I disagree Battle Before Dawn isn’t fundamentally flawed like those other maps and when it works it’s great.
BBD just needs a few changes notably with Jaffar, he just needs a few more weapons and to be moved to right outside Zeph’s room.
Nino needs a few more points in luck to avoid crit from the monk,
Ursula with Bolting would be fine if you where told where she is this can be done by having fog happen on turn one, allowing preps to see the map, or by just using a system message and highlighting her position to tell the player, that’s it those three changes make BBD a great map if you like fog, you’ll still hate it if you dislike fog.
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Of course, Battle Before Dawn isn’t fundamentally flawed, you just have to fix its fundamental flaws and then it’s great. That’s how you know its fundamental aspects aren’t flawed.
In theory navigating moving platforms could be a fun challenge, and deciding which units attack snow and which units deal with enemies hiding inside it could be a fun challenge. In theory Dragon Veins lessen royal dominance by giving them something to do besides combat, giving other units a chance to shine, but in practice Dragon Veins don’t do that well enough.
Battle Before Dawn could work in theory, you just need to address the whole “Information is conveyed poorly and you might send the wrong units the wrong way to prioritize who seems to need help most” problem and the “RNG and bad AI can cause you to lose through no fault of your own, luck must roll your way or you lose before you have a chance to complete the map” problem.
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Do you know what the word “fundamentally” means?
When I say fundamentally flawed I mean in the map’s construction and content are broken on an inherent level, all of the content and design of BBD is good it just has, in comparison, a few smaller issues.
The snow map couldn’t work with a few changes, the enemy placement, chapter placement, and concept are all broken, the snow breaks in too small chunks, however if it broke any bigger it could reveal too may enemies, your army is way too small, and there is no clear path for you to take, as such the map encourages, slow, unfun play inherently, this can’t be fixed with a few small tweaks.
Same with sumaragi’s elevator, rev even has moving platform maps that work but the sumaragi elevator doesn’t work as it is the only way to move unlike the other maps that allow you to fly and use pair up to maneuver in other ways, while the elevator forces you to wait 3 turns when you take it and unlike the other levels doesn’t allow you to engage with the game’s other mechanics.
Rev’s stealth map is also broken as the FE formula just doesn’t jive well with stealth I feel like I don’t need to explain that one.
I’ll even throw in the conquest wind tribe map, with the wind it’s annoying unit placement micro managing, that sometimes you get completely screwed over by reinforcements, and inability to move units to a safe space, or hyper train fliers to 1 turn the map, if it lacked the wind it’d be choke city, none of these are fun or encourage creative strategy, this map is broken and shouldn’t exist.
Each of these levels would need a complete redesign unlike BBD which just needs a few small tweaks to function in good form as such they are fundamentally broken while BBD is not.
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I played FE7 on the wiiU in 2016ish. It was my 4th FE game after FE9, 10, and Awakening (13?)
I know a lot of people here (especially the old heads) have a lot of love respect and nostalgia for FE7 so it’s not a game I feel good about attacking.
But since you asked:
- A Soft majority of the map designs are shit
- A soft majority of the character bases, growths, and accessibility are shit
- The story begins really promising, and has several really really good beats, but has a severe case of wandering into the dumpster
- Even if the maps were good, class design is such that I don’t find even the basic gameplay enjoyable
- I don’t care for much of the cast personality wise (Eliwood and Lyn feel especially flat for me)
- I find most of the music really obnoxious
All around my most negative experience with an FE game (including fangames). For context, I have played sections of every FE game except 2,3,12,14, and 17.
Now that i’ve risked tarnishing people’s sweet summer memories of being a tween and discovering what feels like the best medeval fantasy rpg they’ve ever played in their short young lives, here’s a list of things I really like about FE7:
- The graphics are really pretty
- …
- It has good atmosphere…
- The first 7 or so chapters are really cool exciting and fun
- The character portraits are really really good. (maybe some of the best in the series imo)
- Did I mention that the backgrounds are top notch? Like some of the best in any game I’ve ever played.
I would definitely hire FE7’s artists to work on any game project, the rest of the devteam not so much…
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I know what fundamentally means, but how am I to know what you mean by fundamentally? The fundamentals of the map are flawed, but I don’t believe the ideas are inherently bad.
Snow map: Enemies can break themselves out of the snow and get a bonus for doing so, and move on the turn they do so. That’s right, Ambush Spawns with a power boost, unless you dedicate some units to destroying TOUGH snow and some units to destroying TOUGHER enemies before they have a chance to wreck you. Trigger a Dragon Vein to break all snow and turn this map into a hyper-aggressive hellhole for a few turns, survive and the map’s over quicker.
Elevators: Add time limits. Add enemies who chase you down. Make who you put on each elevator an interesting question. Can the part of your army holding off pursuing enemies survive without whoever you just put on the elevator? Or make being forced to wait for and use the elevators your punishment for not properly interacting with a more interesting level gimmick. Portals? Dragon Veins? Flying carpets and claw machine claws? Hell I’d take a repeat of Fuga’s Wild Ride over nothing on this map.
Stealth Map: Could work if enemies indicated where they will move to on that map, and obliterating enemies before they summon guards was an interesting challenge. Do you take out this guard? That guard over there might notice the lack of a guard. Take him out too. But the more units you have oneshotting guards, the fewer units you have to deal with other time-sensitive challenges like stealing stuff from… Villages? Armories? There could even be a Sleeping Quarters area, plant an explosive to prevent extreme reinforcement waves spawning from it if you’re detected, but going loud like that alerts the whole base and makes them search for you harder. It could work. It just needs a lot of work. Wasn’t there a Metal Gear turn-based strategy game?
Fuga’s Wild Ride: Honestly I loved it. I wish there was an indicator to help the new players see where their units will be when the wind blows. That would help people who don’t like counting tiles for every unit.
But there are certainly bad maps…
Stairs Hell was an unfun slog, Fox Hell was dull and full of cheating enemies that don’t do anything interesting or ask you to do anything interesting(What if they could only be counterattacked? That’s one of the ideas of all time), and Ninja Hell is softlock city if you aren’t paying attention to who goes where and what units you just sealed away. I really think Ninja Hell should have automatically disabled obstacles behind you after you disable their nearby Caltrops to prevent softlocks. Bad play can punish you by forcing you to make your units go back and take the long road. Also, Saizo was an uninteresting part of the map, I would have made keeping him alive and ensuring he kills the boss (you must kill the boss’s OP cheating guards) part of the clear condition.
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is this a joke?
Snow: actual cancer if you think this is good you suck at game design.
Elevators: this all just makes the map worse
Stealth map: are you serious the game already does this and it still sucks.
Wild Ride: good for you? it’s fine to like flawed things this is still poor design, the wind is unpredictable and forceably moves your units very far.
Stairs hell is fine abuse your movement and use tonics.
Ninja hell is fine you just suck, you literally get Shura right before this and he’s great on this map, you also get xander the previous map lol.
counting movement is fine all the information is displayed and Saizo shows you how it affects move range at the start by removing those caltrops at the start, you can also use Dragon veins to block enemies.
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I think the point was that Battle Before Dawn just needs a few adjustments, namely:
-fixing the enemy placements (doesn’t even have to be anything too drastic)
-putting a torch next to Ursula so the player knows where she is and can see she has a siege tome
-giving Jaffar an iron sword
Fixing the fates maps would require you changing how the maps work entirely; overhauling the gimmick, changing the map itself so that it works better with how the gimmick was changed, etc.
The snow map idea I kinda like, actually. I was thinking that could work similarly to the gorgon egg map from FE8, except you only know the general location of the enemies. They could have a little timer telling the player when the enemies would break out of the ice and attack. Though honestly, its something I would want to playtest first because it could easily get out of hand.
I can guess at the thought process behind putting a timer on the elevator map, but… no. Just no. It sounds like an easy way to make the map more frustrating. I think it could work if you gave the player control over when the elevators move. Maybe make it so that it moves once a certain number of your units go inside? Idk, just throwing ideas out. The elevators are also basically moving choke points, so maybe make them… not that. The map in general pretty much needs to be scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up to make it work.
Stealth maps are cool. I want to make them work. I like some of your ideas here, but some of the others sound a bit complex for FE. I wanna see it work, though.
The other maps you mentioned from Fates I genuinely don’t remember and as such have no opinion on.
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Rain and snow
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The problem with the base version anyways is no way to skip the tutorial at least in Fire Emblem 8 for example you could skip the tutorial by playing a higher difficulty but in Fire Emblem 7 you required to play the tutorial Lyn mode which I feel wouldn’t be as bad if the game basically didn’t hold your hand throughout the whole thing I also feel like maybe they could have made it so after you beat the tutorial section and you replay win mode let’s say you’re playing it on a different difficulty instead of like the similar classes you were playing on in the last mode to make it more difficult add different classes to replace the classes that were previously there like maybe instead of the first boss being a bandit maybe the first boss could be a pirate just to shake up a second playthrough of it.
I really like FE7 but it overstays its welcome even if you skip Lyn Mode. The last fourth of the game becomes a bit of a slog.
Lyn isn’t given the respect she deserves. She is a blessing and should be treated as such!
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Most annoying thing is i can’t recruit linus, i would gladly throw out legault, nino and jaffar for a chance at him
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doesn’t have branching promotions afaik, avatar character is underutilized.
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Some others may have said some of it already, but my personal gripes with FE7 are the following:
-
Merlinus:
I hate how the Supply works in FE7. If you want to send anything to the suppIy or take something out of it, you NEED to deploy Merlinus, otherwise you can’t take anything out or send anything into it and be forced to drop Items. In FE6 you still needed to deploy Merlinus to access the Convoy, but you still were able to send any items you get into the Supply, plus some maps in FE6 have lots of deployment slots, meaning you can probably fit Merlinus into certain maps without him really taking away a spot. Plus he can actually move around in FE6 unlike FE7, where he is still for most of the maps until he promotes. Aditionally, the game often throws reinforcements near him in the later turns of maps for the sole purpose of killing Merlinus if you don’t have anything to protect him. I know the game wants you to protect your Supply as a sort of “secondary objective” when you deploy Merlinus on the map, but in most cases it mostly boils down to have one or two units doing nothing other than standing around at the start in case Merlinus gets attacked. This already is a problem for me, but it’s made even worse with my following gripe. -
Low Deployment Slots:
What really makes the game unfun for me (and to an extent makes my first point more annoying) is the fact that Deployment Slots get smaller on Harder Difficulties. I simply dislike it because it means that I HAVE to use less units than I actually want. As much as I dislike FE7, there are some Characters I do like and would like to use… But I can’t since the harder difficulties have a stupidly low amount of Deployment Slots, and I don’t want to downgrade to Normal Mode as it’s too easy.
As an example of this issue, let’s take Pirate Ship from Chapter 17E/18H. On Normal Mode you get 11 Units, which is a decentish Number at this early point of the game. On Hard you instead only have 8 Units to choose from. Now, there’s also to consider the fact that some units you SHOULD deploy even if they aren’t force deployed. Let’s go over them:
Eliwood/Hector/Lyn: You probably don’t have to deploy them every single map, but you do want to regularly deploy them so they can keep up and be sufficiently strong for the later parts of the game where they are force deployed in several maps. Aditionally, if you want to get Geitz (who is arguably much better than Wallace in every possible way), you have to train up your Lords up to at least a combined Level of 50, which pretty much means you almost always have to deploy them if you want Geitz. Even if you don’t care about him or don’t have a problem with Lloyd’s map, you still have to train them up so they can do something other than to immediately die in maps where they are forced.
Marcus/Oswin: With how enemy dense FE7 is, you likely want to deploy Marcus for most early maps so he can get rid of a lot of enemies to make things easier for you. Granted, he can also be interchanged with Oswin for the tanking and killing duty, and if you played Lyn Mode and early promoted Kent/Sain, they can do a similar job, but that requires actually playing Lyn Mode and promoting either of them very early, which also hampers their lategame potential.
Serra/Priscilla: They can both Heal. Healers are important. If you don’t have any Healers, you need to otherwise spend lots of your precious Gold and Actions for Vulneraries, so you also want to deploy either one of them.
Matthew: Matthew or the other Thieves aren’t important for every map, but in this example, they are. Both a Pegasus Knight hold a Elysian Whip and the Boss Zoldam hold a Guiding Ring. They can only be obtained from Stealing, and if you want to use some Fliers and Mages, you pretty much want to deploy Matthew to get them
So, now that we have deployed all 3 Lords, Marcus/Oswin to make the enemy killing easier, Serra/Priscilla to keep our units alive and Matthew so we can steal the important Promotion Items, we are left with a total of… 2 Slots. We now have 2 Free Slots to use any other unit we want. 2 Slots… out of 13.
Granted, not every map has their deployment reduced or lowered to such an extreme extent, but the deployment slots don’t really increase over the course of the game and instead stagnate at around 8-12 regularly, which makes the aforementioned problem more apparent the more characters you recruit over the course of the story.
- Low Promotion Gains:
The Promotion gains are laughable. In FE6 the Promotion Gains were very high, and felt like an actual reward when you used one of your precious Items to promote one of your units, especially with how low the growth rates in FE6 are. in FE7, the Growth Rates are slightly higher, but the Promotion gains are absolute garbage for most classes. In the rare case I do play FE7, I almost never bother to promote before Lvl 20 because the gains barely improve a unit and are at best just a good level. The only time where it feels somewhat worth it is on a Magic Unit to give them Staves or on a Armor Knight since Knights are the only class in FE7 that actually have good Promotion Gains (aside from the Lords). This is a big problem for me, since this issue also seeps into most FE7 Hacks that aren’t rebalances, since the hackers don’t really change the promotion gains aside for their Lords, meaning Promotion Gains are also bad there, which is why I often use an Armor Knights in FE7 Hacks even if they may be bad, as they are the only class type I can rely on having actually good Promotion Gains.
There are lots of other personal issues I have with it like the Map Design, Rain and Snow, the fact that most enemies wield Lances which in turn makes Swordlocked units perform poorly, most units being weak ass children with Negative Constitution, that you get no Energy Rings during the main campaign, that enemies are weak in high quantity and make Sword/Bow units feel bad to use, 2x Effectiveness making Bows and Armor/Horseslaying weapons crap, some weapons like Tomes or Durandal/Sol Katti being heavy as shit for no reason or beginner units like Erk and Dart being made completely useless and outclassed by units like Hawkeye and Pent, but that would otherwise make this already long post reach up into the stratosphere.
If you have actually read this wall of text, then uh, thank you for reading it and I hope you understand my problems I have with FE7.
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I guess my biggest issue is that it’s… Rather middling. I haven’t finished playing it yet, I am on chapter 19, but I don’t know if I am all that interested in continuing. It just hasn’t stood out to me much… Also, the rain thing was weird. I think it shouldn’t have been on and off and instead stayed on for a whole map.
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Because of the gameplay? Story? Or a combination of both?
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Probably the story moreso? It lost it’s steam to me after Lyn mode. I can’t even explain why. The stakes are higher, it takes up more ground, but somehow feels less exciting. Also as an aside, I haven’t been able to get any supports, but that could just be me not playing optimally.
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Bro venting his frustration of fe7 its like this thread was made for him lol but jokes aside i forgot deployment slots in my previous post and i agree with him in every word
Yes i read it all like the unemployed i am (joke)
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OH RIGHT, LYN, I also never liked that they relegated the female lord to the tutorial character. That always just rubbed me the wrong way.