Thieves: Rags and Riches
The thief is one of the more iconic classes in role playing games, let alone Fire Emblem as a whole, appearing in every game in the series with the exception of Gaiden and Shadows of Valentia, including the Kaga Saga games. With a set of skills focused on picking locks and stealing items, the class boasts good speed and usually some kind of slight mobility advantage compared to its fellow infantry classes, at the cost of poor defensive parameters and mediocre offenses. Because of this, thieves are often relegated to supportive roles among the player’s team, providing them with easier or unique access to certain items, opening doors, and other perks that vary from game to game.
Thieves usually wield swords, thought they’ve also been represented as bow or dagger users, and some of their promotion paths include assassins, rogues, tricksters, adventurers, and bow knights, but they’ve also been represented fairly often as a unique class, incapable of reclassing or promoting.
With this in mind, it’s no surprise that thieves are one of, if not the single most variable class in the whole series, having vastly different design philosophies throughout most of their incarnations. Do you limit them to opening locks? Do you give them extra utility via extra Fog of War vision, easier item/gold management or even a pseudo-provoke effect? How about giving them some combat niches? Or maybe even make them actual great combat units?
In this post, I will attempt to showcase how mainline Fire Emblem, Kaga Saga and some romhacks provide us the many different ways to make thieves useful, good, interesting and, most importantly, fun, as well as the times were it didn’t go so well for the class.
The (Literal) Key to Victory
As stated before, one of the most iconic traits of the thief class is being able to open locks, including doors, chests and sometimes even bridges. So, an easy solution to make thieves more useful would be to make this utility more valuable, and in my opinion a game that really succeeds at this is Blazing Blade in its earlier maps.
You’re given Matthew, your first thief. As you can see, he has fairly normal thief stats, but what really matters for him is the utility he has in the first about 10 chapters in the game, being able to obtain a red gem and open doors in Ch 11H, a mend staff and a silver axe in Ch 15H, and having extra fog of war vision in Ch 13X. However, one map where his utility really shines is Ch 17H.
This map has 4 treasure chests and a number of other side objectives (such as recruiting Raven and Lucius, saving the green soldiers and protecting Merlinus if you take too long). They contain very useful items, such as the promotion items hero crest and knight crest, a silver sword and an unlock staff.
The chests are distributed such as there’s 2 chests on the bottom left room, and 2 more on the top room, and Matthew can get you these chests, however, you’d notice that Matthew would have to walk a very long trek in order to get to the top room from the bottom one. This can be solved by rescue chaining him with the several mounts the player has at their disposal by this point in the game, vastly speeding up the process of getting these items, and forcing the player to engage with the game’s mechanics in a meaningful way.
Other relevant contributions he has include stealing the elysian whip and the guiding ring in Ch 18 HHM, fog of war visibility in Ch 19H and stealing the silver card in Ch 19X HHM, though on the topic of these stealables, it’s important to level up Matthew so he can grow his speed stat, as thieves can only steal items from enemies with equal or lower speed stat. The bosses Zoldam and Aion can roll between 11 to 12 speed, and 13 to 14 speed respectively, so it’s something you have to keep in mind if you’re aiming to get these items.
Matthew can also help opening more chests in Ch 20H, which include a brave bow, a blue gem and a Luna tome, though he’s not gonna be alone in this task, and that’s because…
This map introduces Legault, your second thief. You’d notice his stats are actually quite a bit better than Matthew’s in pretty much every way possible, so his upside is that he’s a much better combat unit than Matthew, allowing him to have decent combat contributions in Ch 21H, 22H and 23H. However, Legault does have a notable downside compared to Matthew.
You’d notice that when I started this segment on FE7, I specifically mentioned the early game maps. In the mid and late game, thief utility is just not as valuable. Don’t get me wrong, Legault is far from useless, he can still open chests, steal items and scout during fog of war maps, but by this point, the player has access to keys which can be bought, the aforementioned unlock staff, and stealables are not as worth obtaining with a few exceptions (like the hero crest in Ch 21H, the white gem in Ch 23H, and maybe the heaven seal in Ch 28 HHM?). And while Legault has better combat stats than Matthew, he’s still far from a combat god compared to units like Marcus, a trained Heath, or Pent.
And speaking of good combat units…
The final thief unit to join FE7’s roster is the assassin Jaffar. He has even less thief contributions than Legault, with the only notable one being opening doors on Endgame, due to his later join time and because assassins lose the ability to steal (not that there’s any notable stealing items by this point in the game). However, where Jaffar really shines is in his combat capabilities. Despite his lack of 2 range besides the magic swords and being somewhat fragile, he sports very respectable offenses, which you can see on the screenshot above, and A rank swords.
Assassins in FE7 are also capable of performing the Silencer skill, which instantly kills the enemy upon activation (and also slightly boosts the gained exp) at a crit chance/2 rate. While this sounds really good, in practice all it does is make kills for Jaffar slightly more reliable, which is still pretty nice to be completely fair.
But let’s say you really like assassins or Matthew/Legault. You can promote them to assassins, and that sounds really cool, but the promotion to assassin comes with several drawbacks.
Those promotion gains are appalling, even by FE7 standards, and these stats aren’t even close to Jaffar’s bases. And on top of that you get this promotion item incredibly late, by killing Sonia in Ch 28XH, and if you missed this chapter or if you wanna promote both thieves, then the next instance where you can obtain it is in the secret shop of Ch 31. It’s also very expensive, so you might even wanna sell for an easy 25K gold. So overall it’s just not worth it to promote the thieves, just stick with Jaffar for the better stats and if you like the assassin class.
So overall FE7 has an interesting philosophy on thieves, where their actual utility is more prevalent early on, and as the game demands less and less thief utility, the ones that join have better stats to make up for it. Overall, there’s a lot to learn from Blazing Blade, both good and bad, in how it handles thieves. It paints thieves in a mostly positive light, but there’s definitely room for improvement.
However, let me picture the following scenario. Let’s say Matthew dies very early into the run, so you can’t obtain items like the previously mentioned early promotion items or the silver card. While a notable loss, a player can still keep playing, overcome these downsides and beat the game just fine. What I’m saying is that these items aren’t mandatory to get, but what if the item or objective to reach is too important? What if the player doesn’t have a way to access this objective without thieves, keys or movement tools? Would this player run into a softlock?
Enter Mystery of the Emblem: Book 2 and its remake, New Mystery. A core aspect of the early-midgame of these stories is the hunt for the Star Shards in order to create the Starsphere and complete the Binding Shield.
A few of these shards, namely Libra, Capricorn and (exclusive to FE3B2 due to a rework in FE12) Pisces, are locked behind chests. Now, even if we ignore the story behind these items, you definitely want to get them, as they boost the growth rates or parameters of certain stats depending on the game. But missing out on just one of these means that you cannot create the Starsphere, which means you cannot complete the Binding Shield, which means you cannot access the good ending.
“But Renoud! This isn’t a softlock! You just can’t reach the good ending! And besides, both Book 2 and FE12 provide you with a surefire way to open those chests!!!” You’re right, so how about we take a look to a more extreme scenario where an actual softlock can realistically happen to a player?
Take Thracia 776’s Endgame, a personal favorite map of mine. To win, you have to defeat all 6 Deadlords and stand on the seals they are protecting, which will open the way to Veld’s chamber. You then defeat him and claim the throne with Leif. It’s a very interesting and complex map with a critical flaw that can definitely hit a blind player: The seals are locked behind doors, and if you lose your thieves or lack any way to get through these doors, then the player is softlocked. It’s not uncommon for veteran players to recommend people getting started with Thracia 776 to invest on their thieves or to buy door keys, just to prevent situations like these. But Endgame isn’t the only reason as to why Thracia’s thieves have a fairly good reputation.
You see, FE5’s early game has an iconic set of chapters coined by the fanbase as the “Manster Arc” (or Munster Arc if you care about accurate localized names). This arc is made up by chapters 4, 4X, 5, 6 and 7, and in all of these, the utility provided by your thieves, Lifis and Lara, is extremely valuable.
These are Lifis and Lara. They have fairly standard thief-like stats, though Lara’s more extreme strength and defense weaknesses definitely stand out. These units can perform the classic thief role of opening doors and chests, and that enough is very helpful for this segment of the game, though they also have some unique aspects thanks to Thracia’s engine and mechanics.
FE5 is the game that introduced stealing items from enemies, and it works slightly different compared to the later titles in the series. Here, units can steal weapons provided that they have lower weight to the thief’s constitution. This allows Lifis to disarm enemy mages by stealing their fire and thunder tomes in a much safer way than trying to capture them, as well as nab a few heal staves, besides only stealing regular items. Lara on the other hand, if she’s unequipped, can serve as capture bait for the enemies, making them way weaker as a result, just be careful to not leave anything of value on her inventory. Though this isn’t unique to her, she’s the most frequently used unit for this role due to her pitiful offenses.
As you can see, FE5’s early thieves shine thanks to how the early game is structured, much like Matthew, and they also have some unique strengths on their own. Thracia 776 teaches you that making stealing more powerful and also giving them some additional utility roles can really benefit thieves to make them more interesting. And on the topic of additional roles…
FE5’s Ch 12X marks an important event for the thieves. In this chapter, Lara promotes to dancer, giving her a new, way more important role to fulfill. You also get a few more units, including Tina, a cleric capable of using the staves unlock and thief, expanding the player’s ways of obtaining new items and opening locks, and the third and last thief in the roster:
Here’s Perne. He has noticeably better stats than the other two thieves and the skills vantage and sol. Perne outclasses them as far as thieves goes, though, like Legault and Jaffar, loses out on the earlier maps where thief utility is more prevalent. By this point in FE5, staves have already started to take center stage and the main way to fulfill objectives. Still, his circumstances are far less extreme than the previously mentioned FE7 thieves, there’s still maps where opening locks and stealing is important, like Ch 18, 21x and, of course, Endgame.
Thracia 776 stands as high point in the class’s history, with many important contributors and roles they can fulfill. Still, there’s the elephant in the room that’s the potential softlock in Endgame. How do you avoid scenarios like these? A few games handle this by giving the main character themself thief utility.
Recall the “surefire way” to obtain the chests in the Archanea games. Starting from Ch 3 onwards, Marth is able to open every chest in the game with the help of the Fire Emblem, allowing the player to obtain the important chests I mentioned previously.
These other two handsome gentlemen are Holmes and Zade, the main characters of TearRing Saga and Vestaria Saga 2 respectively. In TRS, there’s multiple maps where opening chests is the win condition, such as the infamous Ch 16, where you’ll need every thief that you have access to. TRS also features an Endgame that’s very similar to FE5’s though noticeably harder to softlock thanks to Holmes’ utility and a playable unit joining on turn 4 with a door key. VS2 also features important doors to open such as the ones in Ch 24 which block levers you have to trigger in order to complete the map.
These games show you that giving mandatory units this utility allows the player to complete different side objectives without worrying of losing a thief or not having enough keys, and it also allows YOU, the hack creator, to get away with more gimmicky and creative maps and side objectives.
But that’s enough about the utility aspect of thieves. What if you get inspired by the way Jaffar is designed? A thief-like unit with strong offenses is pretty cool after all, so how about we take a look at some more combat focused thieves?
Move Like a Thief, Sting like a Ninja
The ninja in Fates have a plethora of strong tools at their disposal, in the forms of forging, great skills in their classline, and stat stacking via tonics, dishes and pair ups. Due to daggers and shurikens being 1-2 range weapons and the aforementioned tools, the ninjas can turn massive enemy formations into dust during enemy phase. The class promotes to master ninja or mechanist, both strong options with their own benefits, like master ninja having higher speed and access to Shurikenfaire, and mechanist having higher movement, bows and Replicate.
Birthright is the most susceptible game of the trilogy to this kind of strategy due to its lower enemy quality and multiple rout maps. Not counting reclasses or child units, you get three ninjas here, in Kaze, Saizo and Kagero, with all three being very good and having some minor upsides on certain stats, like Kaze having higher speed, Saizo having higher skill and defense, and Kagero having higher strength.
Revelations takes a bit more time to setup due to the ninjas joining a bit later and having kind of average stats by their join time, though it’s definitely not imposible and can pay off.
Conquest on the other hand demands higher stat benchmarks than the previously mentioned routes, features some particularly nasty enemy formations, and you’re more limited with the class, with your only immediate options for ninjas being Kaze and reclassing Laslow and Shura. Still, a properly built enemy phase unit can trivialize a lot of the annoying gimmicks this game can throw at you, and ninjas can be of great help against threatening magic users.
Of course, ninja isn’t the only thief-like class in Fates, as you also have the outlaw.
The Nohrian class trades daggers for bows, which means no 1-2 range for easy enemy phases, but instead effective damage vs fliers. Outlaws promote to adventurers, which have access to staves, and bow knight, which can wield swords and get higher movement.
Niles in Conquest has the reputation of being a very strong unit, with very high speed, solid damage output and uniquely being able to capture units, which is a very valuable asset in certain runs, as some of the generics and bosses in Conquest have very solid bases and/or posses some rare and useful skills.
Unfortunately, Niles wasn’t as lucky in Revelation, where he’s much weaker here. In contrast, the adventurer Shura is blessed with great bases for his join time, being able to fight very well right off the bat, in comparison to his fairly infamous Conquest incarnation or his filler performance in Birthright.
So overall Fates was pretty kind to the thieves in general, providing many examples of successful combat thieves, and I didn’t even mentioned how they even have great utility as pair up bots, providing speed and a coveted point of movement. Of course, Fates isn’t the only game with strong combat thieves, so let’s look at some more examples.
Here’s Drake, Vestaria Saga 2’s main thief unit. Though his stats look fairly subpar aside from his agility, dexterity and movement, his true strength lies within his multiple personal items and skills. He’s equipped with Sinagur, his 1-2 range, 7 mt, 75 hit, 56 uses, brigand and pirate effective, brave effect and guaranteed crit on enemy pase prf sword, and it’s as strong as it sounds. He also comes with the Crested Armlet, which gives him +3 defense, +5 resistance and the charisma skill, which improves the avoid of all allies by 10% on a 5 tile radius.
Speaking of skills, he has a lot. Besides the typical lockpick, he has multichance (which is basically adept), double march (basically Jugdral/Tellius canto) and parry (basically great shield), and as he levels up, he’ll learn skills that increase his crit rate and his avoid even further.
Drake is a powerhouse of a unit in VS2, showcasing that you don’t necessarily have to make a class good to make the unit good, you can just get away by giving them everything in the kitchen sink and they’ll turn out great. Though it’s undeniable that he’s a very extreme case from a game with a very extreme take in unit design, and there are more grounded takes on combat thieves that are great because they fill on specific combat niches.
And one of them is Radiant Dawn’s Sothe, where he fulfills the role of the Jagen in Part 1. He boasts very good bases, being able to solve a lot of the players needs early on, and though his weapon type of choice is on the lower end in terms of damage, he does possess some interesting upsides in 1-2 range and effective damage against laguz units. The Dawn Brigade is a bit lacking in terms of powerful units, so they’ll take anything that they can get, and Sothe is one of their most welcome contributors.
Of course, he does fall off as the game progresses, starting as a mainstay for the team, then taking more filler combat roles, and then becoming one of the weaker playable units. He’s not helped by the fact that his promotion not only comes very late, but it’s also very bad.
As you can see, there are many different ways to make thieves strong combat units, whether it is by making the class strong, giving said thieves unique tools, or having them partake in additional roles for the party. Of course, adding value to their utility or making them strong combat units aren’t the only ways to make them good, right?
Not Just a Thief
Of course not. The series has a few examples of thieves that also have unique traits that few or no other units have, so let’s dedicate a short section to a few examples.
In FE1 and FE3, Julian, Rickard and Marth have a shared quirk in that the enemy AI is more likely to target them on enemy phase, giving them some pseudo-provoke utility. You can use this at your advantage to move in more fragile units or to train them more easily if you so desire.
Maerchen is one of the more iconic units in TearRing Saga. Besides the thief abilities, the former pirate possesses the skill mug, which allows him to take every single item that the enemy is holding upon killing them. This is a very strong trait to have, allowing the player to obtain strong and unique equipment and to quickly amass large amounts of money, so the developers balanced this unit by giving mediocre bases, low movement, dreadful growth rates, and hidden effect in mug which lowers the hit and avoid of all allies withing 3 tiles by a whopping 50%.
Though some would argue that the negatives outweigh the possitives, there’s no denying that Maerchen is a very unique unit, and a skilled player can easily setup kills for him and make good use of his utility when the need arises.
Finally we have Tallan. He has extremely poor bases and growths, so he should never be seeing any combat, but he can help you with item management with his access to the convoy and by repairing whatever item is at the top of his inventory list, restoring one use per turn until turn 20.
The thief class has shown many flavors and versions throughout the series’ lifespan, some with very notable contributors like the ones we’ve analized before, and others that aren’t as lucky, such as the Path of Radiance thieves Volke and Sothe which have subpar combat at best due to wielding knives arguably the worst weapon type in the franchise, and the Engage thieves, Yunaka and Zelkov, which had a lot of their utility stripped down, while also struggling to reclass out of thief due to it being considered a special class.
Anyway, we’ve talked a lot about mainline Fire Emblem and the Kaga Saga games, so let’s finally analyze a few iconic thieves in romhacks.
The Four Kings presents us with Ava and Zachary, two of the five main characters of the story. Ava wields bows and is presented as a more magic focused unit, with a prf that hits on resistance, a decent 35% magic growth, as well as gaining C rank staves upon promotion. She’s a fairly standard thief unit that guarantees the player to always have someone with thief utility due to her status as a Lord.
Zachary on the other hand is a more complex unit. The man is not only considered a Lord, he’s also the Jagen, much like FE10’s Sothe, and his limited caps and growth rates really cement this. 10 base strength is solid in Ch 1, and he also has a 100% hit personal sword with an eclipse effect to set up kills for other units, but he’ll very quickly be outshined when it comes to raw combat. His bulk is also something important to take note, as he has 0 res with no way to permanently increase it, and Four Kings features some particularly nasty enemy siege tome users later on, so if the player wants to make effective use of Zach’s thieving skills, they will have to extra care of him.
In a roster full of diverse units, Zachary and Ava manage to stand out even as far as romhack thieves goes. If you wanna see a roster where everyone has something of value to offer, definitely check out The Four Kings.
Shackled Power features yet another protagonist with thief utility in Prosel, though his abilities are limited to opening doors and chests without keys. He has great strength, speed and luck growths, though his defense and resistance are below average. He’s also the only unit in the game with the shove skill, so he’s a mix of a glass canon with some utility under his belt.
The other, more regular thieves are Darrel, Orville and Kassandra, with the former joining earlier than the later. These characters seem fairly normal as far as thieves goes, but their catch is their access to a new weapon type: the bombs.
Bombs calculate damage with the user’s strength and the enemy’s resistance. They also have reliable hit rates, can attack from range, and usually come with an additional effect, like SC-Cracker having 1-2 range, the Stunner, which prevents enemy counterattacks, or the Attom Collider having additional crit rate. This new weapon type gives thieves an additional combat niche that few units can replicate, and it should be noted that Prosel can also uses these after promotion. If you’re interested in checking out a new weapon type and the impact it can have on a hack, then I highly recommend Shackled Power.
While the previous hacks featured protagonists with thief skills, they aren’t exactly about thieves or bandits or stealing stuff, unlike the ones up next.
A Vestrian Tale features Ezekiel, the leader of a band of thieves. It’s a 10 chapters long project that was heavily inspired by Thracia 776, featuring capture mechanics and stat caps of 20 across the board. Naturally, Ezekiel’s thief utility takes center stage here, allowing the player to obtain powerful items safely, such as the master seal in Ch 2, and he also has fairly solid combat contributions, thanks to his personal weapon, the Love Promise: A 1-2 range sword that hits res.
Next up we have Liberty’s Beacon, a hack that takes heavy cues from Conquest in its design. Asaph, a member of the Southern Dagger thieves, is the main character, and he’s built to be a mage killer unit, possessing high res and a personal weapon, the Sagaris, which is a 1-2 range axe that is effective against tomewielders. Unique to him compared to other thieves, he has the steal+ skill, which works exactly like stealing items in FE5, compared to the other thieves that have the regular steal skill. Like A Vestrian Tale, Liberty’s Beacon puts a heavy emphasis on stealing and thief utility.
Now we have one of the main characters of Eternal Winter: the scout Affogato. Eternal Winter is a game that really pushes the limits of what’s possible in the GBA engine, giving its units various unique gimmicks, and Affogato is no exception. Among his high arsenal of abilities, he can enter the Stealth status, which prevents enemies from targeting him on enemy phase and grants him pass. The Stealth command isn’t his only way of entering this status, as he can also do it by Vaulting on an ally (which is basically pivot from Fire Emblem Heroes and Engage), additionally granting him another turn, and when he’s not on Stealth, he can also canto 2 tiles after performing any action. It should also be noted that thieves gain another turn after opening locks, which can really benefit the action economy.
These three projects showcase what a hack with a heavy focus on thief utility can look like, and you should absolutely check them out if you’re interested. Liberty’s Beacon and Eternal Winter are still works in progress, but having been a playtester for both of them, I have high expectations on how they’ll develop in the future.
The final hack I’ll cover is Sun God’s Wrath, a project that takes elements and mechanics from many different games in the series, such as the legendary weapons and scrolls from Jugdral, and the 3 tier promotion system from Radiant Dawn. The curious thing about SGW is that it doesn’t really have any outright thief unit besides the ninja Fuuma, instead it gives thief skills to various members of the cast, with some of them only being able to use lockpicks (like Sakura and Jeff), one of them only being able to steal (like Oreades), and some of them capable of doing both (like Artemis, Janet, Nereid and the previously mentioned Fuuma). This hack shows you that you could just get rid of the thief class if you wanted to, just be sure to relegate the utility to other members of the cast if you plan on having a serious emphasis on locks and items, which Sun God’s Wrath definitely does.
CONCLUSION
The thief class has had many interpretations, some more successful than the others, but honestly chief just have fun with what you’re designing. You can make your thieves however you want, there is no right or wrong way to do it, just pay attention to the maps. Thieves are a core component of the average Fire Emblem experience, so if you’re adding or designing them in a particular way, then you gotta make sure the context of your maps, or even your game as a whole, fits them. That is way more important to keep in mind. Take it from me, after all, I did make a hack with no thieves but still had to include thief utility in some capacity.
Thank you for reading.