to healing that obviously Hag in White is a very extreme example of. If you’re deploying 2+ healers every chapter of a hack it can feel kind of hard to notice their impact at times. But when Hag in White sends you to a map with an army split, you really notice that the group that gets Apate is way better at making progress. You really get to feel the full impact of a simple heal staff.

Other characters I’d put into the build around category are Luigi from Justice and Pride, Emile from The Morrow’s Golden Country, and Pent from FE7. You can see basically all of them are prepromoted, which makes sense both from a lore perspective in that a character being this good at wielding healing magic would probably also be competent at other forms of magic, and from a gameplay perspective in that having a character that can both fight and heal is like, sick as hell.

But not all healers can be a build around unit, in fact unpromoted ones almost exclusively are not, so while they’re not as flashy, let’s take a look at a more typical healer design.

Mashed Potatoes

Mashed potatoes are never the star of a meal, but you know I’ve never seen someone unhappy to get them. When it comes to standard healers my mind immediately goes to Lydia from Four Kings. Four Kings in general has pretty strong unit design while still sticking pretty closely to vanilla class designs. Lydia in particular is based off of Rhys, who is one of my favorite clerics in the vanilla games. As I said earlier clerics only care about staff rank and magic and boy do these two have it, especially magic.

This creates a really cool dynamic with each of their respective Troubadours (Mist in FE9/10, Zoe in 4K). Troubadours are, in a vacuum, just better Clerics, since their horse lets them heal frontliners easier and provides some additional rescue utility; but if you create a big gap in magic between your Troub and your Cleric, you get this nice push and pull where the Cleric is able to keep up with the Troubadour’s range by relying on physic, and the Cleric is also better at addressing big wounds. And as the gravy on top for Lydia in particular, she joins with a Sleep staff, which is a prf and cannot miss. Really great for securing the tight side objectives throughout the campaign.

There are other clerics in this category that I’m pretty fond of, like Svetomir from Bells of Byelen and Ginepro from A Vestrian Tale, but trying to cover every example of this kind of Cleric would be a fool’s errand. It’s probably the most common way to design a Cleric in your hack, which I think is a good thing, it’s a nice way to add a bit of depth and decision making to what is otherwise a pretty plain class. But there is one final path I wish to discuss, one that revels in the plain.

Serra was right

One of the things that I like about Fire Emblem compared to other RPG serieses is that sometimes units just aren’t viable the whole way through the campaign. Sure you can bring Jagen to endgame, but it’s pretty obvious that he’s kind of built to be outclassed by then. And you know who else is built to be outclassed by then? Wrys.

Yes Wrys, Elen, and many of the other 1 magic wonders of the vanilla games serve not only as tutorials for how healing works, but are also intentionally pretty mundane. These characters aren’t very striking as individuals, but use the more interchangeable nature of clerics to strengthen the game itself, namely through adding to the player’s sense of progression. Moving from Serra to Pent feels like a very material upgrade, and a sign that your ragtag group has become a truly formidable force.

This kind of design is rarer in hacks, I feel like most hackers want their entire cast (minus the Jagen) to be endgame viable with investment, but I have seen it a few times, mostly in FE7 hacks. Sylvia from The Road to Ruin, Arthur from Dark Lord and the Maiden of Light, and Asher from (former FE7 hack) Dream of Five I think all fall into this category.

The last Cleric that I want to talk about is Paul from the current WIP hack Faces of a Stranger.

Say hi to Paul

Faces of a Stranger is unique in that even Clerics and other healing classes get combat options immediately, but Paul is by far the closest to a pure Cleric in the game, having a staggering NINE attack by chapter 9 (watch out Wolt!) he’s often better off just forgoing a weapon entirely in favor of an extra staff. Also unique to Faces, staff effects are decoupled from a unit’s magic stat. So the Physic equivalent always has 1-5 range and always heals for 15 HP no matter what.

So with all these mechanics changes seemingly set out to nerf purely staff focused units like Paul, how does he stand out? Well the answer should be clear by now, it’s his staff rank (called medicine rank in this game). B rank medicine by chapter 9 is a pretty big deal, seeing as weapon ranks can grow kind of slowly in this game, and it gives Paul almost exclusive access to 2 unique items. The Ganlon Tonic and Liechi Tonic are variations of Ninis’s Grace/Filla’s Might from FE7, giving a character of your choice +8 def/res or +8 atk respectively until the next player phase. These are really strong effects, and throughout the midgame Paul is really the only one that can deliver them.

And although I don’t think the demo has gotten far enough at time of writing for any other character to consistently outclass Paul, he’s pretty clearly a unit with a Best By date. The second another character you’re using gets B medicine there’s not really much reason to keep using him, but I think that’s fine. Even when they are only messengers for the staff effects you want to give the player access to, Clerics can and do absolutely add a lot of flavor to a game.

"These things are me

Until I die

These things are me

Until I die…"

[Sphealnuke]

(post deleted by author)

[Sphealnuke]

(post deleted by author)

[Sphealnuke]

I SUMMON THE POWER!

I would imagine that many were disappointed when Fire Emblem 6 released and it went right back to the basics: Things like character and class skills were completely gone, replaced by axes with horrible hit rates. They were still disappointed when Fire Emblem 7 came about and still lacked them, though it remembered to make axes more useful this time around. And then Fire Emblem 8 happened and skills were finally back. And axes were still good.

Many promoted classes gained access to some extra battle skills. Players welcomed the return of random General bosses being able to completely deny your attacks, and the addition of your Wyvern Knight striking so hard the game could lock up. But at the end of the day, most of these skills were just random battle bonuses that couldn’t be planned around and actively used. But, if the player looked hard enough, such skill-expressing abilities could be found in one class.

The Sacred Stones introduced the Summoner class to the series, albeit it is (rightfully?) an incredibly rare class. No enemy in the game uses it, and they didn’t even bother making a class card for it. It can be accessed as a promotion for the Shaman class, competing with the Druid. Both classes are mostly identical, but Summoner gets a completely game-changing special skill while the Druid gets… Anima access.

I can go more into how the class is practically used by the Sacred Stones units that can even access it, but first we should get into the nitty-gritty of the Summoner.

The special skill is Summon. How creative. Once per turn you can have your Summoner, in lieu of village visiting or combat, create a new phantom unit that is immediately under your control. Each summoner you have can only control one phantom at a time, but you can create a phantom at your leisure with no limits on how many times they can be summoned per map.

                                              ![image|153x113](upload://am3HdVdzjvMZKJYI8wklafpZ1ne.png)

The Phantom feels even more sloppily thrown together than Darkling Woods, being exclusive to the player and being the only class in the game to lack battle animations of any sort. But it is a unique class with a bunch of very odd, sometimes nifty, properties.

The Phantom’s stats directly scale to the level of its Summoner and individual characters actually produce Phantoms with slightly different growth rates, albeit the differences are miniscule enough to not really matter. While it grows more powerful in battle, it will always exclusively use Axes and has just 1 HP with no defense or resistance whatsoever. A single hit is just about guaranteed to get rid of it. A tidbit not well known is that the Phantom gains the chance to spawn with stronger weapons the higher the Summoner’s level is. It defaults to the iron axe, but at higher levels can be given tools like the Killer Axe or the Tomahawk.

Being a true ghost, the phantom will completely ignore most forms of terrain. They receive no bonuses from tiles they are on, but can move freely over most normally impassable terrain like water and mountains. Short of walls, nothing will stop the Phantom from reaching its destination.

The Phantom cannot rescue units, though it can be given and drop units provided its constitution is sufficient for the job. It is also prevented from trading with your units or accessing shops to prevent you from selling its weapons for infinite money. An unfortunate side effect is that if the Phantom obtains items from defeating enemies, there is no way to reclaim them. They’re destined for the grave, so watch what they defeat.

Lots of complicated mechanics are at play. But what do they mean for direct gameplay?

In The Sacred Stones, three characters gain access to the Summoner Class or a renamed form of it:
-Ewan, who is a Trainee that has to be given copious amounts of levels and sent through a very specific promotion path. Joining after the halfway point of the game, it is virtually impossible to train him up without abusing the Tower of Valni.

-Knoll, a Shaman who joins in Chapter 15 at a level where he can immediately promote into Summoner but is famed for his generally poor combat abilities.

-Lyon, who can only be unlocked as a playable unit in the Creature Campaign. And by the time you’ve fulfilled the conditions to unlock him, there’s almost nothing left in the game to complete.

As such, the Summoner class can only be accessed extremely late into a playthrough, and is attached to characters that range from mediocre to awful. The bright side of this dilemma is that once a character is promoted to Summoner, they will probably never have to go into direct combat ever again.

Summoning Phantoms acts as both emulation of a 1-man army and a source of easy EXP points per turn. You can just send out phantoms ahead of you and never have to worry about the Summoner holding his own in a fight. He’s free to summon for level ups each turn, and maybe grind his staff rank on a turn where a Phantom happened to live. Possible, but admittedly rare with how fragile they are.

And that fragility might be so extreme it wraps back from being a deficit all the way to being a strength. Enemies in all GBA Fire Emblem games love to go after kills whenever they can, most other rules be damned. If you send out a group of units that maybe die in 2 hits with a phantom, enemies will still target that Phantom if it will die in 1. This gives the Summoner an extreme safety net they can cast over any play you make. Sure, it’s one dummy. But it is infinite and versatile, and with no terrain penalties it can easily keep up with your army. The most obvious issue to solve with this is siege attacks, and in Sacred Stones these situations come at the perfect time. You get a free Master Seal for Knoll in Chapter 15, then Chapters 16 and 18 are very heavy on siege attacks the Phantom can keep at bay. And Knoll needs zero training at all to do this.

In that same way, it can be abused to act as a flying delivery service for any unit. While Phantoms cannot directly rescue other units, they can still take and drop them with little issue. The Phantom can fly away with a unit to get them closer to their goal, then take the hit and let them off in a single turn with no drop needed. You’re only limited by your time and imagination.

So yeah, the Summoner is arguably the most flexible class in the entire game. But this does come down to a nasty core trait of its whole experience: The idea of Phantoms as disposable units completely breaks the permadeath structure old Fire Emblem games are based around.

You can’t just have your Pegasus Knight fly wherever it wants with a unit, or it’s likely to get shot down and killed forever. If the Phantom does this, no problem. It did exactly what it wanted to and can be back next turn with no issue. If a Phantom lures in a dangerous enemy by biting the dust, good. And with no limit to their numbers, you can do this one at a time to single enemies on the map provided no direct time pressure exists. It has the potential to create 100% safe scenarios via tactics you wouldn’t dare use with any other unit. It encourages you to repeatedly sack units, and Sacred Stones doesn’t reward you with bonus chapters for that unlike some other games in the series. The class comes late, and the later Chapters only really deal with the possibility of constant enemy lures by throwing so many at you that it would take forever to bait them all.

Which leads to a big question when it comes to ROMhacking: How does one create a campaign that gives you freer access to a Summoner without letting their action economy undo most of the challenge ahead of them? It has been tackled in more than a few ways that rely on the base mechanics of the game.

THE SUMMONER HAS NEXT TO NO STATS

Fire Emblem: Journeys introduces the Summoner Flynn as a free unit recruited automatically at the very beginning of Chapter X. Flynn’s Phantoms have all of the normal banes and boons as their vanilla appearance. The difference comes in Flynn himself, who possesses a distinct lack of any real stats. He’s nearly useless in a straight fight, and enemies will hurt pretty hard should they get a shot at him. The game here limits where the Summoner himself can go, though all of the usual utilities still exist.

The bigger thing acting against Flynn is that maps in Journeys are far heavier on direct time pressure, be it devastating enemy reinforcements meant to kill players for taking too long (Referred to from hereon out as Death Reinforcements) or direct turn limits on maps. While these have far greater effects on the player’s strategy than being directly made to interact with Flynn, they do succeed in preventing scenarios where Flynn can individually bait enemies with Phantoms. This kind of design, however, can act as a deterrent against many players who feel constrained by set turn limits that constrain their available options. It requires proper tuning and map design to still feel fun.

THE SUMMONER IS ON THE CLOCK

Shelby from Fire Emblem: The Four Kings is a Shaman that joins in Chapter 3, and their sole promotion option is the Summoner. Shelby is not the ideal combat unit, mostly notable for their unique tome, Munio, that massively boosts their defenses. Having little in the way of direct power, getting Shelby to promotion level can be a bit of an ordeal. Once they reach the Summoner class, it has all of the same versatile abilities as in Sacred Stones. The defensive utility of these Phantoms are far more pronounced in this hack due to the extremely high attack power of the average enemy and the relative lack of survivability amongst your army. Most of your army’s total defense ends up concentrated into a number of units that can be counted on one hand, particularly during the middle portion of the game that divides your army into two. Shelby being able to offer fool-proof ways of luring in problematic enemies or exhausting siege tomes ends up being invaluable.

In this sense, Four Kings is much more reliant on anti-turtling countermeasures and hard turn limits to put a ceiling on Shelby’s power. Death Reinforcements are somewhat frequent. You can’t really dawdle on most maps, especially in the lategame where all maps are directly timed or directed in flow by uncontrollable units. Hanging back and letting Phantoms do all of your work will often be a quick ticket to the Game Over screen. Shelby being able to move themselves into harm’s way to back up their Phantoms is much more encouraged, and thankfully Munio gives them the capacity to survive most situations.

Proper use of Shelby drastically lowers the difficulty of many sections of the game, particularly when promoted. The game in general encourages early promotions and Shelby is arguably the biggest example of this. Of course, knowing that Shelby promotes into Summoner isn’t a given and that can lead to many players not passing EXP over to them due to their poor combat prior to promotion. But if you’ve struggled with this hack before, maybe give Shelby more of a spin. I certainly wouldn’t have completed it without them.

THE SUMMONER CAN’T CONTROL IT

Cassius from Fire Emblem: Vision Quest is a prepromoted Summoner, with no other playable unit being able to enter the class. The game is divided into multiple parts in the vein of Radiant Dawn, and Cassius doesn’t join until partway through the last of the four parts. In that vein, Cassius feels more like a lategame reward that offers you an incredibly strong tool to face the final challenges with. However, the game still felt the need to counteract the known and incredible strengths of the class. How it did this was actually very unique compared to the previous examples I have given, in that Cassius does not create Phantoms. No, he creates something far more powerful and far more realistic:

***"Chicken, man! No discussion!"***

Use of Cassius’s summon command brings forth the spirit of Custer the Chicken. Their stats far exceed what you would see from the average Phantom, and they can sincerely get some important kills when put in range of their victims. But Custer has one trait that completely changes how they get used: Custer is a green unit.

Being a green unit means that no direct commands can be given to Custer. Custer will cross roads of their own accord and go around interacting with the world like a chicken would. They cannot be directed towards who you want them to stop, and their higher HP makes it rarer that Custer will go down immediately. Summoning Custer is far more of a commitment than your typical Phantom. Custer also cannot be used for Take/Drop strategies because of the lack of control.

Let’s get past the comedy of a chicken roaming around occasionally choosing to help out like it’s Moana. An uncontrollable summon certainly gets around a lot of the commonly-sighted issues with the Phantom since it will move after the enemies and cannot be set wherever it needs to be. But it inherently removes a lot of control from the skill, and in that manner a sense of skill expression. Not a lot of the remaining maps would even be broken by constant enemy luring, since the remaining maps either have some form of time limit or feature bosses that directly charge the player once enough time passes.

Is it necessarily a bad thing to handle summons this way? It may feel more in line with the intention of the class, but it takes a lot of control out of the situation that can lead to very interesting, out of the box strategies. Granted, it still gives access to some very simple and absurdly effective strategies if the map allows for it. It’s a very precarious balance that can be tough to judge, and Vision Quest chose a much more conservative approach than its contemporaries.

Balance Vs Fun is a complicated affair. It is undeniably fun to lead a Phantom army raised from the dead with near limitless applications, but not designing around it when it’s easily accessible can lead to the moment-to-moment structure of the game being easily derailed. And many more modern hacks have gone above and beyond in overhauling it. Limiting the number of summons per map, messing with the summons to be pure utility, respawning them on enemy phase… It’s getting pretty deep. But is it to the detriment of fun? It’s about doing whatever it takes to include them in a normal class set so they can be used for more than 5 chapters.

However you choose to do it, remember to make sure that the choice to summon remains involved, fun and smart. You’re working with easily the most complex of the GBA classes here, so make it feel like such. I may have sidestepped the issue entirely in my hack, but that doesn’t mean you have to if you’re afraid they’ll inherently break the game. Just apply them with proper purpose and the way to work it out will become apparent.

The Enemy

Enemy Summoners are equally rare in the games. The closest they’ve ever gotten in the regular games is Izuka in Radiant Dawn, and obviously he can’t have his “summons” walk through walls, disappear and fly. They end up getting used in the same way as reinforcements get used on pretty much every other map in the series, which is probably why they never kept them around. It would just be a different flavor of bringing in more units to stall you, and isn’t inherently interesting in its mechanics.

Enemy Summoners in other hacks usually fill the same role: Reinforcement events are set up to just create new units around them rather than their own skills bringing forth the summons. Often they’re used for flavor in this context.

When it Wasn’t a Summoner Doing the Summoning

In the Tellius games, the Falcoknight Tanith possessed the ability to call in a whole squad of ally units once per map. It’s as awesome as it sounds, but that’s another class for another dissertation.

NEVER STOP SUMMONING

[UltraxBlade]

Heals on Wheels: How to Design When a Class Can’t Be Bad

Of all the standard classes to appear in Fire Emblem, Troubadour might be the single hardest one to screw up. The combination of mounted mobility and staff access offers such potent noncombat utility that you could give a Troubadour 1 HP and 0 in every other combat stat and, while players may not like them, they’d still probably be good enough to use – all it means is you might have to actually buy a Mend staff for once in your life. To make a truly bad Troubadour, you’d need to, I don’t know, have them join not just understatted but also late to the point where your infantry staffers have all promoted, give them reduced mov compared to other mounts so as to have no advantage over said promoted infantry, and make them underleveled enough that you can’t promote them anytime soon to regain that advantage, and stick them with a poor enough base staff rank to be unable to use important staves like Restore in time for when you need them. But surely no one would do that, right?

Oh. Right.

Because the class is so straightforwardly strong, there really isn’t much to say about designing a Troubadour in a vacuum. Unlike Archers or Armor Knights, no one has ever asked “how do I make my Troubadour good”. It’s the only class other than Dancer where the floor is so inherently high as to always be good on class merits alone. Even L’Arachel manages to find her way into deployment sometimes as serviceable last-slot filler. At the same time, it’s hard to make a Troubadour too good either, as the same function that lets them not care about having bad stats also results in them not really caring about having good stats either – at least, not until they promote, which tends to take a while for pure staffers to get to. Now, some hacks – and even some vanilla games, hello Jugdral – do opt to also give their Troubadours or Troubadour-equivalents access to a combat weapon even before they promote. This obviously makes an already-strong class even stronger, and I’ll circle back to it a bit more later, but generally-speaking either their combat is irrelevant and they play the same as normal, or you’re designing a Cavalier with bonus utility and should check out the Cavalier writeup by one of my counterparts.

So, if Troubadours can’t really be bad but also can’t really be broken, what else is there to say about them? A fair bit, actually. And it all starts with a question you’ve probably found yourself asking whenever you look at the deployment screen the map after the Troubadour joins: why the hell would I use the Cleric when the Troubadour exists?

Deployment of the Fittest

This is probably a comparison you’re familiar with. And while there’s a very good point to be made about how it’s perfectly okay, perhaps even healthy for some units to be designed to be used by necessity short-term and replaced by better units later, it’s a comparison many hackers prefer to avoid paralleling so starkly. Most hackers prefer for every unit they design to at least have some argument for deploying them over their competitors, and Troubadour vs Cleric is on its face about as lopsided as it can get. And since stats are so much less important to healers than they are to combat units, it can seem a lot harder to make a Cleric stand out in the face of a Troubadour competitor.

Before I continue, there is one thing I must address. Even when the Troubadour does outclass the Cleric, that does not mean the Cleric won’t be deployed. The role of healer is one that generally doesn’t need that many units to fill it, but it’s quite common for the number you want to still be at least two. Maps that force your army to split into two groups are quite common, especially in hacks, and being able to send one healer with each group is extremely valuable. If you don’t believe me, play Hag in White, where you only have one healer, and compare the progress made by the half of the army Apate goes with to that made by the other half. So, if maps demand it and deployment slots have space for it, the player will bring both the Troubadour and the Cleric even if one is worse than the other, at least in the short term. The problem starts to arise once a third healer joins the army, and a mage gains staves on promo while having way better combat, and the Troubadour always locks in the first dedicated healer slot while the Clerics get forced out.

So, let’s assume you’re one of those hackers who wants your Troubadour and Cleric to be comparably good. Luckily for you, this really isn’t actually that hard or complicated, at least on the surface. Vanilla even gets it right sometimes.

…No, not that screen, we already know that doesn’t matter and it’s not like either of these sets of numbers is good anyway. The other one.

Staff-users don’t care all that much about combat stats, but there’s one value that they care quite a lot about: staff rank. Clarine’s D may not look that far behind Saul’s C, but as anyone who’s played the game can tell you, FE6 weapon ranks grow extraordinarily slowly and that D vs C base makes a world of difference in terms of which of these two units can feasibly make it to Warp rank in time for it to matter. Saul’s base rank lead also gives him immediate access to useful non-healing staves like Barrier and Restore that Clarine can’t click, and often means he’s your first available Physic user. Physic in particular is worth some extra attention in a broader sense, because a Priest or Cleric that can use Physic to heal from farther away effectively cancels out the Troubadour’s movement advantage, though at the cost of spending what is often a more limited resource, and even once the Troubadour’s rank catches up, their usually-lower Magic stat often means their Physic range is noticeably smaller. The early Priest with a Physic staff is a pretty common sight in hacks these days for this reason.

Of course, staff rank only matters as much as the staves the player actually gets access to. It’s not enough to give the Cleric a higher staff rank than the Troubadour if the only staves you get for the first 10 chapters are Heal, Mend, and Torch. And while an early Physic can certainly help the Cleric, it may not be enough on its own when all it offers is 15 uses of “equivalent to the Troubadour” healing range with a staff that can’t be replaced until you’re 20 chapters in. For a staff rank-based advantage to actually hold up for more than a few extra chapters, there needs to be a reasonably-steady supply of higher-tier staves with which to use it, and those staves need to offer something meaningfully unique over healers who can only heal.

Lydia’s sleep staff is a prf, but the point stands. Rank-advantaged staves are basically prfs in the short term anyway.

Another option hackers will sometimes employ is giving the infantry staff-user access to a combat weapon, while the Troubadour is stuck with pure utility (or at least, with combat that is far less effective). This is also a fairly straightforward way to distinguish them, and is arguably easier to design around than differentiating on pure staff rank difference. And this is the approach I leaned into when working on chapter 4 of the currently-in-progress telephone hack An Enemy Ambush, spiritual successor to An Unexpected Caller, in which I had to design a second healer to follow up on this:

Irma here is, uh, not very good. Her stats are comparable to the notoriously-bad Serra, and on top of that, at the time, she had a negative skill dealing damage to her after every combat to represent her being a Gaiden cleric. The only things she has going for her are above-average growths (which aren’t enough to keep her fielded long enough to catch up) and her weapon ranks. The one C-rank staff available so far was Restore, for which I didn’t want to spam too many status enemies as early as chapter 4, and her stats meant her combat was so bad as to barely be a factor with the basic Light tome you had to buy for her in preps to even have. Now, I decided fairly quickly that one of the two units I wanted to add would be a second healer, and I also realized that another Priest or Cleric right after Irma joined would be both too similar and likely too much of a direct upgrade. So, instead, I decided to add a unit of the class that’s even more of an upgrade:

Pheros joins the chapter after Irma as a Troubadour with stats better than hers in every way, except, of course, for staff rank. Staff rank would matter somewhat, of course, as Pheros wouldn’t be able to use Irma’s Restore staff for a while if anyone put in status enemies in the next few maps, and I also put a shop on the map selling C-rank Physic staves as an option (though they were somewhat expensive). But more importantly, Irma, while certainly not a good combatant, at least had the option to chip down low-Res enemies safely at range and level up faster by taking kills to let her better growths catch up to Pheros’s intentionally-gimped Magic growth. But that wouldn’t be enough if her combat remained as bad as it was, especially as the power creep among other combat units was already getting out of hand.

Staff rank isn’t the only place a high weapon rank can matter. A Seraphim tome, of which she was the only current user, gave Irma a unique advantage against the exceptionally-dangerous undead on the map, allowing her combat to genuinely contribute while also helping her get a jump-start on catching up in levels. Pheros, on the other hand, did what Troubadours do best: move around with high mobility, trading items and clicking basic Heal. Both units were contributing, not just by necessity of fielding two healers, but by virtue of their own individual advantages and weaknesses.

Ride of the Valkyries

How bad can a prepromote’s stats be while still being a high tier?

Where Troubadour is the best utility class out of all tier 1 classes in the game, its promoted form, Valkyrie, may well be the best class in the game. Period. Not only does it have all the utility of its unpromoted counterpart with the boosted mobility of being promoted, Valkyries add combat on top of that, and most often, this is using the best weapon type in the game: magic. Valkyries are typically only held back by subpar stats, and while this does keep them from completely dominating, it is almost impossible for a Valkyrie to not be one of your best choices to deploy. Now, by the time Valkyries come online, healers’ stats, or lack thereof, do start to matter more. Higher-tier staves like Physic, status staves, Rescue, and Warp have ranges that scale based on the user’s Magic, and the gap in Magic between a Valkyrie and a Bishop or Sage is often large enough for the range difference to meaningfully outstrip the movement difference – especially when the target you need to reach is behind a wall, or you need to warp one of your units from a fixed starting place. On top of that, the obvious potential combat power of a mounted mage tends to also exert downward pressure on the stats Valkyries are allowed to have. Therefore, the logic with prepromote Valkyries is often to lean even more into the same things that make unpromoted Troubadours good.

Unlike unpromoted Troubadours, prepromote Valkyries are often seen with quite good base staff ranks, as they’re designed to be the ultimate out-of-the-box, no-investment-needed pure utility unit at the phase of the game where pure staffers are no longer really a thing. As stats on lategame staffers actually matter now and high staff rank is more widespread, the Valkyrie’s typically-low base Magic stat becomes the main limitation, while also keeping their combat in the “useful when it comes up but never great” range.

And that’s… kind of all there is to say on its face. Like base Troubadour, a bad Valkyrie is still a Valkyrie. Cecilia FE6 is at this point widely-known as a very good unit even if her base stats are horrendous and her base staff rank is only C and her join map has her stuck as a horse in a desert after being bodied by Zephiel in the previous cutscene. It’s just almost never going to be the case that you have a Valkyrie and they’re not worth deploying at least over whoever your 12th-best combat unit is, and the balancing act of keeping them in line is easier now that their stats are a bigger deal.

That said, if you want your prepromote Valkyrie to join a bit earlier in the game, there is also an interesting middle ground, one best highlighted by a romhack unit who isn’t literally a Valkyrie in name but is effectively one by all mechanics: AUC Selena.

FE8 Mage Knight and Valkyrie are literally the same class with different names.

Selena here is a prepromote Mage Knight who you can recruit as one of your two picks from the first interlude, which comes between chapters 5 and 6. Note her weapon ranks. Despite being a prepromote, Selena’s base stats are barely any better than her unpromoted competitors, but they are still better enough in conjunction with her 8 mov and magic access that she can function as a sort of secondary Jagen combat-wise. That A rank in Anima also lets her use the extremely-useful Bolting tome she comes with, something that will have value even as her direct combat falls off. But the main way in which Selena can maintain her relevance long-term is through building her noticeably-poor base staff rank. While E rank staves isn’t really much of a drawback at her join time, it does mean she has some work to do if she wants to use better staves later on, especially since, as a prepromote, there’s no promo gain down the line to bump it up. But on the flipside, if she is able to build up some staff rank, an 8 mov staff-user, as established, is always good, even if her stats fall off. She strikes a unique balance of short-term secondary Jagen and long-term weapon rank training project, while still leaving room for competing staffers to have a huge lead on her staff access and for competing combat units to quickly outstrip her raw bases.

The subject of FE8 Mage Knight also brings me to a topic that, while objectively rather minor and not especially popular as a mechanic among hacks, I always find fascinating: split promotion design. FE8’s split promotion for troubadours, while not as blatantly-lopsided as FE8’s version of Paladin vs Great Knight, is infamously one of the most boring choices in the game. The only differences between promoting L’Arachel to Mage Knight vs Valkyrie are a single point of Res and a choice between two weapon types where the difference barely matters. (Ok, there’s also a hidden EXP bonus on Valkyrie, but it certainly isn’t stated anywhere and may not even have been intended. And without being able to see it, you can’t really use it to make choices.) While differentiating the promotion gains a bit more would certainly help, it still doesn’t fix the problem of the classes being so fundamentally similar. They’re both promoted cavalry with staff access and a magic type, and in both vanilla and the majority of hacks, which subtype of magic you use doesn’t tend to matter very often.

Seriously, why bother?

So, what’s a more interesting choice you can make here? Well, later vanilla games seem to have learned nothing from FE8’s Paladin vs Great Knight, as Awakening gives us the absolutely laughable Valkyrie vs War Cleric split, and Fates presents the only barely better Strategist vs Butler. Wow, I sure love taking 6 mov and a physical weapon type over 8 mov and magic access on my unit with better Magic than Strength! And what really bothers me is that these games actually had the perfect promoted class to use as Troubadour’s alternate promotion: staff-wielding Falcoknights. A flying staff-user is the only thing better than a mounted one, but being stuck with physical melee lances instead of 1-2 magic tomes on your magic-focused Troubadour is a significant decrease in the combat potential the promotion provides. This promo split is what I used for Troubadours in my first ever hacking project, and unlike any of the vanilla Troubadour splits, it actually works! A tradeoff between going even harder into pure utility vs adding competent combat to their toolkit is exactly what a split promo for a utility class like Troubadour wants. This exact split of course isn’t the only way to do it, but it’s a pretty good example of what split promo choices for a class like this should present.

The Big Picture

As I was drafting this writeup, my good friend lowres, who happens to be the one writing the closely-related Cleric counterpart, pointed out something very insightful:

honestly i think troubadours lend themselves better to like, map design discussion rather than class design, as strange as that sounds. in my experience the best feeling troubadours (alta SP, that one from guard of avelon) are ones where you’re doing a lot of both healing and rescuing, and one isn’t just way better than the other

GBA Rescue (not the staff, the mechanic) is one of the most interesting parts of the base engine we hackers all use, and it’s the truly unique utility tool that Troubadour’s movement type enables that isn’t just doing a Cleric’s job either better or worse. When used well, it can generate very powerful movement advantages – pulling other units back to safety, getting slower-moving powerhouses to the front line, delivering the lord to the seize point ahead of schedule, etc.. It’s a very versatile mechanic with a lot of room for skill expression, and one that Troubadours make especially good use of as enablers on turns where their healing is either not needed or less valuable than aiding in a Rescue-Drop. But, as lowres points out, how impactful it actually is depends on the surrounding map design. And admittedly, my own map design is not always very kind to creative use of Rescue – I tend to make denser maps that lean on taxing the player’s action economy, leaving less room to contribute multiple units to proactive Rescue setups. Troubadours in such an environment are still good! They’re still Troubadours! But when they end up spending most of their turns on staff use without room for rescue, they do lose a bit of what makes them truly unique over other staffers. So if you want to lean a bit more into this aspect, you might want to have some maps with a bit more open space so that Rescue strats can really shine.

[SubwayBossEmmett]

Bards and Dancers

Before we begin, I am going to assign these two classes a specific term to describe what they do. They are refreshers. Maybe your bard is actually called a ‘vagrant’ who can use light magic, or you’re feeling silly thinking you’re gonna have a dancer join with a rapier. It doesn’t matter as long as they can make a unit act again.

They

are

refreshers.

And that’s great!

Refreshing is one of the strongest tools you can have in a fire emblem campaign:

-Your strongest combat unit can act again clearing out tougher enemies
-Your safest chip option and weaken foes
-You can have your best staffer either work up to stronger staff rank or use their extremely powerful physic, rescue, warp, sleep, etc more than once in a turn
-Craziest of all, you can feed your favorite unit twice as many kills a turn!!

While that’s a lot to blurt out at once it’s hard to undersell how good refreshing is as promoting and rewarding dynamic play.

However all that power does not come without a drawback. Refreshers generally are frail. As in, the single weakest units in your army in vanilla and most hacks.

Since the class(es) at hand are a bit more limited compared to other topics at hand, I will be discussing patches accessible in FEBuilder to discuss

What Bulk Should Refreshers have

Generally this giving refreshers minimal bulk is a standard and warranted trade off.

Something that allows for more aggression on player phase, lacks the ability to do anything on enemy phase. If your hack wants to use longer ranged siege magic or ballista, more than vanilla does, you may want to consider increasing your refresher’s bulk.

Notable example here is 4kings’s Dorian who inverts the typical speed/luck dodgetank statline for def and res. You do not need to go to this extreme but that doesn’t mean you cannot play around with their stat lines.

Although note, it is possible for Dorian to eventually get doubled late into the game and 4kings consistently has very strong attackers from start to finish so his bulk isn’t as excellent as it appearas. However by the time he starts facing serious issues at range you do generally have a lot more options for movement and dealing with enemy attacks.

In an ideal situation your refreshers shouldn’t be put into the line of fire and how much they can survive should come down to how much difficulty you want out of an FE experience when you’re coming at this from the perspective of a designer. That is ultimately your choice.

What Refreshers Help Generate

An often underlooked element of refresher assistance is the weapon experience they help your units earn. Generally this is allowing your units to use the best tools in the game. Frequently this is in the form of S rank weapons and staffs, but sometimes your goal might just be A rank. It always depends on the game at hand.

I will concede that you get a bit more value out of this the more you value lower turncounts, but I know I appreciate not having dead turns where I want to rout the map of reinforcements still spawning or hearing the “near victory” theme while I mindlessly use the barrier staff.

To the other end of “just” weapon experience there is the value of being able to pump traditional experience into a unit of your choosing as well. If the game does not tend to have a lot of enemies spawn as reinforcements there will be only so many turns that you can get kills and get a unit to a specific level. Whether that’s for level up skills, getting to promotion requirements, or even raw stats from leveling up the ability to improve the units around is the core of refresher utility.

Fire Emblem at its core is not having an equal army that can handle everything equally well.

It’s about an army where your units are specialists that can handle and let the player overcome specific threats by your selected units’ specific individual strengths and tools.

Refreshers exist to enhance those strengths even further. Whether it’s letting units access even higher tier versions of tools or getting to do their specialized action more than once a turn.

Additional Tools for Refreshers

Being small.

No seriously.

A huge advantage to refresher design in the GBA + Tellius games is how small refreshers are because they are able to be rescued / shoved all across the map and out of danger in a pinch with most units being able to assist.

The risk vs reward for an aggressive dancer play and having another unit potentially hold them on enemy phase taking rescue penalties is an interesting trade off and promotes more thoughtful decision making every turn.

Okay Fine, Actual Tools for Refreshers

Dancer Rings, which were introduced in FE7 were essentially the first incarnation of the rally mechanic that would go on to define stat stacking in more modern FE that you apply every turn in a range. It is interesting to contrast how different it started out as.

Nini’s Grace is a single target +10 boost to def and res and Fila’s Might +10 damage given as a custom status effect that lasts for a turn. I’ve also heard that there’s two more rings in FE7? But I’ve never heard of anyone using anything other than Nini’s Grace and Fila’s Might so I think it’s just a playground rumor.

Both of these effects are bordering on egregiously strong. Quadding with a brave weapon now does +40 damage of what it would normally do. Or taking -40 less damage from 4 enemies on enemy phase, provided none doubled your unit.

Example, Athos walking up and down smashing the final boss.

FE7 balances this out with both durability and rarity, with Fila’s might being a desert item. Not to mention dedicating your refresher’s singular action to “not” refreshing but needing to be near a unit that wants to engage the enemy.

With patches, you can alter the values that the rings give if you think these effects are too strong as they stand and you would prefer to give out this effect more frequently. You can also effectively assign whatever stat modifiers you want to the 4 rings. Even though vanilla has a laughable +10 avoid ring, you can change it to be +50 avoid, +50 hit and +50 crit all at once if you wanted.

Technically you could assign these to staffs but that’s escaping the scope of this write up, but thought I should mention it.

Additionally when you go into patches, you can make these also refresh the user and assign the ring’s effect. I personally don’t like that but thought I would just let the reader know.

Regardless, dancer rings are very fun and act as large scale opportunity trade offs that fit what dancers are all about. Giving up a unit you could deploy for combat or staffing every turn. However, giving the ability to make your best boss killer secure a boss kill or your best tank to survive a scary enemy phase is once again, letting your specialists act as even stronger specialists.

Should Refreshers Have Self-Defense?

I understand why people want to put a weapon type on a refresher. A bit of self defense in the worst case scenario is understandable. Maybe it’s a part of their character that they’re less good at fighting than their other skills. Hell, maybe you just enjoy feeding a unit that is not supposed to be in combat and watching them grow. You can do a lot to justify giving a refresher a weapon.

To continue this point is more or less a continuation of the bulk discussion. You can do whatever, just know that the stronger they are (in regards to not dying as well) the easier and less punishing your hack may be.

However, there is nothing wrong with that! It is your own game.

Staffing Refreshers

Now you may have noticed that in this post that talks about the utility and flexibility that dancers provide to your army. Yet I haven’t commented on dancers who can also use staves which crop up every so often in hacks.

Wouldn’t that add more utility and add to their toolkit?

Order of the Crimson Arm actually has one!

I actually have a simple response to that line of thinking that has already been covered in a video before for me.

What you just said

But no seriously, do not give refreshers staff rank.

It’s a trap.

It goes against generating more wexp benchmarks for high ranking staves if your game has them. They likely have worse magic than other staffers so won’t heal as well. Not to mention they likely lower staff rank and more competition per action.

So maybe if they have the largest magic stat and a weirdly high staff rank that they are the best staffer you could use the trade off while making sure you can’t refresh the best staffer. I guess that might be neat?

Refreshers As Enemies

…I mean. I know there’s a patch in FEBuilder to give them Dancer AI to refresh other enemies. I cannot say I have played anything with that, and it sounds horrifying to account for.

Otherwise if they don’t have AI routines to refresh other enemies at most they will presumably be just worse versions classes with the same weapon type. Are you looking to read me discussing a hypothetical enemy dancer statline as if that’s not just worse myrmidons? Just read about myrmidons.

However, I am only critical towards generic enemies in a refresher’s class. On the contrast, using a typically refresher class for a boss

Boss from An Unexpected Caller.
(Funnily enough this does drop so your refresher can use it if you so desire.)

Boss from Lonely Mirror

I would like to place some emphasis on the fact they are using uniquely made personal weapons instead of something generic to help function better as bosses. Both are about inflicting status, something that you could always do with generic staves…

However it is hard to deny that these are more memorable set pieces because an atypical class with unique weapons is threatening you.

I think that is the best fate for using a typically refresher class as an enemy. A specific memorable interaction with more deliberate thought and effort than something you can plop down.

Judgral Bards

This only applies to 2 units in vanilla. Lewyn in FE4 and Homer in FE5. Both happen to clearly be Kaga’s bias characters with arguably the best available player holy weapon for Lewyn and Homer joining with paragon and crazy good growths for FE5. They both then promote into Sages. This write up isn’t for “guys who become sages” this is for refreshers.

Refresher Elements I Advise Against

As some closing thoughts that didn’t fit into the rest of this write up I wanted to comment on two things, whereas staff dancers fit nicely next to other weapon rank discussions.

AoE or 4-Way Refreshing

Generally refreshers only refresh one unit with their action, but there have been exceptions with FE4 and the Tellius Herons.

FE4’s reasoning for why it breaks the traditional dancer mold is quite simple, it’s to mitigate the size of those maps that most other things shouldn’t approach.

Tellius either gives a meter to prevent Reyson from using the 4 way refresh asap or just refuses to give Rafiel availability to limit his unrestricted access to 4 maps before the Tower Endgame.

To a lesser extent 3 Houses and Engage dip their toes into 4 way refreshing with a battalion and an engage effect (specifically referencing 3H doing this) and they are beyond centralizing element in those games once they come into play but even then Int Sys holds off giving you those until like the real last stretch of the games there (unless Blue Lions route) and are part responsible for Engage and 3H to have such easy access to 1 turn clears.

The point is, aoe refreshing is such a centralizing mechanic that usually has its own asterisks and janky availability it’s easier to not really consider this as a reasonable option to include for what it enables.

Multiple Refreshers that can refresh each other.

Or in other words, a bardtrain

…Do not do this.

I, the writer of this post, who has a core hack gimmick around perfect availability dancer and bard from turn 1 am pleading with you to not do this. Refreshers who can chain their refreshes warp map design around themselves to such a degree you have to change some fundamentals of your hack and map design principals. Every village needs to be guarded. Every chest is theirs for the taking if a chest key exists. I’ve had people rescue drop combat units forward across the map because they were 1 con below the refreshers leading me to alter the entire map and my philsophies more than once.

If you want to create a tight experience where you don’t have to worry about players breaking your maps or having concrete turn deadlines work as intended via distance, do not do this.

Learn from me…

[ATHATH]

reserving a post here for what I promise will be a funny bit in like 14 hours

I’d finish writing this now but I have literally been awake for 23 hours straight due to a botched night shift → day shift transition and I think staying up longer will actually hurt me

but I promise it’ll be cool and funny and epic and insightful when I wake up tomorrow and spend like an hour writing it

[Augenis]

The Anatomy of the Bandit Chapter

“Fight through the early maps, where a bunch of bald, ugly, untoothed bandits teach you that killing is okay - as long as it’s gross people!”

The bandit, the brigand, the pirate, the barbarian, the cutthroat, the purloiner, the ne’er do-well, the corsair (remember Corsairs? that famous FE7 class?) - they are people known by many names, who are present in almost every single Fire Emblem game, vanilla or hacked. In fact, the bandit chapter is seemingly the most non-negotiable trope of any story claiming itself to be Fire Emblem - the jagens and christmas cavaliers need not be part of your unit list, the evil dragon-resurrecting emperor need not appear, the hero need not be a blue haired rapier wielding lord or a noble at all, much less wield a weapon effective against both armor and cavalry - but no matter what, you can almost guarantee that you will spend at least one chapter, if not a few, chasing after bandits thirsty for gold and pillage.

Naturally, as they are such an omnipresent part of the Fire Emblem mythos, romhackers have asked since the earliest days whether this class could finally make its way to the player unit lineup. Though not as infamous as the “romhack soldier”, the “romhack brigand” was a staple during the age of FE7 romhacks. They still exist today, but they are nowhere near as prolific or visible.

When first plotting out this diatribe about brigand and pirate units, I asked my friends on Discord what fun and interesting romhack brigands they know, and frankly, we all were a little stumped before we ultimately settled on Begoña from Hag in White and not much else. In fact, romhack brigands have a reputation for being… terrible. Earlygame filler which gets dropped almost as soon as they’re no longer forced to be on your team. Why is that - and how exactly do you make a romhack brigand… work?

1

Unlike romhack soldiers, who had no representative in official games until Path of Radiance (except for Gaiden, which nobody played), brigands (and pirates, for that matter) did have some rep in official games during the GBA era and earlier. These are Gonzalez from FE6 and Marty from Thracia 776, and of the two, the former is more relevant to the discussion at hand. Gonzalez is a funky little unit whose most notable attribute, compared to the other footlocked axe users in the game, is his speed and the berserker’s +30% crit chance, assuming you promote him despite the heavy competition over the Hero Crest. Garbage hit, garbage defenses, standard fighter growths in HP and strength, but at least he is not wearing boots of depleted uranium, or any boots at all.

This build is then mostly replicated by Gonzalez’s counterpart in FE7, Dart, who comes in the Pirate class instead. In growths and bases, Dart is a replica of Gonzalez (in normal mode, not counting hard mode bonuses), with only small adjustments to some of his stats and growths. He still has a bonkers speed growth (tied with Lyn, of all people), and though he actually has a functioning skill stat, FE7 also massively nerfs promotion bonuses and cuts Berserker’s +5 skill boost to a meager +1 skill boost, which, coupled with Dart’s equally tragic skill growth, means that the difference is miniscule in practice.

From this emerged the romhack trope of the brigand as the “speedy axefighter”. In my opinion, this trope is further strengthened by two other reasons:

• The brigand is notably more “mobile” than the standard axe fighter in animations. The fighter walks slowly and his attack is carried more by the weight of the axe than by his own movement; the brigand hops around, ducks and screams. When trying to find differences between fighters and brigands, it is natural to look at this difference and think at least once or twice that perhaps the brigand is slightly more mobile. (The way animations shape FE romhack design is a topic for another time, but it is a pretty big topic. After all, those of us who do not have thousands of dollars lying around to comm all of their hack’s battle animations have to work with what GBAFE and the repo give them…)

• As fighters are pretty infamous for being slow (GBA fighters in particular), the parallel between slow, bulky, hard-hitting fighters and speedy brigands is easy to come to as a conclusion. It’s pretty hard to make a brigand even slower than a fighter, when you already have vanilla fighters walking around with 10-20% speed growths, and if you keep speed the same, where do you distinguish the two classes? (if you distinguish them… but more on that later…). Speedy brigands and slow fighters also parallel the distinction between myrmidons and mercenaries in the foot swordfighter lineup and thus feel “natural” for Fire Emblem design.

Perhaps the example of how this distinction works in practice that’s easiest to point to is the aforementioned Hag in White. Early on in the hack, you receive two footlocked axe users - Begoña, a brigand, and Fango, a fighter - who fall into the distinction between brigands and fighters described above:

Design wise, Fango is not too dissimilar from standard axe fighters found in vanilla and romhacks alike, with perhaps only the distinction that his growths beyond HP/str are not completely garbage. 40% speed is not good, but it is passable, certainly more than, say, Dorcas - whereas his base strength and growth are off the charts. Combine that with both of his promotions giving quite a bit of strength, and he’s going to be the first of your units to cap strength if you regularly use him. Begoña, on the other hand, is speed focused. Despite her foot axe class and muscles on the portrait, her highest stat is going to be speed - which, at a base 10, is one of the highest of all the units in the first arc of the hack, only narrowly edged out by Kairos. If you regularly use her, she is going to be fast, and she is going to be surprisingly dodgy due to her speed and luck. She also comes with a leadership star, which is quite valuable.

Of the two, Begoña stands out more, but the distinction between the two is not so extreme as to make Fango completely obsolete. He still brings a massive amount of strength, and his accuracy issues can be easily patched up with a triangle attack - which, yes, if you have not played Hag, the two axe users, alongside their thief friend Lopez, have a triangle attack together. What matters most is that they’re different. The worst sin which your brigand unit may commit, and one which has been committed by hacks before, is making your brigand function so similarly to your standard axe fighter (assuming you have one, of course) that you start to wonder what the point of having a playable brigand was in the first place. Except for, of course, the bragging rights of having a playable brigand.

Another example of a brigand done right is Frani from Curse of Lagdou. She is the first axe user which joins you, is in the Brigand class, and if you were to take a quick look at her stats, you will probably immediately spot some of the same “speedy brigand” DNA which we talked about in the Begoña section.

And, indeed, the speed on her is certainly off the charts compared to the slower Garcia and Francizka you get a few chapters later. (Her base speed is actually higher than that of Garcia even though she is a level 1 brigand and he is a promoted Warrior). However, it is not necessarily her speed which distinguishes her. To those who may not be aware, CoL comes with a completely reworked, un-randomized crit system where reaching 50% crit chance guarantees a critical hit for both players and enemies. This is not only, frankly, a very fun system to play with, but it also allows the hack to further differentiate units through skills that tie into this crit system. Frani is one of them - she comes with a buffed Wrath which gives her a +100 crit bonus when her HP is below 50% percent. So, basically, she is going to crit.

yeah.

Frani is far from the best unit in CoL, she falls off eventually due to her permanent footlocked mono-axe user status and the many lategame joiners the game gives you, but she puts in a lot of work during the earlygame - and what’s most important, she puts in work different from the other axe users you get a few chapters later, in Ch5. Ross is perhaps the closest due to his starting Pouge also making him focus on crits, but its mono-3 range and Chaos Critical make him work quite differently; Franciska is a cavalier with Rally Mov so she isn’t even in the discussion here; and Garcia is a more traditional fighter built around raw str (and is also… not particularly good, or well I didn’t use him anyway).

2

When carefully distinguished from more standard axe fighters and given their own niches in gameplay, brigands can really spice up your unit lineup. But as I have hinted at several times already, this is not always the case with romhack brigands. In fact, the reputation they have garnered is more of being… bad. So with that introduction, let’s talk about Dale from Dark Lord and the Maiden of Light.

Dale is a really funny guy, and probably the least “brigand-like” of the characters here as far as their background is concerned. He is a crazy old man who has a garden in a snowy mountain peak, gets pissed off that the enemy units are trampling his vegetables, calls a soldier “bozo” and you recruit him. He is exactly the kind of character you’d challenge yourself to bring to 20/20 and kill the final boss with for the memes. But in a normal playthrough, his greatest contribution to your team is that he gives you a killer axe.

In his core, Dale does want to be a Frani or a Begoña. His speed, while not great, is technically passable, after all. However, he is simply not invested into this role enough while facing the exact same issues which “standard” axe fighters like Hyle face - incredibly bad hit rates, speed that does not entirely perform against anyone but armors (and you have plenty of options against those in the lategame), and an overinvestment in HP and Str. Ultimately, he is not going to feel that much different from the other axe units, while also being… not that good, simply put. He’s not exactly the worst unit in DLATMOL, but have fun with 30 hit rates in the lategame if you decide to give him a shot.

(Just to address, DLATMOL does have a more unique fem brigand later on, Dakini, and she is indeed pretty neat and fits into the speedy brigand role, but I’ve not really used her so I can’t really make anything but cursory comments about her. She does however play very differently from Hyle and Dale with her bonkers speed yet lackluster str, and I’d say she is a brigand well done.)

When it comes to romhack brigands who feel too much like fighters, Dale is in good company with Martel from Order of the Crimson Arm.

Martel is the definition of the “bad romhack brigand”. He is the first enemy recruitable unit in the game, all the way back in chapter 1, and is actually your only axe user for a few chapters, until you get Gerwulf and Sven, both of whom immediately send him down to the bench to never return. He plays that short stretch of axe user monopoly extremely straight - despite the brigand class, he feels like your run of the mill axe fighter. He isn’t the slowest thing in the world, sure, but enemies in OCA are by no means slow and he simply cannot overcome enemy speed as early as ch4. His key investments are in HP and Str, again, just like Dale, and just like almost every axe fighter in vanilla. So, ultimately, what you get is a mono-axe fighter on foot who hits with high HP and strength, cannot double anyone but soldiers, and has accuracy issues. He is a fighter, and a bad fighter in addition to that.

And unlike Dale, he isn’t even funny.

What I have detailed in these two sections should not be interpreted as me trying to say that a romhack brigand can only be done well if they are a good and optimal unit. This by no means has to be the case, and while Begoña and Frani are undoubtedly more competent than Dale and Martel, they too both ultimately fall off and generally head to the bench unless you are sincerely attached to them. They do, however, have to be distinct.

Romhack brigands have the unfortunate case, but also opportunity, of not being as intrinsically defined by their vanilla counterparts as many other classes. Love it or hate it, the design of most romhack classes is in one way or another shaped by their vanilla predecessors. Romhack myrmidons are generally speedy crit machines because we design them thinking of Rutger and Joshua. Romhack cavaliers often end up nerfed because we remember with worry how dominant paladins were in FE7 and FE8. Romhack brigands do not have such luxury. Sure, you have Gonzalez and Dart to look back to, but they are not as etched into the public consciousness as the other examples.

Thus, the duty of defining the role of the romhack brigand falls upon the romhacker themself. Are they the speedy equivalent of fighters, not as invested into strength but with a functional speed stat which actually allows them to double for much of the game? Are they axe myrmidons, crit machines who should always have a killer axe or equivalent at hand? Looking back to Fates and how they handled the Oni Savage/Chieftain, maybe they have a promotion which allows them to hit resistance while fighters and their promotions cannot? Perhaps an even funkier distinction is on the table? After all, who said that brigands can’t use staves?

But the worst answer to this question would be to simply make them axe fighters with, at best, slightly different distributions of stats but the same playstyle.

3

Before I move to the next section of this writeup, there is one small connecting thought that’s a bit out of left field which I have to bring up. There’s a bit more to class design than just the gameplay side of it. A Fire Emblem game is not just two bundles of stats and weapons duking it out against one another - it is a platform for a story to tell, and in standard Fire Emblem storytelling, brigands have a unique role they share with only a few classes, most notably monsters and maybe the final boss - they are not a morally neutral class.

This is something which distinguishes brigands from soldiers, who too are a traditionally enemy-only class which is often made playable in romhacks - despite their enemy-only status, a soldier is morally neutral. As such, a soldier can be anyone - a villain, a hero, or just someone following orders. Because of their sprite and animation, as well as the standard name (“soldier”), romhack soldiers do often gravitate towards current or former military people - say, Nikolaos from Hag in White or Mikey from The Morrow’s Golden Country - but they do not necessarily have to be. Similarly, fighters, the competitors to brigands for the role of the axe footman, are a morally neutral and even background neutral class, with the only distinction being that they are expected to be physically strong and thus belong to some sort of background which is responsible for their physical strength (but not necessarily! Hilda from Three Houses is anything but bulky, instead representing the common anime “girl with a big mallet” trope). Dorcas and Bartre are mercenaries. Vaike is a street urchin who fights alongside Chrom with no military or mercenary status, just as a vigilante. Natasha from TMGC is a Dalstian villager and woodswoman.

This is not the case with brigands, and this is something which immediately “distinguishes” a brigand class character even if they may not massively differ from axe fighters in how they work. Martel may not be much more than an axe fighter with somewhat average speed, but he does have a small little moment about being a brigand who is seeking redemption after meeting a cleric from the faith he worships and the Order of the Crimson Arm accept him into their ranks to allow him to facilitate his redemption. This is a different story from the axe fighter duo you receive ways later and that “Brigand” class name next to Martel’s name reminds you of that.

The brigand character is generally either recruited during or is otherwise closely associated with your hack’s bandit chapters, and chances are their presence on your team is going to be those chapters’ most notable lasting impact. This immediately brings a lot of questions. What is the reason why your characters are willing to have someone who is or used to be a bandit in their army, as opposed to putting them in jail? What is their relationship with banditry, and is this a matter of redemption or pragmatism? But to fully delve into all of that, we have to investigate the anatomy of the Bandit Chapter.

4

That’s right, I tricked you! This longpost may have started as a brigand class analysis, but it was actually a blog on bandit chapter storytelling! Frankly, there was not that much I was going to be able to say on brigand class design aside from the obvious point of “don’t make them just fighters with slightly better speed stats”, and this is a much more interesting topic for me to write about.

The bandit chapter(s) is one of the most seemingly non-negotiable elements of romhack stories, and there are reasons for it besides just emulating vanilla games (which, yes, is a major part of it). The progression and growth of your protagonist or protagonist group is the main element of any Fire Emblem story (or any JRPG in general) and bandit groups are a very simple and obvious starting enemy to throw at them. We generally expect brigands to be less competent in battle than trained soldiers, hence it is reasonable to assume that our fresh and not that experienced lord would be able to defeat them. You also do not need to establish as much of your plot or setting if you want your characters to be motivated to fight them. If you wanted the enemies of the first chapter of the game to be, say, soldiers of the enemy empire, you are going to have to establish why exactly this empire is the enemy of the protagonists, why our protagonists are currently fighting them, what the context for this battle in question is, so on and so forth. Not that this cannot be done (Radiant Dawn does this), but it will make the start of your hack more complicated and a bit more exposition heavy than usual. Bandits, on the other hand, do not require this exposition. You still need to establish who your characters are and why they are in an area infested by bandits, but as soon as the bandits show up, you can cut to the first Player Phase pretty much immediately. Just have them ramble something about pillaging and burning villages and you’re set!

But when it comes to actually writing a plot, bandit chapters can and often are a slog. That’s the catch.

I’m going to picture this by talking about The Dark Amulet. (Minor spoilers for Dark Amulet here.) DA has a really long “bandit chapter” arc centered around the fight with the bandits of Braggo. Though it is interspersed somewhat with the two-chapter campaign against Ormer and Chapter 5 being an assassination plot, ultimately they all fall into the same umbrella of “Edric and his mercenaries are at Forness’s employ doing tasks for him”, which concludes with the final fight with Braggo in chapter 7:

And my god it dragged for me. Technically, the fight with Braggo does play a notable part in the plot as that is where Edric and his team first witness monsters and which later ties into the plot with the namesake Dark Amulet, but functionally, the story only really begins with the three-parter of 8, 9 and 10 which concludes in the gang fleeing Forness’s territories. The chapters preceding it feel more like busywork, they establish some plot elements for later on but otherwise are simply dragging their feet before the shoe can finally drop. Couple this with DA’s tendency to really swarm you with reinforcements every chapter, and you can be forgiven for losing some patience with whatever the plot is withholding from you.

(DA spoilers over, you can keep on reading.)

There is an unofficial rule that’s especially prolific among anime fans who have to browse through a massive repertoire of new shows (but it’s also taken off for fans of other media), the so-called “three episode rule”. It is said that one should give a new anime they’re watching three episodes to hook them in before they drop it and go for a new one. Now, a romhack is not an anime, and there’s no reason to follow said rule to the letter - but there is a kernel of advice to take from it.

Ideally, by the end of the first 3-5 chapters of your hack, the player should have, at minimum, a sense of where your story is going and what it is bringing to the table. You do not have to lay your plot out in front of them during that time, obviously not. However, there should be something that hooks them - it is basic storytelling.

Bandit chapters kind of run opposite to this principle, as they are intentional time-wasters designed to inject easy XP into your lord and starting units until they are ready to meet the soldiers of the evil empire or cult or what-have-you they’ll be fighting. And this is why a lot of bandit chapter arcs feel like busywork. Because they, in a certain sense, are.

A common solution to this issue is a prologue which sets up a hook for the story and lets the player know from the beginning what they might expect from the story. A lot of hacks built on FE8 also emulate FE8’s story hook in some form - the protagonist, an heir or noble of some house, flees a besieged castle, and we either get a chapter depicting their escape or a prologue with the doomed king and his retainers fighting the forces of the big bad. However, a prologue is not an excuse to skimp out on the subsequent bandit chapters. You cannot start with an action climax and then move into low-stakes bandit fighting, you will need to keep the storyline you established in the prologue going throughout. And if you do not have an action prologue, this matters to you even more.

You are going to have to weave your bandit chapters into the overarching story, one way or another. You will have to make those bandit chapters actually say something and be connected to the rest of the plot.

So let’s run through the questions you should ask yourself and hopefully have answers for as you write your own bandit arc. First of all - what is banditry?

Wait… that’s the question? I mean… everyone knows what banditry is, right? Big ugly guys, usually wielding axes, come to town and start taking everything that’s not nailed down. right?

Well, let’s look at it this way. As the player, you are given plenty of opportunities to “take everything that’s not nailed down” yourself, right? You generally have thieves who can steal everything which the enemies have, most of which they presumably legitimately own. You receive “droppable items”, which is just a fancy gameplay term for looting the dead. The distinction is, presumably, that you are leading a force of good that is defending themselves and only taking what’s necessary rather than looting civilians. But then, remove a few of these inhibitions, turn yourself a bit uglier, and you almost have a brigand that thinks they aren’t one.

The age old question - should your bandits be sympathetic? - is the one writers seem to most often consider when setting out to characterize their bandits, and I’ve seen both sides often. I’ve seen hacks which go out of their way to explain what has driven these poor individuals to crime, and I have seen hacks where the earlygame brigands attempt to rape a girl. (Maybe don’t do that last one in your hack.) Hell, Curse of Lagdou even went so far as to give some sympathy to the generic Borgo Bandits of FE8 through optional conversations between Frani, Bone and Bazba. Frankly, I’ve no preference in this regard and either interpretation of your bandits can work. You should not go overboard with sympathy, as ultimately you will still want your player character and their friends to swing their sword through them and not feel too bad about it (not that you cannot do that… if you’re willing to build your story around said regret)

But sympathy or lack thereof is not the only way to more thoroughly define your bandits. What form does banditry take? The most generic answer which both vanilla and romhacks take is a bandit gang with one or a few leaders (who indubitably end up as chapter bosses) which is established somewhere remote or at least somewhere where they are not immediately threatened by the law. This is far from the only way that banditry can manifest, though. From a more fantastical side, fantasy and pseudo-medieval stories enjoy the concept of criminal organization on a regional or even nationwide scale, such as in the form of a “thieves’ guild”. The closest real life equivalent to these would be the mafia and other criminal organizations, which nowadays operate on international scales, although of course they are also far removed from simple robbery and marauding. From a more real world side, banditry of “mere malefactors” has always been only one side of the coin of extrajudicial violence. The term “brigand” itself comes from mutinous or deserting troops who take to banditry - and as long as armies and soldiers existed, you have had armies and soldiers using their power to extort and rob civilians.

And this is not just a medieval thing, either.

Sort of in between the “wartime looting” and “standard banditry” concepts, you have mercenaries. First of all, mercenaries (like free companies or routiers) in the Middle Ages didn’t generally just sit on their asses waiting for contracts to come to their camps. More often than not, mercenary work and banditry work were fulfilled by the same people, just that the former was their “job” and latter was “between jobs”. Second of all, mercenary work was banditry work. Bandits were hired as mercenaries to “do their banditry” on the territories and supply lines of the opposing realm, and by extension were feared as much or more than bandits themselves. This is important for you if you are writing a FE story that already starts in the middle of the war. The bandits you face in the first and second chapters are, in a sense, a military force of their own, and in a medieval war, neither side is going to ignore a military force which could be bought to do work for them. Your brigands may still be brigands, but they can be under the enemy nation’s employ, or contracted by a third party to do X things or Y things. (Vanilla games and romhacks alike do do this; I still wanted to highlight it)

These ideas and more are able to put additional color into your bandit enemies. A bandit gang of its own is not particularly exciting, but a bandit gang which is made up of deserters from the heroes’ country which has been employed by the villains’ empire to pillage their own lands? That immediately brings out potential for interactions between the bandit bosses and the main lord. What about a bandit gang which is a section of a nationwide organization of thieves and robbers, which is maybe controlled by the main villain from the shadows? That could be interesting, if you can pull it off.

Finally, the biggest question, perhaps the most important way you can tie your bandit chapter to the plot - what is your bandit chapter an indictment of?

What do I mean by “indictment”? Despite the populations of most fantasy-medieval settings being 75% bandits, banditry is not a normal state of society. Rather, it emerges from a failure of society to maintain order. If you are a little bit read into, say, political theory, you may be aware of the theory of the social contract - the idea that a state exists because of a contract between it and its citizens, where in exchange for their loyalty and duties it provides security to the people from the hostile world. Banditry is one of the manifestations of this hostile world, and its appearance indicates a failure of the social contract, which is big. It means something isn’t working in your setting country, and something not working in the main characters’ country immediately leads to story hooks.

As such, writing a bandit chapter, you should ask yourself - who exactly is to blame for this failure of the state? Who is responsible - and what does that mean for the story at large?

• A common answer in vanilla Fire Emblem stories is that banditry is an indictment of war. Hell, if the story starts with the game’s primary war already ongoing, this is almost universally going to be the answer it takes. Think back to the bandits of FE6 and FE8, who emerge because of a power vacuum caused by Bern’s invasion of Lycia/Grado’s invasion of Renais. FE8 spends quite a bit of time explaining how the invasion of Renais is causing banditry because the Grado army is forbidden from pursuing bandits and is instead on a hunt for the Sacred Stones. This clues you in to several things about the plot - that something is off about Vigarde, that Grado is not conquering Renais for actual conquest reasons and they need the Stones for some unclear reason - while also giving Eirika some early characterization in how she reacts to her country’s plight. This also has a foundation in reality, quite a lot of which I’ve already described earlier. An invasion of a country and the occupation of a territory previously controlled and kept stable by its institutions creates a power vacuum, as the invader is not yet able to create alternative institutions, hence there is no one keeping hostile elements in check.

  • But where have those new, hostile elements come from?

  • They may be preexisting bandit groups which took advantage of the power vacuum. If so, were they doing anything previously? If your player army has soldiers or knights, do they have any history with said bandits? Perhaps the lord(s) themselves was responsible for them being kept at bay - if so, how do they react to them reemerging? Are they beating themselves up for the war causing such a plight for the people? Angry at the bandits for being unpatriotic and taking advantage of the situation? Excited at the prospect of beating them, for one reason or another?

  • They may be former civilians who were forced into banditry to survive. This is reasonably common in hacks - Dark Amulet and Curse of Lagdou both do this. What specifically has driven them to choose banditry - a dangerous job where many are expected to die? If they have some kind of moral code from their civilian lives, how does this manifest in story or gameplay? Does your lord see this as tragic and a motivation to end this war, or do they see this as treason? Perhaps there is even a chance to achieve a peaceful resolution to get them to return to their homes?

  • They may be enemy deserters, mercenaries, or in some other way hired by the enemy to do their dirty work. If so, what is the relationship between the bandits and the main villains? How much, if anything, do the bandits know about any true goals of the invasion, if it is just a smokescreen for their real goals? Do the villains think highly of the bandits, and in turn, do the bandits see them positively or negatively? Is it only getting paid and loot that motivates them, or do they have greater ambitions? How do more regular soldiers and generals of the villain side see these hired bandits?

  • And what do your main characters think of them?

  • Chances are, your lord, whether or not they are a noble of the country or a mercenary type (or even some less treaded choice, it doesn’t matter), knows that the country did not use to be this way, and they are also most likely aware that it is the war which is causing the rise of banditry. Their reaction to the events of the bandit chapters is important, as it allows you to set up early what your main character thinks of the major conflict of the story. If you intend them to be more pacifistic, an Eirika or Corrin type, then this could tug at their pacifism and convince them to finish the war as soon as possible or simply get them to take up the sword. (But do the rest of your characters necessarily have to agree with them?) If you intend them to be more brash and decisive, then this is a good opportunity to show off how they might fall to righteous anger or perhaps act more pragmatic and rush their army to ignore bandits until it becomes too vast of an issue to ignore.

• When the setting of the game does not start with a war already ongoing, another option is that banditry is an indictment of the failure of the existing state. This is a topic much less explored in vanilla Fire Emblem games, as while there are game settings which do not have the game start with a war, they also do not take this as an opportunity to explore peacetime banditry any deeper. (FE9 is an example of this.) The level of banditry we see in Fire Emblem games requires no less than a complete failure of the state to provide protection to its settlements and citizens - and that is something that can happen! In fact, medieval states were rife with banditry of all forms precisely because their institutions were too weak to enforce law beyond the limits of castles and strongholds. Still, it was generally limited to scales smaller than that of FE, be it highway robbery or protection rackets. The pillaging of settlements required a loss of control, and that required some sort of failure on the state’s part. And that is something which both main characters and other actors can have opinions on.

  • What does this tell about the state in question?

  • It is not uncommon for romhack stories to have their protagonist exist in some kind of “bandit-hunter” role at the start of the game. Off the top of my head, examples would be Hag in White, The Dark Amulet, The Drowned King and so on. In fact, many stories where the lord and main characters are mercenaries do so, as it is a very easy and simple way to throw your characters into starting bandits - they’re here because it’s their job, they fight them because it’s their job. In that sense, they are enforcers of the law who are trying to amend this weakness of the state. But on whose orders? Are they some kind of official authority pursuing criminal groups, or have they been hired to do the dirty work? Who hired them? The ruler of the country, some lord whose region is facing trouble, or maybe even a merchant or independent citizen concerned about the situation? If your characters are mercenaries hired to fight bandits, then did the ruler of the country do this because they’re lacking troops (why?), or because they’re not interested in policing the country (why?), or maybe because they aren’t able to use their own troops (why?), or for some other reason? What is the player characters’ perspective on this? Are they enthusiastic that they’re able to profit off a country being in disarray and infested with banditry (and does this motivate them to act in a specific way?), or are they disappointed with the country being overrun by bandits? If they are disappointed with it, how does this paint their opinion of the realm at large? If they are from this realm, does this shatter their patriotism - or, alternatively, makes them more patriotic and determined to make their country more stable?

  • Chances are, despite the rife banditry, the country where this is taking place still has an official government, whether it be a king, a parliament, or a tyrannical emperor. What is their position towards banditry, and how does it tie into the rest of the plot? If the chapter hints that the king is aloof, hedonistic and surrounded by corrupt nobles and thus provides no help to his villages, then this can pay off in a more plot impactful way through the main villains abusing this weakness, or the king and nobility becoming antagonists themselves. If the chapters hint that the bandits were originally some kind of rebellion against the state which devolved into banditry, then it’d be remiss to not show exactly what might have caused this rebellion and their cause then become a major antagonistic force. So on and so forth.

  • If there is truly something rotten about the state which makes it unstable and rife with banditry, what can be done to “fix it”? The victory at the end of your hack could feel hollow if the players feel that not much will actually change for the people you were supposed to be fighting for. If the king is corrupt, then are they replaced by the end of the story? If yes, by who, and what makes the new ruler more competent than the last one? What else is reformed? If your bandits are reasonably sympathetic and came from, say, dispossessed farms and mines, then are their workplaces returned to them, or was something else done to provide them labor and places to live? How invested is your main character in “fixing” the country? Is it a matter of principle to them, or does it simply happen around them? Do the encounters with bandits give them ideas for what must be done, or is it a later development?

• Finally, several vanilla Fire Emblem games take the option that banditry is an indictment of foreign meddling. Think back to the prologue chapter of Awakening, where the Shepherds and a newly awakened Robin face off bandits which are sent across the border by Plegia. The difference between wartime looting here is that the two states, generally one where the main character and their team is located, and another which is hostile to it, are at a peace or some kind of standstill, and the latter attacks the former by hiring or sending bandits across the border. In that instance, they are more similar to privateers - pirates who were bought by naval powers in order to attack the trading ships of their opponents - or medieval free companies which were hired to attack the supply lines of enemy countries. In this case, your bandits are essentially the first stage of war, before it is officially declared (and usually in these kinds of stories, war follows soon after the confrontations with the bandits are concluded).

  • The question which arises in this case is why do the two states fight each other through sending bandits and raids instead of having already gone to war?

  • The options are numerous even among the vanilla stories. In Awakening, Plegia is still rebuilding itself after Ylisse’s last exalt inflicted a genocide on the Plegians. In Fates, Hoshido has a magic barrier that makes any Nohrian soldier immediately give up their will to fight if they cross it. Both instances require the villainous faction to rely on subterfuge and raids, although it does not involve bandits specifically in the case of Fates. A simple explanation is some kind of peace treaty which forces the enemy side to resort to these means - but why do they not break this treaty? Do they not consider themselves prepared yet for war, for whatever reason? Is there a third power which both sides fear or respect which is enforcing peace between the two nations? The same questions can apply also to stories where there isn’t an explicit peace treaty which keeps the nations in question at peace at the start of the story.

  • Does the foreign power take advantage of some real issues which plague their opponent? There are plenty of real life examples of foreign powers stoking unrest and violence within their political opponents, but more often than not, these initiatives only find success if they latch onto real problems which the target country faces. If you want to stoke a revolt within the enemy country, it’ll be more likely to work if there are people or a part of them who have genuine grievances with the state and could be convinced to take up arms. If you want to send raids into the enemy countryside, it’ll work best if the enemy country’s defenses are actually weak or their countryside is poorly managed. This can be an easy way to inject some complexity into the politics of your setting - you can set up the bandits in your starting chapters as being, say, bought by the evil empire to pillage villages and hunt down nobles, but those bandits come from dispossessed local peasants and workers who are desperate enough to accept this “job offer”. Instead of being just a generic bandit chapter you clear without much thought, it now offers an opportunity for your lord to reflect on the country they live in.

  • Of course, this does not necessarily have to be the case. Your bandits can be complete foreign transplants or raiders who crossed from their territory - which brings a new slew of questions to consider. If this is a regular occurrence, why is this not considered a cause of war? If this is something new, then is this an official strategy of the enemy country or was it concocted by someone within their government specifically, who perhaps desires war or organizes raids for other means? Are the bandits actual enemy soldiers, just out of dress (such as what happens in some Act 1 chapters in Three Houses), or are they bandits hired to do the enemy country’s dirty work?

This was a really lengthy section, but ultimately, the conclusion from it is simple and perhaps even a little obvious - do not treat your bandit chapters as somehow “separate” from the rest of the plot. Tie them into what the plot of the story will be for at least the majority of its runtime in one way or another. The player must feel like there is a natural progression from the bandit chapters to the “main plot”. And use them as an opportunity to flesh out the setting and specifically the country the chapters are set in - chances are, the bandit chapters will be the most peaceful and “usual” that your player characters’ country will ever be. It’s only going to pick up from here - no matter what you had planned, anything from an invasion by the evil empire to the dark cult blowing up the capital to extra-dimensional aliens invading your setting, you will find it harder and harder to allocate time for these kinds of things, as everyone’s attention will simply be taken up by the main plot. Through these scant few chapters before the plot truly kicks into gear, you can establish who is in charge in the country and are they doing a good job, what’s their relationship with foreign hostile powers, and what your main characters think of it all and how their opinions differ.

I would also want to do a small aside to address bandit recruitment, comfortably also directing us back to where this post began - with playable brigands. Even though, of course, you don’t get to only recruit brigands from bandit groups - standard fighters, mercenaries, myrmidons, even the odd mage with a portrait may show up alongside the ugly toothless bandit boss and then be converted to your side with a single Talk command. But what does bandit recruitment say about your main characters? Consider it this way - even if the units you recruited from a bandit gang may be more moral than the bosses they serve under, they still come from an explicit criminal background, they may even have a bounty on their heads, which is never a good thing for any military organization, as that means one of the soldiers under your wing is a walking target. Why do they choose to bring said person on their side, instead of killing them or putting them in jail?

Hacks answer this question in many different ways, and each possible answer frames your lord and retainers in different ways. The most vanilla approach is a strong belief in redemption, perhaps combined with naivety from the main characters’ side (consider the Lilina-Gonzalez recruitment in FE6 as an example). This is the most fitting for more explicitly good vs. evil stories and settings, which most vanilla games are, and so it works fine for them. On the completely opposite side, you have the hacks which toy with the idea that their main characters are, if not immoral, then at least more willing to pragmatically let bygones be bygones. The recruitment of Sven in Order of the Crimson Arm is an example here, in which Algimas simply accepts Sven having a bounty on his head and tells him to wait for them outside if they visit any towns. And, of course, if your main character is an outright villain, surrounded by an entourage of similarly evil minions, then bandits can sign up for their team without even needing to give up their ways - see Dark Stone for an example. Finally, it can simply be an act of desperation, which is how Kyra ends up teaming up with her lifelong bandit rivals in Hag in White, as both of them end up targeted by the Inquisition and are forced to work together. This will of course require a more specific plot structure for your hack in order to make the desperate situation actually desperate enough to rely on criminals.

In that sense, bandit recruitment is simply an extension of the characterization/worldbuilding task which the bandit chapters should work on. And as this writeup has gotten as long as… four other writeups in this thread added together, I’ll call it quits here. Have fun writing, and have fun making interesting hackrom brigands!