Surely Three Houses’ choice is Ferdinand. Firstly, he needs an Armor requirement. This can only be taught by Alois and Gilbert. Alois is absent on Chapters 5 & 10 and Gilbert is only available starting Chapter 5 and is absent on 10. Byleth also can’t train Armor in a battle unless he is in the Armored Knight Intermediate class. And on top of ALL that, Ferdinand’s B support is only unlocked post-timeskip. This means that A. Byleth cannot lower his recruit requirement more and B. Ferdinand cannot join another house automatically like other units can normally can do with a Byleth B support
Exactly this. On my run of Blue Lions, my first run, I got EVERYBODY... except Ferdinand von Aegir. Dorothea was so upset when we had to kill poor Ferdie because he locks his freaking A Support behind the time skip and he wants freaking Heavy Armor. :P
Would it not be Jeritza since he's technically the only unit you obtain by going Crimson flower and that is arguably harder than just getting your stats up by a certain point in the game
On my first playthrough of Three Houses, I grinded like crazy and got EVERYONE. Except for one. One single character who I ended up being forced to kill because I could not get an A support with him and he wants HEAVY ARMOR and I freaking HATE Heavy Armor. "We killed Ferdie! Don't you remember Ferdie, professor?" Like come on. There's no legitimate option other than Ferdinand von Aegir.
I thought Lysithea is one of the few students you can recruit instead of killing, atleast in one of the routes. So she is very easy to recruit because of that
@@CatsLilaSalem Lysithea is the only student/enemy that can be recruited post-timeskip if you did not recruit her pre-timeskip. The other two post-skip enemy recruits are more like re-recruits. On Silver Snow and Verdant Wind, you can only recruit Ashe post-skip if you recruited him pre-skip (otherwise he's forced to die at Ailell), and the same is true for Lorenz on Silver Snow and Azure Moon (otherwise he's forced to die at Myrddin).
Counterpoint, FE12 Wolf, especially on Lunatic. You need to rush to the village to recruit Roshea, rush him to recruit Vyland, get Vyland to recruit Sedgar, and put Sedgar under fire to recruit Wolf, all in a map with very dangerous reinforcements and enemy placements.
@@artificialaceattorney6822 Felix is the easiest student recruit, if you don't include Sylvain who's only requirement is that you're female. Byleth is designed to be a fast sword user, even having the swordmaster class during the dlc route, showing that it's intended. Byleth has a good speed growth and already high sword ranks with a personal sword that you're intended to use that even repairs itself, and many tutors teach swords in academy phase. I never have a problem with him and one time he was my first recruit even before Sylvain, though only cuz I forgot about him.
I really wish they stopped making most recruitments automatic in modern FE. I love the wacky recruitments, secrets and replacement units from the older games, so it's kinda sad to see them abandon them for the most part.
Nah we're not done talking about Xavier yet bro, come back for a sec: The real enemy here is the AI that can and will chokepoint itself into a stalemate preventing anyone from moving. Map is horrible for no valid reason
Other dishonorable mentions I can think of: Matthis (FE3/12): Requires you to run a big lap around the map to recruit Julian so he can talk to Matthis. Rutger (FE6): Two words: AMBUSH SPAWNS. Teodor (FE7): Bending the rules a bit to make a point, since you don't actually recruit him, but let's be real, did anyone unlock 19xx without a guide? Karel/Harken (FE7): A mutually-exclusive pair found in an already bizarre chapter. Depending on which version of Pale Flower of Darkness you get, the condition is either based on how many promoted units you kill or how many doors you open. Ymir (FE11): Shadow Dragon’s paralogues (not counting 24x) require you to have killed of several of your units to play, and Ymir is the worst offender of this gimmick, joining in Chapter 20x when most players would already have several units in their army to kill off. Anna (FEW): Bonus character with several complicated requirements to unlock. I don’t remember exactly what they were, but she’s supposed to be the last unit you get. Ferdinand (FE16): Other people already brought him up, but Ferdinand has the harshest requirements of all of the students to recruit in Three Houses. Amusingly, Three Hopes makes him completely unrecruitable outside of the Black Eagles route. Leonie (FEW:TH SB): While the option to persuade her shows up no matter what, she won’t join you if you killed Jeralt earlier.
To be fair, most people are going to go out of the way to get Julian since he's required for the best ending to save Lena. Also you can cut through the center if you don't care about Mathis dieing (he pretty much will if you cut through the center since he sucks) Its more difficult due to the powerful wyvern riders and balista, but its heck of alot faster and less tedious.
I'd bring up Nomah as an Honourable mention in SoV. He isn't technically hard to recruit, but unlike Delthea who can be spared with the Subdue art on the shiny new weapon you were just given for that very purpose, and then do nothing because she won't have enough HP to cast Aura, he's hidden all the way into deepest part of the Temple of Mila in Part 4. He's probably the easiest recruitment to miss.
"Teodor (FE7): Bending the rules a bit to make a point, since you don't actually recruit him, but let's be real, did anyone unlock 19xx without a guide?"' Sure, I leveled up my Nils to level 7 in Lyn's story because it's such an obvious thing to do, spending 70 turns using a charactern with 5 movs! /s (Why is that even a thing, c'mon IS)
I am not watching this for spoiler reasons, playing Fe4 at the moment, but having the very first non-forced recruitment in that game be the incredibly obtuse process of getting chased by Ayra while Benny Hill is playing, seizing the castle and talking to her all with Sigurd made me really scared that all of the recruitments would be like that.
Initially I did plan to mention a few characters from each game and Shinon would've been talked about, but I wanted to keep the video kind of short so I decided to only choose one from each game.
I'd actually argue that Shinon is a harder recruitment than Stefan. Stefan is really only difficult because of the obscurity; if you know what to do, it's trivial. Shinon, on the other hand, is more complicated. It's a two-step process with no clear indication. It's _possible_ that someone brings Rolf along, thinks to have him talk to Shinon, then just picks up the kill with Ike thinking that the recruitment isn't possible or something, but it's not likely and has a lot of caveats. For one, Rolf is really bad in FE9. The odds that you're using him at all are pretty low, which means you probably won't want/think to deploy him on this map. Even if you do deploy him untrained for the specific purpose of recruiting Shinon (which, again, you probably wouldn't know to do), this map has both fliers and siege tome users that make keeping him alive a lot trickier. Then you have to run him into enemy range for the conversation and get the kill with Ike (yet again, something you wouldn't know you need to do) really fast before Rolf has a chance to get killed. In my own playthrough of FE9, where I wasn't against looking things up, Shinon still managed to be the only recruitment I missed. Also, Shinon only joins after the chapter. If by some chance somebody dies later in the chapter and you decide to reset, you don't know that you had fulfilled the conditions to recruit him, and you might assume that you did something wrong and not try to do the same thing next time.
@@Bogeynator I happened to use Rolf in my first playthrough and accidentally got shinon cause I thought that Rolf would just be able to talk to him and recruit him but after it failed I just had Ike kill him since he was close
The translation of Thraccia 776 i played even gave a little help with the Knights and their relatives. It was not much easier though. I only allowed myself to use save states out of frustration on two chapters and this was one of those.
For Engage I'd personally say Saphir is the hardest. You recruit her chapter 19, where the optimal strategy is to turtle on the ship and let the enemies come to you, yet Saphir starts pretty far up and can make that plan quite a bit harder. It's been a while since I've played, but I think she can die turn 1 in maddening if you aren't careful or don't rush to recruit her. If you have Alear on a flying class or you're willing to waste valuable rescue staff uses, it does become a lot easier though
beating Seigberts chapter is more difficult than rescue warping Shiro. I also think church route Hilda is the most difficult to recruit since she's locked out until Edelgard betrays you
Nah, Seigbert's chapter is more tedious than difficult, using two or three flyers w/someone with Royal Blood trivializes the thing and Siegbert it's a fairly good unit that doesn't die in Turn 2 in Lunatic unlike Shiro
2 FE6 mentions, 1 Douglas for being a general with silver weapons that will chase you and keep attacking you until the chapter is done, but he does not attack Elffin/Larum which gives some room to body block him, or just sleep him. But the first times with him suck so much if you want him. 2 Fir, for coming out of the mist, attacking someone dying on the counter since she is super fragile. Or she just picking a weak unit yours and critting, but even then is her damage not great often. FE7 has the same problem with Guy crit killing one of your units, but that one is kinda fast to just replay
Zeke isn't a hard or rare recruitment in Echoes but i love how if you listen to the dialogue of the bosses and that they have him in a leash of sorts and freeing Tatiana makes him and his army friendly and basically trivialize the map. Such a cool interaction for my first playthrough
For three houses I believe another character should be thrown in the ring since we are using the Serenes stat requirements, using those I believe Hilda is the hardest character to unlock as she is not only unable to acquire a B support which heavily reduces recruitment requirements, requires a C rank in axes which you are only gonna grind for if you really want Wyvern lord, but she is also the only character in the game to require 30 in a stat in order to unlock, in this case Charm. This is even ignoring Black Eagles in which the only chance you have to recruit her is the little interem period between the route split and the time skip since you can't even recruit her on CF.
You can get B support with Hilda and still recruit her on SS. It may take a bit of resetting but you 100% can get her pre timeskip. Also Charm is one of Byleth's best stats since they get a guaranteed +1 every month, assuming you do tea time correctly. Compare that to CF Alois who has only 1 chapter to be recruited before he goes away or OOH Ferdinand who requires a D in Heavy Armor.
@ ok the B rank definitely makes it easier, but you’re much more likely to get 8 dex for C+ support OOH Ferdie, also Alois is the only guy you can train axes from so it takes even longer to get the required ranks then armor. You’ll likely spend more time going for Hilda than Ferdie due to the combo of support and axe grinding, which in my mind constitutes harder for 3H standards.
@@cman5516 Almost no Byleth would ever want to want train in Heavy Armour. The only sources of tutoring for it are Alois and Gilbert, both of whom go missing from the monastery for some time, you have to at least make it to E+ to gain experience in Armour Knight. Hilda’s charm requirement is extremely easy to reach if you do your birthday teatimes and getting to C Axes is very desirable regardless of class because you want Death blow in any physical class. Plus, Hilda can achieve a B support, whilst Ferdinand can’t pre-timeskip
@@envan7865 oh sorry you don’t want armor knight? considered one of the best classes in 3H to get due to how much free defense you get on any character. Also again, for Axes you need Alois specifically to train you who, as you said, dissapears constantly. You can certainly get that handful of axe exp from fights but nowhere near enough to get anything useful, let alone enough for a character. Getting the armor for Ferdie takes literally half the time it takes to get the axes or about as much time for the support grinding for Hilda and takes a lot less teatime to do.
@@cman5516 Armour knight is not a good class. All it’s good for giving you baseline 12 defense. On average that’s only +3 defense at Level 10 for Byleth. Axes can also be taught by Seteth, Glibert and Anna (if you have DLC). Four sources of tutoring instead of just two and the in combat experience is small, but it’s something. The teatimes do not take anytime, just doing the ones you get for free on characters birthdays is enough to get you like plus +14 charm without level ups by chapter 12. Plus, the option for a B support can take that down all the way to D Axes and 12 Charm, along with the random chance to join. Whereas for Ferdinand, all you can do is one tutoring session with Alois until chapter 3. And you actually have to get the Armour rank, unlike with Hilda
I know everyone likes to pick on Xavier and Hannibal for having obtuse recruitments for just okay units in return but I really don’t think they’re as tedious and disappointing as Karla Like the game asks the player to use a bad unit the entire game to get a worse unit for the last chapter
I would actually bring up recruiting Hilda in 3 houses, since you have only a single chapter window to do so. She is only available to recruit in chapter 11, no sooner Also for fates conquest, Ignatius would probably be the hardest. Same logic behind Shiro, do the chapter to late and he'll die on turn 2 due to being ridiculously under leveled, surrounded by powerful enemies, on the far side of the map
@@DaakkuuYRS Ferdinand can't b support in academy phase, so you have to train heavy armor, which only two tutors teach, both of which are often absent, and you can't train it in battle until you already have enough to become an armor knight, which is a waste of a class for byleth. Ferdinand is the hardest, and quite so compared to characters from some other games, although Xavier from fe5 is still the hardest ever in the series, he can even softlock you from recruiting him. Ferdinand is nothing to him, but he's still difficult. Moreso on the deer route cuz no Gilbert, who is one of the aforementioned tutors.
Just desequip weapons and surround him he isnt a very dangerous unit. And if you use Olivia as you should you can recrut him super fast On the other hand Priam is by far on the hardest non dlc map Awakening have. And lunatic awakening is already one of the hardest fire emblem game.... Recruting him on lunatic is hell, it require tons of maxed out units or you'll die On other difficulty its still Severa, but rescue staff can give you tons of time
@@anonyme4881 awakening is the only game where i say the baseline for difficulty should be hard, purely because while other games have more fair lunatic modes(other than hard 5 but fuck that) awakening is just bs. when the only way to progress in any meaningful way in maps is to either abuse fredrick or have robin/chrom paired up the entire game it's just pointless(lunatic+ can also go die in a hole with everything being bs*100).
@@fala5764 you only need Frederick for the 3 to 5 first map in lunatic and you dont need to pair up chrom and robin for the whole game. Awakening hard mode is too easy to be interresting I was doing my support collection in lunatic personnally, if you survive the 3 first map the game become actually interresting and you can use every character minus Donnel Thats because the only bs thing in awakening lunatic is that the early game map ennemi got way too much stats. After some level your unit will be way more stronger than ennemi units because of awakening insane growth rate and super strong skill Tho, I forgot about Donnel in lunatic which is nearly impossible to recruit and train since he deals 0 damage to normal ennemi and die in 2 hit. (He can only damage the thieves in this chapter)
Newer FE recruitments just aren't the same... I mean seriously, Engage doesn't even have a recruitment theme despite those almost always being some of the best pieces of soundtrack in the entire game! Outrageous!!!
I'd argue that L'Arachel on Ephraim's route is way easier than other Ephraim's route recruits. Cormag can prove way trickier with Rennac taking the crown. Recruiting Rennac has 2 conditions to begin with. L''Arachel or 10k Gold. What if you do not have the 10k and L'Arachel was left in the barracks untrained due to how late she joins? All through Sleep/Silence Staff shenanigans on top of Berserk shenanigans? And all that with a time limit as well since Rennac can just casually leave the map never to be seen again. You must rush under Sleep/Silence/Berserk with potentially an untrained L'Arachel taking a spot. That can be brutal.
I still remember the first time I played Birthright. I didn’t know about the Chapter 15 thing and I didn’t really do supports that weren’t S-ranks, and I paired Corrin with Silas. I was completely heartbroken by Kaze’s death and I spent the entire rest of the game in denial, thinking he might show up alive. Takumi survived falling into that same canyon, why couldn’t Kaze?! I was sad to beat the game and still not see him. I had a gut feeling that he there was SOMETHING I could’ve done to save him, especially considering how he wasn’t among the characters who appeared during the near-death experience. I immediately started a new play through, completely determined to save him. I had one idea for how to save him, based on my experience with saving a character’s life in Persona 3 Portable (I won’t go into details so I’m not spoiling a whole other game). I decided to try A-ranking Kaze, and if that didn’t work I’d look it up. It seemed pretty hopeful, the A-rank conversation was nearly identical to that of the pre-tragedy talk, where Kaze reveals his past and pledges loyalty as your retainer. Just for good measure I also decided to S-rank him before chapter 15 rolled around. At the end of the chapter they were STILL talking at the top of the cliff, and I was practically screaming at them to get away from there. Then, when things played out differently and Kaze survived I was dancing up and down and cheering I was so happy that I had successfully managed to save him
I'd say hardest for Path of Radiance is Nasir. In order to recruit him, you need to defeat the Black Knight in 5 turns or less. Which is notable difficult unless Ike has basically been maxed out, and even then. It is still rigged slot machine level difficulty. You need to be lucky Aether activates more than his Eclipse activates.
Fair on Karel for FE6. Game has a lot of difficult or tricky recruitments, though: everything about Douglas, Thea's annoyingly finnicky AI, characters like Echidna and the second pair of cavaliers being able to die before being recruited, Rutger being able to just murder one of your units out of the blue (and Fir, to a lesser extent)...
For FE3 I would dare say that Samson is harder than Sheena, Sheena will stay still on her throne but Samson will move to attack you and potentially even block the way since I’m 90% sure the door is in his aggro range.
Lysithia I'm gonna have to disagree with. You're pretty much given her for free on 2 of the 4 routes imo making her one of the easier students to recruit
For engage i would honestly go for anna you have to rush for her before she gets killed by the enemy at a point where your stats aren't high enough to one round most opponents. Technically you could wait until you are a much higher level but that's not really fair in my opinion because you could also wait untul your a much higher level for severa by that logic
since it has been established that the Kaze entry was a Joke Imma chain it with one of my own: I would not say Kaze is the hardest for birthright but his kid Midori, since you can only do the paralogue in question after Kaze survives the cutscene even if he's married already, getting Kaze is easy, getting his daughter that's the hard part. (bonus cheese points if he's married to Corrin) on a slightly more serious note, I'd say Shinon is more complicated to recruit in FE9, You need to talk to him with Rolf, which implies you either trained him or are escorting a very weak unit and then you must beat Shinon WITH IKE to then have the recruitment thing play at the end of the chapter. (at least success or failure you get the brave bow) and the only Hint in game I've seen about any of this is if Mist talks to Shinon which is even less likely to think about on your own and then no hints whatsoever about Ike having to be the one kicking his ass.
Not sure how true this is since I've only seen people mention this online with no actual footage but I think the hardest FE3H recruitment is actually the other lords/ second in commands. Apparently before the games first update there was a glitch you could perform if you were precise with your button pressing when selecting a house at the start of the game that would actually let you start with all units recruited from an additional second house. Like for example having Dimitri and Dedue in Black Egale or Edelgard and Hubert in Golden Deer. So if this is true they'd technically be the most difficult recruits since they're locked behind a patched out glitch
While Bartra and Carla may look like a random easter egg recruitment, you gotta give it points for being able to see Fir's parents meet especially after seeing the end screen for Bartra always being "falling in love with a warrior he rivals" or smth like that
For 3 houses I'm going with Hilda on Church Route, because if you play black eagles you cannot recruit her UNLESS you do the split thing for Church and then you only have the small gap between that event and the end of the first half to ACTUALY recruit her, but since she's been locked out the ENTIRE TIME you either need to already be set to recruit her or on NG+ because you can't raise her support with Byleth fast enough. Plus you need to realize he BECOMES recruitable - since to this point she hasn't been.
I'd think Athena is among the hardest unit in FE11 (Shadow Dragon), because she's one of the "you lost a bunch of units" filler units. Also, for FE16 (Three Houses), Hilda in Black Eagles (Silver Snow Route) is probably the hardest unit to recruit. If you go Lions, she is normal recruit with Charm and Axes being her stat and skill; if you go Deer, she's in your house, and if you go Eagles, she's unrecruitable... unless you set up to go the fourth route (Silver Snow) by not siding with Edelgard, where you can spend the one in-game month (4 possible trips to the monastery at most) trying to woo her just like Lions route, before the attack on the monastery that happens in all routes that divides the base and war phases of the game.
Just imagine when the times when each fire emblem came out and people start their first playthrought, not knowing how to recruit and skiping like half the characters, and like you said in the video with out guides at least in the first 5 fire emblems the games has to be really hard, and thats the magic of the classics games, now with just one search to get to know everythings and thats cools too, for me since im playing fe binding blade with guides im just pumped to start again and beat the game faster having all this knowleadge but the magic of the first blind playthroughs are amazing
I am not sure what Nintendo was thinking with Karla(4:44). We need a specific unit be given a valuable promotion crest and appropriately leveled to recruit her. No hints given to the player about her or about Batre needing to fight her. When you talk to her, combat is automatically initiated. Let's hope your Batre has been getting lucky with defense or speed. There is a strong chance you are gonna get crit(5:03) possibly twice if you are slow. There is a strong chance Batre will die. On the other hand, Batre can gain to much strength and kill Karla with the Swordreaver. Alternatively, Batre can be equipped with a Killer Axe which is not hard to get at this point in the game. There is a chance Batre lands a hits and crits Karla.
I disagree on FE13, I think Laurent is the hardest unit if you don't know what you're doing. He's not hard to get if you know what to do but I'd argue he can be missed if you are not aware of the village you have to interact with. To be honest, when I did this chapter, I actually thought you'd find the village upon completing the quest. I didn't even know until my 2nd playthrough that this chapter was a child-unit chapter as when I recruited Lucina I already had a load of S Ranks which naturally unlocked a load of Child Unit Chapters. Severa really isn't hard to work out, just have 1 or 2 units with the rescue staff to keep her out of harms way and from there just have your crew kill every last 1 of them.
As much as the stat requirements for pre-time-skip recruitment are the bigger hurdle for Three Houses recruits, I’d be interested to hear who you think is the hardest permanent recruit when you come across them again after the skip. Even if you got them in part one and have that opportunity in part two, you still need to then worry about talking to a red unit like normal recruits. At least I think. To be honest, I didn’t manage to recruit any students outside my house on my initial Golden Deer run, and didn’t see a NG+ Blue Lions run to the time skip, so I don’t actually know how difficult the later recruits are because I’ve never had the chance to do them.
Hmm. FE5: 100% Xavier. It's a mystery to me about why they made recruiting him so challenging-especially with how easy it is to miss him. FE6: This game has a lot of units that are meant to replace other units or locked to a certain route. For me, this is a fight between Rutger and Douglas. Douglas is in Chapter 16, a pretty big map which also has Hugh and Zeiss on it. To start with, he has strong weapons on him-and he will chase your units around. To even have a chance of getting him to calm down, you need Larum or Elffin to talk to him, and hope to god he doesn't blow himself up afterwards. If you don't have these lads by then, forget about it. There's also some douchebag Mage with a Bolting tome immediately at the start of the map, so that doesn't help much. :D Rutger is one of your best units in the game, but recruiting him is a nightmare. To begin with, your units will not be prepared for the onslaught of enemies coming your way on this map. There's barely any cover, so if you're not ready, you can expect a few deaths. You need Clarine to recruit him, but good luck having her survive against wave after wave of Cavalier spam. All of this is on Chapter 4 btw. FE7: Jaffar. He's on the infamous Battle Before Dawn map, and there's a lot to be mindful of. First things first-you need to recruit Nino, and then proceed to have Nino talk to him and keep them alive the entire chapter. Battle Before Dawn is infamous for how strong the enemies are, the fact Jaffar can die before you even reach him, Ursula having a BOLTING TOME, and all of the chests being troll shit. Karla isn't necessary for any gaiden chapter, but Jaffar is required for one. Without recruiting him, you miss out on 26x. Shadow Dragon: Ymir. Shadow Dragon has these really bad gaiden requirements, being that you need to kill off some of your units to unlock them. That's bullshit already, but that's not all. By Chapter 20, you will have a lot of units, and the gaiden unlocks if you have only 15 people alive. For 90% of FE players, even beginning ones, you would never figure out that you have to lose people just to recruit someone who's not even worth it. Three Houses: Felix is actually the easiest. He requires B+ in Swords and 15 Speed, something Byleth will do very, very easily. Most of the time, he will come to you once he sees how broken Byleth is. Ferdinand however? He needs C in Armor. You don't have a lot of room to train Armor natively, as your only options are Alois and Gilbert. So if you really want to recruit Ferdinand, this means you will have to grind as an Armor Knight. An honorable mention is Hilda, who straight up won't join if you picked Black Eagles, and even if you picked Silver Snow, you have exactly one chance to recruit her, and it's before the timeskip. You better have 30 charm and a C in axes. Three Hopes: Byleth on Scarlet Blaze. First things first-this is a race against time. You need Resonant Lightning, which is a reward from one of the survey spots. Then, make Baron Mateus surrender and cut off Byleth's path to Rodrigue. From there, you have to avoid Byleth, beat Alois and kill Rodrigue, all before Byleth gets there. This is a huge risk, because failing to recruit Byleth will change the story, and it locks you out of recruiting Leonie in the first place. Engage: Anna. Early on, you'll have a paralogue chapter where Anna decides to hide in a chest. In a map heavily infested with enemies. She gets discovered pretty fast and will have a tough time fighting anyone that comes her way. Similar to Jaffar, it's possible for Anna to die before you even reach her. Lindon is the easiest recruitment, since you can recruit him with the Elusia nobles (Ivy and Hortensia), both with really good mobility.
Hannibal's recruitment is hard on paper, but he's pretty easy to cheese. If all of his soldiers are dead, he'll head back towards his castle to get more, and if you just place a unit on the gate of the castle without seizing it, he'll just stand next to them and not do anything. Sure, it doesn't deal with all the wyverns, but without Hannibal and his guys causing problems they're pretty easy to deal with; you can seize Luthecia and recruit Coirpre with just Seliph and Ares (or any other decently strong unit tbh), so holding out against Travant's squad isn't that difficult when you have your entire army minus Seliph, his helper, and whoever's blocking Hannibal to do it with.
My first playthrough I lost Kaze. I was using him exclusively with Rinkah, he would soften them up with poison, chip damage, and the shuriken debuff and she would finish them off. But since I always had him next to Rinkah I didn’t gain any relationship points between him and Corrin. Ended up costing me and I was seething since I loved his character
yeah no,it's Ferdinand Von Aegir he's an unit who not only can't get to B support before timeskip but also,his tutor is armor,Armor! you can't get armor rank easily
Honestly, for Engage I would put Jade and Saphir (moreso Saphir) up for contention, especially on Maddening. While either is not particularly hard to recruit, especially with the Draconic Time Crystal, it is possible for both to die within two or three turns of the map starting (Jade gets worn down by two armoued knights, Saphir gets swarmed by warped-in cavs)---this is a limit that's easier to rescue Jade in, because her starting location is easy to reach and the enemies that rush you turn 1 aren't particularly challenging. Saphir though starts on a tile that's hard for anyone in your army to reach on turn one unless you happen to have Alear, Diamant, or Alcryst as a flier, or want to put Sigurd on either of the princes for the entire map.
In Fe9, with Ike you can use the magic card. The only problem is to make he moves. In Fe8, over stephan, I found Ilyana really difficult to recruit in hard difficulty. Haar, and Astrid for the same reason as larachel
The hardest character in BS Fire Emblem to recruit is Frost: you need to wait about 32 minutes of in-game time for him to join automatically. Yeah not hard, BSFE doesn't have hard recruits in the slightest. Most units join at the start, while three of them join after a specific time in the map; Frost just takes the longest to get. I guess you could also argue he's pretty easy to kill if you don't know better (though when this came out it was packaged with an opening and voice lines that would lean you towards not kiling him), though he's not a free kill cause he's very fast with only a thunder tome, and he runs away from your units if you get near, though you could kill him if you catch up and chip enough (he's fragile ofc since he's a bishop), you've got three fliers on that map after all. Meanwhile you have a weaker squad on the map where you get Malice and Dice; Navarre is your best combat unit at the start, but Malice is literally just better than him statistically, and Dice's devil axe could cause issues.
If caught unprepared, Yen Fey (spelling, its been way too long) in Awakening can be impossible. Before him, Chrom himself can recruit everyone. But Yen Fey can only be recruited from Sayri. Throw in, she is decent but overshadowed by that. She is not likely to be naturally on your team.
Surely 3H is Hilda, right? She’s the only retainer unit you can recruit outside of her rout, BUT not at all on crimson flower, and only for one chapter in Silver Snow.
For Engage, I wanna say Saphir forvthe same reason as Shiro. She might kust die before you can recruit her, or if your Alear sucks they recruit her then die themselves
I love this "Red, Blue, Green Unit" business. It's like "Haha, I am going to kill you wearing these red pants." (his ex-girlfriend wearing blue pants runs up to him, begging him to switch sides) "Yes, I have seen the error of my ways; I will now change into blue pants!"
Lindon is not really an obscure unit but the community treats him like one; he almost never appears on tier lists or balance discussions because I think most players kill him and move on thinking he's a miniboss or something.
Hardest characters to recruit in Fates are probably Charlotte and Benny in Rev. It's actually pretty straightforward but I'm pretty sure nobody else in Fates requires a character that *isn't* the main character to recruit Shiro is a good choice, but he is not available in just Rev, y'know?
I’m more than certain that Kaze condition is entirely tie to the fact that *YOU* benching him for way too long, he might be the worst unit you can recruit but I can still tell that bad unit with some level is still mile better than bad unit with no level, if you don’t use him then why keep him?
Anna could be a bit of a pain in Engage to recruit. Basically you need to reach her in I think 3 turns or she dies. Not to hard but kind of annoying. Though 3 houses for me, recruiting everyone wasn't really a problem. Though I grinded like crazy to get everything high enough along with their support levels.
I say silver snow Hilda might be the hardest because you cant recruit her in through most of the BE playthough and is only truly available is if you pick the silver snow route and available for 1 chapter and you need a b rank with her then she can be recruited
@@harrycarson6526 Getting perfect teatimes on Character’s birthdays can give you +1 charm, up to twice per month. From chapter 4 to 12, that’s +16 charm just from birthdays which don’t take time. Byleth starts with 7 charm and a 50% charm growth, meaning you just need 7 charm from like, 25 level ups, which is super manageable. I’ve ended runs where Byleth has upwards of 60 charm
Ignatius in Fates can be annoying to recruit if you do his chapter late. I had to optimize a path for my fliers to go around the entire map just to get him because he will just die if you take more than like 3-5 turns.
I disagree with FE11 Nagi on the grounds that getting her is more optimal than using the true Falchion on higher difficulties - plus, both it and Tiki herself are *very* missable on a blind run. No, my pick for FE11 is Ymir - a unit you can only recruit if you have 15 or less units left alive at the end of Ch20... in a game where you're supplied new recruits left, right and center.
I kinda disagree on L' Arachel,the hardest is Rennac. if you didn't manage to recruit L'Arachel or get enough gold by the time the chapter rolls in where you get to recruit him,then he's basically unrecruitable.
i feel liek Ayra is harder then Hannibal you simply have a lot less tools to deal with her no sleep staff or sword you can't make her retreat towards her castle for reinforcements even if tsht works which im unsure cuz its the same castle youre trying to seize she has less bulk but more damage potential relative to your armys current durability and only Alec can negate her astra and hes not particularly durable,
The hardest is always the "HOW AM I SUPPOSE TO KNOW THAT?" requirements. This is not exclusive to FE either. Some games are so unforgiving about it as well. Did you do the opinional time limied 8 side conversations that you have to find hidden across the overworld? Too bad you did them in the wrong order so you didn't unlock the 9th hidden conversation that was hidden behind the first 8. Did you do them all in order this time? Too bad all option choices matter even when the conversation was just small talk so when you selected "I love oranges" instead of "I hate oranges" you can no longer unlock the hidden character because you bonded over your shared hatred of oranges.
I'd say the hardest "recuitment" is keeping Iñigo(Laslow), Odin and Peri alive on Lunatic in Chapter 16, at least Ryoma and company could hold their own but those guys suck ass
I think Ymir is harder to get than Nagi. When I first played Shadow Dragon as a kid, I got Nagi by accident. For Ymir, you either have to go out of your way or REALLY suck.
Ignatius is also in the same situation if you do his paralogue to late. Since he's the same under leveled green unit who starts on the far side of the map and is quickly swarmed by enemies who will absolutely one round him if you go into this chapter to late.
There's translation patches you can search for online, some are better than others, you just have to apply them to your rom, which also can be found online.
Never forget Scarlet in Reveletion that has the same bullshit thing like kaze but this time you can't avoid it. So you can have she only for one battle... Just let her be a green unit for that battle and then start the cutscene and let her die...
I think Geitz is harder than Karla. To get Karla you need to train one bad unit. For Geitz you need to train three (well 2 bad units and one okay unit)
@Roland_Volpahart Yeah I forgot about Dark Deity. I played it on PC. If it got a switch release I didn't know about it. It wasn't bad though it might be what you're looking for.
Lehran in Radiant Dawn is on a tier of his own in terms of how obscure and difficult to recruit he is and the only one in which luck plays a part on top of being extremely obscure and cryptic. Ike needs a few speed stat points to be able to not deck doubled by the black knight and killed as a result so if you get unlucky with Ike's level ups you can't get Lehran even if you attempt to do everything else correctly. You also need to hope he doesn't get Eclipse in that combat too because that would be an instant kill but I might be wrong about it being able to trigger on the defensive.
No hate, but the 3h section is a travesty. No mention of how easy it is to bypass these requirements with a B support, and no mention of the two students who don't get B support until after the timeskip. Not to mention, none of the 3 you mentioned are particularly difficult, with Dorothea and Felix being all but free.
Yeah 3H is the one I was most unsure about as I don't usually bother to recruit characters from outside of the house I choose. But, a lot of other comments are mentioning Ferdinand and Hilda and I would agree with them on that.
Im sorry, but if most difficult list of recruitment doesnr include ferdinand three houses its just wrong. You mention specificly playthroughs where you arent focusing on recruiting. But even without that restriction, is easily ferdinand. Not only are his B and above supports locked behing time skip, he also eants heavy armor. A skill line that can only be trained on byleth via spedning time points in the monastery, and that unlocks relatively useless class of armor knights. There is literaly no reason to ever train heavy armor on byleth
Surely Three Houses’ choice is Ferdinand. Firstly, he needs an Armor requirement. This can only be taught by Alois and Gilbert. Alois is absent on Chapters 5 & 10 and Gilbert is only available starting Chapter 5 and is absent on 10. Byleth also can’t train Armor in a battle unless he is in the Armored Knight Intermediate class. And on top of ALL that, Ferdinand’s B support is only unlocked post-timeskip. This means that A. Byleth cannot lower his recruit requirement more and B. Ferdinand cannot join another house automatically like other units can normally can do with a Byleth B support
Exactly this. On my run of Blue Lions, my first run, I got EVERYBODY... except Ferdinand von Aegir. Dorothea was so upset when we had to kill poor Ferdie because he locks his freaking A Support behind the time skip and he wants freaking Heavy Armor. :P
Would it not be Jeritza since he's technically the only unit you obtain by going Crimson flower and that is arguably harder than just getting your stats up by a certain point in the game
@@noishhater9138 He’s not a difficult unit to recruit. He joins your party automatically
@luminary6818 yeah after reading the other comments I agree that Ferdinand is probably harder
Ngl I thought you meant Sylvain and this was gonna be an elaborate joke of some kind.
On my first playthrough of Three Houses, I grinded like crazy and got EVERYONE. Except for one. One single character who I ended up being forced to kill because I could not get an A support with him and he wants HEAVY ARMOR and I freaking HATE Heavy Armor.
"We killed Ferdie! Don't you remember Ferdie, professor?"
Like come on. There's no legitimate option other than Ferdinand von Aegir.
I thought Lysithea is one of the few students you can recruit instead of killing, atleast in one of the routes. So she is very easy to recruit because of that
@@CatsLilaSalem Lysithea is the only student/enemy that can be recruited post-timeskip if you did not recruit her pre-timeskip. The other two post-skip enemy recruits are more like re-recruits. On Silver Snow and Verdant Wind, you can only recruit Ashe post-skip if you recruited him pre-skip (otherwise he's forced to die at Ailell), and the same is true for Lorenz on Silver Snow and Azure Moon (otherwise he's forced to die at Myrddin).
I go the angsty way when I play and only allow myself one out of class recruit and then kill the rest
Counterpoint, FE12 Wolf, especially on Lunatic. You need to rush to the village to recruit Roshea, rush him to recruit Vyland, get Vyland to recruit Sedgar, and put Sedgar under fire to recruit Wolf, all in a map with very dangerous reinforcements and enemy placements.
Also the fact that Roshea, Vyland, and Sedgar all suck in FE 12. So they are at serious risk of outright dying before they can do the recruit chain
@@YarharsuperpirateI saw a comment saying Roshea gets one-rounded on basic hard mode. Dear god what a pain.
I ended up getting Felix without even trying on my first playthough because Byleth naturally got the ranks in Sword and points in Speed.
@@artificialaceattorney6822 Felix is the easiest student recruit, if you don't include Sylvain who's only requirement is that you're female. Byleth is designed to be a fast sword user, even having the swordmaster class during the dlc route, showing that it's intended. Byleth has a good speed growth and already high sword ranks with a personal sword that you're intended to use that even repairs itself, and many tutors teach swords in academy phase. I never have a problem with him and one time he was my first recruit even before Sylvain, though only cuz I forgot about him.
I really wish they stopped making most recruitments automatic in modern FE.
I love the wacky recruitments, secrets and replacement units from the older games, so it's kinda sad to see them abandon them for the most part.
Doesn’t even need to be obscure, just give me in-map scenarios of like, any kind!
I do greatly appreciate engage for having enemy recruitments, even if it’s only one LOL
Feels way more earned too instead of it just being like "Here's a character cause we want you to have them"
Nah we're not done talking about Xavier yet bro, come back for a sec:
The real enemy here is the AI that can and will chokepoint itself into a stalemate preventing anyone from moving.
Map is horrible for no valid reason
Other dishonorable mentions I can think of:
Matthis (FE3/12): Requires you to run a big lap around the map to recruit Julian so he can talk to Matthis.
Rutger (FE6): Two words: AMBUSH SPAWNS.
Teodor (FE7): Bending the rules a bit to make a point, since you don't actually recruit him, but let's be real, did anyone unlock 19xx without a guide?
Karel/Harken (FE7): A mutually-exclusive pair found in an already bizarre chapter. Depending on which version of Pale Flower of Darkness you get, the condition is either based on how many promoted units you kill or how many doors you open.
Ymir (FE11): Shadow Dragon’s paralogues (not counting 24x) require you to have killed of several of your units to play, and Ymir is the worst offender of this gimmick, joining in Chapter 20x when most players would already have several units in their army to kill off.
Anna (FEW): Bonus character with several complicated requirements to unlock. I don’t remember exactly what they were, but she’s supposed to be the last unit you get.
Ferdinand (FE16): Other people already brought him up, but Ferdinand has the harshest requirements of all of the students to recruit in Three Houses. Amusingly, Three Hopes makes him completely unrecruitable outside of the Black Eagles route.
Leonie (FEW:TH SB): While the option to persuade her shows up no matter what, she won’t join you if you killed Jeralt earlier.
To be fair, most people are going to go out of the way to get Julian since he's required for the best ending to save Lena. Also you can cut through the center if you don't care about Mathis dieing (he pretty much will if you cut through the center since he sucks)
Its more difficult due to the powerful wyvern riders and balista, but its heck of alot faster and less tedious.
FE7’s map requirement designers were on crack
I'd bring up Nomah as an Honourable mention in SoV.
He isn't technically hard to recruit, but unlike Delthea who can be spared with the Subdue art on the shiny new weapon you were just given for that very purpose, and then do nothing because she won't have enough HP to cast Aura, he's hidden all the way into deepest part of the Temple of Mila in Part 4.
He's probably the easiest recruitment to miss.
"Teodor (FE7): Bending the rules a bit to make a point, since you don't actually recruit him, but let's be real, did anyone unlock 19xx without a guide?"'
Sure, I leveled up my Nils to level 7 in Lyn's story because it's such an obvious thing to do, spending 70 turns using a charactern with 5 movs! /s
(Why is that even a thing, c'mon IS)
Matthis' recruitment would not be a fucking pain if they didn't limit to just Marth visiting the villages
I am not watching this for spoiler reasons, playing Fe4 at the moment, but having the very first non-forced recruitment in that game be the incredibly obtuse process of getting chased by Ayra while Benny Hill is playing, seizing the castle and talking to her all with Sigurd made me really scared that all of the recruitments would be like that.
You're right in regard to these requirements. But i never thought in FE12, you would get to recruit Michalis, one of the bosses in the previous game.
I mean you already got Camus, who is also a boss in the previous game so adding Michalis isn't *that* weird
Camus is weird enough that he went incognito.
@@SobmicSSBBAfter temporary memory loss in FE2/15!
Feel like the re-recruitment of Shinon deserved a mention here in FE9.
Initially I did plan to mention a few characters from each game and Shinon would've been talked about, but I wanted to keep the video kind of short so I decided to only choose one from each game.
I'd actually argue that Shinon is a harder recruitment than Stefan. Stefan is really only difficult because of the obscurity; if you know what to do, it's trivial.
Shinon, on the other hand, is more complicated. It's a two-step process with no clear indication. It's _possible_ that someone brings Rolf along, thinks to have him talk to Shinon, then just picks up the kill with Ike thinking that the recruitment isn't possible or something, but it's not likely and has a lot of caveats. For one, Rolf is really bad in FE9. The odds that you're using him at all are pretty low, which means you probably won't want/think to deploy him on this map. Even if you do deploy him untrained for the specific purpose of recruiting Shinon (which, again, you probably wouldn't know to do), this map has both fliers and siege tome users that make keeping him alive a lot trickier. Then you have to run him into enemy range for the conversation and get the kill with Ike (yet again, something you wouldn't know you need to do) really fast before Rolf has a chance to get killed. In my own playthrough of FE9, where I wasn't against looking things up, Shinon still managed to be the only recruitment I missed.
Also, Shinon only joins after the chapter. If by some chance somebody dies later in the chapter and you decide to reset, you don't know that you had fulfilled the conditions to recruit him, and you might assume that you did something wrong and not try to do the same thing next time.
@@Bogeynator I happened to use Rolf in my first playthrough and accidentally got shinon cause I thought that Rolf would just be able to talk to him and recruit him but after it failed I just had Ike kill him since he was close
@logietimesperfect luck. you muPst the child of some prophecy
@@Bogeynator Hey, don't disrespect my boy Rolf like that! He's strong if you give him a chance. Or at least mine was.
The translation of Thraccia 776 i played even gave a little help with the Knights and their relatives. It was not much easier though. I only allowed myself to use save states out of frustration on two chapters and this was one of those.
For Engage I'd personally say Saphir is the hardest. You recruit her chapter 19, where the optimal strategy is to turtle on the ship and let the enemies come to you, yet Saphir starts pretty far up and can make that plan quite a bit harder. It's been a while since I've played, but I think she can die turn 1 in maddening if you aren't careful or don't rush to recruit her. If you have Alear on a flying class or you're willing to waste valuable rescue staff uses, it does become a lot easier though
beating Seigberts chapter is more difficult than rescue warping Shiro. I also think church route Hilda is the most difficult to recruit since she's locked out until Edelgard betrays you
Nah, Seigbert's chapter is more tedious than difficult, using two or three flyers w/someone with Royal Blood trivializes the thing and Siegbert it's a fairly good unit that doesn't die in Turn 2 in Lunatic unlike Shiro
2 FE6 mentions, 1 Douglas for being a general with silver weapons that will chase you and keep attacking you until the chapter is done, but he does not attack Elffin/Larum which gives some room to body block him, or just sleep him. But the first times with him suck so much if you want him.
2 Fir, for coming out of the mist, attacking someone dying on the counter since she is super fragile. Or she just picking a weak unit yours and critting, but even then is her damage not great often.
FE7 has the same problem with Guy crit killing one of your units, but that one is kinda fast to just replay
Just wondering, like really really wondering,
how easy was it for you to recruit Ferdinand when he demands heavy armor?!🤯
i dunno bout you but I didn't even realise Nomah was someone you could recruit in Echoes and went through the whole game without him
I hope Xavier becomes a GHB in Heroes so we can immortalize his recruitmant into history
Zeke isn't a hard or rare recruitment in Echoes but i love how if you listen to the dialogue of the bosses and that they have him in a leash of sorts and freeing Tatiana makes him and his army friendly and basically trivialize the map. Such a cool interaction for my first playthrough
For three houses I believe another character should be thrown in the ring since we are using the Serenes stat requirements, using those I believe Hilda is the hardest character to unlock as she is not only unable to acquire a B support which heavily reduces recruitment requirements, requires a C rank in axes which you are only gonna grind for if you really want Wyvern lord, but she is also the only character in the game to require 30 in a stat in order to unlock, in this case Charm. This is even ignoring Black Eagles in which the only chance you have to recruit her is the little interem period between the route split and the time skip since you can't even recruit her on CF.
You can get B support with Hilda and still recruit her on SS. It may take a bit of resetting but you 100% can get her pre timeskip.
Also Charm is one of Byleth's best stats since they get a guaranteed +1 every month, assuming you do tea time correctly.
Compare that to CF Alois who has only 1 chapter to be recruited before he goes away or OOH Ferdinand who requires a D in Heavy Armor.
@ ok the B rank definitely makes it easier, but you’re much more likely to get 8 dex for C+ support OOH Ferdie, also Alois is the only guy you can train axes from so it takes even longer to get the required ranks then armor. You’ll likely spend more time going for Hilda than Ferdie due to the combo of support and axe grinding, which in my mind constitutes harder for 3H standards.
@@cman5516 Almost no Byleth would ever want to want train in Heavy Armour. The only sources of tutoring for it are Alois and Gilbert, both of whom go missing from the monastery for some time, you have to at least make it to E+ to gain experience in Armour Knight. Hilda’s charm requirement is extremely easy to reach if you do your birthday teatimes and getting to C Axes is very desirable regardless of class because you want Death blow in any physical class. Plus, Hilda can achieve a B support, whilst Ferdinand can’t pre-timeskip
@@envan7865 oh sorry you don’t want armor knight? considered one of the best classes in 3H to get due to how much free defense you get on any character. Also again, for Axes you need Alois specifically to train you who, as you said, dissapears constantly. You can certainly get that handful of axe exp from fights but nowhere near enough to get anything useful, let alone enough for a character. Getting the armor for Ferdie takes literally half the time it takes to get the axes or about as much time for the support grinding for Hilda and takes a lot less teatime to do.
@@cman5516 Armour knight is not a good class. All it’s good for giving you baseline 12 defense. On average that’s only +3 defense at Level 10 for Byleth. Axes can also be taught by Seteth, Glibert and Anna (if you have DLC). Four sources of tutoring instead of just two and the in combat experience is small, but it’s something. The teatimes do not take anytime, just doing the ones you get for free on characters birthdays is enough to get you like plus +14 charm without level ups by chapter 12. Plus, the option for a B support can take that down all the way to D Axes and 12 Charm, along with the random chance to join. Whereas for Ferdinand, all you can do is one tutoring session with Alois until chapter 3. And you actually have to get the Armour rank, unlike with Hilda
I know everyone likes to pick on Xavier and Hannibal for having obtuse recruitments for just okay units in return but I really don’t think they’re as tedious and disappointing as Karla
Like the game asks the player to use a bad unit the entire game to get a worse unit for the last chapter
It really blows my mind that Karla will fail to ORKO a 0% growth Bartre without weapon triangle advantage or a crit.
@ I feel like the devs wanted to make sure she can’t kill the only dude who recruits her but completely forgot they could just do a scripted scene
I would actually bring up recruiting Hilda in 3 houses, since you have only a single chapter window to do so. She is only available to recruit in chapter 11, no sooner
Also for fates conquest, Ignatius would probably be the hardest. Same logic behind Shiro, do the chapter to late and he'll die on turn 2 due to being ridiculously under leveled, surrounded by powerful enemies, on the far side of the map
I agree, but this is only for the Black Eagles. For Blue Lions, she's available sooner.
@@artificialaceattorney6822 for non BE routes, it's Ferdinand for sure
Yeah. But honestly, everyone in 3H are easy. Even Hilda; worse case scenario you spam her with gifts.
@@DaakkuuYRS Ferdinand can't b support in academy phase, so you have to train heavy armor, which only two tutors teach, both of which are often absent, and you can't train it in battle until you already have enough to become an armor knight, which is a waste of a class for byleth. Ferdinand is the hardest, and quite so compared to characters from some other games, although Xavier from fe5 is still the hardest ever in the series, he can even softlock you from recruiting him. Ferdinand is nothing to him, but he's still difficult. Moreso on the deer route cuz no Gilbert, who is one of the aforementioned tutors.
For Awakening i was actually thinking Gangrel. He's VERY aggressive, and you have to talk to him with Chrom three times just to recruit him.
Just desequip weapons and surround him he isnt a very dangerous unit.
And if you use Olivia as you should you can recrut him super fast
On the other hand Priam is by far on the hardest non dlc map Awakening have.
And lunatic awakening is already one of the hardest fire emblem game.... Recruting him on lunatic is hell, it require tons of maxed out units or you'll die
On other difficulty its still Severa, but rescue staff can give you tons of time
@@anonyme4881 Yeah. Priam and Severa are difficult, but definitely worth it. Especially Severa. She's one of my mains.
@@anonyme4881 awakening is the only game where i say the baseline for difficulty should be hard, purely because while other games have more fair lunatic modes(other than hard 5 but fuck that) awakening is just bs. when the only way to progress in any meaningful way in maps is to either abuse fredrick or have robin/chrom paired up the entire game it's just pointless(lunatic+ can also go die in a hole with everything being bs*100).
@@fala5764 you only need Frederick for the 3 to 5 first map in lunatic and you dont need to pair up chrom and robin for the whole game.
Awakening hard mode is too easy to be interresting
I was doing my support collection in lunatic personnally, if you survive the 3 first map the game become actually interresting and you can use every character minus Donnel
Thats because the only bs thing in awakening lunatic is that the early game map ennemi got way too much stats. After some level your unit will be way more stronger than ennemi units because of awakening insane growth rate and super strong skill
Tho, I forgot about Donnel in lunatic which is nearly impossible to recruit and train since he deals 0 damage to normal ennemi and die in 2 hit. (He can only damage the thieves in this chapter)
Never forget Karla or how annoying it is to recruit Tiny
Newer FE recruitments just aren't the same...
I mean seriously, Engage doesn't even have a recruitment theme despite those almost always being some of the best pieces of soundtrack in the entire game! Outrageous!!!
I'd argue that L'Arachel on Ephraim's route is way easier than other Ephraim's route recruits. Cormag can prove way trickier with Rennac taking the crown. Recruiting Rennac has 2 conditions to begin with. L''Arachel or 10k Gold. What if you do not have the 10k and L'Arachel was left in the barracks untrained due to how late she joins? All through Sleep/Silence Staff shenanigans on top of Berserk shenanigans? And all that with a time limit as well since Rennac can just casually leave the map never to be seen again. You must rush under Sleep/Silence/Berserk with potentially an untrained L'Arachel taking a spot. That can be brutal.
I still remember the first time I played Birthright. I didn’t know about the Chapter 15 thing and I didn’t really do supports that weren’t S-ranks, and I paired Corrin with Silas. I was completely heartbroken by Kaze’s death and I spent the entire rest of the game in denial, thinking he might show up alive. Takumi survived falling into that same canyon, why couldn’t Kaze?! I was sad to beat the game and still not see him. I had a gut feeling that he there was SOMETHING I could’ve done to save him, especially considering how he wasn’t among the characters who appeared during the near-death experience. I immediately started a new play through, completely determined to save him. I had one idea for how to save him, based on my experience with saving a character’s life in Persona 3 Portable (I won’t go into details so I’m not spoiling a whole other game). I decided to try A-ranking Kaze, and if that didn’t work I’d look it up. It seemed pretty hopeful, the A-rank conversation was nearly identical to that of the pre-tragedy talk, where Kaze reveals his past and pledges loyalty as your retainer. Just for good measure I also decided to S-rank him before chapter 15 rolled around. At the end of the chapter they were STILL talking at the top of the cliff, and I was practically screaming at them to get away from there. Then, when things played out differently and Kaze survived I was dancing up and down and cheering I was so happy that I had successfully managed to save him
Xavier is probably one of the only times i said fuck it and didnt recruit him. I know hes basically a machine gun but it was so annoying lmao
I'd personally pick Silver Snow Hilda for Three Houses because you can only get her in the final chapter before the timeskip.
I'd say hardest for Path of Radiance is Nasir. In order to recruit him, you need to defeat the Black Knight in 5 turns or less. Which is notable difficult unless Ike has basically been maxed out, and even then. It is still rigged slot machine level difficulty. You need to be lucky Aether activates more than his Eclipse activates.
Fair on Karel for FE6. Game has a lot of difficult or tricky recruitments, though: everything about Douglas, Thea's annoyingly finnicky AI, characters like Echidna and the second pair of cavaliers being able to die before being recruited, Rutger being able to just murder one of your units out of the blue (and Fir, to a lesser extent)...
For FE3 I would dare say that Samson is harder than Sheena, Sheena will stay still on her throne but Samson will move to attack you and potentially even block the way since I’m 90% sure the door is in his aggro range.
Technically, the hardest recruitment of all times are the Summonings in Heroes
Only if you want 5* with the best Boon/Bane.
I remember only recruiting Lysithea on my first playthrough. Maybe Leonie...
Lysithia I'm gonna have to disagree with. You're pretty much given her for free on 2 of the 4 routes imo making her one of the easier students to recruit
For engage i would honestly go for anna you have to rush for her before she gets killed by the enemy at a point where your stats aren't high enough to one round most opponents. Technically you could wait until you are a much higher level but that's not really fair in my opinion because you could also wait untul your a much higher level for severa by that logic
I would've thought Hilda was the hardest fe16 recruitment.
since it has been established that the Kaze entry was a Joke Imma chain it with one of my own: I would not say Kaze is the hardest for birthright but his kid Midori, since you can only do the paralogue in question after Kaze survives the cutscene even if he's married already, getting Kaze is easy, getting his daughter that's the hard part. (bonus cheese points if he's married to Corrin)
on a slightly more serious note, I'd say Shinon is more complicated to recruit in FE9, You need to talk to him with Rolf, which implies you either trained him or are escorting a very weak unit and then you must beat Shinon WITH IKE to then have the recruitment thing play at the end of the chapter. (at least success or failure you get the brave bow) and the only Hint in game I've seen about any of this is if Mist talks to Shinon which is even less likely to think about on your own and then no hints whatsoever about Ike having to be the one kicking his ass.
For FE6 should be Echidna who can die on her first turn.
Yeah, I was gonna say her or Thea
Not sure how true this is since I've only seen people mention this online with no actual footage but I think the hardest FE3H recruitment is actually the other lords/ second in commands. Apparently before the games first update there was a glitch you could perform if you were precise with your button pressing when selecting a house at the start of the game that would actually let you start with all units recruited from an additional second house. Like for example having Dimitri and Dedue in Black Egale or Edelgard and Hubert in Golden Deer.
So if this is true they'd technically be the most difficult recruits since they're locked behind a patched out glitch
While Bartra and Carla may look like a random easter egg recruitment, you gotta give it points for being able to see Fir's parents meet especially after seeing the end screen for Bartra always being "falling in love with a warrior he rivals" or smth like that
What about Scarlet from Revelations? In that story she's forced to die no matter what, even friendship/marriage won't save her unlike with Kaze
For 3 houses I'm going with Hilda on Church Route, because if you play black eagles you cannot recruit her UNLESS you do the split thing for Church and then you only have the small gap between that event and the end of the first half to ACTUALY recruit her, but since she's been locked out the ENTIRE TIME you either need to already be set to recruit her or on NG+ because you can't raise her support with Byleth fast enough. Plus you need to realize he BECOMES recruitable - since to this point she hasn't been.
I'd think Athena is among the hardest unit in FE11 (Shadow Dragon), because she's one of the "you lost a bunch of units" filler units.
Also, for FE16 (Three Houses), Hilda in Black Eagles (Silver Snow Route) is probably the hardest unit to recruit. If you go Lions, she is normal recruit with Charm and Axes being her stat and skill; if you go Deer, she's in your house, and if you go Eagles, she's unrecruitable... unless you set up to go the fourth route (Silver Snow) by not siding with Edelgard, where you can spend the one in-game month (4 possible trips to the monastery at most) trying to woo her just like Lions route, before the attack on the monastery that happens in all routes that divides the base and war phases of the game.
I think a lot of the conquest kids are a lot harder than Shiro, on lunatic those maps get ridiculous.
Good list and video!
Just imagine when the times when each fire emblem came out and people start their first playthrought, not knowing how to recruit and skiping like half the characters, and like you said in the video with out guides at least in the first 5 fire emblems the games has to be really hard, and thats the magic of the classics games, now with just one search to get to know everythings and thats cools too, for me since im playing fe binding blade with guides im just pumped to start again and beat the game faster having all this knowleadge but the magic of the first blind playthroughs are amazing
I am not sure what Nintendo was thinking with Karla(4:44). We need a specific unit be given a valuable promotion crest and appropriately leveled to recruit her. No hints given to the player about her or about Batre needing to fight her. When you talk to her, combat is automatically initiated. Let's hope your Batre has been getting lucky with defense or speed. There is a strong chance you are gonna get crit(5:03) possibly twice if you are slow. There is a strong chance Batre will die. On the other hand, Batre can gain to much strength and kill Karla with the Swordreaver. Alternatively, Batre can be equipped with a Killer Axe which is not hard to get at this point in the game. There is a chance Batre lands a hits and crits Karla.
I disagree on FE13, I think Laurent is the hardest unit if you don't know what you're doing. He's not hard to get if you know what to do but I'd argue he can be missed if you are not aware of the village you have to interact with. To be honest, when I did this chapter, I actually thought you'd find the village upon completing the quest. I didn't even know until my 2nd playthrough that this chapter was a child-unit chapter as when I recruited Lucina I already had a load of S Ranks which naturally unlocked a load of Child Unit Chapters.
Severa really isn't hard to work out, just have 1 or 2 units with the rescue staff to keep her out of harms way and from there just have your crew kill every last 1 of them.
Damn! I killed Lindon and I had no idea you can recruit him!
Thanks for the video
Thanks for watching!
As much as the stat requirements for pre-time-skip recruitment are the bigger hurdle for Three Houses recruits, I’d be interested to hear who you think is the hardest permanent recruit when you come across them again after the skip. Even if you got them in part one and have that opportunity in part two, you still need to then worry about talking to a red unit like normal recruits.
At least I think. To be honest, I didn’t manage to recruit any students outside my house on my initial Golden Deer run, and didn’t see a NG+ Blue Lions run to the time skip, so I don’t actually know how difficult the later recruits are because I’ve never had the chance to do them.
Society if Karel joined a few levels lower:
Hmm.
FE5: 100% Xavier. It's a mystery to me about why they made recruiting him so challenging-especially with how easy it is to miss him.
FE6: This game has a lot of units that are meant to replace other units or locked to a certain route. For me, this is a fight between Rutger and Douglas.
Douglas is in Chapter 16, a pretty big map which also has Hugh and Zeiss on it. To start with, he has strong weapons on him-and he will chase your units around. To even have a chance of getting him to calm down, you need Larum or Elffin to talk to him, and hope to god he doesn't blow himself up afterwards. If you don't have these lads by then, forget about it. There's also some douchebag Mage with a Bolting tome immediately at the start of the map, so that doesn't help much. :D
Rutger is one of your best units in the game, but recruiting him is a nightmare. To begin with, your units will not be prepared for the onslaught of enemies coming your way on this map. There's barely any cover, so if you're not ready, you can expect a few deaths. You need Clarine to recruit him, but good luck having her survive against wave after wave of Cavalier spam. All of this is on Chapter 4 btw.
FE7: Jaffar. He's on the infamous Battle Before Dawn map, and there's a lot to be mindful of. First things first-you need to recruit Nino, and then proceed to have Nino talk to him and keep them alive the entire chapter. Battle Before Dawn is infamous for how strong the enemies are, the fact Jaffar can die before you even reach him, Ursula having a BOLTING TOME, and all of the chests being troll shit.
Karla isn't necessary for any gaiden chapter, but Jaffar is required for one. Without recruiting him, you miss out on 26x.
Shadow Dragon: Ymir. Shadow Dragon has these really bad gaiden requirements, being that you need to kill off some of your units to unlock them. That's bullshit already, but that's not all. By Chapter 20, you will have a lot of units, and the gaiden unlocks if you have only 15 people alive. For 90% of FE players, even beginning ones, you would never figure out that you have to lose people just to recruit someone who's not even worth it.
Three Houses: Felix is actually the easiest. He requires B+ in Swords and 15 Speed, something Byleth will do very, very easily. Most of the time, he will come to you once he sees how broken Byleth is.
Ferdinand however? He needs C in Armor. You don't have a lot of room to train Armor natively, as your only options are Alois and Gilbert. So if you really want to recruit Ferdinand, this means you will have to grind as an Armor Knight.
An honorable mention is Hilda, who straight up won't join if you picked Black Eagles, and even if you picked Silver Snow, you have exactly one chance to recruit her, and it's before the timeskip. You better have 30 charm and a C in axes.
Three Hopes: Byleth on Scarlet Blaze. First things first-this is a race against time. You need Resonant Lightning, which is a reward from one of the survey spots. Then, make Baron Mateus surrender and cut off Byleth's path to Rodrigue. From there, you have to avoid Byleth, beat Alois and kill Rodrigue, all before Byleth gets there. This is a huge risk, because failing to recruit Byleth will change the story, and it locks you out of recruiting Leonie in the first place.
Engage: Anna. Early on, you'll have a paralogue chapter where Anna decides to hide in a chest. In a map heavily infested with enemies. She gets discovered pretty fast and will have a tough time fighting anyone that comes her way. Similar to Jaffar, it's possible for Anna to die before you even reach her.
Lindon is the easiest recruitment, since you can recruit him with the Elusia nobles (Ivy and Hortensia), both with really good mobility.
Hannibal's recruitment is hard on paper, but he's pretty easy to cheese. If all of his soldiers are dead, he'll head back towards his castle to get more, and if you just place a unit on the gate of the castle without seizing it, he'll just stand next to them and not do anything. Sure, it doesn't deal with all the wyverns, but without Hannibal and his guys causing problems they're pretty easy to deal with; you can seize Luthecia and recruit Coirpre with just Seliph and Ares (or any other decently strong unit tbh), so holding out against Travant's squad isn't that difficult when you have your entire army minus Seliph, his helper, and whoever's blocking Hannibal to do it with.
My first playthrough I lost Kaze. I was using him exclusively with Rinkah, he would soften them up with poison, chip damage, and the shuriken debuff and she would finish them off. But since I always had him next to Rinkah I didn’t gain any relationship points between him and Corrin. Ended up costing me and I was seething since I loved his character
yeah no,it's Ferdinand Von Aegir
he's an unit who not only can't get to B support before timeskip
but also,his tutor is armor,Armor! you can't get armor rank easily
Honestly, for Engage I would put Jade and Saphir (moreso Saphir) up for contention, especially on Maddening. While either is not particularly hard to recruit, especially with the Draconic Time Crystal, it is possible for both to die within two or three turns of the map starting (Jade gets worn down by two armoued knights, Saphir gets swarmed by warped-in cavs)---this is a limit that's easier to rescue Jade in, because her starting location is easy to reach and the enemies that rush you turn 1 aren't particularly challenging. Saphir though starts on a tile that's hard for anyone in your army to reach on turn one unless you happen to have Alear, Diamant, or Alcryst as a flier, or want to put Sigurd on either of the princes for the entire map.
In Fe9, with Ike you can use the magic card. The only problem is to make he moves.
In Fe8, over stephan, I found Ilyana really difficult to recruit in hard difficulty. Haar, and Astrid for the same reason as larachel
The hardest character in BS Fire Emblem to recruit is Frost: you need to wait about 32 minutes of in-game time for him to join automatically.
Yeah not hard, BSFE doesn't have hard recruits in the slightest. Most units join at the start, while three of them join after a specific time in the map; Frost just takes the longest to get.
I guess you could also argue he's pretty easy to kill if you don't know better (though when this came out it was packaged with an opening and voice lines that would lean you towards not kiling him), though he's not a free kill cause he's very fast with only a thunder tome, and he runs away from your units if you get near, though you could kill him if you catch up and chip enough (he's fragile ofc since he's a bishop), you've got three fliers on that map after all. Meanwhile you have a weaker squad on the map where you get Malice and Dice; Navarre is your best combat unit at the start, but Malice is literally just better than him statistically, and Dice's devil axe could cause issues.
If caught unprepared, Yen Fey (spelling, its been way too long) in Awakening can be impossible. Before him, Chrom himself can recruit everyone. But Yen Fey can only be recruited from Sayri. Throw in, she is decent but overshadowed by that. She is not likely to be naturally on your team.
For 3 houses I think the hardest could be Hilda, since she can only be recruited during month 12 on a blue lions play through
I’d like to say Shanon in path of radiance is pretty hard as well, you have to talk to him with Rolf and then “kill” him with Ike.
Going in blind and seeing Kaze die ONLY in birthright left me empty after playing the other routes and seeing him alive
Dude that Kaze removal made me angry. I gave him so much of the team experience my first playthrough.
Surely 3H is Hilda, right? She’s the only retainer unit you can recruit outside of her rout, BUT not at all on crimson flower, and only for one chapter in Silver Snow.
The DLC characters are the hardest to recruit in Engage.
lysithea could be hard to recruit but defenitily worth getting her specially to dab on the death knight
For Engage, I wanna say Saphir forvthe same reason as Shiro. She might kust die before you can recruit her, or if your Alear sucks they recruit her then die themselves
I love this "Red, Blue, Green Unit" business. It's like
"Haha, I am going to kill you wearing these red pants."
(his ex-girlfriend wearing blue pants runs up to him, begging him to switch sides)
"Yes, I have seen the error of my ways; I will now change into blue pants!"
Lindon is not really an obscure unit but the community treats him like one; he almost never appears on tier lists or balance discussions because I think most players kill him and move on thinking he's a miniboss or something.
I'd say Ferdinand needing 'Heavy Armor' requirement sucks, most Byleths won't bother
Hardest characters to recruit in Fates are probably Charlotte and Benny in Rev. It's actually pretty straightforward but I'm pretty sure nobody else in Fates requires a character that *isn't* the main character to recruit
Shiro is a good choice, but he is not available in just Rev, y'know?
in fe7 its not Karla, its Geitz. your lords have to be at level 17. Or you get lyn and hector to level 20 and Eliwood at level 10
For Three Houses it should be Dedue since he can die in Post Time Skip if you don't do his Para. Just like Kaze
I’m more than certain that Kaze condition is entirely tie to the fact that *YOU* benching him for way too long, he might be the worst unit you can recruit but I can still tell that bad unit with some level is still mile better than bad unit with no level, if you don’t use him then why keep him?
Anna could be a bit of a pain in Engage to recruit. Basically you need to reach her in I think 3 turns or she dies. Not to hard but kind of annoying. Though 3 houses for me, recruiting everyone wasn't really a problem. Though I grinded like crazy to get everything high enough along with their support levels.
I say silver snow Hilda might be the hardest because you cant recruit her in through most of the BE playthough and is only truly available is if you pick the silver snow route and available for 1 chapter and you need a b rank with her then she can be recruited
You don’t need a B rank to recruit Hilda at all, on any route. Just 30 Charm and C Axes, which are easily attainable by Chapter 12
The Charm stat isn't something often noticed, but i dont think it ever gotten to 30 without stat boosters
@@harrycarson6526 Getting perfect teatimes on Character’s birthdays can give you +1 charm, up to twice per month. From chapter 4 to 12, that’s +16 charm just from birthdays which don’t take time. Byleth starts with 7 charm and a 50% charm growth, meaning you just need 7 charm from like, 25 level ups, which is super manageable. I’ve ended runs where Byleth has upwards of 60 charm
Ignatius in Fates can be annoying to recruit if you do his chapter late. I had to optimize a path for my fliers to go around the entire map just to get him because he will just die if you take more than like 3-5 turns.
Are we disregarding post game units in FE8 that have requirements such as clearing lagdou ruins 20 times?
Yeah, I wasn't considering them in FE8, 9, or 6 since they're kind of just extra content not a part of the main game.
I disagree with FE11 Nagi on the grounds that getting her is more optimal than using the true Falchion on higher difficulties - plus, both it and Tiki herself are *very* missable on a blind run. No, my pick for FE11 is Ymir - a unit you can only recruit if you have 15 or less units left alive at the end of Ch20... in a game where you're supplied new recruits left, right and center.
I think the dude from FE10 is also exclusive to new game plus. I know I couldn't recruit him my first playthrough but maybe that was user error
Yes, you need to start a new game from a cleared file, I forgot to mention that.
I had the feeling Lindon was gonna be for Engage
I kinda disagree on L' Arachel,the hardest is Rennac.
if you didn't manage to recruit L'Arachel or get enough gold by the time the chapter rolls in where you get to recruit him,then he's basically unrecruitable.
i feel liek Ayra is harder then Hannibal you simply have a lot less tools to deal with her no sleep staff or sword you can't make her retreat towards her castle for reinforcements even if tsht works which im unsure cuz its the same castle youre trying to seize she has less bulk but more damage potential relative to your armys current durability and only Alec can negate her astra and hes not particularly durable,
Hardest Engage recruits are the Fell Xenologue units cause you have to play the Fell Xenologue every time lol
The hardest is always the "HOW AM I SUPPOSE TO KNOW THAT?" requirements. This is not exclusive to FE either. Some games are so unforgiving about it as well. Did you do the opinional time limied 8 side conversations that you have to find hidden across the overworld? Too bad you did them in the wrong order so you didn't unlock the 9th hidden conversation that was hidden behind the first 8. Did you do them all in order this time? Too bad all option choices matter even when the conversation was just small talk so when you selected "I love oranges" instead of "I hate oranges" you can no longer unlock the hidden character because you bonded over your shared hatred of oranges.
If Revelations was added, I would say Scarlett for the same reason as Kaze.
I'd say the hardest "recuitment" is keeping Iñigo(Laslow), Odin and Peri alive on Lunatic in Chapter 16, at least Ryoma and company could hold their own but those guys suck ass
No I'd say thea or klein for fe6 since they may not even move.
I think Ymir is harder to get than Nagi. When I first played Shadow Dragon as a kid, I got Nagi by accident. For Ymir, you either have to go out of your way or REALLY suck.
I completely forgot Shiro was such a pain to recruit
Ignatius is also in the same situation if you do his paralogue to late. Since he's the same under leveled green unit who starts on the far side of the map and is quickly swarmed by enemies who will absolutely one round him if you go into this chapter to late.
How did you play the Japanese only FE games in English?
There's translation patches you can search for online, some are better than others, you just have to apply them to your rom, which also can be found online.
I’m surprise you didn’t say Lyon for sacred stones.
Never forget Scarlet in Reveletion that has the same bullshit thing like kaze but this time you can't avoid it. So you can have she only for one battle... Just let her be a green unit for that battle and then start the cutscene and let her die...
Maybe not mineline but in hopes hardest one to recruit from what i remember was Lu Bu.... I mean Byleth
I think Geitz is harder than Karla. To get Karla you need to train one bad unit. For Geitz you need to train three (well 2 bad units and one okay unit)
I won't even attempt these without save states from emu's.
Is there any games for Nintendo switch that looks and plays like fire emblem on gba or snes ?
@@Roland_Volpahart I'm not entirely sure.
@@halvey_ i find game dark deity , that looks like fire emblem games on gba , maybe there are some other similar games
@Roland_Volpahart Yeah I forgot about Dark Deity. I played it on PC. If it got a switch release I didn't know about it. It wasn't bad though it might be what you're looking for.
Hilda charm stat 30 axe at rank C.
Lehran in Radiant Dawn is on a tier of his own in terms of how obscure and difficult to recruit he is and the only one in which luck plays a part on top of being extremely obscure and cryptic. Ike needs a few speed stat points to be able to not deck doubled by the black knight and killed as a result so if you get unlucky with Ike's level ups you can't get Lehran even if you attempt to do everything else correctly. You also need to hope he doesn't get Eclipse in that combat too because that would be an instant kill but I might be wrong about it being able to trigger on the defensive.
No hate, but the 3h section is a travesty. No mention of how easy it is to bypass these requirements with a B support, and no mention of the two students who don't get B support until after the timeskip. Not to mention, none of the 3 you mentioned are particularly difficult, with Dorothea and Felix being all but free.
Yeah 3H is the one I was most unsure about as I don't usually bother to recruit characters from outside of the house I choose. But, a lot of other comments are mentioning Ferdinand and Hilda and I would agree with them on that.
Im sorry, but if most difficult list of recruitment doesnr include ferdinand three houses its just wrong. You mention specificly playthroughs where you arent focusing on recruiting. But even without that restriction, is easily ferdinand. Not only are his B and above supports locked behing time skip, he also eants heavy armor. A skill line that can only be trained on byleth via spedning time points in the monastery, and that unlocks relatively useless class of armor knights. There is literaly no reason to ever train heavy armor on byleth